Lippy
Young Vic, London SE1
It gets grim, then grimmer, and I can’t promise you’ll like it, but theatre doesn’t come much more dense with thickets of ambiguity than Dead Centre’s Lippy. If you’re bewildered by it, good: you’re meant to be. This is a play audiences don’t so much watch as dream while it attempts to grope its way into the closed-off world and secret desperation of three Irish sisters who, along with their elderly aunt, starved themselves to death in their home in 2000. It kicks off with a post-show discussion between an actor and lip-reader and his fatuous interviewer, but this is quickly discarded. Mainly, we witness the women’s lives slowly winding down in a production that is part forensic reconstruction, part ritual re-enactment with Pina Bausch touches — and that’s just before it plunges us into yammering Beckettian nothingness. The soundscape is an ominous fridge hum, and on first seeing the women — shadowy, hooded figures holding bin bags floating like black balloons — you have to quell an urge to bolt. The piece tears meaning to shreds, then sifts through the bits, demanding that we look again, look closer, even as it maintains its central enigma.
Maxie Szalwinska
Crouch, Touch, Pause, Engage
Sherman, Cardiff, then touring
Gareth “Alfie” Thomas — hero of the Welsh rugby field and a covertly gay man dealing with his demons — is not the sole focus of this fantastically moving documentary play from Out of Joint. Even as the big man of Bridgend makes his town proud and evades the tabloids, self-harm spreads among the young people — including Darcey (an outstanding Lauren Roberts), cutting lines like telegraph poles up her arms. Robin Soans’s verbatim-style play interlaces these tales via candid, generous interviews. Everyone, male and female, takes turns to pull on Alfie’s red shirt and share his story. (One slight woman stands on a bench as Alfie intimidates a journalist.) Max Stafford-Clark’s production doesn’t waste a second, in an excellent locker-room set by Angela Davies that creates a private/public space, perfect for these lives easing into the open. Bridgend, abandoned by its rugby club, “out on a limb”, is a town struggling with self-hatred. A convivial Neil Kinnock figures, describing the blasted economic landscape, though I could have used some more specific social context. Emotionally, it’s a wallop — the two principal stories build towards darkness, then edge painstakingly into the light — and I wept like a baby throughout the second half. It’s a tremendous evening.
David Jays
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King Lear
Viaduct, Halifax, then touring
Barrie Rutter, head honcho of Northern Broadsides and our King Lear, disconcertingly welcomes the audience as we enter the theatre. Minutes later, Lear is smiling fondly at his favourite daughter, Cordelia. Then, in a foolish strop, this deluded man gives his kingdom away. Jonathan Miller, who has directed this play many times before, sets it in Shakespeare’s age, when audiences were terrified of civil strife. Lear has no right to decide that he’s tired of kinging it, and once he gives up his realm, he loses everything: his authority, his retinue, his home and finally his sanity. The state falls apart. Rutter is terrifying when he is angry, and finds unexpected humour, but you never believe his heart has cracked. How could he not realise that two of his daughters would take to depravity with such enthusiasm? As Regan, Nicola Sanderson has a bosom that heaves with excitement at the thought of Gloucester losing his eyes. And Goneril nods complacently when Regan complains of the poison her sister has administered. Jos Vantyler, as their go-between, is a petulant, wide-eyed Oswald. Possibly, Miller has exhausted his enthusiasm for this play. The clarity is impressive, but the pace sluggish, and it’s a curiously bloodless affair.
Jane Edwardes
