Issue 03 - 2006
Prompt Corner 
I've written once or twice about making allowances when assessing a performance, of evaluating it as "good, considering...". I'm against it: I think what I said was that audiences don't pay to make allowances. External considerations shouldn't bear on one's opinion of the quality of a production, any more than whether it was an unpleasant journey to the theatre.
And yet (1): I increasingly find myself, when seeing a show with modest beginnings that has subsequently come into the West End, thinking that it was probably fine in its more limited original context but simply can't claim a place in the most exalted rank. Most often this is a matter of value for money: is a show worth West End ticket prices? Is any show worth some West End ticket prices? It was only a couple of years ago that, if I recall aright, Jerry Springer- The Opera broke the £50 ticket barrier. Shortly afterwards, Acorn Antiques The Musical upped the ante to £65... to pay for the names involved, I hope, rather than the uncertain production. In April, the latter show's venue, the Haymarket, is reported to be ready to break the ton: top-price tickets for Judi Dench in Hay Fever, £100. Sure, this will include complimentary programmes (so that will be, what, a £3.50 value) and what is described as "V I P service"... which, frankly, for my hundred quid, would have to be the kind of service once legendarily given and received in one of the boxes at the Victoria Palace during a performance of Jolson. In any case, what's the difference between evaluating a production in terms of ticket price and, say, in terms of a company's professional qualifications or whatever? Moreover, it won't be my hundred quid: since reviewers get free tickets in any case, how hypocritical is it of us to gripe about what others pay but we don't?
Perspective
And yet (2): sometimes there are circumstances which are hard not to set on one side. When Strathcona TC staged Notre Dame de Paris a few years ago, it was clear that the theme of judging by appearances was one that chimed deeply with this company for people with learning disabilities. The result was a richer, more complex and far more satisfying reading than the hollow spectacle of the same tale's musical treatment a little while earlier in the West End. There have been instances, some of them recent (one of them, indeed, not yet published), when experience or knowledge of an actor's circumstances has led me to see a production from a perspective not available to most of its viewers. How far should such things be deliberately ignored, or how much used to give a more informed review?
Even when such a factor is widely reported and known, how far should it impact on the way we watch a play or a performance? This is where the general musings become particular with regard to one of this issue's shows, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? I'm in the minority on this one, along with Rebecca Tyrrel and Aleks Sierz: I reckon this was a very good production indeed, but ultimately it didn't excite me. In particular, I was not excited by Kathleen Turner's performance as Martha. The best Marthas I have seen have carried an air not just of undeniable physical presence, in boozy, blowsy seduction and whatnot, but of suppressed physical threat... as if, when George gained the psychological upper hand, Martha might just conceivably change the rules and floor him with a roundhouse punch. Turner's Martha had no such air: her movements were economical, almost languid.
Jazz hands
Now, here's the thing. Turner has for over a decade now been living with the pain and damage of rheumatoid arthritis, and in recent years has addressed it publicly on a number of occasions. I found that I simply couldn't help wondering to what extent the physical aspect of her performance was determined by this condition. Let's take one particular moment as an emblematic example. There's a set-piece in which Martha explains to George that she has lost the last of her patience with him; it contains the repeated motif, "SNAP! It went snap...". The first of these "snap"s is explicitly, in a stage direction, a snap of the fingers; the rest are implicitly so, and I can't recall seeing a production in which they weren't played as such: finger-snaps, with the suddenness and almost the sound of slaps across the face. Turner, instead and almost grotesquely, made sudden "jazz hands" gestures, flinging her arms out. In other circumstances, this could have been made to look like feinted lunges to attack George; here, to me, they simply looked as if she needed to find something else to do because the arthritis prevented her from snapping her fingers.
I may be wrong; these physical points may all be actorly and/or directorial choices with no relation to Turner's illness. But it's all part of the same issue. To what extent should I have set that knowledge on one side when considering her performance? To what extent might it have informed the way I watched the production and, now, have written about it, or to what extent might it have sent me striding up a blind alley? When and how can information lead to condescension? I don't know. What I know for certain is that, for me, Turner wasn't fully there on the stage of the Apollo.
Invisible
The Soldier's Tale wasn't fully there, either. Ian Herbert writes about it in this issue's ...Af The Back column, and I agree with him and pretty much every other reviewer whose main criticism was that there was altogether too much of it there, and that in effect performing the originally spare and angularly elegant piece twice over made for a laudable gesture but a leaden evening in the theatre. However, in one crucial respect there was a conspicuous absence. Director Andrew Steggall staged the piece by placing his musicians on either side of the stage, beyond the proscenium arch. This is a piece of music theatre; the musicians, whether simply playing their instruments or taking an active role, are a crucial part of the proceedings. We reviewers, seated as we were by convenfion on the aisles down either side of the Old Vic's auditorium, were simply unable to see one or other group of musicians, British or Iraqi, depending on which side we were sitting on. It seems not to have occurred to Steggall to do something as basic as checking his sightlines.
This is not nearly as rare a complaint as it ought to be. Last summer I grumbled that a director as experienced as Lucy Bailey had failed to take account of the difference in sightlines when moving The Postman Always Rings Twice from the open stage of the West Yorkshire Playhouse's Quarry space to the pros-arch environment of the Playhouse on London's Embankment, with the result that the production's big name, Val Kilmer, was invisible from several dozen seats during two climactic scenes. Once, on the Fringe, I pointed out to a director that the wide but shallow staging she had opted for meant that, playing as the show was to an audience on three sides, half the house had their view of most of the actors entirely blocked by the body of the one nearest them; she replied that yes, she was aware of this, but she had chosen this staging. It didn't seem to occur to her, even with such prompting, that the audience of a theatre event was a party worthy of consideration. It shouldn't need saying, but alas it seems to, that the audience's experience is the point.
Slabs
And... breathe... The Schuman Plan was not quite there in terms of drama. A decade or so ago, Tim Luscombe suggested in EuroVision that the universal language was music; here, he seems to be arguing that it's fish. But for the programme notes, it would never for a moment have occurred to me that Luscombe originally set out to write a play lauding the European Union but that his attitudes grew more ambivalent as the process of composition continued; to me, it looked as if right from conception it had been a rather trite polemical piece in which callow youthful idealism was repeatedly tempered by iniquitous reality. Personal disagreement with a play's ideology is, of course, something to put on one side; what can't be discounted is that he has simply written great unwieldy slabs of exposition and debate. Meaning no disrespect to the intellectual powers of Suffolk fishermen's wives, but I doubt I'd ever hear one of them casually use the phrase "commercial extinction"; it's just not the way the idea would be phrased in conversation, even a conversation with a reporter and an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries and Food. That, for me, was the emblematic moment - the "jazz hands" moment- of Luscombe's play.
The Creeper was hardly there at all as a play. There's generally a broad consensus among reviewers, but seldom such a degree of unanimity as here: even raves and pannings don't usually march so closely in step as the reviews of Pauline Macaulay's revival (with the sole, inexplicably generous exception of John Peter). Every single star rating I saw was two-star, and when I finally saw the show I couldn't find any reason to disagree in the slightest. Alan Cox's performance is amusing, especially if one knows Alan Cox; other than that, nada, zip, zilch. lan Richardson's performance could have been phoned in on a heavy, period, Bakelite apparatus. As You Desire
Me temporarily lifted from the Playhouse the stigma of being one of the West End's blighted venues which seem seldom to house successful or long-running shows; with The Creeper, it's not just Richardson who is cast once again to type, but the venue itself.
At the Back
Can you hear me in Scotland?
Since I was involved with foreign parts in last issue's column I didn't comment on its British content, so let me start this one by taking issue with my esteemed boss, and quite a number of other critics, for theirtreatment of M Ibrahim And The Flowers Of The Qur'an at the Bush. The point at issue seems to be that it's too light. The heavy brigade, Messrs Billington, Nightingale and Taylor, all found it shallow, flimsy, sentimental; I'm with Dominic Cavendish and John Peter, who did not find its charm too cloying and were able to take away the warm feeling Eric-Emmanuel Schmitt and his adaptors wanted to impart. I think it's an example of many critics' resistance to judging a performance on what it sets out to do. My hobby-horse, the West End musical, gets a lot of negative attention for setting out to please and entertain. Ayckbourn is now dismissed as a mere entertainer in his current work. This resistance to solid work lacking in innovation was also evident in some of last issue's reviews of A Man For All Seasons. In contrast, productions which show more innovation than competence can often receive raves, something detectable in some of the reactions to Nights At The Circus - though Charles Spencer's demolition job is one to e-forward to navel-gazing "performance studies" workgroups everywhere.
Flawed groundbreakers
This time around, I haven't seen many of the reviews but it will be interesting to study whether the good, if run of the mill shows get better reviews than flawed groundbreakers. You can give all manner of marks for trying, for instance, to Abdulkareem Kasid and Rebecca Lenkiewicz's adaptation of The Soldier's Tale, but there's no disguising how deadly dull it was. Great set, excellent musicians, yes, but the effect of putting an Arabic translation, textual and musical, on stage next to the English (and very cleverly managing the transitions, let it be said) was to draw out what should be a lively one-acter beyond acceptable limits.
An even bigger disappointment was the Gardzienice double bill. Wlodzimierz Staniewski's rural team have some wonderful achievements behind them, but in spite of the enthusiasm of most of his audience in The Pit I found these two "theatrical essays" exactly that, rather than acts of theatre. The wonderful Gardzienice singing is still there, applied to some questionable Greek and Roman "songs" from several different centuries, but their refusal to tell the two stories on which their essays were based seemed something of a cop-out. The second, Elektra, was excused as a study of gesture in ancient Greek drama. Its chief effect was to reveal the troupe as not very good actors.
You could call Colin Teevan's excursions into the territory of Greek drama, Missing Persons, "theatrical essays", too, but Greg Hicks' intense performance (none of his sometimes irksome "voice beautiful", just damn good speech and movement) made these five little solos miniature dramatic masterpieces: there was pleasure in recognising the originals on which Teevan constructed his riffs, but each stood up in its own right as a strong, modern situation, enriched by Teevan's verse. The final piece, the mock-heroic account of Roy Keane's Achillean quarrel with his manager, made a suitable satyr-play to end this very Dionysiac evening, to which Cleo Pettit's waterside set and Tony Simpson's murky lighting made an important contribution.
Writer's block
These two shows have their target audiences: the pretentious European masterwork audience, and the serious theatregoer - not necessarily the same group. Whether they hit their target is what we want to know from the critics. Rebecca Prichard's audience is presumably the Royal Court crowd who praised her to the skies as a very young talent some years ago, producing a writer's block that is only beginning to unblock here in Futures at Theatre 503. The good news is that the ear for language Prichard showed in Essex Girls and Yard Gal is still there, now offering a lyrical tinge to the dreamscapes she describes in what appear to be two parts of a three-part work-in-progress. A deep tale is being partly told here, much of it in language of great beauty, and if Ms Prichard can pull it together it will make a fine play. What I think it now needs is the view of Alex, wife of an abusing husband and daughter of a stroke-bound father, of events which seem to include some kind of 9/11 cataclysm.
Bilge and piffle
The critic-as-audience-representative idea was thrown into high relief by two shows I saw out of London this weekend. The Romans In Britain was something for critics to collect, and no expense was spared to give this big-cast, big-theme play a proper showing. Ralph Koltai's design, his first for ages, proved that he has lost none of his masterly ability to make an abstract set allow for layer upon layer of stage meaning. Peter McKintosh's costumes were rich and evocative, without too much of the hessian-sack look. Peter Mumford's lighting brought the best out of both Koltai's set and Sam West's actors, well used as stage decoration themselves. And then you have Brenton's text, written as if his typewriter had some kind of epic overdrive which he could switch on at will, for fine (and for the most part meaningless) phrases to pour out. Magnificently mounted (all too literally in several scenes), the play is nevertheless bilge and piffle, as Charles Spencer (who else?) so accurately puts it.
Soft target
Whereas I Want That Hair, Jane Thornton's new one at Hull Truck, is all too easy to dismiss as mindless popular entertainment. In fact it says rather a lot, and a great deal more coherently than the flashy, empty Romans In Britain. Mrs Godber has done a hairdresser play before, and Liz Lochhead has done an even better one in Perfect Days, but in its compact way this new one looks without flinching at what turning 40 can mean to someone who has never really been anywhere in their life and is just beginning to realise that they never will. The heartbreak creeping up on Thornton's two crimpers is as real and as meaningful as anything in Chekhov, and hidden under a very similar layer of ripe comedy. All right, it's only a tiny, hairdresser play, a soft target for a snob reviewer, but worth treating for what it is. It's splendidly acted, by Gillian Jephcott and Kiki Kendrick - and the hairdressers loved it. [Too soft, in fact, for any national reviews of it to have been run - I.S.]
There's just room to talk about two [two more - I.S.] shows that probably won't figure in this issue's official contents. Candies - Girlish Hardcore attracted my prurient curiosity, but the Japanese experimental group Yubiwa Hotel who presented it at the ICA were more girlish than hardcore, and did little to excite on either level. I mention them just to remind you that the ICA is still programming adventurous foreign work, even if nobody goes. A total recommendation, however, goes to Gerry Tebbutt's staging of the Maury Yeston/Peter Stone Titanic - The Musical, performed by the Guildford School of Acting in that town's delightful Electric Theatre. No need to lower the critical threshold for this very professional rendering of a show that did well on Broadway but never reached London. It benefited from a great staff band, and David Collis's designs did almost as much for the show as Mark Thompson's for Once in a Lifetime, at a hundredth of the cost.
Contents / Reviews
London |
||||
BELIEVE WHAT YOU WILL Revival of play by Philip Massinger (RSC) |
Trafalgar Studio 1 |
1 Feb |
11 Feb |
122 |
BLACK & WHITE SEXTET New adaptation of Shakespeares "Othello" by Rupert Pennant-Jones |
Rosemary Branch |
31 Jan |
26 Feb |
125 |
THE CREEPER Revival of play by Pauline Macaulay |
Playhouse |
9 Feb |
|
139 |
FUTURES New play by Rebecca Prichard |
Theatre 503 |
9 Feb |
25 Feb |
143 |
GLADIATOR GAMES Return of new play by Tanika Gupta |
T R Stratford E15 |
8 Feb |
25 Feb |
142 |
HOUSE New play by Daniel Maclvor (Suspect Package) |
Finborough |
2 Feb |
25 Feb |
113 |
JEFFREY DAHMER IS UNWELL Revival of play by Alan Francis and Mike Hayley |
King's Head |
6 Feb |
12 Mar |
129 |
JOURNEY TO THE RIVER SEA New adaptation by Carl Millers from book by Eva Ibbotson |
Unicorn (Weston) |
9 Feb |
25 Mar |
136 |
JUMP New piece written by Chul-Ki Choi |
Peacock |
7 Feb |
26 Feb |
135 |
LOVE ME, DOROTHY! New play by Dylan Costello (FLIP) |
Greenwich Playhouse |
9 Feb |
5 Mar |
130 |
MARY, MOTHER OF NO MAN'S LAND New play by Damian Wright (Company:Collisions) |
Oval House |
1 Feb |
18 Feb |
111 |
METAMORPHOSES / ELEKTRA Adaptations from Lucius Apuleius I Sophocles (Gardzienice Centre) |
The Pit |
1 Feb |
11 Feb |
124 |
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM Revival of play by Shakespeare (RSC) |
Novello |
7 Feb |
25 Feb |
137 |
MISSING PERSONS: FOUR TRAGEDIES AND ROY KEANE New play by Colin Teevan, from Greek myths |
Trafalgar Studio 2 |
2 Feb |
25 Feb |
127 |
OTHELLO Revival of play by Shakespeare (Tight Fit Th) |
Broadway |
7 Feb |
4 Mar |
121 |
THE POISON MAKER New play by John Symonds (Alchemy TC) |
Old Red Lion |
2 Feb |
18 Feb |
126 |
THE PRINCE AMONG MEN New play by Eric Henry Sanders |
Union |
2 Feb |
18 Feb |
126 |
THE SCHUMAN PLAN New play by Tim Luscombe |
Hampstead |
6 Feb |
25 Feb |
131 |
THE SECOND MAIDEN'S TRAGEDY Return of play by Thomas Middleton (Blue Eyes TC) |
Hackney Empire, Acorn Studio |
2 Feb |
25 Feb |
130 |
THE SOLDIER'S TALE Revival of music theatre piece by Igor Stravinsky and Charles Ramuz, in new version |
Old Vic |
30 Jan |
4 Feb |
109 |
THALIDOMIDE!! - A MUSICAL Return of new musical by Mat Fraser |
BAC |
31 Jan |
13 Feb |
112 |
TITUS ANDRONICUS Revival of play by William Shakespeare, adapted by Andrew Potter (Wildcard TC) |
Courtyard at Covent Garden |
2 Feb |
26 Feb |
138 |
WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? Revival of play by Edward Albee |
Apollo |
31 Jan |
|
114 |
YESTERDAY WAS A WEIRD DAY New piece by Look Left Look Right |
BAC |
7 Feb |
26 Feb |
134 |
Regions |
||||
BILLY LIAR Revival of play by Keith Waterhouse and Willis Hall |
Liverpool Playhouse |
7 Feb |
25 Feb |
152 |
ENDGAME Revival of play by Samuel Beckett |
Belfast, Waterfront Hall Studio |
2 Feb |
18 Feb |
149 |
JERRY SPRINGER - THE OPERA Revival of musical by Richard Thomas and Stewart Lee |
Plymouth, Theatre Royal / touring |
23 Jan |
4 Feb |
153 |
THE MEMORANDUM Revival of play by Vaclav Havel |
Perth I touring |
2 Feb |
18 Feb |
154 |
THE ROMANS IN BRITAIN Revival of play by Howard Brenton |
Sheffield, Crucible |
8 Feb |
25 Feb |
149 |
ROMEO AND JULIET Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Glasgow, Citizens |
9 Feb |
4 Mar |
156 |
SATURDAY NIGHT AND SUNDAY MORNING New adaptation by Amanda Whittington from Alan Sillitoe |
Nottingham, Lakeside Arts Centre |
2 Feb |
18 Feb |
144 |
SHAKESPEARE'S R&J New play by Joe Calarco |
Cumbernauld / touring |
2 Feb |
4 Feb |
155 |
TARTUFFE Revival of play by Molière, adapted by Ranjit Bolt |
Newbury, Watermill |
6 Feb |
18 Mar |
147 |
THATCHER - THE MUSICAL New play by Jill Dowse |
Warwick Arts Centre |
7 Feb |
11 Feb |
147 |
TITUS ANDRONICUS Revival of play by Shakespeare |
Bristol, Tobacco Factory |
10 Feb |
18 Mar |
153 |
WEEDING CANE Return (revised) of play by Sonia Hughes |
Manchester, R Exchange Studio |
9 Feb |
25 Feb |
154 |