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British Theatre Guide Review of Comedy Chekhov
Anton Chekhov
Bridge Theatre Company
Everyman, Cheltenham
From 27 September 2017 to 30 September 2017
Review by Colin Davison
Richard Derrington as the actor Svetlovidov
Credit: Bridge Theatre CompanyIt’s too easy to throw around ‘Chekhovian’—I did it myself yesterday about English Touring Theatre’s must-see The Weir—to describe ultra-realistic plays about frustrated lives in the country.
Yet there is more to the penetrating observer of human folly than suggested by a characterisation based on his late, great works, as this intriguing selection of three early one-acters shows.
Chekhov turned to playwriting as a third career, after his work as a doctor and short-story writer, and while The Proposal shows the influence of Gogol grotesques, the even earlier Swan Song, in which an actor muses on his fading career, might almost point the way to Samuel Beckett.
Director Alison Sutcliffe frames these and The Bear as if played by the actor Svetlovidov—the name might be translated as spotlight catcher.
It is, at the start of Chekhov’s writing for the stage, a love letter to the theatre, and in the space of 15 minutes Richard Derrington pours out his devotion and disappointments like a drunkard, a tired old man re-animated by playing splendid cameo excerpts from King Lear and Hamlet.
Dani Carbery manages, remarkably, to transform herself into the plain, love-starved Natalya in The Proposal before re-appearing as the alluring widow Popova in The Bear.
It’s hard to maintain a grip on credibility with such exaggerated figures, but she and Mark Carey as choleric landowners in both plays give it all in the spirit intended. Their accelerating progress from naïve courtesies to personal insults is a joy, followed in The Bear by the canniness with which the pair see through each other’s pretences.
Academic review of Mary Pix project
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-3581182721/review-of-mary-pixs-the-beau-defeated-1700-the
Review of DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Get off that sofa and start an argument
By Henry Porter
The Observer, Sunday 22 March 2009
(excerpt from article)
Ten days ago, Newsnight asked the question: is TV doomed? I cannot tell you what the distinguished panel of TV people said in answer to the question, because I switched off the set in the bed and breakfast where I was staying. At that moment, I didn't give a damn about the worries of TV people, because it seemed to me that quite a lot of TV's problems reside with those very TV people. But also ringing in my ears was the music of an ad hoc ceilidh band that plays each week in the Ferry Boat Inn, Ullapool, music that would fill several halls over in London, but is all the more intoxicating in a snug on the north west coast of Scotland with the Moon occasionally glittering on the loch waters outside.
Forget TV, I thought, live performance is all.
A couple of nights before, I had been at the Bridge House Theatre in Warwick to watch Richard Derrington and Janet Dale in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It was a heart-stopping production played to a full house, which contained quite a number of A-level students who gave every appearance of being stunned by the pathos of Derrington's Willy Loman. I was too. There hasn't been a drama in 10 years on the BBC that has moved me as much as that evening in Warwick.
Naturally, the experience of watching live music or actors in the flesh is more intense. And that is the point about a trend that has been developing for some time.
Anton Chekhov
Bridge Theatre Company
Everyman, Cheltenham
From 27 September 2017 to 30 September 2017
Review by Colin Davison
Richard Derrington as the actor Svetlovidov
Credit: Bridge Theatre CompanyIt’s too easy to throw around ‘Chekhovian’—I did it myself yesterday about English Touring Theatre’s must-see The Weir—to describe ultra-realistic plays about frustrated lives in the country.
Yet there is more to the penetrating observer of human folly than suggested by a characterisation based on his late, great works, as this intriguing selection of three early one-acters shows.
Chekhov turned to playwriting as a third career, after his work as a doctor and short-story writer, and while The Proposal shows the influence of Gogol grotesques, the even earlier Swan Song, in which an actor muses on his fading career, might almost point the way to Samuel Beckett.
Director Alison Sutcliffe frames these and The Bear as if played by the actor Svetlovidov—the name might be translated as spotlight catcher.
It is, at the start of Chekhov’s writing for the stage, a love letter to the theatre, and in the space of 15 minutes Richard Derrington pours out his devotion and disappointments like a drunkard, a tired old man re-animated by playing splendid cameo excerpts from King Lear and Hamlet.
Dani Carbery manages, remarkably, to transform herself into the plain, love-starved Natalya in The Proposal before re-appearing as the alluring widow Popova in The Bear.
It’s hard to maintain a grip on credibility with such exaggerated figures, but she and Mark Carey as choleric landowners in both plays give it all in the spirit intended. Their accelerating progress from naïve courtesies to personal insults is a joy, followed in The Bear by the canniness with which the pair see through each other’s pretences.
Academic review of Mary Pix project
https://www.questia.com/library/journal/1P3-3581182721/review-of-mary-pixs-the-beau-defeated-1700-the
Review of DEATH OF A SALESMAN
Get off that sofa and start an argument
By Henry Porter
The Observer, Sunday 22 March 2009
(excerpt from article)
Ten days ago, Newsnight asked the question: is TV doomed? I cannot tell you what the distinguished panel of TV people said in answer to the question, because I switched off the set in the bed and breakfast where I was staying. At that moment, I didn't give a damn about the worries of TV people, because it seemed to me that quite a lot of TV's problems reside with those very TV people. But also ringing in my ears was the music of an ad hoc ceilidh band that plays each week in the Ferry Boat Inn, Ullapool, music that would fill several halls over in London, but is all the more intoxicating in a snug on the north west coast of Scotland with the Moon occasionally glittering on the loch waters outside.
Forget TV, I thought, live performance is all.
A couple of nights before, I had been at the Bridge House Theatre in Warwick to watch Richard Derrington and Janet Dale in Arthur Miller's Death of a Salesman. It was a heart-stopping production played to a full house, which contained quite a number of A-level students who gave every appearance of being stunned by the pathos of Derrington's Willy Loman. I was too. There hasn't been a drama in 10 years on the BBC that has moved me as much as that evening in Warwick.
Naturally, the experience of watching live music or actors in the flesh is more intense. And that is the point about a trend that has been developing for some time.
Review of AS YOU LIKE IT
Brilliant. We liked Shakespeare's classic romantic comedy very much
By Oliver Williams
As You Like It, The Bridge House Theatre, March 2008
Black is the colour which engulfs the stage at the beginning of this impressive offering of Shakespeare’s classic romantic comedy As You Like It.
And this ploy to accentuate the oppressive regime from which its lead protagonists escape succeeds in making their existence in their new wilderness home as spellbinding as the famous bard envisaged.
Once the shackles of this society and the play’s foundation-laying acts were broken then some wonderful acting amid plentiful dramatic highlights came to the fore.Maya Barcot put in a sprightly and infectiously endearing performance as the playfully deceptive Rosalind, which set a pleasant pace to the work’s humorous love story.And as a welcome contrast, Edmund Kingsley was assured and prominent as the candid observer Jaques.A nice directorial touch was for Kingsley to appear as a modern day filmmaker -intrigued by, yet removed from, the peculiar events unfolding around him.Christopher Harvey’s superb singing as Amiens, Arthur Kohn’s suitably slick wit as Touchstone and the confident smiles of Charlie Clemmow as the flirtatious Celia and Tom Foster as the love-struck hero Orlando were among the many other features of the production.
Shakespeare may have been right to say that the entire world is a stage.But to describe the Bridge House Theatre Company as ‘merely players’ would be a massive injustice judging by this performance.
Oliver Williams
The full article contains 294 words and appears in Leamington Courier newspaper.
Last Updated: 28 February 2008
Brilliant. We liked Shakespeare's classic romantic comedy very much
By Oliver Williams
As You Like It, The Bridge House Theatre, March 2008
Black is the colour which engulfs the stage at the beginning of this impressive offering of Shakespeare’s classic romantic comedy As You Like It.
And this ploy to accentuate the oppressive regime from which its lead protagonists escape succeeds in making their existence in their new wilderness home as spellbinding as the famous bard envisaged.
Once the shackles of this society and the play’s foundation-laying acts were broken then some wonderful acting amid plentiful dramatic highlights came to the fore.Maya Barcot put in a sprightly and infectiously endearing performance as the playfully deceptive Rosalind, which set a pleasant pace to the work’s humorous love story.And as a welcome contrast, Edmund Kingsley was assured and prominent as the candid observer Jaques.A nice directorial touch was for Kingsley to appear as a modern day filmmaker -intrigued by, yet removed from, the peculiar events unfolding around him.Christopher Harvey’s superb singing as Amiens, Arthur Kohn’s suitably slick wit as Touchstone and the confident smiles of Charlie Clemmow as the flirtatious Celia and Tom Foster as the love-struck hero Orlando were among the many other features of the production.
Shakespeare may have been right to say that the entire world is a stage.But to describe the Bridge House Theatre Company as ‘merely players’ would be a massive injustice judging by this performance.
Oliver Williams
The full article contains 294 words and appears in Leamington Courier newspaper.
Last Updated: 28 February 2008
Reviews of COMEDY CHEKHOV
Reviews Gate
Miniature delights, delightfully performed.
By Rod Dungate
9 March 2011
As well as his mass of short stories and the great plays of his later years, Chekhov wrote a number of short plays. It’s tempting to look at them to see if we can see the seeds of the later plays; but I’m not sure that this, while interesting, is the best way to approach them. It’s better to just watch them, and see what happens.Certainly in the airing the Bridge House Theatre Company gives these four. They are delightfully eccentric and crammed full of exuberant observation. Qualities that director Alison Sutcliffe seizes and encourages from her acting team.
In the first two, RELUCTANT HERO and THE BEAR, Chekhov appears to wind up his protagonists and then set them going. And go they do, talking themselves, non-stop, into foolishness while at the same time revealing a touching vulnerability. Richard Derrington gets the whole package off to a flying start in HERO, closely followed by Nicholas Asbury’s Smirnov in BEAR – his ability to leap into heroic, manly poses or to ape French manners are a joy. THE PROPOSAL is much more of an ensemble. Sarah Whitehouse merges Russian landowner and English County Lady perfectly to create a gorgeously comedic character. Edmund Kingsley and Arthur Kohn deftly dovetail performances to complete this lovely trio. I’ve waited 25 years to see SWAN SONG. Such a simple idea - an old bit player is left alone in a theatre, and slightly drunk, acts out great Shakespearean speeches. This is great Chekhov in miniature, perfectly blending pathos with comedy. Richard Derrington unerringly soars the heights and plummets the depths beautifully supported by the Stage Manager, Nicholas Asbury. This is lovingly staged, too, in Judy Reaves’ designs, with real footlights that hum when they’re switched on – lighting by Wayne Dowdeswell.
Reluctant Hero:
Murashkin: Edmund Kingsley Tolkachov: Richard Derrington
The Bear:
Popova: Sarah Whitehouse Luka: Arthur Kohn Smirnov: Nicholas Asbury
The Proposal:
Lomov: Edmund Kingsley Chubukov: Arthur Kohn Natalya: Sarah Whitehouse
Swan Song:
Svetlovodov: Richard Derrington Nikita: Nicholas Asbuy
Director: Alison Sutcliffe
Designer: Judy Reaves
Lighting Designer: Wayne Dowdeswell
Sound Design: Andrea J Cox
9 March 2011
As well as his mass of short stories and the great plays of his later years, Chekhov wrote a number of short plays. It’s tempting to look at them to see if we can see the seeds of the later plays; but I’m not sure that this, while interesting, is the best way to approach them. It’s better to just watch them, and see what happens.Certainly in the airing the Bridge House Theatre Company gives these four. They are delightfully eccentric and crammed full of exuberant observation. Qualities that director Alison Sutcliffe seizes and encourages from her acting team.
In the first two, RELUCTANT HERO and THE BEAR, Chekhov appears to wind up his protagonists and then set them going. And go they do, talking themselves, non-stop, into foolishness while at the same time revealing a touching vulnerability. Richard Derrington gets the whole package off to a flying start in HERO, closely followed by Nicholas Asbury’s Smirnov in BEAR – his ability to leap into heroic, manly poses or to ape French manners are a joy. THE PROPOSAL is much more of an ensemble. Sarah Whitehouse merges Russian landowner and English County Lady perfectly to create a gorgeously comedic character. Edmund Kingsley and Arthur Kohn deftly dovetail performances to complete this lovely trio. I’ve waited 25 years to see SWAN SONG. Such a simple idea - an old bit player is left alone in a theatre, and slightly drunk, acts out great Shakespearean speeches. This is great Chekhov in miniature, perfectly blending pathos with comedy. Richard Derrington unerringly soars the heights and plummets the depths beautifully supported by the Stage Manager, Nicholas Asbury. This is lovingly staged, too, in Judy Reaves’ designs, with real footlights that hum when they’re switched on – lighting by Wayne Dowdeswell.
Reluctant Hero:
Murashkin: Edmund Kingsley Tolkachov: Richard Derrington
The Bear:
Popova: Sarah Whitehouse Luka: Arthur Kohn Smirnov: Nicholas Asbury
The Proposal:
Lomov: Edmund Kingsley Chubukov: Arthur Kohn Natalya: Sarah Whitehouse
Swan Song:
Svetlovodov: Richard Derrington Nikita: Nicholas Asbuy
Director: Alison Sutcliffe
Designer: Judy Reaves
Lighting Designer: Wayne Dowdeswell
Sound Design: Andrea J Cox
Reviews of A WARWICKSHIRE TESTIMONY Royal Shakespeare Company
The Independent
Arts: The secret life of an English village
A WARWICKSHIRE TESTIMONY RSC THE OTHER PLACE STRATFORD-UPON-AVON; Theatre
Paul Taylor
Tuesday, 17 August 1999
YOUR FAMILY has run, and made their home in the village post office for the last 100 years. But now the lease is up on the quaint cottage with its 16th-century beams, and the place is about to lose its traditional purpose and be sold to middle-class outsiders from Birmingham. Naturally, you feel wounded and resentful at the prospect of dispossession. On the other hand, is understandable grief at the passing of a way of life a wholly adequate explanation for your tragicomic cussedness? There's talk of suicide (using an old fished-out rifle); a flat refusal to budge to the point where vital services are cut off and your husband threatens divorce; and there's the rudeness to the pregnant purchaser who is told: "You'll never be able to buy what we have because you can't buy belonging to a place." Or is all this defiance masking a deeper hurt - one for which your compensatory project of compiling an oral history of the locality can never be a true consolation?
Ambivalence about the virtues of tradition and old close-knit communities pervades A Warwickshire Testimony, a piece which is itself based on interviews conducted by the director, Alison Sutcliffe, with members of local groups surrounding Stratford. From these "living memories", dramatist April de Angelis has fashioned a wryly funny and sensitive play. Shifting with a spare, charged poetry, in Sutcliffe's absorbing production, between the present and recollections spanning a whole century, the drama focuses on Dorothy (Susan Dury), the woman who is resisting eviction, and her elderly Aunt Edie (Cherry Morris) whose memory she is taping.
This latter is, we see, a rum source for an affectionate local history. Callously treated by a mother whose capacity for love was frozen when her husband perished during the war, Edie was always driven by a determination to flee the gossipy, claustrophobic feudal village where she featured as resident oddity. Now she wants to escape from its equally undesirable reverse; the blank impersonality of an old people's home. So she wangles herself into an ironic position, coming back full circle to the beleaguered family post office in return for feeding her niece with memories.
As the younger Edie of the flashbacks, Catherine Kanter beautifully charts the character's progress from sullen misfit, whose main pleasure in doggedly losing her virginity is that it will spite her mother, to successful but still love-starved career woman, the owner of a smart little Sixties hairdressing salon. Scenes full of sympathetic, skilfully syncopated comedy adumbrate a world where, in the director's telling phrase, there's a sense of the "mundane sitting beside the momentous". An episode where young Edie goes, for the first and last time, to help her mother in her sideline business of laying out corpses is a case in point. The girl's yearning for the father she never met is poignantly underscored when the dead body she is about to sponge down revives in her father's identity and snatches a conversation with her. This is hilariously off-set, though, by the mother's brisk, definitively non-spiritual orders: "Pennies on his eyes. Book under his chin. Cork up his back passage."
Death haunts the piece, eventually explaining why Dorothy is so paralysed in an idealised version of the past. This subtly balanced play ends with plans for another funeral ritual, one which will be both a homage to tradition and a way of psychologically breaking free into the future.
SUNDAY TIMES
August 1999
A WARWICKSHIRE TESTIMONY
The Other Place Stratford-upon-Avon
This is a play of time, history, memories and forgetting. Inspired by the reminiscences of people in a Warwickshire village, the director, Alison Sutcliffe, has collected similar material in the Stratford area, and this inspired April de Angelis’s craggy, sombre, moving play. Tom and Dorothy (Derek Hutchinson, Susan Dury) have to leave their old house because the lease is up and a brisk young city woman (Sirine Saba) is keen to buy it. For Dorothy, this is traumatic: the house is her past, and the past is her life. Would it help her to write a book based on the reminiscences of her 82 year-old aunt (Cherry Morris), Edie? As Edie talks, a slice of history comes alive, and unfolds into a shifting mosaic of births and deaths, longing and resentment, world wars, people who disappeared and people who can foresee the future. Young Edie (Catherine Kanter) is odd and lonely: she is always less popular than her bubbly sister Margery (Alison Reid). Their mother, the iron-willed Gladys (Mary Duddy), is the village midwife who also lays out the dead: guardian of births and deaths, she never forgives Edie for not following her into the profession. It is Edie’s resentment that keeps her alive, makes her succeed in business, but also makes her lonely. The more you want to forget things, the more you remember them, brooding over the bitter details of the past while the world around you moves on. De Angelis’s point is that mourning and searching has to end, and memories must be allowed to fade: the past really is a different country, and you must not become a prisoner of it. The writing is simple but haunting, and Sutcliffe’s direction responds beautifully to its moody shifting focus.
John Peter
Review of TRANSIT OF VENUS by Maureen Hunter Royal Shakespeare Company
Independent on Sunday
Quarks of life: Round-up
ROBERT HANKS
Wednesday, 22 June
1994
Craftsmanship is an outstanding feature of Maureen Hunter's Transit of Venus - to the point, in fact, that it rather precludes emotional engagement. There's something suspiciously contrived about this story of a romance between a girl and an astronomer, set in the France of the Age of Reason. Still, for two days last week at the Pit, it at least provided a useful showcase for Alison Sutcliffe, an RSC assistant director, and her RSC cast - if all the Barbican main- house shows displayed the same level of intelligence and style, we'd be laughing.
Independent on Sunday
Quarks of life: Round-up
ROBERT HANKS
Wednesday, 22 June
1994
Craftsmanship is an outstanding feature of Maureen Hunter's Transit of Venus - to the point, in fact, that it rather precludes emotional engagement. There's something suspiciously contrived about this story of a romance between a girl and an astronomer, set in the France of the Age of Reason. Still, for two days last week at the Pit, it at least provided a useful showcase for Alison Sutcliffe, an RSC assistant director, and her RSC cast - if all the Barbican main- house shows displayed the same level of intelligence and style, we'd be laughing.
Review of The Taming of the Shrew Leicester Haymarket Theatre
Daily Telegraph
THURSDAY OCTOBER 18 1990
The Joy of a Perfect Shrew
ALISON SUTCLIFFE’S faultless production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Leicester Haymarket provides that rare theatrical experience: joy. Designs, cast, choreography, diction and pace conspire so strongly that I can imagine even the most radical of feminists applauding – inwardly at least – the metamorphosis of the shrew into the good wife.
The play begins in the present day, with a rich man and his yuppie sidekicks devising an exquisite experiment: to persuade the drunken Christopher Sly, discovered sleeping in a cardboard box, that he’s a lord and to offer him rich entertainment. This entertainment takes us to an Elizabethan Padua.
Paul Farnsworth’s designs are dazzling simple: two flats evoke a red house with a green door and a blue house with shuttered windows. An
enormous sun and moon are suspended between the houses. Ben Ormorod’s tactful lighting helps set the Italian ambience. Kate Nicholls is Katherina, the
shrewish elder sister wrested from clenched and biter spinsterhood by a relentless Petruchio (Ian Gelder). Katherina’s is a thankless part for a modern
actress, but Nicholls adjusts it subtly. From her first violent encounter with her suitor she makes it clear that she has not only met her match but – to her
surprise – her mate. What follows is less Petruchio’s mastering her than her mastering herself.
She begins in caricature, her face sour and harsh like a step-sister in Cinderalla: but this step-sister becomes a sinewy, shrewd Cinderella herself. Unsentimental, canny, she delivers the famous submission speech in a way that makes it clear that her surrender to a man who has outshrewed her is a wry triumph in itself: she has what she wants.
The Taming of the Shrew, among Shakespeare’s least poetic, exists for the stage, and in this production Alison Sutcliffe brings out its inherent power. Her production should transfer without alteration: the whole play is here.
Michael Schmidt
THURSDAY OCTOBER 18 1990
The Joy of a Perfect Shrew
ALISON SUTCLIFFE’S faultless production of The Taming of the Shrew at the Leicester Haymarket provides that rare theatrical experience: joy. Designs, cast, choreography, diction and pace conspire so strongly that I can imagine even the most radical of feminists applauding – inwardly at least – the metamorphosis of the shrew into the good wife.
The play begins in the present day, with a rich man and his yuppie sidekicks devising an exquisite experiment: to persuade the drunken Christopher Sly, discovered sleeping in a cardboard box, that he’s a lord and to offer him rich entertainment. This entertainment takes us to an Elizabethan Padua.
Paul Farnsworth’s designs are dazzling simple: two flats evoke a red house with a green door and a blue house with shuttered windows. An
enormous sun and moon are suspended between the houses. Ben Ormorod’s tactful lighting helps set the Italian ambience. Kate Nicholls is Katherina, the
shrewish elder sister wrested from clenched and biter spinsterhood by a relentless Petruchio (Ian Gelder). Katherina’s is a thankless part for a modern
actress, but Nicholls adjusts it subtly. From her first violent encounter with her suitor she makes it clear that she has not only met her match but – to her
surprise – her mate. What follows is less Petruchio’s mastering her than her mastering herself.
She begins in caricature, her face sour and harsh like a step-sister in Cinderalla: but this step-sister becomes a sinewy, shrewd Cinderella herself. Unsentimental, canny, she delivers the famous submission speech in a way that makes it clear that her surrender to a man who has outshrewed her is a wry triumph in itself: she has what she wants.
The Taming of the Shrew, among Shakespeare’s least poetic, exists for the stage, and in this production Alison Sutcliffe brings out its inherent power. Her production should transfer without alteration: the whole play is here.
Michael Schmidt