AN IDEAL HUSBAND at the Vaudeville - Wilde casting

Dominic Dromgoole's theatre company Classic Spring is coming into the home stretch now in it's year-long season of plays by Oscar Wilde; unsurprisingly THE IMPORTANCE OF BEING EARNEST will close the season but before that we have the first of the two plays Wilde presented in the fateful year of 1895, AN IDEAL HUSBAND.

It has been thrilling to see the plays presented together and to fully appreciate the fizzing wit and barnstorming melodrama in A WOMAN OF NO IMPORTANCE and LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN.  However AN IDEAL HUSBAND, although it has these elements, seems to have Wilde trying a more through-drama with less chattering characters swamping the storyline.

Sir Robert Chiltern is a high-flying member of the Government, married to a woman who holds the view - Wilde's young wives always initially hold dogmatic views on things - that if you have done wrong you should be punished.  What Gertrude Chiltern doesn't know is that her husband's whole standing in society is based on a shady secret - he gave a Baron news that the Government were going to back the building of the Suez Canal a few days before it was announced, giving the Baron time to invest in the deal and make himself a fortune.  The Baron's financial recompense to Chiltern bankrolled his start in political life.  Oh and by the by, how remarkable that Oscar should hit on the Suez Canal as a possible source of Government embarrassment.

At a soiree given by the Chilterns, their friend Lady Markby arrives with the glamorous but mysterious Mrs Cheeverly, who reveals to Chiltern that she was the late Baron's former lover and has in her possession Chiltern's incriminating Suez letter.  Her price for silence is that Chiltern puts pressure on the Government to push through a similar canal deal in Argentina which Cheeverly and her friends have invested in but which Chiltern knows is doomed to failure.  Mrs Cheeverly was a contemporary of Gertrude's at school and they always despised each other, which is another reason for her to wreak havoc on the couple.

Chiltern capitulates but when Mrs Cheeverly, in a row with Gertrude, reveals the secret to her, Gertrude is appalled that her "Ideal Husband" has broken the law.  Gertrude demands that he admits his wrongdoing even though it will ruin them.  In desperation, Robert confides to his best friend, the pleasure-loving Lord Goring, his quandary but Goring insists he keeps quiet and allow him to see to Mrs Cheeverly, whom he was once engaged to!  While all this is going on, Lord Goring is appalled that his father is putting pressure on him to finally marry - could Chiltern's sparky younger sister Mabel be about to get her "Ideal Husband"?

As Oscar himself said "The good ended happily, and the bad unhappily.  That is what fiction means" but not before he has taken us through twists and turns over the allotted 24 hours of the play's timeline.  It is a play I like very much - the two sides of the narrative intersect every so often and there are of course the killer lines dropped like jewels on velvet in the text, oddly enough mostly by the gossiping Lady Markby in the second act when she comes to tea with Mrs Cheeverly - it's like Oscar thought "you want the gags - here they are".  So we get scintillating lines like "She ultimately was so broken-hearted that she went into a convent, or on to the operatic stage, I forget which. No; I think it was decorative art-needlework she took up. I know she had lost all sense of pleasure in life" - lines that pop and fizz in the mind and that so betray the debt that Joe Orton had to Wilde.

The film version in 1999 was excellent with the perfect Lord Goring in Rupert Everett, but oddly enough the last time I saw it on stage was again at the Vaudeville Theatre in 2011 in a production that at the time I felt had "no unity of style, time and again a character would come on stage and suddenly you are forced to adapt to a new acting style so you are never sure on which level the play truly sits"  Here there certainly was that unity of style thanks to Jonathan Church's well-paced direction but the production felt topsy-turvy with it's casting.  I posited the idea that the actors had all called their agents and said "Why haven't I been asked to do the Classic Spring season - get me in one quick" and they have all landed up in AN IDEAL HUSBAND.

The quasar of oddity was Freddie Fox's casting as Lord Goring; in itself it wasn't a bad performance - particularly in the second act - but his youth threw the rest of the characters awry.  There was no way Nathaniel Parker's middle-aged Sir Robert would ever have had the late-twenties Lord Goring as his confidante and possible saviour from disgrace, while the idea that Fox's Lord Goring could have been engaged to Mrs Cheeverly years before simply stretched believe to breaking point, particularly as this is a major turning point in the plot's resolution.  Similarly, Frances Barber's gurgling, predatory Mrs Cheeverly must have been held back MANY terms at school if she was a contemporary of Sally Bretton's priggish Gertrude Chiltern.

It was a casting coup to get real-life father and son Edward Fox and Freddie Fox to play the fictional father and son of Lord Caversham and Lord Goring and they certainly had an easy playing style together on stage - Edward Fox is now sounding like a member of a lost Hapsburg royal house as his vowels are so clipped, he really was never the same after playing Edward VIII was he?  He also seemed odd casting initially as he broke the rhythm of the scenes he popped in and out of, but as with Freddie, came into his own in the second act when Caversham has more substantial scenes - and one absolutely killer exit line, played to perfection.

Other pleasures dotted among the odd cast were Susan Hampshire who was sweetly cutting as Lady Markby (despite the odd stumble), Tim Wallers as Goring's butler Phipps - only on for one scene but stealing everything in the scene apart from the doorknobs - and Faith Omole, in her West End debut,  as a spirited and cheeky Mabel Chiltern. The best performance, unsurprisingly, was the unstoppable Frances Barber as Mrs Cheeverly; in this oddly-cast production, she was the perfect fit - even if some of her costumes were not.  I am sure they were designed to be over-the-top but at times they got in the way of her performance.

Cut from the same cloth as Mrs Erlynne in LADY WINDERMERE'S FAN - mysterious woman living on her uppers in Europe returns to London to intrigue society - here, Mrs Cheeverly has no real redeeming features - which is why I love her!  However I would say that underneath it all, she is a Modern Woman, living on her own and by her own design, using the traits that if she were a man would possibly take her far.  In the tying-up-all-the-loose-ends of the last act it is a damn shame that she vanishes from it, I yearned to see her one more time - she is facing an uncertain future with her investments lost but you know she will land on her feet - or her back - but always on her own terms.

Of course it is impossible to watch any of the plays without overlaying it with Oscar's fate: despite the wide-range of characters his authorial voice is so strong you cannot help but see and hear him behind each of them.  The play premiered in January 1895 and was still running three months later when Oscar brought Lord Queensberry to court on the ill-fated charge of Criminal Libel; the collapse of that trial led to his arrest for Gross Indecency and all that followed...

While hearing the lines about your past indiscretions catching up with you, it's the following speech by Mrs Cheeverly that rips through the intervening years with a startling prescience:

"Sir Robert, you know what your English newspapers are like. ... Think of their loathsome joy, of the delight they would have in dragging you down, of the mud and mire they would plunge you in. Think of the hypocrite with his greasy smile penning his leading article, and arranging the foulness of the public placard"

Oh Oscar.

 

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.

Genius In West Sussex

Sometimes it does you good to get out of London's Theatreland and venture into the country's Theatreland instead.

Last Saturday found us on a train chuffing down to Sussex to see what the renovation of the Chichester Festival Theatre were like but primarily it was to see Rupert Everett play the barnstorming role of Salieri in Peter Shaffer's AMADEUS.

I had seen Milos Forman's award-laden screen adaptation but had never seen the play on stage before.  The original directed by Peter Hall at the NT in 1979 with Paul Scofield and Simon Callow was three years before my Paulian conversion to the magic of theatre and I later missed Hall's revival at the Old Vic in 1998.  That version starred David Suchet as Salieri and Michael Sheen as the titular composer.  I am presuming my reason for not going was because if it wasn't Paul Scofield then there was really no point!

But when I heard that Rupert Everett was going to play Salieri to open the new season I knew I had to see it this time.  Chichester is only 90 minutes by train from Victoria so tickets were booked and it was off to a Saturday matinee.  Needless to say a matinee in Chichester can almost guarantee that I will be among the youngest in the audience!

 

Seeing it the first time on stage made me realise how theatrical the play is, a Shaffer trait.  The aged Salieri almost gives us a commentary on the play itself, signalling when the interval is going to be and what we can expect in the second half - when he has returned from evacuating his bowels!   The sinister opening with the citizens of Vienna in the theatre eerily whispering "Sssssalieriiiii" sets the unsettling tone of the play which culminates in a truly haunting final image.

I am also surprised that in 35 years this is only it's second major revival.  Shaffer's play gives the chance for two actors to play such well-written lead roles and the play always seems to have successful runs.

Salieri (Everett) is a recluse in his Viennese palazzo, a forgotten composer whose operas and compositions were once fashionable but the city is swirling with the rumour that he murdered his fellow composer Mozart (Joshua McGuire) 32 years before.  The decrepit Salieri takes us back to that era when he was the court composer to Emperor Joseph II (Simon Jones) and the rumour sweeping the city then was of the arrival of the gifted young Mozart.

Salieri, a man who as a teenager vowed his life to God for the chance to make music, is appalled to discover that the young man who composes music that Salieri thinks is Heaven-blessed, is an obnoxious, braggart who revels in childish behaviour and scatological humour.  If this is how God chooses to bestow his grace then what has Salieri's vow to be His servant on earth been for?  In a rage against God and life, Salieri sets out to ruin the young composer's chances of advancement, to wreck his musical career, to kill him. 

Who better to be our sardonic narrator than Everett?  He was quite magnificent.  Effortlessly moving from the crabby and aged Salieri to his suave and assured younger self with just a wig, two swipes of black across his eyebrows and a change in his voice, he held the attention for the whole length of the play with ease. 

By turns playful, murderous, anguished and self-pitying, he rose to the operatic finale of the play with a power that left me stunned.  His horror at the cruelty of life and God was wonderful to see.  As I watched him I felt grateful that he has decided to embrace the stage again because, as he proved as Oscar Wilde in THE JUDAS KISS, given the right part he is sublime.
  

McGuire's Mozart was less of a success, probably due to Shaffer's unwillingness to show us the soul where his music comes from; if Shaffer wants to show that Mozart could just 'turn it on' and produced music with such passion without having any himself then he has succeeded.  Only in his last scene, composing the music in his head as he dies in his wife's arms, did McGuire connect.

Jessie Buckley was a little revelation as Constanze, the wife who stands by her husband no matter what life throws at them.  She first came to my attention in the BBC series I'LL DO ANYTHING as one of the contestants vying to play Nancy in the revival of OLIVER! and I later found her ineffectual as Anne in the Menier's A LITTLE NIGHT MUSIC.  But last year she impressed as Princess Katherine to Jude Law's HENRY V and here she was very good as the playful wife who becomes a bewildered, hurt woman.  

  

I liked Simon Jones as the airy, ineffectual Joseph II and could see how marvellous the late and great John Normington would have been in the original production and there was a demonstration in excellent supporting performance from John Standing, Richard Clifford and Timothhy Kightley as the unmoving bastions of accepted music in the court.

Jonathan Church's production was atmospheric and moved at a good pace while losing none of Shaffer's literate script and certainly provided a wealth of memorable moments, helped immeasurably by Simon Higlett's spare set of frosted mirrored doors - encompassing crumbling Vienniese mansions and elegant court life - and Tim Mitchell's evocative lighting.  Fotini Dimou's costumes were a feast for the eyes as Paul Groothuis' sound design was for the ears.

  

I have heard nothing of a London transfer for the production - it would be a shame if it's short playing time at Chichester could not be extended elsewhere, giving a wider audience the chance to enjoy a fine production and to see how charismatic a stage actor we have in Rupert Everett.