Beowulf

performed by Julian Glover and Jamie Glover

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 24 May 2015

Julian Glover has been reciting a performing version of 'Beowulf' for some years. It is abridged from Michael Alexander's 1973 translation for Penguin Classics, with some material from Edwin Morgan's 1952 translation and occasional lines from the original Old English text. On this occasion (the evening recitation) he was performing it for the last time and 'handing on' the oral tradition to his son Jamie.

The candlelit playhouse was an appropriate venue even though its decorative style is far removed from ancient or even mediaeval English architecture; and there was in fact some discreet spotlighting of the stage too. Julian Glover began by chatting to members of the audience in the pit, in order (he said) to get the recognition chatter over and done with before the recitation started. He was casually dressed, but wearing an Anglo-Saxon style cross pendant.

Once started he moved from easy geniality to firm assurance and commanding speech according to the demands of the poem. With only a table, two chairs, a drinking tankard and a sword for props, he evoked the story with consummate ease, and demonstrated the enormous power of the poem in recitation (as opposed to book reading), despite the use of the translation. The Old English text, when spoken, added an emphatic air of mystery and age; often a translation followed (or had immediately preceded) these lines, demonstrating how extremely distant the original is from common understanding, but at the same time contributing strongly to the atmosphere of the evening.

The poem has three major movements - the scene setting and Beowulf's struggle with Grendel, which occupied the first part, the struggle with Grendel's mother which began the second part, and Beowulf's struggle with the dragon fifty years later which concludes the work. The fights of Beowulf's youth are full of proud endevour and triumphant celebration, while the final struggle leads to his death, and to the passing of the flame, so to speak, to his young kinsman Wiglaf. Thus it was entirely appropriate that on this occasion Julian should stop speaking at the moment of Beowulf's death, and that Jamie should come onto the stage from the pit to conclude the account of his funeral. The shape of the performance thus matched the narrative of the poem and lent an extra authenticity to the whole experience of the oral tradition.

Ah, Wilderness!

by Eugene O'Neill

seen at the Young Vic on 223 May 2015

O'Neill's only comedy, written in 1933, is directed by Natalie Abrahami and stars George Mackay as Richard Miller, Janie Dee as his mother Essie, Martin Marquez as his father Nat, Susannah Wise as his aunt Lily, Dominic Rowan as Sid Davis and David Annen as an unscripted O'Neill figure presiding over the action who also takes a couple of minor parts. The set design is by Dick Bird.

The costumes forego the ostensible setting of the play in 1906, preferring simpler and indeterminate lines from the mid 20th-century, and the set design ignores the painstaking descriptions provided by O'Neill of various locations in and around the Miller's house. Some of these are read out by David Annen, but often against considerable hubbub from the characters, so that they become a background noise - a neat transference from the visual background a set would normally provide. Instead, there is a raised area at the back with openings onto a sky, and on one side an exit to stairs leading up (presumably to bedrooms and a bathroom); and on the other side stairs leading down (presumably out of the house). The various levels visible to the audience are covered in great drifts of sand, with steps only partially visible. Characters usually negotiate the steps quite successfully, unless in a passion of emotion or a fug of inebriation when they tend to trip or slide in the sand alarmingly. It's a brilliant device for puncturing the histrionics of teenage self-absorption (in Richard's case) or the potentially sorry spectacle of Sid's (and to a lesser extent Nat's) drunkenness in the Fourth of July celebrations.

But there are levels of seriousness beneath the pratfalls, beautifully exposed by Essie's inability to name things that disturb her - whether it be Richard's reading (Wilde, Beaudelaire, the Rubaiyat) or the continuing problem of alcohol amongst the menfolk. And though Richard's outbursts are essentially adolescent tantrums born out of frustrated disgust with social mores and intoxication with racy ideas from literature, there is no escaping the knowledge that these can easily grow into monstrous adult egotism. The ever-present O'Neill figure, often wearily mimicking Richard's nervy and immature gestures and even mouthing his lines, shows us the connection. The 'comedy' lies in the fact that the family is basically harmonious instead of dysfunctional, and the teenager's idealism is looked at fondly rather than cynically.

The cast is excellent. George Mackay brilliantly conveys the restlessness and emotional volatility of a youngster at odds with his world, his great spouts of verbal pyrotechnics matched by physical awkwardness - the twitchings of what now would be classified as ADHD. Janie Dee shows us a mother bemused by this gifted but problematic child, someone with a firm hand and a solid idea of how a household should function (despite a weakness in controlling a wayward Irish maidservant) - the sort of dependable mother figure completely missing from O'Neill's own childhood. Her prudishness is not risible - it is touching. Martin Marquez shows Nat to be a decent man by his own lights, and someone Richard ultimately respects and loves underneath the fireworks; there is a tender rapport between them at the end of the play which is brief but deeply moving. The supporting cast - Richard's siblings, some neighbours and a seedy bartender and callgirl - are well played (the latter pair could so easily have been mere caricatures), while the quiet desperation of the subplot in which Lily Miller consistently refuses to marry Sid Davis provides a poignant counterpoint to the main story.

Hay Fever

by Noel Coward

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 13 May 2015

This revival of a famous farce from 1925 is not entirely successful; its main claim to attention is Felicity Kendal, who plays the matriarch Judith Bliss. Judith's super-dramatic style as a recently not-so-retired theatre doyenne controls the behaviour of her husband and two children and leads to the general mayhem that farce feeds on. Kendal's performance is flawlessly timed and full of the necessary mannerisms and abrupt changes of register, but the remaining cast are not so adept at the form, and there is too much shouting and too little subtlety.

The play itself shows its age, and some of its comic references are now irretrievably dated and consequently no longer funny. The first act in particular lacked energy, though the ludicrous goings-on in the second act raised the level considerably.

I wonder if perhaps the streak of narcissistic cruelty that features in several of Coward's plays as leavening for the comedy (for example 'Design for Living' and 'Private Lives') is weaker here, or if it was just not allowed sufficient head in this production.

Each His Own Wilderness

by Doris Lessing

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 4 May 2015

The play, directed by Paul Miller (the Artistic Director of the theatre), features Clare Holman as Myra, Joel MacCormack as Tony and Susannah Harker as Milly. It was written in 1958, just before Lessing embarked on her novel 'The Golden Notebook' (1962).

Myra, heavily involved in the campaign against the H-bomb, and with a lifetime of political activism behind her, is completely non-plussed by the apolitical attitude of her son Tony, just returned from National Service. He affects complete scorn for her chaotic and bohemian lifestyle, and is woundingly critical of all her attempts at a rapprochement. Her assumptions that he as a young man must want freedom and autonomy he sees as just one more example of her inescapable manipulative influence over him. His apparent desire to be an electrician (instead of an architect) living in a 'normal' tidy household with an attractively made-up and dignified mother she sees as irrelevant and insulting immaturity. 

Carmen Disruption

by Simon Stephens 

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 2 May 2015

The play, directed by Michael Longhurst and designed by Lizzie Clachan with music by Simon Slater, dramatises the predicament of a Singer (Sharon Small) whose sense of self is unravelling as her commitments to sing the role of Carmen take her from place to place with no connection to the world outside taxis, briefly rented apartments, and the opera theatres of Europe. Four other characers in a particular unnamed city are also adrift in loneliness - a rent boy named Carmen (Jack Farthing), a female taxi driver Don José (Noma Dumezweni), a young student Micaëla (Katie West) and a futures trader Escamillo (John Light). Viktoria Vizin prowls the stage dressed as a conventional Carmen, singing snatches of the opera, or other lyrics, to the accompaniment of two cellists (Jamie Cameron and Harry Napier).