Review Miss Julie

A perfectly pitched production of a 19th century playwright's pioneering drama thrills Peter Barker.

Miss Julie
by August Strindberg
Adapted by Howard Brenton
From a literal translation by Agnes Broomé

Danse Macabre
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

The daughter of a Swedish aristocratic gatescrashes the servants' midsummer eve's party on her father's country estate.

So begins a passionate and emotionally intense version of August Strindberg's one-act naturalist tragedy from 1888 in an adaptation by Howard Brenton.

The production starts with minute attention to detail. Valet Jean played by James Sheldon and Izabella Urbanowicz's cook, also his lover, carrying out their menial duties in a working kitchen.

Director Tom Littler carefully paces the show from this slow start to establish an atmosphere of tension and suppressed sexuality.

After the appearance of the young mistress, there is a skilful change of tone and quickening of pace as the deadly emotional dance between servant Jean and Miss Julie gathers momentum.

This is played out in the intimate surroundings of the Jermyn Street Theatre as the audience follows every move in Howard Brenton's three-hander adaptation of Strindberg's play.

Brenton keeps his adaptation in the 1880s, powerfully reflecting Strindberg's teasing out of class and gender within a tempestuous, short-lived relationship across the class divide with all its power shifts.

Charlotte Hamblin is the capricious coquette, almost a young predator until in a convincing switch we glimpse the vulnerability beneath.

As the employee, James Sheldon is a charismatic, handsome presence,  the couple swinging between antagonism and love. 

As the mistress of the kitchen and Jean's betrothed, Izabella Urbanowicz completes a trio of fine performances.

All of which is complemented, in a 90 minute drama in one location, by Louie Whitemore’s exquisite costumes and detailed set, suitably domestic and workaday in constrast to the emotionally violent scenes. Sound from Max Pappenheim adds to the powerful crescendo.

Miss Julie is an oft-performed play but the playwright, with director Littler and a cast extracting every nuance, refresh this Strindberg classic into a thrilling experience and it's a well-deserved green light.

Review The Blinding Light

The Blinding Light
by Howard Brenton

Down But Not Out In Paris 
http://www.jermynstreettheatre.co.uk/

Fin de siècle Paris and a famous writer is holed up in a seedy hotel doing decidedly weird stuff in the bathroom.

Howard Brenton's new play tangles itself with a few months in the life of Swedish writer, poet and painter August Strindberg, the "other" Scandinavian playwright.

For those not up on world playwriting, Norwegian Henrik Ibsen is probably slightly higher on the league table of Scandinavian playwrights in terms of fame, something which comes up in Brenton's sometimes witty but rather static and opaque take on this episode in Strindberg's life.

It should be enough for anyone coming new to Strindberg and this play to know only this. Certainly there's a pretty strong cast with Jasper Britton as the fiery, choleric Strindberg. He has shut himself away to pursue his weird science - the ancient dream of alchemy to transform base metals to gold.

So much for his theories - the play starts with a face off between the dishevelled and disturbed Strindberg, clad in his underwear and an artisan's apron, his hands stained with the chemicals needed for his experiments and forthright, dark-haired hotel cleaner, Lola (Laura Morgan) trying to do her job.

After that comes a succession of his former wives in what is,possibly a hallucinatory Faustian pageant. First of all, bossy aristocrat Siri von Essen (imperious Susannah Harker), an actress and mother of his two children. Then Frida Uhl (Gala Gordon who could have stepped out of a Gustav Klimt portrait), an Austrian writer, barely out of her teens when she first met and married Strindberg bearing him another daughter.

It's a neat irony that the elder of his wives' real first name reflects an authoritarian piece of Apple software (isn't all "helpful" computer software by its nature authoritarian?). Is Brenton playing on this? Who knows but he and maybe his director Tom Littler in a detailed and measured production?.

Yet in the midst of Strindberg's rantings and paranoia (he liberally takes swigs of what may be absinthe), the occasional futuristic reference crops up. Strindberg, we hear from one wife, "made his excuses and left" like some old-style tabloid hack.

The name of the celebrated movie from Ingmar Bergman (another Scandinavian!) Wild Strawberries also comes into his conversation. Such references and his assailing by inner and outer voices almost turn The Blinding Light into a Stephen King-style science fiction time travelling story.

Indeed, despite a polished staging, Max Pappenheim's soundscape made TLT and her own definitely non-imaginary sidekick (a talking, theatre reviewing car, what are you accusing TLT of? 😉) wonder whether this was originally intended for radio and maybe a prospect for a feature film.

This might explain, despite a grippingly intense, feverishly wild Britton and nicely stylized performances from Morgan, Harker and Gale, who cross over "real" life, painting and literature in one fell swoop, why The Blinding Light partly didn't quite work for TLT & Co.

The other part was like the recent Mrs Orwell: the name dropping and theorizing  might have the cogniscenti chuckling knowingly. However,  unless you know your Wedekind from your Swedenborg, audience members might drift off, drawn in again by only the occasional glimpse of a story.

There is a threat from Siri which finally materializes, only to dissolve through the help of the canny chambermaid. But in the end it feels as if The Blinding Light might work better as an opera with all its internal conflict and duologues with women in Strindberg's life.

Just in case, this sounds altogether too gloomy, it's worth adding there is a sense of irony and some comical juxtapositions transformed into a kind of writer's (and literary agent's) crafty happy ending when Strindberg, transformed, breaks through his own brick wall.

It's 90 minutes with good performances, if sometimes the writing itself seems rather studied and self conscious. There's an ingenious design by Cherry Truluck for Lucky Bert with gravy-brown late 19th century furniture in front of abstract painted screens, spot-on costumes from Emily Stuart and impressive lighting from William Reynolds,

The Blinding Light starts off well and ends well,  but the script  sinks into rather undramatic verbosity part of the way through, despite some redeeming humour and the best efforts of the director and cast. All in all, the voices assailing the collective mind of TLT and her jalopy whisper amber light.       

Review Magnificence

Magnificence
by Howard Brenton

The State We're In
http://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Which play links squatters, bailiffs, Che Guevara t-shirts, Cambridge University, constables, Brixton Prison, situationism, bonkbuster novel The Carpetbaggers, graffitti, public lavatories the welfare state, Edward Heath's Tory government, a revolutionary banner with a tendency to sag, John Marston's Jacobean satire The Malcontent, baked beans, the clap, the High Court, Winston Churchill ...

(Takes a breath!) ... The church,  investigative current affairs programme World In Action, Chairman Mao, the BBC, calor gas lamps, dustbin men, Hollywood stars Caroll Baker and Steve McQueen, cornflakes, Marmite, Mickey Mouse, the Paymaster General, French writer Jean Genet, the Weathermen, Black Panthers, the Apollo Moon Landing, the Stars and Stripes, the Hammer and Sickle, Benny Hill, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, China, champagne, The House of Lords, the biblical Song of Songs and a London Times obituary?

You may have guessed by the title of this review, it's Howard Brenton's 1973 Royal Court Theatre play Magnificence. This uneven, but complex and fierce play is very much rooted in the student politics, arguments, idealism and violence of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Finborough Theatre production has certainly garnered an impressive cast of theatrical luminaries of that generation to help fund it -   Judi Dench, David Edgar, David Hare, Joanna Lumley, Tom Stoppard and Harriet Walter (in case you are the type who wants to complain, the programme/play script acknowlegments studiously avoid the use of Honours' List titles) among others.

A group of squatters during the housing shortage of the 1970s break into an empty derelict house (Phil Lindley's evocative and adaptable peeling-wallpaper set, equally a squat, a Cambridge college and an English garden).

They find themselves under siege from "murder in my heart" Slaughter the freelance bailiff (Chris Porter) acting for an unnamed landlord. An ex British mainland and colonial policeman, he's already been exposed in a TV documentary for a fatal misdemeanour, but is nevertheless backed by a philosophical constable (Tim Faulkner).

The squatters, whose first act is to spray slogans on the walls, are a motley crew, led by libertarian Jed (Joel Gillman) with his pregnant soft-hearted, homemaking girlfriend Mary (Daisy Hughes) in tow.

Plus the more easily swayed, apologetic Will (Will Bliss) with a Uriah Heep turn of phrase, "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am, to wreck Society", denim-clad Veronica (Eva-Jane Willis) on two weeks' holiday from the BBC and the more quietly-spoken and observant Cliff (Tyson Douglas). 

The constable allows the bailiff to raid the premises. In fact,  it is the clash between the new (the police constable's concern over the health and safety of a calor gas lamp) with the old (the bailiff's subsequent unregulated private sector violence) which leads directly to Mary losing her baby, Jed's imprisonment and a final path to destruction.

In between the action switches to the rarified environs of Cambridge's ivory tower and a meeting between  don Babs (Hayward B Morse) and his smooth talking grey tinted former tutee, lover and now a new breed of managerial MP Alice (Tim Faulkner again).  

Magnificence has a  rawness, political and literary inclusiveness which are both its strength and weakness. Indeed, Brenton was fresh from writing fringe plays when he was given space at the Royal Court with director Max Stafford-Clark.

The writer using part naturalism, a part Mr Punch stylized Jacobean satiric style grapples with a mosaic of competing issues of some complexity including the archaic leftovers of another age within a new, educated society.

Even the Chief Constable of the local force (force being the operative word) has a Cambridge degree and the Special Branch have tutored the constable in the ins and outs of factional politics and theories.

In 1973 Oxbridge was also still allowed the special privilege of their own top and bowler-hatted police forces (which Cambridge still retains) and a substantial property portfolio.  Simultaneously Lord Eccles held the purse strings as Her Majesty's Paymaster General and as Minister for the Arts.

The scene which has lasted the best remains the Cambridge scene, done full justice by Morse and Faulkner, with not only the recognizably Not The 1948 Show or  Pythonesque, intellectual playfulness but also ultimately a controlled fury. 

Yet the play feels torn inside itself. It has something in common with Seán O'Casey without the dramatic polish but some of the poetry.  Finding a dramatic structure for the avalanche of issues becomes problematic and the sudden reappearance, after a considerable absence, at the play's end of Cliff with a final response (harking back to the Royal Court's two scandalous playwrights - John Osborne and Granville Barker) only serves to emphasize the flaws.

Neverthess it still has currency in our twentieth first century. It's a neat irony this Finborough Theatre revival  coincides with the hoo ha over Bob Dylan's disruptive silence regarding the Nobel Prize for Literature - Alfred Nobel being the inventor of gelignite which, along with a stylized take on literature, features largely in the play.

Mind you, the current housing crisis and the re-emergence of stories about presidential hopeful Donald Trump's landlord past also make the invalid court eviction notice and harassment of tenants still relevant.

This tragi-comic piece is directed with clarity and pace by Josh Roche benefitting from Joe Price's lighting design signalling the deliberate changes in style.

The title Magnificence with its mixed root meaning of grandeur and pomposity feels accurate for this unwieldy, experimental, hit-and-miss play. At the same  time its jabs of sporadic ferocity still hit the spot.

It's an upper range amber light from your agent provocateur reviewer and her own four-wheeled agent of revolution. 

Review Lawrence After Arabia

Lawrence After Arabia

by Howard Brenton

Arabian Knight 

http://www.hampsteadtheatre.com

 

It's now a few  generations since David Lean, Peter O'Toole and Omar Sharif gave us Lawrence of Arabia. Now Howard Brenton nips in with Lawrence After Arabia before the Chichester Festival Theatre's production of a separate much older play by Terence Rattigan, Ross, which was jettisoned after the movie went into production.

So younger readers may have to be instructed on the background (see link),and glamour of T E Lawrence, almost a British Boys' Own equivalent of a sexless Rudolph Valentino sheik. Indeed Lawrence is described so many times in Howard Brenton's new play as "stepping back into the limelight", we wondered whether there should have been an upper case "L" and if Charlie Chaplin was thinking of producing a movie about him many years before the well-known desert epic!

Set in the early 1920s in Bernard  and Charlotte Shaw's luxury Hertfordshire cottage, Lawrence After Arabia covers  the time T E Lawrence enlisted  under a false name in the RAF, apparently trying to escape his fame (and the propaganda) as a derring-do British hero who allied himself with the Arab cause against the failing Ottoman Empire.

We have to confess  a personal interest in this, as a relative married  a Welsh Cambridge don who had also attended Jesus College, Oxford, was in the intelligence corps as an Oriental studies expert at the same time as Lawrence (and also knew his brother Arnold).

While we're no experts and have only done the slightest of research some years ago, it seems Lawrence was not as isolated and his company was much more diverse than many would assume. But this play isn't a close study of Lawrence. 

It actually reminded us a little of Ronald Harewood's An English Tragedy, we've recently seen in an amateur production, although it would of course be misleading to identify Lawrence with the same politics. We should also say, as explained in Lawrence After Arabia, Lawrence turned down a knighthood (never let a fact get in the way of a good headline ;)!)

Curiously while Jack Laskey makes a quietly indiosyncatic and charming Lawrence wracked with guilt at his part in colonial double dealing, the Shaw household has the most punch in this play. The parallels between the myth of a Shavian heroine, in a work then in progress, and the hype surrounding Lawrence make for a convincing parallel as Shaw scholarship has uncovered.

It's a pity then that an aphoristic Shaw (Jeff Rawle) and his secretary Blanche (Rosalind March) are written as rather one note. Even if the suggestion does crop up that the image of Lawrence as portrayed in the play and other literature may itself be a figment of Shaw's socialist and anti-colonial imagination. This begs further questions about Shaw and his cohorts' promotion of  Lawrence, questions which remain unasked in Lawrence After Arabia.  

Shaw's wife, Charlotte, (Geraldine James), a wealthy woman and a powerhouse in her own right, is an intriguing character who deserves exploration. 

However she is given rather disappointingly reductionist motives. Still, James does well to convey sensitive intellect despite some rather clunky dialogue. And hey ho, maybe Charlotte shares the fate of many a woman where biographers, at least in the past,  have more of a stake in the male subject than those they rate as the supporting cast.   

All in all, this feels like the bare bones of something or a pulling together of disparate elements focussing, for the moment, on Lawrence rather than a development of the Lawrence story. 

It's proficiently directed by John Dove and all the actors acquit themselves well and don't bump into the furniture in Shaw's study designed by Michael Taylor! ;) But the switch from the study to the desert feels more like a slickly attractive school primer going over well-worn ground than revelation. An  amber light.