Theatre/Musicals - SPEAKING IN TONGUES Appreciation 1 ~ Starting on Sep. 18th in London

***Andie*** · 07-22-2009, 09:17 AM

John Simm (Life on Mars, State of Play) returns to the stage this autumn leading an exciting cast including Ian Hart (The Virgin Queen, Harry Potter and The Philosopher’s Stone), Emmy award-winning actress Lucy Cohu (The Queen's Sister, Torchwood), and Kerry Fox (An Angel at my Table, Shallow Grave), in the highly charged thriller SPEAKING IN TONGUES.

A missing person. A mysterious stiletto. Relationships in crisis. In SPEAKING IN TONGUES, the seemingly random confessions of a group of strangers are pieced together into a powerful study of infidelity and interwoven lives, as Detective Leon Zat (Simm) investigates the disappearance of a leading psychiatrist.

Andrew Bovell’s play will have its West End premiere at the Duke of York’s Theatre, directed by rising star Toby Frow. Bovell’s previous work includes Baz Lurhmann’s Strictly Ballroom, and his own adaptation of SPEAKING IN TONGUES into the acclaimed film Lantana.

**I Don't Dance** · 07-22-2009, 09:28 AM

Thanks Andie, for opening this thread. I read a little bit about this production last week, and am intrigued. Alas, I am really far from the West End. I am an Anthony LaPaglia fan, and have seen the film Lantana, though I have to admit I didn't understand it all.

Do you plan on seeing the show?

let it be · 07-22-2009, 09:08 PM

The premise of the show seems really cool. I adore John Simm and really wish I could see this show.

***KervyQT16*** · 07-23-2009, 11:30 AM

John Simm is love. I really missed him on DW and of course I miss LoM. Thanks for bringing this over, I wish I could see it.

***Andie*** · 09-26-2009, 01:23 PM

IT IS FREAKIN AMAZING

***Nad*** · 09-26-2009, 01:26 PM

Quote:

Originally Posted by Andie (View Post)

IT IS FREAKIN AMAZING

Word

Saw Speaking in Tongues on Wednesday and it was all kinds of awesome. I can only recommend it, if you have the chance to see it, go for it, the cast is amazing and the storyline drags you in and makes you think a lot

Guess I'd have to watch it again (and that is not a bad thing

) to say I got every single detail because I'm sure missed a few due to the story being so complex.

***Nad*** · 09-29-2009, 08:51 AM

Here are the first reviews for Speaking in Tongues:

Guardian:

Quote:

Speaking in Tongues
Duke of York's, London

out of 5

Michael Billington
guardian.co.uk, Tuesday 29 September 2009 10.18 BST

Andrew Bovell, as we know from When The Rain Stops Falling, is a wizard from Oz who writes fiendishly intricate plays. And this earlier piece, ﬁrst seen at Hampstead in 2000 and later turned into the movie Lantana, has all his trademark ingenuity. But, while it mystiﬁes and entertains, I felt irked by its lack of cultural speciﬁcity: it seems to be happening anywhere-in-general and nowhere-in-particular.

The plot is a theatrical spaghetti junction. It starts with two couples who have brieﬂy jettisoned their married partners, embarking on one-night stands. Although Leon and Jane make it into the sack where Pete and Sonja don't, both couples echo each other's dialogue. Matters get stranger when they are edgily re-united with their spouses. Jane, in particular, has an unnerving story to tell about seeing a bloodied neighbour hurling a woman's shoe into a rubbish dump. The ramiﬁcations of this are explored in the second half, when we learn that the shoe belonged to a therapist suﬀering her own marital trauma.

What Bovell is saying gradually becomes clear: Trust, whether between husband and wife, supposed lovers or therapist and patient, is dismayingly rare; and although we live in a world of hidden connections, we are all sentenced to solitary conﬁnement inside our own skins.

As a lover of detective ﬁction, I admire Bovell's use of narrative suspense and his ability to suggest that coincidental encounters mask a deep unease: a seemingly random confrontation between two women in a bar, for instance, leads to the revelation that they are diﬀerently attached to the same man. But the play's diagrammatic neatness leaves us feeling emotionally detached and the universality of Bovell's theme would be enhanced if we actually knew where we were.

Toby Frow's production, however, visually reinforces Bovell's idea that our lives are marked by intimate isolation. John Simm as an adulterous cop and Lucy Cohu as his fraught wife are particularly good at conveying the nervy irritation that comes when all passion is spent. Ian Hart as the therapist's guilt-ridden husband and Kerry Fox as her querulous patient also add to their air of accumulating tension.

"Only connect", EM Forster once told us; and Bovell's clever play reminds us of the diﬃculty of doing just that in the emotional Babel we inhabit.

The Times:

Quote:

September 29, 2009
Speaking in Tongues at the Duke of York’s

out of 5

Either the unnamed town in which Andrew Bovell sets this play is very small or there’s a strange erotic magnetism in its air.

Here’s John Simm’s aloof, wary Leon enjoying a one-night stand with Kerry Fox’s awkward, eager Jane at the very moment his wife Sonja is unsuccessfully launching into an equally surreptitious affair with her husband Pete, with each pair closeted in a similarly tacky hotel room and often burbling identical things. And the coincidences continue, right up to an ending in which three other characters turn out to be sexually but unknowingly linked.

Sound complex? Well, four actors play nine characters, sometimes speak in unison, and appear in scenes that cut into each other and don’t always follow the laws of time. But Bovell’s dramatic knots aren’t Gordian tangles or even over-intricate sheepshanks from Scouting for Boys. Thanks to his sharp writing and Toby Frow’s adroit handling of an able cast, the job of unravelling the plot proves manageable, rewarding and purposeful.

The play’s point is surely that, to quote Elaine May, there’s plenty of proximity but little relating. In our global village we connect, by design or accident, but even in marriage we’re seldom close. The Australian dramatist, whose equally adventurous When The Rain Stops Falling played in London in May, initially brings such a light, deft touch to his subject that you think you’re watching a post-modern version of Coward’s Private Lives, especially as he’s Anglicised the action; but, as events escalate, you feel the mistrust, insecurity, bewilderment, loneliness and desperation of people who (remember Pentecost) might as well be “speaking in tongues”.

Simm is not only Leon, a policeman trying to discover the whereabouts of a missing psychiatrist, but also dim, glum Nick, who gave that woman a lift, only for her to panic, jump out of the car and run into the forest.

Fox is both Jane and Sarah, a serial adulteress who regards men as disposable. Lucy Cohu is both glamorous, confused Sonja and that outwardly authoritative, inwardly troubled shrink. And Ian Hart has three roles, most strikingly Neil, an obsessed nerd who has spent years haplessly pursuing the woman he loved and lost, Sarah.

Does he commit suicide? Can’t tell you. One of the conclusions of this disturbing play is that life is inconclusive. We don’t learn the fates, marital or otherwise, of any character. And does this leave us as frustrated as them? No, because we’ve watched something riveting and real.

Box office: 0844 8717623 to December 12

London Evening Standard:

Quote:

Men are from Mars in Speaking in Tongues
By Henry Hitchings, None 29.09.09

out of five Henry Hichtings's rating

out of five Reader's rating

Andrew Bovell’s brittle drama of loneliness and betrayal calls to mind that hoary sporting cliché “It’s a game of two halves”. For this is a play that could end at the interval.

In its engrossing first half we see two couples enacting the routines of adultery; their deceptions are synchronised and overlap in a manner at once amusing and creepily erotic. Then in its second, the cast expands to a total of nine characters, and the connections between these nine are revealed. But precise satire gives way to anecdotal rambling, and as the links are explicitly articulated mystery dissolves into a mixture of the prosaic and the improbable.

Bovell’s play, besides suggesting the interweaving of our fates, is a provoking comment on the strangled communication that occurs between men and women. As lovers, we habitually talk at cross purposes — hence the play’s title.

Yet while this is a finely geared piece — Bovell has engineered its structure with scientific skill — its burden of coincidence defies belief. Although the text ultimately combines the implausible with an unhealthy dose of cliché, matters are redeemed by the performances. I would pay good money to watch any of Lucy Cohu, John Simm, Kerry Fox and Ian Hart on the stage. To see them all together might be regarded as a lavish treat, and of the four the nervily protean Hart and luminously engaging Cohu stand out here.

Toby Frow’s production emphasises the cinematic qualities of Bovell’s play. It was adapted for the screen as Lantana, and bears more than a passing resemblance to Patrick Marber’s Closer. Yet as it fidgets towards its quixotically inconclusive ending, its smart pretentiousness calls to mind a David Lynch movie — enigmatic, disorientating and brutal, perhaps, but at the same time strangely tenuous.

Until 12 December. Information: 0871 297 5454.