The Height of the Storm

by Florian Zeller

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 18 October 2018

Jonathan Kent directs Jonathan Pryce as André and Eileen Atkins as Madeleine, with Amanda Drew and Anna Madeley as their daughters Anne and Elise in Zeller's new play, in which he again addresses themes of love, loss, memory and grief. The translation is by Christopher Hampton , and the set is designed by Anthony Ward - each in their own way excellent.

In an ageing writer's country house (or at least, a house outside Paris), in which shelves overloaded with books to an impossible height dominate several visible walls, Anne is trying to gain her father's attention, but he seems lost in a reverie staring out through the kitchen windows to the garden beyond. We soon conclude that he is recently widowed and possibly succumbing to dementia - there is talk of resolving 'the situation' and realising that new arrangements must be made.

Measure for Measure

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 18 October 2018

Josie Rourke (the outgoing Artistic Director of the Donmar) directs Hayley Atwell as Isabella and Jack Lowden as Angelo in an intriguing production of Shakespeare's problematic play concerning the abuse of power in sexual politics and the conflicting claims of justice and mercy.

The play opens in sixteenth century dress, with the political world very masculine, not to say patriarchal. But the contemporary relevance is all too obvious - the rule of law ignored through inattention, laziness or dereliction of duty, and the opportunities for a powerful man to abuse his authority just there for the taking. And this is what Angelo, deputising for an absent Duke, does in relation to Isabella - he offers the life of her brother Claudio in exchange for sexual favours. When she protests and threatens to publicise his actions, he asks her chillingly "Who will believe thee, Isabel?"

The precariousness of Isabella's situation is both helped and hindered by the Duke's actions. Having colluded in the opening situation and then walked away from it, he has returned to Vienna disguised as a friar, and he tries to 'help' by suggesting the use of the bed trick to entrap Angelo (who has, it is suddenly revealed, himself jilted Mariana, a young woman who loves him). It seems like the usual ploy of a romantic comedy, but in the context of this play, it is distasteful. The likes of Isabella, Mariana and even Claudio take the friar at face value, but in fact he has no spiritual authority at all. Furthermore, when all is revealed and marriages are forced upon Claudio (though his fiancee never appears) and on Angelo, Isabella is begged by Mariana to sue for Angelo's life, and then further the Duke suggests that she should marry him, thus riding completely roughshod over her intention of entering a convent. No words are given to Isabella to respond to what is yet another example of male dominance in disposing of a woman's life. In this production, quite credibly, she just screams.

This is the end of the play; but we have not yet reached the interval. A good deal has been cut, the subplot with the whores and whoremasters of Vienna being stripped back almost to nothing. Just before the interval starts, we are suddenly back at the first scene, but this time in modern dress, and the Duke is deputising Isabella to act in his place while he leaves the city. What was done with parchment and wax seals at the beginning is now done with phone texts and tweets.

In an even more brief recapitulation of the play, Angelo now is the young man dedicated to a spiritual life (not conventionally monastic, but more contentiously in some sort of Christian commune), and in begging Isabella for mercy on his brother's behalf, he becomes the victim of Isabella, a predatory woman. It's an intriguing reversal, and a salutary reminder that personal relationships can be unbalanced and corrupted by a woman in power as easily as by a man. In some ways, the reversal exposes the disturbing power plays even more acutely, as the disguised Duke presses his even more obviously unwanted attentions on the naive young Angelo. But the play cannot really bear this burden, and at the last moment the Renaissance Isabella presents herself before the modern Duke with an ambiguous greeting.

Hayley Atwell and Jack Lowden play both their parts extremely well. In the first half she is an intense and self confident young woman gradually weakened, and he an austere deputy Duke with a soft-spoken Scottish accent (hinting perhaps at a Calivinistic outlook?), and each is gradually weakened by the complicating factors swirling around their personal encounters. Interestingly, Angelo's soliloquy about his predicament is given due weight, though it by no means exonerates him. In their reversed roles, Atwell is far more sensuous as the powerful woman, and Lowden has less moral authority and perhaps more naivety. It is fascinating to watch in effect two interpretations of the same speeches in quick succession, and this emphasises even more the problems which this play reveals to a modern audience. 

The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 9 October 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some related works; this is the fourth major production. Michael Fentiman directs Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Jack, Fehinti Balogun as Algernon, Sophie Thompson as Lady Bracknell, Pippa Nixon as Gwendolen, Fiona Button as Cecily, Stella Gonet as Miss Prism and Jeremy Swift as Canon Chasuble in this, perhaps the most brilliant play of its kind.

Almost nothing can detract from the perfect poise of Wilde's writing; the aphorisms and witty repartee, the clever inversions that reveal social snobberies and prejudices with rapier-thrust accuracy, flow from the lips of almost all the characters as the absurdities of the situation mount up and then are almost as absurdly resolved. It would seem that the only things counting against it are its reputation and the shadow of some overpowering performances from the past (for example, Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell).

In many ways this production hits the right note, with the cast on the whole managing the delivery of the lines more successfully than in the other two productions I have seen. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Pippa Nixon and in particular Sophie Thompson are the best at this, though Fiona Button is too modern in her deportment for a teenaged girl of that time, and unfortunately it is clear that Wilde's vocal style works best with a late nineteenth-century physical restraint.  

However, I have serious reservations about some of the directorial and design decisions. The social comedy relies on the social context which it is satirising, and it is dangerous to ignore this; false notes are an unwelcome distraction. The first false note is the presence of a peculiarly explicit painting of two naked men grappling one another, which is given prominence in Algernon's living room. It is simply inconceivable that any gentleman would have had such a thing on public display in a room which ladies would be likely to visit (especially, perhaps, relations).

More seriously, the relationship between Algernon and Lane (his butler) is conceived as far more intimate than it should be. Lane remains on stage for a considerable stretch when the stage directions explicitly indicate that he is not there, and Algernon lights him a cigarette, offers him sherry and indulges in the occasional kiss. It is just plain wrong, a complete distraction from the real business of the play, and a needless sacrifice of any genuine social comment that might be made of the badinage between them, which is if anything a precursor of the Jeeves and Wooster situation, not the cover for a surreptitious sexual fling. 

A similar social barrier is needlessly crossed in a small dumbshow scene in which Cecily shares an illicit cigarette with Moulton the gardener behind Miss Prism's back. Cecily may have a wild imagination, but the sheer impropriety of this idea threatens to ruin the whole ambience in which she moves. Equally the presentation of Merriman as an outdoors servant (open shirt and no jacket) overburdened with the supposed Ernest's luggage, when he is obviously a superior house servant who would have ordered the footmen to deal with the luggage, is a serious misreading of how a wealthy country household would have been run. 

Finally, the marvellous scene in which Cecily and Gwendolen descend from superficial effusiveness to icy politeness to silent hostility is just about ruined by the crassness of the sugar and cake business at the end. (Indeed the consumption of food in general too often degenerated into incipient custard pie moments when again absolute adherence to social norms generates the comedy.) No well brought up young lady of that period would grab a tea cake and pull it apart with her hands and then allow a servant to touch it while handing it over even to a rival. The whole point of the scene is that the ritual of afternoon tea is pursued with absolute correctness but without paying attention to what the guest has asked for.

It's curious that I accept many directorial interventions in modern Shakespeare productions, but I think that attempts to introduce subplots into Oscar Wilde's plays - which all three productions that I have seen in this season have done - are a distracting failure. There is simply no room for them; the plays are not about secret romances belowstairs, and even less about shenanigans between upstairs and downstairs, and to interpolate such things as a modish modern joke or knowing social comment is simply gratuitous. The catastrophe of what Wilde himself suffered in a homophobic society is very well known, but it does neither him nor his social comedies any favours to pretend that they are the place to show what could not in reality be shown or referred to.

It's a pity, really, that these gem-likef plays should not have been trusted to entertain today's audiences on their own merits.