The WINTER'S TALE at Sam Wanamaker Playhouse

In April I will be seeing the Royal Ballet's production of THE WINTER'S TALE at Covent Garden.  It's nice to know that I will not have to speed read the synopsis before it starts as I am now a bit familiar with the story having seen it twice in four months!  First Kenneth Branagh's production at the Garrick before Christmas and now the new production at the Globe's Sam Wanamaker Playhouse Theatre.

As usual with the Wanamaker Playhouse, it's intimate space made the play more involving and allowed for a more subtle playing style from some of the actors.  Our 2nd tier seats were facing the stage so nothing was missed apart from when they lowered the six candle chandeliers above the stage so all you could mostly see was the actors legs.

However the biggest literal pain was the bench seating... it absolutely beggars belief that this theatre that opened only two years ago was built with such uncomfortable seating,  No doubt the Playhouse would say they were keeping to the Jacobean style of theatre. But then I am sure the Jacobean back stage area did not have showers and toilets.  Think on...

So, here I was again in the court of the King of Sicilia Leontes and his wife Hermione who have both enjoyed a lengthy visit from his childhood friend Polixenes, the King of Bohemia.  One night Leontes is overcome with an irrational jealousy and accuses Hermoine and Polixenes of adultery much to their astonishment which results in Hermione arrested and Polixenes fleeing with the courtier who Leontes sent to kill him. Despite the pleadings of Paulina on her behalf, Hermione is put on trial and is not allowed to see either her young son or the baby girl she has just given birth to. Leontes has sent word to the Oracle to judge Hermione's guilt but is angered when his messengers return with the news that the Oracle has declared his Queen is innocent.

As Leontes remonstrates against the Oracle's decision, word arrives that his young son has died and Hermione collapses with grief.  Leontes slowly realizes his jealousy was wrong and this is compounded when Paulina announces that Hermione is died.  Too late too for Antigonous, Paulina's husband, who had been told by Leontes to take his baby daughter to a far-off shore and lose her there.  Antigonus does this but is killed by a bear while carrying it out.  The baby girl is found by an old shepherd and his son who adopt her.

It all makes for a fast-paced and claustrophobic first act as Leontes irrational feelings bring disaster to his court.  Sadly the second act moves 16 years later and relocates the action to Bohemia and the lost daughter now named Perdita who has caught the eye of Prince Florizel, son of Polixenes.  No matter what production I see of this play, this is usually where I check out mentally: after the delicious sturm und drang of Leontes' festering jealousy, the bucolic hey-nonny-nonny of Perdita and Florizel's simpering allied to the extended laborious comedy of Autolycus the pickpocket stealing from the shepherds just goes on and on and on. And on.

Luckily it's Polixenes' turn to spit his royal dummy and forbids Florizel from marrying Perdita.  They high-tail it to Sicilia but are pursued by Polixenes who arrives just as they are presented to Leontes.  What follows s a scene of such staggering literary cheek that Shakespeare has the good grace to do it all offstage - Perdita's real identity is discovered, the shepherds are rewarded, and father and daughter are reunited... but Paulina still has an ace to play which gives the play it's famous denouement.

After the fussiness of Branagh's production, Michael Longhurst's production was refreshingly direct and concentrated, the Wanamaker's stage design was also the perfect setting for the reveal of Hermione's statue, its centre doors proving a natural grotto.  The candlelight was very effective as usual, especially after the death of Antigonus when the auditorium was plunged into complete darkness for a few moments before the shepherd's lanterns were seen.

After Branagh's rather showy Leontes, John Light was suitably moody and tormented which felt more of an ensemble performance as did Niamh Cusack's Paulina, suitably impassioned when she needed to be but not as barnstorming as Judi Dench or Deborah Findlay at the National Theatre in 2001.  For me the performance of the evening was Rachael Stirling's Hermione, a role usually played as a trembling twit but Stirling was marvelously resolute and strong.  Her playing of the final scene was also beautifully pitched and all the more moving for that.  Echoes of her mum Diana Rigg were very strong!

There was also good support from Dennis Herdman as the dim younger shepherd, and Steffan Donnelly & Tia Bannon as the young lovers Florizel and Perdita.  I had wondered aloud if Owen thought that there might be a jig at the end of the show and, sure enough, there was, a courtly pavane with waggly hands that added precious little to the show.  Along with the benches, the after-show dance is something the Wanamaker could possibly 86...

TAKEN AT MIDNIGHT at Haymarket - remembering the forgotten

Last night we went to see something rare in the West End - a new play by a new author in one of the most prestigious of London theatres.  Nope, not the Donmar or Almeida or some poky over-a-pub fringe venue but in the Haymarket, the sometime home of all-star revivals.

If I am honest I think that although this transfer from Chichester is to be applauded for introducing a new voice with a thoughtful and engrossing new play, I think it was an uneasy fit in the plush surroundings of the Haymarket, a more intimate auditorium would have served the play better and made it more powerful.

Mark Hayhurst is certainly no stranger to the tragic tale of Hans Litten as he has already written a tv drama and documentary about him so he is the right person to bring it to the stage but this time he shifts the focus to Litten's mother Irmgard.

Hans Litten was a young barrister in Berlin who specialised in defending the left-wing working-class in court.  In 1931 he prosecuted three members of the SA for killing three and wounding twenty others in an attack by the paramilitaries on a left-wing dance hall.  His bold coup-de-grace was to call Adolf Hitler to the stand where he was cross-examined on his claims that the Nazi Party did not propagate violence and were a credible political party.

Litten set out to show that Hitler was in fact the leader of a party that terrorised it's opponents.  Hitler's obvious discomfort at being cross-examined was not forgotten.  In 1932 the Nazi party rose to power and the following year, on the night of the Reichstag fire, Hitler exacted his revenge - Litten was arrested at midnight and spent almost five years being shuttled around various prisons and concentration camps, subjected to beatings and torture.  This was done while he was being held without trial in "protective custody" - another fine example of the Nazi's corruption of language.  Eventually moved to Dachau, Litten hanged himself on 5th February 1938.

All the time he was in prison, his mother Irmgard relentlessly pursued the Nazis for his release, haunting their offices with increasing desperation, happy for any information of his whereabouts from released prisoners as proof he was still alive.

There was one moment of real hope when Litten's case was picked up by British politician Lord Clifford Allen but although Allen had a meeting with Hitler, nothing came of it as Allen believed in appeasement with the Nazi party.

After their son's death, Irmgard moved to England while his father relocated to Northern Ireland.  She lived to see her son's tormentors defeated and died in 1953 but her husband had predeceased her in 1940.

The play has them at odds over how to react to their son's fate and indeed, Hans had grown distant from his father, a Jew who converted to Lutheranism to further his legal career.  Baptised a Christian, Hans embraced Judaism to get back at his father although this rebounded on him when he arrived at Dachau as he was classified Jewish and made to wear the yellow star.  Which is also ironic in that the tragedy that overtook Hans Litten, his colleagues and other disaparate groups in the 1930s risks being lost in the wake of the overwhelming later Holocaust.

Some artistic licence has been taken in casting the tall and graceful Martin Hutson as Hans Litten as, in real life, he was more of a Billy Bunter lookalike, but he gave a heartfelt and affecting performance, nuanced enough to suggest that Litten realised that he had been the unwitting agent of his own fate.

The supporting roles have been cast well with solid, experienced actors: Pip Donaghy is very good as Erich Muhsam, the anarchist poet/playwright who shares Hans' cell and who remained unbowed in the face of his own death while Mike Grady plays Carl von Ossietzky, a left-wing journalist who also shares their cell.  Ossietzky was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1935 but remained in prison until he died in the following year from TB.

David Yelland was good as the affable Lord Allen, full of waffle about freedom but doing nothing to anger Hitler while John Light was suitably chilling as Dr Conrad, the Nazi who is Irmgard's one unpredictable link to her son's release.  She has to demur to him in the hope that in doing so Hans will gain freedom but all the time you get the feeling of a sometimes-interested cat playing with a mouse.

There is a final confrontation scene between them when the avuncular mask drops and the real brutal face and mind of Nazism is revealed and it is to the credit of the lean, sinewy writing and committed playing of the actors that in this and similar scenes you could hear a pin drop - apart from the obligatory coughing.

Penelope Wilton was excellent as Irmgard, her unflinching quest for justice reflected in her tense, ramrod posture and her fists clenched.  Lesser actresses would play the sentiment but Wilton remained believably stoic, aware that any sign of weakness would be seized on by her son's captors.  She finally relents in her last meeting with Hans when she begs him to realise that "the time for bravery is over".  Early on in the play it occurred to me that she almost seemed to be channeling her CHALK GARDEN co-star, the late Margaret Tyzack; both in her lower register and speech.  Once I thought that I couldn't shift it from my mind.  I hope she takes it as a compliment that I thought that. 

Jonathan Church's direction has a relentless forward motion to it, moving inexorably towards the inevitable conclusion although after a while I wanted something more than the actors walking on, saying their lines and walking off.  Robert Jones has designed a simple but very effective set which helps the action move seamlessly from scene to scene and is helped enormously by Tim Mitchell's marvellous lighting suggesting the looming shadows of German expressionism.  In one memorable moment, Litten strides off after a reanactment of the 1931 trial with his shadow growing ever larger across the back wall only for it to suddenly change to the shadow of him hanged.
 

As I said, Mark Hayhurst's taut writing kept us subdued and attentive and with mothers across the world plaintively asking madmen for the return of their sons and daughters, the story of Irmgard and Hans Litten will tragically always be relevant but ultimately the play felt at times like a radio play transposed to the stage.