Stage

Review: The Amen Corner

John Nathan — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 09:00:53 +0100

The first of two plays written by the novelist and essayist James Baldwin — revived here by director Rufus Norris in a version gorgeously saturated with gospel music — was penned in the knowledge that religion was a refuge for his fellow African Americans. For them, opportunities to be anything other than an unskilled labourer were practically non-existent.

Baldwin’s heroine is single mother Sister Margaret (Marianne Jean-Baptiste), the pious preacher of the Harlem church where all the action takes place. This is where Margaret and her congregation can escape the injustices of a white-ruled world.

It is 1953. Things have changed a little since then. So the fervour of a play whose characters greet each other with “praise the Lord”, and the religiosity that has dominated Margaret’s every thought and action ever since she and her baby boy left her hard-drinking husband, come across as a pointed rebuke against blind religious faith.

In fact, The Amen Corner even serves as a particularly powerful attack on religion when it is dominated by the religious, or at least the pious. And there is no one more pious than the virginal Sister Moore (Cecilia Noble) who, as she puts it, “ain’t questioning the Lord’s way. He done kept me pure to Himself for a purpose.” In Sister Moore’s case, that purpose appears to be to replace Sister Margaret as pastor.

Spite and ambition is fine if it is God’s will. The return of Margaret’s dissolute jazz musician Luke (Lucian Msamati) is proof enough to Sister Moore and her fellow scheming congregants that God no longer loves Sister Margaret the way he used to. When Luke knew her she was just “funny, fiery, fast-talking Maggie”. Now she is no fun at all.
A bit like the word of God, Baldwin’s message is open to interpretation. But Norris’s production lends the piece extra force through the power of gospel. And in the more tender moments, Norris modulates the mood with the use of a soulful jazz trio, just visible through the church windows of Ian MacNeil’s two-tier design.

Jean-Baptiste charismatically captures the persuasive powers of a pastor in full evangelical flow, melding them beautifully with a more vulnerable introspection when away from the pulpit. Sharon D Clarke as her sister Odessa is wonderfully poised, while Noble combines attitude and piety as Margaret’s formidable usurper. The terrific Msamati also deserves a mention and, in the prayer scenes, there is a chorus mighty enough to raise the rafters and almost make a Jewish atheist praise the Lord.

Review: Mission Drift

John Nathan — Mon, 17 Jun 2013 08:32:46 +0100

Brooklyn-based theatre company The Team exists to reflect the experience of living in America today.

Its latest offering follows the fortunes of Joan (Amber Gray), a Vegas waitress sacked as the credit crunch bites, and real-life pioneers Joris (Brian Hastert) and Catalina Rapalje (Libby King), who first encounter each other on an Amsterdam dock in 1624. In this version of American history, they conquer the frontier and 400 years later evolve into Vegas magnates who own the joint that laid off Joan.

It is a tale told by a cast drawing on a fathom-deep pool of musical talent and especially that of singer-songwriter Heather Christian. Her Miss Atomic, named after the Nevada beauty queens whose pageants celebrated local A-bomb tests, serves as a kind of singing, piano-playing MC who also narrates with the seductive intimacy of a night-time DJ.

Yet the story is so specifically American, it lacks what all great theatre has — the sense of the universal.

Review: These Shining Lives

John Nathan — Fri, 24 May 2013 11:03:21 +0100

North London’s newest theatre, just a stone’s throw from Finsbury Park tube, is already being hailed as a miracle — and no wonder. The £2.5m build costs have been met without a penny of subsidy.

And with two performance spaces, the place has the feel of a serious venue capable of attracting equally serious talent. Maureen Lipman is slated to perform there in July in Oliver Cotton’s new play Daytona.

The theatre’s inaugural production is a worthy offering in both senses of the word. Written by Melanie Marnich, the play, first seen in Baltimore in 2008, tells the true story of a group of Chicago women factory workers whose job was to paint luminous clock and watch faces. They were given good wages and, it later emerged, fatal radium poisoning.

Loveday Ingram’s well-acted production lifts some solid, if at times stolid writing. Marnich rather clunkily uses narration as her storytelling technique. Her heroine, Catherine Donohue, quickly transmits that hers is a posthumously told story, which does nothing for the evening’s tension.

Still, the cast, led by Charity Wakefield as Donohue, strongly evokes the female camaraderie of women workers who had received the right to vote only a decade earlier.

Review: Relatively Speaking

John Nathan — Fri, 24 May 2013 10:56:23 +0100

The conversation based on a misunderstanding is a well-used comedy device. You know the kind of thing, one person is talking about their dog while the other thinks he is talking about his wife. The genius of Alan Ayckbourn’s 1967 West End hit (his first) was that he managed to sustain this kind of gag for almost an entire play.

This comedy four-hander opens in a grubby London garret — love nest to twentysomethings Greg (Max Bennett) and Ginny (Kara Tointon). When the action moves to a sedate house in Buckinghamshire, it emerges that Ginny is trying to extricate herself from an affair with the older Philip (Jonathan Coy), who Greg mistakenly thinks is Ginny’s father. So when Greg turns up and asks Philip’s permission to marry his daughter, Philip is under the impression that Greg is asking his permission to marry his wife Sheila (Felicity Kendal), who Philip suspects is having her own affair. Got it? Never mind.

Ayckbourn’s structure quite brilliantly sustains misapprehensions for nearly two hours. Yet Lindsay Posner’s no more than solidly performed production is a comedy-free zone for much of this time. You can’t really blame the cast. As clever as Ayckbourn’s conceit is, the play is populated by characters immersed in attitudes that either date or diminish them.

Philip is your classic middle-aged chauvinist, Sheila is his meek housewife and although Ginny seems an independent-minded girl, in Greg she has hitched herself to an insecure whinger who wants to get married just a month after meeting her.

Interestingly, another revival playing in the West End — Peter Nichols’s Passion Play (1981) — is similarly brilliant in its construction and also features a man in late middle-age having an affair with a woman young enough to be his daughter. And that play is also almost fatally dated by the attitudes of its protagonists.

To be clear, this is not a call to ban plays with old fashioned opinions. It’s a call to rewrite them. Or at least revamp them. Why does a play have to be a Victorian romp before it can be honed into something that works as well now as it did originally? After all, when Richard Bean got his hands on Boucicault’s script for the National Theatre production of London Assurance a few years back, it was one of the funniest shows in London.

Bean not only made the play funnier — he took the opportunity to undermine its long-running antisemitic jokes.

And if Patrick Marber can polish a 100-year-old script such as Trelawny of the Wells as he successfully did for the Donmar recently, why can’t a script nearly half that age, such as Ayckbourn’s, receive similar treatment?

A National treasure — Hytner looks back on his greatest hits

John Nathan — Thu, 23 May 2013 14:30:41 +0100

It was Nicholas Hytner’s third big opening in as many weeks. And how better to follow celebrated productions of Verdi’s Don Carlo starring Jonas Kaufmann at the Royal Opera House and Shakespeare’s Othello with Adrian Lester at the National Theatre than an evening in conversation at the London Jewish Cultural Centre.

The plan was for the National’s artistic director to talk to me about his work for 45 minutes — maybe an hour including a Q&A session. In the event, the running time was almost two hours.

Now any show that ends up being twice as long as originally planned is a worry for those involved. It can be downright terrifying for an audience. There are shorter plays in the West End. And two blokes sitting on a platform talking about the performing arts is not many people’s idea of a good night out. Unless, that is, one of those blokes is Nicholas Hytner. Or, more formally, Sir Nicholas Hytner, though he tends to eschew the “Sir”.

In answer to my first question, he did admit to once name-dropping the title. “I tried it on with British Airways hoping for an upgrade. It worked, and I was so embarrassed I never tried it again. I did consider turning the honour down. But I realised that I wouldn’t have the moral strength to refuse it without letting everyone know about it. And then I realised I was actually rather thrilled.”

Why did he contemplate rejecting the honour? “All my life I’ve used other people’s ‘Sir’ ironically, like everyone else I know in the theatre. And I suppose I was dubious about giving all my friends the opportunity to ‘Sir Nicholas’ me.”

From that candid moment, the audience of 160 people packed into a room for the Ivy House Music and Dance event were as enthralled by Hytner — who arrived in his modest blue Volkswagen Polo — as they had been by his productions.

Expectations were further raised by the fact that since the director had accepted the invitation to speak at the LJCC (he said yes within 15 minutes of receiving the email request), he had announced he would be moving on from the National in 2015.

There were some revealing replies over the course of our conversation. For example, how as a major contributor to the country’s cultural life, he feels part of a cultural heritage created by European Jewry — “although four generations ago my forebears were in the shtetl, not in Vienna or Berlin”. And his vocal opposition to anti-Israel boycotts.

He fears it will become more difficult for British and Israeli theatres to collaborate in the future, such as the National’s venture with Israel’s Habima Theatre in 2007. On this last point he emphasised he was speaking personally, rather than with his NT hat.

In what seems the unanimous opinion of critics and theatregoers, Hytner’s 10 years at the National have been a golden age. It’s hard to think of anyone who has enriched the cultural life of this country more. No one has argued more forcefully or eloquently to maintain the lifeblood of subsidy funding for the arts, or has worked harder to increase access.

Before the LJCC event, I looked up the first interview I did with Hytner soon after he took over from Trevor Nunn at the National in 2003. He spoke then of fostering a collegiate, open plan atmosphere by knocking down some of the building’s internal walls. Whether sledgehammers were actually brought in doesn’t really matter.

Because what’s happened since is that barriers have been broken down in all sorts of vital ways.

Whereas NT audiences were once predominately white, middle class, middle-aged and often, it has to be said, significantly Jewish, they now encompass all ethnicities, income brackets and age groups. What used to be a concrete-built, ivory tower of the dramatic arts is now open and welcoming. It boils down to a sense of civic responsibility and, one suspects, a hatred on Hytner’s part of performing arts existing for their own sake rather than for a public who have paid for the work through their tickets and their taxes.

It’s been a decade that has also been informed by a generosity of spirit with an instinct to turn high art into low-hanging fruit within the reach of all. And a cornerstone of that is the Travelex discounted ticket scheme, possibly the UK’s most far-reaching arts sponsorship programme. Yet none of this would have been possible if the art created by Hytner himself, and under his artistic direction, had not been so consistently daring, entertaining and — a word that perhaps isn’t used as much as it should be in theatre — beautiful. There have, of course, been occasional duds, but some huge hits — The History Boys, War Horse and One Man, Two Guvnors among them.

Hytner’s brilliant career has embraced opera, film and theatre — from Handel’s Xerxes to Miss Saigon. When you look at his work and add the steely resolve which has seen him become one of the sharpest thorns in the government’s side on arts subsidy, it is hard to think of anyone over the past decade who has enriched the cultural life of this country more.

He was characteristically open in our interview, evading only one question. He had expressed the hope that whoever succeeded him at the National would view his regime as “just a little bit boring”. Was that what he thought of the National’s output under Trevor Nunn? After a tantalising pause, he opted for the most diplomatic, no comment, response.

Shakespeare devotees in the audience were treated to the thinking behind, for my money, some of the most memorable productions of the Bard over the past 10 years, including Royal Shakespeare Company productions which have rarely shown the clarity of language and vision that define Hytner’s.

Take two revelatory moments from his 2010 “police state” Hamlet. The way David Calder’s Polonius advised his son Laertes “to thine own self be true” suggested that the courtier was complicit in the murder of Hamlet’s father. “Or at the very least, he knew about it,” Hytner said.

The production also implied that Ophelia was murdered. Hytner took the LJCC audience through the logic of his decision-making. “It would have been a police state. The king had just been murdered.

And now you have a mad woman going around Elsinore speaking the truth,” he explained, mimicking a shrill Ophelia. And then back in his own soft voice, Hytner continued: “Of course she was murdered.”
In whatever period Shakespeare set his plays, “he knew that he was writing about a world that his audience would recognise as theirs”. This was why his Henry V — Hytner’s first production as NT director — and Othello, his latest, were modern dress.

Comparing the two Shakespeare works most noted for their racism, Othello and The Merchant of Venice, he pointed out: “Merchant of Venice is an antisemitic play that contains within it a criticism of antisemitism. Everybody who isn’t Jewish in the play is antisemitic. They ascribe everything bad about Shylock to his Jewishness.
“You can’t imagine Shylock being appointed commander of the armed forces. Putting Iago aside for a moment, not many people in Othello are vocally racist.”

Manchester-born Hytner — son of a barrister father and a theatre fundraiser mother — also disclosed that he was unimpressed by his own opera productions, even Don Carlo, the success of which he attributes to the quality of the singing more than any directorial decision.

Only his 1985 production of Handel’s Xerses, which remains a cornerstone of the English National Opera, passes muster for him.

Actually, according to a conversation I had with the NT’s head of music, Matthew Scott, Hytner is more than the occasional flautist he admitted to. “He’s a fine musician indeed.” But, no, he was not up for playing a piece for the Ivy House crowd.

“Matthew is exaggerating,” he insisted later. “I’ll spare you and the audience. It wouldn’t be a pleasant experience for any of us.”

Pulitzer play turns spotlight on relations with Muslims

John Nathan — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:40:10 +0100

T he latest play to win a Pulitzer Prize for drama will be remembered for a long time by those who see it at west London’s Bush Theatre, where performances begin today. And Jewish or Muslim audience members are unlikely to forget it. Disgraced is written by Ayad Akhtar, a 42-year-old American actor, screenwriter, novelist and now dramatist. Previously performed at New York’s Lincoln Centre last year, the play is set in a fancy apartment in the city’s Upper East Side.

Its hero is corporate lawyer Amir, who has forsaken his Pakistani Muslim heritage and assimilated himself into American society as a member of its professional classes. His artist wife Emily is not Muslim, the law firm where he is a rising star is largely Jewish, as is the curator of the gallery who wants to exhibit the paintings created by his wife. Amir’s is an idyllic life of urbane sophistication — until, that is, his rejected Islamic past begins to catch up with him, forcing him to confront issues of identity.

The play climaxes in an explosive scene in which Amir and his Jewish dinner guest Isaac square up over the kind of issues that have caused friction between the Muslim and wider world in general — and, it could be said, Muslims and Jews in particular.

“I’ve been thinking about that a lot,” says Akhtar when I ask if Disgraced suggests that those points of friction between Muslims and others are at their most incendiary when the non-Muslims are Jews. Without quite answering the question head on, he lays out the context pretty succinctly.

“The question is the beginning of a whole series of things,” he replies. “Amir’s relationship to Jews, to Jewish immigrant experience, to making one’s way as an immigrant in American society by looking up to or being mentored by Jews — this is the politics but also the landscape of the play.” It was those questions of second generation immigrant experience and the dual identity of being a Muslim in a largely non-Muslim world that provided Akhtar with the themes for his acclaimed debut novel American Dervish, described by the New York Times as a “modern Muslim spin on earlier stories of Jewish assimilation”. Akhtar’s 2005 film The War Within took a different tack, exploring how a Muslim student in Paris becomes a radicalised terrorist in New York.

There are similarities between Akhtar and Amir, the fictional hero of his play. Both are sons of Pakistani parents and each has decided to live a largely secular life away from traditional Islam. Akhtar’s parents, both doctors, arrived in the US in the 1960s, settling in Milwaukee. They had a secular outlook, so their son’s interest in Islam was largely self-generated as a child.

“I had an amazing teacher in high school who sort of bombarded me with all the great existentialist literature — Sartre, Camus, Dostoevsky and Kafka. I was 16 and that was a shift. There was a different way to ask questions that encompassed this larger picture but that was not about blind belief. Which is why I [now] call myself a cultural Muslim, which is to follow so many of my Jewish friends who call themselves cultural Jews.”

In the play however, Amir’s relationship with his parents is very different. We hear how, when Amir was a boy, his mother dissuaded him from having anything to do with Rivkah, the Jewish girl in his school Amir fell for.

His mother does this by spitting in his face. And it’s partly this willingness to grapple with the attitudes of some Muslims to not only the non-Muslim world but to Jews too that gives Akhtar’s writing much of its power. This is balanced by his willingness to also grapple with the way Muslims are treated unfairly in the non-Muslim world, and by some Jews also. It’s explosive stuff.

“American Dervish is actually much more directly about Muslims and Jews,” says Akhtar of his novel as we chat in the Bush Theatre’s kitchen. Downstairs, rehearsals for Nadia Fall’s production of Disgraced, which has just won the Pulitzer, are well advanced. The venue is abuzz with anticipation.

“I get asked a lot ‘what is it about Muslims and Jews that’s so interesting to you’? And to me there are a couple of different levels. The first is that you can say that Islam is many things, but one of the things it certainly is is a meditation on Judaism. And the Koran, of course, quotes so much of the Old Testament, as if the original audience for the Koran was familiar with those stories. This is to say is that the Koran emanates from a landscape that is in part Jewish and there are continuities of ideology, mythology and of sensibility and practice between Jewish and Muslim cultures. When I was 13 I was assigned My Name is Asher Lev by Chaim Potok when I was in middle school. I loved the book so much that I read all of Potok’s books. And I had this odd feeling that he was writing about people I knew, my people, even though he was writing about Chasids in Brooklyn.”

It’s probably worth pointing out that the main dramatic relationship in Akhtar’s play is not between Amir and Isaac, the Jewish curator, but between Amir and his wife, whose art, just to load the dramatic dice further, incorporates traditional Islamic design and imagery. Amir remains a rare Muslim version of something that has existed in Jewish literature for a long time — the self-hating Jew. In fact it’s thanks to the work of two artists with Muslim backgrounds that this hitherto largely Jewish trope has found its way to the stage recently. The production of Arthur Miller’s Breaking Glass, starring Antony Sher as the self-hating Gellburg, was directed with great sensitivity by Iqbal Khan. Now comes Amir, a very different kind of self-hater, of course. But it is still no coincidence that his creator understands the Jewish diaspora experience as well as that of Muslims.

“When I was in college and discovered Philip Roth, Saul Bellow and especially Woody Allen, there was a feeling of familiarity,” Akhtar recalls. “But also a liberating sense that I could tell stories in ways that were familiar and which were my experience. There was this bridge that was showing me how to go about the process of authoring the Muslim American experience.”

Review: Travels With My Aunt

John Nathan — Mon, 20 May 2013 16:28:38 +0100

In Giles Havergal’s amusing adaptation of the Graham Greene novel, four actors in dull suits interchange the role of Greene’s narrator — retired bank manager Henry Pulling — and all the other male and female characters in the gently subversive story.

After his mother’s funeral, Pulling is swept into his Aunt Augusta’s law-breaking, convention-busting world of long-distance travel. Christopher Luscombe’s shadowy production is set among the architecture of Pulling’s local suburban train station, suggesting his escape from a life of conformity. The evening is high on charm and Jonathan Hyde, who takes the bulk of the Aunt Augusta role, and the oddly mesmerising David Bamber — whose stares have a strangely manic quality about them — are outstanding.

But Greene is diminished in a show whose acting overshadows rather than enhances the story.

Review: The Hothouse

John Nathan — Mon, 20 May 2013 15:50:36 +0100

Harold Pinter’s vision has come true. Up and down the land, institutions set up to care for the vulnerable have become callous places of torment. As a series of disturbing reports have shown, in a number of places, residents are at best routinely treated without respect and, at worst, abused. In that sense, real life has overtaken this prescient play. At least here, Roote (Simon Russell Beale), chief executive of the hospital in Pinter’s nightmare, has enough humanity to be appalled by the death of patient 6457. And at least he has the decency to show a little shame when it’s revealed that the baby born to patient 6459 is his.

He also appears to fear he might be called to account for the abuse under his watch, which is rarely the case in real life. So nobody can doubt the searing relevance of The Hothouse. But, as Pinter apparently acknowledged, the satire here comes across as pretty laboured at times.

Jamie Lloyd’s production, the latest in his muscular Trafalgar Transformed season, evokes both physical and moral decay. Soutra Gilmour’s design lines the Trafalgar’s cavernous stage with shabby interior walls.

Neglect here is engrained. The pointy bust, tight pencil skirt and high heels worn by the sexually insecure and predatory Miss Cutts (Indira Varma) locates the play somewhere around the year Pinter wrote it, 1958. And so does the humour. The exchanges between Roote and his sinister subordinates Gibbs (John Simm) and Lush (John Heffernan) have a kind of Beyond The Fringe absurdity about them. What makes them funny is Russell Beale, whose Roote is a brilliant portrait of insecure authority. Every piece of bad news delivered by Gibbs is received with gasping, gobsmacked incredulity.

But terrifying though the scenes in which the willing Lamb (Harry Melling) is experimented on with electrodes are, the evening fails to generate the fear that Pinter a little too obviously intended. And although, yes, we are made to think not of just failing hospitals but also of totalitarian regimes, the evening amounts to little more than vague political posturing. I was left feeling an absence of hard facts about real events that, for instance, Howard Brenton’s new play about Ai Weiwei delivered at the Hampstead Theatre — although that also failed on the fear factor. This is political theatre with a blunt edge.

Hytner: Othello's race 'not a big deal' to the Venetians

Jennifer Lipman — Tue, 14 May 2013 10:24:34 +0100

The racism in Othello is not as pronounced as the antisemitism in the Merchant of Venice, the director of the National theatre said this week.

Sir Nicholas Hytner, whose critically acclaimed production of Othello starring Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear is currently selling-out at the National, expressed his view in conversation with JC theatre critic John Nathan at the London Jewish Cultural Centre on Monday evening.

Discussing how the interpretation and reaction to William Shakespeare's work has changed over time, he noted that in 1604, London audiences would have had a very different response to a man with black skin than they did in 1804 or 1904.

"It was written before we had learnt to be as racist as we became," he said. "I give you as evidence of this the Merchant of Venice. Same city, same world, there isn't a page in Merchant of Venice which isn't obsessed with Shylock's Jewishness."

Sir Nicholas, who is only the second person to have run the National Theatre for more than a decade, described Merchant as "an antisemitic play which contains within it a criticism of antisemitism".

"Everybody in the play is antisemitic, they ascribe everything bad that is done to Shylock's Jewishness," he said. "You can't imagine Shylock being appointed commander of the armed forces.

"In Othello it's not a big deal to the Venetian duke and the senators of Venice that they are appointing a Moor. Not many people in Othello are vocally racist."

Sir Nicholas, who announced earlier this year that he was standing down from the National in March 2015, said he hoped his swansong would be a production of a new play by an up and coming writer. Although he gave no indication of who his preferred successor would be, he said it was great "for a theatre to have an artist as chief executive".

His tenure at the National has seen collaborations with Habima, the Israeli theatre company that faced boycott calls when it performed at the Globe Theatre last year. "I don't personally agree with boycotts," he said. "None of my colleagues said let's not work with them."

But he also revealed that as a young pupil of Manchester Grammar School, he initiated his own boycott – of the school's Jewish choir, joining the non-religious one instead. "The standards were not high enough in the Jewish choir so I boycotted it on musical grounds."

Review: The Weir

John Nathan — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:22:34 +0100

Best watched with a pint in the hand, there is no more convivial and captivating evening at the theatre than Josie Rourke’s faultless revival of Conor McPherson’s perfect play.

Tom Scutt’s design evokes exactly the run-down charm of a rural County Leitrim boozer and Rourke’s production shows the solitude of men who drink within.

You can see why the arrival of Valerie (Dervla Kirwan), a mysterious single woman, would cause a stir.

The ghostly stories constitute a kind of masculine bravado (the superb cast is led by the mesmerisingly macho — and tender — Brian Cox) until the one told by Valerie strikes her hosts dumb.