Forced Milk Wood

In the week they buried Elizabeth Taylor it seems appropriate to revisit Under Milk Wood, in which she appeared briefly as Rosie Probert at the height of her partnership with Richard Burton in the 1971 Technicolor version.

Even though playing a bit-part, Taylor was famously difficult, refusing to travel to Fishguard where the movie was being shot. Her scenes were filmed in London over the two days she had available before leaving England to avoid being collared for income tax, and the stills with a cameraman lying on the floor to get the only angle which flattered her low-slung figure and showed off the three Parisian nightdresses she’d demanded which cost half the costume budget.

Both Parisian nightdresses and Technicolor are absent from the Pentameters production. Colourlessness becomes a positive virtue in a play where the sounds are paramount, a day-in-the-life of a small Welsh fishing village seen through the eyes of a blind sea captain.

It starts well enough with a convincing blackout and a few minutes in which to let the imagery of the sleeping hamlet beside the ‘sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboat-bobbing sea’ unfold in your head. Even without Richard Burton’s impassioned baritone, it works. Unfortunately as the lights come up, the scene is an anticlimax: an all-purpose set comprising a badly painted door panel, the back of a piano and a cheap flat-pack Welsh dresser certainly not borrowed from any self-respecting neighbouring kitchen here in Hampstead.

There are two ways Under Milk Wood is successfully performed: with a vast and colourful cast recreating as authentically as possible in costumes and props a fishing village in the fifties, or on an almost bare stage returning to the piece’s heritage as ‘a play for voices’. This production falls uncomfortably between the two stools with the five actors straining – a lot of the vocals are shouted – to portray in snapshot 64 different characters and using the all-purpose Welsh dresser as everything from captain’s bunk to wild wooded hillside, but equally using all-purpose accents which, even to my one-sixteenth-Welsh ears, sounded occasionally English in their inflections and certainly more random than the quite specific lilt of Cardigan Bay where Dylan Thomas placed the village.

The play has been set to music, by director and onstage participant Tom Neill, but it’s the sort of self-consciously-worthy wheezing and whining compositions you might hear scraped out by a school orchestra and serves only as irritating punctuation while the actors clump on and off stage to their instruments. The music is massively better when the cast sing, finely in two- or four-part harmony for example in the first-act closer of the Reverend Eli Jenkins’ morning service in which Tom Neill and Thomas Heard counterpoint particularly well together.

Even when shared among only five pairs of hands, the material can shine, and the bickering of Mrs. Ogmore-Pritchard with her two deceased husbands, or Butcher Beynon’s taunting of his wife with the liver of her pet cat are quite nicely pointed.

It’s a heart-felt production: Pentameters founder Leonie Scott-Matthews introduced the evening with a personal memoir of Dylan Thomas’s daughter Aeronwy, who read and dedicated her own poems on this same stage, and Neill’s affection for the work is palpable. Sometimes the best that a fringe production can do is to indicate that a classy revival is overdue. Hopefully the National or the Donmar will hear this clarion call from Hampstead and give Under Milk Wood the production it deserves.


This review written for The Public Reviews

French Leave ... preferably in the interval

Sacre Bleu, Zut Alors, Quelle Horreur, and as for the choreography: Fosse septique … pick your own Francophone diatribes, this is vachement awful.

It’s a shame, because the hand on the Kneehigh Theatre tiller is Emma Rice who helmed their extraordinarily inventive Brief Encounter but to continue the boating metaphors it’s no coincidence that Cherbourg was the port from which the Titanic steered out into the Atlantic, you can’t wait for this leviathan to hit its own iceberg.

Reworked from the Jacques Demy movie which made Catherine Deneuve a star, it's a tenderly simple story of very young lovers parted by circumstance – he’s sent to fight in Algeria whilst she covers her pregnancy marrying a rich bore.  He returns, she’s gone, he marries the maid.  The central character of the girl’s mother is played here by the much undervalued Joanna Riding as a haughty harridan in a ginger Fanny Cradock wig and the lovers limply by recent Guildford graduate Carly Bawden and Andrew Durand for some unfathomable reason imported from the US to play Guy, despite the fact the West End is crawling with unemployed lightweight younger leading men: shout across the street from the Gielgud to The Yard bar and you’d find a dozen his equal.

‘Internationally renowned’ (although not so much in this country) cabaret artiste Meow Meow – actually a harmless Australian soubrette called Melissa Madden Gray who assumes her fantasy alter ego rather like Humphries does Edna - is contractually obliged to front the soiree in a split skirt, fishnets and black beehive.  She also has to hustle the reluctant audience participation so morphs Irma La Douce with Gladys from Hi-de-Hi in a performance which is more cliché than Clichy.  Mind you, in the echoing grove of yesterday’s second press night with three-quarters of the seats unsold, not even Ken Dodd could have warmed us up.  Her ‘straight’ entr’acte solo ‘Sans Toi‘ is delivered sans taste and with so much eye rolling, r’s trilling and lardoned pathos that the producers of ‘Allo ‘Allo would have cut it from embarrassment.

Veteran composer Michel Legrand reworked his orchestrations for the production – but using the sort of random, stunted, cul-de-sac riffs which make you realise some jazz is basically musical masturbation: enjoyable for the participants but ultimately not really a spectator sport.  And it’s through-sung which means banalities to music, and no interruption for some sharp dialogue or even a joke.  There’s only one recognizable theme tune (appropriately the made-for-lift-muzak If It Takes Forever I  Will Wait For You) which repeats on such an interminable loop the audience feels it’s being battered to death with an especially stale baguette.

There’s a highly mechanized set from Lez Brotherston with tricksy use of model buildings, artful neon and an unexpected skate ramp, colourful costumes, and a seductive lighting scheme by Malcolm Rippeth, but it’s all so much empty effort when the performance doesn’t engage with the audience.

London weather’s so unpredictable but I expect folded Umbrellas before Easter.

Kitchen Sink for the Cornbelt

Although set in the remote boondocks of Northern Illinois, on a near-derelict farm, we are not in any new territory with Sam Shephard’s ‘Buried Child’.

The possibility that an outwardly-naturalistic family shelters a dark secret which through the arrival of a stranger is revealed to devastating effect over three drawn-out acts is a theatrical motif so well explored as to have lost its power to shock even by 1979 when ‘Buried Child’ won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama – an accolade which, incidentally, Shepard said gave him less satisfaction than winning a roping contest in the local rodeo.

Shepard’s plays chart the decline of the American dream but more angrily than Miller or Albee, and more autobiographically too: Shepard’s father, a former WWII Air Force pilot, grew up on a broken-down farmstead and supported his mother and brothers from a very young age when the farm business collapsed but later succumbed to alcoholism, living a life that was endlessly disappointing and not able to find another path.

But Shepard is not easy to pigeonhole: his works combine attempts at satire, farce, and cynical verbal attack with images of the Old West, a mourning sense of nostalgia for a lost rural idyll, and a disconnection from familial and spiritual roots.

Possibly Shepard wanted to be a Beckett or a Pinter but merely acquired Pinter’s relentless verbosity and Becket’s obscurantism which makes the play hard to listen to since the dialogue is repetitive and disconnected. This isn’t helped by the variable accents of some of the cast and their propensity to turn upstage on important lines – Tala Gouveia is simply unintelligible a lot of the time.

The ramshackle farmhouse – the location is shown as ‘a squalid farm home’ in the programme - is excellently realised in Martin Thomas’s design, and Howard Hudson’s carefully graduated lighting scheme.

There are some good performances: the play starts well enough with a verbal sparring match between John Atterbury, totally convincing as the old-timer Dodge, arguing with his irritable wife shouting from offstage. His ‘slow’ son Tilde played by Math Sams and grandson Vince by Joe Jameson are also well-studied and persuasive performances of quite unengaging redneck characters.

In Timothy Trimingham-Lee’s lurching production, the actors are required to switch urgently from kitchen-sink drama to Ortonesque farce and back to horror when the parentage of the dead infant is revealed in the too-long-coming third act denouement.

It almost works, but last night’s audience was too readily entertained by the absurd to focus on the dramatic conclusion.

In fact towards the end it was a bit like 'What the Butler Saw' with Vince chasing Bradley round the stage with his prosthetic leg. But too hard to call, the audience was an odd mix of bemused blogcritics and over-volubly enthusiastic friends of the cast: it might have been better if we'd just had a fist-fight ourselves over it.


an edited version of this review appears on The Public Reviews

Covent Garden markets

Tuesday morning 11am and one is royally chuffed to be invited with a clutch of bloggerati by the Covent Garden media/marketing team to put ones feet up in the Director’s box at Covent Garden for dress rehearsal of the David McVicar Aida which opens on Friday. 

Apart from the close-up view of the singers’ facial expressions and a position right over the pit where we can eyeball Fabio Luisi spurring the orchestra to a spanking pace, we're all captivated by brilliance of both staging and movement.

If you’ve seen Aida before, forget those legions of spear carriers and chorines in white nighties and gold halters, crapping camels or Zandra Rhodes’ pleated silk elephants making the Nile run turquoise with fashion accessories. In Jean-Marc Puissant’s design it’s more Dune than Pyramids, and his motifs are smeared blood, scimitar and samurai. We’re in a darkly exciting metallica world framing the stories of battle, sacrifice – literally, human sacrifice – and conflicted loyalties.

In a brief chat after the performance, associate director Leah Hausman points out that Verdi was writing a serious piece about war: the word ‘guerra’ appears a hundred times more often than ‘amore’ in the libretto, so this is a story of war in which love happens, rather than the other way round.

It looks like Coriolanus but feels suddenly relevant: Amneris condemns the priests as controllers of a rotten society, Radames as head of the army is called upon to save the nation for posterity amid popular chanting and a march of bloodied and butchered foot-soldiers.  It could be played out in Tahrir Square.

The grandiose set-pieces are so much more than parades: there’s a fantastic troupe of athletic bare-breasted women whose urgent runs and synchronized thrusting seem lifted from a Soviet spartakiade, there’s ritual disembowelling and corpses dangle from the rafters.  Their male counterparts stage Kendo-inspired sword and lance fights in a dance of death under David Greeves’ genius martial arts coaching.

It’s no-one’s fault but Verdi’s that Aida shoots its load in the first two acts and what remains after the interval is the afterglow of the doomed romance between Radames and Aida, and Amneris’s slow-burning disappointment. But this is where the production really delivers as the emotional triangle is explored in scenes of tender and realistic intimacy, due to the powerful collaboration of the three principals: Roberto Alagna, Olga Borodina and Micaela Carosi whose acting is every bit the equal of their sung performances.

It’s edgy casting: Alagna was booed at La Scala in the same role in 2006, Olga Borodina famously walked out of an earlier Covent Garden Aida in a disagreement with ROH music director Antonio Pappano, so it’s a miracle not just that they are both here but that they conspire with Carosi to create such chemistry.

We went backstage for the scene change and some gossip: Swan Lake has had a box office mega-surge due to the ‘Black Swan’ effect with phone calls asking when Natalie Portman would be ‘on’.  The box office has a sense of humour because they’re tempted to answer ‘every other night alternating with Billy Elliott’.  But the best news is that ROH is trying to reprise its sensational Anna Nicole in 2013, and working on available dates with Eva-Maria Westbroek.



a version of this article appears on Londonist

Dis-Spirit-ed

There’s a whiff of mothballs at Richmond, and it’s not all coming from the audience in this starry but stolid revival of Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit …

A glossy 2009 Broadway production showcased Angela Lansbury in cracking and crackpot form as clairvoyant Madam Arcati and Rupert Everett in a role he was born to play, the suave and languid author Charles Condomine.

At Richmond on the last leg of its 'immediately prior to West End' tour, a new British production heads for the Apollo in Shaftesbury Avenue next week and features Alison Steadman as the medium, Robert Bathurst and Hermione Norris reprising their Cold Feet pairing as the novelist and his wife, and Ruthie Henshall as the ghostly ex accidentally manifested during a séance.

From the same Triumph/Theatre Royal Bath production stable as the Kim Cattrall Private Lives and helmed by Thea Sharrock who directed the brilliant Daniel Radcliffe Equus, it has all the ingredients of a surefire hit, and yet it doesn’t quite come off.

Even the indulgent Richmond audience wasn’t lapping it up, although they seemed to appreciate the physical comedy better than the dialogue which is only partially explained by the ruckus at the desk in the foyer when several complained their hearing-impaired headsets weren’t working.

It’s smartly costumed with authentic late 1930s gowns, but both script and setting feel stale: a childless and fustian middle class marriage afloat on a wash of cocktails and coffee fetched by servants is all about to be swept away by the war, and whilst there’s no spectre of the coming realities in Coward’s script, this production doesn’t sustain a constant barrage of bright and brittle banter either.

Coward wrote (and Margaret Rutherford made flesh) Madame Arcati as a tweedy countrywoman with an almost professorial interest in the occult – Steadman makes her much more strident which might be effective if it weren’t all on one note, and misses both the charming battiness and the sensitive vulnerability of the character.  Perhaps she’s spent too long in easy sitcoms like Gavin and Stacey and Fat Friends but this isn’t her best work and doesn’t compare with the excellence of her last West End outing in Alan Bennett’s Enjoy.

Where Lansbury was balletic and hummed to herself as she danced about the stage, Steadman grunts and feints hand jives that look as though she’s pioneering hip-hop fifty years ahead of its time.

Norris is the most successful in the thankless role of Ruth, the domestically-rooted second wife, but she plays it with less petulance and more elegant authority than the part usually receives and so is more fairly matched with the impishness of Ruthie Henshall’s shoeless and footloose Elvira.

The set, by the usually laudable Hildegard Bechtler has predictable art deco touches but looks cheap with a tackily painted piano and centerpiece terrible green sofa with rigid polyurethane foam cushions which weren’t around till the 50’s.



This review written for Londonist

Phone rings, door chimes, pretend you're out ...

Poor Steve Sondheim. During his 80th birthday year in 2010 his works were exhaustively produced and his dramatic entrails more pored over than in any autopsy. There’ll be less of a retrospective when he’s dead. In London, the revivals ranged from a lumpen ‘Follies’ atop a Walthamstow boozer to a puppyishly adoring all-star Albert Hall Prom which was the theatrical equivalent of humping the Great Man’s leg.

As the dustcart follows the Lord Mayor’s show, here comes Southwark Playhouse’s production. Company contains some of Sondheim’s best lyrics, is most autobiographically representative of his own views on relationships, but it’s not the best ‘book’ musical in the canon. Indeed, the script by George Furth is so inconsequential that the show works largely as a song cycle wherein married friends revolve round bachelor Bobby in a carousel of exhortation to find a wife. Updating it with iPhones and MacBooks robs it of a certain 70’s ‘Mad Men’ style and contemporaneous conventions about relationships, but does bring some fresh perspectives.

In his first fully-fledged directorship, Joe Fredericks allows too much unevenness: Siobhan McCarthy’s uncannily accurate impersonation of Bette Davis doing Margo Channing is funny but can undermine the power and pathos in her bravura rendition of ‘Ladies Who Lunch’, Mark Curry’s archly dated portrayal of husband Larry clings more to Mr Clifford in Acorn Antiques than to Broadway, and for a musical so deeply rooted in Manhattan the accents wander widely and the singing projects some very English vowels.

Cassidy Janson as Amy scores highly for her comic timing and vocal precision in ‘Not Getting Married Today’ in which she’s partnered by the strong and charming voice of Greg Castiglioni as Paul. Two of Bobby’s single girlfriends also stand out: Katie Brayben as April the air hostess manages to find the comedy in the script, her dumb blonde resistance to Bobby’s chat-up lines were one of the few laugh-out-loud moments, and Michelle Bishop as spunky punk Marta takes command of ‘Another Hundred People’ with genuine panache.

Bobby is meant to be an enigma, often portrayed as a coolly suave playboy who degenerates into a self-pitying mess, but Rupert Young‘s performance showed less of an arc since his Bobby is a greasy sweaty cokehead from the outset, perpetually dishevelled and disoriented. It’s a more modern reading of the part and emotionally distanced from the audience, but improves in the second act when ‘Being Alive’ was thoughtfully phrased and strongly delivered.

The singing is mostly very fine indeed, but the production lacks pace - you could see the audience’s attention wander - entrances need more immediacy and less clunking over the underlit Bridge-of-Sighs-made-from-scaffolding set - and for the dialogue to crackle authentically, cues need to be picked up much more smartly.


This review written for www.londonist.com

Her name was Lola ...

The temperature is now officially half-past fucking hot and the only way to enjoy the beach is for Rhea and I to take a very early morning walk – all the way to the headland between us and Ipanema, and a paddle in the extremely chilly Atlantic before the sun beats us indoors for breakfast. We’d been promised an endless parade of beautifully sculpted Brazilian bodies but what’s passing us either on the sand or the boardwalk is definitely not hot. It’s rather like Miami Beach, and if you’re thinking ‘Golden Girls’ think more the Sophia end of the spectrum than the Blanche.

It’s also an opportunity to assess Copacabana for what it is now and the faded showgirl from the Barry Manilow song is a useful metaphor. I’m struggling to remember the technical term for a once-glorious demi-monde that attracted people from all over the world to its glamorous nightlife and racy atmosphere but is now a shadow of its former self. Oh, right, I remember: shit-heap.

The high-rise narrow hotels which form a fourteen-storey terrace along the seafront remind me of Acapulco without the lush foliage, or perhaps Benidorm. This is not an exaggeration: one block from the front and you’re into decrepit old apartment buildings and tatty sidestreets of which even Brighton (all front and no knickers) would be ashamed.



We walked to the night market, a small parade of booths and stalls on the central reservation of the six-lane corniche selling every possible kind of lurid tourist tat except anything you’d actually want to buy, and it made me wonder if Copa is now aimed at tourists from other, poorer South American countries rather than Europeans or Americans. Although the hotel prices (well over $400 for a tiny room) don’t seem so low-budget.

For our ‘farewell dinner’ we were taken to a restaurant famed, if that’s what you’d call it, for its ‘eclectic’ decor. It’s not so eclectic for Pirates of the Caribbean to meet the Addams Family in an interior that looked as if it could have been installed overnight by a theatrical set-building team, but our group was in high spirits and the waiters in pirate headscarves and Goth boots brought excellent barbecued meats although the evening did feel a bit ‘manufactured’.

On the bus, Carla the tour director announces she is leaving early in the morning to return to her hillside pueblo in Costa Rica, despite the fact the tour doesn’t officially finish until 6pm. We’re in the hands of the local guide Will who’s actually smarter - being a university professor and veterinary surgeon as well as occasional tour guide. And gay. However quite a lot of the clients are annoyed Carla shipped out early since it means residual uncertainties over the checking of the sugar-loaf mountain of luggage they have collectively to transport to the airport.

After dinner, various clusters continue their evening drinking either in the hotel or in local bars but I have an assignation with Jorge and what we then do pressed up against the window overlooking the twinkling lights of Copacabana beach will stay in my memory rather longer than just another caipirinha.

(later)

I have to extend this piece by explaining that Copa is not Rio and Rio is not boring. It’s as much a collection of ‘villages’ as London and the residential areas of Copacabana, Lagoa, Ipanema, or Leblon have as little in common as Chelsea with Croydon. We take a short walk round the historical financial district where many buildings are already being gutted and reassembled for the World Cup and Olympic Games in 2014/16 and the scaffolding shrouds the many others getting their facades sandblasted in a masonic tribute to Rio’s face-lift industry.

We lunch at Confeteria Colombo, a turn-of-the-century landmark with ornate trilled mirrors and Thonet style furnishings but it’s now hedged in with messy shopping streets and many of us loll in the too-hot sun till departure time although Curt indulges in a bout of what can only be described as shirt-lifting with Will the gay local guide since they each return with a bag full of the things.




For the best and brightest views of the city, not to say the coolest and breeziest in a place where hot and still are the perpetual norm, we ascend variously to Sugar Loaf Mountain and to Christ the Redeemer atop Corcovado. I love the ‘Elevador’ funicular ride up Corcovado, it’s reminiscent of Madeira and Lisbon but others are vertiginously subdued.

Otakar, the Czech paterfamilias, and I discover our vertigos are directly similar but that these high balustrade terraces somehow don’t trigger it, so we’re more relaxed. Fellow-sufferer Curt wisely declines the higher platforms and gets time for coffee and to polish off the New York Times crossword. He didn’t miss much, a view is still a view even if you skip the last thousand feet.



As the group dissipates towards the end, we lunch with Bruce and Susan and have a final/farewell dinner with what I’ve rudely but affectionately been referring to as the ‘Jew Crew’ – the inseparable foursome of Wachts and Schechters, so lovely Robin, Rhona, Avi, Howie, Curt and I are booked for Aprazivel restaurant in the topmost suburb of Rio, Santa Teresa.

At first, most taxi drivers decline to take us claiming the route is dangerous, but a hotel car is braver and whilst we drive through a couple of slightly less genteel neighbourhoods on the lower slopes of the hill, as we continue up and up and up AND up, the streets become cobbled and the mansions grander until when we eventually think one more hairpin bend will mean oxygen masks fall from the roof of the car we arrive at a barely marked door in what is quite clearly an echelon above Rio de Janeiro in every sense.

Inside and down steep stairs, it's a delight with area after area of intimate and bucolic seating locations some at ground level and some actually perched in the trees - we were offered several choices and took a ledge overlooking the spectacular view which only improved with nightfall.



This is definitely a Cariocas' location - although there were some tourists, most of the guests speak Spanish or Portuguese and so do the waiters, although we find one fluent in English to help us through the interesting menu as well as with wine choices. Brazilian Gewurztraminer, anyone?

All our dishes were excellent, from the wood-roasted heart of palm - an absolute revelation to anyone who had, like me, only tasted the nasty canned stuff on buffet salads - and to which I am now a complete convert, and the excellent salt-water fish grilled and very lightly sauced with citrus, perfect medaillon of beef in an interesting jus and a wholly original souffle of spinach and banana on the side.

We shared a couple of desserts, my favourite being the tapioca ice cream – and if you’ve screamed the lunch room down as I have at being force-fed tapioca at school, I can promise you it’s completely different as a gelato – atop a delicious sludge of Acai berry. Yum.

And so with some reluctance we toast ourselves and the end of the trip.

L’Chaim.