John Morrison

Mark Rylance's Richard III

There are moments in Mark Rylance's long-awaited Richard III which, like his performance in Jerusalem, conjure up the ghost of Laurence Olivier playing Archie Rice in The Entertainer.  He's a turn, a card, a cheeky chappie;  and it's not only the presence in the cast of Roger Lloyd Pack as his sidekick Buckingham which makes me think that this king is the Del Boy of the middle ages.

Yes, he's outrageously, hilariously funny in a way which may offend Shakespearean purists but will surprise nobody who saw him playing Cleopatra on the same stage.  Rylance, returning to the Globe for the first time in six years, always holds the audience in the palm of his hand.  His timing is incomparable; and there's nobody like him for exerting control over both stage and audience without over-acting.  The last time I saw Richard III at the Globe, the role was played by Kathryn Hunter, another highly individual performer with similar gifts;  I've also seen Ian McKellen play him as a Fascist dictator, Jonathan Slinger play him as a psychopath for the RSC and Kevin Spacey turn him into a twisted evil villain at the Old Vic.  All these were fine performances, and all completely different from each other.  Rylance, cozening the audience into his confidence like a street trader, manages to be completely different again.  Like Roger Allam as Falstaff, he turns Richard into a crowd-pleasing show-off who by the end of the play is in a state of disintegration, unable to joke his way out of trouble.  The best scene in Tim Carroll's production in the one when Richard mounts the throne not on his own but accompanied by his queen;  Anne perches like a stuffed dummy on the arm of his throne, frozen in horror as Richard's true ambitions are revealed.

And yet, and yet...  I feel there's still something missing in Rylance's performance.  Like his previous incarnation Johnny 'Rooster' Byron, and like Allam's Falstaff, he dominates the proceedings, but never chills the spine.  This man, unlike Byron and Falstaff, is a serial killer, and there's a moment when the chuckling has to stop.  Rylance gets the audience on his side early, and never seems to lose their support, but it might be better if he did.  A few years ago I saw Alan Cumming play Dionysus in The Bacchae;  first he charmed the audience by flirting with them, then slowly revealed himself as a psychopath.  It was all deeply uncomfortable, and I was hoping Rylance would perform the same trick, making the audience feel complicit in his crimes.  His Richard certainly develops and evolves, but apart from an arrogant flick of his royal cloak at the groundlings on his way to mount the throne, he remains a bit too amusing to frighten us.

This production is a 'traditional practices' one, with authentic Jacobethan costumes and men playing the women's roles.  This brings with it a style of playing that turns its back on naturalism and tends towards a stylised, operatic theatricality rather than a realistic human drama.  Despite the sterling efforts of Samuel Barnett, James Garnon and Johnny Flynn, the combination of rigid female costume and pancake make-up make it hard for the actors to use their bodies or their faces to bring their roles alive.  Barnett as Queen Elizabeth, denouncing Richard for murdering her sons, manages however to break through the limitations.  There are good backup performances from Globe veterans Paul Chahidi, Liam Brennan and Peter Hamilton Dyer, and terrific cameo efforts by the pink-suited princelings on their way to be murdered in the Tower.

This production has its press night tonight, and I expect it will get even better by the time it has run a few weeks at the Globe and then moves to the West End. 

 

A Doll's House

I'm not usually a big fan of directors who want to update 19th century classics, but this Young Vic production of Ibsen's best known play by Carrie Cracknell is a model of how to do it;  and it boasts a sizzler of a performance by Hattie Morahan, who I bet will be shortlisted for every acting award going in 2012.

Morahan, whom I last saw on stage just down the road at the Old Vic in The Real Thing, is paired with Dominic Rowan as her banker husband Torvald, who is also outstanding.  I'm not sure about some of the other casting, but the ding-dong battle at the end between Nora and Torvald gains extra power from the way the characters lust after each other in the earler scenes.  Rowan and Morahan turn Torvald and Nora into passionate lovers, who at one point seem about to have tear off their clothes in the drawing room.  Morahan dances a mean tarantella in her flaming red fancy dress costume.  But the physical passion between them has a dodgy side;  for Torvald (who is, remember, a banker), it's all about possession, and for Nora, the seduction she turns on is all about manipulation.  The audience can pick and choose which one to sympathise with, but the key thing is the depth of characterisation these actors bring to their roles.  Ibsen, unlike Chekhov, wasn't much good at subtext;  his characters often say exactly what they think, but they have a fascinating ambiguity which this production allows to emerge fully.  Elements of the plot are lifted straight from 19th century melodrama -- The Woman With A Guilty Secret, The Forged Signature, The Fatal Letter -- but the dialogue and the characters are superb.

Dr Rank, the old family friend who confesses to loving Nora just at the time he discovers he is terminally ill, has no real function in the plot, but his presence allows the audience to see Nora as a complete adult, not just as the child-figure which she plays for Torvald.  This man infantilises his wife, but it happens with her connivance.  Nora's transformation from kittenish spouse to independent woman forms a character arc that is a real challenge for whoever is playing the role;  here the director and actor turn the tarantella that Nora dances for Torvald and Rank into a climactic, expressionist moment which concludes the first half of the play.  As the lights dim and Nora dances under a spotlight, it's clear she is dancing for herself, not for the other people in her life, and this moment of self-revelation sets up the final scenes beautifully.

Without re-reading the original and comparing it to Simon Stephens' version, I can't say how many changes he has made.  But the text, the staging, the acting, the design by Ian MacNeil and the costumes by Gabrielle Dalton form a harmonious whole.  Essentially the play remains in the 19th century, but has moved forward 30 or so years to the cusp of the 20th.  The change means there is electric light in the Helmer household, but no jarring innovations of the kind which Howard Davies and Andrew Upton introduced into their adaptations of Gorky and Chekhov at the National Theatre.  The set is a subtle blend of ancient and modern; with its light colours it could almost be copied from an IKEA catalogue.  The biggest innovation is to use a revolve to show not just the Helmer drawing room but the entire flat -- Torvald's cubbyhole of an office, Nora's bedroom and a dining room.  As the stage spins round between scenes, the characters move from one room to another, giving the effect of a camera tracking their movements. The single perspective of the view past the proscenium arch into the drawing room is broken up cinematically to give a more rounded picture of the household as a living organism in constant movement. Nora's two children and her baby (a real live infant who I hope is being paid Equity rates) are given more prominence, and the switch from drawing room to bedroom gives extra intimacy in the scene where Nora confesses to her friend Kristine that she has secretly borrowed money.   The body language, like the words and the scenery, has a modern feel to it;  Nora lies on the bed with her friend like a teenager, kicking her legs in the air, and it feels natural and appropriate.

Between them, the creative team and the actors have managed to breathe new life into Ibsen and bring the play up to date while remaining true to the writer's intentions throughout.  This play has been extended for another week until August 4.  I would love to think of it transferring for a West End run but I can't think of another theatre which could handle the revolving set.  It's certainly one of the best evenings I've spent in the theatre this year, and I hope it propels Hattie Morahan into the very top drawer of stage performers where she clearly belongs.

Simon Russell Beale's Timon of Athens

From Falstaff to Macbeth, from Hamlet to Iago, from Leontes to Benedick -- I find it hard to think of a Shakespearean actor with the range of Simon Russell Beale, except Mark Rylance.  Like Gielgud, Russell Beale is instantly recognisable in face and profile, with his bulging eyes and teddy-bear physique.  His voice is also unmistakable, like Gielgud's, with its measured and musical delivery.  Rather than being a master of disguise, he manages to inhabit every role while always remaining himself.

I first saw him in Shakespeare at the National Theatre in Othello about 15 years ago, then as Hamlet and then as Benedick in Much Ado About Nothing.  I've also seen him at the Almeida playing a uniquely introverted Macbeth, at the Old Vic as Leontes in The Winter's Tale, as Malvolio in Twelfth Night at the Donmar, and most recently on TV as Falstaff.  If, to paraphrase Coward, he ever performs the London telephone directory, sign me up for a ticket.

All that by way of getting to the main point:  I think his latest role as Timon of Athens at the National possibly outstrips anything he has done before.  Russell Beale is a highly cerebral actor and in this play his ability to use his understanding of the words to show Timon's catastrophic fall is mesmerising.   I have only seen one previous production of this Middleton/Shakespeare play, a very disappointing effort at Shakespeare's Globe four years ago directed by Lucy Bailey, who for unexplained reasons set the play in an aviary and missed the chance to draw modern parallels.  In Nicholas Hytner's modern dress production, which I saw in an early preview, the director transforms a play from 400 years ago into something that could have been written yesterday, pulling off the same difficult trick as he did with The Alchemist, Hamlet and The Man of Mode.

Nicholas Hytner's successful reign at the National has probably forced him to spend more time than he might have wished with the mega-rich -- the bankers and hedge fund owners whose names appear in small print at the back of every National Theatre programme.  In an exquisitely framed series of scenes set in an art museum, a bank, a parliamentary lobby, a smart corporate dinner and a fashionable Soho club, Hytner is now able to enjoy quiet revenge for the hours he has spent being polite to odious wealthy donors.  Timon is not just wealthy, he's oligarch-rich;  his latest philanthropic donation is the Timon Gallery, at the opening of which he presides with courteous bonhomie, dispensing favours beneath an El Greco old master. Timon's empire, like so many today, turns out to be a bubble;  when the credit ratings agencies turn on him, the writing is on the wall;  the recipients of his generosity stop fawning on him and come up with a series of excuses for refusing to bail him out.  From a smooth, silky operator, Timon is suddenly transformed into a dishevelled figure of anger as he understands his business is going to the wall.  Inevitably, his underlings leave the building with their desk contents in cardboard boxes -- a Lehman Brothers moment. 

In the second half of the play, Timon becomes an outcast;  there's a bleakness in the landscape and the acting which is worthy of Samuel Beckett but lacks his redeeming hope and humour.  Timon is a troglodyte, a tramp pushing an overloaded shopping trolley stuffed with plastic bags of rubbish, which he scavenges for food.  This is the underside of corporate London, where the poor scurry around half-built concrete stumps, sleeping in cardboard cities -- just like the one which was a permanent feature of the concrete underpass at Waterloo until it was cleaned up a few years ago.  Timon's anger and hatred not just for Athens but for all human beings is without any redeeming qualities;  he spits in the face of his faithful steward (Deborah Findlay) when she comes to help him.  His hidden hoard of gold becomes a false substitute for human values, just as much as in the first half of the play. 

At this point I have to praise not just Hytner and his excellent cast but his designer Tim Hatley, whose neat and elegant stage set fits the production like a glove and uses the revolve on the Olivier stage to great effect.  As I've recently been rude about excessive set design in Shakespeare, let me redress the balance by saying this is exactly how it should be done.  Hatley and Hytner between them have got the tiny details exactly right;  in the scene set in parliament (the palace of Westminster is framed through a large window) the understrapper whom Timon has despatched to seek a bailout wears a plastic visitor pass pinned to his lapel of exactly the right size and design, while his interlocutor has a permanent parliamentary pass on a chain around her neck.  Spot on. In the scene set in a bank, the window is replaced by a giant painting which would be a genuine/fake Damien Hirst if the blobs of colour were round rather than square.  Everywhere in this fluid production there is a sense of a different world outside the corporate bubble;  before the play starts, the audience sees a half-darkened stage cluttered with cheap tents, a reference to the Occupy movement.  The anti-Athenian rebels led by Alcibiades, a gang of violent anti-capitalist protesters, inject a sinister note of violence.  There are some unforgettable images -- Timon lifts an iron plate covering a sewer and fishes out his stash of gold bars, bathed in yellow light and wreaths of smoke. 

This is a Travelex show, with lots of cheap tickets, though I imagine once the reviews are in it will sell out fast. 

The Taming of the Shrew at Shakespeare's Globe

How do you stage one of Shakespeare's most problematic plays?  The Merchant of Venice may have a whiff of antisemitism, but it also has layers of ambiguity;  The Taming of Shrew, on the other hand, remains misogynistic to 21st century ears however you read it.  The most interesting production I have ever seen was Greg Doran's for the RSC nine years ago, with Alexandra Gilbreath and Jasper Britton playing Kate and Petruchio as a pair of deeply damaged and destructive people who become soulmates and achieve a kind of fragile equality.

The last time Shakespeare's Globe tackled the play, they solved the problem with an all-female cast led by Kathryn Hunter as Kate and Janet McTeer as Petruchio;  this injected all kinds of layers of ironic meaning into Kate's final submission to her husband.  The problem is that it's hard to find even a germ of this ironic reading in Shakespeare's text, an early work which falls short of the psychological insights of his later writing.  Watching this new production at Shakespeare's Globe, I was struck by how little attention he pays to developing the role of Kate, who has very little to say for herself and offers no insights into her own character.  Petruchio, by contrast, talks all the time, but also lacks any self-awareness.  He stays the same from his first appearance to the end, while Kate executes a sudden and unexplained 180 degree turn from aggression to submission.  This falls far short of what Shakespeare achieved in Much Ado About Nothing, with the characters of Beatrice and Benedict going through parallel character arcs which take them both from a pose of hostility to genuine mutual love.

This production, directed by Toby Frow, plumps boldly for turning the play into a comic romp, sidestepping the psychological difficulties.  It succeeds triumphantly in generating a cascade of laughs, thanks to a very strong and experienced cast.  Like a box of lemons being squeezed, each scene generates the maximum number of comic moments.  The production is self-consciously theatrical in a Brechtian sense, helped by the decision to use the opening scene with the drunken Christopher Sly to create a 'play within a play' framework.  The slapstick is done very effectively, and the interplay with the audience is achieved without too much exaggeration.  Samantha Spiro as Kate and Simon Paisley Day as Petruchio are both very funny, while never suggesting the genuine affinity which might make their story more credible.  Pearce Quigley as Grumio the servant adds a masterly range of deadpan comic touches to his role, and all the characters involved in the predictable subplot about the wooing of Bianca perform with great vigour.  There are moments when the comedy becomes a bit too much like a Morecambe and Wise Christmas Special, but this is a production that takes maximum advantage of the Globe's unique space. Saturday afternoon's performance was a sellout, and there aren't many tickets left for the remainder of the run.

No sets please...

A link to my theatre blog piece for the Guardian yesterday.  The headline was written by someone else.  I'm griping about productions of Shakespeare, not Chekhov, Ibsen, Shaw and everyone else.

Still Life

Whatever happened to lunchtime theatre?  Is it dead and buried, just like the traditional lunchbreak?  It  seems to be in terminal decline in London, a victim of a world in which people have to be too busy to do more than grab a sandwich at their desks.

But all is not completely lost.  The Bridewell Theatre, just off Fleet Street, still offers a home at lunchtime for that orphan of the theatre world, the one-act play.  And if they are all as good as this production by DeadAnt of Noel Coward's classic Still Life, lunchtime theatre will deserve a comeback.

Still Life, for anyone who's been away, is one of the scripts from Coward's Tonight at 8.30 season of one-act plays, dating from the mid-1930s, in which he starred with Gertrude Lawrence.  It was later developed into the classic movie Brief Encounter with Celia Johnson and Trevor Howard as the couple who meet in the tearoom at Milford Junction station, fall in love, almost have an affair and finally agree to part.

James Williams' production wisely makes no attempt to update or change the original script, and uses the Rachmaninov music from the film score to get the audience in the mood.  It's meticulously designed to the very last Bath bun and the acting is pitch perfect.  There are lovely steam train sound effects, reminding us that today, without the showers of cinders from passing locomotives, there is no longer any opportunity for general practitioners to offer assistance to lady passengers who think they've got something in their eye.  (This is one of the many disadvantages of progress, but we'll let that pass for now.)

It's a reminder of Coward's genius with dialogue;  only Rattigan and Pinter are in the same division in creating subtext for the characters on stage, enabling them to act one thing while saying something completely different.  Some of the cod working class repartee the playwright put into the mouths of his characters now sounds a bit forced, but it doesn't matter.  What counts are the subtle signals that point to what the characters are feeling, rather than saying.  'Stanley, don't you be saucy - you were saucy when you started to work here, and you've been getting saucier and saucier ever since,' says the redoubtable Myrtle, queen of the tearoom, to young Stanley.  Poor Stanley, forever banished to the platform to sell bars of milk chocolate to passengers, never gets the chance to be saucy with Beryl the waitress, but the idea of the tearoom as a place for hidden passions has been successfully planted.

And so it continues.  By the end there's not a dry hanky in the house as the leavetaking between almost-lovers Laura and Alec is brutally disrupted by the arrival of Laura's gossipy acquaintance Dolly, bringing them down to earth with a bump. Laura and Alec are played with exquisite stiff upper lips by Alice Knapton and James Powell, while Jean Perkins as Myrtle and Anthony Wise as Albert (played by Stanley Holloway in the film) reap most of the laughs.

Unfortunately this is the last week of this play, but try to catch it if you can.  Just tell your boss you are going out for a rock cake at one o'clock and may be some time.

 

The Physicists

Is there a scientific basis for coincidence?  I have absolutely no idea.  In fact since passing my O level physics in 1964 I have struggled to understand science.  I once found myself on a plane crossing the Atlantic sitting next to a professor of astrophysics who patiently tried to explain Einstein's theory of relativity to me at my request.  By the time we touched down I was still none the wiser.  My fault, not his.

I mention coincidence because I went to see Friedrich Duerrenmatt's 1962 play at the Donmar just as news started breaking about the possible discovery of the Higgs Boson by physicists at CERN.  Einstein and Newton, or people pretending to be them, appear in the play.  The third character isn't Higgs (a name which always makes me think of the theatre critic in Tom Stoppard's The Real Inspector Hound) but Moebius.  Not August Moebius, the mathematician who described the Moebius strip, but the fictional Johann Wilhelm Moebius.

Like his Swiss compatriot Max Frisch, Duerrenmatt was a big cutting-edge name in European theatre in the middle of the 20th century.  His drama doesn't seem quite so cutting-edge now, but I think his non-realist way of putting intellectual questions on stage may well have influenced Stoppard and Caryl Churchill.  I think there are echoes of this play in Stoppard's Jumpers and Churchill's Top Girls, and an absurdist doctors/nurses/patients/policeman plot which may have given Joe Orton some ideas for Loot and What the Butler Saw.

Duerrenmatt, writing at the time of the Cuban missile crisis and the threat of mass nuclear destruction, depicts three physicists in a psychiatric clinic who strangle their nurses; the first two, who seem to think they are Einstein and Newton, take no moral responsibility for their actions.  'Nurses are nurses; we are physicists' is the closing line of Act One.  Moebius, the most interesting character in the play, is the only one of the three who seems to have any moral feelings at all.  To say that physicists have to take responsibility for the consequences of their discoveries and not just pass the buck back to politicians is a fairly obvious argument.  Duerrenmatt also plays around with the idea of sane people  pretending, like Hamlet, to be mad to achieve a higher purpose.  Moebius appears to be totally sane, but claims to be seeing visions of King Solomon.  In fact the story is a bit more complicated than that, but the moral dilemma of the scientist (Oppenheimer, Sakharov) who is tortured by the uses to which his research is put hasn't dated.  Possibly we are now less worried by nuclear weapons and more by the military applications of research into biology, psychology or pharmacology, but the issues haven't changed.

What matters more to me is whether the play works in dramatic terms.  Josie Rourke the director and her designer Robert Jones create an all-white clinical setting.  The play only really comes to life with the appearance of the wonderful John Heffernan as Moebius.  He is as gifted as Michael Sheen, though less well known, and having seen him several times in stage roles including Richard II at the Tobacco Factory I think it is only a matter of time before he becomes a household name.  Heffernan brings a sense of humanity and suffering to the role of Moebius and gives a really breathtaking performance, particularly in the two scenes he shares with Miranda Raison. I wish I could say the same about Sophie Thompson in the role of Dr Mathilde von Zand, the clinic proprietor.  She appears to have strayed in to this production from a Carry On film and overacts horribly.