Black and White Dog

A review, for ThePublicReviews of 'Dream of the Dog' at the Trafalgar Studios, 27.5.10




In the living room strewn with tea chests and cardboard boxes it could be cosy Priestley or Coward, ‘Laburnum Grove’ or ‘This Happy Breed’ as an elderly housewife packs away the last of the family belongings before the house move to a peaceful retirement by the sea. But instead of South London we are high on the windswept veldt of KwaZulu Natal where Janet Suzman as Patricia Wiley is leaving the farm she inherited and has sold to developers.

We see her truculent, crude, memory-failing husband Richard, played with brutal intensity by Bernard Kay as an unreconstructed old colonial hand whose bigotry runs deep, before he storms out into the night to do some unexplained task on the hillside. A stranger arrives – another echo of Priestley – the son of one of the farmhands, named ‘Look Smart’ as a boy and whom Patricia had loved like a son and paid for his schooling returning after fifteen years to demand she now face up to some harsh truths about the dreadful event that caused him to leave.

What follows is an hour of possibly the best one-act play seen in London in recent memory.

The writing is so authentic and natural, and Ariyon Bakare as Look Smart has all the fierceness and pride of the emancipated African, but also a far subtler humility when facing an admission of his own self-deception. In other hands, this could have been a predictable exchange of taunts about racism and patronage, but Suzman – who participated in the development of the play with writer Craig Higginson – resists the obvious and in one of the finest performances you can see in London at the moment, delivers an honest and intelligent reading of the white woman who feels responsible for her actions but cannot find the resource to atone for them completely, nor to assuage the pains and isolation she feels from her own perspective on the past.

The strength of Suzman’s acting is palpable when you feel the strain of her frustration in attempting to explain her thoughts and feelings, and realize that this is not stage technique, but actual emotional truth.

It’s true that the plotting is somewhat over-tidy and the political issues familiar from Athol Fugard and other writers, but in an 80-minute piece there must be some compromises.

This is a play about black and white people whose issues are so far from black and white that you must follow them intently to the end which, even if you can see it coming, is enthralling.

Goodnight, Vienna

There is an array of all-American talent squished onto the Menier Chocolate Factory stage that is both formidable and incomprehensible. From Mandy Patinkin, arguably the finest Sondheim interpreter of his generation, to Broadway back-catalogistas like Judy Kaye and John McMartin, this is the stuff of dreams for many producers.

I won’t hazard a guess at the total number of awards between them, but it must be over fifty. Some dullard from Leeds will undoubtedly tally up the Tonys, Drama Desks, Oscars, Oliviers and BAFTAS listed in the programme and write in to correct me.

Such a pity, then, that they have been assembled, in the no less luminous hands of Evita-to-Phantom director Hal Prince and prima choreographa assoluta Susan Stroman in a complete barrowload of tripe.

It is impossible to fathom what passed through whose mind when it was first suggested that the Shah of Persia’s visit to Vienna in 1873 would make a viable subject for a musical, that modern lyrics could be welded to genuine Strauss tunes, or that it was a good idea to convince Jewish actor Mandy Patinkin to shave his head and play a fey Muslim eunuch in a performance exactly midway between Alec Guinness’s equally racially unrealistic Dr Godbole in A Passage to India, and Kevin Chamberlin’s Uncle Fester in Addams Family the Musical.



It’s called ‘Paradise Found’ but the only reference to Milton I can find is that you’d have to be blind to see the good in it.

Was Max Biyalistock originally Viennese?

Whilst Nasser al-Din Shah Qajar was a fascinating and cultured monarch – a painter, a poet and photographer who held sovereign power for almost 50 years, outstripped only by Queen Victoria whose reign ran parallel to his own. He was the first ruler to visit Europe and the first to publish his diaries – but in the Richard Nelson script, he’s a randy one-dimensional buffoon played half a degree above Baron Hardup and in a series of cheap lurex kaftans by five times Tony nominee John McMartin who looks understandably bewildered throughout.



The gist of the plot is that the Shah becomes infatuated by the Empress of Austria, and demands his servants procure her sexual favours. To spare the court’s blushes, a prostitute masquerades as the Empress and receives from the Shah a massive pearl necklace. Two, if you count the one she can wear in the street.

There’s a duet about masturbation set to the music of a Strauss mazurka.

So far it’s Kismet crossed with The Merry Widow and a side order of Indecent Proposal.

In the second half those of us who returned to the airless auditorium were rewarded with a further descent into farce as first there’s a prison scene where the prostitute is reunited with her favourite client, a cardboard Baron played with more conviction than the production deserves by the explosive bass-baritone talent of Shuler Hensley. Hensley is most noted in the UK for his outstanding portrayal of Jud Fry in the National’s Oklahoma! where he briefly but powerfully diverted the audience’s attention from its seat-wetting adoration of Hugh Jackman, and subsequently in a string of Broadway hits including playing the Monster in Young Frankenstein.

She’s been in prison, he in alcoholic penury, but they come together as actors in a coarse vaudeville which summarises the plot all over again only to oom-pah-pah music, after which the authors clearly got bored with the plotting and tie up all loose ends in a single scene worth of a provincial pantomime. Three Strauss strains are briefly reprised – even though we’re all now back in Persia - and we stagger out to the bar to try to make sense of it all.

Apart from airfares and accommodation for the cast, it’s not an inexpensive production – costumes, set and lighting are way above the Menier’s usual budgets: the programme refers to a number of producer type individuals as ‘Enhancement for this production has been provided by …’. Presumably ‘Enhancers’ are Angels who haven’t a hope in hell of seeing their money back.

Maybe it’s a tax loss, maybe it’s just an aberration on the part of otherwise competent and talented individuals, but this has the feel of a work-in-progress, perhaps a tryout where the European setting will be more familiar to audiences, prior to an opening on Broadway. If so, it will need the kind of eighteen month long re-write that kept Sister Act so firmly out of town, or closed Imagine This in its second month.

Either way, the presence of so many fine actors and singers is a bait to lure audiences to a production which fails to deliver either as musical comedy or a genuine operetta.

Go on then, they should call it The Strauss-Trap.

Holding the Man

Apocalypse Soon-ish

Home to Hammersmith is one of my least favourite journeys on public transport. It's the 'wrong' side of London for me which on a good day never takes less than an hour, and on one particularly horrible Saturday during tubular disruptions of an epic scale, two and three-quarters.

Although I like and admire the Lyric Theatre there - an extraordinary Victorian proscenium box airlifted into a concrete shell atop one of the nastiest shopping precincts in England - it's always with a heavy heart that I dither and defer my departure from home to make for a 'just-in-time' delivery in London W6. Scene set, then, for a preview of 'A Thousand Stars Explode In The Sky', a play about the end of the world.

I was reminded of that moment in Through The Looking Glass when Alice is introduced to the Plum Pudding 'Alice, Pudding. Pudding, Alice' and then cannot bring herself to carve into something she's just met - in that my lovely theatre-blogging friends introduced me at 7.28pm to David Eldridge, one-third of the triumvirate responsible for the new playscript.

He appeared a perfectly nice chap and I now feel hobbled that I can't bring the full weight of my puny invective to bear on a play I really didn't enjoy. Not that it would be legitimate to post a proper review since it sent me to sleep within the first forty minutes.

It SEEMED to be about a disparate family, mostly of fatherless brothers - five of them ranging in age from about seventeen to just past fifty which is surely biologically impossible for the mother unless she had the first in her early teens and the redoubtable but grimly aspected Ann Mitchell certainly didn't look that type - and their need to be together, or not, on a pig farm in Yorkshire at the impending Apocalypse which is neatly scheduled for midnight in three weeks from the start of the play.

Things happen. A charming dog appears in one scene and is subsequently beaten to death with a hammer. The fiftysomething man, who suffers from colon cancer and is otherwise a bit artless, is washed standing up in a tin bath genitals and all, by his mother. I might have preferred it if she'd washed the dog onstage and he'd been beaten to death with the hammer.

Certainly washing the dog on stage would have trumped Meera Syal's nightly preparation of chips and egg in Shirley Valentine, as well as provided some leavening laughs to this rather wordy, rather morose piece. 'Pinteresque' is all very well, but not when it emulates Pinter's capacity for logorrheic tedium.

There's presumably some significance to the leitmotif of smoking - the youngest brother is learning to do it, the oldest one has cancer because of it, the middle-middle brother is concealing the fact he does from his wife, then does so openly as an act of defiance - but all the actors handle it awkwardly and the opportunity to figure out their motivations eluded me as by the end of the first half I had lost the plot and caught the tube.

The Buffer Day

I sleep soundly till about 6 but am in no hurry to get up since I’ve reserved today as a sort of buffer against travel delays and to acclimatise to the heat and humidity of which there’s clearly plenty even this early in the morning. It’s nice also to take time over breakfast, in the hotel’s lovely courtyard and my first bowlful of truly ripe, truly tropical fruits – I calculate it would have cost about a tenner from Marks & Spencer, but the jewelled blocks of mango, papaya, pineapple, watermelon and banana are just a picture.



Since breakfast is a la carte I have no idea what else to order as everything on the menu is eggs – but they also bring doorsteps of wholemeal toast, with guava jam which is pretty nice. When the bill comes it runs to five figures of colones and I realise I have no idea of the conversion rate. I’m later relieved to discover there are over 800 to the pound.

It’s too hot to sit in the sun and there’s no shade on the roof terrace which is equipped with two boiling Jacuzzis instead of a cool pool, so I later opt for a trip into town. It’s hard to find something nice to say about San Jose ... any description ends up an endless litany of what it’s not – neither beautiful, architecturally interesting, clean or modern it seems to consist of unremarkable buildings from the Spanish colonial era interspersed with a lot of sixties brutalism, none of which has been keenly restored or preserved.

There’s a central market building with typical ordered displays of fish, meat, fruit and vegetables, but nothing so out of the ordinary as to merit multiple photographs. Nor are the people much to look at: even though I work my way through the commercial and political centre, passing courts, theatres, banks and municipal buildings, I don’t see anyone smartly or fashionably dressed, the typical uniform being trackpants and a baggy vest. Men and women.

The prevalence of American retail brands is almost alarming, there’s so little in San Jose to betray its once-proud Spanish heritage – of course you expect KFC and Macdonalds, but all the hotel, bank, chain store and petrol station brands are from the US and it feels like a poor and dirty county town from Iowa or Indiana.

I make contact with my facebook friend Jose Reyes who was once a lawyer with the International Court of Arbitration in The Hague but has returned to practice in his native Costa Rica and since my hotel is alleged to have the best restaurant in town I make us a reservation for dinner.

Jose has other plans, and instead drives me to a rustic finca high on the hills of Escazu and overlooking the whole of San Jose in the valley. From this distance with the stars above and the city lights below it looks almost attractive. The restaurant is interesting with large groups of people sharing some of the tables, I think at first it might be a tourist trap, but these are all locals or from neighbouring Nicaragua or Guatemala come for the food and the genuine folkloric dancing.



I throw myself into the spirit of the place and eat highly spiced beef, frijoles, plantain, yucca and pico di gallo which I spit out because it’s laced too heavily with the dreaded coriander ... whilst Jose chooses grilled chicken and plain boiled vegetables, it’s an odd exchange of our native cuisines.

The dancing seems good and is wildly applauded by the customers, although there’s not a lot of variety. For the girls, the routine seems based on lifting your skirts to your ears, and shrieking a lot. If that’s all it is, I know a goodly number of chorus boys who could join the Costa Rican national ballet.

We have an entertaining evening but by 10 I’m shattered and whilst I sense Jose might like to take things a bit further, he’s a perfect gent and escorts me back to the hotel where we say goodnight.

Do I know the way to San Jose ?

I won’t bore you with the details of the journey except to say that flying Continental was less traumatic than anticipated, and despite it not having lie-flat BA seats, the food was particularly good, the movie selection Oscars-fresh and the service attentive so, since airmiles beggars can’t be choosers, I’m not complaining.

I changed at Houston where the unfathomable island that is the United States insists you clear customs and immigration despite the fact you have only one hour and 25 minutes to spend in the airport let alone the country, they seem unable to process airside international-to-international passengers, although my luggage goes straight to Costa Rica and does not pass ‘GO’.

It was perhaps unfortunate my flight from London coincided with the arrival of the Emirates service from Dubai, a sixteen hour nonstop which decants 250 tired and anxious beard and burqa wearers into the ignorant hands of monolingual Texas redneck border officials with resultant misunderstandings, intolerance and delays to we less ‘profiled’ passengers waiting behind. Appropriately enough, the airport is named after George Bush.

On the connecting flight to San Jose I am seated in front of a pair of loud mouthed good ole boys on their way to visit their sport fishing boats and imported Brazilian girlfriends, an indication that a lot of the migrant population into Costa Rica consists of American retirees eking out their pensions. The overheard conversation runs to discussion of finances until the free liquor slugs them to sleep, but not before I learn the cost of living is rising to beat them and they must consider a further, cheaper, destination for their remaining days, possibly Nicaragua.

I’m always quite pleased with myself to arrive in a third world country, particularly late at night, and successfully negotiate sufficient currency and directions to get myself to my first hotel although it’s surprisingly uncomplicated as there’s a fixed-price airport taxi service and I’m soon on my way. The driver has other ideas, though, carefully questioning me about my accommodation before telling me the hotel’s full and he’d be able to find me another one. It takes a certain amount of firmness to insist we go where I know I have a prepaid reservation and he eventually dumps me at the rather elegant Hotel Grano d’Oro, an extended and boutique-ified colonial mansion in an area which seems otherwise reserved for plastic surgery clinics. Perhaps they’re expecting me.

It doesn’t take long to check out the small but charming room with its polished floorboards, iron bedstead, heavy French armoire and ceiling fan – the windows are open but its surprisingly bug-free and I chance it without insect repellent for the first urban night, since after taking a shower I realise it’s now 11pm Costa Rican time and therefore 22 hours since I left home so I am more than ready for bed.




As I drift off, I am aware of the most beautiful birdsong. And we’re not talking squawks and chattering, this is pure uplifted melody from the trees in the garden below my window, I believe from the national bird of Costa Rica, the clay-coloured robin which sings like a louder nightingale, and all night long.

Listen here

END OF THE PEER SHOW

Lord Andrew Lloyd Webber is not a well man. His operation for prostate cancer before Christmas led to complications and Love Never Dies may be his last composition, since he’s now producing Wizard of Oz rather than developing new material. I hope not, because the author of Sunset Boulevard and Evita deserves a better epitaph than the load of old rope currently on full-price £65-a-seat preview at the Adelphi Theatre.

We are in Coney Island, and if Lloyd Webber’s claim that the events are set ten years after Phantom of the Opera is accurate, it’s about 1891. The Phantom has become a sideshow illusionist, bringing with him Madame and Meg Giry, and three henchpersons called something like Felch, Squelch and Gargle whose sole purpose is to strut about in Cirque de Soleil costumes. In a barely comprehensible plot, he invites now-famous Christine Daae to sing in his theatre and she arrives aboard the Lusitania with Oscar Hammerstein (who would have been four years old at the time), Nancy Astor (eleven) and Cornelius Vanderbilt (born 1898). Improbable or what?

Christine’s son turns out to be fathered by the Phantom who entertains the ten-year-old in what looks like Michael Jackson’s bedroom, complete with Bubbles the ape maniacally playing a pipe organ. Other elements of scenery are like an Art Nouveau explosion in a resin factory, interspersed with trapeze and rope twirling from a provincial circus.

ALW’s form is distinctly variable: whilst Cats and Evita pushed the envelope of musical theatre his recent appearances on low-rent television stunts like ‘Any Dream Will Do’ have diminished his profile which was equally dented by penning the dire Eurovision entry 'It's My Time' which I have previously suggested took him precisely three idle minutes to write, including standing up, flushing and washing his hands afterwards.

It now seems outrageous that he should be the recipient of a peerage for his contribution to the nation’s musical heritage, an honour not accorded Purcell, Delius or Elgar.

He does, however, deserve some sort of national award for recycling.

The lead-up to Christine’s performance of the theme song is interminable and gives you time to reflect it’s not a new tune. Setting aside the internet gossip which invites comparison between ALW’s composition and the theme from 1960’s Shirley MacLaine movie ‘The Apartment’, ‘Love Never Dies’ is itself a re-hash of ‘Our Kind of Love’ cut from his musical ‘The Beautiful Game’, stripped of its meaningful lyrics, jacked up an octave and given ludicrous operatic pretensions and drowningly lush orchestration.

Whilst Serena Boggess looks stately – the pink crystal-studded frock is simply gawjus – and sings right to the top of her soprano range until you wonder whether bats will fall from the rafters with their wings over their ears, it’s a soulless performance made even less engaging because it’s so difficult to care about any of these characters.

It’s tantalizing to wonder what might have happened if Christine had been made fully three dimensional, and the piece sung in a normal register with emotion by Hannah Waddingham – as she did on Parkinson some years ago - then this could have been the most electrifying sequel.

The pretence that this is somehow an opera score trips ALW up time after time – Ramin Karimloo’s voice seems to have only one setting: ‘stentorian’, and all his interactions with Christine are overblown and overloud. The recitative sounds directly snatched from ‘Sunset Boulevard’ and is endlessly repetitive, whereas a few lines of spoken dialogue and a couple of jokes would have been more than welcome.

The counterpoint popular numbers like Summer Strallen’s Miss Adelaide style vaudeville routine, a fatuous rock anthem, and a chronically forgettable ‘beach’ ensemble seem jarring, as if they belong in three different musicals.

In the bare-stage climax (hm, seen any Bizet, Andrew?) and for no apparent reason, Strallen’s character shoots Christine and a blood capsule explodes in her bra. She dies in the Phantom’s arms as they kiss one last time.

It takes her six minutes, during which she reprises four different tunes before the orchestra wells to the sort of climax normally reserved for the last night of the season at Verona as Tosca chucks herself off the battlements.

Lloyd Webber probably thinks he’s written Carmen.

I think car-crash.