Month: September 2011

The Stow Festival – A shameless plug and a great event

Tomorrow kicks off a project that I have been working on in the background  for almost 9 months. No, I am not expecting a baby but in its own way the residents of Walthamstow can look forward to a new arrival  of their very own tomorrow: a dedicated local music  festival in an area that is in desperate need of more culture.

A number of ‘concerned local residents’ decided to take matters into their own hands and have put together a 4 day festival that takes place over 9 venues and includes over 25 musicians. A massive thank you must go to all the bands, venues and local businesses who have helped us to create The Stow Festival.

Now all we need is an audience…this is where you come in.

If you live in Walthamstow you have no excuse,

If you have friends who live in Walthamstow, well its the perfect time to visit,

If you have never been to Walthamstow, well what could be better than kicking off your experience with a whole host of live music to enjoy.

Shameless plug yes but this blog does not endorse any old crap. It should be the last good weekend of the year – after this it will be cold, dark, gloomy and dank. So finish off the Summer in style by showing your support and having a great day out.

www.stowfestival.com

Stow Festival Programme

 

Ok shameless, shameless plug over. Normal service will be resumed once the festival is out the way and I have managed to catch up on the many hours of sleep that I am currently missing.

Reviews over the next few weeks should include: Othello in Sheffield, Hamlet in the Young Vic and One Man, Two Guvnors in its West End incarnation. If you have any productions that you would like me to review then feel free to get in touch, I am always interested in fringe productions and new writing.

 

Sexual politics and swinging London

When Did You Last See My Mother – Trafalgar Studios, until 08 October. 

Written when he was 18 and produced for the Comedy Theatre two years later, When Did You Last See My Mother, marked Christopher Hampton’s explosive debut and meant that he was the youngest playwright of modern times to have a play staged in the West End. It opened to almost universally rapturous reviews and immediately propelled Hampton into the spotlight as a precocious new talent. After a career that includes The Philanthropist, Tales from Hollywood and the Oscar-winning screenplay for Dangerous Liaisons, When Did You Last See My Mother seems like it is from the distant past and almost unbelievably this new production at the Trafalgar Studios marks the first major revival of the play in the West End for almost 40 years.

Currently the West End appears to be in a period of looking to the past; we have seen a number of Rattigan revivals in his centenary year, The Kitchen has just opened at the National and the Donmar will soon be staging Osborne’s Inadmissible Evidence. A reason behind these revivals is the belief that these three playwrights share an ability to create a universality of truth that can transcend the time when it was written; Rattigan finds his range across the spectrum of human emotion whilst Wesker’s masterpiece, The Kitchen, lays bare the individual within the machine.

To expect that a play written by an 18 year old will reach such a level of truth is unreasonable and there are moments when it is clear that Hampton is still finding his ear for dialogue; in particular Jimmy’s mother must deliver a couple of lines that suggest a playwright still finding his feet in giving voice to a mature women; interestingly a theme mirrored within the play. However this production is full of moments that touch on the sublime and show us glimpses of a master honing his art. More crucially, Hampton is very strong on the undercurrents of sexual identity and class envy that run through the play and still feel immediate and challenging to a modern audience. Review Continues Here

A reflection: 10 years on

Decade – Headlong, St Katherine’s Docks – Until 15th October

There is no doubt that Decade, Headlong’s collaborative theatrical response to 9/11, reaches moments that are powerfully affecting, even for those with no direct ties to the event. The strongest of these in Decade are where we see the butterfly effect in action; the ripples that change the course of someone’s life, years after the event.

We witness a woman engaged in an increasingly manic speed dating event, plagued both by eczema and a need for security and strength, ultimately unable to commit as she is unable to let go of her husband who died. A group of survivor wives meet every year at a coffee shop within sight of the Ground Zero. The audience are shown the scenes in reverse; a tricksy device suffers from the law of diminishing returns in its final scenes but does function as a powerful reminder of the long shadow cast by 9/11. The wives are unable to grieve in any understandable way, holding on to brittle bonds artificially-forged in the tragedy; held together by a sense of duty and continually reinforced by the sight of presidential candidates solemnly appearing at the site as part of carefully stage-managed campaigns.

Also outstanding is Tobias Menzies portrayal of a man recollecting his account of watching the Tower’s collapse after booking the day off. The audience’s awareness of events lends Menzies’ flat affectless delivery a heart-breaking quality. As we hear, with an Alan Bennett like focus on the absurdity in the mundane, a description of the day before and an ensuring phonecall to the office just after a plane hit the first time, there is a tragic inevitably in the growing awareness there won’t be Hollywood happy endings. Later we find that as a result of his experiences he has edged close to the ‘Truther’ movement; desperately trying to find meaning in his unanswered questions.

Not everything was crafted so successfully, a muscular, Mamet-ish duologue between journalist and a soldier involved in the death of Osama Bin Laden, began promisingly with the conversation hurled across the audience in staccato bursts reminiscent of machine-gun fire. However the contrivance of building a link to a relative who died in the Pentagon began to pull the characters apart at the seams and strain credulity. Continue Reading Here