My Brilliant Friend Parts One and Two – National Theatre

The page to stage transfer can be a tricky process and in the last few years The National Theatre has been at the forefront of a wave of inventive and on the whole successful co-produced adaptations of much-loved novels. Their Jane Eyre with The Bristol Old Vic utilised a host of theatrical techniques to dramatise the life of the proto-feminist governess, while last year’s production of Small Island felt significant. Yet the pitfalls are many in the process of removing the interior authorial voice and giving life to the wider  narrative context and characterisation that the novel has the space and capacity to consider in detail. This two-part reworking of Elena Ferrante’s Neopolitian series is much anticipated and, after an acclaimed run at the Rose Theatre Kingston, makes its West End debut at the Olivier Theatre.

Part One summaries Ferrante’s first two novels, My Brilliant Friend from which the show takes its overall title, and The Story of a New Name with around 85-minutes given over to the content of the first book and 45 to the second. Part Two – which you can see on the same day or on successive evenings – deals with Those Who Leave and Those Who Stay (c. 75 minutes) and The Story of the Lost Child (c.60 minutes) making both a little shorter than their advertised 2 hour and 45 minute run times.

It is undoubtedly an ambitious project to compress a couple of thousand pages of text, a huge cast of characters and 60-years of history into just over 5 hours of theatre, and while sometimes the show feels a little lightweight as it gallops through the incidences of Lenu and Lila’s story, the overall effect successfully conveys the complexities of long-lasting female friendship as well as capturing the undercurrents of violence that form the social structures of Nepalese society, not to mention the aspirational effects of scholastic achievement that run through the novel to create class movement in a period of rapid social and technological change, particularly for women.

People love Ferrante’s work for its psychological authenticity and the almost immersive quality of the writing that instantly pulls the reader into the world and experiences of her characters, vividly creating the nature of life in Naples in the 1950s and 1960s particularly well. Her characters are so well-rounded that no one is wholly good or bad but given depth and perspective that shifts over the long experience of the novels as lives go in opposing directions while opportunities, love affairs and calamities come and go. To bring all this to the stage Melly Still’s reworking of April De Angelis’s adaptation gives the show both a flowing and episodic quality as the interior monologue of the protagonist Elena Greco know as Lenu through whose eyes the reader sees the world entirely in the books, is replaced by fully dramatised scenes that in Part One tip the balance in favour of Lila’s character before restoring Lenu to the centre of her own story in Part Two.

As a result, Lenu becomes more an observer of her brilliant friend’s more vivid life. Events pass rapidly on Soutra Gilmour’s sparse set that (surely) repurposes the fire escapes from Follies to become the balconies and stairwells of the slum area of close habitation that frames the story – an effective approach which captures the bustle and tension of neighbours in close proximity and in which threats of spontaneous violence often erupt. The sparring use of giant wrap-around video screens project images of writing and drawing in Part One as Lila creates The Blue Fairy from which Lenu’s own desire to become a writer stems, while later images of apartment blocks, riots and even static distortion convey the wider social and political atmosphere.

The creation of community where love and hate live side-by-side is one of My Brilliant Friend‘s most interesting achievements in Part One building a strong foundation – as Ferrante does with the novels – for the direction of her protagonists in their simultaneous desperation to escape, control and be consumed by this formational place. It is here that the basis for both women’s future interaction with men are shaped, using Toby Olié’s puppetry to interesting effect to dramatise the violent confrontations that shock but also show the disassociation of the victim. When Lila is raped on her wedding night by her new husband, a puppet dress takes her place in a stylised confrontation while the real Lila lays distraught on the floor – it is powerfully rendered. The later use of puppets to represent children in Act Four feels superfluous and irritatingly twee by comparison.

The choice to make Lenu solely a character and not a narrator is – at least in Part One – an uneasy one, pushing her into the background and simplifying, on the one hand, her role and the intensity of her relationships in the first two novels including downplaying the mixed messaging of Nino. On the other hand, towards the end of the first evening, it does help to mark her transition to writer and chronicler of Naples life. When Niamh Cusack starts to recite text taken directly from Ferrante’s pages at the bookstore launch of Lenu’s first novel, the whole play suddenly comes alive in an entirely different way, arguably marking the point where Lenu finds her voice and a degree of independence from Lila that will shape Part Two which also makes sense as a stage decision. Yet the absence of her authorial perspective in the rest of Part One feels like a loss in what at times becomes a succession of connected scenes rather than an unfolding narrative held firmly and consistently together by Lenu’s controlling hand.

Part Two is considerably more successful and while potentially the earlier production has created the groundwork, it is here that the stage adaptation shows greater confidence in the management of the material and the overarching themes – helped not a little by the proper placement of Lenu at the centre of her own story. The growing discontent she feels as an intellectual woman force by circumstance and patriarchal expectations into the (to her) restrictive roles of wife and mother are really well conveyed, lifting dialogue so recognisably from Ferrante’s third instalment. Likewise, Lenu’s struggle to retain her sense of self and a momentum to keep writing throughout her awkward marriage to fellow academic Pietro well suggests the building pressure and loneliness of a woman who believes she was educated for more.

The third act is also more strikingly political as Still in her duel capacity as director uses the video screens and choroegraphed fight sequences by John Sandeman to evoke the riot at Bruno Soccavo’s factory, aspects of which intrude on Lenu’s growing domestication and seeing the two side by side with Lenu and her family blithely unaware of the violence around them is one of the high points of this production. Likewise, the growing Mafioso-like dominance of the Solaras has the two brothers and their matriarch enter like film noir villains, bathed in shadow and scored with a notable composition that strikingly contrasts with family life.

The skill with which Still combines these two aspects creates a stronger and more consistent narrative flow than Part One that cleverly represents traditional power structures under attack as they are brought under pressure from political activism as well as also the growing demands of female intellectual recognition. And Jon Nicholls sound design and music choices are integral to the context of the piece, playing snatches of era-defining songs at crucial moments to facilitate scene changes but also to rapidly relocate the action to a different year or decade creating instant recognition for the audience of the mood of the times and the individual characters at any given moment.

Across the four acts of this two-part drama, the changing friendship of Lila and Lenu is the strength of My Brilliant Friend and while this is at the expense of depth among the supporting cast, creating only impressionistic portraits of everyone else, the charting of an enduring but never smooth experience of female companionship and solidarity is rare enough sight on any stage. In many ways the story improves with Lila’s absence – an unpopular opinion perhaps – but the character never quite holds the allure her author originally ascribed to her, while Lenu’s trajectory was always far more interesting on the page even when she doubted her own value.

Niamh Cusack plays Lenu across the many decades of the story taking her from the gauche pre-teen playing with dolls to the assured author in her 60s, and while the concept of adults playing children usually means squeaky voices and plenty of exaggerated gurning, Cusack avoids all of that to make her youthful Elena studious and innocent, vastly overshadowed by her glamorous friend. But as the years pass, Cusack brings a growing strength to the performance that captures the Lenu we know from the books, navigating her way through domestic upheavals while reacting to the changes affecting Naples and the wider world that drive her own desire to commentate on it as well as enhance her education. As our narrator, Lenu is highly sympathetic and Cusack sustains the momentum well across more than five hours of theatre, an impressive performance and no mean feat given she is in almost every scene.

Katherine McCormack conveys the fiery aspects of Lila as she chooses a path that is ultimately far more treacherous than her friend’s. But Lila is a hard character to like, she’s largely dismissive, aggressive and at times self-pitying, making decisions that deliberately wound Lenu, so in the play’s more simplified approach its difficult to believe – as Lenu’s husband Pietro points out – that the pair could have remained friends for so long. McCormack captures the relentlessness of Lila’s life and the extent to which decisions that shape her are beyond her control leaving her with very few moments of real happiness, but across the many hours of the play the character’s attitudes and slightly dramatic style of speech are remarkably unvarying, giving McCormack little to work with.

A similar pruning happens across the sub-characters too, a necessity to bring this complex set of novels to the stage, and although well-acted across the cast, it does loosen some of the emotional undercurrents present in Ferrante’s work. Ben Turner’s Nino has far less presence here and while Turner suggests his charm there’s none of the charismatic intensity of long-held romantic or political passion for which Lila and Lenu risk both their marriages, while Mary Jo Randle’s mother to Lenu is primarily a comedy character transposed to generic northern housewife that gives little time to the substantial psychological influence Immacolata has on every aspect of her daughter’s life and the significance of Lenu’s determination to make her own decisions.

Part Two is a little more satisfying in construction and flow than Part One largely because Lenu is much more in focus in the second half, but the five and a half hours essentially fly by. This page to stage adaptation should largely please fans of the Neapolitan series, finally seeing much loved characters brought to life in this interesting way, although some may feel the breadth of this world compressed into two plays is at the cost of emotional and narrative depth within the subplots. Nonetheless its hard not to be impressed by the achievement of this two part production of My Brilliant Friend, and its interesting techniques to imagine the vast world of Ferrante’s novels.

My Brilliant Friend Parts One and Two are at the National Theatre until 22 February with tickets from £15 per show. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog   

Dear Evan Hansen – Noel Coward Theatre

In a very strong year for musical theatre with big revivals and plenty of brand new shows opening in the West End it can be difficult to stand out, especially for young performers looking to establish a career with their first break-out role. But the heralding of a great new talent of any age is always big news and it’s comforting to know that while audiences flock to see their favourite established stars – and this year Jason Donovan, Sheridan Smith, Katherine McPhee and Bonnie Langford have returned to the London stage – important leading roles are still given to graduates fresh from drama school where exceptional performances can set them on the road to a glittering career.

Jac Yarrow’s Joseph was lauded by critics and audiences alike when he all but stole the show from his famous co-stars, instantly everyone knew his name and the show returns to The Palladium next summer. Over at the Noel Coward, the UK premiere of the American smash-hit musical Dear Evan Hansen may well do the same for some of its young cast, several of whom are making their professional debut in one of the year’s most anticipated productions. Benj Pasek and Justin Paul are the musical theatre force behind hit films La La Land and The Greatest Showman that have arguably done more to modernise and popularise the genre than any other musicians and lyricists of the last five years, creating a cult following that is about to translate to the London stage. What sets Dear Evan Hansen apart is its status really as the first major musical of the social media age.

Where other shows have integrated smart phone and tablet technology into their stories as accessories, plot devices and sometimes staging techniques, Dear Evan Hansen is really the first musical to utilise and comment on the blurring of the boundaries between public and private that our 24/7 exposure to social media has engendered. The creation of online personas, communication channels and engagement is sewn in to every aspect of the show, it drives the plot as the protagonist accidentally unleashes an internet storm he struggles to contain but it also filters through to the way the show is staged, how characters are shown to interact to one another and to the bigger themes that Pasek, Paul and book writer Steven Levensen explore.

Over the course of its 2 hours and 45 minutes, those themes are shown to be increasingly complicated as our muddy relationship with the online world we simultaneously feed and resent is not as straightforward as it appears. So while the show initially looks set to vilify social media and its poisonous influence on image and expectations of behaviour, in fact the writers suggest a far more intriguing proposition, one which argues that it is the characters’ (and our) misuse of these platforms that has become so detrimental. So, even an attempted good deed can rapidly spin out of control. And this is one of Dear Evan Hansen’s most accomplished tricks, to let the audience think that they are watching a slightly cliched High School drama in which a lonely, nerdy 17-year old will transform into a beautiful swan. Instead, the writers take the story quite quickly in an unexpected direction.

Yet, for all its modern credentials, Pasek, Paul and Levensen know that musical theatre is all about human connection, that their technological framework is a structure for examining the ways in which families, friends and strangers interact with one another and the emotional ramifications of those relationships. Dear Evan Hansen is chirpy and fun, it bounces along with archetypal characters and occasionally outlandish scenarios as events unfold, and the creative team clearly enjoy playing with the multimedia staging techniques, but it never distracts them from the basis of the genre, focusing always on the personal examination of isolation, loneliness and self-acceptance at that crucial transition stage from child to adulthood.

Musicals may have a mixed reputation but their popularity resides in their ability to showcase complex or heightened emotional states in a single song, whereas a playwright might struggle to express the same in pages of dialogue or even an entire play. They have a unique ability to affect audience responses to the story through music – something which filmmakers know well and a carefully composed score can do as much as the actors to shape the mood of the piece. The songs in Dear Evan Hansen are a very modern mix of pop-influenced styles rather than the more traditional musical theatre melodies that take their lead from classical music and are more typical of the West End stalwarts. Increasingly, musical writers are looking to fresher, diversified styles to capture a different audience but the choices here also suit the age and personality of the characters they are writing for.

At the heart of this show is the perspective of four teenagers, Evan himself, the hapless and lonely protagonist, Connor whose early (unseen) suicide shocks the production out of its generic High School trajectory and drives the plot, Jared who conspires with Evan to lie to the world and Alana who becomes the self-nominated guardian of Connor’s digital memory project – all played by performers making their professional or West End debut.  Against a backdrop of tweets and Instagram posts, designed by Peter Nigrini and projected all over David Korins very simple set of stationary flies that cut up the large space to create intimate rooms including Evan’s bedroom and the Murphy family home, the character interactions take place both in person and on social media platforms demarcated on the stage in different ways.

Sitting on their laptops, each of the teenagers is shown in a separate projected frame that looks like a smartphone screen as they Facetime each other while updated feeds scroll behind them. When Evan makes his big speech at Connor’s memorial and when Alana updates the blog with new information, TV screens – sparingly used – project their words around the auditorium to represent the hundreds of people viewing the vlog online. But Nigrini also distorts some of these images, making them look warped as they project across different levels of set when the lie takes on a momentum of its own, with strangers reposting, commenting and offering faux sentiment on individuals they have never met.

At other points Nigrini emphasises the power of words that are the building blocks of social media, with text from Evan’s original letter with pertinent words picked out in bold projected across the whole stage, showcasing the starting point for all the ensuing madness and a reminder of the character’s own pre-existing personal desperation, mistaken for Connor’s, and now engulfed in an internet frenzy. When all of that dies down to focus on the Murphy’s grief or other moments of intimacy, the stage can look a little too empty yet the entire effect that director Michael Greif creates is an astute understanding of the pressures that our online presence can create not just for mental health and wellbeing, but also the ultimate emptiness of that outpouring of platitudes and sympathy expressed online by strangers after a tragic event who know neither the context or the person involved, especially when the object of their faux sentiments was previously overlooked and ignored. And while the outcome is a positive memory of Connor, what does it say about our society that his death means more than his life?

This is sure to be a star-making role for lead actor Sam Tutty who will undoubtedly be the one to face the press this week, but Alternate Evan Marcus Harman who assumed the part for this performance deserves as much recognition. In some ways Evan is  a classic teenage role, an outsider desperate to find a place in the confusing school hierarchy and, with divorced parents, grappling with self-confidence issues as he tries to work out who he is. Harman plays the occasionally stuttery and bemused Evan extremely well, charting his increasing panic and befuddlement as the depth and speed of his small white lie eclipses his entire life.

But Harman also shows an Evan emerging from solitude and using his storytelling ability to create on one level a false persona as Connor’s secret best friend who becomes a school star, yet underneath a more confident young adult starts to break through, finally able to vocalise his anger towards his often absent mother and start to accept his own sense of purpose. Some of his fellow characters are more impressionistic but Harman makes Evan likable and a credible adoptee for the Murphy family who fulfill his own yearning for traditional parenting and stability. Harman also sings well, his powerful voice conveying all those mixed teenage emotions to the back of the auditorium  in solos including ‘Waving Through a Window’ and ‘Words Fail.’ Tutty may get the press night glory but if you see Harman’s performance you won’t be disappointed.

Playing his classmates are a fellow group of debutantes who bring plenty of colour to the supporting cast. Jack Loxton as non-friend Jared is primarily a comedy sidekick who helps Evan to forge emails supposedly from Connor, and Loxton’s sharp timing adds much to the performance. Doug Colling as Connor has a larger role than you might think despite his early demise, becoming a conscience for Evan as well as his own personification in the brilliant ‘Sincerely Me’ with Jared and Evan. Finally Nicole Raquel Dennis as Alana goes from barely remembering Connor in her English or chemistry class to Co-President of his memorial website and guardian of his legacy. We discover little about her as a person but her purpose as the human face of the media storm is pertinent and well conveyed by Dennis, at once earnestly self-perpetuating and hungry for revelation while jealously guarding the right to control and determine the right kind pf public response.

Lucy Anderson as love interest Zoe and Connor’s sister belongs more to the family sections and marks Evan growth away from his teenage life and it is a solid debut from Anderson who offers more grit than many female characters in such roles. The adult are more in the background of the drama but there are some touching moments with Rupert Young’s Larry Murphy whose contained grief and cynicism sympathetically crumbles as he gets to know his son Connor (or thinks he does) through Evan and there is a subtle and sweetly played connection with Harman. Lauren Ward as Connor’s mother Cynthia suggests all the hope of a parent unable to come to terms with the loss of a child, while Rebecca McKinnis as Evan’s harassed mum Heidi does just enough in a small role to give context to Evan’s original plight as well as shaming him enough to propel the conclusion.

There are aspects of Dear Evan Hansen that perhaps don’t quite work, the style and lyrics are often quite saccharine, while the overarching story could easily shed a couple of numbers with no material effect on the plot that would help to neaten the running time especially towards the end of Act Two with several story strands to conclude – the depth of some of the wider characterisation perhaps not deserving of so many solos and reprises. But it’s dark and miserable outside – both politically and seasonally – so why actively resist the charms of this feel-good story. The close integration and self-enforcing completeness of story and technology makes this truly the first responsive musical of the social media age with a number of excellent break-out performances. So email, tweet, Instagram and Facebook all your friends and RSVP to Dear Evan Hansen’s message to us all -#youwillbefound.

Dear Evan Hansen is at the Noel Coward Theatre until 2 May 2020 with tickets from  £15. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog   

The Beauty Queen of Leenane – The Tower Theatre

With two West End shows last year, Martin McDonagh is also back in vogue on the fringe as two productions of his early play The Beauty Queen of Leenane  opened in London within a week of each other, one at the Queen’s Theatre, Hornchurch and the second at the new home of The Tower Theatre Company in Stoke Newington. McDonagh’s very particular brand of black comedy, at once cartoonish in its characterisation with undertones of violence, is skillfully balanced with an affecting pathos, bringing out the play’s central themes of mental illness, Irish identity and the broken dreams of youth that irreparably change the lives of the Folan family.

The Tower Theatre company has existed for more than eight decades but this inaugural seasons at its new permanent venue is clearly setting a standard for the future with well received productions of Terry Johnson’s Dead Funny and Noel Coward’s Blithe Spirit for Halloween, with Sam Holcroft’s Rules for Living concluding the autumn season in the run-up to Christmas. With a focus on comedy so far, this third production The Beauty Queen of Leenane seems perfectly suited to the intimacy of the Tower Theatre auditorium where the stationary setting of the Folan family kitchen feels warm and intimately inviting, belying the ferocity of resentment between mother and daughter.

With the exception of the awful A Very Very Very Dark Matter, McDonagh draws his characters in full bloodied glory, they are inherently comic in behaviour, attitudes, circumstance and language yet they never realise the degree of their own folly. And McDonagh’s gift for social observation makes them both tangible representations of recognisable archetypes and grounded enough to endure credible emotional experiences that sustain the drama of the story.

Here, the central character Maureen is overshadowed by her demanding and only partially lucid mother who sits in a rocking chair demanding cups of tea, bowls of porridge and regular doses of Complan. Instantly we note a long-established scenario, a routine of dependency and expectation between two women who long ago came to terms with their personal shackles. The drama emerges from the ways in which McDonagh upsets that dynamic by bringing back childhood love Pato (who has been working in England) to give mother and daughter a simultaneous hope and fear of what a new and very different future could hold for them both.

The obsession with the long effect of the past and how it shapes the very basis and structure of village life is at the heart of McDonagh’s play in which several characters explore the effects of some kind of loss in earlier years that continues to afflict and limit their current lives. In Colette Dockery’s production there is a sense of the characters being frozen in time, with only memories of a better era and fantasies of what life might have been to give them comfort.

There is a notion – as you find in Brian Friel’s work – of past and future colliding, of a rural, confined Ireland clashing with the urban possibilities of the city and often of overseas migration. While both Maureen and Pato cling to a romantic memory of their teenage love for one another and seek to reclaim an opportunity they once lost to be together, the characters also symbolise the very different paths open to young people to either remain in their communities and become their parents or to move away – even to the dreaded shores of England – where they can shake-off the traditions and expectations of their families.

The tragedy of McDonagh’s play lies in the essential inability to reconcile Pato’s symbolic role as both past and future which is strongly conveyed in Dockery’s interpretation; to Maureen her romantic longing for Pato is an escape from the drudgery of her daily life as virtual slave to her mother’s whims, yet the reality of the man she yearns for and his true nature and life beyond the village barely occurs to her. Even after their night together and when the possibility of moving to Boston is raised by letter, Maureen speaks of it in fantasy terms, as though imagining something that will never be just as she had earlier goaded her mother about similar daydreams that she enjoys to wile away the hours on the farm.

There are other smaller moments pertaining to the same theme; neighbour Ray bemoans the loss of a swing ball set as a child and continues to feel the same degree of anger at its loss while Mother Mag complains about the petty long-held grudges held by the people in the area. The claustrophobic setting of the kitchen in the small Tower Theatre space easily suggests both the limited daily activity that creates a disproportionate primacy of domestic matters for a place in which very little else happens, and the emphasis on local tradition and expectation that maintains this particular way of life regardless of the occasional intrusion of the outside world – the final scene in which the old ways reassert themselves by claiming the next generation is a strong and meaningful conclusion to this production.

McDonagh also plays with our expectations about age and mental health using the character of Mag as both the play’s anchor around which much of the action circulates, allowing her to force some of the plot developments by choosing to destroy and conceal crucial information from her daughter. In this Tower Theatre production the sympathies and expectations subtly shift between the characters and while it is Mag who initially seems to be the most troubled due to her age, relative infirmity and total reliance on her daughter for sustenance, Dockery shows us not only how calculated Mag can be but that it is, in fact, Maureen whose grasp of reality is challenged by the events of the play, a sympathetic tragedy that has tones of A Streetcar Named Desire full of the unfulfilled sexuality of a woman on the cusp of middle age.

And much of this is shaped by the failure of communication within The Beauty Queen of Leenane which has to retain its early 1990s setting to allow the stunted transfer of information to retain its credibility. Phillip Ley’s set is a aged farm kitchen, still welcoming and cosy but far from its best, even a tad deprived with features that wouldn’t have been updated for many decades. The story depends on the failure of communication where letters are intercepted and destroyed before the addressee can read them, and Ley ensures there are no phones or other means of contact with the outside world – except an old TV on which only Australian soaps of the era (The Sullivans and A Country Practice) are shown while Mag waits for the news that never comes. The almost Beckettian purgatory situates the play in a very particular time period while opening-up the possibility of mix-up and failure that Dockery shows is both farcical and tragic.

Part of the creation of this world comes through the language that McDonagh employs for each of the characters, often using dialect to develop a rapid back and forth with characters firing lines at one another as the tension builds. Dockery’s control of the changing tensions within the play uses the rhythm and cadence of McDonagh’s dialogue to great effect as the plot weaves between bitter exchanges between mother and daughter, to a sweet love scene between Maureen and Pato in the second section, building to the wistful devastation of the finale. None of this ever takes away from or undermines the sharpness of McDonagh’s black comedy resulting in a production that is both wickedly funny and quietly moving.

Amanda Waggott ages-up to play the troublesome Mag, a seemingly confused and demanding 70 year old incapable of taking care of herself, but there is a purposeful cruelty beneath the surface in Waggott’s performance, a sense that Mag is manipulating those around her at every point rather than genuinely requiring their care. There is a touch of Mrs Overall on occasion, but Waggott conveys a sense of Mag’s surface identity, using her physical frailty to hide a calculating streak that wants to hold on to her daughter’s attention at all cost, yet when Mag complains of Maureen’s ill treatment and abusive behaviour there is ambiguity over whether she’s telling tales or telling the truth.

Julia Flatley is a superb Maureen in a complex role that changes considerably across the course of the play taking the character from disgruntled carer and farm hand to tragic heroine whose grasp of reality is shattered by her proximity to true love. Flatley makes Maureen largely sympathetic, a woman trapped in her own life watching from the sidelines as her sisters and former love depart for new lives beyond the village and hopelessly resenting the care of her mother, circumstances which credibly underscore her own viciousness. The joy at seeing Pato again visibly lights her up and Flatley is particularly good in the moments between the expression of this fantastical happiness and the grim reality of Maureen’s existence, twisting the knife  by parading her good fortune in front of her mother. As Maureen is driven to desperation to cling to that fleeting future, Flatley’s performance of the collapse of those illusions becomes both violent and full of emotional intensity, it’s pure Tennessee Williams.

The male characters in McDonagh’s play are mere ciphers for the final breakdown of the relationship between the Folans. Nick Cannon as Pato develops a great chemistry with Flatley that suggests the desperate longing and long-held passion between two people finally coming together, but Cannon adds a hint of indecision, of a man keeping his options open that makes the play’s final blows so savage. Simon Brooke is very funny as local Ray, the messenger of the story whose choices determine the fate of the two women at the centre. Brooke’s Ray is an innocent in many ways, unaware of the role he’s playing – and being maneuvered into – yet through his conversations with Mag emphasises some of the themes of national identity, community and tradition that suffuse McDonagh’s work.

The energy in this production dips very slightly in the final third in the run-up to the more confident conclusion and the silent black out of the fairly speedy scene changes – which are difficult to avoid on a static set – do interrupt the flow and there may be a way to imagine a neater transition from one to the next. Yet the skill with which this production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane has been developed clearly demonstrates a theatre company with a revitalised energy, settling into its new home with a six-month season of classic and relatively new plays that show a level of ambition on which the company is determined to deliver.

The Beauty Queen of Leenane is at the Tower Theatre until 16 November with tickets from £11. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog   

Ghost Quartet – Boulevard Theatre

The first show in a new theatre is both intriguing and exciting; for an audience member it is a chance to see a new space, to understand its possible configuration while assessing its comfort, sight-lines and to an extent its style. With new theatres popping up all the time, there’s a feeling of change across theatreland and a focus on big commercial venues including a new Nimax build by Tottenham Court Road Station and a second theatre for Nicholas Hytner at King’s Cross. And while there is a cost to some smaller venues like The Bunker which has announced permanent closure in the Spring, others like the King’s Head and Southwark Playhouse are also heading to new purpose-built venues. Somewhere in between is the new Boulevard Theatre, a classy, intimate space in the heart of once-seedy Soho which held its first press night last week for inaugural production Ghost Quartet.

In an area still undergoing extensive corporate redevelopment, this new theatre is a stylish and very comfortable addition to the West End landscape. Complete with a bar and restaurant all modishly decked in pink surfaces and rainforest wallpaper, the auditorium itself is an intimate space arranged in the round for its first unveiling. A central floorspace of burnished copper acts as the stage, with individual chairs – no flip-up stalls here – and an upstairs balcony area with additional seating. In any configuration, the audience will always feel part of the action while the entire concept has a 60s Mad Men vibe that suits the cabaret feel to the opening show.

Ticket prices are fairly reasonable for the area at £24-£36 – down on Shaftesbury Avenue a restricted view in the Balcony would be at least that with the best stalls view now at over a £100 – while the £12 Roulette Ticket scheme is a potential masterstroke if you book early. 10 tickets are available for every performance with seats allocated at random on the day.

Choosing a show to launch your brand new theatre should feel significant, it needs to showcase the facilities, technology and creativity of the artistic team while somehow advocating the brand, what sets it apart from other venues and showing what audiences can expect from the season ahead. But does anyone really remember these first shows with any notability? When the National Theatre launched in 1963 it chose Hamlet, while more recently in 2017 Nicholas Hytner christened the new Bridge Theatre stage with Richard Bean’s Young Marx which opened to warm if not ecstatic reviews but arguably remains the best new play the venue has managed to produce in the subsequent two years.

The Boulevard Theatre has chosen to host the London debut of Dave Malloy’s strange musical Ghost Quartet, and in some ways it is a curious decision. With its fragmented stories and concept-album structure, this is a show that requires the audience to pay attention as several different narratives are woven together, told in a jumbled, mix-up way, out of sequence, and even then you may not be sure exactly what is happening. And while it doesn’t feel like a show you’ll remember much about in a few months time, director Bill Buckhurst marshals the resources of the new venue to create an atmospheric and entertaining experience.

It is the right time of year for a stories of death and remembrance, officially opening on Halloween, Ghost Quartet uses four performers to tell four thematically related stories across 90-minutes. Unusually, the show is conscious of it’s album-like roots, announcing the Side (of which there are of course four) and Track number ahead of every song which has a way of disrupting the rhythm so the audience isn’t drawn too far into any single story, but it also helps to maintain the flow, like chapter headings announcing changes of direction and musical style.

Malloy’s four narrators take on multiple roles throughout the piece, performing as different characters as well as playing all of the music on the instruments that litter the stage. There is no formal scene setting or book, every story is directly created within each ‘track’ so the performers must use the lyrics to conjure the changing locations, settings and scenarios, while moving back and forth between them as Malloy weaves between his various tales.

Most recognisable is a version of Edgar Allan Poe’s The Fall of the House of Usher which recurs throughout Ghost Quartet as Roxie Usher dies after her child is taken from her and her family keep her body in a vault beneath her mother’s bedroom. In a series of songs entitled ‘Usher’, the narrative moves back and forth through time as the seven year old Roxie talks about an imaginary best friend before later returning from the dead. In another strand two sisters Rose Red and Pearl White vie for the affections of The Astronomer who tries to show them both the constellations, but in the third section Rose Red enlist the help of a magic bear (yes really) to kill her love rival but must gather ingredients for a magic potion, while in the final story a young woman named Pearl is pushed onto the tracks at a subway station.

The names Rose and Pearl connects several of these stories, all in some way versions of the same women but interacting with each other differently depending on the narrative. It is sometimes confusing whether it’s the jealous Rose Red in the Astronomer’s story or the young Rose with a camera who sees Pearl’s train track murder who is being referenced and in Buckhurst’s version they are the same performer. But Malloy’s approach is deliberately opaque, making a wider point about the ways in which all human machinations end the same way, in our obsession with death and regret.

On a stage cluttered with musical instruments, furniture and an assortment of junk that reflects the eclectic tone of the piece, Simon Kenny’s design is not so much a set as a studio, albeit one with different layers allowing Buckhurst to vary the height at different points as stories reach crescendo or talk of the stars. Yet, anything that too obviously suggests time, place or character is deliberately held back, the room is a musician’s space not an actor’s one, and despite the busy mass of items that come close to the audience, nothing detracts from the prominence of the song lyrics and storytelling focus. Emphasis is created by Emma Chapman with a lighting design that adds texture to everything from cheery group numbers to haunting solos and dramatic strobe effects during the Poe horror sections.

And perhaps in a clear signal of what to expect from future Boulevard productions, there is an focus on fully interacting with the audience, passing out glasses of whiskey as they sing ‘Four Friends’, a few boxes of percussion instruments to shake in time with the beat during the Side One finale ‘Any Kind of Dead Person’ and a cunning use of people from the front row to actually play instruments in the show’s concluding number ‘The Wind and Rain.’ It’s all done with ease, as though the barrier between performers and viewers barely exists which is usually so hard to achieve in live theatre or even concerts. The space encourages direct involvement the way listening to an album at home feels like a personal experience with the musicians.

Malloy’s musical influences are as eclectic as his narrative ones, and the 23-song soundtrack use a piano, cello, drums and guitar as their base but incorporate all kinds of percussion and other instruments to create sounds as diverse as folk music, ballads, gospel and avant-garde styles amongst others. And despite its disconnected approach, there’s something about Malloy’s combinations that works, it may not always make a lot of sense as a complete experience but it always maintains your interest. There is a lively warmth to the production which despite its subject matter helps you to feel included even when you’re lost in its twists and helps to maintain an energy that drives your investment as it unfolds.

Performers Carly Bawden, Niccolò Curradi, Maimuna Memon and Zubin Varla are hugely talented actor-musicians with the very difficult job of guiding the audience through so many bits of narrative. Together they create the changing atmosphere of Malloy’s songs and it is testament to their skills and performance as a company that they hold this eclectic evening together. They look to Varla – recently seen in the West End transfer of Equus – on the piano to set the tempo who brings a darkness to his role as The Astronomer, with Memon adding a haunting quality as the various Pearl characters, while Bawden adds emotion and occasionally an ethereal quality as the Roses.

Reminiscent of Hadestown a similar concept-album approach that reimagined the song cycle of musical theatre, Ghost Quartet is a interesting experience if not always a satisfying or even a very clear one, so in what has been a very big year for musicals it may be easily forgotten. Malloy’s experimental musical does however take the building blocks of the genre in a new and unusual direction by utilising different music styles and a fragmented structural approach which certainly has presence in the intimacy of this new performance space. If this inaugural show means the new Boulevard Theatre is setting out its stall for a programme of unusually staged and challenging productions in the future then there is every reason to come back soon.

Ghost Quartet is at the Boulevard Theatre until 4 January with tickets from £12. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog