RUINED

21/4/10, Almeida

3 hours (?). Multi-award-winning American play by Louise Nottage, a reversioning of Mother Courage set in the modern Congo with the focus on the ghastly treatment of women: raped, abused, mutilated, abandoned, their children murdered etc etc.

The set by Robert Jones (who also designed the David Tennant Hamlet and Greta Garbo Came to Donegal) was fabulous: a wonderfully detailed tin shack on the revolve. This was Mama Nadi's whorehouse, where she entertained rebels and government soldiers indiscriminately and took everyone's money.

The rebel leader was a staring-eyed ranter; the commander of the government troops an equally terrifying man first seen in a truly hideous bright yellow shell suit with white T-shirt and sunglasses. Both were clearly psychopaths.

Sophie (Pippa Bennett-Warner) was a young girl who'd been "ruined" -- horribly mutilated, to the point where sex was impossible and she was in constant pain, by having a bayonet thrust into her. Salima (Michelle Asante) was a woman who'd been raped and held captive in the bush for five months after her baby's head was crushed beneath a rebel's boot, and after escaping and returning home had been thrown out by her family for dishonouring them. In one of the less-plausible subplots her husband, called Fortune, now a soldier comes looking for her but she refuses to see him even though he spends all night outside the shack.

Lucian Msamati (a marvellous actor we've seen in Death and the King's Horseman at the NT, The Overwhelming about the Rwandan genocide at West Yorkshire Playhouse and Ubu Roi at the Lyric Hammersmith and who was the male lead in the TV version of The No 1 Ladies' Detective Agency) played the salesman who brings the girls to apparently hard-as-nails Mama Nadi (Jenny Jules) in the first place and courts her unsuccessfully... until the final scene in which she confesses that she too is "ruined" and he nonetheless embraces her. In one sense it was a marvellous theatrical moment: the house was utterly silent. But it was also a sentimental cop-out: a bleak play about a bleak subject, man's inhumanity to man, especially woman, and the utter inhumanity of war, should have ended bleakly as Mother Courage does and as The Overwhelming did. Such American sentimentality compromised what was otherwise an outstanding piece about an often-forgotten human disaster.

Directed by Indha Rubasingham.

MEASURE FOR MEASURE

17/2/10, Almeida

Missed it: had to work. Anna Maxwell Martin. Everyone said it was a cracker.

WHEN THE RAIN STOPS FALLING

2/7/09, Almeida

Missed the beginning, which meant I didn't realise the last scene was a kind of repeat of the first. The 1950s father was a paedophile; when his wife discovered the awful truth he went to Australia and sent postcards to his son, who never learnt the truth from his mother (with whom he had a poisoned relationship in adulthood). So he went to Australia and met a girl whose brother had been abducted and murdered on the beach. And they fell in love and went to Ayers Rock and then he died in a car crash. And she grew up to marry a very decent cove, and we saw them in middle age, she suffering Alzheimer's, he desperate because he knew she didn't really love him, and their son had gone off who knew where. And the son was is in the final scene as the father who was visited by his son (by whom? we never discover), who at last broke the cycle of misery and drought by a reconciliation with his father, and at last it began to rain.

And there was a fish fell out of the sky.

Writing this weeks later, D and A and I struggled to reconstruct all that. Scenes from all four periods/generations were interwoven, played out on the same set, sometimes with characters from different periods overlapping, eating soup, echoing dialogue. It was written by Andrew Bovell, who also wrote the screenplays for Lantana and Strictly Ballroom.

It was mesmerising. It shouldn't have worked but it did. I thought up until the very last scene that it was going to leave us with a very bleak message indeed about the sins of the fathers; but it didn't, and the ending, which might have seemed force, was in fact tremendously moving. Tears welled up.

Reviews here:

http://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/theatre-dance/reviews/when-the-rain-stops-falling-almeida-theatre-london-1691614.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2009/may/22/theatre-review-when-the-rain-stops-falling

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/culturecritics/charlesspencer/5386565/When-the-Rain-Stops-Falling-at-the-Almeida-Theatre---review.html

PARLOUR SONG

10/04/09, Almeida

1hr 40mins approx, no interval. A last minute booking for Good Friday. Toby Jones in Jez Butterworth's latest, with Andrew Lincoln and Amanda Drew. Well reviewed.

We liked it. Butterworth owes a lot to Pinter (though, as S said, he is kinder to his characters). There's the same air of unspoken menace; the same exchanges between characters that never quite connect; the same exaggerated fascination with the mannerisms of ordinary speech.

Ned is a demolition expert living in a new housing estate with a view of the motorway. Dale, with his shorts, gold chain and unbuttoned check shirt, is his neighbour, who made his money from a chain of carwashes employing 40 Kosovans. Joy is Ned's sexually frustrated wife.

It was full of nice ideas. Ned and wife play "sexy Scrabble" ("If you can spell it you can have it... I once scored 45 for 'blow-job' on a triple word score"). Ned is a hoarder whose things keep disappearing, despite his best endeavours: he's put a padlock on the garden shed but someone's chiselled it off, cutting themselves in the process... his wife's stuff is still there but the lawnmower's gone. He tells this to his wife who has a plaster on her finger because she claims she cut herself slicing six dozen lemons for lemonade.

Ned seems to know his troubles, imagined or real, reflect the fact that his marriage is in trouble, but seems unable to discuss it with Joy. His responses are indirect. He tries to get fit (cue very funny mime with barbells and weights). He listens to a tape of advice on sexual technique (cue another very funny mime trying to follow the instructions for oral sex). Jones is a brilliant clown and carries this off brilliantly, but they seem to belong to another play, not the slightly surreal, skewed world reflected in most of the dialogue.

Amanda Drew powerfully sexy as the wife, who seduces an uncertain Dale; Andrew Lincoln roguishly engaging as the neighbour, who narrates.

The set a flat translucent back wall, onto which images are projected (note: every play we've seen lately seems to come with video projections; very good they are too and, as A said afterwards, cheap). The wall revolves to reveal two segments behind. Just before each revolve the set behind the wall lights up to show a bed or a sofa.

At the end Ned appears to smother Joy in bed behind the wall (though there seemed to be more than one ending, with Joy appearing on stage immediately after her "murder", leaving me rather muddled as to how much of this was dream/nightmare/fantasy and how much "real").

Afterwards in the bar, where we repaired to discuss tickets for the Edinburgh Festival, there was a Pinteresque moment of confusion. D thought the man at the next table was an actor, George Layton, who used to be in Doctor in the House. Toby Jones was talking to him. As we were leaving Layton recognised me. We established who I was. Then he introduced himself. I left, but behind me A was telling Toby Jones how much she'd enjoyed the show. D asked Jones if the man was Layton. Jones said "No". But it was: I've checked his website.