Actors Touring Company Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★★

“The energy expended by Samuel and Ward is exhilarating”

The Actors Touring Company revives its production of Dave Harris’s thought-provoking play from Stratford East two years ago with newcomer Clifford Samuel stepping into the role of Tambo alongside Daniel Ward’s original Bones. It’s a strange piece, certainly, with the opening scene revelling in its Beckettian absurdity. Tambo (top hat and tails) and Bones (waist coat and bowler) are minstrels in a fake world of painted scenery and cut-out trees (Set and Costume Designers – Sadeysa Greenaway-Bailey and ULTZ).

As the pair’s antics verge closely on clowning, the chemistry between the two actors is immediately evident. But there’s an edge in the comedy which splits this audience; some laughter from the stalls suggests it’s the funniest thing ever, whilst others are hearing the darker overtones. The pair discuss how they can escape their situation; Bones wants to perform cheap tricks for our money, whilst Tambo would like us to understand the history of the black person’s experience.

Moving forward, the pair are now hip-hop stars and the second scene is an extended live performance. The two men bid to out rap each other whilst a DJ at the back mixes the beats. Is it the director himself, Matthew Xia, in his persona of Excalibah behind the mask? Stage smoke and powerful lighting (Ciarán Cunningham) provide the stadium performance atmosphere. The energy expended by Samuel and Ward is exhilarating but for the predominantly white middle-aged audience, it’s also rather bemusing. If there is something to be learnt through the poetry, then we don’t get it.

The futuristic third scene with its Orwellian overtones shakes things up again. The stage is stripped bare and, in a brave piece of writing and direction, our two heroes passively narrate the story of the history of the new world whilst two white robots mime the action. Jaron Lammens and Dru Cripps as X-Bot-1 and X-Bot-2 provide the performance of the night. There’s surely never been a better choreographed and performed scene of robotic movement than this. Disappointingly, a final piece of action important to the ultimate meaning of the play and that should be devastating in its effect misses its punch.

Dave Harris’s play won’t be to everyone’s taste, with the long central hip-hop performance particularly divisive. But there is no questioning the commitment, versatility and brilliance of the performers.

Rice

Orange Tree Theatre

Reviewed – 13th October 2021

★★★★

“Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story”

Rice is Michele Lee’s enterprising two hander about women of colour trapped in the heirarchical (and blinkered) world of male dominated business in Australia. It has just opened at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond. It’s a co-production between the Orange Tree and the Actors Touring Company, directed by Matthew Xia. Despite the best efforts of all concerned, Rice is a play with a brilliant premise that doesn’t quite meet its promise.

Lee, who is Hmong-Australian, wanted to create a play that gave two actresses of colour a chance to play multiple roles—roles of “versatility and virtuosity and range.” In creating Nisha, (played by Zainab Hasan) an ambitious young executive hoping to rise in the Golden Fields rice company of Melbourne, and pitting her against the older Yvette (Sarah Lam), a cleaner of Chinese ancestry at the same company, Lee creates a situation fraught with cross cultural tensions both within and without these women’s lives. Hasan does not only play Nisha, an Australian of West Bengali ancestry, but shifts into a variety of roles, including Sheree, Yvette’s troubled daughter, and the white (and very privileged) son of David Egan—a man who is threatening her daughter with a prison sentence. Lam takes on an equally dazzling range of roles, including Tom Budd, an executive at Nisha’s company with whom Nisha has a brief and ill-judged affair; Graeme Hartley, a management “guru”, and Gretel Patel—who brings Nisha’s dreams of advancement to a crashing fall during a disastrous business trip to India.

The story of Rice is quite simple: Nisha and Yvette meet in Nisha’s office where she has been working long hours. Nisha is unhappy with Yvette’s refusal to clean her workspace to her liking. Yvette has very definite ideas about what she should be cleaning. But this clash between powerful personalities is about to become irrelevant in company politics—the Golden Fields company has just hired a management “guru” who is slashing and burning every budget he can find. Thrown together in mutual misery in a series of after business hours encounters, the women become friends. They bond over food, naturally—both Yvette’s home cooked Chinese dishes, and Nisha’s concern over her happy go lucky boyfriend’s food truck and his “khaki rolls.”

Two actresses, no matter how experienced or talented—as Lam and Hasan are—cannot quite pull off the range of roles in Rice, although dialect coach Catherine Weate has done sterling work with all the accents. It’s hard for the audience to keep track of all the characters that cross this bright, white stage in ninety five minutes of playing time. It’s to Lee’s credit that she has created such interesting and varied roles—it would be great to see a cast playing each role with a single actor. Similarly, the change of scenes in Rice would benefit from changes of scenery. Changing the lighting (again, even in the talented hands of Bethany Gupwell, the lighting designer) doesn’t quite do it.

A play with such a varied cast and complex settings (the scenes shift from Melbourne, Australia to Delhi, India) is a lot to pull off successfully in a small theatre in the round. The intimacy of the Orange Tree stage should work well in a two hander, but in this case, the set design is unnecessarily cluttered with a desk. This makes playing in the round quite tricky—every time someone sits down at that desk, the space is transformed from four into three sides, and the audience seated on the fourth side behind the desk have to grapple with the backs (or, at best, the profiles) of the performers. This happens too often not to be an unwelcome distraction. But the overwhelming feeling that remains after the conclusion of this production of Rice—is that this might not be a piece for the theatre. Perhaps the story would show to best advantage as an Australian indie film—the kind that has made Australian film making famous.

In Rice, Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story. But it needs the right environment to show to best advantage. Put together a bigger cast in the right medium—and this could be a classic.

TAMBO & BONES

Royal & Derngate Theatre

★★★

“The energy expended by Samuel and Ward is exhilarating”

TAMBO & BONES

Royal & Derngate Theatre then UK Tour continues

Reviewed on 11th March 2025

by Phillip Money

Photography by Jane Hobson

Previously reviewed at this venue:

TAMBO & BONES

TAMBO & BONES

TAMBO & BONES

Orange Tree Theatre

Reviewed – 13th October 2021

★★★★

“Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story”

In Rice, Michele Lee has created great characters and a compelling story. But it needs the right environment to show to best advantage. Put together a bigger cast in the right medium—and this could be a classic.

Reviewed by Dominica Plummer

Photography by Helen Murray

Rice

Orange Tree Theatre until 13th November

Five star reviews this year: