Marvellous, @sohoplace review — risk pays off as new West End theatre opens

To name a play Marvellous might seem like a risk. To open a new West End theatre with that play, even more so. Fortunately, in the case of this autobiographical drama from Neil Baldwin (written with Malcolm Clarke and director Theresa Heskins), the piece more than earns its name. And as the opening show for producer Nica Burns’ gleaming glass and steel venue @sohoplace (the first purpose-built West End theatre for 50 years) it feels like a welcome statement about belonging and hope.

Heskins’ production takes its cue from its author and subject, the engaging and irrepressible Baldwin. Born in Newcastle-under-Lyme, Staffordshire in 1946, Baldwin was labelled as having learning difficulties as a child. He also had an indomitable spirit and a fiercely loving and supportive mother who ensured limitation wasn’t in his lexicon. She worked as a cleaner at Keele University, where as a teenager Baldwin began setting up a stall each year to greet new students. Soon he had become a much-loved, permanent fixture and in 2013 was awarded an honorary degree.

He worked for years as a circus clown, parlayed his way into a role at Stoke City football club as kit-man and all-round good luck charm (described by manager Lou Macari as “the best signing I ever made”) and runs his own football club. He’s had a BBC film made about him (starring Toby Jones), has hobnobbed with countless famous names and was awarded a BEM (British Empire Medal) in 2019. He hasn’t yet been made prime minister but, as his character points out drily in the play, “there’s still time”. His philosophy is simple: “be happy in life”.

That inspiring optimism bubbles through the drama, which brings an aptly unconventional approach to the task of telling Baldwin’s life story. Several actors share the lead role, with the supposed “real Neil” (Michael Hugo) popping up from the audience to direct the narrative. The action dots back and forth in time, with Hugo’s drolly blunt, endlessly energetic Neil masterminding events and producing an endless stream of props from his capacious “bag for life”. Despite cast illness, the opening night, in true Baldwin spirit, went ahead with two fine understudies (Joe Sproulle and Perry Moore) stepping up to the job.

There are glimpses of darkness: the banter that turns into bullying; the name-calling; the exploitation. But it’s a play that seeks to emphasise Baldwin’s upbeat spirit and the highlight of Heskins’ production (first seen at the New Vic Theatre in Newcastle-under-Lyme) is a wildly messy cookery scene that, beneath all the tomfoolery, speaks volumes about the love between Neil and his mother (Suzanne Ahmet, deftly catching the mix of hope and anxiety). Occasionally it becomes too determinedly playful; it could be stronger for being a little darker.

But this is a perfect fit for @sohoplace’s softly lit auditorium, an adaptable space that holds 600 but feels intimate. And to launch a new venue not with a star vehicle but with a joyous show, delivered by a neurodiverse cast, that celebrates the potential in difference, well, that’s quite marvellous.

★★★★☆

To November 26, sohoplace.org

“I’m alive,” states Theo Fraser Steele’s George in A Single Man, crafted for stage by Simon Reade from the 1964 novel by Christopher Isherwood. Physically, that much is true. But George is a man for whom living has become a shell, following the death of his lover, Jim, in a car crash. That he is gay in early 1960s America makes it harder still to express that loss.

Reade’s adaptation, directed by Philip Wilson, skilfully catches the strange dislocation of grief. George walks through his day as an expat English professor as if he were a ghost himself, acting out a part on a stage. The oddness and effort of still being alive when someone you love has died are potently delineated. Fraser Steele’s George goes through the early-morning motions — pee, wash, dress — as if starting up a reluctant old machine. At the sides of the stage, two white-clad figures talk through each physical function as it kicks into action, as if he were a specimen on a slab rather than a sentient person. Caitlin Abbott’s set, all grey forbidding blocks, sketches in the LA backdrop but also resembles the prison that life has become for George.

Fraser Steele’s excellent, angular, awkward performance precisely charts the physical discomfort of George’s continued life, as he negotiates encounters with his neighbours, his students and a lonely bohemian friend Charley (Olivia Darnley, bringing an edge of desperation to her bright bonhomie). Finally, he opens up to one his students (Miles Molan), who turns up at a local bar late at night. That flirtatious encounter, culminating in a dip in the ocean, is the nearest he comes to feeling alive, but it is tinged with sad yearning. Molan deftly pitches his performance between concern and a coolly shrewd awareness of the power of his youth and beauty.

All that being said, there is something a little sterile and remote about the show. That might be in keeping with George’s sense of dislocation, but it makes for a muted experience. And the episodic structure, as people drift in and out of George’s day, feels clunky on stage. It doesn’t completely gel, but it’s a sharply funny, sensitive and sad adaptation.

★★★☆☆

To November 26, parktheatre.co.uk

The elephant in the room comes in the shape of a piano in Anoushka Lucas’s new play. For her character Lylah, it’s a source of wonder and escape, a friend and ally as she charts a path out of her council flat childhood and into the music world. But as she negotiates the biases and inequalities in society, it becomes symbolic — its ivory white keys and mahogany frame emblematic of the legacy of empire. Lylah’s complex relationship with the instrument she loves becomes a conduit in the show for a frank, witty and richly complex exploration of the way colonial history underpins and weaves through contemporary western society.

She begins by talking about semitones and it’s clear that Lylah identifies with these crucial in-between musical intervals. Her intricate heritage — from Cameroon, France, India and Dorset — makes her hard to pigeonhole. Her musical talent and academic ability propel her into a school attended by upper-class girls, her fluency in languages alerts her to the way words can both expand and limit understanding. Falling in love with a drummer leads to an excruciating dinner with his wealthy white parents. Dotted through the show, meanwhile, are various toe-curling interviews with music executives, who urge her to be more “urban” or “accessible”. The piano, meanwhile, sits in the room throughout, a silent companion until she releases its voice by touching the keys.

This clever, subtle piece draws on Lucas’s own experience as a young female musician of mixed heritage: endlessly told to rebrand, repackage, simplify, change. She responded by expanding into acting (she will soon reprise her excellent performance as Laurey in the Young Vic’s Oklahoma! in the West End) and writing. Here she pulls all three together, delivering her own script and musical compositions with a beautifully light touch and mercurial physicality (directed by Jess Edwards). A gem of a show that unpicks the history behind easy assumptions and lazy labels.

★★★★☆

To November 12, bushtheatre.co.uk