THINGS TO COME - CTW'S NEW SEASON

CTW announce their next season

So here it is, CTW's new “bums-on-seats” season 2014-2015. A whiff of weekly rep, perhaps, with farce and Christie in the mix, but a varied season, including sure-fire favourites at the Old Court like Stags and Hens, Terry Pratchett and Blackadder.

It all kicks off in September with Irish playwright Connor McPherson's 2009 reworking of the Daphne Du Maurier novella The Birds, best known of course in its Hitchcock incarnation.

And I'm pleased to see in amongst the crowd-pleasers one of the most innovative shows to come out of the National Theatre in recent years, Mike Bartlett's Earthquakes in London, and to end the season, Midsummer, a “play with songs” by David Greig & Gordon McIntyre, which had a successful run on the London Fringe - part love story, part Edinburgh guide, part drama and part philosophical treatise about today's middle-class, thirty-somethings ...

here's the complete season list:

The Birds by Connor McPherson (Daphne Du Maurier)
September 2014
The Haunting of Hill House by F. Andrew Leslie
October/November 2014
Blackadder's Christmas Carol by Richard Curtis and Ben Elton
December 2014
No Sex Please, We're British by Alistair Foot
January 2015
And Then There Were None by Agatha Christie
March 2015
Wyrd Sisters by Terry Pratchett
April 2015
Earthquakes in London by Mike Bartlett
May 2015
Stags & Hens by Willie Russell
June 2015
Midsummer by David Greig & Gordon McIntyre
July 2015

CONNECTOME

CONNECTOME

Royal Ballet at Covent Garden

31.05.2014

This eagerly-awaited new work from Alastair Marriott, starring Natalia Osipova, is based on Sebastain Seung's book, which tries to show how the wiring of our brain makes us who we are.

Not sure that we'd know that without being told. I think we might have guessed, though, that the concept originated with the designer, Es Devlin, with whom he worked on the Closing Ceremony for the London Olympics.

It does seem, sometimes, that the dancers are almost secondary to the effect of the stage pictures.

The design is certainly stunning. 400 suspended Metallic poles, like a glitter curtain, cast stark diagonal shadow stripes across the stage floor. Later, projected behind the dancers, neural strands like seaweed or birch twigs rotate slowly. And finally, there are brightly coloured strands, which die back to black as Osipova is left alone on stage.

Each section of this 30-minute piece explores a different aspect of our conscious experience: human interactions, creativity, death and loss. The music is Arvo Part, including the much-played Fratres – piano, woodblock and violin are prominent [the fiddler took a well-deserved stage call with conductor Barry Wordsworth and the dancers.

The dancing is vigorous and fluent, with lots of floor work. Osipova is joined by Steven McRae and Edward Watson, plus a corps of four young male dancers. The skimpy costumes recall the gymnasium; the style has elements of tai chi. Some of the dancing, despite being made on three of the best performers in the business, struggles to compete with the design, but at its best – as when McRae is held aloft as a sacrifice, danced to an ethereal solo voice floating around the dome – is memorably effective.

This world premiere is framed by two repertoire favourites.

Ashton's Dream – an hour-long reworking of Shakespeare to Mendelssohn's familiar music. Very Victorian fairies, a striking Titania from Roberta Marquez, partnered by McRae's spectacular Oberon. Paul Kay's Puck, though engaging, is a little on the earthy side, but Bennet Gartside is a brilliant Bottom, enjoying a lovely hoof-point pas-de-deux with Marquez.

Gartside stars again in Jerome Robbins' Concert. On a bare stage, a pianist [Robert Clark, the Royal Ballet's Head of Music Staff] sits down at the grand piano to play Chopin. The audience enters one by one, bringing their own folding chairs, and a nice little intrigue emerges: Lauren Cuthbertson is hilarious as the myopic would-be dancer, pursued by Gartside's errant husband, to the fury of his nagging harridan of a wife [amusingly done by Laura Morera]. It's obvious stuff, in the main, but the constantly diverting ideas – the ragged pas-de-six, the Raindrop umbrellas, the Papillon butterflies chased off at the end by a frustrated Clark with his butterfly net – keep the audience audibly amused.

A satisfying sandwich, this – excellent value, too, with two masterpieces superbly recreated and an inspired new work beautifully realised.

And a timely reminder of Ashton's delicious Dream, as Northern Ballet tour their new version – a ballet company on a train trip from monochrome to technicolor – and the Mariinsky bring their Balanchine ballet to this very house ...

QUARTET

QUARTET

Greville Theatre Club

The Barn Theatre Little Easton

24.05.2014

Mary Redman was at Table D in the Barn ...

Ronald Harwood is well known for his accurate portraits of life upon the wicked stage such as The Dresser. This affectionate picture of life in a genteel retirement home for geriatric professionals, though peppered with theatrical injokes that were new long before Noel Coward was a boy actor, is great fun for audience and cast alike. Sample black joke about “being the guest of honour at the crematorium”.

Against the background of a cosy but elegant set designed by Jan Ford and directed by Pam Hemming, four of Essex's most experienced thespians assembled for curtain up. All playing retired opera singers who had appeared on stage together years ago.

We were treated to not just an entertainment but a lesson in growing older. Either gracefully or disgracefully, depending on whether they still had most of their marbles or had lost a few over the years, plus how nimble their limbs had remained.

Ramrod straight and smartly besuited Mel Hastings's grumpy Reginald's prim and proper, pedantic and governed by rules person, bitterly resented his treatment by the care staff on whom he wasted his vitriolic anger.

His more urbane, sex maniac fellow inmate Wilfred was given a roistering performance by Michael Gray. He created plenty of laughs from the word go with his character's delight in his own jokes and with his lecherous leanings towards Jan Ford's delightfully dotty and simple Cissie. This was a beautifully restrained performance. Wilfred's lasciviousness now confined by age to verbal “attacks” only, but resembling in looks the modern comic actor Kris Marshall. It was very good to see Michael in a comedy role so hopefully this won't be his last swansong.

Into this settled situation came an intruder. Diana Bradley's oh-so-elegant Jean, once married to Reginald and horrified by the ravages of age. With her cool exterior she came trailing ex-husbands in her wake, including of course the resentful Reggie.

They were then asked to come out of retirement to appear at a concert which led to much twittering in the dovecot but was successfully resolved with hidden modern technology.

Sound by Steve Bradley was excellently timed especially when a Doppler effect was needed as a door opened and closed on a rehearsal. It was a pity that Richard Pickford's lighting was pooled so that as the cast stood up and moved around their faces went from light into shadow.

This was a thoroughly entertaining evening. Thank you Greville.

production photograph by Adrian Hoodless

GODSPELL

GODSPELL

Cut to the Chase at the Queen's Theatre Hornchurch

19.05.2014

for The Public Reviews

Somewhere between Hair and Superstar there was Godspell, a free-love, feel-good take on St Matthew with some pretty good songs.

Matt Devitt's bold re-staging almost convinces that it's worth reviving. The playground is now a grungy concrete wilderness, skateboard ramp, wire fences and graffiti which includes some sneaky sacred imagery. Plus of course a keyboard and drum-kit for the actor/musicians who power the show. The clowns are now random performers, in hoodies for the opening, where the philosophers and thinkers [plus L Ron Hubbard] are googled, kicking off with an Essex-accented Socrates.

Musically the show sounds superb [the MD is Julian Littman], with a super-charged rock-rhythmic pulse for the noisy numbers, and, just as effective, simple guitar accompaniment for the more reflective moments, like The Willows, or By My Side, a survival from the original stateside student entertainment that started it all. Wisely, the crosstalk vaudeville All For The Best remains unrevised, and is brilliantly delivered. Only Turn Back O Man disappoints – superbly sung, but really needs a slinky chanteuse to make sense of the style.

The show is eager to please, with its naïve joy in the word of the Lord, but can seem predictable with each parable acted out with naïve enthusiasm, and one clap-along worship song after another. So Devitt skilfully keeps things fresh with constant clever touches: the hypocrites in a supermarket trolley, the water into wine, George Formby and his ukulele as Abraham, Alan Sugar as the rich man – nice to think he'll never enter the Kingdom of Heaven. And, alongside all the cartoonish New Testament characters and the sketch-show acting, there are moments of real reflection. The prog-rock crucifixion, red ribbons against the wire fence, foreshadowed in the Baptist's washing of Christ's out-stretched arms, is followed by the simple sincerity of the Deposition. We are left with a more typically upbeat finale, of course, All You Need Is Love on the screens, the audience clapping along to the Megamix medley.

Wonderfully outgoing performances from these ten actor/musicians; Queen's newcomers Patrick Burbridge and Deborah Hewitt impress instrumentally, too, on guitar and violin. Sean Needham is a darkly powerful presence as Judas, and also John the Baptist in the opening sequence, in which Sam Korbacheh's Messiah is discovered wrapped in a blanket. His Jesus radiates intensity and love – a very charismatic figurehead for a cult.

The original Godspell struck a chord, on both sides of the Atlantic, with the generation who went to Sunday School in the 50s and to college in the revolutionary 60s. Does it have any resonance today, when the cynical Book of Mormon is our West End view of religion ? Or, even in this eager-to-please reworking, is it just a feel-good sequence of songs and sketches ?

production photograph by Nobby Clark

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW

WHAT THE BUTLER SAW
Kytes Theatre Group
Brentwood Theatre
17.05.2014

Mary Redman was in the audience for Orton ...

Joe Orton, an outsider from an early age, was the enfant terrible of British theatre in the 1960s. His chief delight was to upset the apple cart of the Establishment with his plays and his behaviour. In this play he chose the straitjacket form and rules of farce, plus his wicked humour backed by his deadly accurate observations of human nature in all its weakness. Thus blowing sky high the pretensions of the comfortable middle classes with their entrenched views of how society should behave, contrasting with the hopeless helplessness of the lower classes.
Set in a private psychiatric clinic, this gives Orton an opportunity to use madness to examine the madness of the world around him.
This production directed by Bob Thompson started relatively quietly with an innocent and very proper young lady arriving for an interview as potential secretary to Justin Cartledge's twitchy Dr Prentice. As his demands grew more and more ludicrous Laura Leigh Newton's eyes became more and more saucer-like. Her understanding of how to play this ingénue role was superb and she would have made a wonderful member of any early Carry On cast in the Barbara Windsor kind of role.
Intruding into this hothouse of masculine desire comes Nina Jarram's totally OTT Mrs Prentice, a flourishing, whisky-swilling nymphomaniac ready to chase anything in trousers. She's closely followed by the apparently innocent hotel pageboy of Jake Portsmouth who is used to living on his wits.
The recipe gets stirred up further with increasingly preposterous excuses and events. 
To add to the seasoning Alan Ablewhite's Dr Rance's seemingly calm approach hiding his rampant sexuality as the inspector from the government. The two doctors collude to declare the would-be secretary non compos mentis and pump her full of drugs.
The final touch is the arrival of Mark Griffiths's Sergeant Match, the perfect PC Plod.
How much views have changed in the years since this play was written is reflected in Conchita Wurst: a man appearing as a woman and singing in a woman's voice but complete with a bearded face won an international competition by a country mile. And what was once considered pornographic is now mainstream in various forms of media.
Farce does impose rules on both director and cast. You have to play it absolutely straight to get the maximum humour across to your audience. In this production the hysteria began too soon leaving the actors nowhere else to go. As the doyen of theatrical critics Michael Billington once commented on an earlier, professional production "...Orton's subversive wit gets buried under an avalanche..."