OTHELLO at Shakespeare's Globe: "Chaos is come again..."

So.. back to the Globe Theatre for a fourth time this year, which in itself is remarkable bearing in mind a year or so ago I was driven away from the place by the sheer ghastliness of Emma Rice's absurdly juvenile look-at-me, look-at-me caperings.  In the productions under new Artistic Director Michelle Terry there has been a focus primarily on the player and the words while stripping back the absurd trappings.  There has still been the odd clanging idiosyncratic choice - usually in the casting - but the productions, each in their own way, have been enjoyable, but Claire van Kampen's production of OTHELLO might just be the best of them all.

Van Kampen has been the Director of Music at the Globe since 1997 and has composed the scores for over 50 productions there. Mr. van Kampen is none other than Mark Rylance and they have worked together constantly, so it is no surprise that he is here cast as Iago, but any thoughts of obviousness are forgotten as he is wonderful in the role, Iago is the motor for the whole play and Rylance here is firing on all cylinders.

His Iago is all the better for being older than I have usually seen played: it makes his anger at Othello promoting the younger Cassio over him more understandable and, played by Rylance as a jovial 'uncle' of the battalion, makes it more understandable that all the characters would confide in him.  The production is taken at a fast pace so Rylance's quick emotional changes between concerned friend to conniving instigator are all the more exciting.  His performance was also full of delightful touches: his increasing insistence that Roderigo bring money when he follows Othello to Cyprus signposts the poor sap is going to be rinsed by Iago, and starting off the lie to Othello about Cassio and Desdemona in such a teasing yet apologetic way.

Although not matching Rylance, André Holland's Othello was very well performed, slowly and inexorably drawn into the quicksand of jealousy and doubt.  While not quite reaching the tragic heights of Othello's final moments it was still a fine portrayal which had solid roots in his first scene, where he established that Othello was by far the most worthy of husbands for Desdemona, his retelling of their courtship was very nicely played so the impression was of a performance that was thought-through from before he even set foot on stage.  He also speaks the verse excellently in his American accent.

He was well-matched with Jessica Warbeck's Desdemona; it is a bugger of a role and I have seen previous Desdemona's slip into insipidness by just over-doing the wide-eyed innocent but Warbeck reined this in and gave a good performance of a woman torn between love and bewilderment.  She was particularly affecting in her bedroom scene, singing the "Willow Song" while haunted by foreboding.

The three principles were surrounded by fine supporting performances: the always dependable William Chubb made an impression as Desdemona's distraught father Brabantio (a role he also played at the NT in Hytner's under-whelming production in 2013), Aaron Pierre's virile Cassio and Steffan Donnelly's duped Roderigo, for once not played as a silly-ass clown but as a young fish-out-of-his-depths.

Van Kampen's production also made me think of how the women all end badly: Desdemona and Emelia dead and Bianca - nicely played by Catherine Bailey - arrested for Cassio's attack. Sheila Atim's Emelia, the cynical wife of Iago who is Desdemona's attendant - was nearly done in by the costume designer's frocks: two pants-suits which were distracting for all the wrong reasons, particularly her first-act gold crushed velvet number which even Prince would have turned his nose up at.  However she gave a full-on fiery performance, particularly in her final speech which in these MeToo times rang clear: 

"Let heaven and men and devils, let them all,
All, all, cry shame against me, yet I'll speak.

 

Is Othello my favourite Shakespeare play?  It's certainly up there, thanks to no 'rude mechanicals' cluttering up the play with sub-plot, it's masterly construction and it's characters that come so vibrantly to life - and death - when played well.  Psychologically astute and emotionally wrenching, it is somehow wonderfully fitting that after the carnage that he is responsible for has happened, Iago - who until then has never stopped talking to the audience making us unwilling accomplices in his plot - says nothing.  He doesn't need to, the fun was in the plotting... he had no endgame, just revenge...

Demand me nothing: what you know, you know:

From this time forth I never will speak word.

 

It is somehow fitting that OTHELLO should play the Globe as it's creator, actor Sam Wanamaker played Iago opposite Paul Robeson's Othello in 1959 at Stratford-upon-Avon in a production directed by Tony Richardson.

It is a pleasure to be able to recommend productions at The Globe again and although OTHELLO is sold out until the end of it's run on October 13th, there is always the chance of returns sold 90 minutes before the show's 7.30pm start.

 

 

 

ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD at the Old Vic

Yes Constant Reader it's true... I really struggle with Tom Stoppard.  There, I've said it.  I feel cleansed.

It's that Smart Alec air, the over-use of wordplay and punning which wears me down; I feel I want to yell back at the stage "Yes I get it, English is your adopted language - now stop the bloody barrage!".  So you can imagine that it was with a heavy heart that I sat down to watch his first big success ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD now revived at the Old Vic, the very theatre where it made it's London debut 50 years ago staged by Olivier's National Theatre.

My only experience with Stoppard's play was seeing his own drab 1990 screen version starring Tim Roth and Gary Oldman so at least I had a general idea of what to expect but swipe me, I really liked it!  In large part this was due to David Levaux' crisp and fast-moving direction but also impressing were Joshua McGuire as Guildenstern and - the real success of the evening - Daniel Radcliffe as Rosencrantz.

Stoppard's megamix of WAITING FOR GODOT and HAMLET muses on what happens to Rosencrantz and Guldenstern - Hamlet's university friends invited to Elsinore to spy on him by Claudius - when they are offstage.  They sit and wait for Hamlet, Claudius and Polonius to update them on what is happening - they chat, they bicker, they play question-and-answer games, they guess at what's going on but even when they are told by Claudius to actually do something - to find what Hamlet has done with Polonius' body - they don't do anything.  Finally they get to do something when they escort Hamlet to England... but as we know, this doesn't end well...

Stoppard's clever trick is to use the actual Shakespeare text for the scenes from HAMLET but uses vernacular in the scenes between the two friends as well as their scenes with The Player, the leader of the troupe of actors so beloved by Hamlet.  The Player gives David Haig the chance to be as splenetic as ever but also to investigate Stoppard's musings on the permanence of death and the pretense of performing.  Who better to muse on death than the actor who has to die convincingly?

Maguire and Radcliffe make a good double-act, the former obviously the more dominant of the two as he gets so easily exasperated at Radcliffe's sweetly naive Rosencrantz.  But under the comedy wordplay they also suggest a sadness and pathos of two lost souls caught up in a situation not of their making and although not aware of it, totally in over their heads.  As I said above, this really does showcase how good Radcliffe is now as a stage actor - EQUUS and HOW TO SUCCEED IN BUSINESS.. showed him to be a charismatic performer but those early performances had an air of trying too hard, here he seems relaxed on stage which helps the comedy.

The excellent performances of the three lead actors is matched by a fine supporting cast; it was interesting seeing this so soon after the Almeida Theatre production of HAMLET and it must be said that the performances of Luke Mullins as Hamlet, William Chubb as Polonius and Helena Wilson as Ophelia are as good as anything seen in a standard production of Shakespeare's play.

As I said David Leveaux' production has a nimbleness that only slightly becomes becalmed as the play comes to an end but overall it kept one engaged in not just the dizzying wordplay but the action both offstage and on.  The non-specific set by Anna Fleischle and lighting by Howard Harrison also contribute greatly to the overall enjoyment to be had.

It has just been announced that ROSENCRANTZ AND GUILDENSTERN ARE DEAD has been extended at the Old Vic to May 6th - this production is thoroughly recommended both for a good laugh but also for the arguments which linger in the mind after.

KING LEAR at the Old Vic - Glenda's Back and Shakespeare's Got Her...

If you are gonna go, go big. 

When Glenda Jackson stood down last year from being the Member of Parliament of Hampstead and Highgate after 23 years, it was assumed she might make a return to acting but in what?  Her first role was in a Zola radio adaptation but there are no great leading roles for an 80 year-old actress in the theatre.  Simple, take over a male role...

The result is a performance of mighty power and endurance and her casting really has no effect on the play, at times seemingly channeling Wilfred Brambell in STEPTOE AND SON, Jackson gave us a wily, querulous old man, capable of angry rages at all and sundry.

It was a magnificent achievement but it came with conditions: it's rare for me to not be moved at the end of the play with it's shattering final scene, no matter how awful Lear has behaved, but here it was only thanks to Shakespeare's words that a tear trickled.  Jackson might have given us a powerful Lear but it was one that was hard to feel any empathy for.

Appropriately, it was at the Old Vic I first saw Glenda Jackson on stage, 32 years ago as Phedra in Philip Prowse's remarkable production.  I subsequently saw her a few times more onstage and always found her to be easy to appreciate but hard to like.  I think it was/is largely due to her testy and abrasive vocal delivery, she has never had a particularly warm voice which is why she made a such a success in roles that called for a certain tart, sardonic quality.

Here she exploits that to the full, raging at Cordelia for her refusal to say how much she loves Lear, raging at Regen and Goneril who are so quick to undermine his attempts at being an independent retired King by refusing him a retinue of 100 knights, raging at the storm that dares to whip around him at his lowest ebb and raging at the sanity that is fast escaping him.  The moments of tenderness were less effective: the reunion with Cordelia felt thrown away and, as I said, the final scene seemed to be a missed moment.

This could very possibly be more of a result of Deborah Warner's over-imagined production.  It's like she read through my previous blogs, made a list of what I hate then based all her creative decisions on them.  I so wanted to enjoy the production but kept being confronted by the usual, dreary, look-at-me-look-at-me Director Theatre tropes.

My new bete noir is the nonsense of pretending the curtain is down when the audience enters the auditorium: we were treated to an interminable period of understudies wandering about, shifting the minimal flats that make up the scenery, talking into head-mikes, hoovering or carpet cleaning (very badly it would seem as they took ages on the same spots) or our leads sitting on chairs reading newspapers, talking to each other then wandering off to presumably get their make-up on.  Does Warner really think we buy all this cock - the audience saying to each other "Ooo look, that's what happens on the stage before the curtain goes up, aren't we lucky the Old Vic doesn't seem to own tabs?".

The only time I felt the minimalist design by Warner and Jean Kalman was effective was during the storm scene, seemingly done with black rubbish sacks sealed together that rippled, blew and flapped to show the ferocity of Lear's storm.  I did however like Kalman's atmospheric lighting.

Much was made of the starry cast that Warner has surrounded Jackson with but I felt they were all rather under-powered - if they feel drained by Warner's Brechtian approach then they are not to blame but I honestly was expecting more from Celia Imrie as Goneril and Jane Horrocks as Regen.  Imrie was bland and Horrocks seemed to make her high heels do most of her work for her although she did rouse herself briefly when she snarled her anger at Lear in their confrontation scene.  She also had the best piece of business too when she hurled Gloucester's eye out into the stalls!

Morfydd Clark's Cordelia was a bit more animated than I have usually seen her but it really is a thankless role: each time she appears she is different - rebellious daughter, forgiving daughter, liberating invader, corpse.  Danny Webb and Karl Johnson made an impression as Cornwall and Gloucester, William Chubb was a sympathetic cuckolded Albany and I liked Gary Sefton as the oily courtier Oswald.

Sefton would have made an excellent Edmund but we were stuck with the woeful Simon Manyonda who played the role like a Southwark estate 'yoof'.  Against such a ghastly performance, Harry Melling could only impress as the good brother Edgar even if he had a rather ill-starred nude scene.  Sargon Yelda also was an underwhelming Kent, especially when one remembers how Stanley Townsend mined the role for marvellous moments in Sam Mendes' National Theatre production.

Rhys Ifans I also found problematic as Lear's Fool; any momentum the first act developed came to a juddering halt whenever he appeared in his grubby Superman outfit as Warner has seemingly allowed him to add scene-stealing business but which just left me staring at him in dismay.  Warner also disposes with any idea as to the Fool's disappearance from the second act - he is left sitting in a shopping trolley at the end of act one!

I am sure I will remember this KING LEAR for Glenda Jackson's astonishing performance but probably not much else sadly.

RICHARD II at the Globe Theatre - non-Cumberbatch Shakespeare

You would never know it from the press hype surrounding Benedict Cumberbatch's HAMLET but there is another vacillating royal in serious trouble on the London stage and we were lucky to see it last week.

RICHARD II is the latest production in the Globe Theatre's 2015 season based around the themes of Justice and Mercy, qualities that are singularly lacking in the story of the downfall of the vain, misguided Plantagenet King who learned too late that it's more important to be human than majestic.

Charles Edwards brought his upper-class panache to the role of Richard: by turns pampered, remote, haughty and witty, he sailed through the first act on an air of privilege, uncaring of the turmoil he was creating in his wake among his lords and barons, sure in his knowledge that as an anointed King he was impervious to complaint.

However when Richard II tires of the dispute between Henry of Bolingbroke and Thomas Mowbray and banishes them both abroad he sets off a chain of events which swiftly leads to disaster.  Caring little for the angry remonstrations of Bolingbroke's dying father John of Gaunt, Richard seizes his property and goods to pay for his war with the Irish and in doing so deprives Bolingbroke of his legacy.  The King returns from Ireland to discover that Bolingbroke has returned from exile and rallied an army while his own followers have vanished.

Up until this point Richard has been fairly unlikeable but his realisation that his destiny is now uncertain leads him through various stages of self-pitying anger, despair, and finally to a wisdom that is touching in it's resignation.  Up until the arrival back on English shores, the only moment of real poetry has been John of Gaunt's denunciation of Richard, brooding on what his reign has done to "This sceptre'd isle".  William Gaunt in the small but haunting role of John of Gaunt was excellent, using up the last of his energy to rain down anger on Richard's reign.

But with Richard's growing realisation of his inadequacy, Shakespeare ups the ante and Richard finds his poetic voice, in particular when he invites his admirers "let us sit upon the ground and talk about the death of kings".  Two excellent scenes follow where Richard and Bolingbroke confront each other, first at Flint Castle where Richard attempts to face down his enemy but eventually capitulates to fate and the following scene at Westminster Hall where Richard is called before the council to abdicate.

This magnificent confrontation - where vacillating Richard literally makes Bolingbroke pull the crown from his grasp and then ruminates on the transition from King to man - saw Edwards at his finest and indeed, his final scene was shot through with a noble pathos.

David Sturzaker also upped his game as Bolingbroke in his scenes with Edwards although he at times felt a bit lightweight to play such an important main role.  There was very good support from William Chubb as the honest Duke of York, Richard Katz as both the murderous Exton and the Queen's head gardener and Sarah Woodward as the Duchess of York.  However her major scene at the end where she begs Bolingbroke to spare the life of her traitorous son while her husband the Duke demands his son's death was played almost as slapstick and threw the tone off dramatically.

Overall, Simon Godwin's production was very enjoyable although some of the cast were a bit lightweight and the first act seemed to feature one too many scenes of the rebellious lords sweeping on to only sweep off again after a few minutes.  Despite this I enjoyed it more than the Kevin Spacey/Old Vic production from 2005.

Where the production did score well was with Paul Wills set of cracked and peeling shining gold paint.  As soon as I saw it I was reminded of the famous portrait of the ill-fated King in Westminster Abbey.