50 Favourite Musicals: 28: THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS (2010) (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: 2010, Vineyard Theatre, NY

First seen by me: 2013, Young Vic, London

Productions seen: one

Score: John Kander, Fred Ebb
Book: David Thompson

Plot: The device of a minstrel show is used to explore one of America's most shocking miscarriages of justice: In 1931, nine young black men - aged from 13 to 20 - were arrested and sentenced to death for the alleged rape of two young white women in a boxcar train.  Although the death sentences were commuted - and one of the women admitted on oath that the accusations were all lies - the Scottsboro Boys were made to endure re-trial after re-trial.

Five memorable numbers: GO BACK HOME, NOTHIN', COMMENCING IN CHATTANOOGA, HEY HEY HEY HEY!, NEVER TOO LATE

Sometimes I see a show and within the first 15 minutes I know I can relax as I am safe in the hands of practitioners at the top of their game, THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS was such a show.  Those practitioners were composers John Kander and Fred Ebb, writer David Thompson and director / choreographer Susan Stroman who met in 2002 to find a new project to work on. They revisited the court room territory of Kander and Ebb's CHICAGO and looked at famous American trials, and the case of the Scottsboro Boys was chosen.  Work was underway when lyricist Fred Ebb sadly died in 2004 putting the show on hold.  In 2008 Stroman asked Kander to try writing the unwritten lyrics and two years later, the show appeared Off-Broadway.  It transferred to Broadway later that year but frustratingly did not find an audience and closed two months later, ironically it was nominated for 12 Tony Awards after it closed but won none.  I saw it when Stroman recreated her show at the Young Vic - with five cast members from the US show - where it became a sold out hit and it later transferred to the Garrick in the West End for a four month run.  Soon after the show opened on Broadway it had to run the gamut of protesters protesting Stroman's use of the minstrel show.  What these clowns could not understand was that the device of the minstrel show was just that - an ironic device where the avuncular white Interlocutor doubled as the various judges who denied the men justice, while the minstrel show's two resident comedians Mr Bones and Mr Tambo play the men's defence lawyers, prosecutors and racist policemen and warders.  During the course of the action, the nine men playing the Scottsboro Boys slowly take over the storytelling - much to the Interlocutor's frustration - until the finale is disrupted by them refusing to give him the happy ending he wants.  Shadowing all the action is a black woman who responds to the injustices and mistreatment with sorrow; this all comes full circle when she closes the show, climbing on a bus and refusing to move her seat.  It was a bit obvious but is based in truth, Rosa Parks and her husband had campaigned for the Boys' release. The score is 100% Kander and Ebb - their unique sound filtered through vaudeville numbers, high-stepping cakewalks, blues ballads, and jazzy tap. A show about the human spirit that entertains while shocking you at the same time...  I would love to see it again.

Here are the original Broadway Scottsboro Boys - lead by the marvellous Brandon Victor Dixon who appeared at the Garrick Theatre in London too - singing the opening "Hey Hey Hey Hey" and the joyous "Commencing In Chattanooga" at the 2011 Tony Awards, singing as they travel on the box-car, unaware that it leads not to adventure and happiness but to years deprived of their liberty...

THE INHERITANCE at the Noel Coward - "Only connect the prose and the passion..."

We first heard about Matthew Lopez' play THE INHERITANCE in July 2017 after a rehearsed reading of BENT at the Lyttelton; in an after-show Q+A director Stephen Daldry said that his next project was an epic two-part play for the Young Vic called THE INHERITANCE.  When it was announced that Vanessa Redgrave would be appearing in it I managed to snap up tickets for both parts last May.

In May we got about 20 minutes into Part One before the lights blew!  After an agonizing 45 minutes, Daldry appeared onstage to announce that the problem could not be fixed and the show was cancelled - AUGH!  An agonizing wait for replacement tickets led to finally hearing that the Young Vic had re-booked us for it's West End transfer to the Noel Coward Theatre.  So, we begin...

Matthew Lopez was raised in the conservative Florida Panhandle, with feelings of otherness as his family were the only Puerto Ricans in town and also bullied at school for being gay.  His aunt is the actress Priscilla Lopez - the original 'Diana' in A CHORUS LINE - and he saw Broadway shows on family trips to New York, sparking interest in theatre. A concomitant love of films led him at the age of 15 to see James Ivory's HOWARDS END with his teacher mother, primarily because Emma Thompson was being considered a front runner for the Best Actress Oscar.  In his own words "that day changed my life".

Lopez was haunted by EM Forster's story and when his mother bought him the original book, he read it repeatedly.  Ten years later, Lopez was living in New York and finally realized why HOWARDS END meant so much to him when he learnt that Forster was homosexual.  Galvanized by Forster's influence and using HOWARDS END as a template, Lopez started writing a play about a group of professional gay men living in the New York of today and the often unspoken dichotomy of what has been gained since the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s and more importantly, what has been lost.

The NY gay community, the AIDS crisis and the two-part play of course echoes Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA and THE INHERITANCE can be seen as a complement - and reaction to - that epic's polemic and storytelling.  I think it's remarkable that both plays have had huge success in early productions in London: in fact THE INHERITANCE has still to be performed in America.

Ten students wrestle with how to tell a story.  An older man appears and selects one to show how to structure a narrative, he asks the student to use a favourite book as a template - of course the book is HOWARDS END and the older man is revealed as the spirit of EM Forster.  Out of the group emerge the young man's central couple: Eric Glass and Toby Darling.

Eric and Toby live together in an upper-East Side rent-controlled apartment that previously belonged to Eric's grandmother.  They lead a busy cultural and politically-engaged life surrounded by similar gay professional friends.  Toby has published a successful novel about a handsome, wealthy gay man in New York which he is adapting into a Broadway play.  They take Adam, a young actor and adopted son of a wealthy couple, under their wing.  He is cast as the lead in Toby's play and Toby joins him in a Boston preview tryout. Toby becomes obsessed with the enigmatic Adam, while Eric, alone in the apartment, befriends Walter, an older neighbour who lives with his longtime partner, Henry Willcox, a rich property investor.

Walter tells Eric of his life and how he is haunted by the devastation that AIDS brought to his friends and the fear and stigma they all felt. Walter also discloses how his and Henry's relationship  suffered when, on finding an old friend called Peter destitute and dying, Walter brought him to their upstate NY country house to spend his last days in comfort.  When Henry found out, he angrily denounced Walter for bringing the disease to their home and handed over the house to Walter, washing his hands of it. Walter made it a place to bring other gay men to die in peace as Peter had.

Walter dies suddenly before he can show Eric his house.  The bereft Eric - also rocked by Hillary Clinton's defeat - finally admits to Toby that their apartment is being reclaimed as it was in his grandmother's name only and they have to leave; Toby provokes a fight with Eric and walks out on their life, however when he tells Adam this, Toby is shocked to discover that the actor is dating the play's director.  Toby can't shake his obsession for Adam and sleeps with Leo, a rent-boy who resembles the actor.

Eric shares his grief over Walter with the enigmatic Henry Willcox who slowly becomes charmed with Eric's goodness; but even he is appalled when a note is found written by Walter saying he would like Eric to have the summer house.  Henry and his two grown sons destroy the note, swearing to keep it secret.  After Henry finds Eric a new apartment, he takes Eric to Walter's country home.  As Eric explores the deserted house, he is welcomed by the ghosts of the men who died there, including Walter's friend Peter.  Eric has found his spiritual home....

In the second play we see the ramifications of the characters' actions: Toby starts a relationship with Leo but as his chems addiction grows, Leo is left hurt emotionally and physically but still sees an anonymous, rich 'john'.  Despite Eric's friends being horrified that Henry is a Republican who happily financed the Trump campaign, Eric still agrees to marry Henry when he proposes.  Their wedding is disrupted by a drugged-up Toby, but Henry's violent anger at the presence of Toby's guest Leo makes Eric realize that he has been the anonymous man using Leo for sex.

The hurt and anger that all the characters feel make for new alliances: Toby finally confronts the fact that his assumed 'golden boy' status was in fact as unreal as his book - he came from a deprived home and faked his way into the NY scene, while Eric becomes friends with a contrite Adam again and discovers Leo destitute and badly sick with HIV.  Disgusted at Henry's refusal to help Leo - and haunted by Walter's actions - he takes Leo to Walter's old house.  On arrival, they meet Margaret, an elderly neighbour who has become almost a caretaker to the house, both physically and spiritually.  Eric discovers that, rather than just storing his grandmother's old furniture from the apartment there, Margaret has furnished the empty house with it.

Margaret reveals her son was one of the men who Walter brought to the house; she had never accepted her son's gayness and was reconciled with him only moments before he died.  She stayed on to nurse the following dying men to atone in some way for her actions and her revelations bring the story full-circle and all the characters to a conclusion which echoes Forster's famous phrase "only connect".

Stephen Daldrey's wonderful production - despite it's combined length of 6 and a half hours - never once lost my attention, his incisive direction knowing exactly when and how long to linger on a scene or a line, knowing that particular moment would gain greater resonance further into the story.  It was a pleasure to be able to pinpoint the moments that reference Forster's book - and rather than seem to be ripping off HOWARDS END, it illuminates the characters and the play.  Daldrey's patience in telling the story reaps massive rewards.

Lopez's play also touches on so many different levels and each play leaves space for two hugely enjoyable - almost Shavian - arguments: in the first, Eric and his friends debate the uneasy balance of gay life in the 21st Century, by gaining access to the straight world, does that mean that gay identity is defanged, it's history forgotten and it's very words co-opted and devalued into the straight world.  In the second play Lopez dissects the gay response to Trump when Eric's Hillary-voting circle of friends are appalled that Henry Willcox is not just a Republican but also contributed financially to Trump's campaign.  His polished intellectual debate to their emotive one is fascinating to watch.

But it's not all politics; Matthew Lopez slowly constructs fascinating characters whose inner lives are slowly revealed while also leading to highly emotional climaxes that really strike at the heart.  It is also as wildly funny as it is tender and hard-hitting.  What is THE INHERITANCE of the title?  The apartment that was Eric's family home? The inherited sadness of the AIDS crisis on the gay community?  The inheritance of the art and culture of previous generations?  The denied inheritance of Walter's house to Eric?  It's all of these and more.  Bob Crowley's wonderful design of a stark marble stage rising and lowering to suit the play's mood against the black backdrop which parts to reveal certain locations, make you really concentrate the mind to the characters and what they are saying.  Jon Clark's lighting and Paul Englishby's score also help to make the plays' shine.

Six and a half hours is a long time to concentrate on just 14 performers but Daldry's ensemble act with an intensity and fearlessness that is truly thrilling.  Kyle Soller takes on the central role of Eric and is magnificent: it is difficult to play someone who is a force of goodness and compassion but he manages it by making Eric warm and sympathetic that you root for him from the start, while Andrew Burnap, again in a difficult role, makes Toby also charismatic and interesting, even at his most heartless.

John Benjamin Hickey is excellent in the difficult role of Henry Willcox, a man used to living his life to his own intellectual rules who can only react with anger when faced with emotional decisions that cannot register in his ordered mind, and Paul Hilton is equally fine as ethereal Walter, a man out of time, and he deliciously turns on a sixpence to become the intellectual and conservative Forster, also in a sense out of his time, quietly marvelling at the quality of life he was never allowed living in the Edwardian era.

Samuel H. Levine again showed marvellous versatility in his dual roles as Toby's obsessions: Adam, the gay Eve Harrington who worms his way into the lead in Toby's play, and Leo, the lonely hustler with the bruised heart and secret love of literature.  He captured the narcissism and desperation of the two characters wonderfully.  And then there was Vanessa Redgrave as Margaret: you have to wait a long time for her as she appears in the penultimate scene of Part 2, but once she is onstage she illuminates all that has gone before.

In her thrilling monologue, Vanessa hits the grieving but loving heart of the play; Margaret is forever haunted by her disgust at her son's teenage revelation of being gay and her subsequent blotting him out of her life.  Without sentiment but conveying the truth of the character, Vanessa played the remembered moments of seeing her dying son and their fleeting reunion before his death, a tremor in her voice and a catch in her throat was all that was needed to show the grief.  As important as her performance is to the play, her sheer presence alone is special - while watching her I could not forget her first husband Tony Richardson died from an AIDS-related illness in 1991, a year after the death of her friend Ian Charleson.  There was also another reason to celebrate her appearance in Matthew Lopez' play: she, of course, played Margaret Willcox in the film of HOWARDS END that so inspired him as a teenager - the film is even mentioned in the play which provokes a character to yell "Emma Thompson!  Vanessa Redgrave!!"

The other actors all deserve to be mentioned: Hugo Bolton, Robert Boulter, Hubert Burton, Syrus Lowe, Michael Marcus, Jack Riddiford, Michael Walters and Joshua De La Warr.

THE INHERITANCE is at the Noel Coward Theatre until the 19th January, click on the cast shot below to book tickets...

An already memorable year in theatre-going has just been made more wonderful by THE INHERITANCE.  If you love theatre and the alchemy of a wonderful script, committed performances and exquisite direction, you must see THE INHERITANCE.

FUN HOME at the Young Vic - Drawing out the past...

I had never heard of Alison Bechdel's 2006 graphic novel/memoir FUN HOME until it's musical adaptation transferred to Broadway in 2015 where it won five Tony Awards including Best Musical, Best Score and Best Book.  I can't say I was particularly interested in it until the Young Vic announced it was going to stage it's London premiere and I thought "Uh-oh, that will sell out there so I had better go - just in case".  I am glad I did because I enjoyed it a lot.

The Young Vic production is staged by the Broadway creative team - directed by Sam Gold, choreographed by Danny Mefford, designed by David Zinn, lighting by Ben Stanton - so it's a rare opportunity to get the full intention behind the original musical over here.  To be honest, I can't say I totally loved the score but allied to the excellent performances, I was won over at the end.

Alison Bechdel wrote (and drew) FUN HOME to come to terms with her upbringing in a Funeral Home (FUNeral HOME) in Pennsylvania.  If that wasn't odd enough, it was only when she went to University - and came out - that she realized she had been unknowingly living in an emotional pressure-cooker: her father - full-time teacher, part-time funeral director - was a closet homosexual who had indulged in risky encounters throughout his marriage, even leading to police involvement.  After a visit from Alison to the now-bleak family home, her father walks in front of a speeding lorry.  Her father might have been destroyed by his sexuality but Alison is liberated by hers...

Lisa Kron's book slides back and forwards in time as Alison reviews her life: from Small Alison first realizing that she might be different to Medium Alison's coming out while confronting her family's secrets.  Indeed I felt that Kron's book is better than her lyrics, I am sure she would say that repeating a line three times reflects Small Alison's limited vocabulary but after a while it got wearing "I wanna play airplanes / I wanna play airplanes / I wanna play airplanes..."  Really Lisa?

Jeanine Tesori is on a bit of a UK roll at the moment: THOROUGHLY MODERN MILLIE has just toured (cancelled abruptly by shady producers), CAROLINE OR CHANGE is due to open later this year in the West End after a sold-out run at Hampstead and now FUN HOME is sold out at the Young Vic.  Her score was certainly soaring at times and had her usual pastiche numbers - a Jackson 5-style number when Alison and her brothers pretend to be in a tv ad for their Fun Home, and a Partridge Family pastiche about living in a loving family - but they stay in my mind while I am in the theatre, none of them have stayed with me since.  However within the show they worked very well, I really liked the scene where Small Alison and her brothers are visiting New York with their father, and when she catches him leaving them alone at night-time, he sings her a lullaby, almost whispered and a capella, you could hear a pin drop as we watch a moment of tenderness while knowing he wants her to sleep so he can leave them to have sex.  

Sam Gold's direction is excellent however - you can believe all characters have an inner history and motivation - and he brings out performances which draw you in to the story (apart from one).  David Zinn and Ben Stanton's contributions also make this show a surprisingly visual delight - there was a reveal in the second act which even elicited an 'ooooo' from the audience.  The music also sounded rich and full under Nigel Lilley's musicians, hidden away at the back of the stage.

As I said, one of the nine performers, for me, stood out for the wrong reasons: Zubin Varla as Bruce, Alison's father, gave a jangling, odd performance that was resolutely charmless.  As written, Bruce is an unsympathetic character so the actor playing him has to have some spark of charisma and humanity to understand him but Varla remains a cold fish throughout so his desperate suicide makes no impact.

No such problems with Jenna Russell as Helen, Alison's schoolteacher mother, hers is a performance that, from the start, is intriguing.  Tense and stoic, Helen's life is spent watching for signs of Bruce's infidelity and this finally cracks when she tells Alison of her unhappy life; Russell's singing of the angry "Days and Days" was one of the show's highlights.

Kaisa Hammerlund was very good as Alison, hardly ever offstage and totally sympathetic; she also had one of the best musical moments: riding in the car with her father on her last visit home, they struggle to speak to each other and the moment to connect is lost while Alison watches the telephone lines stretching out into the night.  Eleanor Kane also created a sympathetic Medium Alison, stumbling bashfully into her lesbianism.  She was partnered with the delightful Cherrelle Skeete as her fellow-college student lover Joan.

Playing Small Alison was Harriet Turnbull, she was remarkably charismatic and shone with a directness that totally swept you along with her; none more so than in her solo "Ring of Keys" where for the first time, while sitting in a diner with her unobservant father, she notices a butch lesbian delivering a parcel and immediately feels a connection.  Hers was the performance of the evening. She also had a good onstage partnership with Archie Smith and Eddie Martin as her siblings.

Who knows if FUN HOME will transfer, it certainly deserves a chance for it's remarkable originality, production and performances but would it find an audience?  Watch this space...

 

Design Overload: LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE and AH, WILDERNESS!

Seeing Caryl Churchill and Eugene O'Neill plays are never going to be the most laugh-heavy evenings but two recent theatre visits have been made harder by distracting scenic concepts.

Caryl Churchill wrote LIGHT SHINING IN BUCKINGHAMSHIRE in 1976 for the Joint Stock Theatre Group where it was performed by six actors.  Now here we are, revived at the National with a cast of eighteen with forty-four supernumeraries bulking out the stage.

I can understand why director Lyndsey Turner has wanted to flesh it out - election year, a play about the different protest factions left to flounder after the Civil War, big stage needing an epic play of the people etc. etc.  It just doesn't work - and it doesn't work with the scenic concept that has been clamped down over the text like a metal cloche.

The stage is filled with a huge wooden table - raked like a platform stage - at which are seated noblemen eating a candlelit dinner in the first act, puritan scribblers in the second.  The characters in Churchill's fragmented scenes clamber up onto the table and play their scenes with admirable commitment but without much interest generated for me as I nodded off a few times in the first act.

The play was arrived at through a research workshop and at times I felt I really ought to paying more attention as each scene felt like a 17th contemporary pamphlet being acted out but it's sheer relentless dourism made it hard to engage with anything - and just as you felt being drawn into a debate, we were treated to a group folk sing-song. Yawn.

Cromwell's New Model Army has won the Civil War but in it's wake troops of dissenters have appeared, all of whom think the time has come for their visions to be fulfilled but all of them had not realised that Cromwell was replacing one tyranny with another and he sounded the death knell for their hopes and ambitions.  The Ranters who believe that God is within and wanted sexual and political freedom, The Diggers who wanted all common ground to be given over to the common man, and the more politically-minded Levellers who drew support from unhappy members of the army are all represented.

The second act begins well with Gerrard Winstanley demanding his rights to farm on common land but again Turner's wish for a scenic Big Idea muffs the action by having the supernumeraries break up the large table with spades to disclose a huge allotment underneath.  A nice scenic idea but in practice it means that the following scenes are overshadowed by extras pulling up the planks of wood and slowly moving them off the stage, ridiculously distracting and something that should have been quashed during the technical rehearsals.

Performances from Nicholas Gleave, Ashley McGuire, Joe Caffrey and Ann Ogbomo were good, but they would have worked better in a smaller, less distracting production.  Bruno Poet's lighting is good, Soutra Gilmour's costumes are down to her usual drab standards and Es Devlin is responsible for the distracting set.  I must admit that while watching this first production under Rufus Norris' reign as NT Artistic Director, my heart sank a little - please don't let this be an omen.  I am also seeing Lyndsey Turner's HAMLET later this year at the Barbican which is again designed by Devlin.  Quakes.

Next was the Young Vic revival of Eugene O'Neill's 1933 play AH, WILDERNESS! which holds the distinction of being his only comedy.  Needless to say an O'Neill comedy is hardly Brian Rix material but it has a gentle charm where the comedy is more character-based than anything that happens within the plot.

Which is just as well as director Natalie Abrahami has thrown out O'Neill's stage directions and set it in and around sand dunes which have taken over a large clapboard house.  Oh and she has a character obviously meant to be O'Neill who hangs around the stage, pulling props out of the sand - a table yet! - and intoning in voice-over the stage directions.  This drafted-in character also has the last lines, a paraphrasing of a quote from the Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam which O'Neill inscribed to his wife on his own copy of the play.

So why?  Is Abrahami so unsure of the material that a concept has to be imposed on it?  To make it more 'relevant' to the Young Vic, a theatre which relishes director-imposed reinventions of texts?  When, at the start of the play, the O'Neill character describes in taped voice-over the stage description of the Miller household with it's tasteful but tasteless furnishings, none are to be seen - just banks of sand which the actors gingerly clamber over like so many turn-of-the-century mountain goats.

Richard Miller is 16 and at *that* age, discovering literature for the first time and brooding that all of his life will be stymied by his parent's conventional lifestyle and the lack of intellectual freedom in his world.  We've all been there and O'Neill's sensitive handling of the archetypal prickly teenager is charmingly done.  He is angered by his mother's blinkered ideas of his advanced reading matter - there is a nice joke when Oscar Wilde is said to have been found guilty of bigamy - but not far beneath the surface he still loves her and his amiable, newspaper-owning father.

He shares the house with his older and younger brothers as well as with a maternal uncle and paternal aunt.  Aunt Lily is on her way to becoming an old maid but quietly loves Uncle Sid but his not-so-secret drinking is getting out of hand and will always be a barrier between them - and needless to say, there is also a cheeky Irish maid too.

Richard is also struggling with his feelings for his neighbour Muriel whose father does not approve of him but when he goes out for a 5th of July drink with his older brother, he is seduced by good-time girl Belle.  It was around now that I managed to transcend Abrahami's absurd concept and started to just enjoy O'Neill's writing.

The play culminates in a scene between Richard and Muriel, full of wonderfully hesitant writing as they deny then declare their love and this is played against Richard's parents expressing their continued love for each other.  See Miss Abrahami?  The play is definitely the thing.

The usually-dependable Janie Dee played Essie the mother, but here she noticeably stumbled over a few of her lines, but there were good performances from Martin Marquez as her husband Nat, Susannah Wise as Aunt Lily and Dominic Rowan as the wastrel Uncle Sid (although his drunk acting was a bit over the top).  By far the performance of the evening was George Mackay as Richard, usually prickly and intellectually snobbish but played with great guile and he even executed a funny belly-flop into the onscreen lake.

Charles Balfour's lighting was a major plus for the production while Dick Bird's monumental set finally came into it's own when a lake suddenly appeared from nowhere.  Ultimately what made me annoyed was that Abrahami's handling of the performers proves she's a worthy director so there really is no need for the unnecessary concept imposed on the play.  I am sure if O'Neill had wanted AH, WILDERNESS! to be a dreamy, memory play he would have written it as such.

An odd footnote: AH, WILDERNESS! inspired no less than two musical adaptations - in 1948 Mickey Rooney starred as Richard in the MGM film SUMMER HOLIDAY while in 1959 Jackie Gleason won a Tony award for his role of Uncle Sid in Bob Merrill's TAKE ME ALONG.

An even odder footnote: It was Bob Merrill's second O'Neill-inspired score as in 1957 he had written the music and lyrics to NEW GIRL IN TOWN starring Gwen Verdon and Thelma Ritter which was based on ANNA CHRISTIE.  Go figure.

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.

HAPPY DAYS at the Young Vic

A woman is buried up to her waist in a mound of earth exposed to the strength of the sun, a loud harsh bell wakes her up and announces when she should sleep, her meager, nearly depleted possessions are in a nearby bag while her uncommunicative husband remains on the other side of the mound just out of her eyesight but still she can tell herself:

"Oh this is a happy day, this will have been another happy day.  After all.  So far."

Samuel Beckett's HAPPY DAYS is truly one of the great roles for any actress: actors may have the Shakespearean kings to look forward to as they get older, women have Winnie in HAPPY DAYS.

I had never seen the play before but I read it two years ago so was disappointed that Natalie Abrahami's Young Vic production last year sold out quickly.  However it has now been revived so jumped at the chance to finally experience the play's power in person - which is how HAPPY DAYS should be experienced.

Beckett wrote the English version of HAPPY DAYS in 1961 (he would also write a French version as was his custom) and the part was first played on the London stage by Brenda Bruce.  In 1976, Peggy Ashcroft played it at the National Theatre and she reflected that Winnie "was a part that actresses will want to play in the way that actors aim at HAMLET - a summit part".  Beckett told Brenda Bruce that who could cope with all that Winnie has to and still go down singing but a woman?

1n 1979 Beckett directed a revival at the Royal Court with his favourite interpreter. Billie Whitelaw.  She later wrote that when she read it for the first time she wondered "how this man could have written the story of my life so long before he knew me?"  For Winnie, does in her extreme state, what we all do - we get through the day as best we can.  We chatter about what is around us and recollect memories to keep the darkness at bay.  

Beckett actually left the rehearsals for two weeks as their intense one-to-one method was, for the first time, beginning to stress Billie out.  She contacted Brenda Bruce and asked did she feel that after doing HAPPY DAYS she could learn anything?  No, said Bruce, after HAPPY DAYS she felt like she could never learn anything again.

Luckily, Whitelaw's performance was filmed by the BBC and can be seen on YouTube in an uncomfortable tape-to-digital transfer - come on BBC, get this remastered and available on dvd.  However even during filming Whitelaw was put through the mill as she was recovering from the flu and had to have cortisone injections on the day of filming to get through it.  Seeing this revival only two months after Billie Whitelaw's death made it all the more moving.

In Natalie Abrahami's production which wonderfully balances the humour and the tragedy, Juliet Stevenson was simply astonishing as Winnie, her bright, optimistic chatter as she goes through the pattern of her day only clouding over when her fears overtake her: that she is an object of ridicule to a couple who pass by, that Willie will one day not be there to answer her with his monosyllabic answers.

Her parasol catches fire in the heat of the sun, her medicinal tonic runs out, her toothpaste is nearly squeezed out but still Winnie chatters away, playing with both the revolver and the music box in her bag.  And she has her half-remembered quotations and memories: a ball she attended with Willie, a kiss in a garden shed when young, a little girl frightened by a mouse while undressing her doll under a table at night.  

In the second act, she is in even more dire straits as she is now buried up to her neck, kept awake by the insistent loud bell and blanched by the heat of the sun.  Although her regimented emptying of her bag's contents is lost to her, she can still see it and there is Willie.  After all.  So far.

Dwarfed by Vicki Mortimer's rockface set with it's path of trickling pebbles and deprived of bodily expression, Stevenson mesmerised with her croaking voice and facial reactions and at the play's climax, when David Beames' decrepit Willie crawls across the ground in his (wedding?) suit to collapse in front of her, she broke my heart with her whispered singing of her music box tune 'The Merry Widow Waltz':

"Every touch of fingers

Tells me what I know,

Says for you,

It's true, it's true,

You love me so"