The things we do for love… America the Beautiful (2026), Kings Head Theatre

Liam Jedele and Borris Anthony York (credit Ross Kernahan)

LaBute refuses comfort… That willingness to sit inside discomfort is what makes the work so compelling.

Borris Anthony York

"America the Beautiful" is a patriotic song first published on 4^th July 1895 with lyrics written by Katharine Lee Bates and music composed by church organist and choirmaster Samuel A. Ward at Grace Episcopal Church in Newark, New Jersey, though the two never met. Together they created a song for the ages and one that means something different to every age as the shifting signifiers of American Beauty coagulate into a murderous slop.

Oh sorry, that’s just my take but, to the point, what to make of one of the USA’s finest playwrights Neil LaBute, epic nine-scenario cycle addressing his homeland, love and persuasion in the 2020s? Tonight we saw the first of the triptych with three of these scenarios presented at the Kings Head all different in tone and building a bigger picture that forms itself in your mind as you dash for Kings Cross after realising that Angel Station is closed.

As played by various combinations of just four actors: Liam Jedele, Borris Anthony York, Anna María and Maya-Nika Bewley there is so much thinking required to map the emotional content of three widely different situations and never has the personal being so political in terms of the wider meaning in this, the second week of the Third Gulf War or, as might be said, WWIII.

The first sequence sees Liam Jedele as an anxious and conflicted man aiming to commit murder at the behest of a man Borris Anthony York whom he desires and wants to commit to a life together. Borris plays his paramour as an almost light-hearted and playful guy who winds his uptight boyfriend up with forgetting his key card, buying Danish pastries and turning up with a strict no contact clause in their relationship.

His character is about to marry a rich older man and, sizeable insurance policies being what they are, he can bear the repulsive sexual contact just long enough to get married before sending his new groom to his death at the hands of his younger lover. We’re just not sure, the longer they talk, if things will work out, Liam’s character apparently battling his own disgust at his sexuality and winding himself up to do the dead so that he can be with his love.

Any relationship between the flirtatious and ultimately faithless rulers of certain states and the War-maker in Chief are purely coincidental.

Borris Anthony York (credit Ross Kernahan)

Talking of which, Borris Anthony York makes a quick change of character and posture as his morphs into an American soldier on trial for the apparent killing of his wife, her lover and several others… This is the fanatic deceived by his own lack of logic – perhaps little reason to believe in his wife’s fidelity whilst also blaming her for what he “had” to do… cognitive dissonance in the face of so many dead.

Women have a “power”… his wife almost bade him do it and he had no rational explanation for his vengeful ferocity. It’s only a short leap to imagine the ICE agent’s decision to execute US citizens in the streets for simply getting in his way or for being “unfaithful” to a common culture someone had convinced him was shared widely. America is Ugly in different ways as it is beautiful: the kill switch is in the hands of the beholder.

Then last we saw either the greatest saleswoman in the world or the sweetest lover as Anna María works to persuade Maya-Nika Bewley that they should be lovers by firstly sleeping with her faithless boyfriend and then telling the other woman that she had to do it as a chance encounter had left her instantly smitten and convinced that she was the love of her live.

Taken at face value this is a sweet story but nothing is clearly as it seems in any of these acts, and given that there are six more to come, one should reserve judgement even as new possibilities emerge the more you think about what has just transpired.

It’s an exercise in persuasion and logic and, given this can be as much technique as anything else you’re not quite so sure that this is a love match or a power play? Have we not seen sexual power – or just force of personality – used to make people act against their will?

Anna María and Maya-Nika Bewley credit Ross Kernahan

IThankYouTheatre verdict: I’m reeling on the train post show and can only throw four big stars back in the play’s direction. It’s daring and engaging and so well performed by the four leads who make the most of LaBute’s outstanding words. ****

These are actors we will want to see more of and the direction from Artistic Director of Greenwich Theatre James Haddrell is outstanding creating another world just yards away from the comforts of Upper Street.

The first two chapters play at the King’s Head until 21^st March and then transfer to the Greenwich Theatre from 31^st March to 4^th April.

Do not miss these intimate and impactful shows, you won’t stop thinking about them for days…

 

The paw law… The Monkey’s Paw (2025), The Hope Theatre

Steven Maddocks and Josephine Rogers (photo Cam Harle)

The Hope Theatre gets inside your head, it’s a box of delights that closes in on the audience always a different shape, always a different story and tonight’s fever dream was no different as we were lost between a dark Edwardian cottage and the storage space deep beneath the British Museum. W. W. Jacobs’ original story became something of a warning to the wise in a psychodrama played out with such expert choreography by Josephine Rogers and Steven Maddocks… not forgetting the mysterious Herbert a supernatural substitute for love and offspring that may or may not be “real”.

The Monkey’s Paw was originally published in 1902 and became a stage play by Louis N. Parker in 1907 then, a sadly lost silent film in 1915, starring John Lawson, who also played the main character Parker’s play. Since then, there have been numerous adaptations all most thrilling and focused on the horror. This version devised, written and produced by Infinite Space Theatre and directed by Leah Townley, is focused on the more human horrors of a husband and wife living on the margins and struggling to make ends meet as the Great War looms and their economic and personal circumstances stretch their sanity and their relationship to breaking point.

Josephone Rogers, Steven Maddocks and the paw... (photo Cam Harle)

The horror here is not so much the monkey’s paw as their ability to establish a relationship and to improve their circumstances. They wish for a child and they pray for professional success and economic wellbeing – they want to be warm and comfortable – they do not want to fall into debt, and end up in the workhouse which, at this time, was you’re only option should you not be able to meet your financial obligations. Those good old days all the flags and indignant pomp of modern politics evoke, of course overlooks the lack of welfare and healthcare at this point in Great Britain when most didn’t even have the vote.

Jenny and John White represent what could be described as the struggling lower middle and it doesn’t take much bad fortune for the former to be losing her eyesight through working on her Singer sewing machine 14 hours a day or dreading working with rabbit skins as her family had had to do when she was young, an existence so squalid that as an eight year old she just didn’t notice the dead eight-day old baby in the bed in which her twin brother was dying having inhaled just too much rabbit fur to breathe.

One stage, two worlds...

The real horror is their lives and not the paw… this is merely a device to show that self-improvement is only possible through solidarity and hard graft, together with aligned purpose.

The paw is a distraction especially for John who works in the museum’s store and having found the mummy of an unidentified child, also finds the remains of the primate hidden in the folds of its bandages. Accidentally discovering that it can make his wishes come true after it magics him home, he quickly wastes his next two wishes on lamb stew and then a vague hope for happiness for his wife. The paw grants wishes but never for free, there is always a consequence and there is almost no way of wishing, for example, for money without someone or something precious being lost or wishing for life when that night only mean death warmed up…

Whilst these horrors are very well handled and key to the story, the real power is in the relationship between these two fragile but determined souls, trying to make their love last in the most challenging of circumstances.

The choreography of the two main characters, the paw and the Herbert who may or may not be a real baby, is brilliantly handled as is the use of the space to denote Jenny at home and John at work or in Egypt chasing his lost cause in the War for 18 shillings a week… My granddad was stationed in that area at 17 in 1918 and this part of the play is particularly touching bearing in mind his experience as a young lad from Widnes who would have much to contend with over the decade after his return. 

Josephine Rogers and Steven Maddocks work so hard for the audience and lose themselves and us in their moments and they full deserved their applause at the end: as plays go this is like whistling and dancing at the same time whilst juggling too… well played! 

IThankYouTheatre Rating: **** For a thoroughly inventive and enjoyable play that reminds us of the essential hardships of life without magic wishes as much as the perils of Egyptian magical forces!

A tip of the hat to Hannah Williams excellent stage design as well as Alex Forey illuminations and the atmospherics of Peter Michaels sound design. Gisela Mulindwa also made some truly unsettling props… I shall be having nightmares – a regular thing, all started by Doctor Who and plastic dummies when I was a child… but thanks all the same Gisela!

The Monkey's Paw plays at the Hope until 8th November and I recommend it as a scary seasonal treat and a stark reminder of the past we should never forget! 

Photography all from Cam Harle

 

PS: National Insurance was introduced in 1912 (thanks Lloyd George) but was far from comprehensive whilst workhouses continued in use until the late 1920s and beyond… This “golden age” of our past, when was it exactly?

Wonder-full… Janie Dee’s Beautiful World Cabarets, Charing Cross Theatre

By co-incidence today was the London Pride march and working my way through the sea of colour between Leicester Square and Charing Cross was the perfect visual/cultural aperitif for the sea of green that greeted us at the fabulous theatre under the arches. I haven’t been to the CCT for a long time but it remains an atmospheric venue with the space being used since 1864 to provide and oasis of entertainment.

Janie Dee’s ground-hugging cabaret has previously had rave reviews and a sold-out series when it ran at Crazy Coqs in May and I knew within minutes that this matinee introduction to the new run was going to be no different with a terrific atmosphere and an immediate intimacy established between world-class performers and the audience.

We started off with an excerpt from Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony – I think? – expertly played by the Mazaika Duo with Sarah Harrison on violin and Igor Outkine on accordions, both looking like they might have just stepped out of The Red Hedgehog tavern (Zum Roten Igel!) so favoured by Johannes Brahms, who would listen to the gypsy players there. This wasn’t just cabaret but a throwback to the classic variety theatre of the Victorian age, an era, for all its dark mills was closer to nature than we are now even if the industrial terraforming of the planet was well underway by then.

And then came Janie and she was singing On a Clear Day, channelling Streisand in a way few can in a thrilling rendition of this most uplifting and complex song, doing so with confidence and with love. The perfect cue to open our eyes and minds to a discussion of what some hard hearts call “the Green agenda” as if miserable cliché is going to have utility in a world pushed too far and filled with old men (mostly) claiming that we “can’t afford” to save our futures. No room for hackneyed emotion in this show and, to be honest, it’s not my first rodeo when it comes to Janie Dee making me cry…

Different hosts twice a day! DO NOT MISS!

The show is about positive action though after all, “what good is sitting alone in your room?” mused our star as she took a sip of wine from the table adjacent to the stage. As with all good cabaret there’s always a risk of audience involvement… but we are all already involved and invested in this situation. Kanie sang Cabaret with Lisa-level skill accompanied by musical director Jordan Paul Clarke on piano and the Mazaika Duo.

She explained the reasons for the shows and, as someone in the audience later said after the show, If Janie Dee tells you she’s got an idea you better listen… It was sparked by seeing her children marching for the Green cause as she saw them off from the National Theatre where she was performing in Sondheim’s Follies. And since that point she’s worked to include some of the finest songs and writers in connecting our planet’s situation to the eternal truths of their work. So, we had thoroughbred versions of Tom Lehrer’s Poisoning Pigeons in The Park and Stephen Sondheim’s Another Hundred People, mixed with Janie’s quoting from Shakespeare… 400-hundred-year-old words, that still land hard on humanity with the humility to give them pause.

In 2025 faced with belligerence and boredom on both sides, as we sleepwalk towards our downfall what else can we do apart from start a cabaret and enjoy ourselves, inform ourselves… it’s later than we think.

Janie was joined by Josephina Ortiz Lewis and Sophia Priolo, both remarkable rising stars the former in possession of a remarkable operatic power and the latter an actor, dancer and poet who has a film featuring her words recently released. Each will present their own cabaret over the next week at the Charing Cross and they are bright and beautifully talented people.

Warning: Dangerously talented!

Janie then introduced a trio of other emerging acts starting with EM The Master – Lady Gaga collaborator! - who as possibly the country’s leading theatrical music artist, diver and ocean conservationist blew our minds with her description of the, to me at least, and no doubt many others, previously unknown Shrimp Pimp…

The Mantis Shrimp comes with an impressive set of 16 cones in their eyes, over five times the range of vision we humans have with just three and whilst seeing a lysergic world of incredible colours is also the apex predator of its crustacean class. Its skin is also a marvel being used in the development of man’s military clothing… and, as MT proceeded to sing, this Shrimp is clearly no-one’s wimp.

Next up was the multi-talented Alfie Freedman who I’d seen earlier this year as Connor Sparrowhawk in Laughing Boy at the Jermyn Street Theatre with Janie playing his mother, Professor Ryan, in a play based on the true story of Connor’s death in care. Here he showed his vocal prowess and ability to move us in different ways.

Then there was Three’s Company: Helena Neil-Smith, Miriana Pavia and Rebecca Goddard, all brought together by a force stronger than fate and singing their way forward in beautiful unity.

Finally, there was the mighty Ian Shaw leading the company singling Joni Mitchell’s Shine:

Let your little light shine, Let your little light shine

Shine on the dazzling darkness, That restores us in deep sleep

Shine on what we throw away, And what we keep.

Not only is Ian one of our finest jazz performers he’s also got a heart of gold and is deeply involved in these issues. The song was beautifully wrought and lifted the whole space as each performer added their voice.

This man has A Voice!! Book Now!

IThankYouRating: ***** We left the theatre on a high and full of hope and resolution to see more of these Beautiful World Cabarets… No tube hassle of delayed trains could spoil my mood as Mitchell’s words kept on repeating in my mind… and the thought of what can I do?

Engaging and energising, it’s sincere in a skilled and entertaining way that touches us all. It's a call to action, it's a call to come and join the cabaret... my friends!

The cabaret runs until 13^th July and full details are on the Theatre’s website – book now for as many as you can! Also, a good bar and very good aircon… just saying!

Saturday 5 July at 7.30pm - Wayne Sleep OBE

Saturday 5 July at 9.30pm - Carly Mercedes Dyer

Sunday 6 July at 4pm - Lorna Dallas

Sunday 6 July at 6pm - Cassidy Janson

Monday 7 July at 7.30pm - EM The Master

Tuesday 8 July at 7.30pm - Barlow & Smith

Tuesday 8 July at 9.30pm - Janie Dee

Wednesday 9 July at 7.30pm - Josephina Ortiz Lewis

Wednesday 9 July at 9.30pm - Three’s Company

Thursday 10 July at 7.30pm - Olivia Williams

Friday 11 July at 7.30pm - Alfie Friedman - Unsovereignty

Friday 11 July at 9.30pm - Sister Mary - ‘Seven Deadly Sins on Earth’

Saturday 12 July at 7.30pm - Ian Shaw

Saturday 12 July at 9.30pm - Mazaika Duo

Sunday 13 July at 4pm - Laura Pitt-Pulford - “Love, Life and the World”

Sunday 13 July at 6pm Dame Maureen Lipman and friends

If you see me walking down the street... cross the road!

History Men... The Gang of Three, King’s Head Theatre

 

Oh, I wouldn’t worry too much about Sunny Jim, far too common to be a leader…

It’s now a truism that all political lives end in failure although over recent years we’ve seen more than enough profiting healthily in that state but in the midst of that life we are always so close to death with the knife hovering close to the backs of even the best of friends.

Events open with The Who’s Won’t Get Fooled Again as we join old Oxford and political allies Anthony Crossland (Alan Cox) and Roy Jenkins (Hywel Morgan) meeting at the latter’s house after he has just resigned, on principal, as Labour Party Deputy Leader. Tony senses an opportunity here and wants Roy to support his bid to take over in that position but, as we are to discover, these two have much that divides them as well as the vast amount they have in common. 

Robert Khan and Tom Saliinsky’s new political drama gets us inside the head of these key players at a time of possibility and danger for the Labour Party. Then they had failed to get a third term for Harold Wilson as Ted Heath took the Tories to victory and then, against the odds, they bounced back in 1974 with a win that Jenkins describes as both unlikely and unlucky: Labour was left with an economic time-bomb as well as unruly industrial relations and a Conservative Party starting to define itself around the monetarist purity of Mrs Margaret Thatcher.

The play gets to grips with the anxieties at the heart of Labour’s top team as three moderates fail to form an alliance that might have fended off Thatcher and the subsequent splintering of the party with Jenkin’s departure to form the Social Democratic Party with Roy Rogers, Shirley Williams and David Owen, as the left wing took over with the Tony Benn supporting Michael Foot into power leaving the party in opposition for the longest time since its 1945 landslide.

Hywell Morgan and Alan Cox - photographer Manuel Harlan

Do we tend to lionise former politicians or do we just long for a time when they were more driven by principals and less concerned with sound bites and social media. Writing in the programme, Steve Richards, explains the conditions of the time which were much more conducive to a broad church which allowed debate and lengthy careers to flourish with Jenkins, Healey and Crossland all having served in Wilson’s governments in the sixties and before that Gaitskell in opposition. Crossland’s book, The Future of Socialism (1956) is made the butt of a few jokes here – it’s a framework that supports analysis in any era… not out of date! – is still a key text for the likes of Gordon Brown and Ed Miliband. 

In the play the men are combative and friendly in moments that only occasionally hit the future nail on the head too hard… we’re subsumed in a time of more intellectual debate over possibilities that may never end – a polite civil war involving egos and views of Europe, nationalisation and the balance of payments. There’s love behind the barbs with Tony celebrating Roy’s legalisation of homosexuality and abortion: “you were the bespectacled Father of the Age of Aquarius!” – these men have achieved things but maybe they’re out of ideas when all they want is more power?

Thus, it is that these two friends and a third, from the year above them at Oxford, Dennis Healey (Colin Tierney) play games over the years as fortunes shift and the game slips away as the left with Benn and Foot seemingly making the deal their centrist colleagues couldn’t bring themselves to agree as the popular vote shifted decisively through The Winter of Discontent, and the book balancing resisted so forcibly by the Trade Unions.

The play makes light work of the history and, assumptions there may be aplenty, but they are informed and help to map out the chemistry that combined with circumstance to consign this Labour generation – 12 years in government out of the previous 16 – to opposition for the next 18. It’s not so much how it happened as who it happened to and the characterisations are rich of these three brilliant minds. I can’t see a Reeves, Streeting and Kendall version working quite so well… but then maybe all political lives are revived by the distancing of time?

Colin Tierney and Hywel Morgan - Photographer Manuel Harlan

In these days when there is no longer a “natural party of government”, we see the delusional certainties that make the trio miss out on history with Healey playing games with the IMF and his party and Jenkins driven by principle and privilege and Crossland perhaps wrong-footed by the gifts that came too easily.

IThankYou Theatre rating: **** The political theatre of the recent past makes for a gripping analysis of our politics today; history does not so much repeat itself as continue on the same lines evolving around the same issues and divisions with the added spite of social media and new forms of communication.

Alan Cox is a very plausible Tony Crosland full of charm and wit with his old Oxford edge over Jenkins still informing their relationship, a friendship somewhat deeper than I had imagined. Hywel Morgan’s “Woy” is a man of destiny yet still full of insecurity and a guile whilst Colin Tierney’s assured old Mertonian is the true heavyweight just lacking the charm and the destiny… perhaps all three together would have made the perfect leader?

Kirsty Patrick Ward directs and creates a compelling world of political intrigue, the potential and the quite desperation of ‘70s Britain only a few dozen metres below the streets of 21^st Century Islington former home of King Tony and the young man with the scruffy beard who used to hang on Tony Benn’s every word…

Robert Khan and Tom Salinsky have previously written the acclaimed play on Brexit, as well as other political works Coalition, Kingmaker and Impossible. Their attention to detail is fabulous and their wit hits home throughout, I look forward to Truss: How I Won the War!

The Gang of Three plays at the Kings Head Theatre until 1^st June and you can buy tickets directly from their website here!

All photographs by Manuel Harlan

Critical singing… The Magic Flute, Wilton’s Music Hall

Eleri Gwilym - photographer Bill Knight

Soon, to herald the morning,

The sun will gleam along its golden path,

Soon, superstition will vanish,

And the wise man will soon win the victory… 

Mozart’s opera was first performed in 1791 in the relatively intimate Freihaus-Theater auf der Wieden in suburban Vienna. At this point, over in London, Wilton’s was an alehouse dating from 1743 and it was only in 1839 that a concert room was built behind the pub and it became a saloon theatre, before transitioning into what is now the oldest Music Hall on these shores. I would imagine that an opera as accessible and brilliantly inventive as The Magic Flute would have amused the clientele of any period as much as tonight’s audience who clapped so hard we could barely express our satisfaction.

The source of this wonder is the latest production of the Charles Court Opera who, celebrating their 20^th anniversary year, have refreshed Mozart’s popular comic masterpiece, for modern ears with a few adjustments to Emanuel Schikaneder’s libretto courtesy of a new translation by John Savournin (book) and David Eaton (lyrics), which includes a call to assess the power battle between the Queen of the Night and Sarastro with objectivity and “critical thinking”. Mozart and Schikaneder’s creation thus proves as malleable as Shakespeare or Verdi and its original call for enlightened absolutism is now taking new meaning. Enlightenment and understanding free the hearts of all and love leading the way.

It's a jungle sometimes… and the marvellous restoration-in-process that is Wilton’s was lit all in green with even the pillars supporting the circle covered in theatrical foliage courtesy of Simon Bejer’s inventive design. The wall at the back of the stage was so well crafted that changes in lighting showed the extremes of emotion and climate unfolding before it… the observed reality of the Hall shifted in mood and texture.

Martins Smaukstelis and Alison Langer - photographer Bill Knight

John Savournin’s direction brought new vibrancy and focus and the centuries simply fell away once his troupe had begun to accompany musical director, David Eaton’s piano. I’ve seen a number of operas but all very grand affairs and yet here there was a show fit for any of those venues, exploding from the Wilton’s stage with full-throated force. Of course, this was how this opera would have originally played in Mozart’s local theatre, his Singspiel enabling a performance more connected with the audience as the players mix dialogue, direct to audience – fourth wall smashed – as well as each other and when they sing emotions are heightened in spine-tingling fashion. Honestly you don’t get this connection way back in the stalls of the Lincoln Centre or up in the Gods at the ENO!

Now for the players and a timeless story set in this East End jungle in which the aforementioned Queen of the Night – an incandescent Eleri Gwilym outstanding on her character’s aria – sends intrepid explorer, Tamino (Martins Smaukstelis) off to rescue her daughter Pamina (Alison Langer) from the high priest Sarastro (Peter Lidbetter). The Queen sends her three hench-women to greet Tamino and they act not only as a Greek chorus but also use puppetry as well as their voices and ability at rapid costume changes – in soccer parlance Sarah Prestwidge, Martha Jones and Meriel Cunningham act as a fast-moving midfield press, taking turns at firing shots into the scoring zone.

Completing the cast is Matthew Kellett as Papageno, bravehearted or at least “hearted”, companion to Tamino on his quest and who acts as the audience’s companion in this fantasy adventure. Then there is the dastardly Monostatos, Jon Ashmore, who aims to steal the princess for himself.

Matthew Kellett as Papageno

All were in fine voice and to repeat it is remarkable to hear such classical training in a venue in which you can see the performers’ expressions so clearly and connect in the intimate way of a concert and theatre audience with their musicality and dramatic intent.

The story picks up the dramatic stakes as well as the humour once hero finds heroine and is given a series of tests by Sarastro who turns out to be not quite the monster the Queen has described as she attempts to persuade her daughter to kill him at the first chance. It’s then when the puppetry – the three women with assorted birds of paradise – and the inventive humour also go into overdrive. We couldn’t take our eyes off and our ears were also fully occupied with the critical singing.

IthankyouTheatre rating: **** This was indeed magic theatre, a special venue filled with top quality voices and an uncanny energy that can change moods and perhaps fortunes… the key to salvation is in the music and the hearts of these wonderful performers. Heck, it may well be 2025 outside but right now, we can deal with anything!

Alison Langer and Martins Smaukstelis sang so true and made for an impressive couple whilst Matthew Kellett’s pantomime hardened wit as well as vocal skill provided the charm. Peter Lidbetter brought physical power and presence as the high priest and I was also taken with Meriel Cunningham’s charismatic presence as one of the multi-tasking three. But everyone was on top of their game and this was a truly delightful evening all round in what Time Out tells us is the 5^th most iconic building in London! 

Meriel Cunningham - photographer Bill Knight

The Magic Flute plays at Wilton’s until Saturday 8^th March and I would urge you all to go and see this marvel in the raw: part panto, part concert, and utterly entertaining!

Full details on the Wilton’s website!

Persona... The Maids, Jermyn Street Theatre

I contain within me both vengeance and the maid and give them a chance for life, a chance for salvation.

This performance pulls you in confronts you and leaves you staggering into the dark on Jermyn Street questioning not only reality but the meaning of cruelty. Jean Genet’s play maybe almost 80 years old but it has lost none of its power to shock in its display of the fantasies that kill even as they sustain the existence of two sisters locked into a life of servitude with no chance of escape.

Foucault wrote about how society can be measured by its approach to incarceration and this has a wider relevance to the prisons of wage poverty and duty which have trapped many of our forebears and many still. My great grandmother was in service, her mother too and the grandmother who brought her up after – presumably – one of the masters put her in the family way.

This is a great play for women to perform as you can tell from its heritage both on stage – Huppert, Blanchett and Elizabeth Debicki in Sydney – and film - Vivien Merchant as Madame, Glenda Jackson as Solange and Susannah York as Claire in 1974. Big shoes to fill but there’s a special energy from Anna Popplewell as Solange, Charlie Oscar as Claire and Carla Harrison-Hodge as Madame on another one of those nights in which the discrete performance space of the JST transformed into a stark Parisian apartment, overlooked at the highest level by a room full of onlookers – the audience cleverly reflected in the glass window.

Charlie Oscar and Anna Popplewell - all photography by Steve Gregson

This is a very wordy play even with the fluidity of Martin Crimp’s translation, yet the cast are remarkably sure-footed throughout as if they’d just spent a year in a verbal boot camp, toughening themselves up for the pace of delivery as well as the expression of the essential brutalities of Genet’s play, trust me, if you see Anna, Charlie or Carla outside after rehearsals or a performance, give them space and don’t try make any jokes!

Inspired by the real events involving the Papin Sisters in 1933, the play examines not just the class struggle but the nature of imprisonment and the combined imaginative power of the sisters. They start the narrative by play acting with Solange as Claire the Maid and Claire as their Mistress, there are various transgressions not least in their wearing of their mistresses make up and clothing but also in the sexual undercurrents of their play. They are so in character its hard for the audience to know what is real and what is not. A perfect start to a play to confounds expectations and challenges our sympathies.

Anna Popplewell is excellent as the older sister, forceful and yet considerate, worrying about her sister even as she tries to order her about. Charlie Oscar has the playful air of a younger sibling but is also protean convincing in play as the mistress and then switching from doubt to resolution as their grand plan takes shapes and big decisions and resolution are required. Both take the roles of their mistress equally well, switching from dominance to submission across the full spectrum of the power relationship.

Anna Popplewell and Carla Harrison-Hodge - all photography by Steve Gregson

When their mistress does appear, as eloquently portrayed by Carla Harrison-Hodge, we see what they’ve been contending with. Their employer is more than that and not for nothing does she refer to them as her “children”, she infantilises them and knows she is in complete control. Her lover has been arrested thanks to a letter sent by Claire who fears exposure but, before hearing of his release on bail, Madame is in a self-indulgent strop offering her expensive clothes as gifts to her temporary friends only to withdraw them without a thought. 

Within this oppression the girls’ only escape is fantasy and thoughts of taking control in the only ways possible. They are the most unreliable of narrators but the beauty of the play is in gradually allowing the audience to solve the clues pointing to reality. It is such a playful yet deeply unsettling experience as they look to gather the courage to kill their Madame and find the freedom they long for. 

IThankYou rating: **** It’s impossible to not be impressed with the performance level as the cast delivers the story in such visceral ways you’re sucked into the concerns of these desperate women whose lives are only ordinary in so many ways. 

Annie Kershaw directs with pace and power as her cast patrol the stage like frustrated animals in an overlooked zoo robbed of the enrichment of their natural conditions. She is a graduate of Jermyn Street Theatre’s Carne Deputy Director Scheme and The Young Vic’s Genesis Future Directors Award – it’s great to see such new dramatic talent coming through!

The Maids runs until 22^nd January and is a coproduction between Jermyn Street Theatre and Reading Rep and the show transfers to Reading from 28 January to 8 February. 

Full details and tickets are available on the respective websites: 

Jermyn Street Theatre 

Reading Rep Theatre

Charlie Oscar - all photography by Steve Gregson

The naked ape… Report to an Academy, Courtyard Theatre, Camden Fringe Festival

Ah, one learns when one has to; one learns when one needs a way out; one learns at all costs. One stands over oneself with a whip; one flays oneself at the slightest opposition.

Long before Chuck Berry wrote his classic song about over-elaborate administration and bureaucracy, Too Much Monkey Business, Franz Kafka was addressing the issues of societal convention and animal rights (which are human rights) in this tense and provocative play about an animal just trying to get by in a society dominated by inhumanity. If that sounds flippant then just look around and see where we stand in 2024, 107 years after the short story on which this play is based was published. It’s been years since I saw The Trial with Anthony Sheer, Metamorphosis with Tim Roth or read Kafka’s America and other works and yet the immediacy of his concerns are ever present and always ring true. Why is that?

The meaning or this parable is still debated and there are a variety of ways the story can be interpreted starting with Kafka’s awareness of the need for Jews like himself to assimilate in a culture such as Germany and stretching as far as evolutionary theory itself, after all adapt and survive is pretty much Darwin 101. Today though it felt very much a universal and sinister warning to all of us animals which shows the inherent beauty and strength if the author’s words and the skills of the performer. 

Robert McNamara plays Red Peter an ape who was shot and captured on a West African hunting trip and then taken back to Europe by ship. During the voyage he is brutalised by the men and with no option of escape, he learns their language not to communicate his despair but to mollify his all-powerful masters. Duly impressed they continue to torture him in ways humans do until he reaches Europe and faced with the option of the zoo or the stage, opts for the latter where he becomes a huge success. But is he now more man than ape and he is called to explain his situation to a top Scientific Academy.

Robert McNamara, photographs from J. Yi Photography 

You have done me the honour of inviting me to give your Academy an account of the life I formerly led as an ape.

Peter’s demeanour is serious and, clearly, five years after learning to talk he is also widely read and is able to address his audience with the academic rigour they would expect. He tells his story, stopping only to take increasingly frequent sips from his hipflask he keeps in his jacket pocket. His face still bears the red scar he gained after being shot during capture and it’s an angry wound that reflects his inner state. 

McNamara has performed Gabriele Jakobi’s adaptation of the story – which he also directs – on a number of occasions for the Scena Theatre of Washington, DC where he is also Artistic Director. His familiarity with the character and passion for the role was genuinely humbling to see and he attacked this difficult and aerobic monologue with real force. Peter’s need to be human also addresses the existential nature of freedom – is it illusory if we always have to sacrifice and hide our true nature?

We were left stirred and shaken with minds a-race with the play’s possibilities after a thoroughly absorbing hour. Peter an ape more sinned against than sinning had roused guilt as well as self-conscious examination, leaving his scientific and theatrical audiences with much to consider.

… your life as apes, gentlemen, insofar as something of that kind lies behind you, cannot be farther removed from you than mine is from me. Yet everyone on earth feels a tickling at the heels; the small chimpanzee and the great Achilles alike.

Robert McNamara, photographs from J. Yi Photography

IThankYouTheatre rating: ****

This play hits hard and is a tour de force from McNamara who, following his painful walk on to stage at the start, faces down the audience as Peter would the scientists he was having to explain his survival too. It’s this fifth wall that adds an extra painful dimension to the play – we’re literally between the ape and his captors who are the real audience whose opinion will impact his freedom, as we sit and watch. Every inaction is an action and we’re all political voyeurs unless we decide to actually do something and help.

Report to an Academy is presented by Scena Theatre and plays at the Courtyard Theatre until 6^th August, so be quick! Full details are on the Courtyard website here! 

It’s part of the Camden Fringe Festival for which details are here!

My first time at the Courtyard and it’s a spending venue a few minutes from Old Street and well worth your support!