Sex, Death and A Baked Swan Reviews
Reviews
Highbury & Islinton Express
May 6th 2005 www.islingtonexpress.co.uk
Dying for more
****
IT'S not apparent from these masterful two plays that their author has not written for the stage before. What does show is fine craftsmanship and an insightful, understated flair for character observation. As it happens, playwright Deborah Cook has been writing TV and radio for years.
A poetic but bitterly comic monologue about a Roman woman's resolve to poison her adulterous husband, A Baked Swan is a lyrical treat for the ears. It helps that actress Danielle Allan portrays Flavia with such studied care - a blend of Bree from Desperate Housewives and Hedda Gabbler.
In The Main Event, Cook builds up a suspenseful study of two women's relationship as they prepare to kill each in a public gladiator fight. Cook's is certainly a voice to listen out for in future.
Helena Thompson
Sunday 1st May 2005
This double bill takes us back eighteen centuries to London in the early third century. In the first play, A Baked Swan, Deborah Cook, who clearly knows her Apicius, presents us with Flavia, a patrician lady preparing a dinner party to entertain some of her husband's barbarian British business associates. She was betrothed to Marcus Gaius when she was only seven and married by proxy at thirteen when her bridegroom was in Gaul. Now, she has ended up with him in Londinium, not as she expected in the city — no one of any position lives there, they just go in for the temple, politics and business — but outside in a grandiose but shoddily built villa in the middle of a field.
Roman ladies usually leave cooking to their slaves but bored Flavia has taken it up as something of a hobby and clearly enjoys it, even though she can't get many of the ingredients she needs in Britain and has to use her ingenuity to replace them with British near-equivalents. Danielle Allan makes her a very engaging second-century Delia, or perhaps more accurately a patrician Nigella, chatting to us as she prepares her dishes, describing her menu and her life. Gaius has rather kinky tastes, he's got a lover and he's recently turned Christian. Most of the multi-course menu is dedicated to "tiny" things: stuffed dormice and lark's tongues for instance, but to honour his new religion, Gaius has demanded a winged final course to represent angels. I won't spoil it by giving all the details but it includes not only a whole baked swan but pastry flamingoes.
This small theatre provides an intimacy that parallels that of television celebrity cookery programmes but the latter never give you such a commentary on marriage and the woman's lot and would never think of substituting taxus berries for those other small red berries that are an ingredient of her husband's favourite dish. With them, the plot — like one of Flavia's sauces — begins to thicken. Allan totally engages us, and the writing bubbles with gentle humour.
The second play, The Main Event, takes us to the dressing room of a couple of primae matronae at the London Colosseum (not the Coliseum, note: these divas are gladiatrix not sopranos). Rob Pomfret plays a limping stagehand (is he a survivor from the arena?) forced by some rather nasty flooding to put both stars together, despite contractual stipulations. Thus Claudia, a patrician senator's wife turned fighter, finds herself encountering her former slave whom she named Greeneyes. Fliss Walton makes a very haughty but no less human Claudia and Toni Darlow a spirited Greeneyes. The slave identifies herself as Welsh and in earlier days was an accomplished harpist, but this is a racial identification rather than location, as she was clearly not reared there. She has previously been her mistress's slave in Rome and has an English lower-class accent, equivalent to her slave-girl Latin.
As the two of them prepare to face each other in the arena we learn their back-story: how love made a grand lady into a gladiatrix; how a slave sentenced to the arena for murder won her survival. Deborah Cook offers us intriguing situations and her historical research seems faultless but these are in no way antiquarian pieces. She also has much to say about sisterhood and marriage. Women today may not have such low legal status as under Roman law but you never feel that they are talking from a distant past since men really haven't changed all that much.
I can't pay director Robert Gillespie a bigger compliment than to say you don't notice his direction. It is a different matter with set and costumes: Kevin Freeman has cleverly transformed the space to create an atmospheric setting for both plays, aided by Stephen Ley's lighting, while for the second play sound designer David Peto has provided a track of clanging doors and noisy spectators to remind us how close we are to the blood and sawdust.
These plays might not work so effectively in large venues but are ideal pieces for intimate spaces and make a well-matched pair. They provide three good parts for women of which these actresses make the most.
Howard Loxton © 2005
Time out. May 4th, 2005
Don't be fooled: precious little sex, death, or indeed baked swans materialise on the Rosemary Branch stage in this intriguing double-bill from Deborah Cook. In fact, it is the marginal, notably undramatic nature of the plays that makes them both so interesting. Set in London a good 2,000 years ago, they examine three markedly different but quintessential Roman women's lives, in entirely private, feminine contexts.
The kitchen is the arena for the first play, where the long-suffering wife of a civic administrator is preparing for a din¬ner party. Danielle Allan is well cast as the down-trodden, defiant Flavia, grinding down her spices, reminiscing about her home and childhood in the chill of rain-soaked London while explaining the recipes for the five-course extravaganza her husband has demanded. Well crafted and cleverly conceived, 'A Baked Swan' examines the tiny fractures that occur in the wholesale export of imperial culture, but it's a shame Cook can't forego unearthing all of her metaphors and slapping them down centre stage.
‘The Main Event' is altogether richer, subtler and more satisfying. Set in the female dressing room of the London Coliseum, two gladiatrix, Claudia and 'Greeneyes', prepare to fight to the death. Cook's research pokes uncomfortably through her dialogue, with bald fact, back-story and a messy flashback sequence bogging up her drama. But this tale of an ex-slave and the disgraced wife of a senator, brought beautifully to life by Fliss Walton and Toni Darlow, and ably, inventively directed by Robert Gillespie, soon triumphs over its shortcomings. Determinedly prosaic, witty and increasingly effective, 'The Main Event' in particular provides a fascinating glimpse of Rome through the smallest of keyholes.
Lucy Powell
The Stage
EastEnders scriptwriter Deborah Cook makes her stage debut with a delightful double bill of plays about Roman women in ancient Britain circa 200AD. Impressively well researched, the plays show off Cook’s droll wit while making interesting, still relevant points about power, class and gender.
A Baked Swan is a monologue in the form of a cookery demonstration, a lesson in Roman cuisine expertly delivered by Danielle Allan. With the brisk efficiency of a classical Delia Smith, Allan’s expatriate Roman matron Flavia takes us course by course through the sumptuous dinner party she is preparing for her civic administrator husband and his guests.
She provides recipe tips on a range of exotic dishes from roast dormouse to baked swan, interspersed with complaints about the plumbing and the help, and other jibes at this benighted rain and windswept corner of the empire. Meanwhile, Flavia’s marital history gradually emerges, as does the cunning gastronomic revenge she has in store for the boorish husband to whom she was forcibly married at the age of 13.
The Main Event, Cook’s second play, also explores a power struggle. The antagonists are two female gladiators, formerly mistress and slave, who are preparing to fight each other in the London Coliseum.
Fliss Walton’s haughty Claudia, the disgraced ex-wife of a senator turned superstar gladiatrix, and her ex-slave, Toni Darlow’s feisty Celt Greeneyes, at first appear worlds apart. Claudia subscribes to the stiff upper lip Roman code of duty, Greeneyes owes her sensibility to the romantic myths and songs of her Welsh heritage.
As the time for their entry into the arena approaches, however, the similarities between the women emerge - both are fighting back against a male-dominated world in which low-born slaves and upper crust wives alike are property. Initially wary and hostile, the pair slowly discover a touching kinship.
Aided by Robert Gillespie’s skilful, unobtrusive direction, Walton and Darlow do an excellent job of conveying the shifts in the women’s relationship, while effective lighting and sound design by Stephen Ley and David Peto enhance the tension as the time for the women’s fatal duel draws near.
What’s On. May 4, 2005
If Delia Smith had broadcast her cookery programmes in 200AD, they might have looked something like A Baked Swan - a salty lecture delivered by a middle-aged Roman wife unhappily transplanted to chilly Londinium.
With a mixture of chin-up briskness and sudden dark asides, Danielle Allan's Flavia talks us through the recipes for a dinner party for her husband's political cronies - grinding peppercorns, marinating dates and blending her ubiquitous fish sauce at the same time.
Along the way she reveals her grievances about life with her overbearing war hero husband. Finally forced to convert to Christianity her thoughts turn to radically new recipe ingredients. Allan's jolly but vulnerable Wl-style matron is hugely enjoyable. The second playlet in this ancient Roman-themed double bill by EastEnders script-writer Deborah Cook, is less self-assured.
The Main Event is set in the dressing room of Londinium's own colisseum, where two female gladiators discuss a shared past while preparing to fight each other to the death. Forced into a life of combat in the arena by an indiscreet extra-marital fling, celtic ex-slave Greeneyes (Toni Darlow) and her former mistress Claudia (Fliss Walton) argue about romantic Celtic love versus hypocritical Roman duty while strapping on their armour and sharpening their swords.
There's a slight froth of soap bubbles rising from some of their heated exchanges and the piece could be significantly shorter. Still, wit and originality are never in short supply in this piquant evening.
***** Helen Chappell
Feature
Islington Tribune 6 May 2005
Eastenders action in Roman Britain
by RACHEL CALTON
DEBORAH Cook describes writing for the stage as "nerve-wracking because you can actually see your audience" but "a real pleasure doing something of your own".
"Meanwhile writing for television can begin to make you feel like a sausage making machine," she says, but adds, relieved: "The laughs seemed to come at all the right places." Cook has scripted enough episodes of Eastenders, Casualty and The Archers to know how to pull a laugh from the audience when she wants one.
Another novelty of being the playwright is creating characters. For Cook, inspiration for her first venture from television to stage came when evidence of the first female gladiator was unearthed, here in London (Southwark, 2002).
"The discovered remains confirm a rumour that has been around for years, that a female gladiator did fight in the arena, probably against another female," she says. "The burial proves this was a woman of great stature in Roman society."
Unsurprisingly for someone who has scripted some of soap's most feisty females, this female fighter is a character that caught Cook's imagination. The play is based in the changing rooms of an amphitheatre, in Londinium, 200AD. Thousands of spectators await ex-senator's wife, Gladiatrix Claudia in combat with barbarian, and ex-slave, Greeneyes. The drama that unfolds reveals how they have come from mistress and slave to face each other as equals in the arena, fighting for dignity or death.
This tale of female rivalry, dressed up in war paint and breast-plates, really is Rome sexed up, and these are women determined to survive. This is an empire where everybody is owned by somebody - slaves are owned by senator's wives, wives are owned by the senators and senators are owned by emperors.
Written by someone well acquainted with East End organised crime, domestic violence, and all the dirty play that comes in tow, Cook evokes a Roman London where all the dynamics of soap opera action are alive and kicking. Claudia slathers on the oil before going to the arena in the same manner Kat Slater might slap on the lipstick before facing a public brawl in the square.
If you're wondering where baked swan fits in, this is a separate short play that precedes the above. The wife of an influential Roman politician, in the process of adorning her husband's dinner table, demonstrates that she who rules the kitchen, rules the empire.
Comment
Dear Cecilia,
All five of us greatly enjoyed yesterday's "roman" show. Surprisingly authentic as well as well written. You pleased four professors (two of them trained in classics and teaching classics) and one Ph.D.candidate.
Kit, Judy, and I have made a hobby of visiting Roman sites in Britain and made a jaunt to Pompeii and environs this year, and we are not exactly uncritical. So tell the people involved that we were really pleased and impressed. The new plays we've seen at the Hampstead Theatre this year haven't been half as good.
If you can get an approximate running time for the Scholar/Bear double bill I would be much obliged. We have seen 195 plays/operas since last July and we have something booked every day for the next three weeks, but we'd really like to catch this show. We have tickets at the Globe on unday 5 June at 6:30, but I am hoping the timing might work, in which case we would be a party of at least 4 (and possibly 5) people. thanks!
Robert D. Hume
Professor of English Literature, Department of English, Penn State University, USA.