1984

Almeida Theatre, London

*****

By George Orwell
Adapted and created by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan

Mark Arends, (centre seated) and Company

This adaptation by Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan of George Orwell's chillingly prescient classic, respects the story and its 65 year old heritage, yet gives it a disturbing relevance that speaks to our 21st century lives.

One wonders what Orwell would make of today’s multi-lane information superhighway. A world in which millions of digital fingerprints are left every day, creating a priceless seam of data to be mined or exploited by governments, corporations and bandits able to reach beyond the always outmoded and feeble data protection legislation. And that’s just here in the free West. Elsewhere dictatorships and fundamentalists across a spectrum of political and religious extremes tragically perpetuate the evils that Orwell’s oft quoted dystopian hell sought to mimic.

The Almeida’s co-production with Headlong and the Nottingham Playhouse is vivid and perceptive. Chloe Lamford’s set design shows meticulous detail in depicting Winston Smith’s world, details that literally fall away after his arrest, with the stark screened whiteness of Room 101 being so bleak that Smith’s blood, shed during harrowing torture scenes, provides a shocking splash of colour. Ingeniously Lamford deploys large video screens across every scene, graphically promoting the reality that Big Brother is watching everything.

Mark Arends’ Smith embodies the flawed everyman that Orwell intended and his grappling with desire, love and betrayal, against a backdrop of the pernicious Thought Police is as plausible as is his pain during torture that is almost unbearable to witness. Onstage throughout the single act 100 minute play, his performance is a flawless demonstration of his craft. Provoking and breaking Smith, Tim Dutton’s O’Brien is almost a cliché, were it not that the spook he represents is just so believably manipulative. Hara Yannas’ Julia, who loves Smith and yet who betrays him, as he betrays her under duress, gets the balance spot on in her character’s ambiguity.

Deservedly sold out, the play holds a mirror to our fractured world. That our democratic society provides a forum in which theatre such as 1984, together with the political debate it sparks, can thrive, is a liberty that in itself should be cherished. In far too many nations, the worst aspects of Orwell’s grim fantasy remain a terrible reality. 

Runs to 29th March 2014

Duncan Sheik - Live

Bush Hall, London

****

Duncan Sheik

In London to premiere his latest musical American Psycho, Duncan Sheik headed across a wet wintry capital to front a gig at (Shepherds) Bush Hall, his first appearance in town since playing Dingwall’s in 1997.

With Spring Awakening already to his Broadway credit and notwithstanding its predominantly rapturous but certainly eclectic critical reception, American Psycho likely to follow suit (a West End transfer must surely be on the cards) it would be easy to assume Sheik is little more than an occasional writer of hit shows. Actually he’s a whole lot more and there is not just depth but breadth to his work too, with his singer/songwriter role borne out in an ever increasing number of album releases.

Under Simon Hale’s musical direction and backed by a string quartet, two keyboards and drums, Sheik was the sole and occasionally solo guitarist on the night. Starting on acoustic, The Love From Hell an acerbic album number, suggested a hint of Tom Waits amongst its angsty guilt. Lucie Jones, who impressively took time out from the gruelling demands of opening American Psycho at the Almeida, was to give a scorching Mama Who Bore Me from Spring Awakening, with Sheik’s accompaniment giving an edge of authentic nuance that sometimes only a song’s composer can truly achieve.

Sheik’s respect for the sound of the 80’s is well documented and in 2011 he released his album Duncan Sheik Covers 80s, featuring his own take on a dozen or so hits of the synth-pop era. On the night, his interpretation of Depeche Mode’s Stripped was another fine work and along with much of Sheik’s performance, continued to define him as a fine musician and performer.

With electric guitar replacing acoustic, Sheik treated the packed-out hall to This Is Not An Exit, as a snatch from American Psycho. The show is an 80’s satire and it says much for Sheik’s work that with hits from the era sprinkled throughout the work, his new compositions preserve the sound and the mood of so much that was vacuous in that decade. Matt Smith acts the song sublimely eight times a week, but in Sheik’s hands the number evolves from a musical theatre moment into a piercing comment upon the time. The show's original London cast need to release a recording soon for Sheik’s work demands nothing less than a considered listening.

Nearly twenty years has been too long to wait to hear this man on stage. He spoke of finding this west London audience and venue much more welcoming than his 1990’s Camden gig. With a new album due out in 2014, here’s hoping he returns here soon.

American Psycho plays at London's Almeida Theatre. My review can be found here.

American Psycho

Almeida Theatre, London

*****

Book by Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa

Music and lyrics by Duncan Sheik

Based on the novel by Brett Easton Ellis

Directed by Rupert Goold

Matt Smith

Trading sonic screwdriver for shotgun, Matt Smith sheds his Dr Who persona to emerge as Patrick Bateman the damaged anti-hero of American Psycho. A bestselling and sometimes darkly comic comment upon the vacuity of the 1980's, Brett Easton Ellis’ novel was famously realised as a 2000 movie starring Christian Bale. Since then a musical version has been talked of, but it has taken until now for Rupert Goold to helm the first ever translation of an Ellis novel from page to stage.

A young and talented investment banker, Bateman is devoted to style and success, finding failure nauseating. His psyche however is complex and being surrounded by chatteringly beautiful Vogue-devoted peers, (the women in particular have a clever early ensemble number You Are What You Wear) whose pursuit of fashion or the next major deal leaves him cold, only deepens his frustrations as his actions become increasingly barbaric.

Smith represents perhaps the most inspired casting of recent years. Where the eponymous Doctor is at best semi-detached from society, Bateman’s mind is truly a world apart from his surroundings and when it comes to detachment, nobody does it better than Smith. His antic disposition early on sets him apart from his banker buddies and as his reason ebbs away, Smith perfectly captures Bateman's mental decline, never once losing focus nor resorting to cliche. His signature number Clean is a clinically chilling performance from an actor not usually associated with melody.

The company work is classy and consistent. Susannah Fielding is Evelyn, Bateman's fiancée, more focused on the carat count of her engagement ring than the slowly crumbling cognisance of her betrothed. Goold has given her a persona more often associated with a Roy Lichtenstein pop art painting. Fielding's characterisation is one of the most fleshed out depictions of a shallow two dimensional woman to be found. Cassandra Compton’s Jean, whose love for Bateman touches the very heart of the beast, has us fearing for her safety whilst gasping at her performance as during her assured solo of A Girl Before, Bateman seductively undresses her, all the time his nail gun close at hand. Amongst the men Hugh Skinner’s closeted gay Luis who mistakes a murderous grip from the homophobic Bateman as a sign of affection, delivers a recurring vulnerability that is never offered cheaply. Seasoned trouper Gillian Kirkpatrick, playing Bateman’s mother, suggests just a whiff of Hitchcock’s Mrs Bates as we seek to comprehend the complex motivation of her son.

Roberto Aguirre-Sacasa’s book takes a scalpel to Ellis' original, fashioning a carefully crafted arc that is original yet also true to source. Aguirre-Sacasa's background is in comic book creativity (his is the Vegas-bound Spider-Man: Turn off the Dark) and his eye for the graphic makes for a seamless interpretation. With music and lyrics by Spring Awakening's Duncan Sheik, the 1980’s pedigree of the show is assured. Sheik's songs are consistently concise and on point. No trite lyrics here, Bateman himself would be proud.

Es Devlin uses the compact Almeida space effectively, enhancing the minimalist set with two inspired revolves on stage left and right that stylishly shift the action from Manhattan’s high society to a Hamptons beachfront with Finn Ross’ video projections completing the illusions. The story’s violence, mostly suggested and only once depicted with extreme gore, is tastefully portrayed with Lynne Page’s choreography brilliantly depicting the (blood-free) shotgun blastings of a deranged nightclub massacre.

Whilst the story may not be timeless, some thirty years on and amidst London’s multi-million pound properties, chic eateries and an ever widening gulf between rich and poor, much of the ethos that Ellis despised lives on today. But much as Bateman takes an axe to his victims, so too will this show split critics and opinions. Not for children, nor the easily offended, American Psycho is shocking and uncomfortable theatre. Brutally inspired, brilliantly realised and stunningly performed.

Ticket details:

In one of those episodes of life imitating art, with the run already sold out and until this show transfers to the West End (which it surely must), you are more likely to score a table at New York’s fictional Dorsia restaurant than at the Almeida.

Day tickets are available until the show closes February 1, details below. Queue early and wrap up warm.

http://www.almeida.co.uk/your-visit/booking-information/american-psycho-tickets/

The Dark Earth And The Light Sky - Review

Almeida Theatre, London


**


Written by Nick Dear

Directed by Richard Eyre

This review was first published in The Public Reviews

Shaun Dooley (l) and Pip Carter watch Hattie Morahan (Helen)

The poet Edward Thomas led a full, if melancholy life, before enlisting to serve in the First World War and being killed in an explosion at Arras in 1917 at the age of 39.

Nick Dear’s play charts Thomas’ life from his younger days and meeting Helen, whom he was to marry, and pays particular attention to his relationship with the much lauded American poet Robert Frost, as their paths crossed shortly before the outbreak of war. Thomas also enjoyed an arguably unhealthy but nonetheless strictly platonic friendship with the 20th century writer Eleanor Farjeon, adding a complexity further deepened by Helen’s ensuing jealousy, which forms another strand of Dear’s writing.

Whilst the play’s canvas is certainly broad, it fails to be as effective as Dear would surely have intended, only occasionally presenting a moving depiction of the human condition. Thomas, sensitively played by Pip Carter, wrote of rural landscapes and as the programme acknowledges, often with a metaphysical reach that embraced the natural world around him. He was a man enchanted by birdsong and nature. To then attempt to recreate and import his beautiful world onto a theatre’s stage, albeit one sprinkled with genuine earth but nonetheless still within the intrinsically artificial environment of the Almeida auditorium and then pepper it with recorded sound effects and a starlit backcloth, seems to abuse all that was natural that inspired this wonderful poet. Dear has also reduced too much of the action of Thomas’ life to caricature, though Ifan Huw Dafydd relishes his role as Phillip, Edward’s father. Shaun Dooley as Frost is a stiltedly arrogant American, and when late in act two he relates the familial tragedies that have befallen him, it seems a strangely perfunctory inventory of death and illness.

The audience learn of Thomas’ death firstly in an act one monologue from Farjeon, touchingly performed by Pandora Colin and then after the interval, complete with sound effects and pyro, we have to witness the poet’s actual demise on stage. Dear’s re-visiting of this death is unnecessary and rarely has a stage reference to The Great War been as unmoving as this play’s. One jumps at the explosion, but does not weep at the loss. R C Sherriff’s Journey’s End achieved so much more with much less stagecraft.

Whilst the work’s intentions are noble, as a drama it is flawed. Richard Eyre has immense wisdom and creative talent and with further development, this tale could deserve a cinematic treatment. Eyre has excellent form behind the camera, and for him to capture England’s Hampshire and Gloucestershire and New England’s Franconia on film, would give Dear’s writing and Thomas’ verse the stage they so richly deserve.

Runs to 12 January 2013

King Lear - Review

Almeida Theatre, London

****

Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by Michael Attenborough

The Almeida's image of Jonathan Pryce as King Lear

King Lear at the Almeida is a raw production, designed and costumed with a pre Christian simpleness of stone, flax and linen that serves the story well. Lear's pagan kingdom, rife with base human motives of bastardy, lechery, jealousy and greed, as well as deep love and loyalty is clearly depicted in this interpretation by Michael Attenborough.

At 65, Jonathan Pryce is realistically aged for the title role. At times majestic, his wild ( not entirely grey ) hair and luxurious beard combined with a partially exposed chest, suggest a man still in possession of many physical faculties. His is a rare Lear that still has the potential to make members of the audience swoon. The performance is pitiful too as we witness the fraying of the king's powers of reason with his age. "Oh let me not be mad " has rarely conveyed such power, coming from a man who whilst at that juncture of old age where his mind is becoming increasingly muddled and  impaired, is young enough to still be painfully aware of his own decline.

Clive Wood’s Gloucester is as good as any. He easily suggests a man who enjoys life and who enjoyed begetting Edmund out of wedlock, yet is sufficiently naïve to be hoodwinked by his bastard son into believing Edgar's plot against him. Even more than Lear perhaps, this Gloucester is a man more sinned against than sinning. As Edmund, Kieran Bew possesses power, presence and evil will. He exudes the sexual attraction that sees both Goneril and Regan lust for him and up until his final swordfight he remains a plausible villain. Richard Goulding provides a thoughtful Edgar and in an interestingly creative touch, Attenborough has us introduced to the young man whilst he is whoring. A credible concept given his father’s track record and with a further degree of inventiveness provided by Edmund paying off the whore. This small detail by the director provides a slightly refreshing perspective on the two brothers, clearly demonstrating Edmunds perceptive and manipulative skills. Goulding’s Edgar goes on to be a moving performance, particularly after he encounters his blinded father, but he has more in the tank that can be given to this production and he needs to find it to truly win the sympathy and pathos that an exceptional Edgar can garner. 

Attenborough has also had some creative fun with Regan and Goneril. During the opening scene in which the kingdom is divided, as Lear awards each sister their portion, he kisses these two older siblings fully and inappropriately on the mouth, clearly suggesting an abusive sexual relationship. This sexual connotation almost justifies the sisters’ subsequent cruel stance towards their father and provides another refreshing perspective on a critical aspect of the tale. Zoe Waites is a worthy Goneril, but no more than that. The moment when Lear curses her with sterility, is a point in the play that has the power to bring an audience to tears. Where a well acted king requires an "as strong" actress as his daughter, to flinch at her father's venomous words, Waite's response to this pivotal speech lacked emotional power. Jenny Jules’ Regan also needs greater depth. Attenborough could have and should have extracted more from both these women, they deserved it.

Chook Sibtain’s Cornwall was nasty throughout. He oozed contempt with word and action, blinding Gloucester in a scene that owed as much to Eli Roth’s “torture porn” as to classic writing. When he throws the ripped out eyeballs at his bleeding helpless victim, the audience flinch and rarely has Gloucester’s Tenant needed to have been as kindly as Alix Wilton Regan’s, her warmth almost soothing the crowd before they rush out for much needed interval G&Ts.

The Almeida stage is sparsely adorned for the production. Laid with heavy flagstones, a pre mediaeval time is clearly suggested. The production is generally lit well too, though there is an occasional incongruity with electric bulkhead lights flickering on external castle walls that sit at odds with the setting of the play, particluarly true with traditional flaming torches burning in the production. 

Without doubt this is a King Lear that demands to be seen. Whilst Attenborough could have made the company more exciting around their star, Pryce remains one of the leading actors of his era. His performance as the ageing raging king is memorable, moving and will stay with one for a long time.

Runs until November 3 2012 

FOOTNOTE

Much anticipation surrounds each new production of both Hamlet and King Lear. Within an actor's professional life cycle, to play the Dane marks an accession to Shakespeare's great roles, whilst Lear is a role typically tackled in the twilight of a career. At 65, Jonathan Pryce plays the ageing king at perhaps the commencement of a twilight chapter with his performance presenting a more "youthful" take on the ageing monarch when compared to some of the other relatively recent Lears of Jacobi and McKellen. As a footnote and albeit long before blogging was invented, Hecuba was fortunate enough to see Pryce's astounding 1980 Hamlet at the Royal Court and it is pleasing to witness part of the revolve of this actor's Shakespearean career.