Vassa - Almeida

For me, they’ve been the most consistent. I haven’t booked for Vassa as it didn’t appeal, as with a few others, but I was very positive on Summer & Smoke, Albion, The Writer, Dance Nation, Lies, Richard II, Three Sisters and The Doctor. I was less enthused by The Twilight Zone and Machinal but that’s an 80% success rate, for me, and that’s better than any other theatre, I think.

Reviews seem to be 2* to (how???) 4* for this.

An email from the Almeida on Tuesday promises a 'new announcement' (tautology?) with 'exciting news'. Hope it's about a play or two rather than building more loos.

Caught the matinee yesterday, and was underwhelmed. A comedy this dark needs infinitely more oomph, and just as important, tonal consistency.

Some spoilers follow. . .

It's clear the director knows this is a comedy, that this isn't a naturalistic drama, because she puts up tongue-in-cheek surtitles at the beginning, declaring the end of capitalism, and swishes back the curtains with a silent movie melodramatic flourish. . .

But from that point on, everybody on stage hits a different tone: Daniella Isaacs is comically serious, Michael Gould is seriously comic, Cyril Nri is comically comic, Alexandra Dowling is seriously serious, Siobhan Redmond is dispassionately amoral, and Amber James is amorally dispassionate.

Of all the tones, Amber James' amoral dispassionate commentary on the blackly comic cruelty and greed all around her hold the most promise, setting up her character as a kind of Edmund Blackadder, spelling out and mocking the foibles of the fools all around her. But nothing is sustained, no tone stays constant, laughs are squandered.

What you need, I think, was a zanier director, someone like Hideki Noda, who specialises in directing post-modern shows where he and Kathryn Hunter ignore and scream at each other, as if in a dystopian CeeBeebies, over pop music din. I can imagine Noda blasting out the Benny Hill theme tune as the "capitalist greed" gets increasingly farcical, and all the actors would hype up their performances into anti-naturalistic overdrive. It wouldn't be likeable, but you'd never forget it.

Unlike this, which fades in your memory the moment you step out of the theatre.

Danny Kirrane never puts a foot wrong here, as he veers from aggression to playfulness, and eventually regresses to repeating words like they are comfort blankets.

But it's telling that Kirane's performance in "Jerusalem," in which he ruthlessly sponged from Mark Rylance's Rooster Byron every materialistic benefit he could get out of him, was a far more effective and memorable take-down of our materialist society than anything that Leninist Gorky, and his acolyte Mike Bartlett, manage here.

2 and a half stars for being a real curio, destined never to be seen again! :0

Sweet really. 

I wonder if this script had come in from anyone other than Mike Bartlett whether Rupert Goold would have allowed it anywhere near an audience, or at least not without requiring extensive re-writes ? Eventually even very good ADs become over-indulgent of their star writers - there are many examples, mostly involving the NT.

I have seen many plays by Gorky, there is no doubt they pose challenges but there are several ways of doing them: I've seen very good productions that treat them as if they actually were by Chekhov, or as sweeping cinematic large-scale historical/political dramas, or as small-scale social realist/kitchen sink dramas. Bartlett however goes for farcical black comedy. For a start this is a very hard genre to succeed in - look how few good revivals of Joe Orton plays we get - but having chosen he then fails dismally in its execution. This is just not funny. For example, he puts in (or retains) jokes about a woman being fat. Are we meant to laugh at the joke itself (presumably not), or in a superior way about the ignorant character telling the joke ? Or (and this is what happens) is the entire audience meant to sit in uncomfortable silence while 2 or 3 audience members laugh loudly ? I remember a Howard Davies production of another Gorky play where this problem was very well-handled. Sadly the direction here is really weak and inconsistent and the problem remains.

This is another error by Goold, handing this script to a younger inexperienced director does them and us no favours at all. I could just about see the script working in a Richard Jones expressionistic cartoon-like production and Cyril Nri actually delivers a performance from that production, but the other actors, cast adrift, choose their own styles from realism, to broad comedy, to camp melodrama.

Plenty of leavers at the interval - "That's an hour and fifteen minutes of my life I'll never get back" announced one person as they departed. On occasions like this I always feel sorry for the actors at the curtain call facing the polite smattering of applause - they know and we know, this was a turkey. Meanwhile, elsewhere, well away from this, Goold and Bartlett are planning their next West End triumph.

Funny thing, foxa and Doc, I noticed that too. Very odd and unpleasant and deliberate. But to what end? The whole shebang was dreadful.

"I remember a Howard Davies production of another Gorky play where this problem was very well-handled."

Are you sure it wasn't the Almeida's last production of Vassa, which he directed? In the west end, with Sheila Hancock and David Tennant. I remember enjoying that, but I'd never have guessed it was the same play. That said, I quite liked this, mainly for its expressionism; the Almeida is one of the few theatres to have produced expressionistic plays over the last decade or so.

Don't disagree, though I liked the set: so ugly. Didn't see the Lyumibovs. I love a bit of expressionism. I thought the thing at the National with Adam Godley and a big clock and bicycles, which many people hated - German I think (of course) - was fantastic.

I saw this last night ( Monday) there were a lot of empty seats ( hence the" Islington First" price scale still being offered. I agree with most everyone on here that it was pretty much a dud in every department. Ms Redmond is a good actor but not great, and the role needs someone great, but the play ( or at least this adaptation of it ) needs a strong director who can fuse the farcical and political elements together through the actors performances and the design. A failure on all counts. Also the programme was utterly useless. The two essays one about strong women in drama and the other about life juat before the revolution in Russia were rather generic in what knowledge and insight that they offered. Better the notes should've been about THIS play. When has it been done? Why isn't it done more often (well we found that out by watching it.) After the interval there were many many more seats available and the side sections of the Circle were virtually empty. The audience response was decidedly muted.