Theatre review: Preludes

Prolific off-Broadway composer Dave Malloy hasn’t had much work seen in the UK that I’m aware of, but with his shows starting to move to Broadway and win Tonys London theatres seem to be catching up, with two works from his back catalogue opening this autumn. If the opening salvo is anything to go by we’re in for an… odd time, if not quite as irritating to me as some of his peers’ experimental work. Preludes takes its theme from the late 19th/early 20th century Russian pianist, conductor and composer Sergei Rachmaninoff, who became an overnight sensation with his Prelude aged 19, only to have a disastrous reception to his Symphony No. 1. There followed a three-year period of depression and writer’s block, which he only came out of with the help of extensive analysis and hypnotherapy from Nikolai Dahl (Rebecca Caine.) Malloy imagines this period of Rachmaninov’s life through the prism of the trances he was put into.

Theatre review: Torch Song

Have you ever felt like a theatre's gaslighting you? It's how I felt when the new Turbine Theatre announced its launch show as Harvey Fierstein's iconic 1970s gay play Torch Song, and none of the articles leading up to the production seemed to acknowledge that it's much better known as Torch Song Trilogy. It turns out that no I'm not going mad, yes that is the title of the 1970s play cycle, and yes there is a distinction: This is in fact the 2017 version of the script that Fierstein made significant cuts to, the slight title change differentiating between the two texts. Not that Drew McOnie's production departs from the original structure, even announcing the original plays' titles in neon signs over Ryan Dawson Laight's set. It's a story whose cast grows as it goes on, so opening act "International Stud" lights up just on drag queen Arnold (Matthew Needham) as he gets changed after a show, confessing to the audience how much he longs for a man he truly belongs with in the hedonistic underworld of gay '70s Manhattan.

Theatre review: A Doll's House

The seasoned veteran in 2019's round of Artistic Director Musical Chairs, Rachel O’Riordan taking over the Lyric Hammersmith means she's run theatres in Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales and now England. On the other hand she could be seen as the one with the most to prove to a London audience, considering her last outing here was last year's catastrophically misjudged revival of Foxfinder. Well her opening production feels like it's done a good job of catching the Lyric's brand, taking as it does a well-loved classic - Henrik Ibsen's A Doll's House, a play that seems to be on a lot of people's radar at the moment - and giving it a fresh twist. It's also, despite the fact that the story's been kept in the year of the play's premiere, 1879, a reinvention that ties in to a lot of current concerns, namely the way the rose-tinted view of Britain's colonial past has finally come back to cause destruction in Britain itself, and that past is ripe for reevaluation.

Theatre review: Falsettos

Another week, another show gets embroiled in controversy - in the case of Falsettos it's over whether the long-delayed (27 years) UK premiere of William Finn (music and lyrics) and James Lapine's (book) musical engaged meaningfully with the Jewish community during the rehearsal process. Tara Overfield-Wilkinson's production has no Jewish cast or creatives, and when a show opens with a number called "Four Jews in a Room Bitching" (as well as later featuring a major plotline about a bar mitzvah, and a whole song about the cliché that Jews are bad at sports) it does seem mind-blowing to me that nobody considered at the very least having someone in the room in a consultancy role for some scenes, just to make sure the show's brash, cartoonish style didn't tip over into something insensitive.

Theatre review: Evita

Regent's Park Open Air Theatre says they only cancel 5% of performances due to bad weather; I must be particularly unlucky then because I'm averaging 33% over the last two years. So this is my second attempt at Jamie Lloyd's take on Evita; regular readers will both know I regularly grumble about not much liking the work of The Rev. Dr Baron Dame Sir Andrew Lloyd Lord Webber BA (Hons) MEng, QC, MD, P.I, FSB, while consistently finding reasons to go and see it anyway. In this case, it's the fact that the Open Air will be trying to recreate the success of 2016's revelatory Jesus Christ Superstar, and getting Lloyd for it is something of a minor coup for the venue. Evita is ALW and Tim Rice's take on the controversial figure Eva Perón (Samantha Pauly,) First Lady of Argentina during the 1940s and seen as the power behind the throne for her populist husband Juan Perón (Ektor Rivera.)

Theatre review: Total Immediate Collective Imminent Terrestrial Salvation

Two years before the performance in the Royal Court Upstairs, Miles' son fell through the ice on a lake and drowned. Miles tried to save him but failed, and although he survived he ended up in a coma. In the present day, he regains consciousness, waking from dreams of the end of the world which he believes are premonitions; others believe him too, and follow him to the cult he sets up in a remote part of Bolivia. Fifteen years from now, the solar eclipse that portends the apocalypse is finally due, and Miles' estranged wife Anna (Susan Vidler) has flown out in a last-ditch attempt to get their daughter Sol (Shyvonne Ahmmad) away from his clutches. As with most plays, Sol's words and actions are pre-determined by the playwright's script. But the playwright in question is Tim Crouch, an experimental theatre-maker who regularly plays with the idea of how stories are told and who's in control of them, so Sol the character actually has a copy of the script in her hand.

Theatre review: Chiaroscuro

After the explosion of new female artistic directors of London theatres earlier this year, this month sees the start of them all debuting in their new roles with productions that will inevitably be seen in part as a mission statement. It's something Lynette Linton acknowledges at the Bush: It's overwhelmingly a new writing venue but being the opener for a new regime can put a different kind of pressure on a premiere so I can understand Linton's motives for kicking off with a revival. In her introduction to the show, the director says she wants an ongoing theme at the Bush to be the stories of queer women of colour, so Scottish Poet Laureate Jackie Kay's 1986 play Chiaroscuro fits the bill. Meanwhile integrating the music that formed part of the play, so that the women performing are also making their own music - something that becomes integral to the play's themes - gives the show its own identity.

Radio review: Great North Run

Just a few words about Tom Wells' likeable new contribution to Radio 4's stalwart Afternoon Play strand, Great North Run, which takes place in the buildup to the titular Newcastle half-marathon. It also takes place largely in the head of its narrator Will (Andrew Finnigan, who might have overtaken Andy Rush in the "regular Wells collaborator" stakes,) who tells the story in an imagined conversation with best friend Em (Amy Cameron.) Imagined because, as is often the case with these events, it's being run for charity in someone's memory - when she was ill with cancer, Em got Will to promise they'd run together in aid of Macmillan, and when she died, she left him instructions making it clear she expected him to stick to the plan (she also left him the tutu she expects him to wear.) Will's training coincides with his first year at university, in which he struggles to fit in, and provides a welcome nightly escape.

Theatre review: A Very Expensive Poison

It's seven years since Lucy Prebble has written for the stage, a self-imposed exile because - as the playwright herself admitted when that play got adapted for radio - she was so happy with The Effect that she genuinely didn't believe she'd ever match it. Well, she's finally braved the weight of her own high expectations to debut A Very Expensive Poison at the Old Vic, and instead of taking similar ground to her last play it instead goes back to ripping its story from the headlines like her earlier hit ENRON. It also uses something like that play's genre-hopping, metatheatrical style, although director John Crowley can't quite bring the flair of a Rupert Goold to it. Based on Luke Harding's book of the same name, A Very Expensive Poison follows the murder of Russian whistle-blower Alexander Litvinenko with Polonium 210, a radioactive substance so rare it could be traced back to the precise nuclear plant where it was produced; and despite this the trouble Litvinenko's widow Marina had getting anyone in power to point the finger at the most obvious suspect.

Theatre review: Bartholomew Fair

The 1980s Canadian sprinter wasn’t the first Ben Jo(h)nson to very obviously be on drugs, as evidenced by the Jacobean playwright’s Bartholomew Fair. Jonson’s comedies tend to be madcap affairs with a lot of grotesque characters getting themselves tied up into convoluted plots and gulled by con-men. Bartholomew Fair’s slice-of-life look at the characters who populate the titular fair features all of this, but without even the suggestion of a coherent plot holding it all together – as Phill put it, if someone asked what happened in the play, you’d have to answer “everything.” But a couple of plotlines do just about start to make sense: Bartholomew Cokes (Zach Wyatt) is due to get married on the feast day of the saint who bears his name and, laden with cash, is spending the day at the celebratory market (in what is now Spitalfields,) keen to stock up on food and luxuries for the wedding day.

Theatre review: World's End

With its 1990s-set teenage gay romance in neighbouring flats of a London tower block (albeit in Chelsea rather than Thamesmead,) World’s End invites inevitable comparisons to Beautiful Thing. Actor James Corley’s playwriting debut lacks the relatable characters to have anything like the same impact on audiences, but it does have its moments. In late 1998, Viv (Patricia Potter) returns to London after two failed marriages and many years of constant moving around; she rents the tiny flat next to Ylli (Nikolaos Brahimllari,) an Albanian widower and once-aspiring artist who now takes odd jobs in security. Both have 19-year-old sons, Viv’s new one-bedroom flat meaning Ben (Tom Milligan) has to sleep in the living room, where he locks himself away most of the time playing on his new Playstation. Besnick (Mirlind Bega) is more socially confident, and while perhaps not technically out to his disapproving father seems unfazed by Ylli’s occasional digs at his effeminacy.

Theatre review: Appropriate

Branden Jacobs-Jenkins has been an up-and-coming name in American playwriting in the last couple of years – I personally liked An Octoroon, if not as much as everyone else seemed to, while being less convinced by Gloria, but it was hard to deny the obvious potential. For my money this is the one where that potential is realised (albeit in a play written five years ago,) as the Donmar Warehouse stages the UK premiere of Appropriate. On the surface this is the playwright’s most conventional play to date, being his take on That American Play Where An Extended Family Gets Together After A Long Time, Preferably At Thanksgiving But That’s Optional. Six months after the death of their reclusive father, the Lafayette siblings and their families go to his plantation house in Arkansas; he was a hoarder who left half a million dollars in debt, so they have a lot of work to do clearing the place up so that his belongings can be sold in an estate sale, and the house and land sold at auction.

Theatre review: The Secret River

While Peter Gynt has a stint up at the Edinburgh Festival the National does a straight swap, with the Sydney Theatre Company’s visiting production of The Secret River coming to the Olivier for a couple of weeks’ run (minus its narrator Ningali Lawford-Wolf, who died suddenly during the Edinburgh run; Pauline Whyman has been flown over to read in the role.) Andrew Bovell’s play adapts Kate Grenville’s novel about the bloody origin story of modern Australia, one that mirrors the treatment of the Native Americans but is arguably less well-known internationally. William Thornhill (Nathaniel Dean) has had his death sentence for theft commuted to transportation, and his wife Sal (Georgia Adamson) and sons have followed him to Australia. Once his sentence is up, Sal wants them to go straight back to London but William asks her to wait five years so they can build up enough money through farming to return in more comfort than they left.

Theatre review: The Doctor

When an Artistic Director leaves their theatre, their final production is generally made a big deal of. Less so in the slightly more nebulous role of Associate Director, but Robert Icke’s time at the Almeida has seen him shoot up to superstar director status, so his last time in this particular role has been worthy of much comment. As with many of his biggest hits at this theatre, The Doctor sees Icke do his own radical rewrite of a European classic, and after more famous works like the Oresteia, Mary Stuart and Uncle Vanya, he bows out with a more obscure work, Arthur Schnitzler’s Professor Bernhardi. It’s not one I’d heard of before but apparently it’s a classic clash between science and medicine, Christian and Jew; in Icke’s hands it becomes a clash between much more – and so much more than we can even see. Ruth Wolff (Juliet Stevenson) is founder and head of a private hospital specialising in dementia research, and a familiar figure from medical dramas – the brilliant but not-particularly-likeable, abrupt and no-nonsense surgeon.

Theatre review: Once On This Island

After last year’s Bring It On, youth musical theatre company the British Theatre Academy returns for a second summer season at Southwark Playhouse, the centrepiece a revival of Lynn Ahrens (book and lyrics) and Stephen Flaherty’s (music) 1990 fable Once on This Island. Taking its themes (very loosely) from The Little Mermaid and applying them to a story about the legacy of colonialism, it’s set on an island in the French Antilles divided starkly along both geographical and racial lines – there are the black “peasants,” and the white “grands hommes,” descendants of the French colonisers. Orphan Ti Moune (Chrissie Bhima) is discovered in a tree after a tropical storm and rescued by peasants. When she grows up and witnesses a car crash, she believes that the reason she was saved from the storm as a child is so that she can in turn save the driver’s life.

Theatre review: Tree

It’s meant to be something of a party but the Young Vic’s Tree will likely be remembered as the show where Idris Elba and Kwame Kwei-Armah Milkshake Ducked, after the controversy over how much of the show they’re credited with creating actually owes to writers Tori Allen-Martin and Sarah Henley. The latter two are credited in the programme notes as having “helped Elba along the way” – in his personal list of thanks, not the official acknowledgements – and under the circumstances it’s interesting to note that there’s no specific writing credit anywhere. But obviously I have no way of judging who’s in the right so all I can say is what the finished article is like. I can say that from an audience point of view it’s been a bit of a rollercoaster figuring out if the show would give me backache – I booked when it went on sale back in November 2018 before the configuration had been finalised, and a couple of months ago the website blurb announced that Tree was meant to be experienced standing, with only a handful of seated tickets available for those with access issues.

Theatre review: Measure for Measure(RSC / RST, Barbican & tour)

The current RST season has so far been OK without coming close to blowing me away, and it now limps to an end with Measure for Measure. A Problem Play - so much so that it fits into the narrow original definition of the term that only encompassed three plays - it's admittedly not one I find it easy to like, unless approached with a kind of originality and flair that Gregory Doran's production doesn't have to offer. Vienna - in Stephen Brimson Lewis' design an early 20th century version, the Vienna of the waltzes - has always had prohibitively strict morality laws that have been hard to enforce (because, as the play acknowledges, it would entail expecting people not to behave like people.) The current Duke (Antony Byrne) has been particularly lax in enforcing the law, and the city has become a haven for extramarital sex, whether for fun or profit. The Duke regrets this but after all this time thinks it would be hard for him to enforce it again himself so, pretending to leave the city, he leaves his deputy Angelo (Sandy Grierson) in charge, while staying in Vienna in disguise to see what happens.

Theatre review: The View UpStairs

The 1973 arson that killed dozens in New Orleans’ UpStairs Lounge gay bar was the biggest terrorist attack on the LGBTQ+ community before the Pulse shooting in Orlando, but ranks as something of a forgotten chapter of queer history. I’d never heard of it before this year, but perhaps it’s fitting that in the 50th anniversary of the Stonewall riots other landmark moments are commemorated, and I’ve seen the attack referenced on stage twice this year: It formed a plot point in Gently Down the Stream, and is now the inspiration for Max Vernon’s musical The View UpStairs. In the present day, entitled influencer Wes (Tyrone Huntley) buys a burnt-out building in New Orleans’ French Quarter with the intention of gutting it and turning it into the flagship store for his new fashion line. It is, of course, the building that once house the UpStairs Lounge, and when he’s alone the ghosts of the bar’s owner Henri (Carly Mercedes Dyer) and her clientele appear.

Theatre review: A Midsummer Night's Dream (Shakespeare's Globe)

The third and last of this year's major London Midsummer Night's Dreams comes courtesy of Sean Holmes in his new position as an associate at the Globe. In a crowded field the production needs to do a lot to stand out: While there's a couple of interesting little twists on the familiar story this isn't a particularly high-concept Dream; instead everyone's energies have been thrown into mining every possible moment of comedy, with great success. Jean Chan's Athens is more South American than Southern European, the design evoking a pastel-coloured Rio Carnival, although to start with this is for appearances only - Duke Theseus (Peter Bourke) is holding festivities for his upcoming marriage to Hippolyta (Victoria Elliott) but the latter has no choice in the matter of marrying a much older man, and is far from thrilled with it - this is the second Dream this summer to have the Amazon Queen arrive on stage in a box, although it's played slightly more for laughs here.

Theatre review: Southern Belles

London’s unofficial Tennessee Williams season continues, and if Orpheus Descending and The Night of the Iguana are comparatively infrequently produced then the two one-act plays paired up by the King’s Head as Southern Belles are outright obscurities. Both deal with queer stories with varying levels of directness, and correspondingly varying levels of success. In Something Unspoken, Southern Grand Dame Cornelia (Annabel Leventon) is at home sitting by the phone, pointedly avoiding a meeting of the local chapter of the Daughters of the Confederacy at which a vote is being held. Her hope is that she’s so well-respected within the society that she’ll finally be elected to the highest position of Regent unopposed: But she’s so nervous that things might not work out that way that she’s feigning illness and staying at home; and her fears are well-founded, as her mole keeps calling from the election with unpromising updates.