Monthly Archives: July 2023

OLD SOHO SPEAKS AGAIN, AND WISELY

  Of all the places you’d expect to see Quentin Crisp  – even as a ghost or tribute – one of the least likely is a wooded amphitheatre in Suffolk at dusk,  with a clear moon rising through the branches and the last birds twittering  innocently to roost.   Crisp belonged  rather to 1930’s Soho streets, where passers-by beat him as a matter of course and even the gay clubs thought he was a bit much. So did the recruiting sergeant when war came and young Crisp thought “fighting might be a nice change of agony”.  

         So he stayed home while the US servicemen with their flawless complexions and dollars, “flooded in, like butter over green peas” to appreciate tarts of either sex.   But life is strange indeed: in his seventies and eighties suddenly he belonged to America  instead. A land where “everyone who isn’t shooting you is your friend”, and where big theatres and packed tour dates gave his wit at last the appreciation it deserved. 

        He was long a hero of mine for his scorn for mimsy housekeeping and the deathless line “Don’t keep up with the Joneses. Drag them down to your level, it’s cheaper”.  I finally met him,  just for a couple of hours ,  in ‘90s New York.  A treat.

          So of course I nipped down the road to see Mark Farrelly perform his one-man tribute, from the great maverick’s own writings,  at the new outdoor Thorington Theatre.   I last saw Farrelly  as Frankie Howerd’s lover Denis  in another thoughtful play  he wrote, a two-hander  (https://theatrecat.com/2020/10/30/howerds-end-golden-goose-theatre-camberwell/)  so I knew his ability.   Here,  alone on the bare wood stage with the old Crisp’s purplish bouffant,  Farrelly’s long drawl and thoughtful, unafraid silences rang true enough.  

        And it’s a lovely script,  taking him through youth as “a minority within a minority, an effeminate homosexual”  and his hopeless dream of the Great Dark Man who might love him;  it goes through his painfully evolving philosophy, half pain and half joke :“If at first you don’t succeed, failure may be your style”.    In a brief coda as himself, Farrelly mentions that as a catalyst in his own lowest, most suicidal year a decade back. And it is indeed one of the best philosophical jokes going. 

           The first half bravely ends with a dying fall, a contemplation of coming death and advancing age.  After the interval, though, he is in a tuxedo on a stage on 42nd street,  having escaped forever the “vast rainswept Alcatraz” of Britain.  Here he spent years confidently  telling the new world how to live.  Again,  he offers lapidary insights about keeping on through despair,  and how if  gay life became possible because if you lean limply against the wall for long enough, it falls.  He expresses his headshaking scorn for “Pride” , preferring simply to call it style. 

           I had not encountered before his rather wonderful paean to human beings for  our sheer courage in simply having evolved – crept out of the sea, grown limbs,  learned to walk upright, moved on.  No God did it for us –   “You did it! “ he cries.   Though as ever, the undernote is “more fool us”.  But hell, “there is no salvation, only laughter in the dark”.     And finally, friends, treasure his insight about us out there in the audience.  “Throughout the world ,  a theatregoer is a middle-aged person with a broken heart”.

     Excellent.  Here’s to Quentin Crisp, and to Mr Farrelly for the tribute.   As it roams the land,  see if you can catch it. 

Touring through to 2024 :  next outings for Quentin Crisp  Penzance & Newquay in September

http://markfarrelly.co.uk  for tour details 

rating four 

THE WHITE MAN’S BURDEN?

    Tanika Gupta’s play is a sprawling,  angrily intimate epic about Indians in Britain during the height of empire,  thirteen years running up to old Queen Victoria’s Diamond Jubilee.  It was an RSC commission ten years ago, when there was not yet quite the current popular emphasis on the abuses of Empire, and our failure to acknowledge and teach its ‘problematic’ history.  It occurred to me during early, irritable moments of Pooja Ghai’s production  that this time lag may explain just why the first half feels feels so cartoonishly didactic ,at the expense of any subtlety of character.   

         We begin on a ship, with impressive ratlines and mass swabbing by   Lascar seamen (someone tell the movement director that is NOT the way you climb ratlines,  and that to convey a ship’s movement it helps if everyone lurches in the same direction).  Our central heroine, Tanya Katyal as Rani, is a teenage Ayah for a posh  British family who abruptly sack her on the dockside. The Indian seamen are beaten and cursed, even distinguished Indian passengers are not allowed on the white passengers’ decks (they include a young lawyer called Gandhi, and  Naoroji, a politician later to become the first Asian WestminsterMP and the man who at her jubilee bravely called Queen Victoria the “empress of famine and queen of black death”).   Thus it is firmly made clear within minute that Britain is robbing India blind. The colonialists are even unloading an elephant’s tusk, to make them even more hateful. 

      Teenage ayah Rani, a studious autodidact reading Coleridge,  is flirting happily with sailor Hari  (Aaron Gill), though the majestic Abdul Karim, who is about to be given as a gift-servant to Queen Victoria,  chivalrously checks she isn’t being harassed.  In no time at all she finds herself alone and fighting for her virtue  in a low den ( the full joyful RSC-at-the-Swan scene –  whores, corsets, brawls and booze) .  Brits ignore her pleas for work, but a  Gujurati woman encourages her to get some so she does . And is promptly raped by her Anglo-Indian master and chucked out pregnant.   Hari meanwhile learns about a British shipwreck where all the lascars were carelessly drowned because no lifeboats. Back at sea, he gets flogged for mutinously asking for equal pay.   

       Meanwhile Abdul –  a fine and subtle performance throughout by Raj Bajaj – is presented to old Queen Victoria,  and takes her fancy as a table servant in his  magnificent regalia,  despite the contempt of her lady-in-waiting (Francesca Faridany, splendid).  Abdul delights the bereaved Queen with accounts of the beauty of the Taj Mahal as a symbol of Shah Jehan’s love and grief: he doesn’t   mention the warlike Mughal brutalities, obviously,  for  the moral being hammered home to us yet again is that  India is beautiful, innocent, artistic, loving and exploited,  while English people are grasping and brutal and horrid, “a nation of slave traders, it’s in the blood”.  

      Even the charity ladies who found a home for destitute Ayahs to “bind colonials in a web of gratitude” are sneered at by the Indian women, who reckon Englishwomen can’t look after their own children and the Christian Bible is despicable.  The only English character not ghastly is Lascar Sal in the sailors’ pub,  who is a working-class diamond (Nicola Stephenson  is terrific, cheers us up no end). 

           Historic cruelties must be honestly told, but the unsubtlety of  the Dickensian hardship-romance of Rani and Hari  wears you down a bit: until very late on they aren’t allowed characters  beyond innocent victimhood.   Better is the growing relationship between Victoria – a beautiful rendering by Alexandra Gilbreath – and Abdul, who becomes her “Munshi”, much rewarded and equally hated by the court and the Prince of Wales.  That’s subtly done, touching and funny and nuanced,  for while the sight of an ‘exotic’ being treated as a pet  accessory is grating,  there is a real relationship: Victoria was remarkably open-minded, keen on the idea of India and anxious to be taught Hindustani and listen to his orotund recitations from the Quran about peace and gentleness.  

         I am happy to say that the second part becomes less strident and more interesting: properly fascinating is the figure of Dadabhai NAoroji,  the aspiring Liberal MP (too little known, and too briefly at Westminster: on  election he had congratulations from KEir Hardie, Ramsay MacDonald and Florence Nightingale).  Could have done with more of him, though neatly Gupta makes clever Rani , now  housed by the despised charity,  into his aide and secretary.   Victoria meanwhile comes under pressure from the Prince of Wales and Lord Salisbury to stop treating her “Munshi” Abdul as an equal and has to compromise;  Cecil Rhodes sends her keen letters about how Britain should rule the entire planet for its own good.

          The interplay of politics, race, immigrant community-building and colonialism starts to become  properly interesting.  And as Victoria fades,  it is shamingly  true that her Munshi was thrown out of the country and  all his mementos and awards burnt as if he was an embarrassing aberration.  And good that  ,although the words are not sung clearly enough ,  Gupta marks the Jubilee moment not with Rule Britannia but with Kipling’s startlingly uncompromising verse about the arrogance of those who  

“….made up the white man’s burden

To serve the Empire’s need

To hide their guilty conscience

And justify their greed.

It helped them plunder freely

Convinced of their self-worth –

This precious sceptred island

Brought famines to the earth”

       It would be a better and more gripping play  if more of that internal Victorian conflict had pushed its way in,  past the mere indignation.

Box office. RSC.ORG.UK. To 18 november

Then at the Lyric Hammersmith,  lyric.co.uk.  From 4-28 October

Box office. RSC.ORG.UK. To 18 november

Then at the Lyric Hammersmith,  lyric.co.uk.  From 4-28 October

A FEW OF OUR FAVOURITE THINGS…

        Let it be said first of all that Gina Beck is a glorious gamine Maria:  sings like a bird and is satisfyingly able to convey in her voice her growing-up : at first edging towards beltingly shouty like any excited teen,  then playful without coyness as she gets the  seven (unnervingly compliant)  children on her side in minutes,  then  later lets her voice mellow beautifully.   Nor will you  be disappointed, absolutely not,  when Janis Kelly’s twinkling Mother Abbess  gives  it the full ROH  Force Twelve to get us climbing every mountain.   We thundered suitably.   And yes, the six child performers were immaculate, the tiniest in each ‘team’ having their professional debuts.  We are not used to such almost robotic ensemble precision in movement-direction of children these days,  and one wonders whether there are still any audience children innocent enough to relate to this cosiness with a governess,  not now they have been conditioned by sour-hearted old Roald Dahl and the Harry Potter villains.  But hell, this is a classic from 1959,  and it’s only at those well-drilled set pieces that modern sensibility balks a bit: the kids scamper properly in between them.  And at their head as Liesl, Lauren Conroy is an absolute charmer, as indeed she was in Bath’s Into the Woods:  watch that name.

           Chichester got teased a bit in the press about this production for its trigger warning may-contain-Nazis, and indeed it does , though only  in the last twenty minutes with due Heil-Hitler shock value as the Anschluss bites down on the Von Trapps and the only hope is a nun-assisted flight across the Alps. Some directors might have ramped up the danger a bit earlier, with ominous decor-hints , and more made of the edgy ball scene so as to  remind us why all the kitten-whisker sweetness is under threat .  But when the  banners, swastika armbands and stormtroopers running down the side aisles appear in the second half they have the proper shock value: the enforcement of von Trapp’s collaboration feels real enough when the concert scene ends in the ominous spotlight.    

       Actually, the press teasing about triggers was a bit unfair, since I suppose it is just possible that some of the audience don’t know the story of Rodgers and Hammerstein’s last, most unashamedly sentimental story about the singing family.    Only just possible, though: so I  spent much of the first hour of Adam Penford’s magnificently straight production hoping that there’ll be audiences who genuinely don’t know it, because the knottiest problem any director is going to face is overfamiliarity.  The whiskers-on-kittens, doh-a-deer and lonely goatherd stuff  risks feeling exhausted, numbers worn smooth by seventy years of easy-listening radio and people singing Edelweiss in pub car parks.   You almost brace yourself for the famous ones, nicely done though they are.    So despite Lizzi Gee’s  witty choreography   (Liesl and Rolf’s teenage romp  in and around the fountain is brilliantly sensitive and athletic too).  I found more  pleasure in the less repeated songs: the nuns’ choruses,  the  way the old R & H satirical bite returns when  Max and Elsa try to turn Von Trapp to the dark side in  “No way to stop it” , and Maria’s  lovely rendering of “Something Good” when chemistry fizzes at last between her and the Captain.  I had also totally forgotten the sharpness of “How can love survive?”as the venal Max and Emma Williams’ millionairess Elsa mourn the difficulty of romance when couples are not picturesquely  “warmed by insolvency”.   And I like the way that this production with particular care takes the nuns seriously: the programme piquantly tells me that Mary Martin, the first Broadway Maria,  took advice from a real nun about not sending them up. 

           I got happier and happier as it wore on, and was very taken by Edward Harrison’s von Trapp:  notably his is the first significant male singing voice, a whole hour in, when on hearing the children he abandons his bosun’s-whistle-martinet personality in a startling trice.  Harrison’s  voice is rougher, less ‘trained’ in style,  than the women’s , and that actually helps.  When asked why he can’t see things Elsa’s way he snaps  “Not if you see things THEIR way”  with real bite.   And when in his country’s shame and ruin , he sings Edelweiss very quietly alone,  there’s a proper heart-shake.     

    Though dammit,  outside in the car park afterwards one lady was complaining loudly  because they didn’t ask the audience to sing along to Edelweiss.   But you can’t blame a theatre for letting in people without souls, can you?  

Box office. Cft.org.uk. To 3 September

Rating four.

THE WAY IT WAS

     Ah, the forgotten plays of the 30s and 40s, how they lure me to basements and pub rooms and tunnels:  Jermyn and Finborough and Southwark in particular!     Like contemporaneous novels ,they bristle with real social history,   the how-it-felt of great-grandparents’ life and work. Especially work: few  plays now properly reflect that aspect of life,  unless  the trade or company is  being condemned for capitalism. 

     This one for instance,was a West End and Broadway hit in 1933 with Celia Johnson, and deals with the world Merton Hodge was familiar with:  the five-year grind of study far from home,  medical students in Edinburgh living in Mrs McFie’s boarding-house . Boarding houses are a rich mainstay of drama from 1900-1950s, and beautifully set here in Geoffrey Beevers’ production with Carla Evans’ design painstakingly careful, right down to the dresser with shining china, the mouldy copy of Gray’s Anatomy,  and some elegant scene-change work with tablecloths and doilies.  

      Hodge was, alongside prolific playwriting success,  a  working doctor, an anaesthetist.  Jenny Lee is a solid, unimpressed but kindly Mrs McFie and the students are well delineated: Mark Lawrence ganglingly flippant as Gil,  Harvey Cole a solid golfing John,  David Furlong as the (quite possibly gay, and very fascinating) French senior, who creates in our hero a frisson which might have been unacceptable if the Lord Chamberlain had noticed it,  and above all Joe Pitts as the almost preternaturally innocent mother’s boy Charles.  He  thinks he will marry the girl his mother approves of when he goes  back down south but who of course encounters a more interesting and subtle girl through the Frenchman.   

    It has a dangerously long, slow-burning establishing opening half; I’d have trimmed it.  But it picks up beautifully after the interval, when a few years have passed and Jill  comes up to see him (Helen Reuben, doing the infuriating coy flapper for all it’s worth) escorted by her pal Roger,  a caddish cocktail-jockey played with devilish comedy by Lynton Appleton (the hair alone is worth the money, and as for the Oxford bags, words fail me).   Joe Pitts has the difficult role of Charles as far too slowly he becomes a grownup and admits what he wants and needs;  modern young audiences of the Tinder-and-hookup age may find the whole process utterly baffling.  But it is educational and fascinating to enter into the dutiful mental world of middle-class students from only 90 years ago. It convinces: if anyone had murdered Jill,  a not unlikely denouement given her frightful carry-on,   it’d be Lord Peter Wimsey or Miss Marple who solved the crime.  

Finboroughtheatre.co.uk To 5 august

BIRTH, DEATH, SCIENCE , ANGER

       “The smell – the smell – the sheets…”   Curtain up,  he is gripped by urgency, past or present. . Now a successful doctor home in Hungary,   he turns back to play chess  with his pregnant wife, joking and fond.  It is the only time he will seem briefly peaceful, for we are meeting him at a late mid-point of a journey through life and work.  Good work:  under 1% maternal mortality in his hospital.    In a moment old colleagues will call,  begging him to return to Vienna and speak about his success.  The request will send him,  and us,  back   to his early work in Vienna and then forward to betrayal and death.  We will, with him, be haunted through this poetic, balletic play by ghosts emerging from the deep black background of his mind:  memories of women lost to childbirth fevers.   Musical, graceful,  tragic figures.     

         For back in the 1840s, young Ignatz Semmelweis was distressed by the  way that young women gave birth successfully, then in great numbers died of puerperal fever.    It was a time of scientific excitement in medicine,  his boss Johann Klein extolling an end to “potions and lotions and ancient texts”,  conducting autopsies into the messy miraculous human body and – significantly – telling his distressed young assistant never to carry the ghosts of dead patients with him,  but to scrub them off like barnacles and sail on.      

        Semmelweis can’t.  He is distressed that local women beg and plead to go on the midwives’ ward not the doctors’ one. Why?   Because three times fewer die there.   Defying Klein,  who says it’s all about windows,  he scans the archives and theorizes that it may be because only doctors may work in the “deathhouse”, and so bring “cadaverous fragments” to their ward: the smell of autopsies is horribly like that of dying women’s bodies…

        He inaugurates chlorine handwashing for all; survival dramatically improves.  A minor injury provokes a further intellectual leap: maybe any “decaying organic matter” of any kind, not just off cadavers,  does it?  He has discovered sepsis, years before Pasteur’s microbiology and ideas of bacteria.   The medical establishment scoffs,  Semmelweis kicks off. It doesn”t end well for his career but thousands of mothers and babies are saved, simply  by handwashing.  

      Its a brilliant true story, and no surprise that Mark Rylance spotted it and, with Stephen Brown , co-wrote the play. For  it is a Rylance role if ever there was one: a flawed heroic genius, acquainted with grief, antennae quivering, always  on the edge of crazed anger. Tom Morris as director finds a perfect framing for its troubling oddity:  expressive choreographed movement by  Antonia Franceschi with Adrian Sutton’s score, many of the women playing instruments as they float into memory.    The sacred-monster  energy of Rylance shivers and shatters: this is scientific hero as  difficult bastard, as nerdy obsessive,  emotionally intense and  teetering between rant and nervous mutter.  He is disastrously undiplomatic (an unforgettable moment iswhen Roseanna Anderson’s stately Baroness Maria Theresa arrives willing and interested in supporting the work,  but on flinching from the acrid chlorine washing-bowl is violently shoved away from the ward door by Semmelweis  as “murderously” dirty.  Klein and the snobbish medical establishment consider him even more nuts and dangerous after that. 

     There are moments of earthy medical pragmatism – a lovely, if finally tragic, friendship with Pauline McLynn’s Nurse Muller,  and crazy moments:  a ticket to the ballet and ends up with him so distraught about a young dancer’s death under his hands  that when the ballet shows Death taking young women he invades the stage and tackles the male dancer.   No idea whether that really happened,  but the Semmelweis as played by the glorious Rylance definitely would have. 

            Throughout the time-shifts and memories there is the sad calming voice of his wife (Amanda Wilkin),  who unlike him understands that it with new ideas it is no use “crossing the river and shouting furiously from the other side” unless you build a bridge:don’t just demand others plunge into the unknown waters.  When Semmelweis returns to Vienna and tells a sceptical medical conference they are all murderers,  the end feels inevitable.  

      It’a a haunting play, beautifully theatrical, unexpectedly topical after our Covid years of desperate medical searching, raging disagreement,  politics and deaths .  One of those nights when you for a while think it is a truly great play,  then maybe hesitate, then realize that  maybe it is, and that you will be as haunted by it as Semmelweis himself, caught up in the massive grief of deaths which spring dark from the fresh joy of childbirth.   Remarkable.  

box office  haroldpintertheatre.co.uk        to 7 October

rating five