All posts by Yeside

Nine Night

National Theatre, Reviews

                                                   

Nine Night by Natasha Gordon

At the Dorfman

12th May, 2018

“We are all fragments of someone to feel so disjointed”

Nine Night, also known as Dead Yard, refers to a Jamaican custom of nine nights of official mourning following the death of a loved one with lots of friends, food, drink, and dancing. The final night, Nine Night, is the most important: it’s when the spirit of the deceased is given a final farewell, and encouraged to leave the house.

Natasha Gordon’s nerve centre is the recently deceased Gloria, a Londoner whose roots lay in Jamaica. All the events take place in Gloria’s home, and as her dead body lingers upstairs, we meet her assorted family members: her cousin Maggie and Maggie’s husband Vince, her children in the UK, Robert and Lorraine, Robert’s (white, English) wife Sophie, Lorraine’s daughter Anita, and the daughter she left behind in Jamaica, Trudy.

Cecilia Noble (Maggie) delivers a tour de force as the nit-picking hypochondriac. Her eccentric habits of expression make her interfering comments hilarious.  We watch her recharging herself to deliver her memorable one  liners, noting that the Freedom Pass was the “Only decent ting me gat from dis teeving gov’ment.” And later, she worries that her dead sister’s bird’s-nest hairdo may “frighten Jee Suss!”

The play’s Caribbean humour is sometimes lost on a European audience which makes me smile. On the one hand, the Jamaican patois takes some time to adjust to. Nevertgeless, it is deployed effectively with Maggie’s Jamaican verbal acrobatics.  Her ripostes create moments of complete hilarity, supplemented by her personal injections of wisdom: “Be careful, not carefree”; “When yuh get to Heaven, yuh see, God will deal wid yuh”; “Save yuh eye water, niecey”. The linguistic mix of English and the West Indian verbal rhythms gives conversation sheer energy as well as a shared cultural delight in observing Jamaican mannerisms or cultural rituals which are lost on the world outside. Continue reading Nine Night →

Tina

Aldwych Theatre, Reviews

“Tina, The Musical”

at the Aldwych Theatre

8th May 2018

“Oh yes, I’m touched by this show of emotion

Should I be fractured by your lack of devotion?”

I recall Tina Turner’s career comeback as the once derided ‘fortysomething singing has-been’ in the early 1980s. Our children learned to recognise the foot acceleration in my car when “Simply the Best” rang out of the radio!  My only regret was not being able to go to one of her concerts.

So here was the next best opportunity to being at a Tina Turner rock concert: “Tina, The Musical”.

Born Anna Mae Bullock in Nutbush, Tennessee, and loving singing in Baptist choirs, Tina (Adrienne Warren) learns to cope with her parents’ separation.  Many will know what came next, whether from Turner’s autobiography or the 1993 film “What’s Love Got to do with it”: a churchgoing youth that gives way over time to fervently held Buddhism, alongside episodes of abuse most often at the hands of an ex-husband, Ike Turner, who gives the soulful Anna Mae her newly alliterative stage name. In the first hour, light is shed also on other struggles: racism, ageism, Tina’s conflicted relationship with her mother, and her own struggles trying to raise a family while simultaneously building a career. Continue reading Tina →

The Kite Runner

Reviews
The Kite Runner adapted by Matthew Spangler
at the Yvonne Arnaud Theatre, Guildford
21st April, 2018
“There is only one sin. and that is theft… when you tell a lie, you steal someone’s right to the truth.”

Network

Reviews

“Network” adapted by Lee Hall

At the Lyttleton Theatre (NT)

19th, February, 2018

“We’re all you know. You’re beginning to believe the illusions we’re spinning here.”

John at The Dorfman Theatre

National Theatre, Reviews

 

 

John at The Dorfman (National Theatre)

3rd February, 2018

“It’s like miniature shit”

And sadly, it is, despite many favourable reviews. Young couple Jenny (Anneika Rose) and Elias (Tom Mothersdale), heading back to Brooklyn after spending Thanksgiving with Jenny’s parents, stop off at a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania which is a tourist  site of Civil War conflict and carnage.

We have already met the oddball Mertis (American actress, Marylouise Burke), who has rooms called after Andrew Jackson, Abraham Lincoln, and Joshua Chamberlain. As the guests quarrel, Jenny spends more time with Mertis and her blind friend Genevieve (June Watson), bonding over a bottle of wine, talking about love. The lovers argue again; the women talk. Over red wine, Mertis’s blind friend, Genevieve explains her journey to make peace with that inescapable gaze, how she’s come to feel that watching as a kind of acceptance. Amidst all this are prolonged periods of silence whether for reflection, unexpected consequence or inability to verbally expand or engage.  To indicate the close of an act, Mertis  pulls the stage curtains together.

Chloe Lamford’s detailed set integrates with every theme in the play. A central staircase climbs high to the unheated, possibly haunted guest rooms; a dining area aspires to be Parisian; a grandfather clock marks the passing of time yet controlled by Mertis; every wall and surface at this weird establishment is crammed with knickknacks and glassy-eyed dolls; a mini-Wurlitzer jukebox.  Even a self-playing pianola bursts into chirpy melody without warning. The Hitchcock setting promises so much, despite its contrived nature. Continue reading John at The Dorfman Theatre →

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

Bridge Theatre, Reviews

Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare

at The Bridge Theatre

26th, January 2018

“As I love the name of honour more than I fear death.”

I fondly remember an all-black version by the RSC in 2012 but wow, was I pumped up as we entered the Bridge Theatre auditorium.  The charged rendition of “ Rock ‘n’ Roll Star” by Oasis, Survivor’s “ Eye of The Tiger “, during which,  David Morrissey appears in character with ‘Mark Antony’ emblazoned on the back of a sports robe, to egg on the crowd was electric; and more still with the “Seven Nation Army” by the White Stripes! I wasn’t sure whether I was in the wrong venue, but this is orchestrated mob rallying. It is a soundscape springboard through tyranny, conspiracy and tragedy.  It is a reminder that we are the populace who reside amidst the unchanging nature of politics.

In demonstration of the new theatre’s versatility, the theatre has been reconfigured in-the-round with the action playing out on a central platform as well as in the surrounding pit. Promenade tickets are available for those who want to get up close to the action.  Though seated in the front row of the auditorium, we were still complicit in the events.

As you may have guessed, Hytner’s production is reimagined for the era of post-truth populism; it’s in modern dress, and the parallels with certain current world leaders are evident. But there’s no fiasco as there was earlier last year,  when a New York production of ‘Julius Caesar’ got into trouble for depicting Caesar as Trump, assassinated by women and people of colour. We do have Caesar’s minions selling T-shirts emblazoned with “CAESAR” instead of “Make America Great Again,” also pin badges before the show, and the man himself sporting a red baseball cap bearing his own name. These are not gimmicks but a very real precursor to our perspective on the nature of power.

David Calder’s narcissistic Caesar emerges red tied and casual in golf clothes, as the band revs up the crowd climactically with Twisted Sister’s “We’re Not Gonna Take It”.  At times he displays insouciant charm; at others he is s given to impulsive decisions, an almost childish tyranny.  His surrounding security staff are reminiscent of Mussolini’s Blackshirts, shouting and pushing the stand-up audience back and forth to make way for the platforms that ascend from, and disappear into, the floor. “The Groundlings” are used as the crowd/mob and manoeuvred/manipulated round staging platforms that rise and fall in the acting/audience space. Not sure what happens if you don’t have a biddable audience. The more so when the Bard’s words slip as one actor shouts: “Pompeii is dead, Get over it!” Continue reading Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare →

Cell Mates by Simon Gray

Reviews

Cell Mates by Simon Gray at The Hampstead Theatre

20th January, 2018

“Spies betray people. That’s what we do. It becomes a…. a habit. Difficult to break …even when its not … not strictly necessary”.

This may be my shortest review, yet. Simon Gray’s  “Cell Mates” is  famously known for the original 1995 production of Simon Gray’s play which was deemed a flop after Stephen Fry, suffering from bipolar disorder, walked out a few days into its maiden run. Therefore, it seems strange that Edward Hall should choose to revive it.

The play begins in Wormwood Scrubs in the 1960s where George Blake, a notorious double agent, is serving a forty-two year sentence. Blake (Geoffrey Streatfield) did immense damage to the West’s cause, putting many agents in harm’s way and revealing the existence of the Allies’ tunnel under Soviet Berlin (Operation Gold) to the KGB.  He strikes up an unlikely friendship with Irish petty criminal Sean Bourke who, in 1966, helps him to spring the prison, with a hacksaw and a rope.

The theme of entrapment continues to the hideout and then Blake’s Moscow flat. The irony is that Bourke, having liberated Blake, makes the fatal error of visiting him in Moscow where he ends up virtually imprisoned himself. Their oddball relationship ensues under hints of homosexual attraction which is never played through. Bourke is reduced to teaching “Danny Boy” to Blake’s Russian housekeeper (Cara Horgan). Danny Lee Wynter and Philip Bird complete the cast as a cartoon image of the KGB which is both irritating and predictable. Continue reading Cell Mates by Simon Gray →