Monday, February 18, 2019

VIENNA 1934 - MUNICH 1938: A FAMILY ALBUM at The Rose Theatre, Kingston - Vanessa Looks Back...

Last Saturday I finally visited the Rose Theatre in Kingston, it's only taken 11 years!  So, Constant Reader, you will know that it had to be something fairly special to get me there, how about Vanessa Redgrave's debut as a playwright and stage director?  Fairly special.


VIENNA 1934 - MUNICH 1938: A FAMILY ALBUM was billed as a work in progress - and it was definitely that.  There were three performances at the Rose which followed on from two weeks of workshops on it, and the actors were certainly all ready for an audience and gave committed performances.  The problem was the shape of the piece itself.

Written in response to the rise of right-wing political parties particularly across Europe, Vanessa Redgrave has attempted to show us the lives of people who confronted the rise of Fascism in the 1930s.  The play started disarmingly with Vanessa wandering on to put some papers down on a table at the side of the stage, turn to look at the audience and say "Hello!"  She then proceeded to sit down and tell us what she hoped to illuminate through the play and also to introduce us to the main characters via photographs on the stage's backcloth.


There was the poet Stephen Spender who - on a holiday to Croatia in the early 1930s - met the American psychoanalyst and doctor Muriel Gardiner who, using her family's wealth, had come to Vienna to hopefully be taught by Freud.  Although Spender was in a sexual relationship with his 'assistant' Tony Hyndman, he and Muriel started an affair.  The affair petered out when Muriel fell in love with a militant socialist leader Joseph Buttinger.

By now Muriel could see first-hand the danger that her friends who were communists, socialists and Jews faced from the Austrian and German Fascists and in the years leading up to the start of WWII - when she, her young daughter Connie and Buttinger managed to escape to America - Muriel worked tirelessly for the anti-Fascist Underground, smuggling false passports from Prague into Austria.  In these efforts, she was also helped by a brave Tony Hyndman with whom she remained friends.  This took up part one of the play with Daisy Bevan (Vanessa's grand-daughter) playing Muriel - and two of Vanessa's co-stars from THE INHERITANCE - Russell Boulter playing Spender and Paul Hilton playing Buttinger.

 

But doesn't this all sound familiar?  Rich American studying psychology in Vienna becomes tireless anti-Fascist activist?  After the 1973 publication of Lillian Hellman's PENTIMENTO - which was later turned into the film JULIA starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa - friends asked Muriel could she possibly be 'Julia'?  Hellman insisted she had never met Gardner and her character 'Julia' actually existed; Muriel agreed she had never met Hellman, but when she arrived back in the US she had been a neighbour of Lillian Hellman's lawyer who knew of her life in Austria.  All of which proved fuel to the long-running fire that raged between Hellman and fellow-writer Mary McCarthy who said of Hellman on a TV show "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'".  How strange that Vanessa stands now at the crossroads of that story, having played and won an Academy Award as the possibly fictional Julia and now having written a play about Muriel too.

Vanessa never met Muriel but she did meet her daughter Connie just before she died and also was a very good friend of Stephen Spender's wife Natasha Litvin.  A snapshot of Tony Hyndman appeared which linked Vanessa to the story in a more direct way - Hyndman had been her father Michael Redgrave's lover too, briefly in 1940.  She showed photos of Michael and Rachel Kempson in the year of their engagement and also a photo of her brother Corin.  The second act was primarily based around the section of Corin's book MICHAEL REDGRAVE - MY FATHER where he attempts to identify who his father's elusive lover called 'Tommy' was while he was appearing as Macheath in THE BEGGAR'S OPERA.  It turns out that 'Tommy' was Tony Hyndman's real name - and one of the many aliases he used.  Michael and 'Tommy' went on a painting weekend in the countryside during their brief affair - which was also attended by Spender!!  In this act Boulter played Michael and Paul Hilton played Corin.


It should have ended there - but no.  After a pause, we were meeting through photograph's Rachel Kempson's brothers Nicholas and Robin - the latter killed in WWII.  Just to complete the family album we also saw a photograph of Vanessa's husband Franco Nero - "isn't he nice?" she said bashfully!  Franco was up there just so Vanessa could tell us that his father had been an officer in Mussolini's Carabiniere - Oh well, we can't all be on history's right side I suppose.

The whole play is based on letters, memoirs and diaries and this - for me one act too far - was based on her Uncle Nicholas' journals kept as a Midshipman.  He gives us a contemporary account of Mussolini's Italy occupying Abyssinia in 1935 which happened despite being damned by The League of Nations.  Their sanctions were never fully carried out and Great Britain and France also secretly agreed to give over two-thirds of Abyssinia to Italy.  Which of course Vanessa ties in with Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler over the Sudetenland and the annexation of Czechoslovakia that followed it. Uncle Nicholas (Russell Boulter) gives way to Thomas Mann (Paul Hilton) and his essay 'This Peace' in which he dissects the fact that Hitler was appeased by the Governments of Europe.


Very much like her film SEA SORROW which dealt with displaced persons through history, VIENNA - MUNICH fairly buckles with the weight of material that it carries.  Vanessa needs to hand the whole play over to a play doctor who would be able to tie-in all the connections - and there are many - while containing a dramatic through-line; be that the fight for political freedom (Gardiner) or sexual freedom (Michael Redgrave).

The third act could very easily be dropped as it has no immediate bearing on the relationships established in the first two acts between Spender - Gardiner - Hyndman - Redgrave, but I suspect that Vanessa would be loathe to drop the third act as it is the most political and has more of a bearing on the current worldview of turning a blind eye to world-wide injustices.  The trouble being that - despite Paul Hilton's impassioned reading - ending it with the verbatim reading of Mann's essay is dramatically deadening.


All the family have discussed their identities within the family and the outside world - Michael wrote his autobiography assisted by Corin and, after his death, Rachel, Vanessa and Corin all wrote memoirs, while Lynn addressed Michael's emotional remoteness in her one-woman play SHAKESPEARE FOR MY FATHER so it is no surprise to find Vanessa mining this seam, indeed for me it provided the emotional centre of the play.  It was very moving to see Vanessa onstage as her father and mother's married life was explored with it's acceptances, compromises, emotional cruelty and concomitant guilt; Rachel Kempson emerging as a remarkably forward-thinking 25 year-old in unconditionally accepting Michael's bisexuality before they were married.

So it will be interesting to see the next steps for the play; in the evening there was a Rose Theatre fundraising event AN EVENING WITH VANESSA REDGRAVE where she was interviewed onstage by director Roger Michell.  She obviously likes him as, for once, she did not seem overly wary as she usually is in onstage interviews - she was downright playful at times - but he let her stray too often away from the point of the question asked.  However during the event she said that she and The Rose were looking for avenues to explore with the play and she hoped she might be able to get it booked into the Edinburgh Festival.


Among the clips shown - the BBC recording of her legendary Rosalind in the RSC's AS YOU LIKE IT, ISADORA, VENUS (directed by Michell) and JULIA, was a segment of a film that her son Carlo had compiled for her 80th birthday party which showed her activism from the 1960s onwards - Vietnam, Ireland, Women's Rights, The Palestinians, standing as an MP, UNICEF, Kosovo - they were all there and while she would not be drawn on whether she felt that her career had suffered, her remarkable fearlessness was there to be seen.  In particular in her remarkable speech at the Academy Awards where, battling against boos from some sections of the audience, she commended the Academy for not being swayed by the "Zionist hoodlums" who were burning her effigy outside the theatre.

I was going to include that here but I will settle instead on this delightful compilation of moments from over 60 years of film performances - yes, Vanessa, you have a canon of work!


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