Issue 09 - 2005
Prompt Corner 
I'm a great believer in eavesdropping at the theatre. I don't think I've ever heard anything to match the classic example of the blimpish figure overheard at the Royal Opera House asking his companion, "What are they givin' us tonight, darlin' - singin' or dancin'?" But third-party remarks can unexpectedly illuminate one's own views about the play in question. Oddly, major press nights are in fact less fertile ground for such furtive harvesting: those audience members who aren't engaged professionally and thus observing our critical omertà are in all too many instances there for the event rather than the play, as it were. (Moreover, at least nine out of every ten remarks I overhear from "civilians" in theatres consist of people in the seats behind me asking each other whether they can see past me. Absolutely true, alas.) But every so often, up pops a line that serves to throw the whole evening into focus.
One such, for me, occurred recently. As I edged through the throng in the theatre foyer (in as much as I can edge anywhere), I encountered a couple of well-heeled first-night habitués intent on having a conversation across my path. The remark I caught was, "Ah, at least you know how to dress properly!" Now, at almost any other opening, this would have been mere snobbishness. But this was the West End press night of Kwame Kwei-Armah's Elmina's Kitchen, which as Caryl Phillips notes opposite is the first West End opening by a black British writer in thirty years (others claim the first ever); as a result, it attracted a number of young black Britons, dressed smartly but not always in keeping with the more conservative codes still expected in some quarters. In such a milieu, it's hard to avoid the suspicion that the remark might have been outright racist. I wish I'd had the presence of mind to ask the gentleman in question whether he was being snooty on an equal-opportunities, colour-blind basis.
Machismo
Conversely, mind you, it's all too easy to make the standard white liberal noises about Elmina's Kitchen and still emerge sounding like a well-meaning but uncomprehending, faintly patronising pillock. (I suspect I'm about to do precisely that.) I'm not sure that, in his story of three generations of men in the same family, Kwei-Armah is offering an indictment of failures in parenting. In a cultural context in which the idea of the nuclear family is far less prevalent as an ideal, it makes little sense to lament its absence. These are individual male relationships being portrayed, but set within what is also a culture of machismo. Reduced to its basics, it's hardly revolutionary: a stifled father/son bond in conflict with peer pressure to conform to a more fast and loose lifestyle. Its power is in the freshness and directness with which the writer locates it in this particular environment - one which is part of everyday urban British life, but seldom given such a natural treatment.
That's "natural" in social terms (and linguistic ones - if Billy Elliot gets stick for providing a glossary of Geordie in its programme, pity the poor ras claats who can't get by without a Caribbean lexicon), rather than dramatically natural and fluid. As I suggested with regard to his subsequent play Fix Up, Kwei-Armah is skilled and sensitive at asking questions, less so at finding plausible paths for his characters once he has placed them in dilemmas. The combination can feel at times like a counsel of despair. I don't think his own performance in the central role of Deli helps, either: he is more stilted on stage than on screen, and director Angus Jackson lets him get away with too much by way of playing Deli as a noble hero doomed by external forces; we don't see enough of the faults that Deli himself brings to the mixture. (And that gag line, "You been watching too much casualty, mate!", is almost unbearably knowing when it's delivered to a man who is both the author of the play and a star of said television series.)
Identity
Michael Obiora has garnered deserved plaudits as Deli's conflicted son Ashley. In Obiora's performance, you can believe Ashley's sincerity when he claims that he's finding an identity for himself, even as you see that he's simply giving himself over to be the creature of hoodlum godfathers. It's a far stronger performance than those of a couple of other young men during the fortnight in question.
In panto season, I noted that Joe McFadden is a natural Wishee Washee; unfortunately, he was cast as Aladdin at the Old Vic. He brings the same wide-eyed gee-whizzery to J Pierrepont Finch, the protagonist of Frank Loesser's How To Succeed In Business Without Really Trying, and consequently blunts the savagery and cynicism of the script: he's not so much a dedicated go-getter following the amoral manual of the title as a decent guy led astray by its excessive callousness. Tim Walker is the only reviewer not to compare Loesser's and librettist Abe Burrows' work here with their earlier triumph in Guys And Dolls - it's a lesser piece, not simply in comparison to that classic, but pretty much in absolute terms. Nevertheless, Martin Duncan gives it his characteristic musical pizzazz (without, as he does on occasion, going over the top), Beverley Klein reprises her now-standard characterisation as a pocket battleship, and David Langham gangles and lopes to an extent that his namesake (and relative?) Chris would be proud of.
Introspective
From McFadden to MacFadyen, and Matthew of that ilk's performance as Hal in Nicholas Hytner's Henry IV diptych. I'm afraid I fail to see the cold calculation that others discern in this Hal's low-life scenes; I simply see someone who can't roister plausibly on stage. No matter if it's all an act that Hal's putting on - he should still put it on; otherwise Falstaff, so sharp in so many ways, comes across as a complete idiot in his persistent attachment to someone who, in this performance, shows little or no warmth in return. The disavowal at the climax of part 2 - "I know thee not, old man; fall to thy prayers" - is chilling in its venom here, but it's no surprise that the new king says it; his soliloquy early in part 1 revealing that his heart isn't in the jack-the-lad business - "I know you all, and will awhile uphold/the unyoked humour of your idleness" - is no more surprising, and far less potent for its measured, introspective delivery.
MacFadyen's failings mean that, for me, the broader thematic thrust of the plays is also lacking in oomph. His Hal is better at the courtly stuff than the tavern scenes, so the prince/king scenes tend to work better than the prince/Falstaff ones... but with such an imbalance, the tension between the real and the surrogate father never goes taut, and so these plays about fathers and sons never come into proper dramatic focus. Similarly, the "as above, so below" sense of the country as a whole - or large parts of it - torn between true and false kingly "fathers" doesn't quite come off, although there's certainly a feel for the depredations of war in general. David Bradley's King Henry IV, too, is compelling as a man grown brittle with age and monarchical cares. (Has Bradley ever played Lear? If not, why not? If so, what kind of fool am I for having missed it?) As for Gambon's Falstaff, it's all in the reviews: the protean accent (which lends his "honour" soliloquy so much more power for being the one point in the plays where he's not putting on an affected voice of any kind) with its occasional unintelligibility, the sense of "all-hallown summer", the perfect coupling with John Wood's Shallow, the lot.
Abstract
Hytner doesn't remake the Wars of the Roses in a topical image the way he did with the French war in his Henry V a couple of years ago. David Greig more or less does the opposite in The American Pilot, turning contemporary conflicts into a more abstract situation. It's not just the deliberate lack of specificity about the territory in which the pilot crash-lands, and the usual Greig tropes of language and ideas. I'd argue that it goes much further even than exploring the image of America 9deliberately beginning by suggesting that the pilot may be a virtuous, even heroic figure, then modulating the impression repeatedly). I think he's using audience preconceptions about America and its role in the modern world as both a symbol for his more conceptual preoccupations and a test of our own acuity: can we see past the stars and stripes to the more nebulous issues that are, as ever, at the heart of Greig's work? We see a local warlord captain who has almost lost a sense of ideology to underpin what he does, who can't explain the basis of his conduct but continues to try to act in the best interests of his people; we see his lieutenant, driven by ideology but likewise unable to articulate it, and who in the most telling speech of the play recounts his experiences of America as if it were both heaven and hell at once; we see the farmer's daughter with her home-brewed mixture of young love and religious fervour. In every case, it's suggested to us that there are great concepts here which lie just outside the grasp of these people - and perhaps of any of us - to pin down in words. As such uncertain ideas go, the notions of "America" and its values are probably the biggest around at the moment.
Begrudgery
And as uncertain ideas go, consider The Birthday Party. Twenty reviews, and pretty much as many interpretations of what's going on in there. The most salient viewpoints may be Sheridan Morley's story of a young actor named Alan Ayckbourn daring to ask the author what it was about, and Toby Young's speculation that Pinter's writing was here driven more by an immediate contrarian streak to the plays around him than by any grand concept of the authority represented by Goldberg and McCann. I'm afraid that the strain of begrudgery running through this issue's Prompt Corner extends also to Henry Goodman's performance as Goldberg. I've long had a problem with Goodman, which is that he always seems to be "on", always working the audience, even if out of the corner of his eye. It worked a treat with his Charles Guiteau in Sam Mendes's production of Assassins years ago; it sank his Richard III more recently; and here, I fear, it saps the venom of Goldberg. His urbanity is never quite hollow enough... or it's hollow in the wrong kind of way, in an "actorly" rather than a "characterly" way, so that the contrasting menace never has a chance to assert itself. As against that, Eileen Atkins is beautifully unsettling as the too-solicitous landlady Meg, and Paul Ritter shows what he hinted at in Lindsay Posner's Bristol production of The Caretaker a couple of years ago, that he was born to play Pinter.
Ian Shuttleworth : ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
Can You Hear Me Up North?
They're a funny lot, the Swedes - correction, they're almost unremittingly serious, especially when making theatre. I'm back from their Theatre Biennale, and it was not a frivolous occasion. It was, however, both very friendly and superbly organised. It took place over five days in Umea, a burgeoning university town boasting an opera house and several modern theatres to serve its 100,000 inhabitants, up towards the Arctic Circle, and included a dozen performances, selected by a jury of critics, as well as lectures, seminars, panels, debates and readings, making it quite impossible for one person to catch all the riches on offer. I concentrated on the shows, missing such delights as the African Storytelling Workshop, the talk on Theatre As A Project For Social Integration, and (most reluctantly) the panel on Is Quality A (Gender) Neutral Concept?
Faux-Greek
What strikes the casual observer most of all about Sweden's theatre today is its lack of boundaries: dance and song mix happily with "straight" performances, and any differences in quality between children's and adult theatre are more likely to show to the disadvantage of the latter. Take for example Suzanne Osten and Per Lysander's 1970's play Medea's Children, revived by her own Unga Klara company from Stockholm's City Theatre. Annika Nieminen-Bromberg's set, comprising a set of steps leading to a pedimented doorway, provides a faux-Greek space for the opening moments of jolly mime on which the peplos-clad actors and musicians can tell the story of the Golden Fleece and get us to Corinth. We are then ushered through the doors into a complete auditorium, the living quarters of Jason and family, still Greek in feel but now the cockpit for a deadly modern game of marital discord that is watched, and indeed largely played out by the children of the title, a chubby, mischievous five-year-old and his angular, bossy sister. That these two are played by adult actors is quickly forgotten, so perfect is Anna Takanen's production on this and every level.
Sweden's young theatre companies obviously have money to spend. Another equally professional presentation, from Gothenburg's Folk Theatre, of Suzanne van Lohuizen's Three Gentlemen Who Did Not Want To Die, takes place on a huge maze of a set which is quite over the top. All you need to play this charming short opera from Holland is space for the three beds in which the old gentlemen wake up, to find a message telling them that this is their last day on earth. The bickering camaraderie which takes them through that day is what sustains the piece, not the furniture. Guus Ponsioen's music gives fine opportunities for the three singers, who are supported by three musicians, sympathetically wearing long grey beards (even the lady xylophonist). They are the ones to carry the old chaps off to heaven at the piece's end, in the form of puppets.
Appalling songs
Neither of these two children's productions would fail to please an adult audience - indeed the latter is more than suitable for the elderly. With Lisa Langseth's Mark Me, directed by Richard Turpin for the touring Unga Riks company, one wonders whether even its designated audience of tens and upwards would be satisfied with such a naïve piece of agitprop. Linda Birgersson is pleasant enough as the central figure, a little girl who hears her trainers crying and sets off to Indonesia to meet the suffering workers who made them; but she is supported in this feeble fable by an alarming trio of screaming queens in a variety of roles that are more likely to inspire reflection on homosexual stereotypes in theatre than the global exploitation the play targets. Both author and director are names to watch - Turpin was awarded for a production of Attempts On Her Life for his own company - but this is not the piece on which to judge them.
The fifteen-year-olds targeted by Stefan Lindberg in Lavv must feel equally patronised. The title is a distortion of 'love', but gains punning emphasis for the English spectator by being set in and around the school toilets where a bunch of inadequates conduct their search for emotional maturity through their first fumbling sexual experiences. Again, it would be a pity to judge the work of Ung Scen Ost, in Linköping, on this piece, since under their young director Mans Lagerlof they have gained a deserved reputation for a programme that has in recent seasons included The Sugar Syndrome and Norway Today, as well as other work by house playwright Lindgren. Here they offer little but gauche grotesquerie, supported by some appalling songs such as the painfully unforgettable "Fuck My Brain, Mothafucka" - sung, alas, in English. I have to admit that the adult Umea audience adored it.
Increasingly fervid
Lavv boasted an expensive wraparound set on two levels, more evidence of the riches available for small Swedish companies. Yet the stripped-down, economically lit platform on which Kyla (Cold) took place gave far more opportunities for its four young actors to shine. Its only scenery was a metallic back wall and a couple of garden chairs, one of which was quickly smashed against it. The play's events are simple enough: three bored neo-Nazi kids in a park, two of them celebrating their graduation, find a victim in a Korean fellow-student. Lars Noren, one-time enfant terrible of Swedish theatre and still just as controversial, directs his own play for the touring Riksteatern with a thrilling economy. Having shown us at once his characters' potential for violence, he gives them long stretches of calm conversation as a contrast, and lets their increasingly brutal attacks on the Korean become more and more stylised, converting what could be dismissed as yet another TV docudrama (it is based on a real event) into vital, disturbing theatre.
The scenes in Lavv's toilets are brought to us by the wonder of video, a device also employed in Staffan Valdemar Holm's production for Stockholm's Dramaten of Marius von Mayenburg's latest, The Cold Child. Set in the station buffet at the end of the universe, the play revolves around a set of relationships including that of a flasher and his victim and the parents of the "cold child", who is ritually torn apart at its climax. We can see that it's only a doll, of course, but its significance is increased by the fact that Holm populates his stage with dolls, in the form of realistic life-sized models of each of his characters, who share the restaurant space until the play's third act, when they gaze down on the increasingly fervid action from a slot in the back wall. Some good acting, which one should expect from Sweden's premier company, is overshadowed by these concepts and some over-emphatic design. (Also in the Biennale programme was a much less showy production of the same play by a group of students, which was by some accounts far more successful.)
Love and loss
The City Theatre company from Gothenburg seemed equally intent on obscuring a good play with concepts in Norwegian director Terje Maerli's staging of A Doll's House. Like Ostermeier's, his Nora is a sexy, modern woman, with some very modern children present on stage for much of the action. The design was mercifully uncomplicated - a big, square platform which threw the emphasis on to the actors. Unfortunately, these actors had to perform a kind of prologue to the play in commedia masks, and took this stylistic hint into the main action with some down-front addresses to the audience which robbed Ibsen's subtle drama of any nuance. The jury of critics admired this "self-ironic appeal"; I did not, though I would grudgingly admit that it was not as completely unfaithful to its original as the Ostermeier travesty.
My impressions are those of a spectator who, in the absence of translation, has to rely on what he sees on stage. Yet deep impressions can be made without close understanding of the text, as several of these productions have demonstrated. Curiously, the big hit from Stockholm's City Theatre, Birgitta Egerbladh's dance-enhanced anthology Chekhov Garden, was more effective for its Swedish audience. Yes, the Chekhovian themes of love and loss, arrivals and partings, masters and servants were cleverly brought together by the piece's large mixed company of dancers and actors, but without close knowledge of the words one tended to notice the show's rapid changes of costume and furniture, and to wonder why the cast should break into a rousing chorus of "Something's Gotta Give", rather than being swept away on the tide of subtextual emotion that earned it a prolonged standing ovation.
Seamless discourse
A morning of readings from plays in English translation showed something of what we were missing in the text: Klas Abramsson, Margareta Garpe and (best of all) Cristina Gottfridsson were represented with excerpts from plays, largely for young audiences, which examined all the appropriate earnest Swedish social concerns - drug and alcohol abuse, sexual issues, handicap - but treated them with a welcome lightness of touch that avoided barren preachery. Yet the most impressive evening I spent in Umea was at a production whose text probably baffled Swedish speakers as much as it did me. Rickard Gunther, obviously a major directing talent, and three splendid actresses from Stockholm's independent Teater Galeasen put together a development of Elfride Jelinek's Princess Dramas which welded these five monologues into one seamless discourse, monitored by the on-stage presence of the Nobel laureate playwright herself. On Peter Lundquist's clever composite set (kitchen, woodland grove, White House bedroom.) we could enjoy Jelinek's wry dissection of some celebrated female archetypes, deliciously played by Ingela Olsson, Monica Stenbeck and Anna Wallander. The latter's physical and vocal transformations as she moved from awkward Snow White to strutting Prince, and on to a voluptuous Marilyn, were especially impressive, but the Swedish critics were absolutely right not to separate them in giving them their annual award, presented at the Biennale. What's more - feminism be blowed - I got to kiss all three.
Ian Herbert - ian@herbertknott.com
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
THE BIRTHDAY PARTY Revival of play by Harold Pinter (Birmingham Rep) |
Duchess |
25 Apr |
549 |
|
DEALING WITH CLAIR Revival of play by Martin Crimp (Drayson Th Prods) |
Etcetera |
3 May |
8 May |
565 |
DRACULA AND THE VOYAGE OF THE DEMETER Devised adaptation from Bram Stoker (Liminabozo) |
Arcola |
5 May |
22 May |
583 |
ELMINA'S KITCHEN Return of play by Kwame Kwei-Armah (NT/Birmingham Rep) |
Garrick |
26 Apr |
556 |
|
HENRY IV parts 1 & 2 Revival of plays by Shakespeare (NT) |
Olivier |
4 May |
31 Aug |
568 |
IF DESTROYED TRUE New play by Douglas Maxwell (Paines Plough/Dundee Rep) |
Chocolate Factory |
28 Apr |
22 May |
560 |
IMMODESTY BLAIZE AND WALTER'S BURLESQUE! Burlesque show |
Arts |
3 May |
576 |
|
INTIMATE HISTORY Return of piece by Craig Stephens and Jake Oldershaw |
BAC |
30 Apr |
14 May |
582 |
THE KINDNESS OF STRANGERS New play by Sara Mason (Allegresse Prods) |
Warehouse Croydon |
1 May |
22 May |
566 |
MARILYN: CASE #81128 New play by Brian Stewart |
Jermyn Street |
5 May |
28 May |
583 |
THE METHOD New play by Natasha Langridge |
Oval House |
28 Apr |
14 May |
581 |
MY WIFE'S DEAD MOTHER / LOVE AND THE PIANO / THROUGH THE OPEN WINDOW Triple bill by Georges Feydeau (Encore Prods) |
Greenwich Playhouse |
5 May |
22 May |
567 |
NATIONAL ALIEN OFFICE New play by Stanislas Cotton (Fabrik-à-Brac) |
Riverside |
5 May |
22 May |
579 |
PRIVATE FEARS IN PUBLIC PLACES New play by Alan Ayckbourn (Stephen Joseph Th) |
Orange Tree |
6 May |
4 Jun |
580 |
RESISTANCE New adaptation by Maria Oshodi of autobiography of Jacques Lysseyran |
Riverside |
27 Apr |
1 May |
582 |
SEX, DEATH AND A BAKED SWAN Two new plays by Deborah Cook (Jane Nightwork Prods) |
Rosemary Branch |
28 Apr |
29 May |
578 |
TOSSED! New version of The Tempest by Shakespeare (Pants On Fire TC) |
People Show Studios |
26 Apr |
7 May |
578 |
TRELAWNY OF THE "WELLS" Revival of play by Arthur Wing Pinero |
Finborough |
28 Apr |
21 May |
555 |
Regions |
||||
THE AMERICAN PILOT New play by David Greig |
Stratford, The Other Place |
5 May |
9 Jul |
587 |
CANCER TALES Revival of play by Nell Dunn |
Ipswich, New Wolsey |
6 May |
14 May |
593 |
CUL DE SAC New piece by Daniel MacIvor and Daniel Brooks (Da Da Kamera) |
Glasgow, Tron |
5 May |
7 May |
604 |
DAVID COPPERFIELD Adaptation by Giles Havergal from Charles Dickens |
Leeds, WYP Quarry |
5 May |
28 May |
592 |
DOORMAN/BOUNCER New play/film double bill by Geoff Thompson |
Liverpool Everyman |
26 Apr |
30 Apr |
594 |
HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS WITHOUT REALLY TRYING Revival of musical by Frank Loesser |
Chichester Festival Theatre |
5 May |
10 Sep |
597 |
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Revival of play by Oscar Wilde |
Bristol Old Vic |
4 May |
28 May |
590 |
IN THE BAG New play by Wang Xiaoli, literal transl. Cris Bevir, English version Ronan O'Donnell |
Edinburgh, Traverse |
3 May |
22 May |
602 |
LAUREL AND HARDY Revival of play by Tom McGrath |
Edinburgh, Royal Lyceum |
23 Apr |
14 May |
600 |
A MANIFESTO FOR A NEW CITY New musical by Julia Darling (Northern Stage) |
Glasgow, Tron |
20 Apr |
22 Apr |
600 |
NEVILLE'S ISLAND Revival of play by Tim Firth |
Birmingham Rep |
27 Apr |
7 May |
594 |
THE RESISTIBLE RISE OF ARTURO UI Revival of play by Bertolt Brecht, transl. Ranjit Bolt |
Colchester, Mercury |
25 Apr |
7 May |
594 |
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Stratford, Royal Shakespeare |
28 Apr |
10 Oct |
584 |
WHEN HARRY MET SALLY Touring production of Marcy Kahan adaptation from Nora Ephron screenplay |
Richmond |
25 Apr |
30 Apr |
589 |