12 Friday April 8 2022 | the timesfirst night
PAMELA RAITHcharisma and fiery rhetoric —
qualities that are captured in Wils
Wilson’s ambitious production in an
unflagging performance by Bettrys
Jones as the politician.
When we meet Wilkinson, she is
sharing a platform with Herbert
Morrison (a fine, nuanced turn from
Kevin Lennon), whom she outshines,
both for her clarity of oration and the
uncompromising nature of her vision.
Although the pair rose through the
ranks of the Labour Party together
(in Bird’s version their relationship
spills over into an affair in the depths
of the Second World War), Wilkinson’s
achievement is — inevitably — harder
fought, her public image ridiculed, the
rewards less illustrious.
Bird creates a trenchant portrait
of her subject, charting the rocky
trajectory of a woman whose motto
of “showing up is not enough” was
sincere, but who vacillated in her
preferred revolutionary vehicle
between Labour and the Communist
Party of Great Britain (of which
she was a founder member), before
participating in a wartime government
whose actions appeared to overlook
the very people she sought to
represent. So, while Wilkinson is
clearly a figure to be admired, the
play doesn’t try to gloss over her
inconsistencies, her occasional
delusions of grandeur or her loneliness
and desire for intimacy.
These intricacies make for involving
drama, and while Wilson’s production
runs to three hours of compressed
history — covering many turbulent
events of the mid-20th century —
the show doesn’t feel overstuffed.
Shifts between scenes are fluently
choreographed, making efficient use
of Camilla Clarke’s flexible set design,
while the director and ensemble make
light work of the period transitions.
The pace sags a little in the second
half, but the production never
meanders, and Jones sustains our
sympathy for Wilkinson — flaws
and all.
To Apr 9, then touring to May 28,
northernstage.co.uka minister in Churchill’s wartime
coalition and, later, in the postwar
Attlee government.
While Caroline Bird’s sweeping
biographical play takes its title from
the nickname that clung to Wilkinson
throughout her career, it also calls
attention to the dilemma she faced:
between sticking rigidly to her socialist
principles and compromising for the
sake of her career and electoral
prospects. Wilkinson was famously
diminutive (the Daily Worker called
her “thumb-sized”) but what she
lacked in stature she made up for inE
llen Wilkinson — one of
the first female members of
parliament — may not have
the name recognition of some
of her male counterparts, but
her life and political career were no
less eventful.
As Labour MP for Middlesbrough
East from 1924-31, then Jarrow in
Tyne and Wear between 1935-47,
she organised and participated in the
most famous of the “hunger marches”
of the 1930s. She rubbed shoulders
with Ernest Hemingway during the
Spanish Civil War, then served asN
arcissists, fantasists,
control freaks, pervs,
frauds, the indolent, the
greedy and the utterly
deranged — no, not a
description of the House of Commons.
This is what Beauty encounters when
she enters the world of online dating
in this entertaining new opera, which
meshes together two ancient tropes
— those of Beauty and the Beast and
The Seven Deadly Sins — with such
misanthropic virulence that you
emerge thinking that Sartre was on
the right track when he declared that
hell is other people.
Beauty signs up to a dating app
called Magic Mirror, which promises
that she will find true love within
seven encounters. The online context
gives James Hurley, who stages this
production by the resourceful Opera
Story company, the chance to wheel
out a truly exhausting array of
technical wizardry.
The only singers performing live
are Katherine Aitken, who is on stage
throughout as Beauty and superbly
credible, and the equally fine Dan
D’Souza, as the emotionally troubled
Magic Mirror employee who sets
up her dates.
The other singers have been pre-
recorded (as has the small orchestra),
and films of them, flashed between
three screens, are ingeniously woven
into the live performance, the
conductor Berrak Dyer gamely
co-ordinating the whole thing.To make matters even more
complicated, the seven episodes of the
two-hour show have words and music
written by seven different composer/
librettist teams.
All things considered, it’s a small
miracle that the show holds together
as well as it does. One reason for that
is the musical consistency maintained
by the seven composers, who all write
what you might call sophisticated
modern film soundtracks: nothing
too memorable, but well crafted for
atmosphere and as vehicles for witty,
quickfire texts that demand to be
heard clearly.
And the show’s satirical bite is
greatly enhanced by having such
characterful singers as Sarah Tynan,
Nicholas Lester and Anthony Gregory
playing the ghastly individuals who
intrude into Beauty’s solitary world.
The opera is 20 minutes too
long and sometimes descends into
whimsical surrealism. On the other
hand, enough of it rings painfully true
to prove what I suppose is its point:
that after 200,000 years of trying,
Homo sapiens can’t seem to nail this
courtship ritual thing without being
crass, clumsy, pretentious or plain
creepy. And the internet only makes
things worse.
Richard Morrison
To Apr 14, theoperastory.comBettrys Jones (seen here with Laura Evelyn, left) sustains our sympathy as Labour MP Ellen WilkinsonA f lawed trailblazer
The life of Ellen Wilkinson makes for a complex show. By Allan Radcliffe
storyline. For the first hour, you cling
to the hope that Danya Taymor’s
flamboyant direction and designer
Matt Saunders’s Hockney-esque
evocation of Bel Air will be enough to
fill the holes in the script. They aren’t.
Harris is one of the hot new
names on the American scene. His
provocative, sexually charged fantasia,
Slave Play, was one of the most talked-
about productions of recent years.
“Daddy”, an earlier work, may be full
of larger-than-life effects — at one
point Bang wades into the water to
deliver a karaoke version of George
Michael’s Father Figure — but its
storyline is rather more conventional.Harris’s central character is
Franklin, an articulate young black
artist who becomes the lover and
plaything of a middle-aged collector,
Andre, whose home is crammed with
works by Lichtenstein, Cy Twombly,
Basquiat and the like. Bang plays
him as a purring, spoilt hedonist with
a flat English accent reminiscent of
David Bowie.
It’s clear from the outset that
Andre’s affection for his young man
comes with all sorts of fetishistic
twists. As Franklin works on his
creations — crude, doll-like figures —
the arrival of his god-fearing mother,
Zora, inevitably generates tensions.
Sharlene Whyte makes the best of
a one-dimensional matriarch.
With the Zora-Andre conflict
simmering away in predictable fashion
there’s some entertainment to be had
in watching audience members in the
front row occasionally being splashed.
And a trio of female gospel singers
clad in white roam here and there like
some demented Greek chorus. An
extra splash of melodrama comes in
the form of Phantom of the Opera-style
fanfares every now and then. But the
tricks begin to pall long before the end.
Clive Davis
To Apr 30, almeida.co.uk.
This review appeared in some
editions yesterdayW
hen things get dull,
you can at least
admire the swimming
pool. Sleek and
seductive, it stretches
across most of the stage and Claes
Bang and other members of the cast
spend a good deal of time splashing
around in various states of undress.
All credit to the Danish actor and
his co-star Terique Jarrett for being
willing to bare so much flesh. Along
with the full-frontal male nudity,
there’s a lot of kissing, caressing and
even some spanking too. What this
Jeremy O Harris play conspicuously
lacks, however, is a worthwhileClaes Bang and Terique Jarrett spend much of “Daddy” in the onstage poolMARC BRENNER‘Daddy’: A
Melodrama
Almeida, N1
{{(((Red Ellen
Northern Stage, Newcastle
{{{{(Beauty and
the Seven Beasts
Brixton Jamm, SW9
{{{((theatre
theatre
opera
Beauty is on a
dating app called
Magic Mirror