John Morrison

Michelle Terry to take over at Shakespeare's Globe

Three resounding cheers from me for today's announcement.  Michelle Terry is an ideal choice and I predict she will have no difficulty in moving the theatre into a new era that blends tradition and innovation in a way that Emma Rice never even got close to.   There seems to be a certain amount of confusion today among Rice's diehard supporters, who swallowed her line that she was only removed as Artistic Director because she was a woman.  That was always nonsense.  It was always likely that another woman would take over as the choice of a largely female selection panel. And a very good thing too.

I don't want to dwell on the reasons why Emma Rice turned out to be such a bad choice;  though I may have been one of the first to predict that she would have to depart early.  My reasons for thinking her appointment a big mistake by the Globe Board haven't changed.  She charged into a theatre with a brilliant reputation built up by her predecessors and made it clear she was determined to trash everything they had created, creating something of a personality cult along the way, with her photograph adorning every programme. 

This has been misleadingly described by people who are unfamiliar with the Globe's past under Mark Rylance and Dominic Dromgoole as a conflict between Rice, the fearless innovator, and the massed ranks of traditionalist Shakespeareans, clad in doublet and hose.  But the opposite was true.  It was Rylance and Dromgoole who built their theatre around Sam Wanamaker's original innovative vision of Shakespeare performed with the audience and the actors sharing the same light and sound conditions.  This created something unique.  Rice, by contrast, insisted on maximum lighting and maximum sound amplification, creating a style of theatre that was 100 per cent conventional and reliant on artificial aids.  This wasn't just the 'ostensible' reason why the Board decided she had to go -- it was the real reason, in my view.

It also became quickly apparent that her knowledge and understanding of Shakespeare and his language was very limited.  While her productions of A Midsummer NIght's Dream and Twelfth Night drew a lot of audience laughs and sold out, it became fairly obvious that she would never be able to direct any of the tragedies or the histories. Her programming for the indoor Sam Wanamaker theatre left a lot to be desired.   I wish her well down the road at the Old Vic next year.

I am sure that despite dire warnings of internal feuds and conflict at the Globe, Michelle Terry will be able to use her authority and experience to do a terrific job and pick up where Dromgoole left off.  There are plenty of actors who will be queuing up to work with her.

Woyzeck

Understudies don't get much recognition in the theatre unless the lead actor has to withdraw for an extended period.  So I'm happy to blow the trumpet for Theo Solomon, who stepped in to play Woyzeck at the Old Vic yesterday afternoon in the absence of John Boyega.  Solomon's portrayal of a British army squaddie troubled by inner demons was pitch perfect, but I was also very impressed by Sarah Greene as Marie and by a number of other performances.

Despite the excellent acting, I'm not fully convinced by this production.  This has nothing to do with a lack of respect for Buechner's original text -- a series of fragmentary scenes that he left unfinished.  But there's an unresolved tension between the naturalism of Jack Thorne's adaptation and the expressionist style of Joe Murphy's direction, heavily reliant on a non-naturalistic set design by Tom Scutt.  Woyzeck's story is told through his eyes as he descends into a form of madness, so the audience sees a distorted version of reality.  Thorne's text uses some scenes from the original text but adds a great deal of complicated backstory.  Woyzeck's relationship with Marie, the mother of his child and his eventual victim, becomes more central to the story than in Buechner.  And the play has a very precise setting in time and place -- Berlin in the early 1980s -- which seems to limit and narrow down its universality. 

 

Greg Hicks as Richard III

Greg Hicks mesmerises the audience for three hours with a performance that mingles sadism, misogyny, venom and flashes of humour, distilled and concentrated by the Arcola theatre's tiny stage.  Mehmet Ergen's taut production allows one of our greatest Shakespearean actors free rein to exploit all the viciousness that Shakespeare intended.  Richard is a character without any redeeming features, but that doesn't mean he's one-dimensional.  In the RSC's Histories cycle a decade ago, Jonathan Slinger made him a psychopath;  at the Old Vic, Ian Mckellen played him as a fascist 1930s dictator, and Kevin Spacey at the Old Vic delivered his own unique take on the character.

The Arcola is an intimate arena, and this production gives us the private Richard rather than the public.  Hicks catches the razor-sharp intelligence of Richard and his capacity to manipulate and cajole.  He is always several steps ahead.  When his loyal follower Buckingham hesitates over the plan to murder the princes in the Tower, Richard instantly sees him as an enemy.  One might argue that Richard's villainy is only a matter of degree, because most of the other characters are also fairly unpleasant types.   The chief baddie in this production is the chilling executioner Catesby, played by Matthew Sim as a man who seems to enjoy killing for its own sake.  Overall, the cast is exceptionally strong, with Sara Powell, Annie Firbank, Georgina Rich and Jane Bertish all making a strong impact as Richard's female victims.

Hicks has appeared many times in small-scale productions at the Arcola, including a memorable solo performance in the Kreuzer Sonata.  Here he exploits the dimensions of the theatre to eyeball the audience and create a kind of complicity;  but we sense that this Richard of Gloucester would not hesitate to eliminate any one of us instantly if we got in his way.

Othello by Shakespeare at the Tobacco Factory

This Othello is among the very best I have seen. Without star names and with no public subsidy, Andrew Hilton's Bristol-based company has a glowing reputation for concentrating on the essentials and showing that less can be more. Like Declan Donnellan's Cheek by Jowl company, it works because the actors and director concentrate on finding the meaning in Shakespeare's plays rather than swamping him with chaotic design concepts.  Unfortunately, while Emma Rice's latest Shakespeare-as-panto season at the Globe is sold out, this three-week run at Wilton's Musica Hall of an infinitely better show has been under-publicised and doesn't deserve the empty seats I saw on Tuesday night.

Director Richard Twyman is now the creative head of English Touring Theatre after an early career path at the RSC and the Royal Court.  I was bowled over by the quality of his production of Al Smith's two-hander Harrogate last year, and he tackles Shakespeare with the same penetrating intelligence.  The Tobacco Factory stage in Bristol places the audience on four sides of an empty space, and at Wilton's the design is the same.  It's a bit like a boxing or wrestling ring;  the imposing figure of Abraham Popoola as Othello appears to command the centre of the ring, while Mark Lockyer's Iago skulks in the corners, seemingly soaking up punches on the ropes.  But it's an illusion.  Like a canny veteran boxer, Iago is manipulating his younger and more powerful victim every step of the way.  Popoola is a 2016 graduate from RADA.  Like Nonso Anozie, who once played Othello for Cheek by Jowl, he's of British Nigerian descent, and has a powerful physical presence.  Lockyer is a veteran of countless RSC productions of Shakespeare, and the two are perfectly matched.  The play opens with a silent scene in which Othello and Desdemona marry in an Islamic ceremony;  Othello's Christian conformity to the norms of Venice is no more than an outward show.

Desdemona always seems to me to be an underwritten part;  for much of the play she has far too little to say for herself.  Norah Lopez Holden, another recent RADA graduate, makes up for her lack of lines with an imaginative physical performance that brings the character to life in unexpected ways.  Rather than a passive victim, she's a sparky young woman in dungarees, making fun of her new husband by greeting him with mock-salutes, and using her sexuality unapologetically to get her own way.  When her usual flirtiness fails to make Othello's defences crumble in the second half of the play, she is cast adrift and helpless.  We see Desdemona and Emilia (RSC star Katy Stephens) transform their final scene together into a raucous romp in which Holden dances on the dining table. 

This is just one of the action scenes which Twyman uses to vary the pace, introducing elements of danger and tension.  The violent drunken brawl between soldiers that leads to Cassio's demotion has a current of homoerotic soldierly horseplay, suggesting a world where women are largely absent.  When there is a male-female relationship on stage, it is always dysfunctional.  Twyman injects a 20th century note by having Iago lead a chorus of the barrack-room classic Bless 'em all (Fuck 'em all in this version).  It fits perfectly.

While not all the actors have the same Shakespearean experience and Lockyer and Stephens, there are no weak links anywhere in the cast.  I've seen quite a few excellent productions of Othello, including the Donmar's version with Chiwetel Ejiofor as the Moor, and two at the National Theatre.  This production, created with a fraction of the resources, ranks with the best of them.  It runs until early June, and if there is any justice in theatreland, the empty seats at Wilton's won't stay that way for long.

Salome

There aren't too many fixed rules for making theatre.  Thank goodness for that.  But in my experience, an alarm bell starts to tinkle when the writer of a show and the director are one and the same person.

This is the case with the National Theatre's new production of Salome, written by the very talented director Yael Farber.  I've seen three plays directed by her -- a stunning South African version of Strindberg's Miss Julie in 2013, a highly original revival of Arthur Miller's The Crucible at the Old Vic, and last year a richly rewarding production on the National's Olivier stage of Les Blancs by Lorraine Hansberry.  For her Mies Julie, Farber rewrote most of Strindberg's dialogue, but kept the essence and structure of his play.

Salome is a different matter.  While Farber seems to have used Oscar Wilde's Salome as a starting point, the version on stage in the Olivier is clearly the work of her own imagination from beginning to end.  It's an ambitious attempt to restage a slender story from the Bible and turn it into an enduring modern myth with multiple themes -- colonialism and the subjugation of women being just two.  Unfortunately, it fails to hit the target for a number of reasons.  For me the main one is the absence of a critical director prepared to tell the playwright that certain lines and scenes just don't work.  Farber's text is clunky and awkward.  In the hands of a poet, this story might have been turned into something magical, but the production I saw at yesterday's matinee only briefly caught my imagination.  I was soon looking at my watch -- always a bad sign.

Farber divides the role of Salome into two, with Olwen Fouere taking most of the dialogue as the character dubbed 'Nameless' and the much younger Isabella Nefar acting out the climax of the play as Salome "so-called".  Ramzi Choukar, a French-Syrian actor, is impressive as Iokanaan (John the Baptist), but the only actor who really turns his part into a recognisably human character is the always excellent Paul Chahidi as Herod.

I have no objections to the way Farber chooses to upend the traditional version of Salome's story and turn it inside out;  the problem is that most of the first half of the play is very slow and very static, with the actors declaiming their lines.  If it were not for the vigorous use of the Olivier's revolve, the result would be even more static.  After a few minutes I closed my eyes and recalled the classic riposte of Julie Walters' character in Educating Rita, when asked how she would stage Peer Gynt: "Put it on the radio".   In the second half (there is no interval and the show lasts around 100 minutes) the play becomes a lot more visual, with the death of Iokanaan and the triumph of Salome. It has moments of spectacular grandeur, but they come too late.

The question I'm tempted to ask is why Greek classical dramas succeed, despite being static and declamatory, while this one does not.  I think part of the answer is that Greek dramas benefit from fewer characters, and from the explanatory presence of a chorus, who gives the audience a different angle on the action and the characters and a sense of perspective.

Putting on this play, originally staged at the Shakespeare Theatre in Washington DC, is a gamble by the National's artistic director Rufus Norris.  I'm not going to criticise him for that, and I still think Farber is a wonderful theatre maker.  But I think she should stick to directing rather than writing. 

An Enemy of the People writes to his MP

A lightly edited version of the letter I posted yesterday to my MP Sir Michael Fallon, the Defence Secretary.  Like Theresa May and Philip Hammond, he was a Remain supporter who seamlessly switched sides after the referendum.

Dear Sir Michael,

Now that parliament has voted for Article 50 to be invoked and the Prime Minister is composing her letter to Donald Tusk, I am writing to you to set out my views on the Government’s White Paper on Brexit. I have also watched very carefully Sir Ivan Rogers’ testimony to the Commons Brexit committee.

I have never felt so angry, disillusioned and alienated from the government of my country, which no longer represents me. I feel the UK is now being steered towards a cliff edge by a xenophobic coalition of Nigel Farage, Norman Tebbit and the Daily Mail. Your party may heap scorn on UKIP, but you cannot deny that you have now fully embraced their agenda.

My conviction that leaving the EU will be a political and economic disaster  has only strengthened in the nine months since the referendum. This was not a victory for popular democracy, but an act of self-inflicted damage on the UK by the Conservatives, motivated solely by considerations of internal party management. 

When I spent a year writing a book in 2000-2001 on Blair’s first-term constitutional reforms I was struck by the general ignorance and muddled thinking at Westminster on the subject, particularly in the two major parties.  Since the late 1990s this seems to have got worse.

The confusion in government thinking is well illustrated by the following passage in the White Paper, which is legally and politically illiterate:

The sovereignty of Parliament is a fundamental principle of the UK constitution. Whilst Parliament has remained sovereign throughout our membership of the EU, it has not always felt like that.

To whom, may I ask, has it ‘not felt like that’?  John Redwood, perhaps?  Paul Dacre?  It is not the EU that has undermined the sovereignty of parliament, but the referendum, which was defined in legislation as non-binding.  It was called in casual fashion without any serious thought to how it might undermine the sovereignty of parliament, which is supposed to be the guiding principle of our ramshackle constitution.  The UK is supposed to be a representative parliamentary democracy, not a plebiscitary democracy.  I do not, like Ken Clarke, regard referendums as completely out of place in a parliamentary system, but June 23 illustrated the pitfalls of not having a written constitution setting out minimum requirements for major constitutional changes, such as the need for a super-majority rather than just a 50% majority.  The result of David Cameron’s improvisation on the back of an envelope is a constitutional mess.  We now have the sorry spectacle of MPs abandoning their better judgment and supporting Brexit out of fear of being seen to oppose the ‘will of the people’, a concept that appears nowhere in any constitutional document. David Davis has told the House of Commons that in 2019 its role in Brexit will be that of a rubber stamp, not a legislature.  We see a government fighting tooth and nail on spurious grounds to deny any future role for a supposedly sovereign parliament in determining the final outcome of negotiations with the EU 27.  Are we living in Putin’s Russia or Erdogan’s Turkey?

In four decades as a political journalist, I cannot recall reading any document as delusional as the Brexit White Paper. Very few of its woolly aspirations are achievable.  Despite several months of work, it displays a disturbing ignorance in No. 10 of how the EU works and a total failure to anticipate the likely negotiating priorities of the other side. The defenestration of Sir Ivan Rogers for attempting to tell uncomfortable truths to the government was a disgrace.  Sooner, rather than later, the Tinkerbell strategy of having our cake and eat it will swiftly fall apart in the face of reality.  The government seems to think the EU can with a stroke of the pen replicate our current open trading arrangements with the EU as a ‘third country’ while we reject any role for the European Court of Justice and quit the customs union and the single market.  The outcome of this wishful thinking is likely to be a car crash in which we exit the EU with no deal at all.  That will be welcomed only by the hardline minority of anti-Europeans who are now controlling Conservative policy.  It will make us all poorer.

The White Paper opens with the Prime Minister’s utterly delusional statement that the country is ‘coming together’ and that Brexit now has the support of 65 million people. 

The referendum was divisive at times. And those divisions have taken time to heal. But one of the reasons that Britain’s democracy has been such a success for so many years is that the strength of our identity as one nation, the respect we show to one another as fellow citizens, and the importance we attach to our institutions means that when a vote has been held we all respect the result. The victors have the responsibility to act magnanimously.

The losers have the responsibility to respect the legitimacy of the outcome. And the country comes together.

 

This is complete nonsense.  Theresa May is in the position Mikhail Gorbachev was in after winning a referendum on keeping the Soviet Union together in March 1991.  The meaning of any referendum is time-limited. As you no doubt remember, the Soviet Union, despite Gorbachev’s referendum win, had ceased to exist by the end of 1991. I and 16 million others voted for the UK to remain in the EU and nothing has happened to change our views, which have been treated with total contempt by the government.  There has not been a single conciliatory gesture towards the Remain camp, which has simply been told to shut up and had its patriotism questioned.  Far from the country coming together, I sense that public opinion is increasingly uneasy about the course the government is taking and will shift further in the next few months if the economy weakens and it becomes clear what damage leaving the single market and the customs union will inflict, particularly to the highly mobile financial sector and the car industry.  Brexit will dig a hole in the public finances and lead to more austerity. The idea that a ‘good deal’ on future trade is achievable within two years is a fantasy.  The idea that we should walk away from the EU with no deal at all and rely on new trade agreements with the USA and other countries under WTO rules is even more of a fantasy.  The plan floated by Boris Johnson that the UK should emulate Margaret Thatcher at the 1984 Fontainebleau summit and and ‘ask for our money back’ as an opening gambit is absurd.  I was present at Fontainebleau, covering that meeting as Reuters Paris bureau chief.  The majority of EC states had good reasons for accepting a difficult compromise with Thatcher over the UK rebate. The situation now is completely different, and the EU 27 have no reason to show any flexibility over the Brexit bill to be paid by the UK.  They will have the upper hand in these negotiations, not the UK, and will insist the outline exit terms are agreed prior to any negotiations on the future relationship. 

The basic contradiction in the government’s strategy is that it cannot reconcile the idea of a ‘Global Britain’ open to free trade with the backward-looking protectionist priority of controlling EU immigration, which formed the basis of the victory for the ‘Out’ campaign.  Keeping as many ‘foreigners’ out of the UK as possible is economically illiterate as a policy objective. Globalisation implies free movement of labour, along with capital and goods, as the government will discover when it tries to negotiate agreements with India and Australia, to name but two.  Free movement and immigration from the EU have been of huge benefit to the UK economy.  ‘Taking back control’ means more regulation and more bureaucracy.  To anyone who believes in a liberal free trade regime and the UK being ‘open for business’, it makes no economic sense.  I look forward with interest to see how the Home Office will manage the visa and residence system not just for millions existing EU residents but for those hoping to come here in the future, skilled and unskilled.  The latter will be needed to pick our vegetables in East Anglia, as at present, and to serve coffee in Prêt à Manger.  But the government has backed itself into a position with its immigration targets in which every ‘foreigner’ who remains here or arrives, even a student, is a policy defeat and each one who is forced to go home is a policy success.  Applying this daft policy to Italians, French, Germans and Poles makes as little sense as applying it to the Irish, who will still have free movement.

I regard EU citizens not as ‘foreigners’ or immigrants whose presence is by definition undesirable.  They are my fellow citizens and I want it to stay that way.  But we now to have a prime minister whose hostile attitude extends not just to EU citizens but even to refugee children in the direst circumstances.  If Theresa May had been in charge of the Home Office in 1939, there would have been no Kindertransport. The children would have died with their parents.  I feel ashamed to live in a country whose head of government understands so little about the history of international human rights law that she would like to withdraw the UK from the European Convention on Human Rights. The proclaimed open, welcoming and tolerant nature of the UK has already been undermined since the referendum by a rise in open hostility to EU citizens, many of whom are already deciding that their professional future no longer lies in the UK.

As a former foreign correspondent it pains me to see the marginalisation of the UK, which used to be a leader in European foreign policy.  This decline has been largely the fault of David Cameron, who will be viewed by historians as the most inept prime minister in foreign affairs since Chamberlain.  Margaret Thatcher, John Major, Tony Blair and even Gordon Brown exerted a lot of influence in Europe.  As an example, you will recall Major’s achievement in protecting the Kurds in the aftermath of the first Iraq war.  By contrast, in the recent crisis over Crimea and Eastern Ukraine, the UK should have had a front line role as one of the powers that guaranteed Ukraine’s territorial integrity in exchange for it giving up nuclear weapons.  But the Minsk agreement has been left to France and Germany, with the UK having no involvement.

Brexit will further marginalise the UK, and at best leave it in the position of Canada as a friendly but distant country outside the European family.  A prominent UK role in NATO will not compensate for the damage already done by Brexit to the UK’s credibility as a reliable partner in Europe.  The government may well be correct in arguing for the primacy of NATO over plans for EU military integration and planning.  But by leaving the EU it has deprived itself of a seat at the table where these issues will be decided, and made the development of an EU alternative to NATO defence more likely.

The UK’s perceived closeness to the Trump administration already puts it at odds with mainstream European opinion on many issues.  I find it shameful that the only European politician who fully approves of Theresa May’s policies is Marine Le Pen.  I can’t help wondering if the admiration is quietly reciprocated.  If, as Sir Christopher Meyer has suggested, the real nightmare for the UK is an EU led by Emmanuel Macron in Paris and Martin Schulz in Germany, what does that say about the UK and its values?

Brexit brings big risks to the integrity of the UK, which the White Paper tries to address but fails.  I have no personal objection to the idea of Scottish independence, nor to the eventual prospect of a united Ireland, but the prime minister will no doubt want to avoid following in the footsteps of Gorbachev and presiding over the breakup of the United Kingdom.  All the arguments she has advanced against a second independence referendum in Scotland – ‘Tunnel vision, uncertainty and division’ -- can just as well be levelled at her own policies on Brexit.  The poker game between the prime minister and Nicola Sturgeon over a second Scottish independence referendum has now started, and my judgment is that Sturgeon, as the more flexible and tactically skilled politician, will inevitably come out on top.

I am confident that by 2019 the delusional vision the White Paper presents of a happy post-Brexit future will have been shattered by a dose of reality. I cannot predict what will happen in the Conservative Party or the Labour Party, but I am sure events in the coming two years will drive a big change in public opinion in favour of remaining in the EU.  I would bet on a 60/40 majority for Remain by the spring of 2019. The case for another referendum may look far-fetched at the moment, but it is not going to go away, and it will gather in strength as the implications of a ‘clean’ Brexit become clear.   A narrow majority of voters may have supported Leave, but many of them did so because they were lied to.  Those lies are going to be exposed.  The first referendum on Brexit was a victory for ignorance and intolerance.   I expect the second to be a victory for common sense, once the message sinks in that every parliament in the EU will have a meaningful vote on the outcome except our own.  A second Brexit referendum, perhaps in exchange for Scotland withdrawing its independence referendum, may be the easiest escape route for the government in the face of impending disaster.

As you have pragmatically changed your mind on Brexit once already, I am sure you will have no difficulty as a common sense politician in changing it again and arguing that circumstances have changed, and the best outcome will be for the UK to withdraw its Article 50 notification and remain in the EU. 

Yours sincerely

John Morrison (aka ‘an enemy of the people’)

Mehmet Ergen's Cherry Orchard at the Arcola

In many ways this is one of the very best productions I have seen of Chekhov's greatest play, which I first encountered in Chichester half a century ago.  Mehmet Ergen's casting is inspired, and he allows the actors to fully explore the many intricate relationships between the characters.  From Sian Thomas as Ranevskaya, giggling her way through Lopakhin's plan to avoid the sale of the cherry orchard by building holiday cottages, to Lily Wood as Dunyasha the flighty maid, every role is fully developed but also balanced as part of an ensemble.  Jack Klaff is the best Gayev I have seen and Jade Williams as Varya, vainly hoping for a proposal from Lopakhin, creates a heartbreaking moment when he fails to pop the question.  Jude Akuwudike conveys Lopakhin's lack of emotional intelligence and education very well, while Abhin Galeya conveys the priggish certainties of Trofimov the eternal student with an understated power.   The other minor characters all shine too, while the almost complete absence of any set in the confined space of the Arcola means that the audience can use its imaginaton..

Some great directors manage to get this play badly wrong;  I wasn't greatly impressed with Sam Mendes' production at the Old Vic in 2009 as part of the transatlantic Bridge Project, though it had its moments.  I felt Simon Russell Beale was cast against type as the boorish Lopakhin.  And I hated the late Howard Davies' version of the play at the National Theatre, which wrenched it away from its period, inserted extra speeches by the adapter Andrew Upton and wrecked Chekhov's subtle comedy.  Ergen gets almost everything right, but like most British directors, he ignores the rich social and political context of the play.  Chekhov was writing a play not just about individual characters but about the decline of the Russian gentry class, the prelude to revolution and the social mobility that allows the peasant's son Lopakhin to buy the estate and chop down the cherry orchard.  For me, these are important elements in the play, but they are missing here.  All the characters are put into modern dress, which creates a sense of social equality that is at odds with Chekhov's play.  The uneasy relationship between the feckless gentry family, their hangers-on and the hard-working but insensitive Lopakhin is a complex one, and it relies heavily on their different social status.  Firs the aged retainer represents the rural world before the abolition of serfdom in the 1860s, while Yasha the valet, Dunyasha the maid and Yepikhodov the clerk all have modern ideas above their station.  Unfortunately the choice of contemporary 21st century dress, British in style, blurs all these distinctions and tensions.

I used to take a hard line against anyone who tried to update or adapt Chekhov or move his plays out of Russia.  Since seeing Anya Reiss's thoughtful modern versions of The Seagull, Uncle Vanya and Three Sisters, I'm less doctrinaire today.  But if a director wants to put Chekhov into a modern setting outside Russia, it's important to be consistent and find a modern context that is a fully thought-through alternative to the original.   This is an excellent production but I can't help feeling that a closer attention to the original Russian social context would have made it even better.

Twelfth Night with Malvolia

When I've seen a Shakespeare play dozens of times, studied it at school and acted in a student production, there's always a risk of seeing it once too often.  Will it really be funny when I see it for the umpteenth time?  At last night's early preview of the National Theatre's new Twelfth Night, I found myself laughing out loud -- and so did the rest of the audience in the Olivier theatre.  Make no mistake, Simon Godwin's production is going to be a big hit.

Tamsin Greig, transformed with a single character stroke from Malvolio to Malvolia, generates most of the laughter.  It makes perfect sense to centre the play on the unhappy outsider who walks out of the general rejoicing promising to take revenge. Declan Donnellan did the same with his much darker Russian Cheek by Jowl production at the Barbican a few years ago.  Greig starts the play dressed in severe monochrome, with a severe white blouse and a long black divided skirt. She patrols Olivia's very modern mansion like a Puritan avenger, fixing a single small beer bottle with an icy stare and complaining that Sir Toby and his friends have turned it into an ale-house.  Buried somewhere under her black bobbed wig there lurks something intense; could it be a driving lesbian passion for her mistress the lady Olivia?  Godwin uses the revolving stage to insert a very short scene in which Malvolia's secret desires are hinted at. 

Along with As You Like It, this is Shakespeare's most gender-bending play.  If one accepts, as Shakespeare does, that gender is often fluid and desire is ambiguous, then it doesn't make too much difference whether Malvolio/Malvolia is played by a man or a woman.  Greig's performance is a tour de force, which is no surprise.  She won an Olivier award for her playing of Beatrice in the RSC's Much Ado about Nothing and has superb comic gifts, which are used to the full in the scene where she discovers the fake love letter.  This is one of the best things Shakespeare ever wrote, but it's still possible for directors and actors to muck it up by inserting too much stage business.  A garden scene always benefits from a bit of water spraying around (Greg Doran used the same trick when he staged an excellent Sicilian Much Ado a decade or so ago) but here it is rightly never allowed to distract from the words.  There's also a swimming pool scene with Olivia and Viola that provides a nice comic splash.  Nick Hytner's Much Ado with Simon Russell Beale and Zoe Wanamaker used the same pool trick on the same stage in 2007.

When Malvolia finally appears cross-gartered in her yellow stockings, descending a Hollywood-style marble staircase like a burlesque artiste and casting aside stray pieces of costume, the result is electrifying comedy.  What gets lost in this solo act, however, is Olivia's reaction.   There's also a problem (at least for me) in the way Greig casts aside all traces of the Malvolia we saw in the earlier scenes.  I think the comedy of this scene should be grounded in the fact that Malvolia/Malvolia is still the same Puritan and repressed character as before, but forced to play an unaccustomed part.  Stephen Fry got this right when he played Malvolio at Shakespeare's Globe in the famous production with Mark Rylance in 2012. What we get here instead is a Malvolia who looks as though she has been spinning nipple tassles with gay abandon all her life.   As with Rosalie Craig's Rosalind in the National's recent As You Like It, the audience doesn't get the sense of a character skating on thin ice and pretending to be someone else.  However in the scene where Malvolia is locked up and taunted, and in the character's final appearance, Greig is very good at suggesting a character stripped bare by humiliation.

There are some other standout performances, notably Tim McMullen's Sir Toby Belch.  He is not the well-rounded quaffer we are used to seeing, but a groovy long-haired middle-aged hanger-on with a hipflask who might once have seen better days as a minor rock star, or a TV personality.  I can imagine him having an evening out with Jeremy Clarkson and the other aged schoolboys presenting Top Gear.  McMullen always adds something special to his Shakespearean roles, and this is no exception.  I also liked Phoebe Fox's flirty Olivia, who adds a new dimension to the theory that women who stick to a little black dress should not be trusted.  Tamara Lawrance (last seen at the National as Ma Rainey's young girlfriend) has some excellent moments, but the UST (unresolved sexual tenson) that should be present in her scenes with Orsino is absent.  Oliver Chris brings a cheery lightweight charm to Orsino, but never suggests the character's darker, obsessive side.

In this play Feste's melancholy songs should set the tone, but Doon Mackichan, while musically adept, plays the jester as just another comic character and does not explore the depths of one of Shakespeare's most interesting parts. Feste should have one foot outside the action of the play, casting a quizzical look at what the other characters are up to and acting as a bridge to the audience. 

Designer Soutra Gilmour's use of the Olivier's revolve with a giant pillar at its centre is technically very smart;  we get a storm scene (a bit like the opening of The Tempest) and Viola wakes up in a hospital bed asking which country she is in. .  Godwin moves the fight scene in the second half from chez Olivia to a drag evening in a club called the Elephant at which a singer intones Hamlet's To Be Or Not To Be.  It's well done but a bit OTT and it jars with the rest of the play.  By way of comparison, Rupert Goold's Merchant of Venice set in Las Vegas had a more coherent design vision that illuminated Shakespeare's text.  Illyria in this production seems curiously featureless.  Is it a forgotten provincial backwater or a thriving modern place?  It's never quite clear.

Revolution: Russian Art 1917-1932

This survey of Russian art’s turbulent history between 1917 and 1930 opens an extraordinary range of material, much of it familiar, but it also contains some stunning surprises.  I’m fairly used to rubbing shoulders with the works of the Russian avant-garde and I’ve seen enough socialist realist paintings to last me several lifetimes, but some of the stuff on show at the Royal Academy really made me sit up.

Despite the exhibition’s superb breadth and depth and its political honesty in chronicling the dark fate of many artists, there is one crucial question that the curators don’t seem to have asked:  how much continuity was there between the utopianism of the avant-garde years that followed 1917 and the Stalinist utopian vision that came later.  Were they really poles apart?

It’s a cliché to talk about this period of Russian art as one of extraordinary creativity, but it’s true.  As a thought experiment while climbing the stairs at the Academy, try to think of any great works of British art created during the same 17-year period.  Then plunge in.

The curators have taken as their starting point a big exhibition in Leningrad in 1932 organised by Nikolai Punin surveying Russian art since the Bolshevik revolution.  With the exception of Kasimir Malevich and a few other figures, the avant-garde had already been marginalised and Stalin was shortly to decree socialist realism as the only acceptable style for art and literature.

The exhibition avoids any over-simplified narrative in which a glorious wave of revolutionary avant-garde art was suddenly halted and put into reverse in 1932.  It recognises that the real story is a lot more complicated than that.  This was a period of internecine warfare between rival artistic factions and individuals, wielding arguments of bewildering complexity in order to put each other out of business and compete for scarce patronage from the state.  Some of the great innovators in Russian art, such as Kandinsky and Chagall, were already fully formed before 1917 and owed very little of their creative development to the Revolution.  For others there was disillusionment – fast or slow – and exile in Europe.  Even for those who embraced the brutal reality of Bolshevik rule, like Vladimir Mayakovsky, time ran out.  He shot himself in 1930, by which time the avant-garde’s heyday was long over. 

Rightly, the curators have struck a balance in setting the political context without too much bewildering detail, and have done their best to let the art on show speak for itself, while avoiding long explanations of the social differences between Lenin’s ‘War Communism’ and the New Economic Policy that followed for most of the 1920s.

There is no attempt to gloss over the repressive nature of the Bolshevik regime or to pretend that it only went off the rails when Stalin came on the scene.  I found it instructive to examine my dusty copy of the catalogue of the pioneering ‘Paris-Moscow’ exhibition of 1979.  This historic blockbuster show in Paris and Moscow first revealed the riches of the early Soviet period, but inevitably, coming in the Brezhnev period, fudged the political story in mealymouthed fashion to the extent of never mentioning Stalin at all.

One of the highlights for me is an extraordinary selection of silver gelatine original prints of photographs of artists and writers from the collection of Cologne art dealer Alex Lachmann.  These pictures by Moisei  Nappelbaum, Arkady Shaikhet and others are mostly new, at least to me.  Among the other surprises are Kuzma Petrov-Vodkin’s rarely shown painting of the dead Lenin in 1924 – of which more later -- and a bizarre portrait of a near-comic Stalin by Georgy Rublev in which the dictator sits in a cane chair reading Pravda, a dog stretched out at his feet.  

As in the original 1932 exhibition, Malevich and Petrov-Vodkin get whole rooms to themselves;  the work of these artists is pretty familiar by now, though I found several layers of ambiguity and a depth of humanism in Petrov-Vodkin of which I was previously unaware.

One of the most engaging artists in this show is Alexander Deineka, whose work has hidden depths and an acute sense of pathos, with a touch of humour.  He escapes the narrow categories of ‘avant-garde’ and ‘socialist realism’ while appearing to pay lip service to both.  His ‘Textile Workers’ are vulnerable young women in skimpy cotton shifts rather than burly Stalinist shock workers .  Their essential individuality shines through against a harsh factory background in grey black and white.  Buried deep in the distance is a tiny scene that reveals Deineka’s true originality.  Through the factory window we glimpse two cows driven forward by what appears to be a half-naked Indian in a dhoti.  It’s too small to detect in the usual reproductions, but stands out when the original painting is seen close up.  The same humanism is evident in Deineka’s ‘Construction of New Workshops’ which pairs another cheerful young woman in a cotton shift with the rear view of a much burlier woman labourer.  As with the textile workers, they are both barefoot.

I was also struck by two paintings I had never seen before. The first is Vladimir Kuptsov’s ‘The First of May’ from 1929, a striking diamond-shaped pattern with an awkward-looking Lenin at the centre on a blood red background, surrounded by lines of automaton-like Bolsheviks.  The second is ‘The Formula of the Petrograd Proletariat’ by Pavel Filonov, a blend of mystical geometry and blurred movement that seems to return to a medieval two-dimensional world.

If there’s something missing in this exhibition, it’s the perspective of art critic and philosopher Boris Groys, whose 1988 book The Total Art of Stalinism explored the continuity between the two utopias created first by the avant-garde and then by Stalin.  Groys’s writing is dense and packed with paradox, but he’s on to something when he writes :  

Under Stalin the dream of the avant-garde was in fact fulfilled and the life of society was organised in monolithic artistic forms, though of course not those that the avant-garde itself had favoured.

In other words, we should not be misled by the apparent difference between the styles of avant-garde art, exemplified by Malevich’s ‘Black Square’and socialist realism, which was also a utopian vision disconnected from reality.  Groys criticises what he calls the ‘myth of the innocent avant-garde’ and highlights the fact that Malevich, at least, was no champion of diversity and pluralism.  His own views on the absence of any creative rights for artists who did not subscribe to Suprematism were fairly totalitarian, with a chilling will to exercise power.   Groys’s view challenges the prevailing art history perspective in a way this exhibition does not.

My second beef concerns the superficial way the curators have dealt with Petrov-Vodkin’s portrait of the dead Lenin, telling us that ‘it was unacceptable to show the leader dead’.   This is highly misleading; the whole point of displaying the body of the dead leader in Red Square was to show him dead.  But the mystique of the body was preserved in a unique way;  Walter Benjamin’s ideas about mechanical reproduction were turned on their head and no photographs or paintings of the body in its sarcophagus were allowed, while millions of the faithful queued to see the original.  Again I am indebted to Boris Groys for a better explanation of what is going on in Red Square:

The mummies of the pharaohs and other ancient rulers were walled up in pyramids and concealed from mortals – opening such graves was considered sacrilege.  Lenin, in contrast, is on public display as a work of art…Lenin was from the outset simultaneously buried and displayed…Lenin’s body is revered precisely because the deceased has irrevocably parted from it. 

On the RA website there’s a short clip in which curator Natalya Murray introduces Petrov-Vodkin’s painting and suggests that Lenin’s body was embalmed as part of a widespread hope that one day science would allow him to be brought back to life.  It’s true that such ideas were current in Russia at the time, but there’s not a shred of evidence to suggest that the Bolsheviks shared them.  I have studied in depth the story of the body and how it was embalmed, and there was never any suggestion of Lenin being ever brought back to life. His brain and vital organs were removed before the body went on display.  As Groys puts it, the display of the corpse is a way of ensuring that the dead leader’s cause can be incarnated by others.  ‘It is meant to offer eternal proof that he really and irrevocably died and will not be resurrected, and that the only appeal that can be made to him is through the heirs who now stand upon his tomb.’

Simon Russell Beale in the RSC Tempest

I finally caught up with a second cinema showing of the RSC's flagship production for 2016 of The Tempest, with our greatest Shakespearean actor Simon Russell Beale as Prospero.  It's a triumph;  I've seen him play Iago, Hamlet, Macbeth, Benedict, Lear, Timon, Falstaff and other roles, but I think his Prospero surpasses all of them in its sheer humanity.  He wrestles not so much with his enemies on stage but with himself, on a long journey that begins with revenge and ends in reconciliation and forgiveness.  It's a wonderful interpretation of the part, which Russell Beale explains very lucidly in his pre-show recorded interview with Suzy Klein.

Unfortunately I was underwhelmed by most of the other aspects of Gregory Doran's production, though I am a big admirer of his approach.  The rest of the cast do not reach Russell Beale's level, with the exception of Joseph Mydell as Gonzalo, Mark Quartley as Ariel and and Tony Jayawardena as Stephano.  Miranda is supposed to be an immature teenager, but Jenny Rainsford plays her as a knowing and sophisticated adult.  As a result, her naive 'O brave new world' exclamation falls flat.  Doran tweaks the relationship between Prospero and Caliban by inserting a couple of lines into the last scene and making Prospero hand over his broken staff.  A bolder re-interpretation might have been to make Prospero give Caliban one of his books.

This production is unique in its heavy reliance on digital trickery and imagery, with 3-D avatars and all sorts of other business, designed to remove any possibility that the audience might be invited to use their own imaginative powers.  I think I might have enjoyed being immersed this production more if I had been in the theatre, but in the cinema it is all flat and two-dimensional and curiously ineffective.  Live cinema broadcasts of theatre and opera often score well by using close-ups, but there are very few in this production.

Doran's choice to give a big emphasis to the wedding masque, which is often cut or shrunk, is easier to defend because so few directors are prepared to take the risk.  The singing and dancing don't exactly add much to the drama in themselves, but Prospero's violent intervention bringing them to an end with 'Our revels now are ended' is enhanced by the flummery that has gone before.

The RSC, with its massive technical resources, has a weakness for over-designed big productions that ignore Sir Peter Hall's well-chosen theatrical motto 'Less is more'.  This is one of them.  I don't think the two years of work that went into the digital mastery and CGI added much.  This production will be remembered above all for Simon Russell Beale's wonderful performance, which could just as well have been done on a bare stage.

It's called acting.