Vardy v Rooney : The Wagatha Christie Trial - Review

Ambassador Theatre, London

****

Adapted by Liv Hennessy

Directed by Lisa Spirling 

Lucy May Barker and Laura Dos Santos

Sporting possibly the longest title to be found in London right now, Vardy v Rooney : The Wagatha Christie Trial is playing in the West End's Ambassador Theatre before heading out to a run of away fixtures across the country. 

Based on the court transcript of Rebekah Vardy’s (spoiler alert) failed libel action against Coleen Rooney, and lasting for as long as a typical football match including injury time, Liv Hennessy fillets down the seven days of High Court evidence into a slick one-two of drama that slots home a brilliant explanation of Rooney’s exposé of Vardy’s leaking of her private life to The Sun newspaper. With the beautiful game running through the heart of show, Hennessy’s script offers up the throw-in of a couple of court-side pundits who deftly sidestep the story’s more cumbersome legal details, allowing the cast to take a wicked deflection with the narrative and keep the audience gripped as the play’s end-to-end storytelling unfolds.

The pace is fast, witty and perceptive - and it’s a mark of the show’s role as a record of very modern history, that nearly all of the laughs come from the trial’s verbatim transcripts. What brings the dryness of the English legal system to life however is the outstanding performances from Lucy May Barker and Laura Dos Santos as, respectively, Vardy and Rooney, with equally brilliant turns from Tom Turner as Rooney’s barrister David Sherborne and Jonathan Broadbent as Vardy’s silk Hugh Tomlinson. Under Lisa Spirling’s direction all four leads exquisitely capture the essence of their characters in a crackingly crafted combination of caricature and credibility. Dos Santos goes so far as to elicit a touch of sympathy towards the humiliation that Coleen Rooney has endured, with dignity, for years.

Pitch-side, the show’s creatives have a fine game too. Polly Sullivan’s set and costumes capture both the gravitas of the courtroom alongside the stiletto-spiked accoutrements of WAG-dom. Likewise Johanna Town’s lighting plots keep the tempo slick.

For an evening of informative and often hilarious entertainment, Vardy v Rooney hits the back of the net.

Runs until May 20th, then on tour

Photo credit: Pamela Raith

Queen Anne - Review

Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon


****


Written by Helen Edmundson
Directed by Natalie Abrahami

Natascha McElhone and Emma Cunniffe

Commissioned by the RSC, Queen Anne is a new play by Helen Edmundson, directed by Natalie Abrahami in her debut season at Stratford-upon-Avon.

Little is known about Anne's 12 year reign and Edmundson creates an intricate, intriguing and intelligent portrait of the Queen. She also captures a poignant observation upon the friendship between Anne and   Sarah Churchill, later Duchess of Marlborough.

What emerges is a neatly written play that moves the audience from deep laughter to overwhelmed silence in the same scene. With its satirical ballads, its perfectly directed staging and, most of all, a witty and sharp text, Queen Anne shows a not-so-common ability to depict a credible and colourful image of the politics and human condition of the time.

Intriguingly, Edmundson also creates two of the fiercest female roles to have been seen on stage in some time. Her look at the development of Emma Cunniffe’s Anne and Natascha McElhone’s Sarah and of their friendship (and eventually of its end) is a moving and mesmerizing experience encompassing love, betrayal and sacrifice.

Cunniffe embodies suffering, both physical and emotional as her Anne is divided between her duties as Queen and her heart and feelings as friend, whilst McElhone's Sarah offers a bewitching crescendo of emotions.  

Jonathan Broadbent delivers a scheming Robert Harley, representing the emergent political world and providing a link between the Anne's court and the outside world of the Inns of Court, Daniel Defoe and Jonathan Swift. 

The production's flamboyance – especially in the choral and satirical scenes – owes much to the creative vision of Movement Director Ann Yee.

Helen Edmundson has delivered a fascinating and gripping historical comment. Queen Anne proves to be a story that has needed to have been told and which demands to be seen.

Runs until 23rd January 2016

Guest reviewer: Simona Negretto

Photo Credits: Manuel Harlan

My Night with Reg - Review

Apollo Theatre, London

****

Written by Kevin Elyot

Directed by Robert Hastie

Geoffrey Streatfeild, Jonathan Broadbent and Julian Ovenden

On paper, My Night with Reg could be a searingly witty sitcom written around six unorthodox characters, each with their own hilarious intricacies and tragic plights. However, the death of writer Kevin Elyot in 2014 sees the play’s more macabre and somber notes raise the inflexion, making this production more melancholic and disconcerting than just a classy revival of a now certified ‘classic’, modern, British comedy.

Not just an original gay play, Elyot lays bare (quite literally) the social and sexual manners of the titular Reg, who never appears on stage, though his seed, it seems, has been sewn just about everywhere else. Elyot’s gratifyingly outrageous and authentic dialogue is ignited brilliantly by Jonathan Broadbent who reprises his Guy, the probably-passed-it central figure, whose circle of old university friends come over for a dinner party.

Robert Hastie’s direction is delicate and nuanced from the offset. Not a glance or a line is missed as we are introduced to Geoffrey Streatfield’s dandy Daniel, the camp and frivolous dancer to David Bowie’s Starman with his long-time sidekick pal John, played charmingly by Julian Ovenden. 

Newly in love Daniel is a bounding energy, which makes his demise to a mourning mess all the more poignant. The plot then begins to trace the long line of his beloved’s bed notches, which becomes a standing joke as an ever-entangled web of deceit and betrayal is found to be woven throughout the friendship group. 

Meanwhile, Guy’s unrequited love for the coiffured-in-the-style-of-Hugh-Grant John is the most profound theme (alongside the infidelity) and is best exploited through Richard Cant and Matt Bardock, the brilliantly mis-matched hopeless lovers Bernie and Benny. This bold bittersweet comedy duo of the expletive loving brazen Benny who is more akin to a Jason Statham stereotype than the lover of conservatory-coveting Bernie, in turn described as “redefining boredom”. But one can’t help feeling for the softly-spoken Bernie as he dotes after the gregarious Benny and doubts the strength of his own relationship, before both confess to having bedded the apparently insatiable Reg. 

As we move into the darker territory of the third and final section of the play, this lack of forethought and arbitrary irresponsibility threatens to take down of each them and following a key character’s death, Hastie’s direction, like the sex, takes on a casualness, with the play’s pace suffering as it lulls sulkily towards the curtain.

Arguably, the reason Elyot’s play continues to draw audiences is that the issues remain as pertinent now as they did in the 1980’s. Disputes regarding promiscuity, sexual politics and AIDS remain equally unresolved and enduring.

Runs until 11th April 2015

Guest reviewer Lauren Gauge

My Night With Reg - Review

Donmar Warehouse, London

****

Written by Kevin Elyot
Directed by Robert Hastie

My Night With Reg is a powerfully perceptive observation of being a gay white Englishman in the 1990's. The spectre of AIDS is cutting a swathe through the community, yet the addictive pulses of love, passion and promiscuity beat fiercely. The play focuses on 6 men all connected, be it through shared times at university or simply drinking together at the local pub. All are friends, some are lovers and most have had a passing or lingering sexual relationship with Reg. Kevin Elyot’s drama revolves around a flat warming and two wakes - the first of which is for Reg, who whilst he never appears on stage, befalls an AIDS-related death that marks the play's portentous gravitas.

Robert Hastie directs with vision, but it is casting director Alastair Coomer who has done an immaculate job with a company that gel magnificently. Jonathan Broadbent plays Guy - a camp, cookery-focused, home builder. Desperate for love, but looked on by his peers as simply the very best of a mate - and with revulsion by young Eric (Lewis Reeves) who describes anything intimate with the older corpulent man as akin to "snogging your mum". That Guy's friends confide their desires in him and how they are cheating on each other, only adds to the pathos of his loneliness.

Guy's two friends from student days are John and Daniel, played with the most subtly elegant public school wit by Julian Ovenden and Geoffrey Streatfeild. Ovenden's chiselled looks define him as the object of Guy's unspoken desire. Raffishly rampant, he can have who he wants and Ovenden deftly portrays his character's wracking guilt at having only ever found true love in an illicit affair with Reg, whilst the dead man had been Daniel's partner. Elyot’s dramatic incisions into the pain of John’s guilt is merciless. Streatfeild is another treat - flamboyant and larger than life, a man who can gloriously "sniff another's tumesence", yet whose grief at Reg's death allied with his suspicions that his partner was cheating on him, is another gem of a performance.

Completing the sextet are local pals, the effete, timid Bernie (Richard Cant) and his gloriously rough-trade bus-driving partner Benny (Matt Bardock), a man who will shag anything that moves. His is a clever creation, demonstrating that sexualities straddle society.

Against an occasional backdrop of Bowie and musical memories that the men may have shared at different times with Reg, the humour plays out against a knowing and mostly unspoken fear of the epidemic they risk. It is left to Benny to articulate the terror of any "cough or twinge" bringing him out in a cold sweat.

The text of the play is finely crafted, matched only by the exquisite stagecraft that the six men display. Not a "must see" as the nudity, whilst in context, may offend, My Night With Reg remains another example of London's world class theatre.

Runs until 27th September 2014