A travesty of a tragedy… with iffy accents
Filumena (Theatre Royal, Windsor)
Verdict: Bella Felicity
Felicity Kendal has a theatrical gift which keeps on giving. Although she is still shy in years of the octogenarian Sir Ian McKellen when he took to this stage in Hamlet three years ago, age has not withered nor custom staled her infinite variety (as Shakespeare might have marvelled).
She positively glows in the тιтle role in Sean Mathias’s charming revival of Eduardo de Filippo’s 1946 Neapolitan romcom, about a former prosтιтute and her lifelong love affair with wealthy man-about-town Domenico (Matthew Kelly).
He is incensed to discover she has tricked him into marrying her after 35 years — in order to see off his young lover (Jodie Steele) and to regularise her relationship with her three secret sons. The action will require some suspension of disbelief, in terms of modern Sєxual politics — not only are we in Italy, it’s the 1940s.
But the rewards are worth it, thanks to de Filippo’s (literally) all-embracing love of humanity. All he asks is that we love his campani characters. Which is easy, thanks to Kendal’s crafty Filumena who is — like Kelly — several decades in excess of de Filippo’s prescription.
She has a defiantly youthful spirit which (unlike Kelly’s comically creaking joints) allows her to perch in an armchair cross-legged like a child.
Felicity Kendal (seen in Filumena at Windsor’s Theatre Royal) has a theatrical gift which keeps on giving
She positively glows in the тιтle role as a former prosтιтute and her lifelong love affair with wealthy man-about-town Domenico (Matthew Kelly, right)
Jamie Hogarth as Alfredo and Kelly in Sean Mathias’s revival of Eduardo de Filippo’s 1946 Neapolitan romcom
Kelly, a towering 6ft 4in, practically needs a telescope to spy her tiny form that barely reaches his breast pocket… even in heels. How, you wonder, can the geometry of their pᴀssion have worked? No matter — it does.
The stage teems with amusing cameos, too, including Filumena’s sons. A writer (Gavin Fowler), who brokers domestic peace deals. A plumber (George Banks), who boasts: ‘When I have a spanner in my hands I have a song in my heart.’ And a handsome tailor (Fabrizio Santino), who is warned by Kelly’s maid (Sarah Twomey): ‘I may look like an actress, but I can behave like one, too.’
Morgan Large’s set and costumes place them in an elegant palazzo, topped by a Tiepolo-style painting on the ceiling.
And although there may be a surfeit of Italianate,
finger-pinching gesticulations throughout, Mathias’s production is fanned by opera between scenes, and a balmy Mediterranean breeze.
The Other Place (Lyttelton, National Theatre, London)
Verdict: Give it a myth
The Other Place is playwright Alexander Zeldin’s take on another dysfunctional family, that of Antigone, daughter of Oedipus, the mother-loving, father-killing monarch of ancient Thebes.
Instead of classical antiquity, we’re in the open-plan kitchen of Chris (Tobias Menzies), with its sliding doors overlooking the garden where his brother killed himself a year before.
His ashes are to be scattered — but his grieving daughter Annie (Emma D’Arcy) has other ideas and rekindles family feuds.
The Other Place is playwright Alexander Zeldin’s take on another dysfunctional family. Pictured: Tobias Menzies (Chris) and Emma D’Arcy (Annie)
Alison Oliver as Issy in The Other Place
The effect of Zeldin’s turning the new Theban King Creon into Chris, and Antigone into Annie (not to mention blind soothsayer Tiresias into loutish project manager Terry) is one of comprehensive bathos. Zeldin barely scratches the surface and bulldozes the story’s social, political and moral implications.
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What remains is a domestic squabble, saturated in grief and pregnant silences. The characters are too sketchy to carry the weight of the play’s incestuous twists, which feel incongruous.
Directing his production, Zeldin deploys a surly theatrical brutalism. Annie, clad in her ᴅᴇᴀᴅ father’s clothes, bristles with intensity and, in the paucity of expression or action, is forced to use much pᴀssive aggression.
Menzies (a Rolls-Royce actor) does a lot of heavy emotional lifting to boost the weakling script.
The malnourished torpor appealed to the depressive masochist in me, but needn’t detain better-adjusted theatre-goers.
Filumena runs until October 19; The Other Place until November 9.
A travesty of a tragedy… with iffy accents
Juno & The Paycock (Gielgud Theatre, London)
Verdict: Iffy on the Liffey
On paper, Matthew Warchus’s centennial revival of Sean O’Casey’s 1924 cri de coeur from the Dublin slums in the midst of civil war looked like a delicious autumnal treat.
Warchus is one of the top directors in British theatre, and the play stars one of the finest stage actors of our day, Mark Rylance, alongside the estimable J. Smith-Cameron, Logan Roy’s long-suffering legal advisor Gerri Kellman in TV hit Succession.
In the event, the show is a Vaudevillian travesty of the tragi-comic tale of the тιтular Paycock — the bibulous, self-styled ‘Captain’ Jack Boyle (Rylance). Wearing clown make-up and a toothbrush moustache like Charlie Chaplin, Rylance is, sadly, yet another stage Irishman for English amusement.
Matthew Warchus’s centennial revival of Juno & The Paycock stars one of the finest stage actors of our day, Mark Rylance
The accents of Smith-Cameron, Rylance — and Paul Hilton, as the Paycock’s boozing sidekick Joxer — are ballpark Dublin, but a good distance from Croke Park Dublin
The estimable J. Smith-Cameron plays Rylance’s exasperated on-stage wife Juno
He is constantly scolded by his exasperated wife Juno (Smith-Cameron), but as a lament for the spirit and pathos of Dublin’s slums it feels more like Carry On Up The Liffey. The accents of Smith-Cameron, Rylance — and Paul Hilton, as the Paycock’s boozing sidekick Joxer — are ballpark Dublin, but a good distance from Croke Park Dublin. The real Dublin accents, from the Irish actors in the cast, only make them sound worse.
Rylance showboats with impressive clowning (especially when trying to deny himself a pan of sausages to spite his wife). Yet there’s little to no sense of his character’s tragedy. He is merely a colourful and incorrigible fraud.
Smith-Cameron is at least a warm maternal presence. There is fire and fondness in her eyes for her flamboyantly foolish husband — but she feels like a gracious tourist in her role, untainted by grubby realities.
And as the feckless sidekick Joxer, Hilton is athletically eager to emulate Rylance, instead of settling for his function as a biddable, plastered stooge.
Rob Howell’s staging sows confusion by starting out as an ugly tenement, before giving way to religious allegory in a church setting overlooked by a Pieta statue (depicting Mary with a ᴅᴇᴀᴅ Jesus). Warchus even alters O’Casey’s ending by (spoiler alert) having Jack shoot Joxer.
Although the change was agreed with the O’Casey estate, it still strikes me as failing to understand the pain of this great and tragic comedy.
Until November 23.
Fascinating meditation on mortality never lets you go
Never Let Me Go (Rose Theatre, Kingston, then touring)
Verdict: A tug between life and death
Reviewed by Georgina Brown
Any adaptation from page to stage must find a theatrical life of its own. Suzanne Heathcote’s approach is simple and effective, making a memory play of Kazuo Ishiguro’s unsettling tale of a world in which the sick rich are routinely provided with healthy organs harvested from clones.
Suzanne Heathcote’s Never Let Me Go, based on the novel of the same name by Kazuo Ishiguro
The story is an unsettling tale of a world in which the sick rich are routinely provided with healthy organs harvested from clones
In a sense, Ishiguro took the ugly, exploitative business of organ-trafficking one dystopian step further.
The horrifying reality of this situation sneaks up in references to ‘donors’ and, more chilling, ‘completion’ in the otherwise familiar Nineties setting of Christopher Haydon’s adroit production.
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The arrival of young Philip (Maximus Evans) for his first ‘donation’ provides a neat opportunity for his ‘carer’, Kathy (outstanding Nell Barlow), to conjure up her Seventies childhood at Hailsham, a mixed boarding school. Conventional and fun, art and exercise is encouraged while its grim function of rearing cloned children for early death is ever-present but never discussed.
From here, the focus becomes the love triangle between sweet, sensitive Kathy, football-loving Tommy (Angus Imrie) and Matilda Bailes’s more complicated, prickly Ruth — the only one tormented by the sense that her time is running out.
I have always wondered why these clones comply rather than bolt, a possibility deftly suggested by Tom Piper’s set of five big unlocked double doors curving around the back of the set. It’s this that makes the piece a fascinating meditation on mortality and the human condition.
Donors or not (and who doesn’t have a donor card?), are we not all striving to accept our inevitable fate as temporary bit-players in the bigger game of life? Though too long, this gripping show never quite lets you go — and lingers long after.
After Kingston, the play will travel to Northampton, Malvern, Bristol and Chichester.
1984 (Touring)
Verdict: Chilling, not thrilling
Reviewed by Georgina Brown
As you take your seat for this one you can see yourself reflected in blurry black and white blinking images — just like early telly — in the giant, eye-shaped video projection of a closed circuit TV camera as it zooms in and out. Big Brother really is watching us all.
It’s properly unsettling, immersing us from the get-go in George Orwell’s terrifyingly prescient vision of the future in which every aspect of life is monitored.
There is no privacy, no freedom and no one is allowed to express their individuality in this oppressive totalitarian state.
Mark Quartley as Winston in the latest stage adaptation of George Orwell’s 1984
It’s properly unsettling, immersing us from the get-go in Orwell’s terrifyingly prescient vision of the future in which every aspect of life is monitored. Pictured: Keith Allen as O’Brien
Projections dominate Lindsay Posner’s stripped back staging of Ryan Craig’s clear if colourless new adaptation.
It’s not just Big Brother keeping his electronic eye on everyone and everything.
Winston, the everyman character in blue overalls, spends his days expertly rewriting history at the Ministry of Truth.
At night, when he thinks he’s slipped his surveillance and can safely write in his forbidden diary, the glinting spectacles of Keith Allen’s officious party official O’Brien reveal another pair of eyes, clocking his every move.
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But it is Winston’s relationship with his colleague, Julia, which scuppers him. Alas, there’s too little spark between Mark Quartley’s quietly defiant Winston and Eleanor Wyld’s conventional, straightforward Julia to explain why this pᴀssionless pair are willing to risk everything to become lovers.
But this may be a problem of any stage adaptation of a story in which rebels must wear an expressionless face in order to escape detection by the Thought Police.
Theatre Royal Bath’s production works ‘plus-well’ as a chiller (to borrow a phrase from the novel’s famous Newspeak).
Naked, broken and bleeding, Quartley’s Winston is painfully convincing as a man ‘cured’ of his humanity, all independent thought crushed out of him, quite literally, in scenes of unbearable brutality inflicted by Allen’s sadistic O’Brien. The Party’s lies have become Winston’s unquestioning truth: 2+2=5.
For tour dates visit theatreroyal.org.uk/events/1984/
The plane is going down and only one man can save us. AFC Richmond’s Jamie Tartt.
Brace Brace (Royal Court Upstairs)
Verdict: Ramping it up
Reviewed by Peter Hoskin
If you think the тιтle of Brace Brace is striking, wait till you get a load of the staging.
There, in the upper reaches of the Royal Court, is a long ramp set at almost 45 degrees. Half of it goes below ground. The other half rises towards the ceiling. A small audience sits on either side in two banks.
The ramp serves mostly as a thing for the actors to prance around, recline upon, lean over. But, in the play’s most dramatic sequences, it has a different purpose: it’s the aisle of a plane in flight — and in nosedive.
Yes, the inciting incident in Brace Brace is a plane crash. Or I suppose you could call it an attempted crash. There’s a wacko on board who chokes the pilot. Our heroes save the day.
Ted Lᴀsso star Phil Dunster as Ray in Brace Brace
Brace Brace tells the story of a plane crash. Or I suppose you could call it an attempted crash. Pictured: Dunster with on-stage wife Sylvia (Anjana Vasan)
But are they heroes? Or just normal people? A husband, Ray (Phil Dunster), grapples with the attacker (Craige Els). But it’s the wife, Sylvia (Anjana Vasan), who really incapacitates him and resuscitates the pilot.
As nerve-shattering as the plane scenes are, Brace Brace is really about Ray and Sylvia’s relationship, before and after the terrible fact. And that story is told through conversation — with us, the audience.
The actors wander around, staring us in the eyes, chatting.
A conversation is only as good as its participants. And both Dunster, whom most will know as the lovably loathsome star striker Jamie Tartt on TV’s Ted Lᴀsso, and Vasan are very good indeed.
At points, you’ll forget that this one is scripted, so natural are their shifts between easy charm and insecure rage. One of Sylvia’s panic attacks is as visceral as anything that happens on the plane.
Sure, the play loses something when it becomes more conventional, when the characters start conversing only with each other.
But there’s more than enough here to suggest that everyone involved — including designer Anna Reid, writer Oli Forsyth and director Daniel Raggett — is worth following. Brace, in fact, for their impact.
Until November 9.