Hostel Environment

LOVE

The REP, Birmingham, Wednesday 1^st February, 2017

 

Written and directed by Alexander Zeldin, this highly naturalistic piece transforms the REP’s studio space into the communal area of a grubby hostel, supposedly temporary accommodation for those who, for one reason or another, have no home to go to.  We meet Tharwa (Hind Swareldahab) a Muslim woman who keeps herself to herself for the most part; Colin (Nick Holder) who cares for his elderly, incontinent mother Barbara (Anna Calder-Marshall); in the room next door is a family, evicted due to sudden rent hikes.  There is dad Dean (Luke Clarke), his two kids and his new, pregnant partner, Emma (Janet Etuk).  Late arrival from Syria, Adnan (Ammar Haj Ahmad) finds it difficult to interact with his new neighbours…

The play provides a snapshot of life in these terrible conditions.  Yes, they have hot water and a roof over their heads (complete with dirty skylights), and a toilet they have to share, and there are people in the world who have things much worse.  But this is Britain in 2017 and people are trapped in this purgatory by unnecessarily draconian benefit sanctions and a lack of housing stock.  At times, it’s a gruelling watch.

It’s also funny and moving.  The resilience of the human spirit, the bonds of relationships – sorely tested by circumstance – shine through.  The characters struggle to retain their dignity and their morale while a faceless, careless bureaucracy continues to pile on the pressure.

The cast are, without exception, pitch perfect as they shuffle around.  Natasha Jenkins’s set replicates the setting perfectly, and the blurring of where stage ends and audience begins makes us part of the action, silent observers of the dramas unfolding before us.  This is happening in our space, our country, and we cannot help but feel compassion for these downtrodden and dispossessed souls.

Zeldin’s direction keeps the pace natural.  The piece reeks of authenticity.  That we don’t learn the characters’ ultimate fates maintains the sense of never-ending struggle.

An important, eye-opening and heartrending play that Iain Duncan Smith should be made to watch over and over so that he realises what he has wrought.

Anna Calder-Marshall

 

 

 

A sad tale’s best for winter

THE WINTER’S TALE

Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, Wednesday 6^th February, 2013

 

Lucy Bailey’s production of Shakespeare’s fairytale for grown-ups hits the spot, thanks to a no-nonsense approach and a straight-faced telling of what is essentially a far-fetched and melodramatic narrative.  She allows the humanity of Shakespeare’s characters to flourish despite the exotic nature of their circumstances.

William Dudley’s design concept impresses from the start.  A video screen fills the back wall, showing an ever-changing seascape, a kind of mood ring that reflects and supports the emotional changes in the story.  The court of King Leontes is a bohemian affair (well, it is Bohemia!).  Patterned carpets and cushions are strewn across the scene and on these, the king and his courtiers lounge around in this calm before the storm.  With the hookahs and the turbans, it’s all very Byronesque.  Leontes quickly proves he is mad, bad and dangerous to know.

As Leontes, the king driven to distraction by misplaced jealousy, Jo Stone-Fewings is entirely credible.  His rapid descent into delusion unfolds before our very eyes, triggering a disastrous series of events.  He is convinced his wife Hermione (Tara Fitzgerald) is having-it-off with his lifelong bezzie mate, Polixenes ( Adam Levy) and that the child she is carrying is not his own.  The scene in which he publicly accuses and denounces the queen is shocking in its violence.  A swift punch to her belly reverberates around the auditorium. – only minutes before we may have been tutting at the drag she takes from Polixenes’s cigarette!

In this pre-Jeremy Kyle setting, the only way Leontes can discover the truth is to despatch a couple of men to consult the Oracle.  They return with the mythic equivalent of DNA results: the queen is innocent, Leontes is a jealous twerp, et cetera.  They also bring the dire warning: Leontes shall have no heir until that which is lost is found… Here Shakespeare puts the audience in god-like omniscience: we know the baby, abandoned in the wilderness, has been found… There is something comforting in this knowledge, and curiously, it doesn’t rob the play of its tensions.

Tara Fitzgerald as the much-wronged Hermione is very strong.  Her delivery is as though she is thinking up the lines on the spot, her mind racing to make sense of the hell she is shoved into, as befits the stress placed on a woman arguing for her life.

With every production of this play, the question always crops up: how will they do the bear?  The famous bear of the famous stage direction.  How will it appear and how will it pursue Antigonus to his exit?  This time, the bear is a bit of CGI animation, arising from the waves on the backdrop like an ursine Poseidon.  Antigonus has to move towards it before he can get off-stage.  A bit disappointing: the bear reminded me of those behind-the-scenes at Toy Story clips, where a character is modelled on screen, before all the surface detail is added.  It seems unfinished.  But this is only a brief moment in a production that is for the most part commendable.

The second half takes place sixteen years later.  Bailey rightly drops the outmoded prologue by Time itself – we have moved to a more modern age.  The romantic, rocky coastline of Bohemia is replaced by a more proletarian pier.  We are in a place of deckchairs and knotted handkerchiefs.  This is an earthy contrast to the court of Leontes.  The locals indulge in a spot of country dancing, clog dancing, morris dancing, and the rough and ready females have at each other like a riot in Prisoner Cell Block H.  By contrast, lost princess Perdita (Emma Noakes, bearing a passable resemblance to the unfortunate Hermione) stands out as someone regal – even if her accent is all ee-by-gum and ‘eckythump.   This is wakes week in a Northern industrial town.  Perdita and her beau (the son of Polixenes, passing himself off as a morris dancer) cannot escape the notice of Polixenes himself, also travelling incognito.  He upbraids and beats up his errant son in a display of offspring abuse that is a running theme in this production.  We have already seen a child abused in utero and subsequently abandoned to its fate.  It seems the grown-ups in the two kingdoms are unreasonably visiting their anger at themselves on their children.

Emma Noakes is charming as the lost-and-found princess.  As Florizel, her dashing boyf, Gavin Fowler has something of a young Josh Groban about him.  I also enjoyed Pearce Quigley’s rather deadpan Autolycus and Daniel Betts’s reliable Camillo.  Rakie Ayola is splendid as the forthright Paulina, speaking her mind and putting the king in his place.  Her mild-mannered husband (Duncan Wisbey as bear-fodder Antigonus) is just as effective in contrast.  As the good-natured shepherds, David Shaw-Parker and Nick Holder bring the warmth and humour that is absent from the court of Leontes.  The king himself is ever-present, atop a rusted tower that is part lighthouse and part helter-skelter, a beacon of his own repentance, a public demonstration of his self-inflicted sorrow.

The resolution is always keenly anticipated.  How will they perform the statue that comes to life? (I told you, it’s a bit far-fetched).  Tara Fitzgerald blinks and stirs as though returning to living form, supporting Paulina’s fiction until the last possible moment and the revelation that the queen has been hiding away for all these years.  It’s always a credibility-stretcher but the scene is so embued with moments of reunion and reconciliation, it works.  In this instance it’s more touching than out-and-out moving, but you leave the auditorium with a warm glow, ready to face the cold air of winter on your cheeks.

Tara Fitzgerald as Hermione.

Photo by Sheila Burnett

Strange bedfellows

THE TAMING OF THE SHREW,
Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, Monday 6th February, 2012

The set for Lucy Bailey’s production consists of turning the entire stage into a bed, a big brown bed. Actors can lift up the covers and scurry around like mice under a blanket. This they do in-between scenes and it loses its charm faster than you can say ‘dutch oven’.

It begins with an “Induction” – a sequence in which a drunken slob (think of Toby Belch selling the Big Issue) is gulled into believing he is in fact a lord, with wife and servants, and even a group of travelling players come to perform. He, Christopher Sly (a grubby Nick Holder) settles down in bed to watch the play. Come the second half, this framing device is dispensed with altogether and Sly goes behind the scenes in a quest for his underpants. Having treated us to views of his bum and cupping his genitals in a saucepan, he is reunited with his grundies. “Pants!” he cries out in triumph. By this point, I was more than ready to agree with him.

This is a heavy handed production with the subtlety of someone else using your bed as a trampoline. Kate – the ‘shrew’ – (Lisa Dillon) is a Tasmanian devil of a woman, brawling, spitting, even pissing standing up. Tracey Emin would consider her a bad bedfellow. She is ‘tamed’ by David Caves’s Petruchio, a sort of Irish Jim Carrey figure, who, rather than ‘curing’ Kate of her wilfulness, shows her he can operate at her level. It is a meeting of minds rather than the imposition of a husband’s will on a wife’s. The inference is that this wild and oh-so-unconventional pair are better off than the straighter couples. Kate ‘submits’ to Petruchio and he ‘submits’ to her. They dash upstage, tearing at their clothes, for a meeting of bodies. I found myself not caring in the slightest.

There is another plot, involving the courting of Kate’s sister Bianca. This is a contest between swains involving deception and swapping identities that has Bianca as the prize. There is some good comic playing from Gavin Fowler as Lucentio in disguise as a nerdy Cambio, Huss Garbiya is a lively and likable Biondello, and I also liked Elizabeth Cadwallader’s playfulness as Bianca but on the whole you get the feeling that everyone is trying too hard. There is little to contrast with the madcap dashing around and vulgarity, no change of tone from the raucous and the low. I found it impossible to engage with, like the only sober one at a booze-up.

The running time seems excessive. Rather than taming a shrew, it is the audience who is beaten into submission. It is like being caught up in someone else’s pillow fight and they have stuffed their pillow with bricks.