Intimate Apparel, 25.7.14

*SPOILER ALERT:  this review contains a plot summary*

Motley's first time at the rather bijou Finsbury Park Theatre for the UK première by Lawrence Boswell's Bath Theatre Royal company of the touching first (2003) work by African-American playwright Lynn Nottage (b1964; Yale & Columbia).  Booked on the strength of seeing Nottage’s Pullitzer-winning ‘Ruined’ at the Almeida in 2010.


Tanya Moodie (Esther) and Ian Goodman (Mr Marks)
share their love of fabrics together

Play centred on the search for love of an “unidentified negro seamstress” Esther (an emotionally transparent Tanya Moodie) in 1905 New York.

 

The eternal feminine: 
Tanya Moodie's Esther

Esther, a plain-but-homely long-term lodger in the “rooming-house” of the redoubtable Mrs Dickson (Dawn Hope) has just turned 35, still a lonely spinster.  She strikes up an unexpected correspondence with George (a dodgily-accented Chu Omambala), a Caribbean labourer on the Panama Canal whom she’s never met.  Illiterate Esther, who’s built up a cottage business supplying ‘intimate apparel’ both to Fifth Avenue white ladies (Sara Topham as the self-absorbed and mildly Sapphic Mrs Van Buren) and Tenderloin tarts (Rochelle Neil as piano-playing sex kitten Mayme) allows her clients to pen the letters on her behalf.  The epistolary romance blossoms into an unlikely marriage. 

Reality though comes home to roost in Act Two as the hapless George, emasculated by racial discrimination, betrays Esther and gambles away her lifetime’s savings.  It emerges that George too had relied on others to pen his letters and, with that shattering disclosure, Esther ends up in Mrs Dickson’s rooming house, poignantly back where she began. 

Whore or dressmaker? 
The choices for black women in early C20 NY
 (Rochelle Neil & Tanya Moodie)

This warmly-feminine well-constructed chamber-piece benefited from deft staging, strong all-round performances and suggestive musical accompaniment (an intriguing mix of klezmer and ragtime). 

What might have been a purely cautionary tale was transmuted into something more hopeful by the sense of solidarity between the women (all variously constrained by white patriarchy) and by a friendship forever teetering on platonic romance which Esther strikes up with the shyly-decent Shtetl haberdasher Mr Marks (a standout performance from Ian Goodman).  

“How we be friends? When I ain't never been through your front door”
Esther confronts wealthy patron Mrs Van Buren (Sara Topham)

Drawing on memories of her own great-grandmother, Nottage gave empathetic but non-preachy voice back to that most forgotten of groups, the black women who helped to power NY’s extraordinary turn-of-the-century growth. 

While lacking the visceral force of ‘Ruined’, it was well worth the effort of getting to the less-than-sylvan Finsbury Park on a sultry summer night.

  

Porgy and Bess, 23.7.14

Timothy Sheader’s new production of the Gershwin opera at the Regent's Park Open Air Theatre, based on a musical adaptation by Diedre L Murray, condensed the original, successfully bringing it, like the 2006 Trevor Nunn London production, much closer to musical theatre.

Rufus Bonds' crippled Porgy (centre) at the centre of the action

Rufus Bonds Jr and Nicola Hughes (who was Bess in the Nunn production) took the title roles. They were supported by Tony-award winner Phillip Boykin as baddass Crown, the magnificent Sharon D Clarke as matriarch Mariah, Golda Resheuvel as church elder Serena and, resplendent in natty yellow suit, the diminutive Cedric Neal as “happy-dust” dealer Sportin’ Life.  Bonds, Boykin and Neal were all on loan from Broadway. 

Phillip Boykin as Crown,
the alpha male with the voice to match

In an open-air setting, the vocal plaudits went to the powerful Boykin and Clarke and the acting plaudits to Neal and Hughes, who really inhabited their characters.  In contrast, Bonds and the orchestra were a little under-powered. 

Nicola Hughes' Bess samples the goods
(Phillip Boykin as Crown)

The show opened with Nicola Hughes, all taut sexual appetite, coming on silently in a black one-piece and donning a dress as dangerously red as her “loose woman” character.  Wrapped erotically around the big-bellied Crown, Bess is initially treated with disdain by the married women of 'Catfish Row'.  But when Crown kills Serena’s husband Robbins for his winnings from a game of 'craps' and has to go into hiding, Bess has an opportunity to come off the happy dust and “live decent” with crippled beggar Porgy.  Dealer 'Sporting Life' eventually tempts her back onto dope to snatch her away to NY, but the work ends with a hint of optimism as the besotted Porgy sets off in hot pursuit (cleverly staged here by Bonds walking tall over a series of strategically-placed tables). 


Cedric Neal struts his stuff as dealer Sportin' Life

Although Motley, like the rest of the planet, knew the main numbers (“Summertime”, “It ain’t necessarily so”, “I loves you, Porgy”), shamefully he'd never seen the whole work before.  It was fascinating to see how everything fitted together and to discover the lesser-known numbers (“My man’s gone now”, “It take a long pull to get there”, “Oh Doctor Jesus” & “A red-headed woman”).  And all at much less length than the operatic version!

With on-stage racial assaults, two murders, drug use and some fairly explicit crotch-grabbing, it was strong meat, both sexually and politically (which is probably why it took forty years to be accepted into the operatic repertoire).  Aside from baddies Crown and Sporting Life, the black residents of 'Catfish Row' were nonetheless sympathetically depicted as a coherent community, thrown together by poverty and white oppression. 


A set which came alive as the evening darkened

Staged against a cleverly-lit Expressionist luminous metallic backdrop, which changed colour according to the mood, this 1935 Depression-era work came across as more vividly sexual and political than Motley had anticipated: Brechtian in ambition.  (A hurricane, for example, was successfully simulated with only a few stage props.)   

Judging from the standing ovations, if this doesn’t turn into the London hit of the summer, Motley will eat his hat!

[Personal note:  many thanks to DP for the wonderful fourth row stalls seats and catering] 
 
 
 
 

Fathers and Sons, 11.7.14

 

Arkady and Bazarov, the two students who return home
in Friel's warmly humane 'Fathers and Sons'

Brian Friel’s deft 1987 stage adaptation of Turgenev’s landmark 1862 novel (set just after the Emancipation of the Serfs) was directed at the Donmar by Lyndsey Turner (ex of “Chimerica”).  Rob Howell designed a beautifully organic matrixed wooden set redolent of Russian birch forests. It was encouraging to see how many Russians were in the audience for this, one of their national masterpieces. 

L: Joshua James as Arkady
R:  Seth Numrich as Bazarov

The plot was simplicity itself:  two Petersburg students imbued with a fashionable commitment to radical change return home only to find that family, love, disease and the harvest all conspire to obstruct the dawn of a ‘new Russia’. 

Twinkly-eyed newcomer Joshua James (~22yo), a gawky jug-eared youth at first clearly in his comrade’s shadow, was impressively supple at conveying the underlying decency of Arkady, the less dogmatic of the two students, from a traditional land-owning family.   

Revolution is no laughing matter: 
Seth Numrich's Bazarov

US import Seth Numrich (27) had the harder role of making one warm to the less appealing Bazarov, a doctrinaire nihilist who’s beastly to the humble parents who are so devoted they celebrate his homecoming with a ‘Te Deum’.  Bazarov’s facile rejection of emotional ties for political reasons is compromised when he falls head-over-heels for glacial wealthy widow Anna Odintsova (played by Irish beauty Elaine Cassidy). 

Karl Johnson, one of the proud fathers

Karl Johnson made a strong impression as Vassily, Bazarov’s bumbling country doctor father, a man incapable of finishing a sentence without a trio of Latin tags.  As so often with the Donmar, a large cast (thirteen in all) gave an object lesson in ensemble-playing.  Stand-outs amongst the smaller roles included Siobhan McSweeney’s lovesick maid Dunyasha, Anthony Calf’s distrait Nikolai (Arkady’s father, a well-intentioned but inept landowner with a younger wife he’s raised a social peg or two) and Susan Engel’s batty Princess Olga (who grasps for the blunderbuss at the merest whiff of cat or accordion player).    


Tim McMullan's magnificently
disappointed Uncle Pavel

Tim McMullan’s Uncle Pavel, a fastidiously world-weary Europhile dandy whose world-view is most directly-challenged by Bazarov’s brash nihilism, was the play’s emotional pivot.  Billington put his finger on it beautifully by calling McMullan’s Pavel “one of the best displays I’ve ever seen of the superfluous man” (a type Motley has no difficulty empathising with).

Ivan Turgenev (1818-83): 
prophet of a lost Russian liberalism

A typhus epidemic brings matters to a suitably tragic ending, but it would be wrong to classify ‘Fathers & Sons’ as a tragedy.  Its emotional core, which rang so true, lay in its affectionate depiction of how families (doting fathers, idealistic sons, disappointed uncles, anxious second wives, mad aunts, brisk sisters and truculent servants) function as a microcosm of the almost Burkean “wider ties that bind”, which no one political philosophy can truly encompass.  It was Russia’s tragedy that a subsequent generation of idealistic students rejected Turgenev’s humane liberal vision.