John Morrison

The Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes

The Royal Shakespeare Company have taken over that atmospheric crumbling space Wilton's Music Hall to present a new play by American actor/writer Adriano Shaplin, who has been their writer in residence for the past two years.  I'm always suspicious of plays which are partly devised by actors, and after reading some hostile reviews I went expecting to be annoyed or disappointed, or both.  In fact I enjoyed Shaplin's play, which has some glaring faults but a lot of redeeming features.  He sets himself an uphill task by plunging into an area of intellectual history that almost nobody knows about.  Unless you've read Lisa Jardine's books (I haven't) the world of mid-17th century science is an area for specialists.  The fight between Thomas Hobbes and the more experimental scientists who founded the Royal Society, exemplified by Robert Boyle and Robert Hooke, takes place in a zone where few of us are at home. Shaplin's play reminded me of Tom Stoppard's sortie into Russian intellectual history in The Coast of Utopia, another ambitious play about the history of ideas which didn't quite come off.  These historic philosophical jousts fascinate playwrights, but do they make good theatre?  I'm not saying Shaplin fails completely, but it's an uphill struggle all the way.  The play starts with Oliver Cromwell closing the theatres, putting actors out of work and allowing the philosopher Thomas Hobbes to return home from abroad.  In the introduction to my paperback copy of Hobbes' Leviathan, John Plamenatz writes: 'If he was never elected to the Royal Society, which he aspired to join, it was not owing to any reluctance on the part of its Royal Patron (Charles II); it was because he had incurred the hostility of various professors by his attacks on the universities and his failure to respect competence greater than his own. He was a very clever man who thought he understood more than he in fact did.'  The first half of the play sets up the clash between the aggressive Hobbes and the experimental scientists quite well, but the second half is an anti-climax because Hobbes is less important.  One of the faults of Shaplin's play is that although this play is supposed to be tragedy of Hobbes, he isn't really the main protagonist at all.  Hooke dominates the meandering second half of the play, which fizzles out inconclusively. Structurally, it's a bit of a mess, and an excellent proof of the old maxim that it's best to work out the ending of the play before you start tapping away on the keyboard with act one.  It's about half an hour too long, in my view.  On the credit side, Shaplin creates a wonderfully muscular and poetic 17th century language that really sings.  The relationship between Boyle and Hooke carries echoes of Prospero and Ariel.  How about this speech by Boyle summing up his dispute with Hobbes:

HOOKE: What of Knowledge will we rely on?

BOYLE: None, for Knowledge is an old, handed-down thing./ Knowledge is earth bound,/It is too near to a fireside story corrupted by man,/ Facts are fresh and pure, they are innocent of man's intent,/ They are universal things, incorruptible; and if a fact is over-turned, it vanishes,/ It never was a fact.  I've noticed knowledge hangs around, it hangs on men./ We will be more than men, we will be Divines./  It takes patience to proceed this way.

Here's another speech from Boyle to Hooke from the same scene:

Our first moments together here burn in my chest,/ I feel them now, and will not forget them,/ I take this radiant hear to mean you are my spirit's familiar,/ Mirror of my soul's inquiry and kindred missioner to the horizon of Enlightenment,/ Where wisdom meets the universe, to reinvent the light.

The aristocratic Boyle is played by a woman, an artistic choice not of the director but of the author, and though the reasons are not spelled out, I think it lends the character a certain distance from the rest of the group and works well in Amanda Hadingue's performance.  Unfortunately this is a rather shouty public play, with few moments of quiet intimacy, and the characters are mostly two-dimensional.  The acting by Jack Laskey as Hooke and the other leading characters is vigorous and muscular, though I felt Isaac Newton was rather underpowered.  The three-story scaffold set is mostly used to good advantage, though there is a lot of pointless climbing around during a scene between Charles II and the scientists, and some equally unnecessary acrobatics towards the end of the second act.  It's directed by Elizabeth Freestone, who I suspect is a name to watch.

August: Osage County

The all-American voice in the National Theatre's Lyttelton auditorium tells the audience to turn off their cellphones and 'unwrap your candy now'.  It's going to be a long evening, spent in the company of a totally dysfunctional but very funny family somewhere in Oklahoma.  The Westons have the same problems as any other respectable middle class American family;  alcohol and drug abuse, indecent assault on a minor, adultery, divorce and incest.  The play kicks off with a nasty suicide as patriarch Beverley Weston, a university teacher, drunk and failed poet, drowns himself after giving what we later realise is a farewell monologue to Johnna Monevata, the young Cheyenne woman he is hiring as a housekeeper.  This play by Tracy Letts (a he-Tracy not a she-Tracy) on the National Theatre's Lyttleton stage lasts for three and a half hours with two intervals.  It arrives having won Chicago's Steppenwolf theatre every Broadway award on offer and a Pulitzer for best play. The preview audience on Tuesday in the Lyttelton loved it and so did I.  The acting from a cast of 13 is top-notch and despite its length, the play never drags. 

Here's the plot-spoiling summary:  'My wife takes pills.  I drink.  That's the bargain we struck.' That's what Beverley tells the new housekeeper shortly before driving off into the blue. His body is found in a lake five days later and his pill-swallowing widow Violet Weston is joined by her three daughters, her sister and their equally dysfunctional families for the funeral from hell.  Sister Mattie Fay is married to Charlie Aiken, a none-too-bright man in the upholstery trade, and they have a dopey son, known as Little Charles.  Daughter#1 Barbara returns from faraway Colorado with husband Bill Fordham, who is having sex with one of his students, and pot-smoking 14-year-old daughter Jean.  Daughter#2 Ivy is the dumpy unmarried one who is desperate to break away from her domineering mother, but she's now in her mid-40s.  Daughter#3 is flighty redhead Karen, returning from Florida with the new love of her life Steve, a dodgy businessman whom she plans to marry on New Year's Day.  The family reunion (T.S. Eliot is quoted in the first scene) is a predictable disaster and the family finally scatters more divided than ever after all the skeletons come tumbling out of their closets. 

That summary doesn't do justice to the play, which is wickedly funny, highly ambitious in its scope and perfectly judged in tone;  there are echoes of the family dramas of Eugene O'Neill, Tennessee Williams and Edward Albee and the individual scenes have the crisp economy of David Mamet at his best. The trio of sisters is reminiscent of Chekhov, and so is the bitter blend of tragedy and comedy.  The dialogue crackles and it's painfully funny.  Think of Hamlet's cutting remark to Gertrude about the funeral meats furnishing the wedding feast, and you'll understand how deftly Letts makes the audience laugh. The great pitfall of family drama is an excess of backstory, and Letts skilfully avoids this, with just enough exposition.  I can't think of a home-grown playwright who would be capable of writing this beautifully structured play, and it's a salutary reminder that the British invasion of Broadway doesn't mean we always do it better. American writing and acting sometimes have an intensity that is difficult to match, and this is a rare chance to see an original cast at the very top of their game.  It's also a reminder of that extra something that an ensemble who have acted together for years can bring to a play.  Deanna Dunagan is outstanding as the ghastly matriarch Violet, who veers from total incoherence to savage bullying.  She won a Tony and three other awards for this performance, and I would be surprised if she doesn't make it to the Olivier shortlist as well.  

This is a play about the disintegration of the American family;  it's not a political state-of-the-nation play although the Cheyenne identity of Johnna, the one character with no family ties, gives it a symbolic dimension.  Violet, who at one point complains loudly about the 'Indian' who has come to live in her house, ends the play cradled in Johnna's arms.  The subtext is that the great American experiment that displaced the native Americans from the plains has collapsed from within, undermined by selfishness and a lack of any real family values.  Unlike Arthur Miller,  Letts isn't writing about the death of a wider American dream of success;  dollars and cents aren't mentioned and nobody seems short of money.  The other thing that marks Letts off from Miller is the former's sense of comedy.  He does seem to be writing about the woes of a particular generation, but here I found the signals a little mixed.  There's a deeply disturbing moment when Violet, too stuffed with pills to take in the news of her husband's death, dances to the sound of the Eric Clapton classic Lay Down Sally.  This appears to be the self-indulgent poast-1945 baby-boom generation getting its come-uppance.  But confusingly (to me at least) elsewhere the daughters mock their parents' membership of the 'greatest generation' and refer to how they grew up in poverty and 'hated Nazis' -- something that suggests an earlier generation altogether.  The echoes of Tennessee Williams are strong, but Williams' characters are outsiders and misfits who seem to inhabit their own fantasy worlds, while Letts is writing with less lyricism about a more mainstream family.  The slash-and-burn dialogue and the mordant humour reminded me most of all of Albee's Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf.  In Violet, Letts has created a historic monster who is just as memorable a character as Albee's Martha, played in London a year or two back by Kathleen Turner and less recently by Diana Rigg.  I'm sure the critics will go overboard for this production, so tickets will be hard to come by.  A brilliant decision by Nicholas Hytner to take the risk of bringing Anna D Shapiro's outstanding production to London. 

Evening Standard Awards and Donmar's Law

Excellent news that Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters has deservedly won Best Play in the Evening Standard Awards announced yesterday.  I'm glad that Chiwetel Ejiofor has got his Best Actor award for Othello, adding to the Olivier he won earlier this year (the calendar for the Olivier runs until December 31 and this was a 2007 production for them).  I'm in two minds about the Best Actress award shared by Penelope Wilton and Margaret Tyzack for The Chalk Garden.  Both performances were excellent of course, but I thought the play was a load of rubbish.  There is of course DONMAR'S LAW (should I trademark this phrase?) which states that any play, however bad, looks hugely improved when performed at the Donmar because the audience is so close.  This wasn't a great year for female acting performances -- not the fault of those richly talented actresses but of a lack of good parts.  I might have picked Katy Stephens for her roles in the RSC Histories cycle, or Jane Horrocks for The Good Soul of Szechuan, or Nicola Hughes as Ella Fitzgerald in Marilyn and Ella.  2008 was a year in which the repertoire's innate bias towards male leads was very evident. 

Postlethwaite's revenge

There was a wonderful interview on BBC Radio Four yesterday (Front Row Thursday Nov 20) with Pete Postlethwaite, who's playing King Lear in Rupert Goold's critically panned version at the Everyman in Liverpool.   This production (which I haven't seen) was billed as the theatrical highlight of Liverpool's year as European City of Culture, but got awful reviews, even from such fair-minded critics as Michael Billington and Susannah Clapp. As a piece of delicate stiletto work carried out by an actor on a director,  Postlethwaite's interview was in a class of its own.  Of course, he didn't criticise Gould openly.  But he made it sound as though the entire cast had gone into revolt and forced Goold to junk lots of his high-concept variations and additions to the play, such as a recording of Margaret Thatcher's 'Let us bring harmony' soundbite when she took office in 1979.  Finally, nearly four weeks after the opening, the production 'is just getting to base camp,' he told interviewer John Wilson. Ouch.

He made it clear that the cast were 'overwhelmed by the ideas and technicalities' of Goold's production and their performances suffered.  The Thatcher recording at the start of the play was 'symptomatic of things that were misjudged,' he said, noting that the remainder of the production didn't have any political references:  'Rupert has been bold enough to say that didn't work.'  Postlethwaite, who had waited years for the chance to play Lear, was obviously wounded by the critical mauling the production received, and was making clear that it wasn't the poor bloody actors' fault.  Wilson asked whether the cast had tried to sit down and air their concerns with the director.  'It's very difficult to sit down with Rupert.  You go along and you trust.'  According to Postlethwaite, the cast are now 'a very happy bunch of bunnies' and the play has risen like a phoenix from the ashes.  After the new year it comes to the Young Vic (not the old Vic, as Wilson announced) and will look quite different, apparently.  Perhaps the critics will give it a second chance.  But I think Goold's reputation as the wonder boy of British theatre will take a while to recover.  I'm wondering if Mrs Thatcher will be on stage when he does Time And The Conways at the National next year.

http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio4/arts/frontrow/

Gethsemane

David Hare has had fourteen original plays and four adaptations on at the National Theatre.  Under Richard Eyre it sometimes seemed as though he was the house dramatist with his own flat in the concrete wonderland of the South Bank.  Under Trevor Nunn his star waned but under Nicholas Hytner he's back in semi-detached residence, though they had a slight falling-out over the failure to give a longer run to Stuff Happens.  So one has to take him seriously, and I do.  There's no other playwright/screenwriter who understands his craft quite so well, and nobody else with such a sustained interest in politics.  But the fact remains that some of his plays are better than others, and this new one at the Cottesloe isn't one of his best.  In fact it's disappointing and lacklustre.

Gethsemane is Hare's shorthand for a moment of doubt;  as one of the characters points out, Jesus overcame his doubts in the garden of Gethsemane and went on.  Hare's territory of doubt is the moral/political nexus formed when money meets politics.  One of the main characters, Otto Fallon, is a rich entrepreneur from the pop music world who now raises money for the Labour party.  Another, Meredith Guest, is a woman Home Secretary with a dodgy financier husband.  There's a prime minister who plays the drums in his spare time and spends his evenings meeting potential donors for a game of squash at Otto's house in Bishop's Avenue.  Lord Levy, Tessa Jowell and Tony Blair spring immediately to mind, but Hare isn't trying to recreate real events as he did with Stuff Happens or his (far better) play about the railways, The Permanent Way.  He describes this play in the programme as pure fiction.  The other characters include the minister's stroppy drug-taking 16-year-old daughter Suzette, a journalist who has sex with the daughter at a party, a political adviser who tries to limit the scandal, and an ordinary couple, Lori and Mike Drysdale.  Mike, a Home Office civil servant, is recruited at the minister's suggestion to join Otto's team of fundraisers but has moral qualms.  Lori, a music teacher and temporary busker, is Suzette's former teacher and is called in to help her get back on the rails.  The play begins and ends with Lori, but she's somehow too peripheral to the action of the play to really dominate it.  In fact the dramatic action is too slight and spread too thinly between the characters, and most of the scenes end inconclusively. The bottom line is that not enough stuff happens in this play for it to get interesting.  It's clear that Hare is too subtle a writer to be tempted by the idea of an old-fashioned 'moral dilemma' play in the style of Ibsen or Granville-Barker.  Will the politician take the money?  Will the woman give in to the blackmailer?  Will the minister choose her family or her career?  But in choosing to avoid the bleedin' obvious in terms of plotline, he ends up with a diffuse story that never really comes into focus and in the end, just fizzles out.  The characters are mostly well drawn, the dialogue often crackles and the individual scenes start well, but when something happens, it happens off the stage.  Otto makes a large donation to Suzette's posh private school of which he's a governor to sweeten up the headmistress into overlooking the drug-taking.  Big deal.  But we don't see it on stage, nor do we meet Meredith's financier husband.  Instead there's a very unlikely journalist, who combines being a parliamentary sketchwriter with being a columnist for a paper that sounds very like the Daily Mail.  This man was once a medieval historian who has moral qualms about what he's now doing, but can't go back.  That's just believable, but the implausible part is when he has sex with Suzette at a party along with three other men, then writes about it in his newspaper. This is backstory, so we don't see it.  I always try to suspend my disbelief in the theatre (I wanted to give Joey a sugar lump in War Horse) but this is tosh.  Middle-aged parliamentary sketchwriters (I've worked with them) do sometimes misbehave, and so do teenagers, but I just can't imagine them going to the same parties and misbehaving together.  What Hare doesn't seem to know is that with rare exceptions such as Euan Blair's drunken antics in Leicester Square a decade ago, the misbehaviour of politicians' teenage children is a taboo subject for Fleet Street these days.  It's strictly off-limits.  I didn't feel by the end of the play that the author really understood the relationship between politicians, the media and the world of money. The relentless 24-hour pressure of news coverage is mentioned but it never comes to life dramatically.  And it's never clear whose story this is.  In the great drama of New Labour, Lord Levy the fundraiser was a comic walk-on part, not a central player.  A play about a newspaper proprietor like Rupert Murdoch might have got closer to the truth, but I suppose Hare has been there many years ago and done that.

I sometimes wonder whether any of Hare's plays will really stand the test of time and become classics;  some of them are too topical, too much of their period to be more than curiosities for future generations.  He may end up like Granville-Barker, much respected but only rarely performed.  His writing doesn't seem to have the timelessness of Pinter or the wit and imagination of Stoppard and Frayn at their best.  I have to say that anyone coming to the National Theatre who wants to see a play that says something about Britain and its politics would be better advised to buy a ticket for Lee Hall's The Pitmen Painters instead.

When writers have the reputation of David Hare, the National Theatre doesn't tell them to go away and produce another draft. That's a pity, because this play is full of flaws. Life is often inconclusive and rarely has a neat ending, but it's generally not a good idea for plays to work on the same principle.  On the plus side, the direction by Howard Davies is excellent, as one would expect, and so are the actors.  I liked Stanley Townsend as Otto with his neat little ponytail, I liked Tamsin Greig as the Home Secretary and Nicola Walker as Lori.  In fact I was quite convinced by most of the characters on stage, though Gugu Mbatha-Raw is far too impossibly beautiful and stylish to resemble any political adviser I have ever come across.

The White Devil

The programme notes for this excellent production of John Webster's gory revenge tragedy at the Menier Chocolate Factory suggest that the author was the Jacobean equivalent of a jobbing TV script writer, penning occasional episodes of The Bill.  That seems a pretty good summary, though Webster would probably have found his after-the-watershed niche on the True Crime channel writing scripts for The Mafia's Bloodiest Murders.  I keep on thinking of him as the sadistic boy who hangs around the theatre in Shakespeare in Love.  The very nasty adolescent John Webster imagined by Tom Stoppard in his screenplay never had the range of Shakespeare, though he borrowed shamelessly from his older contemporary.  In The White Devil the sequence of poisonings, stabbings, stranglings and shootings is relentless.  There are ghosts, a mad scene with strong echoes of Ophelia in Hamlet, and a great trial scene.  The plotting is intricate, the action is fast, the characters are too bad to have any moral qualms about what they are doing, and at the end of the play almost nobody is left standing.  This production is directed by Jonathan Munby on a narrow traverse stage which to my mind is the format that suits the intimate space of the Menier best.  It's inventive but Munby doesn't get carried away by his own originality. The story revolves around the life and loves of Vittoria Corrombona and the Duke of Bracciano -- a real couple who died only 27 years before Webster wrote his play.  Given the real nastiness of life under the later Medicis, Webster didn't have to exaggerate much.  And the plotting at the court of our very own James I wasn't very different.  The cast includes quite a few RSC veterans and Aidan McArdle, who is outstanding as Vittoria's shady bisexual brother Flamineo.  Claire Price plays Vittoria not as a hard-faced man-eater but as an amoral fun-seeker whose first instinct is to laugh, even when she is on trial.  Darrell d'Silva is also impressive as Bracciano.  This is an exhilarating show.

Six Characters In Search Of An Author

I'm not a Pirandello buff, so I don't know this play well enough to say exactly what Rupert Goold and his writing collaborator Ben Power have done to it.  They've added a lot of material, particularly at the beginning and the end, so it's now six characters not just on stage but interfering with a TV drama-documentary (or is it a docudrama?)  Please don't write on both sides of the paper at once, particularly if you are a media studies student.  And don't turn the videocamera on yourself.  This is a media-savvy version for media-savvy people, with the action as a series of boxes.  Just when you think the last box has been opened, Goold opens another one.  I missed his prizewinning production of Macbeth with Patrick Stewart, but I've seen quite a bit of his other work, including The Last Days of Judas Iscariot and Faustus.  It's an easy temptation to dismiss his work as Too Clever By Half, but I do sometimes wonder whether he ought to ponder the idea that Less Is More.  Sometimes simplicity works better in the theatre than complication.  Not every good idea has to end up on stage.

The actors are terrific, particularly Ian McDiarmid, Noma Dumezweni and Denise Gough, and so is the design by Miriam Buether, who was responsible for the stunning reinvention of Brecht's Good Person of Szechuan at the Young Vic last year.  She also designed The Wonderful World of Dissocia at the Royal Court (a play I hated) and uses some of the same techniques here.   I have limited interest in watching plays about the problem of reality and truth in the theatre or on film, just as I don't read novels about people writing novels.  It's an area for media obsessives.  Give me Stoppard's Real Inspector Hound any day rather than Pirandello.  In short, this production was not entirely my cup of tea but next time Goold and Headlong Theatre are in town I shall probably swallow my doubts and buy a ticket.