THE RED BARN at the Lyttelton Theatre - dead behind the eyes...

After what has seemed an interminable wait - 19 DAYS! - I have broken my 2017 theatrical duck.  By the way Constant Reader, don't you think 2017 is a very ugly number?  Hopefully that doesn't influence the next 50-odd weeks.  I also hope THE RED BARN does not prove an omen for my theatre-going this year... oops, showed my hand there eh?

David Hare grew up reading the novels of George Simenon and found himself drawn to the writer's stand-alone psychological thrillers more than his Maigret crime novels and now he has adapted the little-known novel "La Main" (The Hand) for the National Theatre stage.  I know what he means.. give me the stand-alone novels of Ruth Rendell of a seemingly normal person going wrong over the neatly-packaged Inspector Wexford books. 

THE RED BARN is the National Theatre debut of director Robert Icke who is the new *hot* director at the Almeida and his production shows all the signs of a director being given all the opportunities the National Theatre can offer - video projections, elaborate scenery possibilities and lighting, special effects...  The trouble is when these are what one remembers of the piece itself...

THE RED BARN is set in a Connecticut town in 1969, the seemingly unflappable community hides a jittery, nervous feeling of unwanted change in the country while on the verge of Richard Nixon's presidency.  Two married couples - Donald and Ingrid Dodd, Ray and Mona Sanders - attend a dinner party which takes an embarrassing turn when Donald stumbles unseen upon Ray having sex with the host's wife.  They all leave the party early due to a flash snowstorm but Ray vanishes when they all have to walk the last mile back to the Dodd's home.

Donald braves the storm again but returns after an hour without Ray and, so Mona will not be alone, Ingrid arranges that they all sleep on mattresses by the fire.  Days later, the snow is cleared and Ray is found dead.  However in the Dodd's nearby barn, the Police also discover a number of cigarette butts which lead to Donald confessing to be his - rather than hunt for Ray during the storm he sheltered in the barn for over an hour smoking.

His motives for this are possibly shown when, while visiting Mona in her Manhattan apartment to offer his professional help, they start a sexual relationship.  However it's not long before Donald starts to slowly become engulfed by his emotions and secrets and when, Mona casually tells him that she is going to marry another man, he suspects that somehow Ingrid is behind it all...

It certainly sounds like a well-told tale; the plot feels very old-fashioned for such a prestige production which might explain the flashy look of Icke's production.  The stars of the show are actually Bunny Christie's set design and Paule Constable's moody, atmospheric lighting - a massive shout-out too for the Lyttelton's tech crew who make the filmic quality of Icke's production work.

But - and it's a very big but - it feels like the one thing Icke is reticent to do is give us a thriller.  Oh no... that's too obvious, too common - no this, is an existential, slow-moving story of the destruction of a dull man's psyche.  The fact that the play features two deaths hardly registers in the frigid air atmosphere.   It all felt like one of those independent films where acting is dialed down to a minimum, the score is usually 'ironic' use of pop songs and the cinematography tends to linger on 'artistic' static set-ups just a little too long. 

The actors do not pull focus under this poe-faced concept (imagine Pinter meets Dennis Lehane): Mark Strong is obvious casting for Donald bearing in mind his last stage role was as the equally obsessed Eddie Carbone in VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE and with his unprepossessing brown wig and nerdy glasses he hardly seems equipped for the passion that allegedly grips him in his desire for his dead friend's wife.  But Strong is playing him on such a low light that his despair rarely registers, apart from an overly dramatic STAGGER SLUMP as he leaves Mona for the last time.

Hope Davis as Donald's emotionally controlled wife Ingrid certainly gives her an icy exterior but again is played in such a colourless way that you cannot care for her.  However she does make some impression, which is more than can be said for Elizabeth Debicki as the recently widowed Mona.  Her banal performance leaves you utterly clueless as to why Donald would throw up his life to be with her - he would surely be equally at home with a showroom mannequin.  I am sure she is supposed to be a blank canvas that Donald projects all his fantasies on but any interior life is totally missing from her phoned-in performance.

As I said the real star of the show is it's design; Bunny Christie has utilized black screens that move up and down, left and right to create a theatrical version of film pans and zooms which makes it enjoyable to watch - although this technique for making a show more filmic is not original - and has also designed the set to change in an instant: from the long and low cabin of the Dodds, to the Sanders' wide open and expansive Manhattan apartment.

Paule Constable's moody and atmospheric lighting is almost too much at times - in the final scene you are squinting at the stage to make out what is going on in the log cabin - but she does deliver, and Tom Gibbons' soundscape comes into it's own at the end, sounding louder and more discordant to signal to you that something shocking is about to happen.... and it does. If it had not been for this you would hardly be aware there was about to be a violent conclusion as Icke's production is played at such a glacial rate.

Something which only struck me later was how insidiously misogynistic it was - Donald is seemingly trapped between the primly efficient Ingrid (who looked astonishingly like Hilary Clinton at times from where I was sitting) and the icy beanpole Mona.  The drama is all his and after the offstage afternoon sex scene between Mona and Donald it is of course Debicki who enters topless... why?  What did that possibly add to the scene bearing in mind Strong was fully clothed.  Added to the violence of the climactic act it really did make me wonder on whether this crossed Hare or Icke's mind at all.

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: Love and Death

I am finding it difficult to write about the acclaimed production of Arthur Miller's A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE which has transferred from the Young Vic to the Wyndhams Theatre.  Not because of Ivo van Hove's production which grips like a vice but because of the action of one woman in the audience.

Miller originally wrote the play in 1955 as a one-act verse drama which was unsuccessful so he re-wrote it as a more traditional two-acter which premiered in London the next year in a production directed by Peter Brook with Anthony Quayle.

Belgian director Ivo van Hove has stripped the play down to it's bare essentials: an oblong playing area surrounded by a low ledge - and with on-stage seats on either side - feels like a bear-pit and with the single open door in the back wall there is the suggestion of a staging for Greek tragedy.  Miller acknowledged he was inspired by the Greeks in his story of Eddie Carbone who brings about his own inevitable destruction with a relentlessness worthy of Euripedes.

The white, brightly-lit, space serves for all the locations in the play - even the longshoreman's showers - but mainly for the claustrophobic apartment where Carbone lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine who has a deep attachment to him as a father figure.  Eddie has helped finance her secretarial school lessons but is upset when she accepts an office job before finishing her studies.  Exactly what fuels Eddie's smothering protection of his niece?  The situation is blown apart with the arrival of Marco and Rudolpho, two cousins of Beatrice who arrive illegally from Italy to stay in the Carbone apartment.

With no fear of exposure within the tight-knit Italian community, Eddie gets them work on the Brooklyn docks.  While Marco is quiet and respectful, just wanting to send his wages back to his impoverished wife, Rudolpho is more gregarious and a centre of attention on the docks with his blonde hair and love of singing at work.  Catherine is drawn to the fun-loving Rudolpho which triggers Eddie's jealousy and hatred of the younger man who he suspects is gay and using Catherine as his marital meal-ticket to stay in America.

 

When he realises that Catherine and Rudolpho have slept together, Eddie's jealousy consumes him and after first kissing Catherine he also violently kisses Rudolpho to show his niece what he thinks the younger man really is.  Eddie visits Alfieri, a lawyer who is trusted by the community (and the show's narrator), and hints at betraying the two men to the immigration department which Alfieri warns will make him a pariah.

But Eddie does betrays them and, when they are arrested that night, he dismisses the accusations of Beatrice and of Marco who contemptuously spits in Eddie's face.  Alfieri manages to get them bailed but begs Marco not to go after Eddie who, as he foretold, has been shunned by the community. But Marco wants his vengeance and Eddie wants his name restored, a stand-off that van Hove ends in literally a shower of blood.  It is left to Alfieri to close the play with a halting summation of the tragedy of a man who he will mourn "but with a certain alarm"....

...and it was at this moment in the play that the woman in front of Owen switched on her mobile phone.  

For it's two-hour running time, van Hove's pressure-cooker atmosphere built and built - aided by a constant ominous soundscape - to paraphrase Alfieri about Eddie, it was like a slow car-crash that you are unable to stop but can only view helplessly... all ruined by this stupid woman lighting up the first few rows with the light from her mobile phone.  Owen prodded her shoulder and asked her to please turn it off which she eventually did and after the cathartic relief of the ovation, she was railed at the two women sitting beside Owen and us both.

And what was her excuse for totally ruining the ending of this production?  In a self-righteous tone she whined "I had to check on the children".  That, Constant Reader, was when I LOST IT.  "Why couldn't you have waited FIVE MORE FUCKING MINUTES" I shouted at her smug puss.  Not once did she apologise, not once did that sense of entitlement waver.  

Frankly, I wanted to punch the fucker over the edge of the Dress Circle into the stalls.  On leaving the row, another couple were waiting to tell us they too had suffered through someone behind them rattling their last few Malteasers in a box toward the end of the play and fully understood our anger.  Which of course leads us on to why do theatres sell sweets that rustle and chocolates that rattle?  Why indeed.  And why didn't the Wyndhams give the usual announcement about switching off mobile phones, and why didn't the Circle usher race down to the woman and get her to turn off the phone?

I am sure if the hag had taken a photograph at that moment then the usher would have made her presence known so it leaves you to surmise that theatre managers are more eager to protect their rights over the rights of the audience.  John Waters has spoken about cinema audiences should become more militant - set light to projection booths if they show films out of focus etc. so maybe it's time for us as theatre audiences to have a similarly terrorist approach to idiots.

What angers me is that now this excellent production is forever going to be tainted by this stupid bitch and I don't want that.  I want to remember the excellent work of Mark Strong as Eddie, Nicola Walker as Beatrice who splendidly showed a woman slowly coming to realise the trouble in her marriage, Phoebe Fox's Catherine, Emun Elliott's Marco, Luke Norris' Rudolpho and Michael Gould's Alfieri.

Ivo van Hove's unrelenting direction leaves you breathless as he ratchets up the tension with every scene so any chance for salvation - Alfieri trying to persuade Eddie not to betray the men, Beatrice trying to tell Catherine to stop pestering Eddie - feel all the more desperate when they fail.

Jan Versweyveld's open but claustrophobic set with it's unexpected showers at the start and end of the play works wonderfully as does his lighting which subtly shifts the intensity of the bright light to mirror the shifts within the characters.  A special mention must go to Tom Gibbons' ominous soundscape which plays throughout the action, sometimes swelling into religious choral sound, that keeps you permanently on edge.

I am hoping the memory of the idiot in the row in front of us might fade but I fear she will not... so here she is.

So be warned if you see this person anywhere near you in a theatre.  Me? I just hope she drops dead.