So close… Far Away, Donmar Warehouse

Caryl Churchill’s plays are so diverse it’s difficult to pin down her style other than a brutal honesty mixed with strong characterisation and healthy humour. This play was first produced in 2000 and its vision of a Britain involved in a war on home turf and with martial law and public execution part of the entertainment of a ruthless single state, is far more frightening twenty years on. Maybe we just don’t see things as clearly as this playwright or we just delude ourselves harder but the hostile environment on display is all too believable.

The play is short – 40 minutes - as well as, ahem, being nasty and brutish and, personally, it has the aftertaste of a novella when there was perhaps more to say. It’s based on three sequences and whilst the first has the biggest shock value and the second has the most spectacular set-piece, the final section plays a little flat in comparison especially when the humour and horror that is balanced so well before this point breaks down to some plain daft ploys about animals and the weather being involved in the war. I get the point but not the continuous joke.

Jessica Hynes (Photo, Johan Persson)

The performances are very strong throughout and not least from young Sophia Ally as young Joan who features in the first section as she examines a large metal block that occupies the central stage. The block is raised revealing her Auntie Harper (Jessica Hynes) hard at work sewing; this is a time of make do and mend and more besides as the inquisitive Joan has already discovered on her first day staying out in the country. Joan has seen far more than she should and her question and answer with Harper is so well constructed, as every time the grown up thinks they have come up with a convincing way of explaining strange events away, they are demolished by something even darker the youngster has seen. Why was Uncle hiding those people, why was he hitting them and why were they crying? The brutality of the near-future Britain is revealed through the forensic cross-examination of a child.

Aisling Loftus and Simon Manyonda (Photo Johan Persson)

In the next section an older Joan (Aisling Loftus) is just starting her career as a milliner, making a glorious green feathered hat alongside Todd (Simon Manyonda) a more experimental and experienced man who explains the uncomfortable truth about the place they work. Their conversation hints at routine issues with workplace communication and employee relations and, again, we only gradually find out what they are doing and why.

The stage keeps on darkening to delineate the passing of days and every time the hats get bigger and more elaborate a visual gag that is only setting us for the darkest and most spectacular reveal of the play.

From there it’s only the final act as Joan returns to her Aunt’s home with Todd and more of the future Britain’s realities are set out in sharp relief to that off-kilter humour.

IThankYouTheatre rating: *** Director Lyndsey Turner has created some startling moments and the staging makes the most of the Donmar’s intimacy but for me the intensity wavers in the final third.

Far Away plays at the Donmar until 28^th March – booking details on their website.

Stardust we are… Nearly Human, Perhaps Contraption, Vault Festival

We are like butterflies that flutter for a day and think it is forever…

Jimi Hendrix was so impressed having seen the band Chicago in 1969 that he said their horn section played like it was a single set of lungs. Well, from where I was sat tonight, Perhaps Contraption also have two collective lungs, along with a single-minded purpose - a powerfully syncopated mix of movement, words and something like a Vulcan musical mind-meld. This band is so tight and so joyously in tune with each other, their subject and their hugely appreciative audience that you cannot fail to move with them.

I’d seen the band before playing, amongst other things, the most outrageously arranged version of Radiohead’s National Anthem, all perfect be-bop phrasing mixed with a muscularity that one sensed owed at least something to the early jazz-prog of Robert Wyatt Soft Machine, Caravan and King Crimson – as confirmed by Artistic Director also flautist/vocalist/guitarist/tenor sax and contact juggler, Christo Squier after the show. But this is truly progressive music that has modern sensibilities and a desire to make something different.

It’s music as forward-thinking as Carl Sagan, an astrophysicist credited with helping to inspire this cosmic take on life, the universe and the sousaphone… No one else sounds quite like Perhaps Contraption and it’s hard to see many other bands taking on the subject of physics for a stage show that is also being turned into a concept album and, personally, I hope it’s a double and on vinyl too.

The performance starts, appropriately enough with Iain McDonald appearing like a Sousaphone Spaceman and explaining how we’re all so remarkably lucky and unlikely to be here. This is more than just a reference to the irregularity of Southern Rail services – the Vault festival is based in the cavernous underbelly of Waterloo Station, literally and underground festival… but the fact that our atoms, the enamel in our teeth, the nitrate in our digestive tract and the oxygen in our lungs has all come from the heart of stars long ago.

If ever there was a time to think about Man’s insignificance in the vast improbabilities of space, now is surely it. A repeated refrain from the band and the recorded narrators is that extinction is the norm and that survival is the exception and we simply shouldn’t take that for granted.

There are as many molecules in a single cell of DNA as there are stars in a typical galaxy...

Not that the band are giving us a PC lecture, they are simply celebrating our improbability and urging us to move onwards. Their songs have hooks to burn and they play with such movement and feeling with instruments rarely associated with dance. So it is that even glockenspiel and vibraphonist Amy Kelly plays on the move whilst bass trombonist Yusuf Narcin duels with Mickey McMillan and his trade-mark orange trombone. The King of Jazz, Paul Whiteman’s band may have swung but these guys dance and play as one courtesy of movement direction from Christa Harris and Lucy Ridley.

There so much light and dynamic shade in the group’s music helped by the range of instruments with Jin Theriault’s soprano sax a relatively recent introduction and also a variety of lead vocalists from Christo and Mickey’s masculine lines to tenor sax player Stephanie Legg and French horn player Letty Stott. The band sing close harmonies crowded forward on the playing are while the soloists hold back or mount the steps in the aisles; every inch of the theatrical space is used like a contrapuntal planetarium.

The sound is anchored by the combination of Iain’s bass voice and his sousaphone along with Riccardo Castellani’s drums; on some gigs the band feature mobile drums on a pram but here he has too much kit to wonder far.

The band provided a chart showing how the songs progress from the nature of our atomic particles – The person you love is 72.8% water… so drink them deep! – through a consideration of our place in this universe to the ultimate need to continue our particle journey far into space. A someone who grew up on scientist visionaries like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke as well as Carl Sagan it is music of the spheres to my eager ears. Science fiction was never about escape it was about hope and now more than ever we need more of that.

IThankYouTheatre Rating: ***** This is vibrant, imaginative and playful performance with a hybrid of happy contemplative drama with lung-busting, body-impacting sound! I’m going back to see it again and I’m taking as many of my friends and family whose particles aren’t nailed to the ground.

We are, each of us, a little universe.

Nearly Human plays at the Vault Festival until this Sunday 23^rd February – I urge you to get on quick and book tickets now. Details on the festival website!

You can also follow developments from the band on their website and here’s the link to that splendid version of National Anthem… try getting that out of your head!

More details of the band and their previous works on the PC website here.

Pedigree chums... The Dog Walker, Jermyn Street Theatre

Pekingese are very good listeners which is more than can be said for most humans…

Paul Minx says his plays tend to stay with him, slowly marinating as the characters take over and begin to write themselves. The two in this play had their origins in the Nineties and, like lost dogs, have followed him through to their being wrote into existence for this quietly visceral and affecting play.

It was worth the wait as both dog walker Herbert Doakes and his client Keri, feel rounded and of such substance that they can hold contradictions as well as secrets even from the close-quarters audience in the Jermyn Street Theatre. Both take turns in being infuriating and almost utterly lost, propping themselves up with drink and drugs as well as the fantasy realities of work, irony and religion. As Keri says, “wounds heal but grief does not”, and Herbert, denying the failure of his marriage and Keri, blaming herself for a child’s death – caught in the cross-fire in front of her apartment – both try to lose themselves, to hide from their loss.

Minx’s dialogue is like vintage screwball pepped up with contemporary cussing and so well handled by both leads. Victoria Yeates makes for a febrile Keri, a role that could easily slip into ironic self-pity but she skilfully holds enough back to gain our sympathy and runs through so much emotional complexity when her relationship with Herbert begins to change in some alarming ways. The same can be said for Andrew Dennis as the more ostensibly comic Doakes, a man holding himself together through the disciplines of his dog walking job – Pups International – as well as self-help books such as The Seven Habits of Highly Successful Jamaicans. His story almost mirrors Keri’s as he goes from self-controlled/in denial to hard-floored reality over the course of the play’s three “movements” … music is ever present before and during the story and it is indeed a symphony of grief.

Andrew Dennis, all photographs courtesy of Robert Workman

“I am the most emotionally responsive dog walker in the district. I scored 4.8 on the City Empathy Test.”

At the start of the play we find Keri locked in self-pity as she drinks herself into a haze and dopes herself to meet the deadlines writing the e-books, such as Seven Habits… that people like Herbert read. She has a Pekingese dog, a bitch called Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart, and Herbert arrives to take it for the contractually required 28 minutes’ walk. But Keri is being evasive – drunk and disorderly – playing games with Herbert and greeting him on all fours barking like a dog.

Herbert recoils and recounts the numerous colleagues who simply refuse to take on one of the company’s more difficult customers. It soon emerges why Keri is so awkward as she explains about witnessing the child’s murder and being haunted by the Ghost Girl who she feels getting ever closer to avenging the transition from humanity to becoming a fatality…

Herbert is a man of many facets, in addition to working as a janitor he also has a college degree and is able to receipt Spenser’s Faerie Queene and yet he lacks spontaneity and holds himself tightly within the bounds of Christian and professional duty. He bangs heads uncomprehendingly against the quicksilver wit of Keri who is so free spirited she is deeply lost, bewildering him with depths of atheistic nihilism. Finally, Herbert becomes concerned with the dog’s health and says he needs to file a UPR – Unwell Pet Report – before, finally, we find out why Wolfgang isn’t really ready for her walk, as she is now an ex- Pekingese.

Herbert becomes more of a tragi-comic figure in the middle section as he ostensibly returns to give Keri the “cremains” of Wolfgang only for her to throw the urn out of her window. He has bought some of his “mummy’s” jerk chicken – or jerk-off chicken as Keri has it, as a way of connecting but she’s not buying it. Herbert then talks of his relationship difficulties with his wife Julia and asks for Keri’s help in learning how to properly “pet” her… he crosses the line and the intensity darkens between the two as Keri repeatedly asks him to leave.

Victoria Yeates and Andrew Dennis. Photo Robert Workman

It’s only in the spectacular final third that we truly understand these characters and what exactly they are trying to hold together. That’s skilful work from the playwright but the actors have to perform it and they both achieve the significant transitions required and, as has been noted elsewhere, these are two characters you really come to care about. Harry Burton directs with precision and sympathy whilst Isabella Van Braeckel’s set design turns the Jermyn stage into a steamy Manhattan apartment drenched in the desperate hope that, against all the odds, redemption is still possible.

IThankYouTheatre Rating: **** The Dog Walker is as honest as the long summer days are long in New York City and that is why you laugh with and care so much about these brittle souls; we all like dogs but most of all we crave unconditional love. That’s one thing this smart production deserves too.

The Dog Walker plays at the JST until Saturday 7th March, tickets via their box office.

They fought the law... Time, Tristan Bates Theatre

If you can’t do the time, don’t do the crime…

Before the play starts we hear various South London voices talking about various capers including a poor fella who tried to crown a turf accountant with a cosh hidden in a newspaper only for it to fly out as the News of the World landed with a whimper and not a bang.

Michael Head’s new play is based on tales from the underground not unrelated to those his Grandad used to tell; stories from an age of criminal chivalry which still fascinates a time, as the older character Waldorf (David Schaal) relates, when there were rules and honour among thieves. Waldorf knew the Richardsons and a code of conduct that rationalised the violent side of their work as the only means of protecting the good people in their lives; family and friends, from men like themselves.

The Code meant that they would only ever battle their own and that innocents would never be harmed. The Krays, he reckons, we “unstable” and too interested in fame and a film star lifestyle whereas the Nashes, Frankie Fraser and the Richardsons followed the rules. It’s hard not to see this as a meditation on working class Britain or make that just Britain; what happened to our loyalties?

David Schaal and Michael Head

Four men meet up in a pub called The End of the World, jokingly referred to as the depths of South London Waldorf would go to get a drink bought for him. They’ve been on the run in various safe houses waiting for the heat to die down after a botched robbery and have met in this boozer owned by Slipps (Michael Head) who is so called because he has, so far, avoided doing any time.

He’s first there of course before being joined by Waldorf, a tall charismatic gangster who is their connection to the golden era of the sixties. The walls of the pub are lined with family photographs and the two reminisce about Slipps’ Uncle Mick as well as his Auntie who Waldorf romanced after Mick passed away. There are also notices of various family misdemeanours including Slipps’ Mother’s banning from Morrisons for illicit stock-taking. Some of these tales are true and from Head’s own family lore and that adds to the telling; this feels like a celebration of the extended family values many of us shared from the sixties and seventies when people mostly lived where they grew up and everybody had at least one dodgy Uncle Les and at least a couple of Aunty Flo’s.

The wise-cracking Fisherman (Daniel O'Reilly) is next up, ten minutes late because he hates waiting for people… He’s a total “rise taker” and kicks into his mate Slipps from the off with some delicious banter that makes you want to pull up a chair and grab a glass of that whiskey yourself. He reserves his fiercest barbs for the superbly named Prozac (Paul Danan) who is last to arrive and first to get the blame for the job just gone South.

Paul Danan and Daniel O'Reilly

Prozac, so-called for his addiction to every drug going, lives on his nerves and was panicked into using the gun taken only for show, during the raid, firing off “like John Wayne on crack…” aka Grand Theft Arsehole (I am going to borrow that next time I hit the M25!). Prozac claims the coppers started firing first but no one else remembers anything other than his mistake.

Things calm down as the whiskey kicks in and Fisherman lays out some generous lines of white powder and we get more excellently crafted stories and group interplay. Michael Head writes great, natural dialogue and, as with his previous plays, Worth a Flutter and The Greater Game, the shared narratives are the strongest, pulling you in with a smile as you recognise the bond between these mates.

The men discuss how crime has changed and how imprisonment was not only an occupational hazard it also helped you establish new contacts and relationships for more escapades once outside. Thus, is it that drugs suppliers help Uncle Mick develop his pharmaceutical business in South London – although strictly without heroin, another part of The Code. Prozac became pally with a lad called Pretty Face, and when they were outside, “getting properly pissed like Liverpool town centre on dole day…” (in fairness, it doesn’t have to be pay day, it can be any day), he reintroduced him to old school pal Slipps.

And so, bonds are formed and the boys go about their business; doing their best to make sure their families have different choices. Slipps has two daughters and doesn’t want them ending up with his lot; he needs to leave them a legacy.

Cracks start to show between Prozac and the others and they become more aggressive and open – it’s not just the coke talking though and there are deeper truths about family and love to be revealed.

The Time Team...

IThankYouTheatre Rating: **** You won't find a more compelling or entertaining night out with the lads anywhere else in the West End! Great characters and smashing stories.
Time is a very passionate play and the gang of four inhabit the roles with fulsome conviction (well, they’ve been sent down enough times…). Director Joe Withers makes the very most of the Tristan Bates intimacy and the biggest laugh of the night cam after a deft ad lib from Mr O'Reilly after a line from Mr Danan that speaks volumes for the tightness of this cast!

Time is only playing this week and is already sold out on some days so get in quick, it’d be a crime if you missed it! Details on the TBT/Actors Centre website.

I used to work with Ronnie and Reggie’s niece, she used to say her Nan would get her to behave by threatening to get her uncles onto her. So, if you know what’s good for you, get yourself down to Time as soon as!