Theatre review: Nine Lives

My last visit to the Bridge Theatre's initial season of monologues is to another tale of the precarious life of an immigrant seeking asylum in the UK, and after the religious persecution behind An Evening with an Immigrant, Zodwa Nyoni's Nine Lives gives us a man fleeing the country of his birth because it's dangerous for him to be gay there. But while his sexuality forms part of what he's looking for, as with Inua Ellams' play the need for somewhere to belong is a more important element of the story than what he's running away from. Ishmael (Lladel Bryant) has fled Zimbabwe after his relationship with another man was discovered; he tries to contact David, who left before him, but his ex seems to be ignoring all his Facebook messages.

Stage-to-screen review: Bubble

"Zoom? It'll never catch on."

It's no surprise if one of the most prolific playwrights working today is among the first out of the gates with a new Covid play, nor that James Graham has approached the subject with a sharp political focus but from a highly original direction. Bubble is playing for three performances only at Nottingham Playhouse, with a socially distanced live audience and everyone else able to buy a pass to watch one of the performances on Zoom. Micro-pub owner Ashley (Pearl Mackie) and teacher Morgan (Jessica Raine) are buzzing after having been on a great first date, the first successful one for either of them in a long time. Then lockdown laws are announced and they have a very reckless thought: What if they went into isolation together and found out just how accurate those great first impressions were?

Stage-to-screen review: The Boys in the Band

Last seen in London four years ago, Mart Crowley's seminal 1968 gay play The Boys in the Band got a Broadway revival in 2018, which responded to the calls to let gay actors be the first choice to play gay roles by using an all-openly gay cast. Given that's something clearly close to TV mogul Ryan Murphy's heart as well, it's not too surprising that he's behind a movie adaptation of Joe Mantello's production that was released as a Netflix original a couple of weeks ago. Michael (Jim Parsons) is hosting a birthday party for Harold (Zachary Quinto,) the only member of his friend group who can rival him for bitchiness. Five more of their friends have been invited, and two unexpected guests also arrive, with one of them, Michael's straight former college roommate Alan (Brian Hutchison,) dredging up such strong self-loathing emotions in the host that he goes on an emotionally destructive rampage.

Theatre review: An Evening with an Immigrant

Another trip to the Bridge Theatre's monologue rep season while I still can, and an artist who's become a firm favourite at the National, and who started working there while the current Bridge team were running it; though as An Evening with an Immigrant reveals, Inua Ellams might have more to thank Nick Starr for than just his big break. The story of his and his family's attempts to be made permanent, legal UK residents, which has taken more than half of his life so far, the blurb warns that there's some crossover with Ellams' breakthrough show The 14th Tale, but that was long enough ago that I don't remember much detail - there's passing mention here of Ellams' twin sister, who I think was a much bigger element in the earlier story. Here the focus is more on Ellams himself and his parents - with a Muslim father and Christian mother, the family manages to live harmoniously with their religious differences.

Theatre review: The Last Five Years

When The Last Five Years originally ran at Southwark Playhouse in March it became my first show this year to fall victim to illness - although that was because the performance I'd booked was cancelled due to non-COVID-related cast ill health. There was no time to reschedule before it joined the rest of the UK's theatre in limbo, but with socially-distanced performances inching their way back to the stage it was an obvious candidate to make a return: Jason Robert Brown’s musical features a bubble-friendly cast of only two, who barely even have to interact as they inhabit the same story, but almost never at the same time: Jamie (Oli Higginson) takes us through his five-year relationship with Cathy (Molly Lynch) from the excitement of realising he might have met the "Shiksa Goddess" of his dreams, through their marriage and up to the point of him leaving her a letter asking for a divorce.

Stage-to-screen review: Monday Monologues

A quick roundup of a series of very short pieces courtesy of the Bush Theatre, which posted a new YouTube video every few weeks over the summer as their contribution to keeping theatre in people's minds and lives over lockdown. And lockdown is very specifically the theme of most of the Monday Monologues, beginning with Skype d8 by Travis Alabanza, in which Ibinabo Jack plays a woman fretting over what to wear for a virtual date with a man she'd only met a couple of times in person. It's frantic and funny as Jack's character recognises the ridiculousness of how much time she's spending making a good impression on Skype, but it does reveal an underside about how the starkness of having to deal with people virtually makes people feel exposed in a way face-to-face communication smooths out. The Bush's artistic director Lynette Linton directs most of the videos including this and the second, Shaun Dunne's Beds.

Radio review: Andromache

17th century French playwrights had a trend for recreating the themes and styles of Ancient Greek theatre, but while the originals are regularly seen as ripe for restaging and reinvention, I haven't seen a Racine play since 2012's Berenice. This Radio 3 adaptation by Edward Kemp, first broadcast in 2017, is one of those that literally went back to the same source of Greek mythology, although the story strand explored in Andromache was entirely obscure to me (and seems largely contradictory to some of the better-known stories.) It's Trojan War: The Next Generation as, a year after the sacking of Troy, the children of the victorious Greek generals try to tie up the remaining threads. So Pyrrhus (Alex Lanipekun,) son of Achilles and his successor as King of Epirus, has been betrothed to Hermione (Susannah Fielding,) daughter of Helen and Menelaus, for some time.

Stage-to-screen review: Romantics Anonymous

I've more or less consigned Emma Rice to the same "I'm just never going to see the appeal" box Samuel Beckett has been sitting in, for more or less the exact opposite reasons, for years. But anything resembling live theatre is still a rarity, and Romantics Anonymous is a show that's inspired a lot of love among people whose opinion I consider worth listening to. It debuted at the Swanamaker at the tail end of Rice's notorious run at Shakespeare's Globe, and after playing at the Bristol Old Vic earlier this year it's now returned there to play to an empty theatre with the live performances streamed to computers (the platform they use, TicketCo, turns out to also have an app that works on my TV so that was better than expected.) Based on Les Émotifs Anonymes by Jean-Pierre Améris and Philippe Blasband, Rice (book,) Michael Kooman (music) and Christopher Dimond's (lyrics) musical plays out the familiar French movie trope of quirky misfits finding love.

Stage-to-screen review: My Beautiful Laundrette

Leicester's Curve Theatre continues to dip into its archive recordings to provide online content and fundraise during lockdown; latest is last year's My Beautiful Laundrette, adapted by Hanif Kureishi from his own screenplay. It's something of a rollercoaster ride during the early eighties for an extended Pakistani-British family, rising above the general wave of unemployment by building a small business empire (albeit one that isn't quite as legal and respectable as it initially appears) while at the same time being regularly reminded that they're still viewed by many as an underclass. It's seen through the eyes of Omar (Omar Malik) and his complicated relationship with old schoold friend Johnny (Jonny Fines, who seems pretty spot-on casting for a play about laundry, considering he's always struck me as looking literally very clean, but metaphorically a bit dirty.)

Stage-to-screen review: Death of a Hunter

Fond as I am of the Finborough Theatre, some of its deadly-serious, issue-based programming can be a hard sell. It does produce its share of joyous shows - I still sometimes go on about how funny Quality Street was a decade later, and only last year they camped After Dark up to within an inch of its life - but its online offerings during lockdown haven't exactly been focused on escapism. Which brings us to September's offering, the story of Ernest Hemingway blowing his brains out. Mercifully not in musical form, but in German playwright Rolf Hochhuth's 1977 play Death of a Hunter, which got its English-language premiere at the Finborough in 2018 (this archive recording is being released as a tribute to the playwright, who died in May.) We follow Hemingway (Edmund Dehn) in the last hour of his life, having already decided to follow his father's example and commit suicide.

Theatre review: Beat the Devil

My first visit in nearly six months to an actual theatre for a live show takes me to the Bridge, and while there's a kind of minor triumph to a limited number of venues finding a way around social distancing to present shows despite the indifference of the powers that be, I was also acutely aware of being in the same place where I saw my 2019 Show of the Year: The large space with its seating capacity greatly reduced to allow distance between audience groups, standing in stark contrast to the heaving bodies at last year's Shakespearean party. I guess it would also have been nice if my first tentative venture back out into live theatre had been for some escapism from what's kept us apart all these months, but instead we're right in the thick of it as playwright David Hare came down with Covid-19 at the same time that a belated lockdown was introduced in the UK; Beat the Devil is his furious memoir of his time suffering from a "mediaeval" disease and the actions of those he squarely blames for his having contracted it.

Stage-to-screen review: Three Kings

After a busy first couple of months, theatres' commitment to streaming content has been tailing off as it's become increasingly apparent how much they're being hung out to dry by the government, and their resources to create online content must be running low. But they haven't given up the ghost yet entirely, and the Old Vic's occasional series of broadcasts, "In Camera," has aimed for a particularly authentic feel of a trip to the theatre: The show is performed live and streamed via Zoom; there's the sound of audience hubbub and the ten-minute bell as you take your seat (in front of the computer) and, of course, the show starts a few minutes late. Some of the less appealing features have also come with it: The Old Vic has persisted with a system of staggered ticket prices and the related online queue, despite everyone getting the same view (in theory it promotes a "pay what you can" policy but don't tell me the Duchess of Argyll wouldn't grab a £10 subsidised ticket if she got first place in the queue) and it comes with the pitfalls of live theatre - Three Kings' entire run was postponed twice when its star Andrew Scott had to have minor surgery.

TV Review: Talking Heads -Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet / The Shrine

I've been spreading out watching the remake of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads over the summer, and with Nicholas Hytner's London Theatre Company behind the production it's perhaps not entirely surprising that one of the first tentative steps towards bringing live theatre back involves Hytner's Bridge Theatre staging a selection of the monologues with their new actors. I'm not currently planning on watching any of the planned double bills, but I do still have the last of my televised ones to catch up with, and as Sarah Frankcom's production opens with a shot of Maxine Peake's slippered feet walking down the stairs we're in for one of the more bizarre explorations of suburban kinks and secrets from the 1998 series, Miss Fozzard Finds Her Feet. The second monologue to have been originally written for Patricia Routledge, Frankcom and Peake seem to have found their own take on the story.

Stage-to-screen review: The Beast Will Rise - Star / Night / Puzzle / Snow

It's been a while since I checked in with Philip Ridley and his lockdown monologue collection: That's because I've been watching them in groups of four or five playlets (you can also read my reviews of the first and second sets) and I'd been waiting for all fourteen to become available before winding the reviews up. But production company Tramp are among those dipping a toe back into live performance, and a final monologue called Cactus appears to be being saved to premiere live. So maybe that'll eventually surface on YouTube as well and I could give that a quick review, but in the meantime parts 10-13 of the sequence feature another one of the somewhat longer speeches, followed by a trio of very short snapshots. They've got a tough act to follow as the 30-minute opener Star is frantically memorable.

TV review: Talking Heads -Nights in the Garden of Spain / The Hand of God

I do like a random connection in my shows and the new 2020 remake of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads has featured Martin Freeman, plus Sarah Lancashire, his intended co-star in James Graham's 2017 comedy Labour of Love, and now Tamsin Greig, who actually appeared as his sparring partner in that play when Lancashire had to pull out. Greig appears in the latest of my double bills, a pair from the second, 1998 series, and although still laced with sadness these are two of the most straightforwardly funny monologues from the collection. The comedy is very dark in Nights in the Garden of Spain, which Marianne Elliott directs, as Greig's quietly unhappy Rosemary uncovers the dark underside of her bland suburban neighbourhood. And all it takes is helping her neighbour deal with the sudden death of her husband - because she's just shot him.

Stage-to-screen review: Reasons to be Cheerful

Punk and jukebox musicals don't seem obvious bedfellows, unless the music comes from Ian Dury and the Blockheads and the theatre company doing the adaptation is Graeae, who champion the work of D/deaf and disabled actors and creatives: Not only did Dury himself have disabilities caused by childhood polio, but he regularly referenced them and celebrated his difference in his songs (most famously "Spasticus Autisticus.") Paul Sirett's book for Reasons to be Cheerful keeps the story very simple as a hook to hang the songs on - not a bad move, given what can happen when a jukebox show overcomplicates its story - and follows Vinnie (Stephen Lloyd) and his best friend Colin (Stephen Collins) as they try to get tickets to a sold-out Blockheads gig in Hammersmith, at the height of their popularity in 1979.

TV review: Talking Heads - A Chip in the Sugar /The Outside Dog / Bed Among the Lentils

It's hard to separate Alan Bennett's Talking Heads from their original performers but my next selection of remakes sees their actors put a new stamp on them. In among the collection of current and future dames each of the two original series had one male monologue, and the original series opened with Bennett himself in A Chip in the Sugar. So if any piece is associated with the writer's distinctive voice even more than the others it's this one, and Martin Freeman is the actor taking on the role of Graham for director Jeremy Herrin. Like most of the actors in this remake Freeman isn't trying too hard to emulate the original accent, which might lose something in authenticity but helps avoid too many direct comparisons. Graham is a closeted middle-aged man who lives with his mother, having had trouble living alone in the past due to paranoid schizophrenia. He's now on medication but his mother's chance meeting with an old boyfriend from her youth unsettles his routine and he starts to think the house is being watched again; except maybe this time it actually is.

Radio review: I Am the Wind

I guess we're now reaching the point where I'm starved enough of theatrical content to be seeking out stuff I strongly suspect I won't like: Nearly ten years ago the Young Vic staged an elaborately designed and directed production of Jon Fosse's I Am the Wind, which came with much discussion of how the Norwegian playwright was one of the most frequently staged throughout Europe, except for the UK where he was virtually unknown. Well in the subsequent decade I haven't seen another Fosse play, nor do I even think I've heard of any major production being staged, so it's probably safe to say the play wasn't the hoped-for London breakthrough. I think the reviews were generally scathing, and my own opinion was that while the production was spectacular I remained unconvinced that there was much of substance underneath it. Now the same English version by Simon Stephens gets a radio production from Toby Swift, and what better way to see if my opinion's changed than by stripping the play down to just words and sound effects?

TV review: Talking Heads - Her Big Chance /Playing Sandwiches

Of the collection of current and future dames in the new version of Alan Bennett's Talking Heads the most zeitgeisty is surely Jodie Comer - even with the discussion about Killing Eve largely focusing on how much it falls foul of the law of diminishing returns, she's still one of the biggest names to emerge in recent years. The other big name she replaces in these monologues is Julie Walters, as Comer takes on Her Big Chance. She plays young actress Lesley, who's not very bright but still isn't quite dim enough to fool herself that she's not really being used and abused by the film industry she's trying to break into: More by luck than judgement she lands a role as the villain's mostly-naked girlfriend in a low-budget German crime thriller being filmed in Lee-on-Solent, a distinctly chillier location than the Riviera setting it's meant to be. Her Big Chance is a very cleverly balanced tragicomedy - there's a profound sadness to the inevitability with which every man Lesley meets uses her for sex while pretending to help her career, not just on a one-to-one level but the entire cast and crew barely registering her as a person and walking out on her the morning after the night before.

TV review: Talking Heads - A Lady of Letters /An Ordinary Woman / Soldiering On

I can't realistically brand the new Talking Heads as "stage-to-screen" since they originated on TV in the first place; but Alan Bennett's beloved '80s and '90s monologues have occasionally been produced on stage as well, and this new lockdown version corralled by Bennett's regular collaborator Nicholas Hytner features a new collection of current and future dames who are mostly stage regulars, and some big theatre names directing. So I think we can call them stagey enough to keep my blogging muscles exercised on. Monologues filmed on an existing set - the Eastenders complex - are a clever way of making socially-distanced TV without resorting to the ubiquitous Zoom calls, and while I agree that giving some out-of-work playwrights the job of creating new ones might have been a better way of supporting talent, there's nothing stopping the BBC from doing that as well, and if something's acclaimed as a modern classic it should be able to stand up to reinvention.