Flying high in the unfriendly sky... Billy Bishop Goes To War, Jermyn Street Theatre

“Nobody shoots no one in Canada…”

What begins as a lightly humorous, jaunty tale about going to fight a war “that hardly feels like a war at all…” culminates in some mesmeric monologues about the intensity of war, the fascination of the kill and the bravery of men like Albert Ball who, though barely out of his teens, took down 44 German planes before succumbing to the brutal odds of war.

Billy Bishop outscored Ball (probably), he survived and to do that must have learned more tricks than almost anyone else in the matter of aerial conflict; even the Red Baron, Manfred von Richthofen, got shot down from time to time. Bishop recalls his 46^th kill when he strafed the underside of a two-seater reconnaissance plane and saw both pilot and gunner fall, unharmed, alive, fully conscious to their death many thousands of feet below: “almost as if they could feel him watching…” It is only after a while that you realise that you are holding your breath.

Set design is ace too Daisy Blower! All images courtesy of Robert Workman

Bishops “score” is open to debate but the fact remains that he was a highly successful combatant who saw more of death than most even during The Great War… and, even more importantly, he remains a Canadian hero and a marker on the country’s route to independence.

Charles Aitken makes for a dashing and believable Billy and so does Oliver Beamish as his older self. Aitken looks every inch the swashbuckling pilot and is so convincing as the Canadian misfit who makes the journey from military school drop out to unlikely officer and subsequently fighter pilot. Beamish plays piano and harmonises with his younger self, they toast at the same time and it’s fascinating to watch his memories flashing across the face as the younger man lives them – very “meta” but very engaging in the JST’s intimate space. The play was originally written for one actor and a pianist but this is a stroke of genius: the pianist is the character "looking back"...

As a British dominion, Canada’s foreign policy decisions were in the hands of the British government when war was declared in 1914, the country could, however, decide on its level of commitment to the conflict and duly sent an expeditionary force of 620,000 of whom 67,000 lost their lives and 250,000 were wounded. That’s some contribution and evidence of how “this country” maintained its position in the world a century ago.

Charles Aitken sings and Oliver Beamish plays

Billy somehow misses the first waves of troops but finally gets his passage on The Good Ship Caledonia which survives rough seas and an attack on the convoy to deliver him up for service in 1915. At first, he joins the cavalry but is eventually persuaded that the flying corps gives him the best chance of a good war, as he said himself: "it's clean up there! I'll bet you don't get any mud or horse shit on you up there. If you die, at least it would be a clean death."

Billy’s reckless style had him hanging by a thread when he met socialite Lady St. Helier when recuperating in London, she helped him complete his training and seems to have looked after his growing fame at home, ensuring he met everyone. Aitken plays her ladyship – and is convincing even in military uniform and both he and Beamish get through some 18 characters during the course of the play: I especially enjoyed a French nightclub scene which saw winks to the audience from the piano player and Aitken in an imagined boa, vamping up the audience.

I was reminded of William Wellman’s silent film classic Wings, the director had been a fighter pilot in the First World War as had one of his stars, Richard Arlen, who flew his own stunts in the film as did his co-star Charles Buddy Rogers, who had to learn to fly just for the film: the Right Stuff was more common in those days. The dog fights in this film must have been very much like the slow-motion game of cat and mouse Billy experienced, even on the day he evaded the Red Baron.

Gradually the tone gets more serious and the critique of the powers that were becomes more pointed. Written and composed by John Gray with Eric Peterson, the play was first performed 40 years ago and has developed over that time to include the older version of Billy as they too began the life-long process of re-evaluating their earlier deeds as an older man.

Thus, Billy Bishop Goes to War becomes a broader-themed discourse on age and memory and not just the high-speed life and death of the flyers who whilst they may well have been As Calm as The Ocean – an essential part of their slim hopes of survival – existed on a knife-edge of increasingly unlikely chance and possibilities.

Friends Ain't S'posed To Die, but sometimes, and often, they do… and the survivors spend the remainder of their lives haunted by guilt and, as in Billy’s case, trying to help younger men cope with yet more war.

Billy Bishop Goes to War is being presented by Proud Haddock in commemoration of the centenary of the Great War’s ending and as part of their War Season and Jermyn Street Theatre’s Rebels Season. 

Director Jimmy Walters described it as an inspiring story that is a privilege to revive and he stages it so well with two powerful performers who soon get you lost in the narrative, hanging on their words and imagining those incredibly fragile and brave young men, giving their all in service to country and Commonwealth… times have changed but not that much.

Billy plays until Saturday 24th November 2018 Monday – Saturday, 7.30pm Saturday matinees, 3.30pm  - tickets are available from the Box Office or Jermyn Street website.

IThankYou Rating: **** Hold your breath and hang on as your mind takes flight into dangerous skies. Not to be missed.

Poster featuring the actual Billy Bishop

Thee too… Measure for Measure, Donmar Warehouse

“…Dear Isabella,

I have a motion much imports your good;

Whereto if you'll a willing ear incline,

What's mine is yours and what is yours is mine.

So, bring us to our palace; where we'll show

What's yet behind, that's meet you all should know.”

To which Hayley Atwell’s Isabel turns to Duke Vincentio, and screams!

This was no ordinary Shakespeare and in taking such liberties with the text, was almost certainly not to the taste of many. Having no familiarity with the play, I was surprised – once again – about how the subject matter was so very now… almost as if, in the hands of a talented cast, the words find their true mark even in our contemporary minds, removed from their meaning by time and texting.

Measure for Measure is about justice and the casual ways in which access to the law can be traded for sexual favours: it’s a comedy but not really, this was a late-period play under a new monarch that opened the lid on the ways of the world be it legal, be it theatrical. Even Will may have had to turn a trick or two…

But, does this timeless tale of sexual give and take need much updating? The first half played things out in traditional period style with Hayley as Isabella fighting to save the life of her brother Claudio (Sule Rimi) who has been harshly sentenced to death for infidelity by Justice Frederick (Ben Allen) who has been placed in charge of legal judgement by Duke Vincentio (Nicholas Burns), who, for reasons of his owns, has opted to drop out of sight as a poor priest.

Nicholas Burns and Hayley Atwell

The Duke wants to see how things work without his wisdom and, sure enough soon finds Frederick being compromised by power as he suggests to the chaste Isabelle that the only way to save her brother is to sacrifice her honour to his lust. Now, hearing of this, the Duke/Priest hatches a plan to substitute the Justice’s former betrothed, Mariana (Helena Wilson), who willingly gives herself to the evil Fred in Isabella’s place, and the lecherous lawyer doesn’t even notice…

Now all of this will come to a head once the Duke reveals himself and there are neat Shakespearean ends all tied up as measure is swapped for measure but… are they? The ending of the play is left open and we never know if Isabella accepts the “reward” of the Duke’s love or, as here, throws it back in his face.

Now, this is where it gets troublesome as not only does Josie Rourke’s energetic production shift events forward to now, she re-runs the narrative only this time with a power-dressed Atwell as Justice Isabelle and Frederick as a meeker-than-Isabelle brother of Claudio. It works in part as Atwell is simply outstanding in both halves but, overall, it’s game over in that high-pressing opening hour with the cast overall far more convincing in their original setting.

Modern role reversal: Ben Allen and Hayley Atwell

You spend your time comparing before and after and whilst Sule Rimi is equally impressive and Matt Barock’s Lucio equally outrageous, the Duke and Frederick are a little lost in time. Isabelle is now the one with the power and I have to say that Atwell is most convincing in either role.

But, even before the trickery, the point is well made and that primal scream was powerful enough to have settled any play.

Overall a very enjoyable production but it was hard to reconcile the duality, however well-intentioned: I don’t feel that the view of the modern half added anything fundamentally dramatic to the story we had already watched.

IThankYouTheatre Rating: ***1/2 Ms Atwell is a player with huge charisma and stage power and I would, literally watch her in anything: she is magnetic.

Oh brother. Sule Rimi

Metamorphosis… Medusa, Jasmin Vardimon Company, Sadler's Wells

"A lot of people remember Medusa as a monster killed by Persius, but actually they don’t remember what made her become that monster…” Jasmin Vardimon

This is a highly-conceptual work full of remarkably innovative movement and narrative; it’s a Avant modern dance gig at Sadlers Wells and as such, a bit of an “away game” for me but I do at least have familiarity with the music which includes not only Sonny Bono, Handel and Grieg but also Ben Frost, Aphex Twin, Pharmakon, Mogwai and the mighty Silver Mount Zion who I've seen live many times.

This impressively eclectic range is used to accompany a retelling of the story of  Medusa, the jellyfish as well as the creature from Greek legend in a “story” that touches on the relationship not only between men and women but people and power.

More than that, there are so many themes interwoven in the narrative that it is impossible to not relate – pollution, male violence, women’s role in society, and the politics of now. There also so much deft and unusual choreography that you are immersed through concern for the performers’ safety as much as in wonder at the powerful precision with which they work.

One dancer waves a green lasso over her head and as it approaches each member of the company they have to fall away and push themselves across the stage as it compelled by a mystical blast. Then they must find they feet ready to repeat this move over and over again, with split seconds to spare… it is – appropriately enough – transfixing and one of the most impressive moments of human movement I’ve seen on stage.

The story opens as a lone dancer arises from huge folds of transparent plastic on the Sadlers Wells’ stage, she (Olga Clavel Gimeno – a sinuous presence throughout with a background in gymnastics before dance) clears paths through the plastic – the sea, the folds of jellyfish flesh, something more ectoplasmic? Then shapes shoot out from the central platform – is this a birthing? Then Olga is suddenly lifted up on the platform by a single male dancer – a stunning moment of strength and stage craft – my money’s on hunky Kieran Shannon as the lift in this instance.

The story is more thematic in the early stages, and characters start to emerge from the rest of the company notably Joshua Smith who, surprisingly, addresses the audience twice, the second time to try and explain – or should that be man-splain – Jean Paul Sartre’s text Being and Nothingness. This contends that it is the gaze of others upon ourselves that makes us realise that we exist as objects for others… the gaze of the Gorgon/Medusa.

There is also a quite remarkable sequence in which a man – Joshua - walks with his female shadow (I’m not sure who the dancer was – Silke Muys perhaps, apologies if I got the wrong one!), who, incredible is able to keep pace with his movement whilst rolling and pushing herself on the floor. She tries to get up at one point: to be on his level, but he eventually succeeds in knocking her down.

There’s also violence as the muscular Mr Shannon – whose long hair makes him look a little Norse – out-matches poor Joshua Smith. These physical struggles are so well worked and, as you can see from the picture of this interaction, require inch perfect rehearsal and athleticism.

Medusa is raped by Poseidon in the Temple of Athena who then, rather unreasonably, punishes the woman. Similarly mistreated are the invertebrate Medusas – the jellyfish – who after 650 million years are now been suffocated by plastic and man-made pollution… It’s not hard to spot who the real villain is here but there’s hope as even at the end, the forces of good – Athena (Patricia Hastewell Puig) resist.

In the cerebral melange of messages Vardimon has mixed together there is the philosophical question of “what to do” in a world of commodified everything… we need to transform ourselves and not get submerged and strangled in the everyday battles of ego and commerce. We need to work together as well as the Vardimon company and to clear the decks of the philosophical pollution as well as the all choking expansion of plastic.

The Guardian thought there was too much for one show but I have to say that it worked exceptionally well for me; after all isn’t there already “too much”? Away from the madness outside and in the comfortable seats, this was a chance to be slapped around the head and like it!  Which, broadly speaking, is the purpose of art is it not.

I must mention the rest of the line up as they were all outstanding:  Jasmine Orr, Andre Rebelo and the flame-haired Lucija Bozievic. Dance of this nature must be built up from the ground with fewer conventional steps; the mix of tumbling and even gymnastics must also take a long time to perfect: it was incredibly disciplined! Still Jasmin Vardimon has been doing thsi for twenty years and 

The run has now finished in the UK but I’m sure the show will be repeated just like the company’s Pinocchio which is returning to Sadlers Wells later in the year: not one to be missed!

Ithankyou Theatre Rating: **** Viscera, vital and violent, Medusa works on the heart as well as the head to leave you questioning and reeling.

Oh bondage? Up yours! People Like Us, Union Theatre

Brexit…it’s the first thing in ages that’s actually made me FEEL something. So BIG - yet so personal. Visceral, even… 

There were times when Julie Burchill and Jane Robins’ new play felt so dated, not just in June 2016 when most of the arguments seemed stuck but also an earlier time… The music played before the start and during the interval was Nouvelle Vague’s soppy Gallic-pop tribute to British post punk – those Europeans just can’t do it like The Clash man, and then we had a snatch of The Jam’s All Around the World.

One of the characters says that Brexit was the first time in years that she felt out of her comfort zone: yes, Brexit was punk… Hey kids lets put the show on right here even if Syd can’t play bass and Joe can’t really sing. Yeah, with a band made up of Dave, Mike, Bo and IDS we can get gigs and make a real go of it. Julie always loved a wind-up and the more outraged the reaction the better yet, whilst we live in the age of the incurably irritated, there's a real opportunity to explain how people on both sides think: this could be hilarious and it could be healing.

Paul Giddings, Sarah Toogood, Kamaal Hussain, Marine Andre and Gemma-Germaine (photo: Paul Nicholas Dyke)

The action takes place in an Islington book group because those people are just evil and ugly. Three old Oxford chums are the core of the group: Ralph (Kamaal Hussain) is a successful man with a second house and a second wife, Clemence (Marine Andre) who is much younger than him and very much French.  His old friend Stacey (Gemma Germaine) is the second core member of the group often outspoken and the sharpest tongued by far, she lives with the working-class Frances (Sarah Toogood) an out-spoken and passionate women – a clear believer in the truth. The final piece in the collegiate triumvirate is Will (Paul Giddings) a writer perpetually mid-book who is so far on the fence it’s a wonder he is able to reach down to his herbal tea and copy of The Guardian in the morning.

There’s plenty of peachy banter in the first half as the old friends rub up against each other in that way you do; forever certain that any offence will be brushed aside.

The problem soon emerges though that the Remainer three are not just flawed characters, but they’re caricatures. Ralph has a “Ginsberg is God” cushion, says things like “absolutely charment” and isn’t, actually, “adoringly pompous” as Stacey describes him. He’s dressed head to foot in Paul Smith (is that still a thing?) and has aimed for young and pretty in his choice of a replacement for his now divorced wife, Sarah, mother of his two, relatively young children (I mean, what a git, right?).

Britannia resurgent! (photo: Paul Nicholas Dyke)

His wife does not like his old friends, or more specifically Stacey and why would she, there’ no warmth extended her way and, like so many Europeans – don’t you find – she is controlling, humourless and narrowminded. Proof? She can’t even see that Patricia Highsmith’s The Talented Mr Ripley is a bad book, only worthy of being a graphic novel (they’re all bad too).

And Will? He’s a drip but at least he’s out campaigning for Remain, actually putting his time where his mouth is? Yes, but he hasn’t finished his book though has he? In fairness, Stacey has a great line about reading: “when I was a kid, reading was a way of signalling you wanted to be alone, now it’s a sign of how popular you are.” But that’s no reason to exit the Customs Union, surely?

Stacey wants to leave the EU as Brexit is the only thing that has made her “actually feel something” for a long time. For Frances, the issue is a “power-crazed attempt to create a European super state” and also fears of cultural dilution as she makes the suggestion of a book that covers Islam. This is not racism, just a problem with integration and moral alignment, as Stacey says: “what do we do when two virtues clash: female honesty and religious tolerance?”

Their next meeting will take place after the referendum and Ralph warns them that they will be glad their “boring friends” did the right thing by voting for the seemingly inevitable Remain win…

Celebration time: Sarah Toogood and Gemma-Germaine

Frances and Stacey are riding high on victory at the start of the second act as they relish a revolution of their own: “I haven’t voted in something I believed in for ages!”

It’s interesting now to see their celebrations but the play struggles with the counter arguments from the disappointed Remainers who trot out cliched riffs as they struggle on in denial and anger. I’m perfectly willing to say that some of their phrases may have come from my lips/keyboard but these three say them with hatred for the “deluded” leave voters and I honestly think a lot of people were and are genuinely concerned for their businesses and their standard of living.

Taking a punt on an unpredictable and exciting new spin of the wheel doesn’t sound that exciting when, two years of evidence and argument later, the business case for Brexit is quite clear: there isn’t one. And, if you’re poor, have special needs (like my son), old or unwell, Brexit will mean less support for a long, long time… there just won’t be the money. Brexit is austerity.

Losers plot revenge exclusion... Paul Giddings, Marine Andre, Kamaal Hussain (photo: Paul Nicholas Dyke)

So, hearing these old tropes about snobbishness, urban elites and the Working Class (who they?) protest votes sounds dated and doesn’t quite ring true.  Frances and Stacey are the only believable characters and you’re much more interested in what they have to say than the Remainer three, so it’s incredibly unbalanced as a debate. They are excluded from the book group - cast off as friends... and made to seem the victims of the democratic expression of their free will... but we don't get deep enough into the argument to really feel this.

There are, of course, many good lines and the cast all do a tremendous job with the material. I just don’t buy into enough of it: I’m not a member of a book group and I don’t live in the city anymore… and where I live voted strongly to Leave.

People Like Us plays at the Union Theatre until Saturday 20th October – the run is already sold out but contact the Box Office for returns and details of any newly-released tickets.

Ithankyou Rating: ** A missed opportunity to really dig into the national divide is missed in favour of shallow characterisation and cheap shots.

Bad education… The Lesson, The Hope Theatre

Every language is facts, it's only a matter of speaking it…

I prepared for The Lesson by learning nothing about Eugene Ionesco, I knew this play was going to be different and how important it is to the Hope’s Artistic Director Matthew Parker, but I didn’t want to cheat, I wanted to experience it all freshly cut. I wasn’t disappointed – even in my ignorance, my preconception was that this would be another piece of dynamic, jarring, theatre – and it surpassed my lazy assumptions by slicing through the fourth wall and imbedding itself in my mind even after a long working afternoon spent discussing data…

The play’s classroom turns out to be more like a torture chamber than anything else and it wrongfooted the audience who didn’t know whether to laugh or gasp; the main thing they had in common was an open mouth. Some were obviously familiar with the play and the style, but others were reacting with fresh-faced glee and/or horror.

I’ve never seen a funnier play about indoctrination, miss-communication and fascism but that’s damning The Lesson with faint praise. It’s a furiously-complex piece that operates on many levels all at the same time - all of them in your face.

Now I’ve read up on Ionesco and I understand that he wrote this in Post-War France for a first production 1951 and it has been in continuous performance ever since… it really is a play for today that shows just how quickly discourse turns sour and fatal decisions made based on ideas that suit rather than anything else.

Sheetal Kapoor

It begins with a Maid (Joan Potter) cleaning up the classroom of a Professor (Roger Alborough). The doorbell rings and a new Pupil arrives for her lesson (Sheetal Kapoor) with the Professor. The atmosphere is strange and yet here we have a perfectly ordinary scenario; a classroom, an exchange of knowledge what could be safer? What could be more normal?

In this World mademoiselle, one can never be sure of anything…

The Professor comes into the room and starts to assess his eager new pupil who seems as bright as a button! It’s absurdist with her answers to simple questions pleasing him no end as we sit thinking of course 1 + 1 equals 2… but we’re being set up and so skilfully as well. What we think we see is only a pretext for a deeper discourse on the nature of mutual understanding.

So, when the Pupil suddenly wrong-foots expectations by not being able to subtract 3 from 4 we have to readjust expectations and try to work out new rules for this game.

We struggle to see the logic – how can she not subtract? The Pupil seems only capable of learning through wrote; she has memorised the answers to billions of calculations without being able to work them out for herself… that’s brilliant but it’s also disturbing: what kind of society doesn’t allow for the imagination to deviate through creative processing?

The Pupil starts to get tooth ache – a manifestation of the shadow discourse twisting violently in the room. The Maid returns warning the Professor to avoid other subjects, appalled when he suggests philology: “the worst of all!”.

Toothache no barrier to learning...

Knowledge is a danger in itself but it’s the spaces between understanding that is most dangerous of all and the secret meanings you can only second guess unless you “fit”.

Pronunciation is itself, worth an entire dialect!

The tension between Pupil and Professor mounts along with the violence of his language and we look on in dread – what started off as highly formalised politeness has descended into something far more serious and theatrically wonderful!

This is another stunner from The Hope and I swear its playroom morphs like a Tardis in certain productions: I always remember the space differently based on the play. That’s down to ace direction from Artistic Director Matthew Parker along with sound design, lighting and set layout – take a bow Simon Arrowsmith, Chris McDonnell and Rachael Ryan who has the walls covered in chalked calculations; as if we’re the blackboard!

The performers grew larger than life in front of us as audience reality was distorted by the sheer intensity of Roger Alborough’s Professor as his madness proved malleable and self-normalising: we’ve seen so much of that recently haven’t we?

Sheetal Kapoor was the perfect pupil, polite and vulnerable in her conviction that learning would be the all she needed to do. Joan Potter’s cleaner was also relatable as she enabled, acquiesced and kept calm and carried on…

Joan Potter

IThankYou Rating: ***** 2+3 equals 5 as does 7-2 and 19+33. This small space above busy Highbury is transformed into a darkly magically-real else-world… The Man in the Upper Street Hope and Anchor.

The Lesson plays until 13^th October and tickets can be obtained from the Hope Box Office on and online.

Keep talking… Dust, Trafalgar Studios

"Suddenly it’s a lump of plastic and metal and not my best friend…”

After the play finished there was life still as the magnificent Milly Thomas stopped her ovation to point out that the play had been produced with the support of the Samaritans, a charity close to her heart and a vital resource for those for whom a conversation can make all the difference.  I was very glad that Milly spoke… relieved she broke the spell of her mesmerising performance and stepped through the forcefield of the fourth wall to connect with us. Really glad she was alright.

We’ve all varying experience of mental illness, there’s not a single family unaffected and we all recognise the symptoms based on our own lives or those we know. For some the thought of self-destruction is unimaginable but others have lived it, brothers, fathers, mothers or sisters absenting themselves because they could see no other way forward.

Milly’s play starts off with her character Alice coolly observing her dead body on the mortuary slab; she carries on almost as if alive, the same speech patterns and sense of humour you’d expect from any twenty-something Londoner.

For Milly the mortuary is just another part of experience and she reacts as anyone would to the look of the female mortician as she “judges” her for wearing a bra to her deathbed and the male for putting his hands where he shouldn’t.

Milly Thomas - all pictures courtesy of Richard Southgate

Her parents arrive, and she views them with well-worn diffidence, as both react exactly as she expects as it she’s just broken any of the dozens of petty rules governing the daily loving drudgery of family life.

But it’s early days and our dead girl will find that everything changes when you can no longer use your mobile or reach out to your friends. Also, once you’re passed away you find out who your friends really are… and your relatives too.

Alice’s afterlife is full of revelations as her parents act up – “this is better than the time Mum reversed up the motorway after missing the turn-off to Chessington World of Adventures…” and brother Rob self-medicates with coke as he “bottles” it all up. Posh Aunty Isobel arrives to take charge and relieve her little sister after Alice’s “selfishness” and relishes the role of “funeral planner”.

All parts are performed by Milly and her transitions are incredible not just across character but also emotion: it’s genuinely startling to see an actor running through walls at this incredible pace, a smile fully formed as tears still role down her face: this is exceptional expression.

“I can’t believe I stayed with you so long because I was frightened of being alone…”

There’s humour too and some wonderfully off-hand and graphic descriptions of her own and other sexual activities. Best friend Ellie – a successful barrister – is seen making love with her new man as she’s also pregnant; life has carried on without Alice even for the one she loved the most. Her ex-boyfriend Ben has moved on and not in an impressive way but, as Milly mimes Alice planning her suicide as Ben enters her from an awkward angle… you know they were never for the long term in any respect.

Alice is disconnected in death as much as she was in life only gradually breaking down when thinking of the last time her father picked her up – a moment she ruined after she dropped and broke her phone. The symptoms of her depression are revealed subtly and with poignance: her father picked her up again as she lay dead… in death she tastes emotion long denied even as physical experience is nulled (she cannot taste a Bakewell tart).

Milly makes us really care for Alice and we’re devastated all over again as she relives the moments of her suicide: it has to be this way, no blinking aloud.

Sara Joyce directs with clear intent and invention and uses three mirrors to enhance her actor's presence and to add to the dislocation. Lighting occassioanlly reveals the audience - all rapt and caught between a rythmn of laughter and concern.

Living or dying it's a very personal choice and Milly Thomas, I salute your bravery and skill in producing such intense revealing work. We left in near silence and the play stays with you as you walk to the tube and travel home; I doubt I’ll ever forget it and nor should I. It leaves your heart heavy just as your spirit is moved by the performer’s dexterity and it makes you want to make sure you do what you can while you can.

Dust plays at the Trafalgar Studios until 13^th October and tickets can be snagged off the website or Box Office.

IThankYou Theatre rating: ***** Deeply affecting, essential autumnal viewing. Please go and see it.

Dust is produced by award-winning production company Deus Ex Machina Productions and

partners with Samaritans to raise awareness of help available to those in need.

The Samaritans can be contacted toll-free on 116 123, email: jo@samaritans.org or via their website.

A dream of horses…. About Leo, Jermyn Street Theatre

Max Ernst desperately wanted to capture the essence of his lover Leonora Carrington but, all too often, she just wanted a cup of tea.

Alice Allemano’s first professional full-length play is remarkably composed and strikingly clear-headed. It juggles expectations about hero worship (for him and for her) and ends up being kind-hearted and inspiring in a universal way: one of the most holistic and wholly satisfying debuts you could expect to find.

About Leo was showing as part of the Jermyn Street Theatre’s Rebels season and is based on Alice’s own discovery of the free-spirited, ground-breaking and grounded artistic outsider following a visit to the Tate, Liverpool in 2015. Like Alice I had never heard of “Leo” before although I had heard of Max Ernst, her lover for three years and a major figure himself, so much so that Leo, if she was mentioned at all, was described his muse.

“I have never, in my life, for one moment, been anyone’s muse. I was too busy rebelling against my family and learning to be an artist.” 

Artistic balance? Nigel Whitmey and Phoebe Pryce

As with other artistic relationships, one thinks of Suzanne Valadon and Degas (not to mention Eric Satie) or Lizzie Siddal and Dante Rossetti, the inspiration flowed both ways and the balance of ability was not always male-dominated.

This is spectacularly the case for Leonora who became one of the most significant artists in Mexico and hugely successful in other ways too, finding her own way on her own terms; free not only of her father’s controlling instincts and her upper-middle class programming but also any need to be regarded as an artistic appendage to a man, even one as talented as Max Ernst.

With deft direction from Michael Oakley, Allemano’s play is superbly interpreted by a strong cast featuring Eleanor Wyld as young journalist Eliza Prentice who, perhaps, acts as the author’s voice. Eleanor is a woman in search of confidence and direction and arrives unannounced in Mexico to find out more about the now aged artist: almost unknown in Britain: her chance for a first feature… in a professional life constrained by expectation and the cost of living.

Susan Tracy plays this Leo whilst Phoebe Pryce plays the younger and both are well cast: Phoebe even looks like a younger Leo whilst Susan Tracy oozes life-experience and wisdom even if it is filtered through copious amounts of tequila. The two ages of Leo sometimes overlap as the story flicks from “now” (Carrington passed in 2011) to 1939 just as the War started and the young artist’s life with her lover is about to change for ever.

Eleanor Wyld and Susan Tracy

Nigel Whitmey is an intense Max Ernst, full of male single-minded drive and involved in an ongoing struggle to “capture” the perfect picture of the woman he loves so passionately. The interplay between the two is playful and yet so earnest (no demi-pun intended) – they’re not in competition but their methodologies and philosophy rubs the against the other sparking human passions as well as artistic frustrations.

Leo tells Eliza: “I knew that I had met the greatest risk of my life and I fell… he radiated life” and yet, she still held back “you have to own your soul. It’s a disaster to hand it over to any man…”

Leo is driven by animalistic response and has always "heard" the sound of wild horses - she calls herself a horse and Mexico the land of horses - a metaphor for her artistic impulse, the speed of life, the need to be simply natural...

This is a force to be reckoned with and channelled. She resists being pigeon-holed as Ernst’s fellow surrealist, Andre Breton’s “Enlightened Child”; a woman unaware of her artistic power and direction… a “femme innocent”. I’m not sure of the full content of Breton’s statements but it’s clear Leo was every bit as “deliberate” about her work as any man and refused to be reduced to the level of an almost unconscious creator…

She also never missed her home country with it’s “labels” and found freedom even after what Eliza had naturally assumed would have been the end of the perfect creative union once Ernst was taken away by the German authorities after the invasion of France.

The answers are not that simple and yet neither are they sad, as Eliza drinks more and more of her host’s tequila she discovers the full, happy truth of a great talent fulfilled…

The moves from 1939 to 2010 are handled so smoothly and the delight is in seeing Loe start to interview her interviewer; pushing Eliza to listen to her own creative impulses and not give in to compromise so soon in her life… Art and the Artist can still inspire at any age.

I went with my daughter and she loved it to: she’s still at university, a few years younger than Eliza… but still with much to decide. Tonight, she found some new role models.

A tip of the hat too for Amy Mae, who's lighting created some unexpected depth and mood for the JST's performance area... almost mystical, I'd have to say!!

About Leo runs at the Jermyn Street Theatre until Saturday September 29. Tickets are available from the Box Office or online. Do not miss it!

IThankYouTheatre Rating: **** An amazingly balanced first play that will leave you questioned and questioning for days… Listen to your inner animus!

All photographs are from Bob Workman.