Together Dancing Cheek to Cheek

 

Nobody seems to have noticed that the most important member of the production team in a pair of new plays on the London stage is the choreographer. Cheek by Jowl’s Measure for Measure and the Almeida’s Carmen Disruption by Simon Stephens (playwright of The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time) are both balletic, and both require those on the stage to move in precise, co-ordinated patterns, often involving all the characters at once, more like a corps de ballet than the cast of a drama.

Measure for Measure comes to the Barbican in London from the Pushkin Theatre, Moscow, where Cheek by Jowl director, Declan Donnellan, and designer Nick Ormerod have since 1999 had a sister company of Russian actors, with its own repertory that includes Pushkin and Chekhov as well as Shakespeare.

Ormerod’s minimal sets of three red cubes for the Shakespeare “problem play” provide a sort of labyrinth for the cast of Russian actors (speaking in their own language, with heavily edited surtitles by the Bard) to move in and around in a shoulder to shoulder huddle. They do this wordlessly for the first few minutes of the play, and then proceed to race through the story of the Duke appointing Angelo to rule Vienna in his place, as he dons a friar’s habit and observes the goings-on in his city-state. Angelo condemns Claudio for the offence of fornication that has resulted in Juliet being pregnant, and Claudio’s novice-nun sister, Isabella, pleads for his life with Angelo, who loses his own priggish virtue as he offers to spare Claudio in exchange for Isabella’s virginity. Donnellan’s ruthless excision of the subplots means that this staging is finished in less than two rapidly-passing hours.

Petr Rykov, a graduate in linguistics, who had a prior four-year career as a model in the international rag trade, plays Claudio as a gorgeous hunk with an unexpected ability to play, and pose with, the double bass; and Irina Kashuba’s choreography suddenly becomes more conventional as the cast begins to waltz. However, this is not a Viennese waltz, more a Parisian dance to an accordion-led band. Do we know what’s going on? Not exactly – and Donnellan has inserted the suggestion that it is not only Angelo who lusts for Isabella, but also her own brother, adding the spice of incest to the borscht of brothel-keepers, prison warders, monks, nuns, liars and lechers.

This happens on stage, while the bed trick is revealed in the scene when the Duke has returned to an overwhelming and slightly confusing red carpet reception, which leads us to conclude that his own merits are eclipsed by his demagoguery. The scene is a touch perplexing, but the parallels with Putin are so striking that one marvels at (and admires) the Pushkin Theatre’s chutzpah in mounting this production.

Sergey Skornetskiy’s lighting is an essential part of defining the space in which this ballet/drama takes place, a good deal of it set to composer Pavel Akimkin’s music, and Ormerod’s cubes turn out to be stages themselves. Yet what one will remember is not just the brilliant surging and jostling of the crowd scenes, so superbly choreographed that the actors’ eyes even move together, but the excellence of the individual acting, especially – for me – that of Isabella, Anna Khalilulina, who is as poignantly beautiful as the young Ingrid Bergman. It ends in yet another waltz for the whole cast, and the music and choreography make you feel that what you’ve seen is all of a piece and has come to a climax.

If Cheek by Jowl’s Measure for Measure has its puzzling moments, the Almeida’s Carmen Disruption is baffling. Director Michael Longhurst and Imogen Knight, the movement director, move the cast of eight around the stripped bare walls of the stage in patterns that sometimes reveal obsession, or indicate mutual alienation; sometimes they move rapidly, and other times in arrested slow motion. One character literally climbs the walls, another races around the stage in increasingly hysterical circles. As in Measure for Measure there is a great deal of ensemble movement, making the production highly balletic.

Simon Stephens has deconstructed Bizet’s Carmen to make a tale (or a group of tales) for today. There are as many clues to what it’s all about in the programme booklet as there are on the stage, which is probably a fault. But the choreography (and Lizie Clachan’s pared-down design) certainly enhances the impression we get that this is an urban space that could be anywhere because all urban spaces are now alike; that our dependence on social media and the gadgets we use to access them damages human relationships; and that sexuality itself is now near-allied to violence.

At least this last theme can actually be found in the Merimée/Bizet Carmen. Stephens has separated out several aspects of Carmen, Bizet’s character. His most fully realised creation, played gloriously by Jack Farthing, is a preening, skinny-jeaned, in-love-with-himself, hair- and clothes-obsessed rent-boy, who has a graphically described afternoon session with a client, which goes very wrong. This is a complete plot line, with a rounded character. If only the other story-lines worked liked this one does, Carmen Disruption would be, for all its boundary-pushing, a work that could last as long as Bizet’s.

Another Stephens strand is that of The Singer, played by Sharon Small, an opera singer specialising in the role of Carmen, who jets from opera house to opera house with her pair of wheelie-suitcases, and performs her rituals to settle in her temporary lodgings, before going to the very few rehearsals in which the director tells her where to stand and not much else. In the production with which we are concerned, the Intendant of the house calls her in and tears a stripe off her, accusing her of not paying attention and of not caring about the production. She goes to pieces; but I have to say that I couldn’t tell whether she was suffering from frequent traveller’s anomie or incipient dementia. The other story lines felt similarly abbreviated or obscure. Escamillo is a futures trader who gets in trouble but appears to be rescued; Micaëla is a suicide-contemplating undergraduate involved in a sexual relationship that involves sexting. Most mystifying of all, Don José is a woman taxi driver who seems to have walked out on her son and is now involved in some sort of crime.

The strands are never made tangible, but they are gathered together by the Chorus, a dramatic mezzo costumed as Carmen. Viktoria Vizin sings snatches of the opera and some newly composed music by Simon Slater, accompanied by two accomplished cellists (who are part of the on stage ensemble). She has a thrilling lower register, incidentally. Somehow or other, the music and choreography supply the missing magic (if not the absent logic) and pull the play fairy triumphantly together.

Is it just a coincidence that these two otherwise very different productions depend so much on movement and music? Or is this a trend we’re going to see a lot more of on the London stage, a serious hybrid of drama and dance that differs from musicals? In a way, I hope so – both these moved right along, without an interval, finishing in well under two hours. Bad for the bar takings, maybe, but very good for the audience.

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