DVD/150: BEYOND BIBA: A PORTRAIT OF BARBARA HULANICKI (Louis Price, 2009)

An intimate - and maddeningly short - documentary of designer Barbara Hulanicki, which sketches her life as swiftly as one of her fashion drawings.

Filmed in Miami, where Barbara has resided since 1987, she prepares for a London drawings exhibition while reminiscing: Polish-born, she moved to Jerusalem in the 1940s with her diplomat father, only for her life to change aged 12 when he was assassinated by Zionists.

Growing up in England, Barbara was working as a newspaper fashion illustrator when the Daily Mirror asked her to design a day dress - her design in pink gingham, costing 25 shillings, resulted in over 17,000 mail order requests!

Barbara and husband Stephen Fitz-Simon opened Biba in 1964 which in it's third move became Big Biba on Kensington High Street: where seven floors offered it's customers, for the first time, a whole lifestyle - clothes, furniture, food. make-up, dog food - at affordable prices.

Shelf or charity shop? Big Biba is one of my most treasured memories of growing up in Kensington in the 1970s so this is obvious to keep!  It is also interesting to follow Barbara's post-Biba career designing hotel and restaurant interiors in Miami, and to see her meeting old friends like Twiggy and Molly Parkin.

DVD/150: DON'T LOSE YOUR HEAD (Gerald Thomas, 1967)

Anglo-Amalgamated released the first twelve CARRY ONs but when the franchise moved to Rank, DON'T LOSE YOUR HEAD was released without the prefix due to problems over who owned the CARRY ON.. title, the words still appear on the poster...

Robespierre's Reign of Terror is interrupted by the elusive Black Fingernail who, disguised, rescues aristocrats from the guillotine and under the snooty nose of police chief, Citizen Camembert.

The rescuers are two English fops, Sir Rodney Ffing and Lord Darcy Pue so Camembert journeys to England to catch them with his bumbling assistant Citizen Bidet and his mistress Desirée.

DON'T LOSE YOUR HEAD, despite the tsunami of double entendres, runs out of steam about two thirds in and never recovers.

Sid James is fine while the anarchic pairing of Kenneth Williams and Charles Hawtrey fizzes and Joan Sims is glorious as the outwardly-'refained' but common-as-muck Desirée.

Shelf or charity shop?  Despite some classic CARRY ON... gags, I think I can let this one go...

50 Favourite Musicals: The Interval...

The interval - time for a mid-performance wee, an ice-cream or an over-priced drink in the under-staffed bar. I am halfway through my 50 favourite musicals so let's have a recap of the action so far - it's only taken nine months to get here!

How many would be in your Top 50?

The bell is ringing... the mission continues...

50 Favourite Musicals: 25: A CHORUS LINE (1975) (Marvin Hamlisch, Edward Kleban)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

 First performed: 1975, Public Theater, NY

First seen by me: 1989, Shubert Theatre, NY

Productions seen: two

Score: Marvin Hamlisch, Edward Kleban
Book: James Kirkwood Jr, Nicholas Dante

Plot: On an empty Broadway stage, director Zack selects seventeen dancers for the final round of auditions to be cast for an upcoming musical which needs a chorus line of four women and four men.  Zack puts them through a rigorous physical and emotional work-out; he wants dancers for whom it's life itself... not just a job.

Five memorable numbers: DANCE: TEN, LOOKS: THREE, WHAT I DID FOR LOVE, NOTHING, AT THE BALLET, ONE

Like a lot of musicals on my list I came to the show first through the cast recording which can be a bit of a problem when you finally see the show: the score which flows naturally from song to song in your mind actually stops every so often: "wait, there are lines *during* the song??  Who knew!"  A case in point was A CHORUS LINE which was played continuously by someone who I used to work with.  I knew practically every breath that the cast took so when I finally saw the show - on Broadway which was like drinking wine in the country where the grape was grown - it was a shock to realize that the show was actually more like a play with music, so strong are the 17 main characters and the situation they find themselves in.  I found myself totally involved, quietly rooting for my favourite dancers to get the all-important job.  The imprint of director/choreographer Michael Bennett is all over the show but of course most of all in the great dance numbers - the exhausting "God I Hope I Get It" as the successful 17 are selected out of a general chorus cattle-call; the epic montage number which incorporates "Hello Twelve, Hello Thirteen, Hello Love" as all the dancers tell director/choreographer Zack of their years growing up and what lead them to become dancers, and Cassie's big solo number "The Music and The Mirror".  Cassie is Zack's former lover and former established dance soloist who left Broadway - and Zack - to try her luck in Hollywood, but now she's back and despite Zack's goading, desperate to get a job again on Broadway, even if it means being part of an anonymous chorus line: "God, I'm a dancer, a dancer dances".  It all culminates in the shiny and brash "One", the chorus' big number in the upcoming show, which reduces the individual dancers into a glittery, uniform ensemble - all moving and looking as one - but we now know what each of them has gone through to give themselves over to that collective unit, a chorus line.  A CHORUS LINE was Broadway's longest-running musical until overtaken by by CATS in 1997, and won nine Tony Awards, the Pulitzer Prize for Drama and, for it's London production, the prize for Best Musical from both the Evening Standard Awards and the Society of West End Theatre Awards (which later became the Oliviers) - the first year the latter were awarded.  It is sad to think that from the eight people who made up the original production team only co-choreographer Bob Avian is still with us. 

Sadly most of the video available for A CHORUS LINE is from Attenborough's galumphing film version but here is the 2018 NY City Center gala production featuring some of Bennett's iconic choreography.

DVD/150: LA PASSION DE JEANNE D'ARC (Carl Theodor Dreyer, 1928)

One of silent cinema's true masterpieces, Dreyer dispenses with the events of Joan's life to focus on her heresy trial in 1431 by the clergy, basing his script on the trial transcripts.

Dreyer distills the trial's four months to a single day, all elements of the film pared down to focus on the extraordinary performance of Maria Falconetti, previously known as a light comedy stage actress.

Dreyer's extensive use of extreme close-ups rivets the viewer to Falconetti and the actors playing the conniving judges.  Rudolph Maté's cinematography shoots them without make-up, capturing every blemish and wart.  But Falconetti's pure face allows every fleeting emotion to shine through her glassy, obsessed gaze.

 

Critically acclaimed but financially unsuccessful, for many years PASSION was only viewable in a truncated version which Dreyer disliked - ironically the original having burnt in a fire in 1928 - until a complete print was discovered in 1981.

Shelf or charity shop?  I can see myself wanting to re-visit the haunting intensity of Falconetti's performance so she can live in the limbo of my plastic DVD box...

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM at the Park Theatre - ...In Gay Years...

Forty years ago this year, Martin Sherman's play BENT opened at the Royal Court Theatre.  Originally written for the Gay Sweatshop theatre group, they passed on it hoping a bigger theatre company would do it so the play could be seen by a wider audience.  It was initially rejected by the Royal Court while Hampstead would only stage it if a gay director did it, but none came forward.  The Court eventually staged it with the star power of Ian McKellen and Tom Bell but the management still disapproved.  No leading West End producers wanted it until producer Eddie Kulukundis took it to the Criterion but only on the agreement with the Society of West End Theatre that it would be gone by December as the Society felt it would be distasteful to be seen at Christmas time in the West End.

In those forty years, gay plays and musicals have found an easier journey to the stage usually through the tried and tested route of either the subsidized theatre or fringe stages.  Those forty years have also seen a whole societal change for gay men and women in the UK and Martin Sherman's latest play GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM addresses that very idea.

Directed by Sherman's frequent collaborator Sean Mathias, GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM takes place in London between the years 2001 and 2014.  Pianist Beau is an American from New Orleans who has lived mostly in Paris and London since the 1950s, ruefully observing the world around him from a distance and through the prism of his music.  Beau has taken the plunge and met a much younger man called Rufus online through Gaydar.  Beau is taken aback when Rufus reveals that he is actually a fan of his music and, in particular, his years accompanying the legendary cabaret star Mabel Mercer.

It transpires that Rufus - who works in the City of London - loves the films and music from the 1930s onwards and had been aware of Beau's presence online and made the first move.  Beau is skeptical of Rufus' effusiveness - especially when he confesses to being bi-polar - but is slowly charmed by him and his genuine interest in recording Beau's reminiscences of his life as a gay man down the years.  However he refuses to indulge in Rufus' starry-eyed nostalgia, telling him that those years were dangerous and lonely years for gay men: "Someone like Mabel confirmed our misery, and mythologized it, but misery it was - and, as a result, everyone was drunk.”

Rufus moves in and they negotiate his manic spells and Beau's unspoken disbelief that they can possibly have a life together, a combination of his only serious affairs having ended sadly, and his knowing that any new-won rights can just as easily be taken away.  Eventually Rufus confesses that he has fallen in love with Harry, a gay performance artist in his early 20s with an ego bigger than his empathy.  Beau is saddened but maintains a friendship and even acts as the couple's Best Man at their wedding.  While Rufus and Harry dwindle into a semi-bickering married life, Beau realizes that happiness can arrive just when you wouldn't suspect it...

Sherman's work can sometimes take on too many themes - I shudder to remember his clunky 1989 play A MADHOUSE IN GOA which even Vanessa Redgrave couldn't rescue - but here the bulk of 20th Century gay experience isn't as unwieldy, thanks in no small part to Beau being such a fascinating character, aloof from the world's cruelties but surprising himself at his capacity to feel.  At times it reminded me of another Sherman play called ROSE which starred Olympia Dukakis at the National Theatre which, while an admirable one-woman feat, finally wore you out as the eponymous Everywoman figure hit every major Jewish experience in the 20th Century like a crazed bagatelle.   Here, because Beau is imparting his stories to Rufus, the experiences of living through Mabel Mercer, AIDS, the shocking 1973 UpStairs lounge arson attack and gay soldiers in WWII New York, doesn't seem such information overload.  Beau got through it all... and he's still here.

This is helped by Jonathan Hyde's exquisite performance as Beau; looking at times like a slightly pissed-off parrot, Hyde's wonderfully acerbic patrician Beau showed subtle changes of thought with delicate expressions of under-played humanity.  It is remarkable to think that the 2017 premiere of GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM off-Broadway starred Harvey Fierstein as Beau, a radically different interpretation I am sure.

The roles of Rufus and Harry cannot help but pale next the the all-encompassing Beau but Ben Allen and Harry Lawtey both eased their performances into the spaces around Hyde's to give him plenty to react to, Lawtey in particular, was very good at turning the initially ghastly feckless Harry into a character with hidden depth.  Sean Mathias might have had some misfires before but here his direction was nuanced and illuminating.

GENTLY DOWN THE STREAM certainly sends you into the night musing on Sherman's arguments of the changing gay experience and I hope it will be seen by a wider audience than us lucky few who have seen it at The Park.

In thinking back on Martin Sherman's work, I am now hoping that one day we will see a revival of his remarkable play WHEN SHE DANCED based on Isadora Duncan's later years in the 1920s Riviera - but where would you find actresses now who could match the power of Vanessa Redgrave and Frances de la Tour?

50 Favourite Musicals: 26: SOUTH PACIFIC (1949) (Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1949, Majestic, NY

First seen by me: 2010, Vivian Beaumont, NY

Productions seen: two

Score: Richard Rodgers, Oscar Hammerstein II
Book: Hammerstein II, Joshua Logan

Plot: On a South Pacific island, nurses and sailors in the US Navy find love against the background of WWII,  Nurse Nellie Forbush falls in love with French plantation owner Emile de Becque while Lt Joseph Cable falls for Liat, the young daughter of a wily Tonkinese peddler but their happiness founders on perceptions of race from within and without.

Five memorable numbers: THIS NEARLY WAS MINE, SOME ENCHANTED EVENING, YOU'VE GOT TO BE CAREFULLY TAUGHT, I'M IN LOVE WITH A WONDERFUL GUY, I'M GONNA WASH THAT MAN RIGHT OUTTA MY HAIR

Indeed - as Lt. Cable sings - you have to be carefully taught.  For many years I had an active disinterest in the musicals of Rodgers & Hammerstein. The only show of theirs I had seen on stage was the National Theatre's CAROUSEL which I found dreary, and despite seeing the films of THE SOUND OF MUSIC, THE KING AND I and OKLAHOMA!, still the team's work was never something I actively sought out.  I guess my baptism in stage musicals coinciding with discovering Stephen Sondheim kept their perceived excessive sentimentality at bay.  Indeed any liking I had for them was thanks to individual songs being recorded by Barbara Cook, Nancy LaMott or Bernadette Peters.  So it was no surprise that I had never seen SOUTH PACIFIC before despite a 1988 West End revival with Gemma Craven or the 2001 National Theatre production, but a trip to New York in 2010 made me want to see Bartlett Sher's acclaimed Lincoln Center production - the idea of seeing this quintessential Broadway musical where it should ideally be seen made me book - and I'm glad I did.  Bartlett Sher's wonderful production featured a 30+ orchestra which made the score wonderfully alive and his concentrated direction gave the piece a respect for the sub-plots of lonely people, unchallenged prejudice and the irretrievable loss of the future that war brings.  The committed performances of Laura Osnes, David Pittsinger, Andrew Samonsky, Daniel Burstein and Loretta Ables Sayre made the characters very real, and the next year Sher brought the production to the Barbican where Ables Sayre was joined by Samantha Womack, Paulo Szot (Sher's original Emile), Daniel Koek and Alex Fearns.  Remarkable how the show's score which features so many standards makes those songs seem fresh when you see the characters' lives that they were written to illustrate. The original production won 10 Tony Awards - every one it was nominated for - as well as the Pulitzer Prize; Barlett Sher's revival won 7 Tonys.  I think the show's rating will increase the next time I do one of these lists...

There are plenty of SOUTH PACIFIC video clips to choose from but I went with a scene from a 2010 live recording of Bartlett Sher's Lincoln Center production which illustrates the way he makes the songs flow naturally from the book scenes leading up to them; of course it helps to have performers like Kelli O'Hara as Nellie, Paulo Szot as Emile (who I saw at the Barbican) and Andrew Samonsky as Cable (who I saw at Lincoln Center)!

WAITRESS at the Adelphi Theatre; Half-Baked... or the Cherry On The Cake?

As KINKY BOOTS has strode off into the sunset, the Adelphi is now the home of another Broadway import which just happens to be based on another feelgood independent movie from the mid-2000s about living your life and dreaming your dreams.

There were a lot of them about...

I have never seen the film of WAITRESS but I believe it has that most tenuous of trappings flung at it, a 'cult' movie.  It had been written and directed by Adrienne Shelly who had become an immediate indie darling through her first two screen roles in THE UNBELIEVABLE TRUTH and TRUST, both directed by Hal Hartley who was all the indie cinema rage at the start of the 1990s but whose career has dwindled ever since.  Shelly found herself in the low-budget indie world so diversified into television and directing; as well as some short films WAITRESS was the third feature film she directed.

But by the film's release, 40 year-old Adrienne Shelly was dead.  Initial police announcements of suicide were re-examined after protests from her husband and further examination of the room revealed she had been murdered by a construction worker working in her building.  A grim, brutal shadow which hangs over her whimsical, quirky screen persona and films.  I do not have to have seen WAITRESS to know what the film would have entailed however as the genre was formulaic: quirky, off-centre characters who muddle through life being nice to each other, natural lighting, cinematography featuring empty buildings with one person featured in the corner of the shot, you get the etc.

But the musical WAITRESS is a bigger, more bombastic incarnation, although it too also - like it's source material - fits neatly into tropes of it's genre.  I wanted to use the word cookie-cutter somewhere there but thought better of it.  The musical's publicity is based around that the four main creative roles - director, writer, composer and choreographer - are all female.  But are they any good?  For the most part I would say yes... the only real offender being Jesse Nelson's basic, unimaginative book.

Jenna is a waitress and baker of pies (or 'paaas' as they are relentlessly called) for Joe's Diner in the American South.  Beloved at work by her colleagues and customers, Jenna has a harder time at home with her moody and chauvinist partner Earl   When Jenna discovers she is pregnant, she keeps it secret from Earl as she knows he will demand she stop working and baking paaas.  She visits her doctor, Jim Pomatter, and brings him his own paaa - one bite and the married doctor is smitten by both Jenna and her baking.  Earl is fired and turns abusive with Jenna, only stopping when she blurts out her pregnancy, to which Earl demands she never loves it more than him.  Even Abanazar at his most hissable is less of a scumbag than this character.  

Joe - of Joe's Diner fame - is, of course, an old curmudgeon but who appreciates Jenna's wonder paaas and tells her to enter a national paaa-making competition; Jenna decides to enter and to run away from Earl if she wins the prize-money.  In the meantime she starts a steamy relationship with the very-lovable - and very-married - Doctor Jim, mainly as he doesn't ask her to love him more than her paaas or baby.  In the meantime her two waitress colleagues are finding their own pleasure: one with the chef, the other with a goofball she met off the Internet who is into American Civil War reenactments - only in indie films... and Broadway.

And so it moves along until Earl discovers the cash that Jenna has been hiding to make good her escape but she mollifies him by telling him she was saving it for baby expenses.  Jenna has her baby and, when confronted with the reality of a real little human to care for, finally has the strength to ditch Earl.  But the getting of wisdom and a dollop of good luck can come in all shapes and sizes, just like paaas...

Diane Paulus' direction keeps the action moving at a steady pace from diner to doctor's examination room to Jenna's living room and is helped by the interesting choreography of Lorin Latarro which snakes itself around both Jenna and Scott Pask's sets.  But I kept coming back to the same problem - the musical simply looks stranded on the huge Adelphi stage, the action is concentrated in the centre of the stage which just looks strange on that large space.  A show that tries so hard to hang onto that cameo-style essence of it's source material looks beached.  I really do think it's the wrong theatre for this show, a more intimate house would have drawn you into it's small story rather than sit back and watch the gaps at either side of the stage.

By far it's most interesting component was the score by singer-songwriter Sara Bareilles whose American success has been slightly less so here.  Her score is suitably slightly whacked and off-centre with interesting orchestrations and tones running under the songs which do make you concentrate on the song itself if not the intent to push the show along.

But where the score goes wonky is the more obvious book numbers - there are nice enough songs for the cartoonish antics of fellow-waitress Dawn and her odd boyfriend Ogie but they tend to outstay their welcome, particularly the vaguely irritating wedding song "I Love You Like A Table" - you kinda have to see that in context.  The other waitress Becky is given a big number at the start of the second act when Jenna catches her married friend having sex with the chef Cal, but the "in your face" finger-snapping and hands-on-hips attitude is only there to give the black actress playing the character a chance to have a Jennifer Hudson-style number and after the song ends, they are best buddies again.

Bareilles also gives Jenna two big pop ballads at the climax of the show which certainly gives Katherine McPhee as Jenna a chance to blast off into her previous 'American Idol' territory but ends the show on a rather too-obvious 'That's worth a Standing Ovation surely?' note.

As I said Katherine McPhee certainly has the belt to put across her numbers but apart from some nice playing with David Hunter's lovesick married doctor, I found her oddly anonymous, I was left wondering what a real theatrical powerhouse performer like Sheridan Smith would have done with it.  The rest of the cast perform well enough but the characters in Jesse Nelson's book are simply too thin to be involving, in particular the ridiculous character of the lousy boyfriend who does everything but leap onto the stage twirling his moustache and swirling a cloak.  It is worth seeing for 30 ROCK's Jack McBrayer who invests the odd Ogie with just the right amount of anarchic goofiness.

WAITRESS reminded me of the Samuel Goldwyn review of a family film which had 'charmth and warmth' but I fear it's over-sweetened paaas were just a bit too sugary for me.

50 Favourite Musicals: 27: PIPPIN (1972) (Stephen Schwartz)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

  

First performed: 1972, Imperial Theater, NY

First seen by me: 1998, Bridewell, London

Productions seen: Three

Score: Stephen Schwartz
Book: Roger O. Hirson / Bob Fosse

Plot: A strolling band of players invite us to watch them perform their show about Pippin, the restless son of King Charlemagne.  Pippin is unloved at court with his distant father and scheming stepmother Fastrada who is pushing her clueless son to become heir.  Pippin is caught in an existential quandary - where can he find a purpose?  War, sex, revolution, the simple life...  Pippin tries them all, but The Leading Player seems to know exactly what Pippin is there for...

Five memorable numbers: MAGIC TO DO, CORNER OF THE SKY, NO TIME AT ALL, SPREAD A LITTLE SUNSHINE, KIND OF WOMAN

Stephen Schwartz had written PIPPIN in the late 1960s while at university so with the success of 1971's GODSPELL, producers asked if he had any other shows.  PIPPIN was dusted off and rewritten but the 1960s echoes through the plot - a young man's existential crisis - but it's the ghost of Bob Fosse, the original director/choreographer, that haunts subsequent productions. Fosse threw Schwartz and Hirson's concept out and gave it what is now recognized as the Fosse style - needless to say, the rehearsal period was marked with frequent spats between director and composer.  1972 was the year Fosse won the three main Director showbiz awards: Academy Award (CABARET), Emmy Award (LIZA WITH A Z) and the Tony Award for PIPPIN.  He even directed a revolutionary TV ad for PIPPIN - a whole minute of star Ben Vereen as The Leading Player and two chorus girls doing a quintessential Fosse number 'The Manson Trio' - the voice-over then announced you could see the other 119 minutes of PIPPIN at the Imperial Theater; a simple idea but it was the first theatre ad to focus on just one song; the show ran for four and a half years!  In London, it famously flopped despite Fosse recreating his production.  That slinky, sexy Fosse style has been lurking in all three productions I have seen - with directors adding their own spin on top of it, throwing concepts on it to divert attention from the skimpy-but-bizarre book.  Although amusing enough, it cannot really contain the weighty themes it raises.  The eventual collapse of the players' make-believe world which leaves Pippin and his lover Catherine facing life with no coloured lights or music feels more like it just ran out of steam - the idea was better realized in INTO THE WOODS with fairy-tale characters, having sacrificed their Narrator, suddenly faced with having to create their own ending.  I don't think I have seen a fully successful production but what always has me returning to the show is Schwartz's score - his finest - which, although sometimes at odds with the book, features some dazzling Broadway show tunes: the wonderful seductive opening number "Magic To Do", Pippin's 'I Want' number "Corner Of The Sky", Berthe's infectious, sing-a-long "No Time At All", Fastrada's dissembling "Spread A Little Sunshine", the choral loveliness of "Morning Glow", Catherine's pop-infused "Kind of Woman" and her break-up ballad "I Guess I'll Miss The Man" are enough to make me overlook any other flaws - oddly enough the 1972 cast recording was on Motown Records, which explains why Michael Jackson and The Supremes covered songs from the score.

There is plenty of video representation of PIPPIN but you cannot improve on the best... here is Ben Vereen in his Tony Award-winning role as the Leading Player seductively enticing us to enter the unsettling word of his troupe of players with MAGIC TO DO, truly one of the best opening numbers ever.  This was taken from a 1981 performance that was recorded for Canadian Television but what it does is immortalize Vereen's magnetism and Fosse's choreography, directed here by his PIPPIN dance captain Kathryn Doby who - among other Fosse credits - was one of the Kit Kat girls in his film of CABARET.

NINE NIGHT at the Trafalgar Studios - Wake up and sing!

We caught the award-winning NINE NIGHT just before it's limited run closing at the Trafalgar Studios and, going by it's reception in the packed auditorium, it could easily have kept running!

NINE NIGHT is the debut play by actress Natasha Gordon and after it's premiere at the National Theatre's Dorfman Theatre last year, it won her the Evening Standard Award for Most Promising Playwright - and deservedly so.  It gripped it's audience throughout with it's look at the love and bickering that holds a North London family together amid the shock waves that every family feels at a bereavement.

Gloria has finally died from cancer and lies upstairs in her bedroom in the house she owned in North London.  She has been lovingly nursed by her daughter Lorraine who took early retirement from a good job to care for her.  Although emotionally and physically drained, Lorraine now has to face the next hurdle: the Jamaican ritual of Nine Night, the nine nights of a wake to celebrate Gloria's life and to help her spirit to move on.  Lorraine is helped by her feisty daughter Anita and mostly hindered by her brother Robert who vaguely deals in property with a friend, Robert's white wife Sophie who still feels an outsider, and Lorraine's formidable Aunt Maggie and sensible Uncle Vince.

Talk frequently turns to Gloria's oldest daughter Trudy, who she left in Jamaica when she came to London with the Windrush generation.  Trudy was eventually sent for after Gloria had married and had Lorraine and Robert, but never appeared - will she travel for her mother's burial?  The consensus is no but Aunt Maggie knows differently... on the final Nine Night Trudy appears, at first an uproarious larger-than-life addition to the sad family but Trudy brings with her an extra dimension of pain that is unleashed like a Jamaican hurricane.

I loved how Gordon made room within the play for each of her seven characters to contribute: Anita first seems like a stroppy daughter but is revealed to be a loving young mother and partner whose idea of spirituality changes with her experience of the Night Night, Trudy's fun-loving exterior disappears to reveal the hurt and betrayal she has carried from a young girl of being left alone without her mother, Aunt Maggie, although cantankerous and demanding, knows exactly what is best for her late sister's soul, while Robert who appears unfeeling and conniving in trying to sell his mother's home against Lorraine's wishes, has his own pain at being faced with the thinly-veiled contempt of his white mother-in-law.

Director Roy Alexander Weise's production had a great mixture of laugh-out-loud humour, painful family life and even a touch of the supernatural - this final shift of the play should have felt jarring but it didn't thanks to Weise's careful pacing and the explosive scene of Trudy's anger.  The seeming appearance of Gloria's spirit is almost a release from the pain of the previous scene.

By the time we saw it, the award-nominated Cecilia Noble had left the production to star in a new play at the National Theatre so the part of Aunt Maggie was played by understudy Jade Hackett who, although she got a big response on her laugh-lines, was overdoing the old woman shtick which you feel would have sprung more naturally from Noble.

There were fine performances from Karl Collins' wise Uncle Vince and Rebekah Murrell's open-hearted daughter Anita but the stand-outs were Michelle Greenidge's Trudy, a force of nature that arrives with presents for everyone - and many bottles of rum - but who shakes the family with her angry pain at her mother - and Natasha Gordon herself playing Lorraine, the daughter who put her life on hold to care for her mother but feels guilt at her own suppressed feelings of sadness and anger.

They all deserved the huge ovation they received at the end of the play, and it was heartening to see the audience was predominantly black; Gordon had definitely tapped into an experience which was loudly appreciated in the funny dialogue but also attentive in the more serious moments of the play.  Natasha Gordon is a playwright to watch, let's hope she finds an outlet in the theatre and we do not lose her very real observational talent to television.