John Morrison

Never mind the Olympics, what about the Donmar?

Vanishing Olympic tickets are one thing, but can someone explain to me why every single performance at the Donmar Warehouse between now and next February is allegedly sold out?  I went to the box office in Covent Garden on Monday in search of tickets in early November to see Douglas Hodge in Inadmissible Evidence, only to be told that every single seat for the theatre's June-February season was sold on the opening day of booking, June 6.

There's something decidely fishy going on here;  I've been buying tickets to the Donmar since the 1990s, and I know you have to book two or three months ahead -- even longer when big box office names are in the cast.  It's a tiny theatre and demand is always high, but recently I successfully bought tickets in May to see Luisa Miller in July.  I was not surprised to learn that the two-month run of Eugene O'Neill's Anna Christie starting on August 4 was sold out -- after all, Jude Law is in the cast.  But I don't believe that the theatre's regular audience is responsible for the sellout of Inadmissible Evidence, or the final play of the season, Richard II with Andrew Buchan and Eddie Redmayne.

Someone somewhere has latched on to the fact that the Donmar's modestly priced tickets can be resold on the grey market at a handsome profit, and has invested accordingly.  I'm not blaming the Donmar for a moment, as all its telephone and online sales are handled by ATG and are not under its direct control. Nor do I imagine its principal corporate sponsor Barclays Capital will have booked out more than a small proportion of the performances for the next eight months in Michael Grandage's final season.  But someone has, and I'd be interested to know who.

The Merchant of Venice at Stratford

As the bard put it so memorably, Don't You Step On My Blue Suede Shoes.  This is the production where Shakespeare meets Elvis, courtesy of that master of theatrical time travel Rupert Goold.  Sometimes Goold's stage instincts lead him astray and he goes spectacularly over the top, but not on this occasion;  setting the play in a Las Vegas casino works brilliantly, with only a few loose ends trailing.  Why? Because the vulgarity of wealth and the flawed link between money and happiness is a central theme of the play.

Goold and his designer Tom Scutt, like true Las Vegas high-rollers, bet large, and win the jackpot.  The visual style of the production is breathtaking, from the moment the actors people the stage as staff and punters in a casino.  There are stetsons, bermudas, baseball caps, mini-skirts and glittering high heels, and at the centre of the gambling floor, one man sitting absolutely still in the middle of the hubbub.  It's the enigmatic, intense figure of the merchant Antonio, clad in a dark suit and totally focussed on the odds.  Anyone who saw Goold's Enron won't be taken aback by the sheer chutzpah of his approach, but there is a lot more than exterior razzmatazz.  He gives the audience a subtle reading of the play which places Portia right at the centre, so it becomes her story. 

Portia's competition for a husband with the aid of three boxes is turned into a TV game show called Destiny, complete with flashing signs telling the audience when to applaud.  The Belmont scenes show Portia and Nerissa poised extravagantly on a sofa like a pair of Chihuahua dogs competing at Crufts; Portia has escaped from the cast of Legally Blonde, but it's clear a girl as simperingly dumb as this one won't be going anywhere near Harvard.  So far, so comic-strip;  but the real strength of Goold's interpretation comes in the second half, where Portia reveals that she ain't no dumb blonde after all.  Her elaborate wig comes off not just for the traditional male impersonation trick in the court scene, but to signify that her earlier persona is entirely assumed.   The final scene of the play, which can be banal and predictable, suddenly comes alive as Portia realises in a flash that in marrying Bassanio, she has made a fatal mistake.  Susannah Fielding, making her RSC debut, is absolutely wonderful as Portia, giving a stunning performance of great versatility.  At the end of the play she is cast adrift by Bassanio and clutches desperately at her blond wig to the sound of Elvis singing Are You Lonesome Tonight? 

Where does this leave the tragic figure of Shylock? Although many productions place him squarely at the centre of the play, he doesn't have to be there.  Patrick Stewart plays him convincingly as a buttoned-up Jewish outsider, a devout property tycoon in the mould of the Reichmans who built Canary Wharf.  Shylock doesn't have to be a sympathetic figure in himself, and Goold doesn't let him tug at our feelings for a moment.  Instead, he emphasises the casual anti-semitism of the Christians. When the word Jew is spoken, even by Portia, it is spat out with contempt.  And Shylock leaves the courtroom not only defeated but bearing his tormentors' spittle on his back.  His prayer shawl is picked up from the floor by the janitor and bundled into a black binbag -- a terrific theatrical touch.

There are fine performances from Jamie Beamish as Launcelot Gobbo, clad in a white Elvis suit and singing the King's best tunes with gusto, and from Howard Charles as the cocky hoodlum Gratiano.  Chris Jarman is an excellent Prince of Morocco (a boxer in gold shorts) and Scott Handy is very good as Antonio.  To balance a Portia of this complexity, the production really needs a much stronger Bassanio; in Richard Riddell's interpretation it's never quite clear precisely why Portia has made the wrong choice by marrying him.  Is he in love with Antonio, or just a money-obsessed chancer?  Daniel Percival and Caroline Martin as Lorenzo and Jessica sometimes seem adrift, but that's Shakespeare's fault for not giving them enough to do in the second half of the play.

Goold's direction of the trial scene is wonderfully dramatic and full of tension; it really has the audience on the edge of their seats.  The transfer to a 21st century Las Vegas courtroom would never work if it were played too realistically, but Goold sets it in a fantasy framework in which giant sides of beef are hanging upstage beyond a perspex screen.  When Shylock takes out his knife and puts it to Antonio's chest, the meat-packing atmosphere lends credibility to the threat of violence.

Not everyone will like this production, in which the actors are mostly equipped with microphones and hundreds of ducats become millions of dollars.  Did the Bard really talk about penthouses?  Possibly not, but it doesn't matter.  As a pedant and a purist who regularly insists that LESS IS MORE in the theatre, I might have hated this production, but I loved it.  I have no idea whether Elvis is really alive or not, but the RSC should have another hit on its hands with this show. 

The new RSC theatre with its fabulous auditorium is a big improvement on the old one, which left many of the audience stranded too far from the stage.  A thrust design is in my opinion far better than a proscenium arch for staging Shakespeare, and this one seems to me close to perfection.  One can quibble about the integration of the new and the old around the edges, but the theatre itself, constructed like a Roundhouse-style drum within a square outer shell, is simply breathtaking.  All the RSC needs now is a proper London base for its operations that will duplicate the Stratford experience.

Dunsinane at Stratford

'We will leave when we win,' says Siward the English general defiantly as the occupation of Scotland, designed to bring the lawless country quickly to peace, stretches on with no end in sight.  David Greig's  brilliant play, first seen very briefly in London at the Hampstead Theatre early last year, is now more topical than ever as generals and politicians ponder how to bring troops home from Afghanistan without allowing it to look like a defeat.  When I first saw it I said it deserved to become a classic, and I see no reason to change that view;  revived by the National Theatre of Scotland at the Lyceum in Edinburgh and elsewhere, it's now running at the rebuilt Swan theatre in Stratford, luckily with the same actors in most of the key parts.  Siobhan Redmond and Jonny Phillips form an extraordinarily powerful couple as the widowed queen Gruach and the English general, whose devotion to 'peace' leads him to burn families alive.  As he stands with his sword poised to slaughter the baby who appears to be the heir to the Scottish throne, Gruach tells him: ' You're a good man, Siward. It would have been better if you weren't. There would have been much less blood.'  There is also a finely honed performance by Brian Ferguson as the cynical, manipulative king Malcolm, installed by the English as the new legitimate monarch.  This trio of actors are even better than when I saw them the first time around in February 2010, and there's an equally assured performance by Alex Mann as Egham, the English knight for whom occupation is less of a noble cause and more of a business. 

I think this is probably the best new play the Royal Shakespeare Company has staged in years, and it's a pity it hasn't had the chance of a West End run.  Redmond in particular gives a truly Shakespearean performance that would be worthy of an Olivier.  To say its political theme is topical does it a disservice;  this is a play whose theme -- the perils of military occupation -- will never go out of date. It should be required viewing for anyone involved in the current Afghan campaign and the conflict in Libya.  When the dictator is removed, that's the moment when the real insoluble problems start.  David Greig's use of the familiar story of Macbeth as a platform on which to build his play is highly astute, but it's the quality of the dialogue, plot and characterisation and Roxana Silbert's direction of the cast, using a simple Shakespearean style and highly atmospheric music, which turns the production into a triumph.  Go and see it!

Emperor and Galilean

 "Do it on the radio" is Rita's memorable response to an exam question about how to stage Ibsen's Peer Gynt. "If they had had the radio in his day, that is where he would have done it."  Game set and match to Willy Russell's heroine.  Watching this interminable Ibsen play at the National Theatre last night, I kept on thinking about the truth of Rita's three-word essay;  at least when it's on the radio, you can switch it off.

One of the best things about Nick Hytner's glorious reign at the National Theatre is his willingness to take risks and his refusal to play safe.  It would have been much easier to revive A Doll's House or Hedda Gabler instead of taking on this unstageable epic, but like Rita, Nick is ambitious and wants to challenge the boundaries of what's possible on the big Olivier stage.  So I'm reluctant to take the easy view that Emperor and Galilean should have been left to moulder on the library shelf with Ibsen's other unperformed works.

However (Odnako as Pravda used to say in its front page editorials) this production by Jonathan Kent is a theatrical disaster of monumental proportions.  The critics have most liked it, partly because it's a  chance to see a play that has never been staged in English.  Charles Spencer thinks it's pretentious tosh, and I'm in his camp on this occasion.  Like him, I was looking at my watch and willing it to end.

So why doesn't it work?  I certainly don't blame the actors;  Andrew Scott as the emperor Julian shows extraordinary stamina and is onstage for all but a few minutes.  He doesn't quite convey Julian's transformation from a hesitant young man into a megalomaniac ruler, but that's because the frenetic pace of the production doesn't allow him enough time and space.  Ian McDiarmid is a great actor but struggles to make the seer Maximus into more than a pantomime villain consulting the entrails.  There's good backup from Nabil Shaban as the sinister emperor Constantius and from John Heffernan (a name to watch after his stunning Richard II in Bristol earlier this year) as Julian's friend Peter.  At a platform event before the performance, director Jonathan Kent talked about the 'gladiatorial' nature of theatre and the way actors have to 'fight a play into submission'.  This 'vast sprawling monster' of a play didn't quite obey the normal rules of theatre, in his view.  He explained that the action, on an epic scale, needed driving forward all the time, using the Olivier stage's revolving drum and as many effects as possible to create a kind of total theatre.  Relentless attack can be quite a good method in the theatre, but any device which is over-used quickly loses its effectiveness;  I haven't seen so many high-speed revolutions since I last switched on an electric coffee grinder, with the actors flung around the drum like so many beans.  There are back projections, floodlights, explosions, flames, and more spectacular stage effects than in an Edwardian panto.  In short, the production is over-designed and the effects crowd out the actors, who are reduced to shouting at the tops of their voices.  Less is often more in the theatre, and I wonder how a more minimalist director like Peter Brook or Declan Donnellan would have approached this play.

Of course, Ibsen's original text, which was not intended for performance, would have run for eight hours or more;  this version by Ben Power lasts three and a half.  Structurally it makes sense, but Power is a dramaturg, not a creative writer, and the language he uses is woefully banal.  "We can't go on like this" and "We need to talk" are just two of the many cliches in a text which needs to deliver poetry, but doesn't.  Two and a half years of hard work has been devoted to creating this version, but it remains pedestrian throughout.  If a text is a scaffold on which actors can climb around and use their imagination, this one doesn't provide them with a firm foundation.  It's fair to ask what would have happened to a script like this if it had been submitted to the National as an original work; I don't think it would have got very far.

The reason why Julian fascinated Ibsen and other writers such as Gore Vidal is that he tried to reverse the Roman empire's adoption of Christianity and return to paganism.  Ibsen's comparative view of religion and his understanding of how opposing beliefs can be used to justify murder, repression and dictatorship are startlingly modern.  Somewhere in his text there is hiding a really good psychological play about megalomania and religious belief, but I don't think Ben Power and Jonathan Kent have found it.

This production is deliberately ahistorical in style;  Kent describes it as a conversation between the time it was written, the time it is set in, and the present day.  That's fine as far as it goes, but to me the result is a visual muddle.  An actor playing a politician can wear either a dark suit or a toga and be equally convincing;  but when he wears both, he just looks like an actor who has raided the costume cupboard.  An actor playing a soldier can be a convincing Roman with a sword and a breastplate, or a convincing modern infantryman if he's wearing combat fatigues;  make him wear both, and he's not convincing on any level.  In his platform conversation with Genista Mackintosh, Kent was dismissive of one critic who questioned the juxtaposition in a battle scene of a line about elephants and an image of a helicopter gunship.  'There's no contradition for anyone who has been to the theatre in the last 50 years,' he said.  'Libby Purves wasn't convinced, poor lady.'  On this issue, I'm on the side of the audience, battered by a sensory overload which doesn't encourage it to use its own imagination, and by a director who seems to think that the Olivier stage always demands more spectacle, not less. 

On balance, I think that like Peer Gynt, this play would have worked better on the radio.  There's still a strong case for buying a ticket for this production, because it isn't likely to be staged again, and it's full of useful lessons about theatre, mostly negative.  But for psychological insight into character, give me Educating Rita every time. 

Government Inspector

Richard Jones is an opera and theatre director for whom the written word is less important than visual and musical impact.  I first came across his work in a phantasmagoric Midsummer Night's Dream he directed for the RSC in 2002, which turned the play from a dream into a nightmare, rather at the expense of Shakespeare's comedy.  More recently his production at the Young Vic of Brecht's The Good Soul of Szechuan created a hellish vision of a capitalist/communist China which was one of the standout London shows of 2008.

Now Jones has returned to the Young Vic with designer Miriam Buether, costume designer Nicky Gillibrand and writer David Harrower to create a version of Nikolai Gogol's Revizor (Government Inspector), which turns its face resolutely away from any kind of realism. Gogol's satire about a lowly St Petersburg bureaucrat who is mistaken for an all-powerful government inspector by the mayor and officials of a Russian provincial town was updated by David Farr at the National Theatre a few years ago in a production that starred Michael Sheen as Khlestakov, under the title The UN Inspector.  That show emphasised the contemporary relevance, setting the action in a newly independent and corrupt post-Soviet republic and making the central character a London estate agent.  This one is completely different, being set visually in surreal dreamworld that combines elements of Russia in the 1840s with the present day.  There is a genuine surreal streak in Gogol, but the fuzziness of time and place in Jones' vision blunts the satirical edge.  Think of the absurd landscape of Lewis Carroll, illustrated by Tenniel, and you will get a flavour of what's in store.

Although there are still plenty of excellent visual gags, the essential complicity between actors and audience which is the key to comedy is wholly absent.  The fourth wall remains intact throughout, even in the speeches delivered by Khlestakov to the audience.  As a result, the play's key line 'What are you laughing at? You're laughing at yourselves' delivered by the Mayor in the final scene makes no impact.  There is an excellent performance by Kyle Soller as Khlestakov, who is much more than just a cynical impostor;  he deceives himself just as much as the mayor and townsfolk.  Amanda Lawrence as the postmaster and Doon Mackichan as the mayor's socially ambitious wife are also very funny.  I'm not totally convinced by Julian Barratt as the mayor.  With a background in standup comedy and TV rather than stage acting, he seems to lack something in the acting department compared to the others.  I saw this play in an early preview, but I don't think that the essential elements of this production are likely to change.  Jones worked wonders with Brecht two years ago, but I don't think his reinvention of Gogol is as successful.

 

Chicken Soup With Barley

Arnold Wesker is the skeleton in the cupboard of British post-war theatre;  still going strong and writing in his late 70s, he has been largely ignored for the last 30 years, rather like the more experimental Edward Bond.  I was too young to have experienced his initial 1950s heyday, and this revival by Dominic Cooke at the Royal Court is the first Wesker play I've ever seen.

As the author of a play about 1930s communists which also used The Internationale as a musical background, I felt a small thrill of recognition as the curtain rose to a chorus of voices singing Arise, you prisoners of starvation. Arnold Wesker's 1958 play is a domestic epic tracing the family life and political times of Sarah Kahn, a Jewish CP member, from the idealism of the struggle against the Mosley Blackshirts in the 1930s to the post-Hungary disillusion of the 1950s, taking in the post-war 1940s on the way.

As a revival, this production at the Royal Court delivers everything the author could possibly have dreamed of in his long years of theatrical exile.  Though I saw only the second preview, the performances are breathtaking, particularly the highly versatile Samantha Spiro as Sarah.  Designer Ultz creates two terrific hyper-realist interiors, firstly the Kahn's cramped East End attic in 1937 and in acts two and three their more spacious post-war LCC flat.  Sarah buzzes around offering cake, sandwiches and more cups of tea than Mrs Doyle in Father Ted; she is the Jewish communist matriarch at the heart of a tightly-knit ethnic and political community, a passionate fighter for the working class.  Her husband Harry fails to match her, a lethargic shirker who spirals into a physical decline portrayed with devastating effect by Danny Webb.  Gradually the web of tight family and political relationships of which Sarah forms the centre unravels, leaving her on her own. 

Full marks to the actors, to Cooke's direction, to Ultz's meticulous design, complete with 1930s milk bottles, and to the Royal Court for reviving a work by a major post-war playwright which it originally turned down.  As Michael Billington records in his book on post-1945 British theatre, the Court was pretty lukewarm about this genuinely working class writer and passed the play on to the Belgrade in Coventry.  But the key question remains -- is it actually any good?

While Wesker undoubtedly took British theatre into uncharted waters and had a great ear for Jewish working class speech, I think Chicken Soup With Barley was outclassed and outshone by many of the proletarian playwrights who came along later -- notably David Storey.  Half a century of leftwing TV drama, much of it political and centred on the working class, has also shown up Wesker's relative clumsiness.  While choosing a big canvas spanning two decades, the story of the Kahn family and their friends, neighbours and relatives is too inward-looking to be a real 'state of the nation' play.  It doesn't provide much insight into Britain in the 1930s, 1940s or the consumerist 1950s, or into the real story of the working class as a whole, merely into a tiny Marxist-sectarian fragment.  Sarah Kahn is a well-drawn character and so is her failure of a husband, but neither of them achieve the symbolic grandeur that Arthur Miller created in Willy Loman and Eddy Carbone, or John Osborne in Archie Rice as representatives of their country and their times.  Wesker overloads the play with exposition and long passages of dialogue go past, rather in the style of The Archers, without anything approaching real drama.  Plays only come alive when characters are in conflict and when they are torn apart by rival loyalties and agonising decisions.  But here the important decisions seem to happen everywhere except on stage;  there's a young man who's volunteered to fight in Spain, but we don't see him deciding to go.  The Kahns have two children who move out of the nest for different reasons, but the vital moments when they break away aren't shown.  At the end of the play Ronnie, disillusioned by the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956, returns to a blazing row with his mother, but this is the first real political ding-dong of the play, and it fizzles out inconclusively.  There are two parallel narratives here, the family chronicle and the political story, but Wesker doesn't seem to be able to weld them together so that each accentuates the other.  Instead, they remain apart. 

As well as Arthur Miller and David Storey, I found myself making comparisons with a more recent work about the decline of the working class -- Lee Hall's superb play The Pitmen Painters.  This is rich not just in character and political insight, but in the dramatic choices made by the protagonists.  Admittedly written with the benefit of several decades of hindsight, this play shows up the comparative weakness of Wesker as a dramatist.  If the Royal Court moves on to revive the second and third two plays in Wesker's trilogy, I shall certainly be there to see them, and I'll be happy to revise my opinions if they turn out to be more dramatically effective than this one.

 

 

 

 

One Man, Two Guvnors

I've always been fascinated by 1963, so imagine my delight at finding myself surrounded by a grey-haired National Theatre matinee audience stomping, clapping and shouting their appreciation at a bunch of musicians in shiny Italian suits with razor-sharp creases who seem to have stepped straight out of that magic period.  Two guitars, a double bass, drums/washboard and a musical repertoire that straddles the faultline between Lonnie Donegan and the Beatles, between 1950s skiffle and the more bluesy early 1960s. For me, as Cliff Richard and Tommy Steele gave way to Lennon and Macartney, it was the end of childhood.  Like most of the afternoon audience in the Lyttleton theatre, my memories of 1963 pop music are etched as strongly as the tracks on an EP record (remember those?).  Ask me about the X Factor and I score 0 out of 10, but play two bars of an early Beatles tune and my remaining grey cells get up out of their seats and start to dance around.

All of which is a way of saying that the musical accompaniment to this production, composed by Grant Olding and played by him and 'The Craze' (pun intended, I think), would be worth the price of the ticket on its own, even if One Man, Two Guvnors wasn't the funniest thing the National have staged since their last revival of Michael Frayn's Noises Off.  Richard Bean has reworked Carlo Goldoni's 18th century comedy A Servant to Two Masters, setting it in the fringes of the criminal underworld in Brighton in 1963.  I recall a very funny RSC production of this play, adapted by the excellent Lee Hall back in the 1990s, some time before he wrote Billy Elliot.  Tim Supple directed and Jason Watkins played Truffaldino, the servant caught between two employers.  I remember bowls of spaghetti being served to patrons lucky enough to be sitting in the front row of the Young Vic, and I still have a copy of Hall's play, which he described as an attempt to reinstate Goldoni.

Bean's version is much more of a free adaptation;  it's a hybrid farce, owing something to the Whitehall/Brian Rix/Ray Cooney tradition, a little to the Victorian world of Pinero in which food becomes a substitute for sex, and a surprising amount to Joe Orton's Loot and to the art of Christmas pantomime.  Truffaldino is now Francis Henshall (James Corden), a minder to gangster's moll Rachel Crabbe, who is impersonating her dead brother, murdered by her lover Stanley Stubbers.  Francis ends up working for both Rachel and Stanley simultaneously.  In this adaptation, directed with sublime precision by Nicholas Hytner, the accent is on physical comedy and slapstick.  Instead of the non-stop clockwork plotting of Feydeau, Bean creates a world of verbal anarchy where the action sometimes grinds to a halt and spirals into absurdity, drawing on the Goons and Spike Milligan.  'First names are for girls and Norwegians,' one character insists.  There's a series of running gags about Australia and opera, a post-modern riff about a future woman prime minister, and some excellent sight gags. 

The show revolves around Corden, who is terrific;  his timing is impeccable, his physical dexterity enhanced by his bulky, Bunterish figure.  Above all, his backchat with the audience when he appeals for a sandwich has a genuine air of spontaneity. When he appears for a brief moment in a fez, it's more than just a homage to Tommy Cooper.  The panto element involves inviting members of the audience up on stage to take part in the business -- something that breaks down the invisible fourth wall.  There's a scene involving Corden, two waiters, his two bosses and several platefuls of food at the end of Act One which made me laugh more than anything I've seen on stage since I saw Mark Rylance in Boeing-Boeing.

The rest of the cast are also pitch-perfect, as are the 1963 costumes and the old-fashioned flats recreating Brighton.  Bean's play creaks a bit towards the end, but Hytner's direction more than makes up for any weaknesses.  What I missed in the story was a sense of real danger and jeopardy for the central character to make him afraid of being found out.  But it's riotously funny.  I was heavily critical of this Bean's last play The Heretic, after liking England People Very Nice.  As a satirist, he can be heavy-handed, but at his best he creates a demented sense of anarchy on stage.  England People Very Nice had a wonderful scene of Orthodox Jews in late Victorian London being pelted with bacon sandwiches by Jewish revolutionaries, and that's the kind of off-the-wall comedy that Bean does best.