by Natalie Bennett

The production of Danton’s Death at the National Theatre is pretty well everything you’d expect – well-acted, spectacularly staged, snappily directed.

Toby Stephens is a charismatic Danton, the set of Christopher Oram and the lighting of Paule Constable are hugely powerful – sometimes even more than the action. And if the staging sometimes seems to too often involve the very large cast swirling around the stage as brothel/tavern mob, Assembly, or court, the two-level set is frequently effectively utilised.

This is not, however, despite the billing, exactly, or even largely, Georg Büchner’s acclaimed 1835 play – so politically explosive it couldn’t be staged until 1902.

This is Howard Brenton’s heavily cut-down version of the play, with the focus on Danton and Robespierre (Elliot Levey), mostly their personal interactions and interactions with their respective factions, but with a strong dose too of Danton’s personal (libertine) life.

What disappears, unfortunately, is the politics. We end up wiith a French Revolution that’s mostly about the personal power struggle between two men, and a couple of wives (Kirsty Bushell is powerful as Danton’s Julie in a frustratingly 19th-century role) who’ll be so attached to their husbands that they’ll respectively go mad and commit suicide at their deaths.

This is a revolution as a romantic personal tragedy, which really has to be described as a misused revolution.

And it’s a tragedy of two men who are neither attractive characters – Robespierre emerges as the purest of blacks (such that today’s Sunday matinee audience booed the actor at the curtain call) and Danton – certainly historically inappropriately- as pure white.

I’m also less than convinced by an ending that simply goes: four main characters guillotined, the end. The staging is highly, gorily literal, but the audience was clearly waiting for some final exposition, so less (literally) messy ending, but it fails to arrive.

The production continue until October 14: online booking.

Other views: Guardian, Telegraph, Independent.

Free outdoor theatre, where the audience can wander in and out at will, is doubly tough. You’ve got to not just get people, but hold them.

That’s something that the opening night production of Don Juan in Love at The Scoop (the sunken ampitheatre beside City Hall) managed pretty well. A few people left, but most of those who were there at the start were still there 90 minutes later, if rather chilled by an unseasonal August evening.

The company chose the play well – plenty of sexual innuendo (played with physical glee), lots of violence, and non-stop drama in the oft-told story of the great lothario, here drawn from the 1839 dramatisation by Spanish romantic Jose Zorrilla.

If you’re looking for subtle psychological exploration of machismo, then you won’t find it here. But if you can enjoy a lively tale, well-staged (the final death scene – a coffin lid covered in blazing candles and skulls, used by the furies to force Don Juan down into hell – is particularly notable), and well-acted. (Although perhaps it is time to declare a moratorium on on-stage sword fights – they’re really never convincing.)

Presented by the Steam Industry Free Theatre, the show runs until September 5 at 8pm at The Scoop. Practical notes: limit of 1,000 seats. May be cancelled in case of rain.

To start with the easy labels, it’s billed as a “musical comedy”, and gets quite operatic at times. That’s in terms of how it sounds and feels.

In dialogue and lyrics it is, well, distinctive – “let’s conspire tonight/we’ve got dynamite”, “he’s one good king/ you can’t get rid of him”. There’s some lines without sexual references or expletives – “fuck email, we’ll tell them to bugger off”. Just not a lot.

Its subject, very, very loosely, is the Gunpowder Plot, although that’s a thin underlay beneath satirical comments on contemporary politics and society – it’s the Gunpowder Plot with mobile phones and Channel 5.

It’s translated from Hungarian, having been commissioned by the University of Theatre and Television there, where the show originally opened in 2009.

And without fear of contradition, you could call it surreal.

There are some brilliant moments – my favourite was King James (Timi Charles-Fadipe, who also plays Guy Fawkes, in an extraordinary blond whig – very not 17th-century) watching a “how to be a dictator” video (styled on exercise videos), ranging from Napoleon to the older Bush, stopping at Thatcher along the way. And Lady Domina (Adam Ganne), as James’ transexual courtesan-cum-press secretary delivers press conferences that are delightfully on the money.

The choreography, by Shih-Huang Hsu, was also fine, and some of the clowning scenes between Servina (Barbara Zemper – who displayed the finest singing voice here) and the butler (Duncan Wilkins), their nature playing off a running Shakespeare-as-speechwriter gag running through the show, were notably excellent.

But there were some technical faults – the music too often drowned out the lyrics, and the projection of videos through the actors was distracting (the fact the video shook when the upstairs show got lively has, I’m afraid to just be put down to the realities of the fringe and I won’t hold it against the production – but perhaps some cushioning rubber pads would help?)

What left me most uncomfortable, however, was the character of Shylock the moneylender. Sure, it tied with the Shakespeare gag, sure you might argue for period veracity (not that that’s held back anything else), but I still was left uncomfortable with this stereotypical character, who we’re told is from Golders Green. He could easily have been an East End gangster, or any other cartoon-character baddie from London’s history – the racial choice and presentation left a nasty taste.

So can I recommend it, overall? Well, it kind of depends. Some people will really enjoy this show, a great many would class it as near-torture.

Judge for yourself from the description…

The show continues at the Courtyard Theatre until August 29.

A play about a 12-year-old girl turning 13, who is played by an 18-year-old, which is written by a 17-year-old (Anya Reiss) and which has a guidance note saying that it’s suitable for 14 years upwards, is always going to be an interesting prospect.

The Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, always such an adaptable space, is presented as a two-level house, rather like an open-fronted dolls’ house.

The emotions that are acted out within that house, however, are all too human and recognisable.

Warring parents, played superbly by Sharon Small and Kevin Doyle, argue relentlessly, paying no heed to the fact that their 12-year-old daughter Delilah (Shannon Tarbet) is looking on – indeed, she sometimes ends up acting as a referee.

Add to this toxic mix a 21-year-old lodger Daniel (James McArdle) who has problems of his own, and self-mutilates in his room.

Whether it’s a response to the war zone in which she lives or simply adolescent hormones, Delilah kisses Daniel, completely unnoticed by the parents (who are just sitting – arguing – at the other end of the settee). A moment, perhaps, that requires a small amount of suspension of disbelief.

There then follows lots of brow-beating, as Daniel repeatedly rejects and then kisses Delilah, who threatens to tell her parents what has been happening.

The problem with the play is that the constant arguments of the parents are realistic, but hearing other people’s arguments is both painful and dull – a strange combination.

There are some great lines – the mother, in a rare calm moment, tells her daughter, “I was in such a rush to grow up – I never thought what I’d do when I got there.”

Some lines, though, are surplus to requirements – the father’s statement “This is such a dysfunctional family!” is a case in point. I could have also done without the repetition of the title within the script – ‘spur of the moment’ is used to describe both the father’s affair with his boss and Delilah’s advances on Daniel.

The title of the play, as well as being bland, doesn’t really fit – I was reminded of Margaret Atwood’s advice to young writers at a workshop I attended some years ago. Atwood simply said “titles are murder.” So perhaps Anya Reiss can be forgiven for not coming up with a great title for what is her first play.
The production continues until 21 August: More.

What to do with an unused Eurostar terminal? Perhaps the far from obvious answer is to stage a version of E.S. Nesbitt’s children’s classic, The Railway Children, complete with a real steam train.

After walking through the rather airless and abandoned terminal, complete with closed-down shops, stained carpets, and cockroach traps, the audience is ushered into a sectioned-off part of the track, where banks of seating rise either side (platform 1 and platform 2, of course).

It’s a clever idea, but will the play live up to both the aggressive marketing and also the 1970s film version, always a stalwart feature of the Christmas television schedule?

There were some curious casting decisions – young adults play the children, and they tell the story in the past tense, almost taking for granted that the audience is already au fait with the plot.

There were a surprising amount of laughs to be had – good one-liners such as “We saved lives with our underwear” after the children wave their red flannel petticoats in order to avert a certain rail catastrophe.

Also rather knowing was the way in which the actors alluded to the restrictions of the staging – the scene in the tunnel, rather wonderfully done with black netting and effective lighting, was preceded by the warning, “Now for this part you’ll all have to use your imaginations.”

The steam train makes two (rather slow and perhaps slightly anticlimactic) appearances, including in the last scene, where the eldest daughter, Bobbie, is reunited with her father. This is the infamous scene from the film, guaranteed to get
audiences blubbering in unison. There were plenty of tears and sniffling sounds in the auditorium at that point, so it must have passed the tissue test.

It’s a shame that ticket prices are so steep – £20 to £45 – with no reductions for children’s tickets, means only rich children will be going to see this play about poor children, which is somewhat of an unfortunate irony.

The show is now running, with online booking.

I was looking forward to The Worst Street in London. An account of an east London street of doss houses frequented by the poorest of the poor might not, I concede, be everyone’s idea of good holiday reading, but I’ve read some spectacularly good micro-histories — Robert Robert’s The Classic Slum: Salford Life in the First Quarter of the Century springs to mind – and sometimes a local focus brings a real humanity and detailed sense of place to history.

That’s not, however, what I got from this account of Spitalfield’s Dorset Street by Fiona Rule. The initial account of the settlement of the area by Dutch weavers, the arrival of the Hugenot refugee silk weavers, the development of the area as a relatively prosperous one is decent enough, if covering well-known ground, much popularised by 18 Folgate Street . But as the street declines, the quality of the research is seriously lacking.

We wander off to the foundation of the colony of NSW, stroll briefly around the Great Potato Famine and occasionally hear random stories of individual suffering – but few are directly connected with Dorset Street or even its immediate environs.

But that’s not what really annoyed me about this book. Inadequately researched popular histories are hardly unknown. What’s totally unforgivable about this book is its thoughtless, reactionary, actively cruel attitude towards the poor people who fill its pages.

Rule concludes, it appears on no evidence whatsoever except for the popular newspaper accounts of the time, that the prostitutes who walked Dorset Street and its surrounds are gin-sodden saps who had perfectly good working class lives then threw it all away, leaving their good hardworking menfolk for the fake pleasures of the “high life”.

For example:

Many of the local prostitutes were rather pathetic, gin-soaked women whose alcoholism had caused their families to abandon them many years earlier. Many were in their forties and possessed rapidly fading looks. They plied their trade on the streets, taking punters down the nearest alleyway for a quick knee-trembler.

She’s surprised and a little shocked that a jury in 1724 saved Ann Brown from the noose by down-valuing the cost of the stocking she had stolen, “despite having no reasonable excuse for her actions”!

By contrast, she’s soft on the men who ran the hideous, unsanitary, indeed deadly doss houses. The people who created the “worst street in London” were just being good capitalists on this account.

It is astonishing that this book has gone into a second printing – well perhaps not so astonishing given that Jack the Ripper – that guaranteed sure-fire sensationalist seller – features on its pages and heavily on its back cover, since his final victim died in Dorset Street (although unsurprisingly Rule has nothing new to offer on that extraordinarily well-trodden ground).

The only mystery is why Peter Ackroyd allowed his name and words to be used for the foreword.

But let’s try: it’s part cabaret, part stand-up comedy, part polemic, part tragedy, a lot comedy, part multi-media performance, a bit of a lecture – that’s a lot in 85 minutes of intense performance, storytelling and confession.

But those are a generally gripping, dramatic, and often moving 85 minutes – certainly not everyone’s glass of vodka, and if you’d described it to me beforehand as an exploration of one person’s gay identity and rage against society’s attempt to put individuals into neat boxes of sexual identity, I might not have gone.

“Why is who I choose to fuck such a decisive factor in who you think I am?” is an interesting question, but in the wrong hands could easily have lapsed into self-indulgent navel-gazing.

But I’m glad I did choose to see Confessions of a Dancewhore – it was a powerful, political, lively evening – and filled with laughs, which is always a plus. And it would have been worth it almost for the line alone: “I am a post-drag queen.”

Finally, no review of this show would be complete without a warning: there is quite a bit of audience participation, and the usual expedient of requesting a non-front row seat won’t save you.

But the good news is there’s no Madonna song – not that I’ve any objection to Madonna per say, just that it is good to see another stereotype broken, although perhaps this is another way in which Twaits is trying to make it clear “this is not a gay play”.

Confessions of a Dancewhore continues at the Trafalgar Studios until July 3. IT is presented in conjunction with London Pride 2010.

Article first published as Theatre Review (London): Confessions of a Dancewhore at the Trafalgar Studios on Blogcritics.

I now know better. Nettles – yes I knew about those – I’ve made nettle soup (a recipe roughly like this, from young sping nettles in France), although it wouldn’t have occurred to me to make nettle pakora (you could base it around a recipe like this – but really now I realise that you could use nettles in virtually any recipe that calls for cooked spinach.

And as we discussed – nettles are nutrient-packed and every bit as deserving of the title “superfood” as lots of expensively promoted, high cost foreign foods you see in supermarkets.

Now I wonder why it is that they aren’t so well promoted ….!

The only warning is that with mature nettles you should only take the top few leaves – the bottom ones can accumulate crystals not good for the liver.

The other really magic ingredient was elderflower blossom … we didn’t actually make elderflower champagne, but we had a very good taste of it – and very nice (and very alcoholic) it was too!

We did have elderflower blossom fritters (well unfortunately I couldn’t because they had a flour – hence gluten – batter – but these went down a treat with everyone else, and I’m reckoning on perhaps giving them a go with rice flour). Basically dip a spray of blossom on the batter, fry, cover with lemon juice and sprinkle with icing sugar.

The greatest surprise ingredient, for not just its presence, but its ubiquity, was rocket… growing, once you knew what to look for, practically everywhere!

Eaten raw, or lightly cooked – we had it in a salad wiith a little fat hen, and with some raw elderflower, and lime tree flowers (not lime as in citrus, what I’ll call British lime for want of a better term.

Much less common – but certainly good size when found – was also fennel.

We also made a couple of great teas – lavendar – take blossom, immerse in boiling water for a few minutes and drink, and surprisingly pleasant it is too. And also the slightly unfortunately named pineapple weed – a close relative of camomile, although with a distinct pineapple juice flavour.

I’ll be walking around London with new eyes now…

(The obvious warning – don’t eat things unless you really know what they are – and if you do make a mistake, don’t blame me!)

A one-act play is a tricky thing. You need to present the characters, create scenarios for them, then neatly roll it up, all within something less than an hour.

You need to grab people fast, but make them feel like they are getting something meaty and substantial, with something to talk about after the show.

The two plays that have just premiered together at the Old Red Lion in Islington take two different approaches, although both are centred around the interaction of two characters.

The first, Dig, sees an incompetent, nervous, weak hitman try to force his planned victim to dig his own grave. But his victim isn’t playing ball.

It’s hardly an original scenario, and it really doesn’t quite work. The behaviour of the nervous hitman is logical enough, but that of his victim-to-be makes little sense. The explanation he gives to the audience – I really couldn’t tell if we were supposed to believe it, I certainly didn’t – just doesn’t hold together.

My companion said that the acting failed the script, I thought the script didn’t give the actors a chance; perhaps the former view was backed by the fact that when a third character, the mafia boss (Victor Perez) appeared on the scene, some real sense of menace and power was injected.

It wasn’t awful – it was just a rather cliched scenario played out with a too-neat — just-like-they-teach-in-drama-school — twist at the end. Perhaps there’s a hint here about the spoiling of the American dream as the nation tumbles economically – a bid for something deeper – but it never really grips.

The second half of the bill, No More, Salvator? is a very different proposition. By the Scottish playwright Michael Haart, it’s a light-hearted comedy, and we already “know” one of the characters, the Mona Lisa (Belinda Wylie), who comes to life to converse with the “late Renaissance” painter Salvatore Rosa (the late bit particularly grates on him), whose two Louvre paintings hang beside her and are overshadowed by her fame.

They’re like an old married couple bickering and ranting at each other, the humour coming both from some rather good lines –”the only reason you should be famous is you’re the world’s first Goth” –, from the incongruity of the Mona Lisa speaking in 21st-century casual slang, and some dashes of brilliant comic timing (I particularly enjoyed the way Mona adopts “her smile” while walking through her picture frame.)

It’s not a weighty piece; there’s no message here (and sometimes the exposition is a little overdone), but it’s 45 minutes I don’t at all regret spending on light entertainment. And Stefan D’Bart as the petulent, juvenile artist is much better cast than he is as the hitman in the first play.

Online booking at the Old Red Lion. Playing until June 26.

That it also delivers a polished, entertaining, gripping evening is a tribute to director Mark Down, puppet designer Nick Barnes and a fine acting team.

There have been many attempts to stage and film 1984, and few have been successful. Really, this is a book about what goes on in Winston Smith’s head – and that’s not easy to put on the stage.

The challenge is centrally overcome here by the use of a chorus – which sets the scene and carries the stories, and the thoughts, along. It marches for Hate Day, it dances obediently to Big Brother’s tune, it sings patriotic songs, it is the puppet-master – and it never leaves the stage. Even when Julia goes to light a gas flame in Winston’s “secret” room, the “flames” are the dancing fingers of a chorus member. And then there’s that sex scene – Winston and Julia’s first meeting in his “golden country” – in which the chorus manipulates their bodies. It sounds weird, but in fact it is an effective metaphor for the whole story unfolding before us.

Added to that central frame provided by the chorus are some fine, sophisticated conceits. This is – an old trope but in this case an effective one – a production within a production. We meet the cast on the bus on the way to the BAC, and they explain the staging, and announce each scene.

And there’s also a “staging” of Emmanuel Goldenstein’s The Theory and Practice of Oligarchical Collectivism by means of moving comic book – playing wittily off the current trend towards “comic book” versions of philosophical and political foundational texts.

The puppetry too is entirely self-conscious and upfront. A cardboard thrush is an odd conceit, so to a Goldenstein of head and hands that pops over a screen, yet both are curiously effective and affecting. And the spookily human-and-yet-not-human movement of Charrington, the junk shop owner who rents Winston a room, is something that will linger in my mind.

Simon Scardifield is powerfully restrained as the passionate Winston, the frightened Winston, the broken Winston. Julia Innocenti as the fun-loving, for-the-moment Julia is also fine, capturing her tremulous, uncertain, and ultimately shallow conversion to political passion with fine judgement. If there was one character I wasn’t so sure about, and I’m not sure I’d blame the actor here, it was Gergo Danka’s O’Brien – the goosestepping, potbellied strutting of his character I found more distracting than illuminating.

But if there’s one aspect of this 1984 that really gives me pause it is the fact that here we are in CCTV-flooded London in 2009, with a government that keeps trying to hold alleged “terrorists” while refusing to disclose the evidence against them to they can defend themselves, in a city where peaceful demonstrators can be “kettled” for many hours without cause. Yet this production very much sees 1984 as an historical artefact.

The feel of the production is quasi-Soviet (indeed much of it reminded me of the filming of a North Korean propaganda movie that I witnessed many years ago), the costuming very much of that era, and the technology is of the strings and cardboard, British post-war idea of how to imagine the future. It seems to almost perversely be refusing to engage with the debates of today, particularly given that Amnesty International is involved in the production.

You could argue that it’s sticking purely to the psychology, to the exploration of Winston’s reaction to tyranny, yet why not engage, in some way or another with the politics that’s pervading the very air of Battersea? (Indeed we’re just down the road from the Stockwell Tube station where police shot dead the innocent Brazilian Jean Charles de Menezes.)

There’s so much skill and quality in this production — so much pure entertainment and quality stagecraft — that I’m sure (combined with the “everyone knows the story” quality of 1984) this will be playing to packed houses through its run. It’s a pity then that an opportunity has been missed to encourage the crowds to leave the theatre thinking about the London of today, rather than a past Stalinist age.

The production continues at the Battersea Arts Centre until January 9.