Review: Almeida's Our Town

It's been said that since 1948, Thornton Wilder's seminal Our Town has been performed every single night, even on Sundays. In America, it's mega: amateur groups perform it because of the deliberately minimal staging, actors love it because of the naturalistic dialogue and directors worship it because of the bold metatheatrical devices, including having an on-stage 'Stage Manager' (played in this production by director David Cromer).

In the Almedia Theatre's new production, things have been stripped back even further: actors mime props, speak in thick regional English accents and David Cromer's stage manager oversees proceedings with a sense of casual ceremoniousness. When he enters, he describes the town of Grover's Corners. "The sky is beginning to show some sneaks of light" towards the back of the stalls and Main Street runs between rows A and B of the Almeida's new traverse auditorium.

And while this might sound like modernist mumbo-jumbo, it's actually good. Fantastic, even once it gets going. Cromer's simplistic staging ensures that the focus is always on the audience, and the theatrical revelation that comes in Act 3 filled the auditorium with gasps and even the odd teary eye. 

Marc Brenner

The cast, many of whom are making their professional stage debuts, give it their all, and special credit goes to Laura Elsworthy, David Cromer and Richard Lumsden as the everyman journalist Mr Webb. 

The lighting, while simple, is also standout. Performed mostly with the house-lights up, the gentle shifts to half-light and the sudden drop to black in third act did nothing but add to the startling intimacy and tenderness of this gripping production. 

With his production of Our Town, David Cromer has shone a light over the everyday. It is a play, and production, that asks us to not only look at the stage but also at each other; that young couple on the front row, the two pensioners at the back, me. While Wilder and Cromer share mayorship, it's still very much Our Town.

10/10

Review: National Theatre's Savage Medea

It would be easy going into the National Theatre's stunning new production of Euripides' Medea expecting a small budget affair. Remember their Mother Courage, with its minimalist, white-wall set, or Edward II, with the focus more on multimedia than sheer spectacle? Well, it's shocking how a £3 increase can so drastically affect a production, because Medea is big. Really big. Tom Scutt's two-storey design places the action in a dilapidated mansion, with peeling wallpaper and gaudy carpet. Visually, it's stunning, with the action taking place across both levels, often simultaneously. Upstairs, we can see a function room full of white chairs and a wedding cake from which the Chorus appear like ghosts. Downstairs, a window looks out into a forest of gnarled trees.

The floor, initially littered with the toys of Medea's two young sons, provides an ample arena for the fierce emotional intensity of the actors. The Olivier hasn't been this heated since last year's Othello. There's strong support from Martin Turner as a sadly underused and slimy Creon, and Michaela Cola is crushingly aware of the inevitable as the Nurse. Cole also manages to brilliantly navigate her way through both the opening and concluding monologues, even making Ben Power's sometimes flat dialogue seem natural and unforced. Cole has a bright future ahead of her. Also in the cast is Danny Sapani, who as Jason is both a smooth politician and loving father, devastatingly (and awkwardly) posing for a picture with his two small sons.

And then there's Helen McCrory who is a vicious and barbaric Medea. Dragging the bloody corpses of her two sons in sleeping bags, she appears more as a savage lioness than a mother descended from the Sun Gods. Her performance is richly nuanced, and despite her small stature she towers above the rest of the cast with wild-eyed power and control.

Helen McCrory in the title role
© Richard Hubert Smith

Even the music is stunning. In a brilliant design choice, Carrie Cracknell chooses to have the Chorus appear as bridesmaids, carrying boxes of flowers and dresses. They dance erratically to Alison Goldfrapp and Will Gregory's sinister, carnivalistic score, becoming more and more bloodied and messy as the show continues.

With hundreds of £15 now on sale, you have no choice. You have to see Medea. Despite some occasionally dull dialogue, this powerhouse production will go down in history as one of the best Medea's to ever grace the stage. The cast fire on all cylinders, performing on a stunning stage under the genius, focused direction of Carrie Cracknell.

9/10

Review: Almeida Theatre's Mr Burns: A Post Electric Play

Ten minutes in the sighing started. Like nuclear fallout, it slowly crept forward, invisible, deadly, from the back of the circle down to the front of the stalls, until it was time for the first interval and like irradiated hyenas we scrambled out of the theatre.

It's no wonder people are escaping at the first interval. The first act of Anne Washburn's bizarre new play - Mr Burns - sees a group of people who I didn't care about enough to even remember their names huddling around a campfire, in the middle of the night in the middle of a nuclear apocalypse, tediously recounting the famous The Simpsons episode Cape Feare. Line by line, scene by scene, they work forward, dully recounting lines of dialogue in bad impressions of Homer, Lisa, Bart and Marge. In a bold move, director Robert Icke has chosen to stage the first act in almost complete darkness, but it's too dark on stage to see the actor's faces clearly, so act one is more like listening to a radio play in a dark room.

One scene sees the stereotyped cardboard cutouts - the geek, the mysterious, shotgun wielding drifter who seldom speaks, the paranoid woman - monotonously read names of lost relatives out of blank notebooks. Would it really have been so hard to just write some names down on a page?

The only redeeming features are the subtle references to what caused the nuclear apocalypse, life after it (one character describes a town devoid of all life, another describes the stink of irradiated corpses) and the genuinely sinister arrival of a giggling madwoman, played by Jenna Russell.

The second act, thankfully, skips ahead seven years. How do we know about the time difference? Each act opens with an obviously unhappy Almeida steward holding up a cardboard sign denoting the name of the play (as if we didn't know) the playwright (whose work I wouldn't be too keen on seeing anytime soon), and the time period. It's all very Brecht.

In the second act, the group of travelers from the first act have now formed a theatre troupe and, using scripts purchased off the black market, stage and perform television shows and the commercials. A rival group, the Primetime Players have a huge cast, while one group dedicates itself to performing episodes of the West Wing. 

Unlike the first act, subtlety isn't key here. One sections sees the cast perform a montage of classic songs a capella, from Britney Spears' Toxic to Daft Punk's Get Lucky. It's a brilliantly choreographed, exciting sequence, and the cast give it their all. 

© Manuel Harlan

I was genuinely unhappy when the second act finished. It really was great. It was a wonderful piece of post-apocalyptic black comedy, with a brilliant premise, great performances and a shocking and unexpected ending. 

Act three really gets weird. And when I say "really weird" I actually mean "really really really weird". Because it was. Set seventy-five years after act two, The Simpsons is now mythic. Opening with a yellow-robe wearing Greek chorus singing Ricky Martin's Livin La Vida Loca in an operatic style, the cast reperform Cape Feare, now fit to bursting with references to Christ and the Nativity and Ancient Greek Legend. Bart (Jenna Russell) wears a leather breastplate, crown and wields a sword. Lisa wears a headdress not too different from the Statue of Liberty's. And Mr Burns - confusingly replacing Sideshow Bob as antagonist - has  the thuggish Itchy and Scratchy as machete wielding minions.

This act, with beautiful music by Michael Henry and Fiona Digney with opera sung by Adey Grummet, is flat out confusing. I personally find it pretty unbelievable that it would only take seventy-five years for the show to receive mythic status and through Biblical imagery, Washburn may be attempting to show how ritualistic and revered religiously the show is, but this falls flat due to a complete lack of characterisation. It would have been far more effective to show, say, a family worshiping and discussing the show five hundred years into the future than only showing the ritual itself.

The Chorus Enters
© Manuel Harlan

There are genuinely some strong ideas inside Mr Burns. It's interesting and exciting with a beautiful score and evocative lighting by Philip Gladwell. However, it's hindered by a flat, turgid first act and unlikable characters. In contrast, act two is bold, funny and sad. And while act three provides no satisfying conclusion, it's complex and full of interesting metaphors and imagery. 

It asks some tough questions and leaves us to answer them, and ultimately asks what will happen if the world as we know it really does end. Will humanity focus on the essential or finding comfort in the trivial?

Mr Burns is the latter. But could have been the former.

6/10

National Theatre Announce New Phone-Hacking Play

Great Britain, a new satirical play written by Richard Bean (One Man, Two Guvnors and Made in Dagenham) and directed by Nicholas Hytner based around the recent phone-hacking scandal, was announced today and is due to open next Monday on 30 June in the Lyttleton Theatre after no previews.

Billie Piper stars in the 'anarchic' play as 'Paige Britain, [an] ambitious young news editor of The Free Press, a tabloid newspaper locked in a never-ending battle for more readers.'

Tickets for performances from 30 June - 12 July are on sale now, with tickets from 14 July - 23 August going on sale at 9.30am on 30 June.

Almeida Theatre Autumn 2014 Season Announced

26 August – 4 October
World premiere
Little Revolution
A world premiere by Alecky Blythe
Directed by Joe Hill-Gibbins

In the summer of 2011, London was burning. Alecky Blythe took her dictaphone to the streets.
Little Revolution explores the stories of a community brought together and divided.

See the Almeida’s space transformed as the audience are placed at the heart of the action.
Little Revolution is Alecky Blythe's first new London production after her success of London Road at the National Theatre.

9 October – 29 November
Our Town
by Thornton Wilder
Directed by David Cromer

We all grow-up, we fall in love, we have families and we all die. That is our story.

Award-winning US actor-director David Cromer directs this intimate and new version of Wilder’s iconic American play.

This deceptively simple story exposes the stark truth of human existence as two people fall in love, marry, and live out their lives as a small American town becomes an allegory for everyday life.

“David Cromer’s rethinking of Thornton Wilder’s masterpiece is a landmark” Wall Street Journal

Following a sold-out run at the Almeida King Charles III by Mike Bartlett will transfer to the Wyndham's Theatre on 2 September for a strictly limited run.

Review: RSC's Henry IV Part One. A Triumph.

As you walk into the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, you’ll immediately be struck by the large wooden crucifix hanging above the bare, dimly-lit wooden stage.  It’s a strong image, both on a physical level and a metaphorical one when placed in the wider context of the play; Henry Bolingbroke is now king and Richard II is dead. Henry, wracked with guilt, wishes to make a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, but a political uprising helmed by Richard’s heir Mortimer and the Percy family means that he is forced to delay this trip and risk incurring the wrath of God. Meanwhile, his son, Prince Hal, played by Alex Hassell, is refusing to accept his responsibility of prince and instead spends his time with Sir John Falstaff – an incredible performance by Bard veteran Anthony Sher – in the taverns of Eastcheap generally being badly behaved.

Boys behaving badly

The play is easily one of Shakespeare’s best. I was hugely disappointed with Richard II last year, but I found the seamless juxtaposition of family drama and political thriller taut and gripping. The narrative is told from the perspective of various politically and socially aligned groups. It’s almost like Game of Thrones: Live, and both sides are determined to be the victor.

Jasper Britton is fantastic as a guilt-wracked Henry. This is a man fully aware of the religious implications of his actions, and someone determined to avoid a repeat of the previous King’s disastrous reign. He is further aided by Alex Hassell as a leather-clad, sex-bomb. We first see him under the covers with two women, and as they leave he cops a feel of one of them and coolly chucks the other a pouch of coins. Not only is Hal in denial of his future role as king, he seems to be completely unaware.

When we first see Anthony Sher’s Falstaff, he is passed out in an alcohol-induced stupor. When he awakens, he treats Hal with a sense of paternal caring, but soon, his darker nature starts to appear. He treats Paula Dionisotti’s Mistress Quickly with a misogynistic bluntness, and he even sinks to pillaging the corpses of his fallen allies in the Shrewsbury battle, gleefully plucking a ring from a fleshly slain corpse. This is a man used to manipulating the world for his own gain. He even calls the men he is leading into battle "food for powder, they'll fill a pit as well as better". Prince Hal is horrified, and it is from this moment that we know that this friendship is quickly approaching an inevitable demise.

That’s the best thing about this production: the sense of change. Falstaff is an old-school conman, a swindler, and the sadness in his eyes knows that pretty soon, there won’t be a place in the world for people like him. Mistress Quickly presides over her tavern with a sense of world-weariness, and she seems to be constantly asking herself the immortal question: how long left?

The rest of the cast are strong too, especially Trevor White’s relentlessly unhinged Hotspur. He’d rather be in bed with his wife than acting like a husband, and is blinded by rage towards Henry.

The problem with the production is that it feels very safe. Ivo Van Hove this isn’t. It’s a standard, risk-free production of a Shakespeare play, and Greg Doran needs to be careful or else his formula of purist, traditional dress productions will quickly grow thin.

Next year, Doran will presumably direct Henry V. I can’t wait. This is a triumphant production of one of Shakespeare’s greatest plays. Simply unmissable.

8/10