Royal Court; Queen Elizabeth Hall; Southwark Playhouse, London
Haunted Child is its own ghost. Joe Penhall's new play is like a strange afterbirth, an epilogue, an addendum that flits around the stage when the main action has finished.
Penhall, who wrote the screenplays for The Road and Enduring Love, established himself as a writer for the theatre 11 years ago with Blue/Orange, in which he made a debate ? about race and psychiatry ? twist and turn as few others now do on stage. In Haunted Child the central confrontation is muffled. On one side is a woman ? rational, anxious, sharp-witted ? battling to protect her son after the unexplained disappearance of his dad. On the other is Dad, who, when he bobs up, turns out to have taken up with a new-age religious sect whose leadership demand that he glugs down pailfuls of salt water, abstains from sex, and hands over a tithe of his property. The aspect that would have given depth to the couple's sparring over his position is the history that drove them apart in the first place. That is missing. The argument is lopsided.
Jeremy Herrin's production opens with spectral promise: in a creaking house at night, the frightened small boy appears on a stairway, in the half-light, claiming that he knows there is someone moving through his home. Throughout the evening Jean Kalman's lighting ? glowing and streaming down in rays ? suggests ghostly presences, although it is clear early on that Penhall's title is a tease: this haunting is not exactly supernatural, and the child in question is not necessarily the youngest person on stage.
Ben Daniels is both fierce and delicate as the distrait dad, who has the worst of the script. Sophie Okonedo brings to the part of of the mother all her considerable ability for suggesting pent-up, about-to-brim-over emotion: she looks sodden with unspent tears. Still, these considerable talents can't disguise that this is a wraith of a play.
What should have been an invigorating fusion on the South Bank ends up as flaccid dithering. The Bollywood Trip has been devised by the Republique theatre company from Denmark and choreographed by Gauri Sharma Tripathi, an exponent of kathak dance; Stephan Grabowski is the composer. Set in a closed psychiatric ward in Copenhagen, where a man who believes himself to be a movie star sets Danish pulses racing, Rolf Heim's production takes Bollywood into One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest. A glum, monochrome, hesitating Copenhagen is set against a saffron-silked, beckoning Mumbai. It is Hamlet versus Haroon.
Every now and then ? when, for example, a nurse rips off her white overall to shimmy around in gold ? you see how it could have worked. But the songs are too few, the dialogue too puny, and the dances too obviously illustrative: there is an ECT one which involves much jerking up and down, and a straitjacket one which gets everyone flapping empty sleeves around the stage. This in a show which claims to be sticking up for the power of fantasy against dull realism.
A sloping, scoop-shaped stage is proving to be a feature of the Christmas season. The Heart of Robin Hood featured one at the RSC; now here is another ? this time as a silver coloured backdrop. Once again characters (in this case, mad persons and medics) are obliged to clamber up it or slide down it; once again it isn't clear why they are doing so, unless trying to put some spice into a weedy script. Movement theatre deserves better than this.
I can't think how Tacit Theatre settled on their name: they are one of the noisiest of companies. Their adaptation of The Canterbury Tales goes full out for the ribald, and even in the more stately episodes of Chaucer's work, rollicks the action along on a tide of violin and cello scraping and tin-whistle tooting.
In Juliane von Sivers's production, Southwark Playhouse has been boisterously transformed into the Tabard Inn, from which the pilgrims set forth on their chattering holy journey. There is a working bar at one end and a hayloft (for vigorous swiving) at the other; the Host takes charge of the proceedings on a round wooden stage with the audience on either side. The cast, who appear in generic non-posh medieval costume of dun and oatmeal leggings and boots, hurtle around as knights and chickens and grisly church functionaries; a beauty in one story is turned into a hag in another by draping a fawn-coloured scarf over her face.
What with the music, the speed, the stamping and the occasional passage orated in Middle English, large chunks of the six tales selected for dramatisation are hard to follow and some passages can barely be heard. Tacit don't help the pace of their evening by beginning with the notoriously po-faced "The Knight's Tale" and then putting cheek by cheek the stories from its two raunchiest characters ? the adulterous bottom-kissing tale told by the Miller and the marriage homily delivered by the Wife of Bath. The evening is hopeless for elucidating Chaucer, but successful as a medieval cabaret that takes in philosophising about farts (how can they best be evenly distributed?), tankard brandishing, chats with audience members, some extraordinarily catchy ("Give me a girl that will wriggle and will twist") folk songs and the use of a fiddle bow for illicit rumpy-pumpy. Not so much a show as a gallimaufry or junket.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/dec/18/haunted-child-bollywood-canterbury-review
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