Funny that the same theatre company sometimes has a hit and a flop in the same week; but that’s exactly what the Royal Shakespeare Company did recently. Denis Kelly’s new play, his take on King Lear, called The Gods Weep, and starring Jeremy Irons, opened at the RSC’s current London base, the Hampstead Theatre. It was so very bad (and this is, I believe, the unanimous view of all us London critics) that you have to wonder why someone didn’t say, at an early stage, “Look, this is not good enough to stage. Go home and rewrite it, and we’ll see if anything can be salvaged.” But the next day in Stratford-u-Avon, the RSC opened Rupert Goold’s superb Romeo and Juliet. http://online.wsj.com/article/SB126955523847067631.html Go figure.
The National
Theatre has recently mounted a pair of new productions, one of which I found
mildly amusing, while the other I thought a real masterwork. The ho-hum play (for
me) was a revival of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1841 romp, London Assurance, directed by Nicholas
Hytner, and redeemed only by designer Mark Thompson’s period sets and costumes
and the performances of its stars Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw.
Boucicault was a jobbing playwright, and the original version of the play
(nicely updated for the NT) was really a vehicle for the Russell Beale and Shaw
of his day. And that’s still the problem with it. Despite the funny character
names (she’s Lady Gay Spanker, he’s Charles Courtly) and hint of Restoration
comedy naughtiness, it’s just a trifle about money and marriage, with lots of
opportunities for camp acting.
Mikhail
Bulgakov’s The White Guard, on the
other hand, is another one of the NT’s hugely successful productions of Russian
plays directed by Howard Davies. The chequered history of the work (first
novel, then play – or maybe not) is undetectable in Andrew Upton’s new version,
which brings the slang of the dialogue up to date without detracting from the
historic credibility of the characters. It is the Ukraine 1918, and the
bourgeois Turbin family is caught up in the civil war that followed the October
Revolution. (The background is supremely well explained in the programme essay
by the Oxford Russianist, Julie Curtis, one of the best such efforts I’ve ever
read.) The large, hospitable apartment household in Kiev is held together by
the sole woman in the play, Elena Vasilena Turbin (Lena, played gloriously and
believably by Justine Mitchell), wife of the White Guard’s (i.e., the armed
force of the Tsarist White Russians) Deputy Minister for War, and her two brothers,
a country cousin and several hangers-on, including her admirer, Lieutenant Leonid
Shervinsky. Conleith Hill plays him as a puffed-up dandy, whose physical
self-confidence would seem completely misplaced – except that Lena really is in
love with him. The casting is so luxurious that the wonderful Anthony Calf has
only a small role as the preposterous White leader, the Hetman. He even looks a
bit like John Cleese in this part, which emphasises the Monty Python aspects of
the whole staging. Which is very appropriate, for the playwright seems almost
to have anticipated their surrealist streak, and joined it to a Chekhovian view
of his characters crossed with the Tolstoy of War and Peace.
In the 30 or 40
plays I must have seen on the stage of the Lytteton Theatre over the course of
the 17 or 18 years I’ve been the Wall
Street Journal’s critic, I’ve never seen the stage machinery better used
than in Bunny Christie’s amazing designs. The whole, vast apartment set recedes
many, many metres to the very back of the outer wall of the stage, to be
replaced by another huge set for Hetman’s Palace – in the blink of an eye. It’s
breathtaking.
Bulgakov’s great
feat is to make a sort of comedy of this tale of the White Guard losing the
war, first to the evil, Jew-torturing
Ukrainian Nationalists commanded by Petlyura, and then to the
Bolsheviks. The play is filled with singing, eating and vodka (and some of the
best-directed drunk scenes I’ve ever seen); and the Turbins and their friends
exude warmth and good feeling. Nevertheless the play has scenes of Nationalist
violence and plentiful tragedy surfaces through the comedy in the production’s
second half. Cynicism seems the only possible way to protect yourself, in the
end. Betrayed by his boss, the Hetman, and by their German allies, Shervinsky
of course discards his White Guard uniform, When he shows up at the flat in
Kiev, he’s asked by Lena whether
the new overcoat he’s wearing means he’s gone over to the Bolsheviks? “This overcoat
is neutral, darling, neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik. Just essence of prole.”
Declan Donellan
and Nick Ormerod’s Cheek by Jowl troupe are performing their spare version of Macbeth at the Barbican. I’m still in
two minds about it. I love the first scene and reappearance of the Weird
Sisters (“witches” is not used in Shakespeare’s text) as the whole ensemble
(which includes only two women) whispering menacingly in the background, the
use of mime, even for the violent scenes, and the absence of props (all the
daggers here are daggers of the mind). I wasn’t so sure about the minimal
costumes – the black T-shirts sported by most of the men make it difficult to
know who’s speaking.
Taking a clue
from the programme again, the production seems to endorse Freud’s view that Mr
and Mrs Macbeth are one being split into two bodies, both feeling the same
ambition, and the same apprehension, and both needing to be told to screw their
courage to the sticking point. Anastasia Hille and Will Keen capture the
intensity of their situation, and make very good, essentially narcissistic
lovers. In this very physical production the boys can’t keep their hands off
each other, and in the midst of this constant homoerotic cuddling, the scenes
of heterosexual love are actually a wee bit shocking. I am convinced this was intentional,
because the only other woman in the cast, Kelly Hotten, plays a sluttish
Porter, mini-skirted, knickers showing as she runs her metal detector
lecherously over the crotches of the men seeking entry to the castle.
Does the
production illuminate the play? The bar is very high, as last year we had
Rupert Goold’s unforgettable version of the Scottish play. Yes, I think the
concept of the Macbeths as a single soul in two bodies is interesting. But if
there really was a homoerotic subtext in the production, one expects to see it embodied
in the relationships of Macbeth to Duncan, Macduff and Banquo; and if it was
here, it somehow eluded my attention.
Leave a Reply