Issue 09 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
William Goldman, in his book Adventures In The Screen Trade, famously propounds the single most reliable rule as regards predicting big-screen success: Nobody Knows Anything. As if to emphasise that this is also true of theatre, scarcely have I written in the last Prompt Corner that "West End shows... hardly ever fold before Theatre Record can collate and reprint their reviews" than it happens for the second issue in succession. Bruce Graham's Coyote On A Fence at the Duchess, like Simon Gray's The Holy Terror at the Duke Of York's, lasted just three and a half weeks after its opening night. And once again this isn't a terrific surprise - certainly not enough to justify the Evening Standard's traditional mid-May "West End in crisis" article, although they ran it anyway. (Average attendances, wrote Nick Curtis, are only 67%, "on a good night". What on earth does that mean, "average... on a good night"? What are average attendances on an average night? But I digress...).
Graham's American death-row drama didn't raise my hackles the way Gray's mad-publisher muddle did, but it was fairly clear that it simply didn't have a hook for audiences. Not in terms of "scalps" - neither Ben Cross nor Alex Ferns is a big enough name to attract significant numbers of punters, although they're likely to recognise one or both faces once they're in the theatre. Not in terms of big issues: the question of capital punishment is largely settled on this side of the Atlantic, and we respond to American dramas on the subject (in whatever medium) as instances of a particular thematic sub-genre rather than as contributions to a debate. And not in terms of entertainment pizzazz: Graham hasn't written big yoks or big thrills, just a thoughtful piece of work... although I fear that, in the character of Bobby Alvin Reyburn, he doesn't subvert the redneck-racist-retard stereotype enough to get away with buying into it in the first place (I doubt whether Pennsylvanian Graham's play has been or will be staged south of the Mason-Dixon line, at least not outside liberal-arts campus towns).
I'm confident that the production worked well in its original space, the studio of Manchester's Royal Exchange (the reviews of which run can be found in Issue 07). But in the West End - even a venue like the Duchess which seats fewer than 500 - it's simply over-exposed. I'm not sure whether to applaud producer Matthew Mitchell for taking such a chance, or to scratch my head and wonder why he didn't know better... for this is surely an instance where Goldman's Law doesn't apply all that rigidly.
Freshly thought
Few such risks attended Trevor Nunn's first production of Hamlet in over thirty years, and none have survived the reviews. Casting all characters on the young side may not have been a marketing strategy aimed at the teenage set-text demographic, but it certainly hasn't done any harm on that score: even by the second-night performance I attended, the youthful character of the house was well established.
As for the artistic success of the production, well, I'm not quite in the a-star-is-born camp with the likes of Nicholas de Jongh and Charles Spencer, although clearly Ben Whishaw should be able to parlay this gig into a more than respectable c.v. for an actor of his age. I am full of admiration for the way Whishaw - and Samantha Whittaker, who's been given a somewhat raw deal from the critics as Ophelia - make their lines sound absolutely new-minted: freshly thought, never mind written. (It seems to have been considered churlish to point out that some of this freshness comes at the price of losing much sense of the verse.) They give utterly compelling renditions of their characters.
I'm just not sure that their characters are Shakespeare's. John Gross, master of textual exegesis, cuts straight to the chase when he opens his review with the observation that "We know how old Hamlet is." The Gravedigger's line in question is often cut - indeed, in my experience more often than not now - but this is usually in order to allow some leeway in the other direction rather than as a result of casting a prince appreciably younger than Hamlet's explicitly stated 30 years. John makes a plausible case for there being some ambiguity, even confusion, in the writing as between the more youthful and the more adult elements of Hamlet's thought and conduct. In the end, though, I believe it's the latter that win out; in my view, it's easier and more dramatically satisfying to gloss the immaturities of the character when playing an older Hamlet than to take the opposite approach. Similarly, I'm afraid I can't in the end believe that Whittaker's schoolgirl, boom-box-playing Ophelia would go mad and drown herself over her maltreatment by Hamlet; she'd take to her room for several weeks and listen to a lot of Amy Studt, is what she'd do.
It's absolutely not intended as glib disparagement when I say that as Hamlet and Ophelia, Whishaw and Whittaker make a phenomenal, epochal Romeo and Juliet. However, whilst I was immensely impressed with the accounts they gave of their characters as individuals, what I felt wanting (though, in all fairness, many older than I didn't) was the leap from the individual to the universal. Late emotional developer though I am, these two didn't speak feelingly to anything that's still within me. In that respect, I'd nearly be inclined to attribute more success to Tom Mannion's Claudius, who shows genuine concern and conscience at a number of points, almost as if Claudius thinks he's the protagonist of the story. No quibbles here, though, at the praise of Imogen Stubbs' Gertrude as the performance of her career to date; it was moreover a joy to see Rory Kinnear, recently such a comic delight in the RSC's Shrew/Tamer diptych, show that he can also add considerable heft to his more "serious" work.
Imbalance
I invited a much younger female friend to accompany me to David Mamet's Oleanna - almost literally one of my students - in the knowledge that it would be a delicious conceptual gag, especially when we had the traditional flaming row afterwards about our interpretations of the play. I'm afraid, though, that Lindsay Posner's production let us down by just not being either sparky or contentious, and we ended up earnestly, amicably agreeing about the imbalance in the writing, with Mamet's argumentative sympathies on one side and strength of character on the other, but in turn without plausible linear development to back the latter up.
As Carol, the student who over-interprets her lecturer's patronisation, Julia Stiles gives three excellent performances, one for each act, but she and Posner aren't up to bridging the gaps in characterisation that Mamet sloppily left between those acts. It's also instructive to compare and contrast Stiles' performance, especially in the first act, with that of Gillian Anderson in The Sweetest Swing In Baseball (also Issue 07). Like Anderson, Stiles is superb at "reaction-shot" acting; unlike her, though, the younger actor hasn't figured out how to adapt this skill to the stage, and rather than toning down the discreet twitches and mugs she keeps them going the whole time until they stop being discreet - once you've spotted them, it's hard to take your eyes off them.
The.
This isn't helped by Aaron Eckhart's anodyne performance as lecturer John. I completely missed the alleged sexual tension that some reviewers seem to detect merely in his being younger than the character as usually cast. On the contrary, John seemed to me to be already rooted in a kind of arid self-regard where process and trappings, domestic as much as professional, matter less for what they are than because they're What One Does: when he calls his wife "baby" over the phone the problem is not, as Carol implies, that it trivialises and infantilises her, but rather that it's plainly without any kind of feeling behind it at all. And as for his delivery of Mamet's fragmentary, stop/ start dialogue... It's difficult to convey this on paper, but let me try: at one point, I heard Eckhart deliver the single word "The..." not as a dangling, bitten-off abortion of a sentence, but as a one-word line in its own right, rather as one might say, "Yes." or "There." Or, in this case, "Wrong."
One insight I did carry away from this production: several years ago, I had the unpleasant experience of being fly-on-the-walled, of having seen broadcast a TV programme all about a vain, venal, generally disreputable hack who unfortunately happened to have my name and face. The utterly fictitious storyline was the creation of ten months in the edit suite aided by judiciously nudging voiceover remarks from the programme-maker. When I complained to the Broadcasting Standards Commission, the broadcaster's defence was in essence, "Well, Mr Shuttleworth did indeed say these things," to which my response was (in excruciating detail) yes, and the show wrenched them out of their context and confected its own. The reason I pick at this old scab now is that, throughout the second act of Oleanna, I listened carefully to Carol's accusations against John, and found that this is exactly the strategy adopted there. The wild rhetorical and ideological exaggerations don't begin until the final act; in Act Two, Carol's indictment is on the face of it entirely factual, just decontextualised... accurate without being true.
Ideological ogres
In its way Oleanna is already a historical work, at least in Britain. On its original production at the Royal Court in 1992, there seemed a genuine prospect that the American-campus strain of political correctness would be imported here. In the event, though, it never happened to any significant degree; in the UK today, the various forms of the term "PC" have no positive meaning in themselves, being used entirely pejoratively (as in "It's political correctness gone mad!") in what are usually specious attempts by the illiberal to justify their illiberality. The ideological ogre portrayed here is no longer one which threatens us. Certainly not in comparison with the pernicious, insinuating racism peddled by Alan in Roy Williams' Sing Yer Heart Out For The Lads.
It's a timely revival for Williams' play, as the loathsome British National Party stands on the verge of possible gains in next month's local and European elections; it's also a welcome opportunity for more people (myself included) to see it than could be accommodated in its original 2002 run in the National's temporary Loft space. And the play's a fine piece of work, examining the various vectors of conscious and unconscious racism in modern Britain. Ultimately, though, it's more an important play than it is an excellent one. It's certainly not agitprop, but it does line its pieces up in a fairly obvious way to engineer the set-piece exchanges demanded by the subject matter. We forgive the obviousness, but we shouldn't deny that it's there.
Embarrassment
For obviousness, though, Alistair Beaton's Follow My Leader currently
goes unchallenged on the London stage. Yes, Bush's and Blair's conduct
over Iraq offers an embarrassment of riches to the satirist, but this
is another kind of embarrassment altogether. Jason Durr does a fine
cartoon Blair, and Peter Polycarpou enjoys his various segments, but
Stuart Milligan resembles George W Bush less than he does Joe Don Baker,
and overall I've seen more complex Punch and Judy shows. A small point,
but I think a telling one: in a production tailored both towards updates
as events unfold in real life and towards its particular company, and
one in which both the female members of the cast, as it happens, are
black, can you guess which major political figure behind the Iraq campaign
is neither portrayed nor even mentioned during the entire show?
Ian Shuttleworth
At the Back
Two useful documents have passed our way these last weeks. The first, briefly excerpted as last issue's Quote of the Fortnight, was Estelle Morris's essay on Government And The Value Of Culture, the first sign for a very long time that our masters are at last ready to accept the idea that excellence is important, that poverty of aspiration needs to be combated just as much as the other aspects of national poverty identified by Beveridge more than half a century ago. The essay itself is not enticing in its dogged verbosity, but phrases such as "Complex cultural activity is not just a pleasurable hinterland for the public" should not be allowed to conceal our Culture Minister's real desire to put excellence (a concept which her thesis handles gingerly but with sympathy) back on the agenda. Her very use of the term culture is something of a breakthrough: it's not a word we British use comfortably.
Ms Morris's heartening conclusion is that "politicians have enough reasons to support culture on its own merits to stop apologising for it by speaking of it only in terms of other agendas." She goes on to raise a number of questions that deserve attention from anyone who cares about the arts (or culture, to use her preferred term). They amount to "If I'm right, how do we get away from bureaucratic target-setting and promote cultural excellence with intelligence and sympathy?"
Monotonous inevitability
Such thinking flies in the face of much recent Arts Council England policy, and those who have been forced to implement it should welcome its opening of a few elitist doors. At Stratford East, Philip Hedley has striven for years to meet the needs of London's most deprived community, yet has never lost sight of the idea of excellence. The last show of his long tenure, The Big Life, is the latest in a line of locally-produced musicals that seek to show that the music and mores of today's urban kids can be just as valid, as excellent if you like, as those of thirties America, the modern musical's benchmark.
Let me not become too preachy here. Some reviews in this issue suggest that this is a great musical, and it's not - it's nowhere near as innovative or interesting as the hip-hop Da Boyz or the Bhangra Baiju Bawra, both developed by Ultz - but it has pleased the local audience enough to sell out its extended run. When you examine it carefully, you find a thin story and some average-plus tunes (which appear with monotonous inevitability at the end of each variety-sketch scene in Paul Sirett's patronising script) redeemed by some affectionate performances and a winning band. The splendid impro of Tameka Empson distracts us as cumbersome set dressings are moved around, and we all go home happy.
Never mind, the aim is there. Stratford isn't just pandering to fashionable demands for "diversity", it's trying to do so by innovation and the search for the best.
Interesting, if true
The second document comes from Dominic Shellard of Sheffield University, and was commissioned by Arts Council England, supported by SOLT and TMA, paid for in part by the Arts and Humanities Research Board - a useful marriage (or menage à trois) of art, education and commerce. Dominic's Economic Impact Study Of UK Theatre follows Tony Travers' London-based 1998 Wyndham Report to confirm that, on a national scale, theatre earns the country a lot of money, not just from ticket sales but from the meals bought, transport paid for, even the baby-sitters engaged to make a good night out. On top of the price of a ticket, the new report concludes, the average visitor spends a further £53.77 in the West End, £7.77 outside (Curious, those .77s.) This enormous gulf may start us wondering about the survey's accuracy, but even that figure means that the theatre outside London brings in £1.1 billion to the economy on top of the West End's £1.5 billion.
An interesting aspect of the (rather short) Shellard survey is that the 259 theatres who supplied data are listed in descending order of turnover, producing an impromptu league table of their financial clout. Interesting, if true, as they say - is Plymouth really the nation's highest turnover theatre after the NT and RSC? Stratford East occupies a respectable position in the top third of the table, ahead of Hampstead and Greenwich, and indeed the two spaces of the Traverse. But does the Orange Tree, a little further down, really produce more turnover than Richmond, which has four times as many seats and several more playing weeks?
The spirit of Carry On
The Orange Tree, like Stratford, aims for excellence and seeks it in unexpected places. After challenging the locals with Lorca, Sam Walters is just as happy to offer a forties farce, Love's A Luxury, as a reminder of the merits of this now neglected art form. It sits well in its sixties setting, and although far from a classic, it still tickles the ribs, with some Orange Tree regulars making the most of their opportunities and Roger Sloman bringing something of the spirit of the Carry On movies to the evening. Perhaps Walters should look at Ring For Catty, the farce that gave birth to Carry On Nurse and all that followed.
It's amazing that the current West End roster offers no farce at all and hardly any comedy - that is, plays which can be called comedies. We're in the middle of the London Comedy Festival, the last gasp of stand-up, and there are minor hybrids about like A Very Naughty Boy, Adrian Poynton's life of Brian, the Python Graham Chapman. To be snobbish, Poynton and his sidekick, Tom Price, who plays John Cleese, simply lack the public school manner to voice their roles convincingly; but Chapman's confused, confusing life is well enough told to please its young, post-Python audience.
Real weals
M.A.D at the Bush is raw stuff indeed, with David Eldridge giving an account of a marriage breakdown even more hurtful, if more conventional, than that in The Goat. Jo McInnes, coming straight from On Blindness, gives another of her fine, committed performances: she spent the second act nursing very real weals from her fight with Lee Ross. Eldridge seems to be exorcising demons of his own here, but the manner of his doing so gives us superb, cathartic theatre.
The other very noticeable element of this London season is the boom
in American plays. This issue brought Oleanna and (briefly) Coyote
On A Fence to join Harry Met Sally and The Goat, with Suddenly
Last Summer, Fuddy Meers, The Shape Of Things, even Bob Wilson's Black
Rider jostling behind. Let's hope the tourists are coming - they
had better be, for the sake of the West End's health.
Ian Herbert
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
THE ATHEIST'S TRAGEDY Revival of the play by Cyril Tourneur |
White Bear |
22 Apr | 9 May | 557 |
THE BIG LIFE New musical by Paul Sirett and Paul Joseph |
T R Stratford E15 |
22 Apr | 29 May | 530 |
COYOTE ON A FENCE New play by Bruce Graham |
Duchess |
28 Apr | 22 May | 555 |
DEFYING HITLER Adapted by Rupert Wickham from the book by Sebastian Haffner |
New End |
5 May | 22 May | 572 |
FLUSH New play by David Dipper |
Soho |
22 Apr | 8 May | 573 |
FOLLOW MY LEADER New play by Alistair Beaton with music by Richard Blackford |
Hampstead |
26 Apr | 22 May | 545 |
GONE MISSING New musical by Steven Cosson and Michael Friedman with Peter Morris |
Gate |
5 May | 22 May | 574 |
HAMLET Revival of the play by William Shakespeare |
Old Vic |
27 Apr | 1 Jan | 547 |
HENRY IV Revival of the play by Luigi Pirandello, in a new translation by Tom Stoppard |
Donmar |
4 May | 26 Jun | 566 |
HER ALABASTER SKIN Revival of the play by Nick Green |
Barons Court |
22 Apr | 10 May | 559 |
LES PARENTS TERRIBLES Revival of the play by Jean Cocteau |
Jermyn Street |
5 May | 22 May | 576 |
LOSER New play by John-Paul Zaccarini and F/Z |
Drill Hall 1 |
24 Apr | 16 May | 554 |
LOVE'S A LUXURY Revival of the play by Guy Paxton and Edward V Hoile |
Orange Tree |
30 Apr | 29 May | 560 |
M.A.D. New play by David Eldridge |
Bush |
23 Apr | 22 May | 543 |
THE MAN WHO Revival of Peter Brook adaptation from Oliver Sacks |
Pleasance |
22 Apr | 9 May | 565 |
OLEANNA Revival of the play by David Mamet |
Garrick |
22 Apr | 1 Jan | 533 |
PIGNIGHT Revival of the play by Snoo Wilson |
Menier |
3 May | 9 May | 532 |
PROVENANCE New play by Ronnie Burkett |
The Pit |
29 Apr | 15 May | 558 |
SING YER HEART OUT FOR THE LADS Return of play by Roy Williams |
Cottesloe |
30 Apr | 26 Jun | 561 |
THE TWO GENTLEMEN OF VERONA Revival of the play by William Shakespeare |
Greenwich Playhouse |
20 Apr | 6 May | 539 |
A VERY NAUGHTY BOY New play by Adrian Poynton |
Soho |
22 Apr | 8 May | 540 |
Regions |
||||
BASIL AND BEATTIE New play by Linda Brogan |
Manchester, R Exchange Studio |
26 Apr | 8 May | 577 |
BLONDE BOMBSHELLS OF 1943 New play by Alan Plater |
Leeds, WYP Quarry |
28 Apr | 22 May | 581 |
CINZENTO GREY New play by Joana Craveiro |
Glasgow Tron |
5 May | 8 May | 590 |
DROWNING ON DRY LAND New play by Alan Ayckbourn |
Scarborough, Stephen Joseph |
4 May | 11 Sep | 583 |
ENGAGED Revival of play by W S Gilbert |
Pitlochry, Festival |
30 Apr | 14 Oct | 588 |
FULL CIRCLE Revival of Alan Melville adaptation from Marc-Gilbert Sauvajon and Frederick Jackson |
Glasgow, King's |
3 May | 9 May | 588 |
GILGAMESH Presentation by Teatro Kismet |
Brighton, Gardner Arts Centre |
5 May | 8 May | 585 |
INSIGNIFICANCE Revival of play by Terry Johnson |
Northampton, Royal |
27 Apr | 15 May | 578 |
KINDERTRANSPORT Revival of play by Diane Samuels |
Bolton, Octagon |
30 Apr | 22 May | 577 |
MANDRAGORA, KING OF INDIA New play by Nirjay Mahindru |
Glasgow, Tron |
22 Apr | 24 Apr | 586 |
MARY STUART Revival of play by Friedrich Schiller, translated by Jeremy Sams |
Southampton, Nuffield |
27 Apr | 15 May | 581 |
PAINFUL CREATURES Outdoor performance piece/installation devised by Ian Smith |
Falkirk, Callendar Park |
1 May | 2 May | 582 |
THE PEOPLE NEXT DOOR Revival of the play by Henry Adams |
Glasgow, Citizens |
27 Apr | 1 May | 590 |
PERFECT New play by Kaite O'Reilly |
Manchester, Contact |
30 Apr | 15 May | 582 |
SCENES FROM AN EXECUTION Revival of play by Howard Barker |
Dundee Rep |
27 Apr | 8 May | 587 |
TELL ME ON A SUNDAY Revival of musical by Andrew Lloyd Webber and Don Black |
Edinburgh, Festival |
26 Apr | 1 May | 586 |
THE TRIUMPH OF LOVE revival of play by Pierre Marivaux, translated by Martin Crimp |
Colchester, Mercury |
4 May | 15 May | 584 |