CLYBOURNE PARK

11/2/11, Wyndhams

2 hrs. Every bit as good as they say it is (which is always a relief and a pleasure to report): scabrous, funny, discomfiting and superbly acted, an absolutely riveting expose of the continuing cancer of race in American society. At several moments there was that rare complete stillness in the theatre which seems to happen less often in the West End than in the subsidised/Off West End sector: pure theatrical magic.

Not having seen Lorraine Hansbury's Raisin in the Sun I had no idea, until we read Matt Wolf's excellent essay in the programme at half time, that Bruce Norris's play is a riff on that one -- related to it, according to Matt, in much the same way as Stoppard's Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is related to Hamlet.

In Act One we see a white couple and their neighbours, plus their black maid and her husband, as they argue over the couple's plan to sell their house to a "colored" family. The husband Russ (Stuart McQuarrie) is sunk in gloom; the wife (Sophie Thompson) maintains a brittle jollity. In time we learn their son, convicted of killing civilians while serving in Korea, had committed suicide upstairs (the maid found his body). The central encounter comes when a neighbour, Karl (Stephen Campbell-Moore), argues against the sale on all the expected grounds: it will depress property prices, the neighbourhood will go down the pan, "these people" live differently, eat differently, will be more comfortable if they live separately in their existing neighbourhood. The act climaxes with the confrontation between Karl -- unable to comprehend that his intervention is utterly unwanted, that his arguments have entirely failed to persuade -- and Russ.

Act Two brings us to the present day. A young couple (Campbell-Moore again, wonderfully insensitive, and Sarah Goldberg) have bought the now thoroughly dilapidated house and want to demolish and rebuild; they are meeting the local residents' committee, including a black couple Lena and Kevin (Lorna Brown and Lucian Msamati), to discuss the proposal. Superficially the new owners and the residents' committee all belong to the affluent middle classes. But underneath black and white still have their differences. An elliptical remark from the Brown character leads by degrees to a competitive joke-telling session which is at once hilarious and horrifying: the jokes themselves aren't funny; the characters' reactions are.

How this toxic confection would play in other hands doesn't bear thinking about. With this director (Dominic Cooke) and this cast, playing it with a kind of stylised, heightened naturalism, it's mesmerising and jaw-droppingly effective. And they are good. Though it's invidious to single anyone out, Campbell-Moore plays two very different characters, buttoned-up (literally) 50s suburbanite and Rotarian and superficially liberal but actually boorish 90s man in shorts, and does it brilliantly: they are the two key characters since it's their intervention which propels the action in each act. It's a measure perhaps of what a strong ensemble this is that Lucian Msamati, one of our favourite actors, is here not exactly outclassed but doesn't stand out.

THE HERETIC

8/2/11, Royal Court

Superfluous smoking near-miss*

2 hrs 45 mins. Penultimate preview with Juliet Stevenson of new Richard Bean play. Billed as about climate change but actually two plays. A conventionally-plotted old-fashioned farcical melodrama with some good twists, and an inadequately-developed didactic climate change play bolted on.

Part one is an intermittently interesting piece of limited plausibility about a university earth studies lecturer who steps out of line to claim that sea level rise as a result of climate change isn't happening. It's set in her office, where she gives one-to-one tutorials (and where does that happen these days outside Oxbridge?), fences with her boss and one-time lover, the professor, and then falls foul of the management and gets fired after an unauthorised appearance on Newsnight (filmed in the Newsnight studio with Paxo himself doing a turn).

Part two is a thoroughly implausible denouement set in the kitchen of her converted barn at Christmas, with much plotting ingenuity devoted to getting the characters to the location and in and out of the back door at the necessary moments and culminating (spoiler alert) in violence, near-death and a wedding. Some good jokes which should get even better as the performances bed in, lots of fizz and bubble, and a lot more entertaining than last week's climate change play, the NT's Greenland, but actually a bit of a mess.

You got the impression that Bean had started with the situation in part two and cast about for a suitable McGuffin to set the clockwork in motion, finding it in the timely but slightly arbitrary business of climate change sceptics.

The highlight: a wonderful performance by Johnny Flynn as a, like, climate-obsessed, right, personally troubled, like, bicycling, like really, really, um, confused student who gets belly-laughs from the audience, brings out the maternal in the Stevenson character and provokes naked lust in her daughter (a "purging anorexic") and even at one point sings a song he's "written" to his own guitar accompaniment... which could have been toe-curling but was actually rather sweet.

Stevenson and James Fleet as her boss and one-time lover have some equally good lines but haven't yet quite got the measure of them (and as A said may still be struggling with cuts and rewrites); as the performances mature I'd expect the dialogue to zing and the audience reaction to increase. But Stevenson has some awkward speechifying which slows things down: it didn't worry me too much, though revealingly I can't remember what the speeches were actually about; S got really cross.

Bean has invented some spurious science to move his plot along. The Stevenson character's life's work is measuring sea level rise in the Maldives, where she has planted a tree, and where she deduces sea level isn't rising at all. In Part Two our friends hack into the website of a rival university to discover from their emails (shades of the UEA scandal here) that their data has been massaged. The hacking is of course illegal, and none of this seems remotely plausible; worse nothing really happens in the play as a result of these revelations, which by that time have become much less important than the love story, the death threats story, the mother-daughter relationship story etc, the will-she-get-back-together-with-her-ex-lover-now-his-wife's-thrown-him-out story etc etc, which all provide "texture" but are all a bit of a distraction from the main event.

But there are nice touches: the Newsnight; the battery of laptops brought out for the hacking episode; and the polar bear (yes, this play has a polar bear as well, just like Greenland -- a teddy brought on as our scientist's union rep during the sacking scene which ends Part One).

*There's much talk of smoking dope and the Prof does come on at one point with a joint... but it's unlit.

KIN

21/12/10, Theatre Upstairs (Royal Court)

1 hr 15 mins straight through. A bit of a dud, unfortunately, because it was a nice idea. Ten-year old girls at boarding school, swearing themselves blue in the face, emotionally needy, being beastly to each other one moment and clinging the next, discussing "annie" (anorexia), crushes and the like in brittle, staccato dialogue... and played by ten-year old girls. Unfortunately while one of the two main characters spoke well and convincingly and you could hear every word she said, the other was hard to decipher, having that high, apparently clear but actually rather muffled voice that many children have, and much of her dialogue got lost.

There were three girls and three adult actors -- a female teacher, a male governor ("Are you a paedophile?" one girl asked him brightly) and an older brother. The girls' dialogue and their deep-seated unhappiness, which breaks out in pashes and rivalries and jealousies and conspiracies and petty blackmail, was caught accurately. Part of the "plot" revolves around who's playing who in the school production of The Crucible, which of course the girls don't understand. The adults were much less convincing, especially the teacher. Perhaps we were supposed to see them as the girls saw them, but if that were the case the scenes with the teacher alone on the phone to the headmistress simply didn't work.

The set a pair of bunk beds and not much else. Tuck boxes and trunks (one of which is dropped out of a window). Grey school uniforms. Constant noises off: shouts, gossip, laughter, running, the whole place never quiet (and after dark the waving of torches in the corridors).

I'd say the author (E V Crowe) is one to watch.

Afterwards S said her boarding school was never like that and I was inclined to agree: neither was mine. A, being American, said she thought boarding schools barbaric. S and I defended them, saying we'd been happy at ours and well-educated. But afterwards I thought that what sticks in my mind is secondary school: prep school was a different matter and I remember ten year old boys being almost as beastly to some people (including me) as those ten year old girls.

TRIBES

3/11/10, Royal Court

A play by Nina Raine about deafness, about belonging (to a family, the deaf community or some other "tribe"), about communication and language. Featuring a deaf actor, Jacob Casselden, as the third child in an otherwise noisy, opinionated, argumentative and not wholly-functional hearing family of academics, would-be academics and musicians. It's a measure of her skill that I thought his girlfriend, the hearing child of a deaf family who is herself going deaf, was also played by a deaf actress, Michelle Terry; except that Terry (we saw her in England People Very Nice and London Assurance at the National) isn't deaf, she just gets the slightly false emphases, the dodgy timing of the deaf and hard of hearing bang on.

The early part of the play neatly established the family milieu. Especially the problems of adult children returning home (the rows about nicked socks and smoking in the greenhouse). The characters were neatly sketched in: dominating Dad (Stanley Townsend), full of information and himself, joking, bullying, relishing his reputation for blunt speaking; peace-making Mum (Kika Markham), for ever interceding and mediating. We see them first at table, noisily (that word again) arguing, with the deaf child the oddly silent one.

His sense of exclusion from his talkative family fuels his enthusiasm for belonging to another tribe, that of the deaf. Ironically his girlfriend, as the play progresses, rebels against her position as a member of another (small) tribe, that of the deaf activist.

There is (from memory, three weeks later) more cleverly-written dialogue about tribes and their membership, but I've forgotten it.

There were some good things in this, but it was spoilt by being overly schematic and melodramatised. The son home from university and nominally working on a masters was convincing until he turned out to be a drug addict and reformed stutterer and no longer plausible. The sister (a tyro opera-singer played by Phoebe Waller-Bridge, who we saw at the Soho in Roaring Trade) was underwritten.

Here are some reviews:

http://www.royalcourttheatre.com/whats-on/tribes

SUCKER PUNCH

26/07/10, Royal Court

The Royal Court was transformed into a boxing arena with the ring in the centre of the stalls and seats constructed onstage to mirror those in the circle and rear stalls.

Two young black kids pitch up at a white-run gym in South London c 1980, at the time of the Brixton riots. One shows promise and is coached to a UK and European championship, abandoning his friend in a fight with police along the way for fear of destroying his career. The other skulks off to America where he too becomes a boxer. They meet; the American, mentally tougher and meaner, wins resoundingly.

In a sub-plot the Londoner falls for the white gym owner's daughter, to her father's fury, and then chooses the father and fame rather than the girl.

Nothing especially remarkable about the plotting or the characters, several of whom are from stock, especially the black American trainer (sharp suit, sharp beard, sharp talk), and the white gym owner (hopeless with money, lives for boxing, always seeing his greatest hopes poached by cleverer promoters, at heart racist).

But effectively done with few false notes: a play as much about racism as boxing, but also about the 80s (a disastrous decade of rioting and recession and social conflict and terrible fashions), about Britain and the US and about the price people pay for success.

Roy Williams wrote it. Good performances by Daniel Kaluuya as the promising boxer, Nigel Lindsay as the trainer and Anthony Welsh as the other kid.

The fights were mimed, the knockout blows done with a lighting flash in slow motion. There were occasional soliloquys when the lights dimmed and our hero alone was illuminated in the ring, speaking to us.

As often with plays by black authors and/or with a largely black cast there was a strong black contingent in the audience, much noisier, more vocal, more engaged, laughing raucously at the jokes, than the usual theatre clientele of uptight middle class whites.

POSH

5/5/10, Royal Court

What Alan Bennett's History Boys might have become if they'd gone to Eton, Harrow and Winchester instead of a Yorkshire grammar school. A thinly-disguised portrait of the Bullingdon Club timed to coincide with the General Election.

Top notch ensemble performances, clever direction by Lyndsey Turner (the blocking alone a triumph, what with ten or more actors on the tiny Court stage, much of the time sitting around a dining table), one or two good jokes... but awful people, made utterly obnoxious by the sense of entitlement that comes with wealth (in the case of the Greek Dimitri) or a title or a sentimental attachment to Things as They Were. And that actually made it rather boring to watch.

This was a club in which talk of politics was supposedly banned but which was political to its core, if total disregard for the interests and feelings of others constitutes a political position. They meet to get "chateaued" in some country pub, play silly games, argue, boast (they're barely out of adolescence) and then it all turns nasty when one of them insists on kissing the landlord's daughter against her will, her father protests at what they've done to his pub (trashed it) and to his daughter and a minor sexual assault turns into a serious physical assault which leaves him unconscious.

There's then an unconvincing coda in which a suave MP gets the one who's agreed to take/been lumbered with the rap (he did throw the first punch, played by Leo Bill) positioned for a career in politics. The actor playing the young man was a dead ringer for Tim Gardam.

There were some nice touches in the script (by Laura Wade). At one point they lament the decline of the country house -- mummy and daddy forced into two rooms by the beastly National Trust, thousands of oikish visitors trampling the carpets -- and the gay one goes into a riff about how dreadful it is and one of them suddenly twigs from the way he talks that he must actually go to these places as a paying visitor. The one who eventually throws the punch has a nice turn when he reads out a letter he's found in the chairman's bag, a letter which begins ("Why I want to work for Deutsche Bank"): this to a roomful of people who insist they don't apply for jobs, the jobs come to them. And the one who throws the punch also closes the first act with a spectacular spittle-flecked rant about privilege and entitlement and the little people and how sick he is of poor people which was hard to follow but had a certain bravura quality.

There were a few good jokes, but an alarming number of people in the (very posh) audience seemed to be laughing like drains with rather than at the club's antics.

Clever production included occasional a capella songs to break the action up and mark the passage of time. But it was one of those plays where seeing it didn't really add much to what you got from reading the reviews. The experience of watching it gave little pleasure; and frankly it was hard to care tuppence about these horrible people and the way the related to one another.

DISCONNECT

10/3/10, Royal Court (Theatre Upstairs)

1 hr 20 mins straight through. A call centre in Chennai, where young Indians called Roshan, Vidya and Giri pretend to be Americans (called Ross, Vicky and Gary) hounding credit card debtors in Illinois to pay up.

The heat is on in the windowless office where a new supervisor (Paul Bhattacharjee, looking even more hangdog than usual) has been sent by a nervous young manager after being relieved of command in New York because his staff rebelled.

The contract is up for renewal, the pressure is on. But the new man is old school: a stickler for rules and regulations, a fashion victim in striped shirt and tie ("my grandfather used to wear that stuff," says one of the trendily T-shirted youngsters), a speaker of very precise but heavily Indian-accented English.

His staff dream of America, drink coffee, adopt American accents, hold American-themed parties (cowboys. Snow White in a ghastly white mask for Vidya-Vicky, who wishes she were paler-skinned). Their exposure to the downside of the American consumerist dream doesn't seem to have shattered their illusions.

Ross, the most Americanised of the three (Nikesh Patel, fresh out of the Guidlhall School, with flawless American accent), is supporting his brother who's about to depart for college in the promised land, Chicago. He falls for one of the marks, fiddles the books for her to write off a debt of $23,000, then discovers she's dropped him. His constant calls provoke a suit for harrassment. He's fired, goes off the rails, can't bear to leave, hides out in the building. The Bhattarchajee character and his boss (Hasina Haque beautiful but disappointing as a nervous young executive) are fired. Giri-Gary (Neet Mohan, fresh out of the Central School) gets a new job. Only Vidya-Vicky (Ayesha Dharker, quite well-known in India apparently) is left.

All the performances, with the exception of Hasina Haque (who like Neet Mohan was in England People Very Nice at the National), were spot on. The set was by John Napier (A knows him) who'd created a three-sided windowless box papered with credit card bills stamped "overdue", with a door in each wall, on one of which hung a whiteboard tallying up what each collector had raised that day. There were three desks for the workers and one behind for the boss, which moved around between scenes so we saw the set-up from different angles. The collectors had headsets and keyboards (though screens were dispensed with) and spent much of the time on the phone, their conversations with their marks cleverly interwoven as they faced straight out at the audience.

I was convinced by a picture if a mind-numbingly repetitive job in which nonetheless there is considerable scope for applied psychology, and of young Indians in a dependent, second-class relationship with the West. There is only one window on their floor which looks out on a giant rubbish dump, which they can't really see anyway because the time difference means it's always night when they're at work. The Bhattacharjee character laments the fact that he never sees his wife, who works during the day: "Sometimes we leave post-it notes on the bedpost".

Written by Anupama Chandrasekhar, who is based in Chennai. Directed by Indhu Rubasingham, whose memorable Ramayana we saw years ago at the National.

OFF THE ENDZ

1/3/10, Royal Court

1hr 50 min, no interval. By Bola Agbaje, whose Detaining Justice S and A saw at the Tricycle last year and liked very much. A said this was more uneven in the writing, but it had an energy and drive that carried it along nicely and some good performances.

The Endz is some ghastly housing estate. David was brought up there. He comes out of prison and pitches up in the flat of his old friends Sharon and Kojo, now an item and expecting their first child. They want out and are planning to buy a house. But their middle-class lifestyle turns out to be built on a mountain of credit card debt: they can't pay their bills.

David is feckless, irresponsible, sexist, a wastrel, lazy, a perpetual adolescent who thinks the world owes him a living and when it won't give him one plays the race card (with dubious success since everyone we see, including officialdom as represented by the woman in the Job Centre, is black).

Sharon is sensible, straight-talking, a nurse -- but an incorrigible spendthrift.

Kojo is weak, unwilling to diss either his wife or his old friend, unable to bring himself to confront his wife about her spending or tackle their huge debts, even when he loses his office job when the company goes into administration thanks to the recession (he doesn't tell her). He tamely goes along with David's plans to make a living as a "small businessman" (drug dealer) on the estate -- and then is shot in a case of mistaken identity by the ten year olds who now control the neighbourhood and whom David refuses to take seriously.

The first half had tremendous energy, and the large black contingent in the audience loved the scenes in which David berates the young receptionist at Kojo's office, and the middle-aged Job Centre lady who gives him sound advice about the need to get a job. There was raucous laughter at every exchange (and a lot of crisp packet rustling from the row behind us which drove the ladies wild, though for once it didn't bother me too much).

Energy flagged in the scene outside a police station when David summons Kojo to give him a lift home (not realising Kojo doesn't have his car with him) and the two sit on the front of the stage while David outlines his plans to go into business.

At the end Kojo and Sharon appear reconciled, having fallen out, both to one another and to the need to start again; David is left alone ranting and shouting centre stage with less and less conviction.

Nice set: the odd desk or hospital bed wheeled on diagonally across the stage as required, a basket ball hoop to signify the open spaces of the Endz; a sofa slid forward from behind the back wall, initially with its back to the audience and facing a huge plasma screen and Sky Plus box which descend from above, later facing the audience with the swish kitchen fitments of Sharon and Kojo's flat slid on from the wings.

ENRON

15/10/09, Royal Court

Written by Penelope
Enron is now a byword for fraud. A giant corporate puzzle built on flimsy foundations which came apart at the seams. Some of the details are complicated and, even now, defy belief. Before I say what I thought of this play, I feel I should declare an interest. As a journalist working in the US in 2001, I covered the Enron saga, meeting people who'd lost all their savings, visiting the company's HQ in Houston and attending the congressional hearings which attempted to bring those at the top of the empire to account.

Lucy Prebble's play based on this sorry tale blends fact and fiction, farce, musical and tragedy into one production. And it works. Sam West is outstanding as Enron's CEO, Jeffrey Skilling. He is, by turn, insipid, creepy, imperious, venal and pathetic. He's on stage almost the whole evening so it's a role which demands stamina in addition to great acting. One of my favourite scenes was when he and Tom Goodman-Hill (who plays the CFO, Andy Fastow) hold a "meeting" in an imaginary gym on make-believe exercise bicycles. The audience was roaring with laughter.

Fastow and Skilling were the two executives who dreamt up some of the worst aspects of the Enron fraud - a company with high share prices built on nothing. Explaining mark to market accounting and shadow companies isn't an easy prospect but Lucy Prebble's script achieves this with aplomb. And this play resonates well in the current recession.

It's directed by Rupert Goold and is fast moving, entertaining and bold. The scenery and lighting (designed by Anthony Ward and Mark Henderson respectively) are imaginative and stark. There are songs, dances and moments of disbelief at the absurdity of the protagonists' behaviour. Goold is a director full of ideas. There were a couple of moments when one or two of them might have been edited out, as I was in danger of being overwhelmed. But it seems unfair to criticise anyone for having too many ideas! Also deserving a mention are Tim Piggott Smith as the wilfully blind company Chairman, Ken Lay (accompanied by three blind mice) and Amanda Drew as Claudia Roe who also worked for Enron.

For me, there was one glaringly awful moment in the evening which was a crass "reconstruction" of September 11th 2001, complete with projections of planes and tiny pieces of paper falling from the sky. I didn't feel this was necessary and it made me feel uncomfortable to use these iconic historical moments for entertainment. But that squeamishness aside, I loved it and the play thoroughly deserves its imminent West End transfer.

ENRON

12/10/09, Royal Court

We thought it was absolutely cracking, stuffed full of invention and first-rate performances. Directed by Rupert Goold: compare his Turandot which was also full of ideas and invention, but on that occasion they were often baffling or at odds with the music and the direction of the drama. Not here.

There were songs, dance routines, fantastic lighting, "raptors" in the basement (the fancy accounting devices and off balance sheet vehicles designed to cook the Enron books, which eventually came back to devour their creators), swift sketches of members of Congress, analysts, bankers and others blinded to Enron's failures by stupidity, greed, arrogance or a desire not to seem out of step with the prevailing consensus... oh, and Lehman Brothers sharing a single overcoat.

Sam West played Jeffrey Skilling, the CEO, developing from backroom geek to master of the universe to desperation and later paranoia as it all comes crashing down. Towards the end his lawyer tells him the principal accusation against Enron is that it "took advantage" of others (including the state of California, whose power supplies it deliberately disrupted to drive up the price). "Taking an advantage is what we do in business," Skilling retorts. Except of course that it isn't: making an honest profit by providing goods or services is one thing; unfairly exploiting legal loopholes and other people's gullibility while producing dishonest accounts is quite another.

I suspect the principal female character was an invention, there to contrast the Skilling approach to business with something more traditional (as well as to create a major role for a woman... except that she disappears two-thirds of the way through, when she's fired). She wants to build power stations in India, a market she thinks has huge potential, and she is of course right. But building power stations takes years, requires huge amounts of capital and provokes strikes and demonstrations and political problems; Skilling's approach to business makes everyone at Enron instantly rich overnight.

The parallels with the banking bubble are eerie. This is a company which started as a conventional business (oil and power generation) and grew massively and unsustainably by turning itself into a trading entity, many of whose products were incomprehensible to anyone but insiders. This was a play about the way businesses can lose touch with the underlying realities as clever people think up ever cleverer wheezes to make money. In the end Enron was little more than a Ponzi fraud.

Tim Piggott-Smith played the chairman, Ken Lay, as a good ole Texan boy. But A, who is American, said the accents for the most part were excruciating.

Lucy Prebble, who wrote it, is only 26: a fact which has inevitably excited much remark. We await her next with huge anticipation.

Penelope went to see it a few days later. I agree with almost everything she says.

JERUSALEM

15/7/09, Royal Court

New Jez Butterworth play with Mark Rylance. Missed it: was in Bulgaria. D said it was a cracker. The reviews (which I read on the plane back) agreed.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/jul/16/jerusalem-review

http://entertainment.timesonline.co.uk/tol/arts_and_entertainment/stage/theatre/article6715697.ece

http://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/reviews/article-1200217/Thank-God-Wild-West--Wiltshire.html

AUNT DAN & LEMON

22/6/09, Royal Court

Missed it. Had to work. D said it was very disappointing. Not unlike the previous Wallace Shawn at this address (Grasses of a Thousand Colours, 20/5/09). And despite having the estimable Jane Horrocks in it. Horribly self-indulgent and rather smug, apparently. So no more Shawn for us, it seems.

GRASSES OF A THOUSAND COLOURS

20/5/09, Royal Court (Upstairs)

Missed it: had to work. D went and left at the second interval.