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.