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.

True West

by Sam Shepard

seen at the Vaudeville Theatre on 17 December 2018

Matthew Dunster directs Kit Harington as Austin and Johnny Flynn as Lee with Donald Sage Mackay as Saul Kimmer (Austin's agent) and Madeleine Potter as Austin and Lee's mother in this curious comedy noir play about the conflict between two brothers, which has been read as an embodiment of the inner conflicts of Sam Shepard himself.

Austin is looking after his mother's house (she is visiting Alaska), and trying to complete a screenplay to seal a deal with his agent. But his tearaway brother Lee turns up, disturbing his equanimity. Where Austin appears focused and in control, Lee is a freer spirit, evidently feckless and untroubled by low-level criminal activity. Fraternal tension is only exacerbated by these temperamental differences.

The Importance of Being Earnest

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 9 October 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some related works; this is the fourth major production. Michael Fentiman directs Jacob Fortune-Lloyd as Jack, Fehinti Balogun as Algernon, Sophie Thompson as Lady Bracknell, Pippa Nixon as Gwendolen, Fiona Button as Cecily, Stella Gonet as Miss Prism and Jeremy Swift as Canon Chasuble in this, perhaps the most brilliant play of its kind.

Almost nothing can detract from the perfect poise of Wilde's writing; the aphorisms and witty repartee, the clever inversions that reveal social snobberies and prejudices with rapier-thrust accuracy, flow from the lips of almost all the characters as the absurdities of the situation mount up and then are almost as absurdly resolved. It would seem that the only things counting against it are its reputation and the shadow of some overpowering performances from the past (for example, Edith Evans as Lady Bracknell).

In many ways this production hits the right note, with the cast on the whole managing the delivery of the lines more successfully than in the other two productions I have seen. Jacob Fortune-Lloyd, Pippa Nixon and in particular Sophie Thompson are the best at this, though Fiona Button is too modern in her deportment for a teenaged girl of that time, and unfortunately it is clear that Wilde's vocal style works best with a late nineteenth-century physical restraint.  

However, I have serious reservations about some of the directorial and design decisions. The social comedy relies on the social context which it is satirising, and it is dangerous to ignore this; false notes are an unwelcome distraction. The first false note is the presence of a peculiarly explicit painting of two naked men grappling one another, which is given prominence in Algernon's living room. It is simply inconceivable that any gentleman would have had such a thing on public display in a room which ladies would be likely to visit (especially, perhaps, relations).

More seriously, the relationship between Algernon and Lane (his butler) is conceived as far more intimate than it should be. Lane remains on stage for a considerable stretch when the stage directions explicitly indicate that he is not there, and Algernon lights him a cigarette, offers him sherry and indulges in the occasional kiss. It is just plain wrong, a complete distraction from the real business of the play, and a needless sacrifice of any genuine social comment that might be made of the badinage between them, which is if anything a precursor of the Jeeves and Wooster situation, not the cover for a surreptitious sexual fling. 

A similar social barrier is needlessly crossed in a small dumbshow scene in which Cecily shares an illicit cigarette with Moulton the gardener behind Miss Prism's back. Cecily may have a wild imagination, but the sheer impropriety of this idea threatens to ruin the whole ambience in which she moves. Equally the presentation of Merriman as an outdoors servant (open shirt and no jacket) overburdened with the supposed Ernest's luggage, when he is obviously a superior house servant who would have ordered the footmen to deal with the luggage, is a serious misreading of how a wealthy country household would have been run. 

Finally, the marvellous scene in which Cecily and Gwendolen descend from superficial effusiveness to icy politeness to silent hostility is just about ruined by the crassness of the sugar and cake business at the end. (Indeed the consumption of food in general too often degenerated into incipient custard pie moments when again absolute adherence to social norms generates the comedy.) No well brought up young lady of that period would grab a tea cake and pull it apart with her hands and then allow a servant to touch it while handing it over even to a rival. The whole point of the scene is that the ritual of afternoon tea is pursued with absolute correctness but without paying attention to what the guest has asked for.

It's curious that I accept many directorial interventions in modern Shakespeare productions, but I think that attempts to introduce subplots into Oscar Wilde's plays - which all three productions that I have seen in this season have done - are a distracting failure. There is simply no room for them; the plays are not about secret romances belowstairs, and even less about shenanigans between upstairs and downstairs, and to interpolate such things as a modish modern joke or knowing social comment is simply gratuitous. The catastrophe of what Wilde himself suffered in a homophobic society is very well known, but it does neither him nor his social comedies any favours to pretend that they are the place to show what could not in reality be shown or referred to.

It's a pity, really, that these gem-likef plays should not have been trusted to entertain today's audiences on their own merits.

An Ideal Husband

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville THeatre on 5 June 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some associated works; this is the third major production. Jonathan Church directs Sally Britton as Lady Chiltern, Nathaniel Parker as Sir Robert Chiltern, Faith Omole as Miss Mabel Chiltern, Frances Barber as Mrs Cheveley, Susan Hampshire as Lady Markby, Edward Fox as the Earl of Caversham and Freddie Fox as his son Viscount Goring.

This play has more substance than Lady Windermere's Fan (reviewed in March this year); though perhaps this is a modern conclusion, since the potential scandal driving the plot is one of political corruption rather than the revelation of illegitimate birth. Mrs Cheveley wishes to blackmail Lord Chiltern (a member of the government) into supporting a shady foreign deal because she has irrefutable evidence of the fact that he based his fortune on selling a Cabinet secret many years before. Although she is eventually foiled, and we are on the whole glad that this is the case (since she is herself hardly a moral paragon), the situation nevertheless raises many pertinent questions about loyalty, honesty, public power and private integrity, and there is no doubt that she scores many points.

Lady Windermere's Fan

by Oscar Wilde

seen by live streaming from the Vaudeville Theatre on 20 March 2018

Dominic Dromgoole has created a theatre company to perform all of Oscar Wilde's social comedies and some associated works; this is the second major production (after A Woman of No Importance). Kathy Burke directs Grace Molony as Lady Windermere, Joshua James as Lord Windermere, Samantha Spiro as Mrs Erlynne and Jennifer Saunders as the Duchess of Berwick.

Wilde uses the conventions of a melodrama to skewer social pretensions and at the same time to criticise unthinking adherence to moral absolutes. Mrs Erlynne is the catalyst for a crisis in the Windermere marriage. But most of the crisis is played out according to the mores of the time - the wife virtuous and condemnatory of social and ethical impropriety, the husband floundering in his attempts to do what's best in a situation where his natural presumption of masculine authority collides with his entrapment in blackmail. Curiously, although the audience is soon aware of the secret causing all the mayhem, Lady Windermere remains oblivious and some other major deceptions are also not unmasked.