John Morrison

Blood and Gifts

How can a play be well acted, well directed, well designed, full of truthful political insight into recent history and yet ultimately lacking in drama?  In this new play at the National Theatre on the Lyttelton stage, American playwright JT Rogers tells the story of U.S. involvement in Afghanistan from the early 1980s (the Soviet Union sent in troops at the end of 1979) to the early 1990s, when Moscow withdrew its troops.  It was a Cold War victory for the West which hastened the collapse of the Soviet regime but led to horrendous consequences. 

We know now something that the characters in the play don't -- that the U.S. sponsorship of the mujahideen plunged Afghanistan into chaos and bloodshed after the Soviet union left, and led ultimately to the rise of the Taliban and al-Qaida.  Rogers doesn't need to trace the story further towards the present, because the dramatic irony is created by the audience's hindsight. We know what happened next, the characters don't.  The events are in the recent past for us, and the link to the present is as clear as it would have been for an Elizabethan audience watched Shakespeare's histories.

We no longer see any link to our recent past in the story of the Wars of the Roses, but Richard III still fascinates us, generation after generation, because of Shakespeare's ability to create real drama out of character and plot.  Unfortunately, Blood and Gifts, while a competent example of historical documentary writing, lacks the dramatic X-factor.  Its main character is James Warnock, a CIA officer played by Lloyd Owen, whom we see arriving in Islamabad at the opening of the play.  His relations with his main Afghan contact Abdullah Khan (Demosthenes Chrysan) make up the core of the play, but we also see him with his British SIS counterpart Simon Craig (Adam James), with the smooth and venal Colonel Afridi (Gerald Kyd) from Pakistan's SIS and with the KGB's man in Islamabad Dmitri Gromov (Matthew Marsh).  Rogers tries to give his characters more depth by having them talk about their missing wives and families, but this kind of writing-by-numbers doesn't work.  The actors are uniformly excellent, and so is Howard Davies' direction, which zips the play along.  But the characters remain shallow and never really come alive.  The dialogue between them doesn't ring true;  although it's all founded in historical research, it's all text and no subtext, and much of it, especially in the first half, is designed to convey exposition to the audience. 

The second half moves the location to Washington, and the best scene is between Warnock and his boss Walter Barnes.  There's less need for exposition here, and the characters seem to be interacting with each other rather than conveying facts to the audience.  There's another good scene in which Abdullah Khan is brought to Washington to meet an influential U.S. senator.  The cultural gap between the Afghans and the Americans widens, despite the efforts of Warnock to create a bond of trust.  Afghan guerrillas reveal themselves as fans of Duran Duran, as keen on hi-fi equipment as on Stinger missiles.  But ultimately the play remains devoid of drama.   Because Warnock is on stage throughout the play, we see everything through his eyes -- a mistake Shakespeare never made in his history plays.  The tragedy of Afghanistan, which I witnessed briefly as a reporter shortly after the Soviet invasion from the relatively safe surroundings of the Kabul Intercontinental hotel, is one of Shakespearean dimensions.  But too many of the key characters in this story remain off stage and never appear.  I left the theatre nostalgic not just for Shakespeare but also for Brecht and George Bernard Shaw. Both of them were tendentious, partial and lacked even basic respect for historical truth -- but they knew how to create real drama, not docudrama.

Clybourne Park

Bruce Norris's new play, set in the Chicago suburbs, has had some cracking reviews.  There are so few good comedies around that it's great to find a playwright who can write such brilliant dialogue.  And Dominic Cooke's production is perfectly judged, with exquisite comic timing and a wonderful cast including Martin Freeman and Sophie Thompson.  So why did I go away dissatisfied?

The play traces two episodes in the life of a house, some 40 years apart.  In the first act, set in the 1950s, Clybourne Park is an all-white suburb where Russ and Bev are selling up to move closer to his work.  In comes a neighbour to tell them that the purchasers are black -- something sure to lower property prices.  In the second half, the house is semi-derelict and the new purchasers want to knock it down and start again. But the neighbours in this 'mixed, vibrant' residential area, newly fashionable and regenerated, are uneasy about the new-build plan. 

This is fertile territory for social comedy, exploring American sensitivities and hypocrisies about property, territory and race, which Norris does to great effect.  The problem is that he seems nervous about foregrounding the black side of the equation.  In the first half, the black purchasers of the house never appear, and we get to meet only Francine the maid and her husband, who have no dramatic function and little to do except observe.  In the second half the black couple are also left a little on the margins, though there's a great passage in which Steve (Martin Freeman) blunders into telling an offensive racist joke, excusing himself on the grounds that he heard it from a black colleague at work. 'Half of my friends are black!' exclaims his wife Kathy.  We know she's exaggerating, and Norris knows how to make the most of the comedy of embarrassment.  But somehow his under-use of his black characters means he's pulling his punches.

A bigger problem for me is that he has added a second theme to the play (SPOILER ALERT) which jars with the social comedy.  It's painful, but not painfully funny, unless you find Ibsen funny. The house has been the scene of a suicide.  Kenneth, the son of Russ and Bev, has killed himself after returning from the Korean war.  This is a classic skeleton-in-the-cupboard theme which, while explaining Russ's irascible outbursts, seems to me to distract from the main theme of the play.  The trunk in which Russ buries Kenneth's suicide note is dug up again in the second half, but the impact is diluted because the main characters have already left the stage by the time the note is read.  Kenneth himself appears on stage in a ghostly flashback which jars with what has gone before.  It's cheap melodrama.  Knitting together the past and the present of a house is a fairly common dramatic device, but the playwright here falls short of his ambitions.  The result is that there two plays in Clybourne Park, either of which would have been okay on its own.  But they don't combine well together.

Bedlam

Shakespeare's Globe has struggled to find playwrights who can compete with the Bard and use its extraordinary open air stage to best advantage.  Howard Brenton's In Extremis -- the story of Abelard and Heloise -- proved popular and was revived for a second season, but I didn't like it.  Plays about the Chartists and Tom Paine worked quite well but both reminded me of historical pageants, with an excess of characters and too many scenes in different times and places. Che Walker's The Frontline was chaotic and confusing.

This zesty production of Bedlam delivers the goods and works well on the Globe stage.  The audience loved the show and went away into the night beaming with approval, and I found it enjoyable from start to finish.  But that was largely thanks to the director Jessica Swale, who has conjured up a a colourful 18th century romp that masks the inadequacies of Nell Leyshon's script. I was very enthusiastic about the same director's production of The Rivals a few months ago, and this production has the same kind of fizz.  The key to performance at the Globe is establishing an initial rapport with the audience, and the use of genuine 18th century street ballads to start the play forges an instant bond between spectators and performers. Just occasionally the audience participation (boos for the villain and cheers for the hero) tends to get out of hand, turning the experience into too much of a pantomime.  But this is a crowd-pleaser with some excellent performances.  Ella Smith -- large and lovely -- is a wonderful Hogarthian gin-seller who seems to have been born to act on this particular stage.  All credit to Nell Leyshon for tracking down the original songs at Cecil Sharp House and to composer Olly Fox for creating the music. 

Unfortunately it is the incidental street scenes -- the ballads, the gin-selling and the rough music of Georgian London -- which work the best.  Leyshon's writing struggles to create convincing plot and character, and her feeling for the period doesn't go deep enough to parody its style successfully.  She doesn't settle on a consistent idiom or tone, leaving the language to wobble between the 18th century and the 21st.  The language she uses lacks the crisp period cadences of Alan Bennett's The Madness of King George, and her story is very soft-edged by comparison.  Not all the characters seem to be acting in the same play;  while Dr Maynard (Sam Cheadle) is completely serious, other parts seem to have been borrowed from a Carry On film.   The story of May, a beautiful country girl who ends up in the asylum when her beloved Billy is taken away to sea and she loses her reason, is told without real narrative twists and turns. When Billy turns up at Bedlam to rescue her, the play doesn't explain how he got there.  Meanwhile the story of the poet Laurence who falls in love with May is meant to be funny but ends up as mere slapstick because Leyshon's writing lacks the plotting ingenuity that is needed to deliver either high comedy or farce.

Some critics have found fault with a play that turns such grim material as the story of an 18th century lunatic asylum into comedy;  I don't share the view that madness can't be made amusing (Bennett shows how it's done) but the treatment has to be hard-edged and unflinching.  Comedy can be very cruel (think of the treatment of Malvolio in Twelfth Night) and can deal with the grimmest subjects, but what it should steer clear of is mushy sentimentality.  Unfortunately this play doesn't avoid that pitfall, especially in its ending.  Nor does it deliver any serious insights into madness and the 18th century.  I never saw the National Theatre's brilliant production of Coram Boy, about the early years of London's Foundling Hospital, but I suspect it was much better in its storytelling than Bedlam. Bertolt Brecht's Threepenny Opera also flashed into my mind; Brecht had his faults, but there were moments during this play when I longed for his uncompromising view of history and the understanding that life doesn't always have a happy ending.

My suggestion for the Globe is that it should stop commissioning new plays and try putting on Brecht, who really knew how to write hard-edged historical drama.  Or Dominic Dromgoole could try to negotiate the rights to revive Dunsinane, a brilliant sequel to Macbeth by David Greig written for the RSC, which had an all-too-short run earlier this year at the Hampstead Theatre, did a brief tour in Scotland, then disappeared.

Earthquakes in London

Non-stop movement, theatrical flair, dazzling visual pyrotechnics, imaginative design and music -- it must be Rupert Goold.  Gooldian, like Shakespearean or Brechtian, should now become standard theatrical shorthand for a high-octane style of direction which either hits the bullseye (Enron) or misses its target by a mile.  The risk in being Gooldian is that the original play gets lost under the razzmatazz, or gets distorted in the rehearsal process. 

Earthquakes in London is by Mike Bartlett, one of the sharpest dramatists around, linking a family story of three sisters and a cruel absent father (shades of King Lear) with the ever-present fear of global catastrophe and climate change.  Don't go to this play expecting tedious journalistic lessons about climate change;  it's not that sort of play.  There are one or two moments of self-indulgent directorial pantomime, but you'll never be bored.  There are loose ends left hanging in the family story, which is chopped up into a myriad of short scenes, but the overwhelming theatricality of the experience carries the show forward, at least until the final half-hour.  Miriam Buether has transformed the Cottesloe into an exciting space with an S-shaped orange platform whose colour and shape made me think I was in a Yo! Sushi restaurant. Half the audience stands in the pit, looking up at the actors, and the rest look down from the galleries on each side.  At either end there's a shallow rectangular box, a kind of miniature proscenium stage, similar to the one Buether employed to great effect in her design for the final act of The Wonderful World of Dissocia.  I was sitting above the action and looking down from the gallery, but I would love to see the show again from pit level with my eyes at the level of the actors' feet.  From any position, the design is a spectacular success. 

Bartlett's play explores the conflict between environmental and human values;  it asks whether, with an environmental disaster just around the corner, we can really go on behaving as before, producing new generations of children whose lives may not be worth living.  Pregnant Freya, the middle sister of the three (Anna Madeley) roams the streets in turmoil because she doesn't want her baby to be born; eventually we discover her disturbed state of mind is linked to something her estranged father Robert (Bill Paterson) has said to her.  Robert is an atmospheric scientist with a curmudgeonly personality who seems to be partially modelled on James Lovelock.  The conversation between Robert and Freya's husband Steve (Geoffrey Streatfeild) is one of the few scenes where the environmental arguments get a chance to breathe.  Bartlett's script, much rewritten in development and rehearsals with the director's Headlong company, links up the environmental and the personal in subtle ways, avoiding the tedious cliches of issue-based and documentary drama.  The women have all the best scenes, with the men bouncing off them.  Madely is terrific as the confused Freya, as are Lia Williams as her older sister Sarah, a Lib Dem cabinet minister, and Jessica Raine as the punky, aggressive younger sister Jasmine.  The canvas is sometimes stretched too far for plausibility, as when Sarah brings together a smooth airline lobbyist with an Eritrean student environmental activist.  And some of the characters, such as Sarah's husband and Robert's landlady, seem to have been included purely for comic relief.  But these are minor blemishes.  Overall, it's a thrilling piece of theatre whose Gooldian virtues far outnumber its flaws. And it's a shot in the arm for the National Theatre's small Cottesloe stage, which rarely seems to be used to its full potential.

What worries me slightly is that the success of Rupert Goold's all-singing, all-dancing style is going to spawn a whole school of less talented imitators over the next few years.  Keep your shares in Goold but keep a weather eye open for young Gooldian directors who will enter the market with a similar product. 

If So, Then Yes

N.F. Simpson has not had a new play produced on a British stage for 30 years.  After sitting through this one, I can see why.

I'm sorry to have to write this.  I bought my ticket for the Saturday matinee (£14 concession) at the Jermyn Street theatre hoping to be able to write about Mr Simpson (who is 91) striking a blow for the over-60s against the cult of yoof and triumphing over years of exclusion and unjustified neglect.  The author was in the audience and took a bow at the end, amid enthusiastic applause from an audience not in the first flush of youth.  But it all struck me as rather sad.

For those who weren't around at the time, N.F. Simpson was part of the absurdist comedy school of the late 1950s and 1960s, with plays such as One Way Pendulum, first produced at the Royal Court in 1959 under the direction of Bill Gaskill.  I still have a well-thumbed early Faber copy of the play (price six shillings) on my bookshelf, which reveals that the lead role of Kirby Groomkirby was played by a young actor named Roddy Maude-Roxby.  More than half a century later, the same Roddy Maude-Roxby gives a nice deadpan performance as Geoffrey Wythenshaw, an elderly writer dictating his memoirs and contemplating the prospect of death amid frequent interruptions.  He's backed up by seven other talented actors, including Paul Copley, but their combined efforts are not enough to rescue the play, which is directed at a leaden pace by Simon Usher.

N.F. Simpson's work featured in a mixed bill at the Donmar three years ago under the title Absurdia.  My verdict in 2007 hasn't softened as a result of his new play;  it confirms my view that his talent is suited better to radio than any other medium.  If So, Then Yes unfortunately lacks even the basic ingredients of good drama.  It's title recalls Pirandello, but it is about as theatrical as a wet sock.  The actors talk at each other, wander on and off the stage exchanging speeches, but there is no dramatic action of any kind.  Of course, absurdism in the 1950s marked a long overdue and very healthy subversion of the traditional well-made realistic play based on character and plot.  Absurdist writing influenced Joe Orton, Peter Cook, Tom Stoppard and the Pythons.  But Stoppard moved on from his early fascination with verbal pyrotechnics to create real characters with real emotions.  Though plotting has never been one of his strongpoints, his plays have a powerful underlying structure, which boils down to having a beginning, a middle and an end. The same can be said for Joe Orton, though his career was cut short.  N.F. Simpson, by comparison, hasn't evolved at all.  The scenes in this play could be staged in any order.

Whereas his early play A Resounding Tinkle featured a couple taking delivery of an unseen elephant, this one has a young woman who wants to turn herself into a walrus, and who talks about using binoculars to tell right from wrong.  There's a chorus of two cleaning ladies, a joke about Basingstoke and a man whose speciality is analysing the muddiness of historic battlefields. The play ends with a lecture about belief and rationality, which appears to be entirely serious.   Some of the short scenes appear to have been written purely for the sake of one verbal gag, including a discussion about Sartre's failure to win the Nobel Prize for literature because of his false teeth.  All the characters speak with much the same voice and tell the same kind of jokes.  There's a mention of a mosquito. Does he carry malaria? one character inquires.  If asked, comes the reply.  This isn't totally unfunny -- it might make a good if old-fashioned Punch cartoon -- but it has nothing much to do with theatre.  At best, the result is a collection of disjointed sketches around the theme of meeting one's maker.  But it isn't a play.  I felt my £14 could have been better spent elsewhere.  British theatre has moved on quite a bit in the last 40 years, and absurdist comedy is now so much part of the cultural mainstream that it is no longer labelled as such .  I'm the last person to argue in favour of cutting edge modernity or keeping up with theatrical fashion, and I firmly believe a good play is a good play whether it's written in the style of 2010 or 1960.  The essential problem isn't so much that N.F. Simpson's writing is dated, but rather that verbal paradoxes which look good on the page aren't enough to create theatre -- something that demands to be watched rather than just listened to.