A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes, 7.11.15

“Are y’all ready?!  For a spirit-filled, water-baptized, saved and sanctified, Holy Ghost convocational, multi-denominational, occasionally Pentecostal, get on the good foot Gospel fest?”

 

“A Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes”, the follow-up to last year’s moving “The House That Will Not Stand”, which has just received its world première at the Tricycle under director Indhu Rubasingham, looked like a change of direction for American playwright Marcus Gardley.  A full-throttle farce on the well-worn theme of the Southern preacher (African-American in this case) nicely broken-up by musical interludes, it opened with an invigorating Gospel choral anthem which took you straight back to the National’s re-staging of James Baldwin’s “The Amen Corner” in 2013.  (Both acting leads, Lucian Msmati and the full-throated Sharon D Clarke, previously appeared in that.) 

 

However, it shared more with Gardley’s earlier play than was first apparent.  Like the New Orleans piece, it was huge fun, melding camp gags, well-timed slapstick and a range of OTT accents with brio.  It was equally well-written, with the thirty-six-year-old Californian experimenting with verse and proving himself a wizard with words, one of the English-speaking theatrical world’s most promising newcomers.  Although a man was the focus of the plot, all the best lines, as with ‘House That Will Not Stand’, went to the women.  And as before, it adapted an earlier canonical work.  Whereas the earlier play drew loose inspiration from ‘The House of Bernarda Alba’, ‘Wolf in Snakeskin Shoes’ was more straightforwardly an update of ‘Tartuffe’, Molière’s 1664 satire on religious hypocrisy.  Most importantly, both plays shared the same theme of human cupidity and the corrosive effects of money-worshipping on relationships and values.

Sharon D Clarke's First Lady catches Lucian Msmati's Toof red-handed



In Gardley’s version, Tartuffe was ‘Apostle Toof’ (a rumbustiously lecherous Msmati, complete with “more rings on his fingers than the pope”) whose two-bit southern church, run as a business with his wife First Lady (the statuesque Sharon D Clarke), is about to be foreclosed by the bank.  Constitutionally incapable of keeping his snake in his trousers, but endowed with mysteriously healing hands, Toof (“the preacher who can reach ya and teach ya and beat ya with the book of truth”) has been caught by First Lady laying his hands on trailer-trash parishioner Maxine (a super dumb blonde cameo from Michelle Bonnard). 

In a providential deus ex machina, the formidable Mother Organdy (over-played to perfection by Angela Wynter), convinced that “this planet is going to hell in a fruit basket because women have rights” and fired up by Toof’s “demonic zeal (that) pulsates my pulse and causes all my pulpy places to perspire”, helicopters in from Hog Jaw, Tennessee to summon him to heal her son Organdy (Molière’s Orgon), a “fried-chicken-fat shack, check cashing, liquor store and funeral parlor tycoon” who’s dying of heart cancer.

Ayesha Antoine's Africa (Organdy's daughter), bamboozled by Toof

Toof somehow convinces the gullible Organdy he’s cured him and sets about relieving his relations (fey son Gumper, curvy mistress Peaches and recently-returned-daughter ‘Africa’) of their inheritance rights.

 

In a drastic twist to both Molière’s story and Gardley’s text, Rubasingham’s production let Toof succeed, but at the cost of losing everything he’s hitherto held dear.  The un-performable textual conclusion, involving a well-timed lightning-bolt, was ditched in favour of this more unsettling ending, quite at variance with the light-hearted tone of the rest of the piece.  I wasn’t sure the sudden switch to expressionist seriousness worked, but full marks to Rubasingham for playing with our expectations.

The troublesome ending aside, the one-liners zinged past at a rate of knots.  Meeting Ayesha Antoine’s ‘Africa’ (“it means she who laughs like the hyena, bathes like the hippo, hunts like the lioness and walks like the dodo bird”), Michelle Bonner’s maid replies:  “O, that’s sweet, Nigeria, but I got you beat.  I’m Rosarita Dorita Carnita Tortilla Margarita Chiquita Garcia.  And I’m American even though I’m 40% tequila and 60% Mexican”.



Brother-and-sister act:  Karl Queensborough's Gumper and Ayesha Antoine's Africa

Africa’s down-low brother Gumper (newcomer Karl Queensborough) alternated between bitching (“Are those flip-flops?  Tell me you didn’t hop half way ‘round the world looking like you sell ass at a truck stop”) and qualified warmth (“Seeing you will be the icing on a diabetic cupcake”).

Motley’s old school colleague Adjoa Andoh, who must be knocking fifty, did an impressive job as the ex-poledancer with the heart of gold (“Folks call me Peaches cause I’m the sweetest thang you ever gone meet”) and almost made you believe such baroquely convoluted lines as:

Adjoa Andoh's Peaches soon realises Lucian Msmati's Toof is
"just another man who talks with the muscle 'tween his legs"



“I am a thick, golden brown, brick house goddess of voluptuous lusciousness  … when God made me She broke the mould, and put an earthquake in the sway of my hops, a hurricane in the curve of my stride and a tornado in the whip of my hair.”

Toof’s ceremonial de-gaying of Gumper, fresh from telling his father how Ricky Martin “bangs”, was another coup-de-theâtre: 

“Tonight you become a man.  I rebuke every demon, every spirit, every sprite, every fairy.  I loosen from your heart every flower, every fruit, every Nancy, Pansy, every Mary … I cast out ponytails, painted nails and stylish Italian underwear.  I speak against booty shorts, muscle tees, periwinkle, winks and Elton John CDs except The Lion King ...  I dispatch angels to feed you a carb, to catch you up on rugby, to uncross your legs, to make you sit through Saving Private Ryan and break things for no apparent reason.”

Molière was probably turning in his grave but one had the sense Gardley had fun writing it and we certainly had great fun watching it.  Motley spotted new Shadow Chancellor John McDonnell in the audience the night he went, so this playwright is picking up fans in high places too.

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]

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] 
 
 
 
 

The Amen Corner, National Theatre, 12.6.13

James Baldwin’s heavily autobiographical early (1954) “gospel” play focused on a Harlem pastor’s attempt to reconcile her church leadership with her family and her past.

Marianne Jean-Baptiste powerfully headed the all-black cast as strict pastor ‘Sister Margaret’, whose authority is undermined when her irreligious alcoholic ex-husband Luke returns. 

There was excellent support from Sharon D Clarke (as ‘Odessa’ her full-figured sister, feet firmly planted on the ground), from Lucian Msamati (as the dying jazzman husband Sister Margaret had deserted years earlier) and from Eric Kofi Abrefa (as the son who flees the nest; a clearly autobiographical figure). 
 

It's invidious to single out one performer from a great ensemble but special mention is due to Cecilia Noble as ‘Sister Moore’ (the pastor’s vast, virginal and Machiavellian rival), whose comic timing was impeccable, and who generated a rousing audience response from lines like:
 
"I want to praise the Lord for being here ... I want to thank Him for keeping me pure and set apart from the lusts of the flesh, for protecting me--hallelujah!--from all carnal temptation.  When I come before my Maker, I'm going to come before Him pure.  I'm going to say 'Bless your name, Jesus, no man has ever touched me!' Hallelujah!" 
 
After a slightly underwhelming start to the season, this has to be the stand-out NT show of the year (counting ‘This House’ as belonging more to 2012).  Directed with brio by Rufus Norris (who, it's just been announced, will be taking over from Nick Hytner as the National's Artistic Director), the production featured a two-tier set by Ian MacNeil (chapel on the upper floor and pastor’s living quarters below): typical strong NT production values. The piece was infused with humour and verve and the glorious live music from the London Community Gospel Choir really brought it alive:  “Praise the Lord!” 
 


Jimmy Baldwin in NYC

Baldwin, who first honed his inimitable skill with words from a pulpit, showed how street churches proved both refuge and straitjacket for the 'respectable classes' of Fifties Harlem, most of them first-generation arrivals from the violence of the 'Jim Crow' South.

The 'message' was the same one Baldwin preached all his life, from the Northern slums to his voyages of discovery in the South in the early years of Civil Rights, from the cafes of the Rive Gauche to the steep streets of Istanbul and the heady scents of the St-Paul de Vence villa where he died:  that to go out into the world is to live, to take risks, to embrace love.

Or, as Sister Margaret puts it, in her preacher's vernacular: 

“To love the Lord is to love all His children -all of them, everyone! -and suffer with them and rejoice with them and never count the cost!”.