Here’s a good start to the new year. A show that dismantles old assumptions but fizzes with its own life. One Woman Show has sparkled into the West End via the Vaults, Soho and Edinburgh. At first it seems that Liz Kingsman is simply going to use Phoebe Waller-Bridge’s Fleabag as a satirical trampoline. There is an elliptical allusion to a collision with “a bridge” as a foundational experience, and she describes waking up in a disorientatingly strange bed, which turns out to be her own. At work at the Wildfowl & Wetlands Trust (yes, there is eventually a gag about being foul and wild) she unleashes a wanky speech about masturbation, which her Australian boss thinks could do with being reined in a bit. There is a lot of booze, a tricky ex-boyfriend, a burgeoning new romance, an all-purpose best friend.
Much to recognise; but the evening, which is framed as if it is being ineptly filmed, flies beyond parody. Kingsman dances her way out of box after box. And points out what she is up to, just before her audience notice. Every bit of predictable plotting or fatty phrasing is picked to pieces as she sends up the loquacious, intimate, supposedly unflinching but actually indulgent monologue in a loquacious, intimate etc etc: “I am so relatable.”
Together, she and director Adam Brace create a comedy that ends in colossal disorientation and yet is always totally clear. Not least in its skewering of female prototypes, of attitudes that began as exhilarating escapes and end as straitjackets. The cringe away from appearing competent. “You’re not a mess,” a shrewd colleague remarks: “You just want to be seen as one.” The swerve from sweetness: “We don’t have to be likable any more,” Kingsman explains, as she punches (or thinks she does) a charity mugger and stubs out her cig in the temp’s Pret porridge.
The Globe – once considered a theatre that enshrined heritage – is becoming a place of remaking. Last year it reimagined Joan of Arc and turned round Henry V to show the prince’s inner life. Now Hannah Khalil’s Hakawatis: Women of the Arabian Nights, with contributions from Hanan al-Shaykh, Suhayla El-Bushra and Sara Shaarawi (translation by Hassan Abdulrazzak), delivers a fresh Arabian Nights: gutsy, cooperative, playing with tradition. The idea is that the stories Scheherazade told the sultan to save herself from death were supplied by other women, who used the tales to examine their own lives.
Five women – a dancer, an ingenue, a warrior, a writer and a sage – wait in an intimate, candlelit room. They are “plucked and waxed and creamed”: prepared for the sultan’s delectation, ready to “tickle his turban”, hoping not to be killed after use. They shimmer in harem pants; the dancer tosses her waist-length hair to the ground as she spins her hips. They spar, they swap orgasm stories (one stars the sultan’s dog); they tell tales to the accompaniment of a patter of percussion, the shiver of oud and violin.
Here is the story told by a mother about a sparrow who tried to seduce an eagle and ended up in a cage: it was designed to keep her daughter from trying to soar too high by going to school. And the tale of a woman who pretended to be a donkey. The reclaiming of these stories from a white, male, orientalist perspective is energising, though sometimes too explicit; there are dips in pace and some overemphatic acting. Yet Pooja Ghai’s staging, in this co-production with Tamasha, again reveals the Sam Wanamaker’s ability to become a magic drum. The auditorium shakes to thumps on the walls behind the audience. The candelabra lowered and raised at the end of acts are echoed in candles lit by the women – who at the beginning of a new story pass the light from hand to hand. The flame of the telling sometimes flickers, but it shines.
For years, the film director Alan Parker refused permission for stage productions of Bugsy Malone. He feared that his 1976 spoof of gangster movies – set in New York during prohibition and starring child actors – would be cutseyed up. Sean Holmes, a director not celebrated for dimpling, eventually got around the ban, and in 2015 put on a whiz-bang, nonstop, full-throated show at the Lyric Hammersmith, which he was then running.
That production has arrived slightly muffled at the gorgeous Ally Pally. Though the lofty, russet-walled auditorium breathes grand excitement, not all the younger actors can be clearly heard; some of the jokes don’t land. And the splurge guns are nowhere near splurgy enough: it is not clear that the heap of bodies on the ground are joke massacres. Still, an awful lot can go missing when the songs (who doesn’t remember My Name is Tallulah) are as zippy as those written by Paul Williams, and the action as swiftly directed as it is here, with Drew McOnie’s choreography also whipping along an ensemble of older performers.
There is never a moment without movement, which spangles out in all directions. When someone goes off stage, a trapdoor opens, or a hamper is flung wide to reveal hidden people. Characters never simply walk: they sashay, slink, swagger, cartwheel or leapfrog – and, in one of the best sequences, box. Behind all this is the encouraging idea – embodied in the beat-up boxer who gives the show its name – that anyone can be a contender. It’s a welcome message for a show to sing out as it sets off on tour in disgusting times.
Star ratings (out of five)
One Woman Show ★★★★
Hawawatis ★★★
Bugsy Malone ★★★
One Woman Show is at the Ambassadors, London, until 21 January
Hakawatis is at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare’s Globe, London, until 14 January
Bugsy Malone is at Alexandra Palace, London, until 15 January, and tours until 19 February
