John Morrison

Called to Account

Called to Account at the Tricycle theatre in Kilburn has been praised by some critics including the Guardian's Michael Billington, who's keen on political theatre of all kinds.  But Michael Coveney found it boring. It's a bit cerebral, certainly, very much a men-in-suits sort of play which doesn't generate much human drama.  I was fascinated by it, though my overall feeling is that sometimes fiction can get closer to the truth than non-fiction like this when most of the key facts are unavailable.  I have written in more detail about the play for the Guardian arts blog here.

The Rose Tattoo

I'm glad I saw this, though Tennessee Williams' plays are always something of a hit or miss experience.  I knew nothing about this work from 1950, and it seems to have an uncertainty of tone, containing more comedy than his greatest plays such as A Streetcar Named Desire or The Glass Menagerie.  Zoe Wanamaker (last seen on the National's big Olivier stage in His Girl Friday) stars as Sicilian-American widow Serafina delle Rose, and she carries the play.  In the first scene, her adored husband fails to return from a final truckdriving job, transporting contraband (probably drugs) for the mob under a cargo of bananas.  His death unhinges Serafina, who begins to fall apart and finally disintegrates when she discovers that he was never faithful to her.  Don't ever turn human beings into gods, Williams is clearly telling us.  The dead husband's ashes are flung to the floor and Serafina enjoys a passionate night with Alvaro, a comic reincarnation of her husband, before sending him packing in his underpants when she catches him admiring her 15-year-old daughter Rose.  Wanamaker is a great comic actress but she also handles Serafina's tragic moments well.  Overall, I had difficulty in believing in this play, partly because I found Williams' Sicilian-Americans to be stereotypes.  Nick Hytner is the director, having taken over when Stephen Pimlott died of cancer.  The play is I think too intimate for the big Olivier stage (Streetcar with Glenn Close was staged in the smaller Lyttelton) and I have to confess that my heart sank a bit when I saw a half-sectioned house turning round on the revolve, with small children running round it.  There's even a goat with horns (very impressive, but unneccessary) and I could have done without the music.  It's almost as if Hytner, whose work I admire greatly, didn't quite have confidence in the play's text.  Apart from Wanamaker, I greatly enjoyed Susannah Fielding, playing the daughter in her professional stage debut.  Unlike some of the cast, she's pitch-perfect in accent (deep deep South with lapses into Italian) and is utterly convincing as a starry-eyed amorous teenager.  An interesting experience but I would have preferred to see it in a smaller theatre.

Total Eclipse

A tasty night at the Menier Chocolate Factory - my first visit to this highly successful venue a stone's throw from London Bridge station, I have to confess.  This was the first time I had seen Christopher Hampton's early play about the relationship between Verlaine and Rimbaud, two poets whom I must once have written essays about, but can't recall very well.  The play explores the doomed and violent relationship between the two men and is a fascinating piece of writing, spoiled only by an excessively long epilogue scene between Verlaine in old age and Rimbaud's sister.  What I liked most in Hampton's play was the way Verlaine's bisexuality is portrayed without anachronistic 20th century layers of psychological introspection tagged on.  He isn't looking for his sexual identity, but just wants both his wife Mathilde and Rimbaud and is unable to choose between them.  Daniel Evans, fresh from winning an Olivier award for Sunday in the Park with George, plays Verlaine and Jamie Doyle the young Rimbaud.  Of the two I preferred Doyle, who plays Rimbaud as a sexy, rude 16-year-old full of leering menace. A bit of an Orton character, in fact.  Evans seems just too nice to be credible as Verlaine and the scenes where he is violently drunk don't convince.  Rimbaud is the honest one of the two, while Verlaine prevaricates endlessly between his wife (the source of his cash) and his young male lover.  Evans captures the hesitation and weakness of Verlaine but there's a sinister dimension in the character that isn't there in this production, staged on a rectangular thrust stage with the audience watching from two sides.  It's an unforgiving environment for actors who are only a few feet from the audience, but it has the same intimacy as the Donmar. The director is Paul Miller, a director with a solid track record in new writing over the past decade, but one whose work I don't think I've seen before.  It was a satisfying evening and an off-West End venue I'll certainly go back to.  The chairs in the theatre are hard but there's a nice restaurant attached.

Venus and Adonis

What happens when we suspend disbelief in the theatre?  Does it ever really happen when we are adult, or are we just kidding ourselves that it does?  Is our response the same aged fiftyfive and at five?  I began to reflect on these questions on the way home from seeing the puppet show of Shakespeare's Venus and Adonis at the Angel Theatre Islington, a joint production with the RSC directed by Gregory Doran.  It's absolutely brilliant, lasts just an hour and raises all sorts of questions about illusion in the theatre.  I have to say that puppetry isn't one of my passions, but around 25 years ago I lived in a block of flats opposite the Moscow Puppet Theatre, and I can vividly remember the noisy jangle of its clock rising across the traffic hum on the ring road flyover.  That was the first place I saw puppetry for adults; some of the Sergei Obraztsov shows were technically adept but looked a bit stale and reflected the rather corny official Soviet style of humour.  In Paris I took parties of small children to the Guignol, a traditional puppet theatre for kids of the kind that isn't common in the UK.  And I've seen puppetry in India.  Last night I went away thrilled and enchanted.  There's a classical guitarist on the left and a reader (John Hopkins) on the right, and in front of a gilded 17th century theatrical proscenium, three or four puppeteers manipulate the wooden figures.  It's a magical conjuring trick, and it brought home to me how quick and easy it can be in the theatre to get the audience to buy in to a convention.  Doran's production is partly inspired by Japanese Bunraku puppetry, a style in which, if I've understood it correctly, the puppets are always manipulated on rods rather than on strings.  The puppeteers are clearly visible, though clothed in black, but for me it made no real difference.  Visually I believed in the reality of the characters and their movements, even if I knew they were just carved lumps of wood.  Is my response the same when I see live actors in the theatre?   I think it is.   Anyway, Doran's production is a triumph of long preparation, experiment and hard work and shows all the same acute and subtle qualities as his other stage productions.  It's sexy (Venus is a real slapper), funny and the perfect way to rediscover a Shakespeare poem that almost nobody reads.  Venus stamps her feet in frustration at Adonis's reluctance to respond to her embraces, two horses show off, a giant boar roars across the stage and Venus arrives and departs on a golden carriage born by doves.  Wonderful.

Dying For It

April has begun with something I really enjoyed -- Moira Buffini's adaptation of Nikolai Erdman's The Suicide at the Almeida.  I'm not sure quite how much of an adaptation this is -- perhaps I should find the Russian text and compare it -- but the result is highly satisfactory.  The set by Lez Brotherston conjures up an ancient crumbling pre-revolutionary building, stuffed full of communal tenants eking out an existence in the 1920s.  I enjoyed Erdman's other play The Mandate at the National Theatre a couple of years ago, and this one (written later) is even better.  I remember seeing a version of it in Edinburgh a few years ago done by Hamish McColl but the Almeida's production seems to me far better.  Anna Mackmin (whose Almeida production of The Lightning Play at the Almeida I also liked) is the director, standing in for the indisposed Kathy Burke. She has a very sure touch and seems to have the gift of persuading actors to give 110 per cent performances. What I liked about this production, with a highly experienced yet non-starry cast, is that there's no striving for comic effect.  It's a very dark play and Mackmin rightly avoids trying to make it funny-funny.  The actors quite rightly play it as near-tragedy and let the comedy emerge naturally.  It's firmly set in period, in the NEP era of 1920s Moscow, and though the pronunciation and stressing of Russian names is mostly wrong, the look and style of the production are otherwise spot on.  Tom Brooke is Semyon, the young man whose thoughts of suicide are exploited by all around him, Liz White is Masha his grief-stricken wife, and Susan Brown his mother-in-law.  All are excellent.  Moira Buffini is an intriguing writer, and I remember seeing Harriet Walter give a mesmerising performance in her black comedy Dinner at the National a few years ago.  Though I still wonder what her name is doing on the play instead of Erdman's.  Watch this space for some further research on the ethics of adaptation.

This play was banned under Stalin, although it did at one stage get close to being performed.  In the easier climate of the 1920s, it would probably have been put on, but by the early 1930s the censorship was tightening and only Socialist Realism was approved.  Miraculously, Erdman survived exile after he fell into disfavour, and so did his plays, although they were not performed until the 1970s and not in Russia until the 1980s.  By any standards he is a major writer.  I can't think of any English play from the 1920s that I would swap for this one.  But it's worth reflecting on the fact that it would probably been banned by the Lord Chamberlain here as well if anyone had tried to stage it.  I don't think Lord Cromer or Lord Clarendon would have liked its treatment of suicide, its subversive political content or its depiction of that horror of horrors, a man and a woman sharing a bed on stage.