Review The Ferryman

The Ferryman
by Jez Butterworth

Cooking The Family Goose
https://royalcourttheatre.com

Quinn Carney (Paddy Considine), a former IRA man, has turned his sword into a plowshare and now, in 1981, is cultivating cereal crops on the family farm.
 
Jez Butterworth's dramatic tapestry weaves in the past - back to the prehistoric bog men whose fate disturbingly echoes more recent events through the Easter Uprising of 1916 and the men and women who disappeared during The Troubles - up to the play's present day with the hunger strikers in Long Kesh's Maze Prison 

Artfully staged and acted, the large cast of this sprawling family melodrama is skilfully deployed by director Sam Mendes over nearly three and a half hours.  

The play is structured like a movie  or a boxed set  setting up a question mark and the imminence of threat and violence in the first scene and switching to the Armagh countryside with several stories intertwined.

A distinctive literary sensibility runs through the drama - the plays of Brian Friel, Sean O'Casey and Eugene O'Neill came to mind while there's more of a whiff of James Joyce with its tales of lost loves and dashed hopes with political activity.  It's often humorous, troubling, delightful and menacing in turns.  

There's meticulous attention to detail by designer Rob Howell down to the kitchen of the Catholic farmer's family with the smell of cooking meat wafting from the substantial range. 

As the family descends for the start of the harvest, there's also something of a feel of Northern Irish harder-edged, more sweary version of  The Waltons  where we meet parents, children, elderly uncles and aunts and eventually cousins. 

But the play starts very differently in a city the very name of which is a matter of contention with a horrifying exhumation of the recent past, showing this can be no rural idyll.  

The family arrangements of Quinn, his widowed sister-in-law luminous dark haired Caitlin (Laura Donnelly), joined eventually by his fragile, exhausted fair-haired wife Mary (Genevieve O'Reilly) and the pall of  possible illicit relationships and abuses, past and present, also hang over the generations. 

Yet in some ways this felt like a mystery story which never quite materialized, almost as if we were being deliberately diverted (in every sense of the word), with the possible chief character of that tale, Father Horrigan (Gerard Horan) hardly appearing. 

And that's what we found mildly frustrating Stories are evoked and then curtailed - so we never quite know what happens in the end even if it does feel jam-packed. The strands of the stories come thick and fast with the hovering of stereotypes. 

Yet it enchants enough that we bob along on the sea of words and comings and goings including a remarkably docile baby and various live animals, courtesy of gentle giant Englishman Tom Kettle (John Hodgkinson), with a Shakespearean sounding moniker which happens to be the name of a Home Rule politician and friend of James Joyce. 

Considine as Quinn makes a fine professional stage debut, a tall, slightly stooping but sturdy figure who like, Donelly's Caitlin, is caught between ancient and the modern, 

But this is very much an ensemble piece from youngest child Honor (Grace Doherty alternating with Sophia Ally) to aged wheelchair-bound Aunt Maggie Far Away (Brid Brennan). Like a victim of sleeping sickness awoken by drugs, she has moments of lucidity turning her into an aged Scherherazade.   

Des McAleer as Uncle Pat straddles the century through his education in the classics, as well of his memories of a harsh but pastoral farming past. An education which smacked to us as possibly British based. Equally, Dearhbla Molloy crosses the years both visually and verbally as the staunchly republican Aunt Patricia.
  
The play's visceral strength lies in its archeological layers of Irish history where everything. good and bad,  feels "pickled", perpetually in readiness for Virgil's boatman of death, The Ferryman of the title. 

Amidst the lyrical flow there are also sly hints of something more - a glimpse of another son of Armagh, the Reverend Ian Paisley and also international economic reality underpinning the farm.  

Through myth, literature and filmmaking, the image of Northern Ireland and Ireland has itself been "pickled", even if the hornblowing for the harvest crosses more than one culture. 

Now on the verge of Brexit, we look back from yet another archeological layer as the borderlands enter into a new phase and it's a green light for a play which feels obliquely apt for our times.

Review Much Ado About Nothing

Francis Beckett admires a beguiling Benedick and distinctive Don John in the RSC's Much Ado About Nothing but finds the 1918 setting unconvincing

Much Ado About Nothing
by William Shakespeare

Making A Home Fit For A Hero 
https://www.rsc.org.uk/haymarket

The decision to set Much Ado About Nothing at the end of the First World War sounds like a good idea, since the play starts with the men returning from war.

But, like a lot of good ideas for making Shakespeare work better for audiences nowadays, it struggles to survive its confrontation with parts of the text. 

There are some splendid things in it, the best of which is Edward Bennett's witty, sardonic Benedick with a touch of self-mockery and impeccable comic timing.

The first scene of raillery between Benedick and Beatrice is very well done, with every ounce of humour extracted from Shakespeare's very clever dialogue.

When hidden Benedick is gulled into believing Beatrice has declared her love for him, it is laugh-out-loud funny. This is achieved by making the best use of Shakespeare's own funny dialogue and building the business round it.

But it's followed by a dreadfully unfunny scene where the comic possibilities are overlooked in which the same happens to Beatrice. And the relaxed, urbane Benedick contrasts strangely with Lisa Dillon's stressed and ambivalent Beatrice.

The clowns don't work at all. Director Christopher Luscombe seems to have taken the view that the words are not especially funny and he needs to extract his laughs by means of rather too forced and over-the-top slapstick. 

Nick Haverson's Dogberry roars out his lines, and does his best to make us laugh by imitating disabilities which are not at all funny. At one point I was left with the impression he was pretending to have Parkinson's Disease.

Any version of Much Ado About Nothing has to address one main problem: How to make believable and acceptable Hero's passive and grateful acceptance back of the fiancé who, on the flimsiest of evidence, so brutally denounced her in public, at the altar on her wedding day.

Indeed I have never seen a production without nurturing a momentary hope she will give his second proposal of marriage a two-word answer, the second word being "off".

The 1918 setting makes this even harder to pull off. It was the year women got the vote in Britain - only women over 30, it is true. 

But, while Britain was still a patriarchal society, women were not handed over to their future husbands by their fathers like cattle in the way Hero is handed to Claudio.

Rebecca Collingwood's charming but passive Hero smiles and simpers her way through the play. There's not much else to be done, it seems to me. Tunji Kasim does his best to make Claudio's stupidity believable.

The villain of the piece, the man who frames Hero, is Don John. I have always thought him one of the most interesting characters in Much Ado About Nothing, and he is here given a World War One injury that requires him to use a crutch.

Sam Alexander plays him quietly and makes him intriguing as well as menacing. But why is his brother Don Pedro played by someone - John Hodgkinson - who seems, though a fine actor, to be easily old enough to be his brother's father? 

There are many good things about this production of one of Shakespeare's best comedies, but there is too much wrong with it to merit more than an amber light.    

Review Orson's Shadow

Orson’s Shadow 

by Austin Pendleton

From an idea of Judith Auberjonois 

Suitable Lives For Treatment 

www.southwarkplayhouse.co.uk 

After a disastrous theatre run of his Shakespeare adaptation Chimes At Midnight, Orson Welles rolls into London in 1960 to direct Laurence Olivier and Joan Plowright at The Royal Court.  Olivier himself is in the midst of a marriage break up with troubled film star wife Vivien Leigh and about to leave her for his young co-star. 

Welles, while hating the play, absurdist French drama Rhinoceros by Eugene Ionesco, is lured by the chance to work with Olivier and raise his profile to find finance for his movie pitches from either the Eastern bloc or the Middle East. Instead the collaboration is mired in acrimony and pettiness with Olivier going behind the exasperated Welles's back, giving directorial notes to the cast.

Austin Pendleton, who acted with Welles in Catch 22 (see 2m 31s), fleshed out this little-known episode with some artistic liberties in 2000 and turned it into a well-received backstage play Orson’s Shadow. Now it receives its UK premiere at Southwark Playhouse directed by Alice Hamilton.

Set at a time when television was starting to take hold and just before the onset of new stars growing up with film rather than theatre or radio, this Cold War piece captures the moment of ageing stars caught adrift.

A middle aged Welles (John Hodgkinson) with Falstaffian girth, unresponsive to diet pills as he gulps down multiple steaks, tries to discard his reputation as a one-hit wonder with Citizen Kane. Olivier (Adrian Lukis)  flushed with his success in Angry Young Man John Osborne’s Suez play The Entertainer, albeit harking back to a past age of music hall,  is about to found the National Theatre with enfant terrible Marxist theatre critic Kenneth Tynan (Edward Bennet). 

Indeed the travails of Welles and Olivier seem to be presented mostly through the filter of Tynan as narrator, with a soupçon of unreliability, portrayed as a fixer. 

Both rhinoceroses in their own way, the lumberingly obese yet sure-footed Welles and the scheming yet insecure Olivier cross swords. Pendleton also inserts into the mix Olivier’s lover, Joan Plowright (Louise Ford), a straightforward personality of the new acting generation standing her ground between the rivals.

Meanwhile exotic Vivien Leigh (Gina Bellman) floats in like some spirit conjured up by both Tynan’s malevolent yet grudgingly admiring imagination and Olivier’s Svengali impulses. Add to this, a fictional Irish stagehand Sean (Ciaran O’Brien).

Infused with wry humour and a mash up of acting styles from melodrama to naturalism with a gallop through playwriting history,  this ambitious production can be interesting but is also uneven. Despite Tynan’s naturalistic ironic commentary played against the deliberate staginess of the first act, there is a sense of self conscious exposition and name dropping.

The interlacing of acting styles, character and back story finds more purpose in the second act, when Tynan, despite himself,  is sucked into the action and the reason for the play’s title brought into focus. An amber light from TLT and automotive companion.