Going to the theatre

[philipchevron]

The Plough and the Stars by Sean O'Casey (Abbey Theatre, Dublin) Seen in previews July 24, opens July 27

I didn't actually see it myself, but in a TG4 film about the Irish Famine this week - Remember Skibbereen - one contributor to the film suggested that at the back of every Irish mind, conscious or un- is the dark question: What did my ancestors do to survive? Survivor guilt is a powerful and consequential thing and, in a history filled with solutions ranging from starvation to cannibalism to emigration, the Famine has always been, along with the Civil War some 75 years later, the Elephant in the Room for we Irish. In a country obsessed with its past, its cultural essence and its sense of grievance, there is an egregious absence of memorials or memory or even just a position of common assent to either trauma. The Famine and the Civil War do not, on a daily basis, impinge much on our lives, but perhaps it would be better if they did, as the alternative is an unprocessed sense of communal grief, expressed or supressed in who knows what unhealthy ways.

As late as the early 1960s, the filthy, disease-ridden Georgian tenements of O'Casey's Dublin plays, and of The Plough And The Stars in particular, were still very much a part of my city. A bus stop I used regularly en route from my grandmother's flat (over an inner-city bookie's shop) to my home in North Dublin was planted right in the heart of the Gardiner Street slums, more or less unchanged since O'Casey's day, and still stinking from piss and despair and poverty and young death as they had fifty years earlier. I have never yet seen a production of the play, at the Abbey or anywhere else, that adequately evokes the misery of the Dublin slums. O'Casey tempered his picture of slum Dublin with ripe characters who depended, like the real life drunk Fluther Good [who once caused my father, as a young boy sitting on Ballybough Bridge, to fall back, in terror of his approach, into the Tolka river] on a well-developed sense of black humour or mordant philosophy or naive political positions, to get them through the day. In a sense, the backdrop has disappeared, blandly at one with the theatrical heritage of the Abbey itself, and only the comic characters remain. This is unfortunate, as O'Casey's sense of social injustice screams through his plays, always trumping idealism and dreams, and he was too good a playwright to set out that injustice in dramatic exposition or direct appeals to the audience. He knew, or thought he knew, or hoped he knew, that the milieu spoke eloquently for itself.

So I always get a pang of proprietorial distress when I hear my audience neighbours laughing heartily at Fluther's or Uncle Peter's or the Covey's or Rosie Redmond's or Mrs Gogan's "comic" stuff with the unmistakeable sense that the pain the comedy is masking has somehow been missed. The Abbey's new production is a conscious attempt to pass on the torch to the next generation of young theatre practitioners and it seems clear that the Company is willing to untie the apron strings of tradition. This is as it should be, of course, but I'm not yet persuaded that young director Wayne Jordan has quite found a way to put a new guiding principle in place of the chain that connects the people with the history, the history with the play, the play with the playhouse and the playhouse with the city. Some of the props, like the pram used to ferry the spoils in the looting scene, date back to the 1926 premiere (and were salvaged from the 1951 fire) as is customary with this play, though I don't recall the Abbey ever previously felt it necessary to punt features about this fact to the Irish Times, as they did, perhaps tellingly, today. Jordan's production uses a deliberately theatrical playing style and design ethic to add a "performative" element to the work, but this produces the mixed blessing of somewhat further distancing the play from its emotional core.

To a large extent, this may just be down to a hesitancy, so early in performance, from the actors as an ensemble and I already look forward to my return visit in September when the rhythms of the play, of the language, of the turning on a dime of the comedy and tragedy, may have settled into a more convincing ensemble effect. I suppose it's just a little strange that this can no longer be taken for granted from an Abbey production of The Plough And The Stars and, despite their impressive props archive, the Abbey now sets out on an O'Casey journey with no special privileges: they are on the same level playing field as every other attempt at The Plough. For now, some of the individual performances offer ample compensation, notably Cathy Belton as a terrific Mrs Gogan, her strange, gasping speech patterns an intriguing comic echo of daughter Mollser's fatal consumptive gasps. Gabrielle Reidy, magnificent as the crown loyalist Bessie Burgess, and in particular Joe Hanley as a Fluther Good who does not automatically accept the long-implied designation of blustering coward: O'Casey gives Fluther some good stuff in the final act in which he exhibits an interesting defiance towards the British tommies. Hanley plays this text with an astute awareness that Fluther arrives on stage preceeded by generations of dissolute jokers, and sets out to remedy that.

So, another worthwhile, if underachieving Plough which, while not reaching the great heights of the Abbey's 2002 production, is at least welcome testament to the fact that, even if the Abbey continues to programme its classics in the tourist-friendly Summer months, it does so on its own terms and with a laudable commitment to an ongoing dialogue with the plays of its most famous playwright. No "heritage" O'Casey here.

But back to the business of survivor guilt which set this train of thought in motion. In 1926, the second act, infamously, made international headlines when the play was met with organised protests/riots orchestrated mainly by groups connected to upholding the memory of the 1916 Rising. The act, which takes place in a pub, supposedly descrated the Irish flag [the tricolour is paraded in the bar late in the act], Irish womanhood [a prostitute is touting for business in the bar], and even Patrick Pearse himself [ The Figure In The Window, seen only in silhouhette outside the pub as he rabble rouses, is unmistakably supposed to be Pearse]. It dawned on me for the first time tonight that the abandoning of an innocent infant (in Mrs Gogan's care) on the floor of the pub was not on the rioters list of grievances! But more to the point, by 1926, the patriotic narrative of 1916 was already being restrospectively reshaped to enshrine the executed leaders of the Rising [undoubtedly a major strategic error by the Brits] as heroes and martyrs. Sean O'Casey, a man with impeccable Citizen Army and IRB credentials himself, had long since become impatient with these pieties. What he did in The Plough And The Stars was put onstage the Dublin of 1916 as it actually was viewed by the people of Dublin at the time - an unpopular and inexplicable eruption of misjudged patriotism that did not put a single crust of bread into the mouth of a single starving child - and not the alternative history its curators had, effectively enough, by 1926, provided for it. O'Casey was not much interested in history's judgement on the Rising and, only ten years on, there was perhaps no real sense anyway that it would become the defining moment of Irish nationalism in the 20th century, proving useful for a few decades and then, after 1968, a bit awkward. If, 6 years away from the centenary of the Rising, we still hold ambivalent and unresolved positions about the insurrection, we owe Sean O'Casey a debt of gratitude that only 10 years on, he had the courage to tell the unvarnished truth in the face of opposition even from some of his own actors.

If we must add 1916 to the Great Famine and the Civil War as black holes in the Irish consciousness and self-awareness, as it looks like we must, then one man who can not be held responsible is the man who wrote The Plough And The Stars. O'Casey, with the remarkable outsider-soul so characteristic of Protestant artists in Catholic Ireland, understood it as a hugely complex event.

What did my ancestors do to survive? It's a question Young Cassidy understood well.

[joeh66]

..interesting, Joe Hanley/Fluther

[Heather]

I'm a little bit peeved tonight. Thanks to the coalition government, the North West Development Agency has been told that they need to save fifty-two million pounds. One of the projects they have decided to cut the spending for is the new Everyman Theatre in Liverpool. Regular readers of this thread will remember that I saw the plans for the new theatre a few weeks ago and was very impressed by them. The news has upset and angered me, despite the fact that the bosses at the Everyman say that they are determined to carry on with the rebuild and will try and find alternative funding. I hope that they do, because if they can't, then another historic theatre will have to close. Obviously, I'll keep you posted on developments as and when they happen.

The story is here:

http://www.liverpoolecho.co.uk/liverpoo ... -26936801/

Everyman Theatre's response to the news:

http://www.everymanplayhouse.com/News/N ... e/306.aspx

[philipchevron]

Through A Glass Darkly by Ingmar Bergman, adapted by Jenny Worton (Almeida Theatre, London) Seen July 28

When I was a child, I spoke as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things. For now we see through a glass darkly; but then face to face: now I know in part; but then shall I know even as I also am known. And now abide faith, hope and love, these three; but the greatest of these is love - Paul: Corinthians: 13; 11-13

The publicity for Michael Attenborough's production of Through A Glass Darkly makes the claim that the 1961 movie from which it is taken was the only one of his films Ingmar Bergman permitted to be adapted for the stage. What this says about Sondheim and Wheeler's A Little Night Music, the tuner adapted from Bergman's 1955 film Smiles of a Summer Night, one can only speculate, but the claim does serve as a reminder that the great film maven had an equally distinguished, if inevitably more ephemeral career, as a theatre director, principally in Sweden's Dramaten Theatre. His theatre work, it will surprise nobody to hear, was centred around the work of Ibsen and Strindberg and clearly these informed his cinematic vision too, though no explanation is given as to why he found Through a Glass uniquely suitable for the stage.

It poses numerous questions for Jenny Worton, the Almeida dramaturg, some of which she solves better than others. Worton finds it necessary to supplement Bergman's comparatively spare screenplay by doubling the dialogue. While this means the play seems fussier and more expositional, sometimes spelling out what the film prefers to leave allusive or ambiguous, I can quite understand why Worton took this route: film and theatre function in different dynamic ranges and require different input from the audience. Unsurprisingly, there are gains and losses here, and you have to wonder whether as un-Bergmanlike a line as "I just want you to know I'm there for you", spoken by Dr Martin (Justin Salinger) as the husband of paranoid-schizophrenic Karin (Ruth Wilson) is just clumsy writing or, my preferred option, whether Jenny Worton has interpolated it deliberately as an invitation to the audience to mock the well-meaning but clueless husband/doctor.

On balance however, the adaptation has to be considered a success. Making us more visceral witnesses to Karin's mental decline seems right in the theatre in a way that would just be ludicrous in a movie. Crucially, a theatre piece plays to a living, breathing, audience, and a film plays to thin air, irrespective of how many spectators are actually viewing the silver screen: it is not organic. So Worton, director Attenborough, and the actors (the remaining two are Ian McElhinney as Karin's self-absorbed novelist father David, and Dimitri Leonidas in an assured professional stage debut as her pubescent teenage brother Max ) give themselves plenty of room to explore the Laing-esque psychology in Bergman's work. RD Laing, after Freud, toiled usefully in the vineyard of madness. Beckett wrote (in Godot) that "We are all born mad. Some remain so". Laing, similarly, argued that what convention considered to be "madness" was in fact a closer connection to self. It was all the rage in the Sixties and influenced, for example, David Bowie's tortured The Man Who Sold The World album (1971) but, with the passing of time and intellectual fashion, much of Laing's theory has stood up to time's tests.

Since she justly won an Olivier Award for her Stella in last year's Streetcar Named Desire at the Donmar and had a mesmerizing co-starring role opposite Idris Elba in BBC TV's Luther, Ruth Wilson has become the latest young British actress whose announcement that she will be publicly reading the London telephone directory from cover to cover should immediately be greeted with the storming of the box office. She is the sort of actor most frequently described as "fiercely intelligent" and while she is this, she is also armed with a strong instinctual sense of character. Her performance as Karin, both heartbreaking and repellant, lingers long after the event.

[Low D]

We've just been to the (Vancouver, Canada) Theatre Under the Stars production of "Singing in the Rain". I won the tickets at work. I was interested to learn that it is a broadway show based on the movie; i always assume the movie comes after. Either way, i'd have to say stay with the film. This production would have been great... if it was a high-school or ameatur/community theatre production. The singing was so-so, the dancing entirely rudimentary, and only the character that really shone was Lina Lamont (Cailin Stadnyk). But really - is over-acting the bimbo actually challenging?

If we had paid $40 a pop for our tickets, i would have felt very ripped off.

On the plus side, the band was great, the music really created excitement - too bad the actors let the air out.

[Christine]

I've just seen the Prince of Homburg at the Donmar. A very Prussian play but made quite believable through the modernised prose text (Dennis Kelly).
Charlie Cox was very good as the Prince, perhaps more convincing in the romantic impestuous part of the role than when he accepts what he then realises as his duty. But the star of the show is Ian McDiarmid who is very convincing as the scheming Elector, hell-bent on duty and strict obedience to law and order.

The play could have done without the music which seemed superfluous.

One gripe about the audience. The Donmar is tiny and you simply sit on benches. In the row in front of me a very fat lady must have really annoyed her neighbours by taking up a lot of their space. And opposite me a couple seemed totally uninterested, one spent minutes closely examining his cuff links during one of McDiarmid's very forceful speeches, the other put his feet up on the stage, perhaps half a metre from McDiarmid - the lighting leaves the audience in the front in full view of the actors. Manners, eh?

[Heather]

One gripe about the audience. The Donmar is tiny and you simply sit on benches. In the row in front of me a very fat lady must have really annoyed her neighbours by taking up a lot of their space.

They have my sympathy, I was sat next to the family fat during a production of The Woman In Black last month at the Liverpool Playhouse, not a very good experience, I don't know how they even managed to get into their seats or out of them for that matter, with great diffculty I should imagine.

[old barney greyheron]

fat people are sweaty...izza truefact.

[Biddy ORafferty]

La Bête

I was thinking of attending this in September. Seeing it at The Music Box is a plus.

I'm mulling over the Edwin and John Wilkes Booth extravaganza An Error of the Moon at Theatre Row. Never can get enough of walking past the Port Authority on the way to the theatre.

There really isn't much doing while I'm there.

Really sad to be leaving before Public's GATZ opens. That sounds awesome.

[BelfastsLittlesHobo]

Recently I have been on tour around Ireland working as part of the crew on The Lyrics adaptation of Moliere's 'The Miser'. I have not seen any other adaptions of the play so I have nothing to compare to this effort, but I did enjoy this production, although I was glad when it was all over!

[philipchevron]

Recently I have been on tour around Ireland working as part of the crew on The Lyrics adaptation of Moliere's 'The Miser'. I have not seen any other adaptions of the play so I have nothing to compare to this effort, but I did enjoy this production, although I was glad when it was all over!

How's that new Lyric Theatre building shaping up? Any closer to opening? Belfast sorely needs it.

[philipchevron]

The Prince of Homburg by Heinrich von Kleist (Donmar Warehouse, London) Seen August 14

Prince Friedrich (Charlie Cox) wins a glorious battle for the Prussians but in so doing has disobeyed direct orders and, following a summary court martial, is sentenced to die by firing squad by The Elector, the man who decides such things. Kleist's 1811 classic examines this dilemma from several angles, finding both honour in stupidity and stupidity in honour. The Elector's (Ian McDiarmid, close to the top of his form) hardline adherence to strict codes of practice is actually considerably more nuanced and interesting than Adolf Hitler's witless dramaturgy would have had you believe. That's right, the Fuehrer's crimes do not stop at those commited against humanity: when he pressed the play into service as a piece of Third Reich propaganda it became a simplistic parable about duty and self-sacrifice and obedience, a fate it did not recover from until about 30 years ago when it was reexamined by scholars and restored to the canon of Germany's great dramatic literature, where it has since more or less remained, forming, for instance, a core part of the Berliner Ensemble's repertoire.

Unfortunately, Hitler was not unique in his facility for witless dramaturgy. Dennis Kelly's new English adaptation for the Donmar attempts to further rescue the play from the Nazis' clutches by changing the ending so that the Prince is shot dead by the firing squad while the Elector who has condemned him to death bellows, tyrant-like, from above. You know.....kinda like Hitler. This not only dramatically alters Kleist's narrative curve (the original has a much more ambiguous denouement) but it utterly betrays the playwright's dramatic intentions too. Kleist framed his play with a beginning and end that asks questions about the nature of dreams versus reality - surely a perennial concern of the thinking dramatist - and by lopping off Kleist's original ending, Kelly has wrecked the careful symmetry wrought by the playwright.

Artistic vandalism aside - c'mon now, it's 2010, it's surely just a footnote by now that The Prince of Homburg was the Fuehrer's "favourite play"? - Johnathan Munby's production is absorbing and watchable, with notable performances from Siobhan Redmond, David Burke and Sonya Cassidy to put with those of Cox and McDiarmid.

[philipchevron]

Eugene Onegin by Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. Libretto by the composer and Konstantin Shilovsky (Royal Opera House, London) Seen August 14

Marshall McLuhan famously called ads, as in commercial advertising, the cave paintings of the 20th Century, a more reliable record of our time than the fruits of art with loftier goals. All the same, music too, lowbrow and high, must be considered in the same way: music can't help itself - it reflects its times whether or not it sets out with that goal. Consider the transition from plainsong to harmony and counterpoint; Howard Goodall worked out that for a monk to commit the entire liturgical repertoire to memory, it not only had to be handed down in a purely vocal tradition (with all the random mutation that implies) but it was the equivalent of learning the entire oeuvres of Wagner and Beethoven combined. So when Guido "Monaco" d'Arezzo invented the first primitive method of writing music down 1000 years ago, he liberated music from the merely practical and elevated it into the stratospheres of the possible, the imaginable, a process that continues to this day. It is, therefore, impossible to separate the dark ages from the moment when musical sophistication began its fascinating evolutionary journey.

We often think of Modernism, in music as in the literary, dramatic and visual arts, as a sort of "moment" in 20th century thinking, a sort of creative consensus, most typically explained by the catalytic intervention of the First World War and, in particular, the human and moral price it exacted from us. But it's a misleading line of thought, because it overlooks a more complex underpinning of incremental development, not all of which is immediately visible or audible or attributable. In simplistic local terms, one does not go from Sean O'Riada to The Pogues without first encountering the Clash and the Dubliners and equally, it is almost certainly incorrect to consider Bill Whelan a more logical heir to O'Riada than the Pogues are, though none of us will still be alive when music history makes that judgment call, if indeed it can be bothered.

This is the sort of stuff that goes through your head when you find yourself in the enormously humbling and privileged position of occupying an Orchestra Stalls seat in the great theatres and opera houses of the world on a regular basis. As with McLuhan's ads, our theatrical and musical creations are our cave paintings, the daubs that, over time, cannot disguise the essence of who we are and how we got there. History books can and do lie to us; our artworks are incapable of deception: even the contrivance to deceive will eventually be seen in the context of a truth bigger than itself.

And this has what to do with Pete Tchaikovsky? Well, I think he may still be getting something of a raw deal, though it is, of course, still too early to tell - we're still getting the hang of Bach and Handel, after all. The Russian composers who followed in Tchaikovsky's wake tended to revere him, even (especially?) the radical terrible children like Shostakovich, and Stravinsky but, rather like the Jerome Kern/Irving Berlin anecdote [Interviewer: "Mr Kern, what is Irving Berlin's place in American music?"/Kern: "Irving Berlin has no place in American music - Irving Berlin is American music"] which gets trotted out from time to time and invites itself to be seen as a gnomic utterance from a genius (Kern) about a gifted hack (Berlin), Stravinsky's admiring claim that Tchaikovsky was the "most Russian" of Russian composers tends to be taken as the warmly patronising tribute of an indulgent adult child towards a parent in the early stages of dementia. Perhaps old Tchaikovsky made the mistake of getting too popular. Mozart knows all about this: his popularity denied him his supreme genius for at least a century. Or maybe it's just that Tchaikovsky's ambivalence about his contemporary Richard Wagner (Wagner music good: Wagnerism bad) sent him to a semi-exile from which he has never quite returned. He's the guy that wrote all those bangin' tunes best heard in conjunction with the visual stimulus of the tutu.

In any event, one of the many joys of this production of Eugene Onegin by the guesting Bolshoi Opera company, is the frequency with which the composer's 1881 score appears to foreshadow musical developments we are not supposed to notice for decades yet. Not just the Russian composers that would follow, but Strauss and Britten too. Some of the music has an astringency we tend to associate almost exclusively with Modernism. Interestingly, Onegin was not fully appreciated when it first appeared and, as with Chekov's The Seagull, it took a stage genius like Stanislavski to recognise that what was going on here was not in fact, poor stagecraft but rather, a radical new language of stagecraft which would come to supplant the existing templates. Ironic then, that the Bolshoi was stuck with its previous production of Eugene Onegin, which premiered during World War Two, for over 60 years and that there was a very loud howl of public rage when the company finally replaced the "beloved" old carthorse with this magnificent version which treats the work as though no such creatively crippling performance history exists while still doing it the service of recognising it as one of the great masterpieces of Russian lyric theatre.

The Bolshoi has brought its own orchestra too, and there is something undeniably moving about watching a large band of Russians coaxing, hitting, fingering, blowing and bowing their way around so vital a piece of its own musical legacy.

[CM]

Anne Boleyn @ Globe. Howard Brenton writes brilliantly for the Globe with it's unique dynamics (previously: In Extremis). A cheeky companion piece to Shakespeare's Henry 8, it unveils the origins of the King James Bible and a love torn asunder by the absence of male heir for Henry 8. I've liked Brenton since I saw Paul at the NT a few years ago and Christians mobbed the Cottesloe, denouncing him via placard as a heretic and blasphemer. They wouldn't much like this either. "Why is it when rulers say God has told them to do something, it always coincides with their personal interests?" 8/10

Comedy of Errors @ Regent's Park. Set in the '20s, a couple of songs and a funny bit with a gorilla costume. 7/10

Beauty Queen of Leenane @ Young Vic. A MUST SEE. 8/10

One for you Mr C

GEORGE M COHAN TONIGHT!

The Story Of The Man Who Owned Broadway

by Chip Deffaa

New Players Theatre, Villiers Street

Telling the incredible story of one of the pioneers of modern musical theatre, George M.Cohan Tonight! arrives at The New Players Theatre for a strictly limited four week run.

Known in America as The Man Who Owned Broadway, Cohan was much more than your average entertainer. As a performer, producer, composer, director, and writer, he was responsible for penning over 50 shows and 500 songs. This award-winning musical biography is ...

[philipchevron]

Anne Boleyn @ Globe. Howard Brenton writes brilliantly for the Globe with it's unique dynamics (previously: In Extremis). A cheeky companion piece to Shakespeare's Henry 8, it unveils the origins of the King James Bible and a love torn asunder by the absence of male heir for Henry 8. I've liked Brenton since I saw Paul at the NT a few years ago and Christians mobbed the Cottesloe, denouncing him via placard as a heretic and blasphemer. They wouldn't much like this either. "Why is it when rulers say God has told them to do something, it always coincides with their personal interests?" 8/10

Conor, I share your enthusiasm for Brenton's Paul, a play I liked so much I bought a copy of the playscript for my mate Terry Woods, something of an expert on matters biblical, theological and doctrinal, who also dug it. I wish I could say the same for Brenton's current project, the lamentable adaptation of Georg Buchner's tedious Danton's Death (Olivier Theatre, seen today). Not even so skilled and imaginative a director as Michael Grandage can find any theatre in this piece of didactic pageantry, which must be why he allows the actors, led by the normally reliable Toby Stephens, to declaim the play rather than find characters worth exploring. Grandage's final capitulation, in the face of what must have seemed a losing battle quite early in the rehearsal process, comes at the end, in as crass a coup-de-theatre as I've ever seen, as heads "literally" roll for Madame Guillotine. Depressing.