Category: Reviews

Federico Garcia Lorca’s 1934 play ‘Yerma’ is set half in the house of the young couple, Yerma and Juan, and half in the fields that surround their house in the Spanish countryside. The Corpus playroom presents both of these scenes simultaneously, hung with long windows and lined at floor level with reeds, displaying a doubleness of set which layers the two locations on top of one another and allows for smooth transition between them.

Amara Heyland-Morrin’s vision carries a clear sense of place – not of specific place, but more the feeling of a society, one separated from any wider world, where values are fixed and all-engulfing. Here women marry and give birth, and this is what matters. We take Yerma’s desire for granted as we watch this play, and we feel with her that it is the most important thing: we don’t even question the problems of a society which promotes such a problematic vision of femininity. This play, as it is presented here in Morrin’s directorial vision, does not push against society’s values, but works within them. Yerma’s name means ‘barren’ in Spanish, and thus from the start she is defined in terms of her inability to have children.

The play opens (and closes) with a dance. These framing sequences, performed against the backdrop of a projection of waves, epitomise the symbolic choreography that is so central to this production. This production drips with symbolism, and each of these moments are wonderfully crafted so as to be at once beautiful and grotesque – and backed by live piano and violin music by Sam Tannenbaum and Esme Cavendish. The white sheets (possibly the production’s most important prop) enact this endless symbolism as they first become a noose in a silent strangling scene (as well as in a loud one at the end), and then create a moving surface which drowns Yerma, and against whose tautness her movement begins to look like the kicking of a baby inside a mother; in the gossiping scene with all of the women they begin as the floaty freedom of laying washing out to dry in the open air but soon become tainted with the dark cruelty of these women’s words. The skipping rope made out of these same sheets is not an image of liberating childishness, but one of the nastiness of children excluding others in the playground: it becomes so horrible we can’t even look.

The most eerie moment may come when these women act as a group, but individuals shone in their scenes too. Bathsheba Lockwood Brook, playing the wise old woman who calls Yerma child and tells her to feel the wind through her skirt, squeezes the truth out of Yerma not just through her words but also through her ownership of the space: he moves closer with each prying question she asks or suggestive detail she extracts from Yerma. Vee Tames as Maria shows a wonderful development in her role, beginning as the young, naïve and worried expecting mother to the woman with two children who is not afraid to voice the difficult effects of Yerma’s envy. She overtakes Yerma; she makes us feel the pain of Yerma’s lack.

Annabelle Haworth as Yerma relishes in the detail of her smaller movements, particularly in the later scenes. Her eyes flit skittishly, and her hands shake: her whole body takes part in the feelings. Part of the power of her symbolism lies in the way she is dressed, but Haworth makes sure that she complements and fills her costume, rather than letting herself be defined by it. She begins in a white dress, when the illusion of her happiness is more solid, but after the women gossip and call her barren, she reappears in grey linen, with her hair scraped back. I cannot praise enough the artistic vision both of Hemma Jari and directors Heyland-Morrin and Teodorescu for the way these costumes shape how the audience views the characters. They unleash a power of costume so often overlooked in student theatre.

The dynamism of these female characters contrasts with the stillness of the men. Gabriel Wheble as Juan does everything with the tightness of a man constrained by honour, one who ‘just gets the job done without paying a single attention to the details’: a man who eats an apple without calling it delicious. Harry Burke as Victor is conscious of the boundaries which he cannot transgress, and there is a feeling throughout of his pent-up passion which never quite shows through. In this production, the men have been interpreted as merely representations, rather than individualised characters: and I must admit that I’m not sure about this way of playing the male characters. While I could convince myself that their stiffness was deliberate, I felt at moments that the men seemed uncomfortable and mechanical on stage: and it was a shame to feel this about Burke and Wheble’s acting. If they are going to follow this interpretation, perhaps they should be even more deliberate, so that the audience can be in no doubt that this is what they mean to do.

The biggest tragedy of Lorca’s play is the particularity of Yerma’s desire. All she wants is a child, and everything else she wants is merely to reach this end point. Heyland-Morrin and Teodorescu’s production, set aside from reality in the brightness of the countryside, the river and the isolated house, follows through this sense of the only thing that matters: the female body and its desire to grow. The female actors, complemented by the men, do just this as they act, emphasising the power and the importance of their womanly bodies, but in the end, too, their failure. These women will wither like roses. This production of ‘Yerma’ is thoughtfully and beautifully executed, and the new touches which this team have given it are wonderfully creative and perfectly-pitched. ‘Yerma’ completely deserves the sell-out audience it got on its opening night.

Published anonymously in Varsity, March 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/17325

A year abroad in Paris and Leo Benedict returns bursting with excitement. Cambridge theatre needs something completely new and he has found just the thing. This is the start of the Cambridge Mask Collective, and its first show is ‘Conversations with Myself’, directed by Benedict and Odette Baber Straw.

Benedict wrote the beginnings of ‘Conversations’ during his year abroad (in French) but this was just the start of it all. From the moment he brought it back to Cambridge, the piece became not his own, but a collaborative effort. He describes his work as different from that of a ‘theoretical playwright’ who goes away on their own and drafts and redrafts before finally presenting their work to a group of actors; this play has been crafted and recrafted and recrafted again, cut and restructured, rewritten, expanded, reduced, in a swirl of movement and constant change. There are 150 pages of unused material, Baber Straw tells me, and one of the hardest parts of this process has been deciding what to cut and what to keep, and not getting too attached to what doesn’t fit.

On one level this process, hinging on spontaneity, brings a vivacity to the performed final piece. On a practical level, it is a great set-up for the hectic rush that is a Cambridge theatre turnaround. The script was only finalised ten days before opening night, but because the process has improvisation at its core the actors have a wonderful confidence in what they are doing which cannot but pervade the scenes.

Benedict stresses that everyone on the Camdram page has had a creative stake in this production, and excitement characterises the experience for all of them. Each of the actors (Amelia Hills, Milo Callaghan, Victoria Zanotto, Hannah Ramezani) is from a different walk of theatre – from verbal realism to musical theatre to pantomime to physical theatre – so they each bring something different to the performance, merging themselves with the character, the person behind the mask with the face shaped on it.

It is Tim Otto who has designed and made the masks for ‘Conversations’, and Benedict praises his understanding of the simultaneous coherence and disparity needed in these masks: that is, they portray at once general characters and highly specified individuals; they are all made of the same white plaster and yet intensely different. In short, the paradoxes of the mask-making through which Otto has so carefully navigated epitomise the identity crisis which is at the centre of this play. The set in this case is the mask, the self, the character, and it is their stories and nothing else around the outside which Otto tries to tell through the visuals of his designs.

But this play is about more than aesthetics. I watched the cast go through a Meisner-esque exercise called koala (you can picture it) which forced them to think about something between the verbal and the physical qualities of their acting. It directed them to the tiny point of interpretation which is not defined by the body’s movement but also by its stillness and its very fact of being. Watching the actors act without masks made me think about the effect of these pieces of plaster: they at once conceal expression and craft it. Watching the actors act without masks meant I could only imagine what these lines would sound like with the full-mask aesthetic or how they would seem to an audience who had never heard them unmasked: and I can’t wait to see what these scenes look like in their full unravelling this week.

This project is energising. Benedict tells me he chose the actors for each other; he was thinking about what they could learn from each other, and what they had to teach. It is this sense of uncertain novelty, of fragility which is spontaneity, and of glorious instability in novelty which gives the confidence to go out there and show us a whole different answer to the question of student theatre. These actors definitely aren’t going through the motions, and I’m intrigued to see what they will bring us.

Published in Varsity, March 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/17251

As a reviewer, it’s usually a good sign when I pick up my pen to scribble something down. There are moments, however, when I am so enthralled, so shocked, so paralysed by the intensity of the performance, that I don’t even want to look down at my notebook. These are rare. But in ‘Harrogate’, there were times where I found myself so disarmed I could barely stop to write down what I felt.

George Solomou and Anna Wright manage these moments with subtlety: they give the audience just enough space and time for the revelations to sink in, but they don’t look back for too long, leaving the audience feeling that it is only we who didn’t know this the whole time. It’s hard to write this review without giving a lot away and spoiling the beauty of the experience, so I’m going to write about the elements that come together to create this wonderful play: simply, incredibly talented acting, and a cleverly-detailed set and production.

I’ll start with the set. What set designer Anna Sayles has done here is a brave step in theatre: she has opted not for naturalism but for creating instead a sense of the space. Silver strips of folded material hang from the walls of the Corpus Playroom, turning different colours in the lights which are so wonderfully designed by Deasil Waltho, to give an alien metallic feeling which is almost clinical in its strangeness: the feeling of emotions being reflected at strange angles by the walls of this family home. What Sayles is trying to do here is so hard to get right: if wrong it can distract the audience from the scene, but when it works, as it does here, it fits so coherently with the play that the audience don’t even notice it’s there.

The black colour-scheme, the monotone matching Solomou’s monotone speaking in the first scene, absorbs the play’s emotions; the high table in the centre of the stage becomes a barrier separating the characters from one another at the moments of highest intensity. My favourite element of the set is the digital clock in the middle of the table: time is visible in ‘Harrogate’. At its simplest, the clock makes you realise how quickly these scenes escalate (in the first scene, only 22 minutes from opening to climax) but then also how carefully and naturally this escalation is managed by Solomou and Wright. I don’t always feel that a set adds to the power of a play, but in this production of ‘Harrogate’, the set is not just a complement: it is emphatic and important.

George Solomou is one of two actors in ‘Harrogate’. The power of his acting lies in his stillness, which he controls so carefully that it is felt not as a lack of movement but as a shouting stasis. He moves at just the right moments, and I realised this precision more and more as the play went on.

 Solomou also nails his looking. He has a directness of gaze which seems not, in a cliché, to bore a hole through Wright as he looks at her, but to create a line between them, connecting the two inextricably through his looking in a relationship that hangs between love and conflict, darkness and fondness. Solomou’s stare expresses a desire to control and shapes the object in front of him: we can see his imagination working as he looks, a kind of pleading which does not give itself away in his expression but is undeniably there in its intensity.

Solomou is soft – threateningly soft or softly kind? Is he slimy or just protective? Solomou epitomises our difficult experience as the audience of ‘Harrogate’: that is, we think terrible things but then draw back from them, telling ourselves it’s just our own minds making this up, that this can’t really be what the playwright means. Then we are forced to think about them again, and thus we move through the play in a cycle of thought and withdrawal, led in this dance by Solomou’s ambiguous softness.

Now let me turn to Anna Wright. What Wright achieves in this play is probably one of the best performances I have ever seen in Cambridge. Listed as ‘Her’ in the cast list, she plays three different characters in the space of two hours. Each one is subtly different as she crafts each character through mannerisms, by shifting her weight to a different side of her body, by facing Solomou’s gaze in a slightly different way.

Her performance as the daughter was my favourite. She captures perfectly the in-between age of fifteen: old enough to talk about sex and love but too young to understand the difference between them or the darker side of each; old enough to realise she has a power over others, but too young to know how to control it; young enough to still be comfortable in her scruffy clothes and to spill chocolate powder everywhere in her excitement at being allowed to drink alcohol.

There were moments in the play when I felt the script leaned too far into streams of confessional monologues, but Anna’s remaining ruthlessly in character, refusing to lapse into cliched emotions or take the easy way out through the emotionally-weighed lines, redeemed all such moments. Her tears, when they come, are fantastically natural.

There are so many layers to this play. The audience are constantly having the carpet ripped out from under our feet, and I think a lot of credit should go to director Issy Snape and assistant director Angus Jackson for their management of these moments of revelation. The directorial touch is not glaringly obvious in this play – and I think that is something that deserves a lot of praise. The direction has been so in tune with the script and with the actors that it feels like they are speaking these lines for the first time.

‘Harrogate’ is full of moments that will make you wince, shudder, or sit completely still in shock. It is a whole experience which grabs you and won’t let you go until the final bows. The show succeeds through its complete coherence, but I think we are blown away most of all by the nuance, depth and pure talent of Solomou and Wright’s acting.

Published anonymously in Varsity, February 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/17192

Drops of water fall from above the stage into a spotlight in the centre of an empty stage. Something rumbles but the audience is transfixed. And transfixed we will remain for the rest of the play, mesmerised by these characters: four women who have lost their children in the collapse of a spoil tip eight months earlier and the ‘Revlon girl’ who comes to give them a make-up demonstration. We are held by their tragedies and their comedies until we forget that what we are seeing is a preview, a before-the-action, a behind-the-scenes before the organised grieving begins. What we are waiting for, whatever that is, never comes. So we will make do with this.

The characters construct the set themselves in the opening minutes, turning on the lights and creating from a blank space a semblance of structure in a table laid with make-up and two rows of chairs for the audience. They seem to forge their own stage and to set up their own expressive space in the worlds of both fiction and reality. A sense of self-sustaining runs through this play: as the inside space we see on stage becomes more animated, the outside world, fraught with the fear of judgment as it is, demarcated only by the Revlon girl’s flashy car parked at the front, seems to fade away, until the characters are standing in an echo chamber of their memories and feelings. The blankness of the scenery and the minimalism of the square, wooden furniture creates a perfect silent point in the middle of this teetering village where disasters are waiting to happen – and where they have already happened.

The Revlon Girl (Emily Webster) is our route into this room: she is the only reason that we, the audience, can see these women and their grief, and she remains unnamed, on the other side of the room for the entire play. Webster wrings her hands and her responses to the scenes are self-consciously understated as she navigates the line between being deeply involved and yet so separate from what these women feel. Webster plays her part with just the right balance of brightness and helplessness, and the details of the changes in even the smallest of her movements load every moment with meaning.

Indeed Webster’s separation from the other women on the stage is just one example of how this production deals so effectively with space. Credit should go to Geraint Owen, Izzy Collie-Cousins and Lucas Marsden-Smedley for their direction here: space is made obvious, both in the larger sense of the stage, where the bucket in the middle is a constant reminder, intrusive and awkward and sometimes quite loud, of what is broken and can never be fixed, but also on the small scale of interactions between characters. For an hour, their only contact is when make-up is applied to their faces: when they do finally touch, it is a moment for drawing breath.

Each of the women in this play is wonderfully individualised. Freya Ingram (Sian) has a certain quiet efficiency-with-an-edge which reminds us that she is a young mother and not an old woman, and the depth of emotion which she reaches both in her own monologue and when listening to others is heart-breaking. Meg Coslett’s stream of consciousness as Rona is unafraid of expletives, scoffingly sarcastic and apparently thrilling with certainty or at least with anger – but she is utterly charming in her verbosity.

Amelia Hills (Marilyn) plays the perfect watcher, acting even when she is not the centre of attention and yet able to erupt with such power before folding in on herself once more. Martha O’Neil as Jean is caught in the middle of this group, struggling to manage her feelings as a bereaved mother and mother-to-be and leaning on her faith as a way of getting through. These little people (it sounds better in a Welsh accent) become very big people on this stage: but big people acted with a subtlety and gentleness that cannot be over-praised.

The five women onstage manage the rhythms of this play with a precision that feels natural. There are moments of laughter which are executed with a genuine sense of relief which can only come from their complete emotional investment in the scenes they are acting and the stories they are telling, but these fragment all too quickly into bickering. The play rises and falls, pushing the characters together in their shared directionlessness only to pull them apart again. Ingram, Webster, O’Neil, Coslett and Hills carry out each motion with careful energy, giving the audience just enough hope in the laughing moments but forcing us to acknowledge but also understand the realism of their arguments when laughter gives way.

‘The Revlon Girl’ doesn’t offer answers or solutions. It doesn’t tell us that grief can be overcome and that everything will be alright. Because nothing ever can or will restore these mothers’ children to them. What it does tell us is that sometimes all you can do is exactly enough. This is a play full of things that can’t be said, but then are said too much, and that then we have to pretend were never said at all. Suddenly all speech has implications, and even the smallest filler words which the Revlon girl uses are a reminder of unimaginable pain. I came away from the Robinson auditorium wondering how I could watch a play like this and just go straight home to write up a review as if nothing had happened. But what this play showed me is that things have happened – and we do go on.

Published anonymously in Varsity, February 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/17163

‘Corpsing’ (laughing on stage) is one of an actor’s worst fears. It can break up the scene and take away from its dramatic and emotional impact; particularly in student theatre, it reminds the audience that they are watching student actors playing parts, rather than the characters themselves living out the scenes. But if you can carry it off, staying in character and making the laughter something charming rather than scandalous, then I think corpsing can have a value of its own. When Tom Nunan (Dirk Gently), Stanley Thomas (Richard MacDuff) and Eleanor Lind Booton (Reg) broke down into giggles in one of the last scenes of this week’s ADC Mainshow ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’, their laughter actually proved just how funny they are, and just how much fun they are having.

It would be completely wrong to begin a review of this show in any way other than with praise of Nunan. There is a sharpness to his comedy: every movement is deliberate and to-the-point, creating the impression that the whole show is, for him, some complexly choreographed dance. His comic timing is exactly on the beat, making use of the full range of a comedian’s tools – pause, facial expression, body language – and I can’t stop thinking about his different coloured suits. In what is such an intensely absurd play, Nunan manages to resist the urge to over-act or overplay the comedy, and instead what he delivers is a controlled, tight and hilarious performance as the infamous detective Dirk Gently. Such energy and precision must be exhausting, but Nunan takes it in his stride.

There seem to be two levels of comedy in this play: the comedy the individual line, and the comedy of the whole plot. The balance is a difficult one to strike, and I felt at times that the drive of the scene was lost in pursuit of puns and punchlines within it: a couple of the scenes seemed to lose their momentum as a result, and what could have been a hilarious line, if the audience had been drawn into the ridiculousness of the scene’s humour, fell a little flat at the end of the scene. This was not often, however. On the whole I was impressed by the delicate attention to detail, even in moments which would not become apparently funny until later in the play. (And certainly, if the audience is to really enjoy this play, they need to exercise some patience, some faith in the system that will bring a full understanding in the final scenes.)

That is to say, these actors don’t perform like individuals, but as a cast working together to sustain this three-hour absurdity. I got the impression that they were aiming at something quite different to a good review about their own personal comic timing or slickness of movement; this play deconstructs the dramatic and the theatrical, and it is this that the actors tap into throughout. At the beginning Nunan appears at the top of a set of stairs, addressing the audience from above and in the lofty words of Coleridge; while it all feels strange, I think it is his height that feels particularly unusual for the opening of a play which strives to set up intimacy between narrator (in this case, Dirk Gently) and audience. The fourth wall is broken after the interval when a ‘previously on’ clip (professionally executed, I should add, with beautifully clear sounds and transitions) plays; an earlier scene becomes meta-theatrical when Thomas (as MacDuff) breaks out into song and the other characters dance in wonderfully-choreographed semi-chaos behind him.

And yet this play, as some of the first lines of Nunan’s opening speech suggest, centres around Gently’s idea that nothing is coincidence: his belief is in the ‘interconnectedness of all things’. The play explains away MacDuff’s seemingly spontaneous dance as hypnotic conditioning, and indeed throughout ‘Dirk Gently’s Holistic Detective Agency’ there is a sense that mystery is pushed aside and reason is victorious. Everything is connected, and therefore everything has a distinct rational explanation. And when this explanation is brought to our attention, and we realise that we would be foolish to go along with the absurdity and accept as normal that MacDuff could burst into song in the middle of a scene, we find that we are laughing at ourselves. The absurd is reiterated and reiterated, only for the veil to be whisked away again at the point when we have just fallen in tune with it.

Particular praise should go to the show’s set. Firstly, it spins. Not only is this impressive mechanically (I would argue the most exciting set I have ever seen at the ADC) but in the context of this ridiculous play, it provides so much scope for acceleration and unbalancing which fits with the precariousness of the play and is guaranteed to draw a laugh from the audience. The rotating circle is split into thirds (although it can be stopped in more than three positions, so that each scene is not necessarily in a single room), and what struck me is just how different each room is. Set designer Tim Otto has managed the space with skill, and his attention to detail is exquisite while not being too picky, giving a sense of each room and the person who lives there, while not filling the stage with gratuitous ornamental objects.

In the end, I think, enjoying this play is about perspective. Sure, the script is wonderfully-crafted, as every insignificant detail comes back later to play an important part, and some lines leave you thinking for minutes afterwards, and the energy and slickness of Nunan is bound to endear and engage you. But this is also a highly ridiculous play, so ridiculous that the actors themselves can sometimes barely contain their laughter, and it relies on the audience suspending their inhibitions and laughing at pure absurdity. We have to engage with the intellectualism of Coleridge and the motion of time and the problem of a sofa wedged in a staircase, but we also have to let ourselves laugh at a horse reading a magazine in a bathroom. It’s a performance of juxtaposition which needs us to be grinningly open-minded: and I think that’s a pretty good exercise for Week 5.

Published anonymously in Varsity, February 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/17139

When I read about this week’s ADC main, ‘Wild Honey’, Chekhov’s earliest surviving complete play adapted and translated by Michael Frayn, I did not expect it to be funny. Or at least not funny in the way that Maddie Trepanier’s version of ‘Wild Honey’ was funny, which was not even surprising Beckettian tragicomedy, but a comedy which relished the ridiculous and the over-expressed.

I’m not sure exactly how I felt about the humour of this play. There were some stunningly hilarious performances: Rory Russell and Ross McIntyre deserve the highest praise for their performance of drunkard father and son, consistently funny in their irrelevant one liners and drunken circuitousness, and yet steering clear of the slapstick or the merely silly. Alice Murray showcases a skilled subtlety in her acting as the ambitious paranoid Petrin, revealing a range of facial expressions so perfect for every moment of her scenes. Alice Tyrrell’s comic timing, even in her few appearances, is exquisite.

And yet by the end of the play, I felt that the humour had become not just a momentary dry laugh in the middle of a high-emotion scene, but it had begun to take over; Jesper Eriksson as Platanov seemed to be playing purely for laughs and thus losing some of the most wonderful moments of intimacy and emotional expression: I wasn’t so sure whether I wanted this to be a funny play anymore. It felt like Kay Benson (Sofya), Emily Beck (Sasha) and William Batty (Osip) were acting in a completely different play from the rest of the characters, as they engaged an emotional depth and tone of quietness which was certainly not shared by all.

This is not to criticise Eriksson. His performance as Platanov was charismatic, waistcoated, garrulous, his endless talking coming close to grating but always swinging away again at just the right moment to charm the audience once again. When he first appears Platanov consistently talks over his wife, answering questions directed at her with ‘us’, and yet Trepanier’s and Odette Baber Straw’s fantastically clever staging when he lies his head in his wife’s lap and the two women talk behind his head seemed to show that they are not fazed by his act ofs masculine imposition. This philosopher is not actually a threat, and it is true that despite all the havoc he wreaks in the play, by the final scenes Eriksson’s Platanov was pathetic in his mania and in his inability to engage emotionally. He is, as Petrin earlier describes him, like a performing bear: ‘you don’t know if he’s going to perform, or maul.’ In the end, he performs and then he collapses as if from the strain of the act.

A particular mention should also go to Inge-Vera Lipsius as Anna Petrovna, the ethereal hostess who frames the whole play. Lipsius certainly grew into the role as the play goes on: the more people arrived at her house, the more she became the figure of authority striding through the problems of life, a queen of the fairies figure almost, admired by anyone who sees her, a figure of a goddess for Osip and so many others. When the focus turned to her own emotions, she was abrupt and certain: ‘I have thought.’ At the end of the first act Lipsius was framed by light, her white dress catching the spotlight as she spun and danced in the centre of the stage and of everyone’s gaze.

But this play wasn’t perfect. As I see it, there were two main problems. The first comes down to the details. I thought the set could have gone much further: sure, it is exciting to have the wall of the schoolroom descend from above, but the wall itself was a fairly standard representation of a schoolroom, and it lacked, I felt, any sense of coherent aesthetic or specific visual intention. There was no symbolism or detail to draw the audience’s attention. The same can be said of the trees which formed the set for the rest of the play. If a theatrical set is to work, it should either demand its audience’s attention, mesmerise and transfix them, or it should fit so perfectly with the scene that it seems to become one with the lines that are being spoken. The set of ‘Wild Honey’ was neither of these things, seeming to collapse under any scrutiny and adding little to the words and actions of the characters.

The second problem, in my opinion, was to do with the confidence. The play’s opening was where I felt this most: it was shaky. The singing was not as tight as it could have been, and indeed my general feeling about the music in this play was that it could have been used more powerfully if polished and better shaped. The acting in this first scene seemed to lack psychological subtlety; it was too ‘nice’, too amiable, not dark or complex or nuanced enough. I think this was a problem that the actors faced particularly in the larger scenes, as the later scenes with only two characters were much more effective. In these smaller scenes it felt like the actors really knew what they were supposed to be feeling or thinking at any given moment, and it was clear that more time had been spent on these rehearsals. For a play which explores different types of relationships and thinks about different kinds of love, though, maybe this is not such a bad problem: it is more important that the small, intimate scenes work (which they do).

‘Wild Honey’ is enjoyably entertaining, considering different modes of loving and of being loved, pitching the characters against Platanov’s charismatic arrogance one after the other to see what comes out. It is a shame that the set was not what it could have been, and that at moments the acting seemed to slip beyond the awkwardness demanded by the text and into lines which sounded slightly forced, were ever so slightly mistimed, or revealed unexplored motivations beneath the surface. But it’s a hard play to pull off, and this cast and crew really come together to interpret the Chekhov-Frayn creation.

Published anonymously in Varsity, January 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16916

The young woman (Inge-Vera Lipsius) and her husband (Ross McIntyre) sit side by side, each reading a newspaper, each picking up on different stories. The husband gets up to answer the phone, relays the conversation to his wife. She is disinterested. But she’s more than that. She is brimming, poised, stifled. There is a circularity to the couple’s conversation that is comical but also threatening, and each time her husband asks what she is reading, the young woman’s answer is darker. Lipsius manages this feeling of domestic restriction, the resentment-turned-hatred that characterises her relationship to her husband, with an impressive confidence and maturity, and she (as is McIntyre) is at her best in this scene.

Lipsius’s performance is not perfect, however. She starts at fever-pitch and ends at fever-pitch: not much seems to change in her character as the play progresses. Perhaps this is a challenge presented by the play itself, as the intensity of the writing demands emotional strain from the beginning, but I felt that there were a number of moments where the climactic power was lost as a result of this lack of change. At the end of the newspaper scene which I described above, Lipsius’s character stands up and shouts into the darkness, deciding in this pivotal moment that she will do anything to be free – even murder her husband. This had scope to be such a terrifying moment, but by the time it was reached, it no longer felt like a climax.

What was most successful about the rest of this scene, however (and indeed in my opinion, the rest of the play), was the use of rhythm. The speech of ‘Machinal’ is constructed out of rhythmic phrases which seem to form parts of a song, perhaps in evocation of the eventual machine, or to emphasise this play as performance, and not merely story. All of the actors managed these rhythms skilfully, making them sound natural and not letting them interrupt the flow of speech, while still recognising and doing justice to the beauty of the speech movements.

Indeed it is not just Lipsius whose performance is to be commended: Louisa Stuart-Smith was hilarious as the mother, her shrill garrulousness verging on the chilling in its imposing sense of expectation; Charlie Saddington was wonderful in his casual softness in the speak-easy, and then in his wandering storytelling when he and Lipsius are in the bedroom together. The unspoken (and sometimes spoken) intimacy between the two actors in this scene was moving and uplifting, as the hopeful uncertainty of ‘quién sabe’ was repeated again and again and again.

The whole play centres around this idea of the possibility freedom, around the excitement of a coin flip to decide who will pay a bill, and around the imagining of dark mountains to be climbed in a future not yet unfolded. We see a glimpse of freedom in this bedroom scene – the first time we see Lipsius’s character smile – but the only real liberty comes moments before the play’s tragic ending. Just when there is nothing to hope for, for a split second, this young woman is unchained from the expectations of society, her mother and her own self.

When I left the theatre, however, I was struck with a sense of incompleteness, and of something being not quite there. Perhaps I was wondering just what exactly the play made me think. This is a play set somewhere we, the Cambridge student audience, are not, in a time almost a century in the past, in a society where gender relationships, sexism and the pressures on women are, objectively although not completely, more extreme than anything we experience ourselves. These facts alone don’t deny the play relevance to a Cambridge audience, but I think for a play to have a lasting impact it should make us think about our own situation here and now. This is what the cast and crew of ‘Machinal’ did not quite get a hold on. The expressionism of the deconstructed scenes, broken down into locations and then into more suggestive abstract words, and then further into sounds and bursts of speech was artistically and aesthetically exciting and gripping, but more work could have been done to engage with the audience’s reality even within this disjoint.

All in all, the cast and crew of ‘Machinal’ should be proud of what they have created. This is a difficult form of theatre to pull off, and they have done so rhythmically and energetically, capturing the insane word-associations of this stifled young woman as she is pushed from the working scene to a domestic one to the maternity ward and then, eventually, to the law court. This is a daring artistic creation performed with skill and intensity, and maybe the fact that it isn’t perfect should be taken as part of the glory of modernist theatre.

Published anonymously in Varsity, January 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16845

It’s not very intellectual to write a theatre review about crying. It’s just that Billie Collins, in her newest masterpiece ‘Bastard’, doesn’t make us cry like we usually do.

When we watch a play and cry, we’re not (most of the time) crying because we have a shared experience with the character on stage. Normally we cry because of some abstract connection with the scene, or because the thought of being sad reminds us of what upsets us in our own lives. When you watch ‘Bastard’, you’ll cry about the awfulness of the experience of sadness, and the failure of human expression in the face of such experience. Essentially, Collins nails grief.

What I admire most about Collins’ writing is her ability to capture the everyday in all its quirkiness and theatricality, even within a play which is very much not about the everyday. The power of her style is in her similes which present every element of the world, every interaction and experience, in terms of what we knew so well as children. Her method is simplification, and yet with this comes glorious precision.

Collins’s almost novelesque style merges character monologue with the sharp immediacy of dramatic interactions, as Charlie (Stanley Thomas) is pulled in two conflicting directions throughout the play. On the one hand he wants to tell his story, giving what feels like a speech as much to himself as to a roomful of people, speaking as a way of coming to terms with what has happened. On the other, the moments are passing within these scenes, the other characters are waiting with bated breath for his responses: this is much more complex than pure character exposition.

And yet, of course, there are no other characters in the scenes. Stanley Thomas is alone on stage for the whole 90 minutes. He speaks mostly as himself, but sometimes he speaks the lines of his mother and father, or his half-daughter or his newly-appeared biological father. This should be ridiculous – if you’d pitched it to me, I would have said this can only come out as farce. But Thomas captures perfectly the storyteller role that Collins proposes, aware of the fragility but also the egotism of the lone actor’s position. He is caught between the world of the story he tells, and the world of audience and storyteller that exists now in hindsight.

It is in the details that Thomas’s acting is most impressive, however. His mannerisms are so carefully thought-out and rigorously maintained from beginning to end (he rubs the back of his neck, he pulls down his t-shirt), transforming him into the uncertain young man who suddenly finds that everyone around him has been lying for much longer and in much more depth than he ever imagined possible. He has been unsteadied; he is still in the process of thinking. It’s one thing to play a magnificent king in a Shakespeare play, and quite another to play a pretty ordinary student whose not-knowing and not-being-able-to-cry isn’t anything more than ordinary human failure. It’s not romantic or angry, and Thomas deserves infinite praise for this subtlety.

Just as it would be wrong to simply term this play a ‘one man show’, it’s wrong to describe the staging in terms of any kind of minimalism. It’s true that the Corpus Playroom stage is pretty much untouched, except for one chair and long pieces of white paper covering the walls from floor to ceiling. But this isn’t an aesthetic, and I think this is one of my favourite things about the play. The lighting changes only minutely, with the occasional shift to orange or blue or brighter white; the total number of sound effects in the whole play is a single figure. Collins isn’t making a point with this – she just chooses light which fits with place and time of the scene. The paper on the walls becomes a kind of drawing board for Charlie, a place to express himself visually as he draws on his route from the station to his house, and then the outline of his father, Stephen, and then (tracing around his own body) the outline of his biological father, Mark. The drawing can be symbolic, but it can also just be a way of better getting his point across and a way of helping his audience understand the story he is telling. What makes this play, written in what I have called an almost novelesque style, not a novel, then, is that Charlie’s thinking becomes an act of thinking through this drawing, a physical action which illustrates and makes sense of the thoughts and feelings that pile one upon the other in Charlie’s mind.

‘Bastard’ is a play which makes you want to write your own play, because you want to say these things that you have always felt and never put into words. Except Collins has already put them into words, and watching this play is an experience that I cannot recommend more highly. It’s not sensationalist, it’s not even tragic – it’s cathartic.

Published anonymously in Varsity, January 2019: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16774

The preview written for Varsity promised a focus on and a control over Pinter’s language – words which are terrifying and yet also endearing, comic and yet also unsettling. It is this confidence about what they are saying that comes through most clearly in the actors’ lines in this play, as they unravel the dark comedy that is Pinter’s ‘The Homecoming’.

This play is difficult to watch. Director Angus Jackson makes his characters have a hardness, a grim bitterness which perfectly suits the conversations which seem to approach emotional matters only to withdraw from them into a violent outburst. The play’s climax is expertly managed and skilfully executed, creating in the audience a sense of disgust but also daring us to keep watching: we become strange voyeurs towards the end of this final act, and the characters take pleasure in this manipulation. All of the actors display, in this scene, such a bravery of acting, not shying away from the hideous movements in the script but embracing them and carrying them to their full extreme – it is the only way Pinter can be done.

A particular mention should go to Theodora Mead for her performance of Ruth, the only woman in this household of men, whose role shifts from object to ruler, pivoting on male sexuality and the insatiable lusts of these men who have been cooped up together, womanless, for so long. What was most commendable in Mead’s acting was her amazing physical stillness in the opening scenes, a stillness which added to the sense of her being out of place in the household, an object for the men to gawp at and label as a prostitute and eventually decide to keep with them to satisfy their sexual needs. In the scene between Lenny and Ruth there is a power in her unflinching stillness which transforms into active power as the scene draws to a close – the tension is shuddering; the complete silences in the audience which the cast achieve throughout are impressive.

What is most to be praised in this production, however, is the way in which the actors handle the language. Jackson and assistant directors Helena Brann have clearly spent time working on the rhythms of Pinter’s speech, not just on the pause but also on the relationship between each part of the line, and the effect is almost musical. While all of the actors achieve this rhythm, I was particularly impressed with Isaac Zarnet’s performance as Max: the anger with which he speaks, which rises at moments which can seem completely ridiculous, and the pure aggression of his every interaction, can be hard to maintain, but Zarnet’s Max oscillates between deeply humorous and terrifyingly unnerving – and never once are his words lost at the end of the lines.

Where there was room for improvement, I felt, was in the blocking of the scenes. There were some moments of symbolic brilliance – for example, when Ruth takes Max’s chair in the centre of the stage for the final interaction, representing her taking control of the family in her femininity – but in general I felt there could have been more creative blocking, particularly in such a large space as the Robinson auditorium. There were moments, often the ones with underlying sexual implications, that I felt could have been drawn out and experimented with more physically, and some of their power was possibly lost.

The set, too, posed a problem for me. It must be said, as the play went on, I grew to appreciate its appropriateness more and more, creating a living room which felt not quite right, not quite a home, with something unsettling in its bareness but also gratuitous ornaments that I could not quite put my finger on: this fit with the play’s general sense of the unnerving. Where it fell short, I would argue, was that the actors did not interact with it enough. Apart from Joey boxing in the mirror and one significant movement of the chair in the scene between Ruth and Lenny, the set felt a bit like a background against which the action was happening, rather than a room which the characters were actually inside. A few moments of interaction with the set, acknowledgement that this is a room of a house in which the characters have lived for so many years, could have added a little more coherence and authenticity.

Putting on Pinter is an incredibly difficult task – getting the timing of the pauses, capturing the comedy and the darkness, presenting the relationships between the characters not just as completely monstrous but also as somehow human. I really admire Jackson and his cast for what they have done here – and I think they did a lot of things right. Pinter’s words, his timing, his pauses are what matter most in this production, and as a result the production feels in control – and thus even more disturbing. Each of the actors held their own throughout the performance, sticking closely to their character even in the moments when they were not talking, giving the audience not one single moment of rest or reassurance. It’s always a good sign when the audience are afraid to make any noise during a silence on stage.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16520

To anyone who has ever read Austen, the prospect of putting on a play with her words might be a puzzling one. Her writing relies so much on long and winding clauses, on sentences which change perspective halfway through, and on description which would surely be lost in the transition from page to stage. At the end of Madeleine Trepanier’s production of ‘Northanger Abbey’ last night, I was no longer puzzled.

Trepanier’s script is wonderful in its preservation of the complexity that is so fundamental to Austen’s writing, as the twisting and turning sentences unfold into a kind of adventure in the scenes in front of us. Lines are shared between characters as perspectives shift and fragment, and the characters often find themselves narrating their own actions in the third person: the sense of dramatic self-consciousness that this creates is enthralling.

Kay Benson’s Catherine delivers her lines with such clarity, relishing every word of the text and reminding the audience that this play is, in the end, about Austen’s language. The story is there, and it is tense and charming, but it is the language to which we should be paying attention. Benson’s performance is generally brilliant; she perfectly captures the figure of a woman coming out into the social world for the first time in her sultry looks down the chapel aisle, but also the innocence and curiosity of one so unprepared for reality. She is earnest; her emotions swing wildly through every changing situation. She plays a Catherine so beautifully caught up in the novels that she reads, novels which are heaped upon her by the characters in the opening scene of the play as they pile books into her hand and thus metaphorically seem to construct her understanding of the world.

Of course what I have failed to mention so far is the setting of this play. Selwyn Chapel provides a startingly new and yet intensely perfect backdrop – although it is used much more cleverly than just as a backdrop. The spotlight which lights up the majestic stained-glass window in the second act is a nice touch, and a particular highlight is the moment when Catherine stands in the raised seats behind the choir, framed by the Gothic carvings and drowned in red light. The cast use the space interestingly and excitingly, the pew becoming the stalls of a theatre, the aisle a ballroom and then the halls of Northanger Abbey itself. The Gothic imagination is preserved and emphasised.

The props which construct and deconstruct this space are deployed with smoothness, from frames to sheets to candles – my favourite was the construction of the carriage out of chairs turned to face different directions as the characters looked out of the front or the back windows. These props create a strong sense of Austen’s place, yet never let the play break out of the space of the chapel.

The costumes evoke typical Victorian clothing: the way in which they manage skilfully to tread the line between indulging these 19^th century fashions and yet not being overly complicated or exquisite is certainly to be praised. The coordinated ribbons and sashes for each of the three female protagonists, a different colour for each, gives each of them an almost symbolic presence in these scenes which show so many different young women coming out into society.

This is something completely new, something which you won’t have seen at Cambridge and probably never will again. The script has obviously been scrupulously thought-through, the acting clear and beautifully light, and the music and costumes complement the awe-inspiring setting of Selwyn Chapel. The cast fill Austen with a newfound energy that will excite anyone who has read her (and intrigue anyone who hasn’t). It is impossible to sit there, in the pews of this Gothic chapel, and not feel the pull of the Gothic imagination that runs through Catherine, or the longing for the ballroom and the social world of these women as they talk about books and men and life. It is impossible not to be charmed, gripped and thrilled.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16448