Theatre review: Cockfosters

Taking its title from the station tourists mistakenly think has the smuttiest-sounding name on the Tube (only because they don't know how Londoners pronounce "Hainault,") Hamish Clayton and Tom Woffenden's Cockfosters is a short, affable and affectionate comedy about the London Underground. Technically the genre is romantic comedy, as it follows a journey on the entire Piccadilly Line route from Heathrow Airport to Cockfosters as Tori (Beth Lilly) returns from a relaxing holiday to Mexico and James (Sam Rees-Baylis) tops off a much more disastrous trip to Venice with the airline losing his luggage. But while the journey serves as an extended meet-cute it's really a framework for a series of comic sketches in which they encounter the various characters and situations that regular commuters will recognise - and generally dread.

Theatre review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

I may have to consciously try to keep this review short, because I suspect it's either that or sit up all night writing a dissertation and flailing. In 2019, Jethro Compton (book and lyrics) and Darren Clark (music and lyrics) presented their musical adaptation of the endlessly reinvented F. Scott Fitzgerald short story The Curious Case of Benjamin Button in Southwark Playhouse's Little Theatre. It was a short run but I ended my review at the time hoping it would have bigger and better things in its future. It was a widely-held opinion and I'm not claiming any special foresight, but we know by now how theatrical gems can disappear without trace. But its return to the theatre four years later in the new main Elephant stage not only steps up the scale but also comes with a list of big-name producers plus West End and Broadway names in the leads, so it's fair to say its potential has been spotted.

Theatre review: The Curious Case of Benjamin Button

Jethro Compton’s love of Americana really seems to have translated into stories audiences want to see: According to the programme notes his work is regularly staged in the USA and South Korea, he himself works steadily as a director in Vienna, and The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance has been licensed for fifty productions worldwide. But while his first venture into musical theatre (book and lyrics, with Darren Clark providing music and lyrics,) once again takes an American classic as its inspiration, this time he brings the story closer to home. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s fantasy The Curious Case of Benjamin Button is transplanted to North Cornwall between 1918 and 1988, with a cast of five actor-musicians telling the story of a man who’s born a fully-grown seventy-year-old, and ages backwards. James Marlowe plays Benjamin, whose birth as a frail old man is such a horror to his mother (Rosalind Ford) that she soon kills herself, while his father (Joey Hickman) locks him away in an attic room so that people don’t see him and start to ask questions.

Theatre review: White Fang

When the Park announced its winter season, an adaptation of White Fang in the studio space seemed easy to skip until I noticed it was written and directed by Jethro Compton – after The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance became a surprise favourite of mine a few years ago, another trip to the 19th century North American frontiers suddenly seemed more appealing. This is described as “inspired by” rather than “adapted from” Jack London’s novel, and although I haven’t read it a look at the Wikipedia page suggests that’s fair, the story bears little resemblance beyond the setting – Canada’s Yukon Territory during the Gold Rush – and some of the characters. Lyzbet Scott (Mariska Ariya) is a young Native American girl whose entire tribe was massacred in a dispute with wolf hunters when she was a child; one of the hunters, Weedon Scott (Robert G. Slade,) rescued her and adopted her as his granddaughter.

Theatre review: The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance

Some genres barely ever get seen on stage, and you can definitely count the Western among them. So even though I've never really been a fan of Western films, spaghetti or otherwise, I was interested to see what Jethro Compton would do with The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance, and it turned out to be a great decision. When young lawyer Ransome Foster (Oliver Lansley) embarks on an ill-thought-out journey to the West, he ends up beaten up by outlaws in the middle of nowhere, and needing rescuing. Rance ends up recuperating in a saloon in the tiny town of Twotrees, where he falls for the landlady, Hallie (Niamh Walsh.) As an excuse to stay for a while, he agrees to teach Hallie and some of the locals to read, but his top student is Jim (Lanre Malaolu,) and the local outlaw gang led by Liberty Valance (James Marlowe) aren't too happy about a black man getting an education.

Theatre review: The Bunker: Morgana & Agamemnon

Edinburgh shows are wasting no time in coming down to London this year, and first up we have a double bill from writer Jamie Wilkes, who transposes stories from mythology to the trenches of the First World War in The Bunker. Morgana and Agamemnon are the stories being paired at Southwark Playhouse (at the Festival they played in rep with a third piece riffing on Macbeth.) Director Jethro Compton has set the plays in a claustrophobic design that sees the Little Theatre transformed, and the audience squeezed on benches around the same bunker as the characters. In Morgana a group of 13 public schoolboys who nicknamed themselves after King Arthur and his knights all volunteered for the War together. A couple of years in and only Arthur (Dan Wood,) Lancelot (Sam Donnelly) and Gawain (James Marlowe) remain, still warning each other to watch out for the machinations of Morgana despite the presence of a much more tangible enemy.