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

Narvik – Liverpool Playhouse Studio – 10/09/2015

Returning to the Playhouse Studio, a space reopened in 2011 by her “Swallowing Dark”, Lizzie Nunnery here combines her stark theatrical writing style with another strand of her work, as singer-songwriter, but Narvik is not to be confused with a musical.

Nunnery appears onstage, along with composer/musicians Vidar Norheim and Martin Heslop (Bright Phoenix), and all three engage in the stage movement whilst providing the soundscape for the play. There are a small number of folk-inspired songs, reminiscent of sea shanties, amidst a sea of sound and colour that seeps out of the woodwork of the stage, as they use a variety of found objects as well as traditional instruments to create their music.

Narvik is big on atmosphere, and Richard Owen’s lighting nuances a detailed set by Maeve Black, which makes use of every square inch of the Studio’s performance space, ropes weaving out over the heads of the audience.

The warp and weft of the story are the lives of Jim, a Liverpool fisherman and Elsa, an Oslo schoolteacher, which become entangled with those of Kenny and Lucya. The play opens with Jim, at 90, who falls and lies calling for help. As his consciousness drifts we follow his memory back to 1940, when Jim finds himself in Norway working as a warship radio operator with Kenny and meets the enigmatic Elsa. So we are reminded of the involvement that the town of Narvik had in WWII, through the lives of two people brought together and torn apart by the conflict. He may not have a girl in every port, but Jim’s romantic tale is far from straightforward.

Joe Shipman delivers a powerful performance as Jim, successfully navigating the journey from youth to old age and back several times throughout the play’s 70 minutes, although his opening scene is just a little awkward in the writing. Lucas Smith’s bluff, pragmatic Kenny is a perfect foil to Jim’s brittle character and Smith does a good line in smouldering behind heavy brows. Nina Yndis, by turns coquettish and knowing, has tremendous presence on stage, both as Elsa and as Jim’s Russian brief encounter Lucya.

Lizzie Nunnery pays tribute to the Battles of Narvik through the wartime memories of her grandfather, and Director Hannah Tyrrell-Pinder finds both anger and tenderness in Nunnery’s words.

Narvik is produced by Box of Tricks theatre in association with Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and it plays at the Studio until Saturday 19th September.

Nina Yndis, Lucas Smith & Joe Shipman

Image © Decoy Media

Volpone – Swan Theatre Stratford – 24/07/2015

Greed, corruption, lust, vanity and the worship of wealth...

...the driving forces in both works I saw in the RSC’s Swan theatre this weekend (the second being The Jew of Malta). But, if the motivation had parallels and the venue and many of the cast members were the same, the two productions could hardly have been more different.

For their new Volpone, the RSC have not only produced a modern setting in Stephen Brimson Lewis’s designs but they have also tinkered with the dialogue, with textual revisions by Ranjit Bolt. The inclusion of references to social media and nano-technology (a clever play on the name of Volpone’s dwarf) is not going to sit comfortably with the purist, but in this refreshingly witty staging they add a contemporary edge to the humour that you can’t help feeling Ben Jonson would have approved of.

Movable translucent panels and full-motion display screens form the set, which morphs from scene to scene courtesy of Tim Mitchell’s high-contrast lighting and video designs by Nina Dunn. A ticker-tape display of stock prices and CCTV security images give way to heartbeat and blood pressure monitors when Volpone is on his sick-bed, and we see live video of Lady Politic Would-Be as she is followed about the stage by paparazzi. The cast organise their lives and take selfies with smart phones and tablets.

Casting by Hannah Miller is a stroke of genius, with perfect choices more or less throughout. Geoffrey Freshwater and Matthew Kelly are splendidly obsequious as Corbaccio and Corvino, the two hopefuls trying to ingratiate themselves with Volpone so they might inherit his fortune, while Annette McLaughlin somewhat oversteps the line into caricature with her Lady Politic Would-Be. The trio of Androgyno, Castrone and Nano, played by Ankur Bahl, Julian Hoult and Jon Key, bring both sinister and pantomime elements to the piece, and turn out a couple of song and dance routines into the bargain.

Henry Goodman revels in the leading role, slipping in and out of disguise as he leaps into his hi-tech hospital bed and transforms himself into a drooling wreck, left with only a twitching hand and rolling eyes to perform his telling asides to the audience. His faithful, parasitic servant Mosca is played with poise and elegance by Orion Lee, one of several cast members in a debut season with the RSC.

Ben Jonson was making a serious point about materialism, corruption and con-merchants, and there is a sense in which the satire loses some of its bite amidst the comedic delivery under Trevor Nunn’s direction. There are clear messages in the work for a modern audience that could possibly have been given a little more weight in a modernist production, but very fine performances and ensemble timing score a hit nonetheless.

Henry Goodman, Annette McLaughlin, Orion Lee, Matthew Kelly and Geoffrey Freshwater - Photo (c) Manuel Harlan / RSC

The Hudsucker Proxy Liverpool Playhouse 5th June 2015

Is Norville Barnes really gonna jelly-up the sidewalk?

You could spot audience members who knew Joel & Ethan Coen's film because they were the ones chortling to themselves a split second ahead of the delivery of the gags. Other than a neat theatrical framing using the prologue, Simon Dormandy has remained reverently faithful to much of the screen text and narrative in his adaptation for the stage, making a very theatrical piece of cinema into a very cinematic piece of theatre.

However, taking it as theatre in its own right, this new adaptation co-produced by Liverpool Everyman Playhouse and Nuffield Southampton (where it premiered last month) stands as legitimately on the stage as though it has been born there, and those who have not seen the original neednt feel they have to revise beforehand.

In a nutshell, and with as few spoilers as possible, when company president Waring Hudsucker takes a dive from the 44th floor of the Hudsucker building (45th if you count the mezzanine) the board replace him with the seemingly witless mailroom assistant Norville Barnes in order to depress the stock. When he comes up with a stroke of genius that foils their plans, they have to resort to desperate measures to achieve their goal.

Not only has Simon Dormandy written the adaptation and co-directed with Toby Sedgewick, but he has also had to step into the shoes of Clive Wood, who was to have played Vice President Sidney Mussberger before having to step down following an incident in rehearsals. If the play gets the continued life it deserves beyond its current run we may yet get to find out what Clive Wood made of the role but, as it is, its hard to imagine a better fit for the part than Dormandy. For the same reason Tim Lewis, whose lead character is the lift-operator Buzz, adeptly takes a role originally rehearsed by Liverpool's own Nathan McMullen.

There are some excellent characterisations from a cast who all play multiple parts, and its hard to pick highlights, but watch out for Rob Castell's astonishingly malleable face, Tamsin Griffin's platinum blonde, Nick Cavaliere's swagger, David Webber's all knowing clock man Moses, and Sinead Matthews' wily but affecting Amy Archer.

Holding it all together is a magnetic central performance by Joseph Timms as Norville Barnes, whose fortunes rise and fall faster than the elevator. He is brilliantly cast in the part and fills the role with naive optimism and tremendous energy.

The production is made in association with Complicite, whose trademark physicality is visible in so many scenes, and the inventiveness of movement and the deft use of props and performance space keeps the piece rattling along with as much precision and clockwork as the great timepiece at the top of the Hudsucker building.

The look of the play is every bit as stylish as the acting is slick with Dick Bird's complex set, in which physical scenery blends with mapped video projection from Tim Bird. This allows for some brilliant cinematic touches, such as the rolling of the presses as a news item hits the front page. It also means that scene changes are as seamless as if they were on the screen. The whole look and feel captures the era perfectly.

Apply the final gloss of lighting and sound design from Paul Keogan and Gareth Fry and what you get is almost 2 hours of fast-paced theatre that delivers a morality tale with its tongue firmly in its cheek and is a joy to watch.

The Hudsucker Proxy continues at Liverpool Playhouse until 27th June.

Joseph Timms - Photo © Clare Park

Death of a Salesman - RSC at the Noel Coward Theatre - 2/6/2015

You can’t eat the orange and throw the peel away - a man is not a piece of fruit! 

Death of a salesman is often considered Arthur Miller's finest achievement and, a piece inspired so very heavily by experience of the issues of his own family, it stands as a work of incisive realism. When Gregory Doran chose to commemorate Miller's centenary in the new RSC season, he could hardly have chosen a more appropriately personal work.

An actor recently said that there is an age at which one should play Lear, and I’d be inclined to suggest that the same could be said of the character of Willy Loman. Antony Sher appears to be at that age. He has announced his forthcoming appearance as Lear in 2016, also under Gregory Doran’s direction, and in juxtaposing it with his performance as Loman in this production he and Doran assert the significance and stature of Miller’s work.

Arthur Miller is famously explicit in his stage directions and, while some productions kick against this, Gregory Doran and his designer Stephen Brimson Lewis have remained faithful to the author. What is on the page comes vividly to life in their multi-level set, on which past and present can coexist and blend seamlessly from scene to scene.

Antony Sher exudes world-weariness from every pore in the opening scenes, drawling out the lines as though every word were an effort and when stepping back to earlier times, sparring with his sons, we see the toll that time and circumstance have taken on him. Harriet Walter is spectacular as his long-suffering wife Linda, the burden of watching the disintegration and shame of the love of her life almost visible in her carriage, and palpable in every line. Alex Hassell and Sam Marks give strong performances as brothers Biff and Happy, as do Joshua Richards and Guy Paul as Charley and the spectral Uncle Ben.

Gregory Doran’s  thoughtful and well paced production seems to focus on Miller's idea that the play has “more pity and less judgement”, and it leaves us feeling for Willy Loman in his desperate search for where everything went wrong.

Death of a Salesman has a performance time of 2½ hours including one interval and it continues at the Noel Coward Theatre until 18th July.

Alex Hassell, Harriet Walter, Antony Sher and Sam Marks - photo (c) Ellie Kurttz