A Mad World My Masters, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

A Mad World My Masters

Swan Theatre, 29^th July 2013

 

I finally got round to watching Burton and Taylor the other day.  A nice chance to see the chameleon-like Dominic West doing a fabulous Richard Burton.  But I was taken by a particular scene where he is chastising his ex-wife, Elizabeth Taylor (played by Helena Bonham-Carter not doing quite enough not to be Helena Bonham-Carter) for smooching with the audience.  As they perform in Noel Coward’s Private Lives, bringing more reality than performance to the play, Liz winks at one of the audience members when he shouts something sleazy to her.  Burton’s criticism is that the audience is confusing fact and fiction and she is aiding and abetting them in this interpretation.  It seems to me that this attitude demonstrates a brief blip in the history of theatre.  One from which we are perhaps only just recovering.  Ask any artist to define the difference between fact and fiction, truth and art, and they will be flummoxed.  The artist does not see that a polarity exists and nor, perhaps, should we. 

So it was that husband and I greeted an unknown play, A Mad World My Masters by Thomas Middleton, written in 1605.  There is only really one word that springs to mind when trying to define the play and that would be bawdy.  I think the RSC has had great fun with it.  As they usually try and extract any opportunity for slap-stick in the Shakespearean comedies, Middleton’s play is a glorious find.  And this performance is genuinely funny.

We had seats right at the front which was a treat or a trial depending on how you view such things.  Being seven months pregnant I think exempts one from being dragged into the play’s more raucous humour although I did worry that I ran the risk of having cast members land on me during some of the fight scenes.  As the audience filed in a waitress in 1950s Bunny Girl costume made conversation with various members on the front row which felt at once against the rules and thrilling.  It set the scene perfectly for a play that seemed to evolve according to the atmosphere within the theatre.  As the rest of the cast came on stage in what was set to look like a 1950s Jazz club, we in the front row were handed drinks (ginger ale, ‘non-alcoholic’ the waitress assured me, looking at my bump) which we all viewed sceptically to begin with, assuming them to be props and not ‘real’ but we soon got used to the level of audience involvement as cast members made little asides to we members of the audience.

We were not to miss anything and this was guaranteed very early on in the conception of this performance.  The director Sean Foley is evangelical about his decision to change some of the play’s language and to cut large chunks of it that he felt were inaccessible.  I’m with him on this.  What is important, in staging a play that is over four hundred years old, is that an audience is still able to appreciate the essence of the play.  If the language is inaccessible then the jokes will be too.  Foley claims that what is left is 97% Middleton and that’s good enough for me.

The play and its humour are exceptionally fast paced.  Always referred to as a ‘city comedy’ this pace reflects the changing faces of the modern city.  I say ‘modern’ because it is the nature of urban environments, not set on a groove of seasonal and agricultural pattern, that they are always charting new territory.  So, Jacobean London has many similarities with 1950s Soho, where sex and money remain the unshakable obsessions.  I will not relay to you the plot as its intricacies are fairly typical of the period, i.e.: disguise, deception, men dressing as women, a play within a play and a resolution of sorts at the end.  However, the journey is pure pleasure, executed by some of our best talent.

John Hopkins plays the conniving Penitent Brothel.  His voice should be the voice of every male actor, his projection and diction are rich and clear, his face places him as a Mafioso.  However, took me a while to realise that he’s the chap from Midsomer Murders so he’s made a successful escape there.  Sarah Ridgeway was exemplary as the whore Truly Kidman, a character who always has the upper hand in a pleasing nod to seventeenth century feminism.  She was Barbara Windsor in every ‘Carry On’ that ever was.  She was alternatively saucy and kittenish and was responsible for furthering both of the strands of the plot.  She looks very young to take on such a big part with such aplomb and make it look so effortless.  Finally, may I say how nice it was to see Ciaran Owens on the RSC stage?  For those five of you who read my reviews you might remember my commending his performance in Our Country’s Good back at the beginning of the year.  He had only a small part in this play, as a suitor of Truly Kidman but he was comfortable and convincing and I’m glad that the RSC has got a hold of him.

For such an old play it felt genuinely fresh.  Older members of the audience could not contain their hysteria (at one point someone was stretchered out of the balcony seats which may or may not have been due to one too many references to erectile dysfunction!) however, as I am of a miserable bent I found it more entertaining than laugh-out-loud funny.  But how entertaining!  I would thoroughly recommend it especially to those of you who are tiring of the more juvenile Shakespearean humour.

Hamlet, RST, 26th April 2013

Hamlet

RST, Friday 26^th April 2013

 

For the last few years it has been difficult to escape Jonathan Slinger (in a theatrical sense, you understand?)  He is a dependable and capable actor and here he has been trusted with the most famous Dane of them all, Hamlet.  He gives a dependable and capable performance.  I want to think of something nice to say because there really wasn’t anything wrong with it but then neither was there anything particularly right with it.  The RSC has, in recent times, preferred to under-do Shakespearian drama and overdo Shakespearian humour.  Mr Slinger is ideal for such an interpretation of the Bard because he has almost no stage-presence.  I have touched upon Mr Slinger’s appearance before and shall not do so again but suffice to say he was too believable as a lunatic when he feigned madness and not remotely believable as the fresh, young and passionate student from Wittenberg (in this instance, curiously older than his pretty contemporaries).

            Although the costume was loosely contemporary, generic Scandinavian, i.e. Lots of knitted, patterned jumpers; fencing and its dress was used to convey the play’s tension.  I’ve always found fencing to be a slightly effete past-time but it is true to say that in Shakespearian times fencing was a required skill for anyone who considered himself a gentleman.  The ghost of the old King was got up in fencing gear and wore the sinister mask of the fencer.  He and Claudius were played by John Stahl.  These characters were meant to be played by the gloriously intense Greg Hicks who was apparently ‘indisposed’ on the night that we went to see the performance.  That was a shame.  Mr Stahl misplaced his lines in the first act which did nothing to inspire the audience with confidence.  Although, again, his performance went on to be completely satisfactory.  He played the part of Claudius like a Mafioso thug rather than a clever, scheming villain and was therefore unpleasant, rather than fearsome.

            On a more positive note, the play within the play was superbly weird and wonderful.  There was a Vaudevillian vibe as the players enacted an approximation of the old King’s murder.  The actors used mime and costume to convey their drama.  When the actor playing Claudius wanted to signal his intentions towards Gertrude he raised up a baguette hanging from his waist and aimed it at the player-Queen in a bizarre simulation of sex that was both humorous and sinister.

            After a long first half we were in much need of a drink.  By which I mean coffee (and those scrumptious raisins covered in about an inch of chocolate) because the theatre was so cold and I needed to thaw out.  However, an officious young usher prevented me from taking my coffee back to my seat on the grounds of ‘Health and Safety’.  I’m not sure why it is more dangerous to drink coffee in the theatre than in the draughty foyer.  I could have taken wine back to my seat and run the risk of becoming drunk and disorderly but not coffee ‘because it’s hot’.  So, you might want to remember to take an extra jumper if you’re going to the RST anytime soon.

            I liked Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, played by Oliver Ryan and Nicholas Tennant respectively.  They gave an edgy, roguish portrayal of the duo.  Their entrance into the drama moves the plot on as we see Hamlet and Claudius from another perspective.  Robin Soans as Polonius was a joy, with his misjudged meddling in the affairs of state.  He brought just the right amount of humour to the part so that I felt genuinely sad to see the end of his character when Hamlet mistakenly murders him.  His daughter, Ophelia was played by the much lauded Pippa Nixon.  I say much lauded because I believe her Rosalind (As you like it) is superb.  As Ophelia I was perturbed by her elfin haircut.  Hamlet had nothing to grab hold of when he tries to assault her.  Perhaps the Pre-Raphaelites are to blame for my unshakable vision of Ophelia with abundant locks.

            The scenery implied an old-fashioned village hall with wooden floor and stage with curtains.  This was suitably dark but oddly impersonal.  This scenery existed for the first two thirds of the play until all the wooden flooring was pulled up to reveal muddy earth underneath, the resting place of Yorick etc.  This change of scenery seemed unnecessarily time-consuming.  It took the characters some time to pull up all the wooden flooring and remove it from the stage.  Still, it’s not as if Hamlet’s a long play…..  When the new setting was established it also acted as an appropriate place for Ophelia’s burial.

            Finally we came to the scene of almost everybody’s doom.  There was a distinct lack of gore in this fencing scene which meant that I wasn’t quite sure when the fatal blows were inflicted and again, the fencing seemed oddly sterile for such a tragic close to this famous play.  Perhaps the creators of this particular interpretation felt the same because, for some inexplicable reason, when all lay dead and dying water started pouring from the Gods.  This was either some sort of simulation of a sprinkler system or of rain.  We near the front received splashes of water in the face.  Ophelia, still lying in her grave, got absolutely soaked.  When she got up to bow she looked absolutely murderous, with water trickling down her forehead.  She looked more unhinged than she had done throughout the whole performance.  I cannot fathom what this was meant to add to the play but it certainly acted as some much needed drama but too little, too late.  By this point all my hopes were with Fortinbras whose optimistic lines close the play.

A Life of Galileo

A Life of Galileo

Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, 26^th February 2013

Good theatre is good theatre; good, affordable theatre is a cultural and social victory and I am victorious on your behalf.  It is not just a pre-occupation with parsimony that makes me consider the cost of theatre tickets in this blog, it is the belief, shared by Ms Wertenbaker (see previous) that we will all be redeemed by theatre and therefore I will scour the earth for affordable theatre tickets so that the masses may benefit and then I will tell you about it.  You may not want to know, you may not want to go but I can but try and win you over with my words.  Listen, to simplify, there’s a lot of crap on TV but we all pay our license fee.  Stop paying it, throw out the TV and stand in the cheap seats!

So I stumbled across £5 tickets to the Brecht.  Hurrah!  The catch, if you can call it a catch, was that it would be an understudy performance.  Sometimes an idea shines with such brilliance that it lights the way and this seemed to me to be just such an idea; an idea where everybody wins.  The actors get a rare chance to take centre stage and show off their mettle, the audience gets cheap tickets and the powers-that-be get a full house.  I wonder if this happens often?  I’ve never heard of it before but the old people must be in the loop because the revolution at present seems to be restricted to the pensionable section of society; the Swan was crammed to the galleries with the older theatre-goer.  Perhaps, you may say, it is because they are the only people who can attend a matinee performance.  But then, £5 tickets!  Take a sickie, pull the kids out of school for the afternoon, make theatre the priority!

I took my pensionable mother because everyone else was busy.  She hoped that there would be pretty scenery and authentic costumes.  I questioned her on what exactly people wore in sixteenth century Padua, she didn’t know exactly.  Then a very young woman came onto the stage, the assistant director, keen to have a go.  She explained that this would be live theatre (thank goodness!), some characters would be playing more than one part (revolutionary!) and seemed, other than having her fifteen minutes, to be apologising before the performance had even begun.  It whetted the appetite but really, she needn’t have fretted, what ensued was a delight and highly accomplished and professional.

At the beginning of each scene electrical displays dangled from the ceiling stating in lights the date and location.  These were difficult to read and a bit of an irrelevance but caused a a stir at first.  Paul Hamilton played Galileo Galilei and he embodied the role instantly, stripping to the waist and washing himself on stage so that the audience understands that this is the man; the body of the man who will be pivotal to the world of science forever; he is real.  Brecht wanted Galileo to be real.  He wanted him to be fallible, to have impulses of the flesh but not, I think, for the old reason of having the audience relate but more because he seems to want us to avoid judging the character; not to hold him responsible.  Hamilton is never quite larger than life but he is still the anti-hero of the play around whom the other characters orbit.

Unfortunately the costumes were, as I tried to explain, representative.  Loosely twentieth century, characters wore a uniform that represented their status and occupation.  Andrea as a boy wears shorts and bobble hat, Galileo wears the scruffy shirt and shorts of an aging bon viveur, the dignitaries of Rome wear ceremonial robes much like they have always worn, Mrs Sarti wore an apron to denote her status as housekeeper.  When Andrea returns in the last scene as a grown man to take the secret manuscript out of the country for publication he wears the mac of the spy.  This is very effective because we are reminded of the times that surrounded the writing of the play.  Brecht had fled Nazi Germany and the Gestapo would seem a fitting influence for the Inquisition in the play.  In this way, the play feels very modern. 

It was commissioned this season because the RSC wanted to explore what was happening in other parts of the world around the time our own Bard was writing his play.  Galileo and Shakespeare were born weeks apart.  This gives our interpretation of the play a level of confusion.  Galileo and Shakespeare may have been contemporaries but Brecht was writing in the twentieth century.  Brecht’s motivation was not to give an accurate, biographical account of Galileo’s life but to represent ‘a twentieth century perspective on the conflict between religious dogmatism and scientific evidence’, so says the programme.  This is the play’s great strength.  The moment of climax comes after his recanting of his beliefs when Galileo shouts in response to Andrea’s cry of, ‘Unhappy the land that has no heroes!’ with, ‘No.  Unhappy the land where heroes are needed.’  This is a philosophy that will travel and is as relevant now as ever.

However, this performance seemed to take representation too far.  The vaudevillian theme that began a lot of the scenes; masked dancers, big band music, seemed to suppress any sort of emotional resonance that the play could have had.  Unfortunately it was a little dry.  Virginia played by Joan Iyiola never seemed completely plausible as his daughter.  Her devotion seemed to spring from religious fervour rather than daughterly love and Galileo’s flippant treatment of her and of every one he encountered made him seem at odds with the life-loving man of the flesh.  Instead there was a hint of the autistic to all the relationships. 

Mrs Sarti, played by Nia Gwynne was a Welsh Harpy with a comical turn of phrase and hand-on-hip exasperation.  Susan Momoko Hingley as the Bursar was comical because of her small stature.  Dressed in black trouser suit there was something of Charlie Chaplin about her as she tried to rein in the maverick Galileo.  But these attempts at humour did not manage to humanise the relationships. 

            But that is not to detract from how well my interest was held throughout.  At the end the actors’ smiles were triumphant with much back-slapping and hugging, you could sense their relief at their achievement.  The atmosphere in the theatre was one of generous good-humour, as if we were all part of some sort of revolutionary experiment together. 

Our Country's Good

Our Country’s Good

St James Theatre 18^th February 2013

Age is a slippery thing.  Until the age of thirty it is true to say that you are always the youngest person in the room.  But once past that milestone age your perception is jolted regularly by strange occurrences:  You celebrate a humdrum birthday and someone asks you if it’s the big 4-0 and you laugh so hard that it takes you a while to realise that they were being serious; school boys call you a milf even when you ARE NOT WITH YOUR CHILDREN, when by rights, you should really just be an ilf, you know! And cultural points of reference that you thought were universal turn out to be specific to the particular time when you grew up; it is, for example, possible to get through adolescence without having seen ‘Pulp Fiction’ nowadays.

            Following on from this, you read one day that a play that you studied for GCSE is being described by a broadsheet newspaper as a ‘forgotten work’ that is ‘enjoying a revival’.  Well, Timberlake Wertenbaker’s ‘Our Country’s Good’ has not been forgotten by this English student.  And so it was that my sister and I hurried along the dark pavement with a little maternal trot towards the St James theatre to see Max Stafford-Clark’s revival of said play. It seems that trotting must now be avoided as I smashed the iphone en route; trotting and texting can now be consigned to the list of ‘things I used to be able to do at the same time.’  I should mention that my sister had never heard of the play on account of being younger than me but then Stafford-Clark claims that ‘Our Country’s Good’ is a play which “a whole generation has grown up without seeing”.

            The theatre fell into disrepair in the ‘90s and then, with the help of various grants, was virtually rebuilt to create a cosy, sophisticated establishment, the bar of which looked very appealing, if only we hadn’t been late, as usual.  We had to get to our seats (right at the front) by crossing the stage.  The St James would generously be described as intimate but with the stage jutting into our knees, the impression was more cramped.  Still, we were right at the front which is a treat.  Everything in London is expensive, except the theatre when compared with the RST.  You need to take out a small mortgage to sit that near the front in Stratford, restricted leg room or not.

            The cast arranged themselves on a makeshift ship bound for New South Wales and spoke their eerie, poetic opening lines and at the words ‘cunt’ and ‘lick’ I was suddenly fifteen again and trying to look very serious so as not to giggle.  The female convicts all looked like they had taken method acting too far and had starved themselves for the part; it was suitably grim.

            However, what unfolded made for an exhilarating and entertaining evening.  To denote the scenes that took place in daylight the full force of the theatre’s dazzling lights shone onto the stage, giving the impression of a searing Australian heat.  In contrast, the night-time scenes, especially when Ralph Clark, played by the fresh-faced Dominic Thorburn, is writing to his beloved wife Betsy back home on her English pedestal, seem ghostly and lonely.  These scenes show us how far from home all the characters are, convicts and officers alike.

The play’s humour was brought out by superb acting.  Matthew Needham as Robert Sideway was endearing in his earnest attempts at theatrical portrayal of emotion whilst rehearsing George Farquhar’s ‘The Recruiting Officer’; as he tells Ralph Clark, the officer turned director, ‘I’m still establishing my melancholy.’  This received riotous applause from the audience.  Of course, juxtaposed with the humour were scenes of such startling poignancy that it was almost painful and the scenes are short so this layering was happening rapidly without allowing any one mood to prevail.  As each convict told a brief account of their life-stories a tale of injustice emerged in a way that was not self-conscious or didactic, just touching.

            The cast, like the venue, was small and most actors played two parts, an officer and a convict.  For obvious reasons this was tremendously effective but if it’s not obvious I should explain that it portrayed something of what it’s like to walk in another man’s shoes or, there but for the grace of God go I..... or some such proverb.  Most successful of all was Ciaran Owens who played the repellent bigot Major Robbie Ross and the desperate and shamed hangman Ketch Freeman.  He was equally believable as Ross, whom he played as a Scottish sadist who used his power to torture, both physically and emotionally, the convicts.  And as Ketch, he was a soft headed and hearted Irishman, led into criminal ways by lack of judgement and tormented by the voices of the dead that he’s hanged.  The scene where he measures his friend, Liz Morden, for her hanging is tender to watch as he promises that it will be quick and she will feel nothing and he picks her up to ascertain her weight.

            Of course, the play enjoys this revival now because the Arts are undergoing so many cuts but it seems a shame, almost cowardly, to make the play a symbol of our political climate.  ‘Our Country’s Good’ seems to transcend the political; it is a play with a simple morality that avoids sentimentality or blatancy by its dystopian and far removed setting of a 1780’s penal colony.  But pick the play up and place it in any setting where people doubt the possibility of redemption and it is just as effective; whether a society is suffering a recession or enjoying a boom.