Review Winter Solstice

Winter Solstice
by Roland Schimmelpfennig
Translated by David Tushingham

A Suitable Case For Treatment
https://www.orangetreetheatre.co.uk/

May you live, so the Chinese saying goes, in interesting times.  Brexit, Donald Trump, a pensions' crisis, an oil and gas conundrum, a network of global and individual loans and debts, currency speculation, a housing crisis, an exploding population, an ever-expanding media bubble, constant conflict.

Except it's all a load of tripe. Not the pensions, the conflicts, the currency, the loans. As far as we know, they exist. No, there is no such Chinese saying. Somebody made it up and decided to put an ancient mythic spin on it and attributed it to the Chinese. And now, with the economy as it is, it has taken on a political life of its own.  And you probably thought it really was a Chinese saying. TLT did, until she did the research.

An unexpected Christmas visitor also brings in an apparently seductive pseudo-mythic script of his own in  Roland Schimmelpfennig's Winter Solstice. Written in 2013 and first produced two years later, it is now a new Orange Tree Theatre and Actors Touring Company co-production in a translation by David Tushingham.

It's a snowy Christmas Eve and the household of a German middle-class, liberal couple Albert (Dominic Rowan) and Bettina (Laura Rogers) is in minor disarray as they argue over her mother's arrival -  she wants to cut her off, he feels caught in the middle.

Still, she's the only grandmother of their one child - little Marie - and Corinna (Kate Fahy) is now in the house with the "old-fashioned, wealthy, middle-class doorbell" asking for soap and putting on her new. expensive dress of dubious origins.

With a set by Lizzie Clachan, it's doesn't seem so much a household as an office with the remnants of a party or a rehearsal room for a table read of a script.

Long meeting tables with melamine tops and office chairs serve as the skeleton of scenery. And we get not only the dialogue but narration in the form of  film script action and character description.

Albert is a pill-popping publisher, sociologist and author who has graduated from writing books  on the Holocaust to short story fiction. Bettina is a lithe, ambitious film maker. Inevitably it is Albert who loses out during the play for we learn Bettina has become a bit of a know-all who no longer reads his books - "she knows what's in them or she thinks she knows".

Corinna's apparent previous chance encounter on a broken-down, unheated train ushers in Rudolph (Nicholas Le Prevost), a distinguished elderly doctor who, uh-oh, comes from Paraguay.

He plays Chopin and Bach beautifully and speaks with sweeping gravitas of unity and community to the rapt Corinna, Bettina and their artist friend Konrad (Milo Twomey).  The latter, it turns out, is dependent on and in debt to Albert whose voice becomes diminished over time.

Directed by Ramin Grey, the juxtaposition of narration and dialogue with the movement swinging diagonally like clockhands makes for a mostly perky script, sparking off humour. The performances are taut and precise but at nearly two hours played straight through, there are nevertheless moments in the latter stages when there is a fall-off and its just words whizzing by.

For our English ears, there was a touch of the JB Priestley about the situation - the parable of the stranger entering the household, the eventual fracturing of time and all save for bookish Albert (except someone has sat on his reading glasses!) developing rhinoceros hides as Rudolph's not-so-subtle fascist agenda emerges.

Except how does one differentiate what's in Albert's mind - after all, Rudolph seems to have a Baron Munchausen youthfulness - bristling with hostility and pharmaceuticals and what's a threat? What's improvisation and what are on-the-hoof changes and what is deliberately thought out? And could it all lead to the same dangerous outcome? As Bettina tensely remarks at the beginning, there's always someone who is out to change the script.

We could have done with it being shorter and some of the allusions being, well, a bit less cryptic and secretive. A divided Germany, post World War Two and during the Cold War, developed a unique psychological take on its past, some of it imposed by occupying countries. This play, we think, tries to bring the story up to date as a fresh screen-led generation is more and more distant from those world-shattering traumas.  An amber/green light for a play which serves to show us we live, of course, in interesting times. 

Review Measure For Measure

Measure For Measure

By William Shakespeare 

Whose Law Is It Anyway?

 www.shakespearesglobe.com/

It was hot, hot, hot at The Globe and that wasn’t just the sex and corruption on view in Shakespeare’s 1604 (or thereabouts) ‘problem’ play Measure For Measure. For the groundlings’ fans were fluttering as we sweltered in a catch-it-while-it-lasts fully-fledged British heatwave!

For those who don’t know the latest 1604 salacious gossip, the puritan Lord Angelo (Kurt Egyiawan), deputizing for the Duke of Vienna (Dominic Rowan) and a martinet when it comes to enforcing the law of no sex without marriage, has been caught trying to having his wicked way with novice nun Isabella (Mariah Gale). 

A bit rich, since Isabella only came to him to plead for her brother Claudio’s (Joel MacCormack) life after the latter admitted getting one Juliet (no, not that Juliet, another one in the shape of Naana Agyei-Ampadu) up the duff and now faces execution. 

And the state, after turning a blind eye for many a year, has suddenly found itself shocked, shocked to find debauchery and brothels on nearly every street corner.

 

Will Angelo get away with it? Will Isabella save her brother? And how will she save her brother? And will Duke Vincentio save Vienna, even if it thinks it doesn’t need saving?

Well, it is termed a comedy rather than a tragedy, so perhaps you can guess at least some of the answers. And Artistic Director’s Dominic Dromgoole’s swansong production at The Globe certainly seeks to milk every ounce of comedy with the bawdiest of bawds (Petra Massey), a light-footed roly poly Constable (crowd-pleasing Dean Nolan) a wobbly man toy who seems to be able to right himself after numerous tumbles, a Duke who seems to have leapt off the alternative comedy circuit and even a play on the name of Claudio reminiscent of the Mel Brooks’ Frankenstein pronounciation quip  

But Measure For Measure is also a late, dark play alongside Troilus and Cressida, A Winter’s Tale and The Tempest with echos of The Merchant of Venice and, while harking back to the mores of another age, strangely modern in its take on economic, sex and marriage issues. 

Claudio has broken the law with Juliet because she cannot marry while her merchant relatives keep back her dowry to use in their business. There’s the fear of single motherhood. The Duke, who doesn’t want to be the baddie, allowing brothels for many years and then stamping down on them, delegates responsibility to others. 

Angelo of course would now be ripe titillating hypocrite fodder for many a tabloid. For the broadsheets also, having rejected on spurious grounds fiancée Marianne (Rosie Hilal) after she loses her dowry and the implications of the “private order” to expedite Claudio’s execution.  

Even the crude pun on marriage by the-pimp-turned-assistant-executioner Pompey (Trevor Fox) almost (but not quite) makes equals of husbands and wives: “If the man be a bachelor, sir, I can; but if he a married man, he’s his wife’s head and I can never cut off a woman’s head.” 

The Duke’s words give Juliet’s lover a status in modern lingo: “Your partner, as I hear, must die tomorrow.” And his final words to Isabella have a modern ring: “What’s mine is yours and what is yours is mine”, taking their relationship with each other outside the realms of family and dowry. 

So how well does this production marry the dark and lighter shades? The bawds are rightly called bawds and fill the large Globe stage, but it does sometimes feel like comic overload undermining the darker aspects of a play examining weighty issues. 

However, Mariah Gale makes an intriguing Isabelle – initially an over schooled student, shying away from life, with rehearsed speeches before finding her own voice and clear-sighted disgust as first her brother’s and then her own situation becomes more and more desperate. In the final scene, as she retreats to a chair and tries to make sense of the situation,  we believe in her baptism of fire into worldliness, the uncertainty of events and people.

Kurt Egyiawan’s Angelo is more inscrutable and it does feel sometimes that his interpretation is the play straining at the bit for a modern dress version.  

Indeed, the New Orleans tinge to the music made a pleasing and somehow plausible mash-up in this production.

It’s with the Duke that the problems of this problem play are highlighted. In this ultimate ‘quis custodiet ipsos custodies’ play, he seems a  figure hoofing it. This brings out a lot of humour in his tonsured disguise as a religious friar but this personality seems at odds to the supposed restoration of order at the end of the play, despite his humble profession on his knees asking Isabella for her hand in marriage. 

So the different measures of this production were not always equal for us, but we award it a golden sunshiny amber light.