John Morrison

She Stoops To Conquer

Directing your first classic English 18th century comedy in the unforgivingly vast surroundings of the Olivier theatre is a high hurdle to jump for a young director like Jamie Lloyd; and it's not made any easier when bloggers like me come along to a very early preview and start to pick holes in a production that hasn't quite got into top gear.

Lloyd, who has risen to prominence directing plays in the much smaller spaces of the Donmar and the Royal Court, rises to the challenge of the Olivier by sensibly framing most of the action in a defined space at the centre of the stage which serves as the drawing room of Squire Hardcastle's home, complete with burning log fire.  It's beautifully designed and costumed by Mark Thompson, and the acting at its best is excellent.  John Heffernan, whom I saw last year as an unforgettable Richard II in Bristol, oozes languid 18th century charm in the supporting role of Hastings, and is well partnered by Cush Jumbo as Constance. Katherine Kelly is superb as Kate Hardcastle, delivering a masterclass in sly high comedy and timing. She plays Kate not as a country ingenue but a mature and quite sophisticated woman who knows exactly what she wants.  Overall, however, there are too many variations in style, with some cast members like Sophie Thompson (Mrs Hardcastle) overplaying the comic effects and others too restrained.  Harry Hadden-Paton, despite his experience as a rioting toff in Laura Wade's Posh, doesn't quite convince as Marlow, the young upper-class twerp whose brazen confidence in seducing serving wenches evaporates into shyness when he meets a girl of his own class.  I much preferred his performance in Jessica Swale's excellent production of The Rivals at Southwark Playhouse in 2010.  In the scene where he meets the lovely Kate for the first time and is tongue-tied in embarrassment, Hadden-Paton makes Marlow such an imbecile that it is hard to see why Kate should actually fancy him.  When she swaps her clothes and pretends to be a barmaid, he again overplays the swaggering seducer. Kate remains in character as herself, even when dissembling, while Marlow I and Marlow II seem to be different people altogether.  Good comedy flows naturally from convincing characters, and this production is too eager to find the audience's funnybone without giving the characters time to develop.  David Fynn as Tony Lumpkin is by contrast a little too restrained (I started to wonder what James Corden might have made of this part) and doesn't quite get across his character's essential feature -- that his little grey cells tick over more slowly than those of everyone else on stage. He should be a beat behind everyone else.  Lumpkin thinks he's clever but he's actually extremely dim, as he proves when he hands over to his mother a letter which he can't read himself, thus giving away the elopment plan of Hastings and Constance.  

The best scenes in this production are very good, but overall the production isn't helped by its thumpety-thump musical score and ho-ho-ho dance interludes, all of which are designed to tell us we're watching a comedy.  It's the unnecessary equivalent of holding up a sign saying LAUGH NOW.  In fact this is the sort of play where it's quite safe to postpone the business of getting laughs until the play has got into its stride.  I think it's safe to say that with a few more performances, the show will tighten up and the comedy will start to flow more naturally as the talented cast gain confidence.

The Sea Plays

Four burly stokers, their shoulders streaked with sweat and dust, are shovelling coal against the flickering orange light of a furnace.  A ship's crew battles against a raging sea, twisting and turning giant iron bulkheads as water cascades over them. One man falls and has to be borne away on the shoulders of his fellows.

This is the stunning opening to three short plays by Eugene O'Neill in the Old Vic Tunnels and I have no doubt it will prove to be one of the most remarkable London fringe theatre productions of 2012.  O'Neill's Sea Plays are staged in a claustrophobic, dank, brick-lined, phantasmagoric space under Waterloo station which is one of the two most atmospheric venues in the capital (the other being Wilton's Music Hall).  It's not a suitable spot for light drawingroom comedy, but it's a perfect frame for the heightened naturalism and despair of O'Neill's seafaring dramas.  This is my second trip to the Tunnels, after seeing an excellent production of two early David Mamet plays in 2011.  On both occasions directors and designers have fully exploited the claustrophobic nature of the space to create a breathtaking theatrical experience.

As the audience files its way through a dank corridor lined with barrels, boxes and maritime detritus, the stokers are framed under a brick archway like inhabitants of hell.  I love shows that come to life before the audience have even taken their seats -- Rupert Goold's site-specific Decade about 9/11, Ian Rickson's Hamlet at the Young Vic, or the African Macbeth which Max Stafford-Clark created at Wilton's a few years ago. 

O'Neill wrote these plays in 1916-17 at the start of his dramatic career;  Bound East For Cardiff, the first of the trilogy, premiered in a rickety wooden theatre perched over the waves in Provincetown.  A seaman lies in his bunk coughing blood, seriously injured after falling into the hold. It's the last half hour in the life of a man who knows he is going to die and end up in a watery grave.  The second play, In The Zone, shows a man falling victim to the wartime paranoia of his fellows who persuade themselves that he's a German spy trying to betray their ship, crossing the Atlantic with ammunition, to the prowling U-boats.  After the interval the final play, The Long Voyage Home, is set in a seedy Docklands bar where a Swedish sailor is drugged and kidnapped.  The plots are linear and predictable, but the writing crackles with tension and atmosphere;  O'Neill's use of popular speech sounds a bit hackneyed to us, but was revolutionary in its day. 

In an ensemble production like this one with a cast of sixteen, it's hard to single out individual actors, but Matthew Trevannion makes the most of the part of an Irish sailor who is the dying man's friend and confidant.  As the naive Swedish sailor, Raymond M Sage gives a memorable performance, well partnered by Amanda Boxer as the lady of the night who lures him to his doom.  Kenneth Hoyt, founder and artistic director for a decade of the Provincetown Repertory Theatre, directs all three plays with great assurance.  But the really outstanding work is done by the design team -- Van Santvoord (stage design), Emma Chapman (lighting) and Alex Baranowski (sound).  By the end, my timbers were thoroughly shivered -- whatever that means. 

 

Count Oederland

Nobody much under 40 will ever have heard of the Swiss dramatist Max Frisch, although he was one of the big beasts of post-war German-language theatre and died only 20 years ago.  So it's heartening to see a first ever production in English of this play from 1951.  Graf Oederland was never a big success and the author rewrote it more than once, but it has lots of themes that resonate today -- an inexplicable motiveless murder, an underground armed rebellion, a mythical axeman who roams the land chopping off heads and a bourgeois social order that is crumbling away from inside.  There are echoes of Brecht and Buechner in this highly political play in twelve scenes, which seems to foreshadow a lot of late 20th century theatre while also tracing the impact of Nazism.

It starts with a public prosecutor pacing around in his bedroom in the small hours of the morning, obsessed by the case of a bank clerk who has murdered an office caretaker with an axe. The killing is motiveless but the prosecutor tells his wife: 'There are times when I understand him'.   The prosecutor disappears into thin air and re-emerges as the reincarnation of Count Oederland ('Wasteland'), a fairytale figure who goes around chopping heads.  The story has elements of a psychological mystery, of a social parable about the haves and the have-nots, and of a dark thriller. 

This production by the Cerberus company at the Arcola doesn't quite master all these registers. Director Christopher Loscher skilfully marshals a cast of eleven on a tiny angled white platform of a stage;  the style is abstract-minimalist, with white designer furniture, and doesn't convey the variety of locations.  The murderous axe is too tiny to become a dominant symbol, and the acting is uneven.  Evelyn Adams shines brightly in three different parts, while Jacob Trenerry is excellent as Dr Hahn.  I also liked Simon Norbury as the prosecutor and Natasha Alderslade as his wife.  But this is a flawed play, with characters that never get beyond the two-dimensional, despite the best efforts of the cast. 

The Art of Concealment

The tiny Jermyn Street Theatre is unusual among London's studio theatres in its location a few steps from Piccadilly Circus, and because of its atmosphere, which owes more to old-fashioned West End theatreland than your average slummy over-the-pub fringe venue.  Rather than serving up revivals of familiar classics, it concentrates on new plays and unjustly forgotten works.  It is the ideal venue for a biographical play about Terence Rattigan, who has swung back into fashion over the past two or three years as audiences and critics have rediscovered not just his talent for stagecraft and dialogue, but his insights into life's hidden emotional depths.

The Art of Concealment by Giles Cole is subtitled The Life of Terence Rattigan and it is exactly that -- a dramatisation of his passage from handsome young Harrovian cricketer in the 1930s through dazzling success and failure to his final years when a new generation of theatrical writers -- Osborne, Wesker, Pinter and their successors -- had elbowed him aside.  Having struggled myself with writing a biographical play covering several decades of a man's life, I think Cole very nearly brings it off, though the play has a few flaws.  It has eight characters when six would probably have sufficed, and it occasionally lapses into repetition and cliche, with one or two scenes too many.

The author puts the dying Rattigan of the 1970s on stage to comment on the antics of his younger self, and the scenes where they are on stage together enable the play to cast away its naturalistic origins to good effect. Cole also brings on Aunt Edna, the fictional middle-aged theatregoer whom Rattigan invented as an argument against the post-war dramatists who he felt lacked old-fashioned craftsmanship.  Rattigan's nemesis, the star critic Kenneth Tynan, doesn't appear in person, but one of Rattigan's boyfriends reads his acid reviews.  Cole writes convincing scenes showing Rattigan with his parents, and suggests that his lifelong concealment of his sexuality owed much to the example of his father, whose diplomatic career ended in disgrace.  His adoring mother appears never to have quite grasped what was meant when her son was described as 'not a ladies' man';  there's an interesting contrast here with Noel Coward, whose equally adoring mother seems never to have had a problem with her son being homosexual.  Like Coward, Rattigan never 'came out' and it would be hopelessly anachronistic to suggest that he should have done so in an era when gay sex was illegal.  When in doubt, Rattigan put his career and reputation first, banishing his boyfriends back to the suburbs and keeping them away from his smart parties.  Cole dramatises well the fierce jealousies between the playwright's lovers and his gay theatrical friends.  'Rent boy!' snarls Rattigan's producer friend Freddie Gilmour (a fictional amalgam of several real people) at one of his boyfriends.

The story is well told, up to a point.  There are one or two key scenes in Rattigan's life which are under-exploited, such as his fateful decision to reject the idea of making the disgraced colonel in Separate Tables overtly gay in the American production of the play.  Cole also leaves out the hilarious story of how the Lord Chamberlain blocked a satire on Hitler which Rattigan co-wrote, on the grounds that the German embassy -- which was sent the script and invited to comment -- didn't appreciate it.  Cole's writing is a bit predictable, and falls well short of the bold imaginative poetry which Tom Stoppard achieved in The Invention of Love, a play on a similar theme which paired the young A E Housman with his older self.

The real problem is that while Rattigan the writer was a master of subtext, in Cole's play all the characters tend to say more or less exactly what they mean.  This is more than a stylistic shortcoming;  it robs the story of the kind of ambiguity that makes drama come alive.   When the older Rattigan talks to the audience about his younger self, he's telling the truth.  But this kind of monologue would be far more interesting if he were to tell a few lies.  I prefer plays that leave a greater element of doubt hanging in the air.  Characters who deceive themselves are more interesting than characters who deceive each other, and characters who attempt to deceive the audience are the most interesting of all.

Dominic Tighe is outstanding as the young Rattigan, and is well supported by Alistair Findlay as his older self.  Graham Pountney doubles as the playwright's father Frank and his camp friend Freddie, while Judy Buxton plays both the adoring mother and the steely Aunt Edna.  Christopher Morgan gives a nice understated performance as Rattigan's friend Cuthbert Worsley, while Daniel Bayle and Charlie Hollway are Rattigan's lovers Kenneth and Michael.   None of them fall short, and I'm sorry that the eighth member of the cast Benedict Salter, playing the young Rattigan's friend Tony Goldschmidt, has only a brief cameo appearance in the opening scene.

Why?  It was Goldschmidt, who was killed in World War Two, who was the co-author of Follow My Leader, which was written in 1938 but only got a licence from the Lord Chamberlain once the war was already under way.  Past its sell-by date, it arrived in the West End in January 1940 and limped along for 16 performances.  The play, archived in the Lord Chamberlain's files in the British Library, is pretty feeble but has one excellent joke;  when the Patriots Party in Moronia try to blow up the embassy of neighbouring Neurasthenia, they destroy the British embassy by mistake, whereupon the British ambassador apologises.