Three stars

Reading Sarah Kane’s 4:48 Psychosis is like dragging nails down a blackboard filled with the ranting of a depressive: you’re left with bits of text and the echoes of a despairing shriek. 4:48 Psychosis has no characters, no stage directions, only the voices of madness – sometimes lamenting, sometimes furious, and sometimes blackly humorous.
Monaghan’s production is similarly fragmented in its diverse presentation, but unfortunately tends towards sensationalism. The audience are treated to screaming, cackling, crying, frotteurism, actors writhing on the floor and all manner of clichés about the mentally ill.
It’s pretty ironic if you contrast it with the promo quote: ‘At 4.48, when sanity visits…I am in my right mind.’ The production is clearly non-realistic, but as an expressionistic approach it fails to capture the fact that the experience of mental illness includes the belief in one’s sanity; it portrays society’s perception of a mad individual’s mind rather than the individual’s actual experience.
See, you don’t usually get screaming and writhing at 4.48 a.m. At 4.48, the kebab vans have gone, it’s dark and you’re left alone with a broken heater, a half-done essay and the piercing apprehension of absolute futility. This sense of the dark night of the soul, and the play’s lyricism, is lost amid the sensationalism.
Of course there are arguments for a sensational approach, but then the objection becomes that Monaghan didn’t go far enough. The tropes of torment trotted out barely approached the kind of cannibalistic violence, say, of the theatre of cruelty.
Still, there were plenty of good elements, suggesting that the problem was mainly the overambitious choice of play. Although Monaghan cut out some dark humour in favour of strained Christ symbolism, what’s left is played in an interestingly offbeat way. The inclusion of accomplished musical and vocal accompaniment is genius, and should have been explored more. And beneath their histrionics, the four actors are obviously talented with good vocals and stage presence. Amelia Peterson in particular strangely emanates a sort of gaunt mystery which I felt related more to the text.
All of which makes it a shame to give three stars, because had Monaghan and his crew turned their attention to something more conventional, it would have been very, very good. As it is, it’s watchable for a few innovations and the fact that, after all, it’s still a Kane.

Four stars

Sit back, relax and let David Eldridge’s angst-ridden script explode with vitality, richness and unnerving realism as it hits the BT stage in 5th week. Relax is certainly what will happen as Oxford drama boasts of its effortless acting capabilities, as this precocious cast bring Eldridge to life with complete conviction and thorough investment. Director Charlotte Gibney realises this stark play with a visual genius, leading her cast with an astute sense for the naturalistic which will leave the audience wonderfully enthralled from beginning to end.
Written in 1996, when Eldridge was still a student at Exeter University, Serving It Up follows the life of Sonny (Matt Orton) as he trudges through life on a council estate in Hackney, exploring his ups and downs, his loves and his hates with a raw intensity and a biting anger. Aside from dabbling in the delirium of drugs, Sonny exhibits a problem with violence, struggling to quell his more aggressive outbursts, whether directed at his mother, Val (Jennie Hyde), his love interest, Wendy (Antonia Tam) or his best friend, Nick (Max Woolfson).
Gibney sets the stage up to witness visually the internal battle Sonny struggles to subdue, with the stage exhibiting the conflict between internal and external by a central division, thereby emphasising this concept concretely and dynamically.
Quite simply, the cast is good; a refreshing delight to watch (not to mention to review). Orton commands the stage with his almost uncomfortably-good portrayal of Sonny and all his schizophrenic tendencies. Switching between extreme emotions is a difficult thing for an actor to pull off well, and Orton does so with splendid results. A perfect complement to this is Jennie Hyde’s seamless representation of Val, Sonny’s flighty mother who exhibits a humorous obsession with cake and the comfort this offers her in between the instabilities of her love life. Hyde manages to convince an audience that she is, in fact, a middle-aged woman with a bizarre Victoria-sponge- obsession, arousing a great deal of sympathy for her character in the midst of the play’s violence.
Another highlight is Antonia Tam’s realisation of Wendy, the coy young girl with an acrid tongue who Sonny takes a shining to. The chemistry between Orton and Tam lights up the stage, where they are able to match each other’s hostile remarks tit-for-tat. Woolfson delivers the role of Nick with satisfying results, although his performance is less memorable or imposing than that of his co-actors.
Designed for the true theatre-lover, Serving It Up does not promise to be “easy” theatre; nothing is spared, neither in the language nor in the action, and it reminds us that theatre is a forum in which we can explore the very boundaries of human acceptability. Great acting, solid directing and clever staging, this production certainly does serve it up, bringing to the stage a play any well-versed and erudite audience would be impressed to watch.

It’s a hard life being a director. Yes, there’s the shining glory and the sense of intellectual accomplishment; the applause and the adulatory praise; the proud face of your adoring mother. However, on the other hand, there’s rehearsals. The hell of trying to synchronize the movements of ten filthy actors, so self-obsessed they think they’re doing you a favour just by turning up, is only just offset by the looming thought of the crippling embarrassment when, on the night, it all goes hideously, hideously wrong. In all honesty, however, the majority of rehearsals are probably a waste of time. Let’s face it, the cast are not going to know their lines for at least the first two-thirds of them. And true thespianism cannot be achieved with a script in one hand, a coke in the other and the incessant, jarring chant of “Sorry, where am I supposed to be?” And after all that, the actors get more attention than you anyway.
The job is not without its perks, however; there’s a certain creepy allure to all that power. Not only do you have the actors’ lithe, agile bodies at your directorial disposal, you also – assuming you’ve got any degree of talent – have the audience’s hearts and minds in the palm of your hand. Equally, you have the whole canon of English theatrical literature to choose from, in your attempt to toy with the public’s feeble minds. Then there’s the scores of attractive young nymphs desperate to sleep their way to the top… and that’s just the boys. Such a path surely only appeals to those unable to eek out a decent living as a smalltime dictator?
Nevertheless, everybody knows that writing is where the real action’s at. Only when one has dabbled in the manipulation of the immortal word can one truly call oneself a master. However, just to make all us laymen feel really inadequate, some go so far as to combine all three aspects of the beautiful game, in making a name for themselves as both actor, director and playwright. It can be done successfully, and indeed, it has been by such legends as Harold Pinter, Shakespeare, and of course, George Clooney. In contrast to the average Oxford director, they’ve got it all: the lithe bodies, the absolute power, the train of exquisite muses and on top of all that, the tumultuous love lives only associated with true genius. So if you’re an unfulfilled director, desperately trying to sell more tickets for your latest show, do yourself a favour: join them, write your own magnum opus and play the leading lady yourself.

The court’s full of sycophants. The heir to the throne’s meeting a friend returning from abroad. The queen’s in an uncomfortable position. Schiller’s play isn’t exactly subtle in its influences as it ransacks the plot of Hamlet to launch into an attack on church and court. And given that the set is mostly black and the heavily photoshopped posters show our self-obsessed hero brooding, it’s clear that producer Krishna Omkar hasn’t exactly been subtle in targeting this at the emo market either.

Worrying signs, you’ll agree. Despite this, is there any chance that it could actually be good? It’s hard to fault director William Maynard’s adventurous choice of play, but can he pull it off; in a play about stifled individuality, can he make his actors’ presence felt?

The answer to both is, surprisingly, yes. His secret weapon is the superb choice of translation: Mike Poulton goes for a surging, passionate rendering, which fits the spirit of the play perfectly: it feels grand and architectural in a Shakespearean way without feeling so archaic in its language as to be an anachronism, with wry jabs of intertextuality (such as Don Carlos imagining applying for the role of himself) which for once don’t feel like gimmicks. He also goes for the theatricality of it, alternating public life with glimpses beneath the masks: characters stand apart in public, grab and cling to each other in private.

In the lead role, Matt Maltby goes for a rugged, no-nonsense and somewhat unsubtle rendition of self-obsessesion, idealism and anguish at loving his hated father’s new wife and: the passion is perfect and his story of not seeing his father until he was six genuinely heart-breaking, and though he misses a little of his character’s wit at the start (like in a line about first meeting his father signing death-warrants) he warms up to give a very good performance. But Ed Chalk, as the king, is in a different league altogether. I’ve seen Derek Jacobi in this role in an acclaimed performance in London and Chalk is actually better still: dry, ironic, frequently fluty of voice, but also angry: this performance really gives the sense of the his almost, but not quite, unerring self-belief, as the only man in Spain allowed to be himself, signing the death warrants of anyone who seeks to challenge authority and be an individual like him. The other actors can never match him, and several slightly overdo the sinister side of their roles (to be fair, this reviewer wasn’t able to stay for the whole rehearsal and missed out on some of the juicier lines and scenes). Never mind: this play is a strong cocktail of ideas and passion, and the central performance is flawless. Oxford’s emos are in for a treat.

4 stars