A Mirror – Almeida Theatre

It is the middle of August and we’re all invited to a wedding. The Almeida Theatre has been decorated throughout, there are ribbons and flowers, photos of the happy couple and a guest book celebrating their big day and that’s before you make your way into the ‘Almeida Hall’ for the ceremony itself. Someone has gone to an awful lot of trouble to make this day special right down to the order of service on every chair and the officiating minister stalking the aisles waiting for the bride and groom. Sam Holcroft’s new play A Mirror is never quite what you think it is, the elliptical synopsis, the ambiguous poster design and the tag line informing you, quite factually, that ‘this play is a lie’ because it is one.

Theatre can be many things but the very best productions are able to surprise the audience; a classic revival seen from an entirely unexpected perspective or an idea about the world or the theatre that is entirely overthrown. Not knowing what is coming next or not being able to entirely predict a show’s direction even if you know the story well is one of the most exciting things theatre can do, shaking audiences out of their complacency and making you pay proper attention to the characters and what is happening between them. And A Mirror is endlessly and wonderfully surprising throughout its gripping 2 hour running time.

And its tightly woven structure is something that needs to be experienced on its own terms, free from direct spoilers. There are elements of the show that can be gleaned from the outside. Amongst the wedding bunting in the Almeida foyer are a number of small behavioural notices, laminated to emphasise their importance, that list the ‘rules’ of the Almeida Hall and of the limited, controlled role that culture must play in the society the audience is about to enter. Emblazoned on the far wall is the Oath of Allegiance, referencing a ‘Motherland’ that citizens are expected to defend with their lives. It is clear that everything is not what it seems, this happy occasion is situated in a very specific political context in which culture is dangerous.

Then, just as the synopsis promises, ‘at the signal, the entertainment’ begins. Holcroft’s play is a multilayered examination of the blurry line between life and art, and the attempts to shape and govern where culture is made and who by. Within that structure it is also concerned with the layering of individuality, where a character may simultaneously be the storyteller and an actor in their own tale or they might be appearing as a fiction in one devised and designed by someone else. There is a Christopher Nolan shape to A Mirror that plays with reality, bending the question of truth in art around it to test the role of the artist in reflecting or distracting from the everyday. And to do this, Holcroft takes her cue from Inception by building plays within plays within plays, searching for the moment when an idea takes hold of an audience filtering back up through the layers to reveal the truth and incite a reaction to it.

The confidence of A Mirror in all those layers is one of its greatest strengths with the playwright fully in control of them at all times. Everything connects, right through from the deepest level of fiction as the players act out several ‘realistic’ and ‘unrealistic’ plays, to the decorations in the Almeida foyer that create the top layer of storytelling from the moment you arrive at the theatre, all of it carefully honed and integrated to wrap a real truth in several lies. At every moment the attention of the audience is being misdirected, scattered in a different direction and buried in alternative fictions, while being simultaneously given all the facts, directly pointed at the reality we are choosing to look at but not observe. Everything you see at all time is both a lie and the truth.

Holcroft is particularly interested in the role that theatre plays in society and its purpose as a tool for political activism in both the overt and incremental forms it takes in A Mirror. Writing plays is deemed a political act, one that is either for or against the status quo and protection of the existing forms of governance. The production centres around a debate about massaged realities that are primped and simplified, even glamourised for the stage, pitted against shows that directly and unambiguously reflect everyday life. This debate nods to the same arguments made about working class and kitchen sink dramas in the 1950s, where critics argued that no one wanted to see their own mundane lives on stage or screen. Holcroft reignites that debate here, directly challenging the audience to question what role theatre should play and whether it should reassure and preserve, or hold a mirror up to the society it represents, showing people who they truly are.

And this becomes of the play’s most intriguing themes, following a character who believes he is one thing but resents the flattened, bullish and vicious version of himself as seen on stage. The person that Čelik thinks he is, the positive arts supporter, fighting the system to nurture talent and protect artists from themselves, is astonished to see the grating bully, the small-minded despot and thug in his reflection. Holcroft pushes at the meaning of character construction and in the same way that scenarios are nested like Russian Dolls, so too are the individuals depicted in the story with fragments of self breaking through as the play itself takes shape and their true character portrait emerges. A Mirror is not so concerned with the narrative progression of characters – although that certainly provides momentum – but with how they see themselves in relation to others. In the play as a whole, if Holcroft is holding mirrors up to society, albeit distorting ones, so too are the characters reflections of reflections, fictionalised versions of a reality that is written and rewritten until they become almost unrecognisable to themselves.

The key to the success of A Mirror is the quality of the realisations at every level that Holcroft has created for this play, each is entirely believable and for the time that it exists, the audience is entirely drawn into it, even for just a few seconds. As audiences we are conditioned to engage in the substance and environmental controls that makes us feel we are being taken into a play and away from the real world, and Holcroft uses those cues throughout to take the Almeida audience as well as her own characters into multiple layers of theatremaking, groups performing a fiction at the very top level who then put on a play and within that story then examine the role of theatre, the construction of stories and indeed the performing of plays. The clarity of these layers and the full belief with which Holcroft takes the audience into each one of them, giving each its own credible reality makes A Mirror really special.

Directed by Jeremy Herrin and designed by Max Jones, this is a production that begins from the moment you enter the building, where the atmospheric contrast between the peachy silks of the wedding and the ominous notices are well controlled, hinting at what is to come and the potentially totalitarian state in which all of Holcroft’s worlds exist. Jones has turned the theatre space itself into a community hall with a raised stage where the wedding will take place and some wonderfully detailed additions including a buffet table and more of those firm notices scattered around the space. There is an air of regular disuse in the room like many community spaces with stacked chairs and out of date decor that feeds the forbidding atmosphere of the play.

Azusa Ono’s lighting cleverly does the same, strings of charming fairy lights suggest the romance of the marriage we are about to witness but each layer of A Mirror has its own particular design, with the deepest point of the fiction in the more traditional semi-darkness of the theatre, becoming lighter as the story comes closer to the surface. Herrin commands all of this with care, pacing the show to give space to the different emotional strands developing between the characters, opening up the fictional substance that Holcroft requires to make her points about the powerful illusion of theatre while still implying the dangerous urgency and secrecy of what we have all been gathered to participate in. And into all of this there is great levity, moments of comedy that cut through the darkness but never derail it.

Not seen on the UK stage for a decade, Jonny Lee Miller is brilliant in the central role, playing Čelik as an institutionalised bureaucrat, a cerebral character proud of his literary knowledge and enjoying a kind of largess that he believes makes him one of the good guys. There is so much interesting intent in this performance – similar to David Tennant’s work on Good – in which Čelik undergoes a gradual process of self-realisation, discovering how his actions have been interpreted by others, and the careful ambiguity of Miller’s performance looks different as a result. Throughout he maintains a balance between the socially awkward kindness on the surface and the menance underneath asking what the line between constructive guidance and circumstantial coercion looks like in this particular form of governance, and Miller blends Čelik’s aspiration to goodness with the possibility for violence in his performance, knowing that it is all around and within him even if he chooses not to acknowledge it.

Tanya Reynolds is more straightforwardly good as Mei (and Leyla whose wedding we are attending), drawn into the sphere of two very different men but with her own military background that becomes increasingly important, and Mei is far more sympathetic for reasons that become clear as the play’s truth emerges. Adem / Joel is in the angry young man model of writers pushing for truth on stage and Micheal Ward suggest the everyman perspective caught up in an unexpected powerplay with something he doesn’t understand. Whether his actions are deliberate sedition or an innocence about playmaking are purposefully unclear but Ward makes Adem the mirror of the audience experiencing this place for the first time and wondering how he ended up there.

The cast is completed by Geoffrey Streatfeild as Bax whose comic talents lift the play at all the right moments. Streatfeild mocks the swagger of a playwright enjoying his fame and believing too literally in the fiction of his own brilliance, stealing several scenes with a performance that is just outrageous enough not to tip the balance of Holcroft’s work too far into parody. But Streatfeild also finds the tragedy underneath, the pressure of maintaining his reputation knowing his best and most beloved work is behind him, the seediness of his actual existence and the painful distance from the great art he hoped to write. It is a very different performance than the others in this play but one that injects just the right amount of additional fuel to prevent the central scenario becoming too laboured.

A Mirror is a play to experience with few preconceptions, allowing its different scenarios and their inter-related meanings to form as it unfolds. It has so much to say about the boundary between art and life, about truth on stage and the purpose of playmaking, as well as the different degrees of self-delusion that individuals need to make it through the day. This play is absolutely a lie but it is also the closest thing to truth you may ever see in a theatre.

A Mirror is at the Almeida Theatre until 23 September with tickets from £22. Follow this site on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Romeo and Juliet – Almeida Theatre

The boundary between different art forms is where the most creative things happen, put theatre, dance, music and cinema together and it can even give new life to a very well-worn tale. Romeo and Juliet has been done and done and done, so finding a new way to tell the story almost everyone in the room will already know at least something about is enormously challenging. It is a play performed with such regularity and seen so often that in plodding through the overly-familiar scenes – a meet cute, a balcony, a fatal stabbing and some poison – it is easy to miss what it is really about, not love but hate, pure irreconcilable and consuming hate between two sets of men. Rebecca Frecknall’s new production for the Almeida Theatre foregrounds that hate and the male violence that drives their children to destruction.

There are many things that set this revival apart, not least Shakespeare’s promise of two hours’ traffic which is actually delivered almost to time with no interval. Frecknall has made deft cuts to sharpen the story and while this play’s declarations of undying love have always been quick, coming after a single encounter, so too are the consequences that play out over only a few days, giving the lovers too little time to reflect and creating instead a reactionary pace that hastens their end.

And seeing the plot anew through Frecknall’s eyes, the audience can see that this is a story filled with rash behaviours and hot-headed actions that individuals barely have time to repent. The simmering anger of the rival gangs towards one another that tips into violence within moments of trading their first insults, the speed with which both Romeo and Juliet forget their mutual grief to grasp their only night of passion and the blistering anger of Juliet’s father when she refuses to marry Paris merely a few hours after her cousin’s murder are the drum beats of this version as the tragic drive pulls the couple towards their inevitable ending, one that Frecknall’s tightly-wound production brings compelling new life to.

The master stroke is to make this really feel like a play about men, about posturing masculinity, control and competition that consumes and marginalises the experience of women in their way, of whom we see only three – Juliet, her mother and the nurse. Beyond Romeo’s soon-forgotten first amore Rosaline who is never seen and easily dismissed, women are controlled, sold in marriage or expected to be grateful and servile, obeying the commands of their menfolk. That Romeo stands apart from this model in his treatment of Juliet is more notable in this version of Shakespeare’s tale, although his involvement in the performative bravado of his family very quietly implies that perhaps had they been given the time, Romeo may have been as contemptuous of his wife as Lord Capulet proves to be of his spouse and daughter.

Romeo here has a foot in both camps to an extent, a kindly devoted lover but still an impulsive young man who commits a major act of violence even after his wedding. And Frecknall includes him in the fascinating dance sequences that stand in place of the story’s violence, stylised encounters created by Frecknall and fight director Jonathan Holby that turn the men into avenging Valkyries, aided by Wagner’s emotive and forceful music which recurs through the show. The choreography is balletic in style but this is no West Side Story finger-clicking gang warfare but an intensified frenzy of coordinated pack movement that builds the enmity and power of these two groups and the effect of their frequent clashes. The introduction of dance is unusual but it becomes an absorbing shorthand to convey a complex backstory and escalating assault, the origins of which Shakespeare never explains.

The hyper-masculine reality that Frecknall creates is contrasted by the naive simplicity of Juliet’s early love in which the cast find great humour as well as the traditional sentiment. The disabusing of those sensibilities is something that happens by degrees across this unbroken production as the simplicity of true love becomes embroiled in the reality of the couple’s circumstances and Romeo’s own true nature. And while Juliet doesn’t love him any less, the rapid ascent into the adult world is something that changes the character as she better understands the consequences of family rivalry and the cost of her own actions. These two things stand in stark contrast throughout and the realisation of the taint on their marriage that comes from the dual deaths of Mercutio and Tybalt on their wedding day adds considerable impetus to their choices in the aftermath. Far from reducing their love, it brings increased impact to a very slightly reconceived final scene, giving the familiar end an added emotional resonance that shocks with a terrible new power.

And nowhere is this more revealing than the scene late in the play when Juliet’s father demands she marry her official suitor Paris in which Frecknall’s cast find an alarming ferocity that explains the toxic inheritance of male violence that characterises this interpretation. Until this point, Lord Capulet (Jamie Ballard) has only been affable and publicly loving towards his family, but suddenly behind closed doors, when defied, a monstrous rage emerges that terrifies the three women in the room. Ballard stalks the stage, intimidating and threatening, showing a different face to this character that exposes the true nature of the society and the family rivalries that persist unchecked. It is a world controlled by powerful men who deliberately instill the same notions of hate and antagonism they got from their own fathers in their successors. Frecknall’s production argues that boys die in Romeo and Juliet because older men demand they do to keep an ancient feud alive, so what hope do two lovers ever have against this insistent coercion of the young and they way it is used to reinforce the power of their fathers.

Designed by Chloe Lamford, with lighting by Lee Curran, this is a decidedly cinematic production that uses a variety of editing and scene-setting techniques borrowed directly from film to hone the story and to find quite different resonances in the text. In trimming down the play, Frecknall also finds places to overlap different interactions that give this production a new driver including playing side-by-side the conversations between the Nurse and Juliet as well as Friar Laurence and Romeo following the double murder. In setting these simultaneously, as a film director would do, Frecknall cuts between the scenes, blending them together to show the audience how these activities affect the hopes and fortunes of the newlyweds. In other places, major speeches have additional silent action taking place in the background, an opportunity to contrast the romanticism of young love with the reality of their enemy households, again adding this feeling of inevitable doom to proceedings that traps the characters in their trajectory.

It gives the play a filmic quality and pace without detracting from the content, helping to really clarify the ways in which the circumstances and experiences of these characters is constantly shaping the outcome of their story. As a result nothing happens in isolation, instead Frecknall has given the play a fresh understanding of cause and effect, using this new management and presentation of the text to enhance the impossibility of Romeo and Juliet’s relationship and moving this story on from petulant first love that destroys itself to a despairing couple who are backed into a corner by degrees with only one way out. The director underscores this with choreographed activity taking place behind Juliet’s major speech when she takes Friar Laurence’s sleeping draught, with small vignettes silently staged in the background that show the family causes of her despair.

The pacing of this production is then its most important feature as scenes flow easily from one to the next, shaping the text to create fluid transitions that motor this familiar plot and help the audience to find new meanings and an urgent energy in its presentation. Debbie Duru’s costume design blends Jacobean ruffled collors and jerkins with hints of New Romanticism but still with a twenty-first century style feeding through the choice of fabrics and colours, that make the story feel both timeless and contemporary. Lamford’s minimalist stage design likewise enhances the story, focusing on character with few props and giving the playing space itself a moment of recognition at the very start of the play.

Getting the central pairing right is, of course, essential and here both Toheeb Jimoh as Romeo and Isis Hainsworth as Juliet bring interesting gradations to their roles, giving them a strong chemistry that becomes their only lifeline as the story unfolds. Both crave escape and safety in their own way, initially without realising it and that only enhances their investment in one another as Romeo seeks respite from the uber-male expectations placed on him while Juliet’s desire for romantic love initially feeds a particular fantasy but becomes an essential outlet if she is to escape the confines of her father’s house and eventually the limitations of an arranged marriage to a man she knows no better than Romeo. That trajectory from girlish innocence to a more substantive understanding and control over her own destiny is an important development in Hainsworth’s performance and one that balances the outward compliance expected of young women with a rebellious spirit, even an anger that springs occasionally when her needs are overridden, frustrated by the gap between the life she wants and the changing, and even dangerous, reality around her. It makes her final moments more moving and affecting than they can sometimes be, driven by the walls metaphorically closing in around her in which love cannot be enough.

By contrast, Jimoh’s Romeo treads a more difficult path between the swift exchange of lovers, the genuine and heartfelt feeling he discovers for Juliet and the bantering friendships and family loyalties that tie him into set violent behaviours. That Romeo has trouble reconciling these drives his troubled character, pulled in multiple directions in Jimoh’s performance that allows these different expectations to overtake him. When Jimoh’s Romeo is in love, he is wholly in love but in the midst of turf war he is overcome by the requirements of his Montague blood and unable to think of the consequences for his marriage or his mortality. His end too becomes far more emotive as a result, impetuous to the last, Romeo’s fate feels like a waste of life, as it should, and the all or nothing dynamic that governs this version of Romeo shapes his life and his death.

In a slimline performance, several other characters also work hard to make their mark in an ensemble that Frecknall uses to create the poisonous context in which the lovers exist, all of whom are creators and victims of their circumstances in different ways. As well as Ballard’s Lord Capulet, Paul Higgins’s Friar Laurence is an ominous figure here, not quite the saviour but a more ambiguous architect of Romeo and Juliet’s fate by presiding over their marriage and presenting Juliet with the fateful sleeping draught plan that quickly unravels. As a result, there is something both kindly and shadowy in Higgins’s performance that supports the broader culpability for this tragedy and likewise underscores the fate of Jack Riddiford’s Mercutio who, though briefly seen has a new significance. Strutting like a 60s Mick Jagger with costume to match, Riddiford is a live wire, the Queen Mab speech full of allusion and mystery that suits his art student vibe, but like Romeo, he too is motivated by a deeply held personal kinship that seeks out confrontation with his family’s rivals and curses these same bonds of loyalty that force him to defend it with his life.

Frecknall has rightly won great acclaim with a series of intimate productions that recast familiar stories, finding both alternative perspectives and contemporary pulses, especially in the presentation of female characters given a different kind of agency. In this Almeida Theatre production, it is the combination of theatre, music and dance that creates something quite different, finding compelling meaning and purpose in the masculine construction of the play from which the inevitable tragedy emerges. Romeo and Juliet may be over performed to the point that the audience is ahead of the actors in anticipating what is to come, but this insightful two hour production gives it renewed purpose once more.

Romeo and Juliet is at the Almeida Theatre until 29 July with tickets from £12.50. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

The Secret Life of Bees – Almeida Theatre

In 2015, Lynn Nottage wrote one of the most important plays of the twenty-first- century, Sweat, a searing examination of class division, economic depression and the forgotten communities of former industrial towns, a play that, when it came to the Donmar Warehouse in 2017, said as much about contemporary Britain as it did about the US rust belt states where it was set. Four years later and the writer lent her sharp understanding of social forces and their political purpose to a musical adaptation of Su Monk Kidd’s novel The Secret Life of Bees, which now arrives at the Almeida Theatre, that puts women’s experience of civil rights at the heart of a politically complex but nonetheless uplifting show about runaway companions escaping their small-minded, male-dominated, racist town to find solace in a private community of honey-making worshipers of a black madonna.

Nottage adds a sharp edge to a sometimes sentimental novel working with Duncan Sheik the composer of Spring Awakening which the Almeida revived to considerable acclaim at the end of 2021, emphasising the positioning of this tale on the cusp of a new era, where the possibility of a better, more equitable future chafes against a traditional and hate-filled past that still seeks to order society by race and gender, retaining power in the hands of white men prepared to employ violent means to protect their supremacy. Like Hairspray before it, Nottage draws out this important socio-political commentary while Sheik’s extraordinary songs with lyricist Susan Birkenhead combine funk, gospel, folksy rock and a hint of blues that carries the unusual plot along and makes you root for this powerful group of women determined to live their lives as equals.

Like Sweat, Nottage emphasises the dangers of trying to hide from the outside world, of the inevitability of reality intruding even in the calmest and most secluded forms of paradise. The contrast between the state of semi-urban 1960s America that this creative team showcase and the rural idyll among the beekeeping women living on a kind of commune led by August (along with sisters May and June) is stark, but there is no stopping the backdrop of racial segregation and Southern violence coming between them, placing the women in the midst of personal as well as socio-political challenges. And it is a balance that this new Almeida production, directed by Whitney White, manages pretty well, and while Monk Kidd’s plot often seems underdeveloped, the impact of those songs successfully knocks your socks off.

During the course of the show, that external world is brought into the quiet community as runaways Rosaleen, a black maid, and Lily, the white teenager she protects, seek refuge, challenging the women’s ability to live apart and bringing additional strife to their door. And while Act One presents a rosy picture, Act Two reveals a darker side, as the new arrivals and the audience learn more about the reasons this community of women exists along with the attacks, humiliations and losses they have already endured. Nottage’s book and Birkenhead’s lyrics draw out a longer history of suffering that shapes individual, collective, generational and community identity in this story, helping to temper the sweet simplicity of The Secret Life of Bees messaging and instead turn it into a rousing and even moving declaration of intent.

The frame for this 1964-set story is the opportunity for black women to vote for the first time, something that the downtrodden Rosaleen is setting out to do at the start of the show, a display of enfranchisement in which she is determined to Sign My Name. It is a full-blooded opener and a chance to reference some of the key personalities that made it theoretically possible including President Lyndon Johnson and Martin Luther King, while later a character is reading essays by James Baldwin. And the growing political awareness of these women is a thread that runs through the play as a violent altercation prevents Rosaleen from expressing her newly won democratic right and gives her a reason to leave, while later reluctant to face a similar threat the community briefly demur. But, like the Pankhursts in Sylvia and Motormouth Mable in Hairspray, the sisters and their friends determine to make a stand together and finally fulfill their electoral role.

But there are other kinds of political comment working through this musical that explores the difficulties that Lily’s arrival repeatedly creates for her companions. June warns of the danger that Lily’s presence poses, eager to be rid of her and to make her stay as short as possible. It is notable too that the attack on Rosaleen takes place because she is walking through the town with Lily which draws attention to them and makes her a target. This is mirrored in Act Two when Zachary and Lily leave the commune to deliver honey and are stopped by the police, the presence of a white girl in his car posing an added danger to his freedom and his life. This deeply embedded and systemic racism in American society comes out in other ways as well, as the sisters sing of their endurance while the circumstances surrounding the death of the fourth Boatwright sibling April becomes a symbol of the chains they are trying to throw off.

This all takes place at this moment of change in which the old ways are being overridden and a new hope emerges, one that The Secret Life of Bees clings to throughout and leaves as its lasting message, so however challenging the musical becomes, and there is physical violence, child abuse and offensive language, the outcome is always to see a brighter future. These two thoughts the dark and the light work quite nicely together in White’s production, never becoming too sickly sweet but also refusing to wallow in the hopelessness and misery of these endless cycles of suffering. And it is here that Nottage’s influence comes to the fore, drawing on her work in Sweat to tighten up the broader purpose of this story and expand on the feeling of disenfranchised powerlessness that affects ordinary working people as opportunity shuts down. And while they may be fighting for different things at different times, the industrial community and this women’s beekeeping commune are not so far apart, each seeking recognition, to be seen by others and counted as equals. It’s an approach that brings great humanity to these characters and while the 2 hour and 30 minute running time may only provide a surface engagement with many of these issues, the cumulative effect is nonetheless emotive.

Sheikh and Birkenhead’s songs are tremendous, a series of ferocious anthems that work well together, supporting the narrative arc while also providing powerful insight into character need and the challenges and pain that shape their collective and individual identity. It is through song, rather than dialogue that character depth emerges, showcasing Rosaleen’s determination to assume her right to vote as well as staging the argument song between June and August who debate Lily’s presence among them. The worship of the black madonna also has a couple of lively and high tempo numbers that explain their faith while some sweet romance songs offer a different kind of optimism for the future. All of this is supported by Shelley Maxwell’s excellent choreography that eschews big song and dance approaches that take the audience outside of the story and draws movement from character instead, creating patterns of dance as individuals lose themselves in the excitement of their prayer or the possibility of first love.

Staged on a broad set with a revolving segment used sparingly to indicate tension or movement, Soutra Gilmour’s stage is surrounded by long grasses that evoke the South, a largely representative space that becomes the kitchen of Lily’s original home, the dusty roads of the town as well as the serene Eden of August’s exclusive retreat with its prayer-house-like gazebo holding the central figure of the black Madonna. Gilmour creates a sense that the characters are always outside, part of the natural world to which they tend while giving an impression of roasting summer sun that slowly turns to autumn as the story unfolds. Neil Austin’s lighting has quite a range here from golden afternoons that Rosaleen basks in to the oppressive red and orange blaze of heat that forces them all into the shade and even lowering that brightness every time the shadowy presence of the angry men threaten their harmony, supporting the emotional changes of pace as local tensions also simmer over.

The bees themselves are implied, a set of hives and honey frames eked out by Simon Baker’s swarm sounds that vary the intensity of the activity as Lily becomes more used to the behaviour of the creatures and tries to calm them, alongside a broader soundscape of subtle birdsong and rural sounds that support context creation and staging choices. Whitney’s direction is smooth, allowing scenes to flow quickly that carry the story along and build an interesting tension between the women and the interjection of the outside world that is inevitably in store for them. And Whitney makes space for the musical performances as the heart of this piece in which individual characters come more clearly into view.

There is considerable talent on display in The Secret Life of Bees and across the performances there is astonishing vocal depth and range from everyone involved. But it is a collective performance, one that gives equal space to all of the voices, creating a kind of harmony in performance that allows the audience to enjoy and understand each character perspective. From determined Rosaleen refusing to be pushed around by her employer or the men determined to limit her future to the calm and angel-like August commanding respect and loyalty from those around her, kindly May and ferocious June hiding a softer heart beneath her harsh exterior, while the broken and nervy Lily whose powerful voice starts to emerge as her confidence grows, along with the sweet neighbour who, like Tommy Trafford in An Ideal Husband, comes to propose to June every couple of weeks. The vocal performances including Abiona Omonua, Rachel John, Danielle Fiamanya, Ava Brennan and Eleanor Worthington-Cox are outstanding, along with excellent support from Noah Thomas and Tarinn Callender.

The source material for The Secret Life of Bees may have a perhaps overly simplistic plot and limited character development but Nottage, Sheikh and Birkenhead have done much to bring this story to life through the much more grounded civil rights frame and ongoing challenges faced by working communities, while the music brings a real soulful and impassioned perspective that builds audience engagement. Whitney’s production for the Almeida has its moments of sentiment but it is never a passive experience, ultimately delivering a hopeful and meaningful night.

The Secret Life of Bees runs at the Almeida Theatre until 27 May with tickets from £12. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Women Beware the Devil – Almeida Theatre

What are the limits of a woman’s ambition at a time when she had no power? Lula Raczka’s new play Women Beware the Devil explores accusations of witchcraft and the meaning of evil at the outbreak of the Civil War in the early part of the 1640s, but while that makes for an interesting premise and context, the story is really about the ambitions of three women of different ages and class in the same house trying to control their environment and the future through their actions. It is not always successful as drama, however, struggling to find an even tone between comedy and commentary, with activities and motivations emerging in haphazard and often obscure ways, but there is an underlying purpose here that considers the physical structures in which women lived and the extent to which they had power through their relationship with menfolk as well as how their bodies became battlegrounds that could be overcome as well as deployed to achieve their ends.

The Almeida Theatre has had a strong run of form, a series of particularly acclaimed work culminating in the almost instantaneous transfer of A Streetcar Named Desire to the West End. Women Beware the Devil is its first stumble in a while, a work that feels unfinished, not quite aligning its dramatic ambitions and messaging with the structures and management of the material to convey the plot to the audience. There is a strong basis here, however, in which a young stable-girl, to whose name is attached considerable suspicion, is invited to become a lady’s maid by the mistress of a large country house who needs her brother to marry and produce an heir in order to save the estate from entail to a loathed cousin. This combination of mercenary motives and the potential for devilry is filled with possibility, combining magical means and earthly ambition with the need to arrive at a practical outcome.

Raczka creates that initial scenario well, particularly the ambiguity of a forbidden and highly dangerous method by exploring the power dynamic between the high-born Lady Elizabeth who in manner and confidence is intimidating and certain of herself, and the lowly and introverted servant Agnes who denies any alleged powers but agrees to the bargain nonetheless. That Elizabeth needs her and cannot manage her brother or their family destiny alone is significant in a play that seeks to subvert established notions of governance and position, although it is unclear until the second part of the story just how important the role of dynasty and heritage will be when Raczka’s visions for presenting a ‘world turned upside down’ emerges in more ways than one.

Christopher Hill, the Marxist historian who used that phrase as the title of his seminal book about radical religious groups in the Civil War, would be jumping for joy at Raczka’s interpretation of an event that forms the backdrop to this drama in which the Royalist central family endure chaos without and within. The play begins in 1640 and ends shortly after King Charles leaves London and war breaks out, with the slow dissolution of the monarch’s power mirroring the events occurring within the household. As the old, established order crumbles outside it is frequently referenced in the text, with characters debating the Godly appointment of the monarch, the duty to serve in his army and, later in the play, Charles’s human failures that lead to violence.

Within the house a similar challenging of authority takes place, although that is perhaps not explicit enough until Act Two when Agnes embraces opportunity and, bored with her victory, looks to destroy everything she has won. But it is Lady Elizabeth that sets out the stakes, repeatedly referencing the fabric of the house that she holds so dearly and risks her soul to preserve. The house, she argues not unsympathetically, is both a landmark and a source of employment for generations of local families, a symbol of constancy and continuity whose privilege provides reassurance and stability – a sentiment echoed by the other servants. Agnes’s enthusiasm for destruction is less convincing and harder for the audience to follow, although Hill might enjoy its notions of leveling the playing field.

It is here that Women Beware the Devil becomes most muddled as the piece moves towards its dramatic crescendo, Parliamentarian forces heading for the house bringing, to Agnes’s mind, a form of liberation from oppressive rule and stale codes of behaviour that prevent stable-girls from becoming great ladies. And while Raczka allows Lady Elizabeth to fleetingly suggest that Agnes’s supposed saviours will be far harder on witches than the previous regime, it is not pursued any further. This rather romantic and simplistic view of the Parliamentarian forces is as old as Hill’s 1970s book, and serves no clear purpose in this play. It is never clear why Agnes can predict King Charles’s fate – which was certainly not a possibility in 1642, even as late as 1648 few believed that regicide was a serious consideration – but not foresee the extreme Puritanism that will grow out of the Parliamentarian cause in the years ahead, and, most importantly, why in a play about the strength and ambitions of women, Agnes puts her faith in a group of men who will pursue witchcraft with a fervency as yet unseen.

Raczka’s play is most frustrating in its presentation of women’s relationships, pitting them against one another and thereby reducing the fault of men in the pursuit and pronouncement of witchcraft. The central triangle between servant Agnes, lady of the house Elizabeth and the woman her brother marries, Catherine, starts well enough, the characters forming allegiances with one another and working towards a common goal, to produce a male heir to protect the estate. Elizabeth and Agnes are united by a blood pact that brings Catherine into the story, and having fulfilled her side of the bargain, Agnes is appointed as Catherine’s maid where the women become friends of a kind, sharing confidences almost as equals.

But just as Raczka seems to be heading towards an exploration of male failures, demonstrated through the inability of Catherine’s husband to consummate his marriage and instead exploits the bodies of his servants, the writer takes the story into a less satisfactory direction, creating situations in which the women betray and condemn one another for personal gain. Each one has their own ambitions to pursue, Elizabeth wants to maintain her family name and home, Catherine wants to fulfill the duties of a wife and Agnes, when pushed, longs to wear silks and know the finery of aristocracy. Setting women against one another is a tired trope, particularly in a story that not only allows men to prosper from their demise but absolves them from any responsibility for it, but it also makes little sense in a play that is ostensibly about witchcraft.

Raczka’s plotting feels arbitrary at times, a jumble of scenes that picks up and puts down different character motivations without sufficient explanation. Why Elizabeth feels that asking an alleged witch for help is her only option is never clear, nor why her brother refuses to marry when so much is at stake. The relationship between brother and sister is once shown to be inappropriate, resulting in an act of attempted sexual violence which remains unexplained and why Agnes seeks revenge against this family, and Elizabeth in particular, when this is the only place she been treated with humanity and without suspicion makes little sense either. Likewise, Catherine makes some strange choices that lead to her own downfall but few of Raczka’s decision create a coherent whole. Moments are compelling but Women Beware the Devil lacks a consistent message, implying women should be far warier of one another.

Ultimately, there is very little examination of witchcraft itself, and while the early part of the play suggests Agnes may be maligned, protesting her innocence and a desire to be ‘good’ repeatedly, Raczka doesn’t offer any rational alternatives to the possibility that Agnes is a witch and therefore controlling events, a decision the writer fully embraces later in the play, while the unpleasant and torturous methods of the Witchfinder are glossed over in a single scene. It means the play struggles for dramatic momentum, mixing together lots of different kinds of scene that distract from rather than support the eventual resolution, leaving the audience wondering what much of it was for.

Director Rupert Goold has found some pacing through the staging, a beautiful long-room set created by Miriam Buether and a checkerboard floor that suggests heritage but also creates space to imply lots of different places in a grand house, largely implied with no furniture. A four poster bed emerging from the floor is a great piece of design by Buether, allowing scenes to take place fluidly between different characters in different rooms at the same time. Evie Gurney’s costumes are equally impressive and redolent of the period, while still suggesting character – monochrome but seductive for Lady Elizabeth, while Agnes and Catherine pointedly share a dress design.

The performers too are working really hard ahead of this week’s Press Night to make this play come to life, although there is too little time to address these intrinsic concerns. Not seen on a London stage since Oslo, Lydia Leonard is particularly excellent, a confident and ultimately likable Lady Elizabeth who will go to any lengths to protect her family legacy, and Leonard invests her with a consistent dignity even at her character’s lowest moments. Alison Oliver moves from reticent and beleaguered to invincible as Agnes, a character whose trajectory and motivation is not easy to plot, while Ioanna Kimbrook adds to a growing CV with her childish Catherine who eventually finds some inner steel when her ambitions are crushed. Leo Bill is a little cartoonish as as Elizabeth’s brother, another character whose behaviours feel inconsistently realised while Nathan Armarkwei-Laryea is the face of every other man and the devil. These may all be his disguises but again it’s not a device that Raczka does anything with.

Three characters directly address the audience in Women Beware the Devil, drawing contemporary parallels by asking whether we still value country houses, heritage and duty in the same way and if we even need the devil now that more human evils have taken his place. In a stronger piece, those might be interesting questions to ponder, but the play gets so lost in its exploration of the witch trope that it forgets to object to the malignity of three women betraying each other over a man and never challenges the role they played in hunting and destroying women accused of witchcraft. In a story that puts ambitious women at the forefront of the drama, it seems a shame today to watch them destroy each other instead.

Women Beware the Devil is at the Almeida Theatre until 25 March with tickets from £10. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

The Village / Rush – Almeida Theatre

You can tell a lot about the confidence of a theatre by its programming and never more so than in the degree of community and youth engagement it undertakes. The Almeida Theatre, then, couldn’t be more exciting and following a highly acclaimed Autumn / Winter season with rave reviews for both Tammy Faye and its current production of A Streetcar Named Desire, the stage is given over for two Sunday evenings to the Almeida Youth Company, presenting two brand new 50-minute plays written for and by a vast company of young performers under the direction of Abi Falase. Working with two established theatremakers – Tatenda Shamiso and Rafaella Marcus – this evening of performance is a true collaboration, one that showcases the Almeida’s talent development ecosystem.

Often, the work of young companies is confined to the tricky summer holiday period when much of the theatre community decamps to Edinburgh and no one risks opening a major show. Last summer, both the Donmar Warehouse (The Trials) and the Young Vic (Of the Cut) offered their spaces to works created by their youth and community programmes, two highly successful concepts that explored production techniques and site-specific opportunities to celebrate the venues that nurtured them. Now, the Almeida Theatre has taken the concept a step further, tying its Youth Company performance to its current show with both The Village and Rush directly responding to themes and concepts raised by Tennessee Williams’s play – a smart and insightful decision that creates a future model for its community engagement activities.

The Village

The first performance of this double bill is The Village, a deeply political piece guided by Shamiso that draws on notions of utopian ideals in Williams’s play and the ways in which dreams and reality are often sacrificed at the point when old and new worlds collide. In this scenario, the young people of the UK have created a pilot society, designed and governed by themselves, an ideal place in which policies and State functions are provided by a Council of emancipated youth free to set their own priorities and budget using devolved powers given to them by the adult Government in the outside world. It is an interesting and well-worked premise, one that explores concepts of power, management, democracy and corruption within both the economic and physical limitations of the village they establish.

There are two particularly intriguing elements here that ultimately shape the direction this 50-minute piece takes; the first is the geographical boundary of the village itself, housed in an abandoned seaside town which instantly evokes notions of dereliction, decline and, importantly, distance from the real seat of power in London. Although the physical location is never specified, this created commune is clearly on the margins of the UK, as close to the edge of the land mass as it is possible to get, and thus without connection to much of the country. Are the young people being set up to fail deliberately while similarly isolated from any kind of wider connection that could add momentum to their cause?

But this is also a piece about the limitations of the space they are given to govern, a physical patch of ground that only affects those living within it. The Government of the day has not awarded them total power for all young people in the country allowing their needs to be met by this group, and instead grants them jurisdiction over those living within the boundaries of the youth State. As youth members ‘age out’ they are replaced. It is this contested physical limitation that drives much of the drama that follows and it is in this space where those notions of utopia and reality must co-exist. Naturally more than one kind of betrayal occurs, not least in the relationship between central Government and this small pilot site with little to gain from its shackled independence. The youth have been given their dream but in a place that in every physical and geographical sense will fail them, undermining the regime in much the same way that Blanche’s fantasies betray her when the price of realising them proves too brutal.

The second important element of this society is that is was created from mass protest, a violent and energetic opener in which 20 performers storm the stage in masks that obscure their faces. But a society created from revolution and built on foundations of anarchy is doomed to fail when attempts to reimpose rules and a form of governed democracy become compromised by elitism and mass disillusionment. This is the main driver of The Village, the growing disenchantment of the people which is escalated upwards to the seemingly ineffective rule of its Council. That further protest and regime change are subsequently mooted naturally stem from the State foundations, and, in subtle reference to works like Animal Farm (not to mention recent Government scandals), frustrations about the meaning of equality play out across this story.

There are real complexities here though with an understanding that rules and leadership are far more complex than they may appear. While the Council is not sympathetically portrayed, the difficulty of balancing the economy, food shortages and negotiating their independent status with the existing Government proves troublesome. Similarly, there is much advocacy for a newly created Education system based on student interest but an equal recognition that boundaries and regulations are necessary for a society to function which add nuance to what could have been an idealistic but naive concept of utopian democracy. That State failure seems inevitable never detracts from the hope everyone has for improving and achieving this idealised society regardless of the human behaviours that prevent it from happening.

The Village has a conventional theatrical approach, a linear story that, like The Trials, explores notions of young people bringing forward power to make decisions about the kind of future they want to build. Focusing that around the driver of new recruits being inducted as well as the ways in which this society tries to hide its struggles, to present its best self to the outside world through the presence of an (unseen) documentary film crew and social media manager are areas that could be expanded in a longer project. Yet, this is a 50-minute production filled with interesting questions about that tricky space between fantasy and truth.

Rush

The second performance, shaped by Marcus, is a quite different proposition although it too considers a place between dreams and reality. Set during a single night at a fairground, Rush is about wistful lost love, the pursuit of idealised happiness and co-dependency in various forms. The Company create a last night atmosphere in this piece, of a world or way of living that the various inter-related characters already know has ended but who chose to suspend their disbelief for a single night in order to recapture the innocence of their connection one last time. By morning, everything will change, particularly as one of the protagonists is about to leave the group forever, bound for a grown-up life abroad.

Linking to Williams’s creation of characters fooling themselves about who they are and what their future will be, Rush also considers the last-chance desperation of individuals pursuing a fantasy that only takes them further away from themselves. This takes places across two groups of friends, each containing one half of a couple who dated for a year before their relationship fell apart, and both coincidentally, or perhaps deliberately, in the same place for this one night where there is one last chance to set things right. What takes this away from rom-com territory is that the desire for reconciliation is one-sided, a scenario that nods to the changing connection between Stella and Stanley in A Streetcar Named Desire, that places protagonists Leah and Toni on opposite trajectories.

Under Marcus’s guidance, there is a dreamlike quality to this scenario aided by Fraser Craig’s romantic lighting design and Phoebe Shu-Ching Chan’s evocative costume choices. The setting is more Coney Island-like that Dreamland Margate, tapping into a very American notion of innocence that fairground rides and safe end of the pier spaces create. It feels like a warm summer night with characters dressed in shorts and crop tops or Hawaiian shirts, an easy, casual vibe where everyone wants to have a good time, and like the similar scene in Blood Brothers in which Micky, Edward and Linda go to the fair while the narrator casts doom over their unaffected joy, in Rush there are no thoughts of what’s to come.

The two friendship groups are well created but given slightly different structures, one in which Leah is too distracted by the possibility of finding Toni to fully appreciate her friends and the other in which Toni is fully absorbed in every moment of the evening unconcerned by the possibility of bumping into an ex they have emotionally left behind. The groups are loud and boisterous at times, fun-loving and cheeky, performed with energy by the Company who create a very credible connection between people with more than a decade of friendship to call upon, but are also in their early 20s and on the cusp of change.

To this, Rush adds some intriguing theatrical devices and movement sequences that focus on the existential pressures individuals are feeling that hide beneath the jaunty projection of happiness. Juxtaposing these monologues or philosophical reflections within the central story as characters talk about the momentary freedom offered by being in the Hall of Mirrors where you can evade the constriction of societal rules, or the claustrophobic smallness of the individual relative to the uncaring universe dampen the romance of the central scenario, and while these could have a stronger role in pulling out contrasting notes of potential ugliness at the funfair, the choreographed precision of the complex mirrors sequence is particularly effective.

Rush also has plenty of expansion potential, drilling further into Leah’s need to rekindle this defining romance and the willingness to sacrifice everything for its sake. Like Williams, the Company are exploring the cruelty of unrequited desire and of rejection about which these characters clearly have more to say in the aftermath of their meeting. Nonetheless like The Village, this 50-minute play probes the place between reality and fiction, where individual fantasy and hope are subsumed into a more satisfying collective.

These plays may not be the obvious responses to Streetcar that you might expect but are all the more interesting for it, and the development of contemporary work delving into the themes of Williams’s mighty play is well worth spending a Sunday night at the theatre. This model for youth participation is a promising one, filling a space between classic plays and audience engagement that is rich with possibility. Creating space for it in future programming will be the challenge but one that will offer rich rewards for a thriving creative culture.

The Village / Rush will be performed again at the Almeida Theatre on 22 January. Tickets at £5. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog