theatre
Othello, Union Theatre. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Othello
Venue and town: Union Theatre, Southwark
Writer: Shakespeare
Director: Phil Wilmott
Cast includes: Matthew Wade, Carlotta De Gregori, Rikki Lawton, Jerome Dowling, Claire Lloyd, Maximilian Marston, Megan Grech, Jeremy Todd, Kit Carson
Dates of run: Until April 6
Running time: two hours, 45 minutes, including interval
Almost exactly 100 years ago on April 13, in Amritsar, the British Indian Army fired into a crowd of unarmed Punjabis, killing and harming hundreds.
Director Phil Wilmott marks this appalling example of man’s inhumanity to man by transporting Othello from Venice and Cyprus to the India of the British Raj, making the Moor a Sandhurst-trained officer and his lieutenant Cassio a fallible army chaplain prone to women and drink.
In so doing, he creates a realm where the word “honest” that resonates tauntingly throughout the play has only the depth of British hypocrisy.
It’s also a heady atmosphere in which we can well believe manipulated men lose all sense of judgment as unfamiliar forces reign and it’s appropriate that the Union flags draped around a piano look flimsy, while the renditions of Jerusalem and Rule Britannia are sadly out of tune.
So far, so good and for the first half, we charge through the action building to by far the strongest scene in which Iago (Rikki Lawton) transforms Matthew Wade from an upright Othello, the confident general blissfully in love with his wife into a physical wreck as wretchedly jealous as Iago himself.
Lawton’s Iago, short but muscular beside the tall, lean Othello, shares with us the exhilarating, nerve-racking challenge of executing his malicious plot. It’s expertly paced as every time Othello’s love nearly saves him, Iago’s hateful determination prevails.
But once Othello is caught, the momentum dwindles into a second half that drags and the character interpretation, however well-acted, doesn’t convince. Rather than making the play topical and relevant, politically incorrect assumptions leap to the fore. The Raj setting confuses our response to Shakespeare’s most emotionally direct play and a tale that confirms the prejudice against mixed marriages makes uncomfortable viewing for a contemporary audience.
Casting Cassio (Jerome Dowling) as a chaplain with a mistress who treats his Bianca (Megan Grech) with mocking contempt strips him of the nobility Othello had seen in him. Bianca is a dispensable strumpet or whore – a word Desdemona cannot bear to pronounce.
Desdemona (Carlotta De Gregori) combines modern physical strength with girlish wiles. With a power built up over 14 years of dance training and work as an “advanced combatant”, collaborating with fight directors, De Gregori’s fascinating Desdemona puts up a mighty struggle with Othello.
But she doesn’t win it. The victor is Lawton’s Iago, maddening, even triumphant, when cornered, in his refusal to say a word as an evil we cannot get the better of.
Barbara Lewis © 2019.
The Merry Widow, ENO. Review by Julia Pascal.
The Merry Widow
English National Opera
Franz Lehar
Viktor Léon and Leo Stein in a new translation
English lyrics by Richard Thomas
English book by April de Angelis
Julia Pascal
This was the first time I had seen this operetta and the idea of Viennese kitsch did not excite me. Director Max Webster clearly shares my antipathy for schlock. His production is a wonderful reframing of the story from a post #MeToo perspective.
The operetta is certainly ready to be reimagined. Hanna Glawari, a rich widow is the prize desired by all males in an imaginary Balkan country. There is a simple running gag that shows all the men, of all ages, chasing the merry widow for her pecuniary value. The government decides that she must marry a citizen to help the country’s economy. Innocent enough, or is it?
In the programme notes, writer Fiona Maddocks tells us that ‘Hitler adored The Merry Widow even though Lehar’s wife and most of his librettists were Jewish’. It is easy to see why this was a Nazi hit. The politics can be masked under the beauty of the compelling Lehar waltzes and the general silliness of the situation. Elements of French farce are seeded by the 1861 original comedy The Embassy Attaché written by Henri Meilhac. However, Lehar’s operetta was written in 1905 when revolution was in the air at the dawn of the twentieth century. And Webster’s production suggests a post-Freudian and post MeToo version which delicately keeps the spirit of 1905 while also plunging us, at moments, in to Brexit-crazed Britain. The brilliance of the production is the way Webster embraces the absurdism of Chaplinesque slapstick but layers it with political comment. He is well served by Richard Thomas’ satirical lyrics of and April de Angelis’ sharp book.
I enjoyed the line- up of men declaring their inability to understand women as they urinated together in an open-door vespasienne. I enjoyed the line- up of high-kicking dancers in Maxim’s declaring how their elderly clients were dosing them with the clap. Bravo for reducing the forced, commercialized eroticism of French burlesque to the reality of French gonorrhea.
Sarah Tynan was a witty widow and Nathan Gunn as Danilo, her former lover, was solid and compelling. Kristiina Poska brought a huge energy and sensitivity to the orchestra. I liked that Esther Bialas costumed The Widow as a 1930s movie star while dressing the rest of the cast in turn of the century costume. This aesthetic elegantly connected to the suggestion of consecutive time frames.
Max Webster’s Merry Widow is a hugely enjoyable version of Lehar’s loved classic and, happily, is a long way from apple strudel and whipped cream.
Julia Pascal © 2019.
Medea, The Barbican. Review by Julia Pascal.
Medea
International Theater Amsterdam
Barbican
Ends 9 March
Preview Blueprint Medea at the Finborough Theatre, May 21-June 9.
Julia Pascal
Medea is perhaps the most potent myth for the #MeToo generations. First-performed in 431 BC, Euripides’ drama has had countless interpreters. The action is horrifyingly compelling. Medea, the foreign princess and sorceress from Colchis –which is present day Georgia and Turkey- enters the Greek world to help Jason find the Golden Fleece. She falls in love with him. They have two sons. However, Jason is ordered to marry King Creon’s daughter Glauke. He abandon Medea. Medea sends a wedding dress as a gift to her rival. The robe is poisoned. Glauke dies. Medea’s further revenge is to kill her sons and, it is this act, which has horrified audiences from antiquity to today. The children are innocent, why should they pay for their father’s sins? This myth has no redemption or happy end. Medea is unpunished by Euripides and her outrage at her ill-treatment is her expression of her pride and honour. Here ‘honour killing’ is not an expression of patriarchy but one of self-respect and pride. We do not know if it can ever be defended but we see its roots in the injustice of male-domination.
Simon Stone, as writer-director, changes the names of the characters: his version is also inspired by the case of Deborah Green who has served 22 years in a US prison for the attempted poisoning of her husband and her three children. Stone loses the concept of Medea as a foreigner within the narrative but that does not matter in his wonderful production. Medea is now Anna. Jason becomes Lucas. Glauke is renamed Clara.
Stone stages his interpretation on a white stage with almost no props. Screen techniques are integrated in to the dramatic action, for example when Anna’s sons film their parents in bed and show the video to their father’s lover, the result is comic. Stone makes us laugh before transfixing us with the horror of murder to come. But the importance of this adaptation, and the play itself to the #MeToo zeitgeist, is to reveal the abuse of a hugely intelligent woman by the ruling patriarchy. Classical Greek drama is so now.
Stone’s production is set in modern day Amsterdam. The creative team is strong and the directorial overview offers a pleasing aesthetic synthesis. Medea premiered in 2014 in Amsterdam and comes with financial support from Holland and Fonds 21. Marieke Heebink won the Theo d’Or prize for her portrayal of the main role. The myth is so strong that it regrows with each telling and with each cultural transplantation. This is subsidised state theatre at its radical best.
Blueprint Medea, my own adaptation of the myth, opens at the Finborough Theatre May 21-June 9. I have transposed the original setting to London today. Fascinated by the idea of Medea as an outsider, after all Colchis is also part of modern Turkey, the original story of woman-in- political-exile, is partly based on interviews with former Kurdish soldiers from Turkey and Iraq. My 2019 Medea is a Kurdish warrior from Turkey who comes to London on a false passport. She has fought the Islamists and arrives with a history of war. In London, her Jason is the son of an Iraqi taxi driver. They are both Muslim but their cultures are utterly different and the battleground of love, sex and patriarchy is played out against the Middle Eastern conflicts in Syria, Iraq and Turkey.
https://www.finboroughtheatre.co.uk/productions/2019/blueprint-medea.php?spektrix_bounce=true
Julia Pascal © 2019.
Only Fools and Horses, the musical. Review by Barbara Lewis.
Only Fools and Horses, the musical
Venue and town: Haymarket, London
Writers: Paul Whitehouse and Jim Sullivan
Director: Caroline Jay Ranger
Music: John Sullivan and Chas Hodges
Cast: Peter Baker, Chris Bennett, Tom Bennett, John Bradley, Lisa Bridge, Andrew Bryant, Oscar Conlon-Morrey, Pippa Duffy, Pete Gallagher, Lee Van Geleen, Ryan Hutton, Adrian Irvine, Chris Kiely, Samantha Lane, Andy Mace, Melanie Marshall, Jeff Nicholson, Dianne Pilkington, Samantha Seager, Adam Venus, Paul Whitehouse
Running time: 2 hours and 30 minutes, including interval
Dates of run: booking until August 31.
Five hundred years ago, Peckham was green and pleasant. By the 1980s and 1990s, when two of its most famous fictional characters Del Boy and Rodney Trotter were plying their dodgy wares, even the pigeons wanted to be elsewhere, or so Rodney tells us.
Now you need to be one of the millionaires the Trotters dreamed of becoming to afford Peckham’s property prices, raising the question: where have all the cockneys gone?
As the London bubble becomes ever more exclusive, it’s a question that resonates in our BREXIT-troubled times, making this the moment to deliver what co-writer Jim Sullivan, son of the late John Sullivan, the creator of Only Fools and Horses, describes as an act of homage.
As a tribute, it recognises its limitations. The wafer-thin plot and light musical texture do not aspire to match the content of the 64-episode run of Only Fools and Horses.
But, like the original, which at one point in 1996 captured a record-breaking audience of more than 24 million viewers, it responds to an enduring appetite deep in some sections of the British public for characters who are loveable failures that they like to believe can succeed: if they had their chance on the London stage, they would make the grade.
For the space of an evening of West End nostalgic fun, we’re back in a contained community, where family counts for everything and bending the rules to get by never leads to anything more serious than a few broken bones.
The one-liners are the work of highly professional comic writing, delivered with great naturalness by Del Boy, who is played with swagger, warmth and hints of pathos by Tom Bennett, and by Ryan Hutton as the put-upon Rodney.
For the most part, the jokes are more mainstream than edgy and daring, but they’re not devoid of depth.
I particularly enjoyed the bickering between Grandad (charmingly performed by co-writer Paul Whitehouse) and Rodney and Del Boy. They are all expert at doing each other’s heads in and they trade blame and emotional blackmail: Rodney is fed up of being the downtrodden slave, Grandad is sick of being ignored, and Del Boy could have been “something” if only he’d put his little brother into care instead of bringing him up. In their affectionately-insulting ways, they are devoted to each other.
As grandad ponders his limited remaining time, the brothers battle with their “sort-of” feelings and the quest for romantic satisfaction with the eligible Cassandra (Pippa Duffy) and the kindly Raquel (Dianne Pilkington).
By way of subplot, Marlene (Samantha Seager) and her pompous freemason man Boycie (Jeff Nicholson) are struggling to conceive. It may not be quite ground-breaking, but we’re still only in the infancy, so to speak, of tackling infertility as subject matter for a musical.
The sperm-shaped fireworks that light up the sky above Liz Ascroft’s believable set are a fine visual joke and the seedless “jaffa” verbal joke verges on the genuinely offensive, only forgiveable in the everyone-is-family community of Only Fools and Horses Peckham.
The punters at the Haymarket roared for more. John Sullivan, whose own story was a rags-to-riches rise from poor, working class roots, via the back stage of the BBC to a man who entertained millions and continues to do so, would surely be content.
Barbara Lewis © 2019.
‘The American Clock: A Vaudeville’ by Arthur Miller. Review by Gary Beahan.
‘The American Clock: A Vaudeville’
by Arthur Miller.
Directed by Rachel Chavkin.
The Old Vic 4th February – 30th March
Of all the Miller revivals currently doing the capital’s round, ‘The American Clock’ is not the softest option for any director, actor or audience to take on. Part social documentary, part human drama, part political commentary, it can feel at times like it has bitten off more vision and message than it can theatrically deliver. Nothing daunted, Rachel Chavkin has decided to take the lumbering bull by its socialist horns and, with a nod in the direction of Peter Wood and his acclaimed 1986 NT production, opted for the energetic, jazzed-up ‘vaudeville’ version of the play, here complete with revolving stage, sharply choreographed song and dance numbers and an onstage band. A series of interlinked tableaux presenting a variety of characters reeling from the effects of the ’29 Crash and The Great Depression is punctuated by musical interludes featuring songs of the period, often juxtaposed with modern, bassy beats.
On the whole, it works; at times brilliantly (Golda Rosheuval’s bluesy vocals and Ewan Wardrop’s tap-dancing corporate executive spring to mind) confirming suspicions that the script plays better than it reads. Miller’s human panorama and heartfelt message – at its core, the inhumanity of the Capitalist System and its innate potential to destroy itself and those who play by its compassionless rules – are never allowed to congeal into heavyweight stodge nor deviate satirically into Busby Berkeley Does the Wall Street Crash. The music and movement are high quality and bear more than a passing relevance to the themes (which are powerful and plentiful) and the narrative (which is thin and patchy; not really the point of this piece) while the upbeat, kinaesthetic format lends an accessibility and coherence to the material which it would otherwise lack.
Further binding factors are the magisterial Grand Narrator presence of Arthur Robertson (a gravelly-voiced Morgan Freeman-like Clarke Peters) who opens and closes the show and introduces and comments on many of the scenes; the Baum family, our focus characters, who descend from comfortable, servant-supported middle-class affluence to cramped, mortgage debt collector-fearing penury (rather like Miller himself); most importantly, how the spectre of an unexpected fall from financial grace will pay no heed to class, family or wealth, and can affect everybody from a Wall Street mega-broker to a plain honest Midwest farmer. Only Mr Robertson escapes: prescient enough to see The Crash coming, he cashes in his investments before things turn bad and makes more money during the Hungry 30s than he has ever done before. Huh. There’s always one.
Strangely enough, given that much of the play’s content is based on Miller’s memories of his New York adolescence and the moving personal accounts of The Great Depression recorded in Studs Terkel’s ‘Hard Times’, it is the human side of the story which does not quite gel and convince. Miller has always had the ability to sum up an entire attitude, generation or sector of society in a line or two of dialogue which avoids either the vacuity of aphorism or the narrowness of mundanity. Yet here, characters vacillate uneasily between Individuals you want to invest in emotionally, and Types whose situation carries a message you want (or feel you need) to understand. Intellectually, you can buy this angle. Types are not bound by the context in which they are presented, so can achieve wider relevance in meaning and message than Individuals unravelling their poignant human story in a kind of thoughtfully constructed, socially-sensitive soap opera. In terms of connection and empathy, however, it’s a harder sell.
The same thinking applies to the production’s dramatic configuration of characters and their roles. The Baum Family, which spans three generations and includes cousins, aunts, uncles and in-laws, is our focal point in a narrative sequence which frequently jumps in time and space. Various members appear and overlap in a kaleidoscope of related but contrasting situations as they gradually age in the course of the play, but character continuity and recognition are compromised further by having the three core roles (Moe the Dad, Rose the Mom and Lee the Son) played by three different sets of three actors who travel the ethnic spectrum from White to Asian to Black. Each also plays one or more other, different roles. (Hang on a minute – wasn’t he Lee’s dad? And now he’s a sheriff in a bar in the Deep South?). One effect of this deliberate mechanism of alienation is the separation of actor from character and role. We’re back to Types and Universality, and the championing of message over messenger. Another potential effect is audience confusion and distraction caused by the very superficial inconsistency they are meant to see through and rise above.
So to the ending. ‘The American Clock’ is a play about belief: the erosion of old, familiar, long-held beliefs and the desperate, humanly needful search for something to replace them. Lee Baum, accused by his father of not believing in anything, is attracted to Marxism, a philosophy with which he cannot find fault but cannot commit to, because it lacks a natural and sympathetic understanding of the mentality of the white working class. What he does believe by the end is that there is a ‘system’ which controls his life. Yet the ending is upbeat. Arthur Robertson is left to deliver Miller’s final word. What saved the country; the net (and possibly unintended) result of Roosevelt and his New Deal was that “the people came to believe that the country actually belonged to them.” Really? Could this sound a little hollow or contrived after a three-hour procession of characters in the grip of a system beyond their control; corporate financiers who shoot themselves in executive washrooms; men too proud to stave off starvation by going onto welfare; families living in fear of debt collectors; land repossessed and auctioned for a song to pay off loans; the rise of extremist politics? They ended up believing the country belonged to them? Well, good – who else would want it?
Gary Beahan © 2019.
‘The American Clock’ plays at The Old Vic 4th February – 30th March 
The Good Person of Szechwan, By Bertolt Brecht. Review by Julia Pascal.
The Good Person of Szechwan
The Moscow Pushkin Drama Theatre
By Bertolt Brecht
Translated into Russian by Egor Peregudov
Directed by Yury Butusov
Barbican Theatre
Julia Pascal
It is rare to see productions of Brecht in London today. It is even rarer to see them performed in Russian. This jewel from Moscow came only briefly to London but it showed audiences that there is an antidote to endless naturalism. Here is an international style that is brazen and brilliant. It is loud and it is risky.
Brecht’s parable on whether a person can be ‘good’ in a corrupt society offers huge scope to directors and here Yury Butusov seizes the text and roughs it up as an extraordinary spectacle that engages on every level. There is music and dance, there is Expressionism and there is carnival. There is Brecht’s Verfremdungseffekt which makes the audience think as well as feel. It is a total theatre experience that is constantly surprising.
Brecht’s anti-parable is set in an imaginary China. We know that in 1935 he saw performances of Chinese Opera in Moscow and that this influenced his own thoughts on epic theatre and contributed to the creation of his theory on the Verfremdungseffekt. Butusov’s production also has an operatic element. He uses Paul Dessau’s score but there are additions of jazzy compositions by Igor Gorsky’s band Pure Music.
Adding to the alienation effect, I liked that the text was in Russian but the songs were sung in German. It gave an edge to the vocal soundscape and reminded us that Brecht wrote the play in exile beween 1938 and 1942. Uncredited in the programme are Brecht’s co-writers actor, writer, translator Margarete Steffin and writer, director, photographer Ruth Berlau.
The story is simple but the text is a complex interrogation of morality. Its protagonist is Shen Teh, the prostitute visited by the gods in search of one good person. Jewish tradition requires 36 wise men to save the world. Brecht’s gods are less ambitious.
The acting company are magnificent. It is unfair to pick out individuals in a stunning ensemble but, as the production centres on Shen Te the prostitute and her alter ego, her male cousin Shui Ta, it has to be acknowledged that Alexandra Ursulyak’s huge dual performance is magnificent. There are moments of Chaplinesque humour and poetic beauty. The extraordinary set by Alexander Lisyansky is plastic and inventive. Although the production was Brechtian in its soul it also had a post modern feel as all staging suddenly broke down when actors sat onstage to face the audience while speaking the text.
The play has no happy end. It resolves no Christian dilemma about Good and Evil. It remains complex and disturbing as Shen Te utters a solitary cry to the audience ‘Help!’
My only regret is that this production had such a short run. We need to see much more of this Company and this ensemble.
Julia Pascal © 2019.
The Red, Pleasance Dome. Review by Barbara Lewis.
August 19, 2019 by Barbara Lewis • plays, theatre, year 2019 • Tags: Barbara Lewis, plays, theatre •
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