Cymbeline

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 18 January 2025

Jennifer Tang directs Cymbeline, one of Shakespeare's late plays, which is full of incident, misunderstandings, disguises, and an almost absurd number of resolutions: a description of the plot on the page makes it seem utterly chaotic and implausible, but in performance (if well done) it can be fun, exciting, distressing and moving by turns - even though it is still implausible.

So it proves in this production in the intimate candle-lit space of the Sam Wanamaker theatre, the second time I have seen the play produced here (see the review of 12 March 2016). Cymbeline, a contemporary of Caesar Augustus, is facing a Roman invasion (not actually historical in Augustus's time), while his daughter Imogen (or now more commonly Innogen) has earned his wrath by marrying a commoner (of Roman extraction to boot); and his consort is the classic wicked stepmother with an uncouth son of her own (the aptly named Cloten, played by Jordan Mifsúd) who has designs on the hapless princess.

Here, in an ingenious twist to the political opposition between Britons and Romans, the whole society is imagined as being a matriarchy, and Cymbeline (Martina Laird) is the Queen rather than the King of Britain. Furthermore, Innogen's unapproved marriage is to a woman, an arrangement not remarked on in any way apart from the fact that it does not have the Queen's blessing (and is an obstacle to Cloten's desires). All the rituals of the court, and its religious rites, are female-oriented, with all references to Jupiter in the text replaced with prayers and invocations to Gaia. It's a remarkably effective idea to soften the effect of some significant 'gender-blind' casting, and it proves an intelligent way of creating a 'British' culture in preference to stereotyped Druidism.

Innogen (Gabrielle Brooks) and Posthumus (Nadi Kem-Sayfi) are parted almost as soon as they are married, and Posthumus gets involved in a rash wager that Innogen is chaste and faithful, which the scheming Iachimo (Piero Niel-Mee) apparently disproves by smuggling himself into her bedchamber and taking an inventory of its design and of Innogen's distinctive mole. The masculine aura of this shoddy wager is preserved even with Posthumus being female, and it is the trigger for much of the subsequent plot development.

Soon many of the characters are in Wales, well away from the court; the setting should be the wild hillsides, which is of course impossible in the playhouse. Nonetheless the verve of the production encourages indulgence on this point as on so many others, not least the propensity for several characters to adopt or be given false names and disguises which delay any chance of untangling all the cross-purposes. Even though the fact that Innogen mistakes Colton's headless body for that of Posthumus, simply because Cloten is wearing Posthumus's clothes, is rendered doubly implausible since one was a man and the other a woman, in the rush of events and the momentary revulsion inherent in the whole scene the confusion is allowed to pass.

In a series of revelations and explanations which provoke delighted hilarity in the audience, everyone finds out everything they need to know. With just the right amount of seriousness in the cast, these denouements pass muster, and all is as it should be - even the conniving Iachimo has a chance to reform. As Oscar Wilde much later had it, "the good end happily and the bad unhappily: that is the meaning of Fiction" .

While the Sun Shines

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 29 November 2021

Paul Miller directs a revival of one of the Orange Tree's most successful productions, Terence Rattigan's farce While the Sun Shines, first seen in 2019. Four of the original cast reprise their roles - Paul Labey as the Earl of Harpenden, John Hudson as his manservant Horton, Michael Lumsden as his prospective father-in-law the Duke of Ayr & Stirling, and Jordan Mifsúd as the French Lieutenant Colbert - while three new cast members take the other roles - Rebecca Collingwood as the Earl's fiancée Lady Elizabeth Randall, Sophie Khan Levy as Mabel Crum (an independent woman of considerable acuity), and Conor Glean as the American Lieutenant Mulvaney.

It's a great pleasure to see again this entertaining production of an intricately plotted play in which the surface confusions and rivalries, which could have been merely superficial nonsense, unexpectedly reveal deeper truths about the workings of society and the pitfalls of over-hasty presumptions about how people will behave. There is something Shavian about the twists and turns by which the characters navigate the perils of social expectation and personal happiness.

See also my review of the original production at 

https://nicholasatthetheatre.blogspot.com/2019/06/while-sun-shines.html#more

Shaw Shorts

 by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 24 June 2020

Two short plays by Bernard Shaw, How He Lied to Her Husband (written in 1904 as a curtain raiser to Man of Destiny) and Overruled (written in 1912 for an evening of short pieces by various playwrights) herald the welcome return of live theatre with a small audience to this wonderful theatre in Richmond. 

Paul Miller, the artistic director of the Orange Tree, has form in reviving the classics of British drama, not least several scintillating productions of plays by Shaw. Here, two pieces rarely performed because they are so short - and because the idea of a 'curtain raiser' would probably be incomprehensible to a modern audience and unthinkable financially - are given the chance to remind us of Shaw's brilliant use of an absurd situation to expose the hypocrisies of social convention.

In How He Lied to Her Husband Henry Apjohn (Joe Bolland) has written sonnets in praise of Aurora Bompas (Dorothea Myer-Bennett). She has mislaid them, sure that her sister-in-law has purloined them and will show her husband Teddy (Jordan Mifsúd). In just a few turns of dialogue the dreamy romanticism that allows Henry to idolise Aurora is skewered by the curious mixture of carelessness and worldly wisdom exhibited by Aurora. The moment when social reality really begins to collide with high-flown sentiment is wonderfully managed by the shift of the lovers from using their christian names to using their formal titles ('Mr Apjohn', 'Mrs Bompas'), a social nicety with almost no practical force nowadays, but one which Shaw's unerring instinct for dramatic shorthand can still bring into play for an attentive audience. 

Masculine pretensions are further skewered by the arrival of Teddy Bompas. Has he seen the poems? Will he be outraged? Who will prevail in a fistfight? He is more angry when Apjohn attempts to deny that the sonnets were written to his wife than when he finally confesses that they have been - though the anger may be entirely confected. The suggestion that his wife is not worth writing love poems to is far more wounding than the threat of a love affair disrupting his marriage. It is brillint anarchic stuff, perfectly suited to a thirty minute exposition.

In Overruled Gregory Lunn (Alex Bhat) and Mrs Juno (Hara Yannas) have been conducting a shipboard romance - but Lunn is appalled to discover that he has mistaken Mrs Juno for a widow. With a ridiculous yelp he squawks that he has broken a sacred promise to his mother never to flirt with a married woman. Voices which each recognises as their respective spouses cause a flurry of alarm, but it transpires that Sibthorpe Juno (Jordan Mifsúd) and Mrs Lunn (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) have also been romancing on a cruise liner travelling in the opposite direction around the world. When the two couples meet, the ladies almost immediately form an urbane alliance (one thinks of Gwendolen and Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest) while the men desperately try to catch up with the unconventional possibilities of the situation. Shaw subtly indicates his own sympathies by allowing the wives to use the christian names of their husbands (one of them quite ridiculous) but withholding those of the women, thus buttressing them with a subtle authority. Once again, further development is superfluous.

It is so refreshing to see the conventions of 'mere' social comedy used so adroitly to raise issues as serious as the double standards between male and female propriety, the tiresomeness of male presumptions of superiority, and the innate common sense in women's negotiation of the social niceties. Even in a stripped down acting space, with half the seats removed from around the stage and an audience necessarily distanced from one another and facemasked, Shaw's provocative and whimsical humour, wonderfully embodied in this fine cast, still produces a welcome tonic and a challenge to the way we think and behave.

On the cultural front, Shaw and the Orange Tree 2 : pandemic 0 

While the Sun Shines

by Terence Rattigan

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre on 18 June 2019

Paul Miller directs this sparkling revival of one of Rattigan's most successful and popular plays, written in 1943 and set in London - indeed in the celebrated chambers of the Albany off Piccadilly - during the Second World War. In a great ensemble cast Philip Labey plays the Earl of Harpenden, John Hudson his manservant Horton, Julian Moore-Cook the American Lieutenant Mulvaney, Sabrina Bartlett the Earl's fiancée Landy Elisabeth Randall, Michael Lumsden her father the Duke of Ayr & Stirling, Jordan Mifsúd as the French Lieutenant Colbert and Dorothea Myer-Bennett as Mabel Crum.

Misalliance

by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 14 December 2017

Paul Miller directs his third Shaw play at the ever-impressive Orange Tree Theatre (unfortunately I missed his The Philanderer though I saw Widowers' Houses in 2015). The new play fizzes with ideas and with almost absurd social situations, but the witticisms reveal unexpected truths and often surprisingly painful tensions, both between characters, and between the social roles people live by and their own (usually flattering) images they have of themselves.

In the hands of an excellent cast the now-unfashionable wordiness of Shaw is managed with great verve and dexterity; the speed of delivery is perhaps only possible in such an intimate space, but it certainly helps in preventing the play from being bogged down by its own verbiage. What lifts Shavian cleverness into something more probing is the deft revelations of depths of character beneath the surface brilliance of the dialogue. From the peculiar camp narcissism of Rhys Isaac-Jones's Bentley Summerhayes to the worldly-weariness of Simon Shepherd as his father Lord Summerhayes, from the brittle self-righteousness of Jordan Mifsúd's interloper to the bullying suavity of Luke Thallon's Joey Percival, we see people who can experience real pain, which their superficial behaviour can mask but not entirely conceal.