Theatre review:After Dark; or, a Drama of London Life

Whenever a radical new playwright comes along to change the kind of theatre people want to watch, the big names in vogue at the time tend to get swept away for a while, but get rediscovered and brought back into performance eventually. But while Oscar Wilde and Bernard Shaw are credited with that kind of revolution in Victorian theatre, their immediate predecessors have pretty much stayed in the obscurity they were cast into. I’ve always sort of assumed this was partly because the popularity of music hall at the time meant there weren’t many big names there to be swept away in the first place; and of what’s left, if even somewhere like the Finborough hasn’t seen fit to rediscover the hits of the time, there’s probably a pretty good reason. Well now the Finborough has rediscovered the big West End hit of 1868: Dion Boucicault’s comedies occasionally resurface but it was his melodramas that made him a household name, and my suspicions for why these plays remain obscure are proven right: From a 2019 perspective After Dark is very, very bad – in the best possible way.

Theatre review: Finishing the Picture

Arthur Miller must have spent half his life being asked to write about Marilyn Monroe, and in his final play he did. Finishing the Picture may take place on the set of an unnamed 1961 film with fictional creatives, but there’s little question what the inspiration is: The film is the famously troubled The Misfits, the safari-suited director Derek (Stephen Billington) is John Huston, and the screenwriter Paul (Jeremy Drakes,) married to the unpredictable leading lady, is Miller himself. We never see Kitty, the film’s star, but she’s all anyone talks about. The production is nearing the end of its filming schedule – and budget – and the new producer, Philip (Oliver Le Sueur,) has flown in to see what’s holding up the final scenes. These all require Kitty, but she refuses to leave her trailer; even on the rare occasions she’s attempted to perform, the camera’s easily picked up how heavily sedated she is so the footage is unusable.

Theatre review: Incident at Vichy

Arthur Miller remains popular and respected enough that rediscoveries of his obscure work always do well - the Finborough's latest has already sold out its run and added a couple of extra matinees. But unlike No Villain audiences won't find something that echoes his more famous work too closely, as director Phil Willmott's contention is that Incident at Vichy is the closest Miller came to absurdism. The setting is a concrete and frightening enough one though: In the early days of the Nazi occupation of France, several men are taken off the streets of Vichy; some have their papers checked, some have their noses measured. They're left in a waiting room and called in one by one to be seen by a German scientist (Timothy Harker.) Most are Jewish, although given the rumours they've heard they don't mention that at first, only using the euphemism "Peruvian."

Theatre review: Princess Caraboo

It's a little over five years since I saw a rehearsed reading of Phil Willmott's musical (songs co-composed with Mark Collins,) Princess Caraboo, as part of a Vibrant season at the Finborough, and I guess it's true what they say about the time it takes to develop a musical, as it's only now that Willmott returns to direct a full production at the same venue. Based on the true story of a notorious 19th century hoax that took in polite society, Sir Charles Worrell (Phil Sealey) narrates the story of how he and Lady Elizabeth (Sarah Lawn) were approached by Spanish con-man Osvaldo Agathias (Joseph O’Malley,) who claimed to have found a shipwrecked princess from an unknown land. Princess Caraboo (Nikita Johal) speaks no English, and the motherly Lady Elizabeth takes a liking to her, so instead of running off with the silverware as planned, Caraboo sticks around, and meets their nephew Eddie (Christian James,) who they hope might be able to communicate with her.

Theatre review: Road Show

After the rise of the Nazis in the first part of his two-show season at the Union, director Phil Willmott goes for something a bit lighter but not necessarily easier: Road Show is the fourth title, and who knows how many dozen rewrites and reinventions, for Sondheim and Weidman's attempt to tell the story of Addison Meisner, the turn-of-the-20th century architect whose style defined much of how Florida looks to this day. After their father dies, leaving them poorer than they expected, Addy (Howard Jenkins) and his brother Willie (Andre Rafig) seek their fortune in the Alaskan gold rush. Addy's hard work and determination sees their plot of land yield results, only for his brother to lose it in a card game. It sets a pattern: The drunk coke-head Willie is a schemer whose plans always seem to leave him penniless and take any number of other victims with him.

Theatre review: Fear and Misery of the Third Reich

Fringe stalwart Phil Willmott has followed the example of some of the West End directors in forming his own eponymous production company, although unlike them his is a not-for-profit venture. He opens a short residency of two very contrasting works at the Union with Bertolt Brecht's rarely-performed indictment of the rise of the Nazis, Fear and Misery of the Third Reich. There's ominous mentions of the regime's ambitions to invade other nations and spread their power and ideology, but the play's real focus is on Germany itself in the years before World War II actually broke out, and the oppressive atmosphere which sees people betray their neighbours before they can be betrayed themselves. A pair of Hitler Youth (Ben Kerfoot and Tom Williams) patrol as a number of loosely-connected sketches play out, opening with a factory worker (Joshua Ruhle) refusing to join in with the official propaganda, and being carted off to prison.

Theatre review: Princess Ida

I was due to see Princess Ida last week, but instead spent the afternoon on a District Line train stuck between stations. Although Gilbert and Sullivan aren't one of my biggest theatrical interests, I'd rather decide which shows to see or miss myself, not have TFL do it for me, so I gave it another go. And I'm glad I did - apart from anything else if a piece by writers this popular is being staged at the Finborough, you know it'll be one that's slipped through the cracks and doesn't get performed often. Although adaptor-director Phil Willmott hopes to change that - Princess Ida as written has apparently dated badly and is structured in a confusing way that puts people off. So he's given it a more linear telling of the story of Ida (Bridget Costello,) who has many suitors but, on the day she turns 21, her guardian Gama (Simon Butteriss) decides he'd much rather marry her himself. To keep her away from rivals he convinces her that men are beasts to be avoided, and she should establish a women-only university.

Theatre review: Lear (Union Theatre)

After dabbling in the decidedly dodgy apocrypha last year, Phil Willmott's annual Shakespeare production at the Union returns to the canon, but with a twist: Having decided that, of his regular collaborators, Ursula Mohan was best equipped with the range to take on the part, he gives us a female Lear. Among a number of edits to the text, Willmott comes up with a slightly different context for the story. Mohan's Lear is now the recently-widowed Queen, assuming power herself but already displaying mental health problems which mean she has to distribute it elsewhere. The kingdom is divided between the two daughters who flattered her the most, while the third is disowned for her bluntness. But Lear adjusts badly to life without influence, and soon finds herself cast out to the elements with nothing.

Theatre review: Finian's Rainbow

Can a show be so naff it comes out the other end and becomes cool? Actually the answer is no, cool is in no way on the table, but if you're prepared for enough cheese to floor Wallace and Gromit, you could be in for an entertaining night. It seems Finian's Rainbow is revived fairly regularly in America, where tolerance to high levels of begorrah and bejaysus are higher than here - the Union's is the first professional London production for 50 years. And it's actually not surprising, because I imagine this ridiculous bit of Irish-American whimsy from songwriter Burton Lane and writers E.Y Harburg and Fred Saidy is pretty hard to pull off for British audiences. But that's what Phil Willmott has done, funnily enough by failing to do what he'd intended to: The rights-holders had considered letting him do a rewrite for modern audiences, but changed their minds.

Theatre review: Lost Boy

There was a lot of Peter Pan around last year, and as 2014 marks the 100th anniversary of the start of World War I, there's going to be a great deal of theatre coming up commemorating it. The two years' themes come together as the Finborough is first out of the gate with its "THEGREATWAR100" series: Phil Willmott has imagined a Peter Pan who not only grew up but, like the Llewellyn Davies boys who inspired him, ended up fighting in the French trenches. Faced with orders to lead his men into yet another pointless bloodbath, George Llewellyn Davies retreats into a fantasy where it's his childhood hero who has to fight instead. Drawn from Neverland by the feeling that there's an awfully big adventure going on in Europe, Peter (Steven Butler) arrives in London to find Wendy still saving herself for him, and with the help of the Lost Boys finds out what sort of thing a woman expects from a grown man.

Theatre review: Fair Em

Director Phil Willmott has made a bit of an annual tradition of reviving Shakespearean obscurities at the Union Theatre, with the dubious Double Falsehood and the largely neglected King John in past years. I would have thought there were enough relatively unpopular Shakespeare plays left in the canon (The Two Gentlemen of Verona, Titus Andronicus, The Two Noble Kinsmen, the Henry VIs) to keep him busy for a while yet before having to dip into the Apocrypha - the collection of anonymously-authored plays falsely attributed to Shakespeare around the time of the Restoration. But that's what he's done this year with the "modern world premiere" of Fair Em, a charmless romantic comedy where the funniest joke is the suggestion that anyone could have ever actually thought Shakespeare wrote it.

Theatre review: The American Clock

In recent years a number of theatres have commissioned new plays looking at the current financial crisis, its causes and historical precedents. True to form, Neil McPherson at the Finborough has instead done some digging to find a theatrical great who'd already written such a play, only for it to fall into obscurity. Arthur Miller's The American Clock was nominated for an Olivier in 1986 but hasn't been seen in London since. Arthur A. Robertson (Patrick Poletti) was a wealthy businessman who predicted the Great Depression, put all his money into gold and managed to hold onto his wealth as a consequence, able to observe the chaos the USA fell into in the 1930s. Robertson acts as narrator, as Miller uses Studs Terkel's book of interviews Hard Times as inspiration to tell the stories of dozens of people who faced financial ruin.

Theatre review: King John (Union Theatre)

First Shakespeare of 2012 and the "feast or famine" theme from last year is still going strong - I've only seen King John once before, about ten years ago, but there's already two productions lined up. First up, the Union Theatre in Southwark. With Richard the Lionheart and his brother Geoffrey both dead, the crown has passed to runt of the litter John (Nicholas Osmond.) But in the unending conflicts between the neighbouring nations, the King of France (Damian Quinn) is supporting a claim by Geoffrey's son, Arthur. The main recollection I have from the last time I saw the play was it being surprisingly funny, and Phil Willmott's production goes full throttle for the comic potential in this play of political machinations - though there are battle scenes, this is essentially a story of deals and allegiances, and of the two countries' fates being pushed around by the Church's insistence on being obeyed. (At one point, having just suppressed a peace deal, the cardinal (Michael J Hayes) sits calmly eating a cake in the middle of the chaos he's just reignited.) Willmott avoids letting these political dealings drag by injecting a lot of pace as well as using some Gooldian overlapping scenes.

In its unexpected tone, which must make it a hard one to promote, and the political back-and-forths of the story, I can see on the one hand how King John remains comparatively unpopular; but there's other elements that you'd have thought would make it popular in performance, like the faint tone of absurdity and the relatively good roles for women. There's the feisty Eleanor of Aquitaine (Maggie Daniels) and Geoffrey's widow Constance (Samantha Lawson,) constantly interrupting peace talks and sometimes literally pushing her gormless son Arthur (Albert De Jongh) towards an English throne he's clearly as uninterested in as he is unsuitable for.

Embracing the story's ridiculous side can make performances tend towards the large side - Rikki Lawton as John's illegitimate nephew makes a risky performance choice with mixed results: At times his relentlessly hyperactive Philip The Bastard is a bit one-note, and feels like he's courting audience approval too much. But then there's times when this energy is an absolute gift to the role, especially in the second half. In fact although the first half is decent, it's after the interval that the show really comes to life. Osmond's John also comes into clearer focus, in essence an ambitious middle-manager whose reactions to the problems of power are woefully inadequate but who won't let this stop him from clinging on to the crown, even after his death. There's a healthy-sized cast for a fringe venue so while a slow starter, this King John ends up being a clear and entertaining production that in its modest way throws down the gauntlet to the RSC's upcoming version this summer.

King John by William Shakespeare is booking until the 11th of February at the Union Theatre.

Running time: 2 hours 40 minutes including interval.