Category: Theatre

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.

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

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.

Click here for a link to the Finborough on-line resource for this play/production. It includes some press quotes from the original production(s) of this piece in the USA – the Finborough production is a European premier.

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:

Click here for a link to reviews and other stuff connected with the Finborough production, which has mostly been very well received so far.

Other memorable moments from the evening:

  • 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.

A really good evening.

Death Of A Hunter by Rolf Hochhuth, Finborough Theatre, 1 April 2018

After our wonderful experience at the Almeida the night before seeing Summer And Smoke…

Summer And Smoke by Tennessee Williams, Almeida Theatre, 31 March 2018

…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.

Here is a link to the Finborough’s resource on this production.

Below is a trailer:

We went to the first night, so no formal reviews yet. Previews and (to the extent that they will appear) reviews can be/will be found through this link – click here.

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.

Summer And Smoke by Tennessee Williams, Almeida Theatre, 31 March 2018

Bloomin’ ‘eck this was good.

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.

Here is a link to the Almeida’s resource on this one.

Below is the trailer:

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.

We saw Patsy Ferran only a few week’s ago and were hugely impressed with her at the Royal Court in My Mum’s A Twat – click here or below:

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

Below is a slightly longer vid with opening night reflections from the cast and crew:

This production has had absolutely rave reviews on the whole – click here for a link that finds most of them if the headlines on the Almeida site aren’t enough for you.

Doubtless we’ll remember this as one of the highlights of our theatre-going year.

Misty by Arinzé Kene, Bush Theatre, 17 March 2018

Janie and I both found this a very entertaining and unusual piece. A one man show written and performed by Arinzé Kene.

Friends who have seen my own little Mithras performance from earlier in the week – click here or below…

The London Mithraeum With The Gresham Society, 15 March 2018

…might expect Misty to be a sort-of jazz standards musical. You’d be so wrong.

So is Misty a play, a rap musical, an installation performance or what? It is sort-of all of those things.

Click here for a link to the Bush resource on this piece/production.

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.

Checkpoint Chana by Jeff Page, Finborough Theatre, 11 March 2018

After our excellent experience seeing Returning To Haifa on Friday…

Returning To Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, Finborough Theatre, 9 March 2018

…we were really looking forward to the other piece running concurrently at the Finborough, Checkpoint Chana, but we found it comparatively disappointing.

Finborough Theatre, near Earl's Court, London

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.

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

A search term that finds the reviews – mostly middling – can be found here.

Returning To Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, Finborough Theatre, 9 March 2018

Janie and I rated this piece and production very highly.

I’m not usually a big fan of adapting cerebral novels into plays, but Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace have done a superb job with this one.

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

Not without controversy – it was originally set to be performed in New York and then withdrawn under political pressure.

It is controversial material from a controversial author. The piece is the story of a  Palestinian couple returning to Haifa in 1967, some 20 years after abandoning their home and (inadvertently) their infant child in that city.

Here is a short vid about Kanafani and this play – basically it was the fundraising vid for the production:

Kanafani was clearly a serious intellect who could see the Israeli/Palestinian debate from both sides. There is nuance in this piece which is rarely seen in dramatic material on this subject.

It reminded me of a piece Janie and I saw nearly 20 years ago at the Tricycle, The Gardens Of Habustan – click here or below:

The Garden Of Habustan by Rebecca Wolman, Tricycle Theatre, 27 April 1999

It took me a while to identify the name and author of that play, despite the fact that it was written and directed by my old friend Rebecca Wolman. Weird – I remembered that play so clearly and I separately of course remembered going to see Rebecca’s play in 1999 and getting a chance to see her again briefly after so many years, but I hadn’t connected the two until I dug out my old archives. But I digress.

Rebecca’s play, similarly nuanced, used the fertility of the gardens as an allegory for the impotence of the displaced Palestinians. Kanafani’s piece uses the abandoned child as that symbol.

Both plays I believe contain sufficient insight to make strong arguments for a  peaceful resolution, but whereas Wolman’s piece is firmly oriented towards peace, Kanafani’s protagonist, Said, suggests that only fighting could resolve the conflict, even if that results in brother fighting brother. Kanafani’s own political career and life sadly went in the violent direction, although there is evidence that he renounced violence (certainly of the indiscriminate kind) shortly before he was assassinated.

Kanafani
Click this link to find reviews, most of which are very good.

A humorous aside – the play was performed in the round at the Finborough, with the audience seated on benches. The usherette (who admitted it was her first day) told us all that we needed to sit five to a bench as the show was sold out. I think she meant that some of the benches seated five people and that those would need to accommodate five people – some of the benches (ours for example) were quite modestly sized even for four people.

The result was a fair bit of jostling for position before the play started. I wondered briefly whether the mistake was deliberate, to get the audience into a “there’s not enough space for all these people…how do we resolve this?” frame of mind. But in truth I think it was just an honest mistake. It soon became clear that common sense could prevail and that, as long as four people sat on the four-seaters and five people sat on the five-seaters, there was enough room for everyone. If only the Israeli/Palestinian problem could be solved so easily.

Returning To Haifa is a fascinating play, extremely well acted and produced – it deserves a much larger audience than a short run at the Finborough will provide for it, which is a shame. I do hope it gets a transfer on the back of its success.

Acceptance by Amy Ng, Hampstead Theatre Downstairs, 3 March 2018

A truly gripping and fascinating moral drama about a young musical prodigy from Hong Kong applying to an elite university in the USA.

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

As the rubric infers, all is not as it seems in this play. Our assumptions and prejudices get tested to the limits, as do those of the characters.

Below is the trailer, with short interviews with the cast and creatives:

The young prodigy obsesses about some Bach, so I was tempted to headline this Ogblog article “Baroque And Enroll”, but Janie says that such a headline would be crass for such an emotive play.

It is certainly a very thought-provoking play and it is potentially a very moving production too.

We saw the second preview of this play/production, so it is possible that one or two of the wrinkles we observed will have been ironed out by the time it gets to press night.

The main wrinkle for us was the see-through screens that divide the stage from the audience. The purpose (if any) behind this device was unclear…as was some of the sound that emanated from the stage as a result of these clear screens. More importantly than the slightly muffled sound was the sense that we, as audience, were somewhat separated from the action. This is a highly emotive piece, yet the audience seemed strangely numb to it – I think the audience would far better be able to embrace and respond to this piece without the screens.

Another wrinkle, for me, was the complete absence of the particular piece of music that seemed so central in many ways to the story; the Mercy Aria – Erbarme Dich, from Bach’s St Matthew Passion.

While I imagine that the cast and crew didn’t want the play/production to be compared too readily with Death And The Maiden, the differences between the two plays are great and the similarities are there whether you use Erbarme Dich or not.

Erbarme Dich is described in so much detail, referred to so often and is so significant to the plot. Even if they simply played the violin part of Erbarme Dich right at the end of the play, I think it would have helped.

Even as seasoned Baroque-oholocs, Janie and I had to dig out Erbarme Dich and listen to it when we got home to remember exactly what the piece sounds like – most of the audience would have been even more in the dark.

Below is a beautiful rendition of Erbarme Dich:

I really thought Acceptance was a superb play – just the second play by Amy Ng, another new playwright to watch. The disturbing issues raised by this play are covered with a confident blend of subtlety, sensitivity and visceral moments.

The acting was truly excellent.

I would thoroughly recommend seeing this play/production even if the production team doesn’t make a few changes, but I sincerely hope that they will gauge audience reaction and make the few tweaks I think it needs to turn this production into an absolute stunner.

No reviews yet at the time of writing – this search term – click here – will find them when they come.

Trust by Falk Richter, Gate Theatre, 23 February 2018

This was a quite extraordinary piece. Weird, in a way that, it seems, only German plays can be weird.

Janie and I often walk away from such strange stuff baffled and dissatisfied, but certainly not on this occasion – we found the piece compelling to watch and entertaining, as well as baffling.

Sixteen very different scenes, ranging from videos with voice-overs, to seemingly straightforward two-handed romantic strife, to a Mandarin Chinese lesson for the audience…

…I suppose it’s all about the abuse of trust – domestic, financial and governmental.

Here is a link to The Gate’s resource on this production – click here…

…and below is the trailer, although the play only gives a passing mention to Brexit – you might expect more Brexit based on the trailer.

Excellent performances from Pia Laborde Noguez and Zephryn Taitte…and indeed from Jude Christian, the ubiquitous director who chose also to appear in this one.

Exceptional use of an infeasible quantity of props in a small space.

We thought the piece was very imaginative indeed and would recommend it highly. Yet another feather in the cap for Ellen MacDougall and her Gate tenure.

It will be interesting to see how critics and other people react to this piece. We saw a preview, but Daisy and I were interviewed for reaction on the way out – so we might well “form part of the conversation”, as the young folk say.

Update: yes, I got my 1.5 seconds of fame in the vox pop – see below but don’t blink or you might miss it:

Go see this show for yourself, if you are able – at the time of writing it has three weeks more to run.

Once it has reviews, this search term – click here – should find them.

The B*easts by Monica Dolan, Bush Theatre, 17 February 2018

This was a very interesting piece about sexual exploitation of children, written and performed by Monica Dolan, who was excellent on the stage.

Click here for the Bush resource on this play/production.

Janie got more out of the piece than I did – I found the ending a little contrived and felt the piece lacked drama. It is difficult to make monologues truly gripping – we’ve seen some corking good ones lately. This one is redeemed for me, though, because the piece is so interesting and Monica Dolan is such a strong stage presence.

Below is the trailer…

…and below is a “meet the writer” vid:

The reviews are, deservedly, pretty darn good – click here for a search term that finds them.

Another winner at The Bush as far as we are concerned.