Issue 12 - 2005
Prompt Corner 
To revisit a previous topic, albeit from a different angle: I was on a discussion panel last month about criticism, semi-inspired by the National's current production of Theatre Of Blood. During the discussion itself it seemed that my fellow panellist Lee Simpson was growing more and more taciturn, perhaps taking exception to what he thought of as navel-gazing about criticism. After the formal part of the proceedings had ended, he protested in conversation that the thing about Theatre Of Blood that the critics hadn't got was "IT'S A STORY!" Nothing more: no fiery polemic or grand manifesto, "IT'S A STORY!"
And yes, sometimes we get carried away over-analysing shows. but then again, who's to say what amounts to over-analysing? Shakespeare, after all, would no doubt be astounded to find himself at the core of such a theatrical and scholarly industry, but if the plays and poems have so much content, how can it be wrong to look so closely? If a work looks likely to repay study, why not give it that study? Simpson and Phelim McDermott's version of Theatre Of Blood is a more complex creation than the film, and arguably more so than most plays, not least in that it deliberately stages an argument about the direction of theatre whilst being performed in the very citadel of one particular approach to it, and furthermore emphasises this fact. But even if it didn't go to such lengths of engagement with its subject matter, would it somehow not be legitimate to look closely at such a work? How often do you hear a composer protesting of their work, "It's just a tune," or a painter "It's just a picture"?
Arbiters
I've quoted before the remark that the function of criticism is "to explain culture to itself": that applies to individual works as well as to broader streams of discourse. And yet it feels terribly arrogant. literally: we are arrogating to ourselves the position of declaring upon the very meaning of a work of art, even more than the artist. There's an air of vanity and self-aggrandisement about it: that somehow, despite not being involved in creativity ourselves, we are the real arbiters of it. But strip this issue of its emotional resonance, and it turns out to be nothing more than the standard way that any act of communication works.
Take an everyday conversation: you want to convey something to me; you say something, which may be a little different; I hear it and understand something which may be a little different again. Sometimes I may misunderstand what you said. but sometimes, too, I'll be able to put it in the context of other remarks by you or by other people, or to infer things from your tone or your body language. Those may be things that haven't occurred to you; they may even be things you're trying to conceal or at any rate would rather they didn't come to light. Put like that, it sounds terribly complex, but it's no more than we do dozens of times a day without thinking about it. So why should the dialogue between a work of art and a reader/viewer/etc be looked on as any different from that, as any more egotistical or improper? "IT'S A STORY!" and nothing more? I'll be the judge of that: not necessarily because it's my job, but because I'm interested and aware. Each one of us will be the judge.
Stereotype
The Shaughraun, now, that is just a story. Or was before director John McColgan got his hands on it. McColgan's production for the Abbey Theatre, and to a large extent Boucicault's play itself, indulges pretty much every stereotype that dogs the Irish; indeed, the very foundation of the Abbey was declared to be in opposition to this kind of melodrama (although, as far as can be ascertained, neither Yeats nor Lady Gregory ahd ever actually seen any). If the term on this issue's front cover puzzles you, think of, say, Paddy Moloney of The Chieftains doing the folk equivalent of scat-singing along to a traditional jig: "Ahhh, dee-deedle-idle-eedle-idle-iddly-idle-UMM!"
It's easy to remember that McColgan was the director of the Riverdance stage show. In fact, it's hard to forget, since he insists on interrupting the action to have a bunch of supporting players fling themselves around in energetic traditional ways (although they seldom wear the serious expression of many Irish dancers, which makes it look as if their lower limbs are autonomous and the person is a little surprised and disquieted at all the shapes being thrown below their waist). The Irish are feckless and sly; the main Brit is nice but dim. I heard a colleague expressing incredulity at how Irish audiences could have taken this production to their hearts at the Abbey, given how shamelessly it plays up to all the clichés. This seemed a fair point, until I remembered how fond the English are of Gilbert & Sullivan. I suspect Boucicault's work does much the same: simultaneously affirms and subverts - indeed, many of the virtues one might discern in a work of postmodernism, only a century and a quarter before that term became modish.
However, work that's so close to the national bosom doesn't always travel well, and this production hasn't set the West End alight. I saw a midweek matinee performance immediately after press night, but even making allowances for the lack of grapevine word and the low custom of such houses, I think a grand total of 80 spectators in the stalls of the nearly 900-seater Albery augurs ill. Patch the dog didn't seem 100% behind the production, either: far from stealing the scenes he was in, his somnambulant performances were apparently the result of ennui on leaving his native soil; auditions were consequently held for a native pooch to replace him.
Lumpier
Another thinnish house, though on nothing like the same scale, at the second night of The Postman Always Rings Twice. Not all that surprising, when you think about it: it's a decade and more since the high water mark of Val Kilmer's Hollywood career in Top Gun, The Doors and whichever Batman movie it was; there's an entire generation of young film- and theatregoers, then, who simply don't consider him a big-name scalp to be collected. And, it must be said, on the strength of this production, they may not be wrong. His performance has been looked on as sluggish or soporific; really, though, he's simply indulging in that particular kind of low-key, undemonstrative naturalism beloved of a number of American actors, particularly screen actors who find themselves on the stage. It simply happens not to mesh with the rest of Lucy Bailey's production.
I was moderately fond of this show when I saw it in Leeds with Patrick O'Kane in what's now the Kilmer role (although I still can't bring myself to believe in Charlotte Emmerson as a siren who drives men to extremes, just as I couldn't in Bailey's production of Baby Doll a few years ago). In the Playhouse, though, it does indeed feel lumpier. To an extent this is a function of the theatre configuration itself. Even though most of the action is framed within a (yawn) CinemaScope-proportioned box set, there was both wit and impact when it broke out of the frame, as it were, in the amphitheatral thrust space of the West Yorkshire Playhouse's Quarry house. Put the same design on a proscenium stage, and everything remains framed, most of it doubly so. Moreover, Bailey and designer Bunny Christie showed no sign whatever of having reconsidered the set for the Playhouse's different sightlines. When two of the moments of greatest tension in the second act are a courtroom scene in which the accused is invisible to several dozen seats and a fight which the same audience members can't see at all, this is not just unfortunate, it's incompetent.
Indictment
When the same comparison strikes a number of reviewers independently, it could be worth taking notice. There's a further significant example of this phenomenon coming up in the next issue, but in the mean time, consider how many times Michael Sheen's performance in The U.N. Inspector is compared to Rik Mayall. Fair enough, Mayall played the counterpart role in Gogol's original on the same Olivier stage twenty years ago, but that's not usually ground enough for such detailed likeness as is remarked on time and again in Sheen's case. The facial expressions, the very cadence patterns when he speaks, all suggest Mayall.
Farr has come in for some flak for losing Gogol's deftness of touch. (Indeed, it's quite a novelty to see Michael Billington berate a show for having too much social relevance.) What I think he's given insufficient credit for is the unblinking darkness of his final half-hour, in which earlier instances of comedy are one by one pushed beyond the point of laughter as we're confronted with a bunch of despots and wannabe-despots who will stop at nothing to maintain their own power. It stops being a satire and becomes a simple indictment, more outspoken than, say, anything the British government itself has said about the current Uzbek regime. When Kenneth Cranham's president comes to the front of the stage and yells at the audience, "What are you laughing at? You're laughing at yourselves!", it feels overdone for a moment, but we are indeed complicit in a national and international state of affairs where the vast majority of such tyrannies aren't even spoken about plainly, never mind counteracted. This is our world, all right; good old us.
Ian Shuttleworth ian@theatrerecord.com
At the Back
This is going to read like an extension of "More on Previous Productions". You may have noticed that I've been reporting more on theatre out of Britain than in, and becoming as reliant on Theatre Record as many of you, dear readers, for my updates on UK theatre. I'm off again next week, on six weeks' retirement practice, so you may not hear from me for a while. Before I go, I did want to put in my twopenn'orth about one or two of the London shows I have seen lately.
For a start, I must join in the general raves over Billy Elliot. From its simple opening, (so reminiscent of An Inspector Calls, where a boy sits on stage, this time watching a Pathé newsreel) to its polished curtain calls, we know throughout that we are in the hands of an expert team. Expert, but not expert in stage musicals, where Stephen Daldry and Lee Hall are both novices, and it's important to recognise the measure of their achievement. They have taken the film's known and heart-warming story, and established it more securely in a social and political context. Such an unusual intensification could have alienated the average middle-of-the-road lover of musicals, but I reckon it's the added realistic bite that makes the stage show so much better than the already splendid film. Elton John's music is more than serviceable but not his top-flight best, and there is some irony in the fact that show's greatest musical moment is pre-recorded Tchaikovsky. There are other tiny flaws, like the disappearance of the key figure of Mrs Wilkinson from most of the second half, but what brings unstinting admiration time and time again is Daldry's natural understanding of the rhythm and pacing that makes for great musicals. The musical numbers are given room to breathe and develop, as are the dance routines. In between, character and plot are growing in carefully contrasted scenes for individuals and groups. Daldry's ensemble work has the Trevor Nunn touch - we recognise each member as an individual.
The apparently effortless skill which turns ephemeral crowd-pleasers like Oklahoma! or Anything Goes into lasting masterpieces is not easily learned, as we see in failed musical after failed musical, but Daldry (together with his writing and choreographic colleagues) has got it immediately: already the master of big crowd productions, of political engagement, of emotional finesse, he's now the master of musicals - jammy sod.
Political theatre
Something else the Billy Elliott team have learned is that musicals need to be something more than mere spectacle - that contrast is more important than endless glitz. Many of the show's big moments take place on an almost empty stage, where the often colourful scene is set entirely by Rick Fisher's pinpoint-accurate lighting and Nicky Gillibrand's costumes. Ian McNeil can fill the stage with scenery, trucked in from the wings, lifted up on the central revolve, dropped from the flies, but he also knows when to clear a space and let the actors and dancers do their stuff. That restraint is there in the songs, too - some of the anthems are sung a capella, and the modest nine-piece band, when it does play, is always properly subordinated to the singers. Just as Daldry has proved himself instantly as a director of musicals, so Lee Hall shows himself as no mean lyricist - Gran's "We'd Go Dancing" and the pitfolk's final "Once We Were Kings" are poems in their own right.
Above all, this is not the musical of the film. When Keystone Kops police and dancing miners re-enact terrible episodes of our recent history, the second time as farce; when one of the show's funniest numbers is a song wishing Maggie Thatcher were dead, we are made aware that this is as much a powerful piece of political theatre as the story of one boy's ambitions as a dancer. Not content with industrial politics, it has plenty to say about sexual politics, too, in its treatment of homosexuality in a way that demands sympathy but permits the heights of politically incorrect description. In his talk before the performance I saw, Stephen Daldry claimed - I think rightly - that Billy Elliot is highly suitable for children, in spite of the producers' warnings. Yes, there is some very ripe language. The silly thing is that today's children are more likely to be familiar with that language than were the '80s children into whose mouths it was slightly anachronistically put.
Last thought on Billy Elliott : like The Producers, this is truly a classic musical. Not a sung-through mock-opera, or a crowd-pleasing raid on someone's back catalogue, but a story with its own original songs and dances in which all three elements blissfully and equally combine.
Pretty daft
It's hard to talk about The Far Pavilions in Billy Elliot's shadow, but let's try. There were the usual sneers at this hubristic effort. After all, the idea of condensing a densely plotted thousand-page novel into three hours of stage musical seems pretty daft, if you forget about Les Misérables. And to put the music into the hands of a composer with no West End track record seems a bit foolhardy, too, if you forget about Claude-Michel Schönberg. I had the instructive experience of seeing the show both in preview (I feared it might not stay long enough for me to see it after its opening) and two months into its run (so much for pessimism).
The emphases in the preview hadn't been fully worked out. A very long introduction, featuring the hero Ashley's childhood, was followed by a very abrupt transition, from a declaration of enduring love for his Indian sweetheart to a proposal of marriage to his British intended, in spite of this courtship lasting a year in real time. And the normally reliable Lez Brotherston had produced a set which for much of the time looked like a side wall of the National Theatre, all dull concrete. The show had great promise, but remained slow and heavy. It did feature a fine understudy performance from Simon Gleeson, playing Ashley instead of his chum Walter at a point when he was still settling into his own role.
Two months on, some of the problems had been fixed. The loss of some early scenes made the plot less complicated, and one was less aware of that ugly switch in Ashley's love interest. The set was now alive, and the basis for some richly coloured lighting from Peter Mumford, taking advantage both of the neutral "concrete" and some reflecting panels which lent themselves well to metallic hues. The cast had settled, with David Burt in particular relaxing into his role of villain, avoiding moustachioed melodrama and becoming far more effective as a result.
There's still work to do, but the parallel with Lez Miz continues: two months after an iffy opening (at the Barbican) a much more solid production was in place - the one most critics missed, at the Palace. If an outside director were to come in now with a fresh eye, and take a final, unprejudiced look at the balances and rhythms (the secret of Billy Elliot's success), a good show could become a magnificent one. But let's offer praise now to Gale Edwards for her work to date, to Philip Henderson for a magnificently tuneful score (so big that John Cameron needs to tone it down, and the principals belt it less), to Andreane Neofitou for some smashing costumes, to Kuljit Bhamra and Piali Ray for their seamless inserts of Indian music and dance (much less cheesy than the like efforts for Bombay Dreams) and to a very hard-working company. The Far Pavilions has just announced an extension to November. This may be the mark of a tyro producer (the show's original adapter) on the way to losing not just his shirt but his dhoti, but it just possibly might mean the arrival of another critically scorned show that goes on to achieve the wide audience appeal of a musical classic.
Gentle poetry
There's just enough space to commend three small-scale works. It's good to see the Cherub Company shaking off its awkward heritage under a new director, Michael Gilieta (albeit another Pole). They get off to a fine start with the splendidly mounted Nilo Cruz play Hortensia And The Museum Of Dreams at the Finborough, with Gilieta effortlessly welding young and experienced actors into an integrated ensemble.
Philip Goulding's Strange Lands received its première in Greece with a scratch cast, and came over well. That its UK première at the Courtyard was less successful is due to the amateurism of many of its larger London cast, but the play remains a good and thoughtful look at our attitudes to suffering and the media's presentation of it, and Goulding, with a strong regional track record but little London exposure, is a writer worthy of greater attention. The same may be true of Abi Zakarian, whose debut play A Thousand Yards was very well staged at Southwark Playhouse by Róisín McBrinn. Treading similar ground to Strange Lands, Zakarian brings a gentle poetry to her harsh subject, helped by sympathetic performances from Susan Vidler and Gerard Kearns.
Ian Herbert ian@herbertknott.comContents / Reviews
London |
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ALL THE RIGHT PEOPLE COME HERE New verbatim piece by Alecky Blythe |
New Wimbledon Studio |
14 Jun |
2 Jul |
789 |
THE COUNTESS New play by Gregory Murphy |
Criterion |
7 Jun |
17 Sep |
786 |
CRAZY LADY Revival of play by Nona Shepphard |
Drill Hall |
11 Jun |
26 Jun |
806 |
CYMBELINE Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Open Air |
10 Jun |
3 Sep |
780 |
THE GODS ARE NOT TO BLAME New play by Ola Rotimi, based on Sophocles (Tiata Fahodzi) |
Arcola |
9 Jun |
2 Jul |
802 |
THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST Revival of play by Oscar Wilde (Ridiculusmus) |
The Pit |
9 Jun |
9 Jul |
804 |
KISS AND TELL New play by Bayla Travis |
Drill Hall |
15 Jun |
26 Jun |
806 |
MEDEA Revival of play by Euripides in new version by Rebecca Atkinson-Lord (Mirtos Prods) |
Barons Court |
17 Jun |
10 Jul |
809 |
THE POSTMAN ALWAYS RINGS TWICE New adaptation by Andrew Rattenbury of novel by James M Cain |
Playhouse |
7 Jun |
790 |
|
ROOM SERVICE New performance/film piece by The Gob Squad |
Great Eastern Hotel |
10 Jun |
18 Jun |
810 |
SCENES FROM A SEPARATION
|
Orange Tree |
17 Jun |
25 Jun |
814 |
THE SHAUGHRAUN Revival of play by Dion Boucicault (Abbey Theatre) |
Albery |
8 Jun |
796 |
|
SMACK - THE POINT OF YES New solo piece by Janey Godley |
Soho |
8 Jun |
11 Jun |
814 |
SPLICE: A Theatrical Ode To Cinema New piece by Pants On Fire |
Oxford House |
15 Jun |
2 Jul |
785 |
A THOUSAND YARDS New play by A N Zakarian |
Southwark Playhouse |
8 Jun |
25 Jun |
801 |
TICK, TICK... BOOM!
|
Chocolate Factory |
9 Jun |
3 Sep |
807 |
TWELFTH NIGHT Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Open Air |
6 Jun |
1 Sep |
777 |
THE U.N. INSPECTOR New play by David Farr, based on Nikolai Gogol (NT) |
Olivier |
16 Jun |
5 Oct |
816 |
UNION OF SHORTS Collection of new short plays |
Union |
16 Jun |
2 Jul |
800 |
THE VEGEMITE TALES Return of Melanie Tait play |
Riverside 3 |
7 Jun |
27 Aug |
795 |
THE WATER ENGINE Revival of play by David Mamet (Young Vic Direct Action) |
Theatre 503 |
16 Jun |
26 Jun |
822 |
THE WINTER'S TALE Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Globe |
15 Jun |
1 Oct |
811 |
WORLDS APART New play by Darren Rapier |
Brockley Jack |
14 Jun |
9 Jul |
803 |
Regions |
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THE DUTIFUL DAUGHTER New play by Charles Way |
Leeds, WYP Courtyard |
8 Jun |
11 Jun |
825 |
LADIES' DAY New play by Amanda Whittington |
Hull Truck |
3 Jun |
25 Jun |
823 |
MULGRAVE New site-specific piece conceived by Louise Ann Wilson and Wils Wilson |
Mulgrave Woods, nr Whitby |
14 Jun |
3 Jul |
825 |
OLD BIG 'EAD IN THE SPIRIT OF THE MAN New play by Stephen Lowe |
Nottingham Playhouse |
7 Jun |
25 Jun |
823 |
ROOKERY NOOK Revival of play by Ben Travers |
Guildford, Yvonne Arnaud |
17 Jun |
18 Jun |
827 |
THE SEAGULL Revival of play by Anton Chekhov, adapted by Mike Poulton |
Colchester, Mercury |
6 Jun |
18 Jun |
824 |
TIPPING POINT New play by Davey Anderson |
Glasgow, S T U C Centre |
10 Jun |
10 Jun |
831 |