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it’s friday! theatre
Wizard
tale from
Oz packs
a punch
Fleabag is ready for her close-up!
Reviews by
Patrick Marmion
The Secret River
(Olivier, National Theatre, London)
Verdict: Brutal but brilliant ★★★★★Appropriate
(Donmar Warehouse, London)
Verdict: Weak plot rescued by Monica Dolan
★★★✩✩Pictures: RYAN BUCHANAN/ MARC BRENNER/ MATT HUMPHREYA
ustralians revel in their
rough reputation — think of
shane Warne, or aussie ‘rules’
Football. and let’s not even
mention some of the chardonnaythey send us.
But the secret river, andrew Bovell’s uncom-
promising adaptation of Kate Grenville’s novel
about the impact of convict settlers on native
people, is an even rougher — and bleaker — offer-
ing that manages to be moving and uplifting, too.
the production, which was also seen in
Edinburgh this month, is made all the more poign-
ant by the fact that ningali lawford-Wolf, who
played the story’s narrator, died suddenly on
august 11, leaving the company in shock.
Her replacement, Pauline Whyman, flew in from
australia last week and has slotted neatly into the
alternately murky and luminous tale of mutual
ethnic suspicion, tentative co-operation and
eventual horror. the hero is cockney convict
watch from a distance will
soon move on. the spear-
carrying natives hope for
exactly the same thing.
neil armfield’s production is
a little slow to settle but
stephen Curtis’s design makes
a stunning spectacle. anyone
who’s been to australia will
recognise the piercing yet
creamy light that pours onto a
backdrop of what could be the
pale skin of peeling gum trees
or folds of ancient rock reach-
ing to the sky.
it’s a part-naturalistic and
part-ritualistic performance
that mingles Western piano
and cello music with native
australian chant.
the characterisation is rough
and ready, veering from the
cheerfully filthy, xenophobic
misogyny of Jeremy sims’s
smasher, to Colin Moody’s
more sanguine thomas
Blackwood, who tries to
integrate with the indigenouspeople. the native aus-
tralians remain an enigma
to both the colonists and
most of the audience,
using their own language
and inscrutable rituals.
But at the heart of the
story is nathaniel Dean
and Georgia adamson as
our troubled hero Will and
his gutsy but playful wife
sal. Maybe Dean sounds a
little more sydney suburbs
than Bow Bells, but he cuts
a mighty presence, strug-
gling to be a good father and
husband while keeping the
peace with the indigenous
people and resisting the hard-
bitten belligerence of his
fellow settlers.
inevitably it ends in tragedy,
but until then it brims as much
with love and compassion as
it does with guilt and shame.
Brutal but brilliant.
■ APPROPRIATE is a much less
profound take on historical
legacies of racist violence and
slavery. Written by Branden
Jacobs-Jenkins, a rising star
of the american stage, it haslittle new to say. the evening
is set ablaze instead by
Monica Dolan, who prowls
the stage like a linguistic
flame-thrower as toni, the
matriarchal sister who fiercely
defends her late father against
charges of racism, when the
family gather to settle
his estate.
Her first move is to torch
the Jewish princess wife
(Jaimi Barbakoff) of wealthy
brother Bo (steven Mackin-
tosh). and then she turns herire on youngest brother
Frank (Edward Hogg), who
lauds himself as a recover-
ing addict.
Ola ince’s production is
highly competent; enhanced
by Fly Davis’s fiendishly
cluttered set: its sweeping
staircase and Doric col-
umns designed to remind
us of Gone With the Wind.
What it needs is a prop-
erly painful showdown for
its sketchy characters.
What it delivers is a slap-
stick fistfight interrupted
by a genuinely shocking
moment that made a largely
white audience laugh on the
night i saw it this week.
and yet it’s worth catching
for Dolan alone. she’s an
incandescent frump who,
with her bed-head and saggy
dressing gown, reminded me
of roseanne Barr in her
sitcom days.
and if her bracing invective
finally dwindles into embar-
rassing self-pity, she’s still the
meteor that lights up an
iffy night.(^) William thornhill who receives a full
pardon for his crimes in london after
reaching australia in 1806.
Will’s wife wants to return home with
their boys, but Will persuades her to give
him five years to establish a farm by the
Hawkesbury river in new south Wales.
He prays that spear-carrying natives who
ME AND my mate Phil like Fleabag, too.
And not just because Phoebe Waller-
Bridge, below, is an honorary bloke
who acts like a geezer in a skirt. A
sex-maniac who’ll have a go with
anyone. Most men I know aren’t
like that anyway.
No, what’s refreshing about
her act is that in this lofty age of
political correctness, Waller-
Bridge recognises we’re all a bit
of a mess. And none of us models
of good behaviour.
In some ways, this revival
of her hour-long mono-
logue from the Edinburgh
Festival of 2012 is like look-
ing the wrong way down
a telescope.
It’s not particularly
rewarding, seeing the
small green shoots that
grew into the TV show
with its lush charac-
ters — Brett Gel-
man’s sordid
brother-in-law,
Sian Clifford’s
neurotic sister, Olivia Colman’s evil step-
mother and Bill Paterson’s hapless
dad. All culminating in the icky affair
with Andrew Scott’s ‘hot’ priest. And
yet, it’s fascinating to see her on
stage — especially when she dresses
like the chair she perches on: red
top; skinny black legs.
She’s not as warm on stage
as she seems on screen. But
she still has a subversive
eye for detail.
She also has a knack for
characterisation, in her
depiction of the rodent-
faced man she cops off with
on the Tube. And she knows
when to play the self-depre-
cation card, in her feminist
gaffe about wanting to trade
five years of life for a perfect
body. But her best joke is her
most laddish and disgusting,
one that ends in the gents,
with an actual punchline. Men don’t feel
threatened by her, not in the way old
school feminists used to take pride in
claiming. More importantly, I suspect a
lot of women don’t feel threatened
either. Because though beautiful in her
willowy way, she’s unusual looking and
coyly hides a mole under her fringe.
Otherwise it’s all about her naughti-
ness: the disgraceful sex drive of a cred-
ulous bimbo combined with the con-
science of a hard-boiled dominatrix.
The adoring audience at Wyndham’s
give her an easy ride. But she doesn’t
seem seduced by their blandishments —
not until the curtain call at any rate.
We may all love to revel in her squalor
but we know she’s not really, as her
character claims, ‘a selfish, depraved,
morally bankrupt woman who can’t
even call herself a feminist’.
Her secret is that she’s found a way
of saying things women think they
can’t say — and men know they abso-
lutely mustn’t.
■ Fleabag will be live in cinemas
on September 12 (ntlive.national
theatre.org.uk)
Fleabag (Wyndham’s Theatre)
Verdict: Thoroughly modern filly ★★★★✩
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Raw power: Nathaniel
Dean, left, and Shaka Cook.
Below, Monica Dolan
(^) Daily Mail, Friday, August 30, 2019