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. 

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.

Mike Newell's 'Great Expectations'

Great Expectations

1^st December 2012

Husband likes to do things in the correct order:  read the book, see the film.  And now that you can download a lot of the classics onto your Kindle for free I foresee a number of visits to the cinema to see period adaptations. 

So, off to our little, local, art house cinema.  Sounds cute, I know.  And it could be if they could just stop getting everything wrong.  Every time I go, some sort of slap-stick calamity hinders our enjoyment of the entertainment on offer.  Yesterday, we arrived to discover that we were half an hour early because the time that the website stated was inaccurate.  I paid £15.60 for two tickets, YES, £15.60 for two tickets!! And made my way to the bar to kill time that could have been spent on something other than parting with £6 for a small glass of Sauvignon*, YES, £6.00 on a small glass of wine!!  The bar was so cold that I could see my breath.  I put my complaints to the girl behind the bar; said, “Gosh, isn’t it cold in here?” and “Gosh, what expensive wine,” and felt like the oldest, most curmudgeonly cinema-goer in the world.  She said sorry in a vague way, said that people kept going outside and letting the warmth out.  Nobody went out whilst I was there and there seemed to be no source of heat present.  An elderly customer sat by the bar in sheepskin coat and red beret.  We smiled at each other, as if united in a tremendous effort to enjoy ourselves.

Still, with the gift of time came the chance to reflect on what we were about to see.  Why always Great Expectations, I asked myself.  Why not A Tale of Two Cities or Dombey, for a change?  Well, I think Mike Newell answers this question well in his adaptation of the book.  We can overlook the numerous details of the hard-to-believe plot; we can overlook the obsequiousness and downright blandness of Pip because what this tale has, or rather, what it is, is a string of utterly striking and compelling images, more so than any of Dickens’ other works.  Newell knows this and has not tried to mess with the origins of the book’s power.  The opening scene is everything that it should be, the marshes stretching out to a misty nothingness, a lone child clearing moss from his parents’ headstone.  It is perfect, I thought.

Indeed, what Newell’s film does in its honesty to Dickens’ novel is it brings us a greater understanding of Pip.  If Newell’s film is original in any way, and I fear it may be criticised for not being, it is in this power to make us understand and not just pity the character of Pip.  When the young Pip, played by Toby Irvine, gives food and file to Magwitch, we see here that it is not just out of fear that he does so but out of a sense of moral rightness.  This raises the character of Pip in our estimation as he is not simply a receptacle for the whims of others.  As Pip and Joe travel across the marshes, joining in the soldiers’ search for the convict, Pip whispers to Joe, “I hope we don’t find him,” with which Joe agrees.   Joe Gargery, played here by Jason Flemyng, is the book’s moral compass but in seeing the two characters together like this, united, not just as victims of Mrs Gargery but as good souls in a cruel world we do not give up on Pip later in the film as can happen for readers of the book.  Here, we believe that he has not strayed too far from his roots.  The older Pip, played by Jeremy Irvine, convinces far more as a blacksmith than as a would-be gentleman and for this we like him much more.

Satis House was beautifully Gothic and the vines growing around it gave a wonderful intimation of fairytale to the scenes outside.  Husband and I disagreed on Helena Bonham Carter as Miss Haversham.  He thought that she was too wholesome to play such a twisted shrew but I thought that our National, Gothic treasure was just ripe for the part.  She hints just enough at menopausal madness to fully embody the despair of Miss Haversham.  However, the film’s greatest travesty comes in the burning of said character.  Who does not see it in their mind’s eye?  The white dress going up in flames, the darkened rooms suddenly illuminated;  these are such dramatic images that it struck me as gratuitous that we should then be exposed to her charred, dying flesh as she squeals her way towards her fate.  This was not necessary, Mr Newell but thankfully your only slip.

Casting was inspired without missing the mark.  Robbie Coltrane as Jaggers was a surprise but a successful one.  I suppose I think of Jaggers as being physically spiky and not so rotund but such is the Scottish actor’s talent that he embodied the part perfectly; his meanness of spirit and rigid self-control were portrayed convincingly.  Olly Alexander was superlative as Herbert Pocket; played as if the character had jumped straight off the pages of our imagination and onto the screen.  David Walliams as Pumblechook was suitably revolting.  My only criticism of casting was that Ben Lloyd-Hughes as Bentley Drummle was far too attractive; if I was Estella I wouldn’t have put up much of a fight.

The pace of the film was mercifully swift.  Before we have time to be bored of Pip’s exploits in London, Ralph Fiennes’s Magwitch appears again to call proceedings to their inevitable denouement.  Fiennes does not play a pathetic culprit as is often the case in adaptations but brings a quiet elegance to the part.  We see his devotion to Pip as a supreme act of selflessness which has the effect of finally enabling Pip to grow into the decent man that he promises at the beginning of the tale.  When he dies in prison with Pip at his side I felt genuinely moved.

To conclude I would say that this adaptation was visually superb and that the casting was effective.  I hope now never to see another adaptation of Great Expectations.  Let this be enough.  Oh, and one last thing:  Wemmick’s drawbridge.  I loved this; perhaps the greatest achievement of the film!

*I do not live in London