Review King Lear (PREVIEW)

King Lear 
by William Shakespeare

Pop Up Britain
http://www.shakespearesglobe.com/

Would the rain hold off? That was the question in TLT's mind as she slalomed her way through the crowd towards the edge of the Globe stage with its pillars swathed in tarpaulin for Shakespeare's play of fractions and factions.

Of course a storm at the appropriate time would be nature's seal of approbation for one of the then Jacobean playwright William Shakespeare's most famous scenes - the storm scene both inciting and reflecting the madness of King Lear in the play first known to be performed in 1606.

Kevin McNally, best known for his role as Joshamee Gibbs in the Pirates Of The Caribbean movie franchise,  takes on the title role in the Shakespeare's Globe production directed by Nancy Meckler.

He's a very neat, one could almost call him dapper, Lear with a snowy white manicured beard and designer tattoos.

This Lear dresses in a not-quite-a-military uniform as if he were a corporate man with a penchant for vodka shots who has turned to a fashion choice of freshly laundered and ironed jacket and trousers in shades of khaki brown and beige.

There's a huge KEEP OUT daubed on the nailed up doors of the stage (designer Rosanna Vize) torn down by the motley crew of performers invading the stage with their shabby suitcases and creating a makeshift pop up Britain for this King Lear.

A goods trolley roll container from a warehouse (maybe in the age of the internet it's also warehouse Britain) lies on its side ready for them.

So these squatters zip up their windcheaters, turn their baseball caps, pull their beanies down over their ears. And lay a golden cloak and golden circlet crown on the ground for Lear, King of the Britons.

The daughters of Lear stand on crates, ready for their father to address them while the King's Fool (Loren O'Dair)  is a delicate Pierrot musician with a tear painted on her cheek, playing the violin.

Gloucester (Burt Caesar) is a credulous complacent astrology-believing  senior courtier in an Edwardian red velvet smoking jacket whose good and bad sides are embodied in his sons, all-too-gullible Edgar (Joshua Jameson) and driven, bitter illegitimate Edmund (Ralph Davis). 

The Duke of Kent becomes "Our Lady Of Kent" (Saskia Reeves), a bespectacled sensible woman politican in white jacket, skirt, blouse and court shoes, holding a large black book of accounts or minutes of the Royal court proceedings  or maybe a version of the Domesday Book, a book of land deeds.

She narrowly avoids a throttling when her position is ripped from her after she dares to question Lear's wisdom in giving up his kingdom in favour of his daughters and, more pertinently for a patriarchal monarchy, his sons-in-law.

There's Goneril (Emily Bruni), thin and sallow with pursed red lipstick lips, hair scraped back in a bun, a small cape around her bony shoulders.  Regan (Sirine Saba), black hair streaming down her back, is fleshier, more voluptuous in a silky white halter neck, a fur pagan pelt stole and long velvet skirt.

They pile on the flattery.  Cordelia (Anjana Vasan) famously says nothing, a small figure in over sized, virginal white high waisted robe and silver adornments,  all ripped from her by her angry father to reveal a plain slip which could pass equally for a 1960s dress.

This is a solid, vigorous flat cap production with clear verse speaking - ideal for exam students who, despite cuts, want to hear the text. At the same time, it didn't blow TLT or her own automotive courtier away.

The use of  the cage-like warehouse roll goods container for the tearing out of Gloucester's eyes by  Cornwall (Faz Singhateh), the changing of Edgar and the pitting of sister against sister over their deceitful lover Edmund felt rather laboured.

The best things about the production?

Saskia Reeves's sturdily loyal Kent with extra resonance when disguised she answers the question, "How now, what art thou?" with "A man, sir".

 And  Joshua James's loose-limbed scampering Edgar, the only character who via a lunatic vagrant disguise, really gets low down and dirty truly gaining the sympathy of the audience and credibly transforming into a thoughtful statesman by the end.

Otherwise it's altogether too clean and laundered and  a lacklustre mash up of the traditional and the modern in dress and delivery.

This otherwise conventional production of King Lear does extract a fair amount of comedy out of Lear's contradictions and his realisation of his two elder daughters' treachery, but it does feel this is at the expense of power and pathos.

Having said this, there is a gesture towards homelessness in a corporate Britain, with a courageous military soul drained into pointless voilence, and the Kingdom's division did make us think of the union, Brexit and the implications for the island of Ireland.

The rain held off and, while this wasn't top notch for us, this brisk and admirably clear (and maybe televisual?) version of Lear is still an excellent upper range amber light introduction for those coming fresh to the Bard.

Review Life Of Galileo

A magnificent performance at the centre of a Brechtian universe brings a German classic into focus for Francis Beckett. 

Life of Galileo 
by Bertolt Brecht

On Different Planets
https://www.youngvic.org/

The Young Vic under artistic director David Lan encourages its directors to use its space in unexpected ways.

With Galileo, director Joe Wright and designer Lizzie Clachan have filled the centre circle, where you expect to see only actors, with some of the audience, seated on cushions. No doubt this has the incidental advantage of maximising the potential box office.

Galileo, a 17th century academic and scientist, passes off the telescope as his own invention in the Venetian Republic.  Yet with the telescope he then makes a true discovery which counters popular belief and sets him up in opposition to the powerful Roman Catholic Church.

Much of the action of the play takes place on a narrow raised platform around the centre circle, and sometimes the actors thread their way through the members of the audience on the cushions.

They use this part of the audience as props, handing out pieces of paper which they retrieve a few minutes later. When an audience member sneezed, the actor speaking at the time added “Bless you.” to his lines  During the interval the 11-strong cast engage the people seated on cushions in conversation.

Some of the cast are also seated on the cushions. This is a modern dress production, so you don’t know who are audience members and who are actors until the actors stand up and speak. The entrances and exits are used for the occasional spectacular set piece.

Before the play begins, Brendan Cowell’s Galileo has to run and dance around the raised platform for quite a long time.  I am not sure it was wise of the director to make his leading actor do this: the night I saw it, Mr Cowell sounded a tiny bit breathless in his first few scenes.

Sometimes, even with the impressive planetarium-style design, projections by 59 Productions  and pulsing music by the Chemical Brothers' Tom Rowlands,  I felt the director was getting carried away by clever gimmickry, but if you can’t experiment with that great theatrical innovator Bertolt Brecht, who can you experiment with?

And it does emphasise the relevance and immediacy of this most political of plays, translated by John Willet.

For Life of Galileo isn’t about Catholicism, though the Catholic Church comes out of it pretty badly. It isn’t, as some academics have suggested, a play about Marxism. It’s exactly what Joe Wright says it is: “At the heart of the play is a questioning of authority… It’s about power. It questions the way power maintains itself through prescribing an ideology and dogmatising an ideology.”

The great strength of Joe Wright's production is that everything he does emphasises that central idea, underlining that it’s as relevant now as it was at the time of the Inquisition or when it was written in 1938 and then revised in 1947. During those years  the Nazis were in power in Germany, Stalin’s terror in full swing in the USSR and then the nuclear bomb unleashed on Hiroshima.

Brendan Cowell is a magnificent Galileo. He offers us the selfish, self-assured, almost childish impatience of genius for much of the play, but at the moment the Inquisition comes for him, all the cockiness drops away. 

He is instantly diminished. It prepares us for the moment when he confesses that they did not torture him.  They only showed him the instruments of torture. That was enough for Galileo. It would certainly be enough for me.

A fine production of one of the greatest plays of the twentieth century is certainly worth a green light.

Review Young Chekhov Platonov/Ivanov/The Seagull

Young Chekhov

Platonov/Ivanov/The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

in new versions by David Hare

Chekhov Cluedo

http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/

Yes, it was Anton in the drawing room with the revolver. But what led up up to the fatal shot? There is a danger seeing three early plays by the young Anton Chekhov (or in this case Chekhov as adapted by David Hare) in one day that it does become a kind of Cluedo common denominator search.

Well-educated but disillusioned young(ish) men, landowners whose mortgages are being called in, dodgy doctors, scoundrel schoolteachers, easily influenced young females, worldly wise older ones ...  Will the National Theatre's retailing arm soon be selling a "Construct Your Own Chekhov Play In A Day" kit? ;)

To be fair, it seems to TLT and her little troika, that a hint of the boxed set approach, alongside broadcasting of the plays, is probably inevitable in this day and age.

This trilogy, directed by Jonathan Kent, starts in the 19th century and ends with an updating, costume wise, of The Seagull to 1930s Russia. With the set designed by Tom Pye, a Russian estate complete with woods and water seeping onto the stage, there is the implied sense of a saga based not on one family, unless that family is the family of actors, but centred on one property. 

Platonov was never staged during Chekhov's lifetime with more than five hours' of play discovered in archives many years after his death.  Although untitled, it usually takes its name from the central character of the schoolteacher, bitter cynic Platonov who nevertheless proves an object of desire for the women around him. 

These are his wife Sasha (Jade Williams) with whom he has fathered a child, the forceful landowning general's widow, Anna (Nina Sosanya) her daughter in law Sofya (Olivia Vinall)  and the blue stocking Maria (Sarah Twomey) both repelled and attracted by him. Written by a 20 year old Chekhov for an actress who rejected the script, it remains, although cut down to two hours and 40 minutes, a baggy monster of a play. 

In Hare's version there is a vitality but also a sense that maybe it is a piece rooted in another literary form. There are a plethora of short stories contained within its flexible frame. 

Familiar Chekovian themes of debt and disillusion mix with broad melodrama, including a bandit (Des McAleer) prepared to do the violent bidding of a moneylender (David Verrey),  alongside farce. Farce, despite that tragic ending when Anton leaves the loaded revolver in the dining room. 

It's certainly a tour de force for  James McArdle as the eponymous schoolmaster, who casts himself part as Don Juan and part as Hamlet,  swirled between these women. 

There is a repertory company for all three plays with some of the actors cast in two (Peter Egan, Joshua James, David Verrey, Jade Williams, Nina Sosanya, Jonathan Coy, Pip Carter, Brian Pettifer, James McArdle, Des McAleer, Sarah Twomey Mark Penfold, Beverley Klein, Col Farrell, Geoffrey Streatfeild. Debra Gillett) or three roles (Mark Donald, Olivia Vinall, Luke Pierre) across the entire Young Chekhov opus. 

Yet in some ways Ivanov felt the most successful of the three plays for your own spritely duo. Firmly hooked in the melodramatic tradition, Ivanov is about a thwarted reformist landowner (Geoffrey Streatfeild), up to his ears in debt while obligated by his pre-announced ideals to pay his workers as well as his lenders in full.

He is obstinately set on a economically doomed course of action, railing against his dying Jewish wife (Nina Sosanya) while he knows her own lack of blame and power over the situation. Interestingly, the Young Chekhov programme notes the playwright claimed to have been engaged for a brief time to a young Jewish woman (later, unknown of course to Chekhov who died in 1904, to be arrested in her eighties in Vichy France and gassed in Treblinka). 

Before one dismisses the Ivanov story as a mere melodramatic trope, TLT can verify a similar situation in an American branch of her family - although without that familiar revolver turning up in the drawing room. 

The third play is also the most familiar - The Seagull. Olivia Vinall completes an impressive trio of roles, this time as the betrayed young Nina. 

With costumes updated to, presumably, 20th century Communist Russia, an actress mother  Irina Arkadina (Anna Chancellor) of aspiring playwright Konstantin (Joshua James) returns to her estate with celebrated writer Trigorin (Geoffrey Streatfield again). 

Naive Nina, initiated into the world of theatre in more ways than one,  pulls away from besotted Konstantin after his mother introduces her to Trigorin. 

This third play felt much more like a screen interpretation - indeed there is a visual hint that the tragic fate of Konstantin, even after some success in the literary world, is linked with the movies. Surprisingly nevertheless Irina Arkadina and Trigorin felt too sincere about their art for us in this version.  

As we have noted before, Nina's last appearance can equally encompass revenge for being lured into life as an actress and spurned lover as well as a genuinely unhinged aspect to her behaviour. This dual resonance was something we felt was lost in this adaptation. 

At the same time, Young Chekhov gave us generous dose of the playwright and the intertwined trio of plays added one more character: the Creative Tension between playwright, actors, directorial interpretation and, even if it is a big word, life.   

Above all, seeing these three productions together in one day brought home to TLT and her motorised theatre-going comrade the complex humanity which lies behind Anton in the drawing room with his characters and a loaded revolver.  An amber/green light.