Theatre Review: Photograph 51 (Noël Coward Theatre)

Photograph 51: Photo: Johan Persson

Science on stage can yield mixed results, from the charm and cheek of Charlotte Jones’s Humble Boy, through the deep intellectual pleasures offered by Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen  to, most recently, the cutesy superficiality of Nick Payne’s Constellations. 

Photograph 51, Anna Ziegler’s new play about  Rosalind Franklin, the British scientist who helped to discover the structure of DNA but who, as a woman, was ultimately sidelined from the story,  isn’t quite up to the Copenhagen level. But it’s a lot closer to Frayn than to Payne. It’s a sober, solid, serious-minded piece of writing, sometimes a bit too eager to tell where it might show, but astute, nimble and thoughtful, nonetheless. Michael Grandage's characteristically crisp, lucid production – 95 minutes, no interval – keeps up the pace, delivering a gripping evening that, though starting a tad stiffly, gradually thaws into surprising emotion. Christopher Oram's design evokes both the restrictive walls of fusty academia and the puzzle of a chessboard, as its protagonists’ grapple with the mysteries of scientific discovery (and the mysteries of each others’ personalities, too).

Beyond the telling of an important, still-relevant story - as recent ill-advised comments have shown, the status of women working in science is far from resolved even now - the production’s big draw is, of course, Nicole Kidman, returning to the London stage for the first time since her turn in The Blue Room set an over-excited Charles Spencer salivating about “theatrical Viagra”. It’s to Kidman and Grandage’s great credit that her performance as Franklin never feels like a star turn: defining Franklin as someone who wasn’t “a showman”, Kidman captures without fuss and with great feeling the character’s prickly defensiveness, her intellectual drive, and her latent longings.

Echoing Franklin’s position as a woman in a man’s world, the production surrounds Kidman with an all-male cast, comprised of Will Attenborough as James Watson, Edward Bennett as Francis Crick, Stephen Campbell Moore as Maurice Wilkins, Patrick Kennedy as Don Caspar and Joshua Silver as Ray Gosling. Attempts at humour sometimes feel forced but Kidman and Campbell Moore succeed in making something truly moving of the Wilkins/Franklin relationship – with its misunderstandings and missed opportunities - finally revealing the piece to be a melancholy memory play at its heart. It’s doubtful that Photograph 51 will constitute anyone’s idea of “theatrical Viagra” but its quiet intelligence and unflashy approach make Grandage’s production a definite asset for the West End. 

The production is booking until 21st November. Further details here.   

Theatre Review: Directors' Showcase (Orange Tree Theatre)

The Spring season at Richmond’s Orange Tree Theatre concludes, as usual, with the Directors’ Showcase programme: a double-bill of short plays directed by the theatre’s two trainee directors. This year, the Showcase presents the work of Jimmy Grimes and Teunkie van der Sluijs, and avails itself of the talents of several of the actors from the theatre’s just-concluded run of Three Farces. Grimes presents Then the Snow Came, a new piece that he has researched with Richmond’s homeless charity SPEAR and that combines verbatim text with improvisation and (briefly) puppetry, while van der Sluijs directs Winter, a play by Jon Fosse, the prize-winning Norwegian writer whose I Am the Wind deeply divided audiences at the Young Vic earlier this year. These two apparently contrasting pieces prove surprisingly complementary and make for a challenging but rewarding evening at the Orange Tree.

Taking as its inspiration an impromptu night that the director himself spent on the streets of Richmond, Grimes’s Then the Snow Came focuses on the relationship between two homeless men, the bolshie ex-con Mickey (Kieron Jecchinis) and the more soulful and philosophically-inclined Liverpudlian Stu (Daniel Cheyne). The play follows the two men as they move around various Richmond locations, looking for a place to sleep, begging, bantering about Star Trek, and talking about their lives. Matters come to a head when Mickey is faced with the challenge of scraping together some money for a trip up North for a family emergency. Threaded throughout the narrative is Oscar Wilde’s tale The Happy Prince, the story of which Stu tells to Mickey and which serves throughout as a comment on some of the themes of the piece and a counterpoint to the men’s developing relationship.

It’s an ambitious mixture of elements, but one that Grimes manages to pull off with care and skill, resulting in a compassionate but unsentimental drama that’s shot through with both pain and humour, as well as some nicely judged poetic and expressionistic flourishes. Jecchinis and Cheyne give superbly naturalistic performances, their efforts complemented by the appearances of a multi-tasking Ed Bennett who cameos in no less than seven different roles, the most significant being that of a police officer whose retrospective narration structures the piece.

Although some of the scenes are a little short, the play maintains fluidity and momentum throughout, helped along by an effective and economical design by Katy Mills. There’s also an especially affecting late scene between Mickey and his estranged teenage son Ben, who’s very well played by Michael Smith. Although it goes far beyond reportage, there’s no doubting that the various local references, and the fact that the audience is watching the play in a venue in the very town in which it is set, contribute to the resonance of Then the Snow Came, giving the piece an urgent and at times implicatory power. It’s a considerable piece of work and a terrific achievement for Grimes and his collaborators.

If the following piece, Winter, emerges as rather less satisfying then that’s due to Fosse’s play, rather than any major faults in the production. Like I Am the Wind, this is another elliptical two-hander, this time focusing upon an encounter between a married businessman and a disturbed young woman in an unnamed city. At times, the piece suggests a Pinterized variant on the plot of a screwball comedy, the kind in which a “crazy lady” shakes up the life of a staid, conservative man.

But not only does Fosse’s text offer next to no humour it also offers little in the way of real insight. What is offered is more of the gratingly repetitious, “rhythmic” dialogue that is evidently the playwright’s trademark, and which is no doubt faithfully rendered in Ann Henning Jocelyn’s translation. Playing ‘The Woman,’ poor Jennifer Higham has to declaim the phrase “I am your lady” so many times that she starts to sound like the opening lines of the chorus to Jennifer Rush’s “The Power of Love,” stuck on repeat. Thus the play’s portrait of two people struggling towards connection never becomes quite as affecting as it should.

Despite the play’s limitations, both actors come through with committed performances. Higham, often cast for fresh-faced wholesomeness, shakes off that particular shackle with a striking interpretation that encompasses strung-out neediness, foul-mouthed ferocity and girlish vulnerability. Always a sympathetic stage presence, Stuart Fox is touchingly tentative here as ‘The Man,’ although one can’t help but wish that he was playing less of an archetype and more of a freshly imagined character. The quality of the acting, and the sensitivity of van der Sluijs’s direction, ensure that the production sustains interest, in spite of the qualms one may have about the script itself, while Sam Dowson’s design and Stuart Burgess’s lighting help to convey a palpable sense of atmosphere as the action shifts from park to hotel room and back again. Overall, then, this is an impressive double-bill that makes for a strong conclusion to an altogether excellent season at the Orange Tree.

The Directors Showcase runs until 9th July. Further information at the Orange Tree website.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Theatre Review: Three Farces (Orange Tree)

Farces have long been something of a staple of the Orange Tree’s programming, resulting in some of the theatre’s most popular and crowd-pleasing productions. Over the years, the theatre has presented work by Feydeau, Hannequin and Verber, and, last year, Reggie Oliver’s enjoyable adaptation of Hennequin and Delacour’s Le Procés Vauradieux, translated by Oliver as Once Bitten. For only the second time, however, the theatre has turned its attention to the work of a British farceur, in this case John Maddison Morton, the Victorian writer best known for his 1847 play Box and Cox, which was turned into an operetta by Arthur Sullivan. Editor Colin Chambers and director Henry Bell have adapted three short plays by Morton into one package, as Three Farces. The result is a most enjoyable evening that benefits from the wonderfully inclusive intimacy of the Orange Tree’s space.

Attractively designed by Sam Dowson and fetchingly costumed by Katy Mills, Bell’s production sweeps the audience up in cheerful bonhomie from its opening moments, in which Daniel Cheyne arrives on stage (complete with ukulele) to welcome us to this “veritable smorgasbord of farcical frolickings” and to introduce us to the other actors - Clive Francis, Stuart Fox, Edward Bennett, Jennifer Higham, David Oakes and Natalie Ogle - each of whom comes with their own epithet. Cheyne serves as “Master of Ceremonies” throughout the night, singing an introductory scene-setting ditty before each of the plays, and bantering with the audience during the two intervals. Proceedings kick off with “Slasher and Crasher,” the most anarchic (and also the funniest) of the three comedies. It’s a satire on duelling, with Francis as a patriarch concerned about the cowardice of the eponymous fellows (Oakes and Fox), who are suitors to his niece Rosa (Higham) and sister Dinah (Ogle). The madcap shenanigans culminate in a truly spectacular fight scene between Fox and Oakes, and there’s also a hilarious performance from Bennett as Lt. Brown, another potential suitor for Rosa.

It’s followed by “A Most Unwarrantable Intrusion,” an effective two-hander for Francis and Bennett in which a North London husband’s quiet day alone is interrupted by the appearance of a strange young man who’s trying to commit suicide in his garden. Underpinned by a hint of menace, the piece suggests the “home invasion” thriller as skewed by The Two Ronnies, and ends with a very neat, rather Brechtian flourish; Francis and Bennett are a dream team here. The final play, “Grimshaw, Bagshaw and Bradshaw,” also pivots around a home invasion, as Mr. Grimshaw (Fox) finds his room appropriated by a host of characters on the run. With its mistaken identity plot, disappearances into cupboards, and romantic confusions, this feels like the most conventional of the three pieces, but it’s consistently amusing nonetheless and played with infectious enthusiasm by the actors.

The star of the evening is undoubtedly Mr. Francis, who morphs brilliantly from fussy patriarch to befuddled bourgeois and finally Cockney-sheriffs-officer-cum-bovver-boy across the three plays. But all of the actors here get a moment to shine. The tone of Morton’s writing is less caustic and more generous-spirited than that of some of his French counterparts, and, mercifully, none of the plays resorts to funny-foreigner stereotypes or characters with speech impediments in order to draw laughs, opting instead for some marvellously surreal non-sequiturs. (The best involves a reference to a cotton umbrella.) Bell’s fluid, well-paced production avoids the trap of becoming too frenetic or strained, even as it embraces the self-conscious artifice and theatricality of the plays, and their glorious silliness. This is a thoroughly charming and enjoyable evening to convert even the farce adverse.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.


Three Farces runs for 2 hours 20 minutes and is booking until 25 June. Further information at the Orange Tree website.