THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE at the Dorfman, National Theatre - into the woods...

Hot on the lion's tail of THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE, it was time to see another theatrical adaptation of a fantasy novel - one in which, ironically, CS Lewis' Narnia novel is heavily featured.  Welcome to the at-once familiar, but very strange world of writer Neil Gaiman's THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE.

I have only read one of Neil Gaiman's novels, the topsy-turvy London adventure NEVERWHERE, but have seen him onstage playing wingman to his missus Amanda Palmer, and even met him once ten years ago when we bumped into the two of them taking photographs in the Vaudeville Theatre foyer.  Luckily Owen had one of Amanda's badges on so we got a hug and told her we were seeing her soon at the Union Chapel.  While queueing that night for a signed cd, Neil Gaiman nudged Amanda and said "Oh look Amanda, it's the two gentlemen from the theatre".  Fame, eh?

Gaiman dedicated THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE to Amanda;  it started out as a short story in response to her questions about his childhood, but as he got more involved into the plot it changed to novel-length.  Wildly successful, it later won Book of The Year from the British National Book Awards.  Gaiman has had no involvement in Joel Horwood's adaptation but there is a connection to Amanda Palmer as a frequent musical collaborator Jhereck Bischoff has composed the score.  Not having read the book I had no idea what to expect but it did not take long for me to get involved in the story as well as the way it was told. 

A man attends a family funeral and, strolling back to his old house, he strays towards a nearby farmhouse where he encounters an older woman.  Prompted by her, he vaguely remembers a girl called Lettie Hempstock, who he was inseparable from when 12 years old, and just about remembers that she moved away.  We then flashback to far-flung 1988: he is living with his father and younger sister, and the whole family is silently trying to cope with the death of the children's mother a year ago, his escape being his love of books.

Their lives are further disrupted when the family's former lodger commits suicide after stealing the family car.  The boy meets Lettie on the border of her land soon after and when he tells her about the suicide she brings him home to her mother and grandmother to tell them about it too.  The women of the farmhouse are strange mystics who believe that the man's suicide - caused by guilt of stealing money - has allowed an evil entity - a 'flea' - to attempt to 'cross over' into the real world. Lettie and the boy set out to destroy the 'flea' by magic but the boy is warned not to let go of Lettie's hand - but during the tumult he accidentally does.

Later that night in his bathroom, the boy extracts a worm from a wound in his hand without realizing he has left a piece inside... which means the 'flea' has escaped into the real world!  Shortly after, the boy's dad informs his children that a new lodger is moving in, a woman called Ursula Monckton who bonds with his sister but who the boy takes an instant dislike to.  Slowly he realizes Ursula is the 'flea' in human form and soon his father is her pawn too..

With Ursula able to read his mind, he escapes from the house by reciting from memory THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE to block his thoughts.  Once safe at the Hempstock farm, the boy and Lettie must again fight evil in the shape of Ursula - but what if there is a greater danger than her?

Director Katy Rudd has a firm hold on the narrative for most of the play - oddly it only lapses at the end where the climactic battle between good and evil seems to plateau out - but she not only gives us a good eerie tale but also a sad portrait of a family struggling with the loss of a wife and mother. 

Concentration on the tricksy plot is well-served by Fly Davis' simple set - a thicket of trees serves as a backdrop with all other locations suggested by a few pieces of furniture, this comes into it's own as Ursula spreads her malign influence in the boy's house with her appearing behind every door he opens and, in a particularly scary moment, when the boy casually drops the worm from under his skin into the bath, a bloodied hand reaches out of it.  It was one of a few moments when I wondered how the few scattered pre-teens in the audience were handling it!

Paule Constable's lighting is exemplary in illuminating unsettling moments, Steven Hoggett's movement suggests a whirling world of dark undertows and a particular mention to Samuel Wyer's puppet and costume designs - Ursula's pink peg-leg trousers pinpoint the late 80s very well.

In a hard-working cast, three stood out: Pippa Nixon was very good as the smiling intruder Ursula who left the action too soon; her insidious poisoning of the household was an excellent, unexpected plot twist.  Justin Salinger was very good as the boy's father, trying hard to keep his two children occupied after their mother's death but not seeing the enemy within; he also played the grown-up boy at the beginning and end but he could do little with the over-emphatic lines of half-finished sentences which meant to show his hesitant forgetfulness but, as Owen said, just made you think no one speaks like that in real life.

But the performance of the night was Samuel Blenkin as boy at the centre of the action.  Gawky and uncomfortable, unhappy and sad, he was a very believable anti-hero and delivered a touching and true performance.  I think the play could possibly stand another look-at to iron out some pacing issues in the second act but THE OCEAN AT THE END OF THE LANE was an unexpected delight and deserves going on to bigger stages: for a fantasy tale, it has a lot of truth in it about memory and loss.

On the night we went, the actress playing the boy's sister was unwell and could not perform and while the Dorfman as is has the same rule as the Cottesloe as was, eg. no understudies, still they managed to find an actress to go on reading the script.  Well done whoever she was - there was no slip in the programme and the stage manager mumbled her name.  Needless to say she got a nice round at the end...

The IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST at the Vaudeville Theatre: Classic Spring has sprung...

The year-long celebration of Oscar Wilde at the Vaudeville Theatre has been an enjoyable season courtesy of Dominic Dromgoole's Classic Theatre Company, a debut season in their mission to present classic writer's plays on the proscenium arch stages that they were written for.

A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE, LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN and AN IDEAL HUSBAND have led inexorably to the climax of the season, his magnificent comedy THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST. Sadly the production sits very shakily on the top of the others' achievements.  The play has been dazzling audiences since 1895 and will continue to do so... but through no thanks to director Michael Fentiman who imposes himself between the glorious words and the audience from the start.

EARNEST is the blistering, blissful apex of Wilde's career in all possible ways; the pure distilled joy of his invention, his previously Melodramatic plots are here whipped into a creamy souffle of confused identities and his seven main characters confound and delight with every whiplash line of epigrammatic pleasure.  It is impossible to stage any play by Oscar Wilde without seeing it refracted through the cut-glass shards of his downfall, in which EARNEST sits as an innocent bystander.

Wilde's state of mind during it's writing is reflected in the what-the-eye-doesn't see engine of it's plot - he wrote the play while holidaying with his wife Constance and his children in Worthing (which explains the town's importance in the play) but as soon as they left, in moved Lord Alfred Douglas.  It turned out to be yet another unhappy experience: Wilde nursed Douglas through a sudden bout of influenza but when he himself became sick, Douglas left him to fend for himself.  Six months after it's initial writing, it was premiered at the St James' Theatre and had been rewritten and reduced from four acts to three.  

The successful opening night was marred by the threat of Lord Alfred's father, the Marquess of Queensberry, who intended to disrupt the curtain call so Wilde had the management rescind his ticket and bar him from the premises but four days later he left the infamous calling card at Wilde's club, the Albermarle, calling Wilde a sodomite.  Wilde sued... and the rest is sad history.  Sir George Alexander, manager of the St. James' Theatre and the original Jack Worthing, took Wilde's name off the posters to try and weather the storm but eventually closed the play after 86 performances.

But EARNEST continued to delight audiences - albeit on small tours and 'fringe' performances while Oscar languished in prison - and two years after his death in 1900, George Alexander revived it at the St James'.  Since then the play has been revived countless times and is now rightly acclaimed as one of the greatest comedies in the English language, not least because of Anthony Asquith's glorious 1952 film with the titanic performances of Edith Evans, Michael Redgrave, Michael Dennison, Joan Greenwood, Dorothy Tutin, Margaret Rutherford and Miles Malleson.

All the film cast's souls will rest easy knowing their hold on the roles are still firm.  As I said Michael Fentiman's directorial choices continually butt in to the production; they cannot really stop the glory of the words but his cheapening of the characters begins to irk after a while.  The sooner Fentiman understands that the audience are there for the play, not his ideas around it, the better.  It's too late for EARNEST however so we shall press on.

It's a production where the women come out on top but only just.  Sophie Thompson's comedic experience is on full display as she swoops and honks her way through Lady Bracknell's dazzling lines but has a touch of humanity about her so the character is less of a gorgon than usual.  Pippa Nixon seems to take her lead from Sophie, her Gwendolen is definitely her mother's daughter with her imperious air and directness.  Fiona Button plays Cecily Cardew with an equal boldness so their second act confrontation was a trifle overpowering - it didn't help that Fentiman has them stuffing each others mouths with the bread and butter.  No, I don't know either.  Stella Gonet was off so we saw her understudy Alana Ramsey as Miss Prism and she was ok.

So to the men... Jeremy Swift was fairly anonymous as Canon Chasuble, just... nothing there.  Mchael Fentiman's heavy-handed approach to the play was all over the actors playing Jack and Algernon: Jacob Fortune-Lloyd (a name to change away from) actually managed to make some impression as Jack especially in the 'interview' scene with Lady Bracknell but in the second half, as the complications and coincidences crash head-on, Fentiman has directed him to play it like Daffy Duck at his most uncontrolled.  I felt sorry for the actor...

The Algernon of Fehinti Balogun was just a mess, he appears to have appeared in several off-west end roles - including ensemble work in Glenda Jackson's KING LEAR - so what on earth made Fentiman think he could carry this lead role in his first proper West End play?  I am sure he is capable of acting but high comedy is certainly not his forte: instead of pitching his lines up and out, he blotted them as he gabbled their delivery.  It says a lot about the production that the most memorable male performance is Geoffrey Freshwater's butler Lane in the opening scene.

And of course, as it's 2018, Fentiman ramps up the subtext, as if it really needs to be spelled out in neon letters instead of leaving it to bubble along in the background.  So we have Algernon absurdly snogging Lane his manservant and doing bizarre nose-rubbing with Jack when they meet in Jack's country house while Gwendolen acts like she has a vibrator up her skirts at the mere thought of marrying Jack aka Ernest.  It's all so reductive and does Wilde's masterpiece a serious disservice.

That there is still fun to be had is a tribute to the indestructible magic of the play.  It's just a shame that Classic Spring's excellent season ends with such a mis-firing production.  One wonders who Dromgoole might go for a possible second season, there are plenty to choose from but would they be commercial enough?  The obvious choices almost cancel themselves out by being well-catered for such as Shaw, Chekhov, Rattigan, Orton, Pinter and O'Neill so a less obvious choice might be interesting.

THE TEMPEST at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse: it's going to be a bumpy night...

So here we are, the final production in the Globe's staging of the last four plays of William Shakespeare which have laid bare the hidden and not-so-hidden links within them.  Fathers lose daughters, mothers vanish or are never present, love is discovered by chance, physical journeys are bound upon and safe havens sought while coincidence exists alongside magic...

Oddly enough I have only seen THE TEMPEST once before on stage, I seem to have seen filmed or tv versions more often.  The only stage version seen was Sam Mendes' dreary production at the Old Vic in 2010 with an under-whelming Stephen Dillaine as Prospero and the mixed UK and US cast turning the text into a right fugue for tinhorns.

No such problems for Dominic Dromgoole's production at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse which despite it's spartan, fixed-design stage, still managed to be infused with the right amount of mystery and imagination to suggest the more magical moments of the play.

If I have a criticism of the production it would be that it seemed a little too benign at times - moments such as the two murder plots to kill both Alonso and Prospero seemed to come and go without causing too many ripples of alarm.

Tim McMullan is not usually an actor I warm to - his sonorous voice can be too distracting - but I enjoyed his performance as Prospero, the Duke of Milan who, 12 years before the start of the play, was overthrown by his jealous brother and bundled aboard an unsafe boat with his three year-old daughter Miranda and set loose on the sea.  McMullan had the right commanding presence and was a believable magus, capable of bending the elements to shipwreck his brother and retinue of lords onto the strange island where he himself was washed up with his daughter.  He also spoke Prospero's last two famous speeches - "Our revels now are ended..." and "Now my charms are all o'erthrown..." with great simplicity.

Phoebe Pryce - daughter of Jonathan who we saw as Jessica in the Globe's MERCHANT OF VENICE last year - was good as Miranda, a dutiful daughter but eager to fall in love with the King of Naples' son Ferdinand when he is separated from the others during the shipwreck and there was also an interesting performance from Pippa Nixon as Ariel, Prospero's spirit servant who also is aching to be free.

Fisayo Akinade was a bit too obvious and one-note as Prospero's subjugated native slave Caliban but there was better fun to be found in the low comedy antics of Trevor Fox as the permanently soused Stephano and the flamboyant Trinculo of Dominic Rowan, his comedy 'business' at times threatened to capsize his scenes but he is such an engaging actor that they were great fun.

Another reason for the success of the production was the sympathetic performance of Joseph Marcell as Gonzalo, Prospero's friend who came to his aid when he was deposed by filling his boat into exile with provisions and, more importantly, with books on magic which Prospero has used to his advantage.

Jonathan Fensom, although constrained by the afore-mentioned playing space, made good use of the stage and made necessity a virtue by having a large flat rock in the middle of the stage which was turned around for each scene giving the actors something to clamber over and around, simple but effective.  Stephen Warbeck's music was ever-present and engaging throughout.  Needless to say, Prospero's lovely parting words asking for the audience's applause to free him from the island were undercut by the usual end-of-play meaningless jig about.

The Globe is to be applauded - and I did! - for staging these last four plays so one can make connections with their recurring themes of love and reconciliation, now bring on the events to honour the 400 years since Shakespeare's "little life was rounded with a sleep".