Posh Picnic with No Knickers

Sometimes in London the venue affects your mood.  Kicking your way through the rotting veg or chicken carcases of a street market towards a dingy hall in Hoxton or Kilburn demands a wellspring of optimism to meet the play with an open mind. Not so at Regent’s Park, whose well-established and well-run Open Air venture regularly inspires critics to scour the thesaurus for epithets like ‘bosky’ and ‘sylvan’ even when the thing’s set indoors. 

Well-spoken couples bring picnic spreads which feature chermoula and quinoa alongside the ‘rather good brie’ and bottle of claret nudging a crossword-completed Telegraph in the recycled hempen tote.  A sudden chill presages symphonic zipping up of Barbours. The repertoire is a conservative blend of Shakespeare, Musical and Literary.  The seasonal staff are polite.  The ice creams are organic. If Waitrose did theatre, this is what it would be like. 

Its Beggar’s Opera is staged in a quest for 18th century authenticity.  Champion designer William Dudley (whose wife Lucy Bailey directs) has raided Hogarth’s illustrations of ‘Gin Lane’ for his portable Newgate prison jangling with nooses and chains but also tumbrils strewn with flowers, silks and pillows emphasizing the contrast between the ruffians and prostitutes who populate the story.

Arranger Roddy Skeaping (whose wife Lucie plays Jenny Diver) has orchestrated 69 snatches of folk song for period instruments including the cittern and lute. At first the audience seemed to love it, tittering at every mention of ‘jade’ ‘whore’ ‘prick’ and ‘hussy’, at the joky references to marital duty from which ‘most’ women would welcome their husband’s execution as a release, and feigning amused shock when the skirt-lifting tarts remind us that knickers weren’t invented yet. 

The first act is largely exposition and those who left in the interval missed the fun of a couple of well-staged fights – movement by Maxine Doyle of Punchdrunk – including a hilarious one between a cruiserweight Beverley Rudd as pregnant Lucy Lockit and her love rival Polly played by the bantam Flora Spencer-Longhurst who seemed to fly from the fist whenever Rudd hit her. 

Act II also featured the best performance of the evening, Parklife-guesting Phil Daniels’ sly and earthy jailer Lockit. ‘Musicals’ purists will be disappointed that the short ballads never erupt into a sustained production number, but the beauty of the Regent’s Park repertoire is that all tastes are eventually satisfied and ‘Crazy For You’ opens on July 28.



originally written for Londonist  and published on 1 July 2011

Twisted Sisters

Review of Snake in the Grass, by Alan Ayckbourn
at The Print Room, London W2.



In 1985, Susan Wooldridge (centre) made her name as Daphne Manners in ‘The Jewel In the Crown’ by having a nasty shock in an overgrown garden. You turn your back for 25 years and she’s at it again this time in a tense and twisting three-hander by Alan Ayckbourn which - in his 61st script - combines his well-documented empathy for the anguish of suburban womanhood with an unfulfilled ambition to write a ‘serious’ play.

Wooldridge is solidly middle-middle class Annabel Chester who returns - after thirty years and a failed marriage in Tasmania - with Barbour and headscarf but no trace of Australian accent to inherit the family home, and to spar uneasily with her sister Miriam who has tended their ailing father until reaching the end of her tether.  This could be Ayckbourn re-working Sarah and Annie from 'The Norman Conquests' (the characters on which Barbara and Margo were based for 'The Good Life' as a matter of fact) if it weren't for the suggestion that Miriam may just - slightly - have overdosed papa with his medication and – ever so gently – pushed him down the stairs.

It could go either way - spirited comic banter, or kitchen sink meltdown if the situation weren't complicated by the arrival of father's long-serving but recently-sacked nurse, played by Mossie Smith as a muscular prole with the stomping energy of a cage fighter looking to land her first punch on the square jaw of Wooldridge's clumsily bombastic Tory bitch - and with a nice sideline in blackmail.

They're well-matched if somewhat stock characters, so it's Miriam who captures the audience's attention in Sarah Woodward's intelligently finessed performance. She has the slight advantage that the author gives her the best lines and the most interesting motivations, but this is a naturalistic acting of the highest calibre.

It's this naturalism which helps resist the decline of the piece into schlock as it becomes a sinister ghost story through Ayckbourn’s cleverly controlled gradual escape of the darker detail of the disturbed relationships each of the women has had with the men in her life, and with each other.

The atmospherics are enabled superbly by William Dudley’s magisterially dilapidated tennis court set - how did they persuade such an ace designer to work in a relatively unknown fringe venue - and which could be a metaphor for the dessication of middle class society complete in every detail down to the rusted mower and dried out grass, and equally by Richard Howell’s creepily effective lighting and Neil Alexander’s subtle sound patterns.

There are flaws: the plotting will be easily anticipated by anyone who’s seen ‘Deathtrap’ or ‘Sleuth’ – the clues are so obviously planted they could come with potting shed labels, but director Lucy Bailey controls the pacing carefully to heighten the tension, and there’s every chance the hairs on the back of your neck will rise more than once before the denouement.



versions of this review appeared on ThePublicReviews and Londonist