Whirling in Noël Coward's vortex

The Vortex by Noël Coward

Rose Theatre, Kingston, Friday 15 February (running until Saturday 2 March)

The jazz hands of 1920s glamour open this play; the wringing hands of Florence and her son Nicky, conscious echoes of Gertrude and Hamlet, wring your heart by the end of it. We are thrust from the wit and frisky joie-de-vivre of the first act into a mortal coil of bitter self-discovery and betrayal, which feels as relevant and shocking now as it must have been in 1924. Noël Coward has an uncanny ability (considering he was only 24 when the play premiered) to stick a dagger into the concerns of age and of youth and expose the fears of us all. The Rose Theatre has put on a production that teases out these real psychological anxieties with brilliant panache, embracing the play's hysteria without ever giving way to gratuitous sentimentalism or melodrama.

Stephen Unwin’s accomplished direction produces virtuosic changes of tone that take the audience hurtling through emotions faster than Scott Joplin’s fingers move over a piano in the Maple Leaf Rag. One minute you’re laughing at light-hearted socialite repartee, the next witnessing an unspoken, heart-jolting revelation that prompts you to interrogate exactly what you were laughing at and how you failed to see the tragic cracks just below the artificial surface of rouge and perfume. The wonderfully Art Deco set from Neil Warmington locates us in the decadence of the age, while reminding us that Coward’s concerns are equally modern. An anachronistic Mick Jagger lips sofa and a broken yellow frame surround the stage to suggest a fragmented, undeniably contemporary world.

Within an excellent cast, David Dawson shines particularly – his Nicky, grappling with probable homosexuality and clandestine cocaine addiction, is brilliantly pitched. He never veers into over-emotive frenzy or contemptible self-pity. You can always perceive a basic moral integrity and elusive rationality that lie buried beneath the addled, insecure exterior. The acting throughout is consummate – with a few minor exceptions, all the actors maintain a superlative control of the shades of grey within their roles, however slight their character may be. James Dreyfus deserves a particular mention for his turn as a bitchy dandy who wafts in and out of scenes with ineffable flair.

‘We are all swirling in a vortex of beastliness’: this is how Nicky characterises his whole experience of life. And when he utters it in such anguished desperation, we feel instinctively that this applies to us just as much as to him and his world. Watching this play acts as an intense reminder of just how threatening that vortex is, just how closely it whirls beneath us and how we must remain vigilant against its magnetic pull. And the Rose's production provides this reminder with such finesse that we cannot help but want to absorb ourselves in Coward’s world, however disquieting it may be.

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Finally in the headlights: Frightened Rabbit's Pedestrian Verse tour

Frightened Rabbit at The Forum, London
Wednesday 13 February, touring the UK until 28 February

Tall white posts, each crossed by three horizontal slats, flank the spartanly spiritual stage. They act as artful metaphors for Frightened Rabbit’s music. When singer Scott Hutchinson puts such raw passion into lyrics like ‘Well I can dip my head in the river/ Cleanse my soul, oh/ I'd still have the stomach of a sinner’ in ‘Holy’, they become mutated Christian crosses, embodying the tension between doubt and faith that runs throughout the new album. And with the panegyric ‘Old Old Fashioned’, on which Hutchinson croons ‘There's a radio in the corner/ It's dying to make a scene/ So give me that soft soft static/ With a human voice underneath’, the posts transform into pylons beautifully transmitting the band’s music, celebrating its amplified energy and its simultaneous old fashioned-ness, its allegiance to their traditional Scottish roots. Frightened Rabbit embody Celtic indie rock at its best, slowly building into anthemic guitar riffs layered with hauntingly honest lyrics.

It is these lyrics that really make Frightened Rabbit a heart-in-mouth kind of band. Hutchinson (also the songwriter) articulates himself through unusual, symbolic, breathtakingly frank depictions of loneliness and anguish. Occasionally some of this intensity is lost in the live performance – surprisingly for a nominally indie rock gig, it was the acoustic songs that had the rawest power. Every word of pain was agonisingly audible. The intricate finger-picking of ‘Poke’, with Hutchinson’s resonant voice intoning wistful ‘oohs’ between verses of exquisite desolation, made me cry (without any poking at my iris…)

But the coarser full-band songs had their own potency, despite a few moments when enthusiastic guitar riffs overwhelmed the finer complexities of lyrical beauty. This was a forceful, crisp and lucid gig, truly worthy of a band now deservedly selling out venues off the back of their first release on a major label with their fourth album, Pedestrian Verse. Tracks from this record were vigorous and robust, but I still think the visceral ache of their second, The Midnight Organ Fight, remains Frightened Rabbit’s best work. It clinches the longed-for condition of an indie rock band – that blurry curtain-opening moment of emotional nakedness when all the horrors of the drunken night before hit you square in the stomach, combined with the ability to face that moment with a musical dignity that makes it all worthwhile.

There was, perhaps inevitably, some of that simple, instinctive emotion missing from the live show. Pedestrian Verse as an album has more of a balance between the brutally personal and the universally contemplative – similarly, the band seem to have a more detached live presence than when I saw them at 2000 Trees festival two years ago. But with that detachment comes musical tightness and an overall coherent eloquence to the set. There is nothing humdrum or prosaic about Frightened Rabbit’s foray into the ‘pedestrian’. Quite the contrary: they have a sinewy power and subtle originality that is thoroughly deserving of the new disciples they will acquire from this landmark tour. The very fact that they deal in ‘not heroic acts of man’ is what paradoxically makes them great – not heroic perhaps, but better for that: discerning, elemental and refreshingly emotionally honest.

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Book launch: protecting the primates at Barbican's conservatory

King Bruno by Paul Glynn

Barbican Conservatory, Wednesday 6^th February

In aid of the Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, Sierra Leone

Walking into the Barbican’s conservatory, atmospherically lit to illuminate palm tree fronds and enliven birds of paradise, I could almost convince myself I was in Sierra Leone’s heady, breathing forests, a chimpanzee watching me from the camouflaging shadows. If you’ve been to the conservatory in the daytime, you’ll know that the plants don’t quite succeed in disguising the building’s brutalist concrete architecture – the place is an uncomfortable juxtaposition of organic oasis and urban asceticism. But at night, the ugly linear austerity recedes and the flora flourishes.

A perfect setting, then, for an evening celebrating the work of Sierra Leone’s Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, founded twenty years ago by the then-accountant Bala Amarasekaran. Bala’s adoption of one orphaned chimpanzee lead inexorably to his rescuing myriad more and working tirelessly against the chimpanzee pet and meat trades. King Bruno is Paul Glynn's gentle, honest account of that first adopted chimp. Through Bruno’s eyes, we witness his happy but conflicted life with Bala, his endurance through the terrors of the Sierra Leonean civil war and his flight from the sanctuary into the wild (which has now become the potent stuff of local legend).

A particularly brilliant passage was read at the launch by Aminatta Forna, one of Sierra Leone’s most celebrated writers (her exquisite novel The Memory of Love is an intricate, elegiac lament on the catastrophic trauma wreaked in her country by the civil war). Forna's astute reading brought out all the elements of humour, bemusement and poignancy in the young Bruno’s accidental poo on Bala’s carpet:

He wanted to be human, clean and dainty. And so, when he turned around one day and saw the neat, perfect poo he had left on the carpet, Bruno grunted anxiously.

In the forest, no-one would have minded. In the forest, you went to the toilet anywhere, as long as it wasn’t in your own nest. You could even pick your poo up and throw it around.

Bruno had lived in Bala and Sharmila’s house for nearly a year now, and he had never once seen Bala throw his own poo around. […] Bruno fidgeted. He had to do something about it before Bala returned home. Then he remembered. Upstairs, in a small room, stood a bowl with a puddle of water and a roll of paper beside it. He panted in excitement, dashed up the stairs and grabbed the paper. […]

It was harder than it looked. The roll of toilet paper was big and Bruno’s hands were small. When he wiped at his poo, it just seemed to spread everywhere. But in the end it was gone. The carpet was brown and sticky and piles of brown paper lay everywhere. Bruno clapped and jumped up and down. Bala would be happy.

Bala wasn’t happy.

The book is written for children but it holds just as much appeal for adults - I was captivated by its subtle, elegant, wonderfully humane tone that reminds us just how similar chimps and people really are. Bruno’s view of the world is at once faithfully animalistic and engagingly anthropomorphic – the narrative naturally elicits our empathy but simultaneously divorces us from our blinkered human outlook, reminding us just how contrary our baffling species must seem. This is a hugely important book for raising our awareness of the plight of these animals, with an authentic, sincere appeal to the heart that is more effective than any list of facts about the threats to chimpanzee populations (which are horrifying). King Bruno brings to life a chimpanzee whose voice is as unique and believable as the horse narrating Michael Morpurgo's War Horse. We can only hope Handspring Puppet Company pick it up, marvel at the writing and the beautiful illustrations (also done by the author) and turn it into their next theatrical masterpiece.

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Post script:

Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary’s work has now extended beyond its own boundaries, and the High Commissioner to Sierra Leone announced at the launch that, thanks to Bala’s indefatigable efforts, the forests around Tacugama are to become protected National Park. So hopefully Tacugama will soon be able to release more chimps to join their King Bruno in the knowledge that the wild is a safe place for them to thrive. And in the meantime, thank god that there are self-sacrificing souls like Bala among our truly baffling species.

For more information about Tacugama Chimpanzee Sanctuary, see here.
Also, there's a great little Q&A with author Paul Glynn here.