Tuesday 31 January 2017

Love's Labour's Lost/Much Ado About Nothing at the Haymarket, or, An Undeserved Transfer

In advance of these performances I was looking forward to them. I hadn't seen Love's Labour's Lost since Ian Judge's fantastic 1993 RSC production, and Much Ado is very close to my heart. Sadly it proved to be a thoroughly disappointing day featuring uninsightful direction, weak casting and poor verse speaking.

Christopher Luscombe has chosen to set the plays on either side of the First World War. Thus Love's Labour's Lost ends with the four men going off to the front, and Much Ado About Nothing begins with their return. In the case of Love's Labour's Lost this is especially unfortunate for someone like myself who saw Judge's production. In that case, the hint of what is to come was done with great subtlety – simply with a dimming of the lights and the distant sight and sound of the guns in Flanders. Luscombe forces the point, by bringing the quartet of men back on in their uniforms and loses the punch of the moment as a result. In Much Ado, with the exception of Don John and Dogberry there is really no sense of any of the other characters having been through the horrors of the conflict. Dogberry does appear as if he might be both mentally and physically injured but the way in which this is turned into a subject of mockery is frankly disturbing and, I finally felt, inappropriate. As an aside there is something similarly troubling about the way all the lower class characters are afforded regional accents.

Sunday 29 January 2017

Mary Stuart at the Almeida, or, Ultimately Untrusting of the Audience

Note: A belated review of the matinee performance on Saturday 21st January 2017.

Regular readers will know that I have not been a fan of recent work at the Almeida, or of Robert Icke's work as a director. As a result I was not optimistic in advance of this performance. There are some strong aspects to this show, but overall I found it a more mixed experience than many.

Icke chooses to set the work in an unspecified modern time and place. That's to say although the script keeps all the stuff about prisons, England/Scotland etc. there's really nothing in terms of the almost bare circular stage to help to make that concrete. The show gets away with this in the scenes at the English court, it is rather more problematic in Mary's prison where the set completely fails to give any sense of oppression, and in the outdoor meeting at Fotheringhay where there is no assistance to the contrast the script evokes between prison and the outside world. Within this bare environment, Icke's movement direction is bizarrely inconsistent. In the English council scene and the intimate Leicester-Elizabeth encounter which follows it is excellent – adding point to the sparring councillors, sensuality to the duo. But elsewhere Icke is much less sure footed – his decision to have the queens sprawled on the ground for much of the famous encounter is a mistake, as is the choice to have the subsequent debate over the death warrant conducted by the participants charging round in circles while the set simultaneously revolves beneath them – it's distracting and ineffective. Icke also commits the familiar error of leaving a dead body (Mortimer) on stage and clearly visible to the protagonists of the next scene despite the fact that they are clearly not supposed to be able to see it or to know that character is dead, and of not getting people off stage swiftly enough at the start of other's soliloquys which they (those departing) clearly should not hear. On several occasions, I was reminded of the unsuccessful film close-up style Icke employed in his recent indifferent The Red Barn at the National. Here as there, I felt that Icke expects you to watch particular faces and places and therefore pays insufficient care to his onlookers, or to how people get off the stage. The problem is that, unlike in film where the director can give effect to such wishes via what he chooses to film, on stage that power is not the same.

Tuesday 17 January 2017

Der Rosenkavalier at the Royal, or, Greater than the Sum of Its Parts

The Royal Opera is retiring a few much revived productions these days, with the Schlesinger Rosenkavalier the latest to go. There's always a risk involved and, equally, it's clearly a necessary process. In this case picking Robert Carson, on the basis of recent work that I've seen, was a sound choice for a popular work which needs a revivable production. The Board can breathe easier knowing that his new version is revivable. Whether it has the endurance qualities of Schlesinger's is rather more open to doubt.

Carson has chosen to set the work in 1911, the year of its composition. This is most conspicuous in Act 2 and during the final moments of Act 3, elsewhere it is unobtrusive. Carson's best work comes in his direction of the principals. He draws a nicely judged masculinity from Alice Coote's Octavian which creates a really effective physical contrast between her and the other two women. He has thought, as so many opera directors don't, about the interaction between the leads – on many occasions in those powerful intimate scenes at the ends of Acts 1 and 3 he gives extra point to music and emotion by how he has them move. When the large bed was first lowered in Act 3, in a manner reminiscent of the recent Glyndebourne production, I was not convinced but Carson makes eloquent  use of it later – as the Marschallin stares at it we feel she is looking back to her Act 1 assignation with Octavian, and when Sophie draws Octavian to it for the final duet there's something lovely about it. Carson also seems to be interested in the idea of moments of this opera taking place as some kind of internalised dream. There is textual support for this – and it creates some effective pictures – the Marschallin listening to the Italian tenor at the levee as if to a record and at the same time remembering nights at the opera (it reminded me of The Drowsy Chaperone, a whole show based on a similar conceit), Octavian and Sophie's first duet in Act 2 where Carson contrives to make the whole room fall away.

Wednesday 11 January 2017

Love at the National, or, Ultimately Evading the Harder Arguments

In advance of this show I had considerable misgivings. Partly because my run of poor experiences at the National over the last year or so has given me low expectations. Partly because this has garnered considerable critical praise and I've disagreed with similar choruses on several NT offers lately. And partly because the advanced advertising made clear this was an issue play – and I have seen far too many poor plays in that category in recent years. As it turned out, some aspects of this 90 minute one act grew on me. There are some strong performances in the company and at times I was moved, but I found the end less powerful than others and I think this is a show which takes an easier way than might be apparent at first sight.

The setting is a shared flat with communal kitchen/living room and bathroom. Its inhabitants (so far as we are shown) are Nick Holder's Colin looking after his incontinent mother (Anna Calder-Marshall). The mixed race couple: Luke Clarke's unemployed and recently evicted Dean and pregnant Emma (Janet Etuk), plus Dean's two children (if I understood correctly Emma is not their mother and one of several flaws in Alexander Zeldin's script is that it is never established how this situation has arisen or what has happened to their mother). Finally we have two under-written refugees – Hind Swareldahab's Tharwa and Ammar Haj Ahmad's Adnan.

St Joan at the Donmar, or Ineffective Modernisation

Note: This is a review of the matinee on Saturday 7th January 2017.

The previous time I saw this great play was at the National Theatre in 2007 directed by Marianne Eliot and starring Anne-Marie Duff in the title role. Shortly before I attended this new version a debate arose in my twitter timeline about the appropriateness or otherwise of making comparisons to past productions/performances. I personally think that criticism to be meaningful needs benchmarks. In addition a great production of a work I've seen previously actually usually has the effect of making me forget, while I'm watching it, that I have seen those previous versions (a recent show that achieved this was the Opera North Billy Budd). But to return to St Joan. That 2007 NT production was outstanding. Josie Rourke's new version doesn't run it close, mainly because of a badly judged attempt at modernisation.

Recently I've felt that rather a lot of directors appear haunted by the Iraq war (Ivo van Hove's recent Barbican Shakespeare mash-up and Robert Icke's ineffective Oresteia at the Almeida spring to mind). This seems to result in a desire to make plays which weren't specifically dealing with that conflict overtly speak to it – the results in my experience are rarely effective. Rourke's St Joan falls into this trap. Robert Jones's set (bar the beginning and the end) consists of an enormous glass conference table and pastel covered chairs on wheels, backed by video display screens. The table is further placed on a revolve, and proceeds to do so for almost the entirety of the show – this device adds nothing. As on other occasions with this kind of narrowing of focus of geographically expansive work, the show loses a sense of kingdoms being at stake – not only because the world is so circumscribed but more significantly because rooms and costuming are so nondescript we could be pretty much anywhere in the modern world. No doubt that is the point, but it falls down when the script is so very clear about when and where we are supposed to be. Putting only Joan in more medievalish garb only further confuses the issue. The table also imprisons the actors – it hampers the ability to create effective tension in positioning and interaction. On occasion Rourke goes even further to deliberately hamper this – most notably in the bizarre decision to have Joan's meeting with the Dauphin staged as a video conference call.