Phaedra – National Theatre

There are many ways to update a classic text; you can relocate it to another time period where the play’s themes and political subtext can find accord with the tone of a later era – a popular option for Shakespeare adaptations where alternative period settings seek to reinforce universal truths about human nature in the writer’s work; you could make drastic cuts to the dialogue to create a leaner and more pointed story or replace some of the text with alternative forms of expression as Ivo van Hove often does with film, or dance and movement as Frantic Assembly have done with their recent Othello. But Simon Stone makes theatre a little differently, by creating a new contemporary version of the story using the shape of the plot and its messaging but in an entirely new and accessible language.

His adaptation of Yerma at the Young Vic in 2016 was a triumph, a translation of Federico Garcia Lorca’s original play into a contemporary obsession with female reproduction and the expectation to be a mother. Staged in a confining glass box, Stone created an original scenario onto which he successful grafted Lorca’s story to understand the endless pressures placed on women of childbearing age to conform to both external and internalised expectations to procreate. Stone’s sensitive but balanced production was a huge success from a writer who understands and so well represents the complexities of womanhood on stage, with his central character able to reach across generations and link to Lorca’s original.

Now, Stone turns his attention to another important literary woman, Phaedra as imagined by Euripides, Seneca and Racine and given a modern retelling in a production at the National Theatre written and directed by Stone. With its Press Night later this week, Stone’s production has a number of technical issues to resolve, complicated changes that are creating overlong pauses between some of the scenes and intruding on the pace of the show which hopefully repeated performance during the preview period will resolve. Nonetheless, Stone’s vision for Phaedra is riveting in a piece that explores mature sexuality, fantasy and generational competition between mother and daughter.

Phaedra in this production is relocated to the modern day where she is the head of a wealthy and consumerist household. A senior politician in the Shadow Cabinet, Phaedra, renamed Helen (a pointed choice given the tragedy of beauty and masculine aggression to follow) has what appears to be the perfect life with two children – a grown-up daughter, Isolde, who is married and a teenage son Declan – as well as a devoted and supportive husband and father of the children, Hugo, who is of Iranian descent. Stone creates an instant sense of their life, of white privilege and self-satisfaction, of believing themselves to be liberal, people of the world but with a surface engagement not only in the political consequences of their lifestyle but also in their relationship to one another, only they don’t yet realise it.

So, Stone puts them in another glass box where we can watch it all go wrong. And as the light’s come up on Chloe Lamford’s quite spectacular set, in the first minute of the show, the audience has all the information it needs to understand this family. The living room and kitchen visible at the start is expensively and tastefully decorated with marbled surfaces, minimal but chic furnishings and a deference to showcasing their taste that Lamford notes may be filled with life but is ultimately hollow. The spectacular coup de theatre some way into this first scene is quite remarkable as the glass case revolves showing its cubed structure for the first time and a plush home that turns into a bedroom and en suite that characters can fully circumnavigate during conversation. This perfect stage picture is something Stone is about to shatter.

Having established who Helen/Phaedra is, Stone starts to bring her to life and in doing so teases out all kinds of complex responses that explore female sexuality and fantasy. The arrival of Sofiane – the son of her former lover Achraf – is the catalyst for the inevitable disaster that plays out across the following hours of performance and Stone creates an added layer by recasting this relationship, and making Sofiane a non-relation. This helps to generate some of the empathy that Helen must elicit while also keeping just enough inappropriateness to make the relationship between them a little uncomfortable and not only due to their age gap.

Stone’s Helen wallows in a form of lost fantasy, the chance to rekindle a ghost of passion with a lover who died in a car accident that left her unable to resolve her feelings for him. Playing those out with his son, who she knew as a young child, creates a kind of substitution in her mind. And while the affair with Sofiane is incredibly passionate, reawakening a side of Helen that she had thought dormant in her long marriage to the less inspiring and over-familiar Hugo, a danger arises when she repeatedly references Achraf, showing the extent to which the two men merge in her mind as Helen is transported back to a carefree time in her life that she desperately wants to recapture.

This father-son dynamic is then mirrored in an equivalent mother-daughter perspective in which Sofiane also begins an affair with Isolde who then leaves her mild husband Eric for the man she knows is having an affair with her mother. The younger woman is also besotted by a fantasy about this stranger that she barely knows, struck by his different conversation from the first encounter in Helen’s house and reading deeper feelings into discussions and meetings they have offstage. Isolde too is projecting a romantic fantasy onto Sofiane who likewise replicates his childhood desire for Helen with her daughter, with Stone creating a complicated but credible series of projections in which none of the characters see one another as they really are.

But there is an important political dimension here too that comments on the impressionistic exoticism with which both Helen and Isolde see Sofiane, a reductive overlaying of his complex heritage and agency that prioritises their romantic and sexual needs above his existence as a real person – a point made so well in the final Act in which a visit to Morocco finally gives the audience a greater understanding of this man and his needs. That Phaedra returns repeatedly to the memory of Helen’s time in Morocco with Achraf is important, and through the fog a picture of this past relationship emerges, one of a group of Oxford-educated intellectuals enjoying a tourist’s perspective on the country and expecting it to meet their cliched expectations, suggesting Helen’s engagement with reality was limited even then as well as her capacity to lie to herself about her own desirability.

That this mutual fantasy becomes the basis for sexual jealousy and competition between mother and daughter is at the root of the tragedy that ensues, while Sofiane’s own muddied desires also make him a more rounded character. Stone works hard to ensure the audience don’t see this man the way that the women do, providing extra layers of Moroccan politics that allow him to clash with Hugo over more than his wife, while the masculine aggression stemming from a need to possess or even exceed what his father had runs through Sofiane’s motivation and emotional responses – feelings that become increasingly confused as his relationship entanglements begin to suffocate him.

A set-piece moment immediately after the interval where this all plays out at a restaurant birthday gathering for Helen is extremely effective, as the quietly sniping birthday girl who misses her now errant lover slowly brings the party to its knees and reeks havoc in all of her relationships, the consequences of which play out across the remainder of the story. The trajectory from smug, confident politician at ease with herself through a desperate illusory passion to destructive rage is something Stone manages particularly well, and, as he did with Yerma, the writer increases the tension, the personal need and the stakes bit by bit as his characters lose any sense of control, giving themselves over to pure emotion.

Structurally, Stone takes the same approach as he did with Yerma with time leaps between each scene in which the audience must infer all that has happened in the interim, but each time the characters appear before us, the stakes are considerably higher and there is further for them all to fall. Scenes appear suddenly out of the blackness as though a light has been flipped on and a key moment is illuminated for the audience before it too fades to black and another takes its place. In between, Stone inserts a tense musical composition by Stefan Gregory than creates a sense of anticipation mixing vocal ululations with classical and North African tones to reflect and guide the audience’s changing perspective on the story and it’s thematic implications.

It doesn’t all work and – technical issues of the early run aside – there is a lack of clarity in the long penultimate scene that would benefit from a little tightening and rewriting. This is a very different and decisive moment in the play, where all the romance and clutter of the jumbled sexual relationships has been swept aside and the action decamps to the snowy roads of Morocco where the UK characters seek Sofiane once more and Helen decisively confronts her past. Much of this dialogue is spoken in French and Arabic with slightly out of sync subtitles (which will be rectified), yet the consequences for Sofiane are a little muddy and not as clearly expressed as perhaps they could be. It is a long scene with multiple conversations but it’s not always clear where lies and misdirection are being used to defer Helen and if all of what we’re told in multiple languages is true. This is a pivotal scene for Helen, a moment when the scales fall from her eyes and she sees a reflection of herself so it’s important that the production can find the clarity it needs to make her fate really powerful.

The National’s production is suffering from the practicality of its genuinely magnificent set, and while the structure of the Young Vic space meant Yerma‘s pacing could be assisted by the use of a treadmill to carry sets on and off at speed in the darkness, the nature of the Lyttleton space and the level of realism that Lamford and Stone have chosen make this a far more cumbersome process to effect. When locations appear they are incredible, a testament to the ingenuity of the National’s in-house workshops but a couple of scenes could be simplified, made more representative in order to facilitate the swifter scene changes Phaedra needs to maintain its momentum and to showcase the interesting scenic approach that Stone employs so well.

The actors though are already well ahead of the play’s logistics creating an immersive and compelling story as soon as the lights go on. Janet McTeer finds incredible range in Helen/Phaedra, a woman whose confidence and self-satisfaction is at its height during the early part of the show. But she also has an excessive sexual confidence, a certainty that men should respond to and fulfill her regardless of her marital status, so when Sofiane comes along her ‘right’ to pursue him and the possessiveness she reveals is all consuming. McTeer also connects Helen’s physical expression to the image of the woman she once was (and is still in her head), driving a single-mindedness that blocks out other people’s emotions or needs, failing to listen when they speak and unable to subvert her own desires to support others.

Making his UK stage debut, Assaad Bouab is something of an enigma as Sofiane, a character whose ‘otherness’ underscores the drama, making him both an object of exotic allure to the women but also a man struggling to define himself. A process of loss bubbles through Bouab’s performance as the character tries to reconcile a paternal resentment and a kind of jealousy, coveting the things his father had but destroying them the moment he finally has them. Bouab is particularly impressive at reflecting on Sofiane’s disarranged mind as the multiple secrets and expectations lead to a dramatic conclusion.

Supporting the leads, Paul Chahidi is particularly good as Hugo, a seemingly lightweight personality at first, a figure of fun than Helen is easily able to cuckold, but Chahidi finds sympathy and depth as the story unfolds. Mackenzie Davis as Isolde echoes the selfishness of Helen as mother and daughter play our a similar life pattern, determined to follow their own desires regardless of the consequences, while John Macmillan as her husband Eric fits into a Hugo-like role, a nice man who is easy to betray but the better person in the longer term. Helen’s political life is given context by friend Omolara (Akiya Henry) who attends personal functions and becomes Helen’s main confidant but she finds their connection one-sided.

Stone’s play has so much potential, meaning if the technical and pacing issues can be resolved, it could be a very powerful production indeed. Phaedra is a contemporary reworking of a well-known tale that fits its new context extremely well and with an understanding of the evolution of female sexuality that has an affecting and poignant resonance. Most of all Phaedra is about the tragedy of self-delusion and the failure to the see the world and other people as they truly are.

Phaedra is at the National Theatre until 8 April with tickets from £20. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog

Othello – National Theatre

It’s an interesting decision for the National Theatre to tackle Othello again when their last production in 2013 still looms large in the memory even a decade on and available via subscription service, National Theatre at Home. But it was a lifetime ago in theatre terms, under a previous Artistic Director that existed in a quite different cultural and political context to Clint Dyer’s equally contemporary but far darker perspective on a play about systemic racism and the social system stacked against not just Othello but the women of the play as well. And this is a production that recognises its place in the history of performance, scattering the stage with a digital montage of Othello posters and playbills across the centuries including the RSC’s notable version in 2015 with a black actor playing Iago and interpretations from all around the world. Co-designed by Nina Dunn and Gino Ricardo Green, as the audience take their seats, it’s clear that Othello continues to reinvent itself for every generation and that its central messages matter more than ever.

There are a number of striking decisions in this new production designed to emphasise how greatly the scales are weighted against Othello as his rise to power is stymied by jealousy and racial denigration. It may take some time before the audience see them all but the National has deliberately eschewed diversity in its casting making Giles Terrera the only person of colour in the cast, a decision that reflects Othello’s isolation in the play and must have created some interesting tones in the rehearsal room, particularly for the lead actor exploring the unusual position of this character, a self-made man who rises to a position of influence in a world that views his race with suspicion and disdain – and we note early on that the Duke of Venice happily takes advantage of Othello’s military prowess but pointedly refuses to shake his hand.

And Director, Dyer digs deep into this notion in an attempt to deconstruct the inevitability of Othello’s decline despite his soldierly successes. In a brief scene that could have been lifted from Coriolanus, Movement Director Lucie Pankhurst choreographs a sequence in which Othello is successively cheered by the crowd and then jeered as his popularity rapidly wanes. Over the course of the show, Dyer then expands this concept, inserting a bank of silent characters known only as the ‘System’ who become a physical manifestation of the status quo with a vested interest in destroying Othello. They lurk like malevolent spirits behind Iago as he unfolds his dastardly plans to the audience, showing signs of joy and rapture as he derails Othello’s marriage and unbalances his mind, while leaning in hungry for the drama as the tension rises.

It works very effectively, adding both a broader sense of the Venetian society that Iago and Othello represent, mirroring the Duke of Venice’s willingness to use the title character but abstain from him, while drawing out the feeling of an Establishment closing ranks, actively keeping people like Othello on the outside, destroying them if need be. Dyer arranges his intimidating Chorus around Chloe Lamford’s dramatically tiered stage, who, perhaps like the witches in Macbeth, may be driving the action or merely observing it. But the stillness of their chilling presence also speaks to the growing confusion in Othello’s mind, almost becoming the physical representation of the poison that infects him when the sinister System bears down on him in the final portion of the play as he feels a kind of spiritual possession take hold.

They reach their apotheosis with the final deal done over the bodies of the dead. And it adds to the tragedy that, knowing the truth about Iago’s game, no one is then sorry about or for Othello. Here, quite the opposite, after the frenzy of that multiply-murderous scene, the remaining white men forget about the dead laying before them and merely offer new jobs to one another with congratulations. The final insult to Othello that his death, like his life, means nothing to those in the System because power is restored to those who always have it.

Although it may be Dyer’s intention to point the effects of the System towards Othello, the final section of this production also makes clear its effects on the play’s three female roles – Desdemona, Emilia and Bianca – who also suffer its suffocating strictures (quite literally in Desdemona’s case). Women in Othello are treated little better than ‘The Moor’ himself and perhaps even a little worse in some ways. They are routinely disbelieved, suspected of treachery and wantonness and called ‘strumpets’. The plot is built around Desdemona’s supposed adultery and her vibrant sexuality which Shakespeare writes about often in graphic terms, referencing her body and her lusts first for her husband and later for multiple men either accused with or coveting her. She is pitched as a betrayer from the start, deceiving her father to run off and marry Othello which causes a parting between them and after which he dispatches a warning to her new husband about her trustworthiness, a warning that hangs over her character throughout the play.

Notable too is the additional domestic violence subtext that Dyer adds to this production, making Emilia, wife of Iago and maid to Desdemona, a quiet victim of abuse. Appearing with a bandaged elbow at first but later with bruises, her deference to him becomes an important motivational device in which Emilia becomes enmeshed in Iago’s plot against Othello. But it lays the groundwork for Othello’s own acts of violence towards his wife, creating a model for male brutality against women that leaves them with no recourse to justice. Pointedly, no one believes in the virtue of either woman until it is too late.

Bianca too, though featured only briefly, endures taunts about her own chastity and decency, hauled away by soldiers before she can reveal the truth with Shakespeare equally uninterested in what happens to her. The presence of the System is then a multi-layered one that seeks only to protect its own, showing no grief or care for the fate of the people it tramples over so long as it triumphs and is sustained. These harbingers of fate separate this Othello from the National’s 2013 version, reflecting very contemporary concerns about social justice and the inbuilt biases of modern power structures that ultimately deflect and deter even the smallest incursions.

Dyer and Lamford’s vision is a gloomy one, a world of shadows in a classical meets dystopian-utility design that draws out the embedded political processes stacked against Othello and the women, dwarfing and enclosing them even when they think they are the height of their power or happiness. Lamford has created a tiered set, almost ampitheatrical that nods to Greek and Roman democratic tradition upon which the System imperiously sit, watch and guide the action like Olympian Gods observing their instrument Iago. There is something solid and unshakable about the design, a stone edifice that seems carved into the stage representing millenia of stable, unmoving and unchanging power resting with the elite, one that by default creates a pit or arena at the stage level where individuals from outside the System contend for victory and place. Yet, before the story even begins Lamford’s imposing structures shows us that they will always lose.

Michael Vale’s costumes dovetail very neatly into this concept, using military uniforms for men and women as a base but making them feel like everyday wear, a utilitarian consistency in how everyone must dress that suggests a rigid right-wing despotism of the kind that George Orwell might have written. The most obvious allusion is to fascist blackshirts which underpins the racial tension in the play and Vale exclusively uses blue and black in his colour scheme, combining 1930s tailoring with the simplicity of futuristic and orderly design to enhance Lamford, Dunn and Green’s notions of a sad timelessness in which the story of Othello plays out again and again. Vale gives the protagonist only one moment of true power in the play, when he appears after his wedding wearing a tunic that suggest his cultural heritage – also in midnight blue – matched by Desdemona as the pair are momentarily ascendant and in sync before their attempted conformation and assimilation consumes them.

Dyer controls all of this really nicely and while there is no sense of urgency in the performances – with a three hour running time – the methodical destruction of Othello by degrees unfolds with precision, giving space and clarity to all of the complex crossover plots and devices that Shakespeare uses. Iago’s plan are complicated and multi-dimensional with no pre-determined direction at the beginning of the play. Instead he tries a few things out on Othello and others to see if his venom will work and when it does amplifies his plan accordingly. This production is very good at making those moments particularly clear and marrying together the emotional manipulation and linguistic tricks that Iago employs with the trail of physical evidence he creates as the decisive handkerchief is passed between characters. Notable too is Iago’s influence on others and his ability to coerce not just his wife but Michael Cassio and Roderigo which are well presented here.

Terera’s Othello is a complex figure, a doomed tragic hero unable to account for the very different forces that assail him, not recognising the gradations of difference between his own internal jealousy, and the external influences of racism and the System willing him to fail in marriage, job and status. It makes his Othello extremely trusting, taking things at face value be it his wife’s professions of love or Iago’s words, and as a consequence he slips very easily into paranoia which soon consumes him. And Terera charts that descent confidently, creating a sense of the voices plaguing him as doubts and fears drive him to a form of insanity. That this then connects to the masculine aggression for which the Venetians use him makes sense and Terera feeds this into the production’s take on domestic violence and the effect of male rage acted upon female bodies and reputations.

Paul Hilton’s Iago is given leave to be a big, bombastic villain that seems to suit the grandiosity of Lambert’s surroundings, making his character something of the graphic novel baddie. Hilton relishes every word of Iago’s speeches, enjoying the mischief he makes and even when finally caught out, laughing dismissively and with great self-satisfaction. Hilton nonetheless makes his Iago tangibly intimidating, using every inch of his height to tower over Tanya French as the cowed Emilia and dominate any space he is in. That this Iago can choose to stand unnoticed in the shadows while equally forceful when he needs to be be makes him doubly dangerous, leaving the audience in no doubt of the physical strength that matches his vicious oration.

Among the rest of the cast, Rosy McEwen does her best with the fairly thankless role of Desdemona, a little too giggly in the first half perhaps but certainly demonstrating a fighting spirit in the second. French is suitably ambiguous as Emilia who well presents the symptoms of abuse that appear as devotion to her husband but she is ruled by fear, while Joe Bolland makes much of Roderigo as a creepy chancer chasing Desdemona and Rory Fleck Byrne makes a dignified patsy in Cassio. Together with the Ensemble who flesh out the System, the cast convincingly create a sense of society keeping Othello at bay using gesture and body language consistently to isolate and ultimately shape his destruction.

This is a production that has thought very carefully about the things it wants to say and, particularly, what Othello has meant at different points in its performance history. Dyer’s perspective, which has its Press Night this week, is not on fire just yet but it soon will be, bringing a meaningful reflection on Shakespeare’s tale to the stage while clearly distinguishing it from all of those that have come before. Othello continues to resonate not only for its jealousy themes but because now, as in 1604, while the System remains, those on the outside of it will never be safe.

Othello is playing at the National Theatre until 21 January with tickets from £20. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Shoe Lady – Royal Court

The one-hour play format has really come into its own in the last few weeks with several of the larger theatres staging meaningful One Act pieces and taking the lead from fringe theatre and festivals where shorter works are often programmed back-to-back to appeal to two or even three different audiences in one night. In some ways this is a natural reaction against a period of extra-long plays extending to at least if not beyond three hours, but the chance to be home by 9pm is a welcome one even if this spate of short plays doesn’t last long. The revival of two Carol Churchill plays is largely responsible with artistic integrity prized above interval bar sales with Far Away at the Donmar Warehouse and A Number at the Bridge Theatre playing solo, both so packed full of atmosphere and meaning that a second work would only detract from the power of their commentary on how the domestic and social is affected by science and politics.

Now, Graduate of the Young Writer’s programme, E.V. Crowe presents her new 65-minute play Shoe Lady at the Royal Court, which opens to the Press this evening, and takes an equally impactful look at the pressures of modern living. The central concept, that of a character with one one shoe forced to live with the indignities and physical challenges that it presents, is on the surface a silly one and the audience might expect plenty of slapstick encounters or Sex and the City posturing as the heroine Viv hobbles through this one day.

But Crowe uses this seemingly trivial scenario to more closely examine the ways in which we internalise and respond to societal expectations while judging those who fail to meet these prescribed standards – something as minor as a lost shoe becomes a symbol of Viv’s increasing ostracization and rapid descent into social dejection. The role of women as workers, wives and mothers is central, so to maintain status, lives, homes and families along with set notions of normalcy into which we painfully force ourselves, we all try to fit in, play the game and stay afloat. Crowe’s work is particularly interested in how the “merry-go-round” of commercial city living along with the “have-it-all mentality” this engenders affects female mental health which Shoe Lady charts in Viv’s declining stability as life and health unravel.

The compression of time in this play means Viv’s story acts as a symbolic or representative experience taking place across a single day in which the central character changes from reasonable optimism at the brightness of the morning to disorientation, devaluation and despair at its close. Director Vicky Featherstone’s approach adds layers to the concept with nods to seasonal changes as well, the charming spring morning turning to the searing and uncomfortable heat of summer that burns the exposed sole of Viv’s foot on the tarmac before autumnal leaves blow at her as she flees from a rash and pressured act, leading to an engulfing darkness as the consequences of her shoeless state are felt.

There is also a focus on the uneven balance of the trivial and more vital functions of life, with Viv frequently distracted by small homely concerns that put her wider purpose at risk. The flow of Viv’s mind between these different degrees of concern is one of Crowe’s most notable achievements here, and as the character prioritises fixing her bedroom curtain over taking her son to school and getting to work on time, or is distracted by a hidden and unnoticed smear on the window of a house she is showing to a potential buyer, Crowe reflects on the multitudinous expectations of perfection that Viv experiences, where the ideal home or outfit is given as much precedence in our overly-stylised instagrammable society as the basic functions of providing food and shelter.

Shoe Lady packs a lot of themes into its 65-minute run time, held together by the semi-absurdist style that Crowe has adopted in which her monologuing female lead talks to the audience, herself and occasionally to other characters in a scattering of dramatically constructed conversations. In staging the show, Crowe and Featherstone draw their influence not from the contained almost apocalyptic worlds of Beckett or Ionesco but from the dreamlike illusion of 1960s French cinema but mixed with the noirish splintered imaginings created by Salvador Dali for 1940s films like Hitchcock’s Spellbound. This heightened but vaguely nightmarish state is well maintained throughout the show as the tone darkens and the consequences of Viv’s lost shoe take on a terrible momentum of their own.

Chloe Lamford’s exciting design is simultaneously simple yet complex, a plain narrowing black box that creates a funnel shape with no exits to left or right, with only a square rear window at the back which references both those tense Hitchcock screen designs as well as the inescapable nature of this scenario for the lead character. Drawing more on this metaphor, Lamford creates further height within the stage with two descending staircases for Viv and her family to access the downstairs rooms of her house. Initially covered by a bed, the centre has a thin treadmill with clear allusions to the relentlessness of the society that Crowe depicts as well as creating opportunities for Featherstone to incorporate movement, travel and emotional emphasis within the rhythm of the play.

Katherine Parkinson’s recent stage work has focused on the challenges for modern women expected to publicly deliver an idealised concept of themselves and their lifestyle. Her last major West End role in Laura Wade’s superb Home I’m Darling as a wife wanting to live-out an idea of 1950s domestic perfection and vintage ease was a fascinating study in the dangers of nostalgia and our misplaced concept of historical reality that fractured beautifully in Parkinson’s fragile and nuanced performance. Parkinson has such an ability to tread the line between comedy and emotion which she uses here to great effect, drawing out the inner sadness and anguish that Viv experiences but maintaining the lightness of the play’s frame.

Here as the titular Shoe Lady there are similar ideas about the pressures placed on women especially to look, behave and even think a certain way. Crowe’s character is shown to be immediately afflicted by various contradictory worries but to the outside world as long as she looks presentable and normal in two shoes and can physically put one foot in front of the other, Viv’s interior struggles are irrelevant. Using that idea as the baseline of the play, we infer much of this from the writing and Parkinson’s performance, with Crowe starting from the point at which that changes. What we see, then, in Parkinson’s fascinating performance is a constant battle between wanting to maintain a semblance of normality, of adherence to social expectation while struggling to cope with the physical demands of her shoeless state.

So, while Viv proceeds with her day wearing only one shoe, makes it to work and continues to engage with her family, two intertwined things are happening to her; first her balance is physically and emotionally disrupted by the absent shoe, making her hobble but also slowly fracturing her sense of self and completeness with the missing part of her increasingly dominating her thoughts and actions. Parkinson is particular good at creating the confusion of Viv’s mind, the ways in which her thoughts splutter and disconnect, mindful only of the missing shoe – which itself represents another kind of internal balance that the treadmill of work and family expectation is disrupting or at least muting.

Second, is the bodily effect of Viv’s bare foot that becomes bloodied, painful and inflamed as she walks the city streets without any protection from the grit and damage of her journey. Parkinson often holds that leg out, drawing attention to its damaged state and incorporating greater physical distress into the performance as the impact of her day takes its toll on vulnerable flesh and bone. There is a sense of how easily we can suffer, how random acts and decisions, even the loss of a single shoe, can cause someone’s life to unravel fairly quickly and the audience is given an insight into the economic consequences for this small family.

Crowe uses secondary characters sparingly and allows them very little dialogue. Tom Kanji is Viv’s husband Kenny who remains mute for most of the time he is on stage, a presence in the same bed who attends to their child but rarely voices his own feelings or concerns to his wife. We learn that Kenny is also facing potential problems at work with redundancy looming but Viv quickly becomes absorbed by her own day, creating an interesting effect that Kanji manages well to create a character who is present but somehow colourless.

There is a similar challenge for the younger actors with Archer Brandon at this performance as Viv and Kenny’s child (he will be alternating the role with Beatrice White) and has a key birthday scene in which Viv tries to teach him an important life lesson without considering the impact of her behaviour. Her final interaction is with Elaine played by Kayla Meikle as a fellow shoeless woman fallen on hard times that Viv meets in the park and represents how far Viv has to fall. This also offers the play’s most comic scenes as the pair awkwardly tussle over footwear and their relative superiority.

Some of Shoe Lady’s production decisions are a little curious, including the regular appearance of stagehands to deliver props and dab further gory mixtures onto Parkinson’s exposed foot. And while the purpose is to jolt the audience back to reality, drawing attention to the unreality of the scenario created while practically managing the changing scenes creates a jarring effect, intruding on the carefully constructed composition of Lamford’s staging. The talking curtains in the house sale scene are also a weird addition that doesn’t develop into anything more significant later in the story, and is left hanging in every sense.

Matthew Herbert’s piano composition adds to the increasing drama, creating tension and anxiety that integrates really effectively with Lamford’s multipurpose design and the overall tone of nonsensical unease that Featherstone and Crowe create. With a very short run of only three week at the Royal Court, Shoe Lady may only be an hour but this is an intriguing and well-considered examination of the social and domestic pressures placed on women to perform multiple and often contradictory roles in our society.

Shoe Lady is at the Royal Court until 21 March with tickets from £14. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog.

Teenage Dick – Donmar Warehouse

Shakespeare and the High School rom-com go way back; the universality of his plays make them suitable for adaptation to a number of different environments and in the prescribed social structure of the American High School with its strict categorisations, power plays and love of social gatherings (proms, pep rallies and elections) it is a perfect setting to explore some of Shakespeare’s most enduring themes. Gil Junger’s 1999 reworking of The Taming of the Shrew became the accomplished 10 Things I Hate About You, a high point of the genre that made stars of Julia Styles and Heath Ledger, while Baz Luhrmann took a more traditional approach to the language if not the style of his 1996 version of Romeo and Juliet starring pin-up Leonardo DiCaprio and Claire Danes. And plenty of High School movies have at the very least referenced or borrowed plot points or ideas from Shakespeare including Never Been Kissed in 1999 whose heroine played by Drew Barrymore adored As You Like It.

In this context, Mike Lew’s new stage adaptation of Richard III feels surprisingly at home in its new world of teenage angst and social divisions set against the backdrop of the Senior Class President elections at one normal American High School. Taking Shakespeare’s overarching plot, some characters and themes as inspiration, the way in which the two genres have been melded together is remarkably sophisticated although on the surface Teenage Dick looks and sounds like your almost average US teen movie. And while the adaptation has not found universal favour among the critics, anyone growing-up in the era of the High School rom-com will delight in its affection for the genre and an approach that celebrates rather than dilutes Shakespeare’s text.

From the mid-1980s with The Breakfast Club to the mid-2000s when High School Musical signaled the end of the golden age of this enduring genre, for 20-years the US high school movie was a relatively low-budget staple of productions aimed at the teen audience. While the tone varied, they all had their stock formula, usually some kind of disaffected loner or outsider drawn into the world of the cool kids in order to effect change, social realisation and self-belief. There were highs like Heathers (1989) and Mean Girls (2004) – both now stage musicals – as well as the satire Election (1999) and there were plenty of lows too but the genre launched the careers of actors from Paul Rudd to Lindsay Lohan, Zac Efron to Rachel McAdam, Alicia Silverstone, Emilio Estevez and countless others who all went on to bigger, albeit quite different careers.

In Teenage Dick Lew absorbs all of this to believable create Roseland Junior High where jock Eddie is gunning for re-election as Senior Class President having served in the position for two years based entirely on his good looks and football-star status. Surrounding him in what is a very small cast for this kind of setting, we have a teacher Miss York looking to promote social equality and justice, therefore easy to manipulate, and the outcasts demarcated by their disabilities. But integrating Shakespeare into this context makes Lew’s approach so much more interesting than that and soon the audience is questioning whether the apparent divisions we are shown are only truly visible to Richard Gloucester, our protagonist and potential villain.

The central role is recognisably Richard III and those who know the play well will enjoy watching his masterful manipulation of friends and teachers as he manoeuvres himself into candidacy while letting his helpers think it was their idea. But in our more enlightened times, Lew deliberately sidesteps the notion of a truly dastardly Richard while also deciding to tone down the violence to make it appropriate for the High School setting. Instead, Lew asks interesting questions – as Shakespeare does to a degree – about the perception of Richard’s disability and its role in preventing others from seeing him as a leader. Most importantly though, we see clearly how Richard fails to see past his own physical appearance and it is this misconception about others that drives his behaviour and the action of the play.

What is so interesting about Teenage Dick is that there are no straightforward heroes and villains, so we see both Richard and Eddie behaving badly, squaring-up to one another while also being reminded that they are essentially children, 17-year olds acting out with a greater capacity for emotional development than the early part of the play suggests. The audience becomes complicit in its categorisation of the characters into their High School cliches before Lew spends some time in the second half revealing more complex truths beneath the surface.

Richard’s plan to bring about Eddie’s downfall initially seems straightforward and entirely justified when the popular boy taunts and mercilessly bullies Richard, using his disability against him. Eddie’s arrogance and use of offensive language to describe Richard’s condition pit the audience against him while he appears equally cruel in dumping the play’s love interest Anne Margaret before the action begins. Yet as with Shakespeare’s version, our changing opinion and understanding of Richard starts to recast the people around him, including Eddie so before too long other traits including his friendship with Barbara Buckingham known as “Bucks” and his clear popularity at the Presidential Debate force us to re-evaluate our judgement of him. This is only given greater emphasis by the shocking revelations and events of the last section that makes us wonder if, as our narrator, Richard has been manipulating the perspective of the audience as well as the characters.

Lew follows Shakespeare and incorporates aspects of his work in interesting ways across the play, occasionally having Richard break into a flowery Elizabethan structured speech (something which “Bucks” reminds him repeatedly is weird) and maintaining the wonderful soliloquies in which the protagonist directly addresses the audience in spotlighted revelations of his evil plans – there’s even a very funny moment when “Bucks” is onstage for one of these and thinks her unresponsive friend has just gone to “his happy place.” More humour comes from the occasional phrase borrowed from other plays including Julius Caesar – it is used sparingly but adds to the semi-artificiality that both the High School setting and Shakespeare create in allowing Richard to narrate his own story.

But Lew also gives Shakespeare short shrift for his treatment of women and the expansion of Anne Margaret’s character to create the central romance as well as delving into her backstory, aspirations and own feelings of self-exclusion which are meaningfully explored. There is a very sweet tentative chemistry that builds between the initially nervous Anne and Richard, two people from quite different cliques who find humanity in each other, and it is this which prevents Lew’s play from becoming either too snide or too lightweight. The effect of Richard’s decisions have significant consequences for this character and Lew gives her a chance to meaningfully address the viewer and stake her claim to relevance beyond Richard’s existence.

Lew has stipulated that both Richard and “Bucks” must be played by disabled actors which makes perfect sense in this version of the story. Daniel Monks is superb as the teenage Dick of the title, a young man tired of being defined and reduced by his physical appearance so decides to assume the mantle of the villain – as his Shakespearean counterpart does – to upset the balance of power in the school. What makes Monks’s performance so interesting is the conflicted perspective he brings to the role and not only does his Richard believe he is a good person using nefarious means to bring about a greater good, but sometimes he really is.

This nuance is evident all the way through the show and while it takes Richard to quite different places, navigating both a sensitive and sweet relationship with Anne Margaret that develops a real emotional honesty, and into some much more controversial territory as he schemes and undermines his friends, Monks retains the oily fascination of the original character who cannot see beyond his own image and uses that to blame others, while finding a large degree of empathy for his genuine social struggles. And this makes his final actions all the more shocking as he loses control and perspective.

The supporting cast is equally fine, particularly Siena Kelly as the compression of two Shakespearean originals to create a young woman desperate to hide from the spotlight to focus on her dream of becoming a dancer, but she learns to care for Richard and Kelly makes her trajectory extremely moving. Ruth Madeley is a calm presence as best friend “Bucks”, the only character to remain rational throughout, refusing to be blinded by Richard’s obsession with Eddie and finding plenty of comedy in their sparky interactions. Susan Wokoma is fantastic as the enthusiastically naive teacher unwittingly drawn into Richard’s plans, while Callum Adams as Eddie and Alice Hewkin as Clarissa perfectly represent their High School tribes but get to offer some deeper sense of motivation and emotion beneath the surface.

It all looks wonderfully recognisable in Chloe Lamford’s basketball court setting, with floor markings and hoop redolent of any secondary school gymnasium. Characters are dressed appropriately for their social status with Richard in the trademark black jeans and t-shirt of the outsider while sweatshirts and school-branded baseball jackets mark out the sporty boys. The transformations are quickly managed by Director Michael Longhurst who takes a cinematic approach to scene changes using speedily rearranged furniture and lighting to maintain pace. The ball scene is simply and effectively achieved instantly establishing the characteristics of an event we’ve seen in countless movies, but it is the inclusion of projected social media feeds, hashtags, tweets and characters filming on their smartphone that brings this up to date, skewering our modern obsession with an instant visual record and online responsiveness that magnifies every humiliation and private moment.

The murderous tension doesn’t build in the same way as Shakespeare’s original and that sense of deathly danger is all but expunged, yet at only 1 hour and 50 minutes rather than three hours something has to give, not to mention that the idea of mass murders in a High School setting would be in pretty poor taste. Lew has nonetheless created a version of Richard III that suits this context extremely well asking the audience to consider attitudes to disability, power and social structures that perpetuate all kinds of inequality. Teenage Dick may make less sense to those who bypassed the High School movie, but Lew’s play is funny, sad and meaningful, and like Joel Edgerton and David Michod’s film The King, Lew demonstrates that Shakespeare’s characters, plots, structure and themes are just as important as his verse and vocabulary, proving that Shakespeare’s understanding of human nature is as relevant to a battlefield in Leicestershire as it is to a High School gym in America.

Teenage Dick is at the Donmar Warehouse until 1 February with tickets from £10. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog   

The Antipodes – National Theatre

Annie Baker is a major force in modern American theatre whose work captures the sense of a nation battling with its identity, history and loss of purpose. Her characters are always people who, whether they realise it or not, dream of more, of being something or someone else but are economically and emotionally trapped in the perpetual cycle of their own existence from which they are unlikely to break free. The way in which Baker deconstructs the modern American psyche is every bit as accomplished and vital as David Mamet’s skewering of masculinity in the 1980s, but with her own cerebral approach that distinctly uses language to create tension between the intellectual and instinctual in her plays, while drawing on the the underlying tones of religion and mysticism that run through Western societies where faith and science sit side-by-side.

Her latest play The Antipodes is at least an hour shorter than her previous works in the UK – The Flick and John – and focuses on the essential nature of storytelling set in a kind of writers’ room where a small group of people share personal anecdotes over a three month period. What they are all doing there, what the outcome is supposed to be and who they are working for isn’t the point – and it’s not something Baker spends any time trying to explain -because for a play in which plot is the key driver, there really isn’t one. Instead it is these various interactions that become the point as the team explore what it means to tell a story, where stories come from and why they need to feel authentic.

That is not to say that Baker’s scenario doesn’t create a number of questions that have subtle points to make about the ways in which we appropriate individual stories and often commercialise them with little benefit to the storyteller – note here the character of Josh who months into the project still hasn’t received his ID card and most importantly hasn’t been paid despite being an equal contributor to the group – is he being used? Clearly, the team are working for a big commercial organisation represented in Chloe Lamford’s design as a large corporate and soulless boardroom – no pictures or inspiration adorning the wood paneling  and just a stockpile of Perrier water in the corner. There is nothing about this room that inspires imagination or creativity, yet the occasional references to boss Max suggest the scale of this business endeavour and whether it is TV show development, a film project or video game design, there is a feel of exploitation, of something being taken from these people without them realising, dressed up as an exclusive opportunity.

One of The Antipodes most interesting aspects is how Baker controls the changing nature of the stories being told and while these may seem random there is a deliberation behind what people share and when that builds a sense of isolation and even mania around the room as the play unfolds. So it begins with questions posed by Sandy – a management representative who controls the pace and nature of the conversation without sharing himself – using icebreakers that encourage the group to reveal intimate details such as how they lost their virginity and biggest regrets. Over time these become clearly fantastical, taking on the sci-fi bent that they have been gathered to create and running alongside this are discussions about the nature of time, as well as the monsters and creatures that will be included in the final story. The point is that eventually one of them will tell the right story, that the influence of the collective unloading will be something they can sell.

What is so interesting about Baker’s play is not only the intensity of the pressure as eight people remain trapped in a room, but that it takes them all back to the beginning of life itself. Those strands of mysticism and Christianity emerge in elaborate evocation of the Adam and Eve story where the act of creation becomes the ultimate tale, and one which is mirrored by the simplicity of the childhood stories that Eleanor tells. Baker has things to say about how we over-complicate our stories, we elaborate, add dramatic emphasis to make them seem more important and include complex subplots to sustain interest, but what we miss is the youthful innocence of a child’s story with its straightforward detail and rapid resolution, while our obsession with monsters and fear of the dark stems from the biblical twosome who started it all, that all stories will eventually take us back to the origins of life.

The pacing of The Antipodes is still finding its rhythm ahead of Wednesday’s press night but co-directed by Baker and Lamford, it’s almost there with only a couple of energy sags later in the production as the characters themselves tire of the process they’re being subjected to. Like Duncan Macmillan’s Lungs, Baker employs no clear scene breaks and instead changes in time happen with just a flicker from the actors, the lights alter perhaps or the group simultaneously move their chairs creating an unbroken flow to the narrative that helps to create the growing displacement that affects the characters as the show unfolds.

There is also a strong sense of the apocalypse outside that increasingly draws Sandy away to attend to diseases and extreme weather conditions that give the Boardroom a bunker feel, as though storytelling has become our refuge against the outside world. That contrast is well created by Baker and Lamford, adding a fear of the external and a growing displacement from it that adds to the safe-space concept within the room. The reality seems fantastical, that, outside the stories being created in the room, the world is upside down and only here is truth.

While we hear often deeply personal tales from each of the  members of the group, Baker determinedly doesn’t distract us with too much characterisation and although there is enough distinction between them, it is their collective function as a a hive mind that holistically  deteriorates and struggles that determines the ebb and flow of the narrative. Their stories and  their ability to conjure these experiences is the point and it is notable that while petty competition  and momentary tensions exist between them, these are not the focus, so there are no dramatic breakdowns for individuals or even particularly separate trajectories. This can be a strange and puzzling  experience at times but as with the scene in which the team take part in an interrupted futuristic-looking conference call with Max, Baker is asking us to consider how we form the collective stories we tell as groups, societies and nations. And by taking the voices or experiences of others into the very concept of identity, how we express and communicate that through language to embed these ideas and reinforce them between generations.

Of the eight characters, Sinead Matthews’s Eleanor is purposefully the only woman in the creating set, and Baker uses the character quite carefully to explore both her different mode of storytelling and the small moments of sexism endemic in these scenarios. Matthews is clearly separated from the others not by distance but in bringing her own food each day as well as the expression of her anecdotes. You see in the opening scene that the men describe their first sexual experience as a technical or circumstantial occurrence – who, what, and how – but Eleanor never shares these details only the feeling, the strong impression of it which Matthews delivers with the warmth the memory holds for her character. Later, she subtly conveys her astonished indignation when she sees Dave take credit for an idea she had expressed in an earlier scene. Matthews has a way of drawing the audience to her character, part of the group but always noticeable and intriguingly fragile.

Arthur Darville’s Dave is the most competitive and is the team member trying to keep everyone else on track when Sandy is absent. He’s outraged when he catches Eleanor texting after phones were banned and takes a high-handed approach to chastising her. Similarly, he frequently emphasises how lucky they all are to be chosen and how hard he has worked to get into this room. Dave’s behaviour stems from a need to ensure that no one else jeopardises his big chance, but Darville also gives him a hint of neurotic frustration, an arrogance about his creative abilities and a need to be seen as the unofficial second that adds additional layers to a play where movement and dramatic development are deliberately stifled.

Among the remaining cast, Conleth Hill is a force as boss Sandy, the only one allowed to stay in contact with the outside world and who openly displays his interest or contempt for what he’s hearing with a steely gaze. Imogen Doel as PA Sarah becomes a marker of time passing with constantly changing outfits and is the pleasant face of the corporate machine who becomes increasingly drawn into the creative process, while Fisayo Akinade has a great monologue in the final part of the show. Completing the cast is Matt Bardock as Danny M1 who has more of a no-nonsense approach than the rest and tells a wince-inducing and graphic story that will make you recoil in your seat, while Bill Milner as note-taker Brian performs a strange ritual that could be better explored in the text. Stuart McQuarrie as Danny M2 whose squeamish reluctance opens him up to criticism adds a depth to the dynamic, as does Hadley Fraser as new recruit Josh obsessed with stories that play with time but finds himself unable to fully benefit from the corporate machine determined to use him.

Annie Baker’s plays can be an acquired taste and in spite of its much shorter running time this is one of her most challenging so far. At times you do wonder if perhaps she has bitten off more than she can chew in an attempt to explore the universality of storytelling, while the descent into a kind of collective insanity may seem strange in lieu of a plot. But this is a writer with lots to say and always with her work, you find your thoughts returning to it again and again once the curtain comes down. We are a culture built on storytelling, the myths we believe about ourselves and our national history, the way the news is presented to us and the tales we daily pay to consume on TV and in the cinema. But we never stop to ask ourselves who is telling these stories and why – this is the brilliance of The Antipodes, Baker’s decision to jettison the plot leaves us to wonder what madness is filling the void?

The Antipodes is at the National Theatre until 23 November with tickets from £15. Follow this blog on Twitter @culturalcap1 or Facebook: Cultural Capital Theatre Blog