Farm Hall review: Spied on in an English country house, explosive rows of the Nazi Oppenheimers, writes PATRICK MARMION
Farm Hall (Theatre Royal, Haymarket, London)
Verdict: Nuclear Nazis
Why didn’t the Germans build the bomb first? Could they have tried harder? These are some of the intriguing questions posed by Katherine Moar in her engaging, drawing-room drama set in the dying days of World War II.
First seen last year, at the nearby boutique Jermyn Street Theatre, the play is based on transcripts of six leading German nuclear scientists who were gathered and held by British Major T.H. Rittner at Farm Hall in Cambridgeshire.
They include the great sub-atomic physicist Werner Heisenberg (Alan Cox), and the Nobel Prize-winning pioneer of nuclear fission Otto Hahn (Forbes Masson).
Having little better to do in the dilapidated stately home that has become their open prison, they read plays aloud, relate the plots of cowboy films, classify plants in the garden, count door knobs and invent a parlour game of ‘guess what will be redacted’ from their letters home.
But when the Americans drop the bomb on Hiroshima, the six men who had all been involved in Hitler’s nuclear programme then lapse into a mix of recrimination, disavowal and envy.
The cast of Katherine Moar's production of Farm Hall at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket
First seen last year, at the nearby boutique Jermyn Street Theatre, the play is based on transcripts of six leading German nuclear scientists
Yet despite their varying degrees of loyalty to the fatherland, their self-effacing humour could easily have been written by the Anglophile Tom Stoppard. It’s a gathering that feels about as German as the Long Room at Lords.
No matter. Cox lends charm and self-doubt to Heisenberg (famous for his uncertainty principle), who had been suspected by Hitler’s henchmen of being a ‘white Jew’ for teaching the work of Albert Einstein. And, as if thumbing his nose at Oppenheimer and the Americans, he sketches his own blueprint for a nuclear bomb on a sleepless night.
Masson, meanwhile, brings angst to Hahn; blaming himself for the loss of the thousands of lives thanks to his work on splitting the atom.
David Yelland is typically urbane and reserved as the anti-Nazi Max Von Laue, while Julius D’Silva is the stiff Nazi-semi-apologist Kurt Diebner, who was a leading director of Hitler’s nuclear programme.
Stephen Unwin’s tidy production may only detonate comparatively modest theatrical explosions, but it’s still a thoughtful and amusing historical snapshot.
Pericles (Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon)
Verdict: Wholesome revival
There’s something in the water in Pericles. Incest, murder and sex trafficking, to name just three of the nasties in a tale co-written by the Bard and George Wilkins in 1608, about the titular Prince of Tyre scouring the Greco-Turkish archipelago in search of a wife.
His first call is Antioch, where the king is offering the hand of his daughter to anyone who can solve a riddle outlining his incestuous paedophilia. Get it wrong and you die. Get it right and you die.
Pericles scarpers, pursued by an assassin, and sails all over the Mediterranean where, between storms, he gains, loses, and regains a wife and child. It’s a dream-like and sometimes nightmarish folk tale which can defy producers, actors and audiences alike. However this production, by the RSC’s new Co-Artistic Director Tamara Harvey, brings calm, elegance and clarity.
Pericles’s peregrinations are ornamented with actors creating choreographed friezes like underwater plants, while a wonderful score by Claire van Kampen (aka Mrs Mark Rylance) of marimba, saxophone and percussion heaves through the story like the sea, between storms and periods of azure tranquillity.
Alfred Enoch and Leah Haile starring as Pericles and Thaisa in Pericles by Shakespeare
There’s something in the water in Pericles. Incest, murder and sex trafficking, to name just three of the nasties in a tale co-written by the Bard and George Wilkins
Alfred Enoch (pictured) crawling on the stage floor as he protrays the protagonist in the Shakespearian plays most recent revival
The stage is set like a giant loom, with a ship’s rigging suggesting the strings of a musical instrument; while costumes create a terracotta palette of burnt red and orange. In the midst of the theatrical swell, Alfred Enoch makes a squeaky-clean Pericles: he is tall, handsome, smiling, and yet tortured by fate. Leah Haile plays his eventual wife.
Christian Patterson and Felix Hayes add touches of Harry Secombe and cartoonish caricature as two other madcap monarchs; while Rachelle Diedericks — as Pericles’s virtuous daughter — lives up to her billing as ‘a palace for crownèd truth to dwell in’.
The result is a wholesome revival that disperses the play’s sometimes sickly toxins.
As You Like It (Holloway Garden Theatre, Stratford)
Verdict: No-frills Bard
Should you trip when leaving Stratford’s Swan Theatre, you may well crash into the temporary Holloway Garden Theatre, where they are staging a no-frills production of Shakespeare’s As You Like It. The scaffolding arena is not without charm, but the plastic seats (which seem determined to tip you out) are almost entirely without comfort.
You may therefore, like me, find yourself rooting for a rapid conclusion to the reduced 90-minute jaunt through the comedy about fair Rosalind (Letty Thomas) chased by handsome, lovelorn, poet-wrestler Orlando — played by Luke Brady with one leg in a cast, following a painful accident. (So the opening fights are played solo by the other wrestler, Peter Dukes — to hilarious effect.)
Brady is burly but cute and reassuringly biddable, from the point of view of Thomas’s playful but bossy Rosalind. Trevor Fox does a nice Withnail-ish turn in ‘all the world’s a stage’ as melancholy Jaques. Duncan Wisbey raises laughs as Touchstone.
The band also provide him with music-hall sound effects for the punchlines (including both whistles and cymbals) in Brendan O’Hea’s merry but physically punishing production.
Christina Tedders, Letty Thomas as Celia, Rosalind in As You Like it (pictured left to right)
The cast dancing on the stage at the Holloway Garden Theatre in Stratford
Pinter’s Party is as menacing and mysterious as ever
The Birthday Party (Ustinov Studio, Bath)
Verdict: Pinteresque perfection
When it opened in 1958, one critic wrote off Harold Pinter’s first full-length play as ‘half-gibberish and lunatic ravings’. It flopped.
Staged again shortly after, another hailed it as the work of the ‘most original, disturbing and arresting talent’.
One of the many remarkable aspects of this Pinter play is that the passage of time (and dozens of productions) have done nothing to dispel its power to disturb.
Richard Jones’s revival is as menacing, mysterious and mighty as ever. Almost everything — walls, floor, clothes, suits — in the seaside boarding house (designed by Ultz) is bare, hard, unembellished and brown. The knitted (brown) tea-cosy on the (brown) teapot is the single thing that is soft.
So there is nothing to distract from wordplay, superficially naturalistic but as intricately patterned as a rap.
Then you clock that everyone is broadcasting, shut up in their own worlds, not really hearing and never properly responding. At one level, this elusive piece is a horrible and brilliant study of human isolation.
Jane Horrocks is on the case as Meg, the vacant yet smiley landlady, inanely asking her husband Petey (Nicolas Tennant), while looking straight at him as he sits at the table, if he is back from work. She all but suffocates the only resident, Stanley (Sam Swainsbury), sometimes maternal but often uncomfortably flirtatious. Horrocks can make the word ‘succulent’ sound both saucy and disconcerting.
To begin with, the banality is funny — but the mood changes when Goldberg (John Marquez) and his sidekick McCann (Coalan Byrne) arrive, immaculately suited and booted, icy cold and impenetrable behind their smiles. They are the knock at the door we all live in fear of.
Jane Horrocks starring as the vacant yet smiley landlady Meg in Harold Pinter's The Birthday Party
Their nastiness makes this a challenging watch, but the precision of the performances compels. Indeed, such is the force of this production that you emerge from the theatre gasping for air. A triumph, of a peculiarly Pinteresque kind.
Until August 31.
Latest from the Edinburgh Fringe Festival
Mythos: Ragnarok (Assembly, George Square)
Verdict: Ragna-rocks
Norse myth, pro-wrestling and a thumping heavy metal soundtrack... anyone planning to challenge Mythos: Ragnarok for the title of maddest, baddest show on the Fringe had better get ready to be stomped, nutted and body slammed.
The bonkers brainchild of wrestler, actor and impresario Ed Gamester, it takes Viking mythology and turns it into a death battle between gangster god Odin and chief mischief maker Loki (Gamester himself when I saw it), with other celestial Mafiosi, including fertility god Freyja, and meat-head thunder god Thor, also attempting to muscle in.
The brilliance of the act is not just that the performers are built like outside toilets. They’re also supremely agile. The choreography of fighting, slamming one another onto the canvas, bumping chests and spinning from the floor in a single move, wins oohs and aahs from the rapt audience.
The troupe’s first show in Edinburgh two years ago played to an audience of one. Now they’re a phenomenon.
Two actors in the heavy-metal thumping, pro wrestling show called Ragnarok at the Edinburgh Fringe
Hold On To Your Butts (Pleasance Courtyard)
Verdict: Jurassic larks
Speaking of gods, Hold On To Your Butts is the sort of brilliant idea that is a gift from above. It’s a re-creation of Steven Spielberg’s Jurassic Park, improvised by two actors and a Foley artist (an old-school sound technician).It will help if you’re a Jurassic fan, but I found it all came back to me anyway.
The laboratory with the hatching egg (fingers wriggling through a napkin) and a rampaging T-Rex (high-viz cycling helmet, parking cone fixed to rear end), before the kids are confronted by a raptor (pair of swimming goggles), ahead of the final escape in a helicopter (cue spinning brolly).
Some characters could be clearer, but there’s no mistaking deadpan Jeff Goldblum. The sound (courtesy of Kelly Robinson) is always right on cue. And Natalie Rich and Matt Zambrano fill the roles interchangeably. Add dino-poop gags and ‘it’s behind you!’ panto moments as dinosaurs creep up, and it’s the hit of the Fringe.
Natalie Rich and Matt Zambrano (pictured) at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in Hold On To Your Butts
Sh!t Theatre: Or What’s Left Of Us (Summerhall)
Verdict: Sad songs made merry
The time has surely come for Sh!t Theatre to ditch their puerile name. They are, as Radio Five football pundit Chris Sutton likes to say, ‘better than that’.
I went to this engaging, thoughtful and touching two-woman show in fear of a juvenile caper. In fact, it’s about the two performers putting themselves back together after one lost a dad and the other a brother.
Their rather sweet response to these body blows was to research the English folk song tradition surrounding death and renewal, after discovering a folk club in West Yorkshire – which, shockingly, was fire-bombed a week after their visit.
The pair integrate guitar, lute, violin and squeeze box into an act which they call a ‘Sing Around’ — which we are invited to join in.
They also season the show with a kind of Wikipedia of fun facts, discovered in their research.
They sport badger hats at the start because, they explain, badgers don’t hibernate...they ‘torpor’ — or go into a kind of low energy mode (much like the shock of bereavement).
There is also a theme about how the Japanese mend broken bowls with gold, which ties into their account of piecing themselves together in their grief.
Performed on a pub bench, set on an island of swirly carpet, this is no misery fest.
The purpose and effect is cathartic and it all ends with a wassail sing-around in the bar afterwards, in line with the centuries-old tradition of reviving spirits (in every sense).
Katie Norris: Farm Fatale (Pleasance Courtyard)
Verdict: Queen of the cat ladies
Katie Norris is a West Country lass who grew up on a farm and gossips about pets, boyfriends, and a Gen-Z flatmate (who doubles as a servant).
She is proud to have ‘divorced woman energy’ (despite never having married), and adores her moggy, Atticus.
Making her Edinburgh stand-up debut, Norris oozes batty talent and can sing like a diva. She also has some good lines (‘only astronauts need space’).
But she could do with a bit more schtick - like playing piano to accompany her songs, perhaps.
And in the current climate, she should probably drop the Taylor Swift gags.
Comedian Katie Norris pictured in front of an advertisement for her Fringe festival set Farm Fatale
Victor’s Victoria (Assembly Rooms)
Verdict: Victor Mature tribute
Victor’s Victoria is a sweetly sentimental tribute to the Hollywood golden age actor Victor Mature, performed by his stylish, opera-singing only child Victoria.
The mathematics of their relationship are interesting, too. The ornately handsome Italian American Victor Maturi was born in Louisville, Kentucky in 1913.
Victoria is in her (late) 40s. Meaning that despite an impressive run of five wives, Victor left child-rearing late — John Humphrys and Mick Jagger style.
A trained classical singer, her numbers include an Italian knife sharpener’s chant, a Kurt Weill number from one of Dad’s Broadway shows (Lady In The Dark) and some songs related to his film Samson And Delilah, including Saint Saens’ French opera of that title and the Gershwins’ Girl Crazy (sadly no room for Tom Jones’s Why Why…).
With a red flower in her raven black hair and a long charcoal dress that slinks about her like a cat, she graces the Fringe like a Dior frock in a charity shop.
Maybe she’d have been more comfortable if she’d gone a little further downmarket, and accompanied her strong, expressive voice on piano with a chattier routine.
But this is not how the children of Hollywood royalty think.
Funny girl on the money
by Veronica Lee
Olga Koch Comes From Money
The title Olga Koch Comes From Money says it all, but Koch — born in Russia, educated in America and settled in the UK — isn’t apologising in this confessional comedy that could divide the room if she weren’t so likeable and funny.
It’s just who she is. The comic has an interesting take on how wealth — inherited, earned or appropriated — affects us. Having a dad who’s almost an oligarch means growing up rich is the hardest thing she’s done, Koch says, as ‘is this relatable to you?’ becomes the leitmotif.
But this isn’t a humblebrag; it’s an astute examination of cultural differences and wealth inequality, with big laughs.
Jack Skipper
Jack Skipper doesn’t come from money, as his show Skint attests. He was once a carpet fitter (‘rated 14th best in Croydon by Check A Trade’) and has all the bants you might expect, with his old-fashioned joke-telling and observational comedy that doesn’t try to be deep.
But it does entertain as he discusses differences between his childhood and how he raises his children, and why he doesn’t watch the news (‘I missed the previous episodes’).He’s happy to be doing something he loves — and does well — and his joy is infectious.
Let Down Your Hair
Luke Rollason says very little in Luke Rollason, Luke Rollason, Let Down Your Hair (Pleasance Dome), which is full of clowning, mime and audience participation.
Olga Koch in a frilly pink dress at Live At The Moth Club
Luke Rollason (pictured) in a promotional photo for his show Let Down Your Hair at the Pleasance Dome
Trust me, though: it’s better than it sounds, as he mashes together Michael Rosen’s We’re Going On A Bear Hunt with Hansel And Gretel and Rapunzel (whose hair is flowing loo roll). There’s plenty of subtext if you want it, about parenting and companionship, but it’s just delightfully daft if you don’t.
Come For Me
Come For Me is an hour of musical comedy by the American thirtysomething Catherine Cohen (Pleasance Courtyard) that catches the self-obsession and vulnerabilities of her social media-addicted generation.
The songs (she’s accompanied by pianist Frazer Hadfield) are clever and catchy, but it’s her between-numbers patter that raises the laughs. Dry and whimsical by turns, she talks about freezing her eggs, being horrified that her boyfriend has become an uncle, and her sex life. The last features prominently, but never crudely; in ‘Fill the Void’, there’s a double entendre, of course, but actually it’s about searching for contentment.
Cohen’s stage persona is of a needy, ego-driven but deluded princess – ‘Dating me is an immersive experience’ - who wants all of our attention, all of the time. But it’s easy to give, as she creates a fascinating and funny world for us.
Edinburgh Fringe continues until August 26.
