John Morrison

Phedre with Helen Mirren

We all bring our own personal baggage to the theatre when we watch a play;  in my case, Racine is one of a trio of playwrights (the others being Moliere and Chekhov) who were regular victims of my essay-writing at university.  I can't remember what I wrote about Phedre 40 years ago, but many of the original lines of Racine's play have stuck in my memory.  Eleven years ago I saw Diana Rigg on stage in the title role of the queen who falls in love with her stepson Hyppolitus and sends him to his death.  I'd like to say Dame Diana was unforgettable, but all I can recall from 1998 are vague memories of a sizzling performance.  My recollections of her playing Medea in the same West End season are a bit sharper.   Four days before making my way to the National Theatre to see this play, I was soaking up the sunshine on an island in the Mediterranean, so I felt a strong pang of post-holiday nostalgia when I saw the Lyttelton stage transformed into a sun-baked terrace with a shimmering blue background and a rocky outcrop.  This production by Nicholas Hytner uses the same translation by Ted Hughes of Racine's Phedre as the 1998 revival with Diana Rigg.  In the original French, the power of Racine is entirely in the hypnotic effect of the alexandrines, a precise classical form within which the words convey aqnd confine shattering emotions and violence.  It's impossible to reproduce in English, and Hughes quite rightly made no attempt to try. His version is earthily English and very raw.  Hytner too makes no attempt to mimic the classical French style of tragedy, where physical action is kept to a minimum;  but he's a director who never over-eggs the pudding and knows that less is often more.  So when the bloodstained body of Hippolytus is dragged on stage at the end, leaving a red smear in its wake, it's a taboo-breaking moment.  Such scenes are routine in Shakespeare but totally outside the French classical canon, which doubles the impact.  Bob Crowley's design transports the play away from 17th century France and into a world which is recognisably the modern Mediterranean.  The guards wear combat fatigues while the women's dresses have an echo of ancient Greece.  Normally I am left uneasy by this kind of mixture, but in this production it works well.  Helen Mirren is just spellbinding as Phedre;  her vocal technique is so good that every syllable, even delivered in a whisper, is audible right up in the Lyttelton circle.  Phedre moves from tormented guilt when she confesses to loving Hippolytus to fevered jealousy when she learns that he is in love with the imprisoned princess Aricia.  The last time I saw Mirren on stage at the National was a decade or so ago when she played Cleopatra to Alan Rickman's Antony -- not a combination that struck many sparks.  Mirren only hit top gear once her lifeless Roman partner was safely out of the way.  Here, by contrast, she's at maximum velocity throughout.  'Phedre is an express going trhough the station without much declaration - you either jump aboard cleanly or you miss it,' Ted Hughes said.  In other words, it's like 20/20 cricket, where the players don't have a few overs at the start to play themselves in.  They have to reach the right level of intensity from the start, and maintain the pitch for two hours without an interval.  Stanley Townsend is terrific as a muscular Theseus returning from slaughtering and swyving abroad, while the veterans Margaret Tyzack and John Shrapnel are a joy to watch in the roles of the confidants Oenone and Theramene.  Newcomer Ruth Negga shines brightly in the role of Aricia, and Dominic Cooper (last seen here as one of the History Boys) plays Hippolytus with an adolescent swagger that gives way to disgust when his stepmother declares her passion.  Physically, he is convincing, but swallows some of his lines which aren't always audible.

This production is a sellout but can be seen shortly on cinema screens nationwide.  Helen Mirren hardly needs my fawning admiration at this stage of her career, but for my money there is no other actress who manages to combine her complete mastery of stage, TV and big screen.  Racine is a difficult but deeply rewarding dramatist, and it's fantastic to see his plays come alive on stage rather than just reading them on the page.  I will have to look in the loft and see if any of my essays on Phedre have survived.

The Bridge Project's Winter's Tale

The problem for me with this late Shakespeare play has always been the lack of motivation behind Leontes' fit of jealousy which makes him imprison his wife and sacrifice his child.  For the first time ever, I've now seen a production where the opening scene makes this jealousy totally credible.  Simon Russell Beale displays the wary vigilance of a middle-aged man who sees his young wife cuddling and holding hands just a little too closely for comfort with a handsome man around her own age.  Suddenly as Hermione and Polyxenes canoodle around on the cushions, a red light flashes on in Leontes' mind and he imagines the worst.  Thanks to terrific performances by Russell Beale and Rebecca Hall, the Sicilian scenes have a real emotional depth.  Sam Mendes, in an eerie parallel with the opening scene of The Cherry Orchard, sets this in the nursery, and the young son of Leontes and Hermione, supposedly asleep but in fact very much awake, overhears the confrontation between his parents.  There are teddy bears everywhere, foreshadowing the fate of Antigonus, devoured by a life-sized grizzly at the start of the Bohemian part of the play.  After the disappearance of Hermione and Leontes, it's always a challenge to make the sheep-shearing party scene work successfully.  Mendes relies on his American actors to carry the Bohemian scenes, with Sicily standing in for Britain.  Ethan Hawke does the business as a guitar-playing Autolycus, though at one point he reminded me of Johnny Depp in Pirates of the Caribbean.  But after the realistic furry bear, I was disappointed by the lack of any trace of sheep or wool.  The rural party sags a bit, and only comes to life with a rude dance involving balloons.  I have to say I've seen this part of the play done better, notably by the RSC at the Roundhouse in 2002 when Matthew Warchus swapped Bohemia for West Virginia and turned the sheep-shearers into hillbillies.  Among the other performances, Sinead Cusack stands out as Paulina. Unlike The Cherry Orchard, there were a few unsold seats at the Old Vic, but once the reviews are in I doubt if they will stay unsold for long.  Russell Beale gives Leontes a tortured inner life and self-awareness that he has brought to all his major Shakespeare roles.  I've seen him play Hamlet, Iago, Macbeth and Benedict, and his Leontes is a performance to be treasured. 

The Bridge Project's Cherry Orchard

The last high-flyer who tried to bridge the Atlantic was Tony Blair.  Now Sam Mendes is having a go with his long-planned season at Kevin Spacey's Old Vic, kicking off with The Cherry Orchard and The Winter's Tale. Mendes is nothing if not a risk-taker, and this is the opening work of a three-year British-American ensemble that will tour the world.  In 2010 they will move on to Three Sisters and As You Like It.  I don't think this production of Chekhov quite matches up to the Uncle Vanya which Mendes directed at the Donmar in 2002 and which scooped a handful of Olivier awards, but it's a fascinating effort and well worth seeing, despite its flaws.  Although the play has already been seen in New York, the performance I saw at the Old Vic was a preview, and I have the feeling that it will probably improve.  The text of The Cherry Orchard is a new one by Tom Stoppard which flows easily, with one or two characteristic puns;  its only flaw is that it tones down some of the conflicts between the characters by smoothing away some of the verbal aggression that's there in the original Russian.  Sinead Cusack is excellent as Ranevskaya, and I was hugely impressed by Rebecca Hall's performance as her adopted daughter Varya, whose collapse in Act Four when the businessman Lopakhin fails to propose to her is the most heartbreaking moment in the play. Chekhov is the undisputed master of broken dreams and missed opportunities;  he finds comedy and tragedy in the things that should happen but don't.  I was less convinced by Simon Russell Beale as Lopakhin.  I am a huge fan and I remember his Uncle Vanya as a truly great performance, but here this most cerebral of actors is cast against type as the wealthy and boorish former peasant who buys the beloved cherry orchard and the estate from the impoverished gentry.  Lopakhin is not a bad man, but he is totally lacking in emotional intelligence, and Russell Beale seems to have difficulty conveying this aspect of the role.  This Lopakhin is too genial and not quite ruthless enough, and the moment in Act Three when he returns from the auction as the new owner and systematically goes around the room kicking over all the chairs seems out of character and artificial.  This wasn't the only moment in the play where I felt that the director was striving for effect rather than looking for the real meaning of this multi-layered text.  There's a moment when a tipsy passer-by comes in and asks for a few kopecks;  Ranevskaya hasn't got any, so she gives him a gold coin instead and he can't believe his luck.  Mendes takes this scene and builds it up into something quite different;  the passer-by appears as one of a vaguely menacing line of proletarian figures who appear in silhouette upstage against the back wall, suggesting the heaving angry Russian masses.  It's a nice idea, and this is a play in which Chekhov came close to flirting with symbolism, but I think it's unneccessary.  There's a similar superfluity in the opening of Act Three when Ranyevskaya's informal social evening with a Jewish band is turned by Mendes into a formal masked ball where the ladies carry fans and the gentlemen in evening dress look as though they have strayed in from the ball scene in Evgeny Onegin.  It just looks wrong and adds very little.  Chekhov's play is deeply packed with social nuances and the battle between the classes is one of its major subtexts, but most of these go missing.  As the old servant Firs complains, the days when the masters were masters and the serfs were serfs have long disappeared, but Mendes takes the erosion of class barriers much too far.  When the vain valet Yasha helps himself to the champagne put out for the guests in Act Four, it should be a transgressive and taboo-breaking moment, but the impact is completely lost because Yasha has been helping himself to wine and coffee throughout the play.  Dunyasha the maid is called upon to dance at the party -- another transgressive moment -- but in this production the impact is lost because she's dressed in a ballgown and equipped with a fan from the start.  Everyone lounges around from the start on a basis of social equality, which certainly wasn't what Chekhov intended. Declan Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl production of Three Sisters at the Barbican a couple of years ago got it right by subtly emphasising the class barrier etween the three snobby gentrified sisters and the petty bourgeois upstart Natasha who becomes their sister-in-law and gradually drives them out of their house.  Another moment of superfluous tinkering by Mendes comes in Act Two, where Dunyasha starts to unbutton Yasha's flies with the obvious intention of giving him a blow-job.  It's more New York in 2009 than rural Russia in 1904.   The set design by Anthony Ward is simple and uncluttered, with a rectangular platform and a few carpets and articles of furniture.  There's nothing particularly Russian about it, and it seems particularly urban rather than rural. If the audience want to get the sense that there's a beautiful cherry orchard just off stage waiting for the axe, then they will have to shut their eyes and use their imaginations, because the director and his designer seem oblivious to it.  Another moment when Mendes tries to change the meaning of Chekhov's text and gets it wrong comes at the end of Act Two where the moth-eaten eternal student Trofimov and the soppy 17-year-old Anya spout platitudes about the glorious future to each other. 'We are higher than love!' they pompously declare. Mendes adds a passionate snog to this encounter. The comedy of this scene goes completely missing, which is largely because Ethan Hawke's performance as Trofimov is one-dimensional and ignores the pretentious and ridiculous aspect of the character. Chekhov is poking fun at these ascetic high-minded pseudo-revolutionaries, even though he may well have shared some of the ideas that Trofimov proclaims about the future.  Trofimov is attacked by Ranevskaya later in the play as a sexless prig who has never been kissed, but the line becomes meaningless if the attraction between him and Anya is physical.  Chekhov's play is a work of genius and directors should be wary of trying to improve it.  Declan Donnellan shows the way by respecting his text and seeking layers of meaning inside it, rather than adding stage business that doesn't really belong.