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February 10, 2020 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Rsc review. The Whip.

The Whip

The RSC’s most recent play in the Swan Theatre is just as good and just as interesting as A Museum  in Baghdad which it has replaced.

Ostensibly about the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 it goes far beyond the superficial and often somewhat PC and sentimental treatment of the topic, showing the political wrangling involved in the passing of the Act and some of the hidden history behind it. Playwright Juliet Gilkes Romero manages to intertwine two stories – that of the anti-slavery legislation and also the pressure to do something about child labour in factories which led to the Factory Act, also in 1833. All of this is played to the backdrop of the Reform Act which was passed the previous year and which brought to an end the purchasing of most parliamentary seats and increased those entitled to vote to about one fifth of the population. It was a time of considerable political turmoil. For me the play was even more interesting in that it was so timely, coming hot on the heels of the UK’s separation from the EU, and that it was so relevant to our political situation in 2020.

Democracy was said over and over again. Does that ring a bell? Can there be democracy when fewer than half the men and no women have the vote? Is there democracy when we have an antiquated first past the post system and when both Conservative and Labour MEPs said when we visited the EU in Brussels that because of our method of electing MPs Britain was the least democratic country in the EU?

But what came out loud and clear in the play – over slavery, slave ownership, factory ownership (and in the whole Brexit business) – was the masking of political self-interest by ostensible moral righteousness.

The play points to the iniquities following the Slavery Abolition Act of the ‘apprentice scheme’ whereby the lives of ‘emancipated’ slaves was even worse than under slavery, a scheme which had to be abolished in 1838. It does, of course, make one wonder what privations will occur after our emancipation from the EU legislation which is so widely chattered about.

So this is an important play, not only because it shows hidden and suppressed history but because of its relevance to our situation today.

Juliet Gilkes Romero tells her story well. She focusses on the relationships between Government Chief Whip, Alexander Boyd, who has adopted as ward a runaway slave Edmund who has made good, become a parliamentary assistant to Boyd but receives no salary even though he is over sixteen, on Horatia Poskett, an ex-cotton worker who has become Boyd’s housekeeper and on Mercy Price, a runaway slave and abolitionist.

Corey Montague-Sholay is outstanding as Edmund. So is Debbie Korley as Mercy Price, a remarkable performance which makes it hard to believe that it is the same actress who played the American soldier in A Museum in Baghdad. Richard Clothier held my attention and interest throughout in a performance which ranges from dignified, powerful, vulnerable, self-seeking and principled by turns.

There are some striking decisions made by director Kimberley Sykes. Which accent do you use when? Both Mercy Price and Horatio Poskett are made parallel in their manipulation by pronunciation variations and are therefore undercut at times as moral characters, making the play more complex and interesting.

I did get a bit irritated by Ciaran Bagnall’s highly stylised set but that’s just me. The whole thing is a square boxing ring surrounded by a slightly raised area where the actors spend much of their time. A rectangular table flies up and down, up and down, up and down throughout and lots of people stand on it to deliver speeches, mostly political. Akintayo Akinbode’s music score is excellent and really enhances the play. I particularly enjoyed the various takes on hymn tunes which are integrated with more contemporary and atmospheric sounds.

The play also has my favourite line of the year so far, that we are ‘leaping into the arse-end of oblivion’:  a line for all seasons.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: abolition, new play, parliament, rsc, slavery, Swan theatre, theatre, workers rights

November 22, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

King John. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

Royal Shakespeare Company

Swan Theatre

King John isn’t done all that often – a good reason to see it if you haven’t seen a production of it before. But this is the third production of the play in recent years and all three have been very different from each other.

I recommend that if you don’t know the play you read a synopsis first. It can be a bit confusing as it is very political and the character of The Bastard isn’t easy to grasp at first.

I guess that each RSC production of the same play needs to be different. There are clever ways of being different and just ways of being different.

Director Eleanor Rhode clearly thought that it would be different to have a woman (Rosie Sheehy) play King John and doubly different to have an obviously female character referred to ‘he’ and ‘him’ throughout. She borrowed the idea of having a woman play the Cardinal, too, from a previous RSC production but whereas on that occasion the excellent Paola Dionisotti played the Cardinal with gravitas and dignity, Rhode makes Katherine Pearce play the Cardinal as a comic character. Another way of being different is to play the Bastard as a Scottish mixed race man who comes from Northamptonshire. Whereas the gender switch in a previous production gave rise to some interesting dynamics between King John and the Bastard, Rhode makes sure that there aren’t any. Nothing I could work out is done with the doubling of characters and it is not always clear when the actor is playing one character and when another and which.

There is some good acting. Michael Abubakar as the Bastard is good to watch throughout. Rosie Sheehy does well with an impossible and untenable brief. Charlotte Randle as Constance has some strong and effective scenes and the boys who play Arthur (I saw Gianni Saraceni-Gunnar) are very good.

It’s been a while since I have seen a production of anything which is gender blind, colour blind and doubling blind. If you enjoy this then this is the perfect production for you.

The production is also noteworthy in that every battle is done in a different way. And there are lots of costume changes.

Many of our guests at Moss Cottage have said that they have thoroughly enjoyed the production.

A Museum in Baghdad is also playing at the Swan in repertoire with King John and is well worth seeing.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: King John, rsc review, RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan theatre, Theatre reviews, Theatre Stratford upon Avon

November 22, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

A museum in Baghdad. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

Royal Shakespeare Company

Swan Theatre

A Museum in Baghdad was ten years in the making. Author Hannah Kalil began by writing a play about Gertrude Bell, an archaeologist who became the first custodian of the museum in Baghdad which opened in 1926. She then developed her play after she realised that there were parallels between this event in 1926 and the reopening of the Museum in 2006.

It is a complex and fascinating play drawing on both Tom Stoppard and Caryl Churchill in its techniques and looking at historical repetition compulsion as well as tensions between artefacts and politics, the influences of the past, clashes between cultures, the role of women and attitudes to history.

Until they realised that the two time periods are interwoven some audience members were confused about what is going on. It’s pretty straightforward, though, once you realise that Gertrude (1926) is paralleled by Ghalia Hussein (2006), that they each have their staff but that Abu Zaman as the local caretaker appears in both time periods, tying the two together through a consistent Iraqi presence.

The play is, perhaps, a touch longer than it needs to be. It’s sometimes a bit attenuated, sometimes a bit portentous, but Erica Whyman’s direction is absolutely superb. Her treatment of the interweaving of the two time periods is brilliant. A la Churchill there is a chorus, but the words of the chorus are split up and thrown around by all those on stage. There are brilliantly handled freezes and mime sequences. There are several moments when both Bell and Hussein say the same lines. There is real depth of characterisation. Each character has his or her own reasons for being involved in archaeology and museums.

The performances are outstanding. Emma Fielding gives one of the performances of the decade as Gertrude Bell – she radiates charisma in a very gentle way with exquisite attention to minute detail. Her assistant Salim is wonderfully played by Zed Josef; his movement and vocal technique is impeccable. Rasoul Saghir is also outstanding as Abu Zaman. He is on stage when the audience enters, fulfilling his role as caretaker in ways more than literal.

There are some wonderful moments involving metaphors and symbols. Several times Abu Zaman withdraws something from his pocket which is preceded by a handful of grains of sand (sands of time, no doubt, as well as of desert) which fall to the ground. There is debate in both time periods about the museum’s most treasured possession, a goddess and a headdress, and these become highly charged symbolic objects where the audience is invited to create their own meanings. A display cabinet is commissioned in each time period and we are invited, by shadow play and fog, to imagine what is in it. Towards the end other artefacts appear against the backdrop which are hard to realise are only projections, so that even the technical word, projection, accrues meanings.

Many found the ending when Gertrude died very moving. I thought the symbolism and myth making were a wee bit obvious but there is no doubting the power of the imagery. This is a very interesting and thought provoking play, but I am not convinced that I have ever seen better direction.

It should be seen.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: rsc, RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |, Stratford upon Avon theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan theatre

November 22, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

The boy in the dress. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

I have no doubt that The Boy in the Dress is going to be as great a commercial success for the RSC as Matilda was (and still is). For a start the combination of the names of David Walliams, whose children’s book the musical derives and Robbie Williams who contributed to Guy Chamber’s music and lyrics, is bound to sell thousands of tickets.

Director Gregory Doran ensures that the piece is swift paced and full of visual stimulus. Robert Jones’s cardboard cut-out style sectioned moving backdrop and the moving multi-purpose stage blocks which create lots of stylish transformations of mood, location and atmosphere are gorgeous. The costumes are sumptuous. As you might expect in a mainstream musical there are lots and lots of costume changes, many of which give the actors very little time to change and the variety of costuming is extraordinary, giving constant stimulus. The disco scene costumes are glitzily amazing. The music is very well played and some of it is quite catchy – just what you need.

There is some originality, too. Oddbod, a puppet dog splendidly manipulated by Ben Thompson, is always great to watch. It’s a challenge to show five a side soccer matches on stage and the RSC’s solution to the problem is brilliant. The dancing is slick and varied. The many lighting changes beautifully handled. Scene transformations are impeccable.

This is a production, then, which I thought had outstanding production values. I didn’t much like the story and the text which I felt was superficial, sentimental and often simplistic. Serious issues are mentioned but skated over, for example the struggle of working class single parent families, the mother’s leaving the family turned here into a catchy song, the need for talk at times of psychological crisis, the exploitation of gender identity, the difference between a boy in a dress and adult cross dressing. But I guess it’s not meant to be even approximate to reality. When I saw it the second time I decided not to take my brain with me and leaving it at home meant that I enjoyed it more.

Because there are several minors in the cast there are several young people performing these roles on different nights. By chance I saw the same cast on both occasions. All four of the boys who play the lead, Dennis, were in Matilda and therefore have RSC experience. I saw Toby Mocrei and on the second performance, only a week after I had seen him previously, he had developed his role very considerably. He is going to be splendid. I saw Tabitha Knowles as Lisa James and could not believe that she was as young as she must be; it was a stunning performance. So was Zachary Loonie’s John. The adult actors worked beautifully as an ensemble. Even when I thought the writing was superficial and simplistic (as with the characters of Raj (Irvine Iqbal), Mr Hawtry (Forbes Masson) and Dad (Rufus Hound)) I thought they did what they could to make their sketchy characterisations enjoyable and entertaining. Natasha Lewis as Darvesh’s mum didn’t have to compensate for weak writing. She was brilliant every time she appeared: for me the star of the show.

This is family show but the production elements are so good that adults will enjoy it, too. I loved details like the goalposts rising up from the floor and then disappearing back into it so that they couldn’t be detected. There’s plenty of slapstick, a Rees-Mogg joke, some naughty swearing, a little bit of smut, a fair dose of schoolchild humour, lots of jokes against teachers. Something for everyone, really.

This show will win awards. Come and see it. Why not come and see it one day and either King John or A Museum in Baghdad at the Swan theatre the next? Or if you just want some good fun see Jack and the Beanstalk at the splendid Attic Theatre, just the other side of the river from the RSC There will be a warm welcome for you at Moss Cottage when you can end breakfast with our gold award winning marmalade (our first gold this spring at the World Marmalade Awards this year).

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: David Walliams, Guy Chambers, Panto, Robbie Williams, RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |

April 2, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

When you know it’s a great play and when you’ve already seen over twenty productions of it you can sometimes feel reluctant about seeing yet another production, particularly if you have memories, as I do, of wonderful things you have already seen.

Tread the Boards Company is doing its double act again this spring – two Shakespeare plays done by the same company, playing in repertoire. King Lear is the first, directed by John-Robert Partridge. Much Ado About Nothing is following next week.

It’s a wonderful coincidence that Kunene and the King, a play where a dying actor has the chance of his last role as King Lear, is playing at the Swan Theatre at the same time as King Lear is playing at the RSC. If you don’t know King Lear back to front you need to see it. If you don’t know Kunene you have to go to the RSC after you have been to The Attic.

Because John-Robert Partridge’s production is played with eleven actors there is a great deal of doubling. Right from the opening Robert Moore impresses with his presence as the King of France, impresses again as Edgar and then wows us with his very physical and often lightning speed Poor Tom. Matilda Bott is a beautiful Cordelia played with apparent simplicity and a vigorous Fool. I’ve been to lots of productions where it’s not easy to remember which daughter is Goneril and which Regan. Not so here. Kate Gee Finch’s lively sinuous Regan, all over her husband Cornwall when occasion allows, is contrasted by Alexandra Whitworth’s steely Goneril, stuck in a loveless marriage to the delightfully wimpy Albany . Joe Deverell-Smith differentiates his roles splendidly and is the best Doctor I have seen. Pete Meredith is chilling as the villainous Edmund.

The revelation is Philip Leach as Lear. The hardest thing an actor has to do is to look as if there is no acting. It takes tremendous skill and control and Leach does it perfectly. We never quite know why Lear does and says what he does. He’s always in the moment. It’s a most impressive performance.

Those who know the play well will enjoy some splendid touches – Regan putting on Lear’s crown once he has cast it aside, Albany’s rather insipid milky tenderness, the Fool and Kent (Philip Jennings) as attentive but unobtrusive onlookers in the storm scene, the stunning end to the first half where Partridge takes away the metaphor from Act V’s  ‘And my poor fool is hanged’, the way Georgia Kelly is used as Oswald and other servants as a thread which binds the whole play together, the Fool’s fear of lightning.

Rarely has the way Lear makes the transition between the stale court and its stuffy characters and the transformative power of nature shown by Poor Tom in the storm been so clear.

Partridge made me think again about different manifestations of madness and the ways in which image, metaphor, symbol and reality collide. I loved it.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Attic theatre, King Lear, shakespeare, theatre, William Shakespeare

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Reviews from the RSC

Rsc review. The Whip.

King John. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

A museum in Baghdad. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

The boy in the dress. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

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