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 In Idleness [Preview]

  
Francis Beckett takes issue with the late Terence Rattigan's examination of post Second World War society, but takes pleasure in a splendid cast.

 Love in Idleness
by Terence Rattigan
Adapted by Sir Trevor Nunn

The Times They Were (And Are) A Changin'  
https://www.nimaxtheatres.com/apollo-theatre/love_in_idleness

It’s a sign of reactionary times when we hear a lot about how the great Terence Rattigan was unjustly cast into the outer darkness by the emergence of the radical playwrights of the late 1950s – John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and the rest. As David Hare once put it, “in rightwing times, rightwing art flourishes.”

Trevor Nunn, who directs Love in Idleness, writes in the theatre programme: “Kenneth Tynan’s excitement at seeing John Osborne’s Look Back in Anger in 1956 was understandable, but then his constant rejection and derision of Rattigan, in favour of ‘angry young man’ plays, was a mistake.”

David Hare nailed this rubbish as long ago as 2011, writing: “It has become a commonplace of commentary to turn him [Rattigan] into some sort of public school victim whose fall from grace can be put down to nasty goings-on initiated by yobs at the Royal Court and Stratford East in the 1950s.”

The truth is that the new playwrights spoke to the generation of the Attlee settlement. Rattigan didn’t.  That’s not to deny that Rattigan at his best was a thoroughly accomplished and, in his own way, rather radical playwright.

The play now at the Apollo Theatre, after a run at the Menier Chocolate Factory, is a composite. He wrote a play called Less Than Kind in 1944, then altered it at the behest of the famous acting duo Lynn Fontanne and Alfred Lunt and renamed it Love in Idleness.  Years later he regretted this, and  Nunn has now reworked the two plays into one.

If Nunn is right – and I have no reason to doubt it  – to suppose that this play is at least something approaching the work Rattigan would have produced if left to himself, what it tells us is that the playwright was on the wrong side of history.
 
Written and produced as the Second World War ground to an end, it addresses, as every writer worth his salt was addressing at that time, the sort of post war world that was going to emerge. 

But while some writers were looking forward to a new and better world, Rattigan, on the evidence of Love in Idleness, was looking forward to business as usual; to a return to the status quo ante, when the rich knew how things should be done, and the poor knew their place. 

He thought the Beveridge Report was so much froth, and the new world that the Labour Party dreamed of creating would turn out to be, as one of his characters puts it, “the same as the old world but spring cleaned a little.”

He was wrong. Between 1945 and 1948 the Attlee government carried out the only real social revolution Britain has ever seen, and Beveridge provided their blueprint.

If Rattigan felt like sneering at it – and he did – that places him in the sad harrumphing old tradition of William Douglas-Home, who wrote a very successful and entirely vacuous play, later a film, around the same time called The Chiltern Hundreds, about a butler who stands for the Conservative Party and defeats the uppity socialist.  (Message: the working class salt of the earth know their place.)

In Love in Idleness, Sir John Fletcher, a rather conservative (with both a small and capital c), Canadian businessman, has been drafted into Winston Churchill’s war cabinet as Minister of Tank Production. 

Presumably Rattigan had in mind the Canadian newspaper proprietor Lord Beaverbrook, whom Churchill appointed as Minister of Aircraft Production in 1940. Yet this is odd because he paints Fletcher as a terribly decent chap, and Beaverbrook was a shit.  

Sir John has parted from his much younger wife, whom we are encouraged to assume is a gold-digger, and is living with the widow of a dentist, whose son is serving with the army in Canada. 

But when the son comes home, he is distressed by this arrangement – both because it makes his mother a kept woman, and because he disapproves of Fletcher’s right wing politics. 

None of the characters rang true to me. Sir John is a wise and kindly multi-millionaire; his widowed lover, Oliva Brown, a charming, rather dippy social climber; and her son Michael a selfish and self-absorbed 18-year-old who has adopted some foolish ideas about making a better world which we are encouraged to hope that he will grow out of soon.

They are played with matchless professionalism and conviction, Sir John by Anthony Head, Olivia by Eve Best and Michael by Edward Bluemel, but nothing these fine actors can do, and nothing Sir Trevor's assured direction can do, will make them anything other than unbelievable standard-bearers of a complacent and reactionary political point.

Nonetheless, it is always a pleasure to watch such very good actors at the top of their form in a well plotted play, so I’m happy to give it an amber light.

Review No Man's Land

No Man's Land
by Harold Pinter

The Batting Order
http://www.nomanslandtheplay.com/

After the first performance of Harold Pinter's absurdist No Man's Land back in the Cold War days of 1975, the Times critic Irving Wardle said it was "... palpably the work of our best living poet in its command of language and its power to errect a coherent structure in a twilight zone of confusion and dismay."

We did not personally mine this quote from the esteemed Mr Wardle but owe its excavation to the programme introduction of director Sean Mathias's current production, which also doffs its cap to a quote from the equally esteemed Mr Billington from that time, 'a mixture of "admiration, respect and bewilderment". Ah, those heady days, when print was king and the word blog would have been viewed as some kind of unforgiveable newspaper misprint!

All of which is to say that No Man's Land, we would be presumptuous enough to believe, is very much a product of its time, a class system, a literary and Oxbridge hierachy. It's still got heft and bite. However it's a slow burner for current audiences, now when surreal humour and intricate power play has entered mainstream television and internet.

Step into the breach, Sir Patrick Stewart as eminent man of letters, Hirst, and Sir Ian McKellen as Spooner, a dishevelled lesser poet. Spooner enters the twilight zone, after a chance encounter on Hampstead Heath - ho, hum - and an invitation back for one - or several - drinks.

The twilight zone turns out to be a huge circular domed drinking room with panelled walls, designed by Stephen Brimson Lewis, within Hirst's North London abode. Up above we see the the night outline of tree tops against the transparent roof. Strangely it reminded us of a space ship come to earth in what seems to be Hampstead. Perhaps not unusual though for some individually commissioned Hampstead architecture of the time. The room almost empty in its luxury,  aside from a padded leather chair and some other sparse furnishings.

The two trade stories and memories. Yet we are never sure about them. Are they true recollections coloured by one-upmanship? Spooner, apparently reduced to collecting glasses in a pub for a pittance, could be desperate to keep his own end up with a university contemporary. Or he could be exercising literary skills, with a liberal amount of dirty mindedness, in a competitive manner, somewhat reminiscent, it seemed to us, of Jean Genet's "The Maids".

There's a rhythmic, musical feel as the lines jump back and forth between the pair of elderly gents as part of their mind games and twilight zone competition. But it's not just a two hander.

Spooner, after leaving behind rivalry with Hirst for the possibility of a position in his household, suddenly finds different competition. It appears in the shape of Hirst's male secretary or "amanuensis", John "Jack" Foster (Damien Molony) and manservant cum bodyguard Briggs (Owen Teale) and a whole new generation of posturing.

Pinter used the names of cricketers for his characters, carefully picked. Hirst a Yorkshire cricketer, a "player" rather than a "gentleman" who first worked as a weaver and in a dyeing firm before becoming known for cricket and his swing bowling. Spooner, a public school-educated Lancashire man and celebrated for his batting prowess. Foster, another public schoolboy, England captain and middle order batsman. Finally Briggs, a professional cricketer and noted spin bowler, who crossed over from Yorkshire to Lancashire.

So we may gasp and be left bewildered at the foresight of Harold Pinter using the word "Google" in his script. However, a passing knowledge of cricket's googly will make this an accidental glimpse of future technology. Continuing this glossary, we should add that, less cryptically, Jack Straw's Castle was then a listed pub (now luxury apartments since 2002 closure), not some citadel of a future and somewhat controversial Home, Foreign and Justice Secretary.

Just to let you gen up before you go - for you surely will go, like us, to see two legends of British acting at full throttle in a classic play, matched with Game Of Throne's Teale as Briggs and Molony as Foster. The latter is all set to step into the literary shoes of Hirst - if Spooner does not hinder his plans. 
      
The lines are thrown like skilfully bowled cricket balls and equally skilfully batted away. We still feel The Caretaker, Betrayal, The Dumb Waiter (the three Pinter plays we have previously seen) are more accessible. Yet there's an undoubted power to the twilight zone of No Man's Land.

Written at a moment when the reach of literary magazines, funded by who knows what or who, the left or right wing Oxbridge set was on the cusp of the wane. And a Hackney lad, the son of a Jewish ladies' tailor and a housewife, a cricket fanatic, could eventually be thought of as a modern Shakespeare.

It's an upper range amber light from TLT and her own motorised amanuensis for an occasion they wouldn't have missed, even for the complete editions of Wisden.