Theatre Review: The Hothouse (Trafalgar Studios)

My review of Jamie Lloyd's production of Harold Pinter's The Hothouse is up at The Public Reviews. You can read it here.

Theatre Review: Larisa and the Merchants (Arcola)

My review of Larisa and the Merchants, Samuel Adamson's version of Alexander Ostrovsky's Without A Dowry at the Arcola, is up at One Stop Arts. You can read it here.

Theatre Review: The Rocky Horror Show (40th Anniversary Tour)

Don't dream it, see it: my review of The Rocky Horror Show's 40th Anniversary tour is up at British Theatre Guide. You can read it here.    

Theatre Review: A Doll's House (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester)

Comparisons are odious. Yet inevitable. Greg Hersov’s production of A Doll’s House at Manchester Royal Exchange (which enticed me to make my first, long-overdue trip to this excellent venue) has the dubious fortune to be following hard on the heels of Carrie Cracknell’s recently-revived 2012 take on Ibsen’s play at the Young Vic, a production viewed as the best for many years. Even those of us who weren't entirely persuaded by all aspects of that Simon Stephens-penned version couldn't deny its distinctive elements: an incredible spinning set by Ian MacNeil, for one, and Hattie Morahan’s all-out performance. For many, Cracknell's  production will be a hard act to follow.

Never fear, though. For Hersov and his team manage to make something subtly different but also very compelling out of Ibsen’s masterpiece.  Digging out the play's themes and images with admirable clarity, and with strong performances from all of the cast, this new production has a vibrancy and immediacy that's quite bracing. 

A spry translation by Bryony Lavery, which puts subtle spins on some lines to give them fresh textures, helps. As does the space. While Helen Goddard’s spare design is far more conventional than MacNeil’s was, being played in-the-round gives the piece a particular intensity. The excellent Cush Jumbo  - last seen in fine form as Mark Antony in the Donmar’s all-female Julius Caesar (which made by Best Productions of 2012 list) - cleverly uses Nora’s fractured mini-soliloquies to subtly make the audience her confederates and comrades throughout; we’re with the character every step of the way. Entering with a carefree giggle, ending with the determined stance of a woman who knows she must make a painful break in order to find herself, Jumbo expertly captures the character's complexities: she’s by turns gleeful, wheedling, flirtatious, vain, fearful and shrewd.

The actress is aided – as Morahan wasn’t, entirely – by performances that match hers in quality. Jamie de Courcey is an unusually effective Dr. Rank. Jack Tarlton, who featured in Cracknell's interesting short film variant on the play,  brings both taunting menace and touching desperation to Krogstad. And David Sturzaker gives us a Torvald who considers himself a tolerant, avuncular fellow: an indulgent corrector of his wife’s foibles. Directed for pace, a few moments could use a little more depth and shading. But the production grips and moves nonetheless. The final slamming of the door may not shock as it once did, but the greatness of Ibsen’s play – beautifully brought out here – is that it’s not simply a period piece at heart; rather, it’s a work that still has much to say to us about the damage that an uncritical adherence to societal norms can do to the individual – in the domestic sphere and beyond.

The production is booking until 1st June.

Theatre Review: Merrily We Roll Along (Harold Pinter Theatre)

My review of Maria Friedman's production of Merrily We Roll Along, transferred to the the Harold Pinter Theatre, can be read at One Stop Arts.  

CD Review: Quercus (Tabor/Ballamy/Warren, ECM Records, 2013)

2011 proved, even by her high standards, a terrific year for June Tabor, one bookended by the release of two of her finest-ever recordings: the exquisite, sea-themed Ashore (review here) and her long-anticipated second collaboration with Oysterband, Ragged Kingdom (review here). The latter deservedly scooped Best Album at the BBC Folk Awards in 2012 and Tabor was – just as deservingly – once again named Folk Singer of the Year at the same ceremony. The momentum generated by those two great releases has seen Tabor sign up for lengthier-than-usual touring duties in the past couple of years, and prove her ability to rock out with the best of them in her thrilling gigs with the Oysters across the UK.

The performances on Tabor’s latest release actually predate her reunion with John Jones and co, though, and find her in more customarily minimalist – though no less commanding – mode. Quercus (Latin for “oak”) is a trio made up of Tabor, her longtime pianist/arranger Huw Warren and saxophonist/composer and Food co-founder Iain Ballamy (who featured on Tabor’s 2005 album At the Wood’s Heart). The group undertook a series of concerts in this format in early 2006, and the new release draws from one of those shows, presenting performances from a gig at the Anvil in Basingstoke. Not that you’d necessarily identify this as a concert recording just from listening to the CD. For, as on Tabor’s 1997 classic aleyn, the sounds of the audience have been removed (the occasional light cough notwithstanding) to prevent distractions and to place the focus firmly on the performances. The result is a wonderfully fruitful and distinctive collaboration.

Stylistically, Quercus finds June at the jazziest she’s been since 1999’s A Quiet Eye (her album with the Creative Jazz Orchestra) - or maybe even since 1989’s album of standards, Some Other Time. (That's a record that someone really should get around to reissuing soon, by the way.) Jazz, of course, has informed her singular “chamber folk” approach ever since she hooked up with Warren in the late 1980s. But, accompanied solely by his piano and Ballamy’s tenor and soprano saxophones, the influence is at its most unmistakable here. That said, the album’s sound isn’t, at first hearing, wildly dissimilar to the kind of aesthetic that the singer's honed over the past 25 years, while the material – drawing on poems, standards, Ballads and (Les) Barkers – tackles treasured Tabor topics: war, death, Love Gone Wrong. But subtle distinctions do emerge, for the trio’s approach, with its compelling mixture of precision and improvisation, fleshes the songs out into little suites that produce a range of fresh textures, often edging into classical terrain. (In addition, there’s also a higher-than-usual proportion of songs focusing on Love Gone Right here, but more about those anon). There is, throughout, a subtle sense of experimentation and exploration to the endeavour. By turns delicate, grave, and brimming with passion, Warren’s piano-work has seldom been more luscious, or more orchestral in its range and breadth, while, brought to the forefront, Ballamy’s saxophone-playing proves a simply stunning complement to Tabor’s inimitable dusky contralto, with its breathtaking control and remarkable dramatic power.

Warren, Tabor, Ballamy (Photo: Tim Dickeson)

Thoughtfully structured, the album opens where At The Wood’s Heart closed: with a velvety rendering of “Lassie Lie Near Me” that - even more overtly than the album version - transplants Robbie Burns’s anthem of seduction from a familiar pastoral setting into a smoky jazz dive. The traditional “As I Roved Out” is exquisitely restrained and quietly devastating, with precise piano, plaintive sax and a shudderingly intense yet dreamy vocal cutting right to the heart of this classic of thwarted love. Ballamy and Warren’s instruments dance nimbly through both Barker’s “Who Wants the Evening Rose?” and George Butterworth’s setting of A.E. Housman’s “The Lads in their Hundreds,” the latter suggesting youthful innocence about to be swept aside by the turmoil and horror of war. Following it, Warren’s John Dowland-inspired instrumental “Teares” is a thing of aching, shimmering beauty whose title names the emotional response that the piece both evokes and provokes, cleansing the listener.  

A gorgeously extended take on Mack Gordon and Harry Warren’s “This Is Always” suits the song’s celebration of enduring love. And it’s doubtful that the year will yield a more warmly, maturely romantic track than the closing rendition of “All I Ask of You,” Barker’s spare adaptation of Gregory Norbet’s text stretched to a glorious, embracing eight minutes. In contrast, Tabor takes “Brigg Fair” solo in one of her rivetingly direct a cappella performances that make it feel like the whole world just stopped in deference.

A few tracks require – and reward – more work from the listener. The trio’s coal-black take on Feste’s “Come Away Death” from Twelfth Night sounds forbiddingly austere on a first listen, but gradually reveals itself to be a deeply humane and soulful performance, as Tabor and Ballamy's tight "duet" gives way to spirited riffing when Warren joins in.  Billowy sax and wintery piano float around the image-rich floating verses of “Near But Far Away” in a reading that’s full of misty ambience. The track I’ve found myself returning to most, though, is David Ballantine’s deeply mysterious “A Tale From History (The Shooting)”. I’m not sure to what event the song alludes, specifically. But shifting from delicate, wistful verses to seething, impassioned choruses, the trio’s interpretation conjures a vivid sense of sudden violence intruding into everyday routine that feels all but timeless, and that cuts bone-deep. Rich and resonant, inhabited with soul-stirring skill by seasoned performers, the songs here are all  “tales from history” that connect with the listener in this direct way, and that captivate with the intensity, grace and depth of feeling with which they are delivered.

Quercus are currently touring. Further information here.

Theatre Review: The Breadwinner (Orange Tree)



Cate Debenham-Taylor in The Breadwinner (Photo: Robert Day)



"Well, I’m dished!" The Orange Tree’s mini-season of plays on the subject of breadwinners and providers concludes with a spry final offering: Auriol Smith’s enjoyable revival of W. Somerset Maugham’s 1930 comedy. There’s been a pleasingly radical streak to each of the early 20th C plays presented in this season, especially in their engagement with issues of gender and economics. Githa Sowerby’s The Stepmother critiqued patriarchal control of the purse-strings by showing the hard-working efforts of its enterprising heroine being systematically undermined by a no-good spouse. And GB Stern’s intriguingly conflicted The Man Who Pays The Piper advanced the proposition that a woman’s ultimate fulfillment might lie in the business world rather than in the domestic sphere. Though consistently lighter in tone than those texts, and much more condensed in its time-frame, Maugham’s play also offers a bracingly oppositional perspective on the way in which “money matters” in familial relationships - and on much else besides. That the play intersects beautifully with the two previous productions in the season isn’t a surprise. But it also proves a neat complement to Matthew Dunster’s creamy revival of Rodney Ackland’s Before The Party, currently at the Almeida and based, of course, on a Maugham short story.

Like Before The Party, The Breadwinner also skewers the shallow, status-obsessed mind-set of its spoilt middle-class protagonists and traces the fallout of one rebellious family member’s flouting of expectations. In this case, it’s the father of the family, one Charles Battle (Ian Targett), who stirs up his Golders Green clan when he announces that, following a serious spot of financial bother, he’s turning his back on the daily grind of the stock-broking world - and leaving the family, to boot. It’s a premise that might be played for hand-wringing melodrama. But as Charles’s wife Margery (Cate Debenham-Taylor) and his self-absorbed teenage kids Patrick (Joseph Radcliffe) and Judy (Nathalie Buscombe) register their objections it’s made clear that they’re more troubled by the possibility of scandal and the fact that Charles’s absence might deprive them of their creature comforts than by much emotional attachment to Daddy Dear.

Maugham can be a slyly subversive writer at the best of times (witness his euthanasia-endorsing The Sacred Flame, revived by Dunster for ETT last year) and in The Breadwinner he inserts a still-relevant critique of matrimony and materialism into an apparently well-behaved drawing-room comedy. Witheringly cynical about marriage, provocative on parent/child perceptions and insightful about the effects of WWI on gender roles and family relationships, the play’s jibes aren’t always subtle but they are well-aimed, and there’s a decidedly serious undertow to the demonstration that conventional family roles and the business world can stifle the spirit. Whether Maugham had been reading his Emerson when composing The Breadwinner I’m not sure but there’s surely a trace of Transcendentalism to the drama’s insistence that the individual must be allowed to develop beyond oppressive social contracts and conventions. In this way, Maugham’s Charles might be viewed as the more genteel English forebear of American Beauty’s Lester Burnham, as he espouses a philosophy of self-reliance and starts telling his loved ones some long-repressed home truths. And seldom can a male protagonist’s desire to abandon his family have been presented more sympathetically than it is here.



Nathalie Buscombe in The Breadwinner (Photo: Robert Day)



Designed with customary precision and economy by Sam Dowson, Smith’s production might benefit from a little tightening: a couple of performances still lack a bit of definition and not all of the lines generate the laughs they should. But the production is entertaining throughout and boasts several spiffing turns. Ian Targett warms up as Charles to give both poignancy and insight to his portrayal of an apparently humourless man’s bid for freedom. As the spoilt son who believes a hardcourt tennis court to be “one of the ordinary necessities of existence” Joseph Radcliffe puffs up with hilarious indignation at his father’s dismissal of him as “boring.” Cate Debenham-Taylor brings wonderfully subtle comic skill to her characterisation of the aesthete wife who’s contemplating extra-marital dalliances but is none-too-keen on the idea of being dumped. The Harriet Walter-esque Isla Carter gets a show-stopping vamp moment. And the appealing Nathalie Buscombe starts archly but softens into sympathy as the only family member to come round to the pater’s point-of-view.

Booking until 18th May. Further information at the Orange Tree website.