Joe Penhall’s award-winning Blue/Orange at the Young Vic is the best play on the London stage and not to be missed. Matthew Xia’s revival confirms a modern classic. The acting is excellent.
The setting is a NHS psychiatric hospital. A junior doctor and a senior consultant are battling over a young black African who has a borderline personality disorder, the border being between the neurotic and the psychotic. The patient (Daniel Kaluuya) may or may not be mad. He thinks oranges are blue and that Idi Amin is his father.
The doctor (Luke Norris) wants to keep him in for further treatment. The consultant (David Haigh) wants to release him into the community. Will he get his freedom? Should he get his freedom? Where will he go if he is released? Who will care for him? Is he being released only because there is a shortage of beds?
The consultant fears that the hospital may have made the wrong diagnosis due to cultural differences – Afro-Caribbean males are up to 12 times more likely to be diagnosed as schizophrenic than white males.
Michael Morpurgo was inspired to write Running Wild when he read about a boy being saved by an elephant during the 2004 tsunami and surviving in the Indonesian jungle. Timothy Sheader and Dale Rooks’s production at Open Air Theatre in Regent’s Park uses Samuel Adamson’s adaptation and deserves to have the success Morpurgo’s War Horse had in the theatre. The puppetry, designed and directed by Finn Caldwell and Toby Olie, is magical and will enchant adults and children alike.
The elephant is played by a life-size puppet manipulated by four visible puppeteers and she is as real a character as Joey, the horse. Visible puppeteers also manipulate a tiger and an adorable family of orangutans. The visibility of the puppeteers is not distracting; it is part of the attraction. The tsunami is created in the Chinese theatrical manner with huge blue sheets that are dragged over stage and auditorium, “drowning” actors and spectators.
Kenny Morgan was Terence Rattigan’s ex-lover and his suicide in 1949 inspired Rattigan’s best play, The Deep Blue Sea, which Mike Poulton uses in his fictional play, Kenny Morgan, at Arcola Theatre, as a template to create an interesting pastiche of late-1940s drama. He explores both the relationship Morgan (Paul Keating) had with his selfish, drunken young lover (Pierro Niel-Mee), who wants to get rid of him, and the relationship he had with the fabulously rich and over-possessive Rattigan (Simon Dutton), who wants to get him back. The actors are very good. Lucy Bailey directs.
Eric Whyman directs a so-so touring production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream for the RSC. At each of the 14 venues at which it is playing, a local amateur group act the rude mechanicals. They don’t exactly upstage the professional actors. But they are the major point of interest and the RSC generously allows them to take centre-stage.
Shakespeare’s bombastic, jingoistic, anti-Catholic King John at Rose Theatre, Kingston-on-Thames is a satire on political expediency and opportunism. Overlong and heavy-going, it has never been popular with modern audiences and will appeal mostly to Shakespeare completists. Jamie Ballard plays unstable John for a weakling rather than the usual scenery-chewing villain.
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