John Morrison

Men Should Weep

He's a sly dog, our National Theatre boss.  In the week the government announces big cuts in welfare spending which Guardian commentators predict will plunge us back into the 1930s, Nicholas Hytner programmes a half-forgotten play about...poverty in the 1930s.  Not only that, but the play and the production are excellent.  The choice of this family drama set in a Glasgow tenement (press night next Tuesday) as the NT's artistic contribution to the debate over the Comprehensive Spending Review is an inspired one.

Never having heard of the author or the play, I was in two minds about whether to buy a ticket. Then I discovered that the family in the play is named Morrison and the head of the household is John Morrison, so I felt that it would be disloyal to my Clydeside metal-bashing ancestors to stay away. (My grandfather John Morrison, a plater, was killed in a shipyard accident in 1942.)  But I half-expected something that would be either dated, or sentimental, or preachy in a Left Book Club kind of way.  I'm delighted to say all these expectations were dashed at Friday's preview.  Ena Lamont Stewart's 1947 play runs for three hours and avoids all the predictable pitfalls of the social realist genre. 

Her John Morrison (I'm also delighted to say) isn't a bad sort;  he may be an unskilled labourer with only occasional jobs, but he's now 'TT' (teetotal) and loves his family, or thinks he does.  But his male pride leaves his exhausted wife Maggie slaving from dawn to midnight in a dirty shabby flat which is rightly described by visitors as a 'midden'.  Does he pick up a dishcloth or a broom to help?  You bet he doesn't.  And his patriarchal desire to control his 'wains' drives his daughter Jenny away with instructions never to return.  Maggie has her weaknesses too;  she has been so indulgent to her eldest boy Alec that he is a spoiled weakling whose doomed relationship with his hard-as-nails wife Isa brings a dangerous thread of sex and violence into the family home.

There's a small son with a nasty cough, a semi-senile granny, a bossy sister and sister-in-law and three gossipy women neighbours.  The play weaves together their narratives with a dramatic skill that makes it seem extraordinary that this was the author's only hit play.  If, as the programme suggests, she was deliberately ignored and excluded by the Scottish theatrical establishment of the day, then that's a huge shame.  Half a century later, she would have become a star scriptwriter for Eastenders or Coronation Street.  Her characters are the predecessors of the ones which arrived a generation later not just in television soaps but in the working class novels and plays of the 1960s.  The play builds to an emotional climax which never tips over into melodrama or sentimentality;  although the family has a glimpse of a better future, the final blackout falls on John with his head clasped in his hands, conscious of his failure as a father. 

Lamont Stewart can't be compared to Arthur Miller;  her play portrays the grim reality of poverty, with the family fighting over the last crust of bread and jam, but the wider intellectual, political and social issues that Miller confronted are missing.  However in one respect, she's streets ahead of the (mostly male) playwrights of her generation.  This is a feminist play in which the strongest characters are all women, held back by misguided deference to their men.  The dialogue, with its salty Clydeside backchat between the women, shows that Lamont Stewart had an acute ear for words and a wonderful instinct for how to use them dramatically. 

Josie Rourke (director of the excellent but tiny Bush Theatre) gets her first chance to direct at the National and carries it off triumphantly. Despite this play being in previews when I saw it, the thousand and one details were all in place and the timng was right to the nearest split second.  No loose ends at all.  I wondered beforehand how a play about a cramped tenement would work on the vast proscenium space of the Lyttelton stage, but Bunny Christie's set solves the problem ingeniously.  The space is divided by a horizontal and vertical grid, leaving a central space for the Morrison family kitchen, with apartments above and below them partially visible.  One one side there is a small bedroom and on the other, a communal staircase.  There's a perfect balance between the glimpses of action elsewhere and the Morrison kitchen, which meticulously creates the sordid reality of the kind of world Orwell wrote about in The Road to Wigan Pier.

So what does this play tell us about welfare reform?  Above all, like a trip to Africa, it adds a sense of perspective.  Poverty is relative, and it's a posthumous insult to the generation that experienced the 1930s to suggest that we are returning to the same conditions again.  We are no longer in a world where a family worries about whether to eat a single tin of beans today or tomorrow.

The large cast is uniformly excellent, though the Glasgow dialect left some members of the audience struggling. An American lady sitting behind me only seemed to understand occasional snatches and sounded a little bemused.  'Was it Glasgow?  I thought it was Manchester,' she murmured.  This play should be required viewing for MPs if their busy House of Commons schedule allows them to walk across the Thames to see it.

Design For Living

Noel Coward's characters often carry a real whiff of danger.  If there is anything missing in this otherwise excellent production of one of his classic plays at the Old Vic, it's that nasty streak.  Gilda, Leo and Otto (Lisa Dillon, Tom Burke and Andrew Scott) make up a very funny menage-a-trois, well backed up by Angus Wright as Ernest and Maggie McCarthy playing a wonderful cameo as the maid Miss Hodge.  Veteran director Anthony Page, who cut his teeth in the kitchen-sink 1950s when Coward was distinctly out of fashion, has chosen not to play up the gay subtext which Coward was unable to make explicit in the 1930s.  Originally written by Coward as a vehicle for himself and his close friends Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne in New York, the play's risque theme of two men sharing the same woman was too much for the Lord Chamberlain's department in London.  (I must go to the British Library and look up exactly what Lord Cromer and his lieutenants thought of it). 

Coward, as Michael Billington has often pointed out, had a hard-working lower-middle class puritan streak and an ambiguous relationship to the idle rich among whom he moved as his career soared upwards from 1924 onwards.  His sexuality was never ambiguous (he wasn't tempted by women) but for press and public his private life remained firmly in the closet.  Gilda, Otto and Leo are likewise caught between the desire for honesty with each other and the instinct for concealment that comes with professional success.  The last act of the play marks the moment when the trio burst out of the closet.  None of these three characters are particularly pleasant, and of the three I think Andrew Scott gives the best performance as Leo.  Playing a role which Coward himself once performed is always a challenge for an actor, and Scott avoids the pitfall of a camp impersonation.  But he conveys brilliantly the edgy, highly strung character of a man on the edge of a nervous breakdown, lapsing into childish tantrums when he can't get his way -- not so different from Coward himself.  Tom Burke is less successful in giving a distinct personality to Otto, while Lisa Dillon is a little too wholesome to convey the dark, callous side of Gilda.

Design for Living contains some of Coward's funniest lines, and like Private Lives, it is a model of structural precision. Act Two, however, is too long, largely because of the extended drinking session between Leo and Otto which is a prelude to them cuddling together on the sofa at the end.  My guess is that in a less censored age, Coward would have cut out the drinking bout altogether and allowed the latent sexual attraction between the two men to emerge more naturally.   This production has exquisite timing, wonderful sets by Lez Brotherston (which gained their own round of applause on the night I saw the play) and maintains the delicate balance between laughter and emotion which is the essence of Coward's best writing. The combination of tones wobbles slightly at the end of the last act with the humiliation of Ernest, Gilda's art dealer husband, as she opts to return to Leo and Otto instead.  For a minute or two, as Ernest flails around in despair,  the audience isn't quite sure if it should be laughing or not.  Perhaps a greater sense of pain at an earlier stage in the play would have avoided this moment of uncertainty.  In this production Gilda, Leo and Otto are governed more by a brittle hedonism and a light-hearted sense of fun than the sado-masochist desire for inflicting and receiving pain of the kind which Coward dissected in Private Lives. 

Faust and the Jumpers

KERBOOM!!

One of the worst sensations in the theatre is to know that everyone else in the audience is having a great time when you are not.  As I looked at my watch in the Young Vic, praying for this show to end as soon as possible, my distress was worsened by the obvious enjoyment of my neighbours, many of them a third or a quarter of my age. It may not be entirely an age thing, just a matter of personal taste. After all, many people like Andrew Lloyd Webber's musicals. I'm happy to accept that my failure to share everyone else's pleasure may be more my fault rather than that of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe, or of Gisli Orn Gardarsson who has adapted Faust with his Icelandic mates from the Vesturport company.

Having greatly enjoyed Vesturport's stunning adaptation of Kafka's Metamorphosis at the Lyric Hammersmith a few years ago, I was

KERZOOM!!

hoping their unique style of physical theatre would do the same trick this time.  In Metamorphosis, Gisli (I'm not being over-familiar here -- he signs his programme note with just a first name) defied gravity, crawling around like an insect and turning turn walls into floors.  The crucial difference at the Lyric was in the language; the Kafka adaptation had that very talented writer/director David Farr on board, while here the Icelanders have devised a

KERBAMM!!!

 text in a peculiar kind of international English that falls entirely flat.  Mostly shouted at top volume, it has all the poetry of a series of multilingual flight announcements at Reykjavik airport.  Perhaps the Icelandic and German versions will be better. 

KERRANG!!!!

I must apologise for these interruptions.  Another talented Icelandic gymnast has just bounced on to a net just above my head.  Trampolining, bungee-jumping and healthy leaping around on nets are what Vesturport do, so I shouldn't really complain, but it reminded me of a ghastly outing to the acrobatic display at the Millennium Dome a decade ago.  People crawling around on nets and sticking their heads through the scenery are in my view a theatrical cliche, done to death by directors such as Lucy Bailey at Shakespeare's Globe.   The last word on acrobatics as a metaphor for the Meaning of Life was of course written by Tom Stoppard in his brilliant early play Jumpers.  Inspector Bones inquires: 'Who are these acrobats?'  George replies: 'Logical Positivists, mainly, with a linguistic analyst or two, a couple of Benthamite Utilitarians...lapsed Kantians and empiricists generally...'

I'm not complaining on behalf of Goethe, whose Faust wasn't really written for the stage anyway, and who is old enough to look after himself.  And I don't want to sound like an old sourpuss about the Young Vic, which is one of my favourite theatres, with a track record of exciting new shows that is second to none.  I just feel that visual and physical acrobatics, all delivered at a single high-voltage level, aren't enough to tell a dramatic story.  When I go to the theatre, the words matter too.