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ROYAL COURT THEATRE

Sloane Square, SW1

TWO VENUES: Theatre 'Upstairs' & Theatre 'Downstairs'

BOX OFFICE: (020) 7565 5000

www.royalcourttheatre.com

 

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

 

 

 

OFF THE ENDZ

by Bola Agbaje

 

now playing at the Royal Court Theatre Downstairs until March 13th

 

Anyone seeing Off The Endz, Bola Agbaje's debut in the Royal Court's premier space, must surely wonder whether there are really any people like David, the maniacal petty gangster around whom the story is built.

 

An impressive Ashley Walters plays a man who believes that the world owes him whatever he needs and does his best to make an irredeemably evil character seem lovable.

 

Having been released from prison, David's primary goal seems to be to get his return ticket in record time, that is if a bullet doesn't prevent him.

 

Even if Davids exist, surely his childhood sweetheart Lorraine Burroughs' Sharon and their best friend, now her partner, Kojo played by Daniel Francis, would run a mile rather than humouring such a poisonous personality.

 

In the play, pregnant Sharon invites David into their super-stylish, minimalist home, designed with great flair by Ultz. He lazes around, insults, assaults and tries to break the couple up but still inexplicably, they persevere with him.

 

The upwardly mobile couple may be struggling to take the next rung up life's ladder, in part it is suggested because they are Black, but even so, it is hard to see Kojo's motivation when he spends the deposit on their new home to set his old pal up as a drugs baron.

 

Some comedy arrives courtesy of a trio of teeny gun-toting punks who object to the cuckoo in their nest but also overtones of the fear that now exist on many London streets.

 

In the early scenes, David enjoys the kind of experiences familiar to David Mamet's Edmond, much to the amusement of the audience. As the play develops, his personality takes over not only his supposed friends with disastrous consequences but also a play that becomes too predictable.

 

The intention behind this play might well have been to make us consider whether dropping out of the system is as valid as conforming. However, it asks the question without offering too many answers despite Jeremy Herrin’s slick production.

 

It is rare to leave a theatre disappointed that a play's protagonist did not catch the bullet directed at his gullible friend but that was the overwhelming feeling at the close of this 75 minute exploration of self-indulgent schadenfreude.

 

Bola Agbaje has already made a big impression Upstairs at this theatre with Gone Too Far and more recently, when the excellent Detaining Justice played at the Tricycle.  This time around, while the idea of exploring gun power on London’s streets is good, the delivery fails to make this critic suspend disbelief.

 

 

Reviews by Philip Fisher for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

 

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DONMAR WAREHOUSE

Earlham Street

WC2

BOX OFFICE:0870 060 6624 (No booking fee)

www.donmarwarehouse.com

 

 

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

www.youngvic.org

 

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)

www.sohotheatre.com

 




 

Reviews by Lucy Popescu for Theatreworld Internet Magazine

 

 


JERMYN STREET STUDIO THEATRE

16b Jermyn Street

(off Lower Regent Street)

BOX OFFICE: 020 7287 2875

www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk

 


 

 

For more details or individual advice/help - email:  GPowner@aol.com