My Night With Reg, 28.8.14

Robert Hastie's well-performed twentieth anniversary Donmar production of Kevin Elyot's 1994 landmark gay comedy set in 1985, a 1950s parlour drama with added profanity, was played through without intervals.  The play had created a stir back in 1994 as the first "out" gay drama to hit the West End.  Is it picky to think it might have worked better if it had been a little more "in"?  Comic toasts ("Gross indecency!") exemplified a tendency to banality, while the play helped initiate the tendency of every subsequent 'gay play' to throw in some arbitrary full-frontal nudity to pull in the punters. 


Lewis Reeves' butt enlivened an otherwise
less than enthralling trip down memory lane

Elyot (who died in June, just before this production opened) dallied in the over-familiar territory of the English inability to communicate or engage emotionally.

Most of the characters, with the exception of the youngster, were stereotypes, exiled from youthful dreams of David Bowie by fear of imminent lonely middle-age, or worse.
 

Jonathon Broadbent's apron-clad Guy

Jonathon Broadbent was heavily-bespectacled and repressed Guy, the recipient of multiple well-intentioned cookbooks for one, ever the hostess and never the bride.  Floppy-haired Geoffrey Streatfeild was Daniel, Reg’s dandyish widow, forever running off to hop on planes to the other side of the world.  Old-Etonian Julian Ovenden (better-known from “Downton Abbey” and the son of HMQ’s former chaplain, no less) was public-school drifter John, one of Reg’s many bits-on-the-side, and the object of Guy’s excruciatingly undeclared affections. 
 
Relief from the tiresome Oxbridge-ness of these three came from Matt Bardock as Benny, a priapically blunt Cockney bus driver, and from Richard Cant's Bernie, a classic bore who banged-on about conservatories with an impressively nasal whine.  Twinkly-blue-eyed twenty-five-year-old blond Lewis Reeves was ingénu Brummie painter Eric, the least damaged and most appealing character (as well as the least clothed). 
 

Geoffrey Streatfield's flighty Daniel and
Julian Ovenden's vulnerable John

The central conceit was, of course, that the eponymously absent Reg had slept with them all (bar Eric) and had just been carried off by AIDS.  The unexpected plot twist was that it was the gentlest and least promiscuous character (given to donning Marigolds before any intimate encounter) who was unexpectedly next in line for the Grim Reaper.
 

Lewis Reeves as Eric, the one point of optimism
in a play misleadingly labelled a "comedy" 

Motley's feelings about the play were strangely unchanged from twenty years ago.  It was quite hard to stomach the depressing mixture of unfulfilled men, mundane text (characters constantly being offered refills) and low comedy ("Nuts anyone?", asked the gauchely 'Carry-On' host at his breathtakingly dull soirée), even without the looming threat from an unnamed killer virus.  It was also too well-manneredly English, summoning up little of the rage of Larry Kramer's "The Normal Heart", another early AIDS drama.
 
Elyot’s rancid view of gay men was unsentimental and reductive in more or less equal measure (though not entirely unfair, judging by post-production chat-room comments on the size of Mr Reeves’ equipment).  Improved social and medical conditions have fortunately allowed most gay men to move on from those terrible mid-Thatcher years – and not before time.  

Boyhood, 20.8.14

Mason Jnr (the 6 year old Ellar Coltrane) as we first saw him

Richard Linklater’s Berlin Silver Bear winner was a Bildungsroman examining how “time’s winged-chariot” deals with both children and parents.

Media coverage rightly focused on the extraordinary feat of filming the same fictional family, in cinema verité style, over twelve years. 

We watched Patricia Arquette (Mom) and Ethan Hawke (Dad - Mason Snr), unmarried American parents of modest means, split, move, marry, divorce, remarry and divorce again, while bringing up two children through this maelstrom of changing relationships.  Arquette was particularly impressive at conveying the low-key decency of a Mom who’s serially disappointed by men (“I thought there would be more”, she concludes - about life rather than men).
 

Mason Jnr's Mom (Patricia Arquette), who matures 
as much as either of her children

The eponymous boy Mason Jnr (Ellar Coltrane) went from six to eighteen before our eyes, in tandem with his slightly older sister Sam (played by Linklater’s own daughter Lorelei). 

Yet while we saw Mason Jnr grow up, for him, as for many teenagers, life was always elusively in the present tense (“It’s like it’s always right now”). 

Linklater’s typically Texan-set film was a languorous moody affair, more interested in the mundane realities of relationships and family life than broader social issues.  There were a few topical references to Iraq and the 2008 Obama campaign (Dad swiped some McCain billboards).  Many of the rites of passage were specifically American: baseball and bowling with Dad and a, to European eyes, creepy vignette where Mason Jnr was given a shotgun for his fifteenth birthday by doting bible-bashing hick step-grandparents.  A few more troubling episodes apart (for instance when Mom was beaten up by her alcoholic second partner), the focus of the movie was on showing children's personalities developing - not least in opposition to adults’ frequently cack-handed attempts to guide them.

Finally accepting responsibility:  Dad (Ethan Hawke)
takes his son away for one of many single-parent weekends

Linklater ‘s trademark mood of slightly bemused directionlessness, memorably essayed in “Dazed and Confused” as long ago as 1993, was repeated here at deliberate length.  The pace of the 2 ¾ hour screen time occasionally flagged but the film worked far better than Terrence Mallick’s “Tree of Life”, which tried to cover similar territory more impressionistically.

The universality of the theme, despite the particularities of the American setting, virtually guaranteed a positive audience response, helped by Linklater’s refusal to sensationalise.  Motley had two main cavils. Firstly, with the exception of one Hispanic, there was no attempt to represent America as the melting-pot that it is, with African-Americans in particular conspicuously absent.  Secondly, as many others have commented, flick was mis-titled and should have been called “Family” or “Motherhood”, since it was as much about Mom, Dad and the Sister as about the Boy. 

"The Three Ages of Boy":
Mason Jnr at 6, 14 and 18

That said, compared to the pap that Hollywood generally churns out, kudos is due to the “auteur of Austin” for a sensitive, acute and authentic portrayal, from admirably multiple perspectives, of the transfer of the baton between the generations.
   

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. 

Handbagged, 7.5.14

Marion Bailey as "Q" and Stella Gonet as "T" in Moira Buffini's comic gem "Handbagged"

Moira Buffini’s sparkling comedy about the weekly meetings between Maggs and HMQ, which Motley missed at its Tricycle première, has won a well-deserved transfer to the West End, and comes highly recommended. 

L-R: Lucy Robinson (Liz), Marion Bailey (Q)
Stella Gonet (T), Fenella Foolgar (Maggs)

This well-written, larky and funny play comprised two Thatchers (Stella Gonet as the older “T” in dark blue and Fenella Foolgar as the younger “Maggs” resplendent in royal blue) and two Queens (Marion Bailey, all scowls and jowls as the older “Q”, Lucy Robinson more neutral as the younger “Liz”), bouncing off each other.  The doubling of roles provided a mechanism for voicing the other self’s inner thoughts as well as for looking back in judgment. 

Neet Mohan and Jeff Rawle played a huge range of (mainly) male roles

Two excellent comic actors (Jeff Rawle from 90s TV's “Drop the Dead Donkey” and newcomer Neet Mohan) covered off a host of other cameos in a bewildering range of accents, from Denis to Kinnock to Reagan to (my favourite) Mohan in full drag as Nancy Reagan, immaculately coiffured in red, bouncing along on a bone-shaker driven by HMQ in Windsor Great Park. 

Buffini’s use of self-referencing meta-theatricality (the Queen is desperate for an interval, whilst Maggs is happy to dispense with it) and use of the male bit-parts to offer light relief and to give voice to opposing voices proved highly effective.  The nuanced text moved deftly from slapstick to pathos and gave a well-rounded view of each leading lady.  Motley particularly enjoyed the jokes about Thatcher shivering in Balmoral and loathing every minute of Prince Philip's barbecues.

Stella Gonet as the 1990 T and Fenella Foolgar as the 1979 Maggs

The culmination of the plot-line was the ‘Sunday Times’’ story from 1986 (which Motley remembers as if it were yesterday) claiming that HMQ was “dismayed” by Thatcher’s divisiveness.  “Is Her Majesty a socialist?” asks a Maggs clearly going off the psychological rails after the failed Brighton bomb.  “I don’t think she’s an actual Trot, old love” replies Denis. 

It’s a familiar story (cf “Margaret”, “The Long Walk to Finchley”, “The Iron Lady”), in many ways the background music to Motley's whole life, but one which it’s hard to tire of when, like this, it’s done so well.  It's also an altogether more entertaining effort than last year’s “The Audience”, which covered off broadly similar ground with La Mirren as HMQ.  Hard to believe it’s only 25 years since Prunella Scales as the Queen in Alan Bennett’s “A Question of Attribution” was accused of lèse-majesté for the first ever stage depiction of a ruling monarch. 

Translations, 1.5.14

Brian Friel’s 1980 play about the linguistic confrontation between English and Gaelic in Nineteenth Century Ulster was poignant and moving.  The setting was County Donegal in 1833 as the Ordnance Survey moved in to compile the first reliable maps of this remote corner of the Empire.  Two army officers of dramatically different temperaments (Lancey and Yolland) arrive to map a rural backwater but are unable to communicate with the Irish-speaking villagers.  

Beth Cooke as Maire and John Conroy as Jimmy Jack

The play memorably gave voice to a Gaelic-speaking generation soon to be decimated by the Potato Famine (“Sweet God, did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag?”).  Friel dramatized that hinge moment in Irish history when Gaelic (still the language of c50% of the Irish in 1830) was displaced by English (the language of c75% of the Irish by 1850).  Ironically, the Irish-speaking peasants could only be represented on stage by characters speaking English. 

Niall Buggy bouncing along as the
hedge school master Hugh

The central character of Hugh Mor O’Donnell was a gift to any actor (in this case to the impressively stentorian Niall Buggy), an “aul drunken schoolmaster” who communicated floridly in richly orotund Latinisms (“Silentium!”).  Through Hugh, Friel asserted an authority for Gaelic by claiming an affinity between it and the classics (“our own culture and the classical tongues made a happier conjugation / English ... couldn’t really express us”). 

Friel used the character of Hugh's oddball buddy Jimmy Jack (John Conroy) to underline that being non-Anglophone didn't mean being uneducated.  Self-taught Jimmy was so deeply ensconced in the classics that he addressed the Gods of the Greek myths, who were as real to him as his neighbours, in Greek.  There was more than a hint that languages may have functional specialisations:  English for commerce, but Gaelic, Latin or Greek for learning.

Not all the villagers were keen to keep up their Gaelic though and the chief facilitator of English linguistic colonialism was Hugh's shopkeeper son Owen (played by the chirpy bearded Cian Barry).  The strongest scene of the play was when Owen watered down the more egregious elements of the official proclamations from the ramrod Captain Lancey (Paul Cawley), systematically mistranslating his English to make it less offensive to the Irish. 

James Northcote as Ltnt Yolland

In contrast, the other, far more idealistic, Englishman, Lieutenant Yolland (a slimly winning James Northcote), primarily responsible for translating (or mistranslating?) all the Gaelic place-names into English for the new maps, was seduced by the countryside, the "poteen" and by local girl Maire (Beth Cooke).  This latter entanglement put him in competition with Hugh's younger son Manus (Ciaran O’Brien).  In this 'linguistic war' it was Yolland, the character who strove hardest to bridge cultural differences, that had to pay the highest price. 
‘Translations’ was far being from a Nationalist tract.  In many ways, the characters like Yolland, Maire and Owen who tried to find a middle ground between colonisers and colonised were the most attractive. The serious political points were also lightened through the inclusion of much classic Beckettian-style blarney, particularly from the vaudevillian pairing of Hugh and Jimmy. 




Brian Friel

The under-rated Friel has a strong claim to be considered our greatest living playwright (though Stoppard runs him close).  As "The Times" put it:  "Nobody can write as wrenchingly as Friel about the ache of the soul and its yearning for ecstasy". 

Friel's greatest skill is his ability to capture twilight moments, the melancholia of the marginal and the displaced, and to give them voice through language of limpid beauty and precision (see also "Faith Healer", "Dancing at Lughnasa" and "Molly Sweeney"). 

In "Translations", Friel's message, through Hugh, was that:  
“It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language”. 

Hugh boasted Friel’s best lines and most acute insights, such as: 
“Remember that words are signals, counters.  They are not immortal.  And it can happen... that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of ... fact”.  

Or again:  “You’ll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. It (Gaelic) is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception – a syntax opulent with tomorrows.  It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only hope of replying to ... inevitabilities.”

Sheffield Crucible’s impressive touring production (directed by James Grieve on a suitably rustic set by Lucy Osborne) gathered strength from its faithfulness to Friel’s powerful text.  And Kingston's smartly suburban Rose Theatre made an ironic contrast to the tumbledown setting of the play.  This was a show guaranteed to make a ‘Hibernophile’ of anyone!