Tag Archives: Alice Selwyn

IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY

★★★★★

Jack Studio Theatre

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IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY at the Jack Studio Theatre

★★★★★

“brilliantly kinetic and breezy”

This year, we’re all round Doreen’s for an absolute cracker of a Christmas.

It’s the best of times and the worst of times but this fractious and penniless Islington family have no choice but to see it through, squeezed together in their council flat like overcooked sprouts at the bottom of a bin bag.

So who’s on the guest list?

There’s world-weary matriarch Doreen (Alice Selwyn), boozing away bad memories, proud of her girls but they drive her nuts.

And sisters Gemma (wryly mordant Nancy Brabin-Platt) and single mum Riley (Lois Tallulah, more on her later). They’re at each other’s throats, one Spurs, one Arsenal, which seems to sum up their forever frenemy feuding.

And then there’s teenager Jorja (a lovely, affecting turn by Ella Harding). She’s the odd one out. She has a different father to her sisters and a secret boyfriend who is perhaps pushing a little too hard for Jorja to grow up.

Together, they are all as sparky and temperamental as Christmas lights.

Hang on. Where are all the men? Well, they are close by. That’s because this rogues gallery of feckless losers is in Pentonville prison which is just over the wall. So near and yet so far.

The wall casts a long shadow. Sometimes it’s an obstacle, especially for little lost Jorja who misses her dad. And sometimes the wall is a last line of defence against an onslaught of deadbeat drug-dealing do-nothings. Prison reform is a theme here but not so much as to be intrusive. Besides, with these men, more prison seems like the answer, not less.

Who else is coming? There’s flush Trish, an old friend (boisterous Jennifer Joseph), spreading good cheer. And pregnant stranger Jamila (Nadia Lamin showing formidable comic chops). The sisters encounter her shouting madly over that wall at incarcerated hubby Christian to keep him updated. Because Jamila is very, very pregnant. And it’s Christmas so, er, hello? How’s that going to end, we wonder.

As the sisters build up to Christmas there are secrets to be shared, some of them very uncomfortable, but in director Isla Jackson-Ritchie’s brilliantly kinetic and breezy production, the traumas are brushed past quickly, being more effective for their handling.

Enough of this doom and gloom, declares sozzled Doreen, let’s have a lovely Christmas.

The Jack Studio’s compact stage is packed and lively – three rooms in one, including a working kitchen, fridge, Christmas tree – and people are always coming and going. The whole thing is thrillingly unstagey and natural, the connections between the women – perpetually frayed, never broken – are a breath of fresh air.

The script feels less written than lived in. Lois Tallulah who plays struggling Riley with a hard face and a soft heart is the writer (and also co-director). Wow, what a talent.

Despite the friction, the endless man problems, the heartache and the cheap plonk, we could have stayed at Doreen’s a lot longer – perilous though it is – if only to find out how it all works out for the sisters. They feel like family now.

With this production, you buy a ticket, but you get an invitation: spend the festive season with the girls. They’re a raucous bunch – brutal, brittle, drunk and teetering. But you’re gonna love ’em.

Joyous. Utterly joyous.


IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY at the Jack Studio Theatre

Reviewed on 14th November 2024

by Giles Broadbent

Photography by Tim Stubbs Hughes @ Grey Swan

 

 

 


 

 

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:

CAN’T WAIT TO LEAVE | ★★★½ | November 2024
MARCELLA’S MINUTE TO MIDNIGHT | ★★ | September 2024
DEPTFORD BABY | ★★★ | July 2024
MUCH ADO ABOUT NOTHING | ★★★ | August 2022
RICHARD II | ★★★★★ | February 2022
HOLST: THE MUSIC IN THE SPHERES | ★★★★★ | January 2022
PAYNE: THE STARS ARE FIRE | ★★★ | January 2022
TRESTLE | ★★★ | June 2021

IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY

IN THE SHADOW OF HER MAJESTY

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A Very Very Very Dark Matter – 4 Stars

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A Very Very Very Dark Matter

A Very Very Very Dark Matter

Bridge Theatre

Reviewed – 29th October 2018

★★★★

“the joviality imbues a sense of giddy discomfort to the atmosphere as the script and the cast expertly squeeze every ounce of black humour out”

 


With his unique brand of dark humour and storytelling, Martin McDonagh has authored countless classics, from The Pillowman to Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri. Naturally, then, there’s a lot of excitement surrounding his latest play that dismantles the glorification of nineteenth-century writers like Hans Christian Anderson and Charles Dickens. Does it deliver? Very very very much.

The play centres around the notion that all of Anderson’s work was actually written by a Congolese pigmy named Marjory, who he keeps imprisoned in a pendulous box in his attic, and that he takes all the credit for her work (occasionally making edits, such as changing The Little Black Mermaid to just The Little Mermaid). It later transpires that Dickens is doing exactly the same thing with Marjory’s sister. This is of course an allusion to the cultural appropriation and colonialisation of BAME narratives, which McDonagh attempts to heighten by linking it with a time travel plot involving a massacre carried out by King Leopold II of Belgium. However, this never really seems to add anything of substance to the main themes of the play, and leaves you wondering exactly what its purpose was.

This is one of McDonagh’s most comically focussed works, with characters frequently playing directly to the audience and firing off joke after joke. Most land spectacularly, and the joviality imbues a sense of giddy discomfort to the atmosphere as the script and the cast expertly squeeze every ounce of black humour out. Jim Broadbent as Anderson is pitch-perfect, portraying him as lovable and somewhat bumbling, despite having committed the horrific act of enslaving Marjory – he’s the quintessential product of imperialism. Johnetta Eula’Mae Ackles makes her stage debut as Marjory and does a formidable job as the driven and unstoppable genius behind Anderson’s work, and Phil Daniels and Elizabeth Berrington are excellently paired as Charles and Catherine Dickens, whose hate-fuelled chemistry makes for some of the show’s most hilarious moments.

Anna Fleischle’s gothic design exacerbates the fairytale-esque quality of the story, with Anderson’s cavernous attic being adorned with marionettes that enhance the disturbing undertones of the subject matter. Matthew Dunster’s direction, too, strikes a just-right balance of not labouring the themes while also not downplaying the intellectual drive of the script. And A Very Very Very Dark Matter has intellectual drive in droves – it asks questions on celebrity, appropriation, oppression, colonialisation, imperialism, authorship, and the nature of stories and time itself. It spends so long asking questions, however, that it forgets to lay the foundation for the audience to find answers. This is a play that will subsequently gnaw away at your mind for a long time, as you ponder the reach of its implications. A Very Very Very Dark Matter takes you on a mesmeric journey, but never quite finds it destination.

 

Reviewed by Tom Francis

Photography by Manuel Harlan

 


A Very Very Very Dark Matter

Bridge Theatre until 6th January

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
Julius Caesar | ★★★★★ | January 2018
Nightfall | ★★★ | May 2018
Allelujah! | ★★★★ | July 2018

 

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