London Tide - Review

National Theatre, London

*

Based on Charles Dickens' Our Mutual Friend

Adapted by Ben Power

Songs by Ben Power and PJ Harvey

The cast of London Tide

Like an incoming tide of the River Thames, so has London Tide, PJ Harvey and Ben Power’s musical adaptation of Our Mutual Friend, washed over Charles Dickens’ original reducing the 19th century classic to a slurry of mediocre melodrama that runs for more than a mind-numbing three hours. 

Alongside the writers, Ian Rickson’s direction is equally to blame for such an uninspiring evening. Rickson reduces the Thames’s majesty to a figment of our imagination, treating the Lyttleton’s massive proscenium space as a virtual warehouse, albeit one that has a floor that rises and falls along with undulating rows of lighting gantries - suggesting the river’s tidal flows.

Of the acting company Jake Wood is woefully underused as Gaffer Hexham a muscular, menacing Thames Boatman. Elsewhere, the actors try to make the best of this ghastly script, in a show that is not helped by Harvey’s monotonous melodies being poorly sung. The modern songs are grim and lazily written. By way of example, “London is not England, England is not London” must surely rank as one of the most inane lyrics ever to have been sung on stage.

It’s not just the wilful damage that Power and Harvey have wrought on Dickens’ writing - it’s that a sizeable slice of the National Theatre’s all too precious budget will have been consumed in this deluge of pretentious moralising.

London life has been far better served by Lerner and Loewe’s My Fair Lady and Barrie Keefe’s The Long Good Friday, both of which portrayed the city’s gritty contrasts. When it comes to musical interpretations of Dickens, the capital can consider itself well in to be seeing the return of Lionel Bart’s Oliver! later this year.

Runs until 22nd June

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

It's All Going Wonderfully Well - Growing up with Bob Hoskins - Review

****

Written by Rosa Hoskins

Bob Hoskins with baby daughter Rosa

Bob Hoskins, one of this country's best loved actors and who tragically died in 2014, never wrote an autobiography - in fact one can actually imagine his scorning the pomposity of such a suggestion. And in the absence of such a memoir, It's All Going Wonderfully Well - Growing up with Bob Hoskins written by his daughter Rosa proves to be an enlightening and reflective read.

To many around the world, Bob Hoskins was probably most famous for playing private eye Eddie Valiant in Robert Zemeckis' Oscar winning live action / animation mash up, Who Framed Roger Rabbit? But it was before Hollywood studios were to summons him from North London, back in the early 1980's, that Hoskins achieved British stardom on screen and stage with two remarkably different and yet towering performances.

In John Mackenzie's 1981 release The Long Good Friday, Hoskins played Harold Shand, an old-school London gangster. Colossus-like, Shand bestrode his empire, oblivious to the forces of political crime and terrorism that were eroding his firm from within and which would ultimately destroy his traditional East End villainy. Barrie Keefe's script for that movie was as brilliantly funny as it was brutal (only Tarantino has since combined violence with wry wit to similar effect) and much of the film's success (it is frequently nominated in the top ten of British films and at #1 in British gangster flicks) is credited to Hoskins' performance.

And then a year later Richard Eyre, in one of the bravest and most visionary casting decisions ever, chose Hoskins to play Frank Loesser's low-life Nathan Detroit in what was to be the National Theatre's groundbreaking and first ever musical production, Guys and Dolls. The production scooped countless awards and nominations and is still talked about to this day. With his three fellow leads and a faultless company of actors and creatives, Hoskins learned to tap-dance, polished up his singing and proved that his indomitable Cockney charm could work as well on Broadway as in Bethnal Green. Born in 1983, some months after her dad had moved on from the show's cast, one of Rosa Hoskins' fondly spoken regrets is that she had never seen her dad's take on Nathan Detroit.

Her book however is more than a biography of Bob Hoskins' career. Rather, it is a deeply personal and incredibly poignant look back and appreciation of a young woman's love for her father. There is an unpretentious and at times unflinching honesty to this woman’s writing. She speaks with radiant warmth of her dad, but also and without self-pity, talks of her own struggles, both personal and professional and how her father tried at all times to support her. There are also some wonderful glimpses into her father's private life. In the latter part of his career, when the film parts offered were not quite so glamorous he described the "cameo role" in a movie as "....the governor....you're paid a lot of money, everybody treats you like the Crown Jewels, you're in and out and, if the film's a load of shit, nobody blames you". If Harold Shand had ever given up crime for acting, those words could so easily have been spoken by him!

The book is meticulously and beautifully researched, with Zemeckis, Dame Judi Dench and Ray Winstone amongst many of the industry greats and not-so-greats sharing their memories of Hoskins with his daughter. Perhaps the only omission is Helen Mirren, whose portrayal of Victoria, Harold’s moll in The Long Good Friday, came close to matching the complex depths of Hoskins' performance.

As an impressionable sixth former and then student both The Long Good Friday and then Guys and Dolls burned themselves into my appreciative psyche and to this day many of Harold Shand's phrases, as delivered by Hoskins, can aptly sum up so many of life's moments. And it is a mark of crafted talent in Rosa Hoskins' writing that the man she writes of so fondly as her father, is also so recognisable as the man that millions loved on screen. Like myself, one may have never met the man or his daughter personally and yet this book suggests that what we saw on stage and screen was, at all times, the very essence of the man himself - irreverent, witty and above all caring and decent. Rosa Hoskins’ words paint a rich picture and her sentiments will touch the hearts not only of those who admired her father's work, but quite possibly of anyone who mourns the loss of someone deeply loved.

It's All Going Wonderfully Well, is a rather wonderful read, hard to put down and keep the tissues close at hand. I never knew Bob Hoskins personally - but after reading Rosa's book, it turns out I did.

My reflections on The Long Good Friday can be found here.

And my reflections on the National Theatre's 1982 production of Guys and Dolls can be found here.

It's All Going Wonderfully Well - Growing up with Bob Hoskins - Can be purchased in bookshops and online through all good distributors.

Barbarians - Review

Central St Martins School of Art, London

*****

Written by Barrie Keefe

Directed by Bill Buckhurst

Jake Davies, Thomas Coombes and Josh Williams

It has long been recognised that when writing about his world, Barrie Keefe’s finger is firmly on society’s pulse. With Barbarians however Keefe goes one step further, not just finding that pulse, but slicing it open in front of us, confronting his audience with those bloody, ugly realities that, skin-deep, continually surround us.

A 1970s trilogy of short plays, Barbarians follows three disaffected young men from their confused and sometimes angry adolescence into adulthood. Keefe’s deployment of irony is always a treat and the evening's opening play, Killing Time is peppered with his trademark black humour as the teenagers, not long out of school, contemplate an evening of petty crime.

Abide With Me sees the audience shepherded into holding pens to watch the three lads, all fans of Manchester United, spend the 1976 Cup Final ticketless outside Wembley Stadium and brimming with futile hopes to get in to see the game. Anger and frustrations bubble, as amidst the trio’s evolving dynamics, Keefe also exposes football's vicariously exploitative place in modern England. For young men with little else to believe in, their team offers a cause and a flag to rally behind, in later years a devotion often further exploited by the right wing National Front.

Barbarians ends with In The City, set against a backdrop of the Notting Hill Carnival. The boys are grown up now, yet still Keefe's scalpel mercilessly exposes further layers of pain and frustration.

Youth unemployment was (and is) rife when Keefe wrote the scripts and his prose remains a masterful and perceptive analysis of angst and inadequacy. Those of us who knew the era will relish the nods to Dickie Davis and adverts for Denim after shave, as well as recalling the days when a "tranny" meant a portable radio and a Rover 3500 signified some modest status. Alternatively, Barbarian’s younger audiences may perhaps consider a comparison with Green Day’s American Idiot, a show that speaks to and of an American wasted generation, as they observe Keefe’s characters walking their own boulevards of broken dreams.

Throughout, the three actors compel, no mean feat for a show that's nigh on three hours. Thomas Coombes plays Paul the wannabe alpha-male. He’s all mouth (or boot, or knife as circumstances dictate) and menace. Coombes explores his character’s machismo with an impressively thuggish sensitivity. Railing against a world that is passing him by bestowing him no favours, his ignorant hatred darkens with each chapter.

Josh Williams is Louis, the black kid. In Killing Time he’s the one of the trio that’s gone and got himself a skill as a refrigeration engineer. As he displays a decent commitment later to the army cadets and ultimately in landing himself a decent job, we see Keefe’s caustic vision expose the decay of friendships that were once strong, into an envious and racially fuelled contempt.

Completing the trio is Jake Davies’ Jan. The least impacting of the three in the first two plays though his subtly played reactions to his friends is critical, Jan dominates In The City. As a newly passed-out squaddie who's fearfully contemplating a posting to Belfast, Jan's terror and frustrations surge into a revelation that is as agonising as it is horrific.

Staging Barbarians in the starkly furnished former Central St Martins School of Art lends the tales an aura of frustrated bleakness and the fact that 40 years ago the venue hosted the first Sex Pistols gig, thus becoming the birthplace of punk, only adds to the evening’s zeitgeist. The site itself is a challenge. Three floors up, no lift and with a requirement to walk (or be herded) between the space’s auditoria, it’s a deliberately uncomfortable experience. Credit to Rob Youngson’s lighting and Josh Richardson’s sound design, both of which classily complement the location's complexities

Reprising Tooting Arts Club’s 2012 revival (although of that cast only Coombes remains), Bill Buckhurst - who recently directed the TAC's acclaimed pop-up Sweeney Todd - returns to the helm. Amidst spellbinding soliloquy and monologue, Buckhurst demonstrates a profound understanding of Keefe’s language and nuance, delivering a scorching, brilliant drama.

Runs until 7th November

My Girl 2

Old Red Lion Theatre, London

****

Written by Barrie Keefe
Directed by Paul Tomlinson

Emily Plumtree

Sam is a social worker. An over worked, underpaid carer on the front line, confronting horrific child cruelty and neglect whilst drowning in debt. His wife Anita stays at home in their impoverished drafty council flat, a loving mum but emotionally chained and drained by parenthood and heavily pregnant with a second baby. Sam's 30th birthday looms and whilst he may be a hero to the abused at work, at home he threatens violence to his child and tells lies to his wife, as the couple drift further apart.

Sam is an everyday Walter Mitty, though possibly a far too recognisable reflection to too many. He avoids telling his wife about the extent of their payday loan indebtedness and spins pie-in-the-sky yarns to his bank manager about when the overdraft will be repaid. He is also involved in a relationship with a case/client which is at best inappropriate and at worst un-believable. In what is a tough role, Alexander Neal makes a fine job of bringing Sam's life into the confines of the flat from which the play's action never leaves. Burdened by painful boils, that he responds to with acute hypochondria he remains a whinger, whilst Anita remains the heavily tested glue that binds their nuclear family. 

Keefe is an astute writer who doesn't just have his finger on the pulse of modern England, he presses the nation's carrotid, hard. Updating his 1989 play My Girl which was a comment on Thatcherite times, he is in fact at his best when he goes off-picket line and writes about people driven to extremes, rather than politics. In Emily Plumtree's Anita one finds a stellar off-West End performance as she wrings the profound perception of the human condition from Keefe's writing. Perceptive to her husband's failings, but unaware of the depths of his flaws, she dreams of escaping their urban slum for a big house in Braintree. As Keefe’s narrative reveals quite how deceitful Sam has been to her, Plumtree's character goes from disbelief to defiance and ultimately desperation. Brilliant, harrowing and often unbearable to watch, Anita is a heroine in a play that at times suggests a modern day Greek tragedy.

Paul Tomlinson directs with sensitivity, coaxing the nuances of well written cockney grit from both performers. My Girl 2 does not make for easy watching, particularly with an ending of ambivalent despair, but it is one of the more thought-provoking pieces of theatre in town.

Runs until 12th July 2014

Sus

Lion & Unicorn Theatre, London

****

Written by Barrie Keefe

Directed by Paul Tomlinson

Alexander Neal

Barrie Keefe’s Sus is revived in an intimate traverse setting at Kentish Town’s Lion & Unicorn theatre. Inspired by and drawn from the police’s  “stopping on SUSpicion” powers of the 1970’s that were widely misused against the black community, the producers are keen to suggest that not a lot has changed in the last 35 years.

Set on the eve of Margaret Thatcher’s first election victory, the one act play’s action never leaves a police interview room. Interestingly, the crime for which Delroy, a black man who has been brought in from the pub for questioning, is not a SUS matter, but rather the recent bloody death of his pregnant wife,  where CID officers Karn and Wilby have not unreasonable initial grounds to suspect him of her murder. It is the extent however to which these institutionally racist coppers pursue their line of inquiry, throwing their rule book out of the window and treating their suspect appallingly, that makes for such gripping theatre that is at times unbearable to watch.

Keefe’s writing has always been gritty, peppered with just enough coarse language and above all sprinkled with frequent exchanges of cockney gallows-humour that only an accomplished London writer can master. That a highly charged moment of confrontation can be reduced, in a moment, to a comparison of the respective sexual charms of TV newsreaders  Anna Ford and  Angela Rippon (this is 1979 remember) demonstrates Keefe’s ability to make one chuckle uncomfortably whilst at the same time cranking up the dramatic tension.

Wole Sawyerr is Delroy who, as the the mood of the piece darkens, digs deep to find his his grief and his rage . When he is beaten up by Wilby, one feels for the agony of the blows and his pleading tears crave our sympathy. Of the two cops, Nason Crone’s Wilby is perhaps the most stereotyped. His is the lesser educated of the two policemen, most capable of expressing his contempt for Delroy with his fists. Wilby is a complex character with whom Crone has yet to engage at an appropriate level of depth.

It is Alexander Neal’s Karn that is the engine at the core of this production in a performance that again demonstrates the excellence to be found on London’s fringe. Neal relishes every word of Keefe’s carefully crafted irony and chain smoking, moustachioed and with hair greased back, he embodies a truly ugly side of the police that Life on Mars’ Gene Hunt set about portraying in an altogether lighter vein.

Seen today, Sus is a fascinating piece of historical comment, that at the very least was prescient in describing the culture that was to surround the police response to the tragic murder of Stephen Lawrence.  Two years after the play premiered at Theatre Royal Stratford East (where Paul Barber defined Delroy) Brixton and Toxteth erupted into riot, largely prompted by an abuse of the Sus laws. The programme states that this production is a response to the 2011 riots but that association seems a little opportunistic. The social and violent unrest of those more recent summer troubles was certainly a complex cocktail, probably fuelled by a lot more than just a kicking out at a racist police force.

As an observation, the packed audience on press night (some of whom were atrociously behaved and all credit to the actors for playing on) was entirely white, not an accurate reflection of this city’s ethnic make-up and Sus is nothing if not a play that deserves to be seen by all. A strong company, Neal’s chilling performance and Keefe’s still shockingly electric writing make for a troubling 90 minutes. Catch it if you can.

30 years on - Looking back on The Long Good Friday

 *****

 

Hoskins addresses friends....

It is sobering to acknowledge that more than 30 years have passed since The Long Good Friday was released to the British audience. Film more than any other medium, has the power to jolt us into this recognition of time passing. The viewing of a striking piece of cinema can stay with one for a long time and combining this power of recall, with the massive audience that a movie can be exposed to ( as compared to the more intimate reach of say a stage masterpiece, restricted to only one theatre, rather than a general release to cinemas)  and a film, especially one that is popular, can very quickly be established as a recognised moment, or milestone, in a society's cultural history.



..& enemies in The Long Good Friday

The Long Good Friday is one such seminal and popular movie. I first saw it on its release in 1981 having just finished my A levels and having grown up in 70's London. The film’s impact then was breathtaking. The storyline was brave and credible.  The screenplay was from Barrie Keefe, whose mastery of the nuances and grit of London at the start of Thatcher's 80s had an almost Dickensian accuracy for its time and with a soundtrack that at all times complemented the graphic and often brutal imagery of the movie. And atop this excellence, a collection of performances that would go on to define many celebrated acting careers, all deftly helmed by the perceptive eye of the late John Mackenzie.

So why write these thoughts right now? A chance scan through Twitter this week told me of a screening of the movie, at a small screen in Stratford E15, followed by a Q&A with producer Barry Hanson. How to resist? I rarely visit this part of London (though when I do, to visit the Theatre Royal Stratford, the entertainment is usually excellent) and so to arrive and witness the dominance of the Olympic park construction bestriding the area, the resonance of the film’s vision for how London was even then on the cusp of change, rang so true.

The film's story follows the decline of a "traditional" East End gangster Harold Shand, who fails to recognise the power of the tentacles of an Irish politically-based terror campaign that is methodically waging a violent and destructive war against his 'Corporation'. A sub plot depicts a relationship that Shand is seeking to cultivate with the US mafia to fund  the development of a future London Olympic park and who have sent two key players over from New York to negotiate with him. As he is betrayed and his empire disintegrates not only before him but humiliatingly, in front of the Mafia stooges too, Shand's rage, disbelief and inability to cope with the new world order, is a masterful performance by Bob Hoskins.

Helen Mirren plays Victoria, a youthful but smart moll/wife to Shand, and it was interesting to hear from Hanson, and indeed to concur with him, that in his opinion, throughout the story, it is Victoria who is perhaps the most powerful and manipulative character of all.

But Hoskins and Mirren, whilst the two star names of the movie, led a cast that had not only aspects of the UK's established best - Dave King as a deliciously bent copper stands out - but so many other names who were to reach later stardom. That Pierce Brosnan, a future James Bond no less, as a young bare chested Irish assassin barely features on the credits and Derek Thompson who played a critical role in the film's story and who was to go on to lead the cast of BBC TV's Casualty drama series but who was professionally unknown at the time of filming, is a measure of the quality of the production's casting.

I make no bones about it: I admire and enjoy the film. Keefe's script is as timely today as it was then and his writing, combined with Hoskin's unique vocal style, is the blackest of comedy. The writer has a talent for penning moments of deepest London based Blitz-spirit irony. Hoskins' farewell speech to the Americans in particular shines, though the script is peppered with wryly observed gems, brilliantly delivered.

With the London Olympics about to start, and Operation Elveden digging into police corruption, to echo just two of the films themes, the story's message remains as relevant today as it was at the start of the 80s. If you've seen the film before dust down the DVD or rent it from iTunes/Netflix, and watch it again. If you haven't yet seen it, then do so. The Long Good Friday is British filmmaking at its best.