By Jeannine Inglis-Hall

What if no one had the legal right to refuse any person’s request for any sexual act? Would this new law produce a new breed of equality? These are the questions at the centre of Gaudeamus, the new play by Peter Morris, set on a Vermont campus where students make and enforce their own laws. Written chiefly as a series of monologues by three characters, we are invited to leave prejudice aside and watch this play with an open mind to the possibilities.

The audience enter as Lynette (Chipo Chung) pauses between pillars to read a book, self-consciously and unconvincingly. In only a few moments she will come forward to talk directly to us, introducing herself and the audience as strangers “because that’s what we are”. Lynette is intended, according to Morris’s script, to come across as “confident, charismatic and breathtakingly intelligent” but instead she seemed twitchy and immature. The pace at which Chung delivers her monologues seems set in the first few sentences and her character is equally unmoving. She is the force behind the social experiment, but starts out, and remains, ignorant of the darker effects of her new “law”.

Had Chung played the role with less enthusiastic naivety, the plot would have been a little more believable. Brad (Travis Oliver) and Helen(Kika Markham) achieved noticeably stronger performances. Brad is a golden retriever-esque college kid, straight out of the American teen college movie, obsessed with sex and completely self-absorbed. Helen, although a 68-year-old virgin with an apparently liberal background, was played in a way that this bizarre sexual anomaly didn’t distract from the composed Professor of Classics who enjoys conjugating verbs in bed.
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by Jonathan Grant and Nirmal Grewal

When George Orwell wrote his satirical masterpiece Animal Farm, I doubt very much that he had in mind anything like the theatrical adaptation by Ian Woodridge that has just opened at the Courtyard in Kings Cross. Yet, while this piece firmly has its origins in that great work, it is to the credit of Woodridge, the director Freda O’Byrne, and the rest of the cast and crew that this mix of narration, performance drama, and gospel choir provides an original contribution to Orwell’s already substantial legacy.

Walking into the Courtyard, one is immediately transported into an agricultural age. Flanked by a cast of a dozen or so, wearing workman-like blue dungarees who, without a feather or piece of fur in sight, represent the revolution-aspiring animals of Manor Farm, we nod approvingly at Old Major’s (Julia Eve) dying words of liberty and equality.

Likewise, when the animals defeat Mr Jones et al at the Battle of the Cowshed, to run the farm on egalitarian lines and effectively take charge of their own destinies, we rejoice. And, in parallel to the Russian revolution, when the pigs, corrupted by power, establish a new tyranny under the impressive Napoleon (Justin Melican) and persuasive Squealer (played by the superb David Ajala), we despair and question how it could have gone so wrong.

For this, Woodridge offers an interesting deviation from many versions of this modern-day classic, which tend to present the story from what is essentially a socialist viewpoint; that the system is good, but that individuals are corruptible. Instead, in Woodridge’s version, the cast portray a subtle revisionist distinction; that it is not the fault of the ruling classes for wanting and taking more luxury, but rather it is the fault of the uneducated and blindly trusting classes, represented by the hard-working Boxer (Dennis Ducane), for allowing themselves to be oppressed.
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In a production of Shakepeare that gets the delivery right, the language itself is magical, fantasmagorical. As a member of the audience you can just sit and let the flow of words reach deep inside, to tug at the core of your being.

That’s what you expect when you go to see a production by the Royal Shakespeare Company, and that’s what you get with Trade, one of the plays of its “New Work” season, which has just arrived at the Soho Theatre in London. It is just that the topic — women sex tourists — might be not quite what you are expecting.

This is the dialogue of a rap song, turned to blank verse. The characters pick up each others’ words and bounce them off each other in a rapid-fire song that is music without tune. The writer, Debbie Tucker Green, will definitely be someone to watch.

The scene is a stretch of perfect white sand – just like the brochures – and it opens with three bored women – the kind of “massage, hair-breading, jewelry-sellers” you’ve seen on beaches from Vietnam to The Gambia. Jets roar overhead, money jingles, but none of it is going to them.
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If, to form a relationship with a play, you demand to be wooed with perfect red roses, entertained by fireworks, and seduced by the image of a perfect life, then The Leningrad Siege is not for you. Jose Sanchis Sinisterra’s creation, making its English-language debut at Wilton’s Music Hall, instead sidles up to you, laughs crazily, wobbles, then drifts around in a haze, penetrating yet indeterminate, like an old lady’s lavender water.

Yet if you relax, hold out your hand, and allow yourself to be led into this story of two old ladies living out a confused, often fantastical, “reality” in an old theatre that’s falling apart around them – you’ll find you’re exploring the whole of 20th-century European history from an intelligent, if oddly tilted, perspective. Continue reading

Divorced, beheaded, died; divorced, beheaded, survived — this is a mantra that few English school students could have avoided learning at some point. They might have even enjoyed finding out about Henry VIII and the frisson of sex and danger that surrounded him; so different to the monarch they know, in her sensible shoes and frumpy hats.

But it can be a bit hard keeping those Cs and Ks straight, so the writers of Divorced Beheaded Died, which premiered last night at the Jermyn Street Theatre, have kept it simple, only putting the first three on stage. Catherine of Aragon (Melanie Dagg), Anne Boleyn (Stephanie Fastre) and Jane Seymour (Frederica Dunstan) are in some sort of heavenly waiting room; you might call it Limbo, but we never get to that level of theological sophistication.

They are the caricatures you remember from high school history: Catherine’s the solemn, humorless one with a strong foreign (if rather indeterminate) accent; Anne’s all sex and temper; Jane’s all simper and stupidity. They think it is 1536, but suddenly Mary Boleyn — Anne’s sister — joins them in this curious room, and they learn it is 1543.

There’s news to catch up on. So for an hour there’s a potted history lesson, with multiple flashbacks to the earlier years of Henry’s reign. It is more or less a comedy, if of the rather obvious kind, with many of the jokes coming from the use of contemporary slang and putdowns by women in Tudor dress. In such a production “What century are you living in?” is a dead cert for a laugh, but not exactly an original one.
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by Jon Grant and Tom Warren

How to Pick Up Girls by Tim Briffa is a sausage-fest of a Battle-of-the-Sexes in the Two Pints of Lager…. mould. It is neither head-scratchingly deep, nor rip-roaringly funny, but does occasionally come to life in flashes of entertaining observations. Adam, Vince, and Nick are twenty-somethings who buy into the “lad culture” of porn magazines and one-night stands, until they see old mother time ticking by. This is the story of their early forays into the serious adult world of relationships and women problems.

However, what follows is neither clever nor insightful. The plot struggles to develop beyond the superficial level of “boys on the pull”, and this is in part due to the often flat performances of the cast, who struggle to develop any chemistry with one another. Largely though, it is because the storyline is too base, neither developing the plot nor the characters enough, to give the actors an anchor in their roles.
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