Last Easter

by Bryony Lavery

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre (Richmond) on 15 July 2021

Tinuke Craig directs this revival of Bryony Lavery's 2007 play Last Easter, in which June (Naana Agyei-Ampadu), a lighting designer, is diagnosed with terminal secondary breast cancer and is supported by her three friends drag artist Gash (Peter Caulfield), property manager Leah (Jodie Jacobs) and actor Joy (Ellie Piercy).

June is the often still centre of a maelstrom of displacement activity by her panicked friends, particularly in the first half of the play when Gash and Leah propose a trip to a villa in France which just happens to be close to Lourdes, and then the three decide to reduce shared costs by inviting Joy along as a fourth - Joy who is alarmingly self-obsessed and still reeling from the suicide of a boyfriend. To add to the larkiness generated by Gash and Leah within the narratvie of the play, there are frequent comments made directly to various members of the audience, including apologies that June's occasionally deep introspection is dramatically exceedingly uninteresting to watch.

The trip to France is a bit of a wacky road trip; the visit to Lourdes a mixture of horror at its insitutionalised commercialism of the unwell and humour at the prospect of a lapsed Catholic, a Jewess, a Buddhist and the quietly sceptical June actually gaining any benefit from being there. At times it seems that the play is trying to cover too many bases at once - farce, pathos, meta-theatricality, the loyalty of friends under extreme emotional pressure. In the second half, as the issue of assisted suicide is addressed, a deeper seriousness invades the stage in which the hilarity of inappropriate speech and gesture is more successfully integrated into a poignant and difficult circumstance.

The cast acquit themselves with infectious energy, skilfully managing the swerves of the play's style. Moments of solidarity and affection jostle with impatience, pain and disillusionment in a way which acknowledges that life is often raw, messy and painful, while there are also episodes of merry excitement and even quiet enjoyment. Not only is June enthralled by the light in a painting by Caravaggio; she also enjoys just being. It's fascinating that a play celebrating a fair degree of brashness nevertheless gives due weight to these quieter moments as well.

After Life

by Jack Thorne

seen at the National Theatre (Dorfman) on 8 July 2021

Jack Thorne has adapted this play from a 1998 Japanese film of the same name (at least in English: 'Wonderful Life' or 'Wandafuru Raifu' in Japanese) which was devised by Hirokazu Kore-Eda. The play is directed by Jeremy Herrin with the set and costumes designed by Bunny Christie, and it features a cast of twelve: five 'guides' and seven 'guided' with some of these seven doubling up in ancillary roles. It is presented by the National Theatre in conjunction with Headlong Theatre.

The action takes place over one week in a facility where guides are assigned to the recently dead to encourage them to identify a memory from their lives which they are happy to take with them (to the exclusion of all other memories) into eternity. The guided have three days to decide on their memory, after which the team of guides will reconstruct and film the memory for the onward journey, which must take place before the end of the week. On Sundays the staff tidy up and prepare for the next week's arrivals on Monday.

For some the memory to be chosen is fairly obvious, but a teenage girl is somewhat put out to discover that her choice (a visit to Disneyland) is all too common for her age group; eventually she chooses something more personal. But should she have discovered this? The knowledge came from one of the guides, despite the fact that guides should only be facilitators; the apprentice guide (Millicent Wong) has yet to learn the constraints of the job.

For others, making a choice is extremely difficult; a young man (Olatunji Ayofe) is shocked to discover he is not in a place of judgement, and he prevaricates. An older man(Togo Igawa), perhaps playfully given the same forename as the director of the film, feels his life has been too much on an even keel for him to make a valid choice. The guide assigned to each case tries to encourage reflection without forcing the issue.

There is something rather haphazard about the whole arrangement, brought to the fore when a couple of the memories are reenacted. The stage manager - or would it be production designer? - is frustrated  in re-creating a memory for a young pilot who was happiest flying a Cessna through clouds - the props department can only provide the wrong sort of plane. Equally, there are difficulties in arranging for the right quantity of cherry blossom to fall for the childish memory of an idyllic spring afternoon.

Jack Thorne's adaptation skilfully blends a number of characters from the film and makes clear through dialogue what was achieved in the film by indirection and voiceovers. While there is a lightheartedness about the presentation of some of the memories, an older lady Beatrice Killick (June Watson) reveals a deeply affecting life story when she is finally able to acknowledge the emotional cost of her experience. Likewise the interaction between the older man Hirokazu Mochizuki and his guide (Luke Thallon, giving an excellent performance) leads unexpectiedly to an extraordinary and moving resolution for them both while at the same time revealing to us more of the workings of the facility. The guides, while trying to be professional and discreet, have their own stories after all, which can all too easily impinge on their assignments.

The film, which I have watched again before writing this review, must have nuances connected with Japanese attitudes towards death which may well escape an anglophone viewer (there are, for example, some references to unfamilar devotional ceremonies). The play wisely concentrates on 'domesticating' the workings of the facility and imbuing some of the characters concerned with a more familiar Englishness: for example Beatrice Killick is very recognisably a type of stalwart no-nonsense Northern woman and her reminiscences of a dance hall where she danced with her brother easily evoke the bygone focus of social life in provincial towns. 

It is a great pleasure to see an intriguing but probably little known film transformed into an equally beguiling play.

Constellations 1 and 2

by Nick Payne

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 3 July 2021

Michael Longhurst revives Nick Payne's play, this time on behalf of the Donmar Warehouse where he is now artistic director, though in a West End theatre since the Donmar itself is currently undergoing a major renovation.

The play is well suited to the current situation in terms of its technical requirements, in that there are only two actors involved, with a small technical team to back them up; also, at only 70 minutes in length, it places a fairly minimal threat in terms of gathering strangers in an interior space for a prolonged period. Many of the seats in the theatre are in any case unoccupied due to current government restrictions.

The beguiling investigation of memory, its significance and fickleness, is further emphaised in this revival by the decision to use four separate casts to play the protagonists. On this occasion I saw Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in the afternoon performance, and Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in the evening performance.

Visually the production is the same as I recall seeing in 2015 (see my review of 24 June 2015 for my account of the play itself and the way it challenges the audience's expectation of following a straightforward narrative). The interest here, therefore, resides in watching two completely different pairs of people interpret the play on the same day: an older couple followed by a younger couple. Inevitably one assumes that the opening scenes in which Ronnie and Marianne tentatively get to know one another are played out with a different hinterland in each case: the nerves of older people making a connection which may or may not be comfortable being fraught, one supposes, with past possibly disappointing experience, whereas the nerves of the younger pair may only arise from inexperience. These contrasting possibilities cast very different lights on what follows.

I felt that there was a drawback with Zoe Wanamaker and Peter Capaldi. They are both distinguished actors, but their styles are also very distinctive, and in a play with so little material pointers - a stage full of balloons, for exanple, rather than any representation of a recognisable space - it is hard to distance onself from the knowledge of who the actors are. Their personal mannerisms are simply too prominent at times. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah are not (yet) so well known, though Sheila Atim has an immensely striking physical presence. It seemed to me that the younger pair had an easier time with establishing the flirtatiousness of the two characters, whereas with the older actors the same scenes came across more as social comedy or world-weariness. Consequently I found the second performance more convincing.

The play revels in repeating scenes with slight variations of dialogue, creating multiple ways of understanding what might be happening or what is going unsaid. It is even more fascinating to watch two such different performances in quick succession, allowing even more resonances to reverberate in the mind.