Ruby Slippers – Lantern Theatre Liverpool – 20/02/2016

Ruby Slippers is Break a Leg Productions’ debut play, written by Emma Culshaw and David Paul, and directed by Jackie Downey and saw its sell-out premiere performance at the Lantern Theatre on Saturday.

James Rogerson plays Raz, the owner of The Ruby Slippers drag club. He presides from behind a bar adorned with a pair of said slippers and photographs of his movie idols, who age him a little for some of his mystified younger patrons. Many have defected to a new bar down the street along with most of his star acts, leaving the business on the rocks.

Loyal drag queens Destiny and Phoenix (Owen Farrow & Jordan Sims) soldier on amid worries for the future of the club, but their more immediate concern is to sort out Raz’s love life once and for all. Everyone can see that he and his new flatmate Ryan have fallen for each other in a big way, so why don’t the two of them get together? Ryan (Jamie Paul) has a secret, however, which makes everything far more complicated than it seems.

When Destiny and Phoenix force the issue Ryan’s revelation sets emotions running high, and the future becomes uncertain for everyone.

Ruby slippers is an important piece of writing, in that it tackles issues of prejudice from both inside and out of the LGBT community. What the authors have done, in one scene in particular, is to eloquently articulate confusions between sexuality and gender identity. What comes across well is the lack of understanding for the many differences and distinctions between gay, transvestite, drag queen and transgender, something which is paradoxically blurred by the inclusiveness of the term LGBT.

An important question we’re left with is to ask whether what Raz feels is prejudice or an understandable sense of loss – almost bereavement – as is suggested by another character in another emotional fulcrum of the work.

Rogerson hurls himself into the part of Raz with huge energy, while Debra Radcliffe gives a particularly strong and insightful performance as Helen, Ryan’s mother, whose lioness instinct leads her to deliver some of the best dialogue.

Jamie Paul has perhaps the hardest job to do as Ryan, torn between love and identity, and there are some scenes where he is simply left to play mute vulnerability. The intention seems to be to highlight his internal dilemma but the effect, occasionally, is to arrest the dramatic flow.

Farrow and Simms (the former also known on the Manchester drag scene as Divina De Campo) bring us glamour, certainly, but also carry some pretty weighty writing too. There is a strangely camp but very witty performance from Emma Vaudrey, who delivers a parallel narrative thread that drives the play to a resolution.

This weekend’s three performances at the Lantern have all sold out, and the play has a planned series of future appearances across the North West. The first of these is at Manchester’s KIKI in Canal Street next Sunday, 28th February. Watch out for further dates coming up, with the play returning to Liverpool at the Epsein Theatre in the autumn.

 This review was originally written for and published by Seen Liverpool.

James Rogerson and Jamie Paul - Rehearsal photo (c) Jane Macneil

The Broke 'n' Beat Collective - Unity Theatre Liverpool - 09/02/2016

In a world where young people are pigeon holed or hold their problems locked away internally, Broke ‘n’ Beat Collective encourages us to think inside the box.

Keith Saha of Liverpool based 20 Stories High and Sue Buckmaster of Theatre Rites have worked together before and Liverpool audiences will remember their work on Melody Loses her Mojo in 2013. Both are committed to helping young people to find a voice through theatre, and here they join forces to explore a collection of issues that are often ignored or misunderstood.

In something that seems to have grown out of a set that Miriam Nabarro designed for Saha’s 2014 ‘Black’, she has now created a world that lives entirely in cardboard boxes, stacked up at the rear of the stage. The cast unfold boxes to reveal scenes from young lives, while out of other boxes emerge puppets and props enabling the stories to be told.

Broke ‘n’ Beat Collective introduce themselves as a band playing a gig, in which each of the numbers they perform recounts a young person’s story. The material comes from direct workshops with real people, but the off-the-wall delivery enables us to see each of their lives from a different angle. Principal narrator is poet and singer Elektric (Elisha Howe) and alongside her are b-boy dancer Ryan LoGisTic Harston, puppeteer Mohsen Nouri and, creating most of the soundtrack, champion beat-boxer Hobbit (Jack Hobbs).

Hip-hop theatre meets puppetry in many different ways during the show’s unbroken 70 minutes, but the effect is constantly alive and thought-provoking. The four performers cross over between each other’s disciplines in sequences where dancers perform as if puppets, with boxes on their heads, where one or more operate puppets to a narrative, and where all there is is the music.

A girl cuts herself because magazines give her a negative body image, so she’s played by a puppet made entirely of paper, while another gives birth to a baby made entirely of boxes. There’s humour with a boom box becoming the head of a dancing puppet, but there’s a political message behind this too.
Running through the whole show is a thread following Omar, a boy in a grey hoodie who feels marginalised and invisible and reacts with a mixture of fear and aggression. This puppet – an empty hooded top – is startlingly human in form despite its lack of a face or lower body, and the skill of the puppetry here is really striking. The sequence when Omar finds a voice and finally connects is, along with the Paper Girl, among the most emotionally charged parts of the work.

What Saha and Buckmaster achieve in spades here is a perfect balance between emotional tension and engaging humour, and the entire piece is delivered with such energy that it can’t fail to keep its audience engaged. Rarely will you find such weighty issues leaving you with quite such a sense of exhilaration.

Broke ‘n’ Beat Collective plays at Unity until Saturday 13th February after which it continues on a 14 venue tour ending April 2nd.

This review was originally written for and pubished by Good News Liverpool.

Ryan LoGisTic Harston  & Mohsen Nouri with Omar - Photo (c) Theatre Rites

I Am Not Myself These Days – Liverpool Playhouse Studio - 3/2/2016

First performed at the Edinburgh Fringe last August, Tom Stuart’s adaptation of Josh Kilmer-Purcell’s biography begins an 8 venue tour this week at the Playhouse Studio, in a home gig for Everyman Playhouse Associate Director Nick Bagnall and produced by Fuel Theatre.
Tom Stuart not only made the adaptation but also performs the work, and his affection and commitment to the source material are evident from the outset. His characterisation of Josh is seen almost exclusively through the persona of his drag-queen alter ego, Aquadisiac / Aqua, and the show charts the fall and rise of Josh as he descends into a vodka-fuelled nightmare world abetted by his new partner Jack, a sex worker with a crack addiction and a colourful assortment of clients. Josh’s epiphany, as he finally (and literally) casts off the guise of Aqua to save himself from self-destruction, is as powerful and heart-breaking a piece of theatre as you’re likely to see.
The writing is uncompromisingly stark and honest and takes turns between acid wit, hysteria and rage. Stuart delivers an explosive and visceral performance with blistering intensity but with passages of astounding calm and beauty, and the physical energy of the work is quite literally jaw-dropping.
Nick Bagnall’s familiar pace and darkness are clearly visible in the staging, which is presented on a distressed, geometric stage design by Ti Green. The set marries with Guy Hoare’s lighting in a manner that slips us swiftly and with style between times and locations: an apartment balcony, a nightclub, the open road.
Emotional balance is under masterful control, with the audience compelled to belly laughs one moment and holding our collective breath the next. It’s impossible to know whether to be on the edge of the seat or pressed down into it by the overwhelming intensity of the words.
Tickets for this week are in short supply, but snapping up the last remaining seats is highly recommended.
I Am Not Myself These Days is at the Playhouse Studio until Saturday evening and then tours a further 7 venues ending in Shoreditch on 12th March

This review was originally written for and published by Seen Liverpool.

Lord of the Flies - Liverpool Playhouse - 2/2/2016

Older audience members’ familiarity with William Golding’s Lord of the Flies will mostly be memories of school literature classes or of Peter Brook’s excellent 1963 film adaptation. Meanwhile, groups of Merseyside students on school theatre trips are in for a treat this week, as Regents Park Theatre present their touring version of Nigel Williams outstanding stage adaptation to Liverpool under the stylish direction of Timothy Sheader. Seeing the work brought so vividly to life will surely illuminate any connected coursework.
Set before a backdrop of forest it’s easy to imagine the piece in the open air setting of Regents Park, but although it has been brought indoors there have been few changes to the staging for the transfer. The theatre management must have taken a deep breath when they read the technical script for the production and saw how much use is made of fire onstage, but wait, I’m ahead of myself…
Entering the auditorium we’re greeted by wreckage of a plane on a beach, its broken fuselage and wing sections dominating the stage, and mountains of luggage spilling beyond the proscenium. The obvious drama of Jon Bausor’s stage design perfectly sets the scene for Goldings allegorical tale.
It’s the casting, though, that makes this production really work. Most of the actors are a little older than they appear, but they have clearly been chosen for their ability to be believable as teenagers, as well as for their considerable acting talent. Especially strong are the central trio of Ralph, Jack, and Piggy, played by Luke Ward-Wilkinson, Freddie Watkins and Anthony Roberts. Ward-Wilkinson really captures the philosophical nature of Ralph and Roberts’ Piggy has tremendous appeal, while Watkins is genuinely terrifying as his Jack spirals into a lust for power and control. Another piece of casting that seems an obvious choice, but is probably no mean feat to achieve, is the appearance of twin brothers Thiago and Fellipe Pigatto in the roles of Sam ’n Eric, their apparent fraternal telepathy making the unison text delivery very slick indeed. Three children share the role of Perceval, and Benedict Barker inhabited the part with huge confidence on Tuesday.
The entire cast perform with boundless energy, utilising every inch and level of the sculptural set. As the play progresses, more and more parts of the airplane wreckage disintegrate along with the law and order that Piggy and Ralph try in vain to wrest back from Jack and his increasingly savage band of hunters. Fire, stolen from the sun with Piggy’s glasses, becomes both a bid for rescue and the demonstration of a quest for control, and its early refusal to be tamed makes for some nail-biting theatre.
The central tragedy of Piggy’s murder is cleverly adapted to balance palatability with horror, and the suddenness of the ending as rescue arrives is as arresting as it is in the source novel, a stark shift in lighting emphasising the transformation back into frightened children.
Lord of the Flies is at the Playhouse until Saturday and then continues with a further 5 tour venues until 19th March.
This review was originally written for and published by Good News Liverpool.

Photo (c) Johan Persson

Wit - Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester

A powerful and uplifting production, rich in warmth and humanity.

There are no spoilers here as Margaret Edson’s fin de siècle drama about the final hours of Dr Vivian Bearing’s life, first performed in 1997, is well documented and much acclaimed. Even the Exchange’s publicity posters quote the central character’s early line “I don’t wish to give away the plot, but I think I die at the end”.

An overheard snippet of conversation in the Theatre foyer pre-show made me smile: “What a lovely end to a romantic day – a play about death!” From their tone it was clear the speaker was aware that, while impending death is present throughout the play’s unbroken 100 minute span, it is more like a character in its own right, and the key ingredient in the text is the titular Wit of the ill-fated professor.

Having spent much of her professional life teaching metaphysical poetry to students (in particular that of John Donne) Vivian Bearing finds herself not only a subject of study for the hospital staff, working on an experimental treatment, but a matter of considerable interest to herself. As her life ebbs away she reflects back on formative events and people from her life including her father and an English professor, Dr Ashford, a former mentor and the only friend who comes to visit her in the hospital. Through extracts of Donne and her own musings, Bearing finds her bearings and her identity as she seeks mechanisms for coping with the inevitable and the pain that she must endure.

Director Raz Shaw has personal knowledge of stage 4 cancer, a precipice that he has looked over and managed to return from, leading to much work helping others deal with the experience. This history clearly illuminates his approach to Edson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning text and gives the production an air of authentic emotion.

Julie Hesmondhalgh also famously brings experience, in her case of playing a character battling terminal cancer in her former role in Coronation Street, but this is no type-casting as the roles are poles apart. Hesmondhalgh occupies Bearing’s character with tremendous authority and delivers a hypnotic performance that grips the audience throughout from the narrative opening, through episodes of wit, sarcasm and indignity, to her final incandescent apotheosis. Here she doesn’t so much walk into the light, as the text suggests, but almost appears to become the light itself.

Vivian’s frustration, both with her own coping strategies and with the insensitivity of the doctors, is painfully apparent but Raz Shaw balances the text’s intrinsic dark humour and the bleak subject matter well. The clumsiness of some of the medical staff is clear from the writing and well conveyed in Tom Hodgkins’ Harvey Kelekian and Esh Aladi’s blundering Jason Posner, the latter just getting away with his portrayal of a doctor who is almost unbelievably crass and insensitive.

Other strong performances among a good cast come from Jenny Platt as Nurse Susie Monahan, Vivian’s ally in her hour of need, and Julie Legrand as her friend and confidant Dr Ashford.

Hannah Clark has kept the stage design simple and clinical using an open stage and a slow revolve, to ensure that sight lines are unimpaired throughout the house and to give us a gradually shifting perspective in some of the more extended scenes. Lighting by Jack Knowles is brilliantly conceived to both shift the mood and to create the striking image of the closing scene.

Despite its apparent bleak subject matter, Wit is rich in warmth and humanity and somehow leaves us with a great sense of upliftment.

Wit runs at Manchester Royal Exchange until Saturday 13th February.

Julie Hesmondhalgh - Photo (c) Jonathan Keenan

The Wonderful World of Dissocia – YEP at Playhouse Studio Liverpool – 05/11/2015 & 06/11/2015

When the company of this new Young Everyman Playhouse production of Anthony Neilson’s play have gone to such lengths to keep us guessing, even so far as not providing programmes until after the performance, I am reluctant to post this commentary until after the final performance.

However, as the play was first produced in its present form over a decade ago, its unconventional and deliberately disconcerting two act form and mysterious unravelling is well documented.

A Quote from Neilson in the pre-publicity suggests a kind of Alice in Wonderland but with more sex and violence, and he has also been known to liken the first act to the Wizard of Oz. But the Alice reference seems very clear as the chief protagonist, Lisa Jones, descends not so much down a rabbit hole as in an elevator in search of an hour she has lost. It seems that she crossed the date line in a plane at the same time as the clocks went back – don’t worry – it all becomes clear, but not until after the interval.

On her unlikely quest Lisa meets a range of fantastical characters, from a pair of insecurity guards (possibly channelling Tweedledum and Tweedledee) to a scapegoat and singing polar bear. The people of the land of Dissocia in which she finds herself seem domineered by a mad queen with a penchant for oatcakes and dogged by unhelpful public servants all working to their own peculiar brand of logic.

It is only in act two that everything falls into place but not until the audience is led perplexingly back into the auditorium via a completely different route, to find the room changed almost beyond recognition. In this much shorter segment (barely more than a quarter of the whole play) every scene recalls to mind the characters and events of act one as we learn of Lisa’s struggle to cope with mental illness.

It is deeply moving stuff, but served up with copious amounts of surreal humour, and it is to the huge credit of YEP under the direction of Chris Tomlinson that they not only pull it off but do so with tremendous success.

Lisa is played by Naimh McCarthy (Wed & Thur) and Poppy Hughes (Fri & Sat) and it is staggering to think that both actors have prepared the weighty part for just two performances, while doubling other roles on their other nights. I managed to see one performance by each of them and was struck by the way that both made the part their own while entirely buying in to the director’s concept of the piece.

A multi-skilled cast who I am not going to begin to count because of the complicated role-doubling (but there are a dozen or so of them!) succeed in bringing lucidity to the host of weird and wonderful characters they play while demonstrating again the company’s strong use of stage movement, bringing the tiny Studio space to vivid life. We even discover musical talents including a saxophonist and a beat boxer in their midst.

Along with our two Lisas, there are some very strong performances, including Isobel Balchin’s stoical Jane and Alice Corrigan’s Britney. The two insecurity guards James Bibby and Stuie Dagnall at first appear as likely candidates for the panto, but Bibby later turns to a far darker form of comedy and Dagnall also gives us a really delicate performance as Lisa’s partner Vince. Elliot Davis shows remarkable skill and subtlety of movement, with every twitch and blink carefully measured.

Set, lighting and sound designs are to the same high standards of imagination and technical skill that we’ve come to expect from YEP.

There is a great deal to remember this production for, from its fearless approach to discussing not just Dissociative Identity Disorder but mental health in general, to the sheer joy of seeing so much emerging talent displayed again by this vibrant company. YEP continue to offer us an optimistic view of the future of Liverpool’s Everyman and Playhouse.

YEP publicity design for The Wonderful World of Dissocia

The Odyssey: Missing, Presumed Dead – Liverpool Everyman – 30/09/2015 & 03/10/2015

“This bed was my ship and this ring was my compass, my one bearing, my only direction, this ring with your inscription, ‘from Penelope, your Ithaca’.”

Throughout her characteristically passionate and witty post-show speech on Wednesday, Everyman & Playhouse AD Gemma Bodinetz was clutching a well-worn copy of Homer’s Odyssey, the one she’d used when studying ancient Greek. Back then, she told us, she just didn’t get how the Mediterranean and those familiar island holiday destinations could be the places of such peril and danger as Odysseus found them. But on reading the first draft of this new script it all became immediately clear, having inescapable resonance with images we’ve all seen in recent times of people washed up on beaches, having fled for their lives in unseaworthy boats.

Although this is a story that poet and playwright Simon Armitage and Director Nick Bagnall have been wanting to tell for some time, they could barely have chosen a better time to do it, for it brings, as Gemma observed, an urgent message about the way that society responds to strangers and the things that frighten us, whilst in this new treatment it still retains the timelessness of Homer’s text.
 
It is a hefty piece, coming in at 2hrs 45 by my watch, but it doesn’t feel like it, as the pace is well maintained throughout by a tremendously tight ensemble cast and very physical staging, on a dramatic set by Signe Beckmann. So much so, that I returned again 3 days later for another viewing from a slightly different angle, one of the joys of a space like the Everyman.
 
Colin Tierney played Odysseus in The Last Days of Troy at Manchester’s Royal Exchange, in which the same author and director left him marooned. Here all three are back to bring the character home on a fraught and dangerous journey where he and his shipmates encounter storms and terrifying creatures.
Armitage has chosen once again to re-tell an ancient text by running two parallel threads of narrative alongside one another. Rather than simply placing the Homeric characters in an updated working of the story, he uses an almost dream like rendering of the Odyssey woven in and out of his modern day tale, surfacing out of the shadows and then slipping back out of view scene-by-scene.
 
After a brief prologue from the goddess Athena, we meet our 21st century Odysseus, a Cumbrian government minister called Smith, who has the beer chilling in the fridge and  is looking forward to settling down to watch the England v Turkey World Cup qualifier on TV, before celebrating his son’s 18th birthday. The Prime Minister has different ideas, needing to make an impression by sending someone to the game, so Smith has to make a shame-faced call to his wife Penelope, and apologise to his son Magnus before he boards the plane.
 
Shortly after the match, Smith and his aide get mixed up in a fight with some England fans, and social media goes into meltdown with a picture that appears to implicate him. He disappears off the radar as he tries to get home without being caught by the press, who are baying for his blood.
Back in Cumbria, the PM’s secretary and daughter Anthea (Athena in modern garb) pays the family a flying visit and delivers Magnus a birthday gift – a copy of Homer’s Odyssey.
 
As Magnus opens the book and begins to read, his father reappears with his fellow travellers, now transformed into Odysseus and his crew on board ship, and so we begin the epic journey home. The stories weave in and out of each other, with the trials of Odysseus mirroring events in the modern world. They encounter storms, strange lands, hostile people and mystical creatures including the lumbering Cyclops, counting his sheep Cumbrian fashion, the witch Circe and the lure of the Sirens. A pneumatic system sub-stage turns a central section into a ship, which pitches and rolls underfoot as the sailors navigate their course.
 
Simon Dutton plays the Prime Minister, analogous with Zeus, a larger than life figure who delivers some risky dialogue, but balances biting satire with a good deal of humour. Some of his speeches receive spontaneous applause from the audience. Dutton also appears as the blind ghost of Tiresius, and as the Cyclops, this latter bringing out some of the wit of Homer’s original in his battle with “nobody”.
 
There are strong performances too from the supporting cast. Polly Frame is Anthea/Athena, Susie Trayling is Penelope and Lee Armstrong is Magnus. Odysseus’s crew are Sule Rimi, Roger Evans and Chris Reilly, while David Hartley and Ranjit Krishnamma are a couple of predatory media hacks, doubling as the Cyclops’s hands and the Turkish bartender, and Danusia Samal is, among other characters, the mystical Circe who casts her porcine spell on the travellers.
 
It is, however, Colin Tierney’s Smith/Odysseus who steers the whole piece on its epic course, and he gives us a splendidly rounded characterisation of the dual role. It is also he who has the last word, as the play’s spine-chilling closing scene finally merges the twin threads together in a chilling, theatrical climax.
 
I initially covered this play in a review for The Stage (whose standard word limit concentrates the mind) but here I have the luxury of having been for a further viewing 3 days after press night, and I can be more subjective. I have also now been able to compare my opinion with the other reviewers who saw the same performance as I did and, as is often the case, am intrigued to see how we all saw the piece slightly differently. One reviewer felt that the pace was good in act 1 but slackened off in act 2, while another was polar opposite, finding the first act slow and the second much more engaging. For myself, I thought the pacing was held well throughout, although the length of the piece demands these strong performances to hold an audience. Initial reported run time at previews was just short of 3 hours including interval, but some cuts later it now runs at approximately 2hrs 45mins.
 
Signe Beckmann’s set presents a deceptively simple appearance, with a curved rear wall enveloping the back of an elliptical, stepped platform which occupies most of the Everyman’s thrust. The sheer scale of it, including some understage access and machinery, is going to be a technical challenge for the stage crew taking it on its tour, and it will also be intriguing to hear how it fares in the Jacobean surroundings of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, especially with its complex lighting script from Mike Robertson.
 
The score by James Fortune includes a few classical excerpts, including Dido’s Lament and Casta Diva, which punctuate his own mystical writing and his haunting siren song will quite probably drift through audience’s minds for days after they leave the theatre.

The Odyssey: Missing, Presumed Dead, is a co-production between Liverpool Everyman & Playhouse and English Touring Theatre. It runs until 17th October at Liverpool Everyman and then tours  via Richmond Theatre, Theatre Royal Brighton, Shakespeare’s Globe, Cambridge Arts Theatre and Northcott Theatre Exeter, until 28th November.

Colin Tierney in The Odyssey - Image (c) Gary Calton