NETWORK at the Lyttelton, National Theatre: Fake news....

Sidney Lumet's 1976 film NETWORK was a success when released, going on to win four top Academy Awards - but when was the last time you ever saw it on tv or re-released in cinemas?  I suspect it has not aged as well as some other 'classics' although in 2007 it was ranked 64th in a list of 100 Great American Films by the AFI.  I admired it at the time for the barnstorming performances of Peter Finch and Faye Dunaway and the savage satire of Paddy Chayevsky's script but now I suspect I would find it's underlying misogyny a pain.

However here we are, 40 years beyond Chayevsky's ideas on the state of television and the vision  seems all too real - the race-to-the-bottom of tv planners chasing an ever dwindling audience, reality shows of every description and, in particular, the movement from straight news to 'opinion news'.  The pin-up boy of high-concept, director theatre Ivo van Hove now brings us his take on it - and a fairly maddening experience it is.

Okay let's get the most annoying thing out of the way first, what's a bloody restaurant doing onstage?  Van Hove and his partner-cum-designer Jan Versweyveld have taken over all of the massive Lyttelton stage and turned it into a vast television studio with a glass production booth, mirrored make-up desks glimpsed at the back, the now-standard shiny mirrored studio floor and dwarfing all else, a huge video screen to get you up close and personal to the characters thanks to the prowling stedicam operators.

All well and good I guess, all within the world of the piece... so why make one third of the stage into an onstage restaurant with punters having a three-course meal within the running time of the show?  Van Hove would no doubt say because there are a few bar/restaurant scenes.. but there are also about the same amount set in Max's apartment so why not have that there instead?  It was profoundly irritating to be distracted from the play by kitchen porters wandering at the back or waiters walking around dispensing drinks.  NETWORK runs 2 hours with no interval - is it just a cunning ploy to make up for what they lose in the bars between acts?  If they were so keen to make it an immersive experience within the world of the play, why not have the Gogglebox alumni sat at the side of the stage commenting on Howard Beale's onscreen rants?  Oh and don't get me started on the four dj blokes sitting like Kraftwerk high above the large screen...

Oh and another thing Mr van Hove... was all the filmed footage projected onto the large screen meant to be about 2 seconds delayed so the close-ups didn't match what was being said?  Profoundly annoying and unnecessary.

Apart from all the distractions there was an actual play going on, but what on screen worked as a concerted satirical pummelling of the television world, scaled down to human form onstage it all just seemed a little obvious, a little forced, and definitely preaching to the converted about the heartless bastards who run television networks.

Howard Beale has been a tv news anchorman for many years but his audience is dwindling and he is eventually told by his old friend Max Schumacher that he is to be replaced, which Howard appears to be resigned to.  However when he announces this on the air the following evening, he also says that he will blow his brains out on his last day on-air.  The network bosses go ballistic but Max manages to persuade them to let Howard atone for his outburst but when next-on-air Howard again goes into a meltdown resulting in a huge jump in the viewing figures.

This arouses the attention of Diana Christensen, a TV producer who is in charge of programming, who offers to take the news department under her wing, and make "The Howard Beale Show" an even bigger audience favourite with shock-opinion reporting and Howard as it's centre-piece.  The execs override Max's protests of dumbing-down the news and replace him with Diana; despite this they start an extra-marital affair.  Howard does not disappoint and becomes a ratings smash with such direct appeals to his audience to open their windows and scream "I'm mad as Hell and I'm not going to take it anymore".

However Howard oversteps the mark when he urges his viewers to write to the White House to stop a secret take-over of the network by an Arab conglomerate.  Despite the huge reaction, the head of the network reveals to Howard that without the Arab's cash the network will go under and that he views television as just a commodity to channel the views of politicians and capitalism.

Howard tries to preach this to his audience but his new message alienates the viewers and he faces rating disaster.  Diana also realizes that she needs a new controversy to kick-start the show's ratings - and to get interest in her new tv show: a reality programme 'starring' a terrorist organization...

Ok I will admit that I was never bored during NETWORK but mostly that was down to the charismatic performance by Bryan Cranston as Howard Beale.  Unlike Peter Finch's scenery-chewing in the film, Cranston played the character as a man who dares to say what he feels and what he sees in the mad world around him, his Howard knows all too well what he is saying and what the desired effect will be; which makes him a truly tragic figure at the end of the piece when he gets lost in the machinations of the powers that he once tried to put an end to.

Cranston's magnetic, seductive performance was not matched by the surprisingly dour performances from Douglas Henshall as Max and Michelle Dockery as Diana.  Lee Hall's adaptation seems to pull it's punches in making his Diana the icy villainess that won Faye Dunaway her Best Actress Academy Award so the role seems to have no inner conviction nor does Henshall who is possibly too young for the role.  For you van Hove fans, Dochery does get to fly into a rage and throw papers around for no better reason that Ruth Wilson did it in HEDDA GABLER.

The supporting performances are all fairly one-note; NETWORK famously won Beatrice Straight a Supporting Actress Academy Award even though she only appeared on screen for just over 5 minutes. However those 5 minutes are magnificent as she reacts with shock, anger, hysteria then a rueful knowingness when William Holden's Max tells her he is leaving her for Diana (you can see the whole scene on YouTube).  The role was played here by Caroline Faber on a very low-light.

I will briefly mention Tunji Kasim who, as the venal network boss Frank Hackett, gave such a laughably 2-dimensional 'baddie' performance I expected every new appearance to be accompanied by a swirling cape and a twirled moustache.

The amusing thing was to see the audience being used as much as Howard Beale's unseen tv audience - during the scenes involving his crass news show the audience are exhorted to shout out three times "I'm Mad As Hell And I'm Not Going To Take It Anymore" and clap wildly, and at the end of the show, in an outrageous moment of preaching to the converted Pavlovian dogs, van Hove has video footage played on the big screen of the US presidential inaugerations from Gerald Ford to this day... cue mad cheering in the audience when Barrack Obama appeared, cue mad booing when Donald Trump appeared...

Thanks to Bryan Cranston, NETWORK is sold out for it's entire run but the National Theatre always has a number of seats sold on the day as well as it's Friday Rush for tickets on sale for the following weeks performances, see the website for more details.

HEDDA GABLER at the Lyttelton, National Theatre - Ruth Wilson Scores With A Hedda....

I really wrestled with seeing Ivo van Hove's production of Ibsen's HEDDA GABLER, his first for the National Theatre.  Yes I loved his revival of Miller's A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE with it's bold performances and pressure-cooker atmosphere but I had squirmed through his production of the David Bowie musical LAZARUS.

However word of mouth that this was one to see had me scouring the sold-out seating plans on the National website until I found two returns in the stalls.  I was glad I changed my mind because for all his obvious Director Theatre tropes, van Hove delivered a scorching revival.  

As with his VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE, van Hove has stripped the play down to the bare bones and shone a bright, white searchlight on the characters leaving them mercilessly exposed to our view.  Luckily, van Hove has still allowed for Patrick Marber's sardonic, sarcastic humour in his translation to pierce the action but as Ibsen's plot gathers momentum then his trademark high-level tension starts to ratchet up.

As usual the production is designed and lit by van Hove's partner Jan Versweyveld - I wonder if their home matches their theatrical aesthetic?  Minimalist spaces and the odd chair or couch... it would be fun if the van Hove home is actually packed with kitsch.  Versweyveld gives the production a soulless room with cold whitewashed walls, empty apart from a couch and chair, a table, an overly-designed table lamp, a large piano and incongruous buckets of fresh-cut flowers.  Oddly enough it works, suggesting not only the new home that Hedda is trapped in now she is married to the loving but petulant academic Tesman but also the emptiness she feels in the relationship. 

Six months married and finally back from their honeymoon, it is clear to Hedda that she has miscalculated; the spoilt daughter of a domineering General who panicked at his death and, not getting any younger, agreed to marry Tesman in the belief that he would be successful and keep her in the style she is accustomed to.  To her disgust she finds he is already suggesting economies in their lifestyle and that he has been supported while growing up by his Aunt Julie whom Hedda finds a bore.  Even their dream home is built on a lie - Hedda had told Tesman she would love to live there when they walked past it as she had run out of things to say!

In denial that she might be pregnant, Hedda turns her attention to manipulating the lives of those around her namely Thea Elvstead and Ejlert Lovborg.  Hedda had tormented Thea while growing up but pretends to be a friend after learning that she has left her husband to help Hedda's one-time suitor Ejlert Lovborg to stop drinking and finish his academic masterpiece that could win him a coveted job over Tesman.  The only person immune to Hedda's manipulations is the cynical Judge Brack, another longtime friend of hers who can match her deceptions easily.

To Thea's dismay, Lovborg gives in to Hedda's taunts and starts drinking before joining Tesman at Judge Brack's house for a lad's night out.  In the early hours Tesman arrives home and tells Hedda that Brack moved his guest to the local brothel and on the way Lovborg drunkenly dropped his manuscript but Tesman found it and gives it to Hedda for safekeeping.  Like her father's pistols which are never far from her side, Hedda has been handed a loaded gun but her shot ricochets back on her...

In a constant state of ferocious intensity, Ruth Wilson was magnificent as Hedda; crackling like an overhead train cable in the rain, she roamed the stage like a trapped panther, dripping scorn even when attempting to compliment others - only quiet finally when trapped by Brack in the trap of her own making.  Wilson has always been a strong stage actress but this was a particular triumph.

There were strong supporting performances too from Sinead Matthews as Thea Elvstead (nasty frock though), Kate Duchene as Aunt Juliana and Éva Magyar as the ever-watchful maid Berthe.  The men proved a bit more uneven: Rafe Spall was a snide, loutish Judge Brack - although he was effective against Wilson a little more shade would have been welcome, Kyle Soller's Tesman was less of a puppy-dog than usual but Chukwudi Iwuji as Lovborg was two-dimensional.

As I said van Hove's direction was watertight but for each good directorial touch - Hedda 'decorating' with handfuls of flowers and a nailgun - there were ones that stuck out as too distracting: the supporting cast took forever to board up a large onstage window before the last act for no particular reason while Brack's pouring and spitting the contents of a can of tomato juice over Hedda as a visual illustration of his final power over her was just heavy-handed.  I could also have done without the blasts of Joni Mitchell's 'Blue' between scenes...  how 60s.

These clumpy moments apart, van Hove's HEDDA GABLER blew the clutter off the usual Ibsenisms away to deliver a thrilling, highly-strung experience.

HEDDA GABLER will screen in cinemas in the UK, Europe and the US as part of National Theatre Live on 9th March - to find a cinema near you, click on the picture below:

LAZARUS at The Kings Cross Theatre - The Man Who Stayed On Earth

As it turned out, the announcement of David Bowie's death in the second week of January was an omen for the year to come as it has been a litany of unhappy news ever since.  But Bowie has haunted 2016 and as it started with the release of his album BLACKSTAR, it ends with the London premiere of his musical LAZARUS which he completed shortly before his death.  Indeed Bowie's appearance at the show's premiere in New York was the last time he was seen in public.

It would have been wonderful to say that LAZARUS is a perfect end to a dazzling career but, while the show is brimming with creative ideas and the Bowie songs are obviously sparkling with his genius - as is fast becoming a mantra on this blog when discussing musicals - without a sturdy book any show will just be a collection of disparate moments, and playwright Enda Walsh's book is frustratingly opaque and never far from being annoying.

LAZARUS is a sequel to THE MAN WHO FELL TO EARTH, both the original Walter Tevis novel and the Nicolas Roeg film, in which Bowie played the tailor-made lead role.  Thomas Jerome Newton is an alien who has come to Earth from his arid planet to use his advanced technical knowledge to raise the money for his own space programme so he can return home with water to save his planet.  However Newton has reckoned without the evil ways of Mankind and his plan is frustrated, leaving him stranded on earth, rich beyond measure but alone and lost to alcoholism.

LAZARUS raises Newton to continue his story; now isolated in an anonymous apartment building the alien boozes his time away waiting for the release of death while various under-written characters float in and around the action: a psychopath stalking the clubs of NY, Newton's assistant who is almost possessed by Newton's long-gone love Mary-Lou and an ethereal child-woman who knows more about Newton than he understands.

It is so maddeningly elusive that after a while I thought "okay you don't want me to get involved with these characters? Fine I won't" so checked out and watched the pretty video projections on the otherwise ghastly beige anonymous apartment set.

US TV star Michael C Hall played Newton with some level of intensity but, given nothing to do then wander around the stage, he soon wore out his welcome.  Fellow American actor Michael Esper had a bit more to do as the murderous Valentine, but as soon as the character announced his name I was literally counting down the minutes until the appearance of the song "Valentine's Day".  Boy did it take it's time too.

I had more trouble with Sophia Anne Caruso as the blonde Girl and Amy Lennox as the schizophrenic Elly.  The latter goes into full drunk slut-mode within minutes and the young girl finally reveals that she is the spirit of a dead girl who is hanging about to die properly before Newton can get the release he needs.  All the time these characters were on stage it was hard to overlook Enda Walsh's ghastly misogynist writing of these two characters.  It certainly wasted both actress' talents.

Bowie's score sounded excellent under the musical direction of Tom Cawley and the onstage band - trapped behind glass like a recording studio - sounded fine; the sax was played by James Knight who was Kirsty MacColl's partner.  But although it was nice to hear the Bowie songs played live, that did not stop the clash of hearing songs like MAN WHO SOLD THE WORLD, HEROES, LIFE ON MARS and ABSOLUTE BEGINNERS shoe-horned into Walsh's naff book.  They are too unique to be 'book' songs with too many personal resonances to fit in a musical.  You can do that kind of stuff with the songs of Abba in MAMMA MIA... but Bowie?  Nope.

Ivo van Hove's production certainly never felt dull thanks to the video projections of Tal Yarden and the contribution of van Hove's lighting designer partner Jan Versweyveld but when the music and the lighting stopped and the speaking started... yeesh.  It was telling that the biggest ovation at the curtain call was when a large picture of Bowie filled the stage, his giving the audience an "I'll be seeing you" gesture being probably all we needed to see after all...

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.