Review Magnificence

Magnificence
by Howard Brenton

The State We're In
http://finboroughtheatre.co.uk/

Which play links squatters, bailiffs, Che Guevara t-shirts, Cambridge University, constables, Brixton Prison, situationism, bonkbuster novel The Carpetbaggers, graffitti, public lavatories the welfare state, Edward Heath's Tory government, a revolutionary banner with a tendency to sag, John Marston's Jacobean satire The Malcontent, baked beans, the clap, the High Court, Winston Churchill ...

(Takes a breath!) ... The church,  investigative current affairs programme World In Action, Chairman Mao, the BBC, calor gas lamps, dustbin men, Hollywood stars Caroll Baker and Steve McQueen, cornflakes, Marmite, Mickey Mouse, the Paymaster General, French writer Jean Genet, the Weathermen, Black Panthers, the Apollo Moon Landing, the Stars and Stripes, the Hammer and Sickle, Benny Hill, Marilyn Monroe, Jesus, China, champagne, The House of Lords, the biblical Song of Songs and a London Times obituary?

You may have guessed by the title of this review, it's Howard Brenton's 1973 Royal Court Theatre play Magnificence. This uneven, but complex and fierce play is very much rooted in the student politics, arguments, idealism and violence of the 1960s and 1970s.

The Finborough Theatre production has certainly garnered an impressive cast of theatrical luminaries of that generation to help fund it -   Judi Dench, David Edgar, David Hare, Joanna Lumley, Tom Stoppard and Harriet Walter (in case you are the type who wants to complain, the programme/play script acknowlegments studiously avoid the use of Honours' List titles) among others.

A group of squatters during the housing shortage of the 1970s break into an empty derelict house (Phil Lindley's evocative and adaptable peeling-wallpaper set, equally a squat, a Cambridge college and an English garden).

They find themselves under siege from "murder in my heart" Slaughter the freelance bailiff (Chris Porter) acting for an unnamed landlord. An ex British mainland and colonial policeman, he's already been exposed in a TV documentary for a fatal misdemeanour, but is nevertheless backed by a philosophical constable (Tim Faulkner).

The squatters, whose first act is to spray slogans on the walls, are a motley crew, led by libertarian Jed (Joel Gillman) with his pregnant soft-hearted, homemaking girlfriend Mary (Daisy Hughes) in tow.

Plus the more easily swayed, apologetic Will (Will Bliss) with a Uriah Heep turn of phrase, "Doing our 'umble best, Ma'am, to wreck Society", denim-clad Veronica (Eva-Jane Willis) on two weeks' holiday from the BBC and the more quietly-spoken and observant Cliff (Tyson Douglas). 

The constable allows the bailiff to raid the premises. In fact,  it is the clash between the new (the police constable's concern over the health and safety of a calor gas lamp) with the old (the bailiff's subsequent unregulated private sector violence) which leads directly to Mary losing her baby, Jed's imprisonment and a final path to destruction.

In between the action switches to the rarified environs of Cambridge's ivory tower and a meeting between  don Babs (Hayward B Morse) and his smooth talking grey tinted former tutee, lover and now a new breed of managerial MP Alice (Tim Faulkner again).  

Magnificence has a  rawness, political and literary inclusiveness which are both its strength and weakness. Indeed, Brenton was fresh from writing fringe plays when he was given space at the Royal Court with director Max Stafford-Clark.

The writer using part naturalism, a part Mr Punch stylized Jacobean satiric style grapples with a mosaic of competing issues of some complexity including the archaic leftovers of another age within a new, educated society.

Even the Chief Constable of the local force (force being the operative word) has a Cambridge degree and the Special Branch have tutored the constable in the ins and outs of factional politics and theories.

In 1973 Oxbridge was also still allowed the special privilege of their own top and bowler-hatted police forces (which Cambridge still retains) and a substantial property portfolio.  Simultaneously Lord Eccles held the purse strings as Her Majesty's Paymaster General and as Minister for the Arts.

The scene which has lasted the best remains the Cambridge scene, done full justice by Morse and Faulkner, with not only the recognizably Not The 1948 Show or  Pythonesque, intellectual playfulness but also ultimately a controlled fury. 

Yet the play feels torn inside itself. It has something in common with Seán O'Casey without the dramatic polish but some of the poetry.  Finding a dramatic structure for the avalanche of issues becomes problematic and the sudden reappearance, after a considerable absence, at the play's end of Cliff with a final response (harking back to the Royal Court's two scandalous playwrights - John Osborne and Granville Barker) only serves to emphasize the flaws.

Neverthess it still has currency in our twentieth first century. It's a neat irony this Finborough Theatre revival  coincides with the hoo ha over Bob Dylan's disruptive silence regarding the Nobel Prize for Literature - Alfred Nobel being the inventor of gelignite which, along with a stylized take on literature, features largely in the play.

Mind you, the current housing crisis and the re-emergence of stories about presidential hopeful Donald Trump's landlord past also make the invalid court eviction notice and harassment of tenants still relevant.

This tragi-comic piece is directed with clarity and pace by Josh Roche benefitting from Joe Price's lighting design signalling the deliberate changes in style.

The title Magnificence with its mixed root meaning of grandeur and pomposity feels accurate for this unwieldy, experimental, hit-and-miss play. At the same  time its jabs of sporadic ferocity still hit the spot.

It's an upper range amber light from your agent provocateur reviewer and her own four-wheeled agent of revolution. 

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.