John Morrison

Kafka's Metamorphosis

As a words person I've never quite found the vocabulary to do justice to physical theatre.  Sometimes it's best just to stop trying to analyse what you see in words and let the eyes and emotions take over.  That's what went through my mind on Saturday when I caught the last performance at the Lyric Hammersmith of  Franz Kafka's Metamorphosis, adapted and directed by David Farr and Gisli Örn Gardarsson.  It was brilliant but two days later I'm still hesitating about the hows and the whys.  Gregor, the young travelling salesman who turns into an insect, is played by Gardarsson with astonishing physical and acrobatic skill.  The upper half of the split-level set where Gregor exists is an optical illusion that tests our normal visual responses: the set has been turned through 90 degrees so the audience viewpoint is from above as Gardarsson clambers insect-like around the walls, provoking the disgust of his family.  It's an astonishing performance, achieved entirely through movement.  I think the key to its powerful effect is the contrast between the fluidity and athleticism of Gregor and the jerky movements of the rest of the family.  Which one of them is 'normal'?  At the end Gregor breaks through the ceiling and ends the play swinging lifeless from a long strip of red cloth as his family celebrate his death framed by brightly lit flowers.  It's a heart-breaking scene which unlocks the many meanings of Kafka's story about humanity and inhumanity.  The words spoken by the British and Icelandic actors don't matter very much because the meaning is in the movement, the design and the music.  Unforgettable -- a show that rightly earned five Billingtons from the Guardian and wowed most of the other reviewers as well.  David Farr isn't a household name but his track record is starting to be amazing.

The Alchemist is pure gold

Some directors seem to turn almost everything to gold, and Nicholas Hytner is one of them.  Last Thursday, by coincidence the day of the National Trust's History Matters mass blog, I had one of the best theatre experiences I've had for ages. It was a truly historical moment -- a rare sensation of experiencing something created 400 years ago as if it was created yesterday.   This was Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, now playing on the National Theatre's Olivier stage, with Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale.

This isn't a play I know well, having seen it only twice.  The first time was a production at my grammar school in the 1960s, of which I can remember very little, and the second time was at the Barbican in the 1990s with the RSC.  The National's version is so good that I really won't be in a hurry to see anyone else perform it for quite a while.  I started reading the play before heading to the theatre, but gave up, finding Jonson's language opaque and difficult.  But on the stage all the obscurity just melted away.  Hytner stages the play in modern dress and his choice is triumphantly vindicated.  Mark Thompson's set and costumes are thought through in wonderful detail, especially for the minor parts.  I've seen Alex Jennings several times at the National. most recently playing George Bush in Stuff Happens, and before that as Lord Foppington in The Relapse and Walter Burns in His Girl Friday.   This time his role as Subtle, a conman, means he has to slip in and out of a series of parts -- a Californian new age guru with headband and granny glasses, a devout Scottish presbyterian in a grey tweed suit, and a religious messiah in a white kaftan.  Russell Beale as Face, the housekeeper, starts out as a phoney naval 'Captain' with blue blazer, cravat and ill-fitting toupee, changing into a begoggled lab assistant of dubious foreign origins.  Their companion in crime is Lesley Manville as Dol Common the prostitute, who metamorphoses from breezy slut to society whore.  It's a cold and callous play in many ways, lacking Shakespeare's redeeming warmth, but it reminds us that all great comedy zeroes in on the eternal truths of human nature, which remain essentially unchanged over the centuries.  Every act of deception in Jonson's rumbustious world -- the play is set just a stone's throw from the theatre -- depends for its success on an equal act of self-deception by the victim.  We don't feel particularly sorry for Sir Epicure Mammon, Abel Drugger, Tribulation Wholesome and the Angry Boy because they bring their downfall on themselves by greed, ambition and stupidity.  Character, character, character, as the experts always say when laying down the secret of a good television sitcom.  From Jonson, go back to Plautus or forward to John Sullivan's scripts for Only Fools and Horses, and there's a golden thread of truth about human nature that will never be out of date.  Sullivan's Del Boy differs from Subtle and Face in believing in his own dodgy schemes, but otherwise there's a lot in common between his South London get-rich-quick world and that of Jonson's characters. 

London theatregoing doesn't get much better than this.  Russell Beale and Jennings are both past multiple award winners, and so is Nicholas Hytner, and if the gongs are awarded on merit this year, they should collect a few more.

The Ryanair of theatreland?

Tonight, Friday the 13th, was the night I should finally have seen Terry Johnson's Piano/Forte at the Royal Court. Third time lucky, perhaps?  Alas, I had what I can only describe as a Ryanair experience.  You know how angry you feel when your flight is cancelled at the last minute, after you've checked in, and there's no proper explanation or apology, just a few low-level checkin staff who have to bear the brunt?   Of course, this was Sloane Square, so good manners were observed all round without Sturm und Drang, but there was quite a bit of Brechtian alienation in the air.

It all started so well.  After last Friday's last-minute cancellation when Kelly Reilly was ill, today we were assured in mid-afternoon that the evening performance was going ahead.  The first sign of a problem came when the doors of the main theatre remained firmly closed at 7.30 when the show was about to start.   Crowds were packing the upstairs and downstairs foyers and the stairs up to the small Jerwood Theatre Upstairs where Harold Pinter was supposed to be performing Krapp's Last Tape.  Both shows were sold out.  Front of house staff were told there was 'a technical issue' but didn't know any more.  At 7.35 we were told the performances would begin at 8, so we spilled out into the street and waited.  At that point a van arrived towing a generator, which was brought into the alleyway behind the theatre.  We waited a bit more.  Around 8 a fire alarm sounded and the building was evacuated, stopping the traffic while we crossed into the centre of Sloane Square.  It was all very British except for one group of theatregoers who began singing Edith Piaf songs in French to pass the time.  At first I thought they were just showing off, but then I realised they WERE French. (Perhaps they were still showing off...)   After a few more minutes a harassed technician with a loud-hailer that didn't work mounted the statue in the square and announced that the performance had been cancelled because of a power problem.  We were offered a pre-printed letter of apology with instructions for getting a refund.  So that was that.  The run ends tomorrow. 

We'll probably all get the chance to see the scintillating Kelly Reilly again before long, but the same may not be true of Harold Pinter.  Not many theatres get the chance to cast a Nobel Prize winner and then have to cancel his performance for technical reasons.  On the way home I tried to imagine Pinter's response.  Betrayal, or just A Slight Ache?  Perhaps just one of his famous silences?

Okay, things can go wrong in the theatre.  Especially on Friday the 13th.  But the Royal Court seems to take the Ryanair/Easyjet approach to its audience.  Tell them as little as possible, wait until the very last moment, and leave it to the junior staff to deal with the public.  The French have a phrase for it - de haut en bas.   This is a theatre which doesn't even seem able to produce a working loud-hailer, which I would have thought was a health and safety requirement.  What happened tonight really wasn't good enough.

King Lear in Russian

Lev Dodin's Maly Theatre company from St Petersburg brought an unforgettable version of Uncle Vanya to the Barbican last year.  This time they're doing King Lear for four nights.  First, the positives:  it's a wonderful example of real ensemble acting of the kind that we rarely see here. There are some magical moments, particularly in the opening scene where the Fool plays corny Russian melodies on a piano.  Lear, played by Pyotr Semak (Astrov in Uncle Vanya), enters the theatre through the audience with the house lights still up, pauses and nods, making lingering eye contact with us before joining the action on stage.  This is a new translation in rough, unpoetic Russian with no verse rhythms.  The actors are in black, white and grey.  There are moments when we feel we are in an asylum, as Lear's madness seems to spread itself to the rest of the cast.  At its best, this production reminded me of the groundbreaking theatre produced by Robert Sturua's Rustaveli Theatre from Tbilisi in the 1970s and 1980s.  I've seen King Lear performed at the National a few years ago, with Ian Holm, and a stunning production at the Young Vic by an apprentice RSC company, with Nonso Anozie.  Somehow King Lear is such a great play that one imagines it can't fail -- in contrast to other Shakespeare plays such as Antony and Cleopatra, which always seems to fall a little short.

But to succeed, King Lear has to be performed, not savagely cut.  Dodin strips out the politics and a lot of the secondary plotting, particularly in the second half.  After the blinding of Gloucester the play rushes to a quick, balletic conclusion in which Lear dances with his three daughters and then laments over Cordelia's corpse.  How? Why?  The Shakespearean story gets lost.  The Fool disappears but his piano keeps playing -- a tricksy device which almost overshadows the stage action rather than balancing it.  A mixed verdict overall -- brilliant but flawed. Last year's Chekhov had humanity and compassion and so did this, but it became muffled after the interval.  Let's hope Dodin's company are back again soon with something else.

Tonight's performance is cancelled

Friday night was supposed to be devoted to Piano/Forte at the Royal Court. Tickets were collected shortly after six but an hour later there was a sign up that the performance had been cancelled.  No reason given and no apology, just a big scrum at the box office of people trying to rebook.

In a production cast without understudies, it's inevitable that occasionally someone will fall sick and be unable to go on stage.  Everyone understands that, and I wish the unnamed member of the cast a speedy recovery.  But I feel the Royal Court made a mistake by cancelling so late in the day.  I don't know the circumstances, but unless it was a last-minute accident, it would have been better to take the decision a few hours earlier, try to telephone as many members of the audience as possible, and allow them time to go to see another show.

Everything is Illuminated - Aargh!

I thought this play at the Hampstead Theatre was a real stinker.  I'm not over-fond of theatrical adaptations of novels, because narrative and drama aren't the same thing.  This one really didn't work for me on any level. It's an adaptation of the bestselling novel by Jonathan Safran Foer in which a fictionalised character named Jonathan Safran Foer travels to Ukraine to find traces of his Jewish family roots. Simon Block explains in the programme that he was attracted to the story because of a similar trip he once made by car across Europe to Auschwitz. At various moments the contemporary story of the visit to Ukraine fades into literary musings in which the travelling writer argues with his fictionalised dead relatives about their place in the narrative he is composing.   I haven't read the book, but this kind of intertextuality (I think that's what they call it) doesn't translate well to the stage.

The first act is Woody Allen territory. It's all Jewish-cultural and linguistic misunderstandings.  Naive backpacking Jonathan is met at Lviv station by guide Alexei and his grumpy grandpa, who drive him in a battered Lada in search of his grandfather's village.  In the second act they meet a mysterious old lady who recognises not only the photogaph of Jonathan's grandfather, but the face of Alexei's grumpy grandpa as well.  Cue revelations about the Holocaust and some sentimental reflections on guilt and the past.  I thought it was pure shlock, though I suspect that's not the fault of the adaptation.  I liked Patrick Kennedy's portrayal of Jonathan and Craig Parkinson's linguistic acrobatics in the role of Alexei but I wasn't convinced by David Ryall as grandpa and Gemma Jones as the old woman. 

This isn't a realistic or naturalistic play and the director and designer don't attempt to conjure up Ukraine as a place.  That may be a wise decision, but the result is that Jonathan the young American seems to be let loose among a group of British eccentrics. Perhaps my views are coloured by the fact that I've spent time in Ukraine as a journalist and bumped around the countryside meeting characters a bit like these.  Everything in this show seemed phoney and fake.   

Up Pompeii at the Globe

Still thinking about the decline and fall of farce, I stood in the rain at the Globe for The Comedy of Errors and left feeling much less gloomy.  This production passes the basic test for Shakespearean comedy -- it's funny!  That sounds pretty banal as a requirement, but I can think of quite a few RSC productions in the last few years that didn't pass the test.  Something in the air in Stratford makes directors throw out the baby with the bathwater and fail to try to make the audience laugh. I felt that about the RSC's most recent Comedy of Errors (the Shockheaded Peter one) and about their nightmarish Midsummer Night's Dream three years ago.  Well, the Globe production hit the target for me by tapping into ancient memories of Frankie Howerd as the slave Lurcio in Up Pompeii and Sid James in Carry on Cleo.  Lots of great sight gags and excellent use of the Globe stage.  For the first time that I can remember the area behind the stage -- the 'tiring house' is opened up and used as part of the acting space.  Christopher Luscombe's production seemed to tap into that long theatrical tradition of farce, reaching back through Feydeau and Shakespeare to Plautus, reminding us that while jokes and humour come and go, real comedy is based on permanent patterns of human behaviour that don't change over the centuries.  Life is a comedy of errors for all of us. We deceive our spouses, our employers, but most frequently ourselves.  We can't see things that are totally obvious, we give in to temptation and behave abominably.  Reality shifts in front of our eyes and we can't always trust what we see or hear.

The Globe has had a good year under Dominic Dromgoole.  Following Mark Rylance as artistic director was a tall order, but the opening season had some real high points.  Jonathan Cake's Coriolanus was terrific and so was the production.  Frances Barber pulled out all the stops as Cleopatra but Nicholas Jones as Antony didn't quite get the seedy heroics right -- perhaps he was miscast.  The real disappointment was Howard Brenton's In Extremis, a retelling of the Abelard and Heloise story which I thought was a shallow piece of writing, though the audience seemed to love it. More surprisingly, so did a lot of the critics.  This is a theatre that makes special demands of the cast.  Not everyone can interact with the audience and project to the upper gallery of an open air theatre without overacting, while ignoring the competition from passing planes and helicopters.  If you come through with flying colours then the audience experiences something unique that even the best indoor theatre can't provide.