Tag: Jennifer Jackson

Midnight Movie by Eve Leigh, Royal Court Theatre Upstairs, 30 November 2019

No, still don’t get it…

Whoops.

I booked this on the back of us very much enjoying Eve Leigh’s unusual piece, The Trick, earlier this year at The Bush:

The Trick by Eve Leigh, Bush Studio, 23 February 2019

But where The Trick had been unusual and a little puzzling, Janie and I both found Midnight Movie impenetrable.

Here is The Royal Court’s verbiage on the piece.

The trailer also provides some clues:

In many ways the play is in the tradition of dream plays, so it would be wrong to complain about the lack of plot and confusing switches. But this piece seemed, to me, so very disjointed, it was hard to get anything much out of the experience.

It is laudable that Eve Leigh and the Royal Court have tried to produce a piece that specific speaks to people with physical challenges, but the notion that the central male character was substituting internet experience for the physical experiences his body would not allow, really struggled to make that point through the material.

Janie really hated the piece.

I tried to go with the flow but couldn’t get anywhere with it.

It is only 70 minutes long, but it felt like so much longer.

We both had out own physical challenges by the end of the ordeal – those narrow arse-ache chairs had us John-Wayning out of the theatre.

We saw a preview, so there’s a chance that the piece has been tightened a little ahead of press night, but I doubt it.

Early signs from the reviews is that the opacity of the piece shines through, as it were.

A rare miss for us at the Royal Court.

Amsterdam by Maya Arad Yasur, Orange Tree Theatre, 7 September 2019

Amsterdam - Keizersgracht 387
Amsterdam – Keizersgracht
Click picture for attribution and link

Gosh, this was a truly fascinating short play at the Orange Tree – our first venture to see a play for some while and a great start, from our point of view, to our autumn season at the theatre. We were seeing a preview.

The Orange Tree Theatre’s blurb on this piece can be found by clicking here.

This is not a naturalistic piece. The cast of four narrate the piece, about an unnamed Israeli violinist who is 9 months pregnant living in an apartment in Amsterdam, on the Keizersgracht (one of the canal-side streets).

Are we merely being taken on a voyage through the violinists own febrile, paranoid imaginings or is this a thriller about the uncovering of secrets from Amsterdam’s era of Nazi occupation or are we witnessing a strange brew, mixing those things?

Janie would have preferred some more answers by the end of it, whereas I thought this 80 minute piece was very deliberately leaving a trail of enigmas and unanswerable questions, while at the same time keeping us entertained and weaving sufficient plot lines to tell a story.

All four cast members were excellent; we’d seen Fiston Barek and Hara Yannas recently at the Orange Tree. Daniel Abelson and Michal Horowicz were also strong.

We’d also seen director Matthew Xia’s work at the Orange Tree recently. The style is a bit “workshoppy”, but I think that is the nature of the play and it is hard to imagine how the piece might work in a more stagey syle.

But the greatest plaudits from me go to the writing. I have now read and seen one heck of a lot of plays, so it is rare now to find a writer’s voice so novel and pleasing. For sure I will look out for Maya Arad Yasur’s work again.

Did Janie and I decompress/discuss at length over Spanish food at Don Fernando’s this time? Of course we did.

Did we get home in time to see Bianca Andreescu beat Serena Williams at Flushing? Yes, but only because Bianca kindly lost 4 games in a row (including a championship point) to keep the match alive long enough for us to get home and see the last two games.

Did we play tennis the next morning as usual and then go on to Gunnersbury Museum to see some aspects of BEAT? Yes, yes.

Anyway, returning to the subject of Amsterdam at The Orange Tree; it’s running until 12 October 2019 and we would thoroughly recommend it to anyone who likes imaginative, modern drama.

Reviews for this production, if/when they come, might be found here.

The Trick by Eve Leigh, Bush Studio, 23 February 2019

Bush Theatre

Our first visit to The Bush this year – our previous visit had been to the Studio to see a quirky piece, Lands:

Lands by Antler, Bush Studio, 17 November 2018

The Trick is also a quirky piece, but differently so. It is about loss, bereavement and the ways we need to trick ourselves into keeping going through life.

I thought we might find such a piece hard to take this weekend – our next door neighbour at Noddyland, Barry, died on Thursday night. But actually the piece was very charming, unusual and entertaining, without being heavy at all.

My only beef with the piece is that it was very bitty and that some of the bits didn’t really make sense. One scene, where the two younger performers simply made breathing noises into microphones, seemed, to me, to simply be a bridge between one of the quirky scenes (in which one of those performers read the palm of a member of the audience) and the next substantive scene about the ageing, bereaved woman and her decline.

But the piece was clearly intended to confuse the audience a bit and mix various genres of performance, ranging from direct story-telling (the Isaac Bashevis Singer story, The Little Shoemaker, is “thrown in” at one point) to chamber drama to audience participation to conjuring tricks. Entertaining throughout.

Here’s Eve Leigh, the playwright, explaining herself as best she can about it:

After the Bush Studio run, which goes on to 23 March, The Trick is going to tour many parts of the UK – here is the trailer including those tour details:

This piece was very well performed by the four actors and cleverly directed and designed.

Janie and I really like short pieces of this kind. Perhaps it is because we are getting older, but we now find 70 minutes of interesting and entertaining stuff a better deal than several hours of drawn out drama.

Baffling in parts but well worth seeing in our view.

Mayfly by Joe White, Orange Tree Theatre, 21 April 2018

We thought this was another really good Orange Tree production of a new play by a new playwright. Once again Paul Miller and his team showing a consistently good eye for talent.

On paper it sounds like yet another small-scale drama about lonely lives and handling grief. But the dialogue sparkles, the mix of tragedy and comedy is elegantly handled and the production values are quite outstanding for a tiny theatre like the Orange Tree. Very clever design with the odd coup de theatre thrown in for good measure.

Here is a link to the Orange Tree’s excellent resource for this play/production.

Below is the trailer:

All four performers were excellent, with Irfan Shamji as Harry the standout performance amongst stiff competition…not that it IS a competition.

In truth, it is a slightly slow play – a lot of build up and back story – but the dialogue is so well written and the piece so well acted and directed, the 105 minutes seemed to whizz by in a jiffy…

…much like the life of a mayfly.

No reviews at the time of writing – ahead of press night – but I’d expect this one to be well received, so (if you are reading this during the run, which ends 26 May), book early to avoid disappointment.

Here is a link to a search term that will find all the reviews once they get here.

For once we did not indulge in Spanish food after the show – my indulgences over the preceding 24 hours, which included a sashimi feast when I returned from Chelmsford…

A Day At Chelmsford With Charles “Charley The Gent Malloy” Bartlett, Essex v Lancashire Day One, 20 April 2018

…had done me in food-wise – but in any case we both felt sated by this excellent evening at the theatre.

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.

Parliament Square, James Fritz, Bush Theatre, 16 December 2017

Janie got far more out of this one than I did. It’s only fair to say that the critics tended to agree with Janie rather than me.

Here is a link to the Bush Theatre resource on this show.

The story/scenario is an interesting and potentially moving one. But I struggled to put aside the foolishness of the protagonist; the way she went about her protest being destined to fail in so many ways. I even struggled to suspend belief and roll with the plot line.

It was very well acted and the sparse design/setting, performed in the round, suited the piece very well.

This search term should find you reviews and stuff – click here.

Here’s the trailer: