Off-WEST END
REVIEWS
ROYAL COURT THEATRE
Sloane Square, SW1
TWO VENUES: Theatre 'Upstairs' &
Theatre 'Downstairs'
BOX OFFICE: (020) 7565
5000
JARWOOD THEATRE -
UPSTAIRS
DISCONNECT
by Anupama Chandrasekhar
At the Royal Court Theatre
Upstairs playing until 20 March
Free
Outgoing was a fine British debut that took us to India for a couple of hours.
It was such a hit in this space that it received subsequent promotion to the
larger Downstairs Theatre as well.
Unlike
so many writers who pour everything into their first work, Anupama
Chandrasekhar has managed to repeat the trick with an intelligent but very
witty play set in the writer's hometown of Chennai.
Disconnect
could well be regarded as the last word in theatre about that much maligned
phenomenon, the Indian call centre, which has in one sense practically turned
Chennai into the 52nd State of the American Union.
It
puts the spotlight on BlitzTel, an Indian operation
that provides collection services for an American credit card company, the
ironically named True Blue.
BlitzTel is not performing well enough and reacts badly to
the threat of losing its contract to a Filipino rival. This feeds down to the
staff so that the opening sees loyal but ageing Avinash,
sympathetically portrayed by Paul Bhattacharjee
redeployed from "New York" to "Illinois", in this strange
virtual world where so many of the staff live double lives.
The
best example is cool Ross (Roshan to his mum and
dad). This maverick with a perfect American accent finds his scripts both boring
and ineffective so ploughs his own furrow, convincing himself that he is more
American than the real thing. This makes him the team's super-salesman but does
not endear the youngster to his new boss.
If
he is the wild star, then his colleagues, lovelorn Vidya/Vicky
and gauche Giri/Gary played by Ayesha Dharker and Neet Mohan also make
their mark in building up a comprehensive vision of the pressures that working
on the nightshift at a Chennai call centre can impose. The cast are helped in
doing so by a flexible design from John Napier, which allows us to view office
life in the round.
Under
the direction of Indhu Rubasingham,
Miss Chandrasekhar shines the spotlight on this sometimes shady industry. In
doing so, she makes some enlightening if oblique observations about the
generation gap today and the exportation of these dirty jobs to cheaper
countries.
She
goes further, exploring the aspirations that keep these workers going in the
modern equivalent of the old Madras sweatshops and the (im)morality of finance companies that pour money on to
customers then persecute them if they are unable to pay their debts.
Disconnect
is a thoroughly modern comedy that can at times be chilling and through its
three young callers and their frustrated supervisor makes one think afresh
about the people who pester you in the comfort of your own home, one hopes only
trying to sell to our readers, not collect from them.
This
excellent play deserves to follow its predecessor down those flights of stairs
to be seen by a much larger audience.
Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet
Magazine
JARWOOD THEATRE -
DOWNSTAIRS
Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet
Magazine
]
DONMAR WAREHOUSE
Earlham Street
WC2
BOX OFFICE:0870 060 6624 (No booking
fee)
SERENADING LOUIE
Now
playing at the Donmar Warehouse until March 27th, 2010
Serenading Louie by
American playwright Lanford Wilson is an odd choice
for the Donmar considering it concerns a time, a place, and 4 people whose
predicament would, I think, baffle a British audience.
Can a contemporary London
audience relate to 4 very conservative, unthinking Americans in domestic misery
in suburban Chicago in early 1970? I strongly doubt it.
The play involves the
lives of 2 couples, married 30 somethings in the
decade after the swinging 60’s, who unfortunately didn’t.
Richard Nixon is in the White House, the Vietnam War after more than a decade
is finally grinding to a withdrawal of American troops, Women’s lib is
gripping everyone’s consciousness, the civil rights movement is in full
swing and peace loving, flower-power hippies are everywhere. Oh, and Mayor
Daley is still running Chicago. All of this has passed these two couples by,
with the exception of Mayor Daley’s government machine, on the periphery
of which one of the husbands works as a lawyer.
The characters in Lanford Wilson’s play are defined by the era and
place in which they lived. Growing up in America in the 40’s, 50’s
and 60’s would have placed them among the most affluent, most physically
comfortable and most privileged humans who had ever lived on earth. The
resulting sense of entitlement was and is exaggerated by the child centricity
of American culture. Childhood, High School, School Proms, Halloween,
Christmas and all of that indulgence has created generations of Americans many
of whom want to remain children forever. In the first scene one of the wives
complains that Halloween isn’t what it used to be. Well, of course it
isn’t. She is thirty something, not six and a
half. This is a state of mind that I fear a British audience would find
quite impossible to understand.
The protagonists are the
same age as the playwright, born too soon to be part of the huge tidal wave of
change that was the 70’s. In their 30’s at the beginning of
the decade, they missed the sexual revolution by a decade and were already
domesticated before protesting became the thing to do. The frustrations of this
generation must have been enormous, particularly if they were of a conservative
turn of mind.
The two un-liberated
wives, Gabrielle, Charlotte Emmerson, and Mary,
Geraldine Somerville, talk with the timbre and cadence of children. Both
actresses have got this just right. They hover in that purgatory for women who
are not allowed to be adults. Gaby is so boring to her husband that he
has lost all interest in her, which only serves to make her sad, cloying
behaviour even worse. Mary is alleviating the tedium of her life with an affair
with a business associate of her husband. Who else would she meet?
Her husband, Carl, Jason O’Mara, was a BMOC (big man on campus) football
hero who has never got over it. He has idealised domesticity and has no means
of grasping why or how it has all gone awry. Alex, Jason Butler Harner, Gaby’s lawyer husband, is making a go at
leading a grown up life with the impediment of finding his home life
unbearable.
While the world is being
turned upside down around them, these four are wallowing in their own strange
world, looking forward to Christmas and wondering why “nothing is an
event any more.” Playwright Wilson
doesn’t intrude the outside world into their suburban lives. The only
reference to what was going on in the early 1970’s is a reference to how
irritating hippies are.
This is very strange and
doesn’t serve to make the characters very interesting. Or, as the American sitting next to me said, believable. In
an era when everyone was politically tuned in, these four are totally tuned
out.
The set is clever but
wrong. There is an allusion to Carl’s having
made investments in property, shopping malls and the like. There is only one
set, a middle income tract house, with the front door leading directly into the
living room, which would have been inappropriate for either couple. This is
Chicago, not California. The designer is Peter McKintosh.
The performances are
across the board superb. Simon Curtis’ direction cannot be faulted.
It’s the play that’s the problem. And it’s not that it is a
bad play. It’s well constructed with lots of very revealing dialogue about
the state of mind of the protagonists. The problem is,
does anybody care.
Reviews by Judith M.
Steiner for Theatreworld Internet Magazine Internet Magazine
THE YOUNG VIC
66 The Cut
SE1
BOX OFFICE: 020 7928
6363
SWEET NOTHINGS
by Arthur Schnitzler, in a version by David Harower
Now playing until 10 April
Arthur
Schnitzler is best known for a masterpiece, La Ronde
that became The Blue Room, though the publicity material tells us that he also
wrote the work that became Stanley Kubrick's Eyes Wide Shut.
David
Harrower has now created a modern version of another fin de siècle
Viennese tale of passion, which turns into a play of two halves in Luc Bondy's imaginatively staged production.
Bondy and his designer, Karl-Ernst Herrmann present the
drama on a circular platform raised about 5 feet above the ground,
intermittently revolving and then almost imperceptibly.
Before
the interval, this is the colourful, untidy apartment of Tom Hughes' Fritz, a
handsome if anguished young rake with a conscience.
For
the second half, it is turned into the chaste, white bedroom of his devoted
teenage love, Christine played by Kate Burdette.
The
plot is deceptively simple. Fritz and his wild comrade, Jack Laskey's infuriating Theodore, party with sweet Christine
and her more worldly-wise friend Mitzi, played with deft skill by Anne Boleyn
from The Tudors, Natalie Dormer.
The
high octane sex scene is just reaching a peak when a mysterious stranger
arrives, turning everyone's world upside down.
He
is the husband of a woman with whom Fritz is two-timing Christine and the only
solution for her honourable lover is that favourite Viennese pastime, a duel.
So
far so good, as the time races by in the style on which the playwright built
his risqué reputation.
After
the break, the maudlin deserted young girl somehow senses her fate and reacts
with extreme consequences. The pacing slows and while Miss Burdette bears her
soul in a deeply felt performance, we learn little that is meaningful other
than the fact that young love is often unrequited and its loss hurts like hell.
To
intensify the atmosphere in this phase, Herrmann presents a wide range of often
highly affecting lighting changes, while the music becomes as anachronistic as
some of the language, eventually favouring jazz.
By
the end, you just wish that David Sibley as her morose father, a prim family
friend played with exemplary disapproval by Hayley Carmichael or anyone else
would slap the hysterical young woman.
Surely
this is all that would be required to bring back her senses before she loses
them forever over a man who cared for her but only as a second choice?
In
conclusion, there is some worthy acting and the production looks good but the
plot feels dated and it is hard to be persuaded that Sweet Nothings is worth
the effort that has gone into its revival.
Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet
Magazine
SOHO THEATRE &
WRITER'S CENTRE
21 Dean Street
London W1
BOX OFFICE: (020) 7478
0100
(24 hrs - no booking
fee)
Reviews by Lucy Popescu for Theatreworld Internet Magazine
JERMYN STREET STUDIO
THEATRE
16b Jermyn Street
(off Lower Regent Street)
BOX OFFICE: 020 7287
2875
For more details or individual advice/help - email: GPowner@aol.com