Alternative Olivier Awards 2009! - a preview

I had the incomparable fortune to sit on the Olivier Awards panel in 2008, which made the whole year of theatre-going experience all the more special. Because they wouldn't take on the same people as lay panellists (which was what I was) in consecutive years, 2009 was a judging-duty-free year in the theatre. However, as I was astounded to have the total number of productions we'll have been to see by the year-end counted by my dutiful partner (sixty-one - including all plays and musicals; eighty-one if you include opera and dance), I thought that perhaps I was adequately qualified to put together an awards list after all. Alas this one will have to depend entirely on my personal taste (eclectic enough, I believe) and judgement (wise enough, I hope). Here we go:-

Best new play

When the Rain Stops Falling, Andrew Bovell
We've had a good year of Bovell plays in London: Toby Frow's new production of Speaking in Tongues shed new light on this earlier work, albeit with an uneven cast; and the European premiere of this stunning new piece, a characteristically multi-layered entangled plot spanning four generations and across two far-apart continents, was a resounding confirmation. Of how a dramatist at the height of his power can judge the narrative and psychological tensions with rare precision, distilling the word 'thriller' with a new, deeper meaning. Also, of the scale of accomplishment by Michael Attenborough in his Artistic Director role at Almeida, one of the independent powerhouses of London theatre. The ensemble cast boast no mega stars yet were uniformly outstanding. The night I was there, Keira Knightley and Rupert Friend were sitting a few rows behind us – now that we know they're both appearing in the West End, it would seem that they were wisely learning from the real pros. It was also one of the very few occasions this year that I was moved to uncontrollable sobs, at any arts event.

Honourable mention: Enron, Lucy Prebble (Royal Court Downstairs); Cock, Mike Bartlett (Royal Court Upstairs)
So much has been said about Enron, all I'd like to add is GO to see it in the West End, if you missed the Royal Court run. It will probably fit the bigger stage a bit better too. I was so pleased we booked for Cock very early on, as it became one of the highlights of the entire year, and because the bare, cock-pit set design (maximum seating: about 60) befit the text so perfectly, it'd be hard to imagine it being transferred to any West-End venue (or anywhere else, for that matter). Here's my 150-word review of it for the Olivier Award panel application:

Mike Barlett's provocatively titled, ninety-minute-long 'Cock', is a compelling piece of work. The series of tableaux portray an emotionally (and sexually – but that's the lesser concern here) confused young urbanite (John, the only named character) oscillating between his long-term male lover (M) and a loving, quietly tenacious female encounter (W), driving everyone involved – including the spectators – into sheer agony with his indecision along the way. If this equivocation sounds like the behaviour of a modern, metrosexual Hamlet, the denouement, a scene of 'the ultimate bitch fight' (as M puts it bitterly) with the threesome plus M's father around dinner table, evokes Ayckbourn at his best. Yet Bartlett shows great promise as an acute observer of contemporary conundrums of the heart, and demonstrates a distinctive style with his spit-fire dialogue in all the two-hander scenes, often delivering piercing poignancy and a great joke in one stroke. Ben Wishaw, as John, leads the superlative cast.


Best musical production
A Little Night Music, Menier Chocolate Factory
It was a shame that the subsequent WE transfer of this superbly elegant revival by Trevor Nunn wasn't much of a hit. Without a superstar billing it really struggled in competing with the likes of Jude Law in Hamlet and Helen Mirren in Phedre, both big summer audience draws. I didn't see it again (at Garrick), nor was I surprised to read about the mostly lukewarm reviews of Catherine Zeta-Jones's return to stage as Desiree in the Broadway transfer a few days ago. The original cast, on the living-room-sized MCF stage, conveyed much more emotional nuance than is usually expected from a musical, even one by Sondheim. The singing was exemplary, the simple design imbued with charm.


Best director
James MacDonald, for Judgement Day (Almeida) and Cock (Royal Court Upstairs)
We've had an exceptional year of London theatre, and yet these two stood out as the most perfect productions of the year for me. The fact that they came from the same director speaks volumes, and yet they couldn't have been more different in idiom and execution. The Horvath revival featured a hugely imaginative and effective use of the Almeida space with its design, which befits the 1930s play about moral responsibilities in its historic details, while also distilling it with a compelling, poetic modernity. Cock, on the other hand, would probably seem on paper like a real headache for many a less able director, with its writer specifying the lack of any set or props. Yet MacDonald achieves that most important task missed (or dismissed, in some cases?) by many directors – he makes us care about the characters, through their primal human behaviours and reactions. The rest is built by our imagination, easily.

Honourable mention: Rupert Goold, for Time and the Conways (Lyttleton, National) and Enron (Royal Court Downstairs)

Enron was the big theatrical event of the year in publicity terms (deservingly so, I hasten to add), but Goold's JB Priestley revival was a revelation of how powerful this 'time play'can still be. With its narrative structure, daringly ahead of its time, and the perpetually familiar setting of a dysfunctional family, the work also features themes of class, mortality, the impact of war, the power of money and the futility of kindness. Phew, quite a heavy-going recipe, you say. Yet above all, what Goold gives us is a poignantly human story, and to me the opinion-splitting multi-media choreography sequences lift the text to a powerfully charged emotional height.

Best actor
Kevin Spacey, Inherit the Wind (Old Vic)
Most pundits have hailed Mark Rylance's turn in Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem as the performance of the year. I beg to differ. Spacey's artistic direction at the Old Vic finally got onto the right track last year, and seems, for the moment, to be going from strength to strength. He's a Big Performer on stage in the same sense as Rylance – powerful deliveries of lines, big physical gestures, sweeping emotions running the whole human gamut. If some of the dramatic movements appear to manoeuvre our emotions, they're there for a reason. Spacey's compelling Darwinian lawyer edges out for me over Rylance's West-country misanthrope, perhaps because so often do powerful plays impress with cool intellectuality stirred and shaken with cynicism, that when a good old fashioned debate (courtroom scene, no less!) fills you with warmth and hopefulness for mankind, it stays in the memory just a little bit longer.

Honourable mention: Ben Whishaw, Cock (Royal Court Upstairs)
I've added it to my Santa's wish list for this year that we see more of Whishaw on London stage before his schedule becomes inevitably monopolised by Hollywood blockbusters and the occasional arthouse films (New Yorkers who're reading this: get a ticket to his turn in 'The Pride' before it sells out NOW – another new play courtesy of Royal Court, this was the winner of the 2008 Olivier Award for an Affiliate Theatre that my fellow panellists and I voted for). It's not everyday that you have a truly dashing leading man who effortlessly exudes indelible charisma as well as piercing intelligence, and when the performer in question is not yet thirty, you know there's a wonderful career ahead waiting to unfold spectacularly.

Best actress
Rachel Weisz, A Streetcar Named Desire (Donmar Warehouse)
I wrote in my pre-review of Streetcar, back in July, that Weisz was excellent in this role but was far too beautiful and youthful for what we expect Blanche Dubois to be. This was echoed by a number of broadsheet critics, and Weisz herself pointed out – rightly – that Williams's text had specified Blanche as being a woman of thirty, a full eight years short of her own actual age. This, if nothing else, is illuminating on how Western society’s perception of youth has changed in the last century. And when I look back on the leading ladies of the year, Weisz's performance still stands out for the integrity and conviction with which she inhabited this well-known character.

Honourable mention: Juliet Stevenson, Duet for One (Almeida)
A superbly understated study of the helplessness of a superb mind, gradually and irreversibly being deprived of the body attached to it. We're accustomed to having such eternally fighting characters on stage now as well as surrounding us in real life. But once in a while an exceptional thespian shows us that the familiar story can be seen through different angles, with a kind of immobile viscerality we hitherto didn't know existed, and that's the case in point here.

Best performance in a supporting role
Bertie Carvel, Rope (Almeida)
Carvel impressed me in the aforementioned Royal Court production of The Pride last year (and as leading man in the new musical 'Parade' before that!), so I'd been looking forward to his latest role, in this Hitchcock adaptation. So much so that I nearly missed his entrance, because the handsome young man I remembered was unrecognisable as the cynical war veteran, so convincingly does he embody the role completely. Now that he's proved himself to be a real chameleon, I think he could become one of the great character actors of his generation. Surely being blessed with good looks doesn't hurt.

Honourable mention: Katherine Parkinson, Cock (Royal Court Upstairs; Rebecca Hall, Winter's Tale and The Cherry Orchard (Old Vic)
Parkinson, along with Ben Whishaw, talks us through a highly charged and deeply confused sex scene (her partner here being a gay man discovering the female species for the first time, literally) with no more physical movement than slowly circling the tiny stage in centrifugal steps. And it's one of the most sensual moments I've ever experienced on any stage. Her diffident, gentle yet steely character is no less complex than others in the play, but is the one who wins our heart. She can do the understated comical too, which is a rare gift.
Hall was memorable in both plays that constituted the inaugural Bridge Project in the summer. It takes a real actress to tackle both Chekov and Shakespeare – her characters effectively divided by twenty years in age – concurrently, with aplomb. As with Wishaw, I sincerely hope her commitment to the stage shall remain for a while, and I can see her maturing into Arkadinda one day already, via Nora and many more Shakespearean heroines along the way.


Best new choreography
Russell Maliphant, AfterLight
One quarter of an evening of world premieres created to the brief 'In the Spirit of Diaghilev', Maliphant's short, mesmerising male solo is deceptively simple by description: a theme and variations of the dancer (Daniel Proietto, ethereally beautiful) spiralling in semi-light. It succeeds, in breathtaking fashion, in what the choreographer set out to do: to capture the essence of Nijinsky the dancer.

Hail, the Civilised Commute

Well I'd never envisaged these two words appearing in the same sentence - until our blisfully stress-free journey home tonight, after the two-hour-long first half of Mother Courage. (I may be a theatre fanatic but I never waver in deciding to walk out of things, which actually happens a few times a year.) Walking across Hungerford Bridge in anticipation of our usual District/Circle line - DLR journey home, shivering a bit in the newly plummeted temperature, we catch sight of a Thames Clipper drawing near Embankment Pier. I have used the service a couple of times before but always for touristy purposes - specifically, taking visiting friends on a boatride from the Savoy Pier (an easy walk from work) to Canary Wharf, followed by dinner at home. M reminds me that Oyster cards are now valid for discounted journeys on the boat. An unspoken collective decision is made in half a second, as we accelerate our steps descending the bridge. The smiling, laid-back pier staff confirm that the boat is indeed about to depart for the East, and within seconds we are seated in the warm, cavernous cabin, watching the pier recede.

There's really nothing more civilised than taking a boat trip down the Thames at ten o'clock on a winter evening. The early Christmas lights already seem a bit more plentiful on the Southbank than usual, offsetting the slightly more distant, yet no less imposing sight of the Parliament nicely. The water is calm, and the brief stops at each pier along the way - only if there's anyone alighting or waiting to board - so smooth, that the harsh chill and wind that we enountered a few minutes ago already seem like a strange urban myth. The National that we just stepped out of, Oxo Tower, Design Museum, HMS Belfast, Tower Bridge - all the familiar landmarks that we choose to sweep under the 'sights for tourists' category on overground journeys anytime of the day, now seem to disclose themselves in a tantalising new dimension. I'm sure the gently irregular, undulating rhythm in which we're travelling has something to do with it. All around us, the dozen or so fellow passengers are either solo commuters (some people caught this boat a lot earlier than we did - metaphorically of course) buried in their books or Blackberries (for you can actually do all the virtual business here if you want, unlike on the Tube), or couples exchanging muted conversations. This naturally serene, almost poetic setting discourages high volume of any sort by default.

Before we know it, the glowing Canary Wharf towers are upon us. We disembark the boat with a cheery wave to the boat staff (even the people working on the river are so much nicer than their underground colleagues), commencing the short walk home. At just over a pound more than the regular Tube journey would have cost, this was worth every penny. We resolve to ascertain the timetable of the Thame Clipper service in the post-theatre hours, and I suspect we'll soon become regulars on the boat. Post-culture journey home had never felt so perfectly civilised.

Thoughts on Flights I - On Cities Big and Small

20 May 2009. BA 799, HEL-LHR.

The most reassuring public announcement? Whatever comes from a BA cockpit, in a magnetic male voice in Her Majesty's English (I do sometimes wonder if they're filtered by quality of speaking voice as well as aviary skills) must rank among the top. 'Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, this is your captain speaking. I'm pleased to let you know that we're making good progress towards our destination, London Heathrow. Weather report is very good indeed, a cloudless day, making it a nice descent...'

Since truly cloudless days are actually something of a real rarity in London's skies, when it turns out to be true, you notice every single window-seat passenger - and some further from the windows attempting a neck-crankling exercise - being completely absorbed by the birds-eye view of the metropolis, noses stuck to the windows. All the more remarkable considering the vast majority of the passengers on this flight appear to be frequent business travelers who may have the tendency to count their daily/weekly commutes in airmiles. The reason is that the view is indeed mesmerising on a day like this. To start with, you can't help being startled by the realisation (or confirmation really) that London is MASSIVE. Even the area within the Circular (the 'inner circle' as opposed to the monstrous M25), which looks like a reasonable size on your road atlas, contains a fascinatingly diverse landscape, viewed from this height. Landmarks along the Thames - there's a reason why every major city in the world has to have a river in the middle of, or circling, it - are easily spotted. But you also take in the green patches everywhere, among the concrete sprawls: parks, heaths, commons, with the undulating trees and boat-dotted ponds. The Millennium Dome (aka 'The O2'), the arch at Wembley Stadium, and the 2012 Olympic site echo each other as 21st-century London's answer to the Colosseum. We spend far too big a part of our daily lives getting from A to B in a sealed tube carriage or on a standing-room only bus, we tend to forget to look up and look around everywhere in between. On this enormous canvas, even the clusters of ugly big council blocks suddenly take on an intriguing character of their own, a striking cubist shade perhaps.

Which, inevitably, brings up the nagging thought I've always had at the back of my mind: how can so much of the London surface that we do encounter everyday seem so helplessly dull? How can so big and great a city have so little character on its streets?

To be specific: London, like every other sizeable city in the UK, is now full of 'cloned streets'. You know the one: a Next next to a Boots next to an Oasis next to a Starbucks next to a Zara next to a Tesco Metro next to a Coffee Republic next to a Waterstones next to... etc etc. And the more upmarket version of this, available to the yummy mummies of the more expensive postcodes (Upper Street in Islington, King's Road in Chelsea, High Street Kensington, shopping centres in Westfield and Canary Wharf), would be something like: a Whistles next to a TM Lewin next to a Café Nero next to a Waitrose next to a Karen Millen next to a Zara (big winners are those who appeal to all classes)... and so on. Even the mighty designer brands, having been so mercilessly bombarded in our faces in every media outlet in the last couple of decades,have lost their previously haughty air of exclusivity, and even Bond Street and the northern end of Sloane Street now merely feel like clones of all the other shops in other world capitals offering identical goods, give or take the currency discrepancies.

I do realise that these are all inevitable and bountiful fruits of market economy/capitalist consumerism/globalisation. And it's produced at least one immortally funny line on screen - in Woody Allen's last good film, Small Time Crooks, the cop who caught the hapless, cookie-shop fronting bank-robbers red-handed offers his priceless one-word advice on how to really make it big without breaking the law: 'FRANCHISE!' But I suspect that I'm not the only one suffering from clone-street fatigue, longing for something different, something that stands out from all this predictable drab (predictability being the evil twin of the omnipresent convenience that modern technologies bestow on us).

This collective frustration has, presumably, played no small part in the increasingly wild popularity of the markets of Portobello, Spitalfields and Borough. That trusty barometer of middle-class Londoners' opinions, Evening Standard, launched its 'save our small shops' campaign last year as a firm rebuttal to the clonisation of high streets everywhere, and had overwhelming responses. Being a realist, though, I think we'll have to accept the demise of independent retailers as an eventuality, a price to pay for having an iconic city without microscopic iconic components on the street level. Yet how does London compare with other capital cities in this respect? My first reaction, on pondering this question, is that the bigger they are, the fewer interesting, non-chain shops they seem to allow. If we take the distinctive architectural backdrops out of the picture (an easy task these days, thanks to technology), the shopping streets of London, New York, Hong Kong and Beijing can all blur into one. Globalisation flaunts itself in the flesh, loud and proud. In comparison, the smaller European capitals and other major cities that often captivate me, rarely fail to come up with unfamiliar brands and logos in their spades (and this is a shopaholic writing): Stockholm, Copenhagen, Antwerp, Berlin, Bologna, Tallinn, Vilnius. But wait a minute, there are exceptions to this theory too. Paris and Tokyo are both bona fide metropolises, yet still have plenty of shop-keepers who run their hundred-square-feet spaces with phenomenal success, and who would run a mile from the smiling corporate boss contemplating a merger/acquisition deal. Is this the great socio-cultural divide again, the one between the English-speaking world –yes, the likes of Hong Kong and Beijing can almost be comfortably categorised as such - and the rest of the (real) world? I don't have an answer, but I know I'd be happy to see London, for one, de-cloned considerably. But I have to stop thinking about it, because in the meantime, ladies and gentlemen, we have arrived at London Heathrow Terminal Five. The local time is seven p.m., the ground temperature, eighteen degrees. It's been a real pleasure to have you on board.

Barbican, week two

Six days later, now in better physical shape and newly recharged by a quick trip to Berlin, I went back to Barbican with M for another pre-show dinner at the Riverside cafe. As with last week, I now noticed the 'other audience' roaming in the foyer - a lot of them wearing exquisite pearls, quite a few elegantly pearl-clad, gingerly sipping their overpriced red wine. This was not 'our' crowd today as we were here to see Pied Piper and they, Parsifal (third act) in concert with Valery Gergiev. We recognise a few friends across the hall and wave to them. I point out to M a riotously-dressed woman in her 60s in scarlett-framed spectacles and her tall, younger companion who looked like an incredibly masculine gypsy. Vivienne Westwood and her Austrian husband, Andreas Kronthaler. Were they here for the hip hop or for Wagner? We managed to amuse ourselves for a full five minutes with the guessing game (the answer was the latter). The LSO concert, as always, started at 19:30 and our opera-loving friend looked on at us with great confusion, from the door across the foyer where he was just about to get in to the concert, as we were not making any attempt to gather ourselves and enter the hall: 'Are you not going in?!' 'No' - we shouted back - 'we're going to see hip hop dance instead.'

And what a show it was. The re-setting of the classic Pied Piper story in the nameless underbelly of contermporary metropolis plagued by ASBO youths was ingenious. The synopsis, divided cleverly into 'chapters', seemed to fit the thrilling choreography (which really favours and befits the episodic narrative as much as classical ballet does) while also making a nod to the medieval literary origin of the story. Kendrick Sandy, the Piper and godfather of the company, Boy Blue Entertainment, clearly inspires so much in his young apprentices and presides the action with unshakable authority. The most virtuosic parts were often left to the youngsters, though, who were capable of doing the jaw-dropping acts with such effortlessness that we cheered and shrieked as spontaneously as the young crowd around us (M had come straight from work in his City suit - for once we really stuck out in the sea of hip-hop audiences). The really breathtaking moments, though, came at the end with the Charming of the Kids scene. Onto the stage came bouncing a score of real kids - we're talking 6- to 10-year olds here - of such a wide range of ethnicity that their mere presence presented a portrait of contemporary Britain right there. And they all bounced and danced and swinged and then did all sorts of gravity-defying things with their limps and on their heads. A lot of 'awwww's emanated from every corner of the theatre. In the final act, 'The Piper's Training Camp' (here's Naughties East London's unique contribution to the tale), they were united with the rest of the cast in a show of disciplines as much as technical brilliance. Isn't this the real morale of this production? The programme states that Boy Blue Entertainment's aim is 'to encourage youth to embrace dance, while teaching them discipline and team building and exposing them to performance and storytelling'. The thought that this company, and this enraptured audience, happily spent the same evening alongside the Wagner die-hards who were just as emotionally moved by a completely different experience, filled me with joy. We might be walking out of a building in the heart of what is now officially a doomed industry, but arts will continue to transcend our otherwise mundane lives, and because of that, this city will never die.

Barbican, week one

First Friday of March (this has been a month accentuated by travels and health problems - but I'm determined not to let either get in the way of catching up with these notes), 7pm. After two bed-ridden days, I was ever so relieved to be interacting with the world again, in the way of hearing a crowd-alluring programme (Rachmaninoff second piano concerto, Tchaikovsky's sixth symphony) with the LSO. But right now, the impossibility to relief myself was the pressing problem - I expected it to be a popular concert but I had never seen the queues for the ladys' loos at the Barbican so long. I ran upstairs to the balcony level. The size of the waiting crowd there was even more daunting. It suddenly occured to me that the ones located in the Riverside cafe would probably be a safer bet now that the concert was almost about to start. I was right, but as I ran across the foyer to reach them I also realised that the queues had bot looked like a typical LSO audience. Now I know they've got a wonderful marketing department working very hard to reach out to new audiences, but surely all the hoodie-donning, bright-haired youngsters with their smooth, rhythmic moves in every step were not here to hear Rachmaninoff?

Then it dawned on me: Pied Piper had arrived in EC1. This was the hip hop dance show that took Theatre Royal Stratford East (if ever you want to visit a venue where watching the audience themselves can be just as fascinating as whatever's on stage, this is it) by storm last year and went on to win an Olivier. The savvy theatre team at Barbican obviously spotted its potential immediately and pocketed the transfer that were now drawing full-house crowds that were demographically as different from the loyal LSO audiences as possible. And as a result, I only narrowly avoided floor-wetting public embarrassment. This is how every major multi-disciplinary arts venue in the world should be run, I said to myself, except the fact that they'd do even better to upgrade the lavatories (I don't want to seem to have a morbid obsession about this, but the typically awful national standard of British plumbing is always epitomised at busy arts centres and West End theatres). I made a mental note to book ourselves for Pied Piper as soon as we got home.

Golden Time for visiting some Golden Ages

Six thirty, Friday evening. I'm staring at a row of Jingdezhen porcetain (the prized variety produced in age-old workships in Jiang Xi Province, central China) in all sizes and shapes, all featuring the trademark blue patterns. These are all from the Ming Dynasty, and the designs seem to tend towards broad brushes and bold iconism rather than the more exquisite lines and figures from more recent centuries. I'm no porcelain expert but I can appreciate the striking craftsmanship.

This is not an exhibition on Jingdezhen, or China, or anything to do with China specifically. This is 'Shah Abbas - the Remaking of Iran' at British Museum, where the golden era of an endlessly fascinating culture, a remarkable chapter in the religious history of humankind is illustrated by calligraphy, paintings, etchings, carpets of all sizes, lamp holders from shrines, and - in the centre of it all and visible from any corner of the beautiful old reading room, images of the great mosques that were built under the patronage of the Shah in Isfahan and Mashahad. The collection of Chinese porcelain was but a fraction of the Shah's treasure trove - many a vase, bowl, and plate travelled up the Silk Road to be housed in the richer homes of the Shiite kingdom.

I should be urging all our like-minded friends to make Friday late-night museum/gallery visits a habit except then the places might well be packed as a result, and the peace and quietude that makes it so appealing to us shall be no more. OK, this is pathetic paranoia. Do go. A one-hour walk through a superbly-curated, gem-packed exhibition like this (and this city happens to excel on such things) on your way home is a splendid way to cleanse your mind of the working week and start the weekend on a gratifyingly high note. When we went to the Rothko exhibition at Tate Modern on a Friday evening it was actually possible to sit in the middle of the vast room of all the Seagram Murals and contemplate at them for 10 minutes without a busload of people blocking your view in every direction. Exactly how the Seagrams are meant to be experienced. Friday evenings soaking up Babylon at British Museum and Byzantium at Royal Academy followed, each mind-enriching and heart-elating. And if you feel smug enough about achieving such an intellectual feat after a non-stop, exhausting week, there's always the option to treat yourself to a nice dinner afterwards which shall be enjoyed all the more with your new-gained knowledge. Even if it's a simple matter of knowing that the best-known Shah had a predilection for top-quality Jingdezhen (and a lesser-known one for beautiful, beardless page boys... find out for yourself). Bon apetit.

Pitmen's chorus

I had all the facts about 'The Pitmen Painters', Lee Hall's universally praised play about the Ashington Group, the group of miners from Ashington (north of Newcastle, our second hometown) who defied circumstances (1930s Britian was steeped in recession as well as its age-old class barriers) to become a celebrated school of painters. I knew the run at Cottsloe last year had been a huge success, and the current transfer to the much bigger Lyttleton had also been completely sold out. I had expected lots of near-impenetrable Geordie accents (thank goodness for our 3 years of living there) and lots of quick-witted dialogues (Hall has a real gift for colloquial rhythms). What I hadn't expected was the impressive amplitude and astounding quality of the miners' works (my ignorance) - nearly accenturating and complementing the plot on the three large slides - and how moving the play was.

The closing scene of Act I featured the five miner/painters upstage, in the centre, in turn delivering each line of the following prose (which, by nature of being prompted by each of the characters in print, automatically becomes beautiful verse) with increasingly focused lighting. This was their collective gut response to what they've seen on a pilgrimage to the great galleries in London, and the spontaneous announcement of their own arrival as a Group. Works of Cezannes, Blake, Turner and Van Gogh appeared on the slides, 'thick and fast' (Hall's stage direction), followed by early drawings of the miners themselves. Their reactions to the masterworks resonated with ours, and their emotions overwhelmed us by their sheer simplicity. A truly powerful moment.

You can take one set of things
some board, some paint, whatever
You can take this one set of things
and you can make them something else.
Whatever your circumstances
rich or poor
And you make them something else.
This is what art shows you.
No matter how hard or how easy
you can take things
and transform them.
You don't have to put up with what you're given
and not just into anything.
You can transform things and make something beautiful
something profound.
You can make something
That's the work of art
that you can change things.
And you can overcome whateber you need to overcome.
No matter who you are, where you come from
You need a brush
or whatever
canvas or bit of old card
and change things.
And that is what is important about art.
You take one thing
and you make one thing into another
and you transform
who you are.

In praise of... Menier Chocolate Factory

Where else can you get such incredible value for money? In the West End, top-price seats regularly go for £45 to £55 (I think the 'hottest tickets' such as Oliver! at Drury Lane are even pricier). Menier Chocolate Factory offers a 'meal deal' at £37 per person. You get a two-course pre-theatre dinner at its lovely restaurant (I had crayfish salad followed by meatballs with rice, and also stple a few bites from M's chocolate-and-pistaschio tart - DELICIOUS), then walk across the room to see the show. Yes, £37 for dinner plus a two-hour-forty-minute show - if you happen to come from any of the territories of the non-sterling major currencies, this is even more startling at the moment.

And what a show! I don't claim to be a Sondheim expert but I could immediately see why people say this piece is best realised/experienced in a chamber setting. MCF is one of those venues where they could justly claim 'every seat is a good seat', and we had the best of the lot, right in the front row. Only after we were 10 minutes into action did I suddenly realise 'A Little Night Music' was actually based on one of my favourite Bergman films, Smiles on a Summer Night. Everything about the production was commendable - the Scandinavian design poetic, the comical timings spot-on, the melancholic moments heart-breaking. The only exception to the otherwise uniformally excellent cast, for me, was Jessie Buckley who played Anne Egerman. Again, this wasn't a biased judgement: I had thought, after her first number, that both her acting and the singing voice were a trifle amateurish compared with the others. Only when I browsed through the programme book during the interval did I discover that she was the runner-up of one of those Lloyd-Webber talent shows making her professional debut (the bliss of not having a TV in our household!). It was a good effort, nonetheless, and she had a tough challenge for a debut facing off Hannah Waddingham as Desiree Armfeldt, whose rendition of 'Send in the Clown' was nothing less than a classic. Interval whispers we caught upon implied that the show was destined for a West End transfer, and I can't wait for the details to transpire so I can recommend it to all my theatre-loving friends. Even though they'll probably have to pay a bit more, and it won't come with the meatballs.

Statistics of the past week

ONE each of disapponting and good theatre trips that bookended the working week. 'Private Lives' (Noel Coward) in a new production at Hampstead theatre on Monday - the only merit of the evening ended up being the venue itself. We'd not been there before but was hugely impressed by the building. The auditorium was almost a mini version of the fabulous new opear house in Copenhagen: lots of Scandinavian-style wood panels and good view/sound from every seat The cast and crew should be praised for their effort, which unfortunately was wasted on an underserving play. Coward's best moments, for me, are the farcical scenes involving multiple characters (I'm especially thinking of some of the most hilarious moments from Present Laughter) - which are the few truly funny moments in this play about an ex-couple bumping into each other on their respective (collective?) honeymoon with their new spouses. His two-person exchanges, be they smouldering or fiery moments, are not effective in any way. Pity. On Friday the ferociously topical 'Roaring Trade' (Soho Theatre, about - you guessed - a bunch of traders at an investment bank) played to a roaring full house. It reminded me of the (equally popular) store-floor-set production of Oxford Street we saw at Royal Court Upstairs last year, in that neither tried to be didactic about any grand theme or profound theme, but instead depicted a specific corner of life with totally convincing vitality from everyone involved.

TWO Japanese films at Barbican's 'After Tezuka' season, brilliantly curated by the resident expert Helen McCarthy. She's one of those people whose intrinsic enthusiasm for the object of her studies (which is an almost degrading term - Japanimation is clearly the air she breathes) is so totally infectious, her way of presenting the subject so succinct yet erudite, witty yet serious, that I would have happily gone along for the pre-screening talks alone. Of course the films themselves weren't half bad either: Dororo (which is actually a live action feature film) serves up all the best ingredients of a proper blockbuster, only with heaps more class and style than the regular Hollywood fare could ever dream of; Akira, being a 20-year-old manga animation, blends dizzying visual kaleidoscope, multi-layered narrative convolusion and metaphysical themes (Darwin, Nietsche, Foucault, Freud, you name it) all in one breath in such sweeping manner, that I stepped out of the dark screening room feeling physically drained.

THREE performers in the totally undefinable site-specific performance 'The Memory of W.T. Stead', in the most unexpected - and unpredictable - space that is the Steinway showrooms on Marylebone Lane. There were two hour-long performances each on three consecutive evenings, with seven invitees/audiences at each, for a specific reason. It's the sort of things that happen a lot more in downtown Manhattan (and probably far too much), but not nearly enough in London (which has both the venue possibilities and the potential audience to offer - someone smart will soon put two and two together, no doubt). We're seated in the eerily surreal ground-floor showroom, each between a pair of Steinways. They become performers already in this silence and semi darkness. Then someone appears, equipping us each with a pair of noise-cancelling headphones and all-concealing eyemasks. With the murmurred instructions, reminiscences, echoes and fantasies through the headphones (pre-recorded and live) we enter a mysterious world with our invisible guides. There's a sombre-looking piano tuner in the far corner of the room. Or is he there? How did he get there? Are we really in a perfectly real, perfectly tangible building moments away from the bustling Oxford Street, or have we somehow fallen into a (David) Lynchian world of intrigues? The performers (Swedish dance duo Lundahl & Seitl, British pianist Cassie Yukawa) explored every inch of the available space, both in the tuning workshops and in our consciousness, and made perfect judgement of the elasticity of their materials. We emerged out of the building, a bit stumbling in our steps trying to find our way towards the tube station. It would have been more reassurling to have the directions whispered to us through the headphones.

FOUR pianists heard in contrasting circumstances. On Tuesday, Cassie Yukawa's performance of Bach's Fugue in A minor (BWV 543, arranged by Liszt) was the deeply personal yet powerful climax of the performance installation 'The Memory of W.T.Stead' (see above) - all the more striking as she conjured the entire piece out of almost total darkness, literally. On Thursday, Simon Crawford Phillips and Philip Moore's piano duo recital at LSO St Lukes offered two 20th-century classics by two Russians who were both master composer-pianists themselves - Rachmaninoff's Symphonic Dances and Stravinsky's Rite of Spring. Knowing both well as iconic cornerstones of the orchestral repertoire of the last hundred years, hearing them in this version, side by side, was a revelation, with the shining winter sun as backdrop. On Saturday, Nikolai Demidenko gave an effortlessly exhilarating reading of Shostakovich's second piano concerto with Philharmonia Orchestra and Tugan Sokhiev. I felt all the more fortunate for having heard the rehearsal the previous afternoon in the intimacy of Henry Wood Hall - as the only 'audience' up in the gallery, I was washed over by the opening strings of the second movement, and then the piano solo, as played by this London-resident Russian, made me realise for the first time how Shostakovich did the impossible: the cross between Mozart and Rachmaninoff.

(No.) FIVE of Tchaikovsky's immortal symphonic output, with Philharmonia Orchestra under an increasingly impressive Tugan Sokhiev. One of those pieces that I know inside out (not least because I had to do a three-hour presentation about it during my academic days, now happily in the past) and frankly had got a bit sick of (reason: see previous brackets). And he gave such a fresh reading, including some remarkably daring but effective tempi and - all too rare in Tchaikovsky interpretations - meticulous precision, that it shed interesting new light on the piece for me. In a week when an older and (for now) much more famous Russian compatriot is giving a string of headlining concerts across town at the Barbican, with his own two home bands from London and St Petersburg, it pays real tribute to Sokhiev's star quality that his two Philharmonia concerts filled Festival Hall. Yes, the programms offered some big blockbuster items (second half of Saturday's concert was Rachmaninoff's Second Symphony), but London's audience wouldn't really be so generous with their ovation afterwards if the performances hadn't been so genuinely outstanding. I expect his star to rise much higher still in years to come. On top of everything else, he's so nice in person that it's impossible to envy his posession of youth, talent and good looks.

SIX more cultural events I'll have been to by this time next week. If you prefer to read about something else, let me know.

TWELVE: the number of times a certain friend told me he went to see 'Push' (the lauded collaboration last year between maverick British choreographer Russell Maliphant and iconic Parisian ballerina Silvie Guillem), because he liked it so much. And you thought I was a culture vulture of the mad kind?!

Adaptations - Part II

Donmar Warehouse presented Be Near Me - 'a stage version by Ian McDiarmid, from the novel by Andrew O'Hagan' - in a co-production with National Theatre of Scotland. It's the story of an Oxbridge-bred Catholic priest in his late fifties, who takes up a new post in a small Ayrshire town. His housekeeper, Mrs Poole, adores him and he in turn teaches her about the finer things in life from wine-tasting to French conversations. The community finds his quintessential, upper-middle-class, intellectual Englishness slightly alien but accepts him and his occasional eccentricity. He befriends a group of local youth in his charge and one fifteen-year-old boy, Mark, in particular. Grown up in a dysfunctional family and entrenched in bitterness and hostility (towards his parents, Muslims, and the world at large), Mark is gradually drawn in by Father Anderton's warmth and reciprocates the friendship by showing him around his secret drinking den (a delapidated pub) where they share a drink, smoke some pot and try to open up to each other. Inevitably, Mark ends up on Father Anderton's Persian rug one late night and the two of them are discovered lying hand in hand, by Mrs Poole who has lately been in a state of constant agitation because of her newly diagnosed cancer, and Father Anderton's nightmare of condemnation and - even worse - agonising process of soul-searching thus begin.

McDiarmid apparently loved the book so much that he decided to adapt it himself. The result is a true showcase for the veteran actor (his two London roles last year, in John Gabriel Borkman, also at the Donmar; and Six Characters in Search of an Author at Gielgud, couldn't have been more different but both encapsulated the essence of good acting perfectly), but it also provided ample platform for ensemble acting with breadth and depth, which I would argue was even more moving and gratifying. McDiarmid is undoutedly a consummate actor capable of running the whole emotional gamut within the space of one sentence, and my favourite moments of the play include Father Anderton's clumsy and desperate attempts to decipher text messages on what is evidently a newly acquired mobile phone, where no a single word is uttered but you can read the impending despair in the way he holds the device and stares at - into - it. Some might feel though that at times the tour-de-force performance (which is truly what it is) becomes too mannered, and we're made to feel as uncomfortable at the way he becries moral hypocrisy (those of others as well as his own) as the villagers are at his intellectual foreignness.

In comparison, the ensemble depicting the villagers, are compelling in different ways. Blythe Duff's Mrs Poole, whose transformation from the chirpiness and wittiness at the beginning of the play to her cancer-ridden, tortured and diminished self to her empassioned and dignified defence of her former employer in the extensive court scene in Act Two, is the most memorable. The two youngsters, Mark the 'victim' (Richard Madden) and his on-and-off, unruly girlfriend Lisa (Helen Mallon), convey their precocious lack of morality through every movement of teenage confusion effortlessly.

The production, directed by John Tiffany, starts with a stage all bare except for six chairs and a long table. The chairs are soon pulled downstage to the back of the wall where the actors who are not involved in the current scene sit, mostly expressionless and occasionally taking part in a startling manner (an almost mechanical, all-sat-down Ceilidh dance became more poignant by the minute). Father Anderton's gradual downfall and self-redemption are told through tableaux, each accompanied by the minimum props but to maximum effect (this has become a noble Donmar tradition, surely). The use of clever sound effects (the echos on the beach) and video (the teenagers giving evidence in court) are perceived as an organic part of the narrative rather than intrusive technical accessories. The folk songs - which I usually find arbritrary and gratuitous in such plays - are sung beautifully by the ensemble who almost metamorphoses into a Greek chorus. The excerpts and discussions of classical music always feel appropriate, including my first experience of hearing a five-minute discussion of a living composer on London stage.

In terms of the plot, everything that Father Anderton goes through, and the reaction of others to it, is quite predictable. In that sense there's no great dramatic arch here, but a journey that's almost too smooth. But to begrudge that would not do such a poetically realised production justice, and the notion that human nobility can transcend moral sins is rarely presented in a contemporary story so convincingly. Having grown up in a culture and society with little resemblance to the vast majority of materials presented in London's theatres, I always take note of evenings where those universal elements of humanity reach out to me from the stage despite a storyline which I have no personal connection with, and this was one of them.

Adaptations - Part I

Adaptations are tricky matters, especially if your source material is regarded as part of the canon. Yet, I suspect, that's precisely the reason why some writers/directors are drawn to face down this uniquely formidable challenge time and again, with varying results. Katie Mitchell's take on Strindberg's A Dream Play, at the National a few years ago, was thoroughly spellbinding. It pushed the text to the edge of possibilities while a new, powerful narrative emerges from within. Her next two productions for the National, Iphegenia at Aulis and The Seagull, were almost identical in many approaches - the bleak stage set; the suffocating lighting design; the droning soundscape; the singularly nihilisic undertone with which every actor in the cast seemed to deliver every line, whatever the circumstance - while neither managed to convince (The Seagull, in particular, was almost disastrous in my view. Most characters ended up being caticatures of what Chekov intended them to be - well, if that had been Mitchell's artistic agenda, then she certainly succeeded).

Having seen two new adaptations in their previews this week (both open in the next few days), I thought I'd make an attempt at writing a review of both here.

Mrs Affleck, at the National (Cottesloe), is a modern take on Ibsen's Little Eyolf, by the young British writer Samuel Adamson, whose previous works include the original play Southwark Fair (which we enjoyed very much) and an adaptation of Ibsen's Pillars of the Community (which we sadly missed, but it received almost unanimous acclaim). I suppose the success of the latter paved the way naturally for this new venture, directed here by Marianne Elliott (whose recent work at the National included War Horse, Saint Joan and the aforementioned Pillars). Little Eyolf, being one of Ibsen's lesser-known works, features similar themes as those of his masterpieces such as Rosmersholm and John Gabriel Borkman: the ambigious and conflicting aspects of familial love, the inate battle of responsibility and desire, the inevitability of past sins - especially those of former generations - catching up with the present and the future.

Adamson is undoubtedly an intelligent writer who wanted to add even more layers to the original story by transferring the actions to 1950s England. Unfortunately, the extra devices he brought into the story in this regard seemed clumsy and superfluous. The Rat Wife in the original story, the mysterious figrue (think a quasi-malicious, female Pied Piper) who might or might not have been responsible for the boy's untimely death, is here replaced by a teenage punk, Flea (was this a deliberate anachronism - I thought they didn't materialise until the sixties?). His appearance in the first act, which ought to be suspenseful (if you read the Ibsen original, this material has potential for a truly creepy moment) is marred by the incongruous combination of metaphysical babble and street slang, and his return in the second half, in the middle of the Afflecks' grief for their now-drowned Ollie (the Adamson incarcation of Little Eyolf), amounts to more exasbating annoyance than anything more illuminating. There's also a second boy, George, who bears witness both to Ollie's ongoing unhappiness and his actual death scene. The fact that he's Carribean is cause for a whole scene in Act II, an emotional confrontation between his usually mild-mannered mother and Mrs Affleck who blurts out a viciously racial remark. Does it add anything meaningful to the emotional core of the story, except as a validation of the new historic/social context here? Not for me.

The heart of Ibsen's story is the intrinsic, moral battle of a man between the life he wants (the almost incestuous passion he's harnoured for his half sister al his life) and the one he's created (the wife whose wealth and beauty he couldn't resist, the child whose disability he may have played a part in causing, the books that he's no longer able to write). There's enough gripping dramatic depth to be explored here without the other distractions. The author and director should have also trusted the transferrability of the material (1880s Norway is a blissfully abstract enough setting) not to need the additional flag-ups. One further qualm about the plot revision is the fact that Audrey, Affleck's half-sister (Naomi Frederick, in a show-stealing performance) discovers the dark family secret - that the two of them are actually not related, thanks to her mother's promiscuity - during the action, rather than before the play begins. The original scenario would create more suspense and nuanced tension during a large part of the play until the secret is revealed, where as here, the discovery results in a moment of impulsive passion in the rain. Not all the newly added elements are problematic, however: the scene where Ollie reappears on the beach, in Audrey's imagination, playing with sand, is a beautfiul trance that we are all willing to be part of.

Finally, It's a shame that Claire Skinner's Rita Affleck is a mostly one-dimensional performance, whether she's conveying jealousy, guilt, hatred, helplessness or despair, whereas Ibsen's RIta Eyolf probably embodied all of these at the same time.

Another not-too-busy week

Monday: re-viewing of Woody Allen's under-rated classic 'Deconstructing Harry' on DVD. Funny how we often say of an actor 'Oh but he/she's always just playing him/her-self in whatever role...' and that's usually meant as a negative remark. For me the one exception is Allen the actor. You can't possibly picture him as anything other than the quintessential, neurotic, hapless, highly intellectual, vaguely nihilistic Jewish New Yorker. And why should he be?

Tuesday: the Guardian interview with David Hare at the NFT (I still refuse to call it the 'BFI Southbank'). We hadn't seen any of the screenings at the Hare season (TV films, really mostly 'plays on TV') but recently saw Gethsemane, his latest, at the National, which has just a few more final performances. Apart from the predictable moment when he couldn't help expressing irritation at critics who'd trashed The Reader ('Oh how satisfying it was to know that we lived amongst people who enjoy such moral certainties!'), it was a most enjoyable session. On the BBC's change in attitude towards drama (specifically, stage drama) over the years: 'Basically, journalists distrust fiction because they don't believe what we do that, by lying, you get to the truth more easily.' TV's 'fundamentally transient and transitory nature' distinguishes it from, say, the stage. On how/why all good plays are political on some level: 'The way in which what is happening makes us who we are.'

Wednesday and Thursday: in Paris, attending the Orchestre de Paris concert with a battery of Chinese artists: conductor Long Yu, cellist Jian Wang, composer Qigang Chen, and the army of (beautiful young female) soloists required for the latter's masterpiece 'Iris devoilee'. I'd got to know the work very well from recording but it was the first time I heard it live. A very full Salle Pleyel which greeted the artists with a thundering ovation at the end. A quick but efficient walking tour of the Marais (emphatically my favourite neighbourhood in Paris) and lots and lots of scrumptious food. Of which more later.

Friday: Aurelien Bury's uncategorisable, and totally triumphant theatre piece 'Les sept planches de la Ruse' at the Barbican. Simply stunning. My only regret being that I couldn't get more friends to see it as there was only one more performance left. It was obvious on Friday that, despite the mixed reviews (the critics really didn't get it this time! I'll write more about it later if possible) word of mouth had clearly got around already that this was a show not to be missed. I walked out of the theatre thinking how there was not a single wrong note in the entire production in any way, and our friend YY couldn't stop smiling with pride at the fabulous performers from her hometown, Dalian.

Saturday: 2 hours of rigourous Yoga with the incomparable Jaqui. I'd enquired last week about the possbility of joining an extra class of hers mid-week to ensure that I'm securely Yoga-ed through the week, and she brings me good news. A rare theatre/concert-free Saturday means the opportunity to catch up with laundry, grocery shopping, reading (at the moment, Alan Booth, 'Looking for the Lost') etc.

Sunday: more glorious sunshine! Full-table Middle-eastern breakfast courtesy of Waitrose (I'm quite convinced that I could live on nothing but hummous and olives for a long time - mind you, would have to be top-quality hummous and olives at that). There are many ways to spend a perfectly civilised Sunday afternoon, one of them being going to a 3pm piano recital at Festival Hall by our friend Stephen Hough. Only the best of artists could put together such a thoughtful and inspiring programme (Bach/Courot - Faure - Franck - Copland - Chopin), bound together by the themes of 'counterpoint' and 'Paris'. He said more with the brief but exquisite Faure Imprompu No.5 than some pianists could with an entire year's concerts, and the Chopin B minor sonata was delivered with such a combination of total assurance, technical virtuosity and thorough understanding of the poetry, it actually got me interested in Chopin all over again (not an easy conversion, after all those childhood hours I spent practising the same bloody Etudes, primarily to get all the right notes).

Life is good.

(slightly belated) best of 2008 - theatre

Having spent some 200 evenings at one cultural event or another, I thought it was worth making a list of highlights. And I'll expand accordingly where I feel there's more than one deserving candidate in each category.

The 'big four' subsidised venues (National Theatre, Donmar Warehouse, Almeida Theatre, Royal Court) continued to churn out tons of good work, and I also had some wonderful experiences in the commerical sector through careful picking, usually chosen because of the director (6 Characters at Gielgud, The Norman Conquests at Old Vic - see below).

New play: Two David Hare plays bookended our 2008 diary, and I personally preferred The Vertical Hour to Gethsemane. Neither was flawless, but TVH managed to consummate the marriage of compelling dialogues and effective dramatic structure with a much more gratifying result. One of my favourite directors, Robert Lepage, returned with the epic 7-hour Lipsynch to the Barbican (9 hours as billed, if you count the intervals too). Again, it had its weaker moments, but you come out at the end of it feeling revitalised and grateful for having been part of it.

Classics: our respective Chekov and Ibsen appetites were satisfied by Ivanov (perfect start to the Donmar in West End season) and Rosmersholm (Almeida - Helen Mcrory particularly notable). Even more memorable, however, was the fabulous Alan Ayckbourn introduction in the shape of The Norman Conquests at the Old Vic - Table Manners being simply one of the funniest things I have ever seen on stage anywhere.

Acting: Simon Russell Beale was the Actor of the Year (again), hands down. We now automatically book anything that he's in, knowing that he'll somehow transform even the most problematic script (and this rarely happens, as he's reliable with his choices, too) into a sublime experience. One to watch is Bertie Carvel, who was outstanding in The Pride at Royal Court Upstairs. Also notable were the entire Steppenwolf ensemble in Osage County (there's still time to catch one of the final performances, if you're in London), and the comedic nuance that Maria Tyzack managed to convey with every single one of her lines in The Chalk Garden (Donmar Warehouse).