John Morrison

Hamlet/The Complete Walk

President Obama and I both dropped in at Shakespeare's Globe this weekend. He watched a short extract from Hamlet while I stood as a groundling to see the whole performance on Saturday night.  My ticket was bought last November and cost me five pounds.  At that price, in a theatre that doesn't get any of the Royal Shakespeare Company's Arts Council subsidy, what I got was not just superb value but the chance to see a really excellent Hamlet -- Ladi Emeruwa.

This touring production with a small cast has been travelling the world for the past two years, visiting nearly 200 countries.  Some day we'll no doubt hear the full story, but it's worth recording that the show betrayed no sign of having gone around the block too often.  Quite the opposite:  it was amazingly sharp and fresh.  Emeruwa, who was cast just after leaving drama school, was for my money a better Hamlet than David Tennant, delivering much more of the character's anguish as well as his sardonic humour.  I also liked the way Phoebe Fildes played Ophelia, bringing a wholesome innocence to the part and a genuine affection for Hamlet.   One or two scenes misfired, including the play-within-a-play scene, which concentrated too much on comedy.  One of the handicaps of doubling the parts of Claudius and the Player King is that the impact on Claudius of seeing a play in which he is fingered as his brother's murderer remains largely invisible to the audience.

But there's no arguing about the impact of this worldwide tour, one of two hugely ambitious initiatives dreamed up by Globe artistic director Dominic Dromgoole.  The first was the Globe to Globe season in 2012, which brought theatre companies from 37 countries to the Globe to perform Shakespeare's works in their own language.  Like the Hamlet tour, this was a spectacularly bonkers idea that paid off, raising the international profile not just of the Globe but of British theatre in general, and stealing the thunder of the less nimble Royal Shakespeare Company.

Dromgoole, though not universally liked (he was notorious among the Globe's volunteer stewards for never acknowledging their presence with a friendly word), can be credited with a series of brilliant achievements.  Not only was he a Shakespeare fanatic who created a series of unforgettable productions, including Henry IV, which brought Roger Allam a well-deserved Olivier Best Actor award, and Antony and Cleopatra, which brought together Eve Best and Clive Wood, but he also opened the Globe's candle-lit Sam Wanamaker indoor theatre with a run of sellout performances, including The Duchess of Malfi with Gemma Arterton.  Mark Rylance, the Globe's first artistic director, arguably faced a greater challenge in launching the Globe from a standing start two decades ago, but Dromgoole leaves with a record of innovation and success to be proud of.

I managed to see about a third of the 37 short films of Shakespeare's plays that made up Dromgoole's final brainwave initiative, The Complete Walk.  This regrettably brief two-day event displayed a bite-sized chunk of every play in the canon to a new audience on the South Bank, who could stroll along the Thames and see the work on big screens.  Not every film quite overcame the shortcomings in picture and sound quality of this format.  The ones that worked best, in my view, were those where the director chose key scenes with just two characters and let Shakespeare's writing take the strain.

Dromgoole hands over this weekend to Emma Rice, a surprise appointment which has generated a certain amount of foreboding inside and outside the theatre.  If her first show, A Midsummer Night's Dream, proves a success, then the pressure on her to prove a worthy inheritor of what Rylance and Dromgoole created may ease off.

 

All That Fall

Over a decade ago I was at Wilton's Music Hall for the most fascinating production of Macbeth I have ever witnessed, a promenade production set in a war-torn African country and directed by Max Stafford-Clark. Well, he's back at WIlton's with a new show that was first seen at the Enniskillen festival last year. This time the historic East End venue, newly spruced up into respectable shabbiness after a long period of structural repair work, is staging a Samuel Beckett radio play.

Stafford-Clark is one of the great figures in British theatre over the past half century, though he and his Out of Joint company aren't the household names that they should be.  I have no wish to detract from the work of writers such as Caryl Churchill and Timberlake Wertenbaker, but their classic plays Light Shining in Buckinghamshire and Our Country's Good both emerged from workshops at the Royal Court led by Stafford-Clark.

All That Fall, which I saw at the Arts Theatre four or five years ago in a production with Eileen Atkins and Michael Gambon, was and still is a play for radio rather than the stage.  Both Beckett and his heirs have blocked any full-scale stage version, a decision that seems to me entirely justified.  The Arts Theatre production had the cast reading their scripts in front of old-fashioned studio microphones.  On this occasion, Stafford-Clark has made the audience put on eye masks so that only the voices and the sound effects are heard.  There is, as Stafford-Clark promised the Beckett estate, 'no vision at all'.

I found it quite invigorating to just use my ears for an hour to 'hear a play'.  All That Fall is only of Beckett's most accessible works, an exploration in sound of the rural Ireland near Dublin that he remembered from his youth.  But the story has a disturbing ending that prevents the entertaining story of Mrs Rooney (Brid Brennan) becoming nostalgic or whimsical.   Best of all, the play has a soundscape of a real steam engine.  I now know, having read Max Stafford-Clark's interview about the play, that he is an elderly model railway fanatic with his own train set, something I should have guessed when I saw his famous production of David Hare's The Permanent Way. 

If anyone out there is writing a play about railways, you now know which director to send it to.

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Light Shining in Buckinghamshire

People, Places & Things

THIS REVIEW CONTAINS PLOT SPOILERS

Denise Gough has won rave reviews for her central performance as a drug-and-booze-fuelled actress trying to detox in Duncan Macmillan's play, which first opened at the National last autumn and is now at Wyndham's in the West End.  Having finally caught up with this Headlong production, directed by Jeremy Herrin, the first and obvious thing to say is that the rave reviews are richly deserved;  Gough is simply terrific.  Like Mark Rylance as Jonny Rooster Byron in Jerusalem, she makes it impossible to imagine anyone else playing the role.  That's my personal definition of great stage acting.

However, Macmillan's play left me strangely unengaged, and I'm still trying to work out why.  It could be that I was perched in a restricted view seat up in the balcony, looking down at the action, but that has never stopped me getting engaged with lots of other plays in the past.  As a regular patron of the cheap seats in the National Theatre's vast Olivier auditorium, I am quite used to being a long way from the action on stage.

It could be that addiction isn't a subject that has ever touched me personally, or anyone I know well.  But the same lack of personal experience has never stopped me feeling empathy with characters in other plays I have seen.  I'm thinking of Tomcat, The Effect, The Curious Incident, Blue/Orange and a host of other productions that have had me on the edge of my seat.

Herrin's approach to People, Places & Things relies a bit too heavily on emphatic stage effects -- very loud techno music and deafening bangs, accompanied by flashy lighting.  Right from the start, it is clear that Gough's character Emma is an unreliable narrator of her own past.  As she staggers into a detox clinic after breaking down on stage, she is over-articulate and very unpleasant.  She lies and makes excuses for her serial inability to tell the truth: 'It is not lying -- it is because there is no truth to begin with.'  As she starts her treatment, Emma is a long way from accepting that she needs to give up drugs and alcohol for good: 'Drugs and alcohol have never let me down, they have always loved me,' she declares.

Macmillan has deliberately chosen to keep Emma on stage throughout, so we never get another perspective on her.  Thinking again of Tomcat, Blue/Orange and other plays about a doctor-patient relationship, I wanted to hear the other characters discussing Emma behind her back, opening up a window of dramatic irony for the audience.  While the repeated confrontations between the increasingly bolshie Emma and the other members of her therapy group are never boring, I felt there was something missing from the way the playwright tells the story.

What may be lacking is an element of 'what if?'  By that I mean an element of make-believe.  Tomcat, for example, asks us to imagine a world where an apparently normal 12-year-old girl can be locked away in a secure unit so that doctors can test her as a suspected psychopath.  It's several steps away from the real world we live in, but it's plausible.  But People, Places & Things never challenges the audience to use their imaginations in this way. 

Emma's incomplete recovery leads her to walk out of the clinic, only to return at the start of the second act, shabby and distressed.  Gradually, she seems to be returning to normality and finally 'graduates' from the clinic.  But the play's not over, and it ends with a scene that finally had me fully engaged.  Emma returns to her parents' house, and makes a carefully rehearsed apology for her past behaviour, while promising that this time she won't relapse.  But she gets an ice-cold reception from both of them, who make clear they really don't care much if Emma lives or dies.  Suddenly it becomes clear that some of the things Emma has been saying about her family, including the death of a brother, have had at least a good element of truth to them.  Her mother (a great performance by Barbara Marten) has even kept the large plastic box of drugs that Emma asked her to throw away, and has placed it helpfully under her bed.

This scene gives a different perspective on Emma, and for the first time I felt some empathy with her.  She ends the play auditioning for a very minor acting job that she almost certainly won't get, but she's clearly in a much better state than she was at the start of the play. It's an ambiguous coda which seems well judged.