THE TEMPEST at the Barbican - The Bard goes digital...

For a play about the use and misuse of magical powers, I have not yet seen a production of THE TEMPEST that was particularly filled with wonder.  It's almost as if directors are afraid to embrace it, as if they are worried that it will be criticized as being too obvious, too much like the over-produced Shakespeare productions of the actor/managers of old.

So it was a surprise to hear that Gregory Doran's new RSC production had gone for a tie-in with Intel to include video projections and motion-capture technology - well if that wouldn't bring the wonder then something was seriously wrong!  The other selling point was that Simon Russell Beale was playing Prospero which in itself is a bit of a special effect.

I am still unsure where I sit with THE TEMPEST, it has one of my favourite Shakespearean speeches and other moments of great poetry but the fragmented nature of the plot means that the vengeful Prospero, by far the most interesting character, is frequently absent from the stage.  We seem to spend an awful lot of time with the Milan/Naples faction of lost lords, none of whom are interesting.

Prospero was Duke of Milan but was deposed by his brother Antonio, aided by the King of Naples.  Helped by courtier Gonzalo, Prospero escaped with his young daughter Miranda in a small boat, also laden with his magic books.  They land on an island where Prospero discovers Ariel, a spirit trapped in a tree by the now-dead witch Sycorax, and her disfigured son Caliban.  Prospero easily subjugates both but promises Ariel he will release him one day.

Prospero learns that Antonio, the King and his son Prince Ferdinand are on a boat nearby so he conjures a mighty storm to sink the ship and the passengers wash up on the island.  Prospero and Miranda discover Ferdinand and the young couple - of course - fall instantly in love.  The surviving passengers remain lost until Prospero brings all together, finally reconciled with friend and foe alike.

For all it's whiz-bang graphics, at the production's centre was Simon Russell Beale troubled Prospero.  It was an interesting performance, shot through with Beale's very human qualities as an actor, none more so than his reading of the wonderful "Our revels now are ended..." speech.  Rather than playing it for just the poetry of the words, he spun the words with a real feeling of bitterness; it felt like his Prospero was aware that his life has been wasted on his island and it seemed that he is realization of Miranda's love for Ferdinand will leave him truly alone.

The play's climactic scene - where Prospero finally gathers all the characters of the island and the shipwrecked boat together - was played very mournfully, Prospero's muted forgiveness of his brother and the King for overthrowing him, as well as forgiving Caliban for his murderous plot with the drunken servants, seemed more like a man who is almost broken with the weight of seeking vengeance.  However his final speech - where Prospero pleads for the audience to give him his freedom now his magic has been abandoned - was very moving.

The always dependable James Hayes was great fun as the drunk butler Stephano although a little Simon Trinder as the jester Trinculo went a long way.  Jenny Rainsford was very likeable as Miranda and I liked Mark Quartley as Ariel, a role possibly made more difficult by the technology, but he made the spirit a real presence with his hesitant tiptoe walk and clambering about the set.  Joe Dixon was also fine as Caliban but again seemed imbued with the mournful feel of the production.

The big selling point - going by the size of the Intel logo on the poster at any rate - was the use of computer graphics and motion-capture and they certainly were arresting and occasionally thrilling.  Stephen Brimson Lewis designed a large standing set of a shipwrecked hull and from above the stage there is a cylindrical shape which occasionally descended, such as when Prospero reminds Ariel of how he was trapped in a tree by the witch Sycorax - in an instant the tree seemed to appear from nowhere, it's spindly branches cracking and groaning, only to vanish as quickly as it arrived.

 

I noticed the occasional flash of light on Ariel's costume which showed where the motion-capture sensors were; at certain moments Quartley would make a movement and suddenly Ariel was projected onto the stage trapped in the tree, flapping above the stage like a frightening phoenix or walking through the air high above the stage.  The disappointing thing though was I would rather have watched the ethereal Quartley than any video-game approximation of him.

The computer graphics came into their own in Miranda and Ferdinand's wedding masque where the three goddesses Iris, Ceres and Juno serenade them with operatic voices.  As they do this, the stage was flooded with almost fauvist landscapes, vividly coloured mountains and fields as well as glowing peacock feathers, and multi-coloured flowers appearing on the goddess' dress as she hovered above the stage.

An interesting experiment certainly but the wrecked ship set was a cumbersome one and left little space for the video projections to really work on the whole of the stage; I feel it would have worked better if the set had occasionally broke apart to give a space for the projections to fully transform the stage.

I am glad I saw this version of THE TEMPEST however but for all the IT bells and smells, it will stay in the memory for the essential human element of Simon Russell Beale's troubled and conflicted Prospero.

LOVE IN IDLENESS at the Menier - Rattigan Reimagined

Just when it looked like the revivals of plays by Terence Rattigan were over, up pops another one at the Menier Chocolate Factory, a highly unlikely home for this writer.

It turns out that LOVE IN IDLENESS is a bit of a cut-and-shunt job.  In 1944 Terence Rattigan wanted to write a play which reflected the conflicts of the time - when confidence in winning the war was tempered by worries of what the country would do next - as well as write a typical Shaftesbury Avenue comedy star vehicle.  Gertrude Lawrence turned it down unread but the acting (and married) partnership of Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne picked it up.

The title was LESS THAN KIND which hints at the play's riffing on HAMLET but Lunt felt it's plot - young man burning with Socialist idealism returns from wartime evacuation to Canada to discover that his widowed mother has moved in with an industrialist currently serving in Churchill's wartime cabinet - was not humorous enough for him so Rattigan rewrote it, dropping most of the confrontations over politics.  Later on he recanted saying that he wished he had kept the play as it was and not bowed to star power.

Fast forward to 2016: Trevor Nunn was looking for another Rattigan project after his successful revival of FLARE PATH in 2011 and discovered the two similar projects and after urging from the Rattigan estate to meld the two scripts - reinstating some of the political debate but also keeping it light and amusing - we now have LOVE IN IDLENESS.  Incidentally the unperformed LESS THAN KIND was given a belated debut in 2011 too at the tiny Jermyn Street Theatre (home of the hags, don't get me started).

I must admit to some trepidation at the thought of Trevor Nunn imposing his love of playing length on what sounded like a frothy comedy (and it does come down after nearly three hours) but remarkably his production delighted in it's brio and in the winning performances.  True, Rattigan weights the plot in favour of the industrialist Sir John Fletcher but when he is played so delightfully by Anthony Head it's a point one is willing to concede.

I was also hugely surprised by Eve Best as the high society-loving Olivia Brown.  Best is *ahem* best at roles which usually find her mournful and constantly wiping away tears or blowing her nose on a hankie secreted up the arm of her dowdy dress but here she blossoms as a gushingly over-indulgent mother but whose sense of fun is nicely balanced with a sense of fair play.  There were several times during the play that I thought what a nice part this would have been for Emma Thompson to have played had she not seemingly turned her back on theatre (SWEENEY TODD withstanding).

As I said Anthony Head is utterly charming as Sir John, possibly the best I have seen him on stage.  He captures the combination of a believable powerful man of influence while also being totally thrown by the emotional devastation that Olivia's truculent son brings with his arrival back from Canada.  As Michael, Olivia's son determined to break up his mother from a man who represents everything he despises, Edward Bluemel starts a bit wobbly but gained in strength during the evening, eventually playing Michael's selfish side well.

Another performance which really surprised me was Helen George as the society girl Diana.  Nicely introduced as what you expect to be a girl that Michael has picked up, the reveal that she is in fact Sir John's estranged wife is nicely done and she plays Diana's ruthless determination very well.  She more than holds her own against her more illustrious co-stars. Sadly the other supporting cast members are all a bit weak but the four leads carry them well.

Stephen Brimson Lewis has designed a pleasing Mayfair apartment for the primary action to take place which converts nicely into a low-rent Baron's Court flat for the final scene and it's a nice touch to have the time and place so well established with old Pathe News clips projected onto the wraparound scrim curtain.

Yes it's lightweight and throwaway, and not really Rattigan's best work, but it entertains and proves that sometimes experience does count for everything.  I was somewhat surprised to hear that it will transfer to the Apollo, Shaftesbury Avenue in May but wish it well as it is a play written to be seen on the Avenue.  I hope it finds it's audience.

FINALLY! My 2011 theatre-going duck has been broken. I knew there was a reason why I was feeling unduly jittery. It's been so long I had to think twice to make sure I was sitting in the seat properly. And what was the production that saw me back in the theatrical saddle? The rather underwhelming AN IDEAL HUSBAND at the Vaudeville Theatre.

I had wanted to see this for a while and, mindful that it was due to close in February, I booked two in the circle using a £10 off discount. Well, I'm not sure what the stalls were doing but my, we were an intimate collection of punters in the Dress - there were 5 of us in J row - and we were seated in seats 1-5! Needless to say there was much spreading out in the interval. In all other rows there were yawning spaces - between the yawning audience.

The production just feels tired, as if the cast had expended all energy in the months leading up to Christmas in the expectation that it would close early. But no, here we are in it's third month and it seemed to me that all the actors were appearing in different plays. If they had a cohesion under Lindsay Posner's direction initially it seems to have been given the go-by. I sat in my little seat in J row and pined for Oliver Parker's screen version - and I didn't expect to say that anytime soon.Oscar Wilde's play is certainly worth this timely revival with it's plot of a seemingly teflon-coated politician gliding his way slowly but surely up the parliamentary foodchain until confronted with evidence from his past which will ruin him if exposed. Peter Hall's acclaimed and long-running revival in the early 1990s also seemed au courant during the end of John Major's Conservative government. But I guess a politician with a secret is never going to be out of fashion - and in the week when it was announced that the Police were going to re-open the News Of The World phone-hacking case it was particularly thrilling to hear Robert Chiltern say "Spies are of no use nowadays... the newspapers do their work instead"!

What also struck me was how prophetic it was of Wilde's own destiny. The play premiered in January 1895 and only three months later Wilde was in court for the criminal libel charge he brought against the Marquise of Queensberry which led to his own trial for gross indecency and sodomy. Time and again in the play, the subject of a public figure ruined by scandal is raised and while watching it I could see Wilde at his writing desk writing a line, looking up, half-smiling and continuing on to possibly write:

Mrs Cheverley: 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 you silly arse.What was so annoying about the production was the way all the performances - and accents - seemed to clash. From High Comedy to naturalistic, from idiosyncratic to BBC 3 sitcom there was 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.

Charles Kay is so busy with his harrumphing codger as Lord Goring's father that you can hear the rhythm of the accent while the actual words get lost in the bluster, Rachael Sterling as Lady Chiltern is so similar in her honking tone to her mother Diana Rigg that it keeps pulling focus and Fiona Button plays the Thoroughly Modern Miss that is Sir Robert's younger sister in the usual high-pitched voice that seems the default condescending accent now for The Ingenue. Of course one goes to a Wilde play to be pinioned by the darts of epigrammatic wit but here they are mostly confined to one very long second scene and all delivered by one character Lady Markby, played here by Caroline Blakiston. However as hers is such a one-note performance you begin to wonder is it ever going to end and it begins to resemble nothing more than the most hackneyed sitcom: line - line - joke, line - line joke.

Which brings me to Elliot Cowan as Lord Goring. In the role he was born to play Rupert Everett was sublime in the film version but here Cowan as Wilde's cynical playboy throws away one good laugh line after another by speaking in the most bizarre accent. I suspect that somewhere along the line he has heard the recording allegedly of Wilde reading THE BALLAD OF READING GAOL and has adopted the ew-sew mannered way of speaking with leeeengthened vowellls and what haeve yoooo that you want to punch him silent.
What makes this absurd is that he is the only one speaking like this and when he plays scenes with Alexander Hanson as Sir Robert, who speaks his lines in the most conversational way possible, it leaves you no way to just relax into the scene. Hanson is fine, but I joined Owen in wondering why he can't walk across a stage without skiffing the soles of his shoes. I kept expecting his blackmailed politician to break into a buck and wing.

Thank God for Samantha Bond! Although she appears to be channeling her frequent co-star Judi Dench vocally, she alone knows how to play High Comedy on stage while still creating a character with a possible internal life. Her sly and calculating Mrs. Cheverley was a pure delight and I pined for her when she was not onstage - Oscar you clown, why on earth did you not have her make an appearance in the final long-winded scene?

The supporting company all played the long party scene at the top of the play with an anonymity which almost had them semaphoring "don't worry, the stars will be on soon". One bright spot was Max Digby as Goring's manservant Phipps who got a bigger laugh with one line than Cowan managed with a whole speech.

Stephen Brimson Lewis can usually be relied upon for a glittery design but here we got a standing set of burnished gold which suggested that he too had seen MADAME DE SADE at the Wyndhams two years ago. Apart from his costumes for Mrs. Cheverley, the costumes for the women all looked like they were bolts of fabric ready to go back to Borovics in the morning.Oh well. Onwards and upwards into the theatreland of 2011....