Life of Pi

by Lolita Chakrabarti based on Yann Martel's novel

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 11 June 2022

After the erudite expositions of Socratic philosophy in Cancelling Socrates, I saw on the same day a rather different approach to dramatising fundamental questions about existence in Lolita Chakrabarti's inventive adaptation of Yann Martel's novel Life of Pi, in which a young boy (Hiran Abeysekera, ably supported by a dozen cast members and assorted puppeteers) first faces and then accounts for a lengthy voyage across the Pacific Ocean adrift in a lifeboat as the only human survivor of a shipwreck (he is accompanied by a number of animals including a huge Bengal tiger incongruously named Richard Parker).

The play, directed by Max Webster with brilliant set and costume designs by Tim Hatley, opens in the hospital in Mexico where Pi is recovering from his ordeal; representatives of the Canadian consulate (Pi and his family were due to settle in Canada) and the Japanese owners of the wrecked ship are interviewing him to try to find out what happened, but are baffled by the extravagant story he tells of shipping a zoo from India to Canada, and the perils of sharing a small lifeboat with a large tiger.

Here is another play in which narrative plays a significant part, but it is only a framing device, quickly seguing into dramatic reconstructions of the major events of Pi's story; with a dazzling array of video projections and more traditional opening and closing of doors and walls the coldly lit hospital ward is transformed into the vibrant town in which Pi and his family live, the port of embarkation, and the cramped conditions of the ocean-going vessel. Lastly the outlines of the lifeboat emerged as if by magic from the stage floor as the vast loneliness of the ocean was evoked by waves projected onto the floor and expansive vistas of sky elsewhere on the stage. All the while, fantastic puppetry designed by Nick Barnes and Finn Caldwell and directed by the latter brings to life the animals and ocean creatures encountered by the resilient boy at the centre of the story.

The boy has grown up exposed to three very different religious traditions - Hinduism, Islam and Christianity - and has participated in the communal aspects of all of them perhaps without deeply understanding their theological underpinnings. However he remains touchingly convinced that a religious outlook on life is essential; atheists he can cope with because at least they have a belief, while agnostics simply flummox him. This attitude undoubtedly helps him to survive even as the cold rationality of his intercolutors threatens to unhinge him; it's a remarkable testimony to the power of stagecraft, as much as to the power of fiction, that we are on his side as he asserts his right to tell his own story in his own way.

It was really exhilarating to see a play rush headlong through a strong and exciting tale with such confidence and energy.

Leopoldstadt

by Tom Stoppard

seen at Wyndham's Theatre on 16 September 2021

Patrick Marber directs a large cast (twenty-five adults and several children) in Tom Stoppard's new play concerning the fate of two extended Jewish families in Vienna in the first half of the twentieth century. There ae major scenes in 1899, 1900, 1924, 1938 and 1955, and four generations of the Merz and Jakobovicz families are on stage at various times.

At the turn of the century the families are well off and slightly contemptuous of their humbler beginnings and any reminders of more traditional Jews from the easern provinces of the empire (they don't actualy live in Leopoldstadt which was by then a popular Jewish enclave in Vienna: one senses they find it beneath their dignity). Hermann in particular sees great possibilities in joining the bourgeois establishment, apparently prepared to overlook the snide anti-semitism surrounding him until it is too glaring even for him. Later, of course, in 1938, as the Nazis take over Austria, any such accommodation is impossible, and in the coda to the play the fate of almost all the family members is intoned in a bleak account of their deaths.

Stoppard's own experience of fleeing Czechoslovakia in 1938 as an infant and eventually being brought up as an English schoolboy with his stepfather's surname willingly adopted and for many years unaware of his wider family's story is represented in the play by a young man similarly naive in 1955, but this is determinedly not a play specifically about the Straussler family. Unfortunately all too many experienced similar aspirations of integration followed by brutal tragedy, and it is perhaps more salutary that Stoppard chose to portray a fictional exemplum of the fate of so many, rather than a documentary drama of an historical case. 

By shifting the location from his own family's provinical Bohemia to the imagined families' cosmopolitan Vienna, and evoking a wide ranging cast of businessmen, doctors and professors, matriarchs and young women eager for more than domesticity, all enmeshed in a comfortable and sociable setting, he easily blends sharp reminders of prejudice with dazzling explorations of intellectual pursuits (especially mathematics) and also with socal comedy and Jewish humour - the scenes in 1924 revolve around an almost farcical conflict between various family members over whether the new-born male should be circumcised, with a typical Stoppardian riff on mistaken identity when a visiting business associate is mistaken for the surgeon invited to perform the rite.

The families could be seen as turning a blind eye to danger for too long - but who did not? The collapse of security in 1938 is a chilling interruption to 'normal' life. After scenes of domestic tension amidst family solidarity, almost the stuff of any comfortable family-oriented drama, the arrival of thugs self-appointed as official bureaucrats to dispossess the family of their apartment, all the while spouting vile terms of abuse, is sickening. The fact that very little overt physical violence is needed renders the ultimate peril all the more frightening.

Marshalling a large cast and exploring a multi-generational story is a huge challenge for playwright, director and actors alike. Stoppard's decades of experience with paradox, coincidence and wit here enable him to create memorable vignettes which underpin a rich milieu: we may wish we had time to explore some of these in more detail, but we have to be satisfied with just the small hints we are given. Yet it is one of these apparently incidental scenes in 1938 which triggers the poignant connection in 1955 between the young Englishman and the embittered Austrian survivor when hitherto their utterly different experiences threatened to leave them cold to each other: a quiet and subtle masterstroke in a play of panoramic ambition.

The Price

by Arthur Miller

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 6 March 2019

Jonathan Church directs Brendan Coyle and Adrian Lukis as two brothers, Vincent and Walter, with Sarah Stewart as Vincent's wife Esther and David Suchet as Gregory Solomon, an elderly second-hand furniture dealer, in a fiftieth anniversary production of Arthur Miller's play about the costs and misunderstandings of filial loyalty played out as the brothers meet after sixteen years to dispose of their father's property.

In an astonishing set designed by Simon Higlett to represent a lifetime's clutter, with chairs, desks and other bric-a-brac climbing surrealistically angled walls almost to hang from the ceiling, Vincent, a policeman nearing his retirement,  has returned to his father's apartment many years after the latter's death to dispose of all the moveables since the building is about to be demolished. This being an Arthur Miller play, the event is fraught with complex memories and resentments, revealed partly through the tense discussion with his wife when she arrives, when it becomes clear that Walter, the successful doctor brother, has been estranged from Vincent for many years and has not answered calls to help deal with this current crisis.

The Height of the Storm

by Florian Zeller

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 18 October 2018

Jonathan Kent directs Jonathan Pryce as André and Eileen Atkins as Madeleine, with Amanda Drew and Anna Madeley as their daughters Anne and Elise in Zeller's new play, in which he again addresses themes of love, loss, memory and grief. The translation is by Christopher Hampton , and the set is designed by Anthony Ward - each in their own way excellent.

In an ageing writer's country house (or at least, a house outside Paris), in which shelves overloaded with books to an impossible height dominate several visible walls, Anne is trying to gain her father's attention, but he seems lost in a reverie staring out through the kitchen windows to the garden beyond. We soon conclude that he is recently widowed and possibly succumbing to dementia - there is talk of resolving 'the situation' and realising that new arrangements must be made.

Long Day's Journey into Night

by Eugene O'Neill

seen at Wynndhams Theatre on 18 February 2018

Richard Eyre directs Jeremy Irons as James Tyrone, Lesley Manville as his wife Mary, Rory Keenan as Jamie and Matthew Beard as Edmund, the two Tyrone sons, and Jessica Regan as Cathleen the maid, in a production designed by Rob Howell.

The play, loosely autobiographical, takes place in the Tyrone's summer house on the day in which Edmund is told by the family doctor that he has consumption. But both his brother and his father have half suspected this (indeed, he may himself have been aware of the likelihood); the menfolk are furthermore confronting the fact that Mary is incurably addicted to morphine, having been prescribe it many years before after Edmund's difficult birth.

Such a bald summary hardly begins to account for the play's power, nor for the unremitting portrayal of self-deception and mutual recrimination that unfolds before us as the various members of the family try to maintain a veneer of normality in the face of long years of denial, repressed anger, and tortured love.

No Man's Land

by Harold Pinter

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 16 November 2016

Sean Matthias directs this revival of Pinter's 1975 play with Ian McKellan as Spooner, Patrick Stewart as Hirst, Owen Teale as Briggs and Damien Molony as Foster; the set is designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis.

Hirst has invited Spooner - a shambling down-at-heels writer - back to his house in Hampstead, an eerily grand affair featuring a room with a curved wall of rather cold blue panels, with a well-stocked bar. Hirst, also apparently a writer, seems bemused by Spooner's meandering speeches, though some of his responses are extremely sharp, even if only by way of a look of mock alarm or distaste. Each drinks heavily as Spooner attempts to discover the nature of the household and Hirst gives little away; suddenly two retainers appear, the brutish Briggs and the cocky and almost camp Foster. They might be dangerous for Spooner - they might even have some hold over Hirst: they are blankly watchful when Hirst collapses and crawls out of the room.

The Father

by Florian Zeller translated by Christopher Hampton

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 7 October 2015

The play is directed by James Macdonald and is designed by Miriam Buether. It stars Kenneth Cranham as Andre, an 80-year-old retired engineer, and Claire Skinner as Anne, his daughter. Kirsty Oswald plays Laura, a care worker, and Nicholas Gleaves plays Pierre, Anne's partner.

The subject is the onset of dementia, and Zeller has achieved the remarkable feat of presenting the situation through the confusion of Andre's mind. It appears that he is in his own flat being visited by his daughter after an altercation with a carer. However, our understanding is soon destabilised by the appearance of two other characters who contradict Anne's statements, and then by Anne's own assertion that Andre has in fact moved to her flat. The techniques of theatrical trickery have been used to disconcerting effect in illuminating the crippling uncertainties of dementia as it may be experienced by a sufferer.

A View from the Bridge

by Arthur Miller

seen at Wyndhams Theatre on 27 March 2015

The play, transferred from the Young Vic, is directed by Ivo van Hove with Mark Strong as Eddie Carbone, Nicola Walker as his wife Beatrice, Phoebe Fox as his niece Catherine, Luke Norris as her fiance Rodolpho, Emun Elliott as Rodolpho's brother Marco, and Michael Gould as the lawyer Alfieri.

Miller's tense drama from 1955, revised in 1956, is here stripped of almost all realistic reference to reveal its strong affiliation with Greek tragedy. The set is a bare space made almost like a shallow pit through being surrounded on all four sides by a low-level boundary which can be used as benches or to signify the enclosing walls of a room. At the back is a wall with a single entrance cut in its centre leading to a black space behind.