Of Mice And Men

Grasses Of A Thousand Colours, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London, Saturday May 30 2009, 3pm.

It was a blazing hot Saturday afternoon when your bustling blogger was making his way to the Royal Court Theatre in London's Sloane Square. A superficially unremarkable middle-aged man in a baseball cap came in from the opposite direction just a few steps ahead, to be swooped upon by a number of people fervently seeking his autograph. Peering up to see the source of the obstruction to our path, we recognise the slightly startled features of the playwright Wallace Shawn* looking at your curious correspondent as if he had identified his own Mark Chapman waiting in the wings. We would like to say relax, Wally, we haven't got a gun, we just wanna get in to see your play, man but we don't, finding a side door instead.

Now probably the one thing you really wouldn't want to discover on sitting down in an intimate studio (the performance is in the relatively tiny Jerwood Theatre Upstairs) at a start of a three-hour plus play on a baking hot day in late May is that the air-conditioning isn't working. If that wasn't enough to get us hot under the collar we found Miranda Richardson directly asking us if we were interested in sex, and if we weren't, to leave the theatre with immediate effect. Which is as good a way to start a play as any.

Shawn's play was about cats and mice, donkeys and rabbits, man and his best friend (and we're not referring to a dog). Cats play with mice, we're told, not because they can, but because they actively enjoy it. Parallels between cats and mice and women and men are drawn throughout the piece, with bestial-themed fantasies langorously recalled as fact rather than metaphor. It's not just sex wars that pre-occupy the piece, however, with a vomiting disease taking hold as a result of manipulations in the foodchain, and a meditation on mortality dominating the final act.

There was an enormous amount to enjoy in the performance - Shawn is a skilled orator (much of the play is in monologue) and a wonderfully mesmering wordsmith, given sterling support by the glacial presence of Miranda Richardson, Jennifer Tilly in showstopping form and physique, and a game Emily McDonnell. The play was eery and pertinent; overflowing with ideas and themes; loaded with portent and intrigue, and made good use of dramatic entrances, exits and projected film. Although some of the material might easily offend, invariably this was spoken word and there was very little graphic action on show to frighten the horses (although the sight of Miranda Richardson lapping at Mr Shawn's bald pate might not be everyone's saucer of milk).

Titillation certainly wasn't the order of the day, with the young lady next to me remarking on the humidity in the room before casually hitching her skirt up several inches providing the biggest frisson of the afternoon's entertainment (aside from Ms Tilly's devastating sideways glances and daring decolletage). It could indeed be argued that a little bit of action might have brought some life to what was a huge running length for a play that was so centred on lengthy monologues. Either that, or some prudent editing, might have reduced some of the inevitable longuers in such a structure.

Perhaps all could be forgiven if the piece was driven to a firm conclusion, but the response to these lengthy meditations on man's inevitable meddling with animals, and the dire consequences that result, seemed to be a resigned shrug, an intelligent, metaphorical hybrid of 'shit happens'. We came anticipating controversy, but not expecting the stark revelation to be the playwright's own ambivalence laid shockingly bare for all to see.

*Now if that sounds like a bit of namedropping, Mr Shawn was no stranger to this either it seemed, as he took justifiably great pleasure in informing the frankly adoring box office staff that Neil Tennant from Pet Shop Boys may well be dropping by if he gets time after rehearsals.

Hap Not Bad

Hapgood, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham, Saturday April 12 2008, 7.30pm.

Spy stories have featured in an increasing number of your covert correspondent's cultural diversions in the last year or so, including William Boyd's thrilling, elegant 'Restless', William Gibson's intriguing shaggy dog story 'Spook Country' and Paul Verhoeven's WW2 espionage drama 'Black Book'. So was sufficiently intrigued to make a furtive foray to the Birmingham Rep to see their revival of Tom Stoppard's late 80s spy drama 'Hapgood', in which Josie Lawrence plays the titular spymaster, who juggles protecting national security with the travails of single motherhood as she tries to track down a missing suitcase and identify a double agent from within her team.

The play manages for the most part to be reasonably exciting, particularly either side of the interval, and features some well-choreographed and brilliantly puzzling setpieces and an attention-grabbing turn from David Birrell as a Northern English agent with a chip on his shoulder almost as large as his hard-on for Lawrence's spymaster. But taken as a whole piece, the play fails to fully satisfy on a number of different levels.

Firstly, Stoppard's attempt to weave a meditation on quantum mechanics within the framework of a spy story, based broadly on a linking theme of 'the duality of all things', opens the project up to accusations of pretentiousness that may well see a successful prosecution. Secondly, any play where the central role was written for a specific actress (in this case, Felicity Kendal) has a difficult task in recasting for a revival, and Ms Lawrence, while a logical choice in her Kendal-like straddling of mumsy and sexy, struggles to make the part her own. Finally, and perhaps fatally, even a high-minded, philosophical melodrama of subterfuge needs to be grounded by some kind of emotional pull and the central relationships which should provide this - between thwarted lovers, and mother and son - miserably fail to convince. A shame that for all the interesting elements on display that a production featuring so much scientific rumination should fizzle out through palpable lack of chemistry.

Monster Mish-Mash?

Frankenstein, The Royal & Derngate Theatre, Northampton, Thursday March 6 2008, 2.30pm.

It's your kitkat-crunching correspondent's first trip to Northampton, superficially a fairly unexceptional Midlands town whose train station is in particularly desperate need of a lick of paint. The museum opposite the theatre has lots and lots (and lots) of shoes, and the sales assistant at WHSmith from whom your well-read writer purchases a copy of Plan B is one of the most hostile customer service droids we've ever had the misfortune to give money to, but apart from that nothing to report. Yet we're not here for tourist travails, but to see whether Lisa Evans' adaptation for Frantic Assembly of Mary Shelley's Frankenstein at The Royal and Derngate can bring the nigh-on-two-hundred-years-old tale of terror back to life.

The answer is yes and no. The production is racy, pacy and stylish, performed with well-choreographed gusto by young and energetic performers on a minimalist but expensive-looking set which has the modern sheen of contemporary horror/fantasy films. Of the cast, Richard Winsor stands out as an unusually lithe monster who stalks proceedings more like a sullen Silver Surfer than the clunking nuts-and-bolts version from the Karloff film, while there's a spark behind Saskia Butler's eyes that the play and her part (as Frankenstein's wife) never quite gives her the chance to ignite.

Evans' brave strategy of juxtaposing the classic Shelley story with a present-day narrative involving a young woman (played by a game Georgina Lamb) locked up in a prison hospital after shutting a baby in a freezer, works to an extent in that it adds an extra layer of intrigue for those overly familiar with the original tale, but ultimately fails to find the right pitch or resonance to provide satisfying comparison or contrast with the bold source material. However, even though not all parts of the play completely work, for the most part the production does succeed in delivering entertainment, excitement and not a few scares along the way, with occasional strong language, adult themes and a graphic suicide attempt making it unsuitable for younger children.

Transformer

Metamorphosis, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham, Wednesday February 27 2008, 7.30pm.

The combination of Franz Kafka and Nick Cave lured your cautious correspondent back into the theatre for the first time in several months. Billed as a six-legged nightmare, the story has been adapted and directed by David Farr and Gisli Orn Garderson to be performed by the Reykjavik-based ensemble Vesturport with an original score provided by Nick Cave and Warren Ellis. With the pedigrees and reputations of those involved we had every right to expect dark material dashingly delivered, and we were not to be disappointed.

Many of you will be aware of the central story concept, of a young man who awakes one morning to find himself turned into an insect to the consternation of his family for whom he is their breadwinner, and who only hear an ear-piercing shriek when he tries to communicate with them. There are many semi-autobiographical elements involved in the story (Kafka turned his back on a conventional career to concentrate on his writing, outstayed his welcome in the family homestead until the age of 31, and had an unusually strong bond with his sister) but perhaps the timeless genius of the piece lies in the way the writer has extracted universal themes from these elements, primarily the way in which both micro- and macro-societies ruthlessly isolate the different and unconventional.

The resulting production is as odd and slightly depressing as the material dictates, but remains a triumph on many levels. The Cave/Ellis score is subtly integral to the mood of the piece, while the magnificent set design (including a gravity-defying bedroom) and astonishing physical theatre make apparent light of the numerous logistic difficulties of translating such surreal material to the stage. Bjorn Thors deserves particular praise for his acrobatic performance as Gregor, particularly moving in the sequence where he appears never-more human than at the point of final rejection by his family. Striking, memorable, theatre, then, worth catching as the run moves on to Plymouth then London (Lyric Hammersmith, March 25 - April 5).

Family Circles

Dans Paris, Curzon Soho, London, Saturday May 12 2007, 12 noon.
That Face, Royal Court Theatre, Sloane Square, London, Saturday May 12 2007, 4pm.

Christophe Honore follows up his impressive, if controversial, adaptation of Georges Bataille's Ma Mere with a friskier, more accessible look at similar themes in the recently released Dans Paris. Gallic thesps Louis Garrel and Romain Duris play two brothers who react in dramatically divergent ways to their sister's suicide under the morose but watchful gaze of their chain-smoking dad (played by veteran Guy Marchand).

With editing, atmospherics and an impish sense of fun redolent of the Nouvelle Vague, Honore has succeeded in making a heartwarming film about loss and a charming film about depression. These things shouldn't be possible if it wasn't for the fact your correspondent watched it with his very own eyes, an indefinable treat offering another cinematic love letter to the French capital city as well as introducing us to the restorative powers of Kim Wilde's 'Cambodia' and the veritable va va vroom of Helena Noguerra as the Scooter Girl.

Later that afternoon mooched over to the Royal Court Theatre to see Polly Stenham's debut play That Face which has something of Ma Mere about it, given the semi-incestuous nature of the relationship between a drunken woman (Lindsay Duncan) and her intense son (Matt Smith) following the family's abandonment by her husband for foreign climes and an exotic new bride.

The play begins with the younger sister (the diminuitive but dynamic Fliss Jones, playing below age) using her mother's drugs to assist her head of dorm (Catherine Steadman, stealing every scene she's in so much one half expected to see her exit stage left with a veritable swag bag) in an initiation ceremony that borders on Guantanamo-style torture, but as the play builds it's pretty clear she's the saner one in the family. In the second half of the play the absent father returns as a kind of self-styled deus ex machina, a tidy man come to tidy them up and away, but can the debris from this broken family be swept under the carpet that easily?

Staged in the Jerwood Theatre upstairs in 'the round', there's no hiding place for the cast and 40-capacity audience alike, giving your hack a ringside seat to the melodramatics that don't even allow a let-up during the scene changes (although we do get Sleater-Kinney, The Pipettes and Yeah Yeah Yeahs via an onstage iPod during the intermission, a welcome first). The boxing analogy is in fact a good way of describing the strengths and weaknesses of the characters and the play itself, with lots of good points being scored without ever quite delivering that knockout punch. Despite these flaws, the 20-year-old playwright Stenham and the hugely committed cast and production team should be applauded for providing a genuinely unforgettable experience.

Love, Death, etc.

Terry Johnson's Hysteria, Birmingham Repertory Theatre, Birmingham, Saturday May 5 2007, 2.30pm.
The Painted Veil, Cineworld Broad Street, Birmingham, Saturday May 5 2007, 5.40pm.
StrangeTime, The Spotted Dog, Digbeth, Birmingham, Saturday May 5 2007, 9.30pm.

Having seen Terry Johnson's last couple of plays (Hitchcock Blonde, Piano/Forte) down in London, your correspondent was curious to see the Brum Rep's revival of an older play of his, namely Hysteria, a farcical fictionalisation of a brief meeting between Sigmund Freud and Salvador Dali during the twilight of the psychologist's years. Johnson again blends highbrow and lowbrow elements, with crude and anachronistic farce set against philosophical and moral musings on religion, psychotherapy and familial abuse. Despite some committed performances and brilliant set design, however, Dead Kenny remained unconvinced that these disparate elements gelled. There is a staggering sequence where the whole set 'melts' into a nightmarish Daliesque tableau vivant that is worth the price of admission alone, but it's just a shame that the play that wraps around it is often so deeply silly.

Then popped across the street to a sports bar to check on West Ham's result against Bolton (a 3-1 victory, ta for asking, but more about the footie after the season's over) where the barstaff seemed more intent on playfighting than serving your anxious hack (they were both uncommonly attractive so it was a pleasing enough distraction as our eyes darted across the multiple Sky Sports screens to establish the necessary scoreline). The Hammers lived to fight another day, on the pitch or in the court still to be decided, so a calming bottle of Bud was dispatched before heading to Cineworld.

John Curran's The Painted Veil (2006), adapted from a Somerset Maugham book, starts off as a study of the passive aggression that lies behind the stiff upper lip of the repressed Englishman, before offering up some hope that redemption can be found in just, y'know, trying to get on a bit better. Edward Norton does a good job of an English accent as the prissy cuckolded biologist who insists on taking his errant wife (Naomi Watts) to cholera-infested Shanghai with slightly unpredictable results. As perhaps could be expected, the film's not exactly a barrel of giggles, but emerged as that rarest of period-piece literary adaptations - something with a whiff of real life about it.

Having stomached a day of death and disease, your cultural correspondent was in the mood for hard liquour, good company and some rattling guitar tunes, so braved the daunting mugger's paradise of the bridge by Moor St Station to reach the oasis of The Spotted Dog (just off Bordesley Street, second city geography fact fans) in time to catch StrangeTime enthralling the Barfly-feeder pub's clientele with a fiesty and engaging set. The rumbling menace of newish song 'Sirens'(?) and spiky splendour of 'Magnet' (pulled from the Kate Finch solo oeuvre) nestled flirtatiously with older numbers like 'Lust' and 'Ex-Boyfriend', before debut single 'Personality Disorder' (available for download from just about evey reputable download source from May 24, record release fact afficionados) gave us the happiest of happy finishes.

Hysteria runs at the Birmingham Rep until May 12. The Painted Veil on general release at cinemas nationwide now. StrangeTime next play live at The Actress & Bishop in Birmingham on May 25.

Neigh Bother

Equus, Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London, Saturday March 3, 2007, 2.30pm.

The woman selling the programmes in the lobby surreptitiously slips a piece of paper inside your correspondent's copy. Opening it up, Dead Kenny finds not a saucy message with the good lady's telephone number but instead the notification that Richard Griffiths will miss today's performances due to illness. Ominous news in that Daniel (Harry Potter) Radcliffe may be getting all the pre-publicity for Equus but Griffiths is the veteran thesp whose role as the psychiatrist is the larger part which to a great extent carries the whole play. Further, Radcliffe knows Griffiths from the Potter films, so his experience and familiarity will have given the young star a comfort buffer in the early showings, thus today will provide the wand-waving wunderkind with his sternest test of nerves since opening night.

And so, the big questions. How does the understudy cope? Colin Haigh is certainly credible as the avuncular shrink questioning the ethics of his profession as he puzzles over the passionate madness of his troubled young patient. He does, however, become increasingly reliant on prompts within his 'case notes' prop to remember his lines - this becomes a little distracting after a while, and the other main difference is that Haigh perhaps lacks the dynamism and projection that a star would have used to provide charge to some of the monologues, during which your dozy hack occasionally drifted. In the circumstances, however, his contribution is heroic.

Secondly, how does Radcliffe fare? Pretty well, in fact, although initially he appears a little nervy and unsettled in his interaction with Griffiths' understudy, this could just be good acting given the unstable state of mind of his character at this point. Yet on the whole he puts in a convincing performance in a demanding role and carries the burden of the audience expectations rather manfully. He also appears genuinely chuffed by the rapturous ovation at the end, bless 'im.

Thirdly, what of the much-reported nudity and sexual content? Well, your correspondent can confirm that Radcliffe and his coltish love interest (Joanna Christie) do indulge in some tastefully-lit full-frontal nudity and we can reassure you that as far as we could tell all the bits were in the right places. It's all played quite clinically and matter-of-factly with minimal eroticism and reports of ten-minute torrid sex scenes are wider of the mark than a Marlon Harewood turn-and-volley. If anything there's more sexual frisson during the scenes where Racliffe pets and grooms his favourite horse Nugget than there is with his tumble in the hay with the stablegirl and that is probably deliberate.

Finally, does the legendary play still hold up over 30 years later in this new production? By and large, yes - it still works as a mystery, and its central theme of different generations coming to terms with each other's sexuality is a universal one that to which many could still relate. Other themes, such as questioning the effectiveness and morality of modern psychiatry and the exploration of what young people are to believe in during uncommonly secular times seem uncannily prescient for a work first staged in 1973.

Less happily, some of the dialogue is updated ('swizz' is replaced by 'con') but other elements of the play that are firmly rooted in the 70s (Radcliffe's character reverts to the 'Milky Bar Kid' theme tune as an avoidance mechanism and there's a pivotal encounter in a porno cinema) are left as they are, meaning the production feels halfway between a period piece and a full re-working. Having Jenny Agutter (who played the stablegirl in Sidney Lumet's 1977 film adaptation) return to the material in the role of a magistrate is a nice touch for the older members of the audience, however.

The play's main coup-de-grace is not so much the nudity but the use of dancers as the ill-fated 'horses'. Wearing magnificent masks and hooves they stalk the smoky, minimal set, adding elements of magic, ritual and atmosphere that the film, by necessity more bound to verisimilitude, could not compete with. The result is a production that fully justifies exhuming the material and one which should provide Radcliffe with a vital bridge between his child and adult acting careers.

More important still, your dazed correspondent won a warm and beaming smile directly from the lovely Jenny Agutter. Eat yer hearts out, gentlemen readers of a certain age!

The Keys Don't Work

Piano/Forte, Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Sloane Square, London, Saturday September 23 2006.

In Terry Johnson's Piano/Forte, Oliver Cotton plays a disgraced Tory MP about to get married for the third time in his country residence, to a glamour model he met amongst the witchety grubs of the reality show that enabled his public redemption. Alicia Witt and Kelly Reilly play (twin?) daughters from his first ill-fated marriage, who have reacted in starkly divergent ways to their mother's suicide - Witt's Abigail, a talented pianist, has withdrawn into stammering agorophobia tended to by her Australian uncle Ray (Danny Webb, in the play's most convincing performance), while Reilly's Louise has travelled across Europe drifting into a life of transient jobs, promiscuity and mediocre circus stunts. When Louise arrives unexpectedly back at the house on the eve of the wedding, with mischief on her mind, the stage is set for a weekend of ribaldry, revelation and recrimination.

Johnson plays with a number of theatrical staples here (country house melodrama; bedroom farce; an Agatha Christie style whodunnit and Hitchcockesque psychodrama, complete with a murmuration of swallows waiting to swoop), stirring in some modern elements of light satire on celebrity culture and showstopping sexual content (Reilly revels in a bold scene where her character descends a staircase topless and torments her father; the Spanish caterers are revealed as erotic acrobats whose wedding performance culminates in public ejaculation and inadvertent buggery) amidst the wordplay, psychological intrigue and special effects. The result is a slightly overlong but hugely entertaining and often funny play, rich in atmosphere if ultimately low on point, moderately hampered by an elaborate set design ill-fitted for purpose in this theatre space, making it near-impossible to view all areas of the action from many of the seats.

Piano-Forte continues at the Jerwood Theatre Downstairs, Royal Court, until October 14.