MY WONDERFUL DAY
October 26, 2009
Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough, until November 1, 2009, then New York
SEX, suppressed feelings, hidden agendas – the stock in trade of Alan Ayckbourn’s painfully comic plays are all here for the viewer’s consumption in the world premiere of his latest. The new twist is that it’s all seen through the eyes of a nine-year-old girl.
Winnie has been allowed by her mum Laverne to accompany her to her cleaning job at the home of businessman Kevin. She’s writing a school essay entitled My Wonderful Day, and decides to record the day she sees, as it unfolds.
In typical Ayckbourn fashion, this means the child is exposed variously to extra-marital shenanigans, ignominious failure and relationship strife, all the while taking assiduous notes for her school project.
Directed by Sir Alan himself, the central conceit works brilliantly. Laverne is hauled off to hospital part-way through proceedings to give birth to Laverne’s baby brother, leaving her in the decidedly dodgy care of Kevin, his business partner Josh and his coquettish PA Tiffany, until Kevin’s cuckolded wife Paula arrives to blow the whole day apart.
Throw in some meticulously planned gags and pay-offs, a wonderfully misdirective device in which it appears to everyone else that Winnie speaks only French, and some stunning performances, and this production – bound immediately for Broadway before a UK tour next year – rarely puts a foot wrong.
A grown-up Ayesha Antoine is outstanding as the diminutive Winnie, catching all the mannerisms and naivete of the nine-year-old with wide-eyed innocence and simplistically trusting openness. It’s a remarkable portrayal of a cuttingly astute role and centres the whole in-the-round production with real confidence.
Terence Booth is an appropriately unlikeable Kevin, Ruth Gibson delightfully shallow as Tiffany, and Paul Kemp a marvellous study in dimwitted inarticulacy as Josh. With additional strong support from Petra Letang as Laverne and Alexandra Mathie as Paula, it’s a recipe for laughs and aching discomfort.
It’s yet another skewering study of the English in all their repressed fake politeness. What the Americans will make of it is anyone’s guess.
THE OPERA SHOW
September 4, 2009
Kilworth House Theatre, Leicestershire, until September 13, 2009
HAVING had a runaway success with Crazy For You earlier this summer, and with this latest Opera Show already a sell-out in the open-air hotel garden venue of Kilworth House Theatre, owners Celia and Richard Mackay have little to worry about on the commercial front.
Their own production company, To Be Productions, is staging this three-act entertainment under the direction of resident supremo Mitch Sebastian and musical director Matthew Freeman.
And with every visual, aural and technological trick in the book wrung from the evening’s extravaganza, there’s certainly plenty to warm up the otherwise autumnally chilly audiences.
For the purists, there’ll be plenty to moan about too, with pre-recorded click tracks supplementing the live eight-piece orchestra and some wacky costumes and scenery adding diversions or distractions, depending on your point of view. This is unashamedly opera for the YouTube generation.
Four soloists voice a wide array of operatic arias, from Purcell to Puccini, in three diverse acts nominally, if bemusingly, assembled under the headings Baroque Beginners, The Recording Revolutions and Electronic Evolution. Among these voices, soprano Anna-Clare Monk and tenor Amar Muchhala excel, with quality performances confidently on top of their material.
Alongside the singers, five dancers are given weird and occasionally completely impenetrable things to do to help things along. Of these, only the second act – in which a 1940s Madrid homestead is evoked to the strains of a simulated radio broadcast – really hangs together properly, although elsewhere the dressings and visual knick-knacks prove impressive at times.
There are some stunning moments, among them Dido’s Lament and Song to the Moon, but it’s interesting that the most powerful musically are those with the least visual accompaniment. It’s as if Sebastian can’t quite convince himself that the arias are enough in themselves, so the whole artists’ toolbox, from video projections to electric guitar solos, is splashed about on the Kilworth canvas with varying degrees of success.
A global tour of the show follows its premiere in the Leicestershire countryside. Goodness knows what the rest of the world will make of it.
CRAZY FOR YOU
June 11, 2009
Kilworth House Theatre, Leicestershire, until July 5, 2009
IT’S impossible to review a production at Kilworth House Theatre without taking into account the extraordinary context.
Opened in 2007 in the grounds of a luxury country house hotel, the venue is a well-appointed, beautifully designed open-air theatre nestled among the trees in a woody glade. However, although the auditorium is covered only by a vaulted, tent-like canopy and the lack of walls allows a chill breeze to blow through, the term “open-air” implies a temporariness that really doesn’t apply to this wonderful whim of the property’s owner, Celia Mackay.
With a necessarily short season limited by the weather, she has put together programmes that have so far included star circuit names such as Ken Dodd and Elkie Brooks, with a full in-house production at the heart of the schedule. And in two short years, it’s really made its mark.
This summer, the glade is jumping to the sounds of George and Ira Gershwin and the posthumously manufactured show Crazy For You, which started life almost 80 years ago as Girl Crazy. Reinvented for Broadway in 1992 with a witty new book by Ken Ludwig, it’s crammed with endlessly hummable tunes and a rollercoaster fun ride of a story about a wealthy New Yorker sent to Nevada to close a crumbling hick theatre.
Kilworth House has formed a partnership entitled To Be Productions, using the considerable talents of West End director Mitch Sebastian, and he helms this show with style and bags of energy. With a 12-piece pit band at his disposal, musical director Matthew Freeman wrings a dazzling soundscape out of the thumping score, and the entire creative team – sound, lights, set and costume – come up trumps with a production that looks every bit the professional barnstormer.
Among the huge cast, there are charming performances from the young leads, Cassidy Janson and Mark Stanford, but it’s among the character parts that the show-stealing turns lie in wait. Michael Howe is a finely comic New York impresario with a fondness for the bottle, Cameron Jack a twinklingly villainous baddie, and there’s a whole chorus line of cowboys and showgirls with enough song-and-dance talent to shake stages far more established than this one.
Celia Mackay’s stated aim is to create “a production which will send you home with a spring in your step”. Chilled bones notwithstanding, this vibrant, exciting, delightful show unquestionably fits that bill.
MARY STUART
May 25, 2009
Theatr Clwyd, Mold
CORRUPT politicians, anti-Establishment conspiracies and internal terrorist threats – no, not the latest David Hare at the National, but a brilliant new Mike Poulton translation of a 200-year-old history play.
Friedrich Schiller’s take on the execution of Mary, Queen of Scots, is beautifully crafted as a poetic classic in this new version by Poulton, and is ravishingly rendered at Theatr Clwyd by resident artistic director Terry Hands.
With designer Max Jones, Hands presents a vast, open stage, skewed slightly and jutting powerfully out into the auditorium. In the first half the floor is virginal white, reinforcing the supposed innocence and naivete of England’s Queen Elizabeth; for the second, it becomes oppressively black as Elizabeth’s disingenuous scheming to bring about Mary’s death without attaching blame to herself draws the tragedy to its relentless climax.
The look and conceit of the production are faultless. But without its players they would be mere show.
Among a superb supporting cast, Vivienne Moore is a touching Hannah, companion and sometime nursemaid to Mary, and Owen Teale puts in a masterly performance of statesmanship and stature as Elizabeth’s chief adviser Lord Burghley.
But at the heart of this political drama is a personal vendetta between two queens – cousins who have never met leading nations at loggerheads – which ultimately amounts to a contest of pettiness over who’s the prettier. To carry off this multi-faceted, complex conflict takes actresses of depth, power and supreme technical control.
Marina Hands as Mary weaves a character of authority and vulnerability, whose railing against the injustices done to her is calmed with real credibility as she wins the moral battle, even as she loses her head.
But the towering performance of the night comes from Claire Price as Elizabeth, whose every moment on stage is as gripping, thrilling and mesmerising as the Virgin Queen’s presence must have demanded. Delivering Poulton’s magisterial language against Hands’s spare but stunning backdrop, Price marks herself out as one of the finest actresses of her generation.
Only Schiller can explain why the play is named after the other queen.