‘100’

The Scotsman

100 is about five people in Limbo, waiting to be released into eternity. To achieve this they must choose a memory – one perfect defining ultimate memory from their lives. When they have done that all other memories will be erased.

Right at this moment I would be tempted to choose, as my one memory, seeing this breathtaking piece of theatre.

I do believe I will remember it, both in my head and my heart, all of my life. It is a tiny, huge, simple, complex play that touched me in places I didn’t even know I had.

The programme notes are peppered with attributions like Chekhov, Stanislavski and Lecoq. Their methods are recognisable in this wonderful production, but in the way that technique allows trapeze artists to fly or du Pré to play the cello.

100 is played within the grey, cavernous reaches of the Underbelly’s Big Belly by five actors using four boxes and four bamboo poles.

Behind a crystal clear fourth wall, the actors’ moves are choreographed, precise. The bamboo poles becomes a child’s swing, a forest, an opening door, a tube train and a cocktail bar as the souls choose their memories.

The play was conceived and devised by the company’s passionately creative director Christopher Heimann, with a small cast. The actual script was written by Neil Monaghan. It is a spare, powerful, insightful piece of writing with unexpected lights in its shades and an iceberg-like mass of affect beneath its surface.

The cast are like a great musical quintet – a perfect ensemble in which each has, nevertheless, a distinct voice.

Matt Boatright-Simon is a gentle bear who has a lovely way with light comedy. He and the charismatic Clare Porter, as a couple who believe they share “the” love but do not share “the” memory, are like a dramatic haiku in the way minimum is used to maximum effect.

Lawrence Werber is an actor you cannot look away from. He has the great gift of stillness. And Tanya Munday and Matthieu Leloup have a visible and compelling passion.

This play moved me more profoundly than anything I can remember seeing in theatre. For those of us that have a memory, it is wonderful. For those off us who do not, it is terrifying. Whichever you are, this play will reach in and touch your soul.

Kate Copstick.

Three Weeks

The only problem with this production is that unless you have a ticket in your hand right now, you probably won’t get to see it. This show has been garnering high praise since it opened and already has been regularly selling out. For all these reasons I was prepared to dislike it. I couldn’t. This is what theatre should be: a strong depiction of human crisis, an exploration of life and meaning that never mires itself (or us) in technicalities. The spare set – a few boxes – gives the phenomenal troupe the space to work their magic. Using bamboo poles to create so many vistas, so clearly, that I still can’t figure out how they did it. The ensemble is likewise brilliant, giving the host of characters they portray equal depth and warmth no matter how small the role. Every aspect has a polish lacking in many West End productions. I’m not one for broad superlatives: this is brilliant.

Scotland on Sunday - Kill for a ticket.

This piece is one in the eye for the Jeremiahs who bemoan the supposed lack of originality in new stage writing. One might describe the play as a dramatisation of existentialist angst, but, as it is set in the void we step into at death, it is more post-existentialist in its concerns.

Neil Monaghan’s script, which is based upon an idea developed by the Imaginary Body Theatre Company, tells the brilliantly conceived story of four people, two women and two men, who have died before their time. In the void – potentially a de-Catholicised limbo – they meet an older man. Neither God nor Satan, he is, perhaps, death himself.

The four must take the ultimate decision, choosing the final, quintessential memory from their life, the one in which they will spend eternity. However, their choice must satisfy the camera at the gate of death, which flashes its acknowledgement, ushering the deceased into their never-ending memory cycle. Failure to make a satisfactory choice leaves the hapless soul in endless blankness, retaining nothing and no-one from their life.

The recollections of the young dead are fascinating and varied, from Lukas’s blasphemous discovery of the roundness of the Earth to Carla’s remembrance of the shattering moment when her mother made her see that she was not beautiful. Profound, humorous and affecting, the stories are told with emotive acting and inventive physical ensemble playing.

100 repeatedly tempts one into heart-over-head platitudes and simplistic readings, but always turns on its heels. By its moving conclusion, one knows it to be a play of lasting significance.

Other reviewers quotes for ‘100’

‘Stunning piece… Put your standard responses aside – this is a rare gem. – The List.

‘This hour long show is based on such an engage idea it can hardly fail to be a winner. Like Sartre’s Huis Clos, but more interesting, it is a theatre show that actually makes you think about your own life, pulls you up sharp. Would you have a memory worth keeping, one that is really significant? - Lyn Gardner – The Guardian.

‘A stunningly original piece of drama, performed with energy, commitment and sheer passion.’ - Edinburgh Evening News.

‘Visually inventive, intriguing play… One of the TOP FIVE shows at the Fringe’ - Evening Standard.

Eye Contact.

Channel 4 - Teletext

Neil Monaghan is no stranger to the stages of Scarborough’s internationally acclaimed theatre and has given us a taster of his capabilities in an earlier pair of short plays, Bolt From the Blue and Dot Com. Now comes his first full-length commission from Sir Alan Ayckbourn, who apparently told him to write whatever he wanted, on whatever subject, and with whichever cast size he desired. Well, within reason and budgetary structures. Monaghan returns – with Beautiful People – to some of the subject matter he explored in Dot Com, but in every other respect his play is stunningly original.

Some authors would be content at re-examining the eternal love triangle. Some authors would turn over the subject of betrayal. Many would give us a well-constructed thriller, some, perhaps, a whodunit. Not Mr Monaghan. He delivers all of these, and then some more. He throws in new technology, insider dealing, corruption and split loyalties… His targets are many and diverse, and, to his credit, he picks them off neatly, one by one.

In examining relationships, for example, he inclines to the opinion that they work because they work because they work, and if that be so, and they ain’t broke, don’t fix ‘em. Outsiders might possibly view them as bizarre, but each to his (or her) own. Or perhaps, for complete satisfaction, to someone else’s own. To call the affair between JJ and Leo ‘conventional’ would be like describing the ascent of Everest as a pleasant Sunday stroll. But having established the reasons why they continue to see each other, Monaghan mixes in JJ’s relationship with Skelton, with Barclay (amusing that he gives his eco-warrior and would be anarchist the name of one of the major high street banks!) and with Amber. JJ has her cake – and then devours the entire banquet.

All the characters ricochet around between their homes and apartments, between outwardly glittering lifestyles, between turning and making the big deal, and striving always to keep at least one stride ahead of the competition. Even well meaning Barclay is eventually sucked into this venally corrupt whirl of backstabbing and duplicity, and none of the characters emerges as a particularly endearing human being – and only JJ indicates any shamed sense of responsibility. Or does she? For in the last few seconds of his play, our author manages to turn up another theatrical genre for his audience, the cliff-hanger. Will they – won’t they? Monaghan reinforces the view that the British are a nation endlessly communicative about love and sex – without ever really enjoying it. All his characters rattle on about liaisons and the grand passions they intend, but each lives a shallow life, living only for the ‘me’. Even Barclay is corrupted and diverted from his well-intentioned path. It’s a strong indictment of the greed of the wannabe dot.com generation.

Gina Bellman, as JJ, gives us a mesmerising performance, flinty and marvellously impartial. She has a range of vocal mannerisms that are both cool and direct and, best of all, she doesn’t make a play for sympathy. Even out of sight, she intimidates. But then in the penultimate scene, a single tear trickles down her cheek. It’s like watching live theatre in slow motion as that drop slowly descends. JJ – calm, collected, calculating JJ – is finally broken.

Edward Kemp does the almost impossible in directing his cast – he makes them natural and plausible, and gives an intimate crosscut flow that is almost televisual. But then he too is assisted by a designer in Jane Heather who jigsaws the set neatly together, a lighting designer (Jon Buswell) who understands perfectly about the intent of the play – the fragmentation of relationships – and original music from Mike Woolmans.

Alright maybe Monaghan could have trimmed 10 minutes from each act, but in compensation we have a play which actually demands concentration, which provokes thought and which stimulates conversation on the journey home. You can’t walk away from these beautiful people with a shrug – it’s far more like a shudder. But in that shudder, Monaghan has brilliantly achieved his purpose.

Yorkshire Evening Press

Beautiful People is a London drama making its debut in Scarborough. Nothing wrong with a capital setting for East Coast entertainment: only last year Alan Ayckbourn’s Damsels in Distress trilogy took place in a Docklands flat.

The star-glitter presence of Stephen Beckett, latterly the hunky doctor in Coronation Street, and Coupling star Gina Bellman suggest a hot new play. Likewise the languorous lean legs and flash of underwear beside a laptop computer on the programme announce that this will be sexy theatre about people on the knife edge of the City.

Here is a tale of power, greed and lack of morality, of champagne, whisky and dope, of risk manipulation and the dot.com economy, with sex and money as both the oxygen and carbon monoxide of City life today. Just as it was in Oscar Wilde’s An Ideal Husband in 1895 and Carol Churchill’s Serious Money in 1987.

Bellman, whose first dress must have been painted on to her slender frame, is JJ, a one-time escort girl who has turned freelance to conduct insider-trading stings in tandem with boyfriend Leo Harper (Beckett), a disgraced City trader now running his one-man bandit scams from his flat.

They are the Bonnie and Clyde of the Square Mile: he spots the chances for insider deals; she targets businessmen on the cusp of selling their companies, offering her body in exchange for gifts, last-minute trips abroad, glamorous openings, book launches and parties and no hassle.

Latest target is slimy big fish Tony Skelton (Joseph Bennett), whose marriage has been easier to destroy than save. He takes up JJ’s services but wants to know more about her from her best friend Amber (Eleanor Tremain), a television producer with treatments gathering dust and a conviction she is past it at 28.

“Are you happy” JJ asks Skelton in a hotel room. “Happy” he ponders. “God knows”. No, these are not happy people but lost, fragile souls; all fear ever younger rivals, all want a change for the better but the devil will lead them on their Faustian routes. Only Barclay (John Lightbody), a cynical Mancunian campaigner for free trade encountered by JJ on a Highbury parking bench, is interested in improving the world.

Bellman’s brittle JJ, the laser-beam precision of Edward Kemp’s direction and the shards of black humour in Monaghan’s caustic dialogue are but three reasons to see this incisive expose of London life as a form of capital punishment.

Charles Hutchinson – Yorkshire Evening Press.

Bolt From The Blue

The candlelit surrounds of a nineteenth century bedchamber, fresh from a Hardy novel. The proud lady of the estate, the honest stable boy.

In fact, we’re looking at a contemporary bedroom, and one of the bedroom games played by Matt and Steph. It’s the first of many surprises in Bolt From The Blue.

Matt (Nicholas Haverson) and Steph (Janie Dee) have been together four years, but still haven’t tied the knot. Why? Well, Matt believes that they don’t really know each other. That everyone has secrets. And when a box of old photos from Matt’s mother turns up, it soon emerges how right he is.

It all starts with a tattoo – and after the truth emerges about that, the floodgates truly open. From confession to confession, Matt and Steph start to realise how little they know about each other’s past life.

The script, by Neil Monaghan, is finely crafted and marvellously structured, with a fine ear for comedy. The revelations range from the sublime to the ridiculous, while managing to avoid the contrived. And a lot of skill has gone into how they are presented to the audience, who never see them coming, but realise the direction things are going moments before they happen.

Both the actors have been cast well in their roles, with Dee intense and believable even when describing the most outlandish of exploits, and the dialogue making excellent use of Haverson’s fine impressionism skills.

All in all, it’s both a pleasure and a sadness when this draws to a close, and it’s possibly the most enjoyable of all the lunchtime shows at the Stephen Joseph.

- Scarborough Town Crier.

The Good Fight - - Maim to get a ticket.

Fresh takes on familial dysfunction are always passable, as playwright Neil Monaghan demonstrates. Here the polar conflict between religion and politics sends weak-willed, philandering, council member-on-the-rise Alan and wife Fran, a recent starch-souled Christian convert into unhappy – yet consistently funny – tailspins. Their emotional and moral muddles also have an impact on their young adult children.

Monaghan’s quick-witted script is poised cleverly between sitcom and soap opera. He’s particularly spot on about the lengths midlifers will go to paper over their individual and mutual guilt, inadequacies and disillusions. He questions – rather deeply and unmockingly, for all the laughs – the idea of faith, particularly as embodied by Fran’s Scot’s pal, the achingly cheery, righteous Joan.

The play never comes across as overly schematic thanks both to Monaghan’s bright writing and Gary Drabwell’s incisive direction of a clutch of deft actors.

Dot Smith and Osmund Bullock play their tragi-comic leads with almost alarming accuracy. Mary McCusker’s Joan wisely avoids teetering into caricature. Louise Paige and especially Michael Kirchner give good accounts of themselves as sexy spin doctor and cynical son respectively.

Donald Hutera – The Scotsman.

The Cenci

Fuelled by hate, the demonic Count Cenci plots the downfall and incarceration of his family. His craving for immortality reaches depraved heights until it seems the tables are turned, but which is the victor between good and evil is debatable.

Taking its cue from Artuad’s Theatre of Cruelty, this is a meditation on what it means to be truly honest in a world bound by hypocritical morality. The narrative is illustrated by fluid choreography and is acted with a dynamic intensity that snarls and sneers at love, death and the whole damn thing with a devotion verging on passion.

- The List.

This Way Up began life as an experimental project by a group of drama students at the John Moores University, Liverpool. They had success with earlier shows at the Edinburgh Festival and, last year, the graduating students went professional with a project begun as an academic exercise but which has developed into a gripping slice of physical theatre.

Count Cenci leads a life of brutal honesty, rooting out hypocrisy and destroying lives as he does so. There are few depravities to which the count will not sink, including the murder of his son and the rape of his daughter.

In a series of encounters, with wife, daughter, son, a priest and a lawyer, the Count pitilessly and brutally tells the truth and sets out to destroy those who stand in his way.

The company have followed Artaud’s own recommendations that total theatre should use sound, light, gesture and visual image, rather than relying on spoken word, in order to fundamentally disturb the imagination of audiences.

Writer-director Neil Monaghan achieves a sharply etched clarity that thrusts the piece forward with considerable momentum. Monaghan and Alex Eckford provide an epic score. Sound and light are impressive too, of a far higher technical standard than is usual in these circumstances.

The cast are a strong ensemble, with Mathew Broad’s evil eyed Count, Rosalind Leggatt’s unfortunate daughter and Matthew Greys’ sad fool of a son making the most of their greater opportunities.

Manchester Evening News.

Under Glass

Neil Monaghan’s uncompromising new play uses dance, text and music to explore a tortured mind. Dan has been diagnosed schizophrenic and is engaged in a desperate struggle against the demons of his own mind.

What follows is a stylised collage built of images that combine to create a powerfully affecting whole. Dan’s brain is split open from within as he is taunted and goaded by his alter egos. From without, parents and priests suffocate and torment him as the rituals of everyday life become a terrifying ordeal.

The five performers, all highly committed and superbly choreographed, are excellent. Monaghan has managed to create out of a fearsomely difficult subject a piece of great depth and integrity that makes uncomfortable but compelling theatre.

- The Scotsman.