by Jonathan Grant & Nirmal Grewal

This is a play about the pimp, the poet and the paradox. Charles Baudelaire (Will Tosh) is the heir to a handsome fortune and has fashionable society at his beckoning in 19th-century Paris. Yet, in true intelligentsia style, and au fait with the times, he rebels against conventionality and takes a mistress, a muse for his poetry, choosing one who is an ex-prostitute of Creole origin at that.

Baudelaire is a poet, aspiring yet failing, and The Pimp, now at Kennington’s White Bear Theatre, is, prima facie, the story of his struggles to publish his works – considered obscene for the age. Yet his liaison dangerous, with the self-destructive Jeanne (Lara Agar-Stoby), and the actions and reactions of Paris’ opulent classes, provides the interesting and substantive part of this story.

Superbly written, full of Wilde-like witticisms and aphorisms that are sharp enough to peel words back to contextual reality, the dialogues between the cast, also including Caroline Aupick (Anna Lindup), Charles despairing mother, and the aptly named Narcisse Desire Ancelle (Timothy Dodd) are well delivered, with a delightful depth of intelligence. The frustrated poet himself, who, with each desperate attempt to cut loose from the privileged class he belongs merely serves to tighten that bond on which he depends so heavily, clearly understands his position.
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Fear is on the prowl in Zimbabwe – in, sadly, the real Zimbabwe, and in the Zimbabwe of Fraser Grace’s Breakfast with Mugabe, the RSC New Work production now at the Soho Theatre. The beast first unleashed, perhaps, when a group of Australopithicenes turned first on a sabre-toothed tiger and made themselves not prey but predator, the beast of revenge, of the anger born of suffering, is here. It was reined-in, controlled, soothed, managed – so miraculously – in South Africa by Nelson Mandela, but not in Zimbabwe.

So it is appropriate that Grace should build his play around a psychiatrist – a white, liberal psychiatrist who’s spent his life studying the intersection of western thought on the brain and African spirituality – called in to treat the problems of President Robert Mugabe (Christopher Obi), who’s being tormented by a ngozi, the angry spirit of a former comrade-in-arms. The psychiatrist, Andrew Perric (David Rintoul) – in appearance and voice all bluff, red-faced classic settler type – is patently aware of the dangers of his position, but determined to turn the President into “Robert”, the patient. Although his motives might just extend beyond a doctor’s desire to heal.
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The basic story of the Salem witchcraft trials is well known. At its centre was a group of young women who made increasingly wild accusations about spirits, demonic possession, and malevolent attacks. It is these young women, led by the spiteful, slighted Abigail (Elaine Cassidy) who open Arthur Miller’s powerful exploration of the story, The Crucible.

The Royal Shakespeare Company’s version – its first Miller production – has just transferred to the Gielgud in London. This is a powerful, classy effort (as you’d expect), with a highly topical theme. Miller wrote the play in the Fifties, when McCarthyism was at its height, and today, with restrictive new laws forbidding “glorification of terrorism” coming into effect today, and a scent of panic in the air, it is again all too relevant.

The three hours never drag, as a small Puritan town gradually implodes into a frenzy of wild allegation. Miller presents, and the production magnifies, one potential slant of the conflict, as a class and generational war that sees the poorer, younger women finally getting their revenge against the older women and men who’ve used their labour and heavily disciplined their lives.

The production makes particular effective use of the pregnant pause, the long heavy silence, its actors arrayed in carefully composed tableaus that are almost picture-perfect, within stone-grey wallls that hold – just – the threat of nature, or sexuality, of change, without.
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Reviewed by Jonathan Grant and Philippa Stewart

There comes a time in a man’s life when he begins to question what it was all for, what his legacy will be, and whether he will go down in his family’s folklore as a great man or another name on the genealogical tree. That this time came to Da, (played wonderfully by Frankie McCafferty), as his son was about to celebrate “having a 100 years upon him”, and that the answer, Da thought, was the felling of said tree, are the comic spur to the enormously witty Trad, now at The Bush Theatre.

In the fast-paced opening dialogue, poor put-upon son Thomas (the brilliant Peter Gowen), browbeaten by his father’s angst, reluctantly admits to having a son some 70 years previous to “a girl da – a girl! a human lady”, and thus continuing the family line. So, with that, and the connecting of Da’s wooden leg to his shell-like bones, the journey begins and Da and son shuffle a geriatric Irish jig, to the fiddler music, across the open grave set that they so convincingly have one foot inside already.

Set in Ireland, at some time in the present, the two, known to the villagers as “one of (them) who was the other one’s father”, trample across Irish bog, stealing apples and pelting them at trains with the use of a hurley stick and getting into other mischief along the way. Their task is a difficult one, for “the child had no name, and the mother had no family name”. Indeed, the only information they have is that the mother’s name was Mary, and the child would have been born some 70 years hence that month. But in true Last of the Summer Wine-cross-Father Ted fashion, and with the aid of shopkeeper Sal (David Pearse) and the drunk and cantankerous Father Rice (Pearse again), they go about their task diligently until they have a name; Thomas… after his father.
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There’s a lot to praise about 412 Letters, the inaugural production of the play by Matthew Wilkie that opened tonight at the Union Theatre in Southwark.

There’s an affectionate, sparky chemistry between its two actresses, Emma Field-Rayner, who plays Ros, the uptight, respectably middle-class, high-flying PR executive, and Louise Kempton, who’s Charlotte, the working class, mixed-up but determined would-be writer.

The script is beautifully structured around the letters the two have exchanged – letters written primarily by Ros, that Charlotte has appropriated for her latest attempt to write the Great British Novel. We jump back and forth through time, as the carefully catalogued sheets reveal how the two met – Charlotte was the drummer in a band booed off-stage, who typically decided to take on the whole abusive audience with her fists, and came out worst from the deal – and how their relationship developed, then imploded.
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Plastic Zion, which has just opened at the White Bear, was written in 1982, and is very much an artefact of that time, featuring a representative subset of the angry, disillusioned youth of Thatcher’s Britain, and their music.

At the centre of this discordant little group, transplanted by some unfortunate attempt to experience kulture to an abandoned cafe in backwoods France, is the working-class lad made rock star hero Clem (Nigel Croft-Adams) and his middle-class rebel, self-mutilating, self-hating, girlfriend Josephine (Caroline O’Hara).

Their “groupie” pack – much depleted from Clem’s glory days – consists of his longterm and faithful schoolfriend Yak (Ben Richardson), who’s been unable to imagine a life of his own, and two spongers, the transvestite Carly (Tim McFarland), a petulant, camp imp, and the dim but assertive Dagmar (Minouche Kaftel).

Over the course of a moderately drunken evening they squabble, make-up, and act out all of their anxieties and problems. Yet at the end of it, with the exception of one, perhaps shattering, revelation, they are at the same point as they started.

This is a play that is both better, and worse, than that description suggests. A sketch of the characters suggest stereotypes, and yet the playwright, Chris Ward, makes each of these come alive as real, suffering human beings.
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