Review The Plough And The Stars

The Plough And The Stars

by Seán O'Casey

A Terrible Beauty

https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/ 

What a strange and devastating play, Seán O'Casey's The Plough And The Stars turned out to be. Turned out, because TLT and her own little theatre patriot did not know the piece and for three quarters of this drama, played out against the background of the run up to and during the 1916 Easter Uprising in Dublin against British rule, they did wonder where it was going. 

And then came an event that put everything into a terrible perspective and made us go over and re-evaluate what had gone before and why. The production at the Lyttleton Theatre, co-directed by Howard Davies and Jeremy Herrin, is not perfect but it does the business effectively.  

The Plough and The Stars is the flag first used by the Irish Citizen Army 12 years before the Easter uprising, O'Casey was born John Casey of Protestant working class stock  and was once a member before disillusionment at the abandonment of a more global socialist cause..  

The play was first produced in 1926 amid controversy and riots at the Abbey Theatre, where it was staunchly defended by Lady Gregory and William Butler Yeats,who had self-censored his own poem on the Rising, only privately circulating it, "All changed, changed utterly/A terrible beauty is born."

For feelings and politics were still raw and O'Casey's play touches on events many setting up the new Irish state  would rather have had forgotten. The drama is set squarely amongst the working class, many of whom were on the breadline and barely surviving in the Dublin tenements, once the homes of rich Georgian merchants under British imperial rule, now run-down multi-occupancy buildings. Many of these tenants, if not content, had enough to deal with without disturbing the status quo of  prospective Home Rule.

Living there are the charwoman Mrs Gogan (Josie Walker) with her dying consumptive daughter Mollser (Róisín O’Neill) - Mrs Gogan whom we first encounter as she chances upon the delivery to young bride Nora Clitheroe (Judith Roddy) of a fashionable hat which the char takes as a sign of the younger woman's snobbery and spendthrift ways. 

It is in fact a gift from Nora's husband, bricklayer Jack (Fionn Walton), far more deserving of Mrs Gogan's condemnation as he sulks for being passed over, he believes, for promotion within the Citizen Army and fails to understand the savagery and danger of the call to arms. 

Nora's elderly labourer uncle Peter (Lloyd Hutchinson) preens himself in a ceremonial uniform and  Covey (Tom Vaughan-Lawlor), a young cousin, buttonholes anyone he can with worthy socialist sentiments without possessing the charm or wit to convert those around him who are either scraping a living or swept up by divisive nationalist sentiment.  

Protestant neighbour Bessie Burgess (Justine Mitchell), whose son is away fighting for the British in the First World War, brawls with Mrs Gogan in the local pub while from the window we see the shadowy outline of the speechifying political leader exalting the blood letting in the global conflict  in a crescendo of words, a means of rousing Dublin men to fight British rule. 

There's a certain inpenetrability to some of the accents in the first part of the play but the characters still hold. In many ways, they are stock types. Look there, and there's Orphelia and isn't there even a touch of the Leopold Bloom in Fluther Good (Stephen Kennedy), the carpenter who fixes doors and helps arrange funerals.  

At the same time, there's something profound about how the characters merge into  literary types as if we can see the sordid realities of history turned into the myths of the forthcoming Irish nation before our eyes, yet then we go backwards behind the myths as  the play ends with shattered buildings and bodies.

For it's not just that Mrs Gogan and Bessie Burgess come together, using a baby's pram to loot the shops in the chaos of the Uprising. Or the unfurling of the starry plough flag in the ignoble surroundings of the pub while prostitute Rosie (Gráinne Keenan) and carpenter Fluther carouse as the bloodthirsty speeches continue outside. 

When Bessie yells "We've all been Shanghai'ed", O'Casey is looking back from 1926 when a year before police fired on Chinese workers in a labour movement protest  against imperialism in the international compound of the Chinese city. 

Evocative revolving sets from designer Vicki Mortimer give physical embodiment to  the claustrophobia of eavesdropping neighbours and events both in 1916 and in the 1920s. So it's a green light for an angry play which cannot offer any solutions yet resonates with the tiny acts of solidarity amidst  treachery and bloodshed.      

Review King John

King John

by William Shakespeare

Game of Thrones

https://www.rosetheatrekingston.org/

TLT and her loyal motorised lieutenant made all haste to the Royal Borough of Kingston upon Thames to see King John, a Shakespeare we had never seen before, at the Rose Theatre.

Even before reading the programme after seeing the play, and finding it was the first Shakespeare to be filmed in 1899, both TLT and her faithful equerry agreed King John has all the elements of a stonking melodrama and political mini-series!

The weak and vacillating king (Jamie Ballard) is dependent on advisers, especially his mother, veteran schemer but still careful Elinor of Aquitaine (Maggie Steed). But the King when left to make decisions on his own, in an effort to stand on his own feet, takes a brutal and murderous misstep.

The victim of this, young boy Arthur (played on press night by Sebastian Croft), a prince by demeanour and blood, pleading for his life reduces the would-be assassin (a bluntly honourable Stephen Kennedy) to tears. 

Arthur's tragic mother Constance (Lisa Dillon) is a power player for her son but ultimately driven mad by grief and grievance. Meanwhile swashbuckling bastard son Philip Faulconbridge (Howard Charles) of Richard the Lionheart is a cynical but heartbroken looker on,  participant and commentator.

This is a production of great clarity in what could be otherwise a confusing play. The nearest we have to a hero is Faulconbridge. Yet this doesn't quite fit and perhaps the clue is in the title of a play upon which Shakespeare drew heavily, some would say rewrote in a "twice told tale": The Troublesome Reign of King John.

For this, it struck us, is a situation tragedy - the troublesome situation of "that England hedged in with the main/The water-walled bulwark" plagued by uncertainty over the throne and land rights. 

And it's rather exciting, mined for humour as well in Trevor Nunn's well-paced (even though it should be said approximately three hours long) production.

Don't look for the Magna Carta though in Shakespeare's version, although perhaps a cloth underfoot rolled out like a parchment at the beginning is a twenty first century gesture towards it.

But this is Shakespeare at his most politic, meanng the play does not disturb the Elizabethan world order, the divine right to rule of the Protestant Tudors implicitly compared with the chaos of the Plantagenet Catholics. 

Nevertheless it is this which gives the play its modern feel. The shifting alliances and plotting of the unstable in power have a relevant resonance. Pandulph the Papal legate (Burt Caesar) has all the deviousness and diplomacy of a corrupt FIFA official, whose European power politics on behalf of the Pope sets off family rifts and wars between English and French.

A seemingly straightforward Globe-like stage with scaffolding to insert more levels is given a sense of time travelling and mash up with two video screens, one on each side (set and costumes by Mark Friend with concept design by John Napier). Describing it makes it sound more clunky than it is for the audience, as the actors' phrase goes, caught up "in the moment".

The screens show stills of stone turrets, discarded amour on a desolate battlefield, medieval illuminated manuscript illustrations and paintings, stained glass figures and as the King grows more fragile, delicate blossoming trees.

There is also sparing but effective use of video - a kingly debate flashes on the screens in close up well serving a play full of competing claims. Public events are publicly broadcast and the battles are in stark black and white like some Eisenstein silent film.

An otherwise plot driven artificial incident to modern eyes,  yet, in our modern times, also too horribly true, is shown as a vertigo black silhouetted figure falling from on high.

The rhyming couplets rang out clearly and every character carried their weight in the play with the, again, straightforward but ratcheting-up-the-tension use of sound effects (Fergus O'Hare) - the drum roll, the ticking clock - and music (composer Corin Buckeridge).

Ballard's King John has stepped straight out of medieval painting with his pigeon chested bearing. Gradually as his power waxes and wanes, his nervous gestures augment and his mouth is increasingly down-turned in the manner of the best silent films. This style suits the build up to the supernatural visions of the play  but his end, in a wheelchair, drooling, also had a touching quality.

The Prince Arthur  (he's the son of John's elder brother Geoffrey so has a claim to the throne) of Croft also has the touching embarrassment of the boy whose widowed mother is fighting his corner. 

This play also provides some powerful roles for women, seasoned politician Elinor, determined yet doomed Constance and Princess Blanche of Castille (Elizabeth Hopper) who finds herself torn from her nearest family on her wedding day as events,  triggered by Cardinal Pandulph, twist and turn.

All in all, King John proved a compelling and absorbing evening, with every argument over claims to the throne, the possession of mainland France territories, the plotting and the scheming followed intently by TLT and her trusty mechanized steed. So for an evening of national and international upheaval a jousting green light