Letter to The Prime Minister, Re: Gender Recognition Act Reform

Dear Prime Minister,

I hope this letter finds you and yours in the best of health. I write to you with much concern about the recent proposals to scrap reforms to the Gender Recognition Act, especially as they relate to the recent Sunday Times' front page article of June 14th, and the highlighted prospective plans to exclude transgender people from single-sex spaces. 

I am particularly concerned that much of this recent action has not given due consideration to many of the unforeseen consequences of such discrimination against the gender non-conforming, particularly the effect such legislation is likely to have against not only non-trans women themselves, but also those that were born women and whom now live and identify as men.

I would urge all those involved in this decision to very carefully consider that as a result of the so-called "trans panic" being experienced around the world, and its accompanying reckless urge to somehow "confirm the gender" of anybody entering women's facilities, many biological lesbian women with unconventional body types, unusual self-presentations, or rare strong facial features, are being subjected to panicked, baseless accusations of being transgender when they are not, by fellow women whom they have every right to share these facilities with.

This is an unconscionable infliction of undue distress and harassment on women for simply going about their lives, which must not be tolerated under any set of circumstances. Indeed, that women should now be expected to have to conform to any sort of feminine standard of appearance simply to get changed or relieve themselves in a public building is manifestly absurd, and must not be encouraged, as I am sure you would hasten to agree.

Furthermore, particularly as this issue relates to female safeguarding and the impact upon transgender men that were born as women, any reduction or removal of legal provisions to enable these men to use the facilities which best affirm their gender identities is very likely to have the unforeseen consequence of forcing people that may now very much aesthetically appear to be male to use women's facilities.

This is certain to subject both vulnerable women and these transgender men to a great deal of entirely unnecessary emotional and psychological distress and difficulty. I am sure you are able to see how this also applies in the inverse case, where those whom now appear aesthetically feminine having been born men, will be forced to use men's facilities, also unduly subjecting them to a significantly elevated risk of distressing encounters and potential male violence. I am sure you will agree that either scenario is clearly ethically unconscionable, and that such outcomes, however unintended, must be strenuously avoided regardless.

Quite apart from any of the real or imagined plight of either transgender or born women, and those that are now transgender men, the Equality Act 2010 has already readily enabled those whom self-identify as their keenly felt gender to freely use their preferred facilities for the past ten years or more. In fact, as you know, the free use of facilities which align with one's preferred gender for at least a year or more is a critical component of full legal gender transition.

This includes both those born men using women's facilities, and those born women using men's, and, with respect, I have simply never heard of any sudden, steep rise in violent, sexually-motivated assaults in bathrooms or changing facilities in all this time, whether that be transgender women abusing those facilities (however unlikely), or (and, I believe, far more likely) transgender women being set upon when surrounded by potentially violent men in an enclosed private space.

This, in and of itself, would seem to rather give the lie to such irrational "trans panic" fears. If such things have not yet been observed to happen in such a vast span of time, it is unlikely that they are ever likely to happen at all, whether now, or in the future. It therefore seems to me quite foolish to hurriedly legislate on the opposite basis.

However, I would also argue that if I am wrong, and transgender women have indeed been the subject of violent assaults by predatory men in their private facilities, surely that is all the more reason to freely enable them to seek the safety, shelter, and solidarity of women's facilities, where they are unlikely to face any such risk of harm? The reverse scenario is, I believe, highly unlikely – if only because a predatory man depends most of all upon the isolation of his intended victim, and it would be extremely foolish of him to attempt any sexual assault upon a woman when completely surrounded by female witnesses, in an enclosed space, in which he would very quickly and easily be trapped and prevented from escaping in far less time than it would take to complain of assault.

Such is why I am also compelled to draw to attention the fact that in circumstances like this, it is most often, perhaps counterintuitively, transgender people whom, rather than posing a threat to women’s rights as is so often incorrectly claimed, are instead the first line of defence against any danger posed to women’s freedoms and legal entitlements. Most recently, Women’s Place UK, the so-called “gender critical” lobby group, took umbrage with women’s access to abortion and medical care being restricted as a consequence of the U.S. Government’s recent rollback of access to medical care for transgender people. This of course had an immediate material impact upon the right of transgender men whom were born as woman, and are still able to become pregnant, to access abortion and medical care services, which poses a serious systemic risk of damage to these freedoms for all women as a class.

Women’s Place were unquestionably correct in their justifiably indignant response that access to medical care and abortion services is an inalienable right for all women – on that, we will always unfailingly agree - and yet have failed to notice or understand the crucial fact that women have been opened up to political attack precisely because trans people have been attacked in the first place, and that it is once again transgender men born as women that are the overlooked victims of such “trans panic” which harms all women as a class.

Furthermore, I also recall a period in which, soon after the current U.S. Government successfully banned transgender people from military service, an unprecedented political assault upon abortion rights was soon launched on the heels of this anti-trans legislation. I do not believe either of these instances to be isolated, coincidental happenstance, but a predictable and preventable outcome of the fact that transgender women and men are most often the first line of defence against the worst forms of misogyny that all women experience. Particularly in light of the ways I have detailed in which women and transgender men are likely to be targeted – however inadvertently – by scrapping these reform changes, I would argue in the strongest possible terms that it is in fact, contrary to apparent opinion, in every woman’s best interests to stand in solidarity rather than opposition with the transgender community. To do otherwise seems, on such immediately available evidence, an act of manifest social and political self-harm.  

Much has also been made, in this so-called "debate" about the "ease" of abusing Gender Recognition Reforms to allow those born men whom have no intention of transitioning to falsely access women's facilities in order to assault or abuse them. I am afraid this is quite simply a fabrication intended to inflict distress and thereby unduly influence policy by appeals to emotion. As you are no doubt aware, all that the Gender Recognition Act changes propose to do - indeed, are only capable of doing in their current state - is to enable the gender recorded on one's birth certificate to be changed so as to be more in-keeping with other legal gender-affirming documentation such as passports and photo IDs. Birth certificates in and of themselves are not acceptable legal identification.

Such baseless appeals to emotion therefore seriously propose that it is possible for a man intending to assault women in their private facilities to use his altered birth certificate as proof of ID, when this is simply not legally possible. Any such person would instead be obligated to present a passport or photo ID, which would completely contradict his birth certificate and thereby expose his malicious schemes and foil him. Surely it is self-evident how absurd and ridiculous and self-defeating this scaremongering scenario is?

Moreover, my genuine concern is again for the transgender men born as women that will find themselves inadvertently hoist on this petard. Are they now to be expected to present a female birth certificate which contradicts their male passports and IDs, and to be denied access to men's facilities, forcing them back into women's facilities and ensuring the difficulty of risking emotional distress to themselves and women? Are we to also force transgender women into men's facilities because of contradictory birth certificates, exposing them to the likelihood of aggressively territorial violence and the harms of men?

Indeed, if neither birth certificates nor legal IDs are acceptable in this scenario, lest they invariably contradict each other, we do perhaps risk the distressing absurdity and harm of somehow informally mandating genital inspections as proof of claim. Indeed, even I may be expected to present my male genitals at the door of men’s toilets to confirm I am not a convincingly transitioned woman if such an imbroglio came to pass in future.

All are morally and ethically unconscionable outcomes which inexcusably infringe upon the rights and dignity of all people whether transgender or not. They must be avoided, and are thankfully entirely avoidable. These proposed GRA reforms merely enable some administrative housekeeping for the transgender population which only makes accessing facilities easier by the kind of passive proxy I have described, if at all. Transgender people are still very much obliged to undergo the long and difficult process of living as their gender for a set period of time as part of their acquisition of legally protected gender reassignment status under the Equality Act 2010. I am sure you will agree that any change which can alleviate some of the stress, even by simply making legal paperwork easier to file for both transgender women and transgender men, is to be welcomed.   

Lastly, I must also protest in the strongest possible terms the reported decision to disregard the results of the recent public consultation on Gender Recognition Reform, which returned a 70% positive result of support for these reforms, and was then accused of being somehow unduly influenced by a phantom “trans lobby” before being discarded. I cannot lately recall any such lobbying myself, and would be most grateful to have it pointed out to me those instances where trans organisations have unduly influenced politicians or swayed public opinion by way of expensive newspaper advertisement or radio or television broadcast platforming, whether in the UK or elsewhere in the world.

To the best of my knowledge, this reform consultation had to be manually filled out, and could not simply rely on any copied and pasted response, requiring individualised, detailed input from all whom took the time to complete it. This consultation was designed to drastically reduce any such outcome in the first place, and is therefore unlikely to have ever succumbed to it.

Furthermore, the consultation itself specifically asked for the input of transgender people and those that represent their interests. Why their input would therefore be discarded immediately afterwards defies comprehension, and would doubtless create a significant sampling bias against the very transgender people the survey asked for the input of rather than the other way around, as is being claimed by the Sunday Times. If anything, it seems that this in and of itself provides an urgent ethical reason to disregard spurious claims of “trans lobby” influence and to instead take full account of the input of transgender people on the consultation they themselves were asked to participate in by the government. Anything else risks an abject failure of good faith engagement with the data.

I hope you will give due and fair consideration to my concerns and those of many others which are shared by the transgender community and their allies, all of whom are acutely distressed and worried about the consequences of such continued misrepresentation of their political interests and everyday lives.

In closing, I urge you to reconsider discarding the results of the Gender Recognition Act consultation, and to pursue an alternative which respects the consultation’s result, as we are rightfully doing in other present circumstances.  

Yours sincerely,

Christopher O'Dea-Giordano

Beckenham, Kent

OPINION - Up With The Black Curtain

Part of why I have written so much about how I've benefitted from white supremacy lately (and invited black voices to help themselves to that writing if it is something they find useful or time-saving on other social media) is because I believe that there is a line between letting people of colour do all the talking, and letting them do all the work of explaining racism to white people, or of addressing the issue. 

Reading educational books is great, and necessary (buy them from black-owned bookshops!!) - but they are always read in a fraction of the time it took to write them. It is the least amount of labour involved. At some point, we must also be the ones labouring to write to educate and inform others like us. Our friends and colleagues cannot do this alone, and they shouldn't have to try to. We must be amongst the first to challenge our own institutions for their lapses. 

With that in mind, questions must be asked of the culture of my own mainstay theatre: 

Why are we packed with white talent, yet I can count the prominent black talent on maybe one hand? 

Why is this talent pool so small that some are even related, either to one-another, or to white performers? 

Why are these few actors only brought out for "black" roles exclusively focused on little more than black experience? 

Why are their audiences often packed with white people? Black audiences must be able to see black actors, or it defeats the point. 

As a white, male-bodied disabled actor, I have been fortunate to receive many non-disabled roles that have allowed me to perform, and to be, more than just my disabilities (although the dearth of disabled roles is another conversation for another time), and this must not remain a white male actor’s privilege. A greater variety of roles for under-utilised talent is essential for the future. 

We know – or ought to know – that black people have higher rates of disability than whites. It is impossible that none of them want to be successful actors, and yet, in nearly 7 years of fringe acting in London, I met the only disabled black woman in theatre I have ever met on my first ever production, in which she was AD, not a performer. 

Disabled black performers are not non-existent. They need only be made comfortable enough to show up, and when they do show up, to be cast instead of overlooked – and allowed to be cast as more than just disabled characters, just as I am (although they should, and must, be the ones playing disabled roles, just as I should be). 

As thrilling as it was to once see the foyer packed with happy black faces from the audience of a hugely successful production, it is wrong that I have since seen so few of any of those faces again, if any at all. We must ask why they have not chosen to come back, and why subsequent audiences for later black-centred productions were (at least in my experience) so overwhelmingly white. I include myself in this, particularly as an in-house theatre critic. Theatre criticism itself is dominated by white, male perspective like mine. We must ask why black voices are not more readily on-hand to critique black productions, either in-house, or more broadly, on the staff of our go-to review services. 

Whilst a point has been made to highlight broader black experiences with a subsequent production, it was in my experience the one with a majority white audience, versus the majority-black audience turning out for a play which especially risks suggesting racism is an exclusively American issue. We must beware of the unintended consequences of this, and appeal more broadly with a wider range of material which represents the full diversity of international black experience, including ordinary, everyday experience beyond paradigms of race – it bears repeating that black actors must also be given more opportunities than strictly black characters, particularly if material stresses black suffering – whether historical or current – in its text. We must avoid that sort of typecasting situation as much as possible. Particularly when coupled with majority-white audiences, the result can be an unsettling sort of voyeurism we must avoid. 

I also note with much concern that there is a broader trend across theatre culture when discussing uniquely black-centred productions to stress that the work is “not about blackness, but about all humanity”, or some variation thereupon. This is something I noted even our own black talent has felt compelled to state when summating their work to our overwhelmingly white audiences. This, quite simply, is an ugly sort of respectability politics which suggests blackness and humanity are somehow separate categories. It reads, and is heard, certainly to me, as a compelled apology for being black, addressed to white audiences. This must not continue, either amongst ourselves, or in London theatre more broadly. We must recognise, and stress, that a work’s blackness is in and of itself a work’s humanity. 

Good work has been done, particularly with stressing the broader inclusion of women as of late, but more can always be done. Fighting one form of oppression in the arts whilst ignoring or overlooking others undermines our own noble cause. We cannot merely cut at the branches. The tree itself must be felled. It is not enough to focus on disability when ableism is derived from a form of sexism, and it is not enough to uplift white women when much paternalistic sexism has to do with the racism of pernicious anti-black myths in our history. 

We must commit to shared unity in the struggle against our mutual dehumanisation and institutionalised mistreatment by those which prize an able (male) body and typical mind in their construct of whiteness. A renewed commitment to active anti-racism must be at the root of all this action in our theatre, and in theatres throughout London – and it is not, nor should it be, the sole responsibility of black actors to make the case for this. We must actively make it ourselves.

Education, Education, Education: An Anecdote #BlackLivesMatter

This is another Twitter thread I composed today about my experience of the unearned benefit of structural racism. Archiving it here.

It is not the responsibility of black people to make the case for structural racism. Here is just one of the (many) ways I have benefitted from it in my life in the UK. 

In Year 4 (or 4th Grade to my non-UK friends), a black boy - the only black boy in my school - picked on me, for the same reason any child bullies or picks on another: he was hurting, and didn't know what else to do. 

One day, that boy left very suddenly - taking all the blackness I had ever known with him - and our teacher sat the class down to explain that he lived 4 hours away from our school. This poor, poor, exhausted black boy - Dominic - had to rise at 4 or 5AM every morning, just so his poor, exhausted mother could do the school run, because no school in his area would take a black boy. 

Some context for his dislike of me: I was not a bad student, but I was an autistic boy in a mainstream school. Sometimes lessons would move too quickly, and I would hide and make a show of working to avoid getting told off for not doing my work. 

Already, I had learned that boys don't ask for help. I lived 20 minutes away. Of course my school would take a disabled white boy with no issue. I got a good breakfast and a full night's sleep every day, and could be ready to learn - even if it was not in my style. 

Poor Dominic was too exhausted and hungry to notice. He looked at me, and he saw a white boy that got to sleep in, who got a good sleep, who had his breakfast -- and then couldn't even be bothered to do his work. He hated me for that. He got angry, because he was so tired. 

He took how upset and frustrated he was out on me. Of course bullying must never be tolerated - but punitive deprivation never works as punishment. We must use rehabilitation and reparation. We must understand why the bully does this, and address why. 

We were both 9 years old. 9 years old, and already this boy suffered the horrors of structural racism that ruined his education, whilst I coasted by, happily oblivious, always welcome at my local school, that was always willing to understand my problems, but never his. 

I have always been able to access local education. I have never had those opportunities denied. Yes, some of these places have had an ableism issue - but they have always had a far greater race issue. 

White Privilege - any privilege - describes the advantage of compound interest on social capital. It's not a cudgel. We only have to understand that this accrues - as it did for me - from 9 years old. Certainly even earlier than that. Across an entire life. 

Did Dominic target me, partly for the unique advantages of my race and disability? Perhaps. I'm almost certain. Yes, he is accountable for the harm he did me - and he is also owed accountability from the racist system that picked on him in the first place. 

His anger and frustration at his circumstances was not wrong. His crime was a targeting error. Nobody can be accurate when they're so young and so tired and so hungry. Two disadvantaged people resenting each other didn't result by mistake. It is the system working as intended. 

We are all held back by this pretended hierachy of oppression. We are all, in our own ways, the victims of capitalistic white supremacy, even when we are, like me, beneficiaries of it. We must not succumb to the ploy of pitting the disadvantaged against each other. 

We must move forward in a spirit of solidarity, and work together. By dismantling racism and its institutions, no more Dominics need to resent white boys for being able to sleep and eat before they come to school ever again. We all benefit. 

I hope Dominic is thriving today, in spite of everything. I hope he is enjoying a good life, and managed to get a good education - and I hope things can only get better for him, and others like him. Let us work together, brother. #BlackLivesMatter

My Fellow Disabled White Dudes: A Thread #BlackLivesMatter

The following is a Twitter thread I composed four days ago which I'm archiving here: 

I want to take a hot minute to call in my fellow disabled white guys. Look, I know it stings to be told we have white male privilege right now. I understand the urge to get defensive. I know a lot of poorly-worded viral tweets and hashtags have felt like punching down. 

I understand the unintentional pain that caused. Assholes trying to radicalise you to the Right will try to abuse it to tell you that the Left hates you, that they'll abandon you, abuse you. They'll try to tap into your fears as a vulnerable person. I know this because they used the same tactic to (almost) successfully radicalise me in the Ancient BeforeTimes of post-election 2016. I was scared. I was vulnerable. I was a prime target, and they knew it, and I bought in just to feel safe and wanted. 

The Right, and the MRA and anti-Feminist and MAGA cults all want you to believe that acknowledging our privilege means self-flagellating, self-hating, and self-abuse. Maintaining that ignorance suits them down to the ground. The way out is knowledge, compassion and self-love. 

So let me break this down: My fellow disabled dudes, nobody has ever wanted us to blame ourselves, or feel bad about advantages we happen to have in life that we didn't ask for. If anyone did, they're an asshole. Every movement has bad actors. Nature of the game. Fuck them. 

Remember that one history class where we all learned that women got the vote because men cried about how bad they felt for being mean, or MLK won civil rights because white people felt bad enough? No. Come on, that's never been helpful. No one useful wants that. 

BUT (I like BIG BUTS, and I cannot lie) it is helpful, and useful, and necessary to acknowledge the advantages our privilege affords us. That's something we all need to be doing. It stings, yeah: but the fact is, being white and male helps a lot, regardless. Take me, for instance: is it my fault Leo Kanner and Hans Asperger just happened to pick out exclusively white boys when they were developing the concept of autism/Asperger's, and our idea of who could/couldn't have autism in the 1940s? No. Should I feel bad? Also no. 

BIG BUT (ha :P ), it would be foolish of me to fail to recognise and understand that that original white-boy-centric view gives me a huge advantage today, even after 80 years. When we think "autism", we think "white boy" whether we want to or not. It's just a fact. That tendency means that, today, being a 7-year-old white boy is everything when it comes to getting the right diagnosis. 

It's meant that in my life, I:

1) Got a correct diagnosis immediately, with no backtalk or gaslighting from the medical establishment.

2) I got immediate access to help and resources and support from a very early age, including speech therapy which helped a working class kid sound MIDDLE-CLASS. Huge personal and professional bonus benefit; and,

3) It has got to be acknowledged, I've seen a hell of a lot more leniency in the face of "challenging behaviour" with autism from authority figures that I honestly don't believe any woman or girl or person of colour could even dream of seeing. 

Women and girls with autism face entrenched medical sexism that misdiagnoses them with personality disorders which blame them for their own condition, and people of colour both struggle to access support and have their difficult autistic behaviour blamed on their race. 

Moreover, white autistic men and boys are just accepted. Nobody tells them outright that they can't be autistic, because we all think we know that it's a white boys' club, no girls allowed. 

I say again: nobody is blaming us for this. Nobody wants us to feel bad about this. None of us asked to get a head start in life, especially if we're already further back from the starting line than non-disabled people; but if we're serious about not wanting to be treated badly for being disabled, the litmus test for that is to not want other disabled people who don't look like us to be treated even worse than we are. 

Fellow DWD's: Let's take this time to recognise that a high tide raises all ships. We will all benefit by acknowledging our privilege (not beating ourselves up over it, just admitting that it's there) and moving forward together in a spirit of solidarity. #BlackLivesMatter

National Theatre Live: Frankenstein - Retrospective

Photography by Catherine Ashmore

The by-now memetic mansplaining refrain of “Actually, it’s Frankenstein’s Monster” unwittingly tells its own meta-fictional tragic tale of how much true understanding of the original novel by Mary Wollstonecraft’s daughter has been lost to the schlock of late-50s Hammer Horror with the passing of years, and how, with it, the voice of Mary Shelley has been stifled, subsumed by a one-note masculine narrative of a mere objectified killer monster on the loose which must be violently destroyed by its male hero creator. There exists a whole host of social and cultural problems with this active sabotage of a woman’s art by what was, and remains, a vastly male industry that has, in essence, stripped her work for parts to profit themselves at market with endless, evermore ridiculous Hollywood sequels getting further and further away from the crucial points being made.

Fortunately, director Danny Boyle’s spectacularly good adaptation of the classic Gothic novel does much to reclaim the work, to restart its deep-probing ethical and moral search, and to begin to restore its feminist foundations, even if its own narrative leaves much still deeply flawed in that way. Dispensing with Victor Frankenstein’s deeply biased male perspective, and telling its story solely as the chronicle of the pitiable, extraordinarily human creature which he selfishly forced into life, the stage show is remarkable for taking great care to properly emphasise the original work’s crucial lessons in morality and ethics, and to put renewed stress on Shelley’s dire warning of the pitfalls of science for its own sake, doing so in a gripping, beautifully-realised, poetic fashion that manages a fabulous trick of simultaneously loosely adapting the novel whilst leveraging the ensuing destructive male saviour narratives of Hammer Horror in its own ingenious, vitally interrogative way. Quite besides that, it is ever-increasingly impossible to ignore the play’s roundabout implication of the terrible, destructive social consequences of birthing an unwanted child one is ill-prepared to raise, which herein fall, for once in history, on a man.

Lee-Miller as the Creature with Cumberbatch as Frankenstein. Photography by Catherine Ashmore.

Indeed, there is much that can be read into playwright Nick Dear’s masterful, multi-faceted, beautiful scriptwriting, almost a guided tour of the most vital English literary and poetic history which is itself often movingly poetic, and which soars to lyrical, literary heights of insight into the human condition as all the best of the Victorian novels did. It charts a course straight back to the heart of Mary Shelley’s writing and ever more close to home, demanding to know who is it that gets to define what is ‘other’ and why, and what makes a monster, or a human being, and what lies in the ill-defined spaces between them.

The line between monster and man is, as is the particular USP of this production, blurred further still by the main roles of Frankenstein and the Creature being swapped nightly between leads Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee-Miller, whom each deliver their own unique takes on the respective roles. Cumberbatch gives an outstanding physical performance in his turn as The Creature, perfectly capturing the hyperactive, unfettered wonder and energy of a newborn child, and growing into a heartbreakingly embittered and damaged man who can never quite be fully formed. Johnny Lee-Miller makes a fine Frankenstein alongside him, his incarnation seemingly marked by a deep need for the illusion of his own superiority which motivates him to invest a great deal of intelligence in ignorance of the consequences of his actions. Indeed, it follows that there is much appalling ignorance poorly masked by his brilliant intelligence, and a lack of the most basic humanity disguised by so-called civility, very well performed by Lee-Miller in his turn.

Cumberbatch as the Creature with Lee-Miller as Frankenstein. Photography by Catherine Ashmore.

By contrast, Lee-Miller feels somewhat derivative and ill-fitting as the Creature. His incarnation, based on his own very young (at the time) son, is closer to a child than Cumberbatch, who, by stark contrast, approaches it as a disabled adult tasked with rediscovering movement, and ultimately humanity, rather than finding it for the first time. Which one proves the favourite will be a matter of per-person preference, but to me, Cumberbatch’s vision feels more authentic to the creature, with its adult body in which movement would be rediscovered and rebuilt rather than formed from scratch.

Lee-Miller seems one-dimensional by comparison, too much like a newborn toddler than a reconstituted man rediscovering himself. It feels oddly inauthentic, as though it suffers for making an arguable pro-choice subtext into text, speaking down to an older audience rather than meeting them on their level. He also introduces vocals to the creature too early, losing some of the tragi-dramatic impact of the creature’s first words being vulgar dismissives in the process, and he seems apart from that almost to too much drag it all out, squandering time, and slowing down the production. Indeed, Lee-Miller seems given over to slightly overplayed melodrama, and even to underplaying moments in both roles, with Cumberbatch more grounded.

Faustian bargaining. Photography by Catherine Ashmore.

Cumberbatch plays Frankenstein as a man hugely taken aback and horrified by what he has accomplished, by the reality of an experiment gone horribly right, and his is a more sympathetic incarnation, if only for not being as given to repulsive lechery as Lee-Miller with the Bride. Regardless, both bring their own unique and compelling takes to the parts, and are worth seeing in each one, though Cumberbatch, being more versatile as a performer, seems to romp home in both leads by virtue of that.

In both versions, amongst the rest of the principle cast, there is a particularly touching and memorable performance from Karl Johnson as the old man De Lacey. George Harris entertains as the Frankenstein family patriarch, bringing a suitably statesmanlike gravitas to his part. Naomie Harris endears as Elizabeth Lavenza, Victor Frankenstein’s wife-to-be, successfully further highlighting the dramatic ironies of the contrast between the Creature and his creator; and John Stahl and Mark Armstrong prove an unexpected highlight as a pair of the mad scientists’ press-ganged assistants, Euan and Raab.

Cumberbatch as a pensive Frankenstein. Photography by Catherine Ashmore

Technically, both versions of the production are a marvel of ingenious staging (customary for the National Theatre’s extraordinarily dynamic space) and artful lighting and set design. A gorgeous Victorian Steampunk aesthetic helps to lend an air of low fantasy, which sharpens rather than softens the hard edge of rage against the myriad evils of men’s unchecked arrogance and vanity which is shot through the reimagined text. The creature’s wretched, tragic existence takes form as a series of tableaus realised in in a succession of literal highlights and lowlights which are consistently enthralling to behold.

One notes that the production has been markedly improved in one the few ways it can be by cutting out its crass, voyeuristic scene of brutal sexual assault. This was never something which needed to be seen, and the production is better for it. Indeed, the play’s female characters do tend to rather get short-shrift here, merely decorating the setting, and motivating the principal men to do their various evil deeds. Others have suggested that it would perhaps have been interesting to see Naomie Harris and Andreea Padurariu swap between brides, if only to give them each more to do, and to reinforce notions of the blur between human and monster, but the thought seems to have gone that it would distract from the mens’ stories, which is a whole other tragedy unto itself.

The duality of man. Photograph by Catherine Ashmore.

Overall, though, it is clear to see why this is one of the National’s most requested productions for on-demand streaming. Beautiful, poetic, wonderfully performed, and boasting a fantastic cast, especially its two endlessly watchable leads. There is, it has been said, something Beckettian about them. Two intertwined lives defined by a vicious, unending cycle of human misery and failure, with no option but to fail and fail again. To fail better, until the world ends.

National Theatre Live: Treasure Island

Photography from The National Theatre

In amongst the stellar selection of lockdown entertainment offerings from the National Theatre’s YouTube channel thus far was Bryony Lavery’s adaptation of Treasure Island in a 2014 production from director Polly Findlay.

Robert Louis Stevenson’s *other* hugely influential classic novel is a piratical high adventure, which sees the brave Jim Hawkins caught up in buccaneer hijinks as they face off against the dread pirate Long John Silver in search of buried treasure.

This is a truly spectacular production, full of charm, whimsy and rollicking spirit, which is hardly ever short of breath-taking sights on its two-hour travels. Lizzie Clachan’s outstanding set design alongside Bruno Poet’s lighting, and music and songs from Dan Jones and John Tams manages to conjure up maritime atmosphere in treasure-digging spades. Gorgeously detailed and vivid backdrops abound, with much ingenious mechanical wizardry on display which keeps the production moving along at a pacey and pleasingly fluid clip.

Photography from The National Theatre

Patsy Ferran leads a strong cast as Jim Hawkins, with a refreshingly modern, even prescient, take on this so-called “boys’-own” adventurer, stubbornly refusing to be whittled down to boy or girl, and full of vim and vigour. Alongside her is Doctor Who alumni Arthur Darvill, hugely enjoyable as the dastardly, two-faced Long John Silver, with both performers having a grand old time of it, and sharing good chemistry onstage, along with some surprisingly endearing shared moments. There are no slouches amongst the rest of the principal cast either, with Gillian Hanna convincing as the crotchety Grandma, Alexandra Maher taking a good-natured pop-culture ribbing as The Doctor (complete with swishy, dandy long coat) in her stride, and many highlights present and accounted for on the good ship Hispaniola’s manifest of misfits.

Confidently and skillfully directed by Findlay, this is a lively, hugely enjoyable production perfect for all the family which captures the spirit of high adventure near-perfectly, and looks ship-shape doing it.

INTERMISSION: Heavy Shit

TRIGGER WARNING: This is a frank discussion of domestic violence and abuse which makes references to child abuse, serious mental illness, complex trauma, and self-harm. Please use your discretion wisely.

According to Refuge, incidents of domestic male violence and femicide during this lockdown have increased from an average of 2 per week to 1 every 36 hours, or over 4 per week. If you can, please consider donating whatever you’re able to their services to assist women and children fleeing male pattern violence, and others suffering at the hands of their partners.

I will be donating £36. One pound for every hour that a woman has left to live as you read this. For many women, that time has already passed, and still more have even less time left. Your donation could help a woman and her children to #StopTheClock.

90% of the violence that occurs is witnessed by very young children. Between 1997 and 2001, between the ages of 7 and 11, I was trapped in my childhood home with an abusive male, and I both witnessed, and was the victim of, domestic male violence. This is both a stream of consciousness exercise in processing my feelings about that – which I will likely be engaged in for the rest of my life – and a testimony of the lifelong impact that witnessing and experiencing domestic violence has on very young children.

I hope it helps.


UK GOVERNMENT GUIDELINES ON SEEKING SUPPORT: https://www.gov.uk/guidance/domestic-abuse-how-to-get-help
REFUGE CHARITY: https://donate.refuge.org.uk/page/51133/donate
WOMEN'S AID: https://www.womensaid.org.uk/

If you are in the UK and need to contact the police without otherwise being able to communicate, press 5 twice on your keypad and leave the line open. The operators are trained to recognise this as a distress call, and will trace it to send officers to support you.
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It happened between the ages of probably no earlier than 8 and no later than 11. It was physical. Emotional. Psychological. Obviously, when you’re a child, you’re completely trapped. There’s nowhere else to go, so that compounds everything, really. You’re a prisoner in your own home. Quite a lot of the time, it came down to just not being allowed to be a child, because children doing silly, childish things embarrassed or humiliated him, and then, of course, any negative emotion was translated into uncontrolled, violent rage. Crying about it made me gay, clearly. Heads he won, tails I lost.

Over a long enough time period, all of your self-esteem is destroyed. It’s lost on a lot of people that being allowed to be a child is an essential part of actually becoming a functioning adult, and if that gets denied to you, then you lose all sense of self. More to the point, you fail to develop properly at all. You learn to live in fear. To never say no, to never talk back, or defend yourself. You develop the worst coping mechanisms; assuming that it’s your fault, that you did something wrong. You learn that anything that is not deliberate, clear affection must be some sort of anger or resentment towards you. You have no ability to recognise or set boundaries, your social competency suffers, and you wind up with terrible, debilitating social anxieties. Panic attacks. Depression. Anxiety. Emotional instability. Personality disorders. Attachment disorders. Deep, complex, lifelong psychiatric trauma in general. All of which I do have, and have to deal with now.

You so often develop complexes that come out in the most debilitating ways – this man was a heavy drinker, so alcohol became this horrifying taboo that paralysed me with fear. I once had a panic attack because somebody offered me a beer at a house party when I was young. Making friends or socialising during university was a struggle. I ended up very isolated amongst people my own age, even before university, simply because they had been allowed to grow up where I hadn’t. I very quickly developed a bad reputation as disturbed weirdo, frankly. It didn’t help that I shut myself away on purpose, out of fear that if anybody ever discovered “the truth” about me, they would hate me and abandon me. Of course, I was also pathologically desperate for approval at the same time, and as we all know, desperation and neediness is very attractive to everybody. That certainly helped with making friends. Altogether, not ideal in my small town university, or anywhere, really.

Quite apart from that, I’ve pissed away years meaning to get around to doing things I still haven’t done. Projects never started. Piles of books unread, games unplayed, films unwatched. It sounds banal, but between a spending addiction that arose as a coping mechanism to give me temporary mood boosts that relieved my depressive states, there is a part of me that is still left waiting for the permission to do anything by myself, to be given leave to spend my time as I please, which will never come. I’m often kicked out of short-term crisis counselling services because they don’t feel equipped to cope with the complexity of my mental health needs. Come to that, neither do long-term secondary services, which shunted me off to art therapy I never went to, I thought it’d be fucking useless – some drunken asshole spent years shouting in my face for every perceived slight and once beat me for not wearing pyjamas when it was fucking boiling at night, the first time I ever self-harmed I was 9 years old, because of that man, I only started talking to myself in the first place because the lack of anyone else to talk to drove me completely ‘round the twist, and you want me to paint shit still life? You’d get better paintings out of Hitler, and he’s dead- but…whatever, I guess.

The thing is, any child psychologist will tell you that traumatised children often get ‘stuck’ developmentally at whatever age the trauma occurred, and that without intervention, it’s difficult to get back on track, if at all. Between the trauma-induced developmental delays, naivety, and the learned lack of boundaries, you’re wide open for even more abuse and general advantage-taking, which then compounds whatever trauma you already had. Domino effect. Complex trauma isn’t one instance of cause and effect, it’s a giant mess of interconnected, interacting, separately-occurring traumas at all points in life, feeding off of each other, including the “afterwardsness” of realising that what happened was abuse, and having that realisation in and of itself become something which traumatises you further. I can’t have been older than 11 when all the abuse stopped, and he left – I remember him crying on my nan’s shoulder and saying sorry, as if he knew he would be damned for life, and hiding under my bed from him whilst he cleared his belongings out of my room without either of us saying a word to each other, as if he knew what he did – and then, sometime after that, my uncle died very suddenly at 21, and I just…sort of… stopped. Ended up stranded on the strange seas of thought, alone, somewhere between the ages of 11 and 12. As if I’d had enough horror.

I spent years stuck there. I never got trauma therapy. Bereavement counselling, anything like that. It was all quiet whispers indoors between the adults, like I wasn’t there, no-one ever really bothered to take me to one side and say, “Christopher, what happened wasn’t normal, you’ve witnessed terrible violence, you’ve been badly abused”, like I was some sort of person who had been traumatised or anything. We do like to patronise kids, don’t we? It’s so much less hassle to just pretend they don’t understand, especially if they’re disabled. It’s an extension of that weird British masculine instinct to sweep it under the rug, keep schtum, stiff upper lip. Bizarre. I put a lot of work into my social skills over the summer after I had a good couple of complete mental breakdowns in my fresher’s year, but even with all that study and practice, I’m pretty sure I’m still way too far behind to ever fully catch up now. I’m 30, and I still feel about 23. That’s not a middle-aged Dad having a mid-life crisis joke on Facebook, I seriously mean I literally, developmentally, am probably where most 23-year-olds should be, and I’m 30. I feel like this is my life now. Perpetually falling behind everyone else, always coming off as a bit weird and needy and immature whether I want to or not. No wonder I’ve never had a girlfriend. I mean, it’s not like I’m owed one, but you know, shit is depressing.

The worst part is, and this is amongst the most difficult to admit, I’d be lying if I said that I hadn’t perpetuated abuse onto others when I was younger. That had to do with my own attachment problems and lack of boundaries. It’s long since stopped, and I’ve made a point of apologising to these people and leaving them to live their lives, but I have to live with it now, and so do they. I will regret the things I did forever. It haunts me. I keep coming back to this horrifying realisation of the destruction and damage done to so many lives, over so many years, because of what that man did to me in the first place – which he did because his father did the same to him. Sometimes, I think part of my urge to never have children is the urge to just make it all stop, forever. By the way, that doesn’t invalidate my asexuality or my decision to be childfree, there are a multitude of other reasons that are nothing to do with abuse, and if you weaponise a history of abuse to deny someone their identity, you’re a special kind of arsehole. Still, the thought does occur to me sometimes.

I hate “what do you do?” parts of conversations with new people. What am I supposed to tell them? That my psychological development is now so stunted by multiple abuses and compound traumas, and my mental health so poor, that I now can’t actually function as an adult my own age, and the DWP actually considers it a severe disability worth permanently signing me off of work over? I feel like that would thoroughly disturb most people right out of wanting to know me. Hell, *I* frighten me at the best of times.

On top of all this, I’m recently rediscovering that my *mother* is a cruel, vindictive abuser, who I haven’t spoken to since last August. So…there’s that. Frankly, I’m surprised I can even think straight most of the time.

For reference in terms of how long this has an impact, this started to happened when I was 8. I didn’t tell anybody, ever, until I ended up alone in a safe room at the age of 20. So, yeah, there…tends to be a bit a satellite delay. It will *always* have an impact from here on out, to the grave. No use denying the way of it.

..and nearly every bit of it solely from witnessing and experiencing domestic violence as a child. I have been left bereft of a huge amount of confidence or security in who I am, and it’s followed that I have led a disappointing shadow of the life that I ought to have done under better circumstances. We do, and must, talk about the women that lose their lives. We must also talk far more about how their children are robbed of so much of the lives they might have had if this had never been allowed to happen to them.

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"The Nobodies" by Chalk Line Theatre

This is a recollection of a performance on February 20th 2020. Also published in London Theatre Reviews, April 21st 2020: http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=2780

Photography by Lidia Crisafulli

Following on from an impressive debut showing with Testament at the Hope Theatre, the Chalk Line Theatre company returns, this time to the VAULTS Festival, with a second offering from writer Amy Guyler in the form of The Nobodies.

Where previous outing Testament dived into the murky depths of male mental health and masculinities, Chalk Line remains keenly socio-political here, telling a new, but no less grimly relevant tale of existential horror through Guyler’s writing, which crackles throughout with all the pacey drama and darkly comic humour, as well as the witticism and insightfulness that has hallmarked Chalk Line’s offerings thus far.

The talented trio of Lucy Simpson, David Angland, and Joseph Reed each thoroughly convince in their parts as radical young socialists Rhea, Aaron, and Curtis respectively, as their group of would-be activists are driven to bribe and blackmail politicians to get their notion of social justice. Before any of them know it, some ill-advised improvisation in a fix starts a radical peoples’ movement which inevitably spirals out of all control, and all manner of ethical horrors ensue in a story which no doubt owes a considerable debt to the stylings of Fight Club and its ilk.

Photography by Lidia Crisafulli

Fortunately, Guyler and the cast manage to bring plenty of distinctly theatrical style, substance, and uniqueness to what might have felt too derivative in less capable hands, and there is much more besides to love about this original production, which pointedly asks searching, discomforting questions about the true moral righteousness of radicals.

Alongside Guyler’s fine writing, and the cast’s great performances, the intimate surroundings of the VAULT stage’s tiny space are put to some very creative and inventive uses by set designer Becca White, whose great sense of place in (quite literally) assembling a scene is ably assisted by atmospheric lighting from Alan Walden, and Mekel Edwards’ evocative sound design. All the while, Vikesh Godhwani and Sam Edmunds’ joint direction makes for a tightly-focused, pacey and very enjoyable evening of drama which certainly proves memorable for its audience. It seems destined for a life well-lived when it transfers to the Edinburgh Festival in the indeterminate future, when (in the words of Beckett) Happy Days will come again.

Photography by Lidia Crisafulli

National Theatre Live: One Man, Two Guv'nors

Photography by Johan Persson

Writer Richard Bean’s accomplished adaptation of 1746 Italian farce The Servant of Two Masters by Carlo Goldoni transports the original’s evergreen comic scenario - a poor, starving fool of a Harlequin blundering into waiting on two masters at deadly odds with one another, in search of an extra meal - to Brighton in 1963, where the modern Truffaldino takes the form of the hapless Francis Henshall, lately fired from his Skiffle band and caught between two sets of hardy East End gangsters intent on killing each other. Commedia dell’arte ensues as Francis recklessly bumbles his way through every desperate effort to stop each finding out about the other, whilst eating literally everything he can get his hands on.

Opening to unanimous critical acclaim during its original 2011 run with the National Theatre, and becoming a global phenomenon, director Nicholas Hytner’s outstanding work is these days rightfully regarded as a modern classic the British stage. Today, in the throes of our prolonged global quarantine, it proves unweathered by the long near-decade since, as fresh, inventive, energetic and full of laughter as ever, and now, a sorely-needed tonic for these lonely days.

The full cast. Photography by Johan Persson

This is a spectacular production, alive with enthusiasm and almost bursting with love for the craft in every aspect. Mark Thompson’s beautifully realised, clever set design transports us effortlessly everywhere around the city of Brighton, from stately homes to the mean streets, to the posh restaurants in-between; Grant Olding seemingly captures the lightning of 60s rockabilly in a bottle and tosses it back to us via the considerable talents of in-house band The Craze, taking us on a musical journey back through time and placing us perfectly in situ in 1963; the Craze themselves treat us to their infectiously energetic, feel-good rockabilly stylings throughout, performing a short albums’ worth of memorable and ridiculously catchy numbers at (literal) intervals throughout; and certainly not least, an impeccably chosen cast make every performance a highlight down to the smallest of bit-parts, with even the ensemble giving some shockingly convincing turns in danger of bamboozling uninitiated or unwary viewers (or indeed, sympathetic reviewers).

To mention any stand-outs would be to list the whole cast, whom all – from lead James Corden’s pitch-perfect Francis Henshall, to Suze Toase’s delightful, doggedly driven Dolly, and Oliver Chris’ side-splitting Stanley Stubbers – display a spectacular talent for making the rigorously rehearsed seem improvisational, and never fail to do justice to the beautifully literary, playful, sparklingly intelligent, and laugh-out-loud hilarious writing of Richard Bean.

Daniel Rigby as Alan Dangle with Oliver Chris as Stanley Stubbers. Photography by Johan Persson

Indeed, it seems easy to see why this was the first choice for our onrush of indoor theatre of a rather different sort. It represents the best possible opening night: a definitive, superlative run of a classic, so practically perfect in every way that it would perhaps be no loss to the art of theatre to put a stop to all future staging efforts on account of the work having already achieved its pinnacle. A five-star tour-de-force of farce.

Suze Toase as Dolly with James Corden as Francis Henshall. Photography by Johan Persson.

Alan Bennett's "Talking Heads" by Brigid Larmour

Also published in London Theatre Reviews, March 12th 2020: http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=2547

Staging a select trio of Alan Bennett’s famous series of BBC monologues – namely “A Lady of Letters”, “Bed Among The Lentils”, and “Soldiering On” - director Brigid Larmour revives the work together with her leading ladies, “Casualty” star Julia Watson and Jan Ravens of “Dead Ringers” fame.

This is a superbly-realised production in every respect. As Artistic Director of the Watford Palace, Larmour knows her beautiful, well-appointed surroundings intimately, and keenly demonstrates their best use by way of the sparse, portrait-like set design (courtesy of Designer Basia Bińkowska and Scenic Artist Aimee Bunyard), helping to draw all attention towards her wonderfully talented lead performers, and the beautifully detailed, evocative writing of Alan Bennett. Tom Desmond’s Sound Design and Bethany Gupwell’s Lighting Design also jointly assist in giving proceedings a light, delightfully whimsical flourish of detail that greatly enhances whilst never distracting, and appears effortless precisely because of great effort.

Much the same is true of both leads in this production, each one giving excellent, artful performances which are full of huge presence, shining personality, and infinite, sympathetic humanity. Jan Ravens is absolutely superb in her joint roles as Muriel and Miss Ruddock, each their own distinct breed of heart-rendingly tragic figure, and full of their own unique, fully-realised and full-rounded humanity. Julia Watson is outstanding as well, cutting a complex and sympathetic figure as the deeply troubled Susan; and each has been skilfully directed with purposeful confidence by Larmour, who never forgets the need for some physicality and movement to lend some visual action to a work heavy on its dialogue.

Meanwhile, Bennett’s writing is full of its hallmarked, often horrendously dark humour, perfectly timed and delivered, and yet still barely able to disguise a razor-keen edge of the macabre. Creeping dread and mounting tension seep through every precisely-chosen word of the trio of monologues, pushing inevitably onwards towards the emotional devastation, tragedy and horror at their respective cores, all the while dealing unabashedly with the urgent, topical issues of loneliness, isolation, mental illness, substance abuse, and plain abuse itself. It is some of Beckett’s finest, with the beauty of his prose never disguising, but only lifting the veil from perfectly realised human imperfection and ugliness – all of which is more-than-capably performed by the best women for the job, who bring everything to vividly-illustrated life, and allow this superb writing to ascend to its full heartbreaking and hilarious heights in their masterful performances.

Magnificent, beautiful work, showing all the evidence of art.

Safe Sex - Network Theatre, VAULTS Festival

Also published in London Theatre Reviews, March 12th 2020: http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=2539

Actor and playwright Harvey Fierstein’s own creative efforts to come to terms with the AIDS crisis in 1980s New York is revived by director Jacob Trenerry at the Network Theatre for the VAULTS Festival.

The short, dialogue-driven piece sees two gay men, Ghee (Sam Neal) and Mead (George White) try desperately to negotiate and navigate their own fraught love life in the wake of the AIDS epidemic, and the ensuing widespread gay panic. Trenerry, along with Assistant Director Joanna Coulton, insists upon an intense, unapologetically queer experience, much to the work’s benefit. There is undeniable power and atmosphere here, ably assisted by the lighting and sound team of Paul Evans and Chris Olsen, together with the clever set design – resembling a see-saw, and reflecting, as it does, the precarious social balancing act required of gay people situated in that place and time in the movement’s history.

Photography by Paul Hajisavvi

With Kathryn Stevens’ voice coaching, both leads put on passable, if somewhat uneven, Brooklyn accents, and perform in their roles very well. Sam Neal in particular bears the brunt of the writing, and carries it off expertly, proving lively, funny, and emotive, as well as capable of rousing genuine shock and awe in dramatic moments. There is enjoyable and clever visual playfulness from the directors, too, with both men clearly coming from vastly different socio-economic backgrounds; the interplay of sex and vice – one dirtily smoking, the other classily drinking – visually intertwining and equating gay sex with vice unto itself, reinforcing that socio-political urgency in the text and evoking sympathy with an audience made to realise that these prejudices are being socially manufactured for political expediency in much the same way as any play is staged.

Fierstein’s writing itself is also a highlight of the production. Full of wit, honesty, and truthfulness, with a keen edge of political radicalism and deeply-felt human sympathy to it, one initially might be reminded of the nihilism and despair of a signature Beckett play, if only this play had not forgotten its warmth and levity, so that, despite everything, there remain reasons to smile, and to hope. Surely something to take no small amount of gay pride in.

Drip Drip Drip by Pipeline Theatre

Also published by London Theatre Reviews, March 7th 2020:
http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=2509

The fifth production from Pipeline Theatre, and writer Jon Welch, Drip Drip Drip tells the tale of an NHS pushed to its absolute limits – this time not by Conservative budget cuts, but by testing the fundamental principle of care for absolutely everyone regardless, when a team of immigrant doctors and staff find themselves compelled to make a dying Nazi apologist comfortable.

It’s a play firmly in the urgently political, meta-theatrical tradition of Bertolt Brecht, merged with the visceral social realism of Jim Cartwright, and the resulting explosive combination produces sincere excellence so outstanding that it almost transcends theatre and becomes a witnessed experience of life itself.

Welch’s extraordinary, meticulous writing is full of real life, shining lyricism, inexhaustible dynamism, and an abiding empathy and love for all of humanity so acute that it feels autobiographical – something made even more remarkable by the fact that Welch is a middle-aged white man with a life nothing like the characters he so perfectly imagines in his work.

The first-rate writing is carried by the work’s other greatest strength, a superb professional cast, all of whom perform flawlessly, and bring everything to life so recognisably that all awareness of the artifice of theatre seemingly disappears, with the audience liable to be left feeling less as if they are watching a play, and more as though they are stealing a shameful, perverse look through a window, into real, suffering peoples’ wretched lives. It seems that Welch has not merely written characters, nor are the cast simply playing parts – but that they have brought genuine human beings to full and vivid life, as all great writing and performance should.

One could easily meet any of these wonderfully-realised people on the street, let alone see them in a theatre play. David Keller is superb as the rambling, scatter-brained academic facing death as a disgraced Nazi sympathiser; Alan Munden totally convinces as the hospital porter who could be any oddball full of nasty little prejudices towards every sort of othered person, whether he means to have them or not; Lydia Bakelmun perfectly embodies the horrendous strains of professional and personal life both as a Muslim doctor and as a woman of colour; and at the true heart of the work are Girum Bekele and Michael Workeye as two loving brothers, struggling refugees torn apart by cruel happenstance, who together send the work hurtling towards its utterly heartbreaking finale, in which one struggles not to weep bitter tears of righteous indignation and fury at the sheer damned inhumanity. There are not enough superlatives for it all.

Ably assisting all this brilliance is the set design of Jude and Alan Munden. Visually sparse in a suitably Brechtian way, allowing the focus to fall on the excellent performances and writing, it nevertheless proves versatile for being so compact, and capable of its own visually striking performances. Some clever use of projection also aids the sense of place and character nicely throughout.

In all, a simply superb production. Flawlessly performed, powerful, righteously angry, poetic, and emotionally devastating. A superlative tour-de-force that demands to be seen and heard. Do so.

John Cleese's "Bang-Bang!" at the Yvone Arnaud

Also published by London Theatre Reviews, March 5th 2020:
http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=2501

Recently revived from its brief slumber after a 2017 run at the Mercury Theatre in Colchester, Fawlty Towers veteran John Cleese (yes, that one) brings his debut farce to Guilford’s Yvone Arnaud. Cleese’s first scriptwriting foray, bearing all the hallmarks of heavy boyhood influence from French satirist Georges Feydeau, adapts the playwright’s little-known French farce Monsieur Chasse – and does a suitably bang-up job.

Leading lady Leontine (Tessa Peake-Jones) becomes convinced her husband Duchatel (Tony Gardener) is having an affair, and determines to enact revenge by carrying on a torrid tryst herself with her secret lover, the family physician Moricet (Richard Earl). Naturally, hilarious chaos ensues between all the members this dysfunctional 19th-century French noble family as the Monty Python star’s exuberant first-rate writing crackles with characteristic Fawlty-esque wit, ingeniously filtering French farce through all the Cleese classics of British comedy whilst a hugely talented ensemble cast of performers bring it all to endlessly watchable, laugh-out-loud (larger-than) life.

Photography by Paul Blakemore

Under the close eyes of writer John Cleese (yes, that one), and skilled director Daniel Buckroyd, the relentlessly fast pace is pitch-perfect, and comic timing is drilled to near-flawlessness, with nary a dull moment to speak of. This is a suitably lavish and elegant production, too, with designer David Shields outfitting every superb performer in beautiful costumes to tread the boards of his extraordinarily comely and cleverly-designed set, with cast and crew ingeniously conniving to distract our attentions whilst the setting quietly shifts and changes.

So much the better for it that this cast has seemingly boundless energy and enthusiasm for their work, with all of their performances soaring to wonderful heights of comic flamboyance, down to each and every part – from Daniel Burke’s delightfully mischievous Gontran to Vicki Davids’ sly Babette, and all in-between, and beyond - especially the wonderfully entertaining turn from Wendi Peters as Madame Latour, whom proves a woman of many talents.

A spectacular production, limitlessly lively, joyful, and funny, and above all, tremendously entertaining. A French farce Fawlty Towers for everyone fond of theatre, that earns a resounding bravo to Monsieur Cleese (yes, that one).

"Sweat" by Ian Hoare

Also published by London Theatre Reviews, February 29th 2020: http://www.londontheatrereviews.co.uk/post.cfm?p=2478

Hot on the heels of its critically-acclaimed West End run, the Tower Theatre have seized the first opportunity to stage Lynn Nottage’s timely, Pulitzer Prize-winning period drama of the endless urban war between class and capital, and its countless civilian casualties.

In rural rust-belt town of Reading, Pennsylvania in the year 2000 (readers of a certain age, perhaps sit down - 2000 qualifies as period drama these days), its community and people are caught in the ruinous hurly-burly of de-industrial revolution as the steel-work industry begins to collapse. Over the course of the play’s series of inter-connected vignettes, industrial strike action fractures the social landscape, and over the cruel course of time tears friends and family apart, poisons minds, and leaves lives ruined.

Ian Hoare directs the unfolding tragedy almost reverentially, clearly having a great admiration and respect for the material. Under his careful, light-touch stewardship, things move along at a good pace, and tension builds and maintains itself nicely throughout, with the sense of time and place reinforced by the Tower Theatre’s customarily excellent set design and use of sound to enhance their dramas. One practically steps right into an all-American watering hole on entering the theatre with Wendy Parry’s set, and the clever deployment of faux radio recordings to frame the vignettes carries us through the surrounding politics of the turn of the century, thanks to sound designer Laurence Tuerk.

Photography by David Sprecher

A strong ensemble plays out the tragic drama, with the entire cast putting in earnest and impassioned performances. It is an unfortunate hindrance to this production, though, that much of the cast seem to focus rather too much on putting on a convincing American accent, robbing Nottage’s superb writing of much of the import of its dialogue as the performers seem to be too distracted by this requirement to focus on really characterising the text. Especially in the first half, this comes across to the detriment of the production’s believability overall; but when more confident cast members, who have mastered their accent work, can put aside that worry and get on with the performance, the work is wonderfully heightened, and its brilliance shines through.

This is especially apparent in the second half, when curtain nerves have subsided, and genuinely harrowing drama powerfully plays out on its own merit, elevating the production to fantastic heights once again. It can make for a somewhat uneven presentation, but it is hard to begrudge this of a talented amateur company bravely tackling West End fare so soon after the end of its recent run.

Nevertheless, it makes for a bold and compelling night of theatre, and a perfect second opportunity to see it away from the West End.

"The Refuge" by The Balon Rouge Company

The Balon Rouge Theatre Company brings their latest production, a Gothic Christmas mystery, to the Barons Court Theatre in London. Regrettably, there is very little to feel festive or charitable about here. The decision to stage a play set at Christmas so late into a new year is a bizarre and poor choice by itself, to say nothing else of the difficulties which plague this wholly lacklustre and unconvincing show.

The writing is by far the weakest component in this uninspired, melodramatic tale, which leans heavily on references to classics of Gothic horror in an obvious and unsophisticated manner, as though crassly trying to better the work by association, but this attempt fails, and only succeeds at coming across as the worst kind of pretentious literary name-dropping.

The poor world-building is upset further by any sense of the time and place crucial to atmospheric Gothic stories skewed by characters veering wildly between speaking as if they’re in a Victorian novel - a hindrance by itself - to suddenly using bizarrely modern choice language.

The cast struggles with the insipid, one-dimensional writing and its ridiculous plot throughout, all sounding as though they have barely started read-throughs, let alone gone on stage, with none of the stilted performers at all convincing in their soap opera roles.

Sound design leaves much to be desired, too, with melodramatic, too-loud stings of clichéd suspense music forming the bulk of a distinctly unimaginative, grating soundscape, and the set – although it didn’t before seem possible – is far too small for the scope of the work’s ambition, with the attempt at audience intimacy only causing a great deal of trouble for the cast, forced to duck and weave to avoid hitting their heads on overhead speakers (to one actor’s misfortune), and leaving supposedly tense scenes of threatening pursuit looking completely ridiculous.

A dreadful, drab sleep-aid of a production, one poorly timed and executed in nearly every significant respect. One can only hope Balon Rouge does better next time. Fortunately, that shouldn’t prove too difficult.

E.M. Forster’s A Passage to India by Simona Hughes at The Tower Theatre

My dearly-departed paternal grandmother was born and raised an Anglo-Indian in Calcutta, her young life spent with war always brewing, either with the wider world, or the British occupation, before her father – a non-serving British Army brat whose forefathers had, for five generations, faithfully served the Empire’s cause – forcefully declared one day, as all around them was destroyed by resistance fighting in the streets, that “these idiots can kill themselves if they please, but my family will have nothing to do with it”, and fled to England, where his family found themselves so helpless without their old servants that they could not so much as make a cup of tea by themselves.

My extended family on her side, in particular my great uncle, retain their distinctly dark brown skin tones. Her five children with her Franco-Italian husband are clearly ethnically mixed – but by the time of my brothers and I, all that remains are the stories she passed down to me. I often wonder at times how to reconcile myself with that erased biological history, with the bizarre colonial implications of its having been subsumed by European whiteness, and never to return to our bloodline. I do not want children. I feel great sorrow and pity for my forebears that this history of our family, along with all those stories of India, and of the Indian women that lived before my grandmother, may well die with me. I am drawn back across the tides of time to the Raj with the overpowering sense that the history of British India is my own family’s immediate history.


Adnan Kapadia stars. Credit: Robert Piwko

Martin Sherman’s theatrical adaptation of E.M. Forster’s classic novel serves as a timely reminder that the dynamics of human relations both within and across cultures and time periods are infinitely complex and delicate – and that our imperial history is far less clear-cut and rosy than many today may be inclined to remember it. When the magnanimous and friendly Indian Doctor Aziz (Rahul Singh) is accused of a terrible crime against an English woman, a terrible clash of cultures ensues, one in which the full ugliness of the evils of imperialism, colonialism, racism, and naked white supremacy is revealed.

Director Simona Hughes, together with an unusually large cast, brings a new adaptation to the Tower Theatre in Stoke Newington – one which may come to stand as one of the best, and most exquisitely beautiful, the company has ever produced, and which one is loathe to divulge too much detail on for fear of spoiling a wonderful experience. This is an absolutely gorgeous production, with Max Batty’s picturesque, dynamic set front and centre in the proceedings, making excellent use of the Tower’s stage throughout. Stephen Ley’s beautiful lighting sets the tone perfectly, and this play in particular pushes the boundaries of anything the company has previously attempted in their space with the use of evocative light and shadow.


Credit: Robert Piwko

Costume designers Sue Carling and Elion Mittiga have perfected the era’s sartorial sensibilities, with every member of the cast superbly dressed, and the triple-threat of sound designer Rob Hebblethwaite, soundtrack composer Tamara Douglas-Morris, and live musicians Mahesh Parkar, Devina Vekaria, and Amiya Bhatia creating an immersive, authentic soundscape of time and place wonderfully steeped in lyrical mysticism. Things move along at a gripping, pacey clip with Hughes’ tight direction, which doesn’t forget when to slow down, nor how to pace these slower moments, resulting in an almost pitch-perfect runtime. Above all, Sherman’s writing sparkles as much as ever, beautifully composed, with so much of it still retaining all of its power to shock and to sober, and to reverberate through to our modern age.

So, too, does this adaptation showcase a huge number of superb, memorable performances from its huge – and hugely talented – cast of 17. Lead Rahul Singh brings Dr. Aziz to vivid life, brimming with infectious, vivacious joy and energy as well as beautifully portraying the aftermath of the terrible accusations against him. South Asian Theatre veteran Adnan Kapadia as Professor Narayan Godbole makes for a wonderfully expressive and evocative narrator of events, and Alison Liney turns in a particularly moving performance as Mrs. Moore, very much the work’s moral centre. Meanwhile, Rebecca Allan is compelling as the conflicted and complex Adela Quested, Simon Lee convinces as the brave and dignified, though very much flawed would-be white saviour Cyril Fielding, and Robin Taylor makes a superb Tower debut performance as the hateful villain of the piece, Ronny Heaslop. So, too, does Paul Willcocks get his turn as a detestable bad sort with a memorable performance as the cruel and conniving McBryde.