Theatre review: 'The Big I Am' @ Liverpool Everyman 20/06/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 27th Jun 18

The Liverpool Everyman Company’s new Ibsen adaptation, ‘The Big I Am’, is fantastic. At times anarchic and juvenile, sometimes harmonious and poignant, it transfers Ibsen’s Peer Gynt into 20^th-century Liverpool, tracking the eponymous Gynt through the 60s, 80s and noughties and corssing continents in the process. Its mix of heightened realism and absurdism is highly energetic, and throughout cast demonstrate imagination in absurdist choices. Sometimes the juvenility is too much – only sometimes though, and certainly not enough to take away from what a fantastic experience this show is.

The play features a great cast, all 3 ages of Gynt – young, middle-aged and old, each played by a different actor – are equally good. The ensemble is great, and the attention given to peripheral characters (in Gynt’s world, all characters seem peripheral, even when he’s offstage) is sufficient to amuse without being distracting from the scene. There’s plenty of music throughout, sometimes in the scene and sometimes as backing, from a variety of eras and genres, and there’s also singing in perhaps unusual or unexpected places which is very enjoyable. The production is a good track of the passage of slow time but the first act is too long. It did keep my attention throughout, but the play in total runs to 3 hours so be warned. It requires endurance, but it pays off in a big little way.

A Defence of 'Orwellian'

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 25th Jun 18

For Orwell’s birthday, I’d like to make a defence of Orwell on account of a quirk of our political parlance. Someone who spends an unhealthy majority of their time reading about politics on the internet tends to run across the term ‘Orwellian’ in a bafflingly diffuse array of sometimes fairly unrelated contexts. Sure, the big bads like the Snoopers’ Charter and the NSA and most things occurring in Russia get ‘Orwellian’ labels and it’s fairly justified. Justified in its use by the average Facebook-user-cum-political-analyst’s loose grasp of a book they almost definitely haven’t read, anyway.
 Enough people have seen ‘Orwellian’ standing for ‘bad oppressive state apparatus’ to learn the broad context and make an educated guess in their own writing. Unfortunately, enough people have learned the word from people who haven’t read 1984who also learned the word from people who haven’t read 1984that such instances as LBC firing Katie Hopkins, Sadiq Khan’s anti-junk food advertisements, and Tommy Robinson being arrested for breaching the peace of court find themselves referred to as ‘Orwellian’. Apparently the somewhat baggier definition of ‘Orwellian’ is “a decision made by someone in a position of power which I don’t agree with”. I wager a tidy sum that at least one person has accused the British state of acting ‘Orwellian’ for arresting the men doing Nazi salutes at the ‘Free Tommy’ demonstration in London.

Shriver Was Wrong on Diversity

An edited version of this article was published on the National Student website on the 19th Jun 18

Let me some up a recent controversy: Leonel Shriver’s gotten in some trouble recently for this article, originally entitled ‘When diversity means uniformity’ as you can tell from the URL, but recently fuzzily renamed ‘Great writers are found with an open mind’, which is bitterly critical of the publisher Penguin Random House’s new diversity policy. The policy aims to make their staff and published authors reflective of UK society by 2025 by ‘taking into account ethnicity, gender, sexuality, social mobility and disability’ – quelle horreur. As a result of her article, she’s been jettisoned as a judge in Mslexia’s 2018 Short Story Competition, who in a tweet quoted their editor as saying Shriver’s comments ‘are not consistent with Mslexia’s ethos, and alienate the very women we are trying to support’.

To my mind, Shriver’s tone in attacking the policy and an accompanying questionnaire used to survey the publisher is almost as offensive as her content. For example, her oh-so-coy complaint that ‘the old chocolate-or-vanilla sexes have multiplied into Baskin Robbins’, and that trans identity ‘merits a whole separate query’ separate to the question on gender. Of course, she could easily defend herself in the first instance as merely using a metaphorical description, as ice cream is frivolous and the disdain is so lightly shaded, but this dog-whistle-inflammatory-language tactic is popular with the Spectator and other reactionary writers and publications for riling up lefty readers and fuelling the stereotype of oversensitive lefties for those who perhaps don’t understand what all the PC hullabaloo is about. 

And then we get to the substantive argument of her article, which you can read yourself or allow me to oversimplify as “diversity is the wrong criterion on which to hire staff and choose which manuscripts to take to print”. But diversity not being the only criterion on which we hire or choose by no means suggests it shouldn’t be highly important among the other criteria. This is the point at which we realise her comments about a ‘gay transgender Caribbean who dropped out of school at seven and powers around town on a mobility scooter’ being published are not only offensive but also wrong. Her defence here to accusations of a host of discriminatory –isms in that one terse phrase will undoubtedly be the caveat she gives that their manuscript is an ‘incoherent, tedious, meandering and insensible pile of mixed-paper recycling’, again obfuscating a reactionary disdain. But it nontheless misses a crucial point: isn’t the idea of a text from a more diverse array of perspectives actually exciting?

Theatre review: 'Trying it on' @ Birmingham REP 12/06/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 18th Jun 18

Trying It On, a new one-man-show by David Edgar which attempts to is not entirely good theatre. Certainly not in the traditional sense of the slick professionalism we’re used to on the modern stage. There are moments that were jarring and awkward, or moments where Edgar took pauses which were perhaps a little too long to regain his place in the story, with the aid of a prompt. It’s not slick, it’s slow and stumbling, but what it is is honest.

The faltering nature is perhaps a reflection of its source material – we were frequently vox-popped along the lines of those over- and under 47 (for purposes as political as you can imagine). Likewise, while the set is nice, the interactions with it are simple and performative (not in the duplicitous sense), but this is the point somehow. The performance is honest, candid, and this closeness to or confidence in the audience allows nuance that an arm’s-length performance wouldn’t.

It’s an intriguing exploration of the generation who dreamed of revolution in 1968 but to varying degrees abandoned it by the current day. A clever device in this involves talking to a recorded voice through a microphone – Edgar’s 20-year-old past-self who reacts in horror at some of the more bourgeois successes of his 70-year-old self – and a key concern of the play is the extent to which we should be allowed to betray our old beliefs or disown or old selves.

Theatre review: '3 Sisters' @ Royal Exchange Manchester 09/05/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 30th May 18

Rashdash is a three-woman ensemble, and from 3^rd-19^thof May they played ‘Three Sisters’, after Chekhov, in the studio space at the Royal Exchange, Manchester. The phrase “after Chekhov” is crucial to the play, a modernised self-referential adaptation of Chekhov’s original intermingled with an abstract dramatisation of Rashdash’s thought process when debating dramatising the Canon. This is such a far postmodern stray from the lackluster realism of conventional theatre that, having asked in their flier for rating out of ‘a) 42’, ‘b) gf%’, ‘c) ★★★★★★★★★★★★★★’, or ‘d) other’, Rashdash would probably be dismayed to see me give them five stars. But the production deserves it, it’s brilliant.

The production (play? artwork? experience?) was anarchic, energetic, joyful. In fact, it was refreshingly disrespectful - disrespectful in the way modern artists probably should be to the revered Classics. A milder form of this phenomenon would be Emma Rice’s euphoric stint at the Globe Theatre. Emma Rice’s critics would have been struck dumb watching Rashdash’s ‘Three Sisters’. Good riddance. I know very little about Chekhov’s original, but I don’t doubt that here the eponymous sisters are given far more stage time than the author intended, and seeing into their world, refracted and distorted as it is by the modernisation, is a rich exploration of character. Rashdash played perfectly with the ambiguity with which female artists approach the mostly male canon and there was also an ambivalence in the actor-character relationship which allowed the knife edge of sincerity and irony to be teetered all the more precariously. At one point for example, a radical feminist grieving the end of an intense romantic relationship questions how her current lived experience interacts with her strongly-held abstract philosophies.

Theatre review: 'The Kite Runner' @ Liverpool Playhouse 27/02/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 3rd Mar 18

‘The Kite Runner’ is a Nottingham Playhouse and Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse co-production with UK Productions and Flying Entertainment. It’s an adaptation of Khaled Hosseini’s novel which the trailer, programme and posters urgently remind us is an ‘international best-selling novel’ which went on to spawn ‘a major feature film’. All of this is meant to sound impressive, which makes the play all the more disappointing: it’s a cheap capitalisation on a cultural phenomenon which, whatever its merits as a novel, should never have been made into a play.

The pacing throughout is appalling thanks to an impossible script which relies on endless tonally-unvarying narration for a crutch to what amounts to a recounting and not an adaptation. “Show, don’t tell” is an elementary commandment, but this is precisely where ‘The Kite Runner’ falls down. One gets a sense of the powerful poetry of Hosseini’s original work, but it jars with Raj Ghatak’s insincere, static delivery which must make up at least a third of the entire runtime, and it overrules the brief snatches of actual dramatic representation the audience is allowed.

The verbose retrospective of the narration created an ironic distance between past and present, particularly in the first half of the play when Ghatak would flit incessantly between the older-narrating and childhood-acting version of Amir, which made it impossible to fully empathise with our protagonist. The overuse of telling also created instances which clearly robbed director and actors of choice and sometimes forced actors into carrying out described actions which did not feel believable, particularly in almost every instance in which a character was said to have cried and the actor was then expected to do so on the spot. 

Theatre review: 'Crimes Under the Sun' @ Bath Theatre Royal 19/02/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 28th Feb 18

‘Crimes Under the Sun’ by new Old Friends is directed by James Farrell and stars Jill Myers, Jonny McClean, Heather Westwell and Feargus Woods Dunlop – a cast of four actors who have to multi-role between them a dramatis personae of fourteen characters. The somewhat farcical pastiche to the period detective fiction of Agatha Christie clearly took some cues from Patrick Barlow’s multiroling melodrama ‘The 39 Steps’ which played the Criterion in London. Highlighting this similarity isn’t a criticism by any means: if a successful and popular production has found a winning formula then why not emulate it?

This production is a lot less polished than its West End equivalent. It’s unprofessional, but charming, funny and self-aware of the opportunities its lack of slick polish allow, with a cabaret-like inclination to try out outside-the-box ideas and the mixing of comedic modes which create a lovely evening of eclectic silly fun. Some of these choices may have been hit-or-miss, for example the song and dance recapitulation of the character introductions which was questionable whilst endearing – although that being said, it’s a more interesting way to stage Christie’s typical introduction of the future suspects than other plays would think of and was enjoyable.

In a decidedly unserious production the multiroling has hilarious opportunities as in Heather Westwell playing all three policemen in the investigation and having to switch between them in one scene with only her voice and the assistance of a moustache, a pair of glasses and crouching for the short one. However, it means the actors are sometimes relying on a silly voice, a stereotyped physicality and an accent to differentiate the more important characters. The acting is affected but works with our sense of the propriety of the time of writing and also works with the ironic tone of the comedy which has to come from the ridiculousness of the premise.

Theatre review: 'A Passage to India' @ Liverpool Playhouse 07/02/18

An edited version of this review was published on the National Student website on the 9th Feb 18

A Passage to India is an adaptation of E M Forster’s novel co-produced by Simple8 and Royal & Derngate, Northampton, adapted by Simon Dormandy, who co-directed the production with Sebastian Armesto. The production is on a 6-stop national tour, having just played the Northampton’s R&D, the Salisbury Playhouse and the Bristol Old Vic. It’s playing at the Liverpool Playhouse till the end of the week (10 Feb). If you want to catch it, and I recommend you do, it’s going on to play Bromley’s Churchill Theatre (13-17 Feb) and a long run at London’s Park Theatre (20 Feb-24 Mar).

The Liverpool Playhouse is joint-owned by the Everyman and is only a short walk from either the Central or Lime Street railway stations. The Playhouse certainly isn’t modern in comparison to its sister-theatre, the Everyman, but neither is it shabby – it has old-fashioned charm, a spacious first-floor bar with a view over Williamson Square and elegant décor in its delightfully traditional proscenium arch auditorium. There were few empty seats in the stalls and the auditorium buzzed with excited chatter, which is always heart-warming in a time of much pessimism with the lack of engagement in theatre.

This is the best professional production I’ve seen in a long time. Simple8 have assembled a truly stunning cast – and star-studded too. Just a glance at the programme shows that the cast have trained at RADA, LAMDA, Bristol, and most have at least a full column of theatre and film credits, and it shows. The acting throughout is precise and believable, and the cast’s utter conviction help sustain our suspension of disbelief in the more interpretive non-naturalistic moments.