Whilst visiting a Caribbean island about 100 years ago, Brutus Jones, an African American train driver, some how ends up emperor of the island’s native tribe. His reign is brutal, so Jones knows it will eventually end. Eugene O’Neill’s 1920 The Emperor Jones begins with Jones’ initially relaxed attempt at escape from the uprising citizens, and inevitable guilty descent into the madness of a Shakespearian villain. The script is entirely spoken by Jones, barring the first and last scenes, with his madness peppered with ghosts that won’t let him rest in the darkness of the island’s woods.
The ensemble cast add variation with movement, dance and music, breaking up the lengthy monologue that comprises most of the play. The Afro-Caribbean style dancing and ritual bowing designed by movement director Diane Alison-Mitchell compliment the set of heavy, distressed drapes that become a throne room, forest and road. The dance and movement plays a vital role in determining the setting, as the script largely neglects this. The time period is also ignored in the text, but also smartly indicated with generic peasant costumes by Sorcha Corcoran. Director Ursula Campbell effectively unites the design elements, rounding it off with Fasier Milroy’s dark sound and lighting.
It’s an interesting play choice for Black History Month considering how unlikeable the title role is, but shows episodes from African-American history in Jones’ hallucinations, and can provide some insight into Caribbean island life. What is also worth considering is that The Emperor Jones was written by a white man prior to US integration and features a black leading man who speaks in the vernacular of the slave generations, but O’Neill was the son of Irish immigrants, a nationality on the receiving end of much discrimination. Though initial pathos towards Jones is impossible, there is room for it to develop over the course of his collapse. O’Neill’s script is similarly wordy and slow to develop tension, not gathering momentum until roughly half way through. It employs several different performance styles including early realism that although experimental at the time of writing, feels dated now.
RSC, National and Globe veteran Mark Springer is egotist Brutus Jones. His arrogance, written into the script, takes a long time to break down; this limits Springer’s range until he starts to lose his mind after which he splendidly falls apart. His second in command, Smithers (Matthew McFetridge), is the bearded manipulator that keeps his cards close to his chest when advising Jones of the people’s revolt. The rest of the cast who form an ensemble are good, but underused.
The issue with The Emperor Jones isn’t the production in this case, but the script itself. Despite considered design and production elements, it becomes clear why this play is rarely produced in the UK. It has little relevant to modern British society and Jones’ narcissism, whilst no doubt fun to play, is much less fun to watch and drags on for too long.
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New writing based on classical literature, with the audience being served Italian food as part of the performance, sounds like a cracking way to spend an evening. The Gastronomical Comedy tells Dante’s story as he tries to be an actor in London but ends up working in his wife’s uncle’s restaurant, The Inferno, to pay the bills. It’s a timeless story of artistic struggle meant to parallel Dante Alighieri’s journey through hell, though the connection between the two stories was tenuous at best as the modern day Dante didn’t encounter particularly difficult opposition to his dreams. Despite good performances, it’s a concept that is good in principle but feels very much like a work-in-progress in need of quite a lot of script development before being a completed piece of theatre.
There’s an abandoned island in the middle of Manchester. One gated and guarded road goes in and out. Zeppo owns it, like much of the land in Manchester, but he doesn’t like to get involved in the goings on at his properties. Too risky. After Ollie’s twin sister disappears, Zeppo tells her to try looking for her on his abandoned island, Pomona. So she does.
Carol (Holly Joyce) moved to a village in Carcassonne to rebuild her life after a devastating divorce and her son had grown up. She is convinced that in a past life, she was a medieval troubadour called Guy in the time of the Cathars. Raymond (Danny Solomon) is an actor working in the second-rate tourist attraction that Carol stalks, and longs for a life in the more exciting London. With a poetic, reflective script by Nick Wood and direction by Natasha Wood, Consolation has riveting moments between these two damaged, conflicting characters as they travel on parallel journeys of self-discovery, but at two and a half hours with a lengthy, slow-burning beginning, the production could use a trim. The slow development and several sub-plots lend a real-life complexity to the story, though the last to be introduced has insufficient expositional time considering its importance to the play’s conclusion. Despite the script’s need for additional development, this is a moving character piece unsentimentally following two individuals as they come to terms with the insubstantiality of their dreams.
A male photographer is photographing a female celebrity who is tired of being so superficial. She wants this photo shoot to show her “true self”. She wants to be “real”, and we’re all hanging out in the studio with them in Action Hero’s Wrecking Ball. Audience expectations are immediately challenged on entry when invited to grab a beer from a cooler onstage, and this boundary remains blurred for the duration. Communication is attempted between the two characters, but neither is really listening and what they say doesn’t really have any meaning, pointedly ironic in characters striving for stripped back honestly. The performance is both funny and uncomfortable as the audience watches their professional relationship cross into the manipulative personal. This is a text-based performance with imagery rich language highlighting the absurdity of their encounter, but it triggers a good amount of reflection on our own behaviour. We all carefully construct our images, particularly in social media, yet at the same time we want to be genuine (whatever that means). This is an excellent, polished piece that is provocative in subject and the actor-audience relationship.
Search Party’s My Son & Heir is without question the funniest thing I’ve seen this year in Edinburgh. Real-life couple Pete Phillips and Jodie Hawkes playfully examine the prospects of their young son, born in the same year as ‘baby Cambridge.’ The two little boys have little in common, though. Pete and Jodie share their hopes for their son in a cheerful, pink chaos that soon disintegrates into relentless judgments on their parenting methods and a stream of ‘what ifs’ capturing the anxiety and pressure to raise a perfect child. The message evokes sympathy and reflection, even from those without children. It’s an outstanding blend of comedy and social commentary on the perils of being an ordinary parent without heaps of cash to throw at your child. Their gleeful, child-like anarchy quickly turns vicious, creating pointed contrast between the haves and have-nots, but ends in a message of love. Perhaps the ending tends towards sentimental, but in a world where money is a large factor in success and a good life, it is also an ending of hope.
Last up is Christopher Brett Bailey’s This Is How We Die, a spoken word and music performance that is deceptively simple but leaves you with overloaded senses and a feeling of having traveled around the world at a million miles a second. When I first saw This Is How We Die at Battersea Arts Centre several months ago, I was so moved that I wrote two responses: 
Eight, 5-minutes plays by established playwrights in response to these event cancellations, followed by a panel discussion with rotating guests, create Walking the Tightrope: The Tension Between Art and Politics. Today’s panel was Jonathan Mills (Former Director, Edinburgh International Festival), Fergus Linehan (Director, Edinburgh International Festival) and Tim Fountain (writer). A cast of four excellently performs the mini-plays; the scripts are powerful and constructively contribute to the debate, and the discussion itself can become a piece of one-off theatre once the audience is handed the microphones.
Hailing from LA, Waitless is a semi-autobiographical play about newlyweds Shelly and Trent, from the American south but living in New York. Trent works in finance and Shelly in TV production, but when Trent’s job transfers him to London, Shelly gives up her career to go with him. Told through heightened, contemporary farce with moments of sincerity, Waitless shows that the cultural gap between the UK and US is bigger than you think.
CultureClash’s debut production, Hannah and Hanna by John Retellack, is a perfect fit for company co-founders and actors Cassandra Hercules and Serin Ibrahim. It’s as if Retellack wrote it for them. Written and set in 2001, Hannah and Hanna takes place in Margate as the British government temporarily re-homes thousands of Kosovan refugees in down-at-heel seaside towns, causing predictable social backlash. Hannah is black British, Hanna is from Kosovo. Both are 16, love pop music and navigating life as teenagers. This production is ably directed by Greenwich Theatre artistic director James Haddrell, and well performed, but the sentimental script with a predictable story arc lets down the talent in the production.
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