Off-WEST END
REVIEWS
ROYAL COURT THEATRE
Sloane Square, SW1
TWO VENUES: Theatre 'Upstairs' &
Theatre 'Downstairs'
BOX OFFICE: (020) 7565
5000
JARWOOD THEATRE -
UPSTAIRS
SPUR
OF THE MOMENT
by Anya Reiss
Now
playing until 14 August
The Royal Court has a reputation for presenting challenging
plays and courting controversy, especially in the smaller Upstairs space.
18-year-old debutante Anya Reiss is reputedly the youngest
person to have a play staged in a London theatre, having been only 17 when it
was written. She has created a 100 minute drama that might shock even hardened
devotees of the theatre, thanks to a central theme of underage love.
In fact, Spur of the Moment holds back and attacks the issue
with the softness of soap opera, not always helped by its determination to
replicate reality in all of its tedious glory.
Every one of the members of this household in the stockbroker
belt is mired in misery. They also love their clichés.
In Sesame Street terms, the play might have been brought to
us by the word "sorry", so often is it uttered by every one of the
five residents.
The problems started when dad, Kevin Doyle's weak Nick had a
four-month fling with his ugly, older boss who happens to share a name with his
tearful wife, Vicky, played with great conviction by Sharon Small. To make
matters worse, he lost his job and is now a frustrated, penniless
house-husband.
Their 12-year-old daughter, Delilah loves High School Musical
and Harry Potter and can't wait to be a teenager. She is even able to pour a
little oil on troubled familial waters.
The joker in the pack is James McArdle
as the family's lodger Daniel, a handsome Scottish student as symbolically and
biblically named as the teeny seductress, in his case waiting to be judged in
the Surrey lion's den.
He becomes a pawn in the parental battle but more worryingly
the subject of Delilah's childish fantasies.
Despite the attentions of his visiting girlfriend, Daniel who
like everyone on the stage suffers from a serious inferiority complex, allows matters to get out of hand, letting the
little girl lead him on and then responding with a kiss that is far from
chaste.
Unhappiness reigns, as the young man repeats the older one's
guilty line "This is the worst thing that I have done in my life".
The acting is generally good and under Jeremy Herrin's
direction Shannon Tarbet, making her first ever
professional appearance as Delilah has marked herself out as a star of the
future.
Spur of the Moment is a real mixture, with some great moments
of tension and comedy broken by formulaic writing. It sets out to shock but
eventually the impact is more likely to be the realisation that deeply unhappy
people wound each other. It is not always comfortable to be a fly on the wall
in situations of this type, even when the walls are part of a two-story set
brilliantly created by designer, Max Jones.
.
While the play is far from perfect, since its writer has not
even sat her A Levels yet, she may well have a big future in the visual arts
though on this showing, Anya Reiss might be better suited to TV than the stage.
Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet
Magazine
JARWOOD THEATRE -
DOWNSTAIRS
Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet
Magazine
]
DONMAR WAREHOUSE
Earlham Street
WC2
BOX OFFICE:0870 060 6624 (No booking
fee)
THE
PRINCE OF HOMBURG
by Heinrich von Kleist
Now
playing until 4 September
The Prince of Homburg is a mighty strange play. Written by
Heinrich von Kleist in the early years of the Nineteenth Century, there is a
suspicion that it might work as well played as a satirical comedy rather than a
historical drama.
Its central character is a heroic young army officer
portrayed by Charlie Cox who, as the play opens, has seemingly lost his mind.
Indeed his friend Harry Hadden-Paton's Hohenzollern
describes the dreamy Prince as "a sleepwalker in love with the moon".
Little thereafter throws doubt on that impression.
His reverie brings about an undying love for the beautiful
Princess and with it, a rash disregard for orders from the Elector of
Brandenburg, an excessively proud ruler given more than a touch of the
preposterous by Ian McDiarmid.
That is hardly the ideal precursor to the next day's work on
the battleground where, recklessly ignoring orders, the Prince becomes a hero
in the fight against the marauding Swedes, though possibly at a cost since he
may have been responsible for the loss of some of his allies' lives.
This is no fairy tale though and rather than getting the girl
and the glory as he expects, the Elector has the Prince court
martialled and imprisoned. The young man's reaction
is pitiful in every sense of the word as he turns coward doing a fair
impression of Claudio in Measure for Measure as he asks his love to beg for
mercy at the cost of her own happiness.
The unlikely consequence is an army rebellion demanding the
resurrection of their hero, led not by a hot blooded young warrior but David
Burke's doddery Colonel Kotwitz.
The remainder of the play is equally unpredictable, as is the
characterisation, since most of the state's great and good take the least
likely course of action whenever the opportunity arises.
By the end, all that is left is laughter, as the headstrong
Princess given very modern sensibilities by Sonya Cassidy attempts to change
the course of history single-handedly and very nearly succeeds.
Dennis Kelly has used poetic modern language to give the
story a more contemporary feel, although the costumes and gloomy setting for
Jonathan Munby's revival are from the original
period.
The Prince of Homburg is a difficult play, with its
inconsistencies and despite Heine's reputed praise that it is "as though written by the genius of poetry
itself", the language is not always sufficient
compensation for a story that seems so flawed.
Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet
Magazine
THE YOUNG VIC
66 The Cut
SE1
BOX OFFICE: 020 7928
6363
THE
BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE
by Martin McDonagh
at the Young Vic
Now
playing until 21 August
At very worst, this exhilarating evening is one of the
theatrical highlights of the year, Some might well
argue that it is better than that.
The Beauty Queen of Leenane was the
play that brought the precocious, mid-twenties Martin McDonagh
to public acclaim and, after great success on this side of the Atlantic, he has become the darling of Broadway.
It takes a brave director to revive a relatively recent play
that has had such an impact but Joe Hill-Gibbins has
always been adventurous and on this occasion surpasses his previous
achievements with a production that is close to perfect.
He gets great help from a quartet of Irish actors, each of
whom shines, with great timing to the comedy but also soul in making ordinary
people come to life.
Anyone who saw the original production at the Royal Court 14
years ago will remember the impeccable performance of the late Anna Manahan as
sly, scheming Maggie Folan. She is the indolent,
incontinent, septuagenarian mother whose only joy in life lies in putting down
her sorely tried daughter.
Rosaleen Linehan may do things a little differently but will also be
remembered for her ability to draw sympathy from an audience despite her
character's mischievous nature.
Susan Lynch may struggle to live up to the requirement that
her unloved and unappreciated daughter Maureen be plain but in every other way
fits the bill, as the living martyr who skivvies as she has done for twenty years
fetching the Complan and porridge but giving as good
as she gets in their continuous war of words.
This mutually frustrated pair are so
real that, at times, you feel an urge to leap on to the stage and intervene.
They are not helped by living in a cottage and community that is timeless and,
due to the lack of mod cons, could as easily be living in the 1950s as the
1990s.
The love-hate relationship contains a surprising degree of mutual
dependency but that doesn't stop the pair fighting with the viciousness of wild
animals.
Their complex relationship is surprisingly funny and the
humour is compounded by the brothers who drift in and out of their lives.
Pato
Dooley is a big, shy man who has taken twenty years to pluck up enough courage
to talk to Maureen, in his eyes the Beauty Queen of Leenane,
let alone get any closer. Their night of seduction is a comic masterpiece that
leads to a shocking finale but not before David Ganly
gets spontaneous applause for his reading of a heartfelt but nevertheless
hilarious love letter.
Terence Keeley as jaunty, younger
brother Ray is itching to leave the country but hasn't the will to do so. His
role in life is to act as a go-between but even that is beyond his limited
abilities.
On a spacious but still atmospheric set laid at right angles
to the audience that Ultz has designed to encompass
the drama, what initially seems like a light entertainment celebrating and
commenting on life in rural Ireland slowly develops through its two hours
twenty minutes into a jet-black comedy that leaves viewers stunned long before
the end.
With Martin McDonagh's popularity,
it would be great if after selling out the Young Vic, which is a racing
certainty, this production had a life elsewhere, either in the West End, Dublin
or on Broadway. It can be shocking but this gripping revival fully deserves to
be seen by as many people as possible.
Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet
Magazine
SOHO THEATRE &
WRITER'S CENTRE
21 Dean Street
London W1
BOX OFFICE: (020) 7478
0100
(24 hrs - no booking
fee)
Reviews by Lucy Popescu for Theatreworld Internet Magazine
JERMYN STREET STUDIO
THEATRE
16b Jermyn Street
(off Lower Regent Street)
BOX OFFICE: 020 7287
2875
(occasional
reviews)
For more details or individual advice/help - email: GPowner@aol.com