THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM at Wyndhams Theatre - Squall in the family...

When it was announced that Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins were to appear onstage in a new play by French writer Florian Zeller, adapted by Christopher Hampton and directed by Jonathan Kent, I knew it was going to be something to see.  Then I saw the prices...  nothing in the stalls for under £74 - and it only lasts 80 minutes!  Luckily Owen nabbed some Upper Circle tix though of course they were restricted view with the edge of the stage obscured.  And the play?  Well...

This is the first play I have seen by Florian Zeller but I know of his work - all translated by Christopher Hampton in the UK.  While I appreciate what he is trying to do with the form, bending narrative structures and giving you characters who might not be the most trustworthy of narrators, however THE HEIGHT OF THE STORM feels annoyingly slight, like a writer cruising on his tricks, thinking "Oh I can do the same to this situation" rather than it feeling in anyway new and revelatory; just narrative guessing games for the sake of it.

Andre and Madeleine have been married for over 50 years and have two daughters.  Andre is beginning to show signs of confusion and although both daughters have arrived at the family home at the same time, he is vague as to why.  Marianne wanders in and out speaking to the family as she busies herself with dinner but the emphasis is on Andre who listens but doesn't really take in what his daughters are saying about a house that they have seen which might suit him better.  They even bring home a woman who vaguely knows Andre and Marianne - much to the latter's consternation as she has always thought she had been in an affair with Andre once - to talk about the house.  An appearance from the younger daughter's latest boyfriend who is a estate agent only makes the situation clearer to all but Andre.

It very soon becomes apparent (through the play and knowledge of Zeller's past work) that one of the couple has died - but which one?  I will not be the spoilsport and reveal who but it's all quite obvious really.  So in actual fact, I left thinking that the play could have been shorter, there seemed to be a lot of re-stating what was fairly obvious before, so much so that at times I felt like saying "Yes we get it, that person is dead!!"

Yes the play reverberates once the curtain has come down, but I think that has more to do with Jonathan Kent's taut direction - despite the several 'interludes' to show time passing - and of course his remarkable lead performers.  That said, credit is due to the fine supporting performances from Amanda Drew and Anna Madeley as the concerned daughters but Lucy Cohu is, as per, a trifle over-ripe as the mysterious friend of the family.

Needless to say there was enough coughing for the duration of the play to make it seem like Scutari Hospital on a wet Wednesday, but as a tribute to Jonathan Pryce and Eileen Atkins you could hear a pin drop in their scenes together, especially the final scene when all the threads come together.  To be honest, it is this final scene that has stayed with me as it was so beautifully pitched and played.

Jonathan Pryce was remarkable and heartbreaking as Andre, a man slowly losing himself in his own mind, given to panicked confusion as he gets stuck in painful repetitions of a sentence, not able to comprehend recent events despite the clues in front of him.  Onstage for most of it's running time, Pryce radiated an intense charisma.  Eileen Atkins was frustratingly under-used, drifting in and out of the action to drop some withering lines but as I said, the last scene was breathtaking as she took flight with a warm delicacy as Madeleine reminded Andre that she once said she would never leave him.

I'm glad I got the see these two favorite performers again on stage, it was just a shame the play was so maddeningly slight.

RED at the Wyndhams Theatre - Molina's masterpiece

Two-handers are tricky plays to pull off.  There is the apocryphal story of two actors slogging through a two-hander when there was an offstage knock at a door which elicited a cry from the audience "Whoever it is... let them IN!"

I must admit there were a few times I felt someone... anyone... would be welcome additions while watching John Logan's play RED which is being revived at the Wyndhams Theatre.  The play premiered in 2009 at the Donmar directed by Michael Grandage while he was the artistic director there; the play transferred to Broadway, bypassing the West End, where it was won 6 Tony Awards including Best Play.  Astonishingly the one award it lost out on was for it's strongest asset, Alfred Molina as the painter Mark Rothko.

It's 1958 and the painter Mark Rothko is preparing for a major commission, the newly completed Seagram Building architects Mies Van der Rohe and Philip Johnson have asked Rothko to provide murals for the building's exclusive Four Seasons restaurant.  Rothko has hired a young studio assistant called Ken to help him mix the paints and stretch the canvasses.  Ken's admiration of the new Pop Art movement incurs Rothko's disdain but when Ken questions Rothko's decision to provide paintings for the Four Seasons' elite diners is when the paint really hits the fan...

My problem with the play - that runs 90 minutes with no interval - was that it very soon became fairly predictable: a series of squabbles where the two protagonists take black/white positions, it's all quite wearing no matter how well it's acted.  Great "themes" are raised but I felt Logan had no particular standpoint on any of them - they were raised just to give the actors something to do.

The thin play however is surrounded by an excellent production: it is well directed by Michael Grandage in his clear, understated style - the non-verbal highlight being where the two actors launch into priming a large blank canvas a dark red colour; working as an aria plays, Molina and Enoch speed paint the canvas, at one point thrillingly in time to the music.

Neil Austin's lighting is up to his usual high standard but the real winner here is Christopher Oram's wonderfully detailed set of Rothko's downtown art studio - during the more mundane stretches of Logan's script it was a pleasure to let my eyes wander over the set to relish the verisimilitude.

The fictional role of Ken was originated by Eddie Redmayne - even winning the Tony for Best Supporting Actor - but here the role goes to Alfred Enoch, late of the Harry Potter film franchise.  I cannot say he ever made any impression on me in them but here he gave a capable enough performance but the character never rang true - he was just an Aunt Sally for Rothko to argue against everything he hates about the current art scene.

As I said the main reason to see the play was Alfred Molina's marvellous portrayal of the conflicted genius Rothko.  Molina made him a real force of nature, a human bull-in-an-arts-supply-shop who knows his own worth but battles with an underlying dread that "one day the black will swallow the red" which of course happened in 1970 when he took his own life, possibly due to growing ill-health.  Molina knew how to colour the emotions though as in his character's crestfallen bitterness when he finally views the Four Seasons and realizes his error in agreeing the commission.

RED is worth seeing for Alfred Molina's larger-than-life Rothko and Michael Grandage's production but the play itself is a little like watching paint dry.

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT at the Wyndhams Theatre - The Long Day Closes

LONG DAY'S JOURNEY is easy to admire, but harder to love.  My two previous experiences of seeing it on stage have given certain memorable moments but the play itself has remained a rambling, shapeless beast, over 3 hours long and full of repetitions and longueurs.  But Richard Eyre might have changed that perception...

I think I have seen the ten most famous plays by Eugene O'Neill - maybe I need to see DESIRE UNDER THE ELMS too - but all have been seen with a vague sense of duty attached; I have been conscious of seeing Great Plays in the Canon: ANNA CHRISTIE, THE EMPEROR JONES, THE HAIRY APE, STRANGE INTERLUDE, MOURNING BECOMES ELECTRA, AH WILDERNESS!, THE ICEMAN COMETH, A MOON FOR THE MISBEGOTTEN, A TOUCH OF THE POET... there would have to be some seriously great actors in revivals of these plays to get me to see them again.

Of all the O'Neill plays I have seen, as I said before, LONG DAY'S JOURNEY INTO NIGHT is the one I have returned to most often: I saw Jonathan Miller's 1986 Haymarket Theatre revival with Jack Lemmon, Bethel Leslie, Kevin Spacey and Peter Gallagher, then in 2000 I saw the late Robin Phillips' version with Charles Dance, Jessica Lange, Paul Rudd, Paul Nicholls - and an unknown actress called Olivia Colman as the Irish maid!  Now here I was... back for another long night in the Tyrone family home on the lonely Connecticut coast.

The monumental play is remarkable when you consider that O'Neill was already suffering the onset of the Parkinson's-related illness which would over the next ten years slowly rob him of the capability to write anything at all.  It's intriguing that the more he was being robbed of the ability to write he turned inwards to write plays where his own alcoholic struggles were reflected, and with JOURNEY, the corrosive feelings he had for his family.

1912: The Tyrone family are staying in their summer house on the Connecticut coast, haunted by the sound of fog horns through the night.  Although all looks well in the morning, by night time all their resentments and secrets will be aired and possibly be unrepairable.  James Tyrone once was an actor of promise but has for many years made a lot of money touring a star vehicle that has kept him in work but never fulfilled his dream of being a great tragedian.  Although he speculates in buying property, he is miserly with money for his family.

His wife Mary harbours a deep resentment for her husband's forcing them all to go on the road with him living out of cheap hotels.  She has never got over the death from measles of a son while touring, and resents her eldest son Jamie who she feels passed it on deliberately.  A difficult birth with her youngest son resulted in her being medicated with morphine, by the cheap doctor Tyrone paid for, to which she has since become addicted.  Their two sons are also caught in misery: Jamie is also an actor but struggles to find work as he is becoming an alcoholic while younger Edmund aspires to be a poet but is succumbing to crippling tuberculosis, again exacerbated by Tyrone's unwillingness to spend money on an expensive sanatorium.

Despite Mary's strenuous attempts to look bright and engaged with the family after being away curing her addiction, her sons slowly come to realize that she has returned to her morphine addiction which over the day becomes more and more evident.  Eventually, the family are lost in the blackness of the night and their existence, forced to watch as Mary appears, once again a morphine addict but remembering her days as a convent girl and her wish to become a nun but she "fell in love with James Tyrone and was so happy for a time."

Eugene O'Neill's father was also a touring actor, forever touring a stage version of THE COUNT OF MONTE CRISTO which earned him money but at a loss of any interest as an actor, his mother was raised in a convent and was addicted to morphine after the difficult birth of her third son, his eldest brother Jamie died from alcoholism and he himself spent time in a TB sanatorium.  Having exorcised his family demons when he finished the play in 1941, O'Neill sat on it until he gave it to his publishers in 1945, on the strict instruction that it not be performed until 25 years after his death.

He died in 1953 but his third wife Carlotta went against his wishes and allowed it to be performed only 3 years afterward in Sweden.  The play premiered on Broadway later that year with Fredric March in the lead role where it won the Tony Award for Best Play as well as for O'Neill a posthumous Pulitzer Prize, his fourth in all.  The first London production appeared in 1958 with Anthony Quayle as Tyrone.  And here we are 60 years later...

Richard Eyre has directed this production with a purity of vision that also was evident in GHOSTS, his last collaboration with Lesley Manville.  Although 3 hours 30 minutes it was only towards the end that one became aware of the time, the scene between the two sons having just a few repetitions too many.  Eyre has subtly brought out the fact that the Tyrones, despite everything, are still together and you do feel that the four members of the family do all love each other - the tragedy is that they all seem to give it the wrong way.

Eyre is reunited with his GHOSTS lighting designer Peter Mumford who draws us through the day to the darkening night and Rob Howell's wonderful set for the summer home puts us right in the centre of the Tyrone's world: the semi-transparent walls reflecting a house where there are no secrets held from others even if you are behind closed doors.

Light relief is provided by Jessica Regan as Cathleen, the local Irish girl employed as the Tyrone's maid; it's a bit of a hackneyed comedy Oirish role but Regan soon has you laughing with her than at her.  Matthew Beard and Rory Keenan were both very good as Edmund and Jamie, the damaged sons of the Tyrone's bad blood, both wishing to escape but unable to draw themselves away from the family quagmire.

Jeremy Irons was an interesting choice as Tyrone: not as obviously dominant as others who have played the role - David Suchet, Charles Dance, Jack Lemmon, Brian Dennehy, Jason Robards Jr, Gabriel Byrne, Laurence Olivier - but he played him with the distracted air of a man forced to engage with three family members who have all disappointed him.  Irons rose to the challenge of the scene where Tyrone explains to Edmund the joy he had as a young actor in being singled out for praise by the great Edwin Booth and his lilting, flowery speaking of Shakespeare conjured up a bygone day of performing.  He also was able to turn on the cutting, sniping anger of a man unused to having to give ground.  It's just a shame Irons' American accent was as drifting as the Connecticut fog outside.

The evening belonged to Lesley Manville as Mary Tyrone, she was quite magnificent.  Starting off girlishly happy and shy at her recent weight gain from her time in the sanitarium, she charted Mary's eventual decline during the day with a deadly accuracy: her skittish behaviour, her sudden flare-ups of resentful anger, her circling around the room edging ever-closer to the stairs that led to her secret supply of morphine, her coquettish dissembling "Is my hair coming down?" when meeting the stares of her all-too-aware family and finally her withdrawn stare as she looks out at her unhappy life while remembering the young girl who fell in love with a handsome actor.  She also conveyed effortlessly that Mary is not without guilt in the way her sons have been damaged emotionally by the Tyrone family life, so giving us a fully-rounded character.

The remarkable thing about O'Neill's writing is that by the end of the play you are so invested in them on a human level that you can only hope that life gives them all another chance, as slim as that seems in the dark night.

LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL at the Wyndhams - closing time...

Some things should never be passed up.  In May 2016, Audra McDonald was due to make her West End acting debut in Lanie Robertson's LADY DAY AT EMERSON'S BAR & GRILL as Billie Holiday, a role for which she had won not only her 6th Tony Award (making her the most awarded performer for performances, not just honorary awards) but also the first to win in each of the four acting categories.  However that engagement was cancelled as McDonald announced she was pregnant but a year later and she is finally at the Wyndhams so one simply had to go.

I am sure in the late 1950s there was a similar feeling if Billie Holiday was playing dates but probably for the wrong reasons.  Her frequent and very public arrests over her use of narcotics had made her more and more of a liability and in 1947 her card allowing her to play NY clubs was revoked meaning a dramatic loss of income as that was where she could rely on big crowds.

She still performed - even in Europe - but her health deteriorated from her drink and drug addictions and one cannot help but guess that one of the thrills in seeing her onstage was the perverse one of whether she would make it - as was the case with Judy Garland and Amy Winehouse.

Robertson's play imagines a playdate for Billie Holiday in the real Philadelphia club Emerson's Bar & Grill four months before her death from Cirrhosis and heart failure in a New York hospital.  Christopher Oram's atmospheric set spills off the stage into the auditorium, with cabaret tables both onstage and in the first seven rows of the stalls - imagine our delight when an usher asked if we would like to move to one of these tables rather than sit in the back-row of the stalls - a difference in seat price of £60!

McDonald ambles onto the stage and it is fairly obvious that she is already 'feeling no pain' however she starts to sing... and that's when the magic happens.  Yes, Audra McDonald is doing a carefully-worked on impression rather than an interpretation of Holiday's unique phrasing but wow, what an impression!  She is truly remarkable especially when one is aware that her own natural range is a high soprano.  She has Holiday's trademark way of curling her voice around a lyric, honeyed yet spiked like a dangerously tampered-with cocktail.  But what McDonald captures too is the heaviness in Billie's voice by 1959... a voice worn out by life.

But this is a play-with-music rather than a musical, and while McDonald's singing is extraordinary enough she also delivers an acting performance of blistering intensity.  Holiday is not-so-quietly seething that the NY club ban has resulted in her having to play Philadelphia, although it was where she was born she hates it for the unrelenting pressure on her from the city's police.

The gig spirals out of control as Billie ignores the pleas of her pianist Jimmy and starts knocking back drink after drink.  She forgets lyrics, accuses the band of not understanding she can only sing songs she feels and after a few more songs, stumbles from the stage.  After an extended break she wanders back on cuddling her chihuahua (instant bedlam from the audience) and all seems to have calmed down until one notices her drooping left sleeve showing bleeding needle tracks.

Lanie Robertson's play certainly doesn't try to glamorize his subject - and McDonald certainly doesn't try to soft-peddle her for audience sympathy - but that eventually is the play's major fault.  I doubt if Holiday at even her most strung-out would have taken her audience on a whistle-stop tour of the tragedies in her life.

Yes of course not everyone is the audience will be aware of Holiday's wretched background, confrontations with racism and terrible men but eventually I felt like Thelma Ritter in ALL ABOUT EVE who says, when forced to hear the seemingly tragic life of Eve Harrington, "Everything but the bloodhounds snappin' at her rear end"; the misery is piled on so thick it leaves no air to breath.

But under Lonny Price's sensitive direction McDonald triumphs as Billie the singer and Billie the woman, and the songs sound marvellous thanks to pianist Shelton Becton, drummer Frankie Tontoh and bassist Neville Malcolm.

There is a remarkable moment halfway through the show which illustrates McDonald's ability to change moods on a dime: her Billie takes great delight in telling of her immediate revenge on a racist uppity-white-bitch maitre d' who refuses to let her use a restaurant toilet and then launches straight into an intense version of "Strange Fruit" Holiday's self-penned classic indictment of Southern lynchings.  So while Robertson's play sometimes feels overladen with misery, Audra McDonald elevates it to an evening of power and wonder.

HANGMEN at the Wyndhams Theatre - 2016 theatregoing starts with a swing...

Four days into the new year and there I was... sitting in a theatre again!  Well you never know... I might get out of the habit.

My first play of the year was Martin McDonagh's deep black comedy HANGMEN which originated at the Royal Court and which has now transferred to the Wyndhams Theatre.  It has received across the board raves and is a bit of a sell-out, thanks in no small part to it being a rare theatre outing for David Morrissey.  While I admired a lot of the writing and the performances, it did rather leave the impression of being a Pinter play with knob jokes.

It starts in 1963 as we watch the last minutes in the life of young Hennessy, about to hang for the murder of a young girl.  He becomes more hysterical when the hangman Harry and his assistant Syd arrive in his cell.  Frantically proclaiming his innocence, Hennessy realises his hangmen are from the North which really upsets him!  Harry is none too pleased by this either - he may hate the men and women he executes but he believes that they deserve as quick a service as he can offer and angered by Hennessy's taunts, he eventually strong-arms him to his death.

Anna Fleischle's prison-cell set then rises to the heavens to reveal a large but gloomy pub in Oldham.  It is now two years later, the death penalty has just been abolished giving Harry the chance to run his pub full-time.  However a persistent local reporter finally gets Harry to give an interview where he pours scorn on his more famous colleague Albert Pierrepoint and to also reaffirm his belief that Hennessy was guilty and not the victim of a miscarriage of justice as is being reported.

Harry runs his pub with his wife Alice and their sullen teenage daughter Shirley who is bored by her existence of serving the same dreary male customers every night.  On the night of Harry's interview a young stranger, Mooney, arrives in the pub from London and slowly starts a barrage of sarcastic comments about the pub, Oldham, Harry's past job and in particular, about the hanging of Hennessy.

Who is Mooney and what is his interest in Harry and the case of Hennessy?  Slowly it is revealed that a year after the hanging, another young girl was found murdered on a beach in exactly the same way - did Harry hang an innocent man?  Has Mooney arrived as an avenging angel or has he a more scary purpose in mind?  He is quick to chat up the lonely, unloved Shirley and invites her to a secret afternoon out on the beach.  The reappearance of Syd, Harry's estranged hanging assistant, gives the plot another twist when it is revealed that he knows more about Mooney than he says he does.  And now Shirley has not come home...

McDonagh's plot eventually started to teeter on the brink of absurdity at the end and I found a couple of 'surprise' plot twists all too obvious.  What cannot be denied however is his knack for tense head-to-head scenes which float on a sea of apprehensive, barely disguised dread, along with a cracking cast and an involving production under the sure hand of directer Matthew Dunster.

Dunster maintains the slightly unsettling atmosphere almost throughout the play, only faltering slightly at the climax of the play but this is more down to the obviousness of McDonagh's final plot twist.  As I said he is helped enormously by Fleischle's set - you can almost smell the pub's slop-tray - and Joshua Carr's lighting.

Bronwyn James as the unhappy teenager Shirley, is all the more impressive in that his is her West End debut.  McDonagh's rather obvious character - the fat, bored and unhappy girl - is transformed by Bronwyn James into the one character that you vaguely feel any sympathy for.  Sally Rogers as Harry's nervy wife could not make the same true in her character.

Johnny Flynn was also successful in making Mooney more than just a threatening Pinteresque outsider and there was good work too from Tony Hirst, Ryan Pope and Simon Rouse as Harry's eternal customers and John Hodgkinson was also good as a surprise last-minute visitor from Harry's past, the only man who can reduce the sneering pub patriarch into a cowed man.

David Morrissey certainly gave a barnstorming performance as the surly, domineering Harry but although he was good I found him a bit one-note.  As I said, towards the end of the play, just as Harry is exacting revenge the only way he knows how, the pub is visited by someone from Harry's past who browbeats him into an apology.  This was the only time Morrissey dropped the 'ard man act, a few more opportunities to vary the tone might have made it a truly stand-out performance.

There is a much better performance from Andy Nyman as Syd, Harry's nebbish former assistant.  It turns out Syd was fired from the job for telling people about the size of a hanged man's knob and he has never forgiven Harry for informing on him.  Nyman stole every scene he was in and somehow made Syd pathetic, creepy and hysterically funny all at the same time!  He also had the best sight-gag involving a pair of car keys...

Would I recommend HANGMEN?  Definitely, just don't expect to find too many layers...

AMERICAN BUFFALO at Wyndhams Theatre: In for a penny...

I have now seen David Mamet's AMERICAN BUFFALO in four different productions.  I wouldn't call it one of my favourite plays but as it features a flashy, kinetic star role it is one that usually attracts interesting actors, and that usually attracts me!

Well I have been drawn back into the seedy, conniving, occasionally touching, world of small time crooks in 1970s Chicago with this new production at the Wyndhams Theatre, directed by Daniel Evans.

This time around, the lead role of the gambling chancer 'Teach' is played by Damian Lewis in a return to the West End after six years away in which he became an award-winning tv star in the US with the gripping thriller series HOMELAND.  Joining him is the one and only John Goodman as Don, owner of a rundown junk shop where the action is centred and coming actor Tom Sturridge as the flaky junkie Bobby.

Lewis joins my gallery of former 'Teach's: Al Pacino at the Duke of Yorks in 1984, Douglas Henshall at the Young Vic in 1997 and William H. Macy at the Donmar in 2000.  So now it's a straight split between UK and US actors and I must admit (unsurprisingly) that the US actors were the most convincing.  Pacino was mesmerising, a human dynamo of itchy anger while Macy was a more rundown and venal 'Teach'.

This production marks the 40th anniversary of the play's first performance and Mamet's idiosyncratic, pungent, salty dialogue, heavily indebted to Pinter, is still a delight to hear.  The plot seems simple enough: Don (Goodman) owns an untidy junk shop where he occasionally also holds after-hours poker-nights.  He keeps a warily protective eye on recovering heroin addict Bobby (Sturridge) who is his unpaid go-fer. 

Don is rattled by the sale of an old nickel (showing the titular American Buffalo) to a coin collector for $90 and, feeling it is obviously worth more, he plans a robbery of the collector's flat to get it back.  The unpredictable chancer 'Teach' appears and shoehorns himself into the burglary plot, persuading Don that Bobby would probably mess up.  When another friend who is recruited for the burglary fails to show up at the appointed time, paranoia and anger lead to an explosion of recriminations and violence.

Snaking around and through the plot however is an exploration of the power struggle between men, the constant shifts in power among so-called friends.  While Daniel Evans certainly keeps the verbal volleys firing across Paul Wills' over-the-top cluttered set, the pace sometimes dipped during it's quieter moments which loosened the tension within the play.  What he certainly did highlight was the underlying care that Don feels for the damaged Bob which Goodman played with gruff tenderness.

John Goodman gave the performance of the evening, catching the rhythm of the prose perfectly, every pause, shrugged response and sudden burst of anger hit the money every time, his stillness being a bedrock of the production.  Whirling around Goodman was Damain Lewis who, while getting the slick self-centredness of 'Teach' well, came across more more like a fly than a mosquito.  It was a very showy star performance which is what most of the audience were happy to see but after one has seen Pacino and Macy really shake the life out of the part, it felt a bit thin.  It was almost like he was letting his 70s pornstar facial hair and brown two-piece do all the work, which was a pity as he is a very likable actor.

I liked Tom Sturridge's Bob as well, you could almost feel the character's itchy clamminess.  Bobby has a brief moment when he senses he is in control of the powerplay and Sturridge played his preening importance well just before being literally felled by a vindictive 'Teach'.

As I said, Paul Wills' junkshop set was certainly eye-catching if over-powering and as with nearly every play in the West End, the lighting was up to Mark Henderson's usual standard.  If you have not seen AMERICAN BUFFALO before I would recommend grabbing one of the few seats left before the end of it's limited run at the end of this month.

 

A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE: Love and Death

I am finding it difficult to write about the acclaimed production of Arthur Miller's A VIEW FROM THE BRIDGE which has transferred from the Young Vic to the Wyndhams Theatre.  Not because of Ivo van Hove's production which grips like a vice but because of the action of one woman in the audience.

Miller originally wrote the play in 1955 as a one-act verse drama which was unsuccessful so he re-wrote it as a more traditional two-acter which premiered in London the next year in a production directed by Peter Brook with Anthony Quayle.

Belgian director Ivo van Hove has stripped the play down to it's bare essentials: an oblong playing area surrounded by a low ledge - and with on-stage seats on either side - feels like a bear-pit and with the single open door in the back wall there is the suggestion of a staging for Greek tragedy.  Miller acknowledged he was inspired by the Greeks in his story of Eddie Carbone who brings about his own inevitable destruction with a relentlessness worthy of Euripedes.

The white, brightly-lit, space serves for all the locations in the play - even the longshoreman's showers - but mainly for the claustrophobic apartment where Carbone lives with his wife Beatrice and her orphaned niece Catherine who has a deep attachment to him as a father figure.  Eddie has helped finance her secretarial school lessons but is upset when she accepts an office job before finishing her studies.  Exactly what fuels Eddie's smothering protection of his niece?  The situation is blown apart with the arrival of Marco and Rudolpho, two cousins of Beatrice who arrive illegally from Italy to stay in the Carbone apartment.

With no fear of exposure within the tight-knit Italian community, Eddie gets them work on the Brooklyn docks.  While Marco is quiet and respectful, just wanting to send his wages back to his impoverished wife, Rudolpho is more gregarious and a centre of attention on the docks with his blonde hair and love of singing at work.  Catherine is drawn to the fun-loving Rudolpho which triggers Eddie's jealousy and hatred of the younger man who he suspects is gay and using Catherine as his marital meal-ticket to stay in America.

 

When he realises that Catherine and Rudolpho have slept together, Eddie's jealousy consumes him and after first kissing Catherine he also violently kisses Rudolpho to show his niece what he thinks the younger man really is.  Eddie visits Alfieri, a lawyer who is trusted by the community (and the show's narrator), and hints at betraying the two men to the immigration department which Alfieri warns will make him a pariah.

But Eddie does betrays them and, when they are arrested that night, he dismisses the accusations of Beatrice and of Marco who contemptuously spits in Eddie's face.  Alfieri manages to get them bailed but begs Marco not to go after Eddie who, as he foretold, has been shunned by the community. But Marco wants his vengeance and Eddie wants his name restored, a stand-off that van Hove ends in literally a shower of blood.  It is left to Alfieri to close the play with a halting summation of the tragedy of a man who he will mourn "but with a certain alarm"....

...and it was at this moment in the play that the woman in front of Owen switched on her mobile phone.  

For it's two-hour running time, van Hove's pressure-cooker atmosphere built and built - aided by a constant ominous soundscape - to paraphrase Alfieri about Eddie, it was like a slow car-crash that you are unable to stop but can only view helplessly... all ruined by this stupid woman lighting up the first few rows with the light from her mobile phone.  Owen prodded her shoulder and asked her to please turn it off which she eventually did and after the cathartic relief of the ovation, she was railed at the two women sitting beside Owen and us both.

And what was her excuse for totally ruining the ending of this production?  In a self-righteous tone she whined "I had to check on the children".  That, Constant Reader, was when I LOST IT.  "Why couldn't you have waited FIVE MORE FUCKING MINUTES" I shouted at her smug puss.  Not once did she apologise, not once did that sense of entitlement waver.  

Frankly, I wanted to punch the fucker over the edge of the Dress Circle into the stalls.  On leaving the row, another couple were waiting to tell us they too had suffered through someone behind them rattling their last few Malteasers in a box toward the end of the play and fully understood our anger.  Which of course leads us on to why do theatres sell sweets that rustle and chocolates that rattle?  Why indeed.  And why didn't the Wyndhams give the usual announcement about switching off mobile phones, and why didn't the Circle usher race down to the woman and get her to turn off the phone?

I am sure if the hag had taken a photograph at that moment then the usher would have made her presence known so it leaves you to surmise that theatre managers are more eager to protect their rights over the rights of the audience.  John Waters has spoken about cinema audiences should become more militant - set light to projection booths if they show films out of focus etc. so maybe it's time for us as theatre audiences to have a similarly terrorist approach to idiots.

What angers me is that now this excellent production is forever going to be tainted by this stupid bitch and I don't want that.  I want to remember the excellent work of Mark Strong as Eddie, Nicola Walker as Beatrice who splendidly showed a woman slowly coming to realise the trouble in her marriage, Phoebe Fox's Catherine, Emun Elliott's Marco, Luke Norris' Rudolpho and Michael Gould's Alfieri.

Ivo van Hove's unrelenting direction leaves you breathless as he ratchets up the tension with every scene so any chance for salvation - Alfieri trying to persuade Eddie not to betray the men, Beatrice trying to tell Catherine to stop pestering Eddie - feel all the more desperate when they fail.

Jan Versweyveld's open but claustrophobic set with it's unexpected showers at the start and end of the play works wonderfully as does his lighting which subtly shifts the intensity of the bright light to mirror the shifts within the characters.  A special mention must go to Tom Gibbons' ominous soundscape which plays throughout the action, sometimes swelling into religious choral sound, that keeps you permanently on edge.

I am hoping the memory of the idiot in the row in front of us might fade but I fear she will not... so here she is.

So be warned if you see this person anywhere near you in a theatre.  Me? I just hope she drops dead.

Love and Politics in the 1990s

I was thinking the other day that we seem to be in a very good season for excellent performances onstage at the moment - Michael Xavier, Joanna Riding (Pajama Game), Julian Ovenden, Geoffrey Streatfeild, Lewis Reeves, Matt Bardock, Richard Cant (My Night With Reg), Clive Wood, Eve Best, Phil Daniels (Antony & Cleopatra),  Helen McCrory (Medea), Billie Piper, Aaron Neil, Robert Glenister (Great Britain)... and now you can add two others to that list, Bill Nighy and Carey Mulligan in the revival of David Hare's SKYLIGHT at the Wyndhams Theatre.

I never saw the original production of the play which starred Michael Gambon and Lia Williams which did the usual hop, skip and jump of National Theatre - West End - Broadway.  After it's Broadway run it reopened in London with Bill Nighy in the Gambon role and he is revisiting the role again, 18 years later.

This production also has Carey Mulligan in her West End debut and she was the reason I wanted to see it as her performances in AN EDUCATION, NEVER LET ME GO, DRIVE and SHAME have been exceptional.  Luckily she did not disappoint, with both her and Nighy giving sparky, memorable performances.

Set in that ancient, long-gone time - the early 1990s - the action takes place in a small council flat in West London which Kyra is subletting from a friend.  Kyra is a teacher in a struggling school in East Ham and has a quiet, untroubled private life.

One wintry night, Kyra is surprised to receive a visit from Edward, the 18 year-old son of her ex-lover Tom, a wealthy restaurateur.  She learns that Edward's mother died from cancer a year ago and that father and son are struggling with each other's unspoken grief, sharing a house that is no longer a home.  Edward is also still angry that Kyra walked out of all their lives three years before with no word of explanation.  Edward, bristling with the sulkiness of youth, skulks off but who should appear later also unannounced?  Tom turns up, saying he just happens to have been in the area.  Just by chance he also has an unopened bottle of Whisky.

 

Prowling the small flat like a lion in a cage, straightening and unstraightening her school books, dragging a chair out with his foot only to push it back again, Tom obviously has come on a mission which slowly is revealed along with what really happened three years before.  Although their story starts six years before that...

That's when Kyra had landed a waitress job in Tom and his wife's Chelsea restaurant soon after arriving in London.  She proved indispensable to the couple and their children, eventually moving in to the family home. Needless to say, Kyra and Tom were soon lovers although she said she would leave if his wife ever found out.  When she did, Kyra left with no goodbyes.  Soon after Tom's wife was diagnosed with cancer and he did all he could to make her life comfortable in their home.  Finally he admits to Kyra that he is there to try and get her back but Kyra is a different person now and refuses to give up her new life, although she cannot help her old feelings surfacing.

What soon emerges in their barbed conversations - and out-and-out arguing - is that Tom, while railing at the political correctness and woolly liberalism that he sees all around him, can no more understand Kyra's wish to travel across London every day to deliberately work in a depressing job than she can for his ever-growing need for money and his selfish world view.

In their night of long knives, we see both sides of their argument - yes, Tom cared for his dying wife turning their home into her holistic paradise but was he doing it out of genuine love or guilt over the affair and yes, Kyra cares passionately for the sink-estate children she teaches but is her hair-shirt approach to life just a reaction against her upper-middle-class upbringing - is she a working class tourist?

Bill Nighy was on excellent form as Tom the misanthrope ex-lover, railing at a changing world while attempting to repeat the past with Kyra.  His comic timing was wonderful, gaining huge laughs at his withering responses to both life and Kyra's attempts at carving out a new career, as well as the physicality of his performance too, you could feel his revulsion having to handle the lump of cheese Kyra was intending to put in her ragu!  But underneath it all was a loneliness, an emptiness and his short-lived happiness at their resumption of intimacy was touching.

Carey Mulligan had a wonderful sense of gravitas as Kyra, firmly believing that she was making a difference to people's lives and ideologically stronger than either of her male visitors.  Her sly sense of humour was delightfully played and she also suggested the quiet gnawing loneliness of a young woman deliberately cutting herself off from love.  I do hope she makes the return to stage often, she is too good an actress to be lost to film.  She also proves she can multi-task by acting and cooking onstage at the same time!  And it was real cooking too... the smell of frying onions was delicious!!!

Matthew Beard was effective as the stroppy Edward - an archetypal teenage boy that his father likens to a character from INVASION OF THE BODY SNATCHERS - who surprises both Kyra and the audience in the final scene.

Stephen Daldrey directs with his customary insight and stages the ebb-and-flow conversations with variety and pace.  Bob Crowley's set design conjured up the drab flat perfectly, it's invisible inner walls seen against a life-like block of council flats with lights going on and off in the windows showing that, while Tom and Kyra are battling each other, life goes on elsewhere.

An excellent revival of a fascinating play, as relevant now as it was in 1995.