This was an interesting and enjoyable visit to the Finborough, albeit not the most drama-strewn visit we have ever made to that place.
Beryl Cook is an interesting character in that she found art later in life and lacked both the inhibitions of her generation and the pretentions of her chosen field. But she basically led a conventional provincial middle-class life that lacked drama. The play is therefore a collection of Beryl Cook’s own comments and things said about her in interviews. Interesting, but not dramatic.
The thing that makes this performance piece unusual is that Kara Wilson, in the persona of Beryl Cook, paints an artwork during the hour of the show. That aspect was truly fascinating.
As we understand it, The Finborough arranged this run with Kara Wilson at relatively short notice, when the theatre’s autumn plans went awry.
This engaging theatrical work enjoyed a successful run at Edinburgh – many of the formal reviews you might find about it relate to that run, although several are now emerging from The Finborough run too. Click here for reviews.
We also enjoyed the discussion afterwards.
Don’t you find it difficult to perform a solo play and paint at the same time for an hour?
…asked Janie, which I imagine was a question that had passed through everyone’s mind, but no-one had yet asked the question.
There’s something gloriously quaint about the Finborough Theatre. Even by the standards of pub theatres, it seems gloriously wedded to the past.
In part, that’s because The Finborough is, at least at present, a few rooms above a corner building that used to be a pub, rather than an actual functioning pub.
But also, it is the sort of place that clings to its roots, even in the matter of archaic ticketing practices. These days we receive, when booking The Finborough, a very modern style e-mail ticketing with a QR code for each e-ticket. On arrival at The Finborough, though, the ticket office still asks for your name and digs out the old-style paper tickets, just like the old days.
Don’t you have a gadget that goes beep and reads our e-tickets?
I asked the nice young woman on the desk.
Do we look like the sort of place that has a gadget that goes beep to read tickets?
She asked in repsonse.
Not really. Except that you did send us -tickets with QR codes on them.
I persisted.
We have no idea why they do that.
The nice young woman thus closed that discussion.
Anyway…
…the reason we go to the Finborough is not to admire the ticketing system. We tend to see consistently good small-scale theatre there.
Jab was no exception. A very good two-hander set during the Covid-19 pandemic, about a marriage that disintegrates during the crisis…although you sense that the marriage had been doing a fair bit of disintegrating prior to the pandemic.
Very well acted and directed. Kacey Ainsworth, Liam Tobin & Scott Le Crass take a bow…well, the first two named actually did.
Just 80 minutes long, if you like your shows two hours plus this type of play is not for you. Janie and I have really acquired the taste for shorter plays. Never mind the young folk having short attention spans, we older folk have short buttocks-stuck-in-one-small-space spans these days.
We went home thoroughly satisfied, theatre-wise. After collecting and then, once home, eating our Mohsen dinner, our appetites for food were also thoroughly satisfied.
Janie loved this piece. In truth, I found it a little mawkish.
The short scenes only occasionally allowed enough space for the emotional impact to flourish.
Lights out theatre?
To be fair, the piece did “exactly what it says on the tin”, in terms of cataloguing the deaths that enter the orbit of one character, Graciela, throughout her life.
Being The Finborough, of course it was all very well acted and extremely well produced, within the limitations of one of the most pint-sized theatres above a pub anywhere.
Let us not forget that The Finborough won “Pub Theatre of the Year 2022” despite there not being an actual pub below then or indeed now.
All the cast were very good, but Vivia Font stood out in the lead role, morphing from tantrum-ready nipper to accepting oldster via all the stages of life in between.
There was a Q&A with the playwright and cast afterwards, but we didn’t stay for it, hungry for a Persian meal that we would not be able to procure after the Q&A.
On exit, we ran into one of my real tennis friends, Tony Joyce, and his good lady. I thought this was quite a coincidence, especially as they are not regular Finborough-istas – indeed they were trying the place for the first time. Tony agreed, not least because, as he said:
…we two couples made up nearly a quarter of the audience.
Slight exaggeration that – I think the place has room for 40 or so people each performance, but still.
Our first visit back to The Finborough Theatre since the pandemic. Coincidentally, our previous visit was our last visit to any theatre before the pandemic, and that piece was also at least partly about Israel:
Since that 2020 visit, The Finborough has been awarded a coveted Pub Theatre Of the Years Award 2022, which is quite something…
…especially as The Finborough currently has no pub. But that’s not important to us, as we were always “only there for the theatre”, not “only here for the beer”.
Janie and I were both very taken with The Retreat. It is set in 1993, in the shadow of the Oslo Peace Accords, although the play is set in Canada, pitting a Hebrew School teacher/would-be script writer with a pair of seasoned but warring (with each other) film makers.
If the play errs at all, it is a bit long, running to nearly two-and-a-half hours. Ironic, really, given that the central conceit of the play is about script editing. But that space gives room for the characters to develop and for the darker recesses of their behaviours to become apparent to the audience.
Janie and I thought all four cast members performed very well but were especially taken with Jill Winternitz as the somewhat vulnerable young woman and Jonathan Tafler as her father.
We’re back at The Finborough in a few week’s time to see the next thing and can hardly wait after enjoying this production. We’d almost forgotten how much we like this type of small-scale intimate drama.
Read all about it on the Finborough site by clicking this image.
Janie and I really enjoyed this evening at the Finborough. We do like that place; it consistently puts on good stuff in a small space. Not Quite Jerusalem is no exception; indeed one of the best things we’ve seen at the Finborough and one of the best things we’ve seen this year.
I was looking out for this Finborough slot late in 2019, when I met the director, Peter Kavanagh at Gaslight.
This production is well cast, with each of the characters playing their role well. Joe McArdle, as the chavvy Yorkshire lad, shows his versatility as an actor; he was the “big reveal detective” in Gaslight – a very different role. Russell Bentley and Alisa Joy both did well as the sabra Israelis; prickly and softening believably and with credible accents too. Ryan Whittle, Miranda Braun and Ronnie York were all suitably irritating as the bright drifter, the damaged female and the uber-chavvy lad from Harlow, respectively.
I had been looking forward to discussing the Harlow chav with John White – he of Harlow- the next day, but our meet up with John and Mandy was cancelled for Covid-19 reasons.
But I digress.
Not Quite Jerusalem is not a great play, but there are lots of interesting elements in it and it hangs together very well as a story. Peter Kavanagh’s production is a thoroughly entertaining evening in the theatre.
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.
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.
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.
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.
“My bad”, as the young folks say, choosing this one.
These days, I usually avoid plays written in the “between the wars” period; there’s something about them stylistically that tends to grate on me and especially on Janie.
This one, by Robert Graves, never previously performed, seemed like such interesting subject matter for its time, from such a fine writer, I thought we might be in for a winner.
It’s probably not the best idea for me and Janie to go to longer, wordy plays on a Friday evening, even at the best of times. But this was at the end of a hot and steamy week…
…a very wordy play with a disproportionately long first “half”…
…I thought the play might usefully be renamed “But It Still Goes On And On And On”…
…we ducked out at the interval and retreated to Noddyland via Mohsen.
To be fair, there was quite a lot to like about the production, as is usually the case at the Finborough. The cast were very good and the production tried to invoke a 1920s atmosphere pretty well, given the limited space and resources available in a room above above a pub; albeit one of the very best pub theatres on the planet.
It was the play that proved to be a let down for us. Hugely stereotypical characters; angst of the spoilt brat variety amongst the privileged classes…
…yes, of course we did feel sympathy with the characters who had suffered in the Great War and those who were struggling with their necessarily suppressed (in that era) feelings of various sexuality. But by gosh was it laid on with a wordy trowel and some ludicrous sub-plots.
It reminded me a bit of The Pains Of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner; an Austrian existential angst play from the same era which, several years ago, also had us out of the theatre early, missing the rather inevitable tragic ending:
Further, I don’t think Robert Graves was a natural for play-writing and although the probable reason that the play was originally hidden/unperformed for many decades was its overt references to sexuality, I’d suggest that one of the other reasons was that those who commissioned it and others who subsequently looked at it decided that the play was not much good.
Given the subject matter, the play is, of course, an interesting curiosity in our modern era and I can see why the Finborough decided to produce it.
The acting was very good on the whole; Alan Cox played the lead role; his daddy Brian Cox (the actor, not the pop-scientist) was in the audience to watch him the night we were there.
We’re still fans of the Finborough; we just didn’t like this play.
