The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! at Jermyn Street Theatre

With a worrying number of versions of A Christmas Carol on at theatres across London it was nice to find some different seasonal fare to savour.

I like Jermyn Street Theatre for various reasons and that was a strong pull in this case. I was also familiar with the tale of Madame Bovary, having listened to an audio drama of it a couple of times I knew that while it is a tragedy there was a lot of good humour along the way.

Some things change and some things change. It used to be a moderate walk from my office in Kings Cross to Jermyn Street and it is now a pleasant longer walk of just under 20km. The restaurant above the theatre used to be a nice Italian and now it is an interesting African called Papa L’s Kitchen. The walk and the food were an excellent start to the evening.

The play opened towards the end of the story with Madame Bovary in the pharmacist getting arsenic to kill herself only to find that a couple of rat catchers had just bought it all. We were told that this was a framing device to enable the tragedy to be turned into a comedy.

We then went to the true beginning with the first encounter between Emma Rouault and local doctor Charles Bovary, and the story took a familiar route from there.

A familiar route but one twisted into great humour, the seeds of which were already in the text. Milking the humour for all it was worth was a fabulous cast of just four playing all the roles with melodrama, panache and a flamboyant array of props and costumes.

It was a lot of fun every step of the way.

Then there was the ending. I will not spoil it but the tragedy/farce dilemma was resolved in an unexpected and very satisfactory way.

The long walk and the fine meal set the evening up well and The Massive Tragedy of Madame Bovary! exceeded that build up, it was the ice cream with glacé fruit piled lovingly on top of the cake.

Beckett Triple Bill at Jermyn Street Theatre was delightfully strange

January 27 is my birthday so, even more than usual, I got to decide what we saw that night and I chose Beckett Triple Bill at Jermyn Street Theatre partially because it was Beckett and partially because it was on at Jermyn Street Theatre.

And being my birthday meant that I could justify eating at Getti which is directly above the theatre. Getti is a posh enough restaurant without being ridiculously expensive, which is could be given the neighbourhood. The bill was under £70 for two courses and an extravagant aperitif each.

Completing the financials, my theatre seat Row A  Seat 3 was just £25.

The view from my seat was almost exactly that in the poster, without the stars.

The evening consisted of three short plays, Krapp’s Last Tape, Eh Joe and The Old Tune. These were plays with few voices, only four across the three pieces.

In Krapp's Last Tape an old man is making a recording of his past year and in preparation for this he plays some of his former ones which, in turn, refer to earlier tapes. It was one voice but from different times.

"Eh Joe" was said several times by a female voice speaking inside another old man's head. She recalled some of his previous actions, including her murder. Whether it was a true story or not did not matter, what did was the sneering tone and the phrasing.

Finally, in The Old Tune, two more old men met for the first time in several years and began a strange conversation on shared banalities with each correcting the other on the details.

It is easy to jump to Waiting For Godot when thinking about Beckett and this case the jump is justified as all three plays carried that same sense of absurd whimsy; conversations of no import that go nowhere and do so delightfully.

Beckett Triple Bill was a great birthday present to buy for myself.

The Last of the De Mullins at Jermyn Street Theatre was powerful and charming too

I had originally planned to see The Last of the De Mullins on 4 February and I had a ticket for that evening ready to use but work kept me in Reading until around 11pm which was just a little too late for the theatre. Work were reasonable and let me claim back the money for the unused ticket but that still left the problem of finding the time to actually see the play.

The solution came with the addition of a Thursday matinee performance just a few days before the end of the run. Even that was not straightforward and I ended up on the day waiting for the production team to return one of their complimentary tickets, which they did at lunchtime, just a couple of hours before the sold out show started.

In anticipation of this I had come into the Central London office that day and was able to get to Jermyn Street for the 3:30pm start. I walked all the way from Kings Cross and went via Liberty to collect some furnishing fabric that I had ordered. It may have been a hastily rescheduled plan but it came together nicely.

Claiming the last seat in the house meant that I was not in the front row, for the first time I believe. Instead I was in the second (back) row of the odd little row of seats in the back-left corner as viewed from the stage. This was almost a bar stool type seat to allow people there to look over the heads of those in front. I was grateful for any seat that I could get but this one was actually quite good and I had a clear view of the stage.

The Last of the De Mullins was a period piece from 1908 and took as its theme the then growing independence of women who had been used to doing whatever their fathers told them to do, including who to marry.

Janet had left the comfortable family home a few years ago having become pregnant outside of marriage by a man she would not reveal. The split between her and her family was very deep but not quite completely broken and she came back, at her mother's request, when her father was very ill.

The relationships remained very frosty but there was some sign that time had healed some wounds. The father was especially pleased to see Janet's son, now eight years old. The boy had grown up well and the father lacked an heir.

Complications came from Janet's sister who was less forgiving and a chance encounter with the boy's father who was about to be married.

The play focused on the cosy countryside life and the role that Janet could play in it if only she would agree to move back and carry on as before. The father thought that this was the obvious thing to do, Janet had other ideas.

The many relationships involved made this a charming story and it could have ended sweetly if not for the powerful independence of Janet, masterfully played by Charlotte Powell (who I had also liked in The Duchess of Malfi at the Southwark Playhouse). In a play about personal relationships the acting really mattered and the cast were strong throughout.

I was also delighted to discover that the play was set in Dorset. I think the actual village was fictional but Weymouth got lots of mentions and some of the key historical events had happened there.

The Last of the De Mullins easily managed to defy its considerable years and it had both a good story to tell and an important message to give.

Exploring morals with The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith at Jermyn Street Theatre

The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith looked like the sort of thing that I ought to see and Jermyn Street Theatre seemed the sort of place that I ought to see it in, so I went to see it.

Its main appeal was that it was like watching the Orange Tree Theatre playing away from home and, as a proud season-ticket holder, it was almost my duty to go.

The likeness between the two theatres came from both the play and the cast.

The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith was written by Arthur Wing Pinero in 1985 and addressed the morals of that time. The Orange Tree has put on a few Pinero plays and the last one that I went to see was The Thunderbolt in 2010.

Two of the cast I recognised from the Orange Tree, having seen both Christopher Ravenscroft (pictured) and Robert Benfield play there several times. Robert was also in the last thing that I say at Jermyn Street, the wonderful The White Carnation.

The shocking situation that the play describes to us is that of a young politician with a promising career who has given up his wife and life in London for a Bohemian life in Italy with (the notorious) Agnes Ebbsmith. They talk of a future together where they live proudly unmarried and writing books.

Disrupting this dream is the call from home.

His uncle, the Duke of St Olpherts, who was played wonderfully by Christopher Ravenscroft, arrives on a mission to bring young Lucas back where he would maintain an empty marriage for the sake of his political career.

Agnes is pulled in a different direction by people she met in Italy, a widower and her priest brother. They are both shocked by the situation and sympathetic to the people involved. They develop their own plans for revolving the crisis.

Other people arrive, many discussions about the future are held, several people have big decisions to make and gradually a resolution, of sorts, is reached. Nobody gets what they really wanted but everybody can accept the compromises that have been arrived at. It could almost be seen as a happy ending though several dreams are lost along the way.

The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith is all about gentle conversations and a great deal is revealed about all of the characters, their pasts, their motivations and their aspirations. Events move slowly but forcefully. It is a play creamy rich in drama while remaining refreshingly modest in action.

There are some lighter moments too and the two servants in Agnes and Lucas' household were often at the centre of those. They also had lovely uniforms with little touches of decoration that brightened the stage whenever they were on.

This was an assured and confident performance that made the drama interesting and relevant despite being based on the moral standards of another age.

The Notorious Mrs Ebbsmith was an immensely entertaining play that dealt with a difficult subject with sensitivity and realism. More like that please.

White Carnation at Jermyn Street Theatre

Somehow I booked The White Carnation without realising that it was about the supernatural, or I did and then I forgot, and so it was a surprise to discover that it was when the theatre posted an update on Facebook the day that I went to see it.

Discovering, or rediscovering, that it was a supernatural thriller was exciting. This is a genre that does not make the stage much there days, this play is sixty years old, so this show was a little special for that.

Actually it was special for all sorts of reasons.

I loved the story because it was unusual (and not just for its genre) and I could not see the end coming until it came. It was a neat and very satisfactory ending too.

The other nice surprise was that I knew two of the cast from the Orange Tree Theatre. One of these was Robert Benfield who I shared a few words with at the Richard Rogers exhibition last year and I was pleased to see him in one of the main roles.

I am still not sure why the Jermyn Street Theatre has allocated seating when none of the other theatres that I go to that sort of size. The plus side of this is that I was able to stay in the local pub (the rather nice Three Crowns) until just before the play started. The downside was that I had a seat in the second row rather than the first, though that was by no means a problem.

The story starts at a Christmas dinner party given by a wealthy stockbroker during the last war. He goes to see some guests off on their way home only for a sudden gust of wind to close the door to the house behind him. He is unable to rouse anybody in the house so he breaks in by smashing a window and he discovers that all the Christmas things are inexplicable absent.

A policeman arrives to investigate lights in the house and we learn that the house has been empty for several years since the family living there had all been killed by a flying bomb. The stockbroker is now a ghost.

He takes some convincing of this but eventually concedes that this is true.

His presence then causes all sorts of problems, not least for the Council who want to knock down the house and redevelop the area.

Priests and ghost hunters are consulted in an attempt to get the ghost to disappear.

There is a lot of humour but this is not Blithe Spirit and there is a edge to it too especially when we learn more about the ghost's past.

The play is a series of dialogues with the ghost receiving a number of different visitors each of whom has a different perspective on the situation from wanting to exploit him on the freak circuit to trying to understand why he came back.

Finally a visit from a neighbour puts the final piece in the jigsaw and the story comes to a natural and moving conclusion.

I enjoyed the whole thing immensely. I loved the characters from the calm ghost to the exasperated Home Office official, the mix of the light and the dark, the pace and ending of the story, and the simple but atmospheric set.

White Carnation was as elegant and as charming as a ghost in a dinner jacket.

Anton Chekhov's Vaudevilles at the Jermyn Street Theatre

I nearly missed this treat.

I got an email promoting something else at the Jermyn Street Theatre and when I went on to their website I found this. The Anton Chekhov name would have been enough for me to book it and this also had Michael Frayn's name too. I feel a sense of local loyalty towards Frayn, he lives just up the road and went to the same local school as my younger son, and he writes good plays as well.

I was a little surprised that the theatre had allocated seating (it did not the last time that I was there) but pleased that my seat was in the middle of the front row (A5). Even more so as the Indian meal took longer than hoped/expected and I did not get to the theatre until about ten minutes before the show started by which time the place was pretty full.

This was a different Chekhov from the one that I am used to that usually ends with a gun shot off stage and the former peasants moving in to the family mansion.

This was funny. Very funny and funnily done.

There were, I think, four short plays and two short stories.

In the first a famous writer was interrupted by a woman who had written a play that she wanted to read to him. All of it. Then. He made excuses but she was determined and refused to leave or to let him leave on any of his pressing appointments. He got more and more desperate and finally resorted to extreme measures.

In another a man inherited a country estate (familiar Chekhov territory) and went to visit his new neighbour only to find her a widow dressed in mourning and determined to spend the rest of her life in her house, wearing black and thinking about her husband, even though we learnt that he had not been good or faithful to her. The visitor is attracted by her feisty determination to maintain her way of life, falls in love with her and proposes.

In the final play, a man called to ask a young lady to marry him having first cleared it with her father. Before he proposed they made small talk about their respective estate and he said that he had plans for a wood only for her to say that the wood was part of her estate. They had a furious row. Then they had another furious row over whose dog was the better. The father then appears, the lady learnt the purpose of the man's visit, her mood softened and she agreed to his proposal. And then they rowed about the dogs again.

It was all very charming and wonderfully acted. I laughed a lot at the pig-headed and pathetic characters and their silly words.

Good Morning Midnight at Jermyn Street Theatre

As usual I cannot recall why I chose to go to the show, or even how I found out about it in the first place, and also as usual, it proved to be a good decision at the time whatever the reason for it.

This was my first time at the Jermyn Street Theatre and it was rather hard to find! There was a small door with steps leading down to a basement in a building that was surrounded in scaffolding. I walked all the way around it before I found the way in on the second pass.

The theatre is squeezed in to a small and unusual space, as such theatres often are. I was reminded of Pentameters and Trafalgar Studios. The stage is wide and not very deep. The seating slopes back from the long side and a little around the side.

The stage was set simply with six bar stools across the back. These and the lighting gave the impression of a night club. This soon showed itself to be appropriate.

The show opens with a radio DJ welcoming us to her programme that runs from Midnight through to morning. The music selection that follows is jazzy.

The six dancers, three men and three women, take their places on the stools and the dance begins. Each song brings a new dance.

From the beginning the dancing is energetic and raunchy. The wide stage is used to good effect as the dancers throw themselves, and each other, with the passion and fury of the late stages of lust. There is plenty of lifting and carrying too. At times it feels more like a circus act or a gym session set to music than a dance, and I mean that in a good way.

Sitting in the front row was to be immersed in this frenetic activity and almost to intrude is someone else's foreplay. There are some undies on show, coloured knickers for the women and grey boxers for the men, but this is naked lust without the nakedness. You have to go somewhere posh like Sadler's Wells for full nudity.

There are some lighter and quieter moment too, such as when one of the men fell asleep sucking his thumb.

My abiding memories are of exuberance, energy and funky jazz. These are good memories to have.