the times | Monday October 26 2020 1GT 9
arts
Theatre
Nine Lives
Bridge Theatre, SE
{{{((I
n a way, Zodwa Nyoni’s brief
monologue about a gay
Zimbabwean asylum-seeker adrift
in Leeds is a victim of bad timing.
The Bridge, after all, is already
playing host to Inua Ellams’s one-man
show An Evening with an Immigrant,
which explores very similar terrain,
albeit from the perspective of a
Nigerian in London. In both works an
individual tries to find a way around a
wall of bureaucracy and indifference.
Nyoni’s drama, barely an hour long,
can’t help looking a little like an
afterthought, which is a pity because
Lladel Bryant gives a more compelling
performance than Ellams does in his
own piece. As Ishmael, a sensitive soul
waiting for the legal process to unfold,
Bryant is a persuasive blend of
vulnerability and anger tinged with
a hint of self-pity. He also catches us
off-balance by suddenly switching
into pitch-perfect imitations of the
Yorkshire folk that Ishmael encounters
as he attempts to while away the time.
So, we eavesdrop on the terse chit-
chat between the salt-of-the-earth
couple who own a café; they
particularly enjoy passing comment
on the kind of human-interest stories
in magazines that used to keep The
Jeremy Kyle Show in business. There is,
too, the young working-class mother
who Ishmael befriends in a park full of
dog mess. Unable to open up about his
sexuality, our narrator takes fright
when she invites him into her home.
Nyoni has a good ear for dialogue;
she can capture the way people talk at
each other. The narrative does tend to
meander nevertheless. It does not
have anything new to add to the
standard portrayal of the immigration
service. Bryant holds our attention
nonetheless, arriving on the bare stage
in a tracksuit, a white suitcase in his
hand. Ishmael is strong and athletic,
yet an encounter with the feral
teenage owner of a pitbull leaves
him cowering on the ground.
Alex Chisholm’s sensitive direction
adds depth and breadth to the slender
storyline. The sound of an old friend
who has already settled in the UK and
refuses to help him is a tantalising
presence at the other end of a phone
line. And Bryant is such an assured
performer that you long to see what
life has in store for his character.
Clive Davis
Box office: 0333 320 0051, to Oct 31TRISTRAM KENTONPeter Brathwaite as the Guyanese poet Martin Carter in Hannah Kendall’s The Knife of Dawn
An overdue showcase
Four female
composers are
spotlighted in
a Royal Opera
programme
of new work,
says Neil Fisher
Opera
New Dark Age
Royal Opera
House
{{{{(A
fter Ethel Smyth’s The
Wreckers appeared at
Covent Garden in 1910 it
took more than a century
for another woman’s work,
Judith Weir’s Miss Fortune in 2012, to
be performed in the gilded auditorium.
It’s amazing what a worldwide crisis
can do: in this single evening the
Royal Opera House gave pieces by
four female composers. Their music
was presented in an unconventional
format: a one-act monodrama by
Hannah Kendall, The Knife of Dawn,
followed by New Dark Age, a kind of
composite oratorio that gave the
evening its bleak title.
Perhaps the greatest thrill of the
disturbing yet cathartic New Dark
Age, minimally but effectively staged
by Katie Mitchell, was to hear great
voices in this space again: the mezzo
Susan Bickley (sombre and direct)
and the sopranos Anna Dennis
(emphatically seraphic) and Nadine
Benjamin (soaringly expansive),
who were buttressed by an off-stage
choral ensemble.
The three composers of New Dark
Age — Missy Mazzoli, Anna Meredith
and Anna Thorvaldsdottir — may not
stylistically mesh, but their music,
lithely despatched by a reduced ROH
orchestra under Natalie Murray Beale,
hit expressive common ground: anger,
intercession, meditation, even wry
humour. In extracts from Mazzoli’s
Vespers for a New Dark Age, we hear
a frustrated narrator interrogate
God, set to churning, flavoursomeorchestral textures. This is music
quivering with emotion and drama.
Meredith, Mercury-nominated this
year for her album Fibs, is known for
her rhythmic ferocity — and there was
plenty of that — but she surprised me
with the beatific appeal of Heal You
(text by Philip Ridley). Thorvaldsdottir
provided moments of exquisite
stillness, with the drone and
plainsong-infused Ad Genua and an
Icelandic psalm, Heyr þú oss himnum
á, in which the trio rose to their feet,
took their masks off, then simply
listened to the chorus. This was a deft
touch by Mitchell and created more
impact than the “age of Covid” videos
by Grant Gee, comprised of
meandering shots of soloists on their
commute to the Royal Opera House.
The strong aftertaste of New Dark
Age was, in the end, more operatic
than the opera that preceded it.
Kendall’s The Knife of Dawn, which
depicts the incarceration of the
Guyanese poet Martin Carter, is a
delicate work about a delicate subject.
Carter, played by the baritone Peter
Brathwaite, strives to fight for his
country but can only do so with words;
as he gets weaker under hunger strike,
off-stage voices confuse and enrage
him. Kendall’s musical palette,
carefully delineated by the conductor
Jonathon Heyward, was arresting, but
it was hard to feel drawn into Carter’s
plight and Brathwaite’s voice didn’t
command the space. Ola Ince’s
attentive staging had striking effects.
Available at stream.roh.org.ukPop
Billie Eilish
Livestream
{{{{(S
eeking to understand the Billie
Eilish phenomenon when it
broke in 2018, I asked the
biggest fan of the Los Angeles
pop star I knew to explain her
appeal. “She understands how we
teenage girls feel,” came the reply from
the 14-year-old daughter of a friend.
Today’s teenagers have a lot on their
minds — climate change, online life,
body issues, the future of democracy
and now Covid-19 — and Eilish, who
is still only 18, managed to address all
of that in this ambitious “extended
reality” livestream while still making it
a lot of fun. As she performed before
a wall of screens filled with fans
watching and dancing from home, she
knew how to connect with them too.
The show was an exercise in making
the most of the limitations facing live
performance at the moment. Eilish,
her brother, Finneas, on keyboards
and the drummer Andrew Marshall
appeared in a vast, digitally enhanced
space that featured giant spiders,
became an underwater world complete
with a shark that swallowed Eilish up,
and depicted scenes of wildfires and
polluted oceans during All the Good
Girls Go to Hell before the words:
“No Music on a Dead Planet.” Eilish
understood her position as figurehead
of a politicised, morally engaged
generation, even as she leapt about in
a Gucci T-shirt and shorts ensemble.
This went with music that isn’t pop
in the usual sense at all. The sparse
electronic minimalism, hushed vocals
and sinister lyrics of Bury a Friend
suggested a kind of gothic futurism,
but Eilish is a traditionalist at heart.
I Love You, performed with Finneas on
acoustic guitar atop a grey monolith,
was tender, Beatles-like folk-pop; Bad
Guy and When the Party’s Over owed a
debt to Broadway musicals and Barbra
Streisand-style balladry respectively;
and No Time to Die had the lush
melancholy you expect from a theme
tune to a forthcoming Bond film.
Most striking of all, though, was how
outspoken Eilish was. “We’ve got to do
something because the world is dying,
and people are dying, and Trump is
the worst,” she said. Although the
return of live music is not strictly
dependent on the removal of Trump
from office, her engagement was
inspiring. “Don’t take life for granted,”
she concluded.
Will Hodgkinsona halt. Morgan (played by Jessica
Raine) was a schoolteacher,
Ashley (Pearl Mackie, right) ran
a micro-pub. Should they spend
lockdown in their own homes
or share the experience under
the same roof?
Graham
cleverly allowed
us to experience
both options,
alternating
between scenes
where the women
were holed up in Morgan’s flat
or living apart and chatting
online. On a spartan stage
with only a couple of chests and
a rostrum, the two visions of the
new normal blended seamlessly.
On the livestream, the twoactors were separated by a
split-screen.
Raine and Mackie injected
energy into their lines. Too
much, perhaps. Rather than
young adults, their characters
sometimes seemed closer
to excitable teenagers.
They adjusted to
a new-fangled
technology called
Zoom, discussed
Boris Johnson’s
illness and discovered
the healing power of
gardening. The vulgar
subject of money
made an all-too-brief
appearance: Morgan’s
job gave her
security; Ashley,being an entrepreneur, was at the
mercy of events.
An associate artist at the Playhouse,
Graham inserted a few playful lines
about those local heroes, the ice
dancers Torvill and Dean. Without
removing a stitch of clothing, Mackie
and Raine made the most of a witty
scene about taking nude selfies.
Laughs were few and far between
otherwise, and the painfully right-on
discussion of Black Lives Matter was
pitched at the level of a children’s
teatime drama. Graham is capable of
much more than this.
The festival continues until
November 7, and includes two
Halloween-themed evenings of ghost
stories read by that connoisseur of
the supernatural, Mark Gatiss.
Clive DavisTheatre
Bubble
Nottingham
Playhouse
{{(((B
est to think of Bubble as
a first draft that may lead
to something much more
interesting further down the
road. James Graham can
always be relied on to address
newsworthy issues. Sadly, his romantic
two-hander about lockdown — part
of the Unlocked Festival of live and
livestreamed work — fell flat. Over the
course of 70 minutes, Graham’s script
worked its way through a checklist of
predictable themes, from fitness classes
to new technology. The heavy-handed
dialogue often sounded as though it
had been written by a computer.
The format, at least, had its
moments. Graham was exploring the
nascent relationship between two
women who had met through a dating
app just before ordinary life came tom