Anima- Tmesis

Theatre has, since its earliest incarnation, been based on a compact: the audience will give their time, money and attention to the performer, and they will receive something in return: a narrative, an insight or an emotion. This reciprocity across the footlights is what creates the magic of live theatre. When it is ignored, it leaves an audience with the almost irresistible urge to stand up and walk out, shout abuse, or start talking amongst themselves. Of course the theatregoers of Bristol, being English, did no such thing. But didn’t we mutter afterwards (once we had given Tmesis a thoroughly undeserved round of applause).
It would be ridiculous to declare that watching Anima was like being raped, but at the core of such luvvyish hyperbole does lie a kernel of truth. For an hour, the audience is expected to take what the performers choose to give it, with no interest or concern for their needs, wants or pleasures. That is not to say that an audience need a strict narrative flow that they can follow: but what they do deserve is something more than two people rambling around a stage incomprehensibly, wrapped up in their own enjoyment like a couple of three-year-olds who have forced their parents to sit down to watch their ‘show’. The David Glass Ensemble were masters of dark and incomprehensible physical theatre, yet their shows - like Hansel Gretel Machine - still oozed beauty and poignancy that could move an audience to tears. Tmesis offer neither engrossing, enriching or elucidating theatre nor the physical fluidity and skill that would at least lift the performance into the more purely aesthetic realm of modern dance. If the intent is to provoke the audience into thinking, agitprop style, about the relationship that should exist between onlooker and performer, then this show is a great success. But I suspect that that is simply an unfortunate by-product and that Anima is shallow, overlong, inaccessible and ultimately chronically self-indulgent.

Suspension - Bristol Old Vic

If Suspension were a food product, it would be under investigation by Environmental Health. What appears to be a light fluffy confection - perfectly edible, but certainly not Tesco Finest - conceals within it a splinter of glass which leaves an unsuspecting consumer ripped and bleeding. Catherine Johnston’s play about two fathers who, through a bizarre confluence of circumstances, end up handcuffed together on top of the Clifton Suspension Bridge is light and funny in a fairly conventional way - and then it suddenly isn’t.

Suspension is not a particularly subtle piece. It is unsubtle in a lot of its comedy, unsubtle in the build to its (highly effective and unrevealable) twist, and unsubtle in the copious dollops of local colour that saturate the play. Not content with setting the story on the city's iconic landmark, Johnson lards the dialogue with Bristol references and speech mannerisms to the point where, at times, even the most chauvinistic Bristolian cries “Enough”. As an aside, this was the one critique that one could also make of Up the Feeder Down the Mouth Again, another celebration of the city which was also directed by Suspension’s director Heather Williams.

Yet this is a very pleasantly constructed piece which is performed with style and confidence. The core performance comes from James Lailey as Gerry, the estranged father desperately trying to reach his daughter on her wedding day. He combines a pitch-perfect Bristolian with a highly refined comic timing. Some of the other performances lack a certain amount of finesse, but since Suspension is not the most understated of plays anyway, this is less of a problem. What is more grating, however, is the fact that some of the cast struggle with the local accent (odd, since they are virtually all either Bristol born and bred or long-term residents of the city). If you’re going to do a play about Bristol in Bristol, you can be sure that audiences will notice if any of your characters sound like the Cadbury’s Caramel bunny. It might, in some cases, have been better to have acknowledged that Bristol has more than its fair share of blown-in residents and a diversity of accents across the city, and allowed the actors to speak in a way that came more naturally to them.

But this is a minor niggle, a counsel of perfection. Beyond itself, Suspension is a fine symbol of where the reborn Old Vic’s focus will hopefully lie: Bristol theatre for Bristolians, not high-class, high-budget productions which strip-mine local resources in order to please London critics and offer little or nothing to the local community. Let’s hope that we are returning to the Bristol Old Vic

Hamlet - Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory

Jamie Ballard plays a very happy Hamlet. A cackling, back-talking Hamlet, a cheeky teenager who strives to lift himself out of the writhing disempowerment of late adolescence with a quickfire wit and a rictus grin that flashes into place like a galvanised frog. At times, it is as if Rik Mayall is playing the Dane. There is certainly no sense that this is a sacred canonical text

The lighter interpretation brings out a lot of the hidden comedy in this bleak tale of murder, adultery, insanity and torment – all the things which (as they say in Chicago) we hold dear. This Elsinore has a lot of laughter in it, as Hamlet’s antic disposition totters manically on the edge of high jinks. It also makes Hamlet, who can sometimes be an irritating drippy and self-pitying creature, extremely likeable.

Occasionally, Ballard’s light touch does, however, detract from the thought processes that the monologues are supposed to lay bare. His choppy delivery slices the ‘to be or not to be’ speech into a tumble of fragmented soundbites, losing any sense of a developing thought process, a weighing up of the rather sexy, rather scary possibility of death and suicide. This Hamlet is quick-witted, but not as deep-thinking as he might be.

Jay Villiers’ Claudius, on the other hand, offers tremendous depth. He is no cardboard villain, a fratricidal robber baron who should be hissed on every entry. Instead, his love for Gertrude almost oozes from his pores: like Macbeth, this is a not a bad man but a man made bad by circumstance and some unfortunate choices. And that is, of course, the essence of tragedy.

The remaining cast give decent support: Roland Oliver’s Polonius hits the comic marks well, Francesca Ryan’s Gertrude is nicely tormented, and Annabel Scholey’s Ophelia is delightfully young and innocent. The weakest contribution is, ironically, that of Andrew Hilton, the founder, director and mastermind behind Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory. His Ghost is utterly unethereal, seems positively laid back about spending time in Purgatory, and wanders into Gertrude’s bedroom like a man returning from a midnight pee. It’s not often one can say this, but in this case it needs a little less Shakespeare and a bit more ScoobyDoo.

Overall, Jonathan Miller’s production is a stripped-down staging free of any directorial conceits or cleverness. It seeks merely to present the text as clearly as possible If there is a flaw in Miller’s approach it is that he is a little too faithful to the entirety of the text, with an almost unabridged staging running to over three and a half hours. Two hours – the length of the first half - is a long time to spend even in a comfortable armchair; on the less than luxurious seating in the Tobacco Factory, it becomes an exquisite agony for even the most devoted Shakespeare fan.

Dr Doolittle - Bristol Hippodrome (and tour)

It is all too often the case that when you have shelled out the substantial sum needed to take the family to one of the big commercial theatres – like the Bristol Hippodrome – it is depressingly clear that wherever your money has gone, it certainly hasn’t made its way to the stage. Happily that is not the case with Dr Doolittle – it is truly lavish, with solid-looking sets and, above all, a complete menagerie of highly believable animals. My daughters thought that the Doctor’s dog was actually a real Old English sheepdog, and not just a man in an exceptionally realistic dog suit. And there is a loving attention to detail in the combination of puppet and animatronic beasts: they are constantly in motion in a remarkably realistic manner.

This kaleidoscope of fauna makes a fine frame for the glowing stage presence of Tommy Steele, a showman to the tips of his Chelsea booted toes. He was the star of the very first West End show I ever saw – Hans Christian Andersen in 1974 – and looks remarkably well weathered 34 years later. Admittedly, he’s not as light on his feet nowadays (well he is 70), and the smile is so firmly fixed to his face that it’s hard to know whether it’s been surgically embedded or is merely the result of doing his famous gnasher flash for over fifty years. But he has charisma and presence in buckets, and seems to be loving every minute, which is always a good way of endearing yourself to the audience. Surrounding him are a strong cast with fine singing voices.

If the plot is a little thin, it is no worse than the average pantomime, and considerably more visually spectacular. This is a slick production which offers excellent value for money. And the push-me-pull-you is breathtaking!

Taming of the Shrew - Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory

The Taming of the Shrew is not one of Shakespeare’s most timeless plays. The device which bookends the main play of the nobleman who tricks and abuses the drunken tinker Christopher Sly may have been highly comical to Shakespearian audiences, but leaves a very unpleasant taste in the mouth in these more egalitarian times. Meanwhile the main play features far too many displays of an outdated humour: the joust of wit. Sitting around trumping one another with hilarious one-liners may well have been the height of social entertainment in the days before Dancing on Ice - but sadly it has not stood the test of time as well as the human universals such as Macbeth's anguish, Malvolio's vanity or Lear’s rage. And then there is the tricky question of the whole husband/wife thing that lies at the heart of the plot: not necessarily insurmountable, but certainly a challenge in the enlightened Noughties.
Added to the questionable nature of the play are the questionable decisions of this production. Both the main characters are strangely interpreted. Saskia Portway’s Kate is not shrewish: she is just grumpy, angry, sour-tempered - all the time. There is no subtlety or superiority to her - just bile. And in taming her, Leo Wringer’s Petruchio does not simply assume the mantle of the domestic tyrant: he acts like a frothing lunatic. In this production, Kate is not a headstrong young woman tamed by a forceful man into a partnership of ‘different but equals’ (the one interpretation which can make the play’s message palatable to a modern audience) - she is a sour-tempered bitch terrified into submission by a railing psychopath.
But being Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory, it is obviously not all bad. Chris Donnelly (Tranio) remains an outstanding and tremendously assured comic actor, although he has a serious rival for his crown in newcomer Oliver Millingham. Annabel Scholey offers a pleasantly multidimensional Bianca, and Roland Oliver’s Baptista is an imperturbable rock of Establishment granite, despite being dressed as a vol-au-vent.
I interviewed Andrew Hilton when he first launched Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory: he told me that the idea was that the project would run for several years, and then lie fallow for a while. He has not kept to that plan, and sadly it’s is starting to show. Although there are obviously major commercial pressures that militate against it, it is perhaps time for Andrew and his troupe to take some time out to recuperate and rediscover the energy that made the earlier productions so unique.