Catherine Love-Smith

Upper Cut, Southwark Playhouse

Posted on February 9, 2015February 20, 2015 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

How do you make politics – or any sphere, for that matter – representative of the population? Do you focus on creating opportunities for minorities? Do you hope that the success of the few will simply inspire the many? Or do you positively discriminate, bringing in quotas and limiting application processes?

There’s also another, specifically theatrical question about representation. In staging just such a debate as the one started above, within the specific context of black representation in British politics, Juliet Gilkes Romero runs into a problem. Factual accuracy and clarity of argument, so important in any other attempt to tell a neglected history, often come at the expense of dramatic dynamism. All exposition and no action rarely makes for compelling theatre.

The difficulty is, there’s a hell of a lot of background to cover before Upper Cut can even begin to land its blows. Gilkes Romero’s play is about the struggle for black MPs in the Labour movement, a battle that threatened to split the already embattled party in the 1980s, and which for that very reason was sidelined in the attempt to get elected under leader Neil Kinnock. Subsequently, the account of that struggle and the Black Sections movement that initiated it has itself been marginalised in the telling of recent British political history. Gilkes Romero’s play is an attempt to remedy that.

Upper Cut goes about addressing this history in reverse, beginning on the eve of Barack Obama’s re-election in 2012 – a handy springboard for discussing how far (or not) we’ve come in terms of representation – and gradually rewinding back to 1986. The arguments in question are dramatised through black activists Michael (Akemnji Ndifornyen) and Karen (Emma Dennis-Edwards); the former, when we first meet him, has gone on to become a career politician and deputy Labour leader thanks to his willingness to compromise, while the latter’s staunch dedication to racial equality has seen her pushed out by the party. Acting as both supporter and antagonist is Labour strategist Barry (Andrew Scarborough), who is more interested in the health of the party than he is in its racial make-up.

Gilkes Romero’s play never makes the mistake of being as simple as black and white, but neither do its varying shades of grey wholly convince. After becoming involved with Black Sections at the same time, Michael and Karen each experience a change of heart – if in different directions – but we are never given enough emotional insight to fully appreciate the weight of these tough political decisions. The suspicion is that these reversals serve the debate rather than the characters, whose motivations are murky at best. Gilkes Romero’s main concession to drama, meanwhile, is a sharp-edged love triangle between its three characters, which does little to animate either the human or the political.

Directing this dramatised editorial, Lotte Wakeham does little to raise the emotional stakes. In a nod to the play’s boxing metaphor, Rachel Stone’s minimal, cardboard box dominated set puts the actors on a raised stage for the duration, but little else about the production gets close to capturing the visceral cut and thrust of the boxing ring or the political arena. The rawness of betrayal and the sting of compromise are never fully felt; there’s plenty of fight, but Upper Cut fails to quite make contact.

Photo: Bob Workman.

The Chronicles of Kalki, Gate Theatre

Posted on February 9, 2015February 16, 2015 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

If God did not exist, according to the well-worn Voltaire quote, it would be necessary to invent him. Deities – real or imagined – are at the heart of Aditi Brennan Kapil’s play, which takes Voltaire’s statement as a starting point of sorts. In today’s world, what need have we for divine beings?

Told in flashback, Kapil’s plot also borrows from the good old dramatic tradition of the newly arrived outsider. Kalki turns up, swift and unexpected as the rainstorm that accompanies her, right in the middle of a religious studies class. Just as rapidly, she befriends two bickering schoolgirls – known only as “Meat” and “Betty”, the nicknames Kalki christens them with – and throws their lives into temporary, gleeful chaos. Then, like the rain, she evaporates. The only difference with this new girl is that she might just be the 10th incarnation of the Hindu god Vishnu.

All this is revealed in snatches, as Kalki’s best friends are questioned by a cop apparently on the hunt for the mysterious girl-cum-god. It’s a play – and a production from Alex Brown – that peels itself back bit by bit. Not given to brevity, Angela Terence and Jordan Loughran’s evasive classmates slowly flesh out their fleeting acquaintance with Kalki, from house parties to cinema trips to schoolyard spats. The drab, bureaucratic surroundings of Madeleine Girling’s set are repeatedly and startlingly split open, as coloured lights usher in Kalki’s dazzling presence.

The teasingly unravelled narrative drops frequent – and not too subtle – hints about the identity of its elusive protagonist. But Kapil’s vision of this final avatar of Vishnu, foretold to destroy all evil at the end of time, seems just as indebted to the comics read eagerly by Kalki’s companions as it is to Hindu scripture. Instead of arriving on a white horse, this harbinger of the apocalypse is an arse-kicking bad girl in ripped jeans and heavy eyeliner – the daydream alter ego, in other words, of every bored and bullied teenage girl.

Ultimately, Kapil’s play feels less about religion and more about the visceral, life-and-death experience of being a teenager, when every day might herald the end of the world. The supposedly life-shattering cosmic force that is Kalki is less vivid than the brutality and asphalt of the school playground. For “Meat” and “Betty”, both cruelly spurned by the cool kids, school is nothing less than a battlefield. Who wouldn’t want a god on their side in that relentless war?

Terence and Loughran make brilliantly believable teenagers, each an endearing mess of bravado, hormones and vulnerability. The problem is that alongside their all-too-earthly confusion, Amrita Acharia’s Kalki comes across as a flat if shimmering mirage of a girl. Not quite human, not quite divine, neither Brown’s production nor Acharia’s performance seems fully convinced by this immortal trickster. Just what are we supposed to make of Kapil’s creation?

The answer never quite arrives. Just as Voltaire’s words hang in the air, so too does the unexplained significance of Kalki’s sudden appearance. Kapil’s play has a certain appealing strangeness – how often do you see teenage angst bumped up against visiting gods? – but its extended riff on fantasy, religion and adolescence fades as quickly and enigmatically as its protagonist.

Photo: Helen Murray.

The Talented Mr Ripley, New Diorama Theatre

Posted on February 9, 2015February 16, 2015 by Catherine Love-Smith

Originally written for Exeunt.

All the best monsters are consummate performers. Think Shakespeare’s Richard III, stylishly murdering his way to the throne, or the deadly flair of Goldberg inThe Birthday Party. Tom Ripley, the brilliant sociopath created by Patricia Highsmith 60 years ago, is no different. He lives or dies on his ability to impersonate, relying on his quick-thinking skill as a performer to quite literally get away with murder.

The Talented Mr Ripley, then, makes for compelling stage material. Tom is essentially a showman, if an awkwardly intense one. We first meet him in a New York bar, head twisting over his shoulder, convinced he’s being watched. It turns out he is, but not by who he expected. Instead, a wealthy businessman offers to pay Tom to bring his son Dickie home from Italy, where he’s run away on an extended European jaunt. Snatching at the opportunity, Tom soon finds himself in idyllic Mongibello, where jealous obsession with charming, carefree Dickie (an effortlessly suave Adam Howden) turns an increasingly murderous shade of green.

The Faction and director Mark Leipacher have wisely fastened on the narrative’s more performative qualities in their new adaptation. Tom, played with fidgeting intensity by Christopher Hughes, is forever trying on new roles, testing a new sweep of the hair or trick of the tongue. We are first of allhis audience, the crowd of attentive eyeballs that he fears and desires in equal measure. The more immersed Tom becomes in his performance, adopting Dickie’s identity bit by bit, the more he revels in the display. As an actor thirsts for the adrenaline rush of the stage, Tom is hooked on pretending.

This emphasis also lends a distanced, theatrical gloss to the protagonist’s cool and unrepentant acts of violence. To him, as to us, the murders he carries out are little more than dramatic punctuation marks. In one intriguing but slightly clumsy device, Leipacher repeatedly positions Tom as the star of his own (presumably imagined) movie, cutting and reshooting crucial sequences in his trajectory. While jarring, it hints economically at Tom’s emotional dislocation from reality; a brutal murder might as well be a thrilling plot twist.

The language of economy is one that characterises The Faction’s storytelling. Their streamlined version of Highsmith’s novel is loathe to waste so much as a second, rattling over the plot’s terrain at sometimes breakneck speed. The upside is that we move at the same pace as Tom’s nervously frenetic mind, seeing the world through his rapidly blinking eyes. Such furious velocity, however, also makes it easy to miss things. Peripheral characters zoom past and the kaleidoscope of European cities in the second half becomes a dizzy haze.

But for those familiar with the often adapted tale, The Faction offer an engaging enough take on this durable material. As ever, the ensemble manage to do a lot with a little, transforming the stylish, stripped back design – just a raised white rectangle, supplemented by Christopher Withers’ evocative shafts of light – into countless different settings. It’s when the focus is on storytelling rather than speed, though, that The Talented Mr Ripley is most absorbing.

Photo: Richard Davenport.

The Diary of a Nobody, King’s Head Theatre

Posted on January 30, 2015February 9, 2015 by Catherine Love-Smith

Hilarity is often found in the banal. How else do you explain the enduring popularity of observational comedy? We enjoy seeing unremarkable aspects of everyday life served up in surprising ways, happily feasting on our own foibles. Be it down to familiarity, reassurance or a fleeting sense of community through habit, the commonplace is a tried and tested route to the funny bone.

There’s a delicate balance, though. Make too mundane an observation and the joke falls flat. Push it too far, on the other hand, and it feels strained. Rough Haired Pointer’s adaptation of The Diary of a Nobody – its attention to the ordinary signalled right there in its title – is in danger of succumbing to the latter.

I admit I’ve not read George and Weddon Grossmith’s original comic serial, but fans seem to locate its humour in the small details of protagonist Charles Pooter’s very human flaws and misfortunes. In director Mary Franklin’s adaptation, these are all crammed into less than two hours, covering several months of the diarist’s humdrum life. Blind to his own pomposity, City clerk Pooter records each last trial and tribulation in his plodding journal, from his son’s irresponsibility to invariably disastrous social engagements. What should tickle is the routine and the minute.

In search of belly laughs over quiet chuckles, Rough Haired Pointer instead choose to inflate the small absurdities of Pooter’s day to day existence. Gently ironic humour takes a back seat to frenetic, non-stop slapstick and meta-theatrical japes. It’s not enough to giggle at Pooter’s self-important delight in another of his terrible puns; a laugh is seemingly not a laugh unless it’s amplified by someone simultaneously falling over a chair and addressing a member of the audience. It all smacks of trying just a bit too hard.

It’s a shame, as there are touches of real ingenuity buried somewhere beneath the relentless gags. Karina Nakaninsky’s design, adapted by Christopher Hone for this revival, is a (mostly) monochrome delight, nodding admiringly to Weedon Grossmith’s original illustrations. And when the action slows down for a moment, it finds time for genuine wit, most inventively in Franklin’s solution to several pages being ripped from Pooter’s diary. The ensemble play a tune while the lost months roll past on placards behind them, varying shades of leaves tumbling down gently on their heads.

Much of the time, though, this adaptation is so busy trying to be clever that it steamrollers its own intelligence. Quips race past before they have time to register; one laugh is still landing when the next follows fast behind, all progressively diminishing in both volume and enthusiasm as they pile up. The all-male cast of four do their best to maintain the pace, but it can’t help but be a bit breathless. This is theatre as treadmill: constantly running, never really getting anywhere.

Photo: Rocco Redondo.

The Changeling, Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

Posted on January 21, 2015February 16, 2015 by Catherine Love-Smith

Putting on a play at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is the architectural equivalent of heartthrob casting. Forget what’s actually happening on stage; it’s an effort of supreme will just to stop perving on the carpentry and the detail and the candles – oh the candles. Three hours of fragile, twinkling candlelight and I begin to wonder why we ever bother illuminating theatres in any other way (sorry lighting designers).

The building, then, is the immediate star of any show it stages. Dominic Dromgoole’s production of The Changeling, Thomas Middleton and William Rowley’s gloriously bloody tale of murder, lust and deceit (the Holy Trinity of Jacobean drama), lightly accepts this, allowing the space to shine – or flicker – as much as the play that fills it. Pauses to appreciate the flame-pricked gloom or the delicate choreography of lighting the dangling chandeliers are just as important as the action they punctuate. The dim, moody atmosphere of the Playhouse, meanwhile, is forgiving of the gore and excess of Jacobean tragedy. What could be sheer Hammer Horror under the glare of bright lights seems no more than appropriately gruesome in this murky house of shadows.

Still, Dromgoole doesn’t exactly sidestep the more lurid aspects of Middleton and Rowley’s tale. Though a tragedy in name, The Changeling has its share of the ridiculous. The swift about-turns, the riotous madhouse subplot and the sheer volume of asides all lend the play to a blackly satirical, tongue-in-cheek interpretation, one that Dromgoole and co gleefully seize upon. Indeed, you begin to wonder whether The Changeling isn’t one big theatrical joke; a wickedly ironic comedy clothed in dark tragic garb.

When they wrench our attention away from the pillars and chandeliers, Dromgoole and his cast offer us a conspiratorial Beatrice-Joanna, a surprisingly dry Deflores and an unusually uncomplicated chorus of merry asylum inmates. What is the nature of madness, after all, in a fictional world where love seems to make madmen, fools and murderers of everyone? Desire is either a spur to bloodshed, in the case of Beatrice-Joanna and her servant Deflores’ swift dispatch of future hubby Alonzo in favour of new suitor Alsemero, or a cause for counterfeit delusion in that of asylum mistress Isabella’s would-be lovers. The only real constancy is the change of the title.

Dromgoole transforms it all – from the venom-laced insults Beatrice-Joanna hurls at Deflores to the gathering puddles of spilled blood – into comic potential. This Changeling is, first of all and unashamedly, entertainment. The obligatory closing jig, in which the blood smeared corpses rise and playfully skip around with their living counterparts, sneaking grins at one another and the audience, neatly captures the spirit of the whole. The many asides, so easily rendered as clunky interjections, are bursts of irrepressible, almost childish emotion. The often ditched asylum subplot is an unapologetic romp, with joyful turns from Brian Ferguson as fake fool Antonio and Pearce Quigley as a restless, wise-cracking Lollio.

But it’s the production’s take on Beatrice-Joanna that really makes it. Hattie Morahan – always a treat – has the audience on her side from the off. Whether giddy with infatuation after her first meeting with Alsemero, plotting the slaughter of doomed fiancé Alonzo, or wriggling her way out of the labyrinth that murder – and the reward of her virginity demanded by willing assassin Deflores – lands her in, there’s a glint in her eyes that seems to say “you’re with me, aren’t you?” Both her revulsion and attraction to Trystan Gravelle’s shruggingly sardonic Deflores, meanwhile, have a youthful impetuosity, her emotions plastered all over her face. Even when things are at their most desperate, Morahan’s Beatrice-Joanna is apt, like us, to contort her mouth into an awkward smile.

Who knew tragedy could be this fun?

Author: Catherine Love-Smith