Category: Reviews

It was a stroke of genius. Christopher Hampton decided to adapt Ödön von Horváth’s novel Jugend ohne Gott into a play. Set in the late 1930s, during the height of Nazi rule in Germany, the story explores generational, educational and religious dynamics in this ever-tightening society, but at the core of its meaning is the opposition of the individual and the group. The physicality of the theatre does not just complement but even defines this confrontation in Hampton’s adaptation, Youth Without God, performed at the Coronet Theatre. The teacher (Alex Waldmann) so often finds himself set apart from the group of schoolboys, in an automatic stance of defiance and scrutinised by their communal gaze. The actors playing the six boys are both a wrestling schoolboy crowd and an ominously slit-eyed mob; the slick coordination of their movements is terrifyingly emotionless. When they line up to spit the third whispered repetition of the patriotic song ‘Ich hatt’ einen Kameraden’ into the audience, the fixity of their stares and the snarling of their lips is more chilling than you can imagine. This is one of the moments when Stephanie Mohr’s direction comes into full flow – and shows itself to be curtly, sometimes even horribly precise, and always unsettling.

Individual performances stood out from this group, too. Finnian Garbutt as Franz Bauer acts with wonderful subtlety when he comes to visit the teacher on Hitler’s birthday, delivering his lines with a certainty that fits both the naivety of youth and the certainty of the rebel; Raymond Anum plays Robert Ziegler with an earnestness that both revels in being one-dimensional and shows the cracks of corruption-to-come underneath. Anum and Anna Munden (playing Eva) embody awkward sexuality with such nuance in their scenes together, and Munden enacts perfectly Eva’s conflict between stubborn detachment and the fears of one too young entrusted with too much responsibility. Nicholas Nunn is an eerie watcher: his inexpressive face is powerfully hardened in every scene.

Unfortunately, I don’t think Waldmann gets it quite right. As the play went on, and afterwards, I kept thinking of explanations for the way he played the teacher, the most likely inspired by a line that Hampton quotes in his introduction as von Horváth’s reason for staying in Germany even when the Nazis came to power: ‘it’s going to be a very interesting time’. Perhaps Waldmann’s teacher is governed by curiosity, and this explains his cheerful, even upbeat tone as he describes that happiness doesn’t really come his way. Perhaps he thinks that it’s all so ridiculous that he can hardly take it seriously and it’s almost funny (the audience find themselves often sharing this thought). Or perhaps he’s just naïve, as his pupils accuse him, because he always talks about the way things should be and not the way things are. But in the end, none of these quite stick: Waldmann’s tone is just a little too cheerful, a little too unlayered and uncomplicated, and the emphasis is in the wrong places. This is a difficult part to play, positioned between the audience and the action on stage, a rebel-too-shy-to-really-rebel in the middle of Nazi Germany, and I don’t think Waldmann quite pulls it off. He needs to be more subtle, more varied, and express less with his hands.

The artistic directors really deserve the biggest compliments here. The blackboards around the edge of the stage act as more than just a background for the schoolroom setting: they become a part of the action as characters draw shapes and write letters and half-words on them, most of which only realise their full meaning later in the play. The frenzied effect of writing in chalk heightens the tension of a number of the scenes, and the eeriness of the red chalk dust floating into the air as Hitler’s marching anthem echoes in the distance is incredibly powerful. This set thrives off small touches – the rain shower at the back of the stage, the rotating boards which hide, reveal or provide doorways between action – which make the production thrill with dynamism.

Hampton’s writing, Mohr’s direction, the aesthetics and the boys’ ability to chill their audience come together wonderfully in this production of Youth Without God at the Coronet Theatre. Together they create a piece of art which draws attention to both the potential for horror and the complete ridiculousness of the Nazi state. This production is dark, but sometimes it makes us laugh: and I think this is exactly how von Horváth wanted to portray the difficulty of working out how to live in Nazi Germany.

Published by A Younger Theatre, September 2019: https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-youth-without-god-coronet-theatre/

The privatisation of the railways: how could this make for nearly two hours of exciting theatre? I’m sure I wasn’t the only one who wondered. Playwright David Ware, director Alexander Lass, and a cast of flexibly talented actors handed me the answer: it’s about the people. The Permanent Way gives a space to those voices previously unheard in this tale of restructure and tragedy. I promise it’s intriguing and charming.

This is verbatim theatre, so the words of the play are directly quoted from Ware’s interviews with people connected to the railways. When it works – when the interviewee uses a hilariously cynical comparison or a strangely personal metaphor – it can be more effective than anything the playwright could have written by himself: we laugh at the wonder of people. But there is a caveat: not all real people make good or exciting characters. Not all real people articulate their experiences in a way that will work for the stage. This is where the playwright comes in. He has to break apart and piece back together the words of his interviewees: he has to make them into a compelling story for the stage. Ware interweaves monologues to create theatrical pace; he guides one story into another; he merges voices or makes them stand out from one another. Most of the time, it works. Sometimes a monologue is still too full of the unedited original speaking: it could be slicker, less technical or even shorter. Almost all of the interviewees have been transformed into theatrical characters: but I think Ware could still go further.

I can only describe Lass’s direction as brilliant. There might not be much space for props in the Vaults Theatre but Lass is unperturbed as he has his actors move around, behind, in front of, beside one another, creating space where we didn’t think there was any and drawing even more attention to the fact that each character almost always seems invisible to the others on stage. In this play, everyone is waiting. Actors and characters wait their turn to speak, sitting on the station benches, as this mass of individual stories, conflicting and supporting, benign and confrontational opinions floods onto the stage. Lass makes the most of the difficult, rectangular space of the Vaults, ordering his actors into lines which perfectly craft the shape of the courtroom or the Railtrack workers’ production line, or positioning the narrating government figures in the corners, critically set apart from the grit of the action.

This play demands flexibility from its actors; and it is clear that Lass has chosen this group because of their ability to switch quickly between completely different characters. Gabrielle Lloyd is the most impressive in this sense: she plays both a campaigning solicitor and a bereaved widow Nina with confidence and poise; her depiction of the impossible pain of loss brings a complete silence over the audience. Anna Acton captures perfectly the nuance of a bereaved mother whose grief boils over into anger; Paul Dodds, although he doesn’t have the long speeches of some of the other characters, manipulates his facial expressions and body language until the audience is laughing every time he steps on stage (or at least, in the case of his John Prescott character, knowingly nodding their heads). Not all of the characters are played with such subtlety: but perhaps it is exactly because the authority figures are uncomfortably one-dimensional that they are so perfectly accurate.

Verbatim theatre is difficult, but the cast and crew of The Permanent Way do a fabulous job. Wry humour gives way to financial realism gives way to heart-breaking tragedy within the space of 100 minutes: and in the black underground space of the Vaults, even the at-first-unconvinced audience is swept along by the flow.

Published by A Younger Theatre, September 2019: https://www.ayoungertheatre.com/review-the-permanent-way-the-vaults/

Girls are made of an ungroomed set criss-crossed with wires that are probably a trip hazard. Girls are made of using a hand-held microphone in a space where the audience can probably hear every word you say without it anyway. Girls are made of taking up most of the stage space with a drum-kit, leaving yourself with only a small square to move in, and still transporting the audience to a whole new world. Girls should want to made of whatever Cora Bissett is made of.

Bissett is glorious. Her writing is both a scripted reading and a spontaneous telling; her musical days might be long past, but her storming success as a performer is right now. She re-enacts her teenage life from her diaries without slipping into the cheesy or the sentimental, instead capturing with such astute subtlety and attention to detail the naïve courage and determination of a young Scottish girl with a dream. On that stage Bissett seems to be ageless: she might start off as a forty-year-old looking back on her teenage days, but by the time she’s in full flow I’ve already forgotten that she’s telling this story at all. There is such a heart-breaking grace in her shift between declaring (when the music career is ending) that there is a fire in her belly which gets shit done and breaking down in tears when she wonders, in a bar toilet, when is it my turn? And through all of this she never once forgets her audience. She leads us through the ups and downs with such a dignity that we cannot help but fall a little bit in love with her.

The boys in this show aren’t so bad, either. Harry Ward’s impressions are achingly funny as he jumps from one supporting character in Bissett’s life to the next. His roles range from an outraged, hairdryer-less mother to a spitting school bully to a night-after tour manager to a dodgy record label agent, and each one seems to have its own pitch. Even when he plays a character for one line, Ward’s delivery is so subtly confident that the audience doesn’t know whether to roar with laughter or gape in awe. Simon Donaldson, on Cora’s other side, is a marvel with his facial expressions, and his rendition of Cora’s father as he slips into dementia-d old age, if it makes us laugh, makes us laugh softly and bitterly through the tears. Emma Smith plays the ‘shit-hot’ drummer: she might have fewer lines, but her drumming commands an entire audience’s attention on that raised platform in the middle of the stage. These three are not just complements to Bissett’s piece: in constructing with their voices, faces and bodies what this show lacks in set and costume, they complete the performance of a life.

Because this is truly a group piece. I like to think that’s why it’s called ‘What Girls are Made of’ and not ‘Cora Bissett’. In contents, it might be the story of her life alone, but in its telling it’s a track for a whole band. The most impressive part of this performance is its sense of rhythm, emphasised by the songs and the fact that these are musicians – a reminder that singing and speaking on stage, playing the guitar or drums and speaking on stage, share an essential need for, indeed a desire for, rhythm. There is such a slickness to this performance which I don’t think is merely the result of a month of performances at the Fringe; it tells too, of a chemistry, or perhaps more accurately, a harmony between the people on stage which mesmerises the audience. They are skilled actors, very talented musicians, but most of all, they are four performers who are here to give us a performance.

The end is a huge romanticised indulgence. We can’t deny it. Bissett imagines telling her little girl ‘what girls are made of’. She sings a song, and tells her that girls are made of gang-huts and stilts and go-carts, and first loves and last loves and all the in-between loves. If you’d told me it ended like this before the play started, I probably would have said it sounds cheesy and over-done. But somehow, by the end of this play, I didn’t mind allowing Bissett this indulgence. In this mess of amps and wires, she has convinced me that even if it doesn’t work, you have to ride that horse to the ends of the earth. She has also convinced me that, as far as I’m concerned, Cora Bissett is Patti Smith.

‘Amsterdam’, first seen at Israel’s Haifa Theatre in 2018 and now, translated by Eran Edry, making its UK premiere at the Orange Tree Theatre, is the story of an Israeli violinist living in a Dutch city. She’s nine months pregnant, trying not to feel out of place in her swanky flat on the Keizersgracht and second-guessing the thoughts of the man behind her in the supermarket queue. It’s also the story of a hiding place in the same flat on the Keizersgracht in 1944, a husband and a wife, and Auschwitz.

Maya Arad Yasur’s play thrives off possibility, imagination, and flexible truth. The four figures on stage – Daniel Ableson, Fiston Barek, Michal Horowicz and Hara Yannas – tell the story as if they are improvising. They bounce ideas off each other; they argue over details (do they knock on doors in Amsterdam? Was Ingrid Jewish?); they add to each other’s descriptions as if they’re playing some kind of elaborate linguistic game.

In an interview with ‘The Jewish Chronicle’, Arad Yasur describes the turning-point that Dutch theatre initiated in her career as a playwright, as its more ‘performance-orientated’ style allows the audience to engage with the actors as real people, while maintaining the aesthetic power of the theatre. Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre is the perfect space for this kind of theatre, and this style of theatre is perfect for this space. It would be incongruous for the actors to avoid the audience in this intimate theatre-in-the-round, and anyway the lights never get dark enough to hide us completely. Arad Yasur’s script demands addressees, and the actors manage to make the audience a part of the piece while keeping our focus on the square of the stage.

At first, as I watched the characters construct the story, I found that I wanted them to be less personalised. I didn’t like the garish shirts and wanted them to be wearing something black and abstract, acting as shadow narrators of this dark tale. But as the play went on, I was more willing to accept Matthew Xia’s aesthetic choice. These aren’t abstract narrators whose identity ebbs and flows with the story they’re telling. They’re supposed to be actors, real people who are muddling through this story of the unpaid bill and Amsterdam in 1944. They’re not functional mouthpieces for the playwright’s aesthetic and verbal thoughts. They are, in some way, us, the audience. They, like us, haven’t thought everything through yet.

Xia’s direction had moments of genius: the silence after ‘genocide’; the stamping out of Jewish children like maggots; the Nazi soldiers bursting through the silver curtain into the hiding place. These moments are characterised by a directness, by movement which begins and ends sharply – and the audience is left with nowhere to go. In the second half, a chain-mail curtain is raised up from the floor cutting through the middle of the stage. Although its symbolism is at first uncertain, the noise it makes is chilling enough to justify its presence until it becomes the doorway of the nook, or the window of the Kaizersgracht apartment. This screen is metallic and horrible and unsubtle, and it spares none of our feelings.

Part of the point of this play is to make us uncomfortable. Arad Yasur wants to make the audience flinch when she uses the word ‘cunt’. The actors have to manipulate the audience, drawing us into a sense of benign comfort before erupting into the horror of ‘the Jews are passé’, leaving us in the stinging aftermath to pick up the pieces while the play rattles on with hardly a pause for breath. In general, I thought the actors managed this with impressive subtlety and a deliberateness which didn’t unravel itself into forced statement. It wasn’t perfect – at times, perhaps driven by the script, their attempts at lightness had the tendency to slip into silliness, which interrupted the flow of feeling in the performance – but it was a valiant effort at a difficult subtlety and subject.

My main criticism of the production is this very flow of feeling. What was lacking, I think, was a sense of the play as a whole arc whose tone changes little by little, propelled more or less unidirectionally towards the ending. The actors were obsessed with maintaining a balance between light and dark, humorous and horrible, but as a result the play, certainly in the first half, seemed to turn in circles rather than make any ground. As the history of the flat on the Kaizersgracht is revealed, the weight should shift towards the dark, the horrible, and the audience should feel that they are part of an unstoppable motion towards a horrible end, less and less frequently alleviated by the actors’ jokes.

But maybe this would be too easy for the audience, because we’re expecting it. Maybe it’s more powerful to keep us feeling uncomfortable, and to make us wince at the light moments. At the end of the play, I felt myself growing painfully conscious once again of the audience on all sides of the theatre. How were they reacting? How was I reacting? How should we be reacting? Arad Yasur wants us to be uncertain. The only certainty in ‘Amsterdam’ is the horror of history.

Behind ‘Bryony Kimmings: I’m a Phoenix, Bitch’ is the story of a mother’s trauma as she loses her mind, her house, her boyfriend and almost her child. It’s horrible to remember that the woman on stage in front of us went through all of this. It’s hard to imagine what it would look like.

But that’s exactly what this play does. It forces us to imagine until all we want is to get up and leave the theatre. It’s not too strong to say that Kimmings creates in her audience feelings of terror and awe. I couldn’t decide, as I watched it, nor can I decide now, whether the performance was intended more as catharsis for the actor herself, allowing her to enact the process of replaying which she tells us her therapist has suggested, or to make the audience feel and understand. In the end, I think, the two come together, and we are torn apart throughout the play by feelings of overwhelming sympathy towards Kimmings, and an absolute fear for ourselves that something like this might happen.

Kimmings’ show pushes at the boundaries of symbolism. Her set is constructed out of four smaller sets – model versions of scenes in her story – shrouded at first but revealed unromantically and even clumsily as the play goes on. The way in which Kimmings unveils the set pieces is a perfect example of her natural, unpolished style; she is a normal woman in conversation, telling this story in all its grit and reality and without any of the glamour and shining lights of the theatre. Each set-in-miniature contains pieces of costume and props which Kimmings uses while she talks: lipstick and an overdone blonde wig for her first night with Tim, a green flowing maternity shirt for the mother-to-be, a spade for that terrible, terrifying scene. The set pieces are stylised representations of scenes in a life; they are aesthetic symbols but also the touchstones of realism; they are the most theatrical elements of the performance yet also the very things which found it in a real story. We would be wrong to read these symbols as merely aesthetic, and when Kimmings drops this analytic distance, things suddenly become very scary.

What is indisputable in this show is Kimmings’ sheer talent. This performance doesn’t just rely on the horror of the autobiographical story for its effects. The way in which she creatively and so seamlessly brings together the play’s different elements is compelling: the wonderfully unsettling technique of filming herself to create a strange sense of the layering of illusion and reality within this story, the songs and the lighting effects don’t draw attention to themselves as theatrical effects or techniques: rather they seem to flow naturally out of the story she is telling. The precision and ruthlessness of thought gone into every moment is evident.

And then there is the talent of Kimmings’ acting. I salute the balance she achieves between the raw and the controlled; she never lets emotion drown out the performance, the story; she never loses sight of her audience. She begins more informal, breathless, sitting on the floor to put on her sportswear as if about to begin a conversation with a good friend, but she ends in full poetic flow, dramatic in every sense, reflecting on bad luck and on life. Her intensity is spellbinding. Kimmings guides the audience through this nightmare with glorious control, letting us laugh to dispel the tension, only to break our hearts again with her next sentences. This is skill onstage like almost nothing I’ve seen before.

At the end of the performance I saw, her last, Kimmings admitted that she wasn’t sure how she had managed to do this every night for a month through the Fringe. I find myself marvelling, more, at how she has managed to go through the process of constructing this masterpiece of emotion: how did she have the talent but also the emotional control and discerning mind to decide what the set should look like, what music she should use, what she should wear and when she should use lighting effects; how did she rehearse this day after day until it was perfect – a ‘perfect’ expression of the most painful and frightening period of her life? This show is not enjoyable to watch – it’s intensely terrifying and overwhelming – but it does inspire a sense of awe at what this one woman has achieved. It is important and powerful: and it will not be forgotten in a hurry.

‘Backspin’ is a young people’s theatre company dedicated to staging new interpretations of the plays of Harold Pinter. Their latest choice, performed by students from the St Paul’s Schools at The Lyric Theatre in Hammersmith, is ‘Moonlight’. And it’s an intriguing choice, because this play is at once very Pinter and very un-Pinter: there’s less grit than we probably expect, and its twist is not as horrible as in ‘The Homecoming’ or ‘The Birthday Party’, yet its sketch-like form makes it into a space where Pinter’s dramatic techniques are compounded and showcased. Suddenly, with this play, what makes the actors succeed or fail is not so much how they carry the story but how they realise these dramatic elements; the demands of Pinter’s theatre are now undisguised and even brutally foregrounded.

Lydia Free tackles the nuances of the character of Bel, and her performance deserves the highest praise. She acts with an intensity and subtlety which allows her to move from knitting wife reminiscing about her convent school days, to blunt wife sparing no one’s feelings with her excavation of her and her husband’s lives of illicit lust, to heartbroken wife and mother watching her husband die and accepting that her sons will never come home. She navigates the more-often-than-not-self-contradictoriness of these feelings with an impressive maturity, and the interactions between husband and wife bristle with the tensions of a power-play.

Because, yes, this is a double act. Charlie Hill as Andy displays marvellously the verbose man, full of expletives, reduced to his deathbed and forced to reminisce about times past in all their glory and frustration. The tone changes even in a single scene from confident mockery to terrified posturing about what happens when we die: and Hill leads us seamlessly through it all. His accent and mannerisms are perfectly pitched and consistent throughout the play; Andy’s dying moments are loud and visceral: the audience was silent.

Silence – both in the audience and between the actual characters on stage – is one of Pinter’s most renowned theatrical weapons: and one of the elements of his drama brought to the fore here as part of the Pinter showcase. Hill and Free use the silences to express the relationship between them. In Free’s case it is a way of gaining power over her garrulous husband; for Andy silence is exactly a sign of his impotence, and that he has been defeated. Silences in the interactions between the brothers, Jake and Fred, played by Harry Church and Marcus Dunfoy, arise as part of their almost-flawless rhythm: these two have clearly rehearsed until their dialogue is polished yet still dynamic, riffing off one another and pitching in at exactly the right moments to create something that is almost musical as well as verbal. Charlie Fisher as Bridget uses silence theatrically in her white dress in the white light, pausing to draw attention to her ethereal form and to let her last words, her list of flowers or description of the moon, hang in the air. Meg Hatfield also plays with silence as Maria, captivating the audience with her wonderful enunciation and the pauses in between, rolling the words off her tongue and creating the scenes and images with her body and words so that the audience cannot help but be transported to the moment she is describing.

Hatfield’s approach to Pinter’s language is to indulge it – and indeed linguistic indulgence is something that this production does very right. The characters play games with words, from the brothers who reel off lists of names in the fantasy they have created for themselves, to Bel’s interrogation of the phrase ‘taking the piss’. The tendency is almost obsessive, as Pinter’s characters fixate on a word from another’s speech and carry it through all its possibilities until it has become a whole new reminiscence which is only distantly related to the original scene. Actors in a Pinter play need to savour their words, think up connections between them, know what each word means and what it doesn’t mean, and become obsessed with language: and I have to applaud these actors for doing exactly that.

What I have suggested here is that it is the words which matter most in Pinter. This is mostly true, but I think where this play could have gone even further was in its physical movement. The stage is not the biggest, and I certainly understand why director Christian Anthony chose to emphasise the stasis of each set of characters confined to their portion of the stage, never overlapping with the others, especially in the glorious ‘Chinese laundry’ phone call scene. But I think it could have been effective to have the characters – or, in particular, Bridget and the brothers – move around more of the whole stage during their speeches, between and around the other still characters. Breaching the tripartite set before the ending, I think, would have emphasised the emotional distances in the family relationships: and how powerless any of the characters are to cross them.

But it’s all about interpretation. And what I felt as I watched is that these actors have picked a reading of their characters and gone through with it, and that this production of Pinter is this group’s unique interpretation. These performers are not content just to be passive readers of Pinter: they are willing to add their own voices to his creation. Such bravery in such young performers is not to be waved away lightly.

In theatre, as in real life, first impressions matter. When the curtain lifts on this production of ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ at the Piccadilly Theatre, written by Stefano Massani, adapted by Ben Power and directed by Sam Mendes, the audience need some time to take in what we see on stage. We need some time to take in the glory in glass that Es Devlin and her colleagues have created. It is partly an office meeting-room, partly a small storage room, partly a living room with a leather sofa and a craning desk lamp – all surrounded, defined and revealed by the glass walls through which images, scenic or abstract, and colours, garish or mute grey, are projected onto the back walls of the stage. We need some moments, at the beginning of this production, to marvel at this construction (definitely not enough moments to even contemplate how the whole thing was transported from the National to the Piccadilly) while the janitor clears up rubbish and tucks in chairs. This is all before we even realise that it spins.

But the set of ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ is fundamental beyond its opening minutes: it embodies the play’s messages, emphasising, underlying and undercutting its meaning, and forming the core of the experience of watching this Massani-Power-Mendes production.

The boxes which the redundant bankers fill with their belongings as they leave the Lehman Brothers offices on the 15^th September 2008 are on stage throughout the play. They form the boxes of fabric in the Lehman Brothers’ first shop in Alabama, the lamp-posts between which the Wall Street tightrope walker strings his balancing rope, and the towering, teetering structure which haunts the dream of Philip Lehman. Even while everything else changes and the years whizz by, the boxes are there. The audience, through these boxes, is never allowed to forget where this play is heading, and what will eventually and inevitably (because this is known history, after all) go wrong. As the boxes are constructed, deconstructed, reconstructed, serving the aesthetic and the abstract of the theatre, they remind us that this is not just a play, and definitely not just an aesthetic exercise: this is the true story of a real-life catastrophe.

The characters grow into the space through the course of the play. When Henry Lehman steps off the boat from Germany and first sets foot in America, his far-sighted dreams of this new world and the tight leather chairs of the office room are decidedly incongruous. But as the brothers increase their appetite for business, and each Lehman generation makes more and more money, the setting seems more and more fitting. It feels as if the whole play comes together just before it all collapses.

In this way, then, Devlin’s set seems to look forwards: but it also carries with it constant reminders of the past. As the brothers draw out their different company signs on the glass walls, they make their mark on eternity, and as the office scene and fabric-selling men begin to converge, the signs hang in the background as a persistent reminder of trajectory. By marking out the steps of progress in this way, this production seems to ask us to consider: is this, in fact, a forward-moving story, or is it nothing more than a cycle posing as progress? In the end, anyway, the signs are only written in flimsy handwriting and erasable pen that can and will be rubbed off before the next performance. The signs were once real, as this progress was once real, but now it is only a play, and these actors are performing it on repeat. This is exactly why ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ is at its heart distinctly chilling.

Whether as progress or as cycle, time marches forwards in this play: and it is driven by the rhythms of Massani’s writing. ‘The Lehman Trilogy’ doesn’t just move to a rhythm when Bobby Lehman does the twist on the table and the stocks spin on the wall behind him (just one example of the genius use of projection in this play, an effect that I cannot praise enough). The play is in constant flow, matching Henry Lehman’s stilted, lilting German accent when he lands in America, and creating throughout a sense that this is not plain English speech, but something closer to music, or even dance.

Maybe the whole play can be seen as a kind of dance. Certainly the third person narrative style with which the story is told, going beyond dialogue to have the characters describe their own words and actions just before or even instead of speaking or acting them, gives the whole play an air of having been choreographed. And that is exactly what Mendes’s direction lends to the play. He does not vaguely gesture at movement or give the actors a capacious emotion to think through, but directs to give a specificity, a tightness, a slickness: the boxes form one shape and then another, the actors play one generation after another –  and time marches on.

It shouldn’t go without saying that the acting deserves the biggest standing ovation: Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Dominik Tiefenthaler’s energy was formidable from the first minute to the last (if I was exhausted by the end, I can’t even think about how these three felt). They managed to maintain a subtlety in their acting which allowed them not only to play such a range of characters and ages, but also to navigate the play’s not rare moments of comedy with lightness but not silliness – and never interrupting the flow of the whole piece.

And the effect of all of this – of the frantic but perfectly managed acting, of the literally jaw-dropping set, and of the self-aware, relentless rhythms – is probably unforgettable. By the end of the play I was out of breath and out of thoughts, wanting to stop to consider but unable to stop: I was overwhelmed and awed by the hugeness of what this had become, this thing that had started as one brother setting foot in America with hopes of a new life selling fabrics in Alabama. And here they have done it: such hugeness in miniature, on the stage of the Piccadilly Theatre.

Throughout Jack Thorne’s ‘The End of History’ I found myself asking: what kind of play am I watching and what am I supposed to be feeling?

At its core this play is a realist drama: domestic action set against the background of a changing political climate. There are five family members and an outsider who becomes part of the family: six characters whose conversations engage with personal, emotional questions and contemporary politics. Threaded through these interactions is a comic tone which veers between the subtly metaphorical and slapstick. But ‘threaded’ carries too much nuance. Thorne combines the comic, the poignant and the realist and the effect is one of a misaligned jigsaw as the genres don’t quite come together. The overall feeling for the audience is one of confusion.

On the night I saw the play the actors seemed to feel this same confusion. Thorne’s play features both David Morrissey and Lesley Sharp, both renowned actors whose famed talent does not quite follow them into these roles. Sharp plays the part of the mother, and her acting was dominated by exaggerated hand gestures, strangely inflected speech and accentuated movements across the stage. Perhaps some of this can be interpreted as coherent with the mother’s occupation as an English teacher: she is used to being the one talking, and she directs all of her lines as if to an audience on a stage. The problem is that these exaggerated movements tended to slip into slapstick comedy, and then the emotional power behind the figure of the mother-trying-to-impress-but-not-embarrass-her son’s-new-girlfriend was somewhat lost. It felt as if Sharp was trying to juggle not just realism and comedy, but also politics and poignance – and these four balls are difficult to hold in the air simultaneously.

I would argue that Sharp’s difficulties are generated by Thorne’s text: in particular, by his characterisation. The impression I got was that Thorne had picked out the strengths and flaws for each of his characters, but hadn’t quite worked out how these different parts would fit together in the finished person. Is the father verbose and political or tenderly sensitive? He can be both, but the line between each conflicting trait needs to be blurred; his character needs to be seamless. The act of creating believable fictional characters requires the playwright to balance absolute realism – the character is exactly like a real person, and behaves just as unpredictably as a real person – and symbolism – the character acts only as an embodiment of a particular trait and their reactions in different situations can be predicted after knowing them for a short time. I am not saying that the doubleness of Thorne’s characters was wrong in theory, but that the two parts needed to be more carefully weighed up and considered in terms of the character’s whole effect. This could have made all the difference to the play’s success.

But there is a more pressing problem of character in this play: the notion of how the characters change over time. Twenty years pass through the course of the play, which is split into three scenes with ten years between each (as the calendar in the middle of the beautiful set declares). Yet the characters hardly seem to develop from scene to scene. Playing a twenty-year-old student and then a forty-year-old corporate lawyer in the space of an hour is far from easy: but I don’t think the script helped. Thorne could have gone further with his setting of the new temporal scene each time, by writing in some extra lines to help join the dots between past and present, or perhaps director John Tiffany could have helped the actors to emphasise their different mannerisms in each scene (I thought Laurie Davidson as Tom was the best at capturing this shift between the first two scenes with his rebellious schoolboy hands-in-pockets and shrugged shoulders). Perhaps the point was to show that people don’t change, and that life doesn’t progress. But if the point was that time passes and things change, then that change needs to be portrayed more explicitly and directly.

‘The End of History’ could have been so many things. It could have been a story of political change acted on a single family in Newbury; it could have been an exploration of the dynamics between three siblings; it could have been an examination of parenthood and how we are remembered after death. There are flashes of brilliance when it is almost these things, but the play doesn’t move forward enough. It stays in one place, balancing genres and complex characters but never quite succeeding in the juggling act.

As many a Norwegian literature student will tell you, Henrik Ibsen’s plays are full of tropes. When characters start a line, or when they go offstage with a loaded gun to play gramophone music, we know exactly what is going to happen. This cast, directed with care by Erika Price, Chloe Lansley and Jonathan Iceton, manage the predictability that these tropes bring with a certain grace; the audience are aware that the actors are in control of the obvious, but we are also left open to the beauty of interpreting for ourselves, and the wonderful feeling that we have worked something out on our own.

Inge Vera-Lipsius, playing Hedda, takes control of this show. She enters silhouetted behind a curtain, the first moment where Ash Pratt-Jarvis’s cleverly-designed three-layer set comes into its own. (The other particularly poignant use of these layers happens when there are actors in both the front and back rooms; the stakes of the foreground conversation are raised because we are constantly reminded, visually, of the fear that those in the back might be able to hear.) She rises tall above the others in this opening scene, commanding and yet intricately proper in every interaction.

Vera-Lipsius revels in the short words, the ‘oh’s and ‘ah well’s which are also the territory of her arguments with Tesman (William Batty). The complexities of her character are condensed into the smallness of her words here, and yet very much not condensed as they spill out in constant contradictions and reversals in the play. When Ruth Wilson played Hedda Gabbler in the 2017 National Theatre production of Henrik Ibsen’s play, she said of her character: “you can’t contain her or put her in a box. That’s unusual for a female character – more often you know what the angle is from the start.” Vera-Lipsius’s Hedda is certainly undefinable: does she create havoc to cure her boredom? Is she so enthralled by the possibility of beauty that she struggles to make her own life, or that of others, fit into this romantic image? Does she have a deviant mind that means she cannot stop herself making plans and playing with other people’s lives?

There was probably one moment in the whole show when Vera-Lipsius dropped out of her character (in her first interaction with Mrs Elvsted): otherwise, her acting was characterised by a ruthless consistency and a tightness of expression. It is Vera-Lipsius, I felt, who redeems the play’s slower moments, but also her interactions with Kay Benson as Mrs Elvsted. Benson gives a nuanced, subtle and clearly experienced performance as she enacts the dynamic of younger schoolgirl terrified and yet enthralled by the older girl she has met outside the school grounds. Benson and Vera-Lipsius work naturally and confidently together, and their scenes are where the play really begins to find its rhythm.

Jesper Erikkson as Judge Brack deserves his own paragraph, too. From his first entrance, Erikkson is sure who his character is. Brack has an effect on the others in the room, as their body language changes in the face of his charisma, symbolic positioning and only lightly-veiled innuendos. In the bigger chunks of speech, Erikkson has a tendency to sound as if he is reading out his script, and he would benefit from taking a moment to pause, if just for a moment, in between his own lines, and to try not to keep thinking about the next line as he says the one before. This said, his command of verbal rhythms and pace in his most important lines is fantastic: especially effective is the way in which he spaces out his words in particularly emphatic or manipulative moments. Erikkson’s performance adds a wonderful energy to the show, and his confidence in his interpretation of character is something to be channelled by every actor.

In general, this play gets better as it goes on. Maybe this is a result of Ibsen’s realism and the need to set the scene and lay out character clues in the first half so that the events of the second are realistic and understandable. Either way, the liveliest scenes and most powerful moments, both aesthetically and dramatically, come in the second half. Music and light come into their own at this point: the music of the play is cleverly matched tempo and tone with the scene it accompanies; the lights in this play simply dim and brighten when the window is opened or closed or in moments of quietness or verbal darkness, as all of the audience’s senses are manipulated at once. I won’t spoil this play for you if you haven’t already read it, but what I will say is get ready for the scene where Hedda crouches by the fire: all of the play’s power, in my opinion, comes together in this sequence.

‘Hedda Gabler’ is a play about the inevitable power of men and the inevitable powerlessness of women. Hedda does not conform to either model of the woman presented by men – she is not a mother or a whore; in this play she is neither the ideal maternal figure, nor does she transgress sexually. Price, Lansley and Iceton do an admirable job of managing an always-difficult dynamic as they tackle Ibsen’s masterpiece: the fact that this play was once shocking to audiences in its portrayal of the feminine, but is no longer. This production is graceful, nuanced and provoking, and it is carried out by actors who are fantastically certain and consistent in their character performances.

Published anonymously in Varsity, March 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/17266

‘Two Man Show’ is a Fringe award-winning piece of feminist theatre written by RashDash, a company of three women who believe in creating art which feels not just with the head but also with ‘our toes, our knees and our ribs’. Tigerlily Hutchinson and Sara Hazemi are two of Cambridge’s finest actors, and director Chloe Lansley always adds excitement. And there’s live music from a talented quartet to top it all off. This show has a lot of potential.

And each element of the production on its own lived up to that potential. Hazemi performed her parts with a subtlety and earnestness which asked for its own space within the question of woman; Hutchinson delivered her lines with a confidence which forced us to follow her as she created meaning out of the seemingly trivial and deflated the momentous. The language plays in the Cards Against Humanity scene were managed particularly skilfully, as the lines led outwards from the game and its possibility for jokes towards the reality of familial relations into an agreement to stop speaking these words altogether. The two together created beautiful moments of physical theatre and dance which alternated grace and brutality, bending their bodies over one another and then viscerally – and audibly – punching one another in the face (Eleanor Lind Booton deserves a mention for her creative and convincing fight choreography).

The music (especially the last song) flowed along with the feeling of the play, at times bringing out the electric guitars in a frenzied song against the patriarchy, and at the end of the play focusing on vocals to create a mesmerising final scene. These four musicians (Mariam Abdel-Razek, Olivia Miller, Phoebe Schenk and Matilda Schwefel) are clearly talented, and my one complaint would be that they were under-used: I would have liked to have heard more from them.

The costumes were cleverly chosen, and I particularly liked Hazemi and Hutchinson’s undressing and dressing in the first scenes, and then gradually undressing until they were in tight nude outfits that seemed to suggest a certain rawness in their final monologues.

But now to turn to the monologues. The monologues were written by the women from RashDash, to be performed by them, and I think this came across in the performance. That is to say, I’m not sure it felt real enough to me. I couldn’t particularly relate to either woman in the last scene: and that would have been fine, if I had believed that I was listening to words that Hazemi and Hutchinson really felt. The first half of the show, where Hazemi and Hutchinson were playing men, felt scripted, but it was supposed to feel like that, as here they were clearly playing characters: it was when they broke out of character and the play collapsed into self-expression in monologue that I thought something was going to change – but it still felt like they were reading someone else’s words.

Perhaps Lansley could have got her actors to write their own monologues about what their own meaning of the word ‘woman’. I just didn’t believe that ‘Sara’ and ‘Tiger’ were playing Sara and Tiger, and not a character written for them by someone else.

It was a shame, because this show came close to being good. But it’s message, that there are so many different ways to be a woman, was lost because it was spoken by characters and not by the actors themselves. The final monologues felt like they could have been hilarious and wonderfully poignant, but the comedy was lost because it felt like they were reading out someone else’s piece of stand-up. To use the Tab reviewer’s word ‘incendiary’: it could have been, but it just missed the spark to start the fire.

Published anonymously in Varsity, May 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/17505