Beast On the Moon by Richard Kalinoski, Finborough Theatre, 8 February 2019

Oh dear. No this one wasn’t for us. It came at the end of a long week for both of us, but any week we would have found the oppressive family situation depicted here difficult to bear for two hours.

Here is a link to the Finborough resources on this play/production.

The central characters are escapees from the Armenian genocide and as such both are sympathetic characters. But the writing seemed, to us, laboured. The progress through the plot is well signalled in advance and therefore seemed very slow. Here is the playwright’s own take on the piece, which includes a video snippet.

But the acting was all very good and as always with the Finborough, you feel that you are seeing a tiny place punch well above its weight.

The play/production has been well received, so maybe it really was us, not the play/production. Here is a link that finds the reviews.

We love the Finborough; we just didn’t love this piece and we didn’t stick around to see the second half.

But It Still Goes On by Robert Graves, Finborough Theatre, 27 July 2018

“My bad”, as the young folks say, choosing this one.

These days, I usually avoid plays written in the “between the wars” period; there’s something about them stylistically that tends to grate on me and especially on Janie.

This one, by Robert Graves, never previously performed, seemed like such interesting subject matter for its time, from such a fine writer, I thought we might be in for a winner.

Here is the Finborough resource that drew us in, now with post-production links too.

It’s probably not the best idea for me and Janie to go to longer, wordy plays on a Friday evening, even at the best of times. But this was at the end of a hot and steamy week…

…a very wordy play with a disproportionately long first “half”…

…I thought the play might usefully be renamed “But It Still Goes On And On And On”…

…we ducked out at the interval and retreated to Noddyland via Mohsen.

Clearly many people and indeed a fair proportion of the reviewers, really liked this play/production. Here is a link that finds reviews, good, bad and ugly.

To be fair, there was quite a lot to like about the production, as is usually the case at the Finborough. The cast were very good and the production tried to invoke a 1920s atmosphere pretty well, given the limited space and resources available in a room above above a pub; albeit one of the very best pub theatres on the planet.

It was the play that proved to be a let down for us. Hugely stereotypical characters; angst of the spoilt brat variety amongst the privileged classes…

…yes, of course we did feel sympathy with the characters who had suffered in the Great War and those who were struggling with their necessarily suppressed (in that era) feelings of various sexuality. But by gosh was it laid on with a wordy trowel and some ludicrous sub-plots.

It reminded me a bit of The Pains Of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner; an Austrian existential angst play from the same era which, several years ago, also had us out of the theatre early, missing the rather inevitable tragic ending:

Pains Of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner, Cottesloe Theatre, 7 November 2009

Further, I don’t think Robert Graves was a natural for play-writing and although the probable reason that the play was originally hidden/unperformed for many decades was its overt references to sexuality, I’d suggest that one of the other reasons  was that those who commissioned it and others who subsequently looked at it decided that the play was not much good.

Given the subject matter, the play is, of course, an interesting curiosity in our modern era and I can see why the Finborough decided to produce it.

The acting was very good on the whole; Alan Cox played the lead role; his daddy Brian Cox (the actor, not the pop-scientist) was in the audience to watch him the night we were there.

We’re still fans of the Finborough; we just didn’t like this play.

The Melting Pot by Israel Zangwill, Finborough Theatre, 3 December 2017

This was a very interesting Sunday evening at the Finborough.

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

The playwright, Israel Zangwill, sounds like a fascinating character in his own right. To some extent the story in the play mirrors his story, although the play is set in New York, not Zangwill’s native London. Also, the play’s young hero is a composer, rather than an author.

The young hero of the play, David, is a refugee survivor of the Kishinev (Chișinău) pogrom, inspired to compose music to celebrate the cultural melting pot he finds in New York. He falls in love with a beautiful Russian Christian radical who is running a settlement house in New York and who turns out to be the daughter of an anti-semitic Baron from Bessarabia. How culpable is the Baron for the pogrom that took place on his watch? And how is the young love going to go down with him and with David’s traditionally orthodox but loving kin?

If that all sounds a bit melodramatic to your taste, I can understand the sentiment. Yet somehow Zangwill manages to avoid those excesses, at least in the hands of this Bitter Pill/NeilMcPherson/Finborough production. The play isn’t quite Ibsen, but it is even less like a melodramatic Yiddish Theatre monstrosity.

Indeed the play seems hugely pertinent today, with many minorities being persecuted across the globe still, plus swathes of refugees and migrants on the move. Zangwill includes both sides of the assimilation (or perhaps I should say acculturation) and ethnic tolerance argument, although you are left in no doubt that you have been in the hands of a liberal enthusiast of the melting pot.

Grandpa Lew, sitting, with his musician brother, Great Uncle Max, standing

Of course I cannot help this piece bringing to mind my own family – in particular my mother’s musical family, who came to London from the Pale of Settlement in the early 1890s.

I wondered briefly whether Israel Zingwall might have taught my Grandpa Lew at the Jews’ Free School, as the programme says that Zingwall taught there, but a little on-line research indicates that Zingwall quit teaching at that school a few years before Grandpa Lew made his fleeting appearances there (between periods of survival-oriented child labour truancy).

Returning to the Finborough in December 2017, the place was deservedly full on a cold, wet Sunday evening. In the bar and audience we saw Michael Billington, with Mrs B making a (now rare/occasional) appearance at the theatre. The Billington’s dedication to high-quality fringe theatre over the decades is exceptional.

Reviews, if/when they appear, should be covered by this search term – click here.

Janie and I highly recommend this production.