Henry V

by William Shakespeare

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 10 March 2022

Kit Harington plays the King with a supporting cast of fourteen taking all the other roles in Max Webster's production of Henry V, designed by Fly Davis. On a bare stage of four marbled tiers or steps, with a featureless metallic wall at the back which occasionally splits apart in the form of a St George's Cross, the career of the hero king from wastrel prince to victorious military leader is played out with sobering attention to the darker side of his progress.

After the famous Prologue apologising for the paucity of stage effects when dealing with such weighty military and political actions, the low expectations of the new king's character are underscored by the interpolation of part of the first tavern scene between Prince Hal and Falstaff from Henry IV Part One, and the crushing rejection of the latter by the former from Henry IV Part Two. Only then are we presented with Hal's full transformation into King Henry as he listens to the Archbishop of Canterbury's interminable lecture about the Salic Law in France (or properly belonging somewhere further east, as the case may be), its tediousness underlined by a confusing Powerpoint presentation projected onto the back wall. The Dauphin's insulting gift of tennis balls does far more to kindle the King's ire and to convince him to invade France to claim his right to the kingdom.

The play veers beween high politics and the less glamorous life of the ordinary soldiers. Indeed, some of the named infantry were once Prince Hal's tavern friends, and two of them come to a bad end, Bardolph in particular singled out for a judicial hanging which the King watches with apparent impassivity. For this production, which is in modern dress, movement director Benoit Swan Pouffer brought in Tom Leigh, a former Royal Marines Commando, to teach the cast basic military drill and to discuss with them the often traumatic impact of combat. The result can be seen in the intimidating manoeuvres on stage, but also in the pained reactions to some events (in particular the order to kill all the French prisoners at Agincourt, which is brutally performed onstage) and in the wild partying following the battle.

All this helps to sharpen the contrast between the high flown rhetoric of the famous speeches, which are wonderfully delivered by Kit Harington, and the sordid reality of close combat. The mutual incomprehension of the two sides (English and French) is emphasised by having the French characters speak French among themselves, with English translations provided on a screen. This cleverly extends the device used in the scene with Princess Katharine as she struggles to learn English, which is often played for laughs. Here, it is not a matter for laughter, and later the Princess has a decidedly unromantic encounter with the King whose plain-speaking wooing is not the bumbling effort of a stranger to flirting (as he suggests), but rather nothing more than a steely determination to consolidate a business deal no matter what the Princess thinks.

Indeed several scenes often used to lighten the tone here receive a more sober and disturbing turn. Captain Fluellen, usually portrayed as an amusing pedant, is here more of an obsessive, and his baiting of Pistol, forcing him to eat a leek, is is an exercise in sadistic bullying. Luckily for the hapless soldier Williams, who had unwittingly wagered to box the King's ear (not knowing who he was talking to before the battle), the scene in which the King asks Fluellen to bear the exchanged glove was omitted: this Fluellen would probably have shot Williams out of hand. Instead the King and Williams resolve the matter directly without the intervening 'joke'. Everyone is clearly very skittish after the victory; the atmosphere is credibly febrile and the King himself erupts in brittle laughter when he is presented with the account of the slain.

It was inevitable that the play would resonate with the current crisis in Ukraine. 'Once more unto the breach' is the rallying cry of a leader besieging an enemy town, and the King's later threats to the governor of Harfleur are a chilling reminder of what a victorious army can do to a town that did not surrender. It is not possible in view of the shelled urban areas in Ukraine to shrug this off as an example of medieval babarity which the modern world has outgrown. By contrast the great St Crispin's Day speech is the exhortaton of a leader in the face of overwhelming odds (a fact perhaps obscured by the unexpected outcome of the Agincourt battle). This too has its parallel in the events unfolding; the outcome is not yet known. 

In frank acknowledgement of the uneasy parallels between art and life, Kit Harington interrupted the audience applause at the end of the play to explain that there would be a retiring collection for the Red Cross, to which we were invited to contribute. It was generously supported.

Whodunnit [Unrehearsed] 2

by Jez Bond and Mark Cameron

seen at the Park Theatre, Finsbury Park on 8 March 2022 

A disparate group of people forced to be together while on a cruise on the Nile; a time (the 1930s) when social status can be marked by accent and preoccupation; the interruption of pleasure by the discovery of a body; a confused detective brought in to solve the mystery: hasn't all this sort of thing been done before? Don't the stereotypes of a southern belle with a daughter who has ambitions on the stage, a toff from Eton, a European who could be a bounder, a nun who can send Morse code with a searchlight, and a deckhand with a past, just ring bells of alarm?

Yes, it has been done, and yes the bells do ring, but the result in this engaging play is a masterpiece of comedy, ranging from social satire to pantomime gags with a healthy dose of vertiginous unpredictability. For the major conceit of the production is that at each performance someone from a roll call of actors and entertainers will be the detective, without prior knowledge of the script. He or she is fed lnes through an earpiece with only minimal, or even positively misleading, clues as to who should be addressed or how the plot is developing. The permanent cast has to cope with the repercussionss of the detective's confusion while gently nudging him or her to do more or less the right thing at the right time.

At the performance I attended Detective Adam Hills took on the case with a mixture of glee and trepidation. The set up was explained to him and to the audience before the play started, and the lucky member of the audience whose name was picked from a ballot to take a minor role in the second half was identified. Then the fun began, and lasted for the duration. It proved impossible for even the experienced cast to keep straight faces throughout, and Adam Hills rose to the occasion with great flair and good humour, even responding to the demand to perform a Music Hall turn with a near flawless recitation of Banjo Paterson's poem 'Clancy of the Overflow'. Though he had carefully explained that the poem was written well before the 1930s, he inadvertently said 'Facebook' rather than 'cashbook' at one point, an anachronism too far which merely added to the chaos.

Jez Bond (also the director) and Mark Cameron (also Giovanni Scaletti the European bounder) have created a wonderful entertainment designed as a fundraising project for the theatre they love, with support from Caroline Deverill as Mrs Constance Coddle, Aisha Numah as her daughter Molly (yes, the puns were that bad), Adam Samuel-Bal as Jasper Jarvis whose excuse and explanation for everything was that he had been at Eton, Lewis Bruniges as Jack Jones the deckhand and Molly Barton as the semaphoring nun. Some degree of control was provided by the line feeders Natasha Colenso and Robert Blackwood. The various detectives provide their services without payment.

In a Q&A session after the show it was revealed that this was indeed the second Whodunnit, and a third is in the making. The authors have clearly learned how to fine-tune their material, while Adam Hills admitted that he had taken part in the first play so he knew that the best way to deal with the challenge was to cede all control to the cast and crew and simply enjoy himself. Luckily he knew Paterson's poem very well. Sometimes a Q&A session can detract from the magic, but on this occasion it served only to enhance it.

The Chairs

by Eugène Ionesco

seen at the Almeida Theatre on 2 March 2022

Omar Elerian directs his own adapted translation of Ionesco's 1952 play Les Chaises, in which an Old Man (Marcello Magni) and his wife (Kathryn Hunter) prepare for the arrival of a Speaker (Toby Sedgwick) who is to articulate the Old Man's important message to a specially invited audience. As more and more guests arrive the Old Man and the Old Woman become involved in arcane conversations while trying to set out enough chairs to seat everybody before the Speaker himself arrives.

The absurdist element to this play is that none of the guests is visible, so all the remarks they might be making have to be inferred from the reactions and replies of the old couple. Their conversation with each other mixes banality, exasperation and affection, and the situation veers between farce and total incomprehension. The Speaker, when he finally arrives, cannot speak.

In this production, designed by Cécile Trémolières and Naomi Kuyck-Cohen, the stage is initially masked by draped light blue curtains, which when opened reveal a space also hung with swaggd material. It gives the effect of a down-at-heel old-fashioned proscenium stage, suitable perhaps for the slightly hysterical music-hall turns of the elderly couple. A doorbell sounds noisily to announce the arrival of guests, but sometimes it is on the left and somethimes on the right. Neither the Old Man nor the Old Woman seems at all perplexed by this anomaly.

Marcello Magni and Kathryn Hunter (husband and wife in real life also) are masters at the art of conveying absolute attention to their predicament in a double act that holds the audience's attention through all the grotesquerie, giving hints of the tragedy that lies behind their evident loneliness and their desperate attempts to allay it. He is dressed smartly in intention, but somewhat dishevelled, while she looks like an overgrown and at times disturbingly wizened child. As these two actors have long been associated with the Complicité tradition there are some wonderful sight gags with imaginary and real props throughout the performance.

The adaptation departs in some significant respects from the original. It begins with an overheard conversation in which Magni is apparently suffering from stage fright and refusing to go on. It ends with a long rambling disquisition by Toby Sedgwick in his own persona on the playwright's intentions, and the way they have been subverted by the 'accident' of his being mistaken as one of the late arriving guests, rather than as the Speaker himself. And in the middle of the performance the fourth wall is deliberately broken as two members of the audience are invited onto the stage to help greet the guests. There is of course much fun to be had with this ploy, since the Old Man can confidently reprimand one of these helpers for tripping over a guest, or for holding out a hand to someone who is plainly not there.

The final monologue defuses the manic energy of what has gone before, but it was a great opportunity to see one of the defining works of Absurdist drama revived by a stellar double act.

Hamlet

by William Shakespeare

seen at Trinity Church Guildford on 16 Febraury 2022

The Guildford Shakespeare Company's production of Hamlet, performed in the Holy Trinity Church in the town's High Street, is directed by Tom Littler and features Freddie Fox in the title role with Noel White as Claudius, Karen Ascoe as Gertrude, Stefan Bednarczyk as Polonius, Daniel Burke as Laertes, Rosalind Ford as Ophelia, Pepter Lunkuse as Horatio, Sarah Gobran as Fortinbras and the members of the company doubling in other roles, with Edward Fox's voice as the Ghost of Hamlet's father.

Inevitably the text is cut to allow for just under three hours of performing time, and it is always interesting to see which of the ostensibly dispensable facets of the full text the director has chosen to retain. In this case director Tom Littler has made the politico-military sub-plot following the manouevres of Fortinbras one of the major threads of the production, while the extensive interactions of Hamlet with the players are necessarily truncated as only one player is present to give the vital Hecuba speech and there is no discussion of introducing new text to the Mouse Trap play. The dumb show of the Murder of Gonzago, imagined to be taking place in the real audience's space, is enough to scandalise Claudius. The abbreviations to the text, and the necessary culling of minor characters to enable the small supporting cast to double the parts, was intelligently managed.

The space and acoustics of the church provided an excellent environment for both the scenes at the court and the destabilising atmosphere on the battlements where the ghost 'appears'. With unostentatious modern dress the guards could deploy battery torches, the sharp white gleams piercing misty air as the characters tried desperately to pin down the apparition. Elsewhere pistols were in evidence - Hamlet shot Polonius at some distance - but rapiers were still essential for the final duel between Hamlet and Laertes. Though the gravedigger was digging a grave, it was only for an urn containing Ophelia's ashes.

Everything depends on Hamlet, and in Freddie Fox we had an engaging but troubled prince, taken to drink in his grief but soon shaking it off as he faces the challenge of revenge, and then by turns witty, sardonic, impassioned, and distraught, speaking the verse with a beguiling confidence and intelligence. The dynamic between Gertrude and Claudius seemed to be barely simmering in contrast to the prince's instinctive revulsion at his mother's actions, but the tensions in Polonius's family were nicely displayed in the scene of Laertes's departure, Polonius's sanctimony being given the added fillip of a clerical collar in a nod to the physical setting in a church. Ophelia's naive humanity was underscored by her facility in playing a cello, poignantly abandoned as she later descended into madness.

This was a stimulating production in an unusual but, as it turned out, entirely appropriate space. 

Force Majeure

adapted by Tim Price from Ruben Östlund's film

seen at the Donmar Warehouse on 6 January 2022

Michael Longhurst directs Rory Kinnear as Tomas, Lyndsey Marshall as his wife Ebba, Oliver Savell and Bo Bragason as their children Harry and Vera (in the performance I saw) and Siena Kelly and Sule Rimi as their friends Jenny and Mats in this inventive stage adaptation of the Swedish film Force Majeure released in 2014.

On a fantastically inventive stage designed by Jon Bausor Tomas and his family arrive in a ski resort for a family holiday. The children are fractious, young Harry whining and teenage Vera chilled out, while Ebba ruefully acknowledges to another guest that it is almost imposible to separate her husband from his phone and work commitments. 

Anything could trigger a crisis: an avalanche does the trick, causing Tomas to flip into panicked survivalist mode and then, afterwards, denying his reaction until a video forces him to realise that his memory of events cannot be correct. The impending collapse of his marriage, built as it is on a wearied acceptance of disappointment on the part of his wife, finally forces him to confront his insecurities. In a brilliant counterpoint to his agony, his friend Mats has a soul-searching night arguing with his partner which is a comic tour de force of psychobabble.

It's incredibly ambitious to stage a piece set in a ski resort in the confines of the Donmar stage, but with a steeply raked and white carpeted floor the place is brought to life as various cast members ski unerringly down the slope and into one of the passages used by the audience to reach their seats. In the meantime the crisis afflicting Tomas and his family is played out on the slopes and in their hotel suite. Actors of the calibre of Rory Kinnear and Lyndsey Marshall can be depended on to articulate the emtional rollercoaster of Tomas and Ebba's 'holiday', allowing us to see everything from ridiculousness to self-indulgence to pain, but it is a tribute to the young actors playing their children that sibling brattishness can be so convincingly played and so easily be shown to mask deeper insecurities. Harry can whine with the best of them about his missing sunglasses, but he is clearly anxious when he senses the tensions rising between his parents, while Vera's adolescent stand-offishness masks (as it often does) a deep-seated dependance on the family not being ruffled.

There is a fragile optimism at the end when Harry accusingly asks his father whether he is smoking and Tomas instinctively denies it even while he has a cigarette in his hand. Then he quietly tells his son to ask the question again, and confesses that he is smoking but that he will give it up when they get home. For the first time in years he is not being an invincible man and we can hope that his faltering steps will lead him out of the prison he built himself.

Given the twin dangers of this play wandering into melodrama or mere superficiality it is a credit to all concerned that the balance of humour and agony was finely maintained to produce an enjoyable yet thought provoking entertainment

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.