Tag Archives: The Rose Kingston

Uncategorised

“The Glass Menagerie” at the Rose Theatre Kingston

Director Atri Banerjee’s excellent 2022 revival of the Tennessee Williams’ classic benefits from a strong focus on the text and a sensual creative vision. Both are aided by Rosanna Vize’s brilliantly sparse design: the set is a neon sign of one word – Paradise. The hopes and wishes of the characters are contrasted with the bare space before us.

There are a few small props. And the pole the sign is on rotates. But the stage is used to tremendous effect by movement director Anthony Missen. The cast hovers or runs around a circular platform – stepping on to it becomes a statement – and frequently walks backwards. Every moment is considered, every move worth watching.

Light and sound become especially important, showing brilliant work by designers Lee Curran and Giles Thomas. The latter’s music for the show is fantastic, full of romance and melancholy, while the use of microphones (when characters argue, whisper or make telephone calls) is smart. And what you hear is surprising, too (let’s just from say from now on a particular Whitney Houston song will make me think of this show). Curran’s lighting includes golden glows and candlelight, suggesting love or nostalgia, or harsh shadows and a shocking flash for stark realisations.

All this before a collection of impressive performances – a further commendation for Banerjee – is addressed. The production is spacious – literally – but also in terms of the room given to develop characters. Consequently, the dreamlike quality Williams tells us about builds.

Kasper Hilton-Hille in The Glass Menagerie
Kasper Hilton-Hille

Kasper Hilton-Hille takes the role of Tom. He’s perfect casting as an angry “selfish dreamer” with just the right balance of quirk, cruelty and regret (by the end, he has tears in his eyes). Although Tom leads the show as narrator with easy command, Banerjee makes sure this is a particularly even production, with time for every character.

There are strong, intelligent performances from Geraldine Somerville and Natalie Kimmerling as mother and daughter, Amanda and hypersensitive Laura. At first, Amanda may seem a cold scold, but she shows a genuine affection for her children that is moving and steers us away from Williams’ exaggerations. Laura might seem not “peculiar” enough… at least until she wears a neon dress for gentleman caller Jim’s arrival. And it is with this scene that Kimmerling comes into her own.

The conversation between Laura and Jim has some of their dialogue repeated and includes a dance that Laura imagines. It illustrates how special Laura is. Her vivid imagination becomes a thing to cherish, her dance a parallel with her brother Tom’s poetic ambitions. The extended scene also means a larger role for Zacchaeus Kayode, who makes Jim vulnerable as well as charming, an admirable figure. While the production is superb throughout, I suspect this scene was key for Banerjee. It really is brilliant and makes for a particularly moving menagerie.

Until 4 May 2024 then on tour

www.rosetheatre.org

Photos by Marc Brenner

Uncategorized

“Don Carlos” at the Rose Theatre Kingston

Friedrich Schiller’s late-18th-century work is a play that has it all, with tons of plot – intrigue at the court of Philip II of Spain (so great for history buffs) – and a romance, too. The Infante Carlos’s love for his former fiancée, now step-mother, leads to scenes with papa Phil that would delight any Freudian. Big politics and Greek-style family drama… it really is two for the price of one.

Samuel Valentine takes the title role, cutting a dashing figure, but also showing the pressurised heir as increasingly fragile. The reigning monarch Darrell D’Silva has a great time striding the edges of a moral and political “abyss”. He does ham it up, but he plays the most powerful man in the world at that time and, if you have a claxon to summon people, it must be hard not to use it. Sympathy for a tyrant isn’t easy, but D’Silva has the skill to make us consider Philip’s deep loneliness. Completing the love triangle is Kelly Gough as Elizabeth of Valois. A figure of “angelic condescension” but also an ambition-fuelled queen, Gough plays with both extremes expertly.

Kelly Gough

On top of roles a good deal wordier than usually encountered, the performers aren’t aided by Gadi Roll’s strict direction. Reflecting the formality of the Spanish court by so often restricting movement is an intelligent instruction that makes you admire the actors even more. Added to that, the speed of delivery here is astonishing, with never a tongue tied. It makes you breathless to hear this play. The impression left at the interval is of clarity but sterility, a dynamic that comes close to totally flipping soon afterwards. The staging is stark, with Rosanna Vize’s design all about Jonathan Samuels’ lighting. Props are minimal and lights moved around – ironically the play is often too atmospherically dark. But Roll ensures this is a gripping story. And there’s still more – this is a play of ideas: leadership, freedom and friendship, all with a Romantic air. 

Embodying many abstract concepts is Tom Burke as the Marquis of Posa, a role that makes the play really special. A plotter in it for the long run, Posa describes himself as “a citizen of times to come”. The role at once parades Schiller’s hindsight and futureproofs the play. Weighty themes of revolution are made urgent and philosophical. The ideas are fascinating, the character too – with a mix of unbelievable devotion and prescience that Burke manages to make credible and human. He also sounds, well, fantastic.

Blood and thoughts are “wild” in Don Carlos– streaming from a conflict with duty and from a time when youth and ideas are about to change the world. The production might struggle with the passion, too tamed at times and then unleashed too quickly, but the complexity of both the drama and the argument are given their due.

Until 17 November 2018

www.rosetheatrekingston.org

Photos by The Other Richard

Uncategorized

“The Second Mrs Tanqueray” at the Rose Theatre Kingston

Leave a comment

Stephen Unwin’s production of Arthur Wing Pinero’s 1893 play, at the Rose Theatre in Kingston, is a quality affair. A version of the ‘fallen woman’ tale so beloved of Victorians, this tragic story of a marriage that attempts to defy conventions is satisfyingly constructed and superbly performed. Aubrey Tanqueray’s decision to wed a woman with a past – motivated mainly by ideals and partly by pomposity – is doomed from the start (beware any plan that means moving from St James to Surrey), and the object of his devotion, Paula, doesn’t help. Understandably, she really isn’t keen on the move.

James Wilby is perfect as a defiant, blustering Aubrey. Laura Michelle Kelly takes on the title role with skill and style. Director Unwin has described her part as an English Hedda Gabler but it’s hard to see her character as that complex. Victorian melodrama can be a tricky thing. There’s the appeal of a period piece, of course, but any moral problems raised will never engage us as they would have Pinero’s contemporaries. The danger is that the drama becomes a comedy and that problem is not entirely avoided by Unwin’s direction.

That said, the humour that comes from the supporting cast is first class. Joseph Alessi deals with Pinero’s sophisticated dialogue superbly as Aubrey’s larger-than-life bachelor friend Cayley Drummle. And there is a fine performance from Sally Tatum as a deliciously rapacious former actress with slippery RP who has married into the upper classes. All great fun, but it detracts from the unsettling drama within the piece. The Second Mrs Tanqueray sets up a moral maze that seems remote, at best a curiosity. Thankfully the strength of Wilby and Kelly’s performances stops it all from striking you as just silly. Most of the time.

Until 27 October 2012

www.rosetheatrekingston.org

Photo by Simon Annand

Written 8 October 2012 for The London Magazine

Uncategorized

“A Midsummer Night” at the Rose Theatre Kingston

Leave a comment

Peter Hall and Judi Dench first worked together on A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1962. In 1969 they filmed another, different production. Now they are working together again at Kingston’s Rose Theatre. But is reunion the right word to describe this much anticipated theatrical event? It is more pleasing to think of these great artists as demonstrating one of the joys of theatre – its constant reinvention and development, the work they have accomplished over the years bringing us closer and deeper to a text they have engaged with so many times before.

Having played the same character for nearly 50 years, some kind of conceit might be thought necessary for Dench to revive the role of Titiana, especially given that in the past she has portrayed the role in a startlingly sensual manner. So, in a crowd-pleasing masterstroke, this Queen of the Fairies becomes Old Queen Bess herself. As she makes her entrance before a word of the play is spoken, we are reminded that the play was first performed before Elizabeth I. Dressed in sumptuous costumes by Elizabeth Bury, Dench looks just like everyone’s mental image from all those wonderful portraits – or at least her Oscar-winning film depiction. Costumed as the virgin Queen throughout, her Oberon, Charles Edwards, has matinee idol looks and reminds us of one of the younger courtiers Elizabeth flirted with, sometimes dangerously, in her later years.

Oberon and Titania’s relationship brings out some of the melancholy present in A Midsummer Night’s Dream – it is very much a play about the passing of time. For humour, the production is blessed with a wonderful performance from Oliver Chris. While it is difficult not to get some laughs from one of Shakespeare’s greatest comic roles, his Bottom (see how easy it can be) is really toned. He shows restraint in not prolonging the jokes, works very well with his Thisbe, and has a physicality that means he can even get the laughs when his impressive ass’s head is hiding his face.

Dench and Chris are not alone in making this production hugely entertaining. The pairs of lovers, Helena, Hermia, Lysander and Demetrius are all played well by Rachel Stirling, Annabel Scholey, Tam Williams and Ben Mansfield. An extremely good-looking bunch, each manages to differentiate their role clearly and speak wonderfully. It is difficult not to view these actors as somewhat in competition – maybe that gives the edge to the boys’ fantastic bravado in a great excuse for a fight scene. All four work hard, although Stirling takes the prize. Her distress at their behaviour seems delightfully genuine and the anger towards her one-time friend deliciously bitchy.

Peter Hall places the production entirely in its Elizabethan context. Bottom is an Elizabethan workman, in awe of his Queen but confident in his own opinions, the Lovers remind us of those Hilliard miniatures, caught in a summer of England’s Golden Age. This consistency is delightful and only let down by some small instances.  Playing Theseus as an English country duke, Julian Wadham possesses so little authority he seems simply dull and his Queen somewhat bored.  The local mechanicals are predictably cast (this group seems condemned to come from Birmingham in whatever production is staged).

These are small points given the quality of production that is presented here. Whether or not they are inspired by their leading lady, this cast excels at speaking Shakespeare in a clear and fresh manner. The direction has a warranted confidence that means you can just sit back and enjoy. The Rose has an undoubted and well deserved success on its hands that, with any luck, will turn around the fortunes of this wonderful new theatre.

Until 20 March 2010

www.rosetheatrekingston.org

Photo by Nobby Clark

Written 19 February 2010 for The London Magazine