The Two Gentlemen of Verona - Liverpool Everyman - 11/10/2016

Since it came to life in the Everyman’s rehearsal rooms back in April, this co-production with Shakespeare’s Globe has been on a marathon tour, visiting venues across the UK and Europe before finally coming home for a 4 week run in Liverpool.

During the first day of read-throughs in April, director Nick Bagnall outlined his motives in setting this late 16th century comedy in 1966. It’s a story of young people breaking free from the tedium of their drab homelife and setting off to find excitement, adventure and love, and for Nick this immediately resonated with the youth culture and music of the 1960s. His Verona is all beige cardigans and Jim Reeves, while Milan is a very different world of long hair and flower power.

Valentine heads off to Milan while his friend Proteus remains in Verona to be with his beloved Julia, but then Proteus’s father sends him off to Milan after all. There Valentine has fallen for Sylvia, daughter of the Duke, but she is already promised by her father to Thurio. When Proteus sees a picture of Sylvia he immediately forgets his love for Julia and we’re on target for a four way tug of love, with all the deceptions and intrigues that Shakespeare goes on to use again in many of his later plays.

The period setting provides opportunities for a lot of music and, as the various love notes and messages are passed about on 7 inch vinyl, the characters break into song to deliver them. The entire cast play multiple instruments, with Guy Hughes as Valentine showing a prowess on the guitar that enables him to join the outlaws’ band in the forest.

There is much doubling of roles, with Amber James who plays Lucetta and Panthino also drawing on a moustache to bring us the self-important Thurio. Launce, servant to Proteus, is a great comic turn from Charlotte Mills, who engages wonderfully with the audience, while T J Holmes’s Speed justifies his name with a little bag of mysterious pills. When you’re touring so widely it’s not practical to have a dog in the cast, so Launce uses an ingenious device, guaranteed to raise a laugh, to bring us his dog, Crab.

The distinctively ’60s set acts like a climbing frame that the cast use every inch of, clambering up and down ladders, and Garry Cooper’s Duke revels in viewing proceedings from on high in a hugely physical performance full of exaggerated gestures.

Nick Bagnall loves the play but has never believed the problematic final scene. His solution gives us a happily ever after that isn’t shared by everyone and it really does work. His use of a song made famous by Janis Joplin brings an inspired twist and a weighty message to the ending. It’s a hugely funny production full of great performances, and by all accounts the ensemble has tightened up tremendously during the tour to give us the pacey show delivered here.

Recalling James Brown’s 1966 lyric, the play is set very much in a man’s world. It’s not intentional scheduling but it’s interesting to note nonetheless that there are many striking parallels with the patriarchal society of Sheridan’s Rivals that I reviewed last week at the Playhouse.

The Two Gentlemen of Verona plays at the Everyman until Saturday 29th October.

Cast of The Two Gentlemen of Verona on tour - image (C) Gary Calton

This review was originally written for Good News Liverpool

Mark Thomas - The Red Shed - Liverpool Everyman - 16/09/2016

The Red Shed is exactly what it says it is, and is the home of the Wakefield Labour Club, celebrating its 50th anniversary this year. Mark Thomas gave his first ever public performance there as an 18 year old student and it continues to have an important place in his life, so he decided to make a show that paid tribute to it.

It’s a story about the miners’ strike, he tells us, but promises that there will be no brass bands and that no young boys will discover a passion for ballet.

He brings on stage six members of the audience (pre-selected in the theatre foyer, so don’t worry about being pounced on in the auditorium). With chairs borrowed from real The Red Shed and a selection of face masks, these volunteers help Mark in the telling of his story, by miming the parts of various characters from his past.

Mark has a very vivid memory of the miners’ march back to work in 1985, and seeing all the children through the railings of a school playground, singing to their fathers, uncles and brothers as they march past on the way back to the pit. He had been invited to join the march, but cannot remember the name of the particular village or pit, or of the woman who invited him.

The problem is that, over the intervening 30 years Mark has re-told this story so many times that he can no longer tell how much of it is the truth and how much might be his own memory romanticising the details. He resolves to make the journey to find the woman, the village, the school and the children, and to find the truth behind his memories.

So it is that, through a series of anecdotes, some true and some clearly imagined, we follow his quest up hill and down dale through the former mining villages. The sites of the pits are frequently marked by no more of a memorial than a new branch of McDonald’s, and schools have been demolished or turned into something else. Nothing quite strikes a chord, until...

To tell what conclusions he reaches would be to extinguish the magic of Mark’s storytelling, and he should be borrowing another recent show’s hashtag, #KeepTheSecrets. In getting to his tale’s destination, he finds a convoluted route that takes in a number of other quests, including the campaign to unionise fast food outlets, discovering a little known fact that finally makes eating a Gregg’s Sausage Roll a guiltless pleasure.

Those who recall Thomas’s previous work will be familiar with his unique brand of storytelling, in which he blends fact and fiction to achieve powerful delivery of a message. There is a deliberate ramping up of the emotional tension in the room, with audience encouraged to participate in building the atmosphere. In 95 unbroken minutes, The Red Shed brings us stand-up comedy mixed with something more theatrical and plays to our sense of truth, whether it’s a truth that we know exists or a different truth that we’d like to make happen.

Following its 2 performances here at the Everyman, The Red Shed continues its extensive tour via Bristol, Nottingham, London, Glasgow and beyond. See Mark Thomas’s website for ongoing tour dates.

Mark Thomas in The Red Shed - Photo (C) Sally Jubb

Review originally written for Good News Liverpool

Queens of Syria - Liverpool Everyman - 15/07/2016

To light a candle is better than damning the darkness.

So explains one of the women during one of the interpolated video segments of this production from Developing Artists and Refuge Productions, brought to the UK on tour with the support of the Young Vic.

Queens of Syria began life as a 2013 drama therapy project in Amman for Syrian women displaced from their homeland, working toward playing out Eurpides’ Trojan Women. The parallels with the ancient drama are clear, but what we see on stage is no longer 13 women presenting a piece of classic theatre. It has become something close to documentary – a kind of community autobiography.

Verbatim theatre often takes the words of real people and places them in the mouths of actors, but there is no way to fully describe the power of hearing a group of women retelling their own experiences in this way. Theatre audiences will have become familiar with frequent references to “The Refugee Crisis” in mainstream performance in recent years, and the participants in Queens of Syria fire a broadside at this in the closing segments of the work.

“Shall we make a play about it” quotes one. “That’s a sad story, but do you have a sadder one” says another. These jibes about the (usually) well-meaning efforts of theatre and media producers, directed straight at the audience, are a reminder that what we are seeing is not staged for effect, but to help us put real faces and real lives to the reports we’ve heard in news bulletins. To humanise the inhuman experiences that people have suffered. To make us recognise that every one of them had homes, lives and families like our own that have been shattered forever.

This is not easy to watch, but if it can use the lighting of its own small candles to start illuminating the darkness of the horrors created by civil war, then maybe we can stop seeing a problem and begin looking for solutions.

Queens of Syria gave two performances as part of the Liverpool Arab Arts Festival at the Everyman on Friday and Saturday and continues touring to Leeds, Edinburgh Durham and London.

Queens of Syria - Photo (C) Vanja Karas

Review originally written for Good News Liverpool

The Government Inspector - Liverpool Everyman - 01/06/2016

David Harrower’s wonderfully irreverent adaptation of Gogol’s satirical farce was made in 2011 for the Young Vic and Warwick Arts Centre. Director Roxanna Silbert has brought it to the stage with breath-taking energy in this new coproduction from Birmingham Rep and Ramps on the Moon.

Pre-show music that could have come straight from the soundtrack of Grand Budapest Hotel helps to set the scene in the slightly tired lobby of a once opulent hotel, somewhere in a forgotten backwater of Russia. Ti Green’s set is a multi-level skeleton affair with staircases, the revolving door beloved of farce and a fully functional elevator, all as transparent as the duplicity of the play’s key characters.

David Carlyle plays the manic Mayor, thrown into a spin by the suggestion that a Government Inspector is coming to town, or may already be in their midst. When Robin Morrissey’s dapper but itinerant Khlestakov turns up he’s immediately taken for the inspector and soon learns to capitalise on the mistake, with the whole town falling at his feet.

Carlyle and Morrisey are joined in the central sextet by Kiruna Stamell and Francesca Mills, who give towering performances as the mayor’s wife and daughter, Anna and Maria. Both fall for Khlestakov in a big way and literally hurl themselves at him at times. Michael Keane brings wry wit to Khlestakov’s servant Osip, while Sophie Stone is hugely expressive as the postmaster with a rather too keen interest in the contents of the mail.

There is also a splendid double act from Stephen Collins and Rachel Denning as Bobchinsky and Dobchinsky, a pair of local squires who propagate the idea that Khlestakov is the inspector. They display gleeful relish in the quick-fire delivery and the characters’ propensity to finish each other’s sentences.

Ramps on the Moon is a consortium of six major theatres and strategic partner Graeae Theatre Company, whose work in making theatre accessible to all is ramped up to a new level in this production. The cast of deaf, disabled and non-disabled performers seamlessly blend signing and audio description into the performance. This adds to the frenetic movement on stage but gives so many additional cues, along with surtitles and projected words and imagery, that the clarity of the storytelling is magnificent.

There is occasional shadowing of characters, in some cases a speaking actor will be followed about by another who is signing their words for them. Elsewhere Judge Lyapkin-Tyapkin, played wordlessly by a signing Jean St Clair, has her spoken dialogue delivered by Rebekah Hinds, who follows along behind. Meanwhile Amanda Wright, playing a police sergeant, has a head-mike which she uses to provide the live audio-description to users’ headsets from the stage, rather than as more usually done from the control booth.

This is high-energy, wonderful farce staged with boundless imagination. The Government Inspector plays at the Everyman, Hope Street until Saturday 11^th June and comes highly recommended.

David Carlisle and cast - photo (c) Robert Day

This review was originally written for Good News Liverpool

Iphigenia in Splott - Everyman Theatre Liverpool - 14 April 2016

Following a triumphant opening run last May at Sherman Theatre Cymru, Gary Owen’s award-winning Iphigenia in Splott embarked on a 12 venue national tour, beginning at the National’s temporary space on the South Bank and ending this week at Liverpool’s Everyman.

It’s the second of two one-woman shows to appear here in as many weeks in a specially adapted stage layout, the first being A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing, reviewed here last week. But, apart from fiery delivery from a solo performer, the two shows could barely be more different. While the former is a deeply introspective piece that makes the audience work along with the actor, Owen’s Iphigenia gives us a lot more signposts along the way, handing us the moral message neatly packaged at the end.

Sophie Melville plays Effie, who skulks onto the stage shrouded in her street uniform hoodie and begins by addressing us in accusatory tones – she knows what we all think when we see her, she tells us, in no uncertain terms. This modern day Iphigenia has little similarity with her Ancient Greek counterpart, sacrificed by Agamemnon at Aulis, but the references are clear enough as she is pushed to an ultimate test for the ills of an ailing society and ultimately makes her own sacrifice for which, she makes clear, we are all deeply in her debt.

Melville’s performance is pin-sharp and keeps the audience on the edge of our seats and holding our breath for much of its unbroken 75 minutes, and under Rachel O’Riordan’s expert direction she times every passage perfectly, whether storming about the stage or holding us in silent suspense. Even passages of laboured breath become supplementary dialogue.

Hayley Grindle’s stage design and Rachel Mortimer’s lighting are inseparable, as the almost bare stage is formed into time and place with the movement of light within an array of flickering tube lamps, and further atmosphere seeps from Sam Jones’s subliminal, pulsating soundtrack.

We can all share the anger of Effie as she rails against austerity and the fact that those least able to defend themselves are left to bear the greatest burden, and her own story of self-redemption is a powerful one. Gary Owen touches further contemporary issues but without ever straying from his central message, introducing, among others, an ex-soldier whose life has been shattered by an IED.

There are times when the writing is almost too tidily done, leaving little work for the audience to do, but there’s no denying the power of both the story and its delivery, and a standing ovation at the end speaks for itself. And the question we are left with in the closing lines – just exactly what will happen when we can’t take any more?

Sophie Melville - Photo (C) Mark Douet

This review was originally written for Good News Liverpool

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

Until They Kick Us Out – YEP at Liverpool Everyman Theatre – 26/02/2015

I'm Satire - or, if you didn’t get your English GCSE, Taking the Piss…

Last year Young Everyman Playhouse stormed the new Everyman stage and took possession of the space with “The Grid”. This week they continue their path to world domination by forming their own political party, for which Until They Kick Us Out stands as a manifesto.

In last night’s post-show debate it became clear that, when you get them to really think about it, people in general – young and old alike – are not so much disengaged with politics as with politicians and the parties they represent - they’re all the same, and they’re all rubbish. How then do you convince someone who’s turning 18 that it’s worth registering and casting their vote when faced with the rhetoric and in-fighting that characterises the run up to an election?

This 90 minute show has grown out of extensive discussions YEP members have had about what politics does and doesn’t mean to them. Often theatre devised and developed this way can become episodic but YEP, under the direction of Matt Rutter and Chris Tomlinson, have woven their stories into a tapestry in which a very clear picture emerges. The performers have dug deep and uncovered individual experiences, sometimes funny, often painful but always telling, that enable them to connect the personal with the global.

These personal experiences punctuate and inform a narrative in which, scene by scene, the case for engaging with the political debate and making your vote count is powerfully made. Until They Kick Us Out injects the often dry subject of politics with YEP’s inimitable energy and makes for a genuinely thrilling piece of theatre.

The 33 listed performers appear as a chorus, and it is impossible to credit them individually, but there are a great many stand-out performances, and everyone will leave the theatre with a personal list of faces they will be looking out for in future.

There are some very witty scenes as the chorus explore political history and education, particularly in an almost Pythonesque mockery of the suffragette movement, and the use of strong movement and music has particular effect as the show builds to its defiant conclusion.

Special mention must go to the movement director Grace Goulding, who has choreographed the piece like a well-oiled machine, and to the team of YEP technicians for their high-impact sound and lighting work.

Until They Kick Us Out is guaranteed to deliver the tingle factor and to leave you wanting more, but hurry – it closes on Saturday night.

Postscript: UTKUO revives for 3 more performances on 28, 29 and 30 April in the run up to the election, which sees a cast member stand for the Wavertree constituency.

(N.B. This review is also published at seenliverpool.com)

Photo (c) Brian Roberts

Bright Phoenix – Liverpool Everyman – 04/10/2014

Tell me something you really believe in and then I’ll tell you if I believe you.

In the spring the Everyman took us to Hope Place where the street and its community wove a tale linking past and present, exploring the changes in our city from a hilltop view.

For the autumn she carries us further down the hill to Lime Street, where the now derelict Futurist Cinema rises as a Bright Phoenix through the imagination and haunted memories of a group of friends who have been left to fall into the same dereliction as the once grand Picture Palace.

Back then they stole into the darkened cinema to inhabit the characters on screen, and now they shelter under its broken rafters recalling their past and dreaming of a future in which they regain dominion over their city.

Bright Phoenix is a surreal and magical piece of theatre that tells the story as though we see the characters' past and present through a kaleidoscope – broken fragments of coloured glass tumbling around in the light allowing us to catch glimpses of episodes in their lives, sometimes clearly remembered, sometimes illusory.

In a city undergoing a renaissance, we find ourselves reflecting on forgotten lives, fractured communities and lost treasures, that have been allowed to decay and become little more than memory.

Paul Duckworth returns to the Everyman as Lucas Firebright, who has been gone for two decades since he tried to escape from the tragedy of his teenage years. Now he returns home to find his childhood friends and rekindle old loves with the people and places that formed him, and to confront the horrors of his past.

Lucas meets his old one-eyed friend Spike (Rhodri Meilir), whose life follows him in a shopping trolley, and the conspiratorial Lizzie (Penny Layden) who he once canoodled with in the darkened cinema, to the disgust of her brother Alan “Icarus” (Carl Au). They are serenaded from the rooftops by Stephen Shakey (Mark Rice-Oxley) who is subsequently forced to join them under the starlit roof of the Futurist. We also find Lizzie’s son Calumn (Kieran Urquhart) who has his own entrepreneurial way of making a living.

Cathy Tyson cuts a strange and other-worldly figure as Elsie, as derelict as the boarded up shops of Lime Street, but who later emerges refulgent in the guise of Rita Hayworth as Gilda, putting the blame on Mame.

The remainder of the parts (including “The entire population of Lime Street”) are all brought to life in a series of colourful characterisations by Rhian Green.

Through memory and dream-like sequences we discover the history of Lucas and his friends, how Spike lost an eye and what befell Alan Icarus before Lucas fled the city. We see their vision of the night-time from the rooftops and follow their quest to regain a voice in the community.

Martin Heslop has composed a multicoloured and atmospheric score which is performed live by Laura J Martin and Vidar Norheim, who become part of the theatrical landscape almost as the street musicians of the city accompany the night revellers down the road.

Ti Green’s apocalyptic stage design pulls the stage round at a slight angle, with seating rearranged to wrap around the action even more than usual. The skeletons and scaffolding of disused buildings provide a rich landscape for movement and some bold technical effects have enabled many of Jeff Young’s stage directions to be lifted imaginatively from the page, including the “Wound of Liverpool” opening up as the fabric of Lime Street is rent apart.

The cast all give tremendous performances and to begin describing them would have me writing till morning. It is clear from the ambition of the staging that they must all have worked astonishingly hard to bring this piece to fruition in all its surreal vision.

Jeff Young has rekindled an old love affair with the Futurist in writing this piece set in and around the old cinema. His characters are the Everyman and Everywoman of the streets and they sing a plaintive and strangely beautiful song to their city. Director Serdar Bilis has brought the work to vivid life with all its twists, turns and bold imagery, to create a work of beguiling magic that will haunt the memory.

Bright Phoenix plays Liverpool Everyman until 25th October and tickets and further information can be found here: http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/Content/Home.aspx

Carl Au as Alan "Icarus" Flynn - photo (c) Jonathan Keenan

Futurist Cinema Lime Street - Photo (C) www.liverpoolpicturebook.com

Those interested in the past, present and maybe future of the Futurist Cinema can read more at: http://thefuturistcinema.wordpress.com/

Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs) – Liverpool Everyman – 21/06/2014

What is the world coming to?

In a tweet after the dress rehearsal, Everyman Playhouse AD Gemma Bodinetz commented that productions like Dead Dog in a Suitcase are what the Everyman was made for, and having watched it yesterday I see exactly what she means. It is anarchic, genre-defying genius.

Photo: Etta Murfitt

Yes, we expect the Everyman to continue presenting a broad and diverse range of work (which it has already demonstrated in this opening season) but its stock in trade has always been a brand of rebellious, thought-provoking theatre that simultaneously entertains and challenges, and this new work, co-produced with Cornish theatre company Kneehigh, falls squarely into that mould.

John Gay’s Beggar’s Opera has been a rich source of inspiration to writers, composers and performers almost constantly since it first appeared in 1728, and here Carl Grose has written a new script with music by Charles Hazlewood. It’s safe to say, since the original was without a proper script and was musically based on popular songs of the day, that any new version is going to be “freely adapted” but the aim, and certainly the result here, seems to have been to create a version of the tale for our times. Grose’s text retains the key characters and plot and manages to weave a tale that obliquely lampoons today’s establishment just as Gay aimed to do. Hazlewood’s musical settings are ebulliant and tongue in cheek, with a widely eclectic variety of styles and techniques brought together to create a world that defies any definitions of time or place.

The music is performed live on stage by the company, frequently acting and playing at the same time. I don’t believe I have ever seen someone act, play the violin and push a wheeled suitcase simultaneously, and this particular feat of multitasking was naturally performed by a female member of the cast!

As they warn you in some of the publicity, yes there is a dead dog in a suitcase, but as they play a sort of suitcasey version of the old shell game I was left wondering how even the cast could recall which one it was in. The health warning in the promo also promises us “...loud bangs, smoke, strong language and dodgy delights amidst corporate conspiracy, hit men, and songs culled from the edge of existence...” and we are served up with all this and more.

Directed as a tight ensemble by Mike Shepherd, the cast is large and the parts too numerous to attempt a full acknowledgement of them all, but I must unfairly pick out some personal highlights. Rina Fatania’s Mrs Peachum is full of biting humour, Audrey Brisson’s accordion playing Lucy Lockitt also takes advantage of her acrobatic training and Patrycja Kujawska’s Widow Goodman, complete with violin, has a mystical air of other-worldlyness about her. Dominic Marsh is our dashing highwayman Macheath who spends much of the play dodging the noose that hangs over centre stage throughout.

The set design by Michael Vale makes use of the full height and depth of the new Everyman’s space and that sense of space is highlighted by the skeletal nature of the structure, parts of which are surprisingly mobile. As much a part of the production’s look is Malcolm Rippeth’s lighting plot, which echoes the light and shade of Grose’s text and Hazlewood’s score. Here and there some pinpoint lighting accuracy is used to make actors and parts of the set almost float in mid-air.

Last night’s first preview performance received a full standing ovation even before it had properly ended and I’m sure it will be getting similar responses through its run. Here and there were occasional moments where the text was a little overwhelmed by the music, but never to the detriment of the narrative, and a couple of technical manoeuvres that momentarily pulled up the action will almost certainly become more fluid over the next day or two.

Final mention must go to the puppetry, under the direction of Sarah Wright. I won’t spoil it for anyone by describing the varied creations that appear, but let’s say that some would be instantly recognisable and familiar to John Gay, while others, large and small, take the parts of characters that may be troublesome if played by live actors. Puppetry is making a welcome return in British theatre in recent years, having previously fallen out of fashion, and it never ceases to amaze me how our minds can be fooled into seeing them as very much alive despite the frequently undisguised presence of their operators.

Dead Dog in a Suitcase (and other love songs) plays at Liverpool Everyman until 12th July, after which it transfers to the Kneehigh Asylum at The Lost Gardens of Heligan from 30th August to 28th September. It will then appear at Bristol Old Vic from 6th to 26th October.

 

Hope Place – Liverpool Everyman – 09/05/2014

We were fine until he came along. With his history this and history that.

Note: As this posting was written following the first preview of this new play, some scenes referred to may have subseqeuntly changed.

The first thing that strikes you as you walk into the Everyman auditorium is Peter McKintosh’s immense set. Every square inch of the stage floor and the walls covered in detail and the frontage of a Georgian house to the rear, reaching upward out of sight behind the technical grid. Before the opening much of what is on the forestage is partially obscured by projection effects but scene by scene we find that the house is effectively turned inside out on itself, so that we can see a series of interiors as well as the comings and goings in the street.

While much of the action takes place in the basement kitchen of number 8 Hope Place and in the street outside, other scenes take us round the corner to the very spot on which the present Everyman Theatre stands and it is here that the play begins in the year 1699. While the main characters are living in the present day, intermittent flashbacks evoke memories – both theirs and those of others – and it is this sense of a shared history that holds the story together.

Maggie lives alone in the house, her family having moved away. None of them far, but they’ve all gone off and had lives while she has stayed home to care for her parents until they had both gone. But families usually come together for a funeral and it’s their mother’s that brings Maggie’s sister Veronica, her brothers Eric and Jack and her niece Josie back to Hope Place.

Along with Josie is her new boyfriend Simon, the posh one from Birkenhead, and he decides that as this family have lived for generations in the same house they’ll provide a rich source of material for his PhD thesis, which is to be based on oral history. This is the simple premise for unfolding the lives and memories of the characters and blending them with the history of the locality. A portrait of ordinary local people of Liverpool and the Hope Street area they live in. How could anything have been more appropriate for a first new commission for the new Everyman?

Delving into the past often wakes up its ghosts and soon we’re aware of the secrets and lies that lie in the family’s history. Rage, reverie, resentment and reconciliation follow in the next couple of hours as the tales of the past are told. Sometimes the truth blurs with oft told stories and reality is hard to pin down.

Hugely effective are passages where children appear playing out the adult’s memories. There is a double cast of children in these roles who are alternating performances, and the team on stage for yesterday’s first night were superb.

Along the way, through Simon’s interviews for his thesis, we meet other local residents - a bar owner, an incomer from London a sex worker, and we also catch glimpses of residents from the past as we drift back and forth through the decades.

This play is both poignant and witty. It has a great sense of structure too – with a conclusion that feels as though we’ve reached a safe place to stop on the ongoing journey. There are no tidy endings but there is a resolution. Michael Wynne has succeeded in celebrating the locality, its past, its present and its people, without ever losing sight of what a play needs for longevity.

Lighting and sound design from Tim Lutkin and Fergus O’Hare, with music by Isobel Waller-Bridge, create the atmosphere on set and the slick scene transitions.

Director Rachel Kavanaugh has assembled a great cast, many of them familiar local faces. Neil Caple and Joe McGann play brothers Eric and Jack and Tricia Kelly their sister Veronica. Josie is played by Emma Lisi and her boyfriend Simon by Ciaran Kellgren. Michelle Butterly not only evokes the ghost of the mother but also performs six other characters including a music hall singer who opens the second act. Alan Stocks also has seven characters, from a 17th century farmer to the family’s late father. On Friday evening Freya Barnes, Rumah Norton, Harry Turpin and Sam Vaughan played the children’s roles, while on other nights they alternate with Julia Carlyle, Kaitlyn Hogg, Frank Turpin and George Turpin.

I have left one person till last because, while the entire cast are excellent, it is Eileen O’Brien’s tremendous performance as Maggie that really stands out for the huge range of emotion that she finds in her multifaceted character.

Hats off to the cast and creative team of Hope Place for scoring another bull’s-eye for the Everyman.

I saw the first preview performance yesterday and Hope Place plays Liverpool Everyman until Saturday 31st May – full details available at www.everymanplayhouse.com or click here

Author and Director were in the house gauging audience reaction and scribbling notes, so some scenes may be modified.

Artwork by Bolland & Lowe for production publicity and playtext