By Jonathan Grant

When someone feels that they have a task as laborious and meaningless as that of Sisyphus, perhaps they have a right to feel melancholy. Indeed, when that person has their fated love chosen for them, they can feel disempowered and hopeless.

Yet, when that “one” is the romantic Prince of Popo, and he is being accompanied by such a starry-eyed and lyrically swashbuckling companion as Valerio, then spirits can only rise. This is the set-up in Lydia Ziemke’s reinterpretation of Georg Buchner’s satirical play Leonce and Lena, which has just opened at the Tabard Theatre in Turnham Green.

As Prince Leonce and his compatriot Valerio embark on their quest for love and the meaning of life, they cut through many of the duchies, principalities and other small “onion states” that have long since disappeared from the European map. Much like that early 19th-century map of Europe, Ziemke’s adaptation is full of quaint arrangements that make the multi-faceted scenes, from melancholic to comic, in the hunt for “Destination True Love” thoroughly enjoyable and alive.
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By Robert Bain

Writer-director Tom W Lister’s new play Sting For Nolte is pretty self-indulgent, so it’s a good thing that it’s funny as well. The premise, if you must know, is as follows. Philosophy lecturer Allen is staying up for the fifth night running to finish an important paper, when his long-suffering fiancée reveals his birthday present – tickets to see Sting in concert.

As soon as she’s out of earshot, Allen reveals the terrible crisis this puts him in: he can’t stand Sting. But there’s a glimmer of hope in the form of Nick Nolte, for whom he has a strange admiration. Clearly, he reasons, the only way out is for Sting to redeem himself by remaking every single one of Nick Nolte’s films. And TV programmes. And plays.

His idea might be off the wall but it rings true. There’s something unnervingly recognisable about this young man who really loves his girlfriend, and yet can’t get over the fact that she likes Sting and hasn’t heard of Nick Nolte.

The reasons why Allen feels this way about Sting and Nolte are of little consequence – he justifies his hatred of Sting on the basis of “the way he was sitting” on the one occasion that he happened to meet him.

The play’s heavy reliance on pop culture in-jokes is very much in fashion, and the idea of real-life celebrities in surreal situations is reminiscent of recent hits such as Being John Malkovich and Extras. But like these, Sting For Nolte only succeeds because there’s real humour and intelligence behind the novelty appeal.
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By Natalie Bennett

The work of the late Sarah Kane has been belatedly recognised as that of genius, even by some of those who were her fiercest critics when her first play was staged by the Royal Court in 1995.

There are multiple rapes, suicide, cannibalism in that work, so perhaps the general hysteria of 1995 was understandable. Yet seeing Blasted anew last night in a new production at the Soho Theatre, it is clear that this is in no way shock-for-the-sake-of-shock. Without the distancing effect of the actor-delivered stage directions and the matter-of-fact delivery this could just be Hollywood-style sexploitation, without the defracting, deceiving mist of the camera lens. But never for a second does it feel like that.

Certainly the relationship between the young, highly vulnerable Cate (Jennifer-Jay Ellison) and the middle-aged, cynical, violent Ian is shocking, but its very complexity is its best defence. Kane explains Ian, presents him as human, while never excusing his actions. And in the second half, as the city of Leeds falls to some un-named invading force, we are in a more surreal world, yet a world that has a feel of truth.

And despite this careful distancing effect, all of obvious Brechtian devices, these are characters, even the nameless Soldier, with whom one immediately feels sympathy and identification. They are never simple, never predictable. This is, simply, a great play, its language masterful in its rawness. Who could top: “I loved Stella until she became a witch and fucked off with a dyke”?
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By Natalie Bennett

There are sequences of true brilliance in All Wear Bowlers, the lively work physical theatre that brings together many of avant-garde techniques of the 20th-century – indeed at one point makes reference to that very term. It is truly gripping to watch Trey Lyford “die” as his partner in silent-screen clowning, Geoff Sobelle, attempts to prevent yet another egg bursting from his mouth, only to become an eerily convincing ventriloquest’s dummy that then comes to life as a comically threatening automatum before morphing into Goya’s child-consuming Saturn.

It is also easy to marvel at the sheer physical virtuosity of Sobelle’s set-piece Laurel and Hardy-style “the ladder and the rope”, played without safety lines or the net of the film set multiple-take. It is set up when the pair of Twenties-style silent movie actors, whose opening scene offers shades of Godot, fall out of that screen onto the Barbican stage, then seek to dig their way out of the ceiling.

That’s typical of the many appearances of Sixties-style Absurdist theatre that they should choose this route – as with those Magritte-style eggs that just keep bursting out and popping up somewhere – sometimes as hard as rocks, sometimes real eggs. (This isn’t perhaps a show for the best coat.)

Although should you find yourself sitting in rows A or B you might want that, for beware, you might find yourself part of the show… one more element in this grab-bag of theatre technique.
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by Natalie Bennett

On Religion is billed as “an exploration of the most controversial subject of the moment”, and it is a collaboration between the philosopher AC Grayling and the writer-director Mick Gordon, who was also involved with the somewhat similar On Ego a year ago.

There’s the same blend of human drama and philosophical exposition, with perhaps a greater percentage of the former than marked Ego, and the slick production values we’ve come to expect of the Soho Theatre. Yet, somehow, it was less satisfying.

With the balance trending more towards drama and less towards thought, we are presented with a family at the point of explosion. Grace (a fine, powerful performance from Gemma Jones) is an ageing but popular academic whose made her career out of what’s generally called atheism, although she’s so hardline that she she refuses to use a word with “theism” in it.

She goes predictably ballistic when her lawyer son Tom (a super-cuddly and engaging Elliot Levey) suddenly announces that he wants to become a minister. In the middle between them are her patient, long-suffering husband Tom (Pip Donaghy) and Tom’s girlfriend Ruth (Priyanga Burford).
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