John Morrison

Gaslight

Gaslight, the latest show at Kevin Spacey's Old Vic, is a big disappointment and raises more questions about this theatre's rather hit-and-miss choice of plays.  There's nothing wrong with the production, which has a tip-top cast led by Rosamund Pike, Kenneth Cranham and Andrew Woodall, but the play is irredeemably awful.  It's a mock-Victorian thriller written in 1938 by Patrick Hamilton which was highly successful on stage in its day and as a Hollywood film starring Ingrid Bergman.  It's an old-fashioned thriller or melodrama of a kind that has completely vanished from the professional theatre, but which in the pre-television age was part of the mainstream repertoire.  I'm no expert on Victorian theatre, but I don't think this is really a pastiche of real Victorian melodrama at all.  Like Rope, Hamilton's other hit play, it owes more to the 1920s vogue for Grand Guignol or stage horror.  Melodrama by definition has no complexity of character;  the villain is unredeemably bad and the heroine is always a pure and innocent victim, with no shades of grey.  Gaslight has a 'psychological' veneer in that the heroine believes she is losing her mind, though she is only the victim of her husband's tricks. But the heroine quickly realises she isn't going mad at all, and at that point the psychology stops being interesting.  None of the characters really develop or learn anything about themselves. Now plays without much characterisation can still work well on stage (think of classic farce), but to compensate they have to have good plotting and structure.  That's just what Gaslight doesn't have. The story of the play about a criminal trying to retrieve some hidden rubies is ludicrous and preposterous and full of holes.  There's a subplot involving the evil husband chasing the maid, but it leads precisely nowhere. Hamilton had no idea how to create suspense by manipulating the audience's knowledge, and that's the play's biggest flaw.  It's set in real time, but there's no 'whodunnit' mystery because the audience knows too much too soon.  There's no dramatic irony either because at no time does the audience know more (or less) than the characters on stage.  Part of playwriting is knowing when to withhold information, both from the characters and from the audience (think of dear old Agatha Christie), and it's obvious that Hamilton didn't have a clue about this.  Reading the programme notes, it's clear that Peter Gill and his cast have delved deeply into the Victorian period to try and breathe life into this hoary old load of nonsense, but I feel they have been wasting their time.  I kept waiting for something to turn up -- a sudden Mousetrap-like twist in the plot, some post-modern 39 Steps-like humour and irony, or a level of complexity in the story and the characters.  But the melodrama just limped forward to a thoroughly predictable ending. It's not even really frightening, like A Woman in Black, which has been sending old-fashioned shivers down spines for two decades or so.   In the theatre, as in the home, I'm afraid that Gaslight has had its day.  I hate to see that wonderful theatre the Old Vic half empty, but I'm afraid that the audiences who stay away are probably right.  This play should have been left in peace.

Betrayal

An excellent evening at the Donmar seeing a terrific production of Harold Pinter's Betrayal.  For those that don't know it, this is the play that charts an affair in reverse order, starting with the breakup and ending with the beginning.  Cracking performances by Sam West, Toby Stephens and Dervla Kirwan and excellent direction by Roger Michell.  When I first saw the play a few years ago, in the West End revival that featured Aidan Gillett and Janie Dee, I think it made a greater impact on me, simply because I was seeing it for the first time.  But I think this production is more subtle.  One hesitates to say what Pinter's plays are about, but it seems this one is less about adultery than the betrayal of male friendship. The real relationship is the one between the two men, who have known each other much longer than the woman. But who is the real betrayer -- the character who seduces his friend's wife, or the cuckold who knows what is happening and conceals it?   I haven't been a big fan of Toby Stephens up to now, having been less than impressed by his Hamlet, but he gives a great peformance here as Jerry the seducer.  As always, Pinter's text is fresh as a daisy -- not a word has dated. 

Cymbeline

Another trip to the remodelled Barbican theatre (which I'm now getting used to) to see Cheek By Jowl's Cymbeline.  It's another Shakespeare play where my knowledge is really sketchy, as I've never read it and only seen it once, at the Globe a few years ago.  Like most of Shakespeare's late romances, it's not often performed and one can easily see why.  But the director Declan Donnellan obviously feels it's worth taking seriously.  Death, love, reconciliation and forgiveness seem to have been uppermost in Shakespeare's mind at a time when he was no longer interested in orthodox tragedy or comedy.  Donnellan weaves his usual magic, sending the actors scurrying around the huge Barbican stage with a minimum of props and scenery, except for two huge proscenium curtains which spend most of the play hoisted above the stage, only to fall at the end.  The play is done in modern dress (1940s or 1950s rather than the present day) and its fantastical elements seem to fit neatly into Cheek By Jowl's non-realist style.  I can't fathom Donnellan's working method, but every word is squeezed for its last drop of meaning and the movement is never random.  Tom Hiddleston, a young actor to watch, doubles the roles of Posthumus and Cloten to great effect.  I would love to see him play Hamlet. Jodie McNee plays Imogen not as a perfect innocent but as a difficult daughter with a flash of temper. She's excellent too.  The ending of the play seemed rather rushed, perhaps because Donnellan has taken the scissors to the lengthy final reconciliation scene.  I don't think Cymbeline is ever going to be my favourite Shakespeare play but this was a fascinating example of how to make a tricky work succeed, not by imposing some external framework but by digging deep to fish out the meaning of the text.

Rafta, Rafta...or Better Late Than Never

I've written a blog for the Guardian site on the National Theatre's failure to say sorry for the delay of an hour last Friday in getting the show on the road at the Lyttelton theatre.  So no more about that here.

Rafta, Rafta...(Slowly, slowly) is an adaptation by Ayub Khan-Din, who wrote East is East, of Bill Naughton's 1963 comedy All In Good Time about a young couple who can't consummate their marriage because they have to live under the same roof as the husband's interfering parents.  Readers of this blog will know how much I enjoyed Nicholas Hytner's successful updating of The Alchemist and The Man of Mode.  This is a well-deserved hat-trick, I think.  The traditional British family and its values seem to be dying out, and the only families where children have to respect and obey their parents are  Asian.  Hytner isn't the first director or writer to have spotted this -- I remember Tanika Gupta's clever Asian makeover of Hobson's Choice at the Young Vic three years ago.  In the Alchemist, Hytner turned Abel Drugger into a geeky young Indian pharmacist and in The Man of Mode, set in trendy 21st century London, the young lovers who disobey their parents are Asian.  Here again, playing the Indian card seems to work brilliantly.  Ayub Khan-Din's script is extremely funny, managing to be true to Naughton's original concept at the same time as delivering something coherent and new.   The casting is excellent, though Harish Patel (a veteran of comedy roles in India) steals the show with exquisite timing as the tactless and overbearing paterfamilias Eeshwar Dutt, who has never even tried talking to his son. Meera Syal plays the mother, though this part doesn't quite allow her to display all her comic gifts.  I also liked Ronny Jhutti and Rokhsaneh Ghawam-Shahidi as the young lovers. The set designer Tim Hatley has created a two-storey doll's house, with two bedrooms, a kitchen and a living room which frames the play beautifully.  I don't know what they'll think of it up in Bolton, but I liked it and so did the audience.