Tag Archives: Gina McKee

Review – The Years, Harold Pinter Theatre, London, 12th April 2025

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It’s often useful to come to a theatrical production completely clueless about its content or history. That was pretty much my situation at Saturday’s matinee of The Years. I knew it had been a big success at the Almeida Theatre in 2024, I knew that it was one hour fifty-five minutes with no interval, and I knew that on some occasions they have to stop the show due to audience members’ reactions to a certain scene. But I’d never heard of Annie Ernaux, on whose book, Les Années, the play is based, nor of Eline Arbo, who adapted it and directs the production.

It’s an autobiographical account of Ms Ernaux’ life, with five actors playing her and the other people in her life. The actors are of varying ages and portray Ms Ernaux as a child, a teen/young adult, a young woman, a middle-aged woman and finally a more elderly woman (although the always incredible Deborah Findlay looks way too young to be “elderly”!) From the start, it’s an ensemble performance, with all five participating at all the stages of her life, describing photographs from the past that serve as launchpads for a scene from any particular era.

Eline Arbo’s direction is very strong on sheetography. A clean white sheet is unfolded as the backdrop for each photograph which will then be used as a tablecloth, or scrunched up to become a baby, or a garment, or a banner – the list is endless. It’s a very clever and successful device that allows our imaginations to work overtime, and all the sheets that have played a part in telling her story are hung up around the stage, like ghosts from a former time, emphasising how a person is the sum of all their experiences – and even their experiences to come. They really do get through a lot of sheets. Indeed, if there is one message that came most strongly forward to me from the production is that a person is made up of so many elements, many of which will contrast and contradict other aspects of their personality. As Walt Whitman said, I am large, I contain multitudes.

The play grows in power as it progresses; unsurprisingly, perhaps, as there’s only so much interest to be drawn from the behaviour and experiences of a child, whose prime interest appears to be following through on her early discoveries of the joys of masturbation. But as the woman gets older, has relationships, finds work and a place in the world, has an abortion – see first paragraph – then a marriage, children and develops the self-confidence and self-awareness to live her life as she sees fit, the story gets much more interesting. And whilst it is a serious play, there are some flashes of terrific humour, such as attending an overzealous exercise class, or participating in a very drunken and druggy party. There are also some surprising musical moments – I didn’t, for example, expect to find myself swaying in my seat to Desireless’ fantastic Voyage Voyage.

The performances are all superb, totally convincing with their portrayal of the gradually ageing central character, as well as all the people around her. Harmony Rose-Bremner is great as the impish young Annie; playful, mischievous, and grumpy when things don’t go her way. I also really enjoyed her performance as one of Annie’s sullen teenage sons. Anjli Mohindra takes Annie into her young adult years where she starts having to make decisions for herself and first encounters men. Tuppence Middleton is the twenty/thirty-something Annie, making the choice that now is the wrong time to have a baby and dealing with all that decision’s consequences. Gina McKee is brilliant as the middle-aged mother and divorcee, starting to find time for herself again; and Deborah Findlay pulls all the threads together as Annie looks forward to whatever time is left, managing her family as best she can and to the extent that they need it, whilst making sure her own needs remain of the prime importance.

It would be wrong not to go back to that abortion scene. It’s graphic and pulls no punches; red blood shows up strongly against a white sheet. It’s also honest and frank; there’s no attempt to dress it up politely because some things just can’t be dressed up. It’s a scene of huge dramatic intensity, performed immaculately by Tuppence Middleton. There are trigger warnings to read, and people may assume that won’t affect me, I’ll be alright; only to discover that some of us are not alright. There must have been at least six audience members throughout the auditorium who were so affected that they had to leave or, indeed, be attended to in their seats. A few minutes into the following scene, the stage manager had to come on stage and announce that the performance would be suspended whilst audience members were assisted.

I can’t stress how helpful an interval would have been. The impetus for keeping up the dramatic pressure by not having an interval needs to be weighed against the practical needs of the audience, and a scheduled break would allow people to settle, or at least for paramedics to do their work. Bizarrely, during the pause – which lasted about twenty minutes – the cast did not fully leave the stage but hovered in the wings, chatting; it seemed like a deliberate decision to do that, but whenever I’ve been in an audience where the performance has had to be paused because of a technical issue, the cast quietly go off and aren’t seen again until everything is ready to resume. Curious!

Not the Seven Ages of Man, but the Five Ages of Woman. It’s a subject that seems rarely to be addressed, and its impact is powerful. And whilst there are a few lulls in the storytelling, particularly in the first part of the play, the content builds to a very strong and memorable conclusion.

4-starsFour They’re Jolly Good Fellows!

Review – Richard III, Trafalgar Studios, 13th September 2014

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You know that thing when you’re really, really looking forward to something and then, for whatever reason, you don’t enjoy it like you think you’re going to? Welcome, dear reader, to my Richard III experience.

Martin Freeman as Richard III? Yes please! That was my instant reaction when the production was announced. I got on the internet as fast as my ATG Theatre Friends membership card would take me, and there was a great choice of seats everywhere. That’s when I realised there would be stage seating too. I’ve only done that once before – almost forty years ago, when I was on a school outing to see Equus (I know, but we were very advanced). In addition to the usual stalls, circle, balcony seats in what was then the Albery theatre (now the Noel Coward), that original production also had benches on the stage, behind the action, not particularly comfortable but with a significant rake that gave an excellent view of what was going on. It was odd to be in that position, and of course, there were times when the actors played out front and not to us so you missed a bit, but my memory of that is that it wasn’t a problem, and us lot at the back certainly got our fair share of attention from the cast. And of course we were so close to the action; I recall it felt incredibly exciting; a unique experience, in fact. So, remembering all that, I plumped for the stage seating for Richard III. I was reassured by the fact that it wasn’t cheap – if it had been, I would have been suspicious, and would have upgraded us to the front stalls in the traditional layout. It’s important for me to have good seats at the theatre – if I can’t see or hear as clearly as I want, my enjoyment level absolutely plummets. But – apart from those goddam Premium Seats – those stage seating seats were top price. So they’ve got to be a quality place to sit. Haven’t they?

No. They are awful, awful seats. Just awful. From our position of BB 11 and 12, the view was extremely obstructed, although primarily not from the people in row AA, but by the furniture and props that littered the stage. This is a very heavily “furnitured” set. The Trafalgar Studio 1 stage is not particularly big, but for this production it houses two long tables and about six other office desks, stacked high with pot plants, typewriters, telephones, and so on, to give you the impression of a 1970s office. It’s set in the 1970s, by the way, so that they can make the “winter of discontent” speech have a double meaning. Otherwise, there’s no particular link made from the play to the era. The offending desk that Mrs Chrisparkle and I mainly resented was the one right in front of us, at which no one sat, no one made a phone call from the phone, no one typed on the typewriter and no one watered the pot plant. If it hadn’t been there, we could have seen something, and it wouldn’t have affected the rest of the staging one iota.

The layout and blocking of the whole production is purely for the benefit of those in the regular seats. There are a few short scenes that take place very far stage right – I don’t know if they were on or off the stage as such as we couldn’t see. “Helpfully”, every so often a member of the cast swings an old TV set in front of us in the stage seating so that we can see what’s happening (these are £52.50 seats remember, not described as obstructed view), but either they didn’t leave it in the best position for us to see or it was obstructed by the people sitting in Row AA right in front of it. So that was a waste of space.

Shakespeare’s Richard III is a cruel, vicious swine. The rather simple story is that he kills everyone who can possibly get in the way of his becoming King, and once he is king, he’s got a bunch of rebels on his hands, one of which eventually kills him. Not a nice chap. This is quite a bloody production, and we get to see him despatch all his enemies and many of his friends too. Well, that’s the case if you’re sat in the traditional seats. From our position, we could only guess that was what was going on. Clarence dies by foul means involving a fish tank, but whether he was drowned, had his throat slit or got attacked by a piranha I don’t know, as his murderers masked the action from our sight. For Rivers’ death, it was one of the pesky long tables and chairs that got in the way of our view. At one moment, he was chatting away – a bit anxiously because he knew things were not looking good – the next he was writhing on the floor, doing a very convincing death rattle, but we had no idea why. Someone must have done something to him but who? And what? Stabbed? Poisoned? Disturbed his feng shui? We couldn’t tell. Then there was the death of Lady Anne. This took place right at the front of the stage, which is physically quite a distance from the stage seating. There was some unexpected movement from Richard and suddenly she was gargling. We think a phone wire was used, but as it all took place obstructed by that sodding typewriter, don’t take my word for it. During her death, to emphasise the atmosphere of anarchy and terror, some bright spark (the director?) decided to make the lift doors continually open and shut, open and shut, like something invisible was trapped there, thus creating a terrible din that really – REALLY – got on our nerves.

To say the production suffered from gimmicks would, I think, be an understatement. A week or so before we went, I received an email saying that you might get spattered with blood if you sit in rows A-D or in AA, so dress accordingly. Excuse me? Not only do you take £52.50 from people to sit somewhere they can’t see what’s going on, you’re also going to add to their laundry bill? I could see that a member of staff was addressing the people in the front three rows before the play started, presumably giving them warning. T-shirts were provided that you could put on to protect yourself. Only a few people did. The blood spattering comes from Richard’s doing away with yet another enemy – a man who was already very blood soaked from the start of the scene, but neither Mrs C nor I could recognise him or work out who he was. Researching for this blog, I now realise it was Buckingham – couldn’t tell from our angle. Not quite sure how it happened but we saw blood spurt out from around his neck high into the air and then splash down on the front rows. A lady in the front row who had obviously declined the T-shirt rushed for paper tissues from her handbag and was looking exceedingly annoyed. But it’s all pure gimmick. There was no need for it. Just come upstage a bit and the blood spurt wouldn’t have reached the paying punters. The same disregard for the audience that fleeces us for obstructed view seats also takes it for granted that we’d love to have our clothes all blood spattered before going out for a nice meal. We’re clearly the least important people in that production.

One more thing – Seat AA8 was allocated as a wheelchair space. Now, no criticism of the wheelchair user herself, of course, but I would question the wisdom of that allocation. The lady who sat there had a very tall wheelchair. If you looked at the height of the heads along the row, everyone was more or less the same height until you came to this last lady whose head came at least a foot taller than the rest. For the lady sitting directly behind her the whole performance must have been completely invisible. I can only hope she got the ticket for free or successfully asked for her money back, because it really was stupid. Her husband, sat next to me, had to constantly duck and dive in order to see anything; and indeed, for a lengthy time in the first act, he simply decided to go to sleep as it wasn’t worth the candle. Mrs C did the same thing too – when she realised what a struggle it was going to be to follow what was going on – she just gave up. Wheelchair seating can be a sensitive issue – they’ve definitely got it wrong here.

As for the production itself, we both felt it was very chewy and hard to follow in the first act. I admit it’s not a play with which I am particularly familiar, but even so, all the gimmicks and all the furniture simply got in the way of understanding. In an attempt to recreate the 70s setting, they had nearly all the men looking like each other. They each had the same Tom Selleck moustaches, the same severe black rimmed spectacles, the same swarthy complexions. I couldn’t tell Catesby from Buckingham from Richmond. Queen Margaret kept on drifting in and out in such an ethereal way I presumed she was meant to be a ghost. The second act was easier to follow, simply because less happened, but as Mrs C pointed out, even more of what did happen happened at the front of the stage and was spoken out to the main audience so that we heard very few of the speeches. Acoustically the setup is a shocker, and when an actor is out front declaiming to the stalls, we couldn’t hear a darn thing. Technically, it wasn’t a great performance; one of the few things we could see was a fax coming through on a printer that an actor tore off and read, but with that old fashioned sound of a dot matrix printer printing away long after the fax had been torn off and whilst the printer was at a complete standstill. It could have been straight out of Noises Off; bit pathetic, really.

We thought Martin Freeman, as far as we could judge, was really good in the role. He has a very intense stare and would be a really scary boss. His timing is great, and we assume he does a great line in quirky looks and comic asides, from the sound of the audience out front enjoying them, although we couldn’t see them. There’s a very strong scene between him and the excellent Gina McKee as Queen Elizabeth, when she is condemning him for murdering her sons and trying to protect her daughter from being next on the list. Miss McKee gave a great performance as the grieving and bitterly furious mother. Fortunately that was one scene we could see properly. Jo Stone-Fewings was very good as Buckingham, professionally malign to further his cause with the king-to-be, then wounded and furious when he finds he has been duped; and I thought Gabrielle Lloyd as the Duchess of York lent the production some much needed gravitas – no gimmicks, nothing sensational, just clear enunciation and proper understanding of the text.

I think the rest of the run is now pretty much sold out. If you’ve got tickets for the ordinary seats, you’ll definitely derive some enjoyment out of it. If you’ve got stage seating, I wouldn’t throw good money after bad by buying a train ticket.

Review – King Lear, Donmar Warehouse Tour, Milton Keynes Theatre, 16th March 2011

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We’ve seen at least three Lears over the past few years. We were very lucky to get good seats for Ian McKellen’s Lear in London a few years ago, and more recently we were slightly less lucky to see the late Pete Postlethwaite’s Lear at the Young Vic. Postlethwaite was excellent but I had lots of problems with the production itself. On the other hand McKellen’s Lear was as majestic as you could imagine.

So it was with great expectations that we witnessed Derek Jacobi’s interpretation of Lear. And I must say it’s a very different, but completely valid and credible portrayal of the misguided king. Whereas Lear is often a towering, bullying, bossy kind of guy, Jacobi’s pre-heath Lear is spoilt, petulant and wheedling, insisting on a peck on the cheek from Goneril before she starts buttering him up, his voice going very high tenor when he wants to get his way – you can imagine his bedroom having a royal cot with lots of toys on the floor. His descent into madness isn’t as gradual as some Lears – to me he seemed pretty on top of his wits until his encounter with Poor Tom, which seemed to flip him over the edge. When he referred to Tom as a philosopher I felt the madness kick in. Technically, as you would expect from an actor of his stature, it’s a beautiful performance. Every word is clear; no line is wasted; his eyes and his manner convey precise meaning when the Shakespearian language gets a little dense.

There are lots of other jewels in this crown of a production. If self-deluded Lear is every inch a king then Gina McKee’s Goneril is every inch a bitch. When she tells Lear how much she loves him in the opening scene her words are not directed at her father but at Cordelia, her eyes challenging her to “beat that” when it comes to her turn. It’s a very mature and physical performance – when she comes on strong to Edmund she really turns on the sex-factor, frankly masturbating in front of him. You wouldn’t want to upset her; I’ve never seen Albany being grabbed by the testicles to mock his weakness before. “Goneril and the Gonads” makes a very sharp impression, and the audience cringes with discomfort.

She is well matched in villainy by Justine Mitchell’s Regan. Looking all butter-wouldn’t-melt she beautifully underplays the scorn with which she suggests Lear’s retinue is diminished from a hundred to barely one. Her squeal of childish glee when Gloucester’s eyes are removed was stunningly horrific. It had all the excitement of a little girl unable to contain herself at a birthday party.

As the other bastard in this play, although this time a real Bastard too, Alec Newman is a very dashing Edmund, and totally believable; you’d swear he was telling the truth about Edgar’s plot to kill his father. Some Edmunds are rather cold and collected in their approach to their plot, but this is a very excitable one, glorying in his wicked plans, impatient to get on in life. When he’s playing Goneril and Regan off against each other you can see his genuine delight at the sport, it’s a really sexy game for him.

The rest of the cast all play their parts very well, Gideon Turner’s Cornwall was very convincing as the unapologetically malevolent putter-outer of Gloucester’s eyes (I particularly liked –if that is the word – the way he threw the second eye on to the floor and you heard it bounce) andGwilym Lee as Edgar’s Poor Tom character did actually bring a tear to my eye with his sorrow at seeing his blind father. As is often the case, Lear’s entry with the dead Cordelia in his arms brought a lump to the throat. It was Jacobi’s “Howl! Howl! Howl!” (Act V Scene III, line 256) that did it.

One thing I really admired about this production is how there was barely any staging or furniture. The unchanging set is just three walls and a ceiling made of planks with various shades of white and grey daubed on them (with additional splashes of red after Gloucester’s blinding). Lights behind slim gaps between the planks create the lightning effect for the heath. For props and furniture, there was a chair, a joint-stool, a map, a few letters, some jewellery and swords and a bit of earth for Edgar’s Tom make-up. This really means that all your attention is on the words, the characters, the acting. Having seen a number of over-staged productions recently it’s thrilling to see the drama evolve unadulterated by minutiae.

Additionally I should mention that Adam Cork won the Olivier Award for best Sound Design for this production, which is a fitting reward for the moody, scary, disquieting atmospheres that he has created. Lear on the heath is a very different interpretation from the traditional – the words are delivered much more calmly and quietly than usual – but the sound design helps create a very spooky experience.

It’s excellent that the Donmar is making this production available to a much larger audience. The Milton Keynes Theatre was sold out for a Wednesday evening, which is good news for business. It’s a great, stark production that lets the text do the talking and with some fine characterisations of its villains and victims to inhabit it.