The Jokers… The House of Yes, Hope Theatre

“A person gets their heart set on a certain thing…”

Funny, sexy, violent, frightening and unsettling, Matthew Parker’s last in-house production as Artistic Director for The Hope, had everything I love about his work. You grab a drink downstairs in the bar of this famous venue and walk upstairs into a performance area that even smells different from the world below. 85 minutes later you crack a twisted wistful smile as you walk out trying to process the many layers just unpeeled in front of your very eyes…

There’s a dark magic here and a team of performers who are utterly within their roles – there’s no room to hide as audience or performer with the players standing amongst us as once again, Mr Parker makes use of every inch of the Hope.

This being a last hurrah it was fitting that three stars from three of my favourite Parker performances feature strongly; Colette Eaton from Her Aching Heart, Fergus Leathem from Brimstone & Treacle and Bart Lambert from Thrill Me: the Leopold and Loeb Story.

Colette Eaton and Bart Lambert  - photos from lhphotoshots

Colette Eaton prowled the stage tonight with malicious confidence as Jackie-O, the twisted twin sister of Marty (Leathem) with a history of psychiatric disorders, medicated almost to the point of normal behaviour but still obsessed with the death of JFK. She makes me think of a certain character currently on screens played by Joaquin Phoenix, only her Jackie has more menace and less make-up. She owns the role with a smile and a laugh that Clown Prince of Crime would envy and has such assurance and control that her primal screams of rage all the more astonishing.

In the intimacy of the Hope you are tempted to reach out and comfort an actor in seeming distress, that’s how completely you are part of their world and I felt for the twin’s younger brother, Anthony, played by Bart Lambert as a sympathetic sociopath all of his own. This is indeed one strange family and Bart has such intense expressiveness and quivering febrility imbuing his character with fear and cunning: at once worn down by and revelling in the family house rules of "do as thy wilt shall be the whole of the law".

It’s Thanksgiving eve and there’s a hurricane blowing outside; the least pathetic fallacy ever – no one’s getting out of this House unchanged.

Mother knows best... Gill King - lhphotoshots

Mother knows best of course, and murderous matriarch Mother Pascal (Gill King, classy, imperious, Cruella DC...) is the wicked witch of Washington who dominates and enables the free-roaming morality of her children. Marty is the one trying to build an existence outside of her centrifugal cruelty and brings home his fiancée, Lesly (Kaya Bucholc, so energetically commited as the play's most identifiable character; experiencing The House through our eyes), a “civilian”, a working class girl from Pennsylvania who has no name just a lot of character especially when faced with the family’s desperate need to pull Marty back in. It's a change of pace for Fergus Leathem after Brimstone, and he plays the almost-straight man to his family's sick jokes with subtle confidence.

"I’ve never even met anyone who’s been to Pennsylvania, much less been from Pennsylvania, Pennsylvania is just this state that gets in your way when you have to go someplace else."

Like antibodies the Pascals work on Lesly’s alien force; Mother through aggression, Anthony by hitting on her and Jackie-O who uses the most powerful lure of all for her twin…

Wendy Macleod’s play resonates on so many levels right now as, thirty odd years after it was written, we have another family running the Whitehouse and who, like the Pascal’s want all of the Kennedy trappings without the political conscience. Jackie-O dresses up as Jackie Kennedy complete with fake blood and JFK brains on her dress; no more horrific than the way reality is turning out. Take notes Ivanka…

Kaya Bucholc - lhphotoshots

The entitled psychopathy is very 2019 as, from all around the world, might is increasingly right and Lesly, despite her spirit, is just another intelligent and reasonable person who is damaged by the Pascal fruits. But, hey, they may be a little “crazy”, but they’re the ones with the power.

The House of Yes is mad good fun with a hundred zingers in the text all delivered with deathly deadpan by Parker’s posse of perfect performers. It’s a fitting farewell for the remarkable Mr Parker – almost a “greatest hits” collection of the funny, peculiar and thought-provoking themes that run though his work like a bitter-sweet Blackpool through a stick of rock. Here’s to the next one but meanwhile DO NOT miss this black swansong.

A tip of the hat too Stage Manager, Laurel Marks who made the lighting and sound design work so well on the night - the sixth performer on stage so no pressure! As usual the Hope was transformed this time by Rachael Ryan's design along with Lucia Sanchez-Roldan's lighting design and Simon Arrowsmith's sound. An in-house team that obviously likes to say yes.

Colette Eaton and Fergus Leathem  - photos from lhphotoshots

IThankYou rating: ***** “A Play for Today with some stunning swerves and quite simply one of the finest displays of acting and direction I’ve seen all year.”

The House of Yes runs until 26^th October, full details on the Hope website.

“Now if you'll excuse me, I'm going to baste the turkey and hide the kitchen knives…”

Premier league lurking from Ms Eaton.

The Devil's in the details... Brimstone and Treacle, Hope Theatre

This is a difficult, challenging play even forty years after it was first produced; it makes you uncomfortable from the get-go and yet before long you laugh, the whole audience laughs. Is there any such thing as pure evil and is there really any purely "good”? After years of debilitating psoriatic arthropathy, Dennis Potter had more than just a few questions for the deity under whose watch he had suffered… physically and mentally he was laid low. Brimstone and Treacle was his way of examining the rhyme and the reason: and in the endless alternations between the good and the bad, can pure wrong make a right.

This play has been a real passion project for director Matthew Parker who conveys the full power of Potter’s angry vision: there are no compromises and he has helped summon four extraordinary performances from his high-powered cast. You can fully understand why the BBC didn’t feel able to screen the Play for Today in 1976 – it took them ten years – which is why the performance at the Sheffield Crucible in 1977 was its debut.

Olivia Beardsley & Stephanie Beattie - Brimstone and Treacle (All photos lhphotoshots1)

Has Britain changed over forty years after the National Front were nearly as popular as UKIP? The play is unflinching in revealing the unresolvable desire to take our country back against a background of terrorism and widespread immigration. And, whilst this casual darkness lies at the heart of one character there are other black deeds at issue; action not words that require no Devil, simply people.

The play opens in truly shocking style; we enter the performance space to find a young woman sleeping peacefully in her bed but once the play begins we can see that she is severely disabled and in a near vegetative state. This is the suburban home of the Bates family and here lies the living remains of their daughter Pattie (Olivia Beardsley who gives a quite astonishing performance) who was very badly injured in a hit and run accident over two years ago.

Paul Clayton

Her mother Amy (Stephanie Beattie) looks after her almost day and night, feeding, cleaning and praying that she can still comprehend even though she can’t express. It’s heart-rending and it’s alarming to see a human figure so distressed: Pattie vocalises incoherently, she writhes with discomforting, dyspraxic, angularity, almost as if she’s being restrained but hasn’t the strength to respond.

Father Tom (Paul Clayton) is convinced she cannot understand anything happening around her and that he lost his daughter for good when the accident occurred. He can see no hope and tortures his wife with his fatalism. The two are broken down, as locked in their own physical and mental space as their daughter; a lifetime of curtailed, stifling routine.

Amy wonders, almost prays, that someone or something will come into their lives to save them, if only for a while. Shortly afterwards Tom has a bizarre encounter with a young man who claims to know him and to have been close to Pattie. Then, there’s a knock at the door and the man, the innocuously-named Martin Taylor (Fergus Leathem), arrives claiming to have found Tom’s missing wallet.

Fergus Leathem

Now the strangeness begins as the excruciatingly-polite, quicksilvered young man talks his way into the Bates’ house and lives. He says he wants to help, claims that he once proposed to Pattie – who declined but said she would consider – and, in spite of Tom’s hard-wired cynicism, impresses Amy by echoing her fluttering Christian hopes.

Yet Martin continually turns to the audience and the lights flicker with demonic force as he reveals either the hideous mind of a sociopath or a more purely evil persona: he’s conning the Bates and making us all complicit. The play is very funny and intentionally so; we laugh even knowing there’s evil at work, even confronted by a severely disabled character… that’s Potter’s challenge down the decades and it still works. Nobody is getting out of this unaffected, certainly not the audience as Martin’s viscous sexual assault on Pattie slaps us hard: and we found him funny?!

In the same way that Alfred Hitchcock brought out the voyeur in us all, Potter makes us complicit in Martin’s plans: we’re curious and he is a magnetic personality… how far will he - and we - go?

Fergus Leathem is outstanding, giving a high-energy performance that combines the unrelentingly unctuous with the irrepressibly malevolent in equal turns. His creepily-atonal version of You Are My Sunshine will be stuck on my head for weeks.

Before the night is out we will be taken to the dark heart of the Bates’ family, as Martin joyfully plays on Tom’s support for the National Front to extrapolate the most logical conclusions for the idea that outsiders should all be sent “home”… It is still very much a play for today. But there’s more… something else that happened before Allie’s accident and, can any good possibly come from Martin’s evil?

Some plays leave you smiling while others scratch your head... this one simply leaves you stunned, challenging us all to look not only at what we’ve just seen but what we’ve just felt. That is pure theatre and pure Potter!

The play runs until 20^th May and deserves to be seen: there’s nothing bad about such great performances - Paul Clayton and Stephanie Beattie are both superbly heart-breaking - and in these febrile times, it’s better the Devil you know… isn't it?

Tickets are available with full details on the Hopewebsite. I'd be quick though, there'll be a lot fo full houses for this one.

Ithankyou rating: *****