John Morrison

Time And The Conways

There are some plays that should not be exhumed for public performance.  Enid Bagnold's The Chalk Garden is one of them, and this play by J B Priestley is another.  Nearly two decades ago, Stephen Daldry worked wonders with a National Theatre revival of Priestley's An Inspector Calls.  It ran and toured for most of the 1990s.  On this occasion, theatrical wunderkind Rupert Goold is the director who is trying to turn the sow's ear into a silk purse.  Though young Rupert goolds the lily in characteristic style, it doesn't work.  This is a play written in 1937 when Priestley was exploring some dotty theories about the nature of time.  Despite a lucidly written programme note by A C Grayling, I'm still in the dark about what he was getting at. I once spent a transatlantic flight sitting next to a professor of astrophysics who tried to explain Einstein's theory of relativity to me, but when we touched down in Baltimore I was still none the wiser. Isaac Newton still rules OK as far as I'm concerned.  Priestley takes a well-off provincial family headed by a widowed mother in 1919 when they are celebrating the birthday of one of the daughters, then fast-forwards in Act two to 1938 when their lives have turned out quite differently, then goes back in Act three to finish the party.  Kay, the daughter who is turning 21, has flashes of insight into the future, indicated by some heavy-duty emoting and lots of twiddling with the stage lighting.  There are loud banging noises at significant moments, and the last two acts end with some over-developed Gooldian stage trickery.  'Isn't he clever!' seems to be the response that is being elicited.  The PBA (poor bloody actors) do their best with this second-rate tosh.  But the characterisation is too thin, even for excellent performers like Francesca Annis and Adrian Scarborough.  As a social drama about a doomed class and about the way life crushes our dreams of happiness, this falls miles behind Chekhov's Cherry Orchard.   There are playwrights who manage to turn obscure ideas into riveting theatre (Stoppard's Arcadia is a wonderful play about the nature of time and how we misunderstand the past) but I don't think Priestley was one of them, on the evidence of this one.   Goold tries to give the play extra meaning by slowing down the play to a crawl and minimising the stage movement, but this only accentuates the banalities.    After three acts and two intervals, I was screaming to be let out of the Lyttelton theatre and allowed to go home. 

Phedre with Helen Mirren

We all bring our own personal baggage to the theatre when we watch a play;  in my case, Racine is one of a trio of playwrights (the others being Moliere and Chekhov) who were regular victims of my essay-writing at university.  I can't remember what I wrote about Phedre 40 years ago, but many of the original lines of Racine's play have stuck in my memory.  Eleven years ago I saw Diana Rigg on stage in the title role of the queen who falls in love with her stepson Hyppolitus and sends him to his death.  I'd like to say Dame Diana was unforgettable, but all I can recall from 1998 are vague memories of a sizzling performance.  My recollections of her playing Medea in the same West End season are a bit sharper.   Four days before making my way to the National Theatre to see this play, I was soaking up the sunshine on an island in the Mediterranean, so I felt a strong pang of post-holiday nostalgia when I saw the Lyttelton stage transformed into a sun-baked terrace with a shimmering blue background and a rocky outcrop.  This production by Nicholas Hytner uses the same translation by Ted Hughes of Racine's Phedre as the 1998 revival with Diana Rigg.  In the original French, the power of Racine is entirely in the hypnotic effect of the alexandrines, a precise classical form within which the words convey aqnd confine shattering emotions and violence.  It's impossible to reproduce in English, and Hughes quite rightly made no attempt to try. His version is earthily English and very raw.  Hytner too makes no attempt to mimic the classical French style of tragedy, where physical action is kept to a minimum;  but he's a director who never over-eggs the pudding and knows that less is often more.  So when the bloodstained body of Hippolytus is dragged on stage at the end, leaving a red smear in its wake, it's a taboo-breaking moment.  Such scenes are routine in Shakespeare but totally outside the French classical canon, which doubles the impact.  Bob Crowley's design transports the play away from 17th century France and into a world which is recognisably the modern Mediterranean.  The guards wear combat fatigues while the women's dresses have an echo of ancient Greece.  Normally I am left uneasy by this kind of mixture, but in this production it works well.  Helen Mirren is just spellbinding as Phedre;  her vocal technique is so good that every syllable, even delivered in a whisper, is audible right up in the Lyttelton circle.  Phedre moves from tormented guilt when she confesses to loving Hippolytus to fevered jealousy when she learns that he is in love with the imprisoned princess Aricia.  The last time I saw Mirren on stage at the National was a decade or so ago when she played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony -- not a combination that struck many sparks.  Mirren only hit top gear once her lifeless Roman partner was safely out of the way.  Here, by contrast, she's at maximum velocity throughout.  'Phedre is an express going trhough the station without much declaration - you either jump aboard cleanly or you miss it,' Ted Hughes said.  In other words, it's like 20/20 cricket, where the players don't have a few overs at the start to play themselves in.  They have to reach the right level of intensity from the start, and maintain the pitch for two hours without an interval.  Stanley Townsend is terrific as a muscular Theseus returning from slaughtering and swyving abroad, while the veterans Margaret Tyzack and John Shrapnel are a joy to watch in the roles of the confidants Oenone and Theramene.  Newcomer Ruth Negga shines brightly in the role of Aricia, and Dominic Cooper (last seen here as one of the History Boys) plays Hippolytus with an adolescent swagger that gives way to disgust when his stepmother declares her passion.  Physically, he is convincing, but swallows some of his lines which aren't always audible.

This production is a sellout but can be seen shortly on cinema screens nationwide.  Helen Mirren hardly needs my fawning admiration at this stage of her career, but for my money there is no other actress who manages to combine her complete mastery of stage, TV and big screen.  Racine is a difficult but deeply rewarding dramatist, and it's fantastic to see his plays come alive on stage rather than just reading them on the page.  I will have to look in the loft and see if any of my essays on Phedre have survived.

The Bridge Project's Winter's Tale

The problem for me with this late Shakespeare play has always been the lack of motivation behind Leontes' fit of jealousy which makes him imprison his wife and sacrifice his child.  For the first time ever, I've now seen a production where the opening scene makes this jealousy totally credible.  Simon Russell Beale displays the wary vigilance of a middle-aged man who sees his young wife cuddling and holding hands just a little too closely for comfort with a handsome man around her own age.  Suddenly as Hermione and Polyxenes canoodle around on the cushions, a red light flashes on in Leontes' mind and he imagines the worst.  Thanks to terrific performances by Russell Beale and Rebecca Hall, the Sicilian scenes have a real emotional depth.  Sam Mendes, in an eerie parallel with the opening scene of The Cherry Orchard, sets this in the nursery, and the young son of Leontes and Hermione, supposedly asleep but in fact very much awake, overhears the confrontation between his parents.  There are teddy bears everywhere, foreshadowing the fate of Antigonus, devoured by a life-sized grizzly at the start of the Bohemian part of the play.  After the disappearance of Hermione and Leontes, it's always a challenge to make the sheep-shearing party scene work successfully.  Mendes relies on his American actors to carry the Bohemian scenes, with Sicily standing in for Britain.  Ethan Hawke does the business as a guitar-playing Autolycus, though at one point he reminded me of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.  But after the realistic furry bear, I was disappointed by the lack of any trace of sheep or wool.  The rural party sags a bit, and only comes to life with a rude dance involving balloons.  I have to say I've seen this part of the play done better, notably by the RSC at the Roundhouse in 2002 when Matthew Warcus swapped Bohemia for West Virginia and turned the sheep-shearers into hillbillies.  Among the other performances, Sinead Cusack stands out as Paulina. Unlike The Cherry Orchard, there were a few unsold seats at the Old Vic, but once the reviews are in I doubt if they will stay unsold for long.  Russell Beale gives Leontes a tortured inner life and self-awareness that he has brought to all his major Shakespeare roles.  I've seen him play Hamlet, Iago, Macbeth and Benedict, and his Leontes is a performance to be treasured. 

The Bridge Project's Cherry Orchard

The last high-flyer who tried to bridge the Atlantic was Tony Blair.  Now Sam Mendes is having a go with his long-planned season at Kevin Spacey's Old Vic, kicking off with The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale. Mendes is nothing if not a risk-taker, and this is the opening work of a three-year British-American ensemble that will tour the world.  In 2010 they will move on to Three Sisters and As You Like It.  I don't think this production of Chekhov quite matches up to the Uncle Vanya which Mendes directed at the Donmar in 2002 and which scooped a handful of Olivier awards, but it's a fascinating effort and well worth seeing, despite its flaws.  Although the play has already been seen in New York, the performance I saw at the Old Vic was a preview, and I have the feeling that it will probably improve.  The text of The Cherry Orchard is a new one by Tom Stoppard which flows easily, with one or two characteristic puns;  its only flaw is that it tones down some of the conflicts between the characters by smoothing away some of the verbal aggression that's there in the original Russian.  Sinead Cusack is excellent as Ranevskaya, and I was hugely impressed by Rebecca Hall's performance as her adopted daughter Varya, whose collapse in Act Four when the businessman Lopakhin fails to propose to her is the most heartbreaking moment in the play. Chekhov is the undisputed master of broken dreams and missed opportunities;  he finds comedy and tragedy in the things that should happen but don't.  I was less convinced by Simon Russell Beale as Lopakhin.  I am a huge fan and I remember his Uncle Vanya as a truly great performance, but here this most cerebral of actors is cast against type as the wealthy and boorish former peasant who buys the beloved cherry orchard and the estate from the impoverished gentry.  Lopakhin is not a bad man, but he is totally lacking in emotional intelligence, and Russell Beale seems to have difficulty conveying this aspect of the role.  This Lopakhin is too genial and not quite ruthless enough, and the moment in Act Three when he returns from the auction as the new owner and systematically goes around the room kicking over all the chairs seems out of character and artificial.  This wasn't the only moment in the play where I felt that the director was striving for effect rather than looking for the real meaning of this multi-layered text.  There's a moment when a tipsy passer-by comes in and asks for a few kopecks;  Ranevskaya hasn't got any, so she gives him a gold coin instead and he can't believe his luck.  Mendes takes this scene and builds it up into something quite different;  the passer-by appears as one of a vaguely menacing line of proletarian figures who appear in silhouette upstage against the back wall, suggesting the heaving angry Russian masses.  It's a nice idea, and this is a play in which Chekhov came close to flirting with symbolism, but I think it's unneccessary.  There's a similar superfluity in the opening of Act Three when Ranyevskaya's informal social evening with a Jewish band is turned by Mendes into a formal masked ball where the ladies carry fans and the gentlemen in evening dress look as though they have strayed in from the ball scene in Evgeny Onegin.  It just looks wrong and adds very little.  Chekhov's play is deeply packed with social nuances and the battle between the classes is one of its major subtexts, but most of these go missing.  As the old servant Firs complains, the days when the masters were masters and the serfs were serfs have long disappeared, but Mendes takes the erosion of class barriers much too far.  When the vain valet Yasha helps himself to the champagne put out for the guests in Act Four, it should be a transgressive and taboo-breaking moment, but the impact is completely lost because Yasha has been helping himself to wine and coffee throughout the play.  Dunyasha the maid is called upon to dance at the party -- another transgressive moment -- but in this production the impact is lost because she's dressed in a ballgown and equipped with a fan from the start.  Everyone lounges around from the start on a basis of social equality, which certainly wasn't what Chekhov intended. Declan Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl production of Three Sisters at the Barbican a couple of years ago got it right by subtly emphasising the class barrier etween the three snobby gentrified sisters and the petty bourgeois upstart Natasha who becomes their sister-in-law and gradually drives them out of their house.  Another moment of superfluous tinkering by Mendes comes in Act Two, where Dunyasha starts to unbutton Yasha's flies with the obvious intention of giving him a blow-job.  It's more New York in 2009 than rural Russia in 1904.   The set design by Anthony Ward is simple and uncluttered, with a rectangular platform and a few carpets and articles of furniture.  There's nothing particularly Russian about it, and it seems particularly urban rather than rural. If the audience want to get the sense that there's a beautiful cherry orchard just off stage waiting for the axe, then they will have to shut their eyes and use their imaginations, because the director and his designer seem oblivious to it.  Another moment when Mendes tries to change the meaning of Chekhov's text and gets it wrong comes at the end of Act Two where the moth-eaten eternal student Trofimov and the soppy 17-year-old Anya spout platitudes about the glorious future to each other. 'We are higher than love!' they pompously declare. Mendes adds a passionate snog to this encounter. The comedy of this scene goes completely missing, which is largely because Ethan Hawke's performance as Trofimov is one-dimensional and ignores the pretentious and ridiculous aspect of the character. Chekhov is poking fun at these ascetic high-minded pseudo-revolutionaries, even though he may well have shared some of the ideas that Trofimov proclaims about the future.  Trofimov is attacked by Ranevskaya later in the play as a sexless prig who has never been kissed, but the line becomes meaningless if the attraction between him and Anya is physical.  Chekhov's play is a work of genius and directors should be wary of trying to improve it.  Declan Donnellan shows the way by respecting his text and seeking layers of meaning inside it, rather than adding stage business that doesn't really belong.

Death and the King's Horseman

There are moments of tragic beauty in this play, largely thanks to Nonso Anozie in the title role of Elesin, the horseman of the king who is doomed by traditional custom to follow his dead master into the spirit world.  Anozie's Nigerian family background and his towering stage presence made him a natural choice for this role.  I first saw him a few years ago playing a magnificent Lear in an RSC Academy production directed by Declan Donnellan at the Young Vic.  He was then an outstanding Othello for Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl company, and he's acted on the Olivier stage before, in David Mamet's Edmond with Kenneth Branagh.  There are very few young British actors who have his kind of charisma, though his massive physique (he looks as though he could push back an eight-man rugby scrum single-handed) may be a handicap when it comes to getting cast.  He effortlessly dominates the stage and in the final scene of Wole Soyinka's play attains a real Shakespearean grandeur.  Elesin's death is foretold and planned, but doesn't happen;  it's not clear whether this is entirely because of the intervention of Pilkings, the British district commissioner who is determined to stop his ritual suicide, or whether Elesin himself has hesitated on the brink of death. 

Rufus Norris's production with an all-black cast is spectacular and exotic, with a wonderful mixture of movement and dance, helped by Katrina Lindsay's rich and evocative designs.  The rest of the cast, led by Claire Benedict and Giles Terera, give Anozie strong support.  The surreal scene of a whites-only fancy dress ball somewhere in the African bush performed by black actors with whited-up faces, is especially striking.  The old-fashioned colonial diction of Pilkings and his wife Jane (Lucian Msamati and Jenny Jules) sounds just right.  My real reservations are about the play, which seems to me unbalanced and flawed, and Norris's production tends to emphasise its weak points.  As a parable about colonialism, or a satire, Soyinka's play falls flat.  Not only are some of the scenes too long, repetitive and awkwardly constructed, but the British colonial officials are cheap cardboard caricatures who can't be taken seriously.  Pilkings is so absurd, especially in this production, that none of his arguments are worth listening to.  Instead of giving the devil all the best speeches in Shavian fashion, Soyinka stacks all the cards in favour of one side.  The rosy message of this play is that African culture is unremittingly noble and valuable and colonial attempts to interfere with it are based on ignorance.  My argument with that is largely an aesthetic one;  the lack of a real argument over values weakens the play.  The colonial experience is a wonderful theme for theatre, but a really radical production would have rethought this play and made the unfortunate Pilkings the hero and heroine.  Othello and The Tempest (particularly the recent Market Theatre/RSC production) both remind us that the real drama of colonialism is an interior one -- how its values become internalised by those who serve it.  But in this play the colonial police sergeant Amusa is just a figure of fun, beaten up by the market women and robbed of his trousers.  Elesin and his British-educated son Olunde are in conflict, but the big confrontation between them never really happens. 

I don't mind the British being treated as ridiculous figures of fun, but I feel there's a more nuanced argument to be had about colonialism, multiculturalism and religious values.  Ritual suicide may be fine and dandy, but how about human sacrifice, polygamy and female circumcision?  The British in India stamped out the ritual suicide of widows, known as suttee, but they didn't interfere much with marriage customs.  The subtlety of British colonial rule and its sophistication was that it mostly left indigenous rulers, beliefs and customs intact rather than trying to impose the standards and practices of British suburbia.  You wouldn't know it from this play, in which the satire is clunky and the real arguments are sidestepped. 

Recently the National Theatre was briefly picketed by misguided protesters who found Richard Bean's England People Very Nice to be racist (I didn't).  Perhaps they should go and see this play and protest on behalf of the Pilkings.

Alphabetical Order

I was amused by this revival of an early Michael Frayn play at the Hampstead Theatre, but left feeling a bit disappointed.  Walking into the theatre and looking at the set produced a wonderful feeling of deja vu.  It's a beautifully reconstructed newspaper cuttings library from the 1970s, with dozens of filing cabinets spewing open their contents and piles of paper everywhere.  The warm-hearted but chaotic librarian Lucy (Imogen Stubbs) runs not so much an information service but a social centre which provides tea and sympathy for the team of misfits who run the newspaper.  Lucy tells her new colleague Lesley that the best place to sort things out is on the floor, because every morning the cleaners will tidy up and put everything back on the desk.  I became a journalist in 1971 and remember my visits as a junior subeditor to the Reuters cuttings library in Fleet Street, in which stories off the teleprinter were carefully filed by country and subject.  For UK stories we could also consult the voluminous Press Association cuttings library on a different floor.  There was an hourly tea trolley with an urn and iced buns, and the lifts were full of aged messengers smoking Woodbines. It's a time capsule of the pre-computer era, but it's gradually apparent that despite the setting, Frayn's play isn't really about the newspaper business. Not much happens in the first act, which does little more than establish the characters and set up the contrast between Lucy and Lesley, the gimlet-eyed newcomer who lacks a sense of humour but clearly has a talent for organisation.  When act two opens, the library has been transformed;  the mess has disappeared, the broken chairs have gone, the cuttings spilling onto the floor have been neatly filed, and the only reminder of the previous chaos is the jumble on Lucy's desk, now separated by several yards of green carpet from Lesley's.  Lesley has taken over, but somehow Frayn holds back from exploring the conflict between the two women which could and should be the core of the play.  Lesley has somehow taken over Lucy's boyfriend John because she feels he needs a bit of order in his life, but Lucy doesn't seem to mind that much.  The sparks never really fly;  most of the other characters also have offstage personal lives, but they never come alive where it counts -- on stage.  When there's a sudden deus ex machina moment in act two as the paper's closure is announced, it's a bit of a let-down because this key development is completely external. It has nothing to do with the characters, unless one blames their general indolence.  The paper's closure sparks a frenzy of childish anarchy as all the characters except Lesley open the files and scatter them in the air.  Then Lesley reappears and announces plans for that night's edition to come out as normal; there is even talk of a workers' takeover.  But although this is a neatish ending, it's all a bit of an anticlimax.  None of the characters have really travelled anywhere or developed, or interacted with each other or learned anything.  There is one aspect to the play which intrigued me, however.  I doubt whether Frayn, a former Guardian journalist, was consciously trying to use the newspaper archive as a metaphor for 1970s Britain, but with the benefit of hindsight, Lesley is a precursor of Margaret Thatcher.  Written a decade later, this might have been a more political play.  As it stands, it's weak on action and plot, although it has some very witty dialogue.  Frayn stands on a pedestal as far as I am concerned, not so much for his widely praised Copenhagen as for his masterpiece Noises Off.  He does have a tendency to philosophize, a bit like Tom Stoppard, but he doesn't always succeed in integrating his ideas with the action of the play.  Alphabetical Order seems to have been inspired by Frayn's fascination for how we make sense of the world by ordering and classifying it. But it doesn't quite translate into a play.  This production by Christopher Luscombe is perfectly competent and the cast do what they can with the limited range of human emotions the playwright offers them.  In the original 1975 Hampstead production Lucy was played by the great Billie Whitelaw, and I would love to have seen her in the role. 

A View From The Bridge

You don't see too many standing ovations in the theatre these days, but Ken Stott's curtain call last night drew the audience at the Duke Of York's Theatre to their feet -- and quite rightly.  This was a really magnificent performance as Eddie Carbone and I'm sure he'll be on the Olivier shortlist for the Best Actor award this year.  On the way to the theatre I met two friends who remembered Michael Gambon in the same role in 1987 and decided to give this production a miss.  A mistake, I think. Great as Gambon no doubt was, I can't imagine a better Carbone than this one.  It's a perfectly balanced cast, with Hayley Atwell as Eddie's niece Catherine and Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio as his wife Beatrice.  Lindsay Posner's production has an operatic feel to it;  I kept hearing echoes of Rigoletto.  The period (Brooklyn in the early 1950s) seems almost as remote as the middle ages, but Miller knew what he was doing when he decided to set his play among Sicilian immigrants.  My only quibble with this great play is Arthur Miller's use of the lawyer Alfieri not just as a character but as an omniscient narrator, introducing the story and telling the audience what to think.  I liked Allan Corduner as Alfieri and I was also impressed by Harry Lloyd as Rodolpho, the illegal immigrant who takes away Catherine from her over-possessive uncle.  Carbone is an obsessive character, driven mad by jealousy, unable to acknowledge his feelings for Catherine and emotionally illiterate.  Stott's performance shows that he's still human, not a monster. 

At the climax of the play, when Eddie appeals in vain for 'respect' and wants his 'name' back, I heard from the middle of the stalls the unmistakeable ringtone of a mobile phone.  Admittedly, it wasn't loud enough to disrupt the moment completely, but I would have been quite happy to see Stott march down into the audience and wield his knife on the offender rather than on Marco.  What part of 'Please switch off your mobile phones' is it that these people don't understand? Don't Blackberries and IPhones have an off button?

Rookery Nook

 A few days ago I saw a beautifully restored 1920s Austin 7, its paintwork glossy and shining, turning heads as it roared along the road.  Rookery Nook (1926) by Ben Travers has much the same kind of period appeal.  This is one of the Aldwych farces staged in the 1920s by actor-manager Tom Walls, with Ralph Lynn, Robertson Hare and a semi-permanent company of other actors and actresses, some of whom were still around to act with Brian Rix in the 1950s.  Rix adored Travers and all his works, but confessed that when he tried to present Rookery Nook on television at the end of the 1950s 'it was already somewhat long in the tooth' and when it was revived in the West End in 1986 'even the combined talents of Tom Courtenay, Ian Ogilvy, Nicola McAuliffe, Jeffrey Sumner and Lionel Jeffries couldn't breathe life into what was now a corpse.'  I imagine that an Austin 7 would have looked similarly dated on the new M1 motorway when Ernest Marples opened it.  A quarter of a century on, the play now has a delicious period appeal which is brilliantly exploited in this production by Terry Johnson at the Menier Chocolate Factory.  Like the Austin 7, it's an antique, but that's why it's valuable.  The same period approach was taken by Matthew Warchus in his highly successful West End revival of Marc Camoletti's Boeing-Boeing a couple of years ago.  Like the Austin 7, Rookery Nook may not have a modern engine under the bonnet and its fittings are a bit dated, but this production has been lovingly polished and the sparking plugs and upholstery have been cleaned.  In short, the play has been treated with respect.  The timing is sharp, the 1920s details are perfect, the sight gags are excellent and the laughing barely stops.  Mark Hadfield takes the original Robertson Hare part of Harold Twine the timid hen-pecked husband, and he's just brilliant.  Scaring Harold to death is the life's work of his formidable wife Gertrude, who drives the plot as the person WHO MUST NOT FIND OUT WHAT IS GOING ON.  Cousins Gerald and Clive Popkiss are played by Neil Stuke and Edward Baker-Duly, recreating the original double act of Ralph Lynn and Tom Walls.  Kellie Shirley is pitch-perfect as Rhoda Marley, the girl runaway whose fetching appearance in her pyjamas in Gerald's rented country house provides the starting point for the story.  Rhoda stays overnight in the spare bedroom wearing the bottom half of Gerald's pyjamas, but of course newly married Gerald doesn't lay a finger on her.  He's pure as the driven snow, but he still has to persuade his wife of the fact.  That's the difference between British and French farce.  In Feydeau's bedroom farces, there is some serious shagging going on.  Men and women are worried that people will find out they are busy seducing each other for real, while on this side of the Channel it's all about keeping up appearances when nothing much happens at all.  Blame the malign influence of the Lord Chamberlain.  In Arthur Wing Pinero's plays like The Magistrate, which Travers took as a model, food often serves as a metaphor for sex, something a Victorian audience would have understood perfectly.  The plays of Ben Travers fell out of fashion in the post-war period, when innocence was little appreciated. When the Lord Chamberlain breathed his last, people went for naughty Feydeau instead.  But like the novels of PG Wodehouse, Travers' plays can now be appreciated for their true virtues, which do not include political and cultural correctness. Servants are funny and so are foreigners.  Wives are domineering battleaxes and girls are brainless, especially attractive ones wearing pyjamas.  It's the asexual world of Jeeves and Wooster.  You either run away screaming and buy tickets for the latest Katie Mitchell production instead, or you find it irresistible.  I am in the latter camp.

The programme notes quote the TLS as praising Travers for his 'single-track dirty mind, the double entendre, the treble think, the quadruple bluff;  funny names, funny local yokels, domineering women, pretty girls and the ever-swinging bedroom door.'  Only part of this is true.  I don't think Travers went in for the double-entendre at all, any more than PG Wodehouse did.  There's a useful comparison to be made with the girl in pyjamas who forgets her latchkey and spends the night in the hero's spare bedroom in Coward's Present Laughter.  In this case, the 'forgotten latchkey' and the 'spare bedroom' are part of a wink-wink, nudge-nudge routine between Coward and his audience, even the stupidest of whom would understand what is going on behind the Lord Chamberlain's back.  But in Rookery Nook the pyjama girl's innocence is real. No mind was less dirty than that of Ben Travers.

The Aldwych company acted together in a long series of plays, as did Brian Rix's Whitehall troupe.  But those repertory days have long gone, and it's a tribute to the actors on stage at the Menier that one would think they had been performing together for years.  Terry Johnson sensibly doesn't try to reinvent the play but sticks faithfully to the original stage directions.  After all, Rookery Rook ran at the Aldwych for over 400 performances.  This production (with which the West End producer Sonia Friedman is associated) is probably on track to follow La Cage Aux Folles and A Little Night Music and transfer to a larger theatre across the river.  Neil Stuke's attempt to disguise a golf club down his trousers is a highlight of the evening.

A critical footnote: quite by chance, I found I had bought tickets for Rookery Nook's press night. Normally I try to avoid opening nights because the preponderance of actors and friends of the cast in the audience, ready to laugh and applaud at any moment, can be seriously misleading.  That wasn't the case on this occasion.  The critics were laughing away like everyone else, though I noticed that Nicholas de Jongh was no longer of the party.  It appears that despite my insults directed at his play Plague Over England, he has decided to give up reviewing for the Evening Standard and concentrate on his career as a dramatist.  All of which goes to prove the amazing power of the blogosphere.

Only When I Laugh

I'm never quite sure if it's the plays that attract me to the Arcola in Stoke Newington, or the choice of juicy Turkish kebabs nearby.  The restaurant I ate in yesterday had Thesticles on the menu, which may be a reference to a little-known play by Sophocles which Sir Peter Hall is planning to put on at the next Epidauros festival in Greece.  Or it may just be a misprint.  Reluctant to show my ignorance, I stuck to the kebabs.

This play by Jack Shepherd is set in the dying world of variety theatre in the late 1950s.  Ageing comic Reg Henson, a working class hero notorious for his alcoholic tantrums backstage but adored by the riff-raff in the cheaper seats at the Leeds Empire, is threatened with demotion to the number two slot on the bill by the arrival of crooner Janey Shore on the train from London, fresh from what used to be called Tin Pan Alley.  Reg cuts up rough and demolishes the washbasin, sinks a bottle of Johnny Walker and generally misbehaves, but in the end sobers up enough to go on stage at the end.  His shadow is the diffident theatre manager Stanley Hinchcliffe, whose job it is to make sure the show goes on.  There's a motley crew of acts propping up the bill -- a second-rate comic with an overbearing wife/manager, a husband and wife dance duo whose marriage is coming apart at the seams, a nubile tap-dancer who is messing around with the comic, a third-rate conjurer and a dragonish lady from the local Watch Committee worried about smut.  Apart from the opening scene, the entire play is set in the number one dressing room, which removes the opportunity to show us what's actually happening on stage. All we get is a few bursts of sound over the tannoy.  As a result the play never escapes from a kind of mundane realism;  the contrast with John Osborne's The Entertainer is quite instructive.  Osborne's play has its structural flaws, but it has two elements that this one lacks:  it shows Archie Rice's off-stage relationships with his family and others, and it shows him performing in front of the audience.  And it also gives us variety theatre as a metaphor for British decline in the age of Suez.  In Shepherd's play variety theatre is also dying and the veteran comic Reg has a lot in common with Archie, but he doesn't represent anything much other than himself.  Shepherd sees him as a symbol of authentic working class culture, about to be killed off by the commercial pressures of showbiz, but the problem is that Reg has no real relationships with anyone.  The other characters float in and out of his dressing room, but none of them stay long enough to puncture his comic carapace or peel away the layers of greasepaint and reveal the man underneath.  Hinchcliffe the theatre manager is a wonderful creation but he barely appears in the second act and doesn't have the chance to develop as a foil to Reg.  In this production Jack Shepherd gives a nicely understated performance as Hinchcliffe;  some of the other characters are acted with rather less subtlety and truth.  The real joy is seeing Jim Bywater as Reg Henson, moving from chippiness to maudlin sentimentality to alcoholic meltdown and slowly back to life via a king-sized hangover.  He's a bit like a smaller version of Max Wall.  It's a great performance.  Only When I Laugh in this production by Love And Madness Ensemble plays at the Arcola until May 2.

Madame de Sade

Regular readers of this blog, if there are any, may have detected a slight pause in my theatre visits since early April.  I seem to have been diverted from Shaftesbury Avenue and the South Bank by the widespread celebrations and ceremonies that accompanied my acquisition of a bus pass.  Anthopologists who would like further details of how these initiation rites into the third age are conducted in the tribal areas of southeast England can contact me by email.  I've also been the victim in a murder mystery and had a walkon part as a hotel guest in a Fawlty Towers sketch (four lines of dialogue in each). Normal service is now resumed.

The translator's programme notes for Yukio Mishima's Madame de Sade describe this play, written in 1965, five years before the writer's ritual suicide, as a homage to Racine.  Racine's plays are famously static; all the action takes place off-stage and all the power is in the words, so I can see a superficial resemblance.  I spent the part of my youth that wasn't misspent writing long essays about Racine;  they're probably in a box somewhere in the loft and I can't remember what I wrote four decades ago, but I think I'm safe in saying that Racine knew how to write a play.  Mishima, on the evidence of this play, clearly didn't, and seems to have totally misunderstood what the French tragedian was up to.  Madame de Sade is complete tosh, and pretty unpleasant tosh.  It's an extended sado-masochistic fantasy, rendered in banal English.  I'm sure Donald Keene's translation is accurate, but Michael Grandage should perhaps have hired a poet to make it less literal.  Here's a few sample phrases: 'She asked me to stop by on my way back from riding practice.'  'You mustn't be too hard on Mme de Montreuil.' 'Don't rush me.'  'Renee, I am so glad to see you.' 'This is like a dream.' 'It's more like waking from a nightmare.'  To which, all I can say is Aaaagh!

The awful Marquis himself (referred to as Alphonse) never appears, but we hear at length from the women in his life; in ascending order of importance, Jenny Galloway is the servant Charlotte, Deborah Findlay is the Baronesse de Simiane, the voice of religion, Frances Barber is the Comtesse de Saint-Fond, an aristocratic libertine, Fiona Button is de Sade's pretty young sister-in-law Anne, Judi Dench is his mother-in-law Madame de Montreuil and Rosamund Pike is his devoted wife Renee.  It's a tribute to these actresses, decked out in wonderful frocks, that they manage to rise above the dire material and make something of these cardboard symbolic characters.  Frances Barber does a nice number cracking her riding crop, Deborah Findlay is transformed into a nun, Judi Dench is Judi Dench, but they're all acted off the stage by Rosamund Pike, who should earn an Olivier for her performance in the impossible role of de Sade's missus.  Whether elegantly draped in eighteenth century silks, as here, or prancing around the stage in the altogether, as she did in Hitchcock Blonde a few years ago at the Royal Court, Pike is sensationally beautiful.  If there were ever any doubts about the fact that her acting is just as sensational, there won't be after this role.