KENNY MORGAN at the Arcola Theatre - art imitating art imitating life...

In June we saw Terence Rattigan's THE DEEP BLUE SEA at the National Theatre, the play that is acknowledged to be his masterpiece.  A reason for this could possibly be because the story came from an incident in his own life.  What Rattigan did however was to do something he could not do in real life... he could change the ending.

Mike Poulton does not have that luxury as his new acclaimed play KENNY MORGAN documents the incident Rattigan could only change in fiction.

Kenneth Morgan was a young actor who in 1940 won a Best Newcomer award for his role in the film of Terence Rattigan's stage success FRENCH WITHOUT TEARS but more importantly he met Rattigan during the filming and they became friends.

They met again after WW2 ended and started a relationship but this was the 1940s and Rattigan was terrified that his homosexuality would become common knowledge.  Not only was homosexuality a criminal act but he also was worried his aged parents would find out.  Rattigan's sexuality was known to his theatrical friends but that was all.  Rattigan lived at the Albany near Piccadilly Circus but he also had the lease for a small flat on another floor which was used for visiting friends and that's where Morgan had to stay when he visited.

Morgan's career had lost it's momentum and he was depressed by his life as the famous writer's secret affair so, while Rattigan was preparing his Alexander The Great play ADVENTURE STORY, Morgan ended the relationship and went to live with another actor Alec Ross in Camden.  Rattigan was upset but assumed Morgan would return.  He did not.  It soon became clear that Ross did not return Morgan's feelings and at the end of his tether, Morgan gassed himself.

Rattigan was in Liverpool with the play's director Peter Glenville when he heard the news and was profoundly shocked but by the evening he envisioned the start of a play where a body was found in front of a gas fire.  It's interesting that Rattigan immediately started to re-write Morgan's fate in theatrical terms as a way of dealing with it.

Poulton's play uses the plot of THE DEEP BLUE SEA as his template but changes a main fact: Rattigan was not in London when Morgan died but Poulton has him making three appearances.  Like THE DEEP BLUE SEA, the play covers the day and night after a suicide attempt with various characters coming and going, attempting to discover what drove the main character to that action, an action that in 1949 was in itself a criminal act; in Poulton's programme notes he estimates that in 1949, 300 people were charged with attempting to kill themselves.

It would appear that in real-life Morgan was successful at his first attempt but to fit the DEEP BLUE SEA narrative, Poulton has him being found in the morning slumped by the gas fire by a neighbour and the landlady and as in Rattigan's play, the neighbour calls a number in a found address book - in the play it's Hester's husband, here it's the playwright.  Also as in the original, Morgan is helped by another neighbour, a European former doctor, struck off under mysterious circumstances.

Also as in the original, Morgan attempts to hide his suicide letter from Alec but it is found which triggers the start of Alec's emotional cruelty and the end of their affair.  In the Rattigan's version, Hester finally sees a chance of redemption after a long talk with the doctor, in this version that chance is also offered through the doctor's appeal to life but one last twist of the knife by Alec destroys Kenny's optimism and he reaches for the gas tap again...

I am still in two minds whether it was a good thing to have seen THE DEEP BLUE SEA so recently: it was good to see how Poulton not only uses Rattigan's structure but also to see how he has referenced certain moments and individual lines in his own play but manipulated them to give it a new meaning.  However I also feel that having THE DEEP BLUE SEA so fresh in one's mind, Poulton's play can only come across as an inferior copy; surely Morgan's despair felt more painful than a copy of a well-constructed play?  It almost felt like a dramatist's exercise - can you write a new play based on the structure of an older one?  Occasionally I wished Poulton could have broken away from THE DEEP BLUE SEA to make us feel Morgan's distress more intently.

There is also a problem with the character of Kenny himself; by writing him as a self-pitying lachrymose gay victim, speaking in the clipped manner of a 1940s juvenile lead, Poulton does make it hard to feel any sympathy for him which is the play's chief failing.  The frequent traffic on the small Arcola stage also felt a bit too mechanical at times: it felt that Poulton was too interested in his characters to leave any of them offstage for long - did Rattigan really need to appear three times?

However I did enjoy the play very much, as well as Lucy Bailey's production which concentrated all the attention on that cramped living room like a pressure-cooker; the flat's design by Robert Innes Hopkins had just the right down-at-heel, drab feel.

Bailey also elicits nuanced performances from her cast: Paul Keating as Kenny had to struggle with the strait-jacketed character of Kenny but was very effective in his scenes in extremis especially when Alec destroyed his last chance of escape with his withering scorn, you could almost see the light go out in him.

As the men in Kenny's life, Simon Dutton was fine as Terence Rattigan, caring for Kenny in his own way but unable to get past his closeted outlook and Piero Niel-Mee was marvellously self-absorbed as Alec, retreating into his bi-sexuality when Kenny's love becomes too suffocating.

Circling these main characters were well-drawn roles that put gentle spins on Rattigan's own supporting characters: Matthew Bulgo was a delight as Kenny's upstairs neighbour, the mild-mannered Dafydd who works in an office job in the Admiralty, lives with his sister and who knows his life is quietly slipping by unnoticed, Marlene Sideaway was good as Mrs. Simpson, the spiky landlady who cares in her way but is suspicious of Kenny and his 'theatrical' ways.

Lowenna Melrose made an impression as Norma Hastings, a young actress friend of Alec who he sleeps with as if to prove to Kenny that he is not gay; Melrose nicely suggested that she was no fool where Alec was concerned.  Rounding out the cast was George Irving as the mysterious neighbour Mr Ritter, a man nursing his past with a quick, sly wit and canny understanding.  His accent strayed occasionally into Mittel-Europeanspeak but he was excellent in his arguments for life to be lived, even the bleak times.

Apart from the problem of Poulton's too-slavish adherence to the structure of THE DEEP BLUE SEA, this was well worth seeing and it would be nice if it had a life beyond it's current run.  It is also a telling reminder of the crushing strictures that the law imposed during that period on the lives of, what Tennessee Williams called "the fugitive kind".

"Why dost thou laugh? it fits not with this hour"

Sometimes it takes a while to get used to an auditorium.  You go, you see productions but nothing particularly happens around you, the walls don't bounce anything back at you.  It usually takes a great production to get you to react to the space as well as to what you are seeing.

I have been to the Globe Theatre at Southwark a few times but have never liked any of the productions enough to warm to the theatre itself, however I think that might now have changed thanks to Lucy Bailey's thrilling, notorious TITUS ANDRONICUS.

It's not that often that theatre productions - classical theatre productions at that - jump from the review pages into the news sections of papers but Bailey's production has been getting column inches over the number of audience members who have been passing out during the more gory moments of Shakespeare's first revenge tragedy.  Yeah, sure I thought.  Good going Globe on the hype.

I had never experienced TITUS on stage before but had enjoyed Julie Taymor's stylish 1999 film adaptation starring Anthony Hopkins as the put-upon Roman general, Jessica Lange as his nemesis Tamora Queen of the Goths and Alan Cumming (channelling his performance of the MC in CABARET) as dissolute Emperor Saturninus.

Owen had booked the tickets in a rush of Shakespearean vigour after we saw Eileen Atkins' magical Ellen Terry show in the new Wanamaker Theatre next door to the Globe and as the days drew closer to last Thursday I found myself getting more excited about seeing it.  Our seats were at the end of the first circle so we had the stage side-on to us but also a good view of the groundlings.  This was actually a stroke of luck as Bailey has the action spill off the stage and in and around the standing punters who were - not too politely - pushed around by the actors to make way for moving metal platforms, marching soldiers etc.  Those at the front were also frequently exposed to thick plumes of smoke that issued out from under the stage!  That'll learn 'em.

William Dudley's design has the usual brightly coloured stage swathed in black material and black netting stretches across the open roof to echo the design of Roman Pantheon.  Two large smoking braziers billowed the heavy scent of incense into the air which added to the sombre, claustrophobic atmosphere.

Titus returns to Rome victorious from a war against the Goths with his captives: Tamora, the Queen of the Goths, her three sons and her servant (and secret lover) Aaron the Moor.  To avenge two of his sons who were killed in battle he orders for Tamora's eldest son to be executed.  Despite Tamora's desperate pleas for mercy from one parent to another, he carries out her son's death.  As in KING LEAR one misjudgement brings down tragedy.  Tamora vows she will avenge this cruel act, with the chance coming sooner than she expected.

Rome is in tumult with the dead Emperor's sons, Saturninus and Bassianus, challenging for the throne.  The people of Rome however declare they want Titus to be Emperor.  He, always the good servant to the elite, refuses them and declares his support for Saturninus.  Saturninus repays him by announcing he will marry Titus' daughter Lavinia despite the fact that she and Bassianus are betrothed.  When the couple and his other sons react angrily to the Emperor, an angry Titus lashes out and kills his younger son.  Bored at their in-fighting - and to punish Titus - Saturninus chooses to marry Tamora instead.  Immediately grasping her chance, Tamora implores her new husband to forgive the Andronicus family and to let Lavinia and Bassianus marry.

 

Tamora, Aaron and her two remaining sons Chiron and Demetrius enact their revenge during the Emperor's hunting party in a forest.  Trapping the young lovers alone, Tamora's sons murder Bassianus and throw his body in a camouflaged pit and, with Aaron goading them on, rape Lavinia and, to stop her from identifying them, cut out her tongue and cut her hands off.  Aaron frames Titus' sons Martius and Quintus to make it look like they murdered Bassianus and Saturninus orders their execution.

Titus' brother Marcus discovers the mutilated Lavinia and brings her to Titus closely followed by Aaron who tells Titus that Saturninus will spare his sons if Titus cuts off a hand and sends it back with Aaron.  Although Marcus and his last living son Lucius argue over the action Titus does what is demanded and a gloating Aaron leaves.  Yes you guessed... his dismembered hand is returned to him, along with the severed heads of his sons.

Well these are the scenes that sort out the men from the boys.  As Lavinia tottered onto the stage, mouth pouring blood and jerking her stumps about I noticed in my peripheral vision the first person being helped out of the pit in a wheelchair... then I saw a tall man in a suit towards the back of the standing punters go *wobble* *crash* - cue another wheelchair appearing to help him out!  As Titus hacked off his hand upstage we heard a dull thud from further along from us and as Lavinia coughed up another stream of blood onto the stage I saw a girl being led out from the audience standing at the front of the stage shaking and white as a sheet.

Me?  I was grinning from ear to ear!  Partly because the ushers who were doing the fetching and carrying were all old grey-haired ladies who are obviously used to all this carry-on and also because I could see, in my mind's eye, Shakespeare then a successful playwright in his late 20s around 1591 cackling with delight as, quill in hand, he wrote quickly across his parchment saying "Oooh I can do this - and then I can do this - oh and I can do THIS too!"  The play exhibits his excitement at attempting his first revenge drama, a genre that had been hugely popular since Thomas Kyd's THE SPANISH TRAGEDY about ten years before.

I found it fascinating to see that here that, despite all the travails that he suffers, Shakespeare cannot make Titus a sympathetic character.  I likened it earlier to KING LEAR and although Lear also starts out as a vainglorious tyrant, by the end of that play Shakespeare has made him a universal figure for pity and sympathy - by the time we reach the famous climax of TITUS with the stage looking like a charnal house, Titus is exactly the same as he was at the top of the play.  I think this is due to the 15 year gap between the plays during which Shakespeare honed his craft and discovered how to give his characters more internalisation.

Something else that struck me is - as in LEAR - no mention is ever made of Mrs Andronicus.  Is she still living?  If she is why doesn't she ever come out of the house?  I can only presume that she wore out from giving birth to Titus' seven children.  Indeed Lucius, the only son left alive at the end of the play, has his own son - Shakespeare could only stretch to Young Lucius as a name - with no mention again of a wife/mother.

I must admit that a couple of times John Gielgud came to mind too.  He never played the role - it's remarkable how few of our acknowledged great actors have - but a critic once said of him that in tights he had "the most meaningless legs imaginable"!  That quote came to mind when I saw Steffan Donnelly as Bassianus standing on two strings of spaghetti with knots tied in the middle - they were quite distracting.

Gielgud also saw Peter Brook's 1955 production at Stratford which starred Laurence Olivier as Titus and Vivien Leigh as Lavinia.  In the play, Titus has Lavinia hold a stick between her stumps and write the names of the rapists in the sand and on the night Gielgud was in, Vivien dropped the stick while she was attempting to write the names.  He went to see her backstage and greeted her with "Butterstumps!"  In a letter afterwards he wrote that Olivier was excellent, but that "poor Vivien seems in a very bad way.  She is utterly ineffective on the stage, like paper, only not so thick".

Lucy Bailey (this is a revival of a 2006 production when Douglas Hodge was Titus) has directed the play with a remarkable clear-eyed approach, the three hours runing time slip by unnoticed, and her determination to stare the atrocities of the play in the face gives it the intensity that so lays waste some members of the audience.

What was fascinating is how she has found the underlying black humour so integral to the play's strength, there were as many intentional laughs as horrific moments - but then the best horror is offset by humour.  If you thought Iago was unapologetically gleeful in his actions, wait till you meet Aaron whose last lines sum up his nihilism while being led to his death:

"Ten thousand worse than ever yet I did
Would I perform, if I might have my will;
If one good deed in all my life I did,
I do repent it from my very soul."

 

In the best performances of the evening, Obi Abili was excellent as Aaron, seizing every opportunity to delight in his actions and to include the audience in on his intentions while Indira Varma was deliciously nasty as Tamora, turning on a Denarius from Saturninus' conciliatory bride to Aaron's ravenous lover to Titus' Furie.

But is she evil?  Tamora has every right to want Titus's downfall due to his unwarrented killing of her son and is he the good character in his own story?  Titus is a domineering military bully who kills his youngest son for daring to stand up to him and who has little concern for his daughter's happiness and even Lavinia displays nothing but withering contempt for Tamora and her plight.   What makes Aaron and Tamora evil is the way they set about their revenge.

I also liked Matthew Needham's whining demanding Saturninus, a nasty spoilt brat playing at being a grown-up and Samuel Edward-Cook and Brian Martin were also good as Tamora's muredrous sons.  Flora Spencer-Longhurst was an affecting Lavinia but the role is a difficult one with few lines at the start of the play to engage the audience and then being but a mute witness to the events that follow her rape and mutilation.  I also liked Ian Gelder as a sympathetic Marcus Andronicus.  I also want to credit the nerve-shredding score of Django Bates.

William Houston was certainly effective as Titus but I grew to dislike his schtick of going from a resonant chest voice up into a wheedling head voice when exasperated or feining madness.  Despite these occasional flaws I loved this production for introducing me properly to Shakespeare's gory early play and for it's heightened theatricality - and yes, I think I have come to appreciate the Globe's special atmosphere.

Now if they could just sort out the Hell that is the forecourt during the interval.

Last Thursday Owen took me to see the Open Air Regent's Park's production of THE BEGGAR'S OPERA - and it didn't rain, hurrah!Now Constant Reader as you might or not know, I have history with John Gay's ballad opera.

Back in 1982 at the National Theatre, Richard Eyre staged a version of BEGGAR'S in the Cottesloe while in repertory with his legendary production of GUYS AND DOLLS and SCHWEYK IN THE 2ND WORLD WAR at the Olivier. If I wasn't in my favorite front-row seat for GUYS I would be in the Cottesloe enjoying the remarkable company take on this famous satire of morality and justice, brought forward to the Victorian era.

Headed by Paul Jones' swaggering Gorbals Macheath, he was superbly matched by Harry Towb's Belfast Mr. Peachum, June Watson's Una O'Connor-ish Mrs. Peachum, David Ryall's Mr. Lockit, Kevin Williams' scene-stealing Filch, Belinda Sinclair's lovelorn Polly Peachum and, above all, Imelda Staunton's terrier-like Lucy Lockit - spitting venom one minute, tremulous with love the next. Her version of "I, like the fox, shall grieve" will never be bettered.Oddly enough when the production was filmed for Channel Four, it seemed to lose a lot of it's uniqueness in the translation.

Lucy Bailey's production places the action back in 1728 when it was first staged and is aided immeasurably by William Dudley's clever design - framing the action under two large Tyburn gibbets and utilising two large tumbrels fashioned into various settings.Sadly I suspect I have been spoiled by being introduced to the show by such a wonderful company as this production, although good in parts, could not find an even footing.

Maybe it was the surroundings, I didn't feel the park setting helped the grimy and Olde London atmosphere that this show demands. The tone also seemed to strain too hard with it's acknowledged Hogarth inspiration being laid on with a very heavy trowel in the first half. The show settled down in the second half with the appearance of the First Family of Newgate, the Lockits.Both Phil Daniels as the snarling Lockit and Beverly Rudd as a powerhouse Lucy, mixing both the thwarted mistress' conniving and bruised tenderness to good effect, were outstanding. Rudd was a very funny Red Riding Hood in the Open Air's INTO THE WOODS last year so it was great to see her again.
Jasper Britton was a venal Peachum although the over-the-top performance of Janet Fullerlove as Mrs. Peachum was a disappointment. Flora Spencer-Longhurst was a winning Polly Peachum and while David Caves was an energetic Macheath - and played his comedy scenes with his warring lovers well - he was a bit lacking in the charisma stakes - his Macheath also liked to show off his physique which proves there *were* gyms in the 18th Century!