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

Birdland, Royal Court

★★★★☆

Simon Stephens‘ Birdland 

The Royal Court Theatre | London

directed by Carrie Cracknell 

As though in a scene from an old, old fairytale: a prince whose every demand is anticipated and met demands a perfect peach. Not too green, not too ripe, locally grown. The scene could be a parable for what money can’t buy you – and in a more straightforward story it might be. But Simon Stephens‘ bleakly brilliant new play tells you both what money can buy, and what it can’t, chronicling a rock star’s debris-strewn trail burnt through the lives of those around him.

Paul’s act must be somewhere between Rufus Wainwright and Marilyn Manson; we never see him sing, but he staggers off stage in a drugged fug, vulnerable, black-clad and tousled, hinting at a soul-searching showmanship. Offstage, his soul searching is more limited. In Andrew Scott‘s endlessly fascinating performance, Paul has the impulsive vigour of a boy-king, determined to control people and events around him, but still to be amused and entertained. His mate Johnny, played by Alex Price with the half-affectionate, half-weary wit that years in the shadows will form, writes him songs and puts up with him when no one else will. Along the way, they pick up fans who are charmed, humiliated and discarded in turn. Jenny is a hotel waitress, former mathematician who turned from numbers because they were too unstable, too relative. Paul knows what she means. So much of Simon Stephens’ text centres on money, and Paul’s inability to make sense of the millions he can command, and the power they give him over people around him – in one of a host of perfectly judged one-liners, he announces “I like Russians. There’s a precision to their use of money that I find really intoxicating.” And the limits of that power, too; the journalist Annalisa (Charlotte Randle) won’t kiss Johnny for his proffered “a hundred fucking thousand pounds” and leaves, piqued.

But Johnny only cares about his girlfriend Marnie, who Yolanda Kettle plays with dreamy, troubled, moneyed simplicity. When she gets hurt, as everyone Paul and Johnny encounter seems to, Paul’s descent begins. Carrie Cracknell‘s direction starts out arch, characters swiveling round on chairs to chime in as a sycophantic or mocking chorus. But her style loosens up as the play’s narrative becomes more and more subjective, whileIan McNeil‘s set rifts upon, unearthing a sickly Lethe of black gunge. MacNeil’s whole design is almost distractingly gorgeous – a brutalist triumphal arch or Stonehenge lit by Neil Austin in a multi-dimensional array of album cover friendly, polychromatic hues.

Simon Stephens spent his early twenties as the bass guitarist in Scottish art punk band Country Teasers – there’s a kind of reminiscing familiarity, almost, in Paul’s chat with his father Alastair about his days driving the band’s kit to gigs. With nuanced symmetry, Daniel Cerqueira plays both Alastair, begging a loan from Paul to the tune of £1,000 after falling prey to internet lenders, and David, Paul’s demonic manager, who presents Paul, mock-begging, with a bill of operatic proportions – scores of debt for ‘Flowers & Miscellaneous’ (drugs, of course) alone.

It’s almost as overwhelming looking at Stephens’ line-up of plays in recent years. He’s got four premieres in 2014 alone, suggesting he’s made his own kind of Faustian pact. But this text feels like he’s cutting loose from award-winning translations of Ibsen and novel adaptations to return to a part of his past, and do something a bit punk. Birdland is saturated with a distaste for money, and for the poisonous corrupting systems it makes that blow apart ideas of value and worth, only to suddenly rediscover them the second something goes wrong. It also feels incredibly personal, though – being wrapped up inside one lethally self-absorbed, but determinedly immortal mind. Seen through Paul’s eyes, the view is dazzling.

Alice Saville

photos | © Richard Hubert Smith

First appeared on Auditorium

The Bridges of Madison County

★★★☆

The Bridges of Madison County

Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre | NYC

music & lyrics Jason Robert Brown | book Marsha Norman

directed by Bartlett Sher

This show’s titular covered bridges are the gentlest possible kind of tourist attraction – charming, dour 19^th century wooden structures. And this new musical is similarly unassuming in scope, dealing with a small, fleeting, suburban affair based on Robert James Waller’s bestselling 1992 novel of the same name – an intimate, tear-jerking memoir for the eyes of 50 million sobbing readers only.

Marsha Norman, who wrote the book, is a Tony-award winning veteran of adapting books for the stage, including The Secret Garden (1991) and the grittier, Oprah-backed musical of The Color Purple (2005), while composer Jason Robert Brown won a Tony for his score for Parade (1998) – this pair are habituees hardened by decades of writing for Broadway, tackling a not-quite vintage, but not-quite forgotten blockbuster romance. Itemised by constituent parts, this musical seems like a sure-fire, splash-quoted hit, and indeed it’s picked up four Tony nominations. But the reality isn’t quite as bold and brash as you might expect. This timid musical is almost embarrassed by its own romanticism; a housewife hiding a slushy novel under a recipe book on the nightstand.

The star of this novel (actual and metaphorical) is the be-aproned Francesca, who’s an Italian migrant trapped in 1960s Iowa. She’s a good rural wife, growing kale on a vegetable patch outside, cooking for her husband and two teenage children, and moderating their squabbles. But Kelli O’Hara’s stellar performance is undershot with just enough edge and subtle glamour to make it clear that Francesca’s dreams float above such mundane concerns. Drifting, handsome Robert, sent by National Geographic to photograph Madison County’s covered bridges, spots this too, as she gently romances him with stories of home and Italian stews. Steven Pasquale’s faint reciprocation is easily outshone by O’Hara’s colour and brightness, but rightly so – this play is her technicolor fantasy, the focus pulled tightly on her animated, ecstatic features.

Around her, the field is blurred and the atmosphere is hazy, the whole play a single summer’s fever-dream. And it’s a particularly American kind of dream, too – one in almost-uncritical love with small-town life and immigrant tales and resilient, unfancy Midwestern values.

Still, the play is shot through with subtle satire on rural Iowa life. Francesca’s children and husband are away at a steer competition that’s handled with a loving half-seriousness, which still finds the grossness of carting shampooed cattle to a state fair beauty parade. Even more sharply, it emphasises the small-town torture of perpetually being watched. Bartlett Sher‘s direction effectively shadows Francesca and Robert’s romance with the presence of their neighbours on stage as mute, stolid adjuncts to the story, pulling out binoculars or noting number plates. And Francesca’s family might be miles away, but they still tug at her by standing as observing spectres as her affair unfolds.

Behind the characters, Michael Yeargan‘s stunning, straightforward design is a cornfield that glows and swells from green to full gold ripeness. And the covered bridge is a set of weathered timbers that fly in, dreamily, in an abstract evocation of the title’s landmark. This beauty is in keeping withJason Robert Brown’s scores unapologetically, swooning romantic approach – unvaried, perhaps, but still unvarying lovely. This is a gentle 1960s that’s not over the 1940s yet, let alone the 1950s. Only Robert’s ex-wife Marian  (a gorgeously-voiced Whitney Bashor) injects a contemporary feel, with her short dresses and free-spirited, proto-Joni Mitchell songs.

Brief flirtations with seductive hippydom aside, this musical is nonetheless a reaffirmation of a deeply nostalgic value set. Francesca must hold her family together to ensure that her son becomes a doctor, not a counterculture drop out, and to soothe her daughter’s anxieties so she can go and marry and mother in turn. The show that revolves dreamily around Francesca follows a similarly predictable trajectory, through old-fashioned values and weak romantic fantasies, which still manage to weave a hazy summer’s day seduction. 

Alice Saville

photos | © Joan Marcus

First published on Auditorium