John Morrison

Filumena

Michael Attenborough's production of this play didn't work for me, and I'm trying to puzzle out why.  There's a splendid central performance by Samantha Spiro as Filumena, the Neapolitan ex-prostitute who tricks her longtime protector, the rich businessman Domenico, into marriage by pretending to be at death's door.  But for me, Eduardo de Filippo's classic was dead in the water long before the interval.

In his programme note, Attenborough writes about his research trip to Naples and the huge gap between rich and poor which still exists in the rubbish-strewn city of today.  There's a lot that the Naples of 1946 and the Naples of 2012 have in common.  Filumena's background and her determination to lift her three sons out of grinding poverty make up 'the off-stage world that is the genesis of what happens on-stage', he writes.  For a Neapolitan post-war audience, the luxurious surroundings of Domenico's home where all three acts are set must have been a fairytale excursion out of their everyday world dominated by barefoot street children, poor housing, hunger and disease.  There's a moment in Act One where a waiter from a nearby restaurant arrives with dinner -- a roast chicken under a giant silver dome, a bottle of excellent wine, some fine smoked cheese and a creamy cake for dessert. 

For a theatre audience in Naples in 1946, wondering where the next bowl of pasta would come from, this would have been a 'Wow' moment when the imagination would have set the taste buds into overdrive, the stomachs rumbling and the mouths watering.  But for the patrons of the Almeida theatre, Domenico's meal is pretty much what they eat on Upper Street every day of the week.  The courtyard of Domenico's house, a sun-dappled ochre-washed square surrounded by colourful flowers and plants, looks exactly like the kind of Italian hotel where the posh Islingtonians who make up the Almeida audience go on holiday.  In the theatre, the meaning of what is on stage changes completely depending on who makes up the audience.  Attenborough has correctly understood that the play doesn't make sense without an understanding of the offstage world of deprivation which Filumena has escaped.  She has stayed 27 years with the awful Domenico to create a new life not so much for herself as for her three sons, given up at birth, who have no knowledge of who she is.  For a modern London audience, that social context can't be created with a programme note and some black and white photos of barefoot children;  it has to be created on stage.  Otherwise the play somes across as tame middle-class comedy.

Usually I applaud directors who try to stay faithful to the author and the text, particularly with foreign authors whose works aren't often performed.  But I think Attenborough has missed a trick here by not going for a more ambitious reinterpretation -- the kind of reinvention which Stephen Daldry achieved 20 years ago in his legendary production for the National Theatre of Priestley's An Inspector Calls.  This stayed faithful to the text but turned the play inside out with a set that boxed the family into a central space while creating from nothing the wider social context of the world outside.  Filumena seems to me a play that is in its essence a long way from mid-20th century realism;  it's more of a folk tale whose origins lie far away in the world of Boccaccio, Chaucer or Shakespeare.  It's a powerful but implausible story about a rich man and a poor woman who has three sons who don't know who she is.  It has all sorts of magical dimensions which this production, with realism at its core, fails to explore.

There are some other problems;  Tanya Ronder's adaptation includes lots of contemporary slangy phrases which jar on the ear, such as 'Tell me about it!' and 'No worries'.  Clive Wood is an excellent actor with many RSC seasons under his belt, but here he is badly miscast as Domenico.  However hard he tries, he isn't plausible as a wealthy Neapolitan businessman.  Like an English tourist in Naples, he never quite looks at home.  The rest of the cast do their best, but their characters seem trapped in stereotype.  The play itself has a soft centre and a happy ending which is like a sugar-topped Italian dessert.  Like most folk tales, it's deeply conservative rather than realist.  I wonder what a more Brechtian director less obsessed by realistic recreation of the Italian setting might have made of it.

The Duchess of Malfi

Church incense wafts across the stalls and up into the circle as masked and hooded figures wearing crosses and carrying candlesticks pad their way on to the stage.  Jamie Lloyd's new production at the Old Vic ramps up the sinister, foetid atmosphere of John Webster's corrupt and Catholic Italy right from the start.  Lloyd cleverly shifts the order of the first scene so that the revenge-driven Bosola, returning from a spell served in the galleys for murder, has the opening line, spoken to the Cardinal: 'I do haunt you still.' 

Soutra Gilmour's set, a towering three-story construction which is part palace, part cathedral and part an extension of the Old Vic's atmospheric auditorium, stays mostly in the shadows but is illuminated by sudden flashes of light, conjuring up the chiaroscuro effects of early 17th century Italian paintings.  However, this isn't a production that relies on Caravaggio-style visual effects alone;  the text is always admirably spoken with great clarity and understanding.  One or two secondary scenes have been cut but Lloyd knows how to emphasise the key moments and dramatic turningpoints in this very dark and atmospheric play.

The chief pleasure for me is seeing Eve Best back on the stage where she last played opposite Kevin Spacey in O'Neill's A Moon For The Misbegotten.  When she first appears on stage in Act One she moves slowly, formally, her face hidden, as if at a funeral procession.  But this widowed Duchess is wearing white, not black, and in a flash she has ripped away her veil to reveal a woman who is, in her own words, made of flesh and blood, not alabaster.  Best plays her as a merry, sexy, unconventional widow who has no time for the instructions of her brothers Ferdinand and the Cardinal that she should not marry again. There are echoes of her sparkling performance at Shakespeare's Globe last year as Beatrice in Much Ado About Nothing.  Best is an actress of charismatic power, as she proved playing Hedda Gabler a few years back at the Almeida.  Unfortunately, Webster has her bumped off with a whole act to go, and when she's no longer on stage the electricity goes down several notches. Imagine the last half hour of Jerusalem without Mark Rylance.  If I was running the country, I would declare Eve Best a National Treasure (like Rylance) and slap an export ban on her.

Webster's play is at its strongest in the first half, with some excellent quasi-Shakespearean scenes of deceit and doubletalk, in which the characters move between text and subtext. The Duchess falls prey to the machinations of Bosola, played with great conviction by Mark Bonnar with a rasping Scottish accent that cuts across the stage like a hacksaw.  A villain with pangs of conscience, Bosola is a far more interesting character than the Duchess's two evil brothers and her secret husband.  The paranoia and secrecy of Webster's world emerges very clearly in this production;  what is missing is the sense of rank and status and the social gulf between the Duchess and the handsome young steward she marries.  It's unfortunate that the second half of the play, particularly the last act, dispenses with character and tips over into unrestrained grand guignol with corpses littering the stage.  It's a challenge for any director to handle this spree of killing but Lloyd rises to the challenge;  I prefer this work to his current production of She Stoops To Conquer at the National, where the comic style is at times uneven.

The Recruiting Officer

One of the best signs that a production really works is that you leave the theatre thinking the playwright is absolutely brilliant.  George Farquhar, who wrote this play just over 300 years ago, shortly before his death at the age of 30, may not have been a genius, but this production at the Donmar is so excellent that it feels as though he is.

In fact, like Sheridan's The Rivals, The Recruiting Officer is a really good play, beautifully structured if, like all 18th century theatre, a bit predictable in its plotting.  Two couples who are clearly going to get hitched by the end of the play overcome a series of predictable obstacles, both external and internal driven by their own characters.  There are intercepted letters, subterfuges, disguises, saucy servants, inherited fortunes, stock comic characters which owe a debt to Shakespeare, and so on.  What helps it rise above the routine is the author's personal experience as an army recruiting officer for Queen Anne's wars against the French, which proves that the old writing class adage 'Write about what you know' was already in vogue three centuries ago.  There's a wider world in this play beyond the domestic courtship routines of middle-class folk in Shropshire, and Josie Rourke's inaugural production at the Donmar suggests this brilliantly.  Four talented actor-musicians play and sing a variety of songs and interludes arranged by composer Michael Bruce, but the one that haunts the memory is 'Over The Hills and Far Away', suggesting that a recruited soldier's fate would probably have been never to see his loved ones again.  The set is a simple structure of candles and wooden frames which leaves the actors free to get on with acting, using the Donmar's unique space to best advantage.  The casting is uniformly excellent, with even the smallest parts delivered with great intelligence and style. 

Nancy Carroll is superb in the 'breeches part' (I think that's the technical term) of Silvia, who dresses as a man pretending to join the army in order to ensnare the handsome Captain Plume, dashingly played by Tobias Menzies.  I've seen Nancy Carroll many times before on stage, mostly at the National Theatre but also playing Viola in Twelfth Night, and she's always a delight to watch.  Tobias Menzies I've seen only once before in Decade, but this part really shows what a good actor he is.  Plume is actually quite a complex character, an army officer who balances his recruiting duties with his long term interest in wooing Sylvia and his roving eye for any pretty girl who takes his fancy.  Menzies is totally plausible in all these dimensions, comfortably in period but also suggesting a modern officer taking up an easy assignment on rural recruiting duties in between tours of duty overseas.  Gawn Grainger as Silva's father Justice Balance, Mackenzie Crook as the odious Sergeant Kite and Mark Gatiss as the foppish Captain Brazen are also pitch-perfect.  Nicholas Burns partners Rachael Stirling as Mr Worthy and Melinda, the other wooing couple, and there are great cameo performances by Kathryn Drysdale and Aimee-Fion Edwards, who cuddles a live chicken as a country girl on her way to market who is waylaid by the soldiery. 

Farquhar, writing at the beginning of the 18th century, owes quite a lot to Shakespeare, who had been dead for less than a century.  His world is more bawdy and earthy than that of the late 18th century, when Oliver Goldsmith wrote She Stoops to Conquer,  currently running at the National.  I think Farquhar's is the better of the two plays, and I'm certain that this is the better of the two productions. Josie Rourke has welded her actors into a real ensemble and given them a coherent style, while allowing them the freedom to act as individuals.  She varies the pace and tone very cunningly, using music and movement to produce shifts in mood from high comedy to farce to genuine emotion. Unfortunately the run ends in mid-April and, as always at the Donmar, is sold out.

After Sam Mendes and Michael Grandage, the Donmar obviously needed a woman's touch.  Not only has Josie Rourke delivered a cracking show on stage, but she's also been tinkering with the upholstery in the auditorium.  Some of the plain red seat cushions have been recovered in an attractive patterned material, probably chintz, though it's not clear if this daring experiment will last longer than the current production.

The London Spring

Imagine London if things get much, much worse.  The streets of central London are a third world crime zone, a bit like Travis Bickle's New York, where visiting American 'grockles' are hustled for their precious dollars by the people they contemptuously call 'the Brits', where unemployed philosophy professors sell toilet paper by the sheet outside the station lavatory and unemployed doctors turn to prostitution to make ends meet.  The Waterloo Station Tourist Lounge is a relatively safe haven where tourist guide Jane shepherds her clients, telling them to hang on to their wallets and their luggage.  Poor Michael, a visiting American doctor, tries his best but manages to lose both in the course of Francis Beckett's dystopian play, playing at the Etcetera theatre in Camden Town.

But the low-lifes preying on Michael all have their own tragic stories and their predicament isn't their own fault.  The widespread impoverishment is the result of the privatisation of public services and the surrender to the free market by the government, which has farmed health and education out to big American corporations.  'You can't cure poverty -- if you stay too close to the poor you can catch what they've got,' warns one character.  But revolt is somewhere in the air, and the downtrodden  lumpenproletariat are planning a 'London Spring' revolt in Trafalgar Square.

There are echoes here of Moscow in the early 1990s and of last year's Arab Spring, and some sharp satire on prevalent first world attitudes to the third world which make uncomfortable listening for Londoners.  The author is a fellow journalist and fellow member of Player-Playwrights who shares my passion for modern history, though it's fair to say our political views don't quite coincide.  Francis takes an unashamedly Old Labour view of the world, which I don't share, and I think I find myself struggling to buy into his rather paranoid view of the future.   The link between free market economics and impoverishment doesn't make sense;   in 1990 Russians were impoverished not so much by the painful medecine of free prices as by the total collapse of the old state-run centralised system.  Twenty years on, whatever one thinks of the ghastly Putin regime, privatisation has left most of them substantially better off. 

None of this matters in purely theatrical terms;  I'm quite happy to swallow anything I see on stage, if I can suspend my disbelief, but the story here never quite breaks the bounds of realism.   The action stays rooted in a single location and takes place in real time with no breaks or intervals;  this means it flows at a cracking pace but gives the characters little time to develop.  Michael thinks he can rescue Catherine, a doctor who now turns tricks on the streets rather than tourniquets, by taking her back to his home across the Atlantic, even though it may ruin his career.  But the invitation comes too early in the story, and the 'London Spring' street protests remain a shadowy presence offstage.  Nonetheless, Suzy Kendall provides a winning performance as Catherine, successfully suggesting a woman who is genuinely hesitating about how she should respond to Michael.  The other standout performance is by Chloe Welsh as Jane the Australian tourist guide.  These characters are well imagined, but the play needs to step further away from realism and into a phantasmagoric urban nightmare to deliver an impact that matches the ideas behind it.

The Pitchfork Disney

I was a bit mystified by this play when I saw a student production a few years ago but I'm glad I jumped out of my theatrical comfort zone to see this new version of it at the Arcola.  Philip Ridley's characters inhabit a strange non-rational universe and it takes time to tune in to his style of non-realist theatre, but I now think it's definitely worth the effort. 

Mariah Gale, Chris New and the charismatic Nathan Stewart-Jarrett all shine in this highly charged production by Edward Dick, performed on a raised platform in the larger of the Arcola's two studios. Hayley and Presley are an adult sister and brother couple, who seem to have survived together for years in a deprived fantasy world amid childhood squabbles over chocolate.  Driven together by fear of the outside real world, they imagine they are living in the aftermath of a nuclear holocaust where everything has been destroyed except themselves.  It is the blend of fantasy and mundane reality -- the row over fruit and nut chocolate -- which makes Ridley's play so creepy.  I've seen Chris New on stage before in Bent and Mariah Gale as Ophelia to David Tennant's Hamlet, but I've never come across Nathan Stewart-Jarrett before.  He plays the swaggering Cosmo Disney, who appears like a strange vision in the litter-strewn flat.  There are moments when he seems to represent the irruption of the real world, puncturing the couple's fantasies, but he also represents another twist in their descent into a disturbed consciousness, culminating in the terrifying appearance of his companion, the black-clad Pitchfork Cavalier.  I found it riveting, not least because the decision to involve a movement director (Jane Gibson) really pays off.  This is intensely physical theatre which at times becomes a ballet of movement, perfectly integrated with the words.  I was riveted to my seat, full of admiration for a playwright who chucks aside the normal logical rules of theatre to write something so original.  Ridley, who trained as a visual artist, is hard to compare with other writers, but there's a perceptive essay in the programme by Dan Rebellato who points out that our world has increasingly come to resemble Ridley's nightmares, and lists a number of ways in which this play influenced other writers exploring what he calls 'the deep irrationality of the twentyfirst century'.

Can We Talk About This?

Having spent a bit of time in the British Library studying the Lord Chamberlain's departmental archive, I am of course opposed to theatrical censorship. But sometimes I am tempted to issue a personal fatwa when it comes to 'verbatim theatre', a thoroughly over-rated art form in which actors bash audiences round the head with recycled journalism.  The only piece of verbatim theatre I have ever really enjoyed was Max Stafford-Clark's brilliant production of David Hare's play about the railways, The Permanent Way.  I don't exactly propose banning verbatim theatre altogether, but I have in mind a mild liberal sort of fatwa advising against it. 

So my heart sank when I discovered that this show by DV8 on the National Theatre's Lyttelton stage would be a verbatim treatment of what's gone wrong with multiculturalism, using interviews and news reports to document the way in which the right to criticise Islam has been increasingly eroded in favour of a culture in which death threats, forced marriage and oppression of women have been quietly tolerated in the name of community harmony.  I have no quarrel at all with the arguments put forward by Lloyd Newson and his team -- quite the opposite -- but in theatrical terms, this show is flat and one-dimensional.  DV8's style of physical theatre means the performers get a good 80-minute workout on stage, alternately running, jumping, bending, rocking, hopping around, sliding and crawling.  Unfortunately a statement about academic freedom gains absolutely nothing when the performer who delivers it is upside down doing a handstand.  After a while I closed my eyes and just listened to the words, finding the constant bunnyhopping around on stage a visual distraction from the theme.

The show, despite being priced at £25 for only 80 minutes worth, won warm applause on Friday from an audience about 30 years younger than the usual Lyttelton crowd, so obviously most of them liked it a lot more than I did.   Politically I was on side, but artistically I thought it never came to life.  Paradoxically, there is nothing in it about Islam which the average believer would find offensive.  There are no cartoons of the Prophet and no playing around with the Koran.  The show lacks any variation in pace or in style.   However much one agrees with what is being said on stage, there is no substitute for a real conflict in which both sides of the argument are heard -- or, even better, dramatised. Come back George Bernard Shaw, all is forgiven.  DV8 is essentially a dance company, not a theatre company, and I don't think this show comes anywhere close to finding the right box of dramatic tricks to get its message across.  I would put it on a level with David Hare's dramatically inert piece of verbatim theatre about the financial crash The Power of Yes, though that less than satisfactory visit to the Lyttelton in 2009 only set me back £10.

I do feel strongly, however, that Nicholas Hytner should be congratulated for finding room for this show and its tricky subject matter at the National, when it would have been a lot easier to avoid potential controversy by leaving some other theatre to take the flak.  Right on cue, during a passage about forced marriage, there was an unscripted shout from the stalls 'This is Islamophobic shit!' which not only unsettled the performers for a second or two but proved the show's point about Islamist intolerance.  Hytner has form in sticking up for liberal values and facing down critics;  he did the same when he staged Richard Bean's England People Very Nice which managed to offend absolutely every ethnic and religious group with a glorious cascade of political incorrectness. That play, which also provoked some minor protests, had a lot more going for it in theatrical terms than this one. 

Why Rattigan's The Winslow Boy is so up to date

As a play about the fundamental issue of human rights and the importance of ensuring access to justice, Terence Rattigan's classic play about a boy accused of stealing a five shilling postal order seems more up to date than ever.  Written in 1946 and set just before World War One, it's a favourite of amateur dramatic societies but less often revived in the professional theatre.  But while some of the dialogue and characters, including a comic parlourmaid and a stuffy cricket-playing solicitor, seem a bit cobwebby, the central story hasn't dated a bit.

The amateur production I saw on Saturday was excellent (congratulations, Shoreham Players!) and a reminder of what a skilled craftsman Rattigan is; in the opening scene the disgraced naval cadet Ronnie returns to the family home from college two days early, unseen except by the maid.  When the family return from church, they don't know he has gone to hide in the garden -- but the audience knows it, and senses that something is deeply amiss.  Dramatic irony of this kind and the use of subtext to disguise passionate feeling are the twin hallmarks of Rattigan's writing.  The main plot of the play isn't about love and passion, but the emotions in the Winslow family get increasingly raw as the parents squabble, the sister's engagement is called off, the elder brother has to leave Oxford and the maid risks the sack as they fight to clear Ronnie's name.  Rattigan raises the stakes all the time without forcing his very ordinary middle class English characters to betray their stiff-upper-lip background.  The emotions get increasingly intense, but they largely remain below the surface of the dialogue.  Catherine, Ronnie's sister, is the most interesting and fully created character in the play -- a suffragette whose personal dilemma is finely balanced and exquisitely expressed.  As the member of the family with most to lose, she nonetheless opts to back her father's legal battle on behalf of his son and is furious when he suggests giving up.  The price she pays is the loss of her fiance, a dullish army officer.  Rattigan delicately shows her initial prejudice against Sir Robert Morton, the 'cold fish' of a Tory barrister whose dramatic decision to take on the case forms the climax of Act One.  Later on she realises she has misjudged Morton;  there's a subtle hint of mutual attraction between these political opposites in the scene which Rattigan uses to end the play.  While the rest of the family celebrate the legal win, Catherine sits there seemingly devastated by the news that the despised and supercilious Morton has turned down the chance to be Lord Chief Justice in order to fight the Winslow boy's case. 

Having seen quite a few Rattigan plays in 2011, the year of his centenary, I wasn't surprised by his theatrical skill in The Winslow Boy.  How many authors can create all the tension and suspense of a court case without actually setting any of the scenes in the courtroom?  What surprised me was the play's very contemporary theme.  'Let right be done' is the theme of the legal battle against the odds which Ronnie Winslow's father launches to clear his son's name.  Rattigan dedicated the play to the young Master Paul Channon, the son of his wealthy Tory lover 'Chips' Channon, 'in the hope that he will live to see a world in which this play will point no moral'.  Rattigan, it shouldn't be forgotten, was a liberal leftwinger, not a crusty Tory, despite his champagne lifestyle.  What is important in the story of Ronnie is not whether or not he stole a five shilling postal order, but whether he has the right to a fair trial in the face of the 'despotism' of a government bureaucracy which has closed ranks and condemned him without a hearing.  Sounds familiar?  Of course it does. You don't have to be an expert on the European Convention of Human Rights and the Human Rights Act, neither of which had been written when Rattigan wrote the play, to understand the need for them.  While the Daily Mail, the Sun and large elements of the Conservative party want to scrap these vital guarantees, Rattigan's play reminds us that sometimes the respectable middle classes need their rights protected too, for the most unexpected reasons. 'No one party has a monopoly of concern for individual liberty. On that issue all parties are united,' Sir Robert tells Catherine in the final scene.  She is unpersuaded: 'Only some people from all parties,' she counters.  'That is a wise remark. We can only hope, then, that those same people will always prove enough people,' he replies.

'Tis Pity She's A Whore

A teenage girl fidgets on a red-sheeted double bed, headphones jammed to her ears, laptop at the ready, her hair covered by a hood.  She kicks her bare feet and twitches the duvet in time with the music, pausing only to lean over and put on a CD, absorbed in herself but stealing an occasional sly look at the audience.  Behind her is a red wall with two doors, also painted red, and a row of movie posters.  The house lights are still up, the play hasn't yet started, and already the audience, looking into this student bedroom, is locked into a performance of mesmerising authority from Lydia Wilson.

As Annabella, the young woman who commits incest with her brother in John Webster's 1633 play, Wilson, who only graduated from RADA in 2009, delivers a central performance of spellbinding intensity. This role in Declan Donnellan's latest Cheek by Jowl production deserves to take her already promising career to another level. In the opening scene with her brother Giovanni (Jack Gordon) she conveys a young woman for whom incest is just another lifestyle choice, like swapping a CD or pinning up a poster.  Later in the play, pregnant with her brother's child, she plays with baby clothes, caught in an impossible dilemma of her own making between Giovanni and her husband Soranzo (Jack Hawkins). Wilson gives a very subtle performance in what is in many ways an unsubtle play.

Cheek By Jowl's annual visits to the Barbican as part of their global tour normally bring us Shakespeare, but the choice of a gory Jacobean revenge play by a lesser writer gives Donnellan a much greater degree of freedom to experiment.  Ford's play has been trimmed to around two hours without an interval, losing the final gore-soaked pages of the closing scene in which minor characters take their turn to be bumped off. This happens after Annabella has been disembowelled and her brother has come on stage clasping her heart.  It's a shame to lose the final line which gives the play its title, but the result is to speed up the action to good effect.  The problem with the play's structure is that Annabella and Giovanni hardly appear together between their initial sexual encounter and the denouement; most of the play is taken up with subplots of lesser interest.  Donnellan, whose normal method in the theatre is subtraction rather than addition, departs from his usual style by using a lot of music, movement and choreography, binding the actors together as a performing ensemble on and around the bed, before dividing them again.  I feared briefly that this over-vigorous approach might swamp the actors and their words, but my nervousness wasn't justified.  There are other standout performances from Suzanne Burden as the lusty widow Hippolita and from Laurence Spellman as the servant Vasquez.

It's a revenge tragedy of sorts, but one in which the wrong people seem to be taking revenge. Giovanni takes revenge on Annabella but the man who really has grounds for getting his own back -- the hapless Soranzo -- forgives his wife and is reconciled.  Whatever the play's flaws, they are well disguised in this visually exciting production.  Nick Ormerod's flair for restrained yet powerful design is well employed here;  one of the doors at the back of the stage leads to a bathroom which doubles as a murder and torture chamber.  There's a happy balance in this modern dress production between no-holds-barred gory realism and Cheek By Jowl's usually pared-down style, which provokes the audience into using their imagination.

The company's annual London run at the Silk Street theatre is, unfortunately, all too brief; in a few days time they will be in New York and then in Madrid after Easter.  Donnellan is a wise old bird whose long years of experience as a director always seem to bear fruit without sliding into repetition of what's gone before.  For my money, he's still the heir to Peter Brook.  By that I mean he has created a theatrical language which is truly international while still preserving what's exemplary in the British stage tradition.  Lydia Wilson's performance as Annabella is a good example of what that means.