Tag: Duramaney Kamara

August In England by Lenny Henry, Bush Theatre, 6 May 2023

I hate to sound smug…actually that’s not true…I delight in the smug thought that it was my idea to book this one, back in November when the Bush Theatre spring season was first announced.

Janie had of course consented to booking it but then largely forgotten all about it, as indeed had I, until the date grew near and we re-engaged with the production.

“Isn’t Lenny Henry a stand-up comedian? I don’t like stand-up comedy,” said Janie.

“He moved on from stand-up comedy a long time ago. Lenny Henry writes – this is a proper play.”

“Do you think he’ll be there on the night?”, asked Janie, who had clearly retained even less about this production than I had.

“I do hope so. It is a one-man show written and performed by Lenny Henry, so it will be more than a little bit disappointing if he doesn’t show up.

Lenny Henry did show up. His grounding in stand-up comedy was never too far away. He opens the play by endearing himself to the audience, not least by giving a few lucky punters a tot of rum. He then tells the story of his character, August Henderson, through a mixture of witty, bitter-sweet and some out-and-out funny anecdotes.

August’s life in Dudley/West Bromwich echoes that of the young Lenny Henry, although August must have been born a few years before Lenny Henry and, unlike Henry himself, the August character was born in Jamaica and brought to England by his mum as an infant. This subtle distinction is fundamentally important as the story unfolds.

Lenny Henry has superb stage presence. Not only does he still “have what it takes” to deliver anecdotes like a top-drawer stand-up comedian, he also dramatizes August’s sad story masterfully through words, expressions and movement. He tells the tale of his love for Clarice and the three children they produce. Also his love of reggae and ska music. His anecdote about skinheads especially resonated with me:

They loved reggae and ska in the beginning, but after a while they stopped loving us. I still don’t know what changed.

I’ve always wondered about that.

The nub of August’s story – or at least its denouement – is the Windrush scandal – the appalling 2012 Government policy creating a “hostile environment” for people who do not have leave to remain in the UK. While this policy was not targeted at people who had been British citizens in former Empire and Commonwealth countries, thousands of people from the Windrush generation – mostly people who came as children from the Caribbean in the 1950s and 1960s, were caught by this ill-considered change in law and policy. People lost their homes and/or their jobs – many were even deported, despite protections that had been enshrined in earlier laws specifically to prevent such injustices. I shouldn’t get on my own political high horse about this, but I’m going to anyway – the whole affair was a shambolic political sh*t-shower which made me (and many others who share my sense of justice) profoundly ashamed of my own Government.

August’s story unfolds with more subtlety than my paragraph above. Yes, really.

The ending of the play is shocking, poignant and thought-provoking. I especially liked the technique – borrowed from verbatim theatre – of getting several real people who were caught up in these injustices to tell their own stories on the screen. It brought home the reality in a way that the comedy drama – delivered by Lenny Henry’s flawed but loveable character August – could not manage alone.

Here is a link to the Bush resources on this play/production. I’d recommend this play/production highly. Unfortunately this run is sold out, but hopefully it will get a transfer as it deserves a bigger audience than five or six weeks-worth of Bush Theatre aficionados.

Mostly rave reviews and deservedly so. Click here for a link that should bring up most if not all of them.

Smug? Moi?

Unknown Rivers by Chinonyerem Odimba, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 9 November 2019

We have a split jury on this one. I really liked the piece and found it interesting; Janie found it a bit ordinary and dull.

Not much pace, I’d agree, but it tackles topics such as mental illness, ethnic identity and urban social issues rather well in my view.

Here is a link to the Hampstead information about this play/production.

Below is a video about the play/production:

The acting was excellent; Renee Bailey, Doreene Blackstock, Nneka Okoye and Aasiya Shah all top notch – Janie and I both agreed on that. We also both thought the play well directed by Danial Bailey and we both liked Amelia Jane Hankin’s minimal yet imaginative set.

Not sold out even on a Saturday night, which seemed a shame – the play runs until 7 December – a few weeks yet to run at the time of writing, so click on the image above or click here for ticket information.

Instructions for Correct Assembly by Thomas Eccleshare, Royal Court Theatre, 7 April 2018

While the previous evening at the Finborough Theatre worked well for us in pretty much every respect…

White Guy On The Bus by Bruce Graham, Finborough Theatre, 6 April 2018

…this evening at the Royal Court – the opening night of Instructions for Correct Assembly – did not.

We arrived at the box office to the dissonant tones of a shouty man, who apparently did not understand what a member of staff was saying to him, tearing that poor member of staff off a strip. The evening went down hill from there.

We were told that the show was approximately 110 minutes without an interval – that is a worrying sign to me. It sometimes means that the play is so absorbing, the creatives feel it best not to break the spell with an interval. But more often it means, “best not to let the audience out for an interval, they might not come back”.

The bar was overcrowded and it took an age for us to get a couple of glasses of juice ahead of the show. The crowd seemed unusually down-beat for an opening night. This all gave me a sense of foreboding, which I did not share with Janie, other than to say, “I’m not sure I’m up for these heaving theatre bars any more”.

The audience did not get less irritating when we entered the theatre. A very tall couple entered the row in front of us – the female of the pair wearing a high-hair do reaching “fairly tall gentleman in a top hat” heights. “There’s lucky”, said Janie when they sat down a few seats to the right of us – at that juncture the seats in front of us were still free.  In the end, though, in front of Janie, a very fidgety man. To the left of her, the type of people who forget that they are not in their own living room. Around the place, several mobile phones went off during the show.

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

Within about five minutes, I guessed that this play/production would not please either of us. At around that moment, Janie turned to me and whispered, “I’m not going to like this one – I can tell”.

What can I say about this play/production?

I had high hopes for it when we booked it. We had found an earlier Thomas Eccleshare play, Heather, at the Bush Studio, fascinating, just a few month’s ago:

Heather by Thomas Eccleshare, Bush Studio, 11 November 2017

But while that one was an innovative, quirky hit for us, Instructions for Correct Assembly kept missing the spot.

A couple who lost their only child in his early adulthood, try to build and train a robotic replacement.

There were some excellent lines. Eccleshare can write. The jokes when the couple did (or didn’t) turn the “opinionated dial” on the robot’s control panel were sometimes funny, although it was basically variants of the same joke several times over.

There were some excellent performers on show – their talents underused and misused on the whole. The only performance of note was Brian Vernel as the robot/druggie son.

There were some excellent illusions to assist with the creepiness of the robotic doppelganger idea – the production team clearly wanted us to experience the uncanny valley, as indeed the neighbour/friend characters get freaked out in the play.

Why the non-robotic characters were made to dance robotically during some of the scene changes is anybody’s guess.

The whole thing added up to very little in our view – a fascinating subject but a very poor play. The comedy of trying to assemble a robot much like an Ikea flat pack bed felt trite and inconsequential, while the tragedy that had befallen the family sat uncomfortably (indeed melodramatically) with the comedic element.

Below is a trailer/interview for this play/.production:

Perhaps we wouldn’t even have bothered to turn up had we watched that video in advance.

Once this show is reviewed, those reviews and other resources will be available through the search term links you can find if you click here.  My guess is that those involved in the production and their loved ones would do best by not looking.

As we were leaving the auditorium, a small group of nice, older people were struggling because one of the women’s coats had got caught in the chair mechanism. We tried to help, but agreed in the end that they should wait for some assistance once the place emptied and the lights went up. The man, whom I recognised as a regular, said to me, with a twinkle in his eye, “we need the instruction manual for the chair”. Sadly, that was probably the most entertaining line of the evening.

Out in the lobby, the same shouty man from our arrival was tearing some other poor member of staff off a strip about some issue or another, this time about the exits. It was so bad, Janie remarked afterwards that she suspects that shouty man has a serious brain disorder. The irony of that notion – both with the subject matter of the play and the way we felt about the evening we’d just experienced, was not wasted on me.

Instructions for Correct Assembly is one to avoid.

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.

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.