Sincerely, Mr. Toad - Greenwich Theatre, Friday 13th September 2013

Synopsis:

Kenneth Grahame makes the lives of his family unbearable while writing The Wind in the Willows and then his son kills himself.  It takes 2 and a half hours to get to this point, by which time nobody cares.

Cast:

Kenneth Grahame – Adam Venus

Mouse – Keith Jack

Elspeth Grahame – Sarah Borges

Beth Thorpe – Kirsty Anne Myers

Ensemble – Luke Foster, Jamie Jukes, Gareth Healey, Gracie Hughes, Kayleigh Smith, Emma Salvo, Julia Cave

Creative Team:

Music – David Andrew Wilson

Book – David Hutchinson

Lyrics – Katie McIvor

Director – Phillip Rowntree

If I had known this was by the Sell a Door Theatre Company then I would have run a mile from it.  I’ve suffered at their hands before.  And in the process of expressing my opinion, found myself on the receiving end of abuse from members of the company.  Well, I had better dig out my tin hat and flak jacket because I am probably going to get some more 

This has got FAILURE written all over it.  To start with, the subject matter is tired, and I can’t say that its one I really care for anyway.  Essentially, the story is about how dreadful Kenneth Grahame’s life was and how he got so obsessed with writing The Wind in the Willows that he made everyone else’s life awful as well, ignoring his wife and eventually leading to the suicide of his son, Mouse.  This kind of thing – digging about in the psyche of authors of famous children’s authors and uncovering darkness – has been done before  and it didn’t work then.  To set this kind of depressing story to music just isn’t going to work full stop.  Particularly when the story is set in a specific period and the music doesn’t reflect this at all. In fact, the score of this musical is so wildly inappropriate to its subject that I began to think that Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad might soon be waving flags on the barricades as Paris burnt down around them.  Its all very sub-Andrew Lloyd Webber.  Even though His Lordship was actually in the audience , where were Mole, Ratty, Badger and Toad all night?  You would have thought that, given the entire story is about the man who created them from his imagination, it might have been appropriate to have incorporated them as characters?  Only once did we get a glimpse into Grahame’s fantasy world of animals and you have to wait for the opening of act 2 to get it – by which time we had nearly given up.  In fact, Him Indoors turned to me in the interval and said “Do you want to stay for the second half?”, which in retrospect I now recognise as a thinly-disguised request to go home.    Grahame’s story is dreary, without sparkle and so portentous that you can tell after the first 20 minutes that you ain’t going to get a happy ending .  Knowing that its all going to go tits up is depressing, and you can feel the doom reaching out to you and dragging you down.  Its over-long by at least half an hour, mainly because the subject is so depressing.  I am sure that everyone went home wondering whether to feel miserable (Mouse commits suicide in some undefined way at the end – possibly there is a train involved but this is unclear) or elated  because they didn’t  have to sit through any more of it. 

Production values were so thin as to be see-through. On a budget this might have been, but this looked cheap and nasty.  Someone’s old bedsheets made makeshift drapes to “decorate” the stage (serving only to emphasise the bleakness rather than hide it) and there was a tiny plywood desk on wonky castors with old books nailed all over it.  Two sets of steps disguised as stacks of books must have taken up a goodly chunk of the production budget and, to be frank, I think it could have better been spent elsewhere.   Better costumes, certainly.    At least, I think they were meant to be books.   Given a decent budget, it might be possible to turn this show into something worth watching, but its going to need some far superior choreography to that which it has at the moment , a major rewrite and a complete change of director. 

Whoever was working on the Sound Desk needs retraining or sacking.  It was all so over-amplified that for a long time I couldn’t hear anything that was being said or sung.  

Given the dreariness of the material, everyone tried hard.  Mouse is a character without any redeeming qualities whatsoever and it is impossible to feel empathy with him, so it is lucky that Keith Jacks didn’t even seem to be trying.  Winsome will only get you so far, love.  Sarah Borges as Mrs. Grahame hid her light under a bushel until almost the very end, taking on a solo of such musical complexity and requiring an incredible vocal range so she can be excused for finding the upper and lower reaches slightly difficult.  Move the song away from the end of Act 2, direct it more sympathetically and it has the potential to be a showstopper.   Nobody else really made an impression.

A real stinker. 

http://londoneer.org/2013/09/review-sincerely-mr-toad-greenwich-theatre.html

http://www.edinburgh-festivals.com/blog/2013/08/15/musical-review-sincerely-mr-toad/

Titanic - Southwark Playhouse, Saturday 27th July 2013

Synopsis:

Big ship hits iceberg. Lots of people drown.

Cast:

Barrett, the Stoker – James Austen Murray

Lightoller – Dominic Brewer

Kate Mullins – Scarlett Courtney

Bride, the Radio Operator – Matthew Crowe

Kate Murphy – Grace Eccle

Alice Beane – Celia Graham

Edgar Beane – Oliver Hemborough

Ismay – Simon Green

Mr Etches – James Hume

Caroline Neville – Clare Marlowe

Jim Farrell – Shane McDaid

Captain Smith – Philip Rham

Kate McGowan – Victoria Serra

Creative Team:

Book – Peter Stone

Music and lyrics – Maury Yeston

Director – Thom Sutherland

MD – Mark Aspinall

Set and Costumes – David Woodhead

Lighting – Howard Hudson

It was the day when the heatwave finally broke, after a week of muggy, vile, humid weather.  It was a horrendously sticky evening and a desultory rainstorm wetted the pavements but did nothing to clear the air.  It was like walking through soup.  And the air conditioning in the theatre had broken down completely.  Consequently sitting there waiting for the show to start was like sitting fully clothed in a Turkish bath.  Every programme was being pressed into service as a fan and every other scrap of paper in the theatre had been scavenged by those without them.  People began wondering aloud whether on payment of a suitable sum the Producer might actually allow the iceberg to make an earlier than scheduled appearance just to lower the temperature in the auditorium, or whether the journey to New York might not actually be in peril if the iceberg had, indeed, already melted.  The show started, foreheads glistened, stage makeup began to slide off faces and everyone silently sympathised with men wearing heavy period overcoats.   Lines about how unusually cold it was for April were met with rueful laughter.  Two-thirds of the way through the first half, the show juddered to a sudden halt.  The Director announced that we had hit an iceberg labelled “Health and Safety” and that The Show Could Not Go On  because of the temperature in the auditorium; Voyage Suspended until something had been done about it.  The audience piled into the lifeboats and waited, bobbing about in the swell.  I wondered whether we would ever get to New York at this rate.  Some 30 minutes later, the engines restarted, the audience climbed back on board and we were off again . The Band Played On  -  sans violinist and sans viola who had been unable to keep their instruments in tune as the humidity in the auditorium was making their catgut go all limp and drippy.  The cast wrung out their costumes and prepared to hit the iceberg.  By the time the Carpathia had delivered the survivors to New York it was gone 11pm, the cast were completely knackered (having already done a matinee that afternoon) and in the audience, T shirts and underwear were clinging to backs and bums like passengers to a lifebelt.  Still, we all stood up and applauded like there was no tomorrow – mostly out of sheer relief but also because the cast had stayed at their posts and given the performance with considerable welly right to the bitter end, probably for Equity Minimum.   I dread to think what the dressing rooms smelt like the next day. 

This is a difficult show to do with a small cast – there are 22 singing roles, as well as a slew of small named speaking roles (many of whom make an appearance in the embarkation scene and then essentially disappear), so there was a lot of doubling up going on, sometimes to the detriment of coherence.  Still, they managed, and on the whole managed well.  This is also a difficult show to do when your performance area is a “black box” and you have to have audience on three sides.  Still, they managed, and managed well.  A back wall of black metal panels gave some idea of the scale of the ship (and the enterprise being undertaken) and there was a clever gantry, accessed by tall sets of metal steps on wheels which gave additional performing space and some sense of perspective.  A nice directoral touch was to have the names of all those lost in the disaster scroll across the floor  in an illuminated “role of honour”

There were some excellent performances.  James Austen-Murray made a fine and believable Barrett (the Head Stoker), sporting a pair of shoulders that I would kill for.  His duet with Bride, the Radio Operator (Matthew Crowe) was nicely handled direction-wise and was, I thought, underscored with a slight sexual frisson – did the socially maladjusted Bride, happier communicating by morse code than with real people, think that all his all his dreams had come true when a sweaty, beefy stoker wandered into the Telegraph Cabin?  Celia Graham handled the role of the irritating Alice Beane and her ferociously difficult solo number with considerable aplomb and James Hume played Mr Etches, the First Class Steward in the style of a slightly affronted heron, exactly how the character should be portrayed.  I was less impressed with Dudley Rogers and Judith Street’s performances as Isidor and Ida Strauss and I really, really did not like the direction of their final number.  Street was hampered in her performance of what should be a heart-rending duet by trying to clamber into a somewhat unflattering costume while singing it.  The role of Mr. Andrews, the architect of Titanic, was watered down almost to the point of invisibility by giving the opening song to Ismay, the owner of the WhIte Star Line.  Doing so kept Andrews out of the audience’s field of vision until it was too late for the character to really register.  Simon Green was the perfect casting for Ismay – Green does the “conceited tosser” far too well for it to be anything other than who he really is. 

The show itself is flawed – its top heavy and there is at least one number (“Doing the latest rag”) that seems superfluous.  With its cast of millions it runs the risk of over-egging the pudding and trying to cram too many stories into the mix.  It cannot be denied that the problems with this particular performance made the show seem a lot longer than it appears.  But I cannot fault the dedication of the cast who gave a sterling performance under extremely trying and difficult conditions.  During the lifeboat scenes towards the end there were a couple of individuals on stage who were so “in” their performances that I found it quite distressing to watch them – Scarlett Courtney in her uncredited role of Lady Duff Gordon seemed to be living the part to such an extent that I do wonder how she managed to sleep that night. 

A round of applause to all involved for soldering on under incredibly difficult circumstances. 

What the critics thought:

http://oughttobeclowns.blogspot.co.uk/2013/08/review-titanic-southwark-playhouse.html

http://www.edwardseckerson.biz/reviews/titanic-southwark-playhouse-review/

http://musicaltheatrereview.com/titanic-the-musical-southwark-playhouse/#.UjtxpIakqV0

http://grumpygaycritic.wordpress.com/2013/08/01/titanic_musical_review/

The Ladykillers - Vaudeville Theatre, Saturday 20th July 2013

Synopsis:

Posing as amateur musicians, Professor Marcus and his gang rent rooms in the lopsided house of sweet but eccentric Mrs Wilberforce. The villains plot to involve her unwittingly in Marcus’ brilliantly conceived heist job. The police are left stumped but Mrs Wilberforce becomes wise to their ruse and Marcus concludes that there is only one way to keep the old lady quiet. With only her parrot, General Gordon, to help her, Mrs W. is alone with five desperate men. 

The criminals argue among themselves and, one by one, they start to plot against each other, each ultimately meeting their deaths at the hands of one of their former colleagues and their bodies being dumped into departing trains. Mrs. Wilberforce tries to convince the local police that she has foiled the robbery plot and tries to return the money but isn't believed, instead being told to keep the money.  She uses the money to take General Gordon on a cruise in order to seek the cure for the illness that has caused all his feathers to drop out.  

Cast:

Constable MacDonald - Blair Plant

Mrs. Wilberforce - Angela Thorne

Professor Marcus - John Gordon Sinclair

Major Courtney - Simon Day

Harry Robinson - Ralf Little

One-Round - Chris McCalphy

Louis - Con O'Neill

Mrs. Tromleyton - Carole Dance

Creative Team:

Written by – Graham Lineham, based on the screenplay by William Rose

Director – Sean Foley

Set and costumes – Michael Taylor

Lighting – James Farncombe

I was looking forward to this to cheer me up.  Unfortunately the first half was completely and totally ruined by the bad behaviour and appalling manners of the middle-aged couple sitting directly behind me.   THREE times (yes, three!) I had to turn round and ask them to be quiet.  And then, in the interval, they started having  a “conversation” which was clearly directed at me so I eventually had to turn round and tell them that I thought people of their generation had better manners.  Things got rather tense so I had to move to another seat – but by this time the show was ruined for me, which was a shame because my bad experience (and subsequent bad mood) will have a knock on effect on how I review it.  I missed a lot of the dialogue in act one because of the constant stream of dialogue coming from the seats behind me.  The rest of the audience seemed to be having a good time though.

The set is marvellous – the interior of a creaky old house, rapidly being shaken to pieces by the rumble of the steam trains coming and going from King’s Cross .  Some of the scenes which take place outside the house are cleverly incorporated into the fabric of the house itself, although the heist scene, which is played out with model cars and trucks moving round on the vertical surface of the house’s exterior wall doesn’t really work terribly well.  It’s a clever idea but not done slickly enough.   There were a couple of scenes during the second act when it seemed as if something hadn’t gone according to plan – perhaps a fluffed line or a missed cue.  Particularly clunky was the scene where the two robbers attempt to throw each other off the roof.  Something got bungled somewhere and Simon Day ended up throwing himself off the roof. 

The cast do the best they can within the limited stereotypes dictated by the script.  Angela Thorne does a marvellous job of the physical aspects of being a doddery old lady (compare her walkdown and bow at the curtain when she seems positively spritely by comparison) and is genuinely touching in some of her scenes - particularly when she descends the staircase arrayed in her lovingly preserved party dress. John Gordon Sinclair manages well with the unforgiving role of Professor Marcus, haunted as he is by the ghost of Alec Guinness, but isn’t nearly “odd” enough.  But Ralf Little’s tics and twitches are overdone and get irritating very quickly.   Con O’Neill’s Louis is inaudible for most of the time because of his appalling accent. 

The script works well, sticking closely enough to that of the film to honour the source but different enough to be fresh.  Unfortunately most of the action takes place in act two so it feels uneven. There is so much going on and so many people to be bumped off that it feels over-crammed yet still rushed. 

The show deserves a better review than I’ve given it.  I was deeply, deeply pissed off with the rude people behind me and spent the second half in a black sulk at the back.  Stupid, I know, allowing other people to spoil an afternoon at the theatre – but sometimes other people can be so bloody inconsiderate.  

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/jul/10/the-ladykillers-review

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10169485/The-Ladykillers-Vaudeville-Theatre-London.html

Passion Play - Duke of Yorks Theatre, Saturday 29th June 2013

Synopsis:

Eleanor is  a chorister whose marriage disintegrates when her husband James embarks on an affair with someone she had considered as a friend and confidante.  James, a leading restorer of paintings, agrees to a clandestine meeting with the couple's sultry young friend Kate, the widow of a former colleague. An affluent photographer, Kate ostensibly needs James' professional input for a book she plans to write; but her real motive for meeting Eleanor's husband is to convince him to take her as his lover.

James needs little convincing, and slowly the lies mount up. The revelation that her husband of twenty-five years is being unfaithful comes as a tremendous shock to Eleanor, who feels compelled to reveal secrets of her own. With the marriage at crisis point, both she and James develop alter-egos  who give voice to the troubled spouses' innermost thoughts.

Cast:
Eleanor -   Zoë Wanamaker
James ... Owen Teale
Eleanor's alter-ego  ... Samantha Bond
James' alter-ego  ... Oliver Cotton
Kate ... Annabel Scholey
Agnes ... Sian Thomas

Creative Team:

Director: David Leveaux
Producer: Tali Pelman
Set Designer: Hildegard Bechtler
Lighting Designer: Mark Henderson
Sound Designer: Fergus O'Hare
Costume Designer: Laura Hopkins

With apologies for the delayed posting - Passion Play will have already closed by the time you read this.  Things have been a little hairy on the domestic front at RTR Towers (to say nothing of the slightly gammy leg still which is driving me up the wall). In fact, I did wonder whether we would ever make it home after the performance, seeing as how some bright spark at Westminster Council had given permission for the EDL to march through central London on the same day as Gay Pride.  Now there's a riot in potentia. Still, at least things have not been so hairy as they were for Eleanor and James, the main characters in this play. 

It wasn't selling well, and its easy to see why.  This was not a pleasant evening out at the theatre.  I found it quite distressing at times, and I wonder about the psychological effect it would have on an actor to be playing it 8 times a week.  I wouldn't have recommended going to see this to anyone who was in any way depressed - and certainly not to anyone struggling with the effects of marital infidelity.  In fact, I was chatting away to the woman in the seat next to me who was on her own and obviously desperate for someone to talk to during the interval and we both agreed that, amusing though aspects of the play were, both of us would probably go home and slit our wrists with a razor blade if it got any darker. 

You do have to pay close attention because, with four people on stage but only two characters (both main characters have an "alter ego" who speaks their thoughts) it can get fairly confusing.  It could, of course, have got even more confusing - the chap in front wondered whether Zoe/Samantha and Owen/Oliver would swap roles after the interval and I thought "if that happens I'm totally lost".  What kept me relatively sane during Act 1 was that the alter egos didn't actually speak directly to anyone else on stage.  And then, during Act 2, the prediction from the row in front was more or less fulfilled and the alter egos not only started interacting with other characters on stage but also with each other and I thought my head was going to go off pop.  It wasn't too bad with the men, because despite being a character and his alter ego, Owen Teale and Oliver Cotton don't really look that much like each other.  Oliver Cotton, for example, has a lot more hair.  But with Zoe Wannamaker and Samantha Bond looking like the pair of slightly demented twins in Gormenghast, with the wigmaker's art having been pushed to its limit, the only way I could easily tell them apart was becuase Wannamaker has a retrousse nose (if anyone knows how to type an accented e in Blogger, I would be grateful for the tip) and Bond was wearing a necklace and slightly different coloured trousers. 

It did, of course, feel like there was somebody missing from the stage, and that was Kate's alter-ego.  Mind you, there probably wouldn't have been much room for it - her personality is (perhaps deliberately) rendered as so manipulative and horrible that any other point of view would probably have got in the way.  You are left in no uncertain terms as to who is the villain of the piece and that James is simply a middle-aged fool flattered into destroying his marriage.  It becomes less and less easy to sympathise with either Kate or James, who seem to act without any thought of the possible consequences.  

The entire play does feel a little dated with its references to records, letters (remember those?) and telephone boxes. Apart from those references, it could be anywhere, anytime, and the spare, pared back set did a good job of being nicely non-specific.  It does all get terribly, terribly confusing (particularly when one is a Bear of Very Little Brain) in the second half when the alter-egos start interacting with the "real people" - a real acting challenge I should imagine to spend half the play saying lines directed at nobody and to whom nobody reacts, and then to spend the second half interacting normally, and it does all get terribly, terribly bleak as things spiral out of control.  Not a play I would recommend to anyone feeling emotionally fragile in any way, or indeed anyone who has ever been in a relationship breaking down because of someone's infidelity.

What the critics thought:

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/may/12/passion-play-zoe-wanamaker-review

http://www.theguardian.com/stage/2013/may/07/passion-play-review

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10041727/Passion-Play-Duke-of-Yorks-Theatre-review.html

Normal service resumed shortly

Dear Readers

Apologies for the lack of reviews lately. I have had to take a bit of time off from blogging due to being in a bad place vis a vis a terrible bout of depression.  Lack of funds have also had a knock on effect - money is tight and there has been little to spend of theatre tickets.  Over the next couple of days I hope to be able to bring things up to date with a series of mini-reviews.

The Audience - filmed performance shown at Greenwich Picturehouse, Wednesday 19th June 2013

Synopsis:

 

For sixty years, Elizabeth II has met each of her Prime Ministers in a weekly audience at Buckingham Palace - a meeting like no other in British public life; it is in private.  Both parties have an unspoken agreement never to repeat what is said, not even to their spouse. The Audience breaks this contract of silence and imagines a series of pivotal meetings between the Downing Street incumbents and their Queen.  

From young woman to grandmother, these private audiences chart the arc of the second Elizabethan age.  Politicians come and go through the revolving door of electoral politics, while she remains constant, waiting to welcome her next Prime Minister.

 

 

HM The Queen – Helen Mirren

Anthony Eden – Michael Elwyn

Margaret Thatcher – Haydn Gwynne

Harold Wilson – Richard McCabe

Gordon Brown – Nathaniel Parker

John Major – Paul Ritter

David Cameron – Rufus Wright

Winston Churchill – Edward Fox

James Callaghan/Private Secretary – David Peart

Equerry – Geoffrey Beevers

Princess Elizabeth – Nell Williams

 

Creative team:

Written by Peter Morgan

Director – Stephen Daldry

Designer – Bob Crowley

Lighting – Rich Fisher

 

I sometimes worry about Him Indoors.  Firstly, this show completely failed to register on his radar.  Given that he is often to be found crouching over the PC like some kind of demented puma at 0859hrs waiting for the booking season for something obscure to open at 0900hrs, this is in itself a matter for some concern (although when this was brought up in conversation, the story subtly changed to “I saw it mentioned and didn’t think it would be the kind of thing you would be interested in”  Personally I think this is a poor attempt at trying to get out of not having realised it was opening.  He always was a terribly poor liar).  Secondly is that he seemed to think that Mary Hopkins was in this.  I think he is losing his mind.  It comes to us all, some earlier than others. 

 

Every time the show has been mentioned in the media over the last couple of months, I have made vaguely distressed whimpering noises, which markedly increased in volume and frequency when I found out that, due to Ms Mirren’s contractual obligations elsewhere, The Audience would be closing shortly.  So it was with considerable relief on both parts that he managed to get tickets for a filmed relay of this into Greenwich Picturehouse.  Not live, unfortunately, because the show has already finished its run.  But still a performance, nonetheless; hey, sometimes we have to take what we can get. 

 

So, it was on a hot, sticky and very sultry lunchtime that we headed off on the bus down to Greenwich, humming “Those were the days, my friend”, and finding that we were the youngest people in the auditorium by a long shot.  Well, I was, anyway.  I wasn’t best pleased to find that we were in the front row; granted there was space for me to stick my still poorly old foot out (apparently I will never dance Giselle again, according to my GP), but it did mean that we were so close I could see that some of the actors hadn’t plucked their nose hair recently and I ended up with a major crick in my neck).  One of the disadvantages of watching a filmed performance is that you have to look at what the director wants you to look at; I would have preferred it if there had been a fixed camera somewhere offering a complete view of the entire stage (so you could watch the show from the point of view of an audience member in the stalls).  Needless to say Him Indoors disagrees; he does this now and then but I try to ignore him as best I can.  Perhaps it wouldn’t have been so bad had we not been so close to the screen. It can be quite disconcerting looking up the Queen’s nose.  I couldn’t see Mary Hopkins though, however hard I tried. 

 

It cannot be denied that Dame Helen gives a tour de force performance as HM.  After a six-month run of this eight times a week, the poor cow must be exhausted as, apart from a couple of short exits for costume changes, she is on stage for the entire 2 ½ hours.  Even so, I did notice a couple of slightly fudged lines.  For obvious reasons, she is somewhat less convincing as Queenie in the very early days of her reign – even an experienced actress like her cannot make a mature voice sound young. As Queenie from the 1960’s onwards, however, the performance is astonishing, helped (of course) in part by remarkable wigs and costumes.  From a distance, it would be incredibly difficult to tell the Dame and the Queen apart – although the Dame has a bit of a conk on her which is obvious in profile.  Every gesture, every facial expression, every posture – its truly uncanny.

 

Most of The Audience is played strictly for laughs, and I thought it would have been better had it been less funny.  The Prime Ministers are, almost without exception, played as pantomime caricatures (mostly villains).  Richard McCabe plays Harold Wilson as a genial, bumbling fool and Hayden Gwynne’s performance as Mrs. Thatcher and Paul Ritter’s as John Major have  both seemingly been lifted straight from Spitting Image. Gwynne’s is a star turn – a cross between Cruella de Vil and Iago.  I was somewhat shocked at the sheer lack of physical resemblance depicted by some performers; Nathaniel Parker doesn’t really look very much like Gordon Brown at all, and Rufus Wright bears no more than a tangential  resemblance to David Cameron (he’s got the hand gestures right, but looks too sharp-angled and ferret-like; Mr. Cameron has got slightly pudgy-faced over the last six months).   Robert Hardy was to have played Winston Churchill but was taken ill during rehearsals so Edward Fox can be forgiven for not looking very much like him.  David Peart looks even less like James Callaghan, but is only on for a couple of minutes or so and does us all the favour of announcing that he is James Callagham, so no worries there. 

 

Again, a full company bow with a solo bow from the star.  I do so hate all this “communist bowing” as Him Indoors calls it – I fully believe that every member of the cast deserves their own bow and their own applause.  I was slightly shocked that Dame Helen didn’t take her bow in character – it was all that was needed to make the illusion complete (perhaps apart from the sudden appearance of Mary Hopkins). 
 

What the critics said:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/mar/10/audience-helen-mirren-daldry-review

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9910160/The-Audience-Gielgud-Theatre-review.html

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/review-the-audience-gielgud-theatre-london-8521370.html

The Cripple of Innishmaan - Noel Coward Theatre, Friday 14th June 2013

Synopsis:

 

Set on the remote island of Inishmaan off the west coast of Ireland just before the outbreak of WW2,  word arrives that a Hollywood film is being made on the neighboring island of Inishmore. The one person who wants to be in the film more than anybody is young Cripple Billy, if only to break away from the bitter tedium of his daily life.  Billy forges a doctor's letter saying that he has TB and only months to live in order to get sympathy from Babbybobby and a ride in his boat over to Inishmore, where he is spotted by the Director and taken to Hollywood for a screen test.  Having failed the test, Cripple Billy returns home to find that life will probably never be the same.  Finally finding  out the truth regarding his parents' apparent suicide, Fate has a couple of surprises still in store for him.

 

Cast:

Kate Osbourne - Ingrid Craigie

Gillian Osbourne, her sister - Gillian Hanna

Johnnypateenmike - Pat Short

Billy - Daniel Radcliffe

Bartley McCormick - Conor MacNeill

Helen McCormick, his sister - Sarah Greene

Babbybobby - Padraic Delaney

Doctor - Gary Lilburn

Mammy, Johnnypateenmike's elderly mother - June Watson

 

Creative Team:

Written by Martin McDonagh

Director: Michael Grandage

Set and costumes - Christopher Oram

Lighting - Paule Constable

I think if you were any member of the cast other than Daniel Radcliffe, you would be really quite peed off with both the Noel Coward Theatre and Mr. Grandage.  Not only is Mr. Radcliffe’s mug plastered up all over the outside of the theatre and all over the programme cover (just him, mind you), but he is the only member of the cast given a solo bow at the end of the show.  Full company bow, solo bow by Mr. Radcliffe, full company bow, solo bow by Mr. Radcliffe, curtain.   Yes, I know he’s young, pretty and Harry Potter (there were at least two sad middle-aged women having their picture taken outside the theatre of them draping themselves over the pictures of Mr. Potter) and a very bankable star name, but this play is very much an ensemble piece (and, frankly, the role of Billy is not actually a very big one).  There are other people in it, is what I’m getting at.  But you wouldn’t know it. 

From the same pen as The Beauty Queen of Leenane, this is  quite a slight play, but with similarly dark overtones and lots of the same kind of comedy.  Like Beauty Queen, there are several points where the plot turns on a sixpence, and you are sit there thinking “Oh my god [this] is going to happen” but then it suddenly doesn’t and the plot twists away in another direction, and you are left sitting there feeling that you have been taken up the garden path and then dumped among the hydrangeas feeling stupid.  There seemed to be very little actual plot, and I’m not entirely sure what the audience were expecting but there were an awful lot fewer people in the auditorium after the interval.  I could have done with two fewer people in the auditorium all the way through – the two idiot teenage boys sitting next to me.  One of them tried to get past on his way to his seat and then barged by before I had managed to get up (narrowly missing poorly foot) and had not yet learned how to blow his nose on a handkerchief and treated everyone in the vicinity to a loud and bubbly nasal symphony every five minutes or so, and neither of them had worked out how to get sweets out of a small cardboard box quietly nor how to drink through a straw without a) blowing bubbles in the drink first and  b) making that loud slurping noise you get when the drink is running out and you are chasing the dregs of fluid around the bottom of the cup.  Needless to say, one of them had a mobile phone which went off during a quiet bit in the second half. 

Most of this play is very, very funny – leaning towards the “Craggy Island” style.  And a certain amount is very, very dark.  And the stage is very, very dark for a lot of the time as well – off towards the wings everything fades into obscurity  - thankfully most of the action is well centred on stage but there is at least one (non-essential but funny) part involving a bible that you may well miss unless you have been eating all your carrots.  The funny lines come so thick and fast that you could miss a lot of the jokes because you are laughing so much, and then it all gets very serious, and then very funny again and then very serious – leaving me feeling rather like I was sitting on a rollercoaster.  It gets a little tiring eventually.  Mr. Radcliffe's accent wanders a bit now and again.

It would be invidious to pick out any individual performance because, as I said before, this is an ensemble piece – unless you are Daniel Radcliffe – and everyone is very good.  Sometimes the Irish brogues are a bit too thick to be penetrable and sometimes the dialogue goes too fast for comfort, but overall its well-paced and slick throughout, which is fortunate because it could become self-indulgent at a slower pace.  The lighting  could be better at times, but all in all it’s a fun evening out, even if the plot is essentially unrealistic.  Why people walked out at the interval I don’t know – perhaps they were expecting Mr. Radcliffe to be whizzing round the stage on a Nimbus 2000?  Apparently he was handed a pile of scripts by Mr. Grandage and told “pick one you fancy being in and we’ll do it”.  It is to Mr. Radcliffe’s credit that he picked something which didn’t supply him with a  “star vehicle” to the detriment of the rest of the cast.  I would still have liked to see everyone get their own bow at the final curtain, however. 

What the critics thought:
http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2013/jun/18/the-cripple-of-inishmaan-review

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/theatre-review-daniel-radcliffe-gives-an-admirably-honest-performance-the-cripple-of-inishmaan--but-his-irish-accent-isnt-quite-there-8663412.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/10127301/The-Cripple-of-Inishmaan-Noel-Coward-Theatre-review.html

http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/cripple-inishmaan-no%C3%ABl-coward-theatre