STARS THAT PLAY WITH LAUGHING SAM'S DICE
Pentameters - By TOM FOOT

WITH Pentameters bursting with jittery hippies, swapping fuzzy stories of one Hendrix show or another, it was hard not to feel a little envious.
I can’t imagine anyone bothering to make a play about the arrival of Robbie Williams, or any of the other pointless din currently propping up Top of the Fops, let alone revive it 30 years after their insignificant demise.
Hampsteadite Leonie Scott Matthews first produced Stars that Play with Laughing Sam’s Dice on a shoestring budget at her Pentameters theatre in 1976.
Written by her friend Robert Calvert – poet, writer and lead singer of the 1970s rock band Hawkwind – the story of a young James Marshall Hendrix makes an emotional return.
The play starts with a poem – written by Calvert after Hendrix’s death. We hear of the singer’s quicksilver fingertips, his volcanic outburst and how he “sang the body electric”. The rest of the script is similarly lyrical, but never pretentious. The action takes place aboard an military aeroplane. A clean-shaven sergeant barks orders as his “human bullets” prepare to take the plunge.
Jimi won’t jump – but he would soon kiss the sky.
Fate comes to the rescue, and it was not long before Hendrix was discharged from the army, returning home to live his dream of being a rock star.
Calvert wrote the play shortly after leaving mental asylum.
But there is reason in madness, and Calvert’s mind’s eye seems as good a place as any to judge what inspired the singer – purple haze all in his brain.
“You smoke a joint,” says Hendrix of composing, “but it doesn’t do anything because you’re already in a different sort of high.”
Shane Chester, clearly revelling in his first ever role, played a sultry, impulsive Hendrix. And the experienced Robert Slade, drafted in at short notice from Canada, brought a subtlety to what could have been the straightforward part of Sergeant McNulty. Short, sweet – cross town traffic to see it.

Until September 10
020 7435 3648

Humour lifts Russian folly

RUSSIAN NATIONAL MAIL
Old Red Lion - By MARTINA ANZINGER

There’s more than one spectre haunting Ivan Sidorovich Zhukov in this one-character play. Old Karl will be dancing in his grave.
The revolution has come and gone, but contemporary playwright Oleg Bogaev’s take on what’s left makes for an unsettling snapshot of post-Soviet society. The Russian’s absurdist brand of humour has won him plaudits back home. The Sputnik Theatre production is the UK premiere of a new translation by Noah Birksted-Breen.
Bogaev was still a twinkle in his mother’s eye when space cowboy Yuri Gagarin in beat the Yanks to the Cosmos, but the Soviet hero is one of the ghosts at this feast of darkly nihilistic humour.
Of course, Lenin turns up too, and Trotsky.
So does Vivien Leigh and even Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II. By an uncanny feat of good timing, there is also a real-life Martian, taking advantage of Earth’s proximity to the Red Planet.
They are conjured up as Ivan Sidorovich ponders his predicament – a Great Patriotic War veteran, alone, penniless, depressed, trapped in a crummy bedsit, with nothing but bed bugs and a battered accordion for company.
Instead, he writes letters to the people on his spectral birthday party guest list – and they actually reply.
This artifice could have been as wrist-slashingly gloomy as a Leonard Cohen ballad were it not for the outrageously surreal flashes of absurdist comic introspection and dialogue.
The play is held together brilliantly by Kevin McMonagle as Ivan, who has the monumental task of convincing you of a mind on the edge of madness.
Bogaev is holding up his mirror to post-Soviet society, but the play will also resonate with the tenants of Camden’s crumbling tower blocks who are still refusing to sell out to the honeyed bribes of New Labour’s housing utopia.
Lonely and deprived people of the world – unite.

Until September 10
020 7837 7816

Son can’t match his father’s war record

ORESTES
Lion and Unicorn - by Dean Matthewson

The last couple of years have seen an explosion of interest in the classic Greek hero myths. Orestes, a new play by Dan Horrigan, deals with a character more tyrannical than heroic.
The play strives to be contemporary, though these attempts do not always sit well. Neither does the occasional modern language (the use of the phrase “suck his dick” is one that sticks in the mind) add much to the play’s centrally strong story.
The coda, in an attempt to contextualize the play in terms of the war in Iraq, pushes rather too far.
At its heart it works as a piece of Greek tragedy.
Orestes, unable to wage his war on a foreign field like his father, instead turns his conflict inward, brutalising his people and destroying what is left of his family.
Dominic Kelly in the lead is a tour de force of facial expressions and nervous energy, strutting Napoeleon-esque about the stage in his black boots, a little man trying to step in to the shoes of his famous father. Kelly works well as a weak ruler aiming for greatness, but doesn’t quite convince as a tyrant to be feared. Central to the play’s momentum is Patrick Ross’s performance as Erin, Orestes advisor, who brings an intensity and gravitas lacking elsewhere.
Orestes is thought provoking enough to make it worthwhile, while the cautionary take on the abuses of power is always likely to be highly relevant. Judging from the poor turnout at this showing, all it needs now is an audience.
And for its ambition and the close intimacy the venue affords the audience to the action, it deserves one.

Until September 11

Rare reminder of harmless fun

TOM, DICK AND HARRY
Duke of York’s - by Illtyd Harrington

Ray Cooney and Brian Rix were the masters of British farce for 20 years and filled the Whitehall Theatre nightly. Rix generally dropped his trousers, demented people ran in and out slamming doors, narrowly avoiding discovery and a dim policeman duly arrives to double the confusion.
Tom, Dick and Harry is Cooney’s latest, co-written with his son Michael. It is set in Tom’s (Joe McGann) house in Kennington on the morning that he and his wife Linda (Hannah Waterman) the fraught Laura Beale of Eastenders, are preparing nervously to be assessed before adopting a baby.
This is the prelude to the chaos, panic and frenzied plot which involves 400,000 cigarettes smuggled from France by Tom’s brother Dick (Steven McGann) and a bag of body parts stolen from the mortuary at St Thomas’ Hospital by Harry (Mark McGann).
Enter a trumpet playing illegal immigrant from Kosovo and his beautiful granddaughter. They speak no English. Meanwhile Tom has shunted his unsuspecting wife off on a fool’s errand to the adoption agency. To add to this bubbling stew comes Mrs Potter (Louise Jameson), the adoption lady.
She has been preceded by PC Downs (Mark Wingett) who you might recognise as PC Carver from The Bill. You guessed it, he’s not the Met’s brightest constable.
The McGann brothers are an engaging trio with Liverpudlian roguery in their eyes. The other characters are the usual stock broad characterisations common of Cooney farces. Cooney is a very skilled craftsmen and like all farcers never deviates too far from reality and his ingenuity is remarkable.
The second act picked up apace and caught rounds of laughter. It is an evening now rare in the West End where an old formula and dreadful jokes are there to be enjoyed and what’s wrong with that? You could take your maiden aunt out on a treat, after all, Cooney claims to have sold 100 million tickets for his comedies around the world.

Until November 12
0870 060 6623

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