Theatre

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.

Review: The Tempest

John Nathan — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:19:42 +0100

There’s a world-weary naturalism to Roger Allam’s likeable Prospero. Other actors lay on thick the other-worldly wisdom which the deposed Duke of Milan has adopted ever since he was cast adrift in a sieve-like boat with his baby daughter, Miranda. But not Allam. The Thick of It star brings a shrugging, almost Tony Hancock-style comic fatalism to his Prospero. The glances of exasperation directed towards the groundlings are returned with a groundswell of sympathy.

As with all productions of Shakespeare’s magical play, Jeremy Herrin’s ebbs in the over-long scenes of laboured high comedy. But it flows, too, especially whenever Allam’s Prospero reconciles himself to releasing those within his power — Colin Morgan’s bird-like Ariel, James Garnon’s earthy (in fact rocky) Caliban, but most of all Miranda, played by Jessie Buckley, the runner-up in the Lloyd Webber TV talent show I’d Do Anything. This is Buckley’s Shakespeare debut and on this evidence it will certainly not be the last. Her Miranda transmits a deep loneliness from being the only child of a single parent on an island with no friends.

But it’s innate star wattage that prevents Buckley from being overshadowed by Allam’s stage presence. Both get terrific support from Garnon and Morgan as the base and lofty opposites on Prospero’s island. Garnon’s Caliban moves like an ape but his baritone voice is curiously infected with the indignant tone of a man with aspirations. Morgan’s feathered Ariel, meanwhile, is a rare, exotic species who sits as watchful, still and alert as a heron.

In the marriage scene, Herrin’s playful production fills the air with fluttering petals. But the real beauty of the evening lies in that daughter-father relationship and in the tender negotiation to set free the thing that is most loved.

Review: Passion Play

John Nathan — Mon, 13 May 2013 11:08:08 +0100

Like Pinter’s Betrayal, Peter Nichols’s 1981 play about marital infidelity turns theatrical convention on its head. Pinter’s work (written in 1978) tells his story in reverse while the big idea in Nichols’s play hinges on married couple Eleanor and James (Zoe Wanamaker and Owen Teale) sharing the stage with their alter egos (Samantha Bond and Oliver Cotton).

It’s a terribly clever device that allows the innermost thoughts of choral musician Eleanor and art restorer James to be subtly revealed. It also serves as a telling metaphor for the double life that adulterers necessarily have to lead. The result is highly entertaining complexity as layers of meaning behind even the most simple exchanges are revealed.

So when middle-aged James is asked by his young lover Kate why they shouldn’t have an affair, his public self (Teale) continues the small talk while his inner self (Cotton) runs through the list — love, affection, habit, cowardice, fear. It’s this syncopated stream of dialogue that elevates Passion Play above so many other adultery dramas.

But it’s an idea and plot that eventually runs out of steam. And unlike Pinter’s play, Nichols’s is almost fatally dated. James’s lover Kate (Annabel Scholey) is a thinly drawn femme fatale who specialises in hooking 50-something married men. She doesn’t have the complexity to warrant an alter ego of her own — probably a good thing considering that we would end up with six actors playing three characters. But, in the second act, the plot, which hinges on the discovery of a love letter, thins seriously.

Eleanor has indulged in a little philandering of her own, but essentially she is the hard-done-by wife who has the breakdown, sees the psychiatrist and takes the overdose of sleeping pills. But because by now we have given up caring whether the marriage survives, David Leveaux’s sexy, sometimes steamy production loses drive and tension.

As you would expect with a cast this strong, the play is well-acted. Wanamaker is an expert at revealing suppressed emotional wounds. And Samantha Bond very subtly modulates her performance in a way that mirrors Wanamaker’s both physically and vocally.

But while the genius of Nichols’s big idea remains, there is a lot here that feels as old as the play. Gender politics partly defined by a mistress unencumbered by the conventions of bourgeois and boring marriages (as Kate would see it) must have once felt awfully on the button in a post-feminist kind of way. Now it feels rather like one man’s old-fashioned view of humanity.

Review: Othello

John Nathan — Mon, 06 May 2013 09:00:09 +0100

The two productions that have bookended Nicholas Hytner’s decade as artistic director of the National Theatre, Henry V and Othello, have much in common. There’s Shakespeare, Adrian Lester in the title roles and an ability to do that thing which Hytner has said National Theatre productions should strive for — holding up a mirror to the nation.

In 2003, that nation was at all-out war in Iraq. Today, it is still fighting, but now conflict in this modern (combat) dress production has the feel of attritional normality. And, although much of the action is set in Cyprus, Hytner still finds room for a whiff of English Defence League-style bigotry before we get there, when the senator Brabantio (William Chubb), backed by a couple of well turned-out thugs, confronts Othello for having sex with his daughter Desdemona. The crime, in the father’s eyes, is clearly compounded not only by the colour of Othello’s skin but also the otherness of his nation.

But it is a state of mind that should — and does — shape the foreground to this psychologically slippery play. Here, Hytner has cast his Hamlet Rory Kinnear as his Iago. That Hamlet production was most interesting for its ideas. It featured a police state, Denmark, and in one unforgettable moment it was suggested that Ophelia was murdered. Kinnear was a fine prince but the evening was much more interesting for its production than simply for Kinnear’s performance.

There is no such imbalance this time. The play is driven by an unstoppable, malign force in the form of Kinnear’s Iago. There are scenes in which he barely speaks and which you only belatedly notice the watchful, brooding figure with the thunderous stare in the corner of the room. When he does talk, there is no hint of duplicity in his breezy exchanges with the people he makes it his mission to destroy. The accent, though, is harder to get a handle on.

A cross between a Jewish taxi-driver and white South African, Kinnear may be going for a broad London, working class brogue that suggests an aspirational lower middle — or should that be upper lower — social class. At one point, he hilariously mimics Othello’s posh lieutenant Cassio (a dashing Jonathan Bailey) and later he clearly enjoys leading Roderigo — here terrifically played by Tom Robertson as an upper class twit — by the nose. Despite the ambiguity of that accent, I doubt there will be a Shakespeare production this year in which the language is better spoken and where the story is more clearly defined.

With most of the action taking place in Cyprus, Vicki Mortimer’s design appears to have been inspired by the cargo crate city of Camp Bastion, Britain’s military base in Afghanistan. The rooms are Lego-shaped boxes that serve as arrestingly banal mini stages to the action taking place within. Othello and Desdemona’s bedroom is not the usual boudoir bedecked with drapes in the Moorish style, but a space whose charmless interior serves as a starkly bland backdrop to the moment when Othello strangles his wife. And it is all the more convincing and harder to watch for that.

As Othello, the excellent Lester conveys a rare kind of urbane warlord. His descent into jealous rage appears rooted in a belief that there is more to life than giving orders and being professionally violent and that Olivia Vinall’s civilising and teasingly irreverent Desdemona is the way to find it. This is a man who is not just in love with his wife, but with the man into whom his wife has turned him.

We got a foretaste of Lester’s Othello when he played the Victorian black actor Ira Aldridge at the Tricycle’s recent production of Red Velvet.

But, actually, it is not so much Aldridge’s Othello that’s expanded upon here, as Lester’s Aldridge — a man whose sophistication and charm is a raft upon which he can rise out of the mire of white bigotry that surrounds him. Except, of course, Iago’s.

Review: Nineveh

John Nathan — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:18:14 +0100

This new work by international company Theatre Témoin takes as its source material the testimony, compiled by director Ailin Conant, of fighters from countries of conflict including Israel, Rwanda and Lebanon.

Their experiences have been filtered through the fertile imagination of playwright Julia Pascal who here hijacks the legend of Jonah by placing four soldiers inside a giant whale. Each fighter is forced to share their own experiences and crime to have a chance of escape.

There is a Beckettian quality to this piece that charts a course through bleak tragedy and dark comedy. But I have a hunch that Pascal was thinking of Sartre when she wrote this play. As is the case here, the characters in Huis Clos (No Exit) are also trapped in an afterlife while forced to confront the decisions and deeds that led them to their purgatory.

However, I’m unconvinced that their stark testimonies are best served by a playwright’s artful symbolism.

Review: #Aiww: The Arrest of Ai Weiwei

John Nathan — Fri, 26 Apr 2013 10:04:32 +0100

Howard Brenton’s play is based on the artist Ai Weiwei’s account of 81 days of detention by the Chinese authorities, as described in journalist Barnaby Martin’s book The Hanging Man. Director James Macdonald presents it as a piece of modern art. The theatre’s stage has been stripped back to whitewashed walls. The four sides of a huge crate open up like a cumbersome flower revealing the artist, played by Benedict Wong, as exhibit. The box also serves as the two rooms in which Weiwei is interrogated. This is torment by boredom, intimidation and, occasionally, by threat of violence. It’s cycle that establishes its own rhythm on Weiwei’s life.

However, it’s clear that the process is as difficult on the artist’s guards — who sit inches away from their charge, staring intently staring at him. And slowly, perhaps too optimistically, their humanity is revealed.

A dialogue about art ensues. Weiwei explains how classical art can no longer cope with modern life, hence the piece for which he photographed his middle finger pointing skywards at various iconic tourist destinations including Beijing. No, it wasn’t an obscene gesture directed at the Chinese government, but a means to show how the artist’s tool of perspective (the finger) had changed. Maybe a horizontal thumb would have been less easy to misinterpret. The dialogue, which in one scene is conducted in ventriloquist mode to prevent the authorities’ cameras from lip-reading, culminates in a moment of triumph with Weiwei punching the air with a “Yes”. The guards have finally understood that their prisoner is a Dadaist.

Brenton and Macdonald convey the mix of absurdity and fear that accompanies being at the whim of a merciless dictatorship. But the wrong kind of indignant outrage informs this evening. When Weiwei is not (understandably) submitting to the orders of the guards, he exhibits what seems to me to be a particular brand of incredulity over his treatment. It is hard to define which brand exactly. But here is a man being treated unforgivably badly and who is (again understandably) outraged that his freedom and freedom of expression have been curtailed. And then it hit me.

The brand of outrage expressed by Wong’s Weiwei could be from any one of us — in this country. His outrage is a Western, scandalised kind. There were moments when I almost expected Weiwei to threaten his guards with a letter to his local MP. What’s lacking is the wearisome, dehumanising grind that informs the plays of say, Vaclav Havel, the Czech dissident who knew all about how the communist machine grinds individuals into nothing and whose plays transmitted the bleak truth of that simple fact.

Review: The Table

John Nathan — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:48:49 +0100

The inaugural play in the National’s temporary, very big and very red new venue is high on concept, but on contrivance also. The big idea underlying Tanya Ronder’s offering is that of the kitchen table not only serving as the surface on which we eat, work and occasionally have sex, but as witness to a family’s trials and tribulations. Here, the scars accumulated each have a story attached, from moments of towering importance, such as the scrape made by a child’s coffin, to the nicks and notches accumulated over “27 million conversations”.

Spanning over a century, and five generations of the Best family, we get a sense of the eras through which the family lived, from the emotionally stunted privations of First-World-War Britain to the hilariously over-expressed needs of 1970s sexually liberated hippydom when the table ends up being used by a commune.

With the help of director Rufus Norris and a terrific cast, it has been turned into an evening of engaging and epic storytelling. But in truth, The Table does not stand up on its own. Richard Bean wrote a play called Harvest a few years ago. It, too, spanned several generations from the First World War to the modern day and it too had a table. Except that it was only very late in the play before it emerged that this piece of furniture was witness to the whole story. It was a brilliantly observed detail, and one that, it turns out, was kept rightly in its place — in the middle of the kitchen mostly — by barely acknowledging it.

Review: Children of the sun

John Nathan — Mon, 22 Apr 2013 10:41:53 +0100

Unlike his contemporary Chekhov, it’s not only Russia’s pre-revolutionary privileged class who populate Maxim Gorky’s plays but a hostile and starving proletariat. This work, which the political dramatist and activist wrote from his St Petersburg prison during Russia’s aborted 1905 revolution, gives a sense of them circling the home of scientist Protasov.

In this new version by Andrew Upton, Protasov’s sister Liza describes their home as an oasis in a black, hostile forest, although in Howard Davies’s wonderful production it’s more of a high-walled fortress.

Oblivious to the condition of his fellow man, Protasov conducts chemistry experiments to advance mankind.

Meanwhile, his neglected wife Yelena flirts with the artist Vageen, the lonely Melaniya dotes on Protasov, her melancholy brother, the vet Boris, expresses undying love for Liza. She is the only one who can see the coming storm — until, that is, the peasants are no longer a menacing, largely unseen presence and breach the walls.

Davies’s gripping production rather brilliantly emphasises that barrier between the privilege within and the poverty without by giving his audience a peasant’s perspective of Protasov’s home – a high dirty wall. In a moment of exquisitely staged transition, the whole edifice sinks into the Lyttelton’s stage, giving the impression that we, the audience, are rising above it until it is possible to see over the parapet and into Bunny Christie’s design of the cavernous, chic-shabby interior.

Upton’s open, unfussy translation has a lightness of touch that serves well the ideas and arguments about art and science with which Protasov and his circle are obsessed. But there are moments when Upton’s obsession with accessibility gets the better of his script. Exchanges such ‘What’s your problem?” followed by “How long have you got?” and lines such as “In yer dreams” feel not only colloquial (which is fine) but like an oddly British strain of sarcasm (which is not).

But this is a small gripe in a superbly performed production that is destined to be one of the finest of the year. The charge of politics would count for little if the relationships here were not so beautifully observed.

Justine Mitchell, as Protasov’s ignored wife, moves from a distracted self-indulgence with her artist fancy man (Gerald Kyd) in tow, to a steely observer of her sexless marriage. Geoffrey Streatfeild, as her brilliant husband, transmits a kind of emotional autism in response to her needs that makes you want to slap him.

And there is terrific work, too, from Paul Higgins as Boris and Lucy Black as Melaniya, who are each in love with their hosts — Boris with Liza, Melaniya with Protasov. Meanwhile, the town is racked with cholera and the revolution cannot be far away. The effect is something akin to a party on the sinking Titanic.

Review: Once

John Nathan — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 12:52:09 +0100

This is the tender little acoustic romance that kicked the hell out of bigger, brasher shows at New York’s Tony awards. And it is easy to see why. Once is based on the Oscar-winning Dublin-set film and uses the same, sometimes devastatingly beautiful soundtrack composed by Glen Hansard, of the indie band, Frames, and Marketa Irglová. Not only that, the music, played superbly well by a the 12-strong cast of actor musicians, is attached to a gratuitously romantic Girl (Zrinka Cviteši) meets Guy (Declan Bennett) story.

Dubliner Guy fixes vacuum cleaners with his widower father. But it is his music that defines him and when Czech Girl walks into a pub to find him singing desolately about the ex-girlfriend who left him, Girl knows that she must save both man and music. For somehow she has gleaned that even though she has just watched guitar man Guy strumming until his fingers practically bleed — and singing to the point where his heart almost bursts, — he is on the verge of metaphorically killing himself by giving up music for good. And so the two end up making beautiful music together.

If the above description has a whiff of cynicism, it is because despite the sardonic wit injected into the story by normally dark-as-pitch playwright Enda Walsh, the love story on which the show rests is pretty thin, despite the fact that Walsh has fleshed it out. It’s a kind of Brief Encounter-lite plot, only without any sense of the social mores that keep Guy and Girl apart.

The musical has been called revolutionary. Well, it is innovative perhaps. Director John Tiffany’s masterstroke is to set the action in a cosy Dublin boozer that hosts impromptu gigs. Before the show starts, audience members are free to join the jamming cast on stage for a few jars.

Tiffany and choreographer Steven Hoggett revive some of the movement magic that informed their production of Black Watch, which was about the army regiment’s tour of Iraq. Heads tilt, limbs arc through the air and hands speak their own sign language.

It works very well here, though has none of the poleaxing impact it had in Black Watch, where the movement served as a way into the emotions of soldiers who had no vocabulary to express them. So there is an element of schtick being resurrected, albeit effectively.

There is also nothing much revolutionary about the score. It’s neither plot-driven in the old-school way, nor is it rooted in the internal life of the show’s character’s in the way the truly ground-breaking Spring Awakening achieved. Rather the songs here — including the Oscar-winning number Falling Slowly — are drawn from Guy’s back catalogue and romantic history.

There is though no resisting great songs beautifully sung; a love story - however thin - well told; and a hugely talented cast lead by the piano-playing Cviteši and guitar man Bennett, who are astoundingly on song.

Review: Peter and Alice

John Nathan — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 11:57:05 +0100

You wait generations for a new play to be premiered in the West End and then two come along at once.

Following Peter Morgan’s The Audience, a highly entertaining, slightly obsequious love letter to royalty starring Helen Mirren, comes John Logan’s high-concept play about Peter Llewelyn Davies and Alice Liddell Hargreaves — better known as the characters they helped inspire when they were children, Peter Pan and Alice in Wonderland.

Michael Grandage’s production is worth seeing alone for two immensely moving performances by Judi Dench and Ben Whishaw. Each captures the particular tragedy of adults whose lives are forever defined during childhood.
But Logan’s dream-like approach to his subjects, who are seen meeting in an encounter that actually took place in 1932, is more distracting than illuminating.

There is a hugely powerful moment when the real-life Alice’s and Peter’s flaws are exposed by their fictional child counterparts (Olly Alexander and Ruby Bentall). But there is an artifice that is more laboured than inventive. Logan revives authors Lewis Carroll (Nicholas Farrell) and J M Barrie (Derek Riddell) and has them contribute to this apparently spontaneous biographical work. And the effect is all too knowing.

Still, Dench and Whishaw, in their contrasting ways — Dench by shedding a walking stick and decades, and Whishaw by being weighed down by disappointment and First World War memories — deliver a mesmerising melancholy.