Tag Archives: Royal Court Theatre Upstairs

Cuttin’ It

Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London (****)

© David Sandison, Tsion Habte (Iqra) and Adelayo Adedayo (Muna)

© David Sandison, Tsion Habte (Iqra) and Adelayo Adedayo (Muna)

As one of the taboos only recently brought fully into the light, FGM (female genital mutilation) counts pretty high. For a long time, everyone pussy-footed around raising it for fear of causing offence to other cultures and their traditions. Continue reading

Human Animals

Human Animals (Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs), London (****)

© Helen Maybanks, Ian Gelder (John)

© Helen Maybanks, Ian Gelder (John)

Scotland has a fantastic tradition for new writing and writers. Stef Smith is just the latest, a double award-winner for Swallow and the text for Cora Bissett’s powerful essay on human trafficking, Roadkill.

Smith has also been part of the Royal Court’s Young Writers Group. Human Animals bears many of its distinctive legacies: criss-crossing narratives, succinct, elliptical dialogue.

Smith’s sights this time are on something as urgent as human trafficking. The human animal and our endless capacity for destruction.

There’s a lot of it about at present as artists try to alert us to imminent dangers. Director Hamish Pirie and designer Camilla Clarke make the point as soon as we enter the Court’s Upstairs space – Clarke’s perspex reflecting the actors as if specimens in a zoo.

Environment and climate change as the pressing issue of our time has become Vicky Featherstone’s abiding theme during her Royal Court tenure. Whilst Caryl Churchill’s recent Escaped Alone occupied the theatre’s main stage a couple of months ago, Smith’s apocalyptic vision (somewhat mirroring Churchill’s Far Away) sounds a dire warning about the catastrophes awaiting our meddling and effects on Nature.

Remembering perhaps the funeral piles of cattle corpses during the foot and mouth epidemic, Smith sets about showing Nature – birds, especially pigeons and foxes – turning on each other and us, and our response. Destroy in order to preserve – a timely metaphor for the current political climate. Create enough fear and leave the human animal to do the rest. Turn on itself.

&Helen Maybanks; Si (Sargon Yelda)

&Helen Maybanks; Si (Sargon Yelda)

Smith’s villain of the piece, Si, works in what he calls `chemical distribution’ and looks to be making a financial killing as society collapses around him: homes and parks get burnt, a state of emergency gathers pace as relationships fall apart.

© Helen Maybanks, Stella Gonet (Nancy), Lisa (Lisa McGrillis)

© Helen Maybanks, Stella Gonet (Nancy), Lisa (Lisa McGrillis)

Smith transmits the mayhem cleverly through the tensions expressed in parallel personal lives – Stella Gonet’s widowed mother and her activist daughter, their neighbour, John and his odd pub drinking pal, Sargon Yelda’s smiling Si and Natalie Dew and Ashley Zhangazha’s innocent young married couple.

© Helen Maybanks, Natalie Dew (Alex), Ashley Zhangazha (Jamie)

© Helen Maybanks, Natalie Dew (Alex), Ashley Zhangazha (Jamie)

There is hope at the end of Smith’s dark tunnel; Nature and kindness do reassert themselves. But Pirie and Smith make it a violent and tense, touch-and-go journey.

Human Animals runs at the Royal Court Theatre to June 18, 2016

Review first published in Reviewsgate,

May 2016

 

 

Yen

Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs (****)

© Richard Davenport; Bobbie (Jake Davies), Alex Austin (Hench)

© Richard Davenport; Bobbie (Jake Davies), Alex Austin (Hench)

Yen is an old word, not often heard these days. My mother used to use it as in `oh, I had such a yen for…’

In Anna Jordan’s Yen, it’s a short form and family nick-name for Jenny, a bright and shining star who enters the dark, festering world of Hench and his brother Robbie, living feral lives dominated by violent video games and porn. Hench and Robbie are still only youngsters, teenagers.

Yen comes to also stand for, as in my mother’s definition, something yearned for, desired – and in Hench’s case, just out of reach, barely comprehensible and unable to properly articulate.

It’s a sense of love and tenderness. And Jen/Yen’s ability to break through Hench and Robbie’s defensive, armour-plated roughness is something to behold.

© Richard Davenport  Annes Elwy (Jenny)

© Richard Davenport
Annes Elwy (Jenny)

No wonder Yen was a winner of the increasingly coveted Bruntwood new-writing prize (this is the second prize-winner to have appeared in London this month; Chris Urch’s The Rolling Stone is also currently in town at Richmond’s Orange Tree: see previous review).  It’s a play that depresses and moves by turns, a veritable roller-coaster of an experience but one that leaves you admiring Jordan’s empathy for a world of such disorder, crying out for social intervention.

For Yen is, after all, a brutal, intensive course in maternal neglect – blame by implication rather than spelt out. We see Hench and Robbie’s Mum – the diabetic, often drunken Maggie – appearing occasionally in their lives. But mostly the two boys are left on their own, victims of Maggie’s chaotic life.

© Richard Davenport. Sian Breckin (Maggie)

© Richard Davenport.
Sian Breckin (Maggie)

The consequences, Jordan shows, are devastating and violent involving bed-wetting, canine murder and rape amongst them.

But interwoven into this mayhem, she also injects beauty, innocence and hope before stamping them out in a play that for all its reflection of the inarticulate in our society is eloquence personified in showing the social waste of dysfunctional families who’ve slipped through the net.

Ned Bennett, director of the also recently acclaimed Pomona has, curiously, edited Jordan’s original text, cutting a whole scene regarding Maggie and her sense of `family’.

Nonetheless, overall, infinitely touching, Yen still emerges as a mournful, powerful and touching rebuke quite stunningly performed by its young cast.

© Richard Davenport. Annes Elwy (Jen), Jake Davies (Bobbie), Alex Austin (Hench)

© Richard Davenport. Annes Elwy (Jen), Jake Davies (Bobbie), Alex Austin (Hench)

Yen plays Upstairs at the Royal Court to Feb 13, 2016
Review first published for Reviewsgate, January 2016

 

You For Me For You

Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs, London (****)

© Tristram Kenton

© Tristram Kenton

Director Richard Twyman is something of a specialist when it comes to international plays. His previous one in this theatre was his sensitive handling of Palestinian writer, Dalia Taha’s delicate Fireworks, covering the ongoing Palestinian-Israeli conflict. Continue reading

God Bless the Child

Royal Court Jerwood Theatre Upstairs.

It’s hard to know which is the biggest star of God Bless The Child. Designer Chloe Lamford whose primary schoolroom is an inspired replica down to the strip lighting, children’s wall drawings and dangly decorations; Vicky Featherstone’s rumbling, threatening production; the eight-year-olds who make up Class 4N. Or the adult cast.
Continue reading