Review: A Lady Mislaid

A Lady Mislaid by Kenneth Horne
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Horne's plays are showing their age. A Lady Mislaid, albeit one of his better efforts, still suffers from being over-long and repetitive, with dramatic moments blunted by wordiness and excess explanation.

Sisters Jennifer and Esther rent a house in the country so that the former, a novelist, can recover from a nervous breakdown. Bullock, an over-enthusiastic policeman, intrudes, searching for the body of the previous tenant's missing wife. Matters are complicated by the arrival of Bullock's suspect, Smith, who remains beyond the police's clutches as long as the body remains missing. Eventually a body does turn up, but so does Smith's wife, very much alive.

A good example of the slow pacing is when the sisters question the newly arrived woman: her line "I'm his wife" should be followed immediately by Bullock's entrance; instead, we get half a page of the sisters exclaiming "His wife?", "But I thought…" and similar such nonsense before the policeman's belated entrance finally shuts them up.

A Lady Mislaid can only be performed as a period piece because of the dated 1950s social conventions and phrasing. Characters talk of "making love" to each other, which sits oddly on the modern ear, and Jennifer's fiancé insists that she won't be able to write books after they're married because she'll be bringing up children. Horne, like most mid-century British comic writers, suffers from the curious delusion that the mere mention of lumbago is always hilarious. Mrs Small the housekeeper is a stock character from the period, but no less fun for all that.

With judicious cutting, this play could still pass muster in a Village Hall. Sadly, the director of the production I'm stage managing is convinced of Horne's unerring genius and that every syllable is sacrosanct. I'm sure the audience will enjoy it well enough, but it would have been better with the red pen deployed.

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Review: Noises Off

Noises Off by Michael Frayn
My rating: 5 of 5 stars

One of the best farces on the English stage. What looks like a poor farce is revealed to be the dress rehearsal (or is it the tech?), with the director storming out of the audience when the actors foul up. Act 2 requires the stage to be revolved, so we see the silent arguments of the cast backstage as the play goes into its run, before the final act portrays a disastrous performance later in the run.

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Review: Daisy Pulls It Off: A Comedy

Daisy Pulls It Off: A Comedy by Denise Deegan
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Saw this at South London Theatre and hated it. But six years later at Bromley Little Theatre it was a lot of fun. Usually comedies are funnier if you play them straight, but this one seems the other way round. Played straight, it's just an old-fashioned jolly-hockey-sticks story, where the lower-class girl proves herself, only to be revealed as a toff after all, validating the class prejudice of her erstwhile tormentors. Only by sending the whole thing up is the class order subverted. Maybe I'm still a socialist after all.

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Review: Tom, Dick & Harry

Tom, Dick & Harry by Ray Cooney
My rating: 1 of 5 stars

As the lights went down for the interval, I turned to my companion and simply mouthed, "Wow." This play is simply awful. Of course, it didn't help that one of the actors was hopeless and the direction was a little pedestrian; a decent script could survive that. But farce only works with an element of plausibility, and this one depends on people making ludicrous, idiotic decisions that nobody with an IQ in double figures would make.

Tom and Linda are awaiting a visit from Mrs Potter to assess whether they are suitable to adopt a baby. Tom's brother Dick has borrowed Tom's van ostensibly to help a friend move house but has instead gone to Calais to load up with cigarettes, brandy and, unwittingly, two Albanian refugees. That's plausible enough and a good basis for a farce.

But Harry? He plans to help Tom and Linda buy their rented flat. He steals some body parts from the hospital so he can bury them in the garden, turning the flat into a murder scene and knocking £100,000 off the asking price. Easy enough: hospitals always leave dismembered cadavers in corridors for anyone to walk off with and would never notice if they sent a body for cremation minus its head and limbs. And why would an absentee landlord suddenly decide to sell at a loss when he has reliable, paying tenants? And why would Tom let Harry bring body parts into the flat on such an important day?

When Mrs Potter arrives to a house is full of dead bodies, and occasional policeman and live, drunk refugees (but not Tom's wife Linda, who has been tricked into going out), she offers to postpone their interview. To which any vaguely sane person would reply, "How about next Wednesday?" Instead, Tom insists the interview goes ahead and concocts the most idiotic story imaginable to explain the situation.

With farce, one has to sympathise with the main protagonist, but it's impossible to sympathise with Tom. He could have solved his problems at almost every turn: with a simple "Yes" to Mrs Potter and a simple "F*** off out of my flat" to Harry, Dick and the refugees. Every situation offers an easy escape that Tom refuses to take.

Like Alan Ayckbourn, Cooney is a staple of AmDram and his comedies have that cosy, 1970s feel (with social attitudes to match). Tom, Dick & Harry was written in 2005 and is a bit more modern, but there's still a whiff of the 70s about it. That's what will keep it running in Village Halls for decades, or at least till the Morecambe & Wise generation have shuffled off.

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Review: People

People by Alan Bennett
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

People is characterised by Bennett's trademark northern humour: sharp, clever, occasionally arch and with considerable human warmth. It's also characterised by what in recent years has become his trademark sloppiness. Bennett wants to get certain gags in, and sometimes goes meandering off to collect every laugh possible regardless of whether the journey was worth it.

Laughs come thick and fast in the first 20 minutes, but they peter out into occasional chuckles as the interval draws near and the script's energy dissipates. The second quarter of the play needs a complete rewrite; I didn't learn much or laugh much, and my attention started to wander. It's possible that I nodded off. Whatever I missed didn't seem important because when the action really got going in the second half, it still made perfect sense.

And it's worth waiting for the second half. The making of the porn film is hilariously scripted with an Orton-like farcical energy, while the denouement is slyly satirical. Maybe three stars is harsh, but I'm getting a bit tired of Bennett publishing half-baked work and still being hailed as a genius.

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Review: Kindertransport

Kindertransport by Diane Samuels
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Worthy subjects do not good literature make. One feels a duty to like Kindertransport because of its subject matter, but it really isn't a great play. The dialogue is flat, especially in the first half, and the transformation from shy, polite Eva into repressed, cold Evelyn isn't convincing. Added to that is the character of the Ratcatcher, who prowls the stage with wordless menace but who isn't properly developed and whose allegorical significance is muted.

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Review: Old Times

Old Times by Harold Pinter
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

During the interval, my companion said, "I don't really understand Pinter." Two others said, "I don't think you're supposed to," with one adding, "Just let it wash over you." We concluded that if you think you've understood it, you almost certainly haven't.

Pinter was in the vanguard of the sixties drive away from linear narrative, and in Old Times the conversation is used not to drive any plot as such but to delve into the nature of Deeley and Kate's relationship. The obvious interpretation is that Kate and Anna had been more than friends, which would have been far more shocking in 1971 than now, but that seems too simplistic. More plausible is the interpretation that Anna isn't actually there: the memory of her is what intrudes into the couple's relationship rather than her physical presence.

But even that might be too literal. The younger Kate comes across as almost autistically shy, and would have been a curious best friend for the outrageously gregarious Anna. There's a clue in their sharing of underwear and in Deeley's assertion that he had known Anna too. Perhaps Anna is actually also Kate: the extrovert part of her personality that was suppressed when she married Deeley.

Despite its impenetrability, obscure dialogue and occasional pretentiousness, Old Times is also funny and poetic and has real dramatic energy.

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Review: La Turista

La Turista by Sam Shepard
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

La Turista is not a play for reading, and probably not a play for seeing. It's a play to be studied. The political references are too obscure for most people to understand during a performance; for a start the allegories are very specifically American (I'm English) and of their time (1967). Even so, according to the reviews of its opening run, most of the New York audience didn't get it either.

For such a play to work as drama, there has to be something – a plot, a story, a character's journey – for the audience to identify with in case they're not getting the subtext. La Turista doesn't even pretend to have that, which explains why 90% of its original audience left the theatre utterly baffled by what they'd just seen. Shepard doesn't give you that. His characters are not characters but archetypes and their words have no meaning beyond the allegorical.

The plot, such as it is, has an American couple (Kent and Salem, named after cigarette brands) lying sick in a hotel in Mexico (i.e. Vietnam) – La Turista means not just a tourist but the kind of dysentery often suffered by tourists. A local boy comes in and won't leave but refuses their money and spits in Kent's face. Kent reappears dressed as a cowboy and is eventually killed by the ministrations of a local witchdoctor.

Act 2 mirrors Act 1 but is set back in America, with the witchdoctor replaced by an American doctor, whose attempts to cure Kent are frustrated by Kent's defiance – the allegory here being that of youth in revolt against its elders.

As usual, Shephard inserts a few coups de theatre that make the play difficult if not impossible to stage. There's nothing as drastic the one-legged man who shaves another actor's head in Buried Child, and it's difficult but not impossible to obey the stage direction:

"SALEM and SONNY make a lunge for KENT who grabs onto a rope and swings over their heads. He … runs straight toward the upstage wall of the set and leaps right through it, leaving a cut out silhouette of his body in the wall"

…but having a witchdoctor slaughter chickens live on stage would give most directors (and theatre managers) pause before staging the play.

Studying La Turista might well be very rewarding, even if it is no longer politically relevant, which is why I've given it two stars rather than the one it deserves purely as the text of a play to be performed.

If I read it again, I'll probably understand the allegorical meaning of the phone being torn from its socket, then being used normally and then being impossible to use because, obviously, it's been torn from its socket. Shepard is many things but incompetent isn't one of them. 'Pretentious' certainly is one of them, but it's the pretension of theatrical ambition, which is something to be applauded. Shepard, who was 25 when he wrote this, would go on to greater things, but La Turista doesn't really work.

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Review: Doctor Faustus

Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlowe
My rating: 2 of 5 stars

Considering Marlowe's reputation, Doctor Faustus is shockingly poor. It makes you appreciate Shakespeare when one reads an exact contemporary writing plays in a similar style on similar subjects but who produces work so flat, so lacking in poetry, so shallow and melodramatic and, - apart from the summoning of the devils - with so little sense of theatre.

The character of Faustus is only skin-deep: his motivations aren't clear and there is little sense of the enormity of his decision nor any plausible motivation. That is only revealed when he sells his soul and embarks on a career as a cheap con-man and juvenile practical joker. You'd think something so momentous would be undertaken to enjoy the glories of the world, but Faustus seems content to tease the Pope and steal his dinner, do conjuring tricks for the Emperor and scam someone who wants to buy a horse.

In Shakespeare's hands, Faustus would have been a doomed hero, diverted from greatness by ambition (like Macbeth), with a tortured soul and sullied magnificence. Marlowe's Faustus is nothing more than a colossal twat.

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Review: Breathing Corpses (Oberon Modern Plays)

Breathing Corpses (Oberon Modern Plays) by Laura Wade
My rating: 3 of 5 stars

Saw this at Beckenham Theatre Centre. It wasn't bad (and it was impeccably acted) and it was imaginatively structured, but the character arcs didn't work for me.

Part of the problem was the way it was sold to me: three sets of characters that are mysteriously intertwined. To me, the link was obvious within seconds, so there is no great 'reveal'.

Jim and Elaine's scenes didn't work dramatically: Jim is cheerfully hen-pecked in his first scene and suicidally depressed in his second, after finding a body. Kate also finds a body in equally (if not more) gruesome circumstances, yet her reaction is mere annoyance. Jim is psychologically destroyed; Kate is unaffected. Yet there is no development in Jim's psyche: we don't see how or why he went from normal to suicidal. Similarly, his partner Elaine goes from being self-absorbed and shrewish to attentive and loving (although there's still some selfishness in her concern for Jim, so it's not a total personality transplant).

Amy is amiable but her first scene is a bit dull. If she hadn't been so beautifully played then I would have found the scene interminable.

On the positive side, the dialogue is witty, well-paced and tightly written, and the circular structure of the timeline is imaginative and perfectly constructed. Some playgoers might find the inevitable anachronism confusing, but as Wisehammer says in Our Country's Good, "People with no imagination shouldn't go to the theatre."

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Review: Harper Regan

Harper Regan by Simon Stephens

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



I saw this in the bar at BLT: there were some terrific performances but the play itself was flawed and even inept in places.

Through a series of about ten encounters, the almost sociopathic heroine goes back to Stockport to see her dying father because she has never told him she loves him. Yes, the play is built on that most banal of clichés. She decides not to tell her husband where she is going: an illogical act that is never properly explained (she doesn't want him to follow her, but since nobody knows where she's staying she could easily have put his mind at rest without risking being found). She apparently loves him but is quite happy to disappear for two days, leaving the poor man frantic with worry. When she gets back, he happily accepts her perfunctory apologies and wedded bliss returns.

There are numerous mistakes and inconsistencies. Several characters comment on Harper's unusual name, but the story behind the name is never told. The first scene is a meeting with her boss – a man who is surreally creepy in a manner quite out of keeping with the rest of the play. One character is described as separated and is then revealed to have married again. Some workmen comment on the good weather, but ten minutes later the mother says the weather is clearing. Two characters suddenly go off on irrelevant racist rants for no apparent reason whatsoever; perhaps it's just the author's cack-handed way of telling us not to like them.

Some of the dialogue is vibrant and funny, but a lot of it is drab, low-energy murmuring that tails off into silence in unconscious parody of Ingmar Bergman. The vain, self-indulgent heroine is a terrific part (terrifically played in the version I saw), but the play's flaws in plotting and long periods of slow, boring musing about nothing at all make the whole experience a bit dull.



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Review: The Fence in its Thousandth Year

The Fence in its Thousandth Year by Howard Barker

My rating: 2 of 5 stars



You don't need the pseudo-musicals based on The Beatles and The Kinks that keep popping up round London to remind you that 60s nostalgia is big business. Howard Barker, whose first play was performed in 1970, isn't a nostalgist for the era; he's still living there. Those bold 60s experiments in theatre made by young playwrights as they sought to wrench themselves free from the shackles of the 'well-made play' and its bourgeois values are mostly viewed now as quaint and even idiotic. Like [b:Ptolemy's Almagest|436352|Ptolemy's Almagest|Ptolemy|https://d.gr-assets.com/books/1347756437s/436352.jpg|425259] in the field of astronomy, they were important staging posts in the development of theatre but no longer to be taken seriously on their own merits.

Yet in 2006, Barker was still writing that kind of play. Characters with names like Algeria, Photo, Doorway and Youterus (who is male, naturally) scream, swear, copulate, fall over, display their privates and talk in riddles. There is, of course no obvious plot, presumably because that would mean submitting the play to the power structures of the patriarchy, or whatever it is these playwrights feel they are subverting by writing plays nobody can understand.

Seldom do one character's words bear much or any relation to another's: all that matters is their own feelings, leaving us with a play without empathy. If the characters can't communicate with each other, how can they communicate to the audience? The actors' job is made harder by Barker refusing to punctuate their speeches (are capital letters and full stops the bayonets of the oppressor?); not only do the characters fail to communicate to each other or the audience, the author refuses to communicate effectively with the actors.

You could make an intellectual argument in favour of this approach. As Barker himself said,

“It's time we started taking our audiences more seriously, and stop telling them stories they can understand.”

and

"A good play puts the audience through a certain ordeal. I'm not interested in entertainment."

Barker is a vigorous and eloquent proponent of theatre as a challenging medium. If only his words on the stage were as engaging as his words about the stage. Yet, if forced to choose between the Beatles stage musical and a performance of The Fence in its Thousandth Year, I'd still choose Barker – if only for the challenge and to find out whether his plays achieve in performance what they fail to achieve on the printed page. Even so, both shows suffer from the same artistic sterility, failing to recognise that the world has moved on. Barker keeps plugging away, stuck in an outdated style that was superseded by [a:Caryl Churchill|85149|Caryl Churchill|https://d.gr-assets.com/authors/1372704000p2/85149.jpg], having closed his mind decades ago. He has quoted one of his own characters as reflecting his own view on communication:

"I write from ignorance. I don't know what I want to say, and I don't care if you listen or not."

As a book, I despised The Fence in its Thousandth Year. As an actor, I can't imagine how it could be performed as anything but the pretentious mess you see on the page. But as an actor, I also know that a good director can find things I can't find in a script and create something amazing. Maybe the problem isn't that Barker is too challenging; it's that I'm not up to the challenge. Maybe the smug fool is me.



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Review: Blue Stockings

Blue Stockings by Jessica Swale

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



This play dramatises the failed campaign to award degrees to women at Cambridge University in 1897. It's a splendid piece of drama, and can be forgiven for sacrificing realism for dramatic impact.

Most of the characters, with the exception of Henry Maudsley, are fictitious, but the thrust of the story is true enough. Women had been allowed to study and receive certificates from Cambridge since the 1860s, but were not allowed to graduate. Swale's modern play recounts the failed campaign of 1896-7 to change all that.

In a series of short scenes, Swale charts the progress of four female students and the varying responses of their male counterparts. The responses range from guarded sympathy through derision to outright, violent hostility (and the latter, regrettably, is true enough). There are 25 scenes in the play, which helps create pace while making a few difficulties for staging. The script also calls for four young women and at least four young men, which will cause problems for all but the biggest amateur societies trying to stage the play.

Swale opts for vigorous dialogue at the expense of period realism. This would be forgiveable if it were solely for dramatic effect, but I feel she didn't really think it through. One could forgive the young ladies talking of Van Gogh and Einstein, even if it's implausible that teenage students in 1896 would have heard of either in 1896, but the word 'hassle' wasn't even invented then, and no Cambridge lecturer would have said 'millennia' when she meant 'millennium'. The numerous anachronisms seem more careless than deliberate.

Still, it's a vibrant, vigorous play that brings a historical story to life.



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Review: My Boy Jack

My Boy Jack by David Haig

My rating: 5 of 5 stars



Haig's drama succeeds by avoiding the clichéd and simplistic narrative so common in World War I literature. Yes, Kipling is vain, pompous, blindly patriotic and emotionally distant, but he still comes across as likeable, with a boyish enthusiasm for life and a genuine affection for his family. Jack, his doomed son, is a rounded and complex character, desperate to escape the suffocating atmosphere at home, while the daughter Elsie ("Bird") is a vigorous and strong-willed force in the family, rivalling her mother.

The story focuses on Rudyard Kipling's efforts to get his teenage son into the army, even before the war has begun. He has already been turned down by the Navy because of his appallingly bad eyesight. We see Jack enthusiastically following his father's efforts, but for his own reasons. We then see him with his men before going over the top at Loos and being reported "missing believed wounded" to his family. Apart from a tender flashback in which Rudyard shows his favouritism to his son above his daughter, this is the last we see of Jack.

The rest of the play focuses on the quest to find out JAck's fate, including a harrowing scene with a shell-shocked veteran who saw Jack's final moments.

The play's only weakness is the ending, where Haig sees Bird married off and then reacts to Hitler's rise to power, persuading him that his son's sacrifice was wasted. Finally, he reads his own poem 'My Boy Jack'. This feels like three different endings when only one was necessary.



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Review: Coram Boy: The Play

Coram Boy: The Play by Helen Edmundson

My rating: 3 of 5 stars



Admittedly, this review is based on seeing the National Theatre's film of its own 2005 production, so not all points hold.

The story plots the 18th Century lives of two boys and their obsession with one girl. One is the heir to a country estate who wants to devote his life to music instead; the other is the son of a thoroughly nasty character who takes money from unmarried mothers to send their babies to the Coram foundlings institution but then murders the children and pockets the cash. Not a nice man.

It's a compelling story, let down slightly by the failure of the two storylines to weave together. The National's production was let down by the intrusiveness of the music, which often drowned out the dialogue and is so prevalent that the show was practically an opera. It's other main failing was the cast, or possibly the director, who seemed to confuse running around, shrieking constantly and falling over with the more subtle art known as 'acting'.



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Review: Autobahn

Autobahn by Neil LaBute

My rating: 4 of 5 stars



Understated and subtle, Neil LaBute's Autobahn shoves a series of characters into the confined space of the front seat of a car where the intensity of relationships is inescapable. These duologues tear into the basis of relationships in a quietly comic yet disturbing way. In a sense, it's classic LaBute.

I especially loved the trashy, almost deranged girlfriend whose needy, wheedling attitude manipulates her increasingly uncomfortable college boyfriend into not dumping her ("I'll find work. They have WalMarts all over").

This is comedy of the unsaid, in which the car becomes a prison where characters are forced to have conversations they would rather not have: a mother silently listens as she drives her daughter home from rehab, while the daughter cheerfully announces her intention to get straight back onto drugs; what looks like a father-daughter road trip is revealed as something far more sinister; a man's apology spirals downwards disastrously against the brick wall of his partner's silence.

These are disturbing yet funny vignettes.



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