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”.
Continue reading

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.
Continue reading

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.
Continue reading