Faith Healer

by Brian Friel

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 18 September 2020

Matthew Warchus directed Michael Sheen as Frank Hardy the eponymous faith healer, Indira Varma as his wife Grace and David Threlfall as his manager Teddy in Brian Friel's powerful play, presented in the Old Vic's 'In Camera' series of filmed live performances for which one can buy a ticket for viewing from one's own home. The theatre itself is devoid of an audience, and only the actors and a skeleton technical staff are in the building during a performance.

The play is ideally suited to the constraints imposed by the government's regulations in response to the current pandemic. It consists of four monologues, by Frank, Grace, Teddy and then Frank again, in which only one actor at a time need be onstage. The three characters speak of fateful trips to a village in Sunderland and to another in County Donegal, presenting the audience with a series of conundrums as it becomes clear that each of them remembers events that cannot all be true, since they are contradictory. That all three are speaking of the same events is clear from the repetition of whole phrases of description, mainly to do with geographic positioning, but their recollections of event and motivation complicate the picture in a way which a more conventional dramatic presentation would be hard pressed to emulate. Is this just the inevitable unreliability of memories of trauma, or is there deliberate or prudential falsification? The playwright gives no real clue, leaving us to draw our own conclusions and to construct our own sense of what may have happened. 

I last saw and reviewed the play at the Donmar in August 2016; it was fascinating to see it again with a different cast and essentially through a different medium. Michael Sheen's Frank was an impassioned man possibly using his old habit of chanting Welsh and Scottish village names to calm his nerves before an engagement to mask a more profound anguish than he can face up to even while trying to confide in us. Neither Indira Varma's fragile Grace nor David Threlfall's drink-sodden Teddy can be free of their own pain, so their recollections too conceal matters on which we are invited to speculate. With all the circumstantial detail of the monologues, there remains an enigma at the heart of the play.

Perhaps the raw power of the play was slightly dulled by the means of transmission: I cannot help feeling that it would have been more overwhelming if one was actually in the auditorium sharing the communal theatrical experience. Nonetheless, in the skilled hands of this formidable cast, it was a great addition to the 'In Camera' season.

Lungs

by Duncan Macmillan

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 3 July 2020

(apologies for not posting this sooner)

This two-handed play starring Matt Smith and Claire Foy was performed at the Old Vic last year. In the current lockdown the two actors, directed by Matthew Warchus, agreed to give six new performances in a revised format to be made available by subscription - that is, by buying a 'ticket' to gain access to the live transmission of a selected performance.

In line with government requirements in response to the coronavirus most theatres in London are still closed. The Old Vic has devised a means of bringing performances to a wider public by choosing short plays with minimal casts and selling 'tickets' for the right to watch a performance at home. The performance is filmed on the Old Vic's stage, with no audience in the auditorium and a skeleton film crew which maintains social distancing.

The stage was virtually bare, with just two small platforms, one for each actor to sit or lie on at certain points; they scrupulously kept their distance from one another, but for much of the time there was a separate camera trained on each of them, mostly in close-up and so resembling a Zoom video. It was very clever technically speaking.  

As for the play itself, it is an intense look at a young couple, well-meaning, aware of the greater problems in the world (climate change and economic damage), wondering if they should have a child together. The prospect brings up all sorts of doubts and tensions, and things go horribly awry, though there is a strong hint that they have an abiding future together. The performances revealed the style of both actors, I think, Foy seeming quite self-possessed but banking down great gusts of emotion, Smith good at a certain type of masculine awkwardness and insecurity. I found parts of it far too wordy, especially when the woman was establishing her eco credentials, and I am quite relieved that I did not pay for an expensive ticket to see it last year, while at the same time being glad to see it here at home.

Three Kings

by Stephen Beresford

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 5 September 2020

Matthew Warchus directed Andrew Scott in this new play by Stephen Beresford, an hour long monologue filmed live in four separate performances available by subscription - that is, by buying a 'ticket' to gain access to the live transmission of a selected performance.

In line with government requirements in response to the coronavirus most theatres in London are still closed. The Old Vic has devised a means of bringing performances to a wider public by choosing short plays with minimal casts and selling 'tickets' for the right to watch a performance at home. The performance is filmed on the Old Vic's stage, with no audience in the auditorium and a skeleton film crew which maintains social distancing.

This is the second such production that I have seen. (I regret to admit that I failed to post a notice of the first, but I shall rectify the omission).

In Three Kings Andrew Scott as Patrick tells of his encounters with his estranged father when he was eight, sixteen, and as a grown man as his father is dying, and with some other people after his father's death. His portrayal of Patrick was intensely interesting, by turns rueful, sardonic, angry and hurt, while his evocation of others (not least the father) was skilfully managed given the constraints of the medium. He conveyed a wide range of emotion with subtle adjustments to the tone of his voice, and his visual cues were expertly calibrated for close camera work, all of which made this a performance well worth seeing. (Of course Scott has wide experience in film and television work as well as on the stage, and this stood him in good stead here.)

Even in such a short piece, delivered by just one actor, the outlines of three flawed lives, and hints of the effects these have had on other people, are brought to life by a brilliant actor.

Blindness

 by Simon Stephens from the novel by José Saramago

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 27 August 2020

'A socially distanced immersive experience' is being performed at the Donmar four times a day from 1 August to 5 September; it lasts about seventy minutes.

The play is based on Saramago's 1995 novel, which describes in harrowing detail the effects of an unexplained epidemic of blindness afflicting an unnamed (presumably Portuguese) city. Juliet Stevenson narrates the description of the onset of the epidemic, and then takes the role of the Doctor's Wife, who, through not contracting the disease, is able to help a small group of people survive the ensuing breakdown of civil society. For much of the time she pretends to be blind herself, until it is no longer useful to do so.

Although Simon Stephens began work on his adaptation some eighteen months ago, and the director Walter Meierjohann had been thinking of staging an adaptation for some twenty years, neither of them could have imagined the wider circumstances in which the production has been launched. The Donmar, like all other theatres in Britain, has been closed since late March, and it is among the first indoor venues to attempt a reopening of sorts; the industry in general cannot see how to stage live performances with massively reduced seating capacity since theatres usually rely on at least 80% capacity to break even.

The solution in this small theatre is to take out all the stalls seats and build up the floor of the acting area to be level with the fourth row (the back row), and then to place pairs of chairs around the space at socially distanced intervals, allowing for an audience of about forty members. Furthermore, each member of the audience has a set of headphones (assiduously cleaned after each performance). Above, there are ranks of tube lighting, some vertical and some horizontal, which change colour before the start. At one dramatic point, the horizontal tubes are lowered to eye level, but for much of the time thereafter, at the height of the epidemic, they are switched off and the audience is n near-total darkness - even the theatre exit signs are not lit.

Everything then depends on the sound. Juliet Stevenson is a gifted actor with a wonderfully expressive voice, and the results are startlingly effective, especially once the soundscape emerges into a full stereophonic effect. The opening narration is dry, but the Doctor's Wife's experience is by turns intimate, practical, worried, enraged, desperate and determined. One feels at times one must be the Doctor, as she whispers confidentially into one's ear; then she is off comforting a young blind boy, or even further away negotiating with soldiers or extortionists in another room. The attention to aural detail by Ben and Max Ringham is astonishingly powerful, and the result is by turns intriguing, frightening, and just occasionally uplifting. There is no point in hoping for a measured response to the crisis by the authorities, since the affliction is all but universal and civic purpose and decency collapses very quickly. Survival can only be ensured by the concentrated effort of small groups of people hoping to find food and water in a now hostile environment.

The outlook in the story is considerably more grim than what we have experienced in the last few months, but that experience itself is bound to affect our reaction to the piece, which brings into sharp focus issues of co-operation and solidarity in a particularly pointed way. It is profoundly eerie to emerge from the experience onto the streets of London at what should be peak early evening travelling time to find them comparatively empty, and to travel home on a train in which there would normally be standing room only for much of the trip in a carriage with barely twenty people in it.

Over years he novel has attracted criticism from blind people for its casual assumption that blindness in itself is a disaster. Although the focus is really on the epidemic, rather than on the blindness, its use as the defining symbol of inadequacy leading to societal collapse can only have been conceived by a sighted person for whom the onset of blindness is a terror. The production team here have not fallen into the error of merely trying to 'teach' the audience what it might be like to be blind: the darkness is in fact  richly creative space for imagining the story.

Theatre in Lockdown: The 'Dream'

For those who may be interested, the Bridge Theatre's recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I reviewed on 17 August 2019 and again as a cinema relay on 17 October 2019, is being made available from today (25 June 2020) at 7 pm British Summer Time for seven days, through the National At Home free streaming service provided by the National Theatre.

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home

Highly recommended - I shall be watching it again myself.

Hamlet (revisited)

by William Shakespeare

a recording from 2018 watched on 22 March 2020

Having announced a pause in postings to this blog, I've now decided to publish my thoughts on watching the Almeida's production of Hamlet (which I've already reviewed twice before in March and August 2017). The BBC broadcast it in 2018, when I recorded it, but it has taken the current situation for me to find time to watch it. I was a little apprehensive that a filmed version of a production which had impressed me so strongly in the theatre would be a disappointment, but I need not have worried. Here goes:

An enforced pause

Measures aimed to discourage the spread of the coronavirus COVID-19 were announced by the British Prime Minister on Monday evening 16 March 2020. These included strong advice to practise 'social distancing' as a precaution, quite apart from any personal necessity to embark on self-isolation.

This has resulted in the closure of galleries, museums, theatres, opera houses, cinemas and concert halls. Consequently this blog will fall silent for the foreseeable future - not for lack of will on my part, but for lack of opportunity.

I wish all my readers well in the meantime.

Notification missed?

On 8th March I posted a review of The Seven Streams of the River Ota, a seven hour epic production by Robert Lepage - but it seems to me that the usual email notification of the review has failed.

The review can be read by accessing the blog directly at

https://nicholasatthetheatre.blogspot.com/2020/03/the-seven-streams-of-river-ota

Uncle Vanya

by Anton Chekhov (in a version by Conor McPherson)

seen at the Harold Pinter Theatre on 11 March 2020

Ian Rickson directs Toby Jones as Vanya, Richard Armitage as Doctor Astrov, Ciarán Hinds as the Professor, Aimee Lou Wood as Sonya, Anna Calder-Marshall as Nana, Rosalind Eleazer as Helena, Peter Wight as 'Waffles' Telegin and Dearbhla Molloy as Grandmaman in  production beautifully designed by Rae Smith - a ramshackle cavernous room taking up the entire stage space of the theatre, with the unadorned back wall and a massive supporting girder - and even safety notices on two of the doors - somehow not looking out of place in the dustladen gloom.

Though not exactly dressed in the late nineteenth century - Sonya and Grandmaman both weaer capacious pantaloons - the sense of a time at a loose end, with enervated overly intellectual but woefully underemployed men and frustrated women is marvellously rendered by the whole cast, from the Professor's overweening pomposity and self-regard, through Astrov's idealism battling with his despair, to Sonya's crushed hopefulness and Helena's bored and exasperated disillusionment with the choices she has made. Because every character is strongly delineated, it is impossible to miss the fact that none of the m really understands any of the others, sidetracked as each is by his or her own obsessions and frustrations. All this can lead to delightful sparks of social comedy as well as to heartbreaking intimations of loss, ennui and future blight.

The Seven Streams of the River Ota

by Robert Lepage and others (Ex Machina)

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 6 March 2020

In contrast to the short plays currently featured at several theatres (the Bridge, the Donmar, the Orange Tree), Robert Lepage brings one of his sprawling epic productions to the Lyttleton for only eight performances - not surprising as the performance lasts for just over seven hours (including two intervals and a longer break - perhaps five and a half acting hours all told).

The free program provides a list of actors but no list of characters, and notes on various topics relevant to the play - the atomic bombs at the close of the Second World War and the subsequent US occupation of Japan; the Theresienstadt concentration camp; Madame Butterfly; the World Expo held in Osaka in 1970; Georges Feydeau; Yukio Mishima; Abbott and Costello; and the Butō dance tradition in Japan. From this wide-ranging list can be gleaned something of the scope of the play, which is divided (of course) into seven acts, starting in Hiroshima in 1945, moving to New York in 1965, Osaka in 1970, Amsterdam in 1985, and Hiroshima again in 1986, 1995 and 1999. These too are not listed in the program, but their number, name, location and date is projected at the start of each section.

A Number

by Caryl Churchill

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 26 February 2019

Polly Findlay directs Roger Allam as Salter (the father) and Colin Morgan as Michael, B1 and B2 (the sons) in a new production designed by Lizzie Clachan of Caryl Churchill's 2002 play concerning a man who, it transpires, has arranged for his son to be cloned, but is unaware of how many 'copies' were made.

In an ordinary slightly rumpled living room, an insecure son confronts his father, having just discovered that he not unique (though he hasn't actually met any of his 'twins'). Salter's immediate reaction is to stall and to muse about suing whoever is responsible, though he eventually has to admit that he condoned 'a single' cloning, and that the boy is not the first son. Unsurprisingly, the boy, already fragile, is very discomposed, rocked by the realisation that much of his family story is a fiction.

Cyrano de Bergerac

by Edmond Rostand adapted by Martin Crimp

seen by live streaming from the Playhouse Theatre on 20 February 2020

Jamie Lloyd directs Jamrs McAvoy in the title role, with Anita-Joy Uwajeh as Roxane, Eben Figueiredo as Christian and Tom Edden as De Guiche, in a production designed by Soutra Gilmour and lit by Jon Clark.

Edmond Rostand's 1897 play sought to re-intorduce poetry and the idea of romantic heroism to a theatre world which he saw as bedevilled by too much naturalism. Traditionally this has inspired productions revelling in lush seventeenth-century costunes and swaggering panache, with Cyrano, the main character, a self-defined misfit in an age where physical attractiveness is held o be essential in the world of love.

Endgame

by Samuel Beckett

seen at the Old Vic on 18 February 2020

Richard Jones directs Alan Cummings as Hamm, a wheelchair-bound blind man, Daniel Radcliffe as Clov, his servant who cannot sit down, Karl Johnson as Nagg, his father, and Jane Horrocks as Nell, his mother, the two parents being confined in dustbins, in Beckett's dystopian vision of the human condition near its wits' end.

The first time I saw this play I was 12 or 13, and it was a play reading at a nearby girls' school. The second time, I was 18 and it was produced at my own school. I think it's fair to say that neither production really managed to get beyond the sheer bleakness of the situation to the manic humour running through it. I saw a production at Trinity College, Dublin many years later, and it was a revelation. The most surprising thing was the lyricism of much of the language, which for me was unlocked by the Irish lilt of the actors in Dublin. This was possibly the most important factor missing from the attempts of Australian schoolchildren to grapple with the text.

The Boy Friend

by Sandy Wilson

seen at the Menier Chocolate Factory on 16 February 2020

Matthew White directs this fizzing revival of Sandy Wilson's 1953 musical The Boy Friend, with Amara Okereke as PollyBrown, Dylan Mason as Tony Brocklehurst, Jack Butterworth as Bobby Van Husen, Tiffany Graves as Hortense, Janie Dee as Madame DuBonnet, Gabrielle Lewis-Dodson as Maisie  and Adrian Edmonson as Lord Brockenhurst, with an excellent supporting cast of singer/dancers. The production is designed by Paul Farnsworth with lighting by Paul Anderson, and the orchestra is led by Sion Beck.

The Sugar Syndrome

by Lucy Prebble

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 6 February 2020

Oscar Toeman directs Jessica Rhodes as Dani Carter, Ali Barouti as Lewis Sampson, John Hollingworth as Tim Saunders and Alexandra Gilbreath as Jan Carter (Dani's mother) in this first London revival of Lucy Prebble's first play, in which a teenager navigates her way from the often illusory world of chatrooms to encounters with the real people behind the names - encounters which may be more exciting but also more perilous.

The play opens with sounds familiar to older users of computers but probably completely foreign to those who have no idea of the tedium of dial-up phone connections. Actors prowl around the edge of the stage in dim blue light when they are in a chatroom, but use a lower central acting space when in the real world. Though the conversations between mother and daughter indicate a level of technology now long superseded, the issues and tensions in the play are still strikingly relevant and disturbing. 

Bran Nue Dae

by Jimmy Chi and Kuckles

seen at the Riverside Theatre (Parramatta) on 16 January 2020

Andrew Ross directs this revival of the thirty-year-old Aboriginal musical Bran Nue Dae with Ernie Dingo as Uncle Tadpole and Marcus Corowa as his nephew Willie, with musical direction by Michael Mavromatis and Patrick Bin Amat. It is part of the festival of Sydney

Willie, expelled from a Catholic school in Perth after antagonising the fierce pastor there, determines to travel back to his home town of Broome though somewhat nervous of meeting his mother and explaining his situation to her. He meets an older Aboriginal man, Uncle Tadpole, who decides to travel with him, and they hitch a ride with two hippies, a somewhat clueless young German and his Australian girlfriend. Their picaresque journey northwards, the naive Willie's education in matters of the heart, and their reception in Broome, form the basic story, but the chief glory of the show is the infectiously enjoyable music, exuberantly sung and danced by the company.

Anthem

by Andrew Bovell, Patricia Cornelius, Melissa Reeves, Christos Tsiolkas and Irine Vela, with assistance by Bryan Andy

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney) on 15 January 2020

Susie Dee directs a cast of fourteen in this work of joint authorship presenting a slice of various Australian lives as crystallised on train journeys made (mostly) in Melbourne. Each author created scenes from observed situations on trains, the results being woven together as a series of interlinked episodes unified by musical threads composed by Irine Vela.

A previous project from 1998 called Who's Afraid of the Working Class? has provided the springboard for the current work, which the authors claim to be tougher, with 'no moments of redemption or reassurance .... unrelenting in the conclusions it draws'. They are certainly right about the tone, which veers from rueful acceptance of the grind of commuting on crowded trains to the raw anger of cultural and class repression with very few lighter moments to relieve the sense of frustration and rage hiding barely beneath the surface. 

The White Album

by Joan Didion

seen at the Roslyn Packer Theatre (Sydney) on 11 January 2020

Lars Jan and the Early Morning Opera group devised this staged adaptation of Joan Didion's celebrated essay on culture and counter-culture in the 1960s, with Mia Barron taking the principal part of reciting the text, five others taking minor parts, and a score or so of 'volunteers' providing the crowd background. It is part of this year's Sydney Festival.

On a bare stage with a wide box-like space at the back fronted by perspex floor-to-ceiling windows and sliding doors people mill about until the performance starts. Then an introductory exercise stills the cast (and the audience) and the recitation begins. Some aspects of the events Didion recounts and ruminates upon are acted out, or emblematically evoked, either on the stage or within the box: there is a particularly effective use of the white wall at the back to create slogans during the sequence concerning university sit-ins, and a slow motion enactment of gun violence in relation to the Manson murders.