by Natalie Bennett

Were Falstaff to wander into the Tricycle Theatre in Kilburn over the next couple of weeks, he’d feel right at home. For in the RSC’s production of a new play, Days of Significance, there’s drinking, and cussing, jokes about bodily fluids, vile curses and martial strutting. Although there’s none of the fine tricksy words of the aristocrats with whom Shakespeare forces him to deal – no fancy lords trying to trap the into battle.

Instead there are the young lads of 21st-century Britain, with few prospects and little to hope for but a rough form of male bonding, and a drunken heterosexual shag on a Saturday night. Their female compatriots are, generally, not reluctant to oblige.

Just as in Falstaff’s taverns of early modern London, the manners are rough. Wooing on the distaff side is as likely to be conducted by a slap around the chops and a twist of the balls as by pretty words, on the spear side by a vomit-splattered, staggering speech “yeah” “err” “whatever”.

But the fundamental subject is Iraq – the “heroes” the achingly young, ill-educated, lost before they land lads who wind up today in the British army ranks, the “heroines” their lasses – as foul-mouthed and drunken, if far more verbally and emotionally literate. (The Daily Mail’s Quentin Letts called it “treasonous”, which has to be a pretty high recommendation.)

The play is billed as written in response to Much Ado About Nothing, although the relationship is distant – the feel much more of a History play – one of those in which Shakespeare skated close to political sensitivities. Which isn’t to say this isn’t a very, very funny play – prepare for belly laughs, often close followed by gasps of horror.
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by Natalie Bennett

Counterfeit Skin is in many ways a traditional story, of misfit damaged characters consumed in unhealthy relationships and dead-end jobs, but done, particularly in the first act, with a light touch that makes it a decent example of that often difficult genre, dark comedy.

There’s an ungrateful layabout youth living off his godfather, a couple of bored, underoccupied receptionists playing dating games on company time while the more uninhibited of them seeks a perfect sugardaddy, the much put-upon partner seeking intimacy while his partner flees at speed.

That all sounds like cliche, yet writer Jason Charles has done a fine job of making these characters – stuffed up not so much by their parents as their past – sympathetic, if over-the-top.

The acting is solid enough, if in the final dramatic denounement beyond the scale of the mostly young cast. The script allows for the melodrama to be played with glee, which is just what the cast: James Kristian, Jonathan Laury, John Rayment and Chris Grezo, Dean Lyle and James Trueman do.
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by Natalie Bennett

The four women played by Linda Marlowe in Believe, which opened tonight at the New End Theatre, would appear, from a simple description of their fates, to all be victims. Rahab is a prostitute who chooses to harbour spies who will assist in the destruction of her city; Bathsheba, seduced by her husband's commander, is forced to watch him sent to his death; Judith might have killed Holofernes, but she can do so only after sleeping with him; Hannah sees her seven sons slain before her.

They have fallen victim to men's wars, men's violence; that this is a comment on the age in which we live now is clearly obvious. But they are victims of circumstance, not victims at heart – when given the space on director Gavin Marshall's sparse, spare stage they're raging, stomping, deadly furies, determined to wreak vengeance on not just the men who've harmed them, but the whole of malekind. They've been raped, abused, twisted, racked, by the patriarchal society of the Old Testament, and they aren't going to rest until male blood has been spilled, male bodies defiled.

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by Jonathan Grant

As audience take their seats and the lights dim, a sense of stepping back to a golden age of quintessential Englishness gripped those attending the first night of The Perfect Picnic at the Jermyn Street Theatre. A penguin-coated pianist enters stage left and, drawing his white gloves from his hands as if challenging music itself to a duel, takes his seat affront his ivoried desk.

As he tickles the keys, producing all of the majesty of Mozart himself, the eyes of the audience glide across the stage, transfixed on Puck, the angel / fairy / harbinger of joy, as she plants the seeds of our story – two tickets to an Opera gala – into the jacket pocket of recently redundant accountant David Sterling.

However, it quickly transpires that David’s ex-wife, the rising opera star Rachel, is performing at the gala, much to the chagrin of David’s long-suffering girlfriend Sarah. But then she finds herself pursued by the flamboyant celebrity TV designer and sometime boyfriend of Rachel, Michael de Haughton-Tours.

What follows is a tangle of love interspersed with comedy, sung in modern day libretto and to the backdrop of 19th-century watercolours of high society and lazy river scenes.
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by Natalie Bennett

The production of Walking on Water that opened last night at the White Bear Theatre in south London features a notably fine cast led by one of the grande dames of British acting, Susannah York. York plays the senile-some-of-the-time, not so matriarchal grandmother in a story that also features her two daughters and a grand-daughter.

Mel Hudson plays Betsy, a neurotic, California-based designer who returns home to small-town Indiana, finally responding to the pleas of her sister Frances (Sarah Berger), who’s lived a classic life of female self-sacrifice – caring for her widowed mother and teaching third grade – made bearable only by copious quantities of “hard liquor.”

We don’t meet Betsy’s daughter, Henny (Victoria Yeates), until the second act, but she also makes a strong impact, powerfully presenting the jagged emotions of a 15-year-old subjected to distinctly questionable parenting.

The four actors form a powerful team; you can feel the strengths of the bond this production has formed. Lolly Susi’s direction brings them together tightly and neatly.
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