Honour - Review

Park Theatre, London


***


Written by Joanna Murray-Smith
Directed by Paul Robinson

Imogen Stubbs and Henry Goodman

'There’s no fool like an old fool’ an adage that sums up much of Honour now playing at the Park Theatre. The play introduces Henry Goodman and Imogen Stubbs as married couple George and Honour. She is a writer who gave up her career to support their thirty-two year old union, while he is a famed intellectual their lives being such that it is almost as if a slice of Hampstead’s intelligentsia has come rolling down Highgate Hill. When the much younger Claudia, an aspiring author who’s profiling George for a book that she’s writing, breezes into their lives, his middle aged mid-life testosterone kicks in and with barely a second thought he succumbs to her attraction, walking out on his wife. 

If the narrative wasn't so ineffably predictable, this might have made for a far more stimulating evening. As it is, as the drama hops from cliché to cliché with the production’s only redeeming feature being Stubbs’ interpretation of a woman in scorned and scorching agony. Hers is a wronged, devoted, heart that bleeds throughout a stunning performance, leaving the audience moved at her pain and cheering her on as faltering, she starts to find a path out of her misery.

Katie Brayben’s triangle-completing Claudia delivers all that the flawed script asks of her - but her encounters with both Honour and Sophie, the couple’s daughter barely a few years her junior, fail to convince. Likewise with Goodman who is forced to wade through interminable melodrama. There is a glimpse of his genius late in act two, after he has been inevitably spurned and rejected by Claudia for a more exciting lover where, Lear-like, he recognises the folly of his deeds. But by then it is too little, too late to redeem an otherwise disappointing turn.

Runs until 24th November
Photo credit: Alex Brenner

Promises, Promises - Review

Southwark Playhouse, London


****

Music by Burt Bacharach
Lyrics by Hal David
Book by Neil Simon
Based on the screenplay "The Apartment" by Billy Wilder and I.A.L Diamond
Directed by Bronagh Lagan

Gabriel Vick and Daisy Maywood

Promises, Promises at the Southwark Playhouse is a delightful splash of Burt Bacharach, in a musical set in 1960s New York and which hasn't played in London for nigh on fifty years. The show's pedigree is top notch, based on Billy WIlder's (he of Sunset Boulevard fame) Oscar-winning Best Picture, The Apartment, translated thence into a musical theatre book via the satirical wizardry of Neil Simon.

Chuck Baxter is a humble accounts clerk in a huge Manhattan insurance office, young and single and who lives in a modest apartment in the city. When Baxter's married manager asks if he can borrow the apartment for an extra-marital liaison with his mistress Baxter agrees - word spreads amongst the managers who all then ask for the apartment's use, with the news ultimately reaching Sheldrake, the department head, who too wants to use Baxter's flat. There's a complicated love that develops between Baxter and Fran, a waitress in the company's Executive Dining Room and for risk of spoiling, that's all that can be said about the plot.

The strength of this show however lies not only in Bacharach and David's eternally hummable tunes, but as much in Simon's razor sharp wit. The comedy is a wry New York shtick and Lagan has polished her cast into a subtle, perfectly timed delivery.

Gabriel Vick plays Baxter and he carries the show magnificently. For those that remember the movie, he captures that beautifully bemused essence of Jack Lemmon - finely principled and ultimately nobody's fool. Vick is also wonderfully voiced and when he picks up his guitar to sing I'll Never Fall In Love Again, it's a pleasant reminder that this timelessly classic song, along with the show's other great Bacharach treats, was born out of the production itself, a refreshing contrast to the modern trend of juke-box shows created long after songs have become hits. Indeed, Promises, Promises is a far more entertaining gig than the recent Close To You, a juke box show framed around the Bacharach catalogue

Opposite Vick is Daisy Maywood's Fran. Maywood captures Fran's feisty and sometimes exploited vulnerability perfectly - with more than a hint of the movie's Shirley MacLaine in her stance. Vocally she's wonderful too, making fine work of A House Is Not A Home.

The casting throughout is spot on. Paul Robinson's Sheldrake is as chiselled in his looks as his morals are despicable, the quartet of middle managers are a delight and John Guerrasio's Doctor, who lives in the flat next door, masters Simon's comically caustic New York nuance. Perhaps the most stunning supporting work comes from the ever excellent Alex Young who opens the second half hilariously as the drunken Marge, stumbling and fumbling towards a doomed romantic tumble with Baxter.

Gabriel Vick and Alex Young

The set design is imaginative but flawed (sit on the far left or right and some moments will be invisible) and likewise Joe Louis Robinson's 7 piece band, who put in a fine shift throughout the evening, need to fine tune a couple of early numbers, though note that these are very modest criticisms.

Promises Promises is a warm-hearted delight on a cold winter's night. This bittersweet story performed by a fabulous company, makes for another jewel in London's theatre crown. 

Runs until 18th February

Photo credit: Claire Bilyard

My Mother Said I Never Should - Review

St James Theatre, London

****

Written by Charlotte Keatley

Directed by Paul Robinson

Katie Brayben

There's a pain and beauty to this first London revival of My Mother Said I Never Should in nearly 30 years that is, at times, quite devastating.

Like a ride on a fairground waltzer, Charlotte Keatley's narrative spins us around and through four generations of Doris Partington's family. Her scenes jump between the years, playing out the evolution of female emancipation in post-war England. 

Keatley's writing is finely honed. She has crafted a (subtly updated) play that is as much a commentary upon Britain's social history as it is a study of four women. There may be a timelessness to the challenges of a loveless marriage, but whilst Maureen Lipman's Doris weathered 61 years of wedlock, confessing on her husband's death that "I don't think we liked each other very much", daughter Margaret sees her own marriage fail in middle-age in the 1980s, whilst granddaughter Jackie faces her own teenage, agonising compromise following the unplanned birth of her daughter Rosie.

Lipman heads a quartet that must surely represent one of the finest ensembles in town. In a play that explores the power and the bind of motherhood, Keatley's characters are stoic. Lipman's brings a measured wisdom and a quiet wounded pain to Doris. All seeing and all knowing, she seasons the morsels of wit that Keatley has sprinkled with a perfect nuance, capturing our affection and respect.

Katie Brayben as Jackie has a first half that could be likened to “Fantine's back story”. Her pain as mother Margaret takes Rosie to raise as her own is a masterclass in understated agony. And it's not just the acting too that is so brilliant - it is Keatley's brutally honest text. Unlike Fantine these women aren’t heroines of grand literature. Fictitious yes, but played out against the suburbs of Manchester and Croydon, they are a part of all our lives.

Caroline Faber's Margaret faces her own agonies. Supporting her daughter, loving and raising her granddaughter and ultimately deserted by her husband, she brings a resonant cadence to her speeches. And then there's Serena Manteghi's gorgeous Rosie. In the early scenes, when the stage-baby is simply a mass of swaddling, Manteghi sits stage right, gurgling and cooing and (brilliantly) giving vocal life to the linen. As she grows into adolescence we forget that the actor's an adult. Manteghi captures Rosie’s childhood without cliché and as the inevitable denouement looms, her pain is refreshingly free of melodrama.

Paul Robinson directs with sensitivity as Simon Slater's sound and music enhance proceedings, with the production marking an impressive debut by producers Tiny Fires. 

Go see this play – the acting is sensational.

Runs until 21st May

Photo credit: Alex Harvey-Brown