Medea at the National Theatre: review for PORT

Helen McCrory as Medea

Medea is on at the National Theatre: I've reviewed it for PORT magazine. You can read it here.

The Changeling at the Young Vic: Lunacy and Lust

I’ve had a few Jacobean treats this year already – Webster’s Duchess of Malfi, cloistral and masque-like, at the Old Vic; a febrile Tis Pity She’s a Whore at the Barbican; an almost perfect King Lear at the Almeida, and now The Changeling at the Young Vic.

It’s a harrowing play, its tale of lustful murders and lunacy spilling its guts everywhere. A collaboration between Thomas Middleton and William Rowley, it sees Beatrice-Joanna fall for the seemingly upright Alsemero. The only problem is, she’s betrothed to another; naturally, the only sensible thing to do is to get the man she hates with all her blood, the disfigured and corrupt De Flores, to kill him. As counterpart to this is a subplot involving a young gentleman who inveigles his way into a lunatic asylum – as a patient – so that he can sate his lusts on the beautiful wife of the doctor.

The stage set was like a school gymnasium, with a blue mattress and a net that served as a sort of membrane between our world and the world of the stage, as well as a means of seeing ghosts and spying on others. The setting was a modern European one – perhaps a dictator’s house – all neat uniforms and tottering high heels. The lunatic asylum was like something from a futuristic nightmare: cages, unshapely figures, screaming.

We first encountered Beatrice (played with brash passion by Sinead Matthews) on her knees, praying, and Alsemero (a brisk Harry Hadden-Paton), believing her to be a shining light of virtue - or at least convincing himself that his sexual feelings were noble -  falling for her and offering his hand on the spot.

But, just as the castle hides dark places where murders happen, all of the characters hide darker parts of themselves. And Beatrice is not capable of knowing the meaning of words like honour and virtue, though she bandies them about with vim. She hides a serpent in her bosom – and links her fate, as tightly as the bounds that chained Prometheus to a rock, to De Flores. Everything will fall apart: nothing virtuous can live, nothing pure, nothing bright; Daiphanta the maiden, perhaps the only pure thing in the text, will suffer as surely as the corrupted murderers; the paranoid doctor's wife, who  remains chaste (in the sense that she doesn't succumb to temptation) is still married to the doctor at the end.

The play had an insane, rushing momentum. Characters shifted in and out of the subplot – De Flores rising from a cupboard in the mad scene; Piracquo doubling as the doctor, Alibius; the counterfeit madman Antonius ("Tony") as Piracquo’s brother. At first I thought these were a heavy-handed way of drawing comparisons between the court and the madhouse; but as the play progressed I saw the sense (hah) of it. In this production, everything is mad and leads towards madness. There is no room for folly here.The final scene showed this perfectly, with Alsemero all but gibbering his lines and hopping about like a madman - the relatively trite lines about "change" sucked into the whirl of the ending, and showing that, in fact, there was no change; the Duke weeping on the floor; and Beatrice and her lover, De Flores, those “twins of mischief”, dead and defiled.

The cast were superb, treading the line between tragedy and comedy with a surefootedness; although, occasionally gabbling their lines at the end, it seemed fitting, as if nothing could stop this terrible breaking apart.  The scenes in the mental asylum were brutally uncomfortable; the dance of the madmen was cleverly superimposed on the wedding of Beatrice and Alsemero, shading into a hilarious dumb show.

This is a steam-train of a production, full of weird lights and clever touches; aware of the magnificent horror of this play as well as its ridiculousnesses and excesses. And there is a sex scene in which food is put to usages I’ve never seen before.

King Lear at the Almeida

Lear: Magnificent

Michael Attenborough's production of King Lear at the Almeida takes place in something part-church, part-castle, but more complex than that: doors open and shut, revealing hidden recesses and secretive figures, suggesting an endless cycle of plotting and scheming.

The figures stride or scuttle about, dressed in robes and combat boots, moving through those endless layers of sight and blindness, truth and lies, towards ultimate chaos. What this version really brought out is the crucial role of Edgar. A lot of people, when reading Lear, are seduced by Edmund; here Edgar's quiet goodness and strength shone out. Richard Goulding first played him as a floppy-haired, good-natured lecher; his transformation into poor Tom was truly startling, his eventual role as avenger, caged in armour like some glistening insect, entirely powerful. The way he ended the play was masterful, too, adding a little pause, as if he was about to say something else, but was too overwhelmed to continue. There is no end to suffering.

The text was tightened up, and clever use was made of music and darkness to heighten dramatic tension. Jonathan Pryce's portrayal of Lear was subtle and intelligent: he twinkled like a kindly grandfather, capered about with his fool, lapsed into  sudden rages, making his descent into roaring madness entirely convincing. When he came, dressed in white, on stage in front of the body of his daughter Cordelia, it was as if the world had stopped.

Edmund (Kieran Bew) was a humorous, sexy villain, laughing at himself and everyone else, playing the two wicked sisters against each other. Cordelia (Phoebe Fox) was initially skittish and adolescent; she played the martial Queen of France well.

Lear is, to my mind, Shakespeare's greatest tragedy, full of madness, darkness and the awareness that everything is falling apart. There is no Fortinbras to take over, nothing to restore order, only Edgar's faint suggestion that the younger generation will not see the like. On that small stage, locked into the confines of that shifting world, we saw the blackness of the universe, and the small candles that light it.

Three Sisters by Chekhov at The Young Vic

Gala Gordon: winsome

I went to the Young Vic last night to watch Benedict Andrews’ production of Three Sisters, Chekhov’s play about the decline of the privileged classes in Russia. It was an interesting staging, bare and sparse. The style mashed up grunge (with a brilliantly weird version of Nirvana’s Nevermind on piano and accordion) with tracksuits and bottle green dinner jackets. It starred Gala Gordon as a winsome, affecting Irina, drifting around the stage first in immaculate, bridal white, then in more mature yellow, her desire to return to Moscow almost primal as she clambered up a ladder made from tables. There were strong performances from the rest of the cast, including the doctor, whose drunk scene was a tour de force of blustery bile; a sexy, almost Ab Fabish Masha; a prim, sensible but affecting Olga, and a Natasha who shades from awkward, vulgar ingenue into an egomaniacal monster. In the second half, stage hands appeared to take away the stage, bit by bit, as if the very world around the actors was diminishing. The empty space left still seemed to be enclosed, claustrophobic and frustrated as the lives of the characters.

The Duchess of Malfi at the Old Vic, dir. James Lloyd: review

Eve Best as the Duchess

 "A prince's court
Is like a common fountain, whence should flow
Pure silver-drops in general. But if't chance
Some curs'd example poison't near the head,
Death and diseases through the whole land spread."
(Duchess of Malfi, Act I, Scene i, l.10)

It's a good time for Jacobean tragedies on the London stage - barely a fortnight ago I revelled in the adolescent fever-dream of 'Tis Pity She's a Whore; now James Lloyd brings to the Old Vic a stately, portentous, wrenching production of John Webster's 1612ish The Duchess of Malfi, which is at once classic and innovative. The text has been cleverly edited - the beginning is shifted to solve some timing issues, for instance; the dumb show has been excised, as have characters that have little to do with the plot -  to make it knife sharp; or alternatively a hollow cave in which revenge gapes and roars, never quite knowing which way it has to turn or who its agent might be, and in which goodness is as fragile as the skin of an apricot.

Webster's entropic revenge tragedy sees a young widow, the Duchess of Malfi, forbidden by her royal brothers, the Duke Ferdinand (an excellent Harry Lloyd, who played him with sinister insanity, a quivering edginess that was thrilling and moving) and the Cardinal (a Machiavellian, martial Finbar Lynch) from marrying Antonio, her steward (played with Disney-esque heroism, shading into something more powerful, by Tom Bateman.) Antonio and the Duchess conceal their love, only for it to be revealed; they are banished, the Duchess imprisoned and then murdered.

Eve Best's Malfi shone out. She was the serious prince; the playful wife; the tender lover;  the wronged woman who goes to her death with pride and honour. The scene in which she must hide her pregnancy and is gulled into revealing it by guzzling apricots was convincing; the gentle merriness of her love with Antonio as they gambol on her bed was touching ("Were we ever so merry?" she asks); at the other end of the spectrum, her death scene was one of the most brutal and powerful things I have seen in recent theatre, her struggles extended but never comical. The calm serenity of her affirmation of identity when she lies imprisoned: "I am Duchess of Malfi still" was underlain with something powerful and scared at the same time.

Equally brilliant was the malcontent intelligencer Bosola, whose complex relationship with the audience, as he goes from rough murderer to avenger, was teased out perfectly by Mark Bonnar: weathered soldier to disillusioned, howling Fury.

Corruption and rankness seep through the play: standing pools, poisoned fountains and rotting flesh are constant motifs: "Thou art a box of worm seed at best, but a salvatory of green mummy", says Bosola to the Duchess; Bosola, his vengeane perfect at the end, says "We are only like dead walls, or vaulted graves / That, ruin'd, yields no echo." The court where the  Duchess of Malfi operates is rank - like Hamlet's Elsinore - a place where gossip and cunning run riot. People hide behind arrases; reputation is all (and nothing). The stage set was a large, cloistered structure, which functioned both as an area where anyone could stand and overhear anyone else, and also shifted (sometimes spectacularly) from public to private space, from court to bedroom, showing how though one may try to shore up those barriers, they are in reality nothing more than gossamer.

Candles lit the gloom, and light and sound was used cleverly: when the Duchess first appears (after Antonio, her beloved, claims that she stains time past, and lights the time to come) she arrived in a blaze of whiteness; when the adulterous Julia is discovered with the Cardinal, the entire stage set dripped with crimson. There is a scene in which Antonio, bent on reconciliation with the brothers, hears an echo. Snow falls, he is wrapped in a cloak: what might have been overly doom-laden was rendered supremely plangent by the fact that the echo sounded like the dead Duchess' voice.

The production also brought out the animality of the play - although it cut my favourite line ("abortive hedgehog") it still bristles with wolves and tigers (and dormice), even entering the plot in the form of Ferdinand's lycanthropy (which, I noticed, is foreshadowed when he tells Bosola that wolves will dig up the Duchess' corpse.) Ferdinand's insanity also dripped throughout the rest of the play - was anyone really sane? Cariola, the Duchess' maid, questions her sanity; when the Duchess is imprisoned, her brother Ferdinand sends madmen to howl outside her windows.

One of the most famous scenes in the play is when the bodies of Antonio and her son are revealed to the Duchess; she is not told that they are only wax representations. It's both a clever commentary on acting - we are taken in, as the Duchess is - and here it was also a suggestive catalyst of fear: the bodies appeared swinging from nooses, reminding me of the messenger speech in Oedipus Rex describing Jocasta's hanging; that slight movement all the more effective.

The cast operated sometimes in masque-like fashion, with static figures; othertimes with stylised, courtly movement, but always with grace and fluidity. The action was quick; the first half like a lit fuse; the second half was like the resonating explosion. A superlative production which slices out the beating heart of the play: the dying Antonio calls for his son to leave courtly life; but after he dies, and the brothers and Bosola die with him, it is his son who is brought in to take on the princely mantel. To enter the machine again. We can only hope that he will be able to purge something from the air.

The Duchess of Malfi shows Webster to be just as interesting a playwright as Shakespeare (though why does nobody ever question that a cartwright's son was able to write about the goings on at a distant court in Italy? Just a thought.) Though the court is rank and enseamed, the Duchess does manage to die a good death - a Christian death. Sanity is possible, and so is goodness.

The Adolescent Fever Dream of 'Tis Pity She's A Whore by John Ford

Incest is best

There's nothing like a Jacobean tragedy for lust, incest, and hearts on sticks. Especially the latter. Cheek by Jowl's flabbergasting production of John Ford's Tis Pity She's a Whore is an uber-tragedy, a slick, serpentine nightmare-machine where everything happens at a thousand miles an hour and under manic, bright strobeing lights. This is what would happen if you boiled tragedy down to its purest essence. It's what the witches make in their cauldrons in Macbeth.

The text has been sliced down to its bare bones - there is no bumptious suitor subplot here. Everything is focused on the affair between Annabella and her brother Giovanni. The stage represents many places at many times, but is always Annabella's bedroom, giving the impression that the whole thing is a sordid adolescent fever-dream draped in posters of True Blood.

Lydia Wilson's Annabella goes from sweet, ipod-bouncing ingenue through lustful demoness to final repentance with ease and poise, her presence always  balanced, and never, though she is often physically thrown about the stage, out of control - until, crucially, at the end. Her brother, Giovanni (Jack Gordon) has a fanaticism to his lust, convincing himself with philosophies and books that he is right, even in his most psychopathic moments. He strides around in a black t-shirt and ripped jeans, recalling Ben Whishaw in Hamlet; the character himself like a depraved, cut-price version of that delaying prince in his more vengeful moments.

The rest of the cast fit seamlessly into the nightmare. There is Soranzo (Jack Hawkins), seemingly a man of good reputation, but in reality as corrupt and whimpering as anyone else. Putana (Lizzie Hopley) wins out as Annabella's conniving maid, playing her with all the world-weariness of an East End gangster's moll. No matter, says she, if a girl gets the fit upon her then father or brother - it's all one.

Characters remain on stage even when they are not there, or even when dead, acting as a weird kind of chorus, a set of Eumenides, sometimes in suits, sometimes barechested, dark ghostlings of a disturbed mind. The simple set has two doors - one that opens into freedom; and one that enters into a white tiled bathroom. If you go into that bathroom, you're not going to come out of it happy. Or even alive. This was perhaps the most effective thing about the production - that the goriest moments happened in that clinical room, thus heightening their power. There were some fine touches, as when Soranzo, trying to reconcile Annabella after he's found out she's pregnant with another's child, buys her baby clothes; or when a leather-clad man arrives suddenly to seduce the nurse Putana into giving away who the father is.

The play eschewed the final lines of Ford's text, which provide the title: "We shall have time / To talk at large of all; but never yet / Incest and murder have so strangely met. Of one so young, so rich in nature's store, / Who could not say, 'tis pity she's a whore?" In a production such as this, the rhymes would have been jangly; the nervous audience would have guffawed. Instead, we were left with Giovanni, spattered with his sister's blood, holding her heart in his hands as her ghost reaches towards him.

Whether manically dancing, or stylised into heaving piles of flesh that resembled paintings ('The Wreck of the Medusa" at one point; the Sacred Heart at another) the cast gave their all to it. This production was full of apocalyptic energy, of a decadent entropy that pulled everything out away from the centre, out of control, into chaos. We are lucky that we can turn the lights on, and escape from that crimson-tinged bedroom. We can flee the nightmare-machine - but only just.

Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher! Review

Six dead Romanians; a night out on the town with a beautiful floozy; a tattoo with a secret in it; a midnight kidnap; a psychopathic Geordie; and Rex Hammer, a man so cool he once managed to sink the Lusitania and bang Rita Hayworth (I think) in the same afternoon - these are just a few of the fantastically loopy yet recognisable features of Humphrey Ker's rocket-fuelled one-man show, Dymock Watson: Nazi Smasher! at the Soho Theatre. It's basically like the Eagle but with swearing and magical swastika jokes (don't ask). And a talking dog.

The setting is the 1940s, and Ker plays the eponymous Watson, a soldier who is rather a likeable cove - both brash and vulnerable - sent by high command to tell the audience how he came to have his SS-smashing sobriquet. There are some well-observed asides, as when he's in a cab ("And I knew it would be quicker to cut up Ladbroke Grove, but I didn't say anything because he's a cabbie and I'm posh.")

There is a plot which drives the show like an amphetamine-crazed Vietnam veteran in a monster truck rally. The son of an architect, Watson's the only Romanian speaker left in England after a spate of mysterious killings. The deaths jettison Watson into a lunatic world of double crosses and derring doers.

It's a gallumphing ride, and Ker's boisterous and best strength is the ability to bring to life the galaxy of characters that Watson meets along the way. There's the aforementioned psychopathic Geordie, who trains Watson in the art of killing: "If someone comes up to you and says 'that's enough', you're doing it right." Or you can slit your victim's throat and whisper in his ear, "real creepy like." There's the marvellous Rex Hammer, who arrives after his weekend long leave still in white tie with a couple of female film stars making out in the back of his limo. "You're all right, homo," he says to Watson.

There's Joanna, the Southern ingenue who might be hiding a terrible secret (who Ker brings to life with just a little skip of his combat-trousered legs.) And there's the dog - Uncle Trevor - who would give the one in The Artist a run for his money.  Best of all (to my mind) were the Nazi fans of a magician that Watson had to impersonate (it's too complicated to explain) - Ker got perfectly the mixture of awe and embarassment, made all the more piquant by the fact that the fans were savage jackbooted soldiers who'd kill at the drop of a hat.

Inventively silly, joyously ridiculous, and yet with a plot line that wouldn't look out of place in an airport thriller, this is beautifully crafted and craftily bonkers, revealing both Ker's obvious love of the genre and his playful twisting of it. And Stephen Fry was in the audience too. You're all right, Ker!

Twelfth Night by William Shakespeare, dir. Peter Hall: review

Twelfth Night has always been one of my favourite Shakespeare plays (and not least because, at the risk of sounding like Polonius, I once played Malvolio...). It inhabits a territory that points towards the weird, late romances (which I favour over the comedies): a shipwreck, lost children, revelations. It is as full of wonder as any of the romances. It's also supremely well-knit, spare and tight, each word doing the job of three or four, its verbal dexterity and shot-silk quality embodied in the words of Feste.

The staging of Sir Peter Hall's production at the National Theatre was also spare. Viola (played by a charmingly gawky Rebecca Hall) stood at the beginning, bereft of everything she has known, her back towards the man who will help her. Orsino's (Martin Csokas) luxurious court was hinted at by three or four cushions (Orsino himself looked like a cushion, wearing a brilliantly long dressing gown of the type which I wish they still made. Barry Lyndon wears one in the Kubrick film, too.) The bare stage focused attention on the actors.

On the aristocratic side, Orsino was debauched, world-weary, commanding his group of courtiers with a languid finger. By contrast, Olivia (Amanda Drew), mourning her brother, was controlled and clearly able to run her household. It struck me that perhaps Olivia senses something missing in Viola - another lost brother - which might aid her infatuation. Drew was almost matronly, which belied her passion; my only difficulty was that one of her best lines ('lips - indifferent red') was swallowed. Sebastian (Ben Mansfield) was a fine, swashbuckling type, although with a slight femininity which maybe draws the captain to him, and helps us to understand the confusion between brother and sister.

Downstairs, Sir Toby Belch was played with malevolent sottishness by Simon Callow. This production really highlighted the cruelty of the trick they play on Malvolio (Simon Paisley Day) - played as a smooth-talking, smooth-dressing major-domo. The imprisonment scene had Malvolio in a tiny cage, blindfolded; with Feste (David Ryall) prancing around him and some sinister violin shrieking, the effect was positively hellish. Sir Andrew Aguecheek was absolutely marvellous, I thought. His foppishness and vanity were given an amiable touch, and Charles Edwards' face provoked many of the biggest laughs. When Malvolio stormed in and shouted 'do you make an alehouse of my lady's?' he nodded fervently as if he were a schoolboy who'd been caught by the headmaster.

Twelfth Night is a play with no pat ending. Malvolio's last line, 'I'll be revenged - on the whole pack of you!' resonated loudly, and pointed towards the ambiguity of the solution to everyone's problems. Only Viola gets her true love; Olivia makes do with a copy, whilst Orsino's decision is based on practicality.

And Feste - when I first saw him I thought they'd made a terrible mistake. He was old, shrivelled. But then as the play went on I realised what a masterstroke it was. To have him singing 'youth's a stuff will not endure' gains extra poignancy. Feste's wildly wisecracking wit turns everything on its head: the fool is no fool, and Ryall's wizened old man showed in bold colours quite how full of wisdom he is. He sang in a slightly-out of tune warble (though trying to get the audience to join in at the end was not a good idea, I thought.)

It was a stately production, perhaps a little lacking in energy, but that added to its sense of elegy. 'Come Away Death', let's not forget, is one of the songs in it; and the Fool's song is repeated in King Lear.

I'll never forget my school production of Twelfth Night. One of the boys in my year, Will Ings, had composed a tune for 'Come Away...' It was haunting, and beautifully effective, and I wish I had a recording. It surfaced in my mind towards the end, and I was nearly brought to tears.

[I still harbour a deep love of the film version with Helena Bonham-Carter.]

Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris: Review

Yesterday was a day of rain sliding out of the sky in sheets, of cloudy hot skies, of cocktails and mussels and balconies. I went to see Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris at the Royal Court Theatre in Sloane Square. As I queued to buy a packet of Cheese and Chive crisps, a rather small but very polite young man walked past me and apologised for getting in my way. What a nice young man! I thought. They do still teach manners! The nice young man turned out, of course, to be Daniel Radcliffe, presumably on a night off from wizardry and Harry Potter.

We (not me and Daniel, of course) had seats right up in the rafters, which made it feel as if we were watching a puppet show. The first half took place in a stereotypical American household. The wife, in a New Look dress and pinafore, demonstrating intelligence but totally desperate, watched her husband loaf around in his pyjamas, mourning the death of his son. Things progress: it appears that a black family is moving into their house, and the neighbours are not happy. I felt that this act had too much in it: racism, the suggestion of hidden tragedy; it felt bitty, whilst the characters did not live and (even the wife) seemed to be merely mouthpieces - puppets, even. One touch of originality was the racist resident's association leader's deaf wife; but even she seemed played for laughs rather than any deeper meaning. Everything was contrived: a trunk was buried (no doubt for future significance), a colander served as an awkward sign of condescension. (Incidentally, I laid a bet with my companion: every 'issue' had been touched upon - gender, disability, racism - so there was a good chance the second half would have a gay character in it.)

But the second half was like a magnesium flare in the darkness. The curtains opened on the same set: but the house was now decayed. Now the neighbourhood was almost totally black, and a middle class white couple was moving in. The same actors appeared in new guises: the once silent maid now reincarnated as a sassy black woman; the suburban mother as a loudspoken lawyer. Martin Freeman (most famous perhaps, at the moment, for putting a stapler in a jelly, but here showing his real skill) went from playing the slimy, pedantic, wordy residents' association leader, to an articulate, bewildered husband. Norris played cleverly with our notions of offence: as a white middle class person, I go through life wondering why most people are so offended by things all the time; a joke the black woman says (after much goading by the others) caused me (and the rest of the audience) to have a sharp intake of breath - and then to think how absurd it was to be offended at all.

The play neatly showed the links between this new society and the one that had gone before. It ended with everybody storming off: and then had a quiet, poignant coda, which showed how fragile we all are anyway. (Oh, and I won the bet by the way - the male lawyer turned out to be gay.)