Return of the "Mogadon bender"

Too Close to the Sun

Comedy Theatre

* (One star)

According to the press materials, Too Close to the Sun is a “dramatic new musical... account of what might have been Ernest Hemingway’s last challenge”. I think the phrase “what might have been” will very soon come to haunt this doomed enterprise.

Flicking through the programme, trying to fight off waves of giggles and pervasive boredom during the first act of this evening’s preview, I struggled to find the name of which misguided producer had financed this disaster of a show. I finally set eyes upon the name “GBM Productions”, which, according to their website (for they didn’t have a biography in the brochure) exists only to produce the work of the composer, John Robinson.

John Robinson and GBM’s previous foray into the West End was as composer and producer of The Man Behind the Iron Mask which, when it opened at the Duchess Theatre in 2005, was greeted by The Guardian newspaper with a one-star review concluding with the words: “the sheer ineptitude of the evening bears all the hallmarks of the West End equivalent of vanity publishing. In this case it is not just a vanity project but a calamity project”. Charles Spencer of the Telegraph spared no punches: he proclaimed “It's so bad that it is merely unendurable… relentlessly, agonisingly third-rate” with a cast that "perform as if they have been on a prolonged Mogadon bender".

[Image: Man Behind the Iron Mask, from Guardian Unlimited]

Keeping his head down after the Dumas fracas, Robinson seems to have spent the last four years preparing this next show, a musical retelling the days running up to the suicide of the Nobel and Pulitzer Prize winning American writer, Ernest Hemingway. With Press Night a week away, I hope GBM and Robinson are prepared for another onslaught. This evening, my friend and I imagined it might have been a lot less painful all around had Hemingway turned the gun on himself (or us) during the overture and saved a lot of bother all round.

For what it’s worth, Too Close to the Sun is a fictional account by Ron Read with lyrics by Roberto Trippini and Robinson himself. It is laid on thick that Hemingway is an aging lothario whose ill-health and vices including liquor and hunting with guns (cue Act II) are only kept at bay by his stern fourth wife Mary, played by Helen Dallimore (better known to West End audiences as a squeaky Glinda the Good). I say laid on thick, as the aging is emphasised in an excruciating opening number Think Good Thoughts sung monotonously by West End veteran James Graeme as Hemingway, whilst straining to act a keep-fit regime and contemplating the transparency of his own urine [sic].

His aging, infidelities and fondness for hunting are then together underlined in an incomprehensible and unintentionally hilarious perfunctory scene in which a wittering Hemingway dismantles and reassembles a shotgun (did I mention what happens at the end?) whilst blindfolded and soliloquizing about where and when in the past something or other had happened as if to indicate a struggle with dementia and depression. Bizarre.

But what an exciting life we are meant to think Hemingway has had, soaring, Icarus-like Too Close to the Sun. What a shame that the pre-interval title number, performed by our leading man straining on his knees and clutching an as yet unconsumed bottle of whisky, is as unmemorable and lacklustre as most of the music which preceded it.

Also living in the transparent, wooden-framed, trophy-clad, revolving ranch is Louella, introduced with a secret smooch and her song The Sentimental Small-Towner That I Am. She is an underemployed assistant, played by American actress Tammy Joelle, whose sirenian presence is barely tolerated by Ernest’s wife. And just to mix things up a bit, an old school friend and all-round rake Rex is invited to stay and is seeking the rights to produce a film of Hemingway’s life – tonight he was played by red-faced understudy Christopher Howell. It turns out that Rex has had his way with both Louella and Mary (the latter, reminiscing in a Spanish themed number Havana which for me rather evoked the Lambada), though his real purpose, I guess, is to provide some gobbet of plot in this otherwise dreary set-up. He also provided some colour, though his musical numbers, including I like to be liked and Hollywood! Hollywood! are incongruous.

I’d love to tell you how it all pans out… but after seventy minutes of this tripe I couldn’t take any more and snuck out at the interval. I guess from the programme that Forgive Me, Wife. You’ll Understand is the moment of Ernest’s extinction, given that it is followed by the remaining characters’ The Regret and I Did My Best.

The press release concludes “in this suggested account of events leading to Hemmingway's death, can there be any winners?”. Unless there’s a miracle before the Press opening, this may yet prove a shorter run than The Man Behind The Iron Mask, which closed after just eighteen days (?22 performances). Ticket prices are up to £52.50. Don’t do it.

"Showbusiness - the best possible therapy for remorse” (Anita Loos)

Blink! And You Missed It
Above the Stag Theatre

**

In the year since its conception as a dedicated fringe space for gay theatre, Above the Stag has hosted a number of fine productions. Plays such as Pride, The Choir and Minor Gods have largely lived up to their ambitious production values and provided moving and thought-provoking performances.

Discounting last week's horrendous and amateur Gay School Musical, (as if High School Musical wasn't gay enough already), which was thankfully only a filler for a few nights, Blink! is The Stag's first attempt at an in-house musical. It is a collaboration with Tim McArthur (better known of Trilby Productions and the inimitable drag nun [sic] Sister Mary).

The conceit of Blink! is to present a revue of musical numbers from shows which were flops when originally presented. A worthy aim, of course, if somewhat broadly defined, with little internal consistency. Some of the offerings such as Silence! (the Hannibal Lecter musical) never made it beyond fringe productions off-off-Broadway. Others, such as Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and Bombay Dreams are labeled flops for this show because although they were successful in London, they were not warmly received on the other side of the Pond. Some, we are told, had disastrous openings (Anyone Can Whistle had only nine performances before its opening run closed) and others were initially greeted skeptically only to return successfully in the years to come (La Cage Aux Folles). And there’s also the inevitable quandary between shows which were successful with the critics and awards and yet closed prematurely (SideShow – a musical about Siamese twins – was met by critical acclaim and four Tony nominations and yet ran for only 91 shows, a similar fate being suffered recently in London by Drowsy Chaperone). I suppose there’s no real problem with this confused definition of a flop… except that under the heading Blink! And You Missed It, it feels a little uneasy to be presented with some numbers that have by no means been 'missed' such as I Am What I Am, from La Cage.

On Press Night earlier this week, the slightly grimy bar was unusually teeming – a good sign. Ascending to the above-pub studio space, the first thing to greet the audience member is a eclectic collection of flyers of the flop musicals were about to see extracts from. The remainder of the set comprises an upright piano, played competently (if not faultlessly) by Debbie Morris, with a backdrop of cardboard golden stars, giving a hint of the Broadway glamour to which the shows had aspired to but invariably failed to achieve. It is a shame that the designer was persuaded also to display yellow print outs of various flop show titles – these, alas, gave more the impression of a primary school teacher excited by a new laminator, than a star studded revue. The cast of five, was largely handsomely clad in plain costumes, with occasional touches of glamour and flair added including pink feather boas for the La Cage scenes, and, hilariously, two girls were tied together with a giant golden bow for the scene from Side Show.

In terms of musical execution, a grand shout-out must go to the girls: Julia Addison, performed a tenacious Everybody’s Girl; Elena Rossi and Nikki Gerard also provided professionalism and colour to their numbers and were a joy to watch. Tim McArthur is credited with devising and directing the show and also proved a competent, if unpolished, hoofer. Invidious as it may seem to single out a dud, Alexander Bradford’s contribution lacked confidence, rhythm and, for many of his numbers, adequate vocal range.

The whole show was narrated light heartedly with a book of facts and figures about the shows being performed, exactly in the manner of Side By Side By Sondheim, the very similar and well established review comprising Sondheim’s own hits and flops. Unfortunately on Wednesday, the cast stumbled throughout in the delivery of these nuggets of information and after initial amusement I was left wishing they had instead decided instead to narrate from a printed script.

A final niggle surrounds a slightly incongruous medley of “actor-muso” pieces (including Sweeney Todd, Company, and Sunset Boulevard). Why does this niggle? Firstly, whether any of these count as flops, I doubt, Sweeney marked the first West End transfer for 10 years of a Sondheim show then ran for over year on Broadway and won two of its six Tony nominations, Company ran for eight months and won the Tony for best revival, and Sunset, which attracted a host of awards first time round, recently ran for eight months in its reduced form. Secondly, the entire gag is swiped wholesale from a previous incarnation of Forbidden Broadway, which is currently providing a slicker (if somewhat more expensive) night out at the Menier Chocolate Factory fringe theatre in Southwark.

Back at the stag, two unfortunate heckles were enjoyed by the audience, if not the cast: singing I Am What I Am draped in five feather boas from his co-performers, Tim McArthur’s opening lines were interrupted by a wisecracking interjection “what are you then, a chicken?!”; in the closing moments, when audience members were invited to suggest other musical flops, another smartarse’s interjection that “Blink!” might be included was met by genuine perplexity before the penny dropped.

Overall I was left with the feeling that I’d had a pleasant evening of largely satisfactory performances of some interesting forgotten gems. I regretted that the show wasn’t as slick as some of the Stag’s recent work, and wondered if they’d be better off attempting to stage an entire show… Silence! or SideShow are surely begging for a London try-out and have the scope for cult appeal.

Whatsonstage gave the show ***** - I wonder if they accidentally wandered into Wicked by mistake.

“Raze out the written troubles of the brain” Macbeth 5,3

[First published in the Royal College of Psychiatrists London Division Newsletter, June 2009
http://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/pdf/royal%20col%20of%20psy%20iss9%20final.pdf ]

Who needs patients, when there’s a wealth of educational psychopathology being performed in the West End?

It won’t have escaped the attention of psychiatrists in the capital with an interest in performing arts that the National Theatre’s autumn season last year had at its core a revival of Sophicles’ Oedipus Rex. Jonathan Kent directed a new translation by Frank McGuinness with Ralph Feinnes as the king, fumbling blindly in search for the truth of his origins. As the stage revolve in the Olivier rotated imperceptibly a palpable tension was created among the audience as we waited for the tragedy to reach its inevitable conclusion.

Later in the season Every Good Boy Deserves Favour (by Tom Stoppard and André Previn), also on the Olivier Stage, demonstrated the dilemma for a psychiatrist between determining what is a thought content abnormality (the delusional belief that one is an orchestral conductor) and what is a thought crime (“Your opinions are your symptoms... your disease is dissent”). At the Almeida in Islington, Juliet Stevenson will be playing a successful musician in consultation with her psychiatrist, played by Henry Goodman, in a revival Duet for One, by Tom Kempinski this spring.

However, even theatregoers who don’t choose to seek out such apparently relevant productions may find themselves nevertheless confronted with compelling psychodrama. From December, also at the National, the Chicago based Steppenwolf Company presented August: Osage County, trailing awards and plaudits from its continuing Broadway run. Tracy Letts’ August is an exhausting and hilarious three-hour black comedy in which the audience is invited to observe a Midwestern family reunite in the aftermath of the disappearance of their father. Here, vile, tragic, Violet Weston, a drug addled matriach, decides over a funeral supper that it is “just time we had some truths told ‘round here’s all” and in so doing repels all around her and invites them to “stick that knife of judgement in me, go ahead, but make no mistake… When nothing is left, when everything is gone and disappeared, I’ll be here. Who’s stronger now, you son-of-a-bitch?!”.

Even avoiding straight theatre, for a psychiatrist, won’t guarantee escape from Axis I and Axis II disorders. At the Royal Opera in the Autumn, Strauss’ Elektra left audiences stunned at Klytaemnestra’s blood curdling cackles, hearing that her son is dead and can no longer assist his sister in seeking revenge for the murder of her beloved father. In the spring, in Korngold’s Die Tote Stadt, we see a young man haunted in grief for his late wife Maria. Elsewhere, at the Hackney Empire, the English Touring Opera are in rehearsals for Janacek’s, Kat’a Kabanova, with sexuality, shame and suicide set to a stormy score.

Among recently opened musicals, Spring Awakening at the Hammersmith Lyric, is a show which adds rock music inner monologues to illustrate Frank Wedekind’s once banned play about teenage sexual urges in an oppressive and uninformative upbringing. Sunset Boulevard, Andrew Lloyd Webber’s stage musical adaptation of the classic movie, might be said to depict a woman with many Cluster B traits and, tipped soon to transfer from Broadway, is a highly lauded revival of Gypsy, in which a Mama Rose disastrously projects all her own aspirations into her daughters.

So I have given a list of examples of plays, operas and musicals that might form an eclectic cultural agenda for a London psychiatric trainee this year, but how might these be perceived as a syllabus or source of clinical inspiration? Perhaps as a series of case studies, and of, admittedly fictional, recreations of more complex dynamics and systems than doctors usually see in a consulting room or A&E cubicle.

In his book Scenes of Madness, Professor Derek Russell Davis concludes that through theatre, there is much we can discover about psychiatric illness and practice, notably that plays offer the playgoer, as an observer, the chance to put behaviour “into a context of events, circumstances and their connections”. We also learn that “intervention from outside by a mediator” especially one with subjective, intuitive, understanding can help the characters gain resolution. This intuitive understanding is gained, “when the playgoer sees the meaning in the behaviour through empathy with the person afflicted”.

In the theatre we’re also free to express and explore counter-transference, whether as a gasp, cry, tut or tsk, or to laugh in a way which would have the PALS office pursuing us were we do to so in the workplace. There’s also the added insight into the intrapsychic world of stage characters in the form of soliloquies, arias and solos, which might allow us to speculate similarly as to the conscious and unconscious motivations of our own patients.

I’m not sure MRCPsych examiners will be posing questions on Hamlet (Donmar West End, Wyndhams, from June), King Lear (Young Vic, Feb – Mar), or Blanche DuBois (Streetcar Named Desire, Donmar Warehouse, from July) but I’ll be in the audience hoping for both entertainment and insight for my own practice.

Non, elle ne regrette rien

Piaf:
In Jamie Lloyd’s revival of this thirty-year-old play, scenes from Piaf’s humble beginnings, decadent career and subsequent decay fly by. The formidable supporting cast (notably Kingsley (Dietrich / assistant)) mostly play several characters and for a while it all seems somewhat of a blur. But perhaps this is how it was for Piaf herself as her career descended into drug use and tantrums. The clarity comes in the exquisite musical numbers by Roger, who seems to channel Piaf and adds her own emotional performance that is heartbreaking even if the French lyrics are not all understood. The Donmar design is sparce with trademark brick wall, but Austen’s lighting creates an absorbing illusion from street to cabaret and to boxing-ring. The play is imperfect and at times the direction and double-casting make it hard to follow what’s going on, but the performance and overall effect are enthralling and devastating.

The Time Warp

In times of uncertainty nostalgia can be especially comforting. As summer approached, theatre producers in the West End must have felt they were facing particularly uncertain times. One after another new shows including “Dickens Unplugged” and “Gone With The Wind” (unsurprisingly) were posting closing notices; “Marguerite” was met with luke-warm critical response and looks unlikely to fulfil its initial six month run, let alone the hoped for six month extension. Longer running shows were faring no better with “Spamalot” and “Lord of the Rings” announcing their curtain-down dates with rumours abound that the reality-show-cast “Sound of Music”, “Joseph” and “Grease” are soon to follow. Only “Wicked” is said to be consistently turning in a profit.

So what better way to revive audiences than to dust off a revival or two… or three. All over London bemused audiences were faced with a musical memory lane. It began with the English National Opera’s new interpretation of Bernstein’s Broadway operetta “Candide”.

Based on Voltaire’s story of Candide and his eventful travels from “West Failure” (as it is renamed in this stylish production led by the Canadian director Robert Carsen) to the New World, this production is a collaboration between the ENO and La Scala, Milan and Le Chatelet, Paris and places Candide’s road trip firmly in 1950s America.

Toby Spence is well cast as the naïf optimist, and Alex Jennings makes a superb and confident narrator Voltaire and syphilitic tutor Pangloss. It was a disappointment that charismatic Tony Award winner Kristin Chenoweth had pulled out of playing Cunegonde; she was replaced with a safe choice in Anna Christy whose “Glitter and be Gay” was satisfactory, if not sparkling. Beverly Klein was an irritatingly exaggerated and at times incomprehensible Old Woman.

The concept and design were the real stars. There were a couple of less successful moments: some disappointingly two dimensional carry-on vessels; a purloigned, albeit successful, “Auto-da-fe” scene with dancing Ku Klux Klan members (“Jerry Springer The Opera” anyone?); narrative confusion caused by the decision both to start and finish the journey in what I would describe as the ‘New World’; and an amusing, if slightly out of place, nod to contemporary politics with world leaders including Blair and Bush cast as the exiled kings, floating on an oil slick. Overall however, the simplicity of multiple grand photographic back-cloths and video projections helped to maintain the pace of an otherwise rambling and lengthy story. Last year the ENO attempted to revive “Kismet” with disastrous results, and they had a previous hit with Bernstein’s “On The Town”. What’s next from the musical theatre repertoire?

Across the road, Covent Garden used a similar, if less slick, 1950s States pastiche setting for their production of Stravinsky’s opera “The Rake’s Progress” which was written only a few years before Bernstein’s first version of “Candide”. Here Robert LePage was the creative force responsible for Tom Rakewell being drawn to glitzy Hollywood rather than the seedy world of 18th century London in the Hogarth images which inspired the piece. LePage’s eye for spectacle rewards in some beautiful images, particularly a car journey with scarf flapping, a swimming pool on the stage and the extraordinary inflation of a caravan and an effective asylum scene. Unfortuantely for those (hundreds) of us in the cheap seats, many of these effects were less impressive when viewed from above than they appear on the publicity photos taken from stalls level. The piece was conducted drearily by Thomas Ades and none of the singers struck a chord.

Even the Young Vic fancied a trip down musical theatre memory lane. Their offering was a production of Kurt Weil’s “Street Scene” for which he won the first Tony Award for Original Score. This was a theatrical disaster. A flabby and insubstantial domestic drama set in a New York neighbourhood, played in what seem like real time over the course of a few hours, in this tale I could see the roots of recent successes such as “Avenue Q” and “In the Heights”, however here any humour or warmth of character was lacking due to appalling direction and casting.

It is surely unforgivable, especially in a studio space such as the Old Vic, to cast singers completely incompetent at conveying any emotion in their acting. The performances and direction had a really amateur feel – at times laughable – and it was impossible to appreciate the score with the distraction of cast members, for no clear reason, rolling and drawing with chalk on the floor, and children skipping by. It has to be a bad sign that the most entertaining thing on stage was a cameo appearance by a pug dog. A concert performance would have been more successful. Thumbs down to The Opera Group.

Ian Marshall Fisher’s Lost Musicals series at the Lillian Baylis Studio sets out to revive forgotten pieces from the archive, so perhaps it is wrong of me to include it in this list of this summer’s skeletons. However a concert staging of Noel Coward’s dated 1961 cruise comedy “Sail Away” proved an amusing distraction. It starred sixty seven year old Broadway veteran Penny Fuller as the perky and charismatic ship’s entertainment mistress with Henry Luxemburg (most recently to Hollyoaks viewers) gurning his way nasally through the role of her unlikely younger suitor. Coward’s amusing patter songs include “the passenger’s always right”, performed with cheery pomposity by the ship’s purser in the first act, and reprised as “the customer’s always right” in a politically incorrect and sinisterly amusing manner by a Arabic street salesmen in act 2.

Sadler’s Wells also received the fiftieth anniversary production of Bernstein masterpiece “West Side Story” in July with the original Jerome Robbins choreography recreated. The virtuosic music and frantic choreography were as vibrant now as when captured on film in 1961.

However this stage production was not without it’s faults. The creaking scaffolding set which intermittently swung into the centre stage from the wings, was a little clumsy and the Maria on the night I saw it didn’t have a singing voice to match her Tony, or the verbal clarity to convey the humour of Sondheim’s words. “Officer Krupke” was as amusing as ever, but “Keep it Cool”, contemporary and trendy at the time, now dates the piece firmly in the late fifties.

And to finish off a summer of theatre which might have been confused for a weekend on the Great White Way in the early sixties, the Royal Festival Hall decided to attempt to redeem itself for recent Musical Theatre efforts with a long run of the “Wizard of Oz” directed by the South Bank Centre (and London 2012) Artistic Director Jude Kelly. The last time I visited the RFH for a musical it was for a semi staged, semi rehearsed and hardly enjoyed performance of Sweeney Todd. I didn’t make it to “Carmen Jones” in 2007. But at least this “Oz” promised to be fully staged and had a fairly respectable cast. And isn’t this is a show that’s impossible not to love? After all, it’s spin off musical “Wicked” continues to be a worldwide smash hit.

Well. When presented with a stage version of the musical, you’re confronted immediately with the sparcity of music. Sure, there’s “Ding Dong…”, “We’re off to see the Wizard”… “If I only had a…” and the “Yellow Brick Road”, but actually there isn’t much else. It was a shame therefore that the “Jitterbug” song (cut from the film) was suggested briefly but then not followed through. The second act narrative, in the stage version, is a bit patchy and scenes fly by at the speed of a whirlwind.

The design for Kansas comprised sepia projections of farm scenes amid a substantial framework of ephemera. The budget for Oz however seemed to have been spent on the same faux naïve artistry as the Olympic 2012 logo. An overhead projection of a biro squiggle passed for a tornado – hugely disappointing – and at times, such as when Dorothy exclaims wonder at the Emerald City (another projected doodle), risible. The cast, clad in costumes deliberately swiped from the MGM movie, were confident and competent. Adam Cooper skips along as the Tin Man, and Gary Wilmot makes a jolly Cowardly Lion. Sian Brooke, I think, isn’t really a musical theatre performer, however she isn’t required to do much here other than recreate Judy Garland in a manner I’ve seen done in Soho by drag queens far less talented a dozen times. The ensemble of children as munchkins and acrobatic extras were enthusiastic and provided much needed bulk to an otherwise insubstantial production.

There was, however, a real star on stage: Toto – a genuine terrier who appeared whenever the other stage activity wasn’t going to be too scary for him and conspicuously carried off, often by Dorothy, and occasionally mid-sentence, when any of the frankly modest special effects were anticipated. The second of this summer’s shows to be cast with live animals and children.

Later this year we’ll have “Carousel” (1946) at the Savoy and the threat of a London transfer for the Chichester “Music Man” (1962). A recent trip to Edinburgh demonstrated that new musicals are being written (Broadway has had a fair share this year alongside a smattering of classics). Lets hope some of them reach the West End.

A plague of opinion (T&C III,iii)

There's a DIY bug in the water this week. Not content with stage dressing, designers seem set upon also refashioning entire auditoria.

Earlier in the year we saw the bland mish mash of pseudo southern bricabrac sprawling from the stage past the sleeping spectators in the New London for "Gone With The Wind", just as Christopher Oram's courtroom extended around the Donmar circle for "Parade".

Now, at the Barbican Theatre the entire front of house is abandoned and tiered seating placed on either side of a performance space for Cheek by Jowl's "Troilus and Cressida". In terms of the usual layout this traverse is created upon a newly constructed thrust stage poking out of the proscenium arch, the seats in the circles and balcony can be seen dimly abandoned, and audience members are given the unusual opportunity to peer up through machinery into the fly tower. What set there was consisted only of rolls of cloth sloping at one end as if to suggest the Greeks' tents, rolling under foot and rising vertically at the other end as the walls of Troy.

Meanwhile across town in a famously versatile venue, The Young Vic, audience members who choose to see "The Good Soul of Szechwan" are directed around a warren of corridors before entering the auditorium and then find themselves entering the theatre across the stage, upon which anonymous Chinese workers are labouring. Again here, the usual seating is dispensed with in favour of bare plywood flooring and walls and plastic bucket seating, surrounded by authentic street paraphernalia. Pounding, repetitive sounds and mechanised movements invoke in the audience a heaviness and claustrophobia before any of the adapted Brechtian parable is presented.

It did make me wonder why these companies bothered using the Barbican or the Young Vic. Why not go the whole hog and chose another space - the "Mask of the Red Death" has recently done so at BAC, and Shunt Vaults is often host to site-specific work.

But what of the productions themselves?

"Troilus and Cressida" was a joy. A lengthy Shakespearean stab at a tale peripheral to the Trojan War, I was unfamiliar with the central characters, their foibles and their sorrows. Here they were played by Alex Waldmann, as a youthful, puckish Troilus, irritatingly darting around the stage in adolescent lust, and Lucy Briggs Owen, in a fairly forgettable performance. It was impossible to believe there was any shared ancestry between Troilus and his lythe warrior brother Hector.

Pandarus panders to the children's amours, pimping his neice to the Trojan prince. Here David Collings is dandyish and loveable, which belies the underlying stagnancy of his lecherous nature, and when this darker persona is revealed in his final speech ("bone-ache" and "disease") it comes as rather a surprise.

Meanwhile the modern take in this production is the leather clad queeniness of Achilles, coupled with the brummie-spouting bitterness of his slave in a dragged-up Thersites (David Caves), narrating and entertaining the assembled Greek troops caustically as a cabaret act in a provincial gay club, inspiring through wine and song, mortal enemies to embrace before battle.

The central characters of the War itself, are Helen and Paris, whose relationship launched the Greek ships in the first place. Here Director Declan Donnellan and Designer Nick Omerod remind us of this fact with the repeated appearance of Helen (Marianne Oldham), ravishing the audience and on-stage paparazzi alike in her full length ballgown. Her Paris (Oliver Coleman), alas, can't act, and is given a wig so laughable that it might belong to a mannequin. However, his preening coupled with her beauty give the glamourous air of a footballer and his WAG.

Coincidentally, as Menelaus Coleman was more bearable. Of the other characters Ulysees (Ryan Kiggell) deserves mention for his demonstration of calm and reserve throughout except for his deliberately disturbing depiction of a dog begging for a kiss from Cressida.

Over in the Young Vic, a youthful cast, most of whom I hadn't seen before, provided the backdrop to Jane Horrocks' fascinatingly split Good Soul, struggling with the weight of the Gods' expectations.

She has an understandably difficult choice between loving and rejecting the handsome yet seedy Yang Sun (John Marquez) whilst being pursued by Wang, played by Aian Gillan.

I found Gillan to be appalling, irritating, childlike and at times occasionally parodying a Chinese accent to an almost racist extreme. His histrionic performance stood out among other entertainingly eccentric characters, as one I'd happily never see again.

The rub in this new translation by David Harrower, I read in the programme later, was that Brecht's play as previously performed relies upon his lead character entering the ethically dubious tobacco industry; this is a translation of one of his later, but previously unpublished, versions in which the industry is heroin and Yang Sun's decline is into addiction.

Presented in brief scenes, with caricatured protagonists and musical interludes, set in the surreal surroundings of a Chinese factory, this was a treat and a fascinating examination of a split soul.

When I'm next likely to see either of these plays, I'm not sure, but after two surprising presentations, I wonder if I'll be bored by more straight performances...

A common pursuit

After Sunday's yawn inducing rendering of amateurs with artistic aspirations ("The Common Pursuit"), I was delighted to discover that the Ashington colliers in Lee Hall's "Pitmen Painters" had a far more interesting story to tell.

These 1930s Geordie miners escape their daytime toils in a weekly nightclass. Having sampled psychology and failed to find an economist, they are lumbered with the RP spouting naif Robert Lyon who offers them classes in Art Appreciation and under his tutorship they begin to create their own paintings for the appraisal of the group.

The delight in this simple production, which was first seen at Newcastle's Live Theatre and has now transferred to the Cottesloe with the original cast, is the engaging ensemble performance combined with unobtrusively projected original images of the paintings created by the eponymous artists.

Any elaborate set is dispensed with in favour of half a dozen wooden chairs and three projection screens on which the images referred to in the plot are displayed. Intermittently we are also given brief phrases describing each enacted scene, in the same way that a title might be displayed alongside a painting in a gallery: "Oliver borrows books", "Rock Hall 1938" and "Newcastle Central Station".

In a lengthy first half we are introduced to the five men who each use their newfound joy of painting to depict their difficult working lives and modest surroundings. Among them Oliver Kilbourn is the most talented of the group and is offered the chance to move out of his working class roots to a life of patronage. His fear that aspiration might take him away from his fellows is heartbreakingly portrayed by Christopher Connel. In contrast Lyon, already believing himself to be of a greater class, although hilariously dismissed as "a middle-brow provincial realist", continues to aspire: he abandons his protégés for a post in Edinburgh, having documented their achievements in a professorial dissertation. 

For me the most moving scenes came just before the interval. FIrstly, the men contradict Lyons' assertion that their work proves that "anyone" - the implication being that even the working classes - can appreciate and create art. Secondly the men's genuine appreciation of the Masters they saw in London, I felt, was overwhelmingly sincere.

There were faults. In Act II a scene in which Lyon is seen sketching Kilbourn was beautifully done, but over-long. And a political rant at the end of the play by a die-hard Socialist about his hopes for the future under Labour and nationalisation was excessively preachy, ending the show with a hymn from the Durham Miners' Gala and a footnote about New Labour's abandonment of Clause IV in 1995. 

The show, in parts, reminded me of the more moving and political passages in Sondheim's "Sunday in the Park With George". That too was stronger in its first half, telling the true life tale of an artist struggling to express himself. It too has a strong political point in its second act and in the recent London revival (now on Broadway) makes effective (albeit rather more complicated) use of projection. 

It is impossible not to draw comparison too with Hall's more previous work "Billy Elliot", either the film or the musical play. As "Pitmen" ends, nationalisation is seen as a post war panacea; "Billy" begins as that aspirational project is dismantled and, tragically for the Northern working class community depicted, in fifty years, the same prejudices are found. In the 1930s the painters might use art to improve their lot, and in the 1980s version it is a young ballerino pirouetting against the grain.

There is talk of a West End transfer. Here's to a film too.