THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

THE CURIOUS INCIDENT OF THE DOG IN THE NIGHT-TIME

National Theatre at the Cottesloe

25.07.12

This review refers to an early preview. If you want to do what I did, and come to the piece with the book unread and the plot unspoiled, look away now. Get into the Cottesloe if you can, or see the show beamed via NT live to your local cinema.

They promised that if we were interested, we could stay behind to hear how he solved his A-level maths problem.

[In the book, it's an appendix.] But like many promises in the troubled life of Christopher Boone, it seems to have been broken. No train ran round level 2 in the Cottesloe, either.

How to turn Mark Haddon's unique book into a stage play ?

The chief obstacle is the narrator's voice: the book he writes – prominent, with its green cover, in this staging – is the medium for everything we learn about the two mysteries in his teenage life, and though there is direct speech, it is presumably as he remembered it.

Approaches might include narration, or a physical theatre approach, with minimal set and props, or a literal acting -out [reflecting Christopher's metaphor-free world view], or a high-tech spectacle, in deference to his love of computers. Or, if desperate, have the story acted out as a play at his special school, Marat/Sade-style.

Simon Stephens' adaptation, directed by Marianne Elliott, has elements of all these; the last, despite acting being a kind of lying, provides some nicely witty moments, including the head-teacher of the school having her verbatim say, and Christopher intervening to adjust details of accuracy and casting.

But, perhaps deliberately, it makes for a confusing experience. When he finds the letters hidden beneath the toolkit [after an amusingly literal search of dad's bedroom], they are real letters [they later flutter down from the roof]. But when he sits down to read them, they are mimed. The panic at Paddington is partly physical [movement by Frantic Assembly], partly soundtrack, as is the – very successful – sequence on the train. And then there's the question of empathy. We cannot help putting ourselves into the shoes of the chap who rescues Christopher [and Toby] in the tube, and misses his train. More importantly, Paul Ritter's Ed and Nicola Walker's Judy – both superb performances, the father hesitant and desperate in his frustration, the mother longing to love her literally unlovable boy – are known by us directly, which seems to go against the spirit of the original.

Niamh Cusack's Siobhan has much of the narration, and is a positive, stable voice in a very turbulent tale. Excellent support from the ensemble, who spend much of the time sitting around the edge of the acting area, Equus-style. Including of course Una Stubbs as the neighbour who blabs and longs to chat with Christopher.

The boy is played very convincingly by Luke Treadaway. Obsessive, gifted, confused, bruised and edgy, he manages to show us the hurtful, damaged adult world from his naïve viewpoint, and let us inside his very private universe, helped by some haunting images of space and mathematics.

The floor is used as a screen [glad we chose an upper level] – negative graph-paper, bits of which move up to be a desk, down to be the tube track. The model railway works [as a metaphor, for me] and Sandy is flesh-and-blood. There are blocks [numbered] for furniture, which re-inforces the feel of drama-school work, and the primes are scattered around the auditorium, with envelopes promising prizes. "293", next to us, was that promise kept, I wonder ?

GRIEF

GRIEF

Mike Leigh's new play at the Cottesloe

14.09.11

Set in the morose, monochrome world of 1950s suburban Britain, Mike Leigh's new piece looks behind the bay window and the lace curtains, and exposes a tragically dysfunctional trio.

Dorothy [poignantly played by Lesley Manville, a regular Leigh collaborator] lost her husband Victor in the war. Now she lives out a shadow of a life with her daughter Victoria, and her brother Edwin.

The play – two hours without an interval – is made up of many short scenes, linked by Gary Yershon's mournful music for lower strings. The same sort of effect as in many of Bennett's Talking Heads. Though this is a world of Bournvita and Disprin [we were constantly reminded of the period, not only by Alison Chitty's superb design, but by references to Algeria, Sputnik, Mr Wilson and the rest] many things have not changed, it seems. Manners are not what they were, traffic is a nightmare, trains are overcrowded. And teenagers – newly invented in those days – are surly and stroppy.

But it gradually becomes clear that the malaise at the heart of this household is more deep-seated than that. Edwin retires from a life-time of ingrossing, Victoria [a chilling performance from Ruby Bentall] becomes more and more withdrawn, and Dorothy, bright and brittle at the start, is greyer and more depressed with each scene.

The tristesse and ennui are palpable. Heightened by long silences, sotto voce duets from brother and sister, recalling childhood songs and a lost harmony, and thrown into relief by the

irruptions of jollity through the front door. David Horovitch's hearty, tedious GP, and two of Dorothy's friends from the days when they were all Hello Girls together: “Garrulous Gertie” - a tour-de-force from Marion Bailey [June Whitfield cum Celia Imrie] and do-gooder Muriel [Wendy Nottingham].

The end, when it comes, is not entirely a surprise. As in Greek tragedy, it happens off stage. The cumulative effect of the pitch-perfect performances and the family's gradual decline into depression is heart-wrenching.

One thing that has changed in these last fifty years is our ability to talk about our problems. You may think that emotional incontinence, counselling, constant sharing and caring, is excessive, but how much worse is the complete inability all these characters share to discuss anything but the trite and the trivial. And that failure is at the heart of the tragedy in Mike Leigh's gentle masterpiece.

this piece was written following the first preview of the play ...

rehearsal photograph of Ruby Bentall: John Haynes

PRINCE OF DENMARK

National Theatre in the Cottesloe

15.10.10

“Who knows what stories lie in store?”, someone muses. Horatio, possibly. Well, most of the audience, I'd guess, since this specially commissioned work is a prequel to Shakespeare's Hamlet, with all your favourite characters in the first flush of youth. Recognisably, if improbably, teenagers.

“a terrific first introduction to Shakespeare’s anti-hero” the blurb promises – the idea being to give today's teens a way in to the tragedy – but the more you know of Osric, say, the more you'll appreciate this clumsy wooer [amusingly done by Abubakar Salim, with an elegantly cool Eve Ponsonby as his Ophelia].

Michael Lesslie's piece is largely traditional, with Tudor-ish costumes [though these youngsters are Converse-shod] and a disconcerting mixture of Shakespeare-speak and a dull modern idiom. There's a willow and a brook, and troupe of travelling players, with a player Prince [Kaffe Keating-Jungreithmayer] the very spit of young Hamlet [Calum Finlay]…

The real Prince has a great speech about the state of England, but the best of the back stories has to be the radical leftie Laertes, scheming to rid the world of privilege and tyranny. A brilliantly intense performance from a very credible Chris Levens. Two fights [Alison de Burgh], the stylish classical battle more successful than the rather careful court swordplay. These impressive young actors, all from the National Youth Theatre, were directed by Anthony Banks.

I found little subtlety in this sixty minutes' traffic of the transverse stage - “The rest is always violence,” as modern warfare thunders around us on the soundtrack – but a clever extrapolation of some very familiar characters.

Photo (Abubakar Salim and Calum Finlay) © Ludo des Cognets

EARTHQUAKES IN LONDON

EARTHQUAKES IN LONDON

National Theatre at the Cottesloe

21.08.10

I escape the V Festival in Chelmsford by going clubbing in the Cottesloe. The National's poor relation has undergone a transformation, in Miriam Buether’s radical design, into a trendy bar, with stools and a standing area for the braver punters. There are videos all around the walls, and two strange widescreen letter box stages halfway up the end walls.

The occasion is Mike Bartlett's new piece – twice as long as his previous shows, and ambitious in its intellectual and emotional scope. More does not necessarily mean better, and I wonder how essential the production numbers are. But the playwright explicitly encourages the director, Rupert [Enron] Goold - this is a co-production with Headlong – to throw everything at the piece. So we have a burlesque strip show, sinister mums with Silver Cross prams, clubbers and lowlife crowding the S-shaped catwalk which snakes the length of the auditorium.

This is theatre for people who like their eclectic playlist on shuffle. Me, I prefer standard sonata form, but I could not help being swept along by the excesses of the production, and of course by the narrative as it unfolded.

Three sisters are disowned by their climate scientist father, who thinks it would have been better had they never been born. Watching their lives unravel, you had to sympathise with his view. The youngest, excellently if uncomfortably played by Jessica Raine, is a wild child, permanently, confrontationally unhappy – memorably, she seduces her own brother-in-law, an impressive Tom Goodman-Hill. Freya [Anna Madely] is pregnant, but desperately unsure whether she can bring a child into this doomed world. The elder sister [a strong, cold Lia Williams] is a Lib Dem minister in the coalition government. Her portfolio is the environment, and like her father she is tempted by the corporate dollar.

The whole seventeen-strong company is excellent – Maggie Service has some lovely cameos as a dismissed employee, a saleswoman in an unrecognisable Liberty, and, touchingly, a war widow nostalgic for a vanished world. Bill Paterson is the curmudgeonly paterfamilias, preaching Armaggedon as he watches the wildlife and waits for Gaia to redress the global balance.

The “Matter of Life and Death” finale sits strangely with the visceral energy of the rest, but there's no doubting the power of the piece, and its timely message.