It’s been a while – here are some more theatre and dance memories! December 2007 to March 2008

Posted on August 16, 2021 by therealchrisparkle

The Country Wife – Theatre Royal Haymarket, London, 29^th December 2007

A great cast assembled to do justice to William Wycherley’s terrific Restoration Comedy, with Toby Stephens as Horner, Patricia Hodge as Lady Fidget, David Haig as Pinchwife, and Janet Brown as Old Lady Squeamish. Directed by Jonathan Kent, it provided a lot of seasonal fun!

The Seagull – Royal Shakespeare Company at the New London Theatre, London, 1^st January 2008

Something of a challenge to go and see Chekhov on New Year’s Day, and there’s no doubt about it, there was definitely a lethargic feel to the audience, if not the performers. In fact the most memorable thing about this show was seeing Simon Callow in the front row nodding off all the way through. Trevor Nunn’s production had a super cast, with Frances Barber as Arkadina and Ian McKellen as Sorin.

King Lear – Royal Shakespeare Company at the New London Theatre, London, 12^th January 2008

Largely the same company that performed The Seagull were also in King Lear, with Ian McKellen as Lear, Frances Barber as Goneril, William Gaunt as Gloucester, and Sylvester McCoy inspired casting as the Fool – and a very down-at-heel, sad fool he was too. Sir Ian went all exhibitionist, taking literally all his clothes off on the blasted heath (“every inch a King” went the reviews at the time) – the best memory of this show however was holding a door open for Joanna Lumley during the interval and she gave me the most beaming smile in gratitude.

Henri Oguike Dance Company – Swan Theatre, High Wycombe, 12^th February 2008

Moving past a production of Godspell at Dunstable’s Grove Theatre, to which we took our nieces as a treat, our next show was the Spring Season show by Henri Oguike Dance Company, and for some reason it’s the only time we’ve seen this company perform. They had six different programmes for their tour – we saw Programme A, which comprised of Little Red, to the music of Vivaldi, then Touching All and All Around, Oguike’s latest pieces at the time and finally Green in Blue, a collaboration with saxophonist Iain Ballamy. All the dances were choreographed by Oguike. I remember it being very enjoyable.

Othello – Donmar Warehouse, London, 16^th February 2008

A rare trip (for us) to the Donmar, to see Michael Grandage’s production of Othello, with just about as stellar a cast as you could imagine. Chiwetel Ejiofor played Othello, with Ewan McGregor as Iago, Edward Bennett as Roderigo, Tom Hiddleston as Cassio and James Laurenson taking on both Brabantio and Gratiano. It was every bit as good as you might have hoped.

Rafta, Rafta – Milton Keynes Theatre, 29^th February 2008

Notable for being the first time I’d been to the theatre on a February 29^th (the only other time was in 2020) – this was the National Theatre’s touring production of Ayub Khan-Din’s Rafta Rafta. Wikipedia helpfully tells us this is a comic tale of close-knit Indian family life in England; useful because I cannot remember a thing about it apart from the fact that I enjoyed it.

Never Forget – Milton Keynes Theatre, 7^th March 2008

This new musical based on the songs of Take That was written by Danny Brocklehurst, Guy Jones and Ed Curtis, and had four very talented performers playing the four lads whose group echoes Take That without being Take That. I remember it having an absolutely woeful book, which was a shame because this could have worked well – but it really didn’t, despite the efforts of Dean Chisnall, Craige Els, Tim Driesen and Eaton James. It only came to life at the finale when they abandoned all pretence and did a fifteen-minute medley of Take That songs. If they had done that for the rest of the show it would have been brilliant.

I Love You, You’re Perfect, Now Change – Westside Theatre Upstairs, New York City, 25^th March 2008

We went to New York to celebrate our twentieth wedding anniversary, and whilst there we saw three shows. The first was this brilliant revue that has been playing off-Broadway for yonks. Extremely funny and insightful, full of great tunes and superb performances.

A Chorus Line – Gerald Schoenfeld Theatre, New York City, 26^th March 2008

Targeted specifically for the exact date of our twentieth anniversary, I had always wanted to see A Chorus Line on Broadway, because it’s my favourite show and where could there be a more perfect place to see it? This was the same revitalised production that would come to the London Palladium five years later. At the end of the show I bought as much merchandise as I could, including a signed poster which hangs on my wall above my computer! And how was the show? Absolutely perfect.

Curtains – Al Hirschfeld Theatre, New York City, 28^th March 2008

For our final Broadway show, we followed the local recommendations and saw Kander and Ebb’s Curtains, which had never been seen in the UK (indeed, not until a few years ago). It starred Frasier’s David Hyde Pierce as the detective, Lieutenant Cioffi, and Debra Monk as Carmen. It was alright, but we just couldn’t really get on with it; and Mr Hyde Pierce just phoned it in. On reflection, the UK production with Jason Manford as Cioffi was quite a lot better.

Review – Othello, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, 25th May 2021

Posted on May 26, 2021 by therealchrisparkle

Fresh from a successful week with their production of Animal Farm, the National Youth Theatre are back at the Royal and Derngate with Othello, abridged by Dfiza Benson, and directed by Miranda Cromwell. When I originally read about the production, I expected it to be closer to a serving suggestion than anything approximating the original Othello. But well over 99% of the text is pure Will; and, anyway, Shakespeare is big and strong and tough enough to lend his work to all manner of adaptations and no number of radical reworkings is ever going to eliminate the Bard’s original plays. More about the language later…

We’re in the Club Cyprus, Manchester. It’s 1991 – thirty years ago. The joint is jumpin’ and the ravers are ravin’. Othello has just got married to Desdemona and they are now wife and wife, much to the fury of Brabantio. Iago, bouncer at the club, is the evil link that binds the story together, manipulating everyone to his own advantage, all of his villainy stemming from that one vital belief: “I hate the Moor.” It’s fascinating to see how this production, incidentally, with its gender-blind casting, strongly brings out the original themes of racism, but there’s not a whiff of homophobia. Brabantio is not remotely concerned that his daughter Desdemona has married a woman; it’s her colour that’s the issue.

The NYT cast and creative team have thrown everything at this production to make it a spectacle of light, colour, sound and movement that assaults the eyes and ears and gives the audience much to enjoy and appreciate. The commitment and creativity that has given rise to this 21^st century Othello is to be applauded. And there are some superb performances. From the start, Francesca Amewudah-Rivers stands out as a truly noble and dignified Othello, crystal clear in her oratory, superbly at ease with taking centre stage with this enviable role. Her stage presence shines bright and she is very, very watchable. And she is matched by a fantastically confident performance from Connor Crawford as Iago who delivers an unusually frantic and jumpy reading of the role, but which makes absolute sense. This is a Iago who knows he is chancing his arm all the way through, desperate to achieve his goals, but with none of the laid-back, quietly superior attitude of some Iagos. This one has to work hard to engineer what he wants, and it works extremely well.

Ishmel Bridgeman gives us an amusingly cocky and vain Cassio, pretending to be streetwise but still a lightweight, wet-behind-the-ears kind of guy, so that he quickly finds life inside the Club Cyprus a dangerous environment. Julia Kass is excellent as Emilia, already knowing she is being duped by her husband when she gives him Desdemona’s scarf (there are no handkerchiefs in 1990s Manchester). And I really liked Jack Humphrey’s Brabantio, all powerless bluster and fury, seeing his paternal influence disappear in front of his eyes as old age inevitably gives way to youth. He almost makes you sympathise with his character despite his racism, which shows just how subtle a performance it is.

I firmly adhere to a belief I’ve held for decades now, which is that I would prefer to see a bold and brave attempt to do something new, even if it fails, than a lazy or complacent success. And that’s exactly how I feel about this production because, as a whole, it doesn’t fully work. There are two big innovations with the structure of this show. One is making Othello a woman, married to another woman, and that works extremely well. The other is the introduction of a Chorus, everyman characters whose voices emerge from the recesses of the dance floor whispering their words of suspicion and jealousy to Othello. At first, I thought it was a clever notion, representing all those unidentifiable thoughts that come into everyone’s head when you have a doubt about something. But the Chorus’ whisperings and warnings, endlessly repeated, soon took away the subtlety and nuance of Iago’s persuasions and influence. No wonder Othello fell foul of jealousy; it was delivered all around him like a sledgehammer. So, personally, that didn’t work for me.

The club/disco setting also begins to pall as the play progresses. Whilst there’s no doubt about the ensemble’s commitment to keeping that rave movement going, rather than enhancing our understanding of the story and the characters’ motivations, it becomes a distraction. It takes away from our understanding – and it certainly takes away the audibility of some of the more important scenes in the latter end of the play. As a result, the whole evening, which starts off very pacey and on-the-nose, begins to get a little drawn-out; and at 105 minutes with no interval, it feels surprisingly long.

Dfiza Benson’s new text takes much of Shakespeare’s original, replaces the Iago/Cassio drinking scene with the disco – which is clever, removes Iago’s last line (a shame, because his final silence is one of the most intriguing things about the play), and adds about twenty instances of the F word. Gentle reader, I am no prude. And it made me laugh that f**k was the first word uttered (much better than the original Tush!) But it didn’t always sit well for me. Othello always expresses him/herself with nobility and dignity, and imagination. Would Othello, who elegantly says Keep up your bright swords for the dew will rust ‘em, turn to Desdemona and storm off with a Well F**k You? It’s Othello’s language that raises the character out of the commonplace. By bringing her language down to the level of the others, it diminishes this stature. If the aim of the production is to establish Othello as a powerful, queer, black woman (quoting the online programme), I feel this use of language doesn’t help.

I also couldn’t understand why the play was set in 1991. Othello and Desdemona are proudly married – not just living together but the full legal ceremony – but equal marriage wasn’t introduced in the UK until 2013. In 1991, the country was still in the grip of the dreaded Clause 28 and LGBT rights were being eroded. Surely it would have made more sense for it to be set in the here and now – pandemic notwithstanding?

For me, although the show is a plucky failure, that’s actually a much better thing than it seems at first sight. It takes one of the great theatrical classics and transports it into our lifetime with our cultural references and shows how we still have to learn the age-old lessons about racism, jealousy and man’s (in this case woman’s) folly. It’s also performed with huge confidence and style by a very talented company. Maybe it’s not for purists, but then maybe purists shouldn’t be such snowflakes (to use the pejorative term of the era). Quentin Letts would hate it, so that can only be a good thing.

Rehearsal photographs by Helen Murray

Three-sy does it!

Review – Othello, Frantic Assembly, Oxford Playhouse, 21st October 2014

Posted on October 24, 2014 by therealchrisparkle

One of the great things about Shakespeare is that you can play him dead straight, at the time in which the play was written, all Elizabethan costume, jesters and madrigals, and it works just fine. Or you can jazz him up and modernise him, setting the play in any era, under any governmental regime, anywhere in the world, and as like as not it will adapt to its new surroundings – to some extent. I wasn’t overly keen on the 1970s setting of the recent Richard III – a bit cynical, I thought; but I loved the anarchic rock concert of Filter Theatre’s Twelfth Night, the East London Comedy of Errors at the National a couple of years ago, and all those anachronistic garden capers at the Oxford Shakespeare Company are a joy.

Frantic Assembly’s Othello takes place in a pub; a world where power struggles and sex take place on the pool table, where private arguments are carried out in the Ladies’ toilet, where chalking the end of your man’s cue is foreplay, where Venetian sea skirmishes happen in the car park, where broken bottles of Stella and baseball bats replace Shakespeare’s knives and “bright swords”. It’s an environment where hail fellow well met can turn in an instant to You’re going home in a St John’s Ambulance. It’s a place where courtship rituals can be at their most provocative, with the inevitable rivalries, jealousies, passions and secrets that follow; everything from love to hate and all that’s in between. In other words, a perfect place to set Othello.

Nine performers play ten roles in this neatly compressed and creatively scissored adaptation by Scott Graham and Steven Hoggett. There’s no Duke, no Gratiano, no Clown; no sundry gentlemen, messengers, sailors, senators or other attendants; cutting away some extraneous characters creates an additional sense of urgency and focus as Iago sets about manipulating all the pub regulars in rapid crescendo, like some godlike puppeteer. It’s really not for purists; speeches are swapped around and given to other characters, completely out of context – I can’t help but think that if you were seeing this production to help you with English Literature A level, it could confuse you more than assist. But that’s really not the point of it. The point is to make a dynamic, punchy, vivid drama in a recognisable setting, whilst retaining the original’s linguistic style and main themes – which, as always with Shakespeare, never go out of fashion and always remain relevant.

You enter the auditorium to the loud jangling sound of technothrob (although there’s no jukebox, there’s maybe a rave going on somewhere) which really sets the mood of sweaty youth going for it hammer and tongs; in fact, throughout the whole play the invasive music by Hybrid becomes a useful tool in speeding the story along to its inexorable conclusion. The set and design are excellent, portraying a seedy pub that hasn’t had money spent on it for years. Old, cheap furnishing, grimy wallpaper – we’ve all been in that kind of watering hole. The pool table is the centre of the action, the place where the pecking order is settled, the natural magnet for all the testosterone bubbling under the surface. The fruit machine becomes a hideaway for onlookers and eavesdroppers, its flashing lights creating a hollow sense of excitement in this drab venue. If this is where you go for a good time – then you need to up your game a little.

This modern setting is obviously going to attract more younger people to the theatre – and I’m all for that. However, I did have a slight panic when I saw quite how many under 18s there were at the performance we attended last Tuesday night. In a play that poses many questions about prejudice, I guess it highlighted one of mine – a fear that too many youngsters in a theatre leads to giggling, chatting, fidgeting, texting and over-whooping. Well, in the modern vernacular, My Bad. Yes there was a whoop when it started. After that – silence, attention, mesmerisation; that unmistakable body language of people sitting as far forward in their seats as possible in an attempt to get closer to the action; proportionate reactions of laughter and horror to what’s happening on stage. Whatever it is they’re doing in this production, they’re doing it right. The sold-out audience was totally rapt.

I was expecting a modern telling of the story; what I wasn’t expecting was such excellent physical theatre. The incorporation of balletic movement and mime into some set pieces worked astoundingly well. It begins with a lengthy but compelling scene where the characters confront their passions, hopes and fears around the pool table, jostling for prominence, ridiculing the weak, exercising laddish behaviour to the full – all done to riveting dance and movement direction by Eddie Kay. Naturally it distances the performance from reality to a certain extent – you don’t normally get pool players doing a pas de deux – but it’s no more unreal than spending the next 100 minutes talking in iambic pentameters. There’s another scene that depicts Cassio getting drunk, acted out in a similar way. It’s a few minutes of utterly stunning physical theatre, performed by the cast with strength, precision and humour. A fantastic mix of styles that really stands out.

Any decent production of Othello has got to have a strong powerful Iago. Steven Miller is perfect. He’s superbly manipulative, wheedling, conniving, and ruthless and you believe in him 100%. When he’s dropping all the hints to Othello about Desdemona’s alleged infidelity, that are purely designed for Othello to latch his suspicions on to, even I started believing him, and I’ve seen the play before. Considering that, depending on your interpretation, this play has at least some element of racism in it, Mr Miller even has the palest of complexions to make the greatest contrast with Othello. Iago has to adopt different tones with so many of the different characters, and Mr Miller gets that variation of tone brilliantly. Mark Ebulue’s Othello stands slightly apart from the rest of the group – as he should – more statesmanlike in the gang, more thoughtful in his responses, and, naturally, with more of his attention on Desdemona than on the lads. His decline into jealousy and barbaric revenge is very neatly done, reacting automatically to almost every titbit thrown out by Iago. Not sure it ever quite reaches tragic hero status, but you probably don’t often get one of those in a public bar anyway.

Kirsty Oswald plays Desdemona with a superb balance between what my mother would have called a “good-time girl” who hangs around blokes in bars but also speaks with gentle and innocent eloquence with her beloved Othello. The balance is very well depicted when she is driven to anger by Othello’s blundering stupidity – no demure sweet girl this, but one who is well able to stand up for herself against the leader of the pack – despite her distress at his falling out of love with her. It’s a very well judged performance. I also very much liked Ryan Fletcher as Cassio, quick to ire, even quicker to overdo the shots, full of bluster and easily fooled; and a chavtastic portrayal of Roderigo by Richard James-Neale, with quirky vocal mannerisms and ineffectual bombast – extremely effective.

I’m not a fan of violence and there’s quite a lot of it in this production. Even when masked by strong dance and movement, there’s no hiding from the gruesomeness of the bloodletting and the old-fashioned kickings meted out. The car park three-way assault by and on Roderigo, Cassio and Iago looks horribly realistic and brutal. Whilst I appreciate that this is the way of life in some places, and that it wasn’t out of place in this production, I still felt that it glorified violence, and I’m uncomfortable with that. I must say though that the final scene, laden with violence as it is, created a stunning visual tableau at the end. The fact that Iago and Emilia are married was only obscurely referenced – I’d actually forgotten about that relationship and it wasn’t until the very end that it was made clear – I had thought she was rather gung-ho in her not caring much about Iago’s taking the handkerchief – that explained it. And another pet hate – no interval! With 110 minutes or so of intense drama, I was shifting buttocks about three quarters of the way in, and I really could have done with a fifteen minute break. There were plenty of points around the Act Three mark where a pause would have created a dramatic cliffhanger, ready for the action to continue once we’d had a short rest. The drive to have no interval is like a false machismo: “My production is so hard that you can’t let the intensity drop”. To all those directors and producers who think this – you’re wrong.

So with a few minor cavils I’d say this is a really exciting and punchy evening at the theatre that brings an old classic right up to date and exposes its bitter and harsh truths in an unexpectedly suitable new way. The tour continues to Leicester, Doncaster, Birmingham, Salford and the Lyric Hammersmith. If you like your Shakespeare in your face – and you’re not a purist – this is definitely for you!

P.S. If you want to know more about the production and how it grew into what it is today there is an excellent resource at Frantic Assembly’s website.