The last production I saw of Richard III was at the Globe a few years ago, which happened to coincide with a huge thunderstorm that raged for most of the play; every dramatic moment was punctuated by a crash of thunder, and when the evil Richard met his end, the rain immediately stopped and the sun came out. (I’m not making this up, by the way; it was spooky.)
No such assistance from nature inside the Rosemary Branch, where Godot’s Watch’s production of Richard III runs until the 29th – but when it comes to creating atmosphere, no help is needed. This modern take on the murderous rise to power of Richard, Duke of Gloucester is a taut, gripping thriller that looks amazing and breathes new life (not to mention sex appeal) into a 500-year-old story.
Photo credit: Caroline Galea
On an empty stage illuminated by coloured strip lights, the throne of England awaits… but to claim it, Richard must first dispose of both his brothers. This he manages with worrying ease, before turning his attention to his two young nephews. With the help of Buckingham, who’s won over by the false promise of wealth and titles, Richard finally becomes King – but how long can he hold on to the throne?
An excellent cast is led by Sam Coulson as the villainous Richard. No hunchbacks here – instead a blood-red birthmark stains one side of his face, foreshadowing the horrors ahead. This is a performance that walks the line between smoothly charming and violently unhinged; one minute he’s sweet-talking the grieving widow of one of his victims into marrying him, the next he’s roaring with crazed delight over the success of his evil schemes. And throughout, he takes the audience regularly into his confidence, making us complicit in his crimes as he bumps off victim after victim.
The inclusion of Elena Clements as Richard’s co-conspirator Buckingham brings a welcome shot of girl power to a play in which every other woman is forced into the role of victim, and I also really enjoyed the twist that turned Gloucester’s two killers into one conflicted soul; Michael Rivers brilliantly channels Gollum as he argues with himself over the rights and wrongs of proceeding with the murder.
Director Séan Aydon clearly isn’t afraid to take a few risks in modernising the story – the use of Siri to find a hitman willing to murder Richard’s nephews gets a lot of laughs, and there’s more than one reference to drug use in the royal court. Not historically accurate, maybe – but then as we’ve seen all too well in recent months, the storyline of a tyrant doing whatever it takes to claim power is one that works just as well in a modern context…
Another star of the show is the lighting design from Jack Channer, and sound from Daniel Harmer, which combine to create an atmosphere of drama and tension throughout. From Richard’s opening soliloquy, which plays out in semi-darkness like a scene from a black and white movie, to the harsh white flashes that accompany his victims’ deaths, it’s an ingeniously simple approach that shows you don’t always need fancy effects or a complicated set to make a powerful impact.
Godot’s Watch is a new company, and if this is what we get from their first production then it’s exciting news for theatre. Their Richard III is inventive, bold and utterly gripping (and don’t just take my word for it; my friend turned to me at the interval and said, “Why have I never seen this play before? It’s amazing!”) – I can’t wait to see more from them, and hopefully soon.
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The Doppel Gang by Dominic Hedges introduces us to four mediocre performers attempting to save their cash-strapped theatre. After stumbling rather inexplicably on a stash of unproduced Marx Brothers material, they decide to try and pull off the ultimate con, impersonating the rising American stars in front of a London audience desperate to escape the horrors of the Blitz. Can they pull it off and make their escape with the cash, or will they be caught out?
It’s a fun idea, and the cast certainly seem to be enjoying themselves from the outset. The play opens with a Fawlty Towers-esque sketch scene, in which frustrated theatre owner Lombard has to deal with an incompetent workman up a ladder. Though it has little if anything to do with the rest of the story, it’s a well-fashioned salute to British humour, and sets up a nice contrast with the all-American comedy that dominates Act 2.
Photo credit: Mitchell Reeve
In fact, The Doppel Gang, directed by Terence Mann, takes great pleasure in lining up British and U.S. comedy alongside each other, and it makes the play very much one of two halves; Act 2 consists almost entirely of the group’s Marx Brothers act, whereas before the interval the focus is on establishing the characters and their often fractious relationships. Cyril (Jordan Moore) and Tommy (Peter Stone) can’t stand Lombard (Jake Urry), who they know full well is just using them for his own ends. And male impersonator Rachel (Rachel Hartley) is getting increasingly frustrated with the lack of respect she gets from the audience or her fellow performers – including her boyfriend Tommy.
The four characters’ constant sniping, and especially Rachel’s feisty disdain for the men she has to deal with, provided for me the funniest moments – although there are plenty of laughs to be found elsewhere too, especially for fans of the Marx Brothers. The cast’s enthusiasm for their subject is obvious, although not being an expert, I’ll leave it to those who know to judge the accuracy of their tribute act. And as the Brits, the four are just likeable and optimistic enough for us to overlook their conscription-dodging ways and wish them success.
There’s a subplot to all this, of course, in the threat of war that hangs over them all, and in the revelation of a secret that places one of the characters at even greater risk. The abrupt, subdued ending, coming so swiftly after half an hour of zany merriment, brings us back to earth with a bump, and out into the cold feeling slightly wrongfooted.
Photo credit: Mitchell Reeve
The set is really impressive for such a small space, with individual components – including a mobile proscenium arch – manoeuvred smoothly into position to take us on stage, off stage and on one occasion, underground. This gives the impression the stage is a lot bigger than it is, an idea backed up by Mitchell Reeve’s sound design, which recreates both the rumblings of war outside and the theatrical acoustics inside.
It’s a risky enterprise to make a comedy, because finding an approach everyone likes is practically impossible, but Just Some Theatre cover a couple of bases with The Doppel Gang, and do it well. I do feel that to fully appreciate this particular play you need to know and enjoy the Marx Brothers’ work (I was slightly in the dark at times during Act 2, if I’m totally honest), but nonetheless this is clearly a talented company with exciting times ahead.
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The Bunker’s first season concludes with Fiona Doyle’s two-hander, Abigail. Although why it’s called Abigail is an intriguing question, since the two characters in the play remain nameless throughout. It’s a dark tale about a dysfunctional, abusive relationship – but in a welcome challenge to convention, here it’s the man who’s the victim, struggling to find his way back to who he was before they met.
It all starts well: after meeting in the snow outside Berlin Airport, the couple embark on a whirlwind romance. He’s quite a bit older than her, but their attraction is instant and intense. By the time their one-year anniversary rolls around, though, it’s all fallen apart. He says he wants to leave; she has other ideas. Doyle’s script hops back and forth in time, filling in the story of their relationship as their final showdown unfolds in the present.
Photo credit: Anton Belmonté for 176 Flamingo Lane
Tia Bannon and Mark Rose give compelling performances as the unhappy couple, dealing skilfully with the many changes in mood as time skips back and forth. Bannon has a bright smile that appears at inappropriate moments and which never quite reaches her eyes. And there’s an eerie, almost robotic calm about her throughout, which makes her violent outbursts all the more shocking. Rose, meanwhile, is the very image of a broken man, and handles the physical side of the role well; I’ll say no more for fear of spoilers, but suffice to say that at times his performance is uncomfortably convincing.
Max Dorey’s set, made up of boxes stacked in a huge pile, allows director Joshua McTaggart the chance to get creative with the staging; the two actors cover almost every inch of the space as they climb all over it, producing props and costumes that are concealed within the set, and which gradually end up scattered around the stage as the couple’s anniversary evening unravels.
So what’s there is good – but the problem is it feels like there’s quite a bit missing from the story. There’s nothing wrong with plot gaps in a play; having everything handed to you on a plate removes any need for interpretation or discussion afterwards. But at just 60 minutes, this play has more gaps than most – and leaves us with a lot of questions but not enough info to try and answer them.
Photo credit: Anton Belmonté for 176 Flamingo Lane
There’s an attempt in the script to explore the psychology of the abuser, but without sufficient detail for us to really understand her motivations. Some conversations seem like they’re about to reveal an important clue – but then the scene changes and we’re left (quite literally) in the dark.
As for the abused, we know next to nothing about him; he keeps insisting he’s not himself in this relationship, but apart from the scene in which the couple first meet, we get very few insights into who he really is outside it; she spends a lot of time reminiscing about her early life, but he never gets that opportunity. No attempt is made to explain why he’s stayed in a relationship that he says himself was only good for the first couple of months, nor what’s prompted him to finally take action now. It’s not often we get to see a depiction of abuse that’s this way around, so it feels like we’ve missed out on a rare opportunity to hear the point of view of a male victim.
I’ll say it again: what’s there is good. This is an excellent production, with strong performances, of a play that just feels a little bit too short. With a bit of work, this could be a really powerful piece of theatre, shedding light on an issue that currently doesn’t get enough attention. As it is now, it’s an enjoyably dark drama, but it doesn’t make the lasting impression that it probably should.
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After a successful opening season, The Bunker opens its second in February with Collaborative Artists’ new production of La Ronde by Arthur Schnitzler. Adapted and directed by Max Gill, a cast of four actors – Lauren Samuels, Alex Vlahos, Leemore Marrett Jr and Amanda Wilkin – will take on the play’s ten roles, but with a twist: each night chance will decide the parts they play, ensuring that each performance is different.
“La Ronde is a helter-skelter through the mores and morals of society, via the sex lives of its inhabitants, thrown together by the blindness of fate and desire,” says Max. “What drew me to it initially was the whiff of controversy. Schnitzler’s original was banned for many years and subsequent incarnations and re-imaginings such as Max Ophüls’film and David Hare’s The Blue Room have certainly sizzled in the public’s imagination.
“Schnitzler’s world of turn-of-the century-Vienna is complex and detailed, but there is a seductive simplicity to the play: a man and a woman meet, they have sex, and we see the aftermath. There is a grammar to the world that is levelling. This allows one’s inventiveness to run quite free in terms of the interpretation of characters and their relationship dynamics.
“Furthermore, the sex act that takes place in every scene in Schnitzler’s original is marked only with asterisks. The text is an invitation to actors and theatre-makers to interpret and imagine; this is surely why it was considered so shocking. This act of imagination makes even the most puritanical of thinkers prurient, even if just for a moment! The play enforces an experience of fantasy, which I would posit is sexuality at its core.”
Max has taken Schnitzler’s 1897 play, set in Vienna, and adapted it for a 21st century London audience. “The play is all the more powerful for the fact it was written over 100 years ago. It presents human warmth and vulnerability, our need for another, and the insatiable beast of desire inside us all as if it were written yesterday. But the world of the original is, of course, of its time. For example, its women, with the exception of a prostitute, maid, and actress of ill-repute, do not work. It presents rigid portraits of gender, class, and sexuality that today are inevitably stale and that I didn’t feel compelled to regurgitate. Hence the desire to adapt it for the 21st century and a London audience.
“Modern London is the greatest social melting pot in the world; nowhere else has quite the same wealth of voices, cultures, and identities jostling together in bars, on the tube, and in the bedroom. To blow dust around in the past would be a shame when instead we could take Schnitzler’s ingenious structure and place it upon the beating heart of contemporary sexuality with its glorious opportunity and polyphony. In this way, I have refashioned each of the characters to suit contemporary social identities and have adapted the majority of situations. The dialogue, desires, and relations are therefore largely very different from the original.
“Integral to the play are verbatim testimonies from real life prostitutes, lovers, fetishists, people who have committed incest and so on, that we have collected over many months in London. It has been an adventure. They are a curation of sexual appetites today and I hope their voices give the play a vibrant relevance.”
Unlike the original, Max chose to make his version of La Ronde gender-neutral. “Fundamentally, I’ve stripped the text of any markers that point to a character’s gender, sexuality or age so that they can be embodied by each member of the cast, either male or female, depending on how the roulette falls,” he explains. “Whilst this in theory means the script is non-gender specific, it means that in performance an audience’s reaction to it is likely to be highly gendered. How do we digest a woman as opposed to a man visiting a female prostitute? And how might we react differently to a male stay-at-home parent philandering than to a female? How then might our appreciation of this relationship transform if both the parents aremen? What inadvertent expectations or prejudices does this throw up for you?Many of the characters appear gendered in that they may be ‘passive’or ‘active’, ‘dominant’or ‘submissive’, ‘masculine’or ‘feminine’; we want to explore how far these labels are attached to any physical reality at all.
“When Schnitzler wrote his play, there was a general fear of the open presentation of sexuality in a public domain. We are the opposite. We talk about sex all the time because we don’t want to be Victorian about our bodies. But this means that people now often have a fear instead of their own sexual repression and an anxiety around their own sexual identities; if sexuality is a spectrum, where am I on it? Do I have a fetish? If not, why not? Should I?! How do my sexual activities define me and do I want them to? A sex worker I interviewed for the play said that ‘people don’t do things not because they don’t want them, but because they don’t want to want them’.We have a freedom of choice today but we still haven’t worked out a freedom of self with regards to our sexual choices, indeed if this were ever possible.
“I hope our play delves into the kaleidoscopic nature of 21st century sexuality but also the freedoms and boundaries that lovers encounter today, be they societal or personal. I hope it goes some way to explore what lies at the heart of any relationship, amorous and/or lustful, no matter who it may be between.”
Photo credit: Ray Burmiston
Unsurprisingly, having different actors playing different roles every night throws up some huge challenges for director and cast alike: “But exciting ones,” adds Max. “We are so lucky to have such a talented cast and their dedication to the project is a testimony to their commitment as actors to keep demanding more and more of themselves.
“For one, it means that the actors have to know the whole play off by heart and it means that every night they have to be prepared to play any variation of roles, which is a very different discipline to acclimatising to one role over time mentally and physically. It means that rehearsals are a very collaborative process; everyone is always present and everyone feels a shared ownership of every beat in every scene, which provides a rare but hugely rewarding cohesion.
“Having said that, each actor is encouraged to have a very different understanding of a character and scene from the others, and so each scene is an exercise in truly engaging with the other actor; there can be no auto-pilot. After we have set down a framework for each scene, the different temperatures each actor and their interpretation brings will lead the moment. There is a ‘liveness’to the action that conventional theatre can lose through repetition.”
Max is honoured to be opening the second season at The Bunker: “It’s a seriously exciting new theatre for my generation, and it’s been welcomed ravenously! As a space, it aims to champion and develop adventurous work by younger artists; to take risks essentially, which sadly is all too rare in theatre today.I can’t wait to see how it continues to thrive.”
La Ronde is at The Bunker from 11th February to 11th March.
Andrew Maddock has already established himself as a writer to watch with his previous work, including In/Out (A Feeling) and more recently, The We Plays. In particular, he really knows how to create characters that we care about, so that when the story suddenly takes a darker turn, we’re caught totally off guard. He(art), Maddock’s latest play, follows a similar trajectory, setting up two separate but equally compelling stories before smashing them together in an explosive final scene.
Alice is looking for a painting to buy with her boyfriend Rhys. But he’s reluctant to commit – to a piece of art or anything else, including seeing a doctor about his congenital heart condition. Meanwhile Kev’s just got out of prison and is hatching a plan with his sister Sam to get the money they need for their dying Mum’s medical treatment – by stealing the very painting Alice and Rhys have their eye on…
Photo credit: Jesse Night
At first glance, there’s a lot in this story that doesn’t quite make sense. How did posh gallery curator Alice get together with “Wembley Warrior” window cleaner Rhys? Why do Kev and Sam have to steal that particular painting (and why any painting, come to that)? What happened to their dad? And what does die Maus Head Man have to do with anything?
We don’t get all the answers, but that’s sort of the whole point – Maddock gives us a sketchy snapshot of events, and how we fill in the blanks is up to us. If a few of those events are slightly random, well it just makes the overall impression more interesting – like a mouse head that triples a painting’s value. The opening scene, in which Alice tries unsuccessfully to teach Rhys about art, is actually as much for the audience as it is for him, letting us know that just because we don’t have all the info it doesn’t mean we can’t flesh out the story in our own way. The stage in director Niall Phillips’ production is a roped-off gallery space; the props are exhibits hanging from the ceiling, as is the painting at the heart of it all. This play is a piece of art in itself, to be examined, discussed and interpreted, not simply accepted at face value.
But as the title suggests, there’s more than just art here – there’s also a huge amount of heart. This manifests itself in small ways, like Rhys’ pride in the fact his are the only streak-free windows on the high street, or in Sam’s eclectic music collection and the affection for Johnny Cash that she shares with her brother. But it’s also built into the relationships of the characters; this is a story that’s absolutely driven by the heart instead of the head. On paper, Rhys and Alice’s relationship should never work. Sam and Kev’s planned heist is doomed to failure. And yet we find ourselves willing both to succeed, because both are motivated by that most fundamental of human emotions: love.
Photo credit: Jesse Night
This love comes through powerfully in the four actors’ performances. Jack Gogarty and Alex Reynolds are very natural together as Rhys and Alice, revelling in their light-hearted banter about the value (or not) of Banksy and a recent scandal in the porn industry. But their relationship is just as convincing in its more intense moments; her anxiety about his health and his longing for a normal life both feel entirely genuine. Similarly, the close sibling relationship between Kev and Sam, played beautifully by Shane Noone and Flora Dawson, feels completely authentic, precisely because it isn’t picture perfect – his concern for her welfare is frequently tinged with impatience and even violence, while her childlike emotional vulnerability and desperate desire to please him put everything at risk more than once.
In He(art), Andrew Maddock has another hit on his hands; it’s a poignant and at times very funny story of two halves – and if this time the twist in the tale isn’t entirely unexpected, that doesn’t make it any less compelling to watch. (One of the great things about theatre in the round is you can see how other audience members are reacting, and it’s safe to say I wasn’t the only one on the edge of my seat there at the end.) Most importantly, it reminds us that whether we’re talking about painting, music or even window cleaning, there’s no such thing as “just art”.
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