Stagey Play For Stagey People

production photo by Johan Persson

How splendidly the Donmar adapts to every new production: from the blinding pennants of the Spelling Bee school gym to the stark guns-and-gantries of the all-female Julius Caesar and now an authentically lamp-black pickled Victorian music hall with soaring columns, creaking boards and a whiff of oranges and cheap scent in the pit.

Rose Trelawny is the darling of the ‘Wells’ theatre troupe but leaves to marry a young posh bloke.  Although she finds his family stifling and eventually bolts, on her return she’s lost her ability to act. The situation is saved by a young writer in the company who’s invented a new and more naturalistic style of play which suits Rose’s new manners.

It's a vehicle for author Arthur Wing Pinero's campaign to change the nature of theatre, seeking to reflect real people in credible situations, here by ridiculing the bombastic and overdone performances of the time. Ironic, really, when you think how his farces like Dandy Dick and The Magistrate still depend on strident acting.

It’s a doubly Londony show, too: set in 1865 when Sadler’s Wells - long before it became the terpsichorean temple of the Waitrose-going classes - was the satellite TV channel of its day churning out lurid melodramas for a lowbrow audience, and the director is Islington-reared, Central St Martin’s-trained film maker Joe Wright who turned Keira Knightley into Anna Karenina.

In the same way we couldn’t wait for that train to arrive, and although both the ideas and the plot are interesting and amusing, Trelawny is a very slow burner and takes too long to develop. Patrick Marber’s script additions blend seamlessly with Pinero’s original and the cast double both the acting troupe and the frightful society family, none better than Ron Cook as the stern Vice Chancellor and a theatrical landlady who’s a close cousin of Old Mother Riley.

Playing Rose, Amy Morgan trills prettily and simpers in a white frock as readily as Amanda Seyfried in Les Miserables but the best of the casting is in the smaller roles: the wonderful Maggie Steed as a fading actress and disabled dowager, Daniel Mays as a posturing ham actor of the oldest possible school.  Finest of all is Daniel Kaluuya voicing Pinero’s own opinions on theatre and the development of the new realism as the hesitant playwright Tom Wrench: excellent characterization and subtlety in a play where most others are deliberately cartoon figures.

This review written for Londonist.com and published 28 February 2013

Not Defying Gravity

Review of The Flying Karamazov Brothers, Vaudeville Theatre



Yeah, yeah, we get it: you’re not brothers, you don’t fly and no-one’s from Russia.  And you juggle, how hilarious is that?

The ‘FKB’ are a four-man troupe led - since 1975 - by ponytailed Paul Magid who has possibly the second least attractive London stage persona after ‘Sir’ Bruce Forsyth.  Certainly he found it hard to lash the sparse Thursday night audience into anything approaching enthusiasm.

He’s also the one who seemed to drop most of the balls and clubs, and we’re not counting those ho-ho-ho ‘accidentally on purpose’ moments which were too numerous to be convincing: when you drop illuminated balls on a darkened stage and they roll into the wings, no-one thinks that’s a joke.

No one thought much else in the act was a joke either – there’s a running (make that limping) gag about gathering nine ‘objects of terror’ like a hatchet, an egg and a shaken bottle of champagne which will be juggled in the finale, but by the time we got to seven someone near us suggested the eighth object of terror should be the script.

Those sight gags about blindness, the casual racism about dog-eating Koreans, the unfunny puns and the whole lame-ass pretence of being corn-pone Americans failing to understand the Brits just don’t work.  And nobody finds anything about the House of Lords amusing, certainly not just mentioning it and hoping for a laugh.

There’s music, but it’s random and often poor – Khachaturian’s Sabre Dance doesn’t by itself make plastic Indian Clubs exciting, and the ‘jazz juggling’ required such long and tedious explanation of how twirling objects is like the rhythm of a jazz quartet that most of the audience lost the will to riff.

The actual juggling routines are well-choreographed and among the younger performers, Stephen Bent is very competent and has nice hair, but it’s too like an audition for Britain’s Got Talent and you long for someone to buzzer them off and make way for a dog act.


This review written for Londonist.

Covent Garden markets

Tuesday morning 11am and one is royally chuffed to be invited with a clutch of bloggerati by the Covent Garden media/marketing team to put ones feet up in the Director’s box at Covent Garden for dress rehearsal of the David McVicar Aida which opens on Friday. 

Apart from the close-up view of the singers’ facial expressions and a position right over the pit where we can eyeball Fabio Luisi spurring the orchestra to a spanking pace, we're all captivated by brilliance of both staging and movement.

If you’ve seen Aida before, forget those legions of spear carriers and chorines in white nighties and gold halters, crapping camels or Zandra Rhodes’ pleated silk elephants making the Nile run turquoise with fashion accessories. In Jean-Marc Puissant’s design it’s more Dune than Pyramids, and his motifs are smeared blood, scimitar and samurai. We’re in a darkly exciting metallica world framing the stories of battle, sacrifice – literally, human sacrifice – and conflicted loyalties.

In a brief chat after the performance, associate director Leah Hausman points out that Verdi was writing a serious piece about war: the word ‘guerra’ appears a hundred times more often than ‘amore’ in the libretto, so this is a story of war in which love happens, rather than the other way round.

It looks like Coriolanus but feels suddenly relevant: Amneris condemns the priests as controllers of a rotten society, Radames as head of the army is called upon to save the nation for posterity amid popular chanting and a march of bloodied and butchered foot-soldiers.  It could be played out in Tahrir Square.

The grandiose set-pieces are so much more than parades: there’s a fantastic troupe of athletic bare-breasted women whose urgent runs and synchronized thrusting seem lifted from a Soviet spartakiade, there’s ritual disembowelling and corpses dangle from the rafters.  Their male counterparts stage Kendo-inspired sword and lance fights in a dance of death under David Greeves’ genius martial arts coaching.

It’s no-one’s fault but Verdi’s that Aida shoots its load in the first two acts and what remains after the interval is the afterglow of the doomed romance between Radames and Aida, and Amneris’s slow-burning disappointment. But this is where the production really delivers as the emotional triangle is explored in scenes of tender and realistic intimacy, due to the powerful collaboration of the three principals: Roberto Alagna, Olga Borodina and Micaela Carosi whose acting is every bit the equal of their sung performances.

It’s edgy casting: Alagna was booed at La Scala in the same role in 2006, Olga Borodina famously walked out of an earlier Covent Garden Aida in a disagreement with ROH music director Antonio Pappano, so it’s a miracle not just that they are both here but that they conspire with Carosi to create such chemistry.

We went backstage for the scene change and some gossip: Swan Lake has had a box office mega-surge due to the ‘Black Swan’ effect with phone calls asking when Natalie Portman would be ‘on’.  The box office has a sense of humour because they’re tempted to answer ‘every other night alternating with Billy Elliott’.  But the best news is that ROH is trying to reprise its sensational Anna Nicole in 2013, and working on available dates with Eva-Maria Westbroek.



a version of this article appears on Londonist