A Christmas Carol

Published http://londonfestivalfringe.com/general/post/?p=14207

Sell a Door’s A Christmas Carol, directed by David Hutchinson and Anna Schneider, recreates the loneliness of Scrooge as he sits at his desk in the Christmas season, jealously counting his money, and enjoying an orgy of mutual hatred with the world. The directors of the Dickens classic use the small stage of the Greenwich Playhouse and a modest budget to maximum effect. They place a live musician with his computer and keyboard in one corner of the room; use the actors and dancers in the production as stage hands and helpers between scenes; and they draw a series of quick-fire sets on the blackboard that acts as backdrop for the play – a surprisingly effective device.

Stephen Barden successfully brings to life Scrooge’s melancholic, solitary existence, while the young cast does justice to the somewhat holier-than-thou Cratchetts, and the various ghosts that pay Scrooge a visit in his home. Tara Godolphin and Jess Mock shine as the ghosts of Christmas present and past respectively. Godolphin in a neon-green dress, a size or two too small for her, totters about in high heels, and gives us a tarty interpretation of the former, while Mock animates her preaching with a coy and flirty, mock-angelic version of the latter. The singing and dancing interludes are effective and Christmasy, though there are Christmas horrors in store for Scrooge, so the play is not an ideal Christmas treat for the young ones.

The paragraph in the promos and programme that points to the similarity between this classic tale and the current banking crisis does the play a disservice, however, in that it raises expectations that there will be more in the script that satirizes, or at least signifies, the current economic climate. I would definitely be up for watching an adaptation of A Christmas Carol that was actually set in today’s recession, where Scrooge could be the epitome of a Northern Rock banker, and Cratchett his hapless employee, fearfully trying to guard against redundancy. I wouldn’t mind seeing a gay Fred, fighting the good fight against his homophobic uncle. However, this is not the case here, and the play is simply a fun, and somewhat contemporary, adaptation of the original.

If you are into fringe theatre, then Sell a Door is a company to watch. They tour widely and successfully, one of the few fringe theatre companies to do so without any funding. Upcoming adaptations include Lord of the Flies and The History Boys.

A Christmas Carol, Greenwich Playhouse, Till January 15, 2012

Disrobing the King’s Mistresses

The Whore's Last Shift, James Gillray, National Portrait Gallery, 1779

Henry Angels as Mrs. Cole in The Minor, Samuel de Wilde, National Portrait Gallery, 1792

Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn, William Hogarth, National Portrait Gallery, 1738

Mary Robinson - Perdita, John Hoppner, Natioanl Portrait Gallery, 1782

  

Nell Gwyn (1651-1687) throws you a deliciously superior glance as her robes fall off her shoulders and reveal a not-so-coy vision of her milky breasts. You can look, but you can’t touch, she says. King Charles II’s mistress, mother of at least two of his bastards, and one of the first actresses to perform at the Theatre Royal in Covent Garden, Gwyn seems exclusively to be painted getting into or out of her clothes. As one of the visitors to the National Portrait Gallery commented, “This one seemed to be cursed with a series of wardrobe malfunctions.”

The First Actresses exhibition is a series of portraits by celebrated painters like Simon Verelst, Sir Peter Lely, and Thomas Gainsborough, of the first actresses to be allowed on the English stage. These were women who were desired and feared in equal measure for their bawdy, confident acting, their throw-it-in-your-face personal lives, and their decadent sense of style and fashion.

Many of the women combined a life as an actress and dancer with forays into the royal court. While this was most often as the chosen mistress of a king or a prince (like Nell Gwyn, Moll Davis, and Mary Robinson), women like Sarah Siddons (1755-1831) entered the royal threshold as reading instructor. Instead of displaying a quantity of rippling flesh, Siddons, in a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, is pictured standing next to a staid side table. A couple of weighty leather-bound founts of knowledge lie on the table, and Siddons’s carriage is made even more stately with a pair of serious eyes and a set of petulant lips.

Some of the choicest pieces in the exhibition are perhaps the ones least touted in the press. These are hilarious satirical etchings by artists such as William Hogarth and James Gillray. One titled Strolling Actresses Dressing in a Barn is a scene of dressers, seamstresses, half-dressed actresses, surrounded by a mind-numbing quantity of green room paraphernalia. Another, this one by Gillray, is simply titled The Whore’s Last Shift (1779).

While the 1660s allowed female actresses to perform on the stage for the first time, these women were considered disreputable and suspect, and easy prey to roving eyes and fingers. By 1737, only troupes with a royal charter were allowed to perform on stage. In this small but choice exhibition at the Royal Academy, portraits of these pioneering women are accompanied by lush caricatures of male cross-dressers. In The Minor, Henry Angels, in voluminous robes and apron, played the infamous role of Mrs. Cole, a woman who ran a brothel in Covent Garden and appeared often in an inebriated state. In this portrait by Samuel de Wilde in 1792, Angels combines a meaty bosom with a soured outlook. 

The First Actresse, National Portrait Gallery, Till January 8, 2012

http://www.npg.org.uk/whatson/the-first-actresses/first_actresses_exhibition.php

Published http://londonfestivalfringe.com/general/post/?p=13883

Mr. and Mrs. God Join Katie Price's Entourage

Mr. and Mrs. God are scouring the earth to find their daughter, the Goddess of Love, who has fallen to the earth, straight into the entourage of Essex-based celebrity Natty. In the meantime, Natty, in her Katie Price outfits (think bubblegum-pink velour), and her continuous orgy of self-loathing (“I'm so shit” is her theme tune), is squabbling with her soul-mate Baz. Natty and Baz are at odds because they're trying “normal sex” – that is, sex without toys, games and guilt – and are finding it strangely lacking. Meantime, a homeless drifter holds the key to love and happiness in a Hermes handbag.

The play is a modern take on the deus ex machina, a theatrical device originally from Ancient Greece, often used by Shakespeare himself, in which a God-figure descends to the earth to sort out the naff problems of the plebeians. In the God of Soho, while the Goddess of Love can perhaps help Natty and Baz find love sans vibrators (though, the play doesn't quite clarify how she does this), Mr. and Mrs. God have endless problems of their own.

Mrs. God is struck by the travails of being a “celebrity wife.” She wears a bag full of her own liposuction juices at her waist. Mr. God is worried that he is no more than a voice in a mental person's head, and his daughter, meanwhile, is driven to love unavailable men. Through her caterwauling about unrequited love, to Natty and Baz's dogged endeavours to enjoy sex, and sundry potty-mouthed interludes by just about everyone in the star-studded cast, the play takes you through a raucous, though somewhat baffling, romp.

The writer Chris Hannan stubbornly claims that the play is not a satire. Meantime, critics are calling it the Marmite of theatre – you either love it or hate it. And yes, Raz Shaw's direction could be tighter, and one of two gratuitous scenes deleted. Nevertheless, this odd mix of bawdy fun (in the tradition of seventeenth-century outdoor theatre that played in similar Greek-style amphitheatres), clever references to celebrity/brand culture, and excellent music by the hairy bikers of the eclectic ska band King Porter Stomp, provides an evening of brilliant entertainment – especially if you're lucky not to be rained on, and you have a sturdy back to withstand the hard benches.

The God of Soho, Shakespeare's Globe, Till September 30, 2011

http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/theatre/on-stage/the-god-of-soho

Published on London Fringe www.londonfestivalfringe.com

Proof: Genius and Madness

Photo: Robert Gooch

David Auburn’s Pulitzer Prize winning play Proof has inspired one of several Hollywood films based on the genius and madness of brilliant minds that dazzle with their grasp of abstraction, but unlike Good Will Hunting and A Beautiful Mind, Proof enters the overlooked and closeted world of female mathematicians. The play opens as Catherine, a young woman shattered by the loss of her father who she has cared for through the last years of his psychosis and his loss of confidence in his mathematical abilities, questions if she has inherited his mania, but if she lacks the elegance of his path-breaking work.

David Hutchinson’s fringe adaptation is set in an intimate theatre space overlaid with synthetic turf that is the front lawn of Catherine and her father’s house. The action centres around the patio, with its lone wicker rocking chair, that becomes the symbol first of Robert’s growing psychosis, then of Catherine’s depression and her tentative relationship with Robert’s doctoral student Hal. In the middle of this turning point in Catherine’s life arrives her controlling sister Claire (embodied to a tee by Amy Burke), who is in turn protective and envious of Catherine’s instability that holds the promise of towering talent when compared to her own normality as a prosaic Currency Analyst.

Hilarious scenes between the sisters complement beautifully Robert’s last years (poignantly brought to life by Marcus Taylor), and Catherine’s inconsolability. Dan Cohen (who would give Hugh Grant a run for his money) shines as the bumbling, awkward drummer who is secretly in love with Catherine, but Holly Easterbrook’s interpretation of Catherine turns her into a petulant teenager, rather than the nuanced Catherine played by Gwyneth Paltrow in the film, her character a mix of acute sensitivity, strength, fragility, and a prickly reluctance to let people in.

Review published in London Fringe, and The London Word http://www.thelondonword.com/2011/05/proof/ 

Anna Karenina: The Perils of Russian Loving

Photo: Robert Workman

Read short review on London Festival Fringe http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray and longer review on The London Word

Helen Edmundson’s rapturous adaptation of Leo Tolstoy’s towering epic Anna Karenina, brought back to life at the Arcola Theatre this spring, is as much about Levin’s idealistic love for Kitty as it is about Anna’s fatal attraction for Vronsky. Max Webster’s skilful direction and a considerably talented cast of actors and physical performers supports Levin’s journey from faltering, wrought declarations of his love to Kitty which she spurns, through the throes of unrequited love, to his eventual acceptance that love is not the perfect dream that he has imagined – that the reality both falls short of, and ultimately trumps, the fantasy.

Anna, meanwhile, satisfies her hunger for meaning in life by falling for Vronsky, a dashing Byronic military man and jockey, who heats her blood like her prosaic husband, twenty years her senior, with his righteous lectures on local politics and big offending ears never could. As Alanis Morissette would say, every hot blooded woman needs an object to crave, and Anna is no exception. Anna’s craving for Vronsky eventually leads her from the empty life of a social butterfly to complete social suicide.

Forming the backdrop are Anna’s brother Stiva and his wife Dolly who struggle to come to grips with Stiva’s chronic infidelity. A theme throughout the book and the play is the idea that though society a tickled by the sexual adventures of men, women pay the price for their own and their partners’ illicit passions – though the truth is, suggests the book, that women pay the price no matter if they follow those passions or not. Dolly chooses her family over her own feelings, and sticks it out with Stiva, even though she knows her happiness is threatened by the next housemaid in a short skirt or the Bolshoi’s next favourite dancer. Anna pays the price of giving up her son and losing the goodwill of the Petersburg gentry when she leaves her husband to travel with Vronsky through Europe. When they return, Vronsky carries on as usual, dining, drinking and cavorting with his friends, while Anna is refused entry into society. As always, Tolstoy gives us a weary view of the world.

Using a trendy theatrical devise, the actors change clothing and accessories to take on multiple personalities. They become abstract figures at times, and towards the end of the play they come together and transmogrify into the train that is to be Anna’s destiny. The set is transformed with zip and verve into the snowy Russian countryside, the streets of Moscow, a railway platform, a sparkling drawing-room, and a votive-lit altar. The scene where Anna and Vronsky dance in the street, as snowflakes flutter all around them, and later when spring blossoms, is bewitching. The Arcola’s new site, a nifty warehouse-conversion on

Ashwin Street

, with seats on three sides of the stage, and even a row of “balcony” seats, adapts well to the shenanigans of the cast. In one memorable scene, Anna is transformed into Frou-Frou, Vronsky’s horse, that he rides with so much thrust that the mare has to be put down.

No one can accuse Tolstoy of brevity, and the danger of adapting his work is not knowing when to stop. It is difficult to adapt something as looming as a Tolstoy novel, one that appeared as a serialized epic (1873 to 1877, The Russian Messenger.) This two-and-a-half-hour adaptation tends to drag a little, but despite that, it convincingly weaves multiple storylines with physical theatre, spiffy set direction, a dash of humour, and a lilting soundscore. Vronsky provides humorous interludes by performing a caricature of the love struck lothario, and cast members with a black mask on the face play Anna’s nightmare of death. This is not the first time Helen Edmundson has set herself the task of adapting a heavy duty Tolstoy epic. She adapted War and Peace for the National Theatre in 1996, and put her lightness of touch to George Eliot’s Mill on the Floss for Shared Experience Theatre. While she retains the dark passions of Tolstoy’s novels, she sprinkles joy and humour into the adaptation, that keeps the story from being entirely grim and cynical.

Anna Karenina

Arcola Theatre

Till April 16, 2011

My Beautiful Launderette

Review on http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray

Trendy couples in skinny jeans and blazers, men with peroxide-blonde punk hairdos and brassy roots, and ageing heavily-made-up Dolly Parton types – and that was just the audience. Above the Stag is a hip theatre company, home to a small but versatile set that changes from bedroom to living room to Laundromat before you can turn and say The 39 Steps. Despite a creaky and stubborn blind that wouldn’t budge, the cosy mise en scene added charm and a few laughs to this fringe adaptation of Hanif Kureishi’s screenplay My Beautiful Launderette.

Full of cultural stereotypes of 1980s London, the play is the love story of Omar, a fresh faced second-generation Muslim with a pisshead father who bemoans the loss of his sentimental ideals of an enlightened Britain and worries that his son’s penis is not in good working order, and Johnny, a skinhead junkie who teeters a thin line between his life as a gay man and his role in the National Front. Their love blossoms in a seedy launderette that smells of bleach, urine and used condoms, with a hustler uncle (played with relish by Royce Ullah) who simultaneously hates and loves England – where you can be anyone you want to be if you know how to “squeeze the tits of the system,” a sleazy young man who would fit the role of a Bollywood baddie like a metal hook fits an arm, and a mistress and daughter in supporting roles.

The program notes promise that the issues of the 1980s are as relevant today as they were thirty years ago. I would like to believe that we don’t live in the same atmosphere of rampant homophobia and racism, but while the play, directed by Tim McArthur, seems a little dated, it hasn’t yet become a period piece either.

My Beautiful Launderette

Above the Stag

Till April 10, 2011

Laminated Dreams

A Bear, an Umbrella, and a Sticky Ex-Girlfriend

(First published in Writing Raw http://writingraw.com/assorted.html at http://www.writingraw.com/files/A%20Bear%20an%20Umbrella%20and%20a%20Sticky%20Ex-Girlfriend.pdf)

There is nothing more seductive than the idea that you can reinvent yourself. That you can throw off the leashes of the past, do away with crippling insecurities and wounded hope, and emerge a whole new you. Psychotherapists make a living out of the belief that happiness lies at the end of the next therapy session, while Lady Gaga, who looks more like a Dr. Who pastiche everyday, has turned the art of reinvention into an evolutionary imperative. The rest of us, meanwhile, colour our roots purple, listen fervidly to the interpretation of our personality offered by Cosmo, and visit life coaches to figure out who we could be if we could only escape who we are now.

If you aren’t a blonde pop-sensation, however, turning into a new you as you sit in the loo every morning and contemplate the meaning of life may not be quite so simple. The status quo holds a fatal charm, and as Marge Simpson would say, “I’ve dug myself into a happy little rut here, and I’m not about to hoist myself out of it.” In Laminated (produced by Lincoln-based theatre company Shooting Fish), Charlie, a flailing young writer played by Johnny Vivash, sits amidst the detritus of his life, packing away the ghosts that haunt him, in cardboard boxes that refuse to remain shut. If he can but escape the cold and critical voice of his mother, his clingy ex-girlfriend Katie, and the pompous publisher who knows nothing of literature and has asked him to turn his life’s work – his masterpiece, no less – into a children’s book, then maybe he can outrun his past and find the success that eludes him. Or – and this is his greatest fear – will trying to fly only prove him to be devastatingly average?

Old conversations repeat in Charlie’s head. His mother, as represented by a retro seventies dress in a faux-Japanese print, tells him in no uncertain terms that he is “not a writer, he writes – a small, but important, difference.” Frigid and unable to love, she is a poor substitute for his father who died when he was a child. All that remains of his father now is a hat stand, a blue mackintosh, and a muddle of contradictory memories.

Then there is Katie (Emily Bignell), his ex-girlfriend, who he met on a pier a long time ago, and who commits the crowning offence of loving him too much. Her cloying hands and her cream-cheese voice follow him everywhere and tattoo his failings as a lover into his brain, where they sit in judgment next to his failure as a writer. Does Katie need him too much, or is she in fact the woman that he desperately wants not to love?

Wracked by obsessive guilt and narcissistic self-doubt, Charlie’s only real source of support is his persevering teddy bear. Hobbes to Charlie’s Calvin, teddy sets out on a journey of self-discovery to reclaim Charlie’s soul. He climbs a steep mountain, braves a plundering ocean, and finally, in the highlight of the play, fights off a murderous umbrella. In the end, teddy gives Charlie all his devotion, and wins for Charlie freedom from the shabby little town in which he grew up and in which he can only ever see himself as a provincial wannabe. (Think Simon Doonan and the beautiful people, just angrier, and minus the jazz hands and the Goyard manbags.) But even as Charlie emerges as a promising writer and escapes the geographical confines of his past life, he comes face-to-face with his ex Katie, and with the fact that no matter how far he runs, in the end, there is no escaping himself.

Vivash and Bignell deliver convincing performances as tortured artist and eternally-patient girlfriend, and Shooting Fish founder Darren Bolton has produced a compelling – though at times a trifle long-winded and in need of tightening – script. But it is puppet master Robert Tygner and his puppets that steal the show. Tygner has Spitting Image under his belt, the odd Muppets episode, and the goblins in George Lucas’ Labyrinth. In this Arts Council-funded reprise of Shooting Fish Theatre’s 2008 Laminated, he, along with choreographer Gary Clarke, makes the ghosts of Charlie’s past come alive. Since we are a seasoned audience of the slick Wallace and Gromit stop-motion animation, and the motion capture technology used to create characters like Gollum, it may come as a surprise that Tygner’s puppets, instead of looking tacky, or at best sort of cute, come across as endearing, oddly lifelike, and hilarious. While the dolls that represent Charlie and Katie, the dress and the hat-stand that mime his parents, and the publisher-monkey are charming, it is quixotic teddy, with his wide-eyed valour and dreams of grandeur that steals the day. To teddy goes the Oscar.

Laminated

Shooting Fish Theatre Company

Tristan Bates Theatre, Covent Garden

Till February 19, 2011

Read a short review on London Festival and Fringe http://www.londonfestivalfringe.com/indexposttag.php?slug=amita-murray and long review in Writing Raw, February 21st edition.