Going to the theatre

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Glengarry Glen Ross by David Mamet (Gate Theatre, Dublin) July 9

"The chief business of the American people is business. They are profoundly concerned with buying, selling, inventing and prospering in the world" - Calvin Coolidge, 1925

Michael Colgan at the Gate appears to have adopted David Mamet as the Gate's house playwright, succeeding Samuel Beckett and Harold Pinter, a process that began in earnest with the BPM (Beckett/Pinter/Mamet) mini-festival in the 2010 Dublin Theatre Festival. I would quibble with this elevation to theatrical Sainthood on the grounds that Mamet has written more poor plays than great ones but, the grounds that BPM have in common a particular facility with dramatic language that relishes the raw stuff itself are sound enough. Moreover, if the Gate continues to give such superb productions as this one of Glengarry, easily the best I've seen, what's to quibble?

During the making of the 1992 movie of Mamet's 1984 Pulitzer play, apparently Jack Lemmon and Al Pacino and Kevin Spacey and the others took to calling the project Death of a Fuckin' Salesman and, for sure, the play is a vital part of that triumvirate of American-as-Salesman dramas which also includes O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh. Though I don't think we ever learn from Arthur Miller what it is that Willy Loman sells, O'Neill tells us Hickey is a hardware salesman. And what are Shelley Levine and Richard Roma selling us? Useless plots of land, basically. Mamet's most telling contribution to the narrative is the prescient idea that the merchandise itself has less and less merit, value or worth. Any contemporary playwright taking up the mantle would have to face the unpleasant fact that now imaginary, theoretical commodities can be bought and sold, creating vast wealth for the few and collapsing world economies in the process. The correlation between the devaluation of merchandise and humiliation of merchant must be considered, for now, complete. Finally, the iconic and noble American salesman conjured up by President Coolidge almost a century ago has become a crook.

Terrific performances from local cream Owen Roe and Barry McGovern and Denis Conway and, fast becoming a Gate Theatre summer tradition in itself, a superb one by an American visitor, Reg Rogers, as Roma.

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The RSC's 12th Night has perhaps the most eye-popping yellow stocking scene I've set eyes on. What separates Jonathan Slinger from Others on stage is that he is able to roll a phrase around his mouth to unveil the inner man. Other actors just deliver their lines, like a postman, they hand them to the audience to make of them what they will. Slinger does it for us, investing them with hisses and tics and stutters and loops. He speaks Shsp in technicolour, while his colleagues converse in black and white. His harsh Prospero is good too. But whether Malvolio, Macbeth, Lenny or the usurped Duke of Milan I still catch flashes of his Richard Gloucester, as if this is his seminal performance, the palate from which he now draws. I hope an Iago and a Hamlet are in the offing.

Somebody up there heard you:

http://www.playbill.com/news/article/16 ... enhill-Pla

[CM]

If the gods are still listening, I'd like DruidMcDonagh, Burbage cloned and Sir Sher to reprise his Richard 3 for those of us who were spendingtheir pocket money on London Irish groups in the '80s, missing seminal shakespeare.

[firehazard]

If the gods are still listening, I'd like DruidMcDonagh, Burbage cloned and Sir Sher to reprise his Richard 3 for those of us who were spendingtheir pocket money on London Irish groups in the '80s, missing seminal shakespeare.

I actually did go to see Lord Sher's memorably spiderish Richard but for a variety of reasons never managed to get to see said groups myself back then. I'd be willing to do you a swap if you like.

[CM]

Envious.

You can have the '91 Tipperary show, but I'm keeping London '88 and love nor money could make me part with the Chieftains @ Brixton.

I saw Sher play 18th century Shsp actor Kean in the west end a few years back, theshow opened with Sher playing Kean playing Richard, but with a nod and wink, also Sher playing Sher playing Richard. Now is the winter ...

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Envious.

You can have the '91 Tipperary show, but I'm keeping '88 and love nor money could make me part with the Chieftains @ Brixton.

I saw Sher play 18th Shsp actor Kean in the west end a few years back, theshow opened with Sher playing Kean playing Richard, but with a nod and wink, also Sher playing Sher playing Richard. Now is the winter ...

He was a good Leontes, maybe the best, and a terrific Macbeth too.

[CM]

Missed them live, but I've the dvds of both, he is excellent. His Prospero was great too.

There's got to be a Falstaff in the post.

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Missed them live, but I've the dvds of both, he is excellent. His Prospero was great too.

There's got to be a Falstaff in the post.

I just loved SRB's Falstaff. Can't wait to see the whole cycle on DVD.

[Christine]

Richard III at the Globe yesterday – fabulous, as expected. Standing ovation for Rylance at the beginning and the end, more than deserved for his utter professionalism in the face of personal tragedy alone, but also for a brilliant performance, scheming and funny. Rylance dominates, even during the final dance of the entire cast you can’t take your eyes off him. Sadly, some of the audience had to leave as they got absolutely poured on – so much rain for a while that it was even hard to hear the actors.

An interview with Rylance about the Olympics (his appearance there cancelled since) but still interesting to hear about his views on corporate sponsors of the games and on the plan for actors (dressed as ‘normal’ people) to approach visitors and discuss the assassination of Julius Caesar:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18663614

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Richard III at the Globe yesterday – fabulous, as expected. Standing ovation for Rylance at the beginning and the end, more than deserved for his utter professionalism in the face of personal tragedy alone, but also for a brilliant performance, scheming and funny. Rylance dominates, even during the final dance of the entire cast you can’t take your eyes off him. Sadly, some of the audience had to leave as they got absolutely poured on – so much rain for a while that it was even hard to hear the actors.

An interview with Rylance about the Olympics (his appearance there cancelled since) but still interesting to hear about his views on corporate sponsors of the games and on the plan for actors (dressed as ‘normal’ people) to approach visitors and discuss the assassination of Julius Caesar:

http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts-18663614

All very encouraging and, given the unpredictable state of the weather at the moment, I took the precaution of booking for Dick: 3 at both its indoors and outdoors venues this year. But I was trying to figure out how the groundlings express their appreciation to the max. With them, every performance merits a standing ovation.

[Christine]

Definitely wise, but there is always something special about the Globe, coming out after the performance, seeing the river and St Paul's, makes me happy to be in London.

In this case, the groundlings' appreciation consists I suppose in merely staying put in the downpour. And admittedly, not everyone perhaps deserved a standing ovation. There were some less convincing performances too, despite some nice cursing the female roles were I thought not quite strong enough. Still, a fine evening!

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A Soldier In Every Son - The Rise of the Aztecs by Luis Mario Moncada, transl. Gary Owen (Swan Theatre, Stratford) July 16

In which the Royal Shakespeare Company and the National Theatre Company of Mexico pool their resources to present the play wot Ernie Wise never wrote.

Coming soon: Moctezuma's Revenge.

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Porgy and Bess by George and Ira Gershwin and DuBose and Dorothy Heyward (Coliseum, London) July 17

Cape Town Opera returns to London with P & G, its Depression-era Catfish Row relocated to a South African township in the 1970s. It is, in reality, not a directorial choice that adds greatly to the opera, whose concern with race, poverty and justice is in any case universal, but neither does it detract, as the more hubristic changes in the recent Broadway revival did, and it remains an opera with more in it to admire than love. But you do absolutely take the point of the American soprano Lisa Daltirus, who played Bess in CTO's 2009 tour and went on record then, in an interview with the London Times that the South Africans' "passionate identification" with the opera was something of a "wake-up call". She continued "I think we've got a little jaded in the US with Porgy and Bess. A lot of people just think that this is a show that is lovely to listen to and happened way back when. They're not thinking that you can still find places where this is real. And if we're not careful we could be right back there." Nobody paying even mild attention to the coded racism directed at the President of the United States and his perceived "food stamp" constituency as he seeks reelection, will doubt that for a moment.

And perhaps Audra McDonald, who came by her 5th Tony Award fraudulently last month for the Broadway portrayal she had effectively rewritten to her personal tastes, might have given some consideration to these aspects rather than pursue the solipsistic dog's dinner she ended up with. There is no doubt that Bess is not an easy role; her transition from party girl to Mother Teresa and back again poses hard questions at every step, not all of them explained by her "reefer madness" style weakness for "magic dust". But Gertrude in the world's most famous play is a tough one too. We never satisfactorily learn just why she has consented to a situation in which she has just married her brother-in-law, the murderer of her husband, although only chronic naiveté could possibly leave her so apparently lacking in suspicion. But some of the world's finest actresses have found ways to triumph over this challenge and not one of them demanded rewrites from either Shakespeare or his less gifted successors.

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The Marriage of Figaro by Marcus Portugal, libretto by Gaetano Rossi, transl. G French/J Gray (Opera House, Buxton) July 18

Almost 20 years ago now, the Abbey Theatre in Dublin staged a rare production of Beaumarchais' farce The Marriage of Figaro which revealed it to be a sly farce with a seditious, even for those just pre-revolutionary times in Paris, touch. And as with the later Mozart/De Ponte version, a great deal of this political stuff was excised in order to get the operatic versions produced at all, though on this evidence, Mozart did a better job of maintaining its essentially rebellious spirit than the Portuguese composer Portugal, who tends to heighten the farce.

The opera canon is an odd organism, with luck and timing playing their part, along with prodigious talent, fine premiere productions and numerous other factors. But it does tend to allow only the supremacy of just one musical treatment of a classic story or play at a time, so curiosities like this tend to get left to the opera festivals to explore, like Buxton and Wexford. Oddly enough, Portugal was a much more successful composer than Mozart was in his lifetime, but his Figaro is not in the same league as Mozart's and sometimes history's evaluation is the correct one. Mozart's is dazzling in its confidence and merriment, this one not much more than tuneful. But there's satisfaction in seeing the alternative versions all the same.

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Jephtha by George Frideric Handel, libretto by Thomas Morell (Opera House, Buxton) July 18

The main reason so many of Handel's works are Oratorios rather than Operas is that the Protestant establishment in 18th century London tended to view dramatic depictions of biblical events as borderline blasphemy and, with the Opera's strong associations with Italian singers, quite possibly heretical too. But Handel did two things that make his major works still meaningful 250 years later. First, he snuck in, wherever possible, dramatic elements from other sources - the Book of Judges story of the general Jephtha leading the Israelites into battle against the Ammonites with the vow that he will sacrifice to God the first person he sees on his return if he prevails (it turns out to be his beloved daughter Iphis) has clear parallels with Euripides's Iphigenia, a tentacle Handel explores well. But secondly, bypassing the option of compensating for any innate dramatic flaws by picking up the pace, the composer actually doubled-down on the apparent inertia, locating a quality both serene and profound in its unhurriedness, its willingness patiently to excavate right to the heart of the matter. There are times, even now, when we have grown more accustomed to longer dramatic and emotional musical lines, when Handel's music still aches like no other's.

In the case of Jephtha, Handel's last great major work, he wrote it while he was going blind and must have known his days as a composer were numbered, and this too contributes to the sense that he left the best till last. These days, directors make a virtue of Handel's imposed dramatic limitations either by "staging" his Oratorios, with only fitfully successful results or by having all the singers face forward and deliver, which makes less sense and tends to promote slumber. So Frederic Wake-Walker's production for Buxton is especially welcome because it treads a middle ground, taking its direction solely from the music (and libretto) itself. It's a triumph of style over problematic content. Not every dramaturgical choice is explained or justified, but that only serves to add to the mystery of the piece. Consequently, the performers, and especially Gillian Keith as Iphis and James Gilchrist as Jephtha, are given all the room they need to explore the farthest crevices of Handel's music. Surprisingly exquisite.