John Morrison

Harvest

Anyone worried about low productivity in the British economy will be heartened to learn that things are far worse elsewhere.  If this play by Pavel Pryazhko at the Soho theatre is telling the truth, productivity on apple farms in Belarus is around zero and is falling fast.

Pryazhko's play is a neat little comedy about our human capacity to screw up the simplest, most straightforward tasks.  Picking apples and stacking them in crates should be fairly easy, but earnest Valerii, doltish Egor and their fetching female co-workers Ira and Lyuba manage to ruin everything they touch.

There's a soundtrack of birdsong and Soviet-style jaunty music of the kind that used to accompany documentaries about cheerful collective farm workers.  But this harvest is set in an indeterminate present, devoid of political, economic or social reference points.  We don't learn anything about either the farm or about the characters on stage, except that they are there to pick apples. And they fail.

Team leader Valerii (Dyfan Dwyfor) tries to direct proceedings but proves his total incompetence at every turn.   Egor (favourite word: COOL!) thinks he knows better, but when it comes to keeping the apples unbruised and repairing a crate with a hammer and nails, he is also several pips short of the minimum level required.

The two women (Beth Park and Lindsey Campbell) pout and flirt but mostly accept their subordinate status in this east European garden of Eden.  With apples passing from hand to hand, there's an erotic subtext to the play which is rich in comedy, though ultimately it's not developed enough to raise the stakes.

Translated by Sasha Dugdale and directed by former RSC artistic director Michael Boyd, the play depends more on old-fashioned physical comedy and timing than on character.  The men seem to me better delineated than the women, and in a work that lasts only an hour, there's not much time for character development.  Although it's funny and I laughed a lot, it doesn't have the subtlety of a full-length comedy like Mike Leigh's Abigail's Party.

By the end of the play most of the apples and the crates have been flung around the stage, narrowly missing the audience, but the damage to the characters is fairly superficial -- a bleeding thumb, an allergical reaction and a bout of high blood pressure.  From the pen of a playwright with a darker imagination, it could all have been a lot more painful. 

 

The Beaux' Stratagem

The vast auditorium of the Olivier theatre isn't always the best place to stage comedy; it relentlessly exposes actors who can't adjust to its demands, and it makes exceptional demands of directors and designers as well.

This production by Simon Godwin of George Farquhar's 1707 comedy isn't laugh-out-loud funny, but it has some rich and rewarding performances, and it takes seriously the play's treatment of the issues of marriage, divorce and women's rights.

As the ill-treated wife Mrs Sullen, Susannah Fielding is outstanding, and the director's decision to focus maximum attention on her plight pays big dividends.  Anyone who saw Fielding playing Portia as a manicured Las Vegas blonde bombshell in Rupert Goold's Merchant of Venice won't be surprised to learn that she turns Mrs Sullen into something special.  She manages to balance her desire to escape the pain of being married to a drunk for something better with the knowledge that 18th century marriage sets women up as automatic victims.  She is well matched by Geoffrey Streatfeild's Archer, who also combines a world-weary cynicism with a streak of soft-hearted romanticism.  When Mrs Sullen's brother arrives at the end of the play to persuade her husband to free her from her loveless marriage, the audience ends up hoping that against all the odds she will find happiness with Archer.

Samuel Barnett plays Aimwell, Archer's partner in a plan to snare a wealthy bride and split the proceeds,  as a haughty young man from the Bullingdon club.  As the object of his attentions, the wealthy heiress Dorinda, Pippa Bennett-Warner seems less confident in extracting the comedy from her ingenue role, and doesn't quite match the others for audibility.

Godwin, possibly stealing an idea from Josie Rourke's glorious production of Farquhar's The Recruiting Officer at the Donmar, punctuates the play with frequent songs.  These are quite funny but again the size of the stage makes it impossible to generate the kind of pathos and emotional punch that is possible in a smaller theatre.

Designer Lizzie Clachan has produced a towering three-storey set with lots of staircases, which doubles neatly as the local tavern and the house where Dorinda and Mrs Sullen live.  But the upper levels aren't strictly necessary, as this isn't the kind of comedy which depends on doors opening and shutting.  So I wonder if a simpler set on one level might have been a better choice.

This is a play that I have never seen before, so I can't compare this version to the work of other directors;  I admire the way Godwin has avoided the easy option of piling on lots of sight gags and extraneous business;  this is a comedy which has a serious feminist core, and Susannah Fielding's performance finds the way to it.

 

Crouch Touch Pause Engage

What do you need to stage a successful play ?  Six actors, six rugby shirts, a rugby ball and a good story, plus an excellent writer and an even more excellent director.  It all looks deceptively easy, but if it was, then every production would be as good as this one.

Writer Robin Soans and veteran director Max Stafford-Clark have turned the story of how Welsh rugby hero Gareth Thomas came out as gay into an absorbing two-act drama which proves once again that less can be more in the theatre.  You can manage with a simple set (a changing room with a few pegs, benches and lockers), minimal lighting changes and no music, except for the actors singing in chorus.  The six male and female actors take it in turns to play Thomas, just putting on a red Welsh shirt when needed.

Robin Soans has had a long career not just as an actor but as a playwright, centred on documentary drama. Stafford-Clark has an even longer pedigree as artistic director of the Royal Court Theatre and the touring company Out of Joint.  One of his most memorable productions was The Permanent Way, written by David Hare and staged in the Cottesloe theatre, a documentary drama about rail privatisation.

Crouch Touch Pause Engage is based on true events, but it is put together with the acute sensitivity and imagination of a fictional storyteller.  The characters speak mostly to the audience but also interact with each other, creating a multi-layered tapestry.  The play's initial focus seems fuzzy, and it takes a little while before Gareth Thomas is at the centre.  But the detailed canvas of life in rugby-mad Bridgend, a place ravaged by the collapse of traditional industries and the closure of the modern factories that replaced them, builds up the necessary social context for Thomas's story.  The play contains another story as well -- that of Bridgend's unwanted reputation as the suicide capital of South Wales.  Running in parallel to Thomas's anguished personal drama is a second life story, of a troubled overweight teenager who hears voices in her head, self-harms with a razor blade and tries to commit suicide, just as Thomas did.

After both characters reach their lowest point at the end of the first act, the second half of the play brings both through a difficult arc of recovery and redemption.  The teenager and the rugby player gradually learn to be honest with themselves and with others.  The message of the play is devoid of sugary moral uplift, but it is genuinely moving.  Thomas finds the most difficult thing to come to terms with is not that he is gay, but that he has lied to everyone.  His relationship with his wife collapses for good after he tells her, but his team-mates give him their support.  And the troubled teenager's story arc meets his when she takes up rugby as well.

Anyone trying to write or direct for the stage should try to see this play, now on at the Arcola as part of an extensive tour.  It's immediately accessible to a wide audience, crisply performed by a great cast, and it gets exactly right a number of things which less experienced writers and directors often get wrong.  There's a balance between the way the characters speak with each other and with the audience, and a balance between showing and telling.  For example, we meet a tabloid journalist who tells the story of how he was told by his editor to challenge Thomas about his sexuality.  It turns out the young reporter was so much in awe of the great rugby player that he barely managed to get his question out. But we don't meet the photographers who hung around outside Thomas's home and made his life a misery, because their experience would contribute little to the story.  The background context about South Wales and Bridgend is deftly explained by the characters themselves, with a historical overview put into the mouth of a local politician -- Neil Kinnock.   The theme of the Bridgend teenage suicides is introduced obliquely with similar skill at the start of the play, through the words of a headmaster speaking to his pupils and offering them counselling about 'recent events'.

Making theatre is just as much about what you leave out as what you put in.  This play proves it.

The Merchant of Venice at Shakespeare's Globe

This excellent production by Jonathan Munby, with Jonathan Pryce as Shylock, couldn't be more different from the last one I saw -- Rupert Goold's hyped-up version set in a Las Vegas casino.  I was greatly entertained by the Goold extravaganza, which I saw in Stratford and again at the Almeida, but I think the Globe's version delves much more deeply into the play's meanings.

Venice is a dark prison-like place, not a fun palace, in Munby's version, designed by Mike Britton.  The carnival revellers are violent and unpleasant, and underneath their masks is a vicious anti-semitism.  Shylock and Antonio clearly hate each other, and Shylock's ultimate humiliation when he is forced to become a Christian is shown as the inevitable outcome of a culture of intolerance.

Pryce's Shylock is deliberately unsympathetic, and the escape of his daughter Jessica is understandable.  Munby has the pair of them exchange a few lines in Yiddish, as if to emphasise their isolation from Venice's Christian world.  And at the end of the play, when Shylock's forced conversion is shown, Jessica sings a Jewish lament.

The play is full of rich ambiguity, which Munby full exploits, revealing all its hidden levels of meaning. It's fair to assume that to a Shakespearean audience, Shylock would have been seen very differently, as more of a pantomime villain like Malvolio in Twelfth Night, rather than as the tragic figure we see today.  Our 21st century take on the play is inevitably shaped by the Holocaust, so a modern audience is more shocked by the casual anti-semitism of most of the characters.  But anti-semitism is only one of many issues raised by the play, and possibly not the most important for a Shakespearean audience.  The virtue of this production in traditional costume is that it continually tests our values, prejudices and assumptions.  We think our morality and values are fixed, but Shakespeare knows they are man-made and constantly shifting.

Michelle Terry as Rosalind in As You Like It

This is undoubtedly Michelle Terry's show.  Whenever she's on stage as Rosalind, you just don't want her to exit.  If there's a catalogue of famous Rosalinds whose performances shine on in the memory, she should be in it.

I never saw Vanessa Redgrave in the part, but I do remember Adrian Lester in Cheek By Jowl's all-male version, and Victoria Hamilton in a much-praised Sheffield production in the 1990s.  Terry's portrayal is not just on a level with these, but more satisfying for the audience because she knows exactly how to get the best out of the unique open-air experience at Shakespeare's Globe.

The Globe stage is a magical space, but it needs skilled wizards to break down the fourth wall and make it work, and Terry, who played Titania in Midsummer Night's Dream at the Globe, is one of them.  Her performance brings out all the fragility of Rosalind's epic piece of 'counterfeiting' when she pretends to be a man to woo Orlando; the play-acting is a tightrope act by someone who knows that any moment she might fall to earth. It's very very funny but it also has the seriousness in which great comic acting is always grounded.

Terry is well partnered by Ellie Piercy as Celia.  She is more self-effacing in the role than Laura Rogers, who rather stole the show as a finger-wagging, hyper-interventionist Celia last time the Globe performed this play in 2009.  Piercy is also an experienced Globe actor, having starred in several productions including Blue Stockings and All's Well That Ends Well.

Simon Harrison as Orlando does a serviceable job, but like most actors who take on this thankless part, he can't escape from being just a foil for Rosalind.  When he takes his shirt off at the start of his wrestling bout to reveal a nicely-honed set of muscles, Rosalind's jaw drops, producing the first big laugh of the evening and reaffirming that this is her scene, not his.

James Garnon is another experienced Globe actor who combines great comic talent and timing with an ability to command the space with no apparent effort.  But his interpreation of the tricky role of Jaques, while amusing, doesn't convey any clear sense of character.  The mordant combination of camp wit and gloomy melancholy which Tim McMullan brought to the role in 2009 under Thea Sharrock's direction is missing.  Daniel Crossley, as the less introspective Touchstone, gives a more straightforward and more successful performance, while newcomer Gwyneth Keyworth stands out among the other supporting cast in the role of Phoebe.

Blanche McIntyre is a rising star among directors;  the first time I saw her work was at the tiny Finborough, where I thought her direction of Dawn King's Foxfinder was an absolute knockout.  Since then I've seen a couple of other examples of her work, and been less certain.  I didn't enjoy what I saw of her Comedy of Errors at the Globe last year, which seemed to me overburdened with comic business unrelated to the play.  There are one or two similar examples in this production, including an unwanted (unwanted by me, anyway) intrusion of a bicycle and a shopping trolley.  But generally she allows the actors to generate the comedy using Shakespeare's words, which is the way it should be.   Her forest of Arden has no trees, real or fake, which makes a nice change.  I'm convinced that over-elaborate sets don't work well at the Globe, and it's much better to get the audience members to use their imagination.

The Father

If Florian Zeller's The Father was just a realistic play about a man with Alzheimer's, it would be well worth seeing for that alone.  But there are several other elements in this production at the Tricycle that make it an exceptional piece of theatre.

There's an outstanding central performance by the veteran Kenneth Cranham as Andre, backed up by Claire Skinner as Anne, his daughter.  James Macdonald, one of my favourite directors (Circle Mirror Transformation) gives the play a hard-edged, precise quality in which timing is perfect and every line and movement is made to count.  Designer Miriam Buether creates a set which matches the play's central theme perfectly, as does the music between scenes.  In Christopher Shutt's sound design, a baroque piano piece starts off sounding near-perfect, then progressively becomes distorted and broken, like a damaged CD.

But the key element is the way Zeller structures the story so that the audience sees it through Andre's increasingly confused mind.  While Anne remains a relatively constant presence, there are moments when Andre barely recognises her.  His confusion over people and places multiplies as his brain ceases to process information, and the play brings this alive by confusing the audience as well. A well-furnished room at the start of the play is reduced to bare white walls by the final scene.

Andre is increasingly baffled by the reality around him.  Is Anne married to Pierre or is she divorced?  Is she moving to London with a new lover?  Is Andre still living in his own flat or has he moved in with Anne?  Is there a chicken in the oven?  Who is the man sitting in the armchair drinking a glass of wine?  Have we met before or is he a stranger? And where is Andre's watch?  Has his carer really stolen it?  And where is his other daughter, the one he prefers to Anne?

The shifting uncertain nature of reality has been explored by other playwrights, notably Ayckbourn and Pinter.  But I have never seen a play that does it with this level of clinical precision, giving dramatic irony a whole new twist.  Dramatic irony depends on giving the audience knowledge that the characters on stage don't have;  we know that Titania's sudden passion is absurd because Bottom has been transformed into an ass, something that we can see and she can't;  but here the process is turned inside out, as Andre's condition worsens and the audience shares his deterioration. 

This might make the writing sound cold and reductive, but it isn't.  There's a genuine humanity and sympathy in the portrayal of Andre's decline and the stress it places on his daughter, who eventually has to put him in a nursing home.  The tragedy of Andre, whose moments of absurd paranoia and suspicion are mixed with flashes of lucidity and insight, is comic, just as Shakespeare's Lear is comic.  Dementia and short-term memory loss lead victims to ask the same questions over and over again, supplying one of the essential mechanisms to generate laughter.  Life becomes a Shakespearean comedy of errors, and Andre's Alzheimer's turns him into a man who never knows which Dromio he is dealing with, and neither do we.

Macdonald's career has been going since the early 1990s, and the first production of his that I can remember seeing was an outstandingly lucid version of James Joyce's Exiles at the National Theatre.  His skill as a director is second to none. I saw his production of Wesker's Roots at the Donmar, A Delicate Balance at the Almeida, and several others in the West End and elsewhere. Occasionally I have felt let down by the plays he has chosen, but never by his direction.

Zeller is a 35-year-old prizewinning French playwright whose work hasn't been seen in England before. Translator Christopher Hampton rightly takes aim at the 'very very insular' culture of British theatre in the programme for this production, first seen at the Theatre Royal Bath.  Given this insularity, putting on this play must have been a bit of a gamble, but it has paid off extraordinarily well.

 

The Angry Brigade and The Vote

I greatly admire James Graham as a playwright, and not just because almost everyone else does.  He has the knack of turning really unpromising material into entertaining drama, something he shares with Lee Hall.  His plays are accessible (which isn't a dirty word in my book) while never being humdrum or predictable.

I knew I'd never get a ticket for his election play The Vote at the Donmar, so I watched it on Channel 4, where it's still available on catch-up for another four weeks.  For anyone who was too busy campaigning, it's set in real time in a polling station in the last 90 minutes before the general election polls close.  It's funny, human and plausible;  when things go wrong and ballot papers get duplicated or muddled and the polling officers try to put things right, the comedy isn't forced or unbelievable.  WIth Mark Gatiss and Catherine Tate in charge of the voting, there's a motley gang of voters led by Judi Dench, and the brilliant Paul Chahidi plays a single-issue candidate opposed to the one-way system around Morrison's supermarket.  What I like most of all is the way Graham, as he did in his 1970s parliamentary drama This House, never loses sight of the serious purpose behind the sometimes absurd ritual being played out.  Yes, it's democracy, and getting it right matters. 

Meanwhile the Bush theatre is showing Graham's new play about the Angry Brigade, a now-forgotten gang of anarchists who carried out bomb attacks against establishment targets in early 1970s London.  I can't claim to have ever known them, but I remember the case well from news reports, and somewhere in my loft I still have a box or two of leftwing alternative newspapers from that strange and troubled period.

Graham's reconstruction of the period has a few gaps and weaknesses, but his sense of stagecraft and storytelling makes the play compelling nonetheless.  WIth just four actors, he delivers two plays one after the other, which is a bold way of solving the structural problem posed by the story.  The police and the bombers don't meet until the final climax, though the bombers send the police their communiques and one of them makes a series of mysterious calls to the detective in charge.  Harry Melling is outstanding in a multiplicity of roles, while Felix Scott plays the acting detective sergeant in the first half of the play, and John, the Angry Brigade's central figure, in the second half.  Patsy Ferran and Scarlett Johnson play the inevitably secondary roles of policewomen before the interval but come into their own as the female bombers afterwards.

For me, the first half, set among the police, is not as good as the second.  The play takes a while to get going, with the accent falling too heavily on comedy at the start.  Yes, the police in 1971 were pretty dim, but not quite as dim as they appear here, with some lines seemingly borrowed from a Carry On film.  The story Graham is telling is how these coppers with extremely limited imaginations were forced to suddenly get to grips with something completely new -- criminals motivated by ideas.  Luckily their leader Detective Sergeant Smith is made of smarter stuff and realises that the puzzling word SPECTACLE means that the bombers have been reading Guy Debord's situationist doctrines.  Gradually the neat and tidy world of the police investigation succumbs to its own kind of anarchism as the team realise they can only penetrate the bombers by thinking and feeling like them.  By the time of the climax they are smoking joints and rolling around on the floor. 

Looking back on the period, most memorably fixed on screen in Lindsay Anderson's 1968 film If, I think it's important to remember that the complex cultural shifts of the 1960s and the political conflicts of the period often crossed over and influenced each other, but by the 1970s they were drifting apart.  Hippy culture, sex, drugs and rock music became a fashionably diluted lifestyle choice and opened up a lot of business opportunities for people to get rich.  Mick Jagger sang about a Street Fighting Man but didn't actually try to be one himself.  The political left, after the defeat of the French student revolt in 1968, abandoned mass revolutionary action.  Some went into party politics while a small minority turned to terrorism, like the Baader-Meinhof group in Germany.  The Angry Brigade was a pale and very British example of the second tendency.  From today's viewpoint, the fact that none of their home-made bombs actually killed anyone seems faintly ludicrous.

Graham's version of what made the Angry Brigade tick is thoroughly researched and as plausible as any other.  The important thing is that it comes to life as theatre, particularly in the scenes between Anna (Patsy Ferran) and Jim (Harry Melling) when Anna tries unsuccessfully to get Jim to say he loves her.

Though the play contains brief references to the Heath government and a well-placed line about the Tories ('They always get back in'), I feel it lacks an overall sense of what was happening in the wider world outside.  When the personal is political, the wider context matters a lot, as it does in plays such as The Entertainer and Look Back In Anger.  John Osborne was technically not as good a playwright as James Graham, but his writing caught the spirit of the age.  Arnold Wesker did the same.

The Angry Brigade, first seen at the Theatre Royal Plymouth and directed by James Grieve of Paines Plough, is nonetheless fascinating drama.  With seats at the Bush costing as little as ten pounds for a concession ticket, it is outstanding value for money.  Who needs the West End?

 

 

Matchbox Theatre

Michael Frayn is the author of Noises Off, the funniest play ever penned by a British dramatist. So Hampstead Theatre no doubt jumped at the chance to put on a selection of his unperformed short sketches.  Big mistake.

At their best, the 20 or so sketches included in Matchbox Theatre are mildly funny.  But as an evening at the theatre, it is very underpowered, despite enthusiastic performances by a versatile cast of five actors including Mark Hadfield and Nina Wadia, directed by Hamish McColl.

The sketches are performed in the round, with a minimum of props and scenery.  There are some quirky good ideas, like the opening sketch about carved stone effigies on a medieval tomb coming to life and bickering like any other married couple getting on each other's nerves.  But often the opening setup isn't matched by a convincing ending. The sketches just drain away without a punchline or a final twist.

The humour is gentle and more than a little dated;  I suspect some of these sketches may have been in Frayn's sock drawer for a number of years.  Gentle fun is poked at couples in restaurants, people who talk non-stop on their mobile phones and at TV news reporters, breathlessly reporting from Elsinore on the 'peace talks' involving the Danish royal family.  There's another Shakespearean parody in which wealthy arts sponsors are allowed to interrupt the actors and take part in the play.

Frayn's unique talent for seeing theatre as a metaphor for life, which made Noises Off such a masterpiece, shines through occasionally, as it did in The Crimson Hotel a few years ago.  I liked the one showing stage sceneshifters as the subject of a TV nature documentary, describing them as small creatures scurrying around furtively in the dark.

Anyone who is happy reading a 1950s copy of Punch, watching old episodes of Hancock's Half Hour or listening to songs by Flanders and Swann on the gramophone will recognise Frayn's brand of slightly absurdist wit and enjoy the way he plays around with language.  But on the basis of the preview I saw, I really wonder whether Hampstead will find a full-price audience to fill the theatre for the next six weeks with this show.