DVD/150: MY BOY JACK (Brian Kirk, 2007, tv)

In 1997, I saw David Haig play Rudyard Kipling at the Hampstead Theatre in his play MY BOY JACK, ten years on he starred in a tv adaptation, with Daniel Radcliffe as his son John, Kim Cattrall and Carey Mulligan.

In 1914, Kipling was an exponent for Britain entering World War 1 - and accepted a Government offer to write propaganda - while also encouraging his 16 year-old son John to join up.

But John was rejected by the navy and the army due to chronic short-sightedness.

Kipling pulled strings and John became a lieutenant in the Irish Guards, much to the shock of his mother and sister. 

A fortnight after arriving in France, John went missing during the Battle of Loos. He was 18.

After doggedly inspecting photographs of injured soldiers, the Kiplings finally heard that John was last seen disorientated during the battle. They never found his body.

Shelf or charity shop?  One for the plastic storage box.  It is a sombre story, soberly told.  A little too soberly perhaps as the film seems to want to build to an explosion of anguish which never comes.  Carey Mulligan is fine as the 'modern' sister who shares John's wish to leave their stuffy family home but her character fades after John's death, while Kim Cattrall is admirably restrained as Kipling's American wife Carrie but her release of anguish is not the fireworks you expect.  Daniel Radcliffe's usual gauche manner suits John Kipling well and he plays well against David Haig's all-enveloping Kipling, his stiff-upper-lip facade trembles marvellously as he attempts to hide his pain.  The most niggling thing about it all is that the poem MY BOY JACK was not written for his son but for Jack Cornwell, the youngest sailor to die earlier in 1916 during the Battle of Jutland.  John Kipling was always called John, not Jack.

"Have you news of my boy Jack?”
    Not this tide.
"When d'you think that he'll come back?"
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

"Has any one else had word of him?"
    Not this tide.
For what is sunk will hardly swim,
    Not with this wind blowing, and this tide.

"Oh, dear, what comfort can I find?"
    None this tide,
    Nor any tide,
Except he did not shame his kind—
    Not even with that wind blowing, and that tide.

Then hold your head up all the more,
    This tide,
    And every tide;
Because he was the son you bore,
    And gave to that wind blowing and that tide!

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD at the Old Vic

Yes Constant Reader it's true... I really struggle with Tom Stoppard.  There, I've said it.  I feel cleansed.

It's that Smart Alec air, the over-use of wordplay and punning which wears me down; I feel I want to yell back at the stage "Yes I get it, English is your adopted language - now stop the bloody barrage!".  So you can imagine that it was with a heavy heart that I sat down to watch his first big success ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD now revived at the Old Vic, the very theatre where it made it's London debut 50 years ago staged by Olivier's National Theatre.

My only experience with Stoppard's play was seeing his own drab 1990 screen version starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman so at least I had a general idea of what to expect but swipe me, I really liked it!  In large part this was due to David Levaux' crisp and fast-moving direction but also impressing were Joshua McGuire as Guildenstern and - the real success of the evening - Daniel Radcliffe as Rosencrantz.

Stoppard's megamix of WAITING FOR GODOT and HAMLET muses on what happens to Rosencrantz and Guldenstern - Hamlet's university friends invited to Elsinore to spy on him by Claudius - when they are offstage.  They sit and wait for Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius to update them on what is happening - they chat, they bicker, they play question-and-answer games, they guess at what's going on but even when they are told by Claudius to actually do something - to find what Hamlet has done with Polonius' body - they don't do anything.  Finally they get to do something when they escort Hamlet to England... but as we know, this doesn't end well...

Stoppard's clever trick is to use the actual Shakespeare text for the scenes from HAMLET but uses vernacular in the scenes between the two friends as well as their scenes with The Player, the leader of the troupe of actors so beloved by Hamlet.  The Player gives David Haig the chance to be as splenetic as ever but also to investigate Stoppard's musings on the permanence of death and the pretense of performing.  Who better to muse on death than the actor who has to die convincingly?

Maguire and Radcliffe make a good double-act, the former obviously the more dominant of the two as he gets so easily exasperated at Radcliffe's sweetly naive Rosencrantz.  But under the comedy wordplay they also suggest a sadness and pathos of two lost souls caught up in a situation not of their making and although not aware of it, totally in over their heads.  As I said above, this really does showcase how good Radcliffe is now as a stage actor - EQUUS and HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS.. showed him to be a charismatic performer but those early performances had an air of trying too hard, here he seems relaxed on stage which helps the comedy.

The excellent performances of the three lead actors is matched by a fine supporting cast; it was interesting seeing this so soon after the Almeida Theatre production of HAMLET and it must be said that the performances of Luke Mullins as Hamlet, William Chubb as Polonius and Helena Wilson as Ophelia are as good as anything seen in a standard production of Shakespeare's play.

As I said David Leveaux' production has a nimbleness that only slightly becomes becalmed as the play comes to an end but overall it kept one engaged in not just the dizzying wordplay but the action both offstage and on.  The non-specific set by Anna Fleischle and lighting by Howard Harrison also contribute greatly to the overall enjoyment to be had.

It has just been announced that ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD has been extended at the Old Vic to May 6th - this production is thoroughly recommended both for a good laugh but also for the arguments which linger in the mind after.

GUYS AND DOLLS - Following GYPSY from Chichester to London...

You can almost hear the owners of the Savoy Theatre when they realised that Imelda Staunton in GYPSY was such a massive success, calling up the Chichester Festival Theatre and saying "Um.. you don't have any more like that do you?"  Luckily for them they did, namely their 2014 revival of GUYS AND DOLLS - which is now playing the Savoy until next March.

There might still be someone in Buttkick, Idaho that does not know that the 1982 National Theatre production directed by Richard Eyre was the production that turned me into a huge theatre fan but it's true.  That production captured me and made me it's own, and while I have seen a few revivals since that have seemed almost cowed by the status of both the musical itself and the NT production, the good news is that I enjoyed Gordon Greenberg's Chichester production enough to want to see it again in it's London transfer.

Yes there are still times that I wonder how such an obvious laughline can be overlooked or mis-handled, yes I can wonder why the orchestrations are sometimes seeming to rush through the songs almost as if embarrassed at the score's riches and yes, sometimes I wonder why the performers sometimes attack the roles like a rugby prop-forward when if they could just relax into it the laughs will come, they just need to trust the material more.

In the transfer to London a key cast change has given the production a new lease of life, namely David Haig as Nathan Detroit.  He has invigorated it and given the scenes involving Nathan and Adelaide a new weight where as in Chichester the show was seemingly all about Jamie Parker's Sky Masterson.

Haig gives his man-nearing-the-end-of-his-tether routine a new shake of the dice and presents us with a Nathan that we can care for and he has a perfect foil in Sophie Thompson's Miss Adelaide. Although still not showing the vulnerable heart of the character, Sophie's performance prompted a huge ovation again at the curtain call which was lovely to witness!

Jamie Parker is still ruling the roost as Sky Masterson and he is now partnered by Siubhan Harrison who certainly captures the steel in Sister Sarah but - like Clare Foster in Chichester - doesn't quite show the girl beneath the Missionary uniform.

The supporting cast all work well with Neil McCaul excelling as a Gorbals Arvide Abernathy and Gavin Spokes certainly seizes his big moment in "Sit Down You're Rocking The Boat" which now also pops up at the curtain call for a tambourine-friendly encore.

A major component of the show is Peter McKintosh's bright and colourful set of shards of Times Square billboards and Tim Mitchell's lighting design.  I must admit that I again found Carlos Acosta's much-vaunted choreography to be fairly uninspiring and lacking focus.

Coming away from the show I felt very proud that I had the good fortune to start my real theatre-going life with such a bona fide Broadway classic.  33 years on, it is a measure of Richard Eyre's production that while watching this revival, I can still half-close my eyes and see Ian Charleson, Julie Covington, Bob Hoskins, Julia McKenzie, David Healy, John Normington, Bill Paterson, Jim Carter, Harry Towb, Belinda Sinclair, Rachel Izen and that new doll to the London stage, Imelda Staunton.

However, even without those ghosts in the memory, you will have a great time at the Savoy...

Dvd/150: TALKING HEADS (Stuart Burge/Giles Foster/Alan Bennett/Tristram Powell/Patrick Garland/Udayan Prasad/Gavin Miller, 1988/98, tv)

Alan Bennett's incisive monologues never lose the power to draw you in, make you smile but leave you drained at the quietly desperate lives they depict.

They are performed by a dazzling cast: Bennett, Patricia Routledge (twice), Maggie Smith, Stephanie Cole, Julie Walters (twice), Thora Hird (twice), Eileen Atkins, David Haig and Penelope Wilton.

Standouts from Series 1 are Maggie Smith as the depressed vicar's wife whose secret drinking leads to the arms of an Asian shopkeeper and the BAFTA-winning performance by Thora Hird as Doris, reviewing her life in the dying light of day after suffering a fall.

Series 2 wasn't as consistent but several are stunning: David Haig as the park cleaner struggling to hide his secret, Julie Walters as the sour wife realising her husband is a serial killer, and a second BAFTA-winning performance by Hird as Violet, a stroke victim in her 90s.

Shelf or charity shop?  They can soliloquize from the shelf...

Memorable Theatre Performances #6:

David Haig in LOOT (Tricycle, 2009)

"What makes this a first-rate farce performance is Haig's suggestion that Truscott is a madman in the grip of an idée fixe" - The Guardian

"It was a joy to watch him prowl the stage drop-kicking Orton's outrageous one-liners into the audience with expert timing" - me, ChrisNThat