Sweet Charity

by Neil Simon (book) Cy Coleman (music) and Dorthy Fields (music)

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 1 May 2019

This 1960s musical is revived by Josie Rourke as her last production as Artistic Director of the Donmar, with Anne-Marie Duff as Charity Hope Valentine and Arthur Darvill as Oscar, a doazen supporting actors in multiple parts, and a special appearance (in this performance) by Le Gateau Chocolat as Daddy Brubeck - different guest artists take this part during the run. Robert Jones designed the set, and Wayne McGregor the choreography.

Sweet Charity is based on a Fellini film in which the protagonist is constantly let down by the men in her life, dashing her hopes to gain some stability and domestic respectability. In this americanised version, Charity is a 'taxi dancer' in a nightclub where men can pay for a dance partner (with doubtless less respectable possibilities in mind); the girls put up with the job but it's not a good place to be. We first see Charity, a boundless optimist, being robbed by a cad of a boyfriend and dumped in a lake in Central Park - a clever piece of stagecraft involving a huge drum full of plastic balls - and returning to the nightclub almost unabashed by the downturn in her fortunes. An evening with a film star goes nowhere, then she meets Oscar, a shy young man who could be the answer to her dreams. If only.

Measure for Measure

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 18 October 2018

Josie Rourke (the outgoing Artistic Director of the Donmar) directs Hayley Atwell as Isabella and Jack Lowden as Angelo in an intriguing production of Shakespeare's problematic play concerning the abuse of power in sexual politics and the conflicting claims of justice and mercy.

The play opens in sixteenth century dress, with the political world very masculine, not to say patriarchal. But the contemporary relevance is all too obvious - the rule of law ignored through inattention, laziness or dereliction of duty, and the opportunities for a powerful man to abuse his authority just there for the taking. And this is what Angelo, deputising for an absent Duke, does in relation to Isabella - he offers the life of her brother Claudio in exchange for sexual favours. When she protests and threatens to publicise his actions, he asks her chillingly "Who will believe thee, Isabel?"

The precariousness of Isabella's situation is both helped and hindered by the Duke's actions. Having colluded in the opening situation and then walked away from it, he has returned to Vienna disguised as a friar, and he tries to 'help' by suggesting the use of the bed trick to entrap Angelo (who has, it is suddenly revealed, himself jilted Mariana, a young woman who loves him). It seems like the usual ploy of a romantic comedy, but in the context of this play, it is distasteful. The likes of Isabella, Mariana and even Claudio take the friar at face value, but in fact he has no spiritual authority at all. Furthermore, when all is revealed and marriages are forced upon Claudio (though his fiancee never appears) and on Angelo, Isabella is begged by Mariana to sue for Angelo's life, and then further the Duke suggests that she should marry him, thus riding completely roughshod over her intention of entering a convent. No words are given to Isabella to respond to what is yet another example of male dominance in disposing of a woman's life. In this production, quite credibly, she just screams.

This is the end of the play; but we have not yet reached the interval. A good deal has been cut, the subplot with the whores and whoremasters of Vienna being stripped back almost to nothing. Just before the interval starts, we are suddenly back at the first scene, but this time in modern dress, and the Duke is deputising Isabella to act in his place while he leaves the city. What was done with parchment and wax seals at the beginning is now done with phone texts and tweets.

In an even more brief recapitulation of the play, Angelo now is the young man dedicated to a spiritual life (not conventionally monastic, but more contentiously in some sort of Christian commune), and in begging Isabella for mercy on his brother's behalf, he becomes the victim of Isabella, a predatory woman. It's an intriguing reversal, and a salutary reminder that personal relationships can be unbalanced and corrupted by a woman in power as easily as by a man. In some ways, the reversal exposes the disturbing power plays even more acutely, as the disguised Duke presses his even more obviously unwanted attentions on the naive young Angelo. But the play cannot really bear this burden, and at the last moment the Renaissance Isabella presents herself before the modern Duke with an ambiguous greeting.

Hayley Atwell and Jack Lowden play both their parts extremely well. In the first half she is an intense and self confident young woman gradually weakened, and he an austere deputy Duke with a soft-spoken Scottish accent (hinting perhaps at a Calivinistic outlook?), and each is gradually weakened by the complicating factors swirling around their personal encounters. Interestingly, Angelo's soliloquy about his predicament is given due weight, though it by no means exonerates him. In their reversed roles, Atwell is far more sensuous as the powerful woman, and Lowden has less moral authority and perhaps more naivety. It is fascinating to watch in effect two interpretations of the same speeches in quick succession, and this emphasises even more the problems which this play reveals to a modern audience. 

Committee

music by Tom Deering, book and lyrics by Hadley Fraser and Josie Rourke

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 12 August 2017

Committee, or, to give it its full title, 'The Public Administration and Constitutional Affairs Committee takes Oral Evidence on Whitehall's Relationship with Kids Company', is an eighty-minute sung account of one day's evidence given to the PACA Committee, edited from the published transcript of the enquiry, directed by Adam Penford. Five MPs assisted by two clerks question Alan Yentob, played by Omar Ebrahim, the chairman of the trustees of Kids Company, and  Camila Batmanghelidjh, played by Sandra Marvin, the chief executive and founder of the charity.

The charity was set up in the 1990s to help disadvantaged and neglected children in poverty, and its CEO was a dominant and charismatic personality who was able for many years to garner sufficient funding for its somewhat controversial methodologies. However by 2015 serious concerns were surfacing about its financial viability and probity, especially as it was in receipt of several million pounds' worth of government funding, which was still being given despite official warnings that it was inappropriate to do so. Eventually the Chief Executive was dismissed, but this gesture was too late to save the charity, and at very short notice it was closed, its staff suddenly unemployed, and many young people and their families who had become dependent on it left unsupported.

Saint Joan

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 15 February 2017

Josie Rourke directs Gemma Arterton as Joan, Fisayo Akinade as the Dauphin, Richard Cant as Poulegny and de Stogumber, Hadley Fraser as Dunois, Jo Stone-Fewings as Warwick, Niall Buggy as the Archbishop, Rory Keenan as the Inquisitor and Elliot Levey as Cauchon in a production designed by Robert Jones.

Shaw's play, written in 1923, not long after Joan was canonised in 1920, uses material gleaned from historical sources close to the events of Joan's life and trials to present a strong-willed and forceful woman undone by the political realities of her time - a picture also of his general vision of the individual struggling to assert the best of humanity against often overwhelming odds.

Elegy

by Nick Payne

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 30 April 2016

Nick Payne seems to delight in concentrated short plays - like his earlier Constellations (reviewed in June 2015) his new Elegy is only 70 minutes long. Directed by Josie Rourke and designed by Tom Scutt, it features Zoe Wanamaker as  Lorna, Barbara Flynn as Carrie and Nina Sosanya as Miriam.

In Elegy Lorna has had surgery for an undefined mental illness, which circumstances suggest is a form of dementia. The surgery involves replacing damaged neurons with synthetic ones, but the consequence is total loss of the memories which the original neurons carried. In Lorna's case this stretches back over twenty years of her life, which in turn means eliminating all her memories of having been married to Carrie.

Les Liaisons Dangereuses

by Christopher Hampton

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 30 January 2016

This revival of the play, based on the epistolary novel by Choderlos de Laclos, is directed by Josie Rourke and designed by Tom Scutt. It features Janet McTeer as la Marquise de Merteuil and Dominic West as le Comte de Valmont, with Elaine Cassidy as Madame de Tourvel, Edward Holcroft as le Chevalier de Danceny and Una Stubbs as Madame de Rosemonde, Morfydd Clark as Cécile de Volanges and Adjoa Andoh as Madame de Volanges.

In late eighteenth-century but pre-Revolutionary France the Marquise and the Comte,once lovers but now sexual adventurers, engage in various plots of seduction to amuse themselves ; but the Marquise is playing for higher stakes than the Comte, who (as is perhaps the way with over-confident men) has under-estimated the woman whom he had thought of as an equal. The Comte at first unwillingly fulfils the Marquise's proposal that he seduce an innocent young girl (Cécile de Volonges), while at the same time he finds that the virtuous Madame de Tourvel stirs deeper feelings in him than he bargained for. In turn Madame de Tourvel succumbs to passion, but they are both destroyed by the Marquise's resentment.

Coriolanus

by William Shakespeare

filmed live performance from the Donmar Warehouse seen on 24 September 2015

This production from the Donmar's 2014 season was directed by Josie Rourke and designed by Lucy Osborne. It starred Tom Hiddleston as Coriolanus, Deborah Findlay as Volumnia, Birgitte Hjort Sørensen as Virgilia, Mark Gatiss as Menenius, Hadley Fraser as Aufidius. Elliot Levey as the tribune Brutus and Helen Schlesinger as the (feminised) tribune Sicinia.

The Donamr stage was stripped back to its bare back wall, painted red to chest height with various graffiti painted or projected onto it to emphasise the political background to much of the action. A single ladder stretched upwards, used in the siege of Corioli; chairs were brought from the back when needed, or otherwise left unobtrusively for actors to sit on when they were not needed for certain scenes. The outline of a rectangle was painted in red by Coriolanus's son at the beginning, and was used to indicate the confines of a house when required; later a small black square was painted within it, used to constrain Coriolanus himself when he is put on trial for treason. All in all, the atmosphere was oppressive and threatening, an apt background for both the political demagoguery and the military struggles depicted in the play.

Tom Hiddleston gave us a strong self-assured Coriolanus whose fatal aristocratic arrogance emanates precisely from his upbringing and his own personal success as a military leader. What seems straightforward to a military man - plain speech, impatience with uncongenial tradition and undisciplined civilians - is soon shown to be disastrous political ineptitude. Anger and rage cause him to turn on Rome and it is only at the last moment, when he capitulates to his mother's entreaties, that he seems truly aware of the trap into which he has fallen. The charismatic leadership, the mood swings, the fraught mother/son relationship, were all brilliantly portrayed, with powerful verse speaking and a great stage presence.

Surrounding him were an excellent cast - the tribunes baiting him with self-satisfied smirks, the soldiers enthusiastic and the plebeians wanting to be so, but frustrated when Coriolanus fails to play to their expectations, his wife and friends distraught by the turn of events, and his mother implacable at first in her almost cloying support, and at last in her crucial appeal to dissuade him from revenge. Deborah Findlay showed us in Volumnia where Coriolanus learnt his sense of superiority and entitlement, and also where he met his match in stubbornness; their confrontations were always fascinating to watch.