It's not just the recession that makes me combine the three plays I saw yesterday in one post. It would be hard to find a greater contrast between the joyous freewheeling style of actors from South Sudan at Shakespeare's Globe and a traditional production of Hare and Rattigan one-acters in the proscenium arch space of the Harold Pinter Theatre.
On my way home I asked myself which I enjoyed more, and the answer was clear. Despite the excellent acting and writing in the evening double bill, it was my afternoon at the Globe, listening to a language that I don't speak, that left me tingling with excitement and wanting more. It was an inspired decision by the Globe to invite a scratch company from the world's newest country to join in their Globe to Globe festival of 37 plays in 37 different languages. And the choice of Cymbeline, which is not by a long way Shakespeare's greatest play, is just as inspired. Because the play isn't as familiar, it gives the company much greater freedom to create a spontaneous audience reaction that isn't moderated by having seen lots of previous productions of the same text. Cymbeline, with its implausible plotting, unlikely characters and odd mixture of violence and whimsy, lacks the psychological depth of Shakespeare's great plays, but here it comes up fresh as a daisy. The secret ingredient is the way the performers interact with the audience from the first moment they appear on stage, dancing to an African drumbeat which links the scenes throughout.
Acting on the open air Globe stage, without the comforting shroud of darkness of an indoor theatre, can be a terrifying experience. It's street theatre, or what Peter Brook called Rough Theatre, and for actors raised on a diet of Stanislavsky, it doesn't come naturally. But these actors bound on stage without inhibitions, jump straight through the invisible fourth wall and set up a channel of communication with the audience that brings the play to life. What they are channelling is Shakespeare the popular storyteller, the reteller of traditional folk tales to an audience that mostly can't read or write. There are some great individual performances, particularly by Margret Kowarto as Imogen (Innogen in this version) and Francis Paulino Lugali as Posthumus (Postumus). The language barrier just melts away, and the cast know exactly when to slip in a phrase in English ('The Queen is dead') at key moments. I can't recall any production at the Globe at which every scene drew a round of applause and which closed with such a joyous response from the audience. Of the four productions I've seen in the Globe to Globe season so far, this one seems to me the one that best conjures up the original world in which Shakespeare created his theatre. If any further proof is needed of his universality and humanity, this production delivers it without the benefit of fancy sets, sophisticated lighting and design and all the artificial accoutrements of modern theatre.
The double bill production from Chichester which I saw in the evening combines a newly written play by David Hare and Rattigan's justly famed one-acter about a dessicated classics master on the verge of retirement from a public school. The Browning Version is the most beautifully structured one act play I know, telling an entire story in a single hour of real time and a single location. The acting by Nicholas Farrell as Crocker-Harris and Anna Chancellor as his unfaithful wife is of the highest calibre. It's revered as a classic because of Rattigan's mastery of subtext and repressed emotion, his economy of language and his mastery of dramatic surprise. Hare's play South Downs about an unhappy boy in a Sussex public school in 1962 is skilfully written, but not in the same class as Rattigan, despite a performance of great sensitivity by the young actor Alex Lawther in the central role of Blakemore. The action is diluted by being spread over several scenes and the unhappy isolation of Blakemore isn't fully realised. Hare is a very nuanced writer, obviously keen to avoid the usual cliches of wicked bullies, sadistic schoolmasters and sexually tormented adolescents. The masters are reasonably human and even the boys seem to pull their punches; so Blakemore, who is intellectual and precocious, is never pushed into the realm of despair which is inhabited by Rattigan's Crocker-Harris. As a result the scene in which he is befriended by a fellow boy's mother (Anna Chancellor) lacks impact. Blakemore is isolated because he is precocious and has his nose stuck in a book most of the time; this gives him an escape route from the friendlessness of school life. If Hare had chosen to portray a boy without any talent or questing intellect, a complete mediocrity, he might have found more fertile raw material. He also can't match Rattigan's skill in writing subtext -- the oblique way in which people never say exactly what they mean, especially in closed inward-looking institutions like single-sex public schools. Rattigan shows us how life revolves around a series of pretences, civilities and lies which are wrapped around the bitter truth to make it bearable. Hare's dialogue is much more direct, with the characters mostly saying what they are thinking, and it's less effective.
If I had to choose between these two theatrical experiences -- an afternoon in Juba Arabic at the Globe and an evening of highly sophisticated English-language proscenium arch theatre -- I would pick the former, not just for its rarity value. I don't want to misquote Peter Brook by using his definition of 'Deadly Theatre' to describe what I saw at the Harold Pinter, but I can't imagine these two plays ever having the same kind of impact in South Sudan as Cymbeline has managed to create in London. Cramming these two totally different theatrical experiences into one day has reminded me that the western tradition of enclosed proscenium arch theatre, running from Ibsen and Chekhov through to Rattigan and Pinter, is a highly specific and idiosyncratic convention. In some ways, the creation of the invisible 'fourth wall' is a deviation from a much older and richer dramatic tradition in which the relationship between actor and audience is paramount. This is the tradition that Peter Brook has been mining for the last half century and the one that the Globe exists to explore. It's why great actors like David Calder, Janie Dee and Roger Allam have realised how much there is to gain from performing there, even though they have to unlearn much of what they're used to doing and start again from scratch.
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