John Morrison

Strange Interlude

I can't think of an evening I've spent in the theatre where the acting was so good and the play was so terrible.  After the 90-minute first half watching Anne-Marie Duff and the other actors fight a valiant losing battle with Eugene O'Neill's script, I headed for the exit -- but I was still glad I bought a ticket.

This production at the Lyttelton, still in previews, is a rare revival of a lesser-known O'Neill play, written in 1923 and winner of a Pulitzer in 1928.  Well, theatre was different then.  The play has dated very badly, not only because of its melodramatic style and declamatory dialogue, and its theme of inherited insanity.  But its worst feature is the 'experimental' use of direct speech to the audience throughout.  O'Neill takes the theatrical device of the 'aside' and turns it into the essence of the play, so that each character spends half the time revealing his or her inner thoughts directly to the audience.  The result is to remove the uncertainty and ambiguity which are the life of drama. If the audience members are given a privileged and permanent channel to the characters' true thoughts, then they have absolutely no work left to do.  Peter Nichols' Passion Play, in which the two main characters are given alter egos on stage to voice their thoughts, suffers to a degree from the same weakness.  I'm all in favour of soliloquies and a direct dialogue across the fourth wall between audience and actors, but it has to be done in moderation. And the dramatist has to understand that 'truth' is an infinitely flexible concept.  A soliloquy can be just as deceptive as a dialogue between two characters.   O'Neill's over-use of this technique destroys the audience's chances of independently understanding and analysing the characters.  Which is why I left at the interval, frustrated at being spoon-fed by the playwright.  Anyway, I think I learned something about playwriting, so I'm glad I was there.

Anne-Marie Duff, appearing at the National for the first time since her stunning Saint Joan,  is mesmerising.  Charles Edwards, Darren Pettie and Jason Watkins are also excellent.  Simon Godwin directs with great authority, but I would really like to see him in charge of a better play.  Should the National Theatre have left O'Neill's odd script undisturbed in the archives?  On balance, I applaud their choice to do something difficult and challenging, instead of an easy popular revival.  O'Neill at his best is a stunningly good, though verbose, playwright.  Some of my most memorable evenings in the London theatre in the last few years have involved his work.  A Long Day's Journey Into Night with David Suchet last year was brilliant, as was A Moon for the Misbegotten with Kevin Spacey and Eve Best at the Old Vic in 2006, and Thea Sharrock's production of The Emperor Jones with Paterson Joseph at the National in 2007.   I also loved the revival of three of his short shipboard plays in the atmospheric surroundings of the Old Vic Tunnels (now sadly closed).   Strange Interlude is by comparison a failed theatrical experiment, though not quite on the scale of the NT's revival of Ibsen's Emperor and Galilean.  Yes, it is fascinating as a revival, though perhaps not for the reasons the playwright intended.

Chimerica

 

Lucy Kirkwood's new play at the Almeida is hugely ambitious and well worth seeing.  It's had excellent reviews. But for many reasons both the play and the production left me feeling irritated;  it seems a harsh thing to write, but some different artistic choices could have made it much better.

It's inspired by an image -- the famous news photograph of a lone man standing in front of a tank in the centre of Beijing during the Tienanmen massacre in 1989.  The author has invented a fictional photographer, Joe Schofield, who tries to track down the man in the picture in 2012, against a backdrop of massive change in China and in the Sino-American relationship.  There are a lot of short scenes, especially in the first half, and the play has a cinematic feel to it.  The set by Es Devlin is a revolving cube, on to which are projected a series of black and white images, crudely marked in red with a photo editor's crop marks. Boy, does it revolve, accompanied each time by deafening rock music.  For most of the play, the actors are performing inside a smaller cubed space set into this revolving box, which gives them very little space to do anything.  Occasionally they emerge downstage in front of the big cube, in a series of two-handed scenes which become rather repetitive. 

The action takes place partly in Beijing and partly in New York, as Schofield and a journalist colleague from his unnamed newspaper pursue their quest for the elusive Chinese man.  Most of the action takes place in 2012, with the U.S. presidential campaign in the background, but there are flashbacks to the streets of Beijing in 1989. Middle-aged translator Zhang Lin is pursued by memories of his dead wife, who died in the crackdown by the army.  Zhang's vague memory of the 'Tank man' going to the United States, recounted to his old friend Schofield, is the trigger for the photographer's obsessive hunt, which ends up causing a lot of collateral damage.

Lucy Kirkwood's dialogue crackles, the American idiom sounds authentic (at least to a Brit like me), and the performances are excellent, particularly Benedict Wong as the anguished Zhang Lin.  Claudie Blakley is pitch perfect as Tessa, Schofield's British girlfriend, a market researcher he first meets on a flight to Beijing.  I also liked Trevor Cooper as Frank, the hard-boiled news editor, and Sean Gilder as the  equally hard-boiled reporter. 

In the 1980s and 1990s I spent a lot of time working with Reuters international news photographers.  They were the best in the business, and I learned a lot from watching how they operated.  News photograhers are often obsessive, eccentric, street-wise rule-breakers, not very good with words, but with razor-sharp visual reactions.  Their equipment -- in the late 1980s it was generally a Nikon F3 like the one pictured above, heavy as a metal brick but indestructible -- was an extension of their bodies. I watched the almost masturbatory way in which, like soldiers with their rifles, they polished their lenses and filters and blew the dust off the gear in their achingly heavy shoulder bags.  Stephen Campbell Moore, playing Schofield, gets the neurotic compulsive personality just right but as soon as he picks up a camera, his body language, like the equipment he's been given, is all wrong. He comes across like a Sunday afternoon amateur, taking pictures on a day out.   It's a pity that in this production, which has in other ways been exhaustively researched, the technical photographic elements don't work.  Instead of a Nikon, Schofield seems to have gone to Beijing in 1989 with an SLR that doesn't even have a motor drive or a long lens.  In the crucial opening scene, he's on the phone to New York, describing what he's seeing outside his hotel window -- a man standing up to a tank.  Any real photographer, rather than giving a description to his editor, would have dropped the phone instantly and started snapping.  In the scenes set in 2012, Schofield seems to have missed out completely on the digital revolution which overtook news photography in the 1990s.  While his strangely computerless editor is still looking at sheets of contact prints, the photographer is still using his bathroom to develop film and his bedroom to hang up his prints to dry out after being fixed.  In one of the final scenes, Schofield meets Tessa for the last time, camera around his neck on the streets of New York.  This time it's a digital camera, but one without interchangeable lenses which no professional would ever dream of using.

Why does all this matter?  One might argue (and I often do) that theatre shouldn't aspire to photographic realism, and the lack of a motor drive doesn't really spoil the play.  Perhaps.  But this play relies on hyper-realistic details and images in its cinematic design, with each piece of the jigsaw looking just right.  I couldn't really believe in the photography theme of the play, or in the central character as a professional photographer.  Schofield's search for the Tank Man is not aimed at discovering a hidden truth or righting an injustice -- the traditional dramatic goal of a quest -- but merely at getting a good story.  So when his editor orders him to drop the investigation, with the traditional phrase 'Consider yourself spiked', it's hard to feel much sympathy.

Lucy Kirkwood's play hops beween too many characters, losing its focus on the central relationship between Schofield and Zhang Lin in Beijing.  Tessa has no dramatic function in the central story, and appears to have been added just to provide a love interest and a sounding board for the photographer.  When she addresses a marketing seminar on why the idea of the rapid 'westernisation' of China is a misunderstanding, it's information, not drama.  The style of Lyndsey Turner's production, as is to be expected from the Headlong company, is fast, frenetic and noisy, but I feel the over-use of the revolve and the over-emphatic set design make the writing seem fragmented. Almost every scene seems to be over before it has really got going.  In many respects I was reminded of Lucy Prebble's Enron, directed by Headlong guru Rupert Goold, but the result is less satisfactory, partly because the set doesn't allow the actors enough space. 

I would love to see this play with an American audience, who might view it differently. Enron, so deservedly popular here. bombed on Broadway.  Despite Chimerica's undoubted merits, I left the theatre with the feeling that this play may have been over-developed, rather like a pre-digital roll of 35 mm film.  If you spend six years on a play, an initially simple concept can become too complicated. Sometimes less can be more, and this evening in the theatre lasts about half an hour too long, at three hours.  Howard Brenton's recent Beijing-themed play at Hampstead Theatre about the arrest of artist Ai Weiwei, which is more tightly focused, is a good example of how to keep it tight by subtracting what's not essential.  So is The Effect, Lucy Prebble's latest play.

I can however make one confident prediction about Chimerica.  With its uncompromising depiction of modern China's efforts to wipe out all memory of the 1989 protest movement, it is unlikely to be playing in the Beijing equivalent of Shaftesbury Avenue any time soon.

 

The Hothouse

This production of an early, little-known Harold Pinter play at Trafalgar Studios is wonderfully funny, brilliantly acted and highlights a strain of comic exuberance that is less prominent in his later, more political writing.

Not that The Hothouse isn't political.  Set in a mysterious 'rest home' where patients are detained without prospect of release, this is play is a reminder that Pinter was from the start a political playwright, long before his savage attacks on American foreign policy.  One incident that inspired it was a decision by the cash-strapped young actor in 1954 to volunteer as a guinea pig at the Maudsley Hospital.  After preliminary checks, he was subjected without warning to electric shock treatment, and left trembling all over.  As he told Michael Billington many years later, this was at the origin of the play. 'I was well aware of being used for an experiment and feeling quite powerless.'

Pinter wrote the play in 1958, at a time when his career as a playwright was struggling to recover from the critical drubbing given to The Birthday Party -- now a classic.  He put The Hothouse in the drawer and it wasn't performed until the 1980s, so it can't be said to have influenced any of the writers who came along a bit later, like Joe Orton.  But it's definitely Pinter's most Ortonesque play, and seems to spring from a common well to What The Butler Saw.  It taps into the same vein of absurdist, post-1945 black comedy as Ionesco and Duerrenmatt, whose play The Physicists, also featuring strange goings-on in a psychiatric clinic, was written in 1962.   But Pinter's comedy, it seems to me, owes much more to a very British tradition of music hall and end-of-the-pier variety double acts.  Much of the dialogue in The Hothouse is classic comic/straight man stuff, more Morecambe and Wise or Galton and Simpson than Ionesco.  Pinter, one feels, if he hadn't made it as a playwright, might have been quite a good sitcom writer.  Here's a speech that might have come from one of Galton and Simpson's scripts for Tony Hancock:

Women! I've known them all. Did I ever tell you about the woman in the blue dress? She was a spy. A spy in a blue dress. I met her in Casablanca. Believe it or believe it not that woman was an agent for a foreign power. She was tattooed on her belly with a pelican. Yes. Her belly was covered with a pelican. She could make that pelican waddle across the room to you. On all fours, sideways, feet first, arse-upwards, any way you like. Her control was superhuman. Only a woman could possess it. Under her blue dress she wore a shimmy.  And under that shimmy she wore a pelican.'

But the authentic Pinter note comes in the stage direction which follows:  Pause.  If I had to pick one passage in this production that I will always treasure, this is the one.  Simon Russell Beale, playing the authority figure Roote, delivers the speech with the merest suggestion of a sensuous pelican-like twitch which brings the house down.  Pop-eyed, increasingly manic, devoid of any recognisably human empathy, Roote is a great comic part which Russell Beale milks for all it's worth.  As a pompous ex-army officer, he's a predecessor of Captain Mainwaring in Dad's Army.  I was also reminded of that magnificent comic actor Ronnie Barker. 

Russell Beale has the perfect comic foil in John Simm, playing his unctuous, over-deferential assistant Gibbs.  There are also gem-like performances from Indira Varma as Miss Cutts, Roote's randy mistress, and John Heffernan as the camped-up Lush.  Clive Rowe, unfortunately, has only a few lines to deliver as Tubb, leader of the 'understaff'.  I very much enjoyed watching Harry Melling as Lamb, the hapless victim of electric shock treatment.  Lamb thinks he's on the staff, but in a blink of an eye finds he is just as much a victim as the nameless numbered inmates whose doors he is supposed to be locking.

Early Pinter or late Pinter?  Everyone has their preferences, and mine tend towards the first.  This play may not be as perfectly constructed as his later work, and it lacks the same economy of language.   Jamie Lloyd takes the play at a cracking pace, much faster, apparently, than the production at the National Theatre a few years ago.  The result, helped by Soutra Gilmour's design, conveys wonderfully the blowsy, hypocritical facade of Britain at the end of the 1950s, ruled by an officer class whose best days were long behind it

 

London ticket prices soar again

My trip last week to see Passion Play at the Duke of York's has set me thinking about the eternal subject of West End ticket prices.  I was amazed to see the theatre half empty (okay then, half full) for a show of this quality, with the gallery closed and the upper circle, where I was seated, very sparsely populated.  The stalls looked busier, but that is where the buyers of discounted tickets tend to sit.

I now rarely go to West End theatre.  I have never been a great fan of musicals, and when I go to a straight play it's usually when half-price tickets are available on the day in the official TKTS booth in Leicester Square.  But even that means paying more than £50 for two tickets.  I suspect that most frequent theatregoers -- those who buy tickets at least once a week -- are in the same boat.  £30 a ticket is about my maximum.  An evening out for two people, plus two rail fares, two drinks and a programme, costs about £100.  And there are plenty of theatregoers whose budget only runs to half that amount.

So who buys these full-price tickets, apart from American tourists who book online before they cross the Atlantic?   The latest Official London Theatre guide shows that £57.50 is now the standard top price for most productions, with The Audience leading the way at £59.  One or two long-running tourist favourites, such as The Mousetrap and The Woman in Black, come in at just under £50.   Most musicals now charge a top price of £67.50, but I think that's a lot more excusable, considering the extra cost of staging shows with a big cast, a band and a lot of backstage staff.  Les Miserables at £67.50 is better value than The 39 Steps (which has a cast of four) at £52.

Of course, most ticket buyers aren't paying these headline prices.  That's exactly my point.  The West End has become like the souks of Marrakech.   More damaging than the relentless rise in the top prices has been the less noticeable inflation in what's charged for what used to be the less expensive parts of the house.  Many productions now ask £30-40 or more for upper circle tickets, often in cramped seats with little leg-room and poor visibility. 

Experienced theatregoers who are persistent know where to find the cheap deals;  I'm off next week to see John Simm and Simon Russell Beale in The Hothouse at Trafalgar Studios, but only because the theatre is offering a cheap £15 deal on Mondays.  To prevent touting, the tickets can be bought in advance but have to be collected personally at the box office on the night, an arrangement that I thoroughly applaud.

The real problem with high ticket prices is that the West End is shutting out the next generation of theatregoers. I know lots of young actors in London who don't have much money and for whom the West End theatres might as well be in New York.  Cheap deals for under-25s and Equity members seem to be very rare.  For those on a maximum budget of around £15 a ticket, the first choice is to go to fringe theatres, where the cast may very well be appearing for nothing.   I know that the cost of putting on a West End show keeps on rising, and that producers can easily lose money.  And I definitely want professional actors to be paid like professionals for their work.  But I wonder how much longer ticket prices can go on outstripping inflation at a time when incomes are static or falling, without the West End audience going on strike.    

 

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Passion Play

Passion Play

Peter Nichols' Passion Play is one of three classic plays about adultery among the London intellectual middle classes, dating from the period around 1980.  The other two are Tom Stoppard's The Real Thing and Harold Pinter's Betrayal, both of which I have seen more than once in excellent revivals in London.  Passion Play is the only one of the trio that I have never seen.

The greatest single feature of this revival by David Leveaux (who has also directed The Real Thing and Betrayal) is a terrific central performance by Zoe Wanamaker as Eleanor the betrayed wife, visibly disintegrating under the impact of her husband's infidelity.  It's the best thing I have seen her do (and that includes her performances in Much Ado About Nothing and His Girl Friday at the National).  Owen Teale is excellent as her errant husband James, a mild-mannered and generally monogamous picture restorer, who is seduced by one of Eleanor's best friends, the lovely young Kate.  Annabel Scholey plays the icy temptress to perfection in a series of seductive dresses, culminating in an all-furs-and-no-knickers moment.  Sian Thomas is Agnes, whose late husband was also a victim of Kate's Formula One seduction techniques, and is keen to get her revenge.

Stoppard's adultery play is about theatre and reality, using a play within a play to explore the ideas of truth and falsehood.  Pinter takes adultery as the starting point but, in reversing the sequence of the story of an affair, he ends up somewhere else entirely, investigating friendship, loyalty, memory and the relationship between past and present.  Nichols' Passion Play is more straightforward -- a story which begins and finishes with adultery.  His original twist is to supply the two central characters Eleanor and James with doubles Nell and Jim, who voice their inner thoughts.  Samantha Bond and Oliver Cotton do this very convincingly.  In the second half of the play, once the cat has been let out of the bag, the barriers between the protagonists and their alter egos dissolve, and by the end they are effectively sharing the roles.  It's fascinating to watch, but in a way it distracts from the intensity of the action.  Hildegard Bechtler's set is minimalist in the extreme, moving the play further away from mundane realism.

The flaw (at least for me) in Passion Play is the character of Kate, who is a caricature of a bob-haired femme fatale, looking very like Louise Brooks.  Her up-front attitude to sex seems to be over-simplified, and her seduction of James is so one-sided that it reeks of male fantasy.  Crucially, she has no alter ego to voice her thoughts, and so she lacks any inner life.  This isn't Annabel Scholey's fault at all.

I also feel that, while this play deserves its reputation as a classic, when set against Betrayal and The Real Thing, it lacks the extra dimensions which Pinter and Stoppard explore.  I always try to ask myself not just 'What's it about?' but 'What's it REALLY about?'  Passion Play is an excellent play about the corrosive effects of adultery on a middle-aged couple, but somehow it's not a play about life in the broader sense.

Given the tip-top casting and the good reviews this production at the Duke of York's Theatre has garnered, I was surprised on Tuesday evening to find the theatre only half full.  This is disappointing for the actors, but may be an inevitable consequence of the West End's recent hike in ticket prices to unaffordable levels.  I shall be returning to this subject shortly.

This House

When James Graham's play about late 1970s parliamentary shenanigans opened at the Cottesloe last September, I decided to give it a miss.  Having finally caught up with it more than six months later on the much bigger Olivier stage, I now realise how wrong I was.

Having sat in the Commons press gallery myself and looked down on the Palace of Varieties for two years at the end of the 1990s, I didn't imagine that a play about parliament could ever rise above the usual cliches and capture the atmosphere of this dysfunctional political zoo. But this one does. Graham's intelligent play is deservedly attracting sellout audiences to the National Theatre's largest stage. Who would have thought that one of the hottest tickets of 2013 might turn out to be a play about political trench warfare at Westminster nearly half a century ago, featuring a roster of political names, most of whom are now forgotten?

What Graham, director Jeremy Herrin and designer Rae Smith have cleverly done is turn the play's potential handicaps into advantages.  With a huge list of characters to choose from in the Westminster Ship of Fools, they turn the spotlight away from the officers on the bridge and on to what one of the characters calls 'the engine room' -- the offices of the Conservative and Labour whips.  These are the men (they were and are mostly men) who pull the strings, comfort the afflicted and punish the rebellious, ensuring that their MPs turn up to vote.  In the late 1970s, Labour clung to office by the tiniest of majorities, sometimes with no majority at all, relying on arm-twisting, plotting and occasional deviousness to maintain the governments of Harold WIlson and James Callaghan in power. The stakes in the British winner-take-all system were very high. When the Conservative opposition finally won a vote of no confidence in 1979 after nearly five years of attritional warfare, it ushered in the era of Margaret Thatcher and 18 years of Conservative rule.

Much has changed at Westminster since then, but mostly on a superficial level;  many essential things haven't, and this makes the play a lot more topical than I might have imagined.  It's not only the recent death of Thatcher, but the fact that since 2010, for the first time since 1979, we have a hung parliament where no party has an overall majority.  When I was a lobby correspondent in the early years of Tony Blair, Labour had a landslide majority; with a new generation of obedient MPs who did and said what their electronic pagers told them, each vote in the Commons was a formality, with only the Lords providing occasional excitement and dissent.  God, it's so boring, some of the longer-serving press gallery hacks would exclaim.

Graham has done a huge amount of research, not just read a few old press cuttings, as some playwrights do.  He's read all the self-serving autobiographies and interviewed many of the survivors of the 1970s.  Because he focuses on the whips, who never speak in the Commons chamber and whose activities go unrecorded in Hansard and in the press,  he opens up an unfamiliar angle on the story.  Whips such as Walter Harrison and Humphrey Atkins are to Callaghan and Thatcher what Rosencrantz and Guildenstern are to Hamlet.  There's a Shakespearean quality to the way the story is told through the eyes of low-life characters and minor players rather than the principal protagonists.  Many of the MPs are anonymised by being referred to by their constituency names, not their own.  The colourful Norman St John Stevas becomes 'Chelmsford' and Norman Tebbit is 'Chingford', and so on.  The play is of course a blend of fact and fiction, rather than a quasi-documentary, and is all the better for that.  Bernard 'Jack' Weatherill, one of the Tory whips, emerges as transparently kind and decent, as he was in real life, but in other ways the stage character is different from the real model, who was certainly no toff.  Weatherill, although he had once served on the North West Frontier in an Indian army cavalry regiment, was one of the few Tories who had worked with his hands -- he was a Savile Row tailor, and something of a misfit among the knights of the shires on the Conservative benches when he entered parliament.  Graham has his Labour opposite numbers cracking jokes about his suits, but Weatherill once told me a much more revealing story.  In his first few days as an MP, while visiting the gents' toilets, he overheard one of his Tory colleagues complaining to another: 'Can't think what the place is coming to! They've even let my tailor in as a member'. 

One of the aspects of Westminster which has changed since the 1970s is the disappearance of the cohorts of hard-drinking, hard-swearing working class Labour MPs, who were getting thin on the ground even in the late 1990s when I watched from the gallery.  By comparison, the Conservative side has changed much less, with the Thatcherite 'garagistes' now sidelined by another generation of Old Etonians under David Cameron.  The strength of Graham's play is that it gives a recognisable portrait of a failing institution, not just of individuals. Despite, or perhaps because of, a series of family-friendly reforms under Blair, the Commons is still dysfunctional. It works shorter hours and generally avoids late-night sittings. But it still generates among its inmates feelings of paranoia and powerlessness, and a peculiar kind of tunnel vision that shuts out the outside world.  The wider political picture in the real world becomes invisible.  Graham lifts up a stone to expose the creatures scuttling around underneath, and I think it is this glimpse into a hidden world that makes the play so popular with audiences.

In a way I'm glad I've seen the play on the Olivier stage, because this space allows the design to come into its own.  There's a giant back projection of the clock face of Big Ben, and rows of parliamentary benches which are shared between audience members and the actors.  The action is fluent and fluid, switching in a second, with no scenery changes, between the chamber and the backstage offices where the 'usual channels' operate.  The complexity of the action is boiled down with utter clarity, and no scene is allowed to drag on;  up on the gallery there's even a 1970s prog-rock band, playing excruciatingly awful music on guitars and drums.  The 1970s was a bleak decade, as the men's suits with their wide lapels and the hideous women's dresses subtly remind us.  My only complaint about this enjoyable and funny production is that the shiny swivel chairs used in the whip's offices are far too modern for the period.

The Arrest of Ai Weiwei

If contemporary artists are going to be arrested for swindling the public by passing off cheap rubbish as art, not many of them are likely to be left at liberty to walk the streets.  But luckily for the art world, it's only in China where the authorities have the guts to take a firm line against the rising tide of conceptualism.  Hence the arrest and incarceration in 2011 for nearly three months of the artist Ai Weiwei.

Compared to the Pussy Riot trio in Russia, Ai Weiwei seems to have got off lightly, though his experience was unpleasant and at times surreal.  'You are a conman!' a policeman yells into the ear of the artist, manacled to a chair.  I have to confess this is a scene I have often wanted to act out, with me as the policeman and Damien Hirst as the artist.

Ai Weiwei's experience, which he described after his release to the writer Barnaby Martin, has been dramatised at the Hampstead Theatre by Howard Brenton, one of the original comrades-in-arms of Chairman David Hare during British theatre's legendary socialist Long March in the 1960s.  Brenton is an engaging and audience-friendly dramatist, but here the absurdity of the story draws him into unfamiliar territory.  The lack of communication between the artist and his jailers leads to the kind of long pauses that would have turned Harold Pinter green with envy;  the scenes on stage have a whiff of Beckett or Caryl Churchill in their sparse bleakness.  Like Beckett and Pinter (but unlike Churchill) Brenton has a keen sense of comedy, which he uses to great effect. I was strongly reminded of Vaclav Havel's plays about his own dissident experiences in communist-ruled Czechoslovakia.

Benedict Wong gives a splendid performance as the artist, hesitating between futile resistance and pragmatic compromise as his jailers try to humiliate him. 'Who did you kill?  Who are you?' his first duo of police interrogators ask.  It turns out they are from the murder squad, and not much used to questioning artists.

Brenton's dramatisation of the story, pauses and all, is cleverly done, though he loses his way a bit in two invented scenes in which high communist party officials discuss the case.  'He's only an artist. Why can't he paint leaves and pagodas?' one asks the other.  The problem is that although these characters are shown as subtle and intelligent, even cultured (one likes Mozart, the other doesn't), neither deploys any really powerful arguments.  Didn't George Bernard Shaw talk about giving the devil the best tunes?  I'm sure there is a real political argument going on in China behind the scenes about the most useful balance between repression and tolerance towards troublemakers like Ai Weiwei, but this play delivers only a pale reflection of it.  There are, however, useful hints about the fragility of communist authority, which has completely lost its original ideological underpinnings.  The robotic guards in the police station get bored and start playing games on their mobile phones, while the interrogators drop their guard and start discussing noodle recipes with their prisoner.  When Ai Weiwei is moved to an army camp, the soldiers guarding him, who know they are being watched but not listened to, start talking with him without moving their lips, and teach him to do the same.

Brenton's play doesn't have much to say about Ai Weiwei as an artist, though in a programme interview the playwright makes clear he is a big admirer.  This is a play not about art, but about the treatment of an artist.  The real strengths of this production lie in the direction by James Macdonald, whose work I have admired ever since I saw his thrilling production of James Joyce's Exiles at the National a few years ago, and in the design by Ashley Martin Davis.

The play takes place in what appears to be an art gallery 'white cube', with a large rectangular crate in the middle and a row of chairs placed on either side.  It looks and feels like the eve of a major exhibition, with an artwork about to be unpacked and put on show.  Hangers-on take pictures with their mobile phones.  The action starts when Ai Weiwei marches on stage carrying hand luggage, and suddenly we're in the passport queue at Beijing airport.  The artist is told his trip to Hong Kong may endanger state security, and he's bundled off.  The crate opens up into an interrogation room in a police station where the hooded figure of the artist is handcuffed to a chair.  In the second half, set in the army base, the room is a white padded cell, swathed in strips of white tape which provide a visual echo of the artist's best known work, the Beijing 'bird's nest' Olympic stadium. 

Macdonald and his designer have together given the play using a spare, Brechtian look that finds extra layers of meaning.  Ai Weiwei at times makes brief asides to the audience, creating a complicity from the start.    At the end of the play a Chinese vase which has been lurking at the back of the stage on a table is suddenly smashed.  But the speech the artist makes just before this final incident isn't quite powerful enough to hold the attention.  Ai Weiwei is an elliptical artist whose meaning remains wrapped in ambiguity, a bit like his politics.

Othello

If Nicholas Hytner's decade and a half in charge of the National Theatre is to be remembered by a single show, this is the one to go into the history books.  Like Antony and Cleopatra, Othello requires two central characters of equal strength. It's no good if Othello acts Iago off the stage, or vice versa.  One of the reasons for the triumphant quality of this production in the Olivier theatre is the casting of Adrian Lester as Othello and Rory Kinnear as Iago.  Triumphant?  I can't think of any other Shakespearean production that has kept me on the edge of my seat like this one. 

Rory Kinnear is an actor who has grown in stature at the National over the past decade.  He turns Iago into a genuinely chilling villain, manipulative, cold-blooded yet restrained, who speaks with a slight estuary accent that betrays a man who has probably risen from the ranks into the officer class.  Lester's Othello has a patrician born-to-rule quality, combined with a tendency to extreme violence.  Rather than an uncouth military outsider, he is shown in act one (the Venetian scenes) as an officer and a gentleman, well tailored and quite at home in the corridors of power.  Venice is not Venice but Whitehall, and the military decisions on how to confront the latest Cyprus crisis are taken in an anonymous conference room equipped with jugs of coffee and stale sandwiches. Visually, this production mirrors the contemporary military setting which Hytner chose for his post-Iraq version of Henry V (also with Adrian Lester) nearly a decade ago.

Often I complain about over-elaborate sets which cramp the actors, but here the concept Hytner and his designer Vicki Mortimer use is so precisely thought out that there's no conflict possible.  From the opening of the second act, the action takes place in a forward military base, protected by high walls and concrete blast barriers. Life is lived in the demeaning, cramped surroundings of a containerised, prefabricated zoo.  It's Camp Bastion, a military zone where the normal rules of civilian life don't apply.  Into this prison world Othello brings his new bride Desdemona, brilliantly played by newcomer Olivia Vinall.  Desdemona, a ditzy blonde teenager married to a much older man whom she hardly knows,  is completely out of her comfort zone.  She's not the only woman on stage -- there are, as in Camp Bastion, quite a few women soldiers in uniform, but she stands out in her light cotton shirt, slacks and canvas sneakers.  She's an interloper, just like the hapless Rodrigo, who is also in civilian clothes.  There's a wonderful moment when she joins in a football kickabout with a group of bored soldiers, who politely allow her to dribble the ball past them and score a goal.

Othello's transgressive flaw in this production is not to be black, or a former slave.  He's an insider, not an outsider, but he makes a fatal mistake by insisting on bringing his new bride with him to the front line, where clearly she doesn't belong.  When he first appears in Cyprus, striding on stage after the rout of the Turkish fleet, all the soldiers spring to attention and salute, but Othello ignores them as he makes a beeline for Desdemona.  The assembled soldiery look at their boots in embarrassment, and one senses that Othello is oblivious to the way he has undermined his own authority.

One of the key scenes between Othello and Iago is played out in a prefabricated washroom, a dead zone of military plumbing without any windows on the outside world.  The fight scene where the drunken Cassion goes berserk is also framed in a featureless container, decorated with swimsuited pinups and crates of Turkish beer.  The bedroom where Desdemona dies is even more blank and characterless, emphasising her isolation.  The Olivier stage has lots of wide open spaces, but Mortimer's set deliberately confines most of the action to a succession of narrow claustrophobic boxes, which concentrate and focus the action in riveting fashion.  When the characters briefly escape from the boxes into the open air, as Desdemona and Emilia do for the Willow Song scene, it only accentuates the prison-like confinement of their lives.

Despite these challenging design choices, every moment and every line is clearly visible and audible from the back of the circle.  The Olivier, because of its size, can be a fairly dead space for an audience.  It's far easier to create tension and intimacy in a small space like the Donmar, where Chiwetel Ejiofor won an Olivier award for his Othello, or the Cottesloe, where Simon Russell Beale was a terrific Iago some years ago.  Hytner's skill at using this giant stage and auditorium to best advantage in modern-dress versions of classic plays is quite extraordinary.  I have seldom spent such an exciting evening in the theatre, and the standing ovation at the end was totally deserved.

If Othello had followed up his murder of Desdemona by breaking the fourth wall, jumping from the stage and strangling the two audience members whose mobile phones went off in the final deathbed scene, my evening would have been absolutely perfect.

 

 

Venus and Adonis

After Tuesday night's Apocalypse Now experience with Beyonce's helicopters drowning out The Tempest, I'm glad to report that on Wednesday there wasn't even a whisper of a helicopter overhead.  Let's hope the Globe's vigorous complaints will mean peace and quiet on for the rest of the summer season on the South Bank.

I saw this fantastic South African show by the Isango company from Cape Town on their visit to the Globe last year, but I didn't have time to write about it.  Their work is constantly evolving, but it's substantially the same extraordinary blend of opera, dance and movement by a multi-skilled ensemble.  It brings together a classical European operatic tradition and African traditional music and dance, woven around a Shakespearean poem and using several languages.  There's nothing quite like it in London. There are still tickets on sale for the remaining few performances!

The Tempest at Shakespeare's Globe

Prospero's magic unfortunately doesn't have any effect on helicopters.  Last night's performance at Shakespeare's Globe was seriously disrupted by what seemed like a scene from Apocalypse Now -- a fleet of passenger helicopters heading downriver to the O2 for a Beyonce concert.  I hope the singer (said by the Evening Standard to be flying in to her concerts from a luxury hotel in Berkshire) and her entourage will be asked urgently to adjust their route.

The Globe has always suffered from stray plane and helicopter noise, but last night's interruption, which went on for about 30 minutes during the first half of the play, gave a new meaning to Caliban's words 'The isle is full of noises'.  Cast members were reduced to rolling their eyes skywards and pausing to let the noise die down.   Luckily after the interval the Biggles squadron made themselves more scarce, so we could enjoy the play, despite the temperature falling to a few degrees above freezing.

Roger Allam brings different qualities to the central role from Patrick Stewart, who was an outstanding Prospero in 2007.  He is less of a shaman or magus than an ordinary man bent on revenge. His opening scene with Miranda reveals a wounded, raw anger. Prospero is determined to revenge himself on his enemies for deposing him as Duke of Milan twelve years previously.   In this production by Jeremy Herrin, his rage at being usurped finds an echo in the anger of Caliban, who has also been dispossessed. 'This island's mine!' he exclaims.   The parallel between the two characters is more skilfully drawn than in any production I have seen of this play.  And Prospero's decision to forgive and be reconciled with his tormentors has a much greater impact because we have seen his inner fury.

At the Globe it's thankfully the actors who bring out and embody the play, not the stage designers.  This production has an exceptionally strong cast, and it finds out a lot of hidden laughter, not just in the overtly comic scenes with Trinculo and Stefano.  Allam is perfectly partnered by an excellent  Miranda (Jessie Buckley) and Ferdinand (Joshua James), both RADA-trained and appearing at the Globe for the first time.  The key to performing at the Globe is to build a much closer relationship with the audience than is possible in a darkened indoor theatre.  Allam won an Olivier Best Actor award a year ago for his portrayal of Falstaff in Henry IV, and the other cast members also have the experience to handle the intimidating open spaces of the Globe stage without hamming it up.  James Garnon as Caliban, Peter Hamilton Dyer as Alonso, Sam Cox as Stephano and Trevor Fox as Trinculo are all excellent. Garnon is a particularly sly and intelligent Caliban, alternately standing as an equal to his partners on the stage and then shrinking back, semi-human and crouching on his haunches.

Herrin's production lasts just ten minutes short of three hours, which some might find a little long. He leaves in some passages which are often cut short, and also the masque scene, which becomes a slightly comic interlude in which Prospero joins in the flim-flam.  I'm not entirely persuaded by this.  But it's an clear and very illuminating presentation of the play in authentic period costume which will help me forget the misconceived RSC production by David Farr I saw at the Roundhouse in 2012.