Review Richard III

Richard III
by William Shakespeare

Living The Dream
http://www.arcolatheatre.com/

Near the end of the Arcola Theatre's Richard III we gained a glimpse of what this production could have been.

Richard (Greg Hicks) has just been visited in his sleep by those he has wronged and murdered. Suddenly the pangs of conscience cripple him. Hicks's Richard in a nuanced soliloquy envelops us with the cold sweat of the villain as both his past and future merge and he turns his frightened gaze round the audience.

It's a highlight of an otherwise mostly over-emphatic production directed by Mehmet Ergen which nevertheless has other instances of clarity and ingenuity.

Mark Jax's suddenly repentent murderer is both comic and affecting. There's a modern chime to Jim Bywater's Mayor of London, puzzled but then expediently adapting to all the twists and turns, as well as when we hear from Peter Guinness's savvy Buckingham the reaction of the London crowd and the city wives.

Annie Firbank's fine Duchess of York, Richard's mother, conveys a clear-sighted doughty aristocrat, becoming a spokeswoman for the grieving Royal widows dislodged by the son she abhors.   

However, at other times we found the inconsistency of the mash up strange and distracting.

The start of the play places us in Italian café society with Richard in black leather  - part mafiosi, part Stasi - sipping on wine and spinning a tiny top. When he stands up to the cawing of crows, we see the chain extending from flexed foot to his hands to help him walk. Bespectacled Matthew Sim as Catesby extends the sense of a Communist apparatchik or Fascist henchman carrying out Richard's instructions.     

At another time we wondered whether we were in the midst of artisans who decided a change was needed from usual mystery plays, deciding instead to put on the arch-Machiavel's story. Yet the concept seemed tried  - and then left behind.

The overpowering television-style sound effects also struck us as intrusive, sometimes unnecessarily disturbing the rhythm and tension of the play.

We've nothing against a production paced television thriller style. But we were far too aware of the sound effects rather than the sound being seamlessly part of the background. In one instance, a very loud cock crow was followed by the information that - er - a cock had crowed.

Anthony Lamble's two tier design is fine as far as the lower space goes, surrounded by the audience on three sides. However, sitting in the seats stage left, we had major sightline problems for the upper tier. The raised walkway running above our seats blocked our view of the second tier at the back of the space and the actors above mainly had their backs towards us. This felt like a thoughtless piece of staging.

Hicks certainly has the potential to be a great crow-like Richard III but we felt he was hampered by more than his chains in an uneven production which needed more variety in its pacing. Individually there were some fine performances and good moments but overall it's an amber light.

Review The Plague

The Plague
after La Peste by Albert Camus
Adapted by Neil Bartlett

The Cycles Of History
http://www.arcolatheatre.com

A couple of days after Marine Le Pen, French presidential candidate, denied French state culpability for the rounding up of Jews and imprisonment in the Vélodrome D'Hiver in 1942, the French cycling stadium, TLT and her four wheeled buggy went along to Dalston to watch Neil Bartlett's adaptation of the 1947 novel The Plague.

It was rather eerie watching and hearing this tribunal-style drama and chronicle of contagious disease, written as fiction by Albert Camus,  a metaphor for amongst other things, the step-by-step poisoning of the atmosphere before the occupation of France and its colonies and the reaction of the population including post-war denial.

Of course there is always the question "What would you do?" and there is currently a play touring a about the occupation of Jersey where some UK citizens hardly acquitted themselves with glory.

But TLT knows for a fact that it was far more step-by-step -  refugee Jews were already rounded up in 1940 before the German army invaded Paris under the pretext that they were originally from "Greater Germany". In reality the were mostly stateless Jews and the women were put in the "Vél' d'Hiv'".

While this round up was more hysteria by the authorities after the invasion of France than  direct murderous intent, it was the first step towards isolating a portion of the Parisian population. 

We say this not to boast about our knowledge (although maybe that's part and parcel of being a reviewer ;)) or to condemn the French. In this play (we haven't read the novel), Camus, a Franco-Algerian was probably reflecting on the fate of the Algerian city of Oran. But it also seemed to us to trace the steps towards and then away from what had happened to Paris during the Second World War, the capital of France and a symbol of something much more than France.

The play begins like a modern press conference or, superficially, public enquiry: five citizens sit at a long table with microphones in front of them. Doctor Rieux (Sara Powell) , Mr Grand (Burt Caesar), the town hall registrar of births, marriages and deaths, Raymond Rambert (Billy Postlethwaite), a journalist, Jean Tarrou (Martin Turner), a seemingly affluent outsider with Spanish friends who lives in a hotel and Mr Cottard (Joe Alessi), a doomsayer who discovers an unexpected talent for profiteering during the plague.

The Doctor leads the enquiry from her notes, setting the agenda, as she relates the initial signs of dying rats, the first victims including an infected landlord and eventually how the city becomes a closed off ghetto and a police state.

We couldn't help thinking, despite a well-paced production directed by the book adaptor, Neil Bartlett, using the lighting of Jack Weir and sound of Dinah Mullen to maximum effect, this felt like a radio play. In a way that we never felt, for example, when many years ago we watched Peter Weiss's verbatim courtroom drama The Investigation with Rwandan and Congolese actors.

We also felt that some of the ironies and ambiguities, which surely are present in the novel, are lost on stage.

For example, the armed police entering the poorer areas, where "Arab" immigrants also live, and dragging out people, to the pleas of their families. Surely it is also about the potential for the abuse of and settling of scores with some of the uninfected under a pretext of being infected?

The rat may also well be a carrier of plague but its association with Jews and Soviet Communists would not have been lost on a 1947 readership.

Maybe it works better in musical adaptation as a trawl of youtube uncovered a 1960s' choral work The Plague using some of the novel's words.

Still the sincerely intense diverse cast gives the sense of a modern city. In fact, the term city state, with many cities now separate business entities, does not go amiss in our times and the carrying on, having to stop for some kind of hell and then resuming business as usual has a clear resonance.

We wondered whether we could even detect a more literary antecedent in its ironies with the 17th century La Fontaine satiric fable Les Animaux Malades De La Peste (The Animals Sick Of The Plague).

There's certainly a poetic rhythm to the play at the Arcola  Dr Rieux has seen the writhings of the dying, joined a committee, kept knowledge back along with other doctors, watched as the panic circulated in rumours and eventually emerged in the newspapers, the setting up of quarantine camps and experienced the failure of a pharmaeutical serum, seeing a child die in agony.

Finally she expediently recites scripted blandishments to aid the psychological reconstruction of a society and to fit in with the world status quo, saying:  "... when you live through the time of plague, ... there is more to admire about people than to despise or despair of." This is an intense and thoughtful play, even if as a theatrical experience, not totally successful and we award an amber/green light.