VIENNA 1934 - MUNICH 1938: A FAMILY ALBUM at The Rose Theatre, Kingston - Vanessa Looks Back...

Last Saturday I finally visited the Rose Theatre in Kingston, it's only taken 11 years!  So, Constant Reader, you will know that it had to be something fairly special to get me there, how about Vanessa Redgrave's debut as a playwright and stage director?  Fairly special.

VIENNA 1934 - MUNICH 1938: A FAMILY ALBUM was billed as a work in progress - and it was definitely that.  There were three performances at the Rose which followed on from two weeks of workshops on it, and the actors were certainly all ready for an audience and gave committed performances.  The problem was the shape of the piece itself.

Written in response to the rise of right-wing political parties particularly across Europe, Vanessa Redgrave has attempted to show us the lives of people who confronted the rise of Fascism in the 1930s.  The play started disarmingly with Vanessa wandering on to put some papers down on a table at the side of the stage, turn to look at the audience and say "Hello!"  She then proceeded to sit down and tell us what she hoped to illuminate through the play and also to introduce us to the main characters via photographs on the stage's backcloth.

There was the poet Stephen Spender who - on a holiday to Croatia in the early 1930s - met the American psychoanalyst and doctor Muriel Gardiner who, using her family's wealth, had come to Vienna to hopefully be taught by Freud.  Although Spender was in a sexual relationship with his 'assistant' Tony Hyndman, he and Muriel started an affair.  The affair petered out when Muriel fell in love with a militant socialist leader Joseph Buttinger.

By now Muriel could see first-hand the danger that her friends who were communists, socialists and Jews faced from the Austrian and German Fascists and in the years leading up to the start of WWII - when she, her young daughter Connie and Buttinger managed to escape to America - Muriel worked tirelessly for the anti-Fascist Underground, smuggling false passports from Prague into Austria.  In these efforts, she was also helped by a brave Tony Hyndman with whom she remained friends.  This took up part one of the play with Daisy Bevan (Vanessa's grand-daughter) playing Muriel - and two of Vanessa's co-stars from THE INHERITANCE - Russell Boulter playing Spender and Paul Hilton playing Buttinger.

 

But doesn't this all sound familiar?  Rich American studying psychology in Vienna becomes tireless anti-Fascist activist?  After the 1973 publication of Lillian Hellman's PENTIMENTO - which was later turned into the film JULIA starring Jane Fonda and Vanessa - friends asked Muriel could she possibly be 'Julia'?  Hellman insisted she had never met Gardner and her character 'Julia' actually existed; Muriel agreed she had never met Hellman, but when she arrived back in the US she had been a neighbour of Lillian Hellman's lawyer who knew of her life in Austria.  All of which proved fuel to the long-running fire that raged between Hellman and fellow-writer Mary McCarthy who said of Hellman on a TV show "every word she writes is a lie, including 'and' and 'the'".  How strange that Vanessa stands now at the crossroads of that story, having played and won an Academy Award as the possibly fictional Julia and now having written a play about Muriel too.

Vanessa never met Muriel but she did meet her daughter Connie just before she died and also was a very good friend of Stephen Spender's wife Natasha Litvin.  A snapshot of Tony Hyndman appeared which linked Vanessa to the story in a more direct way - Hyndman had been her father Michael Redgrave's lover too, briefly in 1940.  She showed photos of Michael and Rachel Kempson in the year of their engagement and also a photo of her brother Corin.  The second act was primarily based around the section of Corin's book MICHAEL REDGRAVE - MY FATHER where he attempts to identify who his father's elusive lover called 'Tommy' was while he was appearing as Macheath in THE BEGGAR'S OPERA.  It turns out that 'Tommy' was Tony Hyndman's real name - and one of the many aliases he used.  Michael and 'Tommy' went on a painting weekend in the countryside during their brief affair - which was also attended by Spender!!  In this act Boulter played Michael and Paul Hilton played Corin.

It should have ended there - but no.  After a pause, we were meeting through photograph's Rachel Kempson's brothers Nicholas and Robin - the latter killed in WWII.  Just to complete the family album we also saw a photograph of Vanessa's husband Franco Nero - "isn't he nice?" she said bashfully!  Franco was up there just so Vanessa could tell us that his father had been an officer in Mussolini's Carabiniere - Oh well, we can't all be on history's right side I suppose.

The whole play is based on letters, memoirs and diaries and this - for me one act too far - was based on her Uncle Nicholas' journals kept as a Midshipman.  He gives us a contemporary account of Mussolini's Italy occupying Abyssinia in 1935 which happened despite being damned by The League of Nations.  Their sanctions were never fully carried out and Great Britain and France also secretly agreed to give over two-thirds of Abyssinia to Italy.  Which of course Vanessa ties in with Chamberlain's appeasement of Hitler over the Sudetenland and the annexation of Czechoslovakia that followed it. Uncle Nicholas (Russell Boulter) gives way to Thomas Mann (Paul Hilton) and his essay 'This Peace' in which he dissects the fact that Hitler was appeased by the Governments of Europe.

Very much like her film SEA SORROW which dealt with displaced persons through history, VIENNA - MUNICH fairly buckles with the weight of material that it carries.  Vanessa needs to hand the whole play over to a play doctor who would be able to tie-in all the connections - and there are many - while containing a dramatic through-line; be that the fight for political freedom (Gardiner) or sexual freedom (Michael Redgrave).

The third act could very easily be dropped as it has no immediate bearing on the relationships established in the first two acts between Spender - Gardiner - Hyndman - Redgrave, but I suspect that Vanessa would be loathe to drop the third act as it is the most political and has more of a bearing on the current worldview of turning a blind eye to world-wide injustices.  The trouble being that - despite Paul Hilton's impassioned reading - ending it with the verbatim reading of Mann's essay is dramatically deadening.

All the family have discussed their identities within the family and the outside world - Michael wrote his autobiography assisted by Corin and, after his death, Rachel, Vanessa and Corin all wrote memoirs, while Lynn addressed Michael's emotional remoteness in her one-woman play SHAKESPEARE FOR MY FATHER so it is no surprise to find Vanessa mining this seam, indeed for me it provided the emotional centre of the play.  It was very moving to see Vanessa onstage as her father and mother's married life was explored with it's acceptances, compromises, emotional cruelty and concomitant guilt; Rachel Kempson emerging as a remarkably forward-thinking 25 year-old in unconditionally accepting Michael's bisexuality before they were married.

So it will be interesting to see the next steps for the play; in the evening there was a Rose Theatre fundraising event AN EVENING WITH VANESSA REDGRAVE where she was interviewed onstage by director Roger Michell.  She obviously likes him as, for once, she did not seem overly wary as she usually is in onstage interviews - she was downright playful at times - but he let her stray too often away from the point of the question asked.  However during the event she said that she and The Rose were looking for avenues to explore with the play and she hoped she might be able to get it booked into the Edinburgh Festival.

Among the clips shown - the BBC recording of her legendary Rosalind in the RSC's AS YOU LIKE IT, ISADORA, VENUS (directed by Michell) and JULIA, was a segment of a film that her son Carlo had compiled for her 80th birthday party which showed her activism from the 1960s onwards - Vietnam, Ireland, Women's Rights, The Palestinians, standing as an MP, UNICEF, Kosovo - they were all there and while she would not be drawn on whether she felt that her career had suffered, her remarkable fearlessness was there to be seen.  In particular in her remarkable speech at the Academy Awards where, battling against boos from some sections of the audience, she commended the Academy for not being swayed by the "Zionist hoodlums" who were burning her effigy outside the theatre.

I was going to include that here but I will settle instead on this delightful compilation of moments from over 60 years of film performances - yes, Vanessa, you have a canon of work!

THE INHERITANCE at the Noel Coward - "Only connect the prose and the passion..."

We first heard about Matthew Lopez' play THE INHERITANCE in July 2017 after a rehearsed reading of BENT at the Lyttelton; in an after-show Q+A director Stephen Daldry said that his next project was an epic two-part play for the Young Vic called THE INHERITANCE.  When it was announced that Vanessa Redgrave would be appearing in it I managed to snap up tickets for both parts last May.

In May we got about 20 minutes into Part One before the lights blew!  After an agonizing 45 minutes, Daldry appeared onstage to announce that the problem could not be fixed and the show was cancelled - AUGH!  An agonizing wait for replacement tickets led to finally hearing that the Young Vic had re-booked us for it's West End transfer to the Noel Coward Theatre.  So, we begin...

Matthew Lopez was raised in the conservative Florida Panhandle, with feelings of otherness as his family were the only Puerto Ricans in town and also bullied at school for being gay.  His aunt is the actress Priscilla Lopez - the original 'Diana' in A CHORUS LINE - and he saw Broadway shows on family trips to New York, sparking interest in theatre. A concomitant love of films led him at the age of 15 to see James Ivory's HOWARDS END with his teacher mother, primarily because Emma Thompson was being considered a front runner for the Best Actress Oscar.  In his own words "that day changed my life".

Lopez was haunted by EM Forster's story and when his mother bought him the original book, he read it repeatedly.  Ten years later, Lopez was living in New York and finally realized why HOWARDS END meant so much to him when he learnt that Forster was homosexual.  Galvanized by Forster's influence and using HOWARDS END as a template, Lopez started writing a play about a group of professional gay men living in the New York of today and the often unspoken dichotomy of what has been gained since the AIDS crisis in the early 1980s and more importantly, what has been lost.

The NY gay community, the AIDS crisis and the two-part play of course echoes Tony Kushner's ANGELS IN AMERICA and THE INHERITANCE can be seen as a complement - and reaction to - that epic's polemic and storytelling.  I think it's remarkable that both plays have had huge success in early productions in London: in fact THE INHERITANCE has still to be performed in America.

Ten students wrestle with how to tell a story.  An older man appears and selects one to show how to structure a narrative, he asks the student to use a favourite book as a template - of course the book is HOWARDS END and the older man is revealed as the spirit of EM Forster.  Out of the group emerge the young man's central couple: Eric Glass and Toby Darling.

Eric and Toby live together in an upper-East Side rent-controlled apartment that previously belonged to Eric's grandmother.  They lead a busy cultural and politically-engaged life surrounded by similar gay professional friends.  Toby has published a successful novel about a handsome, wealthy gay man in New York which he is adapting into a Broadway play.  They take Adam, a young actor and adopted son of a wealthy couple, under their wing.  He is cast as the lead in Toby's play and Toby joins him in a Boston preview tryout. Toby becomes obsessed with the enigmatic Adam, while Eric, alone in the apartment, befriends Walter, an older neighbour who lives with his longtime partner, Henry Willcox, a rich property investor.

Walter tells Eric of his life and how he is haunted by the devastation that AIDS brought to his friends and the fear and stigma they all felt. Walter also discloses how his and Henry's relationship  suffered when, on finding an old friend called Peter destitute and dying, Walter brought him to their upstate NY country house to spend his last days in comfort.  When Henry found out, he angrily denounced Walter for bringing the disease to their home and handed over the house to Walter, washing his hands of it. Walter made it a place to bring other gay men to die in peace as Peter had.

Walter dies suddenly before he can show Eric his house.  The bereft Eric - also rocked by Hillary Clinton's defeat - finally admits to Toby that their apartment is being reclaimed as it was in his grandmother's name only and they have to leave; Toby provokes a fight with Eric and walks out on their life, however when he tells Adam this, Toby is shocked to discover that the actor is dating the play's director.  Toby can't shake his obsession for Adam and sleeps with Leo, a rent-boy who resembles the actor.

Eric shares his grief over Walter with the enigmatic Henry Willcox who slowly becomes charmed with Eric's goodness; but even he is appalled when a note is found written by Walter saying he would like Eric to have the summer house.  Henry and his two grown sons destroy the note, swearing to keep it secret.  After Henry finds Eric a new apartment, he takes Eric to Walter's country home.  As Eric explores the deserted house, he is welcomed by the ghosts of the men who died there, including Walter's friend Peter.  Eric has found his spiritual home....

In the second play we see the ramifications of the characters' actions: Toby starts a relationship with Leo but as his chems addiction grows, Leo is left hurt emotionally and physically but still sees an anonymous, rich 'john'.  Despite Eric's friends being horrified that Henry is a Republican who happily financed the Trump campaign, Eric still agrees to marry Henry when he proposes.  Their wedding is disrupted by a drugged-up Toby, but Henry's violent anger at the presence of Toby's guest Leo makes Eric realize that he has been the anonymous man using Leo for sex.

The hurt and anger that all the characters feel make for new alliances: Toby finally confronts the fact that his assumed 'golden boy' status was in fact as unreal as his book - he came from a deprived home and faked his way into the NY scene, while Eric becomes friends with a contrite Adam again and discovers Leo destitute and badly sick with HIV.  Disgusted at Henry's refusal to help Leo - and haunted by Walter's actions - he takes Leo to Walter's old house.  On arrival, they meet Margaret, an elderly neighbour who has become almost a caretaker to the house, both physically and spiritually.  Eric discovers that, rather than just storing his grandmother's old furniture from the apartment there, Margaret has furnished the empty house with it.

Margaret reveals her son was one of the men who Walter brought to the house; she had never accepted her son's gayness and was reconciled with him only moments before he died.  She stayed on to nurse the following dying men to atone in some way for her actions and her revelations bring the story full-circle and all the characters to a conclusion which echoes Forster's famous phrase "only connect".

Stephen Daldrey's wonderful production - despite it's combined length of 6 and a half hours - never once lost my attention, his incisive direction knowing exactly when and how long to linger on a scene or a line, knowing that particular moment would gain greater resonance further into the story.  It was a pleasure to be able to pinpoint the moments that reference Forster's book - and rather than seem to be ripping off HOWARDS END, it illuminates the characters and the play.  Daldrey's patience in telling the story reaps massive rewards.

Lopez's play also touches on so many different levels and each play leaves space for two hugely enjoyable - almost Shavian - arguments: in the first, Eric and his friends debate the uneasy balance of gay life in the 21st Century, by gaining access to the straight world, does that mean that gay identity is defanged, it's history forgotten and it's very words co-opted and devalued into the straight world.  In the second play Lopez dissects the gay response to Trump when Eric's Hillary-voting circle of friends are appalled that Henry Willcox is not just a Republican but also contributed financially to Trump's campaign.  His polished intellectual debate to their emotive one is fascinating to watch.

But it's not all politics; Matthew Lopez slowly constructs fascinating characters whose inner lives are slowly revealed while also leading to highly emotional climaxes that really strike at the heart.  It is also as wildly funny as it is tender and hard-hitting.  What is THE INHERITANCE of the title?  The apartment that was Eric's family home? The inherited sadness of the AIDS crisis on the gay community?  The inheritance of the art and culture of previous generations?  The denied inheritance of Walter's house to Eric?  It's all of these and more.  Bob Crowley's wonderful design of a stark marble stage rising and lowering to suit the play's mood against the black backdrop which parts to reveal certain locations, make you really concentrate the mind to the characters and what they are saying.  Jon Clark's lighting and Paul Englishby's score also help to make the plays' shine.

Six and a half hours is a long time to concentrate on just 14 performers but Daldry's ensemble act with an intensity and fearlessness that is truly thrilling.  Kyle Soller takes on the central role of Eric and is magnificent: it is difficult to play someone who is a force of goodness and compassion but he manages it by making Eric warm and sympathetic that you root for him from the start, while Andrew Burnap, again in a difficult role, makes Toby also charismatic and interesting, even at his most heartless.

John Benjamin Hickey is excellent in the difficult role of Henry Willcox, a man used to living his life to his own intellectual rules who can only react with anger when faced with emotional decisions that cannot register in his ordered mind, and Paul Hilton is equally fine as ethereal Walter, a man out of time, and he deliciously turns on a sixpence to become the intellectual and conservative Forster, also in a sense out of his time, quietly marvelling at the quality of life he was never allowed living in the Edwardian era.

Samuel H. Levine again showed marvellous versatility in his dual roles as Toby's obsessions: Adam, the gay Eve Harrington who worms his way into the lead in Toby's play, and Leo, the lonely hustler with the bruised heart and secret love of literature.  He captured the narcissism and desperation of the two characters wonderfully.  And then there was Vanessa Redgrave as Margaret: you have to wait a long time for her as she appears in the penultimate scene of Part 2, but once she is onstage she illuminates all that has gone before.

In her thrilling monologue, Vanessa hits the grieving but loving heart of the play; Margaret is forever haunted by her disgust at her son's teenage revelation of being gay and her subsequent blotting him out of her life.  Without sentiment but conveying the truth of the character, Vanessa played the remembered moments of seeing her dying son and their fleeting reunion before his death, a tremor in her voice and a catch in her throat was all that was needed to show the grief.  As important as her performance is to the play, her sheer presence alone is special - while watching her I could not forget her first husband Tony Richardson died from an AIDS-related illness in 1991, a year after the death of her friend Ian Charleson.  There was also another reason to celebrate her appearance in Matthew Lopez' play: she, of course, played Margaret Willcox in the film of HOWARDS END that so inspired him as a teenager - the film is even mentioned in the play which provokes a character to yell "Emma Thompson!  Vanessa Redgrave!!"

The other actors all deserve to be mentioned: Hugo Bolton, Robert Boulter, Hubert Burton, Syrus Lowe, Michael Marcus, Jack Riddiford, Michael Walters and Joshua De La Warr.

THE INHERITANCE is at the Noel Coward Theatre until the 19th January, click on the cast shot below to book tickets...

An already memorable year in theatre-going has just been made more wonderful by THE INHERITANCE.  If you love theatre and the alchemy of a wonderful script, committed performances and exquisite direction, you must see THE INHERITANCE.

PETER PAN at the National Theatre: Flying Blind....

Nearly twenty years ago the National Theatre staged a production of PETER PAN at the Olivier Theatre directed by John Caird as their Christmas show.  It was a full-on "bells and smells" production with lavish sets, lengthy running time and star names like Ian McKellen as Captain Hook and Jenny Agutter as Mrs Darling to buttress the relatively unknown Daniel Evans as Peter.

And now it's back in a new co-production with Bristol Old Vic.  I wish I had a better experience with it but it was a long slog, especially the first act.   Yes they fly... but the show is preciously short on wonder.  To be honest I had only booked as Sophie Thompson was due to play Mrs Darling / Captain Hook but she injured her wrist in rehearsals and pulled out.  Thank you for that Sophie *glares*

My heart sank when I realized that Paul Hilton (Peter Pan), Anna Francolini (Mrs Darling/Captain Hook) and Lois Chimimba (Tiger Lily) had all played star roles in the National Theatre's Xmas shitefest in 2015 WONDER.LAND, the absolute nadir in theatregoing. But here they were being directed by Sally Cookson who was responsible for the NT's 2014 Xmas show TREASURE ISLAND - again here we have her shtick of having non-traditionalist casting.

What was so depressing particularly about the first half was the grinding inevitability of the bete noir of my theatre-going this year - the absurd 'poor theatre' trops that flag that the production you see has the taint of Director Concept Theatre.  Teeth-grindingly over-played comedy roles such as Felix Hayes as Mr Darling and Ahamed Saikat as a gibberish, loutish Tinkerbell (both acting as if he is playing to an audience of retarded 4 year-olds), a woeful music score and, the ultimate banal artistic choice, filling the big bare stage with bits of old wood, corrugated iron and old carpet to turn into scenery and have moth-eaten woollen jumpers and bobble-hats donned as costumes.

It's so redundant as a stylistic choice and here is the real kick in the soft parts - all these faux-poor theatre trappings - and my ticket cost £52.  I really have no idea where that money went, it certainly was not reflected in the production.  It is the banal thought processes that have reached their laughable limit in the debacle of Emma Rice's sanctioned performances at the Globe this year.  They are trumpeted as 'magical' but they haven't the slightest shred of magic about them.  Let alone humour...

But even the lumpen thud of an ugly production cannot stand in the way of J.M. Barrie's story of the boy who wouldn't grow up and as the second half is pure plot it thundered along giving Hilton as Peter and Madeleine Worrall as Wendy real chances to shine, particularly in the final scene when Barrie highlights the inherent sadness of Peter's remaining forever outside of life and Wendy's in moving away forever from her childhood.  Anna Francolini was okay as Mrs Darling but made hardly any impression as Captain Hook, the NT keep trying to push her as a lead actress in these shows but to paraphrase my dear friend Andrew "as long as she's got a hole in her arse she'll always be supporting".  She simply doesn't have the star wattage for lead roles.

I first saw a production of PETER PAN onstage in 1969 - a mere babe in arms - at the New Victoria Theatre which featured Hayley Mills as Peter (in her UK stage debut) and Bill Travers as Captain Hook, I suspect in true JM Barrie fashion I am still pining for that more innocent show...

On Sunday I made it to the Globe Theatre for only my second visit - the first time was... um... 7 years ago. What can I say... I obviously don't like alfresco theatre! However both Owen and Sharon's keenness on seeing Christopher Marlowe's DOCTOR FAUSTUS found me risking the elements - to say nothing of the bum-numbing bench and lack of leg-room... it's a known fact that they were of a smaller stature in the Elizabethan era - is there to be NO progress?After a good chomp at the Anchor pub, Owen, Sharon, Eamonn and I made our way to our front row gallery ledge then it was eyes down, here comes Faustus!

Surprisingly this was my first ever Christopher Marlowe play although I had seen the 1967 film of DOCTOR FAUSTUS co-directed and starring Richard Burton, based on the production he appeared in with the Oxford University Dramatic Society with a cameo from one E. Taylor as Helen of Troy. To be honest it's her several wordless appearances that I remember from the film.

I must admit my heart sank when Felix Scott spoke the opening prologue as I could not make out horned head nor pointed tail of what was being said but before long I was hooked by Marlowe's oft-told tale of Faustus, an intellectual who has become frustrated by the limits of knowledge and turns to the lure of magic. He offers to sell his soul to the Devil for the possibility of 24 years of limitless possibility and we follow him through the years as he becomes debased by his own power, relying constantly on the Devil's emissary Mephistopheles, and he becomes all too aware of his day of reckoning.Faustus' story is, of course, mirrored with a 'rude mechanical' tale of a couple of thickos who use the magic book for their own means and as usual it was in these scenes that the production pushed too hard on the button that blares "See, it's rude this bit... see, this is like Carry On". This was at variance with the delightfully subtle performance of Pearce Quigley as Robin who reacted to the most frightening apparitions from Hell with a baleful indifference.

Matthew Dunster's production moved along at a good even pace - the only mis-steps being the grating burlesque moments and also what I assume is an in-house tradition of having a musical coda which here jolts you from the dramatic ending of the play to a jolly jig-about onstage with stick puppets. Again, I am sure the Elizabethan audiences needed something to sugar the pill but we don't need it anymore. There was also a worrying touch of modern dance at the start that, as usual, was a bit of a worry.Have a haunted, lead character who doesn't get many laughs? Call for Paul Hilton! I have seen him in the past as the haunted Orestes in THE ORESTEIA, Eugene O'Neill's version of Orestes as the haunted Orin in MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, the haunted Hjalmar in Ibsen's THE WILD DUCK... you get the deal. Needless to say the role of Faustus was a good fit for him and he charted Faustus' hubris with ease, making his descent from scholar to court 'turn' a fascinating one.

Hilton was well partnered by Arthur Darvill as Mephistopheles. I assume Darvill accounted for the enthusiastic younger strain to the audience numbers thanks to his tv role as Doctor Who's sidekick and he gave a leisurely performance which finally caught fire when Mephistopheles shows his true nature when Faustus turns to him in his final hour. I only wish he had more presence in the role, more often than not I found myself concentrating on the more charismatic Hilton.In the busy supporting cast who doubled and tripled roles I found much to enjoy in the performances of Felix Scott as Faustus' servant Wagner as well as his aristo foppery as the Emperor Charles, Jonathan Cullen as the deposed Pope Bruno, Nigel Cooke as a dessicated Lucifer and Michael Camp, appropriately playing an obviously bubbly bi Duke.

It certainly made me keen to see more of Marlowe's canon.
Production photographs by Keith Pattison.

Right where was I? Theatre....

Owen booked tickets last week for the Mark Haddon play POLAR BEARS at the Donmar. I presume he was working on the theory that as we enjoyed WAR HORSE so much then we were bound to enjoy this. Yeeeees...I had read some reviews for the play as I was not expecting to see it so had a good idea of what I was going to see, however there were some surprises - namely that it was only 90 minutes long. So we took our seats, along with Janet Street Porter, Damian Lewis and Helen McCrory, in the back row of the Donmar stalls, somewhere where I will happily sit to watch 90 minutes traffic of the stage.It wasn't long before I started to feel that this was less a play than a talking piece. As scene followed scene involving two actors standing across from each other - because POLAR BEARS is populated by people without furniture - talking at each other, I had a mental picture of Mark Haddon sitting in his writing room reading the pages out loud - and that's how it stayed.

The play has been directed by the omnipresent Jamie Lloyd - already this year we have seen his production of THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED and there is Sondheim's PASSION coming up later in the year - and again, I found his touch to be speedy but not particularly inspiring. The same was true of his Donmar production of PIAF. So POLAR BEARS whipped along but never seemed to be going anywhere, all in all it made for quite a long 90 minutes.
This is Haddon's first theatre play after gaining praise as a novelist and deals with a man slowly coming apart dealing with his partner's bi-polar disorder. Haddon's two novels have dealt with the subjects of Autism and Dementia - so yeah, the guy's a regular laugh riot. I suspect he has a Collins Home Medical Dictionary propped up next to his Thesaurus.

Sadly I felt it was all a bit borrowed... a bit David Hare, a bit Pinteresque, what I never felt was that I was hearing an original voice. The opening scene sets up the situation of the man - a philosophy teacher - explaining in an obviously manic way to his partner's brother that he had killed her and her body was festering away in the basement? But had he? The next scene had the woman on the phone from Oslo where she was due to leave for...To be honest I really didn't care. The action telescoped forwards and back again but I suspect that was only to provide some contrast to the scene that had gone before. She's up! She's down! She's up again! He's ordinary! He's losing the plot. It gave the actors a wide scale to bounce from one end to the other in a second but some shading would have been welcomed.

I must admit I found Richard Coyle to be a bit irritating as the man whose world of thought is thrown into chaos by his wife's irrational mood swings - it would have helped if his character's look wasn't that of a mid-70s Open University Professor. Jodhi May was interesting as the woman who's career as a children's book illustrator was compromised by her manic depression, although again I longed for her be given the chance to play some more subtle gradients to the role than either UP or DOWN.She was given more-than-able support by her onstage family - Celia Imrie gave a moving performance as the girl's mother, always wary of her daughter's actions and Paul Hilton was fine as her brother - always on the make buying-and-selling but tied to an unhappy family. The cast was rounded off with David Leon who played among other things a chatty irreverent Jesus during one of May's wilder moments. In the play's most bizarre scene, he also played a mortician who dragged a shink-wrapped body onto the stage to describe in detail the stages of a corpse's decomposition. Maybe there was no interval as the Donmar carpet would have been covered in regurgitated ice-cream.

Looking back there was one scene between Coyle and Imrie that hit home due to it's stillness when she showed him two drawings her daughter had done - one perfect and the other a childish scrawl and revealed that the latter was done when she was 'normal', that it was her depression that gave her any talent. Soutra Gilmour's oddly formal panelled set brought to mind the one she designed for THE LITTLE DOG LAUGHED - why she has a thing for cornices only she can tell. Jon Clark's lighting however was constantly intriguing.

I just wish I had enjoyed what it was illuminating more.

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.