25 February 2020. Dances at a Gathering and The Cellist at ROH

Originally sold as New Marston, new Scarlett, the latter was postponed and substituted by Dances at a Gathering, choreographed by Jerome Robbins. It is a very soothing, transporting 65 minutes  offering mainly pairs of dancers to display their talents to the piano music of Chopin. The various pieces are mainly abstract but with some a storyline clearly applies - e.g., a reluctant boyfriend. I'm not sure it is something that will linger in my mind for many weeks but it certainly provided a contrast with quotidien life.
The Cellist is the new work by Cathy Marston covering the life of Jacqueline du Pre (Lauren Cuthbertson). The incredibly clever innovation was having her cello represented by a dancer (Marcelino Sambe). This enabled a very moving portrayal of an eternal triangle between the musician, the cello and her husband (Matthew Ball). The 65 minutes of this piece passed quickly (more rapidly than the Dances I thought), and left me with a feeling of sadness - evoked by the cello anyway and magnified by the choreography.
Overall, this was a memorable evening and the dancers gained well-deserved applause, as did the pianist for the first piece and cellist for the second.

24 February 2020. Pass Over at the Kiln

This new play by Antoinette Nwandu received a good review in the FT and so I made a booking. I was surprised at how easy it was to get a ticket and how many empty seats there were on the night. This seemed a shame as it is a very interesting play, excellently acted and staged.
The two central characters, Moses (Paapa Essiedu) and Kitch (Gershwyn Eustache jnr) spend the days and nights sparring with each other in a way that feels endlessly repetitive - the playwright makes clear its roots in Becket's Godot. The focus of their attention is the Police (po-pos) who pick upon and humiliate black men like them. Their day is interrupted by the arrival of Mister - a white preppy young man who has lost his way to his mother. There follows an interchange punctuated by misunderstandings (e.g., the young man's name is Master), after which he departs.The same actor re-appears as a policeman (ossifer) and the play proceeds to it's grim conclusion with the re-appearnce of Mister who denies all knowledge of encountering the two men earlier, draws a gun and shoots Moses dead.
This was a sobering 80 minutes, brilliantly acted and I ended up buying the text to re-visit some of the subtleties I felt I had probably missed along the way.

20 February 2020. Nora: A Doll's House at the Young Vic

I really liked this clever production which split Nora's role into three. One was from 1918 whose undoing was a loan agreement; the second was 1968 who had a credit card debt and the third was contemporary with a payday loan. They had the deportment of their eras but their issues were the same. So too was the essential attitude of the controlling husband - played by just the one Luke Norris. Whilst his diction altered to suit the era, his controlling and essentially unsympathetic attitude remained the same - both to his wife and to his employee who was to be made redundant at Christmas time.
The synchronisation between the three Nora's coming in and out of role and also adopting the role of the friend was faultless, and also not a distraction. I found the whole 105 minutes engaging and I was gripped to see the story unfold. The critics were united in their three stars which seemed to me ungenerous.

19 February 2020. Acosta Danza Up Close at ROH

This evening at the Linbury with the dancers of Carlos Acosta's company lived up to its name in the intimate setting of the Linbury. From my seat in Row D the dancers seemed a towering presence with the very effective lighting that was employed.
The evening consisted of five pieces as follows:
El cruce sobre el Niagara. Two male dancers, the one taking a few minutes to cross to the other and then dancing together to the music of Messiaen. Dressed only in thongs, this was arresting imagery.
Impronta. This piece for a solo female concluded the first half of the evening. It was brief and felt a bit like an exhibition piece.
Soledad. This very clear story of a love-hate couple opened the second half. It had its amusements but seemed a bit obvious to me.
Mundo Interpretado. I like this quite abstract piece for six dancers. I'm not sure why the reviews I read took against it but there we are.
Two. This solo by Costa himself rounded off the evening. The lighting was incredible, putting him into a tube with the trace of his limbs moving almost as if they had lights attached.

11 February 2020. Far Away at the Donmar

This Caryl Churchill play certainly forces the audience to puzzle out what exactly is going on. It starts out fairly straightforwardly with a child coming downstairs in the middle of the night to her Aunt and telling her about the scene of violence she has witnessed outside in the farmyard. We surmise she is staying with the Aunt and Uncle to escape a war going on. She is sworn to secrecy by the Aunt and we move with an enormous jolt to the next scene. Here we are in a workshop with two people making hats - a man and a woman. The woman is new to it and we are left wondering is this the girl grown up? They are very elaborate/ theatrical, Ascot-like hats and we see their two creations in various stages of assembly. Next we switch to the most arresting scene of the evening - a parade of prisoners in prison garb but also wearing hats, including the two we have seen being made. This is an extraordinary scene, with a concentration camp resonance to it. The prisoners are arrayed on a dual-layered platform before, we learn, being burned with their hats - except for the winning hat which goes to a museum. This time the winner is the creation of the woman in the workshop.
We then switch scenes again completely and have two woman and a man (query aunt, niece and uncle) discussing the progress of the world at war in which animal species and objects of nature (rivers etc) have taken sides (the elephants are with the Dutch). It is on this surreal note that the play, seemingly abruptly, ends. As usual, some in the audience start clapping before drawing breath, which is a shame because I felt it needed a pause to collect one's thoughts. Anyway, the acting was excellent and deserved more whole-hearted applause than it got from an audience somewhat puzzled and shocked. Equally, the direction by Lyndsey Turner and particularly the design by Lizzie Clachan made this a 45 minutes to remember. It had an Orwellian quality to it and transported us to a world where humans were still living their lives but against an extraordinary backdrop of war. Or, that's what I thought.

10 February 2020 Poet in da corner at Royal Court

This was a high-energy 70 minutes as the story of Debris Stevenson unfolded, told through the vehicle of Dizzee Rascal's music - particularly the album Boy in da corner. The story itself is thought provoking - she is a girl growing up in east London with mormon parents, who by the time the story is told has become a teacher of poetry. As a white girl, she is accused by her old friend SS Vyper (Jammz) of appropriating his stuff and failing to acknowledge its provenance. So we have both the tale of her upbringing and her relationship with her childhood friends (both the specific case and the more general white-black relationship) to think about. All this with the innovative vehicle of grime music in a theatre located in perhaps the most prosperous and privileged London neighborhood.
The more I reflect on it, the more positive I feel, joining the raft of recommending reviewers from the 2018 original and this revival.

8 February 2020. Aisha and Abhaya at the Linbury

This was a visually stunning event that started as a film and turned to dance after about quarter of an hour before reverting briefly to film towards the end. The film by Kibwe Tavares showed two refugees washed up on an island - fully dressed and seemingly with a magical box - a memory box. It was beautiful if somewhat confusing (or as the ROH put it, fantastical) to watch, projected across the full size of the front of the stage. Gradually, the group of Rambert dancers was revealed and they took over the action. The choreography by Sharon Eyal was extraordinary and to me felt like looking at movement with a strobe - yet there was no strobe. After about 45 minutes the film came back - projected on the rear of the stage and the dancers left. This revealed a gunman killing the girls' grandmother, thereby explaining their fleeing.
The critics reviews were generally an unfavourable two stars, based on the lack of cohesion between the dance and film. This seemed a fair point but each of the two inputs - plus the music by Ori Lichtik and GAIKA - was sufficiently extraordinary to make it a very worthwhile 65 minutes.
The ROH website had a comprehensive synopsis of the piece that explained how the dance and film knitted together with the same characters but this was far from obvious without such explanation.