Imagine a future, a near future, in which gangs of teenage boys roam the deserted streets of the metropolis, selling hallucinatory butterflies and organising parties in squats for rich clients who have extreme tastes in sexual abuse. Imagine. This is the vividly conceived sci-fi world of Philip Ridley’s Mercury Fur, first staged in 2005 and now revived in an old London office block by the thrilling fringe company Theatre Delicatessen.
theatre reviews
aleks.sierz
Over the past decade, much of the energy in new writing has come from black Britons. Homegrown talents such as Roy Williams, debbie tucker green and Kwame Kwei-Armah have sent us updates about the state of hybrid, streetsmart culture, and alerted us to the experiences of minorities. In doing so, they have reinvented punchy dialogue, with stage chat that zips along with dizzy humour and linguistic freshness. Hot on their heels comes Bola Agbaje, whose latest play has just opened on the main stage at the Royal Court.
Matt Wolf
American spiritual anomie, that beloved realm of cultural enquiry that has fuelled the likes of Revolutionary Road and Ordinary People and much else besides, gets its latest theatrical airing in the form of Serenading Louie, a Lanford Wilson play that is almost as infrequently seen States-side as it is here. Now, here it is at the Donmar, in a mournful, acutely pitched production from the director Simon Curtis (Cranford) that doesn't shrink from confronting head on the abyss into which the characters are falling fast. Hang on for what is a flawed but, if you stick with it, mesmerising ride, featuring several of the finest performances currently to be found on a London stage.
Veronica Lee
Scottish playwright David Greig’s new play, for the Royal Shakespeare Company in their London season at Hampstead, picks up where Shakespeare’s Macbeth left off (almost). We are in 11th-century Dunsinane, the seat of power in Scotland. Macbeth (referred to here as simply “the tyrant”) is dead, his queen (Gruach) is very much alive, and Malcolm and Macduff are poised for power as the invading English army under Lord Siward attempts to install Malcolm as puppet king over a newly united Scotland.
Sam Marlowe
It’s the pretext that reunites Judi Dench and Peter Hall to collaborate on Shakespeare’s comedy nearly five decades after they first ventured into the Athenian woods together at the RSC. But the conceit of conflating the fairy queen Titania with Gloriana doesn’t come close to lending Hall’s workaday production the necessary sense of enchantment. It’s performed on Elizabeth Bury’s sparse and decidedly mundane monochrome set, with its cardboard cut-out trees and a shiny black floor, which lacks any flavour of the sylvan and, thumped across by heavy-footed, boot-shod actors, is sometimes distractingly noisy. Where’s the magic?
What little there is comes, unsurprisingly, courtesy of Dench. Immediately recognisable as an imperious Elizabeth I in glittering gown, curled red wig and ruff, she first appears among her courtiers bidding them, with a commanding gaze, to play out Shakespeare’s drama around her for her own diversion. Hall’s staging is often dully static; he reinforces the queen’s status by frequently requiring the rest of the cast to kneel.
The central concept of his interpretation is intriguing at the outset; and it works well enough when Titania is declaring her right to an Indian boy, who, to her, is a pretty piece of property and the offspring of a loyal subject, or issuing instructions to her band of rather earthbound fairies. But it makes little sense when Charles Edwards as Oberon tricks her into amorous obsession with the ass-headed Bottom – a humiliation to which it’s difficult to imagine the monarch deigning to stoop.
Still, Dench is bewitching, by turns statesmanlike, flirtatious, magisterial and sensual. Her words of love to Oliver Chris’s Bottom, transformed with wonderfully furry ears, big bright eyes and a pair of shiny fore-hooves, drip eroticism; her speech of nature in revolt over the rift between fairy king and queen rings with contained anger and anguish. But what surrounds her onstage feels like little more than scanty window-dressing for Dench’s performance.
Of the lovers, only Rachael Stirling makes much impression: there’s a convincing note of heart-sickness and self-disgust to her Helena – though she sounded dangerously hoarse on opening night. Julian Wadham and Susan Salmon betray not a hint of passion as Theseus and Hippolyta, and Salmon’s delivery of the verse is disconcertingly stilted. As for the Mechanicals, a Midlands-accented band led by James Laurenson’s muted Quince, their knockabout clowning is painfully protracted and even the assembled Athenians didn’t appear to be enjoying their eventual display of amateur dramatics much.
Fairy dust may sparkle and dance around Dench’s Titania; the rest is rarely other than ordinary.
OVERLEAF: MORE DENCH ON THEARTSDESK
aleks.sierz
Looking at posters outside the Apollo Theatre, where the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth’s award-heavy Royal Court success opened last night, you might be tempted to start humming: “And did those feet in ancient time…” But such nostalgic sentiments are unlikely to survive the opening scene of this phenomenal play. Soon after the curtain, a symbolically faded flag of St George, rises, we see a familiar rural scene: under-aged kids stoned out of their minds, dancing in a thumping rave. It’s a nocturnal bacchanalia of house music, gyrating girls and drug-addled wildness.
Veronica Lee
You may know the actor, drag artist and gay activist Bette Bourne from his portrayal of Quentin Crisp in the theatre, or perhaps his Lady Bracknell for English Touring Theatre (a role he was surely born to play) but outside the gay/theatrical London loop, he is less well known. That’s a shame because this charming and rather unorthodox piece of theatre shows that his life story - from an East End childhood, through early gay liberation, the scourge of Aids and the advent of queer theatre to present-day stately homo status - deserves a broader audience.
aleks.sierz
Okay, now that you’re a citizen of Dystopia, and you’ve reached the regulation old age, it’s time to check into an approved care home. Please enter the Ark, and take your allotted bed. A government official will be with you in due course. Yes, that’s right, just take those pills and you will be fine. Will you be expecting visitors? Okay. Any problems, just ask Nurse. In Tamsin Oglesby’s satirical new drama, which opened last night at the National's Cottesloe space, the biblically named Ark is not a means of salvation but an instrument of euthanasia.
Matt Wolf
The wait is over. Less than six months after dramatic literature's defining tramps departed the West End, here are Vladimir (Didi) and Estragon (Gogo) back again, with some new faces to flesh out Beckett's eternal verities about that grievous but also grimly funny thing we call life. Roger Rees has joined Ian McKellen to make up a double-act whose vaudevillian tendencies intensify the more these two abject fellas face down the void.
sheila.johnston
"Plays about cinema tend to be written by people who have done some movies, come back and filled their fountain pens from their spleen," the Oscar-nominated screenwriter Larry Gelbart once told me. David Mamet's Speed-the-Plow is probably the best-known example, followed by such works as Christopher Hampton's Tales From Hollywood, Martin Crimp's The Treatment and, most recently, last week's The Little Dog Barked. Oliver Cotton's diverting comedy (they are invariably comedies) sits very snugly in that long dyspeptic tradition, bringing few fresh insights to the party but lifted by some sharp writing and a trio of outsize, roaring-boy performances that threaten constantly to split the seams of this compact venue. Tip: try not to sit in the front row.