The Book of Dust: La Belle Sauvage

by Bryony Lavery based on Philip Pullman's novel

seen at the Bridge Theatre on 29 December 2021

Nicholas Hynter directs this adaptation of the first volume of Philip Pullman's new Book of Dust trilogy set a dozen or so years earlier than the events in His Dark Materials. That first trilogy was adapted into two plays for the National Theatre in 2004, Nicholas Hytner also directing, and here his frequent collaborator, the set designer Bob Crowley, once again creates a compelling vision as the backdrop to an exciting story.

Two major characters from His Dark Materials, Lord Asriel (John Light) and Marisa Coulter (Ayesha Dharker) are prominent in this story too, and two minor characters in the Oxford of Lyra's world are more important in this story: Alice Parslow (Ella Dacres) and Dr Hannah Relf (Naomi Frederick). The most important new character in this play is twelve year old Malcolm Polstead (Samuel Creasey), son of the innkeper of the Trout at Godstow. He and Alice find themselves protecting the baby Lyra not only from the sinister forces of the Magisterium and the machinations of her mother Mrs Coulter, but also from a deeply unpleasant disgraced research fellow Gerard Bonneville (Nicholas James-Neal in the performance I attended) and a catastrophic flood, until the baby is safely delivered to the scholarly sanctuary of Jordan College, where she is safe for the next twelve years.

The book is dense with action and intrigue, and Pullman as usual confronts the evils associated with established and complacent religious organisations with often gut-wrenching candour - there is an especially creepy brotherhood created by Mrs Coulter among schoolboys which essentially recruits them as spies on their friends and parents, all too reminiscent of the horrors of the Cultural Revolution of Mao's China or the fanatic youth groups in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Malcolm's sturdy common sense and innate kindness cause him to recoil from what he sees as sneaking, but barely protects him from the bullying it encourages.

The adaptation inevitably streamlines the story but cleverly keeps in balance the twin themes of growing into the adult world with its confusions and perils, and the sheer resilience needed to carry out a mission central to any successful quest narrative. Adults are just guests in Malcolm's mother's pub as far as young Malcolm is concerned until he is swept into their often mysterious concerns. Alice is just the annoying teenage girl who works for his mother and teases him relentlessly until they each begin to appreciate the other during their adventure. Samuel Creasey and Ella Dacres, both young adults, convincingly portray much younger characters, and are ably supported by the other cast members.

Visually the production is astonishing, the use of video projections on a deep stage with moveable black flats allowing for immediate scene changes and an enveloping and  convincing flood. Considering that almost the entire second act centres around the headlong journey of a small canoe (La Belle Sauvage) down the River Thames from Oxford to Greenwich, it is remarkable that anyone should have considered trying to make a stage play at all, but the result is a triumphant success from a technical point of view. Of course, there is also the matter of the daemons, the external manifestation of  person's inner self, envisaged once again by an inspired use of puppetry, and providing an excellent means to voice the inner conflicts of the two youngsters.

Though the pace may have been a bit rushed at times, and the forward-looking hints at Lyra's future importance a bit too knowing, overall this was a good adaptation and a marvellous piece of theatre, welcomed by an enthusiastic audience of all ages. It was particularly gratifying to see children in the audience captivated by the spectacle and the story. It has been a long wait, since my ticket (and indeed the whole produciton) was deferred from December 2020 on account of the pandemic, the last and longest delay to a cultural event in my calendar.

Spring Awakening

by Steven Sater with music by Douglas Sheik based on Frank Wedekind's play

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 16 December 2021

Frank Wedekind's controversial 1891 play Frühlings Erwachen is the basis for this musical from 2006 now revived at the Almeida by Rupert Goold with a cast of thirteen excellent young actors headed by Laurie Kynaston as Melchior, Stuart Thompson as Moritz and Amara Okereke as Wendla, with two older actors (Catherine Cusack and Mark Lockyer) taking all the adult parts. 

The usual high-spirited depiction of teenagers favoured by Broadway musicals here meets a sobering and at times shocking exposition of the cruelties of late nineteenth century bourgeois life, in which the suffocating strictures of adult prejudice, unwillingness to communicate, and fateful self-interest combine to quench the spirits and in some cases the lives of young people hopelessly out of their depth and yet eager to explore their world and make it better. 

Miriam Buether's set is a series of steep steps with large perspex doors at the top near the bare bricks at the back of the Almeida stage. The effect is of groups of teenagers lounging on the tiers of a school sportsground, or studying in a classroom resembling a lecture hall, though other scenes (domestic interiors, countryside ramblings, visits to a cemetery) are equally well accommodated. The set also lends itself to snappy choreography by Lynne Page, as the young people vent their frustrations or express their joys; there is a particularly clever song in which the boys wonder about 'all that's known' to the background beat of Latin recitation.

The high spirits, the chafing at ignorance (particularly of sexual matters), the crushing burden of parental expectation, are all refracted through the songs, but there is no escaping the seriousness of the themes running through this piece. While the adults may be presented as caricatures, and thus dangerously near to figures of fun, their baleful influence causes mayhem and destruction in young lives. Wendle, after begging her mother to admit that storks do not bring babies, still knows nothing about the matter when she finally embraces Melchior. He in turn has written an essay to explain the facts of life to the insecure Moritz, which is later used as evidence of his depravity - but clearly he also is not really aware of the possible consequences of his actions until it is too late. These vignettes help to indicate the wider rottenness in a society in which hypocrisy breeds contempt and condemnation; the closeness of the teenage friends is no protection aganist the forces arraigned against them, while their ignorance can lead them into frightening experiments. The scene in which Wendle asks Melchior to hurt her so that she can try to understand how a friend suffering from parental abuse might feel is truly horrifying to witness.

An anthem to a 'purple summer' concludes the play, something which in a less fraught musical would be completely uplifting and affirmative. In this milieu there can only be cautious optimism, since there is no sign within the play that the adults can be seriously confronted or that society will show any kindness to those whom it deems are failures. 

It's an exciting production of a thought provoking play.

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

The Mirror and the Light

by Hilary Mantel and Ben Miles

seen at the Gielgud Theatre on 17 November 2021

This Royal Shakespeae Comany production, directed by Jeremy Herrin, is an adaptation of Hilary Mantel's novel of the same name, the third in her account of the life and career of Thomas Cromwell. The first two novels had been adapted by Mike Poulton for the RSC in 2014 (before I began my blog). Ben Miles as Cromwell and Nathaniel Parker as Henry VIII reprise their roles from the earlier plays, and are both excellent.

The novel is long (by far the longest of the three) and complex, as the final two years of Cromwell's life were full of intrigue and interest. Mantel also imagined his interior life, with many episodes of recollection from his boyhood and youth elaborating on scenes glimpsed in the early parts of Wolf Hall (the first book). Most of the introspection has perforce been stripped out, though glanced at in the play by the occasional appearance of Cromwell's father Walter and his principal mentor Cardinal Wolsey as ghostly figures, an idea that seems at times rather too camp to be effective.

The political struggles are wisely and competently simplified to concentrate on the demise of Henry's third queen Jane Seymour and the negotiations for the fourth marriage to Anna of Cleves. Famously this foundered on the king's displeasure at actually meeting his bride, but Mantel mischievously proposes that she also was less than enamoured at the unheralded arrival of a rather overbearing and by this time physically less than attracitve man. All this was well played in a versatile setting designed by Christopher Oram (inherited directly from the previous adaptations).

I have read the novel recently, and felt that this added some richness to the experience of watching the play, since some fleeting references resonated with my memories of the more extended treatment in the book. The play (and the book) suffer from a lack of tension since the outcome is hardly unknown; this inevitalby reduces the suspense. Of course, one could say the same thing about Shakespeare's history plays, though the plays in the more mature tetralogy (Richard II, the two parts of Henry IV and Henry V) are arguably more memorable for the investigation of character than for mere historical information. I am not sure that these Cromwell plays will prove of such long-lasting interest. There was, for example, no attempt to revive the first two plays to coincide with the arrival of this last part, though maybe such an ambitious project would have been considered were it not for the deleterious effects of the pandemic on theatrical life.

Love and Other Acts of Violence

by Cordelia Lynn

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 28 October 2021

Elayce Ismail directs Tom Mothersdale and Abigail Weinstock in a new play by Cordelia Lynn, designed by Basia Bińkowska and lit by Joshua Pharo, the first production in the theatre since the renovation works which were fortuitously undertaken during the enforced closures of the recent lockdowns.

Love and Other Acts of Violence charts a stormy relationship between an unnamed man and woman, he a poet and she a physicist, who meet at a party, become partners, split for a while after a searing quarrel, and get together again. Their first encounter is unpromising, the man allowing the general noise of the party to excuse his overbearing encroachment on the woman's space and to amplify a typically masculine penchant for over-explaining things. The woman is poised and reserved, ironically amused, but eventually tired of the presumption. Even so, a casual hook-up develops into a more long-lasting liaison.

The tortuous misunderstandings between two adults with strong senses of their own independence form a frutiful subject for many modern plays, but the familiar tensions are given an added twist of urgency here by an uneasy sense that the society in which these two people live (presumably our society) is shifting away from comfortable certainties about personal and intellectual freedom towards something more sinister. The man has always been an activist; his insistent 'mansplaining' at the beginning is full of political jargon and well-worn catchphrases. It takes far longer - perhaps too long - for the woman, coccooned in a university research lab, to realise that his analysis has been broadly correct. She recounts a chilling discussion with her head of department that seems at first sight just a bureaucratic absurdity, but which carries unmistakably totalitarian overtones.

Simmering underneath is a minefield set by historical events the two are poorly aware of. In a purely accidental way the two discover that their forebears hailed from a city with a dark and contentious past, a city with differing names depending on one's viewpoint: Lemburg, Lviv or Lwow. She, from a Jewish background, is uneasily aware of the ramifications. He, of Polish extraction, idly wonders whether their ancestors might have known one another, but she says decisively that it would be better if they had not.

The increasing threat of the contemporary situation is linked in an unexpected epilogue with a glimpse at the disaster that befell her family in the pogrom of 1919. Until this point the entire play had been performed on a bare wooden stage surrounded by gravel and ash, with an equally featureless wooden ceiling suspended above. This ceiling is winched down to reveal a domestic interior in which a terrified young woman attempts to warn her father (Richard Katz) of the approaching Polish troops while he reminisces about the stability of life in the shtetl the family abandoned a generation before; only she survives while a confused Polish man grapples with the horror he has helped to inflict on her family. It is an unusual insight to imagine that the casually anti-semitic young man might be as traumatised by events as the obvious victim. The young people here are clearly the ancestors of the man and woman in the present.

Abigail Weinstock and Tom Mothersdale chart the rocky relationship with skill, dependent entirely on the text since the play is uncluttered by scenery or props until the epilogue. The markers of the wider situation are presented unfussily, and therefore do not seem at all heavy-handed, allowing for the the all-too-common turbulences of a contemporary relationship to become fraught with historical resonances even as the characters remain largely oblivious of them. The woman admits to an overpowering fear of bearing children, beyond anything the man can imagine, but it is left to us to draw conclusions about why she should feel this way.

The newspaper reviews I have read find the ambition of the play laudable but the structure a disappointment. Clearly, however, the playwright did not intend to write just another romantic comedy, or just another variation of Constellations, and I found the play powerful partly because it delibertely pulled back from the intensely personal to explore the wider picture.

Rice

by Michele Lee

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 21 October 2021

Matthew Xia (artistic director of the Actors Touring Company) directs Zainab Hasan as Nisha and Sarah Lam as Yvette in a production designed by Hyemi Shin of Michele Lee's intriguing play Rice, a co-production by the Orange Tree Theatre and the Actors Touring Copany.

Nisha is an ambitious executive in an Australian company hoping to take over the management of India's distribution of rice (the 'public distribution system' or PDS). Yvette is an older Hmong woman who is a cleaner in the Melbourne office where Nisha works. Their initial encounters are extremely abrasive, but gradually a friendship develops, buffeted though it is by each woman's personal and business problems. During the course of the play we see the pressures confronting these two women through family expectation - Yvette has always been denigrated by her family, and has a particularly unsympathetic daughter, while Nisha struggles to make her mark in the masculine world of big business, taking risks which rebound against her and dealing with condescending assumptions about her connections to India (she is presumably Australian-born). Intriguingly, it is not only the men in her business who are ruthless: her liaison with a feamle official in an Indian government department is fraught with power plays and proves quite poisonous.

In an aseptic white set - white floor, white office desk and attachments, a white sunken space which acts as a sluice for water used in cleaning - the story of the business project is played out, but vertiginously the two actors take on other roles to show what happens, and the scene moves seamlessly from Nisha's office to other spaces in Melbourne and various sites in India. We also see Yvette's awkward struggle to protect her daughter from prosecution for a principled assault on the CEO of a polluting company. 

At times the transformations of character take place at great speed, but with carefully managed inflections of accent and characteristic stances and movements we are almost always clear about whom we are seeing and where we are. The accents are perhaps a little overdone at times (the Eastern European manager of the cleaning contractors is rather too much of a caricature, and the Australian accents are valiant but clearly not native), but the overall effect successfully opens out the different cut-throat worlds in which these two women have to navigate their lives.

As a corrective to the predominantly male-dominated interpretations of the business world Rice is an important piece of work; with no men actually on stage we see more clearly Nisha's frustrations and sense the almost impersonal oppression a woman can so often feel with powerful men calling the shots, often acting behind her back while being patronising to her face. Likewise, Yvette, though used to a lifetime of men in her family defining her place and her character, here has a chance to exhibit her resilience and her anger. Zainab Hasan and Sarah Lam show a dazzling technical skill in bringing this remarkable text to life.

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.