Theatre Review: Look Back in Anger (Almeida)

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and many hearts are sick at what they see in England now." (John Osborne, 1959)

Given its (perhaps overinflated) reputation as the play that single-handedly blew the doors of off fusty ol' 50s British theatre and put working-class grievances centre stage, Look Back in Anger is revived with surprising infrequency in the UK. 

Times change, tastes change, and what once looked radical, now - in form at least -  may look tame, since Osborne's play is in essence a static Three Act relationship drama which, apart from the often stinging language delivered by its iconic protagonist, seems not very far removed from the middle-class domestic dramas that the playwright and others of his generation so aggressively critiqued. As Richard Eyre has put it: "However abrasive and excoriating, far from looking back in anger, the play looks back with a fierce, despairing nostalgia."

All of this makes Arti Banerjee’s revival at the Almeida quite welcome - even just as an opportunity to see how the play stands up from a contemporary vantage point. Staged alongside Arnold Wesker's Roots, with which its partially cross cast to form the rather cringingly named "Angry & Young" season (t-shirts available in the foyer!), there's much that doesn't quite work in Banerjee’s production: feeble Expressionist movement flourishes; an unhelpful red carpeted circular set by Naomi Dawson that's too obvious a representation of a domestic hell; and some miscasting. 

But damnit if the power of the play doesn't peek through in the end. That's mostly due to a great performance from Billy Howle (last seen on stage in a more revelatory revival, of Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus at the NT) who, without any sentimentalising, manages to humanise Jimmy in surprising, unexpected ways.

In Tony Richardson's film version of the play, the character's rants as delivered by Richard Burton were effective but felt over-rehearsed. Down to his restlessly twitching toes as Jimmy reads the paper in the opening scene, Howle makes the character's frustration more subtly palpable and demonstrates how it manifests in domestic tyranny. He doesn't stint on conveying Jimmy's cruelty - mostly directed at his wife Alison -  but also shows that to view the character as a "toxic masculinity" exemplar is simply a diminishment. Whether you like the content or not, Jimmy's outbursts against the post-war English scene are often bitingly acute and funny and have a theatrical charge: even if last Friday's audience seemed determined to register their disapproval of the character by responding only with the occasional tut. But Howle's triumph in the role is to reveal Jimmy as at once infantile and insightful, a rebel without a cause who's clearly in pain but also thinks he has a monopoly on it. 

Overall Banerjee's production gets better as it goes along, and some of the sketchier performances start clicking into place as well. As Alison's friend and (apparent) defender, Morfydd Clark lacks the sensual quality that Claire Bloom brought to the part on film but gradually manages to make sense of the character's tricky trajectory  - especially a moral awakening that's powerfully conveyed here.

Playing Alison, Ellora Torchia hits odd notes in most of the earlier scenes. But from the character's touching encounter with her Empire-and-Establishment-representing father (a well-judged Deka Walmsley) onwards the performance begins to find its shape and I wasn't prepared for the depth  of emotion she reaches in the final scene. As a combined portrait of the pain of marriage and the state of a nation, Look Back in Anger reveals itself as a flawed work, but while Banerjee's revival isn't ideal I came away moved in the end. 

Look Back in Anger is at the Almeida until 23 November. Further details here. 

Photos: Marc Brenner

Awake, Arise: A Report on Awakenings (Przebudzenia) - the 13th Retroperspektywy Festival (Łódź, 23/8 - 1/9 2024)

Culminating in the sublime LIVET: Suite for the Earth concert, which brought together performers from Poland, Ukraine, Norway and Bulgaria, last year's Retroperspektywy proved an unforgettable edition of the international theatre festival, which is invariably a highlight of summertime in Łódź. And Retroperspektywy returned this year with a just-concluded edition marking a milestone: the 20th anniversary of its founder, Teatr CHOREA, whose activities encompass workshops with and training of diverse community groups, and, of course, the staging of its own inimitably creative concerts and shows.  

Tomasz Rodowicz... and the CHOREA birthday cake

Based at Fabryka Sztuki in Łódź since 2007, CHOREA's defining feature (or one of them) has been its merging of ancient traditions with practices associated with the 20th century avant garde (taking particular inspiration from the work of Grotowski) and cutting-edge contemporary physical theatre, generating dynamic performances combining song, text, movement, and dance.

The group's ethos has never been one of slavish reconstruction of past models. Rather, CHOREA has been all about exploring how ancient theatre forms can be mobilised to speak to current concerns (and enduring existential ones). As a company they're bridge-builders, alchemists, risk-takers, empowerers, and creators of unique theatrical experiences that attune audiences to the expressive capabilities of the human body and voice, providing a fusion of sensual and intellectual pleasures - also accomplished with a spirit of play.

Exhibition:
Evocations - 20 Years of CHOREA

Under the title "Przebudzenia" ("Awakenings"), this year's edition found CHOREA in a mood both reflective and celebratory. This was evident, for one, in the theme of the festival's accompanying exhibition, "Evocations: 20 Years of CHOREA," curated by Magda Milewski and Janusz Adam Biedrzycki, which presented a narrative of the group's activities accompanied by photos and a well-chosen physical "trace" of each live event through the display of a prop or costume. On Monday and Tuesday there was also the rare opportunity to watch filmed shows from the CHOREA archive.

Ola Shaya opening What's Demeter?

What's more, the opening show of this year's edition, punningly titled What's Demeter?, offered an exhilarating rollercoaster ride through a diverse selection of songs and scenes from CHOREA's performance history - a bit like 2013's "50 Years on Stage" event by the British National Theatre, but much more excitingly done. With artistic supervision by CHOREA co-founder Tomasz Rodowicz and "interventions" by director Łukasz Kos adding a fresh eye, the evening was no mere cobbled together "Greatest Hits" package. 

Elina Toneva and the company in What's Demeter?

Instead, What's Demeter? worked as a profound, playful and cohesive experience in its own right, with a strong flow and meaningful transitions but also loose, improvisatory elements, as artists from the company's past and present took to the stage or joined in and sang from the audience.

Po Ptakach (After the Birds) in What's Demeter?

Highlights were plentiful, from Ola Shaya opening the proceedings in cabaret style to quiz audience members on favourite productions and deliver a number from 2011's The Blue Parrot concert, to Sean Palmer unleashing his gorgeous gritty growl ("CHOREA in the house!") to score Rodowicz and Dorota Porowska's super-sensual pas de deux from 2005's After the Birds (Po Ptakach) - incidentally the first CHOREA performance I saw. 

Ragnarok in What's Demeter?

And even if you had seen some of the featured extracts before you would perforce experience them afresh here, since a major component of the event was the live filming of most of the performances by Kamil Wallace, with the images relayed on a large screen to achieve some startling juxtapositions. 

Particularly overwhelming in this regard was the opening sequence of 2022's Ragnarok. This was already a uniquely haunting spectacle that seems to distill all human suffering and striving, fear and fortitude, as, to the celestial sound of Arvo Pärt's Stabat Mater, the performers slowly make their way across the stage towards the light as a tangled, straining collective. This time, with the variously pained or hopeful faces also presented in close-up on the screen, the piece combined the power of physical theatre with that of silent cinema, and reduced this viewer, for one, to tears.

Joanna Chmielecka in What's Demeter?

On the solo side, Joanna Chmielecka delivered a physical and vocal Bruno Schulz-derived tour de force atop, under and whilst taking the legs off of a table, while Małgorzata Lipczyńska, Anna Maszewska (who is also the festival's indefatigable coordinator), and Julia Jakubowska reassembled for a scene from the latter's witty 2020 feminist fairytale revision Księżniczki (Princesses). 

Dzień Dobry Pinky Mouse! in What's Demeter?

A number from 2021's Dzień Dobry Pinky Mouse! took the already anarchic children's musical to a new level of hilarious mania. And the company's versatility is such that the next moment they could morph into the protagonists of 2015's Derby.Biało.Czerwoni (Derby. Red and White): rapping football fans ready for a ruck.

Maciej Maciaszek in What's Demeter?

Threaded throughout were some soul-stirring interludes of choral singing that spoke to the group's deep roots, while the final section, from 2014's Vidomi - a piece originally developed in collaboration with visually impaired performers - was a delicious last tango in which the audience was invited to the stage to dance, bringing the performance to a perfect, bonding close as we then headed outside to the CHOREA birthday party. The whole evening was an invigorating and inspiring experience. 

Zjem twój dżem

The organisers also took the opportunity in this anniversary year to significantly spotlight the work of CHOREA's Intergenerational Group and its Older and Younger Children's Groups. Among several shows for family audiences, the Older Group presented the endearingly berserk Zjem twój dżem (I'll Eat Your Jam) which brought songs, some film noir spirit and a dose of well-judged social commentary to its tale of food, crime and cross-generational relations set in the Łódź district of Bałuty.

Eden:
A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures

Made up of participants from ages 16 to 80, the all-female Intergenerational Group presented two shows: Pauza, and Eden: A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures. Pauza didn't come together for me, but Eden, directed by Biedrzycki, Magdalena Paszkiewicz, and Wiktor Moraczewski, proved a magical experience - something of a companion piece to the same team's also ecologically-minded Rój. Sekretne życie społeczne ("The Hive: Secret Social Life") from 2018. 

Starting with a disarming scene of chat and comedy (look out for the troublesome deckchair), the piece evolved into an ambient evening of physical theatre, one that - through brilliant lighting (green and blue washes turning fiery red), sound, costumes and performances from the 13-strong cast - conveyed the kind of deep care for and attention to nature that Teatr Nowy's witless recent musical adaptation of The Secret Garden sorely lacked. 

Eden:
A Scenical Fairy Tale in Several Pictures

Each different section of Eden was clearly designed and delineated, but the show felt cohesive, and developed a very tender, affirmative tone, with the bodies of the cast eventually becoming the garden plants, blooming by night in a gorgeous final sequence. With audience members given seeds on our way out, the show offered a cleansing and restorative celebration of nature in the feminine. 

Teraz wiesz, jak się czuję

The invited companies this year included Grupa Performatywna Chłopaki, who presented Teraz wiesz, jak się czuję (Now You Know How I Feel), a lively, crowd-pleasing exploration of contemporary Polish masculinity that combined quiet heart-on-sleeve confessional moments with wild elements of stand-up, game show and porn-parody to interrogate social expectations and stereotypes, and point to possibilities of moving beyond them.

Hic Sunt Dracones

The Czech company Teatr Divadlo Continuo provided one of the festival's most startling experiences with Hic Sunt Dracones, directed by Pavel Štourač. This piece probed the darker corners of consciousness and  corporeality, creating some jaw-dropping images of dismemberment and bodily fragmentation, though not without a dose of absurdist black humour that Tim Burton or Terry Gilliam might enjoy, very much operating in the bold surrealist Czech tradition of Jan Švankmajer. The physical panache of the four performers - Sara Bocchini, Kateřina Šobáňová, Granada Gallego and Diana Khwaja - was enhanced by fantastic music and sound performed live by Jakub Štourač.

Magda Kuraś Quintet / Bilgoraj Triptych

Two terrific concerts by female-fronted Polish bands also spoke to the CHOREA ethos of combining tradition with experimentation. With repertoires based on Konin-area melodies and South-Eastern Polish traditions respectively, the Tuleje trio (Gosia Zagajewska,  Wojtek Kurek and Ksawery Wojcinski) and the Magda Kuraś Quintet (featuring Kuraś, Maciej Świniarski, Ziemowit Klimek, Tomasz Chyła, and Kuba Krzanowski) both took folk music in fresh directions, with jazz, rock, art song and improvised elements, to create rich, immersive sounds that felt totally organic. 

Eine Winterreise. A Winter Journey.
Schubert/ Müller/ Baczyński

The festival's final show also centred music, this time from the classical canon. Contrasting with the expansiveness of What's Demeter?,  the Festival closed with an intimate piece for three performers: an interpretation of Schubert's seminal 1827 song-cycle, Winterreise. Eine Winterreise. A Winter Journey. Schubert/ Müller/ Baczyński was co-directed by singer Łukasz Konieczny and dancer/choreographer Boris Randzio who also performed the piece, alongside accomplished pianist Nikolaus Rexroth. 

The performance's innovations included Randzio's danced contribution  - and the incorporation of poems by the great Polish poet Krzysztof Kamil Baczyński, who was killed in the Warsaw Uprising. The use of Baczyński's verse alongside the original Wilhelm Müller poems that Schubert based the work around developed a powerful counter narrative that suggested the building of a Polish-German cultural bridge in the context of the work's themes of alienation, melancholia and mortality.

Summing up CHOREA's achievements at the time of the company's 15th anniversary five years ago, the critic Piotr Olkusz described them as "the wealth of Łódź," crediting the group with forging "a new form of participation in culture and new responsibility for culture. They've slightly changed us." That definition still stands, and Awakenings was another edition of RPS that opened viewers' eyes, ears, minds and hearts to a rich variety of performances and expressions. As CHOREA enters its next decade I continue to wish that the company would push the "international" element of Retroperspektywy further in terms of audiences as well as performances, broadening out to be more accessible to non-Polish speakers and to ensure that their world-class work is more widely seen than ever. Still, as it is, this year's Festival offered some beautiful ways of celebrating CHOREA's past, being in the present, and looking to the future. 

The 2024 Retroperspektywy Festival took place at Fabryka Sztuki in Łódź between 23 August - 1 September.

All performance images by Agnieszka Cytacka fotografia.

Film Review: Lee (dir. Ellen Kuras, 2023)

 

Ellen Kuras's biopic of Lee Miller has been a long-in-gestation passion project for its tenacious producer-star Kate Winslet. The passion hasn't quite made it to the screen, though. Instead, Lee emerges as a work(wo)manlike biopic that too often defaults to the traditional tropes of the genre. These include a flashback structure featuring Winslet tetchily reminiscing in old age make-up, and reductive broad-brush caricaturing of some of the famous figures who crossed Miller's path. With a spelling-it-out script by Liz Hannah, John Collee and Marion Hume that doesn't trust the audience to know the basics about the Blitz or that Jews were not the only group to face Nazi persecution, the film sometimes skirts Shining Through (1992)-style silliness. But with expectations suitably lowered it's a fairly entertaining piece of work. 

It's not hard to see what drew Winslet to Lee as a subject. Miller's life trajectory - from model and Modernist muse to a dedicated war correspondent whose photos from the frontlines and concentration camps, published in Vogue, revealed the horrors of WWII to the wider international public - is a unique one, to say the least. (The full range of her photographic work was only discovered after her death in 1977, when it was published by her son.)

Unsurprisingly, Lee is quite single-minded in celebrating Miller's pluck and daring. We pick up her story from the late 1930s (that is, post-Man Ray) when she's hanging out in France with a diverse group (including Marion Cotillard as  Solange d'Ayen, noblewoman and French Vogue fashion editor). Lee's bohemianism is immediately signposted when Winslet whips off her top to go bare-breasted during an al fresco lunch, and Kuras can't resist making her a proto-#MeToo heroine with equal obviousness, whether she's  intervening to prevent a rape or revealing her own horrendous experience of sexual assault in a late monologue.

But if the script struggles to get to grips with Miller's complexities,  contradictions or artistic development, Winslet - smoking harder even than Jane Fonda did in Julia (1977) - is compelling throughout, and at least succeeds in making Lee's impulsiveness and drive palpable. 

Most of the supporting cast get fewer opportunities to shine, from Alexander Skarsgård as Roland Penrose, Miller's second husband, to Angela Riseborough taking the clipped diction to Harriet Walter levels as sympathetic British Vogue editor Audrey Withers, or Samuel Barnett as Cecil Beaton in a weak caricature of a cameo. Josh O'Connor, invariably an asset, brings some hints of his special soulfulness to the 1970s scenes, but the performance is slightly hampered by the film's insistence on pointlessly obscuring the identity of his character, long after the audience has twigged. 

Though less adept at shaping these performances, Kuras, an acclaimed cinematographer making her directorial debut here, brings some distinctive visual life to Lee as it moves through time periods and locations; the film is shot with polish by Pawel Edelman. Miller's most problematic iconic moment - taking a bath in Hitler's tub - is faithfully recreated, and the centrepiece concentration camp sequence, with the colour drained to practically monochrome, has some of the power of the Ukraine scenes in Agnieszka Holland's Mr Jones (2019) which employed a similar technique. A biopic-by-numbers that too often resorts to unsubtle shorthand, Lee doesn't succeed in doing justice to its fascinating protagonist, but as a competent primer it's worthy of your time.

Lee is out in UK cinemas on 13 September. 

Sight and Sound Summer 2024

 

The summer issue of Sight and Sound is out now. I interviewed Agnieszka Holland about Green Border for this issue. More details here. 

Concert Review: Barb Jungr - Singing into My Seventies (Crazy Coqs, May 2024)

Barb Jungr
(Photo by Steve Ullathorne)

It's not everyone who'd necessarily opt to celebrate their 70th birthday by performing a trio of shows - each one made up of completely different, challenging musical material drawing on a repertoire of about 40 years.

But if there's one thing we know about Barb Jungr by now it's that she doesn't take expected routes. So that's exactly how Jungr spent her 70th - with a three night residency at one of her favourite venues, Soho's Crazy Coqs, accompanied at each show by a different long-time collaborator on piano.  

The first show on 9th May (Jungr's birthday night itself) found Jenny Carr joining to perform a set titled Dark Love: Elvis, Chanson & More. The 10th May show presented Jungr alongside Simon Wallace with a Dylan-centred programme, while the final night saw John McDaniel re-teaming with Jungr on a set revisiting their beautiful collections of work by The Beatles and Sting.

I was only able to make it to the 9th May performance, but have seen Jungr in concert many times since 2015 and it's always a unique, profound and exhilarating experience. She is, without a doubt, one of the greatest of contemporary singers: her supple voice, always exceptionally expressive but undiminished and deepened with the years, is able to dig into a dazzling range of material to find new and surprising qualities. And she's no slouch as a songwriter herself, either. 

But live she's even more than that: a great mover (in the sense of giving a vivid physical life to each song), and a spontaneous, hilarious and often subversive story-teller. At a Jungr show, you never quite know where the between-song chat will go: "I was obsessed with the Gothic nature of swamps," was one of the gems she shared this time around. But what might initially seem to be a non-sequitur always ends up adding to the texture of the song she's about to perform. Movement, gestures, delivery, chat - for Jungr, it's always about serving the story of the song in the most expressive way. 

Barb Jungr
(Photo by Steve Ullathorne)

With only one Jacques Brel piece, "The Tender Hearts," featured, the 9th May show didn't exactly adhere to its title - a case of 'its my birthday and I'll shake up the set-list if I want to', perhaps. But it was a rich and glorious evening nonetheless. Jungr opened with a punchy "Last Train to Clarksville," placing the song in a Vietnam context that I for one had never been aware of. As the evening progressed, connections between the  songs emerged, whether by theme - loss and separation were big - or by specific imagery: trains pulling out of stations, walking, rain. "It does get cheerful in a bit," she deadpanned at one point. 

With Carr's brilliant piano-playing as a by turns delicate and dramatic accompaniment, highlights included a pair of Elvis songs, drawn from Jungr's often wonderfully weird and spooky 2005 Love Me Tender album, a deeply moving "In the Ghetto" and "Kentucky Rain." With Jungr's delivery morphing from gossipy confidence to a preacher's declamation, the rendition of  Dylan's "The Man in the Long Black Coat" was staggering. And so, in an entirely different way, was "Au Depart," an extraordinary piece of writing by Robb Johnson that conjures a world of history, absence, loss, leave-taking and starting over through its economical images. With Johnson himself in the audience, Jungr performed the song with a captivating stillness that made each word pierce the listener. 

Jungr placed "Au Depart" in the context of the post-war refugee experience of her Czech father. This was one example of the resonant way she wove personal stories through some of the songs, from teenage Stockport memories to a traumatic visit to the eye hospital with her beloved mother (who sadly passed away just before Christmas last year) to her joy at getting a dog (Bambi, from Hungary). The latter relationship was celebrated via a rendition of Cat Stevens' "I Love My Dog," a warm performance of the song and a wry deconstruction of it at the same time. 

Indeed, when the evening did "get cheerful" it was with that infectious, soul-enhancing energy that's one of Jungr's essential qualities as an artist. She expresses a sheer joy in communicating with an audience that's often sadly absent from performers half her age.  A glorious take on Jeff Barry's "Walking in the Sun" and a singalong "Forever Young" were irresistible.  Carr led the crowd in a chorus of "Happy Birthday" before Jungr's rollicking version of "Walking in Memphis" sent us out of the club on an exultant high. 

From Ella to Emmylou, June Tabor to Joan Baez, Jungr joins the many female artists who've continued to perform dynamically in their later years, blowing apart pervasive ageist and sexist assumptions in the process. "I couldn't think of anything I'd rather be doing than singing tonight," Jungr said. A more vibrant and vital artist than ever - listen to last year's blistering My Marquee album for recorded proof - may she continue to do so for many more years to come. 

Sight and Sound (June 2024 issue)

 

The June issue of Sight and Sound is out now. I reviewed Ellen E. Jones's new book Screen Deep for this issue. 

Theatre Review: The Ballad of Hattie and James (Kiln Theatre)

 

A decades-spanning play about loss and forgiveness, talent and time, music and memory, centred around a thorny, complicated male/female friendship, Samuel Adamson's The Ballad of Hattie and James tells the story of the title protagonists - piano prodigies who meet as teens in the mid-1970s to collaborate on a college production of Benjamin Britten's  Noyes' Fludde. 

Inevitably, perhaps, they're a contrasting pair: James a stuttery, pretentious boy who flaunts his high cultural ideals like a badge of honour, and she an unruly middle-class girl, open to contemporary music, who turns up at rehearsal with a bottle of booze in her bag. Adamson's writing - rude, allusive, surprising and tender by turns - is attentive to the places where their experiences and temperaments connect and diverge - and how an early tragedy ends up shaping both their personal and professional lives in different ways.

Though not quite as ambitious as Adamson's last play Wife (2019), which traced and placed queer currents in and around productions of a A Doll's House over many years, The Ballad of Hattie and James shows a similar interest in time and its impact on creative artists. In Wife, a tambourine used in the Doll's House tarantella scene became a talisman passed down over decades. Here a similar function is served by a Bechstein piano owned by Hattie's family, coveted by James, and over which the two bond and bicker through the years.

Again, Adamson includes a futuristic flourish, but adopts a non-linear structure to tell this particular story - dropping in on Hattie and James at various points, moving backwards and forwards in time, as their dynamic shifts and changes. 

At first you might wish for a more straightforward telling. But the structure, elegantly managed in Richard Twyman's astute production, gives the piece a richness of texture  and pays off emotionally in the second half. Layering in references from Britten to Bush to Pulp's "Disco 2000", the play is much concerned with how music shapes identity - and vice versa - and how gender has impacted upon the career trajectories and expectations of musicians through history. 

A depiction of a friendship between a gay man and a gay woman is a rarity on stage or screen, and neither the writing nor the performances sentimentalise the protagonists, who are often prickly, selfish, or blinkered but retain our interest and affection, in all their recognisable flaws. 

With a Penguin book in his cardigan pocket and perfect pitch (but dodgy cords), Charles Edwards incarnates in James a certain species of gawky Englishman, smug and shy at once, dismissive in a kneejerk way of the female composers and writers who mean so much to Hattie. But Edwards also reveals the sense of sadness and loss underpinning James' attitudes. As often, Sophie Thompson seems on the cusp of doing too much, vocally and physically, yet keeps an emotional truth in her performance, including in her most florid moments to make Hattie a vital force even when at her lowest.  The mix of competitiveness and complicity that pair's interactions 

With Suzette Llewellyn multi-roling to great effect, and a pianist on stage to tackle the musical interludes, Twyman's production remains intimate but conveys the vagaries of fate and time and creative expression, a brief ballet of past moments bringing the piece together in a beautiful way. 

The Ballad of Hattie and James is booking at the Kiln Theatre until 18 May.