Pretty rough and ready, these were originally posted on Facebook, hence all the ‘saw this yesterday’ intros. I’ve removed the box office links for obvious reasons. Oh, and some contain strong language.
Common
A note to the National Theatre. It’s not the 1980s any more, you can’t expect people to laugh just because a woman says “fist-fuck”. Excepting the audience for Mrs Brown’s Boys of course. A potentially interesting subject is lost in a tedious whirl of boring ciphers and unfathomable plots. Also, colour-blind casting. Nothing against it until it becomes unrealistic. Like the woman who’s a different colour from her own fucking brother. Maybe less noticeable if they weren’t having an incestuous relationship. And none of the other characters mention this. Goodness me, country folk were so respectful of difference in the early 19th century. The opening scene with its Wicker Man style imagery is the only decent part. There’s no point whining about theatre subsidies being cut when you put on shit like this.
The Goat, or Who Is Sylvia?
I saw this the other week, and a month or so back Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf. I’d not seen any of Albee’s plays before this, and he strikes me as a one-trick pony. Who’s Afraid… was unpleasant drunk people shouting at each other for three very long hours, The Goat was sober people shouting “fuck” at each other for just under two hours.As the subject matter (man falls in love with a goat) is inherently absurd this should have been hilarious, once you’ve established the level you’re at the only way forwards is to go for comedy. There were a few laughs, but the comic potential of the subject matter was left largely untouched. As you’d expect both productions were excellently acted and staged, although there was some twattery with moving walls in The Goat. There’s a great play waiting to be written about fucking goats, but this wasn’t it.
Le Grand Mort
Stephen Clark wrote this two-hander especially for Julian Clary, which does make you wonder what Julian had done to piss him off. There are a few funny lines, but it’s not very good. The first twenty minutes is Julian doing a monologue in verse for no good reason, every now and then an interesting plot seems to be appearing and then it goes back to bollocks. Speaking of which James Nelson-Joyce strips off for a while, nothing better than an actor delivering overwrought lines with his knob out. According to the programme notes Julian’s character is a serial killer, which came as news to me. And don’t get uppity about spoilers, the run has finished and I don’t think a revival is on the cards. It would be nice to see Julian Clary in a decent play as he’s a good actor with a very likeable stage presence. And let us never forget his finest moment – (link to Comedy Awards / Norman Lamont incident).
Hamlet
I went to see this last week. The modern-dress setting works well for most of the time, the stuff with the ghost is done with CCTV, the play within a play scene uses a video camera and so on. There’s more humour than you might expect and Angus Wright is especially good as Claudius. It seemed mostly uncut, the only line I noticed missing was “Go softly on” from Castrovalva. I could have done without the frequent Bob Dylan songs and a few of the scenes were rather padded, if we’re honest this is one play that doesn’t need lengthening. Andrew Scott is a great Hamlet, but I’m bewildered by why he speaks in his native Dublin accent. OK, nobody is doing a Danish accent, but to have one character speaking in a notably different accent to everyone else – even his own family – is very distracting. In an interview he says ‘part of the process was having the confidence to say no, and just speak in my own voice’. If only I’d known this was an option, it would have spared me years of affecting crap American, Northern etc accents in productions. I could have just said “no, I’m using my own voice”. Or would that just have been lazy?
This House
Saw this a few weeks ago, would highly recommend you do too. Excellent play, excellent production, funny, dramatic, surprisingly moving in places. Also avoids the infantile “Labour good Tory bad” level of most political theatre. Excellent scene where the two chief whips lay into each other’s ideologies. Superb ensemble cast, Phil Daniels isn’t exactly exploring new ground as the foul-mouthed cockney Labour chief whip, but he does it so well. Great performance from David Hounslow as well. Really worth seeing.
Ink
Another instant classic from James Graham who also wrote This House (not the Madness musical, which is good fun by the way). Funny, fascinating and fearfully sinister (trying for alliteration there) in parts, and Nick Klein from The Bill and Utopia is in it. Even the audience behaved themselves, managing to leave their phones alone for almost two hours rather than playing with them like kids on the fucking bus.
Julius Caesar
After a somewhat underwhelming The Tempest earlier this year (calm the fuck down Simon Russell Beale) the RSC are back on form with this superb production. They sensibly let the text speak for itself and in doing so find an unexpected vein of comedy. That’s the sort of comment that should be accompanied by some hot glasses / nose pushing action, which I can now do as yesterday I joined the ranks of the specky twats. Indeed, I tried them out during the second half and discovered that Ancient Rome wasn’t all blurry.
Labour of Love
The latest play by James Graham. It’s good, not in the same league as This House or Ink (see reviews below or alternatively wait for the new book The World’s Most Incisive Reviews, Penguin Classics, £9.99) but still entertaining. Martin Freeman was off when I saw it, probably chatting to Sherlock fans online, Tamsin Greig was predictably excellent. It presents the recent history of the Labour Party in a commendably even-handed manner, catering to both the “Blair saved the party” and “that unprincipled war-mongering sell-out wanker Blair” brigades. And as with all of Graham’s work, it’s not preachy. For what it’s worth, I believe James Graham is the best British playwright for decades. PS I was going to call Blair a “cunt” but had a feeling there’s some law about calling former Prime Ministers a “cunt”. So I played safe by calling Tony Blair a ‘wanker’ and not calling Tony Blair a “cunt”.
Oslo
Some years ago if you’d told me that a three-hour play about a Norwegian attempt to instigate discussions between Israel and Palestine would have me on the edge of my seat I’d have spat at you. I’d strongly recommend this excellent production to anyone, apart from the two delightful ladies who sat in front of me eating astonishingly noisy food. Could you really not wait for the interval before shovelling snacks into your maw? Still, you got told off by the usherette, so ha ha. Why can’t people just, basically, fuck off?
The Philanthropist
I went to see The Philanthropist again, the first time wasn’t terribly impressive, but as it was early in the run, pre-press night (although still full-price tickets) I thought it might have picked up after a couple of months, but sadly, not really. There’s nothing wrong with the play, in fact it’s my favourite (most reviewers feel obliged to whine about the women’s roles being underdeveloped, they’re probably not sassy enough either), but this production is pretty weak. The main problem is the cast mangling the lines, meaning that most of the jokes get lost. As Philip Simon Bird is 95% Will from The Inbetweeners, Matt Berry is good but strangely subdued, the stand-out is Tom Rosenthal as Don who has thankfully lost the affected speech impediment he sported at the earlier performance. The other stand-out, for different reasons is Lily Cole, who is simply abysmal. She sounds like she has a mouth full of cotton wool and is sporting an utterly absurd accent (or it might be her real accent, I have no idea). With tickets going for the usual West End prices this sort of dreadful acting really is unacceptable. In the programme notes author Christopher Hampton welcomes a cast of the “proper” age. Presumably he wrote that before seeing this production. Interestingly enough I watched the BBC version the other week, starring Ronald “The Reign of Terror” Pickup, James “Rodney’s Nemesis” Bolam, Helen “LOOK AT MY TITS AND FANNY” Mirren, Charles “Blofeld” Gray and Jacqueline “Maximum Power” Pearce. This was a load of old bollocks as well, the “adaptation” consisted solely of cutting out some of the stronger language and some pointless between-scenes time-lapse shots. The dialogue is delivered at breakneck speed, presumably to facilitate the frequent lengthy and inexplicable silences. And Servalan goes topless for no apparent reason, other than to put Helen Mirren out.
Raising Martha
Oh dear. If this had been put on by students, in a student theatre, I could have understood. I wouldn’t have liked it, but it would at least have been in the right place. To charge £20 (at least) a ticket – and by the way, don’t charge full price for a seat where you can’t see the parts of the stage where a lot of the action takes place – for this infantile stuff is taking the piss. I snorted a few times, and laughed out loud once. But to see a great cast, including the excellent Jeff Rawle and Julian “Davros” Bleach performing this toss was disappointing. It tries to be Joe Orton-esque, but falls very, very short. I like The Park, I’ve seen some great stuff here, but this was not one of those.
Road
I went to see this yesterday, it’s been revived after thirty years. It starts off well enough, rather like Coronation Street would be if Ken Barlow said “fuck” more often. Unfortunately it runs out of steam very quickly. With no plot to speak of this is simply a series of mostly unlinked character sketches about almost exclusively unpleasant people. Jim Cartwright confuses banal repetition with meaningfulness and the play finally ends with an unintentionally hilarious Northern Soul moment (15 minutes more like), featuring Otis Redding, the well-known Lancastrian.
Venus in Fur
Or VENUS IN FUR according to the blurb. Couldn’t really see the point of it, there seemed to be some sort of metaphysical stuff going on but frankly I’d have preferred some form of plot. Well-acted, Natalie Dormer spends a lot of time in a basque if that’s your sort of thing, but I wouldn’t recommend this one. I do like the Theatre Royal Haymarket a lot as they often upgrade me yet keep me on an aisle seat (leg space). I was slightly less fond of the woman to my left who was playing with her phone during the show. After the third occurrence a snap of the fingers, a hissed admonishment and order was restored. Which to be fair was more dramatic than what was happening on the stage.