Tag: Arthur Carrington

Royal Courts And Good Houses In Renaissance Italy & Sloane Square, Not Least: A Good House by Amy Jephta, Royal Court Theatre, 11 January 2025

The worlds of tennis and theatre were intertwined for several centuries from the Renaissance onwards. I describe these connections in some detail, in the context of late Renaissance England, in the performance piece I wrote for The Gresham Society event at Hampton Court in the summer of 2023:

Hampton Court, Tennis, Gresham, Music & Drama

And there is surely no-one in the world who knows more about late medieval tennis and theatre than Cees de Bondt, who wrote THE book about tennis in Renaissance Italy, including a whole chapter entitled Tennis Courts Used As Theatres.

So, when Chris Bray, the senior real tennis professional at Lord’s, told me in early December that Cees de Bondt would be visiting in early January, that Chris thought we’d have a lot of shared interest in Renaissance tennis to discuss, and asked whether I would like to join them for lunch, I said:

yes please.

Then I got one of my attacks of imposter syndrome. I thought, I’d better mug up on the subject of tennis in Renaissance Italy, so I ordered a copy of Cees’s book, and, ahead of its arrival, arranged an appointment with the MCC library copy of said book.

My copy arrived during Twixtmas. I was just over half way through the book come the appointed day for the lunch, 9 January. I brought my copy with me for Cees to sign. I even remembered to bring a pen with me for the signing, which is more than can be said for my own first ever book signing:

My First Ever Book Signing, Clean Business Cuisine (the book), Actors’ Workshop Halifax (the venue), Yet Something Was Missing, 5 July 2000

But I digress.

A Good Lunch, Lord’s Tavern, 9 January 2025

Cees and Chris Bray go back several decades, to 1986 to be precise, when Cees and the Dutch Real Tennis Association had their first real encounter with real tennis. It was very kind of Chris to invite me to join them for lunch. Also at lunch was Cees’s charming travelling companion, Lenne Van Leusden, who is studying English and Theatre at University.

I told Cees that I had quite a few questions for him about Renaissance tennis in Italy.

That’s OK, I have a few questions for you too,

said Cees, before answering my questions very thoughtfully and engaging in lots of interesting discussion about real tennis, past present and future.

Some of Cees (and Leene’s) questions, to me, were about theatre, not least because they were keen to find some good serious, perhaps fringe, theatre to see that weekend.

Rather short notice, I thought, but I skimmed through the listings with them pointing out one or two possibilities, before mentioning A Good House at the Royal Court, as Janie and I would be going to that one on Saturday evening.

As luck would have it, there was a pair of good seats available for that evening (returns I should imagine given the dearth of seats left for that night), which Chris Bray helped them to snap up after our lunch and the mini-tour of Lord’s upon which I hastily took the visitors.

Lord’s Pavilion (top) & Villa D’Este (bottom) – A Good House brings good fortune, eh?

Janie and I arranged to meet Cees and Lenne for a drink before the play at The Royal Court, which was a lovely opportunity to continue our conversations, a little more in the modern theatre context than the medieval tennis context this time, and for Janie to meet these good people.

A Good House, Royal Court Theatre, 11 January 2025

We loved this play/production. By we, I am sure I can add Cees and Leene to the votes of me and Janie. We saw the first preview and/but the production was very slick and the play seemed to work extremely well, so we imagine we saw the production pretty much as it will run.

Amy Jephta is a South African playwright and this piece is very much a modern South African play. It is a co-production with the Bristol Old Vic and The Market Theatre Johannesburg, the piece having been commissioned jointly by The Royal Court and The Fugard Theatre.

Here is a link to the Royal Court rubric for the play/production.

While the piece is firmly rooted in a South African style middle-class suburban community, the issues with which the piece grapples: community, identity, race, class and the fear of invasion from the outside…

…all seemed to be very relevant and topical issues to Western societies, indeed the whole world today.

The play was funny (mostly but not only “comedy of embarrassment”), dramatic, sad and thought-provoking. The acting throughout was excellent. Stand out performances, for me, were Sifiso Mazibuko and Mimî M Khayisa, who played Sihle and Bonolo respectively, but all four other performers, Kai Luke Brummer, Olivia Darnley, Robyn Rainsford & Scott Sparrow performed their parts very well.

Nancy Medina is proving to be a very reliable director – Janie and I saw her production of Strange Fruit at The Bush before the pandemic and were similarly impressed.

This production runs only until 8 February, so I would suggest that interested readers book early to avoid disappointment, as we’ll be most surprised if the formal reviews after press night on 17 January don’t lead to a rush to snap up the remaining seats.

Once reviews are out, click here to see them.

Anyway, that’s what Janie and I call a good start to the “going out year”.

Brace Brace by Oli Forsyth, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 26 October 2024

Janie and I were really taken with this one.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resources on this play/production. The advance description pretty much tells you all you need to know/ought to know before you see the play.

We didn’t see any reviews of the play/production before we went. Here is a link that should find most/all of the reviews.

The piece seems to have divided the critics/reviewers. The conventional press focuses on valid criticism that some elements of the plot seem unconvincing. It is hard to imagine a hijacker, who, only by dint of a passenger intervention, fails to kill hundreds of people in a plane crash, being allowed to walk free on the grounds of diminished responsibility.

But we saw through that to enjoy the dilemmas and interpersonal drama between the honeymooners whose life was ripped apart by the incident.

Oli Forsyth clearly has talent as a writer and should persevere; I’m sure there should be better yet to come from him.

But our praise is really for the production. Excellent acting, especially Anjana Vasan as the “have a go hero”, but also Phil Dunster and Craig Els. Also hats off to the production team, in particular director Daniel Raggett, who certainly helped get a quart of entertaining drama out of this pint-sized (70 minutes) play. Big ups also to Alex Payne & George Mann (fight and movement directors respectively), who managed to achieve some excellent effects in an unusually tight and three-dimensional performance setting.

Yes, there is violence in this play, but it isn’t gratuitous violence, as it is central to the story and the unfolding plot. Janie, who is even more allergic to stage violence than I am, didn’t spot the essence of the coup de théâtre at the end of the play…possibly just as well, given her reaction when I explained it to her afterwards. 😜.

Running only until 9 November 2024. It deserves a longer run or a transfer.

Giant by Mark Rosenblatt, Royal Court Theatre, 21 September 2024

Roald Dahl‘s books and stories were a significant part of my life as a child and teenager growing up in the 1970s. Dahl’s widely publicised anti-Semitic remarks in the early 1980s shocked me at the time.

Giant is about Dahl and those remarks, set during an imagined afternoon at Dahl’s Great Missenden house in 1983.

I grabbed a couple of “first Saturday preview” seats for this one as soon as tickets became available for Royal Court members. I am glad that I did.

Mark Rosenblatt surely wrote most if not all of the play before the events of 7 October 2023 and for sure no-one knew that the Israeli Defence Forces would be bombing Beirut a couple of days before the first Royal Court preview. The play seemed extraordinarily topical, even though that topicality was inadvertent.

It is a very well-written play, depicting Dahl as a charismatic yet monstrous character. An extremely eloquent disruptor, who would use the power of his words and status to charm or bully as he saw fit. Everything I had read about Dahl suggest to me that the character was well researched and brilliantly depicted by John Lithgow, who is clearly a top draw stage actor.

Other real people from Dahl’s world were depicted: Felicity “Liccy” Crossland whom Dahl married soon after his public anti-Semitism row, and Tom Maschler, who was head of Jonathan Cape, Dahl’s publisher.

Into this mix, Rosenblatt throws a fictional character, Jessie Stone, who works for Dahl’s US publisher. Unlike Tom Maschler, who seems (or at least purports) to be able to manage Dahl’s wonky characteristics, the Stone character confronts Dahl directly with her concerns about his remarks, with predictably scary results.

Wondering whether anyone in the audience can tell that I am “one of them”.

There were some similarities between this play and the wonderful David Edgar play, Here In America, which we saw (also in preview) at The Orange Tree last week:

Here In America by David Edgar, Orange Tree Theatre, 14 September 2024

Although the moral dilemmas in the two plays are different in nature (do you grass on your old mates to protect your career? Do you apologise for things you said even if you did really mean them?), both plays are based around true characters and real events and both plays are structured around a visit to the home of the maligned protagonist.

Janie enjoyed both plays/productions but preferred Here In America to Giant, primarily because she found the moral dilemma more paradoxical. By the end of Giant, Janie was convinced that Roald Dahl was a ghastly character with scarily racist views.

I found the arguments suitably nuanced in both plays and enjoyed both for their excellent acting and production, as well as the quality of the writing/drama.

However, I did sense that Here In America diverged from the historical reality of its situation less than Giant.

In Giant, the conceit of the play suggests that Dahl might have made his most outrageously and blatantly anti-Semitic comments as a result of being cornered by his publishers and fiancée on a single afternoon. In reality, Dahl made many such comments in several interviews/conversations over an extended period of time. Dramatic licence, I accept, but it made Giant, for me, a little less convincing as a dramatic whole.

There are some terrific speeches and lines in the play. Janie and I are glad we bought the play text so we might refer back to some of those. Romola Garai was excellent as Jessie Stone; her speech at the end of the first half of the play was a coup de theatre.

Elliot Levey’s performance as Tom Maschler also stood out. Several of his lines, explaining how you can be an overtly English Jew without obsessing about Israel and while feeling more English than anything else, certainly resonated with me. As did his speech about not feeling the need to apologise for the actions of the Government of a country in which he held neither nationality nor residency. And as did Maschler’s speech about low-level anti-Semitic remarks and sneers being essentially harmless and part of the price for being a Jew in England at that time.

I was very much reminded, by this play, about my own strange experience, around the time the play was set, with an overt anti-Semite, Don Knipe, who, in his terms, obviously didn’t mean people like me and my family, whom he loved…he meant all the other Jews.

Strange Case Of Dr Green And Mr Knipe…And Beluga Caviar And Scotch Whisky And A Bust Of Hitler, c22 December 1981

Indeed that experience is so strange, I realise, on reflection, that Don could easily have been a Roald Dahl short story character. Click the above link if you dare. But I digress.

There was a lot to think about in the play Giant and we’ll go on thinking about it for some time, no doubt.

The short Royal Court run (to 16 November 2024) is already all-but sold out, but surely this excellent play/production is lining up for transfers; both sides of the Atlantic, no doubt.

Echo (Every Cold-Hearted Oxygen) by Nassim Soleimanpour, Royal Court Theatre, 19 July 2024

To the Royal Court Theatre on a Friday evening. “Why Friday?”, I hear you cry. Because the Royal Court is now, in its wisdom, starting Saturday shows at 6:30, which is a bit early for us in the summer months, when we like to take advantage of the outdoors in daylight.

We fancied this, as we had seen one of Nassim’s previous works, the eponymous one…

Nassim by Nassim Soleimanpour, Bush Studio, 29 July 2017

…and loved it.

This sounded a bit more techie but a similar idea.

That’s exactly what it was.

When we booked it we had no idea who we were going to see. We discovered a week or so before our evening that our performer was to be Rebecca Lucy Taylor aka Self Esteem.

This is what she looks like when she does one of her more regular things – singing contemporary music:

It is hard to review a piece like this because I imagine every performer stamps their own mark on the piece – that is sort-of the idea. But certainly the evening we spent at The Royal Court was a gripping 80-90 minutes of theatre, using multi-media the way theatre can use multi-media best. It added to the live performance rather than making me wonder whether we should simply be at home watching a film.

Here is a link to the Royal Court resource on this piece, including a list of other performers involved.

It seems to have had mixed reviews, but then different reviewers saw different performers respond to the piece in different ways. Here’s a link to reviews.

We found it moving and thought-provoking. We’re very glad we went and we’re very glad we saw Self Esteem. We could have done without the screaming groupies, but you can’t have everything…or rather you can’t omit everything that you don’t want.