The Beast's Pen

First performed in London over a decade ago, this David Hare play shows the downfall of Oscar Wilde; Act I is set in a London hotel room during the hours before his arrest and Act II is set in Naples shortly after his release from prison. In the original production, the two halves did not gel and it was difficult to engage with the play or to understand its point. Liam Neeson played Wilde then and had the Irish accent right, but, with the benefit of hindsight, he may have got just about everything else wrong. In this production, Rupert Everett as Wilde doesn’t bother with the accent but, in every important respect, he is magnificent, a wounded beast still spitting out witticisms but gradually sinking to the defeat that he knows is inevitable. It is a towering performance and it gives the play a depth and meaning that eluded it before. Freddie Fox and Cal Macaninch also give superb performances as Wilde’s current and former lovers, protagonists urging him to take different paths. A play that was previously very easy to forget now turns out to be a revelation.

This review was originally written for The Public Reviews: http://www.thepublicreviews.com

Describing herself as a third-gendered fallen Catholic, La JohnJoseph here performs her own autobiographical near-monologue (albeit with two supporting performances) interspersed with a few melancholic songs. Born on the day of Pope Jean Paul II’s visit to Liverpool, she tells of her life as a boy and adolescence in that city and then the discovery of her spiritual home in New York. Living with her mother and several step-fathers and indoctrinated by a faith out of sync with her inner self, her life was that of an outsider struggling to find her place in the World. Essentially, this show is a display of defiance combined with a plea for tolerance and acceptance. The story is not punctuated by particularly dramatic incidents, pivotal events or even anecdotes that are more than mildly amusing, it is simply a statement of who the writer/performer is and what made her so. And this is the main problem, because there is nothing new on offer. 50 years ago, Quentin Crisp, for example, could have startled us all with similar material, but the World (or at least the Western World) has now moved on and has already embraced the messages contained here. If this show seems dated, it is for all the right reasons. In view of these reservations about the material, the show stands or falls as an entertainment on La JohnJoseph’s performance. On a set that looks like a second hand furniture showroom, littered with bric-a-brac, she talks, sings, strips, observes and philosophises. She is not a terrific singer, her voice grates but she can sell a song. And she is not a terrific raconteuse, but she has charisma which, although faltering at the start, grows as the show progresses. Her story is about overcoming adversity and, so art imitates life and she just about wins over the audience. Just.

Not for the faint hearted nor possibly for Shakespeare traditionalists, this is a full on assault on the senses that barely lets up from start to finish. Performed in the round on a set that looks vaguely like a disused Glasgow warehouse, lights flash and thunderclaps echo, blood drenches the characters and covers the floor of the stage; there would be more peace and love at a Celtic/Rangers match. It is a bleak, dystopian vison that is not time specific, nor, despite a predominance of Scottish accents, is it place specific. 11th or 22nd century, Scotland or Syria, the human cost of tyrany is the same. James McAvoy plays Macbeth like a hyperactive brat, but is very strong in the second half when insanity begins to set in and he comes to realise the full cost of his murderous deeds. Claire Foy is a Lady Macbeth stripped of all regality, earthy and manipulative. There are many chilling scenes that will live long in the memory; in particular, the murder of MacDuff’s family is worthy of Hitchcock. In all, a striking interpretation of the play, but there is nothing wrong with exploring different takes on a classic provided the text is well served by them and they add clarity to the core themes. This production achieves those objectives emphatically.

Seen in preview, so still a little rough around the edges, this new musical tells the true story of the rise and fall of William Haines, a Hollywood star of the 1920s/30s whose private life failed to meet the expectations of the studios and particularly those of Louis B Mayer. This is a low budget, small scale effort, but it is packed with interesting ideas and winning performances. The three leads, Dylan Turner, Bradley Clarkson and Faye Tozer (as Marion Davies, girlfriend of William Randolph Hurst) all bring their characters touchingly to life, Mike McShane is an ogreish Mayer and Kay Murphy gives a knockout cameo as Pola Negri. The dialogue is peppered with bitchy showbiz one-liners and there are also some clever lyrics and melodic tunes, although occasionally the songs do not seem to fit in comfortably with the narrative. The story is told in flashback, an unnecessary device that gives the show a slow start, interrupts its flow and leads to a very flat ending. Overall it is an entertaining show which, with a little tidying up, could well improve considerably once it get fully into its stride.

In the list of all-time great musical comedies, this comes pretty near the top and inevitably it reappears in London every decade or so. However it is hard to imagine that it has ever been done better than in this wonderful production directed by Trevor Nunn. In an impeccable cast, Hannah Waddingham is outstanding as “the shrew”‘ spitting out “I Hate Men” with real venom, Alex Bourne is excellent as her ex-husband, Holly Dale Spencer makes a delightful dim-witted starlet, partnered by Adam Garcia who “can’t behave” but dances like a dream. In support, David Burt and Clive Rowe stop the show with “Brush Up Your Shakespeare” and Jason Pennycooke opens Act II with “Too Darn Hot”‘ leading a spectacular song and dance routine that brings the audience to its feet. Cole Porter’s glorious songs are too many to mention and the book is bubbling with wit. Brisk direction, dazzling choreography, there is absolutely nothing to fault. Blissful!

Borrowing from football, this could be described as a play of two halves. A satire on German society and the military, set in 1910, it centres on Wilhelm Voigt (Antony Sher in top form), a petty thief just released from jail and struggling to cut through layers of senseless bureaucracy. The first half is vaguely Brechtian with dashes of comedy, superbly staged but somewhat stodgy and it climaxes with a funeral. However, it is necessary to sit through it in order to fully appreciate all the gags that are to follow and doing so gives the added advantage of lowering expectations, so that the second half comes as a complete surprise. Shortly after the interval, the action moves to a public toilet and what follows is around 40 minutes of sublime comedy, as Voigt assumes the identity of a captain and takes command of a unit which he leads to reek havoc in Kopenick Town Hall. We are treated to an explosion of verbal and visual gags, utter lunacy that plays like a cross between “The Goon Show” and the Marx Brothers. Who ever said that the Germans have no sense of humour? It reaches the heights of hilarity and Sher brilliance. At the end. all the audience can do is stagger from the theatre, still aching from laughter and pitying the poor souls who decided to leave at the interval.

This review was originally written for The Public Reviews: http://www.thepublicreviews.com

Jerry Herman clearly has a liking for formidable middle-aged ladies. Having struck gold with Hello Dolly and Mame, he chose to adapt The Madwoman of Chaillot, a play by Jean Girardoux and this musical is the result. But sadly, the hat trick of hits eluded him when it opened on Broadway in 1969 and only now is it getting its first UK staging. So the key question was whether this is a forgotten treasure from a golden age of Broadway or was there a very good reason for its long spell in obscurity? The “madwoman” is Countess Aurelia, played here by Betty Buckley, who marshals a group of her equally eccentric friends to thwart a plot by business moguls to turn the Paris of 1945 into an oil field. It is described as “a musical fable”, making it clear at the outset that Dear World will have very little foundation in the real world and, accordingly, the charming sets, designed by Matt Kinley, conjure up familiar romanticised Parisian images. Even so, amidst all the whimsy, there is satire of corporate greed and environmental ruin that is even more topical now than when the show was written It is interesting that Angela Lansbury, who played the lead originally, has been quoted as partly blaming the show’s failure on the size of the theatre, feeling that the staging needed intimacy and charm. No such excuses can be offered here, as the theatre is both small enough to allow intimacy and large enough to have proper sets and choreography. Yet this is still not quite the lost gem that we hoped for. It is all very uneven, at its best rousing, but at its worst plodding. The title song and One Person are catchy anthems typical of Herman, and most of the comedy numbers work very well, but some other songs, particularly in Act I, are riddled with cliches and instantly forgettable. Buckley has got what it takes to carry a show like this and she does so with aplomb. Paul Nicholas clearly enjoys himself leading the support and Ayman Safiah is very affecting, dancing and miming as the Mute. Katy Treharne has a delightful soprano voice but she and Stewart Matthew Price are given very little opportunity to make a lasting impact as the young lovers. As two other “mad” ladies, Rebecca Lock and Annabel Leventon are highly amusing in their routines with Buckley, whilst Peter Land, Jack Rebaldi and Robert Meadmore playing the moguls, relish the cynical lyrics of their songs together. In view of her background as a choreographer, it is a little disappointing that the director does not include more dance and, generally, that she fails to liven things up during some dull patches between songs. But leaving aside the many quibbles, there is still a great deal to enjoy and it should not have taken over 40 years to get this show to these shores.

This review was originally written for The Public Reviews: http://www.thepublicreviews.com

A gunshot rings out and an aggressor falls to the ground; a young woman is holding the gun and another young woman grabs it to fire a second shot and make sure that the man is dead. An older woman, their mother, looks on. The dead man is the father in the family, but he is not dead to the three women so long as he continues to haunt their minds and his threatening presence on the stage dominates throughout the play’s 90 minutes. This a study of violence inside a family which never resorts to simplistic explanations nor points the finger of blame in a single direction. Yes, the father is guilty of appalling physical, psychological and sexual abuse but the play, whilst never excusing him, is able to show how he was himself a victim of childhood traumas. It also questions the extent to which the three women were complicit in their own and each other’s torment. Set on a near empty stage in a small studio space, the fluid direction ensures that every member of the audience is drawn into the intense drama, as the women gradually reveal their secrets and attempt to understand what has happened so as to rid their minds of the horrors. As Billy, the father, Zach Lee is stunning, making it perfectly credible that the three women could loathe and love him at the same time; his character is both a perpetrator and a victim of violence, suffering from alcoholism and epilepsy, yet, however monstrously he behaves, the actor is still able to eke out a degree of sympathy for him. As Mary, the mother, Tessa Wood gives a moving performance, her character was a neglected child who seemed cast by nature into the role of victim; yet she is aware of her own inability to stop the abuse and, understanding that it crosses generations, she is determined that she does not want grandchildren. Violet Ryder plays Janet, the older daughter as clear-thinking and resolute in determining the only way to end the horror, but equally vulnerable and prone to emotional outbursts. Olivia Dennis plays her younger sister Susan as more confused by her own emotions and racked by personal guilt. Anthony Hoskyns as the women’s interrogator completes the quintet of fine actors. This play is produced by Stepping Out Theatre, the leading mental health theatre group. The writing is stark and unflinching, but still able to allow for occasional dashes of humour. The characters in the play are people who live amongst us. Their plight was allowed to continue because all four remained silent. Yet the outside world saw signs too and also remained silent. Even in its title, this play asks questions of us all.

Described as a “comedy of terror”, this adaptation of Franz Kafka’s surrealist novel first opened here in 2006, so its return indicates that it has gained a reputation and/or a loyal audience; it was something of a surprise to find a near-full house for Kafka in West London on a cold Tuesday evening in February. It begins with a man emerging one morning having, for no stated reason,  turned into some kind of insect; his family recoil in disgust and reject him. The single set is on two levels, a downstairs living room and the upstairs room, cleverly designed to alter perspectives, where the man/insect becomes imprisoned. Playing him Gisli Om Garoarsson displays impressive gravity-defying agility and provides many of the striking visual images that are threaded through the entire evening. The music by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis also adds much to the prevailing mood of weirdness. However, if the production is at its best when it is a visual piece underscored by music, it is at its very worst when the characters are speaking; their dialogue is uninteresting and repetitive being delivered in an irritating, stylised manner. None of Kafka’s antiauthoritarian messages would have been lost if this had been performed as a mime. Indeed, this is a production that would have spoken much louder if it had not used words.

This review was originally written for The Public Reviews: http://www.thepublicreviews.com

Ivor Novello remains an iconic name in British theatre but, unlike contemporaries such as Coward and Rattigan, his works are largely unknown to modern audiences. This production gives clear clues both as to how he gained his stature and as to why his works are now hardly ever staged. To avoid confusion with modern connotations, the *Gay* of the title is Gay Daventry, a fading musical theatre star who founds a school of dramatic arts. There is no more plot worth recounting. Beginning with the positive, the tunes are varied and melodic, the lyrics are sharp and witty. This production has evolved from concert performances at the Finborough Theatre last year and it is easy to see why those performances were successful. They would have accentuated the songs and the book would have been relegated to secondary importance. However, in a full staging, the songs and the book matter equally and the show’s major weakness becomes more exposed. Musical theatre began to change forever after the opening of OKLAHOMA on Broadway in 1943, so this show was already on its way to becoming a relic when it was first staged in 1950, the year before Novello’s untimely death. In the second half of the 20th Century and beyond, musicals have become fully-developed works of theatre in their own right with integrated music and lyrics that serve to augment and drive forward the drama or comedy. Now a musical with a weak book is unlikely to go far, but in Novello’s days, the book of a show, this one included, was usually no more than a loose structure to which a collection of songs could be attached. The cast is 20-strong plus a pianist, not many fewer than a capacity audience in this tiny venue. Many musicals have benefitted enormously from being scaled down to be performed in a small venue, but this is not one of them. It is about musical theatre and, to have even a remote chance of working, it needed to be staged in a traditional theatre, where the big numbers could be made bigger, full dance routines could be added and the show’s critical weakness could be more easily overlooked. Here the spotlight is fixed firmly for long periods on the abysmal script and the performers can find no escape route. The company, led by Sophie-Louise Dann, Josh Little and Helena Blackman are all good singers and all likeable, but between musical numbers, they seem uncertain whether to play it straight or as a parody. In truth, neither option would succeed and their only salvation comes with the next song. The sad conclusion is that the main value of this revival is for it to serve as the equivalent of a museum exhibit, showing us what musical theatre used to be like. It may be a while before a Novello show is seen again.