Issue 23 - 2004
Prompt Corner 
Well, the West End can officially breathe easily again. All the grossly exaggerated press stories of ongoing crisis have been blown away by the excitement of a show that takes £800,000 in advance bookings in the first two days after opening, with - wonder of wonders! - actual queues outside the actual box office of the actual theatre. In short, The Producers worked. The hacks even got to dust off the old Betty Grable story by revealing that Leigh Zimmerman's amazing legs (which, as a friend of mine would say, go all the way up to Tufnell Park) have been insured for $1 million. (Only a million? Sixty-one years of inflation would have raised Miss Grable's million and a quarter pins to over $13.5 million, as far as I can ascertain.)
If anything, it's the show's portrayal of gay characters that's problematic. The Springtime For Hitler element is clearly always intended to be pushing at the boundaries of taste - that's the point of the story, that it be a musical that can't possibly succeed - and so always carries the germ of its own forgiveness. However, as Alastair Macaulay notes, a third of a century on, Mel Brooks still seems to find homosexuality funny per se, and flatly equivalent to being a screaming queen who can't wait to get into a spangly frock (although, as you can see on the back cover, Conleth Hill looks stunning in that gown). Dressing up several chorus hoofers as mid-'70s gay disco icons The Village People only serves to underline how outdated such caricatures are now. As, indeed, does a glance immediately to Hill's right, at Nathan Lane.
Attractive
I also have to admit that, when watching the show, this didn't matter a jot to me. It's an immensely enjoyable evening, if overlong. The (mercifully few) criticisms of Lee Evans' performance as Leo Bloom strike me as similar to those of his Clov in Matthew Warchus' revival of Beckett's Endgame this spring. It's easy to see the simian mugging and Norman Wisdom clowning as being all there is to his portrayal. But he is successfully affecting as a. well, I suppose one would have to call him an unusually mature romantic ingénue. Mark my words, between the Beckett and the Brooks, Evans will pick up some major awards. (Mind you, I said with equal certainty that Bat Boy would close before Hallowe'en.) Nice, too, to gather yet more material for my unfinished thesis on James Joyce, as the musical's script makes a knowing hint which the 1968 movie did not: that Evans' character is the namesake of the Everyman protagonist of Joyce's Ulysses. And did I imagine it, or in the Springtime For Hitler number itself, is that supporting player lip-synching the couplet "Don't be stupid, be a smarty/Come and join the Nazi Party" to a recording of Brooks' own voice?
One can infer from Lane's performance what was probably missing from that of departed leading man Richard Dreyfuss. It's not just that the actor playing Max Bialystock does need to be able to dance and most definitely to sing: Max also needs a considerable rumpled charm to be able to pull off his scams. It's not a matter of being plausibly sexy to work all those elderly women as a gigolo to get funds for his no-hope stage shows, but of being plausibly attractive, which is another matter. Not saying that Dreyfuss isn't attractive, but one suspects that his Max would have had too much of the huckster and not enough of the big ol' teddy bear, in need of a good wash to be sure, but only because he's been so well hugged. Of course, the press are still trying to have their cake and eat it, by speculating on how the show will fare once Lane's limited engagement ends, and who will be cast as his replacement. Ian Herbert has an intriguing suggestion that director Susan Stroman should make an internal promotion, if Conleth Hill can be persuaded to give up the spangles.
Building 'em up to knock 'em down is a press ritual, at least in Britain. Also in this fortnight, London saw a trio of productions of classics, each of which stood or fell by its attitude towards ritual and formality of performance. (I know that's a contrived and tenuous link, but you try coming up with this stuff issue after issue.)
Timidity
Yukio Ninagawa is rightly fêted as a master of stage imagery. It has to be said, though, that his occasional English-language productions reveal an odd timidity with respect to characterisation and performance. It may be a matter of lack of confidence with the language in rehearsal, or of an approach which doesn't translate well between theatrical cultures. At any rate, in such productions we seldom get a detailed sense of the connection between characters' inner lives and the words they utter. His Hamlet at the Barbican is a case in point. A starkly elegant set consists principally of a spinney of vertical strands of barbed wire. Tamotsu Harada's superlative lighting design plots shattered mazes with beams of light (I was reminded of the windows in Daniel Libeskind's Holocaust Museum in Berlin) or sets bare bulbs swinging unsettlingly above the actors. But there it stops, by and large. We can find no illumination (ha!) as to why characters are dressed in a range from western-nondescript to full Japanese pomp for both the Ghost and the player-villain. We glean little depth to the main narrative thrust, which is rattled through in three hours of playing time. Above all, we derive little sense of who Hamlet really is. Michael Maloney's not the ostentatious kind of technician of his rival Hamlet Toby Stephens, but I do always feel that I can see him pulling the levers for any given effect. So, here, we clearly see what he's feeling from moment to moment, but seldom grasp why, especially as he generally delivers his lines in a rapid mutter. His closet scene with Gertrude (Frances Tomelty, a year older than Maloney and playing his mother!) is utterly devoid of sexual or violent tension: even the stylised stabbing of Polonius seems an afterthought. And as for Peter Egan's Ghost, I'd love to see him encounter Greg Hicks' version down a dark alley. The problem throughout seems to be that Ninagawa has an excessive respect for staging this text in its homeland. One can see that he has ideas, but he is far too timid in seeing them through, crippled instead by the sense of paying his respects at the altar of Hamlet.
Rarefied
I said in my (unreprinted) review of Hamlet that Maloney makes one understand why critics sometimes speak of an actor "giving a reading" of a part: he gives an intelligent essay on Hamlet, a sedulous demonstration of Hamletness, but never seems to inhabit the part. Yet how much more true is this, as Alastair Macaulay again observes, of most of the actors in Declan Donnellan's Cheek By Jowl Othello. Donnellan's presentational style is often formal and ritualised, but here it's almost "holy" in an alternative sense: liturgically rarefied. The near-inaudibility of a number of actors, for instance, seems to have been a deliberate decision to play in a kind of cathedral undertone; the use of tableaux during soliloquies, and of actors as "street furniture" during night scenes, doesn't comment upon the spatial relationships of any given scene so much as destroy them.
I think there's a lot to praise on the production, in particular Nonso Anonzie's performance in the title role: unlike a number of reviewers, I found his very lack of musicality a welcome change. Anonzie locates Othello very definitely as a soldier, and a soldier of iron self-control until the iron is corroded by Iago's acid, at which point we begin to see him literally reel, drunken with unaccustomed passions. (This notion of unsteadiness on the feet is taken too far, however, with Caroline Martin's hitherto refreshingly self-possessed Desdemona called upon to repeatedly totter backwards under the force of Othello's castigations of her.) Donnellan's ritualistic approach can work to magnificent effect, as in his version of Corneille's Le Cid in 1998, when the text in question speaks of a world of protocols, codes of conduct and expectations. However, Othello is about the removal of precisely these things; it is their absence, the whirling void in their place, that Shakespeare anatomises.
Then walk a few hundred yards through Hammersmith from the Riverside to the Lyric, and see exactly what can be achieved by taking a ritual form and selectively trashing it. Kneehigh's The Bacchae is such a success because it recognises the value of formality without treating it as a kind of aspic in which to preserve Euripides' work. It can look as if the baby is being thrown out with the bathwater, but the company's electrifying modulation into the final murderous phase of the play refutes all such suspicions.
Important
However, the most important play of the issue - and, I maintain, the most important political play of the year, more so than Guantánamo or Stuff Happens - opened not in the West End nor at the National Theatre, but at the intimate in-the-round space of the Orange Tree. Its author is not British but Australian. And it is likely to engage feelings in fierce opposition; I cannot, for instance, imagine it being produced anywhere in the United States outside the three main cities, if even there. The title of Stephen Sewell's play gives enough indication: Myth, Propaganda And Disaster In Nazi Germany And Contemporary America.
Where Stuff Happens deals with what is already political history, and Guantánamo with what is hidden behind razor-wire, Sewell's subject is immediate: the effect of the Patriot Act on freedom of thought and expression in the United States. The title is slightly sensationalist: it represents not the author's view but that of his protagonist, an outspoken college lecturer who finds himself the subject of unwanted attentions by an inquisitor with a lapel pin and a penchant for pistol-whipping. But this, too, is almost a metaphor; as Sewell chronicles the disintegration of Talbot Finch and the reactions of his family, friends, colleagues and students, it grows clear that what is under indictment is not principally the legislation, but the cultural climate that it has helped to foster. It's easy, the play suggests, to dismiss those who worry about such abuses as being paranoid, or even as being intent on destabilisation themselves. It's also hard to resist falling into patterns of self-censorship.
The play is by no means perfect as a piece of drama. It's at times overwritten or clunky, too diffuse or too ready to fall back on easy laughter, and certainly too eager with a slew of literary and dramatic allusions from Kafka and Orwell to Mamet and Albee. However, for the reasons explained, it adroitly forestalls criticism by hinting that writing it off as flawed and overdone would in itself be a testimony to the reality of the cultural and political climate it depicts. Although the case it examines is entirely fictional, I am loath to describe it as a fable. It feels like a cause célèbre play, merely one without an individual, documented cause. It is loud, and angry, and self-conscious, and patchy, and to many no doubt outrageous. It is also vital.
Oscar Wilde
Finally, it was inevitable that the issue in which I inveighed so vigorously in Prompt Corner against the errors of others would also be the issue whose headline on the front cover was reduced to gibberish by my own stupid oversight. It should, of course, have read "Forced Entertainment celebrate 20 years of performance with a BLOODY MESS at the Riverside". Now, printing a splash that said instead ".with a OSCAR WILDE." [sic] might well constitute the kind of postmodern wackiness that Forced Ents themselves would find both amusing and appropriate. I could even try arguing with a straight face that, since its one-night disaster in October, Mike Read's musical has passed into the jargon of the trade such that "Oscar Wilde" is now indeed a theatrical slang term for a bloody mess. But no, the mess was entirely mine, and I'm as puce with embarrassment as that issue's masthead. Interestingly, though, no-one at all queried the headline. This suggests either that nobody pays any attention to the cover copy, or that an expectation has arisen that the gags there will often be oblique to the point of impenetrability. Food for editorial thought either way, I think.
At the Back
Kiel may not be the most exciting theatre city in Germany - in Hamburg, an hour away, you will find high-standard performances in a couple of dozen theatres - but it is, surprisingly, one of the most successful. The opera house there has just opened a lively production of Bernstein's On The Town, while in the drama theatre Daniel Karalek, its new intendant, is achieving 90% attendances, the second highest in the country.
The Schauspielhaus was host to many of the performances in this November's Thespis festival of one-person shows, and for visiting German favourites like David Bennent (Peter Brook's Ariel, and star of Schlöndorff's film of The Tin Drum) or Josef Bierbichler (three times Actor of the Year) its main house was full. Thespis is, however, a festival of two levels, and it was smaller, studio theatres that hosted most of the competing performances, often to an audience made up only of fellow performers and a hard core of dogged festival fans. I was among this hard core by virtue of being a member of the jury. I also found, rather to my surprise, that I was supposed to be leading daily symposia on the nature of solo performance, together with a dour Russian gentleman who already knew all the answers, and was not, in consequence, very good at listening either to the questions I tried to ask of the theatre professionals who came along, or to their response.
Headings
All the same, these were interesting sessions, which gave those making the shows a chance to talk about their working methods, and those watching them a chance to discuss their reactions. We spoke a lot about the different pressures on an actor presenting a solo show, alone before an audience. They are likely to be greater on those foolhardy enough to choose to do without the support of a director or a technical team, and greatest of all on those who perform material of their own in this way.
I found it useful to look at the performances I saw under four overlapping headings: Performances, Poetry Readings, Productions and Personal Statements. Actors usually undertake solo shows for a reason, usually linked to at least one of these four.
They may simply be looking for other work, and will therefore put on a performance to demonstrate their skills - or they may be so confident of those skills that they see a solo show as a good way to demonstrate them. They may do this by choosing the work of a favourite writer, often a poet, and making of it a glimpse into the creator's life or a reflection of their own. Others may be simply brought in as performers to collaborate with a broader creative team - writer, director, designer - and play their part in what is essentially a normal theatre production. And finally, there are those who have something of their own to say, in verse or prose, and find this medium the best way to say it.
Heart
Any of these motives can produce a good entertainment, and it is very much a matter of personal preference which will most please you. I myself have something of a resistance to performances which simply say, "Look at me, I'm acting," usually with those fatal inverted commas still present. So I could not warm much to Greta Medshlumian's performance as a distraught Armenian mother, for all her refined skills, or to Zia Sokolovic from Slovenia, who stretched out Chekhov's The Bear to ninety minutes of energetic shouting and dancing to the accompaniment of a rather good jazz group, without adding anything to the richness of the twenty-minute original. On the other hand, the Polish actor Janusz Stolarski's forty-five minute version of Nietzsche's last great work, Ecce Homo, was a finely prepared theatre production as well as a piece of beautifully controlled acting, making use of minimal but highly effective props and lighting to expose not only the dense text but also the disturbed and dying philosopher who wrote it. I liked, too, the well organised production values of Juni Dahr's exploration of some of her compatriot Ibsen's women characters; she cleverly used her simple curtain set and solo flute accompaniment to give dramatic heart to what might easily have become a dry lecture-demonstration.
Igor Pekhovich from Moscow is also a talented actor, but on this occasion failed to get inside the difficult spirit of Joseph Brodsky in his portrayal of the poet, leaving himself and the audience both literally and figuratively in the dark for long periods and sadly delivering neither performance nor poetry reading. Jean-Marc Serme from France is in any case a more limited performer, in spite of a persuasive voice, but was much hampered in his presentation of the work of the Breton poet Xavier Grall by the fairly obvious fact that Grall wasn't really much of a poet. Nora Amin from Egypt, in contrast, is very much a poet, and her writings on the position of an educated Arab woman moving between Islamic and Western society have a considerable directness and beauty. She is also an experienced actress and dancer, but this was less apparent from a halting, director-free performance which added little other than distraction to her splendid poems.
Difficult
Three other actors presenting their own work were more successful in adding dramatic value. Both Vala Thórsdóttir from Iceland and Pauline Goldsmith from Northern Ireland chose to tackle difficult subjects with humour - the one, manic depression, the other death itself - and not everyone was able to accept the very serious intent behind these seemingly comic performances. Those who could were treated in Vala's A Bat In The Attic to a meticulously researched study of the tragedy inherent in Iceland's "care in the community" system, while in Pauline's Bright Colours Only, a sympathetic examination of mourning habits in Belfast, where death may come from a terrorist bullet or benign old age, we were given the opportunity between laughs to think deeply about how we ourselves might handle the death of a loved one.
Alexander Thomas's off-Broadway solo, Throw Pitchfork, was a remarkable combination of performance and personal revelation, as he explored the influence of his alcoholic ex-con father, a victim of white "justice" in 1930s Alabama, on himself and his three brothers. It was hard to believe that the show's unemphatic but effective lighting plot was created on the day of Alexander's performance.
Abuse
Three shows stood out as productions, the work of a team on a writer other than the performer. The most ambitious was Marilli Mastrantoni's multi-media staging of GoGoGo, another off-Broadway show, originally written and performed by Juliana Francis and directed by Anne Bogart. Marilli made the bold decision to play in her own Greek language, which had the unfortunate effect, for non-speakers, of creating a distinct uneasiness about the play's study of child abuse and its consequences: the images on screen and stage of female exploitation became as titillating as they were disturbing.
Gili Ben Ozilio played Itzak Ben-Ner's A Kind Of Femme Fatale in Hebrew, but was helped by some harmonious surtitles to communicate Ben-Ner's story of the cancer victim - one might say all-round victim - Mali, who takes her revenge by claiming to her many sexual conquests that she is infected with AIDS. Issi Mamanov's adroit direction of his own adaptation gave Gili every opportunity to show her considerable skills in what was in essence a story of limited depth, but effectively presented.
Confident
The Thespis jury had no difficulty in unanimously awarding its grand prix to a German production, Grete, by the Berlin-based Anja Gronau. Following successful collaborations on two other drama heroines, Käthe von Heilbronn and Joan of Arc, she has elicited a third performance of great charm from the young actress Claudia Wiedemer, who brilliantly shows the heroine of Goethe's Faust not only as a woman of the time, dutifully going to market and confession in a virtuous daily round, but also as a very modern young woman discovering both the power and the pain that first love can bring. Here, all the four elements I have mentioned come together in magnificent unity: a fine demonstration of acting skills, with the words of a great poet effectively staged, in a confident production that adds the element of individual creation in the collaboration between actress and director, who reach beyond the classic text to a sharply contemporary statement of their own.
Thespis may be a tiny event, but it can have quite an effect on those who take part. Many of the shows presented will be picked up for other, bigger one-person festivals in the network which exists to promote the medium. And as I left, the Israeli team were making plans for future collaboration with Egypt's Nora Amin.
Contents / Reviews
London |
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ARLECHINNO, A SERVANT OF TWO MASTERS Revival of play by Carlo Goldoni |
Brockley Jack |
4 Nov | 28 Nov | 1498 |
THE BACCHAE Revival of the play by Euripides in a version by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy |
Lyric Hammersmith |
4 Nov | 20 Nov | 1457 |
BREAD AND BUTTER Revival of play by C P Taylor |
Tricycle |
11 Nov | 27 Nov | 1486 |
THE CENSOR Revival of play by Anthony Neilson |
Union SE1 |
16 Nov | 6 Dec | 1491 |
A CLOUD IN TROUSERS New play by Steve Trafford |
Southwark Playhouse |
4 Nov | 20 Nov | 1459 |
COMPACT FAILURE New play by Jennifer Farmer (Clean Break) |
Arcola |
11 Nov | 27 Nov | 1490 |
CUMQUATS New play by Kieron Barry |
Landor |
10 Nov | 27 Nov | 1480 |
58 New play by Philippe Cherbonnier |
Soho |
8 Nov | 13 Nov | 1491 |
FRESH KILLS New play by Elyzabeth Gregory Wilder |
Royal Court Upstairs |
8 Nov | 20 Nov | 1467 |
GONG DONKEYS New play by Richard Cameron |
Bush |
5 Nov | 11 Dec | 1461 |
HAMLET Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Barbican |
10 Nov | 27 Nov | 1481 |
H-O-T-B-O-I New play by Tim Fountain |
Soho |
16 Nov | 27 Nov | 1504 |
HOW TO LIVE New performance piece by Bobby Baker |
Barbican |
5 Nov | 6 Nov | 1465 |
INSOMNIA New play by Ninaz Khodaiji |
Oval House |
4 Nov | 20 Nov | 1458 |
JEFF KOONS New play by Rainald Goetz |
ICA |
15 Nov | 27 Nov | 1497 |
MURDERER Revival of play by Anthony Shaffer |
Menier |
17 Nov | 22 Jan | 1509 |
MYTH, PROPAGANDA & DISASTER IN NAZI GERMANY & CONTEMPORARY AMERICA New play by Stephen Sewell |
Orange Tree |
12 Nov | 11 Dec | 1495 |
NINE DAYS CRAZY Return of solo piece by Chris Goode |
Drill Hall |
13 Nov | 28 Nov | 1496 |
OF GOOD REPORT New play by John Antrobus |
White Bear |
11 Nov | 5 Dec | 1506 |
ONE GLASS WALL New play by Danusia Iwaszko |
Theatre 503 |
4 Nov | 20 Nov | 1489 |
ORIENTATIONS New piece by Michael Walling |
Oval House |
17 Nov | 27 Nov | 1469 |
OTHELLO Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Riverside |
15 Nov | 4 Jan | 1499 |
THE PRODUCERS New musical by Mel Brooks, based on his film |
T R Drury Lane |
9 Nov | 1 Jan | 1470 |
PROJECT C: ON PRINCIPLE New devised piece by The Work |
Tristan Bates |
11 Nov | 4 Dec | 1466 |
ROADMOVIE Return of solo play by Nick Whitfield and Wes Williams |
BAC |
10 Nov | 27 Nov | 1512 |
THE SMALLEST PERSON New play by Timothy Knapman |
Cochrane |
16 Nov | 20 Nov | 1485 |
TASTE THE LOVE: A POP ODYSSEY New musical by Keith Wickham/Paul Rogan/Andrew Barclay |
Jermyn Street |
10 Nov | 20 Nov | 1503 |
THE TRANSLUCENT FROGS OF QUUUP Transfer of musical comedy by Chris Larner |
King's Head |
8 Nov | 26 Dec | 1149 |
WE COULD BE HEROES New play with music by Richard Lumsden |
Bridewell |
4 Nov | 20 Nov | 1460 |
WOYZECK Revival of play by Georg Büchner |
Gate |
11 Nov | 4 Dec | 1492 |
Regions |
||||
THE BEAUTY QUEEN OF LEENANE Revival of play by Martin McDonagh |
York, Theatre Royal |
11 Nov | 27 Nov | 1517 |
CLOUDS Revival of play by Michael Frayn |
Richmond |
8 Nov | 13 Nov | 1514 |
THE JAIL DIARY OF ALBIE SACHS Revival of play adapted by David Edgar from book by Albie Sachs |
Salisbury Playhouse |
5 Nov | 20 Nov | 1514 |
KAFKA'S DICK Revival of play by Alan Bennett |
Derby Playhouse |
11 Nov | 27 Nov | 1516 |
MAYHEM New play by Kelly Stuart |
Manchester, Royal Exch. Studio |
11 Nov | 27Nov | 1517 |
THROUGH A CLOUD New play by Jack Shepherd |
Birmingham Rep, The Door |
10 Nov | 27 Nov | 1515 |