An excellent director makes a rare misstep with Amsterdam, in which a compelling if tricksy play is given an arch and mannered production that only distances the audience further.
Good programming is an art, and Paul Miller – artistic director of the Orange Tree Theatre – is clearly on a continuous roll with his inspired mixing of the old and the new, forgotten classics and new voices, revivals and premieres. And he loves to take risks.
Hype is a dangerous thing. It often raises expectations beyond the reasonable, and disappointment inevitably follows. It also prioritises PR over artistic activity, putting the publicity cart before the creative horse, sucking energy away from plays to feed the marketing machine.
If this play really were “A Debate in One Sitting” as its author called it in 1909, it would have sunk without trace. “Talk, talk, talk, talk”, complains Hypatia Tarleton (Marli Siu), daughter of an Edwardian underwear magnate. Sick to death of the menfolk talking at her and over her, she longs to be “an active verb”, and we sympathise.
Should Brexit ministers need help understanding the cultural mindset of their continental counterparts, they might consider a subscription to the Orange Tree, the compact Richmond producing house that is defiantly opening its arms to Europe.
The late David Storey spoke movingly, elsewhere on The Arts Desk, of his sense of overwhelming powerlessness at the challenge of accepting his father’s death. “I was quite racked by his death, and what death had become as an abstraction - in other words, what's my death, what's death itself?” he said.
Make no mistake about it, Branden Jacobs-Jenkins is a playwright to watch. London receives its first opportunity to appraise his vibrant, quizzical talent with this production of An Octoroon, for which he received an OBIE in 2014 (jointly with his second Off-Broadway work of the same year, Appropriate). His follow-on play Gloria, opening at the Hampstead Theatre in June, was a finalist in the Pulitzer drama category in 2016.
The social permutations of love are beguilingly explored in the 90-minute stage traffic of Marivaux’s The Lottery of Love, with Paul Miller’s production at the Orange Tree Theatre making the most of the venue’s unencumbered in-the-round space to dance the action along at a brisk pace. The only adornment in Simon Daw’s design is an elaborate chandelier, bedecked with candles and hanging roses, but the sheer élan of the piece more than occupies the stage in itself.
Q: How do you review a show that includes lines that ask “can my mouth swallow my mouth”? A: With difficulty, but I should be okay as long as I resist the temptation of being as surreal as Caryl Churchill is in this double bill of two short, but related one-act plays that were first staged in 1997. Collectively titled Blue Heart, each of the two has a separate name and each tackles a serious issue about family relationships with a breathtakingly confident imagination and thrilling theatrical panache. Each is experimental in form and unsettling in content.
We’re living in the age of the small play. Although there are plenty of baggy epics around on our stages, they are outnumbered by the small and short two-hander, whether it's John O’Donovan’s gloriously titled If We Got Some More Cocaine I Could Show You How I Love You at the Old Red Lion or the equally gloriously acted Counting Stars by Atiha Sen Gupta at Theatre Royal Stratford East. And, sure enough, the latest new play at the ever-enterprising Orange Tree, Zoe Cooper’s Jess and Joe Forever, is small and short. But it is also a hugely enjoyable romcom.