The Invention of Love at Hampstead Theatre

Hampstead Theatre is one of those places that I like to think of as somewhere that I go to regularly only to find out that I have not been there for three years (The Forest by Florian Zeller in February 22) so it was good to have an excuse to go back. The excuse came courtesy of a play by Tom Stoppard starring Simon Russell Beale.

Hampstead Theatre is quite small and from my experience of the place I knew that seats at the back are still good and so I went for Dress Circle Row C Seat 20 at £36. Frustratingly they have changed the seat numbering, there use to be just one sequence of rows A to (at least) N, so it is hard to compare with previous visits, which is the whole point of me noting seat numbers and prices.

All I knew about the play was that the subject was A E Housman, and I had forgotten that by the time that the performance day arrived.

And all I knew about A E Housman was that he wrote the poem A Shropshire Lad  which did not help as the play was about his life as a Latin scholar, which I did not know anything about.

The play started with Housman's death and took a look back at his time as a young man at Oxford University. 

There were lots of discussions about the Classics including the accuracy of the various sources and subsequent translations. I am not a Classicist but I actually found these discussions quite interesting, perhaps encouraged by recently seeing The Browning Version which played in the same area.

The students were less interesting, other then as a view on life at that time, thought there was a marked change when Wilde made a late appearance and risked stealing the show..

The Invention of Love came across as theatre for theatre purists, the construction of the play was intelligent, the staging was interesting and effective, and the cast was strong. I am not sure that it needed a big name to play the old A E Housman but I am am not going to object to seeing Simon Russell Beale on stage again.

In many ways The Invention of Love was really not my thing but the quality of the show won me over and I enjoyed it immensely.

Prism at Hampstead Theatre was wonderful theatre

The main reason that I wanted to see Prism is in the picture, Robert Lindsay, and there was plenty else to recommend it, not least my previous experiences at Hampstead.

Not sure what happened with the booking but somehow seat Q6, in the back row cost me an unbelievably low £25. Not sure what happened on the evening either as i was given the slightly better seat of P7. I only notice that now when writing this up.

Hampstead Theatre sits almost on top of Swiss Cottage underground station but going that way means going via Waterloo and that always seems wrong. Besides, there is no much walking that way so I went via the Overground and West Hampstead instead. The tube map is immensely unhelpful in that part of London as it does not follow the geography closely at all and it is only through walking around there that I have learned alternative routes.

There is not much in the immediate area of the theatre so I rely on the cafe there for food and drink. Sadly they closed the kitchens a while ago so hot food is no longer an option. Luckily I was able to find a fancy open sandwich. It was pricey but tasty and did the job. The bottle of Camden Pale helped too.

In Prism we see a former film maker, Jack, with dementia. His son, Mason, is trying to get him to write the book of his life while he can still remember it. To help he has just hired a carer to look after him and his much younger wife is there too. The action takes place in the large garage of Jack's house which has been filled with all sorts of memorabilia to try and stir Jack's memory.

Two things become apparent quickly; the extent of Jack's dementia and his love for and understanding of the art of taking a picture. The prism in the title was the innovation that allowed film to be made in good quality colour. While Jack can explain in detail how the prism worked inside the camera he could not differentiate a Vermeer from one of his own paintings.

I was a little uncomfortable at first as I do not find dementia anything to laugh at and other people were laughing at Jack's confusion (e.g. he could not find his local pub) and his constant repetition of questions. That quickly ended as we got more immersed in Jack's life, present and past.

The story was compelling and interlaced the present and the past brilliantly (rarely was an interval break better used). All of the characters were interesting, solid and presented skilfully. Robert Lindsay was fantastic as Jack but he did not steal the show as the other three were also excellent. The set did clever things that helped the story and the direction was crisp and imaginative. This was an exhibition in total theatre craft and I was extremely delighted to have witnessed it.

Prism was damn near perfect.

The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures at Hampstead Theatre

Hampstead Theatre is one of the many that I am on the mailing list for and it is only because it is a little harder to get to for me than many other theatres that I do not go there more often. The lure this time, somewhat simplistically, was the title, the play really was "The Intelligent Homosexual's Guide to Capitalism and Socialism with a Key to the Scriptures" though the theatre also used the abbreviation "iHo" and prompted the hashtag #iho.

Another lure was that Tamsin Greig was in it. I've been watching her on TV since Black Books, and still do in Episodes, and listening to her on the radio as Debbie Aldridge in the Archers for many years. I had also seen her on the stage once before, also at Hampstead.

iHo was a long play, basically three acts of an hour each separated by two intervals, and that meant an early, 7pm start. And that left little time to get there or to eat beforehand. I got round the first by leaving the office at 5pm, and believe me that is early, and around the second by having a sandwich at the theatre before the show. They used to have a restaurant there but that had been closed down and there was just the cafe that was long on drinks but short on food.

On of the reasons that I like Hampstead Theatre is that all the seats are good and so having to be somewhere near the back did not worry me at all. I ended up in L17 for £35.

The story revolved around Gus Marcantonio, a retired former trade union organiser, who lived in a New York brownstone (that he owned) with his sister and his daughter's ex-husband. He had three siblings all of whom were visiting him; his daughter and two sons were there because Gus had tried to kill himself and they were concerned that he might do so again.

You might need to take notes now. Gus's sister had been both a nun and a terrorist with Golden Path. His daughter was now married to another woman who was expecting a bay. One son was also gay and also married but he also spent a lot of time, and money, with a gay prostitute. The other son, something of the odd-one-out, was a builder and also married. That's ten main characters, no wonder it took three hours to tell this chapter of their story.

With five of the nine main characters openly gay that's the "homosexual" part of the title explained. The "capitalism and socialism" came from Gus' union background which is family had been immersed in, the "scriptures" from Gus' sister's time as a nun and the "intelligent" from the education and careers of most of the siblings and their partners.

That is a heady mix of characters and themes made for an intense and engaging play. There was so much going on that at times there were several conversations going on at once, much like a Mozart opera. Those conversations went all over the place as several big themes were kept in play, like the infidelities and not forgetting the attempted suicide.

It struck me that this was very much in the vein of an Arthur Miller play, I had seen All My Sons the previous day, with a patriarchal figure and a family troubled both by his legacy and by their own problems. I was very pleased that Michael Frayn agreed with me on that when I spoke to him briefly in the second interval

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iHo did so many things well. The stories and the characters that were at the heart of them were believable and gripping. Many big themes were touched, including a very factual look at suicide, there was a lot of human frailty and passion, and some lovely lighter moments too especially from the seen-it-all ex nun and terrorist played brilliantly by the scene stealing Sara Kestelman. I also liked the ending a lot and preferred it to Miller's because of its lack of certainty and use of a minor character to deliver the final line, a question.

The main thing that iHo did well was the acting. On the theatre's website three actors were called out, including Greig and Kestelman, and while they were undoubtably excellent they were but three among nine and all ten had plenty of time in the spotlight and all ten shone when they had to. The eleventh only had a cameo role and that was excellent too as she described how to commit suicide in a wonderful deadpan and practicable way.

iHo was magnificent and I loved every one of the 180 minutes of it.

Reasons to be Happy at the Hampstead Theatre

Having rediscovered the Hampstead Theatre with Rabbit Hole I was quickly back there to see Reasons to be Happy. I had chosen to see this because it was written by Neil Labute and I had enjoyed his In a Forest Dark and Deep and The Shape of Things. Both were intelligent and disturbing.

I repeated my pre-theatre ritual from my previous visit as that had worked so well. I walked to Swiss Cottage (which is where the theatre is) by following the Regent's Canal and then crossing Primrose Hill. This was a pretty walk and took an ideal 45 minutes. I had booked a table downstairs again, or rather I thought that I had but I could not find one with my name on it so I took one of the few unclaimed ones, an advantage of being early. Their kitchen was closed, they had warned me of that when I made my table booking (!), and so I went for an artisan sandwich - luckily one of the three options was vegetarian (but not vegan). I also had some cake which I justified with the long walk there. I would have had a beer too but they admitted that they were not cool enough to have any craft beers brewed in a Hackney lockup and they had run out of the only ale that they did, Coopers.

The small theatre was set out in its normal form, that is with no seats at the sides of the stage, and I went for a seat in the area they call the Stalls Arcade which is just behind the front stalls. My seat, L19, cost £35 and had an excellent view. It was comfortable too. There is a lot to be said for new theatres.

The set was simple yet clever. The container opened and rotated to create the few settings that were required. Not that the settings, or the movements between them, were that important as this was a play about people and the things that they said to each other.

The simple premise was that a couple had drifted apart and gone their separate ways. The man had subsequently started a relationship with a friend of his former partner which she found hard to cope with. The new woman, in turn, had thrown her husband out for drunken and abusive behaviour.

The crux of the play was the relationship the first man had with the two women and this, sort of, developed into him having to make a choice between them. Each option came with implications far beyond who he lived with and there was the tricky job of trying to resolve the separate aspirations of each of them.

The fourth man (played by Warren Brown who is famous with most people for being in Luther but familiar with me for being in Grownups, the follow-on to Two Pints...) was a blue-collar distraction in a white-collar contest which gave a different perspective to the main story.

I say main story, but really this was four stories with each of the four characters looking for happiness, hence the title of the play, with varying degrees of understanding of what was required to achieve this and varying degrees of success.

Compared to the (few) other Neil LaBute plays that I had seen this did not have the I-did-not-see-that-coming plot twist at the end, though there were plenty of little twists along the way, like a pregnancy and other things that would be spoilers if I mentioned them.

Given that the play was all about the four characters and their feelings for each other this was heavy with emotion and while it was thoroughly engaging it was quite draining too. Or, in other words, the interval and the chance to grab an ice-cream were most welcome!

Reasons to be Happy was full of well crafted dialogue that was delivered well by all of the cast (Lauren O'Neil's Steph was the one that I had the most sympathy for) while the stage design skillfully created the spaces for this to happen.

Rabbit Hole at the Hampstead Theatre covered a painful subject with sympathy and skill

Having been to Hampstead Theatre three times in fairly short succession it somehow dropped off my radar a little, few plays there caught my eye while plays at other theatres did. What brought me back was a Pulitzer Prize winning play with a good cast, notably Claire Skinner the mum in Outnumbered.

I also like the theatre as a facility and welcomed a reasonable excuse to go back there.

As always, I left the detailed planning until much nearer the time and I was delighted at how well that worked. I like to have somewhere to eat lined up for each regular theatre and had yet to find one for the Hampstead. I looked at what they themselves did and discovered that they do main meals, with two vegetarian options, in addition to the snacks that I knew they did.

They also did table bookings so I booked one for 6:15pm reasoning that even with slow service there would be no problem in finishing in time for the performance at 7:30pm. Then I looked at the map and discovered that I could walk to Swiss Cottage in 45 minutes from the Kings Cross office so that worked out spot-on too.

The table turned out to be on the lower level which I did not know existed. I was one of the first there but it quickly filled up and proved the necessity of booking. I've already booked for my next visit in March. I went for the mushroom risotto which did the job nicely. As did the cake, coffee and beer that I also had.

Hampstead Theater has a flexible configuration and this time the stage was thrust forward with seats on three side of the protruding section. I was in the front-row on the left side. only a couple of metres away from the sofa in the living part of the open-plan house.

The play opened with two sisters talking in the kitchen. They were very different characters, one was a steady housewife and the other, for example, had just had a small fight in a bar over a man.

It was a funny opening to a play that had several moments of humour, mostly from the irreverent attitude of the younger sister, but at its core this was a dark play.

The reason for that darkness emerged quickly, the older sister had lost a child. Her four year old son had run into the road following a dog and had been run over. The rest of the play was about the aftermath of that incident and how everybody responded to it.

Completing the main cast was the older sister's husband, Howie, and their mother, Kat. Howie was played by Tom Goodman-Hill who the Hampstead Theatre website tells me appeared in Mr Selfridge, which meant nothing to me. If they had mentioned that he also starred in Humans then I would have been far more interested!

The story moved along slowly, emotionally and painfully as any story that starts with the death of a child probably should. This sadness was intruded on by other people who brought in humour and some good news in to the mix. To complicate things further there was more sadness (another death) and somebody else seeking reconciliation. It was an emotional mess that we were asked to swim through.

Making it an rewarding effort to witness the pain was the excellent acting, especially from the two stars Claire Skinner and Tom Goodman-Hill. Claire looked to be in tears at the end because of the emotional turmoil she had just been through, and that is always a sign of good acting. The only minor  distraction was their American accents that took some getting used to simply because I had not expected them to sound like that.

Rabbit Hole demanded my attention throughout and repaid me for that with a story that gripped me with its depth and uncertainty.

Hysteria at the Hampstead Theatre

Hysteria at the Hampstead Theatre promised much but failed to deliver most of it.

The theatre itself is one of my favourites as it has the unusual combination of being small and intimate and also very comfortable when the former normally means wooden benches and the later means something large in the West End. And a good theatre does not need much to attract me to it and this time the key words were "Sigmund Freud", "Salvador Dalí", "Antony Sher" and "farce".

The show was popular enough and I got a seat in the very back row but it is a small well-designed theatre and the view was fine.

A large chunk of what followed was farce, and passably funny farce too. What worked less well was having Freud as the lead. For example, in one scene Freud carried a model of a large penis as if it was his own which I thought was a bit lame and definitely not in character.

The second theme came via the naked woman hiding in the bathroom who, it turned out, knew Freud's work very well and she challenged him on some of it and how he had changed his mind.

It was an interesting theme but an odd one to include in a farce.

The third theme came with the introduction of Dali which gave an excuse to add some surreal elements, such as the famous melting clocks. I found this less interesting than the other themes and it seemed a cheap excuse to take the farce in to the surreal.

There were some good ideas in the play but the themes clashed rather than complimented and there were too many obvious cheap jokes in the farce. There were plenty of funny moments and, overall, Hysteria was entertaining. However, it just had too many flaws to be anything more than that.

The Taming of the Shrew at Hampstead Theatre

I could have gone to the Rose in Kingston to see Propeller, where I first encountered them last year in the excellent The Winter's Tale, but Hampstead Theatre told me that they were touring first and I had already booked to see them there before the Rose let me know that they were going there too.

The big big attraction of Propeller is that they present Shakespeare sympathetically to the original performances with an all male cast, bawdy humour and direct interaction with the audience.

The attraction of Hampstead Theatre is that it is well designed, cosy and has good facilities. The design means that all the seats have good views, the cosiness means being close to the stage and immersed in the action, and the good services mean a decent coffee and a slice of cake beforehand.

This was only my second visit to this theatre so the seating arrangements still needed some figuring out and as the front row of the circle was taken I went for the mezzanine level behind the stalls and had an excellent view.

The Taming of the Shrew is an out-and-out comedy, provided you ignore the heavily outdated attitude to women that it portrays, i.e. women are submissive to their husbands to the extent to being subservient.

The large part of The Taming of the Shrew is a play within a play where a drunken rascal is convinced by his friends that he is really a lord who play this trick on him in revenge for his behaviour. This is a familiar Shakespeare ploy as are the disguises with the master and servant swapping roles.

Propeller really understand Shakespeare and they bring the story to life in a way that studying the play at school never did. It is rich, playful and a great deal of fun. The laughs come thick and strong with the humour pulled from the script with excellent acting, with top marks to the man playing Katherina the shrew, and brilliant staging that made full use of the whole cast and a few simple props.

The Taming of the Shrew was a truly wondrous performance. This is how Shakespeare should be done.

Longing at the Hampstead Theatre

My first visit to the Hampstead Theatre was prompted by the names Greig, Glen and Chekov.

Tamsin Greig has been in many good things including Black Books, Love Soup, Green Wing and The Archers. Iain Glen is now a major star thanks to Game of Thrones. Chekhov wrote a few classic plays, all of which I like.

Hampstead Theatre is bit of a star too. Built in the sixties it is comfortable and well laid out. The auditorium seats 300 people but still feels intimate and cosy, and there is a bright welcoming reception area with a cafe.

The theatre is also conveniently placed next to Swiss Cottage underground station and that is not too far from the cutely named Finchley Road & Frognal station on the London Overground, where I arrived from Richmond.

Longing is something of a cheat but an acceptable one. Chekhov wrote only a few plays but dozens of short stories and Longing is the merger of two of these. The joins are obvious, i.e. there are clearly two stories being told,  but they are sewn together neatly and effectively.

In familiar Chekhov territory we find a Russian country estate that has fallen on hard times.and he family face ruin, largely due to the husband's unwise investments. Tasmin Greig, a doctor (another Chekhov regular), is visiting the family and they are joined by Iain Glen another childhood friend who is now a successful Moscow lawyer. The family hope that he can find some way out of their predicament.

He tries to help and while he does so feelings develop between him and two of the girls. The possible love story between Tasmin and Iain is the main story.

The summer house Glen is living in needs painting and so we are introduced to the two men whose job this is. One is a young man who is entitled to a higher station in life but who wants to live as a labour and to do proper work.

He is thwarted in this by being engaged to the coarse daughter of a newly-rich man (John Sessions) who intends to buy the estate.

The young man discovers that one of the daughters heard some of his poetry once and he begins to think that perhaps his impending marriage is not what he wants. This relationship is the second story.

The two stories share the theme and Longing is a good summary of that.

This is Chekhov so we get lots of examples of the tensions between the classes, town and country, and new and old money. What is missing though is the expected gravitas of decline. Indeed we get the opposite and the financially inept husband is cheery throughout. Like Billy Bunter he is always expecting something to turn up.

I liked the play a lot. Not as much as a genuine Chekhov but quite a lot none the less. What I liked even more was the acting. The two stories required a few strong characters to carry them and this it had. Everybody in the cast played their part very well and the rousing reception from the sold-out house was well deserved.

Longing was well thought out and delivered. Everything from the theatre to the set to the direction to the acting worked and worked well. The script was good too, it was just a shame that it had the Chekhov name to try to live up to.