Force Majeure

adapted by Tim Price from Ruben Östlund's film

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 6 January 2022

Michael Longhurst directs Rory Kinnear as Tomas, Lyndsey Marshall as his wife Ebba, Oliver Savell and Bo Bragason as their children Harry and Vera (in the performance I saw) and Siena Kelly and Sule Rimi as their friends Jenny and Mats in this inventive stage adaptation of the Swedish film Force Majeure released in 2014.

On a fantastically inventive stage designed by Jon Bausor Tomas and his family arrive in a ski resort for a family holiday. The children are fractious, young Harry whining and teenage Vera chilled out, while Ebba ruefully acknowledges to another guest that it is almost imposible to separate her husband from his phone and work commitments. 

Anything could trigger a crisis: an avalanche does the trick, causing Tomas to flip into panicked survivalist mode and then, afterwards, denying his reaction until a video forces him to realise that his memory of events cannot be correct. The impending collapse of his marriage, built as it is on a wearied acceptance of disappointment on the part of his wife, finally forces him to confront his insecurities. In a brilliant counterpoint to his agony, his friend Mats has a soul-searching night arguing with his partner which is a comic tour de force of psychobabble.

It's incredibly ambitious to stage a piece set in a ski resort in the confines of the Donmar stage, but with a steeply raked and white carpeted floor the place is brought to life as various cast members ski unerringly down the slope and into one of the passages used by the audience to reach their seats. In the meantime the crisis afflicting Tomas and his family is played out on the slopes and in their hotel suite. Actors of the calibre of Rory Kinnear and Lyndsey Marshall can be depended on to articulate the emtional rollercoaster of Tomas and Ebba's 'holiday', allowing us to see everything from ridiculousness to self-indulgence to pain, but it is a tribute to the young actors playing their children that sibling brattishness can be so convincingly played and so easily be shown to mask deeper insecurities. Harry can whine with the best of them about his missing sunglasses, but he is clearly anxious when he senses the tensions rising between his parents, while Vera's adolescent stand-offishness masks (as it often does) a deep-seated dependance on the family not being ruffled.

There is a fragile optimism at the end when Harry accusingly asks his father whether he is smoking and Tomas instinctively denies it even while he has a cigarette in his hand. Then he quietly tells his son to ask the question again, and confesses that he is smoking but that he will give it up when they get home. For the first time in years he is not being an invincible man and we can hope that his faltering steps will lead him out of the prison he built himself.

Given the twin dangers of this play wandering into melodrama or mere superficiality it is a credit to all concerned that the balance of humour and agony was finely maintained to produce an enjoyable yet thought provoking entertainment

Constellations 3 and 4

by Nick Payne

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 14 August 2021

The third and fourth pairings in Michael Longhurst's revival of Constellations for the Donmar began performing at the start of the month. In the afternoon I saw Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O'Dowd, while in the evening I saw Omari Douglas and Russell Tovey, the play having been reconfigured for them (mainly by changing names) so that it is about a gay couple.

What astonished me about the afternoon performance was the lightness of touch brought to the piece by the two actors. Chris O'Dowd is perhaps best known as a comic actor, though he gave a remarkable performance as Lenny in Of Mice and Men on Broadway a few years ago (see my review of 20 November 2015). On the other hand I have only seen Anna Maxwell Martin in serious mode, most notably excelling in the difficult part of Esther Summerson in the BBC's 2005 adaptation of Bleak House. She brought an infectious line of self-deprecating humour to the part of Marianne in Constellations, with the most wonderful giggling laughter that could turn in a moment to a heartrending groan of despair. With Chris O'Dowd as a foil the two told the dizzying story of the relationship between Roland and Marianne as a roller-coaster ride between flirtatious humour and almost inarticulate distress: it was really impressive.

In the final version of the production, Emanuel (Manny), played by Omari Douglas, and Roland, played by Russell Tovey, brought a new dynamic to the play; Manny's flirtatiousness had a slightly camp edge, while Roland, older and more cautious, was an excellent partner (the actors are 27 and 39 respectively). The brilliance of the play at exploring the pressures of creating and maintaining a relationship, and the emotional costs involved when external factors intervene, was by no means compromised by its reconfiguration for two men to take the parts.

Inevitably, with the chance to see four versions of the same play in a relatively short period of time, there is the temptation to assert a preference. All four casts performed well, and it was fascinating to enjoy four quite different approaches to the same text - another sign of the play's inherent strength is that it can sustain such varieties of emphasis. I heard two members of the afternoon audience remark that they could not imagine seeing another cast perform it, and I think that for me, too, Anna Maxwell Martin and Chris O'Dowd gave the most satisfying interpretation - but it would be easy to imagine that other people would choose a different pair as their favourite.

Constellations 1 and 2

by Nick Payne

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 3 July 2021

Michael Longhurst revives Nick Payne's play, this time on behalf of the Donmar Warehouse where he is now artistic director, though in a West End theatre since the Donmar itself is currently undergoing a major renovation.

The play is well suited to the current situation in terms of its technical requirements, in that there are only two actors involved, with a small technical team to back them up; also, at only 70 minutes in length, it places a fairly minimal threat in terms of gathering strangers in an interior space for a prolonged period. Many of the seats in the theatre are in any case unoccupied due to current government restrictions.

The beguiling investigation of memory, its significance and fickleness, is further emphaised in this revival by the decision to use four separate casts to play the protagonists. On this occasion I saw Peter Capaldi and Zoe Wanamaker in the afternoon performance, and Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah in the evening performance.

Visually the production is the same as I recall seeing in 2015 (see my review of 24 June 2015 for my account of the play itself and the way it challenges the audience's expectation of following a straightforward narrative). The interest here, therefore, resides in watching two completely different pairs of people interpret the play on the same day: an older couple followed by a younger couple. Inevitably one assumes that the opening scenes in which Ronnie and Marianne tentatively get to know one another are played out with a different hinterland in each case: the nerves of older people making a connection which may or may not be comfortable being fraught, one supposes, with past possibly disappointing experience, whereas the nerves of the younger pair may only arise from inexperience. These contrasting possibilities cast very different lights on what follows.

I felt that there was a drawback with Zoe Wanamaker and Peter Capaldi. They are both distinguished actors, but their styles are also very distinctive, and in a play with so little material pointers - a stage full of balloons, for exanple, rather than any representation of a recognisable space - it is hard to distance onself from the knowledge of who the actors are. Their personal mannerisms are simply too prominent at times. Sheila Atim and Ivanno Jeremiah are not (yet) so well known, though Sheila Atim has an immensely striking physical presence. It seemed to me that the younger pair had an easier time with establishing the flirtatiousness of the two characters, whereas with the older actors the same scenes came across more as social comedy or world-weariness. Consequently I found the second performance more convincing.

The play revels in repeating scenes with slight variations of dialogue, creating multiple ways of understanding what might be happening or what is going unsaid. It is even more fascinating to watch two such different performances in quick succession, allowing even more resonances to reverberate in the mind.

Europe

by David Greig

seen at the Donmar warehouse on 4 July 2019

Michael Longhurst, taking over as Artistic Director of the Donmar, has chosen to revive David Greig's 1994 play set in an abandoned railway station in an unspecified (but probably Eastern) European country near 'the border'. Ron Cook plays Fret, the station master, with Faye Marsay as Adele, his assistant, Billy Howle as Adele's husband Berlin, Theo Barklem-Biggs as Horse and Stephen Wight as Billy, Berlin's friends, Shane Zaza as Morocco, a local boy made good, Kevork Malikyan as Sava, a refugee, and Natalia Tena as his daughter Katya.

Written during the period in which the former Yugoslavia was being torn apart by war and 'ethnic cleansing', Europe nonetheless still packs a powerful punch. The small town is dying now that its importance as a border crossing has vanished, and automation is making its industrial workforce redundant - Berlin, Horse and Billy are now at a loose end. Stationmaster Fret appears at first to be an old-fashioned martinet swamped by the illogicality of train timetables which no longer include stops at his station, and he has no sympathy for a man and woman he finds waiting on the station, apparently impervious to his announcements that there will be no trains. Adele, stifled in her marriage to the unimaginative and truculent Berlin, dreams of glamorous foreign capitals.

The Son

by Florian Zeller

seen at the Kiln Theatre on 13 March 2019

Michael Longhurst directs Laurie Kynaston as the teenage Nicolas, Amanda Abbingdon as his mother Anne, John Light as his father Pierre, Amaka Okafor as his stepmother Sofia, Martin Turner as a doctor and Oseloka Obi as a nurse in Christpoher Hampton's transaltion of Florian Zeller's nw play, seen as part of a triptych with The Father (reviewed in October 2015) and The Mother (not seen).

The Kiln has a totally exposed stage the width of its auditorium, so upon entering the audience sees immediately a plain space with panelled white walls (somehow looking French; designed by Lizzie Clachan), a black upholstered sofa in the middle, a small writing desk and chair to one side, and a large suspended grey bag on the other side. Eventually Nicolas appears and begins to write obsessively one the wall panel immediately above the writing desk; or else he paces round the room.

Belleville

by Amy Herzog

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 25 January 2018

Michael Longhurst directs Imogen Poots as Abby, James Norton as Zack, Malachi Kirby as Alioune and Faith Alabi as Amina in this one-act ply from 2011, receiving its first London production.

Zack and Abby are a young American couple renting a flat in Belleville, a suburb of Paris. Alioune, the landlord, and his wife Amina live downstairs with their two young children. The flat is not exactly seedy, but it is rather down at heel, and untidy. 

Amadeus

By Peter Shaffer

seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 31 January 2017

Just over 36 years ago, on a cold December morning of 1980, I queued outside the National Theatre in the hope of buying two day release tickets for Peter Hall's original production of Amadeus starring Paul Scofield (Salieri), Simon Callow (Mozart) and Felicity Kendal (Constanze). In those pre-electronic days the limited number of day tickets were only on sale at 9 am from a small booth near the entrance to the building, which was not open to the general public until a later more civilised time of day. Inexplicably, the couple in front of me declined the tickets on offer, and so a friend and I were able to see the play from the centre of the fifth row of the stalls. In this prime position, it seemed as if Salieri was speaking to us alone out of the whole unwieldy amphitheatre of the auditorium as he mused on the appalling mixture of joy, pain, jealousy and betrayal he experienced on first hearing the music of Mozart.

The National has now revived the play in a new production directed by Michael Longhurst with Lucian Msamati as Salieri, Adam Gillen as Mozart and Karla Crome as Constanze, with the participation of the Southbank Sinfonia to provide the musical interludes. Once again, I bought a ticket at the last moment; just by chance there was a return for the evening performance when I asked to the Box Office in the afternoon, this time in the centre of the eleventh row.

The Winter's Tale

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on 9 March 2016

Michael Longhurst directs John Light (Leontes), Rachel Stirling (Hermione), Niamh Cusack (Paulina), Tia Bannon (Perdita), Steffan Donnelly (Florizel), David Yelland (Antigonus) and James Garnon (Autolycus) as part of a season of Shakespeare' four 'romance' plays.

It is interesting to compare this production with Kenneth Branagh's (reviewed in November 2015). The size and the ambience of the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse make for a very different experience - the opening scenes seemed more intense, less stately, with Leontes prwoling in his jealousy far closer to this wife and friend. Meanwhile in the second half, Autolycus could interact far more directly with the audience, even purloining a pair of spectacles at one point to facilitate his 'disguise' as a courtier.

Constellations

by Nick Payne

seen at the Richmond Theatre on 24 June 2015

The play is directed by Michael Longhurst and stars Joe Armstrong and Louie Brealey. Having been a success at the Royal Court and on Broadway (with a different cast in each place), it is now touring before a brief West End revival.

The stage is littered with dozens of balloons, with changing patterns of light on them prior to the start of the performance. Many are raised at the beginning to create the acting space, and many are revealed to be globes which can be lit from within.

Carmen Disruption

by Simon Stephens 

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 2 May 2015

The play, directed by Michael Longhurst and designed by Lizzie Clachan with music by Simon Slater, dramatises the predicament of a Singer (Sharon Small) whose sense of self is unravelling as her commitments to sing the role of Carmen take her from place to place with no connection to the world outside taxis, briefly rented apartments, and the opera theatres of Europe. Four other characers in a particular unnamed city are also adrift in loneliness - a rent boy named Carmen (Jack Farthing), a female taxi driver Don José (Noma Dumezweni), a young student Micaëla (Katie West) and a futures trader Escamillo (John Light). Viktoria Vizin prowls the stage dressed as a conventional Carmen, singing snatches of the opera, or other lyrics, to the accompaniment of two cellists (Jamie Cameron and Harry Napier).