Ballroom Glitz

KISS ME QUICKSTEP

New Vic Theatre, Newcastle under Lyme, Thursday 10^th March, 2016

 

Amanda Whittington’s new play is already proving popular.  People flock to the New Vic because of the subject matter: a ballroom dancing competition.  They come for the dancing but they stay for the humour and warmth of the characters.  The story follows the fortunes of three couples.  Samantha is a jaded champion, disaffected and drunk – much to the chagrin of her snake-hipped partner Lee.  Nancy is a bright-eyed optimist; having met Luka, a Russian dancer online, she has her father fly him over to partner her for the competition.  Meanwhile, married couple, Justin and Jodie Atherton, are facing money troubles and a run of bad luck.  She is neurotic, he has a gammy knee…  Most of the action takes place backstage – the compere (TV’s Alison Hammond) is a disembodied voice, divine intervention interrupting the rows and rehearsals.

In the rehearsal scenes, we glimpse the anatomy of the dances – this is thrilling in itself – but when the dance numbers come they are truly uplifting.  It’s so much more impressive than watching it on the telly!  Beverley Edmunds’s choreography is spot on, and it’s also dramatised to fit the action – There’s a slow-motion sequence that shows in an expressionistic way how Samantha is alienated by the whole shebang.  The cast is augmented by a talented troupe from the local community, adding to the scale of the enterprise.  The Blackpool ballroom is economically evoked by Dawn Allsop’s design and Daniella Beattie’s versatile lighting.

Amy Barnes keeps Samantha together, through her drunken denials to her liberation, bringing warmth to what could be a diva of a role.  Ed White incorporates Lee’s drive and determination, and is a lovely mover.  Hannah Edwards, a New Vic favourite, brings sweetness to Nancy and also the guts to stand up at last to her overbearing, self-appointed coach of a father (Jack Lord, both affable and menacing).  Also returning to the New Vic is Isaac Stanmore (formerly Robin Hood and Dracula here!) as the Russian dancer and rent-a-Gleb Luka, thrilled to be in Blackpool – for more reasons than one, it turns out.  Stanmore is an engaging presence – technically superb in the dancing (they all are, it has to be said) and exuding both strength and vulnerability – We want him to succeed.  Abigail Moore’s Jodie is tightly wound (and very funny) but as soon as the compere calls her to the dance floor she becomes the consummate performer, supported perfectly by Matt Crosby as husband Justin.  Their big dance number brings the house down and this is because we are invested in them as characters.

It’s a conventional play, deftly handled by resident director Theresa Heskins, who puts the humanity of the characters in the spotlight and allows the script’s metaphors and meaning to work on the audience almost subliminally.  Dance = life, and it’s what you bring to the floor that counts.

Jack Lord, Hannah Edwards and Isaac Stanmore

 

 

Well Spotted

THE 101 DALMATIANS

The New Vic Theatre, Newcastle under Lyme, Saturday 23^rd November, 2013

 

The festive season of family fare gets off to a cracking start with this non-seasonal story from the New Vic’s artistic director Theresa Heskins.  Her adaptation of Dodie Smith’s classic children’s novel is a stylish, charming and inventive piece with plenty for all ages to enjoy.

Set in the 1950s, the cut of Lis Evans’s costumes is clean and sharp in bright colours or, of course, vibrant white with black spots.  The cast is paired off into dogs and their human pets.  They lindy hop (I believe it’s called) in a joyous opening number.

What takes the dog biscuit is the jazz-informed score by James Atherton, performed by the man himself, and various cast members when they’re not wagging their tails or holding up props as human fixtures and fittings.  The music is irresistible, the heartbeat of the performance, playing under scenes like a particularly cool and hep film soundtrack, and then coming to the fore for the songs, the best of which are belted out by Polly Lister’s Cruella De Vil.   Atherton’s score is the sumptuous icing on the top of a very big cake.

Playing the lead, as well as wearing one, is Oliver Mawdsley as the energetic Pongo.  He and Perdita (Hannah Edwards) form an appealing and amusing pair, casting asides over their shoulders, commenting on the strange behaviour of the humans.  When their large litter of little puppies is stolen, they em-bark on a quest to retrieve them and the production goes all out for invention and surprise.  The ‘twilight barking’ uses dogs cropping up through trapdoors and speaking in a range of regional accents to convey the distance the message is spread.  The question in my mind, if not everyone else’s, is how is Theresa Heskins going to show us the full complement of Dalmatians?

Well, she does.  A troupe of local children, dog-eared (so to speak) and tailed represent some of the puppies but they are also puppeteers operating many more.  That’s fair enough but then the ideas keep coming – any single one of which would have been more than adequate.  Theresa Heskins has access to an inexhaustible well of invention, it seems.

Polly Lister stalks and declaims (and even drives a marvellous customised car) around the stage.  Her insatiable lust for fur and animal skins marks her out as the villain – Dodie Smith must have been among the first to criticise the fur-fashion industry.

Pashcale Straiton is very funny as Nanny, producing newborn pups from about her person and I would have liked to have seen more of Cruella’s comedy henchmen, Anthony Hunt and Andy Cryer as the Baddun brothers. Matt Connor and Sophie Scott are suitably perky and bright as human couple, the Dearlys – they emphasise the Englishness of this production, reclaiming the story from Disney’s England-through-American-eyes cartoon.

With its anthropomorphism of the dogs and even the hat-racks and table lamps, the show hints at a darker story.  It’s not only a matter of animal cruelty and exploitation, it’s about man’s inhumanity to other humans too. Written post-war, the novel is an archetypal rescue-and-escape story.  It’s Maria and the Captain leading the Von Trapp family away from the Nazis.  Cruella’s Hell Hall is a concentration camp in which the prisoners will be violently exterminated and skinned, their hides put to use – I shivered when I saw a cast member holding up a lampshade.

This is not an overt metaphor but it’s there if you look for it.  What you get at the New Vic is a superb evening’s entertainment, funny and touching.  It’s enchanting in both form and content and will no doubt knock spots off the competition.

Here, boy! Cruella (Polly Lister) eyes up her next handbag.

Ebenezer Good

A CHRISTMAS CAROL
New Vic Theatre, Newcastle under Lyme, Friday 23rd November 2012

Director and dramatist Theresa Heskins adds her version of Dickens’s classic tale to the countless others that have gone before it. The story is so well-known there can be few who attend this production who have not already come across it in one form or another. Amazingly, this is not a drawback. You might think this is a matter of the telling rather than the tale, the way the story is told rather than the actual, familiar material, but both form and content are powerfully represented in this magical and affecting production.

As the New Vic’s resident artistic director, Heskins is in her element working in-the-round. She has adapted the story into a piece of narrative theatre, with cast members sharing the scene-setting descriptions, but she also uses those actors to supplement the scenery as physical objects themselves. This is stylish and fun, to be sure, but the approach also works as a metaphor for the way Ebenezer Scrooge treats people as objects, of his renouncement of their humanity.

The stage is kept busy with beggars, carol singers, revellers, children and all the rest of them, come and go, but the centre of attention is Paul Greenwood’s layered performance as Scrooge, the bitter, sarcastic curmudgeon who is reminded of his own humanity through memory and prophecy. When Jacob Marley steps up to where the door knocker is, it is Greenwood’s reaction that makes it work. We share his delight when he watches his nephew and guests enjoy parlour games. We feel his joy at waking up and realising he hasn’t missed Christmas Day… He is the focus of this production, reminding us that there is more to Scrooge than the stereotypical Grinch-like image.

The entire cast is a slick and well-rehearsed engine. Hannah Edwards makes a cheery and fresh-faced Ghost of Christmas Past, playfully taking Scrooge back to his childhood days in scenes I always find moving. Antony Jardine’s Ghost of Christmas Present is infectiously merry, in a larger-than-life laughing-out-loud performance that proves you don’t need to be padded up in order to represent ho-ho-ho jollity and good cheer. The Ghosts of Christmas Yet To Come are a trio of eerie skeletal wraiths – the show uses puppetry sparingly but effectively; Tiny Tim is a little wooden boy, delicate and vulnerable, but denied any chance of mawkishness and sentimentality.

Bryn Holding as Nephew Fred has a hoot of a laugh that effuses bonhomie. Mark Donald appears as Young Scrooge, hardening his heart against the one girl that loves him – the error of Scrooge’s ways could not be made clearer. There is the imagery of being caught up in a web of his own creation, just as Marley is enchained by the selfishness he perpetrated in life. The folly of preferring money to people is all too prevalent in our day and age. Benevolence is not just for Christmas.

This is a magical, inventive production that allows the original story to have its impact all over again. I was in tears before the interval and infused with a rosy glow long after I left the auditorium. It is well worth the trip to Staffordshire. I hope more people will make the trip and enjoy the ride.