Our first visit to the theatre of 2024 and it was worth the wait.
Set in an NHS mental health service unit for juveniles, the play tells the simple story of a youngster who enters the workplace imagining that he might make a difference in a hurry.
Then reality bites.
The play is beautifully written by Sophia Chetin-Leuner, and very well directed by Ed Madden, who should, if nothing else, pick up a nominative determinism award for directing this particular piece.
Despite the plethora of short scenes, the story and characterisation develop organically and clearly over the 90 minutes or so of the piece. I had to suspend a fair bit of belief around the central conceit that a youngster might implement an NHS patient administration system alone in just a few weeks without encountering or causing any profound issues, but that only proves that I have spent too much of my working life thinking about informatics.
The cast all performed their parts convincingly, with top marks to Debra Baker who played the “seen it all before administrator” Angela.
Denzel Baidoo was the most comedic of the three, playing the naïve trainee Jay. One short scene, set to music, when Jay thinks he is alone in the office will live long in our memories.
If you are reading this piece soon after I have upped it, you have a chance still to see this production at The Bush, as it has been extended to 7 March. In Janie’s and my opinion, it deserves a transfer to gain a wider audience. It is a fun piece that made us both laugh a lot, but it also tackles a great many pertinent issues of our times in a thoughtful and warm-hearted way.
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.
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.
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.
It is the tale of three sisters from a self-confessed chav family which moves to a posh town for the sake of the girls’ education.
It throws up a great many issues about class, families, aspirations and the like.
The problem with it is the extreme nature of the plot. I’m not sure where this posh town might be, entirely populated by such snobby, middle-class people that this trio of roofer’s daughters are so utterly different from all of their peers.
Still, the story provides a vehicle for those pertinent issues and a vehicle also for three very high energy and vibrant performances by the actresses.
Weird set with the audience separated into four quadrants while the stage formed a cross formation covering most of the room, allowing the girls plenty of space for their performances.
It’s a short play (100 minutes without an interval) which suited us well. Janie had bought one of those crispy Gressingham duck things for the weekend and it seemed a shame not to roast and eat it when we got home.
I think we booked this because we had booked so little at the Orange Tree of late and because Janie said she’d never seen a Somerset Maugham play. I had to admit that I hadn’t seen one either, although I had read some years ago (and frankly had found them wanting compared with his excellent short stories).
The scenario of this play, Sheppey, Maugham’s last, is straightforward enough. Sheppey is a gentleman’s hairdresser who wins a small fortune in a lottery. The play is set when written, c1933, when the great depression was biting hard for many. Sheppey’s life doesn’t overlap much with the have-nots, but those he does encounter affect him. Sheppey has always thought himself a lucky man despite his relatively modest life; so should his charity begin at home or should he try to spread the benefits of his lucky ticket?
The play is unduly long, with two intervals, in the 1930s tradition of three lengthy acts. It is hard to cut such plays to one interval numbers, but this play really does labour its way through 2 hours and 50 minutes (including intervals). If Paul Miller needs to persevere with the Orange Tree tradition of early 20th century plays, perhaps he should drop the tradition of “hanging on the playwright’s every word”.
Janie and I lost patience with the piece after two acts, deciding to bail out and take our fabada and solomillos dinner at Don Fernando’s at a more civilised hour.
This is a shame, as Paul Miller deploys his excellent directorial skills on a very talented cast to bring as much life as possible out of this play. He also deftly uses Geff Francis as Sheppey’s boss and Dickie Beau as the prostitute Sheppey tries to help, without ceremony but equally without any indication in the text that the boss might be black and/or that the prostitute might be a man in drag.
Still, this is not a great play, in my view (and in Janie’s). There are reasons why Somerset Maugham’s plays don’t get revived much. They were popular pieces in their day, but tend to seem incredibly dated in style now.
In Sheppey, the characters are a bit one-dimensional and it is pretty easy to see where the story is going. Major plot shifts are foreshadowed so overtly, Somerset Maugham might as well have alerted those shifts with neon signs or tannoy announcements. So when Janie asked me at the restaurant to look up and tell her what happens in the end, there were no surprises for me in the Wikipedia synopsis – above and again – SPOILER ALERT IF YOU – click here.
Of course, the character of Sheppey made me think of my grandfather, who was a gentleman’s hairdresser at the time the play was set and written. I wonder whether Grandpa Lew ever saw the play. My grandmother (who coincidentally, like Sheppey’s wife, had been in service before they married) was dying or recently deceased around that time, so perhaps not.
Grandpa Lew and Grandma Beatrice
But the play was set in Jermyn Street and performed at the Wyndhams, both within spitting distance of the Piccadilly Hotel where Grandpa Lew worked, so who knows? If he took my eleven-year-old mum with him, I very much doubt if her self-confessed childhood attention deficit hyperactivity disorder would have kept her in her seat for the full three acts.
Unusually, I mislaid the programme for this one. Perhaps abandoned at Don Fernandos – who knows? – I didn’t realise it was missing until it was far too late to do anything about it – such was the way back then…
…Stop Press – March 2021 – rummaging in a file for something completely different (don’t ask) I found the programme. Hurrah.
Deborah Bruce wrote it, Charlotte Gwinner directed it, Helen Baxendale, Clare Lawrence-Moody and Emma Beattie were especially good in it, as was the supporting cast.
Meanwhile this production did so well that Paul Miller revived it the following year as part of his “hunkering down because we have no Arts Council funding” programme. It is a real shame that the Arts Council was so far behind the curve with regard to the Orange Tree. Some would even say more than shame…disgrace.
