John Morrison

The Reporter

I now realise that the BBC television journalist James Mossman, the subject of Nicholas Wright's new play at the Cottesloe, committed suicide in the same year I became a journalist, 1971. I vaguely remember the name and the face, but far less vividly than Robin Day and Robert Kee.  First, the good things about this new National Theatre production.  It is superbly directed by Sir Richard Eyre, who is a master of small details, especially in the small arena of the Cottesloe, which he always preferred to the wide open spaces of the Olivier stage during his ten years running the National in the 1990s.  The performances are exceptional, particularly Ben Chaplin in the role of the tortured Mossman.  There are some wonderful cameos, including Angela Thorne as Rosamund Lehmann, Leo Bill as a young BBC producer, and Paul Ritter as Robin Day.  Chris New follows his West End debut in the revival of Bent by playing Mossman's unstable Canadian boyfriend Louis. The period setting of the BBC in the 1960s is cleverly brought to life using a set that uses back-projection.  However, I have some reservations about the play.  I voted happily for Wright's Vincent in Brixton to win the Olivier award for best new play of 2002, and this one shows many of the same qualities.  The dialogue is sharp and subtle, the individual scenes are poignant and full of meaning, but the mystery of why Mossmann committed suicide remains almost as open at the end of the play as at the beginning.  A lesser playwright would have twisted the story into a preordained format and supplied an easy answer.  Mossman's suicide note said: 'I can't bear it any longer. But I don't know what 'it' is.'  The character spends much of the play narrating the story, stepping in and out of the action.  But although the transitions are deftly handled, I always find the use of a narrator on stage a warning sign that the playwright is struggling to turn his material into drama.  Mossman seems to have been a secretive man who revealed little of himself, and possibly didn't know why he was driven to suicide.  Depression and bipolar disorder spring to mind, but somehow they are not the raw ingredients for real drama.  The McGuffin seems to be missing in this play, for all its excellent qualities.  I think the Cottesloe run is sold out, but this is still likely to be one of the best new plays of 2007.

Olivier Awards

As the husband of a member of the theatre judging panel, I spent six hours in the cavernous ballroom of the Grosvenor House Hotel at the Olivier Awards ceremony.  I've blogged about the experience of being a judge for the Guardian website here.  Michael Billington reminds us that it's hard to compare apples and pears, but I think it's good for actors' insecure souls to win as many awards as possible.  Six hours is possibly a bit too long to sit at a glitzy dinner, but we had more fun than most.  Pity the party from Spamalot, with seven nominations but no awards.  The blockbuster musicals, who seem this year to have gone in for some organised lobbying of votes to grab a presence on the shortlists, ended up the big losers when the musicals panel gave its top award to Caroline or Change and five other gongs to Sunday In The Park With George.  Let's hear it for the underdogs!   Tamsin Greig seemed genuinely gobsmacked to win Best Actress (or was she just acting rather well?) and told us all 'I think I've just done a wee -- and it isn't even my dress!'  Am I correct in thinking Tamsin is the first ever Archers star to win an Olivier?   Every year there are at least half a dozen worthy winners of the Best Actor and Best Actress awards, which makes the final outcome often a matter of luck.  Katherine Turner would have been my pick for her blistering performance in Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?  but the rumour says that one or two Olivier panellists saw the play on a night when her voice gave up the ghost entirely.  That would have been enough to tip the balance.  The 39 Steps won the Best New Comedy award, which shows how few good new comedies are being written these days.  It's an amusing series of sketches based on the Hitchcock film, no more, no less.  Anyway, now that Mrs M no longer qualifies for free tickets, we're back paying for our theatregoing again in 2007.  Life at the front of the stalls is over.

A Model Girl

Another outing into musical theatre, this time in at the Greenwich Theatre to see A Model Girl, based on the Profumo scandal of the early 1960s.  I was drawn more by the subject matter than the idea of the show, the work of songwriters Richard Alexander and Marek Rymaszewski, who say they have done five years of research into the story of Christine Keeler and her lover the War Minister.  I'm afraid I found the whole show competently directed and more than competently performed, but I found it rather pedestrian and underpowered.  The music seems to me rather like the music from any other musical, with nothing really memorable, and the story is told in too predictable a fashion.  What these authors needed to do was to throw out their research and use their dramatic imagination, supplementing the facts where necessary to produce a better story.  Normally I take the view that the historical truth is almost always better than fiction, but the whole story of Keeler, her lovers and her friend Stephen Ward has yet to come out of the archives, and probably never will.  Musicals should punch the audience in the solar plexus, grab the emotions and not let go.  Think of Cabaret or Billy Elliot. This one doesn't, unfortunately. The production looks vaguely right for 1963, but the music doesn't sound right, and the performers don't have enough to get their teeth into.  I particularly liked Emma Williams as Christine and James Clyde as Stephen Ward, but I don't see anyone queuing up to transfer this show to the West End. 

Agrippina

I don't go to the opera as a regular and I'm a musical ignoramus, so I tend to look at the theatrical aspects of what I see.  Agrippina at the ENO is Handel done in the rather jokey modern dress style that now seems pretty well standard.  Can anyone imagine this opera being performed either in Roman togas or in 18th century costume?   It's interesting to reflect on this in light of the recent critical debate about the pros and cons of updating theatre classics such as The Alchemist and The Man of Mode.  Michael Billington would have preferred Etherege's comedy set in the Restoration period when it was written, while Charles Spencer liked Nick Hytner's 21st century take on the play.  This is an argument where I sit firmly with one foot on each side of the fence.  I love the updates of Shakespeare and all the other classics when they're successful but I've seen lots of bad ones. For some reason directors seem to love to put Shakespeare in Edwardian dress, which always looks wrong to me.  And there are some playwrights (Chekhov springs to mind) who should I think always be left in period.  Anyway, my point about Handel is that updating baroque opera now seems to be standard practice.  I've seen Xerxes and Semele done at the ENO in similar style.  Agrippina is costumed in the Rome of La Dolce Vita, though Nero is slightly out of period as a teenage Goth.  It works well, and my only quarrel with the rather knowing wink-nudge style of David McVicar's approach is that it makes it hard to empathise with any of the characters.  Agrippina (Jennifer Connolly) is a wicked Gorgon, her husband Claudio isn't much better, and most of the others are pretty unsympathetic.  But Poppea and Ottone are also portrayed as rather too grotesque.  This means that it is hard for the audience to care too much about their fate as the thwarted lovers.

The War Next Door

My New Year's resolution to get away from the West End and explore London's smaller theatres took me to Kilburn and the Tricycle to see this new play by Tamsin Oglesby.  The premise is interesting; it's the story of two London couples -- the liberal marijuana-growing lawyer Max and his black wife Soph, and their next-door neighbours Ali and Hana from somewhere in the Middle East.  When Ali starts beating his wife and openly dealing in the marijuana he has grown from Max's seeds, liberal principles go out of the window, with echoes of Iraq.  Unfortunately, despite the efforts of the cast, Tamsin Ogleby seems to have bitten off far more than she can chew.  The characters are cardboard cliches, the satire on the green pretensions of the London middle classes is feeble, the dialogue meanders between bad rhyming couplets and prose, and I kept wanting to shout out 'People just don't talk like that!'  Here's one pair of lines I scribbled down:

'Don't be such a liberal woolly/You don't have to understand a bully.'

Nicolas Kent's direction also seems to zig-zag in and out of realism;  a baby is represented by a tape recorder and punches are mimed balletically, but Ali's wife sports a real black eye and a bloodstained mouth.  The play, like so many pieces of new writing these days, lasts for 80 minutes with no interval, and seems uncomfortably stuck between a one-acter and a full-length drama.  It's too wordy for the former and too shallow and thinly plotted for the second. Nor does it have anything original to say about domestic violence or liberal principles.  Nicholas de Jongh of the Evening Standard (a man who doesn't mince his words when he dislikes a play) was baffled why Tamsin Oglesby is now the flavour of the month, with works commissioned by the RSC and the National.  I have to say I agree with him, on the evidence of last night.  This play would have been politely torn to shreds at the playwriting and reading group I go to every week.  How come a work with so many flaws makes it on to the professional stage under an experienced director?

The Man of Mode

Nicholas Hytner's gift for staging period plays in modern dress seems to me quite exceptional.  After The Alchemist, here's another textbook example of how to peel away three centuries of dust and show a play so fresh that it might have been written yesterday.  George Etherege's Restoration comedy is moved seamlessly into the London of 2007, somewhere in that magic celebrity triangle between Hoxton, Tate Modern and St Martin's Lane which is inhabited by the stylish idle rich.  What I saw was a preview ahead of the opening night on February 6, and not surprisingly the production wasn't quite at full throttle.  While The Alchemist had old hands Alex Jennings and Simon Russell Beale who know how to dominate the huge Olivier stage, this play has a less experienced cast, some of whom are still working out how to project to the back row of such a big theatre.  One or two scenes lacked the necessary snap, crackle and pop, but I'm sure that will be sorted out. Hytner and his designer Vicki Mortimer build up layer after layer of tiny details with dance, costume and music to create a convincing whole;  Dorimant, the central character (Tom Hardy) is a black-clad serial shagger who flits between his regular squeeze Mrs Loveit (the owner of a tarty lingerie boutique), his new conquest Belinda and the demure Harriet, who is up from Yorkshire and trying to escape an arranged marriage.  Arranged marriages aren't very plausible in 2007, so Hytner solves the problem neatly by casting Asian actors.  I liked Tom Hardy's performance and that of Rory Kinnear as the pretentious Sir Fopling Flutter, who has returned from Paris with a troupe of Gallic hip-hop dancers.  Nancy Carroll (a favourite of mine) shines as Mrs Loveit, and so does Hayley Atwell as her rival Belinda.  The performances all have a core of truth.  I couldn't help thinking back to the Donmar's production of Don Juan in Soho, which inhabited much the same territory but which somehow failed to hit the right note.  Rory Kinnear and Tom Hardy don't quite have the same comic gifts as Rhys Ifans, but their performances were all the better for avoiding the temptation to go over the top. This is Restoration comedy which has thrown out its wigs and lacy costumes, but gained a lot of bite in the process.  Go and see it!