The House That Will Not Stand, 26.11.14

Queen Bee of New Orleans:
Martina Laird's Beartrice massaged
by her slave Makeda (Tanya Moodie)

Marcus Gardley’s “The House That Will Not Stand”, a compulsively watchable new African-American play currently playing at Indhu Rubasingham’s Tricycle in its European première, was a greedy child’s pick-a-mix in the sweet-store of literary tropes.

You want three young sisters pining for male suitors à la Chekhov and Cinders desperate to reach the ball?  Check.  You want an indomitable materfamilias ruling her family with a rod of iron à la Bernarda Alba?  Check.  You want a supposedly unhinged female relative locked up in the attic à la Miss Havisham?  Check.  You want a subordinate out-smarting their stubborn employer à la Goldoni?  Check.  A narrative of female emancipation like Celie’s in ‘The Color Purple”?  Check.  A steamy, sultry New Orleans à la “Streetcar”?  Check.  Drums providing distant echoes of Mother Africa like O’Neill’s “Emperor Jones”?  Check.  A ghost scene and domestic hocus-pocus fresh out of Edgar Allan Poe?  Check.  A bitch-fest between two pugnacious matrons Capote would have killed to write?  Check.

Martina Laird's Beartrice takes her sister
Marie (Claire Perkins) in hand

Add-in some cutesy Gallicisms (it was the French Quarter after all), a smattering of mournful Latin chanting (Lorca again), some sparkling patois (novel Creole meanings for “tea” and “pie”), and an inexhaustible fund of hot-zinger one-liners.  Stir.  Serve hot, courtesy of a female cast on tip-top-form.  Await applause, standing ovations (spontaneous on the night Motley was there) and, with luck, a generous dollop of gongs to follow.

 

The Three Sisters of Faubourg Treme:
devout Maude Lynn (Danusia Samal),
flighty Agnes (Ayesha Antoine) &
dreamy Odette (Ronke Adelkoluejo)

I make light of Gardley’s achievements. His new play broke fresh ground, uncovering a forgotten corner of U.S. history.  The setting was New Orleans 1836, after the Louisiana Purchase (1803), but before the full enforcement of binary U.S. race laws.  French and Spanish custom and colonial law had recognised a mestizo caste and enabled a few black women to own property (including their own slaves) by virtue of being white men’s concubines (“placées”).  But under U.S. governance the racial thumbscrews were tightening.  So when wealthy placée Beartrice’s common-law white husband dies mysteriously, there’s no time to be lost to ensure she keeps a roof over her head and provides for her variously-hued daughters, wayward sister and slave.

Playwright Marcus Gardley (b1978)

If gathering racial storm-clouds make Gardley’s play sound rather heavy (and the ending, while agonisingly well-done by Martina Laird, was a tad histrionic), what really marked Gardley’s play out was its verbal inventiveness, comic verve and the deftly-judged interplay between the female characters. 

 

Fresh from her success in "Intimate Apparel" in the summer, Tanya Moodie’s level-headed and regal slave Makeda demonstrated movingly that legal niceties are nothing set against emotional strength. But the most unforgettable scenes for this writer were the verbal duels between Martina Laird’s steely Beartrice and her sworn enemy, the well-upholstered La Veuve, played with a glint by Michele Austin:

La Veuve (Michelle Austin, to L) faces off against
Beartrice (Martina Laird, to R), flanked by
Beartrice's three daughters

“Sweet Jesus, when I heard you was poorer than Joe’s turkey, I shed a whole tear, I did.  That's why I’m really here in fact.  I ran over to share it with you.  See.  It’s still in my eye.  I’m saving it for you so you can wash the floors with it before I move in.“  (La Veuve)

“The only movin' you doin' is movin' them two antsy legs and that wide mouth off my porch.  I’m keeping my house.  ....  It’s sad that you hate me so much .... It makes me want to shed a whole tear for you.  And I would if I thought it would wash away your hatefulness.  But hate is your true love.  And one day it will eat you:  flesh, bone and sinew, till all that is left is your fluttering tongue:  that overworked red cut of meat that for all its flapping ain’t never did nobody no earthly good” (Beartrice)

 

Anyone who wants to catch this awesome show had better hurry:  it finishes Saturday November 29th.

 

Assassins, 25.11.14

It’s a strangely consistent phenomenon but London Sondheim productions have the knack of out-classing the original New York ones (judging those from their cast recordings).

The Menier did it before with landmark productions of “Sunday in the Park” (2005/6) and “A Little Night Music” (2008/9).  Jamie Lloyd's stupendous production of “Assassins” was no exception. Quite simply it never put a foot wrong, speeding by in 105 minutes, no mean feat for a show whose ‘bitter-and-twisted’ complexity has a reputation for being difficult to bring off. And Motley was fortunate enough to have front-row preview-week seats only inches away from the performers.

 

Director Jamie Lloyd

Sondheim’s tartly pungent 1991 musical imagines a fraternity of U.S. presidential assassins encouraging each other in their serial attempts to change history at the point of a gun (“All you have to do / Is move your little finger”).  Nine assassins, one composite blood-spattered President (hunky Simon Lipkin) and a chorus of five ordinary Joes were complemented musically by an octet directed on piano by Alan Williams.  The even-cleverer-than-usual libretto paid meta-theatrical hommage to that other famous stage failure Willy Loman (“Attention must be paid!”). 

Aaron Tveit as Lincoln's
assassin John Wilkes Booth

Soutra Gilmour’s fairground set, overlaced with a cobweb of multi-coloured light-bulbs, brought out the ludic elements in the piece, while her period costumes anchored each assassin to their specific historical context.  Neon bulbs lit up the words “Hit” and “Miss” either side of the stage after each assassination attempt, proceeding non-chronologically from John Wilkes Booth (silky-voiced Broadway import Aaron Tveit) to Lee Harvey Oswald. Successful assassins were rewarded with a shower of scarlet confetti before expiring on stage in their ensuing executions. 

Mike McShane (almost unrecognisable without beard or half his former bulk) was particularly unnerving as Nixon’s failed assassin, Samuel Byck, the epitomy of brooding Seventies suburban menace in Santa costume and dodgem-car, pouring bile into a tape recorder (appropriately enough) for onward transmission to his (imaginary) “friend” Lenny Bernstein. 

Catherine Tate taking pot-shots at
Colonel Sanders in readiness for her character's
failed attempt on the life of Gerald Ford

Catherine Tate provided more evidence of her impeccable comic timing and talent for accents playing failed Ford assassin, cooky West Virginian Sara Jane Moore.  Lithe and hirsute Stewart Clarke (a National Youth Music Theatre newcomer) did a mean accent as Zangara, FDR’s failed Italian assassin, expectorating vigorously over the stage in mid-electrocution.  Ex-“History Boy” Jamie Parker doubled up as a bluegrass banjo-playing Balladeer, initially a voice of popular reason who transmogrifies sinisterly for the finale into Lee Harvey Oswald (presented here as a kind of ‘assassin’s assassin’). 

Jamie Parker (Balladeer/Lee Harvey Oswald) &
Simon Lipkin (Presidential composite)

A succession of toe-tappingly good musical numbers lifted a show always at risk of being ‘brought down’ by its cast of losers, revealing properly to Motley for the first time the quality of Sondheim’s score. From Leon Czolgosz’s “Gun Song” (pitch-perfect Polish accent from David Roberts) to Charles Guiteau’s “I am going to the Lordie” (an alarmingly manic Andy Nyman) to John Hinckley’s “Unworthy of your love” (Harry Morrison and Carly Bawden duetting in Seventies polyester) the singing was uniformly great. 

The show bowed out with the full troop of assassins singing the deliciously dark choral number “Everybody’s got the right to be happy ..  everybody’s got the right to their dreams”.  It may seem odd given the subject matter but you left the intimate Menier auditorium on a real high, conscious of having seen something special. Motley's nomination for best London show of 2014.
 

[Preview week so no shots yet of the cast in character]

Mr Turner, 2.11.14



Timothy Spall's Turner at the Royal Academy

Motley hasn’t always been Mike Leigh’s greatest fan, but “Mr Turner”, his biopic of England’s greatest artist, is nothing short of a masterpiece, a strong contender for film-of-the-year. 

Leigh (71) focused on Turner’s last years before his death at 76 in 1851, a time before the railways when the quickest way from London to Margate was by sea-steamer.  Seldom have I seen a historical period brought so convincingly to life:  you could almost smell the horse-shit in the streets.



Father & Son (Paul Jesson & Timothy Spall)

Leigh’s Turner (played with gusto by Timothy Spall), the original ‘grumpy old man’, is a bluff self-made rough diamond of few words but many growls, who lives in bachelor-bliss with his beloved ‘Dada’ (Paul Jesson) and their faithful housemaid Dorothy (Hannah Danby) in a suitably filthy town-house.  He’s sired two children, for whom he takes no responsibility, and their shrewish mother comes round occasionally to berate him.  His life consists of jockeying for position with fellow hacks at the Royal Academy, buttering up aristocratic patrons, and purposeful striding into the hills to scout for new subjects to paint. 

Curmudgeons never smile:  Spall's Turner

The misused servant, her face ever more crustular as the years pass, provides an outlet for short passionless couplings until, on one of his many pseudonymous scouting expeditions, Turner meets Margate landlady Mrs Booth (the twinkly-eyed Marion Bailey).  Her ex-naval husband (Karl Johnson), tormented by his own experiences as a slaver, conveniently goes the way of all flesh, leaving Turner free to woo her, with unapologetic directness.  The faithful servant meanwhile, whose love for him is never voiced, is abandoned to an ever-dustier townhouse. 

Light relief came from two memorable cameos.  “Was ist das?” whispers the young Queen Victoria in horror to Prince Albert at Turner’s proto-impressionist daubings at the Academy.  Meanwhile Joshua McGuire’s Ruskin, a Harold Acton-style aesthete avant la lettre, pontificated on art in his stately home with magnificent vacuity (in a role interpreted by some as Leigh’s revenge on critics in general). 

This appropriately visual film, rather like Jarman’s ‘Caravaggio’, conjured up a world of intense physicality, whether in the mounds of freshly ground powdered paint, the cat mess on the painter’s overcoat or the sea-swell on Turner’s bewhiskered face as he was lashed to a mast to experience the full force of a marine storm for himself.  Early Victorian England was depicted as wholly lacking in sentimentality, a place of male inarticulacy and female victimhood, where you either sank or swam. 

When Turner’s end came, ship-wrecked red-faced on Mrs Booth’s bed like the hulk of a sea-lion, we heard Spall grunt his famous last words “The sun is a God!” before the camera cut away to the two women in his life, one smiling, the other disconsolate.  Truly all human life was there.
 


Marion Bailey's Mrs Booth shares a lighter moment
with Timothy Spall's Turner

No such levity for Hannah Danby's misused servant