King Lear at the Theatre Royal, Bath

Any play directed by Lucy Bailey promises a bold creative vision and King Lear, part of the Theatre Royal Bath's 2013 summer season, is no exception. Shakespeare's epic tragedy of family betrayal opens in a typical 1960s London east end pub with chain-smoking sharp-suited gangsters and their thuggish skinhead lackeys. I haven't seen Lear performed before (another tick for my own pretty epic Shakespearean bucket list), so had no preconceived ideas to work with, but the scene was immediately set for an intriguing interpretation of a familiar, oft-told tale.

Old King Lear has decided to divide his kingdom between his three daughters, on condition that they each describe how much they love him. Goneril and Regan are fulsome and fluent in their praise and it's only Cordelia, his youngest, who hesitates to put her love into words. Lear flies into a rage and disinherits her, dividing what would have been Cordelia's land between her two siblings. Fortunately, one of Cordelia's suitors the King of France is still willing to marry her and they leave together. Lear soon discovers the false love of his two older daughters and pays dearly for his erroneous judgement. As Goneril and Regan conspire to deny him his courtiers and his remaining power, the King begins to lose his mind.

The sub plot meanwhile involves another family conflict between the Earl of Gloucester's illegitimate son Edmund and the legitimate Edgar. Edmund convinces his father that his heir is plotting against him and to save himself Edgar is forced on the run, disguising himself as a deranged and homeless beggar, Poor Tom.

David Haig is commanding as Lear, convincingly enraged by his daughters' behaviour, vulnerable and touchingly believable as he descends into madness and wanders adrift in a storm before eventually being rescued by Cordelia. Paul Shelley is also adept as Gloucester, the other father all too easily deceived by his treacherous offspring, blind to Edmund's faults and later blinded by a vicious attack from Regan's henchmen because of his decision to help Lear.

Edgar (William Postlethwaite) initially appears so innocently bumbling and bookish that it's difficult to believe his father would think he could do him any harm. Postlethwaite more than makes up for this though with Edgar's stunning transformation into Poor Tom, a nearly naked gutter philosopher smeared in grime.

Bailey's sixties gangland setting is an inspired choice for the turf wars and seething malevolence of this play with Lear, his family and retinue of courtiers dressed in the style of the Kray twins. Albany (Daniel Weyman) and Cornwall (Samuel Oatley) are threateningly mob-like and Samuel Edmund-Cook is sexily menacing as Edmund. The staging by William Dudley, incorporating images projected on to suspended gauze flats, is striking, particularly in the opening scene and later when Goneril deprives her father of his remaining power. If anyone it is Lear himself who is sometimes slightly at odds with this vision, the otherwise magnificent David Haig perhaps just a little too cuddly despite his sixties suit and slicked back hair. And while Goneril (Aislin McGuckin) and Reagan (Fiona Glascott) parade themselves somewhat two-dimensionally as brittle gangster molls, Cordelia (Fiona Button) is dressed as though she's on her way to an anachronistic S Club party, her difference over-telegraphed by sneakers, jeans and a snow-white top.

Lear wanders into the storm and the stripping away of the scenery emphasizes his increasing isolation. The play draws towards its powerful and bloody conclusion and it becomes more difficult to recognise the time frame because the violence of the thugs could belong to almost any era. This version of King Lear is not flawless and the opinions I have heard of it have been divided, but it reinforces the universal nature of Shakespeare's themes. In turn harrowing, shocking, funny and moving, this is an ambitious and memorable production from Lucy Bailey and the Theatre Royal Bath team.



Pictures courtesy of the Theatre Royal Bath. King Lear completed its run at the theatre on Saturday, 10th August 2013.

May We Be Forgiven by A.M.Homes

A.M.Homes' latest novel May We Be Forgiven is difficult to categorize, which is one big brownie point in its favour as far as I'm concerned (don't you hate it when the whole narrative is already neatly summarised on the back of a book, with no space for your own interpretation?) The story begins with Harry attending Thanksgiving at the house of his younger brother George, a successful TV executive who presides over a table of superficial power cronies while his wife Jane and their children subsist around the periphery.

 But then there's a seismic shift in family dynamics as Jane kisses Harry over the cleared-away turkey carcass, with unforeseen repercussions rebounding all over the place. Harry is an under-achieving Nixon scholar trapped in a sterile marriage and thankless professorship, so in many ways it seems he doesn't have too much to lose by embarking on an affair with his brother's wife. In reality of course, he must lose himself, bottoming out in a pit of emotional despair as his relationships, career and health all deteriorate, to find himself once more as he steps tentatively into his out-of-control brother's shoes. And as he does so, he realises his previously alienated nephew and niece, Nate and Ashley, not to mention his brother's dog and cat and house, are a lot more engaging than he thought.

The story begins with a car crash and a murder and then the pace really begins to quicken. This is a darkly comic feverish brain dump of a narrative, set in Westchester and with New York frenzy written all over it, bombarding you at every opportunity with new characters and events. It's certainly a page-turner that makes for an exhilarating ride, but I often found myself wishing a strand like the girl who goes missing or Ashley's affair with a teacher at her school could be developed in more detail before being cast aside for the next big idea that comes hurtling along. As it is, there are so many passing characters and sub-plots, some more successful than others, that the narrative can become confusing. And for some reason I often forgot this was supposed to be a man narrating the story and repeatedly read Harry as a woman - perhaps that's just me or is he quite in touch with his feminine side?

Despite his health problems, Harry finds himself able to indulge in a lot of easily available sex without too much of a problem, much of it amusing, some of it unexpectedly thought-provoking. And I did enjoy his family relationships - first and foremost his volatile and frequently violent relationship with George, but also with his mother who goes through an almost Lazarus-like reincarnation, as well as Nate, Ashley and various other assorted relatives.The whole Nixon thing didn't do too much for me, but I can appreciate it's a great deal more relevant if you're an American citizen. Likewise the South African adventure, cosseted Americans rediscovering the meaning of life as their material comforts are stripped away, was rather cliched and an unnecessary continent too far.

We now know that A.M.Homes is the winner of this year's Women's Prize for Fiction with this book and I'm sure I wasn't the only one to be a little surprised when the result was announced. Reading it felt a lot like lifting a large plant pot that hasn't been moved for a while, to discover a seething microcosm of life underneath. Some things you find there are more interesting than others, some might be no more than a desiccated carapace, but it does makes for a pulsating, sometimes repulsive yet fascinating whole. Ultimately, I found this an uplifting story of one man's redemption through reconnecting with humanity - but don't let me tell you what to think, you need to read it for yourself.

Bring up the Bodies by Hilary Mantel

Despite its runaway success, I didn't get round to reading Wolf Hall for a while, mainly because my most reliable friends weren't too sure about it. They (independently) found the narrative confusing, frequently referring to 'he' without it being clear who 'he' was. Eventually I thought I'd decide for myself and took the hardback on holiday, lugging it like a brick in a sandstorm around the beaches of Cornwall.

The reason I kept carrying it was because I was hooked - by Hilary Mantel's use of language, her detailed depictions of the fabric of Tudor domesticity and her envisioning of the much reworked courtly rise of Anne Boleyn from the fresh perspective of that previously underwritten commoner-made-good, Thomas Cromwell. to me, it was clear that when 'he' is unnamed, despite the proliferation of Thomases, it's always Cromwell that's being referred to, because the novel is written from his point of view. To be fair, I did have the advantage of tackling large chunks of story in one go and would most likely have found the odd page or two before dropping off to sleep much more challenging.

In Bring up the Bodies, the second of Mantel's trilogy which has already won her a second Booker Prize, she addresses my friends' criticism by frequently writing 'he, Cromwell'. This may succeed in clearing up any confusion, but does reduce the immediacy between Cromwell and the reader, the feeling of standing in his increasingly expensive shoes. Despite this, the moment I opened the book I was basking once more in glorious prose, feasting on Mantel's opulent re-imagining of events

His children are falling from the sky. He watches from horse-back, acres of England stretching behind him; they drop, gilt-winged, each with a blood-filled gaze.

Thus the scene of hawks in flight is set. Cromwell is Master of the Rolls now, sleek and powerful as the enforcer who has rid the King of his first wife at the cost of disestablishing the church, only to find Henry quickly wanting rid of the second, the one he risked everything for. The bones of this story are all too familiar, but Cromwell's viewpoint is as intriguing as ever. The sense remains that he (as written by Mantel) is an unparalleled reader of motive, one pace ahead of his compatriots; the cleverest man in any Tudor room.

In Wolf Hall, I loved Cromwell's evaluation of a person by the provenance and quality of their cloth and was a little disappointed that this diminished in the second volume. It would also have been illuminating to find out more about his close personal relationships; those with women are tantalisingly slight. But Mantel makes up for this with Cromwell's reflections on his life

I never lay awake a night for love, though poets tell me that is the procedure. Now I lay awake for its opposite.

After the long build up to power through marriage in Wolf Hall, the speed of Queen Anne's demise is shocking, as is Cromwell's pivotal role in it. The facts of her conviction are as slippery as the blood spilled by a beheading, but Cromwell's view, once his mind is made up, is unwavering.

Still, he is filled with foreboding by the die-hard English Catholic establishment with whom he reluctantly allies himself, not least the Seymours who see one of their own married to the King within nine days of Anne's death. The niggle I had in Wolf Hall that Cromwell might be too sympathetically portrayed is eradicated by the number of executions he sanctions, all the while calculating that the sands of his time at the King's right hand are running out.

Whatever my criticisms they are minor, because this is another masterpiece from Mantel. Perhaps the judges of the Women's Prize for Fiction were unwilling to vote for the obvious when they didn't choose this book or perhaps they were ready for a change. Whatever the reason, at the moment I find it hard to believe that Bring up the Bodies could be bettered, apart from perhaps by the final instalment of this trilogy.

Bluebeard at Bristol Old Vic

There's a particular excitement about watching something new and untested, the frisson of being in at the very beginning so you haven't been told what to think. Not only is Bluebeard a new production to Bristol Old Vic, developed as part of their Ferment programme, it also introduces theatre company Gallivant, although scratching their surface reveals a wealth of experience, not least from their writer Hattie Naylor and director Lee Lyford.

Bluebeard takes its inspiration from the French folk tale of that name, a dark and bloody fable of a nobleman who has murdered many wives and his latest spouse, who seeks to escape the same fate. Our protagonist Jim is acted by Paul Mundell, establishing his menace early by watching the audience from the stage before we can settle to watch him. As Jim builds the story of his first murderous relationship with Susan from Burnley in chilling and explicit detail, his manipulative and deviant character is laid bare for all to see. With his twisted smile and calculated delivery, Mundell embodies Jim's sense of ill-suppressed violence, one which apparently never fails to attract women in their droves. Without giving the subsequent story away, suffice to say this is a gruesomely compelling and deeply unsettling performance, in which I frequently found myself holding my breath.

The monologue is powerfully written by Hattie Naylor, so many words yet none of them superfluous. There are satisfying touches of repetition as Jim commands his way, an iron fist in a velvet glove, to the inevitable ending of his various one-sided relationships when the gloves most definitely are off. I particularly liked Jim's impersonation of his new wife's aunt, which brought some welcome albeit short-lived light relief, and felt she could have had a greater role to play before the shockingly satisfying denouement. The use of exuberant northern soul music provides the opportunity for some tormented dancing while, at other times, sound combines effectively with the starkly illuminated set to create a series of searing images not easily erased. Having recently seen Hamlet at the RSC I thought I'd had my fill of fluorescent tubes for a while, but they are used to great effect, particularly in the latter stages of the production.

I came away feeling I would have liked a few more comedic moments, a genuine belly laugh or two, to lighten the tone of our encounter with this evil man. On reflection, though, those moments are there and perhaps just need to be enhanced. If one measure of good theatre is how long it stays with you, then the provocative and intelligent Bluebeard is very good indeed, a disturbing emotional assault, indigestion for the intellect. A highly promising start for Gallivant, catch it while you can at Bristol Old Vic, especially if you like to be made to think about the essential nature of attraction and eroticism, the roles we accept within relationships, the why and how in the creation of a monster. You'll need to steel yourself though, it's not for the faint-hearted and the 16+ warning is definitely there for a reason.


Pictures courtesy of Bristol Old Vic

Complicite's Lionboy

The combination of epic children's adventure trilogy Lionboy and Complicite's extravagantly magical storytelling holds the promise of a sumptuous treat for the senses, so it was with great anticipation that my daughter and I headed for Bristol Old Vic to watch this new production, Complicite's first ever aimed at a family audience.

Lionboy by Zizou Corder (the pen name of Louisa Young and her daughter Isabel) is the tale of Charlie Ashanti, the son of two famous scientists working on a cure for asthma who mysteriously go missing. The story is set in the near future when most of the world's oil has been used up, travel by car is the preserve of the wealthy and planes have given way to boats. Large corporations are immensely powerful and the Corporacy, a pharmaceuticals giant, is the largest and most powerful of them all. Charlie is a normal 11 year old Londoner in all aspects apart from one; he can talk to cats and it's the neighbourhood moggies who set him on his continent-crossing quest to find his parents.

The play opens with the characters introducing themselves and their story, something I found endearing. The actors narrate with great energy and charisma; Adetomiwa Edun is a likeable and resourceful Charlie, transforming himself through effortless physicality into the cats and lions he converses with, while Femi Elufowoju is mesmerising as the lion-trainer Maccumo. Robert Gilbert portrays just the right level of menace as Charlie's pursuer Rafi and great moments of comic support are provided by the rest of the cast. The intriguing set is based around a large hanging disc which tilts to suggest moonscapes or the African sun, as well as transforming into the backcloth for shadow-puppetry or the sewers of the Corporacy headquarters.

There's an awful lot to like about this production; the showmanship of the circus and all its characters is a triumph, as is the flight of Charlie and the lions in a hot air balloon to Africa. The percussive sound is evocative throughout and there's enough technical wizardry to keep all the family happy, not to mention the inventive use of commonplace objects such as aluminium ladders to suggest the towering strength of the Corporacy or wet rubber tubing as slippery eels. The occasional splattering of the front row is amusing for those of us not sitting there (and for the actors too, one suspects). But there's a lot of story to squeeze in and some moments inevitably feel compacted. The portrayal of quite complex arguments as a boxing match in the Corporacy headquarters in the second half works less well and left us confused as to the sort of audience participation we were being asked for. And while Complicite's style is very much one of narration, I occasionally felt there could have been a little less of it and a little more dialogue and direct interaction between the characters.

As with many of Complicite's productions, this show has had a long gestation, being over three years in the devising, so the sense of a rushed ending is not likely to be through lack of consideration but because of the need for simplification. If I'd lived and loved the Lionboy trilogy as a child, I might not be entirely happy with what was left out in this adaptation. As a piece of theatre, however, this was every bit as engaging and inventive as I'd hoped.

PS The programme is lovely too!

We saw Lionboy courtesy of those lovely folk at the Bristol Old Vic, it continues its run at the Liverpool Everyman and Playhouse, Oxford Playhouse, Wales Millenium Centre and Warwick Arts Centre - check Complicite's website for dates.

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith

Rereading I Capture the Castle means treading very carefully, because I'm treading on my dreams. When I first read this book in my teens, I longed to step into the shoes of its clever heroine, living in the ruins of a castle with a handsome young swain hopelessly in love with me. My heart was beating to the rhythm of the prose, but could my devotion survive the passing of the years?

I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith (she of 101 Dalmatians fame) is set in 1930s rural Suffolk where seventeen-year-old Cassandra Mortmain and her family are living in genteel yet fascinating poverty. Her father is a famous author who once wrote a very good book but has since been unable to pen another, her stepmother is an artist's model who enjoys communing with nature and her sister Rose is beautiful but bored. Then there's live-in hunk Stephen, who is devoted to Cassandra and keeps dropping lines of poetry into her hands.

The family is surviving by selling their furniture, but everything changes as the local manor house Scoatney Hall is inherited by Simon, a dashing young American who takes up residence, along with his brother Neil. Life is definitely about to get more interesting for the Mortmains...

The novel is written in the form of Cassandra's journal and her voice is as clear and engaging as I'd remembered. Half-child half-woman, she is a narrator who instantly takes you into her confidence, appealingly honest, funny and perceptive about herself and those around her. Her life's ambition is to be a writer and she practices by 'capturing' her characters with vivid and unsparing descriptions. As the story unfolds, it appears the family's poverty can only be alleviated by Rose making a good marriage, unless their father can be coaxed into writing again.

This is a wildly romantic tale and I suppose I was never going to recapture the youthful imagination with which I first read it. One or two things did jar; I began to think the Mortmain family's poverty could not be quite as decorative as it appeared; they were usually hungry and cold and there's nothing much less decorative than that. I was cross that the only way out of their poverty seemed to be through a good marriage - this is the 1930s I know, but weren't Rose and Cassandra capable of doing anything more practical? And I questioned that they seemed to exist in isolation of world events - hadn't Mr Mortmain been caught up in the First World War at all? Wasn't there at least the odd wisp of a storm cloud to foretell the advent of the Second?

But then I'm applying too much realism to a story set in the 1930s and written in 1949, in the aftermath of World War II when escapism was just what was needed. A rather well-written, superior form of escapism is just what is provided by I Capture the Castle, a book you don't so much read as live within.I still enjoyed it second time around - not quite as unequivocally as the first, but the fabric of my dreams is very much intact.

Have you read I Capture the Castle? What did you think of it?


(pictures from film courtesy of inkcrush.blogspot.co.uk)

Four Letters of Love by Niall Williams (and a touch of Bridget Jones)

There's no doubt that certain books resonate with particular times of your life. Think about travelling in North America accompanied by beaten up copies of Steinbeck and Kerouac, or devouring I Capture the Castle as a romantic and wistful teenager.

But others are as mismatched as dry fingers on a fret board, with every sentence grating so much you feel a violent impulse to expunge this book from your life. At least, that's how I reacted to reading Bridget Jones's Diary just after I'd had my first baby - there was Bridget spending hours deciding which pants to wear, obsessing over whether she'd gained a pound or two and flirting with that cad Daniel Cleaver, while I was leaking breast milk and trying unsuccessfully to insert cabbage leaves down my bra. Given half a chance, I would've battered singleton Bridget with her diary.

Yet at another time, I would probably have enjoyed the book as much as I did the film a few years later. Wrong book, wrong time. And that's how I felt when reading Niall Williams' Four Letters of Love for our book club recently.

Williams was born in Dublin but now lives in the west of Ireland, and Four Letters of Love, written in 1997, was his first book. It's the story of Nicholas and Isabel who are, so we're told, made for each other, if ever they are able to meet. So far so good, we begin with Nicholas whose father has been told by God that he should give up his civil servant's career to become a painter, while his mother's reaction to this news is to take to her bed; something she does with increasing frequency as the households assets drain away. Nicholas' story is told in the first person, Isabel's meanwhile is told in the third. I had the sneaky suspicion this might be to distinguish their otherwise similar voices.

Isabel goes to school on the mainland of Ireland, but her home is a rain-lashed island off the coast. Returning to Galway after Christmas in her final school year, apparently she doesn't know she's about to fall in love. This doesn't seem unreasonable, problem is, it's not her soul mate Nicholas that she's about to fall for but the much more prosaic Peader, owner of Galway's least successful haberdashery.

There's certainly some beautiful writing but this wasn't really the book for me. Lots of tortured souls mooning around, accepting their fate and enduring the chronic misery of their lives without doing anything much to help themselves. Mixed up in all this is the conundrum of whether Nicholas and Isabel are ever going to get together, as well as those letters, which I eventually stopped caring about.

Four Letters of Love is poetically written in the Irish tradition and there are some lovely, rambling phrases:

the clouds sat down, the light left the day, and the pastoral greenness of all the stone-walled fields surrendered to a grey and desolate emptiness. For miles it was raining. At the edges of the sky you could see the fraying of clouds and the water spilling, like so many downstrokes of a sable brush'.

But some of it made me cross:

Wives create their husbands. They begin with that rough raw material, that blundering, well-meaning and handsome youthfulness they have fallen in love with, and then commence the forty years of unstinting labour it takes to make the man with whom they can live.

This novel has had some great reviews, so very likely it's just me, but I couldn't feel my way into getting swept along by it.