Category: Review

Two plays in the same week featured a mash-up of authors’ works.

LipService’s Mr Darcy Loses The Plot at Theatre Royal Winchester found Austen’s hero leaving Pride And Prejudice to blunder into Daphne du Maurier’s Rebecca, Mrs Gaskell’s Mary Barton and even Beatrix Potter. It was very funny, not least because Austen’s creation has become a staple in subsequent literature, the dark silent hero with a hidden vulnerability.

In London, Menier Chocolate Factory’s production of Tom Stoppard’s Travesties may have hit some higher intellectual targets, such as Leninism, Dadaism and the tricks of memory, but it didn’t quite match the hit rate of laughs achieved by the pair of slick, professional comics that is LipService.

Hardly anything they did was new but, boy, did they do it to perfection. We’ve seen live actors disappear into film projection before but rarely with such perfect timing as when Darcy and Elizabeth move behind the screen to appear seamlessly in the ball and then dance out of it just as smoothly. We’ve seen actors have to change their appearance or actions to match a changing narrative but the gameness and confusion Maggie Fox and Sue Ryding conveyed to the audience was worthy of Morecambe and Wise.

In Travesties too, a faulty memory meant that scenes and characters changed in a dizzying trip into the past. It was 1917 in Geneva when James Joyce, Vladimir Lenin, the founder of Dadaism and a British embassy official, played brilliantly by Tom Hollander, might have met (but actually didn’t). Hollander’s character is the unreliable narrator who misremembers events and mixes them up with The Importance of Being Earnest in which he was cast at the time.

We each have a history and so does art and so does the world. Both plays said much about how we rewrite the plots of our lives and change the meaning of the past and how the strands of our culture are inextricably entwined. And both productions did it with energy, panache and tremendous fun.

I love musicals so why didn’t I love La La Land?

Let me explain why I think musicals are one of the finest art forms. I love the way the story is enhanced and advanced through song and dance. Music and movement bypass the brain and go straight to the heart. They can give you a visceral insight into the feelings of the characters.

You experience the sadness as Desiree sings Send In The Clowns in A Little Night Music. When the Raoul and Christine sing That’s All I Ask of You in The Phantom Of The Opera, you understand their romantic feelings at an emotional level. As the whole company sings One Day More at the end of act one of Les Miserables, you get all the varied feelings of the different characters in a way that would be a babble if it were spoken word and the marchers are so rousing, you could be marching with them.

As for dancing, the joy of being in love has never been communicated better than when Gene Kelly dances Singin’ In The Rain. No sex scene in a film ever conveys how making love feels like Fred and Ginger do when they dance Cheek To Cheek in Top Hat.

Back to La La Land. I was so looking forward to it. The opening sequence when everyone gets out their cars in a Los Angeles traffic jam and dances with joy gave me high hopes. Then… dancing so ordinary from Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone that it lacked any emotion. Any couple that survives the first month on Strictly Come Dancing is likely to be better. I could just imagine Craig castigating them for ‘gapping’ and aimless ‘armography’.

In the old days, they chose singers who could act. Now, in the quest for reality, we favour actors who can sing. That’s okay. It dosen’t matter if musical stars don’t sing like Doris Day or Howard Keel. Elton John, Bob Dylan and more have taught us to appreciate ‘real’ voices. But a weaker singing voice needs character in order to convey feeling. The singing in La La Land is not bad but it never reaches the heights that make the hairs on the back of your neck stand up or tears prick your eyes.

Just because a musical is dominated by song and dance, it doesn’t mean the acting is unimportant. Emma Stone is superb but Ryan Gosling, who is an excellent actor, seemed only to have one expression in this film, namely mild bemusement.

Director Damien Chazelle has made a beautiful tribute to the golden age of the Hollywood musical but it is not a great film musical. The love story about people trying to make it in the entertainment industry and the sacrifices they have to make is involving but not, in my view, enough to merit 14 Oscar nominations.  I can only think the Academy members are showing their usual incestuous love of films about the film industry.

This article was written by Paul Lewis, owner of Seven Experience and marketing consultant to Hampshire Workspace and Theatre Royal Winchester. A version of this article has appeared on the Daily Echo website.

You don’t see a play using a traverse stage for ages and then two come along at once. But Yerma at the Young Vic and Unfaithful at Found111 reminded just how powerful it can be compared to the usual proscenium arch.

Just to remind you, a traverse stage runs the full width of the auditorium with the audience on two sides. Yerma starring Billie Piper not only put the audience on two sides of the stage but encased the acting area in glass. Unfaithful at the temporary Found111 space was in a small room with barely 60 people facing the same number across the stage.

You might think that looking through the action at members of the audience in the opposite seats would be distracting and I guess it could be if the action were not riveting. Fortunately in the case of these two shows, there was no chance of that. Instead you are much more aware that you are part of an audience watching a performance. In this respect, the arrangement is the same as a catwalk fashion show. You feel you are examining what is being presented before you.

The sense of examining the characters and their stories was underlined by Yerma‘s use of glass. Before the play began, for a few moments it was difficult to tell whether you were seeing a reflection of yourself rather than different but very similar people in very similar seats. I fully expected the glass to fly out but it stayed. As a result, I felt I was looking at fish or lizards or some other animal trapped in a tank. This was enhanced by there being no exits for most of the performance (actors entered and exited between scenes under cover of darkness).

The same feeling that you were examining the characters was what made Unfaithful so powerful. This story about an older couple who, bored with their years of marriage and pushed by mid life crises, have liaisions with younger people who themselves are struggling to separate sex and love.

Intimacy is the other characteristic of the traverse stage. With the audience divided in half, we’re all close to the action. Every twitch, every blink is visible. There’s no possibility of an actor taking a rest. Any lack of concentration will be noticed. The kind of actor that says acting is about learning your lines and not bumping into the furniture doesn’t stand a chance in this arena. The good actor who inhabits the part physically and mentally can form the strongest of bonds with the audience, as did the four actors in Unfaithful- Niamh Cusack, Sean Campion, Ruta Gedmintas and my cousin Matthew Lewis.

There is a moment when the husband of Niamh Cusack’s character makes a surprising revelation. We’re as shocked as she is. We know she can’t let her husband realise the full effect on her of what he’s said but we can see the slight widening of the eyes and ripple that goes through her body as she stiffens. On another occasion, Sean Campion rubs his nose. It’s a small gesture easily missed in a large auditorium but it matters because of what was said earlier about him.

Under the magnifying glass of a traverse stage the script and direction also have to be spot on. So full marks to Unfaithful’s Owen McCafferty for a script without a wasted word and Adam Penford‘s direction that filled every moment wherever you looked.