INVISIBLE
Transport/New Wolsey Theatre (UK and European Tour) 2011/12

THE GUARDIAN

London businessman Felix is 35 and very comfortably off. So why does he feel so disconnected, a supporting character in his own life? On a clear day, Stefan, existing in limbo in a shanty town on the French coast, can see Dover. "You can see it from here – the white cliffs – the finish line." Lara, who believed in those fairytales about finding your own happiness and the golden goose, discovers the finish line turns out to be the starting line in a race you can never win. But when Lara's life intersects with Felix, just for a moment it looks as if everything could be different. So it proves, but not in a way either of them ever imagined.

Since the first migrations out of Africa, the world has always been on the move. But shifts in global politics and capitalism mean that for many, leaving home is not a choice but a necessity. "A person makes plans. One day the world turns upside-down, and you realise there was one plan you never took the time to make," says one character. Few people want to leave home, but sometimes you must, particularly when your neighbour tells you that it would be wise if you left the village before morning.

That's one of the best scenes in this pungent new play by Croatian writer Tena Štivičić, which puts the flesh and bones on the statistics about transnational migration. There's another about the ache to find the gherkin that tastes of home. At times it feels a little over-familiar, but in a smart and smartly acted production by Douglas Rintoul, this play about worth and worthlessness, what we see and what we fail to see, and the dissolution of dreams, has the dislocated air of nightmare.

WHATSONSTAGE ****

THE STAGE
Invisible, by Croatian playwright Tena Stivicic, is a compassionate tale of immigrants to Britain being overlooked, underpaid and broadly underwhelmed. The underlying theme appears to be that in the modern world, with its blurred geographical boundaries, techno-reliance and career pressures, a great many of us exist in a state of flux - it’s just that some are more stateless than others.

Stivicic and director Rintoul have fused a crisp, punchy script with dreamy slow motion choreography and innovative lighting/soundscapes in order to present a multilayered story which builds towards an unexpected climax. It does so stealthily and with the elements fusing near perfectly. Of these layers, the most affecting are inhabited by Anton (Krystian Godlewski) and Lara (Anna Elijasz), two young, brave, hopeful Eastern Europeans reduced to a life of cast-off freebies and dead-end jobs. Godlewski commendably transmits the tension and hurt pride inside Anton, a skilled carpenter reduced to cleaning windows. Elijasz imbues the sunny optimist Lara with just the right air of unspoken desperation as she and Anton grit their teeth at the bottom of the pile - this was a delightful professional debut by the Guildhall graduate.

Meanwhile, Felix is the middle class professional on the other side of the fence. The possibility of a contract stint in Romania makes for a thought-provoking juxtaposition with the people traffic coming the other way, but his mid-life crisis sees him lurch into the migrants’ sphere in London with terrible consequences. Jon Foster enacts Felix’s disintegration with subtlety, even if the plot makes his comeuppance feel just a tad too convenient. Bridgitta Roy is suitably exasperated as Felix’s partner, Ann, while Gracy Goldman, in particular, shows impressive versatility and a keen comedic eye as both careworn immigrant Leyla and the quietly smug metropolitan, Louise.

Using simple artistic techniques to penetrate a complex subject, Transport has produced a highly uplifting piece of theatre. Credit, too, to the New Wolsey for once again combining talents with an up and coming visiting company.

ELEGY - Transport/Edinburgh Festival Fringe 2011

WHATSONSTAGE ****
LOVEFRINGE *****
SCOTSGAY ****

THE LIST **** (Hitlist)

Moving story of a flight from persecution

The last time Douglas Rintoul was in Scotland was to direct a revival of David Greig’s Europe at Dundee Rep. There’s something of the flavour of that migratory play in this powerful production for the internationally minded Transport company, as actor Jamie Bradley tells the story of a refugee traversing the no-man’s land of empty train stations, border crossings and bomb-blasted towns, a man wanted neither by his own country nor anyone else’s.

Based on true stories of homophobic persecution in Iraq, Elegy is a compassionate study of a man enduring brutality, fear and exploitation. He is no more guilty of sin than a left-handed man in a right-handed world, yet his repression becomes so extreme he can scarcely articulate his reasons for fleeing even to himself.

Staged simply and strikingly in a white-cube gallery space on a long bed of discarded clothes, like the shadows of so many human lives, the play avoids the tub-thumping obviousness of some human-rights drama in preference for Bradley’s vivid storytelling with its clever interweaving of narrative strands and understated humanity.

EUROPE – Barbican/Dundee Rep 2007

TIME OUT ****(Critic's Choice)
METRO ****
THE SCOTSMAN ****

EVENING STANDARD ****
"In Brief Encounter, the events that unfold in the tea room at Milford Junction tell us all we need to know about the self-denying England of 1945. In Europe (1994), David Greig uses a station for similarly powerful metaphorical ends. In a small town - "the sort of place people come from, not the place they go to" - somewhere on the border between Eastern and Western Europe, characters hang around the soon-to-be-closed station, caught in limbo between the old world order and the new. Only the true adventurers, however, actually get on a train. While Greig nods obliquely to the fall of the Berlin Wall and war in the Balkans, the real force of this spare but strikingly poetic piece derives from its very non-specificity. Intriguingly, the playwright has said that another title for it could be "Scotland". It's about any Nowheresville in any country where all the good things happen elsewhere and all the bad things - the effects of oppressive centralisation, the resurgence of far-Right politics - trickle down eventually. Director Douglas Rintoul and designer Colin Richmond have put together a slick, sleek production in which benches, timetables and screens are slid around efficiently. The actors add to the unsettling sense of a world in transit by sitting at the sides of the stage when not required. There are some other Brecht-lite tricks, with projected captions providing titles for scenes. Yet the effect is the opposite of alienation. We are constantly engaged by particularly fine performances from Samantha Young as a febrile station assistant dreaming of faraway destinations, and Michelle Bonnard as a refugee fleeing undescribed atrocities. The two young women become friends and offer tentative hope that the ideal of the brave new Europe may also prove to be a workable reality."

THE TELEGRAPH
"The prefatory quotation accompanying David Greig's 1994 play Europe is from W H Auden's Refugee Blues ("But where shall we go to today, my dear?"), which is apt because the opening chorus of anonymous voices is pure Auden: "Ours is a small town on the border, at various times on this side, and, at various times, on the other, but always on the border." Hearing those lines in Douglas Rintoul's superlative revival at the Barbican Pit, a transfer from Dundee, you realise that this is probably the closest British theatre has got to acknowledging a debt to the poet in the centenary year of his birth. Auden's verse dramas remain his weakest suit, verging on unstageable, but, as with so many of the great poets of the '30s, his gift was to connect with the Continent as much as with our sense of being an island apart. That legacy, mislaid in the post-war period, is one Greig has picked up on and carries forward here. This decaying provincial town, where the local industry is kaput and the trains no longer stop, lies both in his native Scotland and in the dark heart of the European land-mass. Some of its inhabitants stubbornly cling to the idea of staying put, making do. Others allow themselves to dream of heading off down the tracks in search of a better life. That tension is brought out into the open, eventually spills into violence, with the arrival of two mysterious refugees, a middle-aged man and a young woman, who camp out in the defunct station. The topic of how Europe treats its migrants has hardly gone away, but Greig gets behind media issue-grinding and traces the hurt, longing and fear on all sides with intelligence, humour and a fair few expletives. Designer Colin Richmond musters beautiful background "departure board" visuals and scatters the mainly bare stage with autumn leaves. Without ever being explicit, the evening blows shaming memories of Bosnia's dead and discarded back in our faces."

THE FINANCIAL TIMES ****
"Playwright David Greig's enduring fascination is with identity: not the old truth/ illusion trope, but how we construct who we are, how we use external frameworks (interpersonal, financial, political) to validate our various modalities of thought. In his early days with the Suspect Culture company, he would deconstruct the drama itself; more recently, with pieces such as The Cosmonaut's Last Message... and The American Pilot, he has deftly interwoven the personal and the broader-world aspects. Europe, dating originally from 1994 and now revived in association with Dundee Rep, is of the latter kind. In a nameless small town near the shifting frontier between nameless countries, the railway station has become redundant: open borders mean no stopping for border controls, so the trains no longer stop. Stationmaster Fret tries to keep going through the bureaucratic motions, while his assistant Adele dreams of journeying to the trains' magical-sounding destinations. Their respective senses of self are catalysed by the arrival in the waiting room of two refugees (from what? from where?), just waiting without hope or expectation of a train or anything else. These incomers in turn become scapegoats for local resentment at the economic downturn, emblematised in the laying-off of Adele's husband Berlin. Europe: at various times it is the dreamed-of better life elsewhere, the exotic, the new opportunities for trade symbolised by international huckster Morocco; it is also who and where we are now, a symbol of civilisation and standards that we may look on as a birthright even while we betray them through, for instance, violent xenophobia. It is half-recognisable but never truly defined, like the blurred, distorted outlines of countries that flash up between scenes on the video backdrop. Greig, writing at the moment that Yugoslavia was fragmenting, grimly foretold so many characteristics and attitudes that are now commonplaces of 21st-century social and political life. This ought to be incidental to the play's central message that we must know not only ourselves but others; however, it cannot help lending an urgency, even a desperation to the work. Douglas Rintoul's elegantly spare production finds its heart in duologues between Robert Paterson and Hannes Flaschberger as Fret and the refugee father, and in particular between Samantha Young as the painfully romantic Adele and Michelle Bonnard as the disengaged, disillusioned Katia.

THE LIST ****
"Reviving a play that is old enough to merit revisiting but too young to be called a classic carries a certain risk. What seemed timely and topical a decade ago might now seem tired and trite. The remarkable thing about David Greig’s Europe, however, is that it speaks even more vividly about our world in 2007 than it did when it was first staged at the Traverse in 1994. Greig would argue that he wasn’t being prescient when he wrote about the movement of peoples on a continent riven by civil war and economic collapse, he was merely tuned in to a problem that hasn’t gone away. That doesn’t lessen the chill wind of recognition when we see Chris Ryman’s wheeler-dealing Morocco being viciously beaten up by a disenfranchised mob for consorting with Michelle Bonnard’s refugee Katia. It could be a racist attack in today’s UK - or anywhere else in today’s world in political flux. What strikes home most forcibly in Douglas Rintoul’s bold, sober, strongly acted production, played out on Colin Richmond’s suitably placeless set of advertising hoardings and neon lights, is the way Greig connects social disintegration with the loss of identity. All the characters in this town near the border of some unnamed country have been uprooted by forces beyond their control, but their greatest psychological wound is caused less by losing their livelihood than by having nowhere distinctive to call home. Perhaps Margaret Thatcher was right when she said there was no such thing as society - and this bleak place is what it looks like.

KING LEAR – Creation Oxford 2006

Andrew Blade – The Stage

The overwhelming space of the Cowley BMW plant is both a plus and minus for this monumental production of Lear. The sheer scale of the place convinces us both of the magnitude of the hostile outer world, and Lear’s own defiant smallness in the face of it.
The storm scenes resonate superbly, with Lear spotlit at the very back of the stage, hurling his invocations across the auditorium like impotent thunderbolts.
Yet sometimes Creation feel the need to use the space even when not strictly relevant to the action. Oswald’s frantic bike-pedalling serves no purpose other than to necessitate a lot of squeaky wheeling over important speeches.
It is symptomatic of a risk-taking production that often works, and sometimes falls flat. Doubling parts is standard in Shakespeare, but an Edmund/Kent pairing requires considerable editing and not a little confusion for a first-time audience. The Regan/Cornwall slow-dance that precedes their assault on Gloucester is not so convincing either.
But much of the acting is beautifully executed. Stephen Ley is a heartbreaking Lear, a mass of human contradictions - warm, irrational, sage and innocent, often within the same line. Charlotte Lucas and Eleanor Montgomery manage to imbue Regan and Goneril with a rare subtlety, while Andrew Macbean (Gloucester) proves that less is more in the cliff-top scene. A pity then that Jenni Maitland is so strident as Cordelia; her Fool seems to merge into the wronged daughter, and vice versa.
Nevertheless, this is a high-class production, as might be expected from Creation, with spectral music and expert costumes, not to mention a good few tears at the end.

Daily Info, Oxford

Hayley Grindle’s bleak, autumnal, all-purpose set matches the bleakness of the story.

Charlotte Lucas and Eleanor Montgomery admirably convey the malevolent essence of the two mean-spirited, power-suited sisters, best avoided on dark nights, the antithesis of Jenni Maitland’s guileless Cordelia.

With a cast of eight, doubling is inevitable; Jenny Mailands’s quirky, haunted Fool forlornly seeks to mend the king’s failing grasp on reality. Darren Ormandy’s thuggish, lascivious Edmund is a natural confederate for Regan and Goneril, marvellously at variance with his fine portrayal of loyal Kent.

In contrast, Richard Cunnigham’s snivelling Oswald is a perverse delight, matched in cruelty by his vulpine Cornwall.

Andrew Macbean’s too trusting Gloucester /(Albany) touches the heart. The crucial Act 4 ‘Dover cliff’ scene between Gloucester and Gareth Kennerley’s notably heroic Edgar has marvellous tension and power.

Despite, or rather because of, the strength and support of the ensemble playing, the evening belongs, as it must, to Stephen Ley as Lear. Despotic and querulous at the start, by turns angry, appalled, fearful of his descent into madness, Ley never goes beyond nature as he becomes as one with the poor bare forked creatures cowering on the terrible storm blasted heath (so wonderfully evoked in the enormous playing area).

At the last, Ley’s wonderful clarity and dignity after madness has scavenged his soul is ineffably moving. At last Lear, and we, the audience, are permitted a vision of redemption:

she lives! if it be so,
It is a chance which does redeem all sorrows
That ever I have felt.

Douglas Rintoul’s supple, vigorous production drives his able cast relentlessly, never from the first moment releasing the audience from the play’s grip, and on through the central brutal chaos to the tragedy’s hushed resolution.

Go and see it.

TOUCHED – Trafalgar Studios 2009

Dominic Cavendish – Telegraph 4 Stars

It's 1984 and adorning Lesley's bedroom mirror are dozens of photo-clips of pop's brightest new star: Madonna.
Not yet a global brand, and a long way from being called Madge, she was still, back then, young, fresh, cool, insolent – with a funny line in fingerless lace mittens.
Lesley, in common with millions of other teenage girls, wants to act like her, pout like her – and stirs to the siren-call of her rites-of-passage hit, Like a Virgin.
She's been touched for the very first time by the miracle of celebrity, the way it instills a sense of belonging and self-belief and, in Madonna's case, a talismanic quality of female empowerment.
Once you've felt that intoxicating rush, though, you can become a little, well, wrong in the head.
Zoe Lewis's likeably witty comedy about Madonna-worship, which both celebrates and critiques the Queen of Pop's influence on her fans, makes the ideal one-woman vehicle for Sadie Frost's West End debut.
While Frost's ex-husband Jude Law is gearing up to play Hamlet at Wyndham's, this is a far more modest proposal.
Directed by Douglas Rintoul, it's aware of its own limitations as well as those of its star, who's never called upon to dig too deep – rather, to show how an ordinary young lass can get into a shallow groove, then stay stuck in it for decades, gradually gathering wistfulness like fluff round a record-needle.
At the very least, the evening shows the world that Frost, a mother of four who – like her character – grew up in Manchester, hasn't altogether turned into a tabloid cliche, living the high life in a fancy-pants house on Primrose Hill, partying with Kate Moss, plugging her fashion ranges or make short films.
She slums it here with trim aplomb – deftly changing costumes between scenes, and holding her own, inches away from the audience, as she writhes about on a bed or confides Lesley's latest misdemeanour.
Lewis piles on satirical twists to match Madge's own spiralling eccentricity.
While our ditzy heroine begins sensibly enough by spurning a local lad and leaving home for London, she winds up, single and childless, madly wrecking a Madonna video in New York, toying with adopting an African orphan baby and making a desperate lunge for the star across a dancefloor.
At once a cautionary tale and a nostalgic trawl through the bubble-gum sounds of yesteryear, Touched proves a warming and incisive ray of light for these dark, regretful days.
Rating: ****

TAMING OF THE SHREW – Salisbury Playhouse 2002

Lyn Gardener – The Guardian 3 Stars

The moment has long passed since productions of The Taming of the Shrew had women running shrieking from theatres. However, it still requires a shrewd director to make this comedy, which can come across like curdled milk, seem palatable.
Douglas Rintoul, a young director of enormous promise, almost pulls it off here with a production that is as eye-catching as it is intelligent. Gemma Fripp's design of Arabic-influenced arches and twisted palms juts out crossways over the stage. Rintoul, too, comes at the play sideways. His setting of the play in a Muslim (but not fundamentalist) society is not only topical but also dramatically cute and intellectually convincing.
Here, when Katia Caballero's spirited - if not 100% proof - Katherina falls down in front of Jay Villiers's sunny, bear-like Petruchio, it is as an obedient wife within the laws of Islam. The way he kisses her hand and raises her up indicates that he too is bound by laws that mean he owes a duty to his wife to honour and protect her.
This is made even more clear in the way that Baptista is shown to have failed in his duties as a father and leader of his household in favouring his youngest daughter Bianca over her elder sister Katherina. Katherina here is the unhappy product of a dysfunctional family, and Petruchio offers the therapy that she needs.

Rintoul's confident production has a lovely comic edge as it conveys all these ideas - not by imposing them upon the play, but through clever use of Shakespeare's sharp-eyed observations on the complexities of human nature. The acting is also the best I've seen in a classical play at this address for some time. What the evening lacks, however, is enough sustained energy to see it through to its conclusion. The momentum slows after the interval and does not pick up until the beautifully realised and detailed final scene, which recaptures the edge of the first half.
That second-half dip is, I suspect, less a product of Rintoul's failure of nerve than of the constraints of limited rehearsal time. A pity, because, like Katherina herself, this is almost a cracker.

DESIGN FOR LIVING – Les Theatres de la Ville de Luxembourg 2008

Janine Goedert - Letzebueger Land

Janine Goedert
Paris, London, New York – these are not the strategic stops in a fashionista’s busy diary, but the three cities Noël Coward’s bohemians are sailing through in Design for Living: an artist’s studio in Paris gives way to a stylish London flat, while the final setting is a splendid New York penthouse that exudes both serious money and tasteful choices.
The comedy, which is currently showing at the Capucins theatre, is about a love triangle between Otto, Leo and Gilda. It premiered in New York in January 1933, with the author himself as Leo, the playwright whose sudden success turns his life into a whirl of cocktail parties and country-house weekends. Clearly, there is an autobiographical element to it all!
Since Leo is increasingly solicited by journalists and other celebrity hunters, Gilda, who left Otto, the painter, for Leo and has been sharing his life for a year and a half, feels lost. In the end she leaves again, this
time in order to marry Ernest, the slightly older wealthy art dealer who has long been friends with the three of them. Yet her escape is not as straightforward as it looks. As Leo warned Gilda in Act I: “The actual facts are so simple. I love you. You love me. You love Otto. I love Otto. Otto loves you. Otto loves me. There now!” The three of them are bound to be drawn together again in this unique and very private game of musical chairs.
Design for Living is a premiere for Luxembourg: Douglas Rintoul, a British director, has come here to work on an English-language production with Luxembourg actors as the three lead characters. Jules Werner and Tom Leick both trained in London, so to them it must feel like a kind of homecoming, whereas Myriam Muller steps into new territory. In Act I she plays Gilda as a doll-like fidgety creature who uses torrents of bubbly words to cover up her uneasiness and drown poor Ernest (David Phelan) in confusion.

By Act II she has fully grown into the part, and when she faces Ernest again, this time in London, the production picks up speed and buzzes with delicious comedy. Ernest is desperate to find out what is going on, yet his tentative, measured approach will get him nowhere. There are further comic interludes triggered by the presence of Miss Hodge (Ann Comfort, who has been one of the stars of the New World Theatre Club for years), the comic housemaid who disapproves of Gilda’s partner-swapping.
Another highlight of the evening is the sparkling double act Otto (Jules Werner) and Leo (Tom Leick) put on in the final scene. When they appear out of the blue at the New York penthouse the now married Gilda shares with Ernest, they swiftly take over. Gilda has finally started a career of her own as a successful interior decorator and is entertaining three rich American friends/clients. Soon the two intruders start playing a game intended to confuse the latter. Their tailcoats and stylised acting have touches of the music-hall, while their comments cut through the Americans’ vapid small talk. When Ernest, who has been away on business, comes back the following morning and confronts them, his pique cannot hold out against their suave insouciance and languorous ease. And then, his stumble over some wrapped-up modern art triggers the final laughter that unites the threesome once more and makes Gilda’s dull but dependable husband the odd one out. Only an avant-garde Matisse may comfort him now.
Douglas Rintoul directs an elegant and nuanced production in which the different characters grow on stage as they go through various emotional setbacks and have to grapple with contradictory feelings. The acting is precise, versatile and full of panache.
Great care has been taken with the three fully realised sets as well as the clothes. Even Gilda’s hairstyles may serve as an indication of her changing circumstances, with the loose pageboy eventually making way for more sophisticated, bouffant American hair. In spite of the occasional rather saccharine passage, Coward’s text succeeds in moving beyond the period-piece feel with the questions it raises about conformity, personal freedom and celebrity. The deep melancholy underneath the laughter is both touching and disturbing.