Review: Peter Pan, Meridian Gardens

STAGE
Peter Pan, Meridian Gardens, The O2
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
The family favourite is brought bang up to date with hi-tech wizardry that takes you on the same high-flying journey as the puck-ish hero.

REVIEW
Discussing movies recently, director Sam Mendes said: "They asked me if I was excited about the possibilities of 3D production. I said that I already do 3D. It's called theatre."

Peter Pan at Meridian Gardens is pitched squarely at achieving the best of both worlds.

This technically intriguing production of JM Barrie's classic combines the usual fly-by-wire work with set designer William Dudley's impressive 360 degree digital CGI panorama projected on to the roof of a tent, which sits like a mini-me beside The O2.

So when Peter takes the jittery children out of Kensington Gardens towards Neverland, we all take the same swooping, swaying, exhilarating Poppins-esque journey above London, swerving left to avoid the dome of St Paul's and ducking low to avoid cracking our heads on Tower Bridge. The effect is that of a Disney Studios ride and it earned spontaneous applause.

And it doesn't end there. We're underwater suddenly, or we're ducking a cannonball or we're sitting pretty amid in a colourful island setting.

So this is a perfect production for those kids who can't absorb anything that doesn't come in pixels. But, happily, director Ben Harrison doesn't fall back on the technical wizardry to swing the deal.

In fact, the puppets - Nanny et al - are delightfully lo-fi Heath Robinson affairs, with an air of charm that eludes the digital world. The crocodile is no more than a chicken coop with attitude but when the thing sees off Hook and belches with sonorous majesty, no-one's checking out its physiology for human appendages.

The cast aims to match the technical theatrics in a very physical, gung-ho production*.

Everyone's forever ducking and diving and stamping and soaring and the choreography and staging makes for a slick big top spectacle. The sacrifice is some of the charm and intimacy of the play - another whooping gimmick is often substituted for childish wonder and motion replaces emotion as the driving force.

Still, we have Jonathan Hyde stealing the show as a raffish Captain Hook and a game Abby Ford as a winning Wendy. Ciaran Kellgren's bouncy Peter can be little more than a cipher but Sandra Maturana makes a nod to more modern sensibilities with a tomboyish Tinkerbell.

The pirates and the Lost Boys bring a brutish bang, crash and wallop to the piece counterbalanced by two ethereal mermaids who beguile with their swishy mid-air gymnastics.

The vast tent affair is a blessing and a curse. There's something of a magical winter wonderland about the whole place - foyer and all - but the acoustics are shot and, occasionally, it's difficult to pick out what the characters are saying, especially as the show's in the round. Meanwhile, aeroplanes coming into London City Airport remind the audience that flying isn't all wishful thinking and a hundred feet of unencumbered leg room.

But this is a jolly, upbeat, energetic production, not as involving as a pantomime, not as distant as a play. Barrie's nostalgia for childhood may be swamped but his boyish quest for adventure finds a next-gen outlet (there's even a neat nod to The Matrix's "bullet-time").

Of course, there is an important public safety message in there as well. It was a close run thing with Tinkerbell the night I went but we managed to turn it around in time. People, you've got to start reaffirming your belief in fairies on a regular basis otherwise we're looking at a significant loss of life over the next few weeks.

- Peter Pan runs at Meridian Gardens until January 10. Go to The O2's website.

* At this point, I was contractually obliged to use the phrase "the action is in tents" but I think I found a loophole.

Review: Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Novello

STAGE
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, Novello Theatre
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Debbie Allen updates Tennessee Williams' 1955 tale of a Southern family confronting secrets and lies over the course of Big Daddy's 65th birthday.

REVIEW
Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, set in the American South, took me to Albert Square, circa Christmas 1985.

There, amid a cascade of domestic feuding, Queen Vic landlady Angie might or might not have a fatal cancer. Den knows the truth but is keeping quiet till he can play his hand to best advantage.
Although it is Dallas rather than EastEnders that has inspired director Debbie Allen's update on Tennessee Williams' savage tale of family strife, the question mark over mortality is the same engine of revelation.

Millionaire Big Daddy's impending death, or otherwise, galvanises his family into action, jostling for position to take advantage of the grumpy old coot's abrogation from tyranny.

Bitter poison courses through this family. Big Daddy is addled by rogue cells, Brick, the favoured son, is mindlessly adrift on a sea of alcohol while offspring and in-laws circle with schemes and strategies to win favours and to do their rivals down.

Big Daddy barks at these incessant upstarts, swatting them away like a big-pawed lion with its cubs but, in the hands of velvety James Earl Jones, the patriarch withholds the fatal bite. He humiliates his wife Big Mama (a grandly brassy turn from Phylicia "Mrs Cosby" Rashad) but she lives in hope that her devotion will win back his approval and Jones always leaves enough to suggest reconciliation is possible.

Freed - he believes - from the curse of cancer, Jones's Big Daddy laughs like a birthday boy, hip thrusts and rolls like a vulgarian and melts at the sight of his son's self-destruction - setting up a touching, if fleeting, moment of empathy between the two brusque masters of indifference.

Brick (Adrian Lester) is the quiet epicentre of the play. He is strangely absent, caught in a world of sulky evasion, dwelling on his doomed friendship with his friend, Skipper, and its unpalatable implications for his sexuality.

Even (and perhaps inevitably) the sinuous attentions of frustrated Maggie the Cat, (a sultry and superb Sanaa Lathan), cannot stir her husband to rouse himself either for her or for the pursuit of his inheritance. Lester finds what he can in the role although his hard-won breakdown fails to deliver the catharsis that the ominous tone had promised.

Director Debbie Allen may be more comfortable with belly laughs than gut-punches and has about her a cast with the same outlook (Richard Blackwood and Derek Griffiths have walk-ons) but this is still a powerful and intermittently moving interpretation - lyrical and endlessly fascinating.

In other revivals, Lathan and Lester would have taken the curtain. Here it could only be Jones and Rashad, evoking wonder and warmth with or without a script.

Oh... and this an all-black cast. Did I not mention that? Doesn't seem important now.

Review: Nation, National Theatre

STAGE
Nation
Olivier, National Theatre
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In Mark Ravenhill's action-packed adaptation of Terry Pratchett's novel two teenagers meet on a storm-ravaged island and must learn to survive.

REVIEW
I checked my watch. It was still going on. It had been going on for a considerable while and would be, according to the box office, continuing to go on long after my watch had drizzled Dali-style over my wrist through sheer fatigue.

The boy in the row in front checked his Transformers timepiece. His mother then checked anxiously on the boy and asked him for the fifth time if he was having a good time and he probably was.

Only... only there comes a time when a good time overstays its time and the boy was looking at his wristwatch and eking out his Wispa bar, fearing he may need to pace his sugar intake to see him through to the end.

There is nothing wrong with Nation. Well, there is, but we'll come to that. But there's nothing hang-your-hat-on-a-disaster, holed-below-the-waterline catastrophic about this colourful and energetic production which tells, by way of metaphorical Micronesian microcosm, the stumbling steps that unfettered humans must take to create a nation - language, law, governance, rituals, science and so on.

The story of civilisation is told by a shipwrecked Victorian girl Daphne (a spirited and delightful Emily Taaffe) and an earnest loin-clothed boy-man Mau (Gary Carr in fine fettle) who stand together, alone, on a storm-ravaged island in a parallel world in 1860 and set about the task of reinvention - of themselves and the world around them.

OK, so that makes it sound Worthy with a capital W - but, on the flipside, there's a big puppet warthog and starchily amusing grandmamma and the Gentlemen of Last Resort and blood-thirsty sharks and vertical waves and shipwrecks and swaying grass skirts and gunshots and comic asides and cultural allusions and musical numbers and director Melly Still's dazzling - I mean really dazzling - effects projected onto three mighty screens and some committed performances from an all-round jolly and likeable cast.

But... but it's too much. It sprawls like a louche cad on a chaise longue.

Based on Terry Pratchett's stand-alone novel and scripted by Mark Ravenhill, its 2hr 25min length, I suppose, gives heft to its purpose - which has a deep sense of (po-facedly PC) morality and it trundles between heavyweight concepts such as colonialism and faith and gender and race and, I guess, if I were 13 I would think myself mighty clever to have stayed the course.

But I would have preferred some characters with foibles and wit, rather than mouthpieces on a mission, and I would have liked to have seen my heroes overcome a series of escalating and well-defined obstacles that inspired tension and thoughts of adventure and I would have wished that one piece of peril fit naturally with the next without the need for a shoehorn or a shotgun.

And I would have liked a lot more of the warthog and a lot less of Milton the parrot who said 'boobies' and 'knickers'. (He stopped being funny in the first act and became a lame plaster to cover a general dearth of whimsy.)

And I wouldn't want anyone giving birth on stage (especially not to a puppet) and I'd be concluding, round about the third wailing contraction, that, on the whole, a lot less would have have meant a lot more.

Review: Ordinary Thunderstorms, by William Boyd

BOOK
Ordinary Thunderstorms, by William Boyd
Bloomsbury, £11.99
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Boyd explores the nature of identity in this thriller about a man hidden in plain sight on the streets of London.

REVIEW
Author William Boyd has a beguiling habit of taking the architecture of genre fiction and then twisting expectations sufficiently to create an original and nourishing read.

Ordinary Thunderstorms is a case in point. The essential plot is not a million miles away from, say, The 39 Steps. Adam Kindred is in the wrong place at the wrong time, stumbles on a bloodied corpse and has to go "off grid" to evade arrest or his own murder while he pulls together enough evidence to clear his name and nail the bad guys.

However Boyd has used this premise as a means of exploring the nature of identity in an age when we are triangulated, barcoded and photographed every second of the day.

Kindred is the innocent who loses everything in a conspiracy to cover up the dubious results of a new asthma drug. In acquiring new identities, Kindred becomes one of the shifting faceless masses of immigrants and underclass wastrels who swash about unnoticed beneath the shining towers.

Boyd makes a point of placing this novel firmly in the capital. From the sink estates of Rotherhithe to affluent Chelsea apartments, he explores, with a restless eye, the social accommodation Londoners make as a matter of course.

Review: I Found My Horn, Hampstead Theatre

STAGE
I Found My Horn
Hampstead Theatre
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Jonathan Guy Lewis brings to life Jasper Rees's comic memoir about his epic wrestle with the orchestra's toughest instrument.

REVIEW
You look at the title - I Found My Horn - and you think... I hope they don't (I know they're going to but...) but I hope they don't go there too often.

I mean, we have the BBC Light Programme back catalogue for all that. But, it's an easy laugh. That whole horn=instrument=genitalia arena is vast and encompassing and accommodating. It's vulgar enough yet safe enough... but I just hope they don't...

... and they do. A little. Writer Jasper Rees, co-author and actor Jonathan Guy Lewis and director Harry Burton do a little (I guess, ultimately, you have to).

Just enough so they acknowledge to the audience what the audience already knows. Because the audience is divided into those who had told chums they were going to see I Found My Horn and laced the telling with a lascivious beer-lashed snigger and those who just said they were going to the theatre to see a piece about Mozart.

So Rees and Lewis and Burton do a little. But mostly it is a more sophisticated anthropological take on the horn=instrument=genitalia metaphor with the horn being the mojo. The self-possession. The joie de vivre. The lust for life. The ramrod proud prow of a defeated man... (See? See where it takes you if you're not careful?)

And it is funny and moving and musical and actor Jonathan Guy Lewis gives spit and texture in his recreation of a cast of characters from Jasper Rees's memoir of the same name (although, interestingly, renamed A Devil To Play in the US which suggests the US was deprived of the BBC Light Programme).

The story is this. Jasper Rees abandoned the French horn as soon as his parents stopped nagging him. Some 25 years later, the 40something man finds himself accommodating his truculent kids at weekends while he comes to terms with a divorce and a feeling that he has yet to make his mark.

The French horn is notoriously difficult so he announces (mostly to himself) that he will play Mozart's Horn Concerto No.3 K.447 at the following year's annual shindig for the British horn elite.

And we take the journey, back in time to patronising music teachers, and up to date with plain-spoken mentor Dave Lee and inspiring professionals at US horn camp (See? See what happens?) and we experience his doubt become courage become doubt again before flowering into the keenest form of courage - courage despite doubt.

Lewis can play too. A glint in his eye when he's making pleasantly discordant mistakes and a full-on gung-ho passion for the final rendition. He earns applause in the same way that plumbers earn a cuppa. It's hard graft, digging it out, making it flow against the odds.

If the story is simplistic and shallow in places it also means the production never tries too hard to be something it isn't. This ensures the finale is affecting, funny and wonderfully satisfying.

A sharp comedy, you could say, if you like your puns.

Review: An Education (12A)

FILM
An Education (12A)
5/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Nick Hornby tells the story of a teenage girl's seduction into a world of glamour by a conman who promises her relief from stifling suburbia.

REVIEW
Don't blink, said the Timelord in a memorable Doctor Who episode back in 2007. Blink and you're dead, he tells Sally Sparrow, played by 22-year-old newcomer Carey Mulligan. Don't look away.

Two years later. You can't blink. Not when she's on-screen. You can't look away. You look away and you're dead - well, maybe not dead but certainly deflated - because, without her, the world of the early 60s, as portrayed by screenwriter Nick Hornby and director Lone Scherfig, is drenched in brown and rain and misery as if the projectionist had spilt coffee on the reel stack then wept over his cack-handed ineptitude.

So you fix your gaze on Carey Mulligan because she entrances and delights and sparkles with such refreshing, uncluttered intelligence that you think - hang the expense I'm building a time machine and heading to Twickenham c.1961 so I can save her from suburban travails and show her a world of music and sex and art and culture.

Then, with the money left over, I'm turning Paris monochrome so it looks like her posters and her album covers and her dreams and she won't ever be disappointed.

And in case your bank manager baulks at the cost, you can show him exactly how that would play out - because that's roughly the story behind An Education (only without the time machine. Or me).

Carey, as Jenny, is being pushed towards Oxford by proud-as-punch parents Jack and Marjorie whose ambitions for their daughter comprise security, fearlessness and a good match in an era in which advancement for women was achieved to the syncopated click-clack of a secretary's Remington.

When dubious, wealthy, man-about-town David (Peter Sarsgaard) asks Mum and Dad to take their 16-year-old away for the weekend, he beguiles them with a vision of colourful and abundant adventure and they immediately chuck thoughts of Oxford over the herbaceous border and convert the stranger into a prospect of equal worth.

But this is no simple story of an ingénue corrupted. When Jenny learns that her parents are not alone in being misled, she becomes complicit in her own seduction, preferring disreputable glamour to double maths, cello practice and a life marking pony essays, like teacher Miss Stubbs (a sternly moving Olivia Williams).

This is an exquisite production. Carey Mulligan shines but Alfred Molina as Jack emerges as the most endearing of the characters as he attempts to manage his daughter's life like she were a wayward lawnmower, forever under- and over-compensating to nail that perfect nap.

Cara Seymour as Marjorie scrubs the pans, sees her daughter aglow and, with a glance, mourns what she has missed. Because the stifling limitations of the era crush lungs and shrink horizons to the size of teacups while twee suburbia is as sweet and brutal as a smack in the face from a paramilitary bon-bon.

Hornby wrings melodic apercus from journalist Lynn Barber's memoir and, together with a cast that includes sterling turns from Emma Thompson, Rosamund Pike and Dominic Cooper, he wraps up a perfect little package that makes a mockery of its modest ambition.

Undoubtedly, the film of the year.

Review: The Invention Of Air

BOOK
The Invention Of Air, by Steven Johnson
Penguin, £9.99
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Steven Johnson examines the life of Enlightenment genius Joseph Priestley, an unassuming man with a vast impact.

REVIEW
Joseph Priestley was a towering figure of Enlightenment England. Briefly a resident of Hackney, this free-thinking natural philosopher made significant contributions in the fields of science, politics and religion that, individually, would have secured his place in the pantheon of revolutionaries.

The fact that he is perhaps not so well known as this country's almost mythical thinkers - a Darwin or a Newton - is maybe a result of his self-effacing way. He was a great believer in open networks of information and his method of working was haphazard and driven by amateur curiosity rather than the obsessional measurement of incremental change.

His most notable discovery - that of oxygen - was perhaps not even his own, as author Steven Johnson suggests. And, as it was accompanied by a wholly discredited fellow travelling theory of phlogiston, it makes his claim more murky, even though he could now be considered the father of the terribly trendy science of eco-systems.

Author Steven Johnson paints a picture of the controversialist as a naïf, skipping lightly through arenas of received wisdom, upsetting apple carts and then looking on aghast at what he had done. He appeared not to recognise the incendiary products of his radical opinions.

But eventually his views, particularly on religion and his founding of the Unitarian church, became unpalatable and he was forced to flee the country, pursued by the rabble - only to stir up more trouble in his new home across the Atlantic.

New Yorker Johnson has written a book for a US audience. Alongside the usual semantic differences, Johnson has need to explain something of Britain and, wherever possible, pulls in some US figure of renown as a measuring stick against which to mark Priestley's worth. Johnson rushes to Benjamin Franklin whenever he is able and they share the book's early chapters like a double act.

However, this can be forgiven if only because Priestley was one of Britain's finest exports to the colonies.

The polymath spent his last years in the US, a confidante - and critic - of presidents and their policies, and even after his death his previous correspondence ignited an exchange of letters between his friends Thomas Jefferson and John Adams that to this day stand as an vital insight into the trials of building a country on a foundation of liberty.

Johnson's book is a compelling read and his Priestley is a revelation. One note of detraction though - while Johnson attempts to embrace the whole gamut of human inquiry provide great insight, they leave his attempts to stitch together the contradiction of the great man undeveloped.

Whereas great men write of Priestley's impact and can recall decades later their briefest exchanges, Johnson struggles to encapsulate the aspects of his character that made him so memorable.

Priestley's thoughts may have made a profound impact on the 18th century but, frustratingly, Priestley the man treads lightly through these pages.

Review: The Power Of Yes, Lyttelton

STAGE
The Power Of Yes, Lyttelton Theatre
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Political playwright David Hare dramatises his own exploration of the banking crisis with input from insiders, experts and observers.

REVIEW
Apparently, those boxes the ousted employees of Lehman Brothers carted across Reuters Plaza last year were full of Milky Ways and Mars Bars.

Not, as we had fondly imagined, folders packed with bonkers currency trade contracts or kneelers neatly embroidered with the Black Scholes formula for valuing stock options. The thing is, you see, the Lehman employees still had credit in the canteen when the curtain fell and, like all good bankers, they weren't leaving without their money's worth.

We learnt this from Masa Serdarevic, a 23-year-old banker and refugee from Sarajevo, as played by the delightful Jemima Rooper. She was one of David Hare's guides to that moment in history when the banks had a cardiac arrest, a grand idea died and we all became very much poorer.

Hare - played with unassuming curiosity by Anthony Calf - announced from the start that this wasn't a play, although it was a story.

The re-enactment of his conversations with a variety of experts, onlookers and insiders about the intricacies of credit defaults swaps and sub-prime shenanighans should have had all the allure of a swine flu jab in Gaza but, strangely, cleverly and beguilingly, this half-documentary, half-lecture gained its own dramatic energy and impetus.

While many of the facts are well-known, there was a dramatic tension of sorts offered by the Emperor's New Clothes question. In the midst of all this bingeing and spending and profligacy and stupidity, why did no-one spot calamity?

The answer is they did. It was obvious. But everyone - bankers, politicians, speculators, economists - were too scared to jump off when there was still money to be made. They were hooked. Gordon Brown funded hospitals with the illusion. Bush fought a war. Buccaneers built empires on nothing but air and promises and no-one dared look down.

George Soros refuted Alan Greenspan's warning against "irrational exuberance" declaring that it was perfectly rational to make money when there was money to be made. It was all a matter of timing.

In Hare's version of history, villains emerge, clearly painted. Gordon Brown saw that the financial services provided 27 per cent of the tax take and stuck his moral compass in the bottom drawer.

He established a system where everyone - therefore no-one - was responsible for governing the system and then, when it all went south, stuffed billions of pounds of public money into the gaping wound while flailing around looking for someone to blame.

It was hailed as "a new kind of socialism. Socialism for the rich".

Fred the Shred did the deal because that's what he did and he saw no reason to apologise. Alan Greenspan inflated the market after 9/11 and left the world awash with cheap cash. The cautious old school bankers were abandoned by me-too investors who ran blindly to the false prophets hailed as geniuses even though it was market doing the work.

As a spectacle this was a collage of intersecting interviews and soundbites, assisted by neat staging and a screen illuminated with redolent images of the drama (queues outside Northern Rock etc).

In charge of this kaleidoscope was director Angus Jackson who gave room on the cavernous stage for each to say his or her piece before the next insight promptly arrived and was efficiently delivered.

The actors are proficient in their albeit limited roles. Jeff Rawle, Jonathan Coy, Richard Cordery, Peter Sullivan and Claire Price stand out in a vast cast that contributed to an uncomfortable dissection of where it all went wrong.

This was not a pantomime but the villains earned knowing, half-gulped groans from the tax-paying audience while the ugly sisters of greed and fear were given a good kicking.

Sadly, the only available hero in this tragedy was "Harry Hindsight" and a fat lot of bleedin' no good he turns out to be when the bill finally arrives.

Spiral Notebook: Land of the Freeview?

Giles Broadbent, not unlike his Freeview box, has a meltdown about the State's institutional mistrust of its citizens.

So, a while back, when I was supposed to, I retuned my Freeview box. I promptly lost half the channels but they were the poor half so I figured I could live without them.

I could be culturally diverse and read Proust and create shadow puppets and learn the names of the bones of the body. ITV One thru Four had blocked my creativity long enough. This was my liberation.

But then I thought - best do it properly, best try again. And my Freeview box eyed me up and down and let out a plaintive cry as if to say - again? Seriously? Again? We've gone through this routine before and you know how fragile I am, what with my dodgy diodes and crackling cables and that thing I do if you change channels too fast. I'm an 100-year-old in an old people's home - you try to move me, improve me, badger me and I'm pegging out, right here and now in the middle of The Bill and that will just plain ruin your day. How lucky would you feel then, huh, punk?

And its afflictions and ailments were sad but true because, for many days leading up to the upgrade, the box had been pixellating almost everything - so, watching The Bill, I knew who the victim was and I knew who the officer was but the suspects were obliterated which, in some not so far-fetched future, will the norm under a new Data Protection Act making it illegal to possess a face in case it excites a paedophile.

And, so, at the third attempt, like the end of one of the Terminator movies, the little red eye at the front of my Freeview box blinked, issued forth one salty tear and finally died*.

(*One of these actions is a fiction - but not the good one, the useful one, the one that would meant I didn't need to stir myself and spend money and miss The Bill).

But that's not the point. This is the point -

I bought a new Freeview box at Tesco, where interaction, emotional investment and interest are, at best, minimal. However, this time it was different.

I was informed I would have to report my purchase to the licensing authorities. I had to fill out a little form there and then. The thin till girl gave me a fat pen and the little till issued forth a fat form and I had to fill it out while those waiting behind me with overfull trolleys tapped their feet and tore off chunks of French bread for sustenance.

So between packing away my Covent Garden Soup Company Leek and Potato and Tropicana Orange With Bits and Bachelors Original Mushy Peas, I told Gordon Brown that I was planning to replace a broken Freeview box and was that alright with him. Sorry to disturb and all that. Know you're busy.

And I thought this has gone too far. Seriously. They're hunting me down in Tesco now. I can't purchase a simple electronic device - a replacement for one that went before - without alerting the all pervading system to my activities.

Why could they not - I mean - why could they not - here's a thing, just a little thing - why could they not, I don't know, like - trust me or something?

Why could they not assume that the chances are that I wasn't a felon, a tax dodger, an itinerant, a gangmaster, a safe-cracker, a lowlife, an off-the-grid runaway, a ducker, a diver, a skiver, a shyster? Why could they not do that?

I mean, they know who I am. Every step I take, every move I make, they're watching me on their cameras. They know when I speed, park askew or for too long, fail to pay just the right amount of council tax (for too much is as tricky as too little).

They know when I haven't filled out my income tax return or beeped my Oyster or stood for too long or too strangely at the kerbside. They know all this. Why do they still want me goaded, perplexed, infuriated, inconvenienced, belittled, humiliated, distracted, delayed at the till at Tesco.

When did their hate become so all-consuming that the last vestiges of humanity went out like the light on the front of - ah, you get the picture.

Leave me alone.

Wouldn't it be easier if the Government fined us all £1,000 by default at the beginning of each week just for being alive and consuming things and having vague thoughts about seasides and teapots and moving from place A to place B and interacting with other humans and all the other activities that indicate we still have a degree of (dammit) freewill.

And then every other Friday we would line up Soviet-style outside the community centre and we would have to plead our case and account for our actions to some bureaucratic numpty in order to reclaim the fine back.

Like, like we could say: We know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but we did applaud your scrappage scheme; or, or we know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but we did buy a house at the second tier of stamp duty; or, or, we know we're inherently evil and unworthy and the State will spend our money more wisely than us but my name is Baroness Scotland and I do declare this is a technical breach.

Is that what they want? Seriously?

At one point between the signing of the Magna Carta and my trip to Tesco to buy a Freeview box did we all sit round the table and fess up like some 12-step alkie that we weren't to be trusted, that there was a power greater than us and it would be best all round if we were treated like habitual offenders who would inevitably transgress.

When did that happen? When did we all become nine-year-old boys in a room with a vase of humbugs teetering on a coffee table edge, requiring of a stern warning, constant monitoring and enclosure in a general fog of mistrust? I didn't get the memo, the vote, the say, the pamphlet, the instruction, the talk, the telling-to, the telling-off.

When did the State start getting in my face about my home entertainment arrangements?

Why can't I - I mean - why can't I go and buy a perfectly normal piece of electronic television-receiving equipment in a dingy Tesco in Beckton without some rat-faced box-ticker in a breeze block office in an industrial estate in Reading twitching and stirring and sniffing the air and deciding that somewhere out there, in the real world, someone was doing something that the State needed to know about? Needed to get involved with. Needed to interfere with. Needed to delay and obstruct.

"Alert! Alert! Someone just did something. We need his form right away. Then we can add him to our database and cross reference him with other things he might have done in case some of them tally and we need him to fill out another form. Or some of them don't tally at all and there's an anomaly and we can fine him.

"Either way, let's monitor this piece of work because somewhere down the line I bet he's the kind of guy who puts out paper on plastic day. In fact, let's fine him for that ahead of time because - excellent - his name's come up on the new £2bn "He'sThatKindaGuy" database which proves my point."

Go away.

Leave me alone.

I just want to watch The Bill and eat unmolested mushy peas. It's not much. Can't you, can't you go next door or start down the other end of the street first or call me on a Sunday afternoon when I was only about to do some washing anyway and I'm grateful for the distraction?

Can't you do your thing and I'll do mine and let's see how we rub along?

How about that? Yes? What do you say?

Review: Prick Up Your Ears, Comedy Theatre

STAGE
Prick Up Your Ears, Comedy Theatre
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Daniel Kramer's new telling of the life and death of Joe Orton and Kenneth Halliwell features a insightful turn by Little Britain star Matt Lucas.

REVIEW
With Alan Bennett's screenplay making Stephen Frears' film and John Lahr's biography drawing on playwright Joe Orton's diaries, the question hangs - why another version of Prick Up Your Ears?

The answer, I guess, is Matt Lucas. A meeting between the playful, bald and camp Little Briton and the similarly attired (if more unstable) Kenneth Halliwell has less the appearance of a happy coincidence than an artistic inevitability.

For this reason alone, it seems, writer Simon Bent attempts a new, if blunted, take on the story of the co-dependent and ultimately fatal relationship between Halliwell and Orton.

Despite a jolly re-creation of their early vulgar playfulness, we all know where it's heading and we monitor Halliwell's leg-jerks, count his Nembutal intake and observe his sweaty perambulations like cod psychiatrists waiting for the moment he blows.

But up until that point this is a game of two halves. The undiscovered pair spend their days writing unpublished works, defacing library books and re-working Mrs Dale's Diary into grubby farce. In this enterprise, Halliwell is the cultured engine of invention, Orton the brusque and unformed mentee.

A spell in prison for the vandalism separates the two and sends their strained partnership on darker and different routes. Orton starts to work alone. He's harder, more focused, more dangerous, more talented. Halliwell, the martyr snob, the babyish brat, is a wreck, popping pills, agoraphobic and fearful of losing Orton.

Their spirit of bawdy excess lingers, though, in the form of landlady Mrs Corden, who pops in occasionally ("Only me!" she screeches). Sitcom staple Gwen Taylor is no stranger to the art of the coy glimpse, the deliberate pause and the ramrod punchline and her broad and lascivious housewife channels Irene Handl by way of Bennett.

Chris New takes Orton on the brisk journey from hedonistic outsider to Swinging Sixties totem with sinuous efficiency. His indulgence of the lachrymose Halliwell is all the more touching after his own heart has been hardened by the hot and cold of literary fortune.

Lucas draws on some rampant forces to bellow and gallop like the raging Halliwell. His performance, as chaos descends, is affecting and rich and there's no shortage of investment in his attempts to deliver the destructive demon dwelling within.

As he sinks further into his jealous rage, craving and loathing his partner, his collages grow up the walls like poison ivy, betraying a frantic and disjointed mind. Designer Peter McKintosh turns the small Islington flat into a fiendish Bedlam predicting the horror that follows.

By the final hammer strike, the cheeky star of Little Britain has been subsumed by something altogether more tangled and tortured. His final stillness, after so much agitation, is all the more disturbing.

The cast features high among the many plus-points of Daniel Kramer's production. But, ultimately, the evening falls just short of the operatic grandeur and forensic insight required to nail the tragedy of two people who forfeit all possible happiness to attend instead to the demeaning rituals of casual cruelty.

Review: A Week In December

BOOK
A Week In December
by Sebastian Faulks
Hutchinson, £12.99
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In an authoritative and biting state of the nation novel, the author aims to capture turbulent times through the eyes of seven characters that typify the times, including a Muslim extremist, a hedge fund manager and a Premiership footballer.

REVIEW
With this commanding state-of-the-nation book with rotten finance at its core, Sebastian Faulks looks to emulate Tom Wolfe without the literary tics.

He takes seven days in the life of the capital in December 2007 and he takes seven characters. He walks in their shoes awhile and watches where their paths cross and, tellingly, where they find no common ground.

Faulks' journalistic background is wonderfully in evidence here, as he negotiates the complex patterns of London, probing a myriad sub-cultures and illuminating strangers with delightful detail. He picks upon the scourges of our age - a hedge fund manager, a druggie, a suicide bomber, a Premiership footballer - and uses their lives to paint a grander picture of end-of-empire indulgence.

Although he is dryly efficient in his prose Faulks rouses himself to glorious indignation to unleash a bitterly comic satire, savaging contemporary betes noires like education, reality TV and the internet. Yet amid his wicked comedy, he still finds the warmth in the heart of even the most deluded and venal of his septet.

Faulks dances across the big themes of the day with such thoroughness there is little doubt this will become required reading when future generations come to wonder where it all went very wrong.

Review: Breakfast At Tiffany's

STAGE
Breakfast At Tiffany's,
Theatre Royal Haymarket
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Sean Mathias directs a playful Anna Friel in the iconic role of good-time girl Holly Golightly.

REVIEW
Anna Friel is a conqueror of worlds. She conquered TV, here and in the US, she conquered movies and now she has magnificently conquered the West End.

Unquestioned acting talent aside, this may be because Friel has a sweet and winning way. She is not boringly beautiful, instead she is an attractive, feline and playful presence. This ensures the role of generous good-time girl Holly Golightly fits her like a rather stylish hat atop a perfectly tailored dress.

That's not to say her performance does not require work - she sings, she plays the guitar, she dances, she maintains a Texan accent, she traipses around naked - but such is her rich accrual of experience, she trips through this multi-tasking with winsome ease.

Against this star turn, William Parsons has a far more arduous and gritty job, forever twirling in the perfumed wake of his enigmatic love.

Joseph Cross puts in the hard yards to keep up. He deserves great credit for supporting the structure of the play on his shoulders and from an overwrought beginning, he brings light and depth to the young writer.

Sean Mathias's production is closer to the Truman Capote original novella than the spritely Audrey Hepburn remake and Friel is perfectly adept at drawing out the heartache behind the smile that is Holly's crowded secret.

Notable among an army of support is James Dreyfus as Hollywood schmuck OJ Berman. Dreyfus gives a broad and entertaining comic cameo perfectly attuned to the '40s screwball motif running through the piece. Dermot Crowley is a neat portrayal of battered desire as barman Joe Bell and Suzanne Bertish gives Madame Spanella a fruity edge for laughs.

Special mention also to Jasper the cat which, although required to do very little, did what it was supposed to do and, crucially, didn't do what it wasn't.

The story centres on the writer's enchantment by a Texan rose with a prickly past who has come to New York seeking excitement and glamour.

Her freewheeling, carefree flirtation with dangerous cads is destined to catch up with her but she keeps her inevitable - and moving - downfall at bay with a balancing act of evasion, charm and puckish high jinx.

The plot is urgent and demanding, and Antony Ward's design requires jack-in-the-box tricks to keep up the frenetic pace of the story.

Two zig-zag fire escapes waltz across the multi-level stage and there's forever something going on, up there, down here, over there. Cinematic in structure, scenes collide, come and go in an instant and nothing lingers for long.

This is, I suppose, to capture the elusive and teasing nature of the minxy main character but, boy, do you have to keep your wits about you.

The early scenes are crammed to the gills and it is only later that everything settles to an accommodating pace, allowing for a more measured exploration of the relationship between Parsons and big-hearted Holly.

Breakfast At Tiffany's is wonderful West End fare - a spectacle, an occasion, a night to remember - with Holly's dashing blonde bob leaving a long comet trail in the memory.

Until January 9.

Review: An Inspector Calls

STAGE
An Inspector Calls, Novello Theatre
4/5

IN A NUTSHELL
Director Stephen Daldry's award-winning and visionary revival of JB Priestley's classic chiller returns to London for a short run.

REVIEW
A dilapidated telephone box stands at an angle, like a drunken grenadier, and, to its right, the boards of the theatre splay and bow, hit by some unseen bomb. That's the first clue that this revival of JB Priestley's classic is going to be emphatically askew.

The curtain rises. Downstage, rain-swept cobbles where Lowry-esque urchins kick through puddles in the gutter. Upstage, a glittering doll's houses on stilts erupts from the street, a Faberge egg opening to reveal its treasures.

It is a staggering set, designed by Ian MacNeil, and one itching to show off its panoply of dramatic fireworks but for now, this one will do - for silhouetted under a street lamp stands trench-coated Inspector Goole, re-creating the iconic image from The Exorcist. He's out to snare him some devils.

Stephen Daldry's ambitious, award-winning, punctilious production, back once more in London, is the reason "revival" is in the dictionary.

Re-imagined, polished, expanded (the core cast of seven is supplemented by a dozen or so silent extras) and choreographed to within an inch of its life, the Billy Elliot director gives the hoary am-dram familiar a miraculous new sheen.

The story is well known - and flawless. A comfortable Midlands family, the Birlings, celebrate the engagement of daughter Shelia to Gerald Croft giving dad Arthur (David Roper) the chance to expand on his theories of wealth acquisition, self-reliance and social division.

Into this cosy pomposity sidles Inspector Goole who tells them a girl has killed herself hours before. He proceeds to examine their foibles and prod their self-satisfaction until they unwittingly reveal how each of them had, in turn, contributed to her downfall. The twists and turns are shattering.

In this overtly political piece (written after the second world war when Priestley was advocating a Labour government's egalitarian agenda), the Birlings one by one descend from their lofty home into the muddy gutter.

Daldry finds comedy too, notably in the figure of the matriarch Sybil (a glorious Sandra Duncan) whose bickering descent from stately galleon to sunken paddle steamer is tweaked neatly for laughs.

Goole (Nicholas Woodeson) and Sheila (Marianne Oldham) hold the moral centre of the piece with affecting power and subtlety. The Inspector rages wildly at the thoughtless mores of the me-first capitalists while the erstwhile prig of a daughter performs the only genuine transformation of the piece.

They are more than ably supported by Roper and Duncan while Robin Whiting (Eric) keeps his performance the right side of indulgent adolescent self-pity.

Daldry's tics and additions - the mute presence of a phalanx of common folk to watch and judge, the direction culled from film noir and the silent era - settle the era and the politics but it is the house on stilts, bowing under the weight of the guilt (and gilt), that makes this the definitive modern revival.

Until November 14.

Review: The Fastest Clock In The Universe

STAGE
Fastest Clock In The Universe,
Hampstead Theatre
3/5

IN A NUTSHELL
In this revival of Philip Ridley's black comedy, a mock birthday party is laced with menace.

REVIEW
Early on in this production, Captain Tock screams out the window. He frightens the birds that occupy the decaying former fur factory in the East End where he lives with narcissistic psychopath Cougar Glass. The screeching of the birds is exquisite and irritating, frantic and menacing.

It is, therefore, typical of Philip Ridley's 1992 unsettling black comedy.

Ridley's portrayal of the destructive homosexual relationship between the middle-aged and balding Tock (a compelling Finbar Lynch) and the self-involved peacock Glass (Alec Newman) has echoes of Orton/Halliwell as imagined by Pinter.

Tock is revolted by his role as the monster's aid yet he is unwilling to rid himself of the hunk of beef sizzling under the sun lamp who lends to him a fleeting sense of worth. Glass requires only to be serviced in his delusion of eternal youth.

As they prepare for Glass's latest 19th birthday party with fake cards, cake and bottles of vodka they fence and bicker like a sick Steptoe And Son in the darkened junk shop of a home surrounded by Tock's stuffed birds and knick-knacks.

Atrophy and cruelty are everywhere, not least in Glass's black heart but also embodied by ageing lank-haired neighbour Cheetah Bee (Eileen Page), wrapped in her fur coat like a '40s Miss Havisham.

In contrast, guest of honour at the mock celebrations is the youthful and exuberant 15-year-old Foxtrot Darling (Neet Mohan) whom the predatory Glass has groomed with sick efficiency.

But Foxtrot has a birthday surprise of his own, bringing in tow the teetering, screeching Sherbert Gravel (a pitch perfect Jaime Winstone). Her fearless unpicking of Glass's fragile self-deception is the comic heartbeat of the production which manages to be both pitch black and gaudy at the same time.

Until October 17.