Hero's Welcome - Review

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford


***


Written and directed by Alan Ayckbourn

Richard Stacey and Evelyn Hoskins

Alan Ayckbourn's latest play sees this most prolific of playwrights fire off yet another salvo of domestic dysfunctionality. Hero’s Welcome, set in a northern English town, treats his audience to tableaux of human misery staged as an end of the pier farce. 

Murray is a decorated soldier returning home from a conflict somewhere east of the Adriatic, to the town he'd fled nearly 20 years ago when he jilted the pregnant Alice at the altar. Time has seen Alice go on to marry Derek, a charmingly inadequate builder (and sensitively played by Russell Dixon) devoted to his model railway layout. Meanwhile, in a palatial house out on the hills, Brad (a former childhood buddy of Murray) has built his home, married to the desperately unhappy Kara. There's the smouldering ashes of a love triangle in here too and if all this seems familiar Ayckbourn territory, the playwright resolutely catapults us into the modern era introducing Baba, Murray's young and devoted wife displaced by war and who Murray has recently married during a tour of duty. 

Ayckbourn (much like Arthur Miller) dwells upon the human condition in his work. But where Miller applies a surgeon's scalpel to fillet out grief and emotion, Ayckbourn uses a chainsaw (or should that be shotgun?) to make his point. Whilst many of Hero's Welcome's themes are recognisable, by the time its characters have endured murder, arson (and for good measure, one of them suffers a debilitating stroke half way through act 2) the play's credibility has all but evaporated.

That being said, Ayckbourn, who also directs, has assembled a marvellous ensemble. Richard Stacey's Murray is believable as the flawed warrior, whilst Elizabeth Boag's Alice cleverly hints at her once glamorous youth and an adulthood quietly spent in a marriage of disappointing compromise.

As Brad, an absolute cardboard cutout of a morally bankrupt bounder, Stephen Billington sports the chiseled good looks demanded of his millionaire lifestyle - and whilst Ayckbourn offers him little more than crass cliché by way of dialog, he makes the most of it. Likewise, Emma Manton's Kara offers a thoughtful study in housebound misery. Though Manton's re-appearance towards the play's end, appallingly wigged and playing her daughter Simone, is stagecraft at its clumsiest. 

The centrepiece of this company however is Evelyn Hoskins' Baba. Hoskins (around whom, one suspects, the part may well have been written) brings an fragile, elfin stature to a woman wise beyond her years and who has witnessed life's horrors. Hers is one of Ayckbourn's most well-conceived back-stories in a long while, with Hoskins defining the resolute determination and courage of a loving woman, desperate to re-build her life in the West. In a masterful turn from Hoskins we sense Baba's vulnerability yet admire her steely resolve.

Aside from the litany of his character's woes, Ayckbourn seeks to comment on other social malaises, raising his scatter gun to take aim at the rise of gastro-pubs, binge drinking whilst all the while inviting us to laugh at other people's misfortunes.

But Scarborough's literary hero is a canny chap and knows what entertains his devoted fan base. After a UK tour Ayckbourn’s company take the play to New York for a summer residency.

Now on tour

Grease

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford

****

Book, music and lyrics by Jim Jacobs and Warren Casey
Directed by Michael Vivian

One of many stunning dance moments from the GSA class of 2014

The audience for Grease, on a Monday night in refined Guildford with the River Wey in near flood-like spate, may well have been more blue-rinsed than Brylcreem’d but along with the cast’s family and friends they packed out the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre. There, they witnessed the GSA class of 2014 morph into the Rydell High graduates of ‘58 in this all-American tale of rites of passage that over many years and countless disco mega-mixes, has been so forcibly injected into our culture.

We know the songs and the story, so with little to surprise us in the plot it is down to the cast’s talent and the show’s production values to impress. And at times this production is truly breathtaking, never better than when the full ensemble pack the stage to execute Phyllida Crowley-Smith’s inspired dance work. If the Rydell girls sing and act, en masse, better than the boys, (which generally they do) then the lads’ movement, which was at times almost acrobatic, more than makes up for it. The agile, technical excellence that the dancers display in Grease Lightning and the show’s carnival like finale, to name but two memorable moments, suggests the jaw-dropping choreography of David Toguri in his pomp.

Like all drama school productions, the focus here is on the company rather than upon the leading characters. That being said, there are still some stand-out performances on offer. Ones to watch from this year’s graduation are Erik West, whose bespectacled square-jawed Eugene is a masterclass in akward geek and who when the Rocky Horror show is next being cast should be a nailed on Brad. Elizabeth Walker admirably tackled the challenge that is Sandy. To plausibly play the pink-clad saint-like virgin, who falls from grace to become a cigarette smoking high heeled hussy ain't easy but Walker pulls it off. Andy Owens’ Doody singing These Magic Changes was perhaps the most charismatic male vocal turn, but the truly spine-tingling performance of the night came from Ellie Ann Lowe’s take on the grizzled Rizzo. Lowe skilfully explored the layers of this brash and ballsy yet still damaged and complex character with empathy beyond her years and her solo, the not often heard “There Are Worse Things I Could Do” was deeply moving in its honest intensity.

For the townsfolk of Guildford, Grease makes for a grand night out. The staging is clever, the laughs are familiar and corny and so long as the teeming Wey stays within its banks, there truly are worse things you could do than give these talented undergraduates full houses for the rest of the week.

Runs until 15th February

Photography by Mark Dean

A LIttle Night Music

Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford

****

Music & lyrics by Stephen Sondheim

Book by Hugh Wheeler

Directed by Alastair Knights

There were almost as many stars on stage as there were twinkling lights in the scenic starcloth hung behind the orchestra, such was the pedigree of Alex Parker’s production of Sondheim’s classic.

Inspired by Ingmar Bergman’s movie Smiles Of A Summer Night, the well known story follows actress Miss Desiree Armfeldt, her family and her (married) lovers over the course of an enchanted midsummer’s night in a country mansion. With a nicely coincidental touch, this production, in itself enchanting, has been staged in June almost as closely as possible to this year’s midsummer’s night.

In a sensible move for a sole performance, the cast performed entirely from the book and it says much for Alex Parker (of whom more later) that he could attract so many established names from the musical theatre firmament to take part. The cast were all excellent, with several performances being simply outstanding. Janie Dee’s Desiree had the required irresistible attractiveness that defined her ability to have two paramours in tow and her performance of the show’s melancholy signature number, Send In The Clowns was as confident and as moving as the song’s modest range allowed.

It was however in the performances of the two scorned wives that the production truly took off. Anna O'Byrne, as the 18yo virginal wife of lawyer/lover Egerman, captured the soprano naiveté and innocent charming beauty of her character perfectly. Hers is a complex and unforgiving role, nailed by the talented Australian. As Countess Malcolm, and Armfeldt’s peer, Joanna Riding gave the performance of the evening, with her character that is as comically caustic as she is  tragic. Her take on Every Day A Little Death, an almost tear-scorched look back on life as a cheated upon spouse was as moving a performance as is to be found. Riding and Dee were both Olivier winners as Julie and Carrie respectively in the National Theatre’s Carousel of 20 years ago and their stage reunion was an added treat for musical theatre connoisseurs.

Simon Bailey’s Count Malcom was an absolute cracker of a bristling Dragoon, clipped and precise and in a show with few props it was easy to imagine his accuracy with the duelling pistol. Other jewels in this glittering cast included Laura Pitt-Pulford’s Petra, the smoulderingly sexual maid to the Egerman household and whose solo number and the show’s penultimate song, The Miller’s Son, was a wonderfully passionate portrayal of a tart with a heart. As the hormonal Henrik, Egerman’s son and trainee priest, Fra Fee gave a master class of pent up adolescent sexual frustration that seemed poised to erupt at the slightest provocation.

The true star of the night however was young Alex Parker, who as well as producing the show musically directed, conducting an orchestra which at 31 members was considerably larger than those to be found in most commercial West End pits. Complete with harpist, this night’s music (far from “little”) was perfection and with  Weekend In The Country, which is one of the best act one closing numbers written,  the full sound of Parker’s ensemble with Sondheim’s glorious brass melodies suggesting  the delightful chaos to be unleashed in the second act was simply thrilling to listen to. Parker had rehearsed his musicians meticulously and on the (rare) moment when an actor stumbled, the confident musical backdrop maintained the momentum.

The evening’s standing ovation confirmed suspicions that this show is simply far too good to have a life of just one night. Parker’s vision in staging this production has been inspired and merits investment and a return to either Guildford or London. One only hopes that complex contracts can be negotiated to allow this glimpse of absolute theatrical joy a further lease of life.