by Natalie Bennett
(First published on Blogcritics)

Are some things beyond satire? When I got the press notice about Justin Butcher’s plan to write a satire about that Royal Wedding, several weeks before the event itself, I wondered.

I’m not an obvious person to go to see this – I never saw the real thing, and I read the absolute minimum about it that I could manage, but having seen and admired Butcher’s The Madness of George Dubya in my pre-blogging days, I thought it might be worth a shot.

And I don’t regret that decision. Which isn’t to say this is a triumph, or anything like it, or even really properly a satire at all, a mildly entertaining, unchallenging evening pretty well does it – I’ve had a lot worse, even if it does have the feel a slightly underprepared university production.

And answering my own initial question, I rather think this does demonstrate that the royal wedding was beyond satire.

Butcher has slid in some of the obvious lines – “we are wicked spongers” say the slacking palace gardeners, “me too”, says Prince Wills (John Sheerman) – but his heart clearly isn’t really in it.

There’s also moments of classy physical comedy – the Queen’s (Stephen Guy Daltry) morning ministrations to Prince Philip (Simon de Deney) a small piece of nicely shaped slapstick. And obligatory jokes attached to an other-worldly, but unhealthily amiable Archbiship of Canterbury (Damian Kell).

Also, this is billed as a musical comedy, but be warned that there’s little in the way of music.

What this primarily could be described as a madcap alternative history that leans heavily on the reimagining of well-known predecessors – featuring the illegitimate son of Philip (also played by de Deney), who’s now one of a team of illegal immigrant gardeners – he’s Romanian, there’s an Albanian, an Algerian and an accordian-playing Bosnian – who come into contact with the cold-feeted Wills on wedding eve, with fairly predictable Shakespearean-style results – think Romeo and Juliet meets Twelfth Night.

There’s also nods to The King’s Speech,  and even sympathetically mocking English take on the Arab spring “international horticulturalists against the decapitation of daffodils”. And “George Galloway” (Rupert Mason) makes a cameo appearance that went down very well on opening night.

The production  held together reasonably well, while giving the general feeling of being a bit under-rehearsed. The cast generally did a good job with the material, with the standout being de Deney’s Bogdan, who shows real stage presence.

It probably won’t surprise you to learn the Telegraph reviewer didn’t like it.

The production continues until June 9, with online booking.

by Sarah Cope

A candle-lit post office is perhaps not the most obvious place to spend Valentine’s Day evening, but it certainly makes for a more original venue than an overpriced restaurant. The post office in question (or ex-post office, now an art gallery) has been reviewed here before, and tonight it kept its doors (and its still-present counter) open late for some love-themed happenings.

Actors from the Arcola Theatre appeared behind the post office counter and read from various love letters. We heard from Zelda Sayre, who, writing to her husband-to-be F Scott Fitzgerald, bid that he ‘wear [her] like a watch’. Richard Burton, on writing to Elizabeth Taylor in 1973, (he refers to her, somewhat dubiously, as ‘a remarkable and puritanical lady’), marked the envelope as ‘very private and personal’, which does make one wonder whether such letters should ever have reached the eyes of the public, destined as they each were for a very select audience of one.

Jessica Piddock, who has made a prison uniform out of shredded, woven letters from prisoners on death row in the US (this piece hangs in the window of the shop), read from a letter she had received from one of the prisoners she corresponded with for the project. The man had become convinced that he and the artists were ‘soulmates’, and Piddock had had to disabuse him of this notion. His letter in response to this news, both bashful and sweet, was possibly the most moving moment of the evening.

Somewhat incongruously, two figures dressed as old women sat near the counter throughout the evening, sewing pincushions. This was in fact Zoe Sinclair and Andrea Blood, who are the artistic duo called “The Girls”. Described by The Evening Standard as “Angela Carter crossed with Cindy Sherman”, their both disturbing and humorous photographs were available to buy in postcard form. Perhaps the most bizarre – and oddly beautiful image – shows Blood naked, crouching on a roasting tin like a turkey, about to be placed in an oven. Another photograph (‘The Garden Party’) shows Sinclair lying on a picnic table, clad only in strategically-placed swiss rolls and petit fours. A vicar helps himself to a canapé from her shin.

Watch out for ‘The Girls’ at their show later this year, where they will be having a joint show with pioneer of feminist art Margaret Harrison, entitled ‘I Am A Fantasy’ at the PayneShurvell Gallery (15th April – 21st May 2011).

The Posted Gallery exhibition is open until 26 February.

Article first published on Blogcritics

by Natalie Bennett

Climate change is perhaps the first scientific issue that’s become hopelessly entangled in the traditional right-left split of politics. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, there’s been a big left-right split in reviews of the National Theatre’s new big production on the issue, Greenland.

The Independent is the most positive, the Guardian’s moderately warm about it, the Telegraph scathing.

But I don’t think any of them had got it really right – this is really a very, very good show, an enrapturing staging of a fast-moving series of tales that crams an astonishing amount of detail and emotion into a tight, non-intervalled two hours.

Sure, if you like your plays as small, detailed exploration of individual psychological states, this isn’t for you. Characters and events are sketched rather than fleshed out, there’s little in the way of backstory, but this is a style, not a fault. And it is funny – really very funny, often.

Perhaps the biggest star of the showing is the staging – this is theatre as spectacle, but often moving spectacle. Lots of reviewers have commented on the polar bear, an hilarious interlude, but also notable are the Arctic guillemots, swooping around the auditorium in a curiously affecting trick of light that makes the emotional attraction of Michael Gould’s Arctic observer and lover of the birds, on stage with his youthful self, entirely comprehensible. Designer Bunny Christie deserves huge plaudits.

Director Bijan Sheibani marshalls astonishing changes of scene and mood beautifully — who’d have thought that a detailed explanation of the method of negotiation in international talks could be made visually interesting? And the conversion of airline check-in clerks in smart uniforms into resting guillemots, to be measured and manipulated by the carelessly loving scientists, then stalked by that polar bear, is a masterpiece of suggestion.

The play was co-authored by Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne, but the joins really don’t show; despite its multiple stories there is a sense of coherence in our confused world of young, angry, fearful campaigners (who struggle against the attractions of popular astrology at a festival), well-meaning bureaucrats who suffer from a touch of the Alastair Campbells, and naively optimistic developing world negotiators arriving at Copenhagen with the conviction that the urgency is so obvious, the humanitarian cause so striking, that something must work out.

There were a lot of empty seats last night, which is a real pity for a big, fine show. My recommendation is to go along and fill a couple, and get a glimpse of the present that might be the view of a future historian of our age.

The production continues at the National Theatre until April 4.

First published on Blogcritics

by Natalie Bennett

Clybourne Park is an often laugh-out-loud funny, bitingly witty, skilfully written play by American Bruce Norris exploring the intersection of race and property values in the US that in this transfer production from the Royal Court is expertly staged and superbly acted.

Through two acts that cover snapshot moments from the history of a single inner suburban home in Chicago (1959 and 2009), it neatly skewers middle-class hypocrisy, self-satisfaction and cant.

There’s one real problem with that: to explore particularly unpleasant middle-class mores requires spending an evening in the company of prattling, middle-class bores, with accents that are frequently horribly grating and irritating.

That’s not meant as a criticism of the acting: Sophie Thompson as Bev, the mindlessly jabbering housewife of the first act, and Sarah Goldberg as the hypersensitively pregnant and astonishingly self-centred wife in the second both do standout jobs in portraying their very, very irritating characters (and the rest of the cast are just as good), but there were moment when I really thought “I don’t want to hear another word from this character”.

And the staging and general production values are high – as you’d expect. (And I doubt I was the only one left wondering how they did the amazing transformation of the set between the first and second acts.)

But there’s another problem with the play – it has at its heart a terrible human tragedy – a soldier who came home to this is family home after the Korea War, convicted and confessed of being what we’d now call a war criminal. But that fact isn’t really explored or developed, it’s simply used as a driving force for the first half of the plot, and as a neat if rather meaningless finishing scene.

If you do go to this play you’ll laugh a lot more than you’ll laugh at most comedies; you’ll squirm in your seat in an uncomfortable way, recognising middle-class examples of all-too-common racism to match this week’s Sky Sports sexism scandal. And many theatregoers will no doubt be happy enough with that – certainly it was packed this evening.

But you might also leave with a nasty little taste in your mouth, having spent an evening with characters you might half-recognise, but don’t really want to remember.

Other views (all more positive than mine): Guardian, Independent, Telegraph.

Clybourne Park is at the Wyndham Theatre, right beside Leicester Square Tube, until May 7.