Review: An Ideal Husband

First published in whatsonstage.com

An Ideal Husband is not noted as one of Oscar Wilde’s finest works but a strong production can offer plenty to enjoy and food for thought.

Over the course of 24 hours a marriage is imperilled, a political scandal unearthed and a small, closely-knit group of upper-crust Victorians is forced to examine issues of loyalty, principle and forgiveness. The agent of this turmoil is the glamorous Mrs Cheveley, visiting London from her Viennese exile in order to blackmail Robert Chiltern (Sunny Moodie), a prominent golden-boy in government who has actually built a glittering career on an appalling moral lapse.

When Robert’s wife Gertrude (Rose Robinson) learns the truth her faith in her ‘ideal husband’ is shattered, rocking her vision of herself as the perfect complement to Robert’s paragon of virtue and threatening their marriage and all the social and moral freight attached to it.

As a counterpoint to these darker themes the dandyish Lord Goring, played with delicious world-weariness by Kieran Simms, gives us the ‘Oscar’ role, spouting witty, apposite comments and showing us an alternative model of male-female relations through his banter with Robert’s sister, Mabel (Emily MacDonald).
Goring becomes instrumental to the action when Mrs Cheveley, in a stand-out performance by Sheridan Johnson, revives her old passion for him and it’s hard not to think that these two would make a sexier item than the other couplings. Ironically, in spite of Wilde’s own impending affront to his class when An Ideal Husband was first seen (he was arrested during its run), he prefers to plump for keeping the wheels of society oiled (although a weevil of mistrust is allowed to remain).

Muckle Roe’s production is admirably spare. The staging is lean and elegant, giving the costumes visual priority (accolades to designer Lucy Wilkinson) and the script has been scythed of extraneous characters. Charlie Ward directs with great pace and dexterity but there’s some work left undone: primarily, Robert Chiltern’s dilemma could be sharpened up.

The cast is largely too fresh-faced for the world of the play, but that’s a minor cavil – this fringe show is both entertaining and smart-looking.

Review: Mercury Fur

First published Whatsonstage.com 30/3/2012

In an abandoned and trashed flat, sometime not too far in the future, Elliot (Ciarán Owens) and Darren (Frank C Keogh) prepare for the party from hell. Elliot is tough but clever, still in possession of historical knowledge that can inform their present, but his traumatised younger brother’s mind is full of warped versions of the past, exacerbated by his need to ingest butterflies, beautiful creatures recalibrated in playwright Philip Ridley’s world as menacing drugs.

Pretty, skinny Naz (Olly Alexander) shows up, exemplifying corrupted innocence, and we learn more about this post-apocalyptic situation. These young people have witnessed the torture and killing of those they love by marauding gangs, and know that no-one is safe anymore. To survive, they have to adopt the morals of the bad guys. The ‘party’ is in aid of making a snuff-movie for a rich, perverted City suit who has information which could keep them alive.

As the horror mounts, and the stage fills with more tragic, brutalized characters, it seems extraordinary that we can still laugh at the pitch-black humour that leavens the piece, but we do. In the tiny Old Red Lion both the story’s savagery and tenderness touch us instantaneously, and there is not a weak dramatic moment over the course of two hours.

Ridley – who is currently enjoying something of a renaissance – invents a new but recognisable world with its own coarse, vivid language. Is this how humans behave when order breaks down? Incidents from modern civil wars and genocides provide plenty of testimony to corroborate Ridley’s vision.

The Greenhouse Theatre Company have hit the ground running with this, its debut production. The cast is uniformly superb, with Olly Alexander particularly affecting as Naz, a performance which is an object lesson in inhabiting a character. Ned Bennett directs with abundant skill, and the design elements are perfectly realised.

Mercury Fur’s original reception in 2005 was part-outrage and part-adulation. Greenhouse now gives audiences the opportunity to take a position on this work while it is still fresh and undimmed by time. A remarkable play in an excellent production.

Review: The Weir

(Review published on Remote Goat 14/3/2012)

Conor McPherson’s play has been widely performed and much loved by audiences and critics since its debut at The Royal Court in 1997. Its great reputation makes its simplicity surprising to the first-time spectator: The Weir is set in a humble environment with ordinary people and at first, there seems to be nothing very remarkable about it.

The venue, the tiny Barons Court Theatre, is most apt for The Weir: to sit in the audience is to feel as if you are sitting right in its Irish rural bar, accurately evoked as a scruffy, ramshackle den by designer Barrie Addenbroke. Five characters seek refuge here: Brendan, the quiet barman (Marcus McMahon); Jack, the ageing mechanic (David Anthony Green); Jim, a handyman who still lives with his mum and has a mild learning disability (Scott Williams); Finbar, the brash property developer (Andrew Barrett); and Valerie, the newcomer from Dublin, poised and brittle with a sad secret (Lara Wilks Sloan).

The night begins with banter about the weather (howling wind) and the draught stout (off), and moves into the telling of ghost stories. The men use Valerie as a new audience for some familiar tales, and yet are still able to chill themselves as they recount personal brushes with Death and Fairies. In between, they drink a vast amount of beer and whiskey, doing nothing to dispel the image of the Irish as capacious liquor consumers, even though tomorrow is a working day. The character of the stories changes when Valerie gets to her feet and tells the men the true story of why she has moved to the country – ghosts feature in her narrative too, but the substance of it is heartbreakingly real. Finally, perhaps emboldened by Valerie’s confession, Jack tells a tale about his lost love, a poignant and all too familiar slice of a life.

The Weir is wonderfully accurate in its representation of a night in a bar in Ireland (but also, Anywhere) with the fractured rhythms of real speech, the petty squabbling, the talking behind each other’s backs, the camaraderie and the gentle revelations of life in all its mystery and sadness. It is a very endearing piece, and hard not to like, in spite of a little roughness in CP Theatre’s production. I would love more rigorously authentic accents, and the casting is somewhat approximate in a couple of cases. Honours go to Marcus McMahon whose kind, understated Brendan feels absolutely real, and Scott Williams for doing some brave expressive work with Jim, a loveable childlike man. David Anthony Greene captures much of Jack’s warm, rueful old bachelor but is a bit too young for the role. That said, the script often transcends the flaws in the production.

The Weir is no blockbuster, but a window onto a world, a compassionate examination of what it is to be human, and a plea for the value of telling stories to deal with life’s challenges. Its atmosphere is catching, and it has a benevolently haunting quality that suggests the play will stay lingering in the mind. Much like a good night out with friends.

Review: Conversation with John Lahr

(Review published on Remote Goat 9/2/12)

What better way to spend a cold winter’s evening than in the cosy company of two gentlemen of the world, the one prompting the other to tell revealing stories of the great and the good? For one night only, Don Campbell, a renowned psychoanalyst, interviews John Lahr, the legendary theatre critic of The New Yorker and biographer of Joe Orton, the latter establishing the Islington connection, for it was here that the playwright lived and was tragically killed by his jealous lover, Kenneth Halliwell. The literal backdrop to the interview is an exhibition of library book-jackets, doctored into collages by Joe and Kenneth, an act of supreme mischief which resulted in their imprisonment for six months (this can be seen until 25 February 2012).

John Lahr is a man of words and needs little help from his interlocutor to pour forth some poignant memories of his upbringing, his father being Bert Lahr, the cowardly lion in The Wizard of Oz, and as miserable a character offstage as he was ebullient on. The discrepancy between public and private personas forms a theme tonight, and Lahr tells us fascinating stuff about Elaine Stritch and Woody Allen, both of whom, he says, are quite different in reality to the tough-talking broad and weakling-paranoiac characters they habitually play. Lahr also talks knowledgeably about Tennessee Williams and his work (a biography is forthcoming), Roseanne Barr (whom he thinks, like all great comics, is obsessively ‘phallic’) and Bill Hicks, who once wrote him a 35-page letter explaining himself, which formed the basis of one of Lahr’s many wonderful in-depth profiles of great performers, writers and directors.

Lahr’s observations of Orton are acute and fascinating, and the actual presence of the playwright’s sister in the audience brings his ghost into the room. All in all, it is a deep pleasure to hear about stars who genuinely deserve accolades for their talent, drive and abilities to transform our lives for the better, rather than the hollow ‘celebrities’ whom we receive on ubiquitous media drip-feed these days.

Islington Museum is to be applauded for hosting evenings of this calibre. It has many free talks on offer too, and is clearly a flourishing cultural centre. Keep your eyes peeled and your ears pricked for the museum’s programme: this is the sort of event that makes living in London a brighter experience.

Review: Freedom

(Review published on whatsonstage.com 31/1/12)

In contemporary rural Tajikistan Benham, an opium farmer, confesses to his son Fariad that their family is in great danger. Their corrupt buyers have ruined a fellow farmer by taking all his profits, and in a few months’ time, when these powerful men return, they might do the same to Benham.

The latter’s solution is for Fariad to win a scholarship to study in Britain, where he must find a western woman to bring back home: this will supposedly convince the crooks that Benham’s family have status and so prevent disaster. In England Fariad falls in love with Jennifer (Rebeca Cobos) his Spanish work-mate at a fast-food concession, who is then unwittingly drawn into the far-fetched plan.

The programme’s description of this play as ‘A powerful story of seduction, betrayal and avarice’ implies a far more dramatic piece than Freedom presents. The action passes back and forth between the farm and the burger bar (never seen patronised) with a lacklustre pace, as the story becomes increasingly implausible.

The initial sympathy we feel for father and son dissipates completely well before the end, and Jennifer never inspires any, underwritten and poorly acted as she is. There is far too much reliance on phone-calls for the storytelling, and Fariad’s assimilation into British culture via some atrocious guitar-playing is risible. However, Indranyl Singharay as Fariad and Rian Perle as Benham are both at least creditable.

The script by Rick Limentani, who also directs, should never have got this far without intervention from The Arcola. The theatre has an excellent reputation which is imperilled by clumsy plays like Freedom.

- Alison Goldie

Review: The Mercy Seat

(Review published whatsonstage.com 2/9/11)

The Mercy Seat has a great premise: suppose that instead of working, as they customarily do, in the World Trade Centre on 9/11, a married man and his lover indulge in a little sex at her place and miss getting killed, as a consequence of which they consider ‘disappearing’ themselves and starting a new life together, free from the entanglements of his family, and the difficulties of a secret affair. The play begins on 9/12 as we watch, at close quarters in the Pleasance Studio, the couple flail about in the murky moral waters they have created.

Abby (Janine Ingrid Ulfane) is in her late 40’s, a smart corporate woman, and the boss of Ben (Sean O’Neill) who is 12 years her junior. Her apartment is shrouded in veils, suggesting the dust from the collapsed Towers (an evocative piece of work from designer Nik Corrall). She is concerned about what’s happening outside the apartment, and suggests to Ben that he get out on the streets and help people, whilst knowing this is impossible if the mooted deception is to work. Abby wants her man to be a hero, but she could scarcely have chosen someone less heroic. Ben listens to his phone ring and ring as his wife tries to find him (we can easily fill in her painful side of the story), he whines, he whinges, he acts like a spoilt brat. Yet there is a coarse masculinity under his shirt and tie, and sexual passion, which must be the reasons Abby has stuck with him for three years. She is much more complicated: more intelligent, cultured and more successful in career terms, but she is restless, brittle and hectoring. Her conundrum is: can she run away with a man who isn’t decent enough to treat his wife and kids honourably, and who is such an opportunist he makes a global tragedy all about him?

Ben takes a lot of stick from his mistress: Abby rigorously goads him, trying to establish if he has the right stuff for their escapade. After a poignant section where she graphically describes his lack of emotional connection with her during sex, it’s hard not to see her as masochistic. Why are these two together? It is a relationship that’s very short on affection, but long on need, in his case primarily for sex, and power over his boss, in hers, for a man who will match her highest ideals. But, wretched though their pairing can seem, it is no more implausible than those of many, many couples.

There’s always the danger of artificiality in a duologue in real time about relationship conflict, because in life, arguments can play out over days, incorporating long bouts of inarticulacy and sulking. Once or twice here, it’s hard to believe the characters’ emotional journeys. However, Ulfane and O’Neill are both excellent, showing with raw power his unprincipled weakness, and her impossible yearning. Ultimately, Neil La Bute proves his status as a pitiless observer of male/female relations, and delivers a provocative and eloquent slice of modern debate that demands serious attention.

Review: We’re Gonna Make You Whole

On 20 April 2010, the Deepwater Horizon oil drilling rig exploded in the Gulf of Mexico, killing 11 men, injuring 17…and that was just the beginning of the nightmare. The resultant spill destroyed marine life and wildlife habitats, and devastated the Gulf’s fishing and tourism industries. By July 9, 2011, roughly 491 miles (790 kilometres) of coastline in Louisiana, Mississippi, Alabama and Florida remained heavily contaminated by oil, in spite of a massive clean-up operation. The people responsible for this unprecedented disaster work for BP, and the company had to claim responsibility. In June 2010, BP set up a $20 billion fund to compensate victims – it has a million claims outstanding, with more arriving each week.

We’re Gonna Make You Whole bases its title on a promise that BP made to the victims, and is heavily ironic given the effects of the spill on a handful of the inhabitants of Louisiana portrayed here. A married couple ( Lennard Sillevis and Jordan King) squabble over how to receive compensation, as she coughs and retches and lives in fear of losing her unborn baby (as other women in the area have) and he, one of the men on the rig on the fateful night, suffers shock, guilt and fear of the future. Elsewhere, an actress (Yasmine Van Wilt) has lost her job on a TV show because of the weeping sores on her body, a fisherwoman has lost her business, and a research doctor, attempting to gather evidence of contamination (both played by Kara Peters) is prevented from continuing.

Immortalis Vox Productions say that the play was ‘inspired by more than 100 interviews with BP Deepwater Horizon survivors’. It is staged on two floors of a shop turned gallery in Battersea, and includes an exhibition of amateur portraits that the company invited locals from Grande Isle, Louisiana to paint, which it then, with commendable savage wit, entered into the BP Portrait Competition in the UK. None won, but given the scale of BP operations, I doubt this was a conspiracy.

Mostly, this event is agit-prop. If it wants further action from its audience, the company should supply an informative programme. The play itself is clumsily realised, poorly scripted and confusing. It wasn’t until I talked to one of the company afterwards that I discovered a piece of ‘information’ that could have been used to much greater effect, that is, the sabotage by BP of evidence supporting compensation claims (by allegedly ‘disappearing’ researchers). There are queasy notes struck, including Yasmine Van Wilt’s insistence on wearing very few clothes, which in spite of make-up representing sores, is clearly an excuse to show her beauty and is utterly jarring here. The show blurb promises to ‘press the boundaries of performance, incorporating cabaret, folk, jazz, blues, funk, film, dance, visual art and installation’. Barring a couple of decent folk songs by Sillevis and Van Wilt, this is extremely misleading. What it did do was make me read more about the oil-spill, and realise that this is a disaster which is definitely not over.