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

Broken Biscuits – Lantern Theatre Liverpool – 05/03/2015

Trisha Duffy’s debut play has enjoyed two previous sell-out runs at the Lantern last year - so well attended, in fact, that I missed the boat on both occasions and was unable to get a seat, so I took the opportunity when it had a further revival this week.

Two young men were posted to Afghanistan but only one returned, his life saved through the selfless bravery of his friend. Back home in Liverpool two mothers, who have been friends for years, battle with the emotional scars that have driven a wedge between them. One is consumed by grief, the other by guilt and compassion.

Rita sits, paces and cries, slowly falling apart behind a locked door, a bottle of whisky in one hand and a bottle of pills in the other. Her neighbour Maggie perches on an upturned crate on her doorstep and tries to talk her into opening the door, but Rita’s emotions run so high that she can’t bring herself to face the friend who seems to represent the reason her son was lost. How can Maggie possibly know how she feels when her son came home safe?

Leanne Martin and Gillian Hardie play the two innocent casualties of war in an hour during which they never come face-to-face, but spar with words and exchange cigarettes and memories through a letterbox. Both deliver powerful performances, negotiating the rollercoaster of emotional peaks and troughs with poignancy.

The play would be a two-hander, were it not for the occasional appearances of Louise Garcia as Molly – a teenage neighbour who comes and goes from a noisy party across the street – and her interjections offer some of the opportunities for comedic relief from the tension that pepper the script.

For all its dark despair there are a surprising number of laughs to be had in the dialogue, which is well written and falls naturally from the actors’ lips. Lantern Theatre A.D. Margaret Connell directs with care and maintains a tension that holds right through to the play’s tragic climax.

Some of the offstage, recorded dialogue overheard from the party felt a little superfluous to me and I would have been happy without it, but this in no way detracted from a moving and thought provoking evening.

Safe to say that debut writer Trisha Duffy has a distinctive voice that could be heard throughout the play.

The team are looking to re-stage the play for this summer’s Edinburgh Festival, and is looking for crowd funding via Kickstarter to help get them there. Anyone wishing to support the project can do so via this link:

https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/399278474/broken-biscuits-edingburgh

Leanne Martin as Rita in Broken Biscuits

Shakers - Lantern Theatre Liverpool - 20/09/2014

“It looks like a glass of sick decorated with hundreds and thousands”

Liverpool audiences have become very familiar with John Godber’s 1977 play Bouncers in a number of recent revivals, one of which was here at the Lantern. Less familiar is its 1985 bookend piece, Shakers, which he co-wrote with his wife Jane Thornton.

While Bouncers features four tuxedoed men who play the eponymous doormen and all the other characters - male and female - Shakers is more or less the photographic negative of the concept.

The 1980s breezed along on an overdressed carnival float of Dynasty glamour, and along with the big hair and shoulder pads came the cocktail bars. So here we are in Shakers – the new place to be on the high street for a night out, where everyone hides behind a veneer of self-conscious faux confidence and nobody knows what’s in the exotically coloured concoctions they’re drinking.

The audience are in luck. Before the house lights even go down several of us are told we’re the hundredth customer and are handed a free drink - something luminous orange in a fancy glass – and so we meet the four cocktail waitresses in the usual garb, all bow ties and starched blouses, who are preparing themselves and the venue for the onslaught of an evening’s clientele.

The idea is simple enough of course, as a series of episodes introduce us to groups of revellers, all of whom are played by the same three actors in unchanging costume. The first big win for the production is the seamless transition that they make as they take on the parts of groups of young women, a gang of lads and a party of businessmen trying to outdo each other with their worldliness. There is a good deal of dark humour in this role play, especially seeing four women aping the lewd, seedy behaviour of these male characters out to impress each other with their machismo.

But as well as the carry-on humour there is a depth to the writing too, and in four excellent performances we see glimpses of the trials, tribulations, ambitions and failures that have brought these young women together to this place. There is hope for the future and jaded resignation behind the bar, where they listen to the same old jokes about suggestive cocktail names. They’ve heard it all a hundred times before, but still manage a weary smile that the half-cut customers take for amusement.

Amy Courtenay, Amy Spencer, Liz Walker and Jenny Roberts play together like clockwork in the fast paced dialogue under the direction of Pamela Courtenay for Trap Door Theatre Productions.

This entertaining and often poignant show has played two nights at the Lantern and now heads off to several venues in Wales.

Vera Vera Vera – Lantern Theatre Liverpool – 24/05/2014

‘Bobby’s dead and you’re still breathing. That’s a fucking walking talking tragedy that is.’

Hayley Squires’ first play was written for the Royal Court (Jerwood Upstairs) and premiered in March 2012 as part of the Young Writers Festival.

Whilst the play focused topically on a family who had lost one of their number in the conflict in Afghanistan, the themes it explores could apply to the fallout from any war in any era. Although director Chantell Walker didn’t plan the performance for this reason, it sits well among the canon of work that is appearing in this WWI centenary year. In her programme note she says she fell in love with the piece for its true grit and honesty and for the pain and hope it displays.

Pain and hope are in abundance in the text, and in the truly gritty and honest delivery from her team of actors. The writing is uncompromising but above all it is believable and sharply observed and the young cast, drawn mostly from Liverpool John Moores University, have clearly got under the skin of their characters.

Bobby has been killed in war and brought home to be buried. The narrative switches back and forth between the immediate time of the funeral, set in the family home, and on a park bench some months later, which is where we begin.

Mother is an invisible presence who doesn’t attend the funeral – she can’t face it and is sedated upstairs - while Bobby’s brother and sister prepare themselves. Danny rebukes Emily for being over made-up and underdressed, but she just wanted to look right in case she gets interviewed by the press. Family rivalries emerge and we begin to learn of the jealousies and hatred that lie just beneath the surface. Bobby’s best friend Lee tries to pour oil on the waters but soon becomes embroiled in the argument.

Matt Tyler as Danny towers above the rest in stature and is a brooding presence on stage. This is the most one-dimensional character in the writing, having very little in the way of redeeming characteristics, but Tyler carries it off well. His sister Emily is a better written role, and Jade Thomson makes the most of the twists and turns, having us lose patience with her one moment and sympathise the next. Robert Moore is superb as Lee. Bobby’s mate wants to keep the peace on this of all days but he is angry too, and he won’t allow Danny to blacken his friend’s memory.

It is in the alternating scenes interwoven between all this that we find redemption in an unlikely place. Two of the most compelling performances in the production are from Cristina Carter as Charlie and Rory Kelly as Sam. Cristina is Bobby’s cousin and looks back on the day of the funeral in her mind as she revises Romeo and Juliet for an exam. She has unresolved questions about it all, including the absence of her aunt at the funeral and the upsetting things Bobby’s brother and sister have said. Her saviour comes in the shape of Sam, soon to be her boyfriend if they ever get around to it. She is terrified that he will get hurt in a fight, not realising at first that he is fighting for her honour – echoes of Sam’s description of the Romeo and Juliet plot, which he condenses with flair from the movie version. There are some really tender scenes on and around this park bench, which Carter and Kelly play rather beautifully. There might be some doubts remaining in her mind over her cousin’s bravery, but she has found her hero.

And who, I hear you cry, is Vera? The answer is in the songs from the forces’ sweetheart of an earlier war that link the scenes together.

Rough and Ready Theatre was formed earlier this year by a group of Liverpool JMU graduates. They have plans for their next work in the autumn and you can find them on Facebook: www.facebook.com/roughandreadytc and Twitter: @RoughandReadyTC 

Cover illustration from the Methuen play text for Vera Vera Vera

 

My Mother Said I Never Should – Purple Coat Productions – LanternTheatre Liverpool – 04/05/2015

“I’m not having babies; I’m not getting married”

Purple Coat productions returned to Liverpool’s Lantern Theatre this week with two complementary works playing alternate nights. Harold Pinter’s Caretaker had played the night before (when I was unable to attend) and to contrast with this classic for three male actors, director Karl Falconer chose Charlotte Keatley’s piece for four women.

Kayley Joy Black has cunningly designed a set that, with a little furniture rearrangement and dressing can double for both plays. In this case it begins with a draped upright piano to one side – obligatory as the text requires Margaret to hide under it at the beginning of the second scene. An arrangement of chairs and other objects move about as the scenes progress, and the piano is replaced by an office desk after an interval. To the front of the stage is a pile of earth that serves as a garden and also hints toward the opening setting of the wasteground.

It is on this wasteground that we first meet all four characters, here all played as children, with the oldest of the characters here appearing as the youngest child. From time to time through the action these childhood scenes return, but for most of the play the four actors play a family that spans four generations, although condensed into three. Doris has a daughter Margaret, a granddaughter Jackie and a great granddaughter Rosie. However, Rosie was born to an unmarried Jackie, and so Margaret brings her up as though she were her own. So it is that Rosie grows up believing that her mother is her big sister.

Among these complex relationships and the interleaved childhood scenes the play explores the effects on the four characters of the choices they make and the circumstances they find themselves in. Often funny, frequently poignant, the text also speaks occasionally of the impact of wartime, something that is creeping out of a lot of the theatrical woodwork this year with the 1914 centenary. Jackie as a child complains to her mother, while they hide under the piano, that her friends have a proper Anderson shelter.

Falconer has assembled a strong cast and directs with a deftness of touch that makes both adults and children believable, despite the awkwardness of the way Charlotte Keatley’s narrative pulls us back and forth across the decades with little help from the text to signpost where and when we are.

Doris, Margaret, Jackie and Rosie were played by Caitlin Clough, Jackie Jones, Rhea Little and Jessica Olwyn.

It was great to see a pretty good house in the Lantern, especially for the Sunday evening of a bank holiday weekend. The Lantern is fairly unusual in occasionally bucking the traditional theatrical convention of closing on Sundays. It is always worth keeping a beady eye on their schedules as most shows, like this one, are here just for one or two performances.

Because She Loved the Lion – Lantern Theatre Liverpool – 17/04/2014

Please stop shouting; you’re making it very hard for me to dream…

How do you dramatise the subject of domestic violence in a way that will engage an audience? Well, you could go for the jugular and play it out with finely choreographed fight scenes or you could take the rather more subtle approach used by Laura-Kate barrow in her new one act play.

The closest we get to seeing any physical evidence of the abusive relationship Ella has with her partner is some smudged eye makeup. He certainly never appears on stage but remains a looming unseen presence, alluded to frequently but absent. We gather that the father of Ella’s child is touring with his band and, in his absence, Ella’s sister Sally makes increasingly urgent appeals that she should get him out of their lives for good.

Ultimately, however, it is through the voice of seven year old Millie that we get our greatest insights into what is actually happening in the household. Her candid observations could only be expressed by the thoughts and words of a child.

Set on an open stage with a very few props, lighting cues lead us rapidly between scenes. Millie’s favourite bedtime story is Aesop’s The Lion and the Mouse. Her mum’s repeated re-telling of this fable of co-dependency changes subtly as the play progresses and it becomes a palimpsest through which we can read Ella’s troubles. The point toward the close where Millie finally applies the tale directly to her mother’s actions is both chilling and deeply moving.

The three-strong cast assembled for this Lady Parts Theatre production all demonstrate the company’s commitment to strong female roles. Esther Dix displays the stoical weariness of balancing her increasingly testing relationship, her love for her daughter and her own self-preservation without once allowing the part to become self-pitying. Sarah Keating is by turns aloof and angry as her frustration at watching her sister’s life reaches boiling point.

Eventually it is Nuala Maguire who has us transfixed most of all with her stunning performance as the seven year old Millie. Although somewhat taller than her “mother” it is only a couple of minutes into the action that we forget we are watching an adult actor and are captivated by the child, who protects herself from the domestic mayhem surrounding her by building her own view of the world which she discusses and acts out with her family of soft toys.

Director Peter Mitchelson (who has worked with this writer previously in Bump for Shiny New Theatre) steers a deft line through the rapid shifts of atmosphere between scenes.

Laura-Kate Barrow continues to demonstrate her talent for producing dialogue that flows naturally from her characters. What is very much in evidence here is her ability to tell a story without preaching to her audience. We understand that she worked with domestic abuse support charity Refuge in researching for the play and it could have been all too easy to take a full-on assault on the subject. Allowing us to see through the eyes of a child lets us view things from another perspective. It also enables her to throw shafts of light and moments of laughter into the writing too.

This is the third piece of Laura-Kate’s work that I have seen by see my previous commentaries on Trolley-shaped Bruise and Bump. She is currently writer on attachment to Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse and has contributed to the writing of The Grid for Young Everyman and Playhouse which opens at the Liverpool Everyman next week.

Following its three days at Liverpool’s Lantern, Because She Loved the Lion will transfer to the Brighton Fringe (Upstairs at Three and Ten) from 3rd to 8th May and will appear at the Kings Arms Salford on 1st June and the Little Theatre Chester on 7th June.

Bump by Laura-Kate Barrow, Jollyboat and Pornovision by John Maguire – The Shiny New Festival at the Lantern Theatre Liverpool – 17th July 2013

“If you listen carefully you can hear the rafters breathe...”

Following hard on the heels of Trolley Shaped Bruise (Unity Theatre, May 2013) Laura-Kate Barrow’s “Bump” opens this Friday at Manchester’s 24:7 festival. I got to see it in the second of three preview performances playing at Liverpool’s Lantern Theatre as part of the current Shiny New Festival, whose director Peter Mitchelson has brought it from the page to the stage.

Like its companion piece, the play centres on a chance meeting between two seemingly different characters whose histories unfold and who ultimately find common ground, but the author has treated this premise very differently here.

Opening with Louise, sitting still and quiet in an empty church, we begin to wonder what has brought her here and what contemplations are in her mind. The arrival of Matt, who turns out to have known Louise at school, gives us the opportunity to find out – eventually.

Sarah Keating brings a quiet dignity to the role of Louise, who is at first reluctant to speak at all and slow to trust the questions. Matt is on edge, wired, all fingernail chewing and pacing about. Played by Thomas Casson, almost too tall for the tiny performance space, Matt fills the silence of the church with his constant need to say something, but there are still some wonderful pauses – laden with unspoken dialogue.

 

When direct questioning doesn’t draw Louise out then a word game begins, and the barriers are replaced with a slow-growing trust. A pivotal point is a scene in the church confessional. After this, stories of the past that the two remember from school lead to revelations about what has happened to them in the few years since and the scars that they privately bear. We finally discover the personal crises that have brought them to the place. The resolution, whilst happening a little suddenly, is satisfyingly out of the blue but believable. Two fine performances from Keating and Casson keep us hanging on their every word.

 

Laura-Kate Barrow has an obvious skill for creating very rounded characters and natural dialogue, and the script offers plenty of opportunity for the performers to play with time and pacing to hold the audience. Hers is an emerging voice to watch out for in theatre.

 

Bump runs at the Three Minute Theatre, Afflecks Arcade, Oldham St Manchester from 19th to 26th July 2013, and Trolley Shaped Bruise has a script reading at The Lass O’Gowrie at 9:00pm on 23rd July as part of the Greater Manchester Fringe Festival.

Sarah Keating and Thomas Casson

Bump was the first of three events I attended yesterday at The Lantern. The Shiny New Festival, which was about half-way through its ten days, presenting three or four items every evening, with special rate multipass tickets on sale each day. Twenty minutes later, Liverpool writer/actor John Maguire presented his new play “Pornovision” which enjoys 4 performances this week.

 

It is unfortunate that none of the online or printed publicity material identifies Maguire’s two co-stars, as they give the best performances in this somewhat schizophrenic work. The title and likely the play itself are probably intended to be provocative, but it didn’t entirely hit its target – maybe because it didn’t have one.

 

Beginning with a doctor telling us we were to see a study of what was going on in the mind of our protagonist, Bartholemew Younghusband (Maguire), what followed was a series of disparate scenes played out between him and his uncredited lodger. Peering through a pair of rather problematic wire rimmed spectacles, we gather that Younghusband has an addiction to pornography. Judging by the laughter, there were still some members of the audience who have not previously heard the joke about gay burglars leaving quiche in the oven. For me this was just one example too many of the gloomy attempts the script makes to define the character as a grimly grimy bigoted heterosexual.

 

The young lady who performed the doctor also appeared in other guises, variously resembling an armour plated Madonna and what looked like a feline pole-dancer, drinking milk from a cat’s bowl. The best humorous passages came from the lodger with genuine stage presence and engineering some great recoveries for Maguire, whose own script tripped him up a few times in this first performance. His ad-lib about the ill fitting glasses raised quite a titter, as did his unexplained but witty near full-frontal nude appearance as a postman. He also managed to improvise his way around some glitches with the props.

 

If there’s an hour of your life you don’t need to keep hold of, Pornovision runs to 20th July.

 

Happily, my evening ended with an hour of musical lunacy from Jollyboat –brothers, Ed and Tommy in a Two-Men-and-a-Guitar revue and describing themselves as Comedy Rockstars.

No strangers to the Lantern’s performance space, Jollyboat have added new material to their act and we were getting a taster of it as it heads toward the Edinburgh Festival. Their very individual re-workings of a variety of familiar songs tread a splendidly balanced tightrope between satire and sheer madness and they never fall off. It is pointless to try and describe any of the material, but safe to say that it would be someone with a very rickety sense of humour who could fail to get a jolly good laugh from this hugely engaging and very funny double-act.

 

You can climb aboard Jollyboat one more time in Liverpool on Saturday 20th July at 9:00pm before they set sail for Edinburgh, where they will be playing at the Base Nightclub, 69 Cowgate from 3rd to 24th August.



Jollyboat

There is a real buzz in the sultry summer air at the Lantern Theatre, where the Shiny New Festival continues to Sunday 21st July. Support this event and let’s hope it returns next year.
 

The Lantern Theatre on Blundell Street in the Baltic Triangle might be off the beaten track, but it is well worth keeping on the radar, as it provides a vibrant, intimate and affordable space for small-scale performance and has a great atmosphere.