Boxes in the Attic: An Interview with Danny Braverman

3 July 2014

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Danny Braverman discusses outsider art, family stories and the story behind his solo show, Wot? No Fish!! which opens this week at Battersea Arts Centre.

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Recovering from a serious illness that kept him off work, Danny Braverman found comfort in looking through shoeboxes that had been hoarded away at his Mum’s cousin Jeff’s house. Inside them he discovered over three thousand ink and watercolour sketches, done by his great uncle Ab for his wife Celie on the wage packets he’d hand her each week; tender, playful, or even chastising counterpoints to this marital transaction.

It might sound like Ab’s an outsider artist, but Braverman’s solo performance, Wot? No Fish!! is more of a duet with his late, great uncle – one which reveals the knowingness and subtlty with which the older man worked. As Braverman explains, “it took me a while to realise that there were so many extraordinary things about these things. When I took them home, I started to realise the scale of it. He was such a fantastic artist, and together they make up a document and record of decades of our family life.”

I wondered whether Braverman was tempted to share the wage packets as a book, or an exhibition – what it was that suited them to a stage hundreds of times their slim diametre. He explains that the performance started life small, as “tabletop storytelling on my i-pad. It was all relatively low-key, just a 14 minute version, but people were very encouraging – people said that it had real mileage because it was me presenting them, and it told my story too.” He worked with director Nick Philippou to come up with a simple, but incredibly effective form of presentation that’s part lecture, part old-school uncle showing holiday snaps on a slide projector. Danny wears white gloves to handle the wage packets, which are projected one by one, or in revealing combinations, on a screen behind him. But there’s also an element of hosting, of welcoming an audience in. Braverman explains that “it’s not acting for me, it’s about building a rapport with the audience and gently bringing them into Ab’s world. I offer fishballs at the beginning, which is a Proustian thing connecting to a specifically Jewish experience through taste and smell – and that’s something that comes back at so many moments through the piece.”

One of Ab’s wage packets.

Ab’s world is a distinct one – a faintly claustrophobic East London Jewish community in the early to mid 20th century which Braverman can trace and reconstruct with photos of each successive house he lived in. But it’s also a universal one, too. “He works a lot of archetypes and mythology and fairytales, making himself into a knight in shining armour and all that fairytale stuff. There are all these gentle contemplations about the way history and place works – the story of generations and immigrants.”

Braverman explains that in many of the places he’s been, he’s unearthed connections to Ab’s story. “Sometimes people have very specific connections, including someone whose mum was a nurse at the institution Ab’s son was in, and they quite often confirm things I wasn’t sure about. I go off script depending where I am, for example in Brighton pointing out that that was where some of the family had been evacuated during the war.” The BAC is just round the corner from the care home where Ab lived at the end of his life. And, as he is keen to emphasise, “it’s got such personality itself – there’s a real sense of it being a town hall for the community. I worked at Theatre Royal Stratford East, which reeks of personality and character, and I don’t think you want a blank canvas. Ab didn’t have a blank canvas to paint on.” In a discussion that feels more and more relevant with the rise of both site-specific and immersive work, he talks about the ‘host’ and ‘ghost’ theory. In Cliff McLucas’s essay ‘Ten Feet and Three Quarters of an Inch of Theatre’, “the host site is haunted by a time by a ghost that the theatre-makers create. Like all ghosts it is transparent and the host can be seen through the ghost.”

For Braverman, putting this theory into practice means “not denying the texture of the canvas you’re painting on,” whether it’s a wage packet concealing financial realities under emotional heights, the atmosphere of the space he performs on, or the emotional contexts his audience are bringing to the performance. In his research as a lecturer in applied theatre at Goldsmiths, he’s also using his theoretical bent “thinking about how storytelling works to trigger storytelling in other people.” I found myself telling Braverman that my family proudly displayed my grandma’s pastel painting-by-numbers canvases, and wondered why his great-uncle Ab didn’t go down in still more illustrious family legend. He sidesteps the question – understandably, since the shoebox discovery that opens his performance has the modestly dramatic power of an old master being unveiled on Antiques Roadshow. But what he does remark on is how stories prompt and trigger other stories.

“One of the biggest influences on me was ‘Man’s Search For Meaning’ (Viktor Frankl, 1946). He was an Auschwitz survivor who wrote about why people survived. It wasn’t necessarily people who were physically fittest – it was because they still had some meaning in their lives. A man might learn his wife on the other side of the camp had died, and that just immediately shut him out of his meaning in life, even if he was healthier than others around him.” These musings on “existential psychotherapy” are linked to the sadder, more conflicted side of memories prompted – Braverman talks of an audience member who told him about a smiling family photo that cloaked memories of an unhappy childhood, and divorce.

But happy families are welcome, too. “I love it when generations come. There was a lovely young woman at Edinburgh who was working front of house and felt compelled to bring her Mum along, and another man who came back with his father and daughter. I have a slight mission that audiences are too niche, too bespoke. The bigger mix is, the more it interests me, and building community amongst that difference.” Before creating the show, he worked as chief executive of the Orpheus Centre, a residential performing arts centre for young disabled adults that couldn’t be further from the story Danny uncovers through Ab’s letters of Larry, a young disabled man who lives apart from his family in a bleak, unstimulating residential home. And he’s passionate about the “bold, celebratory, and funny disabled artists coming into the mainstream. Theatre doesn’t always change the world in the way we want it to, but you see it at the forefront at a lot of the disability rights movements protesting government cuts.”

So, multi-generation families on a sprawling trip to see Braverman at the BAC should be careful that they live up to his ideals; he describes that “I love wandering round theatre bars after performances to hear what people are saying about them, and what journey are they going through. There’s nothing more depressing than hearing people talking about house prices.” After being led on an emotional paper trail through years of personal history, touching on disability, memory, place and even making fun of Hitler, Braverman concludes that “I really hope people are talking about their family, and that box in the attic” – whatever it might hold.

Wot? No Fish!! is at the Battersea Arts Centre, London, from the 1st-19th July, 2014.

First appeared on Exeunt

Clarence Darrow, Old Vic

HAGIOGRAPHY OF AN ALL-AMERICAN SAINT

★★ 

David W Rintels’ Clarence Darrow

The Old Vic | London

directed by Thea Sharrock 

“I’ve always thought lawyers like to say more than is absolutely necessary.” This show, Kevin Spacey‘s last at the Old Vic and first as solo performer, casts him as a garrolous attorney and folk hero of declining years, remembering a career of arguing of horse traders and social justice for thirty-odd years either side of 1900. Thoroughly argued, it’s still a slender proposition to fill the main house of the Old Vic, and Spacey‘s performance doesn’t quite make a case for it.

Clarence Darrow is an all-American role lawyer in an old-fashioned mould: champion of the poor, maverick, womaniser, bootstrap all-round good guy. It’s easy to see why Spacey feels drawn to it as inexorably as businessmen of a certain age are drawn to sing “My Way” at karaoke. He’ll step down from his position in early 2014 as artistic director – this feels like a slow-sailing, flamboyant swan song.

He’s no stranger to the role. He played Darrow at the Old Vic in Trevor Nunn’s adaptation of the 1960 courtroom drama Inherit The Wind in 2009, and in an eponymous PBS movie. Here, Darrow’s judge, jury, and trembling clients must be encompassed by the gestures of his tremulous hands, as he relives his cases in an imaginary courtroom. The most famous of these is the 1925 Scopes Monkey trial – not the historical anomaly you might hope, but the first in a long, scarcely evolving series of controversies about the teaching of Darwinism in schools. But David W Rintels’ rather workmanlike narrative resists the temptation to sprint right up to Darrow’s highest heights of philosophical rhetoric. Instead, he starts with a trudge through the story of his parents – even holding up two outsized photos of them for added didactic value – followed by the early days of his career making out documents for horse traders and struggling to make an impression in rural Ohio.

Thea Sharrock’s direction is similarly patient. Our first glimpse of Kevin Spacey is his feet as he rummaged under his desk – he shuffles around and rearranges paper in dusty contrast to the passionate rhetoric we know to expect. The Old Vic has learnt new(ish) tricks, thanks to a huge reshuffle that puts half the audience behind the theatre’s proscenium arch and a few more at the sides to play in the round; here, this staging has no amphitheatre grandeur. Instead, the house lights are all but up, and Spacey holds court in a kind of chummy “all among friends here” atmosphere, shaking audience members’ hands, or squashing between two seats to expound on his womanising reputation at closer quarters.

His performance is expansive, warm and full of wit. Clarence Darrow is eminently quotable, delivering gems like “I have never killed any one, but I have read some obituary notices with great satisfaction.” Spacey makes him good company – an ideal guest from a carefully composed fantasy dinner party. But there’s also a kind of clunky unknowingness to David W Rintels’ script. It’s hard to tell how much irony is meant when Darrow talks about starting to believe that any boy in the United States could become President, just after telling a story of the horrendously ingrained racism of 1920s Chicago. His womanising is handled oddly, in a kind of bluff dismissal that we’re given little help interpreting. And no other flaws materialise in this agnostic hagiography of an all-American saint.

At the 1924 trial of Leopold and Loeb, two teenage murderers, Darrow gave a twelve hour, rambling oration against not just their indictment, but about the death penalty itself, bringing in science, philosophy, and even nascent Freudian psychology. Trimming his abundant autobiographical works and summary energies into a neat 85-minute is a task beyond even the brightest trainee lawyer. This unambitious dramatisation covers Darrow’s high points, without structuring them into something elegant, or profound – a roughly hewn chunk of a fascinating life.

Alice Saville

photos | © Manuel Harlan

First appeared on Auditorium

Die Roten Punkte

Die Roten Punkte at Soho Theatre

3rd-8th June 2014

Reviewed by Alice Saville

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Die Roten Punkte

Astrid has a joyously foul mouth, a penchant for “soo arty” voluminous sleeves, and a toy drum-kit. Otto’s smear of red lipstick outlines a sadder moue of perpetual discontent. His skinny torso is pinioned in a white strapped straight jacket, and he wields a pint sized, tippex-decorated electric guitar. But this ostensibly German musical duo are about as authentically Berlinisch as a Safeways frankfurter. Embarking on their “Art Rock” tour after two successful studio albums, these Australian comedians skewer alternative pop and rock in saucy, messy style.

Spinal Tap punctured 1980s heavy metal and Flight of the Conchords conquered earnest folk; Die Roten Punkte bill themselves in the same illustrious musical tradition, but their musical targets are a more eclectic band of lo-fi, punk, emo and pop touchstones. Their name means “the red dots” – you couldn’t hope for clearer road markings to the source for much of their satire, The White Stripes. Jack and Meg White delighted in baffling the music press by claiming to be brother and sister, even after their marriage and divorce became common knowledge — it was a way of suggesting their complicity in the grim childhood in American suburbia fetished in songs like “The Hardest Button to Button”, complete with a “backyard/with nothing in it” and a baby brother silenced by ill-defined voodoo antics. Astrid and Otto’s purported childhood outstrips the Stripes to reach Lemony Snicket levels of gothic absurdity. Their parents are killed by a train, or lion (they can’t agree which), launching them on a Babes in the Wood trajectory through unsweetened Black Forests to the bright lights of Berlin.

The banana-protector, affectionately named “bananenhousen” by Otto, is a yellow plastic signifier of his neurotic personality as obvious as any Velvet Underground poster. Daniel Tobias’s clownishly delicate performance is full of minute facial expressions, sulks, and quivering lips. He’s told off by Astrid for his inability to nonchalantly toss off his white-strapped jacket (“but it’s expensive!”), instead neatly folding it on top of a speaker. Clare Bartholomew simmers with a more obvious charisma, mixing relentless sexuality with a schoolmarmish bossiness that rock and roll manchild Otto only tolerates because of his barely-hidden sexual obsession with her. She knows it, and exploits it by flirting outrageously with (read, thrusting her substantial cleavage at) the audience.Their musical satire is similarly agile, quickly leaving lo-fi art punk behind for gleeful, elegantly played and surprisingly catchy numbers including a pitch-perfect Kraftwerk parody about a robot lion, and a Pixies song about a banana-protecting gadget that comes complete with whistling and obligatory audience ooh-ing along to the chorus.

This is an expansive performance, full of physical comedy with none of the controlled finesse usually associated with slapstick – there’s a very real chance of getting slapped in the face by Astrid’s vast, flapping sleeves. Or, as happened to this reviewer, ending up with sticky feet after having a speaker topple off stage onto the space occupied by your drink and feet seconds before.

There are plenty of clever digs at the ludicrous depths of avant-garde wankery bands sink to in search of inspiration for that difficult third album. Under the influence of Brian Eno, Otto and Astrid descend to an underground bunker to listen to the noise of water dripping into a bucket for three maddening months; the ensuing loop pedal soundscape is one of the evening’s highlights. But subtle or refined satire this isn’t.  Clare Bartholomew and Daniel Tobias take the script at a bull-at-a-merch-stall charge. If a few targets are missed, it’s hard not to get swept up in their leonine stampede (or runaway train ride) over decades of sensitive indie-rock sensibilities.

First appeared on Exeunt

Simon Armitage's Last Days of Troy, Manchester Royal Exchange Theatre

NO THUNDERBOLTS ARE PULLED IN ARMITAGE’S RETELLING OF TROY

★★☆

Simon Armitage‘s The Last Days of Troy

Royal Exchange Theatre | Manchester

world première directed by Nick Bagnall

In a torn toga, clutching a creased cardboard lightning bolt, Zeus stands among the ruins of Troy in modern-day Hisarlik, Turkey – or thereabouts, but he’s a god so he should know. Simon Armitage’s retelling of the Troy story opens with his century-spanning meditations on war and love, mediated by his wife Hera’s wry asides. But back in the Bronze Age setting of the world’s oldest work of fiction, as told by Homer in his Iliad, things are rather less considered. Nick Bagnall’s coarse and bloody production rings with the clash of swords, emphasising brute force over narrative power.

The poet Simon Armitage wrote a three-parter dramatisation BBC Radio 4 including one on Homer’s Odyssey. This play is a prequel of sorts, supplementing the enigmatic description of the Troy story that opens Homer’s Iliad with Virgil’s Aeneid to provide a full dramatic sweep through to its bitter and bloody end. Manchester’s Royal Exchange couldn’t be more perfect as a location for this classical mish-mash. It’s punctuated by heartstoppingly vast Corinthian columns of fleshy pink marble – the round theatre stands at the feet of these giants, like an amphitheatre commenting on and reflecting the doings of the gods above.

Armitage’s task is an epic one. He’s had to condense a sprawling but still familiar story into something a bit tighter, amalgamating characters and telescoping events. The most surprising omission is the prophetess Cassandra, who features only in a minor way in the Iliad and Aeneid, but whose foreshadowing of the fall of Troy has become a central part of the tale’s mythology. His retelling is also intriguing for having a foot in each of the three camps; Greeks, Trojans and gods. Events up on Mount Olympus tend to be the most compelling. They centre around Zeus, who, as played by Richard Bremmer, is allowed a degree of evolution and flux that none of the others have time for. He delivers his opening prologue as battered and bedraggled as a fading end-of-the-pier entertainer. No longer worshiped, he’s reduced to penury and, in a nice touch, selling divine little statuettes of himself. But during the Troy narrative itself, Zeus is a statesman tasked with marshaling an Olympus that works like a squabbling United Nations of gods, all keen to make interventions on one side or another – his sparring with a witty and warm Hera (Gillian Bevan) is a joy.

Surprisingly, the humans on both sides are far less compelling, and their motives are obscure – whether Trojans or legendarily enigmatic Greeks.Tom Stuart’s Paris has a cartoonishly foppish haplessness that makes his kidnap of Helen seem like a Herculean leap. But Achilles is still more baffling. In Jake Fairbrother’s performance he’s muscled, mute and simmering with anger. His presentation of his concubine Briseus to Agamemnon smothered head to toe in a burqa-like robe, manhandling her as she screams, is heavy-handedly conceived by director Nick Bagnall – and at odds with a text that suggests he loves her so much he withdraws from battle. It’s hard to get away from the misogyny embedded in the Troy narrative, but Armitage heightens it. His treatment of the ever-enigmatic Helen of Troy is especially telling. She repeatedly describes herself as a “whore”, seeming to half-relish her pariah status. Former model Lily Cole‘s voice is harsh and broken, her movements stiff – her beauty is sinister and unreadable, here.

In keeping with Armitage’s rough and nasty text, Ashley Martin-Davis’s set design doesn’t offer many visual pleasures. Even the beautiful Helen of Troy is hooded like a kind of alien seedpod, her tapestry an odd game of white and red string threaded over a vast wooden table. His most successful move is to break up the theatre’s in-the-round layout with a wooden ramp that closes or lowers like a drawbridge – a clear visual boundary through which warriors can charge or emerge, shrouded in haze. Other measures fall just the wrong side of rough and ready. In particular, the child-size Trojan horse and its wobbling ascent into the flies lacks the buzz that you’d expect from the Greek’s sudden swarm into Troy.

This Lilliputian horse is symbolic in a production that, under Bagnall’s direction, seems to shrink from the challenge of conveying the epic scale of Armitage’s text. It’s at its best when it’s at its bloodiest, but the story’s enigmas and moments of beauty are lost. Beside its inhuman humans, the gods’ dry wit is refreshing. But even Zeus’s millennium-spanning wisecracks aren’t quite enough to bridge the centuries-deep gulf between us and these ancient, inscrutable characters. 

Alice Saville

First appeared on Auditorium

Miss Saigon, Prince Edward Theatre

Miss Saigon at Prince Edward Theatre

Reviewed by Alice Saville

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Gorgeously lavish design.

The helicopter-blade buzz of Miss Saigon’s return to the West End couldn’t be much louder.  Les Miserables got the celluloid treatment in 2012, and the stage show itself has reached its 29th bodice swelling, barricade-manning year. This gorgeous revival of Claude-Michel Schönberg and Alain Boublil’s still more tragic, Vietnam-era follow-up is unlikely to disappoint the record-breaking number of fans who bought tickets on pre-sales.

Its sung-through narrative is loosely based on Puccini’s Madame Butterfly,reworked from 1900s Japan to 1970s Vietnam. But where Puccini is so enthralled by his gentle heroine that her lover US Naval Officer Pinkerton doesn’t even get an aria to justify his caddish behaviour in the opera’s second act, this story is a kinder, and their love affair mutual.

Kim and Chris fall in love when his friend and fellow GI John buys him a night with her. It’s her first time at local impresario The Engineer’s Fun Palace, a fantasy brothel lit in neon, and enlivened by his nightly, half-clad “Miss Saigon” pageant. Her parents are dead, and she’s fled her burnt village in the country. The affair the follows is the kind of romance that the phrase “epic love story” could have been coined for. Political turmoil, the wrath of her powerful Vietnamese betrothed, a love ceremony curse, high-kicking choruses of showgirls and soldiers alike, the separation of oceans and that notorious helicopter – all brought to hyper-real life under Laurence Connor’s fluid, teeming direction, which frames minute personal moments like documentary photos against a story-filled human backdrop.

His focus is most tightly pulled around Eva Noblezada’s stunning performance as Kim – it’s all the more startling since she’s been plucked from obscurity in good old-fashioned, star hunting style, and sold as an 18-year-old from North Carolina acing her first ever professional audition. She’s intensely emotional, and young enough to make sense of her naive, impulsive devotion to Chris. Beside her heartbreakingly rich voice, Alistair Brammer is less assurred, and his vocal tone is sometimes faltering. But his transformation from emotional soldier to settled-down New Yorker, his baby-blonde curls tamed and his manner hardened, is utterly convincing. Pushing himself between them, brothel-owner The Engineer is a kind of sustained satire on American capitalism with all the subtlety of a 20 foot high girl bar billboard.

Through the war’s brutality, Kim and Chris sing of the relief they find in escaping to “the movie in my head”, but The Engineer’s determined to make his dreams of Hollywood glitz real – Jon Jon Briones navigates his vast show tunes with equally vast reserves of vigour and charisma. After singing about his American dream, he to the audience and asks us “wasn’t that something?”.  Reeling as a white Cadillac rolls off stage, carrying a glitter-encrusted woman in a mink coat, and escorted by a calvacade of high-kicking showgirls under a sky of vast gilded dollar signs, it’s impossible not to agree.

Matt Kinley’s gorgeously lavish set is masterfully lit by Bruno Poet in a design that uses darkness as its most powerful tool. Gloomy, hazy scenes are lit by lanterns, or by the light coming from Kim’s room high above a bustling Saigon street.

Although there are more nuances to this musical’s approach to the fraught racial and social tensions of the Vietnam War that the controversies over the production’s original casting  wouldn’t suggest, there are still some elements of its approach that feel dated. The bui doi song is particularly uncomfortable, with a kind of Earth Song American-messianic message and mawkish projected footage of orphanages sitting ill with the way that the “bui doi” label, helpfully translated to suggest that the Vietnamese despised interracial  children as “the dust of life”, is actually a generic term for street children.

But the other sense in which Miss Saigon feels like a throwback are a little more welcome. As the era of mega-budget new West End musicals vanishes in a puff of smoke – like Simon Cowell’s investment in I Can’t Sing! – its vast cast and astonishingly lavish, haze-drenched setting are genuinely thrilling. This is a sparkling and dark vision of wartime Vietnam and New York; one that finds stark emotional and aesthetic contrasts all the more easily because Schönberg and Boublil are outsiders to both cultures, and claim allegiance to neither.

First appeared on Exeunt

A Dashing Fellow, New Diorama Theatre

A Dashing Fellow at New Diorama Theatre

22nd April-17th May

Reviewed by Alice Saville

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The devil in the detail.

Thanks to Lolita, Nabakov is a kind of by-word for an outsider’s perspective on toxic mid-century American suburbia. His short stories, which Belka Productions adapt here, are less saccharine, more sour. Russian emigres in 1920s and 1930s Berlin mourn burnt-down dashas – especially if pretty young women are in earshot – drown their sorrows in drink, cocaine and unromantic liaisons, and most of all, travel, in this stylishly contrived, cabaret approach to their wandering stories.

The evening is introduced by a gleefully charismatic Peter Clements as Frau Monde, who morphs from demented nightclub hostess, archly flirtatious confidante or cantankerous old bag as the situation dictates – she is the devil, after all. But rather than separate the three stories into discrete entities, this framing device ties them together. Rosy Benjamin and Ben Maier’s ingenious adaptation splices their narratives into a fluid, fast-moving hall – the rapid shifts from story to story echoing the long train rides and wanderings they describe.

The play’s titular “Dashing Fellow” is, of course, anything but – he’s Nabokov’s archetype of the philistine, a concept he returned to again and again in his writing. Konstantin (an appropriately grotesque Joel Gorf) is an exile who lacks the imaginative powers to escape the mundane except through nostalgia for Russia, or meaningless sexual encounters. His rehearsed chat-up lines snare the easily impressed Sonja (Madeline Knight) as they share a train carriage. Lena (Kate Craggs) isn’t so easily caught. She’s been separated from her husband Alexey (Luke Courtier) in their journey from Russia and is doggedly searching for him, while he works as a train guard and forgets his misery in cards and cocaine. Simon Eves’ ingenious, fluid direction means that characters from other stories appear as bit parts, or watch mutely, still in character. Poignantly, Lena and Alexey are invariably marooned on opposite sides of the stage.Agnes Treplin’s sumptous, meticulous design alights, with the years of Nabokov’s 1922-37 residency in Berlin to choose from, on an elegant 1930s style of fashion-plate perfect coats and frocks. Centre stage, scaffolding poles outline the form of a train carriage, with slickly opening and closing doors revealing a succession of intimate interior scenes.

A Nursery Tale departs from the naturalism of the other two tales, as a bleak fairytale of flawed wish fulfillment. The devil, Frau Monde, lets painfully shy Erwin choose women to sleep with in a house designed to perfectly enclose his every fantasy. The only condition is that he most choose an even number.

In keeping with the high cabaret tone Frau Monde sets and stringently maintains, the acting across the stories is arch, and relies on the clasping of chests at moments of high emotion, of heaving breaths and bold, down on one’s knees gestures. It goes some way to making sense of these characters, twisting them into grotesques, but sometimes means moments miss their emotional mark. As Erwin, Edward Cole’s signature move is a rodent-like sniff at the air, like a perverted Childcatcher, making him as much the villain of his own story as the devil herself. He’s a kind of proto-Humbert Humbert – several of his “choices” are disturbingly young – and perhaps the nastiness of his story would have more bite if we were allowed to sympathise with him a little more.

Although in a sense, Erwin’s story feels out of place here, his status as fumbling outsider in sophisticated Berlin is key to understanding the Russian exiles experiences. His humiliations by the urbane Frau Monde, woman of the world, heightened versions of Nabokov’s acute perceptions of never-quite-fitting life on the move. This production safely houses his transients in an elegantly gliding evocation of a short-lived era; they’re unlovable, but beautifully made.

First posted on Exeunt

On Tidy Endings/Safe Sex

On Tidy Endings / Safe Sex at Tristan Bates Theatre

22nd April - 17th May

Reviewed by Alice Saville

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Photo: Jamie Scott-Smith

Receiving their London premiere, these two plays account for two thirds of Harvey Fierstein’s Safe Sex trilogy, a lesser-known successor to his Torch Song Trilogy, which had a four year Broadway run, as well as spawning a movie adaptation, and international performances including a more recent airing at the Menier Chocolate Factory. Instead of sequinned cabaret glamour, this sensitive production suffuses them with a quiet melancholy – a softer echo of Fierstein’s anger and frustration at living and writing in the time of AIDS.

Safe Sex opens with two men tumbling through the door in what the tabloids call a “passionate clinch” – their passion almost unfastened as they wrestle with buttons and braces. And then it’s completely undone by Ghee’s insistence that they stop to check “the list”. This list stands like a stone tablet in judgement over their sex lives, grave with the rules of preventing the transmission of AIDS. Neither has the disease, as far as we know, but Harvey Fierstein’s play starts as a psychological exploration of the weight that AIDS placed on gay mens’ relationships. Poignantly nostalgic about the days when the worst they feared was “the clap”, they reminisce about their carefree days before the disease hit.

These days, as Ghee puts it, “Everyone’s scared. It’s normal to be scared.” But it also becomes gradually apparent that his fears are less universal, more nuanced and personal. CJ de Mooi as Ghee feels a little like a successor to Torch Song Trilogy’s Arnold – especially when he seeks refuge in a silk dressing gown – thanks to his vulnerable mix of neediness, neuroses, femininity and wry wit. He’s driven away Mead with his fear of physical intimacy, and torments him, now he’s back, with a range of excuses from worries about AIDS to repulsion at his sporadic showering habits. What Harvey Fierstein is actually pointing to, here, is the way that AIDS became medicalised cover for gay men’s own self-loathing and resulting fear of intimacy.

To highlight the text’s sudden swings in logic and sense of danger, Safe Sex was originally staged on a giant “teeter totter” (see-saw). Here, director Dan Phillips confines the play to the comforts of bed, making it a slightly leaden kind of pillow talk – although the terms of Ghee and Mead’s engagement are constantly shifting, this play is far from sprawling over the edges of its small allotted space.

By comparison, On Tidy Endings is a less self-contained, but more satisfying piece. Arthur (again played by CJ de Mooi) and Marion are mourning the death of a shared love one; her husband of 18 years, but his partner of the last three, as he cared from him during his decline from AIDS. They’re selling his flat, and splitting the proceeds 50:50 – around them, labelled cardboard boxes and sheafs of legal papers emphasise the brutal, contractual side of death, the parcelling out of emotional ties in the form of material goods and monies. Deena Payne is beautifully warm and natural as Marion, despairing of ever understanding what Arthur wants from her, until he explains the devastating impact of being ignored in private and public after gruelling attempts to care for and cure his dead partner. There’s levity, too, though. Daniel Purves is brilliantly chipper as Marion’s young son, Jim – pragmatic as the briskest City lawyer in the face of death. And Emma Blackman as the lawyer in question, is wittily, admirably abrupt, bursting with inappropriate remarks and motherly advice.

Ironically for a play called Tidy Endings, not all the strands Harvey Fierstein pulls out are tied up – although Marion and Arthur reach a truce, even an affectionate one,  the secret insurance policy Emma reserves for Marion alone is left unexplored. Still more devastating, the potential emotional fall out of Arthur being told by Jim that his father loved him third most, after him and Marion, falls flatly and unacknowledged.

This is in keeping with the production’s restrained approach. The first play of the Safe Sex trilogy, which has been omitted, negotiates the relationship between two men who meet on a night out, but post-AIDS are too scared to go home together. Without it, this is a slender evening, the two plot’s distinct identities confused by CJ de Mooi playing similar roles in the first and second plays. Still, director Dan Phillips’s decision to use British accents in restrained, closely naturalistic stagings is an intriguing, and largely successful one – a softly empathetic slice of a bold, angry trilogy.

First posted on Exeunt

The Fanny Hill Project V2.0

The Fanny Hill Project V2.0 at Camden People's Theatre

28-29th April

Reviewed by Alice Saville

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Girls’ world.

TheatreState’s pared down, sharpened up of reboot of this show starts with a game of ” I have never”. Two female friends solicit mute, vodka-lemonade sipping confessions from the audience and from each other . The questions that start innocuous – Tess has never read John Cleland’s Fanny Hill, the salacious “diary” of an eighteenth century woman of pleasure – but grow injurous – she’s sold the pleasure of her feet’s company to foot fetishists while living in New York. What follows splices the two narratives,  one cutesily artificial, one all too real, together in a fun, messily thought-provoking examination of the taboos and values weighing on female friendship and sexuality.

Cleland’s 1748 novel scurrilously flirts with good taste and moral judgement,  pitying its orphaned protagonist, only to discard it and her utterly into a largely cheerful romp through a bawdy, colourful demi-monde  – succeeded, of course, by an eventual tearful repentance.

There are moments of autonomy in her story, but many more of coercion, by dominating economic factors and people around her. This strand is emphasised by the fact that she’s rarely allowed to finish her narratives before the next chapter is announced. Her co-director Cheryl Gallacher also interrupts, bubbling over with toddlerish enthusiasm. She’s reading, and becoming, Fanny Hill, playing this eighteenth century courtesan as a schoolgirl fantasy come cheesecake pin-up in frills.A harsh voice-over splits it into chapters, splicing it with Tess Seddon’s real life story. It has just as many twists and turns, but no such power to titillate. She graduates from studying drama and moves back in with her parents in Yorkshire, embarking on a grim mid-recession job-hunt and a still grimmer temp receptionist role, where she’s forced into a mustard trouser suit they dig out of a cupboard. Then, she moves to New York to do an unpaid internship with a theatre company, and is pushed out of her boyfriend’s aunt’s house by her Speedo-clad, much younger lover.

It’s fascinating to see Cheryl and Tess’s dynamic evolve from a friendship — if one which extrovert Cheryl maintains with little digs at her friend’s inability to dance, or her sexual history – into a bizarre rivalry of competing narratives. At first the pair conspire to tell their stories, aided by props pulled from Cheryl’ s panniers. These hip pads under her 18th century wide hipped skirt furnish the sunglasses that transform her in Tess’s creepy landlord-by-proxy. At other points, the pair dance around in pink pyjamas and have a pillow fight, complete with a fan that blows white feathers over the stage. But as their narratives, the pair are less and less complicit in each other stories – and in a brutal, powerful echo of the pillowfight scene, Sheryl meets a new aggressor.

Jordan Eaton has been safely trapped behind a DJ booth so far; a man responsible for playing pop songs that view female sexuality through a disturbingly male lens, whether it’s the contrived, performative innocence of Katy Perry’s ‘I Kissed A Girl’ – “hope my boyfriend don’t mind it” – or the darker mood of the Ying Yang Twins’s aggressive hiss of sexual threat. When he threatens, then replaces a cowering Sheryl to become a skirted, simpering parody of her joyous Fanny Hill, this production becomes genuinely unsettling.

This is a story of female sexuality trapped and silenced by these intruding male voices and interpretations – a girly sleepover shifted by mens’ gaze. But it’s more complicated, too,  as it looks at this gaze’s more lucrative properties, and its ability to solve some problems even as others yawn open. TheatreState leave the audience to work out how, if at all, empowered Cheryl is by her new won New York earning power, or whether the tangled system of sexuality they interact with can be challenged or dismantled. It’s a mashed-up, artfully muddled pink cocktail of a provocation.

First posted on Exeunt

Visitors, Arcola

COMPELLING ORDINARINESS

★★★★★

Barney Norris‘s Visitors

Arcola Theatre | London

directed by Alice Hamilton

One old-fashioned living room, ornamented with seated figures who have lost, or are losing themselves; billed as a love story, Barney Norris‘s play is more of a loss story. His first staged full-length script reveals itself as such only by its freshness and lightness of touch – his handling of this dimly unfolding story of forgetting is masterful. 

Edie and Arthur are an elderly couple living together in a remote farmhouse; but although he still tramps about from land to house, feeding chickens and caring for livestock, she’s fading slowly into dementia’s daily new failings. They’ve enlisted Kate to stay with them and help out – she’s a graduate who needs time to think, and brings the same enthusiasm tinged with faint desolation that she presumably brought to volunteer WWOOFingon organic farms, or to her postponed trek to a career. Kate’s less willing, more emotionally implicated shadow is the couple’s son Stephen, who enters his family home in a still deeper gloom. He’s separating from the wife his parents never liked anyway, and this failure only solidifies his deeper failure to be a success in his parents’ eyes – to graduate from being worried about to worrying about them, even as they sink deeper into old age.

Despite the bleakness of the story, it’s suffused with a gentle wit that means it seldom slumps completely, while Alice Hamilton‘s direction manages the impressive feat of ensuring that a play that centres on two elderly people sunk in two easy chairs never feels static. And although the themes – aging, family ties, marriage, love – are timeless, this play feels like it could have been written yesterday, or even next week. Kate is a particularly contemporary creation, right up to her blue dip-dye. She’s footloose, her Scottish law degree left behind in a drawer, a tried-on and discarded costume as useless as an old Brownie uniform or out-grown trainers. Eleanor Wyld’s performance combines faintly hapless affection for Edie with real sharpness and feminist anger at Stephen’s flaws.

Stephen’s fascinating too. He’s an outsider, even from the familiar fictional school of social awkwardness – Simon Muller’s mild, but perpetual unease in the role is so much more uncomfortable to watch than slapstick antics or comic faux pas. His agonising joke about Hell – told to his father who, watching his wife’s painful decline, has a nearer idea of metaphysical sufferings – has all the directionless, mirthless length of a sixth-former’s powerpoint presentation. Although physically vulnerable, Edie and Arthur still have silent, parental power; Arthur (Robin Soans) to quietly damn Stephen’s jokes with his stolid silence, and Edie to surprise, and resist. Linda Bassett’s performance as Edie beautifully captures dementia’s excruciating mix of lucidity, even sharp-edged wit, and dreamy immersion in endlessly repeated stories. She’s able to reminisce “I wish I’d tried LSD. We should take some now!”, to experiment with the safer transgressions of Ottolenghi recipes and falafel, and remark, with poignancy, that mornings seem brighter, even though there’s more light in the middle of the day. But then she returns, again and again, to moments that are more like images – a woman in a wedding dress on a beach, no shoes.

Simon Gethin Thomas‘s brilliantly judged lighting enfolds the stage in constant murk, in contrast to the brightness of Edie’s memories; the light-level familiar from old houses with small windows that, somewhere in the 1950s, took “cosy” as their decorative watchword. Francesca Reidy’s design shares the same ideals, but tips softly into the abstract, with wall-shrines framing groups of memories or tasks; a wedding photo framed by lace, an antiquated group of store-cupboard staples. Just as each set of items is rendered notable only by its framing on stage, this play’s  characters are all utterly ordinary, and the events that unfold commonplace; Barney Norris’s feat has been to make this ordinariness compelling. 

Kate and Edie sing together, but alone, ‘Oh Lord won’t you buy me a Mercedes Benz’ – they’re in different world, aligning for a brief moment of song. Norris’s play is all about these fleeting alignments – visits where these lives come together and points of common ground are found, even for a moment. And in a production this good, few connections are missed.

First published on Auditorium

Sweeney Todd

HIGH NOTES & CUT THROATS

★★★★

Sondheim‘s Sweeney Todd

Avery Fisher Hall | New York City

Alan Gilbert | New York Philharmonic 

Sondheim imagined his 1979 gothic shocker Sweeney Todd as a chamber piece – and a filthy chamber at that. Much of the action takes place in the cramped room above Mrs Lovatt’s pie shop, from whence he carves up his victims with a barber’s razor. But Sondheim’s music is built along more spacious lines, which the New York Philharmonic fleshes out in this expansive, semi-staged production inhabited by the sizeable talents ofBryn Terfel and Emma Thompson.

Under Alan Gilbert’s baton, it is the thrill of a full orchestra charging through the score that hits you first, colouring its bright and varied moods – the swarming buzz of brass as the eponymous Demon Barber of Fleet Street’s torment grows, or the magic of surrounding his wistful soliloquies, ugly only in the violence of their intention, in a wall of beautiful warm sound. But around the formality of these massed ranks of instruments this staging has a loose, light-hearted feel. The cast dutifully file on, solemnly clutching laminated-cover copies of the score. Bryn Terfel casts his to the floor with devil-may-care abandon, Emma Thompson throws hers with a gulp of mock-fear, and everyone else follows suit – then they overturn the piano to make a makeshift platform, tear their concert dress into artfully-planned disarray, mess up their hairdos and arrange themselves in a fist-raised parody of a Broadway cast in full throttle. There’s always something slightly awkward about a semi-staged approach. Lonny Price’s direction overcomes the enforced Brechtianism of having the orchestra visible on stage with tongue-in-cheek touches – Mrs Lovatt kneads the dough for her pies on the surface of a vast timpani drum, and steals a violinist’s chin rest cloth to clean up with.

Charging among an orchestra that cowers in fear like so many cumbersome cattle, Terfel is a an immaculate Todd, his saturnine power an enjoyable contrast to Johnny Depp’s nervy edge in the 2007 film of the musical. His voice is the real star of the show – wonderfully resonant and rich, it brings a smooth fluency to Sweeney Todd’s complex, octave-spanning musical soliloquies that, in performance, are more often the jagged, cracked outpourings of a man in torment. He’s a cipher, another Peter Grimes whose motives are obscure to the last. Thompson as Mrs Lovatt is more transparent; she’s having a ball, playing the role as the type of gal to end up being thrown out of any party with free booze. She focuses in tightly on the humorous side of the character – where Helena Bonham Carter played the part with sepulcral whimsy, Thompson has all the vigour of a tipsy aunt, her expansive arm movements barely encompassing her glee.

The evening’s starry feel is supplemented by the unannounced appearance of multi-Tony Award winning Audra McDonald, who doesn’t hide her light under her tattered shawl as the Beggar Woman. Full of charisma, she heightens the contrast between her heartbreakingly sweet, rich lament of “Alms! Alms!” and her bawdy propositioning to its brightest and sharpest degree. Christian Borle swoops about as hack-barber Pirelli in a vast cape, full of musical precision and luxuriously trimmed glee in equal measure. Inevitably, some of the supporting cast are left in the shade. Antony Hope is never the easiest of parts – all priggish impetuousness – and Jay Armstrong Johnson’s relative inexperience shows as he struggles with accent and role alike. Neither is Jeff Blumenkrantz fully inflated with The Beadle’s necessary, overswelling pomposity. But the chorus’ ripe, histrionic voices have all the tremulous power needed to stand up to the orchestral big guns.

It’s a joy hearing Sondheim’s score swelling out from a full orchestra and vast chorus, its operatic tinges finding fulfilment in the hands and voices of such talented musicians. Still, it’s hard not to miss Sondheim’s desolate seriousness and gruesome horror in amongst this production’s rushing energy. The story is scurrilous, lifted from an 1846-7 Penny Dreadful that mined the wildest fancies of Victorian London’s streets, which, after a few quick reads, would tread it underfoot again. The idea of baking people in pies is patently ludicrous, and it’s surrounded by plenty of the more colourful trappings of its setting; patent medicine, transported convicts, lunatic asylums. Yet although Sondheim’s lyrics have plenty of witty nods to the humorous side of things, the piece is at heart a revenge tragedy with all the brutality of Shakespeare’s Titus Andronicus as well as its androgenic pies.

Although here his glistening “friends” are plentiful silvery instruments rather than razor blades, Sweeney Todd is fundamentally a lone, broken man in his squalid attic, consumed by revenge. It’s wonderful to hear the music of his story done justice; how wonderful it would be to see its stars letting rip in a smaller, bloodier chamber.

First published on Auditorium