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.

Monsieur Shakespeare’s holiday… Much Ado About Nothing, Antic Disposition at Gray’s Inn Hall

The Antic Disposition theatre company meld William Shakespeare with the physical comedy of Jacques Tati, place the action in rural France at the end of the second world war and then perform in cathedrals with an Anglo-French cast who also sing and dance… It’s a winning formula and you wonder why no one has done it before! 

This marvellous, multi-tasked Much Ado was performed Gray’s Inn Hall, one of the few remaining original Shakespearean venues, where The Comedy of Errors was performed in 1594. 424 years later portraits of James II, Charles I and a bust of Winston Churchill looked down on the Hall transformed into a period French café, a bar at one end and tables and chairs laid out for the braver audience members as the performers ranged dangerously up and down and imaginary village square.

Directors Ben Horslen and John Riseboro saw the French comic-connection in the form of Dogberry, the play’s constable of the watch who has much in common with the officious, jobs-worth’s of Tati’s films and they also felt the physical comedy would help channel the original humour. This sounds brave, if not foolhardy in principle but the Bard can rest easily as they deftly weaved their way around the core text and re-energised what can be a slightly irritating storyline if not done well (sorry Bill!).

This was in no small part due to a truly vibrant cast who played their hearts out on another muggy evening in sunny London.

The Much Ado About Nothing company – Photo Scott Rylander

The play starts with the business of the café in the village of Messina as it’s clumsily-officious manager, Dogberry (Louis Bernard), “serves” the locals with the care-less help of his assistant… Mark them well for we will see them again later.

Then the real story begins as a troop of British soldiers is announced at the home of local dignitary Leonato (Chris Hespel). They are led by the victorious General Don Pedro (Theo Landey), an old friend, who has brought two of his officers, Claudio (Alexander Varey) and Benedick (Nicholas Osmond) along with his brother, Don John (Alfie Webster) who is, in all ways, a right bastard.

Claudio falls for Leonato’s daughter Hero (Floriane Anderson) as he must whilst his pal Benedick renews adversarial discourse with her cousin Beatrice (Chiraz Aich); the two relationships are almost the reverse and as one gets harder the other gets easier, giving the play an unusual but satisfying balance.

The two couples are played with conviction and you have to admire anyone who can convey Elizabethan meanings through complex verse but if you’re French it’s additionally impressive. Floriane Anderson positively glows as Hero, her dancer’s flow evident in the gracious poise with which she plays out her lines. Chiraz Aich is absolutely fierce as Beatrice spitting out venomous couplets at Benedick whilst in a blur of continuous motion; strutting with athletic menace and with a smile that can turn to sneer in an irritated instant.

Louis Bernard as Dogberry, Scott Brooks as Verges - Photo Scott Rylander

On the English side, Nicholas Osmond gives as good as he gets as Benedick… he has a very British face, think Colin Firth meets Edward Fox (circa 1969) and yet can also play the clarinet.  Not to be outdone, Alexander Varey is upstanding, for the most part as Hero’s hero Claudio and also performs a most remarkable impression of Norman Wisdom/Lee Evans as Georges, one of the local lad’s army under command of Dogberry.

Throughout there’s songs which serve the double purpose of advancing the plot and punctuating the drama. The main players are accordionist with attitude Scott Brooks, who plays Verges and Molly Miles who plays violin, sings and also the maid-servant Margaret… who will stay loyal to her mistress and still be abused by the evil characters around her.

Talking of which, Alfie Webster is marvellously malevolent as the aforementioned dastardly brother who hatches a plot with the Tommy Burgess’ Borachio – a foul nave who I’m sure is world’s away from the actor (who can also play guitar and sing so he must be alright). Between them they plan to drive a wedge through this new alliance of affection and a knife through the innocent heart of Hero…

Molly Miles, Tommy Burgess, Floriane Andersen, Alexander Varey in Much Ado About Nothing – photo Scott Rylander

Will they succeed, and will the ultimate heartbreak engulf those who have already endured far too much? The clue’s in the title and neither William of this company leave us in any danger of sustained misery.

The play ends with a rousing singalong and dance, the company and audience smiling at an evening’s energies well spent. Thus something did come from Nothing and the grand old Hall almost dipped it's ancient arches in architectural appreciation.

Much Ado… continues at Gray’s Inn Hall until 1^st September so you better be quick – tonight’s show was a sell out and rightly so. Tickets are availablefrom the Antic Disposition website.

Ithankyou Theatre rating: ***** It’s Shakespeare but not as we know it sir… C’est Tati mais pas comme on le sait monsieur!

Nicholas Osmond as Benedick, Chiraz Aich as Beatrice  – Photo Scott Rylander