FILM REVIEW: Paul Bettany, Maggie Q in ‘Priest’

Posted on May 6, 2011 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON — “Priest”, directed by Scott Stewart, is a short, dour and stodgy creature feature with average 3D effects that draws on so many film influences from westerns, action adventures and sci-fi tales that what fun there is comes from spotting the many sources.

Set in some nameless apocalyptic past or future it’s a vicars-versus-vampires yarn that aside from a short animated scene setter at the start and the long credits crawl at the end lasts for about 80 minutes. Lacking marquee names and much in the way of thrills, it’s unlikely to linger very long at the local multiplex and the blatant set up for a sequel after the climactic battle appears almost pitiable.

The animated sequence establishes that mankind has retreated within the giant walls of vile, polluted cities after innumerable battles with their vampire enemies, who are now confined to hideous underground camps a long way away.

All that corporal mortification in “The Da Vinci Code” was apparently not enough for Paul Bettany (pictured below). He has the title role of another venomous cleric known only as Priest, who this time has been put out to pasture by the church that rules with an iron fist over what’s left of humankind.

priest

Two sequences set up what will follow in a rag-tag script by Cory Goodman. One has elements of Indiana Jones as a band of soldier-preachers run into a trap set by vampires in an underground maze and Priest fails to save his best mate (Karl Urban), who falls into the clutches of thirsty beasts.

The other has a Western touch as crazed attackers invade a solitary home far out in the wasteland, leave the Priest’s brother and his wife for dead and kidnap their daughter Lucy (Lily Collins). Back in the “Blade Runner” city on a very bad day, Priest tells the church elders that he wants his badge back to he can go rescue Lucy. As a droll but insistent Monsignor, Christopher Plummer orders him not go anywhere as Christopher Young’s choral score starts to soar.

The Priest promptly leaves on a souped up motorcycle and teams with a local lawman, Hicks (Cam Gigandet) to seek the girl. Now it’s “The Searchers” as the embittered older man learns that Hicks is in love with Lucy but has to make it clear that if she has been bitten by the vampires then he will have to kill her.

Monsignor sends a team of priests led by Priestess (Maggie Q, pictured top) to hunt down Priest, but she’s really on the renegade’s side, so now the three of them track the vampires to some kind of mountain that’s shaped like a bee-hive and is in fact called a hive. Inside there’s a large bouncy creature with nasty habits and no face but teeth like the creature from “Aliens”.

Inevitably, Priest’s lost friend shows up, the world’s first human vampire known as Black Hat and looking for all the world like a man with no name except that his eye teeth come to exceptional points. Turns out he likes railway trains and he plans to transport a new army of vampires on a vast train to attack the city and he kidnapped Lucy just to lure Priest out so he could kill him.

Priest, Priestess and Hick must stop the train before the villains can do any harm and now the references come thick and fast. “Once Upon a Time In the West” competes with Mad Max’s “Road Warrior” as Priest and Black Hat fight it out on top of the train while Hicks stumbles along in carriages filled with pods like the ones in “Invasion of the Body Snatchers”.

If that sounds like fun, it’s really not.

Opened UK: May 6 (Sony Pictures) Opens US: May 13 (Screen Gems); Cast: Paul Bettany, Karl Urban, Lily Collins, Christopher Plummer, Maggie Q, Cam Gigandet; Director: Scott Stewart; Screenwriter: Cory Goodman; Based on the graphic novels by: Min-Wood Hyung; Producers: Michael De Luca, Joshua Donen, Mitchell Peck, Sam Raimi, Nicolas Stern; Executive producers: Josh Bratman, Glenn S. Gainor, Steve Galloway, Stuart J. Levy; Director of photography: Don Burgess; Production designer: Richard Bridgland; Music: Christopher Young; Costume designer: Ha Nguyen; Editors: Lisa Zeno Churgin, Rebecca Weigold; Production: Buckeroo Entertainment, Michael De Luca Productions, Screen Gems, Stars Road Entertainment, Tokyopop; Rated PG-13; running time, 87 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ‘London Road’ at the National

Posted on April 15, 2011 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – “London Road” is a documentary musical about the impact of a serial killer on one community with words spoken and sung to match the original phrasing and cadence of people who lived where the murders took place. It sounds horrible but in the National Theatre’s production it is insightful, funny and moving.

Writer Alecky Blythe recorded conversations with scores of people who lived on London Road in the town of Ipswich on the English east coast following the conviction of a man who admitted to slaying five female prostitutes. She then worked with composer Adam Cork to edit them, find rhythms and patterns, and devise clever repetitions to set their words to music.

Cork’s music for woodwinds, guitar, keyboards and percussion ranges from sprightly to elegiac and adds greatly to the resonance of the production.

The performers never saw a written word but heard the edited individual recordings through earphones and were then required to duplicate them in speech and song with all the stops, starts, elisions and expletives that litter everyday remarks. The stage is often filled with all 11 performers, who play several roles, singing their own words, and then abruptly and melodically in unison.

London Road x325Director Rufus Norris and set designer Katrina Lindsay use simple props to show a community hall, people’s living rooms, the street itself where people lived in fear as the killings escalated, and outside the court where the convicted murderer was finally tried. A balcony provides the height from which the media – photographers, cameramen, reporters – can look down on the community, which is pretty much what they did, usually down their noses. A riveting scene shows police tape drawn to zigzag across the stage in all directions with the locals on their sofas suffocated by the fear of not knowing if the killer lives among them and the stress of the police investigation and all the press attention.

The action cuts back and forth from a meeting of folks who live on the street a year after the killer’s conviction to the first news of a murder in the community. Married couples, oldsters, single men and young women sing and speak of their increased terror as the number of dead bodies found grows to five with no suspect in sight.

“It Could Be Him” the girls sing, as their fear verges on hysteria and every man presents as a potential suspect: “You automatically think it could be him … that’s the scary thing, you know he could be amongst us …” In a pub, a man who gives every impression of being slightly weird, runs down the main characteristics of a serial killer: I, um … I, I, I have studied serial killers since my mid-teens. It doesn’t mean I am one but, er …”

When the suspect is arrested, the residents wake up to discover hundreds of police have taken over the street. “That’s When It All Kicked Off,” they sing. As the process of law takes its time, the media glare continues and those who live on London Road take offense at the way their home is always described as a red light district. The media types just comment that the locals still like to watch TV and read the papers: “They Like a Good Moan,” they sing.

Blythe has captured almost every side of the situation and the views expressed range from sympathy for the dead prostitutes to hatred of the killer to resentment over the fear and stress and even to one woman who says she’d like to shake the killer’s hand because he got rid of the sleaze.

Some in the audience will take a colorful show of flower baskets at the end to signify the street’s never-say-die spirit and powers of recovery while others might view it as denial. The cumulative power of Blythe’s work is non-judgmental and there are many genuine laughs along the way. One breathtaking sequence conveys the depth of the show. A trio of prostitutes sing mournfully about their trade and break off suddenly for a minute of perfect silence to remember the slain women.

Venue: National Theatre, London (running through Aug. 27); Cast: Nick Holder, Nicola Sloane, Kate Fleetwood, Rosalie Craig, Duncan Wisbey, Clare Burt, Hal Fowler, Paul Thornley, Howard Ward, Claire Moore, Michael Shaeffer; Book, lyrics: Alecky Blythe; Music, lyrics: Adam Cork; Director: Rufus Norris; Set designer: Katrina Lindsay; Lighting designer: Bruno Poet; Sound designer: Paul Arditti; Movement director: Jabie de Frutos; Music director: David Shrubsole

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ‘Betty Blue Eyes’

Posted on April 14, 2011 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – “Betty Blue Eyes” is a new stage musical based on the 1984 Michael Palin and Maggie Smith post-war English comedy “A Private Function” but in making something loud and boisterous, the show loses the film’s quaint eccentricity and occasional bite.

The setting in 1947 is almost a mirror image of the current state of affairs in the United Kingdom with war, stern austerity measures imposed by the government, and a royal wedding about to take place.

In the show, Princess Elisabeth and Prince Philip are about to be wed. Food is rationed severely following World War II and so the local bigwigs in a small northern town decide to use an unlicensed pig for a banquet to honor the royal couple.

In Alan Bennett’s screenplay for the Malcolm Mowbray film, the town toffs merely conspire in their usual selfish way to eat as high off the hog as they can. When inoffensive podiatrist Gilbert Chilvers (Palin) discovers the plan, his social-climbing wife Joyce (Smith) schemes to kidnap the beast and butcher it for the family.

Betty is an animatronic pig with very blue eyes

The musical, with book by U.S. writers Ron Cowen and Daniel Lipman, is exactly the same except that everybody sings about it. It’s a tune-filled if not exactly melodic show with energetic if not enthralling dancing. A black-and-white newsreel sets the stage and then the cast sings about the then prime minister’s guarantee of “fair shares for all.”

Reece Shearsmith (pictured with Sarah Lancashire and Ann Emery) makes a bouncy Chilvers and he declares his ambition to get a surgery for his practice on Main Street with a jaunty ode to “a place on the Parade”. The local housewives sing “Magic Fingers” in praise of his delicate treatment of their feet and Sarah Lancashire, as the pushy Joyce, reveals an unlikely previous life as a leggy nightclub singer in a number designed to show that she is not “Nobody.”

There’s a rotund fellow named Allardyce, played by Richard Griffiths in the film and here by Jack Edwards, who gets to sing the title song in praise of the stolen pig. The animal is animatronic with just his head, front legs and torso seen to move in time to the music. As Gilbert’s mother-in-law, Ann Emery gets a lot of comic mileage out of thinking that she’s to be killed and eaten, not the pig.

Much is made of the pig’s indiscriminate intestinal habits and incontinence with green smoke billowing in emphasis. There’s a representative of the meat police, Inspector Wormold, played by Adrian Scarborough like a man from the Gestapo made joyless and without appetite of any kind since he suffered German measles as a boy. He sings an airy paean to the joys of confiscating meat that’s been obtained illegally with a chorus of cops in green spotlights. The brush with which he daubs the seized cutlets is, oddly, not green, and his song’s rhymes don’t get much above “if meat is deemed unfit, they won’t be eating it.”

Most of Anthony Drewe’s lyrics are of that order with great use of the most obvious porcine related words although the podiatrist’s song has a reference to “fetid fungal growth” not often heard in stage musicals. George Stiles music is jaunty although it all starts to sound the same.

Director Richard Eyre knows how to keep a show moving and there are no slow bits. David Bamber as a snob doctor, Mark Meadows as a property owner and Ian Conningham as the local bobby join Edwards in a sneering number about how Britain has gone downhill since the welfare state and the National Health Service came in. It sounds like a rebuttal to the anti-Thatcherite themes in “Billy Elliott” on the other side of London.

In going for verve and vigor, “Betty Blue Eyes” loses the ironic charm of the original with Bennett’s clear-eyed view of England’s social strata. As a result, it feels provincial and while it should keep busloads of northern British tourists happy, it’s doubtful that overseas visitors will be similarly attracted.

Venue: Novello Theatre, London (running through Jan 28, 2012); Cast: Sarah Lancashire, Reece Shearsmith, David Bamber, Jack Edwards, Ann Emery, Mark Edwards, Adrian Scarborough, Ian Conningham; Book: Ron Cowen, Daniel Lipman, adapted from the screenplay of the film “A Private Function” by Alan Bennett; Music: George Stiles; Lyrics: Anthony Drewe; Director: Richard Eyre; Set designer: Tim Hatley; Lighting designer: Neil Austin; Sound designer: Mick Potter; Choreographer: Stephen Mear; Musical supervisor: Stephen Brooker.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photos by Michael le Poer Trench.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Harold Pinter’s ‘Moonlight’

Posted on April 13, 2011 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – The late Harold Pinter’s last play, “Moonlight”, revived for the first time in 18 years at the Donmar Warehouse, deals in disaffection and alienation, and it is difficult to warm up to.

Director Bijan Sheibani has most of the players walk out and line up at the back of the stage at the start as if to underline the artifice of what is about to unfold. Presented over 80 minutes with no interval, it’s about an ageing couple that appear to have mislaid their children. Two grown sons are off somewhere and a long-dead daughter shows up to offer ghostly laments.

Andy (David Bradley) lies in a double bed waiting to die as his wife Bel (Deborah Findley, pictured above with Bradley) sits sewing beside him. Andy complains about an unappreciated life as an authoritarian civil servant while Bel offers blithe taunts about her affairs with his best friend Ralph and his onetime mistress Maria.

Andy is angry that Bel has not persuaded their sons to visit him before he dies and there, just across the stage but very far away, are Jake (Daniel Mays) and Fred (Liam Garrigan, pictured below with Mays), two layabouts who like the sound of their own voices. A wisp of a girl, Bridget (Lisa Diveney), floats in mournfully every now and then, and Ralph and Maria drop by for a brisk and unfeeling visit.

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Pinter’s skilful technique is to not give over information that most writers would see as essential. Among the mysteries that remain are how the daughter died, and what happened to alienate the sons. That creates some suspense, but audiences know better than to expect answers from this playwright.

His gift for language remains strong, however, and the language is entertaining with several ironic laughs. Bradley’s craggy features, raspy voice and dry delivery are perfect for a man who has lost his vigor and clings faintly to the hope that his life has been worth living. Findlay has a motherly and doting air but her deceptively soft responses to her husband’s aggressive complaints and defensive declarations cut like a dagger.

Mays and Garrigan play the sons as quick-witted lads full of banter but without purpose in their existence except to spurn their mother when she telephones. Designer Bunny Christie’s sparse set, with just a bed, a cot and a couple of chairs and tables, and Jon Clark’s pinpoint lighting serve to further the alienation of everyone on stage.

The play ponders death before and after life and while it falls to Diveney as the ghost of Bridget to show there’s little reason for optimism, her lilting presence is always welcome. There’s not much light from the moon here, however, and no sunlight at all.

Venue: Donmar Warehouse, runs through May 28; Cast: David Bradley, Deborah Findley, Lisa Diveney, Daniel Mays, Liam Garrigan, Carol Royle, Paul Shelley; Playwright: Harold Pinter; Director: Bijan Sheibani; Set designer: Bunny Christie; Lighting designer: Jon Clark; Music & sound designer: Dan Jones.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photos by Johan Persson.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Terence Rattigan’s ‘Cause Celébre’

Posted on March 30, 2011 by admin

Anne-Marie Duff and Tommy McDonnell as accused murderers in ‘Cause Celébre’

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – There have been two first-rate West End productions of lesser-known plays by the late British playwright Terence Rattigan, whose centenary is this year, but the Old Vic comes a cropper with the third, an unconvincing courtroom drama titled “Cause Celébre”.

Written in the mid-1970s, first for BBC Radio and then for the stage, it is set in the mid-1930s and deals with a real life murder case that caused a major scandal at the time. A songwriter named Alma Rattenbury and her teenaged lover, George Wood, were accused of the vicious murder of her 68-year-old third husband.

Rattigan is famous for writing about upper middle-class folk with stiff upper lips – his screenplays included “The Yellow Rolls-Royce” and “The V.I.P.s”– and despite laudable intentions, his characters here are outside his comfort zone.

Thea Sharrock’s staging is outstanding with an unfussy set design by Hildegard Bechtler that switches quickly from drawing room to courtroom and vibrant lighting by Bruno Poet that rivets characters in single lights and isolates characters hauntingly.

Anne-Marie Duff

Reportedly tempted to write about the murder case for several decades, Rattigan finally got around to it and uses the device of comparing the accused with a fictional woman who becomes forewoman of the jury.

The contrast, however, appears artificial and the result is stilted in spite of the calibre of the players. Alma is written as a giddy slattern and Anne-Marie Duff (“Nowhere Boy”) plays her that way but the woman’s gaiety seems forced instead of vivacious. When young George comes looking for a job, Alma’s loyal but knowing maid (Jenny Galloway) sniffs trouble immediately.

Not only is George a strapping lad for his age, he is unpersuasively sexual. Perhaps the real boy really was, but Tommy McDonnell plays him as wooden and unappealingly thick. Prone to hysteria with a taste for hard liquor, Alma has buried one husband, divorced a second and now tolerates her ageing spouse (Oliver Coopersmith).

She’s sentimental when he’s needy but devious when she requires funds for her outings with George. On stage, it is scarcely credible that this particular woman would become so infatuated with this particular boy that over several months they would, as entered into the court record, engage in 314 acts of congress.

Edith Davenport (Niamh Cusack), on the other hand, is in the middle of a custody battle over her distant son Tony (Freddie Fox) with her estranged husband (Simon Chandler), who has admitted having affairs. Her insouciant best friend Stella (Lucy Robinson) remarks that five affairs over many years does not make him Bluebeard, notes that Edith began having headaches not long into their marriage.

When the headlines splash the murder all over the front pages, Edith joins the general condemnation of Alma and agrees with the consensus that a wicked woman had led a boy astray. Despite her declaration that she is absolutely prejudiced against the accused, she is made forewoman of the jury, which serves the playwright’s purpose in contrast but is not exactly credible. She comes gradually to understand Rattigan’s point that in a relationship whoever is the most adored holds all the power, but the revelation is not as moving as the playwright surely intends it to be.

Rattigan is much more sure-handed with the solicitors and barristers, all shrewd and clubbable, with Nicholas Jones cannily appealing as the main defense counsel. It’s no surprise than in 1930s England, it was the working-class kid who took the brunt of the blame and Rattigan acknowledges that in Stella’s comment that Alma’s affair was with a servant … “that’s the real horror!”

Venue: The Old Vic, London (running through June 11) Cast: Anne-Marie Duff, Niamh Cusack, Tommy McDonnell, Nicholas Jones, Lucy Robinson, Freddie Fox, Simon Chandler, Patrick Godfrey, Jenny Galloway, Oliver Coopersmith; Playwright: Terence Rattigan; Director: Thea Sharrock; Set designer: Hildegard Bechtler; Lighting designer: Bruno Poet; Music: Adrian Johnston; Sound designer: Ian Dickinson for Autograph

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter

Photos by Johan Persson

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THEATRE REVIEW: Lost Musicals’ ‘The Band Wagon’

Posted on March 27, 2011 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – One of the most acclaimed Broadway revues of the 1930s – “The Band Wagon” by George S. Kaufman, Arthur Schwartz and Howard Dietz – is on show in concert for the first time in Europe, presented by the Lost Musicals company, which stages neglected or forgotten works by American artists.

L to R: Tilly Losch, Fred Astaire, Adele Astaire, Frank Morgan, Helen Broderick, from the original 1931 Broadway production of The Band Wagon

L to R: Tilly Losch, Fred Astaire, Adele Astaire, Frank Morgan, Helen Broderick, from the original 1931 Broadway production of The Band Wagon

Eight elegantly dressed performers sing, act and dance a little to piano accompaniment on a bare stage in five weekend performances through April 17 in the small Lilian Baylis Studio at London’s Sadler’s Wells theater. The effect is nostalgic, charming and entertaining.

The original show starred Fred Astaire and his sister Adele (pictured below left) and ran for 200 performances on Broadway in 1931-32. Some of its songs were used in the Hollywood features “Dancing in the Dark,” with William Powell and Betsy Drake in 1949, and “The Band Wagon,” with Fred Astaire and Cyd Charisse in 1953.

The latter, a splashy and much loved Technicolor film by Vincent Minnelli is best known for an original song by composer Schwartz and lyricist Dietz titled “That’s Entertainment!” along with several of their songs from other sources, none of which were in the original revue.

Adele_320The Broadway show had some gems, however, including “Dancing in the Dark,” which is played in the Astaire film as an instrumental while Astaire and Charisse dance in Central Park. In the Lost Musicals show, Robert Finlayson sings the song while Barnaby Thompson and Clare Rickard perform an athletic and elegant pas de deux.

The Minnelli film dumped all the sketches that celebrated playwright and screenwriter Kaufman, (“The Man Who Came To Dinner,” “A Night at the Opera”) wrote and went with an original screenplay by Betty Comden and Adolph Green, but they were an essential part of the 1931 production.

Slick talk, surprise endings and cockeyed satire marked Kaufman and Dietz’s sketches but it’s no surprise they were already dated by the time the film was made in 1953. For a European audience, they smack of smart American wisecracks and a Broadway sensibility, and so do some of the songs.

The opening sequence sends up the audiences that flocked to revues at the time and thought themselves sophisticated. Elizabeth Counsell sits on the piano for a torch song, “Can’t help moanin’ ‘bout that man of mine”, while Clare Rickard sings and dances to the energetically pointless, “If You Haven’t Got Rhythm … then you haven’t got rhythm.” Vivienne Martin laments that “I never kissed a man before … before I knew his name; I never had a taste for wine … because it can’t compare with gin.”

There’s a sketch than lampoons the Old South with the Family Claghorn about to discover something outrageous about their about-to-be-married daughter: She’s a virgin! In one that mocks drawing-room murder mysteries, a police inspector identifies the perpetrator by comparing the width of his buttocks to the impression made on the seat of a chair. Another one teases Americans of the day who prefer to say “bathroom” rather than “toilet”.

It’s mildly amusing stuff and well performed, especially by Martin and James Vaughan as the inspector and the patriarch of the Claghorns. The entire company is professional and accomplished, with the songs such as “Sweet Music,” “High and Low” and “New Sun in the Sky”, all used in the “Band Wagon” film, performed brightly. Even without sets and an orchestra, the show evokes something of what Broadway was like 80 years ago.

Venue: Lilian Baylis Studio, Sadler’s Wells; Cast: Vivienne Martin, Elizabeth Counsell, James Vaughan, Barnaby Thompson, Clare Rickard, Robert Finlayson, Laura Armstrong, Callum Train; Sketches: George S. Kaufman, Howard Dietz; Music: Arthur Schwarz; Lyrics: Howard Dietz; Director: Ian Marshall Fisher; Music director: Jason Carr; Choreographer: Nick Winston.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Clifford Odets’s ‘Rocket to the Moon’

Posted on March 21, 2011 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – American playwright Clifford Odets’s 1938 play “Rocket to the Moon” raises more questions than it answers but a captivating performance by Jessica Raine (pictured top), as a young woman who is catnip for every man she meets, saves the day in the National Theatre’s revival.

The story appears initially to be about Ben Stark (Joseph Millson), an earnest but dull dentist who tries to survive in depressed economic times, and his disappointed but demanding wife Belle (Keeley Hawes, pictured below with Millson).

Her father, Mr. Prince (Nicholas Woodeson) is loaded but she won’t speak to him because of the way he treated her mother. He likes Ben, though, and has offered to finance a move from his office in a rundown office building to a better part of town but the dentist won’t move. That’s where the questions begin, and they continue when Cleo (Raine) shows up.

She wears her white uniform like a cocktail dress with no stockings and too much makeup, and it looks as if the play will be all about whether or not Ben will ride a rocket to the moon with an affair with the girl.

That is part of it, but Ben is not the only one who finds Cleo irresistible. One man, unimpressed by her intellect, calls her a moth, but in fact she’s the flame and it turns out that Odets’ real interest is in how this brilliant but naive young woman might survive surrounded by male pests.

rocket to the moon 2All the action takes place in the dental office where the depression and the heat of summer means there are very few patients. Ben indulges another dentist, Phil Cooper (Peter Sullivan) who owes three months’ rent, and knocks along with a foot doctor from down the hall, Frenchy (Sebastian Armesto) and a theatrical impresario, Willy Wax, who has an office on another floor.

Cleo likes to let her imagination run away with her with claims that she’s from a wealthy family and has visited Europe and California, and she has big ambitions to be a dancer and actress. Ben at first is intrigued by her sprightly gumption but like Frenchy – who tells her, “You pushed that jingling body in front of me” – he falls for her shimmering youth and inviting looks and personality.

It’s a mystery why Odets chose dentistry as Ben’s profession as the play makes little of it, and why Ben chooses to stay in a shabby building with no air conditioning stuck behind a big hotel remains unexplained.

It’s more important that he’s a man trapped with a bitter wife, who is now barren after losing a child, and an empty marriage, which is an affront to his rich father-in-law, who says he leads a life where every day is Monday. Odets has a good way with clever lines and when Cleo fibs about her life, Ben reassures her, “we all tell fables so we can have a little pride.”

Millson plumbs Ben’s unhappiness persuasively and Hawes adds some vulnerability to what could be a brittle role as the wife. Sullivan cuts a forlorn figure as a man so broke he sells his own blood and Woodeson makes Mr. Prince – “I am the American King Lear” – a forgivably noisy image of capitalistic brio.

Raine captures with finesse the poses of a would-be star and with endearing openness shows how Cleo’s innate decency proves unsinkable and fulfils the play’s ultimate spirit of optimism.

Venue: National Theatre, runs through June 21; Cast: Jessica Raine, Joseph Millson, Nicholas Woodeson, Keeley Hawes, Peter Sullivan, Sebastian Armesto, Tim Steed; Playwright: Clifford Odets; Director: Angus Jackson; Set designer: Anthony Ward; Lighting designer: Mark Henderson; Sound designer: John Leonard; Music: Murray Gold.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: David Eldridge’s ‘The Knot of the Heart’

Posted on March 21, 2011 by admin

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By Ray Bennett

LONDON – An engrossing story of middle-class drug addiction with a committed performance by Lisa Dillon, David Eldridge’s new play The Knot of the Heart suffers from being too middle class for its own good.

Dillon plays Lucy, a children’s television presenter who has been fired for smoking crack cocaine, and she’s still very annoyed about it. Now she’s in the garden of her mother’s posh home in North London where Mummy, as she calls her, holds the tin foil while she smokes some more.

Mummy (Margot Leicester, pictured with Dillon) is an alcoholic widow who has spoiled Lucy rotten since her father died and has been equally indifferent to Lucy’s older sister Angela (Abigail Cruttenden), who has become a tightly wound lawyer.

In a sequence of well-staged scenes on a revolving set that changes swiftly from suburban garden to hospital ward to crisis clinic and back again, Lucy descends from casual indulgence to all out addiction. The consequences pile up as she becomes broke, trades sex for drugs and suffers violence and rape.

Dillon makes no play for the audience’s sympathy as Lucy’s life worsens. She remains a spoiled brat who is outraged that simply doing what “all my friends do” has changed her life so unfairly.

Of course, it helps that Mummy has a nice house and a large savings account that she’s happy to forfeit if it means her darling Lucy gets the warm cuddle that she finds in her first injection of heroin.

Eldridge paints a vivid portrait of how easy it is for those susceptible to temptation to succumb to addiction, and Dillon portrays Lucy’s increased desperation and slow awareness with a keen grasp of what a body goes through when gripped by sensation and torn by withdrawal.

The play follows Lucy as she travels through the passages of recovery and relapse, with Kieran Bew adept as various men she encounters, including a sympathetic nurse and a helpful shrink. Cruttenden’s shrewdly observed Angela mellows during the course of the story, and she reveals the family secret that at least helps her sister see that she inherited most of her predilections.

Leicester is all warm bosom and open arms to Lucy even when her daughter’s behavior is reprehensible, although she shows that Mummy can wield a sharp stick when she’s cornered.

It’s an unblinking view of how too much love and indulgence can be as bad as none at all, and director Michael Attenborough and his players draw as much from it as Eldridge is willing to give.

The problem is that the characters are so middle class in the English sense that they don’t appear fully rounded. When Angela wishes to deride her own kind, she has no cutting edge: “I think the working class get such a bad press,” she says. “I think the middle class are so much crasser.”

The language of the mother also appears too articulate and well mannered. “I can’t see for the life of me what I’ve done wrong as a mother. How can a mother’s love be too much?” she asks. Surely, if she knows enough to ask the question, she should know the answer.

The upshot is that despite Dillon’s spare delivery in the central role, Lucy’s plight is very interesting but not exactly touching.

Venue: Almeida Theatre, runs through April 30; Cast: Lisa Dillon, Margot Leicester, Abigail Cruttenden, Kieran Bew, Sophia Stanton; Playwright: David Eldridge; Director: Michael Attenborough; Set designer: Peter McKintosh; Lighting designer: Tim Mitchell; Music and sound designer: Dan Jones.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Neil LaBute’s ‘In a Forest Dark and Deep’

Posted on March 15, 2011 by admin

In A Forest Dark and Deep by Neil Labute performed at the Vaudeville Theatre

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – Compelling performances by Matthew Fox and Olivia Williams as battling siblings make Neil LaBute’s new play “In a Forest Dark and Deep”, in its world premiere in London’s West End, more interesting than it really is.

A two-hander in which a secret is revealed slowly pits Williams as Betty, a successful intellectual, against Fox as Bobby, her redneck brother. It gives LaBute, who directs too, free rein to indulge in attacks from both sides on the other with Fox’s Bobby given most of the good, which is to say politically incorrect, lines.

The problem with the play is that over about 105 minutes without an interval it does not provide sufficient depth of character and relies heavily on the performers to make up for it. “Lost” star Fox and Olivia Williams (“The Ghost Writer”) do that skilfully and it is to their credit that interest is sustained in the fate of the pair.

Designer Soutra Gilmour provides a woodsy, book-filled set where Bobby arrives in a rain storm to answer Betty’s plea for help in emptying the cabin of books and odds and ends before a new tenant moves in.

She is an accomplished teacher with a husband and children, and he is a carpenter twice divorced. Their relationship, however, is clearly abrasive and Bobby derides his sister’s welcome as being the last call she made. It transpires gradually that he was the only one she asked. He drinks beer and comments freely with cheerful vulgarity on the cabin and its contents as Betty reveals more about the previous tenant, a young male student.

Books and magazines prompt Bobby to voice such opinions as anyone who reads the New Yorker magazine must be gay and authors such as Tolstoy and Hemingway are douche bags. The reason Betty has trouble defending herself is made apparent as more information is revealed about the previous tenant and her relationship with him.

This gives Bobby freedom to rant about her behavior as a young woman when she was sexually precocious and he had to put up with the constant gossip of men who’d been with her. There is a very faint suggestion of incestuous envy but LaBute steps away from it.

It’s more that the brother is less intellectual but clings to a moral high ground while the sister is sophisticated but has no moral compass. This theme would have been more absorbing had LaBute better illuminated the characters. The direction of the play might also have been handled more subtly as the clues provided mean that many in the audience will conclude early that it can go only in one way.

Fox makes Bobby lean and threatening, capable of violence and witheringly self-righteous but willing to forgive, and Williams gives the duplicitous Betty an earthy sexiness to go with her clever wiles that have led her down a very dangerous path. It’s not their fault that in the end it’s very hard to care.

Venue: Vaudeville Theatre, runs through June 4; Cast: Matthew Fox, Olivia Williams; Playwright, director: Neil LaBute; Set designer: Soutra Gilmour; Lighting designer: Mark Henderson; Sound designer: Fergus O’Hare.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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THEATRE REVIEW: Terence Rattigan’s ‘Flare Path’

Posted on March 14, 2011 by admin

flare path 2 x650

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – It’s hill of beans time in Terence Rattigan’s wartime drama Flare Path as three little people realize what their problems amount to in a world made crazy by nightly bombing raids as Britain fights alone against the Nazis.

Casablanca appeared a year after Rattigan wrote the play and the dilemma in his love triangle is less noble than in the Oscar-winning picture but it has just as much resonance. It’s made up of a famous movie star who wants to reclaim his former lover from the Royal Air Force bomber pilot she married on the rebound in a whirlwind romance.

James Purefoy (“Solomon Kane”) plays Peter Kyle, an English actor now a major Hollywood star who shows up at a small hotel in England to win back his love. Sienna Miller (pictured with Purefoy top, “Factory Girl”) is Patricia, an actress who fled when Kyle’s divorce was delayed and Harry Hadden-Paton is Teddy, the flyer she has married in haste.

Rattigan’s plays, including “The Winslow Boy” and “Separate Tables”, were made into films but his elegant stiff-upper-lip English style went out of favor when kitchen sink drama burst through in the 1950s.

This is the playwright’s centenary, however, and British directors have returned to his work with “After the Dance” a success at the National last year and Cause Celebre due at the Old Vic. In “Flare Path”, Tony and Olivier Award winner Trevor Nunn uses Rattigan’s insightful characterisations to create a multi-layered view of war and what it does to people.

Rattigan drew on his own experiences as a tail-gunner in World War II to illuminate the way men react to doing battle in the air and the impact it has on their loved ones. It’s no surprise that the play catches the never-say-die stoicism of the time but Nunn cleverly adds an element of hysteria to the determination to fly in the face of death and those who embrace it.

The hotel where the action takes place provides respite for pilots on active duty where they may spend a little time with their spouses. Patrica has come from London not just to visit but also to break the news to Teddy that she aims to leave him.

She is surprised when Kyle shows up, but it’s clear that their passion for each other is mutual and that she really knows nothing about the pilot she has married. Her plans, however, are disturbed when Teddy is ordered out on a desperate bombing mission and that sets a crisis in motion.

Purefoy has movie star charm to spare but he goes beyond that to portray Kyle’s vulnerability in moving scenes with Miller, who offers a penetrating study of someone torn between two impulses. Lithe and assured, Miller shows through tone of voice and the expression in her eyes how divided are her emotions.

flare path 3 x650

She has a powerful scene with Hadden-Paton as Patricia comforts the pilot who is stricken with fear over the constant peril in the air. Hadden-Paton keeps the histrionics firmly in check as Teddy breaks down and Miller provides sturdy support for his emotionalism.

The other fliers and their partners are their to provide contrast to the state of the three leads with Sheridan Smith and Mark Dexter (pictured above) outstanding as a bartender and the Polish count she has married. His mangled English provides much welcome laughter in the latter stages of the play and Nunn draws on these scenes to amplify the conundrum faced by the lovers.

Flare path is the term for the lights that guide planes on take off, and that is illustrated in a large video display above the stage enhanced by vivid lighting and sound as the bombers take off. There is a hazard, however, in that the enemy also uses the flare path to shoot down the planes as they take off. It’s a clever metaphor for the story in the play, and Nunn and his players make the most of it.

Venue: Theatre Royal Haymarket, runs through June 4; Cast: Sienna Miller, James Purefoy, Sheridan Smith, Harry Hadden-Paron, Sarah Crowden, Joe Armstrong, Matthew Tennyson, Mark Dexter, Emma Handy, Clive Wood, Jim Creighton; Playwright: Terence Rattigan; Director: Trevor Nunn; Set and costume designer: Stephen Brimson Lewis; Lighting designer: Paul Pyant; Sound designer: Paul Groothuis; Projection desifner: Jack James; Music consultant: Steven Edis.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

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