BLASTED

11/11/10, Lyric Hammersmith

1 hr 45 mins. No interval (there was one in the original production at the Royal Court in 1995, someone said, but the audience walked out in droves; this way they lock you in for the duration).

The notorious Sarah Kane shocker, and we've seen it at last. And frankly, none of us much enjoyed it. It owes a big debt to King Lear, to Beckett, to schlock-horror splatter movies and to reports of the war in Bosnia, but lacks the profundity and universal resonance of the first two, or the visceral impact of the third, and imports the fourth unconvincingly to Leeds.

The chief difficulty is that it's impossible to empathise with the characters, who seem drawn from stock and equipped with a repertoire of tics and verbal routines that don't quite add up. Beckettian bafflement and boredom was the result.

Some of the shock moments were pretty shocking. A soldier eats the eyes of a man he's just raped. A dead baby is eaten (truly revolting, that). But we wanted it to end not so much because it was shocking but because the violence made us uncomfortable without justification. And perhaps it's a reminder that the most powerful things are sometimes left unspoken or merely hinted at.

The scene is a hotel room. There are the sounds of civil unrest outside but the hotel seems to function normally, with room service and hot and cold running water. It's quite plush, though one of the first lines is "I've shat in better places than this".

There are just three characters. A middle-aged, alcoholic journalist (Danny Webb) apparently dying of lung cancer, a noisy boor who wears a gun in a shoulder hoslter. A girl (Lydia Wilson, whom we saw in Pains of Youth) of indeterminate age (16? 18? 21?) with whom he seems to have had a (presumably underage) sexual relationship at some point in the past. And a soldier (Aidan Kelly), who bursts in half-way through with a gun, abuses, rapes and mutilates the journalist (the girl having escaped through the bathroom window, apparently) and then lies dead during the last few scenes, though how he died we're not told and we don't see.

The characters have rudimentary backstories. The journalist has a wife and child. The girl has a mother and a younger brother with learning difficulties and, implausibly given the civil war outside and her apparent lack of education, she is hoping to get a job as PA in an advertising agency. The journalist scoffs at this, brtually, as he does virtually everything. We know he's a journaslist because at one point he phones through his story to a copytaker. It's about some tragic death abroad and he has presumably been to see the family, but the story he phones over is the kind of finished piece, including quotes from a Foreign office spokesman, that only a sub in the newsroom would produce, not a reporter on the road. The soldier too has a backstory: a girlfriend or wife who was brutally assaulted and killed. We are given the details though curiously I have forgotten them.

The dialogue, which is interspersed with long periods of silent action, is brutal, allusive and sometimes repetitive. The girls says she loves the journalist though what she means by that, and what we're meant to believe she means, is unclear. At the start he takes all his clothes off, grabs his willy and sasys "Suck on this". She refuses (too disgusted?) though later she does give him a blow-job. In bed overnight it seems he rapes her because she complains next morning of pain, struggles to get dressed and says she can't piss or shit; on the other hand, when they woke uop she was still wearing her bra and knickers. Was the assault imagined? Or does the actress not do nudity?

Halfway through there isd a massive explosion which destroys the hotel room leaving only a dark landscape of beams and struts, and the hotel bed. (Maybe it's this that kills the soldier??).

Towards the end the journalist, blinded, helpless and starving, is visited by the girl (why?) carrying a crying baby she's found. The baby dies and she buries it under the floorboards. At the end he digs the corpse up and starts to eat it, then climbs into the hole so that all that we can see of him is his head. It's immediately beneath a hole in the roof through which rain comes down to soak him. The girl returns (why had she gone? why does she come back?) and sharesd a morsel of food with him. By this stage the lights have gone down, leaving only a spotlight on the journalist's head. He says "Thank you". Blackout.

Redemption of sorts, I suppose, in an otherwise profoundly nihilistic play, though one that nags away at you demanding explanation and elucidation, which may be the mark of an effective piece of theatre.

A THOUSAND STARS EXPLODE IN THE SKY

27/5/10, Lyric, Hammersmith

A very curious play, full of odd moments, monologues, loose ends and things that didn't wholly make sense. It's nearing the end of the world. There is a precise time for an asteroid to hit earth; society is running down, people are downing tools to return to their homes. The focus is on a dysfunctional family of brothers from a Yorkshire farm and their mother. One brother is dying of cancer and wants them all to gather before he dies and the world ends. There is a moving scene early on in which his mother bathes him in a tin bath. There is a final scene in which all the surviving participants (the cancer-stricken brother has died by now) gather on a hillside, all standing to face the audience, and await the end.

But there were some very peculiar bits. The oldest brother looked old enough to be the youngest's grandfather, and for a long while it wasn't clear that they were siblings since the younger referred to the older as "Uncle Jake". (The difference in age was explained away in a later scene, not altogether convincingly.) Different scenes and characters seemed to belong to different plays. This may have had something to do with the fact that the play was a collaboration between three different writers: David Eldridge (who adapted Festen for the stage), Robert Holman and Simon Stephens (whose monologue-driven Punk Rock and Pornography we have recently seen). Perhaps they all threw into the pot whatever they happened to be working on at the time and stirred, waiting to see what emerged.

Some performances stronger than others: Ann Mitchell (we saw her with Simon Callow years ago in a play about a butcher at Southwark Playhouse: he stripped naked in that so she's used to handling middle aged male nudity. Callow was in the audience the night we went) was impressive as the mother. Others had difficulty getting the right tone with the sometimes naturalistic, sometimes poetic language.

THE DARK SIDE OF BUFFOON

15/4/10, Lyric Hammersmith

1 hr 15 mins. Two (real-life) brothers called Marquez playing all the parts in a succession of double acts based around the idea of an Italian travelling circus: an evil circus-owner and his dumb brother; a gruff father and his dumb son (and the dumb son's brother, now a puppet kept in a carpet bag); a pair of "birdmen", one of whom climbs into a suitcase while the two of them whistle vigorously; a pair of unfunny clowns. Played in the Lyric's studio space with the audience seated on two sides looking diagonally across the playing area.

Not sure if the evening as a whole was meant to be funny, but it largely wasn't. It was supposed to blend slapstick and melodrama and circus and murder and revenge and repetitive variety routines and so on. Chiefly notable for the incredible quick costume changes, often behind a curtain which swished vigorously backwards and forwards. But pretending to be unfunny for comic effect and parodying the tawdry pointlessness of many circus acts only works if you are yourself funny and talented: otherwise it's tawdry and pointless. Some of it was childish but the language and some of the blacker moments clearly weren't suitable for children. The gruff father, who doubled as narrator, was called "Papa Roni", which gives you some idea.

The odd nice touch: the evil circus-owner was murdered at the end with his brother by the gruff father, among whose props was a pair of red shoes that had belonged to his son's dead mother... the red shoes ended up in the dead men's mouths. (The only problem: the shoes were attached out of sight to the bottom of a table, and were meant to be snatched up and deployed during a blackout, but one of them kept falling out of its clips as the table was used in other scenes, so the surprise was lost.)

Originated at the Belgrade in Coventry where it got deservedly poor reviews. Happily it only cost us a fiver on one of the Lyric's Friends Nights.

THREE SISTERS

26/1/10, Lyric Hammersmith

Missed it. Had to work.

Version of the Chekhov classic by a company called Filter. S very keen to go, but said in the event it wasn't as good as their Twelfth Night. D said first half a bit tricksy with microphones and modern dress and deliberate anachronisms; second half played much straighter and much more affecting. Cast included Romola Garai.

WUTHERING HEIGHTS

15/5/09, Lyric Hammersmith

2 hrs 20 mins. The "Bollywood version" by Tamasha. Disappointing though not actively embarrassing.

The billing was misleading: there were few songs, little dance and no wet sari scene. The best bit of music was a delightful parody of the Ascot Races scene in My Fair Lady, set at the camel racing.

The action was transplanted to 19th century Rajasthan, before the Brits got there: it seemed to work well, and most of the novel seemed to be present and correct. What Emily Bronte would have made of it heaven knows.

THE OVERCOAT

24/3/09, Lyric Hammersmith.

1hr 40mins, no interval. Not exactly an adaptation of, more a variation on the Gogol short story of the same name by a company called Gecko. I'd assumed they were Eastern European (everything about them, subject matter, style, appearance suggested as much) but they turn out to be British, albeit founded by and starring an Israeli, Amit Lahav, and with members from across Europe; they have a residency at the New Wolsey Theatre in Ipswich. Parts of the show come with words, often grotesquely amplified, in a variety of languages (Italian, French, Cantonese): for me the only jarring element in this was the female lead, a bird-like little beauty called Natalia. She was played almost completely silently by an English actress, Natalie Ayton; but when she did speak ("Oh sorry!") she did so in bell-like English tones... and the mittel-European spell was briefly broken.

What did mime companies do before amplification? And modern lighting? This was a fine cast who worked hard, had talent and trained with the best, including Le Coq and Lindsay Kemp. But much of the show's impact derived from the son et lumiere.

In the original story, a lowly clerk saves up, buys himself a smart overcoat, briefly enjoys enhanced status as a result, but then is destroyed when the coat is stolen. In this version a man (Lahav) dreams of marrying the girl at work, some ghastly office where the prize for employee of the month is apparently a smart camel overcoat with opulent fur collar, seen hanging to start with at one side of the proscenium. At one stage it seems he's got both the girl and the coat, but alas, it's a dream. In reality the coat has gone to another guy and our hero is summoned to see the boss (a godlike figure high on a ledge at the side of the stage) who casts him out, stripping him of the coat in the process.

He dies naked and alone in the little room he shares with a two-bar electric fire, a portrait of his parents (cast members gazing through a frame) and a rapacious Spanish landlady who has earlier seduced him under the influence of flamenco music on the Roberts radio hanging on the end of the bed.

These chaps know their stuff. The cast move brilliantly as a crowd, scuttling about the set in a body, yet each one an individual. They battle the wind, grouping and regrouping. At one point the hero is beseiged by birds in the gale: sheets of white paper, bunched and fluttered by the rest of the cast. The hero's room is assembled from half a dozen props: a bed (which at one point swallows him up), the fire, a door, a picture frame, all held in place by the cast. The "office" is a place of school desks each equipped with coloured lamps, red, green and blue-white, with a lamp-cum-hatstand, at which the cast perform mindlessly repetitive tasks, scuttling with documents from one desk to another or to grilles that open in the back wall (Natalia's job is to stamp the documents with rubber stamps; our hero's is to trim them with a guillotine) while the boss hectors them through a loudspeaker in a parody of French.

We loved the set: a black back wall with doors and shutters that opened and shut: design by Ti Green, who presumably also commissioned the early 20th century costumes in which overcoats of various lengths and degrees of tackiness inevitably featured. And a special mention for the lighting by James Farncombe and the music by percussionist Dave Price, who also performs in the cast. Musical high points included a tune tapped out on a tiny xylophone with metal thimbles on his finger tips from high up at the side of the proscenium.

SPRING AWAKENING

2/2/09, Lyric Hammersmith.

2hrs 20 mins. Final preview of a musical based on the notorious Franz Wedekind play, which comes floating on clouds of hype having reputedly taken Broadway by storm, but has been entirely recast for the UK

For the first half of the first half it felt like a superior school play. Almost all the cast were fresh out of drama school and looked about 16, the age they were playing. They were earnest, frightfully well-spoken (they’re meant to be – these are middle class Viennese) and rather callow. The musical interludes felt forced. It stayed on the right side of embarrassing, but only just. I kept wanting to see how an authentically American cast would have tackled it. They might have come across less as “painfully self-conscious” and more as “engagingly naïve”.

The exceptions to the youthful casting were Sian Thomas (last seen going over the top in Tennessee Williams at the Arcola) and Richard Cordery (last seen as the Duke of York and sundry other elderly aristocrats in the RSC Histories), who played all the adult parts – effectively highlighting the divide between adolescence and the adult world in the process. He was rather good as a kind of all-purpose male authority figure, except when called upon to sing and dance briefly, when he seemed to be having far too much fun and slipped completely out of character. She had difficulty distinguishing her collection of parents and teachers and middle-aged matrons sufficiently, and hammed one or two of them up excessively.

I’ve never seen the Wedekind original. A, who has (her son played the hero’s suicidal best friend in a student production last year), says this version is pretty faithful. From the outset it’s clear it’s about sex, specifically adolescent sex – frustration, ignorance, confusion and the rest. There’s a scene in which one of the boys masturbates in the bathroom, while dad thumps on the door. But the show really throws its first curve ball with a song about parental sexual abuse, at which point it’s clear this might be more interesting (and more serious) than you first think. Shortly afterwards there’s a scene in which our heroine urges out hero to beat her with a switch: he does, with just a bit too much enthusiasm.

The first half closes with them making love rather touchingly and in part two it all goes downhill. She falls pregnant, he’s sent to a reform school, his best friend commits suicide, and she dies at the hands of an abortionist. You can see why they banned it in 1899. If nothing else, it’s a splendid advertisement for decent sex education.

The songs were inoffensive but unmemorable (except for one, of which I can only remember the refrain, “I’m fucked!”). They were accompanied by a four-piece band – drums, guitar, bass, piano – at the back of the playing area, in keeping with the artfully contrived artlessness of the staging. Some of the audience were in bleachers on either side of the stage, with the cast interspersed among them (including four chorus members in modern dress). Behind the bleachers were climbing ladders reminiscent of a school gym. The boys were literally buttoned up in grey suits and knockerbockers; the girls were in smocks. They all wore head mics, but still seized hand mics for some (but not all) of the songs, which I thought unnecessary and inexplicably irritating. The songs themselves made no concession to period but jarred less than I feared.

At the back was a brick wall, hung with portraits of bewhiskered patriarchs and other visual bric-a-brac. There was what looked like a headless rag doll in a glass case, and a picture of two adolescent girls. From time to time individual items on the wall were spotlit: I couldn’t see the relevance. At one point, en route to the reformatory, our hero climbs a ladder to sit in a chair hanging from the wall; during the next song he travels along the wall to the far side of the stage, ending up in the reform school uniform.

The clever lighting included electric blue and red and orange fairy lights, intermittently illuminated, and much of the time a cold bright light provided by institutional-looking lamps on the ceiling.

Choreography was by Bill T Jones, a renowned US practitioner, who uses hands and arms especially well.

A disappointment: the suicidal best friend, Moritz, with spectacular hair (all over the place to begin with, sticking straight up as he nears his doom), never made it quite clear if he was rebel or victim (or just plain stupid).

A decent effort. I’d say six out of ten. But I never felt involved or moved.

(The pictures are from the Broadway production.)

OTHELLO

15/11/08. Lyric Hammersmith. Matinee
1hr 50 mins, no interval (including substantial bits of dance/movement/mime)
Frantic Assembly

A stripped-down version set in a pub (“The Cyprus”) with pool table in the middle of the stage, the characters members of a gang and their girls. Othello established in dumb show at the start winning “respect” and leadership, as well as Desdemona (a splendidly suggestive moment as she chalked the end of his black pool cue, held out in front of his crotch, blowing the excess dust from the end).
A fine ritualised dance/fight with pool cues and baseball bats and Stanley knives instead of swords. Yorkshire accents (except for O, the outsider, who spoke London black patois), trainers, hoodies and shell suits.
Pounding music and a constant FX track (distant street sounds mainly) which I noticed cease only once, when O has murdered D and total silence falls, on stage and off (a lot of teenagers in, but this production held them).
The translation to a modern gangland setting worked OK. Soldiers are just members of government-sanctioned gangs; both are obsessed with hierarchy, status, “place”, “reputation”. Cassio in this reading becomes a more plausible and more interesting figure than I remember. Rodrigo’s assault on him (in the pub car park) makes better sense.
There were other pluses. Desdemona and Emilia in the ladies, sharing a spliff and discussing “these men”. The pub walls, which separated to reveal the car park from time to time, were a series of flexible panels: when O has murdered D he backs against the wall, which flexes and gives as he leans on it, tossing him from side to side, his world literally collapsing around him.
Problems. Some of the plot essentials don’t work in this updating: D telling her father that O is now her husband and she owes him her duty: even in the hierarchical world of the gang, would the leader’s girl desert her father for him? (Maybe, on reflection, she would…)
Jimmy Akingbola was too young for O and too shouty, not at home with the verse, reciting rather than inhabiting it. Contrast Iago and also Desdemona, who was attractively feisty, not the drippy goody-goody she sometimes comes across as.
Some of my favourite lines had to go: “As acerb as the coloquintida…”, “Say that in Aleppo once…”
And in this version O had too little time to establish himself as noble and naïve, proud and pugnacious; he lacked nobility and the pride was inadequately sketched, so his sudden tumble into jealousy seemed implausible – though it was well done when it came.
The girls said they were moist-eyed by the end. I was unmoved but not unadmiring.