HA HA HOLMES!

HA HA HOLMES! 

AND THE HOUND OF THE BASKERVILLES

Jamie Wilson Productions

at the Civic Theatre, Chelmsford

for The Public Reviews

Hot on the heels of Ha Ha Hamlet and Ha Ha Hitler, Ha Ha Holmes, an irreverent and gloriously silly look at Sir Arthur's greatest hit.

It's been reworked to accommodate the unique talents of Joe Pasquale, who effortlessly assumes the role of the "sleuth detective".

It's the kind of show which has a warm-up before the lights go down. Ben Langley, author, director and a mean Sherlock in his time, is first up, joined by Andrew Fettes, who plays all the other parts, from Moriarty to Fanny Stapleton. And then by Pasquale, master of the stand-up throwaway line. They mercilessly rib the punters as they drift in … "Peggy Mitchell" … "J R Hartley". And they are upfront and honest about this first night of a gruelling tour that will take them from Yeovil up to Glasgow and back to Plymouth. "None of us know what we're doing … we're flying by the seat of our pants …" They're not entirely kidding either – there are some sticky moments, some soggy moments. But the audience are happy to play along, make allowances, and join the cast in a happy collaboration. Just before they don the deerstalkers and the Inverness capes, and whip the dust sheets off the furniture, they offer some advice: "Lower your standards!".

Seated stage right is Andy Pickering at the keyboard, ready to provide silent movie music, accompaniment for the songs, and the odd bit of acting.

It all feels a little like a poor man's panto, with an audience song, and "volunteers" brought on to form a Neanderthal erection, or ride the stage coach – an inspired sequence, this, using the bookcase and the stairs to make the coach, with someone in row E holding the reins, someone else blowing the horn, the whole audience singing along and builder, biker, cowboy and Indian riding behind. Another priceless routine had Fettes frantically miming the story as Langley told it.

It's quickfire, frenetic, over-the-top stuff, not always best served by Pasquale's laid-back style. He's really at his best playing himself, bumbling engagingly through the routines, looking to the audience for support and sympathy. Sometimes difficult to hear, too, what with the meerschaum, the microphone, and a delivery which recalls the late Sir Patrick Moore.

The setting is versatile and stylish – the moving staircase, the piano/reception desk, the Aga microwave. Yes, we actually see the three of them prepare and eat a meal. And in what other show could you see a man transformed into a hound, and then murder a Lionel Ritchie number as he stumbles down that impressive flight of stairs. Not to mention inflating a rubber glove on his head using only his nostrils. Worth the price of admission alone, I'd say …

Next in the canon, in case you were wondering, Ha Ha Hood in 2014.

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews

BARNUM

BARNUM

Chichester Festival Theatre in the Park

31.08.13

"Barnum’s the name, P T Barnum, and I want to tell you that tonight, on this stage, you are going to see - bar none - every sight, wonder and miracle that name stands for!"

Well, he was always the king of hype, and, while this new Barnum has lots of colour and circus action, there are holes at its heart that make it difficult to love.

The auditorium is certainly impressive – circus tent on the outside, a near-replica of the old auditorium within. Should be an ideal space for this show … But for me, there is none of the warmth and immediacy we've come to expect; a lot of the energy, and the decibels, seem to be lost in the lofty rafters.

The show, even after careful tweaking by Cameron Mackintosh and others, even with Chichester's track record and Director Timothy Sheader's expertise, fails to set the world alight. The numbers are snappy, though, the choreography often impressive: the stairs and the dressing table, the one brick at a time routine.

Barnum's story is full of incident, but short on drama. And Christopher Fitzgerald's pocket-sized PTB, strong on energy and circus skills, lacks the charisma, and sometimes the voice, to carry the role. His long-suffering, sensible wife Chairy is nicely done by Tamsin Carroll. A brilliant ensemble tumbles and abseils round and about the action, and there are very pleasing cameos [all genuine Barnum freaks] by Aretha Ayer as Joice Heth ["the oldest woman in the world"], Jack North as a very lithe General Tom Thumb, and Anna O'Byrne as the Swedish Nightingale. Her entrance on the swing, stunningly lit, is, like North's number with Jumbo, a definite highlight.

Every effort is made to get the show across the footlights – performers and brass players venture up into the audience – but while we might walk back across the park whistling Follow The Band, we don't feel that this was an exhibit that begged to be revived. I'm not expecting to see this follow Singing In The Rain and The Pajama Game into the West End …

EDWARD II

EDWARD II

National Theatre at the Olivier Theatre

29.08.13

An open stage, a little like Habit of Art. Does this mean it's a work in progress, or a rehearsal ? Henry [hoover] and Yamaha [keyboard] both in use as the audience fills the Olivier. There is a tab cloth, used at the end, too.

The ladies behind me are trying to pin down the history.

Becket ? Wars of the Roses ? Princes in the Tower ? White Queen ?

No need to worry, since there's a helpful monarchy slide show at the start, taking us back from Elizabeth to Edward. And bold Brechtian captions to keep us up to speed.

Joe Hill-Gibbins has clearly been given carte blanche, and an impressive cast, to bring his vision of Marlowe to the National stage. It's a disquieting vision, with striking anachronisms and lavish, inventive use of technology. The structure behind the main acting area – we see only its unfinished exterior – turns out to be used for the private worlds, the intimate spaces of the play, all captured, live, on hand-held video. All the voices are amplified, all the time. There's an OB sequence, too, for the entrance of Spencer and Baldock, with some cheeky improvisation. The long interval is spent rebuilding the sacked castle, so it can't be such a random jumble as it appears.

Award-winning American exile, flavour-of-the-month Kyle Soller is Gaveston [or Gavisten, as he has it]. He is also Lightborn the assassin, a clever twist. Obviously the same player, though – he's the one who thinks "whilst" is pronounced "willst". He makes his entrance from exile through the stalls, then commands the stage from the Olivier's sweet spot. Hard to see how this "paltry boy" could enchant the king, though …

Played by John Heffernan, his comic talents largely untapped here. [There are laughs in the show, however, many of them at the anachronistic cigarettes and champagne.] It's a strong performance, though there is little regal about it, charting the tragi-comic fall from insouciant monarch – "brain-sick king" - to shambling prisoner. The most affecting scene has him reluctantly relinquishing the crown - "… let me be king till night!"

This is an equal opportunities court – "our sister Kent" – and there's a fine no-nonsense Pembroke from Penny Layden. The ensemble work is often effective – the dogs with drums, who also walk the bodies off at the end.

The costume flirts with anachronism, too. Bettrys Jones's Prince Edward wears a scarlet schoolboy blazer most of the time. I did feel there was significance here that I wasn't getting …

The big video screens are only partly successful – sometimes difficult to focus on both, and I was well placed. The lighting is wilfully ineffective, mostly from the back, with follow spots from the side, making it hard to see faces. The pace is often sluggish, the verse not well treated.

I imagine this will divide opinion – empty seats after the interval criticism of a sort – a fearlessly creative contemporary take on the play, or self-indulgent drama school posturing. I stayed in my seat, but incline to the latter view ...

production photography: Johan Persson

BUTTERFLY LION

THE BUTTERFLY LION

at the Mercury Theatre, Colchester

30.08.13

for The Public Reviews

Will they mind the liberties I've taken, thinks the adapter/director. Will they change too much of the book, thinks the child in the audience.

No need to worry on either score. Michael Morpurgo's Butterfly Lion is a magical book; the story of a white lion, blue butterflies and two boys who run away from school.

Daniel Buckroyd's stage version captures all that magic, and more, and retains much of the text, too. One of the most heartening developments in British theatre over the past ten years is the realisation that the simplest ingredients can combine to make more of an impact than the most costly special effects. And this staging is economical, and inventive, and ingenious, with an evocative musical score by Carlton Edwards.

It all begins in Millie's kitchen, dust sheets and tea chests. Everything has at least a double life – one of the sheets becomes baby Bertie, the school walls are the lion gate, the fence round the farm in Africa.

The story is told clearly and compellingly. Lloyd Notice, who is the spirit of the lion, takes much of the narration, and is a helpful, sympathetic presence, as well as portraying a tree, a wall and a history teacher. His rich voice is perfectly suited to the mood of the tale, and his work with the sad-eyed adult lion puppet is enchanting. Gwen Taylor is an utterly believable Millie, whether as the mysterious old lady who treats the runaway Michael to tea, scones, and the story of Bertie and the Butterfly Lion, or the nurse in the Great War, or the ten-year-old girl whose kite brings her into contact with the other runaway, who once rescued a lion cub at the watering hole. The boys are both played by Adam Buchanan, which brilliantly points up the parallels in their stories. Fresh out of drama school, Buchanan gives an amazing performance, slipping in and out of narration, equally convincing as the small boy and the V.C. hero. Gina Isaac, no stranger to this house, is the mother torn between duty to her husband and sympathy for her son.

But this is very much an ensemble piece, studded with memorable cameos. Michael Palmer as several not very likeable authority figures, including Bertie's father, Sydney K Smith as Merlot the circus man, Christopher Hogben as the French café owner. Not to mention the menacing hyenas, and the beautiful butterflies, all individually crafted in the Mercury's own workshops. This amazing company really make us believe they're off to Africa, and bring the watering hole to life with model animals and a blue tablecloth. The set is simple, the kitchen stove a constant presence; the slopes of the veldt become Vimy ridge at the start of Act Two, a simple suggestion of a ship's voyage turns instantly into an arrival. The lion puppets, directed by Sue Pycroft, seem often to have a life, and a soul, of their own.

The ending, when reality and imagination, life and death, writer and character all seem to merge, is wonderfully uplifting, the stage filled with Adonis Blue butterflies, flocking to settle on the chalk lion on the Wiltshire hillside.

production photograph by Robert Day

this piece first appeared on The Public Reviews

STRANGE INTERLUDE

STRANGE INTERLUDE

National Theatre at the Lyttleton Theatre

29.08.13

We meet Charlie [Charles Edwards] first. Sitting in Professor Leeds' stylish study, he delivers a long monologue, perfectly timed, about his life as "slacker bachelor", touching on his "sex life among the phantoms", with plenty of knowing glances out to the stalls.

Every character in O'Neill's unfashionably wordy and discursive domestic tragedy [here ruthlessly pared down to 195 minutes] has an inner voice, right down to the small boy who is named for one man, fathered by another, and grows up to step into the shoes of a third.

And good old Charlie makes up four – the men in Cara Nina's messy emotional landscape.

Played with searing honesty and frightening intensity by Anne-Marie Duff, she ages over the three hours from the young woman who's haunted by the ghost of her airman betrothed, to the weary widow, her father, husband, lover, son all gone, who falls into the comforting arms of the crusty, cynical novelist who's been around the whole time, watching the action in this "strange interlude", neither past nor future, which is our life.

The writing is sometimes poetic, sometimes melodramatic. Simon Godwin's near-faultless production tends to play those asides for laughs, which I suspect is not always what the playwright intended.

In Act One, the scenes are played out against a traditional tripartite revolve: the study ["Greek" – and there are shades of Sophocles in this tangled tragic piece], Sam's family home, the seaside retreat. After the interval, Soutra Gilmour's evocative design grows bolder with the century, with a brutal art deco apartment, until the yacht becomes the jetty, with wide late afternoon spaces for the final farewells and the endgame.

Patrick Drury delights, all too briefly, as the Professor, Geraldine Alexander is the desperate mother of Sam, Nina's callow second choice, ironically the only sane man, but "an adolescent mind in an adolescent country" in Charlie's acidic aside. Sam is brilliantly done by Jason Watkins, morphing from awkward, gawky youngster through frustrated failure to fulfilled father and successful ad-amn, and finally, run to fat, "vulgar bore" the proud dad cheering on his son's crew.