Serious middle-class types wanting to rescue prostitutes is a social phenomenon probably as old as the “oldest profession” itself. William Gladstone and Charles Dickens are two of the most famous practitioner of this dubious endeavour, but they had many forebears, and have many followers.

Observers are prone – with good reason – to scoff at the motives of the rescuers – and the more self-aware will question these themselves. And that’s what Marc, the studious, thoughtful music transposer who takes on that role in John W Lowell’s Taken In, which opened last night at the Barons Court Theatre, does, when he finds himself irresistibly drawn to Danny, the rent boy who he meets on Hampstead Heath.

To describe the Barons Court Theatre as “intimate” is no exaggeration, and you might think you don’t want to watch a gay relationship at such close quarters. But this is, by and large, subtly done, and Danny’s early attempts at seduction are so abrupt and obvious that only the coyest could be embarrassed. And as the relationship moves on to a more intimate but, on Marc’s decision, distinctly non-sexual, frame there’s nothing more to worry about.

Marc wants to rescue Danny – to set his dysfunctional life in order, to get him writing to his Mum, to get him a “proper”, safe job, to turn him into something he’s not. He’s well aware of the likelihood of failure – we hear, as he offers asides delivered as much as to himself as to the audience – his understanding of his own mixed motives, yet also his desperate desire to succeed in this non-relationship, where all of his previous relationships have foundered.
Continue reading

Politicians are often accused of being a bad example to children; the brawling at Prime Minister’s Questions has frequently been compared to the spats of the schoolyard. No doubt the same complaints are made about US politicians.

The American Eric Henry Sanders, in writing The Prince Among Men, now at the Union Theatre, has turned these observations through 180 degrees and set the American presidential election of 2000 in a posh boys’ boarding school, where the contest is for the position of Head Boy.

This makes for an entertaining ride, as the thuggish, drug-abusing, dim Bozo (played with verve by Jonathan Baker) is groomed for his run at leadership by the would-be power-behind-the-throne, the smart but curiously rat-like Dickie (Warren Rusher). The motivation here is the right to occupy his father’s farmhouse for Half Term – and no doubt to get into all sorts of mischief.

As with the historical parallel, his father is a former Head Boy, and has thrown huge amounts of cash at the school, which ensures the acquiescence to all sorts of skullduggery by the unsubtly named deputy head, Professor Renfield, a DTs-afflicted, obviously inept man past his prime. (Nicely done by Anthony Wise).

Subtlety is not a big feature of the script. Dicky gets his tips from Machiavelli, and proclaims: “People will do anything if you frame it right.” Bozo struggles with the Renaissance courtier’s name, then wonders if it is a form of latte, before concluding that since he’s going to be Head Boy, that proves he’s smarter than his opponent. It is eerily familiar.
Continue reading

In a company full of young people doing dull office jobs, the staff are all trying to establish their lives, to get ahead, and to get into each other’s pants. It’s a situation as old as the shorthand/typist, but these days, as first-time playwright Jason Charles has grasped, there are potential new twists.

Gay workers are increasingly likely to be “out” at work, and their colleagues are going to have to come to terms to working, and socialising, and even getting changed in the same dressing room, as them.

That’s the situation at the start of Steam, which opened tonight at the White Bear Theatre in Kennington. Matt (Oscar Wild), the self-proclaimed office alpha male, who treats his girlfriend Vanessa (Lusia McAnespie) with scant respect, is horrified to find that for a football match against their deadly rivals in the crate-hire business, she’s enlisted a quiet, serious, and gay, member of staff, Luke (a finely judged, subtle performance from Daniel Kanaber). One of Matt’s more repeatable names for him is “fairy-cakes”.

The team grows by one with the arrival of Chris (Glynn Doggett), who’s also straight. He seems young, and vulnerable, and you wonder what he might be dragged into by this dominating character until the numbers are evened up with the final member of the “team”, Billy (Jonathan Gibson), the office junior. He’s as camp and over-the-top as could be imagined, and has a fine line in sexy song-and-dance routines.

There’s time for a few nice one-liners: “I had a promotion but it is not a lobotomy”, says Matt. “I don’t usually associate loving with Ronnie Kray,” says Luke, after walking in on some of Matt’s “rough wooing” of Vanessa. But the play is a bit slow to get started. Will there be an all-in brawl? you wonder.

No. Instead, a curious sport develops – the competitive telling of what Matt identifies as NQEs (Near Queer Experiences). For a homophobe, Matt is curiously happy to talk about gay sex and gay life. And he seems oddly keen to touch, even if it is often a punch, the apparently vulnerable Billy.

But what about the football? Well, there is no game – at least not of that sort, for, it emerges, there’s a lot more to this Friday after-work gathering than that. And there’s a lot more to this apparently prosaic locker-room than meets the eye.
Continue reading

If you were to step out of your time machine into the Athenian fifth-century theatre, what you would experience is not what you see at the Barbican Pit in the Gardzienice Centre for Theatre Practices production of Metamorphoses & Elektra. While the scientists are working on the machinery, however, this evening is probably as close as you can get to the sensation – the music, the words, and the confrontation of a wholly foreign world – that a time machine journey would produce.

Gardzienice’s is a theatre aesthetic of bodies, and sounds. (Luckily, since few in the audience can have mastered both the ancient Greek and Polish that is mixed in with the occasional English explanation.) The company works with the fragmentary remains of ancient Greek songs (a little of the musical notation survives), then has taken in influences from tours to remote parts of eastern Europe, New Mexico, South Korea and Norway, searching for the elemental in culture and humanity.

This is then reduced and shaped to a carefully rehearsed anarchy, to the point where a group of women in white robes, whirling around the stage to a simple but compulsive rhythm (Sufi mystics by another name), are crying like eerily accurate angry seagulls. Or the Author stands in his cloaks of character masks, defenceless and undefended as they are ripped away.
Continue reading

It is seldom that you get to see a master actor, and a master creator, at the top of his or her form. Robert Lepage’s The Andersen Project at the Barbican is one such show. If you have to borrow the cash, or sleep with someone to get a ticket, do it.

You could write a summary that would make the plot sound like a bad Victorian novel. This account of Frederic, the Canadian pop lyricist brought to Paris to write a libretto inspired by one of the darker fairytales of Hans Christian Anderson for a European “co-operative” project right out of the horror files of the Telegraph, is, however, instead a deeply human story that never strikes a false note.

There are plenty of laughs, with a rapid-fire string of European and Atlantic arts in-jokes that almost, but not quite, descend to a stand-up routine. You are, however, always laughing with Lepage, never at him. On the wilder artistic avant garde: “what makes the English furious makes the French delirious”.

This is a one-man show, in the sense that Lepage plays not only the would-be librettist, seeking professional and personal validation, but also all of the other characters, from Arnaud, the conniving but troubled administrator of the Paris Opera, to the Dryad of Anderson’s tale. Yet there’s a long list of technical credits, from the puppeteer who produces a wonderfully believable mutt out of thin air to the “horse cart-maker”, and these are well deserved. Every aspect of The Andersen Project from the supra-realist video backdrops to the elaborate but designerista set, has been polished to almost eerie perfection.
Continue reading