Front Row

The 1952 MGM movie Singin' in the Rain is one of the greatest big screen musicals of all time. Indeed for myself, Singin' in the Rain is always the dvd I reach for first if I'm at home in the mood for a good dvd to watch.

With that in mind, I wasn't sure what to expect from the stage production. Obviously I know all of the big numbers, but would a stage environment do this big screen wonder justice?

Well, I can only say if you don't leave the theatre with a smile on your face I can only guess that you fell asleep during the performance and missed the entire thing.


When the story first made its transition to the west end in the 1980s, it was somewhat of a flop. However Jonathan Church's new staging, with exciting new choreography by Andrew Wright (which wouldn't have looked out of place in the '52 original) makes for an evening of sheer delight.

If you haven't seen the film or the stage performance, the story is based on the arrival of talkies to Hollywood. Think The Artist but with more humour and a score only MGM could compose.


The cast is superb. Adam Cooper, former Royal Ballet, star is fabulous, his Don Lockwood making easy work of the classic Gene Kelly steps. Louise Bowden as Kathy and Stephane Anelli as Cosmo together with Cooper make a terrific trio.
Jenifer Ellison as the screechy voiced, silent movie star, Lina Lamont is hilarious. The scene where she is practising her elocution with a long suffering tutor is particularly humorous.

The whole show is brilliant, and each number sees the audience rise up in their seats and tap their feet along to the tune. When the opening notes of the number Singin' in the Rain tinkle through the air, the excitement amongst the audience is clearly evident- excited gasps and excited laughter rings ringing out as the first few drops begin to hit the stage.
If you're looking for a good night out, look no further. Just be warned, if you're sitting in the front few rows you may need your waterproofs!

Tickets for the performance from www.superbreak.com/theatre-breaks.htm

Play: Mare Rider

Jane Montgomery Griffiths, Sappho … In Nine Fragments, director Jessica Ruano.

Wednesday 16th January 2013 to February 3rd 2013.

The White Rabbit Theatre, 125 Stoke Newington Church St, London N16 0UH

Web site http://secondskintheatre.com/pages/productions/sappho-in-9-fragments   

4 stars

 

Fluently and fluidly directed by Jessica Ruano of Second Skin theatre, this is a stunningly athletic and entirely sensuous one woman performance by Victoria Grove; she plays not only Sappho, but all the other voices and characters in the play. Ana Ines Jabares has created a rather impressive stage set of a spider web lattice of ropes and scaffolding to suggest Sappho is at once always constrained by myths and by the way she has been read and presented by others and perhaps elusively forever out of reach to those who would know her. An intangible personality of whom little survives but fragments of poems, and yet is capable of sublimely transcending these limitations just likes the ropes and bars of the set. The same set also helps to add a powerful sense of sexuality to Grove’s lithe and acrobatic, twirling performance and together with an evocative sound set from Luca Romagnoli does much to bring the performance an important visceral immediacy.

However, the star of the production is certainly Grove with her voice at once sepulchral in its smoky-jazz tones and her lithe, supple ability to wind her way around  the set, constantly moving from position to position, wrapping herself round ropes and bars to create drama in the performance. The fact that six foot tall Grove looks much like an ancient Greek goddess with her long brown tresses, bare foot in a blue-grey, attic gown only aids  the piercing intelligence which she brings to the words she has to speak. Few actors could manage to portray at once a character who is feisty, haughty, enigmatic and function as an object of desire– this desire isn’t always about sexuality so much, as for the truth which people have always desired – to know who the real Sappho is. It is this hermeneutic problem which the play above all oscillates around.


Figures 1-4. Victoria Grove as Sappho. All pictures are by Jessica Ruano.

I was less enamoured of Jane Montgomery Griffiths' pseudo-biographical script than I was of the qualities of Second Skin’s production. It was certainly fragmentary and I think is was rather hard to follow for someone unfamiliar with Sappho’s work. The trope that Sappho the ghost was being embodied by this production, in a way she hadn’t been before was just that - a familiar theatrical trope -  we know as little of Sappho’s life now as we have for the past few millennia. We do not know if her lyrics should even be read autobiographically – after all the ‘I’  in a lyric is not necessarily autobiographical in the Renaissance and afterwards – we just do not know its status within Sappho’s ancient Greek literary culture.

This conjured up figure of Sappho we see in the play seems to protest frequently at the way others through history have attempted to fill ‘her gap’, ‘ her absence’, with interpretation of various kinds via Montgomery Griffiths’ script.  This seems rather disingenuous as that is exactly what this production itself is doing in reading Sappho as a very contemporary kind of  sexy lesbian figure and which often over-interprets or sometimes deliberately fails to explain the few known facts to make a more acceptable, dramatic and contemporary ‘feminist’ story. Sappho can never tell her real story any more than Shakespeare or so many other famous writers can – it will always be invented by others of which Jane Montgomery Griffiths is in the final analysis, just another interpreter fighting for her place in the sun. One thing the play doesn’t achieve is making us feel though is that we are in ancient Greece with an ancient Greek; as say Annabel Lyon’s novels The Golden Mean or The Sweet Girl achieve so memorably.


Sappho’s ‘neglect’ in the ancient world after her death  in  c. 570 BCE  was no conspiracy, but simply because like others she wrote in  Aeolic Greek, a very different form of the language than that which developed and became dominant. She became read largely in translation subsequently, except by expert scholars and dropped off the classical syllabus for the Byzantines. As any poet knows the original language of composition matters for poetry: what will Shakespeare becomes when only a few specialist scholars can read his work in his original English? How many British people today really appreciate Chaucer's fine poetry, let alone that of the Anglo-Saxons? The burning of the great library of Alexandria was an immeasurable cultural cataclysm of the ancient world, but Sappho was hardly alone in its consequences and by that time her manuscripts were already copied much less than they had been. Of the nine great lyric poets of ancient Greece esteemed by the Alexandrians, the situation of Sappho’s texts is sadly like that of the vast majority; only Pindar’s work really survived that fiery apocalypse, by luck rather than design.

 A few other things also irritated me about the script and particularly the decision to interpolate a new, contemporary fiction. This was a Jeanette Winterson style account of a contemporary, obsessive love / coming out story of rather masochistic desire between a young actress called Atthis   (named after Sappho’s lover mentioned in the surviving fragments), and an older, successful woman called Sappho. I think a play based on how women have read and used Sappho would be fascinating, but here it felt like an attempt to construct what loving the real Sappho was like for the audience: otherwise why would the ghost of Sappho draw it to our attention? Montgomery Griffiths created a figure here who was aloof, cool, wealthy, narcissistic, aristocratic, beautiful and somewhat emotionally sadistic - if only an actress, hardly a great literary figure like Sappho– and the play seemed to imply this was what the real Sappho was like. However, this is just an interpretation based on the writer’s imagination rather than anything else, and one that the ancient Greeks would I think have found unrecognisable, so different is our culture from theirs, most especially as regards ‘homosexuality’, a concept as Foucault among others have noted, that they would have struggled to understand.


I was left somewhat unsettled after this reinterpretation of Sappho because of these elements,  despite Victoria Grove’s exhilarating, powerful and immensely physical central performance. Sappho now seemed a smaller figure, more ordinary and of a more contemporary sensibility. However, was she really as good a poet as the ancient world and others subsequent believed her to be? Turning at home to Anne Carson’s spare, glowing translation in If Not, Winter: Fragments Of Sappho, however, I was relieved to find myself once again impressed by the fragments of Sappho that have survived. Canadian Carson is both a classicist and poet of considerable note and she manages to convey the sheer quality of Sappho’s poetry in a way that the play can’t achieve, partly because it is lost in its own desire to remake Sappho. Montgomery Griffiths aim of ‘embodiment’ is really just another fancy word for a stage biography; no different say from Simon Callow’s recreation of Dickens, where there is an infinitely larger amount of reliable biographical material to go on than for Sappho.  Pace Grove’s brilliant performance, we really learn more about the interpreter’s interests here, than we do about Sappho, just as we have in other period’s attempts to recreate the poet.


But above all, let’s remember that Sappho has always been considered a great lyric poet by other great poets and commentators. It seems more than a little sad that we seem to need to turn her into a contemporary figure by creating a new, more fulsome pseudo-biography for her than previous generations managed with, in order to ensure that her words still shine with their ancient radiance and luminosity.

Guest Blog An Interview with Victoria Grove for The Lady Suman Bhuchar 17th January 2013 Victoria Grove is a stunning woman who stands over six foot tall in her stockinged feet, and is currently appearing in Sappho...in 9 Fragments, at the White Rabbit Theatre, a small cocktail club tucked away in Stoke Newington.

It’s her first one woman show and she’s continuously on stage for the entire seventy minutes during which time she is hanging from a bar or entwined in ropes, lounging in a makeshift hammock or just ‘in-yer-face’ as she portrays the life and longings of the Greek lyric poet, Sappho, who was born on the island of Lesbos sometime between 630 and 612 BC.

There is no hiding place in this intimate venue which only seats twenty audience members at a time. Victoria, the daughter of celebrated writers, Valerie and Trevor Grove is no stranger to such challenging roles. She is the ‘resident artist’ for Second Skin Theatre Company, who produce ‘bold reinterpretations of classics’ and was last seen playing the lead in their show, La Chunga, written by Mario Vargas Llosa.

The 31-year-old, who was born and brought up in North London, studied at City of London School for Girls, Barbican (Ramola Garai, was a contemporary). She thanks her headmistress Lady (Valerie) France for instilling in her pupils the idea that women can do so much.

“It was a wonderful thing to learn,” and it has stood her in good stead. She clearly relishes playing bolder and risqué roles than that of ‘the girl next door’, but jokes that she can be typecast as a transsexual or dominatrix, due to her height and incredibly husky voice. Her unique voice was caused when as a teenager, she accidentally landed on her throat and crushed her larynx and had to painstakingly learn to speak again, a task that took several years. During this time she had to abandon her childhood ambitions to tread the boards and became a photographer’s assistant.

“I was a singer and actress, it was really debilitating and really crushed me,” she recalls. She decided to return to theatre and attended the Actors Company at the London Centre for Theatre Studies, and it was the best decision she made. When not performing, she can be found at the Nightjar in Shoreditch, sipping cocktails and listening to blues and jazz, and indulging in some old school glamour.

Sappho .... in 9 fragments at White Rabbit Theatre until 3rd February Box Office 020 3556 3350. www.secondskintheatre.com

Anon, Fair Em adapted for the stage by Phil Willmott, director Phil Willmott.

 Tuesday 8th January 2013 to Saturday 9th February 2013.

The Union theatre, 204 Union Street, London SE1 OLX

Web site http://www.uniontheatre/  Telephone  Box Office 020 7261 9876

3 stars

Phil Willmott and his company have done good work in adapting the anonymously written Fair Em (full title from the two quartos is A Pleasant Comedie of Faire Em, the Millers Daughter of Manchester. WIth the love of William the Conqueror) for production. But in the end, however much energy and inventiveness a production has: you just can’t make a sow’s ear into a silk purse.

If anything this production should have come even closer to a boisterous Elizabethan version of pantomime and eschewed some of its attempt at taking the action seriously, as a solution to dealing with the Pythonesque meanderings of the increasingly improbable plot developments that unfold.

Fair Em is really one of the weakest, flimsiest Elizabethan stage comedies you will come across and there’s no real surprise that it hasn’t been revived in four centuries. Although what can only have been an example of misfiling in Charles I’s library may have led some cock-eyed optimists to think Fair Em might possibly be by Shakespeare: it is hard to imagine how Shakespeare could ever write so poorly, even if he had been dying of the plague at the time. As an experiment in staging one of Shakespeare’s Apocrypha this more or less proves conclusively he had no hand in it and that it almost certainly isn’t worth reviving again, when there are so many much better Elizabethan comedies deserving of performance.


Figure 1. David Ellis as Manville and Caroline Haines as Fair Em. Photography by Scott Rylander.

It isn’t just the plot is such a ramshackle affair of two quite separate stories uneasily yoked together, one based upon traditional ballad sources such as ‘The Miller's Daughter of Manchester’ and another intertwined story about how William the Conqueror is tricked into marrying a Danish Princess. Nor is the problem that it plays around so ridiculously with history in a retelling of William I’s life, that it could almost be termed post-modern; it would no doubt have surprised William’s actual spouse, Matilda of Flanders, or indeed the average Elizabethan theatre goer who knew some history. The paramount problems are that there is so little poetry in the lines or psychological insight in the presentation of the characters.

Of course, there were Elizabethan entertainment duds, just as there are today, and this is probably their equivalent of what you sometimes find late in the evening, while flicking channels on satellite TV and there is a desperate need to fill a schedule. Who on earth could have written that mess you wonder? In the case of Fair Em no one wanted to own up. Laughing at it, rather than with it, is the way to enjoy it.

The most likely candidate writers of Dear Em were either Robert Wilson or Anthony Munday, but if so, then neither was on good form, or else this was a rush job to fill a hole in the schedule.

Em and her father, Sir Thomas Goddard, who are Anglo-Saxons living in post-Conquest England have been banished to the North of England where they pretend to be a miller and his daughter. However, Em is so luminously beautiful that not one, but three Normal nobles fall for her, even in her lowly guise as a miller’s daughter. To try to placate her jealous lover Manville she tries to put off the other two nobles by pretending to be struck blind and deaf.

Meanwhile William I in disguise as Sir Robert of Windsor has travelled to Denmark, where he has discovered in shock that the woman he thought he was in love with, the Danish Princess Blanch, is not as beauteous as her image suggested. (‘Ill head, worse featured, uncomely, nothing courtly/ I never saw a harder favoured slut.’) He falls for a captured Swedish princess instead, Mariana, who actually loves his ambassador, the Marquis of Lubeck and Mariana cunningly arranges that William will steal away with Blanch – who has fallen in love with Sir Robert of Windsor - while thinking it is actually Mariana he has eloped with. No one seems worried what William will do when he discovers this trick. Amazingly enough, all ends well - if that is extremely unlikely - as William suddenly seems for no apparent reason to finally decide he does love the Danish King’s daughter he previously loathed after all and war is narrowly averted between William and the unnamed Danish King.


Figure 2. Caroline Haines as Fair Em and Robert Donald as Trotter, 'the miller's boy'. Photography by Scott Rylander.

Em marries the one nobleman who truly loves her, Lord Valingford, and in a moment of insanely preposterous Elizabethan retrospective nation-making by wish-fulfilment, Anglo-Saxons and Normans all start getting along happily (quite unlike the endless Anglo-Saxon rebellions of the real William I’s reign). Odd’s blood - William even gets offered the Danish throne in the future upon Blanch’s father’s death!

The interpolation of anachronistic folk songs by four performers called Green Willow was quite pleasant as a way to liven up the action and it is always good to see some neat playing on the musical box. The songs did bring out a summery feel. It was also pleasurable to hear the pagan sounding, ‘All around my hat’, although that is a nineteenth century ballad about a lost love and scarcely Elizabethan nor actually appropriate to the action. The cardboard cut-out set by Phillip Lindley, recalling Wenceslaus Holler’s Elizabethan panorama of London, with an additional windmill, was also watchable, as were the beautiful mediaeval styled costumes, though little of the play is actually set in London (mostly in Denmark and the north of England). The acting was certainly bold and pantomimic though I think it might have been better to have been even less serious. Caroline Haines as the ‘beautiful’ Em and Madeline Gould as Princess Blanch were agreeably feisty, while Robert Donald played a doddering ancient ‘miller’s boy’, Trotter, in a style that would have suited a Carry On film. However, there were decent comic turns from others in the cast.

I can imagine that if I had seen this production at an open-air theatre in the summer - preferably after several ales like a proper Elizabethan - it might have worked better than it did on a wintry night near waterloo.  It is a shame though, that Willmott and his excellent company have rather wasted their considerable talents, when there are so many other seldom seen Elizabethan comedies that really are worth reviving: Fair Em, I fear, has curiosity value alone.

Sebastien Michel, Top Story

Saturday, 5th January 2013 to Saturday, 2 February 2013

Old Vic Tunnels, Stage Door, Station Approach Road, London SE1 8SW

Web site http://oldvictunnels.com/ Telephone  Box Office 020 7993 7420

3 stars

The Old Vic Tunnels are London's most resolutely trendy, underground venue - but theatre I have seen there can be very hit or miss.

A meteor the size of LA is on a collision course with LA and will extinguish all intelligent life on earth, as surely as it did for the dinosaurs – hence it is the ‘top story’ – and all in less than a week. In this respect the two heroes of this play, Lewis Goody’s Talfryn and Ed Pinker’s Gus have to discover how to live their life as if it mattered, in the brief time that they have left in this apocalyptic black comedy.

Though billed as ‘Godot meets Rosencrantz and Guildenstern for the Facebook generation’, these two twenty-something couch-potatoes seem more like an attempt at Bottom meets The Fault in our Stars. Talfryn and Gus, however, are just too charmless, selfish, dull and disengaged as characters for most of the time to be effective clowns, a situation not helped by the frequent inconsequentiality of their circular, Beckett-pastiche exchanges that seldom flare into life except towards the end. The characters seem to have very little at stake in the proceedings due to the lack of pathos within the attempted comedy, signalled by Gus refusing to see his girlfriend because he thinks the ‘whole end of world thing will make her too emotional’. In fact if you were stuck talking to either of them at a party for too long then you’d probably be hoping that the world would end, if you couldn’t find an excuse to get away to the toilet. It does pick up a bit towards the end and Goody and Pinker certainly do their best to animate their characters and rise above the problems of the script – but this is too much for relatively inexperienced actors.


Fig 1. Ed Pinker as Gus and Lewis Goody as Talfryn. L to R. 
Photography credit: Copyright: Foteini Christofilopoulou

It is of course the classic existential dilemma writ large as planetary catastrophe. The elements were discussed by Nietzsche who argued one should live every day, as if it would repeat for ever, and by Heidegger, who contended that we should live our life most authentically by an understanding of our own death as the ultimate finitude of our being. Summarising such ideas rather than locating them within the action of the characters – in the style of Stoppard – is one of the mistakes in the script. Hence there are a couple of rather ponderous boiler-suited angels, who spend the first couple of acts popping into the action to deliver ex-cathedra style, summarised ideas of the multi-verse from theoretical physics and in the last act deliver some existential arguments from Sartre and Heidegger. Director Adam Berzsenyi Bellaagh seems to at least have some fun with the angels pushing around the sofas to show scene changes.

Probably the only reason to go and see this play is really Josephine Kime, who brings some excellent comic skills to bear in her portrait of a British TV news anchor, Chrissie Craven; the fantasy of every man in the dying planet (or at least the projection of our barely adolescent couple’s media-saturated desires). Kime’s precise timing and exaggerated over-acting, as she undermines the conventions of live, rolling TV reportage of events, is by far the most watchable and entertaining thing in this production. Despite the fact her character is little more than a flimsy, sexist fantasy of a desirable news-reader; Kime nonetheless rises gracefully above the limitations of the script and the episodes of the play which feature her do seem to have some genuine satiric bite – albeit the media are an easy target. Andy Hawthorne and Richard Matthews contribute some nice comic vignettes to aid Kime. However, this certainly isn’t Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy style satire.


Top Story would have been satisfactory enough, I suspect, had it been a 20 minute skit on a late night TV comedy show concentrating on the news broadcasts and down-playing Talfryn and Gus. However, Top Story’s current combination of two hours odd of unnecessary additional running-time and a frequently flabby verbosity, as it struggles with delineating philosophical and scientific concepts on which one fears the playwright has only a superficial, flimsy grasp, makes it more an exercise in ennui and looking at your watch surreptitiously, rather than any argument to live authentically, as if every day were indeed to be your last.

The script is available to buy from the production company at the theatre and for some hip reason seems to have eschewed the use of capital letters in preference for exclusive use of the lower case and little punctuation. However, you can amuse your friends down the pub by asking them to spot the undergraduate style summaries spoken by the angels - based upon Heidegger and Sartre’s arguments among other philosophers - and then to identify the original sources if they can.

If you want a slightly different kind of panto experience for Christmas, then I recently visited a couple of offerings in London which I rather enjoyed. 


The first is Tara Arts new, bold version of the old classic - Dick Whittington Goes Bollywood. From 5^th December 2012 to 5^th January 2013, at Tara Arts Studio, 356 Garratt Lane, Earlsfield, London SW18 4ES, http://tara-arts.com/whats-on/dick-whittington-goes-bollywood, telephone 020 8333 4457.


It is immense fun and probably the cleverest multi-cultural London based panto in town. Read my full review from The Public Reviews here: http://www.thepublicreviews.com/dick-whittington-goes-bollywood-tara-arts-london/


The other alternative Panto I admired and which I think could be the one that is ideal for difficult-to-please teenagers is Kneehigh's festive and clever retelling of the Cinderella story at Battersea Arts Centre, from 8^th December 2012 to 13^th January 2013, http://www.bac.org.uk/, telephone 020 7223 2223, 


Read my full review from The Public Reviews here: http://www.thepublicreviews.com/midnights-pumpkin-battersea-arts-centre-london/

Jack Thorne,
Mydidae
December 5th - December 22nd  2012
Soho theatre, 21 Dean Street, London W1D 3NE
Web site http://www.sohotheatre.com/          Telephone Box Office 020 7478 0100 
4 stars

Jack Thorne is building a reputation as one of the sharpest observers of relationships among contemporary British dramatists and here his dialogue sparks and flares as the plays develops momentum and along with some excellent acting, it is the dialogue that is the chief joy of the production.

Mydidae incidentally refers to a family of elusive flies, commonly called the Mydas flies, many of which live underground, while some mimic stinging insects such as wasps, as a self-protection measure against their vulnerability.


Phoebe Waller-Bridge

In this frequently compelling and unsettling two-hander Thorne has accepted new writing theatre company’s Drywrite’s rather strange and perhaps a little contrived brief to create a play set entirely in a bathroom: less the genre of kitchen sink drama then, than a bath, basin and WC performance. The two characters have a physically close but somewhat disconcerting relationship, it feels both intimate because of the vulnerability of the character’s nakedness (and there is perhaps no more intimate a setting than a couple’s bathroom), and yet it also feels as the play progresses as if they are also wrapped up in private troubles that hold them together as much as love.

There’s some extremely brave and effective acting by the two actors. Phoebe Waller-Bridge is the vivacious, but we realise emotionally broken woman, Marian. Waller-Bridge presents Marian as a shrewdly acted study in trauma and assumed guilt. Keir Charles as her partner David, brings some real feeling of repressed, anger and desperation to his role and his character seems to be struggling to find a way out of where the relationship is stuck. We discover it has become less about positive love than the shared co-dependency of a terrible, shared tragedy from the past and he too has internalised his anger against himself just as his partner. Thorne is also good on suggesting the social class and age differences between the two characters, but while this fleshes out the characters it does not really play any significant part in the unfolding plot. Like too many new plays this is perhaps stronger as a study of characters than an unfolding of meaningful themes and issues.


Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Keir Charles
 
There are more than few surprises as the play progresses, all the more remarkable as most of the second half of the play takes place in the large bath that is centre stage. Director Vicky Jones’ approach is good on the tiny moments of low key domestic intimacy, but she did not cope quite as well when the play switches into a tragedy of melancholia’s horror and its dumbfounded blockages of feeling. If there is a serious weakness to the play then it is that we never find out the details of the tragedy that happened to the couple and the play ends with no sense of either conclusion or a sense of the future. In a play that is as low-key and naturalistic as this one, trying to mimic the tautologies of Beckett or Sarah Kane to achieve a sense of the purgatorial did not really work. It makes the play feel instead rather unfinished and the audience worry that perhaps the past tragedy that is finally talked about very vaguely at the end, would not be enough to explain what has happened to the couple. To some extent I felt that had Thorne been allowed to move away from the brief he had been given rather more he could have created a rather more impressive play which was able to communicate more with the audience.


Phoebe Waller-Bridge and Keir Charles.

Last, but not least, I was fascinated by Amy Jane Cook’s design which created a fully plumbed bathroom in the small Soho's awkward upstairs theatre. This is one of the most amazing examples of stage scenery I have seen in an intimate space such as this and ably supports the strengths as well as the weaknesses of the play.

4 stars 

Arts Theatre, London, Great Newport St, WC2 7JB, telephone 0207 836 8643
http://www.artstheatrewestend.co.uk/
Until 6th January 2012

I thoroughly enjoyed Seussical the musical at the Arts theatre it is a perfect show for the under 10s and those who are still young at heart.


David Hunter’s Horton the Elephant and Joe Morrow as the Cat in the Hat.

It combines some dozen of Seuss’ books, such as Green Eggs and Ham and The Cat in the Hat, as well as my own personal favourites Horton Hears a Who! and Horton Hatches the Egg. Many of his best loved and most familiar characters are cleverly brought to life which will delight children and the score is a melodic and intriguing mix of Seuss lyrics and a variety of musical styles from pop and soul to jazz.

See my full review at The Public Reviews:awards.http://www.thepublicreviews.com/seussical-arts-theatre-london/

Duncan Stevens, The Christmas Dinner

November 28^th- December 16^th 2012

The White Rabbit, 25 Stoke Newington Church St, London N16 OUH

Web site http://secondskintheatre.com/pages/   Telephone  020 3556 3350

4 stars

 

Ghost stories performed as drama are all the rage around Christmas, but they are hard to perform successfully – in this rare instance I really did find myself both gripped by the action as it unfolded and increasingly tense and uneasy as the one act play progressed. By the final scene when the secret is revealed, I was genuinely a bit shocked and while I did not have nightmares; I certainly wasn’t tempted to walk past any graveyards as a shortcut home either.

There are several reasons for Second Skin’s success. First, they are experienced at dealing with supernatural themes and their Poe: Macabre Resurrections, set in the church in Stoke Newington which Poe attended as a child, was one of the creepiest shows I saw in 2012. The Christmas Dinner, is creepier and somewhat more worrying still, especially as its ghosts are the ghosts of the poor and the needy, making it somewhat in the tradition of socialist ghost stories which cunningly exploits the bourgeois guilt of the complacent property owning class and their Christmas excesses. It is an age of austerity, but not for the rich.

Second, the fact the play is about a party in a damp basement in gentrified Stoke Newington with its purple painted walls, which is where we actually are, does lend some useful chilly, atmospheric authenticity to the play. Third, there is some first rate and very funny acting from the four members of the cast. Their dialogue, which has been partly improvised Mike Leigh style before being written down, has the naturalistic ring of authenticity in its heavily ironic and satirical portrayal of the young and rich, and is often extremely funny. Laddish Terrence (played by Matthew Howell) and somewhat more sensitive Clara  (played by Sally Lofthouse) are giving the Christmas dinner party, but all is not well in their relationship and they have invited as guests their best friends. This couple are even more bonkers and seem on the verge of splitting up, Rachel (played with gushy, patronising, self-indulgence by Sarita Plowman), and dim by wealthy investment banker, ‘so we all made a few mistakes a few years ago’ Richard (played as a coke-snorting trader at full-throttle by George Collie).


From left to righ: George Collie as Richard, Sally Lofthouse as Clara, Sarita Plowman as Rachel,Matthew Howell as Terrence.  

Plowman is a scream as Rachel, as she tries out her sensitivity derived from couple counselling sessions and a trip to Africa where she patronised poor people and proceeds to berate husband Richard for his general unpleasantness towards her. We did have some sympathy towards him as she insisted on sharing with his friends his somewhat unusual interests in porn.  Collie turns Richard into an admirable comic character, his levels of insensitivity really could rival the character of Alan Partridge. But although you’d like to feel slightly sorry for him because of the treatment he gets from his partner Rachel, who seems to want to humiliate him passive-aggressive style as much as she can-  he is so unpleasantly self-centred and keen on being economically privileged – that sympathy is hard to find. I really wish that Duncan Stevens publishes the script as it is a hoot.

Andy McQuade’s directing often known for its stylisation is rather good at simply allowing them to appear like spoiled youngsters from the upper-class having a dinner party: acting is a real strength in this production. The characters are often like surreal out-takes from a comedy show and the two couples seem to be on the verge of manic hostility even before the supernatural events starts to happen. The humour (someone was laughing so exuberantly behind me all through the play that I really thought he might be possessed), serves to make the disturbing events that follow seems all too real and is an example of contrast which more dramatizations of ghost stories could profitably learn from. This is warmly recommended then, if you want a bit of a chill over the Christmas period. It’s a Christmas Carol without the sentimental happy ending – the poor and deprived are indeed always with us.