Lunch and The Bow Of Ulysses - Review

Trafalgar Studios, London

*****

Written by Steven Berkoff

Directed by Nigel Harman

Shaun Dooley and Emily Bruni

In a powerfully devastating and unrelentingly humorous look at the dark and unspoken truths manifest in the psyches of men and women after decades spent together in a relationship, the double header of Steven Berkoff’s Lunch and The Bow of Ulysses at Trafalgar Studios is gripping theatre that will possibly provide less than comfortable cab rides home for some of the couples in the audience.

Starting with Lunch, the audience is introduced to the plays’ only characters played by Emily Bruni and Shaun Dooley, on a beach (outstandingly minimalist and effective set design from Lee Newby) and portrays the raw passion, emotion, insecurities and yearning that comes during those first moments of courtship - that first night, week, month are frequently referenced - between two eventual life partners. Bruni and Dooley create a stand out chemistry that offers a profound fluidity to the show.

Fast forwarding from that initial encounter on the beach, the audience are presented with their second course, the Bowl of Ulysses. Transported through the rabbit hole of reality, mundanity and time itself the two characters are 20 years older, with Nigel Harman coaxing a harrowing contrast in tone, performance, humour and light heartedness.

It is undeniable how time and life has transformed the pair, but without special effects (or even makeup), just a change of coat and a tying up of the hair, the deliverance of this clear passing of time by just their stage presence is a credit to the performers.

Berkoff is clearly an equal opportunities writer as he points out the numerous and apparent flaws of both sexes. We see his characters launch consecutively devastating attacks on each other in the form of mini monologues with cross hairs aimed solely at the inadequacies of the other, each more brutal and razor sharp than the last.

Ringing throughout the evening is a scorching reality in both script and performance. The production acts as one giant mirror, compelling the audience to look in horror yet all the while wearing smile as they enjoy the and enjoying the show’s potent dark flavours.

To call the plays uncompromising in their articulation of people’s need for companionship and all the wonderful and stark flaws of our species would be an understatement. Whether you walk away from this play electrified or shaken, there is an undeniable honesty in Berkoff’s masterpiece.

Runs until 5th November

Reviewed by Josh Kemp

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

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