A Mirror (Almeida, London)
Verdict: Sketchy censorship drama
Rating:
Next To Normal (Donmar Warehouse, London)
Verdict: Electric rock therapy
Rating:
State censorship may be a live issue in Moscow and Riyadh — or even in Beirut — these days, but not so much in the London borough of Islington. Here, a play is more likely to get shut down by identity militants than by the security police.
Nevertheless, we are asked to suspend disbelief and pretend that such a thing might be possible at the Almeida, in Sam Holcroft’s curiously old-fashioned protest drama A Mirror — starring Jonny Lee Miller as a haughty Minister of Culture in an imaginary totalitarian regime. Holcroft’s play is based on the experience of Beiruti writer Lucien Bourjeily, whose play about censorship was a transcript of his encounters with Lebanese censors.
Here, Holcroft also follows the Lebanese ruse of disguising public performances as weddings, to get under the government radar. So we kick off in a register office, before moving to the ministry, where a young mechanic turned writer (Micheal Ward) is being interrogated.
What follows is a series of sketches in which the minister first admonishes the young writer, then offers him a way out… if he plays the game. By way of encouragement, the aspiring scribe is introduced to Bax, a louche, established writer and ‘national treasure’ (Geoffrey Streatfeild).
A Mirror — starring Jonny Lee Miller as a haughty Minister of Culture in an imaginary totalitarian regime
Unfortunately, the story is an entry-level satire of state censorship, about which there can be little disagreement.
Streatfeild’s character is redolent of talentless conformists who advance through toeing the line, but no parallels are drawn with Arts Council patronage, or the censorious effects of political consensus.
And, ultimately, it fails to do the very thing it calls for: challenge power by holding a mirror to reality.
That doesn’t mean Jeremy Herrin’s production is no fun. Ward is a necessarily straight guy as the put-upon scribbler, but Streatfeild is amusingly vain and lecherous.
Miller, too, has fun as the creepy state functionary who wears black leather gloves, but is secretly in awe of Streatfeild. And Tanya Reynolds, as his assistant, shows fine comic touches in the vein of the great Frances de la Tour.
But over two uninterrupted hours, none of the characters go on much of a journey and, since there is no readmission, the audience must also abandon hope of a journey to the loo. More importantly, it’s a missed opportunity. As we all know, there are bigger, better, more terrifying stories about totalitarian regimes playing out all over the world… right now.
Next To Normal is a Broadway musical from 2008 about manic depression — known clinically as ‘bipolar disorder’. The show was solemnly endorsed with a Pulitzer Prize for Drama in 2010, but suffers from a bipolarity of its own: torn between a serious study of mental illness and the life-affirming requirements of an ecstatic rock musical.
Next To Normal is a Broadway musical from 2008 about manic depression — known clinically as ‘bipolar disorder’
Our heroine Diana Goodman is played by Caissie Levy — best known as the original Elsa in the Broadway version of Frozen. Here, though, she’s a breezy, middle-aged, middle-class soccer mom, with an architect husband (Jamie Parker) who was her college sweetheart.
All seems right in her world until she starts making sandwiches on the floor and enjoying animated arias with her long-dead son.
Tom Kitt’s music offers a kind of electric rock therapy, with Sondheimish, classical interludes for extra seriousness.
Brian Yorkey’s lyrics, though, have flashes of levity including ‘these are a few of my favourite pills’ in a song about psychopharmacology. But the default mode is middle-of-the-road rock.
It’s hard to fault Michael Longhurst’s seamless production, set in a top-of-the-range kitchen which sees singing characters waltz out of the fridge. Eleanor Worthington-Cox, as Diana’s neglected daughter, wins great sympathy in her struggle to stay on the rails, as does Parker, playing Diana’s loyal husband.
Yet I found it hard to empathise with Levy’s hale and hearty Diana who, despite her traumatic storyline, doesn’t seem all that unhinged.
Maybe it’s inevitable that her strawberry-sweet voice should add warmth and colour to a bleak condition. But the Doll’s House ending, where she marches boldly into an uncertain future, seems both unwarranted and ungrateful.
Lord Of The Rings (Watermill, Newbury)
Verdict: Middle-earth in Middle England
Rating:
In 2007, an overblown £12.5 million musical extravaganza — the most expensive to date — at the vast Palladium succeeded in shrinking the beloved Tolkien doorstep, a mythological battle between good and evil, into three underwhelming hours of bafflement and boredom.
Meanwhile, at West Berkshire’s Watermill, squeezed onto a stage as snug as a hobbit’s burrow, a superbly drilled ensemble (should I say Fellowship?) of 20 actor-musicians make the folksy score by Christopher Nightingale, Bollywood’s A.R. Rahman, and Finnish folk band Värttinä, feel like mood music.
Paul Hart’s production starts in the lush garden, bathed in sunshine, Middle England at its loveliest a match for Middle-earth. Here hobbits (‘stubborn as bindweed, tough as old briar’), rural types in bark-coloured breeches playing fiddles and dancing jigs, are celebrating Bilbo Baggins’s eleventy-first year – and the day he passes a ring to his heir, Frodo, before vanishing in a puff of smoke.
Inside the tiny barn theatre, Frodo begins his quest to reach the place where the cursed ring was forged, in order to destroy it, and the real theatrical magic begins. Indeed, this show is an old-fashioned appeal to the imagination using the stage as a box of brilliant tricks. Simple yet ingenious lighting, illusion, puppetry and projection transport Frodo — and the audience — through mystical lands and encounters.
Simple yet ingenious lighting, illusion, puppetry and projection transport Frodo — and the audience — through mystical lands and encounters
Out of the darkness emerge merciless kick-boxing orcs, hooded and hidden behind gas masks; a gigantic boggle-eyed spider lashes out with elastic legs; Matthew Bugg is a grotesque gargoyle-like Gollum, slithering and slimy. Battles rage, underscored by trombones and deafening drums and in quieter moments, trees talk tenderly and romance blossoms, trilled by a harp.
And through it Louis Maskell’s Christ-like Frodo soldiers on, a suffering soul, sustained by unshakably brave Sam (Nuwan Hugh Perera).
Not a single melody clings, but Hart’s production casts a spell. I arrived a Tolkien sceptic and left beguiled and enthralled.
GEORGINA BROWN
FROM THE FRINGE…
Matt Forde: Inside No. 10 (Pleasance Courtyard)
Verdict: Forde motors
Rating:
Even allowing for the fact that we’re in Scotland, the government are not having a good festival. According to Rory Bremner-style impressionist and political analyst Matt Forde, they will crash and burn at the next election because they are simply not adjusted to ‘the new political reality’ — whatever that is.
But to be fair to Rishi Sunak — who’s sent up as a kind of nodding dog — the game is also well and truly up for the SNP. Even more significantly, the audience seem quite happy to let this Englishman ridicule their own Nicola Sturgeon.
And he delights them with the revelation that her husband’s Niesmann+Bischoff motor home (the one impounded by the police) is in fact advertised online as ‘breaking all the rules’.
Even allowing for the fact that we’re in Scotland, the government are not having a good festival
Dom – The Play (Assembly Rooms)
Verdict: Second Cummings
Rating:
If the Tories are to stand a chance at the next election, they could do worse than turn once again to…Dominic Cummings — or at least that’s the view of The Spectator sketchwriter Lloyd Evans in Dom – The Play, his scathing account of life in Downing Street.
Evans’s Cummings insists politicians too often ignore data because they think they know better. But if they sincerely want to win elections, they need to identify small-percentage, swing voters by studying electricity bills, telly habits and social media tendencies.
It’s done as a series of snappy sketches with withering gags; and rubicund Tim Hudson gets a huge laugh just for walking on in a cameo as blustering Boris.
But Chris Porter could use a lighter touch as Cummings himself. Above all, he should keep his beanie on his head – otherwise he’s like Groucho Marx without the cigar.
Chris Porter could use a lighter touch as Cummings himself. Above all, he should keep his beanie on his head – otherwise he’s like Groucho Marx without the cigar
FROM THE EDINBURGH INTERNATIONAL FESTIVAL…
Food (The Studio, 22 Potterrow)
Verdict: Chastening.
Rating:
This has not been a great year for theatre in the ‘main’ International Festival. It has too few shows, on too briefly. The longest running is Food — a 3-dimensional sermon on how we have trashed the planet by feeding ourselves.
It’s hard to disagree, but at least American performer Geoff Sobelle butters us up first with a Zen relaxation exercise, before serving a glass of wine to everyone seated at the gigantic dining table which is to be his arena.
He takes food orders from a few people and then, like Mr Creosote, proceeds to scoff the lot himself: half a dozen apples, a bowl of tomatoes, a bunch of carrots, a celery plant, one raw onion, a medium rare stake and a (fake) fresh fish — all washed down with three bottles of red wine.
Message delivered: gluttony is ugly.
Then off comes the tablecloth to reveal an expanse of soil, like a prairie, below. Sobelle uses this to illustrate the process of planetary destruction by having audience members replace toy buffalos with scale model trucks and buildings of industrial agriculture.
The 90-minute show is visually inventive and chastening, but a mere glance at the News these days is just as shocking.
Thrown (Traverse Theatre)
Verdict: Militant tedium
Rating:
I had high hopes for another EIF production, Thrown, which is billed as a play about five women training to compete as wrestlers in Scotland’s Highland Games.
Alas, far from being good hearty fun, Nat McCleary’s play is a barely dramatised, box-ticking exercise in militant tedium.
Alas, far from being good hearty fun, Nat McCleary’s play is a barely dramatised, box-ticking exercise in militant tedium
The line-up includes a transitioning woman spouting performance psychobabble; a bitter, white Glaswegian would-be influencer; a black Londoner promoting racial division; a mixed-race woman who resents what she regards as other people’s ‘privileged’ recognition of their mother’s face, and a little old lady who gives everyone big cheery hugs.
Make that a woke ‘Glaswegian kiss’ for the rest of us.