Author: irispearso

I don’t want to spoil this show for you by saying too much. But what I do want to say is that you should go and see ‘I’m Having a Wonderful Time in BADEN-BADEN’, whatever it takes.

Picture the room. There is a bed on one side, a hanging window-frame on the other. A desk at the front, with a bottle of Christmas wine standing on it. Everything is white, ‘the flat white of amnesia’. The only sense we have of time is the light becoming brighter and then darker again, and the harmonies of Allie’s alarm clock set to a nostalgic radio station. The white colour of this room is thrown into relief by the orange of four packets of satsumas and the red of her sheets stained with period blood. The white walls become screens for projections, silent videos filmed with the shaky hand of a friend or of memory itself; these projections show us some of what cannot be explained in this play.

Maybe it’s weird that I have started my review with an abstract description, or that I haven’t done what a review normally does and outlined the premise of the play, the characters and the main plot lines. This is because I don’t want to spoil it. Part of the beauty of this play is in the slow release of detail: starting from the phone call where Allie only grunts in response, her speeches become longer and longer, her postcards moving away from banal formalities and whatever she feels she should say and towards something more honest, more painful, and more difficult to write. Amelia Hills controls the pace wonderfully as she moves from silence to frenzy and passes all the points in between.

Indeed Hills cannot be praised enough. While of course lots of credit must go to director Rosie Chalmers whose staging gloriously complements the lines and draws out with its gorgeously coherent aesthetic the complete isolation that Allie feels, Hills’ performance is almost faultless. She conveys a sense of hopelessness, of suppressed emotion and of uncertainty. Hills captivates our attention, and we feel like we cannot look away – we want to watch her in every movement of every moment. She does not just play a part, she embodies it – even when this means biting into a whole satsuma and spitting it out again into her hand or massaging purple sparkly hair dye into her hair. The actor is not the same at the end of the play as at the beginning (she has purple glitter in her hair and she can taste orange peel) and there is something so powerful in Hills’ visceral engagement with the lines that she speaks. And what is more, she remembers, unprompted by any other character, over an hour’s worth of lines.

All the details are perfect, the acting is spot-on – now it’s time to turn to the writing. Jenny O’Sullivan’s language treads a line between the poetic and the conversational, the comic and the painfully poignant, capturing perfectly the sense that we are listening to Allie’s innermost thoughts, which sometimes twist and divert and sometimes pursue one image almost obsessively to its furthest possible point. That her words manage to captivate an audience for over an hour, with only a single character in a single room with a bed and a bloodstained sheet hanging over the window-frame, is something truly impressive. This is writing that speaks of a mature writer, processing feelings whose complexity and subtlety (or intensity) seems to defy words. She finds a perfect way of saying everything.

When you see this play for yourselves, you will see that I have not done justice to the emotions it expresses or the complex realities that it reveals, and most of all I have not even come close to exploring the powerful implications of self-address which comes to the fore in the final moments of this play. But the uncertainty is part of this play’s beauty, and I am not going to spoil that. We do not know what we know right from the beginning. Details are gradually revealed to us, as emotions are written down or spoken out loud or projected onto the blank walls behind Allie’s head. We feel what it is to be completely hopeless, to now know what to do except peel oranges and write postcards to people who might read them or may not even receive them. What O’Sullivan writes, what Chalmers directs, and what Hills presents is so important. This play deserves so much attention.

Published anonymously in Varsity, October 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16296

The opening scene thrills with beauty and tension, and the spell of the past. Tom (Bilial Hasna) wanders across the stage, wonderfully drawing out the poetry of Tennessee Williams, the lightbulbs hanging from the ceiling behind him catching the light as they sway, the screen behind him covering the set like a layer of dust left there by time. His smile as he looks back at life perfectly captures the nostalgic, the sense of the pain and beauty of the past, that is so crucial to this play.

The set has been considered in every tiny detail, from the symbolic blue roses on the wallpaper to the gramophone to the ladder on the right hand side of the stage which acts as the fire escape; this smaller space on one side of the stage forms a space of intimacy which is the site of some of the play’s most profound conversations. The dining room table is sectioned off, surrounded by curtains – I was not entirely convinced by the motivation for this aesthetic decision, but it was an interesting addition to the set.

This show certainly has its moments of brilliance. Kim Alexander, playing Tom’s mother, is hilarious, particularly in the phone conversations with her subscribers: her comic timing is exquisite. Alexander manages to capture the exasperated hysteria of a mother worried about her son going off the rails, about not having enough money to get by – and about her daughter who never has any gentlemen callers. Her accent is great, but she make sure that none of her words are lost in the pace and excitement of her speech.

The main shortcoming of this play, however, is this: there seems to be a disjoint between the words and the actors. It feels as if the rhythms of Williams’ language, which are so crucially to its beauty, are slightly missed by the actors in their performance, and at times it feels as if they don’t quite understand what they are acting. The second half is much less guilty of this, as Ellie Gaunt and Leo Benedict, in their long candle-lit scene, pitch their words perfectly with the subtlety and yet heart-wrenching emotion that the scene demands. As they sit on cushions on the floor behind the candelabra, talking about the past and the present and their characters, the audience cannot help but lean in, intent on their every word, pressing closer to see the glass animals as the light shines through them.

This final scene is still not perfect, however, and I felt that there was something missing. Perhaps it was the blocking, which left the characters in the same place for most of the scene – there was just not enough dynamism. Their dance, however, is magical, and perhaps this giggling intimacy is what redeems the scene.

It is in this final scene that the music finally seems to make sense. Throughout, it seemed like the music was a bit gratuitous, motivated only by Tom’s initial comment about how memory is always to music, but with no particular direction. It was not quite matched to the words, making sentimental or frivolous some powerful scenes which should be listened to with the weight of silence behind them.

All in all, this was an enjoyable performance to watch. It could have been blocked a bit more dynamically, and maybe the lighting could have been more daring, but the main problem, in my eyes, came in the moments when the actors didn’t seem to care or really understand what they were talking about. There were moments of true beauty, however, where the words of Williams were expressed with subtle emotion, expressing a sense of the uncertain future and the need to make sense of everything – but this were moments which fell short, and this is a great shame.

Published anonymously in Varsity, October 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16242

A month of travelling around the USA, and then back to the brand new ADC for the Cambridge home run. You’d expect a cast of wearied travellers – tanned, perhaps, but just a little bit over the show. What you get with ‘The Tempest’, however, is something quite different. Combine slick choreography with skilled acting and beautifully-designed tech, and the ADC opens with a bang.

The show begins almost like a piece of physical theatre, in a chaos of sea and bodies which move with a power and aggression that both mimics the crashing of the sea and provides a background of movement for Shakespeare’s words. Each actor knows their place, and they come and go, hit the floor and breathe their way back up with a certain smoothness which tells of months of rehearsal and performance. This is Shakespeare not just in words, but also in bodies, whose writhing and falling culminates in the opening lines of the play.

There is something beautiful in the wordlessness of this opening, which is evoked later in the play, too: particularly in the scene where Miranda (Shimali De Silva) dreams of herself and Caliban. The two jump over and under each other with ease, crafting for themselves a whole physical story which expresses their relationship, acting with an ease which nevertheless brings out the tensions of the relationship between the two characters.

Caliban (Conor Dumbrell) is shirtless, deranged; he scuttles around the stage like a kind of animal. Ariel (Milo Callaghan) is similarly portrayed, wearing first a ripped shirt and then none at all, with a look in his eye that seems to take pleasure in the chaos that he causes and the suffering and confusion that he brings. The Ariel that Bruce-Jones gives us, then, is not the light fairy interpreted in so many other productions, but a more terrifying, animalistic, indeed even brutal male figure.

There is certainly strength in Ariel’s portrayal. In one scene, Ariel stands at the centre of the stage, bathed in blue light, arms spread wide in glory: the image is frightening and yet beautiful. The blue light creates a sense of the surreal, of a world beyond the one that we know.

The lighting is a particularly strong point of this show. The use of torches throughout is exciting, illuminating, watching the characters, crouching beside them as they speak their famous monologues. Torches focus the light, they give it a sense of direction, and the necessity of them being held gives a sense of the omnipresence of these spirits. In the darker moments, where torches are the only light, there are shadows of the characters on the ceiling of the theatre, reinforcing the sense that these spirits are all around us, behind every door and through every wall, projected on every ceiling even now.

The use of sounds in this play is also remarkable: extraordinarily well-managed, it hangs on the edge of subtlety, as background sounds throughout the scenes create a clear atmosphere which surrounds the characters and does not make them speak into a vacuum. This island is under a kind of spell, and we are drawn completely into its world, not allowed or able to leave.

The human interaction with this world is a source not only of tension and intensity in this play, but also of humour. The performance of Toby Waterworth (Antonio) cannot be praised enough; he manages to make his comedy fit in with the genre of the play, throwing a cigarette into the air in a completely absurd and yet playful image. His delivery, too, is hilarious.

There is a such a coherence to this production: the lights, sound, and scenery (the wooden structures evoke the forest while strongly pushing against it, even celebrating its destruction through their strangely dead, varnished state, reconstructed into trees which are far from natural) create this sense of the island’s atmosphere, from which the audience cannot escape. The actors move Shakespeare as well as feel him, using their bodies to add to this sense of the fairytale and the mysterious. And any audience must be won by an endearing shadow play of lovers behind a sheet, whose lifting sets in motion the revelation scene so crucial to the end of Shakespearean comedy. This is a wonderful rendition of such a complexly mysterious play.

Published anonymously in Varsity, October 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16200