John Morrison

Ninagawa's Kabuki Twelfth Night

My opportunity to rub shoulders with Living National Treasures in the theatre are few.  Twenty years ago I found myself sitting next to Rudolf Nureyev at a ballet in Paris, but these days it never seems to happen.  I do sometimes go to the theatre with the West End Whingers, but Andrew and Phil haven't yet been formally awarded LNT status. In Japan, really famous actors such as Onoe Kikugoro VII, who played Malvolio and Feste in the production I saw last night, are designated as Living National Treasures by the government, which must be better than winning an Olivier award and sounds a lot more distinguished than sharing a common knighthood with disgraced bankers and political donors.  My list of Living National Treasures would include all the obvious names -- Judi Dench, Diana Rigg, Maggie Smith, Harriet Walter, Helen Mirren, Michael Gambon, Ian McKellen, Patrick Stewart, Michael Sheen and Simon Russell Beale.  Fill in the next ten yourselves.  The other Japanese system I think we should adopt here forthwith is that of distinguished actors adopting hereditary stage names.  Onoe Kikugoro is the seventh holder of a name that goes back the 18th century. He inherited it in 1973, having been Onoe Kikunosuke IV since 1965.  Onoe Kikunosuke V was also on stage at the Barbican last night, playing Viola/Cesario and Sebastian.  Are you still with me?  Kenneth Branagh under this system could become Laurence Olivier II, while Patrick Stewart could be David Garrick VII.  Diana Rigg could be Mrs Patrick Campbell III and Harriet Walter could be Sybil Thorndike II.  I am all in favour of raising the morale and boosting the fragile egos of the acting profession (so many parts, so few Olivier awards!) and this seems an ideal way to do it.  Equity might disapprove and Spotlight might find it tricky, but I think it's worth a try. Culture Secretary Andy Burnham, you can have this idea for free and make your reputation in theatreland by introducing it.

Yukio Ninagawa has been bringing his extraordinary Shakespeare productions to the UK for 20 or 30 years, and I've seen two or three of them.  But I think this is the first time he has transformed Shakespeare into a Kabuki play.  That means not just adopting the style and costumes, but the full deal.  Does it work?  Up to a point.  There are some visually and aurally stunning effects in this production by Shochiku Grand Kabuki -- an opening in which three children sing a carol in Latin, a forest of cherry blossoms and a traditional Japanese garden.  Ninagawa puts back what Shakespeare left out by recreating the shipwreck at the start of the story, so we see Sebastian struggling amid the waves.  The Kabuki style adds a lot, but it also takes away.  For a start, the play is very slow -- three and a half hours for a play that normally lasts just over two.  The comic scenes lose most of their punch as Shakespeare's words are simplified for a Japanese audience.  That's fair enough;  what we get here is a production designed to allow a Japanese audience schooled in Kabuki tradition to approach Shakespeare, not the other way round.  Kabuki (about which I no know more than I learned from the programme) is a highly formal art in which the non-comedic scenes rely on subtle movements and vocal inflections for effect.  It's rather like putting Shakespeare into a Victorian drawing room, something which directors often like to do but I consider misguided.  Shakespeare was the product of an unstable, freewheeling and conflicted age, not one where social structures and values were fixed.  Despite the excellent performances and the exotic novelty of Kabuki, I found it hard to adjust to the slow pace of this Twelfth Night.  The doubling of roles between Viola and Sebastian (which can be done quite successfully) led to a muddled final scene which lost the focus on Viola and Orsino.  The unbelievably fast costume changes were spectacular, but in some respects I felt Ninagawa was choosing to neglect some of the play's most potent ingredients. Sir Toby's late-night drinking session with Sir Andrew was far too restrained, and Feste's mood-setting songs were cut.  There's an erotic charge in Viola and Sebastian being dressed identically which vanishes if the same actor wears different costumes as they do in this production.  The doubling of the roles of Feste and Malvolio meant that Fabian's part was upgraded and he took over the taunting of Malvolio.  But there was no prison cell for Malvolio, and his final exit line ('I'll be revenged on the whole pack of you!') was cut. The lesson I took away as the audience (about one third Japanese) filed out of the Barbican theatre was that Shakespeare is indestructible;  you can do anything with his plays and they still work. But I think I knew that anyway.

Victory

Confession time again.  I shall own up to a) never having seen a play by Howard Barker before b) always getting him muddled up with Howard Brenton.  My excuse for ignorance, as always, is that I missed nearly 20 years of English theatre by being abroad in the 1970s and 1980s. So, now I've made the trek to the Arcola theatre in Stoke Newington to see this production of Victory by the iceni company, am I in a position to repair the holes in my knowledge?  Is Howard Barker a pontificating shitbag (his language, not mine) or a great and neglected English dramatist? 

A French friend studying at the Sorbonne for an MA in modern English literature recently told me she was studying Barker, and that the Odeon theatre had staged a season of his works.  Like Edward Bond, he's a writer who's much bigger on the continent than here.  I haven't read any of Barker's writings on theatre, so I can't comment on his theories, but I was fairly underwhelmed by last night's play.  What I liked about this historical fantasy set in the time of Charles II, was above all the language.  Barker comes from the shit-piss-cunt-fuck school of writing, so he's not likely to be much performed in schools.  But his language, violent and poetic, sardonic and bitter, has flights of Shakespearean intensity. 'I have licked Frenchmen's bums for nourishment,' exclaims the revenge-seeking cavalier Ball who has returned from exile with the restoration of the monarchy.  He tells Bradshaw, the widow of one of Cromwell's republicans, that her husband's body has been disinterred and displayed on a spike: 'We have the rat-gnawed stinking thing you clutched in bed once.'  There are other phrases that hang in the air: 'A tongue whose habit is to lie lower in the mouth.'  But language isn't quite enough to carry this play.  There are moments of real pain and tragedy, particularly in the final scene, but Barker doesn't have Shakespeare's skill in creating characters or plot.  There were long periods of tedium when I felt quite detached from what was going on a few feet in front of me.  Victory carries echoes of Jacobean revenge plays, which also score highly on violence and severed heads, but fall short on characterisation.  I really could not care very much about any of the characters, and many of the historical scenes summoned up memories of a long-dead TV comedy series. 'If there's one thing I hate above all, it's a cheerful cockney' is a line that would fit very nicely into the mouth of Rowan Atkinson as Blackadder.  I was looking into the backstage area expecting Baldrick to appear with a cunning plan.   This was particularly true in the scenes featuring Charles II, a less-than-endearing priapic monarch played with haughty disdain by Nicholas Rowe, who was last spotted (by me, anyway) as a vicar in See How They Run and as a Tory MP in Whipping It Up.  The play has too many characters played by too few actors, and I had a hard time keeping up with who was supposed to be who.  In the end it didn't matter too much.  The standout performance was by Matthew Kelly as Ball, a greybearded giant of Falstaffian dimensions.  Geraldine James is a wonderful actress, but as Bradshaw she seemed to me wholly miscast;  I could not reconcile her appearance of injured purity and innocence with the sardonic and cynical lines she was speaking.  Perhaps I missed something here, but the part of Bradshaw seemed to me to demand a performer of a quite different stamp -- someone who might play Mother Courage.  Perhaps Kathryn Hunter would have been just right. 

Austentatious

Sondheim meets Noises Off in this sparky new musical at the Landor Theatre, an over-the-pub venue two minutes walk from Clapham North tube station. (I'm not going to provide a map).  It's a thoroughly enjoyable show which began life in Philadelphia and New York and I'm sure is destined to be one of the hits of the Edinburgh Fringe, if it gets there.  Its five creators seem to have met at Goldsmith's College and come from both sides of the pond, which gives the musical a slightly mid-Atlantic feel as if it's been designed to appeal equally to audiences in the UK and north America.  That's one of my slight reservations, but the pluses outweigh the minuses.  The play-within-a-play takes us from first audition to first night of a musical version of Pride and Prejudice performed by the Camberford Regional Arts Panel, led by an incompetent director called Dominic who is horrified to discover at a late stage in rehearsals that P&P is actually a novel, not a film.  Led by jazz dance maniac and scriptwriter Emily, whose take on Jane Austen (she plays Elizabeth Bennet) takes in  pirates, clog-dancing in Amsterdam and a visit to 42nd Street, the mixed troupe includes mean-faced Lauren and her boyfriend David, who is pressganged into the show as Mr Darcy but finds he has the hots for hard-working stage manager Sam (short for Samantha not Samuel).  The cast also includes spaced-out Blake as Mr Bingley and practical Jessica as a Bennet sister.  The part of Mr Wickam remains uncast, which is one of the reasons why tempers snap backstage and everything goes wrong, very much in the style of Michael Frayn's Noises Off.  The Camberford Regional Arts Panel (perhaps I should abbreviate their full name) is supposed to be an amateur group, but some of the jokes seem to fit better with fringe professional theatre rather than the world of the amateur stage.  I think that in north America the cultural gulf between the two is much smaller than over here.  The music isn't quite up to the Sondheim level, though his influence is ever-present and some of the lyrics are very sharp indeed.  Austentatious isn't crammed with Eng Lit jokes for Austen aficionados, which may be a relief. The seven performers are all excellent.  Cassidy Janson (Sam) kicks off the show with a song entitled 'I Manage' and has two more finely judged solos. Despite holding the show together, Sam's name is left off the programme but she's a real trouper and takes this insult on the chin.  Fem Belling (Emily) and Lucy Mills (Lauren) as rivals for the role of Elizabeth perform very funny tap dance, Richard Meek (David) gives a delightfully deadpan performance as a handsome wet-shirted Mr Darcy and Simon Lipkin is just hilarious as the mushy-brained pot-smoking Blake.  There are lots of good theatre jokes in the script (though not a single one about Trevor Nunn, strangely enough) and some splendid visual gags such as the moment when Jenna Boyd's Jessica gets caught by a marauding bear.  This kind of show can be absolutely dire if it slows down, but director Lotte Wakeham keeps the pace just right -- fast and furious in the comic scenes, but slower in the love scenes between David and Sam with enough space for the actors to develop character and emotion.  The final scenes when Pride and Prejudice has its first night are pure farce and the musical aspects get rather forgotten, but this is a show I thoroughly recommend. And I don't even like musicals.  It runs until March 28th and tickets cost £15. 

Donmar West End's Twelfth Night

The final performance of this much-praised production on Saturday night brought me a moment of deja vu. Let me explain.  A couple of minutes into the play, on came Sir Andrew Aguecheek, played by the spider-legged Guy Henry.  But it wasn't the long legs that provided the Proustian madeleine;  it was his blond wig.  Where had I seen it before?  I wondered.  I wasn't exactly bored by the opening scene between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew, but I had heard these 400-year-old jokes quite a few times before, so I allowed my attention to wander a little.  That wig -- it seemed strangely familiar.  I should explain that I was sitting in the front row of the grand circle of Wyndham's theatre looking down.  It was the angle of view that helped to unlock my memory bank.  A decade ago I spent an entertaining two years as a Westminster lobby correspondent, peering downwards at the same angle from the Commons press gallery at the performers in the Palace of Varieties beneath me.  Michael Fabricant is a Conservative MP whose extraordinary blond thatch has become famous over the past ten years thanks to repeated descriptions in Simon Hoggart's parliamentary sketches for the Guardian.  The realisation that Guy Henry was wearing Michael Fabricant's blond hair, presumably for the entire duration of this play's run, struck me like a thunderbolt.  Had he hired it?  Borrowed it? Or found it in the back of a taxi?  More importantly, how was the original owner coping without it?  If Mr Fabricant had been occupying his seat in the Commons without his blond topping, its disappearance would immediately have been flagged up by Simon, who over the years has shown an obsessive interest in the subject.  I was forced to conclude that the original hair must have been replaced by an understudy, as David Tennant was last December when his back gave out halfway through his run as Hamlet.  Had anyone else noticed? Because life at the Commons tends to happen in the evenings, Westminster

parliamentary folk rarely if ever go to the theatre.  I concluded it was likely that nobody else with experience in the Commons press gallery had been to Wyndham’s theatre and made the vital connection.

Having transported my mind back to the Commons, I immediately started to see other resemblances. Ron Cook’s Sir Toby Belch was no jolly Falstaffian quaffer, but a seedy alcoholic with a hip-flask in his pocket; I have never seen a serial boozer portrayed so well on stage.  I was back in the Commons press gallery bar, among whose regular customers Cook’s Sir Toby would have passed unnoticed.  I then imagined Indira Varma (Olivia) as an elegant but flirty Tory lady, Samantha Spiro (Maria) as a waitress in one of the Commons restaurants, and Victoria Hamilton (Viola) as an earnest young Labour researcher, possibly confused about her sexuality.  But the crowning moment came when Derek Jacobi (Malvolio) tried to wrench his features into an unaccustomed smile at the end of the letter scene.  First he wrenched his jaw one way, then the other, then he opened his mouth wide, then he closed it again, and finally with a supreme effort, contorted his face into a vacuous and lop-sided grin.  As I joined in the applause, two words came into my mind:  Gordon Brown. If ever there were a politician who ought to appear in yellow stockings and cross-gartered, it's our prime minister.

This production wasn’t the best or the funniest Twelfth Night I have been to, but I’ve been lucky to have seen three superb versions in the last few years.  I have great memories of an all-male production at Shakespeare’s Globe with Michael Brown as a very touching Viola and Mark Rylance as a hilariously funny Olivia.  In the same year Sam Mendes signed off his decade at the Donmar with a wonderful production featuring a hairnetted Simon Russell Beale as Malvolio and Helen McCrory as Olivia.  More recently I greatly admired Declan Donnellan’s Cheek by Jowl Russian version at the Barbican, which turned the play into the tragedy of Malvolio.  Last night at Wyndham’s I thought Jacobi, while giving a splendid turn as the pompous steward (a ringer for those penguin-suited ushers who carry messages to MPs at Westminster ), fell a little short of Russell Beale.  I felt I was watching three separate characters – a pompous ramrod-straight Malvolio in the opening scenes, a pantomime clown in the comedy scenes, and a wreck of a man in the final scenes.  Only on Malvolio’s final exit, when he shouts ‘I’ll be revenged on the whole pack of you!’ did the character morph back into his earlier incarnation.

Watching Victoria Hamilton as Viola was a sheer joy.  She’s an actress I have long admired, since I saw her in several plays at the Old Vic by Peter Hall’s company in the 1990s.  I remember her wonderful performance as Rosalind in As You Like It in 2000, a Sheffield Crucible production directed by Michael Grandage.  No surprise that he picked her again for Viola, and no matter that she comes barely up to Guy Henry’s waist; she’s an actress of rare intelligence, warmth and comic skill who’s not afraid to rethink familiar lines and make them sound fresh and interesting.  I particularly enjoyed her reinterpretation of the opening scene with Olivia (‘Make me a willow cabin at your gate…’) in which she conveyed a real mixture of conflicting emotions.  This scene was for me the highlight of the evening.  By contrast, some of the comic scenes, notably the duel between Viola and Aguecheek, were treated rather perfunctorily.  Call me a pedantic realist if you like, but I’m always a little irritated by Shakespearean productions in which the designer deliberately muddles up times and places.  Here we had Viola rescued from the sea in a flowing Victorian dress, Orsino wearing cotton pyjamas, his flunkeys in vaguely Indian waistcoats, Olivia in 1930s Riviera beachwear, Feste in a coloured patchwork dressing gown and Malvolio in a jaunty yachting cap, blazer and white shorts.  Somehow it didn’t quite hang together as it should have done.  Despite these minor criticisms, it was a great evening of Shakespeare.