The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan – Theatre Royal Haymarket ****

[written for The Public Reviews]

Following quite closely on the heels of another comedy of manners, London Assurance at the National Theatre earlier in the year, comes Sheridan's The Rivals. Rivalling Fiona Shaw in the lead role of that former play is Penelope Keith and she, like Shaw, will prove a crowd-pleaser. Perhaps there is something about a romantic farce which we find appealing – it isn't a realistic reflection of the world, nor is it biting political satire, but rather a gentle poking of fun at human nature. The Rivals offers something we can all relate to, and laugh heartily at, without having to consider too deeply the social and moral ills afflicting the characters.

The Rivals transports us to eighteenth century Bath where Captain Jack Absolute woos Lydia Languish in the guise of a lowly ensign, Beverley. Taking her example from trashy romantic novels, Lydia has come to perceive romance only in a match which ill pleases her guardian, Aunt Malaprop. There must be impediments to her love for her to take any interest in it; hers must be a 'sentimental elopement' resulting in the 'prettiest distress imaginable'. From sending up the romanticism rife in the literature of the period, the target of the play's satire quickly switches to the purely mercantile view of marriage with Sir Anthony Absolute in the vanguard for marrying his son off for money, despite having wedded for love himself. Indeed he counsels the reluctant Jack on accepting whoever happens to come attached to a fortune: 'if you have an estate you must take the livestock with it as it stands'. Luckily for Jack, the very woman Absolute is proposing he shackle himself to is Lydia; happily he can fulfil his filial duty whilst bagging the woman of his dreams.

With its various subplots, romantic pairings and confused identities, The Rivals is classic farce and, as such, is a great platform for some excellent comic turns from the cast. Although Penelope Keith was an amusing Malaprop, delivering her characteristic linguistic singularities with the deliberate unconsciousness necessary for them to really work and be funny every time ('he's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile' raised a particularly loud laugh), Peter Bowles’ Sir Anthony Absolute stole the show. His repeated threats that he would work himself into a 'frenzy' (threatening indeed from a man who is restrained and seemingly emotionally constipated, but also quick to anger) were accompanied by deadpan wit and brilliantly timed nods to the audience. Keiron Self's Bob Acres was also supremely funny as a country bumpkin and loveable buffoon. Tony Gardner was an excellent Faulkner; his body language and facial expressions enough to fill a stage left empty when he succeeds in finally chased the ever-suffering Julia away.

The only disappointment was Robyn Addison's Lydia, played opposite Tam Williams' Jack (looking very much like a young Tom Cruise). This was her professional stage debut and, although she looked the part, some of her delivery lacked animation and character. Surrounded by such extraordinary talent Addison was bound to look the novice. And everything here is beautifully done; the costumes are lavish and the set, designed by Simon Higlett, is as crisp and bright as an aquatint. In the hands of Peter Hall, what appears to be a convoluted plot on paper is in performance a neat comic entertainment touching on all the familiar themes but in the most expert and opulent way imaginable.

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H.M.S. Pinafore – The King's Head Theatre, London *****

[written for The Public Reviews]

Having never seen a Gilbert and Sullivan opera, I wasn't sure what to expect of H.M.S Pinafore and wondered whether it would be twee and old fashioned, dating as it does from the end of the 19th century. I was pleasantly surprised by a performance which was a hilarious riot; an incredibly entertaining way to spend two hours. Of course the plot isn't meant to be serious; it lampoons the English class system, pokes fun at the royal navy and every character is flamboyantly unrealistic. This isn't high art but it is a an enduring piece of farce which has stood the test of time and is still gloriously funny.

Captain of the H.M.S. Pinafore, Corcoran has a beautiful daughter, Josephine, who he hopes to marry off to Sir Joseph Porter, a ludicrous old man. She, however, is in love with Ralph Rackstraw, a lowly sailor. Much hilarity ensues as Josephine wonders whether to follow her heart or the social code which would have her marry her equal, or her better if it can be managed. A last minute plot twist results in a revelation which turns hierarchy on its head and allows true love to prevail while curiously reinforcing the very class system it purports to repudiate.

In the intimate setting of The King's Head Theatre, what could have been just another run of a well-worn classic was in fact a rather special 'boutique' performance. It felt exclusive because the space was small, but also because the quality of the performance was so high. The cast were magnificent singers with excellent comic timing, without exception. I felt that nothing would be gained from seeing a production in a big theatre apart from more sumptuous costumes and set design; the music, provided by The Eaton-Young Piano Duo, and the singing were top drawer and the atmosphere created by our proximity to the performers could not have been equalled in a larger production.

It was encouraging to see an audience demographic that actually went some way towards representing the community – there were people of all ages, from pensioners mouthing the words, to young children who had to be restrained by their parents from storming the stage during some of the more energetic numbers. H.M.S. Pinafore could be seen as a non-festive pantomime for grown-ups but in fact it is suitable for children even though this isn't billed as family entertainment.

John Savournin, the director of this production and the artistic director of Charles Court Opera (the company of performers which has a strong commitment to collaborating with young performers), is a brilliantly pompous Captain Corcoran. All of the young performers are talented actors and singers but special mention should go to Sebastian Valentine for his deliciously dastardly Dick Deadeye, Rosie Strobel for her spirited Little Buttercup, Susan Moore for her ingeniously idiosyncratic Cousin Hebe and Ian Belsey for his witty and theatrical Sir Joseph Porter. But it is the entire cast, who performed with such energy and gusto, which makes this production un-missable; I will definitely be recommending it to everyone – a real treat.

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Being Sellers by Carl Caulfield – Waterloo East Theatre, London

[written for The Public Reviews]

Waterloo East Theatre, only opened in September this year and promising to offer affordable and accessible entertainment to the local community, is a small and interesting space in a disused railway arch. Privately funded, I hope that this theatre proves to be successful, as it has with its previous two sell-out shows, in order to offer some hope for culture and the arts in the current economic climate. As many small and independent theatres face closure, Waterloo Theatre East is courageously looking to the future and bringing innovative and fringe work to London's theatreland. And Being Sellers is a show which could put Waterloo East Theatre on the map. David Boyle delivers a virtuoso performance as the great comic actor Peter Sellers in this energetic one-hander, marking the thirtieth anniversary of his death.

Little more than an hour long, the play charts Sellers' life, starting with his death. The audience enters to Boyle confined to a hospital bed, creating a clamour and delivering sharp one-liners ('no visitors again? Bastards') until he overworks himself performing a speech from Hamlet and keels over. Sellers then finds himself in purgatory where he rehearses his life (and that is the correct word for it, in this play which is obsessed with the actor's craft) attempting to discover where he went wrong and why there are obstacles to him making his peace with the world. During a frenzied performance where we meet Inspector Clueso and Doctor Strangelove, among others, Boyle's Sellers reveals himself to be a schizophrenic clown, a paranoid player who can inhabit many characters but remains isolated from his own being.

Not knowing much about the life and work of Sellers was no impediment, for me, to enjoying this play although the jokes would have been funnier if I had of understood the context more fully. Yet the humour offered more than the occasional in-joke and, like Sellers' comedy, was simple but brilliant with its anarchic slapstick quality. Boyle's best moment was a sketch based on Sellers' radio series 'The Goon Show' where he conjured the world of suggested visual humour perfectly. This is a comic and entertaining play, but a dark side to Sellers' personal life is revealed - probe beneath the showbiz surface and jealousy, ego mania and dysfunctional family relationships are revealed. After an hour of probing his life and self, Sellers calls himself a 'nasty self-centred little shit' and 'a spoiled little brat, not a tortured genius'. There is a deep sadness to Sellers who sees himself as a cipher; when he is playing a character it is 'like a tenant renting me out for a while' and when he isn't acting he is unoccupied. At the end of the play Sellers has had enough and retreats into the audience, he just wants to watch for a while. The surrounding narrative is fanciful and possibly no to everyone's taste but Boyle's performance can't be faulted; he comes very close to being Sellers.

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The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams – Jermyn Street Theatre ****

[written for The Public Reviews]

The small studio space of the Jermyn Theatre is perfectly conducive to watching Tennessee William's claustrophobic psychological play about the despair of insanity and the threat of confinement. Clare and Felice, played mesmerisingly by Catherine Cusack and Paul McEwan, are brother and sister players who arrive in a cold, unknown town to deliver 'The Two-Character Play' in a decrepit theatre to an audience who may or may not be present. Their company have abandoned them with a note stating 'you and your sister are insane' - the first gesture towards the idea that things are far more sinister than they first appear.

Clare and Felice are a double-act with a troubling past which is dramatised in their play; they are left alone, confined to their house through fear of the outside world, behind a 'barricade of sunflowers'. They have been branded murderers and left with no inheritance after their mother and father have been killed or committed suicide - the reason for their death is never resolved. Catherine Cusack performs the erratic Clare with a convincing frail and hysterical demeanour; she changes from a drunk to a childish dependant to a mother, and all of these versions of her are fully realised. Paul McEwan's Felice is weak and scared one minute and vicious and sinister the next; the master-stroke, though, is his abhorrent latent violence towards and sexual persecution of Clare which is hinted at in McEwan's sinister narrowing of the eyes and hissing through gritted teeth. With Felice intimating that the two have them had played Antony and Cleopatra, and having earlier called Clare a 'castrating bitch' and 'old demented whore' and referring to their mother as 'frigid', it is a moment fraught with danger when they are left alone in the theatre at the end of the play and he pulls himself close to Clare, putting his arm around her in what seems to be more than a brotherly embrace.

This is a very different offering from something like Tennessee's Spring Storm which played at the National Theatre this summer: that play was full of young love, parental restrictions, and moral didacticism. The Two-Character Play is far more experimental in form and ambivalent in it's tone. As an audience, we aren't able to come to a quick moral judgement about these two characters who are at the same time guilty and innocent, nurturing and vicious. The situation is absurd, in a very Beckettian sense, where Clare and Felice re-enact the same play night after night, a play which becomes indistinguishable from their own lives ('this still feels like the performance of the two-character play') not least because the names of the characters they assume are the same as their own. Like Waiting for Godot, the characters in this play are doomed to repeat ad infinitum with no resolution; Felice isn't sure that even death will offer closure as Clare tries to reassure him that all things must come to an end and so their play must draw to some sort of conclusion. Ultimately the dramatic craft, performance itself, becomes a delusional form of madness where the cold reality of the stage is transformed into the summer of the deep south in the minds of Clare and Felice, so that they no longer need the protection of their coats from the icy winter.

This play is a very intriguing reflection on the dramatic form, where the players can never be sure whether they are inside or outside of the performance, where their lives are just an illusion constantly being formed and reformed by themselves as directors. But this play offers more than a reflection on the nature of theatre; Clare is thought to be based on Tennessee's own sister who suffered from poor mental health, and we can see him grappling with these personal themes to devastating effect here. This is an original, often funny, dark, and rarely performed play which shows another side to the famous playwright, and I would encourage you to catch this whilst the Jermyn Theatre are giving you the opportunity.

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Faust – Young Vic **

Winners of this year’s European Theatre Prize, the Icelandic Vesturport theatre company reinterpret Goethe’s Faust for a modern audience this autumn at the Young Vic. They have teamed up with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis who provide the musical accompaniment throughout. I desperately wanted to like this as I am a huge fan of Nick Cave’s, but even his ethereal piano pieces and occasional seismic goth-rock outburst couldn’t elevate this production from the level of pantomime. And I don’t think I was alone in thinking this; the audience were palpably underwhelmed – we were obviously expecting more from the lauded Vesturport.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the pantomime tradition, and this is definitely more Halloween farce than metaphysical tragedy, but I don’t think this is what Vesturport and the director, Gisli Örn Gardarsson, were aiming for despite the Christmassy setting. There is no character named Faust, but rather an actor who plays Faust only to become him as a result of a devilish pact, entered into merely as part of the ‘play’ – he only mimes slitting his throat for blood to sign the devil’s pact, he is only ‘acting’. When we are introduced to ‘Faust’ he is an old man in a nursing home, reflecting on his life and regretting the choices he has made. He was a famous actor and quotes Macbeth on the actor’s craft: ‘Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’ Perhaps taking this speech too much to heart, the players here are ‘full of sound and fury’ gambolling about the stage, with garish make-up and attention-seeking costumes, performing mildly entertaining acrobatics all to tell a well-known story, much reduced by their telling. What was a straightforward but powerful parable of human greed and spiritual depravity has been reshaped into a jumbled performance with confusing plot developments and non sequiters. The women are dressed in flimsy lingerie and corsets, which could be forgiven if used sparingly on the she-devils ( if wanting to make such a clichéd link between sexuality and wickedness) but even Greta, the pure love-object, cavorts in her underwear, stripping naked to the waist at an impassioned moment with Faust. I’m no prude, but this blatant sexiness and the occasional gestures towards necrophilia and sodomy make this production unsuitable for a younger audience, just the crowd that might find this play appealing.

Energetic and visually pleasing, this performance isn’t a total flop but the acrobatics, which make it such a departure from the norm, are on occasion sloppily executed with Mephisto prematurely crashing into the papered-over trap-door, spoiling his later summoning of the devils -from-below stunt. By its design this isn’t a play for a teen audience so these slip-ups aren’t easily forgiven by a hyper-critical adult audience – the magic of Christmas and Halloween doesn’t work for us either. If the production had been geared towards a younger audience it would have been a great way to get students interested in a difficult and important classic, as it is Vesturport’s Faust is a flimsy thing lacking the existential clout of the original.

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Hamlet – Olivier, National Theatre ***

Elsinore, in Nicholas Hytner’s production, is a foreboding modern dystopia and a surveillance state. The cast are dressed in dark suits and efficiently move around Claudius’ court in a businesslike manner, haunting the corridors of power. Ophelia is driven mad as much by the behaviour of a distracted Hamlet towards her, as by the guards who follow her everywhere and are, at one point, seen to back her screaming into a corner. This idea of persecution creates a potent atmosphere on stage but is problematic in that it detracts from the real rot at the centre of Elsinore, the fratricide visited on old Hamlet by Claudius and his subsequent incestuous marriage to Gertrude. Disappointingly, Patrick Malahide is a very weak Claudius; he sits quite comfortably as his murderous action is recreated by the players before his eyes and his outburst is unbelievably muted when it does come. A much more energetic performance is given by Ruth Negga as a young and vulnerable Ophelia whose madness is convincingly swift-acting and all-consuming. She drags her shopping trolley around the stage in an unhinged frenzy – it is a modern madness where her flower tokens are replaced by childhood toys, her Barbie doll and a stuffed toy.

Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet alone makes this show a must see despite the disappointing supporting cast. A more lacklustre Laertes I haven’t before had the misfortune to witness and Clare Higgins, usually such a pleasure to watch, makes for a hysterical Gertrude who scuttles about the stage in her high heels, working herself up into a high-pitched wail at Hamlet’s murder of Polonius and never managing to convey the powerful nuances of her character. But Kinnear redeems this production from the charge of being just another mediocre modern interpretation. His eloquence transforms the blank verse into something so much more natural than any of the other actors achieve with Shakespeare’s words in their mouths. His language isn’t fraught with the manifold interpretations which precede his, so the big speeches seem fresh – there is no bombastic emphasis or peculiar locution which marks Kinnear’s delivery out from any other. ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ are delivered quietly and thoughtfully like a philosophical man contemplating his place in the universe, not like a bawling actor self-consciously delivering his lines with all the rhetorical flourishes he can muster. Perhaps it is right that those surrounding him are mere shadows in comparison to this Hamlet’s luminescence – it is Hamlet after all who has been received through the ages as ‘real’ in all his doubt and self-loathing and this realness is only intensified in this production which surrounds him with insubstantial puppets.

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Or You Could Kiss Me by Neil Bartlett – Cottesloe Theatre ***

The Handspring Puppet Company returns to the National Theatre after their breathtaking work on War Horse but to much more intimate and subdued effect. In Or You Could Kiss Me the puppetry is, again, enthralling; the two male protagonists are represented by a pair of decrepit and diminutive dummies, with a very convincing shuffling gait, manipulated skilfully by an on-stage team. The intimacy of the stage-hands with the bodies of the old men echoes the closeness that Mr A and Mr B enjoyed as young men in love. Having met in 1971, the two have been together for sixty-seven years and the ‘little one’, Mr A, now finds himself caring for his larger companion who wheezes and splutters, suffering with the advanced stages of emphysema and memory loss. The men must come to terms with Mr B’s hospitalisation and imminent death which spells the end of their life-long bond which has already been threatened by Mr B’s failing memory.

The ensemble cast switch between portraying the two men in their youth and old age which can appear rather chaotic on stage but manages to maintain narrative coherence. Adjoa Andoh's role as master of ceremonies, narrator, nurse, and house-keeper allows the story to be told from a perspective beyond that of the two men, but her swift role changes and fragmented monologues leant confusion to what would have otherwise been a powerful and simple tale. The play also suffered from being too concerned with its temporal setting; for the two men to be in their late eighties and to have met in 1971, the present time has to be 2036, yet there is no visual evidence that we are situated in the future. Of course, this isn’t an important aspect of the play, and it would detract from the action to have this futuristic aspect foregrounded. But props are a major part of this production and the ‘old-fashioned’ answering machine and laptop are anachronistic and conspicuous because it. Yet the moving portrayal of an enduring love, imperilled first by the homophobia of 1970's South Africa and then by the ravages of old age, transcends the particular downfalls of this production.

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Reclining Nude with Black Stockings by Snoo Wilson – Arcola Theatre ***

Powerful male artists with vulnerable women in their thrall seem to be a recurrent theme of productions at the Arcola. Earlier in the year, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s The Line portrayed a curmudgeonly Degas and his relationship with his protégé, Susan, and housemaid, Zoe. Wilson’s is a much shorter and more intense work, delving into the erotic passions which drove Egon Schiele to create his iconic nude paintings.

The charming but bumbling Johannes Flaschberger is our narrator, appearing in the form of Gustav Klimt but addressing us, the audience, as Athenians in order to suggest some kind of parallel with Greek tragedy. Shiele, although not all that dissimilar to the tragic hero beating his breast at the cruelty and inexorability of his fate, he is no mere plaything of the Gods, without volition of his own. He may make pronouncements of innocence and non-culpability but by painting his provocative nudes and carrying on a dalliance with numerous women and models, Schiele is setting himself up for trouble in the eyes of Viennese polite society. To Klimt and his muse, Valerie, he is a tortured genius, but to the police and society at large, he is a deranged and perverted egomaniac. In a Kafkaesque trial scene, Schiele’s artwork is set alight, Valerie finds herself in a catch 22 situation when denying her madness but affirming her involvement in and appreciation of Schiele’s art, and Schiele is condemned on a trumped up charge of rape.

The play is well done and the parts of Valerie and Schiele’s young model are performed passionately by Katie McGuinness and Naomi Sheldon respectively. The Arcola’s Studio 2 is a tiny space which makes the moments of full frontal nudity brave and intimate which, in the context of the play, do not feel gratuitous or titillating. But the play doesn’t please on all fronts; Simon Harrison’s Schiele was enigmatic, sometimes emotionally cold and even inhuman in his betrayal of Valerie, so why the lack of interrogation in respect of the rape charge. We are expected to fall into line with the view that Schiele is being defamed by an ultra-conservative state out to crush his artistic expression. But Schiele is played as a rather distasteful man, for all his genius, who uses and then discards the women he encounters. For this play to feel like more of an examination of Schiele, his art and his passions, we need a more nuanced approach to the central problem of the rape charge and less of Klimt the narrator and his distracting stage business.

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Story of a Rabbit by Hugh Hughes (Shôn Dale-Jones) – The Pit, Barbican *****

Alongside the quietly enigmatic Dafydd Williams, Hugh Hughes delivers a spell-binding show which plumbs the depths of loss and bereavement but at the same time is peculiarly uplifting and life-affirming. Hughes’ project here, according to the programme, is to share his wonderful world with us, and he certainly has a unique insight which is both charming and childlike, especially in the way he marvels at the quotidian (for instance, the number of potato particles in a potato). Telling two stories of death in parallel, his father’s and the next-door-neighbour’s rabbit’s, Hughes gives us an incredibly moving insight into the experiences that can shape an individual; Hughes is at once separate from our own lives and, for the short duration of the show, entirely part of us.

Hughes is a mischievous sprite of a man who wavers between a heartbroken son coming to terms with his father’s death and a stand-up comedian who knows exactly how to exploit his material for laughs. He immediately engages his audience, in a way that could be termed meta-theatrical if it wasn’t for the fact that his self-consciousness is evoked entirely to poke fun at the very approach to theatre that would employ such terms. Indeed, he warns us that throughout the performance he will be using dance and movement to express himself then later proceeds to display an especially peculiar routine which he tells us he conceived during a workshop in Bulgaria, funded by the Arts Council. As the show begins, the lights are up in the studio space and he addresses the audience directly. He offers a cup of tea to one lucky member of the audience, identified by having a ‘T’ written on the back of his ticket, and a second cup of tea (‘EA’ on the ticket this time) is offered later on in the show which serves as a disarming interlude when the narrative reaches its emotional peak. And the performance follows this trajectory throughout; Hughes is excited by the shear wonder of the universe and his place in it, he concentrates on the pathos of his father’s death and then switches to the relative light-relief of the rabbit’s death, then, when it all gets rather morose and Dafydd’s haunting melodies are bringing the tempo down, Hughes bursts through with an unexpected sideline accompanied by Dafydd on the banjo.

Hughes brings infectious energy and touching insight to his show. He greets everyone individually, shaking their hand, as they enter the auditorium, then does the same and hands out badges at the end. This sounds gimmicky but the audience thoroughly enjoyed this unusual intimacy. Hughes was, after all, sharing a deeply personal moment with us, the moment of his father’s death, and it would have been an inferior and colder experience if Hughes had maintained the conventional distance between performer and audience. Story of a Rabbit is one of the most enjoyable performances I have experienced this year because Hughes doesn’t pretend – he is not an actor in the usual sense, this is his story and he plays in a space that is littered with the objects and paraphernalia belonging to his life. The genius of the piece is that we are asked to share in this experience and shown how it can affect us, and amazingly the audience forgets its English reticence and fully engages with the loveable Hughes.

The Wonderful World of Hugh Hughes, currently playing at the Barbican, consists of three performance pieces: Floating, Story of a Rabbit, and 360.

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The Prince of Homburg by Heinrich von Kleist – Donmar Warehouse ****

The hubristic Prince of Homburg is the darling of the Prussian court, raised by the Elector and his wife as if he were one of their own. Prone to sleep-walking, Homburg is discovered in the grounds of the Elector’s palace in a deep trance. The Elector exploits the situation, placing a wreath of laurel on Homburg’s head and offering up to him his niece, Natalia, as a prize. Homburg awakens, with only a woman’s white glove in his hand to testify to the veracity of his dream. For someone prone to reverie, it is significant that the Prince doesn’t experience such an episode again; instead Homburg must face the harsh reality of the Elector’s wrath. Homburg achieves victory on the battlefield by disobeying the Elector’s orders and is thus punished as an example to all who would deliberately act against his commands. Heartbreakingly, Natalia has fallen in love with Homburg and agrees to marry him as soon as it is erroneously reported that the Elector has died in battle. After condemning Homburg to death, the Elector is beseeched by Natalia to pardon Homburg and she is jubilant when he issues her with a writ to release Homburg from confinement. However, the writ is a double bind and, in order for Homburg to secure his freedom, he must state that the Elector has acted wrongly. This is a devastating twist and Homburg then has to choose between living in infamy, as one who would speak against the regime in which he wholeheartedly believes, and a noble death.

This play benefits immensely from the intimate space at the Donmar where the pitiful anguish expressed by Charlie Cox’s Homburg is intensely felt in this slick production which packs a real existential punch. Despite the intimacy, the Elector’s palace is a grey, minimalist structure – its imposing edifice as inhuman as Ian MacDiarmid’s Elector. His diminutive tyrant is thankfully more than your average cardboard cut-out despot; we glimpse his fear at losing a tenuous hold on power over an increasingly disaffected court. But it is significant that both Natalia and Homburg are adopted by the Elector as daughter and son and yet are treated as mere pawns in his power game; their insistence on the fact that the Elector has been like a father to them is no subtle indicator that the Elector is acting monstrously towards them, like no true parent would. The power of this play lies in the way it sustains an internal struggle in the audience to reconcile the desperate situation of Homburg’s death sentence with the coldly rational actions of the Elector. Homburg then matches this rationality with his own self-defeating logic which ultimately seals his fate.

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Ruined by Lynn Nottage – Almeida Theatre ****

Mama Nadi owns an out-of-town bar in the Democratic Public of Congo; her place, a ramshackle two-sided shack taking up the entire stage, is a welcoming and lively retreat from the civil war which is ripping the country apart beyond its doors. Then the professor pays a visit – he has something in his truck that he thinks Mama will be happy to pay good money for, not the usual cigarettes or lipstick, but female refugees. Mama takes the women in, not out of some altruistic impulse to ease their suffering, but rather to put them to work as prostitutes and hopefully generate some income. Life at Mama's is preferable to the alternative, a life lived ostracised from the community because of being 'ruined' as a result of sexual abuse and mutilation. Despite this, Mama's girls are more than hospitable, providing lap-dances for the visiting militia in the bar - a sanctuary from the warring factions outside.

Seemingly impervious to the suffering endured by her new wards, Mama puts them to work. Jenny Jules' Mama is charismatic, wilful and strong but her mercenary interest in her customers, and the rough diamond she has sequestered away, makes her seem cold and inhuman. For Mama, if something can't be measured on a set of scales it isn't worth anything. The menace that has been threatening at the door finally crosses the threshold and there is a palpable change in tone as soon as the second half of the play begins. Horrific violence is first reported by Salima who has been forcibly held as a slave, enduring rape and beatings for five months, and who returns to her village only to be shunned by her family and then beaten and chased away by her husband. The play reaches a climax with the intrusion of war into Mama's realm and the death of Salima who screams 'you won' fight your war on my body any more' as she plunges a knife into her pregnant belly. We learn a crucial thing about Mama at the end of the play – she too is 'ruined' and this explains why she has been so solicitous for Sophie's well-being even after she was found to be stealing from the money-box. The professor finally breaks down the emotional barriers Mama has shored up against her humiliation and she responds to his tender avowal of love.

I can't bring myself to be critical of this play because it was so immensely enjoyable. That's not to say it was faultless, just that it delivered a thought-provoking message in an entertaining and deeply moving way. If I were to be cynical, I might say that the play couldn't decide whether it was a comedy or a tragedy- the humorous elements were perhaps too frequent, the violence, when it came, was then too gratuitous and unrelenting. The love story, rushed in to provide a happy ending, was probably too trite and too unproblematic a conclusion to the deeply troubling series of events that preceded it. Countering this imperfection was an impressive exuberance and vitality; the acting was excellent and the story deeply affecting. The disparate elements came together not to produce a balanced or harmonious piece of theatre (after all, we have moved on from dusty Aristotelian notions of classical dramatic form), but rather to portray the messiness of life and the enduring strength of the human spirit in the face of inhuman brutality and unimaginable adversity.

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London Assurance by Dion Boucicault – National Theatre *****

A delightfully energetic farce, London Assurance is pure entertainment and, under Nicholas Hytner's direction, a joy from start to finish. Sir Harcourt Courtly, a sixty year-old fop, leaves London for a country estate in order to marry the young Grace, niece to Max Harkaway, who at eighteen and haughtily dismissive of love, has committed to marrying Courtly in order to retain her inheritance. Arriving separately and in disguise, Courtly's son, Charles, falls in love with Grace and, along with the hanger-on Dazzle, hatches a plan to divert his father's attention and gain Grace's hand in marriage. Enter Lady Gay Spanker, stealing the show with her exuberant gaiety and hilarious obsession with hunting, to ensnare Courtly and allow young love to flourish.

The conventional happy ending retains a pleasing bite as we realise that Grace's pairing with Charles is not a simple triumph of love over money and duty. Charles inherits the wealth promised to his father if Courtly doesn't marry Grace and so, by choosing Charles, she dodges the unsavoury poser for a younger model in this marriage market. The play is replete with references to the 'mercantile' ways of the world and, although written over 150 years ago, it raises many a knowingly ironic laugh – Dazzle owes numerous debts but assures his creditors that their money will be safer with him than in the Bank of England. Much hilarity ensues as a result of the town/country divide, with the rural dwellers perceiving the Londoners to be vain and vacuous, and the urbanites thinking the country-folk to be nothing more than ignorant hicks with an unnatural predilection for riding horses.

The real reason to go and see this production is not the quality of the play itself; although a neat and entertaining diversion, it would be nothing without a superb cast of comic actors. And here is a superb cast indeed which brings together Fiona Shaw as Lady Spanker and Simon Russell Beale as Courtly – both are outrageous and work so inimitably well together that they could carry the play by themselves. The real treat is that Shaw and Beale are the prize jewels in a glittering crown; the support from the likes of Nick Sampson as Cool and Richard Briers as Lady Spanker's downtrodden husband is first-class. I would be reluctant to see another production of this play in the future, I think we have the definitive version here and I urge you to see it. I doubt it will ever be this good again.

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Election Fever Part II Counted - devised and directed by Steve Bottoms, Ben Freedman and Mimi Poskitt ***

Produced by Roundhouse and Look Left Look Right, Counted is a documentary-play which dramatises verbatim responses given by UK residents in response to questions about the voting process. Staged in the Debating Chamber at County Hall, the play gives a unique and original insight into the widespread apathy preventing people from exercising their democratic right to vote. Televised debates are one way to mobilise us into voting, and the reactions reflected in the polls suggest that people are finally becoming politicised and aware that they have an opinion on political matters. During the course of the play we hear from the controller of factual programming at ITV who suggests that the three party leaders should take part in 'I'm a Celebrity' (or rather, 'I'm a Politician') in order to 'appear human' – as ridiculous as this may sound, more people vote for television talent competitions than they do at general elections.

Of course this play is preaching to the converted – the audience was small (dwarfed by the expansive setting) and predominantly middle-class and middle-aged; your average theatre-going demographic. Those represented in the play were small-town people, speaking with regional accents and obviously coming from a poorer, and poorly-educated, majority. Although the actors did their best to portray these characters feelingly, I couldn't help but think that at some points we were meant to feel entertained rather than shocked by their ignorance. The Debating Chamber is the last place this play should be staged - it should be touring schools and colleges. Counted is trying to convince us that politics is not about the wrangles between MPs in Westminster, but rather the politics governing change at a local level, within the community. The quick-change between characters that the six actors accomplished with ease was engrossing and highly entertaining and would feasibly work in the school environment.

Unfortunately this play has little to offer in the way of a remedy. If people hold strong opinions and would go out and vote if only they knew that their vote counted, then it isn't political apathy that's the problem, but a lack of understanding about the political process and a lack of trust in the politicians. And this play tells us that this lack of trust is justified; the democratic process isn't perfect and, in some ways, it isn't working at all. The same malaise that prevents people from voting has affected London theatre-goers; a disinterest in politics. Just as voters are turning out in ever-diminishing numbers, so are those who would pay to see a play about politics, which is a real shame as this production is vital and necessary, even if a bit rough around the edges. The most moving account was saved until last; a teenage-mother, who knows nothing about what it means to vote, feels helpless when she is treated badly by midwives at her local hospital. But can voting alone restore the sense of dignity and empowerment that so many are without?

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Election Fever Part I A Day at the Racists by Anders Lustgarten**** and Posh by Laura Wade ***

The Broadway Theatre in Barking opened its Spin the Election festival with a one-off performance of Anders Lustgarten’s ground-breaking play about the rise of the BNP, A Day at the Racists. An altogether different play is currently running at the Royal Court in west London with an attack on the privileged ruling classes at its heart. Posh by Laura Wade is centered on the ‘Riot Club’, an Oxford University dining society for aristocrats who rage against the loss of an idealised England they believe once belonged to them. Both plays have much to say about the current state of Britain and have powerful political messages that are lent further gravitas by the proximity of the general election.

A Day at the Racists is particularly provocative because Barking is in real danger of becoming a BNP-controlled council; Nick Griffin is running for MP and in the last election his party ran for 13 seats and won 12, in this election they are running 34 candidates and they only need 26 seats to take the Council. Taking the recent change in BNP party-membership rules to its logical conclusion, the play shows a certain prescience in having a British Pakistani woman, Gina, running the BNP election campaign for the Barking and Dagenham constituency. Gina is believable and charismatic; she avoids the opprobrious BNP ideology and concentrates on policy to address the legitimate concerns of Pete, a working-class and disaffected Labour supporter.

Gina’s promise to overhaul the housing allocation system to give priority to long-time residents strikes a chord with Pete whose son and young granddaughter are living his front room. This is a real concern affecting the borough and, as was made apparent in the Q&A session which followed the performance; residents feel that these are the issues that need to be addressed and have not been dealt with by the current government. The first half of the play is powerful because Gina seems to offer a reasonable way out; we allow ourselves to understand, even for the briefest of moments, why Pete might perceive the BNP to be a real alternative.

Pete is a loveable everyman seduced by Gina’s energy and the solutions she offers to his problems, but he is also seduced by Gina herself and this is where the play is at its weakest. In the second half it becomes apparent that a unique set of circumstances have led to Pete’s entanglement with the BNP – his attraction to Gina and her involvement in securing a flat for his son, Mark. More worrying still is that the only thing that finally discredits the BNP in Pete’s eyes is the incitement of racist violence by BNP members as an integral strategy in their election campaign. This is artistic license on Lustgarten’s part and it serves to bring the play to a dramatic conclusion but it falsifies the reality, and this is a play which draws its strength from the real issues. I would have much preferred a less dramatic ending which saw Pete renounce the party because of abhorrence at their ideology and the values they stand for.


Posh may not be quite so electrifying but it certainly deals with pertinent issues. With Boris Johnson and David Cameron being infamous past members of the Bullingdon Club, we can see exactly where Wade is aiming her invective – straight at the heart of the Conservative Party. The first half of the play is a humorous romp promising much hedonism and revelry as the diners congregate at a private dining-room. A newly initiated member pointedly asks when membership of the club mean automatic entry into politics, but everything else remains lighthearted until things take a sinister turn after the interval. Leo Bill (of Tim Burton's Alice in Wonderland fame) plays Alistair, the most outspoken of the group - venomous in his attacks on the 'poor', he is a distasteful fascist with extreme views. The audience, who much of the time seemed to be laughing with these privileged bigots rather than at them, was perceptibly unnerved by the harrowing turn of events which sees drunken boisterousness quickly descend into serious violence. But soon they were laughing knowingly as the disgraced Alistair is offered a place in 'the party' by uncle-figure Jeremy.

For all its faults, A Day at the Racists has the edge over Posh, although both are exciting and thought-provoking works. Lustgarten's play worked so well because of the frisson generated by being staged at The Broadway. The same could be said for Posh, whose audience definitely had its representative Kensington & Chelsea contingent, but it didn't have the same urgency about it; one passionate member of the audience of A Day at the Racists stressed the importance of Lustgarten's play – the very people watching it have the power to prevent a BNP win in Barking & Dagenham and they have very little time in which to do it.

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1936 by Tom McNab – Arcola Theatre **

Tom McNab cannot be faulted when it comes to dedication to his art – he is appearing after each performance of 1936 at the Arcola to lead a discussion. I cannot enlighten you as to the form or necessity of this discussion as, having not enjoyed the play, I didn't stay for it or for the accompanying excerpt from the Riefenstahl film Olympiad. These added extras are very telling: the play should stand on its own as the dramatisation of a moment in history, it should be whole in itself without the need for attendant analytical baggage. The historical points and ideological implications were so patronisingly laboured throughout that there was really no need to follow it with more prescriptive pronouncements from the cast or playwright.

The play centres on America's potential boycott of the Berlin Olympic Games in response to the treatment of the Jewish athletes by the Nazis. An interesting premise which failed in the execution: this subject does have dramatic potential but the play felt like a fleshed-out textbook rather than an engaging piece of theatre. McNab is so bent on historical accuracy that an engaging script and believable characters are sidelined. Hitler was diminutive and predominantly unconvincing, only once reaching the heights of passion for which the real historical figure was infamous. The director, Jenny Lee, has Jesse Owens and a female high-jumper go at their respective sports in strange sepia-lit slow-motion which managed to raise a chuckle in this theatre-goer but extinguished any last remaining shreds credibility.

By the end, it isn't just the play that asks us 'would the holocaust have happened if America hadn't attended?', there is an irritating reporter/narrator to put this question to us with the lack of subtlety which characterises the whole enterprise. Indeed, we will never know the answer to this question, or any other like it, because 'the ifs of history stretch from here to Albuquerque'. And on that cringe-worthy note, all I can say is that at least 1936 had brevity on its side.

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Macbeth directed by Declan Donnellan - Silk Street Theatre, Barbican Centre **

Having never seen a production of Macbeth I was eagerly awaiting this modern-dress version produced by Cheek by Jowl, the company responsible for a very powerful Othello at the Cambridge Arts Theatre in 2004 and an inventive Troilus and Cressida at the Barbican in 2008. The set was sparse, leaving a wide expanse of stage bounded either side by tall wooden pallets through which light periodically streaked into the murky gloom enveloping the stage. The lighting was atmospheric and particularly effective during the banquet scene; the arrival of Banquo's ghost was spookily done with only his head illuminated, coming seemingly disembodied towards a petrified Macbeth.

Donnellan's efforts were interesting but unfortunately the overall effect was rather underwhelming and amateur. Sincerity was missing from many of the performances and some of the choices made regarding staging were bizarre and didn't work well. The decision to present the three weird sisters as disembodied voices was perhaps a way to make the supernatural elements of the play more palatable to a modern and incredulous sensibility but I was looking forward to terrifying witches in all their bodily ghoulishness. The lack of witches ties in neatly with Macbeth's visions, the 'false creations' of his mind, but this was taken to a whole different level with the absence of all of the murderers in the play which left Banquo squirming around on the floor gripped by dramatic death throes as his would-be assassins remained invisible. Similarly Macduff's wife and child pin their own arms behind their backs and die with terrific convulsions which lack all semblance of shock and violence because of the stifled hilarity provoked by watching someone pretend to die in this overtly theatrical manner.

Anastasia Hille as Lady Macbeth gave an unsteady performance which strengthened as the play progressed; she was bewitching in the sleep-walking scene but her gestures were far too flamboyant and descriptive at the beginning so that she almost appeared to be miming her words. Will Keen was grating as Macbeth; he made a good show of being wracked with guilt, tormented by his ambition and then overcome with a sense of his own power but his enunciation was poor and his utterances often sounded little more than a series of grunts which rather spoilt the great Shakespearean iambic pentameter. The sexual chemistry between the two was well-expressed; the moment where they passionately embrace after murdering Duncan, trying to keep their bloody hands out of the way, was particularly disturbing.

Kelly Hotten's porter was probably the star of the show, her inscrutable thick Glasweigan accent did nothing to mar the bawdy comedy which was excellently expressed with her body anyway. Unashamedly straight out of a pantomime, the porter's character was approached honestly and knowingly which is more than can be said for the rest of the play which offered its audience pantomime theatricality in all pretentious seriousness.

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The Sanctuary Lamp written and directed by Tom Murphy – Arcola Theatre ****

Murphy delivers a fraught drama about three people on the edge of society in a play that plunges the depths of humanity in its ‘unhoused, free condition’ and yet retains a warm sense of humour. Harry is an outcast and shadow of his former powerful self; an itinerant ex-circus strongman, he is hired by the Monsignor of a Catholic church to act as caretaker. He only lasts one shift but it is an eventful night in which he is visited by a ghostlike waif, Maudie, and his nemesis, the Irish blackguard Francisco. These three, battered and bruised by life’s onslaught, entertain and protect each other in ways that are by turns nurturing and beastly, but in every way all too human.

The dingy church setting is realistically rendered with pews, a pulpit, a confessional and the sanctuary lamp but the echoing effect that persists throughout the play is an unnecessary distraction. The very dominance of the church-as-set is ironic because of the very fact that religious faith doesn’t feature as a strong redemptive force (the church echoes because it is an empty signifier); Harry speaks to the sanctuary lamp, remembering his young daughter and lamenting her loss, but he can derive no comfort from it or from the notion of God. Only Maudie maintains her belief in Jesus and his powers of forgiveness because of the extremity in which she finds herself and the guilt she suffers over the death of her child. Francisco is a bombastic drunk but also a plain-speaker who goes someway towards convincing Maudie that the ghostly visitations she believes she has experienced are mere dreams.

Robert O’Mahoney gives an excellent and warm performance as Harry. By way of his compulsion to talk and his antic verbal expression, where he tirelessly appends almost every utterance with a ‘you know’ or an ‘actually’, he counters loneliness by filling emptiness with words - after all “silence is loneliness” in this play. His eccentricity is humorous but also pitiful as his verbal tics reveal that something about his character is amiss. He mentions to the Monsignor that he has a compulsion to do something bad, this ‘something’ remains unnamed but it lends a sinister air to the proceedings, especially when the young and vulnerable Maudie shows up.

Kate Brennan’s Maudie is a strange creature who fetishises the telling of her own story by hinting at the sexual violence in her past and then excitedly asking ‘shall I tell you…?’ when Harry or Francisco provides an audience. Unlike Harry, Francisco is willing to listen to Maudie’s story which serves to demystify it just as his atheistic rant deflates the Mystery of religion – “God made the world, sure. But what has he done since?” Declan Conlon gives an energetic performance as Francisco and manages to capture his Irish charm as well as his disturbing sexual interest in Maudie. This play shows how the religious morality cannot serve as a template for life with all its complexity and nuance. Maudie is young and her religious conviction strong, on the other hand Francisco and Harry display the cynicism that comes with experience. It is obvious that Maudie will lose her spirituality and become a pragmatist – religion has no place where humanity exists in all its imperfection. Murphy’s play is unintentionally all too timely - Harry’s question “is the Pope infallible?” is distressingly resonant at the present time as sexual abuse in the Irish Catholic church is once again making the headlines.

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Twelfth Night - directed by Gregory Doran ****

The RSC's current production of Twelfth Night is riotously funny but, thankfully, does not ignore the darker elements of the play. Previous versions have done so (notably, the 1997 RSC production), playing the entire thing for laughs to the detriment of this complex play, possibly Shakespeare's finest comedy. But Gregory Doran's Twelfth Night is not short on humour and it is always a joy to experience a production of Shakespeare which doesn't just exist as an historical curiosity but is a relevant and vigorous play in its own right. This Twelfth Night didn't just seem like something which should be enjoyed and appreciated because it is Shakespeare - it wasn't in the least tired or bombastic but full of life and interest.

Set against an ostensibly Ottoman backdrop, the action in Illyria is lent an exotic and hedonistic quality by the incense bearers, hookah pipes, and colourful lanterns which process across the stage at various points. And then the characters arrive in English Regency costume with a few pairs of harem pants thrown in (looking like a nod to Renaissance pantaloons) – a bit of a visual non sequitur along with the plastic sea wave protruding from backstage right, confusingly behind a high city wall. Although the set and setting do not make complete sense, the atmosphere that they help to create is spot-on; this is a far away and isolated wonderland which operates under different rules from those at home.

Malvolio's discovery of the prank letter is the crowning glory of a very funny play with an excellent cast. James Fleet stands out as the preening Andrew Aguecheek, and Richard McCabe is effortlessly hilarious as the gross Sir Toby. One cannot forgo a mention of Richard Wilson as Malvolio, possibly the biggest lure of this production; he gives a good but predictable performance with more than a hint of Victor Meldrew in it, but his advanced years definitely add another element to the abasement he is made to suffer at the hands of Sir Toby and Maria. Miltos Yerolemou gives a nuanced performance as Feste; he is a fool with a tragic bent, crying real tears when Olivia uncovers the cruel jest in which he played a part. Accompanying the musicians on stage at the end of the interval, Yerolemou entertains the audience, not in the character of Feste, but as a courtly fool and this is just one example of the exquisite attention to detail that makes this production such a joy. Doran has really thought about the conventions of Elizabethan theatre and brought them back to life here – this is art as pure and unadulterated entertainment.

Perhaps the revelatory last scene, where Cesario/Viola's gender-bending comes to light, isn't as much the carnivalesqe inversion it may have once been; the shock with which Jo Stone-Fewings' Duke Orsino contemplates having had the hots for a girl dressed as a boy, and mistaking Sebastian for his sister, doesn't quite resonate with a modern theatre audience. We can live with Orsino's dalliance in bisexuality, but Antonio's exclusion is more troubling. The final scene is sill humorous and can be taken in the rip-roaringly funny tone intended, but Antonio's pain at being denied by Sebastian lingers on as does Malvolio’s cruel humiliation. A final procession of dispossessed and broken individuals follows that last scene, where comedic custom would have everyone neatly paired off, to stress that the loose ends are far from being tied up in a world where men can harm others for their own sport.

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11 and 12 by Marie-Hélène Estienne and Peter Brook– Barbican Theatre ***

The setting is French-occupied Mali in the1930s and the dramatic action is the violence that resulted from a deep disunity in the Muslim community. Two opposing sects disagree over the recitation of a prayer, whether it should be said eleven or twelve times, and the result is a schism which weakens the native position in the face of the French colonialists. Using this disagreement to their advantage, the colonisers label those who recite the prayer eleven times as political dissenters and rebels requiring punishment and exile.

Having just read Chinua Achebe’s Arrow of God it is obvious that Brook’s play fits into a tradition of post-colonialist representation of Africa. Like Brook’s cast of characters, the novel’s tribes are weakened by internal conflicts which have arisen because of the seductive presence of the coloniser. But the same problems which make this particular novel a slow and difficult read afflict this play. Characters are underdeveloped and appear very wooden and un-individuated. They tend to speak proverbially and in the abstract so that each character becomes representative of a type rather than a personage in their own right. And it isn’t just the otiose script that contributes to this stiltedness; the delivery is very flat with little voice modulation so that the audience really has to pay attention to avoid drifting off.

And, as brilliant and accomplished as Toshi Tsuchitori is, his music (played live and on-stage with breathtaking beauty and variety) was soft, gentle and constant but coupled with the monotone of the cast’s delivery and their slow movements about the stage, it had the effect of a lullaby – soothing the audience gently into a state of semi-slumber. Brook, who once wrote in ‘The Empty Space’, that drama resides even in a single man crossing a stage, has perhaps taken this pronouncement a little too much to heart and has forgotten how to make a drama immediate and affecting.

The play owes a lot to Greek tragedy and has much in common with how these plays are habitually staged; the set is minimalistic but highly effective, the costumes are simple and timeless and the characters are keen on declamatory speeches. But unlike Greek tragedy, this play is lacking in passion, the subject is great but is dealt with in too small and muted a fashion. The religious leaders locked in dispute retain the reverence of their disciples; this is not a tragedy because the status quo is not significantly questioned, the populace not seriously disaffected. For my money I wanted to see a more damning indictment of the religious mindset which allowed the violence supposedly at the heart of this play.

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Heldenplatz by Thomas Bernhard – Arcola Theatre ****

The predominantly middle-aged, middle-class demographic of theatre-goers attending Heldenplatz at Hackney’s Arcola Theatre are unlikely to find anything in this play that they would deem controversial or challenging to the prevailing status quo. And it is a shame that, in watching this play at a remove of more than twenty years from its specific historical moment, what must have been an electric and destabilising drama when first performed is now somewhat dampened in effect. Indeed, Thomas Bernhard’s play was condemned in Austria and the playwright himself prohibited its performance there in his will. Exploring the right-wing anti-Semitic sentiments of those in power, Bernhard’s play shows how a post-war Austria has continued to treat an intellectual Jewish family, the Schuster’s, in such a way as to make Vienna just as uninhabitable in 1988 as it was when they fled it in 1938.

Bernhard structures his play with a succession of powerful and expressive monologues and it is the characters delivering these who manage to hold our attention. The minor personages fade into the background as if only there as a foil to those that do speak eloquently about their situation. Hannah Boyde, as the housemaid Herta, delivers the only strong performance from a minor character in this play. She speaks very infrequently but her nervous movements across the stage and her furious shoe-shining manage to convey her sense of entrapment and unease. She is cornered by Barbara Marten’s excellent Frau Zittel and made to listen to her erratic and often hysterical tale of life with the Professor whilst being admonished for her laziness and her naïve devotion to the family to which she does not belong. The performances lack polish with both Marten and Clive Mendus as Uncle Robert tripping over their words but no doubt they will become more self-assured as the run progresses.

The cast were battling against the tiredness of a flagging midweek audience who found it hard to keep their eyes open past 8pm in the warm and dimly lit studio. It was a real shame because the play and the triumphant performances given by the cast were far from soporific and deserved more attention. This is far from light entertainment but the play does manage to encompass humour along with its bleak misanthropy. And there is something very Chekhovian about this play; perhaps because this is the drama of a single family played out in the drawing room and the cemetery, or perhaps it is the desolation of the premise: suicide of Professor Schuster. Like Chekhov, Bernhard emphasises the importance of place; the Professor never felt at home in Vienna, Neuhaus or Oxford and his widow can’t stand the flat that looks over the Heldenplatz. After all the Heldenplatz is a major character in this play, characters continually stare out of the window at the looming square and, hearing again the phantom calls of Nazi troops from the square, Frau Professor collapses in defeat abandoning the hostile world in which she lives like her suicidal husband before her.

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Van Doesburg and the International Avant-Garde: Constructing a New World – Tate Modern ****

Founder of the De Stijl art movement and magazine, Dutch artist Theo van Doesburg (1883-1931) is a key figure of Modernism and the avant-garde and, surprisingly, this is the first major exhibition in the UK to be devoted to him.

Paving the way for Dadaism, van Doesburg uses a strict method of abstraction in his works which is underpinned by a rigorous theoretical system. The artworks, posters, furniture, videos and sculptures displayed here are worthwhile because of the illuminating light they shed on the political and philosophical climate of Europe in the 1920s, rather than for their artistic merit alone. The repetitive geometry of black vertical and horizontal lines with primary-coloured cubes is what is most recognisable about the De Stijl movement, and many of the lesser artists represented here seem to have been producing derivative works in the same style. But it is the application of this style to exquisite pieces of furniture and architecture which reveals that there is more to this movement that a slavish adherence to minimalistic form; hence the subtitle of this exhibition, ‘Constructing a New World’.

The De Stijl art movement was a collective enterprise which infiltrated design on a functional level and on a grand scale and this is expertly represented here. After the devastation inflicted by the Great War, van Doesburg and his contemporaries turned to formlessness and extreme abstraction to create a utopian future where distinctive colour and form was abandoned for the perfection of the straight line. Take the opportunity to see these works before the exhibition ends in May because you will be rewarded with a much richer experience than the simplicity of the works themselves suggest.

And if you visit this exhibition it is worthwhile catching the excellent Gorky Retrospective…

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Arshile Gorky: A Retrospective – Tate Modern ***

You get less for your money here in comparison to van Doesburg; the paintings speak for themselves but there just seems to be fewer works to see with less expertise expended over their curation. One of the American greats of the 20th Century, Gorky was a tormented genius who committed suicide after a series of personal tragedies and injury. His early works clearly show the influence of Cezanne and Picasso but he developed his own style of impressionist realism with his portraits; the two versions of The Artist and His Mother being the stand-out pieces of the exhibition. In his later works he developed an abstract expressionist style dominated by bright colours, curling black lines and fluid forms. Some of these are haunting in their nightmarish non-specificity and their use of dark colours and large foreboding shapes. Serene works like Waterfall (1943), dominated by a wash of green with bright yellow shapes, appear alongside angry paintings like Agony (1947) with its angular black and orange shapes on a background of livid red. There is an infinite variety of mood conjured by these paintings, all expressed in an energetic and individual style which embodies a rich emotional life despite the outward effortlessness of the composition.

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Decode: Digital Design Sensations – V&A Musuem **

An intriguing concept which failed in the execution.The notion of digital artworks, the inventive and creative application of functional computer programming, is explored through three key themes: Code, Network and Interactivity. But this exhibition is small and overcrowded with a very narrow two-way corridor displaying small-screen exhibits on both sides leading into one large chamber housing the interactive installations. This made the Code section which held the most interesting works almost impossible to see let alone enjoy and appreciate. These small and understated creations were fascinating and even unexpectedly beautiful showing that abstract art doesn’t need to be static or non-referential; Stockspace (Marius Watz) uses statistical data to create graphic visual patterns which change and adapt in response to fluctuations in the stock market as they happen. The collaborative works in Network, such as the Exquisite Clock (Fabrica), went someway to redeem technology from the charge that it is isolating and robotic by showing that technology allows artistic relationships and connections on a global scale.

The Interactivity theme is the one that seems to be drawing in the crowds; visiting on a Sunday, the whole day’s ticket allocation was sold-out by 3.00pm. Unfortunately the computerised blinking eye, which has been the image adorning all promotional material, is now defunct and has been removed from the exhibition. Children and adults alike were marvelling at the rather basic and unoriginal concept of a video camera recording their image and then projecting it on a screen along with other videos captured throughout the day. The only theme of Interactivity seemed to be the mirroring of the onlooker, the reflection of the physical world through the digital eye. A giant mirror, which only slowly reveals the reflected image of the figure that stands patiently in front of it, superimposing the image on the one captured previously, Venetian Mirror (Fabrica) is the least subtle exploration of this theme but at least it is honest in its purpose. As appealing as this may be to our innate vanity, I hope this endless and boring reflection of the viewing-subject isn’t the future for art, digital or otherwise.

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Every Good Boy Deserves Favour – Tom Stoppard *****

Tom Stoppard’s play is unusual and brilliant in that it requires a full orchestra to be present on stage and participate in the action. For this reason, Every Good Boy Deserves Favour is unfortunately only rarely performed. Thankfully, in response to the success of the 2009 run, the National Theatre is staging a limited run this winter with the Southbank Sinfonia. The power of its themes, of imprisonment, madness and corruption, lends this play a gravitas which stands in counterpoint to the dark humour and comic absurdity of much of the action.

A political dissenter, Alexander Ivanov (Adrian Schiller), is interred in an asylum for suggesting that the Soviet system commits sane men (his nonconformist friends) to mental institutions. Caught in a Catch 22-type situation, whereby he must admit to being cured of his psychosis in order to be freed, he refuses to bring about his own release for fear of validating the lies of the Soviet regime and corroborating in their corruption. Coincidentally, his cellmate, also named Ivanov (Julian Bleach), is genuinely insane, believing himself to be in possession and in control of a full orchestra. Apart from providing much entertainment and comedy, Ivanov’s real lunacy allows for a confusion of identities when the Corporal comes to review the two men’s cases for imprisonment. Both are freed but this is no simple solution; the psychotic Ivanov is lost and vulnerable when unleashed on the world, and Alexander has slipped through the net on a technicality when he wanted to act autonomously to expose a hypocritical regime.

The interplay between actors and orchestra is exceptionally handled with the doctor, played by Jonathan Aris, moving fluidly from his acting role into a violinist and back again. Interestingly, the audience participate in Ivanov’s delusion in being able to see the orchestra live on stage, whereas those characters within the play are oblivious to it. Just like Ivanov, we derive pleasure from this music and we feel the loss as keenly as he when the orchestra disbands in what seems to be a violent and cruel catharsis. The received wisdom that madness needs to find a cure is challenged here in a play fraught with conflicting impulses. Sacha, Alexander’s young son played by Wesley Nelson, reminds us that, in sacrificing himself to expose the regime, his father will leave him alone and miserable in a brutal world. Only sixty-five minutes in length, this play carries the weight and fullness of a three-hour production, creating a lasting impression that endures far beyond its duration in the theatre.

Three Sisters, Lyric Hammersmith ****

Irina, Masha and Olga are trapped in their small-town provincial existence, dreaming of a return to Moscow - a place which holds the promise of escape, love and life. Ultimately everyone must come to accept their lot and live the life they have been struggling against: Andrei rails against the small-minded town folk who think that working for the local authority is the pinnacle of one’s career and then boasts when he is appointed to such a post, and Irina is horrified by the thought of marrying Baron Tuzenbach instead of finding love in Moscow but then finally succumbs to the idea.

Nothing happens in this play; the sisters never make it to Moscow, Masha’s love affair comes to nothing and she returns to her husband and, although Irina is willing to marry someone she doesn’t love for the chance of escape it offers, she must abandon her plans when her fiancé is killed in a duel. It is precisely this lack of movement and plot development which makes Chekhov’s play a masterpiece in human observation. In laying bare the dreams and desires which make us human, the inevitable failures and weakening of the individual will to act, this play questions how successful we are as agents of our own destiny. The sisters are initially strong and self-determining, Irina will go to work and be useful and Masha will love Vershinin despite being unhappily married, but by the end of the play all three accept their unhappy lot, pronouncing that their fate is ‘in God’s hands’.

In this new and innovative version by Christopher Hampton at The Lyric, Hammersmith, Chekhov’s Three Sisters is brought up-to-date and made relevant to a modern audience through an inspired use of sound and staging. The open and unadorned set reaches across the wide expanse of the stage, the lighting, sound-system and wings are all in view. This lends to the action an air of unconstrained freedom; the mismatched furniture and chaotic movement makes the family’s lifestyle appear bohemian but the three-bar fires and their unhomely, unhoused condition hints at poverty. Strategically placed microphones amplify sound so that everyday noise becomes strange and disarming. The boiling of a kettle starts at a low rumble but reaches an unearthly and apocalyptic crescendo until it switches off and the audience realise that nothing has happened except that the tea is now ready to be made. Although gimmicky, this sonic manipulation does help to compound the prevailing atmosphere of tension and unease but is also witty and fun like much of the dialogue.

Despite the predictable Russian doom and gloom, this play is funny not least because of the excellent comic performances by Clare Dunne as Irina and Gemma Saunders as Andrei’s soppy but malevolent wife, Natasha. Romola Garai is excellent as Masha, her caustic wit and depressive loafing suggestive of the fact that she is the only sister to have given up hope a long time ago. While the others quarrel as to whether society will see improvement and intellectual advancement or fixity and meaninglessness, Masha believes in faith and meaning but when, at the end of the play, she reiterates the line she first spoke in good humour, ‘and round the oak a golden chain…and round the oak a golden chain…’, it is apparent that she is descending into nonsense and madness in the reiteration of this haunting image of imprisonment.

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Rope by Patrick Hamilton *****

I would always recommend Rope the stage play over the Alfred Hitchcock movie version. Atmospheric and nail-biting though that film is, the experience of seeing the action live on stage is far more suspenseful not least because of the dramatic intensity of having the body of the undergraduate, Ronald Kentley, (or at least the illusion of it) interred on stage throughout. Patrick Hamilton’s play works; it captures that mercurial essence of theatre which is to convince the audience that they are witnessing an event, that something vital is unfolding in the present moment. This is what I hope to discover every time I visit the theatre and I am often disappointed, but it would be hard to come by a more satisfying production than Roger Michell’s Rope, currently at the Almeida theatre.

The setting is the recognizable post-war jazz age of Brideshead Revisited, populated by aristocratic undergraduates at Oxford making mischief while they are down in London for the holidays. But while the mischief is innocuous enough and the tenets of Catholicism the primary source of doubt in Brideshead, Rope has its students questioning the value of life itself leading to cruel and motiveless murder. Based on a real case, this play brings alive the true horror of the crime but, that said, it also has a tremendous comedic force. Phobe Waller-Bridge delivers a faultless turn as the irrepressibly energetic and vacuous Leila. However the truly show-stealing performance is Bertie Carvel's Rupert, with an eccentric turn of phrase and biting wit reminiscent of Brideshead's Anthony Blanche; he is the voice of experience bringing his shambling gait and incongruous tales of war into the centre of the Mayfair party scene.

The rest of the cast are strong: Alex Waldman is suitably nervous and hysterical as Granillo, Michael Elwyn is pitiable and vulnerable as Sir Johnstone, and Emma Dewhusrt brings great comic timing to the role of monosyllabic Mrs Debenham. Blake Ritson is strong as the bombastic Brandon but his delivery was slightly overdone in the opening scene. Similarly, the play closed on a weak note with the body of Ronald being revealed jack-in-the-box-like, bursting through his chest-coffin in a cloud of confetti. Perhaps it was a gesture towards the idea of Ronald's revenge but it failed and left behind an atmosphere of absurdity which did not do justice to the rest of the performance which was spirited, horrirfying edge-of-your-seat stuff.

Innocence by Dea Lohr ***

Appearing as part of the Arcola Theatre’s January season of German plays, Dea Loher’s Innocence , translated by David Tushingham, is just the thing to strip away any lingering festive merriment or excess. It is an astringent black comedy with a cast of strange, mad and disturbed characters. The story of two illegal dock workers witnessing a woman drowning and doing nothing to save her is played out in a dystopian set of corrugated metal walls where the detritus of modern life, books and a television set, are strewn and surrounded by sand, fragments shored up against ruin.

A crazed old woman (Ellen Sheean) intrudes on the bereaved relatives of recent murder victims, claiming to be the mother of the criminal and apologising for her left-handed poet son pleading that she ‘wasn’t being evil’ forcing him to use his right and noticing that the stab wounds show he used his left. Rosa (Caroline Kilpatrick) is trapped in a loveless marriage to an undertaker who takes more care of the cadavers he brings home than of her. Her diabetic amputee mother (the hilarious Ann Mitchell) moves in and stifles Rosa’s attempt at independence. The overarching narrative of the dock workers poses an interesting question of moral culpability but it is the strangeness of the whole ensemble and the creepy atmosphere of the suicide-prone town that really steals the show. This tone is best represented by the blind pole-dancer, Absolute, played by Meredith MacNeill; a feisty but needy and vulnerable waif who picks up one of the dock workers off the street.

In a town where all voices collaborate to shout ‘JUMP!’ at a person threatening to commit suicide from a bridge, because they are holding up the rush hour traffic, strong human bonds are in fact forged. Absolute finds refuge with her new friends, even Rosa’s mother finds a devoted carer in the crazed old woman. Yet it is Rosa’s return to the sea at the end of the play which reinforces the duality at the centre of the play - she is at once free and bound, as she escapes life she is ensnared by the universal compulsion to commit the self to death.

Ellen Sheean gives the most genuine and moving performance; her every move speaking the anguish of her mind. Maggie Steed is great to watch but the part is not a good one, seemingly tacked on without much bearing on the rest of the play. Requiring the characters to frequently narrate their actions and to prelude their lines with introductions, ‘Rosa said…’, the play loses immediacy and realism but this does add to its project of de-familiarisation. Bitingly funny but not afraid to show that suffering often lies at the heart of existence, this is an extraordinary play with which to start the new year.