Review – The Other Boleyn Girl, Festival Theatre, Chichester, 4th May 2024

Posted on May 5, 2024 by therealchrisparkle

It’s to my shame, gentle reader, that I never even knew there was another Boleyn girl. For someone who ought to have a love of history, I blame bad teachers. And, if I’m honest, being a history-hating kid. Too late to do anything about it now, sigh. Mike Poulton’s new play, based on Philippa Gregory’s best selling romantic novel, is my new gospel on the subject and I am sure it’s one hundred percent historically accurate. I trust.

Mary is the other Boleyn girl in question, used by Henry VIII for some diverting rumpy-pumpy whilst Catherine of Aragon was giving him dark looks. No surprise that Mary had a son by him whilst Catherine was “determined” not to conceive – how simple that period of history could have been if only the young lad had been born legitimate; but no, Henry had to keep banging away, literally, until a legal son and heir would be born. As history recounts, it was, in modern parlance, a big ask. Anne, Mary and their brother George were a trifle unorthodox in their relationships, with the very first scene of the play strongly hinting that they were equally at ease with each other’s bodies; yes, incest does raise its ugly head in this story. So do their hideously ambitious mother Lady Elizabeth and their cruelly manipulative uncle, the Duke of Norfolk. Two very ugly heads.

This is a court where, like Glen Campbell’s Rhinestone Cowboy, nice guys get washed away like the snow and the rain. Mary’s husband William Carey has to watch powerless whilst his wife is regularly summoned to the king’s bedchamber and there’s nothing either of them can do about it. Harry Percy secretly marries Anne Boleyn only to be subsequently “cancelled” and “ghosted”. Only William Stafford is sufficiently lowly of status to keep his head below the radar and end up happily married to Mary for as long as God allowed – which sadly for them wasn’t that long.

Mike Poulton’s adaptation tells a story that brings together many plots, relationships, deceptions, manipulations and a lot of highly unpleasant people with enormous clarity and simplicity. This is not meant to be uncomplimentary, but it felt to me like each scene was an episode in a rather classy soap opera, keeping us hanging on with interest until the next part of the tale would be unfolded. Lucy Bailey directs with appropriate stateliness and brings out a lovely juxtaposition between the formality and privilege of the setting and the common ruthlessness of status and ambition, which only the strongest (and luckiest) survive.

Joanna Parker’s set is austere and foreboding, super-simple in having a few rooms and hiding places at the back in a suggestion of rooms and corridors that we never see – all the machinations at court and elsewhere are played out in the useful open space that dominates the front of the stage. Orlando Gough has composed a few stately dances where backhanded comments can be shared and devious plots hatched. The costumes are classy but darkly severe; even Henry VIII’s outfit is elegant but subdued.

The performances are of an impeccably high standard, with Lucy Phelps giving us a Mary Boleyn with whom we can all identify; juggling her life as enforced Royal whore with trying to do her best to protect her children, being a good wife and fully grappling with the needs of running a farm. Freya Mevor is excellent as Anne Boleyn, ambitious from the start, always with an additional touch of arrogant haughtiness that her siblings lack, but as much a victim as anyone else who came into the orbit of the Court. There’s a terrific scene where Anne demands official recognition of her status from Mary, constantly requiring her to call her Your Grace, which Mary steadfastly refuses to do. Sisters, eh, what are they like? Another Anne highlight is her daring to dominate King Henry by refusing his advances and even physically rejecting him, knowing full well that he will bow to her will – temporarily at least. It was as near to an if you liked it then you shoulda put a ring on it moment as you could find in Tudor times. Gripping drama – but with the benefit of dramatic irony, it had the whole audience muttering to themselves oh, she’s going to come to regret this.

James Corrigan makes up the sibling throuple as George; it’s an excellent portrayal of a character who is only ever a supporting cast member, trying to do the right thing for the Tudor dynasty whilst still maintaining his own value and position, hiding his male lover Francis in plain sight whilst saddled with marriage to the ghastly lady-in-waiting Jane Parker (Lily Nichol brandishing very nicely underplayed mischief in the role). Alex Kingston and Andrew Woodall are terrific as Lady Elizabeth and Norfolk, the mother and uncle from Hell, prepared to sacrifice the younger Boleyns’ happiness, health and even necks for the sake of the surname.

Kemi-Bo Jacobs is superb as the dignified and tragic Catherine of Aragon, playing the game that she knows she has to play, and also as the money-grabbing midwife who does her job with brutal callousness. And Oscar Batterham delivers an appealing portrayal of the practical and loyal Stafford; one of those rare characters in and around the Court who simply falls in love, says so, and acts like he does.

At just short of three hours, you’d think this show might drag a little but it never does. There’s always a new plot twist or characterisation to appreciate that keeps our attention throughout; and the simplicity of the storytelling really helps our enjoyment of the play. It continues at the Festival theatre until 11^th May and it’s well worth a trip to the South Coast to enjoy it!

Production photos by Stephen Cummiskey

Four They’re Jolly Good Fellows!

Review – White Noise, Bridge Theatre, London, 20th October 2021

Posted on October 25, 2021 by therealchrisparkle

Leo, Dawn, Misha and Ralph: four close friends from university. Leo and Misha, both of African descent, used to be an item; so were Dawn and Ralph, both of European descent. Now it’s Leo and Dawn living together, and Misha and Ralph partnered up. Their friendships have survived the change partners with ease, it seems. Each of them at different stages of their chosen career paths, some more successful than others. Leo and Ralph are both at a crossroads in their work – Leo in art, Ralph in teaching. The future is looking bright for both Dawn and Misha – Dawn as a lawyer, Misha as an online influencer. But they’re all cool with that, all acting as one big support group whenever they need each other. One day Leo is assaulted by the police in a racial attack. The trauma disturbs him deeply. He needs to find a way to work through and overcome it and comes up with a unique solution. But will the others go along with it?

I didn’t know the decision that Leo made before seeing the show and I’m certainly not going to tell you here. But I can’t recall seeing a play where a plot turn took such an unexpected and emotionally loaded direction. It’s vital to the success of the play that you don’t know what’s going to happen so if you want to see the play, please avoid spoilers at all costs! Suffice to say, White Noise is packed with modern, relevant themes about racial equality, power tactics, mental cruelty, truth and decency, and just how far can you stretch a friendship. It examines the roles people take within relationships, where abuse can start, and how a victim can enable their abuser without it ever being a case of “victim-blaming”. It pitches idealism against reality and explores how one of those inevitably trounces the other. It deals with exploitation and self-exploitation. And it does it all with elegance, wit, style, humour and several moments where the audience gasps at what it’s seeing.

The Bridge Theatre’s versatile acting space comes up trumps as usual. Lizzie Clachan’s excellent and detailed set shows Leo and Dawn’s dishevelled bedroom on one side and turns to reveal Misha and Ralph’s stylish kitchen on the other. We also see Ralph’s functional shooting range, including a smartly designed pulley system that automatically delivers the used paper targets onto the stage. The acting space continues out from the stage onto an apron into the auditorium that really brings the action close to the audience. I also love how the production uses its technical know-how to increase the realism of the performance, as when Ralph monitors Misha’s social media reactions whilst she’s doing her show; his laptop clearly displays the phone number you need to ring in, and shows Misha performing live as the audience sees her – such elements make the production feel really up to date and truthful.

Suzan-Lori Parks has written a stunning play with some fantastic speeches and mic-drop moments. It’s structured beautifully to allow us separate insights into the inner machinations of all four characters as well as watching the power-plays between them. The further the play develops, the more you fear for the wellbeing of the characters, and it builds to a tremendously exciting and dangerous climax such as you might expect from a top-rate thriller.

The four actors all give fabulous performances. From his opening monologue where he engages beautifully with the audience, we are completely on the side of Ken Nwosu’s Leo, no matter what life throws at him. Mr Nwosu delivers a rich and powerful performance, revealing all Leo’s insecurities, embarrassments, desires and fears. He takes us along on his journey, laughing and crying with him, willing him to grab what victories he can. Above all, he makes an outlandish situation seem totally credible. Absolutely superb.

Faith Omole is brilliant as Misha, stunning us all with her showbizzy Ask A Black persona, whilst slowly realising her own self-delusions and that she might be part of the problem despite her outward show of independence and equality. Helena Wilson is also superb as Dawn, with immaculate timing and delivery on the character’s occasional killer lines that alter the course of relationships. Her revelations about the legal case that she’s wrapped up in come as a bolt from the blue, as do her misjudged, clumsy but tellingly insensitive moments in conversation with Misha.

James Corrigan is great as Ralph, a character who has had it all and slowly sees it ebbing away until he seizes an opportunity to regain status and power. He brings out all the sinister ruthlessness that’s lurking just beneath Ralph’s surface and horrifies us with what happens when absolute power corrupts absolutely and there’s nothing to hold you in check. A brilliant performance of a complex character.

In a nutshell: simply outstanding. A play that says so much in a production that delivers it to the full. The season at the Bridge Theatre runs until 13^th November, but I sense this is a play that is never really going to go away.

Production photos by Johan Persson

Five Alive let theatre thrive!

Review – Coriolanus, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, 21st September 2017

Posted on September 25, 2017 by therealchrisparkle

Big plays and small plays, Shakespeare wrote them all. Even though it’s big in stature, Macbeth, for example, is small in size, at only 2,086 lines – little Comedy of Errors only has 1,754. At the other extreme, Hamlet has a whopping 3,798 lines – no wonder that uncut version with Albert Finney at the National back in 1976 took four full hours to endure. Coming in at fourth longest is Coriolanus (3,320 lines), and I reckon a good many of them are spent covering the hard battle for the city of Corioli, city seat of the Volscians. Allow me to give you a potted outline of what takes place: Caius Martius forces open the gates of the city and joins the leader of the Roman army, Cominius, to defeat Tullus Aufidius, commander of the Volscian army. In recognition of his valour, Caius Martius is renamed “Coriolanus”.

With an eye on future greatness, his bossy mother Volumnia wants him to stand as consul, but he’s most definitely not a man of the people. He is a man of martial valour, not petty suburban squabbling; and he finds it impossible to conceal how he despises the common man. The crowd turn against him for his attitude, and he ends up seeking refuge with his old foe Tullus Aufidius, who was previously defeated, but not dead. Together they plan to attack Rome, but at the last minute Volumnia makes Coriolanus repent his double-dealing, and a peace treaty is quickly hatched between Rome and the Volscians. As a thank you for his treachery, Tullus Aufidius kills Coriolanus. Oh, those Volscians.

I’d only seen Coriolanus performed once before – also courtesy of the Royal Shakespeare Company, back in 1978 with the tremendous Alan Howard in the title role. In that production, his name was pompously pronounced “Cor-eye-o-larnus”; thank heavens for the return to the present day sanity of “Cor-ee-o-laynus”. My main memory of the late Mr Howard is that he emerged from the battle covered head to toe in blood; it was Visceral Central. Fast forward almost forty years and Angus Jackson’s gritty new production has our new Coriolanus, Sope Dirisu, also covered head to toe in blood. Plus ça change… In fact, when Mr Dirisu appeared out of the darkness with his black leather armour soaked in gloopy red stuff, I swear the lady next to me almost fainted. It does provoke a strong response from the audience’s collective gut – and it’s not entirely comfortable. Plaudits to Terry King, the fight director, who must have been working overtime to get so many soldiers to clash so closely in hand to hand combat; never has the clinking of axes and the wielding of knives sounded so perilous.

This production is the final in a series of Shakespeare’s Roman plays that previously featured Julius Caesar, Antony and Cleopatra, and Titus Andronicus. I didn’t see those productions – although they are all returning to the stage at the Barbican later this year – so I can’t make any observations about how it fits in with the directorial vision of those other plays. What I particularly took from this production is how it highlights both the harshness of the reality of day-to-day life, and also how it exposes opposites within life; like the tough life of the working citizens and the easy life of the patricians.

The play opens with a fork lift truck driver removing some pallets from the centre stage to the back of the set. It’s a slow, deliberate, unemotional procedure; it has absolutely no bearing on the story or the first scene at all other than to show you the world from the point of view of the working man; in other words, the opposite of Coriolanus. Stark grey metallic grille shutters descend and ascend throughout the whole play, imposing their unsentimental clattering on whatever scene is taking place. They disturb the peace, they suggest a life of hard, manual work; the opposite of Coriolanus. The noble warrior in question, having previously gloried in the full gore of war, must present himself to the people, in an opposite light; as the wannabe consul who has to wear the cloak of humility (literally) in the marketplace to win the peoples’ support. He’s as uncomfortable as a pre-op patient in a theatre gown, carefully straddling the podium to retain as much dignity as possible (and not to let the citizens catch a glimpse up his legs.)

Then there are the two opposing women in his life; his mother Volumnia, the power behind the throne, is as tough as nails and manipulative as can be in her constant quest to mould him into the vanquishing warrior she desperately wants. His wife Virgilia, by contrast, barely dares make a sound as she hopes her husband will survive the battle with “no blood”; clearly the make-up department didn’t listen to her plea. There’s also a stark contrast between the bloody mess that Coriolanus made of Tullus Aufidius, and his later appearance as a society chappie hosting extravagant dinner parties at his pad in Antium. Angus Jackson makes the most of Aufidius’ words of affection for Coriolanus by amusingly tempting the Volscian chief right out of the closet. You’d imagine this Aufidius has shirtless pictures of Coriolanus littering up his browsing history. It’s definitely a production of contrasts.

Technically it’s a tremendous production – Richard Howell’s lighting is evocative, moody, and indeed sometimes quite terrifying. It reveals the harshness of life and the dark uncertainty of the battlefield; and the final tableau is a magnificent capture showing the dead hero being carried into an all-devouring but inexplicable light. As you would expect, the modern-day costumes do a grand job to reflect either the battle scenes, the comfort of the patricians, or the everyday clothing of the working citizens. The only downside to the play is that it’s just unfortunate that so much of the first act is either over-wordy or straightforward battlefield fodder, extremely well performed though it may be. The battle scenes occur too early for the audience to have a real sense of the characters involved, and they end up being somewhat confusing. Who’s fighting who over what? It isn’t always obvious. Added to this, you realise that Shakespeare reserves all his best scenes for the second half of the play; you may feel you have to wait a long time for the whole thing to really get going. It’s a potential problem for any production.

Sope Dirisu cuts an enormously grand figure as Coriolanus; a natural hero of the battlefield but a fake friend to the hoi polloi in the marketplace. Nowhere is his true character shown more vibrantly than when he rounds on the citizens as “you common cry of curs” – Mr Dirisu is just brilliant in this scene. He really makes you feel how wonderful it would be, if you’d had a bad day at the office, just to be able to turn on everyone and say, to hell with the lot of you. He has a fantastic stage presence and you have no doubt that he would win the day at any battle. Paul Jesson is superb as the over-comfortable, benignly complacent Menenius, apparently wandering from social engagement to social engagement with absolutely no clue that there’s unrest below the surface. In modern Britain he would be the archetypal so-called Metropolitan Elite Remain voter who was gobsmacked to discover the majority voted Leave.

Haydn Gwynne brings all of Volumnia’s strength and determination to the fore in a performance that leaves you in no doubt that she would dominate any family gathering. James Corrigan is particularly good as the socialite Aufidius, and his fury when he finally kills Coriolanus is truly shocking. There’s a wonderful performance by Charles Aitken (superb as Brick in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof a few years ago) as Cominius, liable to get hilariously over-emotional at times. The extended ensemble of actors give a great impression of the citizenry at large, in all its unhappy forms. I really enjoyed the scene where they all refused to take the blame for Coriolanus’ exile and his resultant joining forces with the enemy – so typical of how no one takes any kind of responsibility! Finally, a special mention to Jackie Morrison and Martina Laird as the two tribunes; delightfully stirring up trouble and doing their best to manipulate the populace – politics hasn’t changed, has it?

This excellent production emphasises the relevance of the story today and shows you how no single man can be all things to all people. Encouraged too far out of their comfort zone, who knows what calamity might ensue. Don’t push too far, your dreams are china in your hand, as the poet once said. Recommended!