Duplicity Girls, at the White Bear February 21, 2010
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , add a commentA woman comes home through the Canadian snow. Her sister is waiting, wanting to know where she’s been. At the start, its almost irritating. The one who has been out makes Martinis for them both, trying to make her sister choose between an olive and an onion then undermining her choice, pushing her back in the other direction with ‘giddy banter’. Is the housebound sister ill, perhaps some sort of dementia? Is it really something to laugh at? Some people find it funny but I feel uncomfortable.
Paula Costain and Johanna Nutter as the two women present an hour of very disturbing theatre. They talk, intensely and claustrophobically, and argue like children, tormenting each other until its hard to know what is real or if they even alive. Even the half-expected denouement left me unsure.
Duplicity Girls is on transfer from Montreal, and only has one more date in London, at the White Bear on 22 Feb. It’s well worth seeing.
Madness in Valencia, Lope de Vega February 10, 2010
Posted by cathrynsymons in : Reviews , add a commentLove drives people insane, and Valencia is famous for its madhouse. A transfer from the White Bear by Black and White Rainbow, this bawdy comedy of errors by the 16th century Spanish playwright Lope de Vega now playing at Trafalgar Studios is the funniest thing I’ve seen in ages.
As we came in, a writer is scribbling away on the floor, and the play begins with the parts being handed out to the players who study their lines. We are occasionally drawn in to the making of the play, a device which works well in the intimate space with a stage that may be even smaller than the White Bear’s. This isn’t a play where you’re in any danger of being forced to interact, but the audience is certainly part of the performance.
Then we’re off at a gallop. Floriano kills a prince and flees to his friend Valerio, who hides him in the local asylum. Meanwhile Erifila has eloped with her servant, Leonato, who steals her jewelry and abandons her to be found by Pisano, psychiatrist at the asylum, and taken there as a patient. Fedra, niece of Sancho, the asylum owner, falls in love with Floriano as does her maid, Laida. Valerio falls in love with Erifila, who also falls in love with Floriano. Floriano falls in love with Erifila, while being terrified of being caught for murder. I hope you’ve got all that.
The romp that ensues is a glorious farce, as the talented cast weave through misunderstanding and intrigue to an apparently unsatisfying ending, which is resolved in a way that had the entire theatre in stitches.
By the way, make sure you go back early in the interval to see the fragile fourth wall tumble as Laurence Piller’s leery psychiatrist Pisano, his own wits more than a little touched, ad-libs to the audience, seeking out tips for treatments and borrowing drinks.
Madness in Valencia plays at Trafalgar Studios 2 until 6 March, tickets 22.50. Seat D4 was okay, but the first and second seats in any row would have a fairly restricted view, as would the last two. Best to get the centre block if you can, but make sure you see it.
A Yorkshire Tragedy, not by William Shakespeare January 7, 2010
Posted by cathrynsymons in : Reviews , 3 commentsJust after Christmas, little Maisie Copland, 4, and her mother Julie Harrison were killed by the child’s father apparently because he was angry that the mother had left him. What drives men like this, and with a few well-publicised exceptions it is men, to destroy the people they should be most carefully protecting? This most awful of crimes has happened ever since we’ve had families, and in 1605 William Claverley of Claverley Hall in Yorkshire was executed after he killed two of his sons, and tried to kill their mother. It is that tragedy, which shocked Jacobean England, which is the basis for this short play.
Nine young players of Tough Theatre take on over a dozen characters in the tiny theatre space behind the White Bear pub on Kennington Park Road. The floor is covered in straw, with signposts for each location and a few wooden boxes making up the set, which is reshaped by the cast between each scene.
The role of Husband, a man who has gambled away his family estate and blames all his own failings on his long-suffering wife, is played by Lachlan Nieboer, who is well worth watching out for. He’s an unsympathetic character, narcissistic and unwilling to take any responsibility for his situation, who sees killing his family as a kindness, saving them from penury. Even at the end, forgiven by his wife (Jacobean co-dependency, I think) and apparently repentant, its hard to have much regard for him.
The play shows us the motivation behind the crime, but its hard to know what to do with that insight. What can be done about woman-hating self-absorbtion?
Charlotte Powell is the Wife, a woman who takes ‘for better or worse’ a little too seriously. She’s not deceiving herself – she knows what he is, and how badly he is treating her, has friends and lands of her own, but still stays with him to the very end, more loyal to him than even to her children. And sadly that’s not an unusual story either.
Given the subject matter, its no surprise that the play is quite unrelenting, and I left the theatre feeling rung out. When first published, the name William Shakespeare was on the cover, but that’s been fairly definitely discredited. If nothing else, surely the Bard would have leavened it with a little humour or jollity?
This is not an easy play to watch, but it is well presented and challenging, and definitely worth seeing. A Yorkshire Tragedy runs to 24 Jan at the White Bear Theatre.
Bloody Poetry October 15, 2009
Posted by CamdenKiwi in : Reviews , 1 comment so farThe White Bear in Kennington Rd doesn’t really look worth the trip to the wilds of South of the River, with big Sky sports screens, and a few locals nursing pints. Hidden in a back room though, is one of those tiny studio theatres that pubs with a room to spare and a few eager theatre companies throw up. Two rows of bench seats around the walls, lights, action!
Tonight, it was Howard Brenton’s Bloody Poetry, a feast of Byron and the Shelleys. We start with their first meeting, on the shores of Lake Geneva in 1816. Shelley (Richard Holt) is there with his mistresses, Mary Godwin (Ellie Turner) and Claire Claremont (Felicity Davison). Byron (James Russell) has a putative biographer, the deliciously slimy William Polidori, played by Alex Barclay. The four embark on a relationship which lasts the rest of Shelley’s brief life.
Although the language is often that of the poets, the women are not overshadowed by their talented though severely flawed men. Mary Godwin, later Shelley, is beautifully portrayed by Ellie Turner. I make the mistake of thinking of her as little more than the author of Frankenstein, though that would be enough. Her radicalism as she urges Shelley to ‘live the life’ rather than just pontificating about it, or accepts his affair with Claremont, is clearly stronger than Shelley’s own.
Kate Malyon, who plays Shelley’s first wife Harriet, spends most of the play as a Banquo-like ghost, but her initial performance as she delivers a soliliquy before throwing herself in the Serpentine is spell-binding and moving.
This is a small fringe production in a tiny theatre, but worthy of much more. It was a full house tonight, and well worth crossing the river.
Tickets are £10-12. The show runs until 31 October.
