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      On London Stages, High Ambitions and Mixed Results

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      In “Rockets and Blue Lights” and “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia,” British playwrights make grand gestures. Sometimes too grand.LONDON — It seems reasonable to expect fireworks from a play called “Rockets and Blue Lights,” a vivid title for an overstuffed, if intriguing, drama with no shortage of things to say.Running through Oct. 9 at the National Theater here, Winsome Pinnock’s play may require a chart to help track the action: Ten actors play 24 roles. But if the intricate plotting takes a while to flare, the ambition of the piece is welcome throughout. In a theatrical climate defined over the last year by solo or small-cast plays, here is writing that thinks big. It also brings Pinnock back to the National, where the author, now 60, made history in 1994 as the first Black British woman to have a play at that address.“Rockets and Blue Lights” was seen briefly in March 2020 at the Royal Exchange Theater in Manchester before the pandemic intervened; a subsequent radio version was adapted for the BBC. The director Miranda Cromwell’s current production tethers a strong cast to a play in which present and past collide. Pinnock’s principal theme is how artists illuminate (or betray) the world around them, and her way in is the work of the English Romantic painter J.M.W. Turner.The reference in the title is to one of two oil paintings by Turner that were exhibited at the Royal Academy in London in 1840. The other, “The Slave Ship,” might depict the infamous 1781 Zong massacre, which resulted in the deaths of more than 130 African slaves at sea. (Scholars are divided over the work’s inspiration.) The same painting is also known by an explanatory alternate title, “Slavers Throwing Overboard the Dead and Dying — Typhoon Coming On,” and Pinnock traveled to the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston to see the picture for herself.The drama begins in 2007, with two women debating Turner’s achievement. How can such an ugly scene be so beautiful, Lou (Kiza Deen), asks of a painting in which she has a vested interest. An actress, she has signed on for a film in which she will play one of the drowning slaves — an assignment a far cry from her previous starring role, on a TV sci-fi series called “Space Colony Mars.”The action in “Rockets and Blue Lights” plays out on a set designed by Laura Hopkins.Brinkhoff-MoegenburgPinnock then rewinds to the 19th century to address the rapport that develops between Turner himself (a feisty Paul Bradley) and a Black sailor, Thomas (an excellent Karl Collins), whom Turner encounters by the docks. “I can tell by your blistered hand that you’re a man of the sea,” Thomas notes admiringly of the artist. Thomas, though, comes to grief, as befits a play in which the dead haunt the living: The film Lou is making is called, significantly, “The Ghost Ship.”The drama ricochets through enough themes — enslavement, artistic integrity, personal responsibility, among many others — for a play double its two-and-half-hour running time. Through it all, Laura Hopkins’s set allows water to lap at the edges: an apt visual for a play in which the sea is of more than passing interest.That our attention is riveted throughout is due not just to Pinnock but also to Cromwell, a 2020 Olivier Award winner for “Death of a Salesman,” who locates the human pulse in an often dizzying text. The play ends with a moving roll call of the dead and a reminder that art can ennoble the deceased and, in a certain way, give them life.Death also hovers over a second, though vastly different recent London opening: “Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia,” at the Almeida through Sept 18. This play by Josh Azouz filters World War II through the lens of the German occupation of Tunisia, a onetime French protectorate, which began late in 1942. In thrall to France’s Vichy regime at the time of the Nazis’ arrival, Tunisia, a useful program essay informs us, was home not just to a predominantly Muslim population but to 90,000 Jews, many of whom did not make it to the protectorate’s liberation, in May 1943.Adrian Edmondson as Grandma, left, and Yasmin Paige as Loys in Josh Azouz’s “One Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia” at the Almeida.Marc BrennerAs his title suggests, Azouz has taken an obvious leaf from Quentin Tarantino and exhibits the Oscar-winning filmmaker’s taste for folding unexpected levity into tales of depravity. The result shares with Pinnock’s play a gratifying appetite for chronicling history anew, but wears out its welcome much faster: After a while, the gallows humor just seems glib.“Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia’s” defining character is a cruel yet smiley Nazi officer who has taken charge of the local community: The opening scene, set in a labor camp outside the city of Tunis, finds an impassioned young Arab, Youssef (Ethan Kai), forced by one of this villain’s minions to urinate on his longtime friend Victor (Pierro Niel-Mee), a Jew. Youssef advises Victor to move to New York after the war, and the talk soon turns to dispossession, and what it even means to call a place home.The two men and their wives exist at the mercy of the tactically cheerful Nazi, who is improbably nicknamed Grandma because he likes knitting and refers to himself as an “old woman” — albeit one unafraid to float the prospect of gouging out the eyes of Victor’s wife, Loys (Yasmin Paige, eloquently furious).The power games unfold on a deceptively drab wooden set by Max Johns that springs open as required, and features holes for characters to poke their heads through, as in Beckett. Yet the more Azouz recalls one forebear or another, the more you register the difficulty he has in navigating shifts in tone; the director Eleanor Rhode brings a comparatively prosaic eye to material that might benefit from some stage wizardry.It’s good to see the charismatic Kai back onstage after his electric performance in “Equus” a season or two ago, and the comic actor Adrian Edmondson deserves credit for never soft-pedaling Grandma’s dark impulses. But for all its laudable intentions, the play sits suspended between historical inquiry, sendup and cautionary fable: audacious, to be sure, but not fully realized.From left, Laura Hanna, Ethan Kai, Yasmin Paige and Pierro Niel-Mee in “Once Upon a Time in Tunisia,” directed by Eleanor Rhode.Marc BrennerRockets and Blue Lights. Directed by Miranda Cromwell. National Theater, through Oct. 9.Once Upon a Time in Nazi Occupied Tunisia. Directed by Eleanor Rhode. Almeida Theater, through Sept. 18. More

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      Online or In-Person? Soon, British Theatergoers Can Decide

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      Live theater is set to return in England starting May 17, but many online offerings will remain.LONDON — Is watching a play on your laptop enough? This question will be put to the test starting May 17, when theaters in England reopen after a five-month shutdown.Some shows here are experimenting with filmed versions in advance of — or to run alongside — the same play in three dimensions, offering a choice to possibly skittish audiences who may be wary of entering a theater.When Ben Brown’s spy drama “A Splinter of Ice” begins a tour of British theaters on June 8, those who wish to can see it live, as long as they wear masks and maintain social distancing, for the first part of its travels at least. (Such protocol may change from June 21 onward, as the British move still further out of lockdown.) For everyone else, a filmed version, running online through July 31, was shot on the stage of the Everyman Theater in Cheltenham, England. It stars the same distinguished pair of actors, Oliver Ford Davies and Stephen Boxer, who will take the play out on the road.The actor Jack Holden’s feisty performance in his self-penned play “Cruise” was available online through April, in a film shot in the East End, across town from the Soho district where it is set. Holden will return to the show at the Duchess Theater, on the West End, from May 18, hoping that the play’s online run has raised awareness of its onward life onstage.Of course, none of this is new. The 2012 National Theater production of “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time” was shown in movie theaters around the world via NT Live long before it opened on Broadway, where it ran for two years and won five Tony Awards: The screen version surely whetted New York appetites.The difference this time is that many potential audience members will be wary about sitting in crowded auditoriums. These new streamed productions offer a choice — and an additional income source as well.Other British playhouses, including the Almeida and the Orange Tree Theater, both in London, also plan to present works both ways. The risk is, however, that the filmed version will seem sufficient and dampen the desire to experience it onstage.“A Splinter of Ice,” set in Moscow in 1987, tells of an encounter between the novelist Graham Greene, then in his 80s, and the British intelligence officer Kim Philby, who died the following year, at age 76, 25 years after he defected to the Soviet Union. An armchair drama heavy on exposition, Brown’s play doesn’t feel especially theatrical and works fine as an onscreen vehicle for its two splendid leading men.Stephen Boxer, right, and Oliver Ford Davies in Ben Brown’s “A Splinter of Ice.”James FindlayFord Davies, 81, brings a world-weary geniality to the role of Greene, who functions for the most part as an interlocutor trying to make sense of Philby, the onetime journalist who was part of the celebrated British spy ring known as the Cambridge Five.Boxer, his co-star, finds a prickly intelligence in the role of Philby, who refers to himself as “the most wanted man in England” and who, the play suggests, may have been the inspiration for the “third man” of Greene’s 1950 novel. Lovely as it is to see seasoned actors in the flesh, the screen version gives a gratifying close-up view of Ford Davies’s kind, quizzical eyes. The writing is labored at times, but its stars give it a lift, and a heavily accented Sara Crowe completes the cast as Philby’s wife, Rufa, a role that will be re-cast for the tour.“Cruise,” on the other hand, is a far more visceral piece of writing, and its online version makes you want to partake of Holden’s enthusiasm firsthand. A springy study in London gay life in the 1980s and today, the 90-minute play tells of an L.G.B.T. help line volunteer in his early 20s. Accompanied onscreen in a nonspeaking role by sound designer John Elliott, who spins the disco tracks (Gloria Gaynor’s “I Will Survive,” for one) of a bygone age, the character of Jack gets absorbed in the elaborate story of a decades-older caller named Michael. This unseen character, voiced by Holden, has made his way through the fearsome years of the AIDS epidemic, even as many around him have not, and wants to enlighten Jack about the hedonistic days (and nights) of an era unknown to the younger man.At times, the play feels like an English footnote to “The Inheritance,” Matthew Lopez’s two-part glance back at the losses of a generation of gay American men, and few could claim that Holden’s writing, however vivid, breaks new ground. But watching the author dart about onscreen leaves you keen to be in the same room with that bristling energy. In a few weeks, we’ll be able to do just that. More

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      Making Black Lives, Not Just Black Deaths, Matter Onstage

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookMaking Black Lives, Not Just Black Deaths, Matter OnstageThe tragedy of racism is only part of the story in two very different plays from London that carry a dimension of meaning not usually seen in this country.Richard Blackwood in “Typical,” about a man who died while in police custody after a night out.Credit…Franklyn RogersPublished More