Absurdia: 2 Plays by N.F.Simpson and 1 Play by Michael Frayn, Donmar Warehouse, 26-Jul-2007 – Director Douglas Hodge

If I wanted to be more pompous than usual I would point out that it was rather absurd for those three people to leave halfway through the performance (perhaps following the diktat of certain bloggers). It was a little mystifying; everybody else seemed to be having a rather good time and it certainly wasn’t at a natural break (i.e. in the gap between plays – as there was no interval). Whatever their reasons (at the time I suspected that they where disgusted at the notion of so much laughter in the Donmar), they missed a rather interesting mime where Lyndsey Marshal had an invisible man burying his head in her bosom. They also missed Judith Scott almost corpsing during Gladly Otherwise.
While I enjoyed the plays, especially the N.F. Simpson ones I did get the odd feeling that I was watching museum pieces as if “one simply doesn’t do plays like that anymore”. It’s a pity but I suppose that a genre where the extraordinary, weird and/or absurd are treated as ordinary is easily open to abuse by bad writers and worse plays. I could see how things could feel contrived and heavy handed if wrongly handled.
Michael Frayn’s play the Crimson Hotel didn’t really fit with N.F. Simpsons pair of plays, it was perhaps too cerebral and not as linguistically playful. All the same as a fan of Feydeau farces I enjoyed the setup of the play and it wasn’t just because mister Frayn happened to be in the audience.
When I first saw the set something about it reminded slightly of a very famous Buster Keaton stunt (I also think that a recreation of it won the Turner Prize – later, Deadpan by Steve McQueen). It turned out that they did a variation on the stunt to change the set between plays.
One last thing to remember if you see the plays: In the Crimson Hotel don’t applaud until the spotlight shining on the picnic basket goes out, otherwise, as happened during this performance, the actors have to wait for the applause to die down before they say (or repeat) their final lines. Of course with Michael Frayn’s reputation for changing his plays (almost every major production of Noises Off seems to produce another heavily re-written version of the play) he may have altered it the next time it’s performed.

The Enchantment by Victoria Benedictsson, Cottesloe Theatre, 25-Jul-2007 – Director Paul Miller

I like to see Nancy Carroll in a role where she can dominate proceedings because I reckon that when she is in that kind of part, she’s pretty fab. If I used the phrase I’d say she was electric. I spent most of the play wishing and willing her to shake a little vitality into the piece but I’m not sure that the material allowed for it. I felt it was Niamh Cusack that had the stronger part and even though Nancy Carroll was of stage for almost thew hole play I could muster a great deal of enthusiasm for or interest in her character.
Additionally Zubin Varla who is usually an actor I look forward to seeing wasn’t quite as sexy or hypnotic as the play seemed to suggest his character should be.
The play was done ‘in the round’ and something I think I’ve noticed about plays ‘in the round’ (mainly at the Orange Tree in Richmond) is that there is almost always a control-room bias, where the performance seems mostly to be directed towards the lighting/stage/sound control room where, presumably, the director sat during rehearsals. This tends to mean that the further you are from the control-room, as an audience member, the more that there is a distance between you and the action and you often look at the back of actor. Another disadvantage of ‘in the round’ productions is that you can often have some actor’s back blocking your view of the rest of the actors. Some directors experienced in ‘in the round’ productions manage to strike a balance between keeping actors shifting the angles and stopping it from looking like a whirling dance. In the play the material and the direction seemed a little static.
Something about the set that I found almost unforgivable was a piece of set used as a window or door onto a garden. It wasn’t the objects (windows and doors) but the fact that they were placed in between two banks of seating (opposite the control room) in line with the backmost row. The result of this careful planning was that people sitting in rows E, F and G get several minutes of action (split over the play) taking place behind them. This is where I was sitting and it wasn’t until the interval that I saw the picture of a sculpture of a prone figure that served as a backdrop and may well have had a significance lost on me because I had my back to it.
Reading the programme notes it appears that this play was finished by a colleague after the playwright committed suicide. I couldn’t help thinking of Sarah Kane’s play 4:48 Psychosis which was also written shortly before the author’s suicide. Of course that’s pretty much where the similarity ends; I probably just wanted to show myself my erudition.
Finally I found myself being annoyed in the early part of the first act by the sound effect of a collared dove (I think) cooing its three syllable song. The only thing that calmed me was the thought that a critic might mistake the sound for the call of the cuckoo (the first two syllables of each bird’s call sound similar but the cuckoo is more strident and the collared dove has an extra syllable) and then mention it as being a significant clue to unlocking the mystery of the play. I would then be able to feel superior to them and all would be well.

In Celebration by David Storey, Duke of York’s Theatre, 17-Jul-2007 – Director Anna Mackmin

I get the feeling that when this play was first produced back in 1969 people would have understood the problems that two of the brothers had, without needing any explanation. Perhaps it can be said that there was a time when working class people with an education would fret and worry (or cry themselves to sleep) over things like leaving their roots behind and going to live a stultifying middle-class existence that is nowhere near the ambition or the promise that was the motivation for all that book learning. The modern suspicion of educated people being fake or not ‘real’ and the idea of the impotence caused by over-thinking a subject, are probably echoes of this. Of course I can guff on about the attitudes of the working classes for ages (even with my ignorance of the subject) but the point I’m really trying to make is that this is something the play doesn’t do. It takes it as read that people will get it and the thing is that I’m not sure that people do. I was left, along with other members of the group with whom I went to this play, with the feeling that there were several pages of dialogue missing from the play which would explain just what was troubling the brothers, Andrew and Stephen. There are intimations that the mother was somehow a hypocritical tyrant (a desire for extreme cleanliness together with being immorally six months pregnant when she got married) but they never really came to anything and the mother was not anything like harridans such as the mother in the Anniversary or even Sailor Beware.
I also wondered if the play should have been set on an earlier wedding anniversary - the twenty-fifth would have been much suitable for the brothers’ characters and given more immediacy to their problems. Of course you wouldn’t have got the retirement sub-plot or the settled self-satisfied success of the middle brother.
The reason I went in a group was that a large number of people wanted to see Orlando Bloom on stage and he didn’t disappoint, even if they would have preferred him in a starrier role with some pyrotechnic acting (Paul Hilton had that role). What I couldn’t quite understand is why he was made up to look like Richard Benjamin (it was the moustache and the slicked-down curly hair). I think if more of the Orlando fans in the audience had seen ‘classics’ like Westworld or Love at First Bite, there might have been giggles. There’s been some stuff on websites recently about applauding the star on their first entrance and I was expecting a bit when mister Bloom came on but I only heard one unconfident clap which quickly faded away.

The Hothouse by Harold Pinter, Lyttelton Theatre, 11-Jul-2007 – Director Ian Rickson

OK, so this is how Harold Pinter does a stage kiss: Firstly he draws his lips back in a toothlesss grin so that they are pressed hard against his teeth, then he attaches his mouth to that of the kissee and rolls his head from side to side in the manner of an old-fashioned hand-blotter. I mention this because I first saw Pinter’s kissing method in a production of The Hothouse at the Comedy Theatre back in 1995. I have also seen him do the same thing in a number of other productions of his own plays. Perhaps it is actually the correct way to do a stage kiss, maybe it’s the best way to do a real-life kiss and I should stop leading with the tongue.
The part that Pinter played was Roote, the head of the ‘rest home’, which was taken by Stephen Moore in this production. I’m not sure he was quite as menacing as I reckoned the part warranted also he had to be prompted several times which spoiled the flow rather. All the same when he wasn’t adding his own pauses to Pinter’s he did convey slightly dotty authority in a pleasing way.
At one point Paul Ritter, playing the part of Lush, entered smoking a cigarette which reminded me both of the smoking ban which it flouted in the name (and legal loophole) of artistic integrity and the paean to tobacco that he once delivered in the opening lines of a production of Moliere’s Don Juan. I couldn’t help feeling that although theatres can get away with smoking on stage (so long as there aren’t too many anti-smoking jobsworths in the local council), the fear of potential litigation or even just awkward questions, is going to put them off showing plays which feature smoking. It isn’t just the usual suspects like Noel Coward’s plays or Don Juan but I wonder if they would have produced more recent plays like President of an Empty Room (at the Cottesloe) or Anna in the Tropics (at Hampstead) both of which were set in cigar factories (with attendant smoking). Neither of the plays could be described as classics but they were worthwhile attempts at drama.
I also found myself thinking that Paul Ritter is in danger of becoming the best character actor in London (if he isn’t already – his Robin Day impersonation in The Reporter was a classic) especially when, after his first major speech, he received a round of applause.
A very petty point that I took perverse joy in noticing was that the glasses or tumblers that they used for the whiskey drinking scenes weren’t really Pinter regulation issue. They were a little too much ‘garage giveaway’ and didn’t possess thick or heavy enough bases to make me think that they were the real thing. I’m sure it’s not actually in the stage directions (or even important) it’s just that I associate any drinking in Pinter plays with a certain heavy bottomed style of glassware.
Finally if you want to chuckle at the National Theatre’s expense you might want to read the details of the Gala to celebrate Olivier’s Centenary which appears at the end of an article about Olivier which seems to be in all NT programmes at the moment. It’s just that it appears that Mister Olivier hasn’t been born yet.

Glass Eels by Nell Leyshon, Hampstead Theatre, 10-Jul-2007 – Director Lucy Bailey

I get the feeling that at least one review of this show will start along the lines of, “Although thisplay is set in the Somerset Levels, I couldn’t help think of the problems they’ve been having in Yorkshire recently”. Basically the stage gets gradually flooded during the show. It’s quite a nice effect, a small stream (pretty much just a groove cut into the floor) trickles and occasionally gushes throughout, from under a bed, the covering the dried out mud-effect floor. It was odd to notice that although the actors showed no difficulty in wading about in (sometimes) ankle-deep water, when it came to taking the bow at the end several were on tip-toe trying to avoid getting any wetter. I suppose I could go through a list of other waterlogged plays I’ve seen such as the Almeida’s Tempest or Terry Johnson’s play Imagine Drowning at the Hampstead where Sylvestra Le Touzel was dropped into a large glass-sided tank of water at front of the stage, but there really isn’t much to say other than I’m always unnecessarily concerned about the practicalities and the potential damage it does to the props. Actually I did spend a little time thinking that they’d have to use a reservoir of some kind to feed the stream, rather than just turning on a tap from the mains, so that they’d get the right amount of water on stage. I really should think of more interesting or uplifting things at the theatre.
I have to say that I didn’t really get the point behind the imagery of the eels and it did feel over-repeated at times. The back of the play text mentioned “a girl’s sexual awakening” and at the time I didn’t see the connection with eels stirring in the mud, building up their reserves of fat for their great migration to the Sargasso Sea. Thinking about it now I’d concede that there probably is one and I was too obtuse to think about it.
I’m not sure whether there’s much to this play really. Pretty much a father and daughter need to have a good chat about the death of his wife and her mother. All the same it didn’t feel like I’d spent as much as 90 minutes waiting for this to happen when the play ended. I think I would have liked more insight into the character of the father (played by Philip Joseph) and Kenneth (played by Tom Burke).
The only actor I had any problem with was Tom Georgeson as the grandfather. His part seemed to be written as a frail crotchety old man but he didn’t convince me that he lacked the strength of body or strength of will that this character needed. It was a casting thing not a performance thing, perhaps I always see too much iron in Tom Georgeson’s soul.

Love’s Labour’s Lost by William Shakespeare, Globe Theatre, 3-Jul-2007 – Director Dominic Dromgoole

It took me well into the afternoon to realise the connection between seeing Love’s Labour’s Lost at the Globe and Doctor Who (it’s the play that they did before the Doctor met William Shakespeare in the recent series). That said if I were collecting Doctor Who connections with this play I could point out that I saw John Barrowman as Dumaine in the play four years ago. God this is the second time I’ve started with an anecdote about Doctor Who (note to self – get a life).
My afternoon’s realisation did start a familiar train of thought about the way they recreate the theatre audiences of Shakespeare’s day on TV and film. I’m not sure that they do the bad teeth anymore – rotten teeth were solely a rich person’s affliction before sugar became widespread and affordable. If I have problems with the way that the audience is depicted it’s the women, who have been allowed in the galleries but wouldn’t have been in the pit unless they had something to sell (oranges, their bodies etc.) and the general wealth of the pit audience. Although it was cheap, a penny (I think), to get into the pit, that penny had to be disposable income and since many people were getting paid just a few pounds a year a penny becomes a sizable chunk of cash (equivalent to about £10 nowadays, perhaps. The point is that the pit audience probably wouldn’t be filled with the dregs of society. Nowadays the pit seems to be full of students and tourists who probably don’t quite count as the dregs.
I have a bit of a bee in my bonnet about the Globe, in that I reckon that Shakespeare wrote for both the courtyard style of theatre (i.e. derived from an inn courtyard), such as the Globe and the darkened hall, such as the Blackfriars theatre that he helped by late in his career or the halls of great houses where he’d give more intimate performances. These two approaches give a different style of play: in a courtyard the actors are very aware of the audience and the need to keep them attentive so that things like soliloquies could be thought of as one sided conversations; In a darkened hall soliloquies are addressed into nothingness (or the lighting gantry attached to the circle) and become more solitary. The thing is that after the Restoration and pretty much until now all theatre has been the “darkened hall” type; the audience reactions beyond laughter and applause in the right places becoming less and less acceptable.. Even open air theatres like Regent’s Park or Greek/Roman theatres expect the audiences to be quiet, attentive and invisible. With the Globe you could argue that they’ve reinvented the courtyard style of theatre where the audience becomes more of a participant, which is unfamiliar and possibly uncomfortable to both actors and critics. Of course there may be good reasons why courtyard theatres died out. They tend to encourage a raucous and pantomimic style of playing, where it is difficult to be quiet (especially at the Globe with its attendant aircraft going over head) and subtle and fine language loses out to playing things for laughs. That said I’m glad the Globe has a go.
This particular play certainly upped the laughter and pantomime at the expense of the dialogue but with Love’s Labour’s Lost and its rhyming verse-speak, I didn’t think it was necessarily a bad thing. There is rather too much of Shakespeare doing the ‘fooling’ stuff where people stand around to explain and analyse puns – was that ever funny? Everybody seemed to behaving a good time even if William Mannering as Longaville over did it slightly and sometimes gave the impression that he would rather be copping off with one of the men. On the other hand Timothy Walker (who I saw as Hamlet in a Cheek by Jowl production back in 1990) was almost too slow, melancholic and incomprehensible as the comedy Spaniard, Don Adriano.
Anybody thinking of the standing in the Pit should avoid standing too near the right hand (as you face the stage) zig-zag platform that comes out from the stage unless they are happy to see a very great deal of John Bett. I’m not sure if it was justified by the plot but it certainly got some shrieks and lots of laughter.
A name that jumped out at me in the cast list was Oona Chaplin, who played Katherine. And I do mean the name – I’m not sure I have anything bad or even good to say about her acting although she did mange to pull a string of pearls apart which may not have been intended. The only other Oona Chaplin I’ve heard of was Charlie Chaplin’s last wife and I thought it was unlikely that anyone other than a member of Charlie Chaplin’s family would name their daughter Oona so when I got home I checked the web and discovered that she was Geraldine Chaplin’s daughter (and thus Charlie and Oona’s granddaughter). Not that interesting, I know but watching her and wondering I couldn’t help feeling how unlike Charlie Chaplin she looked. Of course the same could be said for the statue of Charlie Chaplin in Leicester Square.

Bedroom Farce by Alan Ayckbourn, Richmond Theatre 25-Jun-2007 – Director Robin Herford

Time was when if I wanted to impress friends who were Doctor Who fans I would tell them that I’d once sat six feet away from Louise ‘Leela’ Jameson while she got naked and had sex in a play. These days, with the all new Doctor Who series, I’d probably have to tell them that I’d once seen David Tennant in his pants (‘What the Butler Saw’ Lyttelton 1995 – as it happens) to earn the same kind of Doctor Who related kudos. Of course what I never mentioned was just how clumsy and awkwardly I thought Louise Jameson’s sex scene was written.
I mention this Louise Jameson stuff, obviously, because she was in the play but also to mark a kind of turning point. This was the first time I’d seen her play the part of an old woman, well not exactly old but late 50s. I think the phrase I’m looking for here is playing a part where she was no longer expected to be sexually appealing. Of course I haven’t seen her on stage for over 10 years nor have I followed her recent TV career so any switch to less sexually vital parts may have happened a while back and I’ve been too slow to notice.
Although the programme was full of blurb about the seventies, when the play was written, this production was updated for modern times. Doing this didn’t seem to involve much more than the casual mention of emails. However it did make the older couple (Colin Baker and Louise Jameson) seem even more old fashioned than they were originally written (50 somethings of today expressing attitudes of 50 somethings from 30 years ago) and now I think about it, the absence of mobile phones was a bit odd – although their presence would have made the second half of the play pointless.
Another point of interest for me was that my namesake Timothy Watson was appearing as the bed-bound character Nick. I’m never sure whether I want him to do well as an actor or not. He always seems to get pretty good reviews in the stage stuff he does but I haven’t seen him that often. Also for some reason I never got round to see him when he was in the Woman in Black for what seemed like a couple of years.

Betrayal by Harold Pinter, Donmar Warehouse, 21-Jun-2007 – Director Roger Michell

I’m beginning to think that I don’t really like this play. The conceit of telling the story backwards is fine, the characterisation is great and the dialogue is mostly brilliant but there’s something about the play that leaves me cold. It is the single Pinter play that I’ve seen the most (four times now) so familiarity could be making it pall but I’ve seen the Homecoming three times and I still think well of that play. It might be a combination of not being able to warm to or care about Dervla Kirwan in this production and the whole stew business. The stew has never felt right, it’s like an indigestible lump that, for me, fixes the play in its period (late sixties/early seventies – when this production was set) and doesn’t seem to belong as part of an afternoon romantic tryst. I know that there are all sorts of practical reasons why the couple would want to dine in the privacy of their Kilburn flat but it’s a fragment of unromantic domesticity that find jarring. It would be even worse if the play was set or updated to the twenty-first century where the cooking reference would either feel anachronistic (the female lover cooking for her man) or would have something to do with heating up a couple of Marks and Spencer ready meals. Maybe I’m bothered by the notion that everything else in the play would allow it to be set at anytime in the last fifty years which would make it more timeless and universal.

Another thing that bothered me about this production was that I found myself distracted by the set while there was action on stage. It wasn’t the moth that seemed to have got trapped in the projector that showed the year of the scene. It was the tracks of the curtain rails on the ceiling; I couldn’t resist trying to trace their complex route before realising that I should be watching what Toby Stephens was up to. The set such as it was, was really just several sets of long, thick, white net curtains that were swished around the stage between scenes by the stage hands and left in different configurations to indicate the walls for different rooms. Oddly when I came in to the theatre and saw single curtain almost forming a box on stage I was reminded of one of the last Pinter’s I saw at the Donmar. That play was Old Times and it was, if memory serves, performed entirely inside a large Perspex box. The odd thing is that, that production had the same director and designer, Roger Michell and William Dudley which I didn’t know until I looked it up in the programme.

I discovered that I can’t really remember the male actors in previous the productions of this play. The only one that really rests in my memory is Martin Shaw who played Robert in the first production I saw back in 1991. The pity is that the man who played Jerry in that production was Bill Nighy several years before he became BILL NIGHY; I just can’t call him to mind.

The only other that might just be worth mentioning is that there was a fleeting moment where Sam West’s mouth was set exactly like his father’s. It lasted just long enough for me to notice it and wonder if it was going to happen again.

The Five Wives of Maurice Pinder by Matt Charman, NT Cottesloe 18-Jun-2007 - Director: Sarah Frankcom

Someone is going to get hurt. Someone in Row A. Someone in a seat numbered between fifteen and twenty-something. I know this because I was in Row A and I saw the chips of masonry fly in the direction of those seats as the breeze-block wall was knocked down with a sledge hammer. OK I’m being overly dramatic but it was slightly unnerving to have a young man swinging a hammer within a few feet of where I sat.

I wondered if perhaps the designer hadn’t quite taken into account that there would need to be an audience sharing the same space as their transverse set. It did seem to take up most of the Cottesloe’s floor space. Also people in my row were turfed out during the interval so that stage hands could lay a concrete (concrete-effect on wooden board anyway) floor on part of the set [Insert slow builder joke here].

As the play got underway I sorted through what my nice liberal opinion of polygamy/polyandry should be. Basically I concluded that so long as it wasn’t abusive or fraudulent then it wasn’t worth complaining about. See, nice, liberal and just a bit glib. Actually I got the feeling that this is more or less what the author, Matt Charman, felt too, although he seems to have concluded that polygamy is always going to be abusive even if there’s no overt violence and little psychological bullying. There was only one outside character expressing moral outrage at the situation but he was driven in part by lust and wasn’t given a strong enough argument against Mister Pinder’s lifestyle. I’m not sure that I entirely bought the set up and maybe there was a more powerful play in the story of the introduction of the second wife rather than the introduction of the fourth and fifth ones. Also perhaps there would have been more tension if Maurice Pinder had been written as more charismatic and manipulative but then the situation would have felt almost ordinary which I think.was the author’s intention.

I felt the need to remind myself about Matt Charman’s first play A Night at the Dogs which I saw a couple of years ago (and which won the Verity Bargate award). I couldn’t remember whether the reviews of it had been positive or excited and my own recollection doesn’t go much beyond ‘interesting’ which is my usual unhelpful comment. I think I missed any common themes between the two plays. They both end, I reckon, with the optimistic possible future slightly outweighing the pessimistic one but in the case of Five Wives… I’m not sure that there was a strong sense that Pinder had learnt anything or changed. Perhaps that isn’t necessary and it probably wasn’t the intention; it’s just me wanting a bit more of a battle.

Gaslight by Patrick Hamilton, Old Vic 11-Jun-2007 - Director: Peter Gill

For some reason during tonight’s performance I kept wondering if I’d ever seen Rosamund Pile in colour. Something about her pale skin and hair together with her grey dress made me wonder if I’d ever seen her in colourful than a beige or cream. Thinking harder I believe she wore some bright colours (or brightly coloured trimmings) in Summer and Smoke last year.

When I first heard about Rosamund Pike she annoyed me. It wasn’t her fault of course it was that the publicity for Die Another Die seemed to talk about her as if she was already well known (none of the usual ‘newcomer Rosamund Pike’ stuff). As her name and face were unfamiliar to me from TV, film or theatre I wrongly assumed that she was some model-turned-actress doyen of the style pages and celebrity mags. I never saw any evidence of that, though and she impressed me in things like Hitchcock Blonde and Summer and Smoke. That said I’m still a little uneasy about exactly where she earned her top of the bill status. She’s good but is she that good?

I suspect that the director and cast decided that they couldn’t do this play as straight melodrama. It wasn’t quite played for laughs either but there was a slightly jokey feel to things when Kenneth Cranham was on stage. I hope it was deliberate because if the occasional, sometimes nervous laughs were unintentional then it won’t look good in front of the critics. It certainly didn’t match the descriptions of the play and subsequent movies which talk about the play as a psychological thriller. Perhaps playing it straight would have looked too ridiculous to modern eyes.

There was one incident that almost halted the play tonight, Ms Pike managed to drop one of the important-to-the-plot rubies which bounced nosily of the stage before disappearing from sight. Pike and Cranham struggled not to join in with the audience’s laughter (which turned into applause) and it was rather lucky that an interval started a couple of minutes later because I’m not sure that they or the audience felt willing to take anything too seriously at the time.

I was actually mildly disappointed with the play given my knowledge of Patrick Hamilton’s novels – I remember being astounded at the depiction of madness and obsession in Hangover Square and it was a book that I’d only picked up because I’d heard it was something that I vaguely ought to read. The play’s ending is telegraphed well before halfway and there is never enough jeopardy for the heroine. I almost wanted it all to be in her imagination or some tortuous trick cooked up by her husband and the ‘detective’, maybe even that the detective was the bad guy. I’m not sure that the husband was given enough opportunity by the play to convince her that she imagined everything.

I’m complaining too much so I ought to mention that everybody seemed to have a good time and even booed the husband (Andrew Woodall) as if he were a pantomime villain (not sure that the cast and director were necessarily looking for that reaction).

I’m always reminded when I see Rowena Cooper (who played Elizabeth) of the first time I encountered her. It was on TV in the eighties where she played Alan B’Stard’s male election agent who got a sex-change part way though the series.

Andrew Woodall was in Peter Gill’s play Certain Young Men and I remember in that play he played a man in a monogamous homosexual relationship who has an affair with a younger man (possibly played by Danny Dyer). His character cursed himself for his weakness but still gave into temptation. Not relevant of course.

Henry IV part one - National Theatre Olivier - 19 April 2005

Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Nicholas Hytner
Designed by Mark Thompson
I find that the third time is the charm when it comes to Shakespeare’s plays. The third time I see any individual Shakespeare play I seem to see the whole of it for the first time. I am always aware that I haven’t really heard some scenes properly before and the third time it all seems to fit together. Of course I still miss stuff; I remember, in my sixth watching of King Lear, when I suddenly heard the “could you undo this button” line. In fact at the time I remember wondering if it was a genuine ad-lib.
Is this production there was a whole “anon, anon, sir” bit that I don’t remember before.
Having said that I stopping missing bit in the third viewing I was up against Michael Gambon’s accent which I couldn’t quite place (West Country, Irish or both?), and which swallowed many of his sentences. When Gambon as Falstaff, first entered with Hal they both apparently urinated. Hal was standing near a tap on a standpipe but I couldn’t see is Falstaff were using anything. Directors seem to like showing characters urinating especially in Shakespeare. They would probably argue that it ‘grounds’ their characters, makes tem seem more realistic. For me, I know that it is more often than not faked – too difficult to guarantee the timing or amount (I think Jane Horrocks as Lady Macbeth was the only time I’ve seen it for real and that’s only because she was dressed in Y-fronts and a vest at the time) – so I don’t quite see the point. It is all faked on stage. Why unnecessarily fake something extreme when everybody knows that stagehands would object to mopping up the real stuff. Jane Horrocks had to bring on a small piece of carpet for her scene.
Michael Gambon’s performance reminded me of his performance in the Caretaker a few years. His Falstaff had more dignity and authority than his tramp but the voice the hair and the drunken attempts to ingratiate himself with Hal did have echoes.
Michael MacFadyen’s Hal (wearing greyish jeans to Falstaffs red/crimson crushed velvet baggys), seemed to be more of an observer than a participator in Falstaff’s revelry. His character seemed to be controlled by his early line about one day having to give up his debauched ways. Another character that seemed different to how I remember him was Ned Poins who here seemed to be a criminal rather than an upper class rogue in a similar mould to Falstaff (much thinner of course) as he is usually seems to be played.
I thought, initially that this was the first time I’d seen Matthew MacFadyen but I have seen him several time before, including a warm and slightly sweaty version of Much Ado About Nothing with Saskia Reeves half a dozen years ago (the heat and sweat was a stage effect rather than bad air conditioning).
The costumes were by and large modern but worn and arranged to give them a slightly older setting. Court characters, especially David Bradley’s Henry IV, wore long coats or modified priests’ robes.
The set was a broad stepped wooden platform in the centre of the stage. It was slightly curved and at the back rose more steeply to a hill-like hump. To the sides were trees receding into the darkness that could produce a gloomy or even desolate appearance to a scene. At the back of the stage were three wide strip-like screens onto which would be projected trees, London streets, stained glass windows or castle ramparts, as appropriate. Mostly they would use a curtain or arras that dropped to halfway back along the platform making a smaller acting area. A hidden flight of stairs led down under the stage from the platform.Ever since I saw the seven of the eight plays in Shakespeare’s Richard-to-Richard sequence (I missed Richard the second) I find myself tempted to trace characters throughout the sequence. For instance the troublesome Aumale in Richard II succeeds his father to become the Duke of York and is killed at Agincourt in Henry V. Of course he doesn’t appear at all in either Henry IV play, but there are others like John of Lancaster who becomes the Duke of Bedford in the Henry VI plays as well as Humphrey the Duke of Gloucester. The male Percy (Duke of Northumberland) line eventually died out in the reign of James I (gunpowder plot I think). Most problematic are the Edmund Mortimers that run through the plays. The Mortimer family seemed to have a habit of naming their first two sons Roger and Edmund. This appears to have gone on for several generations with Rogers calling their first sons Edmund and vice versa. As a result of this there were a lot of Edmund Mortimers knocking around and Shakespeare managed to conflate several of them in later Henry plays.

Julius Caesar - Barbican Theatre - 18 April 2005

Written by William Shakespeare
Directed by Deborah Warner
Designed by Tom Pye
I think that I might be very suggestible. During the interval I overheard a complaint, from another member of the audience, about the terrible acoustics in the Barbican Theatre. I’ve long heard this theatre vilified and declared the ‘worst’ but I’ve not seen it myself. I don’t find the seats that uncomfortable, like the fact that I don’t have to stand up every time people want to pass, and will put up with the brown plush trim. I also like the doors at the end of the rows that shut automatically just before the play begins.
Of course I’d never really thought about the acoustics and once I did I really started to notice. I also remembered not being able to hear some things properly in the first act. It probably wasn’t too bad but there was strange echo effect that occurred once or twice when Simon Russell Beale stepped into the small trapezoidal apron that juts out from the stage.
One of the selling points of this show, other than the quality director and all-star cast, was the 100-strong crowd, some of whom were members of the public. The crowd was obviously well orchestrated but there were a quite a number of proper actors among them and have seem quite a few of them on stage. It was probably intended that the crowd would bring the roman mob to life, but I kept thinking that there weren’t enough of them. It had something to do with the good marshalling. They would flood onto the stage take positions behind crowd barriers and then politely follow the lead of the actors amongst them. If they had use real actors or background artists, they may have got an organised chaos that would have added to the mob feel of things. There would have been danger and no need for barriers or the ring of security guards that were always there.
The problem with an all-star cast is that some of the stars aren’t required to do much. The main case in point in this production was Fiona Shaw as Portia. Shaw was fine, walking stick, falling over etc. but there wasn’t enough of her – it’s too small a part. Also now I come to think about it I didn’t believe a word of her character’s professions of weakness (Fiona Shaw – weak? – pah).
All-star is a relative term as it was only a starry cast if you know your theatre actors. Simon Russell Beale and Anton Lesser might be recognisable outside theatre circles but the likes of David Collings, John Shrapnel, Struan Rodger, Clifford Rose and John Rogan are respected actors but the names mean nothing to most. Actually John Rogan who I saw doing a frightening Inquisitor in Don Carlos a few years ago was also in the tiniest of roles.
The major ‘star’ in the production is probably Ralph Fiennes and this was probably the first time I can remember seeing him, enjoying a role or being so relaxed. Antony was the ‘good time’ guy whose eventual demise in Antony and Cleopatra was signalled.
There were a couple of other actors who I was interested to see. Paul Shearer was in the “Cellar Tapes” Cambridge Footlights Revue with Hugh Laurie, Stephen Fry, Emma Thompson and Tony Slattery, as well as being a regular in the Fast Show. I sometimes think he ought to have made more of an impact.
A few weeks ago I saw an item on an Internet message board that went something like “Robert Demeger. What’s the point?” I didn’t read the full message thread and it was removed not long after it was posted but it did make me think. It is as if I have difficulty in believing that he’s an actor. It isn’t that he can’t act, in fact a quick Internet search produces glowing reviews for some of his performances. It’s more that if you were asked to point out all the actors in a room, you’d never pick him, even if he were the only person in the room. It’s horribly unfair to say or think it and there was nothing wrong with his performance in this.
Another actor to mention was Tim Potter who I remember as Dali in a production of Hysteria by Terry Johnson and as Charles II in the Libertine. He played the soothsayer carrying a consistently filled thin wine glass that his character had obviously been regularly draining.
Initially the set consisted of a wide shallow set of marble steps (filling most of the stage area) surrounded, on three sides by glass panels. There was also a number of square-cut stone columns of different low heights at the side of the steps. I wasn’t at all sure why they were there, other than that some actors stood on them during the crowd scenes so that they could be seen as they spoke. I seem to remember something similar in the way of columns in Deborah Warner’s production of Good Person of Sichuan at the National 16 years ago – almost certainly a coincidence.
For the second half (or final third) the stage was emptied, with furniture whisked on and off, when necessary, by rushing soldiers. In the battle scenes household debris (broken furniture, clothes and toys) was dumped on the stage from on high. This obviously had a deep significance but I chose not to think about it. There seemed to be some kind of video projection on the back wall of the theatre in the last scenes and there were all sorts of video designers and operators mentioned in the programme. However the video seemed to be random noise patterns (like an untuned TV) in green. It was probably art.

Someone Who'll Watch Over Me - New Ambassador's Theatre - 13 April

Written by Frank McGuinness
Directed by Dominic Dromgoole
Designed by Anthony Lamble
The first time I saw Aidan Gillen he looked a little as if he’d lost a few fights. Hooded eyes, flattened nose, more a failed pugilist than a romantic lead. That was in the early 90s. A few years later he had somehow transformed himself - eyes lager, nose sharper. It may just have been losing the puppy fat but I can’t get rid of the impression that it was more surgical. Looking at the programme there is a picture of him that is reminiscent of his old self. In this picture as with his old publicity photograph he is looking down which narrows and hoods his eyes so perhaps that explains it.
As with mister Gillen the play seems to have changed since I first saw it 13 years ago. I doubt it’s the words; it is down to the direction and the set. The first production, which starred Stephen Rea, Hugh Quarshie and Alec McCowen, seemed cleaner and gentler. I think I remember that the set was more along the lines of a closed off room in an apartment block, than this production’s grottier, high ceilinged dungeon-like room. The actors in the first production were cleaner in clothes and bodies. The differences probably have a lot to do with failure of memory on my part but there is also the fact that the Hampstead Theatre (where I saw the first production) stage was smaller and the make-up and costume budgets weren’t high enough for ground-in filth.
Another major difference was the playing of the relationship between Edward and Michael (the Irishman and the Englishman). It felt softer the first time not quite so acerbic. I don’t remember Edward being quite so angry and antagonistic, although it is all there in the script. Also Alec McCowen was much more sympathetic as Michael, more comfortable and more stable. It felt as if David Threlfall was giving a caricature of a stiff Englishman while it was more natural for Alec McCowen. I also wondered if he was wearing false teeth in order to give his character a more buck-toothed expression.
As I suggested, this may well have been the intention of the script (more anti-English, more spite) and the first production got it wrong. This production made me wonder if Frank McGuinness was putting all his anti-English feeling into the character of Edward and not allowing Michael to mount an adequate defence. In the first production Edward and Michael seemed to part with respect and affection, in this it felt more grudging.
My companion had never heard of the hostage crisis in the late eighties, and I did wonder whether this would be the same for others who didn’t have the excuse of coming from a different country and having been in this one for less than ten years. In spite of contemporary echoes with the taking of hostages in Iraq, I do wonder how many others in the audience remembered names like Keenan, McCarthy and Waite. For myself the hostage taking in The Lebanon always gave me (and still does) a sense of impotent fury. I still have a badge that says “John McCarthy – Hostage”, which I carried around with me for several years, rarely actually wearing it. I don’t know what that says about me.
As I said the set was dirtier than the first production: two radiators (on the left and back walls of the room) and a pipe along the floor (on the right) providing the respective anchor points where the actors were chained by the ankle. There was an extractor fan in the back wall and during scene breaks, the fan would spin while a powerful white light shone from behind. At the same time two thick wall-like panels would descend diagonally to block off the set and an old recording of Someone Who’ll Watch Over Me would be played.It is interesting to contrast the roles I’ve seen Jonny Lee Miller in, in films and in the theatre. In films like Trainspotting and Plunkett & MacLean there seemed to be a wildness and exuberance about him but his theatre work (Festen and Four Nights in Knaresborough as well as this) seems to show something more intense and vulnerable.

Previous Convictions - Orange Tree Theatre - 12 April

Written by Alan Franks
Directed by Michael Napier Brown
Designed by Sam Dowson
There are things about the Orange Tree that make me uneasy. It isn’t the rack of mugs on hooks, Dymo-taped with the names of the cast and crew, which I once saw on a wall at the side of the bar. That was just a cute and homely touch. It’s really that I’d like to see Octavia Walters acting somewhere else. I have actually seen her acting somewhere else (Jane Eyre at the Young Vic eight years ago) but not recently and her biog in the programme doesn’t mention too much other than the Orange Tree. It isn’t that I’ve heard her acting being criticised and I have seen some of her performances praised. It is just that she’s the “daughter of the house” so it is easy for things to look like nepotism. It is no worse, I suppose, than a director choosing a bed-mate in a lead role but it still doesn’t feel quite right.
Actually Octavia Walters seems to have established a pattern in the last couple of roles she has played at the Orange Tree. Both roles had her playing well educated, rather self-absorbed young women, going nowhere, spouting environmentalism and anti-capitalism and being capable of manipulative cruelty. It probably says more about the choice of play than her true personality but I’m not sure I can think of her differently just now.
I haven’t seen her mother, Auriol Smith, in anything like as many plays and only one at the Orange Tree. I have a slight problem with her, which I’d noticed on occasions I’ve seen her watching plays at the Orange Tree. Her face and her hair don’t match. Her pale face with the bags under the eyes, seems to tell you that she ought to have grey or greying hair, perhaps even dyed blonde to hide the onset of grey, but her hair is a rich brown with only the tiniest hint of grey near the ears. I don’t like to think that she hides the grey by dying her hair - it would seem too vain somehow. There were times during the play however, when colour came to her face and animation to her eyes, that her hair colour ceased to matter.
I last saw James Woolley playing Lord Hutton, in the Tricycle’s Hutton Inquiry restaging, Justifying the War. At that particular production the theatre was insanely hot and stuffy, largely because of the presence of large plasma screens on stage and the fact that the air conditioning was too noisy to be kept running during the play. There was something I found chilling in one drunken rant his character made. He was talking about the failure of his life, how he had drifted through his twenties and thirties without really achieving anything (not really trying either) and how he had reached the age where men become invisible.
One of the things that the Orange Tree prides itself on is that it is London’s only permanent theatre-in-the-round. While this is true I sometimes feel that the plays aren’t always directed with that in mind. It might be that I like sitting in the rows of seats farthest from the door and opposite the control room but I often feel that plays are being played towards that control room. Of course the only way to test this would be to see plays multiple times from all the different angles. It is just a feeling that some plays aren’t made with all sides in mind.The set was a disused bedroom slowly being cleared of clutter. A bookshelf with old Penguin paperbacks interested some of the audience before the play and during the interval. None of them particularly caught my eye other than a biography of Mussolini that was left in the open. I did wonder if it was significant but nothing was made of it. Another book of which nothing much was made, was a diary found towards the end of the play by the daughter. She went into hiding shortly after discovering the diary but it didn’t look as if she’d been able to read it. Yet she was able to talk about what was in it. Not that, when it came to it anything was made of its contents.

My Name Is Rachel Corrie - Royal Court Upstairs - 11 April

Edited from the writings of Rachel Corrie by Alan Rickman and Katharine Viner
Directed by Alan Rickman
Designed by Hildegard Bechtler
It seems enormously petty to mention that I first saw Megan Dodds in a production of Hamlet at the Old Vic in 1999, even if the production featured Paul Rhys giving what I always claim was best performance in the role Hamlet that I’ve ever seen. It seems pointless to point out that, not knowing anything about her, although her name was familiar, she seems to have settled here from America and that that may have been why here accent sounded so authentic to my cloth ears.
This was the story of an American peace activist who died under a bulldozer in Rafah in the Gaza strip and, doing a bit of research on the web, I realise that the middle-aged American couple sitting in the row in front of me, wearing black and white checked Palestinian scarves, may well have been her parents. A newspaper article from their home town talked about the play and said here parents had stopped off on their way back from visiting Gaza and were planning to see it.
One of the problems with the play’s subject matter was mentioned in the play itself. It is the conflation of the Israeli government and the Jewish people – that to criticise the Israeli Government or army is automatically anti-Semitic and a vile attack on the Jewish people. Also any show of support of the Palestinian people gets argued to be support for the suicide bombers. In fact only a few clicked links from the RachelCorrie.org memorial website gets you to an article that describes Rachel Corrie action in standing in front of a bulldozer as an idiotic “suicide on behalf of terrorists” and others that show her burning an American flag drawn on a piece of paper.
The play is in her words, her testimony and her point of view. It is edited and designed to evoke your sympathy. In my case I wanted to know more about her, the background to her activities and her death. There are some rather graphic photographs out there.
Some of the unsympathetic websites paint her as an unpatriotic freak or an oddball but it is a little difficult to justify that point of view when you hear her eloquent, touching and often amusing words. It could be argued that this is all due to skilful editing and there may be some truth in the matter. However the final speech sounded unedited and was taken from a long email she sent before days before her death. It seemed sincere and, although she backed the right to armed struggle in the defence of family and land, she also wrote about the need for non-violent civil disobedience in a Gandhian manner.
The problem I’ve always found with non-violence is that it only seems to work against people that have a sense of shame. Or that the protest effectively shows the people against whom it is being made, that their self-image is a lie. Britain liked to think it was fair minded and treated India well but Gandhi showed them up. The Chinese soldiers in Tianenmen Square didn’t seem to care about the peaceful protestors.There was a photographer on the stairs up to the theatre just outside the upstairs bar. He seemed to be there to photograph dignitaries as they entered and the staggered up. Actually the only time I saw him take a photograph was after an important sounding flurry of activity in front of a blue suited man who turned out to be Karl Johnson. I know who he is because I’ve seen him in more than a dozen plays and he steals every scene he is in, but a photograph at a first night?

The Cosmonaut's Last Message To The Woman He Once Loved In The Former Soviet Union - Donmar Warehouse - 7 April

Written by David Greig
Directed by Tim Supple
Designed by Melly Still
Brid Brennan has the kind of face which if you saw it on a pvc catsuited and booted, spider-web stockinged hostess at a night club, you would probably know that you’d taken a wrong turn somewhere – in life if not in the street. The clothes worked reasonably well on her but as she turned to face the main part of the audience, I was a little shocked. I was slightly grateful that it was left to Anna Madeley to do the actual pole dancing. Incidentally the pole dancing was done in a slightly strange way: the poles were thinner versions of the real thing about eight foot long and carried and supported by the actress dancing or posing, rather than being fixed.
To be fair to Brid Brennan, her cat-suited character Sylvia, was almost certainly meant to be grotesque - described as a crow in later scenes. Also in other plays, she could certainly do sexy when she needed to. The only real problem I had with her characterisation of Sylvia was that her Tyneside accent kept heading off towards the Irish Sea.
The start of the play was delayed by quarter of an hour, which is normally a sign that the designer has been at it again and their elaborate set doesn’t work or will catch fire in the second act. However when we were let into the theatre I wondered what all the fuss had been about. The set seemed bare with just a couple of pouffes centre stage and a television in a corner towards the front. The wall at the back was blank and black with wide folding double doors set in the middle opening on to the stage. It wasn’t until the play started that there was an inkling of what was held up the play. The back wall lit up showing an array of stars and cosmonauts floated into view. They were, of course, suspended by wires and harnesses. It was well handled, the actors moving slowly and bracing themselves on the wall so that they often stayed horizontal, which prevented the impression that they just hanging. I dare say it’s going to break down one night but at least it worked on the first preview.
The stage had a few points of interest: A long narrow strip trapdoor was opened to show a flowerbed on one side of the stage. A larger trap on the other side contained a bed and the doors of the trap – made from three sections – were folded into triangular sectioned headboards.
As with the other evening there was occasional set change activity while scenes were going on in other areas (unfolding the bed took a fair bit of time) and it was occasionally distracting. Another distraction is that one person in the audience began laughing. For some reason I missed the line that they found so funny, there was some funny stuff in what the cosmonauts were saying at the time but little of it was laugh out loud. I got the impression that a private joke had set this woman off giggling. Her giggling, in turn, set someone else off but until the lines got funny, a little later on, not many others joined in. I find this sort of thing worse than heckling because it felt as if they were having a private laugh at the actors’ expense rather that paying attention to what they were saying and doing.
As I said I’ve seen Brid Brennan a good few times – about ten judging from her biography in the programme. Last year I saw her in The Bog of Cats with Holly Hunter. The last thing I saw her in at the Donmar was a play called The Dark which I remember mostly for scene for a scene where a boy takes a baby from a mother just to see her experience the terror of it. It is the only time that I can remember wanting a scene to end so much that I felt like getting up and stopping it.
Paul Higgins, who played one of the Cosmonauts, is one of the first actors I saw at the Royal Court in the late 80s. It was a play was called American Bagpipes and the only thing I really remember about it was Ken Stott, playing the drunken-policeman father of Paul Higgins character, trying to summon up enough authority to arrest his son and failing.
It may just be that this was the first time that I’ve seen Anna Madeley rushing around with almost nothing on and – as I’ve mentioned – pole-dancing but she’s never caught my attention before. I must have seen her half a dozen times in RSC stuff as well as at the Royal Court, even in the play Russian in the Woods where she was the only woman. I should pay more attention.
Previous plays can often seriously colour my view of actors. The last thing I saw Michael Pennington in was a Hanif Kureishi piece called When the Night Begins. In the play his character apologised for his “old man’s smell” (or stink); that phrase stayed with me and kept running through my mind as I watched him in this. It was relevant to his performance it was just an association in my head.

Stoning Mary - Royal Court - 6 April

Written by debbie tucker green
Directed by Marianne Elliott
Designed by Ultz
There probably should be a law against designers being allowed to adopt a single name. It’s fair enough, if a designer or artist has achieved so much that they are instantly recognisable by a single name but to deliberately adopt one seems like wishful thinking. I rather hope that Ultz’s real name is something ordinary like Brian Smith and he will one day be exposed.
Ultz doesn’t just design he also directs, in fact Martin Marquez (who was in the play tonight) and his brother wrote a play which Ultz directed. The play, The Snowbull, was a rather patchy affair and on the night I saw it an old women chose a quiet moment, towards the end of the piece, to leave announcing to the world that it was the worst thing she’d ever seen. This was at the old Hampstead theatre and she was sitting less than ten feet from the stage.
It is a little unfair to have a go at Ultz, silly name or not, his designs are often very interesting. I remember a piece called Fireface, where the action took place on institutional Formica tables and the audience sat on office chairs that were chained to the floor. The thing is that Ultz decided that this play required a thrust stage, painted blue; covering almost the entire stalls area. The design was described as ‘exciting’ in the letter from the Royal Court that told me that the seat I’d booked in the stalls was no longer available. I doubt that the finance people at the theatre, found the prospect of losing almost a hundred seats a night, terribly thrilling.
It isn’t the first time Ultz has pulled this particular trick at the Royal Court. A couple of years ago in the play Fallout by Roy Williams the stalls were once again covered over with a steep wide flight of steps leading down into them at one end. In that case I seem to recall that they built additional seating over the stage forming an oval arena for the play. Tonight we just got a blue stage stretching to the back wall of the theatre. Not a uniform blue, lots of different shades but in no particular pattern. At the edges of the stage, especially when it met a vertical surface like the boxes, were outcrops of bubbles that may have been intended to be beach pebbles or stones but were too circular. That was more or less it as far as the set went. There were a few ordinary looking tubular framed chairs in each of the sections. Each of the three settings in the play occupied a different area of the stage although there was some overlap. The areas were only lit while action was going on in them and the names of the settings were projected using moving lights that swept across the stage and ended up on the black back wall of the theatre.
The actors were on stage for the whole piece, leaning against the back wall when they weren’t needed anymore. When the action of their scene was interrupted by a scene in a different area the actors didn’t always freeze, as you might expect, but often fidgeted or repositioned themselves.
I quite liked the device, in the play, of having of somebody playing the character’s ego. I thought it illustrated the arguments well. Also I think I’ll just mention that the egos were both dressed in turquoisey-blue clothes.
Reading the play script beforehand brought up a couple of things. There were several sections that dwelt on the smell of people and with this blog in mind I had hoped to write some stuff about how smell is both a deeply intimate and very public sense but the play didn’t really explore this.
Another thing that was very clear in the script was the deliberately degraded quality of the language that was used – plenty of ‘dunnos’ and lack of glottal stops. The thing is that I could help thinking that Emily Joyce was struggling with this. It felt as if she was battling years of good enunciation and losing but it might just have been my imagination. Knowing her best from a tame sitcom may have played tricks on my perception of her performance.
Another actress to mention is Claire Rushbrook. A couple of years ago I saw her in a play called Food Chain Upstairs at the Royal Court where she had a dreamily weary glamour. It contrasted with tonight where she was distinctly heavier and chavier, which was what was required.
There is an instruction in the script that says that all characters must be white. Presumably this (together with the adverts and pamphlets for action aid in the programme) is to draw attention to the plight of third world countries by putting problems like the mistreatment of women, child soldiers and Aids into a white English context. Unfortunately I didn’t think that the world hung together properly. It is a trivial point but in a place where a young woman can get stoned to death, for killing the boy soldier that killed her parents, the man would always get the Aids medicine before the woman and there would be no debate about it.
In the audience tonight was David Tennant and I was tempted to interpret his glances around the auditorium, as attempts to find out if he’d been spotted by weirdo Doctor Who fans. I studiously avoided his gaze.

Tristan & Yseult - Cottesloe Theatre - 5 April

Presented by Kneehigh Theatre
Written by Carl Grose and Anna Maria Murphy
Directed and Adapted by Emma Rice
Designed by Bill Mitchell
Outside the theatre tonight there were a number of white banners on flagpoles. Each banner had a single word on it – war, trust, honour, love and other stirring sentiments. Around the flagpoles were some shallow metal dishes on frames, which were presumably braziers or torches of some kind but looked more like ornate ashtrays and had already attracted the odd cigarette end. I mention these because when I came out of the theatre, the white banners had been replaced with black ones (in keeping with the story).
I first saw a production by the Kneehigh Theatre at the Cottesloe about five years ago, it was a fairly conventional play called The Riot. The next two shows, The Red Shoes and The Bacchae, weren’t. In the first we were treated to an entire shaven-headed cast spending most of their time wearing just Y-fronts and vests – only occasionally putting on clogs. In the second there was a lot of use of sheets of newspaper to make improvised props and costumes were tutus lowered from the fly tower. I may be muddling things up but I’m fairly sure that the Bacchae also featured a number of ladders hung from ropes and pulleys, in such a way that they could be angled and moved.
The ropes and pulleys were back tonight. This time the ropes (three of them) spent much of the time attached to a disc-shaped portion (large enough to hold a person) of the circular stage, in such a way that the disc could be raised up a mast through the disc’s centre. At other times the ropes held character spying on the lovers, a sail for the ship and, most impressively, the lovers as they drunkenly danced – suspended by the wrist - into one another’s arms, under the influence of love potion and alcohol.
When I first entered and saw the band in grey balaclavas, I thought that they might be supposed to be a reminder of chain mail worn by medieval versions of Arthurian knights. It quickly became apparent, as the cast entered and milled about the auditorium, that the balaclavas, blue cagoules (or anoraks), heavily black-framed glasses and the nasal quality of the actors’ voices showed that they were supposed to be spotters of some kind. In this case, love-spotters, observing the story through binoculars and making notes, in the knowledge that they’d never be involved in a love story themselves.
The spotter chorus would occasionally don extra headgear to indicate setting: ‘deely boppers’ with a stars on them for a starry night, the same with beer cans on top for the drunk scene and bushes for a woodland tryst.
The spotter/nerd costumes made it rather difficult to spot the main characters when they were being part of the ensemble rather than the main character (I hope that makes sense). In fact there was a striking difference in the way one actor behaved between playing his main character and being in the ensemble. I’m not saying it was anything special or remarkable, just that I noticed it. The actor in question was Mike Shepherd, one of the founder members of Kneehigh. He has a way of behaving in ensemble that I noticed when I saw him in The Red Shoes and The Bacchae, which drew my attention towards him. It is a sort of deliberate wariness or nervousness in the face of an audience, as if to say ‘don’t stare at me’ while drawing attention towards him. I don’t think that it is intentional attention seeking, it may just be my imagination or the set of his face. The thing is, when he was called on to take off the balaclava and anorak, replace his glasses with fashionable shades and become the King, he was the King. All this may simply be a difference in style between acting with the ‘fourth wall’ up and with it down but I can only say I noticed it.
As might be expected with the cast wandering around the auditorium before the first and second halves there was a fair bit of audience interaction. I have to assume that the spotters were trying to identify and write up lovers on those occasions; I was never close enough or girlfriended enough to hear them properly or attract their attention. If you bought a programme, in addition to a small tube of Love Hearts, you received a balloon that you were asked inflate (without tying a knot in it) and then release to mark the King’s entrance (“I entered to the sound of rapidly deflating balloons). The person sitting next to me disobeyed instructions and knotted their balloon and it spent the interval being batted around the audience with increasing annoyance until someone burst it loudly, eliciting a heart-grip response from (you’ve guessed it) Mike Shepherd. We were instructed in the balloon etiquette by Giles King (a man with pointed sideburns stretching halfway across his cheeks), playing Frocin and he berated a young woman in the audience for not bothering to buy a programme and therefore not having a balloon. He picked on her again when the audience failed to make a good luck toast to the King and Queen but it was all part of the script and not vicious ad-lib.
As well as the odd balloon descending on me from the circle, the audience was leafleted by an invading army (“People of Kernow. Don’t be alarmed” etc.), and in a love scene, silk flower petals were dropped.
The wedding party had a strange and rather joyous dance routine. The most interesting move consisted of the actors holding a leg in the air and kicking it out to the side while slowly rotating.
Something else that I think I remember from the Bacchae was some of the actors breaking into different languages. In that case it was possibly because two of the actors were from different eastern European countries and it had felt right during rehearsal to do it. It might have been the same tonight as the Hungarian actress Eva Magyar said many of her lines in Hungarian (I think) before a discreet hand gesture from the members of the cast caused her to repeat them in English. Tristan Sturrock (who broke his neck last year according to the programme) playing a French Tristan also did many of his lines in French but was only required to translate when it went beyond ‘schoolboy’ vocabulary.
The only other things to mention are the model ships to carried by the actor sailing in it, the small cello that Tristan occasionally carried strapped to his back and which he played like a guitar (across the knee and plucking), and the strange greeting gesture some characters used that a cross between looked like a slow-motion vertical clap and a sedate estimate of a piskie’s height.

Hecuba - Albery Theatre - 4 April

Written by Euripedes (version by Tony Harrison)

Directed by Laurence Boswell

Designed by Es Devlin

I was thinking that this was the first time that I’d seen Vanessa Redgrave in a really tragic role. When I’ve seen her previously there’s always been humour in her performance; something relaxed and knowing. Even when I first saw her years ago, in a “Redgrave” Three Sisters where she played Olga, she seemed to be having immense fun with the part, at least not taking it as seriously as her sister and her niece. Having seen Claire Higgins doing an intense Hecuba last year, I did wonder how Vanessa Redgrave would approach it.
There were no tears or screaming, in fact there was something very cold and calm in the way she took here revenge. Her justification for murder was well argued and efficient but I wouldn’t have called it heartfelt. This isn’t to say I wasn’t convinced by her but there was a placidity there which may well get interpreted, by the critics, as repressed intensity.
On trivial matters there was a moment when Vanessa Redgrave reminded me of her daughter Joely Richardson. Hardly surprising really but suddenly as she crouched over Polydorus’ body her blue eyes pierced out into the audience and I thought of her daughter. Another thing was that as she dragged Polydorus’ body off the stage, I thought “here’s someone who wants to play Mother Courage” – it was the way she carried herself and she’s probably played the part anyway.
The set was made up of a number of curved walls that, at first, formed a drum (before the play started), spent most of the play as a semi circle and finally turned in on themselves, to form a passage between two curved walls. There was probably some significance in this that escaped me, as a black backdrop with a huge white splash was revealed. Actually I suspect something went wrong here, the rear wall of the drum slowly and non-silently moved to reveal the backdrop while Vanessa Redgrave was speaking.
I always like to think that I like Tony Harrison’s Greek translations but that may well be because his reputation is a good one. I’d like to say that I hadn’t noticed his point-making before (Troy equals Iraq, references to bombing or blasting Troy, the Greeks in a ‘coalition’ and a digs at Europe attacking Asia), but I remember that when he reconstructed the Trackers of Oxyrynchus fifteen years ago, it was peppered with social comment.
The Chorus who sang almost all their lines (requiring Vanessa Redgrave to almost sing along with them at one point) were dressed in a style that I’d associate with places like Turkey or possibly Georgia – long coat-like dark coloured dresses (mostly green) and dark head scarves. They also wore make-up to make their faces much paler. This had an unfortunate (possibly deliberate) effect on one olive-skinned actress as she ended up looking a pale green – almost green enough to be a Kathikali dancer. I found myself a little disappointed with the music. It wasn’t bad but I couldn’t help thinking that given the costumes the composer should have gone for Spanish Phrygian mode and some very close intervals in the harmonies but perhaps that would have been a cliché.