THEGAYUK

Tag: One Star Plays Review

The latest One Star Plays Review from THEGAYUK.

  • Bitter Wheat Review: Downward spiral that becomes shockingly dumb

    Bitter Wheat Review: Downward spiral that becomes shockingly dumb

    ★ | Bitter Wheat

    (C) PR SUPPLIED

    John Malkovich and David Mamet attempt to tell a story about a Hollywood mogul and his downfall but it falls completely flat in the new West End Show Bitter Wheat.

    Malkovich, star of screen and stage (70 films in total including Empire of the Sun and Burn After Reading), and playwright David Mamet (Glengarry Glen Ross, Speed the Plow) are where the blames lie in a show that tries to deal with an issue that is very timely but in this stage production is poorly executed. Malkovich is super-rich movie mogul Barney Fein who thinks and makes decisions with his nether regions. All likeliness to Harvey Weinstein is purely coincidental (!!).

    In this satire that is far from funny, Fein’s life is managed by his loyal assistant (Doon Mackichan).

    He even relies on her to get a gift for his mother’s birthday (his mother owns the company) – strangely the same scarf she got her the year before. And then there is another assistant (Alexander Arnold) who has no other function then just to walk in from time to time (including at the end where he announces that there is a man with a gun in the lobby – the same man who kills Feins’ mother in the second half – not shown) – all very silly and unbelievable. But before we get to this we are witness to an attempt by Fein to get young British-Korean actress and Cambridge grad Yung Kim Li (Ioanna Kimbook), who’s flown in to meet him, into a sexual liaison (all she wants is to eat after a long flight).

    Fein first asks her for a massage, and then finally asks her if she would watch him take a shower.

    It’s all very creepy and weird. And the show, at only 110 minutes long, (it also has an interval,) continues on a downward spiral that becomes shockingly dumb and just as quick as Weinteins’ downfall. Malkovich is just not convincing enough and delivers his lines like he’s reading them, while Mamet, who wrote and directed, knows better than to stage a show this bad.

    Avoid at all costs.

    Bitter Wheat plays at the Garrick Theatre until 14th September, book tickets here

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Shopping and F*cking

    ★ | Shopping and F***ing

    What’s not to like about shopping and f***ing? They’re two fine occupations. The answer is a that there’s a hell of a lot not to like in this messy and deeply flawed adaptation of Mark Ravenhill’s 1996 play. This is a world where sex and consumerism are distinctly unfunny, painfully dull and are a chore to watch.

    The play concerns Mark, a heroin addict who’s just failed in rehab, his lover Robbie and their flatmate Lulu. Emotionally deadened and reduced to seeing everything through a lens of consumerism, they’ve lost the ability to connect emotionally. Cue the arrival of Gary, a teenage rent boy who’s the victim of sexual abuse and now wants to be owned and a messy situation with a drug dealer. Events only serve to deepen their jaded worldview.

    Thematically the play has become more, rather than less relevant in the 20 years since it was first staged at The Royal Court. The world feels more mechanical and glassy eyed with the rise in the usage of the Internet. The play should work as well as it did when it was first written. The problem here is that director Sean Holmes’ attempts at a clever staging have swamped the play to such a degree that it’s almost unwatchable and the script feels buried beneath a high sheen.

    The Lyric has been transformed into a TV studio with a change in seating, green screens and cameras. It’s like a 90’s late night crap TV show with bouncy fake enthusiasm crossed with a surreal shopping channel. Runners appear, there are interludes where the cast try to sell tat to the audience and breaks for shameless nostalgia fests with 90’s pop music, one where Robbie gets off his face on E. It feels sloppy and cheap and not in any intentional way. Back projections of porn, scenes of rimming with associated anal bleeding, characters vomiting on stage, karaoke, audience participation, nudity, on-stage sex, drug-use, splatters of body fluid: I’d list more of the multitude of things that this production has thrown clumsily on stage but I’m starting to get flashbacks of boredom.

    It feels sloppy and cheap and not in any intentional way. Back projections of porn, scenes of rimming with associated anal bleeding, characters vomiting on stage, karaoke, audience participation, nudity, on-stage sex, drug-use, splatters of body fluid: I’d list more of the multitude of things that this production has thrown clumsily on stage but I’m starting to get flashbacks of boredom.

    This could have worked and could have been an arch and witty adaptation that slammed home the message of the play and emphasised the caustic wit of the piece. Instead, it just feels juvenile and tiresome with nothing to compel you to watch. It’s about as dull as spending an hour and a half listening to Gary Barlow’s monotone voice (if you hadn’t noticed, the characters are named after Take That).

    Really disappointing work from The Lyric.

    Shopping and F*cking plays at The Lyric until the 5th November

    Follow Chris Bridges on Twitter

  • THEATRE REVIEW | Savage, Above The Arts Theatre, London

    ★ | Savage

    PR Supplied

    Denmark is a country that has a long history of tolerance to gay men and same sex relationships were legal from 1933. With the German occupation of Denmark in World War Two, Copenhagen saw many of its previously openly gay men having to hide and flee. Dutch doctor Carl Peter Vaernet believed that he’d found a cure for this ‘disease’ of male homosexuality.

    The Nazis’ belief that being gay was an ‘abnormal existence’ that should be eradicated were sympathetic to his own and he was allowed to experiment on men in Buchenwald concentration camp. His methods were brutal with enforced injections of hormones into men’s testicles.

    There’s been a worrying emergence of far right wing groups in recent times and with politicians with links to religious ‘gay cures’ or terrible voting records on LGBT rights emerging from their creepy backwaters in quests for power, it’s a good time to be reminded of the lessons from history. Indeed, British history isn’t squeaky clean and in the 1990s the prime minister apologised for the enforced chemical castration of 49,000 men during the mid twentieth century.

    Unfortunately, well intentioned though Claudio Macor is in examining this subject matter, the play fails to engage or shed any new light on history. He focuses on a gay couple, one of who is arrested and experimented upon. Alongside this he offers a contrast to their situation by showing the relationship between a secretly gay, Champagne swilling Nazi officer and a cabaret artiste who he is keeping prisoner. The script feels messy and poorly written with lines that often feel melodramatic and trite. The Nazi general struts about, boasting of torture like something from a cartoon, people stare wistfully into the distance and utter philosophical lines about life and love with misty eyes. This should be a painful play to watch because of its theme but instead is excruciating for other reasons.

    The actors are too broad in their gestures for such a small and difficult space and the production is stagey with little hint of reality or genuine emotion. Only Nick Kyle as half of the gay couple manages to make much of the unwieldy script. On a positive note there are some excellent costumes from Jamie Attle and the set by David Shields is clever in making use of a limited area.

    Sadly this is definitely one to give a miss. You’ll learn more about the subject matter from a quick read of Peter Tatchell’s 2015 Guardian article and save yourself a couple of unentertaining hours.

     

    Savage plays at The Arts Theatre Upstairs until 23rd July 2016