Review of 2010 - what was missed out: January

The Woman Black

By Stephen Mallatratt

This is a touring production of The Woman In Black and we catch it at Richmond Theatre. It’s based on Susan Hill’s novel of the same name and has been running in the West End for almost 20 years.

Basically it’s a two-hander with a non-speaking ‘lady in black’ who glides around the stage on a few occasions. At first the adaptation seems laboured: the conceit is that the younger solicitor who experienced the ghostly events as a young man enlists the help of an actor so that he can tell this story from his youth to other memories of his family. It introduces the idea of a narrative within a narrative – a frequent device of this time of Victorian supernatural tale – as well as engaging (even if only peripherally) with ideas of performance and how to be effectively convincing in performance.

After the slightly tedious set up for the storytelling we get into the tale itself. It is here that the power of the narrative engages particularly. The young solicitor is sent somewhere geographically imprecise but seems to be far to the north and east of London. He goes to clear up the estate of a recently deceased old client who lives in an isolated house cut off by the tide twice a day just outside a small town. Locals do not talk to him about events at the house but he gets a clear sense of something peculiar having gone on there.

The key incidents of the haunting of the house and the spooking of the young man, together with the unfurling of the mystery surrounding the law firm’s dead client are skilfully related. The staging is simple but works extremely well. Surprise and frisson come from apparently simple devices such as a rocking chair and the disarrangement of a previously tidy room.

It was an entertaining evening’s theatre, well performed by two actors who have both been in the West End production as well.

Richmond Theatre

Dr Marigold and Mr Chops

By Charles Dickens

Simon Callow performed two of Dickens dramatic monologues at the Riverside Studios.

The stories were typically Dickensian being both amusing and sentimentally manipulative. Mr Chops - about a deaf and dumb girl - was especially sentimental, while Dr Marigold - a rumbustuous tale about carny folk and a dwarf - was more amusingly poignant. Simon Callow's performance in both simply but effectively staged tales was excellent.

Riverside Studios

On the Harmful Effects of Tobacco/Can Cause Death

David Bradley in a platform performance of a one-act play by Chekhov – On The Harmful Effects of Tobacco. It concerns a man who is giving – at his wife’s behest – a lecture on this very subject. He however is a smoker and a dissatisfied person. Instead of giving the lecture his discusses his failed dreams, his disappointing family life and the machinations of his wife who – we are led to believe – will soon be watching from the wings. He comes out with many of the tropes of the disappointed male, implying that the blame lies with his wife and six – or is it seven – daughters, as well as the fact his house is number 13 and has 13 windows. It is very amusing and elicits throaty chuckles of appreciation from many male members of the audience, many of whom are much younger than me.

Then, while plangent music is played, Bradley transforms himself into a woman. This is done slowly and purposefully – which is very effective. The actor is now the wife of the lecturer who has recently died. She is giving a eulogy at his funeral. This part of the drama is written by Alison Carr and it represents the wife’s view of the marriage of 33 years. Interestingly it provokes more laughter that the male viewpoint did and from a variety of voices. Her view is that the husband was a hopeless case of unfocussed ambition and desire who failed to follow anything through; she tried to help as best she could but he failed to thrive. I think this interpretation of his character is implicit in Chekhov’s original and the juxtaposition of the two pieces makes for a very satisfying three-quarter of an hour. Bradley’s performance is excellent and the simple staging –it takes places on the set of another play in the Cottesloe repertoire – enables us to concentrate on the drama. It receives a justifiably enthusiastic response.

Cottesloe Theatre

(and Northern Stage 17-18 February 2011)

Ivan and the Dogs by Hattie Naylor

Ivan and the Dogs written by Hattie Naylor is based on the true story of a child who lived with dogs in Yeltsin era Moscow (the 1990s).

A small boy lives with his mother and abusive stepfather in a Moscow tenement. It is a time of economic collapse and the rise of gangster capitalism. Drug use and alcoholism are rampant and civil society seems to be collapsing. The cost of surviving is high. So, unnecessary luxuries – such as pet dogs – are discarded. They live in packs on the edges of cities. Children are also discarded, and the four-year-old Ivan decides to leave his intolerable home environment voluntarily.

The play recounts his experience of trying to survive among homeless adults and children. This is more difficult than might be imagined as both adults and children want to exploit rather than help him. The pack dogs turn out to be different, however. After initial suspicion the dogs and Ivan become mutually dependent; in effect they become a surrogate family.

This inter-species cooperation is a stark contrast to human exploitation and manipulation. Eventually, though, society recaptures the boy at the expense of his canine family. He is taken back into the human system and finds some sort of life despite the fact his mother has died in the interim.

Ivan and the Dogs started life as a radio play and is essentially a monologue. But it is imaginatively staged and has an excellent soundscape to fill out and colour the story.

Polish actor Rad Kaim plays the boy Ivan. His quietly intense performance draws the audience in and ensures the utmost concentration on the unfolding tale. This is an engaging, moving and thought-provoking play, imaginatively staged and directed.

Soho Theatre until 6th November

Macbeth by William Shakespeare

Macbeth – a play of darkness political ambition, violence and brutality, is one that never seems out of fashion. The employment of violence and terror to seize and retain power seems to be constant features of human society. In this sense the themes of Macbeth are universal; they don’t just apply to Jacobean England and Scotland. It is a play frequently performed round the world because people find its story has a resonance for them.

Currently at the Barbican’s Silk Street Theatre, this latest production from Cheek By Jowl is stimulating, stark and dark. The stage is bare and there are no props to speak of: wooden boxes serve as seating from time to time. Fights, battles and murders are mimed; the witches are devolved into the ensemble: as are the many lords and thanes surrounding King Duncan’s court.

Duncan is blind – both literally and to ‘noble’ Macbeth’s machinations. The comic porter scene is grotesque and jarring. The sense of ‘warriors’ bonding in a manly fashion is conveyed well but also illustrates the disjunction between obedience to state demands and the potential abuse of power.

Macbeth is a fast-moving play: the eponymous thane goes from a brave soldier upholding the status quo and overthrowing a potential usurper, to becoming an actual usurper of state power himself in a few short scenes. He quickly gains this power but gets mired deeper in brutality and murder trying to retain it.

He soon alienates most of those around him and clings to his position by employing fear, terror and murderous violence. The only support the Macbeths essentially have is what they give each other and – as they ponder and reanalyse their crimes – this mutual support becomes increasingly vital but difficult.

One of the high points of the evening is Macduff’s response to the news of the murder of his wife and children. The straightforward humanity of his reaction offers a fine contrast to the – in many ways – over-analytical, and essentially self-inflicted torments of Macbeth and his wife. Macduff’s reaction also offers a further contrast to the ambiguity of Banquo’s response to the Witches’ predictions about himself and Macbeth that have set in motion the train of events. It is almost possible to suspect that, had Macbeth not arranged for his murder, Banquo too might have become a player in the dark political game overtaking Scotland.

Will Keen as Macbeth and Anastasia Hille as his wife give fine, edgy performances as the Macbeths move from crime to madness to death, Ryan Kiggell is an ambiguous Banquo and David Caves as Macduff conveys well the possibility for the survival of humanity and responsibility in a volatile and murderous world.


Silk Street Theatre Barbican until 10th April

The White Guard by Mikhail Bulgakov

Last seen on a London stage 36 years ago in an RSC production, Mikhail Bulgakov’s White Guard returns to the National’s Lyttelton Theatre in a new version by Andrew Upton.

The story centres on a family called the Tubins and is set in Kiev, the capital of the Ukraine, in 1918. The First World War is coming to an end and the Germans are retreating; the civil war in Russia is in full flow with Nationalist Cossacks, the Russian Red Army and the White Guard (members of the Tsarist army) all fighting for control of Kiev.

The Tubins – the White Guards of the title - are presented in a sympathetic light. In character, the family and their friends are similar to those in a Chekhov play – except they are perhaps not as fully realised. They are a class of people out of tune with their times, whose sense of entitlement coupled with an intellectual and moral inertia leaves them unable to act or seriously influence their own destinies. The tensions in their lives are between the historical reality they are living through and their idealised interpretation of the sort of society they imagine they live in. They are only vaguely aware thet their dreams and nostalgic outlook are actually being overtaken by the advance of history.

However, Bulgakov also shows us that even the privileged (the Tubins) can be betrayed by those they defer to, such as the occupying German forces and their own White Guard High Command. This is most potently illustrated by the flight of Talberg, Elena Tubin’s husband, who leaves his wife and brothers-in-law to their fate in Kiev while he saves himself and his political ambitions by fleeing to Germany. Similarly Shervinsky an aide-de-camp of the Germans’ puppet ruler of the Ukraine changes his position depending whichever rival force is in the ascendancy in order to survive.

This welcome revival of Bulgakov’s play is spectacularly staged: the Tubins’ apartment glides to the rear of the Lyttelton to be replaced by the vast headquarters of the occupying Germans, which in turn is supplanted by the cramped Headquarters of the Nationalist army rising from beneath the stage. These tricks give a sense of the epic scale of the events of the Civil War and how easily individuals can be swept away in the turmoil.

Howard Davies directs a fine ensemble cast. There are notable performances from Conleth Hill as the chameleon like Shervinsky and Pip Carter as the comedic Larion – the Tubins’ cousin.


Lyttelton Theatre