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.

Henry V

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 10 March 2022

Kit Harington plays the King with a supporting cast of fourteen taking all the other roles in Max Webster's production of Henry V, designed by Fly Davis. On a bare stage of four marbled tiers or steps, with a featureless metallic wall at the back which occasionally splits apart in the form of a St George's Cross, the career of the hero king from wastrel prince to victorious military leader is played out with sobering attention to the darker side of his progress.

After the famous Prologue apologising for the paucity of stage effects when dealing with such weighty military and political actions, the low expectations of the new king's character are underscored by the interpolation of part of the first tavern scene between Prince Hal and Falstaff from Henry IV Part One, and the crushing rejection of the latter by the former from Henry IV Part Two. Only then are we presented with Hal's full transformation into King Henry as he listens to the Archbishop of Canterbury's interminable lecture about the Salic Law in France (or properly belonging somewhere further east, as the case may be), its tediousness underlined by a confusing Powerpoint presentation projected onto the back wall. The Dauphin's insulting gift of tennis balls does far more to kindle the King's ire and to convince him to invade France to claim his right to the kingdom.

The play veers beween high politics and the less glamorous life of the ordinary soldiers. Indeed, some of the named infantry were once Prince Hal's tavern friends, and two of them come to a bad end, Bardolph in particular singled out for a judicial hanging which the King watches with apparent impassivity. For this production, which is in modern dress, movement director Benoit Swan Pouffer brought in Tom Leigh, a former Royal Marines Commando, to teach the cast basic military drill and to discuss with them the often traumatic impact of combat. The result can be seen in the intimidating manoeuvres on stage, but also in the pained reactions to some events (in particular the order to kill all the French prisoners at Agincourt, which is brutally performed onstage) and in the wild partying following the battle.

All this helps to sharpen the contrast between the high flown rhetoric of the famous speeches, which are wonderfully delivered by Kit Harington, and the sordid reality of close combat. The mutual incomprehension of the two sides (English and French) is emphasised by having the French characters speak French among themselves, with English translations provided on a screen. This cleverly extends the device used in the scene with Princess Katharine as she struggles to learn English, which is often played for laughs. Here, it is not a matter for laughter, and later the Princess has a decidedly unromantic encounter with the King whose plain-speaking wooing is not the bumbling effort of a stranger to flirting (as he suggests), but rather nothing more than a steely determination to consolidate a business deal no matter what the Princess thinks.

Indeed several scenes often used to lighten the tone here receive a more sober and disturbing turn. Captain Fluellen, usually portrayed as an amusing pedant, is here more of an obsessive, and his baiting of Pistol, forcing him to eat a leek, is is an exercise in sadistic bullying. Luckily for the hapless soldier Williams, who had unwittingly wagered to box the King's ear (not knowing who he was talking to before the battle), the scene in which the King asks Fluellen to bear the exchanged glove was omitted: this Fluellen would probably have shot Williams out of hand. Instead the King and Williams resolve the matter directly without the intervening 'joke'. Everyone is clearly very skittish after the victory; the atmosphere is credibly febrile and the King himself erupts in brittle laughter when he is presented with the account of the slain.

It was inevitable that the play would resonate with the current crisis in Ukraine. 'Once more unto the breach' is the rallying cry of a leader besieging an enemy town, and the King's later threats to the governor of Harfleur are a chilling reminder of what a victorious army can do to a town that did not surrender. It is not possible in view of the shelled urban areas in Ukraine to shrug this off as an example of medieval babarity which the modern world has outgrown. By contrast the great St Crispin's Day speech is the exhortaton of a leader in the face of overwhelming odds (a fact perhaps obscured by the unexpected outcome of the Agincourt battle). This too has its parallel in the events unfolding; the outcome is not yet known. 

In frank acknowledgement of the uneasy parallels between art and life, Kit Harington interrupted the audience applause at the end of the play to explain that there would be a retiring collection for the Red Cross, to which we were invited to contribute. It was generously supported.

Vassa

by Maxim Gorky adapted by Mike Bartlett

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 8 November 2019

Tinuke Craig directs Siobhán Redmond as the matriarch Vassa with Amber James as her daughter Anna, Arthur Hughes and Danny Kirrane as her sons Pavel and Semyon, Michael Gould as her brother-in-law Prokhor and Cyil Nri as her manager Mikhail. Sophie Wu played Lyudmila, Pavel's wife, Kayla Meikle was Natalya, Semyon's wife, and Alexandra Dowling and Daniella Isaacs played the two servants Lipa and Dunya.

In a versatile set designed by Fly Davis, unusually making use of a curtain in this theatre, and allowing for multiple entrance points reminiscent of a farce, the fate of capitalism is played out in miniature as Vassa attepts to preserve the family fortunes from collapse in the face of her husband's imminent death, her brother-in-law's rapacity, and her sons' incompetence. Indeed the staging encourages a view that we are watching a farce, as people erupt on stage, having been eavesdropping at the doors, or else appearing totally unaware of the crisis into which they are plummeting. Vassa herself holds the stage (she is usually on stage) with imperious determination, and even in her absence most people are fearfully aware of her authority.