By Jonathan Grant

It is the Year of Our Lord sixteen hundred and forty-nine. The King of England has just been executed, beheaded by the “great robber” Cromwell, and the age of the Pirate is here! From the drinking dens of London, stretching out as far and wide as the Barbary Coast and the New World, Under the Black Flag tells the story of Long John Silver, the dastardly villain of Robert Louis Stevenson’s Treasure Island, in the days before he lost his leg and boarded the Hispaniola as a humble but conniving cook.

Staged, aptly, at Shakespeare’s historic Globe Theatre on the banks of the Thames, as part of Dominic Dromgoole’s plans to intermingle new dramas with the classics, the audience is taken back through the generations like the retreating tide. And, though he’s writing in the modern day, playwright Simon Bent constructs a language that seems to reel back the hands of time to an age of pocket watches, spyglasses and the Jolly Roger riding high on the Seven Seas.
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What happens in a family that has no “cultural capital”? If it lacks the education and knowledge to make sense of the world; if it lacks the emotional skills to manage its internal relationships; if it is not so much dysfunctional as non-functional, what will happen to its members? Sam Shepherd’s 1985 A Lie of the Mind explores this question, through two families that are widely separated in geography – Montana and southern California, but joined by their joint hopelessness and haplessness.

There are no obvious clues in this production as to why the winner of the JMK Award 2006 for Young Directors, Jamie Harper, chose this as the award show, but given the current state of America, and its bemused, confused, baffled blundering around the international stage, it is hard not to read it as metaphor. But if this was intended, some clues should have been provided.

But perhaps this production is instead just meant as a portrait of human self-destruction and mental collapse. It certainly does that powerfully – perhaps too powerful for the intimate space of the BAC. I know that domestic violence is a terrible thing, but having its victim very nearly in my lap, pathetically sobbing for the man who gave her brain damage, is perhaps setting the emotional volume rather too high.
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A tragic, pathetic fate for a young girl strangled by social convention and propriety; an explosion of youthful sexual experimentation and hormonal energy; radical statements about traditional social structures wrapped up in slapstick farce. Those are the key elements of Frank Wedekind’s Spring Awakening, which has just opened at the Union Theatre.

So radical is this script that it is hard to believe it was written in 1891; far less surprising that it was not performed unexpurgated in the UK until 1974. The challenges for the Union Theatre are today, however, not from moral guardians but from a play demanding a huge cast (17 actors in total), many playing young adolescents, and embracing this huge range of moods and registers.

It is a challenge that director Aoife Smyth and producer Sasha Regan, and their actors, have risen magnificently, aided by a lyrical translation by Edward Bond. (So often it seems impossible to render German into “natural” English, but he’s managed it here.)

If there’s one single lesson from the play it is that Philip Larkin wasn’t saying anything new about parents and children with his “they fuck you up” line … “Parents are bringing children into the world so they’ll have something to shout at,” complains one young character.
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Late Fragment has a lot going for it. There’s a topical hook – its
“hero”, Matthew, arrives on stage dust-spattered and debris-battered, having
escaped from a World Trade Centre Tower on 9/11. The role is played by Alex Zorbas with powerful intensity but some subtlety.

His materialistic wife Marta (Kelli Kerslake), whose first thought is of the
financial implications, is also given a decent degree of ambiguity as
Francine Volpe’s play progresses. Their relationship and its inevitable
decline with the mental health of Matthew whose personal faultlines are
unable to bear the earthshaking national event with gripping intensity.
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by Jonathan Grant

Returning to the Barbican after its sell-out success during the Young Genius season, Vestuport Theatre Company’s production of Georg Bűchner’s unfinished masterpiece Woyzeck charts the downfall of one of life’s erstwhile survivors. The eponymous hero earns a crust, and nothing more, as servant to the brash Captain. Additionally, he is forced to allow the sadistic Doctor to perform medically dubious experiments on his body and mind.

His poverty makes Woyzeck meek. His social standing makes him amoral in the eyes of the Captain, and “nothing more than a dog” to the Doctor, which in turn perpetuates Woyzeck’s timidity to the oppression he suffers and his appearance of stupidity.

Yet, the Doctor and Captain are known only by their titles. They have no proper names. It is they who lack humanity, compassion and morality. They manipulate Woyzeck for their own benefit, not for any social gain, and their own strict moralities prevent them from seeing Woyzeck’s deeper good. They berate him.
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