Marys Seacole

by Jackie Sibblies Drury

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 28 April 2022

Nadia Latif directs Déja J. Bowens, Llewella Gideon, Kayla Meikle, Esther Smith, Olivia Williams and Susan Wooldridge in Jackie Sibblies Drury's new play Marys Seacole which investigates not only the career of the original Mary Seacole, a Jamaican who travelled to the Crimea in the 1850s to provide nursing assistance during the war (where she was rebuffed by Florence Nightingale), but also the wider experience of coloured people as carers and medical staff in the modern world.

In a verstile set designed by Tom Scutt we are sometimes in an NHS ward, sometimes in an anonymous park, sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in the Crimea, and sometimes apparently in the dark recesses of the mind of the generic 'Mary' (Kayla Meikle). The transitions are often abrupt, and the play suffers from becoming too like a series of vignettes none of which have sufficient time to develop into truly engrossing drama. Everything becomes subsumed in the overarching theme of twisted mother-daughter relationships and general racial prejudice, with the individual stories never adequately resolved.

The opening, which gives the impression of being a prologue to a play focussed on Mary Seacole, turns out to be a monologue in which episodes which could have formed the following scenes turn out to be only told to us. The scene in a modern hosptial or care home which follows sets up all sorts of tensions between three generations (a resident, daughter and gradndaughter), and adds the unpleasantness of barely concealed racism towards the staff, but fades from our attention as other matters are addressed. An almost phantasmagoric scene in which broken soldiers lie scattered across the floor while fragments of the dialogue in earlier scenes jostle with each other at shouting pitch gives an alarming impression of a mind in turmoil and stress, but at the cost of wearing down the audience with relentless noise.

All in all, I was not particularly satisfied with this production. After the glorious dramatic coherence of The Corn is Green seeen a few days earlier, on this occasion I felt I was too often present at a hectoring lecture rather than a truly developed play.

Jesus Christ Superstar

Lyrics by Tim Rice, music by Andrew Lloyd Webber

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 15 July 2019

The double album of Jesus Christ Superstar was issued in 1971; the first Australian production (by Jim Sharman) premiered in Sydney in 1972, so it's the best part of fifty years since I first heard and saw it. Now the Barbican has revived the recent Regent's Park Open Air Theatre production designed by Tim Scutt and directed by Timothy Sheader with Robert Tripolino as Jesus, Ricardo Afonso as Judas, Sallay Garnett as Mary (Magdalene), Matt Cardle as Pilate, Samuel Buttery as Herod and Cavin Cornwall as Caiaphas.

The music holds its own, bending many styles of rock with pastiche nods to operatic convention - emotioanl numbers, a mix of solo introspection and energetic choruses. The story, basically the passion story preceded by Palm Sunday and the cleansing of the Temple, focuses on Judas's predicament as much as Jesus's, preferring to 'humanise' the Gospel traitor by giving him ostensibly higher motives for betrayal than mere greed - a disillusionment with a friend whose message is being eclipsed by his growing personality cult; and a tortured sense that he has been manipulated into a false position by exterior forces - Jesus himself? God?. Though we are probably meant to sympathise, there's an awful amount of special pleading and self-pity as Judas unravels towards his suicide.

Jesus himself remains something of an enigma, plainly not the figure Judas sees (though it is easy enough to understand Judas's point of view), but also not really seduced by crowd popularity nor prepared to indulge his followers in their easy optimism. His exasperation is by turns angry and disappointed, and the agony in the Garden is poignant, his aceptance of the inevitable alwayson a knife-edge.

Visually the production has powerful moments. Dressed in casual, not to say scruffy, clothes, the apostles form an engaging chorus moving with infectious choreography to the driving rhythms of the score. Jesus wears a loose white caftan-like shirt until his arrest. The Romans are dressed in black with white masks, thus effectively a faceless authority, while Caiaphas and the priests look as if they have blown in from a Star Wars desert tribe - probably a wise move to distract from the incipient anti-semitism of the text. The flogging scene was chillingly re-imagined with an already bloodied Jesus (obviously the victim of off-stage brutality as he is moved from Caiaphas to Pilate to Herod to Pilate) being attacked and manhandled by many different floggers who were gradually covering him with gold glitter.

The musicians were good; the singers were of course miked in the modern way (discreet appliances near the cheek), but it was a nice touch that all the major characters used hand-held mikes, often deftly passed from one to another, in a reminder that this was how things were done in the 1970s. But there were no string instruments other than guitars, which meant that the final meditative orchestral cod accompanying the deposition scene relied on plaintive wind instruments and lacked something of the melacholy sweetness of the original recording.

Worth seeing for more than old time's sake, even though there is much to criticise on philosophical and theological grounds about the interpretation of the story

Summer and Smoke

by Tennessee Williams

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 21 November 2018

Rebecca Frecknall directs Patsy Ferran as Alma and Mathew Needham as John in this West End transfer of the Almeida production seen at their Islington theatre earlier in the year.

This 1948 play is given an impressionistic outing (designer Tom Scutt), which helps enormously with the fluid sequencing of the action, but also underlines the strange extremes of the situation. Rather than attempting to convey a hot Southern summer with a series of realistic sets, the stage is almost completely bare except for seven upright pianos ranged around the semi-circular back wall of the stage (here, a re-creation of the actual back brick wall of the Almeida theatre). Various characters play on the pianos - sometimes all seven are in use, and only Alma never plays one; and occasionally an actor will walk across the tops of the instruments.

The Lady from the Sea

by Henrik Ibsen, adapted by Elinor Cook

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 12 October 2017

Kwami Kwei-Armah directs Finbar Lynch as Doctor Wangel and Nikki Amuka-Bird as Ellida, with Helena Wilson as Bolette, Ellie Bamber as Hilde, Jonny Holden as Lyngstrand, Tom McKay as Arnholm, Jim Findley as Ballestred and Jake Fairbrother as the Stranger, in a version of Ibsen's play reset by Tom Scutt in the Caribbean in the late 1940s or early 1950s (the tutor Arnholm limps from a war wound from 1943).

The Deep Blue Sea

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 15 August 2016

Carrie Cracknell directs Helen McCrory as Hester Collyer, Tom Burke as Freddie Page and Peter Sullivan as William Collyer in this fine revival of Rattigan's 1952 play. 

Tom Scutt's stage design reveals both the living room and the kitchen of the flat where 'Mr and Mrs Page' live, with the bedroom hinted at when necessary through a gauze screen. Behind the door to the flat we can glimpse the common stairway to other flats, and indeed the main walls of the storey above are also revealed instead of implying an implausibly high ceiling. This clever use of the space allows other residents to come and go (mainly one presumes leaving for work in the morning and returning in the evening), reminding us that we are being shown just one crisis in one flat amongst thousands.

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.