Category Archives: Five Mice

February 13, 2014 · 11:06 pm

1984 Almeida, N1

A TERRIFYING, TRIUMPHANT HEADLONG   TAKE ON ORWELL

I think George Orwell would be sourly pleased at the way Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan of Headlong and Nottingham Playhouse  have treated his great cry of despair.  They riff on it, and in its very structure ironize Newspeak and Doublethink until, pinned to the seat, we too enter the dark terror of Thoughtcrime.   There are even spookily calm scenes fore and aft in which a reading group of 2084 analyzes the book and believes that everything is fine since The Party fell in 2050.  Unless that too is a thought-control illusion.  Orwell would appreciate that.

Unlike the film or Nick Lane’s strong, but more conventional,  adaptation a few years ago,  Icke and Macmillan create a jerky dislocated structure .  From the start Mark Arends’ gaunt Winston Smith is losing his mind with the stress of being forbidden to believe his own senses.  Familiar elements are there –  telescreens, Julia  (Hara Yannas, perfectly the rebel below the waist and pragmatist above) ,  Charrington’s junk shop room and snow-globe, Oranges and Lemons, children denouncing parents, Victory Gin, the apparent Goldstein conspiracy and Winston’s day job deleting ‘unpersons’.   The Two Minutes’ Hate is staged with terrifying vigour, and  there is a deeply affecting moment as Winston watches the maternal singing woman in the street and nurses the hope that salvation lies in the universal humanity of the proles.

So it’s all there:  but as in a dream lines and scenes recur, projections confuse time and place, and crashes, flashes and blackouts force us to into Winston’s understanding  that love and privacy are a chimera:   “We are the dead”.   Chloe Lamford’s design is surreally alarming in itself: the arrest and torture  at the Ministry of Love sees the familiar stage grow huge, white,empty of all but power and pain.  Even there the most frightening element is Tim Dutton’s O’Brien.  Senatorial, civilized, confident, likeable, he is  the ultimate headmasterly or clerical figurehead whose revealed allegiance is both shocking and credible.  This is the eternal Inquisitor:  “We do not tolerate rebellion, even in a brain awaiting a bullet.  We make it perfect before we blow it out”.

Wisely,  there is no updating (though the programme is stuffed with right-on contemporary soundbites)  but plenty does resonate: as the readers say, every age finds itself in this book.  The Snowden surveillance controversy is prefigured in the complacent, tubby loyalist Parsons saying he’s glad of the telescreens because   “There are people out there who hate us and want to destroy our way of life.   And if we’re being watched, so are they!”  And terrorism of all ages echoes in O’Brien’s early demand that  Winston Smith be prepared, in the Cause,  to  “commit murder, betray, kill, throw sulphuric acid in a child’s face…”

A stunning, terrifying hundred minutes.  And a relief to step out into the street,  with evening papers blowing untidily around and glimmering smartphone screens full of raucous contention,  disrespect and unpunished satire. Thirty years on from 1984, we’re not there.    Yet.

Almeida box office 0207 359 4404      to  23 March     Almeida partner: Aspen
rating:  five5 Meece Rating

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January 24, 2014 · 12:54 am

KING LEAR Olivier, SE1

A LEAR TO REMEMBER: SIMON RUSSELL BEALE        The Bard Mouse width fixed

We are in a crumbling modern gerontocracy:  a conference chamber lined with soldiers, Lear white-bearded and gratingly impatient in dictator militaria,   bemedalled grandees. The daughters line up by microphones for the formal delegation of power and statement of adoration.    It is an old man’s world:   Stephen Boxer’s prim, credulous anxious Gloucester too will prove dangerously  ready to believe that a son is plotting against him with  “We have seen the best of our times”.

As  treacheries and tortures unravel,   director Sam Mendes’ vision is all too recognizable in a world where dictators  poison, stab and feed rivals to dogs while women in designer frocks can play as corruptly as men.   Kate Fleetwood’s  Goneril is a tight, dark knot of frustration,  Anna Maxwell Martin gives us Regan as a minxily sadistic Knightsbridge nymphomaniac.  Their final betrayal takes place beneath a massive Stalinist statue of Lear;   we glimpse the ragged wretches of his underclass, and the final battle is of bombs and Kalashnikovs.

So it follows the contemporary National Theatre Shakespeare trope, like  Hytner’s military Othello, police-state Macbeth and metropolitan Timon.  But like The Winter’s Tale,  this play depends heavily on making the tyrant’s initial craziness credible: every actor must find his way through that astonishing opening scene, that intemperate rage at Cordelia’s honesty.    Some directors take the easy route of implying an incestuous back-story  (the language often suggests it) .  Here  it is not explicit, and we have only  Goneril snapping “never afflict yourself to know the cause”.   Lear’s own nature must explain the disaster, and does.

For  Simon Russell Beale gives us a tense old autocrat,  his need for reassurance stoked by sensing his brain failing.  His voice vibrates with tension, released  in paroxysms of fury.  Stanley Townsend’s shocked Kent  offers the only clue to what Lear once was,  and when he disguises himself as a rudely ranting Irish tramp,  displays equal understanding of what the King is becoming: infantilized, reckless,needing to be amused by rude songs with hsi disruptive soldiery ( roaring “oggi oggi oggi” and hurling a whole dead stag on the table: we need to see why Goneril resents them).

The King must travel from rage to madness before he finds his final angry wisdoms.   Not every Lear, however, manages to catch what Russell Beale does: moments of charm and sweetness when he is briefly convincing himself that Regan,  at least, will be good to him.  Dictators often have – or once had – charm: and the glory of this actor is his ability to switch from Stalin to Santa-Claus within a line. Those few smiling moments are precious, and core to his remarkable interpretation of the character.

The charm sneaks through also in his dealings with the Fool,   the other truth-teller to power:   played with subtle comic desperation by Adrian Scarborough in a check suit with a feathered trilby,  as if he had stepped in from Osborne’s The Entertainer.  And Mendes’ one wholly unexpected shock is his death, which I will not spoil but which makes perfect, rare, horrible dramatic sense.

It all does, and that’s the quality of this thrilling production:  like all the best ones it brings out  ideas and secrets from the text which shock you even after knowing the play for decades. Tom Brooke’s  elfin,  intially casual Edgar is  particularly striking:  a Poor Tom naked, scarred,  the bare forked animal of Lear’s vision.   Richard Clothier’s  Albany too brings a rare distressed dignity to the part.

Not everything is perfect:  Antony Ward’s design is nicely sparse with a cyclorama of threatening cloud and a bright hayfield for Cordelia’s return,  but some quirk persuades Mendes to tolerate a ridiculous hydraulic mini-cliff, with visible mechanism,  raising Lear improbably from the believable moor to shout  “Blow winds and crack your cheeks” ten feet up as if he was in a musical.  Sam Troughton’s Edmund, too is oddly directed: often delivering his threats from an inexplicable spotlight like a Bond villain.

But these are quibbles, cited only because of the miraculous fact that nothing can mar the impact of this great Lear.  Or stop you choking in emotional shock at his final slow, quiet  “Never, never, never, never, never” and sharp demand that all of us  “Look there!”  at Cordelia’s body,   and contemplate the murdered innocence of truth.

Box office  020 7452 3000  to 28 May

Rating: five   5 Meece Rating     

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January 16, 2014 · 12:51 am

THE DUCHESS OF MALFI – Wanamaker Playhouse , Shakespeare’s Globe

HORROR , BEAUTY, CANDLELIGHT

It is a tiny jewel-box, this new indoor playhouse: a reproduction of the Jacobean theatres which succeded the wooden O of the Globe.  Clean pale wood benches lie beneath a ceiling of gilded stars, and the only light is from a hundred wax candles:   tremblng in sconces,  carried by actors, or rising and falling on seven great candelabras from the ceiling.  It is a beautiful thing, but until this first production we could not know whether it will really serve the plays.

Banish doubt: it’s a triumph.  Dominic Dromgoole has wisely chosen to open the Wanamaker with a play whose vision of normality overwhelmed by nightmare is  perfectly expressed by its candlelit intimacy.   The poetic morbidity of John Webster reanimates after four centuries his obsessions:  flesh as frail as curdled milk, stranglings , obscene desires, spider-web intrigue,  “Life a mist of error; death a storm of terror”.   Yet at the heart of the play is the most playful, wholesome and loving of heroines. More even than a Desdemona or Cordelia,  the Duchess shines steady against the blackness: a rounded, sensual, happy and fulfilled woman who even imprisonment only brings  to “melancholy fortified with disdain”,  who asserts her noble birth but dies saying “Give my little boy some syrup for his cold”.

Gemma Arterton brings a queenly beauty to the role, and on this night steps up into the first rank of classical actors.   In the lovely domestic scenes with her secret husband Antonio (Alex Waldmann)  she sings and teases, shrugging cheerfully that the “tempest” of her brother’s fury at the marriage will abate.  In captivity, tormented with visions of the beloved dead,  she can rage and grieve without compromising the still dignity which stands gravely by when bayed by madmen.   No grotesqueness can dim her quiet burning candle.

That grotesqueness, meanwhile,  is served with equal vigour by David Dawson as Duke Ferdinand, keeping his incestuous weirdness just this side of camp.  Writhingly petulant, shivering with inexpressible desire he is the perfect contrast to  his sister’s cheerful sensuality.  A fine physical contrast too with his pawn,  Sean Gilder’s Bosola, playing it as every inch the pragmatic ex-army bruiser moving from a brisk “Whose throat must I cut?” to horrified entanglement in the Duke’s filthy games.  And alongside the Duchess is Sarah MacRae’s Cariola:  of coarser clay than her mistress but warmly human and, in her own moment of death, inexpressibly touching.  All this, remember, is  achieved by candlelight:  rising and falling, snuffed out and re-lit,  the practical magic of a past age rediscovered.  With Claire van Kampen’s music on early instruments, it takes your breath away.

After the  savage climax of the Duchess’ death,  every director faces the problem of the longish final act. A more temperate playwright would head for a faster ending, but Webster revels in detailed dissolution, conspiracy, seduction, a ludicrous poisoned Bible and a jarring comic interlude with mad Ferdinand’s overconfident doctor.  For all the Gothic horror of the Duke’s werewolf grave-ripping,  progress towards the final heaping of corpses always risks absurdity.  Dromgoole does not resort to cuts or underplaying but ramps it up,  goes for broke, and allows the absurdities to produce a relieved shake of laughter in the tiny, crammed, beautiful room.

box office:  (0) 20 7401 9919   http://www.shakespeares-globe.com
to 16 Feb

rating:   five     5 Meece Rating

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January 8, 2014 · 11:52 pm

BRING UP THE BODIES SWAN, STRATFORD

AND SO IT GOES ON…

“Intrigue feeds upon itself”  says Thomas Cromwell,  in the second part of this magnificent and terrifying chronicle.  We find Anne Boleyn restless,  fiercely frivolous, sensing the net closing around her,  and Henry turning his eyes on Leah Brotherhead’s  Jane Seymour:  a pale, small, carefully chaste creature whose high sweet enunciation has just enough weirdness in it to make her seem a kind of sybil.  More women to the fore now:  closet gossip from sour Lady Rochford , wanton Lady Worcester and the camp young lutanist  (Joey Batey)  who once played for Wolsey and now haunts the rustling chambers of the |Queen. And more street rumours – comic, dangerous, revealing –  from Piero Niel Mee as Cromwell’s rascally French servant.

Cardinal Wolsey and Thomas More are ghosts now:  ironic, strolling across the stage in Cromwell’s troubled memory.   The Earls of Suffolk and Norfolk are more crudely bombastic than ever,  the Boleyn tribe on the defensive, and Cromwell himself  depended on by the  King.  He is  forced into ever twistier manoeuvres to serve that royal terror: indeed  there were moments during his interrogation of Boleyn’s supposed lovers when our hero seemed  – uneasily, shockingly – to be corrupting like a slow-burning Macbeth.

But then subtle regret, pain and old resentments cross Ben Miles’ expressive  face beneath the sober puritan cap, and you ache again for a man too thoughtful, practical and sceptical for a vainglorious court and whimsical dictator.   Terrible for any man of conscience to have say flatly to a shocked son:   “Once you have exhausted the process of negotiation and compromise, once you have fixed on the destruction of your enemy, his destruction must be swift. It must be perfect. Before you even glance in his direction you should have his name on a warrant, the ports blocked, his wife and friends bought…his dog answering your whistle!”.

Despite brief moments when the telescoping of dense narrative threatened to be a touch Blackadderish,  it was impossible not to be borne along.  One caveat:  for non-readers of the novels this seond play might not stand alone with clarity as the first does.  Best to arrive clear about the history and narrative of the first part.   Tremendous storytelling, though, on any terms: and a vivid evocation of a monarch threatened on all sides: from a Catholic Europe outraged by the exile of Queen Katherine, from arrogant noble families at home jockeying for position.  Meanwhile theologians like Cranmer (Giles Taylor) tell him that power descends to the King from God, while pragmatists like Cromwell quietly know that it only rises from the uncertain docility of a hungry populace.

Thus an oversimplified patch of history becomes  fresh, and the RSC demonstrates its high worth and staunch values.  I am not the only one who left this double day,   after six hours and two plays,  saying that if  Hilary Mantel had yet written the third  – and Poulton and Herrin presented it –   we would willingly have stayed till dawn.

box office 0844 800 1110     http://www.rsc.org.uk

rating:   four .4 Meece Rating
Except that if you see both plays,  somehow it adds up to a triumphant
five   5 Meece Rating

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December 16, 2013 · 11:25 pm

FORTUNE’S FOOL – Old Vic, SE1

LONELINESS,  LONGING,  A  LINEN CUPBOARD: A  HEARTSHAKING REVIVAL

1848 in rural Russia: early morning in the great house,  maids opening up.  High in the great linen-cupboard a man sleeps, yet a footman brings him his trousers.  It’s a neat metaphor Ivan Turgenev offers us for  the status of Kuzovkin (Iain Glen)  on the 1848 estate. He  is chivvied by bustling servants, relegated to a corner  with his (as yet inexplicably) anxious friend Ivanov,  but is no servant. He was the impoverished, patronized “fool” to the late owner, and seven years on still hangs around. Waiting, as they all are, for the return of the estate’s young heiress (Lucy Briggs-Owen)  and her important St Petersburg husband.

Domestic fuss makes for comedy; but this gripping, rarely seen revival (new to the West End, though played in Chichester in 2006 and on Broadway) is tragicomic: profound and angry.   The first act sees young Olga’s cheerful recognition of old Kuzovskin and  her prim husband’s inspection of accounts,  but in the midst of it arrives the neighbour Tropatchov (Richard McCabe),  a stout snobbish fop in a gold waistcoat, with black curly hair like an asymmetric Elizabeth Barrett Browning.    He is insistent, insolent, overconfident to the point of psychopathy,  prone to breaking into pretentious French.  He trails an impoverished insulted companion (as essential to a Tsarist grandee, it seems, as a parasol to his lady).   The young host has no control: they  get  Kuzovskin drunk,  goad him to explain the tedious intricacies of the court case which made him homeless,  and with increasing nastiness force him to sing for his supper, throw drink over him and humiliate him.

For a time I could not see where this was going: the end of Act I is the Bullingdon dinner from hell.   But in the last line the “fool” blows complacency to smithereens with a revelation   I didn’t read the play before,  as there is joy in coming afresh to a classic:  I won’t spoil it.  But in the second act the  household try to resolve it with varying degrees of panic, hypocrisy and tenderness.   Which takes us into a wrenching , beautifully told scene of sadness, longing and love.   Lucy Briggs-Owen,  who so often has lit up RSC evenings of late,  rises from her vivid girlish playfulness to heights of truthful emotion.    Glen, whose bendy-legged humiliation is still  fresh in our memory, becomes a sort of Lear:  when he says ‘My heart is broken, that’s all.  It wasn’t much of a heart”  I shook in my seat.

Director Lucy Bailey has a marvellous cast.  McCabe  – last seen as Harold Wilson – is an astonishing Tropachov, and it is an astonishing part:  ludicrous, buffoonish, yet so horrifying in its dangerous spite that you catch your breath in terror for the victims of his teasing threats.  The genius of Turgenev – and of Mike Poulton’s flawlessly convincing adaptation – is that this preening horror comes after we have witnessed the profound pain of the central pair.

By contrast, the role of Pavel the young husband  (Alexander Vlahos)  is difficult in the opposite way:  a well-meaning prig, victim of the stifling fin-de-siecle convention the play kicks against.  But towering over them all is Iain Glen as Kuzovkin;  a coward afraid of “the world outside –  poverty, unkindness, the insolence of life” but clinging to the core of love, and knowing his own folly and weakness so well  that he achieves a dignity not far from holiness.   A very Russian figure.  It is the glory of great theatre, to carry us   into other times, other hearts, and make us love them.

box office 0844 8717628  to 22 Feb

rating:  five   5 Meece Rating

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December 16, 2013 · 12:03 am

PETER PAN GOES WRONG – Pleasance theatre, Islington N1

JOYFUL DISASTERS FROM COMEDY MASTERS

The director is grandiose as only a student thesp can be;  his assistant (“Co-director” he snaps) surly.  The actors playing Pan and Wendy are an item, envied by the  lovesick crocodile – who only got cast because his uncle’s outboard-motor powers the revolve.  Not always at the right moment.  The ASM has split 7-up on the sound- board,  which keeps interpolating disastrous audition tapes and backstage discussions,  and Tinkerbell’s tutu-lights are having to  be run off the mains, on a long cable. Ouch.

Welcome back to the Cornley Polytechnic Drama Society,  accident-prone, incompetent  and fictional.  Mischief Theatre, their creators, are the opposite:   precisely disciplined and courageous comedy masters.  The only quality they share with their avatars is ambition.  I cheered for their last sellout production The Play That Goes Wrong, which  showed a spoof murder-mystery dissolving into chaos and recrimination, and ran at a tight 70 minutes.   So I wondered anxiously whether they could  sustain his two-act, two-hour show with the same central (and elderly) joke about am-dram hitting the rocks. Even with the wily Adam Meggido joining as director.

Shouldn’t have worried.  Despite one cancelled preview when a key performer broke her foot (Sophie Whittaker stands in, excellently) they triumph again.  Jonathan Sayer and Henries Shields and Lewis are the authors again,  but stick close to J.M.Barrie’s feyly magical text, causing an extra layer of incongruity.   And it helps that they  are all young – a few years out of LAMDA –  and playing the part of a student club.  So they can’t fall back on the clichés of this  genre:  fruity old thesps,  ageing diva, weary director.  The joke is that the Cornley lot are trying really, really hard, without experience: they freeze in horror,  repeat lines in vain, panic.

The slapstick is masterly,  including tricks performed by the  sets (by Martin Thomas),  and there’s sharply timed lighting, smoke and sound.  The movement is heroic:   Nell Mooney is credited as choreographer, and may they forgive her for those terrifying thuds and pratfalls:  this must be the physically bravest cast in Britain.  The first act in particular is full of shocks – I involuntarily clapped my hand over my mouth more than once – and creates disasters so weepingly funny that people snorted.   Critics rarely laugh out loud – what with the notebook – but I heard a mad cackle from myself at the extended joke of Nana The Dog (Lewis) getting jammed in his dog-flap for a whole scene.  I cannot reveal the disaster of the children’s bunks, or the scissors gag, or why the Cornleys’ stage manager  becomes Peter Pan.

I had assumed they wouldn’t attempt flying: wrong again.  I will observe only that  there is Olivier-standard skill in placing a hip-harness in such a way that cast members find themselves delivering key lines upside down,  and even more skill in the real stage crew – led by Thomas Platt – controlling the wires in such a lethally uncontrolled way.  Gorgeous.

box office   http://www.pleasance.co.uk   020 7609 1800     to 5 Jan

rating:  five  5 Meece Rating

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December 11, 2013 · 5:18 pm

THAT DAY WE SANG – Royal Exchange, Manchester

A JEWEL FROM THE NORTH, AN ECHO FROM THE PAST

Forget Acorn Antiques, fun though that was. Victoria Wood’s stage musical, written a couple of years ago for the Manchester Festival, has the trademark wit and observation running alongside the other strain of her genius:  the ability to show everyday uncomplaining pain, and salute bleak lives as they grope towards late-flowering redemption. Brilliant, simple, beautiful.

Pure Wood, it belies the theory that musicals only emerge from infinite rewrites and much squabbling and switching lyricists.   It deals with the real moment in 1929 when a choir of Manchester schoolchildren, many the poorest,  recorded Purcell’s “Nymphs and Shepherds” with the Halle Orchestra. Listen, watch, have a weep: it’s on   http://tinyurl.com/o4dv4au.

Some were reunited forty years on at Granada TV,  and Wood’s four fictional characters begin there, hearing the music again after years. Frank and Dorothy live in a carapace of prosperous 1960’s Mancunian smugness (“Die-stamping doesn’t just happen, you know”) and patronize Tubby and Enid ,who have never met although once they harmonized: girls and boys were separated in the ‘20s).  Tubby is a bravely joking, selfconscious middle-aged bachelor with a bit of a gut,  who looked after his mother till her death.  Only in the flashbacks to 1929  do we glimpse the bitter woman he has been jollying along:  abandoned by a feckless band-singer husband, she  banned his father’s record and tried to keep him from the children’s choir.

The flashback of his audition, wonderfully sung by one of the rotating young cast,  provides a shivery Billy-Elliot  moment of recognition:  a child of poverty with high art in his bones.   We see Enid as repressed and awkward, drab victim of a carelessly controlling boss-lover.  “Where is that bright eyed child? When was I reconciled / To seeing the day today in shades of beige and grey?”.  In another unforgettable barnstorming solo (rhyming sex-tricks with Scalextrix) Anna Francolini rises from wistfulness into a number with wicked echoes of Chicago. Stops the show.

There are nice retro touches: a Golden Egg cafe and the stellar number when the posher couple “journey in to the Berni Inn” .  A revolving table surrounded by gateau-wielding waiters heralds a patronizing chorus of “You’ll have the learn the blarney and fancy words like garni”.   But the simple round staging makes it all the more credible when we flash back, and fifty grey-shabby children are having their Lancashire vowels ironed out by the choirmistress because “You don’t wear hobnailed boots to a party”.  Sometimes the children’s choir simply sit watching as the adult Tubby and Enid cautiously move towards one another or sorrow alone:  there’s a real frisson when adult Tubby duets with his brave child self.

Every role, though, has its glories.  The bible-bashing wooden-legged choir supervisor, ten years back from the WW1 trenches, is a lovely creation from the moment when he first snaps “Excuses! The primrose path to hell! When they came for Jesus in Gethsemane he didn’t make excuses, hopped up on the cross and took his punishment!”   Yet his one-line redemption too is unutterably moving.

I loved its Festival version, but it shines even brighter in Sarah Frankcom’s intimate production.  I hope it will tour, and move south.  Good news that BBC2 is televising it next year, though changing the title to “Tubby and Enid”.  Which is a  decision so muttonheaded that one must sorrowfully assume it came from a TV executive.  For this is no mere middle-aged rom-com,  but a meditation on life’s attrition, the long slow sad loss of childhood’s glee,  and the role of memory and courage in reclaiming it.

box office 0161 8339833  to   18 Jan

rating:  five. I mean it.     5 Meece Rating

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December 10, 2013 · 11:29 pm

THE DUCK HOUSE – Vaudeville, WC2

LIGHT AS A FEATHER, FUNNY AS A QUACK

There’s a lovely moment of finesse when Ben Miller,  as a defecting New Lab MP in the dying days of the Brown government, is trying to impress on a Tory grandee his fitness for Cabinet. This involves him and his wife (Nancy Carroll) pretending that he is not a fraudulent expenses-milker and home-flipper.  At one point the grandee gets a cake splattered on his suit, and Miller bends to blow the icing-sugar off him in desperate little puffs.    The “It’s a Nigella recipe” is a sneakier icing-sugar joke,  but the puffing is real class.

For all its news-quizzy political jokes this is at heart a Cooneyesque farce, rompingly directed by Terry Johnson: well-engineered,  all exits and entrances credible but unexpected.  It has no pretensions to depth or insight: this is the comedy of comeuppance,  embarrassment and impossible excuses. Sharp but not bitter,  joyfully mocking, light as a feather and funny as a quack.

Devilish good luck, of course,  that MPs‘ salary increase hit the news this week.  For Dan Patterson and Colin Swash went to the 2009 expenses scandal for their first stage play, incorporating its beautifully ludicrous domestic details of claims for “second” homes:  a glitter lav seat, moat-cleaning, horse manure , hanging baskets and the infamous duck house itself  (which makes a splendid entrance).   But anger feels less appropriate than hilarity: this was an unprecedented mass trouser-dropping by the powerful, and you might as well laugh. One pleasure of this play is that it gives precisely the correct weight, no more,  to a scandal caused by decades of dishonesty over MPs pay and the Fees Office consequently encouraging them to fill their boots with expenses.

The purely theatrical pleasures are even greater.  Miller is perfect as the swaggering MP struggling in a net of panic,  Simon Shepherd smoothly patrician as the grandee who despite assaults by cake, milk, manure and an enraged illegal Russian housekeeper (Debbie Chazen)  continues his check-up on the new member in the second act by visiting his “London home”.  Which is in fact occupied by the goth-leftie  student son, (James Musgrave)  whose email of course is bombparliament@theyrealltwats.co.uk.  He has sold the furniture and let his foxy girlfriend run an illegal business. Worse still, she’s from Burnley, which makes the MP’s wife gag and flinch.  Indeed Nancy Carroll is a major delight,  haughty and groomed and eager to take her interior decorating flair into the Sam-Cam orbit,  yet able to let this ladylike demeanour disintegrate into comedic panic.

You could criticize it as shouty and frenetic (you’ll have no problem hearing from the cheap seats)  but small sharp asides do soften that, and good lines keep on coming. Enumerating his claims Miller once cries “The pouffe and the trouser-press – what’s that, a novel by Somerset Maugham?” Good Huhne gag, too.   Anyway, it’s farce:  without spoilers I reassure you that there are corsets, a wardrobe, lost trousers, glue, a transparent wall and a perfectly logical giant panda suit. If you don’t laugh, I’ll have none of you.

Box Office: 0844 482 9675  to 29 March

rating:  five     5 Meece Rating

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December 10, 2013 · 5:24 pm

ALADDIN – New Wimbledon Theatre

BRAND  MEETS BEDELLA  – BUT IT’S FLAWLESS THAT’S FLAWLESS!

New lamps for old!  It’s the motto of the best pantomimes : keep the shape of the old lamp – vaudeville routines, spectacle, low comedy and sweet song,  comedy knickers –   but fire up the old lamp with something as new as hip-hop and LEDs.   Cherish the old solid-brass professionals but  rub celebrity agents until they  conjure up star names.  Thus  your improbable lamp will shine.

It surely does in this rip-roaring Aladdin, written by Eric Potts and directed by Ian Talbot.  Above the title Jo Brand is Genie of the Ring, in possibly the most ornately blingtastic outfit she has ever worn. Her trademark sarcasm is written in, but the standup career is evident in that she’s happiest when the fourth wall is down and she can berate the audience and tell  jokes. The kids loved the one about the French cat.

But alongside her towers Matthew Kelly, a Dame of long experience and many costumes (a giant Pot Noodle, a Scotch airer covered in drying pants as a hooped skirt).   And as Abanazar there’s David Bedella,  so memorable as Jerry Springer’s Satan, with his marvellous grainy bass and wo-hoa-hoa laugh of evil.   But then add groovy Britains-got-talent celebrs:  Shaheen Jhafargholi  – who sang at Michael Jackson’s memorial – is a bluesy rather beautiful Lamp Genie.  And even better, deserving  the wildest cheers of all,  the, joyfully acrobatic street-dance group Flawless.

Backflips, handstands, head-twirling  hip-hop genius, at one point in pitch dark with suits of lights.  It’s  breathtaking and street-smart,  but sewn cheerfully into the old patchwork.  Their first appearance indeed is as the Peking Police Force under the leadership of Matthew Rixon as a wholly traditional comic policeman (it could be 1935),  and one of the best jokes is Brand being told “you only like hip-hop because it’s only two letters away from chip shop”.

You see what I mean?  Modern panto melds together the shock of the new with Victorian staples – daft puns, physical jokes (in the laundry the copper goes brilliantly through the mangle,and shrinks).  It has  prancing nippers from the Doris Holford School of Dance and a traditionally pretty and melodious pair of leads,  Oliver Thornton and Claire-Marie Hall,  and dutifully picks up the annual top jokes (last year it was gangnam,  this year twerking and the Gravity movie).    It dares to flash, briefly, a bare bum,  but an entr’acte cross-talk act and a canting song come straight from music-hall.  It greatly relishes insults (“I’m pushing forty!” “Dragging it, more like” ).

And it’s beautiful. Wimbledon always goes nuts on costumes, but in backdrops too Old Peking is a sepia-gold dream of parasols and pagodas, the Palace a blue-and-silver elegance,  the cave green-and-grey with a living gesticulating carpet.  The finale melts all the colours together round a willowpattern plate.  For all the larks and jokes,  the children will have been taking in that aesthetic, too.

box office 0844 8717 646   to  12 jan

Rating:  a panto five!     5 Meece Rating

Damemouse

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December 3, 2013 · 11:16 pm

HENRY V – Noel Coward Theatre, WC2

ROYALTY AND ROGUES,  WAR AND WOOING:  JUDE LAW JOINS THE GREATS

The moment of conversion came in the starlight, when Jude Law’s Henry  wanders hooded and disguised among his weary soldiers, and sits for a while listening silently with firelight playing on his face.  The die is cast:  they are outnumbered five to one, he has proudly dismissed the French envoy’s offer.  If these drowsy men die it will be his doing.  That flickering firelit doubt (ah, that Grandage carefulness with lighting – Neil Austin designs it)  speaks volumes about the loneliness of leadership.

I speak of conversion, because despite the heady poetry this has never been for me a favourite among Shakespeare’s histories. The narrative Chorus can make it too much like a masque with  battle scenes,  the final Franglais wooing scene of the French princess seems anticlimactic,  and the offstage death of Falstaff and the vanishing of MIstress Quickly make you miss the warm humanity of the earlier plays.

Which is why you need a Hytner or a Grandage to make it zing.  It happened ten years ago at the National  and praise heaven, it has happened again.  Costume in Mchael Grandage’s production is medieval, Christopher Oram’s set a simple wooden curve.  But the Chorus is  a young modern street-kid in a Union Jack T-shirt (Ashley Zhangazha).  His intensity gives a surprised, excited vigour to the narrative; in the interval we find him lounging on the stage, reading, apparently engrossed in that earlier England’s story.  It draws you in.

That freshness is equally striking in Jude Law’s virile, sensitively balanced Henry.  To make sense of this young King you have to believe that he is not just a combative monarch keen to see off the French, but the roistering old Prince Hal:  the lad who loved life and low company – his people, after all .  He is slightly bored  (Law does this beautifully)  by the Archbishops banging on about Salic Law and the need for war.  Why would the old Hal want to wake“the sleeping sword of war” and creating “a thousand widows”?  He needs convincing.

So in the war scenes he conveys not Olivieresque dramatic heroism but a kind of taut, almost trembling determination to do the thing decently and bravely,  since it must be done. The St Crispin’s Day speech, delivered in a morning mist,   is rousing but leavened by a laddish jokeyness as he makes them laugh with daft voices evoking of old men’s future bragging.   His appalled dignity hearing of ten thousand French dead – “a royal fellowship of death” – feels as real as his sudden kneeling thanks for the astonishing victory.  As for that odd wooing scene with the Princess (Jessie Buckley)  its gruff laddish charm owes much to the sense of a man relaxing after intense strain.

Lesser joys to note:  Ben Lloyd-Hughes full of nervous bravado as the Dauphin praising his horse,  James Laurenson an authoritative Exeter,  and two beautiful evocations by Noma Dumezweni : as Mistress Quickly describing Falstaff’s death with damped, awkwardly flippant emotion, and as Alice the bilingual maid, keeping her thoughts to herself alongside the young Princess.   And since Shakespearian royalty must have rogues alongside, Ron Cook is a disgracefully funny Pistol.  But it’s Jude Law’s face in the firelight which will stay with me.

box office   020 7492 1548  to 15 Feb

Rating:  five.   5 Meece Rating

and Jennifer-Jane Benjamin came with me, and offers again her terse twentysomething one-word-per-star review:

Bold, Valiant, Elegant, Intense, French

..

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December 3, 2013 · 1:05 am

CANDIDE – Menier, SE1

HIGH KICKS AND HIGH JINKS:  VOLTAIRE WITH VERVE

Voltaire’s story – subtitled Optimisme –  gave the world Dr Pangloss and his disabling conviction that “all is for the best, in the best of all possible worlds”  because whatever happens has a reason.   His innocent pupil Candide holds the faith through decades of  lost love, exile, war, slavery, floggings, volcanoes, pirates, corrupt Cardinals, swindlers and shipwrecks.   Rambling across a war-torn Europe and its colonies this reverses the Tom-Jonesy picaresque which our own 18c novelists enjoyed.  Their heroes come up smiling, Voltaire’s stumbles earnestly from disaster to catastrophe while his companions keep resurrecting and turning up in new guises explaining “Well, it’s a long story…”.

This gorgeously funny, touching, vigorous production  by Matthew White of the Bernstein musical  should have an afterlife.  If, that is, anyone can work out how to transfer it from the Menier’s  audience-teasing staging in the round. The ensemble weave around and among us, slapping occasional hats or crowns on the front row,   singing from fine distressed wooden balconies overhead.  Adam Cooper choreographs,  and when dealing with his former Singing in the Rain oppo Scarlett Strallen  gives full rein to her agility.  As Candide’s stabbed, raped, traded, enslaved and corupted lover,  Strallen demonstrates that she is not just a sunshiny-singy-dancey musical theatre lead but  a physical comedienne.  In  “Glitter and be gay” ,  the fallen woman hurls herself around lamenting  her shame while pillaging the very chandelier for diamonds. Gorgeous.

The musical’s  history is something of a dog’s breakfast,  though with classy ingredients:  worth buying the programme to read how Lilian Hellman wanted it to reflect McCarthysim and America’s blindness.  She enlisted young  Leonard Bernstein:  it flopped, but via several mutations found success with a new book by Hugh Wheeler.  Lyrics are by Hellman, Sondheim, Dorothy Parker, Bernstein himself and John Latouche – too many cooks, but a tasty broth.

Not least because however daft Candide is,  you are drawn to sympathy because Fra Fee from Dungannon is a real find:   innocent elfin face but a voice so deep, honeyed and flawless that your heart  melts.  James Dreyfus as Pangloss (and assorted others) gives a smart, knowing performance, and Jackie Clune hurls herself with limping gusto into the role of  an woman who hair-raisingly claims her buttock was eaten by starving Russians.

For Voltaire’s world, like ours , is a troubled one.   White  cleverly keeps the narration – split between characters as they weave around the weathered balconies – as blandly terrible as a news bulletin:  thousands dead in natural disasters, coldly described atrocities.   Yet during these enumerations of horror the cast enacts them with romps, red ribbons, and childlike drop-down-deads (one general expired in the lap of the Mail on Sunday critic) .   Strallen’s chandelier is suspended on a hangman’s noose, and  the Inquisition dances delightedly round a pyre with “What a day, what a day, for an Auto-da-Fe!”    Interesting that Hellman,  Bernstein and the rest started cooking this up ten years before  Joan Littlewood’s  O What a Lovely War.

I loved it.  Bernstein’s score is lovely,  the comedy fun, the energy high and the conclusion touching.  Pangloss is banished to preach shiny determinism to the sheep, while the rest sing  “We’re neither pure nor wise nor good. We’ll do our best, we’ll chop our wood and make our garden grow….”

box office  0207 378 1713  to  22 Feb

Rating:  five happy mice      5 Meece Rating

apology: in an earlier version of this post Adam Cooper appeared as Adam Cork. Which is disgraceful. Adam Cooper is a genius dancer and choreographer and my hero.  Adam Cork, of course, composed the marvellous sound design for Grandage’s season, including Henry V . A review of which will be up soon.  Which is why he was on my mind.  Sorry both.

 

AP

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November 16, 2013 · 12:03 am

EAT PRAY LAUGH – Dame Edna Everage farewell tour – Palladium, W1

FAREWELL,  POSSUMS!    

My gladdie lies before me on the train seat as I write, wilting gently.   I doubt I shall throw it away,  for the opening night of Barry Humphries’ farewell UK tour is poignant.  My brother Mike and I have seen every one of Dame Edna’s West End appearances since 1969  (her bizarre Albert Hall concerto four years ago and the panto debut at Wimbledon were interludes in a 15-year gap between full shows).  When it all began we were young,  and the Edna character was just an opinionated Moonee Ponds housewife in upswept glasses,  but  some things endure.  On that night 44 years ago, knees less creaky than now obeyed the command to “Stand and tremble!” the gladioli the muscular Edna hurled at us.  Tonight we did it again.

As years rolled by Humphries has elevated her to megastar status, with wilder gowns and sparklier glasses.   The legendary targeting of the audience became ever more terrifying:  last time we were in Row E,  and cowered as rows behind and ahead of us were mercilessly questioned. This time – inspired by a self-absorbed bestseller – Edna arrives on a jewelled elephant and claims to have been in a celebrity ashram, with the Dalai Lama and Sharon Osbourne booked in under false names  and “little Stephen Fry. Booked in as Stephen Fry”.  There’s the traditional verbal strafing of the front rows: “You’ve come dressed for the occasion.  Not this occasion, obviously.  Cleaning the car. Or assisting a family pet to give birth”.    This culminates in the claim that she is licenced to conduct Punjabi weddings and the singling out of an earringed youth and elderly lady, strangers, as bride and groom.   Reports from previews say Edna targets gay men to improve the joke: on press night,  nimble as ever,  on discovering that the victim had a wife at home in Kent she rang her to break the news of the remarriage and broadcast her baffled bedtime replies over the loudspeakers.

Cruel?  Not really.  The immense, self-aware persona rises above that,  mocking her very mockery:  she is the archetype of every waspish female relative who has punctured our self-esteem since childhood.  But this time we can laugh.  And  as a seasoned Ednologist I have to say that there is a softness now, a dilution of the basilisk glare,  which is not entirely due to the light of nostalgia.

I write of Edna,  and the second half is hers.  But Humphries’ first half is just as skilled.   Sir Les Patterson, no longer “cultural attaché” but wannabe TV chef,  amiably repulsive as ever, makes ‘fusion barbie’  rissoles, spitting,  vanishing noisily into the dunnee and telling an apparently pointless, maundering senile anecdote culminating in the rudest joke of the year.  Briefly  replaced by his (newly invented and near-the-knuckle) gay clerical brother, he undergoes a coup de theatre to become Sandy Stone, the mournful old suburban ghost reflecting on a lost child long ago.   Some jib at this deliberate lowering of the energy and acknowledgement of grief, but in character comedy it always feels like the ultimate act of theatrical courage and bravura:  saying “I have the skill to make you cry. It’s just my choice, tonight, to make you laugh”.

I like that.  After the final climactic waving of massed gladdies Edna becomes a mere projection and Barry Humphries walks on as himself,  79 years old,  to say goodbye.  We stay on our feet in something close to awe.  And in sadness,  nimbly  punctured by a sardonic  “Promise to come to my next farewell tour”.   One can only hope.

box office   0844 412 4655        dameednafarewell.com     to 5 Jan
Rating:   Inappropriate.  Too historic.  So here’s a cross-dressed Ednamouse instead. Damemouse

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November 12, 2013 · 10:58 pm

JEEVES & WOOSTER IN Perfect Nonsense – Duke of York’s, WC2

BERTIE STORMS THE STAGE – and gets the cheese! 

 
When Bertie Wooster, with a start,  realizes that the curtain has gone up and turns from his easy-chair to apologize (“I thought we said 7.30 for eight?”),  there is flash of overwhite teeth, a sleek Brylcreem parting and a vacuous “Haw-haw-haw” from Stephen Mangan.  Which together made me think  “Blimey!  Duke of York’s Theatre, and there IS the Duke of York! Prince Andrew, to the life!”.

Which I am sure is not deliberate.  But it added another tiny layer of pleasure.  And this adorable production is about layering joy on joy,  joke on joke in a delectable millefeuille of absurdity.   The Goodale Brothers script keeps P.G.Wodehouse’ language at its heart in a way TV dramatizations don’t manage. It does this by making Bertie the narrator: to have him only in dialogue is never enough to keep us gruntled,  because the joke in the novels is that the dim tongue-tied Bertie is, in narrative, a matchless verbal acrobat.

The idea is that he is back from the eventful weekend at Totleigh Towers in The Code of the Woosters   – the one with the cow-creamer, Spode, Madeleine Bassett,  Gussie Fink-Nottle and Aunt Dahlia’s blackmail .  Someone at the Drones told him he should be on stage, so there he is, alone with retro footlights and visible fly-ropes.  He cannot, of course , manage without Jeeves: so in shimmers Matthew Macfadyen,  razor-sharp creases to his trousers.  He wheels on a series of chimneypieces, walls, a car, a gratuitous ceiling at one point,  and in the second act a home-made revolve off which Bertie tumbles in panic.  “It’s called scenery, sir. Quite widely used in the theatre”.     Game as ever, though distracted by wanting to play with the props,   Bertie struggles on, warning us “There are boring bits in every play. This is one” as he tries to get dressed unassisted behind a screen.

Jeeves takes on other parts – blundering newt-maniac Gussie in pebble glasses and Fairisle tank-top,   stridingly bossy Stiffy Byng,  Sir Watkyn, and a soppily romantic Madeleine in half a curtain and a lampshade, the quintessence of feminine threat as she utters, to a shuddering Bertie,   “A sigh that seemed to come straight from the camiknickers”.   Aunt Dahlia’s ancient butler Seppings (Mark Hadfield)  is everyone else – the aunt, a worryingly camp ginger manservant,  a policeman , the sound-effects and the eight-foot tall fascist buffoon Spode.  The Hitler moustache is easy enough,  but the  diminutive Seppings’  has to achieve Spodeian height with  increasingly desperate theatrical devices , which brought actual cheers.

The joy of Sean Foley’s direction is the way that Wodehousian absurdities (plus a few extra to tidy up the ending)  are complemented, not overbalanced, by Alice Power’s set and innumerable vaudeville devices and jokes about doubled characters trying to meet one another.  It’s top-grade physical meta-theatre,  yet still Wodehouse.   I could go on –  about the rubber duck, the side-whisker disaster and bowtie triumph, the dog attack, the knotted sheets, the surprise bicycle.  But just go.   Tickets start at twenty quid.  It’ll sell quick, so  Bertie would say, screw your courage to the sticking-plaster and besiege  the box office.

box office  0844 871 3051   http://www.atgtickets.com   to 8 March

rating:  five    5 Meece Rating

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November 3, 2013 · 8:53 pm

THE NATIONAL THEATRE 50th BIRTHDAY GALA – a view from the stalls by Irving Wardle

Meece with mask tiny compressedIrving Wardle – now in his 85th year – was a theatre critic from 1958 to 1995: for 26 of those 37 years he was the Times Chief Theatre Critic.  He  was Tynan’s deputy,  Pinter’s friend,  a playwright himself, and is still writing about theatre.  He saw the birth of the National Theatre in 1963 and was an honoured guest at Saturday’s immense gala night.  This new and  unfledged website,  home to one of his Times successors (though I am one whose tenure sadly lasted only three and a half years, not 26) is honoured to host Irving Wardle’s  exclusive impressions of Saturday night….A return to the critic’s chair from one of the art’s doyens.

LP

IRVING WARDLE WRITES:

“Who’s there?”: were the first words spoken on the NT stage in its opening
production of Hamlet in 1963.  The 50th birthday show opened with the same scene and the same words.  Who’s there?
Well, the Queen wasn’t, and nor were Peter O’Toole (the first Hamlet) or Peter Hall.  Otherwise, looking round the house, it seemed that everyone else had turned up, from Joan Plowright, still carrying the torch for Laurence Olivier to the massed crowd of backstage staff who overwhelmed the actotrs at the final lineup amid a glittering cloudburst of golden leaves.
In between it was pretty much bliss all the way.  Nicholas Hytner and his team had followed Peter Hall’s advice when he said that what such occasions need is “the obvious, very well done.”  From the NT’s 800 past productions we got through an astonishing 38 items in two and a quarter hours.  No interval, no commentary; just the dramatic work switching between staged and film archive extracts.  A tight structure that somehow allowed everything to breathe.  Even the instantaneous design – single Corinthian column for Judi Dench’s Cleopatra, or an elaborate cabinet of priceless china (for No Man’s Land) seemed visually sumptuous rather than austere.  While the stage events, no mattter how brief, came over as if they had all the time in the world.

There were two kinds of pleasure: authentic presentation of past events and seeing them recreated by other actors.  For instance there was Alex Jennings back as Professor Higgins, turning “The Rain in Spain” into a bullfight fought with gramophone horns.  Also James Corden reprising his Timms in The History Boys  –   with Alan Bennett himself making the French brothel lesson more riotous than it had been when Richard Griffiths  was taking the class.  Judi Dench returned twice to her past repertory with Cleopatra’s last speech in praise of Antony, and with Desiree Arnfeldt’s “Send in the Clowns”. Both made  time stand still and brought the house down.  As did Helen Mirren, re-enacting the murder of Ezra from Mouring Becomes Electra.

Writing about these scenes has the effect of turning them into a catalogue, which is directly opposite to the effect they had in performance :  each had time to develop its own life.

In the authenticity stakes, the undoubted killer was a clip from Maggie Smith’s Myra in the 1864 Hay Fever, engaged in arrogantly teasing dalliance with Anthony Nicholls before collapsing as a boneless deadweight into his arms  To comic genius on that level,  one responds with as much awe as laughter.

For the record there were some new performances that made you long to see them in full-scale revivals.  Top of that list for me was Ralph Fiennes as the rogue South African newspaper proprietor in Pravda, obsequiously fawning on the management before launching his reign on terror on the newsroom.  But the biggest show-stoppers were all from muscals:    Jerry Springer,  My Fair Lady, and Clive Rowe leading a marvellously drilled gangster congregation in “Sit Down, You’re Rockin’ the Boat.”  But, then, as Trevor Nunn rightly pointed out, “the NT is very well served by doing the whole spectrum.”
Not a bad motto for the next 50 years.

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October 29, 2013 · 11:07 pm

THE SCOTTSBORO BOYS – Young Vic SE1

ANGER  AND  ATROCITY,  PUNCH AND SWING

Dancing  minstrels, catchy tunes, black men becoming mincing Alabama ladies or bow-legged sheriffs; a bluesy vaudeville band , chairs used as prison bars or execution gurneys.   Maybe some atrocities do simply tip over into a zone of absurdity where the obvious proddings of satire are not enough , so only musical-comedy will serve.  Provided, of course, that you have a Sondheim to chronicle Presidential assassinations,  or John Kander and Fred Ebb to mock Nazism in Cabaret  or murderers in Chicago.

That odd thought is inescapable when you consider this Kander/Ebb treatment of 1930’s Alabama racism and nine innocent victims.  Nine black boys, riding the rails to find work, got into a scuffle with white youths at Scottsboro; two white girls (to dodge a prostitution charge)  accused them of rape.   With an all-white jury they had no chance; the sentence was death, even for two thirteen-year-olds.  It was averted when the Supreme Court, after left-wing campaigns in the North, demanded a retrial with a proper defense lawyer.  One of the girls admitted they had lied.  For six years though, each fresh appeal met the same verdict from  resentful Alabama whites:  “Every time they say guilty,  the Commies and the Jews get you boys another trial”.   Four were released after six years,  and conscripted into a vaudeville act in Harlem;   other awkward compromises were made  in the political tug-of-war between North and South, but nine lads’ lives were ruined.  It was only this spring, in the age of Obama, that the Alabama Governor signed an Act  formally exonerating them.

Grim, true, shameful.  How to respond, except with joyfully defiant black energy?  This British premiere, under its American director Susan Stroman,  mixes local talent with Broadway performers like Colman Domingo, Forrest McClendon and the magnificently comedic young James T Lane. It delivers that energy with a breathtaking punch and swing:  shock and pathos, irony and sincerity swirl and mingle restlessly.  The only white performer is Julian Glover,  patriarchal  judge and Governor;  other whites – jailers, women ,  the New York defence lawyer Leibowitz –  are created by the black ensemble in ironic reverse minstrelsy.   The terror of the electric chair (the youngest wrote of living in earshot on Death Row) makes a violent strobing tap number.   Domingo as the prosecutor has a hymn of hate against the “Jew money” funding the defence.   Individuals emerge, notably the defiant Haywood Patterson (Kyle Scatliffe) who refused parole because he wouldn’t plead guilty.

Equally moving is the quiet presence of Dawn Hope as “The Lady”,  drifting and shadowing in the corner of scenes.  A subtle moment at the end shows us who she is and what she did after reading of the Scottsboro case. She’s Rosa Parks: who in 1955  – and in the closing moments of this show –  historically refused to give up her seat in the “white section” of a bus. It was a turning-point for the conscience of America.

box office  www.youngvic.org / 020 7922 2922    to 21 December
Supported by :  Bruno Wang     /    American Airlines

Rating:  five5 Meece Rating

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October 17, 2013 · 11:20 pm

Richard II – Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford

A ROCK STAR RICHARD

David Tennant’s Richard is a rock star: a preening vanity, long tresses flowing down his silk-robed back, with the epicene arrogance of a Russell Brand and a scornful eloquence to match. Defeated, he lurches into self-pitying abasement only to erupt again into royal entitlement. Deposed, he roams the stage in bare feet and white nightie comparing his betrayal to Christ’s. Tennant is almost unbearably watchable, his handling of the verse breathtaking in its ease. His cousin and nemesis Bolingbroke is NIgel Lindsay: stocky and stubbled, chain-mailed gut hanging over his belt, righteous in banished fury and implacable in rebellion. He sighs with visible impatience at the deposed King’s drama-queen antics with the crown. This beginning of Shakespeare’s History cycle falls more easily than most into the headshaking dualism of 1066 And All That: Richard is Wrong but Wromantic, Bolingbroke Right but Repulsive.
Which is not to say that there is anything unsubtle about Gregory Doran’s production – marked by his trademark courteous clarity of line – or much wrong with Tennant’s interpretation of the doomed Richard. At times near the end I felt that his elfin edge of humour sold short the journey of self-discovery which Shakespeare gives the King: even near death his vanity conquers all, and Doran also chooses to make his relationship with young Aumerle rather more emotionally credible than his marriage. But that is a matter of interpretation, and fair enough. And for all Tennant’s shining star quality the real sinews of the production, its glory and its fifth star, reside elsewhere.
For it is a marvellous evening and, with its simple use of shadowy, mirrory projections of grey arches, thorny wilderness and heraldic tapestries, ideal for Doran’s intention to film, stream and distribute it to schools. From the opening scene around the coffin of the King’s murdered uncle where the widow (Jane Lapotaire) delivers her fusillade of desperate grief, through the aborted duel with Richard aloft on his dais undermining the chivalrous code of his barons, each character and nuance emerges with unemphatic firmness. Michael Pennington’s masterly John of Gaunt, the last wise romantic of the dynasty, laments the “landlording” of England; his brother York struggles with the statesmanlike problems of a necessary but shockingly illegal regime change, turning from the impossible Richard to the all-too-possible Bolingbroke with beautifully nuanced exasperation.
Indeed it must be noted that, for all the marvels of Tennant, Lapotaire, and the rest, the old-pro solid gold performance of the night belongs to Oliver Ford Davies as York. As the principled old patriot in an impossible position, or the enraged father in the blackly comic scenes with his lovelorn traitor son and his furious wife (Marty Cruikshank, a ferociously fine cameo), he takes the palm. It is Ford Davies who most draws sighs, small laughs and sympathies from the audience; he who provides the ballast halfway between the wonderfully dislikeable Bolingbroke and the fools’-gold spendthrift mirage of a King who confuses his crown with a halo.
Yet like Shakespeare, who intemperately gave nearly all the poetry to the irresponsible monarch, Doran leaves us with ambiguity. An unexpected great creak of stage machinery, a prison pathos, a sudden compassion for deluded Rutland, and the weather changes, subtly. When Bolingbroke embarks on his gruff pilgrimage of repentance, the choir and trumpeters high overhead soar and yearn at the end of Paul Englishby’s score and we get a final white-gowned dazzle from the ghost Richard overhead.

0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk to 16 nov (then to Barbican in Dec) 0844 800 1110 http://www.rsc.org.uk   to 16 nov   (then to Barbican in Dec)
Rating: five           5 Meece Rating

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