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      Dench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater Greats

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s NotebookDench, Smith, McKellen, Jacobi: On a Vanishing Era of Theater GreatsWith British venues closed and years advancing, there’s even less time to see some of the finest actors in their 80s onstage.From left: Maggie Smith attending the 65th Evening Standard Theater Awards at the London Coliseum in November 2019; Derek Jacobi and Judi Dench at the world premiere of “Murder on the Orient Express” in London in November 2017; and Ian McKellen at the Evening Standard awards in 2018.Credit…Ian West/Press Association, via AP Images; Rune Hellestad/Corbis, via Getty Images; Associated PressMarch 11, 2021, 3:53 a.m. ETLONDON — I’ll say this for the pandemic: It’s brought acting talent together — and into your living room — in ways that might not have seemed possible previously. That sense was probably shared by many on a Sunday night in November when Ian McKellen, Derek Jacobi, Maggie Smith and Judi Dench participated in a Zoom event titled “One Knight Only,” which was facilitated by another, younger member of Britain’s acting nobility, Kenneth Branagh.There, sharing a single screen, were four octogenarians — each a knight or a dame and a winner of Tony and Olivier Awards and heaven knows how many other accolades. Gathered for an online conversation in aid of charity, the quartet embodied a lifelong devotion to the theater that has found time for screen renown as well. The realization that the pandemic and advancing age have significantly reduced the already scarce opportunities to see these actors onstage again gave the occasion an underlying piquancy.How glorious, then, to clock their interplay, McKellen taking the reins as a raconteur, with a puckish Jacobi, nattily dressed, not far behind. Dench leaned into the screen as if Zoom were some inconvenience keeping her from sharing an actual space with friends, while Smith, notably more reticent, seemed to pull back from her screen. The conversation ranged from life during lockdown (McKellen has been painting) to their attitude toward critics and on to embarrassing onstage moments and roles they might like to play now. “Anything,” Dench said. “I would be pleased to be cast in anything.”All four belong to a tradition in British acting where theater was what you did and anything else was a happy add-on. Smith, alone among them, won the first of two Oscars (for “The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie”) when still in her 30s, while the others took far longer to become known overseas the way they had long been at home. Whether in college and drama school or covering the expanse of Britain’s once-storied network of regional theaters, these players cut their teeth on theater and waited for the screen to recognize the gifts already well known to live audiences. (More than once I have taken a seat aboard a trans-Atlantic flight only to find a smiling McKellen on video, advising me on in-flight protocol.)Whether as Gandalf, the stammering Roman ruler Claudius or the tart-tongued Dowager Countess in “Downton Abbey,” McKellen, Jacobi and Smith, respectively, boast screen roles with which they will forever be associated, especially for those who haven’t seen them chart a course across the classics, and many a new play as well, onstage. (Smith’s Professor McGonagall in the “Harry Potter” movies found her a following among preteens, too.) More people probably saw Dench’s inimitably brisk M during just one of the weekends her seven Bond films were in cinemas (she also made a cameo in an eighth) than saw her onstage during a theater career spanning 60 years and counting.Judi Dench, left, and Maggie Smith in the 1985 film “A Room With a View.”Credit…Cinecon, via Everett CollectionDench and Smith in David Hare’s play “The Breath of Life” in 2002.Credit…Geraint Lewis, via AlamyIan McKellen as Freddie and Derek Jacobi as Stuart in the British television series “Vicious” in 2018.Credit…via ShutterstockThe joy of hearing their reminiscences came with an appreciation of how often these actors’ lives and work have overlapped: Think of them as a continuing Venn diagram from the start. McKellen and Jacobi acted together as students at Cambridge, where McKellen has spoken of harboring a crush on his classmate. The pair reunited a half-century later as the waspish elderly couple in the British sitcom “Vicious.” Jacobi and Smith were integral to the early glory days of the National Theater under Laurence Olivier, and McKellen and Dench played the Macbeths for the Royal Shakespeare Company in a 1976 production that exists on disc and is still spoken of in reverential tones.Dench and Smith, longtime friends, have appeared several times together onscreen, in “Tea With Mussolini” and “A Room with a View” among other titles, and in 2002 made up the entire cast of the David Hare play “The Breath of Life.”Surely, there are plenty of younger actors who are no less committed to the stage, and as we saw at this year’s Golden Globe awards, there’s a direct path in Britain from theater training to screen acclaim. Jude Law is a star who loves the theater, as are Benedict Cumberbatch (TV’s “Sherlock”) and George Mackay (the fast-ascending leading man from “1917”).The difference has to do with career paths that no longer require, or even suggest, the lengthy apprenticeship in Britain’s flagship subsidized theaters — the RSC and the National — that gave these senior practitioners an established perch early on. An actor nowadays may do a play or two only to be siphoned away to TV and film. Some return a fair amount (Matt Smith, a former and popular Doctor Who, is one example), whereas others vanish from in-person view: When’s the last time you could see Colin Firth in a play? Not since 1999, when he starred in Richard Greenberg’s “Three Days of Rain” at the Donmar Warehouse here.From left, Maggie Smith, Joan Plowright, Eileen Atkins and Judi Dench in “Tea With the Dames,” a 2018 documentary directed by Roger Michell.Credit…Mark Johnson/IFC FilmsIan McKellen in his one-man show “Ian McKellen on Stage: With Tolkien, Shakespeare, Others … and You” in New York in 2019.Credit…Jeenah Moon for The New York TimesBy contrast, McKellen even now is visibly rejuvenated whenever he takes to the boards. In 2019, he toured a physically demanding one-man show the length and breadth of Britain (and for one night in New York) to mark his 80th birthday, and he has begun work on an age-inappropriate stage production of “Hamlet” that was put on hold by the coronavirus. Attending a Sunday matinee of the solo show, I was especially moved by his presence directly afterward in the lobby of the theater. Energy undimmed, he seemed ready to engage his public in chat well into the night.That same year found Smith onstage for the first time in 12 years not in the more-anticipated realms, perhaps, of Wilde or Coward but going it alone as Goebbels’s secretary, Brunhilde Pomsel, in “A German Life,” a bravura solo performance that by rights should travel to New York. (The plan now is to adapt the play into a film.) Dench has spoken candidly of her waning eyesight due to macular degeneration and her desire to nonetheless carry on acting. How exciting it would be to see her once again on a London stage, perhaps as the agelessly witty and worldly grandmother in “A Little Night Music,” a musical in which she once played that same character’s daughter, Desiree.Dench and Smith were part of a separate, scarcely less distinguished quartet when they joined Eileen Atkins and Joan Plowright in “Tea With the Dames” (called “Nothing Like a Dame” in Britain), a lovely documentary that was aired in the United States in 2018 and lets the camera roll as the four great ladies of the stage take stock, gossip and reflect. To see this generation of talent in any iteration is to applaud their longevity while pausing to note the inevitable passing of a collective kinship with the stage that will live on well after it’s no longer possible to enjoy their talents in person.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      BAFTA Nominations: ‘Nomadland’ and ‘Rocks’ Lead Diverse List

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Nomadland’ and ‘Rocks’ Lead Diverse BAFTA NominationsBut the nominees include many independent films, after BAFTA overhauled its voting processes to rectify all-white, all-male shortlists.Frances McDormand in “Nomadland,” which won the award for best motion picture, drama, at the Golden Globes in February.Credit…Courtesy Of Searchlight Pictures/Searchlight Pictures, via Associated PressMarch 9, 2021Updated 12:56 p.m. ETLONDON — “Nomadland,” Chloé Zhao’s drama about a middle-aged woman who travels across the United States in a van seeking itinerant work, scored the biggest number of high-profile nominations for this year’s EE British Academy Film Awards, Britain’s equivalent of the Oscars.On Tuesday, the film, which stars Frances McDormand and won the Golden Globe for best drama in February, picked up seven nominations for the awards, commonly known as the BAFTAs.It will compete for best film against “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” “Promising Young Woman,” “The Father” and “The Mauritanian.”The best-film nominees are almost the same as the titles that competed for best drama at this year’s Golden Globes. (Only “Mank,” David Fincher’s revisiting of “Citizen Kane,” is missing, replaced by “The Mauritanian.”) But in the talent categories for this year’s BAFTAs, the nominees are more diverse than the Golden Globe lists. Many come from low-budget, independent films, such as “Rocks,” a British coming-of-age tale about a Black teenager in London, that also received seven nominations. This appears to be the result of a recent overhaul of BAFTA’s voting rules to increase the diversity of the nominees after recent criticism. Last year, no people of color were nominated in the BAFTAs’ main acting categories, and no women were nominated for best director. Those omissions prompted a social media furor and criticism from the stage at the award ceremony. “I think that we sent a very clear message to people of color that you’re not welcome here,” Joaquin Phoenix said when accepting the best-actor award for his performance in “Joker.”BAFTA required all of its 7,000 voting members to undergo unconscious bias training before voting on this year’s nominees, as well as requiring them to watch a selection of 15 films to stretch the range of titles viewed. Among dozens of other changes to the voting procedures to increase the diversity of the nominees, they were selected for the first time from “longlists” prepared by BAFTA, with the input of specialist juries.In contrast to the male-skewed nominee lists of previous years, four of the best-director nominees announced on Tuesday are women; four of the six nominees in both leading actor categories are people of color. In the best-director category, for example, Chloé Zhao has been nominated for “Nomadland” and will compete against Lee Isaac Chung for “Minari”; Sarah Gavron for “Rocks”; Shannon Murphy for “Babyteeth”; Jasmila Zbanic for “Quo Vadis, Aida?” a retelling of a massacre in the Bosnian War of the 1990s; and Thomas Vinterberg for “Another Round,” a dark comedy about Danish attitudes to alcohol.In the best-actress category, Frances McDormand, the star of “Nomadland,” will compete against Radha Blank for her role in “The Forty-Year-Old Version,” Wunmi Mosaku for the horror film “His House,” and Bukky Bakray, the teenage star of “Rocks.” That list includes fewer recognizable star names than previous years: Rosamund Pike and Andra Day, who won the main actress awards at this year’s Golden Globes, are missing.Pippa Harris, BAFTA’s deputy chair, said in a video interview that the most important change that shaped this year’s nominations was the requirement that voters watch more films than usual, rather than letting them simply see those with the most buzz from other awards or marketing campaigns. “Time and again, people have emailed in, written in, phoned in to say that made a massive difference, and they watched films they would never have come to normally, and found work they absolutely loved,” she said. Movie awards are generally dominated by five or six highly touted films, said Marc Samuelson, the chair of BAFTA’s film committee, in the same interview. “If we’re disrupting that a bit, it’s a good thing,” he added.Some 258 films were submitted for consideration for this year’s awards, and they were watched over 150,000 times on a viewing portal created specifically for voters, he said.This year’s winners will be announced on April 11 at a ceremony in London. Samuelson would not explain how the event will be held, but he said it would conform with Britain’s coronavirus rules. Indoor events are not allowed in England until May 17 at the earliest. The Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences is scheduled next Monday to announce nominations for this year’s Oscars.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Theater

      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

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      in Television

      How Britain Is Reacting to ‘It’s a Sin’

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      #masthead-section-label, #masthead-bar-one { display: none }What to WatchBest Movies on NetflixBest of Disney PlusBest of Amazon PrimeBest Netflix DocumentariesNew on NetflixAdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyHow Britain Is Reacting to ‘It’s a Sin’The show, which aired last month in the U.K., has broken a viewing record and revived conversations about how the country handled the AIDS crisis in the 1980s.From left, Omari Douglas, Lydia West, David Carlyle, Calum Scott Howells and Nathaniel Curtis in “It’s a Sin.”Credit… Ben Blackall/HBO MaxFeb. 22, 2021Updated 12:39 p.m. ETLONDON — In what may be a perfect formula for helping a well-made TV show go viral, all five episodes of “It’s a Sin” arrived on a British streaming service in late January, on the Friday before a snowy weekend, during a national lockdown.Since becoming available on HBO Max on Thursday, viewers in the U.S. have been binge watching the show, but in Britain, the show has dominated national conversations over recent weeks.The drama, created by Russell T Davies, tells the story of a group of friends navigating gay life in 1980s London, as AIDS moves from a whispered American illness to a defining aspect of their young lives. Episodes aired weekly on television on Channel 4, and the show broke records for the channel’s accompanying streaming service, with 16 million streams.Below is a roundup of how people in Britain have been reacting to “It’s a Sin,” including sharing their own experiences of the AIDS crisis, improving understanding of the H.I.V. treatments available today and lamenting the epidemic’s absence from school curriculums. This piece contains some spoilers.A critical successDavies has had a long and celebrated career in British television, including the relaunch of “Doctor Who” and making other hit L.G.B.T.Q. shows like “Queer as Folk” and “Cucumber.”“It’s a Sin” earned numerous five star reviews from British critics, along with praise for Davies’s writing. In The Telegraph, Anita Singh noted that he makes viewers “care about these characters from the first minute we see them,” adding that “as in so much of his work, he switches seamlessly between tragedy and humor.”In the show, activists stage a “die in” in London to protest the government’s handling of the AIDS crisis.Credit…Ben Blackall/HBO MaxWriting in The Times of London, Hugo Rifkind said, “It is a drama that could only have been made once stories of gay love and gay lives had become an uncontroversial fixture of mainstream popular culture, and it’s obviously thanks in large part to Davies that they have.”There was also praise for the actors’ performances, and how relatable many of the characters felt. In the TV magazine Radio Times, David Craig saw himself in multiple characters.“I remember feeling the same timidity as Colin (Callum Scott Howells) when I first attempted to explore my sexuality,” he wrote. “Likewise, I can recall making fraught phone calls home while still closeted, unable to discuss that which was truly weighing on my mind, similar to Ritchie (Olly Alexander).”Discussions of H.I.V. today“It’s a Sin” has also sparked a renewed public focus on H.I.V. prevention and treatment. The Terrence Higgins Trust, an H.I.V. and sexual health charity, said it had seen a huge boost in donations through its website, a boost to the number of H.I.V. tests requested at the start of H.I.V. Testing Week and a 30 percent increase in calls to its help line.“It’s genuinely been phenomenal,” Ian Green, the chief executive of the charity, said in a telephone interview. “It’s rekindled the narrative around H.I.V. in the United Kingdom.”On the popular daytime show “This Morning” a couple of weeks ago, Dr. Ranj, one of the show’s contributors, took an H.I.V. test live on air. Nathaniel J. Hall, who plays Donald in “It’s a Sin,” talked about living with H.I.V. on the chat show Lorraine. “I’m on medication and my viral load is what is known as undetectable,” he said. “That means I can’t transmit the virus on, so my partner, Sean, remains H.I.V. negative.”After concerns were raised that the drama could lead to misconceptions around contemporary H.I.V. treatments, Channel 4 now advises viewers after each episode on where to find further information.A celebration of ‘Jills’“It’s a Sin” has also sparked praise for the allies of people affected by the disease: friends who visit people in hospital when their families failed to turn up, march in protest and campaign on behalf of H.I.V.-positive people.The character of Jill (Lydia West) embodies these loyal friends, and is loosely based on a real woman, Jill Nalder, who lived in London in the ’80s and is a friend of Davies. On the show, Nalder plays the character of Jill’s mother. Remembering the period in the Metro newspaper, she wrote: “The L.G.B.T.Q. community ought to be remembered as trailblazers because not only were they fighting for their lives, they were medical guinea pigs — sometimes taking 30 pills a day just to survive.”Jill (Lydia West), right, is a loyal friend to Ritchie (Olly Alexander) throughout the years. Credit… Ben Blackall/HBO Max“If you are a gay man, I hope you have a Jill,” wrote Guy Pewsey in Grazia.However, some viewers have been frustrated at the lack of representation of women affected by AIDS in the show. Lizbeth Farooqi, a fictional Muslim lawyer played by Seyan Sarvan, is one example, but is a relatively minor character. “It infuriates me that a lot of coverage of the show has concentrated Jill as the avatar of good womanhood and being this lovely, soft, supportive person,” Lisa Power, a co-founder of the British L.G.B.T.Q. charity Stonewall, told The Guardian. “I want to hear more about the stroppy lesbian solicitor, who most people have not even managed to read as a lesbian.”Institutionalized stigmaThe drama also touches on legislation around the L.G.B.T.Q. community in Britain at the time. In particular, the consequences of Section 28, a 1988 law introduced by Margaret Thatcher’s Conservative government banning teaching that promoted the “acceptability of homosexuality as a pretended family relationship.”In one scene, Ash (Nathaniel Curtis) is asked to check a school library’s books to make sure they comply with the law, only to find that they did. “I looked at all the vast halls of literature and culture and science and art,” he said. “There is nothing.”Section 28 was repealed in 2003, but some say its consequences are still being felt in Britain today. Speaking to The Telegraph, Howells, who plays Colin, lamented that the AIDS crisis was not taught in schools. “Why? How? How can this thing happen, literally kill millions of people, and yet they can’t even implement it in education?” he asked.Some people have also drawn parallels between the stigma that gay, lesbian and bisexual people received in the 1980s and the experience of trans people in Britain today. On Twitter Michael Cashman, another of Stonewall’s co-founders, wrote that some lesbian, gay and bisexual people who lived through that period “are now visiting the same stigmatization, misrepresentation and dehumanization of trans people particularly trans women.”The power of ‘La’During the first episode of the show, Ritchie steps in front of a crowd at a house party, dressed in drag, to sing just one syllable: “La!”“Is that it?” someone in the crowd shouts back. His friends react in hysterics. From that point onward, the characters say “La!” as a greeting and a goodbye. Speaking to “It’s a Sin: After Hours,” an accompanying Channel 4 show, Davies said that “La” was a joke among his friends when he was growing up in Swansea.Philip Normal, a London artist, decided to make and sell a T-shirt emblazoned with the word, with proceeds going to the Terrence Higgins Trust. “For me, it really underpins the love the characters have in the show and the respect and love that I’ve experienced in the L.G.B.T. community when I moved to London as a young gay man,” he said in a telephone interview.He said he had now raised £200,000 for the charity, adding: “I didn’t think it was going to take off! I thought I would sell, like five.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      in Music

      Scrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. Musicians

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyScrapped Plans for London Concert Hall Sour Mood for U.K. MusiciansThe decision comes as classical musicians struggle to deal with the impact of the pandemic and Britain’s departure from the European Union.A computer-generated rendering of the proposed London Center for Music, by the architects Diller Scofidio & Renfro. London authorities announced Thursday that the project would not go ahead.Credit…Diller Scofidio + RenfroFeb. 19, 2021, 11:11 a.m. ETLONDON — Back in 2017, London music fans had high hopes for a reinvigoration of the city’s classical music scene.That year, Simon Rattle, one of the world’s most acclaimed conductors, became the music director of the London Symphony Orchestra, and Diller Scofidio & Renfro, the architects behind the High Line in New York, were appointed to design a world-class 2,000-seat concert hall in the city.Now, the situation couldn’t be more different.On Thursday, just weeks after Rattle announced he would leave London in 2023 to take the reins at the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra in Munich, London officials announced that plans for the new hall had been scrapped. Rattle had been the driving force behind the project.In a news release announcing the decision, the City of London Corporation, the local government body overseeing the proposal, did not mention Rattle’s departure; the new hall would not go ahead because of the “unprecedented circumstances” caused by the coronavirus pandemic, the release said.The announcement was not unexpected. Few private funders came forward for the project, and Britain’s government was reluctant to back the project, which critics had decried as elitist, after years of cuts to basic services.But some musical experts say the news is still a blow to Britain’s classical musicians, already suffering from a pandemic-induced shutdown of their work, and Brexit, which has raised fears about their ability to to perform abroad.“It’s a further confirmation of the parochialization of British music and the arts,” said Jasper Parrott, a co-founder of HarrisonParrott, a classical music agency, in a telephone interview.The mood among musicians was low, Parrott said, especially because of changes to the rules governing European tours that came about because of Brexit. Before Britain left the European Union, classical musicians and singers could work in most European countries without needing visas or work permits, and many took last-minute bookings, jumping on low-cost flights to make concerts at short notice.Classical musicians now require costly and time-consuming visas to work in some European countries, Parrott said. Changes to haulage rules also make it harder for orchestras to tour, he added: Trucks carrying their equipment are limited to two stops on the continent before they must return to Britain.Deborah Annetts, the chief executive of the Incorporated Society of Musicians, said on Tuesday during a parliamentary inquiry into the new rules that she had been “inundated with personal testimony from musicians as to the work that they have lost, or are going to lose, in Europe as a result of the new visa and work permit arrangements.”A British musician who wanted to play a concert in Spain would have to pay 600 pounds, or about $840, for a work permit, she said, adding that this would make such a trip unviable for many. She called upon the government to negotiate deals with European countries so cultural workers could move around more easily.Parrott said he expected many British classical musicians would retrain for other careers, or move outside Britain for work, if the rules were not changed.High profile departures like Rattle’s have only contributed to the impression of a sector in decline. On Jan. 22, Mirga Grazinyte-Tyla, a young Lithuanian conductor seen as a rising star, announced she would leave her post as music director of the Birmingham Symphony Orchestra at the end of the 2021-22 season. “This is a deeply personal decision, reflecting my desire to step away from the organizational and administrative responsibilities of being a music director,” she said in a statement at the time.Manuel Brug, a music critic for Die Welt, the German newspaper, said in a telephone interview that, viewed from the continent, classical music in Britain seemed in a bad way, “with all this horrible news.”The new London concert hall “was always a dream, but at least it was a dream,” he said.Given recent developments, many British musicians and singers may have to consider moving to Europe if they wanted to succeed, he said.Yet not all were downbeat about the future. British musicians could cope with the impact of the coronavirus, or Brexit — but not both at the same time, unless the government stepped in to help, said Paul Carey Jones, a Welsh bass baritone who has campaigned for the interests of freelance musicians during the pandemic.“British artists are some of the best trained, most talented and most innovative and creative,” he said. “But what we’re almost completely lacking is support from the current government. So we need them to grasp the urgency of the situation.”AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      Review: Fathers, but Not Yet Men, in the Prison Drama ‘Shook’

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s PickReview: Fathers, but Not Yet Men, in the Prison Drama ‘Shook’Samuel Bailey’s knockout professional debut isn’t so much about the pipeline to incarceration as it is about the toxic masculinity that keeps it flowing.Josef Davies, left, and Ivan Oyik as teenagers in a British “young offenders’ institution” in Samuel Bailey’s play “Shook.”Credit…The Other RichardFeb. 9, 2021ShookNYT Critic’s PickGreat injustice makes great drama, so it’s no surprise that playwrights have been drawn to the epidemic of incarceration among neglected young men.Or should I say the pandemic? “Shook,” Samuel Bailey’s knockout professional debut, diagnoses much the same disaster in Britain as some recent American plays have diagnosed here.But if “Shook” echoes stateside dramas like “Pipeline,” “Notes From the Field” and “Whorl Inside a Loop” in its mash-up of themes, it is so specific to its own milieu that it rings with fresh truth. That milieu is an English “young offenders’ institution,” roughly the equivalent of a juvenile detention center. Three young men — Riyad, Cain and Jonjo — are the offenders in question, though calling them young men is part of the problem. They are teenagers: Riyad and Cain, 16; Jonjo, 17.Andrea Hall, left, as Grace, who teaches parenting lessons to a trio of boys at the institution, including Oyik as Riyad.Credit…The Other RichardStill, they are old enough to be fathers, which is what brings them together, lifeboat-style, for the play. Over the course of six weekly lessons, a woman named Grace (Andrea Hall) introduces the boys to diapering, feeding and CPR while Bailey introduces us to the violent lives they lived outside and the even more violent ones they live while locked up.That structure could easily be a defect; with so much of the action described in retrospect, “Shook” might have felt distant or placid. And it’s true that Grace is given only the most basic demographic information to suggest a life offstage: She’s in her 30s and has a son of her own. But for the most part, the production from Papatango — a London theater dedicated to new plays and early career playwrights — avoids such pitfalls, thanks to propulsive pacing and sharp characterizations in roles that spark with specificity.That’s especially true of Cain (Josh Finan), who talks as if he were spraying ammunition. Both a threat and a cutup, he says he probably has dyslexia, A.D.H.D. and “problems with boundaries,” as if these were impressive battle scars. Hardly able to read and completely unable to focus, he is more interested in getting a look down Grace’s shirt than in learning to care for a son he never sees.A new arrival, Jonjo (Josef Davies), is introduced as Cain’s counterweight: On the rare occasions he does talk, he stutters. After the crime that brought him to the institution — involving, too predictably, a vicious stepfather — he has been forbidden contact with his pregnant girlfriend. The most eager of the trio to practice his parenting skills, but also the one least likely to use them, he is, at first, lost in a stupor of grief.Cain and Jonjo are white; race is more submerged in “Shook” than in typical American plays on the subject. But as Riyad (Ivan Oyik), who is Black, gradually moves to the play’s center, we nevertheless sense the disastrous way racism intersects with ordinary neglect in an atmosphere of toxic masculinity. That he is “clever” at math, and that Grace, also Black, might bring out his potential, is a hoary first-play device. And yet the scene in which she encourages him to apply to college is perhaps the saddest, if not the subtlest, in the play.“This moment in your life, this place here, doesn’t have to define you,” she says, seemingly referring to the unsparing fluorescents and abused walls of the prison classroom. (The grim lighting is by Max Brill and the grimmer set by Jasmine Swan.) But Riyad needs just one glance at the college catalog to know that the happy students and teachers pictured there “ain’t gonna want me.”It would be an even sadder scene, and play, if Oyik, Finan and Davies — all riveting — were not so obviously a decade older than the characters they portray. Perhaps the gap was not as evident during the original Papatango run in 2019. But just as “Shook” was about to transfer to the West End last spring, coronavirus precautions shut down the industry. What the director, George Turvey, has created on film (with James Bobin) is a record of an apparently excellent staging that the camera’s fixed eye cannot flatten no matter how hard it tries.Credit, in part, the vividness of the dialogue, which is naturalistically profane and comically aggressive but also thematically valid. These boys are mouthing off as fast as they can so they will not open themselves to accusations of softness or be caught short by an incriminating insight. Even if they do say something painfully true, they usually toss it off as a joke. When Jonjo asks whether the other inmates’ children ever come for a visit, Cain answers flippantly: “Not me, la. He’ll be in here himself soon enough, like.”Ultimately, “Shook” is less interested in how young men get into the prison pipeline than in how they get stuck there forever. One answer is embedded in the plot: catastrophic fathering. Riyad observes, and the story bears out, that people like Cain, no matter how gentled by proximity to dolls and diapers, are “programmed” to repeat the injuries they’ve suffered at their fathers’ hands. “When it gets hard,” he says, “they get shook and come back to what they know, innit.” He is clever enough to include himself in that fate.American plays about the prison pipeline typically indict its machinery, which, at least theoretically, can be retooled. The much more despairing drama that “Shook” enacts is the one in which the machine isn’t broken it all; it’s a very efficient system of breaking people, and keeping them broken, in order to feed itself. All the Graces in the world can’t undo that damage.ShookThrough Feb. 28; papatango.co.uk.AdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘The Poltergeist’ Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Madman

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main storyCritic’s Pick‘The Poltergeist’ Review: Portrait of the Artist as a Young MadmanA breakneck performance by Joseph Potter as an embittered former prodigy carries this unnerving monologue from Philip Ridley.Joseph Potter as a once-promising artist in Philip Ridley’s darkly comic play “The Poltergeist.”Credit…Matt MartinJan. 29, 2021The mind of a neurotic artist is a terrifying place to be. Trust me, I know: I’ve had a 30-year residency in one, and it’s no picnic.Still, the artist at the center of “The Poltergeist,” a new solo play by Philip Ridley presented by Tramp and streaming courtesy of London’s Southwark Playhouse, functions on a whole different level. As a teen, Sasha (Joseph Potter) was dubbed a prodigy thanks to his large-scale murals. He was going to be a star, but now, years later, he’s a nobody, self-consciously making smudged watercolors and sketches that he immediately declares worthless.It’s hard to focus on your next masterpiece when you have something permanently stuck in your craw. Sasha prattles through an interior monologue of such unrelenting vitriol about himself, his art and the world around him that he seems hollowed out, a black hole masquerading as a person.When he and his supportive boyfriend, an actor named Chet, go to a niece’s birthday party, Sasha barely manages the smiles and chat and cake. He pops too many painkillers and hardly veils his resentment for his brother and sister-in-law. He trashes the house when no one is looking. He grows more riled up as casual conversations veer closer to the topic of his artistry and the reason he never lived up to his promise. (No spoilers here, but it involves a familial act of betrayal.)Ridley, a screenwriter and playwright (“The Pitchfork Disney,” “Mercury Fur”), regularly trades in a brand of tragicomedy that’s like a blackout on a winter night: acutely dark.“The Poltergeist” is airtight, if not claustrophobic. It almost entirely happens at that one birthday party, with Sasha re-enacting every conversation he has with other guests, rapidly interjecting his own thoughts. The playwright meticulously unwraps his psychology, interrupting the churlish commentary with lush and tender descriptions of color, like the “magenta, crimson lake, viridian, burnt sienna, cinnabar green” he’s putting to use in a painting.All this makes Potter’s job, alone on a bare stage for 75 minutes, tough. He is riveting to watch, full of breakneck energy and Olympian-level verbal agility, especially when he pingpongs from one character to another.This perfectly captures the manic mechanics of Sasha’s brain, but “The Poltergeist” sometimes moves so quickly that things become a garble. Part of the issue is Wiebke Green’s direction, which paces the show like an emotional roller coaster that rises and falls in predictable intervals, without surprise.It goes like this: a barrage of gripes and observations from Sasha, followed by long pauses when he lets deeper feelings finally catch up to him. Some pearls of comedy in the script get left by the wayside, though the emotional conclusion is rich and gratifying.Despite its occasional muddle, “The Poltergeist” is gripping from start to finish, one of the most visceral immersions inside a disturbed character’s mind I’ve ever seen. I’ll happily Airbnb there, especially if Ridley is my host. But I’m giving back the keys when it’s over.The PoltergeistThrough Feb. 28; southwarkplayhouse.co.ukAdvertisementContinue reading the main story More

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      ‘Overflow’ Review: The Bathroom Battleground

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      AdvertisementContinue reading the main storySupported byContinue reading the main story‘Overflow’ Review: The Bathroom BattlegroundTravis Alabanza’s monologue starring Reece Lyons examines agency and safety, here inextricably intertwined with identity.Reece Lyons in “Overflow,” at the Bush Theater in London.Credit…Sharron WallacePublished More