Entertaining Mr Sloane at Young Vic

There was a time when I was a fairly regular visitor to Young Vic but for various reasons (my changes in employment, their change in artistic directors) I had not been there since 2017 but a Joe Orton play was a good reason to go back.

It was a slow return and it took some good reviews to finally nudge me into booking and that was a non-trivial process due to my poor memory of the seating plan there. 

In the end I went for row P entirely missing that this is the front tow of the Balcony which I would have gone for automatically if I had noticed it. There seat Balcony P35 cost me £57.

The view from there was excellent and the first impression of the set was good too, this was clearly a production with some strong stylish thinking behind it.

Entertaining Mr Sloane has a simple concept, young exuberant Mr. Sloane starts renting a room with lonely middle-aged Kath who is regularly visited by her wheeler-dealer brother Ed. Their elderly father also lived with Kath.

The rich comedy came from the dialogues between the three main characters and the way that Orton wrote their words. The speech comes thick and fast with lots of short sentences that followed each other erratically, much like jokes work but with more natural language.

The stylish staging continued throughout with, for example, Mr Sloane remaining a centre of attention even when not in the scene by posing spotlight off-stage. The ending was equally stylish.

The Joe Orton script gave the play a solid base which the cast and staging enhanced. It was a marvellous return to Young Vic. I suspect it will not be another eight years before I go back.

Juliet Stevenson flies brightly in Wings at Young Vic

Wings attracted me because it starred Juliet Stevenson and by the same team that did the remarkable Happy Days in 2015.

Booking was quite confusing. Online I was told that I had a seat in "Zone B - Best available" for £20, i.e. I did not have a specified seat number at that time. Because of the confusion I went to the theatre before eating in Culture Grub next door. Then I was given a ticket that said I had seat A49.

Half an hour later on entering the theatre I found somebody else sitting in my place. That was fair enough as his ticket also said A49. An usher took our two tickets away and when he returned I was given A49 again and the other man was reseated somewhere in row C.

The stage was similar to that used for Yerma, a high stage ran from left to right with seating on both sides. The floor was at about eye height. Not ideal but at least there was not the glass wall between performers and audience that Yerma had.

Wings was a simple play about an elderly woman, Emily, who has a stroke while reading comfortably in her armchair and then fights to recover some of her lost facilities. There are conversations where she goes unheard by the staff trying to help her and later, as she recovers a little, there are conversations consisting of gibberish. It is an intense and emotional portrayal of what it is like to have a stroke and Juliet Stevenson was superb as Emily.

The production did not help. Emily had been an aviator so Juliet Stevenson was given wires to fly above the stage and she wore these for most of the 75 minutes that the performance lasted. It was quite a sight to see her flying and spinning above the stage but I found it something of a distraction and I would much rather have seen her act being in the air than actually being in the air. It did not help either that I had to look even further up to see the action.

It was easiest just to ignore that flying and to concentrate on Juliet Stevenson instead. And that was a very rewarding thing to do.

Cat on a Hot Tin Roof at Apollo Theatre was blistering

There are several names on the poster for Cat on a Hot Tin Roof and the one that made me buy a ticket was Tennessee Williams. I love modern theatre but I like seeing the classics too, especially if I have not seen them before, and so this was an obvious choice to make.

It was a Young Vic production at a west end venue so it came with eye watering west end prices and so I found myself up in Grand Circle, seat B12, with part of the safety rail obstructing my view and still paying £35 for the privilege (top price was £99). The play had to be pretty good to justify that.

It was pretty good.

In a format I am beginning to think of as American Standard we watched a family in almost real time across an evening in one room.

In what felt like the first of three acts (and the internet suggest that it might be that) there was a long conversation between Maggie (Sienna Miller) and Brick (Jack O'Connell) where Maggie did most of the talking and Brick did a lot of drinking. His drinking was one of the things they discussed. Sienna Miller rose highly in my estimation (admittedly from a position of obscurity).

There was also a fair amount of nudity which felt unnecessary to the story and a little distracting. They were in their bedroom, and Brick was having a shower, so the nudity was natural but unhelpful.

In the second act the main conversation was between Brick (still drinking heavily) and his father, Big Daddy Pollitt (Colm Meaney). Colm I did know because he had appeared in several great films including Layer Cake and, or course, Under Siege. This was a more equal conversation about the future. Big Daddy was celebrating his 65th birthday and had big plans for the future. Women featured in these.

In the final act all the family dramas came together and the other people at the party became more prominent, including Brick's mother, brother and his wife who had designs on Big Daddy's substantial wealth, and a couple of old family friends.

The plot helped to move things along and gave a point to the conversations but, as with other American Standard plays, it was the conversations themselves that mattered with the crisp use of language to convey emotions and ideas. The dialogue fizzed because Tennessee Williams wrote a great play and the cast did it full justice.

Yerma at Young Vic was a powerful story

I am not sure why I skipped Yerma when hit first appeared at Young Vic last year but it got plenty of good reviews then, and won some prestigious awards, so I was in the queue early when it returned. That alertness secured me seat A36) in the stalls for an unbelievable £10. At that price it did not matter what view I had or even if the play was not particularly good.

Young Vic seems to delight in extreme productions and this was no exception. The stage was arranged as a rectangle with seating on the two long sides, it was raised about 1.5m, had glass walls and the actors communicated with the audience through speakers. None of this had anything to do with the story and all seemed rather pointless and gimmicky.

That was a shame because Yerma was a really good play and the cast did a great job with it. Of course Billie Piper as the mother trying to get pregnant was the star, and many people seemed to have come just to see her, but there were equally strong performances from her husband, sister and mother.

Yerma started with a raunchy conversation about sex between the couple. I am not sure if it was done to shock us at the very start or as a way of raising the issue to childlessness early but the conversation started with bum sex (as they called it). No other conversations in the play were as crude.

There were many other strong conversations though as the story developed. Possibly the most shocking was the sister talking about her baby in angry terms. The complaint about exploding nappies rang a bell! It was always a tense story and while there were many light touches, particularly from the mother, it was an emotionally draining story to hear and a happy ending never looked likely.

There was no interval and that was as it should be. This was not a story to drop and pick-up again.

Despite the nature of the story I loved it for its realism, grittiness and pace. It dragged you along brutally pausing for breath occasionally.

I love dark challenging theatre and so Yerma suited me well. I liked it a lot and was only prevented from loving it by the somewhat ridiculous staging.

Life of Galileo at Young Vic sparkled despite an exaggerated production

On a few occasions I have found productions at Young Vic a little bit pretentious to the detriment of the play and Life of Galileo was a case in point. Others include Street Car Named Desire and The Trial. Despite the overblown production there was so much good stuff in Life of Galileo that the good significantly outweighed the bad and overall it was a fine production, it is just a shame that it could have been more.

Oddly I felt much the same about another recent Brecht play, The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui at Donmar Warehouse, but this was much stronger and managed to overcome the overblown bits.

Every time I go to Young Vic there seems to be a different layout and this one was more different than most. Playing to the Galileo theme the stage was a circle with some of the audience sat on cushions in the centre while the cast moved around them on a walkway. Above the stage the ceiling was a dome on to which moving images of the stars were projected. It was very effective.

Also effective was the incidental music by a Chemical Brother. I particularly like the sections where the music and the projects combined to show something of the majesty and wonder that Galileo was discovering with this telescopes and calculations.

Some of the other gimmicky things worked, or at least did not detract, and these included the puppet reciting a short poem before each scene and the interactions between the cast and the audience, particularly those that they had to move between in the centre. What did not work for me were some of the bigger set piece such as the carnival scene and the steps with bright lights behind them used for the arrival of senior religious figures.

This pomposity was a shame because at its heart Life of Galileo was a fine play that showed us one of the origins of science and the impact that it had on people. The story telling was made exceptional by Brendan Cowell as Galileo who sparkled at the centre of everything. He bounced, skipped and clapped a lot and he also played the slower scenes very well and one of my favourites was towards the end when he was locked away to stop his ideas spreading and had a touching conversation about the role of science and scientists. I actually disagreed with Galileo's view on this but I liked the passion in his argument.

This production of Life of Galileo (I had seen it before but too long ago to remember the details) was certainly something special and the few moments of exaggeration could be forgiven.

Macbeth at the Young Vic was a bold experiment that did not quite work

London theatre must be doing well as I have not had the opportunity to see The Scottish Play for many years.

The last time I remember seeing Macbeth was (at least) twenty years ago at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, though I did listen to the BBC Radio 3 version last year and I also saw the opera at Glyndebourne in 2010.

I was aware that the Young Vic were doing a modern take on Macbeth but I was a little weary and did not book it immediately. I loved some modern versions of Shakespeare, such as Hamlet and Lear, so this did appeal to me. The doubts came from my recent experience of the Young Vic were some productions, e.g. Streetcar named Desire, seemed unnecessarily complicated while others, e.g. Happy Days, were excellent.

In the end the deciding factor was work with a bit of help from fate. Work was not going well and rather than rant loudly to my boss I thought I would go to the theatre instead, something to calm me down. Macbeth was an option and there were a few single seats left for that evening's performance so I bought one, Downstairs D5 for £27.50.

The play did not start until 7:30pm so that have me plenty of time to walk down to Southwark from Kings Cross, have by usual Chinese style curry at Culture Grub and then get a pint of something brown and yet to drink at the Young Vic. You are allowed to take drinks in with you so I did, mostly because there were no seats in the bar and the theatre opened very early at 7pm.

The seat was a little to one side but I could see all the way down the funnel stage so I was OK. It did not hurt that the person in the seat in front of me did not turn up, the show was sold out but there were a few no-shows. I managed to get my usual shot from my seat despite the close attention of the staff eager to stop photography. The official photo above gives a better idea of what the stage looked like.

My first thought was of Richard III at the Old Vic which had a similar dark set with a series of doors along either side of the stage.

This was a strange Macbeth. It was a new version but I did not spot any changes in the text, nor would I expect to, until I checked afterwards for one specific thing (more on that later). I assume that several other pieces were cut out to make Macbeth more approachable and to make room for the dancing.

Yes, dancing. The first hint of this came when the three sisters first appeared and the prophecies came with modern dance moves, hands around the head and that sort of thing. They were also wearing body coloured body stockings which was another departure from the norm.

There was much more dancing later on especially in a ball scene that involved everybody and was quite fun. Less relevant were the duets between Macbeth's henchmen, their dancing was good but I just could not see the point of it.

The sound and lighting were far more successful in defining the mood and I loved the way that they varied, especially the volume with moments of loud music contrasting against soft speech.

The play is called Macbeth but I think that Lady Macbeth is the main character as she is the one who urges him on when the early doubts come and once that first fateful step is made he is doomed. This Lady Macbeth, Anna Maxwell Martin, was suitably scary not least because she looked like a primary school teacher. She led the rest of the cast well and they followed her admirably with no weaknesses and plenty of strengths.

The staging was light. All the doors were used frequently, the final section slid sideways a few times to show us other rooms and the central section lifted to become a table. What the staging did it did well enough but I missed what it did not do, e.g. there was no visual hint of Great Birnam Wood.

Surprisingly the ending fell a little flat. I heard other people say that on the way out so I checked the play text and saw that the closing speech had been chopped. I have no idea why and the absence of this epilogue made the ending rather abrupt.

My first reaction was, that despite the blunt ending, it was an exciting and thrilling experience, as you would expect Macbeth to be, and I was even considering going to see it again. On reflection, and I like to reflect on things, many of thrills came from the music and dancing and they were somewhat ephemeral, like cream cakes, and the sugar rush was short-lived. The core of the play was still one of Shakespeare's best plays but I was not convinced that the additional elements added anything to the tragedy.

Macbeth was fun, a lot of fun, and I am happy with that even if there was not enough in there to tempt me back for more.

Ah, Wilderness! at the Young Vic

Going to see an Eugene O'Neil play is always an easy decision to make and even more so when is is on somewhere like the Young Vic which has a happy habit of doing classic plays in modern ways so that they appeal to a wide-range of theatre lovers.

My knowledge of Eugene O'Neil plays is still somewhat limited and this was another one that I had not heard of, much less seen and I was keen to increase that knowledge. I was quick enough off the mark to claim a front row seat (A14 for £27.50). The Young Vic rings the changes with the seat layouts which makes it hard to decide where is the best place to sit and I chose this one in a corner of the U based on my visit to Happy Days. It worked again.

FourSquare reminds me that this was a busy day. I worked in Birmingham that day which was fine as our office was very close to Birmingham International station and there are lots of fast trains to Euston from there. I left work around 4:30pm, to be safe, and was in Southwark two hours later. First stop was Culture Grub for my usual curry and then a quick coffee at the Union Theatre Cafe theatre. I had, of course, considered having something to eat and/or a drink at the bar at the Young Vic but that was far too busy, a victim of its own success.

The down-time and refreshments had put me in the right mode for some theatre. My seat proved to be a good one and the only disappointment was the enthusiasm with which the attendants prevented photography, they are the worst theatre for this in my experience. The best I could come up with was the hastily taken, and hence blurred, picture below which I took on the way out. I just wanted something to remind me of the view I had of the stage,

I fell in love with the works of Eugene O'Neil through his grimy sea plays and this was nothing like that. Ah, Wilderness told the coming-of-age story of a young man buried in books and it was a jolly story peppered with a few darker moments.

The jollity came mostly from the young man who had the relentless optimism of youth and a passion for reading.

He was surrounded by his family including a successful father who epitomised firm-but-fair and a couple of siblings who rivalled and loved as siblings do.

Adding the darkness was a friend of the family who was unable to resist the lure of alcohol for long and that led to some bad drunken episodes where he disgraced himself. This addiction kept his long-term love from marrying him thus adding regret to embarrassment.

The young lad also had a drunken episode, led astray by a friend, but this was of the youthful excess kind, prostitutes were involved too, and it was one of the funny episodes in the story.

The story zipped along because the lad did, never still and never quiet there was always something happening that demanded attention.

The production did some very clever things without the cleverness getting in the way. The set, reminiscent of that used in Happy Days, effortlessly changed in to other places without really changing anything. Chairs appeared and it was a bar, a table appeared and it was a dining room, water appeared (by magic!) and it was a beach.

The best thing the production did was leave plenty of space for the strength of all of the characters to shine through and it was those characters in a touching story that made the play work for me.

This production of Ah, Wilderness! was just my sort of thing and judging by the full house and cheering at the end is was lots of other people's sort of thing too.

Happy Days at the Young Vic was bemusing and brilliant

I missed this production of Happy Days when it first came to the Young Vic but was aware that it was getting good reviews and so I paid more attention when it came back for second run. So much so that I bought my ticket for a performance in February 15 way back in March 14.

The original plan was to take in an exhibition in the afternoon, eat somewhere nice and then go to the theatre but the clock got the better of me and the plan got adjusted to a lovely walk along the South Bank from Waterloo to the Tate Modern where the only display I saw was of cakes in one of the coffee bars.

I did manage to get to The Refinery Bankside for a foodie treat. The helpful staff also went and found me a Oyster Card holder when I pointed out that there was not one with the bill and I showed them that I was using one from a previous visit. Every time that I go there I moan to myself that there is nothing like it in Richmond or Kingston where I find eating out more of a challenge than a treat.

From there it was a short walk to the Young Vic and I timed my arrival well to get there after the theatre doors had opened and so resisted the temptation for a beer and missed the hassle of queueing for one.

Inside the theatre the camera police were busy and attentive so I was unable to take any photos but the internet provided me with the picture below which was more-or-less the view that I had from my seat (B36 which cost me £35). For this production the stage was set in thrust-mode with seating on three sides. Given that Juliet Stevenson was stuck in position throughout the play the central section was definitely the place to be.

My knowledge of Beckett was somewhat limited, I had only seen Waiting for Godot many years ago and the adapted short story First Love more recently, so other than strange, I did not know what to expect. I got plenty of strange!

It is possible to over simplify Happy Days in the same way that it is Godot. A woman, Winnie, is buried in the sand and talks at length to us, herself and her mostly hidden husband Willie. Despite being buried and unable to move, Winnie is relentlessly happy. And that's about it.

With Winnie immobilised and Willie either out of sight or absent most of the time, there was very little physical action. The exception was the methodical way that Winnie gets things out of her bag and arranges them before her. These things included a toothbrush and a gun.

What drove the play, and drove it brilliantly, was the rich dialogue and Juliet Stevenson's brilliant delivery of this. This was essentially a one woman show and it was one hell of a show with one hell of a performance from the woman.

Winnie told us about her hopes for the day, it was always expected to be another happy one, and she also told some tender stories from her past. Her conversation flit between times and subjects and that kept it fresh and engaging. When Winnie spoke we wanted to listen.

There were some big themes at play, she was buried in sand after all, but Happy Days is not a play that I would pretend to understand. Some of it seemed more obvious than other bits but that may have been my misunderstanding.

The lack of an obvious plot or message only added to the play's interest and left the dialogue and Juliet Stevenson's performance at the heart of everything. I have seen some mighty fine performances over the years and this was right up there with the best of them.

The Cherry Orchard at the Young Vic was gripping but missed the point

I do not like to miss Chekhov plays and as I managed to miss two Uncle Vanya's this year (one because it finished early and the other because I could not find the time to see it) I was pretty keen to see this acclaimed version of The Cherry Orchard at the Young Vic.

And I almost missed this one as well. I was very late booking and the only time I could find to see it was a Wednesday afternoon. I was very lucky as when I went online to book it there was a single seat in the second row (B28 for £35) so I grabbed that eagerly. Somebody up there obviously wanted me to go.

Being a mid-week matinee the audience was an odd mix of students and retired people with just a few people, like myself, somewhere in the middle. Being a matinee also meant no beers beforehand so I was able to time my travel to arrive about 15 minutes before the show started.

On entering the theatre I was surprised to see it laid out as a proscenium (traditional) theatre with all the seating to the front of the stage. I had been to the Young Vic several times before and while the layout was always different it usually had seating on three sides, i.e. a thrust stage.

There was nothing to see initially as a jet black blind hid the stage. There seemed little point in taking my usual "this is what I could see" picture as all I could see was black. I thought about taking a photo at other times but the staff were always sharp, a few people were caught trying to use their phones, and the black blind returned to hide the stage at the end too. I've settled for this picture found on the web as it more or less shows the view that I had. I guess that I was one row further back and about four seats to the left.

I had a comfy seat with a good view, which is just as well as the play was scheduled to run for two hours without a break. We actually got a break for a medical incident in the audience (I did say it was full of pensioners) but it was short and we stayed in our seats.

The Cherry Orchard had one broad theme, decline and renewal, that was played out through a sizeable cast who each faced the decline in their own way.

The range of characters used to tell the story was almost pantomimic with goodies, baddies and clowns. The main clown was Leonid, the matriarch's brother, who got carried away whenever he spoke, and knew it. He brought a smile to my face every time. Also clowning was the governess Charlotta, though I am not sure why she had to walk through the room naked after a swim.

The young servant Yasha was a very convincing baddie and, as so often happens in real life, he prospered. The matriarch, Madame Ranevskaya was the goodie and the main loser. Her goodness of heart was not matched by he financial acumen and she lost the family's money on a lavish lifestyle and imprudent loans.

A lot of attention was paid to portraying the individual characters and I felt that this was at the expense of the main theme. The production seemed to recognise this and it used mood music, such as used in film, to indicate the wood of the theme that was lost in the trees of the characters.

That said, the characters and their lives were absorbing and the two hours flew by. The thunderous reception at the end showed that this was a good Cherry Orchard, it was just not quite the Cherry Orchard that I wanted to see.

A Streetcar Named Desire at the Young Vic

A Streetcar Named Desire came to the Young Vic heavy with the weight of expectations. It lived up to some but not all. Those expectations came from the reputation of the playwright Tennessee Williams, lead actress Gillian Anderson and director Benedict Andrews, the later returning to the scene of his triumph with Three Sisters.

This was a must-get ticket and the whole run sold out quickly. I was on the ball the morning the tickets went on sale and managed to get second row seats on a preferred date. The day worked out well too. I arranged to work in London that day and was able to get to the Young Vic early enough to bag a seat and table in the upstairs bar and to get something decent to eat for a change.

As soon as I sat down the set was a worry. We were sat in the round and in the middle of the stage was a solid cage, making three rooms of a house, and the uprights restricted the view.

The solution to this was bizarre and ineffective. The stage rotated. Yes the annoying uprights swung out of the way (and then briefly back in again) but the whole thing was unnatural and distracting.

To prove the point, at several times when the main actors were seated round the kitchen table talking one of them turned their back on the others to speak to the audience through the invisible wall. I expected better than this.

What was better, much better, was the play and the acting.

A Streetcar Named Desire was a slow simmering drama that chartered the fanciful world of Blanche DuBois, played by Gillian Anderson, as she slipped slowly from reality over three enthralling hours.

The production kept the temperature steady and warm and my just have kept it a little too steady. The rape scene passed almost unnoticed.

Gillian Anderson has got lots of praise for her performance and it was deserved. The other two main actors, playing her sister and brother-in-law, were good too but the story was all about Blanche DuBois and the performance was all about Gillian Anderson.

The Changeling at the Young Vic

Another last day performance, this time back at the Young Vic for The Changeling.

As is becoming increasingly usual, I decided to go because of the positive feedback on Twitter. You have to be a little careful about these comment as the venues, naturally, only retweet the positive reviews but it was the nature of the words that the reviewers used that led me to expect something unusual and exciting.

And that is as far as my preparation went. I had never heard of The Changeling so it came as a shock when they started talking in Elizabethan rhythm and rhyme.

The other surprise was that the Young Vic had gone for free seating (no idea why) and those free seats had been rearranged.

I managed to get in to the queue early and after taking an unexpected route in to the theatre I bagged a seat in the front row near the centre.  I had actually got my eye on the second row (that's where I sit at the Riverside) but a woman beat me to the one seat I wanted there. The front row proved to be a good choice.

The plot of The Changeling is simple enough, a young woman is engaged to be married but falls for another man so arranges for the fiancée to be killed by an admirer who expects, and takes, something substantial in return. It does not end well.

There are other things going on too and it is quite a chunky plot to get in to.

The production was weird. We had fights and sex with puddings, exaggeratedly dressed and prosthetically enhanced people, a net in front of the stage and some modern English (e.g. "beat the shit out of them") among the Elizabethan.

All this added a lot of pizazz and humour to a dark story. And it is dark, with large dollops of sex, violence and violent sex. It was like eating a dark choc ice.

It may be a coincidence, or part of modern drama theory, but it also had one mad scene with dance and music just like Three Sisters did. This time it was at the wedding and this is what is featured in the poster at the top.

The Changeling did exactly what I hoped that it would do. It told a good story with much imagination in a production that did the unexpected.

Three Sisters at the Young Vic

Chekhov seems to be back in fashion at the moment, and that suits me.

Three Sisters is one of his four last plays which are the four that he is best known for. The Young Vic's performance had got good reviews but the run clashed with my late Summer holiday so I ignored it for a while. Then the run was extended and I took the plunge. Even then I was not able to get there until the last day.

I like the pre-theatre area at the Young Vic though you usually have to fight to get a seat. I managed to find one upstairs. Unfortunately they do not sell bean coffee from the upstairs bar so I had to have a beer.

Taking my seat in the front row it was apparent that this was going to be a modern production. The square performance are was filled with grey tables that made a raised stage. There were a couple of props and that was it.

Gradually we are introduced to the cast and the three sisters took up positions around the edge of the stage, i.e. close to the audience. Again the modernity was blatant. The language of the translation was contemporary and reasonably fresh and, sitting almost in my lap, Masha sang Bowie's Golden Years to herself.

Olga, the eldest sister, is a teacher and a spinster by accident. Masha married young and regrets it. Irina wants to escape the rural home and return to Moscow where she had lived as a small girl.

Add to the mix some local soldiers, a doctor who has forgotten everything that he ever knew about doctoring, and ageing housekeeper, a geek brother and the bibmo who becomes his wife, and a few other local characters. It is a large and diverse cast.

The play is about an ending, as common theme with Chekhov. The ending here is the departure of the army that had been stationed there for some years.

Their departure takes the town back to rural solitude and has a direct impact on each of the sisters, and it is not a happy one.

It was vintage Chekhov.

This production was superb in all respect. The acting made the most of the diverse characters bringing out their differences while keeping them believable. We feel deeply for some, dislike others and find others amusing.

The staging was aggressively modern in a good way. This is not a safe production that lets the established script play out on its own. It adds energy and friction and, like a grain of sand in an oyster, it produces a pearl.

One scene summed it up. There is a party and somebody sits down at the piano to play a folk song. That turned out to be Nirvana's Smells like Teen Spirit that everybody sung along to with gusto pausing only to drink copiously. The atmosphere that created was exactly right.

After the ice cream break the plot themes developed in a downward spiral. There is a fire, a shooting, an affair, a large gambling debt and a broken clock.

The decay is emphasised as the tables that made up the raised stage are slowly removed one at a time. This, and all the other carefully planned parts of the staging and direction, made this a stunning production. It was easy to see why the run was extended and why it was sold out.

Bingo at the Young Vic

It has been quite a while since I bought tickets for an event over a year in advance, and that is what I did for Bingo.

The draw was Patrick Stewart, as the promotion for the show makes quite clear.

He plays the part of an elderly Shakespeare who has finished writing, left London and returned to his country home which he shares with a wife and daughter whom he cannot stand and a couple of servants whom he respects more.

Shakespeare, a minor landowner, gets caught up in the lard reforms of the time, enclosure of common land, and that brings him in to local politics on the side of the rich. This is the right move for him financially but he seems unhappy with it.

He is also unhappy with other aspects of the then current ways of the world and, through his eyes, we learn about matters like almost casual hangings and bear baiting.

Shakespeare is a troubled soul.

He spends a lot of time sitting in the garden despite protestations from the house maid that he should try and keep warm.

There he talks to staff, family, visitors and, when all else fails, himself.

The other scenes are less idyllic and include a gallows, a bar and his bed chamber which is locked to keep his wife and daughter out.

The conversations continue in all these settings and through them we learn more and more about Shakespeare and his world, neither of which are particularly bright. There is little to see of what gave him the title Bard of Avon except, perhaps, a few glimpses in his monologues.

If I suggest that there is little substance, i.e. story, in the play then that is probably right, yet that is not a problem. The play resounds with the words of Shakespeare and they are delivered brilliantly by Patrick Stewart. The rest of the cast play their part too and are more than just foils to his brilliance.

Bingo educates us on Shakespeare's life and times and offers some captivating side stories as it does so.

The Glass Menagerie at the Young Vic

This was my first time at the Young Vic, apart from a visit to the popular bar after another event, so I did not know what to expect from the theatre.

I thought I knew what to expect from the play, Tennessee Williams' The Glass Menagerie but that proved to be wrong.

The original flyer claimed that the play was "seriously funny" and the Culture Show implied that it was about the relationship between a mother and her son but neither of these is that true.

Let's start with the theatre. The layout is unusual, in my limited experience of such things. The stage is a square with bench seating on two sides. The construction is modern and metal. The only comparable layout I know is the Rose Theatre in Kingston but this is on a larger scale and is refreshingly stark.

The Glass Menagerie tells the tale of an American family in the aftermath of the Great Depression when times are tight and the world is changing fast.

The family consists of an organised mother, a drunkard son in a dead-end job and a crippled daughter who stays at home and whose only interest is her collection of glass animals.

The father is absent physically but he still casts a shadow over the family through his picture on the wall and several references are made to his drunkenness and his wanderings.

The scene is set with the family struggling to survive with few prospects for the future. Tales are told of happier days, when the mother was young, and she relies on these tales to bring hope for the future. Many of these hopes are foisted in her daughter who, because of her disability and shyness, does not have the men callers that her mother wants and expects.

Then her brother brings a colleague home and the play's purpose becomes clear as we witness the evening and, through that, get more of a view of morals and manners of that time.

So, not very funny and not really about the son. What it is though, is a tense emotional drama that grabs you quickly and refuses to let you go even after the final curtain.