Tag Archives: Nobby Clark

Brian and Roger

Brian and Roger

★★★★★

Menier Chocolate Factory

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Brian and Roger

Brian and Roger – A Highly Offensive Play

Menier Chocolate Factory

Reviewed – 1st November 2021

★★★★★

 

“scales the dizzy heights of funny”

 

“Brian & Roger”, that carries the subtitle a ‘Highly Offensive Play’, opens the Menier Chocolate Factory’s new smaller space, The Mixing Room. It is a world premiere, but its seeds were planted back in 2014 when the writers, Dan Skinner and Harry Peacock, created the characters for a podcast series. “We had no idea if anybody would listen or care” Skinner recently said. Thankfully they did, and it is to theatreland’s immense benefit that the eponymous characters have now made it to the stage.

Firstly. It is not highly offensive. It is ‘highly’ many things though; highly charged, highly outrageous, highly shocking, highly unprincipled, highly shameless and above all it scales the dizzy heights of funny. The ideas are far-fetched, but you’d travel the earth to keep up with them. The premise is bleak but don’t let that put you off. Brian and Roger are two friends (assume a very loose definition of the word ‘friend’) who met at a support group for recently divorced men. Roger was attending because he was genuinely grieving the loss of his marriage; Brian was instructed to attend by his solicitor if he wanted to dodge paying alimony to his ex-wife. Roger needs guidance and support, which Brian willingly supplies, exploiting Roger’s vulnerability to the extreme. Roger is continually coerced into making bad decisions. Played by Skinner himself, it is a brilliant and hilarious portrayal of a man sinking into the depths of humiliation and injury, with a Panglossian gullibility and belief in the deplorable Brian’s intentions. Simon Lipkin is equally sensational as the hard-nosed but similarly desperate Brian who has found the perfect stooge in Roger. Never has such an unlikeable character been so… well… likeable.

We don’t witness the odd couple’s first meeting. In fact, we never see them together at all. The entire piece is played out on their phones – leaving messages for each other. There is one exception – although we still don’t ‘see’ them together as the scene takes place in a complete blackout. I shall reveal no more except to say that it is a brilliantly darkly funny episode.

Darkness is the key. The humour couldn’t be blacker as Skinner and Lipkin chase the extremes of comedy. It gets progressively more outlandish, as do the peripheral unseen characters who nevertheless loom large over the action, whether it is the octogenarian woman whose sofa Roger lives on, the students Brian is forced to shack up with; the ex-wives, the dominatrices, and gangsters. Even a Mongolian mule named after Roger’s wife! Belief is persistently stretched to breaking point by the sheer outrageousness of the plot. At the same time our laughter lines are stretched even further.

David Babani’s direction is slick, with many neat ideas. It is clear that he has worked closely with his design team. Paul Anderson’s lighting conveys mood and location with the flamboyant touch of a mad professor, brilliantly complemented by Timothy Bird’s projected backdrops. Robert Jones’ design is centred around the drab community meeting room where the pair met. Ingeniously and quirkily though, the play is never set there. Instead, the furnishings and video projections are used to convey – among other bizarre settings – an S&M basement, a hospital ICU, train carriages, taxi cabs, a rugged Eastern European Mountain village, abattoirs, Safari parks, airports… you name it. And to say that the use of props is out of the box is a bit of an understatement. The whole combination, topped off with Gregory Clarke’s soundscape, verges on the surreal.

As preposterous as the storyline is, we are somehow still anchored in real life by the sheer natural flow of Harry Peacock and Dan Skinner’s writing. On paper, the idea of spending two hours watching two sad men talk into their phones sounds like torture. But we are rapt. Skinner and Lipkin are stunning. “Brian & Roger – A Highly Offensive Play”: the idea that one wouldn’t want to see it is more offensive.

 

Reviewed by Jonathan Evans

Photography by Nobby Clark

 


Brian and Roger – A Highly Offensive Play

Menier Chocolate Factory until 18th December

 

Show reviews you may have missed in October:
Dumbledore Is So Gay | ★★½ | Online | October 2021
Back To The Future | ★★★★ | Adelphi Theatre | October 2021
Roots | ★★★★★ | Wilton’s Music Hall | October 2021
The Witchfinder’s Sister | ★★★ | Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch | October 2021
Rice | ★★★★ | Orange Tree Theatre | October 2021
The Cherry Orchard | ★★★★ | Theatre Royal Windsor | October 2021
Love And Other Acts Of Violence | ★★★★ | Donmar Warehouse | October 2021
Yellowfin | ★★★★ | Southwark Playhouse | October 2021
Brief Encounter | ★★★ | Watermill Theatre Newbury | October 2021
One Man Poe | ★★★ | The Space | October 2021
Dorian | ★★★★ | Reading Rep Theatre | October 2021
Flushed | ★★★★ | Park Theatre | October 2021
Lights Out | ★★★★ | Pleasance Theatre | October 2021
Night Mother | ★★★★ | Hampstead Theatre | October 2021
Tender Napalm | ★★★★★ | King’s Head Theatre | October 2021
Vinegar Tom | ★★★ | The Maltings Theatre | October 2021

 

Click here to see our most recent reviews

 

Copenhagan

Copenhagen

★★★★

Cambridge Arts Theatre

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Copenhagan

Copenhagen

Cambridge Arts Theatre

Reviewed – 12th July 2021

★★★★

 

“With the excellence of the three actors’ diction and their evident belief in their doctrines, I can convince myself I even understand it all”

 

Why did the physicist Werner Heisenberg visit his former colleague Niels Bohr in Copenhagen in 1941? Heisenberg was German, Bohr Danish and half-Jewish, and Copenhagen was under Nazi occupation. It is a question we hear asked on numerous occasions during Michael Frayn’s award-winning play from 1998, in this new production directed by Emma Howlett following initial direction by Polly Findlay.

There are just three characters in the re-enactment of this puzzling wartime conundrum. The impetuous, excitable Heisenberg played by the excellent Philip Arditti, the older and more ponderous Bohr (Malcolm Sinclair), and between them Bohr’s wife Margrethe (Haydn Gwynne).

There is minimal set (designed by Alex Eales) with the stage stripped back to its black painted walls. A few parlour chairs and a sideboard suffice for Bohr’s drawing room. Hovering above everything is a large illuminated white halo; at the beginning, perhaps indicating the movement of an electron orbiting its atomic nucleus. By the end of the play, surely portraying the rim of an exploding mushroom cloud. Beneath it, there is not much in the way of movement, the three players pace up and down, placing and replacing chairs in a series of socially-distanced triangles. For one brief moment, Heisenberg breaks out into a short run.

What we do have are words, lots of them: quantum mechanics, the wave equation, the Copenhagen Interpretation, relativity, uncertainty, complementarity. Heisenberg and Bohr discuss and defend their treatises, their arguments flying back and forth like others may argue the merits of a United versus a City. Between them sits Margrethe, sometime observer, sometime inquisitor, umpire, and arbiter. It is a delightful irony that she is the one who offers up the clearest explanation of any of the physics talk, pragmatically bringing the scientific theories down to earth.

With the excellence of the three actors’ diction and their evident belief in their doctrines, I can convince myself I even understand it all. Arditti’s performance is full of energy, with driving momentum in his attempt to prove that Heisenberg’s motives should not be misunderstood. Sinclair’s twinkly eyed portrayal of Bohr shows us a lot of his charm but, through all the science, we do not see much of the man beneath. Haydn Gwynne emphasises Margrethe’s support as the scientist’s wife. Her loving glances towards Heisenberg as he replaces the son she tragically lost, turn into steely stares as she mistrusts his motives towards her husband.

Heisenberg is primarily remembered for his Uncertainty Principle. And the play exploits the notion that there is so much uncertainty about Heisenberg himself. To what extent did he deliberately slow down any progress in developing a Nazi atomic bomb, or did he just not understand enough of the science? And as we take another look at Heisenberg arriving on Bohr’s doorstep in 1941 is it to gloat over the progress of the German nuclear programme, or to suggest a scientists’ pledge not to work for either side in developing an ultimate weapon of mass destruction?

The most poignant moment of the evening comes as Heisenberg explains hearing about the dropping of the bomb on Hiroshima whilst interned at Farm Hall in Godmanchester. This fact is first enjoyed by this audience as a piece of local history, but then the penny drops that all this talk about science is not just theoretical but can lead to such apocalyptic results.

So why did Heisenberg visit Copenhagen in 1941? Heisenberg’s final words, “Uncertainty [is] at the heart of things”.

 

Reviewed by Phillip Money

Photography by Nobby Clark

 


Copenhagen

Cambridge Arts Theatre until 17th July then UK tour concludes at the Rose Theatre Kingston

 

Previously reviewed by Phillip:
The Money | ★★★ | Online | April 2021
Animal Farm | ★★★★ | Royal & Derngate | May 2021
Trestle | ★★★ | Jack Studio Theatre | June 2021
Romeo and Juliet | ★★★★ | Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre | June 2021
Pippin | ★★★★ | Charing Cross Theatre | July 2021

 

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