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Posts Tagged ‘Anna Ledwich’

Dry Powder

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , on February 19, 2018| Leave a Comment »

This play, the UK debut of American playwright Sarah Burgess, is set in the sordid, parasitic world of private equity. The problem for me is that it doesn’t tell you anything you didn’t know already. The PE world is one populated by those who couldn’t give a damn about anyone else and don’t have an ethical bone in their bodies. So what’s new?

Jeff’s working on a deal to bag a luggage company in California. It’s a difficult time for the PE firm, and therefore an important deal, due to negative PR over senior partner Rick’s extravagant engagement party. The luggage company’s negotiator Seth is keen to retain manufacturing and protect jobs, but the PE guys have other plans. Jeff’s colleague Jenny muscles in on the deal, which makes Jeff side with the target (rather implausible, I thought), almost scuppering the deal – but everyone has their price.

It’s performed on an apron stage with a mirrored backdrop and just a perspex table and two chairs for props, everything shades of grey. This made Anna Ledwich’s production a bit static and somewhat perfunctory, though it did zip along. The four performances – Aidan McArdle as Rick, Hayley Atwell as Jenny, Joseph Balderrama as Jeff and Tom Riley as Seth – are all excellent, but I don’t think the material is worthy of their talents.

I’m getting a bit worried about Hampstead Theatre’s selection of new plays.

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Kiss Me

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , on November 15, 2016| Leave a Comment »

Playwright Richard Bean was late to his eventual career, of which he is now pre-eminent, starting at 40. He’s made up for it since, writing 23 plays including two adaptations and one musical in twenty years. One of the features of his output is the diversity of subject and style. Another feature is its quality. No. 23 is unlike any of the others, a finely polished little gem.

It’s set soon after the First World War. A man arrives at the lodgings of a war widow. He’s been sent by a doctor because she wants a baby. It’s something he does for women like her, plus the wives of the war wounded. He wasn’t in the war. They exchange pleasantries, but they aren’t allowed to know their real names, or anything about each other, under the parameters established by the doctor. In the end she can’t go through with it. They part but something is left behind which enables her to find him, and another sort of relationship starts. 

It’s easy to see why, despite his drawing power, it’s in Hampstead Theatre Downstairs; it needs its intimacy. With the audience facing each other on two sides, it takes place on and around a solitary bed in a small space. It’s beautifully written, with a depth of characterisation that’s astonishing given its 70 minute length. It often surprises you and there’s a gentle, warm humour in keeping with the subject matter. He says some nice things about the Welsh too, but that didn’t influence me!

Anna Ledwich’s direction is very sensitive to the material, and to the audience too, given the traverse staging. Both Claire Lams and Ben Lloyd-Hughes are a delight, managing to convey the repression of the period but the intimacy of their relationship.

A much shorter theatrical feast than iHo upstairs, but a feast nonetheless.

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Labyrinth

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on September 7, 2016| Leave a Comment »

It’s easy to think that the economic crisis we’ve lived through in the last eight years is unique. As this play shows us, by explaining the Latin American Debt Crisis of the early 80’s, a prequel to the latest one, everything that has and is happening to Greece happened to Mexico, and other Latin American countries, more than thirty years before. History repeats itself and we just never learn.

In Beth Steel’s brilliant play we follow the career of John. He’s not your usual highly driven Ivy League Long Island banking type, but top banker Howard sees something in him and takes him on, to be groomed by high-flier Charlie in the macho world of international lending. As Charlie rises in the Latin American department, so does John. They loan money for projects that will never come to fruition, with money that won’t, because it can’t, be repaid. We learn of John’s troubled childhood, with his small-time fraudster father in prison while his mother loses everything. His dad comes back into his life and is a ghostly presence during the rest of the play, his dishonesty compared and contrasted with the monumentally bigger stunts being pulled by John and Charlie for their bank. John is a clever guy and by putting forward the idea that gets the banks off the hook, overtakes his mentor.

It’s an intelligent, well researched and superbly written play which manages to make the complex comprehensible. It builds, slowly at first, like all the best thrillers, except this isn’t fiction. It’s traverse staging has a clever, clinical, uncluttered design by Andrew D Edwards, with brilliant lighting and light effects by Richard Howell and a soundscape by Max Pappenheim. I haven’t seen any of director Anna Ledwich’s work before but I was really impressed by this. John is a big role and the character has an extraordinary journey and Sean Delaney, a 2015 RADA graduate, is stunning. Tom Weston Jones is outstanding as Charlie, as is Martin McDougall as Howard and Philip Bird as John’s dad Frank.

It owes something to Enron in terms of subject and style, but it’s its own thing, telling a different story brilliantly. I much admired Beth Steel’s previous play Wonderland, about the miners strike, but this couldn’t be more different, and it confirms her as an exciting new playwriting talent. A must see, and a candidate for Best New Play. What are you doing reading this when you should be booking tickets?!

 

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