Tag Archives: Lex Kosanke

Rice

Rice

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Orange Tree Theatre

Rice

Rice

Orange Tree Theatre

Reviewed – 13th October 2021

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“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 rolesβ€”roles of β€œversatility 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 Eganβ€”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 β€œguru”, and Gretel Patelβ€”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 politicsβ€”the Golden Fields company has just hired a management β€œguru” 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, naturallyβ€”both Yvette’s home cooked Chinese dishes, and Nisha’s concern over her happy go lucky boyfriend’s food truck and his β€œkhaki rolls.”

Two actresses, no matter how experienced or talentedβ€”as Lam and Hasan areβ€”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 rolesβ€”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 trickyβ€”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 Riceβ€”is that this might not be a piece for the theatre. Perhaps the story would show to best advantage as an Australian indie filmβ€”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 mediumβ€”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:
Bad Days And Odd Nights | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Greenwich Theatre | June 2021
Bklyn The Musical | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Online | March 2021
Breakin’ Convention 2021 | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Sadler’s Wells Theatre | July 2021
Cinderella | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Gillian Lynne Theatre | August 2021
Cruise | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Duchess Theatre | May 2021
Overflow | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Sadler’s Wells Theatre | May 2021
Operation Mincemeat | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Southwark Playhouse | August 2021
Preludes in Concert | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Online | May 2021
Rainer | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Arcola Theatre | October 2021
Reunion | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Sadler’s Wells Theatre | May 2021
In My Own Footsteps | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Book Review | June 2021
Sh!t-Faced Macbeth | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Leicester Square Theatre | July 2021
Shook | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Online | February 2021
The Hooley | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Chiswick House & Gardens | June 2021
Starting Here, Starting Now | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Waterloo East Theatre | July 2021
Witness For The Prosecution | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | London County Hall | September 2021
Roots | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | Wilton’s Music Hall | October 2021

 

Click here to see our most recent reviews

 

Gently Down the Stream
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Park Theatre

Gently Down the Stream

Gently Down the Stream

Park Theatre

Reviewed – 17th February 2019

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“deeply personal, yet universal; beautifully crafted, yet natural and full of love”

 

There are some extraordinary theatrical experiences that move you so much that you want everybody to share them. This is one of them. Gently Down the Stream is written from the heart with such genuine feeling and soul that it gets inside you, taking you on a journey full of laughter, tears and hopeful joy.

Martin Sherman wanted to write a play that looked at the changes in gay lifestyle during his lifetime, but couldn’t figure out how to go about it until, one day when shopping for groceries, he got the idea of setting the story around an intergenerational relationship. The play takes place in West London over a thirteen year period, from 2001 to 2014, starting at the beginning of the relationship between sixty two year old Beau and twenty-eight year old Rufus. Rufus’ desire to learn about Beau’s life and his experiences on the gay scene take the audience on a voyage from New Orleans, where he grew up, through New York, Paris and London, from the forties on. As the love between Beau and Rufus develops they deal with their own personal demons, against the background of memory and history, until Harry arrives in their lives and changes everything.

Sherman says β€œI would write about a generation of gay men – my generation – that was brought up to believe they weren’t allowed to love, who now had to deal with a young generation that had no doubt but that they had every right to love.” His writing is deeply personal, yet universal; beautifully crafted, yet natural and full of love.

Jonathan Hyde’s Beau is touching and very funny. Beau’s life story takes us through iconic moments in gay history and intensely personal memories, and Hyde thoroughly inhabits the role. If his accent seems, at times, to slip, it doesn’t matter. He is outstandingly real and believable.Β Rufus is played by Ben Allen with energy and charm. He breathes new life into Beau, showing him new possibilities as he learns about the past. Harry Lawtey brings humour and a delightful freshness to the role of Harry, changing the relationship between Beau and Rufus, and opening the way for other kinds of love.

Director Sean Mathias is a long term friend of the writer, and he has worked with Sherman and his cast to produce an unforgettable piece of theatre. The set, designed by Lee Newby, is a living room with a stairs leading to an upper hallway, a perfect home for Beau, giving a sense of his character through his furniture and possessions. Jamie Platt’s lighting and Lex Kosanke’s sound design meld together, adding to the atmospheric background of the play.

Gently Down the Stream is an important piece of work that tells a story that we need to know. A story of how gay men have come from a world where their lives and loves were illegal, to a world where they can marry and raise children together. There is still homophobia, there are still battles to be won, but this journey through a history that includes Stonewall and AIDS, is a triumphant one. In this play, that is universal and deeply personal, Beau, Rufus and Harry show us how love has many forms, and is at the heart of a life well lived.

 

Reviewed by Katre

Photography by Marc Brenner

 


Gently Down the Stream

Park Theatre until 16th March

 

Last ten shows reviewed at this venue:
The Other Place | β˜…β˜…β˜… | September 2018
And Before I Forget I Love You, I Love You | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | October 2018
Dangerous Giant Animals | β˜…β˜…β˜… | October 2018
Honour | β˜…β˜…β˜… | October 2018
A Pupil | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | November 2018
Dialektikon | β˜…β˜…β˜…Β½ | December 2018
Peter Pan | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | December 2018
Rosenbaum’s Rescue | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | January 2019
The Dame | β˜…β˜…β˜…β˜… | January 2019
My Dad’s Gap Year | β˜…β˜…Β½ | February 2019

 

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