East End Review

Tag: Stage

  • Hamlet – stage review: ‘ambitious, visually lavish and perfectly-pitched’

    Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet in the Barbican's production of the Shakespeare play. Photograph: Johan Persson
    Benedict Cumberbatch as Hamlet in the Barbican’s production of the Shakespeare play. Photograph: Johan Persson

    It may be the magnetic pull of its lead actor that made this the fastest-selling theatre show in UK history, but in the Barbican’s Hamlet Benedict Cumberbatch is just one of the heavy hitters in a knock-out production.

    Lyndsey Turner’s highly-anticipated (and already controversial) production of one of Shakespeare’s most often-performed plays is ambitious, visually lavish and perfectly-pitched. Ciaran Hinds’ Claudius, Anastasia Hille’s Gertrude, Jim Norton’s Polonius and Karl Johnson as the gravedigger are just some of the highlights in an ensemble that bring fresh humour, irony and energy to some of the most well-worn lines in the English language.

    They’re supported by yet another impressive set design from Es Devlin, whose extraordinary work you might recognise from previous London shows including The Master and Margarita (also at the Barbican), Chimerica and The Nether, all the way to Jay Z concerts. The music, a powerful part of the show, comes from renowned producer and composer Jon Hopkins, plus Luke Halls on video, Jane Cox on lighting and Christopher Shutt on sound. It’s an electric performance that chews you up and spits you out three hours later.

    The best thing about Benedict Cumberbatch in this role is that you don’t feel like you’re watching Benedict Cumberbatch. Despite reports his fans flew from as far as LA to queue for a chance of picking up tickets and his (now virally-shared) appeal to audiences not to film the performance, his celebrity doesn’t overshadow the play.

    Maybe it’s because he manages to stay relatively private in the public eye, which is something that made watching Jude Law in the same role quite distracting for example. Maybe it’s because the sheer scale of the production means it hangs less on its lead. At any rate he delivers a powerful, very human and at times hilarious performance in what many see as a milestone role in an actor’s career.

    Dressed in scruffy student clothes, sitting alone listening to Nature Boy on his record player as the play opens, he plays a very relatable Prince of Denmark, wrestling with the death of his father and sudden remarriage of his mother to his uncle Claudius. The uncle who killed his father and whom he will spend the rest of the play finding the resolve to take revenge upon.

    It’s an energetic performance, as Hamlet shapeshifts with agility from self-loathing despair to rage to comedy. His antic disposition, the method to his ‘madness’, is first manifest with him dressed as a toy soldier and marching on the banquet table. It’s very funny, hinging in many ways on the comic chemistry with Polonius, which is perfectly timed.

    During his many speeches there’s clever choreography and lighting to make it seem like the rest of a scene is carrying on in slow motion while he performs soliloquies in the spotlight, which means the play loses none of its momentum. His soliloquies have, of course, been at the centre of heated debate in theatreland over the past weeks.

    The play’s multiple re-writes and length (in full it’s four hours and 4,000 lines) mean most productions cut it down, making the text more than usually open to interpretation. Not too much though, it seems, with the production u-turning on its experiment with putting Hamlet’s famous “To be or not to be” soliloquy into Act 1.

    One of the biggest stars of the show has to be Es Devlin’s set. It takes advantage of the sheer size and scope of the Barbican’s performance space to house two-storey royal palace rooms at Elsinore in which the play opens. There are striking visualisations of the “unnatural” death of the rightful king and imagery of corruption that underpin the play, including entire blanched trees with dead white flowers hanging suspended upside-down over the new King’s banquet table and dead creepers choking the staircase.

    In the second act the entire stage scene is demolished, making Ophelia’s grief and unravelling wits all the more poignant as she treads barefoot in the smoking remains of the castle. Later the same rubble mountain landscape becomes a graveside during the ‘Alas, poor Yorick’ scene and a bleak battle camp as Fortinbras’ men march toward Elsinore. The use of video projection and lighting is particularly striking here, played out across Devlin’s epic designs.

    There are moments of breath-taking stagecraft, including the tumultuous close of Act 3 and the bloodbath of the fencing match that will see most remaining characters die. The last, especially, is a masterpiece of choreography and stagecraft that sees the cast swirling in a whirl of light and shadow as Hamlet finally avenges his father.

    A triumph all told.

    Hamlet is at The Barbican, Silk Street, EC2Y 8DS until 25 October

    hamlet-barbican.com

  • Bakkhai – stage review: Greek tragedy’s modern makeover

    Cast of Bakkhai. Photograph: Marc Brenner
    Cast of Bakkhai. Photograph: Marc Brenner

    Each time Dionysos appears on stage in the Almeida Theatre’s new production of the Bakkhai there is a crackle of electricity. A dangerous flash and fizz of escaped current that threatens to shock the nearest heathen into adoration.

    Ben Whishaw is the ethereal Dionysos, who states in his opening address “I intend to thrill you, Thebes.” Fresh off the boat, his mission is to convert Greece to his own brand of ecstatic worship just like he converted Asia before them.

    The only man that stands in his way is Pentheus, Thebes’ intolerant ruler. Played by Bertie Carvel with conservative restraint, Pentheus displays all of the ignorance and disregard of contemporary politicians in wanting to put down “this Bakkhic nonsense” with the minimum of fuss.

    But he doesn’t know what he is dealing with, and rapidly becomes the victim of his own gnawing curiosity.

    In keeping with the tradition of 400 BCE, three actors alternate through the main character roles, whilst a ten-strong female chorus support, cajole and critique their decisions in song, chant and lamentation.

    Anne Carson’s adaptation of Euripides’ classic text is clean, accessible and totally honest. Where there is no English translation for the original Greek, the character declares it.

    Dionysos admits he is known by a different name in every land he has conquered thus far, his mercurial essence impossible to capture definitively within the confines of language.

    In performance, the simplicity of Carson’s text has the power to both articulate huge emotions and sensations and equally be thrown away.

    Both Whishaw and Carvel play on the sarcasm and informality that characterises so much of contemporary conversation, Whishaw using language to wield great authority and depict puckish giddiness, to torment and to tease.

    Because the language is so plain, the audience tunes in on any glimmer of a double meaning. When Pentheus appeals to us – his courtiers – to support him in maintaining order in the land he governs, we giggle at his double entendres.

    Just as Dionysus would have us do, we corrupt his words for our own pleasure and turn all to sex.

    Pentheus condemns us for disobeying him, but as an audience of voyeurs we are already followers of Dionysos – vocal adherents of wine, ritual and song.

    The quiet control of the performances, the constant rhythm and the coldness of the lighting are what lend this production its eerie atmosphere.

    The Bakkhai themselves, instead of presenting their ecstasy and devotions through chaos, are uncannily still.

    Instilled with a deep sense of peace and joy, they show us what the satisfaction of true worship might look like. They positively glow with the smugness of the brainwashed, gleaming with evangelical self-satisfaction.

    As well as producing new productions of three major tragedies the theatre is presenting an extensive series of discussions, debates and readings interrogating the influence of Greeks on contemporary life.

    The Greek season at the Almeida promises to be impressively comprehensive. And Bakkhai is its magnificently sinister and supernatural centrepiece.

    Bakkhai is at the Almeida until 19 September.

    almeida.co.uk

  • Crossing Jerusalem: stage review – ‘We’re all the same stinking family!’

    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre
    Chris Spyrides in Crossing Jerusalem at Park Theatre. Photograph: Habie Schwarz

    “We’re all the same stinking family!” exclaims Sergei, attempting to diffuse an argument between an Arab and a Jew at a birthday party. In Julia Pascal’s 2002 play Crossing Jerusalem everybody is connected. Arabs, Jews and Christians hailing from countless corners of the world live cheek by jowl in one of the oldest cities in the world.

    Playing at the Park Theatre in Finsbury Park until the end of August, Crossing Jerusalem is set in the Israeli capital during the second Intifada, or Palestinian uprising, when buses and cafés were the frequent target of bombings. So the Kaufmann family is justifiably on edge.

    Head of the household is Varda, a headstrong, workaholic, Jewish mother, who deals in real estate. Trudy Weiss as the matriarch is almost manic with paranoia, absently flitting from thought to thought, briefly breaking her stream of consciousness to criticise her daughter’s dress sense and her own lack of a grandchild.

    Only when she is crossed do we feel the full intensity of her feeling. “This is our country. If it goes to hell then we’ll go with it,” she declares. All of the characters at some point make reference to how dire the situation is.

    Everybody seems to have a claim to the disputed territory, and nobody a solution. So trauma is passed down through the generations with no suggestion of peace in sight. The state of Israel being as young as it is, the provenance of the homes Varda sells is inevitably called into question. An Arab family lived in their home before them – a neat metaphor for the wider political context.

    The design by Claire Lyth and Ben Cowens is simple and effective, summoning the remorseless heat and intense sunlight on blinding, white stone. The play takes place over the course of 24 hours, highlighting a sense of the ephemeral. The citizens of Jerusalem are forced to live in the moment because tomorrow may never come.

    Although Pascal says she had to omit some of the ‘Jewish-isms’ in the play for fear they would not be understood, there is still much laughter of recognition in the audience and a handful of great punchlines too. In an inversion of the famous quote, Varda remarks that Israel’s problem is that it suffers from: “Too much history. Not enough geography”.

    There is strong support from the younger members of the cast too. Adi Lerer is full-blooded and live throughout, and Alistair Toovey is particularly impressive as the vengeful and naïve Sharif. Varda’s husband Sergei battles persistently to diffuse the tensions rife within his family. And if his jollity and bad jokes grate to begin with, they find their mark eventually, with Chris Spyrides showing us the tenderness behind the character’s apparently offhand remarks.

    Crossing Jerusalem is at the Park Theatre, Clifton Terrace, N4 3JP until 29 August

  • Beyond Caring – stage review: the shocking reality behind zero-hours contracts

    Photograph: Mark Douet
    Janet Etuk as Grace and Sean O’Callaghan as Phil in Beyond Caring. Photograph: Mark Douet

    During the pre-election ‘air battle’, zero-hour contracts were a hot topic. It is timely then that Beyond Caring, a play that peels back political rhetoric to reveal the realities of cleaners working in a meat factory with no fixed hours, has transferred from The Yard in Hackney Wick for a brief run at the National Theatre.

    Designed to encourage a flexible labour market, zero-hour contracts force workers to bend over backwards to meet the whims of an employer. If you are young and lucky enough not to fall ill or on hard times – you might survive. But those in Alexander Zeldin’s play are the vulnerable, the poor and the sick.

    The action follows three women taken on for a two-week job at a meat factory. They are bolshy Liverpudlian Becky (Victoria Moseley), timid Susan (Kristin Hutchinson) and Grace (Janet Etuk) who has had her disability benefit cut and has been passed fit for work despite having rheumatoid arthritis.

    They join Phil (Sean O’Callaghan) a gentle giant type who buries his head in detective fiction and is on a treasured permanent contract, and manager Ian (Luke Clarke).

    All the acting is strong but Clarke gives an especially good performance as Ian, the type of manager who thinks an extra 27p an hour and a university degree gives him the right to laud it over his subordinates with fascistic zeal.

    He calls team meetings after punishingly long shifts (“I’m not happy guys”), prevents Grace from taking medication and watches porn on his phone all the while spouting an infuriating jumble of self-help clichés and managerial jargon.

    Nothing happens, the days pass in a pattern of work and biscuit breaks. This lack of plot is consonant with the sense that there can be little progress for those forced to live in the immediate.

    We learn little of the characters’ backstories beyond hints at private tragedy but again this is a reflection on the nature of their work, for how can human connections be forged on such inconstant foundations?

    Tension builds as physical exhaustion and pent-up rage pushes the cleaners towards the edge. Grace’s muscles, pushed beyond their capability finally give in and she collapses over the huge concertina-shaped machine. Paste-grey water is sloshed frantically over stainless steel machines, but the stubborn smears of congealed sausage meat will not budge.

    The cleaners are presented as ‘invisibles’ (Ian says the staff party will give them a chance to mix with the ‘normal staff’) but 2.3 per cent of the UK’s workforce are on zero-hour contracts. The barman at your local gastropub is probably on one, as is the Sports Direct cashier who sells you a bundle of socks.

    What really shocks in this brutal piece of theatre is that legislation that values a business owner’s profit-motive over basic human rights has become so commonplace in modern Britain. Beyond Caring leaves the audience smarting – not just from the pungent smell of sanitiser but from the injustice of it all.

    Beyond Caring is at the National Theatre, South Bank, SE1 9PX until 23 May
    nationaltheatre.org.uk

  • Clarion – stage review: ‘filthy, dark, hilarious and utterly human’

    Greg Hicks as Morris Honeyspoon in Clarion. Photograph: Simon Annand
    Greg Hicks as Morris Honeyspoon in Clarion. Photograph: Simon Annand

    As Clarion – a deeply satirical look at Britain’s press from former tabloid journalist Mark Jagasia – opens at Dalston’s Arcola Theatre, one can’t help but compare it to the successful run of Great Britain in the West End. Where the former was a showy, colourful, big-budget production, Clarion is filthy, dark, hilarious and utterly human.

    The play is set in the offices of the Clarion, Britain’s worst newspaper. As the paper comes under fire for its questionable content, leaked to a rival from the inside, the barebones staff descend into hysteria. Some of theatre’s A-list take a turn on the stage here, delivering some devilishly crafted performances as typical tabloid journos.

    The first half of the opening act features jarring scene changes as the fade outs slice the action. It lacks subtly – though one feels that’s more about the direction than the script. It improves massively about an hour in, however; what starts out as over-exaggerated stereotyping morphs into a scathing, witty diatribe as the first act picks up tempo and charge.

    It’s probing, laden with expletives and with some cracking one-liners. Clare Higgins as long-standing columnist Verity Stokes carries the whole thing, her fading power driving her betrayal, while her editor Morris Honeyspoon, played with shocking acrimony by a remarkable Greg Hicks, is an old-school tyrant. He relentlessly picks on junior staff and vastly overestimates his own opinions, ignorance welded to self-belief.

    The staging is remarkably evocative of the exact environment the dialogue musters, despite the limited space, and there’s a palpable sense of unease that only intensifies as the story breaks. It seems as though the ‘traitor in our midst’ trope is very revealing of Jagasia’s role as whistle-blower through the very staging of this production. The severity of the attack is mitigated with raucous humour; the state of Britain scene is one of the funniest in the production, rousing rowdy applause from the audience.

    Clarion isn’t dislikeable because it’s a poor production, but because it’s unpleasant to watch – the characters are utterly morally and socially reprehensible, throwing out the question of how deeply we’re manipulated by our own press. Jagasia and Ergen have done a magnificent job in bringing this issue to light; it’s not just satire, it’s a damning reflection of the state of British press and politics. With such an accurate rendering of our reality, it feels wrong to laugh, but as witness to a play of this quality, you won’t be able to help it.

    Clarion is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 16 May.
    arcolatheatre.com

  • Politrix – stage review: disillusioned youth and Westminster politics

    Photograph: Catherine Ashmore
    Wendy (Nadége René) in Politrix. Photograph: Catherine Ashmore

    In the Big House Theatre’s latest play Politrix, the embers of the London riots are still glowing.

    This punchy piece of theatre, directed by Maggie Norris, explores the widening gulf between the halls of parliament and a swathe of inner-city youth once branded a “feral underclass” by its members.

    With the exception of Ben Lambert who plays Conservative politician CJ, all the cast members are part of Big House Theatre’s 12-week drama programme aimed at getting care leavers from the ages of 18-23 involved in theatre.

    The plot follows a Tory MP dragging a group of six young people on a whistlestop Westminster tour. Verbatim recordings of the cast’s own trip to the House of Commons are woven into Ben Musgrave’s script, making their voices audible above the legislators that claim to speak for them.

    Determined to use the occasion to her advantage, Monroe (Camilla Ferdinand) asks CJ for help in getting her brother out of prison where he was sent for being present at the scene of a gang murder – a joint enterprise conviction.

    He dithers before declining. “You saw me come in here with my bag of dog-eared papers and you thought: fuck”, she accuses him scornfully.

    For Monroe’s friends, the environment of pomp and privilege is oppressive, and the halls of power morph into a dystopian house of horrors.

    An ashen-faced Margaret Thatcher (another turn for Lambert, now in drag) rises from the dead and attacks Leo (Shane Cameron) and Wendy (Nadège René) for being a product of the ‘something for nothing’ culture of the welfare state.

    Soldiers march past and security guards perform the rituals of stop and search. Authority is everywhere they turn. Respite is found in the chapel where kindred spirits lurk, suffragettes and revolutionaries, whose tales help to soothe the young friends’ jangled nerves.

    With its concrete floors and high ceiling, the all-new Hackney Showroom is an ambitious space and the acoustics are tricky to control – ironic in a play about the struggles of being heard.

    But the cast rises to the challenge and it would be hard to pick out a standout performance from the wealth of fresh young talent on display. From the entertaining Fizz (Auzelina Pinto) to the angry K (Moses Gomes-Santos), each character has formidable presence.

    After the play I ask 22-year-old Kieran Roach, who gives an affecting performance as the quiet Rico, about the anger that runs throughout the piece. “It’s not anger, it’s frustration,” he gently corrects me, “frustration that we are not being listened to”.

    Politrix gives a voice to those who were the collateral of the 2011 chaos. For politicians puzzling over how to build bridges with Britain’s youth it should be compulsory viewing.

    Politrix is at Hackney Showroom, Hackney Downs Studios, Amhurst Terrace, E8 2BT until 11 April.

    hackneyshowroom.com

  • Philip Ridley: ‘You cannot predict what’s going to cause outrage’

    Happy family: Sean Verey and Gemma Whelan to star in Radiant Vermin at Soho theatre. Photograph: Anna Soderblom
    Sean Verey and Gemma Whelan star in Radiant Vermin at Soho theatre. Photograph: Anna Soderblom

    Philip Ridley is not an artist who aims to please. For over two decades he has been writing plays lauded for their lyricism yet reviled for their subject matter. An East End gangster tortured by a gang of girls, child murder, characters who eat cockroaches – nothing is off limits. So the choice of housing as the subject of his latest play, Radiant Vermin, seems comparatively tame. What could be controversial about that?

    The play, which opens this month at Soho Theatre, is a comic satire about a young couple desperate to buy a house, and the lengths they are prepared to go to make their home ownership dreams a reality. What those lengths are, one shudders to speculate.

    “It’s more an exploration of capitalism and consumerism, that we’re never satisfied in the West and are endlessly wanting to buy buy buy,” explains Ridley amiably over the phone. “So this young couple manage to get the offer of a house, but then you’ve got to furnish it and then you’ve got a baby on the way.”

    Moving house ‘trauma’

    Now 50, Ridley has a long and varied CV. Radiant Vermin is his 11th stage play for adults. He is also a successful filmmaker, a children’s author and visual artist. His plays are usually set or inspired by East London, where most of them were written. Born and raised in Bethnal Green, Ridley lived in the same flat on Temple Street for most of his life. When he decided to move out last year, mid-housing boom, the trauma of the experience sparked the idea that became Radiant Vermin.

    “It’s was like going to war,” he recalls, “this maelstrom of estate agents and solicitors and surveyors. But out of it came an idea of what might happen if someone was offered a process of buying a house that was easier than what I had gone through.”

    The experience made Ridley sit up to what was happening to his beloved Bethnal Green. Needing more space so he could start painting again, he found he could not afford the area where he grew up, where all his family had lived, a place he describes as being “in my bloodstream”.

    “No one who wants to move out of a local area in East London can afford to stay in that area. And there’s this thing now where you’ve got places with a ten-foot-high iron gate around them, because they are right next door to a council estate where people have got nothing. It reminds me of Hollywood, where you’ve got huge film stars living in villas, and then you go two streets away and you’ve got slums – and that’s an explosion waiting to happen.”

    Shock tactics

    Whether Radiant Vermin, in its own way, causes an explosion, remains to be seen – though it wouldn’t be the first time. The words ’cause celebre’ have been used to describe Ridley’s work more than most, ever since a charcoal drawing he made as a student, of a man ejaculating a black bird, sent minor shock waves through the art establishment when it was shown at the ICA. Ridley knows the charge sheet well. His third play, Ghost from a Perfect Place, includes a scene where an old gangster is tortured with lighted cigarettes by a girl gang. The Guardian‘s Michael Billington described it as “degrading and quasi-pornographic”. Then there’s Mercury Fur, most controversial of all, a play denounced as “poisonous” by the Daily Telegraph, in which a child is sadistically murdered for entertainment. But the accusation that Ridley is out to shock is something he has always denied.

    “If something ends up being shocking it’s because it’s come out of being real. You cannot predict what’s going to cause outrage with an audience. This idea that it can be contrived … that’s not the way the artistic process works. It’s like dreaming. I sit down and I dream the next play. I’m not in control of it in that sense. And then it receives another life when people start to talk about it.”

    While Ridley is at the stage now of being more revered than reviled, it is interesting to look back at the vehemence of his detractors. The fevered response to Mercury Fur saw one critic accuse Ridley of being “turned on by his own sick fantasies”, and in 2010, his play Moonfleece, about the rise of the BNP, was banned by Dudley Council. But Ridley argues this says more about how we view theatre, than about his particular brand of it.

    “No one goes around saying Cronenberg is a sick human being, or that Tarantino wants to go out and kill someone, you know? In every other art form there’s not that link made, but in theatre there’s still an echo of that Victorian moral values thing, that it should be edifying, a medicine that people are taking. There’s still a patrician sort of etiquette that hangs over it, almost like the subject matter dictates what the thing is.”

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    Philip Ridley: “No one goes around saying Cronenberg is sick, or that Tarantino want to go out and kill someone”

    Ridley points to the double standards applied to the classic plays. In King Lear, a man’s eyes are pulled out; in Medea a woman eats her own children. Their standing is never questioned, we stress their continuing relevance. Yet Ridley’s plays, for claiming to represent the present day, seem more dangerous.

    “You sit through a play like Mercury Fur and people say this could never happen, and of course we’ve been through times where that has now happened. No artist wants to die with it written on their tombstone that he or she pleased the critics. I mean that’s the least of my ambitions really.”

    Solitary child

    Ridley’s determination to stick out may, psychologically, stem from his childhood, which was dominated by chronic asthma, a condition that was not easily treated at the time. He missed a lot of school, and was in and out of hospital and in oxygen tents until he was 13.

    “As a result I was a very solitary child. I didn’t really have any friends so that meant that I was sitting up in bed, reading and writing. My interior life had to become my company, because I had no peers of my own. I grew up conversing with adults more than I conversed with other children.”

    When Ridley did finally go to school, he was the weird one, a boy who didn’t know how to have a conversation with children his own age. They called him ‘Alien’, and looking back, he says, he can see he was in a very “down state”. Nevertheless, he was high achieving, and when the time came he faced a 50-50 decision of studying English Literature or Art at university. He chose art.

    “Going to art school saved me really. St Martin’s at the time was such a thrilling place to be, it was a very exciting, dynamic place. I knew I could always read books and study books, but I couldn’t always get into a lithographic studio or an etching studio and have access to models to paint.”

    All rounder

    Inevitably, our conversation turns to being a multi-disciplinary artist. As a playwright, Ridley is credited with kicking off In Yer Face theatre, as a visual artist he’s up there with the YBAs. Which is not to mention filmmaking and fiction writing. And song-writing. It’s a subject that fascinates journalists, though Ridley less so.

    “It seems to be something that either bothers or interests people more than it does me, he says. “In its most simplistic sense I’m just telling stories. If I think of a story and see two people talking to each other then it’s obviously a stage play. If I think of a story and its images are moving, and there’s not much dialogue then that’s usually a film. If I think of a story and it’s a sequence of images, then that’s either a photograph or a painting. For me they’re not different things at all, they’re all part of the same mountain but just different peaks at the top.”

    Lack of affordable housing is a defining feature of our times, especially in East London. Bearing this context in mind, is Radiant Vermin a state of the nation – or state of East London – play? “That’s not for me to say,” he responds coyly. Ridley’s modesty and refusal to look too deeply into the creative process appear to be characteristic traits. Once in an interview he said he admired artists who had a “signature style”, such as Alfred Hitchcock. How would he describe his own signature style?

    “I don’t think I have one,” he responds. “Other people tell me I have but I’m not aware of it, and I think that’s right. I don’t want to go into writing the next stage play knowing I’m writing the next play by me. I just want to see where it takes me. It’s the duty of every artist to assassinate themselves every now and then. You’ve just got to kill everything and start all over really.”

    Radiant Vermin is at Soho Theatre, 21 Dean Street, W1D 3NE from 10 March– 12 April
    sohotheatre.com

  • Antigone – stage review: new script makes for slanging mismatch

    Frieda Thiel and Savannah Gordon-Liburd in Roy Williams' Antigone. Photograph: Robert Day
    Frieda Thiel and Savannah Gordon-Liburd in Roy Williams’ Antigone. Photograph: Robert Day

    In Roy Williams’ modern day Thebes, women are only ever referred to in the basest of terms. They are bitches, skets, yats and skanks. Antigone, powerfully played by Hackney actress Savannah Gordon-Liburd, is herself frequently described as ‘the inbred’, thanks to her Oedipal parentage.

    She works in a grubby nightclub owned by her sharp-suited uncle, the self-styled king of the underworld Creo, played ferociously by former Eastenders actor Mark Monero.

    Although we never discover exactly what her position of employment entails, it is understood that both ‘Tig’ and her sister Esme (Frieda Thiel), a cleaner at the venue, should be grateful for the work.

    This is the landscape of the play. A culture deeply opposed to women that is ripe for an overhaul. In the original Greek text, what follows is a challenge to that dominance by the most unlikely of heroes. A person who, with incredible determination and courage pierces the very heart of the prevailing system of power, prejudice and inequality.   

    But what Williams’ adaptation gives us is merely the continuation of that system. Facing constant derision on the grounds of her gender, and with her protestations falling on deaf ears, Antigone has no agency with which to challenge her uncle’s will.

    Making Creo such an out-and-out bad guy (he wouldn’t be out of place in a James Bond movie) proves a disservice to the complex characterisation of Sophocles’ play. Once Creo condemns Tig and sentences her to death, he proceeds to sadistically keep her alive, apparently for days, whilst he endlessly insults her and repeatedly reiterates her fate.

    Though the idiomatic script is raw and pacey, it is a shame that this seminal dramatic work needs translating into street slang to make it relevant to a contemporary audience.

    Likewise, that it was thought that the best way to appeal to the East London public was through the prism of violence and gang culture, is problematic in the least.

    Antigone, Theatre Royal Stratford East, Gerry Raffles Square, E15 1BN until 14 March.
    stratfordeast.com

  • The Mikvah Project – stage review: ‘dissecting stereotypes and clichés’

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    Oliver Coppersmith and Jonah Russell as Eitan and Avi in The Mikvah Project. Photograph: Mark Douet

    The stage is a swimming pool, or more precisely, a mikvah, a type of bath used in Judaism for ritual immersion. The leads are Eitan (Oliver Coppersmith) and Avi (Jonah Russell), two young Jewish men discovering what it means to find and hold on to love. This brave and sexually-charged play from writer Josh Azouz and director Jay Miller, now at The Yard Theatre in Hackney Wick, is quite the spectacle.

    Eitan is 17, navigating his way through hormone-ridden teenage years, and arriving at the conclusion that he’s fallen in love with Avi, a 35-year-old married man who’s trying for a baby. They meet at the mikvah to be spiritually cleansed, but it soon becomes clear they’re only there for each other.
    Lighting makes effective use of the space in the theatre, the rippling water casting an eerie reflection on the corrugated iron ceiling. There’s a bravery in the staging and the physicality that transcends the small space, and brings the audience right into the mix.

    Clever interplay between the two vastly different personalities makes for a highly enjoyable exchange of dialogue and the heavy weight of things unspoken. As Avi says, love is “all types of silence”. Wonderful casting really elevates this production from fringe theatre to a piece that could happily sit in the National Theatre.

    Utterly immersive from the outset, the play dissects stereotypes and clichés – both of men and of Jewish culture. It meanders along a relationship between age, experience, longing, desire, admiration and duty, blending startling music with clever dialogue. It’s surprisingly frank and funny, focusing on young male anxieties. Eitan is eager and carefree, Avi has an obligation to his wife – there are very human exchanges of power and control as the two men try to find a place in which they’re happy.

    Exploring the boundaries of desire, fantasy and sexuality, and informed by today’s Jewish culture at every turn, The Mikvah Project is a must-see production in the heart of Hackney Wick. Erotic, emotional, extraordinary.

    The Mikvah Project is at The Yard Theatre, Unit 2a Queen’s Yard, E9 5EN until 21 March
    theyardtheatre.co.uk

  • Happy Ending at the Arcola – stage review

    Happy Ending
    Cast of Happy Ending

    First things first, Happy Ending isn’t, strictly speaking, a musical. Yes, the characters express themselves through song, but arguably not consistently enough to warrant that definition. With the first half containing only two numbers, in this case what the term ‘musical’ refers to is the tone – light, funny and easy going.

    Carrie Evans, a revered theatre actor has cancer. On her first day of chemotherapy she is introduced to three fellow female patients, each with their own quirky ways of dealing with the unmentionable disease. For all her grace and elegance however, Carrie seems to be the one suffering the most, not willing or able to accept her fate like the others. The fate she denies is not death, but the gradual degradation that years of treatment will undoubtedly bring about.

    Clean, white, and impersonal, the set looks excellent in the space, and the supporting cast fizz with all the necessary vigour. The dialogue is clear and fast-paced throughout, skimming merrily across the surface of a rather more complex debate than can be explored in this form, but the show is nevertheless diverting and light-hearted.

    The second half gets into the meat of the argument, which is largely defined by a conversation over who should decide whether Carrie sticks with the treatment or not as Carrie appeals to the doctor’s humanity and the doctor refers her to the law and the Hippocratic oath.

    Execution and sentimentality take precedence over depth and moral complexity here but Happy Ending succeeds in fulfilling the author’s promises in the programme notes about it being a “musical-comical fantasy about a subject that people don’t talk about”.

    Happy Ending is at Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin Street, E8 3DL until 7 March
    arcolatheatre.com