By Natalie Bennett

It isn't at all uncommon for parents and children not to like each other, to be consumed by rivalry and competition – yet you'd think, watching Marina Carr's new The Cordelia Dream as performed by the Royal Shakespeare Company at Wilton's Music Hall, that this was a new, dramatic idea taut with possibility.

At least you would, if you weren't feeling as though you were stuck in a cheap motel room with plywood-thin walls, hearing a two-hour full-on domestic in the early hours of the morning.

This was quite the worst time I've had at the theatre in a very long while. About the only virtue of this production is that it makes the previous effort in the RSC's new play series, The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes, look good in comparison — at least that was an interesting failure. This is just endless, histrionic melodrama, two characters who spend most of the time screaming at each other — when the violins aren't doing the screaming for them.

An aged composer (David Hargreaves) has retired to a bedsit — well he hasn't got a bed, but sleeps on his piano — to attempt to realise his failed potential. His daughter (Michelle Gomez) comes to visit after a long absence, distressed and angry that the relationship has broken down because she's been more successful in the same career.

As the title suggests, reference is continually made to him as Lear and her as Cordelia — increasingly clunking references, at increasingly regular intervals. It's not so much allusion as thumping jackhammer have-you-noticed-yet-audience? repetition.
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by Natalie Bennett

When you call a play "the Tragedy of [name of famous philosopher here]", and get the Royal Shakespeare Company to stage it, the origins on which you're drawing can hardly be mistaken. And in the waning days of the repressive Protectorate, the hysterical gaiety of the Restoration, and the overlaying memories of Civil War, you've certainly get a tale that its possible to imagine Shakespeare would have seized with glee.

But there was wise warning from the Bard that the playwright here, Adriano Shaplin, forgot: "the play's the thing". In telling the story of the struggle between the "traditional" philosopher Thomas Hobbes and his rival "natural philosophers" of the Royal Society, particularly of the brilliant but erratic Robert Hooke (and this play might better have been called Hooke's tragedy), against the detailed background of the political and practical history of the time, Shalpin apparently forgot that this wasn't a school lesson.

You could use it as such – although you might come away with some pretty odd notions, such as that Cromwell died and the King was restored in 30 seconds, that the Great Fire of London was started by an old philosopher trying to avoid the secret police, and (for the younger and more gullible side of the audience), that Elvis was resurrected as Charles II.
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by Natalie Bennett

Imagine if 9/11 had been really big. Not the c. 2,700 people who are now believed to have died (about the same as die on US roads every month), but larger by a factor of 100 — and in a country with a population a fraction of that of the United States.

That’s the scenario of the new political thriller The Ides of March, which premiered last night at the White Bear Theatre in South London. It begins on the one-year anniversary of the day fundamentalist Islamic terrorists exploded a Russian atomic bomb in the Australian city of Melbourne, the date that gives the play its title.

This is a society shaken totally to its foundations, with a bureaucracy struggling to cope, a new secret police force desperate to ensure that nothing like this could happen again — both enjoying almost rabid public support. Set against this direction is a small core of human rights activists and a Muslim community struggling not to be stereotyped as scapegoats. Much like the United States after 9/11 and Britain after 7/7 in fact.
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by Natalie Bennett

There are two sorts of scenes that the Globe Theatre, with its intimacy and its sky-open space, relishes: light sexual comedy, and big dramatic set pieces. The second new play in the Globe’s 2008 season, Glyn Maxwell’s Liberty, set towards the end of the French Revolution, contrives to present a collection of each of those.

The comedy comes before the interval, the time mostly taken up by a picnic at which a frivolous young seamstress, Elodie (played with winsome gaiety by Ellie Piercy) tries to distract a dedicated but callow young revolutionary, Evariste Gamelin (David Sturzaker), from his speechifying and philosophising. Trying to set him back on course is the scheming Louise (Belinda Lang), while also providing distraction is his more sophisticated, and less driven, old friend, Philippe Demay (played with show-stealing charm by Edward Macliam).

The dramatic set pieces come later, as Gamelin rises, pushed by Louise, and inevitably falls, in the turbulent final paroxysms of the Revolution play themselves out. Besterman has a particularly fine piece of wildcat, spitting defiance in the face of the guillotine, and the pathos pulses from a prison scene between a hardbitten bit-part actress Rose (Kirsty Besterman), and Maurice, the Lucretius-spouting former duke for whom she’s surprisingly but believably fallen. And the Globe, as it always does, proves the perfect setting for a fine tumbril scene – as the cart rolls among the inevitably discomforted groundlings.

This is a story based on Anatole France’s 1912 novel Les Dieux ont Soif (usually translated as “The Gods Will Have Blood”), although the dialogue is all the playwright’s own, written in unrhymed iambic pentameters — but not obtrusively so. And the play is marked by a fine stream of one-liners; my favourite was when Demay complained that once, “public safety was trying not to put your feet in horseshit”.
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by Natalie Bennett

Epic in scale, huge in the staging, sure-handed in the storytelling, Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin occupies the demanding space of the National’s huge Olivier theatre with power and panache. Given (astonishingly) that this is the first play by a living female playwright in this landmark space since the National’s opening in 1963, the subject of the play — the suffragettes — could not have been better chosen.

At its centre is one great tale, the relationship between two suffragettes, the upper class, middle-aged fragile rebel, Celia Cain (Lesley Manville) and the spirited but uncertain young seamstress Eve Douglas (Jemima Rooper). Balancing that is the fraught relationship between Celia and her husband William (with whom she’s unhappily had seven children) – he (Adrian Rawlins) is the one male portrayed sympathetically in the play, the one who suggests that men too are being damaged by this grossly gender-imbalanced Edwardian society.

But the truly memorable scenes are those at the heart of the suffragette struggle – the women, joyous in the determination to seize public space with (then) shocking demonstrations, determinedly brave facing the shock of prison life, delicately supportive of each other when the pressure becomes too much. The force-feeding scene – hinted at in the first act and consummated in the second – left the audience gasping, and more than one covering their eyes in shock.

Light relief, in this almost Shakepearean, mulitstranded structure, comes from the political scenes, in Downing Street and Westminster – the only real-life characters, Herbert Asquith and his liberal cabinet being, fittingly, the Hal characters – the buffoons playing silly, drink-sodden games and complaining about such serious issues as the suffragettes having scorched their golf course with acid.
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by Natalie Bennett

Dark comedy is a tough genre. To laugh, but to feel pain, to start, but still sympathise, it is a tough balancing act. When you add that Cosi, which opened this week at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington, is not only a dark comedy, but is set an a mental asylum, well when you settle down into the intimate space of the back-of-the-pub venue, it has to be with some trepidation.

But after a slightly slow expository first 20 minutes, it becomes clear that you are in the hands of a master dramatist. And that’s a fact, for Louis Nowra is one of Australia’s best-known playwrights, and the skill and the experience shows here in the balance of laughter and pain.

And the language is a delight – no surprise to this Australian-born reviewer, who recalls studying a play at high-school in which parliamentarians were called “scrufulous sheep”, but there were shocked goggles in the London audience at lines such as “He’s a testy as a ram wanting to get into the ewe paddock”, but by the time we got to “you know what culture is to most Australians – what grows on stale cheddar” they were right in the swing.

But Nowra doesn’t need specifically Australian references to have fun with language: a particular focus is the problems the transexual inmate Ruth (Neil Summerville) has with illusion and reality. As she explains: “I can deal with things being an illusion or reality but not at the same time.”

There’s plenty of illusion in this tale, however, at least in the minds of the characters, as the inmates of an early Seventies Australian asylum meet the young director Lewis (Matthew Burton) who’s been employed to help them produce a play. Some cheerful simple comedy would seem in order, although Lewis has his heart set on Brecht, but one of the inmates, Roy, is determined to fulfil his life’s ambition of starring in a production of Mozart’s Cosi Fan Tutti, despite the fact that not one of the potential cast either knows a word of Italian, or anything about opera.
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