…we wondered whether we’d done the right thing booking this – especially as the Royal Court rubric on the piece was vague, even by Royal Court vague rubric standards. Click here for a link to the unhelpful material.
The little videos in the Royal Court information resource on this production really do not do justice to the piece or to the production’s creators.
We’d also been impressed by Kate O’Flynn when we’d seen her perform.
This production of All Of It is only running for eight performances over the next few days, so change your plans, beg the Royal Court to find you a ticket, do anything to get to see it. It is 45 minutes of theatrical delight.
Actually, it is 42-43 minutes of theatrical delight. For the first two or three minutes we were both thinking, “oh-oh”, until we realised what was going on and how the piece was going to unfold.
Then we could relax and enjoy a virtuoso performance of a rather brilliant piece of writing.
The piece is basically a short, lyrical monologue about an ordinary woman’s life. All of it.
Just take our advice and get to see it, but you’ll have to be quick. If you miss the next few days, start nagging the Royal Court to transfer it or put it on again because this production really deserves to be seen by lots of people and should give pleasure to far more people than eight-Royal-Court-houses.
We feel as though we have been waiting for ever to see the opening of the new Riverside Studios.
Word reached us in the autumn that the venue had opened for food and drink, so we looked it up to discover that the first theatrical production was to be a stage adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s astonishing movie Persona.
Persona is a bit of a “marmite” movie – some people consider it to be a masterpiece, others dislike it intensely. I have always rated it highly as a movie – not his best but a very interesting piece.
The idea of it as a stage piece intrigued me…and Janie, who does not rate the movie as highly as I do.
Below is a preview video for the Riverside production, which explains how they transformed the piece from a film script and other archival material into the performance piece we saw:
I believe we saw a preview, just a few days into the run. Janie and I very much enjoyed the production. We both thought it worked well on the stage – possibly better on stage than it does as a film.
This version is sort-of narrated by an imaginary film professor (portrayed by Paul Schoolman) who finds himself sick with pneumonia in the very hospital in which Bergman wrote Persona. This fictional character metaphorically unspools the film into a stage piece.
One other excellent feature of this production is the musical instrument the Earth Harp, a huge installation which sits in one corner of the stage and splays out from there above the audience, dominating much of the studio space. It was performed by its inventor William Close.
It is hard to get a true sense from the video below of how this instrument sounds and vibrates through your body in a live performance, but you’ll get a nice tune and a bit of an idea:
Anyway, the performances were all very good and we were gripped by the piece.
We sensed that some of the audience were bowled over by it, others less so. I don’t suppose this production will be quite as marmite as the original film, but I expect it will divide audiences and critics.
We thought it was an excellent start for the revived venue. Slightly less excellent is the cold feel of the expanded, large space that is the venue as a whole. Early days of course and work in progress, naturally. But having dispensed with the shabby chic look of the old place, the Riverside crowd need to start developing some character to the space.
The large colourful paintings helped a bit, but with price tags in the thousands, it felt like a shout out to wealthy West London media types and a bit off-putting to us shabby chic returnees and/or to locals who might have been hoping for enhanced community space for real people.
But go judge for yourselves if you are able – you can see Persona at The Riverside until 23 February 2020. We recommend it.
Almost certainly not the actual wheelchair involved in the story Stephen B Calvert Clariosophic [CC BY-SA (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0)]
What a story.
Athena Stevens, playwright and performer, was born with athetoid cerebral palsy.
And she is ballsy.
But in 2015 she suffered a devastating incident at the hands of British Airways, when the airline accepted her as a passenger on a plane that was too small for her motorised wheelchair, despite having been informed of the chair’s dimensions, causing Athena extreme humiliation and severe consequential harm. Worse yet, her wheelchair was destroyed in the incident.
This play, Scrounger, is a two-hander which makes light and dark in equal measure about this incident and its aftermath; a dramatised true story.
Athena Stevens starts the piece by “calling the audience out”, as she puts it in the playtext, reproaching us for our enlightened, left-leaningness.
It’s an interesting start.
Then she reproaches a “late-comer”, who the audience might be forgiven for taking at face value. Smug me, I realised this must be the other member of the cast, whereas Daisy, bless her, was taken in until the deceit was made obvious.
A rollercoaster piece ensues. The sense of injustice in the way that Athena was treated is palpable.
Yet, there is something about Athena’s immediate full-on social media and then media attack on BA which seemed, to me, counter productive.
I have only ever been driven to complain about relatively trivial or minor issues. I was reminded of my extensive correpsondence with Garuda Indonesia 25+ years ago:
My method in such circumstances, as indeed was Rohan’s in his rather Kafkaesque situation, is to threaten the faceless bureaucracy with public exposure of their jobsworthiness.
Athena Stevens, by contrast, went straight to the social media (and then the regular media), which I think was always likely to result in the unjust bureaucracy digging its heels in and taking its time over its responses.
Perhaps Athena’s is the modern way with social media and in any case I do sympathise with her very specific and difficult situation. But one part of her story, which adds to the darkness of it, is the way this matter caused a breakdown in her relationship with her boyfriend. She wanted to seek legal advice as well, whereas he wanted her to stick solely with the media campaign; he felt that going to the law was (I paraphrase) “too aggressive”.
My view, for what it is worth, is that a media camapaign is at least as aggressive, if not more so, than asserting formally that the other party has been negligent.
But as a piece of drama, the story unfolds wonderfully well, with some clever devices of deisgn and trickery along the way. Athena Stevens is a very good writer and she wrote this story with great gusto.
There are some great lines in the play. After her humiliation at Heathrow, BA Uber Athena (Scrounger) home.
I wanted the ride home to be quiet, but the driver turns on LBC.
There is no level of hell, which cannot sink further…with the addition of an LBC broadcast.
Athena Stevens’s performance is also something to behold, as indeed is the performance of Leigh Quinn, who played a plethora of other parts with great energy and skill.
Janie and I thought this a superb piece and a great start to our 2020 theatre-going. It’s been well received and quite widely reviewed. So you don’t need to take our words for it – click here for the reviews and stuff.
In many ways the play is in the tradition of dream plays, so it would be wrong to complain about the lack of plot and confusing switches. But this piece seemed, to me, so very disjointed, it was hard to get anything much out of the experience.
It is laudable that Eve Leigh and the Royal Court have tried to produce a piece that specific speaks to people with physical challenges, but the notion that the central male character was substituting internet experience for the physical experiences his body would not allow, really struggled to make that point through the material.
Janie really hated the piece.
I tried to go with the flow but couldn’t get anywhere with it.
It is only 70 minutes long, but it felt like so much longer.
We both had out own physical challenges by the end of the ordeal – those narrow arse-ache chairs had us John-Wayning out of the theatre.
We saw a preview, so there’s a chance that the piece has been tightened a little ahead of press night, but I doubt it.
The acting was excellent; Renee Bailey, Doreene Blackstock, Nneka Okoye and Aasiya Shah all top notch – Janie and I both agreed on that. We also both thought the play well directed by Danial Bailey and we both liked Amelia Jane Hankin’s minimal yet imaginative set.
Not sold out even on a Saturday night, which seemed a shame – the play runs until 7 December – a few weeks yet to run at the time of writing, so click on the image above or click here for ticket information.
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 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.
Possibly a little unfair, then, for me to watch a clip of Ingrid Bergman as Bella and then, a few minutes later, watch Jemima Murphy play the part live. Jemima’s own fault for sending me that link, I suppose.
I had only ever seen Gaslight in its movie forms before – there was also a 1940 British film version directed by Thorold Dickinson (Alfred Hitchcock didn’t make a Gaslight, although many a pundit thinks he did) – but Gaslight is probably more suited as a theatre work than as a film. In any case, Jemima Murphy in particular did well as Bella in the “intimate but not claustrophobic” setting of a 100-or-so seater theatre.
ALL PHOTOS BY WILLIAM WATERWORTH – Jordan Wallace as Jack and Jemima Murphy as Bella
Patrick Hamilton is, for me, a frustrating writer. His novels are intriguing, well-written and have become far better known latterly than during his lifetime, when they mostly flopped. He made his dosh from more crowd-pleasing, melodramatic fare for the theatre; not least Rope and Gaslight.
…yes, but I only Ogblogged it a couple of years ago.
But despite my low expectations from Patrick Hamilton as a playwright, First Floor’s production of Gaslight strangely worked for me.
I’m not sure if the script has been cut; I’m guessing that it has and quite rightly so, if the play was originally as long as most 1930s numb-bum-fests. But in any case the directing and acting focused well on the psychological elements of the play, leaving the melodrama and weak crime thriller plot mercifully in the background.
It is, after all, the psychological elements of this play that give it enduring relevance. Gaslighting has become a verb in psychological parlance, increasingly used to describe the several forms of domestic, mental abuse depicted in the piece and sadly all too common in our society.
Just imagine if the term Ogblogging were to become a verb? At least that would be positive rather than negative activity. I don’t think anyone has ever felt trolled by an Ogblog reference.
But I digress. Gaslight.
Rough justice? Jemima Murphy as Bella with Joe McArdle as Rough
Fine supporting work especially from Joe McArdle as Rough, Rebecca Ashley as Elizabeth and Grace Howard as Nancy. In truth Jordan Wallace seemed under-powered for his role as Jack in the first act; I suspect the young actor was very nervous at the start of press night. The slow start in the first act is not helped by the script, but it is quite a short act (there are four) and the piece warms up quite quickly. Jordan Wallace came into his own in the final act, during which his bullying became more sinister and…
***SPOILER ALERT***
…Jack’s comeuppance worked very well. The final act was far and away the highlight for me, with all of the performers well warmed up and neatly directed.
Writer and performer Sabrina Mahfouz pulls no punches in blaming colonial powers past and present for many of the Middle East’s woes. While taking care to avoid attacking particular Middle-Eastern peoples, her lens does therefore focus almost exclusively on colonial interests without considering the intra-Middle-Eastern proxy wars and conflicts that surely also play a major part in the multifarious problems in that region.
But it would be impossible to be historically comprehensive and profoundly nuanced in a 70 minute piece that also seeks to entertain as well as inform. This piece does both with aplomb.
Along with Sabrina Mahfouz, highly talented multi-instrumentalist musician/composer Kareem Samara, plus excellent performers Laura Hanna (who sings magnificently) and David Mumeni (who doesn’t), have pulled off a superb performance piece.
At one point Mumeni sings, karaoke-style, a Suez Canal version of Sweet Caroline that would have worked in NewsRevue had that show started in 1956 rather than 1979. Personally I’d have tidied up some of the scansion, but we’ll let that pass; I suspect the scansion deficiencies were deliberate, for effect. Laura Hanna’s operatic-style aria for an heroic female plumber in Jordan 30 years hence was also an absolute highlight for me.
But despite the fun aspects, the piece is also about that troubled region and impending crises. While campaigners of the Extinction Rebellion kind might be accused of exaggerating for effect, this piece points out, accurately, that Yemen is already one of the most profound humanitarian crises the world has ever seen and that is before that sorry nation runs out of water; an imminent disaster with little sign of any redress.
There was so much going on in this piece, Janie and I were both grateful for the playtext-style programme so we could/can read bits of the text on reflection and in discussion.
At the time of writing (the day after we saw the show), there are still some tickets available for the Royal Court run. Here is a link that finds reviews and the like. We hope this piece gets a transfer and thus a wider audience. It is intelligent, informative, entertaining and witty. We’d recommend this piece/production highly.
Playwright Hannah Khalil explains her thinking behind the piece here:
The following trailer explains little but does give a flavour of the atmospheric music and sensescape of the piece:
Janie and I loved the play/production and came away from the show buzzing from the quality of ideas, drama, sounds and emotions we experienced at The Swan.
Janie tends to dislike plays that overlap time periods (this play is set in 1926 and 2006) and mess with the linear telling of stories, not least because she often finds that confusing. But this one works so well and certainly worked for her, such that the overlapping of the two time-settings just added a little to the chaos of the situations being depicted, without interfering with the narrative line.
The production runs at The Swan for a few months before transferring to the Kiln in London. We have not yet been to the latter since its refurb, so wonder how well the piece will work there. It certainly worked wonderfully for us in the three-sided Swan setting. It certainly should appeal to Kiln audiences.
All of the acting was top notch, as was the design, sound and movement. Hard to single out performances, but Emma Fielding, Rendah Heywood and Rasoul Saghir were exceptional.
We were grateful to be staying just across the road in The Arden, as the heavens were in open mode that evening. We debriefed over a snack supper there. I believe I spotted Mark Ravenhill with his entourage, amongst the small number of people who decamped to the hotel after the show.
We loved A Museum In Baghdad – what else is there to say?
Caryl Churchill stuff is always challenging and a bit different…this production was no different…if you see what I mean.
As a collection of plays, the production touches on themes such as violence in our society, myths and the relentless desire to turn just about anything into a marketing opportunity. The final play, Imp, brings several of those themes together, subtly, in an understated, domestic chamber play.
Excellent cast, direction and design throughout. But the standout performances, for me, were the quartet in Imp: Deborah Findlay, Louisa Harland, Toby Jones and Tom Mothersdale.
Don’t think we’d have made it if we’d bussed it
We had terrible trouble getting to the Royal Court on time on this occasion – we really must allow more time in future. The journey seems to be taking longer by car now on a Saturday evening and we keep allowing less rather than more time. We arrived in the nick of time. Others didn’t. Our marriage has just about survived the hair-raising journey and the difference of opinion about the production. Just about.
