Tag: Gareth Fry

Torn by Nathaniel Martello-White, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 24 September 2016

On paper, this looked so good I booked it twice.

Well, in truth, what happened was, this production was tagged on to the end of an almost year-long season booking list almost a year ago, then was re-promoted a few months ago and I didn’t realise that I had already booked it. The Royal Court very kindly took the second set of tickets back; they seem to treat the term “Friend Of” as a reciprocal thing more than most theatres these days – respect.

Anyway, I really liked the look of this production and was in a very good mood for some more drama, as if the thrill of Middlesex’s last day/last hour triumph in the County Championship the day before had not been enough drama for the next year or so.  

Truth is, this play/production did not really float my boat; nor did it float Janie’s. The subject matter should have kept us rapt and engaged; a young woman confronting her family with complicity in the racial and sexual abuse she suffered as a child and youngster, especially at the hands of her step-father.

Yet it all came across as a rather shouty, soap-opera style drama workshop exercise; the latter part of which description is presumably where this play and production started its life. Fine actors, but somewhat untrammelled in/by this play/production.

Here is the Royal Court stub for Torn.

It seems to have had terrific reviews, so I guess the problem is us, not the play/production.  Half-a dozen rave reviews linked on the fourth tab of the above stub so no need for me to repeat them here.  Of the usual suspects, only Chris Bennion of the Telegraph seems less sure and even then thinks the piece worthwhile for “what it has to say”. 

I believe the run is sold out in any case, but perhaps it will get an extension or a transfer given the rave reviews.

For us, I’m mighty glad that we don’t have to see it twice.

We indulged ourselves with Mohsen’s Persian food after the play, which made us feel that the evening was most worthwhile, despite the play.

 

 

 

Boy by Leo Butler, Almeida Theatre, 16 April 2016

Oh boy, this is a good one.

We’ve enjoyed Leo Butler’s work before, at the Royal Court. We booked this basically on the back of remembering that we like his writing. We didn’t realise that this production also brought back the imaginative team, which brought us Game at the Almeida early last year; Sacha Wares as director and Miriam Buether as designer.

The Almeida’s website has lots of information about the production and also collates the good reviews. As a glance at the review headlines suggests that they have been more or less universally good, this Almeida link should be pretty much definitive. 

We knew that the Almeida had done something funky with the set and seating, because we had a call from the theatre last weekend, asking if we minded that that a rejig of the set and seating meant that there would be an aisle between our front row seats. We could either put up with that or sit together further back.

We politely suggested that it ought to be possible for them to shift people around such that we can still sit together in the front row; we asked the gentleman at least to try. A few minutes later, the nice gentleman called back with the good news that he had achieved our wish.

Just as well, as we observed on entry to the theatre that the aisle in question was more like a chasm than a small gap.

But soon enough we also observed that the characters on the set, who were going around on an industrial conveyor belt like human sushi in one of those sushi bars, were sitting in perfect sitting posture without seats. I worked out that they each must have a support in one of their trouser legs, but the effect was very eye-catching and warmed us up for a short evening of theatre with a difference.

It is hard to do this piece justice in the description. It is 70 minutes of edge-of-your-seat theatre in which nothing much really happens. We are simply following a young 17 year-old lad, Liam, around London on one of his interminable, listless days. Yet all around him (and therefore us) we see glimpses of London life that resonate wonderfully. We are also made all-too aware of the hopeless of such a lad’s circumstances.

In one telling scene, Liam goes to register at the job centre or some such, only to be told that he should return when he is 18 and find himself something useful to do in the meantime. “That’s nearly a year,” Liam yells, despairingly.

The mostly very young cast do a brilliant job, but Frankie Fox as Liam really does stand out. I recognised Wendy Kweh from our recent visit to North Korea as depicted in the Royal Court Theatre Upstairs – the irony of being reminded of North Korean hopelessness while being shown London hopelessness was not wasted on me.

But for us the star performance really is the extraordinary set and direction. The cast have to navigate some tightly choreographed scene changes and movements across the conveyor belt, plus those extraordinary “seats of their pants”, as it were. The wonderful movement elements of the production reminded us a little of Complicite; that’s a complement coming from us.

Lots to think about and talk about after the show, which is what good theatre is all about as far as we are concerned. As only tends to happen after really unusual and excellent pieces, that conversation started with strangers in the audience and some of the Almeida ushers before we’d even left the theatre.

One of the ushers told us that this production has not yet sold out – so if you are reading this fairly soon after the date in the headline, get on to the Almeida and snap up some of those remaining tickets.

This really is a hot ticket.

 

 

 

The Encounter, Complicite/Simon McBurney, Barbican, 27 February 2016

When we heard about this Complicite production, The Encounter, Janie and I were really keen to see it, so much so that we sort-of organised the Nicaragua holiday around it; spotting good seats available for a bit later in the run and thus booking to go away beforehand.

Janie and I have always had a soft spot for Complicite – by chance the spare ticket I had which became Janie and my first date in 1992 was for one of their shows at the National; Street of Crocodiles. That was the first time either of us had seen Complicite, so I suppose we were transfixed by Complicite as well as each other.

These matters are all about timing I suppose. Our timing for seeing Encounter, just a few days after returning from Nicaragua, was perhaps not so clever. The jet lag together with the change from 30 degrees Centigrade to 30 degrees Fahrenheit temperatures gave both of us some trepidation ahead of an evening out.

Still, the show is inspired by the novel Amazon Beaming by Petru Popescu, so perhaps we would at least be transported back to that warm tropical feeling? Too right!

Indeed, the show uses an amazing binaural sound technology, where you wear headphones and sense the sounds coming from any direction around your head. One of the tricks is the incredibly realistic sound of mosquitoes buzzing around you. Now we had surprisingly few encounters with those little pests while we were in Nicaragua – the dry, windy season saw to that. But of course everyone is in fear of mozzies out there just now, with prophylaxis unavailable for the dreaded dengue fever, Chikungunya and topically tropically Zika viruses. Indeed Mukul was at only 60% occupancy when we arrived even though it expected 100% occupancy, as 40% of the expected guests (all bookings from the USA) had cancelled in fear of Zika. Suffice it to say that Janie and I were still highly sensitive to that mozzie sound. Thank you, Mr McBurney.

But of course the show is an absolute triumph. We lost ourselves in the Amazon of our heads for a short while much as Loren McIntyre was genuinely lost in the Amazon for a long while back in the 1960s.

Here is Complicite’s own bumf on the production.  Here follow some of the deserved rave reviews from Edinburgh:

Of course Complicite (at least in the hands of Simon McBurney himself) is no longer acrobatic, movement-oriented shows like Street of Crocodiles. Be fair, the physical stuff he/they were doing nearly 25 years ago was extraordinary enough. So McBurney now adapts his imagination to other means of stimulating our senses – mostly aurally this time – and still he can surprise and thrill.

This was one hot ticket and we are so pleased that we made the effort to book and make our plans around this wonderful production.

Game by Mike Bartlett, Almeida Theatre, 28 February 2015

This was a truly shocking piece. In a good way.

Shocking, as in, it left us feeling really quite shaken and discombobulated.

In a way, this was immersive theatre. The Almeida was reconfigured, such that the audience was divided into sections in sort-of booths, from which you could see some of the action live and the rest on screens. You have to wear headphones to hear everything, which increases the confusion between the real and the virtual.

The conceit of the play is that some people who cannot afford good housing choose to live in an attractive-looking home, but the price is that they are spied upon by sadistic paying customers who are allowed to shoot stun darts at the residents “for fun”.

It is a horrible thought. The story plays out in interesting ways, not all predictable. The experience is disconcerting, because, as an audience member, you feel somewhat complicit in the voyeurism and sadism playing out before your eyes and on the screen. Occasionally some of the action takes place within your booth itself.

It made us think about the housing crisis, the ways that computer games and so-called reality television are encroaching on people’s lives and more besides.

 

Excellent resource on the Almeida site about this play/production, including quotes from many reviews and links to full text for some – sparing me the trouble – click here.

We left the Almeida genuinely feeling in a state of shock and spent much of the remainder of the weekend talking about this play/production.

An Almeida special as far as we were concerned.

How to Hold Your Breath by Zinnie Harris, Royal Court Theatre, 14 February 2015

I have written elsewhere about the Vicky Featherstone regime at the Royal Court seeming to have a relentlessly miserablist agenda.

Janie and I don’t mind gloomy stuff. Crickey, you wouldn’t choose the sorts of theatre that we choose if all you wanted was feel good rom-coms and musicals. But relentless and extreme miserablism?

I can’t remember quite such a quintessentially down-hearted play as How to Hold Your Breath for a long time.

Part of the problem I had with it was my inability to buy into the notion that a financial crisis might have a young, successful, professional Northern-European (presumably German) woman descend from yuppydom to prostitution/migration in but a few days.

Yes of course it is meant to be an expressionistic-type dream play. But to suspend belief sufficiently to buy into a thesis (but for fortune, it might be Europeans desperate to migrate to Africa and the Middle East, not the other way around) it needs sufficient plausibility, which this lacked.

So instead of making its worthy and at times interesting points about inequality, economic power and migration well, it seemed to ram them down our throats to the extent that I (and Janie agreed) almost wanted to throw the metaphorical babies out with the bathwater. Which is a horrible way of putting it, given this play’s unsettling and shocking denouement.

All a great shame because the cast were excellent. Maxine Peake really can act; indeed all of them can. The design was stylish; it was just the unsubtle play that didn’t do it for us. We normally like Zinnie Harris’s plays; we just didn’t like this one.

I can’t remember how we tried to make ourselves feel a bit better with food afterwards – probably Ranoush shawarmas or possibly Mohsen’s Iranian-style kebabs.

 

Wildefire by Roy Williams, Hampstead Theatre, 7 November 2014

A play about modern policing in the inner-London suburbs, the central character being a policewoman who might have bitten off more than she can chew in that environment.

Roy Williams is a highly skilled playwright and this subject-matter is right up his street.

Lots of subplots – domestic violence, police corruption (or is it) in attempts to infiltrate criminal gangs etc.

In some ways the play was all over the place and in that sense unsatisfactory. We went on a Friday after work (and Harry Mograns) – we were quite exhausted by the end of it, despite the fact that it is a short piece (not even 90 minutes long).

But it was gripping and had some great scenes and some superb acting in it – we were glad to have seen this piece.

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

Below is a little “behind the scenes” vid with Roy Williams & more:

On the whole the critics were underwhelmed by the piece – click here for a link to the reviews.

Wastwater by Simon Stephens, Royal Court Theatre, 2 April 2011

We do both like a bit of Simon Stephens. We’re also partial to Linda Basset’s acting. This piece reminded us why on both counts.

We actually thought it was brilliantly acted and produced throughout.

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

Three seemingly different stories that sort-of overlap and sort-of don’t. It’s hard to explain why, but Simon Stephens has a way with drama that simply keeps you gripped and thinking throughout.

Here is a very interesting behind the scenes short film from Sky Arts, including interviews with Simon Stephens, Linda Basset and several of the other cast and creatives, about Wastwater:

Royal Court – Wastwater from daniel bougourd on Vimeo.

Here is a link to a search term for reviews and other resources. The reviews are not universally great – some rated it very good, some rated it poor and cold-hearted.

We rated it very highly.

Sweet Nothings by Arthur Schnitzler, in a new version by David Harrower, Young Vic, 27 March 2010

There’s always something a bit weird about Arthur Schnitzler plays and this one was no exception. All very hedonistic and tragic.

Here is the officiallondontheatre.co.uk resource on this Young Vic production.

The Young Vic made a YouTube trailer for this production:

The cast were very good and the production was excellent.

Well received too – this search term – click here – finds many reviews – nearly all good.

There’s just something about fin-de-siecle Austrian plays that doesn’t quite float our boat, however well done they are.

Still, we were pleased to have seen this one – it was one of the best things we had seen so far that year…but then we were having a poor year for theatre up to that point.

Pains Of Youth by Ferdinand Bruckner, Cottesloe Theatre, 7 November 2009

What a grim evening of theatre this turned out to be.

The only ungrim thing about the evening was bumping into George Littlejohn and his good lady in the foyer before the show and then again in the interval. I have known George since 1994 when we met, for reasons that will only be explained to you if you click here, at the 1994 inaugural Accountancy Awards. Only click if you find pompous awards funny; don’t click if you take them seriously.

The play is about young upwardly mobile Viennese trainee doctors in the 1920’s, who should have been among the most happening people on earth were it not for their unfortunate juxtaposition with time and space (i.e. 1920’s Vienna) and their existential angst.

Janie and I hated the first half of the play and resolved not to stay for the second half. I’m not saying that it was either going to be members of the cast, or us, or a mixture of those two cohorts, but suicide was clearly on the cards during the second half. We made absolutely certain it wasn’t going to be us.

Unfortunately for George and his good lady, they had some sort of connection with someone involved in the production, so they stayed for the second half. We wished them luck as we waved them goodbye.

The irony of the bad straplining of that last piece will not be wasted on George Littlejohn, who was at one time the editor of Accountancy Age, no less, but has since managed to exceed even those giddy heights.

Despite their ordeal, sticking out the whole evening, I am pleasantly surprised, indeed delighted, to report that both the Littlejohns seem hale and hearty at the time of writing (January 2017).  Janie and I ran into them both again at the Curzon Bloomsbury on New Year’s Day 2017 – click here, which triggered this memory and hence this write up.

Be Near Me by Andrew O’Hagan & Ian McDiarmid, Donmar Warehouse, 24 January 2009

We’re big fans of Ian McDiarmid. We think he worked wonders running the Almeida with Jonathan Kent and he is a fine actor to boot. He is also a nodding acquaintance of mine in Notting Hill Gate (although, writing in April 2017, it is a while since I have seen him around).

But in truth I don’t think this play/production did much for us. It all felt a bit grim. It sounded like it might be a bit like a Bergman movie, but ended up a rather drab stage equivalent.

The play/production is well described on Official London Theatre – click here.

No doubt this did well when National Theatre of Scotland took it touring north of the border.

No record of what we ate afterwards, but I’ll guess we went to May’s place (Shanghai Knightsbridge) to take away some yummy Chinese grub.