The Misfortune of the English

by Pamela Carter

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 26 May 2022

Oscar Toeman directs Hubert Burton as Harrison, Vinnie Heaven as Eaton, Matthew Tennyson as Lyons, and Éva Magyar as a tour guide in Pamela Carter's new play The Misfortune of the English, concerning the fateful excursion of some twenty-seven London schoolboys in the Black Forest in 1936, during which five of them died as the result of an ill-adivsed hike into a snowstorm.

Politics swirled around the tragedy, with the Nazi government extolling the role of boys from the local Hitler Youth in rescuing many of the English boys (ignoring the contribution of the adults involved), and the teacher who led the expedition later being exonerated of any culpability though he ignored the advice of locals warning him of the oncoming storm.

The play however is focussed on three of the boys and their immediate experience setting out on the day of the hike. Secure in their Englishness, buoyed up by the inspirational ethos of their school (the Strand School of London, imitating the great public schools in its mission to produce men of good character) and the charismatic flair of their teacher, they reveal a turn of mind all too easy to parody in these more cynical days, but our sympathy is caught by the boys' guileless enthusiasm and amusingly patronising willingness to explain themselves (and their Latin). The encroaching horror of the situation is masked by their breezy assumption that all will be well, and their creeping doubts are tempered by esprit de corps and a fateful uwillingness to display weakness to their fellows.

Dressed in schoolboy grey trousers and maroon jackets (Lyons is still in short trousers, to his mortification), amused by the foreignness of German customs, flattered to be consulted as to hiking plans rather than being told what to do, but completely unaware of the bias in the way proposals are phrased, the boys are a mixture of high hope, woeful naivety and misplaced self confidence. Pamela Carter is concerned to extrapolate from this particular story to a more general exposure of the inherent flaws in the character building so beloved by adults. The damage runs unchecked through the enthusiasms of the boys as they explain how all is right with the world in which they feel that acknowledgement of their privileged position is sufficent guarantee that they will always be safe.

With such a careful evocation of attitudes which most people nowadays would find antiquated, and a general attention to the kinds of ideas the boys would have espoused and the ways in whih they would express them, it was jarring to hear the occasional modern idiom, most notably describing a popular boy as 'cool' and referring to 'out of the box thinking'. Apart from these lapses the period was well observed, while the young actors playing the boys caught the infectious enthusiasms of early adolescence as well as its determination not to admit to weakness or ignorance. With no adults actually embodied on stage (the guide hailed from modern times) the approaching disaster felt cruelly impersonal, as indeed it plausibly might have seemed to the boys who were not really participating in any of the discussions between their beloved teacher and the incredulous locals. The question of adult culpability was not the focus of the play, so it was wisely avoided.

At times there wass too much circumstantial information being smuggled through the boys' repartee, and it perhaps reduced the tension too much to know in advance the fates of the boys on stage, but the play nonetheless hit home in both its general critique of unthinking masculine pride and in the personal tragedy befalling the hikers.

Straight Line Crazy

by David Hare

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 19 May 2022

Nicholas Hytner directs Ralph Fiennes as Robert Moses in David Hare's new play about the controversial and powerful New York urban planner whose projects were virtually unstoppable for nearly thirty years (1924 to 1963) despite increasing doubts about their efficacy or necessity. While proclaiming that his work was for the benefit of ordinary people he had no hesitation in destroying communities to implement his plans. Many of these areas were slums, but the relocations to outlying suburbs were nonetheless brutal. 

For many years Moses had the support of the New York State Governor Al Smith (Danny Webb) though the play suggests that Smith often (or always) felt outwitted by Moses. He also demanded absolute loyalty to his wishes and plans from his staff, here represented by Ariel Porter (Samuel Barnett) and Finnuala Connell (Siobhán Cullen). By the end of his effective career these two had devoted their lives to him and were practically burnt out; finally Finnuala resigns but Moses is incapable of understanding her reasons for doing so, or of realising that the new middle class activism already awakening in the 1950s is too strong even for him.

As a portrait of a masterful man in the early stages of his career (the first half of the play) and later as he fails to recognise the changed times and the increasing power of the forces opposing him (the second half) Straight Line Crazy offers an intriguing and often thrilling character study, brilliantly embodied in Ralph Fiennes's performance. The man is always restless, opinionated, certain of the correctness of his views both in the matter of town planning and in how to manipulate weaker people; Fiennes prowls around the stage barely able to contain his energy while his underlings learn to live and work with this force of nature, whether thrilled or appalled by his vision. 

This has to rank as one of Hare's better plays, and the production does it magnificent justice.

Age of Rage

after Euripides and Aeschylus

seen at the Barbican Theatre on 8 May2022

Gerard Koolschijn and Ivo van Hove have devised an epic retelling of the misfortunes of the House of Atreus and the depredations of the Trojan War based on several plays by Euripides and the Agamemnon of Aeschylus. Van Hove's usual collaborator Jan Versweyveld designed the production, a bare stage with scaffolding at either side for percussion instrumentalists, an area behind a huge mesh screen at the back, apparently the site of nefarious goings-on, and a gangway above allowing for various bodies to be winched out of sight.

It is not, of course, a happy story; indeed it descends into ever more revolting brutality.

As the audience filed in a complex family tree was being projected onto the mesh screen showing the relationships between the Greek characters, many of whom had Zeus as a forebear. The disasters befalling the house of Atreus span many generations, including two occasions when children were murdered and served in feasts to unsuspecting dinner guests. But this is all background: the particular 'age of rage' that we are to witness really begins with the sacrifice of Agamemnon's daughter Iphigeneia, required by the goddess Artemis before she will allow favourable winds so that the Greek fleet (the 'thousand ships') can sail to Troy. The first major action of the play is thus a recasting of Euripides's Iphigeneia in Aulis. 

We were spared a genealogy of the Trojans since they appear only as victims and potential slaves, mainly women apart from the already murdered Polydorus and the hapless boy Astyanax thrown from the walls to his death. These episodes are taken from Hecuba and The Women of Troy, two more plays by Euripides, though the tragic figure of Andromache, the widow of the Trojan prince Hector and mother of Astyanax, was not mentioned. The sacrifice of another girl, Hecuba's youngest daughter Polyxena, to placate the soul of Achilles was a chilling parallel to the initiating obscenity of Iphigeneia's death, underscored here by having both parts played by the same actress (she also represented the dead Trojan boys).

Aeschylus's Agamemnon provided the source for the next scenes in which the general and king is killed by his wife Clytemnestra on his return from Troy. He is accompanied by the hapless Cassandra who can foresee her fate but persuade no-one to believe her, while the queen is abetted by her husband's cousin Aegisthus, eager to pursue his own part in the family feud in order to regain power in Mycenae.

In the second half of the play we return to Euripides (his Orestes and Electra) as a source for the unedifying story of the children of Agamemnon and Clytemnestra buckling under the strain of needing to avenge their father's death at the cost of killing their mother. The gruesome task achieved, Orestes and Electra become unhinged in guilt and embark on further atrocities until providentially stopped by the intervention of Apollo. The less sensational and more profound version of this part of the story devised by Aeschylus does not really suit the message of Age of Rage that violence leads to ever more violence, and that state-sanctioned violence in one generaton too easily permits personal savagery in the next to go unchecked.

There is a huge amount of sheer narrative to take on board here; I am familiar with the original plays and with other literature both classical and modern dealing with these stories, so I found it easy enough to keep track, but I wonder how easy it was for someone new to the tale. The production had enormous energy, with pulsating music and frenetic dancing at climactic points, and gentler percussive effects building tension during the lengthy expositions. Many of the male actors took several parts by necessity, but the powerful doublings were of Ilke Paddenbourg as the female victims noted above, and of Chris Nietvelt as Clytemnestra and Helen (who were sisters).

There is a formal difficulty in adapting Greek tragedy to the modern stage, which here was largely solved by stripping back the choric odes in order to concentrate on the narrative, while indicating the ritual aspects of performance by the use of music and dance, and by often having almost mute witnesses on stage who occasionally contributed to the dialogue. But there is a tonal difficulty as well in trying to yoke Aeschylus and Euripides together in a single production. These are two playwrights who used the familiar myths and legends to very different dramatic ends, and the peculiar power of the Agamemnon is diminished by its being too closely linked to the Iphigeneia story even though it is entirely plausible to do so in a panoramic telling of the family history. 

The two explicit interventions by deities were the least convincing episodes. In the first, Iphigeneia is said to be miraculously replaced by a hind at the last moment before her sacrifice. This allows for the later story in which she is a priestess in Taurus (on the Black Sea), but renders less effective her sacrifice as an explanation of Clytemnestra's hostility to Agamemnon: though we are told of this divine intervention no-one on stage can take any comfort from it or even have any knowledge of it.

At the end of the play Apollo appears in order to stop Orestes and Electra in their tracks, promising that Orestes will find judicial vindication and perhaps a measure of personal peace in Athens (he says nothing to comfort Electra). Here, Apollo was just another young man on the stage, and there was no attempt to invest his words with any divine authority. Consequently his appearance raised a few unfortunate giggles in the audience, and his intervention seemed merely perfunctory. (It is often proposed that Euripides used the deus ex machina convention ironically, but this was not the way to bring an Age of Rage to a convincing conclusion.)

The performance was given in Dutch by members of the Internationaal Theater Amsterdam, with English surtitles: only a minor inconvenience as far as understanding was concerned, but perhaps vocal nuance was inevitably a casualty in a production lasting nearly four hours.

The Ocean at the End of the Lane

adapted by Joel Horwood from Neil Gaiman's novel

seen at the Duke of York's Theatre on 28 April 2022

Katy Hudd directs Tom Mackley as Boy (on the night I attended), Nia Towle as Lettie Hempstock, Nicholas Tennant as the boy's father, Grace Hogg-Robinson as his sister, Penny Layden as old Mrs Hempstock, Siubhan Harrison as Ginnie Hempstock (her daughter and Lettie's mother) and Laura Rogers as Ursula in this imaginative adaptation of Neil Gaiman's novel concerning the fateful irruption of a malignant spirit into the lives of the boy and his family, and the efforts of the mysterious Hempstocks to control and banish it.

The play begins as a reminiscence, the boy returning to his childhood home as a grown man while attending his father's funeral, but very soon we are in the thick of the real story as the boy meets and befriends the young girl Lettie just after having seen the body of the family lodger who had committed suicide. Though Gaiman's novels are aimed at a fairly young readership he does not pull his punches with some dark subjects; the boy has a panicked response which his father tries to assuage, but with typical English reticence much of the father's strategy is a matter of deflection. The Hempstocks seem preternaturally aware of the boy's predicament, but in their own way they are also not forthcoming, leaving him both intrigued and confused.

Lettie views the local village duckpond as an ocean, and this capacity, both fey and childlike, to see strange possibilities in the ordinary world is crucial in developing the atmosphere of the play and convincing us of the strange emanations which she and her family feel bound to monitor and control. The boy's means of coming to terms with the strangeness are bound up with his immersion in the Narnia books of C.S.Lewis (as Gaiman himself was), while his sister is of a more practical disposition: the tension between the siblings is palpable and convincing. When the strange spirit accidentally unleased on the world takes human form as the intrusive Ursula, the 'wicked stepmother' aspect of so many fairy tales takes on an all-too-believable abusive form in the modern world.

With an atmospheric use of the simplest stage effects - lighting, noise, dark shapes and diaphonous swirling sheets of fabric, the work of Fly Davis (set) and Jamie Harrison ('magic and illusions') among others - the numinous world threatening the boy and his family is thrillingly evoked, and the story resolves itself with a muted sense of the need for willing sacrifice and the consequent loss to those left behind. After the somewhat hectoring tone of Marys Seacole seen in the afternoon of the same day, it was a pleasure to witness masterly storytelling on stage.

Marys Seacole

by Jackie Sibblies Drury

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 28 April 2022

Nadia Latif directs Déja J. Bowens, Llewella Gideon, Kayla Meikle, Esther Smith, Olivia Williams and Susan Wooldridge in Jackie Sibblies Drury's new play Marys Seacole which investigates not only the career of the original Mary Seacole, a Jamaican who travelled to the Crimea in the 1850s to provide nursing assistance during the war (where she was rebuffed by Florence Nightingale), but also the wider experience of coloured people as carers and medical staff in the modern world.

In a verstile set designed by Tom Scutt we are sometimes in an NHS ward, sometimes in an anonymous park, sometimes in Jamaica, sometimes in the Crimea, and sometimes apparently in the dark recesses of the mind of the generic 'Mary' (Kayla Meikle). The transitions are often abrupt, and the play suffers from becoming too like a series of vignettes none of which have sufficient time to develop into truly engrossing drama. Everything becomes subsumed in the overarching theme of twisted mother-daughter relationships and general racial prejudice, with the individual stories never adequately resolved.

The opening, which gives the impression of being a prologue to a play focussed on Mary Seacole, turns out to be a monologue in which episodes which could have formed the following scenes turn out to be only told to us. The scene in a modern hosptial or care home which follows sets up all sorts of tensions between three generations (a resident, daughter and gradndaughter), and adds the unpleasantness of barely concealed racism towards the staff, but fades from our attention as other matters are addressed. An almost phantasmagoric scene in which broken soldiers lie scattered across the floor while fragments of the dialogue in earlier scenes jostle with each other at shouting pitch gives an alarming impression of a mind in turmoil and stress, but at the cost of wearing down the audience with relentless noise.

All in all, I was not particularly satisfied with this production. After the glorious dramatic coherence of The Corn is Green seeen a few days earlier, on this occasion I felt I was too often present at a hectoring lecture rather than a truly developed play.