John Morrison

The Tempest at the Roundhouse (RSC)

Another very disappointing evening at the Roundhouse, following Twelfth Night a few days ago.  All I can say about David Farr's over-designed and under-acted production is that the phrase 'Shipwreck Trilogy' is starting to look appropriate.  Perhaps it's unfair to go into too much detail about a show which I abandoned at the interval.  

What it all boils down to in my view is that there are two ways of directing Shakespeare -- or any other dramatist, for that matter.  One can either start with the text and the actors and work outwards from the meaning into designing the production.  Sometimes very little design is needed, and the audience does the work.  That's what I generally prefer.  Or, one can start off with a design concept and shoehorn the actors into it, which is the method that seems to apply in most of European theatre, where directors hold sway.

In the programme for The Tempest designer Jon Bausor makes clear he belongs 100 per cent to the second school of thought.  There's nary a mention of the actors in his description of how he put together a set largely inspired by a Hokusai print of a breaking wave which used to hang on his bedroom wall.  He's also introduced a lot of other elements --  fluorescent tubes, a metal beam, a perspex semi-transparent box, holes in the stage.  Very little of any of this has anything to do with Shakespeare's text, in which the designer and director seem to show little interest.  The acting is mostly wooden, with a lot of shouting for emphasis, and desperate mugging in the comic scenes.  I don't want to blame the actors, because I think the director has tried to weld together too many different ideas and forge links between separate plays which don't really exist.  It's not so long since the RSC gave us a superb Tempest with Patrick Stewart;  in this one, Jonathan Slinger seems miscast. One of the specific features of this play is that Miranda is the sole female character on the island;  but the balance is destroyed in this production by turning Sebastian into a woman. 

David Farr is an excellent director in many ways but has gone astray here.  I don't want the RSC to sink back into the safe middle ground or to be boring and avoid risk.  But I do think it should concentrate a lot less on gee-whiz design and more on acting.  Greg Doran's excellent Julius Caesar, which I watched on BBC4 last Sunday, shows how it's done.

The Last of the Haussmans

It must be a fairly rare event for a first play by an unknown writer to get its premiere not in the Cottesloe but in the National Theatre's much larger Lyttelton.  But director Howard Davies' gamble pays off triumphantly with Stephen Beresford's drama about the shattering legacy of 1960s hippie culture, played out in a dysfunctional family half a century later.

The Last of the Haussmans is sad, very funny, has some brilliant one-liners and a cracking cast.  You could say that no play with Julie Walters, Rory Kinnear and Helen McCrory in it could possibly fail, but that's not true.  Beresford, better known as an actor, knows all about creating conflict on stage as a writer.  Unlike Mike Bartlett's Love, Love, Love at the Royal Court, this play about the 1960s has utterly convincing characters.  Though I saw it in an early preview, this production, like all Davies' work, is the fully finished article.  It has one or two technical flaws in the plot, but the characters' reactions to what happens are so authentic that they don't matter. 

Vicki Mortimer's gloriously cluttered revolving set, built around a dilapidated 1930s Art Deco house overlooking the sea on the Devon Riviera, tells us even before the actors appear that we are in the world of someone for whom time has stopped.  There are gaudy flags draped everywhere like memorials from a Tibetan shrine.  On the terrace there are dozens of faded plants, a bicycle, an old vacuum cleaner, Ban-The-Bomb signs and the accumulated detritus of someone for whom all clocks stopped in 1968.  When daughter Libby (McCrory) and son Nick (Kinnear) meet on the terrace, their mother Judy (Walters) is fast asleep.  When Judy is eventually roused from her daytime slumbers, she turns out to be the hippie mother from hell, with a teenager's mind trapped in a pensioner's body, her flowing hair turned grey but her manipulative selfishness fully intact.  With a mother who lives on Ritz crackers, it's no surprise that her children are so damaged.  Nick is a shambling wreck, a moth-eaten gay junkie whose heavy eyeliner can't disguise the physical and mental harm done by two decades of drink and drugs.  At first sight his sister seems the more capable of the two, but as the play unfolds it turns out that Libby, repeatedly flinging herself at unsuitable men, is just as much a lost soul as her brother, and is despised by her precocious 15-year-old daughter Summer. 

The rhythm and structure of the play resembles The Cherry Orchard.  A family reassembles at a much-loved family home stuffed with memories.  By the end of the play the home is lost for good and the characters depart, heaven knows where.  At the centre of both stories is a woman who has lived too much and seen better days, and neglected her family.  And both families have neighbours who exploit their weaknesses.  Incarnated by Walters, Judy Haussman is perhaps too much of a comic monster, lacking the flickering grandeur and occasional moments of insight of Chekhov's Ranevskaya.  Kinnear is brilliant as the gin-soaked, caustic Nick but the real reason to fight for a ticket to see this play is McCrory's searing performance as Libby.  I have fantastic memories of seeing McCrory in Sam Mendes' farewell season at the Donmar a decade ago, playing Yelena in Uncle Vanya and Olivia in Twelfth Night.  Since then, if anything, she's got better.  Libby is as dysfunctional as her mother and brother, but her frantic efforts to bring order out of chaos give her a real emotional depth.  If the audience can empathise with anyone in this play, it's with her.

Matthew Marsh plays Peter, a dodgy neighbouring doctor with a hippy past who two-times his wife with both the Haussman women.  There's something nasty and chameleon-like about Peter, who shifts between bashing out guitar solo to Sixties classic songs and playing the cold professional GP.  Isabella Laughland, as the all-seeing daughter Summer, initially seems a bit too grown up to be a convincing fifteen-year-old, but comes into her own in a climactic scene in Act Two where she renounces the Haussmans and all their flawed values for the high-end materialism of a life with her prosperous father in France.  Taron Egerton has the difficult task of bringing to life the sixth character Daniel, a neighbouring teenager whose part is somewhat underwritten.  Daniel seems like more of a love interest plot device than a real person.

Act Two largely fulfils the promise of Act One, though the plotting of exactly how and why the house is lost lacks plausibility in the short time frame of a few summer weeks which Beresford has chosen.  From the back of the Lyttelton Circle McCrory is beautifully audible throughout, but Kinnear occasionally swallows a line. Otherwise it's an outstanding success.  I might perhaps quarrel with the author's overwhelmingly negative perspective on the 1960s;  he loads the dice decisively against Judy by making her an unrepentant follower of that shoddy fraudster the Baghwan Shree Rajneesh and making it clear she abandoned her children to live in an Indian ashram.  Not everyone who rebelled in the 1960s was quite that selfish -- or if they were, most of them probably acknowledged afterwards where they had gone wrong.  But that's neither here nor there;  the important thing is that Beresford's characters and their backstories are fully imagined and spring to life.

Henry V at Shakespeare's Globe

Two years ago Shakespeare's Globe delivered a cracking production of Henry IV, with Jamie Parker playing the young Hal opposite Roger Allam's Olivier-winning Falstaff.  Now Parker moves on to play Henry V in outstanding style on the same stage.  Director Dominic Dromgoole delivers a fairly traditional reading of the play which packs a devastating dramatic punch as it moves towards a climax.

Parker begins the play in subdued fashion, sitting with his back to the audience as the clerics outline his claim to the French throne;  he's still only a few steps from being Prince Hal, a young man who still has some way to go to discover what it's really like to be king.   We see him develop psychologically through the violence of war and the brutal decisions he has to make, laying bare his humanity along the way.  Parker's delivery of the play's most heroic moments -- 'Once more into the breach' and 'We few, we happy few' is all the more effective because he gives the impression of a king who is partly making it up as he goes along.  We sense that the whole English expedition could well end in ignominy.   His other great achievement is to change tone for the wooing scene with the French king's daughter, turning himself into an uncertain, clumsy lover.

Not all the casting is equally strong, but I liked Brid Brennan as the chorus, integrated into the action at the start in the role of a female attendant cleaning up after important men have sat in state on her lavatory.  Dromgoole cleverly points up the Chorus's naive approach to military heroism by showing the audience what is really going on among the lower ranks at the same time.  Another strong actor in a supporting part is Brendan O'Hea as Fluellen, a man blissfully unaware of the fact that his real handicap in life is not being Welsh but the fact that he just can't stop talking.  I liked Olivia Ross in the double roles of the Boy (nastily murdered by the perfidious French at Agincourt) and Princess Katherine.  Sam Cox explores a range of subtle -- perhaps too subtle -- behaviour patterns to make Pistol much more than the usual braggart, while Kurt Egyiawan is impressive as Louis the Dauphin. 

This is a vigorous production which can only get better.  Though it's been touring since mid-April, I sense that it needs a bit more time on the Globe stage to develop the relationship with the audience that marked out Allam's Falstaff two years ago and which is the key to success on such a big and exposed open air stage.

Twelfth NIght at the Roundhouse (RSC)

I have a modest 'back to basics' proposal for the Royal Shakespeare Company's new boss Greg Doran:  despatch all the company's set and costume designers, composers, technical panjandrums and assorted backstage experts in this, that and the other on an extended holiday for a year.  Maroon them on a desert island, leave behind just the actors and directors and let them get on with Shakespeare on their own. 

This bright idea, which I know has no chance of being accepted, is prompted by my frustration at seeing yet another over-conceptualised, over-designed RSC production which squeezes the life out of one of Shakespeare's most marvellous plays.  Faites simple was Escoffier's kitchen maxim, and it's not a bad idea in the theatre either.  It explains why I have found recent productions of Shakespeare by scratch companies from South Sudan and Afghanistan at Shakespeare's Globe ten times more enjoyable than my outing to the Roundhouse to the RSC's Twelfth Night.

The simple approach to Shakespeare, relying on the actors to convey the meaning of the play, pays off brilliantly for Declan Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl company;  it also works in small theatres like Bristol's Tobacco Factory and London's Donmar, where there isn't room for any kind of stage set.  Of course there are exceptions to my argument;  nobody can accuse Rupert Goold of keeping it simple, and I very much enjoyed his bold translation of The Merchant of Venice to Las Vegas for the RSC in 2011.

But elaborate set designs and the elaborate directorial concepts that go with them can easily imprison the actors.  I feel that about the National Theatre's current production of Antigone, and the same problem is even more evident in David Farr's Twelfth Night.  Jon Bausor's set includes a water tank, a piano, an old-fashioned lift with iron grilles, a revolving doorway, and a hotel front desk.  It suggests that Olivia's home in Illyria is a seedy old-fashioned boarding house, home to a bunch of undesirable transients.  Sitting in a £25 seat with terrible sightlines at the very end of the horseshoe-shaped auditorium, I started wondering during the first half what else might be lurking in the upstage area I was unable to see;  when I moved to an empty seat after the interval, there turned out to be a giant double bed there as well.  Everything but the kitchen sink, in fact.  When I started reading the programme I found things that were equally irrelevant to the play -- an essay by Tariq Modood about immigration and multiculturalism, and some poetic musings about the transformative power of the sea.

None of this would matter too much if this charmless production was able to summon up any of the magical qualities of Shakespeare's play.  But the relationships between the characters are perfunctory;  I have seen this play countless times, and I struggle to recall a production, professional or amateur, with so little erotic chemistry between the protagonists.  No sparks of attraction or seduction fly between Orsino and his androgynous little helper Cesario, nor between Cesario and the flirty Olivia.  The only outstanding performance, tellingly, comes from Jonathan Slinger as Malvolio, a character who has no meaningful relationships of any kind.  Much of the casting for this play seems to be below the RSC's usual standards, and the director seems to prefer his actors to shout at each other from several yards apart. This is a play that should be both sexy and funny.  In this production, it manages to be neither.  The biggest laugh of the night comes when Malvolio enters on an electric golf buggy with a sign saying Management Use Only.  At one point Sir Andrew Aguecheek shouts into a mobile phone 'Taxi to the airport!' which raises a similar easy laugh, but the gag jars with the overall design of the production.  David Farr is a director for whom I usually have a lot of respect, but his attempt to reinvent Twelfth Night just hasn't worked.  Perhaps he, Greg Doran and all the other RSC directorial team should put on heavy disguise and pay a few incognito visits to Shakespeare's Globe.  The Globe has also had its share of bad productions over the years, but with a few exceptions (yes, I do mean Lucy Bailey), its directors know that the actors come first.

Globe To Globe: Hamlet (Meno Fortas)

Ah well, you can't win them all.  The Globe's magnificent worldwide Shakespeare season is coming to an end with a real stinker.  I do not think I have ever seen a version of Shakespeare as bad as this 'legendary' Lithuanian production, which has apparently been touring the world for 15 years.

For the record, I stayed this afternoon for 25 minutes before walking out -- long enough to realise I was watching a theatrical fossil.  Productions that stay in the repertoire for decades are an East European speciality; when I lived in Moscow, the theatres were full of them.  They're a leftover from Soviet days, when it was such an enormous struggle to get anything past the censors that it was always easier to keep reviving existing works than to try anything new.  I stayed long enough to see a middle-aged Hamlet stamping his feet and throwing the furniture around, to see an equally middle-aged Ophelia smoking a pipe (why?) and Hamlet's ghost presenting his son with a block of ice (why?). There are lots more silly attention-seeking gimmicks in this production, but I really could not be bothered to stay for them.  Back in the 1960s, this style of theatre might have seemed radical and innovative, but not any more.  Too old and long in the tooth, this pretentious show has lost any vestige of freshness.  The actors' eyes are completely dead and at no point do they even attempt to open a channel to the audience.

What a contrast with the show I saw at the Globe earlier in the week-- an Afghan Comedy of Errors which was entertaining, imaginative, funny, and thoroughly unpretentious.  Like the African companies who for me proved the highlight of the Globe to Globe season, these actors knew instinctively how to break down the barrier between themselves and the audience.  Rehearsed in India because of threats to the women in the cast, this was a splendid show which demonstrated just how effective Shakespeare's plays can be when they are handled simply in the spirit of four centuries ago.

Antigone

Director Polly Findlay told the NT Platform audience before last night's performance of Antigone that she was hoping to recreate the atmosphere of an HBO television drama, using the Olivier's concrete bunker architecture to simulate an underground control centre.   It's a perfectly valid way of approaching Sophocles' tragedy but I'm not sure that it succeeds completely.

Using the Olivier for the first time is a huge leap in scale for any director, and there's no doubt on the evidence of this show that Findlay will be invited back;  one of the exciting hallmarks of Nicholas Hytner's rule at the National Theatre has been the chance he has given to women directors such as Marianne Elliott,  Thea Sharrock and now Polly Findlay to use the big stage.  At 29, Findlay is probably the youngest woman to direct a play in the Olivier, and possibly the youngest director altogether.

As she highlighted in her Platform conversation with Fiona Mountford, the set design came long before the rehearsals -- as it always does in big theatres like the National.  Soutra Gilmour has used echoes the curving concrete walls of the Olivier auditorium to shape her circular bunker, peopled by a chorus of desk-bound men shifting paper files, scribbling on pads and monitoring electronic signals. There are cold war phones, reel-to-reel tape recorders but no modern computers;   Findlay and Gilmour have recreated the high-surveillance world of the GDR with a nod to the film The Lives of Others, and there's a photo of actor Ulrich Muehe in the programme.  Like Muehe's secret policeman in the film, Christopher Ecclestone's King Creon is a very human monster, moving forward to comfort Antigone before he learns why she has been arrested.  Findlay avoids the theatrical cliches of orange prisoner jumpsuits and fascist-style jackboots, which is excellent news.

But there are several reasons why I feel this production falls short;  it certainly never engaged me to the same extent as other Greek tragedies I have seen on stage.  At the moment I'm rather under the influence of seeing a series of very simple and effective Shakespeare productions at the Globe, which have relied on an absolute minimum of set, sound and costume.  This type of theatre liberates the actors to communicate with the audience, encouraging the spectators to use their imagination as much as possible.  Like many of the RSC's recent Shakespeare productions, this Antigone does the opposite;  it piles on detail after detail on stage in too naturalistic a manner.  However much Polly Findlay may love HBO, television and the theatre are different things.   Much of the detail on stage is fairly invisible from the back of the circle anyway, unless audience members bring a pair of binoculars (I always do).  Opting for a high-concept design approach can often stifle the freedom of the actors, and I think that happens in this production. Christopher Ecclestone is good but not great as Creon, and the same can be said for Jodie Whittaker as Antigone, who never really conveys a sense of threat and danger. 

Any director of Greek tragedy has to make bold choices, and Findlay has certainly made hers; last night she defended them with great intelligence and verve.  But there's a downside; what goes missing is the powerful potential of the drama as ritual.  The realism of the director's approach isn't carried through consistently;  in a surveillance society, shouldn't we be seeing grainy black and white footage of Antigone burying her brother's body?  I left the theatre feeling a bit indifferent rather than shaken by this retelling of the story.