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

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.

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

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Liverpool Everyman - 21/03/2015

The iron tongue of midnight hath told twelve;

Lovers, to bed; ’tis almost fairy time.

When the Everyman does Shakespeare we expect it to have an edge, especially when the play is one with a supernatural element to it. In his new production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Director Nick Bagnall casts a dark spell over his characters and audience alike and, along with the mischievous humour, he excavates some of the shadowy imaginings that haunt our dream time.

For his first production in his new role as Associate Director at the Everyman and Playhouse, Nick Bagnall has chosen to work with a former collaborator, designer Ashley Martin-Davis. They shared a vision of Shakespeare’s Dream in which there would be none of the obvious visual cues such as trees, moon and fairy wings, preferring to work in a more abstract setting whereby the audience could invoke their own imaginings.

The Athenian court of the opening is alluded to by the plinths of columns with the rest of the stage relatively unadorned. Peter Mumford’s lighting sets the tone for the production, and while the colours of light and costume shift dramatically from scene to scene, it remains in a variety of striking monochromes until a blaze of colour announces the final act.

I would hesitate to say that this is a ‘modern dress’ rendering, as many of the costumes are evocative of other times and places, but the school uniforms of the young lovers in the early scenes contribute strongly to our belief in them as teenagers. The mechanicals too, in their hi-vis work gear, bring us firmly down to familiar earth. It is the trip to fairy-land that flies into fancy, even without its fairy wings, with a dramatic and transformative scene change that takes us into a bewildering wasteland and seems to double the size of the Everyman’s open stage. From this point the action shifts a gear and the entrances and exits become even more imaginative.

Garry Cooper and Sharon Duncan-Brewster are our Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania, while Puck has shifted gender and is played by a spritely Cynthia Erivo, who floats about the stage wielding her cane like some spectral ringmaster. The former pair have great poise as the Athenian Duke and his mistress. Cooper presents a malevolent form when he reappears as a troubled King of the Fairies and Duncan-Brewster’s Fairy Queen shimmers with light and passion.

Andrew Schofield appears as a spry site foreman as Peter Quince, assembling his motley crew of overalled players to rehearse their theatricals. Michael Hawkins is a sharp Robin Starveling /Moonshine, who seems a little confused by his dog, and Ozzie Yue plays Snug, his Lion putting me in mind of Bert Lahr’s creation in the Wizard of Oz. Alan Stocks (also a suitably enraged Egeus) is Tom Snout, who bears a witty wall. Lewis Bray (late of Cartoonopolis) is Flute, the bellows mender, whose turn as Thisbe is a sight to behold. And of he who plays Pyramus? Let’s just say that Dean Nolan’s Bottom has to be seen to be believed. It is a larger than life rendering in which there are moments when he could almost be channelling Brian Blessed.

Hermia and Helena are played by Charlotte Hope and Emma Curtis. They bring a naivety and schoolgirlish coyness to the parts but are equally able to find real venom when roused. Matt Whitchurch and Tom Varey are their confused lovers Demetrius and Lysander, and both have great charm and energy in their performances. The speed of delivery in the exchanges of this quartet is breathless in places, but even from the back row of the stalls I didn’t miss a syllable.

James Fortune’s music is a mixture of recorded sound and onstage performance, including recording work from Members of the Young Everyman Playhouse, and as well as creating the soundscape for the play the music occasionally finds humour of its own.

I have remarked in an earlier posting that I saw performances of A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the old Everyman in January 1983, which broke the mould of theatre for me and made me fall in love with the Everyman space. This play is as open to reinvention as the theatre itself and invites directors to do something bold and new with it.

Nick Bagnall’s production finds aspects of light and shade that bring the work to the stage with renewed freshness and excitement. As well as exploring dusty corners of the text he also reaches out into the new Everyman space making maximum use of its openness, and we see more of the building’s capacity to surprise.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream lasts for approximately 3 hours, including one interval set between acts 3 and 4. It runs at Liverpool Everyman until Saturday 18th April. There is an age recommendation of 14+ due to one very brief scene with sexual innuendo and partial nudity.

Production photography (c) Gary Carlton:

 

Tom Varey and Charlotte Hope in rehearsal - image (c) Brian Roberts