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Fat Ham (Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon)
Verdict: Rude but fun
The poetry in Fat Ham – a comic version of Hamlet set at a backyard barbecue – has been raucously displaced by outrageous, X-rated repartee, delivered in a deep Southern drawl.
James Ijames’s Pulitzer prize-winning play is a provocatively irreverent take on Shakespeare’s tragedy.
Our hero is Juicy (Olisa Odele), a young, gay, black man trying to break family tradition by doing an HR course online (‘school on a cell phone’).
Ghost at the barbecue: Juicy (Olisa Odele) is startled by the ghost of his father, ‘Pap’ (Sule Rimi), who pops up at the backyard get-together that is meant to be his wake
The barbecue is actually a wake. Juicy’s preacher uncle Rev (Sule Rimi) has had his father Pap murdered in prison… with a toothbrush.
It’s a grotesque treatment by Ijames, who uses Hamlet to celebrate and lament black lives in the Deep South.
Instead of a play within the play to expose Rev, we get charades. And as well as soliloquies, Juicy delivers a stirring karaoke version of Radiohead’s Creep.
But it’s Ijames’s love of his uncensored characters that drives the show. There’s Odele’s puzzled, fearful and sensitive Juicy; Rimi’s boorish uncle (who also plays the gibbering ghost of Juicy’s father); and Kieran Taylor-Ford as Juicy’s buddy ‘Tio’, whose hilarious rhapsody on gingerbread men could be right out of South Park.
The women are something to behold, too; in particular Andi Osho, as Juicy’s hot, middle-aged mum Tedra who’s a bit of a karaoke star herself.
Mamma’s boy: Juicy (Olisa Odele) with his mother Tedra (Andi Osho) in Fat Ham at the RSC’s Swan Theatre in Stratford
Sideeq Heard’s production is fitted with excellent illusions (including a smoking ghost), while Maruti Evans’s set is a mongrel of real decking, fake grass, and sliding doors fixed to giant photos of the family home.
Fat Ham (the name is never fully explained) is a joyously disreputable, 100-minute verbal rollercoaster, descending into full-scale bedlam and a drag finale. Shakespeare must be jiving in his grave.
Fat Ham is on at the Swan Theatre in Stratford upon Avon until September 13.
Twelfth Night (Shakespeare’s Globe, London)
Verdict: Poetry in commotion
Poetry may not be the winner in the Globe’s new Twelfth Night. But that doesn’t stop this new production from being frivolous and frisky fun.
Evading the melancholy that sometimes colours performances of the play, it employs a mash-up of traditions – Latin American carnival, English mumming, ancient Egyptian sun worship – to conjure up the magical setting of Illyria.
The shipwrecked Viola (Ronke Adekoluejo), who washes up on shore in modern Nigerian weeds and trainers, is soon enchanted by this tutti frutti universe.
She is enlisted as a go-between for the lovelorn Duke Orsino (Solomon Israel), who hopes to seduce the virtuous Lady Olivia (Laura Hanna), who’s in extended mourning for her brother.
But the revelation of the evening is Pearce Quigley as Olivia’s manservant Malvolio. Quigley (from TV’s Detectorists) looks like an Old Testament prophet and turns a character often seen as a dour killjoy into a furtive Lothario; albeit one who takes a Teddy bear to bed.
The audience loves him, and by the end he wins groans (of sympathy) from the groundlings.
Unlikely lothario: Malvolio (Pearce Quigley) proves to be a crowd favourite in the Globe’s new production of Twelfth Night
There’s also fun in the mischievous sub-plot, with one of the boozy errant knights, Toby Belch, re-created as a bawdy Lady Belch (Jocelyn Jee Esien), conspiring with her lover, Olivia’s muck-raking maid Maria (Alison Halstead). Instead of plodding political correctness, this adds a light-hearted feminine touch to the often bovine male shenanigans led by the psychedelically garbed Andrew Aguecheek (Ian Drysdale).
Robin Belfield’s production is a work of out-and-out crowd-pleasing comedy, engaging the audience at each and every turn.
The Globe is often a set-designer’s graveyard and Jean Chan’s staging, centred on a giant sun with thick wooden sun beams extending in all directions, does look a tad clunky.
But Simon Slater’s punkish score turns terrace chant ‘Here We Go!’ into a can-can and ensures the clamour and clatter of Shakespeare’s comedy comes out on top.
Twelfth Night runs at Shakespeare’s Globe until October 25.
The Gathered Leaves (Park Theatre, Finsbury Park, London)
Verdict: Scattered themes
The Gathered Leaves has many moving insights into the highs and lows of living with autism, but is rather less successful as a family drama.
Set in 1997, and thoughtfully directed by former RSC boss Adrian Noble, it stars Jonathan Hyde as William — patriarchal throwback to a pre-war era — who is celebrating his 75th birthday with a family reunion.
Flocking to the event are eight other characters: in particular William’s now grown-up autistic son Samuel (Richard Stirling), and Samuel’s protective doctor brother Giles (Chris Larkin, son of Maggie Smith and brother of Toby Stephens).
Birthday boy William is furious at his estranged daughter Alice (Olivia Vinall), for turning up late to dinner – even though she has only just returned to the country, after running away to France 17 years earlier with her mixed-race baby (Taneetrah Porter).
Make a wish: William (Jonathan Hyde) is celebrating his 75th birthday surrounded by his family. But he’s not happy with them, and the feeling is mutual, in The Gathered Leaves
Also at the party is Giles’s angry wife (Zoe Waites), their warring children (George Lorimer and Ella Dale) and William’s wife (Joanne Pearce, who is actually married to the director). She admonishes her husband, nurtures everyone else and keeps Samuel’s autism in check with Aga-baked jam tarts.
We learn a lot about changes in social attitudes to autism over the course of two hours and 40 minutes. But as our main man William, Hyde has a very tricky job, and it isn’t clear if his violently erratic behaviour is triggered by autism, dementia, or an extreme case of Victorian Dad syndrome.
Indeed, while everyone around him quotes the Bob Hoskins BT ad about being good to talk, or the Nicole/Papa Renault Clio ad, he is isolated in his double-breasted pinstripe suit behind a broadsheet battlement of The Times.
His son Giles, in his faded rugby shirt and saggy Barbour coat, gets the play over the line with a tense yet warm performance as a long-suffering man whose life is falling apart.
Otherwise, Andrew Keatley’s family saga – on Dick Bird’s plush set painted in ghostly neutrals – feels like a string of unresolved revelations without a dramatic motor.
The mood meter swings from toe-curling to sentimental to dyspeptic, and back. Noble’s fluent staging has a lot going for it, but the scattered themes never quite cohere.
The Gathered Leaves runs until September 20.
