John Morrison

My theatre picks of 2008

My theatregoing has now stopped until the new year arrives, so I think it's time to reflect on the shows that made the biggest impact on me in 2008.  Top of the list was the RSC's triumphant Histories cycle at the Roundhouse, the kind of theatrical experience that only comes around once in a decade if we're lucky.  I saw all the plays more or less in historical order and was bowled over.  I particularly liked Jonathan Slinger as Richard III, Geoffrey Streatfeild as Prince Hal/Henry V, Katy Stephens as Margaret of Anjou and David Warner as Falstaff.  So my special prize goes to RSC director Michael Boyd for steering his ensemble through this two-year marathon.

Best new play was undoubtedly Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters, which is about to return to the National Theatre for a deserved run on the bigger Lyttelton stage.  Hall takes a not-very-conflictual story about a group of miners in the northeast who began to paint, and turns it into gold dust.  

Best actor:  if one counts the Donmar's Othello as a 2008 play, then Chiwetel Ejiofor gets it.  If not, then I'm tempted to pick David Calder's Lear at Shakespeare's Globe, or possibly Jonathan Slinger's Richard III at the Roundhouse.  The best male performances of the year have undoubtedly been in Shakespeare.  David Tennant gets an honourable mention, having contributed mightily to boosting the readership of this blog. 

Best actress:  it wasn't a great year for female parts, with no Saint Joan or The Cherry Orchard or Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf to give those brilliant actresses a chance to dominate the men.  I liked Deanna Dunagan as the horrid matriarch in August: Osage County at the National, the above-mentioned Katy Stephens at the Roundhouse, Jane Horrocks in The Good Soul of Szechuan and Nicola Hughes as Ella Fitzgerald in Marilyn and Ella at the Theatre Royal, Stratford East.

Best Supporting:  perhaps it should go to Tom Hiddleston for his playing of the priggish young doctor in Ivanov.  I also enjoyed a truly Satanic performance by Douglas Henshall at the Almeida in The Last Days of Judas Iscariot.

Best Revival:  The Good Soul of Szechuan at the Young Vic is probably hard to beat.  This took Brecht's play out of rural village China and dumped it convincingly in the socialist/capitalist nightmare of modern industrial China, to great effect.

Best production and design:   undoubtedly War Horse at the National Theatre, which left not a dry eye in the house, including mine.

I'm not awarding any gongs for musicals because I've seen very few, though I really enjoyed Trevor Nunn's production of A Little Night Music at the Menier Chocolate Factory.  The play I enjoyed least was undoubtedly The President's Holiday at the Hampstead Theatre, a work of leaden tedium and wooden cliche.  Harper Regan at the Cottesloe was also on my shortlist of unfavourites, but I abandoned it at the interval and was later told by some people that the second act was better than the first.  I may have missed some brilliant performances and some cracking new writing by not getting out more, but my energy and my wallet will only stretch so far.

My New Year resolution is to spend more time in fringe theatres and go to more new plays and fewer revivals;  unfortunately the lure of a long tube journey to the suburbs sometimes isn't strong enough and I opt for the safer choice of an evening at the National or in the West End.  Let's hope theatres continue to put bums on seats despite the recession.  At least we should be spared another round of ticket price rises.  

Oedipus

Not everyone finds Greek tragedy is their cup of tea, but the giant Olivier stage at the National Theatre is currently sold out for Ralph Fiennes as Oedipus.  It's astonishing to think that only a decade ago the National was struggling to find the right plays to fill its biggest auditorium.  And this isn't one of the £10 Travelex shows either.  The last big Greek play I saw in the Olivier was Peter Hall's Bacchae, with an unforgettable performance by Greg Hicks as Dionysus and a masked chorus.  Since then Katie Mitchell has staged Iphigenia and Women of Troy in the Lyttelton, with mixed results.     This production has a programme note by Salley Vickers about the Oedipus complex, but to my mind Freud's dotty ideas about children wanting to kill their fathers and marry their mothers are just a distraction from the real meaning of the play. Sophocles' play is in a new, very spare version by Frank McGuinness, which avoids all archaism.  The clothes are also modern, a very restrained mixture of black and white with almost no colour.  Only Paul Brown's set, a burnished circle with a giant arch, carries an echo of a far-off pagan world.  At first the tone set by director Jonathan Kent is conversational;  Fiennes, charged with rescuing the city of Thebes, rolls up his white shirtsleeves in front of the chorus and looks like a business executive chairing a meeting.  The whiff of realism is dispelled when the all-male chorus begin their half-recited, half-sung incantations, which immediately bring a change into an operatic key.  The tension mounts and realism collapses into ritual until the blinded Oedipus appears, soaked in blood and accompanied by his four children.  I'm not a great admirer of Fiennes as an actor, but I think this is easily the finest performance I have seen him give.  He see-saws convincingly between jaunty hope and apocalyptic despair as his past crimes of murder and incest are laid bare by a series of reluctant messengers.  The only thing he lacks which truly great actors have is a sense of dangerous unpredictability.  Clare Higgins makes a terrific Jocasta and I was thrilled to see that great RSC and National Theatre star of the 1970s and 1980s Alan Howard back on stage as the blind Teiresias. Howard's frail figure reminded me of Harold Pinter in his recent public appearances. The other supporting roles are well played, though Jasper Britton (Creon) was indisposed on Wednesday night.  I went away thinking that if Oedipus was a new work by a modern author, it would be an overnight sensation and win the Olivier award for best play. Sophocles knocks most new writing into a cocked hat.  Someone in the BBC's New Writing department is probably flying first class to Athens at this very moment, hoping to sign him up to write for Holby City and turn his back on tragedy in favour of a returning series.  Kent's production makes the modern meaning of the play crystal clear, and it has nothing to do with Freudian complexes.  It's about the high price we pay when we try to discover the truth about ourselves and about others. Perhaps it's better not to ask too many questions about our own backstories.

A Little Night Music

I spotted director Trevor Nunn writing furiously in the row in front of me at the Menier Chocolate Factory, compiling an avalanche of notes for his cast.  But I really can't see why he bothered -- it all seemed absolutely perfect to me.  I had never seen Sondheim's masterwork before, and I don't know much about musical theatre, but this production, still in previews, is going to be hard to improve.  The inevitable yardstick for most critics will be the Menier's production of Sunday In The Park With George two years ago, which swept the board at the Olivier awards.  To my great regret, I never saw it though I was at the award ceremony where the Menier's success left the Spamalot team with their noses out of joint.  A director with as many musicals under his belt as Trevor Nunn doesn't have much left to prove, though this is his first crack at Sondheim.  And he may be keen to wipe out any unhappy memories of his last production, Gone With The Wind.  In the programme Nunn says it's the first time he has done a musical in such a small space, and praises the Menier's 'enviable and total intimacy'.  A theatre with around 150 seats seems just right for this show and it's fantastic for the audience to hear the show without the cast using microphones.  What a cast!  Hannah Waddingham is just delightful as the ultra-glamorous actress Desiree Armfeldt, and hits all the right heart-rending notes when she sings 'Send in the clowns'.  She's well matched by Alexander Hanson as her lawyer lover, Jessie Buckley as the lawyer's 18-year-old virgin wife, and Kelly Price as the abandoned Countess Charlotte.  The principals are framed by Desiree's mother, wonderfully played by Maureen Lipman, and her daughter Fredrika, in an amazingly confident performance by young Grace Link, who seems to have been acting for years and years although the programme says she only began when she was eight. I would guess she's about 11, so she can look forward to playing Desiree in 30 years time and Desiree's mother in 60 years time.   I was so riveted by this show that I wasn't even distracted by the offer of a neck massage from the West End Whinger in the seat behind me.  No doubt it (the show, not the neck massage) will deservedly transfer to the West End trailing five stars in all directions, and Trevor Nunn will deservedly become even more famous than he is already.