THE SHOEMAKERS' HOLIDAY

THE SHOEMAKERS' HOLIDAY

Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre

06.03.15

While Shakespeare's company was staging Much Ado About Nothing at their new Globe, their rivals, the Admiral's Men, were packing the Rose across the way with this “city comedy”.

Very different entertainments. Dekker gives Londoners a play set in their own streets, with local references and characters. It's 'Allo 'Allo humour, with catch-phrases, funny foreigners and fart jokes.

The setting is a cavernous Romanesque church, with buttresses, beams, angels and demons, a rose window and chandeliers. Bells ring out around the Swan auditorium.

Phillip Breen's lively, lusty production promises “naught but mirth”, advertised in the prologue, deliciously done by the strolling players, fronted by their boy. But there are deeper, darker moments, notably when the French wars are foreshadowed at the close, and the company freezes as the lights fade.

An excellent company, led by David Troughton's Falstaffian Eyre, with Vivien Parry as his spouse. Their finest moment when they appear as two Holbeins, Henry and Elizabeth [and does her bum look big in that] after their elevation to Lord Mayor. Josh O'Connor is Rowland, who spends most of the play pretending, hilariously, to be Dutch. Daniel Boyd is the journeyman Ralph, conscripted for those same wars. And Jack Holden makes the most of the King, done here as a playful, boyishly affable chap.

Possibly Henry V, who may well have been playing the other face of the same wars over the road in the Wooden O ...

OPPENHEIMER

OPPENHEIMER

Royal Shakespeare Company at the Swan Theatre

07.03.15

“I have it within me to murder every last soul on the planet — should I not be scared?”

J Robert Oppenheimer, the genius behind the bomb that annihilated cities and hastened the end of World War II.

Tom Morton-Smith's ambitious piece brings to the stage this complex character – his politics, his physics, his acadmeic career and his private life. A little too much, perhaps. But it's a compelling evening, with a huge cast peopling Oppenheimer's worlds in Angus Jackson's energetic, eloquent staging.

The ensemble is impeccable – young socialists raising funds for the war in Spain, the scientists scribbling equations on the chalk-board floor, the military watching the tests.

John Heffernan is a revelation as Oppenheimer, with his pipe and his shades, his epiphanies and his eureka moments. He treats us as his students, lecturing us sternly but sympathetically. [There's no dumbing down here, incidentally, Stoppard please note. The German is not translated.] He is a private man, enthusiastic and driven, only occasionally passionate in any extrovert way. Thomasin Rand is excellent as his wife, Kitty, damaged, frustrated and a failure as a parent. And the Serbers, friends and colleagues, are credibly characterised by Jamie Wilkes and Sandy Foster. General Groves, a military man through and through, the polar opposite of the laid-back boffins, is brilliantly done by William Gaminara.

The dramatic conflict between the army and the academics is effective, but like other themes and tropes, tends to be overdone. Much of the play seems familiar, too, perhaps deliberately so. The parable of the chess-game grains of rice, the blind men and the elephant.

The staging is simple – we have to imagine the ranch and almost everything else. The bombs, though, do make an appearance – a boy emerges from one to relate the horrific aftermath.

Projection is cleverly used [as with Curious Incident we were glad to be in the gods], and there's some great live music, including an interval entertainment featuring, for Kitty, that old Louis Jourdain number What's The Use Of Getting Sober [When You're Gonna Get Drunk Again].

The piece is not without its flaws. But the subject matter is so important, and this production so intelligent, that it should be on everyone's must-see list when it transfers to the Vaudeville for an eight-week run.

WOLF HALL / BRING UP THE BODIES

WOLF HALL / BRING UP THE BODIES

RSC at the Swan Theatre, Stratford

26.03.2014

This stunningly successful stage version of the Hilary Mantel novels has just played its last performances in the intimate Swan.

I'm glad I finally got to see it there – the modest thrust stage and the wrap-around seating seem ideally suited to the subject and the swift-paced dramatisation. But it's excellent news that it will be taking up residency at the Aldwych, including the original Cromwell and the original King, amongst others.

Devotees of Shakespeare's Globe will find much that is familiar, and not just familiar faces like John Ramm [Thomas More, Henry Norris] and Joshua James, an excellent Rafe Sadler. The first play starts with a sort of jig, with all those Tudor faces crowding the stage. And director Jeremy Herrin is no stranger to Bankside – Much Ado and The Tempest among his recent successes.

His Wolf Hall turns out quite witty and light-hearted, all things considered. Paul Jesson's superbly worldly Wolsey has an inexhaustible store of bons mots - “do they have lemons in Yorkshire ?”, and there's lightness of touch in the Cromwell household too. Tragedy is never far away, though, and the death of Lizzie, Cromwell's wife, is done with a masterly simplicity.

The wily fixer, the skilled arranger, later Master Secretary, is compelling played by Ben Miles. As in the book, though probably not in life, he is often likeable, his common roots making him a sympathetic character.

His King, a man with passions, fears and dreams as other men have, is commandingly played by Nathaniel Parker, with a hint of that heroic actorly voice that idols like Richard Todd used to have.

Two other memorable performances – Pierro Niel Mee's irrepressible servant Christophe, and Nicholas Day's outspoken Norfolk. But all the characters are given recognizable personalities; there are many delights, and much doubling, further down the cast list.

The staging is commendably simple – a row of flames to suggest a winter interior – but often spectacularly effective – the barge carrying the fallen Cardinal along the Thames, echoed in the second play by another barge carrying Anne Boleyn [a lively, feisty Lydia Leonard] … Two key characters are tellingly glimpsed throughout – Joey Batey's Mark Smeaton with his lute and Jane Seymour, played at the end of the run by Madeleine Hyland.

There's a dark, ominous ending to Wolf Hall, a mood which characterizes much of Bring Up The Bodies, which begins with the Hunt, and young men blooded. The king's jousting accident is strongly, very swiftly, depicted, and there are significant contributions from the afterlife. The fateful testimonies against Anne are played out in front of the witnesses; Anne's end has a heart-rendingly tender flashback at its heart.

Mike Poulton, who took on the seemingly impossible task of bringing these massive novels to the stage, says that it was like dismantling a Rolls-Royce and reassembling the parts to make a light aircraft. It is certainly fast-paced, and carries the audience along with it, whether they have read the novels or not.

It would be good to think that these two masterpieces might one day return to the Swan – maybe as a trilogy with The Mirror And The Light ...