Death of England at the National, or, Too Much on One Level

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 22nd February 2020.

It takes great talent to sustain a 100 minute single-hander play. Rafe Spall throws a huge amount of energy into this new work at the National, but from where I was sitting he didn't equal the recent, subtler work of Laura Linney and Maggie Smith at the Bridge, though he is hampered by aspects of both script and staging.

Clint Dyer and Roy Williams's play concerns Michael, a white man running a flower stall struggling with problematic relations with his family and generally furious with the wider state of the world. The authors' aim, I think, was an investigation of white racism, of the kind of people who are thought to have voted for Brexit. It is certainly significant to have such an investigation written for the stage by two black writers - but they don't achieve a penetration of those issues to compare with recent work on the American dimension of these themes by the black American writer Branden Jacobs-Jenkins (most notably in his fine Appropriate seen recently at the Donmar). We may hear a great deal about what Michael thinks but the play does relatively little to explain how he has come to think this way. Its treatment of politics is superficial - there's a moment when Michael admits that he didn't even vote in the Brexit referendum which is just crying out for further exploration, but rapidly passes as the rant continues. As a result the play doesn't emotionally earn the closure it conjures. Indeed it did worse than that for me, with its (spoiler) use of a voice from beyond the grave, which effects a too easy reconciliation, and again does not allow for sufficient examination of how the situation allowing for that voice had arisen.

The Visit at the National, or, Another Failed Epic

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 15th February 2020.

I rather like a good epic, I regularly go to Wagner operas after all. But the big test of such an epic is whether the time flies by so that, in fact, you forget how long you're there for. On this occasion, proceedings dragged, badly.

I'm not familiar with Friedrich Durrenmatt's original, but presumably it had a Swiss or European setting. Tony Kushner's new adaptation transplants it to a decaying town in rust-belt America. Commentary on the social effects of the collapse of industry in the rust-belt has been everywhere since Trump's victory in 2016. Kushner's take on the setting sadly has nothing fresh to say. I'd recently read Amy Goldstein's Janesville: An American Story (2017) - which both goes deeper into the impact of economic change in the region and is more dramatically compelling than anything in this show.

The Welkin at the National, or, Twelve Women in a Room Arguing

Note: This is a review of the preview performance on Monday 20th January 2020. The Press Night took place last night.

The premise of this play is an admirable one. Essentially it takes the idea of the classic Twelve Angry Men and turns it into twelve women. We do not see such an ensemble often enough on stage and I hope this flawed (from where I was sitting) attempt will be a spur to others to carry the idea forward. This show is blessed by an excellent, in some cases underused, ensemble, but the play itself doesn't quite work.

The plot concerns Sally Poppy (Ria Zmitrowicz) who has been condemned to death for her part in a murder but has claimed to be pregnant. In consequence twelve women have been empanelled to decide whether she is so, with a single male officer of the court in the room with them who is not allowed to speak. The problems arise from how this idea is executed. It takes too long before we are locked in the room with this jury. Musing about it as I walked home I became increasingly convinced that the play would benefit from cutting all the scenes before the empanelment and letting any information we may need from them filter out through the jury room debate - this would also leave room for more mystery, more tension. Because the next issue is that we are told far too much about the prisoner before that debate even starts - there's not enough left to discover about her to generate needed dramatic tension once we're in the jury room. In consequence, in Act Two, writer Lucy Kirkwood resorts to a surfeit of revelations about our jurors which feels overblown - less, as so often would have been more.

EIF 2019 - The Secret River, or, Under Very Challenging Circumstances

Note: This is a review of the matinee performance on Saturday 10th August 2019.

A pre-curtain announcement from director Neil Armfield hinted that the run of this production was continuing under challenging circumstances, but it was only the result of a conversation afterwards with a relative that I learnt just how challenging. Frankly, it is astonishing that the rest of the cast are managing to continue under those circumstances and the remarks that follow must be presaged by an acknowledgement that we were lucky to see the show at all, and a sincere hope for the recovery of Ningali Lawford-Wolf.

To turn then to the show itself. I haven't read Kate Grenville's novel, so I can't comment on how Andrew Bovell's adaptation compares. We follow the fortune of now pardoned convict William Thornhill (Nathaniel Dean) and his wife Sal (Georgia Adamson) as they attempt to occupy a hundred acres of land on the Hawkesbury River in colonial New South Wales. Thornhill attempts to convince himself that the land is virgin, that they are entitled to take possession. His wife, still longing for a return to her native London (evocatively conjured in text and, at moments in staging) is much more sceptical. The story focuses on exposing the fallacy of Thornhill's claim. We find his family at first alongside the First Nation people who have inhabited the area for far longer, and watch as tensions mount to inevitable violence.

Peter Gynt at the National, or, Another Flawed Epic

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 13th July 2019.

In recent years one strand of Edinburgh International Festival theatre programming has been securing higher profile co-production partnerships in the English-speaking theatre world. The idea is admirable but the results have been mixed. The last link up with a major London house (the Old Vic) two years ago produced the disappointing epic The Divide. This year Edinburgh audiences will soon be visited by a new version of another epic - Ibsen's Peter Gynt, this time in co-production with the National Theatre. In advance the show had one clearly positive element - the casting of James McArdle as the lead following his magnificent performance in Angels in America. But there were also question marks - the last Ibsen Jonathan Kent directed at the National - the epic Emperor and Galilean was flawed, most of adaptor David Hare's recent work has been, from where I've been sitting, undistinguished, and the designing of a production that would work equally well in the Olivier and the Edinburgh Festival Theatre did not strike me as straightforward. Sadly, this proved to be a disappointing afternoon.

The one saving grace of the show is James McArdle who makes a valiant, though ultimately vain effort to bring it to life. He has great presence and energy. He ages strikingly - the old, embittered Scotsman of the last act is a particularly fine piece of work. But he failed finally to make me care enough about Peter, or to conceal the considerable flaws of the rest of the show. Credit is also due to Oliver Ford Davies, whose delivery brings a welcome authority to the concluding scenes. Jonathan Coy finds occasional sparks as Bertram. The rest of the ensemble work hard but none of them make a particularly strong impression, though this may be to some extent a consequence of the adaptation or Ibsen's original.

Top Girls at the National, or, A Baffling Reputation

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 13th April 2019.

This was my fourth Caryl Churchill play. I didn't have high hopes in advance as none of the other three (Drunk Enough to Say I Love You (Royal Court), Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Here We Go (both NT)) did much for me. But I was curious to see this particular play on account of its reputation as a classic. Perhaps it was all more daring back in 1982.

The story concerns Marlene (Katherine Kingsley) who some years back fled/escaped her Suffolk home and has built a successful career in London and abroad, ultimately achieving a senior management position in the Top Girls recruitment agency. The fantastical, apparently much famed, Act 1 sees her celebrating her promotion over dinner with an eclectic selection of historical and fictional women. Act 2 Scene 2 sees her and her associates in action at the agency. Act 2 Scene 1 and Act 3 take us to Suffolk.

Tartuffe at the National, or, Insufficiently Fleet of Foot

Note: A review of the performance on Thursday 28th February 2019.

In the opening stages of this show I rather hoped for a fully comedic evening - in the present state of the world our theatres could, quite frankly, do with a bit more sheer escapism. Unfortunately, it quickly becomes clear that this comedy is married to yet another Norris era attempt to lecture us about that world beyond the theatre walls. That attempt suffers from a heavy handedness which infects the more comedic elements depriving them of the lightness, the ease of the best comedy. The result is another evening at the National which drags.

The show is blessed with an enjoyably opulent set (Robert Jones), even if the double doors at the back don't slam with quite the force or ease that the farcical element of the script really needs. Director Blanche McIntyre also successfully shrinks the large Lyttelton stage, although she has been less careful regarding sightlines for those on the front left hand aisle paying full price. With the help of physical comedy director Toby Park she engineers some brilliant surprise entrances. But pacing is often slow, the farcical elements never get quite wild or quick enough, there's an insufficient sense of affairs spinning out of control, and the tilting floor at the end is gratuitous rather than menacing.

When We Have Sufficiently Tortured One Another at the National, or, We Are Listening to You. For Hours.

Note: This is a review of the performance on Monday 4th February 2019.

It was instructive to see this show the evening after Ian McKellen's mesmerising solo tour de force at the Bridge. This show also possesses fine performers in Cate Blanchett and Stephen Dillane, with a strong supporting turn from Jessica Gunning. Blanchett in particular delivers a mountain of text as compellingly as McKellen. Unfortunately there's a considerable gap between the poetry of such great writers as Shakespeare and Gerald Manley Hopkins, and the prose of Martin Crimp.

I'd previously seen a revival of a Crimp play at the Almeida and his two operatic collaborations with the composer George Benjamin, none of which did much for me. This text is considerably worse. We are in a garage in which a couple are playing sex games, with an audience of four. Who exactly the couple are, why they've taken to this peculiar kind of role playing, why on the theme of Pamela (this show is allegedly variations on Richardson's novel - not having read it I can't comment on to what extent that claim stacks up), and why on earth three of the quartet of watcher-participants are involved are all questions which struck me as pertinent but which Crimp never answers. He does belatedly indicate that the fourth watcher is being paid - which given what we are expected to accept that gentleman is subjected to suggests that the unemployment situation is far worse than I'd realised. In place of meaningful exploration of character or motive, or indeed plot that goes anywhere, all we get is endless talk. It was not clear to me what the message was or even if there was one. Occasionally a striking image leaps out from the verbiage, but mostly, despite the best efforts of the performers I just could not get interested in what was going on.

I'm Not Running at the National, or, Neither of Them, Thank You

The issue play is a popular form at the National these days, and this is another in a lengthening line of indifferent ones. The state of the Labour Party and of the NHS are both topics which also seem to be in vogue. On the former we've had the flawed Labour of Love and the brilliant Limehouse, on the latter the recent Hallelujah! This play combines the two themes in an episodic treatment ranging from 1996 to 2018.

It is the decision to posit an actual Labour party leadership contest in 2018 which is at the heart of the work's problems. Firstly, historically, there wasn't one - and at the time there was frankly little sign there was going to be one. Secondly, the terms in which Hare imagines this fantasy leadership struggle emerging are so divorced from the actual history as to render the story deeply unconvincing. Hare posits a Blairite type centrist (so far so fair enough), against an independent woman who has only just joined the Labour party and who has made her political career on the single issue of being elected in Corby by opposing the closure of the NHS hospital there. Hare seems to be unaware that the defining issue of our politics in 2018 and indeed for several years prior to that was Brexit. Moreover recent general elections have decimated the minor parties and independents - our actual politics, contrary to one of the theses of the play, is becoming more tribal rather than less. He also ignores the actual character of the two most recent struggles for the Labour leadership - some glancing comments on the soul of the Labour party notwithstanding, there is an absence of engagement with the Corbyn-moderate battle which defines Labour at present. Had Hare set this debate during the Blair era, or towards its end, and rendered it a purer history piece it might have worked better - though even then the whole argument feels rather redundant in the context of our current political crisis. In sum, Hare seems to want to be making a comment on our contemporary political moment, but nothing really lands because the picture of that moment he constructs is increasingly divorced from reality.

The Tell-Tale Heart at the National, or, In Wearily Familiar Territory

Note: A belated review of the performance on Friday 4th January 2019.

This riff on Edgar Allan Poe's short story commits a series of my more highly ranked theatrical crimes. But perhaps the most notable, and unwise, is to include quite a number of statements in the text which were presumably intended to be jokingly self-mocking and in fact invited firm agreement from this audience member - this began early in the first half with a masturbation joke ("Who wants to watch that?") - we have already by that point had the masturbation and on-stage toilet visit presumably so Neilson can say look what I can do on stage at the National - and concluded when this tedious show was crawling towards an ending with "Well the play was shite anyway." Indeed it pretty much is.

My only previous encounter with author and director Anthony Neilson was his work Realism at the Edinburgh International Festival back in 2006 which was one of the many mediocre new plays I've sat through there over the years. This is worse. The central problem is that Neilson can't seem to decide whether he wants to make a comedy or a chilling murder mystery. Mostly the evening sticks to the former (although many of the jokes are tired and while some in the audience laughed I rarely did). However, as the second half drags on the show makes an attempt to shift to the latter. The whole set up has been so mocked to that point I couldn't take the shift in tone seriously. A further problem with the shift is that, to work, it would require the viewer to be engaged by the plight of Celeste/Camille (Tamara Lawrence). Unfortunately, she is written as such an arrogant, tiresome individual who goes far too unchallenged by anybody else on stage that I felt the sooner she was arrested and removed to prison the better. The writing inflicted on Lawrence is generally problematic - it's difficult to see why Nora (Imogen Doel) is so attracted to her and it's simply ludicrous that David Carlyle's Detective seems to find it so difficult to spot that she's committed a murder when the signs are, in my view, unmistakable. The heights are reached when a voice over claims that Lawrence has planned the whole crime meticulously - a new definition of the term I was not previously aware of.

The Lehman Trilogy at the National, or, American Dreams...American Nightmares

Note: This is a belated review of the performance on Thursday 26th July 2018.

This show is full of things that in other contexts I've hated - long sections of descriptive narration, projections, gimmicky staging ticks. Here they all work, supported by extraordinary versatile acting from the three performers to create a beguiling and ultimately rather sad American history.

The show, adapted by Ben Powers from the original Italian, tells the story of the Lehman Brothers firm from its creation by three German Jewish immigrants in a small room in Montgomery Alabama, with a door handle that sticks, to its demise in a tower of glass in New York City.

Reflections on an Accidental US Race Relations Double Bill

Last Saturday I spent the day seeing two new works on the theme of American race relations – Branden Jacobs-Jenkins's deconstruction of Dion Boucicault's The Octoroon (transferred to the NT's Dorfman from the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond) and Anna Deavere Smith's one woman show Notes from the Field, playing the Royal Court as part of LIFT 2018. The accidental comparison proved instructive.

Jacobs-Jenkins's An Octoroon starts unpromisingly. An actor (Ken Nwosu) playing the playwright comes on and proceeds to detail his problems in writing the play. While the author does have a fresh angle on this (the particular challenges of being, or trying to be, a black playwright) this didn't finally justify the reuse of what is, as far as I'm concerned, an over familiar and ineffective device – that is the device of worrying to the audience about how to start the play – (most recently in evidence at the start of The Inheritance). Why contemporary playwrights so often show this aversion to just getting on and telling the story escapes me. 

Absolute Hell at the National, or, Voices from the Edge of the Abyss

My only previous encounter with director Joe Hill-Gibbins was his frankly dreadful production of Edward II in the Olivier. As a result, I was not particularly optimistic about this in advance. To my surprise it proved to have much to commend it.

The work itself clearly merits revival – I dissent here from quite a few professional reviewers. It's a powerful ensemble piece set in Soho on the verge of the 1945 Labour election victory. Although the cast of characters is very large, and many get only a limited time on stage, I found the ambiguities of the writing intriguing not annoying and I never felt the text needed to do more to flesh them out. Even in the smaller cameos it always gives us just enough to interest and convince. On the whole it doesn't feel overlong (certainly not in comparison to the recent similar marathon of John in the Dorfman), though I did feel Ackland struggled a bit with an ending.

John at the National, or, All My Girlfriends Turn Into Little Green Insects, That Is My Tragedy

Like Annie Baker's previous play at the National, The Flick (seen in 2016), the first characteristic of this new work is the slow pacing. As in that earlier work there are longish stretches of time when nothing much is happening on stage. But the device is less successful on this occasion because the world upon which it is deployed is far less convincingly immersive.

In place of the decaying flea pit cinema of The Flick we are in a bed and breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania. It was perhaps unfortunate that I saw this the week after happening to re-watch the Gilmore Girls episode “The Road Trip to Harvard”. That features a B&B with similarly overwhelming décor and clinging hostess. Unlike The Flick, John never really convinced me I was somewhere fresh. The next problem is one of genre. Baker has thrown at least two together – romantic comedy – or at least mockery of it – and ghost/scary story. The scary stuff is too half hearted to really impact. The treatment of the romance is undermined by the fact that the central couple of millenials are so ghastly that I pretty quickly ceased to care whether they stayed together. Indeed, I felt the play never really established how on earth they had come to be together in the first place (again there was a rather unfortunate echo of last week's similarly unconvincing millenial couple in Donmar's poor Belleville).

Pinocchio at the National, or, Talking Down to the Children (Again)

Note: A review of the matinee on Saturday 16th December 2017.

Despite some blazing highlights (Follies, Angels in America) it has been another year of too many indifferent to poor productions for the Norris National, and this year's childrens show adds another failure to that list. Despite clocking in at modest 2hrs plus interval it feels at times painfully long. The narrative and characters lack emotional depth, the moral lessons are overly didactic in delivery, and though the cast do their best nobody really transcends the weaknesses of the material.

The first problem is the narrative itself which creaks rather badly. In case you're not familiar with it,  there are two strands. One – the attempts of Pinocchio to become a real boy by discovering what is the common element to all humanity. In pursuit of this he runs away with a travelling theatre and visits Pleasure Island. Two – the evolving relationship between Pinocchio and his father Geppetto. In this version the whole thing just never quite gels into a convincing whole. As the afternoon dragged on I found myself thinking of The Fantasticks – it shares similar themes – running away from a home life that seems dissatisfying and dull and eventually learning there is more to that life than was first seen. Of course the songs in that show are rather better which helps, but the book also possesses a greater subtlety, and the characters more depth. Overall here, Dennis Kelly fails to replicate the wit and heart that made Matilda such a wonder, and the moral dilemmas of the story left me cold.

Network at the National, or, I'm Feeling Bored

Note: This is a review of the matinee preview on Saturday 11th November 2017. The press night is this evening.

About midway through this long two hour show a performer demands to know how we are feeling. We're expected to join in a collective applauding of fictitious TV anchor Howard Beale and shouting out of his catchphrase (“I'm mad and I'm not gonna take it anymore”). As far as I'm concerned theatre has to earn my participation, persuade me to become complicit in such an act. This failed. I was bored and I quietly said so.

I haven''t seen the 1976 film on which this show is based, but a read of the plot on-line, scan of quotations on IMDb and a viewing of the trailer suggests that Lee Hall has made a pretty fair copy of the original. Looking at the trailer there is a noticeable difference to the emotional pitch – zany, tending to crazed, which this wearily slow-paced version fails to match. But I also wonder if the politics of the film – the power of television, the threat of a faceless corporate America, were more original and provocative in 1976 than they feel now. I felt I was listening to lectures on these matters I have heard frequently before and which, as so often at Norris's National, were not subjected to sufficient on-stage critique.

St George and the Dragon at the National, or, The Tedium Resumes

Note: This is a review of the matinee performance on Saturday 14th October 2017.

After the too brief glory of Follies, the run of flops in the Olivier resumes with this latest National new commission. This show appears to be yet another attempt by the venue to comment on the state of the nation. The result is two hours and 45 minutes of often painful tedium.

Rory Mullarkey's play starts from the premise that St George reappears age after age to slay the dragon which mutates into different guises. We start in pre-industrial England, move forward to a country in the grip of the industrial revolution and finish up in present day London. The cyclical approach is unfortunately reminiscent of Common's repetitions and problematic, albeit in different ways. Firstly, the play asserts that only a year passes between each encounter but there is really no sign that anybody ages at all in that year. Secondly, the village still seems to be inhabited on each occasion by exactly the same people, but there is almost nothing in the way of individual character or relationship development. This is compounded by the cliched nature of many of the characters – the fact that nearly all of them are denied a proper name and referred to instead by trade both indicates and exacerbates this (crier, butcher, healer etc. - as with Eggy Tom in Common I despair that it seems to have occurred to nobody in the National's commissioning process that there was any problem with this). Then there's the shallow political commentary which Mullarkey will insist on bolting on to this rickety structure – a tiresome anti-capitalist screed in the second cycle, wearily familiar remarks about the breakdown of communities in the third, and general unexplored assertions that there was, at some point in the past, a better, possibly golden, age. The net effect of all this is to bore. Apart from one or two brief sparks in the second half the play basically committed my cardinal sin of failing to make me care about anybody on stage, or to make me really believe in any of the relationships being represented.

Follies at the National, or, Living Up To All My Hopes

Note: A belated review of the evening performance on Saturday 23rd September 2017.

I feel like I've been waiting for this revival for forever. Indeed for years, inspired mainly by the correspondence between the line that the Weissmann theatre is to be a car park (though in this version office block) and the Yes Minister joke about the National's building that the architect was given a knighthood so no one could say the building looked like a car park I've thought the National should do it. That it should be the often dismal Norris era that finally sees this revival was a pleasant surprise. Fortunately, it met all my high hopes.

From my seat on the side of the central Stalls block I found the show superbly made to fit the Olivier space. Vicki Mortimer's straightforward set works well. We see a central wall with an archway on one side of which the theatre's advertising lights are sometimes illuminated. To the left the stairway for the descent of the girls, to the right a muddled, dimly lit ruin of rubble and red theatre seats. Often, though, the central playing area is bare but this focuses attention on the drama – Cooke finds an intimacy that can elude in this space.

Mosquitoes at the National, or, No, you really don't need to tell us this

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 29th July 2017.

This was my first encounter with the work of Lucy Kirkwood, having missed her widely praised Chimerica. Sadly for me this new play did not live up to that reported promise.

Kirkwood presents a rather wearily cliched and overloaded tale of familial disfunction. There are two sisters whose lives are in different ways collapsing – with the addition of the familiar device of one sister Alice (Olivia Williams) starting the play under the delusion she has things far more under control than her badly messed up sibling Jenny (Olivia Colman). Then there's Alice's unhappy teenage son Luke (Joseph Quinn), the sisters' mother (Amanda Boxer) suffering from both incontinence (showing this on stage seems to be in vogue at the National these days) and dementia, Alice's new partner Henri (Yoli Fuller), a recovering alcoholic (he's also black making an inter-racial relationship which I'm afraid came across as contrived) and a mysterious character named in the programme, though not I think in the spoken text, as The Bosun (Paul Hilton) who may be Alice's mentally ill ex-husband. There are a number of problems with all of this. There are far too many plots struggling for stage time. And this is before you add in Jenny's dead child and her role in that death, Luke hacking into and apparently bringing down the Large Hadron Collider (a crime for which Jenny is then arrested, and which the authorities at the LHC then apparently decide is a technical fault – there is also the frankly baffling question as to how on earth the pair of them get inside the facility in the first place), Jenny attempting to sleep with Henri and then trying to commit suicide and so on and wearily so on. As with the Old Vic's Girl from the North Country, Kirkwood misses that less is nearly always more powerful. More seriously, Kirkwood rarely succeeded in making these characters convincing as individuals – they remain too much types seen before.

Common at the National, or, Perhaps They Could Try Playing It For Laughs?

Note: This is a review of the performance on Monday 5th June 2017. The press night took place last night (Tues 6th June 2017).

On paper this new commission had promise. I loved D C Moore's The Swan, staged a few years back in the Paintframe, and Anne-Marie Duff is a very fine actress. Sadly, that promise is not fulfilled.

The principle problem with this show is Moore's text. It is both elaborately over-written and plagued by mangling of word order – one spends a fair bit of time trying to work out what people are actually saying. It rarely achieves naturalness in delivery, despite some of the acting talent involved. Quite often it comes across as just plain silly (did nobody query the name Eggy Tom during the production process?). In itself, the text, much of the time, simply fails to work as dramatic language.