A Taste of Honey by Shelagh Delaney at the National Theatre

Honey past its sell by date

I first read A Taste of Honey in my mid-teens and found it revelatory because it was so different from any 20th century drama I had previously read. With Waiting for Godot, written a few years earlier, Beckett tore up the conventions of theatre – moving it from the comfortable setting of the middle-upper class drawing room to an unrecognisable, post-apocalyptic landscape peopled by grotesques cursed by madness, yearning and loss.

Shelagh Delaney, in A Taste of Honey, keeps the action in a domestic setting, but one that would have been every bit as alien to the theatre-goers of 1958 as the world created by Beckett. And that, in a nutshell, is where the force of the play begins – and largely ends.

Set in a damp, run down rented Salford bedsit overlooking the gasworks and slaughterhouse, A Taste of Honey, tells the story of Helen and her teenage schoolgirl daughter, Jo, to whom she offers occasional moments of superficial attentiveness in an otherwise dysfunctional relationship, where mother treats daughter with selfishness and wanton neglect.

Both mother and daughter find fleeting happiness with men who then abandon them. Helen beguiles the boorish, hard-drinking Peter, while Jo has a brief relationship with Jimmie, a black sailor, by whom she becomes pregnant. Abandoned by Jimmie and her mother, who moves out to live with Peter, Jo invites the gay Geoffrey to live with her. He does so and offers Jo care and kindness, before the returning Helen – cast aside by Peter in favour of a younger woman – ousts Geoffrey from the home and resumes her position of dominance over Jo.

Watching the play in 2014, A Taste of Honey feels like a first time play written by a teenager in two weeks – which is exactly what it is. The characters are authentic, but the action is slow and fails to retain a consistently tight grip on the audience. I saw the production with two white middle class teenage boys, who found it boring. Oh, how different they would have felt if they had seen it in 1958!

Lesley Sharp – and I mean no pun on the play’s genre – chucks the ‘kitchen sink’ at the role of Helen. She acts with every pore of her body, knowing that a dominant, assertive and attentive performance is needed to paper over the cracks of a play that to the modern audience frankly does not really have enough drama for its 2½ hours duration. When she’s off stage, you can’t wait for her to come back on.

Kate O’Flynn as Jo is strong and credible as the daughter in need of love and nurturing, though occasionally I could shut my eyes and swear I was listening to Jane Horrocks as Bubbles in Absolutely Fabulous. When she sings winsomely to herself at the play’s close, sitting alone on the sofa, mistakenly believing that Geoffrey will be back in a minute and unaware he has been thrown out by Helen and will never return, the production achieves a rare moment of pathos. Quietly spoken and uncertain of accent, Eric Kofi Abrefa arguably undercooks the part of Jimmie, but his portrayal does serve to suggest that Jimmie is in many ways as vulnerable and as lost in the world as Jo. Will he return one day or has he abandoned Jo for good?

Shelagh Delaney wrote A Taste of Honey after watching a production of Terence Rattigan’s Variation on a Theme. We can well understand her sense of frustration with and isolation from Rattigan’s play. In response, she wanted to write about the real world as she saw it and knew it – a play that Rattigan didn’t have the insight, ability or guts to write: a play featuring an openly gay character, a black man who gets a white teenage girl pregnant and who herself is damaged by her heartless and promiscuous prostitute mother.

Rattigan’s plays endure, because they capture beautifully the vulnerability and restive yearning of the heart with power, nuance and delicacy. Three years ago the centenary of Rattigan’s birth was marked by multiple productions of his work. In 24 years time I suspect the centenary of Delaney’s birth will not be marked by a rash of productions of A Taste of Honey for the simple reason that while it was a ground-breaking play, it is not a great one. The feeling at the end of this production is akin to arriving at the end of a long car journey – you passed through some interesting scenery, Lesley Sharp did a great job behind the wheel of a car that sounded as if it might conk out any minute, you met some interesting people – but you’re mighty glad you’ve reached your destination.

TBR/March 2014

A Taste of Honey is playing in the Lyttleton Theatre at the National Theatre until May 11th.

Die Fledermaus by Johann Strauss II at The King’s Head, Islington

Get lost in love’s sweet haze

A very well known current presenter of Newsnight, once surprised and alarmed production colleagues for taking time out in the frenetic final preparations before transmission to call his/her young children at home. “Well, it’s only f***ing telly,” responded the presenter, when challenged for not treating his/her role with a constantly po-faced, laughless intensity. I was reminded of this episode not long in to Close Up Opera’s Die Fledermaus, for here is a production that delights in not taking the operetta too seriously, but – like the Newsnight presenter – retains its professionalism from start-to-finish.

It’s often a bit of a gallop with Close Up Opera at The King’s Head, with productions shortened, superfluous characters omitted and the music sometimes confined to the better known pieces and those that most usefully and meaningfully move the plot along. This is done partly in response to the very small space in which cast and musicians have to perform and partly, of course, because Close Up Opera is on a mission to make opera more accessible and to draw in a new audience.

Die Fledermaus is ideally suited to this kind of treatment. When you distil an operetta that celebrates partying you end up with one helluva party and the joie de vivre of the production is evident from its opening minutes.

As is so often the case, of course, the production feels obliged to set itself in the modern day if it is to appeal to modern audiences. And so we learn at the outset that the incident that triggers the events of the operetta is not simply Falke being abandoned drunk and dressed as a bat by Eisenstein for the ridicule of passers-by. Oh no, today’s Eisenstein films the drunk and incapacitated Falke on his i-Phone, zooming in on Falke’s exposed bare bum cheeks – and puts it on youtube for the world to laugh at.

The cast hurl themselves in to the production with gusto and commitment. The performances are uninhibited, particularly from Louisa Tee as Rosalinda and William Helliwell as Eisenstein, her husband, while Chloe Hinton threatens to upstage everyone in a bravura performance as Prince Orlovsky. Oscar McCarthy deserves a special mention as Falke, as I understand he only stood in at short notice due to illness. All these cast members are good singers and actors. Their voices were fantastic and they perform for every second they are on stage, not merely when they are singing. They bring colour and character to the roles they play

There are flashes of bold creativity. Elinor Rolf-Johnson as Adele sings a few bars of a song by the modern day Adele; we get a few lines sung from ‘Anything You Can do, I Can Do Better”; Count Orlovsky does a game-show host turn as he summons a ‘plant’ from the audience to join the cast on stage to sing us a song; there is banter between cast and musicians (they were very good by the way – the musicians, not the scripted banter); and Rosalinda does a joky turn as a TV chef.

The modern ‘cultural’ references come thick and fast. Judy Garland, Jane Fonda, Robert Maxwell, Rupert Murdoch, Lady Gaga, Elton John, the Ministry of Sound, Kate Middleton and Simon Cowell are among those name-checked and there is a running joke about George Osborne. An opera in Islington that takes the piss out of George Osborne? It was bound to go down well with the audience!

The constant striving for the modern and the cool is a little overdone and brought the production close to panto territory, which does no justice to Johann Strauss II or his operetta. But it stops short of being irritable thanks to the efforts of a confident and accomplished cast.

TBR/January 2014

Die Fledermaus is playing at The King’s Head Theatre in Islington, London until January 18th.

Night Beds at The Scala, London

In search of intimacy

Surprisingly, the Scala was only about two-thirds full, when the Night Beds ambled on stage. They wowed crowds at last summer’s End of the Road Festival and their debut album, ‘Country Sleep’, was released to great acclaim in the spring, drawing comparisons with Bon Iver’s 2007 debut, ‘For Emma, Forever Ago’. I thought the gig would be sold out.

Winston Yellen, the band’s 24 year old front man from Colorado Springs, had to briefly absent himself to retrieve his guitar from back stage, but he always has carries with him his most compelling asset – his voice.

It has been likened to Jeff Buckley, Rufus Wainwright, Ryan Adams and, of course, Justin Vernon. For me, it’s nearer AA Bondy and Robin Pecknold of the Fleet Foxes, with the ability to soar and express an emotional fragility that is reminiscent of Roy Orbison.

But, hey, let’s agree that Yellen’s voice is very much his own – a thing of beauty ideally suited to the songs of hurt, loss and regret that dominate ‘Country Sleep’ and form the centerpiece of their performance.

You get the sense that Night Beds yearn for an intimacy with their audience. They want to make the band and audience as one so that together we can have a truly shared experience – one where we, the audience, feel the emotional depth and intensity of the songs every bit as much as the band that creates them. Very few bands can pull this off. I have seen The Low Anthem, Josh T Pearson and The Tallest Man on Earth do this, but many others fall short.

Night Beds come close to this musical nirvana with songs such as Borrowed Time, Was I For you?, Cherry Blossoms and Tenn. They are good songs, but the audience are content rather than beguiled and enrapt. Tracks that sound intimate on the album, lose their warmth in live performance, where too often they sound halfway to Kings of Leon numbers.

It is only when the band literally leave the stage to join the audience and perform an unplugged cover of Gillian Welch’s The Way The Whole Thing Ends that the communion between band and audience is strong enough to make you feel you are part of something truly special.

Yellen tells us at the close that about a year ago he had played before about nine people in a solo show, so a two-thirds full Scala and one of the best albums of 2013 is a year of good progress. Greatness beckons perhaps and may yet arrive, but for the moment Night Beds remain a work in progress.

TBR/December 2013

‘Country Sleep’ is available now on the Dead Oceans label.

Public Service Broadcasting at The Forum, London

Back to the Future?

Pop’s a young genre, but its actors are cast aside and forgotten with bewildering and ever increasing frequency. Pop is the dragon fly of popular culture – bright and eye-catching perhaps, but dead in a day. It has explored every creative avenue open to it. All that’s left is the PR battle for a mention in Heat magazine and a place on Graham Norton’s sofa on Friday night TV. The music can’t speak for itself any more, because the words have already been spoken by others many times over.

Enter Public Service Broadcasting. Having concluded that a forward scan of pop’s horizon offers up nothing new, they have instead looked back – not back to exhume a roadside corpse from pop’s past, but away from pop’s highway to public service films and and radio broadcasts from World War II to the 1970s. They construct songs around the voices and images of old public service broadcasts.

The band amble on looking like over-age interns from the Accounts Department – all three of them wearing a shirt and tie and spectacles. One plays the drums, one fiddles with a lap top and one plays keyboards, banjo and guitar.

I know four songs by Public Service Broadcasting and happily they open with one of them, London Can Take It – a public service eulogy to London’s resilience and defiance in the face of German Second World War bombing raids. It builds from the spoken words of a broadcast that run through the song, driven on by pounding drums and a repeat loop of guitar, keyboard and computer generated noise, rising to a crescendo, while two giant screens behind the band show film images of wartime London.

As we move on through the evening, a giant model of the Alexandra Palace radio aerial occasionally flashes at us from the back of the stage. The songs follow the pattern established by London Can Take It. Some – like If War Should Come – are darker, more brooding and rather reminiscent of Massive Attack, while others, such as Spitfire, are close to outright dance territory and stimulate the crowd to move from contented head nodding to leaping on the shoulders of friends. Sadly, the stewards immediately put a stop to such high spirits – I was very disappointed that a health and safety public service broadcast was not played over the PA at this point.

I kept thinking I saw Trevor Howard on the screens behind the band as the evening wound on towards an encore of Everest. At one point hundreds of coloured balloons were released from a giant sausage-shaped net above our heads. Did this add to the fun or revive a performance that was flagging? I’ll give them the benefit of the doubt on this occasion, because Public Service Broadcasting at least have the considerable merit of being different from a lot of other bands. OK, so they may have had the idea for the band after a few drinks and time spent listening to Frankie Goes To Hollywood’s Two Tribes, but I like to think they didn’t.

After the final song. The band shook hands and left the stage. Shook hands? No manly man hugs and back slaps for these guys. Just a firm 1950s handshake and off stage they go. I really hoped they were having Ovaltine for their post-gig tipple.

As Miles Jupp might say, Public Service Broadcasting seem like a great bunch of lads. And they seem to be having a great time, though we needed more sound on drums and voice soundtrack. But are they a great band? Perhaps not, but they are original and and an evening in their company is not without fun and interest.

Stay tuned and keep this frequency clear.
 

TBR/November 2013

Public Service Broadcasting are currently on tour in the UK, France, Turkey and Poland, culminating in a New Year’s Eve gig at Village Underground in Shoreditch, London.

La Traviata by Giuseppe Verdi at The King’s Head, Islington

Where’s The Sparkle Gone?

My last musical outing was in September at the first night of Yuck’s rousing three night residency at The Macbeth to launch their Glow and Behold album. La Traviata at The King’s Head offered a very different prospect, but one I was looking forward to, as I have greatly enjoyed the three previous OperaUpClose productions I have seen at the venue.

When you stage opera in a small back room of a pub, all the physical aspects of the production – the music, set, cast numbers – have to be miniaturised to meet the demands of the very limited space. What OperaUpClose excel at is scaling down these physical elements, without diminishing opera’s non-physical elements – its passion, emotion and sense of drama. This talent has allowed the company to deliver memorable productions of verve and of an intensity that feels more powerful for being confined within a small space. Until now.

La Traviata has two or three actors for each part over the course of the run, so I can only speak of the cast and performance of October 24th, but that night the passion volume control was set way too low.

In Act 1 Alfredo sings of “a life that effervesces with sparkling women and wine. Let’s drink then, for life overflows with delight”. Laurence Olsworth-Peter delivers this joyous call to booze with all the enthusiasm and brio of a puritanical teetotaller.

La Traviata is a rich drama of coquettes, flirting, scheming, scandal, hypocrisy, intrigue, impetuous and unfathomable love. But Elinor Jane Moran as Violetta was the only significant heat source in an otherwise cold cast. Although her acting was limited, her voice certainly wasn’t and she rose to the occasion with confidence and tremendous vocal range.

At the core of La Traviata is the love that Violetta with Alfredo find with each other, then lose, then briefly rekindle before consumption snatches Violetta away at the opera’s close. Olsworth-Peter acted the role like a nervous sixth former on work experience. “Something has passed between us” he sings to Violetta in a voice that is a lightweight mismatch next to Ms Moran’s. Maybe so, but whatever it was, it certainly wasn’t sexual chemistry.

Alfredo’s father, Germont, is an amoral, lecherous politician who fears his son’s association with Violetta may damage his own political ambitions. Yet Francis Church in the role captures none of the sleaze or ruthless ambition of the character. His colourless portrayal of Germont is echoed by that of Christopher Jacklin as the Baron/Doctor. He passes through the production, without leaving an impression on it. Rosie Middleton as Flora seems similarly out of sorts, delivering a performance that features a lot of hand-wringing and an unconvincing attempt at some sexy and seductive twerking 19th century style.

It was a bold decision to diagonally slice the size of the stage in half with the set design. It’s one thing to be intimate and another to be cramped. We crossed the line from the former to the latter with this production – particularly in the scenes set in Violetta’s bedroom, where the window wall is tilted over the tiny stage to give the impression of a skylight in a garret. The cast seemed caged in and uncomfortable.

Elinor Jane Moran carries the production over the finishing line in a powerful finale from her at least, but overall this felt a little and under cooked production. As I reflected afterwards on the production and Ms Moran’s performance, I was reminded of the exchange between William Holden and Gloria Swanson in ‘Sunset Boulevard’. “You used to be big'” he says to her. “I am big,” she defiantly replies – “it’s the pictures that got small.”

TBR/November 2013

La Traviata is playing at The King’s Head Theatre in Islington, London until November 30th.

Edward II by Christopher Marlowe at The National Theatre

Feel The Power

Many years before the full ghastliness of his movie career reached its nadir with About Time, a youthful Richard Curtis wrote Skinhead Hamlet – an expletive riddled play that galloped through the plot of Hamlet in about five minutes.

Although the f**k count was high in his pared down interpretation of Hamlet, it would surely have rocketed off the scale if Curtis had ever given the same treatment to Marlowe’s Edward II.  While the skullduggery and revenge pursued in Hamlet is often accompanied by indecision and doubt, in Marlowe’s play it is planned and executed with single minded and ruthless ferocity.

All that matters in the world of Edward II is power.  If you are not a power player, you are – as Gaveston remarks near the start of the play – just one of “the multitude that are but sparks raked up in the embers of their poverty.”

Just as power is all consuming in the play, so Joe Hill-Gibbins’ production is acted on a set that stretches right back to the back-stage rear wall.  All the characters are obsessed by power and nowhere is free of its grip – so there is no back-stage area in these power games, right?  Oh, I get it.

This symbolism and sign-posting is a consistent theme throughout the production.  It is almost as if the director does not quite trust the audience to understand the action and its consequences without some help.

For example, just in case we don’t appreciate that Gaveston is an outsider in King Edward’s court, an American actor is cast in the role in an otherwise all British cast.  Are we aware that Edward and Gaveston may have been lovers?  We’re given an extended kiss between the two characters just in case.  Might we not twig that England is descending in to chaos?  The stage set is smashed up half way through to let us know.  Do we realise that in overthrowing Edward II, young Mortimer and Queen Isabella plot themselves in to a situation from which there is no escape?  The director perches them on top of a high crate from which they can’t get down for the whole of the second half to help us understand.  Subtle, it ain’t.

Some of the action takes place in rooms built on stage – or even entirely off-stage – where we can’t see the actors without other characters filming the action, which is projected on to two huge screens either side of the stage.   It adds to the sense of drama and feels sometimes like we’re watching a medieval version of ‘The Thick of It’, with everyone in the part of Malcolm Tucker.  But it’s over-used in the production and at times is downright distracting.

For example, the long scene between young Mortimer and Queen Isabella when they reflect on the magnitude of what they have done and its consequences, carries less impact than it deserves because our attention is drawn away by a filmed close-up of the deposed Edward II being projected on to the screens, as he walks wearily and miserably around the rear of the stage.

The two most interesting parts in the play are King Edward himself and young Mortimer, because they are almost the only ones who go on an emotional journey and change and develop as characters.  Edward starts as a love struck, petulant, spoilt tantrum-throwing brat and is transformed by John Heffernan into a broken, fearful, pitiful wreck.  While in Kobna Holdbrook-Smith’s hands the young Mortimer begins as a solid English oak of a man who simply wants the best for his country, but becomes a murderous and troubled tyrant who will stop at nothing to rule it.

Many of the other characters get killed off abruptly and mercilessly without being given the time or opportunity to evolve and develop.  Kyle Soller almost steals the production, emerging from the audience to deliver a compelling portrayal of Gaveston as a swaggering tart who revels recklessly in the favour Edward shows him.

The play and its actions shock and move – it is a compelling history tale. And, yes, pictures of England’s monarchs from history through to the present day are projected onto the screens at the outset to remind us that all of them in their different ways and in their different times have had to manage the business of power.

One is left, though, with the feeling that the beautiful text that Marlowe has given us in Edward II has been a little over-shadowed by a director who hasn’t quite trusted it.  Joe Hill-Gibbins has delivered a production of creativity, style and confidence, but in the words of Hamlet – has he fully appreciated that “the play’s the thing”?  Or, as a youthful Richard Curtis may have said, “It’s the f***ing words!”

TBR/October 2013

Edward II is playing in the Olivier Theatre at the National Theatre in London until October 26th.