John Morrison

Posh

My trip to the Royal Court Theatre to see Laura Wade's new play about a dining club of badly behaved Oxford toffs was beautifully timed;  I was able to come home from the matinee and then watch David Cameron for 90 minutes in the party leaders' debate.  Fiction and reality. Bliss. 

Given that Cameron and George Osborne have done their utmost to erase from public memory the famous photograph of them in Bullingdon Club tailcoats and waistcoats, I doubt if they will want to go anywhere near the Royal Court.  Being a toff isn't quite as taboo as in the days when I was at Oxford in the late 1960s, but an undergraduate history of inflicting criminal damage in country pubs probably isn't much of a career-enhancer.  Wade's play, however, suggests the opposite -- that a shared record of claret-fuelled misbehaviour is a key to entering at least part of the Tory elite. 

Though I have doubts about the plausibility of Wade's thesis, she writes like a dream. The dialogue she creates for the ten members of the Riot Club, a fictionalised version of the Bullingdon, fizzes like champagne.  It's pitch-perfect. She captures brilliantly the immature hesitations and ambivalence of this group of young toffs towards their joint enterprise. Half the time they enjoy shouting 'Fuck you we're the Riot Club' and flashing large wads of cash every time they meet an obstacle. But the bravado is only skin-deep and when challenged they revert back to being well-mannered public school sixth-formers, worried about their future careers.  The performances are universally excellent, particularly RADA's Joshua McGuire, who reminds me of a younger Tom Hollander in the role of Guy Bellingfield.  Hats off to director Lyndsey Turner and designer Anthony Ward (Enron) , who create an utterly believable framework for the action.  In a play like this -- essentially an ensemble piece with a large cast -- it's a challenge to create individual characters but Wade does this quite deftly, suggesting faultlines and tensions within the group. My criticism is that the expositional first half of the play is too slow to build up to a climax, and should have been trimmed by about 20 minutes.  The internal tensions of the Riot Club never develop into full-blown conflict, which means the play lacks both the economy and the intensity of David Mamet's Glengarry Glen Ross, another play about male bonding and rivalry.  The Riot Club's motto is 'All for one and one for all' and the conflict Wade opts for is between the group and the outside world, in the shape of the well-meaning but hopelessly naff landlord Chris, his student daughter Rachel and the visiting prostitute Charlie.  When the mayhem gets out of hand, the group save their future careers by agreeing that only one of them should take the rap, but I would have liked to see a 'morning after' scene exploring this in greater depth.

While the main action of the play takes place in real time in the dining room of a country pub, it is bookmarked at the start and finish by two scenes in a London gentleman's club involving Jeremy, a Riot Club alumnus and godfather to Guy.  There's a conflict which the author hasn't quite resolved between the idea of the Riot Club as a quasi-masonic establishment brotherhood and the idea of it as a marginalised throwback to the 18th century world of aristocratic power and wealth which is out of step with the modern world.  The young bloods seem to have lots of money but some of them are also impoverished aristocrats whose stately homes have been turned over to the National Trust.  They feel themselves as persecuted outsiders, deprived of their traditional ownership rights over British society.  Wade's ghastly-but-charming toffs don't quite know who they are; the most telling moment in the play is when one reads out the club president's cringe-making application letter for a job at Deutsche Bank.  But I think part of the confusion is also in the mind of the playwright, who is not quite sure if her satire is aimed at the meritocratic vulgar rich or the marginalised aristocracy. 

To my mind the antics of the Riot Club and its real-life equivalent are just a very specific form of a more general British behaviour pattern -- all-male drink-fuelled hooliganism.  If you're at the top end of the scale, you drink two or three bottles of claret each and trash a country hotel;  if you're middle class you get legless on best bitter a rugby club tour of the West Country and smash a few windows;  if you're working class, you follow the England football team across the channel, drink ten pints of Stella and have a fight with either rival fans or the police, or both.  The affinities are more important than the differences.  There are real faultlines of class and wealth in British society, but I'm not sure this play quite fingers them.

Nonetheless, Posh is another triumphant vindication for the Royal Court's ability to nurture new writing.  The current run is sold out and deservedly so.  Oxford University won't find this play very helpful to its image, but that can't be helped;  just when everyone had started to forget Brideshead Revisited, along comes another work about young men and their favourite teddy bears.  However I did spot one mistake which suggests that Laura Wade may possibly have been to Cambridge (horror) rather than Oxford;  one character refers to a 'supervision' rather than a 'tutorial'.  Am I right?

Women Beware Women

Women Beware Women by Thomas Middleton is a blood-soaked Jacobean revenge tragedy with a neatly dovetailed double plot in which two teenage brides fall victim to the conspiracy of a third, much older woman, only to conspire in their turn.  Marianne Elliott takes the high-risk strategy of setting the play in modern dress, with costumes owing much to 1950s Italy and the louche world of La Dolce Vita.  But as the play develops, it bursts out of its realistic framework and builds up to a balletic climax in which the Olivier theatre's revolve spins round to a frenetic jazz score as the bodies pile up.  Rupert Goold is the only other director I can think of who can bring off this kind of coup.  With black-winged angels of death hovering around the stage it's heart-stoppingly, breathtakingly theatrical, teetering on the brink of going over the top but stopping just short.  It works (at least it does for me) because, like Trevor Nunn, Elliott has the confidence to use music, movement, lighting, dance and a striking two-level set while still putting the text at the centre of the show.  The outcome is far superior to the National's last revival of a Middleton play, The Revenger's Tragedy in 2008. 

One of the reasons this revival is so scintillating is the performance of Harriet Walter as the evil Livia, whose plotting and conspiracy drives the action.  For an actress who has triumphed as Cleopatra and Lady Macbeth (not to mention Beatrice), Livia is a monster with no redeeming qualities, but Walter plays her with just the right mixture of cunning and plausibility.  This is the first time I have seen her playing a woman older than her real age, and it's a revelation.  Livia appears first as a stately black-clad widow, only to bare her shoulders after the interval to seduce the hapless cuckold Leantio, a piece of shameless manipulation that triggers all kinds of Jacobethan murder and mayhem.  Samuel Barnett, the original Posner in the National's History Boys, is excellent as Leantio.  There are also standout performances from two young actresses, Lauren O'Neil as Bianca and Vanessa Kirby as Isabella.  The Olivier's giant stage and auditorium is often a daunting environment in which relative beginners have to sink or swim.  O'Neil has a fluent, resonant voice and a commanding presence which reminds me of Rosamund Pike, while Vanessa Kirby, who was swotting for her finals at Exeter University this time last year, makes her mark with a virtuoso jazz vocal.  The stunning set by Lez Brotherston is rather like a Russian oligarch's boudoir.  In many modern-dress revivals of classic plays from the 16th and 17th centuries, the switch of period means that the differences of rank and status get blurred, but not here.  It's easy to understand the huge gap between Leantio and his mother at the lower end of the social scale, and the blingy world of the Duke and his court.

I saw this play at a sold-out early preview, and it will probably get even better.  It may be early to start speculating about 2010 theatrical awards, but I can see this production being in the running for several. I have no idea who may be in the running to follow Nicholas Hytner when he eventually steps down as head of the National Theatre, but I think Marianne Elliott is bound to be on the shortlist.  I have no idea if she even wants the job, but after a phenomenal string of hit productions on the South Bank (Therese Raquin, Pillars of the Community, Saint Joan, All's Well That Ends Well and War Horse), her stock is likely to rise even higher with her latest offering. 

The Real Thing

The Real Thing, first staged in 1982, is one of my favourite Stoppard plays, in fact one of my all-time favourite plays.  Not least because of the scene where Henry, a playwright, uses a cricket bat to demonstrate the difference between good and bad writing.

This thing here, which looks like a wooden club, is actually several pieces of particular wood cunningly put together in a certain way so that the whole thing is sprung, like a dance floor. It's for hitting cricket balls with. If you get it right, the cricket ball will travel two hundred yards in four seconds...This isn't better because someone says it's better, or because there's a conspiracy by the MCC to keep cudgels out of Lord's. It's better because it's better.

Henry (aka Tom Stoppard) is of course right, and I always feel tempted to to quote that speech whenever I come across clunky dialogue and bad writing.  This revival at the Old Vic, directed by the excellent Anna Mackmin, is still only in previews, but it is to my mind absolutely flawless.  Toby Stephens isn't one of my top actors (I thought his Hamlet was very so-so) but he is perfectly cast as Henry, and this is by the far the best thing I have seen him do on stage. He's partnered by Hattie Morahan, and the on-stage chemistry between them really works.  This is the play where Stoppard showed he was capable of more than just jokes and witty intellectualism;  there's real depth in the way he probes into the phenomenon of being in love.  I remember a good revival a decade or so ago with Stephen Dillane and Jennifer Ehle, but I think this one is crisper, funnier and more touching.  Lez Brotherston's set, tucked behind a rectangular white picture frame, is spare and contemporary without much depth, so the audience feels it is looking at a flat-screen television.  There's a clever use of back-projection for the scenes in the train, and apart from the old-fashioned record-player and LPs, and the fact that Henry uses an electric typewriter not a computer, we could easily be in 2010 rather than 1982.  Stoppard's distinguishing feature is his witty dialogue and his facility with complicated ideas, but I'm just as fascinated by his grasp of structure and his knack for keeping the audience off balance by not telling them too much. 

There may be a few misguided people out there who don't like Stoppard's plays; there may be some who don't understand his analogy with cricket and or think that 'having something to say' justifies bad writing.  The cricket season is just getting under way, and this play is the equivalent of a perfect cover drive.

London Assurance

At last, Simon Russell Beale has found the part for which he has been in training for a quarter of a century.  As Sir Harcourt Courtly, he preens and pirouettes across the Olivier stage like a giant marshmallow wrapped in velvet and silk, striking pose after pose very much in the manner of the Prince Regent.  In his deliciously high camp performance, Prinny comes back to life and the theatre audience is whisked away for an evening in the Brighton Pavilion.  I have always thought of Russell Beale as a cerebral actor, but here the genius of his performance is largely physical.  As if preening himself for a portrait by Sir Thomas Lawrence, he points his toes outwards and balances like a giant butterfly, rolling his eyes with the effort.   It's a masterclass in sexual ambiguity.  Sir Harcourt's real passion is for himself, so his profession of desire for the wonderfully named Lady Gay Spanker (Fiona Shaw) is not very serious.  When Russell Beale and Shaw are on stage, the play comes thrillingly alive, and they are backed up with some excellent comic cameos including Richard Briers as the aged husband Adolphus Spanker and Nick Sampson as Cool, Sir Harcourt's Jeeves-like valet.

Dion Boucicault wrote his first hit play in 1841, and Nicholas Hytner's production rightly treats it less as a piece of high Victoriana than as a throwback to an earlier age with looser morals -- as Boucicault was himself.  The play looks back to the Regency period and further back to Goldsmith's She Stoops To Conquer, with its contrast between over-sophisticated townies and country bumpkins.  Boucicault's writing displays great comic exuberance in the dialogue and some great one-liners, but has lots of flaws.  His inexperience shows up in a lack of clear motivation for some of the characters, and a basic inability to get his characters on and off stage in a plausible way.  There's a very tedious country solicitor who contributes very little to the plot, and far too many asides to the audience which merely state what is already obvious.

Lady Gay Spanker, the cigar-smoking, whip-cracking huntswoman, is a wonderful creation, but Boucicault never quite decides why she plays along with Sir Harcourt's plan to elope with him to the Hotel Anglais at Boulogne.  Is she trying to teach him a lesson, or her stodgy husband, or is she just bored?  The love scenes between Sir Harcourt's student son Charles and the 18-year-old Grace Harkaway, originally destined to be married to Sir Harcourt himself, don't work properly and are the weakest link in this production.  This is partly because Boucicault was poking fun at the sentimental rituals and high-flown language of Victorian courtship.  But a modern audience doesn't have any sense of what these rituals are, and Paul Ready and Michelle Terry don't manage to convey them.  Terry seems to me to be miscast; she's too mature and knowing for the part of a pert 18-year-old and her motivations seem to be muddled.  Perhaps the fault is in the text, and it's instructive to compare Boucicault's woolliness with Sheridan's razor-sharp dialogue and plotting in The Rivals, which I saw in a terrific production at Southwark Theatre not so long ago.

Despite his flaws, I think we should see a lot more of Boucicault.  He's the missing link between 18th century comedy and the late 19th century work of Wilde, Shaw and Pinero. While Victorian painting and architecture are now taken seriously again, Victorian plays are still consigned to British theatre's theatrical junk room, covered in dust and regarded as faintly embarrassing. But Boucicault is also part of our theatrical history.  To my regret, the only other play of his that I have seen is the Irish melodrama The Shaughraun, at the Lyceum in Edinburgh about a decade ago.  The Boucicault play I would really like to excavate is Jessie Brown, set during the relief of Lucknow in the Indian Mutiny.  Seeing that on stage really would be interesting. 

Spring Storm

Here's a starter question.  Which famous American playwright included a reference to cricket in one of his early plays?  

A knowledge of cricket and poetry and an Oxford education mark out Arthur Shannon, an over-sensitive self-confessed 'sissy' and the heir to a vast plantation in the Mississippi delta.  Yes, the play is by Tennessee Williams.  It's a very early work, written when he was a student, and it lay forgotten in his papers until after his death.  It was staged a few times by minor theatres in the US, and seemed destined to sink back into obscurity until Laurie Sansom gambled in 2009 on reviving it at the Royal and Derngate in Northampton with Beyond The Horizon, a similarly forgotten play by Eugene O'Neill.  Now, after excellent reviews, these productions have reached the Cottesloe stage at the National Theatre. 

Is it worth it?  Unquestionably, the answer is yes.  If the play had been written by someone other than Williams, it probably wouldn't find much of an audience, but it has enough dramatic strength in its characters and dialogue to be worth seeing for its own sake, not just as an insight into the playwright's later masterpieces.  Arthur Shannon, rich and sensitive, is one of two suitors for the marvellously named Heavenly Critchfield, spoiled daughter of an Old South family, now living in reduced circumstances in which bloodlines have to substitute for money.  Heavenly is already having a secret affair with Dick Miles, a muscular young drifter from the wrong side of the tracks who can't keep down a job and is intent on seeking new horizons.  She's the precursor of all those other doomed, damaged Williams heroines, and Dick is the forerunner of Stanley Kowalski. 

Liz White is excellent as Heavenly, and the scene where she unsuccessfully tries to flirt with Arthur, only for him to whip out a volume of poetry, is very funny.  The comic elements in this play offer a new insight into Williams' writing and prevent it tipping over into melodrama.  Some of the scenes lack strong beginnings and strong endings, and there's too much exposition. Some of the minor characters, such as Heavenly's father, lack a real role in the action.  But these weaknesses aren't critical because they are balanced by some cracking dialogue and some genuinely shock effects.  I liked the moment when Dick, covered in oil and mud, gatecrashes a society ball and his crushing embrace of Heavenly leaves her white organdie dress stained and smeared.

Sansom's production gets around the practical problems of switching between interior and exterior scenes by opting for a single set, a collapsed house which reminded me very much of the famous 1990s National Theatre production of An Inspector Calls.  The choice of a single set allows quick transitions between scenes, but masks the contrast between the gentility and repression of the Critchfield drawing room and the sensuality of the opening scene on a bluff overlooking the great river.  Sansom takes another more successful step away from realism by using a voice-over reading of Williams' stage directions and descriptions of the characters.  It's not something I've seen done before, and I thought it was highly effective as a kind of framing device.