Dead Simple

This play was apparently based on a detective novel by Peter James, one of a series which has sold millions, but passed me by altogether. Not my sort of reading matter.

The cast were largely being sold on their appearances in various long-running soap opera like Eastenders and Hollyoaks, which also meant I didn't recognise the cast either. But for all the unfamiliar material, this was a highly-entertaining evening out.

The victim is a highly-successful property developer who is about to get married to his beautiful fiancee. His best man (and business partner) can't join him at his stag do, leaving the others to stage a mock kidnapping and bury him in a coffin (with a breathing tube) as a payback for the OTT pranks he had played on them at their stag dos. But it all goes wrong when the others die in a car crash and his only means of communication with his abductors - a walkie talkie - is picked up by the mentally subnormal son of the clearance contractor (played like a youthful Johnny Vegas).

His best man suddenly realises that if he keeps quiet about the "mock funeral" he will take-over the rest of the business (of which he is the junior partner) and become fabulously rich. Enabling him to cop off with his best mate's fiancée and a life of luxury - while of course his mate would die a horrible slow death. There are many further plot twists, but needless to say it was a very engaging piece of hokum and you never lost interest. It was a terribly ingenuous plot. But it did make you realise that this was really a book, not a play: the interest was not so much what was going on, but finding out what would happen next. A real page-turner where you wanted to skip over the writing to get to the next twist and eventual denouement.

Stevie

While the Deposit plays downstairs, with an unknown cast, a very well known actress indeed, Zoe Wannamaker, plays in Stevie on the main stage. A bit of a tour de force here as Stevie (ie the poetess Stevie Smith) is pretty much never off stage.

It's a cleverly written play, the story of Stevie's life, partly through reminiscences, from early childhood to her death in 1971 in her late sixties, but with her poetry neatly intertwined into the script. A sort of poetry version of a juke box musical.

It was interesting to me both because I knew little of her poetry, so it was an introduction to that for me, and because she is the only famous person to have come out of my dull little suburb, Palmers Green, where she lived all her life. She was certainly a strange one, both shy and liking parties, and obsessed with death. But for all that I have to say I think the Deposit was the more entertaining, and thought-provoking, evening. At a third of the price!

The Deposit

This was another cracking little play in Hampstead's studio theatre played by four unknown (to me) young actors and with minimal stage props.

Two couples have decided to move in together to a one-bedroom flat for a year, sharing the rent and the cramped accommodation, with a view to being able to save for a deposit in London's ridiculously overheated housing market. The two girls are best friends from university. Predictably the friendly relations soon begin to break down. What was so neat about the writing is the balance of all the characters. No one is exactly in the right or the wrong. Unlike say, the preposterously popular Poldark where the baddies are such pantomime villains that one almost feels the need to hiss when they come on the screen, none of these four young people seem so unreasonable. They just have different viewpoints, and perhaps a bit less tact than would be useful.

Without wishing to give away too much of the ending, it all breaks down in horrible recriminations. The achievement in the writing is how skilfully one is brought from general amity to bitterness and jealously in slow drips.

Oppenheimer

One often talks about brands. In the theatre the brand is often a particular actor or actress. Or it could be the theatre - for some people that might mean the Donmar, and for me its Hampstead Theatre. Even if one knows nothing about the play or the cast, you just know from experience that plays there are more likely than not to be enjoyable.

For Oppenheimer the brand was undoubtedly that it was a RSC production. I didn't recognise any of the (typically RSC) huge cast, and the subject matter - the inventor of the nuclear bomb, Robert Oppenheimer - is probably not enough to bring people in. So it was the RSC trademark which largely attracted me, and it was very good. It cleverly brought in little bits of nuclear physics - probably not the easiest subject matter for a theatrical performance.

It worked by being effortlessly clever, both in script and staging. Scenes rapidly changed before your eyes, characters drifting in and out seamlessly. It was very much plot driven rather than character driven. The story of how this academic took on the task of developing the bomb, the uneasy marriage of scientists with a suspicious military and the left-wing sympathies of many of Oppenheimer's associates, and an unsatisfactory love-life, were all told very well. The one weakness, and probably inevitable to gallop through the story, is that one never felt one had got into any of the characters. This wasn't in depth character analysis - the speeches all too short. As I say it was story more than a biography.

Joan Armatrading at the Barbican

I think the first time I went to see Joan in concert might have been 30 years ago, so it felt right to see her on what was supposed to be her last ever world tour. Indeed, as she announced at the Barbican, on the 120th performance of her last tour.

Joan has always had a quite devoted fan base. And by now it is a quite elderly one too. But she does have a truly delightful stage presence. She is witty and intimate with her audience. You feel you are amongst friends.

One might say she is Britain's answer to Tracy Chapman, but in truth Tracy is only America's answer to Joan. Everything about her seems unlikely. Black, lesbian, Tory supporter from the Black Country who, as she explained in a little photo-montage section, has met Nelson Mandela, has her photo hanging in the National Portrait Gallery ....

...and has played with many of the greats. Her voice has enormous range, deep and powerful at times, but then high and fragile at others. She can do real rock stuff on an electric guitar despite being a lady of pensionable age, but in no way did that seem incongruous. She played most of her hits and, luckily for me, concentrated on her earlier work, with which I am familiar, and not her later Blues stuff with which I am not.

It was just a lovely laid back evening to savour.

Harvey

I think its fair to say this is the only time I will go and see a play about a giant invisible rabbit. Not because it wasn't an enjoyable play, but because there aren't going to be many plays in this particular genre.

Actually this is a play based on farce and whimsy. Harvey is the invisible rabbit that is the friend of the hero of the story, a kindly eccentric called Elwood (played by James Dreyfuss) who drives his sister and niece mad because he insists that he spends all his time with the said rabbit (which of course talks and likes drinking in bars). Worse still, he insists on introducing him to their friends. So eventually his sister (Maureen Lipman, yet again doing an  American accent which seems almost de riguer for her now) does the only sensible thing and attempts to get him put in a private mental institution.

Here the farce works nicely as the junior doctor convinces himself that she, rather than the nice brother, must be the deluded one and puts her in the straight jacket.

That is really where the farce ends and the whimsy begins, because it turns out that the invisible rabbit is real (yes I know, but it works.) The moral in the end is that its better being eccentric and believing in something odd than being sane but soulless and unhappy.

The War on Drugs in Brixton

I got tickets for this gig at close to the last moment, by which time the standing area downstairs at Brixton was sold out. So I got one unreserved seating ticket for the balcony. A sign of my future maybe as I expect at some point I will find standing at gigs too much. But I got there in good time to pick up a seat at the front of the balcony, and had a pretty decent view actually.

Support came from a New York band Amen dunes. Rather earnest trio, but at least their sound was somewhere in the same ballpark, or at least in the same mood, as the War on Drugs. 

So on to the main act. The War on Drugs have been described as a cross between Folk and Prog Rock. An unlikely crossbreed, but its a fair description really. The result though is no mongrel.

I should also say that like their support they are an American indie band. I am starting to find a whole host of American bands I like now. They tend to be characterized by a layered sound, as you tend to get from a large band playing many instruments - the archetype perhaps being the admittedly Canadian Arcade Fire.

This lot are a sextet, as you can see from my lofty vantage point.

Lead vocalist Adam Granduciel sings rather in the manner of Bob Dylan (but obviously better - few people can sing worse), and that is what particularly brings the folk feel to the songs. The prog rock element comes in part from the guitars, in part the slightly meandering nature of the music, but saved generally by the insistent rhythm of the drums which keeps the tracks going at pace rather than slowly winding round like prog rock bands do - a sort of aural doodling. So these are complicated, textured songs - no three minute singles, but nevertheless no self-indulgent dirges either.

Overall, a very talented band whose stuff sounds great on CD (check out Lost in the Dream), but also sound good live. And a very attractive and imaginative, although simple, light show to boot.

Adam Granduciel

  

Robbie Bennett

Jon Natchez - excellent on sax

Charlie hall