Nowhere Boy

It's a good job you don't have to be a Beatles fan to get what's going on in this biopic of John Lennon's early days, based on his half-sister's memoirs.

I say that because I've never got the fuss over the Beatles, and I'm not alone in that. So I dreaded a film soaked in Beatles references and trivia that was only going to make sense to the die-hard fans, whilst also angering half of them for not being loyal enough to the memory of the demi-god Lennon.

Thankfully, that's not the case. There are references to the Beatles, but they're not especially prominent. For example, a young Lennon cycles past a gate with a sign by it that identifies the fields on the other side as 'Strawberry Fields'. Okay, tick that 'early influence on the later music' box – but only if you happened to notice it because you weren't watching the cocky kid on the bike.

Instead of creating a sickening Beatles-fest, director Sam Taylor Wood focuses on a story about a boy growing up torn between his biological mother and the aunt who has raised him as her own. Yes, he's precocious, yes, he's cocky, but he's a teenage lad with the problems you could easily expect to face any lad of the early 1960s. The hint of coming greatness is left as just that – a hint.

Which is why Nowhere Boy is just as good as social commentary of the 1960s as a history of the early Beatles (back in their days as the Quarrymen, before they were allowed anywhere near the famous Cavern Club). Fun as it is to play 'spot the future Beatle' as more promising, fresh-faced lads join Lennon's band, that's not the point. It's a story about boys getting together and singing music. So absent is the Beatles music from the score – which features instead some undervalued, rousing hits of the late fifties and early sixties – that the arrival of the first of their tunes comes as a mild surprise.

Charisma seems to have been a large part of Lennon's appeal, something that Aaron Johnson has plenty of. While there's an awful lot of teen swaggering and surly scowls, Johnson captures the look and feel of a boy who knows that he's the object in a tug-of-love between two women. More, he's prepared to exploit that, playing up to it, knowing that he'll be alright because they both love him deep down. It's a slightly sickening display of ingratitude and unnecessary cruelty. Partially, it seems alright to blame that on teen angst – all teenage boys are like this a bit, right? - but there does seem a little too much of Lennon expecting some sort of concession or special treatment because of his mother's abandoning him.

Luckily he has Thomas Sangster alongside him, giving a measured, thoughtful and thoroughly endearing performance as a young Paul McCartney. In many ways, McCartney comes across as the stable, understanding heart of what would become the biggest (commercially, anyway) band the world had yet seen. He's demure and slight, but looks easily capable of shouldering his future knighthood.

There are strong performances too from Kristin Scott Thomas and Anne-Marie Duff as Lennon's aunt and mother respectively. Hard though it is to believe that they're sisters, they both provide a striking contrast as motherly roles for Lennon. Thomas is the epitome of middle-class respectability, refined and sensible, but heart-breaking when the ice melts a little. Duff, meanwhile, the exuberantly bubbly woman who couldn't keep her son lights up the screen as a woman far younger at heart than in body.


Nowhere Boy is a film that – helped by the quiet dedication and hard work of Sangster – goes a long way to confirming my belief that McCartney was by far the nicer man, while Lennon was – as Sangster's McCartney politely puts it – just a bit of 'a dick'. But at least it tries to explain why.

Small Island on BBC One

Jamaica is a small island. Britain's not much bigger, thinking about it.

The discovery of that fact by two Jamaican immigrants of post-war Britain is the crux of this two-part BBC drama adapted from Andrea Levy's novel. What they also have to learn is something those of us that have lived here for a while could have told them from the start: Britain ain't all that great.

In their defence, Hortense and Gilbert (Naomie Harris and David Oyelowo), have come over as part of the SS Empire Windrush migration from a Jamaica that still recognises imperial Britain as the 'mother country' and have been told countless stories about how wonderful (though cold) the place is. Electric lights in every room! Visits to the King in Buckingham Palace! Yeah...

So partly we're watching the gradual demolition of dreams in the dreary London boarding house and streets of the late 40s/early 50s. Partly, we're trying to ignore the Desperate Housewives-style voice-over that trots of proverb-sounding bits of trite wisdom (stuff that's okay on DH because none of that show can be taken seriously anyway). Luckily, Harris and Oyelowo don't let it get too mawkish, and their early innocence is touching and plausible. They aren't exactly naïve, just unworldly and unprepared for the reality of a post-war 'mother country' that – as Gilbert says – doesn't know where her children live.

My church in Wolverhampton has several members who were onboard the SS Empire Windrush, and I think it's this familiarity with the cadence of the Jamaican accent that made me wince whenever one of the Jamaican accents here went off towards America or somewhere else. Shaun Parkes – a fine black British actor (better known for playing British-Ugandan characters) – carries it off well, but Oyelowo occasionally sounds like a caricature Jamaican. Harris has moments where she could be from America's east coast (which is odd because her mum's Jamaican) – were there no genuine Jamaican actors the BBC could call on?

The ingratitude and blatant racism of the locals is also marked, and sits rather uncomfortably with an audience reminded again and again that the male 'darkies' here are all men who served in the RAF against Nazi Germany and are now full British citizens like their paler associates. That doesn't seem to matter to the cockney postmen who subject Gilbert to a 'noble savage' moment on his knees.

But what's interesting is that, while Small Island lays stress on racial difference, the sexual discrimination of 40s/50s Britain (and Jamaica) is left largely untouched. It's all very well to pull on our heartstrings about the poor RAF men derided as monkeys by their new Royal Mail colleagues, but what of the wife they've left in the boarding house with no idea how to cope in this strange, cold land? It's a classic case of bullying when the disgraced Gilbert comes home to treat his wife to an angry outburst that she can't possibly understand, having not seen his day at work. Time and again, these Jamaican men complain of being oppressed or looked down upon, while treating their women in a strikingly similar way.

It's not all gloom though. Landlady Queenie (Ruth Wilson) gets to have her fun with the RAF and is an extremely progressive female figure. She sleeps with who she wants, she has economic independence, and she bosses her husband, Bernard (Benedict Cumberbatch), around threatening to throw him out in favour of her Carribean lodgers. Well, good for her. Sort of. It would be if she hadn't fallen for completely the wrong man.

Michael Roberts (Ashley Walters) – the Jamaican airman prone to copping off with married white women – doesn't do any favours for the stereotype of black men. As the father of Queenie's illegitimate child he lends some weight to white reservations about hiring black men in places that employ white women. What's worse is that the two thoroughly decent men (Bernard and Gilbert) are always left to pick up the pieces that he leaves behind. Gilbert is often mistaken for him, to his and everyone else's confusion/dismay – as Gilbert says, he's not the only black man in England, but everyone else seems to forget that. While Gilbert takes the reproachful looks on suspicion of impregnating Queenie (adultery twice over), the real father is swanning off to Canada, leaving the woman who has never really loved anyone else.

So we can learn that neither island is the idyll we may have thought it, and that you've got to work at your dreams if you want them to come about. It's not always comfortable for a white audience to hear the sorts of things said to the Jamaican people; there's a smug air of adult to child throughout, and sometimes a genuine fear of physical contact in case the black skin rubs off. But there's also the reminder that without such immigrants Britain wouldn't have made it through WWII never mind the ten years that followed.

We as a nation (a multi-ethnic nation, all of us that appreciate the freedoms won in the 1939-45 war) should be grateful to the passengers of the SS Empire Windrush and those that followed.

A Christmas Carol @ Hull Uni

Just before Christmas, Hull's Drama Department gives us yet another production of that perennial festive favourite: A Christmas Carol.


It seems to be especially common this year, with Scarborough's SJT, London's Southwark Playhouse and Birmingham's REP (among others, probably) tackling the famous tale of Scrooge and the spirits that visit him and turn him from an anti-Christmas miser into a man whole-heartedly embracing his fellow humanity at Christmas. Oh, and there's Jim Carey and that film version. Dickens is still a popular festive choice in other cases, as Bolton Octagon's Oliver Twist shows.


Scrooge's supernatural transformation never strikes me as entirely plausible, so it's a tribute to Joel Redgrave's acting that he almost makes his Scrooge believable. Only almost though – the fault lying with Dickens' ghost story, not Redgrave. What he does do is capture the physicality of the stooped, aged man who has spent his life on building his business in Victorian London. He is warned by the ghost of his old friend (though Scrooge never appears (here or in Dickens) as the sort of man to have friends) Jacob Marley – here played by Jonathan Miles with a commanding presence despite the lights not being set to hit his face. He picks up several other roles later on with aplomb and gusto, featuring as a highlight alongside Redgrave's Scrooge, both of them sensitive to the comedy in Bryan Hodgson's script (80% of which he claims is from Dickens).


For those of you who don't know, Scrooge is visited on Christmas Eve by three Ghosts of Christmas (the Ghost of Christmas Past, Christmas Present (snigger) and the Ghost of Christmas Yet to Come) who show him scenes from their respective Christmasses in an effort to remove Scrooge's virulent misanthropy and hatred of the festive season. So Dickens ticks two boxes by having a ghost story that is also heart-warming and re-affirms the joy of Christmas and human companionship. Well done, Charles.


But it's hard to know if you should blame Dickens or adaptor/director Hodgson for the fat on the bone of this Christmas offering from Hull Uni. Dickens is always a bit wordy and takes his time with plots, which undermines Hodgson's stage production. Part of me wants to blame Dickens for the occasionally slow pace and slack moments, but Hodgson must take some responsibility for not cutting and trimming his source material. Adding in a whole bunch of traditional carols adds a certain nostalgic feel to the piece, but also creates several halts in the action that really aren't needed.


It's lucky that the large ensemble cast don't let the clunky revolve and scene changes slow them down nor damp their vigour too much. Their (surprisingly modern) choreography is still dashed off with skill and enthusiasm. Also coming up well out of some dubiously staged moments are the Ghosts of Christmas Past and Present (Sian Bennett and Huw Allen). Alas, Scrooge's maid is underused, played as she is by an actress (Elizabeth Perry) very much in tune with the comedy under her brief scenes – it's lucky that she gets to shine as Miles' exuberant wife Mrs Fezziwig as well.


Rather like most of Dickens' work, this is longer that it really needs to be, and the transfer to the stage hasn't done much to smooth over those imperfections. But there are some strong central performances and some of the singing is pretty good.

Treasure Island @ The SJT [for thepublicreviews.co.uk]

The Northern Broadsides' production of Treasure Island, adapted from Robert Louis Stevenson and on tour until January.

http://www.thepublicreviews.co.uk/

Macbeth @ Hull Truck

This is a Macbeth that's very much about the audience. No matter where they turn, Shakespeare's Scottish nobles, caught in the close press of Hull Truck's staging, can't escape the eyes fixed on them.

Mainly because Gareth Tudor-Price's adaptation is being staged in the round, which is a first for the new Hull Truck space – and a welcome one. Reducing the playing area has brought the audience closer to the actors than previous productions, serving to increase the audience's sense of involvement as well as bringing back a little of the claustrophobia of the old Spring Street venue (or tin shed).

Intimacy and claustrophobia are two things Tudor-Price and his northern cast are very keen on in this production; even the lighting rig has been lowered to compress the space.
The seven-strong cast give a fast-moving performance, rarely pausing for breath or silly things like scene changes. In a way, that's classic Truck – the reclaimed wooden board set is stripped bare, and costume changes are kept to a minimum (so much so that it can be hard to distinguish between some of the characters). It's also classically 'new Ferensway venue' to have vast amounts of haze pumping onto the stage. For once, the haze lends an incredible atmosphere to the play; murky, bleak and sinister all at once.

On the down side, involving the audience so much leads to several scenes being delivered (with not much sense of movement) out to the main seating block, as though the Truck were still in its normal arrangement. Yes, the cast is playing to the majority of the audience, but at the expense of truly playing in the round. A key advantage of staging plays in the round is that the audience can be more easily made to feel that they're eavesdropping, flies on the wall in a conversation between people unaware of their existence. Actors declaiming into the middle distance spoils that a bit.

Tudor-Price's adaptation removes the physical presence of the infamous witches and instead places them around the stage, often as whispering voices with an eerie backing track. They form another audience, always watching the action, as none of the actors ever leave the stage. It's the sort of directorial trick – Tudor-Price is aiming for a highly ritualistic portrayal of the witches – that looks promising when the show opens with the cast's only woman (Fiona Wass) drawing a tight, occult-type circle in the middle of the stage, while everyone stands around looking ominous in their long leather coats. Later, Lady Macbeth uses the same circle to summon the spirits of the night, and it's a chilling flashback to that opening moment. But other than that, there's precious little witchery. All of the supernatural messing with Macbeth's head is just that – in his head.

Don't get me wrong; James Weaver gives a very strong, solid and captivating performance as the Scottish thane promised the crown by a bunch of witches and spurred on by his wife to kill King Duncan. His relationship with Lady M sizzles, their power balance shifting in every scene, always raw with passion. A shame, then, that their supporting cast is a bit patchy, a bit hit-and-miss. Weaver is the best man onstage for listening to those around him, his face (or sometimes even his shoulders) enough to tell the way his thoughts are going. He justifies Lady M's description of his face as a book in which his thoughts can be read.

With all that haze, the lighting for Macbeth is at times genuinely beautiful, evoking different shades of night as well as the heath and castle, and even making the floorlights look like small torch fires (that probably wasn't deliberate, but looked great). The whole production fits into a sparse, brutal vision, where nobody seems to like anyone else apart from Duncan (the Macbeths like each other, of course) and everyone's on edge. The fights aren't so good to watch – too ritualistic, perhaps, a case of heavy-handed 'one-two, one-two' – but otherwise it all looks lean and mean.

Hull Truck has given the city a Macbeth they can get their teeth into, in an accessible version of Shakespeare's great tragedy.

2012

In some ways, it'd be a blessing if the world did end in 2012. For one, we wouldn't have to sit through the shame of Britain's Olympics going really badly (over-budget, late, silly-looking designs even when complete, that kind of thing, never mind the actual performance of British athletes). We could probably also avoid getting hyped-up about a possible second Obama term, as well, with all the incumbent rhetoric of hope that may or may not ever get fulfilled.

Those aren't things that are important to the latest end-of-the-world film, 2012, which seems to try to take a more realistic view of the whole affair. Hey, they've even got scientists predicting stuff...and getting the schedule wrong! A writer whose book about the end of the world, in which people acted selflessly, is criticised for being naïve. So, the makers of 2012 probably don't want us to think that they're pulling any punches.

But...are they pulling any punches? There might be a bit too much sentimental 'we all need to pull together in the cause of common humanity' stuff (rhetoric of hope?) to avoid such an accusation, but it's still quite touching. Yes, maybe the closing scene is a bit optimistic, but only because of the things it misses out. In fact, there's a lot missing here that would make it much bleaker a film.

Now, let's be honest. The way the trailer plugs this is very much about the effects. The film's main draw is the utter (and I mean utter) destruction of the world. It seems to be the first of two (probably more) films this year to involve 'the end of the world as you know it' (the other, curiously, is Sherlock Holmes, not a subject known for its apocalyptic overtones). There may be a modicum of science thrown in – something about solar flares and neutrinos – but it's basically about watching the planet ripping itself to bits while people scramble to get out of the way. Various governments have been tipped off by science, and so have started building ships, or arks as they're known (watch out for the kid called Noah...see what they did there?).

That 2012 comes from the same director (Roland Emmerich) as he who did Stargate and Independence Day should come as no surprise. Similar sort of people – with immediate access to the US President – bustling through corridors of power, slightly incomprehensible scientific tecnhobabble...oh, and devastation on a planetary scale.

And what devastation! The rumbling, rising of Yellowstone is especially fun, and fictitious plane flights have probably never been so harrowing. There's some slightly improbable dashing away from oncoming danger – lucky then, that John Cusak's character is professional driver, able to race away from what seems like a huge, angry mole in hot (underground) pursuit.

Moments like Woody Harrelson's harmless (and spot-on) conspiracy nutter getting blasted into smithereens are rewarding, as is the one when the President's daughter gets dewy-eyed as the attractive, principled scientist makes a moral case for the sake of humanity, very much in her father's style (the way that ends up is all a bit predictable). Less rewarding are moments like the wanton destruction of a load of flashy sports cars – beautiful things, absolutely no need to trash them. Sometimes, it feels like destruction for the sake of it.

Mind, that's what the trailer advertises, so it shouldn't be a surprise. Plot: hammy. Ending: dodgy. Sense of governments dealing with difficult situations: hope-inspiring. General note of apocalypse: amazing.

These Things Take Time for Cunning Linguists - from October 2009's Hullfire (who said I had to upload in chronological order?)

Hull's Drama Department is definitely not playing it safe this month.

There is a wealth of plays that the Drama Department could choose to perform, classics that have been tried and tested (and done to death) or well-known, safe favourites that are hard to get wrong onstage. But University is a place to learn, to develop, to be brave and daring, to innovate. Rather than take an easy option with an established writer, the Department is giving its stage to two new, young student writers who will also direct their work.

At the end of October, Samuel Lannacombe Oliver's These Things Take Time will play alongside Thomas E. Peel's Cunning Linguists [later changed to The Various Voices of a Cunning Linguist] as a double-bill. Both shows will run each night, one after the other, which presents its own set of challenges to the casts and crew. Most challenging for Oliver is condensing his full-length play down to an hour: “I'd already finished the script before I was given the slot, and it was over an hour long. so I've had to do a lot of cutting. I've got rid of bits I quite liked, but the constant re-reading does mean I've cut bits that were rubbish and put in better bits.” Sharing the performance space each night means that both shows are low on set and have a split budget – two challenges Peel highlights along with saying that “the pressure is on due to the fact that we have written the scripts - the buck stops with us as writers and directors.”

Oliver sums up his play as being about “struggling to write, girls and weird friends”. It centres on Lloyd Karamazov, a TV writer hired to spice up a show's failing second series, and earned Oliver a First in the Scriptwriting Module – so it must be good! He quotes as inspiration things like Jeffrey Brown's 'Girlfriend' trilogy, Mary Chase's Harvey, Fear of Projection, The Goon Show, High Fidelity, Brief Encounter, The Philadelphia Story, Kind Hearts and Coronets, All About Eve and Buster Keaton films. Style-wise, it's an “amalgamation of all the things that inspired me when writing the play. So I hope that the final performance will be a mix of all the styles I've enjoyed, in an exciting and accessible way. Oh, and there's some creative swearing.”

Peel's play is harder to pin down, “I think my play's called Cunning Linguists, I say 'think', as it hasn't named itself yet. My friend suggested Cunning Linguists which seemed witty enough, but perhaps one day it will stop its tantrum and tell me what it wants to be called.” As the plot revolves around not a love triangle but a 'love scribble' and manipulation of language – using language as an “art form that very few people take the trouble to master” - with healthy doses of sex and lust, that seems a very appropriate title. Say it quickly and spot the innuendo in a phrase that's about wordplay – like a pun within a pun. It's inspired by things like “ Wilde, G.B Shaw, pre-Raphealites, aestheticism, Terry Pratchett, Johnny Cooper Clarke, Morrissey, Simon Armitage and films like Rebel Without a Cause, West Side Story, Johnny Got His Gun, The Great Escape, Pygmalion/My Fair Lady.”

Both writers have drawn on a little autobiographical material for their plays – Peel describing his as “basically the two voices in my head put into a story.” One is “driven, knows not what he wants but that he wants something different from everybody else” while the other is “ racked by insecurities, he is repressed but only by himself, and feels like he is an echo inside his own skin.” Alongside such characters, it's easy to see why Peel claims his script “shits on the liberal types in the same sentence as the conservative types.” Oliver's gentler, lightly self-deprecating approach means that his play avoids being “boring and full of awkward misunderstandings and tentative accidents (like my own life)” by being “exciting and full of awkward misunderstandings and tentative accidents (unlike my own life) with amusing characters and the like.”

I asked both men why we should go and see their double bill. Peel says that one of his characters can “bring societal conventions and norms and throw them on their head - he has some odd views which are bound to cause controversy, especially with you ladies.” Then there's “seeing a monkey-hanger (a Hartlepoolian) in a thong, the best chat-up line in the world, the worst puns in the world, being able to tell me exactly what you thought about it after over a pint, and if all goes to plan the longest beer-funnel you will probably ever see” not to mention the after-show party.

Oliver answered: “a theatrical double bill is quite a unique experience. One ticket: two plays. Isn't that nice? These Things Take Time should be seen because it's good fun. a quick-paced romp through all the little trials and tribulations we face from friendly colleagues, aggravating co-workers, pretty strangers and wishful fantasies. Also, I have a very good-looking cast and there may be partial nudity...which is always a seller.”

Both shows have already been learning curves for their writers, which means they've achieved part of their purpose. The final part is for them to entertain the masses, you lot. So, an opportunity to take in some culture, to support not only the learning of fellow students but also their future careers, and some possible nudity (which always perks an evening up). Add in an after-show party on the Saturday, and this could be a perfect student night out.

London's South Bank in the Evening - from November 2009's Hullfire

[My first foray into travel writing]:

The Houses of Parliament look splendid in the sunset. There's a metaphor in there somewhere. The politically-minded cynic might say something about the sun setting on the splendour of an institution of British democracy. By contrast, St. Paul's glows a faint, rosy pink.

Nearby on the steps of a bridge over the Thames, a tour guide has managed to attract to her tour a whole one person. To give her credit, she's going for it 100%, putting her all in as though there were a small crowd at her feet, rather than one slightly bemused Spanish man. Unfortunately, she's just coming across as his slightly patronising, know-it-all friend.

There's something especially beautiful about London in the light of the setting sun after a long Summer's day. The streets – pierced with shards of orange light and shafts of shadow – are filled with smiling people, their shoulders still a little slack after shedding the stress accumulated during the day. Couples stroll at ease, pleased with each other's company. Friends chat about the pubs they're going to and have been to on other evenings. Mothers laugh at their scampering children, or coo over the younger ones that have tired themselves out – more worryingly, a dad is seen rescuing his young daughter from dangerously close to the edge of a bridge, where her curiosity has brought her.

See how no one rushes now like they did during the day – even the trains trundle across the bridges with less urgency. Over there, by the Tube station, an immigrant languidly hands out free London newspapers. Every now and then, a white man in a suit takes one. For some reason, that always seems to be how it works: in stilted English, the vendor chants his simple sales pitch he learned parrot-fashion, and once in a while his hook catches a fish that wants to feel (and look) ever so slightly more informed about events in London and the world. This particular suit has a young blonde on his arm, and says, as he takes a paper, “No, the reason I haven't divorced her yet is -” But the rest is snatched away on the wind, carried off to some other person's ears, one more part of one more story lost in the great melting-pot of humanity that is this great, sprawling city. We'll never know.

It's certainly been a melting-pot today, the air close and the sun bright. Clothes have been light and bright, if they were there at all. Summer, in all its glory – not typical British rained-out glory, but proper sunshine-pumping, Pimm's and lemonade glory. Look, all along the South Bank, under the London Eye and between the half dozen bridges, people enjoying themselves as only young people can. Strapping lads zip past on bikes, their shirts around their waists. Women lie sunbathing while the option's still there, ready to hit the town later on. Some watch as a bunch of lads muck about in a speedboat on the Thames. One of them's fallen in and is splashing about up to his waist – he and everyone else have a laugh – naturally he gets heckled mercilessly by his mates when they pick him up and pull away. In the distance a woman starts to sing an Italian operatic aria, her voice carrying beautifully through the streets and across the tiny waves of the river. It's all good, clean fun (except for the chap who fell into the Thames, that wasn't very clean).

It's easy to see why so many poets and arty-types love and have loved this city.

A History of Opposition - from November 2009's Hullfire

Art has a long history of undermining the more assertive aspects of state control. Partly, that's because the artist is often in an ideal position to observe the workings of a state system and is the sort of person most able and likely to articulate their opinions. An artist is often on the fringes of society, while members of the government support the status quo because it places them in prominent positions. Naturally, if the state's leaders benefit from the way things work, they won't be keen on supporting external reformers. Partly, art that disagrees has much more to say than art that complies with the status quo.

Partly though, that undermining attitude springs from the fact that art and state authority are fundamentally opposed, even in fairly liberal societies. A state system, by its very nature, likes conformity – it prefers all its subjects to be just that: subjects. If everybody does as they're told, a state's job is made much easier. So state systems tend to encourage rigidity and fixed ways of working. Art, on the other hand, likes individuality – it prefers flair and originality. Art aims to liberate people, freeing their minds and encouraging new ideas and new thoughts. It inspires a level of personal freedom that not all state systems are comfortable with. Notoriously 'difficult' playwright Howard Barker described this in 1986 when he wrote in The Guardian that 'Art is a problem. The man or woman who exposes himself to art exposes himself to another problem.' - and state systems try to avoid and/or suppress problems when they can.

Few states provide a better example of this than the old USSR, which cracked down on any form of dissent. Artists came under especially heavy fire, many facing long prison stretches for criticising the government. Those that collaborated had to conform to Stalin's brand of social realism, those that didn't could expect severe treatment.

It's only a few months since the theatre world mourned the passing of one of its most active political campaigners, Augusto Boal. He became famous for developing a type of theatre called the Theatre of the Oppressed, which aimed to involve the ordinary people far more than anything that had gone before. Boal disliked the term 'spectator', and didn't want anyone to passively watch his theatre – instead, he wanted the audience to get up and be involved, taking the part of the actors and making decisions for themselves about the course of the show. These so-called 'spectactors' were allowed great freedom of thought and expression.

Another politically-active theatre practitioner who aimed to challenge authoritarian systems was the Marxist Bertolt Brecht. Like Boal, he formulated a new style of theatre to fire up the minds of his audience and to liberate his art from the standards imposed by the past. His 'epic theatre' stripped away all the conventions of traditional acting and encouraged an intellectual rather than emotional connection between audience and performer. Meanwhile the stories of his plays criticised and satirised the state of politics in his native Germany (especially the rise of Nazism) and promoted much more socialist ideals. Interestingly, both men were politically left-wing and did their most famous work in exile – more evidence of states favouring the status quo over reformers.

Art also performs an important public service in providing a chance for us, the people, to laugh at our leaders (a service performed by playwrights from ancient Greece through to the modern day), even (especially) in legitimate, non-authoritarian states. Recently, someone told me it was scary that people laughed so much at George W. Bush, considering that he was the leader of the free world and so on. But actually, it would be scarier if we weren't allowed to laugh at him. Under Elizabeth I satirical poetry was made illegal, and many playwrights sailed very close to the wind with their writing – some even facing execution. When we're no longer allowed to laugh at our leaders, they have too much power – and leaders who ban mockery can easily extend that ban to criticism and all forms of opposition; Barker's Guardian article goes on to say that 'Nothing can be satirised in the authoritarian state'. As such, satire like Bremner, Bird & Fortune and Spitting Image function as barometers of public opinion and a means of holding politicians to account, venting the anger of the satirist (and the public) in non-violent ways.

The USSR was right to worry about oppositional writers; one oft-imprisoned Czech writer, Vaclav Havel, became a leading light in the 'Velvet Revolution', which eventually brought about an independent Czechoslovakia with Havel as its first democratically-elected President. Art isn't merely a voice for freedom, but a force of liberation.

Book Review - Dragon's Teeth: Literature in the English Revolution, by Michael Wilding

Michael Wilding's opening sentence sets the scene early on – a reference to a cannonball from the seventeenth century Civil War Battle of Worcester makes it clear that Wilding's brand of criticism is going to be rooted in the events surrounding Milton, Browne, Butler and Marvell. Having told us that critics like T S Eliot have dehistoricised and depoliticised Milton, Wilding aims to restore the poet to his rightful place. He does this by re-examining Milton's poetry through the filter of his earlier, pre-Republic, prose. By re-applying the historical and political contexts to Milton, a political radical very much of his time, Wilding fulfils the brief of his final chapter heading and reclaims the radical Milton.

Abigail's Party @ Hull Truck

Talk about onstage drug-taking!

Mike Leigh's 1977 play contains copious amounts of drug consumption – all legal, I hasten to add. What really stands out is the cloud of tobacco smoke that settles over the stage during the two hours or so of this very suburban comedy of manners.

It's not just the seventies outfits and obsession with social one-upmanship with house prices that date this play. For some reason, the bygone age is irresistibly conjured by the mere fact of people smoking indoors so very casually. Nothing brings home a public smoking ban quite like several people coolly and deliberately flouting it (the actors, not the characters, of course; they've no concept of any harm from (passive or active) smoking).

But, though the most noticeable, the fags aren't the only drugs onstage. It's the fags that warrant the warnings in the theatre's foyer, but each of Leigh's five finely-drawn characters always has a drink on the go. Between them – and especially Pauline Simpson's charmingly naïve Angie – they down enough booze to sink more than just a single battleship. In fairness, they probably need a stiff drink (or four) to get through the party and cope with Amie Taylor's strident, acerbic hostess, Beverly.

The middle-class urbanites small talk their way through less raucous – though more dangerous and drink-fuelled – a party than that of Abigail, the teenager hosting her party down the road. At times, her unseen party sounds more exciting, but I bet it has nothing on the drama at Beverley's.

When I reviewed a performance of this play a few years ago, I saw it as a stultifying, dull script that could only appeal to a generous audience who'd attended similar parties in their younger days (decades ago). But the amateurs of Hessle Theatre Company utterly redeem Leigh's play, presenting a sparkling, perceptive comedy that appeals to the youngest and oldest of the audience. This is a bunch of performers who understand the comedy of Leigh's play far better than the professionals I saw a few years ago. They draw laughs from quiet little moments and facial expressions – perfectly judged moments of social interaction – as much as from their excellent delivery of the punchlines. They let the script breathe, allowing time for the laughter, but not often at the expense of pace.

This company contains amateurs with great skill, whose care and dedication to their craft is evident. It can be seen not only in the detailed set, which is pitched beautifully at a sense of suburban pretension and ostentation, but in the quality of acting. Of particular note is Martin Beaumont as Beverley's put-upon estate agent husband, Laurence. A master of trying to maintain social dignity balanced with the husband resisting (vainly) domination by his wife, Beaumont's Laurence is a joy. His relationship with Beverley is a familiar one, well-evoked , of the couple politely vying for control. That he looks and sounds like a younger Ian Hislop only adds to his comic power.

Hessle Theatre Company has given Hull an invigorating dose of modern classic drama, and for that they are to be applauded; it's exactly what the best regional theatre should be doing.

Up 'n' Under @ Hull Truck

A rugby ball sits, waiting, centre stage. A rugby ball-shaped spotlight focusses on it. Smoke fills the stage, beams of light shooting downwards. Is it Wembley? The Millennium Stadium? A true Theatre of Dreams, a Stadium of Light? It's certainly a big arena set-piece to open John Godber's Up 'n' Under at Hull Truck.

Godber allegedly wrote this play after promising to do so at his interview for the job of Artistic Director at Hull Truck. That was twenty-five years ago, and now the Truck has resurrected this tale of a failing rugby side struggling against both themselves and formidable opposition. In a way, it hasn't aged too well, the casual homophobia still being lapped up by 2009's audience. But this audience also laps up the local colour, the banter and the camaraderie of Godber's team. He sets up a fierce rivalry early on, which gets laughs and sets a lightly confrontational tone throughout – what do you expect from a play about rugby with five men and only one woman?

It's in the next scene that Godber triumphs though. It works when he keeps away from the grandiose themes and styles, instead giving the people what they want by sticking some northern blokes in a room to moan and bicker. This is – if you'll pardon the unintentional pun – Godber's home turf, and the scene is a masterclass in both character and dialogue, each line rushing the scene to its conclusion via a joke. Masterful.

You could probably criticise the casting of this play – the singer can't sing, and some argue that Abi Titmuss is just there for the headlines. But at least there's eye-candy for both halves of the audience, and (like many Truck plays) the cast are highly plausible as a unit, if not as individuals. Speaking of eye-candy, Titmuss surely doesn't need to do quite so much work alone in her onstage gym...does she?

There comes a time in this early play when a teacher writes a poem based around the opening of Romeo & Juliet. He actively apes the style of Shakespeare, and the same can be said of Godber throughout the play; he gives an epic scope to the action that tries to raise it above the level of mere amateur rugby up to something higher, something grander. Take, for example, Titmuss setting the scene in heroic fashion before the action starts (then later reminding us of the story so far, in case we'd forgotten...after the first scene), very Henry V. That stadium feels like just one part of Godber's plan to make everything much bigger than it really is. But for all his knowingly-dropped titbits from Henry V and King Lear, Macbeth and Romeo & Juliet, Godber can't get away from the fact that his story is about some blokes who are out of shape and need chivvying up.

What we're presented with is very much a populist piece of theatre. It doesn't engage with any big themes, apart perhaps from the effects of ageing. What it does do very well is tell an encouraging story and raise laugh after laugh, in classic Hull Truck style – no surprise, as this is probably the play which, more than any other, set the benchmark for that style back in the mid-eighties. The ripping of Shakespeare certainly feels like a new writer showing us what he knows and trying things out.

Viewed in such terms, this is a massive success, and deserves the rapturous applause it gets from a nearly-full house. How many of those kids were there because Up 'n' Under is a set text, or were there for Abi Titmuss, is debatable – but if they liked this (they should) and want to see more like it...who cares why they turned up?

Two Hull Truck Shows a-Saturday

Two shows in Hull Truck's Studio on Saturday. Last Saturday, that is. Both one-offs for the Theatre, and neither exactly what you'd expect from the place. I saw both in what felt like a long day of theatre, though that's as much down to the fact that I was beginning to head into illness-fever territory as anything else.

Afternoon
In the afternoon, children's show Don't Mess, by a company confusingly named Moby Duck. Yes, at least one family turned up expecting a story about a whale. I don't think they were disappointed, but they certainly didn't get what they expected, and the kids were confused at the interval.

There aren't any whales in this story, which is 'a tale as old as India' – there's your first give-away that Moby Duck's work has nothing to do with whales...although, simply reading the publicity would also have told you that. Instead, the three performers give us a classic stepmother vs. daughter fairy tale. I many ways, the Indian version of Snow White, minus the dwarfs. There's a beautiful princess, born in rather unusual circumstances, who turns out to be an amazing cook, before being driven away as part of the needlessly cruel schemes of her new step-mum. In telling this story this way, Moby Duck combine several elements of fairy tales from all over the place, and almost make it like the Thousand and One Nights all thrown in together. Instead of dwarfs and a handsome prince, we've got the intervention of the Hindu gods (well, one of them but in various guises, the production perhaps wisely avoids going into too much detail on the exact way Hindu divinity operates) in multi-media form.

There's plenty of this multi-media stuff to keep the kids open-mouthed, and an awful lot going on visually. It certainly makes a colourful spectacle, and as such the South Asian elements of story-telling are very much on display. Oh, and the lad on percussion in the corner, of course – no doubt an integral part of South Asian stories. All that bright light and drumming didn't do any favours for my headache or growing sense of illness – word of warning: don't start popping paracetamol in children's shows; as if being a wheezing, lone man at the back weren't enough, drugs are a definite way to draw anxious looks.

Ultimately, I'm not sure the Indian dance on display is enough to keep the kids hooked, even when coupled with live sound effects and inventive (economical, set-wise) use of video. What Moby Duck do achieve is to bring a bit of high, foreign culture to Hull, which is to be applauded. How much of it went over the kids' heads is another question. But it's a worthy endeavour, and there really ought to be more attempts to do this.

Evening
In the evening, the less child-friendly vaudeville act, Madam Laycock and her Dabeno Pleasures. If you think the name sounds smutty, that's because it is.

This is a group of young women who bill their style as somewhere between vaudeville and circus, using elements of both to create something unique and amazing. But don't get your hopes up. These are young people trying to be Tim Burton, and not quite pulling it off (but, hey, set your goals high). They've an artfully messy set, both musically and staging-wise, making use of talent on a variety of instrument, mostly drums and piano accordion.

Madam Laycock, despite her large amount of hair and innuendo-laden name, isn't as interesting as her assembled Pleasures, a collection of freaks that have backstories you'd love to believe if only they worked. There's Fritz, the mutant on piano accordion, whose story is great until s/he tries to speak, and that ruins it all. The voodoo grandma on drums also more or less works, if you don't think about it too much, as does the Russian doll on violin (the most competent musician of the group). But just how funny is repeating the idea of the Bearded Lady's bestiality, especially when she's lost her beardy costume before her beardy nature is highlighted? It spoils the joke when the Bearded Lady hasn't got a beard any more. Then there's the Ringmaster figure that welcomes the audience in...a potentially brilliant device, if only it were applied consistently. That seems to be it on the circus front, and the company need to make more of that.

Like the family expecting the story of a whale, I was left slightly confused by the interval. Were these kids actors who played music throughout their poorly-plotted play or a bunch of musicians with silly costumes, half-baked characters and a set? Ultimately, a lack of cohesive storyline marks them out as musicians and not actors – which is fine, but they maybe need that to be more clear early on.

While endearingly messy onstage, Madam Laycock's band block out the scenery behind them. A quick word on the scenery: it almost steals the show; detailed and inventive, it perfectly captures the small town the songs are based in. It's even got shadow puppets, courtesy of that ringmaster. But they can't be seen, because of the Dabeno Pleasures. As with so many other things, the group need a little more focus and a little tidying up, so that their design ethic isn't wasted behind them.

This is a promising group, with a wicked streak and mildly eccentric sense of humour (how eccentric for eccentricity's sake is anyone's guess), that is crying out for a guiding hand to steer them in the right direction and give them some discipline and focus. What they also need is time to hone their performance in front of an audience that's not composed of their friends, so they can get more broad, varied reactions to their (at times self-indulgent) material.

The Soloist

Man is a social creature. No matter what the company he keeps, he invariably wants to exist in company.

He – or she, for that matter – also tends to think of himself before others, which is called greed and has led over the centuries to massive differences between the most impoverished and the most wealthy of humanity. There's a line in ITV's recent Wuthering Heights where Heathcliff says he made his fortune by taking advantage of other men's weaknesses – and it's a sentiment that rings very true for all fortunes made on the back of some exploited person.

Exploitation is a big theme hanging over true-story The Soloist. It's the latest film about a gifted person in poverty (and with mental health issues on this occasion), who meets someone that sees his talent and wants to help him. That would be sweet, if it weren't for the fact that the person helping him is reporter for the LA Times – Steve Lopez (Robert Downey Jr.) – who features this homeless, schizophrenic prodigy of a musician in his newspaper column and picks up a journalism award for it. As he picks up his award, his ex-wife jokes that he's exploiting this man – Nathaniel Ayers (Jamie Foxx) – and tells him he should write a book as well as the column. She neglects to mention the film that would be adapted from that book.

Meanwhile, Ayers is slumming it with the 90,000 homeless people of Los Angeles. He's been homeless since running away from the college course that allowed him to play cello in an orchestra, which went downhill once he started hearing voices. Now he's down-sized and plays his two-stringed violin in the streets. He's the soloist of the title, but this story belongs to Lopez. He's the reporter that starts off telling his readers about Ayers, but then gets more involved until he's writing about the ways that he's changing Ayers' life – whether Ayers likes it or not.

While such philanthropy is admirable, it seems misplaced, or perhaps misjudged. Lopez directs his efforts at one man, who only appreciates it some of the time. He's a man uncomfortable indoors, a man who is happiest listening to the sounds of Beethoven's string compositions swelling through the city air and mingling with the sounds of the freeway traffic and building work. Lopez's intrusive 'help' sees him moved to an apartment, and away from the sounds of people that had surrounded him. While it seems an improvement on the crowded slum (crowded mostly with black and mentally handicapped people, the oft-ignored side of America), Ayers has chosen that slum over the apartment he used to have.

It seems the American Dream in which everyone is free to do as s/he pleases has gone sour, as Lopez imposes his help on Ayers while using his story to win awards (and presumably Brownie points at the local philanthropists' club), and a cello teacher tries to convert the prodigy to God.

When We Shouldn't Call a Friend a Friend; or, The Misunderstanding of Facebook Friendship

Personally, I've never been sure what constitutes too many friends on sites like Facebook.

Apart from anything else, I've never understood the idea of adding a celebrity (or mock celebrity) as a friend, nor the idea of adding a band. Things like that require a basic (and wilful) misunderstanding of the term 'friend'. Liking these people makes you a fan, not their friend.

But adding celebs etc. is one way people have of boosting their 'friend' quota. We all like to feel we have an active, healthy social life and what better way to prove that (and measure it) than by pointing to a large pool of people one can count as 'friend'? A big number on a computer screen must be true, after all. Is there also any way to better quantify social popularity, and therefore make a competition out of friendship?

Recently, I watched a French film (My Best Friend, or Mon Meilleur Ami if you prefer) about an art dealer who seems to have a social life but absolutely no friends. Not one. Not a single person he cares enough about to talk to, nor anyone that cares about him – not even his daughter. It (predictably enough) raises questions about what makes a friend, how we treat friends and the nature of friendship. This is a man whose Facebook page would state that he had no friends whatsoever – a depressing, desultory naught.

Unless he used Facebook in the way that you're supposed to – which a minority does these days. The other day I heard a friend (and let's just quickly establish that this was a real-life friend whom I've met only in the flesh and isn't a Facebook friend – there is a difference; the bonds of a Facebook friendship are much looser) complain of a Facebook user: “A thousand friends! He can't possible know that many people!”

Initially, I'm tempted to agree. Surely this chap (not someone either of us knew) can't be holding down cordial relations with so many people. He'd forget who nine out of ten of were. Most of them must be meaningless relationships with people he's met once or twice, if at all. It was even temping to picture him as a social whore with no real friends but a string of acquaintances whose personal details he can access at a mouse click – slave to the ever-rising friends counter, his ego stroked by having more friends than his rivals. What an butterfly-like, lonely and essentially cold person he must be. I don't mean butterfly-like in the good way; this is a man whose attention and affection flitters from place to place, a man who can never settle himself on any interaction before moving to the next.

Then I realised that wasn't the case at all. To have such assumptions and thoughts about a Facebook user is to fundamentally misunderstand the purpose of Facebook. If you use Facebook as a social tool, to keep in touch with old friends and talk to people that you see every day, or just for the rafts of applications, quizzes and games forever being pumped out of the ether, then hundreds of friends you hardly speak to is perhaps like treating human acquaintance as prizes in the trophy cabinet that is Facebook.

However, the site is supposed to be used as a social NETWORKING tool – in this case, social merely referring to people within a network, as opposed to corporations (etc.) within a network. It should be a system of interconnected professional/serious people using the internet for communication and (a more elusive term to define) networking. Under such usage, the more friends the better. Though some blame for confusion must lie with whoever decided to use the word 'friend' and not 'contact'. A thousand contacts on a social network sounds more plausible (and more easily-justified) than a thousand friends on a social site.

Alas, people (myself included) have failed to understand this, and in a way Facebook's success has fatally undermined it. Rather than the slimline professional linkage it should have been, Facebook has become to University students and recent graduates what MySpace is to Sixth Formers and GCSE kids. It's used as a social interaction and gaming tool, not networking, by the majority of its users – it's more toy than tool.

This in part explains the rise of Twitter. It offers to the older professional what Facebook should have offered, and once did. Something simple and stream-lined, an easy way of posting brief bits of important information for others and keeping abreast of what like-minded professionals are doing and thinking. The problem with Facebook was that once people reach that age at which MySpace and Bebo stop being cool (it happens) they use Facebook for the same purpose. Although in my case MySpace stopped letting me log in so I made the full transition to my already-existent Facebook early. I had been trying to keep a distinction running: MySpace for school friends, Facebook for Uni and networking. It wasn't a distinction that survived once all of my school friends moved to Uni and added me on Facebook.

Facebook is a site that no longer does what it set out to do; its purpose has changed, because its users (and therefore their needs) have changed. Networking on Facebook didn't stand a chance once the socialites forced the professionals into a minority.

Sizwe Banzi is Dead @ the Stephen Joseph Theatre

With scare stories about identity theft rampant, it's interesting to see a case in which the theft is not only portrayed positively as a crime that harms no one, but also offers one man's only hope of a future worth living.

In our more enlightened, liberal times it's hard to understand how – or rather, why – a system like South Africa's Apartheid worked. The restrictions imposed on the nation's black population by the white minority back in the seventies (when this play is set, though the restrictions go back decades) seemed to ignore the basic fact that black people were, in fact, people.

They are treated instead like children or common property of the white man – shown especially in moments when black adult men in Sizwe Banzi is Dead are called 'boy' by white children. Every movement of Banzi himself and other black South Africans is carefully monitored and logged in their all-important reference book – which is like a passport but much more restrictive. Banzi is banned from leaving his home town for more than three days unless he has a work permit elsewhere, and having failed to return to his dump of a home in time will be in trouble with the authorities whatever he does. On the evidence of this play, Apartheid (specifically the reference book system) seems to have been set up purely to cause more problems for South Africa's black population. Thinking about it, that probably was the plan.

The difficulties are effectively, if comically, explained here by Buntu – a curiously camp South African played by Louis Emerick (of Brookside fame) – when he runs through the tortuous steps Banzi will need to take in order to work in the town Buntu lives in. Emerick's other character, photographer Styles, spends the play's first half setting a context for the later privations. He tells of his past in a Ford car factory which was clearly no Equal Opportunities employer, instead using black men as cheap, abusable labour while the white men stayed in management. It's a vividly performed monologue, but Emerick takes his time to get warmed up.

There's a certain anger this piece keeps bottled up and repressed until Emerick finally unleashes it all in a furious speech persuading Banzi into an illegal choice, but the only one that offers him a future. It is in Banzi's 'death' and subsequent re-birth as another man that writers Athol Fugard, John Kani and Winston Ntshona raise their key issues. What's in a name? as has been asked before. Or rather, what's the value of that name? Is it worth keeping if it can be exchanged to feed a man's children? What does a man own that he can take with him? In the case of the black South African of the early seventies, not very much at all. In fact, even the freedom Styles' father fought for in WWII looks pretty suspect. Bunto's father was left without even his dignity every time a white man passed him in the street.

Thankfully, this play avoids laying into the white population of South Africa – and indeed of everywhere else for not intervening – for Apartheid. Instead, it concentrates on how that system restricted the lives of countless black people for the decades it was in force. The two-man cast brilliantly convey the sheer hopelessness of the situation, the desperation that leads a man to steal the identity of a corpse.

What the Stephen Joseph Theatre presents is a rousing appeal to the individual to react against state oppression, to not knuckle under and drown. It urges circumvention of measures set up to restrict individual dignity, humanity and freedom. Every individual has to fight a system like apartheid, that way – as the production's final seconds highlight – one of them might just get himself out of prison and elected President.

Pub Quiz is Life @ Hull Truck

At last! A play on Hull Truck's main stage that doesn't wallow in Hull Victimisation Syndrome.

Richard Bean's Pub Quiz is Life comes as a minor breath of fresh air, after a few shows that have made much of Hull's perceived status (earned or otherwise) as a bit of a rubbish city, where the locals readily admit that the place is awful. Don't get me wrong, this play does have the odd symptom, but HVS is nowhere near the rampant disease it has been. We're talking a minor case of sniffles, rather than the recent bout of flu.

What Bean does instead is much better than the tack taken by Alan Plater and Rupert Creed. He mentioned in an post-show talkback that he thinks playwrights should 'lift up the rock and look at the bugs under it'. Rather than have middle-class, middle-aged folk bemoaning the state of their lives and city, Bean shows people living in that city – not all of them are working-class – and his characters actually do things.

His plot centres around Lee, a discharged squaddie fresh from Afghanistan who joins his father to form a pub quiz team. Also on the team is Woody – the man supplying Lee with cocaine to ease his father's MS – and Melissa, who works for a company aiming to regenerate Hull and make it a 'top ten town'...whatever one of those is. Already, you can see where the HVS symptoms are going to creep in. Oh, and Bunny – Lee's dad – is a retired dock worker. So plenty of chance for the old man to have friction with the young woman over the general state of Hull.

Unlike previous stage fictions of Hull – without wanting to continue comparing Pub Quiz... to other plays – this one manages to make some good points. The shouting about Afghanistan and Britain's right to be in the country may not be necessary, but the loss of fishing as an industry – and the subsequent loss of dignity and purpose for Hull's local male population – is as good a reason as any for the city's current degenerate state, and especially the high number of unemployed. Esther Hall (of BT advert fame) tries her best to make the argument that 'iconic footbridges' and shopping malls are an improvement sound plausible, but it just doesn't stand up to understandable anger. That this is anger Bean shares with the older men of Hull seems a reasonable assumption.

The strength of this production lies in its charting of the gradual corrupting of Lee. He starts off as a nice enough bloke, a married father with an eye for a good-looking lady, getting hold of small amounts of crack to ease his dad's illness. But the world he finds himself in on returning from Afghanistan makes him angry, cuts him off and seemingly rejects his hard-working father. The world – perhaps the nation – turns him into something else, not quite a monster but a feeling of revulsion is hard to avoid by the end. Unless you admire the determination and ruthlessness he exhibits, of course.

Another strong point is the pub landlady, Mabel, who asks the questions in a voice like gravel soaked in honey. She's a bit like Chaucer's Wife of Bath revelling in performing a mini-Cabaret act whilst plucking general knowledge questions from a glorious trail of smut. Picture that. Anecdotes about her eight husbands crop up throughout her questions over the weeks, and every now and then she has a song. And what a voice.

Interestingly, only one of the cast is from Hull, and some of their accents are patchy. Watch out for one particularly bad piece of casting in a drug-dealer played far too young, by someone too young (in a way, that's probably a compliment to the actress – or it would be if her accent were decipherable). Throughout, it feels as though the cast all need to loosen up a bit and relax; there's something to be said for deadpan delivery (see: Mabel) but it gets taken way too far here. The same can even be said of perhaps the worst onstage gunshot in the history of the north.

Tellingly, Bean also declared that he'd wanted a Hull play called 'Craptown', and this was probably it. So, while it's not quite suffering a full-on bout of HVS, there's definitely an acknowledgement of the symptoms...Bunny even complains that Luton got the official title ahead of Hull: “We was robbed!”

Where Bean succeeds is in keeping that a side-issue, and not a focus. Pub Quiz is Life is much more about British society as a whole than poor old Hull, and so much better for it.

Rozencrantz And Guildenstern Are Dead @ the Edinburgh Fringe

The ThreeWeeks review of the American High School Theatre Festival's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead, which stops short of calling for a ban on AHSTF performances, even though they do horrible things to this gorgeous script:

What's it all about? So asks Rosencrantz (or Guildenstern, who knows, or cares?) at the end of Tom Stoppard's wordy, clever take on 'Hamlet'. Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are minor characters in Shakespeare's iconic tragedy, but take centre stage in this monotonous production. It's an ambitious project for an American high school to tackle – bringing so word-conscious a play (they miss most of the wordplay, in fact) to a British audience – and they don't really succeed in bringing it to life. Dedicated acting doesn't make up for clumsy staging, nor for lines gabbled at speed in order to keep the play within its advertised running time. Undeniably rushed, by a cast who don't appear to understand the majority of what they're saying.

tw rating: 2/5

On the positive side: Scottish crime-writer Ian Rankin (creator of Rebus) spoke to me in the queue outside, and somehow sat through the whole thing with his family.
On the negative side: after posting this review, I wondered if two stars were too generous.

My interview with (the man playing) Eric Morecambe

Bring me sunshine

Bob Golding tells Richard T. Watson about playing a wife, a mother and an elephant in his one-man show, Morecambe

“When I say I’m doing a one-man play about Eric Morecambe the reaction is always the same; everyone smiles. It’s so warming. The love for the guy was huge,” explains Bob Golding, star of a play what Tim Whitnall wrote (to paraphrase Ernie Wise), ‘Morecambe’.

“The Edinburgh Festival is the hub of première work, and it’s become a lot about comedy”, he adds. “So where better to première a play about one of Britain’s best comedians?”

Eric Morecambe, says Golding, was and is a “hugely-respected member of the comic fraternity” and this show celebrating his life has already had previews where “the responses were so positive and so encouraging” that the show will now enjoy a month’s run at the Assembly Rooms.
“My respect and love for Eric and Ernie was massive before I came into the project,” he continues. “It’s the most amazing project. It’s not like a job; it’s been enjoyment”.

He’s aware of – but unfazed by – the pressures of playing such a well-loved figure. “ I don’t allow myself to think about the pressures of it, because I think you’ve just got to get on with it to your best ability”, he concludes. “Which is what I’m doing with this piece. I approach it like any other role”.

However, he adds: “People have compared me to Eric all my life. It’s not that I’ve thought ‘Oh, I must play Eric Morecambe’, it’s not something I’ve been working my life towards, it’s just something that’s been there, and now I’m making the most of it”.

What really comes across in our interview is how much of a loving tribute to Morecambe this show is. Golding tells me that he considers Morecambe a “comic genius”, adding, “I’m certainly not that, and I don’t know if I can replicate that onstage, but hopefully I can tell a story about the man who was”.

The show’s director Guy Masterson first noticed Golding’s likeness to Morecambe twelve years ago. Golding remembers, “He said, ‘You’re so similar to Eric, but you’re too young at the moment. Maybe in ten years’ time we’ll address it’”.

‘Morecambe’ has clearly been a long time in the making. Golding says that “the toughest part was what not to put in. People would see it and say, ’Oh, you didn’t do that’ and, ‘You didn’t do that enough’; there’s a wealth of knowledge of Eric’s life”.

Audiences will probably expect a brand of family-friendly comedy familiar from the ‘Morecambe & Wise’ TV shows, and that’s what they’ll get. So, it’s suitable for children? “Definitely. It’s a one-man show and it’s an hour and twenty-five minutes, so it’s whether or not they can sit still, really. But Eric of all people was guilty of that as well; that’s why his mother called him Jitter-arse. He had so much energy. That’s an important point to make: Eric was never ‘off.’ He was the eternal comedian, the eternal jester”.

The family-pleasing side of the role should come easily to Golding, who is the voice of Max and Milo in CBeebies’ ‘The Tweenies’, and PC Plod in Five’s ‘Noddy In Toyland’. “For a long time my daughters just assumed every father did some kind of TV voice. Their friends say, ‘Can you do Milo’s voice?’ and I do it, and then become a sort of priest, or celebrity. I’ve been very very lucky in that respect”.

But at the heart of Morecambe is love and respect, a celebration of the man voted Britain’s favourite 20th Century comedian. “I hope that by doing this piece we can tell a simple story about a simple man who touched millions of people”.

ThreeWeeks Weekly No. 3, 2009

The Gigalees Crazy Circus Show @ The Edinburgh Fringe

The ThreeWeeks review of Austraila's cheeky, crazy circus double-act:

The craziest things here are possibly the double-act's outfits, but then the double-act are pretty crazy themselves, in a zany sort of way. This is a brightly coloured, high energy performance in which the pair on stage barely pause for breath; Wilma and Daisy lead their audience enthusiastically through a series of clowning and circus tricks, during the course of almost an hour of classic slapstick, balloon models and juggling. The buffoonery may at times be predictable, but is still funny and gets laughs from parents as well as children. Mind, the dancing only goes well for the kids whose parents also get into the swing. This is a show high on energy, smiles, skill and laughter.

tw rating: 3/5

Waking the Dead VIII - Magdalene 26

How long do BBC scriptwriters spend on re-reading and tweaking their scripts? Really.

Now, I've never really seen the appeal of Waking the Dead (aside from the suits that Spencer used to wear a few seasons ago, and Sue Johnstone's chemistry with Trevor Eve). My mum likes it. I watched this one because my friend (whose opinion in these things I trust) recommended it. He shares a birthday with my mum, so must be trustworthy.

I ask my earlier question because this two-parter – the opening of Season Eight – felt lazy and slapdash. After seven Seasons, you'd think they'd have got the hang of it. There are problems riddling this script, like the maggots that riddle the corpse found hanging from a ceiling in this poor woman's house. Incidentally, who was that bloke? That's one plot strand left dangling, along with any attempt at explaining the car crash that leaves Lisa Hogg's naked character running through the woods with no memory.

I'm pretty confident that I remember seeing perhaps the first ever Waking the Dead – or at least, one in which the team were moving into new offices, being introduced to each other and a lot of time was spent explaining what constituted a 'cold case' and why the dead often needed waking. That sort of thing saved a lot of time when New Tricks needed to do some similar background work. That episode also saw the arrival of French DS Stella (Felicite De Jeu), a handy person who – like the audience – didn't know exactly what was going and needed everything explaining. I point this out because at the start of Season Eight, the team seem to be moving into new offices...ones identical to the ones they've been using up 'til now. Despite the initial set-up where Johnstone struggles to locate her office, it's not followed up. There are apparently no more office issues worth mentioning, and everything flows smoothly. Very smoothly. Too smoothly, in fact. These guys are far too efficient to be plausible. Their forensic checks – conducted by their one forensic scientist (Tara Fitzgerald) – seem to be over in the blink of an eye. Handy, in a crime drama that focusses on DNA and old crime scenes.

Without wanting to give too much away...for a show about coppers whose Modus Operandi (is it inappropriate to use that in reference to the Police?) centres on DNA, is it not a bit of a cop-out to throw in identical twins? Is this a gimmicky attempt to keep the show fresh and interesting? Throwing in the one thing likely to confuse DNA testing...there aren't many things that should hold up an investigation along those lines, apart from not having enough evidence (and that does not exciting TV make). The problem could be that we as an audience are shown the wrong twin's set of memories, meaning that one twin magically appears partway through, and we've been following the wrong one. Maybe the twin sister thing just seems silly, but then it's fine when Wilky Collins does it in The Woman in White.

Then there's Stella. Again, I don't want to give anything away, but the poor girl deserves better. I don't just mean from her colleagues who fail to appreciate her until she's on a hospital bed. Her story is disgustingly rushed and hustled to a conclusion that is completely unnecessary and smacks of an actress' expedient writing out of a series because of contractual issues.

Being no expert on Turkish Mafia-type gang culture or Arab oil fields, I hesitate to label the villains of this piece as stereotypes, or even as bad villains. But they do seem to be exactly everything you'd expect from nasty Turkish immigrants who really shouldn't be trusted (especially with white women). On a similar note, why is the only priest in 1960s Soho an Irishman? It's confusing when the other two characters seen then have just fled Ireland, to Soho, and our only clue that this has happened is said priest (whose Irishness makes it hard to believe they've gone anywhere).

Maybe Waking the Dead is something you only watch for Trevor Eve being rude, and not for a story. Is he rude enough to just bully a Turkish gangster into doing what he wants, though? And is all the shooting really necessary? Won't anybody back in Turkey be a bit annoyed about that – and how will that boss be found if the people that can identify him have been killed?

So many problems jumping up. Don't think about it too much, just watch Boyd and Grace (Eve and Johnstone).

Fringe Review 2009 II

As the dust settles on 2009's Edinburgh, here are some more updates from Fringe Review.

Lilly Through the Dark, The River People:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3155.html

Djupid (The Deep), Jon Atli Jonasson:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3105.html

Rapunzel and the Tower of Doom, Theatre of Widdershins:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3139.html

The Chronicles of Long Kesh, Green Shoot Productions:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3111.html

The Last Witch, Traverse Theatre as part of the Edinburgh International Festival (deserved five stars, but - as I later realised - 'highly recommended' is the definition of four stars):
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3156.html

Time Out of Joint, Heart Productions:
http://www.fringereview.co.uk/fringeReview/3148.html

Stitches @ the Edinburgh Fringe

The ThreeWeeks review of Manchester University's Stitches, the new play from 2009's ISPC winner:

Global warming is a hot topic these days, but this new script from award-winning playwright Claire Urwin gives it a whole new angle. Urwin presents a highly imaginatively created world, based on an Earth devastated by firestorms, acid rain and solar flares. It gives her a chance for language games with survivors who've forgotten how it all works, and she also has fun with an amusing deconstruction of modern society and turns of speech, even if the laughs come from the survivors' misunderstandings more than anything else. A detailed world is built until the emotional, brutal conclusion, at which point the lesbian subtext suddenly makes sense. Another imaginative, image-rich creation from Urwin.

tw rating: 4/5