John Morrison

Our Country's Good

I must be one of the last people in the country never to have seen this classic play on stage.  My excuse for missing the original production of Timberlake Wertenbaker's hit play at the Royal Court in the late 1980s was my transportation abroad to a five-year sentence in a particularly harsh penal colony.  No, not Sydney or Botany Bay, but Brezhnev-era Moscow.

Max Stafford-Clark, who directed it first time around, has revived the play some 25 years on and it comes up fresh as a daisy.  My delight at seeing it was doubled by remembering Josie Rourke's luminous and moving production of  The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar in 2012. As the programme at the new St James Theatre reminds us, the original brainwave of basing a play on Thomas Keneally's novel The Playmaker was Stafford-Clark's.  Wertenbaker wrote the play after the Royal Court actors developed his concept in workshops.

The play that resulted is a terrific piece of work that really has stood the test of time, showing the struggle between the emancipating power of theatre and the relentless violence and brutality of the colonial setting.  The deported convicts discover a common humanity as they rehearse and perform George Farquhar's bitter comedy about men in red coats and their love life, thousands of miles away from home. 

It's a gripping production by a well-balanced ensemble cast, my only reservation being that the erotic attraction between Lieutenant Ralph Clark, the director, and his leading lady Mary Brenham, seems somewhat underplayed. 

The St James Theatre is an unsubsidised 312-seat auditorium, and the ticket prices are accordingly steepish;   I hesitated a bit before spending £35 a ticket to see this, but I can confidently say it's worth every penny.  At last night's preview it was good to see in the audience not only the author but one of the stars of the original production, Ron Cook.

The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida

Henry James' The Turn of the Screw is known as a ghost story; it isn't.  It uses the classic framing device of a Victorian ghost tale -- the rapt after-dinner audience, the manuscript confession locked in a drawer -- to explore something much more modern. James, like Scott Fitzgerald in The Great Gatsby, is exploring the idea of the Unreliable Narrator.  The unnamed woman telling the story of her haunting is self-aware, but lacks any real hindsight into her delusional narrative.  The reader sees the story entirely through her eyes as the story spirals onwards through the clinging loops and arabesques of James's late Victorian prose.  All the way through, the author plants a layer of subtext which can be glimpsed, like a ghost through a dirty windowpane.  It's subtle and ambiguous.

Unfortunately none of this ambiguity and subtlety finds its way into the Almeida's adaptation, written by Rebecca Lenkiewicz, which substitutes the painfully obvious at every turn for the ambivalence of James's story.  The involvement in the production of Hammer Theatre of Horror shows this is a straight attempt to do what The Woman in Black has been doing in the West End for more than a decade -- chilling spines.  Yes, there were a couple of moments when my spine was chilled, as were the spines of the sixth-formers sitting around me.  Well, good luck to the Almeida in putting bums on seats with spooky music, stage lighting effects, a Gothic set, screaming fox noises and projected images of bats circling.

I have to say the acting is impeccable, with Anna Madeley as the governess, Gemma Jones as the housekeeper, and terrific performances by 10-year-old Emilia Jones (one of three young actresses) as Flora and Laurence Belcher as Miles.  Lindsay Posner the director plays up the creepiness at the expense of the psychology, but this is inevitable giving the one-dimensional nature of the script.  Rebecca Lenkiewicz is best known for Her Naked Skin, a drama about suffragettes which played at the National Theatre in 2008 and which I thought fell short on several fronts.  I have no problem with her recognition that James's novella had to be adapted to make the transition from page to stage;  in fact I think a bolder, more psychological modernisation of the story of the haunted governess might have worked better.

The changes she has made to the story seem to me to be either unneccessary, or misguided.  The principal one is to change Miles from a young boy into a post-pubertal adolescent whose sexual feelings for his governess seem to be reciprocated.  Critics have long debated the sexual subtext of the original story, but this adaptation pushes the erotic element right into the foreground.  Miles, it appears, has been traumatised by seeing Peter Quint the dead manservant and Miss Jessel the dead governess shagging away in the bushes.  This may seem very dramatic, but it undermines one of the key underpinnings of the original story -- that the children are normal, even banal.  It is the adults who have the problems.

In the original story, what shocks the heroine most of all when Mrs Grose tells her about the past relationship between Peter Quint and Miss Jessel is that they are jumping the class barrier.  Miss Jessel is a gentlewoman, like her successor, but Quint is a 'base menial'.  Lenkiewicz ignores this and puts into Mrs Grose's mouth a different story, that Miss Jessel became pregnant but Quint refused to marry her.  Instead, she injects an element of class tension in Miles's attitude to his governess, whom he accuses of being from a poor family 'almost in the workhouse'.  I think this shows a misunderstanding of the period, as does Miles' familiar use of 'old girl' to address his governess. 

I am not usually a fan of plays in which characters stand and narrate their stories to the audience; however I think this device might have added an extra dimension to the play.  I also wonder whether the sponge-like Mrs Grose could have been developed more.  But the play's central problem is that the audience, like the governess, sees the ghosts as three-dimensional and 'real'.  Mrs Grose and the two children, who don't see the ghosts, are made to appear delusional.  This is the opposite of what James wanted to suggest. 

Cocktail Sticks

Most people, including me, now feel they know Alan Bennett's late parents better than their own.  Like a pair of cracked Babylonian artefacts, Alan's dear old Mam and Dad have been subjected to endless forensic examination ever since he began writing about his Leeds childhood a couple of decades ago.  For those who are well acquainted with the cobbled streets of Bennett-land, Cocktail Sticks doesn't add much to the fund of information, but it's an exquisite hour in the theatre.

This is partly because of a great performance by Alex Jennings as Bennett, complete with diffident manner, owlish spectacles and impeccable northern accent.  What he captures best of all is the writer's astringent, unsentimental quality.  In life, Bennett is a diffident character who may occasionally flinch from direct confrontation, but as a writer he is unsparing about himself and, of course, about his Mam and Dad.  Mam, in particular, may be regretting the long term consequences of her decision to put away a packet of cocktail sticks in the kitchen cupboard.  This archaeological evidence of a social life aspired to but never lived provides Bennett for the title of his hour-long journey down memory lane.

The success of this play in the Lyttelton owes a lot to Nicholas Hytner's direction and to the cameo performances of Gabrielle Lloyd as Mam and Jeff Rawle as Dad.  The timing is perfect, there's a subtle musical score that never gets in the way, and there's excellent help from Derek Hutchinson and Maggie McCarthy in a variety of supporting roles.  But it's easy to overlook just how clever a dramatist Bennett is.  He strings together a series of short scenes, dipping in and out of a conversational narrative with his audience.  Each scene is a short snapshot, and the roles of the young and old Alan, one participating and the other observing and remembering, are blended perfectly.  Bennett stitches the whole thing together with great skill, turning the banality and absence of incident of his early life into rich material.  Did a strange man once put his hand on Alan's knee on an outing to the pictures?  The truth of the incident, like the conversation between Bohr and Heisenberg in Michael Frayn's Copenhagen, will forever remain a mystery.  What counts is how you tell 'em.

Somersaults

There's a hauntingly beautiful moment in this short play by Iain Finlay Macleod when the music changes from run-of-the-mill rock to the soundtrack of a Gaelic song, performed (I think) by the late and wonderful Ishbel MackAskill.  The beauty of a disappearing language and of the culture it represents is the theme of the play, originally staged at the Traverse in Edinburgh in 2011 and now running at the Finborough.  Though the theme naturally resonates less with a London audience, I find it personally compelling;  for many years I believed my Scottish ancestors were Hebridean crofters from Lewis, though my family history researches have so far failed to substantiate this.

Unfortunately, I left the theatre feeling let down by the playwright's inability to translate his ideas into dramatic action;  there are flashes of poetic imagination, but the theme never comes to life.  It's telling that the subject of the decline of Gaelic seems to hang in the background until the final ten minutes, when the actors appear on stage out of costume and out of character to talk about why the language is disappearing.  It's an inadequate device which underlines the failure to bring intangible ideas to life through vivid characters in the way that Jez Butterworth did in Jerusalem.

James, a successful videogames entrepreneur, is a man with lots of money, a Cambridge degree, a wife and a best friend who is his drinking companion.  But when his life in London falls apart into bankruptcy, his wife runs off with his best friend and his possessions are claimed by a dessicated accountant, he becomes obsessed by the need to return to his Isle of Lewis birthplace and his father, a weaver who is dying of cancer. Words -- particularly Gaelic words -- have a value that is beyond price, and we lose them at our peril.

The play is well acted and crisply directed by Russell Bolam (responsible for Southwark Playhouse's excellent recent production of The Seagull), but the opening scenes are clumsy and fragmented.  The play acquires some emotional power when James'  father appears, and the two men start talking in Gaelic.  But the final impression after 70 minutes is of a first draft, not a finished play.  Vicky Featherstone and the National Theatre of Scotland would have done the writer a good turn by developing this deeply personal script more intensively before bringing it to the stage. 

Constellations

Really good new plays are still as elusive as the Higgs boson, though more common than they were 15 or 20 years ago.  The Royal Court Theatre has probably done more to bring this about than any other institution in London.  This play by Nick Payne is a 70-minute two-hander started life in Sloane Square in the small upstairs theatre, and is now ending a successful and sold-out run at the Duke of York's.  Like the Large Hadron Collider, West End theatres can sometimes seem too big for intimate plays on a small scale, but this one works brilliantly.

Sally Hawkins gives an unforgettable performance as Marianne, a university astrophysicist whose occasional awkwardness and struggle to find words is revealed to be an aspect of a much deeper medical problem. (Here comes the spoiler).  The script visits and revisits her relationship with beekeeper Roland (Rafe Spall) at dizzying speed, taking the story in a spider's web of different directions. One moment Marianne confesses to having sex with a colleague, then it's Roland's turn.  At times it seems the author has just strung alternative versions of the same scene back to back, leaving the audience to choose between them.  Past, present and future merge together, cut and pasted in a series of spirals.  The central idea is that time's path can fork and even double back on itself, a scientific concept borrowed from quantum mechanics and Einstein's theory of relativity.  Payne isn't the first playwright to be fascinated by time, uncertainty and higher physics and he won't be the last.  Michael Frayn, Caryl Churchill, Charlotte Jones (whose Humble Boy also featured string theory and beekeeping) have all visited this territory.

As one who has repeatedly tried and failed to grasp even simplified versions of Einstein's theories and is totally baffled by quantum theory, I have to say with a certain amount of relief that Payne doesn't go too deeply into all this.  The scientific theories may be important to him, but to me they're just a bit of fairy dust;  what counts in this play is the characters.  Hawkins (for my money one of the absolute best actors around anywhere) gives a mesmerising performance as the gawky Marianne, while Spall matches her perfectly.  The dialogue crackles, the timing is terrific, and the transitions between scenes are done with great finesse;  the play acquires a real rhythm, with a sense of a formal structure that recalls some of Pinter's best writing.  Much of it is very funny, but in the second half it explodes into tragedy, as Marianne struggles with a brain tumour and investigates the idea of assisted suicide. 

As her life seems to be heading inexorably towards its end, the playwright springs another trick by positing an alternative outcome;  even death, the great certainty, is made to seem uncertain.  Perhaps I don't fully understand Payne's argument, but it seems to me that this alternative ending weakens the overall impact of the play.  Whether or not one believes in an infinite number of parallel universes or multiverses, as human beings we are either alive, or we are dead.  Unlike the Higgs boson, that's a certainty, not a probability. If that is the message of the play, then it ends up rather muffled.