THE CORN IS GREEN at Lyttelton, National Theatre - The Play's Not The Thing....

An imagined conversation:

Mr Norris: Great news!  We have TV Land's own Nicola Walker coming back to the National.

Mr Cooke: Coolio!  What to do?

Mr Norris: So... it's got to be a Strong Independant Woman, out there on her own, facing down prejudice and division.  So maybe something which is "heritage"?  THE CORN IS GREEN has been mooted...

Mr Cooke: But that's a warhorse fit only for Chichester all-star revivals... it's hardly National Theatre is it?  Maybe once upon a time but not now...

Mr Norris: I know... so let's do the two Rs... Radical Reimagining!

Mr Cooke: Leave it to me boss!

THE CORN IS GREEN... but not as we know it.  For 84 years. Emlyn Williams' semi-autobiographical play of a dedicated teacher in a Welsh coal-mining village focussing on a young lad with a gift for writing to get him a scholarship to Oxford, has been delivering it's remit as a Well-Written Play with a beginning a middle and an end and a stonking female lead role.  But no.  That is not enough for the National Theatre... it has to be Radically Reinterpreted to make it Relevant.

The trouble is that all Dominic Cooke's meta trappings do is make a long play longer and appear tacky, lazy and shallow framing such a well-constructed piece, standing in the audience's way shouting LOOK AT ME LOOK AT ME for no good reason at all.

Cooke has taken a look at the play, snapped his fingers and said "Of course, it's a memory play" so has staged it as one - no matter that it detracts from the material.  So Emlyn Williams is now an onstage character, first seen walking out of a 1920s dance party to struggle through composing his play.  Although by the time he wrote THE CORN IS GREEN, Williams was already a successful playwright and had just had a huge success with his thriller NIGHT MUST FALL.

So we sit through an interminable set-up with Williams being serenaded by a Welsh pit choir as he envisions on an empty set his setting, the makeshift classroom for the soon-to-arrive Miss Moffat.  Oh yes the set... a totally empty stage until the interval, after which the curtain rises on a rudimentary stage set which by the final scene is fully 'realistic' and has it's own cutsey proscenium border.  Again this does absolutely nothing for the audience's understanding of the play, having run the first half's gamut of radio-style special effects to signify doors opening and closing, footsteps going upstairs etc.

Oh yes the singing... Dominic Cooke has scattered throughout the action, passages of singing from a group of Welsh miners - if he was so desperate to make his production a musical one wonders why he didnt just have a go at the 1970s US flop musical MISS MOFFAT in which Bette Davis attempted to revisit the role she had filmed in 1945, rewritten for the deep south instead of Wales, thankfully it died on the road.

The Emlyn Williams character reads out stage directions and the set design, occasionally changing lines as the characters say them and seemingly re-inventing the last act as it's being acted out.  As I said it all smacks of a director who doesnt trust his material - THE CORN IS GREEN is several things but what it isn't is THE GLASS MENAGERIE or OUR TOWN.

The emphasis on the Emlyn Williams / Morgan Evans character also tends to shift the focus from Nicola Walker as the centre of attention which should never be the case, it's her star role to play.  Miss Moffat was originally played by Sybil Thorndike in London and Ethel Barrymore on Broadway, Bette Davis made the afore-mentioned film while Katharine Hepburn made a TV movie in Wales in 1979 directed by George Cukor.  I had seen it before at the Old Vic in 1985 with a matronly Deborah Kerr as Miss Moffat and an Olivier-winning performance from Imelda Staunton as the teenage troublemaker Bessy Watty.

Nicola Walker certainly has a presence onstage, her Miss Moffat was determined and driven but it made the character hard to actually admire as she really showed no light or shade, hardly any emotion at all.  Iwan Davies had moments of fire but otherwise his Morgan Evans was hardly a match for Miss Moffat.  By far the best performance was from Saffron Coomber as Bessy, she actually made the best counter-point to Miss Moffat - as determined to better herself as the teacher wants for her pupil, but with inate knowledge of how to get what she wants now. not later.  Jo McInnes was fine as her cockney mother, former petty thief now a Salvation Army officer - a bit of a stretch there Emlyn - but the remaining cast hid behind their stock characters - spinster teacher, nice-but-dim squire, straight-laced teacher - without bringing them to life at all.

Again at the end of the play Cooke robs his leading lady of the final moment of quiet triumph; he has his production end with his Emlyn Williams character do a foxtrot to a 1930s tune with his fictional younger self.  What on earth was he thinking??

I won't be going back before it's last performance on 11th June.

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.