****Anna  Christie, Donmar Warehouse, August 2011 

It is testimony to the strength of Rob Ashford’s direction that Jude Law’s naked torso, which arrives sea-soaked and writhing in the second act of this outstanding production, gains little direct attention from an audience perfectly qualified to swoon. 

In fact, fans of Law’s dashing on-screen sensitivity or even his critically acclaimed appearance as the Donmar’s Hamlet in 2009 might struggle to recognise the burly, bearded, Calibanesque figure who thunders over the stage, cursing to high heaven in thick maritime Irish. Playing Mat Burke with all the raw virility and sincere emotion due to this ship’s stoker and would-be lover of Anna Christie, Law fits seamlessly into a cast operating at the height of their theatrical powers. Ruth Wilson’s Anna Christie is enthralling in her damaged resilience while David Hayman expertly presents Chris Christopherson, her dotty, often wrong-footed, but unmistakeably doting father. 

A Swedish sailor obsessed with the dangerous power of ‘dat ole davil, sea’, Chris sent his daughter away as a child to be raised by relations on an inland farm. Anna’s upbringing, however, was a far cry from bucolic bliss, with a series of abuses leading to her eventual residence in a brothel.  Exhausted from her journey, Anna knocks back spirits with her father’s latest squeeze and describes with unabashed frankness the horrible sense of being ‘caged in’ which led her to join ‘that house’. She expounds: ‘it was one of the sons – the youngest – started me – when I was sixteen.’ Anna’s entrapment is, she believes, ‘all men’s fault’, but the same sense of being locked into an endless cycle is conveyed by several characters. For Chris it is the controlling pull of the sea, for Burke, a grafting stoker’s life founded solely upon work, drink and lust. He believes Anna, in her perceived purity, to be cure. 

But Ashford also capitalises on the inherent humour of O’Neill’s writing. The same clashes of character, will and circumstance which belie the play’s tragedy also provide ample scope for moments of hilarity as grievances are thrashed out - sometimes literally – by characters eccentric to the extreme.  A particularly memorable instance arises during an otherwise disconcerting physical scrap between Burke and Chris. Elderly, small-framed Chris is raised off the ground more like an infant than an attacker, flailing his arms at the grinning, brawny younger man.

Naturally, the play’s climax arises as Anna finally reveals her past to her father and lover, shattering their self-constructed illusions. In a consuming performance, Ruth Wilson makes Anna’s exasperated confession as a woman whose spirit may be broken but whose survival instinct is unremitting. Here is Tess of the D’Urbervilles with balls. 

In the final act, as we wonder if there will be any reconciliation with Burke, any happy outcome for Anna, we discover that perhaps it is the sea after all which pulls these characters together and drags them apart. ‘We’re all poor nuts, and things happen, and we just get mixed in wrong.’


First performed in 1921, Anna Christie marked a continued endeavour by Eugene O’Neill to introduce realism to American theatre, and was duly recognised with a Pulitzer Prize. Ashford’s directorial triumph is delivering authentically the grittiness of this human story, whilst celebrating the lyrical, mythical language of a play tied so strongly to the oral traditions of the sea.

***A Conversation With Carmel, Barrowland Ballet, Remarkable Arts.
A tender synthesis of movement, film, a spirited community ensemble and one very cute baby.

There is an authenticity to this fine piece of physical theatre which goes beyond its inclusion of projected interviews with real people and an untrained community ensemble. Natasha Gilmore’s entrancing choreography distorts and abstracts bodies and objects, but in all its abstraction, A Conversation with Carmel reveals moments of intense insight into what it is to be human, to be a grandparent, a child, a mother, a sibling, a lover. Age provides the lens through which a life is examined, as relations gather for Carmel’s 80^th birthday party.

Carmel is 83-year old Diana Payne-Myers, whose flexibility would at times put an acrobatic nineteen-year-old to shame. At the other end of the spectrum, Gilmore’s one-year-old son could hold an audience’s gaze all on his own as he toddles, giggles and reacts instinctively to the onstage action. Spirited members of the Barrowland Ballet community ensemble flood the stage at significant moments, and provide visually the sense both of fun and of shared personal awkwardness in public festivities, as they dance here at Carmel’s party. The glee and bashfulness in their faces are entirely genuine, but I found these legitimate reactions far more interesting to observe than had their performances been entirely polished, their conviction complete. Meanwhile, projection of film by renowned film-maker Rachel Davies is seamlessly woven into the action. Everyday objects – the tables and washing lines of Jamie Harrison’s mutable set - become screens upon which interviewed pensioners offer up their own experiences of age, grandparenthood, life and death. Their honesty is striking, the pictures painted often a far cry from cosy family life.

While the central theme of cyclical existence is explored onstage with detail and scope, the play flails slightly in its dramatic focus. Scenes transition with fluidity but the overall through-line becomes fainter towards the play’s conclusion, for example when a tableau of Carmel’s deathbed is constructed and dispelled within a few beats. The proximity of death is naturally an unacknowledged but tangible presence throughout - Carmel’s relations fussing over her in her grand old age at her birthday. But this strong physical manifestation is somehow too literal, unnecessary. The play’s climactic sense of ‘dancing towards one’s end’ is resumed as grieving relatives are whisked away and Carmel once again twirls and boogies on a table-top, contented and childlike as the lights fade down. Significantly for a play of such a title, Carmel never says a word; but there is no doubt that this tender play speaks volumes about the emotional impact of ageing upon the individual.

**** The Table, Blind Summit Theatre, Pleasance Dome

Fight for your seat at The Table, where acclaimed puppeteers, Blind Summit, serve up three very different courses of dark delight and laugh-strewn pathos. The table in question is entirely unremarkable:  merely the white foldaway favourite of church halls and school bazaars. However, lit with stark light, it becomes the luminous prowling ground of the play’s protagonist – an embittered but convivial cardboard man, a puppet brought startlingly to life by the expert hands of Mark Down, Nick Barnes and Sean Garratt. Their concentration is unwavering, never more focused on their subject than when they are humorously revealing the secrets of his creation - from demonstrations of limbs flailing comically where a ‘fixed point’ is not established, to witty deconstructions by the  little man himself: ‘It’s not real, it’s puppetry:  I don’t have a backstory: obviously I was a cardboard box!’ Walking, crawling, moonwalking over the table, the little man introduces us to his life upon it; it is by turns his castle and his prison. Approaching the audience with friendly swagger, the little man is a gruffly spoken geezer unfazed by the crowd but achingly perturbed by the individual that invades his space - and then leaves him alone in it. As a dead-pan Sarah Calver usurps his reign by pulling up a chair, the man’s attempts to remove her, first verbally and then physically, are at once the funniest and most moving moments in the play. While she appears neither to feel nor hear his attempts at resistance, she invades and distorts his dominion with the ease of a Titan. Space, restriction, silence and sound are the tangible elements through which this little man’s moving struggle with independence, comfort and loneliness are revealed.

The company’s next two offerings are shorter but no less visually and thematically engaging. Simple but stunningly effective lighting shone over three open-framed screens creates a human (puppet) fruit machine of activity. Heads and hands - real and unreal – swim, flash and bubble across the ‘screen’ and conjure scenes of human experience: joy, weakness, interaction, invaded privacy. I can only imagine that this might be how it would feel to observe a fish tank while on LSD: the dancing objects mesmerise and disconcert, evoking laughter, fear and sadness. 

Finally it’s time to place the table back in the limelight as the final act, ‘Marionettisme Francais’ is performed with aplomb to the buoyant swells of Elgar. An opened suitcase spills its secrets into the air like the streaming cards of a magician. Doodles and scribbled text are drawn out by the arch-faced, cigarette-sucking puppeteers, delivering a live picture animation which, like the show as a whole, consistently entertains and moves. Playful, visionary and skilled, Blind Summit bring something to The Table that won’t be forgotten.

Edinbound...

Well what a pitch perfect note on which to launch a theatre blog:  the sun is shining in London (an utter miracle given this last week) and BBC Weather insists that blue skies are going to roll out overhead all the way to The Burgh and hang around for the jolly heck of it during my stay. Hurrah and huzzah! So, without even my winter boots to weigh me down as I dash to the train, I’m as excited as an Irn Bru-glugging pigeon bouncing off the Udderbelly cow. Edinburgh Fringe Festival: your humble pilgrim returns.