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.
It’s been a wee while since we visited the Hampstead for no particular reason other than the productions not quite suiting us and perhaps less going on downstairs – our favourite part of the Hampstead.
Anyway, this one was downstairs and sounded interesting. A Trump-like American businessman who covets some unspoilt UK coastline for a golf complex using an employee with local connections to try and do his bidding.
Well, I’m going to say more anyway. We really enjoyed the play and this production of it. The way they designed some of the big visuals (golf course, construction site, neighbouring house…) into manageably small symbols on the stage was innovative, clever and entertaining.
The acting was all excellent, not least Yolanda Kettle as the conflicted young woman and Michael “Fatty Batter” Simkins as the Trump-like anti-hero of the piece.
I met Michael Simkins, many years ago, at Lord’s as it happens, where I passed an very pleasant afternoon chatting with him and Michael Billington. I’ll Ogblog that event in the fullness of time.
Meanwhile, Janie reckoned that Michael Simkins recognised me as the cast took their curtain call. I think she’s probably right, but almost certainly it would have been, “I know that bloke from somewhere…maybe cricket?”, rather than, “that’s the fellow I chatted with in August 2004 when I went to see Middlesex v Sussex at Lord’s with Michael Billington.”
In truth, Janie and I both enjoyed the first half more than the (shorter) second half. The plot seemed to resolve to neatly and easily for our taste. But as is almost always the case at the Hampstead Downstairs, the piece was interesting, well-produced and entertaining.
If I had needed any reassurance that cricket and tennis are my games and that golf isn’t (I didn’t, but still), this play would have provided it.
Oh dear. No this one wasn’t for us. It came at the end of a long week for both of us, but any week we would have found the oppressive family situation depicted here difficult to bear for two hours.
The central characters are escapees from the Armenian genocide and as such both are sympathetic characters. But the writing seemed, to us, laboured. The progress through the plot is well signalled in advance and therefore seemed very slow. Here is the playwright’s own take on the piece, which includes a video snippet.
But the acting was all very good and as always with the Finborough, you feel that you are seeing a tiny place punch well above its weight.
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…
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)…
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
Oh dear, Elizabeth! This one sounded so much up our street in the promotional literature – two real world poets who corresponded for decades – their own words dramatised into a chamber play.
One of the conceits of this production is that different actors will play the roles each night, having never previously seen the script (or quite possibly each other) before.
We got Shalisha James-Davis and Emun Elliott our night. Emun seemd well up for a sight reading gig, but Shalisha, bless her, even admitted before the play proper started that sight reading was not really her forte.
I was reminded during the performance of the Peter Cook and Dudley Moore sketch, One Leg Too Few, in which a one-legged fellow auditions for the role of Tarzan.
You get my drift.
We wondered whether the piece would have worked better for us if both actors had been better able to sight read. It was especially disconcerting, given that Elizabeth Bishop was a woman of letters, to hear her character struggling to make sense of many words on the page…
…in truth, we suspect that the piece wouldn’t really have been for us anyway. The story told in these letters just didn’t grip us as we thought it could or should.
Here is a trailer from an earlier (US) production of the play:
Those who get to see some of the fine actors and actresses who are going to give The Gate’s experimental production a go might get a lot more out of it than we got, but for us, I’m afraid, both play and production are a dud.
The other memorable thing…but not in a good way, was the sycophantic audience – presumably friends of cast and crew – laughing at even the weakest jokes and desperately trying to give the impression that this thin gruel was enticing.
So rare at The Gate, but one we really didn’t take to – these things happen.
Time Is Love/Tiempo es Amor is a fairly traditional revenge tragedy plot, played out in a sort-of film noir style. Imagine Raymond Chandler, Tennessee Williams and David Mamet collaborating on a revenge play set in the Latino (or should I say Latinx?) community in Los Angeles…you might be getting an idea of it.
At the end of a long week there’s always a risk that a 90 minute play without an interval will test our attention span – but this racey and pacey piece held our attention throughout.
Credit to Daisy for choosing this one – in truth, I wasn’t attracted to it by the bumf. Also, the fact that the writer, Chè Walker, was also directing, raised alarm bells with me. The absence of the checks and balances that a separate writer and director brings to a play/production is often a road to weakness, but in this case I think Chè Walker has pulled off a coup.
Daisy was ever so pleased with herself when we recalled that this one was very much her idea.
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.
to enjoy a backstage tour of the National and see a matinee of the 1978 production in the Olivier Theatre 12 October 1978 – written up here.
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.
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.
The Alun Armstrong character is a deputy headmaster, a teacher of 45 years standing, who is due to retire. Maggie Steed is his wife and Nicola Walker is their estranged daughter.
I don’t think it is a spoiler to explain that the central aspect of the controversy in which the central character is embroiled is his use of the cane, until corporal punishment was prohibited in the mid 1980s…
…or is it? The play’s title is The Cane, so it must simply be about that topic. Certainly the cane is a central artifact to the plot…
…yet much of the story doesn’t really add up. Would modern school children really riot against a teacher, days before his retirement, simply because he used to administer the cane 30+ years ago? Surely there must be more to it than that?
Similarly, much of the family’s back story doesn’t exactly add up or reconcile between their memories either. Axe marks on the wall are a visible example throughout the piece.
Janie saw these conundrums (or do I mean conundra?) as signs of weakness in the plot, but I thought the cane was a metaphor for the use of violence as a disciplinary measure generally. I thought the play was a metaphor for power struggles and violence within institutions like schools, within families, between teachers and pupils, between husbands, wives and children.
Still, it was hard to sympathize with any of the characters. In particular, the Maggie Steed character seemed at once pathetically weak and yet hell-bent on making forceful, irreversible decisions in an attempt to assert some element of power. I think Maggie Steed’s voice was failing on our night, which hopefully is a passing issue, but her floundering gestures didn’t really work for either of us. Perhaps she can control and channel those a bit more convincingly between preview and press night.
Janie didn’t find Alun Armstrong’s character sinister enough either, whereas I thought his manner of suppressed violence disguised by a kindly veneer was sufficiently creepy or sinister for me. Vincent Price without the ham.
Similarly, for me, the Nicola Walker character was sinister. We couldn’t get to the bottom of her motivation, even by the end of the play, but I think that air of mystery was the writer’s intention. At first you wondered how this person could be the daughter of those parents – by the end I thought I could see the echoes – a different style of controlling behaviour and a different style of violence – but still those characteristics to the fore.
Personally, I liked the debate about education within the play. In the absence of physical discipline through corporal punishment, how do teachers maintain control. (Answer, in my view, mostly by teaching well.)
There was a fascinating speech from Nicola Walker’s character about discipline the modern way in academy schools – a form of, “eyes front at all times, no talking in the corridors between lessons”. I could imagine that being effective as discipline…but I’m not sure I’d have been any more comfortable in that sort of disciplinary environment than I was/would have been in the old-fashioned “threat of corporal punishment” environment.
Whether that debate would seem as interesting or insightful to those mixed up in the education system (either as parents, teachers or pupils) today I have no idea, but it seemed relevant and interesting to me, sitting (as I do) on the outside of education for several decades.
Before the play we got chatting with a woman in the drinks queue who turned out to be Gaynor Churchward…Minnie Driver’s mum. It would have been interesting to have learnt after the show what she thought about the play; her life experience of schooling being rather unusual and very different from either of ours. But we didn’t stick around to chat with anyone – we dashed off for a shawarma supper and a reasonably early night.
I agree with Janie to some extent that the piece might benefit from a little more naturalism and direct tackling of the issues/story, but I still found the production a worthwhile and enjoyable evening in the theatre, in the hands of some expert theatrical operators.
![Malcolm [CC BY-SA 2.0 (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons](https://i0.wp.com/ianlouisharris.com/wp-content/uploads/2019/02/512px-Cougar.jpg?resize=512%2C384&ssl=1)
