The Taming of the Shrew

The Taming of the Shrew, Royal Shakespeare Theatre

8th March, 2019

On this International Women’s Day I took my two eldest daughters to see Taming of the Shrew at the RST in Stratford.  Interesting choice for IWD you may say but obviously I had no idea of the auspicious day when I booked the tickets.  Such forward planning is sadly not my style.  

The girls didn’t know the play and I was excited for them to see it.  It’s a problematic play in many ways, the clue being in the title.  Ultimately the shrew is tamed.  But the entertainment is in Katherine’s defiance.  Arguably, she is the greatest Shakespearean female with some of the greatest lines: “I see a woman may be made a fool/If she had not a spirit to resist.”

Ahh, “a spirit to resist.”  And this is where the entertainment lies; just watch her resist!  I think I speak for most theatre-goers when I say, “We forgive you, Mr Shakespeare, for ending the play in the manner you did.”  I like to think that, of course, within the confines of the day, he had to have the shrew tamed both for the sake of conventional comedic resolution but also so that fifty percent of his audience were not shocked and disgusted out of ever visiting the theatre again.

All this was pacing around in my head when I bought the programme and discovered that such sacrilege was about to occur that I instantly wished I’d chosen a different play.  What a shame that the first time my girls were to see this play, the wonderful Katherine was to be played by a man.  Even worse, all the roles had been swapped and we were being transported to a sixteenth century matriarchy.  I explained to my girls what was going to happen.  They cared not a jot, having no prior knowledge or affection for the play.  And so, we perched on our stools and awaited the performance, me telling myself firmly to open my mind.  

Matriarchy is an odd but satisfying concept, I suppose.  Not what the feminist aims for, obviously, being so wedded to equality as we are but a nice day dream all the same.  Except, even in day dreams I’m a pragmatist.  What would a matriarchy be founded on?  The patriarchy, of course, exists for one reason and one reason alone: Men are bigger and stronger than women.  And for all the pay inequality, silencing and burkas it's worth remembering that still, today, an average of 137 women, across the world, are killed by men everyday.  There’s the patriarchy.

In the programme for this performance, Jami Rogers writes:

‘Some audience members may find it uncomfortable to watch a female Petruchio wielding power over a male Katherine, but perhaps some will also ask why – when audiences have happily flocked to see a male Petruchio’s treatment of a female Katherine – it is unacceptable if the tables are turned?’

Well, Jami, it’s unacceptable because it doesn’t work.  And you’re wrong that audiences ‘happily flocked’ to see Katherine beaten and bullied by Petruchio.  We flocked to see the guile and spirit and sheer witty brilliance of Katherine in the face of inevitable domination.  The scenes where Claire Price, quite brilliant as Petruchia, physically abuses the male Katherine were simply turned into farce.  The audience roared and indeed they were quite funny.  Funny because it’s all so improbable.  My girls looked thoroughly perplexed.  My eldest struggled not to walk out.  Afterwards, she said, “It’s a horrible play!”  But I tried to explain, “If only you could have heard Katherine’s words spoken by a woman, seen a woman square up to Petruchio, you’d have been incredibly moved.”  Not this time though.  

I do want to try and suspend my disbelief for a moment and comment on the good because there was still much to praise.  All the cast gave their absolute all but Emily Johnstone as Lucentia and Laura Elsworthy as Trania were particularly successful at harnessing the humour of their parts.  How Sophie Stanton as Gremia, managed to hover in her enormous gown so successfully, as if propelled by wheels, was a source of fascination and hysteria to all.  The music, a sort of Renaissance rock, was also effective at enhancing an environment based around mad dating rituals and hidden identities

I suppose, at this precise moment in time, such an interpretation seems pressing and contemporary.  Jami Rogers refers to characters being ‘gender-swapped’ but let’s be clear, the sex of the actors was swapped; nothing to do with gender.  And what the RSC hoped would be subversive actually bordered on offensive.  Womankind has a history and that history is often one of repression and enslavement.  It cannot so easily be handed to men, either in drama or in any other way you might care to imagine.

Tamburlaine - RSC, Swan Theatre

Tamburlaine

Christopher Marlowe

Friday 29^thSeptember 2018

The Swan is Stratford’s little gem of a theatre.  The Arts and Craftsy wooden interior makes you feel like you’re in a cosy log cabin. Because it’s the intimacy that makes a real difference from a dramatic point of view.  You can see the ejaculations of spit from wherever you sit. But for Tamburlaine and all that bloody saliva, we were just one row back from the front.

Tamburlaine is very bloody.  Marlowe was writing at a time, over 400 years ago, when the audience had a hearty appetite for bloodshed; if conquering was to be done properly, there had to be blood. Nowadays, it poses some problems; to keep portraying gruesome deaths relentlessly on stage without them becoming commonplace or hammy is tricky.  And in practical terms it makes a mess.  Gregory Doran and Catherine Mallyon, artistic and executive directors respectively, tackled the bloodshed with subtle innovation.  Characters were painted, carefully, with the fake blood solution.  This had the effect of implying strategy to the deaths and yet also creating a shocking tableau.  Loud percussion added effectively to the drama of the whole piece.  A crashing gong heralded much of the fighting onstage. When the virgins were murdered, it happened behind a screen that showed only the blood, splattered on said screen in a mafia-style assassination.  At the end of the first half, the killing reached peak bloodshed.  Zenocrate, Tamburlaine’s wife, wearing a white gown trails her costume in the blood on the floor and cradles the dying King of Arabia, getting herself further contaminated with the blood.  The blood on her white dress was disturbing.  As the lights went down and part one came to an end, the elderly lady next to me and I discussed the possibility that the actress (Rosy McEwen) might have to have a new white dress for each performance. Or perhaps the paint came out easily when it was washed.  Hmmmm…

“I don’t think they do it very often.  Tamburlaine,” said my elderly neighbour, “Probably because of the blood.”

She might have had a point but I think it’s more likely that the extensive cast causes added difficulties. Apart from Jude Owusu’s Tamburlaine and a couple of his henchmen, all the actors were playing at least two parts, often three.  In part two (where much of the blood had been scrubbed away) there is pretty much a whole new cast of characters so doubling up parts is the only way to avoid an enormous ensemble.  However, it does get a little confusing.

            “I thought he was dead,” Said my neighbour as Mark Hadfield returned to the stage in a new guise.  But the cast was up to the many parts required of them and to worry too much about the intricacies of the play misses the point.  Mark Hadfield was particularly good in his varying roles as he gave distinctive yet different portrayals in each. As the defeated Mycetes he was narcissistic and juvenile, a Trumpian fool who broke down in tantrums whenever his advisors tried to tell him the unpalatable truth.  And of course, he was so easily overthrown by the ambitious and ruthless Tamburlaine; a far more dangerous prospect to fill the void.

Jude Owusu, displaying incredible stamina as the role requires, was impressive in the lead, appearing as an unstoppable force of nature until the end when Tamburlaine realises the magnitude of his task is unachievable and dies with a solemn lament.  Indeed, to sum up Tamburlaine would go something like this: The pursuit of power becomes the power of pursuit and ultimately the crown, all those many conquered crowns, is hollow.  Tamburlaine’s dying wish is that the woman whom he conquered, his widow Zenocrates, be placed beside him in death. It’s a long play but the final scene, a climactic anti-climax in tone, is eerily touching. 

Hecuba, Swan Theatre, 19th September 2015

Hecuba by Marina Carr

Swan Theatre, 19^th September 2015

 

Hecuba had 18 children.  She wasn’t reduced by this; in fact her power as Queen of Troy was much enhanced by being the matriarch of a swelling dynasty.  I think about this as I wedge my belly into my high seat in the gallery.  It’s comfortable enough if I don’t move.  But unfortunately I have left my phone switched on in my handbag on the floor below my dangling feet.  I flip up my seat and climb onto the bars in front and wonder how to get down to my bag without putting my head in the lap of the lady next to me.  I manage to hook it up to me with my foot somehow but then, when I try and pull down my seat to sit on again, I do actually get wedged.  My mother shoves and pulls a bit and I am soon winched back up onto my seat.  Where I must remain for an hour and fifty minutes because there is to be no interval in this performance.  I think this is a modern parable about being pregnant.  I am a modern day Euripides!

The action begins.  Or rather, Hecuba, seated in her throne, the only piece of scenery on the stage throughout, begins to recount her version of events.  This is how the play is structured throughout.  Even though characters are on stage together, they are all recounting what happened as if separated by their own ‘stories’.  You might think the constant “he said”/”she said” would become annoying but in fact it gives a wonderful restraint to the play which could so quickly become an unfathomable blood bath.  Only in certain scenes do we seem to catch up with the drama and the recounting is replaced with direct drama, as when Polyxena is sacrificed.

The drama of this scene is almost overwhelming.  Carr’s script ensures that we understand the awfulness of Hecuba’s torture; she can endure but only just.  Over and over she asks how she can be living through such brutality and inhumanity.  Although death has existed from the moment the play opened, Polyxena is the first character to die on stage.  Agamemnon has to slit her throat twice and still she doesn’t die.  We are told she is finished off by a final stab into the heart.  It’s unbearable to watch.  Carr’s great challenge in re-working Euripides’ drama was to make a shocking and blood-thirsty play both shocking and blood-thirsty.  It is all too easy for audiences to switch off their emotions when assaulted with so much carnage and brutality, especially in an age where our contemporary dramas are comparatively so subtle.  Carr ensures that her play is relevant throughout.  Little Polydorus, played by the beguiling Luca Saraceni-Gunner, whose end is near tells Agamemnon that killing for the sake of killing is inhumane; even animals don’t do that.  And Hecuba herself states that this is not war, for war has rules; they are trying to wipe us out, this is genocide.  Contemporary echoes cannot be ignored.  By the end, everyone is mad and blind to the point of any of it.  The throne gets dragged round the stage, no one sure whose its rightful owner is.

The Greeks are played by black actors. This contrast of white women versus black men is tribal and effective.  As their king, Ray Fearon as Agamemnon, is incredibly powerful.  His

voice is rich and authoritative but Derbhle Crotty and her Irish venom is an ample match for him.  Their repartee is compelling and sexually charged.  In fact, I can’t tell you how good it is.  If Carr’s script gives words an extraordinary power then Erica Whyman, as director, has had unbelievable vision in bringing these actors together in the way she does.  Who would think that a subtle black humour could work in such a play?  And yet, with madness comes laughter.  The relief for the audience in those moments of humour was palpable; a light shone in the darkness.  When Agamemnon has been forced to sacrifice Polyxena in order to appease his men, who believe that a sacrifice will bring them the wind they need to sail home, he looks to the sky and notes in exasperation, “of course there is no fucking wind!” 

At the end of the play Polymestor stumbles on stage and tells Hecuba how a gang of Agamemnon’s men has gouged out his eyes and killed his two young sons.  Of course, in Euripides’ version, it is Hecuba herself who is responsible for these atrocities in revenge for Polymestor’s part in Polydorus’s murder.  Carr is quite right to give an alternative view.  Euripides wrote his drama some 700 years after the fall of Troy.  It seems certain that someone like Hecuba existed but the rest is myth.  I am happy to have been introduced to this particular Greek classic through a twentieth century lens.  Authenticity is not lost; arguably, it is gained.

Death of a Salesman, RST Stratford-upon-Avon, 11/04/15

Death of a Salesman

RST Stratford-upon-Avon, 11^th April 2015

 

It’s been a while.  Over eighteen months.  Not since going to the theatre but since having the brain cells to write about it.  Having a baby causes life to accelerate and leap, all at the same time as enduring nights that last forever!  But anyway, I’m older and I know it.  This altered perception of time makes Arthur Miller’s play even more poignant; for what is the point of art if we cannot say, “I know this, it is me”?

 

Gregory Doran calls Death of a Salesman ‘the greatest American play of the 20^th century’ and it is.  The themes are so universal that it is up there with Shakespeare for enduring appeal.  After all, the American Dream is now everybody’s dream, to some extent.  And so it is hard to get it too wrong.  The play is immaculate.  You can close your eyes and listen and the words just lodge themselves inside the skull and reverberate.

 

Still, better say something about the RSC’s current production or there’s not much point in this:  It’s excellent!  The scenery was clever and well up to the job of this play’s challenging layering of past and present.  A canvas of large tenement blocks created an oppressive back-drop to the Lomans’ house which was effective.  Equally, lighting was used to good effect in the scenes set in the past; the golden haze seeming to imply a ‘rose-tint’.

 

However, casting was where real genius was evident.  The smaller parts were as well cast as the main parts, with Sarah Parks as The Woman being particularly notable.  As Willy’s often drunk, stocking-greedy mistress she very nearly stole the show.  Alex Hassell as Biff embodies perfectly the golden boy of high school sporting achievement as well as being able to convince as a washed-up has-been, drifting from one labouring job to the next.  In the interval, I overheard one woman dub Hassell, “a fine specimen”.  Yes, quite.  And Sam Marks as Happy was equally fitting, being physically smaller than Biff but with all the energy that his older brother has lost.  Harriet Walter as Linda conveyed all the tenderness that the part requires.  Indeed, it was her words that had the most impact.  When she demanded of her sons that ‘attention must be paid’ to her husband, the pain of the situation was hard to bear. 

 

It is a painful play.  At the centre of the pain is, of course, Willy Loman; in this performance played by Antony Sher.  I don’t want to criticise the great man, but…. Firstly, his accent was odd.  In the opening scene this did jar.  His ‘Brooklyn’ was laboured and slurred all at the same time.  This had the effect of making him seem a little mad, which of course he is.  Or rather, he is slowly going mad.  And this was slightly the point as well; because Sher begins with quite an exaggerated performance he does not really have anywhere to go as the play moves towards its inevitable anti-climax.  For this reason, I found the first half much more compelling than the second.  However, I should add that my husband, who has somehow managed to get to thirty-six without encountering the play, thought the second half was more gripping so perhaps I’m being unfair.  Sher certainly does justice to the changeability in Willy.  He was at once ridiculous and pitiable whilst also managing a very real aggression that seemed to make him grow in stature.  And you stop noticing the funny accent after the first scene!

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.