Tag Archives: Sean Rees

Sacha Guitry, Ma Fille et Moi
★★★½

Playground Theatre

Sacha Guitry Ma Fille et Moi

Sacha Guitry, Ma Fille et Moi

Playground Theatre

Reviewed – 29th January 2019

★★★½

 

“Main Quote Line”

 

Sacha Guitry, playwright, filmmaker and actor, was known for his charm, womanising and lyrically frank depictions of Parisian social life in the 1920s. Marianne Badrichani has reimagined the famous wit in a show which depicts the way that life can imitate art, and art life. This makes for a production that feels intelligent and crisp but has a static emotional landscape.

The show interweaves selections of Guitry’s plays with the stories of the playwright and actors bringing them to the stage. Beyond Guitry, then, Ma Fille et Moi is a story of a mother, an actress and a muse, Edith Vernes and her struggles with performance and motherhood. This story line is compelling but is left, unfortunately, overshadowed but Vernes’ affair with Guitry.

The play begins on a meta-theatrical note, with Vernes (played by Edith Vernes) threatening to kill Guitry but waiting to see a little bit of his performance before she does so. “I’ll shoot you when I get bored,” she heckles from the audience. This beginning feels promising in its simultaneous criticism and admiration of Guitry’s work. Unfortunately, Vernes the character, remains at this hightened level of sensitivity and self-involvement and Guitry, played by Sean Rees, remains the confident, eye-rolling playwright, exasperated by his lead actress and lover’s hysteria. The mild misogyny of such a well worn story of the battle of the sexes is a little tiring.

Nonetheless, Vernes and Rees’ performances are full of life. Their movements from different characters and fictions carry an admirable ease. Anais Bachet, playing Vernes’ daughter among other roles, is a talented newcomer to the stage. The multiple narrative switches are also wonderfully and simply executed by some fantastic stage and lighting choices involving an oversized frame of lightbulbs imitating a vanity mirror. Vernes’ costumes too capture the charm of Guitry’s period.

In many ways, this is a play about acting and authenticity. The melodrama of Guitry’s work is juxtaposed with the real problems encountered with making theatre. In this sense, this also not a comedy, but an attempt to inspect how an actor might engage with comedy sincerely. Unfortunately, the play’s meta-theatricality creates a loose form that loses itself and drags in places. It feels easy to forget, in some scenes, why we were here in the first place. However, Vernes’ speech to her daughter at the end is candid and clever and ties these rather loose threads together.

This is a So French Production, performed in French with English surtitles. For those for whom French is not their first language, the surtitles are easy to follow and the translations are sensitive and accurate, holding most of Guitry’s jokes intact. In that humour is often culturally and historically specific, it is possible that Guitry’s humour falls deaf on the ears of a modern, English audience. Though they are just flashes, there are moments of real intelligence as well as a tasteful and elegant aesthetic. As a show about the self-importance of great writers, this production does well to explore Guitry’s life and work.

 

Reviewed by Tatjana Damjanovic

Photography by Sonia Fitoussi 

 

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Sacha Guitry, Ma Fille et Moi

Playground Theatre until 2nd February

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
Fanatical – the Musical | ★★★ | November 2018

 

Click here to see more of our latest reviews on thespyinthestalls.com

 

Ionesco / Dinner at the Smiths – 4*

 

Ionesco / Dinner at the Smiths

Latvian House

Opening Night – 4th March 2017

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️

“an amuse-bouche of eccentric characters and a soupçon of sheer preposterousness… expect a thoroughly entertaining, albeit bizarre, evening”

 

With performances being presented more frequently in unconventional spaces (later this week we see ‘Drinks’ taking place in an empty Victorian terraced house in Peckham), it didn’t seem too unusual to be invited to Latvian House (part Latvian cultural centre, part hotel in need of a visit from Alex Polizzi), a once grand early Victorian property located in leafy Bayswater, to attend a ‘Dinner at the Smiths’.

For all intents and purposes, we are guests at the dinner party of Mr & Mrs Smith. We are led to the dining room by the somewhat gushing butler (Jorge Laguardia), our coats are taken and we are seated around a long dining table. We are given our ‘menu’ (which is actually a clever little programme of sorts), and are taken through some etiquette by the butler and the maid (Sharlit Deyzac).

We then meet our hosts, Mr Smith (Sean Rees) at one end of the table and Mrs Smith (Lucy Russell) at the distant other end. Mr Smith is hidden behind his ‘English’ newspaper (we are enlightened by the staff as to how terribly ‘English’ everything is), whilst his wife talks at him. Once Mr Smith engages his wife, their conversation soon becomes a bizarre tongue twister dialogue involving commercial travellers and their relatives. Welcome to one unconventional evening.

Carriages arrive quite early at this dinner party (i.e. the performance is fairly short), so I won’t give away too much detail about what happens as this would spoil the surprises and enjoyment. And there are plenty of surprises, one perhaps hinted at when you’re met with no food on your plate, but an eye mask …

A lot of the rather clever comic dialogue depends on truisms; the hosts and guests relaying something so blindingly obvious in a way that it seems surprising. This is very much in the style of Ionesco (around whose words and works the evening is based). Indeed it’s reported that this style of his work came from the manner in which he learnt English, in a course that featured a … ‘Mr & Mrs Smith’ …

Well acted throughout, especially the delightfully silly extended conversation  between the dinner party guests, Mr & Mrs Martin (David Mildon and Edith Vernes), where they finally realise they know each other as they are married and share the same bed.

From an absurdist playwright source, you’d expect the absurd and with ‘Dinner at the Smiths’ you certainly get it! Expect a good helping of witty French dialogue (translated in a manner as to be part of the play), an amuse-bouche of eccentric characters and a soupçon of sheer preposterousness.

Above all, expect a thoroughly entertaining, albeit bizarre, evening.

 


 

Created and Directed by Marianne Badrichani

 

Ionesco/Dinner at the Smiths’

is at Latvian House on Fridays and Saturdays

until 1st April

 

 

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