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Posts Tagged ‘James Hillier’

Not Talking

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , , , on May 14, 2018| Leave a Comment »

This is an adaptation of a twelve-year-old radio play by Mike Bartlett, six years before he hit the big time with Charles III and Albion, adaptations like Chariots of Fire and award-winning TV series Dr Foster.

He’s done six other things for radio, so this seems to be another strand sitting alongside the epic, like Albion, and the miniatures, like Bull. Another radio play, Love Contract, a year after this, ended up on the Royal Court stage as Contractions the following year (brilliantly revived last year by Deafinitely Theatre as a site specific piece on a trading floor). Now the enterprising Defibrillator have mined the archives to stage this one at the Arcola.

There are two seemingly separate stories more than half a century apart. James and Lucy meet before the second world war, but their relationship is marred by their failure to have children and infidelity. Mark and Amanda are army colleagues at the time of the Iraq war. The two strands eventually connect and its very satisfying joining it up for yourself. There was too little character interaction and dialogue and too much monologue for me, but given much is looking back storytelling, its easy to see why.

It’s simply staged by James Hillier with just a platform, a piano and some chairs, with some particularly effective lighting by Zoe Spurr making a significant contribution. The four performances are all excellent – David Horovitch and Kika Markham as the old couple and Lawrence Walker and Gemma Lawrence as the young soldiers.

I always enjoy seeing the early work of my favourite playwrights, but this is more than a collectors item, its a fine piece of storytelling. Just seventy minutes, but compelling theatre that’s well worth catching.

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The Armour – Langham Hotel

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , on March 27, 2015| Leave a Comment »

When my former employer reached its 150th anniversary, it commissioned a rather dry book about its history. The Langham Hotel had a much better idea – to commission a play to be staged inside it. Defibrilator Theatre had its second run of Tennessee Williams’ Hotel Plays at the Langham, so they were the obvious choice.

Playwright Ben Ellis’ big idea is to stage three ‘acts’ (I’d prefer to call them playlets as they don’t really constitute one play) in three periods in three spaces and it works well. We start in the present with a pop diva (played by a real life former pop singer, Hannah Spearritt) throwing a strop, refusing to take the helicopter to the arena where 20,000 fans are waiting. Her manager works hard to change her mind. In the second play, we’re in the early 70’s and BBC radio have relocated studios from across the road. An American businessman (and Vietnam veteran) and his wife are waiting to be interviewed on air and we learn of the motivation behind his business and their relationship with one another. In the final play, we’re back in 1871 with the French emperor and his wife in exile, contemplating a return to Paris or a journey to Vietnam.

There are connections between them – Vietnam, margarine (!) and ‘the armour’ that gives the evening its title – but they are three miniatures that come together to provide a satisfying, if brief and fairly expensive, experience. I could have done without the chirpy ‘concierge’s explanations and excuses, which were a bit contrived and detracted a little from the experience, and the journeys from the lower ground floor to the 3rd, 7th and back again became a bit tiresome. The six performances, though, were very impressive. Thomas Craig was well matched with Hannah Spearritt in the first play. Simon Darwin and Siubhan Harrison were intense and captivating as the American couple. Sean Murray and Finty Williams were appropriately regal and graceful as the French royals.

In The Hotel Plays (which I saw and enjoyed in its first run elsewhere (https://garethjames.wordpress.com/2012/10/20/the-hotel-plays) we were scattered in the rooms like flies on the wall, which I preferred to the seating supplied here, but director / producer James Hillier has done a good job staging these plays and the complimentary bubbles were very welcome (though messing us around by trying to change time slots for no obvious reason wasn’t!).

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Theatre Uncut

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , , , , , on November 22, 2013| Leave a Comment »

I very much admire this initiative. Theatre Uncut commissions short political plays by largely established writers, makes them available for anyone to produce anywhere in the world and stages them itself with professional actors who only get a day’s rehearsal time.

The evening is made up of six plays, so you’d expect it to be a touch uneven. The best is Mark Thomas’ Church Forced to Close After Font Used as Wash Basin by Migrants, a spot-on vicious swipe at an odious newspaper baron not unlike some of the real ones. The most famous playwright is Neil LaBute, but I found his Pick One, about three American power brokers discussing large-scale ethnic cleansing, hard to swallow. As often with LaBute, he tries too hard to shock and in doing so realism goes out of the window and impact is lost.

Rachel Chavin’s Recipe gets a different theatre group each night; Dumbshow put together their highly inventive production of it in just four hours, but their staging was outstanding. Clara Brennan’s The Wing featured a fine performance from David Hounslow as an English Defence League bigot clashing with his liberal daughter; he was also chilling in LaBute’s play. James Hillier also shone as Mark Thomas’ press baron and one of LaBute’s power brokers.

It’s great to see theatre that’s edgy and experimental, more concerned with confronting current issues than providing slick entertainment and directors Emma Callander & Hannah Price are to be congratulated. Support it.

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Hard Feelings

Posted in Theatre, tagged , , , , , , , , , , on June 29, 2013| Leave a Comment »

The Finborough Theatre has an uncanny timeliness when it comes to revivals. If you ignore the clothes, decor, period references and what’s going on outside the Brixton house in which it is set, Hard Feelings could easily be a contemporary play. This could be because nothing’s really changed or it could be that we’ve gone full circle.

Doug Lucie’s play takes place during the 1981 Brixton riots. A bunch of Oxford University graduates are sharing the house rich kid Viv’s parents have bought for her. You have to keep on the right side of Viv and fellow rich kids Annie & Rusty do so by providing her with a drink and drug fuelled social life and sex. Working class Baz (who sells frisbees!) and trainee lawyer Jane opt for the quiet life, not joining in but not challenging, as Viv becomes more and more of a control freak day by day. Jane’s boyfriend Tone, a left-wing cockney journo, is afraid of no-one and brings some welcome home truths with news of what’s happening outside, something that for them is just getting in the way of having fun. This is Thatcher’s Britain, so there’s no such thing as society. Only two are left to join Viv in welcoming her parents.

It’s a slow burn at first, but it draws you in to this world. It’s a credit to Isabella Laughland, Margaret Clunie & Jesse Fox that I hated rich kids Viv, Annie & Rusty almost enough to get out of my seat and give them a slap! I also wanted to shake Nick Blakeley’s passive Baz and tell him to grow some balls. Zora Bishop does well transitioning from compliant Jane to angry Jane and Callum Turner is testosterone on legs as brittle Tone. Stephanie Williams’s uber-realistic (and, for me, nostalgic!) design is brilliant and in James Hillier’s excellent traverse staging you’re virtually in the room with them.

Doug Luice wrote 15 or so plays in the 80’s and 90’s (and just into the 00’s). They were produced at places like the Bush, Tricycle, Royal Court, Hampstead, Lyric and even the RSC. I saw seven of them, including the first London outing for this play 30 years ago, and just can’t understand why he isn’t revived more. He doesn’t even get a Wikipedia entry! What would we do without the Finborough? Indispensable theatre, unmissable revival.

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