A
new play by Caryl Churchill. Brief, even for a one-act offering.
Tripartite. First, the “funeral party for a man with an adventurous
past” - drinking champagne in
hospital
is mentioned.
Mourners
stand around awkwardly, wine-glass in hand, making small talk
interspersed with intimations of their own mortality – or pithy
autopsies – and recollections of the departed. Rarely is a sentence
finished, but instead of a naturalistic blending or overlapping, each
speaker seems to apply the brakes – a disconcerting effect.
Then
a masterly monologue by the dead man – a disembodied torso in the
darkness – a confusion of ideas about the [possibly overpopulated]
afterlife: Chiron, Valhalla, Purgatory. A powerful performance from
Patrick Godfrey.
Then
an extended image – Godfrey again, with a patient Hazel Holder –
perhaps of end-of-life futility, or perhaps eternal damnation,
echoing Marlowe's Faustus - “Why this
is hell, nor
am I out of it.”
Too
much of an eternity for some, exiting early through the Lyttleton
doors before the final fade to black.
Dominic
Cooke's uncomplicated direction lets Churchill speak, though
I'm not sure what she's getting at in this black triptych.
“I'm angry . . .just angry at the waste of a good man. Look at the work undone . .. think of it! Who is to do it! Oh . . the waste . . . !”
Thus Walter Kent [Hubert Burton], secretary to Henry Trebell, as the curtain falls on Harvey Granville Barker's Waste, famously banned by the Edwardians. Roger Michell's revival at the National is respectful and admirably acted. But the scandal and the political intrigue feel, if not irrelevant, then a little remote, the pre-occupations of another age. Charles Edwards gives a cool, composed Trebell. He is a career politician “in love” with his parliamentary bill, seeking, a little like Wolsey, to use church property for educational ends. Olivia Williams is excellent as Amy O'Connell, with whom he flirts under a massive moon, the only glimpse of the natural world the production affords. Their ill-fated liaison drives the personal and political tragedy. Much of the “action” however, consists of gentlemen talking, notably at the start of Act Two, gathered at a round table, the only relief a kind of musical chairs. Closest to the style Barker would recognise are Michael Elwyn as the pragmatic Prime Minister Horsham and Gerrard McArthur, sporting magnificent spats, as the Catholic grandee Cantilupe. Sylvestra Le Touzel, as Henry's sister Frances, and Lucy Robinson [pictured] as Julia Farrant, give some much needed depth of feeling to the piece. Hildegard Bechtler's sparsely furnished set, off white walls, high gloss flooring and wooden chairs and tables, uses massive screens both horizontal and vertical as scene tabs, making the epic piece as satisfying visually as it is intellectually or emotionally.
Here
we are, on St George's day, between the Magna Carta celebrations and
the General Election. What better time to revisit Caryl Churchill's
1976 piece about the political aftermath of the Civil War. Poor
relief, an economy on the rocks, corruption and hypocrisy in
government.
This
is the
England of
Levellers and Ranters, where,
600 years on, the ruling classes are still thought of as a foreign
foe. Where all women are considered damned. Where religion, despite
everything, still holds almost everyone in its thrall.
The
stunning first image [Es Devlin's sumptuous design, glowingly lit by
Bruno Poet] is a vast banqueting hall. The table – the size of a
tennis court, it seems – groans under the weight of rich food. The
nobles are sitting
around
it, enjoying the feast. The cloth is also the stage; the soldiers,
the revolutionaries, the dispossessed, move around amongst the huge
platters. It's a wonderful conceit, cleverly followed through, as the
cloth is removed, then the boards torn up by the Diggers to reveal
the earth of England beneath.
Churchill's
play is a series of scenes, some brief, some, like the verbatim
Putney debates, a little long - “we have been a great while upon
this matter ...”. But these confrontations, between Cromwell with
his right hand man Ireton and the soldiers and radicals, saw the
forging of our parliamentary system. Orwell would have appreciated
the back-tracking and the fudging. Not to mention Daniel Flynn's
parson, who, like the incumbent at Bray, is keen to keep his living
under the new order, as a parliament man becomes the new squire.
As
the debates move wearily to a close, the leadership decides to set up
a committee, and, suddenly, there they are in black and white, the
Puritans at the back of the stage. After the interval, it is their
turn to take their places around that broad table, scribbling away as
the Diggers rip up the floor.
It's
a huge cast, augmented by a community company, and it's wonderful to
see them throng the stage, singing their psalms and their songs of
freedom. And
many excellent performances – Leo Bill's dogged Ireton, Steffan
Rhodri as Sexby [and a truculent butcher refusing to sell meat to the
bloated rich], Ashley McGuire as a down-trodden, hopeless vagrant,
Trystan
Gravelle as Briggs, and
Joshua James stunningly convincing as the ranting preacher Cobbe.
In
Lyndsey Turner's production, design and costume details remind us
that the struggle we are witnessing is not confined to one time or
one place. Nowhere
more so than in a
second debate, where vagrants and outcasts noisily discuss the notion
of property and of God. A reminder, too, that this was originally,
and in the recent Arcola revival, a chamber piece, far removed from
Turner's sprawling epic theatre.
But
the Lyttleton stage does allow some superb visuals; after our
protagonists sketch their lives post-Restoration,
turn and leave,
the final scene sees one lone idealist on the empty, sodden field,
as the light shines out towards us, and a flock of birds, alarmed,
flies unseen over our heads.
The
nearest the National will get to a panto, I guess. A fairytale with
magic and music, beautifully staged by Marianne Elliott.
It
tells the story of two warring nations, separated by a wilderness. In
each, a motherless heir to the throne. Stage left, in Sealand, solemn
Prince Digby, stage right, in the kingdom of Lagobel, Althea, the
Princess of the title, She is doubly light, both frivolous and
weightless, afflicted both by levity and levitation, unable to weep
for her mother's death,
Theatrical
traditions are honoured. There is a lovely picturebook front cloth
map, boards for the floor, boxes-cum-balconies either side, The
prologue, shared between Althea's friend Piper and Digby's brother
Llewellyn, is sumptuously illustrated in ombres chinoises
back-projection.
Not
all the design is as impressive; the lake at the end of Act One,
where the lovers seem to drown in billows of white silk, is gorgeous.
The Act Two lake, with its garish lilies and fornicating frogs, seems
straight out of Disney.
There
is puppetry, now a traditional too – scary monsters and soaring
birds, including the beautiful Zephyrus, Digby's faithful hawk. Most
memorable is the floating [not flying, she insists] which contrasts
Althea's lightness with Digby's gravity. Rosalie Craig, supported by
a team of acrobats as well as wires, gives an amazing performance,
singing as she floats and gyrates above the stage.
Outstanding
amongst the rest is Clive Rowe's King Darius, singing superbly [a
fine duet with Amy Booth-Steel's Piper].
The
story is a fable, muddied a little by modern concerns – Althea is
both drugged and force-fed in an attempt to cure her lightness, and
her happy-ever-after includes a degree in Marine Biology. The show,
despite rewrites, is still far too long, especially for a young
audience.
But
the weakest element by far, sadly, must be the words and music of
Tori Amos. The score demands much of the actors – on a par with Les
Mis for its sub-operatic idiom and open-note crescendos. Alas, there
is not one memorable, or even enjoyable, tune. All the numbers end up
sounding much the same, and the words, when they are audible, are
banal to the point of bathos. “H2O” repeatedly used for water …
It's
heresy to say so, but having brought together some of the National's
finest creatives to stage the show, it's a shame they couldn't get
someone who understands the genre to pen the piece.
We
meet Charlie [Charles Edwards] first. Sitting in Professor Leeds'
stylish study, he delivers a long monologue, perfectly timed, about
his life as "slacker bachelor", touching on his "sex
life among the phantoms", with plenty of knowing glances out to
the stalls.
Every
character in O'Neill's unfashionably wordy and discursive domestic
tragedy [here ruthlessly pared down to 195 minutes] has an inner
voice, right down to the small boy who is named for one man, fathered
by another, and grows up to step into the shoes of a third.
And
good old Charlie makes up four – the men in Cara Nina's messy
emotional landscape.
Played
with searing honesty and frightening intensity by Anne-Marie Duff,
she ages over the three hours from the young woman who's haunted by
the ghost of her airman betrothed, to the weary widow, her father,
husband, lover, son all gone, who falls into the comforting arms of
the crusty, cynical novelist who's been around the whole time,
watching the action in this "strange interlude", neither
past nor future, which is our life.
The
writing is sometimes poetic, sometimes melodramatic. Simon Godwin's
near-faultless production tends to play those asides for laughs,
which I suspect is not always what the playwright intended.
In
Act One, the scenes are played out against a traditional tripartite
revolve: the study ["Greek" – and there are shades of
Sophocles in this tangled tragic piece], Sam's family home, the
seaside retreat. After the interval, Soutra Gilmour's evocative
design grows bolder with the century, with a brutal art deco
apartment, until the yacht becomes the jetty, with wide late
afternoon spaces for the final farewells and the endgame.
Patrick
Drury delights, all too briefly, as the Professor, Geraldine
Alexander is the desperate mother of Sam, Nina's callow second
choice, ironically the only sane man, but "an adolescent mind in
an adolescent country" in Charlie's acidic aside. Sam is
brilliantly done by Jason Watkins, morphing from awkward, gawky
youngster through frustrated failure to fulfilled father and
successful ad-amn, and finally, run to fat, "vulgar bore"
the proud dad cheering on his son's crew.
I
clearly remember the first night of Bennett's The Old Country in 1977
– the thrill of not knowing, slowly realising, where, and who,
these people were, as Alec Guinness held forth about the parlous
state of the Church of England.
35
years later, in an age of social media [referenced in this new play],
never such innocence again. Nonetheless, delights aplenty, and no
shortage of surprises, on this Press Night at the National.
Another
collaboration with the patient Hytner, with something of a company
feel, Frances de la Tour contributing another memorable central role.
If
you'd prefer to come to this fading country seat free of expectations
and preconceptions, maybe you should take this preamble as a spoiler
warning, and come back after you've enjoyed the show.
South
Yorkshire, and a fine rain falling. Three [two and a half] sisters in
a crumbling pile – the not very Chekhovian decay of the privileged
classes. "Decay is a kind of progress". Dorothy [de la
Tour] dressed in a jumble sale of woollens, green wellies, crouching
down to sleep before a two-bar electric fire in the vast hall of
their once stately home. Iris, her "companion", [Linda
Bassett] similarly dressed, knitting for the troops, a reliable
source of Northern wit and common sense. Joined later by sister June,
a brisk vicar, Archdeacon of Harrogate[Selina Cadell].
The
house needs saving. Will the National Trust [thoroughly mauled here,
together with its spiritual sister the Anglican Church] save the day
? Or the Golf Club ? The Management College ? The shadowy "Concern"
[already snapping up Anglesey and a major Cathedral] ? Or even
Dorothy's old flame Teddy [a wonderful turn from Peter Egan] and his
mucky films ? They too represent heritage of a kind, shooting on a
fourposter with proper film stock.
As
we have come to expect from Bennett, some self-referencing. "Her
Big Chance"[the unglamorous face of filming porn, "Filthy
is favourite!", with characters called Kevin and Colin] and the
musings on the state of England. Not least the Church of England [another cleric with wandering hands]. And, as in The Habit of Art, Frances
de la Tour has a brief envoi and turns off the lights as she leaves
before the final curtain.
"I
think she was in an Agatha Christie - I can see her in this 20s dress
…" So the cream of acting talent, then, with some superb
performances, the three leading ladies, plus Miles Jupp as the smooth
talking Bond Street barrow boy, and Nicholas Le Prevost as Lumsden
from the Trust.
"Metaphor
is fraud," we are sternly reminded. And this is not really a
state of the nation play. "P.S.T," - People Spoil things –
the crowd have found their way into the secret garden, as Bennett wrote
in the late 60s. Heritage consumers, with nothing off limits –
"that at least the Holocaust has taught us". At the end,
after a stunning transformation to the strains of Eric Coates, they
troop in, and out, Lady Dorothy just another curiosity. But at least
she has been reminded of her glamorous Schiaperelli past, and she is
still in the house she grew up in.
Some
classic farce – the "actress" and the bishop – and many
glorious ideas, the anthology of chambers, the Coal, rumbling
ominously beneath the house [a metaphor if ever I heard one], the
newspapers in the attic, Trenet, and those old sixties songs ["Downtown"].
And most touching, perhaps, the relics. Not the cat's bowl, nor King
Charles's shirt, nor even Coward's "pair of tights King Arthur's
knights have completely worn away", but something more precious,
given away on impulse to young Louise [Frances Ashman], who came with
the crew for "Reach for the Thigh", showed Dorothy
kindness, and returned with the tourists.
And
of course, a rich harvest of Bennett bons mots and aphorisms. "Loving
was never the problem; it was being loved that was hard to learn …"
Dorothy confides to Teddy. Suggesting a darkness in her past, and
typical of the moving melange of moods and styles that make this such
a rewarding piece of theatre.
What would Carlo Goldoni make of
Richard Bean's hugely successful and side-splittingly hilarious
re-working of his Servant of Two Masters ?
Well, he'd recognise the famous dinner
scene, superbly served up in Nicholas Hytner's stylish production.
And the flats giving a perspective view of the seaside – Brighton
standing in for La Serenissima. And the concept of a star player
stepping out of the plot to improvise like a stand-up, and interact
with audience members. Goldoni's original Harlequin one such – the
talented, and equally famous James Corden another, working to
brilliant effect as the permanently hungry and slightly slow-witted
Francis Henshall, who strives to serve both Jemima Rooper's lairy
Roscoe and the public school toff Stanley Stubbers [beautifully
caught by Oliver Chris].
The classy company included several
masters of the farce, not least the crowd-pleasing doddery waiter of
Tom Edden.
And I've not even mentioned the
marvellous music [Grant Olding], using skiffle and rock'n'roll
pastiche to bridge the scenes and transport us to the early sixties.
With some glorious speciality spots, including Corden on the
xylophone.
A sell-out in the Lyttleton, a West End
transfer already selling well, and cinema relays sold out all over
the UK – Goldoni, who died in poverty and in exile, would certainly
have approved of that.
