Theatre review: A Lie of the Mind

I'm still a long way from being a fan of Sam Shepard's work but I've been getting on a lot better with the plays that have been revived this year. They're still quintessentially American, and a focus on what it means to be an American man is at the heart of them, but like in Buried Child there's a wider scope of interest and an unsettling edge of the surreal to A Lie of the Mind. Initially appearing to be about domestic violence, it becomes a spiral of insanity as the violent, unpredictable drunk Jake (Gethin Anthony) arrives at his brother's house claiming that he's beaten his wife to death. In fact Beth (Alexandra Dowling) is still alive, but the attack has left her with brain damage. Jake, too, seems to be out of his mind, the extremity of his violence leading to a nervous breakdown. Both of them get taken back to their parents' homes to recover, but neither house is really a good place for anyone's mental health.

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Missing Dates

SIMON GRAY: Hello my agent! Simon Gray here. I've written a play called Japes, it's about some obnoxious, drunk intellectuals fucking.
SIMON GRAY'S AGENT: Well, you're Simon Gray, so that's pretty much what I'd expect. Shall we go stage it in a theatre then?
SG: Sounds like a plan.

(some time passes)

SG: It's Simon Gray again! Remember that play Japes?
AGENT: Yes, we staged it, on a proper stage, with human actors and everything. It was OK.
SG: Well, I was wondering what would happen if I changed a couple of words in the first three scenes - would the story turn out differently?
AGENT: Oh, well that's a wacky thought to have. Bye then.
SG: No, I actually wrote it! It's called Japes Too, and 3/4 of it is indistinguishable from Japes.
AGENT: Hmmm, sounds like staging that within a decade of Japes would be utterly pointless. How about a rehearsed reading? If we're lucky it might rain, and some students might come see it to stay dry.
SG: That'll do!

(some more time passes)

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Japes Too

Three quarters of the way through Simon Gray's In the Vale of Health sequence, and all I am is more strongly convinced that staging this quartet is an incredibly elaborate vanity project, and one created for the benefit of someone who isn't even alive to enjoy it. The original stand-alone play was Japes, about a ménage à trois that sees Anita (Laura Rees) married to Michael (Jamie Ballard) for decades while carrying on an on-off relationship with his younger brother Japes (Gethin Anthony.) Then there was Michael, a shorter piece which ditched the first act and retold the second from an ever-so-slightly different angle. And now there's the third (though written second) in Hampstead's series, Japes Too, which aims to follow the characters from the original play, but see how things might have turned out if certain details had been different.

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Japes

Simon Gray wrote Japes in 2001 as a stand-alone play; the other installments that make up the In the Vale of Health sequence were later additions to the story of its central characters, when he felt the work as performed didn't say everything he wanted to about them. So Japes should be a play I can easily look at in its own right, but the fact that I saw companion piece Michael last week turns out to make a huge difference to how I react to the original. Here we first join the love triangle in the early 1960s: Michael (Jamie Ballard) lives with his brother Japes (Gethin Anthony) in the house they inherited from their parents. He's starting to fall in love with Anita (Laura Rees) and approaches his brother to ask his advice on whether he should propose to her, even though Japes barely knows her.

Theatre review: In the Vale of Health: Michael

Hampstead Downstairs is staging a quartet of Simon Gray plays in an ambitious project that'd already borne fruit before it even opened: Having quickly sold out, the rep season will transfer to the main house after its run in the studio. Gray's In the Vale of Health project stems from his 2000 play Japes, about a love triangle featuring two brothers. After the play was produced he felt there were alternative avenues to be explored for those characters, and proceeded to write three companion pieces that saw what happened if things had turned out differently. Tamara Harvey's production brings the four plays together, in what is the premiere stage production of the companion pieces Michael, Japes Too and Missing Dates.

Theatre review: The Hotel Plays

Three Tennessee Williams vignettes come together to form an interesting promenade show from Defibrillator, a theatre company that's taken over three bedrooms and a function room of the Langham Hotel in central London to create The Hotel Plays. Small audience groups are led up and down stairs by an usher, and the stories linked by appearances from porter Charlie (Linden Walcott-Burton) as we witness intimate scenes from fracturing lives. The Langham is a pretty swanky hotel, but for Defibrillator's purposes its rooms represent places that probably aren't quite as posh, and more likely to witness the kind of nefarious business we see in the short plays. Like the long-running affair in The Pink Bedroom, directed by Anthony Banks, where a Man (Gyuri Sarossy) arrives expecting another no-strings night with his mistress. But the Woman (Helen George) is starting to want something a bit more from the relationship - something like respect.

Theatre review: A Life of Galileo

PREVIEW DISCLAIMER: The RSC isn't inviting the Press to this until Tuesday.

To round off the RSC's "A World Elsewhere" season, looking at what else was going on in the world during Shakespeare's lifetime, we have a 20th century classic that deals with one of Shakespeare's exact contemporaries, Brecht's A Life of Galileo. Always strapped for cash, Galileo Galilei passes off the Dutch invention, the telescope, as one of his own. He gets found out but not before the new tool gives him a new look at the heavens, and he realises he's found proof of Copernicus' theory that the Earth rotates around the Sun. The fact that the theory is considered heretical by the Catholic Church doesn't dim his enthusiasm or deter him from sharing his knowledge with the people. But the Church won't let mere evidence get in the way of centuries of teaching, and soon the Inquisition has taken an interest, demanding that Galileo betray his science and abjure his theory.

Theatre review: Boris Godunov

Thanks to the World Shakespeare Festival, 2012 has shown us how other countries interpret his plays, but for the Winter season in the Swan the RSC takes its turn to play host in the foreign exchange, staging three international classics that can be seen as Shakespeare's contemporaries - either in when they were written, or the historical period they deal with. Alexander Pushkin deliberately intended to take inspiration from Shakespeare in the way he put Boris Godunov together, and certain moments do mirror scenes from his plays. Adrian Mitchell's verse translation also occasionally references particular well-known Shakespearean lines. So we open with echoes of Julius Caesar as Boris Godunov (Lloyd Hutchinson) is repeatedly offered the Russian throne by the people, and keeps turning it down. It'll take a month of pleading but Godunov will accept the position of Tsar.