Review - A Doll's House, The Donmar Warehouse

A bit like the guests on Marcus Brigstock's radio and now TV show I've Never Seen Star Wars who confess to not having experienced something that would have assumed they had, I have to admit shamefacedly that I have never seen a production of A Doll's House. I know that I have seen clips on telly and I'm aware of productions that have happened but up until last night I have been faking it more than an MP's mortgage repayment.

I was led to believe however that Ibsen, in 1879, had, in telling the story of Nora Helmer and her husband Torvold, produced the first feminist play. A scandalous attack on conventional marriage norms whereby Nora's dutiful wife comes to realise that the love of her husband is conditional on her playing the innocent girl and rejecting this role she leaves him and her children to "find" herself.

However in Zinnie Harris' new translation as directed by Kfir Yefet it's actually about a lovely man with titian red hair who loves his wife very much for two hours and 10 minutes of a two hours and twenty minutes play, only quite rightly losing his temper with her for ten minutes because she, being blackmailed by a nasty northern oik, has compromised his reputation and she not realising when she's on to a good thing bleats on about equality and leaves him devastated and howling in pain.`

Why has this change in emphasis occurred? Because someone had the bright idea of casting Toby Stephens as husband Thomas. Toby Stephens...the only carrot-topped Bond baddie, Toby Stephens...a swoon-enducing Mr Rochester, Toby Stephens whose performance is the sexiest turn since Hugh Jackman strolled onto the National stage singing about the corn being as high as an elephant's eye! At one point Thomas compliments himself for having such an attractive wife and patronizingly crows about his "ownership" of her, the good folk of the Donmar audience harumph politically correctly while I swear that every woman is secretly screaming "own me, own me!"

In updating the text Zinnie Harris has transformed Torvold the bank manager to Thomas the newly elected cabinet minister, and statements about transparency and trust produced chuckles from the auditorium and along with Nora's blackmailing plot gave the whole thing a whiff of Wildean An Ideal Husband.

Gillian Anderson, beautiful, looking like a Singer Sargent portrait, does all she can by hand wringing and foot-stamping to make me care, but how could she leave him? It does not make sense!

Tara Fitzgerald plays her schoolfriend Christine and inexpicably holds a torch but a lack of seating for Christopher Eccleston's blackmailer, who really should lighten up. I'd love to see Eccleston do comedy, maybe some tap-dancing sometime, though it's a moot point whether you can shuffle, ball, change with a permanent sneer on your face. Archie Rice maybe?

Three great theatrical male howls ...Jonathan Pryce in the Almeida's production of The Goat or Who Is Sylvia when he is confronted with the body of his dead goat love, Ralph Fiennes in the recent Oedipus the National when he realises that Philip Larkin was right about your parents, and now Toby Stephens at the end of this production as he is left screaming on the floor when Nora leaves. Fabulous.

Review - Alphabetical Order, Hampstead Theatre

"There should be ashtrays everywhere". The Silver-Fox's first reaction on seeing the set for Chris Luscombe's revival of Michael Frayn's 1975 Alphabetical Order at Hampstead Theatre last night. "Everybody smoked all the time".

When my beloved was not silver just foxy he was a junior reporter on The Southern Evening Echo and it was with this in mind, plus the fact that men of a certain age (his) tremble at the memory of Imogen Stubbs as short-skirted, private investigator Anna Lee in the eponymous 90's TV show, that I had booked us into this trip down newspaper memory lane.

Set in the cuttings library of a provincial daily the play shows the effect of a new ultra-efficient assistant librarian Lesley/Chloe Newsome, on the chaotic work place and the lives of the librarian Lucy/Ms Stubbs and her journalistic colleagues. She tidies the filing system, steals Ms Stubb's boyfriend, John/Jonathan Guy Lewis, and eradicates the cosy bolt hole that comforts the quietly drunken features writer Arnold/Gawn Grainger and Wally/Michael Garner's terminally married leader writer. The cast is completed by Penelope Beaumont as Nora, an amazingly patronising features editor who carries with her a whiff of Celia Imrie's Dinnerladies-HR manager Phillipa, and Ian Talbot as Geoffrey an ageing boy scout of a messenger. They're all very good which makes it more of a mystery as to why they are appearing in this incredibly dated, immensely boring, play-in-aspic production.

Christopher Luscombe's last outing as director, Enjoy, is completing it's very successful West End run. It is a brilliantly dark piece in which Alan Bennett predicts the rise of the heritage industry, Northern terrace life becomes a living museum with human exhibits. In Alphabetical Order he has directed a play that could be on view in such a museum under the title "This is How We Did It Thirty Years Ago".
Mind you the Monday night audience seemed to love it... the gasp of surprise and delight as the lights came up on the second half and we saw the results of a good tidy up on the set was equal to any "reveal" moment on a prime time make-over programme. Similarly the giddy sense of naughtiness induced by the cast flinging folders of cuttings around the office had them nearly wetting themselves with delight., though, judging by their average age, inappropriate bladder leakage might be a not infrequent companion.

Random snippets from our post theatre discussion:
following up his critique of the ashtray situation (Ms Stubbs does light up, cigarette-wise, for one brief moment) the Silver-Fox reminised about compressed air tubes that were used to transport copy from one part of the newspaper empire to another and begged me to stop buying theatre tickets when there were still re-runs of Frasier he hasn't seen yet,
I commented that the bottle green corduroy jacket being worn by Gawn Grainger was the spit of one we picked up in a vintage shop in York,
my God she's 48!
and didn't Jonathon Guy Lewis' hair cut remind one of Robert Redford's floppy fringe in All The President's Men. Now that was a great piece of writing about a newspaper office.

Review - Nocturnal, The Gate

It was a beautiful, sunny day in old London town yesterday, and with the Silver-Fox working to top up that credit card which keeps the dream alive, I indulged in a little theatrical masochism by dropping by The Gate for the matinee of Nocturnal by Spanish ombre Juan Mayorga.


I was there mainly because of Jasper Carrott-look-a-like Amanda Lawrence
who has become a pet project of mine since finding her in Tim Crouch's An Oak Tree at The Soho Theatre and then loving her as scootering Beryl in Kneehigh's Brief Encounter, but the cast was also made up of Justin Salinger, who we saw in Bliss at The Royal Court, Paul Hunter (another Kneehigh regular) and Justine Mitchell (The Stone also at The Royal Court). Great company for 80 minutes, no interval. The audience wasn't without interest either as Sam West and his partner settled into the seats behind me, and I adjusted my posture to catch whatever critical pearls might come my way. So.....

Short Man, council employee/personality vacuum, meets Tall Man, book-loving/sensitive/care worker in old people's home, in a cafe revealing that not only are they neighbours but that he is aware of Tall Man's illegal status in the un-named country and that in order to guarantee his silence Tall Man must become Short Man's new best friend. Nothing sexual you understand, just chatting, playing with his model train, visiting the zoo where he loves to sit in the nocturnal animal enclosure.

Short Man's wife (you're going to love this...Short Woman)meanwhile, suffers from insommnia and has become addicted to a late night phone-in TV show in which a supposed doctor in a dodgy fez (Matthew Dunster) dispenses advice to the sleep deprived. Tall Woman, luckily married to Tall Man, translates pulp Westerns and wears a really nice pair of trousers, while being creeped out by neighbourly visits from Short Man and developing an extra-marital relationship with, unseen, Hat Man. Tall Man becomes increasingly dominated by Short Man, and Short Woman having discovered the real basis for the friendship between the two men shifts from victim to aggressor, demanding the last dance of him at her husband's birthday party, after rejecting Tall Woman's offer of joining her and Hat Man on the last stage-coach out of town.

It's about neediness and alienation and there are quite alot of hats in it. It's billed as a satire, but of what? Neighbours are hell, and Randy Newman got it right about short people? Ben Stiller's underrated 1996 film The Cable Guy has a much darker portrait of friendship and blackmail delivered chillingly by Jim Carrey, the best thing he's ever done.

On a wall there's a poster of a theatrical performance starring Karen Carpenter, which led to thoughts that reports of the death of the seventies superstar may have been greatly exaggerated.

Best moment of the piece, the blinking marmoset-type creatures in the zoo created by Matthew Walker's animation, and out of the corner of my eye the sight of Samuel West resting his head on his partner's shoulder seeming as close to sleep as Short Woman was as far.

The programme notes interestingly that Nocturnal was originally commissioned by The Royal Court, but didn't play there.