The Tragedy of Macbeth

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 7 October 2021

Yaël Farber directs James McArdle in the title role and Saoirse Ronan as Lady Macbeth in a compelling production of one of Shakespeare's more difficult plays to stage. The potent brew of notorious witches, prophecies that come true because they are known about, and others that come true with cruel twists, combined with violent action and unsympathetic protagonists all too often leads to overblown or unbalanced results on stage. Here at the Almeida the pitfalls are avoided, and the director has made some interesting adjustments to the text to create a stark vision of inexorable catastrophe.

What to do with the language? The Scottish court spoke with Scottish accents: only the witches, Lady Macduff and the children did not. This worked surprisingly well once the ear had adjusted to it; Shakespearean cadences resonate just as easily in these voices as in 'received pronunciation'.

What to do with the witches? The presumed mindset of the original audience is no longer available to us, and indeed these witches in particular with their incantatory rhymes have become so stereotypical that they can seem like a joke. Farber has renamed them 'Wyrd Sisters' (having noticed that they are named 'Weird Sisters' in the folio cast list), and the programme notes draw attention to the many manifestations of three women guarding, creating or spinning Fate (Anglo-Saxon 'wyrd') in European myths. Thus there are no old crones cackling over a disgusting cauldron. Instead three enigmatic women, almost serene in their dispassionate presence, may be seen not only when they appear to Macbeth and Banquo, and later to Macbeth alone; they are also visible as silent observers of the outworking of Fate at many other moments during the play - possibly at all moments, though there is a good deal of mist billowing about which makes the back wall of the stage invisible at times.

What to do with the violent action? Macbeth is a bloody play, with unpleasant murders both off and on stage. There were two perspex screens often moved about the stage demarcating inner and outer spaces (part of a brilliant set design by Soutra Gilmour). A director might easily have splashed them copiously with blood starting with the execution of the rebel Thane of Cawdor near the beginning of the play; the murder of Duncan might even have been mimed behind a screen with further opportunity for spraying blood. In this production matters were more restrained, and all the more disquieting for that. At the opening tableau the whole cast gathered on stage to a persistent thrum of a low musical note above which a single cello line wavered. An attendant woman brought on a wheelbarrow full of boots and upended it, then carefully placed them at the front of the stage. A soldier washed himself from a bucket, but what he daubed over himself was blood, since a blood-soaked messenger brings the news of victory to Duncan. Similarly, bloodstains were always restricted only to the bodies of actors - either Macbeth and Lady Macbeth after the murder of Duncan, or Banquo when he appears as a ghost - and not used at all elsewhere, even during the on-stage murders. This made the deaths of Lady Macduff  and her two sons all the more chilling, especially as one child was dragged screaming from a hiding place and the lady herself was ultimately dispatched in a tub of water.

What to do with the disintegration of Lady Macbeth towards the end of the play? Lady Macbeth is a driving force in the first half of the play, but increasingly cut off from her husband's plans and inner torment once he has become king. Then, at the end, there is the famous sleepwalking scene, with little to prepare us for it. Farber has created a daring visualisation of  the trauma precipitating this downfall. She has Lady Macbeth bring the advice to Lady Macduff that she should flee with her children, and then still be present to witness the murders. It is preposterous on a realistic level, but psychologically extremely acute, and Saoirse Ronan utterly convinces in showing the trembling panic of an unwilling witness to such babarity. Naked ambition in the abstract, so forcefully embraced by this woman at the beginning of this play, here confronts the horror of its consequences on real lives, and the strain is too much: a brilliant stroke.

What to do about Macbeth? Make him passionate, ambitious, uncertain about murder at the beginning but plausibly easy with the idea as his obsessions take control, completely unaware of the irony (and foolishness) in his determination to connive at the fulfilment of prophecy when it is to his advantage but to attempt to outwit it when it is detrimental. Make the famous lines of despair at the news of his wife's death deeply felt, not just cynical world-weariness. Give the part to James McArdle who conveys initial doubts over murdering Duncan, horror at the deed, abject terror at the appearance of Banquo's ghost and steely resolve to fight to the last, with equal skill and authority.

What do do about the Porter defusing the tension of the murder scene with long disquisitions about equivocation, a subject of no interest to a modern audience? Dispense with him completely, along with the more lurid witches' hocus pocus. In fact a number of other scenes were streamlined or omitted, making for sharper emphasis and an unremitting atmosphere of tension. I am not sure, but I think I even missed the explicit instruction for soldiers to disguise their numbers by cutting branches from the trees at Birnam Wood (a vital point in destabilising Macbeth's self-assurance, which was cunningly foreshadowed by the procession of Banquo's heirs presented to an anguished Macbeh during his final encounter with the Wyrd Sisters). There was no evocation of the holy stability of the English realm under Edward the Confessor to contrast with the dire state of Scotland or the peculiar defensiveness of prince Malcolm when Macduff confronts him. 

There was no final speech by the new king after the death of the tyrant Macbeth. Instead, the surviving cast gathered again in almost the same positions as at the beginning; the wheelbarrow of boots appeared, and one of the three Wyrd Sisters pronouned once more the opening question: 'When shall we three meet again?'. Malcolm was in the spotlight rather than Duncan, but Fate, evidently, is cyclical.

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.

Statements after an Arrest under the Immorality Act

by Athol Fugard

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 9 September 2021

Diane Page, this year's winner of the JMK Award for new directors, directs Athol Fugard's play from 1972 concerning an affair between a librarian Frieda Joubert (Scarlett Brookes) and a schoolteacher Errol Philander (Shaq Taylor) which falls foul of race relations legislation in apartheid South Africa because she is white and he is not.

The affair is of necessity clandestine, both because of the colour bar and because Errol has a wife and children. Consequently there are any number of tensions between the two, whose needs and passions conflict with fear, uncertainty and suspicion. As Errol and Frieda circle round a huge sunken pit in the centre of the stage, and only occasionally meet in it, they voice their anxieties; each tries to hold on to the joy of their relationship as it threatens to crumble under pressure. The whole stage floor is a matt black, and the circular pit has no sharp edges: the ground just slopes into the wall of the pit, making their circling round it look perilously like water swirlng round a drain. The pit is, of course, of no use as a hiding place when a police raid led by Detective Sergeant J du Prez (Richard Sutton) leads to their arrest and interrogation. Niall McKeever's set achieves both a sense of limbo and an underlying threat.

This is not a play in which love triumphs over adversity. The two lovers are brim full of insecurities deriving from their personalities as much as their political and social situations. Lyrical outbursts vie with the pain arising from the need for concealment, and though this need is obvious it also leads to feelings of guilt and inadequacy. The wider issues of desperate poverty in the townships and intense bigotry in the privileged white areas create plenty of opportunity for misunderstanding. In a mere seventy minutes a whole crushing environment is evoked through conversation, monologue, and the chilling impersonality of the official police report which is delivered with startling venom.

Scarlett Brookes and Shaq Taylor portray two people involved with one another yet always beset by wariness of their predicament and even mutual suspicion. Though neither disavows their relationship under pressure, there is little sense that it could ever survive the rigour of public exposure. It is a salutary reminder that more is at play in the world than struggles for personal fulfilment, and that social oppression can be frighteningly strong. 

This particular piece must be grounded in its historical context to make sense, and therefore the cast adopted fairly strong South African accents. Occasionally this made it hard to catch everything that was said, even in the intimate context of the Orange Tree, and it perhaps ran the risk of giving the audience the consolation of thinking 'that was then, that was there'. Unfortunately for many it is no consolation at all. The cruelties of South African apartheid may have disappeared, but racial prejudice and oppression are still rife; the play has not lost its force or relevance.

Bach & Sons

by Nina Raine

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 1 September 2021

Nicholas Hytner directs Simon Russell Beale as Johann Sebastian Bach with Pandora Colin as his first wife Maria Barbara, Racheal Ofori as his second wife Anna Magdalena, Ruth Lass as Maria's sister Katerina, Douggie McMeekin as Wilhelm Friedrich, Samuel Blenkin as Carl Philip Emanuel, one of four boys as Johann Gottfried Bernhard, and Pravessh Rana as Frederick the Great of Prussia in a new play by Nina Raine. 

The Bridge Theatre has been configured as a thrust stage for this production, with a set designed by Vicki Mortimer inluding moveable truckles to bring on and remove various rooms (offices, bedrooms, court salons), and dominated by a cascade of inverted harpsichords suspended above the acting area. All this emphasises the supreme importance of music in the Bach household, and it is hardly surprising that the play concentrates on the dynamics of a family springing from noted musicians in the past, with a genius father hoping to instil musicianship in his sons for the future.

Inevitably there are tensions, with the two elder brothers vying for their father's approval, and suffering from his implacable honesty, which leads him to criticise their attempts at composition ruthlessly.,He sees it as teaching without fear or favour, whereas the boys find it an intolerable strain. In the background Gottfried the youngest is already showing precocious signs of talent, while their mother frets at her husband's intransigence and tries to suppress feelings of jealousy as a young soprano enters the orbit of the family, and her sister Katerina devotedly keeps house. 

Despite the exuberance of young boys both revelling in and fearing their father's attention, and the delight they take in groaning at oft-repeated family anecdotes (the long walk their father took to visit Buxtehude, for example) or hearing a new example of his cussedness with authority, there is an underlying melancholy in the household, since illness and mortality are not far away and several siblings have already died in infancy. The first half of the play concludes with the poignant death of their mother, the boys' anguish that their father was away on business throughout her protracted illness, and their incredulity that within barely a year he announces to them his plan to marry Anna Magdalena.

In the second half the boys have grown up, Wilhelm seeking to avoid the burden of his father's expectations through drink, Carl closed in by the pain of always feeling second best even as he makes a career for himself in the creepy atmosphere of the Prussian court, and Gottfried studying elsewhere to be a lawyer. In Leipzig Bach continues his irascible interactions with bureaucrats and is scornfully impatient with the quality of the musicians and singers who perform - or misperform - his work, while Anna Magdalena has her own catalogue of sorrows with numerous infants now buried. When J S Bach visits the Prussian court, the meeting with Frederick the Great is stilted and difficult, made somehow more uneasy by Frederick's willingness to foment the strain he perceives between father and son.

It is always a pleasure to see Simon Russell Beale portray a character of intelligence and passion. He manages to convey some of the intricacies of compositional technique with complete conviction so that they seem almost straightforward, while also showing us a man whose self-confidence and prickliness hide the scars of a difficult childhood and the sheer slog of making music to order while believing it to be of supreme importance. 

However, the play does have problems. There is always a difficulty in making drama about acknowledged genius, especially when exposition is needed to set the scene. Famously Peter Shaffer's Amadeus resolved this by using Salieri as a hugely biassed narrator to explicate Mozart's life. In Bach & Sons the composer's career, and the tensions in his family life, are presented without a filter of this sort, and so all the informaton we need to make sense of the situation has to proceed through dialogue. Unfortunately this tends to dissipate the dramatic tension.

Furthermore the time frames are imprecise, and in the interests of dramatic compression they are in fact seriously misleading. I had difficulty in the opening scenes in determining how old the two older boys were meant to be. We were told that Gottfried (the youngest) is three and is kept awake by his father relentlessly trying out musical ideas on the harpsichord, so when he appears later as a young boy at times carried around by his older brothers we may assume some time has passed and he is perhaps by then five. As the actors are young men, I assumed they were playing teenagers, and I kept provisionally lowering their ages in my mind as the style of their conversation (with plenty of references to 'Mummy') indicated their youth. On the other hand in a crucial scene before their mother becomes ill, Carl accuses Wilhelm of having alcohol on his breath (in adult life he did drink), which most easily implies mid adolescence at the earliest. In fact, Wilhelm was ten, Carl six and Gottfried five when their mother died. Also, their aunt died nine years later, but in the play she is portrayed as welcoming Carl to the family home in Leipzig at the time of his father's death sme twenty years later. The creepily camp Frederick of Prussia appears to be giving Bach the first news of Gottfried's untimely death in the guise of offering condolences, but their meeting took place in 1747 and Gottfried died in 1739.

Dramatic licence is of course just that, and one hardly registers the historical distortions that are rife in Shakespeare's plays, but the curious mixture of careful and wilful chronology exhibited here is at times distracting. The various themes of the play - the potentially toxic experience of having a genius for a father and teacher combined; the crushing blows of multiple pregnancies followed too soon by child burials; the enigma of a composer of sublime music who is a difficult man to live with - jostle for attention but do not enttirely cohere to make a great play.

Singin' in the Rain

 based on the MGM film

seen at Sadlers Wells on 28 August 2021

Jonathan Church directs Adam Cooper as Don Lockwood, Charlotte Gooch as Kathy Selden, Kevin Clifton as Cosmo Brown and Faye Tozer as Lina Lamont in the stage adaptation of the famous MGM film starring Gene Kelly, Debbie Reynolds, Donald O'Connor and Jean Hagen.

The story, an affectionate look at the transformation of the movie industry from silent to sound, inevitably appears somewhat more thin on stage, where the flimsiness of the characters is more exposed, but the chief attractions are the musical numbers, and these receive exhilarating treatment by the principals and the supporting chorus. The slapstick energy of 'Make 'em Laugh', with its dizzying use of cinematic tricks, cannot quite be matched on stage, but the delirious title song gets the full treatment, with Adam Cooper gleefully kicking up as much spray as possible from a stage drenched in huge amounts of rainwater. It is clearly wise not to be sitting in the front few rows of the stalls. The staging as a whole made excellent use of an all-purpose set designed by Simon Higlett with lighting by Tim Mitchell, creating many different locatons both interior and exterior with the minimum of fuss.

The thankless role of Lina Lamont, the rather bitchy actress whose voice and elocution desperately need the attention of a Professor Henry Higgins, but whose impossible vowels remain unchanged to the end, is given a wistful song in an attempt to increase her prominence, but this has the unfortunate effect of emphasising that she is little more than the butt of a joke which looks increasingly insensitive. This only goes to show that musicals of this vintage are almost impossible to redeem if one tries to impose modern sensibilities on them. Far better just to go with the flow, get sprayed with rainwater if one is close enough, and enjoy the show as sheer entertainment. 

Paradise

by Kae Tempest

seen at the National Theatre (Olivier) on 26 August 2021

Kae Tempest has transformed Philoctetes by Sophocles into a modern setting in which the titular hero is abandoned, wounded, but with an unerring bow which allows him to forage for food, on an island ironically called Paradise, shared with a chorus of women who live in some sort of refugee camp or staging post for possible release to another country, if only they had the correct papers for travel.

Odysseus, the wily captain, and Neoptolemus, the naive and impressionable son of Achilles, arrive on a mission to persude or compel Philoctetes to join them, since a prophecy has declared that the long war they are involved in cannot be won without him and his bow. Philoctetes is less than willing, his suppurating wound torturing him, and his sense of betrayal (it was Odysseus who abandoned him on the island) festering into suspicion and anger after years of brooding.

So much, so Sophocles, but in modern dress, with references to papers, immigration, refugee status, and the unchanging heartbreak of women who lose men in war, much is also different (the chorus in Philoctetes are sailors accompanying the warriors, not women trapped on the island). Also, although the talismanic bow and the disposition of Achilles' famed armour are still discussed, the soldiers speak in an entirely modern way clearly referencing styles in the British Army - Odysseus the clipped oficer type, Neoptolemus the raw but enthusiastic recruit, Philoctetes the broadest cockney imaginable. The women are very Caribbean in their sensibility, including an older wise woman who speaks, or rather almost sings, in an incantatory style. 

The original play pits youthful integrity against cynical worldliness, with the hapless Philoctetes hoping against hope that Neoptolemus is not trying to trick him and constantly appealing to the young man's sense of honor, Odysseus briskly trading on his naivety, and the young man torn between duty and honour, leading to an impasse so finely balanced that only the intervention of a god (the deified hero Heracles) can resolve the problem by instructing his erstwhile companion to swallow his pride and anger and go with the other two to Troy. In Paradise, by contrast, there is a neat twist forcing the play to suggest a cycle of wounded exiles rather than a resolution of the ethical dilemma - it's a clever idea.

Elsewhere the new playwright's interventions are less successful. The weird incantations are not always easy to follow, and at a critical moment Philoctetes delivers an excoriating speech about blighted patriotism, ugly colonialism and the generally despicble state of the nation to which Odysseus demands he be loyal, which for all its passionate anger seriously interrupts the flow of the drama. It was simply too much propaganda, the character suddenly a mouthpiece for the author.

Perhaps the most startling thing about the production (directed by Ian Rickson and designed by Rae Smith) is the fact that the whole cast (not just the chorus) was female. Anastasia Hille played Odysseus, Lesley Sharp Philoctetes, and Gloria Obianyo Philoctetes. Yet there was no sense that these were female soldiers; masculine pronoun still abound in the text and masculine body language and attitudes confront us everywhere on stage. It makes for an invigorating interpretation of a play that is almost two and half thousand years old, a difficult play in itself not always perfectly presented in its new guise, but nonetheless an intriguing and in many ways timely experience.

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.