The Tempest – Jermyn Street Theatre There are many tragedies, great and small, caused by this wretched virus that’s sweeping the world. People are dying, for goodness sake. But one of the small ones, yet to my mind totally tragic in its own tiny way, is that not enough people will get to hear Michael Pennington speak the words of Shakespeare’s Prospero. To speak Shakespeare as he might have envisaged it, is not only, as Noel Coward said, “speak clearly and don’t bump into the furniture”, it is several lifetimes of hearing, seeing and believing sequences of words arranged in a preordained order and understanding deep in the soul what it is you, and he, are saying. The voice is an instrument, of course, and can be trained to produce mellifluous tones and made-to-order musicality but unless the actor’s sensibility is in tune with what he is saying it will just be empty theatricality. And here comes Michael Pennington, around for enough years at the top of the theatrical firmament that the quality of the voice is no impediment to the meaning of the speeches. They roll off his tongue complete in Shakespeare’s thought process. In Pennington’s interpretation of the old magician who is all too human, it is like sitting in a room with Shakespeare himself, hearing his thoughts, listening to the scratch of his quill, denying Prospero’s venality, applauding his generosity, egging him on not to be so mean to Ferdinand and Miranda. or persuading him to give Ariel his freedom. In Tom Littler’s brave production at Jermyn St there are many treats in a robust farmgirl Miranda (Kirsty Bushell), a romantic Ferdinand (Tam Williams) and a fey androgynous Ariel (Whitney Kehinde) but the great gift of the production is the miraculous Michael Pennington whose rough magic (sorry, couldn’t help it) informs every word. Shoe Lady – Royal Court Is it called The Law of Unintended Consequences? No, that’s not right. I mean the Law of Unforeseen Consequences but I don’t think that’s a thing. It should be. Maybe it’s the Butterfly Effect? You know, a butterfly flaps its wings in China and a hurricane starts in Finland? Something like that. In this quirky little quasi-monologue by E.V. Crowe a small thing happens and the world is changed. Viv is married, has a small child, lives with her husband in the kind of domestic chaos familiar to every young mother who doesn’t have time to fix the bedroom curtain because she’s already late for work. On the tube she loses a shoe. A small thing, really, except that it sets in train a catalogue of unexpected disasters which ruin not just her day, but her life. In one day, which starts with an innocuous missing shoe, all the verities on which she’s built her life fall apart in a sequence of perfectly logical meetings and events. It’s an intriguing idea, one that throws ‘what if’ into sharp focus. There are several other short appearances by other actors but Shoe Lady is basically a one-woman tour de force by the always surprising Katherine Parkinson, cleverly shaped by the playwright E.V. Crowe and director Vicky Featherstone into a comprehensive and satisfying picture of one woman’s life. And catastrophic though it is, it could happen to any of us. POST SCRIPT
While I was writing this, The Royal Court, in common with many other theatres, decided to bow to inevitability and close, responding to the very real threat to audiences and staff alike, from coronavirus. This means that, unless the virus does a remarkably quick disappearing act, you will not be able to see Shoe Lady which has been cancelled along with so many other worthwhile plays. I have to decided to post these reviews anyway as a gesture of thanks to the many theatre professionals who have worked so hard and so well to bring us these performances and whose work will not now be seen through no fault of their own.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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