Tag: Finborough Theatre

Masterpieces by Sarah Daniels, Finborough Theatre, 28 April 2018

I’d been keen to see this one. I remembered reading it “back in the day” and had wondered how it might work as a performance piece.

In truth, it didn’t work for either of us.

Here is a link to the Finborough’s resource on Masterpieces.

The subject matter of the play is fascinating; pornography, the objectification of women, violence against women and how all those things might interrelate. But, to me, the play fails to develop characters and plot sufficiently to make the audience care about the drama; only about the issues.

Janie thought that maybe it was the production that was a bit stilted rather than the play. Hard to tell.

Perhaps we were a little jaded because we were both tired after a longish day at a tennis match…

A Week Dominated By Intense Middlesex v MCC Contests, 24, 27 & 28 April 2018

…but then again, I played the same fixture the previous year, after which we saw and loved The Ferryman at the Royal Court:

The Ferryman by Jez Butterworth, Royal Court Theatre, 29 April 2017

A little unfair, perhaps, to compare a Finborough production with a Royal Court one, but the point is we do have the stamina for long days and long plays if/when the quality is high enough.

Returning to Masterpieces, I can understand why it seemed timely to revive the play, given the topicality of its issues in a subtly different context 35 years on. But as a play, it seemed very old-fashioned to me and the style in which the Finborough directed and produced this play very much locked it in as an 80s period piece, which (for me) was a mistake.

We rarely walk at half time, but on this occasion, tired and cognisant that the second half contains gruelling material, we did walk.

I believe this production is getting mixed reviews at the time of writing, so you don’t need to take our word for it – click here and skim the various reviews. Indeed, the piece has c3 weeks still to run at the time of writing, so you can go judge for yourselves.

On the matter of Sarah Daniels writing style, I cannot find an extract from Masterpieces but here is a short monologue from The Gut Girls which gives you a feel for the style:

Anyway, we have seen far more hits than misses at the Finborough, so we remain fans of that super place.

White Guy On The Bus by Bruce Graham, Finborough Theatre, 6 April 2018

We’ve mostly been very impressed by the stuff we’ve seen at the Finborough Theatre. We started trying the Finborough less than a year ago and this piece, White Guy On The Bus, was our tenth visit in that short time. Again we were most impressed.

We thought we must have seen US playwright Bruce Graham’s work before, until we realised that we were both probably making an amalgam of Bruce Norris and James Graham. The best of those two would make a pretty formidable amalgam as it happens and Bruce Graham’s piece, while perhaps lacking some of the flair of either of his semi-namesakes, was an excellent piece of writing.

Add to that Finborough’s ability to assemble a quality team of actors and creatives to pull together a low budget production that punches well above its weight…

…this was a very good evening of fringe theatre.

The themes of racial tensions, social inequality and political correctness seemed absolutely pertinent for our times. In truth the play is a bit of a slow starter, but by the interval we found ourselves hooked on a thriller with lots of issues and by the end we felt thoroughly entertained and thought-provoked. Two hours well spent.

Click here for a link to the Finborough on-line resource for this play/production. It includes some press quotes from the original production(s) of this piece in the USA – the Finborough production is a European premier.

Below is a trailer from one of the US productions – Curious Theatre Company:

Below is an extract from another of the US productions – Northlight Theatre – which gives a better feel for how the play comes across on a small stage:

Click here for a link to reviews and other stuff connected with the Finborough production, which has mostly been very well received so far.

Other memorable moments from the evening:

  • as Janie and I we were walking up the stairs to the theatre, the man in front of me turned around and said “hello Ian” – it was Kim Ridge. I wondered out loud whether Kim and Catherine were regulars at the Finborough, but it turned out that they were there quite by happenstance having decided to give the place a try for the first time;
  • after the show, “The Ridges” disappeared rapidly, but Janie and I stuck around and chatted briefly with a very nice Canadian lady who had been sitting next to us. It turns out she goes to many of the fringe places we go to – I didn’t recognise her face but suspect we’ll run into her again. Next to her was a really pleasant young woman who also chatted with us about the play. It was that sort of theatre experience for us – we wanted to talk about the issues afterwards;
  • a yummy meal in Noddyland taken away from Mohsen’s – Janie and I continued to mull the issues over dinner.

A really good evening.

Death Of A Hunter by Rolf Hochhuth, Finborough Theatre, 1 April 2018

After our wonderful experience at the Almeida the night before seeing Summer And Smoke…

Summer And Smoke by Tennessee Williams, Almeida Theatre, 31 March 2018

…we thought Death Of A Hunter might be a bit of an anti-climax.

In fact, it rounded off our weekend of theatre rather well. Naturally this is not in the same production league as the Almeida’s production. But this interesting one hour play about the last hour of Ernest Hemmingway’s life, superbly acted by Edmund Dehn, is basically everything we hope for when we go to small scale theatre such as the Finborough.

Here is a link to the Finborough’s resource on this production.

Below is a trailer:

https://youtu.be/faUiOE2QTd4

We went to the first night, so no formal reviews yet. Previews and (to the extent that they will appear) reviews can be/will be found through this link – click here.

We rated this piece and the performance very highly. If you are available one of the nights it is showing, we’d recommend that you grab a ticket now before it sells out.

Checkpoint Chana by Jeff Page, Finborough Theatre, 11 March 2018

After our excellent experience seeing Returning To Haifa on Friday…

Returning To Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, Finborough Theatre, 9 March 2018

…we were really looking forward to the other piece running concurrently at the Finborough, Checkpoint Chana, but we found it comparatively disappointing.

Finborough Theatre, near Earl's Court, London

The topic is interesting – an academic/poet accused of making anti-Semitic references in one of her poems. But as a play it really didn’t work. The poet is also meant to be a soak – so there’s a lot of soak-laden drama involved, which tends to leave us cold.

There’s a lot of telling rather than showing in this play – which tilts it towards melodrama.

I thought it was almost a good short play, but could have done with a heavy prune/edit/revision. Janie really didn’t like it and thought the whole thing beyond redemption.

Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

A search term that finds the reviews – mostly middling – can be found here.

Returning To Haifa by Ghassan Kanafani, Finborough Theatre, 9 March 2018

Janie and I rated this piece and production very highly.

I’m not usually a big fan of adapting cerebral novels into plays, but Ismail Khalidi and Naomi Wallace have done a superb job with this one.

Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

Not without controversy – it was originally set to be performed in New York and then withdrawn under political pressure.

It is controversial material from a controversial author. The piece is the story of a  Palestinian couple returning to Haifa in 1967, some 20 years after abandoning their home and (inadvertently) their infant child in that city.

Here is a short vid about Kanafani and this play – basically it was the fundraising vid for the production:

Kanafani was clearly a serious intellect who could see the Israeli/Palestinian debate from both sides. There is nuance in this piece which is rarely seen in dramatic material on this subject.

It reminded me of a piece Janie and I saw nearly 20 years ago at the Tricycle, The Gardens Of Habustan – click here or below:

The Garden Of Habustan by Rebecca Wolman, Tricycle Theatre, 27 April 1999

It took me a while to identify the name and author of that play, despite the fact that it was written and directed by my old friend Rebecca Wolman. Weird – I remembered that play so clearly and I separately of course remembered going to see Rebecca’s play in 1999 and getting a chance to see her again briefly after so many years, but I hadn’t connected the two until I dug out my old archives. But I digress.

Rebecca’s play, similarly nuanced, used the fertility of the gardens as an allegory for the impotence of the displaced Palestinians. Kanafani’s piece uses the abandoned child as that symbol.

Both plays I believe contain sufficient insight to make strong arguments for a  peaceful resolution, but whereas Wolman’s piece is firmly oriented towards peace, Kanafani’s protagonist, Said, suggests that only fighting could resolve the conflict, even if that results in brother fighting brother. Kanafani’s own political career and life sadly went in the violent direction, although there is evidence that he renounced violence (certainly of the indiscriminate kind) shortly before he was assassinated.

Kanafani
Click this link to find reviews, most of which are very good.

A humorous aside – the play was performed in the round at the Finborough, with the audience seated on benches. The usherette (who admitted it was her first day) told us all that we needed to sit five to a bench as the show was sold out. I think she meant that some of the benches seated five people and that those would need to accommodate five people – some of the benches (ours for example) were quite modestly sized even for four people.

The result was a fair bit of jostling for position before the play started. I wondered briefly whether the mistake was deliberate, to get the audience into a “there’s not enough space for all these people…how do we resolve this?” frame of mind. But in truth I think it was just an honest mistake. It soon became clear that common sense could prevail and that, as long as four people sat on the four-seaters and five people sat on the five-seaters, there was enough room for everyone. If only the Israeli/Palestinian problem could be solved so easily.

Returning To Haifa is a fascinating play, extremely well acted and produced – it deserves a much larger audience than a short run at the Finborough will provide for it, which is a shame. I do hope it gets a transfer on the back of its success.

Booby’s Bay by Henry Darke, Finborough Theatre, 9 February 2018

Oh dear.

We found this one a real dud. Both the play and the production.

The subject matter really interested us. The housing crisis and the notion of a protester taking on the establishment…

…but this play missed the mark for us in so many ways. The protester was not only a flawed hero (that’s a good idea for such a play) but is in many ways a shirking beneficiary of the housing crisis. It is hard to buy into the conceit of a play when you find the moral hero at the core quite so conflicted and irritating.

Click here or image below for a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

The production had ideas beyond its ability to deliver too, with several long interludes of singing and movement that were almost embarrassing in their amateurishness. Janie struggled (failed) to avoid laughing in inappropriate places at times – the good news being that those were such noisy times, few if any other people would have noticed.

Another scene that really didn’t work for us…let’s call it the shark scene…had us laughing at the artlessness of the performance rather than at the material itself, which was meant to be comedic, but not in that way.

The good news for us was that we were both in a pretty relaxed mood on that Friday evening; this lemon of a play/production was so poor it almost entertained us to share that sorry experience and chat about it afterwards. Had we been in a stressy-end-of-the-week mood, having rushed to get to the theatre on time, we might have been far less amused.

Also, as we were just around the corner from Mohsen, we had a very tasty Persian meal to look forward to and then enjoy in Noddyland after the show.

Here is a link to the reviews, which have not been brilliant although some have been much kinder than ours.

We really do think it is a shame that this one was such a flop for us. We’re becoming very fond of the Finborough and we also both think that the subject matter – the housing and inequality crisis in our society, is a very relevant topic for theatrical treatment at the moment. Just not this play/production.

Here is a link to the trailer:

BOOBY’S BAY Trailer 1 from Henry Darke on Vimeo.

The Melting Pot by Israel Zangwill, Finborough Theatre, 3 December 2017

This was a very interesting Sunday evening at the Finborough.

Here is a link to the Finborough resource on this play/production.

The playwright, Israel Zangwill, sounds like a fascinating character in his own right. To some extent the story in the play mirrors his story, although the play is set in New York, not Zangwill’s native London. Also, the play’s young hero is a composer, rather than an author.

The young hero of the play, David, is a refugee survivor of the Kishinev (Chișinău) pogrom, inspired to compose music to celebrate the cultural melting pot he finds in New York. He falls in love with a beautiful Russian Christian radical who is running a settlement house in New York and who turns out to be the daughter of an anti-semitic Baron from Bessarabia. How culpable is the Baron for the pogrom that took place on his watch? And how is the young love going to go down with him and with David’s traditionally orthodox but loving kin?

If that all sounds a bit melodramatic to your taste, I can understand the sentiment. Yet somehow Zangwill manages to avoid those excesses, at least in the hands of this Bitter Pill/NeilMcPherson/Finborough production. The play isn’t quite Ibsen, but it is even less like a melodramatic Yiddish Theatre monstrosity.

Indeed the play seems hugely pertinent today, with many minorities being persecuted across the globe still, plus swathes of refugees and migrants on the move. Zangwill includes both sides of the assimilation (or perhaps I should say acculturation) and ethnic tolerance argument, although you are left in no doubt that you have been in the hands of a liberal enthusiast of the melting pot.

Grandpa Lew, sitting, with his musician brother, Great Uncle Max, standing

Of course I cannot help this piece bringing to mind my own family – in particular my mother’s musical family, who came to London from the Pale of Settlement in the early 1890s.

I wondered briefly whether Israel Zingwall might have taught my Grandpa Lew at the Jews’ Free School, as the programme says that Zingwall taught there, but a little on-line research indicates that Zingwall quit teaching at that school a few years before Grandpa Lew made his fleeting appearances there (between periods of survival-oriented child labour truancy).

Returning to the Finborough in December 2017, the place was deservedly full on a cold, wet Sunday evening. In the bar and audience we saw Michael Billington, with Mrs B making a (now rare/occasional) appearance at the theatre. The Billington’s dedication to high-quality fringe theatre over the decades is exceptional.

Reviews, if/when they appear, should be covered by this search term – click here.

Janie and I highly recommend this production.

Dolphins And Sharks by James Anthony Tyler, Finborough Theatre, 24 September 2017

Interesting play this, an award-winner from New York, getting its first airing in Europe at the Finborough.

The Finborough on-line resource describes the play and production well – here.

It is a comedy and it is a funny play, yet the issues in the play about unfair work practices and about attitudes between different minority communities in New York are both poignant and prescient.

The tiny Finborough had been turned into a sort-of Harlem copy shop with the audience all on one side for a change.

The young woman who checks your tickets took pains to ask us not to throw our rubbish in the bins because they are props. We though it was so obvious that they were props that it was almost embarrassing for her to have to tell us this.

But some dumb mf’s has bi dumpin’ dair trash in de set.

In truth, it did take us both a while to get used to the Harlem street talk used in the play, but either it or we settled down quite quickly to that aspect.

The plot was quite slow to build, but by the end of the first half (which was probably two-thirds of the play in fact) the plot was simmering and we were keen for the second half.

That shorter act, after the interval, was very pacey and well done.

The cast were excellent and you can see why this play won awards in the USA.

We picked up some Persian food from Mohsen on the way home. Janie was in a bad mood at the injustice of life as depicted in this play. So it is fair to say that the play was more than a little affecting.

Well done Finborough – another high quality find, well produced.

Continuity by Gerry Moynihan, Finborough Theatre, 13 August 2017

After Daisy suggested last week that heavy plays like Bodies at the Royal Court were currently doing her head in, it was a bit late to change plans, but it did occur to me that Continuity was unlikely to lighten the mood.

Continuity is basically a monologue about a member of the Continuity IRA and his personal journey.

The Finborough page on the play/production explains it all very well – here.

In this production the performer, Paul Kennedy, is simply excellent. Although it is a monologue – a story told in the first person by a narrator – he acts out some of his colleagues dialogue using ticks and gestures to indicate who is talking.

It is hard to see this play without thinking about Jez Butterworth’s outstanding play The Ferryman, which was recently at the Royal Court and is now deservedly wowing audiences in the West End.

Continuity is comparatively very understated. The Ferryman was surely written with the West End and Broadway in mind. Continuity was probably written with radio and/or small theatres like the Finborough in mind. But Continuity is still extremely effective and affecting. Where has this writer, Gerry Moynihan, been all these years? One to look out for again, to be sure.

Daisy agreed with me that the piece was excellent, but it did also make her reconfirm her determination to select a lighter batch of plays and avoid the heaviest subjects next time around. But when she suggested musicals and farces as the alternative, I guessed that her tongue is to some extent in her cheek.

Jam by Matt Parvin, Finborough Theatre, 16 June 2017

This was not the best Friday evening Janie and I have ever had.

First stop was the Finborough Theatre – our latest hot place – in several senses of the term that evening – it had been a scorcher of a day and was still well hot early evening. The heat in part explains our irritability.

I deposited our “friendship form” with the delightful volunteers at the ticket desk who were unsure what to do with the form, making an almighty fuss about it until someone senior enough came downstairs, grabbed the form and took it away. By this point, Janie was convinced that the senior response was inadequate in the circumstances, whereas I was convinced that it was fine; all I had wanted to do was save myself the price of a stamp by handing the thing in rather than posting it.

We were there to see Jam by Matt Parvin – click here for Finborough resource.

The acting was superb and the subject-matter really interesting, but Janie and I both found it nigh-on impossible to suspend our disbelief in the behaviour of the characters,  in particular the school teacher, given the situation.

Before any savvy readers start to think that we read reviews and then find ourselves seeing the production as reviewers would have us see it, I should say that it is our habit studiously to avoid reading reviews until we have seen a production and formed opinions for ourselves.

But on this occasion, our friend, Michael Billington’s review in the Guardian – click here – sums up almost exactly how we felt and how we discussed it in the minutes/hours after we left the theatre.

David Ralf in The Stage is kinder on the piece; “a touch contrived”. He is also full of deserved praise for the quite excellent performances by the two on stage; Jasmine Hyde and Harry Melling – remember where you heard the names first.

Long before we got to the theatre, Janie and I had agreed that we had a crazy craving for Persian food – Mohsen’s. This craving was only exacerbated by references to the Iranian origins of the teacher character in the play.

But it turned out that Mohsens is closed for a refurb at the moment.

No matter, we thought, Alounak is still there and not such a detour for us. Well, we used to be fans of Alounak’s food, but the standard seems to have declined considerably – at least to our taste. Now we can hardly wait for Mohsen to reopen.

Not the most successful Friday evening ever – but then there was still Saturday evening to come and that turned out to be an altogether more pleasing experience…

…I guess it was a case of “jam tomorrow”.