Tag: Dominic Kennedy

A History Of Water In The Middle East by Sabrina Mahfouz, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 19 October 2019

Bus outside The Royal Court, Sloane Square - geograph.org.uk - 1089253

Another day, another play, another “aftermath of Sykes-Picot” imaginative piece of theatre. Hot on the heels of our thoroughly entertaining evening at The Swan on Monday…

A Museum In Baghdad by Hannah Khalil, Royal Shakespeare Company, Swan Theatre, 14 October 2019

…this hugely entertaining and thought-provoking piece about the Middle East.

Here is a link to the Royal Court Theatre resources on A History Of Water In The Middle East.

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.

Out Of Love by Elinor Cook, Orange Tree Theatre, 27 January 2018

Another day, another excellent preview of a short play at the Orange Tree Theatre.

We saw Black Mountain the previous night – click here or below for that one:

Black Mountain by Brad Birch, Orange Tree Theatre, 26 January 2018

Out Of Love is the same cast, same creatives, but a different play in this rep season.

The acting was once again excellent. The set was the same – no props; just light and soundscape.

Here is a link to the Orange Tree resource for this play.

Janie and I had different views on the relative merits of the two pieces. Janie preferred this one, finding the tender emotional elements of it more gripping than the psychological thriller.

I was a little surprised that Janie warmed so much to this piece – she is usually very resistant to plays that leap backwards and forwards in time, complaining that they mess with her ability to follow the narrative line. She felt that the way the actors deployed their bodies and their voices made it very clear, most of the time, whether they were children, youngsters or adults.

I’m usually fine with temporal gymnastics, but this play had even me a bit confused right at the end, when the two female characters suddenly acquired names we’d never heard before and pregnancies…

…I heard several people wondering about that as we left the theatre…

…but about 15 minutes later, while washing my hands at Don Fernando before dinner, I worked out that the pregnant duo in the final scene must have been the mothers of the two female protagonists just before the main pair were born.

Below I have embedded the trailer:

Here is a link to a term that should pick up all the reviews – at the time of writing just reviews from previous venues as this piece is still in preview at the Orange Tree.

Going by the reviews, Janie is right and I am wrong – Out of Love seems to have gone down better on the whole with the reviewers.

 

Black Mountain by Brad Birch, Orange Tree Theatre, 26 January 2018

We thought this was a very good play/production indeed.

We have been very pleased with most of our visits to the Orange Tree since the dawn of the Paul Miller era; one of those excellent visits was a couple of years ago to see a Brad Birch play called The Brink – click here or below:

The Brink by Brad Birch, Orange Tree Theatre, 9 April 2016

That experience was good enough to have us looking out for Brad Birch, so we very much wanted to see Black Mountain…

…so much so that we decided to make a rare trip to Richmond on a Friday…

…indeed we shall repeat the visit today (the very next evening) to see Out Of Love; the other play being shown in rep with Black Mountain at the moment…

…we are looking forward to seeing the same cast and production team again, because Black Mountain was that good.

Here is a link to the Orange Tree resource on Black Mountain.

Very suspenseful, it reminded us a lot of The Brink, in that we see the psychological disintegration of one male character and at times cannot tell the extent to which the images and sounds we are hearing are supposed to be genuine or in his head.

But Black Mountain is also about relationships and guilt and whether trust can ever be restored fully after a major breach.

Great trailer – embedded below:

I suspect that the Orange Tree’s success with these modern plays owes a great deal to the spirit of collaboration; in this case with Paines Plough and Theatr Clwyd. Long may that spirit continue.

Here is a link to the reviews Black Mountain has had – it seems to have divided the critics with some excellent reviews and some indifferent ones. None of these at the time of writing are from this Orange Tree production (which is still in preview), although I suspect that this piece is already quite well honed over the autumn by this production team.

Janie and I vote it a hit.

Ramona Tells Jim by Sophie Wu, Bush Studio, 14 October 2017

This is the third time we have been to the new Bush Studio and the third time we have been thrilled by the results there. From our point of view, this is akin to the wonders of the Hampstead Downstairs as a source of top notch fringe theatre.

Click here for a link to the Bush’s on-line resource for the Ramona Tells Jim play/production.

Spanning 15 years, the play depicts the fumbling, youthful love between Ramona and Jim as teenagers, as well as the lingering aftermath of those fleeting but life-changing events.

Here is an embedded trailer for the production, which shows snippets of the junior scenes:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zQzStt77Cg4

The playwright, Sophie Wu, is a new name to us. Apparently she is more TV and film actress  than playwright at this stage of her career. We’ll certainly be looking out for her plays again. Ramona Tells Jim is a charming, short piece – very impressive as an early effort.

This search term – click here – digs out plenty of reviews. In truth the reviews speak more highly of the production than the play, claiming some lack of depth and/or plausibility in the latter. But what do the reviewers know? We thought this was 80-90 minutes of high quality, thought-provoking, dark comedy.

Extremely well acted and directed too; the reviewers certainly agree with us on that. Director Mel Hillyard wowed us as recently as March with Scarlett at the Hampstead Dowstairs and also last year with the Brink at the Orange Tree. She is certainly a director to watch.

We had also seen Ruby Bentall before, although I had to look this up to recall where; in DNA and The Miracle at the Cottesloe yonks ago. All of the performers were very good indeed.

The audience had their moments on the night we attended. The Bush was very quiet that evening, as the next production in the main house (Of Kith and Kin – we’re going to that in a couple of week’s time) has not yet opened. Just before the doors were due to open (15 minutes before scheduled the start of the play), two members of staff went through and locked the door behind them. One couple, seeing people go in, went running up to the door and banged on it fervently, thinking that they had missed the start of the show, perhaps unused to 19:45 start times for the new studio rather than 19:30 in the main house.

“We must be the most stupid people on earth”, said the door-banging chap as the couple joined the rest of us in a sedate drinking/milling around mode for a few more minutes.

Actually, the most stupid people on earth award for the evening might go to the woman next to me who left her mobile phone on, noisily pinging through texts and e-mails during the 1998 scenes – very incongruous noise – until she realised the problem was her, at which point she tried to rectify the problem discreetly, hoping no-one would notice that it was her. Plenty of people noticed, love.

Next up for a stupid award was the woman who insisted on rattling her voluminous drink ice around in her glass like a teenager noisily munching popcorn in the cinema, then later cackling like a hyena at the fumbling sex scene which was surely whimsical pathos humour rather than guffaw humour to anyone old enough to know better, which this woman surely was.

Crumbs, the above paragraphs infer that we had an irritating evening but we really didn’t – we came home truly delighted with the play and the production. We had a light supper of salami and cream cheese baguettes with some salad stuff, washed down with a very jolly Dão red.

Highly commended by both me and Janie – we’ll be looking out again for the talent that was on show – writing, directing, producing and acting.