Royal Court at full throttle
It’s many years since I was a script reader and student stage manager at the Royal Court and used to hang around Sloane Square a lot more than I do now. There is nowhere else in London, or indeed the world, quite like it.
I spent much of yesterday around the place and sensed just as much excitement and activity as ever in our premier new writing venue. In the bar downstairs I found actors — including Jennie Stoller, Ben Kaplan, David Horovitch and Susannah Wise, gathering to rehearse Caryl Churchill’s fund-raiser for Gaza next week, Seven Jewish Children.
And in the Theatre Upstairs I watched a matinee of Alia Bano’s immensely promising new play Shades, set among the young professional Muslim classes, also engaged in a fund-raiser for Gaza — in the form of a fashion show of burquas and bandannas.
In between, I sneaked a glimpse inside the caravan parked in the alley where, next week, Ben Freedman and Mimi Poskitt present their thirty-minute verbatim show about the floods of 2007 to a controlled audience of eight at a time.
Also standing by, sipping tea and munching biscuits as insulation against the wintry afternoon, were the Court’s associate producer Diane Borger as well as associate director Ramin Gray and actress Amanda Drew, who open the Court’s German season next week with Marius von Mayenburg’s The Stone. Scenery was being moved about purposefully in the small dock, now open to the elements. Actors and stage staff scurried in and out of the stage door.
And then I popped into the white-washed rehearsal room –once a London Transport cafe — where the 24 year-old Treadaway twins, Harry and Luke, were chowing down with their salads before picking up work on the new Mark Ravenhill play Over There, in which they play twins separated by the Berlin Wall but reunited after eighteen years apart. The lads are also writing the music.
Shades is a blast of a new play, yet another product of the Court’s Young Writers Festival, brilliantly cast and directed by Nina Raine on a traverse catwalk, dealing in a debate about whether or not religious Muslims can have fun; in all the talk of “fundhus,” burqua babes and Tali-tubbies, non-religious Sabina is looking for a man to marry who won’t cramp her style.
Wittily and craftily, Alia Bano charts the on-off friendship of Sabina and religious Reza, while best friend Bengali gay man Zain and his lumbering white boyfriend Mark do their best to help and bad boy Ali stirs up trouble.
Can you drink and pray? If you wear a shawl, do you not go dancing? Zain defends his stylish flippancy by saying that standing up for Muslims in an ironic way is being very British. And there’s a sly, clever awareness in all this of the way fundamentalists and religious Muslims are perceived by the public at large after recent political outrages.
What is particularly impressive here is how artistic director Dominic Coooke is giving this brand new work such a good push, with proper production values, and it seems certain that Alia Bano will join his stable of promising brand new writers including Polly Stenham, Bola Agbaje, Levi David Addai and Mike Bartlett. Their time seems so right.
All the actors are terrific: Stephanie Street’s Sabina and Navin Chowdhry’s Zain are both funny, smart and technically accomplished, with a fair amount of experience behind them.
But check out Matthew Needham as Mark in his professional stage debut (he’s played one tiny part in Casualty on television). The boy’s a comic natural and he gives a mini-masterclass in subdued, careful comic acting that is as delightful as it is refreshing. We’ll see a lot more of him, and of Alia Bano.