Review: Ragtime ★★★★ – A timely revival for a musical about immigration, aspiration and discrimination

At this time of post-Brexit xenophobia and with refugees in crisis, Ragtime’s dramatic account of the hardships and hatred faced by early 20th-century immigrants to America is all too timely.

Terrence McNally’s book works seamlessly with Lynn Ahrens’ lyrics to bring EL Doctorow's 1975 novel to the stage. The story revolves around the interaction of three families: well-established WASPs (white Anglo-Saxon Protestants) Mother, Father and their Little Boy, with Grandfather and Mother's Younger Brother; ragtime piano-playing African American Coalhouse Walker and Sarah, the mother of his baby son; and Tateh (Yiddish for daddy), a young Jewish widower newly-arrived from Latvia with his daughter, as well as his hopes. “A Shtetl iz Amereke,” sings Gary Tushaw’s starry-eyed, sympathetic Tateh.

When Father leaves for a polar expedition, compassionate, resourceful Mother proves she can think for herself, rescuing the new-born abandoned by troubled Sarah, taking her in too and effecting reconciliation between Sarah and Coalhouse. There is an immediate connection when she meets Tateh, in danger of having his aspirations crushed by grinding poverty. But the racial hatred faced by Coalhouse leads to violence that threatens to engulf them all.

Famous personalities of the era play a part, the Jews represented by escapologist Harry Houdini (played by winning Christopher Dickins, his accordion part of his personality) and fiery anarchist activist Emma Goldman (the splendid Valerie Cutko), inspiring and advising alongside civil rights pioneer Booker T Washington (impressive Nolan Frederick channelling Obama). The car Coalhouse buys from Henry Ford (Tom Giles) provokes the hatred and envy that drives the story. And as professional femme fatale Evelyn Nesbit, Joanna Hickman, funny and ravishing, perches on a piano, her cello-playing part of the allure that mesmerises Jonathan Stewart’s likeable, hot-headed Younger Brother.

Thom Southerland’s production fills the Charing Cross’s tiny stage with ‘teeming masses’ - his cast of 24 actors, mostly musicians, dynamically choreographed along with their instruments, by Ewan Jones on a versatile set (designers Tom Rogers and Toots Butcher). Their twin balconies swing across stage to double as ocean liners and twin pianos make vehicles, platforms, and magnificent music thanks to dynamite onstage MD Jordan Li Smith and the nimble fingers of Ako Mitchell’s Coalhouse.

The rhythms of Stephen Flaherty’s score, ranging from the syncopation of ragtime itself to the klezmer brought by Jewish immigrants, wrap the auditorium with powerful sound, thanks to Mark Aspinall’s orchestrations. When the cast sing in chorus it is breathtaking, sometimes overwhelming. There are glorious individual voices. Anita Louise Combe’s Mother has rich warm tones to match her generous personality. Jennifer Saayeng’s Sarah moves to tears with the quiet vehemence of Your Daddy’s Son and soars in a duet with Mitchell’s virile, passionate Coalhouse, and Seyi Omooba’s voice is heart-stopping in this often spellbinding evening.

by Judi Herman

Photos by Annabel Vere and Scott Rylander

Ragtime runs until Saturday 10 December, 7.30pm, 2.30pm & 3pm, £17.50-£29.50, at Charing Cross Theatre, The Arches, Villiers St, WC2N 6NL; 08444 930650. http://charingcrosstheatre.co.uk

Review: Lunch and The Bow of Ulysses ★★★ – Steven Berkoff coupling on fine form

I’ll always be grateful to Steven Berkoff. Back in my days as drama lecturer, blown away by his 1983 play West, his second foray into life on London’s gangland manors, I wrote to him via his agent to ask if I might borrow the unpublished script. The hard copy arrived almost as fast as an email might now, by return with a friendly invitation to keep it. My students adored playing the scabrously ornate muscular verse and the body language it demanded.

Lunch dates from 1983, too and although it is prose, the language is often as extravagant – and as bracingly sexual. A man and a woman share a seaside bench at lunchtime. He confides lustful thoughts that she arouses, which make Trump’s ill-judged bragging look prim, and it’s in-yer-face in this intimate space, too. He is yearning, rather than boasting, with every muscle and fibre in Shaun Dooley’s extraordinary performance. Emily Bruni’s woman is equally physical – at first sight primly upright and uptight, but actually coiled like a spring ready to snap – or catch him in those coils...

Thanks also to Nigel Harman’s direction and movement director Alistair David, what follows is a masterclass in physicalising Berkoff’s language that would have enthralled my students. They prowl around each other like courting cats, he wiping from his brow real drops of sweat with a real hanky. At this proximity, audience members might also sweat uncomfortably as the couple eventually end up adjusting their dress at our feet.

But it’s their relish of the language that carries you along, the taste of it on the tongue – even when his chat-up line is trying to interest her in the space he sells for a living “electro-type on quarto double weight” (yes, space on paper, not online, Lunch is of its time) he enunciates alluringly in his attempt to melt “an ice lolly in a whirlwind.” “You’re not looking for me, you’re looking for it, you canine groper,” is her riposte (this comes more like a chat-up line before that apparent tumble behind the beach shelter).

That’s just a taste of what’s to come in the Bow of Ulysses, set (and indeed written) 20 years later and as many years into a marriage on the rocks. Rather than trading bracing insults, though, the estranged couple express themselves in longer, bitter monologues, downbeat this time. It was good to see these short companion pieces together, though strangely the first, as a real period piece, seemed less dated than its sequel. Ben and Max Ringham provide an evocative seaside soundscape and designer Lee Newby has a great eye for shades of brown that match at least the dress of this ill-matched pair in a seaside shelter that’s the only restful element in an unsettling evening.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Marc Brenner

Lunch and The Bow of Ulysses  runs until Saturday  5 November, Monday to Saturday 7.45pm Thursday and Saturday 3pm, £19.50-£35, at Trafalgar Studios 2, 14 Whitehall, SW1A 2DY; 0844 871 7632. www.atgtickets.com

Arnold Wesker tribute: The playwright still packed them in at the Royal Court in an affectionate and celebratory look at his life

“He shone with the sun”, lilted singer Rosie Archer in a soaring paean that took place as part of many poignant moments during an afternoon of tributes to the playwright Arnold Wesker, who died age 83 on 12 April 2016.

Held at the Royal Court Theatre, Wesker's spiritual home despite the theatre having turned down Chicken Soup with Barley (it premiered in 1958 at Coventry’s Belgrade Theatre), the evening was filled with warm memories of the late playwright from luminaries across the arts world.

Mike Leigh spoke of his delight in his teens at discovering this East End working-class dramatist. “What a hero he was. We sought out his plays and read them avidly,” recalled Leigh, reading from a piece based on an article first published in the July 2016 issue of Jewish Renaissance. Later in the Royal Court’s bar, Leigh told me that he had been approached to participate in the event after Wesker’s wife Dusty had shown the organisers the piece.

David Edgar spoke of Wesker’s groundbreaking representation of “political disillusion”; director Fiona Laird remembered her surprise at finding the playwright “charming,” instead of the curmudgeon she had been led to expect. A frail looking Bernard Kops, one of the last of those ‘angry young men’, recalled Wesker’s desire to broaden the reach of culture with his Centre 42 project.

There were some great performances too: Samantha Spiro’s delivery of Sarah Kahn’s final speech (she played Kahn in the Royal Court’s revival of Chicken Soup in 2011) brought tears to my eyes, although puzzlingly she omitted the ultimate rousing imperative, “You've got to care, you've got to care or you'll die!” Ian McKellen performed an excerpt of Chips with Everything with gusto, and Henry Goodman made a mischievous Shylock in a speech from the 1976 play of the same name. Finally, Jessica Raine, who played Beatie in the Donmar Warehouse’s 2014 production of Roots, movingly reprised that character's astonishing final speech.

And there were surprises: who knew Wesker had written lyrics for a Eurovision Song Contest entry? Sadly, Jonathan King rejected Shone With the Sun as “too classical”, otherwise Britain’s Eurovision history might have told a different story. He had been a talented artist too, said set-designer Pamela Howard, who presented several of his fine ink drawings.

As the audience left, speakers played Aaron Copeland’s Fanfare for the Common Man, a favourite with the playwright, and a reminder of the compassion at the heart of Wesker’s own art.

By Rebecca Taylor

CLICK HERE to read Mike Leigh's tribute to Sir Arnold Wesker from our July 2016 issue

Review: Fagin’s Twist ★★★★ - The exhilarating dance drama gives a thought-provoking twist on a familiar tale

You'll recognise the battered toppers, silk handkerchiefs and the pocket watch, but will you recognise the characters you thought you knew and loved (or hated)? Young orphan Fagin, resourceful and charismatic, escapes the workhouse with his best mate Bill Sykes to build an underground empire, a refuge for the likes of Sykes's girl Nancy and the Artful Dodger. Then they stumble upon young Oliver Twist.…

Fagin’s Twist is a breathtaking synthesis of dance, words, music and design, which succeeds brilliantly in finding – or fashioning – the fully-rounded humanity of Dickens’ characters we think we know so well already from the page, stage and screen.

Writer Maxwell Golden has dared to add his gloss to Dickens to tell those back stories – for Bill Sykes, Nancy, the Artful Dodger and of course Fagin himself. Aaron Nuttall’s Dodger narrates as niftily as he moves, so that Golden lives up to his name – his script sounding direct, fresh and as muscular as the dance itself.

Exploring the dark side of London in Dickens’ time and indeed right now, Tony Adigun’s restless, shape-shifting choreography is complemented by the constant morphing of Yann Seabra’s angular wooden slats lit with extraordinary versatility by Jackie Shemesh, to evoke alleys and streets and the sinister interiors of workhouse and thieves’ den.

A dark and thrilling eclectic score, both found and original, ranges from strings, piano and harp to music to blast you into submission, but even when it’s ‘in yer ears’ it earns its place there, thanks to sound designers Brian Hargreaves and Seymour Milton.

The performers crown this glorious synthesis by tackling both the dance and drama with energy and brio. Ensemble and soloists are equally at home in the breathlessly fast-moving routines and changing tableaux (sleight of hand looks like it comes naturally to this gang), as well as the escape over London's sinister roofscape; and the more measured duets and solos that explore the burgeoning relationship between Lisa Hood’s passionate Nancy and Dani Harris-Walters’ virile Bill. Joshua James Smith is an intriguingly complicated Fagin, a damaged youth using the cards fate deals him to find his golden opportunity in the gang leader’s swinging pocket watch. He’s a fine lithe figure in his swirling coat with fur tippet, cleverly evocative of Victoriana and yet cutting a more timeless dash like all Seabra’s costumes. Plus there’s Jemima Brown’s little orphan Oliver, working hard on tugging at Nancy’s heartstrings with his efforts to find his niche ...

There’s also an intriguing exhibition in the theatre bar of George Cruikshank’s illustrations for Oliver Twist, complete with correspondence from Dickens. Add some sly quotations from Lionel Bart’s Oliver in Golden's script and it all makes for an unexpected twist on Dickens.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Rachel Cherry

Fagin's Twist runs until Saturday 15 October, 8pm & 2pm, £18, £12 concs, at The Place, 17 Duke's Rd, WC1H 9PY; 020 7121 1100. www.theplace.org.uk

Then on tour at the following places:

Monday 17 October, 8pm, £10, at Gloucester Guildhall, GL1 1NS; 01452 503050. www.strikealightfestival.org.uk

Thursday 20 & Friday 21 October, 7.45pm, £12, at Birmingham Hippodrome, B5 4TB; 0844 338 5010. www.birminghamhippodrome.com

Tuesday 25 October, 7.30pm, £15, £10 concs, at Nottingham Lakeside, University of Nottingham, NG7 2RD; 0115 846 7777. www.lakesidearts.org.uk

Friday 28 October, 7.30pm, £14, £11 concs, at Barbican Plymouth, PL1 2NJ; 01752 267131. www.barbicantheatre.co.uk

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Review: Adding Machine: A Musical ★★★★ - An enthralling account of a life lived by and for numbers

What’s the difference between a musical and an opera? One definition might be that in opera the drama is largely generated by the music, in a musical it is largely defined by the text. And of course there are the honourable blends exemplified by Kurt Weill's Street Scene, adapted from Jewish writer Elmer Rice’s play.

Seeing Street Scene prompted Jason Loewith to attempt a similar musical adaptation based on Rice’s 1923 play The Adding Machine. Joshua Schmidt composed the music, as well as writing the libretto and book together with Loewith for a 2007 American opening.

The storyline makes a play of two halves. The first is a stifling, all too real account of the life of white-collar worker Mr Zero, exploited at work and hen-pecked at home till he snaps and murders his boss when he is let go in favour of the new-fangled adding machine. The second half is a surrealist journey into the Elysian Fields of the afterlife (complete with swimming pool in the confined playing space in the Finborough), where even Zero and a fellow condemned prisoner might join other souls offered another chance.

Kate Milner-Evans’ Mrs Zero powers the opening, her singing deploring her unhappy life and worthless husband stark, challenging and in-yer-face in this tiny space, her emotional expression transcending what language alone can communicate. The ensemble respond with an intricate mix of movement and song about numbers, perfectly setting up the claustrophobic atmosphere of a life where people are given numbers according to their social standing. Mr Zero – excellent Joseph Alessi – conveys the burden and boredom of a zero, trapped adding numbers day in day out, incapable of escape and unable to liberate himself (as well as performing the feat of devouring ham and eggs as he sings). There’s excellent support from James Dinsmore as a believable Boss here and in the hereafter, from Edd Campbell Bird as Shrdlu, another murderer, in both worlds and from Joanna Kirkland as the girl of Zero’s dreams.

The music was originally scored for just three instruments, Schmidt explaining that he approached the task with this combination in mind and tried to create a full blown, challenging score for three instruments. “It’s not a matter of compensating for instruments that aren’t there." His music sometimes recalls Kurt Weill, but he has a style and punch all his own and Ben Ferguson (Musical Director), Tristan Butler (percussion) and Hamish Brown (synth) give a full account of the enterprise. Chi-San Howard’s movement direction beautifully fuses actions, movements and words with the musical intent on Frankie Bradshaw’s clever transverse set. Direction by Josh Seymour intelligently contrasts the two halves of the show and seamlessly integrates drama, music, spoken word and movement.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Alex Brenner

Adding Machine: A Musical runs until Saturday 22 October, 7.30pm & 3pm, £20, £18 concs, at Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Rd, SW10 9ED; 0844 847 1652. www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

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Review: King Lear ★★★★ – Antony Sher is every inch a king in Gregory Doran's mighty production

Antony Sher's performance is literally towering at the opening of the play, directed by his husband, RSC Artistic Director Gregory Doran. Lear is borne in on a huge platform above the glittering monochrome of his court (designer Niki Turner), wrapped in fur cloaks that make him larger than life, his every pronouncement accompanied by thunderous chords to make of him a primitive demigod. He may look "every inch a king", as he says ironically later in the strange lucidity of his madness on the cliffs at Dover, but he is equally a very foolish old man, as he also refers to himself later. His rejection of youngest daughter Cordelia (Natalie Simpson, all quiet resolution in white) is especially cruel, arbitrary and yes, senile, simply because of that god-like build up.

But it is the reaction of oldest daughter Goneril (excellent Nia Gwynne, an auburn-plaited Saxon princess in russet jewel-encrusted gown) that is most startling. Foreboding at the impropriety of his asking his daughters how much they love him turns to horror on Goneril's face, as her father turns the full force of his cruel rage on Cordelia for her honest reply. Goneril’s fears are well-founded of course, for later he curses her womb, and the physicality of Sher's spite as he grabs hold of her in a cruel travesty of an embrace and her momentary hopeful and needy response to it are all the more shocking.

Doran also gives Lear several of the hundred knights demanded to keep for his retinue to carouse with him around his daughter's table, and a downright noisy boorish shower they are too, so that to start with it's hard not to sympathise even with Kelly Williams's vivid scheming middle daughter Regan.

This engaging of sympathy for a child who will ultimately prove unnaturally cruel is echoed in the relationship between David Troughton's exceptional Gloucester and his bastard son Edmund (Paapa Essediu, a villain with a fine sense of irony), clearly nursing a 'legitimate' grievance as his father introduces him to Kent with that well-worn tactless joke about the "sport" he had conceiving him.

The brilliance of both Sher and Troughton is in their ability to engage sympathy once they are changed by what they endure. Sher sloughs off the layers of clothing that make him imposing from the outside, as he gradually gets to know himself and understand reality and, for the first time, other people. If he is touching in his  madness on those cliffs, it's because he is content – even happy – in that altered state (in the way that dementia patients often present  for example). The audience learns to love him as he learns himself and is truly reunited with Cordelia.

The parallel reunion between Gloucester, who only sees clearly once he has lost his sight, and his true loving son Edgar, forced to disguise himself as a mad beggar when Edmund convinces his father he’s the villain, is equally moving thanks to Oliver Johnstone's resourceful Edgar, proving ultimate filial devotion as his father, like Lear, achieves closure at life's end.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Ellie Kurttz © RSC

King Lear runs until Saturday 15 October, 7.15pm & 1.30pm, £16-£70, at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 6BB; 01789 403493. Then at the Barbican Theatre, London, ECY2Y 8DS; 020 7638 889, 10 November to 23 December, 7.15pm & 1.30pm £25-£55 . In cinemas from 12 October.

www.rsc.org.uk

Review: How to Date a Feminist ★★★★ – Samantha Ellis does it in style in this fast and funny comedy

Ah, the F word again. No surprises there. But it's the man who's the feminist in Samantha Ellis’s fast and funny spin on Hollywood screwball romcoms, billed as "a romantic comedy turned upside down".

Kate is a journalist who happens to be Jewish. She also happens to have a fatal attraction to bad men, both on the page (Heathcliff) and in the all too solid flesh (her ex is her promiscuous editor). Then there's Steve, a man who happens to be a feminist. His mum brought him up at Greenham Common Women's Peace Camp, while Kate's dad is an Israeli brought up in a refugee camp. She wants to be swept off her feet and into bed. Steve probably wants to sweep the floor for her first. Can they get (and keep) it together despite their prejudices, their predilections and their parents?

Ellis has huge fun turning our preconceptions on their heads, giving artisan baker Steve all the PC lines (his marriage proposal begins, “I want to apologise for the patriarchy”) and Kate the, er, balls.

With delicious wit, Ellis follows the pair's rocky road from meeting at a fancy dress party – she "symbol of female power" Wonder Woman, he "brilliant ethical hero" Robin Hood  (the quotes are Steve's seals of approval - Kate's opening quip is "Are those ladders in your tights or stairways to heaven?") – to very cold wedding day feet at a yurt in Greenham, not the hall in Hendon favoured by Kate's dad, though there is a rabbi to bless the couple and a glass to stamp on.

Ellis zigzags back and forth in time with panache and Matthew Lloyd directs the dynamic duo of Sarah Daykin and Tom Berish with matching brio. Thanks to designer Carla Goodman's clever costumes and some artful velcro, they win our hearts with their onstage lightning changes, morphing into his mum and her dad and their exes in the wink of an eye, literally, as they revel in sharing the fun.

Ellis has some real points to make about those preconceptions and a fine skill at suggesting the emotional hinterlands of her lovers and their parents. And the icing on the cupcake (even though Steve doesn't approve of those either) is that it really works as a romantic night out, too.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Nick Rutter

How to Date a Feminist runs until Saturday 1 October, 8pm & 3.30pm, £17, £14 concs, at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin St, E8 3DL; 020 7503 1646. www.arcolatheatre.com

The show then tours to Stephen Joseph Theatre, Scarborough on Friday 21 & Saturday 22 October, www.sjt.uk.com; and Watford Palace Theatre on Friday 4 & Saturday 5 November, http://watfordpalacetheatre.co.uk

JR OutLoud: Writer Samantha Ellis talks about how to write a romantic comedy for the 21st century

Samantha Ellis’s play How to Date a Feminist is currently on at Arcola Theatre. Her heroine is Kate, a journalist who happens to be Jewish. She also happens to have a fatal attraction to bad men. Her hero is Steve, a feminist who happens to be a man. His mum brought him up at the Greenham Common Women’s Peace Camp, her dad is an Israeli brought up in a refugee camp. With these characters Ellis explores love in the 21st century.

Samantha talks about her influences, including vintage screwball Hollywood comedies, her own background, growing up in London with Iraqi Jewish parents, and her other plays and books.

Photo by Nick Rutter

How to Date a Feminist runs until Saturday 1 October, 8pm & 3.30pm, £17, £14 concs, at the Arcola Theatre, 24 Ashwin St, E8 3DL; 020 7503 1646. www.arcolatheatre.com

Listen to more interviews and audio tours of exhibitions on our JR OutLoud page.

Review: The Great Divide ★★★★ - Beautifully-imagined lives reclaimed from the flames

On the simplest of sets – designer Sebastian Noel’s cabin trunks piled and rearranged to create levels on the set of the play with which it’s in repertoire – and with the audience focusing intently from either side, three young women and two young men begin The Great Divide. They're telling the story about a New York garment factory fire in 1911 that took the lives of 146 workers, mainly young women and Jewish refugees from Russia. Such is the power of Alix Sobler’s storytelling and the lyrical intensity of director Rory McGregor’s cast that there is little need for much more.

Sobler immediately establishes a ritualistic quality to playing out the story. Her play opens with Havdalah, the ceremony that ends the Jewish Shabbat each Saturday with a light kindled and then extinguished, accompanied by a haunting chant. Light and darkness (controlled expertly by Sam Waddington), music and sound (courtesy of musical director and composer Tim Shaw) will continue to play their part, whether for beauty and atmosphere or to establish the grinding repetition of factory work and the horror of fire and smoke. Each ‘player’ has at least one detailed identity – someone the audience will get to know and care about – as well as sketching out other characters as needed. But it’s clear that they have told this story before and must tell it again and that it will be played out in other times and places where wellbeing and safety are sacrificed for profit. The 'profit-conscious' supervisor here is represented by Michael Kiersey's Max, who works well to earn sympathy and contempt as appropriate.

It is Hannah Genesius’s spiky, intelligent Rosa and Emma King’s luminously poetic Manya that we get to care about, as they become inseparable on the boat from the old country, work swingeing hours at the Triangle Shirtwaist Factory and face even more hardship on the picket lines during an 11-week strike for better conditions and hours. It’s hard not to be touched as initially frosty Rosa gradually melts to the sturdy wooing of Josh Collins’s delightfully disingenuous Jacob. And I found myself blinking back tears listening to Manya telling in heart-breaking detail a story of the marriage, children and death in old age surrounded by grand- and great-grandchildren that she would never have. It’s some consolation to meet the real activist, strike organiser Clara Lemlich (feisty Miztli Rose Neville, who also doubles as other women), who did indeed survive into fiery old age, unionising workers in her care home in her 90s.

Lemlich's may be the only real happy ending, yet Sobler and her company succeed in giving back beautifully-imagined full lives and identities to these long-dead young women and men.

By Judi Herman

Photos by Graeme Braidwood

The Great Divide runs until Tuesday 20 September on Sundays, Mondays and Tuesdays only, 7.30pm & 2pm, £18, £16 concs, at the Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Rd, SW10 9ED; 0844 847 1652. www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

JR OutLoud: Playwright Alix Sobler discusses her new play The Great Divide

Playwright Alix Sobler talks to JR's arts editor Judi Herman via Skype about her award-winning play The Great Divide, about the fight for equal pay and unionisation in American garment factories and about the resonance that The Great Divide has today. Inspired by true events, the play tells the story of a fire in a New York garment factory that killed 146 workers – mostly women and mostly Jewish immigrants.

The Great Divide runs Sunday 4 – Tuesday 20 September, 7.30pm & 2pm, £18, £16 concs, at the Finborough Theatre, 118 Finborough Rd, SW10 9ED. www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk

Photo by Luckygirl Photography