So, how do you follow up seeing Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones in the wistful DRIVING MISS DAISY? By seeing SPIDER-MAN: TURN OFF THE DARK! Needless to say, it was a real flying-by-the-seat-of-your-pants experience (pun intended).
When deciding what to see SPIDER-MAN was a given - we wanted to see this alleged theatrical car-crash with it's never-ending preview perfs, cancelled press nights and injured performers. If I could survive such theatrical Ground Zeros as BERNADETTE ("The People's Musical"), WHICH WITCH (aka DEATH BY HAIRDRYER) or LEONARDO - whose chief backer was the Republic of Nauru, a country whose main income is the sale of Guano aka bird shit - surely I could get through this.

Thanks to a cheap tickets website we had fairly good central Dress Circle seats and two big thumbs up go to the Foxwoods Theatre, a rare Broadway theatre which has a large foyer and bar area for mingling in - the front-of-house was so big in fact that the foyer boasted a walk-in merch shop. I guess they got to make the money back!But we couldn't linger front-of-house... eventually the show had to be faced! I knew we were in for trouble when two guitarists walked out OP and stood there with a lineup of guitars - and there they stayed for the entire show, twanging loudly. Why the guitarists? There was thumpy drums too - why must the drummers ALWAYS lose out? Isn't there a Triangle players union?

Oh Julie Taymor, Julie Taymor... while undoubtedly an imaginative director (her films of TITUS and FRIDA demonstrate this) sadly most of what is wrong with the show can be laid at her door. Her schizophrenic book is no help - co-written with Glen Burger the first half is mostly a stage version of Sam Raimi's 2002 film showing how Peter Parker became Spider-Man and battling the mutated scientist The Green Goblin.

But as if guilty at telling such a populist tale, they have mixed in the Greek myth of Arachne and then added the further layer of having a "Geek Chorus" - sigh - who are four Spiderman fans who appear to be our narrators. So we are getting a story within a story within a story - and there is just not enough meat on the show's eight legs to sustain this device.

Taymor and Berger can't even sustain these ideas: the Geeks vanish after the interval, the Green Goblin - killed off in the first act - returns with a Sinister Six of villains to wreck havoc on both Spidey and New York and - most stupid of them all - the Arachne character who has hovered (literally and figuratively) above the action during the first act suddenly turns into an avenging Femme Fatale, all 8 legs, sneers, lust and death threats. It was quite jaw-droppingly awful.A couple of other things pertaining to Julie Taymor - she would no doubt say that theatre can be made with a rag, a bone & a hank of hair so why is this show's budget a mindblowing $61 million? Even more baffling is Taymor's acceptance of Daniel Ezralow's demeaning choreography for the female chorus - their two numbers are as dumb secretaries in a typing pool scooting all over the stage on their office chairs or as sexy spider-women mutants with 8 suspender & stocking legs. Keepin' it real for the sisters there Julie.

The other component for the show's naffness is the score by Bono and The Edge. It's hard to believe they actually sat down and wrote this with a stage show in mind - I suspect they went through their trunk songs and just pulled out ones that hadn't made the cut for their albums. When Boy George wrote the score for TABOO he wrote a proper Musical score - ballads, dance numbers, point numbers, patter songs - but here, as monolithic anthem-rock song follows monolithic anthem-rock song, you are bludgeoned into your seat. No varying of tone, no heed to the plot's needs, just another big slab of music. As to the show's much vaunted flying sequences, well I guess it's fun to watch the stunt flyers whizzing around the auditorium but when they are attached to industrial hawsers it robs it of any grace or magic and will incur no sense of surprise to anyone who has seen any Cirque du Soleil show. I will admit that it is used sparingly - maybe to the show's detriment as more often than not Spidey's antics are described to the audience as they happen offstage!

Needless to say, just before the final big flying-around-the-auditorium battle betwixt Spidey and Arachne, a voice boomed out that they would have to stop the show for a while to adjust a Flying Mechanism Malfunction - RESULT! So we sat there, looking at two actors in silly costumes staring at each other 'in character' while the peanut gallery catcalled, slow-handclapped or just chatted amongst themselves. Like, you've only had since November to sort this stuff!

The show's main saving graces are the stage design of George Tsypin and costumes of Eiko Ishioka. Tsypin's designs seem to fold out of the stage and mostly hold the attention while the performers get in the way and Ishioka's costume designs for the Sinister Six bring some sense of a comic book's sense of style. The video projections of Kyle Cooper are also entertaining but the second act's over-use of them soon palls and one feels like one is watching just a series of long animated pop videos.The performances by the cast unsurprisingly are fairly anonymous - Reeve Carney as Peter / Spidey has been hired as he is a Bono soundalike and his acting style too has the air of karaoke about it. By far the best vocal performance was from Jennifer Damiano as Mary Jane - and no one was more surprised than me as she was so punchable as the whiny daughter in last year's borefest NEXT TO NORMAL. Ameríca Olivio as Arachne seemed ok in the first act but by the second act she was hitting some seriously bum notes.

The performances by Patrick Page as Norman Osborn / The Green Goblin and Michael Mulheren as J. Jonah Jameson were utterly shite. Looking down the cast list during the interval I was gobsmacked to see Luther Creek was playing one of the school bullies and a play-as-cast performer. Last year Creek was a delightfully whacked-out "Woof" in the London transfer of Diane Paulus' revival of HAIR and while it's good that he's employed, it's a shame that he is not given something to match his talent.

Oddly enough when we arrived, the Dress Circle (or Flying Circle as it's renamed) audience was primarily loud teen boys and huge fat girls which had my heart sinking but surprisingly as soon as the lights went down they were remarkably quiet - the DRIVING MISS DAISY oldie crowd were louder!

Unlike shows such as BERNADETTE or WHICH WITCH that were bad but hilariously entertaining to watch, SPIDER-MAN is a show so off the artistic rails that you simply stare at it and wonder why no one involved could see the train crash coming that even a superhero could save.

Did I mention that I have been in New York Constant Reader?

Well I have. I have been to New York.

Nyah nyah ny-nyah nyah.

I also surpassed all other trips by going to the theatre every night - and twice on Saturday. I will be quietly amazed if Owen EVER suggests going to New York again.

Our first visit was to see Alfred Uhry's DRIVING MISS DAISY playing at the Golden Theatre with the jaw-dropping double act of Vanessa Redgrave and James Earl Jones.

This was the play that I was most looking forward to but I was left feeling that two fine actors are saddled with a less-than-roadworthy vehicle.

Surprisingly this production marks the play's Broadway debut, it originally premiered in 1987 off-Broadway where it remained for three years which lead to the Oscar-winning film starring Jessica Tandy and Morgan Freeman. The play appeared in the West End in 1988 with Dame Wendy Hiller in her last theatre role alongside Clarke Peters.
The Broadway production is directed by David Esbjornson who moves the play smoothly along it's short running time of 95 minutes with no interval and Redgrave, Jones and Boyd Gaines respond with performances of great subtlety and nuance - although there were moments when Jones was mumblingly incoherent and of course you really shouldn't ever give Vanessa an accent. And I'm her biggest fan!

It's just a shame Uhry's work is less of a play and more a series of short scenes that give these fine performers nothing really to build up to - an emotion is hit but then the scene is over and they have to move on another few years. It was a strangely fitful affair and riddled with the optimistic passivity one finds in so much American drama.Despite video projections on the back of the John Lee Beatty's rather distractedly sparse set, there was never any real feeling of the momentous times Daisy and Hoke are living through in Georgia.

It was left to the performers to suggest the passage of time. Vanessa in particular, brought a great physicality to the role - when first seen she is furiously beating eggs to make a cake and moving with a ramrod back and slowly you watch her getting more bent and slow. The final scenes have a poignancy that is, again, the result of the onstage chemistry of the three actors rather than the play itself.Although I was a bit disappointed in the play, I wouldn't have missed seeing it or them.

Last week Owen and I went to the Donmar to see their production of William Finn's musical THE 25TH ANNUAL PUTNAM COUNTY SPELLING BEE. Believe me, the title is the only memorable thing about it. Why the Donmar has felt the urge to put it on is anyone's business.

Maybe the team responsible for last year's wondrous PASSION - Jamie Lloyd (director), Christopher Oram (set) and Neil Austin (lighting) all felt the urge to do something a bit more lightweight - I don't mind lightweight but this is more soapy bubbleweight - and it didn't last long in my mind before it went *pop*

It typified the worst of recent off-Broadway musicals - a cute idea based on a piece of American life that probably coasted along on the original cast's charm and verve but simply refuses to be anything but filler - and of course have a score which sounds like something Sesame Street would reject as too bloody juvenile.

Here the premise of a High School spelling competition works within those parameters but I am so bloody OVER the idea that anything to do with American High School kids performing in their gymnasiums - be it staging a musical, forming a glee club or here spelling - is worth anything but a cursory glance.

Pepper your cast with geeky but lovable schoolkids and watch them triumph over adversity.

Yawn.There were good things - Steve Pemberton and Katherine Kingsley both had their moments to shine, particularly in their responses to the participants requests to using their given words in a sentence and Christopher Oram has gone to town turning the Donmar into the school gym.

In an idea which betrays it's tiny theatre beginnings, four members of the audience are onstage to take part in the competition. Oddly enough I felt that as soon as the last one of our audience left the stage - after equipping himself more than well - the show nosedived in my interest as we were just left with the boringly predictable plot. I must say it damns DIRTY ROTTEN SCOUNDRELS, THE LIGHT IN THE PIAZZA and SPAMALOT that Rachel Sheinkin's book for this won the 2005 Tony Award.

As Miss Tallulah Bankhead said "There's less to this than meets the eye".

Constant Reader, I am returned from all points west so have a LOT of catching up to do... so I am pulling out my blogging finger and jumping in at the deep end...
Being a film fan in the 1970s means there are a clutch of American actresses that I have an affection for and two such performers are Ellen Burstyn and Carol Kane. The news that they were to make their London stage debuts in the latest revival of Lilian Hellman's THE CHILDREN'S HOUR had me scurrying to book tickets.

The ticket prices however brought my scurrying to a skid with telephone number prices for 80% of the Comedy Theatre - presumably to match the costs of said actresses as well as the leads Keira Knightley and Elizabeth Moss. Ergo I could only afford tickets in the front row of the balcony - which wasn't too painful but for the safety bar that cut across one's view of the stage.
I must admit I went along to gaze at my screen divas and didn't expect to be involved by the play as I was underwhelmed by it at the National Theatre in 1994. However Ian Rickson has directed the play with a relentlessness that powers you through Hellman's rather old-fashioned melodramatics and the committed cast give it their all. If I have a criticism of this approach it is that it refuses to allow any of the characters a moment of humanity so the grim note of the plot becomes rather unrelenting.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR shows the devastating effect of a child's lies on the lives of two of her teachers. Karen and Martha have pooled their resources to run a girl's boarding school in a New England farmhouse. Mary Tilford, is a wilful spoilt girl used to manipulating those around her and when punished for telling lies by Karen, she absconds to her doting grandmother Amelia. Mary tells her she is scared to return and that Karen and Martha are lovers. Mrs. Tilford spreads the news to other mothers who withdraw their children leaving Karen and Martha powerless to stop the whispering campaign. Their reputations ruined, their only ally is Karen's lover Joe. However the scandal has made Martha acknowledge feelings she had long denied...The biggest surprise for me was Keira Knightley as Karen who I have always found on screen to be an awkwardly overly-dramatic performer, all jawbone and elbows, with a clanging modernity at odds with the period roles she invariably plays. But here her tense, contained acting style is well-used particularly in the second act when she releases her pain in a savage speech to a now-penitent Amelia Tilford.

Elizabeth Moss has the tricky role of Martha, who Hellman does no favours to with a fairly sketchily-written character. Hellman builds up to Martha's big reveal of being a lesbian but it comes as no surprise as she has her react so obviously to Karen's lover Joe, another character that in Hellman's hands is little less than a cypher. It is a testament to Moss' tenacity as a performer that she manages to bring some light and shade to the character.
As I said earlier, I went to see my 70s screen queens and I wasn't disappointed. Ellen Burstyn was exquisite as the matriarch of Lancet - she has a particularly musical voice and so it was a pleasure to hear as well as see her. Her last scene as a woman weighed-down with her guilt was beautifully played and made one wish that her role was bigger.

Sadly she had to share most of her scenes with the staggeringly awful Bryony Hannah as Mary. I guess I might have been spoilt as at the National Theatre in 1994 Mary was played by a young Emily Watson who was sensational - here Hannah plays the role like a gibbering schizo making it incomprehensible why anyone would believe her as she is obviously a mental.

Carol Kane played Lily Mortar, Martha's irritating aunt with a hazy history as a successful touring actress who now teaches language and deportment. She was submerged in the first scene due to having to share the stage with some of the worst 'schoolgirl' acting I have yet to see but after that she was a delight - her fluffy exterior masking a self-centred heart.Rickson's stark production is aided immeasurably by Mark Thompson's clapboard schoolroom set and the excellent subtle lighting of Neil Austin.

As I said I was more engaged than I expected to be by Hellman's melodrama which is thanks to Ian Rickson's vision for the play but within that vision, something akin to an emotional core was missing.

Last week we went to the first night of THE MOST INCREDIBLE THING, a new ballet at Sadler's Wells which has a score by the Pet Shop Boys. Now when you call something by that title you better be ready for the most obvious rejoinder... as here it comes again!

It was announced at the top of the show that it was the first performance in front of an audience and if they needed to stop the show then bear with them. Luckily they didn't have to but I suspect that the announcement was made for us to go easy on it.

The source for the ballet is a Hans Christian Anderson short story - short enough to be reprinted in the programme! Leo works in a dreary factory but is inspired to enter a competition to design The Most Incredible Thing that the King announces will result in the winner being granted half his kingdom and the hand of the Princess.

However the nasty Karl has his eyes set on the Princess and when Leo wins the competition with his magical clock... no, CLOCK... Karl mash it up guy and wins the Princess as what can be more incredible than smashing The Most Incredible Thing? We get a happy ending of course but it's all a bit perfunctory.

I liked the PSB score but it possibly could have done with more light and shade to give the dancers something to interpret. Neil Tennant - who was sat in the row in front of us - said that one of the challenges was to tell a 'book' show through the medium of contemporary dance and I guess it succeeds but with no interest generated in the story or characters as such it's hard to say it's an overall success.

Javier de Frutos' choreography is interesting within it's structured limits but there was never a moment that totally swept me away and of the three principals - Aaron Sillis as Leo, Clemmie Sveaas as the Princess and Ivan Putrov as Karl - it was Putrov who was the star of the show with dazzling pirouettes and leaps as well as de Frutos' robotic moves.

The main problem with the show is that it was split between three acts and the second act - the demonstration of the clock's power and Karl's smashing thereof - was little more than a colour & light show - what dancing there was put me in mind of a specialist dance number you might get in the middle of a panto such as "The Spirit of The Ring". The show would have worked better if it was split between just two acts.

It is due to return next year and maybe it will be worth a re-visit to see if they have sorted out the shape of the show. The King's competition was presented as a BRITAIN'S GOT TALENT-style show with a Davina McCall-style presenter that got old very quickly.

It was well received at the curtain however and it was great to give Neil a cheer as he gave us all a smile and a wave!

When a production has won every Best Play award going for the year - and you come late to it - you run the risk of leaving the theatre thinking "Well it wasn't all THAT". Remarkably Bruce Norris' CLYBOURNE PARK can not be included in that sentiment.
It's a play that is as savage as it's funny, as insightful as it is provocative, as tender as it is angry.

Norris has written it as a companion piece to Lorraine Hansberry's groundbreaking A RAISIN IN THE SUN which in 1959 was the first play performed on Broadway by a black female playwright. If like me you have never seen it then panic ye not, it will not spoil your enjoyment of CLYBOURNE PARK.

The subject of Hansberry's play is a black working-class family being given the opportunity to move to a house in the totally white neighbourhood of Clybourne Park. They are visited by Karl Lindner (the play's only white character) from the area's housing Improvement Committee who attempts to buy them off but they refuse. Norris' launchpad for his play is what was the reason for the house coming on the market so cheaply in the first place and what neighbourly disapproval did the seller face for accepting the offer and how the subject of race has echoed down the generations since then.The play opens in 1959, Russ and Bev are preparing for a move to a new house further out in the suburbs. Bev is a housewife who is kept afloat by her duties and her hyper-active packing is shared with Francine, the family maid. The whirlwind of preparing for the move is disrupted by two friends, Jim the local priest and Karl the head of the neighbourhood committee. Soon the real reason for the couple's decision to sell their house cheaply is revealed - their son returned from fighting in Korea charged with a village massacre and after being ostracised by the community, hung himself in his bedroom.

An explosive argument erupts over letting a black family into the neighbourhood which is witnessed by Francine's unassuming husband Albert and Karl's deaf wife Betsy. It was a powerful first act - the fury of Russ and Karl's standoff made all the uncomfortable by the discomfort of Francine and Albert, the blissfully unaware Betsy and Bev's hysterical breakdown - and is so compulsive that at the interval I was relieved to finally be able to breathe!The second act hurtles forward 50 years in time and the same house in 2009 is now in a sad state of disrepair. On a swelteringly hot day, young couple, Steve and Lindsey, are having a professional meeting with Kathy their lawyer, Tom the estate agent, and Lena and Kevin, another couple from the neighbourhood Improvement Committee over their plans to buy the property, knock the house down and rebuild a bigger one. Only this time the buyers are white, seeking to move to Clybourne Park which is now an all-black area.

The social niceties are wonderfully played out: the mundane chitchat while one person takes a call on their mobile, the effusiveness of the couple wanting to move to the area, one person's dogged attempt to say something to the group while others butt in or wander off topic.In discussing the area it soon emerges that Kathy is the daughter of Karl and Betsy while Lena is the niece of the family who bought the house in 1959 and is mindful of the historical significance of the house to the black neighbourhood. Lena's ice-cool intransigence leads to Steve's frustration exploding into anger and once again the gloves are off - an argument erupts where Steve rails against the curse of political correctness after being forced to retell a black joke he had been told - by a black workmate. It ends with everyone arguing with each other.

The scene is as brutal as it is hilarious - the audience's screams of laughter interspersed with sharp intakes of breath as again you found yourself begging a character "Please don't say what I think you are going to!!"Dominic Cooke's direction is powerfully nuanced and his committed cast who play two roles each rise to the occasion wonderfully. After the play there was a Q&A with Cooke and the company which was insightful for once as to their approaching the play's many challenges.

Lorna Brown is excellent in the roles of Francine / Lena - the maid's deference turned on a dime to clear-eyed annoyance when with her husband, and then the steely calm amusement of the academic who refuses to give an inch of ground - her landing of her joke about white women was the highlight of the evening! Sam Spruell and Lucian Msamati were both fine in the less showy roles as Jim / Tom and Albert / Kevin.

I liked Sarah Goldberg's performance in SIX DEGREES OF SEPARATION at the Old Vic last year and here she is excellent as the amiably deaf Betsy and as the buzzsaw-voiced Lindsey whose ambition for a dream home vanish along with her respect for her husband during the second act. Another SIX DEGREES cast member Michael Goldsmith has a small but telling role iin the play's coda.Stephen Campbell Moore stepped into the main roles of Karl / Steve at the last minute - taking over from Jason Watkins who was himself replacing Martin Freeman who played the role at the Royal Court - but you would never know as he gave both roles a tenacious anger. He was matched in the first scene by Stuart McQuarrie as Russ, a man worn down by the double standards of his community and who finally boils over. He had the more placid role of Dan the builder in the second act which counter-balanced his performance well.

Needless to say I couldn't wait to see the play as Sophie Thompson has had such acclaim for her performance as Bev / Kathy and she didn't disappoint.

Her performance of Bev was a masterclass of controlled hysteria, a housewife burying her grief in packing up her household things while blindly patronising both her maid and deaf friend. Sophie can play this out-front comedy with the best but her breakdown during the fight was chilling and in a tiny moment at the end of the act, when Russ assures her that all will be better when they move closer to his job, she asks "And what will I do while you're gone?" and she captured perfectly the desert of loneliness her character was in. In the second half, she found every laugh going with Kathy's nightmare trip to Europe. She was sublime.

If you have not seen it and want a challenging night in the theatre I urge you to go, if you have seen it before.. go again!

A final thought... at the Q&A afterwards, Matt Wolff asked the question as to why this production has had such a roaring success when the off-Broadway premiere production came and went after it's month-long run at Playwright's Horizons in early 2010.
Lucian Msamati answered the question with a question: would an English play that dealt with our racial fault lines have found a West End theatre so readily?

Indeed.

Last week Owen and I visited Japan. Not for no tsunami business... no we went and stayed in the relative comfort of the London Coliseum - yes, confused reader, we went to see the English National Opera's THE MIKADO...and it's only taken me 25 years to see Jonathan Miller's production!

I'm not the world's biggest Gilbert and Sullivan fan to be honest but Owen had a hankering to see a 'proper' production so away we went to take our place in the Dress Circle with what I suspect was a core G&S/Coliseum audience. More than once my attention was diverted from the action on stage by my neighbours singing along under their posh breaths.

It was all very odd to be in an audience that obviously knew the piece backwards and who laughed uproariously at every laugh line - even when it wasn't funny.


It was always watchable - thanks in no small part to the luxurious 1920s set design of the late Stefanos Lazaridis - a mixture of warm creams and white - the witty and stylish costumes designed by the wondrous Sue Blane and the ever-busy choreography of Anthony Van Laast, recreated here by Stephen Speed.

I didn't realise until I opened the programme that the wandering minstrel Nanki-Poo was played by Alfie Boe who is this year's opera~pop crossover and who is about to start a short run in that graveyard of the musical spirit LES MISERABLES.

It is nice to report that he was very pleasing on stage with a nice baffled air and fine voice. He was partnered by Sophie Bevan as Yum-Yum who while a little colourless in acting sang a lovely version of what I know as "The Moon And I" but turns out to be called "The Sun Whose Rays".

The show was also graced with fine performances from ENO veteran Richard Angas as The Mikado and Richard Suart as Ko-Ko, both of whom have played the role countless times down the years. Suart's Groucho Marx posturings grew a bit stale by the final curtain but what he did do he did with great gusto.

His updated version of the "I have a little list" song which included such possible candidates for execution as the Bercows and Prince Andrew had members of the audience gasping with delight - some people really need to get out more.

But here we come to the reason I was gnawing my knuckles through most of the show. I foolishly assumed that with it being the English National Opera and all that the most basic requirement would be to sing clearly.

Wrong. More often than not great swaths of the score were rendered incomprehensible either down to singers who had neither the breath control for the patter numbers or who seemed more at ease just singing the note rather than the word. It wasn't long before I remembered why I can't abide opera singers.

Every time the awful Anne-Marie Owens started honking and twittering as Katisha I found myself replaying in my mind Louise Gold singing the role in Mike Leigh's film TOPSY TURVY and how she nailed it perfectly. Yes I *know* that was a film and this was live but it has taught me that if I go further in Gilbert & Sullivan's canon then I'll wait until they are presented with actors who can sing and not opera-trained voices trained to just make a noise along with the music.

In fact seeing the show has spurred me into buying TOPSY TURVY and here are Shirley Henderson, Dorothy Atkinson and Cathy Sara giving us a delicious version of "Three Little Maids From School Are We" - watch and learn ENOers....

Sometimes you see a production in a theatre that leaves you so shaken it takes a while to get over it. Peter Hall's latest whack at Shakespeare's TWELFTH NIGHT has left me thus... and not in a good way.

The production sold out to the National Theatre mailing list punters so tickets have been on the rare side - when two popped up on the NT website a few weeks back I nabbed them. No doubt Peter Hall wanted the Cottesloe so we are close to the action and, as is his lifelong mission, can concentrate on the text.

The production marks Peter Hall's 80th birthday and it's his fourth go at the play. I have to say that rather than seeing a production that showed that experience, I saw a production obviously directed by an old man.

An unavoidable problem was the clanging amateurishness of Rebecca Hall. Damn girl, how did you get the gig? Oh yes, I forgot for a minute. Her film career might be in the ascendant with roles in VICKY CHRISTINA BARCELONA, FROST/NIXON as well as winning a BAFTA for the RED RIDING trilogy on Channel 4 but her stage work leaves her with nowhere to hide.

Although she won the Ian Charleston award in 2002 for her performance of 'Vivie' in her father's production of MRS. WARREN'S PROFESSION I found that portrayal a bit two-dimensional but that at least fitted the kill-joy character, and felt she only succeeded playing Hermione in Sam Mendes' 2009 WINTER'S TALE at the Old Vic when she played the statue at the end!

Time and again Rebecca Hall give us true moments of jaw-dropping thinness. In her solo speeches to the audience she gave a masterclass in coarse acting - her arms stiffly raised from her sides for emphasis or looking from one side of the auditorium to the other to 'include the audience in' on her thoughts. It was a performance that semaphored cluelessness to the audience and more than once I found myself groaning quietly.

It all reminded me of when Jennifer, another of Hall's offspring, appeared as Helena in MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM at the Lyttleton in 1983 and gave a performance of resounding averageness.

This mis-firing performance colours the whole production and is not helped by being paired with the rather odd Orsino of Marton Csokas. Looking not unlike a shaggy Russell Crowe, it was a performance that again consistently hit wrong notes all over the place. Like... was Peter Hall having his afternoon sleep during the rehearsals?

Rebecca Hall's Amateur-Night-In-Dixie turn is illuminated all the more by her scenes with Amanda Drew as Olivia. Where Hall speaks her lines with the studied earnestness of an over-achieving schoolgirl, Drew simply acts. For her the lines are learned and tucked away and she simply plays the role with a bemused air that is a pleasure to watch.One of the reasons I wanted to see the production was that Simon Paisley Day was playing Malvolio. His last two roles in ENTERTAINING MR. SLOANE and PRIVATE LIVES have shown him as one of our best high comedy actors but here the life seems drained from him, the comedy gold that Simon Russell Beale and Derek Jacobi have found in Malvolio's pomposity and gulling by his enemies is here fitful and on a very low-light. He is a good enough actor to be able to adapt to Hall's doleful take on TWELFTH NIGHT and he certainly makes you sympathise for Malvolio's longing for revenge at the end of the play - I just felt cheated out of the performance I know he could have excelled in.

Sir Peter doesn't seem interested in the play's lovers. No, for him TWELFTH NIGHT is a serious rumination on death and the autumnal shades of Shakespeare later plays. As early as 1960 when he wrote a long preface to the play that is reprinted in the programme, he identified the central role in the play as Feste, Olivia's rueful clown . Not Viola, not Malvolio, Feste.Now as much as I admire David Ryall who plays the woeful jester, his ponderous delivery and lengthy scenes slowed the night to a crawl. While one can understand Hall's desire to make an elderly character the one we should pay most attention to, it unbalances the play so one sits there enduring the molasses-like atmosphere rather than enjoying a proven enjoyable play. Ryall plays the final scene alone, singing one of his interminable songs. Hall's decision to attempt to do it as an audience sing-a-long was a very wrong call.

As much as I liked Ryall's performance, I could not help thinking what the late John Normington could have done with the role as he was an actor capable of the lightest of touches.Apart from Drew, the best performances come from the devious characters in the Lady Olivia's house. Simon Callow's rambunctious Sir Toby Belch, Finty Williams as a sly Maria and, best of all, Charles Edwards as a delightfully daft Sir Andrew Aguecheek lifted the spirit with their every appearance - but these characters should surely be the mischievous devils who are the icing on the cake - not the ones who you are watching the wings for their next entrance?

I really can't be bothered to write any more about it but I must mention the bizarre design of Anthony Ward - a bare stage with a canopy of autumnal leaves - YEAH WE GET IT - with a tiny row of houses on the left-hand side of a shelf that runs along the back of the stage which doesn't so much suggest perspective so much as the remnants of a seaside gift shop at the end of it's closing down sale. The second-act addition of a large doll's house version of Olivia's mansion suggests a large piece of Capodimonte sitting in a litter tray.

Avoid.

How very strange...

Two actresses whose two landmark films caused a riot of censorship and media 'outrage' have died within a day of each other.
Lena Nyman, who died today, was a 23 year-old actress when she played the lead in Vilgot Sjoman's I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) and it's sequel the following year I AM CURIOUS (BLUE). The pseudo-documentaries were the sensation of the year with it's frank sexuality and nude scenes. I suspect most of the media outrage was - ahem, stoked - by people who never saw it and the film has ebbed away from the collective memory with maybe just the name retaining a whiff of controversy.

Nyman continued to work steadily in Sweden including a featured role as Liv Ullmann's mentally-retarded sister who is a silent witness to her sister's coruscating night time fight with their mother (Ingrid Bergman) in Ingmar Bergman's AUTUMN SONATA. I AM CURIOUS (YELLOW) could get away with the media outrage as it was a foreign film with a cast of unknowns but what if a sexually explicit film starred a Hollywood superstar?Maria Schneider, who died yesterday, was the young French actress chosen to star opposite Marlon Brando in Bernardo Bertolucci's LAST TANGO IN PARIS - cue the media and censorship shitstorm! Bertolucci and Brando of course sailed on regardless through the controversy but Schneider, as is usually the case it seems, was the one who seemed to be scarred by the experience.

After another media brouhaha at her announcement of being bisexual, she had another bite of big-screen fame in Michelangelo Antonioni's THE PASSENGER with Jack Nicholson but after that, although film offers kept coming in, she had a series of mental breakdowns allied to drug abuse and suicide attempts. She managed to kick her habit and continue working but she was always dogged by LAST TANGO.

Oddly enough she was the illegitimate daughter of the French actor Daniel Gélin - a distant figure in her life - who had his own battles with drugs and depression.

One of the most enjoyable experiences last year was seeing the pre-Edinburgh tryout of GUTTED: THE REVENGER'S MUSICAL at the Riverside. Owen had got tickets as his Streatham Rock God Jim Bob from Carter USM was appearing in it so I had no idea what we were letting ourselves in for, but it was a delirious treat from start to end - the only thing I can liken it to would be KIND HEARTS AND CORONETS meets THE ROCKY HORROR SHOW. A cult hit in waiting for Danielle Ward (book & lyrics) and Martin White (music).

So when we saw it was playing one night at the Leicester Square Theatre we jumped at it! This time however it was just a rehearsed reading with The Mystery Fax Machine Orchestra who took up most of the stage. I was a bit disappointed as I hoped for a proper staged production - at the Riverside there had been enough to suggest a full production.
The other reason for disappointment was that Helen George was no longer playing the lead role as at the Riverside she was terrific. I saw that she is cast in the Landor's upcoming production of BY JEEVES so maybe that explained her non-appearance. Instead the character of Sorrow was played by Isy Suttie who might fit the other's stand-up comedy style but she had a voice like a goose farting in fog and wasn't as sympathetic.

However it was easy to overlook her contribution and marvel instead at the comic timing and improvisational skill of Colin Hoult playing the five members of the Bewlay famly that Sorrow takes great delight in bumping off in ever-more outlandish ways. He was great at the Riverside and he was just as good here - real comedy gold.

The cast bristles with eccentric comedy turns: David Reed, Humphrey Ker & Thom Tuck (aka The Penny Dreadfuls) have great fun as the Furies who pursue Sorrow and Michael Legge was a lipsmacking treat as the fruity local Vicar, happy to take the wedding photos although he's blind! At the Riverside he also had the most memorable line "When you sin it's like God sticking his finger up your bum and you have to smell it for the rest of your life" but this time it was changed to "When you sin it's like God bumming your Mum and putting it on YouTube". Funny but not as good as the former.

With delightful support from Jim Bob as the Wedding Singer, Margaret Cabourn-Smith and Sara Pascoe as the Bewlay's grudging servants and the charming Doc Brown as Sorrow's possible happy ending boyfriend, the show had me laughing out loud and clapping equally as loudly at the end. Allegedly it was filmed from the back of the auditorium but I suspect that was for promotional use and I suspect that with their own stand-up schedules any future performances of GUTTED will be few and far between. But if you see it on a schedule I cannot recommend it highly enough.

FINALLY! My 2011 theatre-going duck has been broken. I knew there was a reason why I was feeling unduly jittery. It's been so long I had to think twice to make sure I was sitting in the seat properly. And what was the production that saw me back in the theatrical saddle? The rather underwhelming AN IDEAL HUSBAND at the Vaudeville Theatre.

I had wanted to see this for a while and, mindful that it was due to close in February, I booked two in the circle using a £10 off discount. Well, I'm not sure what the stalls were doing but my, we were an intimate collection of punters in the Dress - there were 5 of us in J row - and we were seated in seats 1-5! Needless to say there was much spreading out in the interval. In all other rows there were yawning spaces - between the yawning audience.

The production just feels tired, as if the cast had expended all energy in the months leading up to Christmas in the expectation that it would close early. But no, here we are in it's third month and it seemed to me that all the actors were appearing in different plays. If they had a cohesion under Lindsay Posner's direction initially it seems to have been given the go-by. I sat in my little seat in J row and pined for Oliver Parker's screen version - and I didn't expect to say that anytime soon.Oscar Wilde's play is certainly worth this timely revival with it's plot of a seemingly teflon-coated politician gliding his way slowly but surely up the parliamentary foodchain until confronted with evidence from his past which will ruin him if exposed. Peter Hall's acclaimed and long-running revival in the early 1990s also seemed au courant during the end of John Major's Conservative government. But I guess a politician with a secret is never going to be out of fashion - and in the week when it was announced that the Police were going to re-open the News Of The World phone-hacking case it was particularly thrilling to hear Robert Chiltern say "Spies are of no use nowadays... the newspapers do their work instead"!

What also struck me was how prophetic it was of Wilde's own destiny. The play premiered in January 1895 and only three months later Wilde was in court for the criminal libel charge he brought against the Marquise of Queensberry which led to his own trial for gross indecency and sodomy. Time and again in the play, the subject of a public figure ruined by scandal is raised and while watching it I could see Wilde at his writing desk writing a line, looking up, half-smiling and continuing on to possibly write:

Mrs Cheverley: Sir Robert, you know what your English newspapers are like. ... Think of their loathsome joy, of the delight they would have in dragging you down, of the mud and mire they would plunge you in. Think of the hypocrite with his greasy smile penning his leading article, and arranging the foulness of the public placard.

Oh Oscar you silly arse.What was so annoying about the production was the way all the performances - and accents - seemed to clash. From High Comedy to naturalistic, from idiosyncratic to BBC 3 sitcom there was no unity of style, time and again a character would come on stage and suddenly you are forced to adapt to a new acting style so you are never sure on which level the play truly sits.

Charles Kay is so busy with his harrumphing codger as Lord Goring's father that you can hear the rhythm of the accent while the actual words get lost in the bluster, Rachael Sterling as Lady Chiltern is so similar in her honking tone to her mother Diana Rigg that it keeps pulling focus and Fiona Button plays the Thoroughly Modern Miss that is Sir Robert's younger sister in the usual high-pitched voice that seems the default condescending accent now for The Ingenue. Of course one goes to a Wilde play to be pinioned by the darts of epigrammatic wit but here they are mostly confined to one very long second scene and all delivered by one character Lady Markby, played here by Caroline Blakiston. However as hers is such a one-note performance you begin to wonder is it ever going to end and it begins to resemble nothing more than the most hackneyed sitcom: line - line - joke, line - line joke.

Which brings me to Elliot Cowan as Lord Goring. In the role he was born to play Rupert Everett was sublime in the film version but here Cowan as Wilde's cynical playboy throws away one good laugh line after another by speaking in the most bizarre accent. I suspect that somewhere along the line he has heard the recording allegedly of Wilde reading THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL and has adopted the ew-sew mannered way of speaking with leeeengthened vowellls and what haeve yoooo that you want to punch him silent.
What makes this absurd is that he is the only one speaking like this and when he plays scenes with Alexander Hanson as Sir Robert, who speaks his lines in the most conversational way possible, it leaves you no way to just relax into the scene. Hanson is fine, but I joined Owen in wondering why he can't walk across a stage without skiffing the soles of his shoes. I kept expecting his blackmailed politician to break into a buck and wing.

Thank God for Samantha Bond! Although she appears to be channeling her frequent co-star Judi Dench vocally, she alone knows how to play High Comedy on stage while still creating a character with a possible internal life. Her sly and calculating Mrs. Cheverley was a pure delight and I pined for her when she was not onstage - Oscar you clown, why on earth did you not have her make an appearance in the final long-winded scene?

The supporting company all played the long party scene at the top of the play with an anonymity which almost had them semaphoring "don't worry, the stars will be on soon". One bright spot was Max Digby as Goring's manservant Phipps who got a bigger laugh with one line than Cowan managed with a whole speech.

Stephen Brimson Lewis can usually be relied upon for a glittery design but here we got a standing set of burnished gold which suggested that he too had seen MADAME DE SADE at the Wyndhams two years ago. Apart from his costumes for Mrs. Cheverley, the costumes for the women all looked like they were bolts of fabric ready to go back to Borovics in the morning.Oh well. Onwards and upwards into the theatreland of 2011....