Giulia Merlo
A house in the north
Carlos’ brother, Sergio, is going to be the manager of a soon-to-be-built shopping centre: not any shopping centre, but the largest in the area, ‘where people will go to take photos of each other riding on escalators for the first time in their lives and buying everything they need to make them feel less like the peasants they are’.
The drama of property
So we’re back to the same living room with Steve, and it’s hot and everyone’s trying to be friendly and hostile in equal measure, as this white pregnant couple who embody the concept of gentrification try to get along with their black neighbours-to-be. And because it’s 2009, ‘race’ is a word nobody uses any longer. Except, as Steve finally suggests to his wife’s horror, that are they all secretly thinking it?
Re-invasion
Mariam Haque, in particular, shows a remarkable talent for comedy - in fact possibly turning out to be too funny for the play’s own good, making it almost impossible for her fellow actors not to guffaw.
A not-yet-adult tongue
Throughout the fragments, the air between them, as well as their tone, their way of negotiating the space of the stage all remain invariably the same: not threatening, and not necessarily angry or desperate, mostly just annoyed, the way you would if the person you live with had misplaced the scissors, rather than if you were worried those scissors could end up in your chest.
Accessories to a conspiracy
From Calypso to Circe to Penelope, from the descent to Hades to a nightmarish vision of a war that was any war, Allen consistently showed a fortunate relationship with Homer’s text, a love that managed to walk on the brink of reverence and shy veneration.
Between nymph, frustrated child and femme fatale
She teases constantly, yet almost never shows to enjoy any of it. She mirrors her lovers’ sentences, repeating almost word by word what they tell her, giving back the image they want - and in this sense works very much as a reflection of their morality or lack thereof.
Thick with humanity
David Lan’s direction maintains the richness of Wilson’s reticence and control, and counterbalances the long, wordy speeches with strong, visceral and willful movements and gestures - Bertha’s caresses and embraces to Seth, Herald’s under-the-skin violence in cutting some yams on a tin plate.
Blissfully unaware incarnation
Here there is a relatively settled Chinese community, but also the first patronizing guided tours, on the model of today’s London walks, which probably benefit from the interest raised in the English public by writers like Burke.
The stranger lurking
There is no lack of big topics here; perhaps there is, rather, an overabundance of them. But Pautz’s text is blessedly devoid of intellectual smugness and lecturing, the energetic and overall excellent performances across the cast save the long exchanges from fatigue.
An ecstatic, animalistic howl
What really brings the text home as a stab to the heart is the cast. Fishburne gives each character his chance to shine during a few glorious minutes of confrontation, and each actor in this production takes that chance by the neck.
Shoulder-shrugging sportsmen
There are cigarettes, trench coats - the Nazi ones angular and thick and rigid, the American ones softer and scruffier - femme fatales in dressing gowns, and a touch of fog; there are tight-fisted demonstrations of power and confidently-handled glasses of Scotch.
Nikolai’s broken cry
The real and true menace is not Communism, nor the new government, but the Future, and it the Future which has its thundering cannons pointed firmly against the sentimental bourgeoisie.
An urban bucolic
The music’s emotional ebbs, together with the projection of Jack Wake-Walker’s beautiful shots of the Thames and of crossing cranes against the sky, seemed to be redeeming the presence of The Restructure; they opposed the most human to the least soulful.
Haunting the heart
Silver’s words kept leaving Cheshire cat’s smiles hanging in the air behind them, the full philosophical wit and insight only hitting us with a delay of a few seconds, or even re-emerging many hours later during a tube journey or a lunch-break walk – ‘I depend on people empathising with me in order to read my own mind’; ‘when I grow up I want to be a pilot; or a member of the cabin crew; or a passenger’.
The dark Clerkenwell mist
Avant! Noir happily managed a smooth equilibrium of media and styles, music and words and images all melting into each other, suggesting further shapes and colours, stretching the genre without straining it.
Shiny red shoes
Promises Promises is not at all a play about an issue, nor a tirade against the follies of dumbed-down multiculturalism. Instead, it is a voyage to the centre of Miss Brodie, which moves swiftly and masterfully from comedy to gothic horror story, passing through Miss Brodie’s projection into six-year-old Rosie (or Nadifa), with a definite touch of doppelgänger motives.
The not-too-subtle symbolism of the suitcases
‘The Viennese are Jewhaters and will remain Jewhaters to all eternity’; ‘this Austrian stupidity is utterly repulsive’; Austrians are nothing else but ‘six and half million feeble-minded raving mad people/screaming incessantly at the top of their voices for a director’ - and the director, who had already come once, will come again and ‘give them the final push down the abyss’.
Physical incarnations of commas and dots
Jodie McNee, as the curious, fervently religious and yet independently-minded Sarah, is the force to be reckoned with. She proceeds with eyes and palms wide open, looking for names to everything under the sun and relentlessly examining life’s minutiae, eventually discovering how to fully inhabit her own force: ‘I know now I must find out the names for myself’.
Pavement lanes
Towards the end, I found myself holding my breath during a mother and daughter confrontation, hoping Oglesby would let her characters finally inhabit the same dramatic tension without interrupting, only to be disappointed again when it all suddenly turned into a slapstick chase of the robot around the hospital beds.
A lesson not a dialogue
There is sophisticated style in this production, and there is, as Zuabi declared was his intention, remarkably little anger. Annoyingly, however, there is also a very clear intent to tell the audience what to make of the story, an intent fully embraced from the moment you step into the Young Vic until the time you leave the building.
Diane solves problems
If it was enraged indignation for Mitchell’s dilemma that Beane was after, I am afraid that it will be almost impossible to muster for most of us - watching Mitchell taking his decision, I suddenly understood Wallace Shawn’s lack of sympathy for those who lament the loss of the cherry orchard.
Rom-com renewal
As demanded by the rom-com tradition (explicitly invoked during the evening), Bob and Helena, the protagonists of Midsummer, are superficially different, and belong to separate worlds (yet deep down, you don’t need me to tell you, they are similar). She is a high-flying divorce lawyer, he is a small-time crook who still exudes an aura of eye-liner-wearing, scruffy adolescent.
A refusal of cause and effect
Loher touches upon a cornucopia of eternal human questions and philosophical concepts, the wide range of which might be the weakest point of her play - from the most obvious two, sex and death, to motherhood and the female connection with water.
Charming and witty evenings of folly
In Hitchcock’s movie, Rupert was played by the wholesome, clean-faced James Stewart, who does not have an ounce of malice in him. At the Almeida, Rupert is inhabited and transformed through a memorable performance by Bertie Carvel, whose presence on the stage illuminates Hamilton’s dialogue and builds up the final scene to exquisite tension.
A small, icy cloud of threat
Sexual interests, obsessions of control and morbid romance are weaved in several directions between all these boys and girls, crossing over genders and reciprocity, as alliances get destroyed and reconstructed. They are all the same and yet very different.
Fragile-looking plastic furniture
What is central is the vulnerability of the women, and yet how dangerous they can seem, even to us who have witnessed Marie’s fight-or-flight response at a mere knock on the door.
A maxim for every occasion
In imagining that Valadon would be the torch-bearer of lust for life and unconventionality in art, and Degas would be the defender of dedication to work and respect for the tradition, Wertenbaker not only adheres to a tired cliché about gender, but also forces upon her characters a set of values and attitudes that belong very specifically to us.
General tearful mayhem
The play was written by a very young woman and is interpreted by more young men and women, yet I have not been out of high school long enough to find their attitudes believable. The overall impression is like Dawson’s Creek set in a comprehensive inner-city high school doing an episode on religious differences.
‘Model’
Surrounded by tackiness and wasted abundance, Dijana is no different from any of these cheap objects around her: she is rushing, like them, towards obsoleteness, in the fastest lane of disposability, hugged then forgotten, desired only until she becomes repulsive as a reminder of the very desire she fulfilled.
We all want magic
Thanks to Mamet’s talent, and thanks to the splendidly staged production that the Arcola makes out of it, there is no line in the sand, in spite of our best and repeated attempts at tracing one throughout the hour, we are mostly cynical about the whole business - or are we?
Lost in adaptation
Where Spark had beautiful, amusing, tender glass figurines of women, at once perfectly unique and amazingly recognisable, Adams’ adaptation has wooden, two-dimensional stickers of poses, grimaces, and caricature.
Languid cynicism by the pool
There is a certain amused enthusiasm à la Baz Lurhmann behind all this: the beautiful and damned, the young and wealthy, in their trunks and bikinis, walking glamorously towards tragedy.
God’s waiting room
The subject willingly and explicitly tackled here is faith. Or Faith, rather. The setting is a waiting room with a group of mismatched chairs and a pitiful plant. The protagonist is a ruffled, averagely awkward guy called Adam who is being interviewed, cross-examined and poked at by a God whose voice we hear intermittently as he plays both good and bad cop.
Slow and unsteadying
It is regrettable that, in comparison to much of the European audience, the British should still appear so firmly set, a priori, against slowness and silence and anything that can be called, generalising for practical purposes, experimental theatre. There are no linear conclusions to be drawn from Tighe’s adaptation, but there is a very stimulating invitation to make your own way into the text.
Selling Medea
How do you turn Medea into a desirable, advertisable product? And how do you make people want every little piece of her? First of all, you turn her into a victim. The sheer violence, masqueraded as care, with which the four women of the marketing company abuse Medea physically and emotionally, making her into a savage, tangling her hair and smearing her face with dirt, is perhaps the strongest point of the production.
Constant humming of claustrophobia
Kursk gives us a very interesting glimpse at what hyper-realism could do to and with theatre, as well as a very well-crafted, well-researched work - the producer, writer and co-directors visited two hunter-killer nuclear submarines to make sure to get the atmosphere right, and the sounds, the protocol, the fluid exchange of precise professional terms all testify to it.
Gloriously gut-churning
It is fitting to the general character of Atreus’ and Thyestes’ family, and to the feelings evoked by it from ancient times through to Renaissance, that Hannah Clark’s set for this production recalls, with exactitude and gusto, the dirty basements lit by dangling lightbulbs recently seen in so many horror movies, from Hostel to the Saw series.
Storming drama
Instead of the black and white moral impositions risked by any work with political and environmental issues at its core, and instead of force-fed ambiguity, there is a very touchable likeness, and sympathy for everyone involved.
A tiny orchestra
Whitemore’s main innovation was to distribute the role of self-deprecating narrator and protagonist among three different Simons, played in this production by Jasper Britton, Felicity Kendal and Nicholas Le Prevost. On paper, this may sound unappealing, but on stage it actually works very well as a way to render the dynamic and un-lecturing, improvising style of the diaries.
A safety valve on a dodgy boiler
Perhaps this lack of a narrative centre would be less perceivable if Reg, who is the core of the piece, were a thoroughly convincing character - but he is not really. For a man who believes himself to be the best thing that happened to proletariat since Marx, he is considerably spoiled and aloof.
Warm compulsion
Frayn’s talent lies in making all these idiosyncratic and occasionally annoying characters seem entirely lovable: as much as their individual peccadillos and weaknesses are exposed, we still really like them - not because they’re funny, but because they are very human.
Friendly neighbours
‘I’m not going to make you work for me or commit a crime or lay a finger on you. One day, I might ask for a bit of conversation, the next go for a walk with me. Nothing terrible, nothing degrading.’
Scholarly finger-wagging
It would be interesting to know how much of the play’s pacifistic moralism comes from Schehadé, and how much comes from Hughes’ own contribution - particularly because both authors were working on the text in significant times for their respective countries.
Sympathy and indignation
If we were to consider the play from a more strictly formal, aesthetic point of view, it would probably have received fewer stars than most critics gave it, as it is built more like a television documentary than as a theatrical work. As it is, the strength of the message and its emotional consequences make us somehow forget that, for example, the space of the stage is not used very well, and that many characters barely move as they speak.
Lyrical prose and physical theatre
Inua Ellams recounts his childhood and adolescence, all the while exuberantly trying to establish a significant space for himself both in the line of people who came before him, and in the cities in which he grows up, moving from Nigeria to the United Kingdom.
Don’t play the fucking Abulkasem!
The fact that we switch so easily between liking and disliking the character is a lesson in the arbitrariness of sympathy, but also, and perhaps most importantly, in how uninformed our interpretations of reality must be when we are unable to see and hear things for ourselves, without linguistic and cultural mediations.
Dead in the red
Bodie picked up on three recent issues: the fact that we are all suddenly out of money; the fact that Alexandra Burke is singing a cover of Leonard Cohen’s ‘Hallelujah’; the big-snow days. She then put three characters in a closed room and made them talk to each other about these things.
Shoreditch was always where it’s at
The merit of this event, and more generally of the London Word Festival, lies first of all in providing a platform for the sort of literary enterprise that would otherwise remain untried or unnoticed.
Indomitably and restlessly guilty
Obscenity fits the kind of heightened, violent and heated atmosphere of the text much better than sexiness would have. This makes it all the more regrettable that in spite of all the boldness and explicitness of the rest of the evening, either the writer or the director chose to censor the only sexual act that would have been worth seeing staged
The power of mothers
Paul and Trudi are not that different from most mothers and children; they remember a different past, even though they lived through the same one. Trudi thinks that Paul failed because she did not push him enough, and Paul thinks that he failed, if he did, because she pushed him too much, instead of supporting him.
Guilty impotence
Singh’s use of the small venue’s space is reminiscent of some of the Young Vic’s most brilliant productions: the Clare becomes a black, empty box, where a metal trash bin, an old public telephone and a basic wooden bench are enough to recreate any bus stop in any Western metropolitan city on any given night.
Standing up to Ibsen
Rita and Alfred’s fight over her jealousy for Olivier and her need for physical devotion contains the most awkward line of the season: ‘I have a uterus’.
