A Night With Janis Joplin - Review

Peacock Theatre, London

****

Written and directed by Randy Johnson

Mary Bridget Davies

Doing what it says on the tin, A Night with Janis Joplin proves to be just that. Mary Bridget Davies has crossed the pond to re-create her Tony-nominated take on Joplin and she is sensational.

Davies’ pipes are a wonder, as over a couple of hours including interval she tackles some of the singer’s most famous songs with a vocal magnificence. Massive numbers such as Me And Bobbie McGee, Stay With Me and Piece Of My Heart are delivered with an authenticity that has to be heard to be believed. Randy Johnson’s links may be corny and melancholic, particularly when Joplin’s death at that tragically portentous age of 27 is barely glossed over, but when the music is this good, that is of little consequence.

Davies is supported by an equally brilliant quartet of Kalisha Amaris, Georgia Bradshaw, Choolwe Laina Muntanga and Danielle Steers who between them offer up vocal nods to classic Motown and blues legends including Aretha Franklin and Bessie Smith. 

Of equal talent on stage are Iestyn Griffiths’ eight-piece band - all fabulous but with special mention to guitarists Kit Craig-Lowdon and Jack Hartigan who between them drive the rock-based energy of the Joplin performance.

Janis Joplin was one of America’s rock legends and this show is a powerful tribute.

Runs until 28th September

Photo credit: Danny Kaan

The Grapes of Wrath - Review

National Theatre, London

***

Written by John Steinbeck

Adapted by Frank Galati

Directed by Carrie Cracknell

Cherry Jones

Frank Galaţi’s 1990 adaptation of John Steinbeck’s classic makes for an interesting glimpse of American history. The 1930s Dust Bowl, coming hard on the heels of the Great Depression and Wall Street Crash saw the fabled american dream evolve into a nightmare for millions, with countless Mid-Westerners migrating towards California, in desperate search of a living.

Simply staged, Carrie Cracknell’s production that comes in at just under three hours mixes quality with tedium. Greg Hicks and Cherry Jones as Pa and Ma Joad are a magnificent focal pair of Oklahomans leading their family west. Hicks only recently played an onstage farmer in the musical Oklahoma!, so there is a theatrical symmetry in seeing his decline from playing a prosperous landowner to an impoverished migrant.  Both he and Jones bring a perfectly weighted gravitas to their family’s struggles and amidst a luxuriously cast company of 27, there is standout work from Harry Treadaway as their son Tom and Mirren Mack as daughter Rose of Sharon.

Steinbeck’s Pulitzer Prize winning novel is brutal in its portrayal of the depths of the era’s hardships, not least in its harrowing finale that Cracknell and Galati effectively retain. The show however slips into cliché too often, with Maimuna Memon’s songs that have been written for this production. The #RefugeesWelcome theme to Memon’s lyrics offers a clumsily crass attempt to link a contemporary political relevance with Steinbeck’s magnum-opus and proves to be a disappointing distraction.

Good in parts.

Runs until 14th September

Photo credit: Richard Hubert Smith

Antony & Cleopatra - Review

Shakespeare's Globe

**

Written by William Shakespeare

Directed by Blanche McIntyre

Nadia Nadarajah and John Hollingworth

There are occasions in the theatre when a play is less than the sum of its parts. So it is with Blanche McIntyre’s take on Anthony &  Cleopatra that boldly translates Shakespeare’s prose into a hybrid of spoken verse and British Sign Language (BSL).

John Hollingworth and Nadia Nadarajah play the famed titular lovers. Hollingworth delivers an adequate Anthony as Nadarajah serves up an equally impassioned Egyptian Queen. However, with Nadarajah communicating her entire role through BSL, those audience members not fluent in that language are forced to follow her dialogue via the surtitle screens placed at gallery level around the Globe’s open space.

While the projected words enable the narrative to be followed, the scrolling text screens completely distract one from the strengths (or weaknesses) of Nadarajah’s performance. One is looking at the screen, not the actor and as a consequence much of the power of the verse is lost. The same frustration applies to those other characters in the story delivered through BSL, where again one’s eyes are taken away from the stage by the projections.

Daniel Millar shines as Enobarbus, notably in his famous description of Cleopatra’s barge, but such moments are rare.

An ambitious production that ultimately fails to deliver.

Runs until 15th September

Photo credit: Ellie Kurttz

The 39 Steps - Review

Trafalgar Theatre, London

****

Adapted by Patrick Barlow

From an original concept by Simon Corble and Nobby Dimond

Directed by Maria Aitken

Tour directed by Nicola Samer

Tom Byrne

Returning to the West End after nine years, Maria Aitken’s affectionate tribute to Alfred Hitchcock’s 1935 movie remains a fabulous fusion of stagecraft, wit and British interwar history.

The 39 Steps famously sees Englishman Richard Hannay caught up in a web of intrigue and espionage as he unwittingly stumbles across a fiendish spy-ring and finds himself the prime suspect for a murder he did not commit. The ripping yarn has him fleeing London aboard the night train to Scotland, pursued by both the police and the villains, with scenes of high drama and derring-do on the train, the Forth Bridge and amidst the remote villages and misty moors of the Highlands.

What makes Aitken’s piece (her work recreated in this production by Nicola Samer) quite so delightful is how she achieves such spectacular thrills and spills with just a cast of four. Using the simplest of suggestive props and lighting and the ingenious conceit of laughing fondly at the stiff upper lip of a time gone by, a re-creation emerges of so many of the wonderful cameos and caricatures that Hitchcock so painstakingly wove into his film.

Tom Byrne is Hannay, on-stage throughout and the only member of the quartet to play just one character from start to finish. Playing the three women with whom Hannay interacts is Safeena Ladha, while picking up the multitude of other roles from Scotland Yard detectives, to shady criminals, to enchanting Highland crofters (to name but a few of their roles) are Eugene McCoy and Maddie Rice in a breathtaking whirl of interchanging characters. The thrills and spills are cleverly played out along with a generous measure of nods to other Hitchcock classics written into the script.

A familiarity with the 1935 film, while not essential, is useful if only to recognise just how ingenious and true to the original, Aitken’s staging proves to be.

The 39 Steps is gorgeous theatre, brilliantly performed. To quote the story’s Mr Memory: “Am I right?” Definitely!

Runs until 28th September

Photo credit: Mark Senior

I Ran With The Gang - Review

Stage Door Theatre, London

***

Written and directed by Liam Rudden

In its first ever London production, Liam Rudden’s tribute to Alan Longmuir, the original Bay City Roller, plays for one week at the Stage Door Theatre above Covent Garden’s Prince of Wales pub.

In a show that's more monologue than musical (this ain't no Jersey Boys) Michael Karl-Lewis plays Young Alan, effectively narrating Longmuir's story and that of the group he founded, the Bay City Rollers, a band that for a chunk of the 1970s saw "Rollermania" dominate the global pop scene.

What this show lacks in panache it more than compensates for in audience enthusiasm. Longmuir’s story is an impressive tale of beating the odds to reach global stardom before the band was to fall apart, but the two-dimensional nature of Rudden's narrative makes for heavy going at times. A heartfelt photo-tribute to Longmuir that wraps up the first phase of this hour long one-act show shares a sentimental intimacy that seems best preserved for a more private gathering, rather than a theatre-show.

No matter - the evening’s second shift sees Karl-Lewis and his fellow performers Ross Jamieson and Lee Fanning leading a glorious kitsch singalong to a backing-track powered medley of the band’s greatest hits. Guilty secret: I might just have sung along to Bye Bye Baby….

The theatre was packed with a mature tartan-waving throng. With most of the Bay City Rollers’ hard-core following now drawing their pensions, to see such a grey-haired mob up on their feet and rocking to the music was as much of a tribute to hip surgery and HRT, as it was to the chart-topping songs.

Strictly for the fans who won’t let the music die.

Runs until 17th August

On location with Martin Kemp

 

Jonathan Baz and Martin Kemp

I spent a day on location with Martin Kemp, currently shooting his latest starring role in serial killer movie Doctor Plague.

Kemp stars as jaded detective John Verney who is on the trail of an ancient cult of Plague Doctors which is cutting a bloody swathe through the London underworld. Dismissed by his superiors as gang on gang killings, the murders draw Verney into an obsessive maze of a secret society conspiracy with links to the Jack The Ripper murders of 1888, putting him and his family in grave danger. Above is a first look.

Joining Kemp in the cast are Peter Woodward (Babylon 5), David Yip (A View To A Kill), Jeanine Nerissa Sothcott (Renegades), Wendy Glenn (You’re Next) and Daisy Beaumont (The World Is Not Enough).

Jonathan Sothcott produces for his indie genre studio Shogun Films (Helloween) with Ben Fortune directing. The screenplay is by Robert Dunn (Knightfall) based on an idea by Robert Geoffrey Hughes. Director of photography is James Westlake (Helloween). Executive producers include Jamie McLeod-Ross and Charley McDougall of Empire Studios, Nigel Smith and Keith Reilly.

Sothcott noted: “One of the best-loved and most recognisable faces in the UK, Martin Kemp has achieved a constant evolution of reinvention for new audiences in the last decade, but I’m delighted he’s back in front of the camera in this gritty horror serial killer movie, facing off against an instantly-iconic enemy and navigating a seemingly endless labyrinth of twists and turns. I know his legion of fans are going to love it and he’s backed by an exceptionally strong cast of terrific British actors. Doctor Plague has instant cult movie written all over it.”

Slated for release in the first half of 2025, look out for Doctor Plague. 

The Birthday Party - Review

Ustinov Studio, Bath

*****

Written by Harold Pinter

Directed by Richard Jones

Jane Horrocks, Carla Harrison-Hodge and John Marquez

One of Pinter’s earliest plays, The Birthday Party’s plot defies explanation. Written in the 1950s and set in a boarding house in an unnamed English seaside town, Meg and Petey own the establishment, Stanley is a long-term resident, Lulu is a glamorous local girl and friend of the household and then, upsetting the already fragile equilibrium, come Goldberg and McCann who throw this gentle world into complete and unsettling disarray. Imagine, if you will, a fusion of the BBC’s Fawlty Towers, ITV’s George and Mildred, with a dash of Alfred Hitchcock’s Psycho thrown in for good measure and even then, in all honesty, you will not be any closer to unfathoming where this story has come from, nor how it ends. But you know what? That really doesn’t matter. Pinter’s finest writing is pure Absurdism and for such writing to take flight requires a high-calibre, finely-tuned company – and it is such a troupe that Richard Jones has assembled in Bath.

Jane Horrocks is Meg and such is this actor's versatility that it is almost impossible to believe that it is Horrocks playing this apparently small-minded and delightfully dotty little landlady. Pinter’s language fuses the everyday and the mundane – and Horrocks’ interpretation of the mundanity is simply a joy to behold. Nicholas Tennant is Petey, a municipal deckchair attendant – again a character from the most ordinary slice of life, and yet when given Pinter’s dialogue, elevates the everyday into excellence.

Sam Swainsbury is Stanley, the birthday celebrant and a man with a clearly damaged background, although the cause and circumstances of whatever trauma has befallen him is never revealed. Swainsbury captures Stanley’s mental fragility in a beautifully weighted performance that has the audience crying out for him with their empathy. Carla Harrison-Hodge plays Lulu in what is one of the play’s smaller roles, but to which she delivers an enormous amount of (ultimately) damaged complexity.

Sam Swainsbury and Jane Horrocks

And then there are Goldberg and McCann, the villains of the piece, played by John Marquez and Caolan Byrne respectively. Marquez is brilliant in capturing so much of what makes Goldberg evil. Is it the predatory sleaze or the wafer-thin veneer of polished charm? Either way Marquez’s (and Byrne’s) mastery of Pinter’s quickfire interrogatory style is outstanding. And again, for both characters to slip into the Jewish or Irish-Catholic heritage of their respective youths is yet another masterclass in outstanding writing, brilliantly performed.

John Marquez, Carla Harrison-Hodge and Caolan Byrne

And for all of the characters, from Meg to McCann, Pinter makes it clear that there is so much more to them than meets the eye.

This production of The Birthday Party needs to follow Jones’ recent Machinal into a London run. A gripping, complex, troubling play that is by no means an evening of easy entertainment. It is however, flawless theatre.

Runs to 31st August

Photo credit: Foteini Christofilopoulou