The Little Dog Laughed - but did I?

Remember when those lovely people at Arthur Leone PR gave me tickets for Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage, and all I had to do in return was pen my thoughts on it for this here blog? And remember how I did pen my thoughts on it for this here blog? Well, they've done it again. Last night I and a distinguished older gentleman who may or may not have been my father (I mean, I know whether or not he was my father, as does he, but I'm keeping him anonymous for the purposes of this review) were the guests of Arthur Leone PR at 'The Little Dog Laughed'. I can only assume one of the following:

- The people at Arthur Leone PR have very short memories;
- The people at Arthur Leone PR never actually read my review of Dirty Dancing: The Classic Story On Stage;
- The people at Arthur Leone PR are very confident about the quality of The Little Dog Laughed;
or
- The people at Arthur Leone PR are of the belief that all publicity is good publicity.

Let's find out, shall we?

Weeeeeeeeell... Oh I can't be bothered to draw out the suspense. It was brilliant.

The Little Dog Laughed is the story of a Hollywood Agent, Diane (Tamsin Grieg) who wants to score a lead role for her client, Mitchell (Rupert Friend) in the film adaptation of a hot new Broadway play. The only catch is that the role is of a gay man... and Mitchell is gay. Doesn't sound like a problem? In Hollywood it is. "If a perceived straight actor portrays a gay role in a feature film, it’s noble. It’s a stretch. It’s the pretty lady putting on the fake nose and winning an Oscar. If an actor with a ’friend’ plays a gay role it’s not acting, it’s bragging." So says Diane, a lesbian herself, who is determined to keep Mitchell firmly in the closet. But things get complicated when Mitchell falls in love with rent boy Alex (Harry Lloyd, channeling a young John Barrowman in this performance). Alex isn't gay - he's got a girlfriend to prove it (Gemma Arterton.) But then Alex finds himself enjoying Mitchell's company more than he expected...

The jewel in the crown of this production is Tamsin Grieg, who despite taking the role of cold, Machiavellian Diane, hams it up with gleeful hilarity, pulling the audience in with her from the very first words. It's almost a pantomime villain role and Grieg is fantastically over the top with it, ensuring that for all the dark twists the story takes, we never lose sight of the fun. Friend, Lloyd and Arterton are less experienced stage performers and suffer a little in comparison - Friend a little hyperactive, Arterton a little difficult to believe in - but they're still solid enough, and all stunning eye candy to look at. We get to look at them an awful lot, and it would be dishonest of me not to mention quite how much I enjoyed the fact that Friend and Lloyd spend much of the play showing off their perfect bodies in very small, tight underpants, and once without even those. I am so glad I went with a distinguished older gentleman who may or may not be my father. (Distinguished gentlemen and lesbians of all ages can enjoy eyeing the beautiful Arterton, and Grieg for that matter, though neither are quite as scantily-clad, so it's equal-opportunities ogling.)

Great performances aside, it's a sharp, funny script by Douglas Carter Beane with plenty of quotable lines ("Give a writer final cut? I'd sooner give firearms to small children"), snappily directed by Jamie Lloyd, and though some reviews have dismissed it as inconsequential, I'd say that the issue of gay actors not being able to come out in Hollywood is important - as with football and the American military, it's wrong when any profession forces people to live a lie. The programme quotes Rupert Everett, one of Hollywood's few openly gay stars, rarely cast in straight roles and lately reduced to a drag part in St Trinians, saying "I would not advise any actor necessarily, if he was really thinking of his career, to come out... the fact of the matter is, and I don't care who disagrees, it doesn't work if you're gay." Or as the play puts it, "Are you British? Do you have a knighthood? Then shut up."

The Little Dog Laughs is not on for long - it closes on April 10th - so if you fancy a joyfully entertaining night out I would advise that you book straight away.

How To Spot A Poorly-Reviewed Play

The latest mailout from the South Bank Centre plops into my mailbox, promoting the new Hanish Kureshi play The Black Album. It has two quotes from reviews on it. Two. The first one seems to be pretty good -

"The flawless cast do Kureishi’s funny script and excellent characterisation proud."

Well that's encouraging. Who said that?

Oh. London Lite.

Well, surely they got a decent quote out of a real newspaper? Look, there's something from the Daily Telegraph. A broadsheet, that mostly isn't given away on the tube to entertain people with its celebrity gossip and dating tips, even if it does have a slight tendency to stuff its pages with stories about Prince Charles.

"This is a long-over due [sic] look at a very urgent issue."

(Oops, they really should have got that ad subbed.) And......? No, that's the end of the quote. You might want to know whether it is an any good long overdue look, but the Daily Telegraph, it say nothing about that. [sic as well. That was deliberate]

Hmm.

Quick peak at the full Daily Telegraph review reveals exactly why they weren't able to pull a more encouraging quote out of it. It begins -

"It may not be the best page-to-stage adaptation ever to have graced the National Theatre. It may not even offer the full satisfaction of a thoroughly gripping yarn. But The Black Album, Hanif Kureishi’s new dramatisation of his 1995 novel, has one ace up its sleeve: it’s about a subject that matters."

Righty-ho. So it's bad, but it's WORTHY. Oh god, that's even worse.

And the Daily Telegraph is the best quote they can pull from anywhere?

I will not be going to see The Black Album by Hanif Kureishi.

Robert Lepage: Lipsynch

So, fresh from two days in bed, on Saturday I headed off to the Barbican centre to see Robert Lepage's new play, Lipsynch. For those who are not in the know, as I was certainly not in the know, Robert Lepage is one of the world's leading dramatists, and a new play by him is a very big deal indeed. A very big deal in the sense that the entire audience was full of salivating thesps. And a very big deal in the sense that Lipsynch is nine hours long.

I know, I know. Who in their right mind would go and see a nine hour long play? But I'm not in my right mind, and I have been getting more and more into theatre recently, and I quite fancied the idea of myself as the kind of cool, in the know, theatre-going person who would go to see a nine-hour-long play at the Barbican by a hip dramatist. And I had the feeling that either it would be absolutely marvelous or it would be horrendously awful but one way or another it would be interesting and noteworthy and I'd have loads to say about it.

It wasn't. It wasn't absolutely marvelous, horrendously awful, interesting, or noteworthy. It was fine. As it turns out, being nine hours long was the most remarkable thing about it.

The structure of the play was in nine parts, like interlinked short stories, each following one of a number of overlapping characters. Overall, thematically, the stories investigated questions of voice, music, family relationships, sexual exploitation, and so on in ways that were diverting but unenlightening. So apparently prostitution exploits the vulnerable, and family love can be stifling but ultimately conquers all, and some things can't be expressed in conversation but only through music, and so on. Feeling intrigued yet? No? Me neither.

The performances were a bit erratic (some cast members surely chosen for singing ability rather than acting chops), the set was so impossibly complex each scene change took several minutes and bits kept falling off so crew members had to run on mid-scene and fix it, the dialogue was in a number of languages but the surtitles didn't always work - so much of it was shambolic that in the end I felt like I had seen a brave school play.

On the other hand it was rarely dull, though the truly good moments were pretty sporadic. I was genuinely moved once (in nine hours!) in a segment where a voice-over artist recovering from a brain tumour struggles to remember the precise sound of her father's voice. Another segment featured a hilarious slapstick funeral complete with farting coffin. A brilliant sequence focused on a man in drag as an old lady lipsynching perfectly to a long anecdote in her voice. And the set - when functioning - could at times be so good that it upstaged the actors. But all of this really wasn't enough.

Ultimately the play was a disappointment. Even though it sucessfully passed nine hours of my life without too much discomfort or boredom, I really didn't feel I had got anything more edifying than I would have in nine hours of watching TV. I would almost have prefered something awful because it would have suggested a few risks being taken. At one moment in the play, one of the characters says of a home video "But it's so banal!" to which another replies, "Well, that's life", which neatly sums up my feelings about the whole thing.

A banal three stars out of five...

Her Naked Skin

Off to the National Theatre last night to see Rebecca Lenkiewicz's 'Her Naked Skin'. Much has been made of the fact that Lenkiewicz's play is the first full-length original play by a woman to be staged on the Olivier stage (the largest at the National Theatre), which by any measure is disgraceful. Sadly what's also disgraceful is that they chose to debut women's writing on our most important stage with such a half-baked affair.

'Her Naked Skin' tells the story of two suffragettes who fall in love while incarcerated at Holloway Prison. Or at least, that's sort of what it's about, but it isn't really about anything much, or perhaps it's half about a number of different things. The first half of the play really only sets the scene and establishes the love story, and is pretty plodding and strighforward. Aside from the lesbian love scenes, there was nothing in this half that I didn't know from learning about Suffragettes in primary school. The second half is more adventurous but also more incoherant. There are surprises to be had, but mostly of the baffled, why-would-she-do-that variety. Little makes much sense, and where it does, it isn't developed far enough to become interesting. Our lead Suffragette, Lady Celia, dumps her lover, working-class Eve, for unfathomable reasons. Celia's husband gets drunk and launches into a stunningly articulate but utterly out of character speech about how she has always rejected him. I got the impression that there were ideas at work, about women having to hide their true natures, or about the difficulties for a man of the period to be married to a progressive woman, but nothing was taken further to the point where some true insight might be revealed.

Perhaps the most problematic aspect of the play was the Suffragette setting itself. There was plenty of historical detail on show, both in terms of the conditions of Suffragettes' incarceration, and the parliamentary battles that surrounded them, but barely any exploration of why these women were Suffragettes or why they chose the tactics that they did. The play is framed around a heavily-trailed climactic scene in which a key character is force fed through a tube down her nose, a long and grotesque set-piece deliberately reminiscent of waterboarding. This scene was so extreme in its staging that I had to stop watching after the first minute, and one audience member was taken violently ill, but in the absence of any emotional or intellectual context, any sense of why someone would choose to go on hunger strike and endure this treatment not just once but repeatedly, all you're left with is shock, nausea, the knowledge that "this is wrong" which most people already knew, and a disinclination to eat foie gras in future. It's not enough. A play should make you feel more than sick.

What's so disappointing is that this was not a "bad" play. Lenciewicz is obviously a talented writer - her dialogue was often sharp and witty, and there were the germs of some interesting ideas. The set was beautifully designed, although to my taste a little over-complex. The acting was impeccable, the direction intelligent. It was all competently handled. It just wasn't ready. The play needed several more drafts, perhaps even a change of focus (I found the husband's story far more compelling than the main Suffragette's). There are producers who oversee these things, who should make sure that nothing is staged in the country's showcase theatre that isn't ready to go on. What could have been a four or even five star play given more time barely registered a two on my scale.

It's dispiriting that what should have been a key moment in the history of women's theatre should have ended up as a rushed, botched job, when it had the potential to be so much more.

Reasons To Be Cheerful

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All thanks to this lovely person.