Monthly Archives: November 2024

GALSWORTHY ?  WELL WORTH SEEING 

    With late Victorians, there’s plenty to bite on:  a rising bourgeoisie aflame with parvenu ambition,  piety , pannier skirts ,patriarchs, an empire nobody can grasp the idea of losing, and under it all the fresh energy of women deciding they have had enough.  Then roll it on a decade or two and everything changes,  WW1 leaves old certainties grasping at straws,  and cue the roaring twenties! 

        Plenty to get your teeth into, and  John Galsworthy did it con brio  and won the literature Nobel in 1932 with  his series about three generations of the  Forsyte family.  Just with sober 1990s  chaps enjoying being rich and  identifying themselves as “in banking/ in Law/ in Tea”   but who like all humans prove more than able to make a heroic  emotional mess of life.

     It became two beloved TV series: perfect parlour-soap for Sunday suppertime. . But here in this enterprising new-writing theatre Shaun McKenna and Lin Cochlan, fascinated by the key women in the story,  grasped the core tale and clipped the books with care into short, excitingly juxtaposed scenes :  the nimble Josh Roche , directing, thus creates a sort of nourishing julienne of the novels. Ignoring the heavy impediment of period sets and and clunky furniture (though getting the costumes bag right) ,  two plays are created:  the first subtitled Irene, the second Fleur.   

         Fun to see them in sequence – see below , sometimes you can make a long afternoon and evening of it –  but each stands perfectly well alone, linked by the magnificent monster Soames Forsyth.  Which is an  unforgettably thrilling performance by Joseph Millson as the Man of Property  who does not willingly let any possession go.   Especially his  young wife Irene whose marital rape (still legal till 1991 here, btw) is the key disaster.   His “a husband shouldn’t have to beg” moment leads to rape, disaster, rage, alienation,  several peerlessly comic moments of absurdity ,   eventually an actual divorce,  and the retrospective discovery of the disgrace  by the next generation.

    Indeed that first play, Irene, is framed by that discovery:  Soames’ daughter  Fleur, as yet unborn , is watching as a shocked family historian, a ghost from their future watching the fatal family tendency to cling to “money and things and secrets”. It’s a three-sided stage, bare red carpet and an occasional chair;  the family gather in various combinations, often some standing aside not truly there but implicated.  Ten actors play 25 characters with elegance, some of course changing age by decades between the two plays. 

        Towering over it are some superb depictions:  Millson a tense, brooding, heavily  Brylcreemed Soames, all too aware that his wife Irene (Fiona Hampton, statuesque and helpless) has fallen for a dashingly tousled  architect, Bosinney  (the Forsyte grandees all love art and talk about it a lot, though largely pleased at its price:  it’s one of Galsworthy’s sly ways of discussing what is of value in life).  

          Even Millson’s occasional blinks feel dangerous,  but Soames’ “Why can’t she love me?” almost bringings him to tears. Which of course horrifies the nearest lady relative who snaps “O Dear Lord, we don’t do that, wash your face and straighten your tie”.    Meanwhile Michael Lumsden, in one of his roles as a very endearing old Jolyon Forsyte,  is reluctantly letting his granddaughter June (Emma Amos) plan to marry the said Bosinney.  Who, of course, will let her down in his pursuit of Irene…

       Enounters, often brief,  keep the excitement going:  you are drawn in so that fears like scandal, disgrace and divorce spring atavistically to life and modern audiences gasp.   A family rift opens with lines like   “I have lost faith in the good judgement of Forsyte and Forsyte!” .  Victorian certainties fade as the old Queen does.    Irene finds  a better Forsyte,  who is willing to be “a perch, not a cage”.  Soames discovers that roaring “Give me a son!”  to an estranged wife who can’t bear to be in the same room, let alone bed, with him  does not work. So he takes up with French Annette and instead, as the first play endes, he gets a daughter, Fleur , instead…

   And so to the second play: FLEUR.   As I mentioned, , they’re standalone plays and both well worth it,  but watch in order and you get the progress of the characters to enjoy: especially Soames grown silver-haired, grimmer than ever with his black coat and ebony cane, his only weak spot his devotion to Fleur.    On the far side of the War the women are  now out of corsets and into loose 1920s flapper clothes and insolent insistence on doing their own thing (Soames does not like Annette’s ways one bit).   

      And – Flora Spencer-Longhurst does this with great skill –  the Fleur we met in the first play as mature,  dryly observant of her ancestors’ emotional chaos,  is now younger, a spoilt rich Daddy’s girl who explicitly does not care about the poor, or the aftermath of war,  or anything that makes her miserable, but does very much like her cousin from the now-enemy part of the tribe, Irene’s son (nicely, it’s  Andy Rush who also played Bosinney).    The tension comes from  this:   young Jon  is too devoted to his mother Irene  to commit himself to the daughter of the man she hates,  they part, but will that last?   Just say that Fleur shows herself a chip off the old block, refusing like her Dad to give up anyone she owns.  

       It’s all engrossing, wonderfully executed, unassumingly a theatrical event of the year .    And through it all runs Millson’s extraordinary Soames,  always with the terrible thrill and danger of personality,,willpower and delusional, vulnerable determination  radiating from him:  it’s like watching a boiler that could blow any moment: a top-hatted Lear , a frock-coated Othello.   Well worth seeing. 

parktheatre.co.uk   to  7 dec       many tue/thu/& sat have the double on same day!

rating 5 

WISDOM IN A LIFE BACKWARDS

     Forget the awful fim made from Scott Fitzgerald’s story about a life lived backwards – a man born in old age, working towards youth and infancy in reverse.  Jethro Compton and the composer Darren Clarke have made of it the most touching, humane, magical and wise new musical of the year.  It’s always good to see Southwark Playhouse’s finds transferring and growing big- west-endy – as did Operation Meatloaf.  Equally transporting to see theatres full of every age – quite young last night, tickets go down past £50 here  –  warming to something genuine and different,   with the sincerity of folk-music energy and humour in a spirited ensemble spirit.  The last parallel was COME FROM AWAY.   

         Compton and Clarke have been seven years finessing this, and far longer thinking it through. That shows: so does the sense of community, the beloved ordinariness of smalltown life, this time in a Cornish fishing harbour.    At Southwark it was more simply set and smaller, but now it has a fine seagull-haunted set with ropework and nets, most of it scavenged feom the real western coast,  and a ladder up and down and around which the 14 actor-musicians scramble and caper with their instruments – fiddle, whistle, accordion, base, cajon, mandolin, cornet, trombone, assorted percussion. 

     Fine tunes and heartfelt unaffected lyrics drive on the story of poor Benjamin, who we see first as an old codger, decrepit in bowler and pipe,  shut away from the world as a monster by horrified parents,  looking through his attic window longing to “live a little life, feel a little freedom, see a little sea”.  His mother’s  grief before her suicide on the clifftop is wrenching and real, too.  They may be stuck in an impossible fairytale curse, but the feelings are universal.  And so it is all through, an unspoilt folk melodiousness and honesty in all of them: not least John Dalgliesh’s Benjamin , and Clare Foster’s marvellous clear sound as Elowen . 

Thus a whimsically impossible tale becomes  something that drills rapidly into real feeling, a real wondering compassion for all of us who whirl through our brief lifespans in the normal direction, womdering how to deal with it, being disbelieved, looki g for love and home. It takes little time for BEnjamin to become likeable, lovable even, as he escapes to the local pub , is dazzled by Elowen the barmaid – who finds 55 just the right age for a man – and, as he grows younger into middle age, gets a job on the trawlers . His relationship with Jack Quarton’s young Jack is endearing: his gradual winning of the (temporarily) much younger Eillowen irresistible.  Their song about the moon and the sea breaks your heart, happily.   The years roll by, recited by minutes and hours and seconds by the narrating ensemble: the second World War comes, he joins the Navy, finds love and has a son; always growing younger, kmowing it can’t  end well.  It almost doesn’t, then does, because that is how the best folktales end.

       Around him the big cast caper and whirl, argue, and chorus, powerful observers, telling the tale, explaining  how events create turning  points nobody could predict. If I have one cavil about  this glorious show , which deserves to run and tour like Come From Away , it is that it would be easier to follow some of the neighbourhood events – a bit under-milk-wood – outside the central life if they were spoken more than sung in tight exuberant choruses.  

      But it is the smallest of cavils and fails to knock off the fifth mouse. Because after a rushed day far from home I came out of it younger than I went in. Button magic. Or as he would sing, “a little part of this old heart is feeling young tonight”.

Theambassadorstheatre.co.uk   To 15 feb

Five.

THE BIG  RATHER UNFRIENDLY  GIANT

      Tom Maschler, legendary publisher  and once a Kindertransport child,  summed up the appeal of Roald Dahl:  his stories offer  “A glorious playful path through the chaos of childhood”.  Dahl was a writer unafraid  – like Grimm – to offer young readers a world containing  both wickedness and resistance.   But when a quarrelsome 1983  luncheon  has run its course in this remarkable play  another verdict comes from  Jessie,  the US publisher sent to try and  talk him into apologizing – at least a  bit – for floridly antisemitic remarks.   Her final summing-up of him is ‘You’re a nasty, belligerent child!”         

          Mark Rosenblatt ‘s play, imagining such a meeting,  reminds us that both have a point.  Dahl has enchanted generations (though some of us shudder a bit at his caricatures of older women).    He was a philanthropist at times,  a gallant fighter pilot, a devoted and doubly grieving parent.  Yet there is about him a quality which  transford a wayward, angry,  bullied, naturally impish child into a grumpy old curmudgeon with little temperate adulthood between.  To have this quality captured here, memorably, in an extraordinary performance by John Lithgow  is treat enough.   But it’s even  more of a stimulus to  have the nature of such men’s  appalling antisemitism skewered and defined in two hours of tense drama .  Especially now,  when that sickness is horribly reviving across Europe.    

          GIANT   has only another week to run, a sellout from the start, and I come late to it for odd reasons.  But since it has garnered 5* reviews and will undoubtedly transfer up West eventually, it feels worth joining the chorus of praise (and of necessary, topical unease) to remind any readers  to go and see it.  As I shall again, wherever it goes .     Nicholas Hytner directs –  a first time at the Court for the NT and Bridge veteran – and there’s never a false note.

              Some fear that its scale – four people at lunch, plus a couple of others briefly appearing – means that the play  can only ever suit a small theatre like the Court.  I disagree: I think it could hit home across a far bigger one and have seen lesser plays and smaller casts do it.  It needs a wider audience, certainly.    

          It’s set in 1983.   Dahl (Lithgow) is looking over the illustrations for The Witches:  irascible,  just divorced, soothed by his new partner (Rachael Stirling) and his publisher (Elliot Levey wonderful as Maschler, whether standing apart trying not to bite his nails, or sitting in a resigned pose of near-defeat when Dahl starts baiting the Jewish New York publisher (Romola Garai). She is elegant and controlled until the old man gets effortlessly under her skin by asking whether she does the stuff with “the funny scrolls”,   and making a distinction between someone being Jewish and being “aggressively Jewish”.   

        Her job is to point out that his remarks are endangering sales of the new book in America, and perhaps a boycott by librarians (Ah, he says ” Satan’s spinster army!” and we can’t help laughing) . She cites one Holocaust survivor bookseller who is concerned.   Dahl  just sneers  that “the kinder of his shtetl” in New England will just have to settle for Helen Oxenbury. The two words clang on the stage like casually thrown daggers. 

           Well, you get the tone, and brilliantly done it is. Frissons of shock run through the theatre as Dahl takes on  Jessie until she shakes with surprised horror and hunches into each angry riposte.  Another kind of shock occurs  as he turns  on Maschler, jeeringly throwing  the publisher’s friendship and admiration back on him to inflict real pain.  Moments of softness-  Jessie  has a brain damaged son, as he once did, and he understands  – swing suddenly to moments of real dangerous hatred. Even while he continues eating the housekeeper’s tasty sorbets .    Stirling, as his partner, does her best to control him with both impatience and love, but it’ll never work.   The sacred monster’s  brief late moment of self-doubt evaporates, taking us into the final twists – two of them. The last one sparks both outraged laughter and then silence. .  

           He throws all the insults, not only at Israel but at all Jews – “hoarding your ancient wounds”  and denying the suffering caused by Israeli warmaking.   When Jessie points out that if he’s not careful some may interpret  the Witches as Jewish (hook nosed, cultish, tormenting children and amassing wealth)  he suddenly gets really outraged :   they were, he says, just  versions of his grandmother.  That’s clever of Rosenblatt, as it momentarily gives Dahl the authenticity of a creator misunderstood.  But in no time he’s  off again,  the nasty belligerent child back among us.

            You come out exhilarated, horrified, wiser,  and better attuned to the terrible spectrum  of this ancient irrational hatred: how subtle and genteel attittudes creep effortlessly up to pogrom level.  You come out remembering the outrage of Jessie but also the real pain of Levey’s Tom Maschler. And yes, we do get that famous Dahl line “Even a stinker like Hitler didn’t just pick on them for no reason.”    You come out thinking.  That’s what its there  for.    Bravo.  

Royalcourttheatre .com to 16 nov 

rating 5, of course

1648, Agra: marble and murder, a terrible beauty

    One of the worst photo-ops of Princess Diana’s collapsing marriage was that shot at the Taj Mahal, billed by romantics as “eternal monument of a husband’s love”. Beautiful it is, ambitiously so. Mughal art is: plenty of it right now at the V& A. But even when you can’t help but marvel (I gasped at the Taj like anybody else)  history makes you too aware of its human price. The Mughal Emperors were one of history’s most brutal, vain, murderous and generally dislikeable ruling cadres, Shah Jahan among the  worst. 

  Whether he did indeed have 20,000 skilled labourers be-handed and the architect murdered to prevent his vanity project being imitated – or  topped –  remains uncertain and semi-legendary. But all too credible,  given the godlike status of the dynasty and its casual chopping-down of fellow-creatures .  That tale fuels Rajiv Joseph’s strange, gripping, gruesome – and finally philosophically fascinating  – 85-minute play. It’s about two Imperial Guards, who we first meet presenting scimitars on an octagonal platform. Its the night before the dawn first breaks on the newly completed Taj.    Babur (Usaamah Ibraheem Hussain) is younger, breaking the rules by chatting; Maanuv Thiara’s Humayun is from an army family, stricter but unable to resist identifying the birds whose cries fill he silence of their post on the palace wall.   They’re immediately likeable, recognizable, young men at work together in any century:  bros.  

  They discuss the rules – Babur pointing out that the sentence of only three-days prison for blasphemy, while torture and death are the punishment for  “sedition” against the ruler,  suggests that the latter rates himself above God.  Humayun is horrified at such youthful irreverence,  even though they’re out of earshot, up on a wall together in the small hours.  They shudder at the expected dictat that the 20,000 builders will have their hands chopped off, and the disgustingness of whoever has  to do it – 40,000 hands!    Babur hopes one day to get the plum job guarding the ruler in the harem,  while the elder reprovingly says “It’s not some depraved home of sluts. Just a place the Emperor goes”.   They know they must not turn to look at the newly completed wonder in the first dawn of its completion but of course they both do, in a beautiful golden light..

        But next time we see them they are blood spattered, with a chopping block, having done the job of hand-chopping.  From  here  – amid their slow but efficient cleaning up of a  mass of stage blood – comes much remarkable philosophical reflection, lad-style, about it all.  Which somehow, subtly and unpretentiously,  sets the mind roving over all hierarchies, all extremes of lowly servitude in every age.  

       Sometimes there’s  horrror at the filth of what they had to do  – one cutting, one cauterizing, over and over.  Then Babur ,  after fretting about what will become of the handless men,  thinks about the ruler’s reason :  to prevent anything as beautiful ever being built again.  In shock, he suddenly thinks that by doing that terrible job he has personally ended beauty: since nothing as beautiful can never be built again.   It becomes an angry obsession.  But Humayun, the older, sterner one with a soft centre, suddenly says birds will always be beautiful.  They have talked about their younger job, in the forest, cutting fragrant sandalwood, building a raft. That inspires them for a while .  Also inspiring – and very laddish – is their flight into creative conversations about imaginary flights to the stars and whether you could invent a transportable hole and if so whether it would fall through itself…

    Final scene:  cleaned up, they’ve been promoted to the harem. But Babur throws another curveball, and the terribleness of what such servitude does to human beings – impossible not to think of the Holocaust –  returns in a climactic end. 

  The play will not be to everybody’s taste. But I see why it won prizes – including one for its director here, Adam Karim.  Couldn’t take my eyes off it, and it stays with me.   Credit to Thiara and Hussain , for Humayun and Babur will stay with me for a long while, speaking for the worker across four centuries . 

Orangetreetheatre.co.uk. To 16 nov

Rating four