Review The Tempest

The Tempest
by William Shakespeare

Fantasy Island
https://www.rsc.org.uk/

A harassed magician and ousted ruler Prospero (Simon Russell Beale), with an impatient Miranda (Jenny Rainsford) straining at the leash, a far more patient but troubled bondservant in the spirit Ariel (Mark Quartley) and a beastly Caliban (Joe Dixon) all uneasily share an island in The Tempest.

And now they're joined by a digital world created by Intel and The Imaginarium Studio and projected on to the large Barbican stage.

Directed by Gregory Doran, towering undulating images dwarf the actors. Otherwise the design by Stephen Brimson Lewis has on each side of the stage half of a ship's two tier skeletal hull, two splays of ribs with an expanse between.

The Tempest would seem like the ideal Shakespeare play for digital special effects. Yet we found several problems with them. They interrupted the rhythm of the play which made some of the real life performances unfairly, we think, seem over-emphatic. Sight gags which would have gone with the flow if there were no gizmos then also feel inserted rather than organic to the play.

It is the quiet moments that work best - especially between Beale's tetchy Prospero and Quartly's thoughtful and elegant Ariel as the latter works towards his freedom while measuring his master's emotions and keeping within his boundaries.

Otherwise Jenny Rainsford makes for a feisty Miranda who has outgrown her father's admonishings and the island. Simon Trinder's white-face, tartan-trousered clown and James Hayes's mutiny-on-the-bounty Stephano's butler make a  comely enough comic duo.

Joseph Mydell's Gonzalo is also distinctive as, having been Prospero and Miranda's saviour, he is also a court politician looking to retain the status quo. We weren't so sure at first about Joe Dixon's Caliban, wrapped in a cockroach-type carapace, but ultimately the severance of his relationship with Prospero has a searing quality.

The special effects?  We didn't see the cinema screenings but it struck us on screen they may have worked better for us. Even though there was a difference made between the scenes of humans and spirits on the island, the masque interludes and the final moments where Prospero abjures his magic, it felt overloaded on stage. It is an experiment worth doing, and doubtless there's a learning curve which will bear fruit, but the play's the thing and we give an amber/green light.

Review Love's Labour's Lost

Love's Labour's Lost
by William Shakespeare

The Lost Boys
https://www.rsc.org.uk/haymarket

Set in the last heady summer before the First World War, this exquisitely designed production of Shakespeare's early comedy Love's Labour's Lost, directed by Christopher Luscombe, is now presented as a delicious Christmas confection, part of a double bill with Much Ado About Nothing.

Determined to create his own celibate male academic haven, the King of Navarre (Sam Alexander) persuades his comrades to join him in his stately home where he sets up his own personal Oxbridge with turretted ivory towers, ordering all women to be kept at bay.

At the heart of the play is a hierarchy of lovers as the best laid plans come to naught. The King and the Princess of France (Leah Whittaker). The King's bluff confidante Berowne (Edward Bennett) and the French noblewoman Rosaline (Lisa Dillon).

The Kiplingesque bespectacled Longaville (William Belchambers) and the French Katharine (Rebecca Collingwood) and aesthete Dumaine hankering after Maria (Paige Carter).  Then Costard (Nick Haverson), an aproned buffoon of a gardener, yet not to be underestimated, and the affected Spanish fop Don Armado (John Hodgkinson) vying for the love of milkmaid Jaquenetta (Emma Manton).

This elegantly-costumed version with musical score by Nigel Hess and live orchestra fuses a whole plethora of literary, variety, theatre and film influences. Gosford Park rather than Downton Abbey with music in the style of Ivor Novello, Noel Coward and Gilbert and Sullivan. 

There is also a touch of The Importance of Being Earnest in the archness of the Princess of France and her female entourage, dollops of Brideshead Revisited (or maybe its inspiration, the Evelyn Waugh/John Betjeman Oxford set), echoes of Peter Pan  and even some zany Marx Brothers' antics with a glancing reference also to the Edwardian epitome of male physical prowess, Eugen Sandow.

Nevertheless the Shakespearean verse still shines through and it's an enjoyable lucid production with the Edwardian environment thought through but spreading its net further. Moth (Peter McGovern) has the look of a Winslow Boy naval cadet while Costard, the bowls' playing parson (John Arthur), schoolmaster Holofernes and constable Dull could have stepped out of The Vicar of Dibley.

Designer Simon Higlett's handsome stately home and halcyon outdoor sets provide a handsome and vibrant backdrop with lighting by Oliver Fenwick. There are some curious contrasts stemming from the wide variety of references, with a touch of modern alternative comedy thrown in, and the polished singing.

But this hardly matters in a bright and breezy production until the final moments when it switches to the poignant. It's a populist winning production, and we award a sparkling Christmas bauble of a bright green light

Review King Lear

King Lear
by William Shakespeare

The Generation Gap
https://www.rsc.org.uk/barbican

Your Mum's dead. Your difficult, out-of-touch Dad offers to transfer all his property into your name, relieving you and your loved ones of all financial problems - as long as you keep him in the manner to which he has become accustomed.

How many in Shakespeare's world could identify with these material concerns is a moot point, although even the poorest elderly peasant who nevertheless had a roof over his head could fear the younger generation ousting him (or her). But Gregory Doran's handsome production of King Lear launches us into a world where an autocratic leader has also, unbeknown even to himself, suppressed unruly divisions in his kingdom.

Antony Sher as Lear is borne by underlings on stage in a magnificent gold and glass casket - a  Titoesque dictator in his combining of three kingdoms, grotesquely assuming he is loved, clad in furs like some pagan Santa Claus.

His demand that his three daughters, including the soon-to-be given-away in marriage and truthful Cordelia (Natalie Simpson), tell him how great he is has the complacency of a Victorian actor-manager hearing the rehearsed plaudits of his favoured actresses. 

There's a minimal feel to the staging designed by Niki Turner  - tightly packed red brickwork and later an illuminated blank white screen with shadow projections as backdrops, single gilded tree branches, giant bronze discs, great swathes of undulating polythene sheets on the floor and falling from above.

Lear's two eldest daughters, Goneril (Nia Gwynne) and Regan (Kelly Williams) in gorgeous gold brocade on dark luscious velvet robes of another era take part in the ceremony of Lear's vainglorious and unforced, wilful splitting of his kingdom.  Indeed when Lear's company of knights later riot and assault serving maids, there seems to be some justification for Goneril's complaints, especially when Lear's bear hug turns into an exercise in power and blight.

There's certainly a clarity and emphasis to the verse speaking and those Shakespearean words come back to bite over the centuries with the twenty first century's own take on value and finance.

Regan's words, "Sir, I am made of that self mettle as my sister,/And prize me at her worth. In my true heart,/I find she names my very deed of love—/Only she comes too short".Then  the later lament of the Duke of Gloucester (David Troughton), "the bond crack'd/'twixt son and father.", the forthright speech of the Duke of Kent (Antony Byrne) "I can keep honest counsel ... and the best of me is diligence." The Fool (Graham Turner) "No, faith, lords and great men will not let me; if I had a monopoly out, they would have part on't..."

At the same time, Cordelia is "unfriended" and the vagrants, the crowd of shadowy figures who lurk and criss cross throughout the play, band together to shake literally the ground beneath Lear and those who stay loyal to him. And two football players have a fidelity to the text but almost immediately place Edgar (Oliver Johnstone) as part of the younger, so far carefree, generation.

Indeed the content of this Lear seems to stretch, especially visually, across from the nineteenth century through that of twentieth century Samuel Beckett to our age. Lear himself transforms into male Ophelia in white asylum longjohns and a garland on his head  - a delicate echo of the Pre-Raphelites which avoids parody. His slow, measured tones, with curses acompanied by melodramatic drum rolls, which gradually break down, have undoubted power, although their pace could do with a tad more variation.

The painterly visual and the verbally poignant come together most effectively in the quieter scene where blinded Gloucester and denuded Lear at their nadir sit together on the ground and the full import of their fates come home.

Meanwhile there is a lucid charismatic performance from smooth-cheeked Paapa Essiedu as Gloucester's illegitimate son Edmund,  innocent looking and wide-eyed enough to be a plausible deceiver and inviting lover for the Lear's truly thankless daughters.

Oliver Johnstone's Edgar convincingly manages the transformation from gullible half-brother through experience to feeling statesman. Graham Turner's Fool is literally a strutting avian white cock beneath his coxcomb, albeit with the ability to play a music hall ukelele.   

Overall, the storytelling is also lucid, but it sometimes feels as if the characters, although acting on each other, are themselves separated in glass caskets. The natural ebb, flow and waves of this towering play are sometimes a little frozen. However it is an amber/green light for a tragedy otherwise well-served by every level of the cast with plenty of wry humour emerging alongside the calamity and horror.

Review Cymbeline

Cymbeline
by William Shakespeare

Swan's Way
https://www.rsc.org.uk/barbican

Once upon a time TLT remembers watching a BBC children's serial The Changes where suddenly nearly everyone in the British Isles turns violently against technology and goes back to medieval village way of life. Meanwhile mainland Europe remains unchanged.

This emerged from the muddy depths of memory while watching the Royal Shakespeare Company's Cymbeline where the Britons live in a twilight post apocalyptic candle-lit world.

Meanwhile over on the continent ... Yes, the Romans host an electric international court with an  multilingual casino lifestyle where the courtiers swan around in luxury designer brands, confident that Latin remains the language of diplomacy.

The programme posits the Britons paying tribute to the Roman Empire as a Brexit fantasy (it was first performed in Stratford-upon-Avon before the referendum), although the parallels feel a little strained in Melly Still's whirlwind gender-swapping production. 

Innogen (Bethan Cullinane) is a tough but still emotionally vulnerable young princess, first seen with a ragged skirt of downy swan feathers, picking up on lines in the play, "Hath Britain all the sun that shines?Day? Night?/Are they not but in Britain? In th' world's volume/Our Britain seems as of it, but not in'it:/In a great pool a swan's nest"

She defies her statuesque Boadicea of a mother, Queen Cymbeline (Geraldine Bevan), to marry her childhood sweetheart Posthumus (Hiran Abeysekera) but their newly married life quickly goes awry when Posthumus is banished and then ends up in Rome.

With its unstable mix of genres and self conscious narrating-the-story style, there's no doubt Cymbeline is a challenge and there are plenty of strengths in individual performances in this production.

Cullinane makes a sturdily attractive Innogen, tenacious and resilient but still fragile enough to make us care in female garb and disguised as a boy. 

The slighter figure of Abeysekera, her lover, then husband who is easily persuaded in a wager that she is an unfaithful wife is more problematic.

He's a bit of a soft puppy dog at the beginning but his final brief scene with treacherous Iachimo does make for a natural and intuitive sense of an ending to that side of the story.

Changing the sex of Cymbeline and that of her consort who becomes "The Duke" (James Clyde) brings a new dynamic to relationships. Out goes the wicked stepmother trope and The Duke (James Clyde) is a rather too subtle, modern brown-suited villain with leather patches on his elbows.

More successful is Italian nobleman Iachimo (Oliver Johnstone) who as a villainous devil steals all the best tunes bringing lusty swagger and humour before his come-uppance.

A word too for the Posthumus's gender-swapped servant Pisania (Kelly Williams), acting as her master's secret agent at the British court who also brings clarity to the plot.

The trouble is chunks of the story get lost in the low-light opening scenes - it's hard for newcomers to the story to grasp, even with flashed up projections of newspapers, that two of the Queen's children were kidnapped as babies or even that the doltish would-be pop star Cloten (Marcus Griffiths) is The Duke's son from an earlier marriage.

Even so, the soundscape from composer Dave Price does bring visceral ripples as the plot unravels. Over in Wales, a nobleman banished unjustly many years earlier from the Queen's court, Belarius (Graham Turner in a solid performance) is living in the wilds with the Queen's children, in this version a girl and a boy rather than two boys, who know nothing of their Royal birth.

Turned into a pair of Peter Pan-like Lost Children, despite a famously gory outbreak of violence, the two (Natalie Simpson and James Cooney) make an engaging bow-and-arrow pair. Altogether, this is a curate's egg of a production which feels a tad long but it's an amber light for this awfully big adventure.

Review Dr Faustus

Dr Faustus
by Christopher Marlowe

Trading Futures
https://www.rsc.org.uk/

What kind of academic would Dr Faustus be in the modern age? OK, don't tell us, he's just a fictional character, a chap from a German sixteenth century chapbook who sold his soul. We know that!

But watching the RSC's version of Christopher Marlowe's Dr Faustus directed by Maria Aberg, we were put in mind of those academics, wittingly or unwittingly, on the side of the bad angels when they promoted their particular brand of financial models before credit came to the crunch in 2008.

The large black box stage is strewn with boxes of the sort Lehman Brothers' employees used to pack up their belongings when exiting the building and turning off the lights in that fateful year.

In slick black suits two men have a face off, mirror images of each other with burning matches held between two fingers of their hand. The one who has the chance, which some might construe as skill, to hold the match which extinguishes first is Dr Faustus, the other taking on the role of the Lucifer's emissary Mephistophilis.

On Barbican press night, Sandy Grierson drew the short flame as Dr Faustus, Oliver Ryan as white suited, bare-chested footpad Mephistophilis and the road to soul crunch began.  As if in some kind of unemployed post Lehman's limbo, Faustus sat in his study cum studio attended by gray bearded donnish Wagner (Nicholas Lumley), of a previoius generation, less slick in his knitted tank top.

Meanwhile magician mates Valdes ( Will Bliss) and Corneilus (John Cummins) egg on their friend to achieve the heights. The "bills"of Faustus, TLT and her automotive non-algorithmic engine ruminated, took on the guise of future trades. And the means of reaching his aspirations became more and more outlandish, fuelled by swigs of Vodka and who knows what other substances.

He strips off his city slicker accoutrements down to vest and pants, becoming part bovver boy skinhead, part punk. When he uses his shirt to dip in white paint and in a frenzy of creation draws a mystic pentangle in a circle, spattered with paint, he's almost like some Faustian Jackson Pollock on the road to creation and damnation.

It's certainly a stripped down one-act Faustus, the comic subplots discarded. So it may be 24 years of magical excess, absolute power, sating the thirst for knowledge, a contract signed with his blood. Or it could be a self-harming down-and-out hallucinating during one violent, abusive night.

Huge projections emerge on the backcloth, vertical neon lights hang down like stalactities  and discordant chords of a band like some tune of the spheres gone wrong make this an decidedly untraditional Faustus designed by Naomie Dawson with Orlando Gough composing the music.

Lucifer (Eleanor Wyld)  is a blonde nightclub host in a white trouser suit and heels with her parade of freaks, the seven deadly sins: High-kicking cat-suited Pride (Theo Fraser-Steele), a Tim Burton-type Covetousness (Rosa Robson) on stilts and outsize tree branch crutches; Black and white middle-aged girl Wrath (Ruth Everett) wields rapiers like Edward Scissorhands; Envy (Bathsheba Piepe) has a black executioner's hood and sexy body corset and swirling skirt ; Gluttony (Gabriel Fleary) has an obscene body with huge overhanging stomach and a hog's head while Sloth (Richard Leeming) slithers on the ground and Lechery (Natey Jones) is a bearded ladyman in white sparkly drag.

Black coated and homburg suited faceless demons and students rise up and surround Faust likr shades of Michael Jackson zombies. Meanwhile, friars seem to come out of a Star Wars film set. Drum beats ratchet up the tension. It's a world skewed where everything is out of season like the disembodied grapes which drop from the ceiling as a gift for the lascivious Duchess of Vanhott (Amy Rockson). But it's strangely resonant in our out-of-season supermarket age.

This is certainly a Faustus to conjure with, imprinting numerous outlandish, weird images on the audience's mind, a Faustus that loses the plot.

There's a Trainspotting kind of energy and a doubleness, as we've noted, that could be the conjurer and university doctor Faustus or equally a drug-den hallucination with real-life consequences when Helen of Troy (Jade Croot) is transformed into a vulnerable child.

It certainly made a visual impression on us, even if the tale of Faustus's understandable mission to gain knowledge, albeit at the expense of his soul, felt somewhat lost.  Your own devilish duo gives this secular Faust a neon amber light.

Review The Alchemist

On a trip to Stratford-Upon-Avon, Francis Beckett relishes a classic city comedy by a contemporary of Shakespeare.

The Alchemist

By Ben Jonson

Greed Is Good

https://www.rsc.org.uk/

This production of The Alchemist by the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC), currently running at the Swan Theatre in Statford-Upon-Avon, zips along nicely, even if it isn’t quite up to the National Theatre’s splendid 2006 rendering. 

Yet it manages to  find for us the fun that the original 1610 audience would have found in Ben Johnson’s satiric London tale of confidence tricksters and their prey. 

Whereas the National Theatre offered the likes of Simon Russell Beale, the RSC gives us a solid, reliable and  accomplished cast – no one great standout performance, but a talented troupe of actors who make us laugh at and care about the characters at the same time.

For me, the nearest to a standout performance is Mark Lockyer’s Subtle, a cynical, world-weary alchemist, bamboozling all around him and taking their money. 

For others it might be Ken Nwosu as his collaborator Face, the manservant who grasps his chance when his master, Hywel Morgan's Lovewit, decides to find respite from the plague outside town. 

Then again it could be Dol Common, played here by Siobhán McSweeney, delightfully and amusingly, as a podgy and cynical whore..

There are some fine cameo performances. Sir Epicure Mammon – Ben Johnson's names often describe his characters – is a greedy, priapic, self-indulgent upper class oaf, brought to bibulous life by a fine character actor, Ian Redford. 

Timothy Speyer as Tribulation Wholesome (there, you know almost everything about him already), a pastor of Amsterdam. Driven out for his faith from his home city – as he never tires of telling anyone who comes within earshot  – is all pious, self-righteous whingeing.

Listening to him, I understood something about religious persecution. For, when every sect is attacking the other, anyone might tend to be cynical about a man persecuted for his religion who, given the chance, would persecute in turn.

Director Polly Findlay’s production scores over the National in its minimalism.  The National these days seems obsessed by complicated, massively expensive and, generally, entirely unnecessary sets, and technical tricks for their own sake.  Here we have a table and chairs, and an uncomplicated, unchanging backcloth; simple, and all the better for it.  

 

She also scores with her decision to cut twenty minutes off the play.  People are often frightened of cutting classics like Johnson, but each generation requires things to happen faster than the last, and a twenty first century audience will not tolerate the length of speeches that a Jacobean audience would find normal.

Altogether this is a fine rendering of a play which manages to be funny and to tell us something uncomfortable about human greed, earning a green light from this reviewer.

Review Oppenheimer

Oppenheimer

by Tom Morton-Smith

http://www.rsc.org.uk/

The Big Bang

Years ago when Traffic Light Theatregoer was just a little molecule and her trusty sidekick not even a single neuron, Walt Disney, no less, and a real German scientist Heinz Haber introduced her to the joys of nuclear physics. ;)

For her rural primary school hired various instructive films for the edification of its young minds and, lo and behold, forever etched in her memory was the projected glorious Technicolor of Disney’s Our Friend the Atom.

Neither Walt nor Heinz (who actually had a very dark World War II record ) with their ambitions to educate the youth of the world with a script of admirable, if rather propagandist, clarity appear in the RSC’s Oppenheimer by Tom Morton-Smith. 

Nevertheless at least one refugee German and one Hungarian scientist do pop up in this lengthy three-hour stage biography of J Robert Oppenheimer, known as the father of the atomic bomb. Both speak heavily accented but entirely fluent idiomatic English, rather improbably for recent refugees.  

The play takes a linear trot through the career of Oppenheimer from university professor to the realisation of the potential chaos which his ivory tower and desert oasis research eventually unleashes on the beleaguered world. 

Mixed with this are the dynamics of unravelling personal and workplace relationships, self-interest and moral choices forced upon academics and public figures amidst the tricksy world politics and shifting alliances from, in the 1930s, the rise of Hitler and the Spanish Civil War to Hiroshima and the start of the Cold War.

Until the final scenes of the play, we encounter (unusually for such a biographical pageant) Oppenheimer as a stranger with hardly any context of family background as motivation, other than knowing his brother to be a communist and his subsequent love affairs, marriage and kids. 

This seems rather mischievous and skewed. For the play, which has transferred from Stratford Upon Avon to the Vaudeville Theatre in London,  presents a straightforward path for the students and lecturers into education. Any adoption of communism as a creed is seen as an equally straightforward ideological battle of theories:  Communism versus Fascism.

In fact, only mentioned in the very last scenes, J Robert Oppenheimer was from a secular Jewish German family. And the play never mentions the relatives in Germany or even the precarious academic situation for Jews the year he entered Harvard in 1922 during an attempt to issue a quota for Jewish students. 

So many of those in Oppenheimer’s circle were not simply adopting a political stance but felt a real threat both to themselves and their relatives if fascism marched on unchecked in Europe and made its presence felt in the USA.

J Robert Oppenheimer is a well-worn subject with films, TV and even an opera. There are times when the play Oppenheimer with its plethora of characters feels like a series of much smaller plays, with the eponymous character and his personal dilemmas lightly sketched and crowded in by other personalities.

This turns Oppenheimer into less an exploration, in scenes, of a life than a series of cartoons touching gently on weighty subjects without any in-depth investigation. 

Is the point that Oppenheimer took a resolutely secular route, thinking he could overcome any religious restrictions by ignoring them and plunging into research? Is this an attempt to make him into an everyman academic immersed in research, perplexed by personal relationships and emotional difficulties, finally made to face reality? None of these is adequately addressed or possibilities explored. 

Underwritten characterisation and on-the-nose dialogue sometimes distracted your petrolhead twosome from what should be a much more visceral story.

The second act did bring moments which linked the tale told to our 21^st century life: The dominance of the gadget, the libraries of data in an automated capitalized world. Plus mention of increased access to higher education where, as we know in the case of university pre-credit-crunch financial modelling, love of pure research has its own inherent dangers.

At the same time, the production values of the play with Robert Innes Hopkins’ punchy design  and sharply effective direction from Angus Jackson admittedly draws fine performances from a hard-working cast with John Heffernan maintaining the energy of the piece as the scientist pursuing the ultimate goal. 

Maybe the nearest we have in Britain to J Robert Oppenheimer is Barnes Wallis, embodied in more naturalistic terms in 1955 by Michael Redgrave in The Dam Busters. Nevertheless, he remained firmly within the confines of the arms industry and cinema screen without the apocalyptic global implications of the nuclear weapon to which Oppenheimer’s name is inextricably linked.  

Meanwhile, in a week when The Economist has on its cover “The whole world is going to university. Is it worth it?", there is still enough about Oppenheimer and his environment in this play to give pause for thought, even beyond the bounds of atomic technology. An amber light.

Tickets to Oppenheimer courtesy of 

Official Theatre www.officialtheatre.com

NB A Guardian-like correction: TLT's blog is, as you may have noticed dear reader, full of accuracies but occasionally the sub-editors slip up, the proof readers let it through and perfection is not reached ... Apologies to writer Tom Morton-Smith, who for a few hours had the wrong name (Morton-Hill - wrong, Morton-Smith - correct) in this review ... We are of course mortified and would discipline and suspend those members of staff who allowed this primary school error to be published. Except of course TLT is the sub-editor - and the proof reader - and boss of this blog. However this public spirited review institution does not wish this one day to blow up into a Jeremy-Clarkson situation. So in an effort to be transparent, taking staff welfare and freelance discipline seriously, Human Resources (Senior Manager: TLT)  this time, while not summarily dismissing the subs' desk (TLT) and proof reader (TLT), has issued a stern first warning to all concerned ... ;)