Emma Butler Archives - thespyinthestalls.com

★★★★

“Peter Sandys-Clarke gives an excellent performance as the ‘dear, dear man’ held in a vocal prison by his childhood trauma.”

Playwright David Seidler (1937–2024) developed a stammer at the age of three as his family travelled from the UK to the US in the early years of World War II. One of three ships in their convoy was destroyed by German U-Boats. Many kinds of speech therapy failed him until at the age of 16, and in a frustrated rage he shouted out the F-word.

Out of this traumatic experience came a playwright, and also his most memorable work, the screenplay for the film The King’s Speech, which is based on a true story. But Seidler’s wife said ‘why don’t you write it as a play?’, realising that the spatial limitations of theatre would enable it to focus on the key relationship at the heart of the piece. The 2010 film, starring Colin Firth and Geoffrey Rush, was produced to great acclaim and won four Academy Awards. In 2012 the play opened in Guildford before touring the world in nine different languages.

The delightfully intimate Watermill Theatre is The Stage’s Theatre of the Year and has a reputation for unique shows which last long in the memory. This revival brilliantly embodies that tradition.

Directed by former Almeida resident director Emma Butler with insightful lighting by Ryan Day, and striking costume and set design by Bretta Gerecke, the play sheds new light on a much-loved and deeply poignant story.

The first act moves rapidly with a lot of plot to cover and many brief scenes, with a greater and more compelling focus after the interval.

If you have seen the film, you will recall that the relationship between the future King George VI (Peter Sandys-Clarke) and his wayward speech therapist Lionel Logue (Arthur Hughes) is the nub of the story. ‘Bertie’ the monarch-to-be is inventively dressed as ‘a thing of threads and patches’ – in a half-made suit that symbolises his status as a future king and as a stutterer ‘trapped in a broken body over which he has no control’. This symbolism is echoed in the set which consists largely of a disordered arc of swirling timber.

Peter Sandys-Clarke gives an excellent performance as the ‘dear, dear man’ held in a vocal prison by his childhood trauma. We see him fail to speak coherently at Wembley Stadium and the abuse to which he is subjected by his family. Against a backdrop of great affairs of state, including the death of a king and the abdication of another, an intimate and touching story of deepening friendship is played out between a plain-speaking Aussie and a very believably austere royal. Arthur Hughes shines as the genial and irreverent therapist, his performance somehow made all the more poignant by his own slight physical disability.

Aamira Challenger gives an elegantly restrained performance as the Princess Elizabeth and Jim Kitson makes the most of some excellent lines as a bluff and bustling Winston Churchill and King George V.

Rosa Hesmondhalgh (Myrtle Logue/Wallis Simpson) is endearing as an Australian shopgirl who gets invited to sit with the royals at a coronation. Christopher Naylor made the most of his role as the scheming Archbishop, Cosmo Lang and cricket sweater wearing Stephen Rahman-Hughes gives a new take on David, the Duke of Windsor who so memorably stood down from the throne as he could not uphold it without ‘the help and support of the woman I love’.

This wonderful revival is a delight.

Renaissance

Stephens House and Gardens, Finchley

Reviewed – 18th September 2020

★★★★★

“There is so much charisma and bite on stage, it seems slightly ridiculous that we should be allowed to experience this in such an intimate setting.”

Twenty or so fold-out chairs, scattered two metres apart, surround a small fairy-light-canopied stage, nestled beneath a big old tree at the bottom of the garden. Not quite summer anymore, there’s a significant nip in the air as the sun sets behind us, and the select crowd snuggles in to their jumpers and coats (one couple taking a sneaky swig from a hidden flask- not a bad idea), readying for the show to begin.

It doesn’t get much more picturesque than that, really. And besides the fact the location was likely chosen due to Covid, it feels more like the perfect setting for a small Midsummer Night’s Dream production or Woolf’s pageant in Between The Acts, and the limited audience makes it feel all the more special. Maybe it’s not extra practical for the production, but I’m having a very nice time…

“Why is everything so bland?”, Cesare Borgia (James Corrigan) begins, lamenting the misery and boredom of his princely responsibilities. He yearns for a taste of freedom, and so decides to offer his position and title to a passing unemployed politician, Niccolò Machiavelli (Nicholas Limm) who jumps at the opportunity, while Borgia himself guises as a struggling artist because, as he rightly posits, “The truth is simple: Artists win at life.” Simultaneously, Leonardo da Vinci (Akshay Sharan), similarly sick of his lot, decides to seek something more grounded than the lofty arts and, also disguised, finds a job in the Borgia palace as a politician. Cue a series of hilarious misunderstandings, disguises piled on top of disguises, genders swapped, stations elevated and swiftly demoted.

Writer Charlie Ward packs a lot in: war, politics, religion, romance, gender identity, class disparity, and all in a form that sits somewhere between a bedroom farce and a Shakespearian comedy.

Everything is in rhyming couplets and iambic pentameter (I think?) and just as with a Shakespeare play it takes a little while to find the rhythm, so with Renaissance, the first few scenes of dialogue are largely lost while the audience recalibrates. But it does give the story a pace, and a certain flavour which, being that it’s set in the sixteenth century, feels apt.

Before lockdown, nearly the entire cast was committed to major theatrical projects elsewhere, and you can see why. There is so much charisma and bite on stage, it seems slightly ridiculous that we should be allowed to experience this in such an intimate setting. The physical comedy and timing displayed, combined with everyone’s extensive previous experience with Shakespearian language brings a very comfortable, natural delivery, as though they spent their lives speaking in rhyming couplets. Corrigan whips between silly and domineering with ease; Bethan Cullinane is a force, so quietly sure of herself, she hardly moves whilst somehow absolutely commanding the stage. And Haydn Gwynne is just fabulous. Considering the immediate affect her presence makes on stage, she feels slightly underused, though you might say that of the whole cast really.

Director Emma Butler’s design is massively pared down, a necessity for such a small stage, and a relief really – there’s already enough to focus on with the grandiloquent language, and striking performances: Costumes consist of a simple palette of whites, creams and dusky pinks, and the ‘disguises’ comprise skirts swapped for trousers, shirts rebuttoned disheveledly, and dodgy French accents. It works though, and adds to the comedy, that someone should merely put a hat on and say they’re someone different from the person they were two minutes prior in the same company.

As theatre slowly starts to pick itself up again, even those productions that do manage to cobble something together will likely be taking an artistic hit, having to re-mould themselves in line with government guidelines. On this occasion, though, the restrictions have only enhanced the audience’s experience. How often do we have the chance to enjoy such a concentration of talent in such an intimate setting, and with fresh, new writing? Take the opportunity while you can, before (hopefully) everything returns to some semblance of normality and such an event becomes near impossible.

THE KING’S SPEECH at the Watermill Theatre

★★★★

“Peter Sandys-Clarke gives an excellent performance as the ‘dear, dear man’ held in a vocal prison by his childhood trauma.”

THE KING’S SPEECH at the Watermill Theatre

Reviewed on 24th September 2024

by David Woodward

Photography by Alex Brenner

Previously reviewed at this venue:

THE KING’S SPEECH

THE KING’S SPEECH

Stephens House and Gardens, Finchley

Reviewed – 18th September 2020

★★★★★

“There is so much charisma and bite on stage, it seems slightly ridiculous that we should be allowed to experience this in such an intimate setting.”

Writer Charlie Ward packs a lot in: war, politics, religion, romance, gender identity, class disparity, and all in a form that sits somewhere between a bedroom farce and a Shakespearian comedy.

Reviewed by Miriam Sallon

Photography by Charlie Ward

Renaissance

Stephens House and Gardens until 20th September

Last ten shows reviewed by Miriam: