Concert Review: Elkie Brooks (Richmond Theatre, 6 June 2016)

Photo: Christophe Cohen

Elkie Brooks takes to the stage of Richmond Theatre looking happy and energised, and clearly relishing the response of a very vocal crowd on a sunny Monday evening.  “What a beautiful day it’s been,” Brooks says. “I hope you’re not too hot… I’ve had the air con turned off because it makes the instruments go out of tune. And it makes me go out of tune as well.”

In fact, there seemed no danger at all of Brooks going out of tune. Watching her effortlessly commanding the stage, her voice distinctively raspy, delicate, or declaiming, is a total joy. For all her enduring appeal, evidenced by the responses of the rowdy, loving crowd, it’s hard not to think that she’s been undervalued as an artist in many ways, not even getting a mention in Lucy O’Brien’s She Bop: The Definitive History of Women in Rock, Pop and Soul, for example. Brooks’s music touches all those genres, as well as blues and country, and she finds dynamic connections between them.

Like the great Barb Jungr, Brooks is one of those artists who's only improved as they've aged, and her palpable pleasure in performance is infectious, putting many younger singers to shame. She doesn’t rival Jungr for between-songs banter, but she has a similar ability to brilliantly focus a song as a dramatic experience, and her joy in rocking out (at 70, after 56 years in the business) is wonderful to see.

Most of Brooks’s biggest hits – “Fool (If You Think It’s Over),” “Sunshine After The Rain,” “Don’t Cry Out Loud” – were placed in the show’s first half. Brooks has been singing these songs for years, but they still sound vibrant, she and her tight, hot band (bass, drums, sax, guitar, keyboards) keeping them supple and fluid and finding fresh textures. She saved “Pearl’s A Singer” for the second half, breaking off mid-song to introduce the band and then encourage an audience singalong. “Lilac Wine” was heart-breakingly vivid and intense; “Nights in White Satin” picked up ambient, prog-rock power;  “Make You Feel My Love,” accompanied by delicate keyboard and bluesy sax, became a beautifully assertive expression.

Brooks gave full vent to her rowdy rock side with a stunning “Roadhouse Blues”, and the encore included three superb covers: Leon Russell’s “A Song For You,”  Bob Seger’s “We’ve Got Tonight,” and, most poignantly, Prince's “Purple Rain,” bringing a great evening to a beautiful close. 

Tour dates here.

Gig Review: The Counterfeit Stones (Richmond & touring)

“Knock up your daughters!” shrieks the none-too-subtle (and none-too-PC) poster for The Counterfeit Stones’ current tour. It’s a tag-line that sums up the unashamedly brash tone of this show – part tribute concert, part spoof – that zips through Rolling Stones hits with raucous glee, and features gags that veer cheerfully from the corny (“a Mars a day helps you work rest and lay”) to the crass (a running joke about Brian Jones’s death crosses the line into tastelessness).

Alongside the Bootleg Beatles, The Counterfeit Stones are counted among the most successful tribute bands on the circuit; they’ve been on the scene since the 1990s, and have developed quite a substantial following in that time, judging by the amount of fans enthusiastically braving the cold for Saturday night’s gig at Richmond Theatre. Fittingly, the tone of the evening is quite different to that of The Beatles tribute show, Let It Be, which is currently (and, in the opinion of this reviewer, undeservedly) doing very good business in the West End. A tackier and livelier proposition, The Counterfeit Stones present themselves openly as “a cartoon version” of rock’s best bad boys, an approach that’s evident even in the choice of names, the current line-up comprising Steve Elson as (yup) Nick Dagger, Bill Lennon as Keef Rickard, John Prynn as Charlie Mott, Alan Mian as Bill Hymen, by Holger Skepeneit as Nicky Popkiss and the very versatile David Birnie tripling up as Byron Jones, Mick Taylor-Made and Ronnie B Goode.

It’s quickly apparent that The Counterfeit Stones certainly aren’t afraid of silliness, then. But what redeems the evening from being an unadulterated exercise in kitsch and camp is the fact that the group are actually accomplished musicians capable of performing a wide range of Stones material with verve and panache. Highlights of the set include a crisp “Not Fade Away,” a jangling, percussive “Out of Time,” a punchy, cutting “Paint it Black,” a surprisingly emotive “You Can’t Always Get What You Want,” a dynamic “Sympathy For The Devil,” and a blistering “Gimme Shelter.”

The endlessly preening, prancing and pouting Elson has the moves like Jagger, all right, and pulls off the singing, the outfits and the cheeky banter with equal aplomb. Album cover parodies and pastiche film footage clips – including a memorably surreal appearance on The Sooty and Sweep Show that ends with Nick and Keef crooning “As Tears Go By” as the puppets get stoned – add to the fun, while the Richmond audience reveled in some well-judged local refs, including an inevitable Jerry Hall mention.

With the Rolling Stones still very much on the touring circuit, The Counterfeit Stones offer a very pleasing evening for those disinclined – or simply unable – to stump up the inflated ticket prices demanded by Mick and co these days, making this irreverent yet accomplished act a good-value and entertaining alternative to the real thing. You get what you need.

Tour dates and details here.

Theatre Review: Headlong's Medea (Richmond, & touring)

There’s just one very good reason to see Headlong’s Medea, which updates and relocates Euripides’s tragedy to contemporary England. It’s not Ruari Murchison’s set design – clever though it is – which places the characters variously inside and outside an archetypal two-storey suburban home that opens and shuts like a large doll’s house. And it’s certainly not Mike Bartlett’s text, by far the weakest element of the enterprise. The reason to see the show is, simply, Rachael Stirling, blazing and brilliant in a great performance that overrides some – though, alas, not all – of the problematic elements of the production.

Red-haired here and by turns husky, harsh and velvet-voiced, Stirling’s Medea dominates – as every good Medea surely should – from her first appearance, with Stirling’s vocal resemblance to her mother Diana Rigg (who of course played the role to great acclaim in the early 1990s) adding another layer to the performance. Bartlett, who also directs the production, makes the character palpably an “outsider” figure in her community, a woman who’s about to be evicted from the house she shared with her husband Jason (Adam Levy), the latter having left her for their landlord’s daughter, Kate, who he’s going to marry. This event has made the couple’s son Tom mute and sent Medea herself into a black depression that’s interspersed with tirades against her errant ex and against a woman’s lot in general.

By turns proud and paranoid, bitter and desperate, Stirling “kills” in the role. But if only every element in Barlett’s production were as strong. It’s not so much the modernising that’s the problem – indeed, it could be argued that Bartlett hasn’t been as radical as he might have been in his adaptation of the text – but simply that the writing isn’t adequate to the task at hand. Complete with references to Strictly Come Dancing and Richard Curtis flicks, the dialogue is sub-soap opera standard for the most part, but there are occasional lurches into a more heightened mode. Medea reminds Jason about saving him from “the Grecian sea” and pauses at one moment to muse: “Is everything preordained? Do you believe in fate?” These jarring juxtapositions mean that the production struggles to find a suitable tone. For the most part, it’s more comic than tragic, and the OTT final moments simply haven’t earned the emotion that they evidently seek to incite.

There’s the odd effective episode, notably a touching late scene between Medea and her ever-silent son, but a couple of moments feel like indulgences (a painful cookery scene scored to Bowie’s “Aladdin Sane,” for one). Overall, the familiarity of the context tends to dampen rather than accentuate the tragic dimension of the piece, and, for all its contemporary allusions, Bartlett’s adaptation gives startlingly little insight into what might motivate an infanticide.

Since Medea is provided with an escape route – courtesy of a kindly neighbour (Paul Shelley, the only cast member to give a performance that’s a match for Stirling’s) – it might have been more effective if Bartlett had not had his heroine wreak vengeance – or at least not in the unconvincing manner in which it happens here – thereby subverting our expectations and providing this Medea with a different fate. It’s a tactic that may have proved more in keeping with the overall tone of the production, for as it stands this Headlong plunge into Greek Tragedy proves a disappointment, albeit one that’s just about worth seeing for Stirling’s commanding work.

At Richmond Theatre until 24th November. Further information at Headlong's website.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Theatre Review: The Judas Kiss (Richmond Theatre & touring)

Freddie Fox’s flair for flouncing is in evidence once again in Neil Armfield’s production of David Hare’s The Judas Kiss. Playing Lord Alfred “Bosie” Douglas, Oscar Wilde’s lover and downfall, Fox delivers a nicely-nuanced portrait of petulance, storming around the pair’s hotel room, preening, and shouting at the staff. Partnering the fresh-faced Fox is Rupert Everett as Wilde: bulked-up, jowly, sunk with the disappointment of betrayal yet still suggesting a coolly appraising mind at work.

Hare’s play about the Wilde-Bosie liaison was first seen in 1998 in a production directed by Richard Eyre with Liam Neeson and Tom Hollander in the lead roles. Armfield’s revival for Hampstead Theatre has been more enthusiastically received, and now tours before its West End transfer. I found it to be a solid - sometimes stolid - production that offers some scattered moments of insight, but that isn’t, quite, an evening to get wild(e) about.

Rather than attempting to cover a broad chunk of Wilde’s experiences - as Brian Gilbert’s 1997 film with Stephen Fry tried and struggled to do successfully - Hare hones in on two key moments in the writer’s later life: pre- and post-prison. The first act unfolds in the Cadogan Hotel between Wilde's court case against Bosie's father and his subsequent arrest. Here, having refused to sully Bosie’s reputation by calling him as a witness, Wilde opts to stay and face the music against the advice of his friend Robbie Ross (Cal Macaninch), who urges him to flee to France. In the second act, Hare shifts the scene to Naples and Wilde’s experiences following on from his incarceration. Reunited with Bosie, who’s busily entertaining his Italian lover Galileo (a seldom-clothed Tom Colley), Wilde reflects on the pain caused by his separation from his children, his writer’s block and his career prospects, as he and Bosie edge towards an inevitable parting of the ways.

Hare, who originally conceived of The Judas Kiss as the first part of a trilogy on the theme of sacrificial love, is interested in where moral integrity meets martyrdom or even masochism in Wilde’s story. He deftly avoids hagiography: Wilde, as constructed here, is an equivocal figure - one who can either be admired for his integrity or reproached for his tendency towards self-sabotage.

The material is interesting enough, but, dramatically, The Judas Kiss doesn’t build up much of a head of steam, and never becomes truly moving. The mood is minor-key - Hare doesn't provide the expected epigram-blitz though there are some funny lines - and the second half turns static, confining Everett to a chair - Hamm-in-Endgame-style - for the duration.  Still, having seemed relatively underpowered in the poor film adaptations of Wilde plays directed by Oliver Parker (An Ideal Husband and The Importance of Being Earnest) Everett is more assured and compelling here, especially in key moments that convey Wilde’s vulnerability.

But though Cal Macaninch is quite effective as Ross, Hare hasn’t really provided enough for the other characters to do. The dialogue sometimes strikes false notes (Wilde helpfully reminds Ross: “You were the first man I ever slept with”), while a late speech resorts to spelling out the significance of the play’s title for us. As another addition to the gallery of Wilde portraits, The Judas Kiss certainly has interest. But Armsfield’s production, though competent, feels more static than dramatic for the most part.

Reviewed for British Theatre Guide.

The production is at Richmond until 3rd November. It moves to the Duke of York's from 9th January 2013.

Theatre Review: Driving Miss Daisy (Richmond Theatre & touring)

David Esbjornson’s revival of Alfred Uhry’s 1987 play Driving Miss Daisy scored a big success first on Broadway and then in London’s West End at Wyndham’s last year, with the powerhouse duo of Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones—both in rather affected, hammy mode—in the lead roles. The production now tours, with Gwen Taylor and Don Warrington replacing Redgrave and Jones. For me, the production actually benefits considerably from this cast change, with Taylor and Warrington both delivering subtler, more nuanced performances that are much more in keeping with the spirit of this most delicate and low-key of dramas.

Indeed, Uhry’s play—which charts the gradual growth into closeness of an elderly Jewish woman, Daisy Werthan, and her African-American chauffeur Hoke Coleburn over almost three decades in Atlanta, Georgia—is a very slight piece of work, one which Bruce Beresford’s 1989 film starring Jessica Tandy, Morgan Freeman and Dan Aykroyd succeeded in fleshing out much more substantially.

With black-and-white backdrops offering images of Martin Luther King and the KKK, the social context feels considerably sketchier in the stage version, and, in addition, the way that the driving scenes are handled in Esbjornson’s production still remains a problem for me—the sight of the two actors sitting on a bench and a chair as one rotates a steering wheel attached to a silver pole never allows the viewer to really suspend disbelief.

But the heart of the piece is Daisy and Hoke’s relationship as it moves from suspicion and disdain (on her side) into dependency, trust and friendship, and that trajectory is touchingly charted here. With Redgrave and Jones in the roles—she either rattling through the lines at breakneck speed or else drawling them out affectedly, and he bellowing and cackling—the play felt strangely unbalanced: there seemed barely a moment when the viewer wasn’t aware of observing icons, acting.

In contrast, Taylor and Warrington inhabit the roles of Daisy and Hoke in a more natural, less self-conscious manner, cutting out the affectation. Taylor communicates Daisy’s cantankerousness without overplaying it, showing the ex-schoolmistress used to being in control who’s frustrated and challenged by what she perceives to be her loss of independence. She brings unforced humour to the role, as well as some understated lyricism to the scene in which Daisy tells Hoke about the first time she saw the ocean. Warrington partners her excellently, nicely conveying Hoke’s wariness and his wry wit, and he’s especially good in the scene in which the character’s illiteracy is revealed.

The likeable Ian Porter also does a more relaxed job than Boyd Gaines in the role of Daisy’s son Boolie, communicating both the character’s exasperation at, and affection for, his mother’s behaviour. In sum, this expert trio of actors bring just the right amount of humour and heart to this modest play, making this incarnation of Esbjornson’s production a less "starry" but much more emotionally involving affair. Recommended.

Theatre Review: The Handyman (Richmond Theatre & touring)

Belying the excessive modesty of its title, Ronald Harwood’s play The Handyman deals in Big Themes: war crimes, guilt, retribution, the nature of evil, the unknowability of others. You won’t be able to miss these themes because the characters keep stopping to announce them. A tendency towards obvious speechifying gives Harwood’s play an artificial air, at times. But Joe Harmston’s crisp and uncluttered production, produced by Guildford’s Yvonne Arnaud Theatre and now touring, proves mostly gripping nonetheless.

The play – which was first staged at Chichester’s Minerva Theatre in 1996 – opens in the quintessentially English (cue birdsong and church bells) garden of an affluent couple, Julian and Cressida Field (Adrian Lukis and Caroline Langrishe): she’s working towards a degree in Gender Studies; he’s “in money.” The pair employ an odd-job man, Roman Kozachenko, known as Romka (Timothy West), a Ukrainian who’s taken care of the family for years, since being befriended by Cressida’s father in a P.O.W camp in Rimini. One day, however, the Fields receive a visit from Scotland Yard who announce that they have evidence connecting Romka to the massacre of over 800 Jews in the Ukraine in 1941. Romka protests his innocence, insisting that he was only a cook in the army and that this is a case of mistaken identity, but as evidence against him begins to mount up, the Fields begin to question how well they know a man that they’ve loved and trusted for years. Or as Julian handily summarises: “How well does anyone ever really know anyone?”

Its premise not entirely dissimilar to that of Costa-Gavras’s 1989 film Music Box, in which Jessica Lange played a lawyer defending her Hungarian father (Armin Mueller-Stahl) against accusations of war crimes, The Handyman stays out of the courtroom. Rather, the piece moves between scenes set in the Fields’s garden – where the couple meet Romka’s lawyer Marian Stone (Carolyn Backhouse) – and others set in Scotland Yard, where Romka is questioned by two police officers (James Simmons and Anthony Houghton). The latter scenes prove to be the most memorable and effective in the piece, and not only because Harmston has managed to entice to two big-names to portray witnesses to Romka’s alleged crimes. Delivering their testimonies via video, Steven Berkoff and Vanessa Redgrave – playing an army comrade of Romka’s and a friend of his sister, respectively – give juicy life to the play’s sometimes rehearsed-sounding arguments, and their star power doesn’t throw the evening off balance. Redgrave, in particular, lifts the piece into another dimension as her character, now a nun in Jerusalem, recalls witnessing a massacre. Unfortunately, the tension generated in these scenes is somewhat spoiled by a plunge into soap operatics in the misjudged final scene – an episode not in the original production of the play and added, Harwood’s programme note informs us, at the suggestion of Christopher Fry.

As the complacent couple who find their comfortable world shaken, Lukis and Langrishe give solid though not outstanding performances. West is superb throughout, however, creating a portrait of a softly-spoken man who’s severed all links with his background to re-invent himself as a British citizen and now finds his past painfully resurfacing. The intelligence of West’s interpretation, and the strength of the interrogation scenes, make Harmston’s production a worthwhile and intermittently powerful experience.

At Richmond until 20th Oct. Further touring information here.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Theatre Review: Steel Magnolias (Richmond Theatre, & touring)

Soap queens and theatre grande dames constitute the astutely-assembled cast of David Gilmore’s engaging revival of Steel Magnolias, Robert Harling’s 1987 talk-fest about the lives, loves and losses of six Louisiana women. Best known in its 1989 film adaptation directed by Herbert Ross, Harling’s play is a slight but affectionate and heartfelt affair. Written following the untimely death of the playwright’s sister, the piece unabashedly celebrates the humour, supportiveness and fortitude of a group of (mostly wealthy and all white) Southern women, whose mixture of strength and fragility provides the piece with its title.

Harling’s sharply-drawn crew of characters comprise the widowed Clairee Belcher (Cherie Lunghi) and her sparring partner, the batty curmudgeon Quiser Boudreaux (Cheryl Campbell); the new-to-town Annelle (Kacey Ainsworth); and mother and daughter M’Lynn and Shelby Eatenton (Isla Blair and Sadie Pickering), who gather in the beauty shop owned and run by Truvy Jones (Denise Welch) to gossip, confess and “crack wise.” The piece unfolds over several years, and the main thrust of the plot reveals around the diabetic Shelby’s determination to have a child against doctors’ advice and her mother’s wishes, the fallout from which decision motivates the drama’s inevitable tragic turn.

As with David Esbjornson’s West End production of Driving Miss Daisy last year, fans of Ross’s film may miss the additional scenes and characters that added texture and nuance to the movie, and find the play to be a little thin and static by comparison, the obviousness of the material accentuated. At the same time, the single salon setting - nicely designed here by Helen Goddard - brings a distilled, sharp focus to the piece, and the play seems more convincing, lively and inhabited than did Driving Miss Daisy, as well as a good deal less calculating in its effects than the obnoxious Calendar Girls, a production whose “demographic” this one would seem to target.

Gilmore’s direction can’t be called inspired - proceedings come to a dead halt during what feel like bewilderingly lengthy scene changes - but the actresses keep things as buoyant and as truthful as they can. Responsible for one of the least-heralded great stage performances of recent years as the MND-afflicted matriarch in The Company Man at the Orange Tree a few years ago, Isla Blair gives an understated, moving performance here as M’Lynn. Carefully communicating the character’s concern for her daughter as she takes her first steps into an independent life, Blair brings a wry humour and captivating stillness to the stage, making M’Lynn’s final outburst of anger and grief all the more affecting.

Cherie Lunghi does a witty, elegant job of work as Clairee, and Kacey Ainsworth is funny and touching as she charts Annelle’s shift from timid new recruit to voracious bible-thumper. Denise Welch, better known these days for her appearances in tabloids and on Loose Women than her acting roles, subverts expectations with a warm and endearing performance as Truvy, the role amply filled by Dolly Parton in the film. And an unrecognisable Cheryl Campbell does a full-on comic turn as a squawking, highly-strung Ouiser, moving from what feels like broad caricature into genuine eccentricity; at one priceless moment, she cackles with glee at her own reflection. As Shelby, Sadie Pickering struggles by comparison, hampered by a studied-sounding Southern drawl, but she manages a couple of affecting moments.

Ultimately, Gilmore’s production doesn’t match Ross’s film for emotional impact. But, attuned to the play’s combination of sharp humour and sentiment, it generates its laughs and tears on cue.

 
At Richmond until 19th May. Full tour dates and details here.  

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

 
 

Theatre Review: Long Day's Journey Into Night (Richmond Theatre)

It’s Eugene O’Neill’s masterpiece and perhaps the masterpiece of the American theatre. It’s ranked fifth on the National Theatre’s survey of the 20th century’s “most significant” plays. It’s the best play about the past’s ability to trap and control us. It’s “the saddest play ever” (per Richard Eyre). It raises the family theme to “mythic heights” (Pauline Kael). It has “the greatest last line that’s ever been written” (Harold Pinter).

Such comments suggest a monument: a play that we should all bow down before in reverence. But watching Long Day’s Journey Into Night in the theatre it’s surprising just how un-monumental it feels. Rather, this powerful and poignant play - wrenched painfully out of its author’s own family history, his memories of his morphine-addicted mother, his skinflint actor-father and his lush of a brother - seems to me to achieve its greatness through its concentrated intimacy, adding up to a compulsive portrait of familial conflict and familial love that, for all its specificity for O’Neill, stimulates very personal feelings of recognition in the viewer.

The play was last seen in London in 2000 in an extremely intense production by Robin Phillips that gave a subtle expressionist flourish - suggestive of ghostly reverie - to the proceedings. Anthony Page’s major new revival - which opened at Richmond Theatre last night and tours briefly before settling into the Apollo in April - doesn’t have a sense of atmosphere to match Phillips’s. Page - a director I always think of as a “stay-out-of-the-play’s-way”-type - takes a traditional, straightforward approach. Lez Brotherson’s wood-panelled set (nicely lit by Mark Henderson) is merely serviceable and Gareth Owen’s sound design is spare and unobtrusive.

The play has been trimmed, however: usually coming in at around 3 hours 30 minutes it’s down to a running time of under 3 hours here. There are no significant losses - and arguably some gains-  to the cuts: a lot of tedious poetry-quoting has been ditched. But there’s certainly an oddity to the placing of the interval: a lengthy, 1 hour 45 minute first half (which clearly tested the endurance capacity of certain irritatingly fidgety audience members) is followed by an hour-long second half comprising Act 4.

There is, inevitably, some fine-tuning still to be done here, but the production casts its spell, primarily through the strength of the performances. Without sentimentalising, David Suchet makes his James Tyrone a more genial and sympathetic figure than most actors have managed: he’s touchingly sincere in his expressions of love for his wife and moving when reflecting upon his sense of wasted potential, or recalling the early poverty that’s at the root of Tyrone’s miserliness. Laurie Metcalf, last seen on the UK boards at the NT in 2001 in All My Sons (a.k.a my all-time favourite production), digs deeply into the guilt, anger and fear that have driven Mary back to morphine, writhing in anguish as painful memories surface, radiating maternal concern and then pointing the finger of blame with devastating ferocity. The performance lacks the lyricism and sheer vocal gorgeousness that Jessica Lange brought to the role in Phillips’s production, and Metcalf may need to find a stronger sense of becalmed serenity in Mary’s doped nostalgic reveries. But as it stands she contributes a twitchily intense and sometimes frankly disturbing turn.

And as the sons, adding their perspectives to their parents’ refrains of blame and complicity, affection and accusation, Trevor White as Jamie and Kyle Soller as Edmund are just right, with Soller (what a great actor he is!) especially moving and impressive as the consumptive aspiring poet: his delivery of Edmund’s florid late speech about his connection to the sea is particularly fine.

Despite the intensity of the key scenes, the ending feels strangely muted and anti-climactic here: Metcalf’s muttered, rapid recitation of Mary’s final aria is a daring choice of delivery but it doesn't resonate (there were complaints about inaudibility from some audience members) and might need to be rethought in future performances. Still, Page’s production is in fine shape already, and looks likely to only get stronger as time goes on. Good enough reason to sign up for an emotionally bruising but highly rewarding evening in the company of the tormented Tyrones.

The production runs at Richmond until March 3rd, tours to Milton Keynes (12-17 March) and Theatre Royal Glasgow (26-31 March) and moves into the Apollo from 2 April.

Concert Review: Kate Rusby (Richmond Theatre) (23/10/2011)

“We’ve never played here before; we wondered if anybody would come,” confessed a characteristically self-deprecating Kate Rusby towards the end of her enchanting concert at Richmond Theatre yesterday evening. Well, Rusby need not have worried, for the folk fans of Surrey and its surrounds were out in full force last night and gave the singer and her band - Damien O’Kane (guitar/banjo), Ed Boyd (guitar), Julian Sutton (accordion), Duncan Lyle (double bass) and John Joe Kelly (bodhrán) - a very warm welcome indeed.

Though nursing a slight cough passed on to her by her and O’Kane’s two-year-old daughter, Rusby performed like a trouper and was in excellent voice throughout the night, sounding confident and clear. With no brand new album to promote - her last, the entirely self-penned Make The Light, was released a year ago - Rusby constructed a thoughtful set-list that ranged widely over her catalogue, offering a pleasing mixture of traditional and original material. And although much of her older work was of course arranged for fiddle and whistles, the competence and energy of the players ensured that the absence of these instruments in the current set-up wasn’t felt as too much of a lack.

Following an enjoyable, assured warm-up set by Kelly, Boyd and the wry O’Kane, the gig proper began with a lovely version of “Playing of Ball,” the opening track from 2001’s Little Lights, and was followed by a rollicking take on “The Cobbler’s Daughter.” (“We’ll get our songs involving deaths out of the way early on,” Rusby quipped. “And then you can relax into your Sunday evening.”) The newer self-written songs also sounded especially supple and strong, with the plaintive “Only Hope” outstanding, while “Walk the Road” - the closest that Rusby’s yet come to an anthem - concluded the first half on an especially stirring note.

It’s fair to say that, stylistically, Rusby’s work hasn’t developed much over the years, and, across an album, her music can sometimes seem to lack variety. But in a live context - and interspersed with her disarming, often hilarious banter - her music feels vibrant and fresh, and the songs sometimes gain new depths and resonances as well. The concert’s emotional highlight came towards the end of the second half with an exquisite, moving performance of “Let the Cold Wind Blow,” while other standouts included a spry, cheeky “Game of All Fours” (“If you’re under 16, then this is a song about a card game. If you’re over 16, make of it what you will”), a gorgeously rootsy “Over You Now,” and a great fun set of tunes from the band. The one-song encore of “Underneath the Stars,” which Rusby took solo, was, appropriately, celestial.

Rusby’s apparently artless, girl-next-door persona belies the talent and tenacity of a musician who’s been on the scene for 20 years now and who’s able to captivate an audience by creating an atmosphere of palpable warmth, intimacy and ease. “This theatre’s gorgeous… I think we’d like to live here,” Rusby mused. And judging by the affectionate response that she received, it seems that Richmond’s residents would be happy if she chose to do that very thing. A delightful evening.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Tour dates and venue information here.

Theatre Review: Dr Marigold & Mr Chops (Richmond Theatre)

Fresh from his successful stint at the Edinburgh Festival in Emmanuel Darley’s Tuesday at Tescos, and having only recently completed a run of Being Shakespeare in the West End, the indefatigable Simon Callow now hits the road with Dr Marigold and Mr Chops. Callow first performed this double-bill of Charles Dickens texts as a Christmas show in 2009, in a production directed by Patrick Garland, and the show has now been revived for a national tour, with Richard Twyman taking over directing duties. Callow is, of course, an actor who has practically cornered the market in one-man shows in recent years, and these colourful monologues - adapted by Dickens himself from two Christmas stories that he wrote and performed on his famed reading tours in the 1860s - provide pretty much an ideal showcase for the actor’s talents.

Callow delivers the monologues on a set by Christopher Woods that suggests the run-down backstage area of a theatre or circus, with red curtains, stacks of theatre paraphernalia and faded posters surrounding him. In the first piece, "Mr Chops," the actor plays one Toby Magsman, a showman who narrates the cautionary tale of the title figure, a circus dwarf whose £12,500 lottery win provides him his long-awaited entrance into “society.” But this position proves rather less congenial than Mr Chops imagined and the story charts his discovery that an increase in social status can represent its own kind of sham and trap. Clearly relishing Dickens’s epigrams and baroque turns of phrase, Callow dexterously conjures the presences of a variety of circus folk here, in a piece that combines social satire with a vivid evocation of the life of sideshow performers.

"Dr Marigold," though, is the richer and more emotionally satisfying of the two monologues. It’s the tale of a ‘cheap jack’ or itinerant merchant, who, following the deaths of his wife and young daughter, adopts a ‘deaf-and-dumb’ girl with whom he forms a deep bond. Like much of Dickens’s work, "Dr Marigold" has been criticised for sentimentality, but underpinning its tender portrait of a healing relationship is a darker narrative that touches on poverty, loneliness, domestic violence and child abuse. And Callow proves himself an absolute master at shifting moods here, moving the audience from mirth to deep melancholy as he slides from Dr Marigold’s quick-fire salesman’s spiel to a devastating account of a bad marriage. Thus the piece really earns its emotional response and heart-warming finale.

There is, it must be admitted, a certain air of quaintness about a show like Dr Marigold & Mr Chops, which is an unashamedly old-fashioned entertainment. But this charming evening proves hard to resist, serving as a reminder of the rich humanity of Dickens’s writing and a demonstration of the skills of an actor whose sheer delight in performance is palpable and infectious.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Review of Mr. Callow's Masterclass last year here.

Theatre Review: The Madness of George III (Richmond Theatre & touring)

Some productions and performances cast long shadows. One such is Nigel Hawthorne’s tour-de-force turn in Alan Bennett’s The Madness of George III, a play first staged by Nicholas Hytner at the National Theatre in 1991 and later immortalised on film as The Madness of King George (for the benefit of those confused by Roman numerals). Hawthorne’s Olivier-honoured performance transferred equally successfully to film; indeed, one critic described the actor's close-ups in the film version as “the best argument for cinema over theatre that I can think of.”

The iconic status of Hawthorne’s performance in both the stage and the screen versions may explain why Bennett’s play has seldom been seen since that initial staging. But Christopher Luscombe’s new production - which closed the 2011 season for the Peter Hall Company at Bath and is now on a national tour - succeeds in carving out its own niche, and boasts a central performance by David Haig that, while not displacing memories of Hawthorne in the role, still constitutes a vivid, gripping interpretation in its own right.

The action takes place in the late 1780s. Already tormented by the loss of the American colonies, George III finds his equilibrium further tested by the onset of alarming mood swings and erratic acts: he disrupts concerts, gropes the Queen’s Lady of the Bedchamber (Charlotte Asprey) and generally appears to be losing his wits. While his physicians advocate crackpot methods - including blistering, purgatives and sweats - to cure his condition, a wider political crisis erupts. The PM Pitt (Nicholas Rowe) attempts to reassure Parliament of the King’s sanity while his Whig rival Fox (Gary Oliver) argues that the petulant Prince of Wales (Christopher Keegan) should take over as monarch. The Queen (Beatie Edney) remains loyal, but when she and George are separated, the King’s best hopes appear to lie with one Dr. Willis (Clive Francis), a parson-cum-medic who has his own unorthodox approach to the King’s mysterious condition.

By turns irreverent and sympathetic, Bennett’s seriocomic vision of George’s predicament is well conveyed in Luscombe’s nimble, no-nonsense production. With the historical context lucidly sketched in, Bennett gives himself reign to indulge in scatology and some flagrant anachronisms, and the play’s oscillations between humour and pathos are nicely captured here. Stirring bursts of Handel underscore some of the scene changes, and the production strikes the right balance between intimate and epic, with an elegant design by Janet Bird and crisp lighting by Oliver Fenwick.

And David Haig’s performance is a show all by itself. Encompassing irascibility, imperiousness and heart-rending vulnerability, the actor delivers a rich and compelling performance here. Physically and vocally dexterous, he takes some bold risks in the mad scenes but underplays beautifully in the late scene - the play’s best - in which the King’s return to sanity is paralleled by his reading of the Cordelia/Lear reconciliation scene from King Lear.

Haig is well supported by Edney, and, especially, by the always-watchable Francis (last seen in three roles in the Orange Tree’s delightful Three Farces), as the challenging doctor who believes that the King’s condition may in part be the result of the unhealthy deference afforded to monarchs.

For all its amusing and insightful moments, though, I don’t think it can be argued that The Madness of George III truly ranks as one of Bennett’s most substantial pieces of work. There’s a “thinness” about the conception of the piece, and, dramatically, the play never cuts quite as deep as you might hope. It may be that the historical setting doesn’t really allow Bennett to exercise his great strength as a dramatist, which is for the minute examination of everyday, contemporary British life. Notwithstanding, the play remains more distinctive and characterful than many recent dramas on historical subjects, and Luscombe’s production is well worth seeing, not least for Haig’s superb, resourceful performance.

The production runs for 2 hours 25 minutes and is at Richmond Theatre until 10th September. Further information on tour dates here.


Reviewed for British Theatre Guide.

Theatre Review: Rock Around The Clock (Touring)

Rock Around the Clock is pretty much the kind of show that you know whether or not you’ll enjoy before stepping into the auditorium. It’s the ultimate nostalgia-fest jukebox musical: a slick assemblage of 1950s and early 60s rock ‘n’ roll hits strung together without anything as distracting as even the semblance of a narrative to get in the way of the music. Over the course of two hours, six hard-working singers (Jamie Capewell, Will Mulvey, AnDre Washington, Kelsey Cobban, Ben Fitzpatrick and Sarah Accomando) and a four-piece band rip through songs made famous by Elvis, Buddy Holly, Fats Domino, Chuck Berry, Jerry Lee Lewis, Connie Francis, The Crystals, The Shirelles and others, while eight colourfully-costumed dancers strut their stuff. The company’s energy generates an infectious enthusiasm throughout the evening and damned if the audience weren’t up on their feet, dancing, singing and clapping along by the end of the show.

Director/choreographer Neil Dorward keeps proceedings flowing smoothly with swift transitions between the numbers. Images are presented on a screen above the band and while this doesn’t always seem entirely necessary (clips from From Here to Eternity to accompany “Lipstick on Your Collar”?) it’s fun to see footage of the original performers. The director seems to toy with the idea of giving a potted history of rock ‘n’ roll in the early stages but abandons that idea fairly swiftly and lets the songs speak for themselves; if part of the show’s function is simply to serve as a testament to the enduring appeal and vibrancy of this music then it certainly succeeds in this endeavour. Highlights include Capewell crooning a memorable Buddy Holly medley and squeezing himself into fetching leather trousers for a dynamic take on Gene Vincent’s immortal “Be-Bop-A-Lula”; the baby-faced Fitzpatrick singing an adorably lovelorn lead on “Unchained Melody”; Washington tearing into Little Richard’s “Rip It Up” and “Good Golly Miss Molly”; a Platters medley featuring “Twilight Time,” “The Great Pretender” and “Only You”; and the wonderfully ebullient Mulvey throwing himself around with gay abandon during Jerry Lee Lewis’s “Whole Lotta Shakin’ Going On.” Unfortunately, the female performers are comparatively underused in terms of lead vocals, but Cobban and Accomando do well by “Stupid Cupid” and Etta James’s “At Last”; the latter is perhaps the show’s most tender and emotional moment.

You don’t feel that there’s a great deal of urgency or necessity about a show like Rock Around the Clock but this good-spirited entertainment proves pretty irresistible anyway, and was clearly delighting the very broad audience in attendance at Richmond Theatre last week. It’s an enjoyable feel-good evening that does, very professionally, exactly what it says on the tin.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews, .

Theatre Review: Eden End (Richmond Theatre, & touring)

Set in 1912, JB Priestley’s 1934 drama concerns the unexpected return to the family fold of one Stella Kirby, a woman who, eight years previously, left home to become an actress, against her parents’ wishes. Stella’s career has not progressed as she hoped, but she conceals this from her father, a GP who has come to view her leaving as a courageous act, the kind that he wishes he himself had made earlier in his life. Completing the family gathering are Stella’s younger siblings Lilian and Wilfred, the former bitter and resentful of her sister, the latter on leave from his job in Nigeria. The appearance of Stella’s old beau Geoffrey and her semi-estranged husband Charles (who she’s neglected to mention to her family) further complicate the reunions, as Priestley constructs a portrait of a group of characters who are all, in one way or another, dealing with disappointment in their lives.

Priestley’s debt to Chekhov in Eden End has been widely noted, and is evident at the level of structure, theme and characterisation. The protagonists’ sense of disillusionment, the hope expressed that things will be better for future generations, the shifts between moments of humour and wistfulness - all of this resonates with the Russian playwright’s work. But Priestley’s exploration of “the way circumstances and time can change and hurt us” has its own resonance. And Laurie Sansom’s expert new production for English Touring Theatre overcomes the play’s derivativeness by emphasising its English social context and by giving it a subtly expressionistic staging. Perhaps tipping its hat to Stephen Daldry’s seminal production of Priestley’s An Inspector Calls, Sara Perks’s design presents the Kirby family’s sitting room on a stage on the stage, complete with footlights. Initially the conceit seems jarring but it proves more effective as the evening progresses and the play’s concern with the role of performance and illusion in everyday life becomes apparent. Apart from an indulgent bit of pre-Act 3 music hall business that feels entirely surplus to requirements, Sansom’s staging is fluid and full of feeling, alert to the play’s shifts in mood.

And the actors deliver strong, empathetic and involving performances across the board. As the prodigal daughter, Charlotte Emmerson takes a little while to settle into the role: she overdoes Stella’s excitement to be home in her first scene, speaking her lines so quickly that they don’t appear to have the weight of thought. But the performance deepens, and Emmerson is extremely touching as she reveals Stella’s regrets about the direction of her life and the ways in which her belief in her talent has been shaken. Emmerson has particularly effective and well-written scenes with William Chubb, who is superb as her father, and with Daisy Douglas, who makes us understand and sympathise with Lilian’s resentment of her sister. Making his professional stage debut, Nick Hendrix is terrifically likeable as Wilfred, a young man who’s come to feel at home neither in England nor in Africa, and with Daniel Betts’s genial Charles, he shares the most enjoyable drunk scene seen on stage since the Old Vic’s production of Design for Living. And as the maid Sarah, Carol Macready gives a lovely performance, creating a figure of both exasperating querulousness and encompassing warmth. Beautifully pitched between naturalism and expressionism, this is a very fine revival of a poignant and perceptive play.

Further information on tour dates and venues here.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.

Theatre Review: Brontë (Richmond Theatre)

Shared Experience’s Brontë was first staged in 2005, in a production directed by the play’s writer Polly Teale. The show now returns in a new, totally re-cast, touring production, helmed by the co-artistic director of Shared Experience, Nancy Meckler. The play follows Teale’s two previous engagements with Brontë-related literature: she adapted Jane Eyre for the stage in 1996 and subsequently wrote a play about Jean Rhys (After Mrs. Rochester), whose Wild Sargasso Sea was of course inspired by Jane Eyre .

Brontë’s focus is the personal and creative lives of Emily, Charlotte and Anne themselves. Unsurprisingly, though, Shared Experience don’t take a traditional or straightforward biographical approach here. Rather, the company brings its distinctive physical and design aesthetic to the show, attempting to enter the inner worlds of the sisters by combining scenes that focus upon their everyday, domestic life with fantasies, memories and dramatised sequences from their novels, constantly blurring the boundaries between the real and the imagined. Indeed, the production sets itself up as a subjective investigation into the Brontës’ lives, opening with three contemporary women (Elizabeth Crarer, Kristin Atherton, Flora Nicholson), speculating about how “three Victorian spinsters living in isolation on the Yorkshire Moors” came to write literature of such passion and enduring power. Following this brief prologue, the three women take up their costumes to transform themselves into the sisters and to both dramatise and comment upon their story.

Thus Brontë may be viewed as, in Teale’s terms, “a response to the Brontë story not a piece of biography.” The production’s highly selective and impressionistic approach won’t be to all tastes and there are moments when the show seems to be straining for theatrical effect. The transitions between the sisters’ real and imagined worlds are sometimes marvelously fluid, especially in those scenes that show Emily tenderly interacting with her creation, Cathy (Frances McNamee), from Wuthering Heights. But at other times they’re abrupt and jarring: particularly problematic are the appearances of Jane Eyre’s Bertha (McNamee again) as an endlessly cavorting and gyrating projection of Charlotte’s animalistic id; these scenes feel crude and heavy-handed. The rhythm of the piece is not always satisfying: characters announce their departures only to return again in the next scene, and some sequences – such as Charlotte’s encounter with Heger, the Belgian teacher she loved – seem to come from nowhere. (Heger is played by Stephen Finegold, who, in a psychologically astute bit of multi-casting, also portrays the sisters’ father, Charlotte’s husband, and Rochester in the dramatised Jane Eyre scenes.)

The great strengths of the production lie in its nuanced exploration of the various functions that writing served for the three sisters, and also in its very fine performances. Crarer beautifully invests Emily the tormented genius with a streak of self-reliant strength, and Kristin Atherton’s censorial Charlotte succeeds in generating sympathy against the odds, while Flora Nicholson is vivid as the eager, socially conscious Anne. And Mark Edel-Hunt gives a lively and finally touching account of Branwell, the spoilt brother whose taken-for-granted privileges are criticized by Charlotte in one of the show’s most memorable scenes. The production is also strong on the social context of the sisters’ lives, even as it’s played with a defiantly contemporary attitude that subverts period drama cosiness. Also noteworthy is the atmospheric sound and lighting design by Peter Salem and Chahine Yavroyan

Despite its bitty structure, Brontë proves a rewarding evening overall, with striking moments of beauty and insight that compensate for its more awkward, forced transitions. Often, it’s the quietest moments that resonate most strongly, such as Emily’s subversive appraisal of the sisters’ position: “Perhaps we should be grateful for obscurity. For invisibility. Nothing was expected of us. Whatever we did was our secret, was our own.”

The production runs for 2 hours 30 mins. Further information at the Shared Experience website.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews

Theatre Review: To Kill A Mockingbird (Richmond Theatre; touring)

Published in 1960, Harper Lee’s To Kill A Mockingbird remains one of the most beloved - and most studied - of 20th century American novels. The book, which draws upon the author’s own Deep South background, is set in Maycomb, Alabama in the 1930s and concerns the trial of an African-American man, Tom Robinson, who’s accused of raping a white woman, Mayella Ewell. The events of the trial and the various reactions to it of the people of Maycomb are described by Jean Louise (“Scout”), the tomboyish daughter of Robinson’s defence lawyer Atticus Finch. Atticus is a single father to Scout and her older brother Jem since the death of the children’s mother some years before. A man of compassion and intelligence, he attempts to provide the children with a strong moral compass in a time of deep prejudice. For, throughout, the novel’s surface charm and its lyrical qualities are combined with a sharp critique of bigotry and intolerance, one that gives the piece an abiding power and resonance.

The novel’s reputation as a bona fide American classic was further enhanced by Robert Mulligan’s celebrated 1962 film version, but To Kill A Mockingbird has also had a considerable life on stage, especially in the US. Damian Cruden’s new production, which originated at York Theatre Royal and is now touring, was developed by The Touring Consortium, a company which was established in 1996 to produce curriculum-based drama, and which has staged To Kill A Mockingbird on two previous occasions. The production avails itself of Christopher Sergel’s 40-year-old adaptation of the novel which attempts to replicate the text’s retrospective narration and the film’s use of voiceover by turning the piece into a memory play. Here, the young Scout (Grace Rowe) is shadowed by her older self (Jacqueline Wood) who addresses the audience and offers a running commentary on the action. This is an interesting but not entirely successful conceit, and one that sometimes proves a barrier to full engagement in the main events of the story by intrusively editorialising on what the audience is seeing. The production is also hampered by some odd ideas: the video projections which periodically punctuate the action seem entirely superfluous, and Liam Doona’s bleached, clapboard set is unattractive. In addition, several of the actors in the twenty one-strong cast lay on their Southern accents much too thickly, and overall, the production lacks an authentic sense of atmosphere, despite an excellent lighting design by Richard G. Jones and the best efforts of Christopher Madin’s rootsy score.

The production is at its best when at its least cluttered, and the courtroom scene, staged effectively to place the audience in the position of the jury, is a powerful highlight of the evening, with affecting work from Clare Corbett as Mayella and Cornelius Macarthy as Tom. Returning to the role of Atticus, which he first played in 2007, Duncan Preston gives a subtle, quietly authoritative performance, delivering his lines in a simple, economical way that undercuts any air of sanctity. The memory of Gregory Peck in the film version casts a long shadow, but Preston certainly succeeds in making the role his own. Filling out the background there’s good work from Jacqueline Boatswain as the family’s no-nonsense maid Calpurnia and from Andy Hockley as the town’s sheriff. And while Rowe, as Scout, and Matthew Pattimore as Jem never completely allow you to forget that you’re watching older actors pretending to be children, their performances certainly don’t lack for enthusiasm and energy. The best of the younger cast members, however, is Graeme Dalling as the siblings’ quirky, likeable friend Dill, a character based on Lee’s childhood friend and neighbour Truman Capote.

Overall, this is a solid but unspectacular production that never becomes quite as emotionally engaging as you might hope due to several odd and distracting elements. Nonetheless, the production boasts some memorable moments and performances, and certainly provides a worthwhile supplement to a close study of the novel for younger audiences.

The production runs for 2hrs 30 minutes. Further information about the tour here.

Reviewed for The Public Reviews