Theatre Review: Hindle Wakes (Finborough Theatre)

The Finborough’s last show, Sam Yates’s exquisite revival of J.B Priestley’s Cornelius, was so superb that the theatre really has to go some to match it with their latest offering. They haven’t managed it, quite, but they’ve come pretty close. Stanley Houghton’s 1912 feminist play Hindle Wakes lacks the emotional depth of Cornelius; if anything, it’s closer in spirit to Priestley’s comedy When We Are Married which was written in 1938 but set in 1910, the same year as Houghton’s text. Still, Bethan Dear’s production proves a most beguiling thing. In an evening full of humour and warmth, Dear delivers the play’s elements of social critique with disarming lightness and charm rather than stridency. The production is delightful. Full review at OneStopArts.

Theatre Review: King Lear (Almeida)

From Ian McKellen to Derek Jacobi, the late Pete Postlethwaite to Tim Pigott-Smith, the last five years haven’t exactly stinted British theatre-goers for high-profile King Lears, a testament both to the enduring power of one of Shakespeare’s most gruelling and gripping tragedies and to the eagerness of veteran actors to get the role under their belts while they’re still physically capable of lugging Cordelia around the stage. Now, pre-empting Simon Russell Beale’s rumoured production with Sam Mendes, it’s the turn of the excellent Jonathan Pryce to venture out onto the heath, in a fine production by Michael Attenborough that makes up in focus, clarity and intimacy what it lacks in apocalyptic vision.

Indeed, Attenborough’s approach to the play is determinedly unfussy. The storm scene is simply staged - smoke and a few sound effects, no water as drenched poor Oliver Ford Davies’s Lear for the Almeida ten years ago - and the overall look is low-key: Tom Scott’s set and costumes could have come directly from a BBC Shakespeare circa 1976. Still, having been somewhat under-whelmed by Nicholas Hytner’s strenuously modern, straining-for-relevance Timon of Athens at the NT just the other day, Attenborough’s gimmick-free take felt extremely refreshing to me. The focus is firmly on character and relationships here, rather than an overriding “concept,” and the production puts some striking spins on the protagonists. A few of these do feel a tad forced: Richard Goulding’s highly engaging Edgar - a character more usually found with his nose in a book, prior to his Poor Tom transformation - is here introduced indulging in a hearty spot of servant-snogging, while the Lear-as-sexual-abuser card gets played for the first time in a while, and to little effect.

Other elements work beautifully, though. Phoebe Fox makes something original and unsentimental of Cordelia, giving the character a combative, steely resolve that melts movingly in the reconciliation scene with Lear; she’s a study of goodness without a hint of sweetness. Kieran Bew - last seen gracing the Almeida stage as the dumbass Kent in Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Pretty - renders a gorgeously amused and cocksure Edmund (the play’s best role, IMHO!). Bew makes the character’s villainy entirely winning; he gets an audience-rapport going from his opening soliloquy and sustains it up to the character’s final (wonderful!) moment of repentance. Jenny Jules and Zoe Waites offer well-drawn takes on Regan and Goneril, and Ian Gelder’s faithful, stoic Kent and Clive Wood’s moving Gloucester are equally fine.

And Pryce himself delivers a marvellously compelling quicksilver turn. A more agile, robust Lear than many, he puts fascinating twists on the most familiar speeches, subverting sentimentality at every turn, whether by ripping savagely into “Reason not the need!” or undercutting the “great stage of fools” speech with ironic  sermonizing. Everything he does feels fresh, alive, spontaneous. His moments of tender connection with Gelder and Wood win through to genuine emotion, and his connection with Trevor Fox’s Fool - whose riddling speeches come accompanied by magic tricks, and who’s capable of cracking Lear up even when he's at his most enraged or despairing - is beautifully done. Attenborough takes the action at a fair clip, and locates the black comedy in the play’s bleakness without overselling it. The evening has both pace and feeling. Those who like their Lears wilder - or more high-concept - may not be stirred, but this was, for me, a terrific night in the theatre, and by far the strongest production I’ve seen at the Almeida this year.

Running time: 3 hours. Further information at the Almeida website.

TV Review: Leaving (ep 1, ITV1)

The capable Julie (Helen McCrory), manager of weddings at a swish-ish country resort, strides purposefully around her little empire, tenderly observing exchanges of vows, counselling reluctant brides, and generally radiating pride and pleasure in her profession. Julie seems rather less sure-footed at home, though, where she lives with an affable-seeming spouse, Michael (Sean Gallagher), and two kids, one of whom is embarking on her first romance. The character’s mild sense of dissatisfaction with her lot leads her into a relationship with Aaron (the Eddie Redmayne-evoking Callum Turner), a young man twenty years her junior who ends up working at the hotel.

Concluding at the pivotal moment when the pair’s relationship turned sexual, Tony Marchant’s new three-part drama Leaving got off to a strong and striking start last night. The series isn’t, thankfully, a Brit take on the Kristin Scott Thomas-starring French flick, directed by Catherine Corsisni, whose moniker it shares, and which also dealt with a disruptive affair. Corsini's film, which I recently re-watched and rather changed my mind about, started smart and ended dumb, but the indications are that Marchant's Leaving might prove more substantial.

In a slightly barmy Radio Times piece, Alison Graham critiqued the series for not delivering on the salacious promise of its premise or for “giving Fifty Shades of Grey anything to worry about.” (WTF?) The estimable Mr. Marchant operates in an altogether classier mode and, benefiting from sleek direction by Gaby Dellal, the opening episode certainly proved gripping. The social details all feel right and, a couple of contrived narrative turns notwithstanding, the scenes had fresh, surprising details and quiet, watchful moments that added texture and nuance. The supporting cast (which includes Deborah Findlay) has yet to make its mark, but what counted the most in last night’s episode was Helen McCrory’s unerring ability to pull you into Julie’s dilemma, communicating every shade of excitement and guilt, pleasure and panic, that the character feels. Seeing McCrory here made me think - not for the first time - how much better Terence Davies’s film of The Deep Blue Sea would have been with her in the lead; let's hope a production of that play is in her future. And let's also hope that Leaving makes good on its promise, avoiding the slide into unconvincing melodrama that Corsini's film couldn’t finally resist.

Theatre Review: Yours For The Asking (Orange Tree)

Aside from the occasional Lorca production or the (even more occasional) Golden Age revival, Spanish drama gets short shrift on the London stage these days. And contemporary - that is to say, post-1940s - Spanish drama gets shorter shift still. Kudos, then, to the enterprising Orange Tree for presenting Yours for the Asking (the Spanish title is Usted también podrá disfrutar de ella; literally, You Can Enjoy Her Too), a 1973 piece by Ana Diosdado that proves quite the special find. Expertly translated by Patricia W. O’Connor, Diosdado’s play is an intelligent, rich and moving work, and Sam Walters presents it with admirable assurance, fluidity and grace in this compelling production.

Juan (Steven Elder) is a journalist for a trashy women’s weekly who views himself, his boss and the magazine’s tittle-tattle-worshipping readership with just about equal contempt. En route with his photographer colleague Manny (James Joyce) to interview a model who’s embroiled in an ad campaign scandal, he ends up trapped in the rickety lift of his interviewee’s building. (The sensible Manny takes the stairs.) When the model, Susi, locks herself out of her apartment, she and Juan start to talk and to bond. To the point that, once released, Juan ends up spending a further five days in her company, gradually learning the reasons for the perturbed star’s distress.

From this premise - not to mention the cheeky Feydeau-esque title - the viewer might be forgiven for anticipating Women on the Verge-style farcical shenanigans here. But Yours for the Asking is in fact a deeply serious - though by no means po-faced - work. The play clearly emerges from a specific historical context - Francoist Spain in its death throes yet still exercising an oppressive grip on its citizens - but it still has plenty of relevance to say to us today. Praising plays for prescience has become a much too popular pastime among the press just now, but Yours for the Asking constantly surprises with its all-too-relevant critiques of celeb culture (the action takes place in the country that gave the world Hello! magazine, lest we forget) and political apathy.

Not that any of this would count for so much were it not for the play’s intriguing, innovative form or its well drawn characters. The structure that Diosdado has devised is marvellously fluid and filmic: the action moves backwards and forwards in time, accruing depths and layers, resonances and ironies, as it goes. It’s a puzzle play of sorts, and Walters’s production gives it the pull of a thriller, aided by a nifty design by Katy Mills that meets the challenge of the play’s shifts in time-frame and location with a minimum of fuss.

And as the play twists and turns back on itself, concealing and disclosing, so our view of the characters shifts and morphs. Initially sceptical of his commission, Juan gradually comes to see that Susi’s predicament - her strange conversion into a public hate figure - allows him to pen the kind of societal critique he’s been longing to write. Is he using Susi for a story - or maybe it’s Susi who’s using him? It’s probably a result of the censorship of the time that the play gets a tad fuzzy when it comes to zeroing in on the root causes of the “System” whose corruption it critiques. Still, Diosdado manages to offer provocative and salient musings on press ethics, stars as symbols (constructed, idolised, despised), herd mentality and - last but certainly not least - the strangeness and the vagaries of love.

Following his memorable turns in the last Orange Tree season as the befuddled second spouse in How to Be Happy and the politician in Mottled Lines, Steven Elder delivers an even stronger central performance here, one that shows Juan’s bitterness to be caused by both wounded pride and idealism, and by his disappointment in his country. Scarred by a prison experience that’s left him with both a justifiable grievance and an unpleasant sense of martyrdom, the character is both a convincingly troubled figure and one who rather enjoys his sense of slumming it. As Susi, Mia Austen partners him beautifully, delivering a nuanced, striking turn that keeps us tantalisingly uncertain as to the extent of the character’s delusion or awareness. In the role of Celia, Juan’s lover and colleague, Rebecca Pownall is wonderfully candid and touching as she reveals both her sympathy and her frustration with her partner, while James Joyce (not a misprint!) is exceptionally likeable as the insouciant photographer who ends up undergoing his own unexpected political awakening. And another OT regular, David Antrobus, is quite effective in five small but key roles: as a sympathetic coroner, a manic editor, a disgruntled porter, a suspicious neighbour and a glib ad agent.

A gripping and unsettling experience, Yours for the Asking has wit, heart and bite - as well as a final revelation that arrives like a punch to the gut. Here’s hoping that we get to see more of Ms. Diosdado’s work on the British stage.

Running time: 2 hours 30 minutes. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Theatre Review: Morning (Lyric Hammersmith)

All told, 2012 has been a pretty good year to be Simon Stephens. The prolific playwright’s version of A Doll’s House at the Young Vic was well received this summer, and his National Theatre adaptation of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time ecstatically so, while earlier this year Three Kingdoms, Stephens’s play on the subject of European sex-trafficking, caused a stir when it debuted at the Lyric Hammersmith. Not a chap to rest for long upon his laurels, the industrious Stephens now returns to the Lyric with his latest work, Morning, an hour-long play that was one of the hot tickets on the Edinburgh Fringe last month. Subtitled “a play for young people,” Morning was devised through workshops involving actors from both Junges Theater Basel and the Lyric Young Company; the latter group gives young Londoners the chance to get a start in a working theatre and to audition for professional productions. The result is a chilly piece that connects interestingly with some of Stephens’s habitual concerns - teen violence, primarily - but it’s one that doesn’t, ultimately, rank alongside the playwright’s best work for depth and insight. Full review at OneStopArts.  

Theatre Review: Kissing Sid James (Jermyn Street)

This isn’t a sentence that I ever imagined I’d find myself writing, somehow, but may I confess that I rather enjoyed Kissing Sid James last night? Robert Farquhar’s romantic comedy about a dirty weekend gone awry debuted at Liverpool’s Unity Theatre in 1992 and has subsequently been produced in countries from Slovakia to South Africa. Having begun life at the New Red Lion last year, Jason Lawson’s engaging revival went on to enjoy a run in New York as part of the Brits Off Broadway season. The production now takes up residence at the Jermyn Street, a venue whose intimacy suits this small-scale two-hander well.  Full review at OneStopArts.

Film Review: Take This Waltz (Polley, 2011)

“I’m afraid of connections at airports. Of being between things,” muses the antsy Margot (Michelle Williams) to the laidback Daniel (Luke Kirby), a man she’s just met during a (rather quirky) writing assignment expedition, as the two fly back home to Toronto. As you might have guessed, it’s not just her feelings about air travel that Margot is sharing here. And what you might also guess is that our heroine is soon to find herself - majorly - “between things”: drawn to Daniel (who turns out to live not only in the same neighbourhood that she does but also on the same street) but torn by her feelings of loyalty to Lou (Seth Rogen), the affable schlump of a spouse to whom she’s been hitched for five years.

The clunkiness of moments such as those outlined above - clunkiness which seems almost perversely assured of its own cleverness - scuppers Sarah Polley’s sophomore feature Take This Waltz early on. Polley made such a good job of Away From Her (2006), her debut film adapted from Alice Munro’s “The Bear Came Over The Mountain,” that it’s painful to see her go as wrong as she does with her new movie. Away From Her had some bogus moments, but not so many as to distract from its strong central premise and touching portrait of a relationship undergoing (forced) renegotiation. Take This Waltz, on the other hand, is practically all bogus moments. Striving for spontaneity, scene after scene here ends up arch and artificial, almost eerily “off.” It’s a movie full of self-absorbed people indulging in affected, unbelievable yakking. Margot and Lou’s marital malaise is sketched in intensely irritating scenes of play-fighting and baby talk, while her growing intimacy with Daniel is outlined in a tortuous restaurant-set sex talk encounter, from which Nicholson Baker’s Vox has nothing to fear.

Despite all the synthetic chit-chat, Take This Waltz attempts to be physical, too. A sequence set at a swimming baths wrests heavy-handed laughs from the camp antics of a water fitness instructor - and a spot of pool peeing - before contrasting the lithe bodies of Margot and her chums with the ageing, sagging flesh of the other women at the class. That might work, were the scene not handily editorialised for us by the characters’ wittering about how “everything new turns old.”

Elsewhere, as in Away From Her, Polley once more displays her impeccable Canadian cultural credentials. Named for the Leonard Cohen (via Garcia Lorca) song which plays over a truly excruciating late montage sequence, the film’s soundtrack also boasts Feist covering Cohen’s “Closing Time” (rather as Away From Her signed off with kd lang covering Neil Young). And when Margot and Lou head out for their anniversary date movie, what should that movie be? Why, nothing less than Claude Jutra’s Québécois classic Mon oncle Antoine (1971), of course.

Since the two male leads aren’t quite adequate - Rogen’s big emotional scene is unhelpfully shot to look like a Dramatic-Acting-101 exercise and Kirby, saddled with almost all the worst lines, can make nothing of his cipher of a role - it’s left to Michelle Williams to carry the movie. One of the finest young actresses in America, she’s up to the job, even if you may wish that Polley hadn’t saddled Margot with quite so many irritating accoutrements, and so many pathetic weepy moments. Still, Williams comes through, especially in those scenes in which the interior drama of the protagonist’s dilemma is conveyed without words.

And, unaccountably, in its final fifteen minutes or so, Take This Waltz comes through, too, taking a swerve into truth that’s all the more startling for being so utterly unexpected. Here, at last, Polley drops the artificiality and the heavy veil of hipster-angst chic and offers a few graced scenes that feel heartfelt and tender, and that stir some very personal feelings. “Some things you do in life - they stick,” one character tells another, gently laying bare their inability to move on. The final scenes of Take This Waltz “stick” too, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen a film that irked me so thoroughly throughout and then succeeded in moving me to tears at the end. (I reported this to a friend who told me that she’d had a similar experience last year at Terence Davies’s The Deep Blue Sea.) It’s frustrating - yet in a strange way also heartening - that Take This Waltz becomes, so briefly and belatedly, everything you'd hoped that it might be.