The puppet children who populate the show’s early stages are symbolically apt, but strangely un-engaging: the show catches light when the actors pulling the strings finally step forward to play the roles themselves. The acting company of three do a remarkable job of fleshing out Dickens’ extensive, eccentric cast list, and their multiple personae are manipulated and juxtaposed with sensitivity and illuminating wit.

The two men in the cast don’t have much joy as gargoyle-ish Victorian patriarchs, but they both have the knack of making good characters interesting. Tom Peters as Stephen Blackpool unearths a seam of humour that warms the persecuted mill-hand’s self-destructive integrity, and James Hyland’s Mr. Sleary makes an understatedly humane appeal for the necessity of circus tinsel among the chimneys of the industrial north. Raewyn Lippert’s Sissy tends towards the clownish, but her Louisa is gravely thoughtful, regarding a repugnant marriage with chilling impersonality, belied by the painful tautness of her deportment. Nancy Hirst’s intelligent choreography makes her a clockwork doll in a bridal veil, the stitching of her wedding clothes fusing diabolically with the Coketown rhythms of sweated factory labour.

Angeline Ferguson’s eerie cut-out projections flood the stage with a phantasmagoria of circus riders and bank robbers, while Christopher Warner’s score seductively maps the show’s descent from the relative innocence of the fairground to the gaudy temptations of more dangerous adult vices. Psycho-balletic dream sequences (very Agnes de Mille) help to maintain narrative fluidity, and offer fleeting glimpses into the repressed secret worlds of characters desperately struggling to subdue their desires and passions to the demands of a bankrupt moral economy. Hard Times is a small show with very big ambitions, which transcends the limitations of some thrifty production values to achieve a genuinely epic quality in its storytelling.

Production Information
Hard Times is at the Warehouse Theatre until 16 November. Visit the Icon Theatre website for information about the company.

Photo Credits
Top photograph:

Falk Richter’s play, translated by David Tushingham, is interesting in that it portrays the fall of a dystopia from the viewpoint of the conservative. The Woman (Geraldine Alexander) is desperate to protect the status quo and her privileges from her husband and son, whom she suspects of opening the gate at night to let in the baying masses. It’s through her quiet but persistent inquisitions that we are drip-fed details about the play’s brave new world.

Naomi Dawson’s minimalist set cages the family like zoo reptiles behind their panoramic windows, in a long, narrow room that gives Alexander maximum space to prowl and pace. She’s poised - a model suburban mother - yet restless, nervous, and her insecurities flow out steadily but unstoppably. The disturbing impression is that she’s borderline hysterical, but still keeps her voice down to thwart informing neighbours.

The irony is that she’s as dissatisfied as her menfolk, snookered between her aspirations, received opinion and reality. She worked hard to gain entry to the community; everyone outside is willing to risk life and limb to gain illicit entry to the community; therefore life in the community must be wonderful, and any thoughts she entertains to the contrary must be denied.

The Man (Jonathan Cullen) provides a reticent counterpoint to his wife’s stream of consciousness. When he eventually explains his disillusionment there’s a very subtly controlled quaver in his voice, revealing a deep-set melancholy behind the evasive façade. Physically, Cullen is miscast. He looks neither old nor weary enough to justify his character’s habit of catnapping through important exchanges.

As the Boy, James Lamb plays a textbook whiny teenager when the script calls for something more sinister. His mother professes more than once to be afraid of him, and Dawson has him in a hoodie, invoking a middle-class fear of rogue youths with knives and attitude. Yet on discovering the Woman has been snooping in his bedroom he is merely affronted, and under gentle questioning he pleads desperately for a reprieve.

With a sulk and a glower, Lamb could be the personification of everything the adults are hiding from, behind their panoramic window, high walls and gate. Instead he’s a product of his privileged upbringing, pampered and spoiled, and his ultimate act of dissidence becomes a petty rebellion.

State of Emergency is at the Gate Theatre until 13 December. Tickets £16 full price; £11 students, Equity members, over 60s, disabled or unwaged. Note that a limited number of pay-what-you-can tickets are available on the door on Monday nights; first come first served, one per person.

Photo top: Jonathan Cullen (as Man) and Geraldine Alexander (as Woman) in State of Emergency. Photograph by Manuel Harlan.

Photo bottom: Geraldine Alexander (as Woman) and Jonathan Cullen (as Man) in State of Emergency. Photograph by Manuel Harlan.

Daniel Winder’s modern-dress production is sometimes impressively liturgical, and sometimes wilfully slow, with flashes of hallucinatory visual excess. A couple of episodes of not-very-passionate dumbshow add little to Hughes’ spare, powerful verse, but some of the show’s other effects work much better, and Alcestis’ funeral procession spilling out into the Covent Garden night is a wonderful collision between worlds.

The chorus of three are gossipy, grudge-bearing neighbours, vulgarly curious beneath their funereal finery. The show’s physical score sometimes pushes these hardworking actresses beyond their comfort and competence, but their singing is glorious, and they tackle the verse with intelligent, northern-vowelled bluntness. Chorus leader Emma Garrett is a figure of compelling authority, stoical, defiant and utterly unglamorous, roughly admonishing Shaun French’s Admetos to ‘meet Necessity with a cheerful face’.

Sarah Kempton as Alcestis is in another world from the beginning, pale and self-possessed and impatient of her husband’s sorrow. John Harwood’s Pheres, doddery, slovenly and incorrigible, makes an unexpectedly eloquent case for an old man clinging to life, and his exchanges with his son over Alcestis’ bier sparkle with a shared sense of grim humour. Christina Gallon and Elizabeth Boag, as Nursemaid and Servant, handle their big speeches with skill, while Matthew Mellelieu and Tom Deplae exploit the hilarity of Heracles’ play-within-a-play to hysterical, discomfiting effect.

The acoustics of The Actor’s Church are distinctly boomy, and the whole company works hard to make themselves heard and understood. Hughes’ gut-wrenching poetry rolls around the cavernous church like rumbling Olympian thunder. And the sacred space is an excellent foil for the play’s howls of bereft despair, and bellows of boozy good-fellowship. Iris Theatre’s Alcestis is an oddly-compounded interpretation of a complicated, tragi-comic drama, but it builds towards a measured and satisfying finale with tragedy, temporarily, averted.

Alcestis is at The Actor’s Church, Covent Garden until 15 November: www.iristheatre.com

Photo top: Anne-Marie Piazza, Emma Garrett, Julie Gilby in Alcestis at The Actor’s Church. Photograph by AbsolutQueer Photography.

Photo bottom: John Harwood in Alcestis at The Actor’s Church. Photograph by AbsolutQueer Photography.

City-girl Swifty is depressed and apathetic, until a giant talking curlew takes refuge in her dustbin, en route to an international parliament of fowls determined to take action to halt humankind’s destruction of the planet. Stephen Sharkey’s bright and brisk text is crammed with irreverent references to contemporary pop and political culture, and the songs have a satiric edge to their lyrics that bites surprisingly sharply. Cloudcuckooland isn’t afraid to present a very young audience with difficult questions, and ethical conundrums without obvious answers. But there are also a lot of uncomplicated laughs as Aristophanic obscenity is rephrased as a series of winningly naughty riffs concerning the avians’ secret weapon: bird poo.

The cast of six work themselves into a lather of quick-changes, multi-skilled musicianship and frantic physical comedy. There are a pair of tumbling twitchers, stilt-walking and sight-gags, an exhilaratingly perilous chase scene and some delicately-judged bouts of onstage defecation. There’s also some wonderfully committed character work on display: I especially loved Dafydd Huw James’ sinister raven, and Leon Scott’s poignant portrait of Dave, a lame Geordie duck. Georgina Phillip as Swifty manages to combine youthful optimism with a creepingly unsettling enjoyment of her new political power. And the whole cast works very hard to draw their audience into the practical and ethical challenges of establishing a city in the clouds.

The hour-long production is batty and buoyant and brimming with ideas and energy. Sometimes the words get lost in the cacophony, and the bird-and-toddler-built city is a bit shaky, but at its mind-bending best Cloudcuckooland is a thought-provoking dollop of big-hearted total-theatre anarchy.

Cloudcuckooland is at the Pleasance, Islington until 2 November: www.pleasance.co.uk or www.onassis.ox.ac.uk.

Words: Stephen Sharkey. Music: Alex Silverman. Director: Helen Eastman
Photo: Dafydd Huw James in Cloudcuckooland.
Photographer: Geraint Lewis.

On the one hand there are Felicity (Muireann Ryan) and her cousin Christian (Simon Desborough). Both are living in a housing estate in the East End, the squalor of which has been newly highlighted by the 2012 Olympic village a few yards away. Christian is a disillusioned solider recently returned from some desert war. In order to cope with his disappointment, he has created his own personal enemy: the government is not to be trusted, all immigrants should be kicked out of the UK, so that the ‘real’ English people finally receive what is their due. In contrast, Felicity is ready to believe in the hope of a better future that the Games promise. Her son Billy, a fifteen year old boxing champion, has just been admitted to the team. Through him, she can dream of success, a fair reward for her untiring care for Christian’s bed-ridden mother.

On the other hand we encounter Ismail (Lowell Baricanosa) and his wife Anna (Linda Lowell). He is a Muslim policeman, she a news reporter from Bosnia. Both are trying to assimilate into the British culture they so admire. Unfortunately the play’s development reveals that Ismail and Anna have invested themselves into a constructed version of reality – like Felicity and Christian; maybe like all of us. Their house of cards is going to collapse all too soon.

Director Dominic Kelly and the actors tell these stories in a remarkably relaxed state though nonetheless charged with energy. Strange though it may sound, it is rare to see actors having fun on stage (no matter how serious the topic). It is this sense of enjoyment that allows the performers of The Day They Banned Christmas to retain a calm, focused, and recommendable unsensational way of storytelling even when the events become more drastic.

These darker and more ruthless energies burst into the play in the form of a bomb, exploding in the Olympic Stadium and killing 40 people – amongst them Felicity’s son Billy. It is in these moments that Muireann Ryan displays the true brilliance of her emotional scale: she encapsulates the total shock and confusion in her distracted singing of Genesis songs, her nervous fingering of the brown paper bag holding the leftovers of Billy’s possessions. The effect is both tender and unsettlingly funny.

Ryan’s ability to create an extremely touching scene is even more remarkable when considering that the explosion itself is curiously ineffective. It is depicted only through a woefully inadequate recorded sound effect, but fails to really penetrate into the world of the play. Katie Lias’ stage design, dominated by a central fragmented wall, made me hope for a complete confusion of the play’s world somewhat like in Sarah Kane’s Blasted. Instead, the explosion takes place in another dimension. It is possible that this complete separation of the blast and the situation on stage is intended – a vague strangeness of the sound, as if it were coming from under water hints at this – but since this is not fully realised, it failed to make a palpable impression.

Since the bomb was allegedly planted by Al-Quaeda, violence against the Muslim population in Britain increases so drastically that the government creates specific ‘zones’ for their protection – zones that sound suspiciously like ghettos. Following several instances of harassment, Anna and Ismail have to move to the former Olympic Village, which has been converted into one of these walled-in districts. After the first encounter of the four characters in the hospital following the bombing, Anna and Felicity’s lives cross one more time when Felicity invades Anna’s new flat in her quest for revenge against the Muslims whom she holds responsible for her son’s death.

I do not want to give away the final twist of the story. Suffice it to say that the two men also meet one more time in a direct face-off. However, the information revealed in this confrontation is ultimately too contrived. Overall, the play is a well-crafted piece of storytelling, but the ending is just too neat to do justice to the chaos of racial hatred, bigotry, and distrust raised throughout the evening. What could have been a truly unsettling story turns into one of many conspiracy theories. Nonetheless, The Day They Banned Christmas remains a powerful play with a consistently strong cast – certainly a theatrical event it deserves more attention than it has received so far!

The Day They Banned Christmas is on at the Courtyard Theatre until November the 9th.

Top image: Muireann Ryan in The Day They Banned Christmas at the Courtyard Theatre. Photo by Cameron McNee.

Bottom image: Lowell Baricanosa in The Day They Banned Christmas at the Courtyard Theatre. Photo by Cameron McNee.

Tonight it’s the turn of Mile End playwright Dan Rebellato to curate, and the result is a rehearsed reading of Fear and Misery in the Third Term, a new piece written especially for the evening by Rebellato, Paines Plough writer in residence Duncan Macmillan and three others. Inspired by Brecht’s Fear and Misery of the Third Reich, the play examines today’s Labour government through a series of short scenes.

Less Epic Theatre and more Simon Stephens, the scenes portray their tenuously linked characters’ experiences of the credit crunch and evaporating Arts Council funding as symptoms of a more pervasive British malaise, embodied in a teenager on a high ledge, leaving messages on his unfaithful girlfriend’s voicemail. There are some excellent moments of black humour: a couple gets bogged down with explanations of global economics in the process of telling their son why they can’t go to Disneyworld; and two investment bankers, livid at being painted as villainous orchestrators of the credit crisis, attempt to outdo each other, Four Yorkshiremen style, with tales of their painful, neglected childhoods.

But it’s only the boy on the ledge who, from his commanding vantage point, can see the big picture: the erosion of fundamental human kindness and decency. It’s something that underlies the comparatively petty complaints of the other characters; which forces the government (as the boy points out) to place adverts on public transport reminding people how to behave; and which leads the boy, originally only on his ledge for some peace, to actually consider jumping, at the behest of unfeeling onlookers interested only in a big spectacle.

Of course, Fear and Misery in the Third Term has now had its airing and may well never be seen again; the point of providing all this detail is only to indicate the level of quality you can expect at Later. What exactly you might experience on other occasions is something you can only discover by going.

Fear and Misery in the Third Term: written by Mike Bartlett, Chloe Moss, Ben Musgrave, Dan Rebellato and Duncan Macmillan; performed by Fred Ridgeway, Kirsty Bushell, David Sibley, Pippa Nixon, Richard Atwill, Jonathan McGuinness, Frances Grey, Rosie Thomson and Danny Lee Wynter.

Later: Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays at 10:00 p.m. until 24 October. All tickets £5. £4 multi-buy offer when you book three or more shows. 20% bar discount with ticket. Details of future performances, including curators and approximate content, can be found on Paines Plough’s website.

The three Annas (Anna O’Brien, Susanna Willetts and Anna Conomos) combine effortless presence with staggering theatrical range. They seem equally happy revelling in the comic grotesqueries of The Grey Ones (one eye, one nose and one tooth between them) or making the poignant music that emerges from the forest grave of a murdered child. Their playful group physicality is frenetic and fearless, and they accost their audience like old friends.

In fact, the whole show has a festival air about it, with enthusiastic greetings and spontaneous dialogue springing up between performers and spectators. Some of its audience interactions and effects would probably flow more easily in a flexible shared space than on a proscenium stage facing a darkened auditorium. Still, Xanthe Gresham’s pacy direction keeps the stream of stories and silliness flowing, and the audience are clearly delighted to become part of the process of shaping and sharing the tales as they are told.

Tongue and Groove is an evening of witty and weird fables, underpinned by some serious messages about the threatened ecology of the planet and the human heart. By turns wacky, mischievous, vulgar, moving and profound, the company present a supremely confident exhibition of contemporary ensemble storytelling.

Tongue and Groove tours until March 2009: for details see www.annamation.co.uk

Luckily - or rather, shrewdly on Shinn’s part - the play’s setting neatly excuses this kind of soapbox declamation. It takes place on US presidential election night, in a hotel room occupied by the Democrat candidate’s son, John Jr. It’s a politically charged environment inhabited by politically eloquent people (campaign staff and the potential President’s immediate family), so informed debates about the issues du jour are realistic, if not always totally theatrical.

The tangents at which the play’s many debates diverge look suspiciously like excuses for Shinn to hawk his many (and considered) political theories to the audience, but they’re interwoven in a way that suggests the personal is political, the political can border on religious, the religious is personal and issues from domestic disputes to public relations to party politics to the Middle East to Islam to Christian fundamentalism to Evangelism to literalism to homophobia and back again are so tightly knotted together that discussion of one will inevitably lead to debates on all the rest. Every tangent is painstakingly anchored in the point from which it branches; politics, Shinn seems to say, cannot help but cover every one of these issues and more. It’s impossible to discuss one topic in isolation. What matters is how it fits into the big picture.

The production has been timed to coincide with the real Presidential race, but benefits also from some serendipitous parallels with real life. The controversial Danish cartoons depicting the prophet Muhammad feature heavily and risk dating the play considerably; but they’re mentioned in relation to John Jr’s indiscretions at a college party, evoking Republican Vice Presidential candidate Sarah Palin’s own filial improprieties in ways Shinn could not possibly have foreseen, but which add immediacy to an already consciously topical production.

All seats at the Royal Court http://www.royalcourttheatre.com cost £10 on a Monday; concessions (£5 off top price) are available on other days. Now Or Later ends 18 October.

Image Top: Eddie Redmayne in Now or Later at the Royal Court Theatre. Photograph by Keith Pattison.

Image Bottom: Matthew Marsh and Eddie Redmayne in Now or Later at the Royal Court Theatre. Photograph by Keith Pattison.

Georgia McGuinness‘ ingenious exploded flat-pack of a set creates wonderfully unpredictable landscapes of domestic discovery. A row of white doors is rife with terrifying possibilities, with insistent buzzers and threatening voices on the other side. However, while a coolly ambient soundtrack and some slickly abstracted choreography are admittedly stylish, they also tend to cocoon the young cast from the challenge of establishing empathetic links beyond the fourth wall.

Some of the actors do manage slip past the show’s stylistic barriers and make a real emotional connection with the audience. Ben Presley and Rebecca Smith make a touchingly unlikely pair, painstakingly negotiating friendship amid the debris of a catastrophic party. And Ryan and Scott Fletcher are achingly plausible as estranged brothers, trading hyperbolic slanders with hesitant, hopeful longing.

It’s evident that Vicky Featherstone’s company have absorbed some unsettling statistics about the likely futures of ‘looked after’ children. But 365 sometimes seems more like an assemblage of data than a revealing dramatic exploration of young people’s lives and struggles. The framing device of an adult voice-over places the audience in uncomfortable complicity with grown-up authority, and the show’s obvious social concern eventually provokes little more than a state of chilly, depressed voyeurism. All too often it feels like we’re spying on these kids’ struggles through a two-way mirror as we observe, without entering or sharing, their remarkable and troubled private worlds.

365 at the Lyric Hammersmith from the 8th to the 27th of September.
Directed by Vicky Featherstone
Written by David Harrower

Photo Top: Simone James. Photo by Pete Dibdin.

Photo Bottom: Ryan Fletcher, Rebecca Smith and Helen Mallon. Photo by Pete Dibdin.

James Graham’s Sons of York riffs bitterly on Henry VI; warring fathers and sons, the grudges that get passed on, and the way ideals get shaken in their transit from one generation to the next. In the midst of it all sits Dad in his paper crown, tyrannising over the ruined mockery of a Christmas dinner, fighting a lost campaign against “that bloody woman” in which his own family are the principal sufferers.

The excellent company make a compellingly credible family group. William Maxwell’s Dad is dangerously balanced between endearing, hearty bluster and unpredictably vengeful anger. Steven Webb as Mark delicately captures the teenage boy’s mercurial, gormless fragility, hero-worshipping Larkin and Bowie, and perpetually getting smacked round the head for some unintended solecism. And Kazia Pelka brilliantly reveals the unflinching intelligence and determination behind nurse Brenda’s professional cheer.

Kate Wasserberg’s terse and attentive direction is supported by some thrilling lighting from Tom White, as the lethal crossfire of family dissension reaches its crescendo. Sitting close enough to the cast to smell the vinegar on their chips, the audience is lured into a horrifying unravelling of fierce, wounded pride, divided loyalties and clashing ideals. “Now civil wounds are stopp’d” assert the play’s closing lines, but the shadow of Richard III subverts the promise of lasting peace for a family, and a country, embattled against itself.

Visit the Finborough Theatre Website for more information.

Top photo: Kazia Pelka, Colette Kelly and William Maxwell in Sons of York at the Finborough Theatre. Photograph copyright of Marilyn Kingwill.

Bottom photo: Stephen Webb and William Maxwell in Sons of York at the Finborough Theatre. Photograph copyright of Marilyn Kingwill.