SHAKESPEARE'S BIRTHDAY: TEN BEST FEMALE PERFORMANCES

Happy birthday to William Shakespeare... born 453 years ago (and died 401 years ago).

Eight years ago I compiled four Top Ten lists of my favourite Shakespeare performances - lead & supporting male and lead & supporting female.

Eight years is a long time in theatre-going - although I have added only one new female lead performance - so to celebrate the greatest playwright ever, here is my updated list of favourite lead actresses and their performances in key roles; these are the ones that all new interpretations are judged against:

BEST ACTRESS (in alphabetical order):

 BRENDA BLETHYN (Helena - 1983)

 SUSAN FLEETWOOD (Titania - 1983)

GLENDA JACKSON (King Lear - 2016)

GERALDINE JAMES (Portia - 1989)

VANESSA REDGRAVE (Cleopatra - 1986)

VANESSA REDGRAVE (Katharina - 1986)

EMMA THOMPSON (Helena - 1990)

SOPHIE THOMPSON (Rosalind - 1990)

SOPHIE THOMPSON (Isabella - 2004)

ZOE WANAMAKER (Beatrice - 2008)

THE WINTER'S TALE / HARLEQUINADE / ALL ON HER OWN - Branagh's bunch at The Garrick

It has been much anticipated but now Kenneth Branagh's year-long season at the Garrick Theatre has started in an eclectic season which includes two Shakespeares and those old enemies Terence Rattigan and John Osborne sharing the Branagh banner too.  Oddly enough, Osborne was much on my mind when I saw the Rattigan but more of that later.

Let us start with the positives - for the most part THE WINTER'S TALE is a successful production which is co-directed by Branagh and Rob Ashford.  I last saw it in the rather under-par Sam Mendes/Old Vic 2009 production which, although boasting excellent performances from Simon Russell Beale as Leontes and Sinead Cusack as Paulina, disappointed in the large yokel scene which takes up most of the second act.

And guess what?  Again I found the Bohemia scenes to be wearing - the scenes of Autolycus gulling the shepherds just seems to go on and on plus the wimpy romance of Florizel and Perdita - yeesh, get me back to the tortured halls of Leontes' miserable Sicilian castle any time.  Not that there is anything particularly Italian about Christopher Oram's Edwardian court set.

Leontes' sudden, creeping jealousy of his pregnant wife Hermione and his lifelong friend Polixenes should seemingly swell out of nowhere and Kenneth Branagh certainly did that.  I have seen him several times onstage since the 1980s and I constantly felt he was somewhat over-praised.  Yes he was good but always felt that maybe in a few years he would be the real deal.  Maybe now he has arrived (for Shakespeare at least).

Leontes' jealousy lasts as long as he tells himself he is jealous, when confronted with the sudden death of his son he collapses under the weight of his own guilt which is compounded when he is told that his wife has died.  Instrumental in this news is Paulina, Hermione's devoted companion played here with blazing conviction by Dame Judi Dench.

The character of Paulina fits Dench like a glove: she is fiercely loyal, fiercely compassionate, and in denouncing Leontes, just plain fierce.  Her authority blazes onstage and she also demonstrates her command of Shakespeare's language by making every line ring true.  The final scene is affecting precisely because Dench judges each reveal just right and her late-moment betrothal to John Shrapnel's Camillo is a small jewel of a moment.

Shrapnel and Michael Pennington's luckless Antigonus add their considerable experience to these smaller roles but I found Miranda Raison to be fairly colourless as Hermione, particularly when surrounded with the afore-mentioned actors, probably a reflection on her being younger than her colleagues . It would also be nice to see a Hermione who was angry at Leontes' accusations rather than a doe-eyed victim.

John Dagleish made an impression as the wideboy Autolycus but even he couldn't lift the deadly Bohemian scenes which here featured two clunky dance routines.  However the production was always lovely to look at thanks to Oram's seasonal designs and Neil Austin's atmospheric lighting design.

The production is currently playing in repertory with a Terence Rattigan double bill - a short solo piece ALL ON HER OWN which features a spiky Zoe Wanamaker as a widow hitting the bottle over her possible-guilt in her husband's suicide, and also HARLEQUINADE a one-act play which Rattigan had paired with the darker, more famous THE BROWNING VERSION.

With that play I can see it possibly working as a divertissment but as a stand-alone piece it outstayed it's welcome.  Branagh is never the most accomplished of comedy actors, he is too knowing and deliberate to just cut loose and his performance as a vain actor-manager touring the provinces with a production of ROMEO AND JULIET shows that.  Luckily Wanamaker popped up again as a tippling grand dame of the stage who chewed the scenery with gay abandon.  One feels HARLEQUINADE is only there because Branagh is presenting ROMEO AND JULIET later in this season - oh and HARLEQUINADE's actor-manager is interviewing girls for his upcoming production of A Winter's Tale.

Maybe in 1948 it had something to say about the theatre companies who kept touring during the war but the shambolic touring company idea has been done to death by Michael Frayn's NOISES OFF and similar works, and there were times when I sat there, surrounded by guffawing audience members, clueless as to what they found so funny.  Although I have admired Rattigan plays in the past, this actually made me side with the writers such as John Osborne in hating the safe, middle-class, old-world attitude of his work.

How odd then that my next theatre visit was to see a revival of Terence Rattigan's 1936 debut success...

Last week it was time to meet again the tortured and torturing inhabitants of Anton Chekhov's THE CHERRY ORCHARD showing up again at the National's Olivier Theatre, ten years after Trevor Nunn's production starring Vanessa Redgrave.

The production reunites the team behind last year's re-discovery of Gorky's THE WHITE GUARD, director Howard Davies, adapter Andrew Upton, designer Bunny Christie, lighting designer Neil Austin and actor Conleth Hill. The production certainly has it's merits but for once Howard Davies' signature painstaking thoroughness doesn't quite suit this play.

Andrew Upton's version keeps poking you in the ribs with clunking modern terms - it certainly was a surprise for Lopakhin to blurt out "Oh bollocks" - but he didn't seem to bring much by way of insight.I have seen THE CHERRY ORCHARD a few times although it's not my favourite of Chekhov's handful of classic plays. All the components are there and there are certainly a remarkable number of roles for actors to get their teeth into, but somehow it doesn't quite engage me fully - although it features enough great Chekhov moments to make one seek it out again.

For me the problem is the dreaded second act when after a number of expositional conversations between characters, the act comes to a juddering halt when Trofimov, the eternal student, rails at the family and hangers on of Madame Ranyevskaya for their indolence and willful ignorance of the lives of the lower classes. It just goes on and on and on. And on.It's a production that probably would have worked better in the Lyttleton - there seemed to be an awful lot of stage to cover for the cast getting around Bunny Christie's faded dacha and this expanse of stage rather dissipated the tension that should grow during the third act party which culminates in Lopakhin's drunken appearance to announce to the stunned Ranveyskaya that he now owns her beloved Cherry Orchard. However despite these mis-steps, the great moments of the show worked their magic.

Most of these involved the heartbreaking character of Varya - in a lovely performance by Claudie Blakely - Ranyevskaya's older, practical daughter who has run the family home while it's fortunes have dwindled to zero and who has a wary but quiet affection for the equally shy Lopakhin. The painful fourth act scene when these two potential lovers attempt to voice their true feelings under the guise of small talk only to let the moment vanish for ever was profoundly moving. Their were fine supporting performances from Sarah Woodward as Charlotta - of the family, but not one of it - whose loss of security and home makes her one of Chekhov's most haunting figures, Kenneth Cranham's decrepit, tragic Firs, Tim McMullan's cadging friend of the family Simyonov-Pishchik and James Laurenson's permanently bewildered Gaev.

Conleth Hill and Zoe Wanamaker were both potentially exciting choices for Lopakhin and Ranyevskaya and while they both gave interesting performances neither banished memories of Roger Allam and Vanessa Redgrave in the 2001 production. In particular Zoe Wanamaker, so adept at playing clear-eyed, practical characters, seemed at times an odd fit for Ranyevskaya who simply refuses to see the woods for her cherry trees.

For the second time within a month I have revisited one of the four classic early works of Arthur Miller, his Tony award-winning breakthrough play ALL MY SONS at the Apollo.
Howard Davies has revived his National Theatre production from 2000, this time the Keller home and verdant garden transplanted from the Cottesloe's traverse stage to the proscenium stage of the Apollo.

The show again bears the hallmarks of Howard Davies' best work: an unhurried, clear-eyed production which frames the text perfectly, a harmony of performance, set, lighting & score and a unity of committed performance from the company.The original production featured a quartet of memorable performances - James Hazeldine, Julie Walters, Ben Daniels, Catherine McCormack - and while the present company are all fine, this new production is dominated by the devastating performances of the two leads, David Suchet and Zoe Wanamaker.

Davies has retained his invented prelude to the play where we see Kate's night-time witnessing of the tree planted in her missing son's memory snapped in two by a violent storm and, in this production in particular, it helps to put the audience on edge from the start as the play otherwise starts fairly uneventfully introducing us to the Keller family and their immediate neighbours.We follow the events of a summer Sunday in 1946 in small-town America. Joe Keller is a contented man, a local businessman doing well, admired by his younger neighbours and his son Chris who works with him. His and Chris' only concern is Joe's wife Kate who, while loving, has been distracted by the disappearance three years ago of her other son Larry who went missing in action in the far east. She is further on edge at Chris' secret invitation to Larry's girlfriend Ann Deever to visit them from NY.

Ann's presence has other implications for the Kellers as it is revealed that her father was Joe's business partner in a munitions factory and is in prison for causing the deaths of 21 pilots by knowingly shipping out faulty parts, an action for which Joe was exonerated in court by being off ill when it happened. Her admission to Kate that she is no longer waiting for Larry's return signals to both the parents that Chris' real intention inviting her there is to propose. However it's the appearance of Ann's brother George that brings down the house of cards that is Joe Keller's life.As I've said Davies elicits telling performances from the supporting cast, each imbuing their roles with an inner life. Tony Vaughan-Lawlor and Olivia Darnley are fine as the young neighbours, particularly Darnley in the scene where Daniel Lapaine's George meets her again and you get a sense of their earlier romance, lost by the intervention of the war.

Steven Elder and Claire Hackett also bring great heft to their roles as the Bayliss' who moved into the Deever house after Ann and George's father went to prison. They both stood out in each of their solo turns - Elder where he ruminates on the life he could have had and Hackett, looking not unlike Kathleen Turner, when she tells Ann exactly what she thinks of the idealistic Chris.While I liked Stephen Campbell Moore and Jemima Rooper as Chris and Ann, I felt they didn't quite eclipse the performances of Ben Daniels and Catherine McCormack in Davies' original production, particularly Rooper who couldn't quite get Ann's desperation - it didn't ring true when she begged Kate not to throw her out as she had nowhere to go. Still they did both give very touching performances.

Nothing however could match the performances of the leads.It doesn't hurt the Box Office of course that Suchet and Wanamaker are as well known to the general public for their television roles as much as their theatre work but here they transcend such concerns and both give performances of a rare intensity.

David Suchet is an actor that doesn't always engage me but as Joe Keller he gives what I think is his best stage performance. From the start his casual underplaying makes you believe Joe's idea of himself as a man trusted and a pillar of his community but as the action continues along the lines of classic Greek drama, this hubris is brought low when the Furies of his past actions catch up with him. Suchet's sheer physicality was astonishing - when first seen he is expansive and genial, safe literally in his own back yard, but when confronted by George Deevor he changes into a sharp business suit and appears more canny and alert but when his culpability is finally revealed, he seemed to collapse in on himself. In a masterful piece of physical acting, when Joe reads the damning final letter from his missing son, you could almost see his life ebbing away from him as the words sunk in. His delivery as well was faultless, in the opening scene his ability to project while still speaking in a conversational tone showed up Vaughan-Lawlor and Elder who were saying their lines In Their Best Theatrical Voices.

Suchet was matched stride-for-stride by Zoe Wanamaker as Kate. With no attempt to play for audience sympathy, she gave a multi-layered performance of a conflicted woman whose life is ultimately revealed to have been built on a lie.

Kate's wary humour, her desperate belief in her son's survival, her barely-disguised distrust of Ann and her lioness-like protection of Joe were woven together to give an outstanding performance.

Like Suchet, she seemed to live in the moment at all times, never dropping her concentration level which made her a hypnotic presence on the stage. None more so than when Kate unthinkingly blurts out an inconsequential remark which in an instant reveals the lie the Kellers have hidden. It was a mark of the audience's involvement in the action that when she said it there was an audible collective gasp of breath!

The production is again helped immeasurably by William Dudley's detailed set of the Keller's back porch and garden which seems to get more claustrophobic as the action progresses, and Mark Henderson's lighting especially in Act II when the characters are slowly bathed in a blood-red sunset as the truth behind the deaths of the 21 pilots is revealed.
This production also made me realise how much of a companion piece ALL MY SONS is to Miller's DEATH OF A SALEMAN in the similar descents of Joe Keller and Willy Loman through their adherence to the work ethic which propels their own American Dreams. In a world where soldiers are killed due to faulty equipment and the ideals of capitalism are questioned, as with the best of Miller's work, ALL MY SONS is as relevant today as it was in 1946.