There’s a snowstorm moaning a requiem for me

He drifts off into unconsciousness, dreaming he is floating. But fate isn’t quite ready for him, and he wakes to the smell of a sausage offered by Prof. Filipp Filippovitch (Steven Page), and follows him home.   The flat is large, with seven rooms, walls moving as we move between them.  Filipp Filippovitch’s patients visit him, keen to have his rejuvenating transplants.  But this is Russia in the 1920s, and the house committee want to  reallocate part of his flat, a move he avoids by speaking to another of his grateful patients, a  senior Party official.

The operation (borrowed from the ENO)

Filipp Filippovitch has plans for the dog, feeding him up, encouraging him to feel at home and calling him Sharik (Russian equivalent of Fluffy).  Soon he too is in the surgery, having a human’s testes and pancras transplanted and  Filipp Filippovitch turns him into a man, Sharikov.  First the dog puppet appears with a human head, a small, deformed creature, and then he transforms into a man, still deformed, with a Phantom-like scarred face.  In an excellent performance by Peter Hoare, he leaps and crouches around the stage,  a man playing a dog, rather than completely transformed.

He is a base kind of man, fixated on his ‘rights’, unable to control his urges for vodka, women or chasing cats, but finds himself a niche as the city cat-catcher, with the help of his friend Shvonder, the chairman of the house committee.  After one outrage too many, and the extremely operatic death of his fiancee, Filipp Filippovitch operates again, and turns him back into a dog.

It’s a complex for an opera, particularly one where the libretto is often incomprehensible and those of us in row B develop cricks in our necks reading the surtitles.  The story is a scathing satire on the Soviet system, where the proletariat degenerate into a subhuman pack, and those with power and position can subvert the state’s rules.  Like Frankenstein’s monster, the Dog is a pathetic creature, a perfectly nice dog but an unpleasant human focussed on his ‘rights’ and cruel to others.  Is it that we’re better off in our appointed place, or that an oppressive society brings out the worst in us all?

The story is based on a novel by Mikhail Bulgakov, written in 1925 but only finally published in  the USSR a few years before the fall of communism.

This is Simon McBurney’s first opera, and as with any Complicite production, it is elaborate and varied, telling the story through words, music, movement, puppetry and occasionally film.  The Dog is a puppet, and so are the cats he chases.   At one point, the stage is full of them, with their puppeteers, as the cat-catcher comes to life.  The set itself moves, and deteriorates as the performance progresses, with holes knocked in walls.  The shades of Frankenstein are obvious, with a hint of Animal Farm, and perhaps a little of Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk, in the chorus of dour proletarians keen to bring down the Professor.

It’s a spectacular, captivating, thought-provoking work, which would bear another viewing.  If you get the chance, there are four more performances at the Colosseum, where it runs until 4 December.  Ticket prices are from £11 to £52, and seat B6 in the stalls was a little close, particularly given the need to read the surtitles.  Get one further back, and in the middle, if you can.

The play opens as Pug, a devil, is keen to learn about vice, and of course London is just the place. The Chief Devil lets him go, and tells him to become the servant of Fabian Fitzdottrel and hone his devilish skills. He arrives, taking the body of a recently executed cutpurse, just as his new master is selling young Wittipol a few minutes audience with his wife for a fancy cloak. And in the background, Everill and Train plot to cheat Fitzdottrel of his lands and money. The characters romp through the next couple of hours, wheeling, dealing and cheating, though a few prove virtuous and honest, at least after a little prompting.

The players are a new small company, Spartan Dogs, plus a few friends to make up a cast which was almost bigger than the audience on Friday night. There should be full houses for this – its only a small theatre, and a very entertaining couple of hours. The language flows clearly, and hints of the circus add to the slightly fantastical feel of it all. At the interval, cast members chat to the audience, commenting on furs and selling toffee apples, nice ones with fresh apples inside.

The Devil is an Ass plays at the White Bear in Kennington until 5 December 2010. Tickets £13/£10.

To play with fear is to play with fire.  No, worse, much worse than playing with fire.  Fire has limits.  It comes to a river or sea and there it stops, it comes to a stone or bare earth that it can’t leap across and there is stopped, having nothing more to consume.  But fear …

Catherine Cusack is excellent as the sister, nervous, tense but controlled, just this side of a breakdown.  Paul McEwan as the brother is a little less convincing in the first half, where his accent makes his speech less clear, though he well and truly comes into his own in the second.  There’s a palpable closeness and tension between the two of them, protecting each other, and, in the tiny, claustrophobic space of the Jermyn St Theatre, smothering each other as well.

It’s not a comfortable evening, but it’s well worth seeing.  The Two-Character Play runs at the Jermyn St Theatre until 20 November.  Tickets £18.

Martin Shaw’s Frank Elgin is an actor with flashes of brilliance between crises of confidence and alcoholic benders.  He’s offered his last chance at a major part by an ambitious young director whose leading man has just fallen through.  Jenny Seagrove’s Georgie Elgin is his wife and enabler, playing out a co-dependent role from which she doesn’t quite want to break free.  Don’t most of us know a couple like that, though perhaps without the flashes of brilliance to relieve the desperation of it all?  Seagrove is calm and dignified, sometimes talking the talk of leaving but, in an utterly believeable way, never quite walking.   Shaw gives us enough of the attraction of her husband, his need for her and his talent, to show why she puts up with his lies and self-destruction.  The strength of the play is in the chemistry between these two powerful actors.

The play itself is fairly ordinary, and somewhat dated.  Would any stage manager today call a leading actor ‘Nancikins’ and treat her like a schoolgirl?  The American accents straight out of drama classes jar a little, and the sets are a bit clunky, with set changes staged as mini-scenes in themselves.  As so often seems to be the case with West End plays, its not something I’d pay West End prices for, but if you can get a cheaper ticket (its on tkts), its a decent evening’s entertainment.

A Country Girl runs at the Apollo Theatre until February 2011 with ticket prices £20 to £65, though you should be able to do better elsewhere.  J12 in the stalls was a very good seat.

The Scott-Fowlers have been happily, if rather distantly, married for 12 years, and are the mainstay of their Mayfair set.  They  have a long-term houseguest, John and a secretary, Peter, with whose  fiance Helen David Scott-Fowler falls in love, and a set of stereotypical 30s B-listers – a drug addicted aviatrix, a wealthy socialite with an eastend toyboy, the former lover who’s become ‘serious’ and runs a window washing business in Manchester.  Everything is extremely well lubricated (“Everybodies a bore unless you drink”) and they dance around each other almost never saying what they mean.

Nancy Carroll is superb as the gay hostess Joan Scott-Fowler, intent on gossip and frippery, drinking her way through life, refusing to be ‘boring’.  There’s something terribly fragile about it all, and when she finally breaks, even with the stilted emphasis on being ‘in love’,  the agony is painfully real.

But it is the questions posed by the central character, David Scott-Fowler, that  really resound.  What do you do when you realise your life has been meaningless?  When you don’t like who you are, but know that to change would be impossible?  When you’re smart enough to see your faults, but not strong enough to change?   Played by a far more serious Benedict Cumberbatch than we’ve had in Sherlock, he takes us through the painful reality of a destructive mid-life crisis step by self-absorbed step.  Cumberbatch is wonderful, with a voice that could be standing right beside you even at the back of the Lyttleton, a large theatre.  I think I’d be happy listening to that man read a phone book.

When this play was first performed, in 1939, it ran to sellout audiences which suddenly disappeared when war broke out, and was rarely performed again.  I wish I’d caught it earlier in its run, as it would reward seeing again, but sadly, it finished on Wednesday.  It is a classic.

Arden of Faversham (Mark Carlisle) is a respectable chap, nice enough, but unfortunately his wife (Rachel Dale), her lover (Jonathan Woolf) and Green , who’s land he’s appropriated, all want to kill him. They hire a pair of London ruffians to do the deed, but these two turn out to be a right pair of clowns, and repeated fail. It’s almost a sixteenth century keystone caper. In the meantime, the wife and the lover seem to have the sort of relationship that would have Mariella Frostrup telling her to learn some self-respect. He’s clearly after her money, and she’s caught in one of those unpleasant, vaguely masochistic things where she can’t cope with his rejection, but knows its not right.

The Rose in Southwark is another tiny space, a raised platform overlooking the archaeological dig of the original Rose theatre where this play was first performed over 400 years ago. We sit along the wall, with the actors between us and the red lights outlining the area of the original theatre. It’s a small audience, and a strong bladder is needed for a two hour play with no interval and no loo on the premises, but well worth it.

Perhaps its just as well the theatre isn’t full, as the ruffians give us some excellent clowning, creeping behind the chairs, telling me to ‘sshhh’ while they stake out Arden on his way back from dinner, getting someone in the front row to hold their pistol and at one point, picking up my shoe (sore feet, slipped my shoes off).

The cast is energetic and enthusiastic with good performances from all. Its a rare chance to see a play which was once very popular but now not often performed.

Arden of Faversham runs at the Rose Theatre until 7 July. Tickets £8-10.

The tiny space of the basement in the Leicester Square Theatre has no room for a balcony. The audience area, with dining chairs and a bar feels like a thirties cabaret, barely separated from the set. Combined with the music, much of it played live by the actors, the whole space invokes a tense Verona with violence never far away.

This is not the sumptuous, multifaceted Shakespeare you get at the RSC. It’s pared down, with a small cast and smaller budget, getting to the tragedy at the heart of the play and laying it bare. This theatre should be very full.

Romeo and Juliet runs at the Leicester Square Theatre until 11 July and tickets are £15-20.

To me, Green philosophy starts with the fundamental ‘ecological’ idea that we humans are an intrinsic part of the eco-system, no more, or less, important than any other species. We do have a unique ability to modify it, which we need to be very careful about. Gilbert White’s detailed day to day observations of the environment around his parish of Selbourne at the end of the eighteenth century, were probably the first in English to start to see ecological systems as a whole, and the interdependence of organisms within them. He talks about trees, soils, births and deaths, rainfall, worms and all the minutiae of life.

The influence of EF Schumacher on Green thinking and the institutions he left us with can’t be underestimated. Small is Beautiful, and his ideas of appropriate technology and keeping economys to a scale that ordinary people can deal with underpins a lot of Green Party policy. In some ways, its problematic in an age of globalisation – the internet does a lot to promote localism but is a massive technology – but still very relevant. The charity he founded, Practical Action probably does more to promote sustainable societies than any green political movement ever has.
When I first came to the UK, it was the Schumacher Society which rekindled my interest in Green politics. The challenge Schumacher poses us in Britain today is how to apply his ideas at urban scales, and this is where many of the Briefings published by the Schumacher Society become useful. These are well-considered policy documents, looking at a range of issues – sustainable cities, democracy, carbon economics, health. They should be compulsory reading for anyone involved in forumulating Green Party policy.

And then there’s the deep ecology end of the spectrum, for which you should read Arne Naess’ Ecology, Community and Lifestyle. I’ve always been a bit uncertain about this – as a philosophy its attractive, but as a guide for living life in London today, or for political parties, its more difficult. Naess believes that a fundamental change in the way we think and act is needed to allow us to live within our environment, and that political parties are not the way to achieve that except in fairly singular circumstances as campaigning organisations (eg a party to campaign against nuclear power) and doesn’t think its useful in bipartisan systems like the US or, probably, the UK.

Jonathan Porritt’s Seeing Green is a British classic, and Caroline Lucas cites it as an early influence. On specific points its perhaps a little dated – I don’t know that many Greens would advocate coal as a transition fuel from oil and gas to renewables now – but worth a read.

I also mentioned Dryzek’s The Politics of the Earth, which I reviewed on here a few years ago. It looks at different ways of discussing environmental politics including descriptions of most of the major strands of Green (and not-so-green) though. Its real value is in showing ways of engaging with various constituencies on Green issues.

Jim – my copy of Small is Beautiful seems to have been recycled somewhere, but you’re welcome to borrow any of the others.

Three actors, Amanda Lawrence, Sean Campion and Will Mannering, using dance and spoken word, to explain what goes on in the mind of a gambler, and its not really about the winning. Gambling is sex, and the foreplay is a big part of the thrill, with the winning or losing as the climax. Lawrence almost mimes masturbation as she extracts coins from her cup of money to put them into the machine. The machine is a comfortable competitor, where everything is just right, and she dances with it, and is sure she’ll beat it.

The performance is only an hour long, and I left a little wiser, but wishing that they had taken extra time to explore some of the ideas further. Each of the characters could be a whole play in itself. It’s bright and flashy, with some insights, but, like gambling, a little hollow.

Gambling plays at the Soho Theatre until 10 April.

In the Almeida’s beautifully nuanced production, I finally get Isabella. Here, played by Anna Maxwell Martin, she’s strong and self-confident, but there is something damaged about her attitude to men. She argues forcefully with Angelo (Rory Kinnear), refuses to give in to him, but the body language is a little ambiguous. In telling her brother of her decision, and persuading him to accept it, she hugs him in a way that close enough to incestuous to be uncomfortable. Is she flirting with the Duke (Ben Miles)? In the end, when the Duke’s plot to deceive her is revealed, she’s not particularly happy to see her brother return from the dead, and her rejection of the Duke is scornful. This is clearly a woman who, for whatever reason, wants to get to her nunnery.

As Ben Miles said in the aftershow talkback, in Shakespeare, the characters always have the perfect words to express themselves, and one of the joys of this production is the extremely high quality of the speaking, from every actor. They are truly wonderful.

The Almeida theatre has very cheap restricted view seats (£8), behind narrow poles that you can easily see around. Even from E21, at the back of the circle, I had a reasonable view. It’s all sold out now, though there may be returns until it finishes on 10 April.