Re-review: Tonight with Donny Stixx

When I did my annual roundup last year there was a first in my list of favourite shows - two new plays by the same writer made it into my top ten. Regular readers (both of them) will know there's only a couple of likely candidates, and while I wouldn't be surprised if Tom Wells manages it too some year, this time it was of course Philip Ridley whose Radiant Vermin I put at number 1, and Tonight with DonnyStixx at number 8; I also gave the latter's star Sean Michael Verey my award for best solo performance. You can read my original review here, from the first-ever public preview, before it officially opened in Edinburgh. It's taken over a year but the murderous but horribly sympathetic amateur magician Donny Stixx is back, David Mercatali's production finally returning to London but to a new venue: The Bunker is an underground former art studio next to the Menier Chocolate Factory that's been converted into a decent-sized thrust stage; I'm pretty sure the multicoloured benches that form the central seating bank are left over from the Menier's production of Assassins.

Theatre review: Blue Heart

Shopping and Fucking might be the most attention-grabbing title getting a 20th anniversary revival but, already long-established by the time Mark Ravenhill & co emerged, Caryl Churchill showed around the same time that she could more than match the new faces for experimentation in form - even if, like her more recent Escaped Alone, she does it with middle class ladies rather than sexually charged Gen X-ers. Blue Heart is in fact a double bill of short works that play around with, in the first instance form, and in the second case language. In Heart's Desire, Alice (Amelda Brown) and Brian (Andy de la Tour) are waiting for their daughter Susy (Mona Goodwin) to arrive from the airport; She emigrated to Australia and this is her first visit back. But the wait is infinitely prolonged because Churchill keeps taking the action back to the start, or to a particular point in the conversation.

Re-review: Radiant Vermin

A quick word about a show that, of course, I had to return to - I saw Philip Ridley's Radiant Vermin twice last year and ended up choosing it as my show of the year, making Ridley the first playwright to get pole position twice (although there's one, possibly two new Tom Wells plays in store this year so he could well have company soon.) You can read my original review of Radiant Vermin here,spoilers and all, and it's about to play off-Broadway so David Mercatali's production has taken the opportunity to warm up back at Soho Theatre - in the smaller Upstairs space this time. Sean Michael Verey returns to the role of Oliver, but Gemma Whelan, who'd originally been due to rejoin him, had to drop out. So Scarlett Alice Johnson now replaces her as Jill, while Debra Baker takes the dual role - or is it? - of Miss Dee and Kay.

Theatre review: Tonight with Donny Stixx

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This was the first public performance of Tonight with Donny Stixx, which is previewing in London and Oxford before officially premiering at the Edinburgh Festival.

Philip Ridley's second new play this year is a monologue described as a companion to 2013's Dark Vanilla Jungle. That starred Gemma Whelan, so there's a nice symmetry to the fact that Tonight with Donny Stixx is performed by Whelan's Radiant Vermin co-star, Sean Michael Verey. Both monologues take the form of a confession of sorts, although whether Verey's character quite realises that's the crux of his story is another matter: Donny Stixx is a teenager who lost his mother when he was a child, and whose father is now also seriously ill; he's also a deluded amateur magician; and a notorious mass-murderer. He's gathered an audience tonight to entertain them with the story of his life, which he's going to tell very much on his own terms, even though people keep annoyingly interrupting him to ask about all those dead people.

Theatre review: Radiant Vermin

Philip Ridley's latest play brings together plenty of people who've worked with the playwright before: Sean Michael Verey starred in Moonfleece, Amanda Daniels was in Shivered, and most recently Gemma Whelan soloed Dark Vanilla Jungle. Director David Mercatali, meanwhile, is one of Ridley's most regular collaborators. They come together for a play that, in its use of language and twisted fairytale, is unmistakeably Ridley's, but stylistically feels like a departure: Radiant Vermin has the stripped-down theatricality of Tender Napalm, but with a frantic vaudeville comedy style. This is why I think the use of actors he'd worked with before was significant - I don't think Ridley could have written the play quite like this if he didn't know he had actors who could handle it, particularly Whelan and Verey who have to carry most of the show like the world's most sinister comedy double act.
 

Theatre review: Coolatully

A certain bleakness seems to be a good way to catch the attention of the Papatango judges, a competition whose winners often delve into dark and depressing places. This year's winner is Fiona Doyle, whose Coolatully sees a full-on exodus from rural Ireland as opportunities for young people dry up. Where America was once the dream destination, following the collapse of the Celtic Tiger Australia and New Zealand are where people are now pinning their hopes, and Eilish (Yolanda Kettle) has already secured a nursing job in Sydney, departing in six months. She wants her on/off boyfriend Kilian (Kerr Logan) to join her, but he feels he still has responsibilities in Coolatully: After his brother's death the year before, his mother has all but withdrawn to her bed, and Kilian now runs her pub despite the fact that the're barely enough people left in the village to provide any customers.

Theatre review: Johnny Got His Gun

With a great deal of attention - deservedly - focused on the main house, Southwark Playhouse haven't allowed their studio space to get ignored, and have brought one of their big-name creatives, director David Mercatali, to The Little. Another commemoration of the First World War's centenary sees Dalton Trumbo's novel Johnny Got His Gun adapted as a monologue by Bradley Rand Smith. Jack Holden plays Joe Bonham, an American soldier whose narration jumps back and forth, confusingly at first, between the day he left his small town to set off to war, and his current situation, incapacitated in some way in a hospital. As his thought processes start to clear a bit, we understand the full horror of his situation as he does: All four limbs have been amputated after an explosion that also deafened, blinded, and left him unable to speak; yet somehow, horribly, he's still alive.

Theatre review: Our Ajax

A figure of pure brute force, Ajax isn't one of the best-loved heroes of the Trojan War, better known nowadays for his bathroom scouring abilities. Timberlake Wertenbaker admits in her introduction to the playtext that Sophocles' play about him was hard for her to get to grips with. So her new version Our Ajax takes a different tack to most of her classical translations, more explicitly superimposing a modern story of Afghanistan over the one set in Troy - with only partial success. We first meet Ajax (Joe Dixon) dragging bloody corpses across the stage: When his nemesis Odysseus (Adam Riches) was promoted above him, Ajax snapped and murdered him and all his soldiers. Or so he thinks: In fact the goddess Athena (Gemma Chan) cast a confusion spell over him to protect Odysseus, and he actually slaughtered the allied army's goats and dogs.

Theatre review: Black Jesus

"I rode into town on an ass. YO MAMA'S ASS!" Actually no, Black Jesus isn't an extended version of that Family Guy cutaway gag, but Anders Lustgarten's return to the Finborough after a shaky outing at the Royal Court. Black Jesus is the nickname given to Gabriel Chibamu (Paapa Essiedu,) a particularly brutal footsoldier in Robert Mugabe's regime, so called because he got to pass judgement on people's fates. The play takes place in 2015, and Gabriel's exactly where he feels he belongs, in prison. Eunice (The Ensemble^TM's Debbie Korley) works for the Truth and Justice Commission, an organisation she knows full well has been set up primarily so that it looks to the outside world as if Zimbabwe is doing something to confront its past.

Theatre review: Dark Vanilla Jungle

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: This was the first in a series of London and Manchester Previews before Dark Vanilla Jungle officially premieres at the Edinburgh Festival.

Andrea (Gemma Whelan) is a rather reserved-looking teenager, dressed as if her mother chooses her clothes for her, and entering the room nervously, stumbling over her words as she tells a story about getting stung by a wasp at the age of five. But her speech sometimes degenerates into obscenities screamed at the audience, her stories feature the phrase "I must have blacked out or something" far too often, and it becomes apparent her speech is some sort of confession or testimony. It seems the young woman's become a regular in the newspapers, which call her a witch or monster because of "what she did to the soldier and the baby." After experimenting with a much more epic scope in his two 2012 premieres, Philip Ridley pares things right down to a monologue for his latest play, Dark Vanilla Jungle.

Theatre review: Feathers in the Snow

The early part of this year was defined in many ways (by us obsessive theatricals at least) by a surge of Philip Ridley plays, which we christened the unofficial Ridleyfest 2012. So it seems appropriate that he has a second new play premiering as the year ends, and that it should open in the main house of Southwark Playhouse where his plays regularly appear, as the final production in the current venue (Simon Kenny's set and Gary Bowman's lighting making an atmospheric farewell to the railway tunnels.) Ridley's violently poetic plays have a recurring fascination with fairytales, which perhaps goes some way to reconciling his very adult plays with his other career as a children's author. Both of these strings to his bow come together now for Feathers in the Snow, an ambitious (perhaps too ambitious) family show with a scope that spans generations and a story that covers the births and deaths of nations.

Re-review: Tender Napalm

Last year I voted Philip Ridley's Tender Napalm one of my shows of the year; this year David Mercatali's production returns to Southwark Playhouse at the end of a tour. When the revival was announced, I said I hoped if both of the original actors couldn't return, that neither would, as I could more easily accept a whole new couple than Jack Gordon or Vinette Robinson trying to recreate their onstage relationship with someone new. As it happens we do get a whole new cast, Tom Byam Shaw and Lara Rossi slipping into the roles of the Man and Woman throwing Ridley's violent love poetry at each other, their dark fantasies helping them cope with a devastating loss.