Tag Archives: The Tower Theatre

The Importance of Being Earnest

★★★

The Tower Theatre

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Tower Theatre

Reviewed – 6th January 2020

★★★

 

“occasionally bewilders and sometimes misses both mark and humour, but is never less than fascinating and intensely real”

 

A quintessentially English play is being given a fascinating and refreshingly cosmopolitan spin at the Tower Theatre with Pan Productions’ new take on the Oscar Wilde classic The Importance of Being Earnest – played by immigrants.

The play is a comedy in which the leading characters create false identities in order to escape familial and social responsibilities. So it doesn’t take a huge leap of imagination to comprehend the thinking behind the enterprising company bringing people from different cultures and languages together to explore what it means to be from somewhere else and answer the question of “who am I?” rather than “where am I from?”

It is a decidedly ambitious project for a group of actors and creatives who spoke their first words in different languages but have made the UK their home.

As the audience enters they are greeted by the characters frozen on stage, occasionally twitching as though waiting to be brought back to life. It is the “Maid” (Nea Cornér) who awakens them and indeed she is at the core of what the production is aiming to do. Cornér moves silently around the foyer in character before the show starts, observing and assessing the audience. In the play she is the two butlers, Lane and Merriman, who Wilde uses to expose the shortcomings of the ridiculous upper class; here, although given few lines, she is the most confident when performing in English (she opens the play by faultlessly quoting Hamlet’s “to be or not to be” soliloquy) and it is she who corrects the actors when they slip into their own language or mispronounce words. Oddly, and often distractingly, she also capers around in the background during other scenes, which is increasingly mystifying.

The concept of “foreigners” performing stereotypical English roles is something Swiss-Turkish director Aylin Bozok enjoys playing with. The slight problem here is that each of the actors is clearly eminently capable of understanding Wilde’s words and characters and indeed they all do it rather well, which means that some of the rationale of the whole production is lost, as we don’t ever truly believe they are out of their comfort zone.

There are some exceptionally strong performances from the multicultural cast. Rarely has the character of Lady Bracknell been so rounded as Ece Özdemiroğlu skilfully suggests a snooty aristocrat who has risen through the classes, desperate to ensure her relatives achieve a social standing that she was not born to.

The leading romantic quartet of the piece is a delight, their awkwardness in matters of the heart reflecting their supposed discomfort with the play as actors. Louis Pottier Arniaud and Duncan Rowe play Jack and Algie as though to the comedy of manners born, while Pinar Öğün and Glykeria Dimou come closest to making us believe their uncomfortable vulnerability as a Turkish and Greek born duo respectively playing Gwendolen and Cecily.

Serpil Delice (as a strait-laced Miss Prism) and Irem Çavuşoğlu (Rev. Chasuble) complete the hard-working cast and add to the idea of identities being created and adapgted through private and public personas.

Bozok has also designed this production, a simple set on a large performing area consisting of a sofa, a bench and carpets, suggesting that this represents the expectations of a comedy about the elite by those unfamiliar with it. The black and white costumes also suggest a confinement of the actors’ creativity.

Sound (Neil McKeown) and lighting (Morgan Richards) are notably well-designed, sometimes enhancing a mood, occasionally standing in startling contrast to it.

Oscar Wilde once said, “I love acting. It is so much more real than life.” This production of The Importance of Being Earnest rediscovers, reinvents and reconstructs the text and story in a way that occasionally bewilders and sometimes misses both mark and humour, but is never less than fascinating and intensely real.

 

Reviewed by David Guest

Photography by Pozi Pyraz Saroglu

 

The Tower Theatre

The Importance of Being Earnest

The Tower Theatre until 18th January

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
To Kill a Mockingbird | ★★★½ | October 2018
Table | ★★★★ | November 2018
The Seagull | ★★★ | November 2018
Talk Radio | ★★★½ | March 2019
Happy Days | ★★★★★ | April 2019
Little Light | ★★★ | June 2019
The Beauty Queen Of Leenane | ★★★★ | November 2019

 

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The Beauty Queen Of Leenane

★★★★

The Tower Theatre

Beauty Queen Of Leenane

The Beauty Queen Of Leenane

The Tower Theatre

Reviewed – 7th November 2019

★★★★

 

“Waggott’s ability to balance frailty and seeming harmlessness with taloned cruelty is quite spectacular”

 

Martin McDonagh has made quite a name for himself in the past few years as a connoisseur of pitch-black humour and crooked characters. Whilst he’s become a household name for major screenplays such as In Bruges and Oscar-winning Three Billboards Outside Ebbing, Missouri, his ability to make an entire audience laugh at the most heinous crimes, and then to gasp at their own inhumanity, is showcased most spectacularly in the theatre.

Having climbed to such great heights as casting Jim Broadbent in the starring role of his most recent West End production, A Very Very Very Dark Matter, it’s quite a treat to go back to McDonagh’s first play and see where he began, and indeed where his twisted sense of humour and humanity first came to fruition.

At forty years old, Maureen (Julia Flatley) still lives with her seemingly ailing mother, Mag (Amanda Waggott), in Leenane, a small Irish village. Embittered by the cards she’s been dealt, Maureen spends her days snapping at her mother and telling her of her fantasies of finding her corpse on the kitchen table. Mag seems little concerned by her daughter’s misery and isolation, and appears to want her to stay forever, regardless.

But at a party at the neighbours’, Maureen reconnects with an old crush, the neighbours’ son Pato (Nick Cannon), and she dares to wonder that there might be a way out of her miserable and lonely existence after all. That is if her mother doesn’t have anything to say on the matter.

The set (Philip Ley) is detailed but traditional, allowing the psychological gymnastics of the script, rather than an overly complex design, to do the talking. The entire story takes place in Maureen and Mag’s kitchen-living room, the room in which they spend the majority of their days, and you can feel the sense of crushing claustrophobia by which Maureen is tormented, and which Mag depends upon, like a crusty old corset.

Waggott’s ability to balance frailty and seeming harmlessness with taloned cruelty is quite spectacular, and Flatley is an equally armed adversary. There’s a natural desire to find the villain in this story, but both are so twisted and yet so tormented, it’s impossible to pick a side.

In stark contrast, Cannon’s open-faced, sweet nature seems completely foreign in this household. Bringing a little levity to the plot, he’s a pleasant reminder that this room isn’t the whole world, and that not everyone is full of rancor and vitriol.

Simon Brooke, playing Pato’s petulant younger brother, is plenty energetic, but he could do with toning it down a tiny bit, just so that when he’s really losing his patience, or being especially sulky, we can tell.

For the first half, I don’t know that I saw much of what I have come to recognise as McDonagh hallmarks, but as the story unravels, so too does the web of miseries and mishaps, and, most disquietingly, somehow we’re laughing at it all. The Beauty Queen of Leenane, as directed by Colette Dockery, is perhaps more subtle than his most recent works, but it is just as disturbingly sadistic, and perniciously potent.

 

Reviewed by Miriam Sallon

Photography by Robert Piwko

 


The Beauty Queen Of Leenane

The Tower Theatre until 16th November

 

Previously reviewed at this venue:
To Kill a Mockingbird | ★★★½ | October 2018
Table | ★★★★ | November 2018
The Seagull | ★★★ | November 2018
Talk Radio | ★★★½ | March 2019
Happy Days | ★★★★★ | April 2019
Little Light | ★★★ | June 2019

 

Click here to see our most recent reviews