John Morrison

Troilus and Cressida

I get more pleasure from going to see a Shakespeare play I don't know than from the old favourites that I've seen over and over again.  I knew nothing about Troilus and Cressida before seeing this Cheek by Jowl production at the Barbican, though I skimmed through the text beforehand and found it fairly impenetrable.  It's amazing how Declan Donnellan has the knack of turning something obscure into something simple and lucid, while other directors seem to manage the opposite.  I was absolutely thrilled by this production, though after seeing half a dozen plays by the same company, both in English and Russian, I wasn't surprised.  That's the other good thing about Donnellan and his designer partner Nick Ormerod;  they're consistently on top form, but that doesn't mean that every production uses exactly the same box of tricks.  There's a minimum of scenery, and lots of movement, and everything is based on giving meaning to the text rather than pulling and twisting it into a shape that matches the director's preconceptions.  There's no sense that this is some kind of mystical experience on which the audience is being allowed to eavesdrop; it's all done for our benefit.

The Barbican theatre has been reshaped before for Cheek by Jowl, but this time the playing area is a narrow rectangle with the audience on either side, a bit like the Edinburgh Tattoo.  Logically enough, because the next play on in the theatre is going to be Black Watch, another play about war that was first staged in an Edinburgh drill hall.  The only scenery is a few stools, which come together to make a bed or a platform, and even a tent for Achilles.  The Greeks and the Trojans have swords and shields but while the Greeks are in black, the Trojans are in white, and their fighting uniforms are modern.  They wear what looks like American footballers' body armour, rather like those kitschy Gladiators that used to be on TV.  It's all simple but effective.  This has been dubbed Shakespeare's nastiest, most cynical play, and I can see why. Military glory is a sham, soldiers spend more time preening themselves and intriguing against their own side than in fighting the enemy, and the war itself seems totally pointless.  It's a good antidote to Henry V.  Love is followed by betrayal as Troilus loses Cressida in a cynical deal between the Trojans and the Greeks, and her loyalty to him dissolves at the first hurdle.  It's an ensemble play and it's hard to single out individual performances, but newcomer Lucy Briggs-Owen (a 2007 Drama Centre graduate) and Alex Waldmann are outstanding as the vulnerable young lovers, collapsing into bed with a teenage pillowfight. Briggs-Owen's final scene, in which she alternately resists her captor Diomed and responds to his advances, is wonderful.  I particularly liked Ryan Kiggell (whom I last saw as Valentine the dentist in You Never Can Tell in the West End) as a bespectacled, donnishly pompous Ulysses, and Richard Cant as an androgynous Thersites.  Cant, with blond wig and ballgown, is at the centre of a powerful pre-battle party scene that oozes muscular military homoeroticism.  I thought briefly of Privates on Parade.  Cheek by Jowl veteran David Collings plays Pandarus as a seedy old gent in a linen suit and panama hat, while Paul Brennan as Achilles and David Ononokpono as Patroclus form a musclebound odd couple.  Marianne Oldham is also excellent in the double roles of Helen of Troy (who starts the play with a flourish as the prologue) and Cassandra.  Donnellan seems to have the knack of coaxing extra special performances out of actors, some of whom (Kiggell and Collings being the exceptions) don't have much Shakespeare on their CVs.  This is a great production of a difficult play which lasts three and a quarter hours.  It wasn't a moment too long.

Thomas Middleton

Gary Taylor, who's a big name in Shakespeare studies on both sides of the Atlantic, gave a fascinating platform talk at the National Theatre last night on Thomas Middleton, whose collected works he's been editing for the past two decades for OUP with a team of other scholars.  He made the case for Middleton being right up there with Shakespeare in the range and quality of his dramatic writing, and outlined very lucidly the reasons why he fell into oblivion.  Two factors seem to have been responsible;  firstly, Middleton wrote his plays for all sorts of companies and unlike Shakespeare, didn't have a loyal group of colleagues who collected his scripts and published them in a folio.  Secondly, his plays were effectively (though perhaps not legally) unperformable until the abolition of theatre censorship in the 1960s.  He made two other points which interested me greatly.  The Revenger's Tragedy is now overwhelmingly attributed by scholars to Middleton, though theatres and publishers don't yet seem to have caught up.  And Professor Taylor is, like me, itching to see someone take the risk of reviving Middleton's A Game At Chess, the biggest hit of English Renaissance theatre bar none.  I have seen this just once -- in a student production on the lawn of an Oxford college (I think it was Trinity) in about 1969.  Does anyone out there recall it and does anybody know who was clever enough to put it on?   I can still remember that Oxford production, with the actors performing on a giant black and white chess board.  Gary Taylor's never seen the play at all, though he's absolutely certain that it would work on stage.  There's a lot of contemporary politics in it, but he doesn't think that's an obstacle. 

Afterlife

'Okay, Mr Frayn, siddown and pitch your idea.  I gotta be outta here to catch a plane in two minutes.'

'Thank you Mr Hytner.  Well, er, think of it as Noises Off meets Democracy.  There are lots of Germans  nobody's heard of, but it's basically about theatre.'

'All the world's a stage, huh? Hasn't that been done before?  Don't matter, we'll do it!  My secretary will send you a contract.'

Actually, I doubt if the conversation at the National went quite like that.  I'm an admirer of Michael Frayn, though not an unqualified one; along with Stoppard, Pinter and Bennett he's one of a quartet of writers now in their 70s who have always defined for me (some 15 years younger) what theatre should be about.  However, though I think Noises Off is a work of sublime genius and I quite liked Democracy, I have to confess that I walked out of Copenhagen at the interval, finding Frayn's dissection of what Werner Heisenberg may or may not have said to Nils Bohr crashingly tedious.  If it's revived, I'll probably give it another go and do my best to find it interesting. 

This eagerly awaited new play by Frayn isn't as good as Noises Off, or as bad as Copenhagen; it's somewhere in between. I expect it will get rave notices and good audiences at the Lyttelton, and I wouldn't be surprised if it moves to the West End.  It's well directed by Michael Blakemore and there are good performances, but I have some doubts about the casting of Roger Allam as Reinhardt and there's a lack of real dramatic conflict. (There's quite a few raised voices, but that's not the same thing).

By accident or design, the National Theatre is running three big new biographical plays in one season: Howard Brenton's Never So Good about Harold Macmillan, Tony Harrison's Fram about Fridtjof Nansen, and now this one.  So it's useful to compare them, because none of them seem to me to succeed completely, and that may be because it's a genre that has pitfalls that are almost impossible to avoid.  Telling a life on stage means chucking out the unities of time and place and plot in favour of a structure which is more narrative than drama.  Some people like nothing better than episodic novels and biographies turned into stage plays, but for me they never really work.  The minor characters tend to buzz in and out like flies and too much hangs on the central protagonist, who often seems to have little inner life. The relationships that develop are too fleeting and one rarely gets the sense of a single dramatic choice or decisive moment that provides a hinge for the play. Tony Harrison partially solves the character problem by giving Nansen a kind of doppelgaenger;  Brenton gives Macmillan the politician the company of his younger self, the World War One officer, to stalk him.  Frayn's Reinhardt has a mistress, a business manager, a secretary and a valet, but none of these relationships is very meaningful;  they just buzz around him, rather like Gary Essendine's entourage in Coward's Present Laughter.  Reinhardt's real companion, his doppelgaenger, is Death, in the shape of the Grim Reaper who confronts the character of Everyman, the play that defined Reinhardt's career as founder and director of the Salzburg festival.  I can see exactly what drew Michael Frayn to Reinhardt; his spectacular rise from an impoverished background as Max Goldmann, a Vienna Jew, to wealth and celebrity and then to impoverished exile under the Nazis parallels the Everyman story, providing fertile material for a look at the relationship between theatre and life.  We don't learn much about Reinhardt as a theatre director, though Frayn makes fun of his tendency to micromanage every actor's performance;  he wasn't a man who liked improvisation, and he was a precursor of the 'director-as-god' school of theatre which dominates the German stage, and of which Frayn himself has sometimes been a victim, as he recounted in a recent National Theatre platform event.  He was a self-invented central European mountebank, more Mephistopheles than Faust, a kind of theatrical Robert Maxwell who existed on a grand scale in a spiral of debt.  Roger Allam, a great actor who has starred not only in Frayn's Democracy (as Willy Brandt) but also in such diverse plays as Privates On Parade and Boeing-Boeing, seems to be slightly miscast.  He hasn't got the demonic, megalomaniac qualities that an actor like David Suchet might have brought to the role, and Reinhardt just comes over as a nice chap who was a bit careless about money. 'I want twenty whores for this scene' he insists to his business manager, who tells him he's already over budget. Perhaps Henry Goodman, who's Jewish, might have been better.  The play opens in 1920 with Reinhardt acting out scenes from Hugo von Hofmannsthal's Jedermann (Everyman) in front of Salzburg cathedral, to persuade the prince-archbishop to allow him to stage the play there.  The archbishop is charmed and says yes, which means the scene and the ones that follows lack any conflict.  In fact the first act has no conflict at all, just lots of backstage bickering from the entourage and the occasional sardonic comment from an outsider, Friedrich Mueller, who emerges after the interval in Nazi uniform (a real Springtime-for-Hitler moment) and kicks Reinhardt out of his beloved baroque palace and into exile.  There's a potential Faust/Mephistopheles scene after the interval which should really be the dramatic turning point of the play, the only moment where Reinhardt has to make a real choice.  It's when Mueller offers him the chance to become an 'honorary Aryan' as the price of keeping his status, his festival and his palace. This should be the Big Bang moment when the protagonist finally discovers who he really is.  But the opportunity is wasted, because Reinhardt doesn't even reply and just shows Mueller the door.  Apart from Allam, the play has only slight opportunities for actors in the other roles. Abigail Cruttenden and Selina Griffiths breathe what life they can into the parts of Reinhardt's mistress and secretary, while David Burke creates a genial prince-archbishop who is a dead ringer for Cardinal Cormac Murphy O'Connor.  The best moments in the play are the ones where Reinhardt's life and his emblematic Everyman production cross over, with Death suddenly appearing and the dialogue slipping from prose into verse. Frayn's translation back into English of von Hofmannsthal's rhyming couplets is extremely deft, capturing the style of the late medieval mystery plays which were the source for Everyman.  Some of the dramatic impact of this is lost because Death makes his entrance several times rather than just once.  I have to say I didn't like David Schofield's rather jokey performance as the Gauleiter Mueller.  One final, pedantic comment:  some of the German pronunciation is haywire.  Franz should be pronounced with a short 'a' as in pants, not a long 'a' as in France.  And Vienna's theatrical temple (I've been there a few times and it's a stuffed-shirt place that made me long to get back to the concrete National Theatre bunker on the South Bank) is the Burgtheater (pronounced Boorg), not the Bergtheater.  Somebody please tell Roger Allam before the first night.