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!

SPLENDOUR at the Donmar - Women in Revolt

My favourite theatre production from last year was the Donmar's funny but devastating revival of Kevin Elyot's MY NIGHT WITH REG which was directed by actor-turned-director Robert Hastie so when it was announced that he would be directing the theatre's revival of Abi Morgan's SPLENDOUR I leaped at the chance to see it.  Could Hastie repeat his success with SPLENDOUR's all-female cast as he had with REG's all-male cast?

Abi Morgan's play, first performed in 2000, is a lesser work than Elyot's MY NIGHT WITH REG but Hastie again elicits strong performances from his four actresses.

The action takes place in the soulless elegance of a reception room in the palace of an unnamed country's dictator.  It suggests the adopted style of a 1970s hotel lobby with it's large windows and the heavy design of it's large, swirling light-fitting.  Unseen to the audience is a large abstract painting by a dead artist.  Surrounding Peter McKintosh's set is a circle of glittering, shattered glass which gives a suggestion of what is going on the other side of the windows.

Kathryn, a famous photo-journalist is waiting to take an officially-arranged portrait of the dictator of an un-named, possibly East European, country.  She waits with Gilma, her appointed translator who seems unsettled, nervously clutching her large shoulder-bag to her at all times.

They are finally joined by the dictator's polished and chic wife Micheleine who placates the photographer with news that her husband is running late and they are also joined by Micheline's best friend Genevieve, bedraggled from the pouring rain. And they wait, and wait.

Morgan's theatrical trick is that they, of course, all speak English but the photographer has to put all her questions to the two women through the translator, who is less than correct in what she translates.  Is she inept or does she have her own agenda?

And still they wait until slowly what is happening outside the palace is made clear - the photographer talks of the scary taxi ride through the agitated city, Genevieve talks of the rising tension on the streets, the translator reveals that she is from the same area as the rebels and we realise that the dictator's regime is in it's last hours.

As the realisation dawns that her husband's non-appearance could mean that he has fled the country, Micheleine lashes out at everyone and in particular at Genevieve, whose artist husband painted the abstract on the wall and whose death was sanctioned by the dictator.  In a harrowing exchange Micheleine chides Genevieve for being unloved by her children thanks to her continued friendship with the wife of their father's murderer while Genevieve reveals she only goes through the motions of friendship for the safety of her family.

Morgan's play is certainly interesting but ultimately it's deliberate obliqueness and showy theatrics cannot sustain it's ambition.  Several times during it's uninterrupted 90 minutes the play stops and starts from the opening scene again but quickly picks up from where the previous scene ended.  You would understand if it was to show the action from each character's viewpoint but it doesn't do this, just a fracturing of the timeline for it's own sake.

However the play's drawbacks are more than compensated by Hastie's taut direction and the excellent performances of Sinéad Cusack as Micheleine, by turns caustic, defiant, spiteful and haughty while finally facing her fate with a withering scorn, Michelle Fairley as Genevieve, worn-down by the constant pressure of knowing her dangerous former friend, and Zawe Ashton as Gilma, the seemingly inept interpreter who slowly reveals her disregard for Micheleine's authority by stealing and breaking objects in the palace.  In a nice final exchange, Gilma demands Micheleine's designer shoes as her people are barefoot but not before Micheleine wryly notices that they are just Gilma's size.

Genevieve O'Reilly had a harder time to impress as her character was the most colourless of all - photographer as observer - but she had an arresting presence on stage all the same.  While ultimately I felt that, stripped of the production and performances, the play is possibly not as good as it thinks it is, Morgan is still to be applauded for writing such densely-woven roles for four actresses.

MERRY XMAS CONSTANT READER!!! A Wild Duck is no turkey...

 
Yes after all that pushing and shoving in shops and on Oxford Street, the regimental planning that goes into my card lists, the fear of starvation due to Budgens closing for one *whole* day... it's here! And what a quiet day it's been, what with O *and* m' Ma up in Newcastle - not together I hasten to add! As there is squit-all on the tv I have watched a few music dvds: 2 x Ed Sullivan Show complilations of Motown acts, Take That's video anthology and a collection of Barbara Cook's 1960s tv appearances.

Andrew dropped by this morning and gave me my Christmas Day present, the wonderful film DOWNFALL starring Bruno Ganz as Hitler. I'll have the paper hat on watching Mrs. Goebbels poison the kids soon...

Have I seen my last theatre of 2005? I went on Friday night to the Donmar Warehouse to see Ibsen's THE WILD DUCK in an excellent production directed by Michael Grandage.

A wonderfully ironic production to be on at this seaon of good will, this devastating play shows how sometimes ignorance really *is* bliss. Gregors Werle, the son of a wealthy businessman returns home after 15 years to discover that his father allowed Ekdal, his business partner, to carry the can for a wrong business move resulting in him falling on hard times. 

Ekdal's son, Hjalmar was his best friend at University and Gregors discovers too that his own father privately financed his friend to become the town portrait photographer and also engineered Hjalmar's marriage to a former servant who left his house when his wife accused them of having an affair. 

Gregors is furious and determines that Hjalmar must be told that his whole life is built on the money of the man who ruined his father. He talks his way into being Hjalmar's lodger and starts on his campaign of Truth.... with devastating results.

Ben Daniels is horrifyingly good as Gregors - the most hissable villain on stage this Christmas - a man who knowingly destroys his friend's life because some absurd notion of The Right Truth. In a world endanged by the terrorist and the neo-con this is a very timely play. 

Paul Hilton and Michele Fairley give fine performances as Hjalmar and Gina whose life is turned upside down due to an outsider's social experiment and Sinead Matthews is heart-breaking as their daughter Hedwig. Excellent support from Nicholas le Prevost as the neighbour doctor who sees through Gregors actions, William Gaunt and Peter Eyre as the two fathers and Susan Brown as Gregors' soon-to-be stepmother.