Boy in the Bubble Alec Benjamin Song Reviews
Bribery (Mercury Theatre, Colchester)
Rating: 
Verdict: Poirot lite
The Merchant Of Venice (Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Earth)
Rating: 
Verdict: Brutally to the point
At that place is goose egg like a piffling blackmail to make an audience sweat. Alfred Hitchcock knew that better than most, and information technology'due south what must have attracted him to Charles Bennett'south 1928 Due west End play, Bribery, which starred a young Tallulah Bankhead; and which the grand master of suspense adapted for the big screen.
Information technology's the tale of 19-year-old Alice, a Chelsea shop assistant who kills a posh bohemian artist after he assaults her in his studio.
The set-up is a trivial creaky, with Alice showtime falling out with her honest copper fiance, Harold.
Alice'due south moral dilemma — come up clean, or save her skin — is merely nigh enough to carry a brisk, 2-hour evening. All the same, I'd accept preferred a little more than psychological intrigue, and a few more ruddy herrings. But Anthony Banks directs a tidy product, with Jessie Hills as a sympathetic and stiff-willed teenage killer
She might take got away with the killing, were she not spotted going in and out of the artist's studio by a friend of the victim — who seizes the opportunity for a spot of extortion.
Bennett went on to become a Hollywood scriptwriter, but evidently connected tinkering with the play until his death in 1995.
Enter playwright Marker Ravenhill, who has now completed that tinkering — highlighting the story'due south themes of women's rights and turning the drastic blackmailer into a gay outsider. The effect is Poirot-ish melodrama, featuring a compromised fiance instead of a moustachioed sleuth.
Alice'due south moral dilemma — come up make clean, or salvage her skin — is simply virtually enough to behave a brisk, two-hour evening. All the same, I'd accept preferred a petty more psychological intrigue, and a few more red herrings.
Simply Anthony Banks directs a tidy product, with Jessie Hills as a sympathetic and stiff-willed teenage killer.
Gabriel Akuwudike's Harold, withal, undergoes a pleasing transformation from idealist bobby to cynical pragmatist. And Lucy Speed, as Alice'due south god-fearing mum, is an honest to goodness Cockney battle-axe.
The about curious performance, though, is from Patrick Walshe McBride as blackmailer Ian Tracy, an most flamboyant dilettante. Veering between squeaking mouse and booming comport, he's alarmingly unpredictable.
This is a neatly restored menses slice worthy of the slickly renovated Mercury Theatre. If only Ravenhill had pushed the characters further, we might accept been able to sweat a fleck more.
Shakespeare'due south Merchant Of Venice is also a kind of bribery story, with a conduce of Venetian merchants putting the squeeze on hapless Jewish moneylender Shylock.
And at present this abridged, ii-hour version of the tale at the Globe's indoor theatre makes that abundantly and brutally clear.
The forfeit of Abigail Graham'southward production is that information technology coarsens the plot line of Bassanio defaulting on his debt to Shylock. Shakespeare'due south version offered a complex vision of a society tolerating institutional racism in the name of concern. The do good, however, is that it brings a horrible clarity.
Graham's modernised setting casts the merchants as a bunch of raucous, routinely racist yuppies — including Michael Marcus's Bassanio, here a smug City banker.
No opportunity to slander Shylock is missed, in vitriolic outbursts of anti-Semitism, accompanied by volleys of spit.
Fittingly, Adrian Schiller's Shylock is measured and deliberate: wary of beatings and fearful of meeting his tormentors' eyes.
It's sometimes hard to see his face in the candlelit gloom, only his torso speak volumes — racked by spasms, every bit if he were fighting invisible demons. I've never been more than distressed by Shylock'southward pain, or keener to encounter him win his pound of flesh.
Fittingly, Adrian Schiller's Shylock is measured and deliberate: wary of beatings and fearful of meeting his tormentors' optics
Jazzed upward Jane Austen is pretty persuasive
Persuasion (Rose, Kingston)
Rating:
Verdict: In awe of Austen's powers
Village in a hoodie has become de rigueur — only a Jane Austen heroine in Athleisure?
This and many other courtships are startlingly played out on a raised rectangular platform which functions equally a disco, catwalk, foam-flooded bubble-party and, most important, a rostrum from which Sasha Frost's wonderfully withheld and high-handed Anne roughly pushes any character who becomes tiresome
Jeff James'due south bold adaptation of Austen'south Persuasion ditches bonnets and decorous jigs to polite piano accompaniments in favour of bikinis, bubble-parties, full-on snogging and robotic dancing to the tune of Robyn's Call Your Girlfriend, Nicki Minaj and Dua Lipa.
The effect is a frolicking, rollicking rom-com nailing the contemporary dating and mating game equally sharply as information technology did in 1818, when information technology was published soon after Austen'due south death. In its shrewd and amused understanding of what information technology is to exist a witty woman in a man's world, information technology captures the essence and spirit of Austen — with an extra portion of bubbling.
This is Anne Elliot'southward story. At the age of 19, she was persuaded by her trusted friend, Lady Russell, that she would be 'throwing herself away' if she accepted a proposal of marriage from impecunious Frederick Wentworth.
Viii years on, single Anne considers herself 'haggard at 27' when Wentworth, now a wealthy captain, unexpectedly turns upward in Bath, a urban center, we are told, 'blighted past modernistic architecture' just where all the newest dance moves are invented. Second time lucky?
This and many other courtships are startlingly played out on a raised rectangular platform which functions as a disco, catwalk, foam-flooded bubble-party and, most important, a rostrum from which Sasha Frost's wonderfully withheld and high-handed Anne roughly pushes any character who becomes tiresome.
Disappearing from view are, variously, her absurdly vain begetter, Sir Walter (Emilio Doorgasingh), posing in a chest-revealing light-green towelling dressing-gown; her sister, the hilariously moaning married Mary (Helen Cripps); her older sister Elizabeth, a spoilt Daddy's girl, superbly played by Matilda Bailes — who besides doubles as i of the Musgrove sisters, Instagram-gear up blonde bimbos in hot pursuit of a married man.
It'southward a hoot — and I was totally persuaded.
Georgina Brown
Source: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/tvshowbiz/article-10600025/Hitchcock-dialled-tension-PATRICK-MARMION-reviews-Blackmail.html
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