THE LION, THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE at The Bridge Theatre - A roaring success?

When I was in primary school, one of my favourite books was CS Lewis' 1950 fantasy novel THE LION THE WITCH AND THE WARDROBE; a gripping narrative, likeable characters, and the titanic struggle between Aslan the lion and the nasty White Witch leading to a final battle for Narnia's throne.  Then someone told me "You DO know it's all about religion don't you?" and my heart broke.  CS Lewis you utter sod.  That then put me off any fantasy-type novel or film... I just sit there waiting for the God analogy to clump like a second boot.

It was with a heavy heart that I went to see the 2005 film but found that I still could really enjoy it's story - and Aslan's mane was WELL strokeable - and to be honest I thought of that film most of the time I was watching Sally Cookson's stage production, currently playing at The Bridge Theatre.  It's definitely time for another viewing.

Did I hate it?  No.  Did I like it then?  Let's just say I got the production I expected when I heard that Sally Cookson had directed it.  Her production of PETER PAN at the National - was it REALLY three years ago? - was one of the most annoying experiences I have sat through.  But happy to say, after a first half that fairly lumped along, the second half picked up the pace and delivered some fairly neat stage images thanks to Rae Smith's designs.  Sometimes though, it might just be pleasant to see an effect onstage that is truly magical without knowing that it is just a tea-chest with a drapery thrown over it courtesy of 'poor theatre' techniques.

The show is billed as being 'conceived by the company' - how '70s - but there is a 'writer in the room' credit for Adam Peck and he certainly did well in distilling such an epic down onto the Bridge stage.  Among the standard over-stated performance with over-emphatic regional dialects, there were a few good performances - Stuart Neal was a graceful Mr Tumnus whose disappearance halfway through is keenly felt, Shalisha James-Davis and Keziah Joseph were good as Susan and Lucy Pevensie - the actors who played Peter and Edmund were fairly nondescript - and I liked Wil Johnson's commanding Aslan, although Laura Elphinstone as The White Witch was rather underwhelming.

I also thought Dean Nolan and Beverly Rudd had a good partnership as the Beavers who help the Pevensie children, and while Benji Bower's music was anodyne folky stuff, Bruno Poet worked some magic of his own with his lighting designs; a word too for the choreographed moves by Dan Canham who kept the stage traffic moving.

So there we go, an amiable 2 and a half hours that might not have done it for me - maybe my head was too full of that night's election results - but hopefully a few of the kids and teens in the audience might have seen something on the stage that made them realize the joy of live theatre and set them off on their own journey.

I must add the poster image is a wonderful design - now, where is that film version... 

A GERMAN LIFE at the Bridge Theatre - Old Memories...

Four Austrian documentary filmmakers, while researching a project, found 105 year-old Brunhilde Pomsel living in an old people's home in Munich and decided they had to commit her memories to film.  It is lucky they did as Pomsel died the following year.  Their film A GERMAN LIFE, was well-received and Pomsel's memories have now been dramatized by Christopher Hampton and is now playing a sold out run at The Bridge Theatre.  His play, a 100 minute monologue without interval, marks Maggie Smith's return to the London stage after 12 years under Jonathan Kent's direction; three theatrical greats combine to deliver an unforgettable experience.

Although the moral quagmire that ordinary Germans who lived under Hitler's Nazi regime had to face in later years has been explored in documentaries and books, it is a situation that never fails to intrigue us today - the implicit question asked by those in the spotlight, "What would you have done in our place?" hangs unanswered, and in a world where right-wing parties across the world are gaining power, it's a question that might be asked again.

Brunhilde sits alone at her table, and as her small flat darkens around her while night falls, she recalls her life in the first half of the 20th Century, all the time explaining that her memory is not what it was.  Her earliest memories are of the lead-up to World War 1 and her authoritarian father's absence, his infrequent return visits usually resulting in another baby brother.  After the war her father curtailed her education, not wanting to pay out for it, but thanks to her mother she learnt typing and shorthand so was able to get a job - again, against Father's wishes.

She remembers how much she loved her secretarial work: her first job with a Jewish fashion merchandiser ended when her father demanded she ask for more money, but she was soon employed again, working two jobs as at night she took dictation from a WWI pilot writing his memoirs.  It was through him that she managed to secure work at the main Broadcasting Centre when he was offered a contract, he was soon dumped but Brunhilde thrived there, she happily remembers how exciting 1920s Berlin was, so many things to do and see although most of it was only really affordable to "rich Jews".

It is in those throwaway statements when Brunhilde refers, with emphasis, to Jews that her frequent disclaimers of knowing nothing really about what was going on around her politically hit you as disingenuous.  Her work at Broadcasting House led to a new job offer in 1942: working at the Propaganda department under the Reich Minister Joseph Goebbels.  Her experience in preparing scripts for radio was a natural fit for rewriting the news for the Propaganda department such as altering the numbers of fatalities, downplaying the Allied forces advances, etc.

There was one condition of her job: she had to be a member of the Nazi party.  Showing a blindness to the situation, she went to register accompanied by her best friend, a Jewish musician called Eva whose life was becoming more prescribed which Brunhilde blithely ignored until it was too late and a weakening Eva was reduced to living in a single room with her family.  By then, Brunhilde had become friendly with Magda Goebbels who gave her one of her own tailored outfits when Brunhilde's only smart clothes were ruined, and she remembers with joy when the Goebbels children would visit the office and she let them play on her typewriter.

Despite all of this, she was also expected to 'freshen up' Goebbels' penthouse apartment after yet another visit from one of his many actress mistresses.  By then Brunhilde had attended the mass rally at Berlin's Sportpalast in 1943 to see her boss declare Total War on the Reich's enemies: his cry for every German to fight the enemy was seen as a warning that the war was being lost; but Brunhilde was so bored by it all, it was only after an officer warned her that she started to clap.

And so it continued until the end; any relief over Hitler and Goebbels' suicides quickly replaced by shock on hearing that Magda had killed herself after participating in the poisoning of their six children.  Brunhilde was interviewed by the Red Army after the German surrender and told them everything she knew, expecting to be treated as a 'friendly witness'; she was jailed for five years, ironically in several of the concentration camps that were still standing, including Buchenwald.  After her release, she returned to West Germany and anonymity, working again as a secretary for broadcasting companies - well, she had all that experience.

Not having seen the documentary it is hard to know where her actual words stop and Hampton's input begins but his play made for a riveting evening, aided by Kent's masterly direction, Anna Fleischle's utilitarian set and Jon Clark's slowly dying light.

But we were not there for Hampton's new play, Kent's new production, or Fleischle's set design; it was to see Maggie Smith, back where she shines best, on a stage with a live audience to hypnotize and delight.  Solitary, testy, guarded, Maggie's Brunhilde constantly has you guessing; every pause, every backtracked comment, every evasive 'um...' could suggest either self-preservation or the weary toll of assumed guilt loaded on her by those who were not there.

Humorous, rueful, only occasionally emotional, it was Brunhilde Pomsel filtered through Maggie Smith - her trademark expressive hands and arms conducting our attention and always that voice... cracked but swooping still, she gave us a woman who asked for no sympathy but found it with her subdued response when, years after the event, she asks at the Holocaust education centre what happened to her best friend and learns she perished in Auschwitz.  The play ends with her reminiscence of having an abortion by a Jewish lover who had escaped to Amsterdam as it would have physically endangered her life - one suspects that Brunhilde's life under the Nazis would have been endangered had she had it.

Maggie was quoted once as saying "I like the ephemeral thing about theatre, every performance is like a ghost – it’s there and then it’s gone".  She will be haunting me with her performance in A GERMAN LIFE.

MY NAME IS LUCY BARTON at The Bridge Theatre: from the page to the stage...

...something can get lost along the way.

When it was announced that US stage and screen actress Laura Linney was to make her UK stage debut directed by Richard Eyre I jumped at the chance to go; since she first came to my attention in the late 1990s, Laura Linney has been an actress that I have admired for her crisp and cool performances in both comedy and drama on both big and small screens.  She did not disappoint, she was remarkable on stage... the play however...

It was all the more annoying as Eyre's production is beautifully nuanced and paced throughout it's 90 minute running time, helped by Peter Mumford's subtle lighting and Bob Crowley's elegant set design.  Sadly the play - an adaptation by Rona Munro of a novel by Elizabeth Strout - felt too thin for the energy expended on it by the creative team.

Laura Linney played the titular character Lucy Barton, a successful novelist living in her beloved New York with her husband  and two children, everything the way it should be.  But Lucy is admitted to an up-market hospital with an illness that proves hard to diagnose so her expected short stay drags on for weeks and she feels herself coming adrift from her life despite the trust she puts in her elderly Jewish doctor.  Worried how Lucy is alone most of the time, her husband calls Lucy's estranged mother from the Midwest to come and keep her company in the hospital.

This situation is fraught with problems, especially as mother and daughter have had a distant relationship for some years with little points of contact.  As her mother bombards her with long-forgotten inhabitants of the same town where Lucy grew up, the daughter muses on their relationship and the more painful memories of living with a father who returned from WWII psychologically damaged.

What her childhood did give Lucy was a yearning to read and write and instilled in her the desire to get away from her limited options for success in her small town and escape to NY to become a writer.  A wary relationship develops between mother and daughter again but as soon as Lucy appears to be on the mend, her mother disappears as abruptly as she arrived; it is only later on when Lucy has to re-evaluate her life that she can join the dots between her parents and her own children.

I am sure that people who know the book might get something more out of seeing it dramatized but I found myself enervated by the story which for all it's psychological digging and attempt to write about the current landscape of American lives, I just found to be just a modern take on the big-dreams-in-a-small-city tale which in the past would have served as the engine to many a Joan Crawford or Barbara Stanwyck star vehicle, or a mundane tv-movie of the week. 

Added to that, the rather tentative psychological insights of the play - which takes in such touchstones as the Holocaust, the AIDS crisis in the 1980s and 1990s, and September 11th - reminded me of what Virginia Woolf said of the writing of a contemporary female writer "It aims to soar but agrees to perch". Although to be honest, it was in this last part of the play, when Lucy tells us of all that happened after leaving the hospital, that Laura Linney really came into her own and held us all in the palm of her hand.

Her cool, reserved quality was a good way in to the play and Crowley's spare set of a hospital bed, a night-stand and a chair, meant that all attention was focused on her exquisite performance which included a subtle shift in accent when playing the mother which gave that character a distinctive personality.  Linney's humane Lucy Barton held the audience rapt until the final well-deserved ovation.

I am so pleased to have seen this remarkable actress finally on stage in such a nicely calibrated production... it's just a shame I found the play to not be worthy of their talents.  I have now been to The Bridge three times and each time have left vaguely unsatisfied.  Maybe it's the space itself?

JULIIUS CAESAR at the Bridge Theatre - all terribly new, all terribly old

All in all, it was an evening of remembering things..
.

 

...I remembered that Nicholas Hytner's 'modern-dress' Shakespeare productions might make critics salivate but to me they are crushingly obvious attempts at saying "Hey kids... Shakespeare could almost be writing about today!"; surely any decent production should rely on the text to get that over to an audience.

...I remembered how The Bridge Theatre's YOUNG MARX so underwhelmed me and here I was seeing it's second production to similar feelings

 ... and I remembered how uncomfortable the seating is at The Bridge, a willful act of neglect on the part of Hytner and oppo Nick Starr as the theatre was only built last year.

...and finally I remembered how much I loathe being interrupted during the first important minutes of a production by disruptive latecomers and a clueless usher.  Could they have come in during the caterwauling pro-Caesar band playing in the round playing area?  No.  Due to this-in-the-round configuration, the latecomers had to come through our row led by a clueless bumbling usher to get to far-flung seats as the actors were already speaking.

Now The Bridge Theatre's 'dress circle' third row has NO legroom when you are sitting in the large tip-down seats so we all had to stand and attempt to squash against the back wall when this tribe of arseholes made their way loudly and clumsily along the row.  Cue shouting from people whose feet were stood on and those who did the standing... meanwhile I have lost my train of thought and the actors might as well be speaking Urdu for all I fucking cared.  I repeat... this theatre was built last year, so we are not talking about seating as in the more ancient west end theatres which are cramped.  So one can only assume that the architect responsible deliberately made them like this.  The arsehole.

So.. by the time the mayhem died down we had missed the first scene altogether.  Sad to report I was so angry at all of the above that the production had lost me... and nothing I saw particularly made me fight to catch up.

Which is a shame considering I was looking forward to seeing this especially after seeing Dominic Dromgoole's gripping Globe production in 2014 which showed how timely Shakespeare's play is and probably always will be... and no, that wasn't in modern dress.

It's also a shame as there were good performances struggling to get out from Hytner's absurdly LOUD production, nothing terribly revelatory, but good.  Ben Wishaw was well-cast as a liberal elite Brutus, first seen at his desk surrounded by books, who is suckered into joining the conspiracy against Caesar when they appeal to his Republican idealism.  Wishaw is not a terribly likeable performer; there is a prissy petulant quality to his acting which suited the role of Brutus - a man whose idealist nature led to his downfall - but there were also no surprises in his performance: he gave me just what I expected.

Michelle Fairley played Cassius with a needling earnestness but nowhere in her performance did she suggest anything that was revelatory or what was gained by having her cast over a male actor, I also got no real heat off of David Calder's Caesar, for all the hints of Donald Trump - which was too drearily obvious to have been pursued in rehearsal.  Again, it's not that he gave a bad performance... it just didn't reveal or illuminate.

I had sadly the same feeling for David Morrissey whose hang-dog Mark Antony reminded me of the Tex Avery cartoon dog Droopy more than the quick-witted character who subtly beats the conspirators at their own game.  He upped his game for the famous funeral oration but then he almost seemed to disappear into the clanging loud whirlwind of the final third of the production.

One had to look further down the ranks for the performances that did stand out: Wendy Kweh's Portia was suitably impassioned in her attempt to keep Caesar from going to the Senate while Hannah Stokely and Leila Farzad stood out as Metellus Cimber and Decius, senators who all play their parts in lulling Caesar into thinking it's just another day at the office.  The most sparky performance of all was from Adjoa Andoh as the spiteful Casca, whose shade-throwing starts the whole conspiracy off; her pointed and arch performance made one feel sorry for the character's absence in the second half.

As i said all the stalls seats have been removed for JULIUS CAESAR making the punters so-many unpaid extras in the crowd scenes - and just like the Globe's groundlings - we had a fainter!  The production had to be halted in the scene between Cassius and Casca when a young bloke fainted and he had to be removed from the acting area, the wuss - it was only about 30 minutes in.

Although I can see the point in the promenade set-up, ultimately I tired of seeing the audience being moved about like so much cattle and looking about themselves while the actors were performing in front of them.  I did however like Bunny Christie's inspired production design of having platforms rise up in and around the audience to give the actors their stages - the Senate was particularly well-realized.

I'm only sorry I did not enjoy the production more.  To be honest I got more from the excellent programme notes than from the production!

YOUNG MARX at the Bridge Theatre - Carry On Comrade...

Two weeks ago we visited London's latest performing space, the rather clunky-named Bridge Theatre, which is situated between London and Tower Bridges.  I find it a frankly ghastly part of town, soulless and ugly, but the theatre space should give it a bit more promise.  The theatre is the brainchild of Nicholas Hytner and Nick Starr who made such a success at the National Theatre when they were artistic director and executive director.

It will take a while to "warm up": the main foyer is fairly drab and oddly-lit from fashionable single bulbs hanging from the ceiling. the security staff out front were hardly welcoming and the trendy menu/bar doesn't inspire confidence.  However the loos are plentiful and there is a very handy stalls foyer space by the auditorium, which in itself reminded me of an enlarged Cottesloe/Dorfman apace.  The side stalls, where we were seated, were angled towards the stage but at the cost of leg-room.

The auditorium was about three-quarters full for the Bridge Theatre's launch production, Richard Bean and Clive Coleman's anachronistic YOUNG MARX which gives a whacking star part to Rory Kinnear as the struggling Karl Marx and is directed by - yes you guessed - Nicholas Hytner.

The thought "Blackadder does Marx" settled into my head very early on and I could not shake that through it's running time.  It gives a comic spin to Marx in his refugee years in Soho and uses many instances from his real life to comic effect - his regular visits to the cupboard to hide from creditors and sponging fellow-refugees, the near-poverty that he and his family struggled through, the attempts to pawn the incongruously expensive possessions of his high-born wife Jenny, and the friendship with fellow political thinker Friedrich Engels is turned into a comedy double-act.

The trouble is, it's just not funny enough.  There are a couple of humorous moments and set-ups but they don't quite land - to paraphrase Virginia Woolf, it aims to soar but agrees to perch.  Bean and Coleman's gags keep coming but arrives at a skidding halt when a death happens in the young family but we are being asked to be sorry for an under-written child role and you wonder why the people are so upset when the dead boy has been such an offstage presence.

Rory Kinnear certainly gives a barn-storming performance but it's also a charmless one and you really cannot understand why his egotistical Karl is seen to be the life and soul of the party.  He is also settling into a shtick where he hits consonants like a man hitting a cow's arse with a banjo - a single line that has words beginning with p, b or d are verbal explosions which become very wearing.

Against his bells and smells performance, Oliver Chris was delightfully witty and wry as Engels, frustrated by Marx's inability to settle down and write his long-promised manifesto.  The usually-dependable Nancy Carroll is wasted as Jenny Marx, forever on the verge of leaving her unreliable husband and being noble, and Laura Elphinstone - while giving a good performance as the Marx's maid Nym - again is making bricks from the straw supplied by Bean and Coleman, the women roles are just cyphers.

There was a nice performance by Eben Figueiredo as the excitable Konrad Schramm, a committed revolutionary who hero worships Marx to the extent that he takes his hero's place in a duel - yet another actual incident - and Miltos Yerolemou makes an impression as the explosively angry French political activist Emmanuel Barthélmey but otherwise the supporting cast hide behind wigs and hats, giving hardly noticeable performances.

The revolving set by Mark Thompson was fun as it quickly changed from hovel to reading room to pub backroom but it's distance from the audience made the play again seem too remote and the production benefited from Mark Henderson's moody lighting.

The play ends on almost a Chekhovian note with Marx finally sitting down to write his great work surrounded by his family and close friends which was a nice way to end but I suspect the writers had just blown themselves out.  Nicholas Hytner directs at a frenetic pace but it eventually reflects the slightly desperate air of the writing to be more than it is.