For the past twelve years the Bristol Old Vic Theatre School has given us a season of contemporary plays presented by the four graduating directors. This ‘Directors’ Cuts’ season has gained a justified reputation for offering diverse, challenging and original work, and has become a much-anticipated feature of Bristol’s theatrical calendar. Based at the Wardrobe Theatre for a second year, here are the plays in reverse order, most recent first . . .
TENDER NAPALM
Tender Napalm, written by the bewilderingly multi-talented Philip Ridley, depicts a man and a woman who constantly fabricate outrageous fantasies, often of an extremely explicit sexual nature. They lie in bed, and imagine they are in some exotic location looking out across a beach strewn with the detritus from a tsunami. ‘Have you seen the view?’ one of them will ask, and they are off into a world of outlandish make-believe. They trade florid similes and metaphors like boxers exchanging punches, each trying to outdo the other for wild invention. It’s an extraordinary pillow fight.
What drives their desire to escape into these bizarre imagined worlds, full of unicorns and sea monsters one moment, and garden shears and genitalia the next? Their intimacy tells us they love each other, yet the grotesque bloodiness of their story-telling speaks of something very different from mere affection. Eventually, there are glimpses of reality; a reality marked by tragedy. The significance of the oxymoronic title becomes clear; love and death are not so far apart – ‘liebestod’ as Wagner would have it.
Director Evan Lordan has devised a Tender Napalm where almost all the action takes place in or on a bed. In Caitlin Abbott’s very effective set design it is quite a spectacular bed, with a huge pile of pillows as extravagant as the stories the man and woman tell each other. This bed is their private island, a safe haven in which they can reveal the very darkest corners of their inner selves.
Pedro Leandro and Hannah Livingstone deliver extraordinarily brave performances that create an illusion of spontaneous, reckless abandon. Their dazzling verbal exchanges and uninhibited physicality are breath-taking.
Tender Napalm is the final play in this year’s season of Directors’ Cuts. The four productions have been impressive showcases for the very talented graduating directors from the BOVTS, and no less impressive has been the extremely high standard of acting. Bravo! ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton 23rd May 2018
KISS ME
A smartly dressed young woman lies on her bed, quietly reading. She gets up to look at herself in the mirror, clearly determined to look her best. A young man enters wears a sharp suit, and he speaks in the clipped tones that instantly mark him out as middle-class. But she is from the lower orders, and it is clear that they have met in order to have sex. Yet he is not seeking a little illicit pleasure, and she is most certainly not a prostitute. She is a childless war widow, and it is her hope that this one-off encounter will result in pregnancy. He intends to do his part in an impersonal, detached fashion, for he is not driven by lust, but by a sense of duty. They are both trying to follow a pre-ordained set of rules laid down by a certain Doctor Trollope; rules such as not revealing any personal details, not kissing, and not using their real names, but this proves impossible, not least because the woman, Stephanie, is a compulsive talker.
Kiss Me is very loosely based on a true story from the years after World War One. A Doctor Helena Wright realised that there were two million women left widowed or single, and that many of them would want to start a family. She helped them to achieve this, and so became responsible for the birth of an astonishing 492 children. Writer Richard Bean has freely riffed on the bare bones of this story, often to comic effect. Kiss Me is frequently laugh-out-loud funny, though it is by no means all froth.
Stephanie is a very modern woman; she has been a lorry driver during the war and she is no shrinking violet. However, despite her relative worldliness she finds this assignation quite scary, and she attempts to hide her nervousness with non-stop talk. Stephanie Booth is utterly captivating as her chattering namesake; touchingly vulnerable one moment, and startlingly robust and forthright the next.
Dennis is the privileged son of a sugar magnate. Running a sugar refinery was considered a vital contribution to the war effort, so he was prevented from joining up. He is seeking to assuage his nagging sense of guilt by helping Doctor Trollope in her baby-making plans, and so far he has succeeded no less than 711 times. George Readshaw conveys Dennis’s somewhat bizarre sense of reproductive duty with a commendable degree of conviction, and it is no fault of his that this character is ultimately rather implausible. Dennis indulges in Freudian musings on Eros and Thanatos, the life-force and death-force, and this presumably is intended to give weight to the idea that he is impregnating all these women out of some high-flown sense of moral responsibility, but it does not ring true. In contrast, proto-feminist Stephanie is entirely believable. Despite this imbalance, Kiss Me is a thoroughly enjoyable play, directed with panache by Katharine Farmer. There are some splendidly sparky exchanges between the two protagonists, especially when they are struggling to keep within the strict parameters laid down by Doctor Trollope.
In the later stages of the play both characters are harbouring a secret, and when these are revealed there are tragic consequences for Stephanie. I will long remember Stephanie Booth’s commanding performance as this modern-minded woman who, in the end, pays a very old-fashioned price for her modernity. This year’s Directors’ Cuts season is proving to be one of the very best. Get to see Kiss Me if you can. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton 16th May 2018
FOUR PLAY
This very modern comedy of manners and morals is about two couples with apparently very different lifestyles. Michael and Andrew have an open relationship – open but with very definite rules. They can have one-night stands, but only with strangers. They are, as it were, faithful in their fashion. In contrast Rafe and Pete are strictly monogamous and have been so throughout their seven-years together; or seven and a half years if one wishes to be as precise as the rather uptight Rafe would insist. They were virgins when they met, and they are painfully aware of their lack of worldly experience. They suspect that their relationship needs re-energising – ‘We have good sex… we think’ – and so they come to Michael with an extraordinary proposition. What follows is frequently very funny indeed, though there are substantially darker moments, too.
The four characters are clearly delineated, and each has his own secrets; this is a play that looks very closely at just what we mean by ‘openness’ and ‘honesty’. Cudjoe Asare is a physically impressive Michael, seemingly entirely relaxed in his casual hedonism, though we learn that there is more to him than meets the eye. His partner Andrew, played by James Schofield, seems equally at ease with their open arrangement. He is charming and good-humoured, but not as devil-may-care as he appears to be.
Of the other more staid and conventional couple, it is Pete who has decided that the time has come to try something rather daring. Outwardly prim and proper, when his inner demons are unleashed Pete is a sight to behold, and Max Dinnen portrays this transformation in a splendidly uninhibited fashion. His lover Rafe is perhaps the most inventively written character of the four. Marco Young neatly captures both his wistful romanticism and his near-obsessive anxieties. Wonderfully pedantic, Rafe is insistent that Asda should never be confused with Sainsbury’s… A delicious irony.
Liam Blain has directed Four Play with a sure touch. The pacing is spot-on, with much of the humour arising from well-placed pauses. In the latter stages there is a seamless transition to a more sombre mood, and the play ends on a poignant note. A great strength of Four Play is that it is not a drum-beating ‘gay issues’ drama; it is a play about four people with whom we can all identify, with all their desires, their failings, their humanity. How sad to reflect that in many parts of the world it would be banned. We should be grateful that we can enjoy it here. Catch it if you can. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton 8th May 2018
LEMONS, LEMONS, LEMONS, LEMONS, LEMONS
How would you communicate with your nearest and dearest if you were limited to 140 words per day? Would the things unsaid take on a new significance? Would the few words you were allowed to speak become overladen with extra weight? These are questions faced by Bernadette (Kate Reid) and Oliver (Alex Wilson) as they struggle to come to terms with the reality of living in a world where communication is severely rationed under a strict ‘hush law’. An aspiring songwriter, Oliver is politically active, acutely aware that democracy depends upon freedom of speech. Somewhat ominously, Bernadette is both less politically aware and a divorce lawyer, and she is determined to get to the bottom of Oliver’s previous relationship with a certain Julie. When he confesses that he recently met Julie again on a protest march and that they ‘threw a brick through a window’, what does that actually mean? How can Bernadette get to the truth when she so quickly runs out of words? Sam Steiner’s award-winning play is a dystopian comedy that cleverly unpicks the relationship between political power and the power of speech.
Director Caroline Lang has skillfully choreographed this two-hander, making effective use of the movement of two simple chairs to denote the changing levels of intimacy and trust in Oliver and Bernadette’s relationship. Emily Leonard’s equally spare lighting design is very effective in indicating the frequent shifts back and forth between the time before the introduction of the hush law and the period after. Alex Wilson and Kate Reid are entirely convincing as the couple faced with more than the usual difficulties associated with communication between young lovers. Given that this is a play about severely restricted language, it is perhaps ironic that Lemons is crammed with rapid-fire wordplay, handled brilliantly by both actors. They are a joy to watch.
Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons, Lemons (phew!) gets this year’s Directors’ Cuts season off to a splendid start. Catch it if you can. ★★★★☆ Mike Whitton 2nd May 2018
