Labour of Love
A Play by James Graham @ Noël Coward Theatre, 16th November, 2017
If NEC, LGC, GMC, AMM, LCF, EC, and a score of other acronyms are second nature to you then this is a “must see” play about life in the Labour Party. I went with 20 other addicts from Battersea and Tooting and got a powerful shot of nostalgia, regret and sentimentality. James Graham, who specialises in political drama, is clearly equally captivated by the intimate dynamics of personal pyscho-drama.
The action covers the rise and fall of Blairism in the Labour Party in the period from the fall of Thatcher in 1990 to the “triumph” of Corbynism in June, 2017. Martin Freeman, as David Lyons, is the spirit of Tony Blair and Tamsin Greig, as Jean Whittaker, represents the heart and soul of the party.
Their failures and triumphs are first plotted backwards from the failure/triumph (as in Dunkirk) of the June, 2017, General Election. It opens with Lyons awaiting his inevitable defeat in a Midland heartland seat, which along with defeats in Stoke and Mansfield, represented the nadir of the early morning of 9th June. Here there is a good laugh for Battersea locals, I suspect Tories as well as Labour, as Lyons humorously contrasts his fate with Labour in Battersea and Leamington.
From here, the action takes us back, step by step, from election to election; from the disaster of 2010 to the triumphs of 2005, 2001 and 1997 to the hubris of 1992. The action, as the play goes into reverse concentrates, on the triumph of Blairite modernism from bringing in new technology to the constituency office to the replacement of the coalmines with call centres.
There are plenty of good jokes on the way and not a little personal drama. Lyons’ wife Elizabeth, just too-too Cherie-like, shows appropriate metropolitan disdain for both his constituency office and the local party activists. Whilst the CLP (see what I mean! For the uninitiated I mean Constituency Labour Party) organiser/agent, Whittaker, is dismissive and disparaging of both the new MP’s and his wife’s metropolitan ways and affectations.
At the interlude, it was clear that the second act was going to change into forward gear and replay the history but why and to what purpose? By the end of the play, I was only left to admire how Graham had created and used this temporal structure to show the different sides of personal dramas, political imperatives and technical gismos.
As the curtain fell, I was left to ponder the vagaries of political certainties; of how yesterday’s truths become today’s old lies and presumably how today’s certainties are as likely to be just as vulnerable to the ravages of time. Time had been just as harsh, as it happened, on new technologies as on new labour, with the fax machine and the tele-text as redundant as any New Labour nostrum. But the play also demonstrated how time and the intense pressures of political lives can be just as damaging for many personal relationships.
The question remained: how were the personal dramas, Lyons and his wife and more particularly Whittaker and her two husbands, going to be played out? As it turns out, of course, the denouement could be divined within the action, both in reverse gear and in forward gear. Along with another message, deeply embedded in the play and that was a successful Labour Party needs both the “winners” and the “dreamers”.
James Graham has given us another clever and witty play for political nuts of all persuasions, not just those of a left-wing bent.
Witness for the Prosecution by Agatha Christie
I went to County Hall to see Lucy Bailey’s Witness for the Prosecution. The play’s action largely takes place in an Old Bailey court-room with a couple of scenes in the defence counsel’s chambers. Designer, William Dudley, might not have done much to stage the play in County Hall’s Council Chamber, but whatever he did do he did brilliantly, because it proved to be ideally and dramatically suited to be transformed into a magnificent Old Bailey court-room. The Chamber was built for political debate, with majority and minority parties benches, a Mayoral dais and press gallery splendidly reflecting the prosecution and defence, judge and clerks of the court and jury seats required for staging a court-room drama. The single-purpose, somewhat claustrophobic, controlled environment of a political chamber also has its obvious parallels with the court-room.
For those unaware of the plot, the play has a very clever, typically Agatha Christie, twist. However, the twists and turns of the plot do demand a remarkable performance from Leonard Vole, the defendant, played by Jack McMullen. He needs to be thrillingly and seductively attractive to women of all ages and at the same time to be naïve and of Machiavellian cunning; unfortunately, McMullen’s acting did not quite have the range to make his character totally credible. Actually, of course, the problems really are the demands of the script. Agatha Christie’s work is to be enjoyed for the clever twists and turns of the plot and not necessarily for the credibility of the demands she places on her characters.
In any event, the central character, defence counsel, Sir Wilfred Roberts QC, is beautifully played by David Yelland and it is his character, which is the central lynchpin of the plot. Indeed, Sir Wilfred is the tragic hero of the piece; well intentioned, polished and sophisticated, elegant and fearsomely clever in a nice aristocratic manner he is made a buffoon and a loser by a scoundrel. The powerful last scene lost nothing by being so well known to many of the audience.
The setting and the dramatic conclusion, the moral dilemmas posed by the story and Yelland’s acting made for a very enjoyable theatrical performance in an interestingly new environment.
Go early and spend 20 minutes walking around the outside of the Chamber, reading the marbled engraved names of the leaders of the London County Council (LCC), the Greater London Council (GLC) and the Inner London Education Authority (ILEA) – most of them now sadly merely names in the records of the past, but some still talked of today – most notably Ken Livingstone, but there is also Chris Chataway (pacemaker along with Chris Brasher for Roger Bannister’s Four Minute Mile but also briefly a Tory Leader of the ILEA) and Sir Ashley Bramall. Less well known but with a very small connection to me, one can also find Norman Prichard, later Sir Norman – as well as being Chairman of the LCC he was also a Labour councillor for Latchmere ward – my ward, then of Battersea and now of Wandsworth.
Witness for the Prosecution runs at County Hall until January and I heartily recommend it although I may have been slightly swayed in that I worked in County Hall for 23 years and it was, therefore, a bit of a sentimental journey. I look forward to seeing many more dramas, especially courtroom ones, staged there in future.
Just a word of warning! If you go in the cheaper seats (but not exactly cheap), in what used to be the public gallery, both view and accessibility need to be checked in advance!
Twelfth Night – a play by William Shakespeare
We went to see Twelfth Night at the National on Saturday. I think I saw the opening act in a drama competition once many years ago and Duke Orsino’s pathetic lament
If music be the food of love, play on,
give me excess of it; that surfeiting,
the appetite may sicken, and so die
at the start of the play had always appealed, for the poetry rather than the pathos. So, I was full of expectation.
The evening didn’t start too well. We got the train from Clapham Junction to Waterloo on a tight but sufficient timescale but then the train stopped 200 yards short of Queenstown Road. Someone was on the tracks – a terrible accident? a suicide? Everyone was patient, that is until we were told that it was a “fun” trespasser. We missed the first 15 minutes and Orsino’s lament. Who knows how many dates were missed; tickets wasted; lovers disappointed?
Two hours later, I rather wished I had missed more and not missed Dele Alli’s wonder goal (yet another) for Spurs against Watford on Match of the Day. What a terrible production!
The play is a complex one; toying with gender roles and cross casting; with love and infatuation; with reality and appearance. It has some very dated elements, not least the treatment of Malvolio/Malvolia. It has exquisite poetry. What it does not need is yet further sex changes to add to the disbelief (I still haven’t worked out whether one woman was playing what Shakespeare had intended to be a man or a woman, or indeed was a man doing the reverse). Nor does it need a fussy, fiddly stage setting, which was changing, admittedly cleverly but so what, every couple of minutes.
And why were Viola and her brother dressed as rather clean punks? Orsino and Olivia as business people? and many of the rest in assorted costumes through the ages? At least Viola and her brother were of the same ethnicity. I suppose the production would have been even more challenging if one had been black and the other white. The poetry, above all, needs clear, beautiful articulation not rather undistinguished method acting and overdone romping at every moment – not one sexual overtone, not one double entendre got away without the most unsubtle action replay.
Perhaps most of all, romantic comedies, no less than romantic tragedies, depend on the romance as much as the comedy. The tragedy of this production was that the comedy was flat and the romance simply incredible. There was no spark between Orsino and Viola/Sebastian nor between Olivia and Sebastian/Viola.
But maybe it was me, or rather us, as the performance got a standing ovation at the end, with plenty of hooting and hollering. But to my mind the director seemed either not to have confidence in Shakespeare’s play and its poetry or in a modern audience and its capacity to understand Shakespeare. Thank goodness for Iplayer and I did later get around to seeing Dele’s goal. Is that boy a genius?
My Country: a work in progress
We went to see this “play” at the National Theaatre on, ironically, St. Patrick’s Day. I say ironically, because we saw a play about the lack of clarity about what it means to be British on a day associated with the very established and internationally recognized identity of one of our constituent “parts”, the Irish.
I am sure that I could find some definition of “a play”, which My Country did not fulfill. In some sense, there were no personal relationships portrayed; there was no action; there was no plot; there was no drama. Yet, in another way, what could be more dramatic than the possible internal collapse of a great country? How could that story not be a plot? Who could say that Brexit and the state of the UK does not constitute action? And whatever happens in these most unpredictable times, the aftermath of Referendum Day will continue to have a massive impact on the relationships of nearly 70 million people.
The play is an anthology of quotes from Britons about the build up to and the fall-out from Referendum Day, 23 June 2016. Quotes from the great and the good, bad and the ugly (Cameron, May, Corbyn, Johnson, Gove and many more starred) and quotes from the people, the people from London-Derry, Edinburgh and Glasgow, the North-East, Leicester, Gloucester, Salisbury and Merthyr are masterfully crafted by Poet Laureate Carol Ann Duffy into a passionate cry for something, but what? Sanity, cohesion, belief, faith, rationality?
I have seen it said of this work that it demonstrates mean, unpleasant, nations(s) retreating into a pessimistic dystopia. I don’t think that’s right. Its rather about a people flailing around blind and lost, without common purpose or direction. That at least was my impression. There was no commonality in almost anything debated, and a lot was at least mentioned. On the other hand there was plenty of wit, humour and nostalgia, but overall there was no sense of purpose or unity; in that sense the play was extremely depressing.
Is it possible that in a lifetime, as it happens almost exactly my lifetime, the UK could go from a nation that will forever be remembered for its finest hour to one totally lost in a world, rapidly gravitating towards continental entities built around smaller regional units? Or is it that Duffy had a peculiar ability to extract from the evidence a story that corroborated her feelings and attitudes, whilst another author could equally assemble a positive, clear picture of where we are going and how, say a picture of close relations with the EU, even the restoration of our role in the EU, and a renewal of a United Kingdom?
This was a confusing evening, stimulating a myriad of thoughts and emotions, not a restful, comforting one. I highly recommend it – if you wish to be provoked. The last show at the National Theatre is tomorrow, 22nd March, but then it goes on tour throughout the UK, returning to Stratford in the east end. For details see: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/shows/my-country-uk-tour
Puccini’s La Bohème
I saw Puccini’s La Bohème at the London Coliseum, on 23rd October. This romantic tragedy of Bohemian Paris is well known and the music is, of course, ravishing. It was, also, beautifully and precisely conducted by Xian Zhang.
The production, however, drew a pretty miserable picture of La Belle Époque Paris. The programme notes quote a contemporary as saying, “Bohemia is a sad country. It is bordered on the North by need. On the south by misery. On the east by illusion. And on the west by the infirmary”. You could believe it watching this.
I suppose that makes it a great production. It certainly convinced me that late nineteenth century Paris was not my dream “Back to the Future” destination. The rich clientele at Café Momus are not appealing and the poor students seemed to me to be a little pathetic rather than tragically romantic.
So why am I even bothering to write this up? One simple reason – the performance of Corinne Winters as Mimi. The English National Opera artists are of course brilliant but the young American, from Frederick, Maryland, outshone everyone. Her power, her range, her musicality out-classed everyone.
Watch out for Corinne Winters, surely a super-star of the future.
Yarico
Heard of Yarico? It’s a play or is it a musical? Or it’s songs and performances telling a story – a story about slavery; its related to Madame Butterfly and Miss Saigon; its an old story but given modern trafficking it is almost certainly a modern story too.
I went to see the London Theatre Workshop’s production a couple of weeks ago at the Eel Brook pub in London’s trendy King’s Road. The pub itself was new to me as was its theatre but well worth a visit and Yarico was a good introduction.
Yarico was an Amerindian from Barbados, who saved the life of an English merchant, named Inkle, ship-wrecked in the 17th century off Barbados. They fell in love with each other, but, as the play had it, he gambled her away on a losing streak. She was enslaved, exploited and abused.
In 1787, George Colman wrote an opera called Inkle and Yarico. The romanticised opera was an enormous success and was performed some 250 times on the London stage before playing in Dublin, Jamaica, New York, Philadelphia, Calcutta, Boston, and Charleston (Thanks to Wikipedia for this data). It appealed to a society, which was just embracing the anti-slavery movement – the slave trade was abolished in the British Empire in 1807, and slavery itself in 1833, again in the Empire. US slavery was abolished in 1863, but as we now know to our shame slavery, especially female slavery, is still very prevalent to this day.
The 2015 version I saw was graced with a very lively and enthusiastic troupe of actors and a very simple but effective production by John & Jodie Kidd. The actors were all athletic – not exactly dance but plenty of physicality in this show – and dynamic. However, the star of the show was Liberty Buckland, who played Yarico herself.
Liberty has a beautiful and powerful voice. Personally I would love to see her play Maria in Westside Story and add some life to the rather insipid classical film version played by Natalie Wood. She brought passion and vibrancy to the role.
But Alex Spinney’s Inkle deserves more than just a mention – again a good voice if perhaps not with the power that one might envisage for the role – and again superb athleticism. Jean-Luke Worrell’s Cicero was yet another among a string of excellent performances.
I went with some people hoping and expecting a little-known eighteenth century play – don’t go with that in mind as what they got was a lively, loud (but not too loud) very modern take on an old story of man’s inhumanity to woman! It does, however, end on a very upbeat and uplifting number called Spirit Eternal. If you read this NOW then I recommend you go straight-away. You have until 28th March, 2015!
Leviathan – a Review
Leviathan is an immensely powerful film about corruption. It starts slowly and builds up to a crescendo assault on the hypocrisy of the established Orthodox church and the Russian state in unison. The sweep of the film is as vast as the drear Arctic landscape and its targets are legion, ranging from the casual drunken violence of the men and the pusillanimous submissiveness of the women, from the dereliction imposed on the landscape by the inheritance of the communist era to the mindless exploitation of kleptocratic capitalism. It hardly needed the giant skeleton of a long dead whale gracing the shore to point out the symbolism.
The country is littered with wrecked fishing boats, a vandalised church, unsurfaced roads and ruined lives. The consumption of Vodka is on an epic scale; the casual gun culture is ironically reminiscent of one’s worst fears about the Americas, both Latin and USA. What hope is there for the future, for the adolescent left as the rootless survivor of this tragedy?
A woman in the audience said, as we left, that she was left speechless by this Andrey Zvyagintsev film. She was the only one of us who was able to say anything at all. If this was a statement of modern Russia then the one positive was that somehow the authorities allowed it to be shown in Cannes where unsurprisingly it won an award. But apart from that the film showed with brutal candour the total corruption of a society, which appears to have lost all sense of purpose, sense of self, self-belief.
Target practice for the shooters were Brezhnev, Gorbachev and other dinosaurs from the past but not Yeltsin, “too insubstantial to bother with”, nor the current leader, “history has not yet had time to assess”. But we didn’t get round to that action – stalled as we were by seduction and violent brawling.
Was there anything encouraging about the film? Well, yes, through all the beautifully acted stages of drunkenness nevertheless the essential humanity of the lead figures came through. The women may have been down-trodden victims of violence but they were the ones who kept society running, whether as the mind-numbing officers of the state or doing the worst jobs, and the men had a certain tragic nobility.
There is so much to say about this film. The descent from the noble statue of Lenin to the tawdry, faded picture of Putin watching over the shoddy, shabby nature of the formica topped tables in the Mayor’s office and the desperate loneliness of the quality (?) restaurant alone were subjects for a book. But don’t take my word for it. If you have any interest in great films, in Russia, in tragedy, then break a leg to go and see this film.
Wot? No Fish!!
Went to Battersea Arts Centre (BAC) last Friday (18/7/14) to see Danny Braverman’s one-man show Wot? No Fish!! He and Nick Philippou are working together using this show as a springboard to re-form the Bread & Circuses Theatre Company.
It was a tour de force of story-telling, enhanced, not hindered, as it happens on Friday by a 30 minute break thanks to a rogue fire alarm – an incident which merely enhanced our admiration for Danny’s skill as a “village or clan” story-teller.
Braverman uses pictures drawn on the back of his weekly wage packets, by Abraham Solomons to tell a seemingly simple story of an East End Jewish family. Solomons presented the pictures along with the packets’ contents to his wife every week from the mid-twenties to the mid-fifties and in the course of it told a story of great charm and considerable complexity.
The end result was not a classic theatrical drama but a story, told with great skill and dramatic impact. It was the story of writer/performer Danny Braverman’s own family, and felt like an intimate family history told by an old friend. His quiet conversational voice emphasised the tenderness and warmth of that family.
The pictures were back projected on to a screen, which was the stage back-drop, and were part of a very cleverly constructed show. On the way we explored the nature of Jewish and ethnic identity, of poverty and wealth in society and of family love and togetherness. There were bad times. We see the pain that the couple have faced during their lives together, particularly when an autistic son is institutionalised. That week’s picture showed the middle-aged couple with a wall between them – very poignant and very simple.
The script includes an interesting take on the nature of history: not a simple line, nor regular cycles; more like a spiral of change but touching upon older contact points as it spirals. Indeed the programme notes claim that the show “is the helix as a metaphor for history”.
The performance ends brilliantly, as the final picture is animated: the couple walk up the hill together, with birdsong on the sound-track. On the verge of being schmaltzy but the warmth and humanity triumphs over that unworthy thought. If you get a chance to see it – do NOT miss it.
Oh, My Sweet Land
A Love story from Syria
By Amir Nizar Zuabi performed by Corinne Jaber at the Young Vic on 25th April, 2014.
Amir Zuabi accompanied Corinne Jaber on a trip to Syrian refugee camps in Jordan and from what was obviously a harrowing experience they crafted this extraordinary one hour, one act, soliloquy they label a Love Story. It would be more accurate to call it a lament for Syria.
The weakness, and in some ways the strength, of the piece is that the drama is set in a kitchen and the action is the obsessive preparation and cooking and re-preparation and re-cooking of Kubah, a classic Syrian dish. Hence the action is, to say the least, limited but the intensity is all-pervasive.
The narrative, it is almost a poem, is by a leading character, who is half-German, half-Syrian, but raised in Germany; and is of her meeting with Ashraf al Rashi, a dissident who had been held and tortured by the secret police, the Mukhabat. They talk, they become lovers. They have three blissful months in Paris; they return and he disappears and she ends up in Munich. The action describes her search for him in camps and shelled out cities, it ends with her meeting him and his wife, Surraya and beautiful baby daughter, Ream – she embarrassed and Ashraf delighted to introduce her to the family.
The circumstances are highly political but neither politics nor religion nor the tribal conflicts, which we associate with Syria are mentioned. The back-drop is full of action but the play/soliloquy obfuscates the detail and the circumstances. This is a tract simply against, against man’s inhumanity to man, against his stupidity, against the waste and pointlessness of conflict, against the pain, and against the destruction of love and life.
For me it was just a little too elliptical, a bit too strange and mystifying. I like my drama to have meaning and perhaps a clue towards redemption. Oh, My Sweet Land is a lament without hope except by escape to a foreign land far removed from the turmoil of the “Arab spring”. But there can be no doubt of the Young Vic’s enterprise in putting on a piece of such gravity about one of the major issues of the day. Remember that she is cooking and thinking of Syria when she concludes:
It’s scalding hot
It’s dangerous
That’s when oil can splatter
A single drop can singe your eye
But no one can afford to look away
Decent people can’t look away from what is happening ….
If even now there can be mass destruction of children and women by gas
The world’s come to an end.
Now is the time to say nothing
There is not even a need to pretend to be shocked
Just listen to the oil sizzling in the pan
And pray that the flying drops miss the whites of your eyes ….
A Taste of Honey
A Play By Shelagh Delaney
I saw the film, starring Dora Bryan and Rita Tushingham, when it was first released in the early 60s. It was yet another story of working class, northern Britain to go along with Look Back in Anger, Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, Room at the Top and This Sporting Life, a healthy antidote to Terence Rattigan and Noel Coward.
But fifty years later the striking feature of A Taste of Honey turns out to be its feminine, perhaps rather than feminist, outlook. On reflection the Angry Young Men were at least as angry with their unfortunate girl-friends as they were with being chippy, working class heroes. Jimmy Porter is callous towards his wife as he looks back in anger; Arthur Seaton is casually chauvinist both on Saturday night and Sunday morning; Joe Lampton is carelessly dismissive of girlfriend and mistress when searching for room at the top; and Fred Machin finds his landlady more complex to manage than the rawness of life as a rugby league footballer.
But in A Taste of Honey Shelagh Delaney’s men are at the same time both sideshows and more varied than the angry young men. There is the gentle, charming but transient black man – Josephine’s lover; Peter, mother Helen’s feckless, drunken, debauched husband/lover and the more interesting gay Geoffrey, who shows an inclination to stay the course as Joe’s friend but does not have either the toughness or courage to manage it.
No, the women are the heroes. They are unsentimental, tough as old boots, far from totally admirable, but they are the stuff of life and continuity. They will bear and manage the child to come. They are what makes working-class Salford work, in this rather grim portrayal of 1950s Lancashire. They reminded me of Ma Joad in The Grapes of Wrath, the epitome of tough women in a tough world.
That Delaney could write such a play, her first, at the age of 20 having seen a Rattigan play at the age of 18 in her first experience of the theatre and concluding that she could do better makes her exceptional. That she could write it in 10 days having left school at 15 makes her a phenomenon.
With two leading female parts, Joe as the pregnant teenager and Helen, her licentious, irresponsible mother, and its handling of racial and sexual diversities, Delaney’s play was certainly not the standard fare of the British kitchen sink drama of the 1950s. It was rather a precursor of a more diverse society shaped by industrial decline and a search for new values. I thought, with only my memories of the film, that it was probably not going to be very relevant to today – I was wrong. It is of a different age but it is relevant and well worth a visit to the National’s Lyttelton Theatre.
The production itself was not, however, quite up to the play. The staging and the direction were up to the National’s normal high standard even if the revolving stage of miserable working-class Salford, interior and exterior, was predictable. The acting, however, did not quite ring true. Lesley Sharp was more arch than I would expect the feckless Helen to be, and whilst her Mancunian accent did not need to be perfect, it sounded a bit mid-Atlantic to me. Kate O’Flynn’s Josephine was certainly not self-pitying but somehow not engrossing either.
The male parts were relatively minor but Harry Hepple as the gay Geoffrey stole the acting honours. His was no caricature but a sensitive account of what it might be like to be a gay, would-be father and caring confidant in a brutally macho world. That Geoffrey could not stand the pressure did not come as a surprise.
Overall, Shelagh Delaney brought a new voice to the theatre and to the interpretation of women’s role. She deserves to be re-instated as a star of the theatre and given a larger, very working-class part in the feminist pantheon.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 