You Bury Me by AHLAM, Orange Tree Theatre, 8 April 2023

Tahrir Square, 2011 (Mona sosh), CC BY 2.0

This was a fabulous play/production at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond.

It’s about revolting young people in Cairo – i.e. the story, over several years, of several engaging, well-crafted characters, initially caught up in the revolution which started in 2011.

This Orange Tree link shows you all you might want to know about the play/production.

No programme for this production, but there is a care pack – click here – this must be the modern way.

The playwright AHLAM is anonymous/pseudonymous, perhaps a proxy for the “always in danger blogger” character Osman, played very well by Tarrick Benham.

The play covers well the politics of those years – from hope through frustration to fear and desperation. In particular the revolutionary blogger character Osman and his gay friend Rafik, played well by Nezar Alderazi, illustrate the big picture.

But it is also a tale of interpersonal relationships. The younger characters, girls at the outset, Lina (played by Eleanor Nawal) and Maya (played by Yasemin Özdemir) getting in and out of trouble with boys and with each-other.

The whole production was very well acted and very well produced. The night we went, Hanna Khogali was indisposed, so assistant director Riwa Saab stood in for her at the last minute. Riwa is clearly a very talented young thing but not a actress – nevertheless she is a performer when not directing and carried the part astonishingly well in the circumstances, as did all the others, in particular Moe Bar-El whose character had to interact with Riwa’s character the most. Theirs was a “star-crossed lovers” story; him from a Coptic family and her from a Muslim family of cops.

It sounds a bit cheesy when described in simple sentences about the plot, but the stories dance between each other and across time to make a wonderfully engaging evening of theatre.

100 minutes without an interval, but at no point did it feel like a drag.

Mostly excellent reviews – see the headlines on The Orange Tree link or click here for links to the raw review material.

Funnily enough, Janie and I did find ourselves in Cairo, in 2012, when one of the secondary bouts of revolution kicked off. We could smell the tear gas when we visited the National Museum on the edge of Tahrir Square.

Janie and I have not been to the theatre much these past few months. We’ll be going a fair bit over the next few months. This one certainly started our “new season” of theatre going with a bang…and I don’t mean tear gas canisters going off in Tahrir Square.

Rice by Michele Lee, Orange Tree Theatre, 30 October 2021

Philip Halling / The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond

Rice at The Orange Tree Theatre was our first visit to the theatre to see a drama for more than 18 months. There’s been a lot of water under the bridge since then.

The last thing we saw, just before the first lockdown, was Not Quite Jerusalem at the Finborough:

The Orange Tree assured us in its marketing that the theatre is “See It Safely” approved, which no doubt it was. The problem with that level of biosecurity in a small theatre like The Orange Tree is that the safety removes much of the warmth, atmosphere and absence of fourth wall that theatre in the round is meant to provide.

It didn’t help that the weather has turned a bit colder on us – well it is autumn – to the extent that even extra layers of clothing and cushions neither made us feel warm nor comfortable while sitting for 90 minutes plus.

The play was not designed to make us feel comfortable of course – it grapples with relationships, inter-generational conflict, cultural conflicts and international commerce – in the hands of two performers, primarily as a two-hander play but each performer also covers several additional, smaller roles.

As we would expect at The Orange Tree, one of our favourite places, the quality of the acting, directing and production was very high. We have been impressed by Matthew Xia’s work as a director before, both at the Orange Tree and elsewhere.

But this complex piece/production did not really warm the cockles of our hearts, to encourage us to rush back to fringe theatre the way we visited regularly and avidly prior to the pandemic. We’ve booked one or two things for this autumn/winter – we might book one or two more .

We’ll keep our (many) memberships going of course – we are still great supporters but we’re just not in a rush to attend very often – not yet anyway.

Mixed reviews but mostly good ones – accessible through this link.

The Mikvah Project by Josh Azouz, Orange Tree Theatre, 29 February 2020

A mikvah (or mikveh) is a Jewish ritual bath (the picture above is a modern example).

It is rather an orthodox thing and mostly a female thing, so, in truth, I’ve not had much truck with mikv’ot (mikvah, plural) personally. I do remember my father saying that he wanted to apply for the job of lifeguard when they opened a mikvah in Streatham, but he was joking and I am digressing.

The closest I’ve got to actually dipping in a mikvah-like manner personally was my visit to the Fukinomori onsen bath in Japan 18 months or so ago:

Now I am digressing even further.

The Mikvah Project is a cute short play which Janie and I enjoyed very much.

Here is a link to The Orange Tree resource on this production.

The Orange Tree team has made an excellent short video explaining the play, embedded below:

It had a short run at the Orange Tree’s Director Festival 2019, which was very well received by the reviewers, but not seen by many people, so the Orange Tree has, wisely, brought the piece back for a full run with a proper set, including a “bad boy of a pseudo-mikvah” on stage.

Janie and I were both really impressed by the writing, the production and the directing. The performances of both Alex Waldmann & Josh Zare were top rate.

At one level it is a slight piece. Just over an hour; a simple and somewhat predictable plot. It made me think of My Beautiful Laundrette, but without the heavy political and inter-racial overtones.

Yet the play works extremely well. It is a charming piece that shows two young men in semi-detached North-West London suburbia who are semi-detached from their roots and from the expectations their community places upon them.

Janie and I like short plays of this kind; entertaining, thought-provoking and well-produced. Another big tick in the box for The Orange Tree.

If you are reading this during March 2020, we recommend that you go and see this piece; it runs at the Orange Tree until 28 March.

Little Baby Jesus by Arinzé Kene, Orange Tree Theatre, 26 October 2019

Janie and I are a somewhat split jury on this one. I really enjoyed the play, finding it entertaining and suitably dramatic. The first half has a much lighter tone than the second. Janie found the first half rather silly and trivial, while she found the second half too long and ponderous.

If the reviews are anything to go by, I called this one “right”, but don’t tell Janie that. Here is a link to the reviews.

Janie and I were able to agree that the three young performers put in excellent performances. In particular Janie was surprised to learn that Khai Shaw has only just graduated from Rose Bruford, as he seemed so confident and assured in his performance. But all three performers – Anyebe Godwin and Rachel Nwokoro included, are relatively new to the stage yet pulled off superb, energetic performances.

I was attracted to book this production because Janie and I had been so taken with playwright Arinzé Kene’s performance piece, Misty,at the Bush last year:

I learn from the programme – which is also a helpful play text with another Kene play, Estate Walls, to read in my spare time – that Little Baby Jesus is actually an early work by Arinzé Kene. The play is being reworked at The Orange Tree some eight years after it was written and performed at the Ovalhouse Theatre. Interesting also that Kene originally worked on the piece with Chè Walker, whose Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor we very much enjoyed at The Finborough a few months ago:

But returning to Little Baby Jesus, there are signs that it is an early work; I understand Janie’s sense that the first half is somewhat unstructured with the three performers introducing their main characters and also performing a lot of secondary characters to introduce the stories. I found it fun seeing that material unfold but Janie probably wasn’t the only person in the audience who found some of it confusing and the language, at times, hard to penetrate.

The second half has a completely different atmosphere, as the youngsters all, for different but in each case tragic (or potentially tragic) reasons, need to grow up in a hurry.

As is often the case with youthful playwrights (Kene was in his early 20s still when he wrote this piece – what a great sign of burgeoning talent) I could see a little too clearly where some of his ideas came from. Structurally, I was reminded of Faith Healer by Brian Friel. And surely the most shocking scene in the second half, when the youths find an abandoned baby, is partly based on and deliberately reminiscent of Saved by Edward Bond.

But this is the way that fine young writers find their own voice and Arinzé Kene surely has a fascinating voice with colourful stories to tell. I highly commend this production of Little Baby Jesus and I shall surely be looking out for his Kene’s work again.

Here is a link to The Orange Tree resources on Little Baby Jesus.

The Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond - geograph.org.uk - 398198

Amsterdam by Maya Arad Yasur, Orange Tree Theatre, 7 September 2019

Amsterdam - Keizersgracht 387
Amsterdam – Keizersgracht
Click picture for attribution and link

Gosh, this was a truly fascinating short play at the Orange Tree – our first venture to see a play for some while and a great start, from our point of view, to our autumn season at the theatre. We were seeing a preview.

The Orange Tree Theatre’s blurb on this piece can be found by clicking here.

This is not a naturalistic piece. The cast of four narrate the piece, about an unnamed Israeli violinist who is 9 months pregnant living in an apartment in Amsterdam, on the Keizersgracht (one of the canal-side streets).

Are we merely being taken on a voyage through the violinists own febrile, paranoid imaginings or is this a thriller about the uncovering of secrets from Amsterdam’s era of Nazi occupation or are we witnessing a strange brew, mixing those things?

Janie would have preferred some more answers by the end of it, whereas I thought this 80 minute piece was very deliberately leaving a trail of enigmas and unanswerable questions, while at the same time keeping us entertained and weaving sufficient plot lines to tell a story.

All four cast members were excellent; we’d seen Fiston Barek and Hara Yannas recently at the Orange Tree. Daniel Abelson and Michal Horowicz were also strong.

We’d also seen director Matthew Xia’s work at the Orange Tree recently. The style is a bit “workshoppy”, but I think that is the nature of the play and it is hard to imagine how the piece might work in a more stagey syle.

But the greatest plaudits from me go to the writing. I have now read and seen one heck of a lot of plays, so it is rare now to find a writer’s voice so novel and pleasing. For sure I will look out for Maya Arad Yasur’s work again.

Did Janie and I decompress/discuss at length over Spanish food at Don Fernando’s this time? Of course we did.

Did we get home in time to see Bianca Andreescu beat Serena Williams at Flushing? Yes, but only because Bianca kindly lost 4 games in a row (including a championship point) to keep the match alive long enough for us to get home and see the last two games.

Did we play tennis the next morning as usual and then go on to Gunnersbury Museum to see some aspects of BEAT? Yes, yes.

Anyway, returning to the subject of Amsterdam at The Orange Tree; it’s running until 12 October 2019 and we would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes imaginative, modern drama.

Reviews for this production, if/when they come, might be found here.

Blood Knot by Athol Fugard, Orange Tree Theatre, 9 March 2019

You wait years for an Athol Fugard to come to London and then, what do you know, two come along at the same time. Like buses, are Athol Fugard plays.

We saw A Lesson From Aloes last week at the Finborough and mighty fine it was too:

Blood Knot at the Orange Tree was also excellent, but if I was only going to see one of these productions, I’d personally choose Aloes, both for the play and for the production.

We saw a preview of Blood Knot, but I think my comments will apply throughout the run.

Blood Knot is a relentlessly grim play. The play is about two half-brothers in Port Elizabeth who are Cape Coloured, to use the hateful vernacular of the South African Apartheid regime. One is light-skinned and could pass for white, while the other is dark-skinned and is more likely to be regarded as black.

The poverty and hopelessness of the brothers’ situation pervades the whole play. The brothers are extremely well portrayed by Nathan McMullen and Kalungi Ssebandeke.

Click here or the picture below for the Orange Tree web resources on this production.

But the play is very slow. Especially the first half. Let’s be honest about this – and I am an Athol Fugard fan saying this – Fugard plays tend to start very slow. Lengthy periods of scene-setting and atmosphere-generating are intrinsic to Fugard’s style.

Blood Knot is especially slow to build. It is an early work and I think Fugard himself would admit that his craft as a playwright improved with experience.

It was a ground-breaking piece in its time; 1961. Fugard himself played Morrie and was testing the boundaries of Apartheid law; loopholes which for a while allowed white and black actors to appear on stage together.

All this and more about the horrible history of racist laws, South African colonialism and the Cape Coloured community are explained in fascinating essays in this production’s programme. I don’t often specifically commend a programme but this one I found hugely informative and interesting.

At the start of the interval, Janie pondered leaving before the second half, but then came round to the idea of seeing the production through.

By the end of the evening, she was really pleased she decided to see the second half – as was I. Still not racey, but the piece makes far more sense as a whole and the second half answers at least some of the questions at a reasonable lick.

Not the very best of Fugard, but still very much worth seeing.

A Bruising Night At the Theatre: Cougar by Rose Lewenstein, Orange Tree Theatre, 2 February 2019

We booked to see the Saturday preview of this one more or less as soon as it was announced – it looked right up our street from the rubric – click here for that rubric.

Sort of chamber play, sort of about big global issues, some top quality, familiar (to us) names in the cast and crew…

…not least Chelsea Walker whose work as a director had impressed us recently with Yous Two at the Hampstead Studio and Low Level Panic at the Orange Tree – click here or below for the former which includes a link to the latter:

One thing I had forgotten about Yous Two was our beef about the set and the resulting sight lines. Strangely, that indifference to audience concerns was replicated in the set of Cougar.

The designer, Rosanna Vize, has designed the sets for a great many plays we have seen recently, as a click through to her Ogblog tab reveals. Her sets are always imaginative and only occasionally impede the audience – in the case of Cougar both physically and visually. The ushers asked us not to walk on the set as we entered the auditorium, but we needed either to walk on the set or stomp on a couple of audience members in one or two places – we went for the set.

Back to the play – here is the trailer:

The play is basically about an increasingly chaotic, globe-trotting relationship between a forty-something woman who is a big cheese, professional environmental expert and her twenty-something lover/paramour. It is a short piece – about 75 minutes long.

An interesting and intriguing play in many ways. The power woman comes across as a rather one-dimensional monster at times, yet her self-centred, ego-fuelled behaviours would seem less monstrous and more nuanced if the gender roles were reversed.

The cross-over between the global issues around climate change and the domestic issues of excessive consumption of resources (real and emotional) pervaded the piece rather well. The short scenes jumping forwards and backwards in time seemed more like a device to maintain the sense of chaos and confusion than an essential structural device for the (straightforwardly linear) story.

If we were being hyper-critical, Janie and I agreed that the female role is perhaps over-written and the male role under-written. Rose Lewenstein more or less owns up to that in the interesting programme interview. Well acted by Charlotte Randle and especially Mike Noble.

Anyway – amongst all this – why have I described the experience as bruising, I hear you cry?

Well, in one chaotic scene, the young man smashes a camera, which I imagine is supposed to break on the stage but not spray everywhere…but spray it did – with the lens (an 18mm-55mm beastie, seeing as you asked)…

Canon EF-S 18-55mm
Muhammad Mahdi Karim [GFDL 1.2 (http://www.gnu.org/licenses/old-licenses/fdl-1.2.html)], from Wikimedia Commons

…flying at me, striking me on the shin. Ouch.

A few minutes later, in another chaotic scene, the young man who has a couple of walk-on, walk-off moments (I assume Ryan Laden, who is thanked in the programme) ran off the stage in the dark, crunching into the same leg as he ran. Ouch again.

Janie wondered if I was OK. I felt a bit like the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “Tis but a scratch”…

…although my equivalent phrase was, “Tis nothing – I play hard ball sports”.

When we got home after the show (and after dinner at Don Fernandos) Janie offered to put some arnica on my bruises.

Oh, that is a big bruise…

…said Janie, admiring a bruise on my left leg.

That’s one I picked up playing real tennis last week. The new bruises are on the right leg,

I said.

I’m sure the cast and crew will work on those production issues between now and press night. It would be well worth going to see this play/production if you read this piece in time – it runs until 2 March 2019. Perhaps best not to book the front row for this one, though, unless you are as brave as The Black Night or a Mountain Lion (Cougar).

Malcolm [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons
Malcolm [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

The Double Dealer by William Congreve, Orange Tree Theatre, 12 December 2018

Well who’d have thought it? You see The Double Dealer at the National Theatre as a teenager in 1978 and then, quick as a forty-year flash, another London production comes around.

Here is a link to The Orange Tree Theatre’s resource on this production.

I have very happy memories of this play from two Alleyn’s School drama field trips at/with the National Theatre:

When this 2018 production was announced for the Orange Tree, one of our favourite fringe theatres, my immediate reaction was that I simply had to see it. But Janie really doesn’t like restoration comedy at all…like…not at all. So we resolved that I would go to Richmond midweek to see this one.

A game of real tennis – a fitting activity to precede seeing a play by William Congreve

I played real tennis late afternoon at Lord’s, then drove over to Richmond to see the play. Tennis is an especially appropriate activity before seeing Congreve, I discovered, as William Congreve managed and premiered most of his plays (subsequent to The Double Dealer) at Lisle’s Tennis Court, aka Lincoln’s Inn Fields Playhouse, in the last few years of the 17th century and the early 1700s.

I took my seat a little early and observed several members of the cast scurrying back and forth across the stage as if still setting up the party which forms the backdrop to the play The Double Dealer. The conceit of this production is that the audience is, in effect, other guests at the party, so the cast at times engages with members of the audience. I thought that aspect worked really well, although one gentleman sitting next to me seemed more than a little nervous of, as he described it, “audience participation”.

Actually I think the cast were, prior to the start of the play, deliberately trying to suss out the audience – working out who might respond willingly or less willingly to such business. As luck (or ill-fortune, depending on your view) would have it, the two seats next to me were unoccupied. 

Dharmesh Patel, who was playing Careless, sat next to me for a while before the show and asked me whether I was an Orange Tree fan, a restoration fan or neither. I told him about my 1978 experience with the play and that I was also an Orange Tree fan. He told me that Selina Cadell, the director, had seen and talked about that star-studded 1978 production it a lot in rehearsal. I said that I was hoping for better. “No pressure then”, he said.

Of course, it is not a competition between the two productions. The equivalent budget for the National production would have been orders of magnitude higher. The Orange Tree holds 180 people maximum; the Olivier can hold nearly 1000 more people than that. It is almost like producing the work for a different medium.

From a personal point of view, my response as a kid of 16, experiencing a major theatrical production for the first time, having had a thrilling backstage look at the play and the production beforehand, cannot be compared with my response 40+ years later, having seen and experienced so much else since.

Not a kid any more.

One intriguing parallel between 1978 and 2018 is a context of political turmoil and Machiavellian-style politics – even more so in 2018 in fact. The Double Dealer is not an especially sophisticated play – in fact it is quite straightforward by the baroque standards of the period – but it surely was written to illustrate political intrigue as well as the overt intrigue of families and sexual relationships depicted.

I read the play in its entirety, for the first time, the night before going to The Orange Tree – from this wonderful Project Gutenburg source, here. When I read the following couplet, from Maskwell’s (The Double Dealer’s) soliloquy at the end of Act One:

One minute gives invention to destroy,
What to rebuild will a whole age employ.

…my immediate thought was, “that reminds me of Brexit.” When Maskwell said that line on the night, a woman in the audience said out loud exactly what I had thought when reading the night before.

Actually, the Maskwell character reminds me even more of the Double Dealer President across the pond, who is shaking up domestic US and global politics with his harem-scarem style. Except that Maskwell is a far more charismatic villain – at least he is so in the hands of Edward MacLiam, a pantomime villain perhaps, but still a charismatic one. 

One element of the play I didn’t notice at all the first time, partly by virtue of my youth and partly by virtue of the time, was the female element of the sexual politics involved. The Lady Touchwood character (played well by Zoë Waites, who had to work especially hard, as she also played Cynthia, well) is a fairly straightforward villain, but the Lady Plyant character (played by Jenny Rainsford in 2018, having been Dorothy Tutin’s award-winning role in 1978) is surprisingly complex. In a way she is also a Double Dealer – but as a woman she is (to milk the card game metaphor dry) playing with a lesser hand with fewer tricks. She knows she can use her sexual allure to some advantage but, having made the decision to marry an old man she does not fancy at all, is frustrated and in thrall to her own sexual desires. In a modern sexual politics context, the #MeToo movement and fake news phenomena came to mind as well.

Personally, I enjoyed the audience interaction, of which I thought the cast did plenty, but not too much. The production could have descended into excessive pantomime style in the second half but they wisely reigned in most of the ad lib business as the plot plays out to its inevitable denouement. 

I also appreciated the use of the original Purcell music, being a bit of an early music aficionado myself. Paul Reid and Hannah Stokely (as Lord & Lady Froth) performed Cynthia Frowns as a solo voice and cello duet extremely well for the context of the play. They are clearly both capable musicians, so it sounded lovely, but they made their efforts come across as “just difficult enough” to be in keeping with their faux culture vulture characters.

I can’t find a male voice rendering of the song on-line, but here is a lovely soprano version of it. The song is, by the way, part of the wonderful original book of Purcell songs, The Gresham Autograph, which I have had the honour of seeing close up at the Guildhall Library. 

Source: http://www.omifacsimiles.com/brochures/images/purcell_1.jpg

Listed as “Celia (Cynthia) Frowns” – even Purcell recycled his original material it seems – who knew?

In short, in my view, this production of The Double Dealer is a really excellent revival of an interesting but not great restoration work. 

The reviews have been mixed – click here – but I’d certainly recommend this production (unless, like Janie, you have an aversion to restoration comedy) as a thoroughly entertaining evening at the theatre, with enough in the text and performances to please thoughtful members of the audience too.

Dealing With Clair by Martin Crimp, Orange Tree Theatre, 24 November 2018

We thought this was a fabulous piece and production – once again a superb evening of theatre at the Orange Tree.

Here is a link to the Orange Tree on-line resource for this production.

We’ve been interested in Martin Crimp’s writing for years. Sometimes his plays are a bit too weird even for us, but they always make us think and are usually chock-full of suspense and creepiness.

Dealing With Clair is no exception. One of Crimp’s earlier works this, when he was writing exclusively for The Orange Tree, it is very loosely based on the Suzy Lamplugh tragedy, which occurred a short while before the writing of this play and not too far away from Richmond.

Yet, this play from 30 years ago seems very contemporary and relevant today in this production.

The whole cast was excellent.

Our hearts sank a little when we saw that the designer had gone for one of those “behind a screen” designs, which we tend not to like, but actually it worked extremely well for this production, not least because the screen is removed at a telling moment in the play.

By gosh the play is creepy. We were talking about it a lot, for ages, after the evening – which is usually a sign that a play/production has really affected us – which this one surely did.

There are plenty of review snippets on the above links to the Orange Tree, but click here for links to the full reviews – mostly very good ones which the production thoroughly deserves.

I keep saying it, but the Orange Tree is doing great work at the moment – I hope they keep it going.

Utility by Emily Schwend, Orange Tree Theatre, 2 June 2018

We thought this was a fabulous piece, beautifully portrayed.

The synopsis sounds like a great many plays; a domestic drama about a woman trapped in an unsatisfactory marriage, struggling to keep the household together domestically and financially.

This is kitchen sink drama to such an extent that there is even a kitchen sink with a somewhat intrusive window as part of the set. I think the theatre had accidentally withheld two decent seats (our usual favourites) and sold the two that were restricted by the set; so we made a late seat swap to return to “our” regular seats. Minor stuff for previewistas like us – I’m sure the Orange Tree will resolve/have resolved for post preview audiences.

In short, the play is extremely well written and the performances are all excellent, making this an exceptional production well worth seeing.

Here is a link to the Orange tree resource for this play.

All of the performances were excellent, but Robyn Addison as the lead role, Amber, was a standout performance in this piece.

Formal reviews have just started to come in at the time of writing, but they seem to be coming through as deservedly good ones – click here for a link to find them.

Did Janie and I go to Don Fernando to chew over the issues and some Spanish food afterwards?  By heck we did.

If you get a chance to see this production of Utility, we suggest you take it.