Article first published on Blogcritics

by Natalie Bennett

Climate change is perhaps the first scientific issue that’s become hopelessly entangled in the traditional right-left split of politics. Perhaps unsurprisingly then, there’s been a big left-right split in reviews of the National Theatre’s new big production on the issue, Greenland.

The Independent is the most positive, the Guardian’s moderately warm about it, the Telegraph scathing.

But I don’t think any of them had got it really right – this is really a very, very good show, an enrapturing staging of a fast-moving series of tales that crams an astonishing amount of detail and emotion into a tight, non-intervalled two hours.

Sure, if you like your plays as small, detailed exploration of individual psychological states, this isn’t for you. Characters and events are sketched rather than fleshed out, there’s little in the way of backstory, but this is a style, not a fault. And it is funny – really very funny, often.

Perhaps the biggest star of the showing is the staging – this is theatre as spectacle, but often moving spectacle. Lots of reviewers have commented on the polar bear, an hilarious interlude, but also notable are the Arctic guillemots, swooping around the auditorium in a curiously affecting trick of light that makes the emotional attraction of Michael Gould’s Arctic observer and lover of the birds, on stage with his youthful self, entirely comprehensible. Designer Bunny Christie deserves huge plaudits.

Director Bijan Sheibani marshalls astonishing changes of scene and mood beautifully — who’d have thought that a detailed explanation of the method of negotiation in international talks could be made visually interesting? And the conversion of airline check-in clerks in smart uniforms into resting guillemots, to be measured and manipulated by the carelessly loving scientists, then stalked by that polar bear, is a masterpiece of suggestion.

The play was co-authored by Moira Buffini, Matt Charman, Penelope Skinner and Jack Thorne, but the joins really don’t show; despite its multiple stories there is a sense of coherence in our confused world of young, angry, fearful campaigners (who struggle against the attractions of popular astrology at a festival), well-meaning bureaucrats who suffer from a touch of the Alastair Campbells, and naively optimistic developing world negotiators arriving at Copenhagen with the conviction that the urgency is so obvious, the humanitarian cause so striking, that something must work out.

There were a lot of empty seats last night, which is a real pity for a big, fine show. My recommendation is to go along and fill a couple, and get a glimpse of the present that might be the view of a future historian of our age.

The production continues at the National Theatre until April 4.

First published on Blogcritics

by Natalie Bennett

Clybourne Park is an often laugh-out-loud funny, bitingly witty, skilfully written play by American Bruce Norris exploring the intersection of race and property values in the US that in this transfer production from the Royal Court is expertly staged and superbly acted.

Through two acts that cover snapshot moments from the history of a single inner suburban home in Chicago (1959 and 2009), it neatly skewers middle-class hypocrisy, self-satisfaction and cant.

There’s one real problem with that: to explore particularly unpleasant middle-class mores requires spending an evening in the company of prattling, middle-class bores, with accents that are frequently horribly grating and irritating.

That’s not meant as a criticism of the acting: Sophie Thompson as Bev, the mindlessly jabbering housewife of the first act, and Sarah Goldberg as the hypersensitively pregnant and astonishingly self-centred wife in the second both do standout jobs in portraying their very, very irritating characters (and the rest of the cast are just as good), but there were moment when I really thought “I don’t want to hear another word from this character”.

And the staging and general production values are high – as you’d expect. (And I doubt I was the only one left wondering how they did the amazing transformation of the set between the first and second acts.)

But there’s another problem with the play – it has at its heart a terrible human tragedy – a soldier who came home to this is family home after the Korea War, convicted and confessed of being what we’d now call a war criminal. But that fact isn’t really explored or developed, it’s simply used as a driving force for the first half of the plot, and as a neat if rather meaningless finishing scene.

If you do go to this play you’ll laugh a lot more than you’ll laugh at most comedies; you’ll squirm in your seat in an uncomfortable way, recognising middle-class examples of all-too-common racism to match this week’s Sky Sports sexism scandal. And many theatregoers will no doubt be happy enough with that – certainly it was packed this evening.

But you might also leave with a nasty little taste in your mouth, having spent an evening with characters you might half-recognise, but don’t really want to remember.

Other views (all more positive than mine): Guardian, Independent, Telegraph.

Clybourne Park is at the Wyndham Theatre, right beside Leicester Square Tube, until May 7.

by Sarah Cope

Here is a play in which very little happens and very, very little is said. On that promising note I will attempt to review it.

Before the action (such as it is) begins, the small audience are ushered into a sideroom and issued with instructions. We will, it seems, be sitting on the set, and are required to take off our shoes. (This, I assume, is because the carpet and rug have to go back to Habitat and the Rug Warehouse when the run is complete).

We then find ourselves in a living room with seating around the edges. A woman (Sandy McDade) is sitting on one of the settees, wearing headphones. It is the early hours of the morning; she is alone, tense, and it becomes clear that she is mentally ill.

This being a play directed by Katie Mitchell, we are aware that something bad is going to happen. Then a baby cries from another room. Although the woman does go to tend to the baby twice – on one occasion returning with a dirty nappy – her main response is to drown out the noise with music, the vacuum cleaner and the television (showing an
incongruously chirpy Nigella re-run).

The play shows that when a mother has post-natal depression, or indeed any other mental illness, and she is isolated and unsupported, she is not the only one to suffer; the baby may be neglected, and suffer the consequences of that for life.

This baby won’t have a lifetime of suffering, however, because this is a Katie Mitchell-directed play. That’s all you need to know.

Small Hours has an extended run until 19th February.

Elsewhere: an interview with Mitchell, another view from There Ought to be Clowns.

Article first published on Blogcritics

by Natalie Bennett

The story of Kaspar Hauser has inspired writers down the generations. It’s a tabula rasa, this story of a boy of 16 found in a town square in Nurnberg knowing only one sentence and life in a single dark room, on which the literary imagination has danced.

It’s clearly the origins and inspiration for Kaspar, by the Austrian-born playwright Peter Handke, that’s now just opened in London. But, any review would be remiss not to point out early on that this is Avant-garde theatre with a very large capital A. If you like your theatre to have plot, character development, or even logical sense, then this is not the show for you.

“I want to be someone like somebody else was once.” With those words – in every conceivable intonation and rhythm, Ryan Kiggell as Kaspar begins the play – and occupies at least the first 10 minutes. It’s a fine performance – it could easily be a jumble, yet the body language and sounds match perfectly to different possibilities, and the detail exploration of that single phrase is followed by an confused but deeply studied exploration of the banal domestic furnishings, chair, table, bench and wardrobe scattered around the “stage”. It constitutes a spectacularly good piece of physical theatre.

To enjoy this performance, you have to be able to focus on the moment, the sound, the phrase – trying to make it all make sense in a narrative form can only result in irritation, although there’s certainly plenty of philosophical games to be played. And that focus makes enormous demands on Kiggell; for nearly every second of the production he’s the only focus, from that halting original experimentation with the single sentence, on to the final, more polished presenter, confident at the microphone armed with a seemingly endless collection of almost sensical management buzz words and self-help slogans that reflect Handke’s exploration of the effect of modern life, modern media on this delicate subject.

The setting for this “pop-up” production (clearly this is going to be the phrase for this economic crisis) is an abandoned office, flashy and optimitisc cheap plastic with additional performance from the trains running over this converted railway arch. That works as a setting for the stream of management speak, as well as for the darker moments of this production, as a autocratic, even fascist, state apeears to be shaping this tabula rasa, with enthusiastic recitation of phrases such as “while giving a beating it is good to imagine the imminent order… beat air from their lungs like dust from a rug”.
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by Sarah Cope `

The first thing to say about Season’s Greetings is that if you have tickets for it already, try to get a refund. If a friend offers to take you to see it, risk the friendship and tell them you would ather gouge your eyes out with a skewer. It really is that bad. Actually, it’s worse.

You may have read the excellent reviews and wonder why I am being so harsh. But let’s look at one of the reviews. The Daily Mail has said it is “a cracker of a production”. In that crackers are full of crap nobody is interested in and terrible jokes, I’d say that was spot on.

Here we have a tired, dated Alan Ayckbourn play, set in the Seventies, though you might not guess it from some of the clothes and shoes (if they can’t even get that right, you know you’re in for a bad evening). It’s set at Christmas, so let’s put it on at Christmas, with some well-known cast members and a lot of sparkly publicity.

All you need to know is that this is a bad family Christmas. As one of my companions pointed out “most people have already been through that – why would you want to pay good money to go through it again?” Quite.

Catherine Tate as the neglected Belinda is possibly the highlight, but that’s not saying much. Katherine Parkinson (from Channel 4’s The I.T Crowd) as the heavily pregnant Pattie is such a moaning minnie it is tempting to cover your ears with your hands whenever she ventures on stage. Parkinson does in fact have a voice that sounds like she’s either about to cry or is in terrible agony – possibly both.

As is usually the case, the most incisive theatrical commentary was to be found in the queue for the ladies loo during the interval. One well-to-do woman said to another, “I could really do without that ‘Del Boy’ character!”, by which she meant Neil Stuke’s Neville, a loathsome, swaggering bully who one could only hope would be electrocuted by the Christmas tree lights.

In fact, I would happily have seen all nine characters end their days this way. The play could certainly have dispensed with three or four of them altogether as they added nothing to the plot – and we could have all gone home sooner. A very strange element was that despite the relatively large cast, the action was essentially a succession of (boring, pointless, unfunny) two-handers – different combinations of two characters talking in the hall, or the lounge, or the dining room – of what was, of course, an utterly bland set.

If you do have a ticket and feel obliged to go along, cheer up – you might get the ‘flu.

Season’s Greetings has an extended run until the end of March.