I have long been a fan of Caryl Phillips‘s writing; I discovered his novels in the mid 1980s and have several of his books in hard cover.
So I was excited to see that he had written a play, although, when I booked Strange Fruit at The Bush, I didn’t realise that it was an early work, written in the early 1980s, prior to the first of the novels.
I think Janie and I saw a preview, although it is hard to tell at The Bush when press night might be without doing deep research.
In any case, we found the production slick and the acting truly excellent.
Written and set in the early 1980s, the play covers some fascinating aspects of African-Caribbean culture and issues from that time, many of which resonate strongly with issues of migration and identity in our current troubled times.
In truth, the play is somewhat unsubtle, starting in a rather tinny, scene-setting style and tending towards melodrama at the end, in ways that Caryl Phillips clearly ironed out as a writer very soon after writing this play.
But there are flashes of brilliance in the writing and the characters, while somewhat stereotypical, are tragic and engaging.
In fact, the whole piece is engaging throughout; although the play is rather long for the simple story it tells, the piece held our attention throughout.
This is not a play that will cheer you up if you seek some light entertainment. It will make you think about the issues and if you like visceral drama then it is most certainly for you.
Gosh, this Irish play, which has done well at the Abbey and in Edinburgh before finding its way to London, got me and Janie debating the issues robustly for most of the weekend.
The play is basically about a teacher’s attempt to help a young boy, Jayden, who is struggling in class, while the parents have separated and are struggling with their relationship and the needs of their children. The play is a tragicomedy – some scenes are genuinely funny, but the underlying sadness of the situation is the prevailing emotion.
The acting was very high quality; Will O’Connell, Sarah Morris and Stephen Jones are all three fine Irish actors. The latter two, who play the parents, also play 9 year-old Jayden and one of his female classmates. It must be very challenging to switch from parent to child mode many times over in one performance, but these two do that well.
The class of the title has, in my view, a double meaning; not only the classroom in which the entire play is set but also the social class difference between the teacher and the families whose children he teachers. It is that class divide, in my view, that drives many of the events that occur in the play, both on stage and also offstage.
We were really impressed and very pleased that we have now seen this play. We read about it when we were in Edinburgh last year and couldn’t get tickets to see it at the Traverse, so were delighted to see it scheduled at one of our beloved local theatres, The Bush, this spring.
This short play has done well at Edinburgh since 2015 and is now finally being brought to London at the Barons Court Theatre.
It is a dystopian play which envisages a British government imposing a 140 word per day limit on every citizen. The play, centred around a couple, moves backwards and forwards in time, covering their relationship before and after the enactment of the draconian “hush law”.
I was kindly invited to the press night in my capacity as a blogger; not the very first time I have been asked but the very first time I have accepted such an invitation.
I thought both of the performances were excellent and the play well directed.
I can understand why aspiring performers and directors might want to work with this play. It provides an opportunity to show off their talents, not only with the use of words but also movement and non-verbal communication.
There are some very clever touches in the writing too. Sam Steiner clearly has a decent grasp of language and tempo for drama and comedy.
My problem, which I found insurmountable, was with the central conceit of the play. Not even our lousy political leaders nor the lousier nutters who aspire to lead, could conceivably enact and/or enforce a blanket law restricting speech in this way. The scenario, when set in a dystopia that looked and felt very much like now, was simply unbelievable.
I could have bought into a future surveillance society that tags, monitors and restricts the use of language amongst a subset of citizens who are deemed to have transgressed the law in some way. Some nations are not far from that today. But the blanket restriction on communication just seemed utterly implausible and impractical.
So, try as I might to sit back, go with the flow, suspend my disbelief and enjoy watching two very talented young performers…
Charlie Suff and Jemima Murphy – both very talented
…I found myself, Alan Partridge-like, constantly wondering, for example:
How does a government, that today cannot even persuade a reasonable proportion of its citizens to put smart energy meters in their homes, suddenly wire up every home and public space to police the number of words each citizen uses?
What happens if someone exceeds the word limit?
Are citizens fitted with chips to prevent them from speaking or are the cells full of verbal transgressors?
How do the very young and the demented fit in with this law?
Are you allowed to write anything down?
If rudimentary eye-contact communication is permitted, why not use actual sign language?
…and so forth.
Mark Ravenhill was sitting opposite me (Barons Court Theatre is a rather sweet and cosy three- sided affair in the basement of The Curtains Up pub). I couldn’t help wondering whether he too was going through such unwanted Partridgean thought processes. Ravenhill’s recent play The Cane, which I thought excellent, takes a scenario about corporal punishment well beyond likelihood, but not so implausibly as to be distracting from the drama.
The other excellent play that came to my mind was Constellations by Nick Payne, which did a very similar style of jumping backwards and forwards in time through short scenes. But the Nick Payne progressed the audiences understanding and the unfolding of a plot, cleverly, despite the constant time shifts. Lemons, unfortunately, felt to me like a series of repetitions that provided no additional enlightenment after about 30-40 minutes and no resolution to the story of the protagonists.
Nevertheless the scenario and the performances got me thinking quite a lot about the issues raised; in particular, at a micro level in the relationship. How the word limit became a bugbear in itself when the lovers returned from work with a large or tiny quota of words remaining for the day. Yet, in scenes from before the draconian law, the couple quite often didn’t want to talk about important matters anyway. And in one comedic scene, presumably a weekend day, they chose simply to waste their quota singing along with a recording of Baggy Trousers by Madness.
This did make me think about the genuine issue of scarcity in our lives and relationships which is, I would argue, time, not words. This parable about restricting the use of words is really a metaphor for the way we use and abuse our scarce time together in relationships.
Which is all good – all the more reason for me to baulk at the implausible scenario when the political and interpersonal points might have been made through a more plausible variant. My inner Partridge just cannot stop chirping about this.
Would I recommend this play/production. For sure, if you like to see fresh talent performing, this is well worth seeing. And if you can suspend belief better than I am able, then you might truly be bowled over by it.
Ahead of time, I hadn’t thought about the irony of the V&A, perhaps the most labyrinthine of all UK museums, having a special display of photographs from the labyrinthine streets of a sprawling Middle-Eastern city such as Cairo.
But that irony was soon brought to the forefront of my mind as we tried and failed to find that Cairo Streets display. Two attempts at the information desk later (including one incident during which Janie and I also mislaid each other), the informed conclusion was that the display in question has been delayed and is not there yet. We have until April 2020 to find it, if indeed it ever shows up.
The irony continued as we asked the kind woman at the information desk to direct us to the Laughing Matters Exhibition and she advised us to go to the third floor, pointing to a nearby staircase & lift.
After wandering what there is of the third and much of that end of the V&A’s second floor in vain, we asked a walkie-talkie-bearing attendant, who admitted to being clueless, but he could and did use his walkie-talkie to radio for help.
“First Floor”, came the garbled instruction from the walkie-talkie, “tell them to walk the British Renaissance 16th and 17th century and they can’t miss it”. We had walked that way before, of course, on previous visits. A bit too Mock Tudor for me, that 16th century section.
Anyway, we did reach Laughing Matters, which we couldn’t miss. Quite a small display, it is. I suppose there aren’t that many artefacts that can be deemed to be quintessentially British Comedy.
The Spitting Image of Mrs Thatcher was a highlight…that’s Mrs T in the display cabinet, not on the phone. Janie (on the phone) was listening to some of the many vox coms (voice of comedians) on such phones in the centre of the room. Some very interesting, many rather mundane. Also around the room were many quintessentially British comedy clips, such as “don’t tell him, Pike”, “don’t mention the war” and Babs Windsor’s bikini-boob-bursting scene from Carry On Camping. No mention of NewsRevue. Tish.
Can you get me a cab a bit sooner than that? I need to get out of here.
The one place in the V&A that Janie does know how to find without a map or a personal guide is the member’s cafe. That was to be our next stop.
Janie fancied some soupy, creamy courgettes, while I just nibbled some nuts with my tea – oooer, missus.
The one performance thing we fancied was a performance piece, in the new Hochhauser auditorium, named Within The Warren, a piece which heaped irony upon irony by satirising the labyrinthine nature of the V&A’s culture. I have oft suggested that organisational cultures tend to reflect some intrinsic element of the organisation – hospitals having an “accident and emergency” style culture, children’s charities having child-like elements in the meetings, etc.
So it came as no surprise to discover, through this lightweight, absurdist piece by Jessica Mullen, that an outsider finds the V&A impenetrable as an organisation.
Even the Q&A was somewhat bewildering, as the interviewer asked a couple of obscure questions and then threw the Q&A open to the floor, to find only one question…from me. Jessica Mullen batted back an answer in such an inscrutable manner, I imagine that she’ll be head-hunted for MI6…if she isn’t in there already.
“Stand clear of the doors”, Japanese poster art style……inspired by…
In any case, we’d not really explored the Japanese rooms before and thought we’d find the whole thing fascinating just six months after visiting Japan.
After that, we both felt exhausted, so we headed home to Noddyland. It was still so early that Janie was able to photograph some ducks on the Noddyland village pond – bless.
Wilderness is about a couple who split up, determined to make it amicable for the sake of their eight-year-old son. But of course it doesn’t work out like that.
Janie and I found this play a painfully visceral piece. Neither Janie nor I have direct experience of this scenario, but that didn’t lessen the power of the drama for us.
Anna Ledwich, who has directed so many of the excellent things we’ve seen at the Hampstead, has again done brilliant work with a new writer, Kellie Smith and a superb cast: Richard Frame, Natalie Klamar, Allison Mckenzie, Finlay Robertson.
An excellent, sparse set by Lucy Sierra added to the sense of cold and decay that pervaded the piece.
One element of the writing that I think deserves praise was how very irritating the main characters were, yet Kellie Smith managed to maintain a sense of goodness and vulnerability, such that we as audience members cared about them and cared what happened to them. One of the ways she did that was to prevent us from ever seeing the child at the centre of the tussle; of course we couldn’t but care deeply for the ever-absent child and the impact the play’s events must have been having on him.
One other event will stick long in our memories. Next to us sat two slightly unusual women; one young, one quite a bit older. They clearly weren’t together but struck up a chatting friendship. At the end of the interval, the younger woman came back with some wine and cake. She plonked the wine down in front of her (we were in the front row) and commenced with munching the cake, taking and expressing great joy in her victuals.
Janie and I both, silently, thought that wine cup was an accident waiting to happen, positioned, as it was, in the path of any late-comer who might be moving swiftly to their seat at the end of the interval. Within a minute, indeed such a latecomer arrived and indeed the cup and the wine were put asunder. To make matters worse, in her dismay and forward lunge in a vain attempt to rescue her wine, the young woman also dropped the remains of her cake.
“Oh no”, said the young woman, “that was entirely my own fault”.
In some ways, that silly incident felt like a comedic metaphor for the serious subject matter of the play. Meanwhile, I have been trying to work out if I can find yet sillier places to leave victuals and crockery lying around the house in order to maximise the chance that they get spilt and/or broken. Thought experiment only, you understand.
But back to this truly excellent play/production, Wilderness. It really is well worth seeing if you like your drama intense, up close and personal.
Plenty of seats still available at the time of writing; Janie and I would suggest that you book early to avoid disappointment. The production runs to 27 April 2019 and I hope it gets a deserved transfer after that.
Declaration of interest: I have known Lydia White, who plays the role of Bella in this production, since before she was born; she is my best mate John’s daughter. This production is Lydia’s professional debut.
Picture borrowed from Lydia’s Twitter account – I’m guessing she wont mind.
Declaration of uninterest: this type of musical theatre is simply not the sort of stuff I would normally see. Yes, I wrote lyrics for Newsrevue in the 1990s, which is sort-of musical theatre and yes I wrote the lyrics for Casablanca the Musical at the turn of the century.
Yes, I am familiar with recordings of many of the great musicals of the 1930s through to the 1970s. But you can search Ogblog high and low for signs of straight musical theatre going in vain.
So, there I was; a chap normally predisposed to parodying musical theatre rather than appreciating it, trying to lap up Rags the Musical, a troubled piece from 1986 which closed on Broadway after just four nights, much revamped for this 2019 revival.
Rags is about a group of Jewish immigrants arriving in America early in the 20th Century. It has often been described as a sort-of sequel to Fiddler On the Roof, with several of those involved in writing the latter also involved in writing Rags. Here is a link to Hope Mill Theatre’s resource on this musical/production.
I thought the quality of this production was quite exceptional. I didn’t really know what to expect in a disused mill, relatively recently re-purposed as a small theatre with grand ideas to put on big shows like this.
Can they do it? Yes they can.
Coincidentally, I ended up sitting next to a pair of gentlemen who I had noticed sitting next to me in the Jūb Thai before the show. The chap immediately next to me turned out to be a local who has become very impressed by this new theatre on his manor. He told me that their home grown productions, of which Rags is one – have been consistently excellent.
The thing that impressed me the most was the universal quality of the performances. Not to detract at all from Lydia White’s superb performance, the praises of which clearly I am here to hail, in seriousness I thought the whole cast, every one of them, was truly excellent.
The quality of the musicianship was very high too. The music is a mish-mosh (if I might throw in bissel Yiddish) of ragtime, klezmer, jazz and show; that cannot be easy to contain and deliver to consistent quality, but the musicians and singers keep going to a very high quality level throughout.
The book was clearly problematic from the 1986 outset with this musical – I think the radical rewrite has partially but not totally solved the problem. I have some sympathy with the original author Joseph Stein. He originally set out to write a screenplay, settled on the libretto of a musical but kept the big picture story about the immigrant experience at the turn of the 20th Century. I have read a synopsis of the original version and it really does try to cover an enormous scope of subject matter for a musical.
And much like a troyer-shpil in the Yiddish Theatre tradition, which Rags The Musical parodies in many ways, it tries to throw in everything but the kitchen sink. So this is not one for the Royal Court.
The rewrite for this production is a smaller canvas but as a result some of the nuance is, I think, lost. So, for example…
…*spoiler alert*…
…Bella’s demise towards the end of the piece seems like happenstance rather than part of almost inevitable conflicts between ambition, desperation, industrial action and greed.
The writers have made some interesting choices, some of which work better than others. I loved the theatre trip towards the end of the first act where the protagonists see a Yiddish version of Hamlet which ends up with Klezmer music and Horah dancing despite Hamlet and Ophelia’s despair.
I was surprised by The Kaddish (mourner’s prayer) song, though, for which the writers chose simply to set the original mourner’s prayer to music. I imagined it would be something akin to the Fiddler On The Roof Sabbath Prayer song, which picks and chooses passages from the Hebrew prayer to make a very charming musical song in English.
The Mourner’s Kaddish is actually a tongue-twister of a prayer – part in Hebrew part in Aramaic – it must be really hard for people to learn it if they haven’t grown up with it and it must sound very strange to the uninitiated ear. Unfortunately I had reason to see and hear a mourner’s kaddish again, two days after seeing the show. I thought about it and really struggled to understand why the Rags lyricist hadn’t selected choice phrases in English to depict the meaning of that prayer with dignity and beauty. Perhaps superstition played its part – you just don’t mess with the prayer for the dead.
I was also surprised that the Children Of The Wind song doesn’t appear until right at the end of the show – reprised almost immediately in the finale. The musical would, to me, have seemed more holistic if that song had appeared early, e.g. when the immigrants arrive, as well as at the end of the show when their tale has been told.
But then what do I know to critique a musical? I don’t really do musicals.
At the small canvas level, the story very much resonated with me. I am, after all, a mostly third generation Jew, three of my four grandparents came to London from the Pale Of Settlement around the time this musical is set – plus or minus 20 years. My father’s family were indeed in the shmutter (rag) trade…they even changed their name to Harris; an idea which the Rebecca character considers but chooses to reject.
Grandma Anne With Dad (left) & Uncle Michael (right), both born in the UK. Two older brothers, Alec and Manny, came as infants with Grandma Anne from the Pale. The Rossinov family changed its name to Harris (based on my grandfather’s first name, Herschel) around 1930.
My mother’s family were musicians; quite quickly in England becoming far more high-falutin’ type musicians than the klezmer musicians in Rags, although I suspect my family arrived performing in much that style.
Grandpa Lew, sitting, with Great Uncle Max standing. Max was already an accomplished musician (strings) when they came to England, Grandpa Lew came as an infant and was never trained as a musician, but I’m told could play pretty much anything on the piano by ear. I inherited none of that.
More importantly, much of the big picture story of Rags resonates very strongly today, I’d argue to a greater extent than it did in 1986. Anti-immigration is a large element of the Brexit saga and also the Trump experience in the USA. The issues around ghettoisation, cultural assimilation and the like are very much with us, albeit not so much in the Jewish community any more. Questions around whether migrants are desirable for sound economic reasons, wanted for reasons of commercial exploitation, accepted because allowing migration is the right thing to do or not wanted at all – these questions are high on the agenda in most nations.
Despite my reservations about the book and some of the songs, I think this is a really super production and a performance piece for our time; it has the potential to do extremely well.
So what did I really think about Lydia White’s performance?
I can try to compare it to the many performances of Newsrevue casts I have seen. On that score, I can honestly say that her performance would be a standout in that environment. An environment where standout performers (e.g. from my era, Dorthy Atkinson and Rosie Cavaliero) have tended to go on to have very successful careers.
In Rags The Musical, the whole cast is very strong and/but Lydia more than holds her own in that company. For a professional debut I think it is an extremely assured and talent-packed start to her career.
It was also a great pleasure to chat with Lydia for a while after the show and learn/observe what a friendly, tight-knit group the company seems to be. Lydia won’t get that everywhere she goes in her show business career, but it’s good news that her first production is such a good one with such a together company.
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.
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.
In truth, Inside Bitch is not quite such a visceral, blow the audience away piece. It is a thoughtfully and entertainingly devised workshop-style piece in which women who have actually been to prison go through a post-modern process on stage of trying to devise a women in prison drama based on reality rather than the sensationalism normally seen in films and TV dramas on that topic.
The show is just over an hour long. Some bits worked better than others for us but for sure we found the piece entertaining throughout. That, despite the fact that many of the references to film and especially to TV drama on the topic were wasted on me and Janie because we simply don’t watch/have never seen that stuff. But we could imagine.
The place was packed with the cast and crew’s nearest and dearest the night we went, which was preview Saturday, so the tumultuous reception was to be expected but was nevertheless deserved.
I have long been a fan of Athol Fugard’s plays. I started reading them in the mid 1980s when on a play reading spree: The Road To Mecca, Master Harold And the Boys…
…they don’t come around all that often to get sight of them. Yet, like London buses, sometimes two come along at roughly the same time. Next week we’ll go and see another one; Blood Knot at the Orange Tree.
Coincidentally, I have lately been writing up my 1988 theatre visits – which was another period during which two Fugards came along in quick succession – A Place With The Pigs:
This one, A Lesson From Aloes, was right up there, in my view, as a memorable night of top notch theatre drama.
Janet Suzman has directed a fine cast; Dawid Minnaar, David Rubin and Janine Ulfane, in this wonderfully claustrophobic play, set in the early 1960s, about left-leaning folk in the Eastern Cape having had their lives ruined one way or another by Apartheid.
As is so often the case with Fugard, the political undertones are played out in a drama about family and relationships.
In many ways Janie and I weren’t in the mood for this depth of drama on that Friday evening – we’d both had busier, more tiring weeks than we’d pre-planned – but the sheer quality of the play, performances and staging kept us both gripped throughout.
At the time of writing this production has only just opened and has not yet been formally reviewed, nor is it yet sold out. My advice, if you are reading this in time, is to book early to avoid disappointment. Here’s the link again…
…while here is an interesting rehearsal video from this Finborough production:
Janet Suzman was there on that Friday evening (I think the last preview night) so I was pleased to be able to tell her personally that I thought the production was extremely good.
The Trick is also a quirky piece, but differently so. It is about loss, bereavement and the ways we need to trick ourselves into keeping going through life.
I thought we might find such a piece hard to take this weekend – our next door neighbour at Noddyland, Barry, died on Thursday night. But actually the piece was very charming, unusual and entertaining, without being heavy at all.
My only beef with the piece is that it was very bitty and that some of the bits didn’t really make sense. One scene, where the two younger performers simply made breathing noises into microphones, seemed, to me, to simply be a bridge between one of the quirky scenes (in which one of those performers read the palm of a member of the audience) and the next substantive scene about the ageing, bereaved woman and her decline.
But the piece was clearly intended to confuse the audience a bit and mix various genres of performance, ranging from direct story-telling (the Isaac Bashevis Singer story, The Little Shoemaker, is “thrown in” at one point) to chamber drama to audience participation to conjuring tricks. Entertaining throughout.
Here’s Eve Leigh, the playwright, explaining herself as best she can about it:
After the Bush Studio run, which goes on to 23 March, The Trick is going to tour many parts of the UK – here is the trailer including those tour details:
This piece was very well performed by the four actors and cleverly directed and designed.
Janie and I really like short pieces of this kind. Perhaps it is because we are getting older, but we now find 70 minutes of interesting and entertaining stuff a better deal than several hours of drawn out drama.
Baffling in parts but well worth seeing in our view.
