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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

September 19, 2018 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Tartuffe. Review by Peter Buckroyd

Tartuffe
The Swan Theatre

Some time after his inspired production of Much Ado about Nothing, set in India, which made sense of a lot of Shakespeare’s tiny details which often strain comprehension and credulity, comes his much awaited Tartuffe. Not only is the play set in Birmingham, it is also in a rewritten version by Anil Gupta and Richard Pinto.
Moliere is the French Ben Jonson and Tartuffe’s early history robbed it of some of its originally conceived satirical pungency because of the political situation and its warring elements in the early 1660s. Gupta and Pinto restore much of Moliere’s biting satire of hypocrisy, combining it with the hot potatoes of religion and politics. The transposition to Birmingham is a joy and the introduction of the narrator/participant character Darina as the Bosnian cleaner (brilliantly played by Michelle Bonnard) creates further universality and contemporary relevance.
The Muslim Pervaiz family is ruled over by Imran, beautifully played as a thoroughly convincing rather stupid and gullible despot by Simon Nagra, gets religion and becomes besotted by Moliere’s Tartuffe character. Imran’s zealous conversion causes credible complications for his westernised family – his sharp but astute wife Amira (Sasha Behar), his daughter Mariam (Zainab Hasan) and street boy son Damee (Raj Bajaj) – because they have no love for the ‘adopted’ Tartuffe and can see that he is an outsider. They catch Taruffe’s phoniness which Asif Khan so cleverly conveys in subtly gradated stages at the same time as the audience does. Imran eventually gives his house over to Tartuffe before the latter’s hypocrisy is unmasked because he is unable to find fault in him despite his lecherous groping his wife’s breast. In the end Tartuffe is unmasked and the new surprise ending gives some measure of order to the chaos that unthinking devotion to pseudo-religion has caused. There are so many contemporary jokes and references throughout the play that the audience can hardly fail to realise that religious infatuation is no different from political infatuation.
The text is hilariously funny, the pace extremely brisk, the music wonderful in the variety of ways it characterises, the direction inventive and full of gags of different kinds (Darina vacuuming in the stalls seats, Damee hiding in a huge floral display, Imran hiding in the sofa in the unmasking scene, fun with cushions, Tiger briefs, Tartuffe playing basketball, for example). The wonderful music catches elements both of contemporary England and the Baroque elements of the play’s source, as well as being used as a tool for characterisation, culminating in a concluding dance rap.
The satire is sharp. At the end it is revealed that Imran was an illegal immigrant who realises in his moment of anagnorosis that he should never have voted Leave and that Tartuffe is not the only imposter. He may have brought the family close to disaster but his religious sidekick Usman (Riad Richie) turns out completely unexpectedly to be an undercover police agent. Opposite sides of the moral spectrum, then, both use religion as their tool. It leaves you with something rather more complicated to think about that you had reckoned.
The whole thing is a romp, a suspense story, a keen satire, a delight to see and hear. Moreover it shows up the stupidity of most men (Mariam’s finance Waqaas, charmingly played by Salman Akhtar and Usman apart) and the potential power of women caught up in evnents over which they have apparently little control.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Anil gupta, Moliere, Richard Pinto, Rsc reviews, Swan theatre, Tartuffe, Theatre Stratford upon Avon

September 7, 2018 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Tamburlaine. Rsc review by Peter Buckroyd.

Tamburlaine
The Swan Theatre

I guess it was a mistake to go to a Preview of Tamburlaine because it is directed by Michael Boyd and his productions are often not in their finished form for the Previews (unlike Gregory Doran’s or Erica Whyman’s). However I did. Friends tell me that it is much better ten days or two weeks into the run. Good.
The story itself is pretty simple. Tamburlaine, born a shepherd, wants to rule the world and sets out to do so by whatever means it takes. He invades, kills and conquers. It was immensely popular with Elizabethan audiences, the first play to spawn a sequel in Tamburlaine the Great Part 11.
This production puts the two plays together, cutting them violently, to result in 2 hours 55 minutes playing time. And for me this is the main part of the problem. A vast number of Marlowe’s mighty lines have inevitably been cut, resulting in a loss of poetry, lyricism, political philosophy and debate and leaving sometimes little more than plot. There are vast numbers of characters (or at any rate named people) involved and so doubling and trebling is parts is necessary. It only takes about an hour or so for the audience to realise that the issues are the same regardless of who is being conquered and that the motivation of the main character is simply megalomania. It’s interesting to see kings killed and reappear as other kings whose behaviour is similar as is their fate. Maybe that is the message of the play, warning Elizabethans of the danger of expansionism and drawing parallels with modern day atrocities. The primary women (Tamburlaine’s wife Zenocrate (Rosy McEwen) and Bajazeth’s wife Zabena (Debbie Korley)) do a good job of attracting audience interest and involvement, despite their curtailed parts and both Tamburlaine (Jude Owusu) and Bajazeth (Sagar I M Arya) are powerful and effective as oppressor and oppressed.
Mycetes, King of Persia, is made semi-comic. Sychophantic Meander (James Tucker), in black, looks out of place and therefore transcends particular time and place.
There is much casual walking over dead bodies. Characters are either smeared in chocolate blood when they die or have chocolate blood poured over them from a bucket. There is a good deal of subtle unobtrusive music, mainly percussion. Bajazeth’s cage is pushed in and off efficiently and serves several symbolic purposes. There are dodgy human horses who pull on Tamburlaine’s chariot after the interval, making obvious political links with Bajazeth in the first half.
There is a horrifying violent immoral ending with the sacrilegious burning of holy books. Kings, we sense, are ten a penny. There are guns and a good deal of leather at the end. All becomes gratuitous violence and slaughter.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: rsc, rsc review, Swan theatre, Tamburlaine, theatre review

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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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