Slow-burn: Felicity Kendal smoulders, but The Argument fails to igniteIt’s all twerk, twerk, twerk in a
turbocharged, open-air Evita
Evita (Regent’s Park Open
Air Theatre, London)
Verdict: Big vote-winner ★★★★✩won’t have a bad word said of his
daughter. He gets stuck into the son-
in-law with an eagerness normally
reserved for his third gin and tonic.
Sarah Earnshaw and Esh alladi are
sketchiest of all as two friends, and even
the costumes are immaculately ironed
to belie personality. None bears even
the tiniest crease and no exit is seem-
ingly too brief for a change into a
freshly pressed blouse or blazer. and
that is about the height of the drama.Nevertheless, I can’t help liking this
play. It’s a fastidiously formed curiosity
reminiscent of french playwrights
Yasmina Reza and florian Zeller — she
of art and he of The father. But it’s
closer to Reza’s whimsy than Zeller’s
dark undercurrents.
I wouldn’t go out of my way to catch
it. arson in a royal dockyard it’s not. It
needs fanning into a full-scale marital
inferno — leaving behind nothing but a
smouldering rack.When Othello went South,
the cast got VERY steamy
THE themes of Evita are
as eternal as... well, Evita
itself, possibly. Populism,
demagoguery, political cult-
ism: just like Andrew Lloyd
Webber and Tim Rice’s smash
from the Seventies, those
things are always playing to
packed houses somewhere.
Current relevance energises
Jamie Lloyd’s surprisingly
transformative revival in
Regent’s Park.
The vibe of Soutra Gilmour’s
set is campaign rally: balloons
and streamers, confetti and
flares, with authoritarianism
lurking in the shadows.
And wow, the energy!
Twerking was a distant dream
when Lloyd Webber and Rice
musicalised the ‘mad exist-
ence’ of Eva Peron, who went
from nightclub singer to
Argentine demi-god. Yettwerking we get in Fabian
Aloise’s fantastic choreo-
graphy for a fiercely commit-
ted ensemble, with street
dances among the sambas
and tangos, the production
boldly stating Evita’s place in
musical history as a kind of
pre-rap Hamilton.
In silk slip and trainers,
Samantha Pauly plays Eva
with edge and power, even
wringing interest from You
Must Love Me, the achingly
dull ballad bolted to the 1996
Madonna movie.
Meanwhile, Trent Saunders
— in the narrator role as Che
Guevara — peers at the hero-ine through black curls and
shifts from contempt to kin-
ship and, ultimately, despair.
The fleeting excursions
into rock still feel as naff as a
set of leatherette coasters,
and Tim Rice’s lyrics remain
oddly shy of rhyme and, in
places, rhythm.
But the production’s verve
pulls it all through and, if
Another Suitcase In Another
Hall continues to feel like
a song from a different
show, Frances Mayli McCann
breathes a startling new life
into its overfamiliar melody.
This reviewer’s sole regret
was attending the production
on a clear night. Lashings of
rain would only have fed the
apocalyptic mood. Judging by
the forecast, other audiences
may be luckier.
GILES SMITHIN 1944, British director Peggy Webster cast
the first black Othello in the U.S., where for a
white woman even to walk with a black man
still attracted spitting hostility.
Her Moor was Paul Robeson, already a star
for his singing and eloquent civil rights rallies.
after Broadway, the show toured the South,
playing to mixed audiences and finding hotels
often reluctant to accommodate a ‘negro’.
Nicholas Wright’s sharp play imagines that
tour and its aftermath in the uneasy years of
the McCarthyite witch-hunts. for Robeson
was not only a black civil rights hero, but
passionately pro-Soviet.
american Tory Kittles plays Robeson: a man
vividly irresistible in his energy and — at first
— his dangerously high self-confidence.
Robeson’s Desdemona was Uta Hagen; her
husband Jose ferrer played Iago.
But on tour, Uta (played by Emma Paetz)
was sleeping with Robeson, and Jose (Ben
Cura) was himself straying, with the director
uneasily trying to keep an eye on all of them.
as they progress between hotels, the tangle
becomes not only sexual, but racial, political
and professional. Robeson is too stubborn and
angry to be either a good actor or a fair lover.
Uta and Jose have the quality of great
thesps (a brilliance and a flaw) as they seek
out their own emotional extremes and use
them on stage. By the end, all three have,despite basic decency, betrayed and been
betrayed. Under Richard Eyre’s taut direction,
we get a chain of brief scenes: some funny,
some moving, some cracklingly tense.
Paetz gives a flaming performance as
Robeson’s co-star. Cura elegantly changes
from an eager young actor irritably outshone
by Robeson to reaching the top himself —
and showing he’ll play dirty to stay there.
Despite the intimacy and speed of the play
(just 105 minutes), you feel you’ve seen an epic.
LIBBY PURVES8 Hotels (Minerva, Chichester)
Verdict: A gripping piece of history ★★★★✩and history gets horrible
lend a lo-fi magic to these flying
moments, as this revival forcibly
suspends our disbelief.
for something a little bit more high-
octane, turn to Brainiac Live! Based on
the Richard Hammond-led TV show,
it promises an hour of ‘science abuse’
and ‘prangs and bangs’... and delivers
on it. (There’s definitely no need for
that double espresso.)
apart from rattled nerves, there
is not much to take away from the
show, but the visual impact of the
experiments, ranging from liquid
nitrogen balloons to calcium carbide
rocket launchers, seems to please
(most of) the younger audience —
while the adults can giggle along with
the onstage crew as they muddle the
script and nearly bungle the routines.
Meanwhile, the latest in the long-running Horrible Histories: Barmy
Britain series is a little less sure of its
audience. It is the usual two-hander of
rapid-fire tidbits and skits.
This time, we encounter a pliable
St alban, a randy Samuel Pepys
and Richard III putting the record
straight in song, among others.
But the light-hearted and light-
weight history lessons (and the slew
of scatological jokes) sit at odds with
contemporary digs at the Prime
Minister, the state of pensions and
Southern Rail — and risk going over
the children’s heads.
Could the Birmingham Stage
Company shed its family entertain-
ment skin for a full-blown satirical
spin-off now that, as they say, ‘Britain
has never been barmier’?
DANIEL LEWISit’s friday! theatre
Daily Mail, Friday, August 16, 2019Party in the Park: Samantha Pauly (centre) as Evita with a very energetic castLess is Moor: Tory Kittles and Emma PaetzPicture: MARC BRENNERPicture: MANUEL HARLANPicture: MANUEL HARLANPage 49