News & Reviews

Review: Fridays When It Rains

****stars

Low Down
Lights fade on a storm and a story; then a story within a story. Emma D’Arcy directs Nick Warburton‘s play, adapted for the stage, a chilling tale of love unanswered.

Review
Fridays, when it Rains, by Nick Warburton, playwright and children’s novelist, is a play set in the age of steam in a compartment carriage on the last train home. Essentially a psychological drama with a ghostly core, Emma D’Arcy produces and a very impressive Vicki Carpenter directs and stars as a woman relieved to make the last train home after becoming lost both the panic and shadows of a maze of streets. But is the last train a train she really wants to be on? And who is the man with whom she shares a carriage?

Essentially a story within a story, a tale unfolds on the shared journey. Robin Saikia looks the part of a sinister, Alistair Sim-like raconteur with eyes that fairly pop out of his head, when he wants to menace. Vicki Carpenter might have fallen straight off a black and white celluloid reel, and the revealed carriage set is startling in its careful realisation, in this intimate theatre space on Gardner Street. We’re in a train carriage, not looking at a theatre set. The cast of two inhabit their characters well and help sustain the tension right to the last. There’s a lot of stillness in this production with vocal delivery the mainstay as the story is shared between them. The stillness is help well, allowing the story to move, like a train towards an unknown destination.

Sets in small spaces often look amateur and unnecessary. Not this. It helps make the piece the absorbing, dark tale that it truly is.

A Tale of the Unexpected, the story unfolds as the train is also a character in one act play. The stations too, the people mentioned in the story, are all members of the cast. The small carriage becomes part of a bigger world, and it is all magically revealed on stage through some excellently paced storytelling, and interactions between the characters.

This particular performance felt a little hesitant at the start, but it soon flowed and this reviewer was witness to a very impressively acted and realised piece of ghost-tale theatre. “If you’re not careful, your imagination can change the world around you” we hear. We certainly forgot we were in a theatre space and were, instead, fellow travellers aboard this claustrophobic locomotive.

Many themes are covered: unrequited love, loss, elusive happiness, the experiences that haunt unto the grave and perhaps beyond…and the stories that we call our lives. The story-within-a-story structure serves the play well; there are a lot of words spoken and it holds attention to the last. Some of the blocking of the physical moments need to be finessed but this is a play that will mature like good wine as it plays more nights.

The soundscape lends a further sinister feel to the dark mood of the story and helps the darkness to close further in not just on the characters but also on we, the captivated audience.

A very impressive and thrilling-chilling piece of theatre. Catch it during the Brighton Fringe where it may well have reached outstanding.

Review: The King’s Face

Genre: Drama

*****stars

Low Down
A surgeon battles to save the life of the teenage Prince Henry in a fascinating exploration of the medieval nation-state.

Review
Assessing a moment in history is a job best suited to historians – placing it in a dramatic context can be a minefield for a playwright. Getting the balance right between history and story is of paramount importance and this is chiefly the reason for the success of “The King’s Face”. Steven Young (who has written and directed the piece) has taken an historical footnote and expanded it into a fascinating debate about kingship, divine right and the nation state, framing it with an unlikely friendship which blossoms between prince and commoner.

The young Harry (King Henry V to be) has sustained a serious injury in battle – an arrowhead has passed under his left eye, lodged at the back of his skull and is irretrievable with current medical skill. The prognosis is terminal and threatens the nation’s future security. King Henry IV secures the services of Dr. Jonathan Bradmore, who gradually gains the prince’s confidence and invents an instrument with which he hopes to perform the surgery.

Graham Bowe’s doctor skilfully combines the gentle, rational scientist with the commoner unused to courtly practice – it’s a precise and beautifully understated performance, which fully conveys the wisdom, patience and occasional frustration which comes with age. He is the perfect foil to G. David Trosko’s Henry – all testosterone-filled teen hothead compromised by sexual naivity. His relationship with the doctor is completely believable and allows us a glimpse inside the mind of troubled royalty – the fear of impending death, the impact on the state – and the possibility he might die a virgin. Bradmore is temporarily in loco parentis – “All I want is a friend” says Henry – and the doctor tries his best to explain how to handle a woman. It’s one of many touching and funny moments in a play which has an unexpected and welcome share of laughs amongst the necessary tension.

Trosko’s Henry is a joy, an awkward and ungainly boy who can instantly assume regality even in a nightshirt. Hailing from Dallas, his accent – a gentle English with tinges of Welsh – is flawless. We see his journey through pain (his prosthetic weeping wound is visually compelling) – and debate – take him further towards manhood and the throne. We revel with him in the excitement of battle and empathise with the guilt he feels about the death of his kinsman Richard II – God’s anointed. The fiery exchanges between him and Bradbury over the state of the nation make for a nice contrast with the gentle scenes of healing.

Young’s script is detailed and well-observed and overall his orchestration of the piece – both writing and direction – is excellent. My two (very) minor quibbles are a slight flabbiness in the second half where the piece momentarily loses impetus and the staging of one part of the surgery, where in the intimate space of Iambic Arts, the eye is not completely deceived.

That apart, the story, the direction and the actor’s accomplished performances are together totally engaging and make for an absorbing and satisfying evening, with plenty to muse on. Real, living history.

Reviewed by NC 27 May 2011
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‘Laissez les Bon Temps Rouler’

REVIEW: The Importance of Being Earnest

Click here to read a fabulous review from The New Current of The Importance of Being Earnest performed at the Iambic Arts Theatre as part of the Brighton Festival Fringe.

QUOTE: The Art of Concealment

Received from Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph Theatre critic, after seeing the show at Iambic Arts on Sunday…

Quote from Charles Spencer, Daily Telegraph Critic, on The Art of Concealment

REVIEW: The Art of Concealment

PREVIEW: The King’s Face from FringeGuru

22-23, 28-29 May, 3:00pm-4:40pm; 24-27 May, 8:00pm-9:40pm

The King's Face: image from FringeGuru

A desperate war, a future king, and the medical man who befriends him. Does that sound somehow familiar? But forget Colin Firth in 1930′s London – this is the summer of 1403, and it’s the Hundred Years’ War that’s raging. Holed up in a castle in Warwickshire, pioneering surgeon John Bradmore fights his own battle… striving, against all odds, to save the life of the king’s first-born son.

If you like your Shakespeare, of course, you’ll know that he succeeds. In later life as Henry V, the injured prince becomes the Bard’s great hero, famously exhorting his impassioned countrymen unto the breach in France. With this new script, playwright Steven Young hopes to reset that propagandist balance – revealing a king who, though unquestionably great, was far more complex than Shakespeare portrayed.

When an arrow pierced the young man’s face, what did it do to his brain? And by saving the prince’s life, what did Bradmore do to the course of history? Of course, we’ll never quite know the answers.

But this thoughtful two-hander, well-matched to the intimate Iambic Arts Theatre, seems ideally placed to explore these royally intriguing questions.

ARTICLE: The Argus, 8th April 2011

Argus Article on The Art of Concealment, Friday 8th April 2011

PRESS RELEASE: 25 January 2011

The Art of Concealment: the Life of Terence Rattigan

The Art of Concealment showing at the Iambic Arts Theatre for the Brighton Fringe Festival

A new play by Sussex-based playwright Giles Cole – The Art of Concealment: the Life of Terence Rattigan – is to be premiered in this year’s Brighton Festival Fringe. It is the opening production of the festival offering at the Iambic Arts Theatre in Gardner Street and runs for nine performances between 6 and 20 May. The play examines the private life of one of Brighton’s most famous residents in the year that marks the centenary of his birth.

He was one of the most acclaimed playwrights and screenwriters of his generation. His fall from critical favour marked a turning point in modern British theatre. He wore a carefully constructed mask of respectable, suave gentility in order to conceal his true nature. But who was the man behind the mask? Who was the real Terence Rattigan?

This is a play not only about the demons that haunted one of our great playwrights, but about the creative process itself, and the process of ageing, of loss, of the search for love, and of ultimate disillusionment – with the ironic twist that we know Rattigan to be more honoured now than he would ever have expected in his lifetime.

Sir Terence Rattigan CBE was a leading light of the British theatre scene from the 1930s to the 1960s, numbering iconic figures such as John Gielgud, Noel Coward, Alec Guinness, Marilyn Monroe, Kenneth More, Laurence Olivier and Vivien Leigh amongst his wide circle of friends and colleagues. He was the highest paid screenwriter of his day, and he wrote four of the greatest dramas of the 20th century – The Browning Version, The Winslow Boy, The Deep Blue Sea and Separate Tables (recently revived at Chichester). He is enjoying a huge surge in popularity a hundred years after his birth, and several major productions of his plays are being mounted around the country this year, with revivals of Flare Path and of his last play, Cause Célèbre, opening in London in March. Less Than Kind is currently running at the Jermyn Street Theatre. The Art of Concealment, however, may be the first play to be written about Rattigan himself.

Giles Cole has written for radio and stage and is a former actor. His writing credits include seven plays for BBC Radio 4 and eight stage plays. He has twice won the Sussex Playwrights annual play competition, and last had a play performed on the Brighton Festival Fringe in 2003 (Frail Blood, directed by Roger Braban and starring Peter Ellis, Mary Conlon, Vanessa Goodliffe and Hilary Farmiloe). Recently he has written a one-act play about the Duke and Duchess of Windsor in their declining years, and compiled an entertainment celebrating the works of Sir John Mortimer, which was directed by Marilyn Imrie and performed at the Henley Literary Festival in 2009 and at the Garrick Club in 2010 – the latter with Hugh Bonneville, Geraldine James, Geoffrey Palmer and Katie Warren in the cast.