By Natalie Bennett

The Union Theatre, though modest in appearance and resources, puts on some very fine shows. The London Ensemble’s interpretation of Medeia, which opened this week, is, unfortunately, not among them.

The problem, perhaps, started with the concept, stated in the programme as being to provide an “accessible new version” of Euripides’ account. That means you get the language of the great ancient tale of the human condition reduced to the sort of psychobabble you find in the “women’s pages” of middle-market newspapers.

So Aigeas tells Medeia, in an apparent attempt at consolation, that Kreon’s decision to leave her is just men being men: “Any man would do the same – a younger model comes along.” Medeia laments to the chorus of Corinthian women “I thought I’d find my feet here”, but assures them she’s not against them: “It is my husband I have issues with.” Kreon assures Medeia: “It’s not in my nature to be a bully.” The language never gets beyond cliche.

And the production is big on exposition – telling the tale rather than showing it – just in case any member of the audience should not be aware of the story. That which should be left unsaid, left to hang in the air, is said, or rather shouted – for this is a production big on ranting and raving.
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By Natalie Bennett

When you think about it, the classic literary agent character — a wheeler-dealer type who loves to close a deal, who regards business as a sporting contest — and the author — an angst-ridden, solitary figure detached from mere vulgar commerce — are an unlikely match. Yet such encounters are necessary before any book, let alone the latest best-seller, lands in your local Waterstone’s.

So it is not hard to believe that Martin Wagner’s new play The Agent, which opened at the Old Red Lion tonight, is, as the writer says, “based on an original meeting”. Traditionally, in such encounters, it is the author who is on the side of the angels, and the agent who’s the cynical, pound-driven realist. But just how much of a bastard can the agent be? And can a writer overcome his wiles by abandoning their principles?

Those are the questions that the Wagner poses, as Stephen, a bespectacled, unworldly, struggling writer, tries to sell his second novel (after the first, as the agent casually reminds him got good review but no sales). There’s a neat twist here, since it is Wagner himself who plays Stephen, in a solid performance that convinces.

Opposite him is the charismatic Alexander (Hamish Clark), who wants only to rid himself of this minor embarrassment and get back to wining and dining his big names. Clark does a good job in making a fundamentally slippery character real – one minute he can be musing on his sad failure as a writer, the next leaping for the jugular in a commercial transaction, even one he doesn’t want to conduct.
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By Natalie Bennett

Peer Gynt is Ibsen, but not the Ibsen you’d you’d normally think of. As written it was a sprawling tumble of verse, designed to be read, not performed, and in performance taking some six hours to complete.

The first piece of good news is that the National Theatre of Iceland’s performance of this epic has been cut and reshaped, to last two hours and 40 minutes, including interval. So your seat bones will survive the experience.

The second piece of good news is that there are some spectacularly good elements in this Peer. This is a production that loves the surreal, embraces the surreal, and produces some ruly memorable scenes – the bathhouse scene in which Peer induces the plutocrats and politicians of Europe to start the First World War is particularly memorable. The “trolls” armed with video cameras and a threatening electric sander are also noteworthy.

This is also a production that observes the details of everyday life in loving detail. The scene in which Peer’s long-suffering mother (Olafia Hronn Jonsdottir) is taken in by his boastful story of “the Buckride” is set in a modern-day fish processing factory, and the interplay among the workers is beautifully observed. And the fish are definitely fresh – you can smell them.
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By Natalie Bennett

The image of the ship of fools was a much-loved medieval device that allowed satirists and artists to attack the powers of their time – which meant, by and large, the church and its instruments. It’s an approach that playwright Andrew Bovell (a name you might know from Strictly Ballroom) has harnessed for the modern age in a play of that name which opened last Friday at the new Theatre 503.

One half of Bovell’s tale is of 1492 Basel, known, as one of its burgher proclaims, “throughout Christendom for civility and sophistication”, when the city council decides to get rid of the mentally ill, the disabled and the heretic by putting them on a rotting, oarless, sailless barge and pushing off to an unknown fate. The other half is in modern Britain, in which the off-stage powers-that-be decide to ship a mismatched group of unemployment benefit recipients off to a mysterious job-creation scheme that might or might not be in Scotland.

Bovell’s not only visiting the Middle Ages, but harnessing much of their rambunctious, scatological energy. Central to the historic tale, and linking together the centuries is the Fool (Andrew Buchan), who morphs into the modern-day delinquent Simon. One piece of dark comedy concerns the “mooning” to which the Ship’s passenger’s subject a bunch of well-meaning nuns; one running joke concerns the uncertain bowels of the mayor of Basel.
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By Natalie Bennett

If “every unhappy family is unhappy in its own way”, then is every unhappy category of people unhappy in their own way? It would seem not, if Alexander Galin’s account of the lives of Russian street prostitutes, Stars in the Morning Sky, is to be believed. The stories of Anna, Maria, Klara and Laura are achingly similar to those we heard in so much detail recently in Britain after the Ipswich murders.

They are victims of poor parenting, of institutional abuse, of exploitation by “boyfriends”, of drug addiction. They survive, and keep themselves going, through a mixture of hard-headed calculation, mad dreams, fairy tales that they half-believe, and sometimes pure panic that matches accounts from British social workers of the lives of the women they try to help.

But there’s no helpful, friendly institutional figures in Eighties Russia – just the rough, much-exploited Valentina (Jan Hirst), half-hostess, half-jailer, whose unreliable policeman son Nikolai (Sean Hammond) is the only indicator of genuine authority, and an unimpressive one. The “working” women have been forced out of Moscow in the clean-up preceding the 1980 Moscow Olympics. That’s one thing that makes this production of Stars in the Morning Sky, the first, it is said, in translation, topical – no doubt a similar set of Chinese women are soon to endure similar treatment.
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