SUMMER AND SMOKE at the Almeida Theatre - Body and Soul...

Playwright Tennessee Williams' golden years can be bracketed between 1944 with the astonishing success of THE GLASS MENAGERIE, and the 1963 critical and commercial failure of THE MILK TRAIN DOESN'T STOP HERE ANYMORE - twelve plays in nineteen years which challenged the American theatre to look again at the way those of 'the fugitive kind' survive the cruelties of life and love.

Of those twelve main plays, there are only two I have not yet seen: CAMINO REAL (1953) and PERIOD OF ADJUSTMENT (1960) - a rare Williams comedy - because, thanks to the Almeida Theatre, I can now add SUMMER AND SMOKE to my 'seen' list.

SUMMER AND SMOKE premiered on Broadway in 1948, a year after A STREETCAR NAMED DESIRE, but only ran three months, STREETCAR ran for two years!  It was directed by Margo Jones, who had made a name for herself in US regional theatre and been an exponent of theatre-in-the-round.  She had co-directed the original production of THE GLASS MENAGERIE and she lobbied for the director role on SUMMER AND SMOKE.  However the rehearsal period was very troubled resulting in Williams and the cast losing all faith in her.

Off-Broadway director José Quintero staged a revival in 1952 at the Circle In The Square which was well-received and launched the career of actress Geraldine Page: she won a Drama Desk award and, when she recreated her role in the 1961 film version, was nominated for a Best Actress Academy Award.  Williams' returned to the story in 1964, rewriting it as THE ECCENTRICITIES OF A NIGHTINGALE but by the time it was staged in the 1970s, Williams was out of fashion and it ran 20 performances.  Amazingly SUMMER AND SMOKE took nearly sixty years to reach London but it only ran for 6 weeks in the West End, unsurprising with the glacial Rosamund Pike in the lead.

But 12 years later, SUMMER AND SMOKE has reappeared at the Almeida Theatre in a re-imagined production which initially threw me but by the interval I was totally hooked.  Director Rebecca Frecknall has come over all Ivo van Hove and has designer Tom Scutt impose an idiosyncratic visual look to Wiliams' play set in pre-1916 Mississippi but the totally stripped-down playing area distills the action to just the actor and the words; the only furniture are nine stand-up pianos that line up in a semi-circle at the back of the stage with their hardback chairs.

Alma Winemiller lives in the incongruously-named small town of Glorious Hill, the highly-strung daughter of the town's straight-laced minister and his demented wife.  She has grown up across the street from John Buchanan, the virile son of the town doctor, and her unrequited passion for him has been unwavering since school when she embarrassed him with a present of handkerchiefs.  Alma's neurasthenia leads her to have breathless palpitations which means she visits the doctor at all hours but Alma and John, while on friendly terms, cannot give each other what they need.  

Alma, a music teacher who holds raggedy literary 'salons', seeks a spiritual connection - she delights in telling everyone she meets that Alma is Spanish for 'soul' - but John is bored with his medical studies and wants life and excitement which he finds regularly in the Latino quarter outside town, especially at the casino on Moon Lake owned by Pablo Gonzales whose daughter Rosa he is involved with.  Alma's choking primness and nervous mannerisms cannot compete with Rosa's lush sensuality and, after a disastrous date at the casino, the die is cast for them.

Dr. Buchanan leaves to help with an outbreak of fever so John throws a wild party at the surgery to celebrate his engagement to Rosa; a jealous Alma contacts his father who returns to angrily confront the drunken Pablo who draws a gun...  an event that leads to Alma collapsing physically and mentally.  By the time she recovers, the momentous summer is over and life has changed forever: John has taken over his father's work, has renounced his former ways and is engaged to Nellie, one of Alma's singing pupils.  Alma realizes that her former attitudes have made her miss out on engaging with life and love:

'The girl who said 'no' — she doesn't exist anymore, she died last summer — suffocated in smoke from something on fire inside her.'

By stripping the action of all distractions, director Rebecca Frecknall draws you into the lives of John and, in particular, Alma and, while she cannot make much of Williams' 2nd Act melodramatic plot turn, she elicits strong performances from her cast of eight - I didn't even mind the Director Theatre shtick of the cast plonking the pianos for atmosphere...  Frecknall made the scenes between Alma and John crackle with tension, in particular the Act 1 scene where he listened to her heartbeat then held her wrist to check her pulse was played to a silence from the audience, gripped by the action.

There are some standout performances: Anjana Vasan was vibrant playing the contrasting roles of Rosa and Nellie, Nancy Crane was good as Alma's deranged mother as well as the gossipy Mrs. Bassett, and Seb Carrington was particularly good as Archie Kramer, the lonely travelling salesman who Alma meets in the darkening town park under the statue of the angel; an ending which is left nicely ambiguous... will it lead to Alma engaging in life positively or negatively?

Matthew Needham played the role of John well, you suspect that Williams wrote a sounding-board for Alma to be play against than a fully-rounded character but Needham showed both the reckless side of the bored medical student as well as the chastened older John who assumes responsibility with his father's death.

But the play belongs to the actress who plays Alma and Patsy Ferran is inspired casting.  Her slightly 'other' quality works in her favour here; you totally believe that her Alma is unable to fit in to the straightened society of Glorious Hill and the weight of her repressed home life is excellently suggested.  Ferran's quality of stillness here illuminates her character and she negotiates Alma's journey well, despite Williams' tendency to overdo Alma's misfit itchiness.  Ferran starts the play with an extended asthma-style panic attack which really pitches you into the character - as well as being an endurance test for her right at the top of the show.

Alma sits interestingly between two of Williams' previous characters: the over-protected and shy Laura from THE GLASS MENAGERIE and the neurotic gentility of STREETCAR's Blanche - another teacher who has embraced life too dangerously.

Although the play is not the best of Williams' canon - the obvious repetition of the soul (Alma) and the body (John) begin to clang after a while - I am so glad to have finally see it in a production which shows it off to it's fullest potential.

HAMLET at the Almeida - something old, something new...

It is now with a regular sense of trepidation that I take my seat to see any play from The Repertoire - it used to be plays pre-20th Century but now even Tennessee Williams has fallen victim to the sweep of Director Theatre - and as the lights go down I ask myself "Am I going to see a version of a classic play that will illuminate while showing why it has stood the test of time - or am I going to see a production by a director who is jamming a classic text into their pre-conceived ideas of audience alienation and quirk-for-quirk's sake gender-blind casting or post-modern tropes?"

It was with the above feelings that I sat down to watch Robert Icke's production of HAMLET at the Almeida and, for most of it's 3 + 3/4 hours running time, I was surprised at the clarity of vision despite the odd anachronistic elbow-in-the-eye.  But then as the climax of the play careered out of control it felt almost like Robert Icke just vomited out all the Director Theatre tricks he had managed to keep down up until then.

Of course nowadays a director feels the urge to give us a HAMLET at about the same time as a name actor edges into the spotlight to play it.  Andrew Scott, this is your 5 minute call... 5 minutes Mr Scott.  I have seen Andrew Scott only once before onstage - DESIGN FOR LIVING at the Old Vic in 2010 - so it was interesting to see him step up to have a go at the gloomy Dane.

For the most part he succeeded but his performance was let down by Icke having him burst into loud tears at the drop of a hat - yes we get it, he's still grieving for his father - and an annoying tendency to over-do the bellowing when Hamlet is riled up.  It's all the more absurd as he has only just told the Players: 

Oh, it offends me to the soul to hear a robustious periwig-pated fellow tear a passion to tatters, to very rags, to split the ears of the groundlings...

But for the most part Scott was very good at speaking the verse - the great soliloquies were not sung out like arias but delivered quietly, as if coming to him for the first time. Where he sits in my league of Hamlets will have to be seen, at the moment I suspect somewhere below Rory Kinnear and my all-time number one Ian Charleson.

That he ultimately did not move me is more the fault of Icke's production than Scott's actual performance.  As I said I enjoyed the first two acts much more than I was expecting and indeed was on board for most of the last act, but as I said above, Icke's botched handling of the climax seemed to almost undercut any chance for the actors to shine.

We had been forewarned to the elements of the botched ending - just as Ivo van Hove's over-reliance on Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' irked during his HEDDA GABLER so Icke's seemingly inexhaustible Bob Dylan collection here very quickly bored, Icke shared Nicholas Hytner's 2010 NT vision of Elsinore as a closed circuit surveillance state and occasionally a large screen dropped down to give us updates on Fortinbrass's progress, to show the security cameras picking up the ghostly presence of the dead King (which actually was very effective) and then to show the reactions of Claudius, Gertrude and Hamlet to "The Mousetrap" while they sat in the front row of the stalls.

This last bit of business was gimmicky and cumbersome (despite the fact that the handheld cameras showing the royal family also picked up the truly regal Vanessa Redgrave sitting behind them!) but it was distracting from the very fine performances of David Rintoul as the Player King and Marty Cruickshank as the Player Queen.  So the final scene... again the screen appeared to show the onstage duel (which we could see anyway) as Angus Wright and Juliet Stevenson as Claudius and Gertrude sat again in the front row - why??  With the duellists' faces covered up with fencing masks we really needed to concentrate on the King and Queen to get the undertow of emotions but this was totally lost.

But if this stage blocking ruined the personal dynamic between the characters at the climax of the show, the text was drowned out by the BLARING final Bob Dylan song - do you love Gertrude's "He’s fat, and scant of breath...the queen carouses to thy fortune, Hamlet" or her defiant retort to Claudius' command for her not to drink from the poisoned cup "I will, my lord. I pray you, pardon me"?  Well you won't hear them here as the bloody song blares out while Stevenson mouths the words.  At least her violent convulsions after being poisoned were more convincing than Gertrude's usual drop and die.

And it didn't end there - Hildegard Bechtler's stage design featured sliding glass panels with a hidden room beyond shrouded by curtains.  It immediately reminded me of Tom Scutt's low-fi set for the NT's MEDEA and with Bechtler's low-level leather couches, easy chairs and arty standard lamps, this is an Elsinore designed around 1981 Sunday supplement advertisements.  But at the end, rather than have Horatio (a short-changed Elliot Barnes-Worrall) and Hamlet exchange the famous last words as he dies, we had a musical fugue where the room beyond was revealed to show Polonious and Ophelia slow-dancing together as one by one the Ghost beckoned those recently dead - Laertes, Claudius, Gertrude - to stand up and join the party within...  all of which vanished to show that we had just been watching what was going on in Hamlet's mind as he died.  I am sure if Shakespeare had wanted a parade across the stage at this point he would have done it as in MACBETH and RICHARD III... so Icke, don't bloody make a long night longer just to be fucking contrary!

As I said, this awful version of the play's climax was all the more frustrating as up until then there had been much to enjoy, albeit in a production which seemed to be made up of moments and not a through line of dramatic tension - Scott's delicate handling of the speeches (when not ranting during Ophelia's funeral), the genuinely spooky glimpses of the Ghost on the security cameras as well as well-rounded performances from the always-dependable Peter Wight as a Polonius seemingly beset by early dementia, Barry Aird's sarcastic Gravedigger, Jessica Brown-Findlay's o'erthrown Ophelia, the earlier-mentioned Rintoul and Cruickshank and a suitably volatile Luke Thompson as Laertes.

Juliet Stevenson was a very good Gertrude, slowly coming to realize the truth behind Hamlet's rages; she proved again what a good actress can find within the otherwise frustratingly-thin role - in particular she delivered the drowning of Ophelia speech wonderfully.  Stevenson also provided the unexpected laugh of the evening when she ran out after the raving Ophelia only to go WHONGGG into the closed glass screen door.  However, in keeping with this unpredictable production, as good as Stevenson was, she only showed up how disastrously low-rent Angus Wright was as Claudius; he played it like it was a tech rehearsal.

So another stage HAMLET to add to the pile, my tenth in all.  I would be surprised if I see another production this year, but it is a play that I find endlessly facinating and profoundly moving when done right, alack not here however - Mr Scott, your director done rained on your parade.

. 

RICHARD III at the Almeida - a very fine Fiennes

My last Shakespeare play was the naff Irish stew version of TAMING OF THE SHREW so I was slightly worried what the Almeida's RICHARD III would offer up.  The Almeida is too keen on re-imaginings for it's own good but I really need not have worried, Rupert Goold has a firm grasp on the play and where he has strayed into the dangerous marshes of Director Theatre it at least is valid and frames the play in an interesting way.

Goold's production starts (and ends) with the excavation in the Leicester car park which reveals the skull of Richard III, his sword and finally his mis-shapen spine to a curious crowd of onlookers, the light fades out on this scene and slowly come up again, revealing Ralph Fiennes at the back of the stage, the skeleton made flesh.  I thought it actually worked, it ties in those recent events to a seemingly long-ago tale of political corruption and murder.

At over 3 hours, the production should feel long but it really doesn't as Goold keeps the action moving ever-forward.  I have seen previous productions which seemed to hit the buffers whenever Richard was not on stage but here nothing is allowed to get in the way of Shakespeare's thundering plot.

The modern-dress production has a simple set from Hildegard Bechtler - a semi-circular set of steps, sweeping curtains made of chains and a see-through stage over Richard's ignoble resting-place - which is a perfect setting for Goold's spare, stripped-down production; a spooky addition being spotlit silver skulls which appear on the back wall for every murder Richard sanctions.

Ralph Fiennes was magnificent as Richard, inhabiting the role with a slippery ease, turning on a groat from charming someone to do his bidding to cold-blooded sociopath.  He is such a skillful actor he didn't just play Richard as a monster but as someone who almost was cast in the role of villain from birth, the scene where his mother pours venom on him sees Fiennes slumped in a chair avoiding her gaze, you suspect he's heard it all before from her.  It was a performance of quicksilver cunning and intelligence, even when he was feigning piety to secure backing for his claim to be King, his mask slipped noticeably when Buckingham called him effeminate.

It's a world where people are only aware of Richard's murderous intent just as they are about to be (literally) stabbed in the back but there is only one person who knows how evil Richard is and that's the haunted and haunting Queen Margaret, the last living member of the deposed Royal family.  Here the ravaged Margaret of Anjou is played wonderfully by Vanessa Redgrave and Goold casting her in this role really lifts the character from being just a mere supporting character.  Although in only two scenes, Margaret haunts the play and the other characters.

In her first scene she curses all present that they know the depths of Richard's evil and one by one, as they suddenly face their destiny, Margaret's words come back to haunt them.  Vanessa's Margaret is dressed in dishevelled fatigues suggesting she has not changed since the Battle of Tewkesbury where her son was killed, and carries a damaged baby doll that Richard at one point smothers to her horror.  In a nice touch, when Margaret reappears to reproach the grieving Queen Elizabeth after the murder of her own children, Margaret leaves her battered baby doll with her, it's Elizabeth who must mourn a dead son.  As always, Vanessa was never less than thrilling.

They are complemented by other fine performances: Finbar Lynch was excellent as Buckingham, Richard's 'fixer' whose political double-dealing made the play all the more topical in these post-Brexit times, Scott Handy was very good as Clarence and made his speech of drowning all too real, James Garnon's Hastings was the very model of a careerist politician, always checking his Twitter account until it's too late, and Tom Canton was a suitably virile presence as Richard's nemesis Richmond.

Aislín McGuckin's Queen Elizabeth was suitably tigerish until she too is broken by Richard - Goold has him rape her in their final confrontation where he demands her daughter as his new wife.  This was the only directorial choice that I am unsure about although it certainly fits in with Elizabeth's sudden capitulation towards the end of the scene.  Susan Engel was exquisite as Richard's mother, The Duchess of York - her denunciation of him towards the end of the play was played with a marvellous delivery of fire and ice.  Interestingly Engel had played Queen Elizabeth in the famous RSC cycle of the War Of The Roses plays in 1963.

On 21st July RICHARD III will be the first Almeida Theatre production to be screened live in cinemas (although some filming will take place in performances before that) - I recommend it highly as the production is sold out for all performances at the theatre.

BAKKHAI at the Almeida - playing with fire in deadly drag

Nowadays it takes something very special to get me to go to the Almeida - a theatre which, like the Young Vic, over the years has grown in self-importance and is also still one of the most uncomfortable to sit in.  They currently have a lengthy Greek Tragedy season on to remind us that they are relevant to our times - gee, I would never have made that connection myself.  But it does mean I can finally see a production of Euripedes' last and most brutal play "The Bacchae" or in Anne Carson's translation BAKKHAI.

I must admit that another reason to see it was to finally see Ben Wishaw onstage and also to see him paired with Bertie Carvel, making a fascinating chance to see two of the more interesting younger actors around together.  They certainly did not disappoint in James Macdonald's claustrophobic and relentless production.

The play was Euripedes' last great play and premiered 2,420 years ago at the Theatre of Dionysus where it won the festival's first prize, awarded posthumously as he had died the year before.  Of all the playwrights writing in Ancient Greece, only Euripedes, Sophocles and Aeschyles' work survives.  Anne Carson's translation is done with a modern slant - Carvel's Penthius could be any moralistic politician trying to impose order on something already beyond his control.

The god Dionysus, come to Thebes in human form to settle some scores.  He has sent the women of Thebes into a frenzy to punish his earth-dwelling aunts for daring to suggest that his mother was not impregnated by Zeus, and has driven them into the hills to worship him and to go native.  But he also wants to punish his earthly cousin Penthius the King of Thebes who has banned the worship of him.  He faces off with the smug King and persuades him to investigate what the wild women are doing by dressing up as a woman. Penthius, secretly intrigued by Dionysus' power, agrees...

With long hair swishing and swirling long folds, Wishaw was never less than hypnotic as Dionysus: fey, petulant, self-knowing, gender-defying, dangerously willful and in his final appearance, terrifying.  He also played the elderly courtier Tiresis and a young witness to ritual slaughter.  Bertie Carvel also played two roles: the smooth, professional politician Penthius, blindly walking into Dionysus' trap and taking to a Chanel suit and grey wig with surprising willingness, and then as Penthius' mother Agarve in long white-blonde wig and gore-splattered white sheath dress - sadly sounding a little too much like his MATILDA creation Miss Trunchbull to be taken too seriously.

Also impressive was Kevin Harvey as the older King of Thebes Cadmus and a terrified shepherd.  The scenes were punctuated by the all-female chorus who sang Orlando Gough's insistent score with an admirable full-throatiness - among their number were musical performers Helen Hobson, Melanie La Barrie and Kaisa Hammarlund - but they held up the play too often.  When you have actors of the power of Wishaw and Carvel waiting in the wings, you don't want to be hearing choral singing.

James Macdonald should have tightened these interludes a bit but otherwise his production rolled unceasingly to it's grim conclusion with a brutal, powerful pace.  Antony McDonald's set design had a grimness which was fairly unrelenting but Peter Mumford's lighting was inventive and clever.

As I said the Almeida has rather slid down my list of favorite theatres but I am glad I put myself through the hell of their seating and stuffy auditorium to experience this hypnotic production.

By the way, the first in the theatre's Greek season, THE ORESTEIA, is transferring to the Trafalgar Studios for a limited season so it will be playing at the same time as the Globe's production.  Had I not already booked tickets for the Globe production, it would get my vote as the Almeida's production is being touted as "Part The Godfather, Part Breaking Bad".  Really Almeida?  Is that really the best you can do for the play that can lay claim to being the originator of all drama? *shakes head*

Revival Day...

Two recent theatre-trips, two revivals, two radically different results.

I was so excited when MUCH ADO was announced as it meant Vanessa Redgrave was finally going to act on the Old Vic stage, the very stage from which Olivier announced her birth to the world.  It also meant she was finally going to play Beatrice, that she was reuniting with her DRIVING MISS DAISY co-star James Earl Jones and they were being directed by Mark Rylance.  What could go wrong?

Loads.

I had deliberately not seen any reviews but heard that they weren't too complementary.  Oh well... not the first time reviewers don't get it.  What could go wrong?

Loads.

The first inkling that something was odd was Ultz' standing set - a bare brick wall set with a large wooden box-affair plonked in the middle of the stage which after a few minutes started to resemble a giant coffee-table and that thought stayed with me for the rest of the evening.  His set mock-up gives you an idea of it's... oddness.

According to the programme it's a tribute to the director Tyrone Guthrie's vision in the 1930s of setting Shakespeare plays in a non-specific setting with a single wooden structure that could suggest different places.  I am sure Guthrie would be charmed by the thought but I'm also sure he would never have wanted something which suggested a giant coffee table and did nothing to help the production but impeded it and cramped the performing space.  Maybe if it revolved, or went up and down... but no it just sat there.

Then the production started. Rylance has hit on the whizzer idea to set it in England during the 2nd World War in a town close to a US Airforce base.  I mean... how else can you explain away a black American actor and an English actress?  It took awhile to get over the poleaxing evidence of Rylance's lack of an imagination.  Then the incongruities and bad choices came, not as single spies but in battalions...



 

Ok so we all know the stage can take years off an actor but even that can't stop you thinking that Michael Elwyn is surely playing Vanessa's brother not her father, besides the hideously ugly costuming does nothing but suggest Beatrice is an old frump.  To his credit, Elwyn does actually give one of the better performances.

 

The arrival of Don Pedro's messenger also throws you completely - is the actor REALLY that tall or is he on stilts? it is one of the most preposterous stage images ever.  Enter Don Pedro's platoon of soldiers... sorry, squadron.  And enter James Earl Jones in the world's largest flying suit or, as Owen preferred to call it, his onesie.

 

 

And then the trouble REALLY started.  Now Earl Jones, aged 82, still has the voice which I'm sure made him a fabulous Othello, Lear, Oberon and Claudius.  What his voice is not suited for is comedy verse.  So the opening skirmish between Benedick and Beatrice - which should set up the larks to come - is here a confusing Fugue For Tinhorns between his rumbling and Redgrave's almost mumbled responses.  These two are supposed to be a couple who have already had a failed relationship but for all their recent experience of working together I was really surprised to find Redgrave & Earl Jones' onstage partnership so negligible, as if they were only meeting for the first time in the lift up to the rehearsal room.

 

And so the first act progressed. Earl Jones rumbled away, saying all the words but with absolutely no sense of meaning behind them, the supporting performances seemingly being spoken as if they were still blocking the scene, a bland Claudio, an insipid Hero, a laughably non-threatening Don John and Vanessa occasionally hinting at the performance I was willing her to give.  Was she hidebound by Earl Jones' performance? 

 

 

Three times, thankfully, she delivered - I loved her playing of Beatrice's lovely lines "but then there was a star danced, and under that was I born" stopping after 'danced' and blowing a kiss up to the chandelier above the stalls.  It felt like an acknowledgement of her birth and that auditorium.  I also liked her surliness in the scene when she bids Benedick to come in for dinner, and she also had fun with her speech after the gulling scene, the start of which she directed to a member of the front row, culminating with a joyous "And, Benedick, love on; I will requite thee, Taming my wild heart to thy loving hand".  I wish I could say the same for Earl Jones.  He rumbled through his speech making no sense whatsoever and when he said "No, the world must be peopled" I am sure I was not the only one thinking "Love, you're 82!"

 

The wedding scene was a bit of a disaster - and not just for Hero.  I have written before about the inherent flaw in this scene as directors always have Margaret onstage during it and as it was she who Don Pedro and Claudius saw standing at Hero's window being seduced by Borrachio, why doesn't she just own up while she is seeing her mistress' marriage going upsy-dutch?  Maybe she had lost the power of speech when she caught sight of the SHITEOUS frock that Vanessa was in.  When she dramatically threw aside her dressing gown to reveal it my first thought was of Dame Edna Everage.

 

 

The wedding scene did have one saving grace in Peter Wight's performance as Friar Francis.  We had just seen him as the bumbling arse Dogberry but here he was, slowing the pace and speaking his lines - Stop The Press - as if he understood what he was saying.  A shout-out too to Penelope Beaumont as Ursula whose several lines also showed that she knew what they meant.  Needless to say, now that Benedick suddenly becomes serious and confronts Don Pedro and Claudius with their wrong, Earl Jones finally - briefly - came into his own.  For all of ten minutes he justified being there.

 

Sadly it couldn't last, we had the bizarre finale to come.  The news of Benedick and Beatrice's marriage - and his command of "Strike up pipers" - was the cue for someone to crank up the onstage record player to play a swing tune so the cast could start a half-hearted jitterbug while Earl Jones and Redgrave sat upstage on two chairs hidden behind an open newspaper.  I shitteth you not.  The curtain call consisted of a company bow which parted for Redgrave and Earl Jones to get up out of their chairs and join them in a bow and exit upstage, with Vanessa waving to the audience behind the by-now shuffling Earl Jones.  You know there is something very wrong with a production when the actors playing Beatrice and Benedick don't get a solo bow.

 

Don't get me wrong.  I didn't hate it.  It just left me bemused and frustrated that it was allowed to be presented as such.

 

Especially as I then saw a production which was the polar opposite: focussed, free of directorial conceits, designed to fit the stage requirements of both the actors and the piece itself and acted with a unity of performance and purpose.  But then, not every director is Richard Eyre.

 

Working from his own adaptation, Eyre's production of Henrik Ibsen's GHOSTS at the Almeida Theatre is a stunning achievement which keeps you gripped from the start.  Even scenes which in past productions have seemed to tread water are here played with an urgency which is forever pushing the characters toward their destinies while stirring up secrets from the past.

 

Tim Hatley's shimmering, translucent set design is the perfect illustration of a house which has kept too many secrets behind closed doors and Peter Mumford's exquisite lighting design from a grey, rainy afternoon to the blackest night to the blazing glory of a new day, so ironical after what we have witnessed.

 

 

I have seen productions where Ibsen's use of repeating images and motifs are clanged like a deafening bell but here the repeated references to parents and children, of the sins of a previous generation being visited on the next, and the stymied chances of renewal slowly build up until they really are the ghosts of the title, haunting the rooms of the Alving house.

 

As I said, Eyre's translation is lean and powerful - although I must admit than an exclamation of "Bollocks" at one point was a bit of a surprise.  He also has cast five performers who act as a real ensemble, keeping the intensity going relentlessly throughout the entire 90 minutes.

 

 

The sometimes sticky role of Jacob Engstrand is slyly played by Brian McCardie, slippery as an eel and always thinking a few steps ahead of whoever he is in dispute with to gain the upper hand.  Charlene McKenna was a spirited, feisty Regina, sure of her future with her employer's son and determined to rise above her place in life.  The savageness of her fury at the shattering of her dreams was well played.

 

The other potentially sticky role is Oswald, the artist son who has returned from a libertine Paris life to confront his mother with his own secret.  In some productions I have seen him played as less of a character and just a collection of symbolist metaphors but Jack Lowden played the role with a real humanity which made his sudden descent into a living limbo all the more affecting.

 

 

Will Keen, while not entirely banishing memories of Tom Wilkinson in the role, was a squirm-inducing Pastor Manders, full of self-righteous hypocrisy and sanctimonious smugness in a brilliantly conceived performance.  He also managed to give Manders a humanity which made it possible to imagine why, when younger, Mrs. Alving ran to him to escape her tyrant of a husband.

 

I have seen Vanessa Redgrave, Judi Dench and Jane Lapotaire play Mrs. Alving but it struck me while I was watching her that Lesley Manville's was the most humane I have yet seen.  Expertly paced, she first appears as a woman happy to explore new ways of thinking and confident in her future now she is free not only of the physical presence of her drunken lecherous husband but, thanks to her action of building an orphanage in his name out of his money, also free from any ties to her from beyond the grave.

 

 

But her attempt at freedom, like Regina and Oswald's, is soon unravelling as Captain Alving's actions do indeed reach back from the past, and Manville's horror that although she has deliberately squandered her husband's financial claim on their son, some inheritances are beyond her control was palpable and real.

 

Her distress at the realization of Oswald's future built and built until I was left poleaxed by the intensity of it all.  I stumbled out into the Islington sunshine breathless from the tension and wondering how she would regroup to do that again for the evening performance.

 

The production plays until the 23rd November and although sold out, there are day seats released at 11am at the box office.

 

Well I suppose I have to blog about A DELICATE BALANCE... it's been over two weeks since I saw it in the awgoosed company of Andrew & Phil West-End Whinger (of the Vauxhall West-End Whinger clan). I was fully expecting, when we entered the Almeida auditorium, a sudden outbreak of whispering and fluttering of programmes-substituting-for-fans as usually seen when the fallen woman attends the Opera in films like CAMILLE or ANNA KARENINA... but no. Damn the chattering classes of Islington and their unflappable hauteur.

But all good things must come to an end... because the play had to start.

I had seen the play previously in 1998 at the Haymarket when the Battle of the Dames took place between Maggie Smith and Eileen Atkins. I suspect I was too busy experiencing these two blazing divas to concentrate much on the play itself so retained only a vague imprint of it as I watched this revival, it was like watching something on a worn video and seeing vague shadows flickering of what had already been on it.

What I remember most of it was that in Agnes' opening speech she talks about her fear of losing her mind... and Eileen Atkins promptly forgot her words. She apologised to the audience and asked an amused John Standing playing her husband to start the scene again. He did this and as soon as she uttered the words "...losing my mind" she got an enormous laugh and cheer from the audience which she slyly acknowledged.

Needless to say Maggie came on all guns blazing to get the audience back with her and soon you could not see the set for cocked shoulders and flapping wrists. They were both utterly magnificent.

Here Penelope Wilton got through this speech without any problems - her stumbled line-readings came later - and away we went into Edward Albee's intriguing but in equal measure infuriating play. Well it wouldn't be Albee I guess...

Tobias and Agnes live a well-heeled WASP life in their tastefully dull large house in the suburbs where they spend their days drinking from an array of decanters and sharing polished, superior dialogue about the possible break-up of their daughter Julia's fourth marriage and what to do with Claire, Agnes' alcoholic sister who, of course, lives with them for the only discernible reason that it breaks up the days fighting with your dipso sister.After sibling verbal battles that echo George and Martha in his - ahem - superior play WHO'S AFRAID OF VIRGINIA WOOLF? the threesome's evening is interrupted by first the arrival of Julia seeking a return to the family nest - although one suspects it was never that much of a sanctuary and the sudden arrival of their best friends Edna and Harry who suddenly do a dog's hind leg and take the play down the ever-shadowy Pinter Alley by announcing they too have come seeking shelter as they have suddenly both developed a sickening terror of... something.

Far from being docile and invisible presences in the house, soon Edna and Harry are seemingly laying down the law in the house and take great delight in turning on Julia - especially as they make a quick dash back to their house to pack more belongs for their lengthy stay at Agnes and Tobias' House of Fun.In further echo's of WAOVW - one of the characters appears in the living room waggling a gun about and Agnes reveals to us that they had a son who died at an early age, an event that was the turning point from which the family have never recovered.

After another act of polished yakking Edna and Harry come to the conclusion that they would never have let Agnes and Tobias stay with them if the roles were reversed and return home, leaving Tobias bereft of speech as he had just asked them to stay... because that's what friends do.One cannot doubt that Albee is a fine writer and the play occasionally comes to life but in James Macdonald's hermetically-sealed production, seemingly as airless as the mahogany-crammed living room, it is just too dreary and strives for a profundity that resolutely refuses to appear. After the first Act I staggered out into the Almeida foyer never in my life wanting so much to hear some Gangsta Rap. I felt smothered by the interminable yak of insufferable middle-class angst played to an Islington white, middle-class audience. And me. And The Brothers Whinger. And Sian Phillips. It was all I could do to shout out "Who the fuck CARES??" The audience also had that really irritating habit of braying loudly and eagerly at any line that had even the whiff of humour, collectively WILLING it to be a comedy.

Imelda Staunton plays Claire, the alcoholic sister who can blister the varnish with her viperous wit and damn, was she missed when not onstage. She gave it her usual abrasive turn, grasping every opportunity she could in her diatribes against the world, her sister and her family, or a snotty sales woman who she teases mercilessly. I must admit that I was fixated on her, not only for her performance but the odd shape of her bust. No doubt an old Playtex Discontinued was pressed into action but it looked like she had a bumper Arctic log under her jumper.Tim Pigott-Smith as Tobias seemed to be giving us an impression of Corin Redgrave - and made me realise how great Redgrave would have been in it and how Pigott-Smith seems to be theatre's answer to Mogadon, his speeches more often than not had me admiring the interesting thing the woman in front of me had done with her hair.

Penelope Wilton has over the past few years proved herself time and again as being an actress of great power but here - wearing Jill Clayburgh's old hair with a glazed, bland air - she whisked me back to the early 1980s when I would walk a mile in tight shoes to avoid her. The fact she stumbled occasionally on her line-readings really suggested the Duse of the Donmar's heart really wasn't in it. It's certainly not the part - when Eileen played it she won the Evening Standard Award for Best Actress.Lucy Cohu as the desperately needy Julia gave another uphill performance which again made me blanch that one day she will probably be giving us her Hedda Gabler. However the biggest surprise was the performance by Diana Hardcastle as Edna. Her rapid transformation from victim to tormentor was very well done from this actress who I have always found a bit mumsy.

The dead-hand direction of James MacDonald was disappointing after his masterly spare production of JUDGEMENT DAY. Laura Hopkins' design probably impressed some but I had to agree with Les Fréres Whinger that it suggested more a funeral parlour than a suburban household.

Needless to say the play has had raves so go know.