John Morrison

Present Laughter

When Noel Coward's Hay Fever was revived at the new National Theatre in 1964, he wrote to Sir Laurence Olivier congratulating him on 'a cast that could play the Albanian telephone directory'.  Last night's preview of the National's new production of Present Laughter left me wanting to gush in similar fashion.  The preview including interval lasted more than three hours, but that was just because the audience was laughing so much.  Every line was delivered with perfect timing.  Alex Jennings is superb as the over-theatrical thesp Garry Essendine, perhaps Coward's most autobiographical part.   It's a definitive performance and although Jennings has a stack of Olivier awards already, I hope he's in the running for another this time around after missing out last year for The Alchemist.  He wisely makes no attempt to mimic Coward's diction or style, and he slides beautifully out of control in the second half.  It's sheer delight, particularly when he juggles with a slice of toast, a plate and a teacup as his private and professional lives collide.  The timing is just perfect and the rest of the cast are pitch-perfect, especially Sarah Woodward as the long-suffering secretary Monica, Amy Hall as the young admirer Daphne Stillington, Sara Stewart as Garry's ex-wife and Pip Carter as the weird young playwright Raymond Maule.  I was less convinced by Lisa Dillon as the rampaging man-eating vamp Joanna, who seduces Garry on the sofa just before the interval.  This was the only scene that didn't quite work for me. Dillon was hampered by a huge red wig, but the irresistible temptress wasn't quite there.  The only previous time I have seen this play was a few years ago with the never-knowingly-underacted Rik Mayall playing the lead.  He was very funny, but all on one level.  Jennings and the rest of the cast manage to dig below the comic froth to find the despair and loneliness that is hidden below the surface in all of Coward's best plays.  I was quite critical of director Howard Davies a few weeks ago for monkeying around with Gorky's Philistines, so I'm happy to redress the balance. My only reservation is a minor one.  I haven't got a copy of the text in front of me, but I don't recall it involving Essendine listening to news of the outbreak of World War Two on the radio.  It only lasts a moment, and it's clear the director wants to frame the frivolity of the Essendine world for us within a wider context. But it doesn't work. The tortured private and professional life of Coward himself, with his faithful coterie of aides and supporters, not the politics of the late 1930s, is the context we need.  The disruption caused by Joanna in this play can be read as an echo of Coward's turbulent private and professional relationship with his American lover Jack Wilson.   The programme notes instead give us an irrelevant picture of Neville Chamberlain and tells us quite ludicrously that Essendine's trip to Africa may have been inspired by Coward's wartime tours entertaining the troops.  This is a red herring if ever I sniffed one.  Coward was certainly engaged by social and political issues in 1939, but he kept them out of this play and put them in This Happy Breed, which he wrote at the same time.  The setting is the late 1930s in peacetime, and Essendine's African trip is an overseas theatrical tour to Johannesburg, Cape Town and Durban of the kind that Coward himself undertook.  It all makes perfect sense.  The play's opening was cancelled on the outbreak of World War Two, only reaching the stage in 1942.  But Coward wisely didn't try to update it.  Howard Davies seems to feel he knows better, but in associating it with the outbreak of war he manages to destroy the plausibility of the plot.  If war had really been declared, then Essendine's African tour would immediately have been cancelled.  Coward knew that.  So, four and half stars instead of five.  But go and see it!

When Midnight Strikes

Sometimes I feel the need to get out of my comfort zone in straight theatre and visit a world I don't really understand.  I mean the mysterious world of musicals.  So I decided to take pot luck at the tiny Finborough Theatre, over a pub near Earl's Court, and see a new musical by Charles Miller (tunes) and Kevin Hammonds (book and lyrics).  Miller is British and Hammonds is American, but this show is as all-American as apple pie, set in a swanky New York apartment on millennium eve 1999 where a smart dinner party to celebrate the new century is just about to kick off.  Jennifer and Christopher West the hostess and host are on edge, and we soon discover why:  Jennifer has found a note in Christopher's pocket that indicates he is having an affair.  The mixed bunch of guests arrives and sing, drink and play games.  Now, I'm not a big fan of musicals, being a words person, and I'm suspicious of shows that try to punch me in the emotional solar plexus.  I can't stand Andrew Lloyd Webber's style of music and that goes for his imitators as well.  But I was bowled over by this show, and left feeling I had shared the champagne being drunk on stage.  Even in straight theatre, it's not easy to get an all-British cast to sound authentically American, but this team of twelve manage it effortlessly.  The characters are well drawn, the musical numbers swerve on a sixpence between comedy and tragedy and include one or two that are quite sensational.  I'm not really a Sondheim buff, but this is a sophisticated Sondheimy kind of show that deserves a billet in the West End. There's an interesting piece in the programme by critic Mark Shenton about how hard it is to get new musicals on to the London stage.   The stage in the Finborough doesn't have room to swing a cat, which means characters who aren't singing or speaking often have to sneak off stage, but that doesn't stop the show from working.  Some of the cast are newcomers just out of musical stage school, while Miles Western is an Olivier award winner.  But they're all great.  Shona White is pitch perfect as Nicole the femme fatale, Stephanie Flavin and Nicholas Moorhead provide the backbone of the plot as the host couple whose marriage disintegrates, and there are great comic performances from Ben Enwright as a nerdy computer buff and Nancy Baldwin as the rude neighbour Murial, who manage to get it together on the leather sofa.  Perhaps I will slink back to the straight theatre again after this excellent show, but who knows? I might get converted to musicals after all.

The Bacchae

Sometimes in the theatre you know in the first half-minute that you're getting your hard-earned twenty quid's worth.  That's how I felt as Alan Cumming descended from on high, upside-down and bare-arsed, to wink at the audience and proclaim 'So Thebes.  I'm back.'  A moment of theatrical magic, exploited to the full.  But the important thing about Cumming's performance is that it isn't just a high-class piece of camperooning about in a gold lame dress. The nudge-nudge, wink-wink complicity with the audience has a serious dramatic purpose.  We're drawn into a relationship with this outrageous Dionysus character and we're rooting for him as he clashes with the buttoned-up Pentheus, king of Thebes, who disapproves of all this sex, drugs and rock and roll on mountaintops.  We, being a hip audience at the Lyric Hammersmith, have a good laugh at the expense of Pentheus, who appears to be a repressed Scottish Calvinist.  But in the second half of the play comes the payoff.  The action dissolves in a pool of blood, and Agave, the mother of Pentheus, comes on stage streaked in gore and proudly bearing the severed head of her son, which she thinks is the head of a lion.  Suddenly Dionysian sex, drugs and rock and roll don't seem quite so much fun after all.  Dionysus destroys everybody in Thebes, not only those like Pentheus who resisted him, but those like Agave and grandfather Cadmus who were tempted to become his followers.  This is a stunning production by John Tiffany, who gave us last year's Black Watch at Edinburgh.  I like David Greig's version of the play, perfectly suited to Cumming's androgynous talents.  Cumming gives us not just the camp humour but the sinister, malicious spirit of Dionysus as he seeks his revenge on the city that has driven him out and dishonoured his mother.  This god is more of a serial killer than a cuddly Graham Norton, and if we had watched him more carefully at the start we would have realised it.  It's a chilling play, which I have seen only once before in Peter Hall's National Theatre production  with Greg Hicks a few years ago.  I found that impressive, but a bit OTT.  I really liked this show, which should do wonders not only for the National Theatre of Scotland but for the ancient Greeks.  My only reservation concerns the music and lyrics for the chorus, performed by eight black women in blood-red dresses.  The mixture of gospel, rock and roll and other styles occasionally misfires and I just didn't feel that Tim Sutton's music reached the level as the rest of the production.

Saint Joan

Last night I went to see a play about a fanatical religious fundamentalist who follows instructions from God to fight against an occupying army, is captured, hooded, shackled, tortured and tried by a kangaroo court, then horribly put to death before becoming a revered martyr.  No, it wasn't the latest play at the Tricycle about the war on terror, but a drama written the best part of a century ago by that old windbag George Bernard Shaw.  Saint Joan is one of those plays that everyone knows about but is only rarely performed, but I was struck by how modern it seemed.  Unlike some of Shaw's plays on late Victorian social issues such as Mrs Warren's Profession, this one hasn't dated.  It's a bit on the wordy side, and some of the scenes are repetitive, but Marianne Elliott's excellent production at the National cleverly disguises these faults with a winner-takes-all combination of theatrical movement, lighting, stage design and music.  As Stuart Jeffries points out in his programme note, the 15th century Joan would today probably be wearing Guantanamo orange.  Joan of Arc, resistance fighter or terrorist?  Discuss. Well, it all depends on where you're coming from.  Shaw, in a deliberate anachronism, uses his characters to describe Joan as a protestant and a nationalist.  He's not interested in historical authenticity, more in the unchanging battle between rationality and belief.  Shaw was an irreligious rationalist but gave Joan all the best lines.  In this production Joan is conveyed quite magically by Anne-Marie Duff, who darts around the stage with the awkward movements of a teenager but also conveys moments of self-doubt.  I hope the 2007 awards juries come bearing gongs for her performance.  The drab soldierly costumes inhabit a kind of theatrical no-mans-land, with suits of armour and swords alternating with drab early 20th century tunics.  Normally I like costumes to be either ancient or modern, but the ambiguity of design is perfect for this highly ambiguous play.  The secondary characters are well defined, particularly Angus Wright as the Earl of Warwick and Paul Ready as the Dauphin.  I was captivated for all three hours of this production.  I have to give the National two extra brownie points for last night's show:  the slight delay in curtain-up because of a lighting hitch was properly explained to the audience and apologised for;  more significantly, I now realise I have seen three first-rate productions at the National in one week, all of them directed by women.  I don't think that could have happened under Trevor Nunn or Richard Eyre.  My hypothetical bet on Thea Sharrock becoming the first woman to run the place remains, but perhaps I should put a fiver on Marianne Elliott as well, after Much Ado About Nothing, Therese Raquin and Pillars of the Community.

Chatroom/Citizenship

This double bill at the Cottesloe was originally part of the Shell Connections series, in which the National Theatre commissions plays from experienced writers to be performed in schools.  Of the two, I preferred Enda Walsh's Chatroom, which seemed to have a real empathy with the lives of troubled teenagers.  The director Anna Mackmin, as always, coaxes excellent performances from her young cast.  Initially I thought this would be just a radio play, as there's very little stage action.  We don't see the kids typing on keyboards, just talking freely, so it's a conversation, but one where there is never any eye contact.  It's the story of Jim, a depressed young 15-year-old, who is encouraged to kill himself by chatroom 'friends'.  I won't give away the ending, which involves a video projection, but it's highly effective.  Walsh shows how cruel teenagers can be without caricaturing them, and captures the insecurity of their aggressive flare-ups, and the importance of inclusion and exclusion from the group. I wish Mark Ravenhill's Citizenship showed similar insights into the real psychology of adolescence, but though his writing is always sharp and sometimes very funny, the teenagers he portrays are nasty caricatures, created from an adult viewpoint.  He seems to press all the right buttons -- drugs, sexual insecurity, teenage pregnancy -- but doesn't really empathise with his characters.  Perhaps, like the rest of us, Ravenhill has become middle-aged?

The Emperor Jones

I'm not a betting man (all those Presbyterian Scottish ancestors) but if I was I would think the odds are shortening on Thea Sharrock becoming the first woman to run the National Theatre.  I hope I'm still around when it happens.  That thought is prompted by last night's visit to her production of The Emperor Jones in the Olivier Theatre, and the Platform event beforehand in which she was questioned by that excellent critic Matt Wolff.  I've seen quite a few plays directed by her, including Top Girls, The Deep Blue Sea, Blithe Spirit and A Voyage Round My Father, though I confess I never saw anything she did at Southwark Playhouse or The Gate. What comes across from her productions is a desire to respect the author's text rather than stamping her directorial ego all over it. 'I don't like to see myself in my works and see how clever I can be.  I try to be as faithful to the text as possible. I prefer to be a facilitator in between the playwright and the actor.'  That's what she explained in the Platform event, and I let out a silent three cheers. What a refreshing change after the unnecessary rewriting and reshaping of Philistines and The Seagull at the National!  Michael Billington has rightly praised Sharrock's bold decision not to bowdlerise Eugene O'Neill's 1920 play, with its repeated use of the word 'nigger'.   This makes it unperformable in the politically correct theatreland of the USA, though Sharrock told us she would love a transfer across the Atlantic.  Americans have been seeking the play out in London because they've never seen it at home. 'Why do the play at all if you're not going to do the play as he wrote it?'  Sharrock asked.  A good question.  The words in this play look strange on the page, but come immediately to life when spoken.  I liked Sharrock's definition of good stage dialogue:  'A playwright uses his ear but it comes from his heart.'  So, after the Platform, how was the play?  Well, it only lasts just over an hour, but it's the most intense and exciting hour I've spent in the theatre for a long time.  This is the best £10 worth of theatre that will come our way this year.  That's due to Sharrock's confident use of the vast Olivier stage and a shattering performance from Paterson Joseph in the title role.  This was a really intense visual and aural experience, a spellbinding piece of theatre.  I know comparisons are odorous, but this production was magical where Trevor Nunn's A Royal Hunt of The Sun on the same stage was a bit pedestrian.  It's an extraordinary achievement to reprise a production from a tiny theatre like The Gate and rethink it for a huge stage.  It's a big solo role and Joseph is magnificent as Brutus Jones, the American runaway convict who sets himself up as a dictator over the 'bush niggers' on a Caribbean island.  The second half of the play is a sequence of nightmare visions, of a prison chain gang, a slave auction, a slave ship and an African tribal ceremony, recreated with music, lighting and a mobile set. Thea Sharrock's meteoric rise looks to me unstoppable;  juding by the evidence of last night, she combines a steely ambition and a decisive self-confidence with strong artistic judgment and a refreshing lack of ego.  She's obviously a bold risk-taker who likes a challenge and won't go for the safe option, but she's highly versatile.  I would like to see her do a major Shakespeare production.