Review The Seagull

The Seagull

by Anton Chekhov

The Rivals

https://openairtheatre.com/production/the-seagull

The Seagull! Squawk! In a new version by writer Torben Betts directed by Matthew Dunster! Squawk! At Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre! OK, enough of these seagull noises!

Of course, Regent’s Park Open Air Theatre made its name with the once annual play-within-a-comedy by the English bard, “A Midsummer’s Night’s Dream”. Here we have a Russian classic, Anton Chekhov’s human comedy and viewed as the first of his theatrical masterpieces. 

And it seems like a dream location, outdoors: water (a man-made stage lake), trees, sky.

The Regent's Park stage is reflected by a huge angled mirror suspended from the heavens for a play with a bitter yet loving satiric edge, It’s a clever touch by designer Jon Bausor in this most self-reflexive of plays about life, theatre and art, where all the characters also reflect each other in one way or another. And all just as relevant in our virtual age!  As the characters stroll on stage, the mirror, hanging like Nature's camera, gives a bird’s eye reverse view, yet frames the figures like the French and Russian paintings of the time.

TLT and her horseless scarlet troika have only ever read The Seagull and were keen to experience this early Chekhov classic tableaux 1895 play of unrequited love, disappointment, life, theatre  – oh, yes and comedy :).

 

Writer Torben Betts who adapted this version made quite a splash with crowd-pleasing Invincible. But Chekhov is pretty funny too in his poignant and, in TLT’s view, subtly political sort of way. If fans of Invincible come to this, they may be surprised to learn that most of the best jokes come from Chekhov. 

Irina Arkadina (a finely drawn and gracefully humorous performance by Janie Dee) returns with her lover Boris Trigorin (Alex Robertson), a successful novelist, to the family estate, home of her bachelor brother retired state councillor and lawyer, Peter Sorin (a suitably curmodgeonly Ian Redford). 

Also living on the estate are Irina’s fretful student drop-out and would-be avant-garde playwright son Constantin (Matthew Tennyson) alongside the farm manager Ilia (Fraser James), his wife Paulina (Lisa Palfrey), their disenchanted goth-like daughter Masha (Lisa Diveney). Wandering in are idealistic young Nina (Poldark’s Sabrina Bartlett), living on a neighbouring estate with her landowner father and stepmother, the old lothario of a doctor, Eugene Dorn (a relaxed and engaging performance from Danny Webb) and impecunious schoolmaster Simon Medviedenko (Colin Hoult). 

Like a seagull, the play is a delicate but tough old bird winging its way through stage conventions, symbolism, images, impressions, politics, history, the constant merging yet separation of  life and theatre.  Still, a play is a play and birds don’t normally get reviews ... ;)

While much critical writing dwells on Constantin as artist, his passion for Nina, and the mother-son relationship, perhaps the play is just as much about the rivalry between two actresses.

  

The women are the centre of attention (much to Constantin’s chagrin) but their positions are always fragile.  For example, in spite of her selfishness and self absorbtion, why should we doubt Irina’s assertion that her costumes use up much of her cash?  Nina, infatuated with Boris but also playing her hand against Irina, makes the decision to go to Moscow and take to the stage when she learns the actress and her lover are leaving.

Boris does leave Irina for Nina but finally abandons the young actress and his child to go back to Irina. In the end, Irina is seemingly successful,  Nina  made to drudge from one small town to another with the implication of possible prostitution to make ends meet. Yet both have lost the fathers of their children and, in a final (off stage) coup de théâtre, their children.

In fact, if it one wants to veer towards theatrical artificiality and a detective story, it’s almost as though other characters deliberately lure Nina to her fate of repertory company drudgery:  Irina herself, her brother the lawyer, the doctor all lavish Nina's acting with praise. Boris, indulged by Irina, seduces Nina, then returns to Irina and uses  the young actress’s life, made into tragedy, for his own purposes.    

Part of the unblinking toughness and poignancy of the play is the attraction and resistance to theatrical symbolism, the guying of melodrama, yet the conceding of the truth melodrama reveals. All back-to-back with hard-nosed money matters.

Seeing this production in final preview, TLT and her cabriolet were taken with the ingenious design, especially the play-within-a-play and the soundscape using recorded voice overs giving a satisfyingly visceral resonance. 

But the mash-up and experimenting with styles felt less successful. 

Nina’s pivotal final tussle against identification with the main symbol of the play, to retain her sanity, her dignity, to face reality and continue, did not come through for us. The production therefore lost its rhythm plus some of the play’s clear sightedness about human relations set within the context of a fast diminishing Russian Empire hierarchy. 

In our opinion, it felt sometimes too muddled to turn the audience into fellow travellers, enthused enough to sway at different times in favour of one character or another or to follow the story’s delicately incremental, viciously funny yet tragic development. 

Perhaps the open air location, particularly with some deliberately jarring sound effects, and large stage didn’t lend itself to the style of production. Nor is it surprising to read that director Matthew Dunster comes from the Young Vic and maybe it all would have worked better in that space. Still, an amber light for a stronger first act, ingenious design, some stand out performances and of course a spectacular park setting.

PS  What is it about seagulls? It did occur to TLT that a near contemporary of Chekhov, German nonsense poet Christian Morgenstern wrote a famous cryptic poem about seagulls  Do these writer chaps know something about gulls that we don't?;)

Review A View From The Bridge

A View From The Bridge

By Arthur Miller

Young Vic SE1 

Family Guy

Yes, we’re back. Do we have to make excuses for our absence? We think not  – after all, you’re reading this blog and hopefully hooked like a fish on bait or a side of meat hung in an abattoir. ;) Nor, unlike some others, will our narration misdirect you. This is a wonderful production of Arthur Miller’s 1950s’ fable, A View From The Bridge, with not a dud coin amongst the performances. 

At the same time, TLT and her well-oiled and speedy-wheeled chariot have to admit, although they would always race to a Miller play, they have always found his writing a little  – well - schematic. Yet in their humble opinion, the rendering of director Ivo van Hove, along with Jan Versweyveld's design and lighting, of A View From The Bridge turns this into a strength.

At the height of an economic crisis, the arrival of a wife's cousins as illegal immigrants from the old country disturbs the tenuous status quo of the Italian-Brooklyn Carbone family: Eddie (Mark Strong), good natured patriarch eventually descending into despairing self-defeating revenge, Beatrice (Nicola Walker), torn between her family and her isolated husband, and Eddie’s young niece Catherine (Phoebe Fox), chafing at the bit to experience life. 

A simple stretched length-wise stage  –  without props, bare-bones black and white with long box benches rising on every side can change within a few words into a dockyard pier, a Brooklyn home, an attorney’s office, a boxing ring or maybe even a court house foyer, a political cell,  an international conference room - or a man trap.

Cousin Marco (Emun Elliott) sets out methodically to earn precious dollars to send back to his own wife and children in Italy but, to the horror of her Uncle Eddie, Catherine is charmed by ambitious Rodolpho (Luke Norris) with his matinee-idol looks. 

Yet there is an explicit indication this play means more than the one man’s tragic (alleged) incestuous, jealous obsession. The two Italians speak perfect American from the start, although TLT and her motorised compatriot willingly took part in the audience's suspension of disbelief, while glimpsing the possibility of parallel stories.

Alongside a masterly use of sound (Tom Gibbons), lighting and choreography, the staging reminded TLT of a previous Young Vic production – the circular heartbeat simplicity of  The Brothers Size. And like Richard Eyre’s recent absorbing Ghosts, this production gathers momentum by eschewing an interval (back to its one-act verse roots) and the two hours fly past. 

The twists and turns of this piece’s tragic trajectory and insistent lawyer-narrator demand attention and open up the possibility of an audience analysing the action and words for itself rather than accepting the say-so about any character from others.

Naturally the pacing is superb with seemingly sympathetic but seedy lawyer Alfieri (Michael Gould) and the increasingly tortured and trapped longshoreman Eddie Carbone juggling the action until all hell breaks out and events spiral out of their control.

A minor quibble alone -  for us, using coloured lighting in the denouement might have made a more visceral impact than a final prolonged clinch in an actual liquid tide, although (we think) we can understand the reasoning for this. 

Anyway this may seem rather churlish as, for us too, the tragic human consequences acted on an anosmic (look it up! :) ) set of otherwise almost digital cleanliness gives the play recognizable currency in our globalized electronic age of video games and drones. A great ensemble effort to which TLT and her rootin’, tootin’ buggy give an unadulterated green light!

Review The Winslow Boy

The Winslow Boy
 By Terence Rattigan
The Old Vic, SE1

Is Right Ever Really Done? -  Rattigan's Tangled Web

It was generally thought to be very strange that a notoriously insincere farceur could so readily turn his hand to matters of fairly serious theatrical moment ..."  The playwright quoted in Terence Rattigan by Michael Darlow and Gillian Hodson.

TLT and her shiny metal aide de camp went to an early Old Vic preview of Rattigan's evergreen 1946 The Winslow Boy, the five-shilling-stolen-postal-order drama. However, at the time we desisted from writing a review of a rather plodding production with the best performances coming from Henry Goodman as pa (Arthur) Winslow, Deborah Findlay as ma (Grace) Winslow and Nick Hendrix as the alleged culprit's brother, Dickie.

What is seemed to miss was the febrile pace of the early years of the twentieth century with Britain on the cusp of introducing universal social insurance, changing subjects to citizens. Also the atmosphere of 1946, with Churchill and the Conservatives defeated, ushering in a new government and a welfare state dependent on American loans.

So this is a rather different review and, hopefully, a thoughtful piece, giving some context to a fine play. Bear with us as we start the engine, build up speed and rev into action! :)

Just to nudge you along the highway, the original old age pension, introduced in the significant year of 1908, paid tellingly mostly to elderly single women, via local post offices was, guess what - five shillings.

The Winslow Boy was inspired by a true-life 1908 post office scandal, which went global, of 14-year-old Royal Naval cadet George Archer-Shee, renamed in the play Ronnie Winslow (acted by Charlie Rowe this time at the Old Vic). Rattigan moved to 1912, after the resolution of the real case in 1911, which was also the year of the first National Insurance Act and Rattigan's birth.

It seems the authorities at the Royal Naval College, Osborne pretended that cadets' parents did not exist but allowed postal orders to be sent direct to cadets rather than to the College and then paid out.

Despite one cadet alleging theft against George Archer-Shee (or whatever else was going on amongst the male cadets), the case did not involve the police and police courts. It was left as an internal affair with the verdict of the internal enquiry protected by Crown immunity.

Perhaps it's worth noting that the character of barrister Sir Robert Morton was based on Sir Edward Carson who represented the Marquess of Queensbury, cross-examining Oscar Wilde at the notorious "somdomite" libel trial. 

In The Winslow Boy, with the help of journalists competing for a human interest story and women readers, the silk Sir Robert Morton (Peter Sullivan, played at the 1946 première by Emlyn Williams, writer of Accolade) proves adept at disguising that Ronnie and family de facto citizens under social insurance, not subjects under the Crown.

Instead he promotes the role of the Crown, petition of right, the play-acting of civil courts with their legal advertisements and presents and Her Majesty's Parliament, already rendered obsolete before the Crown Proceedings 1947 legislation, catching citizens in its Kafkaesque Crown and court web from a bygone age of subjects.

In this context, "Let Right Be Done!", far from a sincere plea for civil liberty, becomes a much more slyly ambiguous expression of deceptive right-wing politics, glib soundbite, "costs" for legal theatricals and the manipulation of a vulnerable family and a gullible newspaper-reading public.

Anyway, in our view, the character of barrister Sir Robert is a Janus-faced chancer of a politician, putting the family unnecessarily through the emotional and, more importantly, financial wringer (pocketing fees and helping legal chums pocket the court costs), manipulating public opinion with contract law rendered a sham by the introduction of social insurance.

In fact, he fulfils the bitter words about him early in the play, voiced by Ronnie's rather Left-wing suffragette sister Catherine (Naomi Frederick), herself a single woman who, by the end of the play, may well be destined for a spinster old-age-five-shilling pension, directly as a result of her family pursuing the case. Unless she, as one of an elite few and token female presence, joins with a "charming hat" the archaic Parliamentary club, as hinted in the play, and either is left in ignorance of or does not let on about the pretence.

This may seem pedantic and over-complicated beside a simpler, more appealing melodramatic court room triumph and almost-love story Rattigan dedicated, "in the hope that he may live to see a world in which this tale will point no moral", to future Tory MP Paul Channon, son of his friend, American-born Henry "Chips" Channon.

However, that loses the sheer Morton-like cunning artfulness, drive and political nous implicit in the writing's sly subtext in the year of armed forces returning hoping for a brave new world and Churchill's speech on an iron curtain descending in Europe.

In 1908 (or 1912) Britain losing its Empire had more ready cash in the all-too-tempting state pension pot at local post offices and the accumulated small savings of citizens, than in failing commercial banks. Citizens' small savings came from wages paid daily or weekly in money, cash - unlike the debts of tottering credit-driven banks, solely with commercial clients, at the mercy of Britain's fading imperial power, US loans and market crashes. Surely, not so distant from current day news images of Cypriots demonstrating with the placards "Hands off our Provident Funds"?

Interesting also to discover that true-life Archer-Shee father did not work for "Westminster Bank" as in the play (nonetheless, a real bank now part of Royal Bank of Scotland) but as an agent in Bristol of The Bank of England.

Meanwhile, The Winslow Boy's real (half) brother, Major Martin Archer-Shee, was a Conservative MP in the Palace of Westminster.

With the Bank of England acting at the time as the Receiver for insolvencies and the real Royal Naval College, Osborne, closing down eventually in the 1920s, it gives added pith to father Arthur Winslow's telephone call to the College after his son's "sacking". He questions the General Post Office (GPO) telephone operator: "Replace the receiver?". It may again be worth noting 1912 was the year when most of the private telephone companies in the UK were nationalised.

If you're still unconvinced, remember the refusal of the headmaster in Rattigan's next play, The Browning Version, of 1948 to pay out of the public school pension pot for the "Himmler of the Lower Fifth", Crocker-Harris the Classics Master.*

In TLT's opinion, much of The Winslow Boy's genius comes from the knitting together and bridging of many 20th-century themes alongside the stolen postal order story, even possibly up to atomic bomb corporation DuPont Chemicals, transformed with acid wit into "Madame Dupont", French dressmaker to the Winslow femmes.

And the play also reflects accurately the sorry clash of modern corporate state with archaic insolvent institutions, in real life still conning citizens with national insurance numbers that they were the middle-class version of Oliver-Twist-orphan/cadet workhouse subjects with no rights.

Surely no coincidence that maid Violet (Wendy Nottingham in the current production), brought up in an orphanage, evolves through the play into a modern woman? She becomes more and more assured in dealing with both media and tradesmen. Like the small savings of Post Office account holders and the state pension funds of elderly women, she assumes an increasingly important role.

For TLT, this remains a beautifully-crafted, mid-20th century play shaped by its characters, a true story and the increasingly desperate strategies of post-war Tory politicians to veer public opinion their way. There are some good performances but energy and vitality are sapped in this unfocussed production.

See the Financial Times, WhatsonStage and The Observer critics to back up this view. The Telegraph, The Guardian, The Independent and the London Evening Standard critics reserve the right to differ, while blogger Head of Legal seems to play off both sides: Just about an amber light from this reviewer.

By the way, the real-life naval cadet pawn in all this, George Archer-Shee, was killed aged 19, after enlisting as a first lieutenant in the army on his return from a Wall Street job,  in the First World War. So, legal farce turned to tragedy and he never lived to collect his five-shilling-old-age-pension (seven shillings and six old pence for couples if he had married) - unlike his lawyer ...

* Furthermore, the story of George Archer-Shee and the postal order was first mooted as a propaganda movie advertising English democracy. Even so, it was inspired by an American piece on the case by critic Alexander Woolcott, brought to Rattigan, the grandson of a high-ranking colonial judge and MP, by actor couple Alfred Lunt and Lynn Fontanne. Filmmakers rejected it as too "dull" for a movie, Rattigan stuck by it and the rest is history.

30th March 2013 UPDATE:  "Crown Post Office Workers Strike Over Franchise Plans' BBC  http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-wales-21974862

25th April 2013 JUST ANOTHER NOTE The beauty of the internet is that when events (as in the apocryphal quote of Macmillan) come along, TLT can add them for posterity or, at least, one hopes, the British Library archive. So, without wanting to diminish the tragic impact of conflict on families, the irony of this story about two First World War soldiers finally laid to rest turning out to be insurance company employees proved irresistible ...

Review Facts

Facts

by Arthur Milner

Finborough Theatre, SW10

Scripting the Cops

After disappearing off the celebrity scene, it takes guts to reappear, as Kerry Katona or Frank Sinatra can testify. ;) But TLT and her somewhat dusty steed (horsepower rather than horse meat!) decided to make a comeback for this intriguing Canadian play. A Jewish-Israeli (Michael Feast) and a Palestinian detective (Philip Arditti) meet in a tiled Israeli military unit, the latter arriving after negotiating checkpoints, to investigate an American archeologist’s murder on the West Bank. Outside their usual local comfort zones, the archeologist's nationality forces them to take national and world opinion into account. Growing above the Palestinian and Israeli impasse, in fact (geddit?!), the play turns into a much more tricksy and close-to-the-bone dissection of policing worldwide and military-dominated land. That is: the use (and abuse) of technology and a police mindset  rooted in literary and screenwriting stereotypes, software multiple choice, competing academic hypotheses and, yes, nationalistic ideology. Everything, save evidence-based investigations. In short, amid this all, what are the facts? Was this clear from the preview performance at The Finborough directed by Caitlin McLeod? One has to say, 'Only sporadically'. Maybe the fault lies in the  script, maybe in an uncertain production, or perhaps a bit of both. Eventually the Jewish militant settler suspect, a property manager and nimble offspring of a lawyer, joins the detectives for interrogation in a canny performance by Paul Rattray. However, it takes a very attuned ear to catch the hints undermining the stereotypes put forward - and they are just faint hints planted amid the red herrings in this piece. It could be this play, despite, or indeed because of, its arguments, needs a more Pinteresque approach to allow the audience to assimilate the ironies underlying the oft trundled-out and well-rehearsed formulas about crime scenarios and Israel/Palestine. Consideration rather than choler.  This discussion of policing and technology should seem vital in a week which has spotlighted local level South African police abuse, often hidden when not filmed, and British children turned into stock computer program figures within school report software for administrative convienience. Instead, if TLT has interpreted correctly why the play may seem schematic, the myths and formulas, instead of counterpointing, are allowed to outweigh the meaning. Of course TLT and friend may have got this totally wrong - something you're unlikely to hear any police officer admit nowadays unless instructed by a professional liability insurance company lawyer or an approved police software program ;) An amber light for a production tackling important issues which may still have the potential to become a must-see if it finds its feet during the run.

Review Mack and Mabel

Mack and Mabel
Music and Lyrics by Jerry Herman, Book by Michael Stewart

Based on an idea by Lionel Spigelglass, Revised by Francine Pascal
Southwark Playhouse SE1

More Than Bagels and Knishes

With a ravishing 1974 score by Jerry  Herman, musical Mack and Mabel, a saga of silent movies, stardom, drugs and a doomed love affair should be a stonking success. Knowing the wonderful songs beforehand, TLT and her firing-on-all-cylinders sidekick were inclined to be kindly disposed and doubt the criticism of the late Michael Stewart's book as some sort of 1970s’ theatrical politicking.  Any musical with the song “Look What Happened to Mabel”, where lyrics impeccably rhyme “ambitious” and “knishes” and still manage to convey touchingly the revolutionary impact of movie technology on people’s lives,  must have something going for it.  Well, your dynamic theatregoing duo came out humming the tunes and admiring the intermittent dance routines but understanding,  through experience, what the critics meant. As silent movie pioneer, Mack Sennett, Norman Bowman is a tad young for the role but has the charismatic brooding look, bone structure and power in his voice to take on the classic Herman bitter-sweet hymns to life, love and the movie industry. Flame-haired Laura Pitt-Pulford's singing performance also reaches powerful heights as deli delivery girl turned Sennett star and lover Mabel Normand. Classy performances emerge too from Jessica Martin as tough-talking Lottie Ames and Stuart Matthew Price as quietly efficient and tactful up-and-coming director Frank Capra.  The problem is the way the main characters of Sennett and his star Mabel Normand are written rather than the performances. The personalities dissolve as the show progresses, pulling any number of ways with no exact trajectory and fudging the melodrama. Maybe in the 1970s, an early twentieth-century tale ending in drugs and eventual death,  with lunatic antics, vagaries of film finance, drug dealing, hints of abortions, gangland hits and something darker underlying even the zany Keystone cops were just too close to home to write about in an uncensored fluent fashion.  In contrast, Fred Ebb's and Bob Fosse's satiric book for Chicago achieves an upbeat, if perverse, slick American Dream ending. Despite revisions by Stewart’s sister Francine Pascal, Herman’s soaring musical peaks can’t hide the dips into anti-climactic dialogue, hurried transitions and narrative clumsiness. Yet, it’s worth keeping the faith for the songs, set numbers, the ragged, atmospheric true-life tragedy and the sisyphean task just about overcome by a talented, hard-working  cast and team, including director Thom Southerland and choreographer Lee Proud. So, still totally worth seeing and an amber light.

Democracy Review

Democracy

by Michael Frayn

The Old Vic SE1       

It’s Complicated 

TLT and her motorised assistant made their way to the white pillars of the German Chancellery, sorry, The Old Vic, for a  performance of Michael Frayn’s 2003 spy drama  Democracy. In a time of coalition and European nations yoked uneasily together, this proved to be an intriguing, if uneven, evening. Democracy is based on a real-life 1970s’ scandal when the knife-edge task of keeping political parties, straining-at-the-leash diverse Western German states and an East German Communist neighbour on side falls on the enigmatic figure of Chancellor Willi Brandt played with wry downbeat charm by Patrick Drury.  Meanwhile by his side is the scuttling, loyal assistant Guenter Guillaume (Aidan McArdle looking for all the world like a stocky Groucho Marx who really was of German descent!), eventually exposed as a Stasi plant. From the Lilian Baylis seats (the Upper Circle) the dry complex wit of the dialogue was sometimes a little lost in the first act. Perhaps the play’s poetic pace and rhythms are more suited to an intimate stage, despite the striking evocation of  governmental conference rooms, corridors and the over-the-border spy control room.  As a blogger, TLT doesn’t have to play the lofty critic and it’s worth eavesdropping audience reaction. Some were totally engrossed in the deadpan evocation of 1970s' politics, personalities and geography. Others were noticeably less enchanted: “A history lesson” and “lack of women” were two comments.  It’s the second act where the ruthless all-male politicking, symbiotic spy network, personal dilemmas and, most of all, the mystery of human behaviour at the heart of this play, come into their own . So mixed feelings reflected in a verdict of an amber with some flashes of green light.