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.