50 Favourite Musicals: 7: CABARET (1966) (John Kander / Fred Ebb)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life.

First performed: 1966, Broadhurst Theatre, NY

First seen by me: 1986, Strand Theatre, London

Productions seen: four

Score: John Kander / Fred Ebb

Book: Joe Masteroff

Plot: Writer Cliff Bradshaw arrives in 1930s Berlin seeking inspiration.  Renting a room at Fraulein Schneider's boarding house, Cliff then visits the seedy Kit Kat Klub - presided over by the mysterious MC - and meets extravagant English performer Sally Bowles.  Sally moves in with Cliff the next day and their love affair grows alongside Fraulein Schneider's tentative relationship with Jewish shopkeeper Herr Schultz.  But the darkening shadows of the Nazis are closing in...

Five memorable numbers: CABARET, TOMORROW BELONGS TO ME, WILKOMMEN, WHAT WOULD YOU DO, PERFECTLY MARVELLOUS

CABARET has infiltrated people's imaginations for 54 years, largely due to Bob Fosse's iconic 1972 screen version with the brilliant star wattage of Liza Minnelli as Sally Bowles.  It seems remarkable that the film was released only 6 years after the show's Broadway debut but it is a completely different entity to it's source.  Fosse dropped most of the score, any songs that were sung outside the Kit Kat Klub onstage were jettisoned to give his film a more realistic feel; a few sneaked through as background music and of course "Tomorrow Belongs To Me" provided a magnificent set-piece in a beer garden.  So a first-time viewer of the show who has a knowledge of the film - like me in 1986 - is thrown initially with the original storyline.   But CABARET has seen additions and deletions from it's score with almost every stage revival as tastes and directorial conceits change.

The first attempt to musicalize John Van Druten's play I AM A CAMERA based on Christopher Isherwood's GOODBYE TO BERLIN stories was by Sandy Wilson, writer of THE BOY FRIEND - just dwell on that for a minute - but the rights transferred to Harold Prince who decided his SHE LOVES ME writer Joe Masteroff could provide the book, with the score being written by John Kander and Fred Ebb, only their second musical.  The show opened at the Broadhurst Theatre, going on to win 8 Tony Awards including Best Musical.  This production included British actress Jill Haworth as Sally, Joel Grey as the MC, Lotte Lenya as Fraulein Schneider and Jack Gilford as Herr Schultz.  The production transferred to two other theatres before closing in 1969, and by then Prince had reproduced the show at London's Palace Theatre with Judi Dench as Sally (her musical debut), Lila Kedrova as Fraulein Schneider and Peter Sallis as Herr Schultz.  As I mentioned, I first saw CABARET when Gillian Lynne directed a revival at the Strand Theatre which felt off-kilter thanks to an over-emphasis on Wayne Sleep's MC to the detriment of Kelly Hunter's Sally, a real star turn.

Sam Mendes staged his acclaimed revival at the Donmar in 1993, starring Alan Cumming as the MC, Jane Horrocks as Sally and Sara Kestelman as Fraulein Schneider.  Setting it within the cabaret itself and ramping up the sleaze, songs were dropped while others were added.  In 1998 Mendes' production, now co-directed by Rob Marshall, made it to New York where it ran for four years, first at the site-specific Kit Kat Klub then, very appropriately, at Studio 54.  The cast was led again by Cumming with Natasha Richardson as Sally and both won Tony Awards as did the show for Best Musical Revival, losing other awards to THE LION KING juggernaut.  Mendes moving the MC to the centre of the production also meant he closed the show by stripping off an overcoat to reveal he was dressed as a concentration camp inmate.  Taking the sleaze and Nazis route, Rufus Norris directed a London revival in 2006 at the Lyric which starred Anna Maxwell Martin as Sally, James Dreyfus as the MC, Sheila Hancock as Fraulein Schneider and Geoffrey Hutchings as Herr Schultz.  No doubt feeling the need to top the Mendes final image, Norris had the MC joining the Cabaret dancers huddled upstage under a shower of Zyklon-B flakes and the sound of hissing echoing around the stage.  Hey Mr Director... we, the audience DO get the ending of the show.  One wonders how the next revival will end, it's almost like the directors are desperately covering up that they are actually directing a Broadway musical.

CABARET should be higher in the chart, it is at #7 only because it has suffered with misguided productions that the show struggles to overcome.

The obvious choice would be a clip of the Fosse film but I have gone with the original 1966 production at the Tony Awards - just look at the size of the cast - with Joel Grey's MC bidding us Wilkommen.... and who can ever refuse that invitation?

50 Favourite Musicals: 31: ASSASSINS (1990) (Stephen Sondheim)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1990, Playwrights Horizons, US
First seen by me: 1992, Donmar Warehouse, London

Productions seen: four

Score: Stephen Sondheim
Book: John Weidman

Plot:  In a funfair, a shooting-range proprietor calls eight men and women to try their luck at his stall.  They are revealed to be eight misfits who attempted - and in some cases succeeded - in assassinating United States Presidents.

Five memorable numbers: EVERYBODY'S GOT THE RIGHT, THE GUN SONG / THE BALLAD OF CZOLGOSZ, UNWORTHY OF YOUR LOVE, THE BALLAD OF BOOTH, THE BALLAD OF GUITEAU

The collaborations between Stephen Sondheim and John Weidman always give us the unexpected: the coerced opening up of Japan to Western trade in PACIFIC OVERTURES, and the ways to make and lose fortunes in early 20th Century America in ROAD SHOW; but their most avant-garde and controversial musical remains ASSASSINS, a show that challenges it's audience to at least understand four Presidential assassins and five would-be ones.  Short dramatic and black comedy scenes are glued together by Sondheim's score which encompasses styles of Americana music to devastating effect.  Weidman's book presents the assassins' warped manifestos and expose them to be disenfranchised loners who realized that if someone has power and fame then a way to get some of that is to be the person who kills them.  They gather together from across history: John Wilkes Booth, Giuseppe Zangara, Leon Czolgosz, Charles Guiteau, John Hinckley, Lynette 'Squeaky' Fromme and Sarah Jane Moore.  Weidman gives two non-musical scenes to the insane rantings of Samuel Byck, on his way to fly a hijacked plane into Richard Nixon's White House and - in the musical's most chilling scene - the assassins emerge from the shadows of the Texas School Book Depository to make Lee Harvey Oswald realise his destiny  Sondheim's score constantly surprises with it's musical sang-froid - Hinkley and Fromme sing a Carpenters-style love song but with a chilling aspect as they are singing of their deranged love for Jodie Foster and Charles Manson; Guiteau performs a minstrel-style cakewalk as he capers up the scaffold stairs; a Souza march is utilized to counterpoint the bitter ravings of Zangara from the electric-chair that there are no photographers present; a barbershop quartet harmonize over their guns; and the show's narrator, The Balladeer, sings a tongue-twisting bouncy song to illustrate Czolgosz's shuffling progression to the head of a queue to shake hands with William McKinley - and shoot him.  Interestingly The Balladeer presents an echo of Sondheim's previous musical INTO THE WOODS as three-quarters through each show, the characters turn on their narrator, disagreeing with his version of events - here the result is the barnstorming "Another National Anthem" as the assassins show their actions as warped versions of searching for The American Dream.  With it's small cast, minimal set and relatively small number of songs, ASSASSINS has been seen in a few fringe revivals in London - not all of them successful - but my fondest memory is of Sam Mendes' UK premiere production at the Donmar, with excellent, idiosyncratic performances by David Firth (Booth), Louise Gold (Moore), Ciaran Hinds (Byck), and Henry Goodman, unforgettable as the insane Guiteau.  Interestingly, it was for the Donmar production that Sondheim added a song after the Lee Harvey Oswald scene "Something Just Broke" which gives a voice to ordinary people at their shock and sadness of Kennedy's killing; an attempt to re-balance the show which I can understand but think it rather undercuts the show's ominous power.  Those fringe revivals that felt too obvious is why ASSASSINS is placed lower than it ideally should be in my list.

Here is the show's final number, performed by the 2004 Broadway cast including Neil Patrick Harris, Michael Cerveris and Denis O'Hare, at the Tony Awards where it won five awards.  The song, a reprise of the opening number "Everybody's Got The Right" is the most Broadway-sounding song in the score but reiterates Sondheim and Weidman's contention that the assassins' saw their actions as being some sort of unalienable right...  The original 1991 cast recording remains sublime.

THE LEHMAN TRILOGY at the Lyttelton, National Theatre - Brother Bankers

What had I let myself in for, I thought, as I sat in the Lyttelton to watch nearly three and a half hours of Italian-translated drama about the banking firm Lehman Brothers who were one of the biggest casualties of the 2008 financial crisis?  I had let myself in for a wonderful night of pure theatre.

Everything about the production purrs along like a Rolls-Royce, making the ride smooth as silk: Sam Mendes direction, Es Devlin's set and the three masterly performances of Simon Russell Beale, Adam Godley and Ben Miles.  Apart from a few noddy moments in the first of three acts, I was fully drawn into the Lehman's world of finance, their rise in power and influence almost symbiotically matched by the growth of America as a country of risk, investment and money.  Luckily the play's adapter Ben Power has reduced the original Italian playing time of five hours!

In a huge, sleek glass-walled office, a cleaner goes about his work in between cardboard archive boxes which are piled up along the windows looking out into a dark Manhattan night; slowly three figures in formal 19th Century frock coats appear from nowhere: they introduce themselves as Henry, Emmanuel and Mayer Lehman.  Henry arrived in New York from Bavaria in 1844, just another Jewish immigrant from old Europe seeking a new life in the New World.  He travelled down to Alabama and opened a store where he was joined by his brother Emmanuel three years later, and the youngest brother Mayer three years after that.  Their store started buying and re-selling raw cotton and, so quietly and unobtrusively, an empire was born.

And so they rose in prominence and influence, every major setback in the country seemingly to play to their advantage especially during the Civil War when they shifted their offices to New York and, when the War proved cotton an unstable product, moved onto coffee and oil.  When the War ended, they deftly became a bank, better to aid the South's reconstruction through Alabama State funds. Soon after the beginning of the 20th Century, the original three brothers were dead.  Emmanuel's son Phillip headed up the company until his son Robert took over: by then they had helped in setting up Woolworth, Macy's, Sears & Roebuck, Pan Am, Studebaker, RCA, Haliburton and Compaq.

Robert managed to successfully steer the company through the Stock Market crash and following Great Depression but with no family to hand the firm onto at Robert's death, disruptive leadership battles in the boardroom led to the business being sold to American Express.  By the time of it's regained Independence in the 1990s it was heavily involved in the shadier, more risky banking practises.  Eventually it's doctored balance sheets and disastrous subprime mortgage loans forced the company into bankruptcy.

The crash is dealt with relatively swiftly as the climax of the play, it's almost like writer Stefano Massini and adapter Ben Powers felt that it didn't need too much time spent on it, they are more interested in the journey of the family to that moment and how the intentions of the three original brothers were changed into the greed and sharp practises 164 years later.  Through the use of careful symbolism the play slowly takes hold, I loved the constant thread (no pun intended) running through the middle section of a tightrope walker who performed on Wall Street in the 1920s (illustrated by Simon Russell Beale!) until the day he fell off the wire in 1929, almost presaging the Crash.

Massini's play has previously been staged with large casts of actors playing all the members of the Lehman family and their associates but in Sam Mendes' marvellous stroke of genius he has just his three actors play all the roles which affords countless lightning-fast impressions of characters - some of whom you definitely wish to see more of.  Of course Simon Russell Beale is pure joy, as the oldest brother Henry whose early demise from Yellow Fever gives him free rein to appear as flirty maids, Southern belles, an old rabbi, the obsessive Phillip Lehman and as Robert Lehman's hard-as-nails wife Ruth - an incidental but never-to-be-forgotten image is of him doing a very prim and demure twist to "The Beat Goes On"!

Adam Godley also triumphs in various roles but mostly as Robert Lehman, whose love of speed and recklessness almost mirrors the eventual downturn in his family's business under his watch, he also hilariously plays all the women that Philip Lehman methodically dates and rejects following a mathematical rating system and the eventual bride Carrie - he also was born to play a screaming baby!

Ben Miles loses out on the showier roles but is very good as Herbert Lehman, the censorious son of Mayer Lehman who avoided the family business and became a powerful Democratic New York politician, as well as the nasty Lewis Glucksman who rises from being a trader to running the business off the rails and into American Express' domain.

Es Devlin's large glass box set slowly revolves at each new scene to open up a new vista and is a wonderful place to stage the Lehman saga, it also manages a cunning reveal in the final scene when the three actors vanish as a crowd of supernumeraries - and what a shock after living with the three lead actors for over three hours it is to see a large group of people - as the 2008 employees crowded into the office with their cardboard boxes waiting for the bankruptcy phone call.

Jon Clark's lighting is exemplary but the real visual coup is Luke Halls' video cyclorama at the back which seamlessly moves the locations from early New York to the cotton fields and rolling rivers of the South back again to the growing, unstoppable skyline of Manhattan, as Robert Lehman's mania for hanging onto life is illustrated by Godley, Russell Beale and Miles twisting on boxes to Sonny and Cher's "The Beat Goes On" - an inspired choice - Halls' dense downtown skyline spins faster and faster out of control; a remarkable stage image.  A special mention too for the musical underscoring by Candida Caldicot on a piano by the side of the stage.

In a year that has already been full of delights, THE LEHMAN TRILOGY is one of the most unexpectedly powerful; it shows again what only theatre can do: to conjure a world and a span of time by allowing your imagination to fly.

50 Favourite Musicals: 46: COMPANY (1970) (Stephen Sondheim)

The 50 shows that have stood out down the years and, as we get up among the paint cards, the shows that have become the cast recording of my life:

First performed: 1970, Alvin Theater, NY
First seen by me: 1996, Albery Theatre, London

Productions seen: two

Score: Stephen Sondheim
Book: George Furth

Plot:  Robert is single and living in New York; on his 35th birthday his best friends - five couples - throw him a surprise party which finally makes him confront his lack of commitment in relationships.

Five memorable numbers: BEING ALIVE, THE LADIES WHO LUNCH, BARCELONA, GETTING MARRIED TODAY, SIDE BY SIDE BY SIDE

As you all reel from the fact that a Sondheim musical is only at #46, I have to say that, although it's not my favourite of his shows, I think I enjoyed it more than the 'Variety' critic who reported after seeing it's 1970 Boston try-out "As it stands now it's for ladies' matinees, homos and misogynists."  Charmed.  I had to wait quite a while to see it and finally caught up with Sam Mendes' Donmar revival when it transferred to the Albery in 1996 with the extraordinary cast of Adrian Lester as Robert, the late Sheila Gish as Joanne, the unstoppable Sophie Thompson as Amy and such solid musical performers as Teddy Kempner, Paul Bentley, Clare Burt, Clive Rowe and Michael Simkins - a company as good as that can distract you from thoughts that the characters are all fairly annoying.  My main COMPANY memory is seeing Patti LuPone at the Leicester Square Theatre who ended her show with Joanne's coruscating solo THE LADIES WHO LUNCH and, at the song's climax, tossed her martini (aka water) into the audience - and over me.  Cow. Let's see if she can do it again in October when we see her play the role in Marianne Elliott's upsy-gender revival at the Gielgud....

Here is a remarkable performance of THE LADIES WHO LUNCH by it's originator Elaine Stritch - the performance is worthy of Beckett it's so unflinching..

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THE FERRYMAN at the Gielgud Theatre - secrets in Troubles times...

2017 was already shaping up to be a great year for theatre and now Jez Butterworth's THE FERRYMAN has confirmed it.  Butterworth has already shown with JERUSALEM that he could write for a large cast but here that includes 21 speaking roles as well as a baby, a goose and a bunny!!

Despite it's roughly-agreed thirty year span, how many plays have directly addressed The Troubles in Northern Ireland?  Bearing in mind how deep it ran in both Ireland and the UK's collective psyche it cannot be said to have populated the main stages of the West End, the fringe maybe, cinema occasionally, the West End no. 

But Jez Butterworth has taken the queasy atmosphere in 1981 Northern Ireland and filtered it through a classic tragedy-style plot where the sins of the past come back to haunt those still living, both innocent and guilty.  But within that framework there is also a stunted love story, comedy, tension, poetry, swearing, 80s pop, the insidious nature of teenage peer-pressure and the constant undertow of nationalist resentment.

Dawn breaks as a couple are playing drunken what-if games in a cottage kitchen, they obviously have a special, easy relationship with each other but we soon find out, as the rest of the extended family wake up and enter the kitchen, that they are brother-in-law and sister-in-law and the oncoming harvest will change their relationship forever.

The very first scene sets a lingering discordant note: Father Horrigan is having a secret meeting with Muldoon, a man who exudes a chilly power.  A body has been discovered in a peat bog, hands tied, shot in the head.  The priest identifies him as a member of the Carney family.  The man's brother Quinn was once an IRA 'soldier' but renounced them at the time of his brother's disappearance to run his father's farm in the countryside with his wife, seven children and extended family.  Muldoon blackmails the priest to go to the farm and persuade Quinn not to make waves.

 

Quinn and his wife Mary had invited sister-in-law Caitlin to move into their home with her son Oisin ten years ago and has made herself indispensable to the family, with Mary retreating for longer periods to her bedroom claiming illness, Caitlin has assumed the role of homemaker.  She has never given up the hope that her husband is alive in England, having been fed with rumours of sightings.  

The rambling farmhouse is also home to aunts Maggie and Pat, uncle Patrick, and also Tom, a simple-minded Englishman who have lived with the family since being discovered as a child lost and disheveled.  Aunt Maggie has dementia but her lucid moments are shot through with a strange mysticism, Aunt Pat is a hardline Republican with a venal streak toward Caitlin who is wrestling with her deepening affection for Quinn who, in turn, is trying to hide his feelings for her now Mary is growing colder towards him.

All this is disrupted when Father Horrigan arrives with his painful news which sends Quinn and Caitlin into shock.  She tells Quinn that she will wait till the harvest has been collected before telling her son but Oisin overhears them and is plunged into despair.  The harvest is gathered, helped by their three young Corcoran cousins, but the celebrations are interrupted by the appearance of Muldoon, greeted as a hero by Aunt Pat and at arm's length by Quinn.  

Muldoon reveals his real interest in the Carney family, the news of the IRA hunger strikers dying has given them massive public sympathy and it would be counter-productive for Quinn or Caitlin to announce that the IRA murder their own.  The political and the personal erupt into a night of growing tensions and betrayals before an explosion of violence that will scar the family forever... 

Sam Mendes's production is a masterpiece of delayed tension; it's always there running under the action, you are just never sure when it will erupt - will it be the internal family pressure that explodes into violence or will it be external world that blows the family apart?  However it is both that leads the stage at the end to resemble a Jacobean tragedy.  I must admit the ultimate sudden bloodbath made me think of David Cronenberg's A HISTORY OF VIOLENCE which pulled my focus; the violence is necessary but I hoped it might be reached through the insidious emotional pressure of Aunt Pat and Mary.

But THE FERRYMAN is it's own entity and it's sheer breadth of invention and dramatic sweep belies it's rural farmhouse look - it also feels more of a whole than JERUSALEM which was powered by it's larger-than-life central character of 'Rooster', here Quinn is almost the still centre of the vortex with his family providing a non-stop array of vividness.  As Quinn, Paddy Considine is never less than watchable, his remarkable capacity for submerged hurt and anger is never far away, in this his stage debut.

Considine's slow-burn performance is all the more remarkable in that he is surrounded by actors playing to the back of the balcony - but in a good way!  Sam Mendes has assembled an excellent cast who all contribute much to the play's success.

It is a production that for once boasts four key female roles, all played wonderfully: Laura Donnelly gives a quietly luminous performance as Caitlin, trapped by circumstance in Quinn's family but unwilling to move on for her love of him; her final scenes of desperation ring shockingly true, willing to accept the most degrading of circumstances to save her beloved and his family.  Her scenes with Genevieve O'Reilly as Quinn's wife Mary were shot through with tension, a sisterly relationship which is undercut with feelings of bitter antagonism and jealousy.

This uneasy relationship is further undermined by the marvellously devious aunt Pat played with icy fury by Dearbhla Molloy, here looking like a dessicated husk of a woman.  Pat is the rural queen of the killer put-down and the laughs she easily wins from the audience tend to die on the lips when you realize how venal she is, yet she is given a believable history of devotion to the Cause through witnessing the death of her brother, killed defending the Post Office in Dublin during the Easter Rising.

Her counterpoint is Brid Brennan's aunt Maggie who for long stretches of the play simply stares from her chair in the kitchen but who wakes from her reveries occasionally to deliver truths learnt on her internal journeys in her mind.  It was marvellous to see these two exceptional Irish actresses given such fine roles to play.

Des McAleer is very good as the comical and understanding uncle Patrick with a fondness for Greek myths, while Stuart Graham is frightening as Muldoon, the softly-spoken IRA chief who understands the weaknesses within the Carney family all too well.  There is fine work too from John Hodgkinson as Tom Kettle, the simple-minded displaced Englishman who provokes a catalogue of disasters when he clumsily proposes to Caitlin hours after she learns she is a widow, and from the always dependable Gerard Horan as the blackmailed Father Horrigan.

At the start of the third act, Quinn's two sons have an early hours drink with their Corcoran cousins which turns more menacing as they show that they are ready to stumble into tragedy themselves.  The feeling of lives about to take a turn down the wrong road was expertly conveyed and in particular I liked the very believable filial performances of the Corcoran cousins: Séan Basil Crawford - as the oldest Shane, already in too deep with the IRA - Conor MacNeill and Oliver Finnegan.

The farmhouse was wonderfully evoked in Rob Howell's cluttered, lived-in set and Peter Mumford's excellent lighting illuminated the 24 hours that devastate the Carney family.

THE FERRYMAN has nagged away at me since I saw it and will for some time to come - I urge you to see this tender and terrifying tale of hidden love and hidden lies.  It's playing at the Gielgud Theatre until the 6th of January.

Interpreting Shakespeare

How to interpret a Shakespearean character?  I have had two opportunities to find out recently...

For the second time in as many years, there is a production that has been heavily anticipated so much you can feel the cognoscenti holding their breath.  Last year it was the combination of Adrian Lester and Rory Kinnear in OTHELLO and now this year we have Simon Russell Beale as KING LEAR, directed by long-time collaborator Sam Mendes.

 

I felt OTHELLO was less than was expected and at times KING LEAR was a bit disappointing too but on the whole it fulfilled the expectation raised.  It certainly was a huge production which opens with a huge flaming sun being slowly eclipsed and then gives us big open spaces on the Olivier stage, big statues, a big cast, torture by water-boarding - and even a big dead stag - but at times I yearned for the claustrophobic Cottesloe production from 1997 which was directed by Richard Eyre with a landmark performance by Ian Holm.

 

 

Mendes has set his production in a 20th Century totalitarian state that is ruled over by the hunched and shaven-headed Lear who calls a summit conference to ask his three daughters the famous question of which one of them loves him the most.

 

Interestingly this was the first production I have seen where the dual plot device was really apparent to me.  Lear isn't the only one who fatally makes a wrong decision regarding his children, Gloucester also chooses to believe his bastard son Edmund's lie that his legal son Edgar is plotting to kill him, his eager belief in the lie echoes Lear's banishing of his favourite daughter Cordelia for her perceived lack of love for him.  Both actions are catastrophic but, as I said this is the first production where I noticed the obvious parallel lines of the plot.

 

 

I think this is mostly down to the exceptional performance of Stephen Boxer as Gloucester, a career politician who realises too late, and at a terrible cost, his miscalculation.  The performances of Sam Troughton as the venal Edmund was very good, played like a faceless Special Advisor who seizes his chance in the power vacuum.  Troughton had good fun with his soliloquies where Edmund shares his delight in his machinations.  Peter Ackroyd's biography of Shakespeare suggests that the same actor would have played Iago in OTHELLO and I believe this to be the case as they both share a delight in their villany,  Sadly Tom Brooke's Edgar was a trifle anonymous, even with his old boy flapping about as 'Poor Tom'.

Stanley Townsend, not a performer I usually warm to, was excellent as Kent.  Gruff and burly and quick to anger, yet he could touch the heart especially with his dignified final lines "I have a journey, sir, shortly to go / My master calls me, I must not say no."

 

Adrian Scarborough was also very good as The Fool, becoming more and more despondent as his truisms fall more an more on deaf ears.  How do you solve a problem like the Fool?  He vanishes halfway through the play and there is a good reason put forward in the Ackroyd book that possibly the boy actor who played Cordelia also played The Fool which explains the character's disappearance as Cordelia comes back into the action. 

 

Mendes solves the problem the same way that Adrian Noble's 1982 production did, namely that during the trial scene Lear, in the depth of his derangement, kills the Fool in place of an imagined Goneril.  Here the violent act springs from nowhere and as such, was doubly shocking.

 

Sadly the daughters didn't do it for me at all.  Kate Fleetwood's Wallis Simpson lookalike Goneril seemed too under-charged while Anna Maxwell Martin was overly-screechy and too obvious as an over-sexed Regen.  Mendes has also chopped and changed the text in areas so in this production, the sisters die on stage: Maxwell Martin poisoned and dying huddled under a table while Fleetwood cuts her own throat.  It certainly moves the characters a bit more into the limelight but it all looks badly staged and not organic to the play's flow.

 

The good news was that I quite liked Olivia Vinall as Cordelia who showed a lot more presence than she did as Desdemona in last year's OTHELLO.

 

 

I have seen five Lears on stage and they have been inching up in ages: Michael Gambon (1983, aged 43), Richard Briars (1990, aged 56), Robert Stephens (1994, aged 63), Ian Holm (1997, aged 66) and Derek Jacobi (2010, aged 72).  Simon Russell Beale drops the scale back down as he is 53 but he gives a consummate performance, maybe just missing greatness.

 

Playing an obviously dictatorial Lear, Beale in the first scene gives a clue to his encroaching incapacity with a trembling hand that twitches behind him, and with each subsequent downturn in his fortunes the twitch becomes more pronounced.  Despite his fearful whispered "O let me not be mad" to the Fool, by the heath scene - oddly staged on a levitating ramp - he is deranged, even stripping down to a pair of baggy underpants in sympathy with the naked Poor Tom.

 

 

Beale appears in the Dover scene as an escapee from his hospital bed, wearing his hospital smock, the Fool's hat and a carrier bag of his meagre possessions.  The subsequent scene where he is reunited with Cordelia was also finely played as a man slowly recovering his memory of his daughter from a fit of anger.

 

The final scene was beautifully played and you could hear a pin drop when he said "Thou'lt come no more / Never, never, never, never, never!" each repetition pitched differently.  I am not sure why on reflection I feel he missed greatness, maybe a feeling that he missed the pathos that Ian Holm and Derek Jacobi brought to the final moments.

 

 

With this production so fresh in my mind, it was fascinating to then see ELLEN TERRY WITH EILEEN ATKINS at the new Wanamaker Playhouse, the Globe's companion theatre.  Built to replicate a Jacobean indoor theatre, it's tiny auditorium would feel claustrophobic if you were seeing a production the length of KING LEAR but this show's running time of 80 minutes was fine.

 

In 1910 the great 19th Century actress Ellen Terry was 63 and after failing as an actor/manager of her own theatre, she decided to do lecture tours on Shakespeare, especially his women.  Eileen Atkins has adapted these latter ones into a one-woman show which has her become Terry to tell us her thoughts on Shakespeare, stories from her career playing his heroines and also perform speeches and scenes from them.  In 1989 Eileen Atkins adapted Virginia Woolf's A ROOM OF ONE'S OWN into a one-woman play with much success and she has triumphed again with Ellen Terry.  I was transfixed by her.

 

 

As Ellen Terry she takes us back to when she played Puck in A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM aged 9 years old and how in the final scene one night, her bare toe was caught in the trap-door.  As she wailed and sobbed, the producer of the show ran on stage and freeing her whispered "Finish the show and I'll double your salary".  Needless to say the always-practical Terry finished the show,

Through her insights into the roles she played, Terry shares her unique standpoint as the person who had to bring those characters to life.  She also includes Rosalind which she never got to appear in due to the fact that Henry Irving would not let her play the role at the Lyceum as there was no good role for him!

Eileen Atkins said in an interview that she would not attempt to act the scenes in Terry's style: "She was extremely clever and passionate, but we all know that acting is subject to fashion. You’re in, then you’re out. It makes me sad that even some of Laurence Olivier’s performances look old-fashioned now. So I’m pretty well Eileen Atkins when it comes to the actual parts" - and how wonderful for that as it's when Atkins plays the scenes that the true magic happens.

With no props or costumes - or even lighting cues - she became Rosalind, Portia, Mistress Page, Beatrice, Viola, Juliet, Desdemona and Emilia as well as Othello, Cordelia as well as King Lear, and finally Ophelia.

 

Several times, this most under-rated and astonishing actress brought tears to my eyes.  Her Juliet, trembling and afraid of having to swallow the potion that will make her appear dead; her Emilia, righteous in her fury at Othello's killing of Desdemona; Portia's 'The quality of mercy' speech; Ophelia's mad scene, and most poignant of all, Cordelia and King Lear's reconciliation.  Coming so soon after seeing the full production along the river, I know which one I would kill to see again.

 

It was an evening that will stay with me for a long time, it was living proof of that alchemy that true acting genius can achieve. 

 

Time to catch up on my last two theatre trips, both written by that promising Brummie William Shakespeare.

Both productions featured performances that had Must-See stamped on them but none more so than Kevin Spacey as RICHARD III - if ever there was a perfect marriage of actor and role this had to be it.This production marked the end of the highly-publicised - and pretentiously titled - Bridge Project which featured Sam Mendes directing nine plays over the past 3 years which toured the world with a yearly company of actors drawn from the UK and the US. However none of the productions I saw seemed to be that successful with some remarkably ropey performances - mostly from the Americans to be honest.

The production was stark - each scene started with the first word of the scene projected on a scrim - and had a clunky stylised air such as certain doors that enclosed the playing space being marked with a X as another of Richard's victims bit the dust - we were treated to Gloucester being graphically drowned while others made do with just having their eyes closed by another company member. All very odd. As with previous Bridge productions there were some remarkably dodgy performances - the prime suspects here were Chandler Williams as a Clarence who seemed to be channelling a bad Kirk Douglas impersonator, Michael Rudko as a dull Lord Stanley and Nathan Darrow as a dreary Henry, Earl of Richmond.

There were no particularly exciting male performers in the cast so let's move on to Spacey. As much as I enjoyed him I must admit that afterwards I felt a bit becalmed as he gave exactly the performance that I was expecting. The slithery delivery, the barnstorming theatricality, the glittering ambiguity... it was all there. To be honest though, nothing he did surprised me or made me see a hidden dimension to his character.

I must say Spacey's physicality was impressive with his twisted gait and calipered leg and, with his constant scampering around the stage, he had boundless energy.

In both acts Mendes and Spacey concocted indelible stage moments: in Buckingham's stage-managed attempt to 'persuade' Richard to accept the crown while he demurs to be left alone to his prayers, Mendes had him broadcast live on a tv screen seemingly shocked and tremulous to be interrupted praying, while at the same time surreptitiously pushing away the fake monks surrounding him. In the second act, as the Battle of Bosworth draws ever closer and Richard's paranoia increases he delivered his speeches in the ranting style of Gaddafi which really drove home the timelessness of the play.

His death scene - while physically impressive - rather defeated his performance. Mendes has the dead Richard hoisted aloft by his ankles, Mussolini-style, to sway above the stage while Henry delivers his speech to the glories of the Tudor age to come. All this did was to remind me of reports of Olivier's famous death scene in CORIOLANUS at Stratford in 1959 - and Olivier should never be allowed to enter people's minds when they are watching another actor play Richard III.Oddly enough, for once the women ruled the roost - Haydn Gwynne (not an actress I usually warm to) was an impassioned Queen Elizabeth, Annabel Scholey was a forlorn Lady Anne and, in the real performance of the night, Gemma Jones gave us a thrilling Queen Margaret, haunting the stage in a top coat and wild hair. Her big scene where she denounces the Yorkist Queens was, for me, the highlight of the evening.I guess any time this play is performed it will always seem to mirror whatever despot is ruling somewhere in the world but with Gaddafi shrieking his revenge in a hidden location at all those seeking to overthrow him it made this 420 year old play remarkably contemporary.

Well Constant Reader, that's *that* crossed off the list. For some reason, I have never seen a production of THE TEMPEST. I know... killing isn't it? Not even when Vanessa Redgrave played Prospero at The Globe - and if I didn't see that....

I had seen Derek Jarman's 1979 film version but remember being totally baffled by it as I was not familiar with the play - all I remember was Elisabeth Welch as a Goddess singing STORMY WEATHER - utterly brilliant! Sadly Miss Welch was not available for reasons of mortality to join the cast at the Old Vic on Thursday. More's the pity.Sam Mendes' production is the latest in his much-vaunted and slightly pretentiously-titled Bridge Project in which two productions are cast with both English and American actors. Much is always made of this, Kenneth Branagh could bore for Britain on the AMAZING concept of using UK/US actors play Shakespeare, but it's been going on for years ffs! John Gielgud's Hamlet to Lillian Gish's Ophelia; Paul Robeson's Othello to Peggy Ashcroft's Desdemona; James Mason's Brutus and Gielgud's Cassius to Marlon Brando's Marc Antony and Louis Calhern's JULIUS CAESAR, Gielgud's Henry IV to Orson Welles' Falstaff in CHIMES AT MIDNIGHT etc.

I saw one of Mendes' Bridge productions last year THE WINTER'S TALE which was ok thanks to the performances of Simon Russell Beale and Sinead Cusack but hardly earth-shattering. THE TEMPEST sadly cannot draw on even these talents.

Within 10 minutes of the production starting I was groaning. I had heard the reports that Stephen Dillaine as Prospero was muffling his delivery but even before he spoke we had Alvin Epstein making noises as Gonzalo - "Ee o' eh' Ba Ee ho" was all I heard - and I was about 10 rows back in the stalls. I was all but shouting out "Speak from your bumhole not through it!"

Ok let's name names - out of the American actors I liked Christian Camargo's Ariel (hardly 'an airy spirit' but well-spoken and an arresting presence), Ron Cephas Jones' Caliban (again well-spoken and with a real stage presence), Jonathan Lincoln Fried as Alonson (a bit stolid but again well-spoken) and Thomas Sadoski as Stephano (a nice hair-trigger feeling of menace)Now the English - I liked Edward Bennett as Ferdinand but I was aware too that his over-emphatic delivery and stolid presence offers little variety in his performance, Anthony O'Donnell gave his usual sterling support as Trinculo making the 'rude mechanicals' scenes bearable and although Juliet Rylance was a convincing Miranda I found her delivery annoying, horribly reminiscent of Stella Gonet's matronly tones.
Which brings us to Stephen Dillaine as Propero. I must put my hand up to say I don't care for him much, I find his wheedling delivery profoundly irritating and earthbound. But who wants an earthbound Prospero? I don't understand how an actor can be given the opportunity to play one of the great roles and piss it away as Dillaine does. You want to feel the poetry in his lines? You want to hear Shakespeare speaking through him in his farewell to the theatre? Well you won't get it from Dillaine who plays the whole thing like an irritated old giffer moaning from his garden shed.I can only presume he is taking his lead from Mendes but it's a misguided lead. The production never felt to be leading anywhere or even know it had arrived. I waited for something to happen, to lift us out of the Old Vic to Prospero's unnamed island but we remained trapped in Tom Piper's cave-like set although Paul Pyant's subtle lighting shifts at least gave us an idea of where we should be in our minds.

As I sat there I found myself drifting back to Ian Charleson - although to be honest it doesn't take much for that to happen.

Ian was a well-received Ariel in 1978 at the Royal Shakespeare Company opposite Michael Hordern's Prospero and would have been sixty this year, the perfect age for Propero. Imagining the way Ian could have made the lines come alive made me resent Dillaine's whittering all the more.