THE HEART OF ROBIN HOOD
December 9, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, January 7, 2012
ROBIN Hood is a murderous thug with no saving graces and precious little charm. It takes a strong woman with moral courage to help him find his heart and become a truly legendary hero.
That’s the premise for David Farr’s witty, bracing version of the tale, which upends all previous takes by making Marion the real star. In the process, his script creates a new legend, a fresh fairytale with a powerful punch.
Coupled with Icelandic director Gisli Orn Gardarsson’s vivacious vision and Borkur Jonsson’s spectacular and versatile set, the offbeat retelling works superbly. The Icelandic team extends further to the atmospheric lighting and music, as well as some fine acting performances, bringing a refreshing outsider’s view to the well-worn English myth.
Olafur Darri Olafsson, for instance, plays Pierre – Marion’s overweight, foppish servant – with a lightness of touch and sure comedy timing, winning the biggest laughs from the enthusiastic audience.
Marion herself (Iris Roberts) is both delightful in her aristocratic guise and wonderfully feisty when she cross-dresses as Martin of Sherwood, whose determination to right the wrongs that Robin is perpetrating leads inevitably to confrontation and love.
Cameos of particular note include Tim Treloar – doubling beautifully as the wicked Guy of Gisborne and the Pythonesque Duke of York, returning from the crusades – and Martin Hutson, whose Prince John strikes exactly the right balance of dastardly evil and feeble incompetence.
The invention, physicality and relentless pace of the production constantly catch your breath, and there’s never a moment to allow the concentration to lapse. To highlight the weaknesses – of which there are one or two – seems a little churlish towards this good-natured festive offering. Better instead to focus on the multifarious good points and sit back to revel in the bravado and sense of sheer fun that roll in entertaining waves from the stage.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
November 23, 2011
RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, March 10, 2012
IT’S starting to look like there’s something in the water at Stratford. Hot on the heels of the controversial Marat/Sade, in which sexual depravities were played out on stage to the horror of the Daily Mail, comes this bondage-laden version of Measure for Measure at the hands of RSC associate director Roxana Silbert.
Fortunately for those of a delicate disposition, the leather, whips and gimp masks are mostly for show, and don’t play a central role in the unfolding tale of lies, deceptions and blackmail in the court of the Duke of Vienna.
In fact, the bawdiness of Shakespeare’s script is pointed up rather successfully and appropriately in this well-paced, glossy production, aided by a colour-coded design from Marat/Sade’s Garance Marneur and some atmospheric music with strong David Lynch overtones from Dave Price.
There are some striking performances too, notably a powerful and imposing Duke (Raymond Coulthard), whose self-satisfied conjuring magic adds just the right amount of playful trickery to the role of a man who plays with his subjects so craftily.
Geoffrey Beevers provides a stout and reliable court official in Escalus, while Bruce Alexander’s Provost and – in particularly fine form – Joseph Kloska’s full-of-bravado Pompey bring weight, authority and wit to their respective roles.
And if Jamie Ballard as the Duke’s deceitful lieutenant Angelo and Jodie McNee as Isabella, the virtuous object of his lascivious desires, lack genuinely gripping presence in their duelling war of words, there’s more than enough energy and entertainment elsewhere in the piece to make up for it.
Silbert’s direction is assured and brisk, the story emerges as clear and intelligible, and a great deal of humour is mined from Shakespeare’s potentially stodgy and awkward juggling of attitudes and opinions.
It may not be the most talked-about show in the RSC season – that accolade has surely been claimed already – but it’s one that certainly merits its place.
WRITTEN ON THE HEART
November 11, 2011
RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, March 10, 2012
THE four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible gives the RSC ample opportunity – if it were needed – to explore the political and religious machinations behind its origins in a new play.
Written by RSC associate artist David Edgar and directed by its chief associate director Gregory Doran, this fascinating, wordy and passionate piece carries the full weight of the company behind it, as well as three years of preparation, workshopping and redrafting.
The result – rather like the scriptural translation of its subject matter – is something of a collaborative effort, and correspondingly displays a mixture of flaws and strengths. It’s very dense theologically, with a fair bit of dry argument about such things as the merits of using the word “church” over “congregation”. And it’s probably half an hour too long and could stand some judicial use of the “pruning hook” that forms part of its dogmatic argument.
But Edgar’s clever theatrical device of shifting back in time from the 1610 conference to the imprisonment of an earlier translator, William Tyndale, 75 years before, and then bringing Tyndale forward into the 1610 scenario, creates a wonderful tension that adds dramatic power to the play, as well as offering the chance to lay out the arguments directly.
Doran’s safe hands render the piece authoritative and impressive, with versatile sets from Francis O’Connor and some haunting choral music by Paul Englishby adding to the imagery and effect.
As the vacillating Bishop of Ely, whose task is to steer the 1610 conference, Oliver Ford Davies is majestic – a convincing combination of doubts, internal debates and self-loathing. By contrast, Stephen Boxer makes a clearly-drawn, utterly driven William Tyndale, whose dedication to the cause of giving the common man an understandable Bible leads inescapably to his own death.
Together with a large and consistently excellent supporting cast, they render Edgar’s thoughtful text as an imposing exploration of the genesis of the KJB, exposing it as a product of its time and open to subjective interpretation. Evidently written from the heart, it’s an argument that demands to be heard.
MARAT/SADE
October 20, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, November 5, 2011
LET me be quite clear about this right up front: watching a man being buggered with a large rubber dildo is not my idea of an evening’s entertainment.
Now generally I am pretty broadminded about this kind of thing. I’m as open to powerful dramatic imagery as the next man (unless the next man happens to be a Daily Mail reader).
But when the dramatic imagery in question is simply nasty, seedy and – worst of all – entirely gratuitous, I do think directors have a responsibility to account for their artistic decisions.
Instead, with Anthony Neilson’s new production of Peter Weiss’s hellish 1964 play, there seems to be nothing short of a deliberate attempt to assault the senses of the audience in as visceral a way as possible, and sod the storytelling.
There’s probably an enlightened debate going on somewhere in Adrian Mitchell’s verse form adaptation of Geoffrey Skelton’s translation of the script. The fact that the last sentence was so convoluted is merely a reflection of the mess of unpleasantness played out on stage.
But if there is something meaningful to be found in the fictional notion that the Marquis de Sade staged a retelling of the murder of the French revolutionary leader Marat while he was incarcerated in Charenton mental asylum, then it’s utterly lost in this production.
For a start, you can’t hear anyone. There’s so much business going on that any focus is diverted, while the frankly pointless songs by Khyam Allami are unintelligible and obstructive to the flow. And the lyrical quality of Mitchell’s verse is wasted when the cast are required to gabble or mumble or just shout their way through it.
The only person to emerge with any credit is Jasper Britton, whose Marquis de Sade is authoritative and emotionally developed. Quite why he gets to dress as a Texan oil baron at one point is something of a mystery. But maybe that’s another of those clumsily laden metaphors – like the bizarre, unsustainable attempt to draw parallels between the French revolution and the Arab spring – which Mr Neilson needs to explain a little more clearly.
It’s a visual nightmare straight out of Hieronymus Bosch and will be the ultimate in Marmite productions: you’ll either love it or hate it. You probably don’t need much help to work out which camp I fall into.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
August 4, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, November 5, 2011
THERE’S more than a hint of Reservoir Dogs about the court of Athens that frames this curious production of the most magical of Shakespeare comedies.
This Athens is all drainpipe trousers, sinister gangsters and alcoholic prostitutes, turning the dream itself into a drug-fuelled trip in the mind of a wasted Hippolyta.
It’s an interesting take by director Nancy Meckler which suffers one major drawback: it leaves the whole ethereal realm lacking any heart. Instead, it’s a painted, one-dimensional world with well-worn theatrical tricks to generate its supposed magical qualities.
This absence of depth or colour is a reflection of the concept itself, which feels grafted on and forced to fit the text, and there’s further reinforcement of the soullessness of the production in the sparse, bare-brick design (Katrina Lindsay) and cold lighting (Wolfgang Gobbel). This Dream has precious little warmth to it.
The spoken verse, too, is largely rigid and charmless, rendering Shakespeare’s words little more than a mechanical device to convey plot – which is a major concern for the country’s foremost exponents of the Bard.
There are positives to be found, among them Jo Stone-Fewings’s fine and playful Oberon and Alex Hassell’s impressive Demetrius. Marc Wootton gives a crowd-pleasing Bottom, but his whole sub-plot merely serves to point up the apparent belief of the director that the original Shakespeare in itself isn’t funny enough: instead, she imposes a lot of slapstick and physical theatre for added effect.
Unfortunately, the effect is to detract from the play, and in comparison with Gregory Doran’s sumptuous production from 2008, it’s left looking pale and insipid, not at all the fantastical feast for the senses it ought to be.
THE HOMECOMING
August 3, 2011
RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, October 15, 2011
HAROLD Pinter was closely connected to the nascent Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s through its artistic director Peter Hall, who first gave The Homecoming a staging in 1965.
Now the company returns to this bleak, seedy work for a fascinating production in The Swan, directed by David Farr. And although the venue’s thrust stage might seem at odds with the square-on, conventional front room setting of the piece, in fact it serves it well, offering a kind of 3D opportunity to put the audience at the heart of the domestic war that seethes and rages.
Whether the audience wants to be any more intimately involved than absolutely necessary is another question altogether. The collapse of this dysfunctional family is brutal, bewildering and ultimately without hope, and if Pinter’s aim (always highly negotiable) was to trigger reflections on our own lives, then for me he badly misses the mark by making patriarch Max and his grotesque brood just too inaccessible.
The performances are uniformly strong. Nicholas Woodeson plays Max by apparently channelling Bob Hoskins at his most vicious, while Jonathan Slinger echoes the menace in middle son Lenny – all filthy looks and sly machinations. Justin Salinger as Teddy, the homecoming son of the title, creates a fish so completely out of these familial waters that he might almost have wandered in from another play, which makes the incongruousness all the more powerful.
There are stark and impressive images and set pieces, though the shouting does become rather tedious after a while, and the sheer oppressiveness of the whole evening will try the patience of the keenest Pinter student. As for non-students, be prepared for the onslaught.
The play is as unpleasant, opaque and downright nasty as it was when it was written nearly 50 years ago, leaving you wanting nothing so much as a shower after a couple of hours in the company of this grubby, squalid family.
DUNSINANE
June 16, 2011
The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, July 2, 2011
WRITER David Greig has done a remarkable thing. Harnessing all the fury, fear and fierceness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he has written an extraordinary play about what happened next. Macbeth: The Sequel.
First staged in Hampstead last year and created by the National Theatre of Scotland in partnership with the RSC, Dunsinane takes as its starting point the capture of Macbeth’s castle and the killing of the tyrant king. But where Shakespeare has Lady M dying in madness, Greig pulls off the master stroke of keeping her alive to generate much of the internecine eleventh-century battling that follows.
The modern resonance of a country at tribal war with itself as the English invader tries in vain to impose some kind of peace is all too apparent but brilliantly nuanced in Greig’s powerful, funny script, and Roxana Silbert’s simple but striking production does it superb justice.
There’s a raw majesty to the Scottish warlords who resent the English commander Siward almost as much as the tyrant’s widow, Gruach. And the contrast with the miserable English soldiers fighting an unwanted war in meteorologically, as well as militarily, hostile territory offers huge scope for political and personal stories to unfold with great depth and emotion.
Jonny Phillips and Siobhan Redmond provide authority and stature as Siward and Gruach, with a wonderfully sly Brian Ferguson as new monarch Malcolm, but it’s as much a play about the impotence of the little people as the power-broking of the chiefs, and there are some fabulous performances across the company.
Tom Gill is superb as the Boy Soldier ostensibly narrating the tale through letters home to his mother in Kent, not only describing the harshness of the landscape, but also revealing a touching ambivalence about his and his colleagues’ role in the machinations.
Alex Mann is macho but all too human as the officer caught between serving his commander and furthering his own ends, while Joshua Jenkins is a highly affecting young squaddie whose naivete and charm prove his ultimate downfall.
With some terrific underscoring from composer Nick Powell and excellent design and lighting by Robert Innes Hopkins and Chahine Yavroyan respectively, Dunsinane is an epic testament to the skills of all concerned and a thrilling, if brief, addition to the RSC’s repertoire in its 50th anniversary season.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
May 19, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Monday, September 26, 2011
…or The Merchant of Vegas, as it is reinvented in this spectacular new version for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
We know we’re in Vegas. Elvis tells us so. The audience arrives into a casino straight off the Strip, with hustlers and gamblers cavorting to a jazzy soundtrack from a tasty live band. Then, entering up through the floor into the centre of this teeming mass, the white-suited one launches into Viva Las Vegas and we’re off.
Later, Elvis is revealed to be Launcelot Gobbo, the servant of one Shylock, whose high-interest loan to the merchant Antonio forms the centrepiece of the plot around which Shakespeare hinges his powerful and dark comedy.
And if it all sounds a little off the wall and eye-openingly radical, the name of director Rupert Goold in the credits should go some way to explaining matters. The thing about Goold is that he doesn’t simply paste on a directorial concept and mangle everything to fit. Somehow, with him, it’s as if the concept is woven seamlessly into the original text, and every tiny idea or flash of inventiveness serves the story precisely.
Thus his Vegas setting works perfectly as the backdrop to a world of avarice and seediness; Portia’s three-casket challenge to potential suitors is transformed with a stroke of genius into a tacky television game show; and the climactic courtroom scene becomes a gangster classic among the meathooks and abattoir accoutrements of underworld America.
Even the accents – which initially alarm, with their heavy Brooklyn or Midwest twangs – quickly become a quite natural part of this exotic tapestry, which does the one thing all modern Shakespearean directors crave: offer a new insight into a four-centuries-old play.
And it does so thrillingly, with Goold’s customary verve and eye for detail evident everywhere you look and listen. He’s magnificently served by his energetic cast, too, with not a foot (or accent) astray in the entire company.
Patrick Stewart is a gritty, mesmerising Shylock, but would, I’m sure, be the first to admit he’s just one cog in the machine. Scott Handy offers an immensely touching, vulnerable Antonio, while Richard Riddell is hugely affecting as his bond-bound friend Bassanio.
But the real coup has to be Susannah Fielding’s Portia, whose ditzy college-girl façade is stripped away – along with the blonde wig and five-inch heels – to reveal the true architect of the play’s machinations. Fielding is equally at home as the Glee-generation, gum-chewing cheerleader and the cross-dressing lawyer with the brilliant mind, revealing perhaps the original inspiration for Legally Blonde.
The show is littered with superb performances – Jamie Beamish’s Elvis Gobbo, Howard Charles’s feisty gangster Gratiano, Emily Plumtree’s Nerissa double-act with Portia, Jason Morell’s hilarious Mexican version of the Prince of Arragon – and so replete with striking images and moments of breathtaking surprise that it’s hard to condense into a cogent review.
It might be enough to say that it’s no more than we’ve come to expect from Rupert Goold, but that would be a disservice to such a wonderful and original production.
THE CITY MADAM
May 11, 2011
RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Tuesday, October 4, 2011
IT turns out there’s a reason why Shakespeare is revered as the all-time master playwright and everyone else from around that time is a minor curiosity.
Philip Massinger’s comedy The City Madam, from 1632, has a great many characters, scenes and set-ups that are remarkably reminiscent of the Bard. Unfortunately, they’re executed with much less skill and panache than Mr S brought to his plays.
That’s not to say that Dominic Hill’s production of this story of come-uppance in a vice-ridden London isn’t colourful, chaotic and well-played – it is all of these things.
Tom Piper’s design evokes a kind of decaying opulence with the minimum of furnishings, while music and lighting (Dan Jones and Tim Mitchell) also serve the director well in his presentation of what amounts to a Jacobean morality tale.
The cast, too, are clearly enjoying their romp, with an ebullient Jo Stone-Fewings at the heart of things as the dissimulating Luke Frugal, plotting to inherit his wealthy brother’s estate at the expense of his brother’s wife and daughters.
The whole farcical nonsense unravels over almost three hours, stretching not only the audience’s credulity but also their patience as increasingly implausible deceptions, disguises and doppelgangers work tenuously towards their manipulative and slightly mawkish conclusion.
Billed as ‘raucous’ by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the play prompts knowing smiles rather than big belly-laughs, although the hand of the director is always assured and the overall production is confident and accomplished.
But there’s no escaping the underlying niggle: Shakespeare it ain’t.
CARDENIO
April 27, 2011
RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Thursday, October 6, 2011
THERE are moments in a reviewer’s life when the bizarre merges with the extraordinary to create an experience that stays powerfully in the mind. The opening of a new play by Shakespeare has to rank up there with the strangest.
To be accurate, Gregory Doran’s magnificent production of Cardenio is not, strictly speaking, a new play by Shakespeare. What Doran and the company have done is take the meat of a text that was first ‘found’ as a handwritten prompt script in the early 18th century and ‘re-imagine’ it using missing pieces, translations and borrowings from co-author John Fletcher, source material by Cervantes and lines from other contemporary work.
The result is a stunning success. While it might not include Shakespeare’s finest writing ever, it’s a rollicking good story with plenty of fun, intrigue and unbelievable subplots: pretty standard Bard fare, in fact, and unquestionably worth restoring to the complete works in its current form.
Doran as director creates a magical world in the newly reopened Swan Theatre, throbbing with the almost tangible heat of the Andalucian sun, and the unfolding of the narrative – at times hilarious, at times highly dramatic – is meticulously managed with the careful brushstrokes of an old master. Indeed, Niki Turner’s sumptuous design has many of the qualities of a Velazquez or a Rembrandt about it.
The ensemble is well crafted, too, with real strength throughout, and a trio of fathers (Nicholas Day, Christopher Ettridge and Christopher Godwin) provide gravitas and presence against which the younger cast bound energetically.
Excellent performances from the two wronged ladies, Lucy Briggs-Owen and Pippa Nixon, are in danger of being overshadowed by the central pairing of Alex Hassell as the almost boo-ably villainous Fernando and Oliver Rix in the title role itself.
Barely out of drama school after an Oxford degree, Rix is a major discovery and undoubtedly an acting force of the future. His Cardenio emerges fully formed, as a character of depth, emotion and vivacity, and his performance is perfectly judged. He shows wit, intelligence and real humanity as Cardenio is first betrayed in love by his friend Fernando, then left in desolation among the Spanish mountains before being restored in a neat conclusion that puts one in mind of another Shakespeare title: all’s well that ends well.
As the opener in the new Swan auditorium – which, incidentally, offers an ideal space for this thrilling romp – Cardenio lays down a marker for the future that promises exciting things from this company and this theatre.
MACBETH
April 26, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, until Thursday, October 6, 2011
SO the Royal Shakespeare Company is back in its newly refurbished home just in time for its fiftieth birthday season, launched with a new Macbeth.
Has it been worth the four-year wait? The building offers an emphatic yes; the production is less convincing.
Modelled on the temporary Courtyard Theatre that has housed the company while the transformation has been going on, the new RST is a triumph. Its slightly shorter thrust stage and squatter, squarer shape make it a highly inclusive space and one that works brilliantly for the kind of abrasive, up-close productions favoured by artistic director Michael Boyd.
And in Tom Piper’s design for this Macbeth, the ruins of a desecrated church are wonderfully evoked, giving a backdrop of deep religious significance to the political machinations that are played out by the characters.
Mystifyingly, though, Boyd has chosen to remove – almost surgically – any of the superstitious or metaphysical elements that underpin Shakespeare’s text, turning it instead into a straightforward, if bloody, battle for supremacy and descent into madness by the warrior king himself. Thus there are no ‘weird sisters’ (they become, instead, the murdered children of Macduff come to visit retribution), and the entire opening scene – ‘When shall we three meet again?’ – is startlingly absent.
Playing so fast and loose with the text is a dangerous game, reliant on the skills of the actors and the soundness of the overall concept to pull it off successfully. Unfortunately, neither is quite up to the task.
There are some fine performances, notably a quietly dignified Duncan (Des McAleer) and a powerful yet affecting Macduff (Aidan Kelly), with Scott Handy’s Ross heavily beefed up and expanded to superb effect as a kind of Greek chorus.
But Jonathan Slinger, whose Richard II and III were so extraordinary in the Histories cycle, seems to be all technique and no depth as Macbeth, while Aislin McGuckin never rises above the mildly excited as her Lady Macbeth spurs him to regicide.
Things improve a little in the second half, and there’s a lovely trio of cellos that underscore much of the drama, but the final impression is more underwhelming than shocking, despite the quantities of blood and gore liberally sprinkled across the new Stratford boards.
December 9, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, January 7, 2012
ROBIN Hood is a murderous thug with no saving graces and precious little charm. It takes a strong woman with moral courage to help him find his heart and become a truly legendary hero.
That’s the premise for David Farr’s witty, bracing version of the tale, which upends all previous takes by making Marion the real star. In the process, his script creates a new legend, a fresh fairytale with a powerful punch.
Coupled with Icelandic director Gisli Orn Gardarsson’s vivacious vision and Borkur Jonsson’s spectacular and versatile set, the offbeat retelling works superbly. The Icelandic team extends further to the atmospheric lighting and music, as well as some fine acting performances, bringing a refreshing outsider’s view to the well-worn English myth.
Olafur Darri Olafsson, for instance, plays Pierre – Marion’s overweight, foppish servant – with a lightness of touch and sure comedy timing, winning the biggest laughs from the enthusiastic audience.
Marion herself (Iris Roberts) is both delightful in her aristocratic guise and wonderfully feisty when she cross-dresses as Martin of Sherwood, whose determination to right the wrongs that Robin is perpetrating leads inevitably to confrontation and love.
Cameos of particular note include Tim Treloar – doubling beautifully as the wicked Guy of Gisborne and the Pythonesque Duke of York, returning from the crusades – and Martin Hutson, whose Prince John strikes exactly the right balance of dastardly evil and feeble incompetence.
The invention, physicality and relentless pace of the production constantly catch your breath, and there’s never a moment to allow the concentration to lapse. To highlight the weaknesses – of which there are one or two – seems a little churlish towards this good-natured festive offering. Better instead to focus on the multifarious good points and sit back to revel in the bravado and sense of sheer fun that roll in entertaining waves from the stage.
MEASURE FOR MEASURE
November 23, 2011
RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, March 10, 2012
IT’S starting to look like there’s something in the water at Stratford. Hot on the heels of the controversial Marat/Sade, in which sexual depravities were played out on stage to the horror of the Daily Mail, comes this bondage-laden version of Measure for Measure at the hands of RSC associate director Roxana Silbert.
Fortunately for those of a delicate disposition, the leather, whips and gimp masks are mostly for show, and don’t play a central role in the unfolding tale of lies, deceptions and blackmail in the court of the Duke of Vienna.
In fact, the bawdiness of Shakespeare’s script is pointed up rather successfully and appropriately in this well-paced, glossy production, aided by a colour-coded design from Marat/Sade’s Garance Marneur and some atmospheric music with strong David Lynch overtones from Dave Price.
There are some striking performances too, notably a powerful and imposing Duke (Raymond Coulthard), whose self-satisfied conjuring magic adds just the right amount of playful trickery to the role of a man who plays with his subjects so craftily.
Geoffrey Beevers provides a stout and reliable court official in Escalus, while Bruce Alexander’s Provost and – in particularly fine form – Joseph Kloska’s full-of-bravado Pompey bring weight, authority and wit to their respective roles.
And if Jamie Ballard as the Duke’s deceitful lieutenant Angelo and Jodie McNee as Isabella, the virtuous object of his lascivious desires, lack genuinely gripping presence in their duelling war of words, there’s more than enough energy and entertainment elsewhere in the piece to make up for it.
Silbert’s direction is assured and brisk, the story emerges as clear and intelligible, and a great deal of humour is mined from Shakespeare’s potentially stodgy and awkward juggling of attitudes and opinions.
It may not be the most talked-about show in the RSC season – that accolade has surely been claimed already – but it’s one that certainly merits its place.
WRITTEN ON THE HEART
November 11, 2011
RSC, Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, March 10, 2012
THE four-hundredth anniversary of the publication of the King James Bible gives the RSC ample opportunity – if it were needed – to explore the political and religious machinations behind its origins in a new play.
Written by RSC associate artist David Edgar and directed by its chief associate director Gregory Doran, this fascinating, wordy and passionate piece carries the full weight of the company behind it, as well as three years of preparation, workshopping and redrafting.
The result – rather like the scriptural translation of its subject matter – is something of a collaborative effort, and correspondingly displays a mixture of flaws and strengths. It’s very dense theologically, with a fair bit of dry argument about such things as the merits of using the word “church” over “congregation”. And it’s probably half an hour too long and could stand some judicial use of the “pruning hook” that forms part of its dogmatic argument.
But Edgar’s clever theatrical device of shifting back in time from the 1610 conference to the imprisonment of an earlier translator, William Tyndale, 75 years before, and then bringing Tyndale forward into the 1610 scenario, creates a wonderful tension that adds dramatic power to the play, as well as offering the chance to lay out the arguments directly.
Doran’s safe hands render the piece authoritative and impressive, with versatile sets from Francis O’Connor and some haunting choral music by Paul Englishby adding to the imagery and effect.
As the vacillating Bishop of Ely, whose task is to steer the 1610 conference, Oliver Ford Davies is majestic – a convincing combination of doubts, internal debates and self-loathing. By contrast, Stephen Boxer makes a clearly-drawn, utterly driven William Tyndale, whose dedication to the cause of giving the common man an understandable Bible leads inescapably to his own death.
Together with a large and consistently excellent supporting cast, they render Edgar’s thoughtful text as an imposing exploration of the genesis of the KJB, exposing it as a product of its time and open to subjective interpretation. Evidently written from the heart, it’s an argument that demands to be heard.
MARAT/SADE
October 20, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, November 5, 2011
LET me be quite clear about this right up front: watching a man being buggered with a large rubber dildo is not my idea of an evening’s entertainment.
Now generally I am pretty broadminded about this kind of thing. I’m as open to powerful dramatic imagery as the next man (unless the next man happens to be a Daily Mail reader).
But when the dramatic imagery in question is simply nasty, seedy and – worst of all – entirely gratuitous, I do think directors have a responsibility to account for their artistic decisions.
Instead, with Anthony Neilson’s new production of Peter Weiss’s hellish 1964 play, there seems to be nothing short of a deliberate attempt to assault the senses of the audience in as visceral a way as possible, and sod the storytelling.
There’s probably an enlightened debate going on somewhere in Adrian Mitchell’s verse form adaptation of Geoffrey Skelton’s translation of the script. The fact that the last sentence was so convoluted is merely a reflection of the mess of unpleasantness played out on stage.
But if there is something meaningful to be found in the fictional notion that the Marquis de Sade staged a retelling of the murder of the French revolutionary leader Marat while he was incarcerated in Charenton mental asylum, then it’s utterly lost in this production.
For a start, you can’t hear anyone. There’s so much business going on that any focus is diverted, while the frankly pointless songs by Khyam Allami are unintelligible and obstructive to the flow. And the lyrical quality of Mitchell’s verse is wasted when the cast are required to gabble or mumble or just shout their way through it.
The only person to emerge with any credit is Jasper Britton, whose Marquis de Sade is authoritative and emotionally developed. Quite why he gets to dress as a Texan oil baron at one point is something of a mystery. But maybe that’s another of those clumsily laden metaphors – like the bizarre, unsustainable attempt to draw parallels between the French revolution and the Arab spring – which Mr Neilson needs to explain a little more clearly.
It’s a visual nightmare straight out of Hieronymus Bosch and will be the ultimate in Marmite productions: you’ll either love it or hate it. You probably don’t need much help to work out which camp I fall into.
A MIDSUMMER NIGHT'S DREAM
August 4, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, November 5, 2011
THERE’S more than a hint of Reservoir Dogs about the court of Athens that frames this curious production of the most magical of Shakespeare comedies.
This Athens is all drainpipe trousers, sinister gangsters and alcoholic prostitutes, turning the dream itself into a drug-fuelled trip in the mind of a wasted Hippolyta.
It’s an interesting take by director Nancy Meckler which suffers one major drawback: it leaves the whole ethereal realm lacking any heart. Instead, it’s a painted, one-dimensional world with well-worn theatrical tricks to generate its supposed magical qualities.
This absence of depth or colour is a reflection of the concept itself, which feels grafted on and forced to fit the text, and there’s further reinforcement of the soullessness of the production in the sparse, bare-brick design (Katrina Lindsay) and cold lighting (Wolfgang Gobbel). This Dream has precious little warmth to it.
The spoken verse, too, is largely rigid and charmless, rendering Shakespeare’s words little more than a mechanical device to convey plot – which is a major concern for the country’s foremost exponents of the Bard.
There are positives to be found, among them Jo Stone-Fewings’s fine and playful Oberon and Alex Hassell’s impressive Demetrius. Marc Wootton gives a crowd-pleasing Bottom, but his whole sub-plot merely serves to point up the apparent belief of the director that the original Shakespeare in itself isn’t funny enough: instead, she imposes a lot of slapstick and physical theatre for added effect.
Unfortunately, the effect is to detract from the play, and in comparison with Gregory Doran’s sumptuous production from 2008, it’s left looking pale and insipid, not at all the fantastical feast for the senses it ought to be.
THE HOMECOMING
August 3, 2011
RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, October 15, 2011
HAROLD Pinter was closely connected to the nascent Royal Shakespeare Company in the 1960s through its artistic director Peter Hall, who first gave The Homecoming a staging in 1965.
Now the company returns to this bleak, seedy work for a fascinating production in The Swan, directed by David Farr. And although the venue’s thrust stage might seem at odds with the square-on, conventional front room setting of the piece, in fact it serves it well, offering a kind of 3D opportunity to put the audience at the heart of the domestic war that seethes and rages.
Whether the audience wants to be any more intimately involved than absolutely necessary is another question altogether. The collapse of this dysfunctional family is brutal, bewildering and ultimately without hope, and if Pinter’s aim (always highly negotiable) was to trigger reflections on our own lives, then for me he badly misses the mark by making patriarch Max and his grotesque brood just too inaccessible.
The performances are uniformly strong. Nicholas Woodeson plays Max by apparently channelling Bob Hoskins at his most vicious, while Jonathan Slinger echoes the menace in middle son Lenny – all filthy looks and sly machinations. Justin Salinger as Teddy, the homecoming son of the title, creates a fish so completely out of these familial waters that he might almost have wandered in from another play, which makes the incongruousness all the more powerful.
There are stark and impressive images and set pieces, though the shouting does become rather tedious after a while, and the sheer oppressiveness of the whole evening will try the patience of the keenest Pinter student. As for non-students, be prepared for the onslaught.
The play is as unpleasant, opaque and downright nasty as it was when it was written nearly 50 years ago, leaving you wanting nothing so much as a shower after a couple of hours in the company of this grubby, squalid family.
DUNSINANE
June 16, 2011
The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Saturday, July 2, 2011
WRITER David Greig has done a remarkable thing. Harnessing all the fury, fear and fierceness of Shakespeare’s Macbeth, he has written an extraordinary play about what happened next. Macbeth: The Sequel.
First staged in Hampstead last year and created by the National Theatre of Scotland in partnership with the RSC, Dunsinane takes as its starting point the capture of Macbeth’s castle and the killing of the tyrant king. But where Shakespeare has Lady M dying in madness, Greig pulls off the master stroke of keeping her alive to generate much of the internecine eleventh-century battling that follows.
The modern resonance of a country at tribal war with itself as the English invader tries in vain to impose some kind of peace is all too apparent but brilliantly nuanced in Greig’s powerful, funny script, and Roxana Silbert’s simple but striking production does it superb justice.
There’s a raw majesty to the Scottish warlords who resent the English commander Siward almost as much as the tyrant’s widow, Gruach. And the contrast with the miserable English soldiers fighting an unwanted war in meteorologically, as well as militarily, hostile territory offers huge scope for political and personal stories to unfold with great depth and emotion.
Jonny Phillips and Siobhan Redmond provide authority and stature as Siward and Gruach, with a wonderfully sly Brian Ferguson as new monarch Malcolm, but it’s as much a play about the impotence of the little people as the power-broking of the chiefs, and there are some fabulous performances across the company.
Tom Gill is superb as the Boy Soldier ostensibly narrating the tale through letters home to his mother in Kent, not only describing the harshness of the landscape, but also revealing a touching ambivalence about his and his colleagues’ role in the machinations.
Alex Mann is macho but all too human as the officer caught between serving his commander and furthering his own ends, while Joshua Jenkins is a highly affecting young squaddie whose naivete and charm prove his ultimate downfall.
With some terrific underscoring from composer Nick Powell and excellent design and lighting by Robert Innes Hopkins and Chahine Yavroyan respectively, Dunsinane is an epic testament to the skills of all concerned and a thrilling, if brief, addition to the RSC’s repertoire in its 50th anniversary season.
THE MERCHANT OF VENICE
May 19, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Monday, September 26, 2011
…or The Merchant of Vegas, as it is reinvented in this spectacular new version for the Royal Shakespeare Company.
We know we’re in Vegas. Elvis tells us so. The audience arrives into a casino straight off the Strip, with hustlers and gamblers cavorting to a jazzy soundtrack from a tasty live band. Then, entering up through the floor into the centre of this teeming mass, the white-suited one launches into Viva Las Vegas and we’re off.
Later, Elvis is revealed to be Launcelot Gobbo, the servant of one Shylock, whose high-interest loan to the merchant Antonio forms the centrepiece of the plot around which Shakespeare hinges his powerful and dark comedy.
And if it all sounds a little off the wall and eye-openingly radical, the name of director Rupert Goold in the credits should go some way to explaining matters. The thing about Goold is that he doesn’t simply paste on a directorial concept and mangle everything to fit. Somehow, with him, it’s as if the concept is woven seamlessly into the original text, and every tiny idea or flash of inventiveness serves the story precisely.
Thus his Vegas setting works perfectly as the backdrop to a world of avarice and seediness; Portia’s three-casket challenge to potential suitors is transformed with a stroke of genius into a tacky television game show; and the climactic courtroom scene becomes a gangster classic among the meathooks and abattoir accoutrements of underworld America.
Even the accents – which initially alarm, with their heavy Brooklyn or Midwest twangs – quickly become a quite natural part of this exotic tapestry, which does the one thing all modern Shakespearean directors crave: offer a new insight into a four-centuries-old play.
And it does so thrillingly, with Goold’s customary verve and eye for detail evident everywhere you look and listen. He’s magnificently served by his energetic cast, too, with not a foot (or accent) astray in the entire company.
Patrick Stewart is a gritty, mesmerising Shylock, but would, I’m sure, be the first to admit he’s just one cog in the machine. Scott Handy offers an immensely touching, vulnerable Antonio, while Richard Riddell is hugely affecting as his bond-bound friend Bassanio.
But the real coup has to be Susannah Fielding’s Portia, whose ditzy college-girl façade is stripped away – along with the blonde wig and five-inch heels – to reveal the true architect of the play’s machinations. Fielding is equally at home as the Glee-generation, gum-chewing cheerleader and the cross-dressing lawyer with the brilliant mind, revealing perhaps the original inspiration for Legally Blonde.
The show is littered with superb performances – Jamie Beamish’s Elvis Gobbo, Howard Charles’s feisty gangster Gratiano, Emily Plumtree’s Nerissa double-act with Portia, Jason Morell’s hilarious Mexican version of the Prince of Arragon – and so replete with striking images and moments of breathtaking surprise that it’s hard to condense into a cogent review.
It might be enough to say that it’s no more than we’ve come to expect from Rupert Goold, but that would be a disservice to such a wonderful and original production.
THE CITY MADAM
May 11, 2011
RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Tuesday, October 4, 2011
IT turns out there’s a reason why Shakespeare is revered as the all-time master playwright and everyone else from around that time is a minor curiosity.
Philip Massinger’s comedy The City Madam, from 1632, has a great many characters, scenes and set-ups that are remarkably reminiscent of the Bard. Unfortunately, they’re executed with much less skill and panache than Mr S brought to his plays.
That’s not to say that Dominic Hill’s production of this story of come-uppance in a vice-ridden London isn’t colourful, chaotic and well-played – it is all of these things.
Tom Piper’s design evokes a kind of decaying opulence with the minimum of furnishings, while music and lighting (Dan Jones and Tim Mitchell) also serve the director well in his presentation of what amounts to a Jacobean morality tale.
The cast, too, are clearly enjoying their romp, with an ebullient Jo Stone-Fewings at the heart of things as the dissimulating Luke Frugal, plotting to inherit his wealthy brother’s estate at the expense of his brother’s wife and daughters.
The whole farcical nonsense unravels over almost three hours, stretching not only the audience’s credulity but also their patience as increasingly implausible deceptions, disguises and doppelgangers work tenuously towards their manipulative and slightly mawkish conclusion.
Billed as ‘raucous’ by the Royal Shakespeare Company, the play prompts knowing smiles rather than big belly-laughs, although the hand of the director is always assured and the overall production is confident and accomplished.
But there’s no escaping the underlying niggle: Shakespeare it ain’t.
CARDENIO
April 27, 2011
RSC, The Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, until Thursday, October 6, 2011
THERE are moments in a reviewer’s life when the bizarre merges with the extraordinary to create an experience that stays powerfully in the mind. The opening of a new play by Shakespeare has to rank up there with the strangest.
To be accurate, Gregory Doran’s magnificent production of Cardenio is not, strictly speaking, a new play by Shakespeare. What Doran and the company have done is take the meat of a text that was first ‘found’ as a handwritten prompt script in the early 18th century and ‘re-imagine’ it using missing pieces, translations and borrowings from co-author John Fletcher, source material by Cervantes and lines from other contemporary work.
The result is a stunning success. While it might not include Shakespeare’s finest writing ever, it’s a rollicking good story with plenty of fun, intrigue and unbelievable subplots: pretty standard Bard fare, in fact, and unquestionably worth restoring to the complete works in its current form.
Doran as director creates a magical world in the newly reopened Swan Theatre, throbbing with the almost tangible heat of the Andalucian sun, and the unfolding of the narrative – at times hilarious, at times highly dramatic – is meticulously managed with the careful brushstrokes of an old master. Indeed, Niki Turner’s sumptuous design has many of the qualities of a Velazquez or a Rembrandt about it.
The ensemble is well crafted, too, with real strength throughout, and a trio of fathers (Nicholas Day, Christopher Ettridge and Christopher Godwin) provide gravitas and presence against which the younger cast bound energetically.
Excellent performances from the two wronged ladies, Lucy Briggs-Owen and Pippa Nixon, are in danger of being overshadowed by the central pairing of Alex Hassell as the almost boo-ably villainous Fernando and Oliver Rix in the title role itself.
Barely out of drama school after an Oxford degree, Rix is a major discovery and undoubtedly an acting force of the future. His Cardenio emerges fully formed, as a character of depth, emotion and vivacity, and his performance is perfectly judged. He shows wit, intelligence and real humanity as Cardenio is first betrayed in love by his friend Fernando, then left in desolation among the Spanish mountains before being restored in a neat conclusion that puts one in mind of another Shakespeare title: all’s well that ends well.
As the opener in the new Swan auditorium – which, incidentally, offers an ideal space for this thrilling romp – Cardenio lays down a marker for the future that promises exciting things from this company and this theatre.
MACBETH
April 26, 2011
RSC, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford, until Thursday, October 6, 2011
SO the Royal Shakespeare Company is back in its newly refurbished home just in time for its fiftieth birthday season, launched with a new Macbeth.
Has it been worth the four-year wait? The building offers an emphatic yes; the production is less convincing.
Modelled on the temporary Courtyard Theatre that has housed the company while the transformation has been going on, the new RST is a triumph. Its slightly shorter thrust stage and squatter, squarer shape make it a highly inclusive space and one that works brilliantly for the kind of abrasive, up-close productions favoured by artistic director Michael Boyd.
And in Tom Piper’s design for this Macbeth, the ruins of a desecrated church are wonderfully evoked, giving a backdrop of deep religious significance to the political machinations that are played out by the characters.
Mystifyingly, though, Boyd has chosen to remove – almost surgically – any of the superstitious or metaphysical elements that underpin Shakespeare’s text, turning it instead into a straightforward, if bloody, battle for supremacy and descent into madness by the warrior king himself. Thus there are no ‘weird sisters’ (they become, instead, the murdered children of Macduff come to visit retribution), and the entire opening scene – ‘When shall we three meet again?’ – is startlingly absent.
Playing so fast and loose with the text is a dangerous game, reliant on the skills of the actors and the soundness of the overall concept to pull it off successfully. Unfortunately, neither is quite up to the task.
There are some fine performances, notably a quietly dignified Duncan (Des McAleer) and a powerful yet affecting Macduff (Aidan Kelly), with Scott Handy’s Ross heavily beefed up and expanded to superb effect as a kind of Greek chorus.
But Jonathan Slinger, whose Richard II and III were so extraordinary in the Histories cycle, seems to be all technique and no depth as Macbeth, while Aislin McGuckin never rises above the mildly excited as her Lady Macbeth spurs him to regicide.
Things improve a little in the second half, and there’s a lovely trio of cellos that underscore much of the drama, but the final impression is more underwhelming than shocking, despite the quantities of blood and gore liberally sprinkled across the new Stratford boards.
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