How to Fight Loneliness at Park Theatre

That I have a tag on this blog for Neil Labute (labute) is a good clue that I like his plays. I also have a Google Alert set for "labute london" and it was that which alerted me to the first UK production of How to Fight Loneliness at Park Theatre.

I got in quickly and secured a front row seat (A7) for £29.5.

I made the most of the opportunity of going back to Finsbury to get a few steps and a few new roads in before the show. I caught the Mildmay line to Hampstead Heath and walked from there.

I arrived in good time to eat beforehand which was just as well as two of the places that I had eaten at pre-theatre there before were closed, probably permanently.

Luckily Park Theatre has a bar that does pizzas and while the range is small they do an Artichoke & Olive (£12.45) which did the job. The pint of beer that I his with it was good too. And having pre-booked seats (unlike in their smaller space) I was able to sit in the upstairs bar area enjoying both until summoned to take my seat.

Anything I might have known about the play beforehand was forgotten and I took my seat ready to discover what was going on.

We meet a young couple, Brad and Jodie (thirty-something I would guess), at home fretting about an expected visitor and whether the right food and drinks etc. were available but also whether they themselves were ready for the meeting.

Soon Tate arrives and the situation becomes clear to us.

Jodie has been on several rounds of chemotherapy and now wants to die before she becomes frail and bedridden.

Brad had agreed to this plan reluctantly and wants Jodie to change her mind and live.

Tate has been chosen as a possible means of assisting her death, for a reason that is explained later.

And that is kind of it, the three of them talk about whether the deed should be done, how it could be done and whether Tate is the right person to do it.

Except, of course, that is not it.Neil Labute plays are filled with meaningful dialogue that usually gets dark and twisty, as it does here.

It is hard to describe the play as fun but it is thoroughly fascinating and engaging. It also gives some perspectives on assisted dying that are relevant given the current debate on this in the UK.

Making the dialogue work was a strong cast in which Morgan Watkins excelled as Tate. I loved his restlessness, his constant movement and frequent adjustments to his cap and jacket.

The staging worked well too with the scene shown above acting as both a living room and a beach with just a few prop changes.

How to Fight Loneliness is very much in the established Neil Labute mould so if you like his other work you will like this. I loved it!

Some Girl(s) at Park Theatre was thoughtful, classy and surprising

I was always going to be keen to see Some Girl(s) because it is by Neil LaBute and even more so because it was on at the Park Theatre which is one of my very favourites. As always the problem was finding the time and I used a comics signing which had brought me into London on a Saturday as an opportunity to see a matinee performance.

The signing finished later than I hoped and there was a mandatory detour through Liberty to check the end of sale offers (no more shirts for me sadly) and so I did not get to the theatre until 2:45pm for a show that started at 3:15 and without a ticket. Luckily I was able to get one and it must have been one of the last as the theatre was happily packed.

I also helped myself to a coffee, a humus and avocado roll and a beer before joining the queue for Park90 early enough to get a seat in the front row.

The set was a hotel room in Seattle, the first of four that we would see. In this room was a thirty-something man, Guy, waiting for a visitor. This was Sam, a woman the same age.

We soon learned that they had been a couple at High School but he had left her. He had come back after fifteen years to make amends for his past.

Of course it was not as simple as that and in their crisp dialogue we learned that she had gone on to have the sort of life, married to a local guy in a steady average job, that he was scared of and had run away from (his excuse).

As their conversation continued we found out more about both of them and things got more complicated as we did so. Typical LaBute.

Next we moved to Chicago. It took a while to model the new hotel room and we watched an aerial flypast of Chicago as we did so. It was good to see the Mies van der Rohe tower that I visited when working at IBM in the 90s.

Joining Guy in this room was Tyler. They had had a very physical relationship back in the day and she was still living that lifestyle with no regrets, just the opposite in fact. After the why are you here? part of the conversation was out of the way Tyler seemed keen to carry on where they had left off, despite being told by Guy that he was engaged. That scene was left ambiguously as the lights dropped for the end of the first half and I went out for another beer.

We came back to Boston and to Lindsay. She was an older (only slightly) married woman who Guy had an affair with when they were both teaching at Harvard. They had been discovered after two terms (semesters) and Guy had fled leaving Lindsay to suffer the consequences. This time the tables were slightly turned and when Lindsa met Guy her husband, who had stayed with her, knew all about it.

Finally, Los Angeles and Bobbi, the girl who not so much got away as was abandoned by mistake. Perhaps Guy's attraction to her twin sister had something to do with it. More crisp dialogue, more revelations.

Then, in a minor altercation, a plant pot fell and the plot twisted sharply and unexpectedly. I was expecting a twist but had not seen that one coming. This was followed by more explanations, more regrets and another surprise.

The four acts fizzed past and somehow it was quickly 5:30pm. The intervening time was consumed by the dialogue which demanded close attention and repaid that investment many times over with it's fluidity, honesty and the little barbs that revealed more about the players and their pasts. These were people that I cared about and I wanted to hear their stories.

My interest in the people was heighted by the action and, unusually, I want to mention all of them; Elly Condron, Roxanne Pallett, Carolyn Backhouse, Carley Stenson and Charles Dorfman. I was particularly pleased to see Carolyn Backhouse again having seen her several times at the Orange Tree.

Some Girl(s) was an intelligent and rewarding play delivered skilfully. Great theatre in a great venue made for a great afternoon.

The Mercy Seat at Hampton Hill Theatre had rich dialogue delivered skilfully

This was one of those fortunate things that do happen from time to time. I was vaguely aware that there was a small theatre in Hampton Hill but had felt that it was too far out of my way to pay serious attention to. Then it looked like I might get a job in Teddington and so I looked for theatres that I could get to easily from there and discovered the Hampton Hill Theatre (sadly, little else).

Then things got better. I looked at their programme, which is intermittent, and saw that they had a Neil LaBute play coming up and that was a done deal. And the price of that deal was a miserly £12, well within the do-not-even-think-about-it range.

I had travelled through Hampton Hill many times by bus, on the way towards Heathrow, but had only been there a couple of times and that was to the same pub, the Bloated Mallard. Confident that there was at least one place that I could eat there I decided to make an evening of it. That began with a walk over the Teddington Footbridge and along the main road in Teddington before catching a bus for the last leg.

Having found the theatre easily enough I was advised by somebody going in there that the box office would be open later and that the pub next door was a good place to wait. That pub was the The Refectory and it did the job. It was a quirky pub split into different zones and I picked somewhere in the middle to have a beer and a snack.

Moving on to the theatre I was pleased to see that it had a small bar. It had a limited supply and nothing on draught but bottled beer was fine. There was a friendly feel in the bar and as the theatre was managed by Teddington Theatre Club I suspected that a lot of the people there knew each other.

There were two performance spaces in the theatre and The Mercy Seat was in the smaller space, the Noel Coward Studio Theatre, and it took a while and some questioning for me to work out which door we would have to go through to get there. Once that was established I hung around the door in question but not too close to seem over keen.

My positioning and alertness meant that I was among the first people to go through to the theatre and I followed a series of signs along some very business-like corridors to get there. The theatre was set up in an "L" shape with seating on two sides of the stage. On that stage was a sofa and I reasoned that this would be the centre of the action and I took a seat in the front row facing the sofa.

The premise of the play was fairly simple, if a little odd.

This was a few days after 9/11 and a couple had survived by being in her flat rather than in the office. The problem was he was married and was having an affair with a colleague. His wife kept calling him to see if he was alright but he was not answering his phone. He had reasoned that being missing presumed dead gave them the opportunity to start a new life together in a different place.

She was less convinced by this plan as she liked her job and wanted him to make a positive break from his wife rather than using this excuse to sneak away.

There were only two people in the play Abby (Amanda-Jade Tyler) and Ben (Nick Barr) and it was all about their conversations. These were about what they should do and also about how their relationship had formed and developed. Like real conversations do, it frequently veered off from the main subject and did not often get back there. Also like real conversations the mood changed too and the tense discussions about the difficult decision they had to make were balanced by lighter moments. One topic that particularly stuck in my mind was Abby explaining to Ben that his preference for having sex from behind and her lack of engagement in the act meant that she was used to reading the labels on the mattress and she wondered how his wife coped.

The construct of the play called to mind LaBute's In a Forest Dark and Deep which consisted solely of a brother and a sister talking to each other. Both plays also twisted sharply and unexpectedly at the end.

The Neil LaBute dialogue made The Mercy Seat a great play and the acting skills of Amanda-Jade Tyler and Nick Barr made this a great production. I was able to tell them that afterwards simply by loitering next to the changing area until they emerged.

If this is anything like typical for what the Hampton Hill Theatre has to offer then I will be going there regularly.

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.

The Shape of Things at the Arcola Theatre

Having missed the Arcola for a few months I then went two night in a row, both times to catch a play just before it closed.

The second time I had to make the long trip round the London Overground from Richmond to Dalston Kingsland and the reason that I did that was because The Shape of Things was written by Neil LaBute and he also wrote In a Forest Dark and Deep which was one of my highlights of 2011.

With Lizzie Siddal claiming the main theatre upstairs The Shape of Things was downstairs in Studio 2. This is smaller, seating under 100, and is more intimate. I had been to the smaller studio before and loved it.

The play is about art student Evelyn Ann Thompson, her boyfriend Adam, his friend Phillip and Phillip's fiance Jenny.

Evelyn and Adam meet in an art gallery in unusual circumstances. He is working there as a security guard, one of his several jobs, and she is there to deface a work of art that has been censored by the addition of a fig leaf. They talk about what she is planning and why and they agree to meet up again.

The relationship seems to be imbalanced from the start. Adam is doing little with his life and is dressed to match. Evelyn has strong ideas, is dressed to impress and is beautiful. Adam cannot believe his luck.

Phillip and Jenny give us different perspectives on Adam. Phillip and Adam shared a room as students despite being very different people and Jenny sat next to Adam in a class but they never quite clicked thanks to shyness on both sides.

Adam shines as his relationship with Evelyn develops. He dresses better, uses contact lenses and even has corrective surgery on his nose, hence the picture at the top.

They may, or may not, have had brief flings with Phillip and Jenny but that does nothing to diminish their relationship.

Then its time for Evelyn's graduation show and an almighty bomb drops, and one I had not seen even the barest  hint of. In a Forest Dark and Deep also has a major twist in the plot but that is more subtle and more gradual, and is made the more dramatic by being low-key. This one just hits hard. In the play Evelyn is left at her graduation by herself as the three others walk out in disgust. In the audience we share the surprise and outrage.

I spoke to "Adam" afterwards and said that I thought he was shabbily treated. I could not bring myself to talk to "Evelyn" in the bar despite her beauty.

A play that still carries the emotions after the curtain calls is a good play and The Shape of Things is a very good play. It was helped on its way by being superbly acted (by all four) and its clever use of a minimalist set.

The Shape of Things at the Arcola was another exceptional night at the theatre and another reminder of why I go there so often despite it being on the other side of London.

In a Forest Dark and Deep

The main reason that I was interested in this play was because I could get cheap tickets through work where we regularly take advantage of group bookings. A good enough reason to try something new.

I sort of knew of the lead actor too, at least I knew he was a lead character in Lost. Even if I never really watched the show and could not remember his name his presence added a little cache, as big names always do.

The brief billing promised a dark comedy and that was the clincher. I like dark and I like comedy and I really love dark comedy.

The theatre was new to me too.

The Vaudeville sits quietly on The Strand almost opposite the Savoy where I saw Legally Blonde a few months ago.

More years ago than I care to remember now, i.e. something like twenty five, I stayed for a few months in a small squalid hotel on The Strand (I was paying with my own money) and walked along there most days on the regular trip between Pizza Hut (remember that?) and The Lyceum (that's the Sam Smiths pub, not the theatre). I'm fairly certain that the Vaudeville was not there then, I'd have noticed!

Inside the Vaudeville is much like any other outdated and shabby Victorian theatre. Not much going for it at all.

The play does, however.

For ninety minutes or so two people talk while packing things away ready to move out. Think of Waiting for Godot without an interval.

Through their conversation we learn that they are brother and sister, have never really got on with each other and have led very different lives; he's a carpenter and she's a professor.

And that's it really. As they talk we learn more about their pasts, his two failed marriages and her sexual excesses as a young woman. And as we listen in on their conversation our knowledge and interest grows and we are enmeshed willingly in their lives.

Then the play takes a slow turn. As the conversation turns to the more recent past, including the reason for the move, a shocking mystery slowly appears, which I won't spoil for you, and the story reaches an unexpected end.

It's a simple story which helps to make it the more believable and this is helped by the natural pace with which it develops. The acting is simple too in that there is nothing particularly dramatic happening but it is also completely believable, and that's all it has to be.

This was my first exposure to Neil Labute and would quite like to see some more of his stuff.

Altogether it was simply another good night at the theatre. Recommended.