Tag: Amy Ball

My Mum’s A Twat by Anoushka Warden, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 13 January 2018

Janie and I loved this short piece. It was funny and intelligent and emotionally complex…

…a superb debut play for Anoushka Warden. It turns out that Anoushka Warden is more or less telling her own story – about growing up with a mother who transforms from a loving parent into an all-but estranged mum running a cult’s outpost in Canada.

It also transpires that Warden works for the Royal Court as head of PR – explained in the interview/preview piece linked here. That might explain why Vicky Featherstone chose to direct it herself but also brought in the very promising director Jude Christian to co-direct.

Here is a link to The Royal Court resource on this play/production.

It’s a one woman show – this must be the first time we have ever been to see a brace of one woman shows in the same weekend – the other being Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 at the Gate the previous day:

Twilight: Los Angeles 1992 by Anna Deavere Smith, Gate Theatre, 12 January 2018

Actually I think we should start an actress emancipation campaign on the back of this weekend’s experience. In Twilight, Nina Bowers had to play 20 different parts and also serve the intermission tea and biscuits – yes really…

…while My Mum’s A Twat, albeit a less physical show, is running twice nightly, so poor Patsy Ferran will be on the stage for in excess of two and three quarter hours each night with not much more than 30 minutes break between performances.

And what a fine performance My Mum’s A Twat was too.

Here is a link to resources and reviews generally for this play/production. The reviews have mostly been good but not great reviews. We actually rated the piece and the performance very highly.

The main criticism seems to be that monologue itself is a limited dramatic form. I see that point, but it is also a very powerful form when done well…and this one has been done very well. The mixture of humour and sadness really works; you sense that the character/author has been both strengthened and emotionally damaged by her maternal experience.

We don’t have a picture of Anoushka Warden’s mum, so here is a picture of Janie’s mum instead. The use of this picture to illustrate this Ogblog piece does not in any way suggest that we think that Janie’s mum is a twat…
…so in the interests of balance, here is a picture of my mum (who also wasn’t a twat)

At the time of writing, My Mum’s A Twat only has a few more days to run at the Royal Court and is sold out. I hope it will get its deserved extension or transfer so that more people can get to see it.

Albion by Mike Bartlett, Almeida Theatre, 27 October 2017

As  usual for the Almeida, we booked this as soon as it was announced because it sounded very interesting and we normally enjoy the Almeida stuff.

We normally go to a Saturday preview or an early Saturday in the run; this time we couldn’t do those dates, so chose a Friday two or three weeks into the run.

The play/production has had universally good reviews, which sounded like good news, but in truth this play did not really do the business for us. A shame, because the cast were superb, seemed very much a team, the design was stunning and there were some excellent coups de theatre and some very good lines. But the play just didn’t work for us.

To us, the garden was a rather clunky metaphor for that section of the English elite that hankers back to bygone glorious times.  A dramatist’s reaction to David Goodhart’s The Road To Somewhere.  The plot, limited though it was, contained one or two rather predictable twists that were well-signalled in advance and very clumsily explained in arrears.

As King Charles III is Mike Bartlett’s Shakespeare pastiche play, Albion is his Chekhov pastiche. Janie liked neither; I had more time for the Shakespearean style of the King Charles III one (to be Ogblogged in the fullness of time).

We’re not averse to Mike Bartlett – we loved Game and we loved Wild. Bartlett can have such an original voice, I’m not sure why he falls back on pastiche. Janie points out that his pastiche ones seem to be way more successful with critics and the transfer market than the more original ones.

“Most of the theatre audience is naff,” says Janie, with her trademark subtlety and tact.

In truth, the Almeida audience the night we saw Albion was dreadful and irritated us. Older on average than the Saturday night crowd, they seemed especially and unnecessarily elbows-out pushy at the bar and in the queues for tickets/entry. Janie was especially irritated by the woman sitting next to her who took off her shoes and then held us up for five minutes at the start of the interval trying to put her shoes back on her ever so smelly feet.

I had spent an hour before the show saying goodbye (workwise) to Ian Theodoreson at his leaving drinks in The Barley Mow. A shorter play would have probably suited me better on the night. But we have both turned up to theatre after longer, harder days than this; in truth this play/production just wasn’t to my/our taste.

Here is a link to the Almeida information hub on Albion – including links to those rave reviews.

Boy by Leo Butler, Almeida Theatre, 16 April 2016

Oh boy, this is a good one.

We’ve enjoyed Leo Butler’s work before, at the Royal Court. We booked this basically on the back of remembering that we like his writing. We didn’t realise that this production also brought back the imaginative team, which brought us Game at the Almeida early last year; Sacha Wares as director and Miriam Buether as designer.

The Almeida’s website has lots of information about the production and also collates the good reviews. As a glance at the review headlines suggests that they have been more or less universally good, this Almeida link should be pretty much definitive. 

We knew that the Almeida had done something funky with the set and seating, because we had a call from the theatre last weekend, asking if we minded that that a rejig of the set and seating meant that there would be an aisle between our front row seats. We could either put up with that or sit together further back.

We politely suggested that it ought to be possible for them to shift people around such that we can still sit together in the front row; we asked the gentleman at least to try. A few minutes later, the nice gentleman called back with the good news that he had achieved our wish.

Just as well, as we observed on entry to the theatre that the aisle in question was more like a chasm than a small gap.

But soon enough we also observed that the characters on the set, who were going around on an industrial conveyor belt like human sushi in one of those sushi bars, were sitting in perfect sitting posture without seats. I worked out that they each must have a support in one of their trouser legs, but the effect was very eye-catching and warmed us up for a short evening of theatre with a difference.

It is hard to do this piece justice in the description. It is 70 minutes of edge-of-your-seat theatre in which nothing much really happens. We are simply following a young 17 year-old lad, Liam, around London on one of his interminable, listless days. Yet all around him (and therefore us) we see glimpses of London life that resonate wonderfully. We are also made all-too aware of the hopeless of such a lad’s circumstances.

In one telling scene, Liam goes to register at the job centre or some such, only to be told that he should return when he is 18 and find himself something useful to do in the meantime. “That’s nearly a year,” Liam yells, despairingly.

The mostly very young cast do a brilliant job, but Frankie Fox as Liam really does stand out. I recognised Wendy Kweh from our recent visit to North Korea as depicted in the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs – the irony of being reminded of North Korean hopelessness while being shown London hopelessness was not wasted on me.

But for us the star performance really is the extraordinary set and direction. The cast have to navigate some tightly choreographed scene changes and movements across the conveyor belt, plus those extraordinary “seats of their pants”, as it were. The wonderful movement elements of the production reminded us a little of Complicite; that’s a complement coming from us.

Lots to think about and talk about after the show, which is what good theatre is all about as far as we are concerned. As only tends to happen after really unusual and excellent pieces, that conversation started with strangers in the audience and some of the Almeida ushers before we’d even left the theatre.

One of the ushers told us that this production has not yet sold out – so if you are reading this fairly soon after the date in the headline, get on to the Almeida and snap up some of those remaining tickets.

This really is a hot ticket.

 

 

 

Tiger Country by Nina Raine, Hampstead Theatre, 12 December 2014

Talk about bad timing.

Less than a week earlier we’d seen a play about dementia (albeit a truly excellent one), while mum’s dementia was fast deteriorating:

Visitors by Barney Norris, Bush Theatre, 6 December 2014

…little did we know that we were seeing this play about NHS hospital chaos less than a fortnight before mum was to make her final, one-way trip to such a place.

In truth, although we quite enjoyed this play/production, we found it a bit fast and furious without really saying all that much. We’d felt similarly about the police one, Wildefire, at the same venue a few weeks before:

Wildefire by Roy Williams, Hampstead Theatre, 7 November 2014

As with Wildefire, there was some great acting, some wonderful lines and some super vignettes in there. Indira Varma was excellent, as usual; in fact the whole cast was good.

Perhaps it was just a bit too near the bone for me – not just in the mum aspect but also because I was doing so much work with NHS Foundation Trusts at that time. Definitely worth seeing, but no wow factor for either of us.

Below is a “behind the scenes” video:

Below is the actual trailer for the production:

Here is a link to the reviews – the critics pretty-much universally loved the piece.

The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas by Dennis Kelly, Royal Court Theatre, 19 October 2013

A weird and dark play about an extreme capitalist. We like Dennis Kelly’s plays – they are always entertaining with dark twists and lots to think about. This one was no exception.

Writing up this play now (march 2018), in our Brexit/Trump infused society, the play seems very relevant and prescient.

The fine actor Tom Brooke seems to thrive on Dennis Kelly plays. Actually the whole cast was good. I think this was our first sighting of Ned Bennett’s work as a director (assisting Vicky Featherstone on this one) – our next sighting being the tremendous Pomona at the Orange Tree – even weirder:

Pomona by Alistair McDowall, Orange Tree Theatre, 15 November 2014

The Ritual Slaughter of Gorge Mastromas certainly kept me and Janie entertained  during and debating afterwards.

Click here for a link to the Royal Court resource for this play/production.

Below is the trailer vid, which is intriguing but not illuminating:

Below is an interview with Vicky Featherstone and Dennis Kelly:

This one divided the critics. Click here for a search term that finds the reviews.

In Basildon by David Eldridge, Royal Court Theatre, 3 March 2012

This was our first theatre visit after returning from Vietnam in February.

A really good one too.

Here is a link to the Royal Court stub for this piece.

We rate David Eldridge highly as a playwright. Here was a superb cast and Dominic Cooke himself directing.

We really enjoyed this play and production.

The critics on the whole loved this piece – click here for a search term that finds the reviews.

Below is a link to the trailer:

Haunted Child by Joe Penhall, Royal Court Theatre, 3 December 2011

We thought this was an excellent play and production.

We booked it on the back of Joe Penhall’s superb play Blue/Orange. We also got a fantastic cast, not least Ben Daniels and Sophie Okonedo.

Here is the Royal Court resource for this play/production.

The Ben Daniels character, the father, is basically being sucked in by a cult. On reflection at the time of writing (January 2018) it has a fair bit in common with My Mum’s A Twat – click here, which we saw recently, except the cult-ista in the more recent case is the mum and the storyteller is the affected child later in life.

Anyway, Haunted Child mostly got very good reviews – click here for a link term that should find them.

Below is the trailer:

Jumpy by April de Angelis, Royal Court Theatre, 22 October 2011

We really enjoyed this play/production. It was witty, enjoyable and made us think too.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this production.

Tamsin Greig was terrific, as was Bel Powley as the daughter. Actually the whole cast was terrific.

Here is a search term that finds the (mostly excellent) reviews.

It got a deserved West End transfer to the Duke Of York’s – here is the trailer for that:

I’m not sure the trailer does the piece justice, but there you go.

The Village Bike by Penelope Skinner, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 25 June 2011

We really enjoyed this play and production upstairs at the Royal Court.

Here is the Royal Court resource on this play/production.

This was a really entertaining and thought-provoking play by the very promising playwright Penelope Skinner. I think this was our first sight of one of hers; Linda at the Royal Court a few years later – click here or below – confirmed our suspicions that she is a special talent.

Linda by Penelope Skinner, Royal Court Theatre, 28 November 2015

The Village Bike had a very fine cast for an upstairs production, not least Dominic Rowan and Romola Garai, both excellent. Indeed the whole cast was excellent, as was the set, directing, the lot.

Most but not all of the reviews rated it excellent – here is a search term that finds reviews and the other resources you might want.

The Acid Test by Anya Reiss, Royal Court Upstairs, 28 May 2011

We’d really enjoyed Spur Of The Moment by the ridiculously young and talented Anya Reiss the year before:

Spur Of The Moment by Anya Reiss, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 3 August 2010

…so were keen to give her another try.

I don’t think this one worked quite as well for us. Yes, there was still sparkling wit to the dialogue. But basically this play was yet another drunken gathering descending into chaos comedy.

Excellent production qualities with top notch cast and creatives, as we expect from the Royal Court, but not top drawer Royal Court to our taste.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this play/production.

This search term should find you reviews and other resources on this play/production.

We’re still hoping to see Anya Reiss progress to greater things on the stage. Plenty of time; she was still only 18 for this one.