TIGER COUNTRY

24/1/11, Hampstead

3 hrs. Best thing we've seen so far this year. By Nina Raine, whose Tribes we saw just the other week at the Royal Court, and who is clearly planning on being as prolific as her dad Craig.

A slice of life in today's NHS, set among the junior doctors and consultants in A&E and a range of other specialisms in some big London hospital. Lots of short scenes played with tremendous energy, book-ended with vigorously mimed scenes of emergency room life familiar from the likes of ER and Casualty. Strongly-drawn characters, especially the women, including a dedicated newbie (Ruth Everett) falling out of love with her boyfriend (Pip Carter), another doctor (who relaxes after a taxing nightshift with a can of beer and an episode of Doctors at 9am) and a mid-career British Asian surgeon (Thusitha Jayasundera -- from Holby City!) who has sacrificed family and personal life for career, and bullies and snaps at her juniors. Some good jokes as well as moving moments. A big cast (I counted 14 including ASMs with the odd line) made to seem bigger still by effective doubling. Played on a traverse stage lined with that blue lino they have in hospitals, curtained areas and nurses' stations at either end of the traverse; much of the action involving hospital beds, wheelchairs, surgical trolleys wheeled on and off with elan. Raine herself directed, presiding over some fine naturalistic TV-style acting and one misplaced performance by Nicolas Tennant as a senior surgeon: he's a good actor but his approach in this play was far too mannered.

At the heart of the play lay the question of how far doctors should care. The newbie cares too much, desperately trying to resuscitate a young women brought in with a heart attack; the more experienced members of the team are used to the idea that patients sometimes die, but she is not yet inured. The surgeon cares about her work and career and standards but not, you feel, about the patients, who are merely so much meat -- until, that is, her aunt is brought in for a routine operation which goes wrong thanks to the incompetence of the consultant on whom she is dependant for her own promotion. At the end of the play we see her breaking the news to an elderly cancer patient (an actor in a hospital soap!) that his condition is incurable; she leaves weeping.

Much of the subject matter was predictable: overworked, exhausted juniors; the doctor diagnosed with cancer ("heal thyself"); the arrogant professional. But some of it was surprising. Like the sexism, not just among the old hands but among the young men. Can that be right? Dr T said it was -- and generally gave the play a thumbs up for verisimilitude though with reservations about detail. In particular she said the old problem of exhausted junior doctors making stupid, perhaps lethal errors after too many hours on call had been replaced by a new one: everyone works sensible hours, so they go home at the end of their shifts, handing over to a new team, which means the doctors are fresher but (unless the handovers are very good indeed) there's often no continuity in a patient's treatment, with each new batch of nurses and doctors coming on with no clear idea of the case history and having to start afresh each day, with sometimes predictably unfortunate consequences.

Michael Billington in The Guardian lamented that the play wasn't "political" enough: that it didn't focus sufficiently on the dire state of the NHS. I think he was wrong. Firstly because Raine didn't set out to write that kind of play, but rather an ensemble, slice-of-life piece that touched on many issues. And secondly because there was quite a lot of politics: the play talked about rationing treatment, about the difficulty of getting properly trained staff, and about the way in which the NHS is kept afloat by the "voluntary overtime" of doctors. Indeed a rant on that subject towards the end prompted a spontaneous round of applause from the audience: clearly there were a lot of hospital doctors in the audience.

One false note: an elderly woman is brought in with a stroke, unable to say anything except "Yes" and "No". A little later she has recovered her speech but not her wits and wanders through the hospital looking at the audience and asking "who are all these people?" It was an unnecessary breach of the fourth wall (or whatever the traverse equivalent is).

ENLIGHTENMENT

18/10/10, Hampstead

A month on and I could remember absolutely nothing about this production. Nada. Zilch. That's what comes of not writing 'em up at the time.

Then I found half a page of scribbled notes and it started coming back to me. Nice middle-class couple's son goes missing on his gap year in the Far East. The mother has resorted to a "medium", a clearly fraudulent old woman, in an effort to find out what happened. The grandfather (ex-Labour Cabinet minister) has called in a 30-something TV producer who wants to feature the boy in a missing kids programme. Everyone's going spare. Then news comes through that the boy's turned up in a hospital. The embassy are putting him on a plane to London. Act 1 ends with the boy's appearance and a shocked cry from the grandfather of "Who the fuck are you!?"

In Act 2 the boy, apparently some lost soul whose memory has gone awol and who assumed he was the son because he had his rucksack when he woke up in hospital, has been taken in by the family. Gradually he turns from a sympathetic waif, with a wrily humorous take on his amnesiac predicament, into a mendacious monster who has clearly played this kind of trick before, a frightening cuckoo who has to be ejected from the nest.

I'm at a loss to explain why all this left so little impression. Among the many reasons to like and remember it: it was wittily and thought-provokingly written by Shelagh Stephenson; we have personal experience of the student-aged child on a gap year travel in the Far East; the TV producer, though a grotesque caricature and a gross libel on the profession, behaved in ways I have seen TV producers behave; it was generally well-acted by a very classy cast (my scribbled note reminds me that there was a lot of listening in this play and the actors listened convincingly and well, which isn't necessarily easy to do: I spent a lot of time watching and enjoying their reactions).

I liked especially the way it played with ideas of truth and mendacity and performance. The boy (Tom Weston-Smith) starts by nicking things (the missing son's T-shirts, the father's socks) and brazenly denying it (and the parents of course believe it). Then he gets drunk and vituperative in a scene with the mother (Julie Graham)... except that after he's gone she smells the wine and realises it's Ribena, so he was just shamming. The TV producer (Daisy Beaumont) lies from the start, quite casually: she seeks the mother's sympathy by saying "As a mother myself..." when she has no family. She asks to film the reunion and when told she can't does so anyway, with a hidden camera. And when she rumbles the boy and tries to alert the parents he turns her past lies back on her, undermining her credibility.

The father (Richard Clothier) is actually the step-father. He is a sceptic, in contrast to the mother's desperate need to know what happened to her son. He mocks the medium (Polly Kemp), and we see that he is right to do so, until towards the end the old biddy turns out to be pretty shrewd -- a successful exponent of what Terry Pratchett's witches call "headology".

The grandfather was Paul Freeman, a veteran. Old-fashioned style (watch the way he stands) but a powerful stage presence. A nice exchange when he introduces the TV producer to his daughter. "Are you sleeping with her?" she asks. "No!" he instantly replies. Then it emerges that they've "had a few lunches". To begin with he seems pompous and vain and a bit of a clown; later he's the only one with the sense to cut through the crap and make things happen.

All in all a sophisticated piece of theatre. Not everything worked. It was a play of two halves, evidently deliberately, but they sometimes jarred. There may have been a shade too many gags in the first part. Dr T had a friend visiting from Canada who remarked on the number of four-letter words: there was only one in the first act (see above) but loads in the second. There was a bit too much shouting in part two as well. And the set (by Francis O'Connor) was a problem: all white, with only one proper entrance. Things like occasional tables emerged from the floor, there was a staircase down through a hole in the floor, and there was a big window to one side of the curved back wall which also served as an occasional entrance/exit. All a bit of a mess. There were also, my notes tell me, overhead projections but I don't remember those.

Directed by Edward Hall, is first play as the new artistic director at this address. The critics were critical. Maybe the first night was a disappointment. I reckon it wasn't half bad. And somehow appropriate that I should so completely have forgotten a play about amnesia.

LATER

It turns out I did write it up at the time. I've just found the text...

This has had mixed reviews and I went fearing the worst. In fact it was a thought-provoking evening, though it had its longeurs.
Shelagh Stephenson play about cuckoos in the nest, identity, loss, truth and falsehood etc etc.
Middle class couple (her daddy a Cabinet minister) have lost their son: he went missing in the Far East while backpacking during his gap year and no-one has the faintest idea what's happened to him. He (stepfather, university English teacher) is sceptical; she (researching the life of a Victorian woman who lost her son at Lucknow during the Mutiny and ended up living in India and going native) is distraught. They are first seen with a medium, a fraudulent old busybody. Then grandad turns up with a young television producer who's going to make a documentary about the boy. Cue phone all from the Embassy in Bangkok, or wherever it is. The boy has turned up. Act One ends with his appearance at the airport and the horrified reaction of parents/grandparent when they realise it's not him.
Act Two charts the boy's progress from hapless and rather charming victim (lost his memory, no idea who he is, woke up in a hospital bed with the missing son's backpack next to him, assumed that was who he was, a waif and stray they take pity on and invite into their home) to a manipulative monster who lies routinely, uses aggressive language and violence and eventually has to be expelled.
It was well-acted, mostly well-written and mostly intelligently directed by Edward Hall (first play in his new job as artistic director at this address).

SALOME

18/7/10, Hampstead

Oscar Wilde's decadent fin de siecle hothouse flower, given a Mad Max makeover by a company called Headlong in a touring production which originated in Leicester.

I was glad we'd seen the opera the other day. The text Strauss set is remarkably faithful to Wilde, but I'm not wholly confident I'd have followed the original if I wasn't already familiar with the outline. But I thought it a powerful and more or less convincing reimagining of a piece which I imagine risks being insufferably camp. But there was a lot of shouting, and I have never seen so much spittle, not to mention a witches' brew of other fluids, including stage blood (some from Narraboth, a very great deal from Jokanaan's severed head), red wine out of jerry cans and a black viscous liquid which lay in pools about the stage and found its way onto the actors' hands and costumes ("I see BP have been," S whispered to me, with reference to the company's current little difficulty in the Gulf of Mexico).

The setting was a futuristic dystopian landscape, the cast in combats, touting modern weapons, the floor made of shredded tyres. It made a nonsense of some of the lines, but it made some sort of sense of a world in which strange superstitions went hand in hand with violence and unbridled self-indulgence and (frankly) outright madness.

It's Herod's play. Played by Con O'Neill with white face, red lips and manic conviction, he is a more grotesquely compelling figure than Salome (Zawe Ashton), a petulant and precocious teenager who suddenly grasps the destructive power of her sexuality, dressed in this production in black halter-neck bra and zip-down-the-front combats. For the dance she changed into an extraordinary pink wig, pink bra and knickers and see-through stretchy dress and a ghastly bright pink wig, and came on with a huge boom box for the music (she pulled the aerial up suggestively with her teeth), before getting down to knickers alone.

Wilde's dialogue works surprisingly well, despite the thees and thous, to anyone accustomed to Shakespeare, and they cast excavated it for its meaning assiduously. And like watching updated Shakespeare, you quickly learnt to turn a deaf ear to the inconsistencies: Jokanaan praised for the whiteness of his skin despite being an almost-naked black man with glistening skin; all the talk of Rome and Caesar.

The stage was bare, with nothing but banks of lights to either side and at the back, and a sort of climbing frame against part of the back wall. Jokanaan (physically impressive, booming voice but had a lisp) emerged from a circular manhole cover centre stage.

CANARY

26/5/10, Hampstead

Jonathan Harvey's latest. He's still ploughing the same old furrow, but he does it intelligently and with a warm and sympathetic heart.

A chief constable (Philip Voss) is outed as a closet gay when it emerges that he had an affair with another young man in his youth but was persuaded, to save his career, to accuse the other guy of raping him.

Three months on (didn't manage to write it up at the time) the details have faded. But I can recall a Machiavellian gay TV host, a scene of a gay man in the 1960s being given aversion therapy, Paula Wilcox as the police chief's wife (and Mrs Thatcher) and a general sense that it was well-done if not groundbreaking.

The second act begins with Voss in drag as Mary Whitehouse conducting one of her early mass meetings which is interrupted by gay activists scattered around the audience.

There's a Big Secret which is revealed towards the end but I can't remember what it was!

Reminded of me Nick de Jong's

Here are some reviews.

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/charlesspencer/7763645/Canary-at-the-Hampstead-Theatre-review.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2010/apr/28/canary-review

http://www.theartsdesk.com/index.php?option=com_k2&view=item&id=1563:canary-theatre-review&Itemid=25

DUNSINANE

22/2/10, Hampstead Theatre

Another cracker from David Greig, whose plays are consistently witty, surprising and politically engaged, in an RSC production by Roxana Silbert (who directed Orphans, which we saw at Edinburgh).

His starting point is the end of Macbeth. The tyrant (never named) is killed and replaced on the throne by a puppet, Malcolm, supported by an invading English force led bu Siward (Jonny Phillips), a bluff, tough so9ldier. But Macbeth's widow, Gruach, and her son have survived as a focus for discontent and rebellion.

Siward, attempting to impose peace by force, is baffled by a country where the local warlords apparently prefer continued violence and instability and rivalry to peaceful coexistence. Think Afghanistan.

Malcolm is a wonderfully cynical, camp figure who educates Siward gradually in the realities of Scottish politics, where nothing is ever quite as it seems. He's played by the red-headed Brian Ferguson who reminded us of the brilliant Jonathan Slinger in the RSC's The Histories. Gruach is Siobhan Redmond, slinky and seductive in black dress and spectacular red wig.

There are English soldiers lamenting their fate at being stranded in this cold,w et, craggy, boggy inhospitable country; and a comic English officer, Egham, played by Alex Mann, first seen moaning self-pityingly with an arrow in his arm, who turns out to be duplicitous and greedy as well as charmingly baffled by the Scots (he promises Gruach her son will be safe in hiding in some Glen, in exchange for liberty for his men to trade and buy provisions; but when it suits him happily betrays the boy to Siward).

Hampstead Theatre reconfigured to create a thrust stage by putting part of the audience at one side of the stage, facing a simple set of piled-up rocks. A live three-piece band on stage (cello, guitar, percussion) and two women (Gruach's attendants, in Muslim-style headscarves) who sing Gaelic songs. Siward accuses them of sending secret messages to those outside the castle in their singing; Gruach scoffs; by the end you think he may have been right.

A clever, well-acted and witty parable about the modern world, the perils of military intervention in other people's affairs, the difficulties of exporting political systems developed in one (supposedly enlightened) country into another (more backward?) country, and about Scots-English relations down the centuries.