Going to the theatre

[Frances]

I can see a book contract for us all - Theatre Toilets We Have Known!

I seem to recall having to walk across the stage to reach the facilities at Atlantic's Ages Of The Moon in Chelsea.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q35QtdGz9us&feature=related

Stephen Rea is boss. Just putting that out there.

[philipchevron]

Misterman by Enda Walsh (Lyttleton Theatre, London) April 16, opens April 18

"Beautiful and kind"

Enda Walsh threads keywords through his characters' thoughts with the tenacity of Tennessee Williams ["mendacity" in Cat on a Hot Tin Roof] or more pertinently, with the insistence of Eugene O'Neill ["pipedream" in Iceman Cometh], though in fact Synge - "lonesome" in Playboy - is the true modern father of this rock candy writing. An unambiguous fan of Walsh's work from the start, I am especially intrigued that he now makes "kindness" a key theme. I believe we now live in a world where love is too much to expect but kindness is an achievable goal and all the best artists are reflecting this shift in their work. Walsh's Misterman, played by Cillian Murphy with dazzling textual focus and unforgettable physicality [movement director: Mikel Murfi], is part Everyman, part avenging Angel, part God of "God made the world" fame and, of course, all actor, which is Walsh's own unique perspective and his special claim to theatrical immortality.

Though Beckett, Pinter, Brecht and Shakespeare all wrote with the wry irony of playwrights acutely aware that their craft involves Making Stuff Up on a massive scale in order to attain access to a clearer Truth than verified facts alone can offer, nobody has ever engaged quite so wholeheartedly with the Theatre of Ritual as Enda Walsh. Though it's been there from the start, the journey into rite and reenactment Walsh committed to in The Walworth Farce and explored further in New Electric Ballroom and Penelope must now be considered to have reached its maturity.

Though an earlier version of Misterman appeared in 1999, this revisit makes perfect sense in the context of Walsh's subsequent work. In many ways, the most telling DNA turns out to have been Beckett's, who long ago blurred the distinction between medium and content by adding modern technology to his armory. Krapp's Last Tape depicts a man rifling through his taped audio diaries to locate a moment of reminiscence that, in a life pondered restrospectively, turns out to have been pivotal, something he could not know at the time. Walsh's Thomas Magill also exists in a setting dominated by tapes and tape recorders, but the playwright has moved the meme forward: the tapes no longer just contain vital information, they also determine the action: they are themselves part of the ritual which must be observed in order to reenact the critical, life-changing moment.

Interestingly, Walsh has also now further distilled this conceit so that it is performed by a single actor (as with so much of Beckett), with the other "characters" appearing either on tapes or in Thomas Magill's own mimicking. You wouldn't bet against Enda Walsh finding still more fat to strip away. It's instructive too that even as he discovers greater dramatic purity by reducing the dramatis personae, he has simultaneously broadened his theatrical palette. Misterman actually needs the vast stage of the NT's middle-sized auditorium to accomodate the kinetic energy of the character as he brings his world to life as both participant and creator.

Enda Walsh will by now be well accustomed to the benignly pointless question, unanswerable in all but the most crassly reductive terms, "what's your play about?" and I have no wish to encourage the question by offering an unasked for response. But for simplicity's sake, perhaps the question ought to be "what's it not about?" It's about 90 minutes and standing room tickets are still available.

[philipchevron]

My Cousin Rachel by Daphne Du Maurier, adapted by Joseph O'Connor (Gate Theatre, Dublin) April 18

My mother and sister liked it a great deal more than I did. "It's a woman thing", my mom explained, by which I think she meant its costume melodrama rather than any affinity it might have had with the better films of George Cukor. I'm not so sure it is though and, after all, both Cukor and the brilliant Joe O'Connor are male. O'Connor does bring a certain acerbic quality to his adaptation that may or may not have had something to do with his gender. But if you have never been inclined to visit Manderlay more than once, the relentlessly Gothic atmosphere of My Cousin Rachel may defeat you as it did me. Apart from Rebecca, and that in its screen version, Du Maurier has passed me by completely, in the same way (though for different indifferences) that nothing has ever drawn me to Tolkien on a bookshelf. But a dip into a critical essay in the programme inadvertently puts its finger on what's wrong here - it makes the novel sound infinitely more interesting, with additional psychological layers, than is possible to portray on stage.

The performances are the mitigating factor here. It's wonderful to see Michael Legge has not, after all, left the acting profession and Hannah Yelland is genuinely enigmatic in the title role. The Gate provides its customary superior repertory actors in the other principal roles, Stephen Brennan in particular doing best possible justice to O'Connor's point of view.

[philipchevron]

Love's Labour's Lost by William Shakespeare (Quays Theatre @ Lowry Centre, Salford) April 20

It routinely eludes me, this one. Is it the Bard relishing word games at a time when modern English language is blossoming into its maturity or is LLL just a minor Shakespeare play? Unfortunately, the refreshingly direct techniques employed by Barrie Rutter's Northern Broadsides company, one of the great underappreciated treasures of British theatre, are unable, in this instance, to shed much light on this or fully find the joy in the comedy, something Rutter can ordinarily be relied upon to deliver in spades. So, for this patient theatregoer, the jury has not yet returned to the courtroom on Love's Labour's Lost.

[philipchevron]

Crave by Sarah Kane (Royal Exchange Studio, Manchester) April 21

Miss Julie by August Strindberg, new English adaptation by David Eldridge (Royal Exchange Theatre, Manchester) April 21

"Not one of us survives life"

Like Ian Curtis, Sarah Kane's ending of her young life at her own hand may be the single best career move she ever (inadvertently) made while simultaneously (and again, unwittingly) harming her own legacy as an artist. It unduly placed death in the forefront of her reputation when what she excelled at was matters of life, of living. As Crave, the last of her theatreworks performed in her own lifetime beautifully illustrates, how to survive acute sensitivity in a world largely inhospitable to such thin-skinnedness was always her real subject matter. Her friend and fellow-playwright Mark Ravenhill makes a compelling case that she was in fact a late Romantic, lacking the skills of irony and post-modern detachment which might have tempered her own almost certainly correct instinct that she was a woman born out of time. Viewed this way, Kane was a supremely moral artist, a rationalised vestigial legacy perhaps, of the Christian evangelical upbringing she rejected.

With this view of Sarah Kane, which I believe is an accurate one, we perceive a witty, likeable and passionate person unafraid to articulate the profound anxieties and breathtaking glories of modern sex and love and intimacy and caregiving, rather than the doyenne of the so-called "in yer face" British theatre of the 1990s, a categorisation so crass, so meaninglessly ludicrous that Martin McDonagh, a playwright whose work has almost nothing in common with Kane's, is also routinely swept up into it.

At this performance of this rivetting piece, a sort of internal monologue/dialogue split up among four different facets of the same individual, the line "there's one thing worse than being fat and fifty and that's being dead and thirty" ignites an electrifying ripple of the laughter of recognition that suggests Sarah Kane may now, finally, 13 years after her death, be reaching the drama-literate audience she has always deserved and not the ghouls and pearl-clutchers of yore. It bodes well for her survival in the canon of world theatre.

Earlier, on the Royal Exchange's mainstage, Strindberg's problematic classic Miss Julie gets no closer to resolving the contradictions of the Swedish playwright's misogyny and feminism, but it's almost always worth watching actors' and directors' efforts to shed new light, and this production, starring Maxine Peake, is no exception.

[Frances]

Mark Ravenhill

His Shopping and Fucking was the first play I ever saw. And paired with Little Malcolm all I've ever seen of British theatre.

I'd really never heard of Ms. Kane.
Blasted sounds rather intense, to say the least.

[philipchevron]

Mark Ravenhill

His Shopping and Fucking was the first play I ever saw. And paired with Little Malcolm all I've ever seen of British theatre.

I'd really never heard of Ms. Kane.
Blasted sounds rather intense, to say the least.

My goodness yes, intense and rather beautiful. Its New York premiere in 2008 at Soho Rep is indelibly imprinted as one of the greatest theatregoing experiences of my life.

[philipchevron]

A Doll House by Henrik Ibsen (Smock Alley Theatre, Dublin) April 23

One of Dublin's oldest (1660s) theatres, and its first to receive a Royal patent, now becomes its newest, in a renovation that is both handsome and suitable for modern purpose. It's a little box fresh at the moment in the first production since reopening, but that surely will not last for long. The discovery of the foundations of the original theatre adds greatly to the excitement of the refurbishment.

Fittingly, Pan Pan theatre company, devoted to the death of theatrical cliche and comfort zones, are the first tenants. Though Pan Pan's tortuous explanation of its deconstruction of Ibsen in the programme may almost be enough to make you turn tail and land in the arms of the nearest Fiona Looney boulevard-com [see, for example, its semantics on the correct English title, which accounts for the pointless discarding of the genitive case in the title], Pan Pan has frequently deserved its position at the forefront of the Irish avant garde, and its version of Hamlet, a piece called The Rehearsal, Playing The Dane, is one of the most memorable pieces of recent Dublin theatre.

Director Gavin Quinn and designer Aedín Cosgrove are committed to theatrical techniques which explicitly remove our sense of familiarity with classic old texts. There's undoubtedly a degree of whatever-works about this approach in place of a clear and single-minded intellectual construct. But that's no bad thing in itself: what's the point of replacing one dogma with another? This has the welcome effect of bringing every moment to you (well, almost every moment - Nora still slams the front door shut at the end, as you'd be foolish not to expect) in that moment.

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Jakob Lenz by Wolfgang Rihm, Libretto by Michael Frohling, Translation by Richard Stokes (Hampstead Theatre, London) April 26

Baritone Andrew Shore, a major international Alberich and something of a definitive Falstaff, can be no stranger to operatic humiliation, so you suspect Rihm's 1979 opera, in which he plays the Sturm und Drang movement poet Lenz, a role which demands no fewer than four immersions in a slimy-looking stage pond in the space of 75 minutes, is no bother to him.

It's a little less clear why the character is so keen to drown himself. The chamber opera, based on a Buchner play which conflates several biographical incidents in the poet's life, focusses on a breakdown - we would now almost certainly categorise it as a schizophrenic episode - during which the intervention of friends (notably, a Lutheran pastor) multiplies rather than reduces his apparent delusions. Though the director Sam Brown meticulously pursues the idea that as Lenz doesn't know he's going nuts, and that therefore the work's strange nightmarish quality comes from his perception of the world, not the world's view of him, a position which laudably adds clarity to the narrative but does not always feel supported by Rihm's musical perspective.

All the same, it's an intriguing, if punishing experience, the unpleasant music only occasionally leavened by some superb choral writing, and Andrew Shore gives and gets full value from the role.

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Love, Love, Love by Mike Bartlett (Royal Court Theatre, London) preview, April 27, opens May 3

"You got your cheap flights and your nice cars but never looked at what they were doing to the environment, you voted in Thatcher, destroyed the unions, reduced taxes............Tony fucking Blair, now surprise surprise you've voted in the Tories again. All because you want to cling on to your money but here I am, your own daughter, and I can't afford a house, a car - a child."

Yes, we could perhaps only be in the Royal Court Theatre, but 37-year old Rosie's outburst to her sixty-something parents in the final act still comes as something of a jolt when we know [the playwright has shown us in the first act], as she does not, that her Mom and Dad, as idealistic teenagers, first got it together in 1967 as the sound of The Beatles performing "All You Need Is Love" on that first ever live global telecast rang out from a black and white television at the dawning of the Age of Aquarius.

The play asks us to consider this proposition: that the baby-boomer generation now approaching retirement, far from ushering in an era of greater equality, liberty and opportunity have behaved selfishly and solipsistically, pulled up the ladder of free love and egalitarianism behind them and ultimately become the first generation in history to bequeath to their children a society less prosperous and hopeful than they themselves experienced. Discuss.

Mike Bartlett's play requires the two principal characters to age from 19 to 64 (today), a challenge well within the skills of Victoria Hamilton and Ben Miles, though perhaps not yet the young actors who play their children. Bartlett, who was last at the Court with the superlative Cock, is in more conventional dramatic territory here, but the issues his play raises demand an airing. He is not foolish enough to attempt an answer to his own question but, undeniably, he is at the vanguard of a subject that is bound to recur with some frequency in theatre over the next few years. Get ready to duck.

[Heather]

Henry V.
Playhouse Theatre, Liverpool.
Saturday 28th April, 2012, 2pm.

This, for me and many others, was unmissable. Well you can't really miss The Globe on Tour can you?

I've had this show booked since November and I have been really looking forward to it, despite the fact that it is one of the few Shakespeare plays which I am not familiar with. Also I never liked history at school and as a result it was never a strong subject for me. I remember more about my history teacher, an old eccentric guy who used to smoke his pipe outside his classroom at break time, than I do about any history lesson. Sadly, I'm ashamed to say, any research on the play was done this morning on line.

On entry into the Playhouse today, I noticed that the theatre seemed was a lot brighter than usual and I could see the beautiful effigy above the stage (not sure who it is) a lot clearer than usual. On closer inspection, I realised that they were using a lot of spotlights, which remained on during the performance and added to the atmosphere. An Elizabethan band played just before the show started which set the scene for things to come.

Despite my lack of historical knowledge and unfamiliarity with the play, I managed to follow the plot very easily and thoroughly enjoyed the show. Henry V finishes tonight at the Liverpool Playhouse but it is worth seeing so if it comes to a town near you, make sure you go.

[philipchevron]

The Flying Dutchman by Richard Wagner (Coliseum, London) April 28

To the Coli for ENO's premiere of David Pountney's translation and Jonathan Kent's new production of Der Fliegende Holländer and, though Ed Gardner in the pit coaxes impassioned performances from the band, the trouble with this opera is there's not a great deal there to love. Unlike Rientze, a performing edition of which Deutsche Oper makes a very strong case in its current repertory, the slightly later Fliegende finds Wagner still somewhat in thrall to the French grand opera style he would soon shuck off and not enough of the masterful musical dramatist he would become. I may be wrong but I think Kent's production tries to make a virtue of the conflict by enhancing it; Wagner did not, after all, in his subsequent revisions, attempt to entirely excise the Old Style, so this is a valid enough approach. It's just that, to my ears, which are still wide open to a persuasive production of the opera, the two Wagners now sound irreconcilable and the passage of time does not seem to be working in Fliegende's favour.

So you need either a great physical production or superb vocal performances to land this sucker. The early entrance into the proceedings of the Ghost Ship is exciting and the presentation of the whole story as Senta dreaming the storybook she's just been reading admirably clear, but the optimistic sense of so-far-so-good soon evaporates and, two hours later, the whole thing just feels overstaged. Meanwhile, all the singing is very proficient, as you would expect from artists of the calibre of Orla Boylan, Stuart Skelton and Clive Bayley, but Ms Boylan is not really up to the Wagner challenge here, and only James Creswell as the doomed Dutchman himself comes close to transcending the opera's limitations.

[peterchrisp]

Loved Enda Walsh's Misterman too, Mr Chevron - It was like watching a one-man Walworth Farce, and the dialogue reminded me of McDonagh:

Mammy: Stick with what ya know!
Thomas: True enough Mammy.
Thomas: Something I learnt when I traded the Milk of Magnesia for those Gaviscon tablets. God d’ya remember that?
Thomas: Yes I do, unfortunately.
Mammy: Jayzus I ate that many tablets that day I ballooned into the size of a whale only to expel myself in the evening for a good two hours.
Thomas: There’s a great honesty to the Milk of Magnesia.
Mammy: Milk of Magnesia’s been clearing out foreign bodies for decades, hasn’t it? It’s like the United States of America of stomach medicines.

Gina Allum, in the New Statesman, said watching it felt 'like being repeatedly lashed with rosary beads'
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/music ... -misterman

[philipchevron]

Loved Enda Walsh's Misterman too, Mr Chevron - It was like watching a one-man Walworth Farce, and the dialogue reminded me of McDonagh:

Mammy: Stick with what ya know!
Thomas: True enough Mammy.
Thomas: Something I learnt when I traded the Milk of Magnesia for those Gaviscon tablets. God d’ya remember that?
Thomas: Yes I do, unfortunately.
Mammy: Jayzus I ate that many tablets that day I ballooned into the size of a whale only to expel myself in the evening for a good two hours.
Thomas: There’s a great honesty to the Milk of Magnesia.
Mammy: Milk of Magnesia’s been clearing out foreign bodies for decades, hasn’t it? It’s like the United States of America of stomach medicines.

Gina Allum, in the New Statesman, said watching it felt 'like being repeatedly lashed with rosary beads'
http://www.newstatesman.com/blogs/music ... -misterman

It is indeed redolent of both McDonagh and Flann O'Brien, but the madness is all Walsh. Cillian describes his friend as "fearless" which is as good a one-word description of Enda Walsh's theatre as any. Watch him win his first Tony for Once.

[peterchrisp]

'the madness is all Walsh' - Yes, all of Enda Walsh's plays are bonkers in one way or another!

I thought the plot was the weak point - the Edel story seems tacked on (and I didn't realise till I got the script that she's only 14). I liked the Time Out review, which described the plot as 'increasingly like 'Crimewatch' through the eyes of a Jesuit on acid'

Unlike the Walworth Farce, a masterpiece of plotting