The week at the theater: Le Constituent; Kyoto; review of Lolita malgré moi | Theater

The constituent had so much to do. Thirteen years ago, James Corden was shooting the massive One man, two governors across the national stage as easily as a child pulling a toy boat; he now returns to the stage alongside the infinitely subtle Anna Maxwell Martin. Playwright Joe Penhall has proven himself in Blue/Orange (2000) that he knows how to make an intimate encounter of social and personal tension resonate. He thus looked at essential subjects in the confrontation between a conscientious and beleaguered MP and a former soldier in difficulty who installs an alarm system in her office. The murder of Jo Cox was mentioned in connection with the play. Two days before the press evening, the windows of the MP Stella Creasy's headquarters were broken by a masked man armed with a hammer.

Despite the urgency of the subject, Matthew Warchuss's direction only runs out of steam. The drama is signaled between scenes by outbursts from Smiths and Billy Bragg, but it is more stated than obvious. The dialogues are loaded with explanations and the action slowed down by overload: not only the threats against women parliamentarians, not only the difficulties of being an often absent parent; Corden's character, unsupported by underfunded social services, suffers from his failed marriage, memories of Afghanistan, and intimidation as a whistleblower.

While convincing when he inflicts a shockingly violent assault, Zachary Hart can do little to deflect the demeanor of a demonized cop. Maxwell Martin has an exceptional ability to rally the audience (here seated in confrontation in two blocks across the stage) around him, but his meticulous tact could be braver and more brilliant. Strolling around in baggy shorts, a pencil tucked behind his ear (if he whistled, he would be the archetypal British working man), Corden starts out seemingly complacent, moves through disruptions and threats, and ends with a terrible denouement. It’s a breakthrough for him: it shows what a versatile actor he is.

It has been a long time since the public went to the RSC for information. Yet the theater of Daniel Evans and Tamara Harvey, alongside its Shakespearean productions, aims to look directly at the modern world with a Shakespearean eye. Joes Murphy and Robertson, who created the morally certain and emotionally charged play in 2017 The junglereunites with directors Stephen Daldry and Justin Martin to create a whirlwind spectacle about the climate crisis, based on the conferences that led to the 1997 Kyoto Protocol.

Demonstrating that this is not an escape route from the S in RSC, Kyoto contains an excerpt from the speech on powerful time in A Midsummer Night's Dream, when Miriam Buether's beige corporate design offers a glimpse of tangled greenery. Yet the main action recreates the babel and the mess of the negotiations: hopes, despair, contradictory national ambitions. The disagreement seems insurmountable and vast but the clauses are shredded with an accuracy worthy of a logic professor.

The arbitrariness of the agreements that President Ral Estrada-Oyuela hammers home as if hypnotizing the delegates with his gavel is almost as appalling as the venality of the national interest and the rigging of debates by the oil companies. What ultimately brings the delegates together is pride, in the face of which principle evaporates. What people will remember, Estrada-Oyuela told the warring factions, is that a compromise deal was reached, not what it was. Kyoto the real subject is negotiation.

In this admonishing production, the delegates emerge as political caricatures: Angela Merkel cuts off dissent by using her hands as blades. Yet they slide from cliché to surprise. The Japanese delegate uses cherry blossoms to describe microclimates. John Prescott, chest puffed out and desperate for lunch, proves a formidable advocate of diplomacy by exhaustion. In a fine, acerbic move, the action centers on Don Pearlman, a Republican lawyer in the pay of oil companies; a climate-crisis denier with a fine touch. Sinuously played by Stephen Kunken, he ends up with a disintegrated spine and lungs filled with smoke. Like the world to come.

“Wide vagina!” came the murmur from the stalls. The public arrives at Bad Girls with the slogans of the 2004 film. They are entitled to a bonus. What better argument for a series that stands against girly conformists (body-obsessed bullies nicknamed the Plastics)?

It's the '50s musical reimagined. Women know they don't need to be decorative or have a guy in tow; guys know they don't need to be jocks; guys who walk around with muscles and hunched shoulders seem more energetic than imposing.

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Not that this is an attempt to make the genre weird: it's a friendly, grassroots show, complete with video designs by Finn Ross and Adam Young featuring all-pink walls, toilet tiles, starbursts bearing George Michaels' face.

Jeff Richmond's music resonates without any striking wonders: it's an effective vehicle for Nell Benjamin's lyrics and Tina Fey's book, which celebrate having a curious brain that refuses to fit in. Who would have thought that the heroine of a West End show would declare: I love calculus?

Charlie Burn sings softly as the girl who turns plastic when she copies Regina, the queen of spite (Georgina Castle in gold-sequined spindles), at her new school. Elna Gyasi and Grace Mouat are comically appealing as Regina clones. Yet the knockouts are the two genuine gays who are in charge of the narrative. Elena Skye is focused, sharp and clean. Tom Xander makes his languid wrists and hips gracefully and humorously contradict what he is singing. He is something rare: extraordinarily amiable. Fetch. Indeed, grool.

Star Ratings (out of five)
The constituent
Kyoto
mean girls