Orphans **

I heard very good things about Orphans after the run in Edinburgh, so I booked up nice and early.

I’d also heard that it was meant to be scary. So I was preparing for a halloween experience at the Soho Theatre, and drafted in a male friend that I could dig my nails into his arm. I placed myself on the back row on the aisle seat, ready to scamper out of the door in terrified horror.

This was certainly no fright night. It was, though, a different kind of disturbing. A young man called Liam (played by Liam Joe Armstrong) bursts in on a couple having some dinner. He is the wife’s younger brother, always getting in trouble with the police. He is covered in blood.

The play shifts cleverly through the different versions that Liam offers, each one revealing that the last version was a lie. It starts off with him finding a boy lying down outside with cut wounds, a “lad” that clearly was getting up to no good himself. It morphs into a version where he is followed down an alleyway and he fights back his attacker. And then reaching out into more and more disturbing places.

It explores the boundaries of what people will do to protect family, what they’ll do to other people, and anbecause they’re scared of getting found out. Playwright Dennis Kelly pushes these boundaries incrementally as the play goes on, like a parent teaching a kid to swim, and moving back everytime it gets closer.

But there are some fundamental problems with this play. There is an unrealness to the conversations between the three characters, which is fine. But for some unknown reason, nearly every sentence is repeated twice or three times. So the conversations go a little bit like this:

WIFE: “Are you going to call the police?”
HUSBAND: “Are you saying you want me to call the police?”
WIFE: “You can call the police if you want”
HUSBAND: You want me to call the police?

(This is an approximation.)

The play runs for 1 hour 45 without interval. Seriously, we could have happily lost half of this if the actors had said the script once. Although I could see that these repetitions sometimes worked (such as “the lad is covered in blood” resonates further in the play when this is repeated), these exchanges were really quite annoying.

Then the characters are pretty flimsy. Helen, played well by Claire-Louise Cordwell, conveys the idea of love and loyalty for her brother and uncertainty about her marriage and pregnancy. Danny (Jonathan McGuinness), her husband is pretty two dimensional, although I am sure he is meant to be quite weak and bland. And it’s interesting to see the change in the husband from a bit of a wet blanket to a torturer. Joe Armstrong is undeniably excellent in the role of Liam, wide-eyed and sweet but capable of dark acts. But the characters weren’t convincing, and I didn’t really care what happened to them.

Overall, its cons outweigh its pros.

I bought a blue car today ***

Vaudeville Theatre, until 6 September 2009

Alan Cumming does a decent job with his one man show.

It’s a mixture of him talking and singing, (very) loosely based on his last ten years in America.

His conversation between the songs was charismatic and entertaining, and a story about Cabaret was particularly engaging. Cumming was performing as Emcee in the musical (presumably dressed in leather or not very much at all) and asked a grandfatherly man up on stage to dance with him. The crowd went wild. When Cumming asked the man’s name, the reply was “Walter Cronkite”, the broadcast journalist named as “the most trusted man in America”.

However, Cumming seemed a bit lost on the stage of the Vaudeville when singing, stripped of any set and any real choreography or ensemble, and his voice doesn’t have enough wow-factor to fully compensate. The selection of songs for the most part is a bit schmaltzy. And when he starts singing he loses some of his natural charisma and falls back on the conventions of musical theatre: making of fists, wide sparkly eyes, wry smiles.

When he goes into a song from Cabaret, Mein Herr, it’s an entirely different matter. This is dark, mischievous and erotic and you can see quite easily how he racked up a string of awards in the UK and US with his performance in the Donmar’s production. He really excels here: his natural charisma re-emerges and he has the chance to do a bit of proper acting.

And the comic songs were a real treat. Taylor, the Latte Boy was sweet and funny, and the encore song that had been written for a 96 year old grandmother was hilarious: “You’re fucking beautiful”, with more “fucks” than a randy band of rabbits.

There was something else undermining the performance though. The band members were undeniably talented and their placement on stage created a nice sense of intimacy. However, I suspect that Cumming was unaware that one of the band members was pissing about for large parts of the performance.

Mate, you’re lit up on stage with a whole audience looking at you! He sat there looking beyond bored, slumping over his instrument, and trying to catch the attention of another musician sat next to him. He was mouthing words and a couple of times, and he even looked like he was playing scissors, paper, stone or some other sort of hand gestures.

Cumming made a big deal about creating bonhomie with his band, introducing them all at the start, and making jokes about their relative youth. Either this musician didn’t care or there was some politics going on, but it really jarred with Cumming’s attempts to create intimacy and distracted from the performance.

It was an enjoyable show. It would have been better with improved choreography, changing some of the musical numbers for funnier ones, a bit more of the Cabaret raunch, and some stern words to the band.

The Mountaintop ***(*)

Trafalgar Studios, until 5 September 2009

Set on the eve of Martin Luther King’s death, The Mountaintop is a surprising play.

The great civil rights activist sits alone in his hotel room while it is pouring with rain outside. The set is remarkably atmospheric and evocative; it is shabby and littered with cigarette ends and empty coffee cups, and Luther King (played by David Harewood) is visibly nervous, jumping in shock each time the thunder cracks: to him, it’s a gunshot, a materialisation of the death threats he is receiving.

The play takes a little while to warm up. Harewood’s voice is initially strange; it wavers with what sounds like heightened emotion even when asking for cigarettes. But he conveys King’s emotional state very well. He’s exhausted from preaching and shouting, frustrated by the lack of progress of the peaceful black rights movement; torn up with guilt about the violence that it has inspired, resulting in the death of a 16 year old killed by police.

But the real treat of The Mountaintop is Lorraine Burroughs as Camae. She gives a brilliant performance as the maid who brings him his roomservice coffee and who doesn’t leave. It’s a two-hander, so it’s just her and him for the whole play, and the interplay between the two characters is authentic and charged with chemistry.

Camae is beautiful and irresistible – “even my uncle couldn’t resist”. But she’s not just a pretty face: she is sharp, witty and has no sense that King is any better than she is, just because he is a Dr, or Martin Luther King or a man. She challenges. This is a voice for black rights but also women’s. She runs circles around him. When King is faltering about what to do next, after realising the marches aren’t powerful enough, Camae puts on his suit jacket and his shoes and delivers her own sermon, one that has King gripped.

The Mountaintop a lovely complex portrayal of a man desperate to do what’s right and have an impact on the world, and change it for the better, while struggling with the thing that he says unites us all and makes us human: fear. And smoking, drinking and ready to cheat on his beloved wife with the beautiful Camae.

But I have to say that the twist in the tale didn’t completely convince me. Camae is no maid: she is an angel, sent to tell King that his days are numbered. In fact, tonight is his last night before meeting his maker. Magical realism and all that, but it is a bit of a stretch to believe that she is an angel and he is on the phone to God.

The actors pull it off as their performances are so strong and the writing is agile. And the final scene where King is transported by Camae, like the Ghost of Christmas Future, into everything that happens since, is mesmerising. The whole set is engulfed in a light show that speeds past riots and murders and hip hop music. It’s overwhelming for us and for King. It ends in a note of hope with Obama’s voice and his famous slogan: “Yes we can”.

Phèdre at the NT ***

I took my mum to see Phèdre at the National, with Helen Mirren and Dominic Cooper of The History Boys and Mamma Mia fame.

The set is a wide bare space with craggy rock and clean sunlight hitting the stage; the lighting creates an incredibly convincing impression of actually being in Greece. Dominic Cooper as Hippolytus is the first on stage and my mum says, “Ooh it’s just like Mamma Mia”. And she’s right – we’re in Greece and Cooper is dressed in a black vest showing off his rippling muscles. But that’s where the similarities end, unless I fell asleep during Mamma Mia and it descended into a bloodbath.

Phèdre (Helen Mirren) is married to Theseus, Hippolytus’ dad. Phèdre fancies the pants off Hippolytus (Dominic Cooper) and has persecuted him in order to prevent her true feelings coming out. But when Theseus is missing, presumed dead, she ends up admitting her love. Unfortunately for Phèdre, Hippolytus is too upstanding for his own good and inconveniently in love with the younger and beautiful Aricia. And, guess what, Theseus ain’t dead after all. The shame of dishonour and the fear of the repercussions lead Phèdre and her maid into some dastardly decisions.

What starts as something quite inconsequential, especially from the perspective of a modern audience – OK she is in love with her husband’s son but nothing has happened and no-one knows – descends rapidly with each scene into a more and more twisted situation, each step digging their graves deeper.

The cast is strong, with Ruth Negga as Aricia and John Shrapnel as Théramène particularly standing out. His gift of story telling brings an epic monologue of reported action vividly to life. Dominic Cooper, as much as I like him, is mainly eye candy. He holds his own but mainly conveys emotion by raising his voice and talking more emphatically rather than really expressing much depth. Helen Mirren is sometimes very impressive, but the main problem is that she pitches in too high too quickly. Her very first entrance is steeped in melodrama, hysterical. When you start off like that, and there’s two more hours of it, there’s no way to build the tension. You get to saturation point quite quickly. It is quite early on in the run, though, and this may improve with time.

Theseus (Stanley Townsend) is a nice surprise. I was expecting a dashing ladies man, an older version of Hippolytus, but instead we get the entrance of a broad set man, with a Yorkshire accent (I think) and the moodiness of a thunder cloud. It felt like the presence of Ted Hughes, who translated it from Racine’s French. Suddenly you realise the danger and the consequences of Phèdre’s actions. When Theseus later confronts Hippolytus he moves like a sumo wrestler, delivering an irreversible curse.

The play is dramatic, stretched taut over two hours without an interval. I am a great fan of the interval (stretch legs, drink, make a swift exit if necessary), but I can see why they didn’t put one in here. It’s almost if you take a break the tension goes. And I was riveted. I am also usually plagued by a disparate urge to go to the loo within about 20 minutes of the start of a show, by my bladder was paying too much attention. Watching Phèdre is like watching a car spiral out of control in slow motion.

But this is also the downside. It’s too dramatic, too stretched, and – mainly due to Mirren (sorry Helen!) – too hysterical and when the play ends, there is a sense of fatigue and anti-climax. Not the feeling that you get after going through emotional highs and lows, but the one where you’ve spent quite a lot of time concentrating and investing in something and then, when it’s done, you wonder if it was quite worth it. You’re just not connected enough to the characters to care deeply about their downfall.

I think it was very impressive, but it left me a little cold at the end.

I think Phèdre could have learnt a bit from Mamma Mia actually and taken itself a little less seriously. The dramatic tension needs some relief, and a bit of dodgy singing from Pierce Brosnan.

The farce of feminism

The Female of the Species, Vaudeville Theatre
****

The first twenty mintues of The Female of the Species suggest that we’re in for a disappointment.

Eileen Atkins and Anna Maxwell Martin, two fantastic actors, appear under utilised in the two-dimensional characters of Margot and Molly.

Margot, obviously inspired by academic Germaine Greer, is a self obsessed feminist writer, who thinks that the world revolves around her. Molly is an archetypal geeky student, rucksack on both shoulders, with a West Country drawl. She blames the death of her mother on Margot and holds her at gun point.

Atkins and Maxwell Martin are restrained by the sterotypes, and the jokes are a bit obvious and clunky. For example, Greer’s The Female Eunuch is substituted with The Cerebral Vagina.

But then Sophie Thompson appears on stage, as Margot’s daughter Tess. Initially, she seems only to be a cypher for the anti-feminist viewpoint: a harrassed wife and mother, everything her mother despises.

But very quickly, Thompson shifts the comedy up a gear. After encouraging Molly to pull the trigger on her mother, she launches into an exhausted and hysterical rant about dealing with the children. Who is God? Where do Pokemen go on holiday? The audience spontaneously applaud her at the end of it.

From this point on, the play is massively entertaining. The arrival of each new character adds to the farce, and the writing and delivery is exceptional. The next entrant is Tess’ husband Bryan – he’s a businessman but also a “new man”, sensitive and apron-wearing. He’s followed by a butch taxi driver who has been attempting to be communicative and caring, but is desperate to show his manly side again.

Yes, credibility is strained. Would Molly’s mother really be driven to suicide because of following Margot’s feminist teachings? (She apparently dies clutching a copy of The Cerebral Vagina). The talented actors aren’t going to be stretched to the limit of their capabilities. And the play’s not going to win any awards for offering the revelation that sometimes women prefer a bit of rough.

But who cares when it’s this much fun?

Completely lost

Lost Highway, the Young Vic
*

The David Lynch film is confusing but it’s a walk in the park compared to this stage production of Lost Highway.

The set designed by Riccardo Hernandez is atmospheric and very cool. A long runway intersects the studio floor, with a perspex box suspended above it; similar to David Blane’s box above the Thames when he went for 40 days without food (possibly a more enjoyable experience?).

The story is surreal. Renee (Valérie MacCarthy wearing a red wig), is murdered and Fred the saxophonist (Mark Bonnar) gets arrested and put on death row. While in prison he gets a headache and turns into a car mechanic, Pete (Quirijn de Lang). Pete the car mechanic is then released from jail as he’s clearly not Fred the saxophonist. He meets and falls in lust with Alice (Valérie MacCarthy wearing a blonde wig); unfortunately she is already going steady with the terrifyingly weird Mr Eddy (David Moss in a fantastic performance, full of screeching and talking in tongues).

The cycle of rebirth and who-killed-who is potentially fascinating, the mystery hovering over it like a fog. But the mystery gets lost in a smog of pretension.

The multimedia experience is a good example of this. Two large screens present cliched images of sex: writhing and heaving bodies punctuated by moaning “oh oh ohs”.

On a more practical note, Lost Highway is billed as an opera but there is very little singing. 40 minutes go by before anyone sings and when they finally do, you wish they hadn’t. The powerful voices of the cast are trapped by terrible lyrics: singing “OK” or “Would you like to go to dinner?” in an operatic way, doesn’t work unless it’s designed to be funny.

A quick glance across the auditorium revealed expressions of confusion and several pockets of poorly suppressed hysteria.

I don’t like to be too dismissive as experimenting is a vital part of developing exciting work; and Olga Neuwirth, the composer, is certainly avante garde. I am sure some audience members emerged feeling it was an overwhelmingly creative experience. But I don’t think anyone could persuade me that it wasn’t pretentious and boring.

It was rescued only by good performances and the car that comes sliding along the runway at the end.

I don’t know about the highway being lost: I was though.

Changing rooms

Metamorphosis, Lyric Hammersmith *****

The play examines that age-old question: what do you do if your son turns into a giant beetle?

The staging of Kafka’s story about transformation, disassociation and exclusion, is beautifully simple.

First of all, the set is very impressive. The two tier set has a sitting room on the lower level, with a bedroom above it, turned on its side. When Gregor (Björn Thors) wakes up one morning and finds himself transformed into a hideous monster (thankfully represented figuratively rather than literally), he scuttles around the walls, climbing up scores of handholds in the ceiling and walls.

The set alone and his incredibly gymnastics around it are spellbinding. The fact is relatively bare but the production is visually stunning, a great reminder that you don’t need huge amounts of cash poured into a staging to make it effective.

Björn Thors as Gregor in Metamorphosis

But the tone of the production is also spot on. It opens with a fabulous score with the mother, father and daughter drinking their morning tea, in a highly choreographed representation of oppressive domestic routine. Throughout the production, the choreography is over-emphasised but perfect, so everything is an exaggerated version of the truth.

Gregor is a dutiful son, uncomplainingly providing the only family income.  When he changes, his family can only see a slavering monster and hear a horrific noise. The daughter initially tries to help him but even she becomes increasingly cruel when she falls for the Lodger, who provides another great performance. The family see him as an impediment to their social status and general happiness. The fact that he remains committed to their happiness, still desperately wanting his sister to realise her dream to study the violin at an academy, is heartbreaking.

It’s funny but moving and intensely sad and uncomfortable; definitely one of the best things I’ve seen for a while.

Randomly brilliant

Random, Royal Court
****

Random is just fifty minutes long. But who needs more time when you can fit this much in?

The performance alone by Nadine Marshall is unbelievably good, deserving of some Best Actress nominations.

As she stands alone on the Jerwood Theatre stage, in semi darkness, all eyes are on her. Marshall holds the attention and imagination for the entire piece, bringing to life playwright’s Debbie Tucker Green’s four key characters – a mother, father, daughter and son – and an array of peripheral characters.

Each is created with clarity and perfect intonation, the personalities all distinct. The mother is steeped in Carribean tradition, dad is a man of few words, the sister is bright, funny, unfulfilled by her boring job with her colleagues “chatting their shit”, and the son is a teenager, skirting around the edges of getting into trouble. It is easy to become completely engrossed and convinced by the dialogue between them.

The series of beautifully observed relationships transform dramatically into a tragedy, when the son is killed in a gang attack.

And this is what lets the play down. Although the tragic climax is powerful, it occurs too early and Marshall has to maintain the grief and pain for too long. The authentic detailed observations of the characters are replaced with wider brushstrokes, descriptions of mourning around the scene of the crime, the policemen breaking the news, viewing the dead body. There is a danger of reaching saturation point with tragedy, where the audience becomes overwhelmed rather than empathetic.

Most of all, the death is narrated only by the sister and I missed the lightness and technical brilliance of the first half, where Marshall switched between characters.

Random is funny, lyrical, moving and dominated by a startlingly good performance by Marshall. But if the tragic climax had come just a bit later, and Tucker Green had reintroduced some of the deftness from the first scenes, the play would have gone from brilliant into unmissable.

Mentally ill: physically fine

Insane in the Brain, Peacock Theatre
****

There’s not much room for examination of the mental state in Insane in the Brain, a street dance version of One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.

But that’s because it’s all about the body. The skill and energy of Bounce, a Swedish dance company, is breathtaking. The angular and unpredicatable moves of street dance (performed to a soundtrack that includes Missy Elliot and Cypress Hill) create an impressive physical representation of the mind in disarray.

The inventive opening scene sets the tone for the rest of the show. On an eerily lit stage, the dancers are dressed in baggy clothes and white masks. When they turn round, there are masks on the other side too and, disorientatingly, you realise you were watching the dancers’ backs.

There are a string of visually stunning sequences. An obsessive compulsive routine is transformed into a complex dance on the hospital beds; bungee jumping performers create a convincing impression of electric shock therapy.

One weak link is Nurse Radcliffe, who is meant to be an iceberg of fear; but the dancer has no chill her presence and her dancing is less impressive than the rest of the cast.

The tragedy at the end of the show is not handled well. It is rushed and, unless you are familiar with the story, it’s not completely clear what has happened.

Dancing is the strength of the cast, so it is lucky that speech is kept to a minimum. When McMurphy arrives at the hospital, the acting is unconvincing. There are no more words after this and there is really no need for it – their bodies do the work of a thousand mouths.

As Ronan Keating says, ”You say it best when you say nothing at all”.

No joy in Troy

The Women of Troy, National Theatre
**

The grief suffered by The Women of Troy is huge: city destroyed, husbands and children murdered, friends raped by the triumphant Greeks. Yet Katie Mitchell’s production fails to deliver the horror and pathos that this should inspire.

Her women are locked in a prison which looks like an underground carpark with cafeteria tables. They are dressed in cocktail dresses and fumble futilely through make-up bags, evidently plucked from a far more salubrious setting. The gap between the high life and rock bottom is a perfect place from which to mine the power of despair.

But Mitchell’s decision to stylise their misery means this opportunity is lost. The chorus of women are reduced to representations of hysteria. They twitch and moan in regular patterns, twirl fabric around fingers, eyes wide with horror: all sterotypes of psychological trauma.

It is an annoying way to present collective shock; but it also means that when the tragedies pile up, it’s a body count instead of an examination of human suffering.

There are moments of beauty. The women drift into ballroom dancing, a ghostly evocation of a previous existence. There is an impressive scene when a woman performs a grotesque parody of the dance, her limbs jerking around in death throes, like a broken string puppet.

There are also scenes when convincing feeling seeps through the stylised surface. Andromache tells Hecuba that her daughter is dead, and the exchange is a quieter and more powerful examination of unbearable grief.

However, these are outnumbered by shouty scenes: the shrieking Cassandra is carted off to marry Agamemnon, stripping off and setting fire to dustbins before she goes. The debate between between Clytemnestra and Helen is not a desperate battle of wits as the script suggests but a brawl, points scored by decibel.

To top it all off, there is an almighty explosion at the end of the play as the prison is blown up. I almost leapt into the lap of the person next to me (which was probably more shocking for her than the explosion). Although spectacular, it was a shock tactic.

But even this explosion could not cut through a relentless tragedy that inspires little sympathy.