Category: Reviews

Bumping into school friends in a pub somewhere once you’ve left school and you all have separate lives, is an inevitability. For some, it’s a joy and a pleasurable surprise; others dread it and will avoid it for as long as they can. It is in this liminal space of reunion and re-stirring of half-buried feelings that Alice Tyrrell sets her new play ‘The Ladies’, which takes place over one night inside (and in the corridor just outside the door of) the ladies’ bathroom.

“I wonder what goes on in there,” muse the play’s only two male characters, separated from their girlfriends and exiled to the corridor by the necessity of gender. The first act shows Ella’s boyfriend Harry (Freddie Bartlett-Evans) passed by a wonderful array of characters as he waits outside the door of the bathroom, and the conversations that take place are marvellously awkward both in their writing and their execution. There is a naturalism to Bartlett-Evans’ acting which nicely complements the words of Tyrrell’s script; all the silences come in just the right places. This first act bursts with humour, sometimes chuckling and sometimes roaringly hilarious but always keeping the audience close to these characters.

We are physically close, too, as a wall stands only a couple of metres in front of the first row of seats, pasted with concert posters which evoke the pub setting but also become a kind of cruel joke for Harry, whose stagnated career as a musician haunts him through every encounter. The set is pleasingly minimalist and yet brightly atmospheric, providing a rectangle of colour and interest in the middle of the grey space of Pembroke New Cellars.

On the surface, then, the first act of ‘The Ladies’, beautifully crafted as it is, has little relation to queer theatre. It is in the second act, after the audience have stepped through the doorway and entered the once-secretive space of the ladies’ bathroom in an exciting piece of staging that the queer focus of Tyrrell’s creation comes to the fore.

The hidden is unveiled; the mystery is clarified. Here the women are left to interact outside the gaze of men, and the range of relationships that Tyrrell explores give the scenes a vibrance and an intensity that is skilfully navigated by the actors. A special mention (which is hard to do in such a talented cast) should go to Kay Benson, whose performance as the pouting, hair-twiddling Jess creates a character almost uncomfortably sassy and yet so real. The gossiping drama of Jess and Poppy (Vee Tames) contrast with the cynicism of Freya (Fran Davis) who comes to centre stage in this act. She is the ‘other woman’, the girl Ella (Hannah Lyall) is trying to avoid with all her might because she doesn’t want to hurt Harry – but mostly because she cannot admit to herself her attraction to Freya.

Lyall and Davis bounce off each other with a simple quietness in their interactions, as Ella’s bubbly expressiveness comes up against Freya’s quiet knowing. If there is one part of this play which did not work for me, it would be Freya’s outburst; while its message was an important one, it seemed too abrupt, too compressed, which was a shame at the end of a play which is so tightly-constructed, with half-hearted comments from the first act taking on new meaning in the second. Ella’s response, however, when Harry finally breaks the magical line and enters the bathroom to find Ella and Freya there, is breathtaking. Tyrrell and Blackburn’s directing here is perfect, as they have Lyall facing each of the two in turn, speaking in the third person as if she cannot quite face up to what she is saying: she cannot quite take ownership of the pain that she is causing. The ending is perhaps a little abrupt, but it is certainly moving, and its foregrounding of queer issues is incredibly powerful.

Yet what makes this show so heartbreaking and so wonderful to watch is not its queer message. It is the humanity of its characters, whose interactions are performed with a subtlety and naturalness that is difficult to perfect: but when it works is enlightening and riveting. To have written something so nuanced and cleverly-crafted, with its layers of meaning running from the first to the last second, is such an exciting achievement, and the cast and staging more than do the words justice.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16483

A detective series with a female protagonist. Two female protagonists even. It’s what we’ve been clamouring for, filling a space in a world which so often fails to express female experience.

But there is so much more to ‘Killing Eve’ than just ticking boxes and satisfying quotas. The BBC’s newest drama does something really special. From the first episode I was captivated; I felt as if this was this what I had been waiting to watch for so long.

Let’s start with the character of the villanelle. Her identity is no secret; there are as many scenes of her life as there are of Eve’s. Waller-Bridge has created in her villanelle an incredible paradox. Oxana (Jodie Comer) is terrifying in her ruthlessness, chilling as she smiles over her victims’ blood-soaked, mutilated bodies which, unafraid to stare into a man’s eyes and shoot him in the head: but she is also, terrifyingly, charming. She doesn’t seem to feel things, but there is also something decidedly endearing about her which draws in the audience and makes us powerless to stop watching. We don’t necessarily want her to be free, even, when she is in prison; we don’t believe she is innocent – how can we? We just want her life to continue to be visible to us. As she sits in a pink tutu in the middle of the grey of Europe in winter, eating a sandwich as she unpacks Eve’s stolen luggage, we cannot help but be charmed by her.

The relationship between Oxana and Eve, if it can be called a relationship, is dominated by these ‘feminine’ images: Oxana sends Eve clothes and perfume, and during the confrontation scene Eve is dressed in a tightly-fitting black and white dress, as if she has dressed up especially for this moment. That Eve’s marriage begins to break down as she comes closer and closer to finding Oxana is no coincidence. The villanelle replaces the husband. When the two women face each other in the forest, the music evokes the sense of a love scene, and the close-up shots create a certain sensuality which runs through the scene. In one of the show’s final scenes, the two lie side by side on a bed, juxtaposed but also in a wonderful kind of harmony.

It is important that each of these moments is inevitably and suddenly punctured by violence: in the forest, the villanelle draws a gun to break the intensity of eye contact; Eve stabs Oxana as they lie side by side on the bed. Violence and blood drench this series, but it is a violence aestheticized, romanticised, executed with skill and a certain beauty which both horrifies and captivates the audience. We want to dismiss it as completely barbaric and murderous and contemptible, but we are unsettled because we cannot. We are drawn to it and to the people – to the woman – who creates it.

What I have skirted around so far, and what any review of ‘Killing Eve’ would be incomplete without, is its humour. Konstantin tells us he must rescue his daughter because she is so annoying, and Eve agrees even as she holds the girl hostage, a gun to her head; the scenes between Eve and Bill are crammed with sarcasm and hilarious cynicism (if there’s anything the show falls short of, it is duly lamenting the death of Bill, which seems to pass almost unnoticed after a couple of episodes, despite the glorious warmth of his relationship with Eve). The humour in this show arises also from its absurdity – from the complete ridiculousness of the villanelle sniffing her sandwich as she rifles through Eve’s stolen suitcase, or nodding her head contemplatively when Nadiya asks if she is going to kill her. We laugh, but we are also deeply disturbed. We cannot cast this woman aside as a villain, and we can’t take her crimes completely seriously, because even at the darkest moments we cannot suppress a snigger.

What Waller-Bridge has created is something entirely new, only partly serious, brimming with female strength but also female vulnerability. There is a naturalism to her scenes which express a detail which makes it almost impossible for us, the audience, to decide who we want to survive: Eve or Oxana. And it becomes clear that neither of these women can decide either, as each negotiates a professional pursuit which brings them together and develops into a kind of obsession, an erotic fantasy. The final note is one of violence, as Eve stands covered in the wounded villanelle’s blood, but even at that moment it does not pick a side: Eve stabs Oxana, and Oxana tries to shoot Eve. Violence streams through this show, yet, despite its set-up as a detective drama, the laws of depraved murderer and moralising detective are upended, and it is never obvious who should be held responsible. What are we left with, then, is the story of two women just trying to live their lives.

Published in Varsity, October 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/film-and-tv/16223

The first thing that strikes you about the Corpus Playroom’s latest production is the set. The walls are lined with huge cabinets crammed to bursting and then some more, filled with everything from dictionaries of hymnology to a packet of Frosted Flakes, from glassware to a coat stand. It could give the sense that every detail has been carefully attended to, every object carefully placed, but I’m worried that the effect was more one of haphazard hoarding – and of course, from a narratorial point of view, that was the intention. I wonder, however, whether there’s a difference between the characters being haphazard and the director being haphazard, and I’m not sure how carefully thought-out the set felt.

The opening of the play, sadly, was the shakiest part. I say this because the rest of the performance was far from shaky, Leigh and Bullard shining with confidence in their complexly difficult characters. Alfred Leigh as Daniel was incredible in his interpretation of the autistic Daniel, sitting emotionless and intensely frustrated in his yellow T-shirt at the centre of the cluttered room, wishing Peppy would stop talking and yet humouring her with a wonderful tenderness. Anna Bullard’s Peppy is garrulous, the elder sister who describes to her brother every detail of her day: the woman with a coat, the buses not running, the shops not being open. She tells Daniel to use his listening ears and yet, we feel, she is talking not so he listens but so she can talk: this is what normal people do.

There is a sense throughout the play, neatly captured, of the necessity of upholding an illusion. What is charming and endearing in Daniel in Act One becomes dangerous and suspicious in the eyes of the police in Act Two; what is friendly and zealous in Peppy quickly turns to hysteria and a desire to stave off the silence. They both dance together in this harmony of concealment, avoiding the world and its gaze, but also, it seems, their own.

The double-vision that this play provides is so important. On one side is the audience’s perspective, the events as the innocently fixed ‘truth’ that Daniel writes in his notebook; on the other is the overly suspicious perspective of the outside world as they look in at Daniel and Peppy and their reclusive lives. What we see is an endearing scene, two lonely people curled up on a chair on a rain-clogged evening, reading from Daniel’s diary and celebrating what is gloriously different about them. What the police see is a dangerous man who poses a risk to Ben and to children, and who must be arrested. The moving becomes sinister as the forensics people come in to search the house and cover it in white cloths, constructing the interrogation table out of this whiteness that is terrifyingly eerie, moving to the same piano music as haunts the whole play but this time more minor, with more of an undertone of the sinister and the uncertain.

It is worth pausing here to heap praise on Emily Beck, whose naturalism in playing what is of course a difficult part in the eight-year old boy of Ben was incredible: she was full of energy, bouncing around with a curiosity and complete social innocence so perfect to an eight-year old who cannot understand anything beyond doing what he wants to and spending time with whoever he wants to spend time with – even if this means climbing out of his window at night and scrambling under the fence.

I was pleasantly surprised by the play’s ability to hold its audience’s attention even after two hours without an interval: I was gripped until the very end, enthralled by the characters and their difference which was refreshing and interesting and so complexly layered that I wanted desperately to uncover the reality of their selves beneath all the levels of concealment.

The range of emotions which the actors are able to command in this play is certainly impressive, moving from the tension of the police investigation to the breakdown when Daniel returns home and Peppy takes his place in the chair in the centre of the room, crying out for those who she has lost while Daniel bangs on a metal bowl with a spoon, desperately calling out for the cat. In the final scene there is a new lightness, a brightness as Peppy sews together the bunting and a breath of fresh air as Karen Parry (Charlotte Husnjak) swirls into the scene with her smiles and her picnic and her determination that things will change.

‘The House They Grew Up In’ is a beautiful study of what happens when we are left to ourselves, cut off from the world, through a play which is touched by Daniel’s words as he describes in his jolting and yet perfectly ordered the world that moves around him, every thought he thinks. This is a play drenched in Odysseus and Titian, cluttered with symbolism which is not always obvious but nonetheless beautiful in its sense of an order that lies beneath. There is something we cannot quite put our fingers on – and this ‘almost’ is delivered with such a tenderness and subtlety that we cannot help but sigh when the actors come up for their bows.

Published anonymously in Varsity, November 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16442

Spend a summer reading the diaries of Virginia Woolf, and it’s impossible not to want to meet her and the people who moved around her. The words of her diaries and her letters seethe with the intellectual, with perfectly-placed adjectives, as she navigates the light and dark of literary society in the 1920s. It is these letters, specifically the ones written between Virginia and her lover Vita Sackville-West, which Eileen Atkins has adapted into the play ‘Vita & Virginia’, and which Sarah Taylor and her wonderful women are bringing to the Corpus stage next week.

The words of this play tremble between the intellectual and the erotic, interspersing discussions about the latest publications and criticism with expressions of tenderness, revealing a relationship fraught with paradox, tension and intensity. Emmeline Downie (Virginia) and Corinne Clark (Vita) have never acted together before, hadn’t even met before the call-backs for this play, but there is something so intuitive in their connection. These two have studied their characters in exquisite detail, reading biographies over the summer and realising how much they have in common with their characters. They seem to feel a real affinity with Virginia and Vita.

The passion they feel is clear: the best part of the whole show, Emmeline and Corinne tell me, is the authenticity of it, the fact that the words they are speaking are words actually written by Virginia and Vita. Even if it means that the loosely-structured sentences are very difficult to piece together and speak on stage, there is something wonderful in following the trains of thought of these two influential figures.

What struck me as I watched the two actors rehearse was the surprising lightness of the letters, and Taylor tells me this is a sense that she wants to create in the play. When people think of Woolf, they think of her suicide, filling her pockets with stones and stepping into the river, but her letters are full of life, laced with excitement and the pleasure of living. The scenes are bursting with irony; Vita and Virginia smirk at each other as they recount stories about their daily lives and the people who move around them. Part of the beauty of this play lies in the necessity of interpretation: these are the exact words that these women wrote, but they are still only words, which Downie and Clark have to invest with tone and character. These literary silhouettes become filled-in people through the course of this play: they become more than genius words on a page.

The presence of the letter in this play is an enduring one. Taylor discussed the difficulties which the letter form poses in terms of movement: the play straddles inner monologue and dialogue, some of the lines directed to the audience, some to the audience, as each of these women hide behind their writing, in their own spaces, protected from the reality of what they are saying and the emotions they are expressing. Keeping it lively has been a challenge, but I have hope that this team will succeed. And at times stillness is perfect. Some questions are never answered, lost in the letters as they lurch from one topic to another, and the audience hang captivated in this unfulfilled answering.

This is a show which really should not be missed. The four women involved – directors Taylor and Williams, actors Clark and Downie – feel a passion for the play and for these characters which we, as the audience, cannot help but feel. The relationship they depict is one which flickers between tension and irony, described throughout in the gorgeous words of these two writers, whose character analyses and overflowing sentences will leave you breathless.

Published in Varsity, October 2018: https://www.varsity.co.uk/theatre/16178

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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