Grief Is The Thing With Feathers
Barbican Theatre, London Until Sat, 1hr 30mins
The superb Irish actor Cillian Murphy – of Peaky Blinders fame – plays a father grieving for his wife who has died, leaving him with two young sons. Friends arrive with lasagna and wise words.
But as ‘Dad’ discovers, ‘moving on is a concept for stupid people, because any sensible person knows grief is a long-term project’.
Dad is a scholar and fan of former Poet Laureate Ted Hughes, who wrote a collection of Crow poems after the suicide of his wife, Sylvia Plath. Crow now enters and inhabits Dad’s grief-torn world.
The superb Irish actor Cillian Murphy – of Peaky Blinders fame – plays a father grieving for his wife who has died, leaving him with two young sons
He’s a huge, foul, ponging black bird – and suffering is his carrion. Murphy plays him simply by pulling his black dressing gown over his head and hopping about like a mad cowled monk with a Darth Vader voice.
He’s an invasive creature who will in the end prove therapeutic.
Murphy’s athletic performance matches the pungent, jagged prose of the text, adapted by Enda Walsh (who also directs) from Max Porter’s short, poetic 2015 novel about a household desperately clinging to the rock face after the mother has died.
Murphy’s athletic performance matches the pungent, jagged prose of the text, adapted by Enda Walsh (who also directs) from Max Porter’s short, poetic 2015 novel
We do meet the mum – Hattie Morahan – but only in a holiday video and as a disembodied voice. The boys – David Evans and Leo Hart, both excellent – are onstage and sleep in bunk beds on Jamie Vartan’s interior design, lit in a sickly dawn light.
Staged with live graphics and raucous episodes where you have no idea what’s going on, this is occasionally too bewildering and chaotic. But then so is death.
It’s perhaps at its best when simplest. The father – Murphy’s blue eyes utterly blank – managing only to state the obvious, ‘I miss her so much’; the boys making toast, mute with their loss. Grief isn’t an emotion, it’s something physical.
That insight gives this superb, upsetting show its raw power.
Downstate
Dorfman Stage, National Theatre Until Apr 27, 2hrs 25mins
Rating: 
Set in a house for convicted paedophiles in Illinois, Bruce Norris’s American play proved deeply controversial in the States, probably because it isn’t written in a sufficiently lynching spirit of vengeance.
The story features a ‘survivor’ called Andy (Tim Hopper), who has come to confront Fred, the piano teacher who raped him when he was 12.
Andy needs closure. Fred (Francis Guinan) is a gentle soul, confined to a wheelchair after a vigilante beating.
The story features a ‘survivor’ called Andy (Tim Hopper, pictured here with Matilda Ziegler), who has come to confront Fred, the piano teacher who raped him when he was 12
But sweet old Fred, you realise with a sick lurch, used his gentleness to groom young victims.
The play also humanises the other paedophiles – notably the tragic Dee (an expert performance from K Todd Freeman). Yet the writer cleverly leaves us wondering just how remorseful he is for what he did to a 14-year-old boy.
I came out of this quality American import – superbly staged by America’s legendary Steppenwolf company – conflicted and in need of a stiff drink.
It’s impossible to recommend as entertainment. But the play does what the theatre occasionally should: it takes you to places you don’t want to know about.
Little Miss Sunshine
Arcola Theatre, London Until May 11, touring to Nov 16, 2hrs
Rating:
We all need a bit of sunshine these days – and not only because we’re coming out of winter. This musical adaptation of the 2006 Oscar-winning road movie is just the thing.
Even the canary hued set is cheering – you need factor 30 to sit in the front row.
Gary Wilmot as grandad is enjoyable here as a lusty cocaine-snorter and sad little Olive played by an appealingly uncutesy Sophie Hartley Booth, a string bean in goofy specs
Though the down-on-their-luck family who make the dash from New Mexico to California so their girl Olive can take part in the titular beauty pageant are no rays of the yellow stuff – they’re as broken as the old VW campervan they’re using for the trip.
There’s the troubled mum and dad, uncle Frank, a gay Proust scholar who tried to commit suicide, a sullen and mute teenage boy – though grandad is a lusty cocaine-snorter (Alan Arkin won an Oscar in the role, and Gary Wilmot is enjoyable here) – and sad little Olive (on first night, an appealingly uncutesy Sophie Hartley Booth), a string bean in goofy specs.
It’s not all gloom in Mehmet Ergen’s peppy production starring Paul Keating, Matthew McDonald and Ian Carlyle. By the end, Olive’s pageant number hits the feel-good pay dirt
The opening song in William Finn’s score, The Way Of The World, is one of failure, poverty and low expectation. And the trek bears this out. Laura Pitt-Pulford’s mum Sheryl movingly portrays her marital unhappiness in Something Better Better Happen.
But it’s not all gloom in Mehmet Ergen’s peppy production. By the end, Olive’s pageant number hits the feel-good pay dirt. There is a danger of sentimentality in adding music to this tale of familial grit, but James Lapine (Sunday In The Park With George) keeps the film script’s wry drollness and an ultimately sunny outlook.
Mark Cook
littlemisssunshinemusical.com
Hair The Musical
New Wimbledon Theatre Touring to Aug 10, 2hrs 30mins
Rating:
This 50th-anniversary production is a bright, shiny touring musical, starring Dancing On Ice winner Jake Quickenden and Hollyoaks’ Daisy Wood-Davis. It may have a killer pop-rock score, with hits such as Let The Sunshine In and I Got Life, but Hair is as wild and unstructured as the hippies it’s about.
Claude doesn’t want to go to Vietnam; around him, his friends protest, take a lot of drugs and have a lot of sex – all of which Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s script is very explicit about.
Claude (Jake Quickenden) doesn’t want to go to Vietnam; around him, his friends protest and have a lot of sex – all of which Gerome Ragni and James Rado’s script is very explicit about
But Jonathan O’Boyle’s production flattens all this out by making everyone into safe comic caricatures, removing any sense of subversiveness. There’s little characterisation, except Quickenden’s hyperactive, oversexed Berger, cheerily getting his bum out.
Even the music is barely loud enough to get toes tapping – although the band is good, and William Whelton’s choreography is fun. Wood-Davis brings some heart as Berger’s girlfriend.
Holly Williams
hair50.com