Vanya at Richmond Theatre

There are three main names associated with this play, all of which I am interested in; Anton Chekhov’s wrote the original play Uncle Vanya, Simon Stephens wrote this new version and Andrew Scott played all the parts.

I half thought about doing a Venn diagram of my experience of these people but quickly though better of it. Suffice to say I have seen several plays by both Chekhov and Stephens, a few with Scott, another Stephens version of a Chekhov play and another Stephens play staring Scott, so the Venn diagram would have several entries in the overlaps of two people. This would be the first entry in the central overlap of all three people.

I presume that of these three names that Andrew Scott was the big draw, while he would have been third on my list, and the poster certainly reflected that. The promoters were certainly expecting a big crowd for this pre-west end run and the tickets were priced accordingly. The price for my normal seat was around £60, I think, so I went up a level instead and paid £30 for Upper Circle A14. I may have been a little cautious with my money but I was off the mark quickly enough to bag a central seat in the front row,

On the day the performance, and the entire week-long run, were sold out so I guess the promoters knew what they were doing.

The set surprised me a little with its modernity and clutter. I never understood the point of the modernity (other that audience recognition perhaps) but the clutter soon made sense as the different parts of the stage were often used to represent different characters, e.g. Helena often sat on the swing.

I had seen Uncle Vanya a few times, three I think, and that certainly helped as the differences between the characters were slight visually, e.g. Scott held a dishcloth in one persona. Of course the voices were different, but not very different.

Uncle Vanya's (Ivan's) story got a little lost in the theatrics and my attention was drawn to the performance at the expense of the story, which is not that dramatic anyway, despite the appearance of Chekhov's favourite prop, a gun. It did not feel like the retelling of a masterpiece, it was more like a brand new play. Nothing particularly wrong in that and most people were there for Scott not Chekhov anyway.

The Stephens version had a lot more swearing, though nothing like the level of some of his other plays (Christmas, Herons, ...), and also quite a few moments of humour that often played on only having one person on stage. Vanya is not a comedy but I chortled quite a bit.

Being a one-person show the success of Vanya depended on Scott and he delivered.

I do not think that anyone will love Anton Chekhov or Simon Stephens more after seeing Vanya, and they may even forget that they were involved. Scott, on the other-hand, Andrew Scott cemented his reputation and he is what made the evening work for me.

Out West at Lyric Hammersmith was a gratifying return to theatre

It is a cautious return to theatre for me and I have deliberately missed several shows that I would probably have gone to in better safer times two years ago. The first show to tempt me back was Out West at Lyric Hammersmith, partially because Lyric is one of my more regular theatres and partially because one of the three plays was written by Simon Stephens. I am enough of a fan of Stephens for him to have his own tag on this blog.

As expected, covid played havoc with my usual Lyric plans, which include eating in the bar there, but the makeshift plan of going to the nearby Hop Poles for a pint an a vegetarian plate. It was also a chance to catch the end of the England v Germany game which had the decency to finish before the theatre started,

It was probably stated on the Lyric website somewhere, which was either unread or forgotten, but this was not a random collection of plays, they all had a connection with Hammersmith (hence, I presume, the Out West title) and they all said something about racism.

The Overseas Student in the first play was Ghandi and it described his time in England studying law, a story I knew nothing about. I liked the way the story was told and it was interesting to learn connections to things I did know, such as the first asian MP Dadabhai Naoroji. I had come across his plaque just off Amwell Street in a road now named after him.

It was also interesting to learn that Naoroji was arguing then that Britain's wealth was at the expense of India's poverty. 

As with all of these plays this was a solo effort and Esh Alladi was excellent as the young man trying to get on in a strange land. The play, by Tanika Gupta, was a simple chronological narrative and that was fine, there was plenty enough interest in the story to not need theatrics.

Blue Water and Cold and Fresh was obviously written by Simon Stephens because of the swearing, though it came nowhere near the record for this that he set in Christmas. It was also obviously written by somebody interesting in the construction of plays and seeing some of the scaffolding added to the fun, as did spotting the recurring themes like sunlight and cups of tea. 

At first most of the interest came from discovering the structure of the story and the geography of Hammersmith then the narrative grew as we learned more about the protagonist and his family's past and then racism entered the story with a jolt.

Tom Mothersdale was measured and convincing as the man trying to understand his father by revisiting his past homes and reliving some memories of those times.

Go, Girl written by Roy Williams and played by Ayesha Antoine also switched between times and in this case it was a mother with a problematic daughter who thought back to when she was her daughter's age and had had the honour of singing to Michelle Obama who made a visit to her school.

Their story was one of both issues and possibilities and, in the end, Go, Girl proved to be good advice.

Three relatively short single-handed plays on a simple set was never going to be an epic but as a cautious return to the theatre this was an excellent and very enjoyable evening.

Sea Wall at The Old Vic

Some plays have "mandatory" written all over them, and this was one of them mostly thanks to the name Simon Stephens though the name Andrew Scott helped too. I have a Google Alert set up for Simon Stephens and that has led me to several of his plays across London in recent years.

There was quite a buzz about this play because of the recent high-profile performances by Andrew Scott but despite waiting a couple of hours to negotiate The Old Vic's online queueing system it was fairly easy to get the seat that I wanted, Lilian Baylis Circle A-13 for £20. I was almost tempted to go for a better seat but, to be honest, charging £80 for a forty minute performance seemed something like robbery.

Sea Wall was first performed at Bush Theatre and I am sure was fantastic in that space but it got somewhat lost in the relative vastness of Old Vic, neither the play nor the performance were enough to fill the space. It was interesting enough and for £20 I could not complain about the cost but it did not live up to the hype and that made it something of a disappointment.

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle at Wyndham's Theatre

One of the Google Alerts that I have is for Simon Stephens so I got an early warning of his latest play, Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle, and duly paid £39 for seat A15 in the Grand Circle.

It was ninety minutes straight through which allowed an 8pm start and that gave me plenty of time to go to Govinda's for a curry and Pret for a coffee beforehand.

Surprisingly the theatre was not full and that meant an upgrade from the Grand Circle to the Royal Circle. This has happened to me a few times at theatres and while the upgrade is always nice I would rather that the theatre were full.

The feedback on social media had given me little clue on what to expect so I sat down ready to be surprised.

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle is the tale of two people and they are the only two people who appear in it. He was a traditional seventy year old and she was a flighty forty-something. In almost her first sentence she apologised for he foul language which set the scene for some of Stephens' trademark swearing though there was a lot less than in some other plays.

In some ways it was a simple story about the two people told chronologically but it was delicately spiced with some surprises. The play's title comes from the principle that if you observe an elementary particle you cannot know both where it is and where it is going and the woman remarked that she watched her son so closely as he grew up that she always knew where he was at that time but could not see the direction that he was travelling.

That principle applied to us too, as we played close attention to the characters' words and actions it was not possible to see where their story was going.

Their journey through the hour and a half had a mix of emotions and moods. Most of them were happy and light and there was a lot of proper laugh-out-loud humour along the way. This was especially true at the beginning when they clumsily got to know each other.

Both the stars, Anne-Marie Duff and Kenneth Cranham, were excellent and made me care about them. I wanted them both to have a happy ending and I was interested in everything that happened to them along the way.

The staging was neat with just a few props, things like benches and tables, rising out of the floor while the walls moved and the lighting changed to show us the different places that the story took us to. It appeared simple, though I am sure that it took clever mechanics and electronics to achieve that, and it was very effective.

Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle was an interesting and unusual tale told in an engaging way. I loved every minute of it.

The Threepenny Opera at National Theatre was brutal and stylish

The National Theatre was featuring more in my plans because while it was west-end expensive it was delivering the quality that justified that price tag. Even so, it was only a few of the productions that I found myself attracted to.

The Threepenny Opera attracted me because it was one of the classic plays that I owed myself to see and because it was by Kurt Weill. It was a significant bonus that this adaptation was by Simon Stephens who did the same job on the highly popular and very excellent The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, though, to be honest, I prefer seeing his own plays to his adaptations.

The final plus was that it starred Rory Kinnear as Macheath, a.k.a. Mac the Knife.

All that was enough to make me fork out £40 for my seat Olivier Theatre Circle A52 £40.

The play opened with Mac the Knife in which we learned how Macheath earned his nickname. That set the tone for the evening with Rory Kinnear looking every inch the brutal and stylish gangster.

The other notable star of the evening was the stage that moved in all sorts of wondrous ways to create interesting spaces for the drama to unfold in. When you have a stage that can do clever things then it makes sense to do them as long as it enhances the drama, which it did her. Oddly it reminded me of the tricks the stage did in Port, a Simon Stephens written play.

Also worth a mention in a large and excellent cast was Haydn Gwynne as Celia Peachum, the wife of a gangster and the mother of Macheath's wife following a brief and unexpected relationship. I still thought of Haydn Gwynne as Alex Pates in Drop the Dead Donkey in the early 90's and she looked no different to me as she did then. She was superb in her role.

The Threepenny Opera took us through the criminal underworld with its strong characters, sleaze, petty machinations, rivalries, violence and changing loyalties. It was a compelling world and the characters' stories quickly drew me into it. The large cast was used skilfully and there was always a lot going on, a lot of stories to follow and a lot of characters to worry about.

The Threepenny Opera remained brutal and stylish throughout and was utterly entertaining too.

Herons at the Lyric Hammersmith was astonishing

I had not been to the Lyric Hammersmith for quite a while, I was last there for Metamorphosis in February 2013, and it had dropped off my radar slightly. It got back on with Herons as that was written by Simon Stephens who, among other things, also wrote Christmas, Port, The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time and an adaptation of Three Sisters.

The Lyric Hammersmith has the advantage for me of being in Hammersmith, the clue is in the name, as various tube lines lead there from Richmond, where I live, and Kings Cross, where I work. On this occasion I was at work and took a stroll to Great Portland Street where I took the Hammersmith and City line.

I knew from my previous visit that the Lyric Hammersmith did food so I made my plans to eat there before the show. That plan worked extraordinarily well despite the vegetarian options being limited and unimaginative sounding as the vege burger that I went for was almost certainly the best vege burger that I had ever had. The burger itself was delicious and the meal was elevated to its leadership position by the salad that went with it, avocado always works for me, and the use of pitta bread rather than the bland burger standard roll. I'll have that again next time. They had a nice expensive craft beer too.

I had gone for a seat in the front row of the Circle, A20, which was a modest £30. Sitting there waiting for the play to start the most obvious feature on the stage was the video of monkeys playing on the large screen at the back. That should have alerted me that something unusual was going to happen but I failed to pick up the clue.

Normally I would say something about the plot and the characters at this point but there was just so much in Herons that focusing on them would be to miss several big points.

For starters, the stage was flooded with water to the depth of around 10cm and stayed that way all through the play. The actors got quite wet, as did some of the people in the front row.

And that video of monkeys kept playing.

Things happened on stage that seemed to have no bearing on the story. For example, at one point the mother (who was not really present in that scene) was sitting on the small swinging horse on the front-right of the stage and she carefully took her wellington boots off and laid them sideways on the stage where they got filled with water. A while later she put them on again.

At other points some of the children went around the roundabout slowly in unusual positions, a another child sat in the water with shock etched on his face and children blew soap bubbles from the top of the lock. All of this happened away from the main action in the centre of the stage but complimented it by adding more textures, rather than diverting from it.

The story started with a boy blowing up an inflatable doll to celebrate, his word, the death of a girl who had been murdered a year ago by, it turned out, his older brother. The play remained violent throughout and had the language to match. There was some love too, though that got swamped by the violence and the threat of violence.

In the eye of this weird and energetic hurricane was Billy (Max Gill) who not just accepted that he would be bullied and abused but almost encouraged it by asserting his intellectual superiority over his bully. He also had to cope with severely dysfunctional and separated parents.

The main characters were school children and were played by young people. It would be tempting to make allowances for their ages but that was unnecessary as all played their parts well.

The combination of everything going on was something like the famous Phil Spector Wall of Sound where to pick out the sound of just one instrument was to miss the point. The glorious richness came from all the parts moving together and was absorbed at a primitive level rather than being consciously consumed.

Herons was theatre craft at its very best.

Christmas (the play) at White Bear Theatre was tense, funny, emotional and very real

It was a playwright, Chekhov, who first got me to go to the White Bear Theatre with an adaptation of Three Sisters and it was another playwright, Simon Stephens, who got me back there to see his play Christmas.

It was not quite as simple as that as it took me a while to realise who Simon Stephens was, or rather what he had done. It was Wikipedia that informed me that one of Stephens' plays was Port and as I loved the production at the National Theatre that was all the convincing that I needed.

It helped that he adapted The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, which I had also loved.

All I needed then was a free evening and I found one on a Wednesday when I was working in London. It was a late decision to go and I booked the ticket on the day.

My first visit to the White Bear Theatre had warned me of the impossibility of getting food there, or anywhere nearby, so I planned to get something from Kings Cross when passing through but the new up-market concourse is either devoid of pasty shops or they are well hidden well away from the entrances to the Underground so I had to do without.

My first visit to the White Bear Theatre also taught me where it is and this time I turned left out Kennington station instead of right and I was at the theatre in just a couple of minutes.

I was pleased to see that the pub did pies, they had not done food previously, but less pleased to see that none of the options were vegetarian. I settled for a packet of dry roasted peanuts which, sadly, is not unusual when I have evening events. The Young's Ordinary was as good as I remembered it from the last time and that mattered more than eating.

The box office opened soon after 7pm to sell tickets to new arrivals and to give them out to people like myself who had booked them earlier (only four hours earlier in my case). The multitude of booking systems meant that they did not know for certain how many tickets they had sold and newcomers were warned that they might not get in.

On collecting my tickets I was told that the show would be without an interval and I took that as a hint to buy another beer to take in with me.

The doors to the theatre opened almost by accident just before the 7:30 start time. Somebody walked in and was not stopped so the rest of us followed him in. Despite the booking confusion everybody managed to get in and the place looked pleasingly full. I like full theatres.

Leaving the bar to go in to the theatre was to swap one bar for another, though the pub we moved in to was from another era, Christmas 2003 apparently (though the publican says at one point that Frank Sinatra died last year and that was in 1998). Behind the bar Michael was getting ready for his customers. Billy-Lee was the first to arrive. He was a casual worked who still lived at home with his mother.

The strong language was bit of a surprise at first but it was perfectly natural, I remember when we spoke like that in my local. The C-Bomb was sprinkled like a sparkler through the conversation and was used as an adjective too but it was said in a calm way and did not shock.

Later they were joined by local barber Guissepe, an Italian who had settled in London years ago and who had lost his wife a couple of years previously.

The final significant character was a postman who had just won some money betting on a horse and was going on a pub crawl to celebrate. He was drawn to this pub because he had been there some years ago.

A few other people came, did something slightly weird and then left.

The conversations ranged widely, as pub conversations do, and covered some familiar topics like football but they were also quite personal at times as each was asked about their plans for the future and incidents in the past. To pick just one example, Guissepe had an offer to go back to Italy to live with his brother that exposed aspects of his relationship to his brother and also to his deceased wife.

All of the characters had flaws and secrets to hide, as we all do, and some of these were gently teased out by their familiarity with each other and by the convivial nature of pubs (not bars). Accusations were made and tempers flared at times but the general mood was conviviality and the play was both funny and emotionally engaging. These were real people with real hopes, dreams and problems. I cared about them and wanted to know what was going to happen to them all.

Because of its language as much as anything, Christmas was the sort of play that will not appeal to everybody but those of us who made it to the White Bear Theatre had an entertaining, if tense, evening that we rewarded with long and enthusiastic applause at the end. I may have whooped.

Port at the National Theatre

I am not sure if it is the National Theatre's fault or mine that I do not go more often but somehow I associate it with safe and establishment and I prefer edgy and fringe.

I found myself back there through an unusual route. I was listening to the always excellent Robert Elms podcast and he interviewed Simon Stephens who wrote Port and who originated from Stockport where the play gets its name. What he said about the play was enough to convince me that I should go and see it, so I did.

Port tells the story of a girl, Racheal, growing up in difficult circumstances in a Stockport estate. We follow her, and her family, from the age of 11 to 24 through eight scenes.

The settings change from, for example, a hospital to a bus stop, smoothly with Racheal staying on the stage as it transforms smoothly around her. It is all very impressive and, more importantly, allows the story to move along without a break. This works very well even though, or perhaps because of, these smooth transitions in our real-time are leaps of several years for those on stage.

I do not want to give too much of the story away but it gives you some of the flavour of the play to know that a parent leaves, her younger brother gets caught up in petty criminality, a good friend dies, a marriage fails and another one is tested, and she moves away from Stockport for a while.

Through all the change the one constant is Racheal's resilient attitude that mixes street smarts with brash confidence. There are vulnerabilities in there too, she cares for her family and wants to be loved by somebody.

Kate O'Flynn plays Racheal and is utterly convincing as she ages 13 years before our eyes and moves through a heady mix of emotions. It's a wonderful performance and worth the entry fee alone.

The story is gritty, as it should be if it is meant to be taken as real life. It's something like Eastenders but set up north, with lots of swearing (it is meant to be taken as real life) and better acting. The grittiness persists throughout but so does Racheal's positive attitude and, despite everything, it is an uplifting story and a great pleasure to watch.