John Morrison

Privates on Parade

Oh, the joy of it!  'You'll need a piece of four by two/To get a really good pull through'.  Anyone who remembers how to clean the barrel of a .303 rifle, as I did in the school cadet force in the 1960s, will glow with pleasure at hearing Peter Nichols' double entendres and Denis King's wonderful pastiche songs in this revival by Michael Grandage at the Noel Coward theatre.

Grandage directed this play at the Donmar in 2001, in a production for which Roger Allam won an Olivier award as the camp Captain Terri Dennis ('Ooh, that Bernadette Shaw!').  This time around Dennis is played in equally sublime fashion by Simon Russell Beale.  I can see why the director has returned for a second bite at Peter Nichols' excellent 1970s play about entertaining the troops, which seems to me now much more than just a period piece.

What were we doing in Malaya in the late 1940s?  Well, much the same as we're doing now in Afghanistan.  When Peter Nichols wrote his play, British troops had been withdrawn from east of Suez and weren't fighting anywhere, so his message about the futility of overseas military intervention has acquired a new topicality.  Sometimes seeing a play second time around produces disillusionment, but in this case I feel I'm discovering depths I didn't see before.

The play has an absurdist streak that didn't register with me when I saw it 11 years ago.  When the vile sergeant-major Reg Drummond and the loopy Christian idealist Major Giles Flack combine to root out the use of perfume in the men's ablutions, there are echoes of Joe Orton and early Alan Bennett.  It'a model example of how to integrate songs into a play, and its structure is very neat, weaving several stories together and introducing subtle changes of tone that never feel out of place.  Like Osborne's The Entertainer, it explores the sunset of Empire through theatrical metaphor, and the passage of time has added depth.  This is clear in the final image of the play, when the two mute Chinese 'boys' who have faithfully served up gin and lemonade reappear in elegant suits against a back-projected picture of present-day Singapore, oozing wealth and succcess.  Of course, the capitalist nirvana of modern Singapore might not have happened if the communist-led insurgency of the 1940s had succeeded.  That thought doesn't undermine the dramatic effectiveness of Nichols' play, just gives it an extra twist.

The casting is universally excellent, as is the music and the typically spare design by Christopher Oram.  Russell Beale triumphs for a third time this year, after playing Josef Stalin and Timon of Athens at the National Theatre.  He's as near perfect as you can get in a fruity Carmen Miranda number and a very clever Noel Coward pastiche.  Joseph Timms, a young actor I've seen on stage in many a lesser role, is excellent as the naive young private Stephen Flowers.  He sings and dances in tip-top style in an Astaire/Rogers style number with the Eurasian artiste Sylvia (Sophiya Haque).  There's a particularly strong performance by Angus Wright as Major Flack, who becomes much more than a caricature. 

It's hard to compare two productions 11 years apart, but the shift from the much smaller Donmar has brought a quite a few benefits.  What the play may lose in intimacy it more than gains from being on a larger stage, which gives the songs and choreography a chance to breathe.  There's some very good lighting as well.

On the subject of revivals, I shall be interested to see if anyone tackles Joan Littlewood's Oh What A Lovely War when the centenary of World War One comes around in a couple of years.  And I hope someone who has served in Afghanistan the way Nicholas did in Malaya turns the experience into a stage play as good as this one.

The Changeling at the Young Vic

How do you describe a production which throws everythng but the kitchen sink at a play in the hope that a few things will hit the target?  A few years ago I would have used the term Rupert (after Rupert Goold) but his recent productions have been quite coherent and restrained.  So I'll switch to using Hill-Gibbins instead. So if anyone overhears me exiting a theatre saying 'That was a real Hill-Gibbins of a show,' they'll know what I mean.

Joe Hill-Gibbins is a very talented director, two of whose previous productions I've seen at the Young Vic -- The Beauty Queen of Linnane and The Glass Menagerie.  I liked the latter very much but felt it displayed a 'look at me' tendency and a lack of visual focus;  there was simply too much going on.  Much the same can be said of this production of the Middleton/Rowley Jacobean revenge tragedy.  Hill-Gibbins has stripped down the Young Vic arena to the basics, with an austerity-type set that looks like a shabby rehearsal room.  There ain't no red velvet in this theatre -- just raw concrete, wooden crates, some trolleys with medical artefacts, a bed made of pallets and plenty of harsh industrial lighting.

It's very reminiscent of the Michael Sheen Hamlet in the same space last year, set in a high-security mental institution, and of the current Julius Caesar at the Donmar, set in a women's prison.  But where those two productions conveyed a clear locational message, the set in this show doesn't tell the audience where it is supposed to be.  There are elements of a rehearsal room, with a dressing room and actor's make-up mirrors in a corner of the rectangular playing area;  there's a net on one side of the space between audience and actors, but not on the other;  there are wheelchairs in which some members of the audience are seated.  In Julius Caesar, a prison murder is committed with the tools at hand -- a bottle of bleach and a kettle of boiling water -- and it makes perfect sense.  But here the weapons seem to involve custard pies and strawberry jam, for no apparent reason.  Overall there seems to be no coherence of style, only an excess of effect-making devices which suggest that the director doesn't really trust the play.

There's an excellent cast, including Sinead Matthews and Harry Hadden-Paton.  As with The Glass Menagerie, there's one very effective scene where the actors are allowed to get on with it, unencumbered by stage effects and business;  it's the one where Beatrice-Joanna (Matthews) is confronted by her servant De Flores (Zubin Varla) who has murdered her husband-to-be at her command, and now blackmails his mistress into having sex by threatening to reveal her secret.  There's a subtext here which this production doesn't quite give the actors the space to explore;  is Beatrice-Joanna really much more attracted to De Flores than to Alsemero, the lover for whose sake she orders the murder of her fiance?  It's no criticism of Matthews and Varla to wonder whether there are dimensions to their relationship that don't get fully explored in this frenetic production.

I have to say I much preferred Declan Donnellan's much simpler version of The Changeling at the Barbican five years ago for Cheek By Jowl, which featured Will Keen and Olivia WIlliams.  That production concentrated on extracting maximum meaning from the text.  I saw it a few months before I launched this blog, so I regret I can't call up what I felt about it at the time. 

Julius Caesar at the Donmar

There's a thrilling level of tension throughout this imaginative and adventurous production by Phyllida Lloyd at the Donmar.  Watching the second preview on Friday night, I remained on the edge of my seat for more than two hours.  Though the show runs without an interval, it crackles with excitement from beginning to end.

Like the Michael Sheen Hamlet at the Young Vic a year ago, it's set in an institution -- a women's prison.  There's a welcome absence of site-specific malarkey and the audience, for once, is left  allowed to sit down without being ordered around by fierce uniformed guards.  But the prison atmosphere is palpable throughout, with roving spotlights picking out the actors from afar, and a cacophony of harsh noise that never lets up, from the opening moments when the actors bang their metal dinner trays. 

The Donmar, not the most flexible of small theatres, has been transformed.  The welders have been called in to turn it into a brutalist nightmare of a place, where every noise is metallic and every steel surface is jagged and hard.   It's not so much the Roman Capitol as Holloway prison on a bad night.  The story of Caesar's killing and its aftermath becomes a play within a play, performed by a motley cast who file in from their cells in grey and yellow prison tracksuits and hoodies.  Lloyd creates a dog-eat-dog world where life is cheap and violence is always just below the surface.  What emerges particularly clearly in this reading is the Shakespearean message that the conspirators' ultimate failure comes because Brutus isn't ruthless enough;  a mistaken sense of fair play and a distaste for excessive violence prevents him from ordering the murder of Mark Antony, Caesar's underestimated sidekick.  But prison is no place for ethical thinking;  only the toughest survive.

The prison setting gives the violence an improvised feel; the weapons used to kill Caesar are the ones easily available behind bars, including a bottle of bleach and a kettle full of boiling water.   In the battle scenes the guns are plastic toys and the knives are prison-issue plastic cutlery, but the killing is no less real.  The soothsayer is a sinister child riding a tricycle, and the Ides of March prophecy comes from a woman's magazine horoscope.  And in Bunny Christie's excellent design, when the conspirators dip their hands in Caesar's blood, the splash of colour comes from bright red rubber gloves.  That's a small stroke of genius, one of many imaginative leaps in this production.  At the second preview I saw on Friday, there were still a few rough edges, a sign not of uncertainty but of an excessively fertile collective imagination at work.  By press night, I expect a few elements to be successfully pruned back.

There are two former Cleopatras in this play -- Harriet Walter and Frances Barber.  Walter, androgynous with short cropped hair, turns Brutus into a character wracked by moral uncertainty, always a little apart from the other conspirators.  It's a stunningly effective performance.  I'm less impressed with Barber's swaggering Caesar, lording it over the other prisoners in black beret and black leather coat.  Somehow this Caesar, stuffing a doughnut into the mouth of Cassius as an excercise in humiliation,  manages to appear more grotesque than truly frightening, lacking the inner stillness of the true dictator.  Barber comes across more like a tough criminal enforcer in a subordinate position than a true capo di tutti capi whose will is enforced at the merest frown or gesture.  But the rest of the acting is superb;  it's no surprise that Jenny Jules makes a brilliant Cassius, whose confrontation and reconciliation with Brutus before the battle of Philippi is one of the dramatic highlights.  There is another standout performances by rising star Cush Jumbo as Mark Antony.  She has the capacity to turn a speech as familiar as the funeral oration over Caesar's body into something new and electrifying. Clare Dunne doubles excellently as Portia and Octavius Caesar, slipping from a soft Dublin accent as Brutus's wife to a harsh and unforgiving Belfast twang.

The perennial problem with the play's structure is that after the funeral scene, everything is an anticlimax.   Lloyd tries hard to overcome this with a variety of stage techniques in the second half, not all of which are equally effective.  For me, there's a bit too much rock music on offer and occasionally the action drifts away from Shakespeare.   But that's what previews are designed for;  this is a living production in which performance, design and style seem to have grown organically, rather than being imposed by directorial dictatorship.  Not everyone will buy into the giant imaginative leaps that Phyllida Lloyd demands of the audience;  the same was true of Michael Sheen's Hamlet a year ago.  But I found her approach exhilarating and refreshing, breathing energy and drama into a play that can sometimes fall into ho-hum predictability.

I now realise that I haven't written at all about the aspect of this production that has attracted most advance attention -- the fact that all the actors are female.  I don't think it actually matters that much, though it's great to see someone of the calibre of Harriet Walter stamp their authority on what are usually male roles.  Did I at any point miss the presence of male actors?  Certainly not, and I have to say I never really thought about this aspect of the production until the performance was over.