JULIIUS CAESAR at the Bridge Theatre - all terribly new, all terribly old

All in all, it was an evening of remembering things..
.

 

...I remembered that Nicholas Hytner's 'modern-dress' Shakespeare productions might make critics salivate but to me they are crushingly obvious attempts at saying "Hey kids... Shakespeare could almost be writing about today!"; surely any decent production should rely on the text to get that over to an audience.

...I remembered how The Bridge Theatre's YOUNG MARX so underwhelmed me and here I was seeing it's second production to similar feelings

 ... and I remembered how uncomfortable the seating is at The Bridge, a willful act of neglect on the part of Hytner and oppo Nick Starr as the theatre was only built last year.

...and finally I remembered how much I loathe being interrupted during the first important minutes of a production by disruptive latecomers and a clueless usher.  Could they have come in during the caterwauling pro-Caesar band playing in the round playing area?  No.  Due to this-in-the-round configuration, the latecomers had to come through our row led by a clueless bumbling usher to get to far-flung seats as the actors were already speaking.

Now The Bridge Theatre's 'dress circle' third row has NO legroom when you are sitting in the large tip-down seats so we all had to stand and attempt to squash against the back wall when this tribe of arseholes made their way loudly and clumsily along the row.  Cue shouting from people whose feet were stood on and those who did the standing... meanwhile I have lost my train of thought and the actors might as well be speaking Urdu for all I fucking cared.  I repeat... this theatre was built last year, so we are not talking about seating as in the more ancient west end theatres which are cramped.  So one can only assume that the architect responsible deliberately made them like this.  The arsehole.

So.. by the time the mayhem died down we had missed the first scene altogether.  Sad to report I was so angry at all of the above that the production had lost me... and nothing I saw particularly made me fight to catch up.

Which is a shame considering I was looking forward to seeing this especially after seeing Dominic Dromgoole's gripping Globe production in 2014 which showed how timely Shakespeare's play is and probably always will be... and no, that wasn't in modern dress.

It's also a shame as there were good performances struggling to get out from Hytner's absurdly LOUD production, nothing terribly revelatory, but good.  Ben Wishaw was well-cast as a liberal elite Brutus, first seen at his desk surrounded by books, who is suckered into joining the conspiracy against Caesar when they appeal to his Republican idealism.  Wishaw is not a terribly likeable performer; there is a prissy petulant quality to his acting which suited the role of Brutus - a man whose idealist nature led to his downfall - but there were also no surprises in his performance: he gave me just what I expected.

Michelle Fairley played Cassius with a needling earnestness but nowhere in her performance did she suggest anything that was revelatory or what was gained by having her cast over a male actor, I also got no real heat off of David Calder's Caesar, for all the hints of Donald Trump - which was too drearily obvious to have been pursued in rehearsal.  Again, it's not that he gave a bad performance... it just didn't reveal or illuminate.

I had sadly the same feeling for David Morrissey whose hang-dog Mark Antony reminded me of the Tex Avery cartoon dog Droopy more than the quick-witted character who subtly beats the conspirators at their own game.  He upped his game for the famous funeral oration but then he almost seemed to disappear into the clanging loud whirlwind of the final third of the production.

One had to look further down the ranks for the performances that did stand out: Wendy Kweh's Portia was suitably impassioned in her attempt to keep Caesar from going to the Senate while Hannah Stokely and Leila Farzad stood out as Metellus Cimber and Decius, senators who all play their parts in lulling Caesar into thinking it's just another day at the office.  The most sparky performance of all was from Adjoa Andoh as the spiteful Casca, whose shade-throwing starts the whole conspiracy off; her pointed and arch performance made one feel sorry for the character's absence in the second half.

As i said all the stalls seats have been removed for JULIUS CAESAR making the punters so-many unpaid extras in the crowd scenes - and just like the Globe's groundlings - we had a fainter!  The production had to be halted in the scene between Cassius and Casca when a young bloke fainted and he had to be removed from the acting area, the wuss - it was only about 30 minutes in.

Although I can see the point in the promenade set-up, ultimately I tired of seeing the audience being moved about like so much cattle and looking about themselves while the actors were performing in front of them.  I did however like Bunny Christie's inspired production design of having platforms rise up in and around the audience to give the actors their stages - the Senate was particularly well-realized.

I'm only sorry I did not enjoy the production more.  To be honest I got more from the excellent programme notes than from the production!

HANGMEN at the Wyndhams Theatre - 2016 theatregoing starts with a swing...

Four days into the new year and there I was... sitting in a theatre again!  Well you never know... I might get out of the habit.

My first play of the year was Martin McDonagh's deep black comedy HANGMEN which originated at the Royal Court and which has now transferred to the Wyndhams Theatre.  It has received across the board raves and is a bit of a sell-out, thanks in no small part to it being a rare theatre outing for David Morrissey.  While I admired a lot of the writing and the performances, it did rather leave the impression of being a Pinter play with knob jokes.

It starts in 1963 as we watch the last minutes in the life of young Hennessy, about to hang for the murder of a young girl.  He becomes more hysterical when the hangman Harry and his assistant Syd arrive in his cell.  Frantically proclaiming his innocence, Hennessy realises his hangmen are from the North which really upsets him!  Harry is none too pleased by this either - he may hate the men and women he executes but he believes that they deserve as quick a service as he can offer and angered by Hennessy's taunts, he eventually strong-arms him to his death.

Anna Fleischle's prison-cell set then rises to the heavens to reveal a large but gloomy pub in Oldham.  It is now two years later, the death penalty has just been abolished giving Harry the chance to run his pub full-time.  However a persistent local reporter finally gets Harry to give an interview where he pours scorn on his more famous colleague Albert Pierrepoint and to also reaffirm his belief that Hennessy was guilty and not the victim of a miscarriage of justice as is being reported.

Harry runs his pub with his wife Alice and their sullen teenage daughter Shirley who is bored by her existence of serving the same dreary male customers every night.  On the night of Harry's interview a young stranger, Mooney, arrives in the pub from London and slowly starts a barrage of sarcastic comments about the pub, Oldham, Harry's past job and in particular, about the hanging of Hennessy.

Who is Mooney and what is his interest in Harry and the case of Hennessy?  Slowly it is revealed that a year after the hanging, another young girl was found murdered on a beach in exactly the same way - did Harry hang an innocent man?  Has Mooney arrived as an avenging angel or has he a more scary purpose in mind?  He is quick to chat up the lonely, unloved Shirley and invites her to a secret afternoon out on the beach.  The reappearance of Syd, Harry's estranged hanging assistant, gives the plot another twist when it is revealed that he knows more about Mooney than he says he does.  And now Shirley has not come home...

McDonagh's plot eventually started to teeter on the brink of absurdity at the end and I found a couple of 'surprise' plot twists all too obvious.  What cannot be denied however is his knack for tense head-to-head scenes which float on a sea of apprehensive, barely disguised dread, along with a cracking cast and an involving production under the sure hand of directer Matthew Dunster.

Dunster maintains the slightly unsettling atmosphere almost throughout the play, only faltering slightly at the climax of the play but this is more down to the obviousness of McDonagh's final plot twist.  As I said he is helped enormously by Fleischle's set - you can almost smell the pub's slop-tray - and Joshua Carr's lighting.

Bronwyn James as the unhappy teenager Shirley, is all the more impressive in that his is her West End debut.  McDonagh's rather obvious character - the fat, bored and unhappy girl - is transformed by Bronwyn James into the one character that you vaguely feel any sympathy for.  Sally Rogers as Harry's nervy wife could not make the same true in her character.

Johnny Flynn was also successful in making Mooney more than just a threatening Pinteresque outsider and there was good work too from Tony Hirst, Ryan Pope and Simon Rouse as Harry's eternal customers and John Hodgkinson was also good as a surprise last-minute visitor from Harry's past, the only man who can reduce the sneering pub patriarch into a cowed man.

David Morrissey certainly gave a barnstorming performance as the surly, domineering Harry but although he was good I found him a bit one-note.  As I said, towards the end of the play, just as Harry is exacting revenge the only way he knows how, the pub is visited by someone from Harry's past who browbeats him into an apology.  This was the only time Morrissey dropped the 'ard man act, a few more opportunities to vary the tone might have made it a truly stand-out performance.

There is a much better performance from Andy Nyman as Syd, Harry's nebbish former assistant.  It turns out Syd was fired from the job for telling people about the size of a hanged man's knob and he has never forgiven Harry for informing on him.  Nyman stole every scene he was in and somehow made Syd pathetic, creepy and hysterically funny all at the same time!  He also had the best sight-gag involving a pair of car keys...

Would I recommend HANGMEN?  Definitely, just don't expect to find too many layers...

Dvd/150: THE HOLLOW CROWN: RICHARD II (Rupert Goold, 2012)

This trilogy of films based on four Shakespeare history plays, commissioned by the BBC for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad, are excellent examples of intelligent, gripping stage-to-screen adaptations.

All three are cast to perfection: Ben Whishaw is marvellous as Richard, fey, capricious and remote, who, like Lear, initiates his own downfall by banishing his cousin Bolingbroke to six years abroad then appropriates his cousin's fortune and lands when Bolingbroke's father John of Gaunt dies.

Rory Kinnear is fine as the conflicted usurper Bolingbroke, their scenes together have an electric quality especially in the riveting abdication scene.

Excellent support comes from Patrick Stewart as John of Gaunt as well as David Suchet, Lindsay Duncan and David Morrissey among others.

Goold, whose adaptation with Ben Power has a fast-paced clarity, directs in a fluid style which leaves no symbolism unchecked and has a slight over-reliance on slow-motion detailing.

Shelf or charity shop?  I'faith my lord, shelf.