Review – Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads, Minerva Theatre, Chichester, 23rd July 2022

Posted on July 28, 2022 by therealchrisparkle

On a truly high buzz having seen the brilliant Crazy For You that afternoon, our party of roving theatregoers turned their attention towards Roy Williams’ Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads, on its second preview at the Minerva. Most of us are pretty partial to our football, and it wouldn’t remotely surprise me if we consulted our old diaries we would find that at least some of us were dahn the pub on Saturday 7^th October 2000, the precise date on which this play is set.

I’d seen two plays by Mr Williams before – one I loved and one I pretty much loathed. I loved Soul, his play about the life (and death) of music legend Marvin Gaye. I loathed Days of Significance, his examination of the lives of young people who have been affected by a tour of military service in Iraq. Basically, I reckon I had a 50:50 chance of enjoying Sing Yer Heart Out or not.

Of course, I must emphasise that this was a Preview performance. By the time it reaches its press night all sorts of changes might have occurred – although I would think that was fairly unlikely, especially given the play was produced at Chichester last year in their garden tent – to excellent reviews, which is no doubt why it has been brought back to enjoy further life at the Minerva. I should also point out that the show had to be stopped for about twenty minutes during the first act, when an audience member fell ill. The staff at the Minerva handled the emergency brilliantly. However, it was perhaps a little more unsettling for me than for most of the rest of the audience as the lady concerned was sitting directly behind me and, whilst she was suffering, chucked the water she was presumably drinking all over me. I was drenched. And while – of course – she was in a much worse state than me, I was left a soggy mess throughout the rest of the first half (I managed to dry out in the interval). So it wasn’t the best of circumstances to enjoy the play. These things happen. I hope the lady is better now.

The play is set in a south London pub as it is being set up to watch the vital England v Germany World Cup qualifier match on television. Regulars arrive to watch it. Excitement and enthusiasm turn to disappointment after Germany score. And then go on to win. Kevin Keegan resigns. The play ends. But it’s not quite as simple as that. There are personal undercurrents between many of the characters who have come to watch the match. Racial and other tensions figure highly. Glen, the landlady’s son, tries to ingratiate himself with a couple of young black guys, Duane and Bad T, who respond by attempting to bully him. Landlady Gina’s also had a relationship with Mark, one of the guys in the pub. Another of the customers is Lee, a police officer who’s recently been assaulted, and his brother, Lawrie, is an outright racist yob. One of the older men, Alan, a devoted follower of Enoch Powell, sinisterly tries to influence the younger men to be the same – or to manipulate and outwit the black guys. When the mother of one of the youths arrives to complain that one of the drinkers has assaulted her son (that’s because they went off to find him because they’d stolen Glen’s jacket, hope you’re keeping up with this), policeman Lee takes “control”. And that’s all in the first act. In the second act, things start getting messy.

Let’s talk about the good things about this production first. The best thing is the staging. The Minerva has been converted into the George Pub with immaculate attention to detail, and when you walk in, you really do feel that you’re in a well-loved, rather downtrodden local pub. The old-fashioned circular bar at the back. The worn, taped down carpet. The pool and bar football tables. The fact that the front row seats have been replaced by bar chairs, tables, and stools. You couldn’t get more authentic. TV screens show us the match while the pub regulars are watching it. Perhaps best of all, above the bar, the scene occasionally moves to the Gents toilet, which you can see through opaque windows. It’s one of the most lifelike, convincing sets I’ve ever seen; even down to the handpump that decided to stop working during the performance with the result that Sian Reese-Williams playing Gina deftly swapped the beer to a lager from another pump. Designer Joanna Scotcher deserves every award going.

And then there are the performances – all of them excellent. For a play that has very few sympathetic characters, it’s hard to say that you “enjoyed” them all; but Richard Riddell as Lawrie is a most convincing thug, constantly teetering on a knife-edge of losing his self-control, and Michael Hodgson plays Alan with huge insidiousness; you can really see how his behaviour could needle the most balanced of people. Mark Springer is excellent as Mark, his calm exterior concealing a torrent of upset inside. Sian Reese-Williams is also very good as landlady Gina, showing all that direct assertiveness required for a woman to run an establishment like that. Alexander Cobb’s strong performance as Lee surprises us with the way his character can turn on a sixpence. But the whole cast come together as a seamless ensemble, creating a combined very believable and physical performance.

But here’s the But – and I realise I’m pretty much on my own here – I really did not like the play. Not because of the bad language, the racism, or the violence; all those elements go to create a challenging play, which is something I relish. However, having set up all this aggression and racism, the play then does so little with them. It just tosses them in the air and says look at this isn’t it awful. It doesn’t make us think differently about the world we live in, it merely wallows in the despair of the worst aspects of human behaviour, offering no solutions, no hope, no light for the future. Some of these characters are violent, or racist, or both. Quelle surprise. Many of our party guessed the final plot twist, as all being sadly predictable. You know that things are going wrong when, rather than concentrating on the play, you end up watching the England v Germany game on the television and following Lawrie and Alan’s pool match – Mr Riddell is a ridiculously talented pool player! The production is visually thrilling, but this static play just left us flat and depressed. A game of two halves, one might say.

Production photos by Helen Murray

Three-sy Does It!

Review – Macbeth, Royal Shakespeare Company, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, 14th April 2018

Posted on April 18, 2018 by therealchrisparkle

I remember having to write an essay on Shakespeare’s As You Like It at university. I enjoyed the play, and considered it from many angles, and then I thought I’d identified something no one else had seen before. Taking much of my idea from Touchstone’s lengthy scene with Jaques describing the degrees of a lie, and particularly his conclusion: “Your If is your only peacemaker: much virtue in If”, I constructed an (if I may say so) elegant, well-reasoned and convincing argument that the whole play is about the art of compromise. I read it enthusiastically to my tutor and eagerly awaited his response. He merely looked over his intimidating spectacles and murmured the two words: “possible interpretation”, at which point I instantly realised I’d run amok with my mad idea and had completely missed the point. For “possible interpretation” read “wrong”.

As Don says in Christopher Hampton’s The Philanthropist, “it’s much more important for a theory to be shapely than for it to be true.” So, to Polly Findlay’s new production of Macbeth for the RSC. If I’d taken time to read the programme before it started (yes, my bad, I know), I would have realised that the whole production centres on Macbeth’s relationship with time. And there’s little doubt in my mind that time is indeed one of the themes of the play. “Tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow”; “the seeds of time”; “untimely ripp’d” and so on; they’re all there. However, I’ve always felt that the ultimate theme in Macbeth is “vaulting ambition which o’erleaps itself”. Then you have those important themes of power; cruelty; tyranny versus nobility; not to mention the supernatural element. Macbeth’s also one of the finest examples of dramatic irony, which applies to all true tragedies, where the hero doesn’t know his character failings nor his outcome but the audience does. And then, of course, there’s the hope for the future. Scotland’s afraid to know itself until the noble Malcolm becomes King. So many options for so much dramatic indulgence.

Now, I love challenging theatre. And I’m all for messing about with Shakespeare (to an extent) – he’s big and strong enough to take care of himself, after all. But if you choose to approach a play from a bold, original and unpredictable angle, there has to be a purpose to it. It should open up the audience’s understanding of the play. It must illuminate where before there was darkness. It has to make you understand things you never fathomed before. But this production does the complete opposite. By linking the play inexorably to theme of time, it imprisons it rather than releases it. Despite knowing the play fairly well, I found the narrative surprisingly confusing and difficult to follow, which doesn’t make for a rewarding night at the theatre. In an attempt to cast new light on one of the most magnificent plays in the English language, the creative team have subjugated it under this all-embracing yoke of time, to the near-eradication of all its other subtleties and glories.

For example: out go the three witches, to be replaced by three cute little girls in pink jimjams each cuddling a dolly. Congratulations to whichever three child actors were playing the parts last Saturday evening because they carried it off superbly. But ghoulish hags they aren’t, which renders many of Banquo’s and Macbeth’s comments about them meaningless. My guess is that they were meant to be eerie, like the children in Poltergeist or The Omen, or some such horror movie. Way off the mark, I’m afraid.

Out, too, goes the comedy drunken porter, and in comes a lugubrious presence who sits at the side of the stage for the whole performance and crosses off random chalk tallies on the wall; if there was a symbolic reason for this, I’d love someone to explain it. He has his uses; when Lady Macbeth didn’t properly turn off the tap on the watercooler, he was there with a deft knob turn. More significantly, and elevated to a level of importance way beyond Shakespeare’s original, he sets off an LED clock on the back wall of the stage, ticking down the minutes and seconds from 2 hours to zero, which will be the point at which Macbeth dies. He becomes the Zeitmeister. Sadly, the ticking clock was much more mesmeric than the nonsensical things that were happening on stage; I almost skipped the interval as I couldn’t take my eyes off it. “Here’s a knocking indeed” says the Porter. And he’s right. I’ve never heard such loud knocking – way too loud to be realistic, so I presume they’re going for a symbolic effect. But for me it’s the perfect example of how this production sacrifices subtlety for an attempt at a wow factor.

Fly Davis’ setting incorporates a second small stage high above the first and hidden behind a screen, which can only be seen when it’s lit from within. This provides a useful additional acting space and works very well. What works less well is the constant projection of random phrases from the text at the top of the stage – I’m never a fan of these Brechtian distancing devices, and, believe me, they are very random. To tie in with the ever-present time theme, the word later often appears over the hidden stage. No kidding. Sometimes it says now but mainly it says later. The observant theatregoer already knew they weren’t seeing a production of Pinter’s Betrayal so they guessed it was taking place in chronological order. Everything’s always later, dang my breeches. You only have to look at the ticking clock staring you in the face – of course it’s later, what else could it be? However, the clock is ticking down in real time, but the play doesn’t proceed in real time; so there are now two timescales, and, presumably, two different types of later. Does that help? No. It’s confusing rather than illuminating. And talking of playing with time, the last fifteen seconds of the production completely rewrite both the original and the nature of all Shakespearean tragedy, with the implication that the whole thing is going to start again with another 2 hour countdown. NO! It isn’t! They’re making up their own story, gentle reader. This shouldn’t be called Macbeth, it should be renamed Macbeth’s Time Machine, based on an idea by Shakespeare.

When you pretty much hate everything the production is trying to do, it’s very difficult to see through that and pick out the good aspects. But I’ll try. The set is functional and clear. There’s one exceptionally good performance – more of which shortly. The technical tricks with the clock were accurate and memorable. The lighting is stark but effective. The costumes were of course excellent – well some of them were a little unusual but when have you ever seen the RSC perform with poor quality or inappropriate costumes?

With a starry cast headed by Christopher Eccleston and Niamh Cusack I had high expectations for a dynamic duo on stage. But I sensed there was very little magic between them. Theirs felt more like a business arrangement than a marriage. To appreciate the pressure on Macbeth and the influence of Lady Macbeth, you have to believe that if he doesn’t screw his courage to the sticking place he’ll have one helluva domestic price to pay. But in this production, that sense of threat is missing. This Macbeth could easily have gone talk to the hand and said whatever as she was nagging on. Mr Eccleston spends the evening being bluff and dour, with not a lot of light and shade to his delivery. Ms Cusack sometimes looks like she’s on a sugar hyper, so jumpy and over-animated is her behaviour. Only in the dining scene, where Macbeth is tormented by the ghost of Banquo, did Ms Cusack seem at ease with the role, with her embarrassed, hurried excuses to their guests. Bizarrely, throughout the whole play, I also found that many of their speech inflections seemed, well, just wrong; stressing the wrong word in a sentence, or the wrong syllable in a word. Much of it was very alien and uncomfortable to the ear.

Most of the other roles lacked a sense of individuality, but to be fair they weren’t helped by the over-stylistic presentation. David Acton’s Duncan stood out as a thoughtful, credible portrayal of a noble king, so it was annoying that Macbeth killed him so early. Michael Hodgson’s Porter became something of an audience favourite with his deliberately stilted, mocking, laconic characterisation. It’s not often that I find the Porter’s crude speech funny; and sadly, this was no exception. I did, however, have to resist the temptation to let out at derisory laugh when he got his carpet sweeper out. OK, in the castle, I expect the Porter would have to do a bit of cleaning now and then. But on the battlefield? I’ve never heard of the detritus of war being cleared up with a Ewbank, particularly as slowly as he was doing it. Either I’m too stupid to get it, or it was too stupid to care about. Your choice.

Thank heavens for Edward Bennett as Macduff, who exuded the perfect degree of upright respectability, spoke with utmost clarity, and, in the words of Ronan Keating, said it best when he said nothing at all when told of the murders of the rest of his family. That stunned silence, that emptiness behind the eyes, that controlled need for repeated confirmation of what had happened, all conveyed more emotion, sorrow and quiet fury than the rest of the show put together. Kudos to him and Mr Eccleston for timing their fight so that the lethal blow was struck at the just the right moment – it would have been agony to be a second out. Although Mr Eccleston was hanging around just waiting to be sliced for a little longer than was believable; I guess that’s the price you pay when you sacrifice the truth for the effect.

It wasn’t long into the show before Mrs Chrisparkle fell asleep. She wasn’t tired; she was a combination of bored, confused and irritated. I knew better than to wake her up. The temptation to leave at the interval was strong; but I have to say, everyone came back for the second half which really surprised me; and it received a very warm reception from the audience at curtain call, so I’m fully prepared to accept I’m out of kilter on this one. But I think this is one of the most misguided productions I’ve ever seen, choked by gimmickry. As Macbeth himself says, Confusion hath made its Masterpiece. He’s right there.

Production photos by Richard Davenport

Review – Catch 22, Northern Stage, Oxford Playhouse, 10th June 2014

Posted on June 12, 2014 by therealchrisparkle

Whether you’ve read the book or not, everyone knows the concept. You’ve got a problem, but you can’t solve it because the solution is the problem: that’s Catch-22. In Joseph Heller’s fantastic book, set during the Second World War, you can be discharged from the armed forces if you’re crazy. The trouble is, you have to apply for the discharge, which in itself proves you’re not crazy. Therefore you won’t get discharged. Simples.

Yossarian is the Everyman figure coming to terms with life as a Bombardier in the American forces, desperate to be sent home because of his paranoia about everyone and everything wanting to kill him. Weaving in and out of his life are his military comrades and superiors, and it’s his relationships with these people and his confrontations with authority that provide the main narrative of the book. A lot of it is surreal and ludicrous, and a lot of it is rather repetitive, which gives the novel a great sense of irony, but sadly these aspects don’t transfer that well to the stage.

Despite the fact this is Catch-22 (the play)’s first ever UK tour, produced by Northern Stage, this isn’t the first time I’ve seen it. Heller adapted it himself in 1971 but it never had a proper commercial release. However, some time around 1980, it was performed by students from Brasenose College Oxford, and I went to see it, because my friend Andy was playing Major Major. Very funny he was too, jumping in and out of windows in his constant quest to avoid responsibility. Alas, I don’t have any other memories of it, but I remember quite enjoying it, although it was way too long.

Back to 2014. Entering the Oxford Playhouse, on first glance it’s a very impressive set, largely featuring the shell of a bomber aircraft which they act in and around. However, the aircraft takes up so much space that it limits the opportunities for the cast to move around the stage freely, and where they do use parts of the aircraft as the scenery, although it’s rather clever, it doesn’t seem very natural to me. There’s a central acting space – the internal floor of the aircraft – that is on an adverse camber, and not particularly useful either in dimensions or in its angle. I think they’ve fitted the action to go with the set rather than design a set that suits the action – a “tail wagging the dog” scenario. It also means that there’s quite a lot of action that takes place at the extreme edges of the stage, which unless you’re seated centrally in the audience, you might not get to see.

You really can’t escape the length of the show. Three and a quarter hours. On a warm Spring night in the Oxford Playhouse with the air-con only working intermittently, that’s a form of torture. You can just about get away with three hours if it’s a musical, when you’ve got the variation of content and a sense of stop-start with each song that allows you to break away from your concentration every so often. But with a play? No. Not unless you’re making a deliberate point, like the National Theatre’s uncut Hamlet in 1976 with Albert Finney. No one ever does Shakespeare nowadays without a little shaving off the edges – it’s just too long otherwise. I went to see that Hamlet as part of a school party – it started at 7pm and finished at 11. At the time it was the “show to see” for the very reason that there were no cuts; its glory was in its completeness. But with Catch-22, I guess Heller just loved his book too much to abridge it further. Like a lovely rose, it needs a damn good pruning. Whilst the repetition in the speeches and plot may well accurately reflect the repetition in the book, I found the constant circular conversations, where characters repeat back the words they hear to the person who said them, frankly boring on stage.

Many of the scenes are quite short and fast, presumably because there’s a lot of book to get through, which I also felt made it feel a bit rushed, and lacking in depth. Apart from Philip Arditti’s Yossarian, who is an almost constant presence on the stage, I didn’t really engage emotionally with many of the characters. That’s not to say you don’t get to know them – you do. Colonel Cathcart’s belligerence and double standards are very nicely portrayed by Michael Hodgson, Geoff Arnold captures the gentle Chaplain’s insecurities extremely well, and Daniel Ainsworth makes Nately’s idealism and decency very clear and strangely moving. But the whole show does suffer from the fact that there are so many characters portrayed by a handful of actors that inevitably a lot of it becomes a blur.

A few scenes really stood out for their dramatic or comic impact – I loved the scene where Yossarian was interviewed by the psychiatrist (Michael Hodgson again on cracking form) who clearly has more mental issues than his patient; and was amused (as I always am) by Major Major’s insistence on having no one enter his office whilst he’s at work, a nice mixture of the sane and insane subtly conveyed by David Webber’s thoughtfully understated performance. But there were other times where I felt the necessary impact was lacking – the constant knife attacks on Yossarian by Nately’s Whore, for example, seemed unthreatening, and, in the final scene, extremely underwhelming. There’s also a scene where Yossarian, just in his boxers, is sitting on top of the plane with Milo, discussing the potential market for chocolate covered cotton as a snack. Whilst some members of the audience were howling with laughter at this, I’m afraid it completely passed me by. Anyway, I have further suspicions about this scene, see ahead for details.

My overall reaction to the production is that Catch-22 is probably best left as a novel. It’s a very worthy project and a lot of effort has clearly gone into recreating the spirit of the original on stage, but I’m not sure it’s really worth it. Probably Joseph Heller is the chief problem here – the play is just too long, and the book has too many minor characters that appear in the stage adaptation resulting in a feeling more of confusion than elucidation. I’m afraid a few people sat near me didn’t return after the interval and one lady actually left halfway through the second act, which is a slightly odd time to walk out, although I can imagine a number of reasons why she might have done so. After it finishes its run at Oxford, it still has Derby and Richmond to visit. If you’re going, I hope you enjoy it and I wish you luck.

P. S. I’m going to put two and two (plus another two) together, and may or may not come up with six or something completely different; let’s see how it adds up. The first “two”: I was really surprised to find such a large number of schoolchildren in the audience. It looked as though several classes had come together for an evening at the theatre. Maybe it’s a set text and therefore will attract school trips. They were reasonably well behaved, so that wasn’t an issue. But they formed a significant percentage of the audience, and many of them looked pretty young to me. The second “two”: there’s an information note on the Oxford Playhouse website regarding this production that simply reads: “Age guidance 14+ contains some nudity” – well, there was no nudity in the performance I saw. And the third “two”? That scene on top of the plane that I felt lacked an impact. It started off with Yossarian at the edge of the stage, visibly getting an idea in his head, and then determinedly and purposefully undressing, chucking his clothes on the floor in a rampage – but then he went no further than his boxers, and climbed up on top of the plane; I believe, in the book, he sits naked in a tree. He had his conversation with Milo about chocolate cotton, and then that scene merged into the next one, with Doc Daneeka and his staff, where Yossarian donned a hospital gown over his boxers; and then that scene merged into yet another, now without the gown again, where he’s conversing with his girlfriend whilst she intimately caresses his upper torso. If my memory serves me right, then we snapped into the interval.

My suspicion is that this performance was effectively censored, possibly because of the large number of under 14s in the audience, and that this was the “nudity” scene. Now, I’m not overly worried about not getting to see Mr Arditti in the buff, but what I am worried about is that this becomes a bowdlerized version of the artistic vision of the production, and if so it totally compromises the integrity of the entire production in my eyes. If they can do that, who knows to what length they will sacrifice their vision to attract the ticket costs of a younger audience. For one thing, at what point would he normally have put clothes on again? For the hospital scene? For the girlfriend scene? If that girlfriend scene normally takes place with his wearing nothing it puts a very different complexion on the audience’s perception of their relationship. And if the nudity was censored, was anything else? Did they remove swear words for example? Were any gestures changed? It’s like going back to the days of the Lord Chamberlain except that it’s the production company wielding the red pen. Once you start playing with a show to adapt it for different audiences, and not being open and honest about it, then you’re sinking in very muddy waters. As you can guess, censorship is one of my pet hates – in fact stage censorship was the subject of my postgrad research. I tweeted Northern Stage to ask these questions, but sadly haven’t had a reply. If two and two and two make six, I am left to conclude that there was something definitely afoot with Tuesday night’s show. However, if two and two and two make five, maybe the creative team have changed it permanently, deciding it works better this way. If you know, please tell me!