Issue 10 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
Nearly twenty years ago, Nicholas Hytner directed a play about the sexual and political awakening of a group of public schoolboys, about the formative influence of an unconventional teacher and about clashes of ideology. Now he's back in the same territory. That's not in any way to accuse Alan Bennett's The History Boys of being influenced by Robin Glendinning's Mobil award-winner Mumbo Jumbo (1987 p617); although informed by similarly intelligent and spirited liberalism, Bennett's play about Thatcherism in a Sheffield grammar and Glendinning's about Loyalism in a Belfast one are chalk and cheese. It's just the kind of curiosity I like to remark on, not least because Robin himself was the unconventional teacher who kindled my own interest in theatre. (The main juvenile role in Mumbo Jumbo, by the way, was played by a young Michael Grandage. How's that for spotting talent early?)
In reviews of The History Boys as in so many other instances, Nicholas de Jongh stands out as the contrarian. Pretty much everything he says about Bennett's piece is incontestable. It's a chronological muddle: Eighties schoolboys with encyclopaedic knowledge of Fifties camp, and indeed a mistaken sense of the Eighties themselves as a single phase in educational history - the scene-setting snatches of period pop music specify the first half of the decade, whereas it was really only in the second half that Thatcher and her minions began to turn the educational sector into a field for pre-commercial training rather than actual learning. Bennett is too concerned with enacting his views on education and culture in general to be that bothered about rooting them in a specific world. The result is that the school becomes a kind of Neverland, and the events depicted less a microcosmic manifestation of a broad social and political shift than a fable about it. Few other reviewers have dared to point out as much, as if fearful that to do so would be to damage the play irreparably.
Soaring majesty
Because here's the thing: it doesn't. The power both of the play and of the argument it advances shine through all the woolliness and inconsistencies. So the new history teacher Irwin is a compendium of bogeys, standing at various points in the timeline for Thatcherite educationalism and the blight of glib media historians and the ideological perversion of policy wonks (with, as it happens, a Blairite flavour). So the blithe acceptance of a certain amount of homosexual fumbling is likewise at best a quaint throwback (when, if at all, will we see a revival of Roger Gellert's underrated schoolboy-affair play Quaint Honour?) and at worst a heresy in this climate of hysterical witch-hunting. So Frances de la Tour's character is included almost as an afterthought, the token woman who owes her status as universal confidant not to her sex but to her sexlessness. One can painstakingly catalogue the blemishes on the bark of every individual tree and miss the soaring majesty of the forest as a whole. The History Boys is a creation of both beauty and potency. It makes important points with both intellectual and emotional passion.
It's easy, also, to dismiss this kind of adulation as the apologism of reviewers who sprang from the same culture themselves and are keen to subscribe to its being thus mythologised. But this is Nick Hytner's National Theatre... and while Hytner the ex-Manchester Grammar School boy no doubt relished the use of a snippet of The Smiths' song The Headmaster Ritual, cutting off just before the opening couplet "Belligerent ghouls/Run Manchester schools", Hytner the artistic director's tenure on the South Bank has shown that his own concerns and interests bear little or no relation to this fictitious England, keen as he is to grapple with altogether more immediate issues as regards the National's place in the nation's culture. The History Boys isn't set in the real world, but it speaks to it and works within it, marvellously. The well-made play is as often as not a pale, bloodless creature; this, on the other hand, is spotty, with raging hormones and that irresistible combination of restless inquisitiveness and utter certainty. In his seventieth year, Bennett has written a nigh-perfect teenage play.
The flimsiest of hooks
Another example of a project worth watching despite flaws - and at the National once again - was Lifegame. Phelim McDermott and his Improbable comrades' version of Keith Johnstone's impro approach to bio-drama contains almost limitless scope for fouling up. That's probably why Improbable, whose raison d'etre is to embrace the spontaneous and unexpected in theatre, like it so much. It just so happens that one of those mishaps occurred on the press night. Not a technical catastrophe to compare with the fire that delayed the opening curtain of The History Boys, but simply this: if your interview subject - about whom you know nothing before they walk onto the stage - turns out to be a modest, unostentatious sort of person, you're not going to get much material to work with. They're not going to volunteer much, or even give much away inadvertently, and so the improvised dramatic scenes will be hung on the flimsiest of hooks. If you're not careful, you might be perceived not so much to be celebrating this person's life as to be persecuting them with two hours of personal intrusion. It's a testimony to Lee Simpson's skill as an interviewer and McDermott's, Angela Clerkin's, Guy Dartnell's et al. as improvisers that the awkwardness seldom if ever veered into outright discomfort. Indeed, one moment from an earlier Lifegame sums up both Improbable and theatre in general for me: when the interviewer gave an answer with clear dramatic possibilities, I looked over to see McDermott silently nodding and gesturing to his fellows, with a great big smile on his face as if this were the best game of let's-pretend ever. Which it is, of course.
Antediluvian
So, let's pretend. Let's pretend that Rattle Of A Simple Man was any kind of reasonable bet for a West End run. (I'm now beginning to feel quite stuffed with humble pie as regards this sequence of shows closing before we can reprint their reviews.) And let's pretend that Beautiful And Damned can in good conscience be praised in any way. If the schoolboys in Bennett's play are quaint, singing Gracie Fields and acting out the end of Now, Voyager, then Charles Dyer's play seems positively antediluvian in places, for all that it's set in the Sixties, just at the moment when Philip Larkin has dunned it into us that sexual intercourse began. And if Percy's strict courtesy - refusing even to say "Damn" in front of a lady (and counting even a hooker as a lady) - was intended to seem olde-worlde then, it's almost incomprehensible now.
John Caird's production made the best of it in the circumstances. Michelle Collins was astutely cast half-in type, half-against it: Cyrenne has all the mendacity but none of the malice of EastEnders' Cindy Beale. And Stephen Tompkinson enjoyed the comedy of gormlessness as Percy, but was restrained either by himself or by Caird from the excess of mugging that so marred his appearance in Arsenic And Old Lace last year. Ultimately, though, the best comments were made by designer Robert Jones. The trompe-l'oeil night cityscape just visible above and behind the main basement-flat set faintly recalled Ian MacNeil's now-classic reimagining of the setting for An Inspector Calls, and thus suggested that the world of this play is likewise out of step and out of kilter with ours... is, as Dusty Springfield proclaimed on the authentic period Dansette-a-like record player sitting downstage right, in the middle of nowhere.
Spectacularly mediocre
Not unlike Scott and Zelda Fitzgerald. For all Roger Cook, Les Reed and Kit Hesketh-Harvey's attempts to locate them at the centre of the jazz age, Prohibition whoop-de-do and so forth in Beautiful And Damned, they make much better icons of an era in theory than in practice. Ian Herbert launches a stout defence of the show in his ...At The Back column this issue, but he doth protest too much, methinks. For, as the reviews generally make clear, this isn't actually a bad show; it's not one to add to the pantheon of stinkers such as Which Witch, Bernadette or The Fields Of Ambrosia, whose producer I still gleefully remember being grilled by Jeremy Paxman on BBC-TV's Newsnight: "Let's face it, it's crap, isn't it?". (Indeed, part of me had been hoping this would be such a catastrophe, because I've managed to miss seeing my proper share of these over the years and I have some catching up to do.) No, the problem with Beautiful And Damned isn't that it's bad, but that it's spectacularly mediocre.
It has ingredients that ought to lift it into graceful flight; they don't, but nor does it collapse with a thud. I'd been listening to some of the quirky-but-cuddly early-'70s pop of Cook's outfit Blue Mink a little while before the show; it's perfect of its time, but he hasn't been able to transcend that idiom. Many of his and Reed's tunes seem simply to noodle around for a couple of bars in the middle of each line before they hit the final few notes that the composers knew they wanted to be there, not unlike the kind of school assembly that takes the mick out of the hymn by spending several verses going, "...drone, mumble, drone, TO BE A PIL-GRIM!" (Look, I said I was from that kind of educational background myself, all right?) Nor is there really that much of a story to Scott 'n' Zelda: he makes it big, he drinks, she gibbers, The End. Still, as I say, this won't live on in the anals [sic] of music-theatre history; it's a sizeable misjudgment, not a landmark calamity.
Loom portentously
Whisper it softly, but is it perhaps time to re-evaluate the oeuvre of Sebastian Barry? Leaving aside 2002's " Charles Haughey" play Hinterland, Barry's principal keynotes for the last several years have been a preoccupation with putting various of his forebears on the stage and a masterly, almost Conradian way with period language but one which doesn't necessarily lend itself to drama. In Whistling Psyche, he has written a pair of marvellous linked short stories; I wonder whether he ever considered turning them into a play? I'm sorry, that's overly cruel. But in truth, all Claire Bloom and Kathryn Hunter can do as Florence Nightingale and Dr James Miranda Barry respectively is relish the author's polished periods and loom portentously in the shadows.
Ah, the shadows: Barry has provided director Robert Delamere
with a bare somewhere-andÂnowhere location, and then done
nothing with it at all, simply luxuriated in his characters'
words and narratives. Delamere does atmosphere well, but
even he can't eke this meagre portion out to sustain an entire
play. Hence Tim Mitchell's shadows. The final moments of
the play attain a kind of sombre magic, but, well, sometimes
the destination isn't worth the journey.
Ian Shuttleworth
At the Back
Back here at the end of the paper, there's room for a few kind words about Beautiful And Damned. The critics have gone into their usual knee-jerk mode for a new musical, as you might expect for a show by a team with no track record in theatre, featuring performers who are not quite stars and put together by a director who is not quite a director. What the critics seem to dislike especially is that the lives of two spectacularly superficial people have been told in a spectacular, superficial manner, that of the modem musical. If you want to savour the critics' detestation of the medium, try Lyn Gardner (presumably Michael Billington has given up on the genre entirely); if you want to be amused by the entertaining venom such an event produces, try Lyn or almost anyone else, but start with the wittiest and most cruel, Charles Spencer. Even Sheridan Morley, who has before now joined me in the tiny corner reserved for defenders of despised musicals, can find no merit in this show. (I suppose we should welcome Sheridan to his new role as an overnight newspaper critic, one which he has sought for many years, except that his arrival at the Daily Express signals the departure of the excellent Robert Gore-Langton, whose role at the paper had lately diminished to that of entertainment commentator and occasional TV reviewer. Perhaps Robert might be considered for the present vacancy at the Daily Mail, which has arisen in circumstances worthy of a killer review from Michael Coveney, or one of Charles Spencer's more confessional pieces).
Beneficial results
Back to the Fitzgeralds. As has been pointed out, theirs could be a story of literary attribution worthy of Michael (Calico) Hastings. Kit Hesketh Harvey's book has taken an easier route, letting marriage and madness, literary success and financial failure act as handy pegs for Roger Cook and Les Reed's not very memorable lyrics and pleasant but undistinguished tunes. One might have hoped for more from two of the most successful pop songwriters of their generation. None the less, and in spite of all the put-downs, it is a well crafted, well performed and neatly structured show, using its asylum frame to good effect and tracing the couple's rise and fall both dramatically and musically. On its try-out at Guildford I believe it was longer and much wordier. Choreographer Craig Revell Norwood has now added the direction to his job description, and the result is an emphasis on dance. Since he is, I submit, one of the world's best musical choreographers, this has had beneficial results which have gone almost unnoticed, rather like the breast which was accidentally exposed in the "wild party" scene on the night I was there. Sitting just in front of me that night was Tim Rice, who seemed to enjoy himself as much as I did. As the writer of the critically misunderstood masterpiece Chess and the critically destroyed success Blondel, his sympathies will, I can imagine, lie with Messrs Cook, Reed and Hesketh Harvey. Several quite rich people will be a lot less wealthy after this show, but I don't think they need be too ashamed of their efforts in a medium which seeks only to give pleasure, but so often runs the gauntlet of displeasure from ill-informed, unsympathetic adversaries.
Wistful
Pause for breath. Rattle Of A Simple Man didn't fare much better, a wistful, perhaps hopelessly dated two(and a half)-hander from the days when it was daring, even offensive even to say "bottom" on stage. Soap-star Michelle Collins, whose vehicle it is, turns in a respectable enough performance, but it needs the calibre of a Sheila Hancock (the original Cyrenne) or a Shirley Maclaine to bring sympathetic depth to the character. Stephen Tompkinson does a very good job with the less demanding role, and there's a faithful cameo from Nick Fletcher, but it has to be admitted that what was once ground-breaking entertainment now seems too long and too shallow for our sexually knowing, soundbite-centred world.
The evidence is there in Neil LaBute's The Shape Of Things, which sits well now as very professionally presented West End fare after artistic success at the Almeida and box-office failure on film. I haven't liked the work of the misanthropic Mr LaBute in the past, so I was surprised to find myself warming to his play. Perhaps it was because his nerdy victim gets to represent what many would still prize, a word-based culture of moral depth, as opposed to his tormentor's visually oriented, brusquely amoral world of the new art. There's a conflict of values here just as fascinating as the one in Oleanna, and in the same way it offers much food for debate over that post-theatre meal.
Richly allusive
So does Martin Crimp's Cruel And Tender, although there's plenty in it to dull the appetite. Crimp's success in Europe reflects the un-English, tangential approach of his writing, and here we are presented with a far from easy, yet richly allusive rendering of Sophocles' Trachiniae (which I had stupidly confused with Euripides' Phoenissae, but never mind). Heracles' downfall at the hands of his wife, who sent him a poisoned shirt, becomes the physical destruction of a modern general by some awful chemical weapon, again sent by an unwitting wife seeking to regain his affections. The contemporary parallels are sharp, and yet so timeless that a play written well before the Iraq hubris seems stunningly up to date. As the reviewers agree, it's a major work, but for me there are two factors which prevent the Young Vic production from being a complete success. One is the performance of Kerry Fox, who finds no more depth in the tremendous central role than Michelle Collins in hers; the other is the heavy-handed direction of Luc Bondy, whose portentous lack of pace is almost fatal. The rest of the cast are splendid, with Jessica Claire and Toby Fisher real discoveries, and Richard Peduzzi's set design a clear demonstration of why he's among the world's best. The play, I'd suggest, succeeds where Sarah Kane failed, in presenting true contemporary tragedy.
And is Tennessee Williams a tragedian in works like Suddenly Last Summer'? Certainly there is the stuff of Greek myth in his climax, a poet torn to death - and for the second time in his canon. There's also something very classical in his structure, with the two protagonists' long, formal expositions set against the reactions of almost chonc minor characters. Diana Rigg transforms herself physically to offer a very different, softer mother-harpy than either Katharine Hepburn's iconic film interpretation or Sheila Gish's recent stage one, for once winning some sympathy for her obsessive love, while Victoria Hamilton delivers her great monologue superbly, like the classic messenger speech it is, full out to the audience. Tragedy indeed, in Michael Grandage's production, emphasised by Christopher Oram's terrific ekkyklema of a set, which swings open to reveal the play's events and slams resoundingly shut at their conclusion, like a cast-iron Venus fly trap.
Mustachio-twirling
Shared Experience's Gone To Earth doesn't quite achieve the heights of tragedy, though Mary Webb (and, one suspects, Helen Edmundson) may have had ambitions in that direction. For all the fine story-telling trappings of the Shared Experience style that Nancy Meckler's usual superb direction brings to the piece, it still comes over as rip-roaring melodrama, complete with mustachio-twirling villain and innocent village maiden. Niki Turner's cage-like set seems inappropriately industrial for this rural story, and (as Rhoda Koenig points out in an otherwise uncharacteristically kindly review) its heavy symbolism is damaged by the easy way in which the cast step through it. But there are great costumes, and a fine debut from Natalia Tena, barely out of Bedales, even if her performance unconsciously demonstrates the inconsistency which marks this uneven production: she acts awakening teenage passion with immense naturalistic conviction, but demonstrates it in a very attractive but quite unsuitable soft-folk singing voice. Helen Edmundson's songs may not be quite right for this piece, but they augur well for her rumoured future as a writer of musicals.
Finally, there's a touch of Shared Experience in the storytelling of
the Indian company who ambitiously brought a very colourful version of
Marquez's Erendira to the ICA. Alas, there's a touch of too many
other styles in their hybrid production, which attempts to combine Latin
American passion with Indian modesty and achieves predictably odd results.
lan Herbert
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
ACHIDI J'S FINAL HOURS New play by Amy Evans |
Finborough |
7 May |
29 May |
602 |
ADAM'S APPLE New play by Sara Mason |
Chelsea |
12 May |
29 May |
621 |
AMERICANA ABSURDUM Double-bill: Vomit & Roses and Wolverine Dream, by Brian Parks |
Menier |
17 May |
4 Jul |
656 |
ANGEL OF MONS New play by lain Landles |
White Bear |
13 May |
30 May |
636 |
THE ARCHBISHOP'S CEILING Revival of the play by Arthur Miller |
Southwark Playhouse |
7 May |
29 May |
615 |
THE BAR New musical by Nicolas Bloomfield |
Drill Hall |
7 May |
23 May |
636 |
BEAUTIFUL AND DAMNED New musical by Roger Cook |
Lyric |
10 May |
1 Jan |
606 |
CRUEL AND TENDER New play by Martin Crimp, adapted from the Trachiniae by Sophocles |
Young Vic |
13 May |
10 Jul |
632 |
ELECTIONS AND ERECTIONS Solo performance by Pieter-Dirk Uys |
Soho |
12 May |
29 May |
620 |
ERENDIRA New adaptation by Alam Allana & Salima Raza of the short story by Gabriel Garcia Marquez |
ICA |
18 May |
22 May |
652 |
EVERYMAN: An Immorality Play New play by Goran Stefanovski |
Riverside |
13 May |
30 May |
659 |
GONE TO EARTH New play by Helen Edmundson based on novel by Mary Webb |
Lyric, Hammersmith |
12 May |
5 Jun |
622 |
THE HISTORY BOYS New play by Alan Bennett |
Lyttelton |
18 May |
1 Jan |
645 |
ISLANDS IN THE STREAM Visual theatre piece by Derevo |
Riverside |
14 May |
29 May |
659 |
LIFEGAME Devised by Phelim McDermott from Keith Johnstone (Improbable Theatre) |
Cottesloe |
6 May |
13 May |
603 |
THE LODGER New play by Paul Birtill |
Pentameters |
13 May |
5 Jun |
659 |
LUCKY DOG New play by Leo Butler |
Royal Court Upstairs |
18 May |
12 Jun |
613 |
MR & MRS SCHULTZ Transfer of play by Alex Jones |
Warehouse, Croydon |
19 May |
6 Jun |
625 |
RATTLE OF A SIMPLE MAN Revival of play by Charles Dyer |
Comedy |
11 May |
5 Jun |
616 |
ROBBERS New play by Lyle Kessler |
Tristan Bates |
7 May |
29 May |
610 |
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Shakespeare's Globe |
19 May |
26 Sep |
653 |
THE SHAPE OF THINGS Revival of the play by Neil LaBute |
New Ambassadors |
17 May |
1 Jan |
641 |
SUDDENLY LAST SUMMER Revival of play by Tennessee Williams |
Albery |
14 May |
31 Jul |
637 |
TABLOID CALIGULA Revival of the play by Darren Murphy |
Arcola |
13 May |
5 Jun |
631 |
TRICK BOXING New comedy by and with Brian Sostek & Megan McClellan |
Blue Elephant |
7 May |
22 May |
644 |
THE TRUMPET MAJOR Adapted from Thomas Hardy's novel by Michael Fry |
Bridewell |
11 May |
29 May |
625 |
WHISTLING PSYCHE New play by Sebastian Barry |
Almeida |
12 May |
12 Jun |
626 |
Regions |
||||
CARNESKY'S GHOST TRAIN Installation/performance piece devised by Marisa Carnesky |
Coventry, University Square |
14 May |
17 May |
666 |
CYRANO Revival of the play by Edmund Rostand |
Musselburgh, Brunton |
6 May |
8 May |
660 |
FERGUS STEPS OUT New play by Clark Crystal and Grace Barnes |
Edinburgh, Traverse |
13 May |
16 May |
664 |
FIERCE New play by Justin Young |
Glasgow, Tron |
8 May |
8 May |
662 |
MAJOR BARBARA Revival of the play by George Bernard Shaw |
Manchester, Royal Exchange |
17 May |
19 Jun |
665 |
LA MORT DE KRISHNA Text by Jean-Claude Camere and Marie-Helene Estienne |
Brighton, Gardner Arts Centre |
19 May |
22 May |
666 |
PROOF Revival of the play by David Auburn |
Glasgow, Arches |
13 May |
15 May |
663 |
THE RIVALS Revival of the play by Richard Brinsley Sheridan |
Bristol Old Vic |
18 May |
12 Jun |
667 |
THE SHOP AT SLY CORNER Revival of the play by Edward Percy |
Pitlochry Festival Theatre |
6 May |
13 Oct |
660 |
A SMALL FAMILY BUSINESS Revival of the play by Alan Ayckboum |
Pitlochry Festival Theatre |
13 May |
16 Oct |
661 |