Romantic treat is ever so sweet: PATRICK MARMION reviews Romantics Anonymous 

Romantics Anonymous (Bristol Old Vic Live Stream via TicketCo)

Rating:

Verdict: A tasty return

The Strange Case Of Dr Jekyll & Mr Hyde (blackeyedtheatre.ticketco.events)

Rating:

Verdict: Saucy split personality drama

Remember when putting on a show seemed relatively straightforward?

Theatre director Emma Rice and her faithful company of actors, called Wise Children, have had Covid tests and isolated in a collective bubble in order to live-stream this cheerfully saccharine musical adaptation of the French film Les Emotifs Anonymes (first seen when Ms Rice ran Shakespeare’s Globe in 2017).

The upshot is that they can now hold hands and even kiss on stage — with Boris Johnson’s blessing.

Rice’s work can seem trapped in a nostalgic Neverland, and Romantics Anonymous — the story of a desperately shy chocolatier who meets the excruciatingly awkward owner of a failing chocolate factory — is no exception.

As a digital tour, sharing proceeds with cash-strapped theatres across the country and performed live at Bristol’s Old Vic, I wish it well.

But as my ten-year-old daughter warned: ‘Too much chocolate can make you feel a bit sick, Dad.’

To add insult to indigestion, painfully shy characters can make for painfully slow progress; and the gaucheness gag wears off well before the two hours are up.

As for the notion that the show is suitable for eight-year-olds, the mother yelling ‘Who gives a s***? P*** off!’ at her Y-fronted boyfriend put paid to that. 

Still, Carly Bawden lends our shy heroine Angelique a sweetly earnest face with a corresponding singing voice, and she flashes her pins athletically for her pas de deux.

As her clammy beloved Jean-René, Marc Antolin sings with a suitably squashed squawk, but for me his pain stays buttoned up inside his cardy. My favourite was Gareth Snook as the bobble- hatted geek who can only muster nervous mumbles at the self-help group for the terminally bashful.

Some of Christopher Dimond’s lyrics are nicely sour, including the French waiters’ boast that ‘even our farts smell like fine pot pourri’. But other songs, charting ever tighter knots of social anxiety, get predictable.

Likewise, Michael Kooman’s endlessly benign music with plinky-plonk piano, rolling drum, tinkling triangle and wheezing accordion, gets a bit laboured.

Perhaps the most exciting thing about this is that it’s happening at all. The TicketCo app worked a treat on my TV; and you can log on from a phone or computer. So maybe it will trigger a whole new sub-genre of theatre online. 

Nick Lane’s filmed stage adaptation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s gothic masterpiece Jekyll & Hyde audaciously smuggles in a love story.

Our respectable Dr Jekyll, who meddles fatefully with his brain chemistry, has an affair with the Irish music hall actress married to his Victorian lab assistant. 

One can imagine Stevenson choking in his grave. At least there’s high-quality acting. Blake Kubena in the title roles is reminiscent of a lavishly bewigged Patrick Stewart; while Paige Round is defiant as his forbidden love.

I have faith that one day this show will return

Faith Healer (Old Vic, London)

Rating:

Verdict: Fantastic Friel

Another spellbinding fundraiser on Zoom from London’s Old Vic last week saw Michael Sheen (right), Indira Varma and David Threlfall purring in Brian Friel’s classic about a troubled Irish faith healer.

Friel’s work comprises four monologues, opening and closing with Sheen as the physician touring village halls in Wales, Scotland and Ireland. It’s never made clear if his character is gifted or just a fraud.

But the one talent Friel does bestow on him is that of a riveting, if unreliable, storyteller; recounting his hand-to-mouth life on the road, the death of his mother, the loss of a baby and an eventual showdown at a saloon bar in Donegal.

Sheen’s accent and intonation are flawless as the bibulous trickster got up like Karl Marx.

Indira Varma is a figure of pathos as the neglected wife who left a good life as a judge’s daughter to take up with this garrulous ne’er-do-well.

Threlfall is no less hypnotic as the devoted stage manager who stands by them both.

Matthew Warchus’s engrossing production beats with love for each of the characters — so for pity’s sake, let us see it again!

P.M.

Discovering a special connection in isolation

Sunnymead Court (The Actors Centre, London)

Rating:

Verdict: Viral attraction

First out of the blocks with a play inspired by the pandemic is Gemma Lawrence’s Sunnymead Court, a short but entertaining love story about two neighbours whose lives intersect for the first time during lockdown.

Coronavirus is never mentioned but Marie (Miss Lawrence) and Stella (Remmie Milner) find themselves suddenly confined to the titular housing estate where they live.

Working from home with a strict routine — ‘Don’t let anyone ever tell you it’s boring’ — the socially awkward Marie happily forgoes outside contact and doesn’t realise the emotional entombment she is creating for herself.

The rather aimless Stella feeds on human interaction and, while taking her daily exercise, basks in others’ appreciation of her outgoing personality. 

Marie isn’t bothered that she rarely sees her father, while Stella sees a bit too much of her sick mother, with whom she lives in a flat opposite Marie’s.

Isolation and connection are the themes explored here as the two women, who for much of the play don’t interact and speak directly to the audience, recount the story separately.

But the author wrong-foots us a couple of times as we think Marie and Stella will meet, fall in love and live happily ever after. Just like our pandemic experience of stay at home/go to work and buy a coffee/stay at home but go out/shake it all about, this is a path strewn with false starts, missed opportunities and confused signals.

The play packs a lot into 50 minutes and Miss Lawrence makes her points about love, loneliness and taking risks with subtlety and efficiency. 

The performances are sincere and funny, James Hillier’s direction moves things along apace and Max Pappenheim’s sound design adds nicely to the mix.

Runs until October 3.

Veronica Lee