Some mopping up – Hot Tin/ Slaves of Solitude / Young Marx

For those kind folk (that should probably read as singular rather than plural) who have been interested enough to ask where Phil’s been, here lies the answer. Hip replacement don’t you know, beating Patti LuPone to the crutches by a matter of weeks. He feels Patti’s pain. And he’s just beginning to dip the toe on the end of his newly bionic leg back into the world of theatre that doesn’t come with a surgeon and anaesthetist.

A few days before the op he was treated (literally) to seeing a heavy-drinking man on crutches portrayed in the tedious, often inaudible Cat on a Hot Tin Roof which director Benedict Andrews (presumably inspired by the Ivo van Hove school of gimmickry) saw fit to set adrift on a minimal setting of soggy carpet. Phil decided not to write about it at the time as his ticket was a present and to criticise this version of Tennessee William’s play would have been like returning an unwanted gift to the shop in the most flamboyant of manners. Can you imagine if shows came with a receipt and you could get money back if not satisfied? We’d be quids in.

Opening, as it did, before the Hollywood scandals and subsequent debates one wonders how the gratuitous nudity might have been received in a Post Weinstein world. Phil would have had no particular problem with the flesh on display if Jack O’ Connell hadn’t been so heavily tattooed. When you’re playing a character called Brick, flaunting of a huge and particularly ugly “Jack the Lad” tatt is silly and distracting. Haven’t they heard of make up? For the record Sienna Miller sports some rather more discrete markings of her own. Would the current climate have questioned the nudity? Or was a tit for tat bargain struck like the transatlantic equity agreement? Is it more acceptable if we have equal nudity from both sexes?

Brick spends considerable time standing under a shower which appeared to empty directly into the carpet and despite being the member of a family worth 90 million dollars can’t afford an ice bucket. The ice for his many drinks is stored in a massive plastic bag on the floor (Brick is on crutches – Phil who was been on crutches for several weeks can tell you how daft keeping anything on the floor is when you’re incapacitated). Ice ended up all over the place. A birthday cake was broken up and ground into the carpet towards the end of the play. Phil felt no sympathy for any of the characters but he did feel for the stage hands who have to clear up the mess.

As Brick downed drink after drink he talks about waiting for the moment it takes effect: “the click”. Phil waited for the moment the play clicked too. After the best part of 3 hours he was still waiting.

 

 

Phil’s first post-operative theatre outing was to the infinitely clickier The Slaves of Solitude at the gloriously comfortable (especially as Phil was still on sticks) Hampstead Theatre. How wonderful to see a group of oldies bickering in a wartime guest house dining room (shades of Rattigan’s Separate Tables) especially since one of them sported a walking stick: Gwen Taylor playing a pair of sisters, fortunately not required on stage at the same time.

Patrick Hamilton’s “much-loved novel” was unknown to us but in this version by Nicholas Wright is rather opulently staged with a handful of sets from Tim Hately and generously cast with the likes of Lucy Cohu, Clive Francis (playing an elderly bigot  – Phil saw his Romeo many moons ago – eek) and the fabulous very much Whinger-approved Fenella Woolgar doing uncomfortable repressed restraint like no other. She’s a not-so-“dusty spinster” finding a seemingly unlikely and strange companionship with an African American serviceman, Lieutenant (don’t tell him) Pike (Daon Broni).

 

 

And so to Nicholas Hytner‘s twin babies, The Bridge Theatre and Richard Bean’s new shall-we-call-it -a- comedy, Young Marx. A first for the new theatre, a first night out without crutches.

The good news is it’s easy to get served in the foyer’s bar, which is spacious and attractive enough but doesn’t quite have that wow factor, the bad news is the queue to enter the auditorium suggests audience flow hasn’t been properly thought through. Our seats, about half way back on Gallery 1 were hard to locate as we couldn’t find the numbers on the ends of the rows, but they were nicely angled towards the stage though clanked slightly and seemed to move as one if anyone fidgeted in them. And although it’s a very good view we (3 of us including Andrew) agreed the stage seemed rather a long way away for some peculiar reason. And as our seats overlooked the stalls you could see the glow of phones as people checked them throughout the play (no announcements about phones of course – have theatres thrown in the towel?). And though great pains have apparently been taken with acoustics (according to the radio programme we listened to about the new theatre) we strained to catch some of the words.

Which didn’t really matter as it turns out, despite coming from the pen of Mr Bean (and Clive Coleman) One Man, 2 Guvs this is not. No wonder people were checking their phones.

This is Rory Kinnear as a youthful, impoverished and frankly annoying Karl Marx living in Soho with his wife (Nancy Carroll), too busy roister-doistering with his crony Friedrich Engels (Oliver Chris) to care about the practicalities of life like dealing with the bailiffs.

The audience seemed to be straining to laugh. We certainly were, we managed to squeeze just two chuckles out. But as the cast worked tirelessly to put their all into it it followed the law of diminishing returns with laughter became more sporadic. This was even lamer than Phil hobbling around on crutches. An interval departure was deemed essential and even the new theatre’s bar wasn’t quite seductive enough to lure us to lurk around in for our post (half) show drink.

 

 

And in further news Phil caught Follies for the second time at the weekend. It’s now slightly shorter than before and with a few noticeable differences, the most obvious is ditching the terrible idea of having Margie in “The God-Why-Don’t-You-Love-Me Blues” number played by a man in drag as it was when we saw it at a middleish preview. A very sensible move indeed.

And don’t get us started on the debacle of the Hamilton ticket shambles. We will come to that at a later date. We’re almost as cross about it as we are about Mr Spacey. Let’s just say Shamilton will need to be even better than extraordinarily good to win us over.