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Latest items? Unedited? Fringe Report Uncut
Two-Way Mirror
Verdict: Fragments of intimacy
Tues-Sat 19:30 (22:00); Sun 18:30 (21:00)
Two-Way Mirror is two short relationship dramas by Arthur Miller from a cast of two (1F, 1M): Some Kind Of Love Story (50 mins); interval (20 mins); Elegy For A Lady (30 mins).
Some Kind Of Love Story. Femme fatale (ish) Angie (Abi Titmuss) teases circles round private dick Tom O'Toole Jay Benedict in several of her multiple personalities as he tries to get to the bottom of a case to which she holds solutions. Sometimes Angie is Angie, sometimes she's 8-year-old Emily cowering from paternal rape; or grimy prostitute Leontine; or upper-class Miss Renata Marshall.
The atmosphere is 1940s/50s American detective fiction, with Angie a frisky blonde intriguer, and Tom a Philip Marlowe traditional gumshoe, ex-cop, digging deep to unearth corruption and truth. It's hard not to think that they're also writer Arthur Miller (1915-2005) and his companion, wife (1956-1961), mistress, muse and special project Marilyn Monroe (Norma Jean, 1926-1962) - bastard child, actress, drug addict, perhaps suicide.
At the start of tonight's press night performance, Abi Titmuss's Angie is seated, quietly doing her face as the audience comes in. She's equipped with blonde curled wig, black silk slip, Japanese dressing gown, martini glass, whisky bottle, a make-up table with 3 mirrors, a hand-mirror, make-up, and fluttering eyes.
It's a crammed-full house, 80 or so, evenly shared between theatre journalists and gossip columnists, including The Sun, and The News Of The World and most of the nationals. There's a quiet atmosphere of destruction in the house (and a pungent smell of urine from one of the reviewers - excited perhaps from the review he's aleady written).
There's a touchable feeling of road-accident anticipation, and it could be significant that Abi Titmuss's character is facing away. That's the direction Julius Caesar was facing when all the knives went in.
Come on, the real purpose of tonight's massed attendance isn't to review Abi Titmuss's performance. It's to see exactly how spectacularly she'll crash through the floor.
'I can't be concentrating on this case and banging you at the same time,' says aptly-named Tom O'Toole. 'It's all wrong'. He might be talking outside the play. At other times, the direction, by Mike Miller, encourages this: the characters frequently nod to the audience or crew, then switch to the world of the play. It's a light half-comedy looked at one way, a penetrating drama of the inner self from the other.
The set is simple, and elegant, defined by a couple of translucent gauze drapes at the back, a nightclub neon sign shining through them, the audience seated around 3 sides. Abi Titmuss's partner, handsome footballer Lee Sharpe, her manager and her manager's staff are in the audience, perhaps grimly noting the similarity of the seating layout to an amphitheatre.
Tom's on the case of Felix Epstein. Was Angie a witness, does she know facts, is what she says true, did she receive letters of evidence, is there a cop car parked outside her apartment threatening her? Or is she stringing Tom along - for 5 years now - because she needs to keep his sexual interest. Will he ever love her again?
It's a tantalising play, and as Abi Titmuss lets Angie switch through her repertoire of split personalities, using them to elude Tom, to attract him ('Do me once more'), commanding him, begging him, teasing out made-up stories, it's impossible not to see the bewildered, love-struck and repelled Arthur Miller trying to make sense of the fragile, manipulative puzzling and endearing lover he and the world quickly lost.
Jay Benedict presents Tom O'Toole as a simple man. There's not a great brain at work, he suggests, but someone trying to recapture integrity. It's comically handled at times, with an undertow of sadness. He evokes a care-worn man, wretchedly tired of what his life has failed to achieve; fascinated by Angie, fond of her and responsible, but determined to extract from her use to his case. His Tom is classically good-looking, masculine, rugged, trench-coated, presented as a man in his 50s.
Abi Titmuss is exactly cast as Marilyn Monroe, catching the loveably ditsy style that's associated with her memory; the vulnerability; naughtiness, humour, tenderness, and contrariness; the gentle and luminous beauty. It's a profound beauty. In Abi Titmuss's face in repose, there's a depth of expression that makes the part work. She catches, without any milking, a poignancy in her characterisation that evokes the centre of this upsettingly vulnerable woman.
At one point, she forgets her lines, and deals with it charmingly. It may be silly to talk about bravery in the theatre - it is only theatre. But facing a vulpinely-smiling crowd of professional writers longing for you to fail takes real guts; writing the resulting story takes none at all. She picks up from where she fluffed, and delivers the rest without a hitch. Her peformance has flaws - whose hasn't? - but far more successes. It's a fine delivery - sweet in its sensitivity - from both the cast - of a gentle and intriguing window on intimacy.
Halftime score: Abi - 1; Critics - Nil.
Elegy For A Lady
A man in his later years is losing his younger mistress to cancer. He visits a fashion store to buy her a parting gift. The proprietress talks with him; in a series of vignettes they become the couple; she enacts the dying woman, reprising their love.
There's a fuller description of this play here, directed, as tonight, by Mike Miller. The other production featured tonight's producer, actress Sue Scott Davison, in the proprietress role.
The play tonight is done in English upper-class voices. The outfits and voice catch a period in the 1950s, though there's a trace of (the war-time film) Brief Encounter to the mood.
Jay Benedict's town-planning consultant wears a loose-cut tailored grey-khaki suit, the trousers with turn-ups, brown shoes, white shirt, a slightly risqué grey suede tie. Abi Titmuss wears her hair brown, sculpted and tied back to a vertical comb-clasp, white open blouse and black and white silk neck scarf, tailored herring-bone skirt to below the knee, black high heels - classic elegance.
Both actors seem fractionally less assured in the second half. Perhaps it's the relief of getting through part one in front of a potentially hostile audience; perhaps the complexity of the second play; most likely the fact it's only the 3rd night.
It feels at times as if neither has at this very early stage in the run taken the characters inside, as if they are reading (well) the script aloud. That's common enough with putting on a play, and by the end of the week the cast will probably have swallowed the characters and begun to exhale them, which seems to be how this play works - nuance, glances, touch, tone and pacing of voice.
However, the sensuality of the relationship comes through, and the sadness - it is a play about death, about getting old, losing love, the search for one last gesture to be remembered by. (Blimey, the Miller household can't have been much fun).
Director Mike Miller taught Abi Titmuss during her year's acting course at Central School of Speech and Drama and directs her tonight in her first professional production. One of the most exciting new wave of UK theatre directors, his work tends to the spectacular - and not always on stage. When Abi Titmuss came to one of his plays last year, there was an unscheduled fight caused by naughty novelist Peter Ackroyd (full story).
Tonight she proves she can act. It's evident in tonight's performance that she has grace and elegance of movement, a perceptive and effective stage presence, and the intangible quality of letting the audience want to watch her. Like any other peformer on their first professional outing, there are technical items that can be tightened up and evolved - actors spend their lives doing that. But the quality is there now.
The performances from both the cast sparkle with humour and a pathos that's free of sentiment; with perception, and with style. Jay Benedict and Abi Titmuss bring to life a play in two parts that is both a worrying dissection of intimate relationships, and a delight.
Cast Credits: (alpha order): Jay Benedict, Abi Titmuss. Some Kind Of Love Story: Jay Benedict - Tom O'Toole. Abi Titmuss - Angie. Elegy For A Lady - Jay Benedict - Man. Abi Titmuss - Proprietress.
Company Credits: Writer - Arthur Miller. Director - Mike Miller. Designer - Roy Bell. Original Music - Anthony J Miller. Lighting - Chris Corner. Dialect & Voice - Charmian Hoare. Stage Management - Roshni Savjani. Props - Fat Faced Cat. Studio Hire - Eitan Lee-al. Thanks to - Julie Foy. PR - Kevin Wilson. Photography - Simon Pugh. Artwork & Design - Lupe Digital. Wigs - Angels. Costume & Furniture - National Theatre. Print - Today's Printers. Print Distribution - Impact. Rehearsal Space - The Jerwood. Presented by arrangement with - Josef Weinberger Limited. Producer - Sue Scott Davison. Co-Producer - The Courtyard Theatre. for Abi Titmuss: Clothes - John Galliano & Alexis Roche at Christian Dior Couture, Paris. PR - Taylor/Herring. Voice Coach - Gary Williams. Make-Up - Kate Bamber. for The Courtyard - Co-Producer: Artistic Directors - June Abbott & Tim Gill. Website - www.thecourtyard.org.uk. Email info@thecourtyard.org.uk. Tel 020 7833 0870. for Scott Davison Productions: Supported by - Stage One/Society of London New Theatre New Producer's Bursary sponsored by FIFA in association with Mamma Mia! and Arts Council England, and supported by Mackintosh Foundation, Wingate Foundation, Clear Channel Entertainment UK. Project Manager - Chris Corner. Production Assistant - Paul Brunger-Johnstone. Producer - Sue Scott Davison.
END
John Park
reviewed Thursday 2 March 06 / The Courtyard At Covent Garden
Fringe Report (c) Fringe Report 2002-2012
www.fringereport.com
