John Morrison

Ghosts

'Old Ibsen is as dead as a doornail' wrote the Pall Mall Gazette after the first London performance in 1891 of Ghosts, a Scandinavian in-yer-face shocker.  Well, Ibsen is still a household name while the Pall Mall Gazette lies forgotten and yellowing in the archives.  Director Richard Eyre, in his programme note for this terrific revival at the Almeida, reminds us of some of the other adjectives thrown at the play: 'revoltingly suggestive and blasphemous...a dirty deed done in public.'  And he adds a cautionary reminder that the first critical response to Edward Bond's Saved in 1965 and to Sarah Kane's Blasted 30 years later was remarkably similar.

So what's so good about Ibsen?  This is a question I never bothered to ask myself until I belatedly learned to appreciate his plays about a decade ago.  I think it was the famous Almeida production of Hedda Gabler which landed Eve Best an Olivier award, or it may have been Trevor Nunn's An Enemy of the People at the National.  Until then I had only seen Peer Gynt in a production at the Young Vic with Alex Jennings, from which I beat a retreat at the interval, feeling that Ibsen wasn't my cup of tea. Now it's fair to say I'm a convert;  I've seen John Gabriel Borkman (Paul Scofield's last appearance at the National), Pillars of the Community directed by Marianne Elliott, The Wild Duck at the Donmar, A Doll's House with Hattie Morahan as Nora, and another compelling production of Hedda Gabler with Sheridan Smith.  There are still a few Ibsen plays I haven't seen, but I am sure I will get round to them eventually.  The key thing is that I know they'll be worth seeing, though I still have reservations about Peer Gynt, which in the immortal words of Billy Russell's Rita, is best staged on the radio.

It was RIchard Eyre who directed Eve Best in Hedda Gabler, and now he's back at the Almeida with another magical interpretation, using his own version of the play.  Tt runs straight through without an interval in well under two hours, which gives the story an unusual degree of paciness.  I'm not sure whether he's made cuts to any of the three acts, but this version moves with unusual speed towards its climax, with Mrs Alving's son Oswald disintegrating before our eyes on the sofa in his mother's arms, struck down by hereditary syphilis.

Euthanasia, incest, venereal disease, adultery -- this is the ultimate skeletons-in-a-cupboard play.  The 19th century theatre loved these skeletons but Ibsen's use of them rises above standard melodrama because of the believable complexity of his characters and the way he integrates the backstory with the present, while sneaking a glimpse into the future.  Mrs Alving, for example, is a terrible mother and wasn't a very good wife to her philandering husband, but neither is she a complete monster.  Lesley Manville conveys this ambiguity perfectly;  her free-thinking views draw the sympathy of a 2013 audience quite easily, but her deviousness, her neglect of her son and her ability to cover up the truth make us hesitate. 

Pastor Manders, on the other hand... Played by the marvellous Will Keen, he is one of the most unsavoury priests I've ever seen set foot on stage.  I remember seeing Keen in a Cheek By Jowl production of The Changeling a few years ago, in the role of the sinister de Flores.  There's nobody who does sinister quite as well, and in this play he's just riveting.  I couldn't take my eyes off him all through the long scene in Act One with Mrs Alving.  Rather than hectoring religious pomposity, Keen's pastor delivers his hypocritical poison with a deceptive gentleness.  He's conversational, until suddenly roused to anger.  Keen acts the part with his whole body, in particular with his hands, which are extraordinarily expressive in their movements.  This is a man who could put his hands together to say a prayer, then use them to strangle someone without missing a beat.

There's a lot of darkness in this play, suggestively brought home to us by Peter Mumford's lighting and Tim Hatley's design.  The other characters are beautifully played by Charlene McKenna (Regina), Brian McCardie (Engstrand) and Jack Lowden (Oswald).  Ibsen, I'm happy to say, is not dead as a doornail -- he is alive and well and living in Islington.  Perhaps the standard of London theatre is now so high that we take revivals of this quality a bit too much for granted.  We shouldn't.

Roots

Yes, I forsook the final round of the Great British Bake-Off for a night at the theatre.  But who needs technicolour TV cheffing when you can see Jessica Raine and Linda Bassett cooking away live on stage at the  Donmar?

This production of Arnold Wesker's classic 1950s play, set in a farm labourer's family in Norfolk, is fascinating for all sort of reasons.  Bassett and Raine peel potatoes, string beans, cook, bake, wash up, dry up, sweep the floor, tidy away the household debris, make the tea, put 'glass' cherries on the trifle and keep things clean and ship-shape.  They would be welcome in my house any time.  It's a delight to watch, and the cooking has its own drama.  Just as Jessica Raine's Beatie is about to bake a cake for her sister, her father intervenes. 'Not with my electricity!' he says, and the cake remains unbaked.  Even in 1959, people were worrying about high energy prices, which just shows what a topical play this is.

Of course, the world Wesker is depicting has changed beyond recognition, and so has the relationship between the play and the audience.  Back in 1959, even a Sloane Square audience would have been aware they were living in a country where some people still had no electricity or running water.  Now the sight of a tin bath filled up with buckets from the wood-fired boiler, or a meal cooked on a coal-fired kitchen range, has all the exotic strangeness of a trip up the Amazon to visit the head-hunters.  'Kitchen-sink' theatre in the 1950s was an uncomfortable reminder of a world from which the audience, or at least their parents, were just emerging.  In 2013 Hildegard Bechtler's immaculate 1950s set, perfect to the last tiny detail, depicts a world almost unimaginable for the Donmar's audience of well-heeled corporate lawyers, fiddling with their smartphones (more on this later).

But the core theme of the play, the British working class's limited cultural horizons and stunted emotional intelligence, hasn't dated.  Wesker's central character Beatie finds herself trapped awkwardly between the low expectations of her Norfolk family and her independent life in London, where her 'intellectual' chef boyfriend Ronnie has introduced her to a new world of politics, debate and art.  Beatie, arriving with her suitcase to stay first wth her her married sister and then her parents, shows off her abstract paintings to general incomprehension.  The absent Ronnie, who is due to visit his future in-laws for the first time, begins to dominate the play as Beatie, mounting a chair, ventriloquises his passionate speeches.   This is a girl who still loves her family but for whom life could be offering something more.  There's a magical sequence at the end of the second act where Beatie puts on an LP record of Bizet's L'Arlesienne and dances, trying to persuade her mother that classical music isn't all 'squit'. 

In the end, the long-awaited Ronnie fails to show.  With the family all squeezed into their Sunday best around the table for an old-fashioned high tea, the postman brings a letter from him breaking off his relationship.  Beatie is shattered but her mother's harsh, unsympathetic response rings true;  the obstinacy and cussed ignorance that she sees in her family are also her own ingrained flaws. 'The apple doesn't fall far from the tree,' as her mother acidly observes.  Finally Beatie, in a closing speech, seems for the first time to acquire her own voice and become articulate.

This is a cracking production by James Macdonald, a director I admire more every time I see his work. Jessica Raine captures the ambivalence of Beatie with a perfectly judged performance.  'You live in the country but you've got no...majesty!' she exclaims.  It's the wrong word, but we know exactly what she's getting at.  Wesker's real insight is that the Bryant family is not just intellectually stunted, but emotionally as well.  This isn't just about education, but about a lack of real roots, an absence of human response.  When the father, already struggling on a pigman's wages of seven pounds a week, is demoted to being a casual labourer, none of the family seems able to respond.  Linda Bassett is superb as Beatie's mother, turning her into a tragic woman who is struggling to understand her own limitations, not just a comic character.  The rest of the cast are equally good.  I can't find anything at all to criticise, though I did hear a muttered comment that the potatoes Linda Bassett peels should be muddier.

I've now seen three excellent revivals of early Wesker -- this one, Chicken Soup With Barley at the Royal Court, and The Kitchen at the National.  All three plays confirm that he's an author who's more than just a period piece.   Wesker's early plays still have lots to say to a modern audience, and though they may seem a little wordy and slow by today's standards, they're uniquely rewarding.

And so to the issue of corporate lawyers and their smartphones.  I understand perfectly why the Donmar has to welcome corporate sponsors, whose ill-gotten loot helps keep down the ticket prices for the rest of us.  Last night the sponsors in the seats next to the stage (an ideal place for them to park their programmes and their drinks) were from Simmons and Simmons, a major international law firm.  As you'd expect, these people mostly showed more interest in their Blackberries than in the play.  I can just about cope with bad-mannered theatregoers doing their emails in the intervals, but I draw the line when the silent use of smartphones continues throughout the performance.   I thought the actors showed commendable restraint in not intervening to chuck a potato at the dark-haired lady in the red dress with a grey scarf (Yes, I mean You) sitting in the middle of the front row of the stalls, who used her phone non-stop though most of Act Two.  I would have exiled her to a pig farm in Norfolk without a return ticket.  After I complained that her flashing screen was a distraction, the Donmar FOH team had a word with her and she reluctantly put the phone away in her bag for the last act.  I know that those 'switch-off-your-mobile-on-pain-of-death' announcements are a bit of an imposition and are widely ignored, but I still think there's a case for them.

 

 

The Resistible Rise of Arturo Ui

Henry Goodman is one of our greatest stage actors, and his performance in Bertolt Brecht's satire on the rise Hitler is an unmissable masterclass.  Arturo Ui starts the play as a washed-up Chicago gangster at the very bottom of the ladder and ends it as an all-powerful dictator. Goodman's ability to mimic Hitler's external appearance, rhetorical gestures and style is extraordinary, but there's another, counter-intuitive element in the way he approaches the role.

In the early scenes Goodman's Ui is a cartoon figure who seems to have escaped from an H.M. Bateman drawing.  With jerky movements and a nasal Brooklyn accent, he's a pathetic figure who has every door slammed in his face.  Then he takes lessons from a Shakespearean actor in how to modulate his voice and his movements.  But here's the paradox:  as the play moves on to its climax, the downtrodden caricature becomes more, not less, human.    By the end the Brooklyn accent has vanished, the movements have become smooth and less jerky, the dictator's eloquence has become silkily plausible and his authority becomes all too believable.  It's clear that this utterly sinister man is no joke.   Only a really great actor could bring this off.

Jonathan Church's production, originally staged at Chichester in 2012, uses a blank verse English translation by George Tabori, slightly tweaked by Alastair Beaton.  The use of verse brings it gives it a theatrical, non-realist, formal tone which seems to me just right.  And it accentuates the Shakespearean elements of the text, which contains large-scale borrowing from Richard III and Julius Caesar.

This isn't Brecht's greatest play.  The early scenes are tedious, and bogged down in the machinations of the Cauliflower Trust, Brecht's plodding Marxist exposition of the evils of 20th century capitalism.  The playwright's feel for politics runs a long way ahead of his understanding of economics.   But in the second half, when the guns come out and the vegetable marketing becomes less important, it's gripping.  Church sticks faithfully to Brecht's Hollywood-driven vision of Chicago gangsterdom as a metaphor, and it pays off handsomely in the climactic final scene.

Brecht's opposition to Hitler drove him into exile from Germany.  This play was written in Finland in the early years of World War Two, before he moved to California.  On his return to Germany, he threw in his lot with Stalin's German Democratic Republic in the east, a decision which to me undermines his political credibility.  But that doesn't affect his greatness as a playwright.  Goodman is backed up by an excellent cast, including Michael Feast.

Black Jesus

A trip to the Finborough, one of London's smallest and best fringe theatres not far from Earls Court, almost always pays off, and last night was no exception.  Black Jesus is an 80-minute political drama set in Zimbabwe in the near future, and it crackles with tension from start to finish.

At the centre of Anders Lustgarten's play is idealistic young lawyer Eunice (superbly played by Debbie Korley), who is on stage in every scene.  Eunice, working for the new Truth and Justice Commission, is questioning Gabriel, responsible for atrocities committed on behalf of Robert Mugabe's ZANU-PF party against its political opponents during the 2008 election year.  To start with, Gabriel, who is behind bars but has not been tried, is aggressive and refuses to talk, but gradually tells Eunice about his violent past, torturing, raping and murdering,  The key question Eunice is trying to find out is who gave the orders to Gabriel and the other 'Green Bombers'.

Eunice's task is complicated by her relations with Rob, her white boss, with whom she is on the threshold of an affair, and with Moyo, a smooth-talking government minister who intervenes to make sure the investigation goes nowhere.  Moyo (played by Cyril Nri) has known Eunice since she was a child and treats her with patronising condescension. 

Lustgarten's play, based on research in Zimbabwe, displays an impressive grasp of the essentials of post-independence politics.  The essentials of the story he has invented are utterly plausible, and the local details are authentic.   To some extent, he's almost too close to his subject matter, and I suspect that many of the clever nuances in the play might mean little to anyone who's never been to ZImbabwe or taken an interest in it.   Unlike Ariel Dorfman's Death and The Maiden, a political drama which speaks a universal language to any audience, this play seems to require a bit too much knowledge of the specific time and place.

What he has understood is that Zimbabwe is a place of many faultlines.  The old clashes between white and black have now been replaced by a series of other conflict, between old and young, between chauvinist men and a new generation of educated women, between a prosperous power-hungry elite and their thuggish footsoldiers, now being cast aside and disowned.   There are other long-standing resentments beneath the surface, between Shona and Ndebele, and between different Shona groups. The 'white card' which Mugabe the great manipulator has played for so long is essentially irrelevant.

Lustgarten asks us to imagine that Zimbabwe in 2015 has entered the post-Mugabe era, with ZANU-PF still in charge, having seen off the opposition MDC.  Minister Moyo, with a son at Princeton, is part of a new elite who want to draw a line under the past and improve relations with the international community.  Hence the carefully supervised Justice and Truth Commission, headed by a white Zimbabwean who spent many years as a political exile.

In dramatic terms, this is a plausible scenario, on the South African pattern, though I can't imagine it happening in real life.  Unlike the ANC which had space for whites such as Joe Slovo and Albie Sachs, ZANU-PF has always been a blacks-only outfit.  The idea that a white activist with a leftwing past might one day be allowed to investigate the horrors of political killings by Mugabe's thugs, even under tight supervision, is too unlikely for words.

But in terms of the play, it's a great starting point.  Lustgarten's writing is not just economical and politically acute;  he has a great feel for how to start and end a scene, and for creating characters that are fully rounded.  My only reservation about the way he develops the story concerns a revelation at the end of the play about Eunice's father, which seems to me superfluous.  If Eunice is having to use a false Ndebele identity to conduct her interviews with Gabriel, then there's a case for revealing that to the audience much earlier.  Gabriel, of course, has to be the last to know the truth about who Eunice really is, but that's the power of dramatic irony -- when the audience knows something that one of the characters on stage doesn't.

While Debbie Korley (whom I've seen playing several roles with the RSC) carries the play in brilliant fashion, she's well matched with Paapa Essiedu, who is totally convincing as the violent Gabriel, who gradually discovers that telling his story can put his own nightmares to rest.  Cyril Nri (who played Cassius in the RSC's televised Julius Caesar last year) oozes hypocrisy and sophistication as Moyo.  Alexander Gatehouse as Rob is the only one who seems slightly miscast, though no fault of his own.  He seems much too young for the role of a veteran activist who claims to have decades of political struggle behind him.

While the Zimbabwean accents are spot on and the direction by David Mercatali is brisk and full of tension, I have one or two problems with the accuracy of the costumes.  Zimbabwean prisoners, even those on remand, all wear a distinctive khaki prison uniform of shirt and shorts, not their own clothes (I doubt that has changed since I reported court hearings and trials in Harare in the 1980s).   And I feel Rob's casual dress-down teeshirt and beach trousers look wrong;  Zimbabwe, unlike many other African countries, is a place where dressing smartly for the office remains something of a colonial tradition.

There's a week to go to catch this play, which has garnered a clutch of four-star reviews and runs until October 26.

Evgeny Onegin live at the Met

No, I wasn't in New York, just at the IMAX cinema at Waterloo to watch Saturday's live relay from the Metropolitan Opera, the first in the annual HD season.  Technically, apart from one or two very brief wobbles, it was superb and I thought the  production was theatrically stunning.  Musical specialists (I am emphatically not one of those) will have more to say about the voices, Valery Gergiev's conducting and the singing.

Two weeks ago the mighty New York Times sniffily dismissed the opening night of this new co-production with English National Opera as an 'also-ran' in the Met repertoire, but I thought it had an authentically Russian look and feel (often a problem when Russian opera is staged abroad), and a lot of psychological subtlety.  Above all, it has the glorious Anna Netrebko singing the role of Tatiana.  This is a role which sopranos rightly avoid until they are ready for the challenge, but that deferred gratification means that at the peak of their singing careers in their thirties, they have to convincingly portray a naive teenager.  Netrebko, thank goodness, is not just a terrific soprano but a wonderful actress.  Not so long ago I saw her on the big IMAX screen charming the socks of the Met worldwide audience, larking  around with comic brio in Don Pasquale.  Here she's utterly convincing as a shy, bookish, slightly puddingy romantic girl in the opening scenes.  Her rendering of the famous letter scene is fabulous, and she's well matched with a largely Slavic (if not Russian) cast, including Mariusz Kwiecen as Onegin and Piotr Beczala as Lensky. 

This new production has had a troubled history.  When English director Deborah Warner withdrew for health reasons, her close collaborator Fiona Shaw stepped into the breach, but couldn't attend all the planned rehearsals in New York because of commitments elsewhere.  So the opening night (if you believe the New York Times) felt a bit improvised.  I'm not usually a big fan of Warner and Shaw, but I think on the evidence of last night they've done a brilliant job.  Act One, usually set outdoors at the start and then in Tatiana's bedroom for the letter scene, is played in a spacious, somewhat shabby conservatory with a backdrop of autumn harvest fruits and vegetables stacked in boxes.  To me, it felt just right, bringing a whiff of backward provincial Russia.  Rather than Tatiana sitting on her bed in her nightie, we saw her staying up in the conservatory to write all night at a table.  When Onegin turns up to return her letter, he's more tactful and less arrogant than in many other productions, and he kisses Tatiana on the lips as they part.  The rejection is painful, but one feels that rather than just being callous, Onegin may be doing the right thing in letting this naive teenager down gently.  When he sings that he loves Tatiana as a brother, and perhaps more strongly, it's completely believable.

 Act Two, with the Larin household holding a party for Tatiana's name-day, is brilliantly staged. With a throng of actors, singers and dancers on stage, it's a scene that can easily turn into something  incoherent, with the row between Onegin and his friend Lensky coming out of nowhere.  Here the buildup is carefully and intelligently done, with all the principals fully engaged.  Monsieur Triquet's charming little song in French in honour of Tatiana masks the furious emotions which are bubbling away elsewhere on stage.  This is where clever camerawork and close-up facial expressions help tell the story, but I think even in wide shot or in the opera house itself, this big ensemble scene succeeds. It's Lensky, not Onegin, who seems determined to pursue this quarrel to the death.

Come the fatal duel in which Onegin kills Lensky, there's a sudden and mystifying lapse from the painstaking realism of the set and design (we're firmly in Tchaikovsky's 1870s, not Pushkin's 1820s).  For some unknown reason, the duel is fought not with pistols but with hunting rifles -- which is historically wrong and just plain daft. There's a deft touch at the end as Onegin shows a streak of humanity in removing Lensky's gold-rimmed spectacles as he cradles his body. 

The final act in St Petersburg shows Onegin returning from years abroad to an aristocratic ball, where he is politely snubbed.  Drinking champagne on his own, he finally grabs the bottle -- another neat piece of theatrical psychology.  Tatiana, still young but now glitteringly married to Prince Gremin, suddenly appears.  Her composure doesn't wobble as her middle-aged husband sings of his love for her.  It seems to me this scene doesn't have the dramatic intensity or electricity it should have.  Perhaps the final act was under-rehearsed, but the final effect of Gremin's famous aria is a bit ho-hum.  Some kind of unresolved sexual tension between Tatiana and Onegin should be generated to which Gremin is blind, but it doesn't happen. The climactic final scene, which also ends with a kiss, is the real deal.  Tatiana confesses her love for Onegin but tears herself away out of loyalty to her husband, leaving him bereft.

This is the most theatrically intelligent production of the opera I've seen.  I can remember seeing the classic 1944 Bolshoi production by Boris Pokrovsky a couple of times, and a Covent Garden version a few years ago.  Far from being a drab also-ran in the Onegin stakes, this version really grabs the emotions. It brings out the feminine streak in Tchaikovsky's storytelling, in which the women have pride of place and the men are interlopers.  I loved it.