Cat on a Hot Tin Roof

by Tennessee Williams

seen at the Apollo Theatre on 26 August 2017

Benedict Andrews directs Sienna Miller as Maggie, Jack O'Connell as Brick and Colm Meaney as Big Daddy, with Kerry Fox as Big Mamma (replacing an indisposed Lisa Palfrey), Brian Gleeson as Gooper and Hayley Squires as Mae in this Young Vic revival of the play now transferred to the West End.

The play has been reset in a strangely empty space with vast metallic walls and a raked floor containing a bed, a dressing table and a shower; though it was written in 1955 some of the characters use mobile phones and there is a modern substitute for a record player - it is not clear that all this is an advantage, although the visual effect is striking and underlines the fact that all the characters are in different ways trapped.

Knives in Hens

by David Harrower

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 24 August 2017

Yaël Farber directs Judith Roddy as the Young Woman, Christian Cooke as Pony William (her husband) and Matt Ryan as Gilbert Horn (the miller) in this revival of David Harrower's 1995 play, designed by Soutra Gilmour and lit by Tim Lutkin. 

Yaël Farber likes to create an atmosphere even before a performance starts; the auditorium is dim, with 'smoke' drifting through the directional spots on stage, and a gradually increasing low hum pervading the space. There is packed earth on the stage floor, black walls behind, and a gigantic circular disk just visible in the gloom, which turns out to be an enormous mill wheel set upright rather than lying flat to the ground.

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.

Queen Anne

by Helen Edmundson

seen at the Theatre Royal Haymarket on 8 August 2017

Natalie Abrahami directs Emma Cunniffe as Queen Anne and Romola Garai as Sarah Churchill in this new RSC production transferred from Stratford. It follows the difficult relationship between the two women from the last years of William III's reign (when Anne was heir to the throne) until about 1708 soon after the death of her husband Prince George of Denmark. When Anne becomes Queen, England is soon involved in a European War, while domestically the Queen sees the 1707 Act of Union between England and Scotland as a personal triumph.

Anne, insecure and ill-educated, is seen by many as biddable and stupid, but she has a clear sense of her own entitlement and her duty, even as those around her try to manipulate her for their own political advantage. Her ambitious friend from their youth, Sarah Jennings, has married the brilliant soldier John Churchill - Earl, eventually to be Duke, of Marlborough - and her own driving ambitions conjoined with his make her dangerously impatient with the dynamics of being the special friend of a woman she has come to despise, but who is nonetheless the monarch.

Angels in America Part Two: Perestroika

by Tony Kushner

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 7 August 2017

Marianne Elliott directs this revival of Tony Kushner's sprawling two part epic subtitled 'A Gay Fantasia on National Themes'. The second part takes up where the first part finished, with the marriage of Joe (Russell Tovey) and Harper Pitt (Denise Gough) in tatters, Prior Walter (Andrew Garfield) trying to fathom whether the Angel's visitation is real or a hallucination, Lewis (James McArdle) his ex-lover) and Joe Pitt tentatively exploring the possibilities of a relationship, and Roy Cohn (Nathan Lane) approaching death. The nurse Belize (Nathan Stewart-Jarrett) provides a strange link between all these characters.

The quality of the production that I praised in the review of Part One (in May) is easily matched in Part Two, as the themes of love, loss, betrayal and fear of death are further elaborated and examined. The disparate elements of angelic powerlessness, encroaching illness, the breakdown of personal relationships, and despair at political negligence and injustice, and the glimmers of hope in the face of it all, are woven into a compelling tapestry, and once again the skill and commitment of the cast prevent the whole fantasy from unravelling into bombastic talk.

2017 Directors' Festival 3, 4 and 5

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 27 July 2017

The Orange Tree Theatre, in partnership with St Mary's University Twickenham, is presenting five short plays directed by graduates of the MA program developed by the two institutions.

3. Albert's Boy, by James Graham, directed by Kate Campbell

In formal terms the most conventional of the five plays featured in this festival, Albert's Boy imagines the meeting of Albert Einstein (Robert Gill) with Peter Bucky (Andrew Langtree), the son of family friends returning from service, and imprisonment and torture, in the Korean War. This is the opportunity for impassioned debates about the nature of war, the ethics of using nuclear weapons, Einstein's own guilt at having encouraged the research in the US - dilemmas which in the succeeding decades have not been resolved.

The play is set in Einstein's siting room, chaotically strewn with papers and books as the great man wrestles with the intractable problems of the Unified Field Theory. The young man is a welcome guest, but there are also tensions due to their very different experiences. The two actors conveyed the awkwardness, and the conviction, of the two men, although the play itself runs the risk of being too didactic, with set piece speeches from both characters articulating the horrors of both conventional war and the dropping of an atom bomb on a civilian population. The latter is given by Einstein as he tries to write to his estranged son, eccentrically confusing him as 'Little Boy' with the so-nicknamed Hiroshima bomb. The old man's pent-up grief and guilt are poignant; mourning for a dead pet cat only adds to his confusion as he wonders why this should provoke tears when the enormity of war does not.

4. The End of Hope, by David Ireland, directed by Max Elton

Dermot (Rufus Wright) has met Janet (Elinor Lawless) through the internet for an evening of casual sex, rendered more than slightly strange by the fact that she is dressed as a giant mouse. The social awkwardness of having a conversation after such an encounter is exemplified as well as being comically undercut by this weird physical presence.

Dermot is articulate and easily provoked into tirades about such matters as the vacuity of ITV and the betrayals of Tony Blair. Janet is down to earth and resolutely unflustered by all his astonishment that she has never heard of Friends (she claims not to watch Channel Four); and she likes Tony Blair's hair. All this is highly amusing social comedy - but there are serious issues as well. The mouse costume is a protection which Janet is extremely reluctant to remove - she claims that God has told her to wear it; but it also masks a deep lack of self-confidence. When Dermot does persuade her to reveal her face, he finds her really beautiful, and the dynamics shift subtly but decisively as he reveals the extent to which he has lied about his own situation. But the comedy resurfaces dazzlingly as Janet undercuts his self-esteem by completely failing to recognise his claims to celebrity. The cross-purposes are brilliantly written and delivered, and there is a chance of a real rapprochement at the close of the play.

It's not easy to spend half a play in a mouse costume and yet convey a mixture of steely resolution and untroubled naivety, nad nor can it be easy to play against such a figure, but this was an enjoyable and at times touching production.

5. Misterman, by Enda Walsh, directed by Grace Vaughan

This play was memorably presented at the National Theatre a few years ago with Cillian Murphy taking the title role. Here, Ryan Donaldson took on the challenge in a shortened version of the play which nonetheless places huge demands on the actor even in such a confined space. 

Thomas Magill is the wayward late-teenaged son of a widowed mother, laughed at by the other youngsters in the village and perhaps indulged or lightly teased by the adults. But he has a mission from God to excoriate evil and redeem the world; everything is related by him with the help of recordings he has made of his daily routines, and only gradually do we become aware that behind all the disarming enthusiasm and disconcerting moral outrage something irrevocably dreadful has happened.

It's an astonishing performance in the unforgiving intimacy of the Orange Tree, with Thomas manically keeping track of his thoughts, helping himself out with various props, and delivering an almost ceaseless narrative interspersed with occasional pieces of dialogue where he takes both parts (if he does not have a recording of the other half ready to hand). The play packs a powerful punch even on a second viewing (that is, when the denouement is known), and here, the director and actor have created an intense piece of work that was a fitting climax to my attendance of the Director's Festival

2017 Directors' Festival 1 and 2

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 26 July 2017

The Orange Tree Theatre, in partnership with St Mary's University Twickenham, is presenting five short plays directed by graduates of the MA program developed by the two institutions.

1. Wasted, by Kate Tempest, directed by Jamie Woods

Danny (Daniel Abbott), Ted (Alexander Forsyth) and Charlotte (Gemma Lawrence) are three friends in their twenties frightened that their lives are being variously wasted, and reminiscing and regretting the days when being 'wasted' was the height of cool. Their nostalgia is focused not only on the jarring sense that their current situations are far below their teenage expectations, but also on a friend, Tony, who died ten years earlier, and who has thus never had to deal with the consequences and compromises of growing up.

The play presents events around the tenth anniversary of Tony's death, framed and interspersed with ruminations about the predicaments of modern city life which are spoken directly to the audience in heightened poetic language. It's a difficult juxtaposition to pull off, but the actors do it well, circling the stage and sharing the verse lines - even word by word at times - and then adopting their characters using minimal props - a chair each, cans or glasses of beer, and so forth, to show Ted frustrated in domesticity, Danny trapped in delusions of ambition about his mediocre band, and Charlotte ground down by the cheerless task of teaching bored adolescents, each of them resenting the others but still very dependent on them.

Though the form of the play runs the risk of being either portentous or preachy, Jamie Woods has enabled his cast to avoid these pitfalls by strongly marking out the lyrical interludes from the narrative scenes, thus adding an unexpected poignancy to the encroaching hopelessness of being wasted.

2. Even Stillness Breathes Softly Against a Brick Wall, by Brad Birch, directed by Hannah de Ville

Her (Georgina Campbell) and Him (Orlando James) narrate and act out the treadmill of their workaday lives, from the unwelcome alarm waking them, through their breakfast routine, the bus journey to work, the work itself, and the journey home. As the routines are repeated a story emerges of their dissatisfactions, the sexist banter in Her office, the pointless irritations in His, the financial strain that afflicts them when He has to start supporting his parents after his father  is made redundant. After an intimate Christmas spent alone, and a socially boring New Year spent with friends, the pressures build to an astonishing climax of rebellion brilliantly conveyed by an extraordinary trashing of the tiny acting space in the Orange Tree.

For quite a long stretch the two characters are merely narrating their lives, hardly seeming to interact with one another at a personal level. This makes the occasions when they do even more powerful and important. In the meantime, a huge amount of atmosphere is conveyed by their meticulous deployment of props around the stage. Initially, there are only two orange benches centre stage, which serve as beds, then as seats on the bus, then as office or pub furniture, and at diagonally opposite corners a number of orange shopping bags are suspended. Periodically, each character takes down a bag and sets up its contents on the floor - office stationery, folders, notepads, computers; later kitchen utensils, family photographs; later still a small Christmas tree and candles. Everything is orange where there might be colour - orange folders, orange telephones, an orange spatula, orange rim on the computer, orange tree and tea light candles, orange picture frames. It makes for a surreal and claustrophobic yet comical comment on the regimented life.

After New Year, the two begin to ignore the wake-up alarm, and turn up late for work, dishevelled and provocative. When the phone bills become too much, and the phone company's demands too onerous, He destroys the mobile and then severs the land line. This leads to a gloriously manic phase of destruction as glasses are hurled, papers torn up, eggs smashed on the floor (the audience having been considered but mercifully discarded as a target), cornflakes scattered everywhere. It's very liberating and very funny, and climaxes in the revelation of a submerged bath full of orange water into which the two characters subside. But such anarchy has its costs, and She leaves Him in the end, unable to cope with living in a filthy flat full of rotting food.

It's something of a triumph that Hannah de Ville has controlled all this mayhem, and plotted the arc from suffocating routine to destabilising wreckage with such a sure touch; and that her cast has responded so consistently and with such commitment to the demands of the play. Only once was there a momentary danger that the spell would break as audience laughter threatened to be too intrusive, but otherwise, it was all extremely impressive.