The Fellowship -Hampstead Theatre

Roy Williams has primarily focused on the challenges of working class masculinity in recent years through his extraordinary play cycle the Death of England, a trilogy co-written with Clint Dyer, that became an instant modern classic as friends Michael and Delroy individually set out their experiences before coming face-to-face in the third installment released as a cinematic film. This year though, Williams is looking at the female experience with a rumored fourth monologue for the Death of England, this time for the pivotal Carly who links the friends, and Williams’s contemporary interpretation of Hedda Gabler opening at the Lyric Theatre in the autumn as Heather. But first, female friendship is the focus of his latest play The Fellowship, premiering at the Hampstead Theatre as class, race and past activism haunts this family saga.

Williams is particularly interested in intense friendships between two people, in this case sistsers Dawn and Marcia, and the events or people that come between them. As with Delroy and Michael, the strength of that bond is the focus of the play and how a sense of ‘otherness’ disrupts and sometimes destroys what they all have assumed would be a lifelong association. First, that otherness tends to manifest physically as a rocky relationship with a partner that disrupts the balance between the friends – in the Death of England, Delroy’s tempestuous involvement with Michael’s sister Carly contributes to the breakdown of their friendship, while here in The Fellowship both sisters have questionable love interests, ending up with men that the other despises.

But otherness is also about interactions between race and society, creating fault-lines within these established relationships that are more deeply exposed through the action of the play. Often inherited from a previous generation, Death of England is dominated by Alan’s deeply embedded racism that comes to play an important role in the deterioration of his son’s friendship, culminating in the pivotal concluding scene in Michael’s monologue which then becomes the starting point for Delroy’s. Here, it is Dawn’s vocal condemnation of white power that comes between the sisters and has intriguing personal and professional consequences for them both as former activist Dawn reels from the discovery of her son Jermaine’s relationship with Simone, a white woman she loathes, while Marcia insists she has taken her place as one of the few black barristers to have made silk as Williams uses his 2019 setting to explore whether being in the room is enough and what happened to the fight.

The Fellowship also has its own focus on inheritance and the troubling cost of legacy, looking across three generations of a single family from the absent grandmother of the Windrush generation through Dawn and Marcia’s experience of riots in the 1980s to son Jermaine in 2019. What has each of these generations left for the next is Williams’s focus, what did they achieve for those still to come and what are the mechanisms of inherited trauma? Does each new age pick up the baton from those who came before or – as Williams suggests here – is each generation cast adrift from its predecessor and successor, left to fight its own battles perhaps for its lifetime but with little tangible achievement, wisdom or support to pass on, everyone always starting again.

This notion of estrangement between the generations is a powerful one, played out in two ways, initially between Dawn and the son that she is fiercely protective of but with whom she finds it difficult to communicate. A hidden relationship with someone Dawn disapproves of leads to an important confrontation at a family event in the second half of the play in which Jermaine gives voice to some of the questions that Williams too is grappling with, whether Dawn’s lifelong activism has achieved anything and the legacy that parents are handing to their children – a concern Williams is raising about his own generation who have been shaped by their experience of marches, protests and rioting but wonders about the effect and meaning 40 years on.

But there is an equally important estrangement taking place between Dawn and Marcia and their mother who remains an unseen presence for much of the play, remaining bedridden upstairs and to whom Dawn acts as primary carer. It becomes an important mark of Marcia’s character that she has entirely disassociated from her mother, leaving the responsibility to Dawn who is the one to have an important elemental encounter. It is a strange scene in contemporary theatre but no more unusual than the ghosts of Old Hamlet and Banquo stalking Shakespearean heroes while also an important feature of Caribbean theatre – something Joubert also utilised.

Williams uses the scene to explore the make up of the Windrush generation – always talked about as a block of people – with Sylvia’s stern and detached approach to parenting which affects her daughters’ characters. As well as creating individuality, turning Sylvia into a credible person with aspirations and faults that directly inform the bigger reactionary elements of Dawn’s character and the sober dignity of Marcia’s, Williams also takes the opportunity to note the ending of their story, that this is a moment where the Windrush generation is starting to die out, moving the experience beyond living memory and subtly asking what that means for this particular family as well as dual heritage black British identity.

As with Death of England, class too plays its part in the complex family dynamic and Williams is interested in how two sisters find their relationship dividing along class lines when Marcia’s profession and status move her into a quite different social circle to her sister. And the contention this generates between them underpins many of the troubled conversations they have about the men they are with, family responsibilities they bear as well as the attitudes and responses to expected social behaviours. That Marcia considers herself a cut above is an important part of the dynamic Williams creates and the fall he sets up for them all.

But The Fellowship is primarily a domestic tale taking place in one room over three hours of performance in which the family unit is the primary driver. A drawing room comedy-drama of sorts, Williams spends some time establishing the close bond between the sisters, their shared love of 70s, 80s and 90s pop music and the small rituals that can only emerge from familiarity and love. The play’s dynamic comes from the holes that Williams starts to create as circumstances pit the sisters against one another, causing them to re-evaluate how well they still know one another and the extent to which they have hidden their real selves behind the habits of their friendship in which both play a comfortable but not quite true version of themselves.

In that, Williams is largely successful, generating considerable heat in the succession of conversations around which this play is structured and through which the various plot points (credible or not) advance the story. Arguably, it may not need all of them and the impact of Marcia’s relationship is lessened by the absence of her partner who could never co-exist in her sister’s world which is predominantly the one Williams is interested in. But by extension, the difficulties that Marcia brings in and the way their consequences play out are undermined by the lack of tangibility, harder for the audience to imagine her in what seems like a mythical place beyond Dawn’s living room with individuals we cannot quire grasp.

The character of Dawn is, however, an exciting creation filled with layers of complexity and questions about her identity that explode across The Fellowship. An ordinary woman who thinks she knows herself and her place in the world, Dawn’s outward bravado and ferocity is underpinned by deep vulnerability as she attempts to reconcile what her life and relationships amount to. How have her role as a mother, partner and sister eroded her sense of self and does her provocative response to most issues stem from a concern that she is no longer in the fight to the extent that she once was, or perhaps the fear that it amounted to very little and her life is as conventional as anyone else’s.

Part of the issue for Dawn stems from being unable to admit who she really is, her hotheaded reactions to perceived instances of white oppression at odds with her secret music tastes filled with white musicians from the Bee Gees to Kylie and Take That – a device Williams uses throughout the show to examine the public / private division in Dawn, the elements she shares with her sister and how much of herself she truly understands, leading to a process of discovery across the events depicted.

Cherrelle Skeete, who stepped into the role at very short notice, finds all of these contradictions within the character, offering a remarkable performance given how little time the actor has had to prepare for the stage. Skeete is caustic but warm, making Dawn someone you would want to keep on side, a great friend if she likes you but a terrible adversary if she doesn’t. This is Dawn’s story and Skeet grasps every moment to sketch out the breadth of this multifaceted woman.

Llewellyn’s Marcia is a contrast, a placid, cool surface with fire beneath, able to command a courtroom and entirely comfortable in the choices she had made for herself. A little comfortable perhaps as a sense of entitlement creeps into her behaviour. Llewellyn creates a woman who both wants her family to think she is the same person that she always was while expecting them to be continually impressed and in awe of her. Ethan Hazzard and Rosie Day are more contextual as Jermaine and Simone rather than fully fleshed out characters. So too is Trevor Laird’s musician boyfriend Tony who is suitably laid back and disengaged to rile Dawn while Yasmin Mwanza as a local police officer and the younger Sylvie makes a great deal of two small roles.

Directed by Paulette Randall on a set dominated by an almost symbolic sweeping staircase designed by Libby Watson, The Fellowship is at its best in the conversations between Dawn and Marcia which Randall paces nicely – particularly given how little rehearsal the actors have had in their present roles. Occasional lags in energy are understandable over a long night and will tighten as the run continued.

If The Fellowship doesn’t quite have the explosive brio and masculine confrontation of the Death of England, that is the difference between the singular voice and a longer, multi-character piece within a family setting with no one decisive event to drive the plot. But Williams’s broader exploration of identity, class and the impossibility of creating and living up to community and family legacy has a quiet power of its own.

The Fellowship is at the Hampstead Theatre until 23 July with tickets from £12. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Mad House – Ambassador’s Theatre

For the second time in successive weeks an American family drama opens in the West End and while Jitney may be a less obvious group of characters, the premiere of Theresa Rebeck’s new play Mad House focuses on a more traditional dynamic. U.S Theatre is filled with dysfunctional family dramas and the relationships between siblings, parents and wider groups of relatives that tend to motor them. A frequent theme used by writers as diverse as Tennessee Williams, Edward Albee and more recently Brendan Jacobs-Jenkins and Tracy Letts, unlike their television and film counterparts, stage families are rarely happy groups and Rebeck finds a somtimes winning black humour in the combination of cantankerous relations and end of life care.

Jacobs-Jenkins’s Appropriate adopted a similar structure as a group of frustrated and estranged siblings return to the house they grew up in after their remaining parent died, looking for the building itself to yield secrets about its occupants. Rebeck – who notably also wrote Smash currently in development as a stage musical – also utilises the varied dramatic potential of the reunion but carefully spreads entrances out across the show to alter the dynamic as new arrivals create tonal shifts and generate opportunities to broaden conversational and behavioural tropes as the story unfolds.

Family drama may be set in the present but is almost always a vehicle primarily to examine the past, the individual lives and the experiences of a group of people who know each other intimately but whose lives have often developed quite differently and with each member of the family having differing degrees of investment in the original parental relationship or home. Tracing that back to their experiences in this house – usually through childhood resentments or traumatic experiences – exposes the uneven treatment they at least felt they received from their parents and becomes the core of why these people are who they are now and potentially what they will be by the end of the show.

Mad House actually changes shape across the 2 hours of performance time, neatly dividing into a straightforwardly comedic first half in which long-suffering Michael is relieved to meet new hospice nurse Lillian and a more straightforwardly dramatic second in which the expected secrets, betrayals and lies are revealed. Staged around the repeated arrival of new characters to repoint the drama and reposition what the audience has been shown in a much larger family context, Rebeck begins with an establishment scene, creating the charged interaction between father Daniel whose life is ending due to terminal emphysema and his wearied son Michael who returned eleven months ago to care for his father in his final months of life.

As serious as that scenario may be on paper this is no sentimental story of palliative heroism or tearful declarations of late-blooming filial love. Rebeck instead builds a deep and vocal resentment between father and son, building on a lifetime of mutual dislike to create an emotionally heightened scenario as Mad House opens, one that plays on the antipathy of its central ‘odd couple’. The audience learns quickly that neither man behaves well, purposefully seeking to thwart and antagonise the other and as much as they despise their situation there is a secret pleasure in locking horns over the trivialities of soup quality and whether Daniel should be smoking, with neither backing down in the sharp exchanges of cutting dialogue that Rebeck’s characters speedily fire at each other.

Into this semi-battleground nurse Lillian becomes the first external caller, a stranger to the family who throughout the play refuses to be drawn into the game between Daniel and Michael, although a timely intervention in family business will have significant consequences later on. Rebeck uses this tool twice more with the arrival of son Ned in the middle of the first half who like an equivalent character in Appropriate brings a fish-out-of-water, city perspective to Daniel’s lifestyle, returning home with personal gain in mind. Pam’s entrance as the conclusion to the largely comedic part of the play alters the narrative once again, and, as a more serious-minded character, pushes the show in a slightly different direction, her presence deliberately sapping what little sense of fun the play had built.

Across several scenes that represent weeks of activity, Rebeck develops layers of outrageousness that escalate across the play, using a farce-like model to up the ante as events become increasingly out of control. Although the humour is rarely physical, the extreme nastiness and curmudgeonly nature of Daniel’s character is ignited by Michael’s experience in a mental health facility some years before which becomes a major reference point for his character and is used by others to control and attack him. As they snipe at each other, openly discussing the inevitable, Daniel seeks ways to escape his incapacitation and as the 70-year old becomes all but bedridden, Mad House questions Michael’s increasingly reckless behaviour, culminating in a slightly over-egged but nonetheless dramatically effective finale scene in Act One that arguably takes the comedy as far as it can go while set entirely in a kitchen.

Throughout this first part of the play, Rebeck has woven in the resentments and painful collective memories that underscore the later drama. The arrivals tool gives the writer different ways to use her characters as well as adding extra dimensions as they start to form alliances – often short lived of course – that move the plot along. In Act Two this comes to the fore as the serious consequences of the earlier part of the play come into focus and the true darkness of this family dynamic finally plays out. With siblings Michael, Ned and Pam now under one roof with slightly different agendas plus nurse Lillian taking sides at last, Rebeck puts different groups in cahoots with one another to fight over their family legacy and their different interpretations of the past.

Act Two has two long scenes set on the porch outside and it is here that the traditional airing of grievances occurs as all three of Daniel’s children take the opportunity to reflect on the life they have lived together, the timeline and responsibility for their mother’s death from cancer while Michael was in hospital and their schemes following the imminent death of their father. Ned and Pam are not well drawn enough for this to be an entirely successful conversation, both there largely as negative reflections of Michael who they attempt to trigger, nor do they possess any real subtly in the personalities that Rebeck has given them, but this is the meat of the show and the confrontation that everything before has been building to, a chance for the audience and the individuals to finally understand the truth before its consequences are felt in the final scene.

But what is the outcome that Mad House is looking for? It concludes quite decisively but also in a sudden way, our two central characters Daniel and Michael are given the ending they perhaps desire and the audience is left with certainty about the life of this family, even given a single moment of romanticism that slightly recasts the relationship between father and son. Yet, this finale is not truly satisfying. Perhaps the ‘bad’ characters are too simplistic in their demands and their tactics to feel truly bested, perhaps Michael has endured too much for so neat a conclusion, maybe the intensely talky revelations of the second half can’t match the more entertaining brutal comedy of the first Act. Perhaps this is really a character piece about two men who should have just had the floor for longer.

David Harbour gives a really big performance as Michael, one that fills the room and brings multi dimensions to what is a complex character. Michael is trapped in a kind of no man’s land between the difficult life he had before and whatever he wants to do next. Formerly holding a Wall Street job like his brother and working for a major oil company, Harbour shows how Michael’s breakdown took all of the fight out of him, returning to a half-life in the family home where memories and notions of failure have plagued him throughout his life. When we meet Michael, he’s worn out, barely dressed to leave the house and deeply frustrated as much with himself as with his father.

Across the play, Harbour explores Michael’s reawakening, a process that is not always attractive as he makes questionable decisions and rails loudly against the pressures and judgement of his family. He’s not always successful in controlling himself but Harbour’s Michael isn’t regressing as his sister asserts but slowly developing a strength that allows him to face himself for the first time. Added to that the acerbic style that Harbour brings to his comedy timing and this performance helps to lift the play.

So too does Bill Pullman’s Daniel, a world away from the surface decency and upstanding certainty of his Joe in the Old Vic’s All My Sons. Daniel may be another family man but this demands a very different kind of physical performance from Pullman, one that requires plenty of wheezing, coughing and fragility that the actor subtly draws. The boldness in Daniel doesn’t come from his condition, which is like a continued base note, but from his vivid personality, a man lost to time, a vile incarnation of his particular generation.

Much of that is played for laughs of course, though his sometimes shocking diatribes evoke more nervous laughter than confederacy with the audience. Daniel is not a man who understand the world as it is now or even cares to, much of what he says is unpleasant, bigoted and often circular, confounding his own arguments with more bile, but Pullman never holds back from any of it, allowing this man to be fully seen. That Pullman still elicits the tiniest moments of empathy is remarkable, to be able to contextualise Daniel as a sick old man with little left to live for is the gift of this performance and Mad House is really at its best when Harbour and Pullman are alone onstage.

Akiya Henry carves a niche for herself as nurse Lillian, a calming presence whose prioritisation of care seems to be the one thing always missing from this household, but Lillian holds her own and refuses to be cowed by either man while building a valuable rapport with both that becomes decisive. Stephen Wright and Sinead Matthews have less to work with as Ned and Pam, the fairly unscrupulous brother and sister who couldn’t care less about their father, but both actors elevate the material they’ve been given and demand their place in the action.

Staged on Frankie Bradshaw’s run down kitchen set that revolves to reveal an exterior porch, there is considerable attention to detail here from the yellow-tinged windows that speak to years of nicotine staining to the grubby-bottomed fridge and tired decor, there is no mistaking this house for any of the grand and cosy family abodes that we’re so used to seeing for American families. Moritz von Stuelpnagel’s direction is pretty pacy, controlling the necessary comings and goings well, managing the changes of pace particularly in the more introspective second half and the show rarely feels its length.

This production of Mad House, which officially opens later this week, really gets to grips with the multiple meanings of its title – the fury of its characters, its interest in the implications of mental health hospitalisation and the comedic frenzy it implies. Its slightly formulaic second half may not quite fit the pieces together but this unsentimental family drama, headed by two characterful performances from Harbour and Pullman, almost hits the mark.

Mad House is at the Ambassador’s Theatre until 4 September with tickets from £25. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Jitney – Old Vic

At heart August Wilson’s writing is part of broader tradition of family plays in American theatre and while his subjects are not necessarily the traditional groups of relatives gathered around the table for a fateful weekend or forced to reassess their lives in the wake of tragedy (such as Apologia or Appropriate), Wilson builds rudimentary families, often groups of men drawn together by their jobs whose complex dynamics, loaded interactions and status conflicts reflect the conventions of those often grand narratives about family that US playwrights return to again and again. Wilson tempers this solemnity with an examination of working class aspiration, history and hardship, placing his group often on the cusp of social change where the mixed age range of his characters brings both promise and disillusionment.

Jitney, revived at the Old Vic in a production by Tinuke Craig and officially opening later this week, is a piece that took the best part of 40 years to make it to Broadway in late 2016 after decades of smaller productions around America and at the National Theatre in 2001. Part of Wilson’s Pittsburgh collection, Jitney‘s concern with the cost of gentrification and the local heritage destroyed in the name of progress exists through the interactions of eight men, mostly taxi drivers and a regular customer, over the course of three days in which their livelihoods and their neighbourhood come under threat from redevelopers.

Thematically, this is a play about the black working class struggle, not directly against racism although much can be inferred from the context and conversations, but with their economic and personal circumstances as individuals try to get by while putting some kind of stake in the ground in order to claim even the smallest patch of it for themselves. Cab office boss Jim Becker is the manifestation of that desire for goodness and decency, of working hard to provide for his family and playing along with the system all to earn a fragment of financial and moral independence. What the sacrifices and endeavours of men like Becker are ultimately worth is the question that Wilson poses in Jitney as this quite diverse group face a collective ending of the disharmonious life they have known together.

In this sense, Jitney also links to more recent plays like Lynne Nottage’s Sweat that examines the destructive consequences of redundancy and deindustrialisation in a rust belt town with no other options, and even to David Hare’s latest Straight Line Crazy, still playing at the Bridge Theatre, which takes the opposite perspective to Wilson, focusing on the architecture of city planning in New York in the mid-twentieth century – concluding shortly before the period in which Jitney is set – that tore through working class districts to create freeways. Together these works comment on the powerlessness of communities to resist what becomes an inevitable future, but in giving them a voice, Wilson expands on the rooting of these groups in quite geographically-specific areas, looking back at the lives they have known but also forwards to the albeit limited expectations of what they want to become.

And to do this, Wilson creates a pseudo-familial structure, essentially trapping eight characters together in the same room for nearly three hours of performance. They come and go, collect fares for what are perhaps infeasibly short journeys, but are continually drawn back together to their work hub, a simple common room office where they wait for the phone call that will take them out again, applying the democratic ‘cab rank’ rule to maintain order and fairness. It is a business venture that Wilson deliberately gives them all a stake in, a kind of co-op of independent cabbies headed by Becker who collects subs once a month, sets fare pricing and the firm rules but each man owns his own car and, in a crucial scene in the second half, they make important decisions collectively.

Within that sometimes quite loose structure, Jitney becomes a fluid character study exploring the personalities and often fraught interactions between the men who spend too much time in the same place but really know very little about each other. They gossip, speculate and spread hearsay, they bicker and judge, there are small scale confederacies, violent altercations, resentments and cruelty while Wilson peppers the discussions with plenty of secrets, lies and revelations that emerge across nearly three hours of performance all of which are typical of the family dynamic play and culminates in a growing emotional connection to the group that somehow weathers its many storms together.

Craig’s production is particularly good at creating that complex interaction, the bristling tension between particular individuals whose combustible personalities flare and rage across the play, while balancing that with the more experienced old hands whose attempts at diplomacy and ability to take life as it comes create interesting tonal shifts that Craig manages especially well. But with lots of people to introduce and a faithful version of the script, it takes a little too long for the audience to settle into the show, to understand who everybody is and connect with the story arc – and even to hear it fully for a time. Jitney has two of these – the imminent closure of the cab office and the return of Becker’s son from a 20-year term in prison but neither generates sufficient heat in the 90-minute first half to give the production any anticipatory sense of direction or feeling of impending catastrophe to drive it purposefully forward.

Much of that is Wilson’s fault, a long opening scene introducing the characters in quick turn arounds as well as their working practices and routines becomes almost redundant with little of what is said or seen having any major significance to the plot. And there is a tendency to linger a touch too long in some of the duologues that cut through the fast-paced work of the cab rank, slowing the action to focus more intently on a particular interaction and the lives it represents. These begin as gripping and insightful scenes but can become circular in their discussion, occasionally repeating and verifying information the audience already has which unnecessarily prolongs more than one scenario.

The final third of the play is tighter as internal and external events come to a head but even here the balance of drama is a little off kilter with more time devoted to duologues, yet a major plot development occurs rapidly offstage between scenes with little opportunity to fully absorb its aftermath or even to question the motive of the character involved. In a story where relatively little actually happens and with not much plot as such, it seems a shame not to investigate this part of the play in more detail or to understand any potential ambiguities in what has been reported. Did things coincidentally happen in this way or, given the difficulties and pressure placed on the individual, was there greater agency at work? Just bad luck and a neat ending to the show, or a pre-determined act of sacrifice and despair?

Wil Johnson’s pivotal performance as Becker leaves you to wonder about the effects of this experience on the most decent man in the office. Striving all his life for the minimum comforts of job, home and family, Becker is a character without unlikely ambition, wanting nothing more than daily stability and the chance to give his child a little more than he had. Johnson has some terrific interactions with returning son Booster (Leemore Marrett Jr) and his fellow cabbies who break his simple rules and cause discord in the office. There is a grand tragedy to his life as a result, filled with the anguish and disappointment of the last 20 years which, for all his efforts and desire for independence, leave him unable to control the wider socio-economic forces shaping his life and narrowing his choices – a key theme for all characters in Jitney – that add particular ambiguity to the play’s conclusion.

Sule Rimi is equally commanding as the volatile Turnbo, a maverick creation whose comedic persona reveals an underlying tendency to violence. We learn relatively little about Turnbo’s history but he imposes himself on this office, still part of the family unit but handled carefully by the others. Although not by Solomen Israel’s Darnell known as “Youngblood” whose altercation with Turnbo over gossip simmers throughout the play. Like Becker, Youngblood is looking for a stable path ahead and while Israel hides that under layers of bravado and machismo, there is a melancholy beneath that partly emerges from those around him who think he’s too young to throw his life away driving jitneys but also from the character’s own fears about life’s continually moving goalposts that might trap him here forever.

This is an almost exclusively male world including Geoff Aymer’s rational old hand Doub, Nnabiko Ejimofor’s street smart Shealey who utilises the office for his romantic exchanges and gambling business, as well as Tony Marshall’s alcoholic Fielding clinging on by a thread while pining the absence of his errant wife 22 years on. Amongst this Leanne Henlon makes quite the impression as Darnell’s wife Rena who arrives to make her views about her man’s behaviour known to him. Henlon’s performance is refreshing, cutting through the fog of masculinity to drag them back to the reality of family and commitment, expounding on the wider consequences for their lives beyond the cab office. In a couple of great scenes, Henlon establishes Rena’s own desire for self-improvement and a refusal to take any nonsense as she bats away interference from the others and makes you long for a few more female characters to keep the men in check.

Staged by Alex Lowde in a representative but realistic space, there is a deliberate sense of imprisonment, even claustrophobia in the 70s bleached wood panelled cabin with no windows beyond a frosted glass pane in the door. No one can see out or in, disconnecting the characters from the real changes happening around them – given a literal interpretation by Lowde in a large frame around the action onto which Ravi Deepres’s video projects the Pittsburg streets and a dominant city plan that shifts from construction to a sea of new builds after the interval. All of this reiterating the blindness of these men to what’s really happening to their city and their livelihoods.

Jitney is a long night, one that could afford to cut 20 minutes or more of material without affecting the overall story, leaving a slightly slicker, more impactful piece behind that doesn’t compromise character insight. There are real moments of magic in Jitney, filled with the sorrow of endings for all of the people passing through the cab office. What even happens to their small community business in the end, Wilson places that in a context of huge and unstoppable change that this little patch of the past cannot resist forever. Something is coming for all of them and, whether they see it or not, Wilson knows the battle is lost before it begins – that is the power of Jitney and the great tragedy that Becker’s car service will never escape.

Jitney is at the Old Vic until 9 July with tickets from £12. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera] – Park Theatre

Tony Blair became an MP and Prime Minister with the sole intention of meeting Mick Jaggers [sic], at least in Harry Hill and Steve Brown’s new satire Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera]. With a political story that includes celebrity, double dealing, royalty, charisma, war and the allure of a mega-watt smile, this world premiere production at the Park Theatre is already striking a chord well ahead of its Press Night later this week. Perfect fodder for a grand operatic story set to a lively rock, vaudeville and musical theatre score, the experience and consequences of political populism are mercilessly mocked while, like all great lampoonery from the cartoons of the eighteenth-century to the hey day of 1980s Spitting Image, it contains a bedrock of truth for our times.

The 1990s are very much back in vogue with big cultural reappraisals of its music – including reflections on the influence of The Spice Girls and Oasis – its clothing and the political shifts from 18 years of Conservatism to the glamorous hope of New Labour. Slightly ahead of that particular curve, James Graham’s Labour of Love in 2017 re-evaluated the effect of New Labour with a time travel drama set in a fictionalised northern working class constituency as the party tore itself apart over its fresh face. Last year, the BBC followed up on its excellent assessment of Thatcher with a five-part series on Labour focused on the division between Gordon Brown and Tony Blair that shaped the political agenda for over a decade. Both have lain the groundwork for Hill and Brown’s musical that covers much of the same period but with a much jauntier, though no less savage, take on Blair’s fraught premiership. Over two hours of performance, Tony! carefully and cunningly charts the rise and fall of the most successful and most controversial Labour Prime Minister of recent decades.

Hill and Brown structure their story in two Acts, Blair’s ascent told as biography and then as a tightly focused second half on the personalities and key decision-making moments leading to the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. All of this pivots from a standard but useful dramatic device, the deathbed reckoning, where the much older Blair is asked to weigh up his achievements and failings. Tony! essentially asks the same of the audience, to decide whether the here presented egomania and failure of judgement in the later years does and should eclipse the better, brighter moments of Blair’s first term in office. And, while the answer to that at a 25-year distance may seem easy, entrenched even in our knowledge of what came next, Hill and Brown challenge us by wondering whether it was all Blair’s fault and the responsibility the electorate must bear for voting for him even after the war. The World is Run By Assholes the finale song decries and we put them there.

Our guide through the story is somewhat appropriately Peter Mandelson who arrives in a puff of smoke and with a crack of thunder, playing up his oily, Blair-devoted loyalty. This fourth-wall-breaking creation interacts directly with the audience, introducing scenes and characters, commenting on events and marshalling history as Tony! compresses more than ten years of political activity into two hours of stage time. But Mandelson’s role sets the tone for plenty of irreverent activity with asides, direct appeals to the audience and attempts to engage people in a sequence of events that most will have already lived through once. And largely it works very well, the silliness of Tony! earning big laughs from the start as the show races through his privileged early years, time at Oxford, revoking a pop music career for politics, marriage and Parliamentary rise, all to meet his hero Mick Jaggers [sic].

The story has more or less written itself, so Hill and Brown look to characterisation for most of the comedy, avoiding direct impressions with the need to look or sound like their counterpart by creating broad interpretations of individuals based on a single characteristic or activity that gives the audience a hook to recognise figures in the story each time they appear. And as few of them require more than a surface introduction in the back of what is Blair’s story, the approach works consistently well, offering opportunities for the surreal slapstick that has become Hill’s trademark while creating opportunities for repeat laughs with versions of the same gag when individuals reappear in later scenarios.

So, John Prescott is all beer-guzzling machismo with a thick northern accent offering everyone a pint, Robin Cook a quietly spoken liberal more interested in his extra-marital affairs than his ministerial duties, Mandelson known as ‘Mandy’ is obsequious and almost cacklingly dark, while Neil Kinnock and John Smith are fleeting figures passed almost in montage as Blair rises to the top. With Blair himself pretty much the straight-man in all of this – defined more by a few well-known mannerisms than any particularly eccentric behaviours – Hill and Brown concentrate on recasting some of the leading players in more interesting and innovative ways to enhance their comedic potential.

A fine decision gives Cherie a Liverpudlian accent akin to Cilla Black that underscores the slight social differences between Blair and the woman he married, as well as giving her a distinct voice in his ear as she tangos into his affections. Gordon Brown as core antagonist repeatedly asking Blair to make good on their deal, is seen as a dour, unsmiling Scot with a passion for macroeconomics and a dry style that leads to several very funny confrontations. Likewise, the presentation in Act Two of Osama Bin Laden, Sadam Hussein and George Bush does just enough to define their personalities, giving each a personalised song that draw on Music Hall styles by contrasting their murderous intentions with an upbeat tune. The creators even look to Groucho Marx for their interpretation of Hussein which, brief as it is, lands well.

Controversial though it may be, the best moments in Tony! take place between Blair and Princess Diana who quietly join forces in their quest for popular appeal, performing a hilarious duet in Act One that is filled with sultry charm while noting a mutual awareness of the media benefit of their relationship – leading of course to Blair’s defining ‘People’s Princess’ speech. Knowing they’re onto a good thing, Hill and Brown reprise the partnership in another form later on as this part of the show takes a quiet savvy perspective on kindred spirits both finding their allure is enhanced by the spotlight and commenting on broader socio-cultural waves in the 90s that celebrated hopeful, seemingly angelic or messiah-like figures of which Blair and the Princess of Wales were the figureheads.

There is a lot packed into Tony! and arguably the second half doesn’t yet quite fulfil the promise of the first, getting a little lost in the details of the war. So where a high-level approach brought a faster pace to the comedy conveyor belt initially, Act Two is a little bogged down in dossiers, resolutions and establishing a homoerotic special relationship which slows the story. This is a more serious subject of course and the centrepiece of Hill and Brown’s show which questions the extent to which these defining moments of Blair’s premiership should erase anything else, but the order of events is well-hashed knowledge. The superfluous addition of extra domestic material including a BSE reference feel like unnecessary padding in a second Act that could be streamlined. It means the laughs are noticeably slower to come as the pacing of Peter Rowe’s production slips.

The combination of comedy and tragedy is a delicate skill but the two here are not entirely woven together. Instead, the comedy almost stops for a melancholy interlude in which a seemingly unassuming audience member confronts Blair about the war dead and failures of his leadership, accusations that are reasonable if a little blunt in comparison to the tighter satire of the rest of the story. And while the character of Blair acknowledges the ‘tragic bit’ as part of the disarming structure in which these creations recognise the staginess of their own lives, and there is a need to confront the man with his ‘crimes’ as part of the weighing of conscience that his deathbed moment has established, it does cut rather inelegantly into the show without perhaps offering any new information. Tony! quickly recovers itself, returning to its caricatured best in the closing scenes with a rapid handover to Brown and Blair’s final assessment of his time as Prime Minister but there may be a cleaner way to integrate the two styles.

Steve Brown’s songs are very enjoyable, merging different musical influences to create an eclectic but consistent score and some very memorable songs that are a production highlight and provide each character with a distinctive sound while merging solos and duets with larger ensemble numbers that are crying out for a bigger theatre. Libby Watson has mastered the look and feel of New Labour in Whitehall with a formal black suit, red tie base for all characters over which she adds more extreme and elaborate wigs, jackets, masks and even a full cow head to create different personality quirks that adds a nice visual humour to Tony! that sits well with both the tone and the limited physical comedy aspects. Watson also ensures the set is minimal but multifunctional with a backdrop of wood panelling and a hardworking chest that becomes Blair’s birthplace, desk and platform all overlooked and impressively dominated by a large sign ensuring Tony’s name is up in lights throughout.

As Blair, Charlie Baker doesn’t need to look like the character but captures the trademark tics and habits that replicate his speech pattern, gestures and cheery charm, clinging to the notion that he is a good guy. Over the performance, Baker shows Blair’s lust for power growing, enjoying the mania resulting from a hyped-up encounter with George Bush and providing a solid central vocal around which the song and dance numbers are built. Holly Sumpton’s excellent Cherie is a great foil, a powerful presence with an impressive voice that keeps her husband in line and on track while Gary Trainor’s Gordon Brown becomes a blank and monotone contrast to Blair.

No one enjoys their performance more than Howard Samuels as nefarious narrator and Master of Ceremonies Peter Mandelson, with Samuels virtually bounding around the stage in glee while delivering a great character study of one of Blair’s most notorious supporters and, as it turns out, a balloon animal expert. Kudos too for Madison Swan’s on the nose Princess Diana, capturing those familiar shy eyes and coquettish glances which Swan has comically exaggerated just the right amount while adding a powerful vocal to an ensemble who perform multiple roles as established political and social figures from the Cabinet to international leaders and noted cultural personalities from the 1990s version of Number 10 parties attended by Liam Gallagher and Bernie Ecclestone.

Tony! needs to smooth its wartime narrative, but it gets the balance right most of the time by taking familiar events and squeezing them for comedy value. And there’s plenty of it in a show that begins by questioning Blair and slowly turns its gaze on the audience asking us who is really culpable for the people we elect or allow to continue in power. Already well on the way to being a very fine political satire, once its run at the Park Theatre concludes Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera] might soon find itself on an even bigger stage.

Tony! [The Tony Blair Rock Opera] is at the Park Theatre until 9 July with tickets from £18. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog