Issue 14 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
One day I really ought to read Edward Said's Orientalism. I rather think it would give a stronger intellectual underpinning than my current reading in that broad line of country (David Toop's fascinating, if idiosyncratic, musical-anthropological work Exotica) to an idea that often crops up when I watch visiting international shows. Namely, how would we react to this piece of work if, all other things being equal, it originated from a prosaic domestic source? Are we truly having our horizons broadened by watching this presentation, or are we merely awarding ourselves broad-horizons points for doing so? Are we actually seeing into another culture, or are we being offered a hybrid confected for the international market, with just enough exotic spice to make unaccustomed palates tingle without rebelling?
If indulged too far, obviously, such doubts could result in an insular chauvinism that's even worse. Equally clearly, not all international work raises such spectres. I'd say that Gumboots - a South African presentation in the Barbican's BITE strand during the period covered by this issue, but principally a dance show and therefore not included on these pages - would be a reasonable target for this kind of questioning. Rather less so with the other South African BITE offering, the Farber Foundry's Amajuba: Like Doves We Rise. And yet that's the one that's got me thinking along these lines now.
Confronts expectations
As Robert Hewison points out in his Sunday Times review, we are a little more prone (pace Athol Fugard and numerous others) to expect happy-clappy work from South Africa, whether now celebrating ten years of the Rainbow Nation or in earlier days offering at least the temporary illusion of escape from the oppression of the apartheid regime. Yael Farber and her company's piece confronts those expectations head-on by simply recounting what claim to be the personal stories of each of the five performers, which take in forced resettlement, abandonment, rape, casual murder and armed resistance. And yet in some respects the mode of presentation works against the material.
The poor-theatre approach of using little more than zinc baths and washbasins as props results in some moments which are both inventive and emotionally breathtaking. However, I worry whether perhaps that combination - poor theatre plus South Africa - has become a kind of cultural shorthand for a set of expectations in which the piece then finds itself unwittingly confined. My fear is that the work escapes our assumptions of easy exotica on the most visible plane only to fall prey to a subtler form of the same stereotyping on a deeper level. I honestly don't know. Perhaps my uneasiness is no more than a personal defence mechanism, a way for me to cope with the horrors recounted by Farber's company by focusing not on the direct content but on a penumbra of signification that I allege hovers around it. Maybe I just think too much. Ah, well, back to my Jon Hassell and Fela Kuti CDs...
Juggling halibut
For obvious faux-exotica, look no further than Edward Fox's portrayal of Bernard Berenson in The Old Masters. Or rather, his performance in the role of Berenson, since he expends as much effort on any kind of impersonation as he does on juggling halibut. Pretty much every reviewer notes that Berenson was a Lithuanian-Jewish-Bostonian, and Fox not only can't move out of the Home Counties but not even out of their stately homes. (My FT guv'nor Alastair Macaulay is inspired to create this issue's greatest moment of orthography when he imagines Fox playing Oscar Wilde's Lady Bracknell.)
I have to resile somewhat from my rather vituperative opinions in Issue 08 occasioned by Gray's The Holy Terror. The Old Masters is clearly much more thoughtful on issues such as dilemmas of loyalty, entanglements of personal and commercial impulses and the like. Indeed, it raises my overall opinion of Gray almost to zero. But it is, as more than one reviewer has also remarked, fundamentally a throwback in terms of its register and structure. We respond more tolerantly to this piece than to his last because the material is more considered and more interesting, and because an air of endearing quaintness hangs over the affair.
Velvet-serpentine
In some ways this is less due to Fox - who's long been so far out that he's on the way back - than to Peter Bowles. Again, Alastair Macaulay hits the nail on the head. There's no significant difference between Bowles' performance here as art dealer Joseph Duveen and his performance a couple of years ago as crime novelist Andrew Wyke in Anthony Shaffer's Sleuth; his intervening West End outing as the villain in Frederick Knott's Wait Until Dark varied from these only in that it afforded him fewer opportunities for velvet-serpentine smiles. There's only so much that can be done to rein in this personal archetype-acting, even by a director as accomplished as Harold Pinter (who would no doubt bridle at Georgina Brown's erroneous bestowal upon him of a knighthood).
À propos nothing, one of the finest bad movies ever made is Wild Geese II. Not only does it star Laurence Olivier as Rudolf Hess, complete with bushy eyebrow wiglets and his all-purpose mitteleuropäisch accent ("I'm an old man who only wants to go back to Spandau!"), but it also includes a deliciously surreal moment when Edward Fox as an ex-SAS officer is required to act a simultaneous malaria attack and bad acid trip. Once seen, never forgotten... try as you might.
Ah, now, hang on... actually, I can fashion a chain of association here: Olivier - Henry V - we Happy Few. There we go.
"Trevved"
Some years ago, as a cub reporter, I had to interview Trevor Nunn on a day when I found myself coming down with a virulent attack of food poisoning. All my efforts were directed towards trying at least to look conscious and not to throw up on his office carpet. Which, of course, required iron-willed self-restraint when he greeted me, whom he had never met before, with one of his trademark hugs. This was the memory which popped up when one member of Hetty Oak's doughty wartime women's touring theatre company in We Happy Few remarked with some asperity, "We've been Hettied again". Is this an oblique allusion to being "Trevved" by such tactics as those hugs? Confirmation can come only from the author, Imogen Stubbs, or Mrs Nunn as she's also known.
Stubbs' play has been given a very rough ride, with the partial result that it takes this issue's closed-before-we-made-it-into-print laurels. Ian Herbert defends it nobly in ...At The Back, and I have to say I'm in some agreement with him. Stubbs is clearly passionate both about the Osiris Players, the real-life basis for her fictional Artemis troupe, and about the imaginative power of theatre. She's also unfairly attacked for being sentimental, as if this were a bad thing in itself. It's not. The best of Stubbs' sentimentality has an affecting artlessness, because she's so caught up in the feeling that she can carry us along with her. It's when she tries to be artFUL that things go awry, and alas she tries all too often.Heart of stone
Both Quentin Letts in the Daily Mail (to whom, welcome, as he settles down to spend all his evenings reviewing proper theatre after spending his days writing about the amateur dramatics in Parliament) and John Gross in the Sunday Telegraph make remarks to the effect that there's also humour in the play, but whether intentionally or not, they do so after citing instances of supposed grimness which are in fact inadvertently risible. There are moments when, as Wilde said about the death of Little Nell, it would take a heart of stone not to laugh. During the interval on the press night, another reviewer and I discussed whether news of the inevitable death of Hetty's son Crispian, fighting at the front, would or would not come during a performance of Henry V. The title of the play notwithstanding, I didn't believe they'd dare go that far. I lost.
William Blake said the road of excess leads to the palace of wisdom, but then, Blake wasn't writing Dunkirk-spirit melodrama. He wasn't writing musicals derived from Plautus, either, but it's just as true of A Funny Thing Happened On The Way To The Forum. I've already written about this in the body of the issue; I'm just abusing my position here in order to pre-emptively disagree with the other Ian's reservations about it. And isn't it odd that both national flagship companies should enjoy success with unlikely choices of comedy involving an absurd set-piece drag sequence (the other being the RSC's House Of Desires), in the same week?
Traipsing
The Dunkirk spirit made an unexpected but necessary return, too, the night I saw London Bubble's Alice Through The Looking Glass. Jonathan Petherbridge's adaptation and open-air promenade staging are lively and inventive. However, the factor which most lends the book to this kind of dramatisation also limits the satisfaction it can give in live performance. Carroll's second Alice story takes the form of an enormous live chess game played across acres of fantastical countryside. This enables Petherbridge to switch locations easily from one scene to the next, even if the geometry of the chessboard can't be reproduced. Conversely, though, it lends matters an excessively episodic feel; lacking a real story arc apart from a deep and complex metaphor which can't be staged anyway, it comes to seem a little pointless traipsing from grove to grove, from scene to scene, with no sense of the overall journey. But the Dunkirk spirit...
Think of the possible drawbacks of outdoor summer theatre, and you think of the weather, insects, hay fever and so on. You're unlikely to consider the possibility of coming under both verbal and physical fire from a bunch of jeering local miscreants. That was what happened the evening I visited Bubble on the fourth stop of their tour of London parks, in Ruislip. First came the shouts, and when they didn't prove sufficiently disruptive, the stones began to fly. Part of me wished that they'd hit the mayor of Hillingdon, who was also present, since at least that would lead to serious action. I'll never understand that destructive urge, even if it's just enjoyment they're setting out to destroy. Mercifully, though, they didn't succeed. After all, you just have to love a production which explains the chess metaphor by telling us that if we all go with Alice the whole way across the board, at the end we'll all get to be queens. Don't you?
Ian Shuttleworth
At the Back
Last week Lynn Barber got a whole page in the Observer to tell us why she didn't like theatre. She didn't mince her words: "It was fusty when I first went in the sixties, it is mummified in its desuetude (sic) now. Where do you start listing what is wrong with it? The booking? The building? The queues for the loos? The surly bar staff? The undrinkable wine? The rip-off programmes? The torturous seats?"
Ms Barber saw five plays and gave most of them short shrift - The Woman in Black:: "A very creaky old ghost story"; Democracy: "The longest evening of my life"; Much Ado at the Globe: "I left in the interval"; The Old Masters: "A long two and a half hours". Only The History Boys, although another long evening, pleased Ms Barber: "For once I couldn't think of any other way I would have preferred to spend the evening."
Strong stuff - strong enough to prompt my editor to write a robust rebuttal. It wasn't published, but Ian Shuttleworth's point, that there is a much wider choice available, was echoed in the one letter the Observer did publish, in which a writer from outside London suggested that Ms Barber - like the full-time critics - should get out more, and see some regional theatre.
The trouble is, I can't help thinking the lady has a point. After all, the shows she castigated are all critical, even commercial successes, with the possible exception of The Old Masters, and even that finds a few old-school defenders in this issue. Is she a better reflector of public opinion? Her article suggests that she has a sadly limited attention span, and a rather less limited, at any rate more sensitive behind. Yet we do have to put up with a lot to see even good work in theatres in and out of London, and we can often be blind to what an outsider picks up very quickly as unacceptable. Example: the refurbished Prince of Wales looks terrific from the street, but inside, the queue for the Ladies' is as long as ever.
And then there are the shows themselves. I saw four of the biggies in this issue and find some sad trends in the critical reaction to them that make la Barber's blunt response refreshing. The one that she saw, The Old Masters, involves two favourite leading actors, a master director and a playwright who has in his time produced brilliant work. Yet Peter Bowles and, hugely, Edward Fox spend the evening hamming beyond belief, as our guest reviewer is quick to observe. They have not been reined in by Harold Pinter's direction, and the vehicle offered them by Simon Gray is in any case burdened by an hour of unnecessary exposition before its one scene of any interest. Gray could have explored rather more than the contest of cunning between his two leads - their relationships with the two subordinate women offer huge dramatic possibilities, but Barbara Jefford and Sally Dexter are left gasping on the sidelines. Taking the rather reverent reviews all in all, you might decide to see this show. Or you could cut to the Barber chase, and save the effort. I think she's right.
Whereas Saturday Night Fever gets the usual oh-god-another-compilation response. Here are a set of leads from a world apart, soap stars, dancers and minor pop people, doing very well indeed with the touring version of Arlene Phillips' terrific dance conversion of the (non-musical) movie. The original at the Palladium eight years ago was a mite slicker, largely due to the performance of Adam Garcia, whose singing and dancing were good enough to sweep aside all thoughts of John Travolta. Stephane Anelli is a very good dancer, but seriously lacking in the charisma of either Garcia or Travolta. One or two critics are gracious enough to notice that the unwieldy, enormous Apollo Victoria was packed withappreciative fans, not just the seventies survivors but their offspring too. On the critic-free night when I was there, they loved every lightweight minute of it, not least the curtain calls, when the auditorium itself gets the chance to shine, with all those colour changes in the walls and ceiling installed for Bombay Dreams coming into their own again.
It's a summer filler and no more, but very well done and insufficiently praised for what it does. Another summer filler gets almost unqualified praise from all but Nicholas de Jongh, and for once I agree totally with the old curmudgeon. A Funny Thing Happened. is a rollicking, smutty old show with some good if infrequent songs and a collection of time-honoured jokes and stereotype characters that make it almost blasphemously accessible. Edward Hall and his designer Julian Crouch have added some prop gags and business of their own to enrich it, and yet the whole thing ends up like amateur night at the Heckmondwyke Empire.
Look at it closely, dear readers. There's Des Barrit, who should be a natural Pseudolus, giving a disastrously underpowered performance and making it worse by trying to sing the numbers Frankie Howerd spoke, when he has no singing voice. There's Sam Kelly, with three stock faces and a wavering memory of his lines. There's David Schneider, with one fewer expression than Mr Kelly and no obvious gift for physical comedy. There's Isla Blair, who may have been fine in the original London cast but should not have been asked to sing today. There's Vince Leigh, a fine lead for Propeller but no matinee idol Hero. And there's a very cut-price band doing its best to synthesise its way through a fine score. The carelessness of the production is epitomised by the courtesan twins, who are kept on opposite sides of the stage as much as possible because they bear absolutely no resemblance to one another. What real musical performers like Philip Quast and Caroline Sheen, who bring the show's rare moments of professionalism, think of the proceedings, I can't imagine.
A show as sloppy as this in the West End would come in for a serious critical lashing. Because it's in the Hytner National, the same folk who lambasted Trevor Nunn for putting on far more polished, far less crowd-pleasing musicals roll on their backs in delight. Agendas, anyone?
Which brings us to We Happy Few. The dreaded Sir Trevor himself, directing a play by his missus - what a soft target! The couple came off unscathed with the teenage Hamlet, but here it's no holds barred. With the exception of Sheridan Morley and newcomer Quentin Letts (who presumably hasn't been inducted yet), everyone else cheerfully puts the boot in. Alastair Macaulay is appalled at the stereotypes and clichés - thank heaven he didn't see Funny Thing. Other stereotype-spotters compare the play unfavourably with Dad's Army, a show which had rather longer than three hours in which to describe World War Two and did so with the help of a joyous and unashamed set of stereotypes.
Let me not be too starry-eyed. The play certainly isn't perfect, but its faults are faults of generosity, as the author attempts to fit in five years' worth of stories, a ripe collection of well-tried theatrical gags, and a whole mini-series full of characters into its short span. The fact is that Ms Stubbs has shown a rare talent for playwriting, storytelling and structure in her first play, which the critics have shamefully failed to recognise. How many fledgling writers today can marshal and control seven characters on stage at a time? How many have even tried? How many have the intelligence to mingle old gags and stock sentiment to such effect? It took Larry Gelbart and Burt Shevelove seven years to get the old gags right in Funny Thing and I'm not sure they managed the sentiment.
And the Happy Few cast, new and old, is magnificent. You surely can't spend an evening in the company of Juliet Stevenson, Marcia Warren, Kate O'Mara (sending herself up with gusto) and Caroline Blakiston without pleasure, and they set a shining example of fun and commitment to Patsy Palmer and the evening's discovery, Cat Simmonds.
I wonder whether Lynn Barber would have liked it? No, I guess she'd
have left at the interval.
Ian Herbert
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
ALICE THROUGH THE LOOKING GLASS New adaptation by Jonathan Petherbridge from Lewis Carroll |
London Bubble |
8 Jul |
15 Aug |
906 |
AMAJUBA (Like Doves We Rise) New play by Yael Farber in collaboration with the company |
The Pit |
12 Jul |
17 Jul |
914 |
CONFERENCE OF THE BIRDS Adaptation of poem by Farid Ud-Din Attar |
Polka |
5 Jul |
6 Jul |
882 |
COYOTE UGLY Revival of play by Lynn Seifert |
Finborough |
1 Jul |
24 Jul |
920 |
A FAN'S CLUB New play by Matthew Couper |
New Wimbledon Studio |
6 Jul |
24 Jul |
928 |
FOUR LADDERS, SEVEN BROTHERS AND A COUPLE OF BROOMS New piece devised by the company |
Oxford House |
6 Jul |
24 Jul |
913 |
FULLY COMMITTED New solo piece by Mark Setlock and Becky Mode |
Menier |
12 Jul |
29 Aug |
926 |
A FUNNY THING HAPPENED ON THE WAY TO THE FORUM Revival by Shevelove/Gelbart/Sondheim |
Olivier |
9 Jul |
2 Nov |
907 |
HARDCORE New play by Jonathan Hall |
Pleasance |
1 Jul |
31 Jul |
899 |
HUMAN RESOURCES New play by Roland Allen |
Camden People's |
13 Jul |
25 Jul |
919 |
I CAN CRY New play by Miri Ben-Shalom, based on the journals of Ester Herschberg |
Lion & Unicorn |
8 Jul |
25 Jul |
905 |
MARK THOMAS Solo comedy show |
Tricycle |
12 Jul |
17 Jul |
916 |
THE MASTER AND MARGARITA Adapted by Blanche McIntyre from the novel by Mikhail Bulgakov |
Greenwich Playhouse |
8 Jul |
1 Aug |
895 |
MERCY New play by Lin Coghlan |
Soho |
13 Jul |
7 Aug |
917 |
THE OLD MASTERS New play by Simon Gray |
Comedy |
1 Jul |
28 Aug |
877 |
OLD TIMES Revival of the play by Harold Pinter |
Donmar |
7 Jul |
4 Sep |
900 |
SATURDAY NIGHT FEVER Revival of the musical from the film, with music by The Bee Gees |
Apollo Victoria |
6 Jul |
1 Jan |
891 |
THE SECRET DEATH OF |
Old Red Lion |
8 Jul |
24 Jul |
888 |
SHELL CONNECTIONS Mini-season of work written for and performed by schools/youth companies |
Olivier/Cottesloe |
7 Jul |
13 Jul |
921 |
SONGS MY MOTHER TAUGHT ME Solo musical show by Lorna Luft |
Savoy |
6 Jul |
21 Aug |
896 |
UNEXPLODED BOMB Return of play by The Ding Foundation |
BAC Studio 1 |
1 Jul |
18 Jul |
925 |
WE HAPPY FEW New play by Imogen Stubbs |
Gielgud |
2 Jul |
31 Jul |
883 |
Regions |
||||
BALLROOM New play by John Retallack |
Southampton, Guildhall |
9 Jul |
10 Jul |
933 |
CANTERBURY TALES Adapted by Gareth Machin from the poem by Geoffrey Chaucer |
Lancaster, Williamson Park |
2 Jul |
7 Aug |
933 |
HOUSE OF DESIRES Play by Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, translated by Catherine Boyle |
Stratford, Swan |
8 Jul |
1 Oct |
929 |
THE JUNGLE BOOK Adapted by Rosanna Lowe from the stories by Rudyard Kipling |
Northampton, Royal |
1 Jul |
10 Jul |
932 |
THE OWL SERVICE Adapted by Anita Sullivan & David Prescott from the novel by Alan Garner |
Plymouth, Drum |
2 Jul |
17 Jul |
933 |
UP 'N' UNDER Revival of the play by John Godber |
Hull Truck |
8 Jul |
31 Jul |
934 |