Mumburger at Old Red Lion Theatre entertained in an intelligent way

I discovered Old Red Lion in Islington via a Philip Ridley play and had kept an eye on its programme since then. I managed to get back there only once subsequently but that was more because of the my inability to see everything that I want to due to a lack of time (and if I stopped working to make time then the lack f money).

Mumburger appealed because it sounded weird but weird alone is not enough. It took me a while but what clinched it was the realisation that Rosie Wyatt was in it. I had seen her act several times before and was keen to keep up the tradition. To be fair to Red Lion Theatre their publicity material did say she was in it but to be fair to me they wrote everything in capital letters which made it hard to read.

Having discovered my error in time I forked out a miserly £16.50 for a ticket on a Friday night.

It is always interesting to go to theatres like Old Red Lion (White Bear and Union are similar in this regard) in that you do not know how the stage will be arranged until you climb up the steep stairs and enter the room.

This time the stage was arranged as an right-angles triangle with the base about half the length of the height. The seating was along the base and vertical and the back of the stage was a grey curtain draped along the hypotenuse. The stage was sparsely set as living room with a boxed seat (useful for storing props) and a coffee table.

The play started with film projected on the grey curtain. This was a fast collage of events including a TED Talk and a serious car crash. The Mum of the play died in that crash. It was a bold and effective start to the story.

Trying to come to terms with the Mum's sudden unexpected death were her husband and daughter (Rosie). The daughter was more in control of the situation initially and had created a shared Google document for them to track activities like notifying people and finding a funeral director. The father/husband was lost in grief.

The relationship between the two was the focus and purpose of the play. That relationship had its expected ups and downs as they both went through the violent stages of grief, shared their memories of Mum (which did not always coincide) and tried to come to terms with her final wish, an emotional act of sharing.

Mumburger went all over the place, in a good way, with moments of humour, anger, sadness, absurdity and tenderness.It was something like a fast version of, er, The Fast Show, with the same two characters. A few of the scenes did not work for me and at times it felt like the script needed a bit of an edit but in saying that it feels now like I am looking to criticise it when serious criticism is unjustified. The play worked well and being a little rough and ready at times did nothing to hamper my enjoyment of it.

I went to see Rosie and she was good, as expected. Andrew Frame was just as good as her father and the two of them gelled well. I could believe that they were father and daughter and that mattered. I liked the simple staging too.

Mumburger entertained in an intelligent way and any theatre that does that is fine with me.

Benighted at Old Red Lion Theatre was neatly done

Without intending to, I found myself in something of a JB Priestly run and while this was with mixed results I was keen to see Benighted because it was billed as the original version of the story of a couple looking for shelter from a storm and finding themselves in a strange house which has been most famously used by The Rocky Horror Show.

It was also an excuse to go back to Old Red Lion theatre and pub. It was the pub first and that meant one of their pies. Nice it was too. So was the beer.

Having eaten I joined the queue that was starting to form at the bottom of the stairs and I was near enough to the front to get a good seat in the front row. It was an L shapes front-row and it was not obvious which were the best seats because of the shape of the stage and I settled for somewhere around the middle of the long side of the L.

The stage was suitably dark (I had to enhance the image below so that you could make any sense of it) and very woody.

It also quickly proved to be very flexible too as a few movements transformed part of it into a motor car. In this car, a typical 1920's open-top, were a young couple and a friend. They were lost somewhere in Wales and it was raining so they were looking for shelter. Any port in a storm they say and so they chose to go to a spooky gothic house where, after some reluctance, they were admitted.

What followed next was much as anticipated with unfriendly hosts, hints a plenty of mystery and moments of light amusement. I've never seen The Rocky Horror Show but I have seen plenty of episodes of Scooby-Doo and there were some obvious similarities. Benighted may not be original but it certainly predated those.

Another couple came to the house looking for shelter, a middle-aged businessman and a young chorus girl that he had adopted for the evening to provide some company and other pleasures.

Then the plot veered sharply from the standard Scooby-Doo script.

A relationship developed between the couple's friend and the chorus girl, there really was something weird going on in the house, and there was real menace about. Somebody died.

The play ended on a satisfying note that was both poignant and definitive, though far from happy.

The story did more than I expected, especially at the end, but the staging did much more than exceed expectations. I knew that it had Offie nominations for lighting and staging and I could see why. The small room became many places, inside and outside, and those places were filled with corridors, doors and stairs. A lot happened skillfully in a small space.

Benighted was a decent enough play and the masterful production lifted it several notches to make it a rewarding and entertaining evening.

Piranha Heights at the Old Red Lion Theatre was delightfully weird

I was vaguely aware of the Old Red Lion Theatre having been to the pub downstairs (prior to a visit to nearby Sadler's Wells) but had never been there, or had a particular reason to do so. Then a chance conversation at another Philip Ridley play at the Arcola alerted me to Piranha Heights.

The Old Red Lion is conveniently close to Angel tube and that made it fairly easy to get there, despite being forced to work in Reading that day. I even had time to eat in the pub, a vegetarian Bombay Burrito, though I did get a little nervous over how long it took to arrive. It all worked out in the end.

The theatre was upstairs but the box office was downstairs, in corner of the bar, and I was able to swap my email for a ticket while waiting for my food.

More or less on the dot of 7:30 we were summoned upstairs. It was a rather orderly rush and my years of training for such events meant that I was among the very first up and so was able to bag the front row seat that I wanted.

My first thought was it was rather like the White Bear Theatre, but much bigger, with a rectangular stage surrounded on two sides with seats in an L-shape. The size, but not the shape, were similar to Pentameters. Or, to put it in other words, this theatre in a pub was similar to other theatres in pubs that I had been to.

The stage was set as a somewhat dated living room. Here we met a middle-aged man waiting for somebody. That somebody was his younger brother who, it transpired he had not seen for a some time. We also learned that they were in their Mother's flat, that she had just died and they both had designs on the flat.

Then, much like a JG Ballard novel, the normal became strange and then outright weird.

An awful lot happened and it would be difficult and unhelpful to try and describe all of if; so here are just a few highlights. The younger brother had brought along a young woman and a baby who he had just met and who we wanted to have living in the house. The young woman had an exuberant young man in tow, not the baby's father. She spoke Gibberish. The older brother's teenage son arrived, he was weird in his own right (he spoke to an invisible Jiminy Cricket character). The son and the boyfriend met with a series of whoops and discovered a shared passion for violence and each other. The baby ...

Through this the relationship between the brothers, and with their families, got more complicated too; such as the younger brother suggesting that his nephew loved him more than his father and that he (the nephew) was going to leave his dad and come and live with his uncle in the flat.

The story was fast and chaotic; probably like a ride on Nemesis if I was brave enough to know what that is like. It was exhilarating, thrilling and exhausting. And, like a theme-park ride, reached a natural ending, though this one left me thinking about what was going to happen next to the brothers and to the two young men. Perhaps it was more of a pause than an ending.

There was a question and answer session with the cast afterwards which I stayed for. This gave some insights to their approach to the production, such as doing some rehearsals without words to get the movements right (there was a lot of movement). It offered fewer clues as to what the play was actually about as the cast had different opinions, the brothers thought it was about them but the others disagreed.

It was certainly about the stories we tell each other and how many of these are not true and what that means. Did the son really see Jiminy Cricket, did the others mean it when they said that they believed that they did, and did he believe them when they said that they believed him? You get the idea.

Piranha Heights was a frighteningly deep and complex play which I was able to navigate safely thanks to the superb crew. The ride was a very rewarding experience.