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.
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.
The subject matter of the play is fascinating; pornography, the objectification of women, violence against women and how all those things might interrelate. But, to me, the play fails to develop characters and plot sufficiently to make the audience care about the drama; only about the issues.
Janie thought that maybe it was the production that was a bit stilted rather than the play. Hard to tell.
A little unfair, perhaps, to compare a Finborough production with a Royal Court one, but the point is we do have the stamina for long days and long plays if/when the quality is high enough.
Returning to Masterpieces, I can understand why it seemed timely to revive the play, given the topicality of its issues in a subtly different context 35 years on. But as a play, it seemed very old-fashioned to me and the style in which the Finborough directed and produced this play very much locked it in as an 80s period piece, which (for me) was a mistake.
We rarely walk at half time, but on this occasion, tired and cognisant that the second half contains gruelling material, we did walk.
On the matter of Sarah Daniels writing style, I cannot find an extract from Masterpieces but here is a short monologue from The Gut Girls which gives you a feel for the style:
Anyway, we have seen far more hits than misses at the Finborough, so we remain fans of that super place.
Postscript: An Extract From Masterpieces…
…has subsequently emerged on the web. Here is an embed [pun unintended]:
We thought this was another really good Orange Tree production of a new play by a new playwright. Once again Paul Miller and his team showing a consistently good eye for talent.
On paper it sounds like yet another small-scale drama about lonely lives and handling grief. But the dialogue sparkles, the mix of tragedy and comedy is elegantly handled and the production values are quite outstanding for a tiny theatre like the Orange Tree. Very clever design with the odd coup de theatre thrown in for good measure.
All four performers were excellent, with Irfan Shamji as Harry the standout performance amongst stiff competition…not that it IS a competition.
In truth, it is a slightly slow play – a lot of build up and back story – but the dialogue is so well written and the piece so well acted and directed, the 105 minutes seemed to whizz by in a jiffy…
…much like the life of a mayfly.
No reviews at the time of writing – ahead of press night – but I’d expect this one to be well received, so (if you are reading this during the run, which ends 26 May), book early to avoid disappointment.
For once we did not indulge in Spanish food after the show – my indulgences over the preceding 24 hours, which included a sashimi feast when I returned from Chelmsford…
Gosh, we thought this was a very good production indeed.
We both normally have reservations about “dystopian future” plays. Janie in particular was not sure about the subject matter of this one when we booked it. Had it not been for my enthusiasm for the specific moral dilemmas I saw coming and our general sense that Hampstead Downstairs plays are normally worth seeing, we might well not have booked this.
In short, the play is about a future society in which genetic profiling becomes the “be all and end all” of people’s prospects.
Indeed Janie said she found the subject matter creepy during the interval and we noticed that several people did not return after the interval. That is a real shame, because the play was extremely well acted, directed and produced; well worth watching for the drama that unfolds, even if the story line is not quite your bag.
The plot was somewhat predictable, because (without wanting to give too much away) the motivation that might cause certain behaviours could only logically have been caused by the eventual, pivotal plot twist.
But I still think this is a good play – the dialogue is top notch and the moral dilemmas well worth exploring, even if in the context of a future society, elements of which seem prescient but the extreme version depicted seems somewhat unlikely.
Below is the promotional video for this play/production:
…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.
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:
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.
We’ve mostly been very impressed by the stuff we’ve seen at the Finborough Theatre. We started trying the Finborough less than a year ago and this piece, White Guy On The Bus, was our tenth visit in that short time. Again we were most impressed.
We thought we must have seen US playwright Bruce Graham’s work before, until we realised that we were both probably making an amalgam of Bruce Norris and James Graham. The best of those two would make a pretty formidable amalgam as it happens and Bruce Graham’s piece, while perhaps lacking some of the flair of either of his semi-namesakes, was an excellent piece of writing.
Add to that Finborough’s ability to assemble a quality team of actors and creatives to pull together a low budget production that punches well above its weight…
…this was a very good evening of fringe theatre.
The themes of racial tensions, social inequality and political correctness seemed absolutely pertinent for our times. In truth the play is a bit of a slow starter, but by the interval we found ourselves hooked on a thriller with lots of issues and by the end we felt thoroughly entertained and thought-provoked. Two hours well spent.
Below is a trailer from one of the US productions – Curious Theatre Company:
Below is an extract from another of the US productions – Northlight Theatre – which gives a better feel for how the play comes across on a small stage:
as Janie and I we were walking up the stairs to the theatre, the man in front of me turned around and said “hello Ian” – it was Kim Ridge. I wondered out loud whether Kim and Catherine were regulars at the Finborough, but it turned out that they were there quite by happenstance having decided to give the place a try for the first time;
after the show, “The Ridges” disappeared rapidly, but Janie and I stuck around and chatted briefly with a very nice Canadian lady who had been sitting next to us. It turns out she goes to many of the fringe places we go to – I didn’t recognise her face but suspect we’ll run into her again. Next to her was a really pleasant young woman who also chatted with us about the play. It was that sort of theatre experience for us – we wanted to talk about the issues afterwards;
a yummy meal in Noddyland taken away from Mohsen’s – Janie and I continued to mull the issues over dinner.
…we thought Death Of A Hunter might be a bit of an anti-climax.
In fact, it rounded off our weekend of theatre rather well. Naturally this is not in the same production league as the Almeida’s production. But this interesting one hour play about the last hour of Ernest Hemmingway’s life, superbly acted by Edmund Dehn, is basically everything we hope for when we go to small scale theatre such as the Finborough.
We rated this piece and the performance very highly. If you are available one of the nights it is showing, we’d recommend that you grab a ticket now before it sells out.
Janie and I both really love Tennessee Williams but neither of us are very keen to see revivals of plays if we have seen a decent production before.
So this production of Summer And Smoke, a play that neither of us had seen before, at one of our favourite places, The Almeida, sounded like the hottest of hot tickets to our taste.
So much so, it would have been understandable had our massively high expectations not been met…but we needn’t have worried – this production most certainly did the business for us.
I’m not too sure why this play is so rarely performed, other than the fact that I think it does need some sort of imaginative staging to come alive – achieved wonderfully by Rebecca Frecknall and her team in Rebecca’s first major gig as a Director.
Frecknall is a star director in the making and Patsy Ferran is similarly a star performer breaking through just now.
Below is a trailer showing one of the rap numbers from the start of the piece:
Below is a short “meet the writer” interview:
Kene explains that it is a piece about trying to write such a piece…
…which I suppose makes it a post-modern performance piece.
There’s some weird imagery too, with some orange balloon motifs acting as a recurring theme.
I don’t think this piece is aimed at the traditional theatre audience, but we were captivated by it.
We liked the poetry of Arinzé Kene’s language, we liked the music – both of the musicians, Adrian McLeod and Shiloh Coke (you can see them in the City Creature vid above) were excellent – I was especially impressed by Shiloh Coke, a young multi-instrumentalist – she should go far.
Arinzé Kene is a very talented rapper, along with being a talented writer and actor/performer.
At the time of writing Misty has only just opened, so you should be able to get to see it over the next few weeks – highly recommended as an unusual but entertaining theatrical, musical, image-filled evening.
…we were really looking forward to the other piece running concurrently at the Finborough, Checkpoint Chana, but we found it comparatively disappointing.
The topic is interesting – an academic/poet accused of making anti-Semitic references in one of her poems. But as a play it really didn’t work. The poet is also meant to be a soak – so there’s a lot of soak-laden drama involved, which tends to leave us cold.
There’s a lot of telling rather than showing in this play – which tilts it towards melodrama.
I thought it was almost a good short play, but could have done with a heavy prune/edit/revision. Janie really didn’t like it and thought the whole thing beyond redemption.
