Welcome Home, Captain Fox!

by Anthony Weigh based on Jean Anouilh's Le Voyageur sans Bagage

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 26 March 2016

The play, directed by Blanche McIntyre, is an adaptation of Jean Anouilh's 1937 play concerning a returned soldier with amnesia. Anthony Weigh has reset it in the USA in the 1950s so that 'Gene' (Rory Keenan) has returned from the Second rather than the First World War. His blank state allows the people around him to reveal all sorts of secrets, prejudices and idiosyncrasies; in the end he manages to deploy some native cunning to escape from a less than ideal predicament.

Pericles

by William Shakespeare (and George Wilkins)

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 24 March 2016

Dominic Dromgoole directs James Garnon (Pericles), Jessica Baglow (Marina), Dorothea Myer-Bennett (Thaisa and Dionyza), Simon Armstrong (Antiochus and Simonides), Fergal McElherron (Helicanus and the Pander), Dennis Herdman (Bolt), Kirsty Woodward (Lychorida and the Bawd), Steffan Donnelly (Lysimachus) and Shiela Reid (Gower) as part of a season of Shakespeare's four 'romance' plays.

Pericles, the only play commonly attributed to Shakespeare but not included in the First Folio edition of his plays, is actually a collaboration, and the text is thought to be woefully defective in certain places. However, despite its episodic and even disjointed plot, and its reliance on fantastical coincidences and unlikely turns of events, it can be a very satisfactory theatrical experience.

The Merry Wives

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Rose Theatre, Kingston upon Thames on 23 March 2016

The usual title The Merry Wives of Windsor has been abbreviated in this production from Northern Broadside and the New Vic (Stoke on Trent) as the action has not only been moved forward in time to the 1920s but also moved geographically to the north of England. Local references have been altered accordingly - 'the fat woman of Ilkley' rather than of Brainford; Slender to marry Ann Page in Skipton rather than Eton, and so forth.

Barrie Rutter plays Falstaff and directs the production, which is firmly in the British farce tradition, broad brushed and raucous. The characters are close to stock figures of fun - the women wise, the husbands foolishly lax or foolishly jealous, Falstaff incorrigibly self-confident, the others various sorts of hangers on, and the young couple romantic but almost without personality. All this is emphasised by the acting style, which is direct and noisy.

Unfortunately the performance did not immediately engage the audience; perhaps the theatre itself, though inspired by 16th century architecture, is not a sympathetic space when the house is not full. At any rate, in the first half it seemed that the cast were at times straining for effect; and of course the language is old-fashioned in a way that can make it laborious to set up the jokes. In the second half laughter came more easily, though the cross-language obscene punning of the Latin lesson was not really effective (despite coaching in the progamme notes).

A further consideration is that there might really still be a faultline between northern and southern styles of humour. The whole play was given in thick northern accents (apart from Doctor Caius' deliberately ludicrous French accent and Parson Evans's Welsh). This made the verbal fireworks at times hard to follow, but also encouraged the almost slapstick style of delivery. Mistress Page and Mistress Ford laughed uproariously at their own cleverness, but it was something of a spectacle rather than an invitation to share the joke.

Good fun as a knockabout farce, but strained at times.

The Tempest

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 15 March 2016

Dominic Dromgoole directs Tim McMullan (Prospero), Phoebe Pryce (Miranda), Dharmesh Patel (Ferdinand), Pippa Nixon (Ariel) Fisayo Akinade (Caliban), Trevor Fox (Stephano) and Dominic Rowan (Trinculo) as part of a season of Shakespeare's four 'romance' plays.

A play which starts on a boat engulfed by a terrifying storm, and continues entirely with scenes on an island, might seem a tall order for an intimate candle-lit space with a highly decorated  wooden screen at the back of the stage and no sense of the natural world about it. However, the storm was brilliantly staged in semi-darkness, with crew and passengers careering across the stage in unison as if the whole edifice were tilting with the waves. The only questionable gambits were to have a large stylised picture of a storm displayed, with Prospero in front of it with his staff, before the action began, and to have Ariel swinging on a lantern above during the storm itself. This weakened the important revelation in the second scene that the storm, so realistically presented, is in fact only a concoction of Prospero's art.

Cymbeline

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 12 March 2016

Sam Yates directs Emily Barber (Imogen - or Innogen as the Globe researchers have preferred to call her), Jonjo O'Neill (Posthumus), Calum Callaghan (Cloten), Joseph Marcell (King Cymbeline), Pauline McLynn (his Queen) and Eugene O'Hare (Iachimo) as part of a season of Shakespeare's four 'romance' plays.

The plot of Cymbeline is over-complex, with princes kidnapped at birth, a loving couple separated and subjected to mischievous misinformation, a king besotted with an evil queen, a fraught political situation, and a final scene in which all is straightened out in a manner that always threatens to fall into sheer absurdity as one character after another comes forward with a variation of 'oh, but that means .... ' The unlikelihoods and coincidences pile up in what ought to be a fatally damaging mess, but given the right direction, it can all prove both entertaining and curiously satisfactory.

This production proves the point. The several strands of the plot are played out seriously, which means that many of them could prove disastrous for the characters - and indeed Cloten the hapless son of the queen is decapitated. The final resolutions, though inevitably comic in their pell-mell succession, transform what could have been tragedy into benevolent reconciliation. The unreasonable jealousy of Posthumus leads not to murder as Othello's does, but into timely remorse. The murderous plots of the queen do not engender the slaughter of Macbeth's career; the intransigence of Cymbeline does not lead to Lear's catastrophe even though he is quite as angry at his daughter to begin with.

The Winter's Tale

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 9 March 2016

Michael Longhurst directs John Light (Leontes), Rachel Stirling (Hermione), Niamh Cusack (Paulina), Tia Bannon (Perdita), Steffan Donnelly (Florizel), David Yelland (Antigonus) and James Garnon (Autolycus) as part of a season of Shakespeare' four 'romance' plays.

It is interesting to compare this production with Kenneth Branagh's (reviewed in November 2015). The size and the ambience of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse make for a very different experience - the opening scenes seemed more intense, less stately, with Leontes prwoling in his jealousy far closer to this wife and friend. Meanwhile in the second half, Autolycus could interact far more directly with the audience, even purloining a pair of spectacles at one point to facilitate his 'disguise' as a courtier.

Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 5 March 2016

Chekhov's play has been adapted by the director Robert Icke so that its setting is less obviously Russian (Vanya is 'Uncle Johnnie') and also later than the nineteenth century (there is a telephone, and electric light in the house). It features Paul Rhys as John (Vanya), Jessica Brown Findlay as Sonya, Tobias Menzies as Michael (Astrov, the doctor), and Susan Wooldridge as Maria (John's mother and Sonya's grandmother), with Hilton McRae as Alexander (the professor) and Vanessa Kirby as his second wife Elena, Richard Lumsden as Cartwright (Telyeghin) and Ann Queensberry as the nanny. The production is designed by Hildegard Bechtler.

On a raised platform of wooden boards, with posts at each corner supporting a black roof or canopy, there are a few props, and an old nanny and a visiting doctor. Conversation is desultory, the old woman offering tea and complaining about the disruption to the routines of the household, the doctor absorbed with signs of his slow disintegration into mediocrity. Slowly, the whole platform revolves, while a neighbour and the members of an ill-assorted family appear and disappear. The management of the estate, which normally occupies Sonya and her uncle Johnnie, has lapsed during the visit of Sonya's father and stepmother who seem to have exerted a fatal lassitude simply by being there, city folk ill at ease in the country. But John is attracted to Elena, his brother-in-law's new wife (Sonya's mother was his sister), and this adds to the simmering tensions.