other theatres

Anything Goes by Cole Porter (seen December 13)

This production is playing at the Sheffield Crucible before touring.

The show opens in  bar with a pianist and trumpeter playing familiar tunes while the bartender cleans glasses and the first customers turn up – and we are immediately involved in the first of several glorious Cole Porter numbers, ‘I Get a Kick Out of You’. The motor of the story (such as it is) is set with Billy’s callous chat with Reno; the instrumentalists disappear below (the pianist to become the conductor of an invisible orchestra); the curtain on which the bar window is painted drops to reveal the SS America, and we on the giddy voyage of a 1930s musical, all confection, wit and lyricism. 

The set brilliantly allows the deck of the ship to start as the back wall, with a beautifully tiled vertical plunge pool, and splay out to the thrust stage of the theatre, rather like a frozen (and far less threatening) moment in a dream sequence from Christopher Nolan’s film ‘Inception’.

This is an excellent space for the high-spirited numbers to be staged and the farcical nature of the plot to be revealed – all disguises, subterfuges, mistaken identities, with a sharp dig at celebrity culture, and a couple of unexpected twists to get all the right couples matched. The comedy is a bit forced and frantic at times, but the musical numbers excuse everything. Along the way, ‘It’s De-lively’ , ‘You’re the Top’, ‘Anything Goes’, ‘Blow, Gabriel, Blow’ – the tunes just keep coming, the high energy company keep tapping, and a good time is had by all.

The modern style for musicals demands amplification, so everyone had a small mike attached, in very varying degrees of obviousness. These pieces used to be sung without such aides, though perhaps the acoustic required is not available in venues like the Crucible. But what has happened? Are voices not trained any more? Though modern amplification is far more subtle than it was when first introduced, this still leads to some flatness at times, particularly in the choruses when the voices just did not seem to emanate from individuals at all – the men’s voices less personal than the women’s as it happened.

However, carping at this trend is useless, and on its own terms the show is a wonderful Christmas musical entertainment with sharp choreography and winning performances.

Pomona by Alistair McDowall (seen November 19)

This is a new play performed at the Orange Tree Theatre in Richmond, an intimate in-the-round acting space.

Pomona is a small derelict island in central Manchester, surrounded by roads and canals, and used here as the setting for unnerving and indeed almost unspeakable urban crimes and mystery. The play is an uninterrupted series of scenes which appear at first hardly related, but which gradually cohere into a nightmarish vision of urban decay, twisted relationships and power plays, and quest motifs played out through RPGs.

The acting space is a square concrete pit with a drain in the middle – at one stage buckets of red liquid are sluiced across this space after an appalling fight between two security guards who are roughing each other up in an attempt to cover for their botched assignment. At other times a sinister yellow light shines up through the drain, inviting uneasy speculation as to what might be happening below.

The theatre itself has been painted a depressing dark grey, and is lit by neon lights while the audience assembles; the lights are disconcertingly malfunctioning from time to time, while a low thrum helps to increase the sense of menace. It is a far cry from the warm and friendly atmosphere generated in the same space at the beginning of the year for the masterful three-part adaptation of ‘Middlemarch’, and heralds the brilliant use of space, light and sound by the technical team throughout this production.

It is hard on a single viewing to grasp all the complex interrelationships of the scenes, though there are clues enough for the sharply observant. The most important point to realise is that the scenes are not presented in a straightforward order, though there is equally no strong sense of flashbacks to help sort out the actual timeline. Also there are twin sisters who do not meet, but are played by the same actress (Nadia Clifford).

Ollie, the first sister we see, has a bizarre encounter with Zeppo (Guy Rhys), a property magnate who looks like a vagrant and subsists on chicken nuggets. He declines to help her in her search, beyond giving some advice about Pomona, but his rant about ‘Raiders of the Lost Ark’, which opens the play, is a startling beginning to the increasingly grim developments that await us.

The younger security guard Charlie (Sam Swann) is also a games geek, and a strange girl Keaton (Sarah Middleton) comes to his ‘club’ (the first applicant after four weeks of Charlie’ having posted flyers about the town). He leads her on a role-playing adventure which eerily echoes the search by Ollie for her missing sister, though it is cast in conventional Dungeons and Dragons fantasy mode. The sister’s involvement in a brothel, and its catastrophic consequences for both her and for Fay (Rebecca Humphries), another prostitute, are interspersed with the game, with conversations between Charlie and his fellow guard Moe (Sean Rigby), and with chilling scenes involving the brothel madam (Grace Thurgood) with the guards, with Fay, and with Keaton.

Pointless really to try to summarise all this, as the pace of the production makes it hard to hold everything correctly in one’s head at one viewing – but in some ways this is not a disadvantage, since the general sense of dread and unpleasantness is well served by the intercutting scenes, and by the mordant comedy which occasionally flashes forth. What particularly impresses is the fabulous use of the space, the extraordinary effectiveness of occasional blackouts, and the assurance of the cast in their movement, their jitteriness, their wary rapprochements. At times the space seemed really crowded, though there were only seven in the cast, and at others, with only two on stage, the physical gulfs between them seemed vast.

It is very interesting that the Mancunian accents were barely a problem, in contrast to the variety of accents used in ‘Our Town’ at the Almeida, perhaps because here they were more uniform (though not all equally strong) and because the acoustic of the smaller space was better (the Almeida, in transforming its usual configuration into a thrust stage, had possibly played havoc with its natural acoustic, often giving the impression that actors were almost shouting instead of projecting more skilfully). In ‘Pomona’ some of the quieter moments, and also some of the more panic-stricken, were extremely effective in the inflections used by the cast.

It’s a play that demands close attention; but, this once given, there are some extremely disquieting themes to deal with, and the skill of the piece is that, once one’s attention is caught, one cannot avoid facing the unpleasant turns of the story – it is too late to shy away.

Our Town by Thornton Wilder (seen November 17)

A production at the Almeida Theatre by David Cromer, with a local cast but closely based on his American productions in Chicago and New York, which take a fresh look at this much-loved (or at any rate much-performed) American classic from 1938.

The play is famously destabilising in that it employs no conventional sets – just a few props such as tables and chairs, with many household devices and activities mimed as necessary – and it makes use of a ‘Stage Manager’ who constantly sets the scene, provides facts about ‘our town’, interrupts scenes when they have performed their function, and addresses the audience directly with various homilies and observations.

The effect of this is curiously universalising and yet at the same time intensely poignant. Daily routines in a backwater conservative New Hampshire township seem at first completely mundane, but there is a cumulative and powerful sense of life being lived amidst the humdrum, and it seems we have an opportunity to see important aspects of human relationships playing out before us without the distraction of idiosyncratic character or plot-driven artifice getting in the way. The three acts show town life in 1901, a wedding in 1904 and a funeral in 1913, but the stage manager makes a number of comments about events which take place in between and even up to twenty years afterwards.

The play must have seemed extraordinary in 1938, but is so well known now in the United States that it can hardly seem new. This is what David Cromer’s production sets out to rectify, by taking its fresh look. Without being fully aware of the American theatrical tradition, which apparently includes no end of high school productions of varying quality, it is hard to know exactly what is being reacted against, and hard to judge whether the response in this production is effective. For the London production, Cromer took the decision to allow his cast to speak in their native accents, though he takes the role of the Stage Manager himself with a beautifully warm and friendly American accent. The resulting jumble of accents is a little disconcerting at first, but not after all what one is now unused to in many parts of Britain.

The production is dressed in a neutrally modern way – apparently for this version there was more of a concession to the idea of school uniforms for the children than the designer has bothered with for the American incarnations. I am not sure that this was a totally successful idea, though the general style of the production would have made strict period costumes an anomaly. However, it struck me that the town doctor was too much dressed down for his position in the town, as he was wearing an open-necked lumberjack’s shirt for the first act.

The visual discrepancy between early twentieth and early twenty-first century dress styles perhaps had its parallel in the uneasy mix between modern and earlier ways of expressing oneself and one’s emotions in family and social settings.

The principal drawback, to my mind, is that a number of the characters were simply too bolshie, often delivering their lines in a strident or over-emotional way – especially Emily Webb, who seemed too highly strung in her relationship to her mother, and in her crucial scene with George when she first criticises his character. Here, the modern teenage style of self-assured bossiness made it hard to credit that she was speaking out of her own wounded pride in George, rather than in the spirit of the girls whose criticism of George stung her as well. She barely deserved George’s utterly disarming gratitude.

In an earlier scene Dr Gibb reproves his son George for failing to cut wood for his mother. Again, the tone was too strident – Dr Gibb should hardly have to raise his voice to make the point, having masterfully got George to avow his complete readiness to do whatever is necessary to run a farm, and then to say, ‘I heard a strange sound this afternoon – the sound of your mother chopping her own wood’. Certainly he is angry, but I think his raised voice over dramatized the situation and made it harder to see that George’s remorse was that of a good-natured boy caught out by his own unthinkingness, rather than that of a difficult teenager undergoing a parental rebuke.

The third act is perhaps the most difficult to deal with, as Wilder includes the deceased of the town resting in their cemetery on the hill and weaves their implacable detachment into the fabric of the play. It is another audacious move, as our expectations of dealing directly with a family tragedy are completely subverted by the focus on the newly dead Emily as she comes to terms with the impossibility of returning to life as she knew it. Her vain attempt to relive a normal but happy day ends in a panicked disappointment followed by the beginnings of the acceptance that has led all the town dead to endure looking forward to the next thing rather than back on their own petty lives. The grief-stricken George does at last appear, sobbing at Emily’s grave, and though it is deeply distressing, Emily can only say, ‘They don’t’ understand, the living, do they?’ and Mrs Gibbs, also dead these several years, can only say, ‘No, they don’t’.

Two things got in the way of the full force of this amazing conclusion. One is the controversial ‘coup de theatre’ introduced to this production. This is a complete departure from the play's style, as part of the effort to free the play from its own now too strong theatrical tradition, but I think it distracted us too much from the force of Emily’s realisation of her predicament. Partly this was a matter of the visual cues we were suddenly too busy taking in, and partly it was due to the physical placing of the actors for this sequence, which weakened the directness of the performances and altered the acoustic of the theatre too abruptly for any subtlety to come through.

The second problem was again Emily’s own performance style, which was once more rather too headlong and headstrong for us to have the time we needed to understand what she was saying. This was a shame, because it both sabotaged the sheer panic of her realisation that everything was going too fast, and also it reduced the full force of her eventual acceptance of the mode of ‘existence’ of the town’s dead.

It is arguable, of course, that my response to what I have taken to be the awkwardness of tone in several crucial scenes – the ‘father’s rebuke’ scene, the ‘soda fountain scene’ and the ‘reliving’ scene – is precisely what this production is aiming for. In the previous productions of ‘Our Town’ that I have seen – an American TV adaptation in the late 1970s, and a high school production in Sydney in the mid 1980s – the brilliance of the play has been the distilled clarity of scenes such as these, uncluttered by any sense of tantrum, ill-will, self-will or self-deception. Perhaps my view of them has been sentimentalised over the years, and some sense of passionate human fallibility is needed to lift them out of cliché and dramatic torpor – but I am not convinced. The more the cast here attempted to instil human specifics into these scenes, the more like ciphers they became, the harder it was to see the ordinariness that Wilder wished to show us in ‘Our Town’. 

Electra by Sophocles (seen November 8)

The version by Frank McGuiness, originally prepared for Zoe Wanamaker in 1997, is used here by Kristin Scott Thomas at The Old Vic.

Scott Thomas portrays Electra as damaged, vengeful and volatile, but not with the absolutely ravaged and draining physicality of Fiona Shaw at the Riverside Studios many years ago. There is evidence of physical abuse (bruises? Cigarette burns?) on her forearms, to which attention is only drawn tangentially, though an alert audience member would notice them sooner.

The supporting cast includes Diana Quick as an imperious and conflicted Clytemnestra, with the difficult tasks of being both saddened and gladdened by the false news of her son’s death, and of providing some sort of justification for her exasperation with her daughter. Orestes is played by Jack Lowden, an extremely capable young actor (brilliant in the Almeida production of Ibsen’s Ghosts in 2013/14) who also has a difficult task in listening to Electra’s outpouring of grief at his supposed death and then admitting that after all he is alive. All this is managed extremely well in a circular space – the theatre reconfigured to be in the round.  

The conventions of Greek tragedy remain challenging to modern audiences - how to manage the Chorus, here played by three women speaking in turn rather than in unison; how to manage the long speeches where nowadays we would expect dramatic dialogue; how, in this case, to believe in Orestes' probity when he does not more quickly stop Electra's outpouring of grief at his supposed death; and again, how to take the recognition scene entirely seriously. This production surmounted these hurdles with some marvellous touches - Orestes looked convincingly both agonised and slightly ashamed of his subterfuge, and Electra confirmed her recognition not so much by looking at a grown man to see the infant she had sent to safety, but rather by smelling him and his clothing, using as it were a more primitive sense to convince herself of the turn in her fortune.