Monthly Round-Up: February 2012

1 - She Stoops To Conquer - National Theatre, Olivier (7/8/8) ****
3 - The Heresy of Love - Swan Theatre (8/9/9) ****
4 - The Taming of the Shrew - Royal Shakespeare Theatre (9/10/10) ***
6 - Absent Friends - Harold Pinter Theatre (10/11/11) ***
9 - The Importance of Being Earnest - Theatre Royal Haymarket (11/12/12) **
10 - Stories Before Bedtime: Twisted Love - Criterion Theatre (12/13/13) ***
13 - A Midsummer Night's Dream - Filter at the Lyric Hammersmith (13/14/14) ****
16 - The Recruiting Officer - Donmar Warehouse (14/15/15) ****
17 - The Pitchfork Disney - Arcola Theatre (15/16/16)  ****
18 - And No More Shall We Part - Hampstead Theatre  (16/17/17) ****
23 - Matilda - Cambridge Theatre (-/18/18) *****
24 - Hayfever - Noel Coward Theatre (17/19/19) ***
29 - Ondine - White Bear Theatre (18/20/20) ***

Another excellent, if sometimes divisive, month spent in the theatre, with the years second five star show (Matilda) and a couple of others teetering on the brink (I was tempted to give both The Recruiting Officer and The Pitchfork Disney full marks, but given how generally generous with stars I am looking to be anyhow, felt I should resist).

In fact, there was only one show I found truly disappointing this month, the Red Lion's transfer of The Importance of Being Earnest to the Haymarket. One of the first plays I saw as a child, it's one I'm incessantly fond of and always keen to see. Given it's such a linguistic, wit based play, I'm not sure the slapstick approach used here was overly successful. It detracted rather than enhanced the play. Though I loved some of the touches, with Owen Roberts as Laine/Merriman and Morgan Thomas as Doctor Chasuble both proving quite unforgettable, but I felt that for the surrealist approach the production used to really work it needed a more solid Earnest at its centre, separate from the encroaching madness.

In some ways it's unfair that She Stoops To Conquer, which used a similar if less bizarre approach, worked so well for me where Importance failed. Here again a broad brushed, lively, raucous production mostly failed to explore the deeper, socially aware, clever play that lurked within. But it did so with such charm that I was completely (with one or two minor exceptions) beguiled. I loved the twisting set, the rising trees, the log fire, the singing servants, the extravagant outfits, and the imaginary horses. Plus it was hard to resist such a superb turn from one of my favourite actors John Heffernan ("Boobies!"). In the end what small reservations I had were entirely drowned out by how much fun I'd had.

I was equally charmed by the Donmar's The Recruiting Officer, which attacked Farquhar with a similar gusto, even if, in this case, a more melancholy heart lingered beneath the surface. Bright, lavish costumes were matched with an excellent selection of fun, frivolous and audience engaging performances that I think suits the Donmar particularly well - with Tobias Menzies, Amiee Ffion-Edwards and Mackenzie Crook emerging as favourites. However, the show was completely stolen for me by the resident band of actor-musicians, The Listed (Chris Grahamson, Stuart Ward, Tom Giles, Matthew Romain, and Peter Manchester), who added to the atmosphere created by the dozens of candles lighting the stage, whilst also adding energy and emotion (not to mention an excellent mobile phone reminder). Their final number in particular was exceptionally haunting and fittingly put the entertainment of the play back into its historical context.

Both Hayfever and Absent Friends took a more traditional, period approach to their comic revivals and came out with solid, if not spectacular, results. Whilst I enjoyed Hayfever, particularly excellent performances from Pheobe Waller-Bridge and Olivia Colman; of the two, I preferred Absent Friends. Crammed full of several of my favourites, I found the taut discomfort of the gathering compelling, entertaining and overly familiar. Plus I loved the garish recreation of the seventies in all it's glory (my family home has a room that hasn't been redecorated since 1971, it's fantastic).

I also caught a revival of Giraudoux's Ondine, a romantic fantasy dealing with the love between water spirits and mortals. It's a beautiful, unusually told story, excellently told here with some fantastically moving performances. Though I personally might have made more of the fairytale elements of the plot and aimed less at realism in its setting and made more use of lighting, I thought the company made great use of what limited resources they have at the White Bear.

Both my Shakespeare's of the month were marked by a frivolous approach to performance and staging; though I ended up wishing that more of the fun and originality of the Christopher Sly scenes (where the entire stage became Sly's bed) in the RSC's The Taming of the Shrew had stretched to the rest of the production. And although the production was generally strong, it couldn't quite match my memory of last year’s wonderful Southwark Playhouse staging. Filter's A Midsummer Night's Dream in comparison didn't suffer against its competition and I have been lucky to see several fantastic productions of the play in the past. Fiercely inventive, they made the play their own with their special brand of anarchy and music and I thought the result was much more successful than their previous foray into Shakespeare, Twelfth Night. A paint splattering, set smashing, food throwing riot of a production. I particularly loved Jonathan Broadbent's lycra clad Oberon, Ed Gaughan's warmly spoken, entertaining Quince and best of all Ferdy Robert's transformation of Puck into a bloody minded, disaffected roadie.

Whilst in Stratford for Shrew I also caught the third of the RSC’s current religiously centred Swan Trilogy, The Heresy of Love. For me this was this strongest of the three and I was sad to not see it being transferred alongside or instead of Written on the Heart. Perhaps it was partly that it was fantastic to finally see a play dominated by women, in an ensemble and theatre that will nearly always be dominated by men - especially covering such a variety of both healthy and unhealthy female relationships. I also loved the passionate exploration of intelligence and religious debate, so cleverly constructed that I even found myself being swayed by the arguments. Given there was so much fabulous writing by Helen Edmundson, the odd places where the script fell apart for me were saddening, I particularly disliked the use of both jealous women and fallen virgin plots that drove the latter action without enough consideration or invention to rescue them. Thankfully I found this fairly easy to overlook, however, due to the swathes of strong performances and a beautiful, atmospheric lighting design.

While we're on the RSC it seems as good a time as any to talk about my favourite show of the month, Matilda. I adored this when I saw it at the tail end of 2010 and thankfully it has lost none of its charm, quirkiness, intelligence or joy in its transformation from the thrust stage of Stratford to the proscenium arch of the Cambridge. In the end it was pretty even between the things I felt worked better in Stratford (much of the choreography, particularly the Smell of Rebellion had a stronger impact for me on the thrust stage), and those I preferred in London (especially the sequences for My House and the School Song, and slightly strangely but marvellously, the curtain call). Best of all my favourite part of the play, When I Grow Up, had lost none of its wonder and the moment when the children stood up on the swings still thrilled me straight back to my own childhood. Everything was perfect, the beautiful swirling score, the fantastic lyrics, the choreography, the fun of spotting the words in the set before the show, the physical sensation of Trunchbull storming past you. And of course the truly superb performances all round from Bertie Carvel's astounding Trunchbull, right through the incredible assured and disgustingly talented child actors - especially Sophie Kiely as Matilda, Jemima Eaton as Lavender and Callum Henderson as Bruce. And to top it all off I got my own personal mocking by Paul Kaye's Mr Wormwood and life doesn't get much more awesome than that (I'm a sworm!)

Another favourite of the month was Ridley's The Pitchfork Disney at the Arcola, my first visit to the theatre in either its new or old setting. Gripping throughout, I'm still not sure if I've entirely made sense of what was happening, with layers and layers of possible interpretation presenting themselves, me and my flat mate have spent days discussing it. The Arcola did a fantastic job of creating the tense, claustrophobic atmosphere of the play and I particularly loved how the set seemed almost to float disconnected from the world. Best of all though were superb performances by Chris New, Mariah Gale and Nathan Stewart-Jarrett.

Equally gripping was two-hander And No More Shall We Part at the Hampstead Theatre's studio. The play reminded me in some ways of other recent productions dealing with relationships, such as Constellations and Lovesong, though in this instance the matter at the heart was euthanasia. The complex issue was excellently and emotionally explored, using clever shifts in time scales, and I cried more than once watching it (a moment where Patterson goes to sleep hidden outside his wife’s door was particularly moving). Though in places I found both the play and the production a little emotionally manipulative, I also found that entirely forgivable because of the excellent performances by Dearbhla Molloy and Bill Patterson and because of the tragic, entirely unexpected ending. It also gets the highest praise that I can give, in that it made me want to rush home and write myself.

Finally, I headed late one night down to the Criterion Theatre to check out one of their new events. It's fantastic to see them broadening their programme with talks, play readings and, in this case, bedtime stories. That said, unfortunately Twisted Love wasn't entirely successful for me, though I thought the choice of stories was interesting and the performances excellent (though Niahm Cusack's should have been restaged so that she wasn't invisible to a large swathe of the audience for the entirety), the audience were frankly awful. Every mildly rude word was greeted by gales of screeching laughter and in an erotic play reading the result was frankly ridiculous, I'm not sure how the actors managed to maintain any concentration. Still I'd gladly go to one of these again and I'm sad to be missing Billy Boyd's at the end of March.