The Corn is Green

by Emlyn Williams

seen at the National Theatre (Lyttleton) on 23 April 2022

Dominic Cooke directs this revival of Emlyn Williams's semi-autobiographical play The Corn is Green, first staged in the West End in 1938. Nicola Walker plays Miss Moffat, the inspirational schoolteacher who blasts her way like a whirlwind into the stratified society of a Welsh mining village and sees enormous promise in Morgan Evans, one of the miner's sons, played by Iwan Davies.

In a startling move Cooke and his designer ULTZ have imagined the play being created on a bare stage in front of our eyes, as if in the mind of Williams himself (Gareth David-Lloyd) who recites the detailed description of the set so typical of the play texts of the time, and then narrates the entrances and exits, the taking of cups of tea and setting out of lesson books, and so forth, with accompanying sound effects. At first this seems distracting and over-clever, but gradually the idea comes to be a brilliant way of showing the recollection and re-shaping of precious memories in action. It is therefore even more startling to find, after the interval, that the room so painstakingly described in words at the beginning has been given a physical manifestation on stage, in keeping with all those 'drawing room comedies' of its time.

Nicola Walker is excellent as Miss Moffat, inhabiting a character who brings all the force of her personality and convictions to bear on a society that expects women of her class to do nothing if they do not marry and produce children. Even on a cavernous stage with bare concrete walls she dominates and controls, blithely unaware of the way she rides roughshod over the personal cost to her star pupil, or the feelings of other lesser beings. Inevitably Morgan rebels, and the social pressures of the time are set to trap him: the energy of the play and of this production almost distract us from the somewhat distasteful moral dilemma posed and the extremely arbitrary solution adopted to 'save' him.

The play remains a powerful expression of gratitude to a life-changing event in a young boy's life, and the intense conviction that a sharp mind will flourish with education shines through the circumstances that tie the story to a particular time and place. The whole thing was a joy to watch.

Henry V

by William Shakespeare

screening of a live performance from the Donmar Warehouse seen on 21 April 2022

Although I had seen this production in the theatre itself (see my review of 10 March 2022 for a discussion of its deatails) I decided to attend the cinema transmission. It was not a live broadcast, but a live performance had been filmed during the production's run last month.

I wanted to see it again because my seat in the theatre had not been ideal. Of course the drawback with a filmed presentation is that the editor and camera personnel decide what is seen, and from what angle, but in the main this gave me a better opportunity to appreciate the forward-facing aspects of the staging. Though the visceral immediacy of the production was inevitably somewhat muted in the cinema, it remained a powerful interpretation of the play.

With many close-up shots of the characters it was possible to appreciate fine nuances of expression in Kit Harington's excellent portrayal of the King; perhaps he was in part reacting to the presence of cameras since the modulations of his half-smiles might have been harder to appreciate even in the intimate space of the Donmar. Far more potent and disturbing also was the mixture of resignation and disdain on Princess Katherine's face as she acquiesced in what was evidently an unwelcome marriage at the behest of her father and King Henry's insistence. Anoushka Lucas as the princess was no simpering lady: she learnt English while boxing with her maidservant, and gave a very cool welcome speech in the peace coference which concludes the play.

The produciton was well worth a second viewing.

The Human Voice

by Jean Cocteau

seen at the Harold Pinter Theatre on 6 April 2022

Ivo van Hove directs Ruth Wilson in this adaptation of Jean Cocteau's 1930 play La Voix Humaine; Wilson is encased in a featureless glass box (designed by van Hove's usual collaborator Jan Versweyweld) symbolising the crushing emptiness of her life as she talks for one last time on the telephone with a lover who has abandoned her.

The conversation begins with the frustrations of crossed lines. Though we hear only the woman's side of the exchange it is clear enough when she is dealing with a stranger who is inadvertently interrupting this painful call, and when she is addressing the now absconding partner. For much of the time she is putting up a brave front, being 'understanding' and 'forgiving' and refusing to blame anyone but herself, but beneath this surface brightness is a deep despair and an awful agony. Occasionally her anger and pain break through, but for most of the time we witness the brittle attempt to master a catastrophic emotional upheaval. Ruth Wilson, a fine actress who has worked with van Hove before (in a provocative Hedda Gabler - see my review of January 2017) pulls out all the stops here, though she is somewhat hampered by the distancing effect of the staging.

The idea of a telephone system in which complete strangers can accidentally find themselves talking with one another must seem almost fantastical to a modern audience. The characterisation of the woman, and in particular the portrayal of her as self-blaming and always ready to exonerate the partner who has abandoned her, has struck reviewers as dated and unsatisfactory. Even with the modern emphasis on personal freedom and self-valorisation, however, the experience of an unwanted breakup can wreak havoc and bring to the fore all manner of unwanted and supposedly outdated emotions, so perhaps these criticisms are rather beside the point.

Nonetheless there is something about this production which mutes the impact of all this distress. The fact that there is a large glass panel separating the audience from the actor inevitably creates a distance, and the actor's voice is clearly augmented electronically in the auditorium. Given that the piece is effectively a monologue, and that Ruth Wilson takes advantage of the arrangement to veer from bright hysterics to an almost voiceless whisper, this technical decision is not as awkward as it can be, but it still removes one of the basic parts of a theatrical experience, and makes what we see more of a spectacle than a direct encounter with human experience. It is very skilled but not entirely involving.

On the other hand, the style does provide for some intriguing ambiguities. For a good part of the time it is not entirely clear whether the woman is actually speaking to anyone at all, as the telephone handset lies forgotten at her feet while she continues to talk. Perhaps we are just privy to her innermost thoughts. Also the breaking up and reconnection of the calls raise the possibility that the partner is already with someone else; at one point in her frantic desire to keep the conversation going she makes a phone call herself (presumbly to a familiar number) only to be told that the ex-partner is not there, and yet almost immediately afterwards she has an incoming call and resumes talking. This small episode is another aspect of the betrayal that she can hardly bring herself to acknowledge, and after only a momnt's hesitation she of course does not offer any recrimination or demand an explanation. These subtleties are what makes Ruth Wilson's performance so effective even if the character's behaviour fails to live up to modern standards of how an independent woman should behave. After all, the play is almost a century old and pain is still pain.

Tom Fool

by Franz Xaver Kroetz

seen at the Orange Tree Theatre Richmond on 31 March 2022

Diyan Zora directs Michael Shaeffer as Otto, Anna Francolini as his wife Martha and Jonah Rzeskiewicz as their son Ludwig in Estella Schmid and Anthony Vivis's translation of Kroetz's play entitled Mensch Meier in German, here rendered as Tom Fool to catch the undertone that Otto Meier is both hapless and pitiable, but also something of an everyman.

In a domestic setting of cheap furniture and minimal comfort (excellent design by Zoe Hurwitz), Ludwig is sleeping on the living room sofa, trapped by his parents' aspirations for him: they castigate him for not earning his keep, but disapprove of his plan to take up a bricklaying apprenticeship because he could do better. Otto works in a car assembly plant, dependant on job security and only half aware that he is sapped by the relentless tedium of the work. He agonises over the awkwardness of having lent his boss an expensive pen which has not been returned - his lengthy analysis of the situation, and the difficulty of raising the matter days after the event, shows in microcosm the stifling social forces engulfing him, forcing him to brood on petty slights until they become an obsession. A later intense discussion about a restaurant bill shows us a mind restless to analyse but constantly presented only with mundane objects of attention (though of course money is tight, so it is vital not to be cheated).

Martha is patient and supportive with a sort of weary tolerance, while Ludwig is disaffected but powerless; his act of rebellion coinciding with the shock of mass redundancies at the assembly plant tip Otto into an unexpected and spectacular bout of rage. It is rare to see so much destruction wreaked on furniture in such a confined acting space, but a stroke of dramatic brilliance to have it followed not by an interval so that the stage crew can clear up the mess, but rather by a protracted scene in which Otto and Martha wordlessly mend furniture and sweep away the broken shards of their domestic life.

In ways such as these the playwright has pinpointed the suffocating pressure of 'ordinary' life, the man of the house bound on a treadmill but with the uneasy thought that he could be let go of at any time, the housewife eking out a domestic haven until it becomes unbearable, the next generation paralysed by uncertainty and resentment. Only a tentative recognition that each of them must learn to look after themselves before taking on responsibility for each other provides a modicum of hope that the bleak cycle of uncomprehended frustration may one day be broken.

This all sounds unbearably depressing, but it was electrifying to watch, with excellent performances from all three actors and a steady direction allowing the all important silences to signify as much as, if not more than, the awkward attempts of the characters to communicae their feelings and frustrations to one another, and hence to us.

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.