by Sarah Cope

Here is a play in which very little happens and very, very little is said. On that promising note I will attempt to review it.

Before the action (such as it is) begins, the small audience are ushered into a sideroom and issued with instructions. We will, it seems, be sitting on the set, and are required to take off our shoes. (This, I assume, is because the carpet and rug have to go back to Habitat and the Rug Warehouse when the run is complete).

We then find ourselves in a living room with seating around the edges. A woman (Sandy McDade) is sitting on one of the settees, wearing headphones. It is the early hours of the morning; she is alone, tense, and it becomes clear that she is mentally ill.

This being a play directed by Katie Mitchell, we are aware that something bad is going to happen. Then a baby cries from another room. Although the woman does go to tend to the baby twice – on one occasion returning with a dirty nappy – her main response is to drown out the noise with music, the vacuum cleaner and the television (showing an
incongruously chirpy Nigella re-run).

The play shows that when a mother has post-natal depression, or indeed any other mental illness, and she is isolated and unsupported, she is not the only one to suffer; the baby may be neglected, and suffer the consequences of that for life.

This baby won’t have a lifetime of suffering, however, because this is a Katie Mitchell-directed play. That’s all you need to know.

Small Hours has an extended run until 19th February.

Elsewhere: an interview with Mitchell, another view from There Ought to be Clowns.

Article first published on Blogcritics

by Natalie Bennett

The story of Kaspar Hauser has inspired writers down the generations. It’s a tabula rasa, this story of a boy of 16 found in a town square in Nurnberg knowing only one sentence and life in a single dark room, on which the literary imagination has danced.

It’s clearly the origins and inspiration for Kaspar, by the Austrian-born playwright Peter Handke, that’s now just opened in London. But, any review would be remiss not to point out early on that this is Avant-garde theatre with a very large capital A. If you like your theatre to have plot, character development, or even logical sense, then this is not the show for you.

“I want to be someone like somebody else was once.” With those words – in every conceivable intonation and rhythm, Ryan Kiggell as Kaspar begins the play – and occupies at least the first 10 minutes. It’s a fine performance – it could easily be a jumble, yet the body language and sounds match perfectly to different possibilities, and the detail exploration of that single phrase is followed by an confused but deeply studied exploration of the banal domestic furnishings, chair, table, bench and wardrobe scattered around the “stage”. It constitutes a spectacularly good piece of physical theatre.

To enjoy this performance, you have to be able to focus on the moment, the sound, the phrase – trying to make it all make sense in a narrative form can only result in irritation, although there’s certainly plenty of philosophical games to be played. And that focus makes enormous demands on Kiggell; for nearly every second of the production he’s the only focus, from that halting original experimentation with the single sentence, on to the final, more polished presenter, confident at the microphone armed with a seemingly endless collection of almost sensical management buzz words and self-help slogans that reflect Handke’s exploration of the effect of modern life, modern media on this delicate subject.

The setting for this “pop-up” production (clearly this is going to be the phrase for this economic crisis) is an abandoned office, flashy and optimitisc cheap plastic with additional performance from the trains running over this converted railway arch. That works as a setting for the stream of management speak, as well as for the darker moments of this production, as a autocratic, even fascist, state apeears to be shaping this tabula rasa, with enthusiastic recitation of phrases such as “while giving a beating it is good to imagine the imminent order… beat air from their lungs like dust from a rug”.
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by Sarah Cope `

The first thing to say about Season’s Greetings is that if you have tickets for it already, try to get a refund. If a friend offers to take you to see it, risk the friendship and tell them you would ather gouge your eyes out with a skewer. It really is that bad. Actually, it’s worse.

You may have read the excellent reviews and wonder why I am being so harsh. But let’s look at one of the reviews. The Daily Mail has said it is “a cracker of a production”. In that crackers are full of crap nobody is interested in and terrible jokes, I’d say that was spot on.

Here we have a tired, dated Alan Ayckbourn play, set in the Seventies, though you might not guess it from some of the clothes and shoes (if they can’t even get that right, you know you’re in for a bad evening). It’s set at Christmas, so let’s put it on at Christmas, with some well-known cast members and a lot of sparkly publicity.

All you need to know is that this is a bad family Christmas. As one of my companions pointed out “most people have already been through that – why would you want to pay good money to go through it again?” Quite.

Catherine Tate as the neglected Belinda is possibly the highlight, but that’s not saying much. Katherine Parkinson (from Channel 4’s The I.T Crowd) as the heavily pregnant Pattie is such a moaning minnie it is tempting to cover your ears with your hands whenever she ventures on stage. Parkinson does in fact have a voice that sounds like she’s either about to cry or is in terrible agony – possibly both.

As is usually the case, the most incisive theatrical commentary was to be found in the queue for the ladies loo during the interval. One well-to-do woman said to another, “I could really do without that ‘Del Boy’ character!”, by which she meant Neil Stuke’s Neville, a loathsome, swaggering bully who one could only hope would be electrocuted by the Christmas tree lights.

In fact, I would happily have seen all nine characters end their days this way. The play could certainly have dispensed with three or four of them altogether as they added nothing to the plot – and we could have all gone home sooner. A very strange element was that despite the relatively large cast, the action was essentially a succession of (boring, pointless, unfunny) two-handers – different combinations of two characters talking in the hall, or the lounge, or the dining room – of what was, of course, an utterly bland set.

If you do have a ticket and feel obliged to go along, cheer up – you might get the ‘flu.

Season’s Greetings has an extended run until the end of March.

by Sarah Cope

There can’t be a child under ten or a parent in the country who doesn’t know about (and can accurately quote) Charlie and Lola, the endearing/irritating cartoon duo devised by Lauren Childs. Most households with children will have at least some of the books, if not the DVDs, stationery, clothing… the list is almost endless.

Now doting parents can take their own little Charlies and Lolas along to see the stage play, or the ‘best bestest play’, to use the rather coy title of this production. And it’s a curiously staged performance, with Charlie and Lola being represented by two-dimensional cardboard cut outs with moving eyes and limbs, which are operated by stage hands in neutral clothing.

They’re there but they’re not there – a difficult concept for any child to grasp. As for the cardboard cut-out figures, I heard one little boy bemoaning loudly, repeatedly, “Mum, that’s not real Charlie and Lola!”

Once the children had learned to suspend disbelief, this was a play that kept this usually fidgety audience rapt. This was helped by the familiarity of the storylines – the play incorporated several of the best-known books and episodes, as well as the voices from the series. The whimsical music used in the BBC cartoons also aided concentration, and when the theme tune started up at the beginning, most of the kids sat up and paid attention in the manner of Pavlov’s dog (minus the dribbling, by and large).
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by Natalie Bennett
(First published on Blogcritics)

Probably the best-known Evelyn Waugh satire these days is Scoop, which since it is required reading for all young journalists gets lots of media exposure. If you know Scoop, then there’ll be little to surprise you in Decline and Fall, Waugh’s first novel, which has been adapted for the stage (for the first time – oddly enough given its obvious comic possibilities, although it was filmed in 1969) by Henry Filloux-Bennett (no relation) for the Old Red Lion Theatre in Islington.

We’re in the early 20th-century British elite – a corrupt, degraded, weak elite, where there’s no honour or justice or even commonsense. The centre of the story is Paul Pennyfeather (Michael Lindall), a young aristocratic scion (we don’t learn his backstory in the play) who’s haplessly caught up in a Bollinger club prank (with contemporary resonances that got a particularly broad laugh from the opening night audience).

From there we follow him on a rollercoaster ride to an employment agency, which sends him to a awful public school in Wales, where he meets the mother of one of the pupils, Mrs Beste-Chetwynde (Fay Downie), who apparently falls for him, and prepares to marry him in the nouveau-riche social event of the year. But it turns out her money comes from South American brothels, a link which ends up with Pennyfeather going down for seven years in jail.

It’s a whirlwhind ride in two hours with interval – particularly with the addition of a complicated subplot around the drunken master Captain Grimes (Sylvester McCoy – yes he of Dr Who fame), who finds himself trapped into signing up for bigamous marriage with the headmaster’s less than attractive daughter.

There are comic lines galore, and the classy cast play up the slapstick to the hilt – it’s almost more of a comedy show than a play (reflecting the background of a number of the cast).

It’s a fine technical debut for Filloux-Bennett at the Old Red Lion, and it has “transferring to the West End” written all over it. (Much of this would actually work better on a large stage with a bit more audience distance.)
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by Sarah Cope

Plays which have transferred from the Edinburgh festival to a London venue often flounder when they come to the capital. Perhaps it’s because festival goers have lower standards, and an easy-to-watch, moderately funny play will receive accolades when playing alongside a lot of very amateur plays. My Romantic History falls firmly into this category of plays that once out of Edinburgh, seem decidedly lacklustre.

The play is based on the rather shaky premise that “if you haven’t met someone by the time you graduate you’re going to marry some cunt from your work”, in the words of the character of Thomas. (Interestingly, this quotation is used on the Bush Theatre’s website, though the word “cunt” is replaced with “idiot”).

Thomas sleeps with colleague Amy, after a Friday after-work drinks sessions. Thus commences an extremely gender-stereotyped “romance”, where Thomas tries to wriggle out of the “relationship” and Amy clings on like a limpet. Thomas’ inner thoughts are known the audience because he narrates them to us; Amy’s motivations are a mystery, albeit a not very interesting one.

In the second part, Amy gets to narrate, and for a moment I thought the play was about to find its feet. No such luck. We find out about the characters’ past relationships, but the facts just aren’t all that absorbing, nor are the characters remotely likeable.

There are some semi-good jokes and some memorable lines, but a bit more than a drop of wit was needed to breathe life into these predictable characters. Office paraphernalia such as a projector and a whiteboard were used to help tell the story, which was not exactly the most ground-breaking or imaginative of devices.

The audience members on either side of me fell asleep, which I think says all you need to know about this rather disappointing play.

Bush Theatre: booking until November 20