Shaw Shorts

 by Bernard Shaw

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre, Richmond on 24 June 2020

Two short plays by Bernard Shaw, How He Lied to Her Husband (written in 1904 as a curtain raiser to Man of Destiny) and Overruled (written in 1912 for an evening of short pieces by various playwrights) herald the welcome return of live theatre with a small audience to this wonderful theatre in Richmond. 

Paul Miller, the artistic director of the Orange Tree, has form in reviving the classics of British drama, not least several scintillating productions of plays by Shaw. Here, two pieces rarely performed because they are so short - and because the idea of a 'curtain raiser' would probably be incomprehensible to a modern audience and unthinkable financially - are given the chance to remind us of Shaw's brilliant use of an absurd situation to expose the hypocrisies of social convention.

In How He Lied to Her Husband Henry Apjohn (Joe Bolland) has written sonnets in praise of Aurora Bompas (Dorothea Myer-Bennett). She has mislaid them, sure that her sister-in-law has purloined them and will show her husband Teddy (Jordan Mifsúd). In just a few turns of dialogue the dreamy romanticism that allows Henry to idolise Aurora is skewered by the curious mixture of carelessness and worldly wisdom exhibited by Aurora. The moment when social reality really begins to collide with high-flown sentiment is wonderfully managed by the shift of the lovers from using their christian names to using their formal titles ('Mr Apjohn', 'Mrs Bompas'), a social nicety with almost no practical force nowadays, but one which Shaw's unerring instinct for dramatic shorthand can still bring into play for an attentive audience. 

Masculine pretensions are further skewered by the arrival of Teddy Bompas. Has he seen the poems? Will he be outraged? Who will prevail in a fistfight? He is more angry when Apjohn attempts to deny that the sonnets were written to his wife than when he finally confesses that they have been - though the anger may be entirely confected. The suggestion that his wife is not worth writing love poems to is far more wounding than the threat of a love affair disrupting his marriage. It is brillint anarchic stuff, perfectly suited to a thirty minute exposition.

In Overruled Gregory Lunn (Alex Bhat) and Mrs Juno (Hara Yannas) have been conducting a shipboard romance - but Lunn is appalled to discover that he has mistaken Mrs Juno for a widow. With a ridiculous yelp he squawks that he has broken a sacred promise to his mother never to flirt with a married woman. Voices which each recognises as their respective spouses cause a flurry of alarm, but it transpires that Sibthorpe Juno (Jordan Mifsúd) and Mrs Lunn (Dorothea Myer-Bennett) have also been romancing on a cruise liner travelling in the opposite direction around the world. When the two couples meet, the ladies almost immediately form an urbane alliance (one thinks of Gwendolen and Cecily in The Importance of Being Earnest) while the men desperately try to catch up with the unconventional possibilities of the situation. Shaw subtly indicates his own sympathies by allowing the wives to use the christian names of their husbands (one of them quite ridiculous) but withholding those of the women, thus buttressing them with a subtle authority. Once again, further development is superfluous.

It is so refreshing to see the conventions of 'mere' social comedy used so adroitly to raise issues as serious as the double standards between male and female propriety, the tiresomeness of male presumptions of superiority, and the innate common sense in women's negotiation of the social niceties. Even in a stripped down acting space, with half the seats removed from around the stage and an audience necessarily distanced from one another and facemasked, Shaw's provocative and whimsical humour, wonderfully embodied in this fine cast, still produces a welcome tonic and a challenge to the way we think and behave.

On the cultural front, Shaw and the Orange Tree 2 : pandemic 0 

Faith Healer

by Brian Friel

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 18 September 2020

Matthew Warchus directed Michael Sheen as Frank Hardy the eponymous faith healer, Indira Varma as his wife Grace and David Threlfall as his manager Teddy in Brian Friel's powerful play, presented in the Old Vic's 'In Camera' series of filmed live performances for which one can buy a ticket for viewing from one's own home. The theatre itself is devoid of an audience, and only the actors and a skeleton technical staff are in the building during a performance.

The play is ideally suited to the constraints imposed by the government's regulations in response to the current pandemic. It consists of four monologues, by Frank, Grace, Teddy and then Frank again, in which only one actor at a time need be onstage. The three characters speak of fateful trips to a village in Sunderland and to another in County Donegal, presenting the audience with a series of conundrums as it becomes clear that each of them remembers events that cannot all be true, since they are contradictory. That all three are speaking of the same events is clear from the repetition of whole phrases of description, mainly to do with geographic positioning, but their recollections of event and motivation complicate the picture in a way which a more conventional dramatic presentation would be hard pressed to emulate. Is this just the inevitable unreliability of memories of trauma, or is there deliberate or prudential falsification? The playwright gives no real clue, leaving us to draw our own conclusions and to construct our own sense of what may have happened. 

I last saw and reviewed the play at the Donmar in August 2016; it was fascinating to see it again with a different cast and essentially through a different medium. Michael Sheen's Frank was an impassioned man possibly using his old habit of chanting Welsh and Scottish village names to calm his nerves before an engagement to mask a more profound anguish than he can face up to even while trying to confide in us. Neither Indira Varma's fragile Grace nor David Threlfall's drink-sodden Teddy can be free of their own pain, so their recollections too conceal matters on which we are invited to speculate. With all the circumstantial detail of the monologues, there remains an enigma at the heart of the play.

Perhaps the raw power of the play was slightly dulled by the means of transmission: I cannot help feeling that it would have been more overwhelming if one was actually in the auditorium sharing the communal theatrical experience. Nonetheless, in the skilled hands of this formidable cast, it was a great addition to the 'In Camera' season.

Lungs

by Duncan Macmillan

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 3 July 2020

(apologies for not posting this sooner)

This two-handed play starring Matt Smith and Claire Foy was performed at the Old Vic last year. In the current lockdown the two actors, directed by Matthew Warchus, agreed to give six new performances in a revised format to be made available by subscription - that is, by buying a 'ticket' to gain access to the live transmission of a selected performance.

In line with government requirements in response to the coronavirus most theatres in London are still closed. The Old Vic has devised a means of bringing performances to a wider public by choosing short plays with minimal casts and selling 'tickets' for the right to watch a performance at home. The performance is filmed on the Old Vic's stage, with no audience in the auditorium and a skeleton film crew which maintains social distancing.

The stage was virtually bare, with just two small platforms, one for each actor to sit or lie on at certain points; they scrupulously kept their distance from one another, but for much of the time there was a separate camera trained on each of them, mostly in close-up and so resembling a Zoom video. It was very clever technically speaking.  

As for the play itself, it is an intense look at a young couple, well-meaning, aware of the greater problems in the world (climate change and economic damage), wondering if they should have a child together. The prospect brings up all sorts of doubts and tensions, and things go horribly awry, though there is a strong hint that they have an abiding future together. The performances revealed the style of both actors, I think, Foy seeming quite self-possessed but banking down great gusts of emotion, Smith good at a certain type of masculine awkwardness and insecurity. I found parts of it far too wordy, especially when the woman was establishing her eco credentials, and I am quite relieved that I did not pay for an expensive ticket to see it last year, while at the same time being glad to see it here at home.

Three Kings

by Stephen Beresford

seen by live streaming from the Old Vic on 5 September 2020

Matthew Warchus directed Andrew Scott in this new play by Stephen Beresford, an hour long monologue filmed live in four separate performances available by subscription - that is, by buying a 'ticket' to gain access to the live transmission of a selected performance.

In line with government requirements in response to the coronavirus most theatres in London are still closed. The Old Vic has devised a means of bringing performances to a wider public by choosing short plays with minimal casts and selling 'tickets' for the right to watch a performance at home. The performance is filmed on the Old Vic's stage, with no audience in the auditorium and a skeleton film crew which maintains social distancing.

This is the second such production that I have seen. (I regret to admit that I failed to post a notice of the first, but I shall rectify the omission).

In Three Kings Andrew Scott as Patrick tells of his encounters with his estranged father when he was eight, sixteen, and as a grown man as his father is dying, and with some other people after his father's death. His portrayal of Patrick was intensely interesting, by turns rueful, sardonic, angry and hurt, while his evocation of others (not least the father) was skilfully managed given the constraints of the medium. He conveyed a wide range of emotion with subtle adjustments to the tone of his voice, and his visual cues were expertly calibrated for close camera work, all of which made this a performance well worth seeing. (Of course Scott has wide experience in film and television work as well as on the stage, and this stood him in good stead here.)

Even in such a short piece, delivered by just one actor, the outlines of three flawed lives, and hints of the effects these have had on other people, are brought to life by a brilliant actor.

Blindness

 by Simon Stephens from the novel by José Saramago

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 27 August 2020

'A socially distanced immersive experience' is being performed at the Donmar four times a day from 1 August to 5 September; it lasts about seventy minutes.

The play is based on Saramago's 1995 novel, which describes in harrowing detail the effects of an unexplained epidemic of blindness afflicting an unnamed (presumably Portuguese) city. Juliet Stevenson narrates the description of the onset of the epidemic, and then takes the role of the Doctor's Wife, who, through not contracting the disease, is able to help a small group of people survive the ensuing breakdown of civil society. For much of the time she pretends to be blind herself, until it is no longer useful to do so.

Although Simon Stephens began work on his adaptation some eighteen months ago, and the director Walter Meierjohann had been thinking of staging an adaptation for some twenty years, neither of them could have imagined the wider circumstances in which the production has been launched. The Donmar, like all other theatres in Britain, has been closed since late March, and it is among the first indoor venues to attempt a reopening of sorts; the industry in general cannot see how to stage live performances with massively reduced seating capacity since theatres usually rely on at least 80% capacity to break even.

The solution in this small theatre is to take out all the stalls seats and build up the floor of the acting area to be level with the fourth row (the back row), and then to place pairs of chairs around the space at socially distanced intervals, allowing for an audience of about forty members. Furthermore, each member of the audience has a set of headphones (assiduously cleaned after each performance). Above, there are ranks of tube lighting, some vertical and some horizontal, which change colour before the start. At one dramatic point, the horizontal tubes are lowered to eye level, but for much of the time thereafter, at the height of the epidemic, they are switched off and the audience is n near-total darkness - even the theatre exit signs are not lit.

Everything then depends on the sound. Juliet Stevenson is a gifted actor with a wonderfully expressive voice, and the results are startlingly effective, especially once the soundscape emerges into a full stereophonic effect. The opening narration is dry, but the Doctor's Wife's experience is by turns intimate, practical, worried, enraged, desperate and determined. One feels at times one must be the Doctor, as she whispers confidentially into one's ear; then she is off comforting a young blind boy, or even further away negotiating with soldiers or extortionists in another room. The attention to aural detail by Ben and Max Ringham is astonishingly powerful, and the result is by turns intriguing, frightening, and just occasionally uplifting. There is no point in hoping for a measured response to the crisis by the authorities, since the affliction is all but universal and civic purpose and decency collapses very quickly. Survival can only be ensured by the concentrated effort of small groups of people hoping to find food and water in a now hostile environment.

The outlook in the story is considerably more grim than what we have experienced in the last few months, but that experience itself is bound to affect our reaction to the piece, which brings into sharp focus issues of co-operation and solidarity in a particularly pointed way. It is profoundly eerie to emerge from the experience onto the streets of London at what should be peak early evening travelling time to find them comparatively empty, and to travel home on a train in which there would normally be standing room only for much of the trip in a carriage with barely twenty people in it.

Over years he novel has attracted criticism from blind people for its casual assumption that blindness in itself is a disaster. Although the focus is really on the epidemic, rather than on the blindness, its use as the defining symbol of inadequacy leading to societal collapse can only have been conceived by a sighted person for whom the onset of blindness is a terror. The production team here have not fallen into the error of merely trying to 'teach' the audience what it might be like to be blind: the darkness is in fact  richly creative space for imagining the story.

Theatre in Lockdown: The 'Dream'

For those who may be interested, the Bridge Theatre's recent production of A Midsummer Night's Dream, which I reviewed on 17 August 2019 and again as a cinema relay on 17 October 2019, is being made available from today (25 June 2020) at 7 pm British Summer Time for seven days, through the National At Home free streaming service provided by the National Theatre.

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home

Highly recommended - I shall be watching it again myself.

Hamlet (revisited)

by William Shakespeare

a recording from 2018 watched on 22 March 2020

Having announced a pause in postings to this blog, I've now decided to publish my thoughts on watching the Almeida's production of Hamlet (which I've already reviewed twice before in March and August 2017). The BBC broadcast it in 2018, when I recorded it, but it has taken the current situation for me to find time to watch it. I was a little apprehensive that a filmed version of a production which had impressed me so strongly in the theatre would be a disappointment, but I need not have worried. Here goes: