The most recent play at the Swan is a collaboration between the RSC and Mexico’s Compania Nacional de Teatro. A Soldier in Every Son by Luis Mario Moncada is about early Mexican history, exploring the overlap between modern Mexico and the Aztecs.

I don’t think it’s a particularly good play but Roxana Silbert’s production is spirited and often lovely to watch with spectacular costumes designed by Eloise Kazan. Linguistically the play is remarkably flat, which made the few metaphors and similies jump out obtrusively. To begin with I wasn’t sure whether this was the writer’s intention or an effect of the translation, but eventually I decided that it was intentional. There is precious little psychology in the characters and almost no character development. Intensity is gained not by language but by shouting. I don’t like shouting; it is usually compensation for actors’ lack of range and subtlety. But here lies a puzzle. We know from Richard III that some of these actors are capable both of subtlety and of complexity (Brian Ferguson and Natalie Klamar, for example). We also know from his King John that Alex Waldman is a fine actor. The lack of psychology, character development, subtlety and linguistic richness must have been deliberate.

The names of the characters are incomprehensible, unmemorable and unpronounceable. There are in a crucial sense interchangeable and fundamentally indistinguishable from each other – all does raher than thinkers, all prone to quarrel rather than negotiate, all prone to kill rather than problem solve, all driven by revenge. The end of the play suggests that if the revenge ethic can be broken then progress might be able to be made, but the plot ends to quickly too tell whether this will happen. Perhaps it won’t.

I badly wanted to empathise with somebody. There were no candidates in the first half which is mainly about Ixtilochitl, played by Alex Waldman as physically and vocally stilted. When he plays Ixtilochitl’s son, Nezahualcoyotl, in the second half Waldman looks and sounds more human. I felt that had there been a Soldier in Every Son II (God forfend) I would have been able to find out something about him as a person. There were a couple of moments in the second half where I was tempted to empathise with Nezahualcoyotl and also with Itzcoatl (played by Brian Ferguson) but again the inflexibility of voice and register prevented me from doing so to any extent.

For there to be political stability and growth and, therefore, implicitly psychological development and growth fundamental change in the society is needed. A Marxist solution leads to totalitarianism and therefore will not do. I thought this might be the message of the play. ‘Chaos comes and out of chaos a new order’, says Itzcoatl. The questions remains though: will the new order be any better? The play reminded me of Howard Barker.

I have to admit that it took me some time and a second viewing to work out what I thought was going on. I decided that the doubling of characters, including mothers and sons, was indicating the interchangeability of the characters in the drama. It didn’t really matter what side anybody was on. History dominated by revenge will take its course and all will meet the same fate. At the end there is a suggestion that it might be Nezahualcoyotl who shows the way forward, but the tripartite alliance created at the end has ominous shades of the ‘triple pillars of the world’.

The costumes are flamboyant, colourful and gorgeous. Much is done to try to make the audience aware of who s on which of the three sides. There is colour coding (black and red, blue and brown to differentiate the three groups. There are also symbols sometimes on the costumes and often repeated on the changing backdrop (snake, lion and eagle) to show which is taking over the other. At one point, for example, the lion is depicted as strangling the snake). There are some fine naked male chests. Movement is excellently handled. The opening dance and the dance of death later on are spectacular.

Luis Mario Moncada said that he approached a dramatic representation of his history through Harold Bloom’s idea: ‘through imitating Shakespeare […] the ultimate master in explaiting the void between people and personal ideals. ‘ The Shakespearian resonances work well. There is a suggestion of the end of King Lear with the dead Cordelia, a blood bath reminiscent of the end of Hamlet, betrayals as in King John, a chorus of citizens a la Julius Caesar. But the lifting is absurd. The lifting of passages from Henry IV Part I added little and seemed like showing off.

What I found lacking was linguistic and vocal variation. Tezozomoc’s swearing was fun for a bit (I hadn’t expected him to call his daughter a ‘fuck-wit’) but it was his only language trait. There was a wide variety of accents used but the Mexican accents were distributed among the three groups. I made no meaning out of the Scottish, Welsh, Birmingham and other accents either. Perhaps all of this was meant to accentuate the randomness of interchangeability of characters and tribes.

The text of  A Soldier in Every Son tells throughout. It very rarely shows. It is lovely to look at, though, and there is much to think about. Bits of it remain with me.

 

We ae just back from seeing the first preview of Greg Doran’s Julius Caesar. I may be quite wrong, of course, as I was with the splendid The Comedy of Errors which I loved and got some poor reviews, but if I’m right then Julius Caesar will quickly sell out after press night. Book for it now.

The idea is pretty straightforward. It is set in Africa because it reflects lots of the revolutions which have happened there. The set is a decaying concrete amphitheatre with a tunel through the middle upstage – to Brutus’s house, to the home of the spirits, to the battlefield tent, to Saddam’s underground hideaway and to Ghaddafi’s bunker. The cast is black. One wonders how the RSC managed to tempt to many of Britain’s leading actors to take part in this production. Normal Stratford productions can often tempt two or three of the country’s most distinguished actors; here there are many. And they all speak in African and Afro-Carribean accents. The accent work is excellent, and far more coherent than in most productions. And what is created is an Afroish voice for iambic pentametre which works spendidly. Doran does not shy away from the extra syllabic ‘e’; it often creates a stylish and telling emphasis.

Jeffery Kissoon’s Caesar is chilling: powerful, aggressive, paranoid, loud. Sometimes very and far too loud. He has no idea about his audience. He is clueless when dealing with Calpurnia’s fears for him. It is a fine interpretation, culminating in his opening his arms to receive Brutus’s final death stab. Ann Ogbomo’s Calpurnia is also spendid. There is no sexual tension between them. She moves round him in several scenes in quite wide arcs. She is vocally very persuasive in telling him not to go to the Capitol but he is easily persuaded by his flatterer. She has no chance. He’s a bastard. Full of himself. And thick. Ogbomo’s verse is beautifully spoken. They work together to create fine drama with hollowness at its centre.

Ray Fearon’s Mark Antony is full of smiles. I thought it was a shame that he was so fully clothed for the race, but then that might just have been me. I have seen very scantily clad Antonys who looked faintly ridiculous so maybe this was just as well. There was nothing ridiculous about Fearon’s Antony. He was smilingly sycophantic to Caesar, brilliantly manipulative with his audience, again full of well timed smiles at the oration and strong, dour and nasty at the end, seeing Octavius as an easily manipulated boy. Something I’d never thought of before was that Antony vocally becomes Caesar at the end of the funeral oration. He shouts as Caesar had done, both of them making the new theatre reverberate. The moment of their disagreement about left and right was interesting at the end. Antony complains about being crossed but he couldn’t care less really. He knows he has the upper hand. He smiles not at all at the end of the play.

So far I’ve written about three fine performances. But there were others, too. Â Joseph Mydell’s Casca is quite wonderful. You can’t keep your eyes off him. Every word is beautifully clear, the characterisation is complex, the intreactions complete in their intensity. Ricky Fearon’s Lucilius is just lovely. He’s a narcoleptic – sleeping at every chance and then beautifully adolescently subservient – but we underestimate him because of what Doran has him do at the end.

This production is about conspiracy and its aftermath, though, and so Cassius and Brutus lie at the heart of the play. Cyril Nri’s Cassius is a bit less lean and hungry and a bit less choleric than many Cassiuses I have seen and therefore provides an excellent foil to Paterson Joseph’s Brutus. The brilliantly cut tent scene in Act IV plays out the shifting dynamics superbly and shows a softer side to Cassius who is genuinely moved that Portia has died. His reaction to the news shows that this streak of human sympathy is Cassius’s tragic flaw, not the usual headstrong hot-temperedness. In that he has something in common with Brutus whose understanding of feelings leads him to allow Antony at Caesar’s funeral rather than his political miscalculation.

The triumph, centrepiece and originality of the production lies in the portrayal of Brutus. Paterson Joseph is, quite simply, magnificent. At every second the audience is aware of how he thinks and how he feels. He has exactly  extraordinary emotional range and all those passages which are usually pretty dry are brought to life because we can see how Brutus feels and what he is thinking. I have rarely seen a performance with such depth, clarity and physical poise. Joseph as understood how Brutus thinks and feels in every phrase. This Brutus is human, too. The sadness behind the outward coping mechanisms to do with Portia’s death are deeply moving. Brutus is intellectually vastly superior to all the other characters and yet he, too, has his weaknesses but these are about judgement: he underestimates Antony; he momentarily forgets that Cassius is not his intellectual equal; he allows social status to obscure Lucilius’s complete loyalty until he has almost run out of candidates to hold the dagger which will kill him.

This production has all the characteristics of Doran’s brilliant blocking. There is a great deal of movement. The crowd scenes create some very pretty pictures and these contrast with moments of great stilness. The costumes are modern with Roman touches of detail. The lighting is daring in some places; a sombre atmosphere is created by some unusually dark moments. The band is great and the music not overpowering. The temptation to have background music at inappropriate moments (which happens in some of the other plays in the repertoire) is avoided.

For the first time the RSC building is properly used after the play. The wonderful band played in the downstairs bar after the play which made me realise that the RSC does after all have sufficient imagination to use its almost incomparable facilities rather than rest on the laurels of its box office receipts. If the bar prices were reduced to levels which mere mortals could afford then the theatre could become a social and community space. Wouldn’t that be wonderful? I’m not holding my breath though. It is the RSC.

I thought this was the best Julius Caesar I have seen. By a country mile. I am still thinking about the power shifts involved in revolutions and will continue to do so for a long time. Power is generated and maintained by not having an interval. Although this first preview ran 2 hours and 20 minutes the cutting in Acts IV and V was so skilful that the plays’s energy and audience involvement was maintained right to the end. I have never seen a Julius Caesar where this happened before. It is a triumph for Doran and for Joseph.

As I said at the beginning, book now, while tickets are still available and while there are still some rooms for a lovely stay at Moss Cottage.

This excellent new play by Helen Edmundson is the third of the RSC’s linked plays – Written on the Heart, Measure for Measure and The Heresy of Love. Its a powerful and emotional play about intellectual freedom and betrayal. The main character is Sister Juana Ines de la Cruz, based on Sor Juana of Mexico who became one of the most significant playwrights of the Spanish Golden Age but whose work was suppressed by the Church.

Sister Juana is a modern woman, born in the wrong way (she was illegitimate) in the wrong place (Mexico) at the wrong time (that of the Spanish Inquisition) and the wrong sex (female). She is powerfully played by Catherine McCormack who conveys Sister Juana’s intellectual honesty as well as her radiant beauty aided by clever costuming and lighting. The play’s conflict is between her and the repressive church, represented by an astonishingly vile bigot, Archbishop Aguiar y Seijas played as skilfully by Stephen Boxer as his William Tyndale was in Written on the Heart. In the middle for a while is the more liberal Bishop Santa Cruz (Raymond Coulthard) until his political schemings force him to change his tactics.

The messages about human frailty, pride and betrayal are as relevant now as they were in the seventeenth century. Director Nancy Meckler deemphasises the Roman Catholic in order to prompt thought about any kind of self-righteous repressive regime characterised by power, male dominance, self-interest and self-righteousness. There is a significant elemnent of the play about heresy, but it is heresy in any kind of context, and about love, but love, lust and self-regarding are more important ideas than those about love of God.

That is why, perhaps, the second part opens with the Archbishop engaged in an amazingly self-regarding narcissistic display of sado-masochistic self-flagellation which sets the conceptual framework for the second half of the play.

In the end armageddon beckons with the results of the betrayals, the arrival of floods, the plague and the death of many of the main characters. While the Archbishop proclaims that this is all an indication that God is angry the audience looks for other interpretations and finds them in human behaviour rather than in religious doctrine. I was drawn to betrayal. Most of the main characters engage in betrayal at some point. Towards the end Sister Juana is revealed to have betrayed her niece and herself. The Spanish court represented by the Viceroy and Vicereine betray Mexico by their departure from the country and even Juana’s loyal slave Juanita, beautifully played by Dona Croll, betrays her mistress by allowing Sister Juana’s niece to engage in a sexual liaison with the vacuous courtier Don Hernando.

This play has a very strong cast – Geoffrey Beavers as Father Antonio, Marty Cruikshank as Brigida, Teresa Banham as Sister Sebastiana and Catherine Hamilton as the Vicereine all offer us fully realised characters – and there was a lot of laughter from the audience which only highlighted the horror of the betrayals. The unitary set is beautifully managed, the blocking on the thrust is unfussily handled and the emtoional patterning of the play ensures that the audience is kept spellbound throughout. Not only are the costumes lovely and effective; the use of posture as a characterisation and emotional tool is splendid. Something else I enjoyed enormously was the singing.

I thought that it would be unlikely that I would see anything else this season which I enjoyed as much as I had enjoyed Written on the Heart. Even without the almost incomparable Oliver Ford Davies I enjoyed this production just as much. And because the links between the three plays are so complex and interesting, I am tempted to see Measure for Measure again.

If you get the chance try to see all three; if you can or if you can’t a warm welcome at Moss Cottage awaits you.

 

Written on the Heart

 

Although ostensibly about the translation of the King
James Bible in 1611, this new play by David Edgar is really about the
feasibility of being a liberal humanist man of conscience in a setting where
political behaviour is thought to be essential. The main character is Launcelot
Andrews who tries to reconcile the pressure of Puritanism with the continuation
of a church which goes back to recent Catholic times.

Edgar cleverly parallels two stories – that of
Andrews, in his early years trying to enforce the new ecclesiastical order
against the old, and that of William Tyndale, imprisoned and killed for
translating the Bible into English. These two stories are brought together at
the end when Andrews is pressured into adjudicating the final contentious changes
to the 1611 translation and is visited by the ghost of Andrews.

Thrown into this mix is the issue of fundamentalism,
represented by Andrew’s servant, Mary Currer, vigorously played by Jodie McNee.
She may be a servant but she is educated, having been taught to read and write
by her father. She does know her place,
but she has outgrown it and dares to speak her mind to Andrews although she
submits to her master’s authority and bidding at the end of the play.

In the end Edgar suggests that conscience and power
are incompatible. Gordon Brown discovered, too, that principle could not
successfully be chosen against ambition. Andrews refuses to be a contender for
the archbishopric of Canterbury, instead supporting the claim of Bishop Abbot
from the Right. Shades of the Labour party leadership election fiasco?

None of this seems like much of a theatrical
blockbuster for 2011 and yet I found the play gripping on both Preview
occasions I saw it. Director Greg Doran opts frequently for stillness rather
than business and this works because the play stars two of our most outstanding
undersung contemporary actors, Oliver Ford Davies as Andrews and Stephen Boxer
as Tyndale. Ford Davies’s emission of sibilant s sounds and slight incline of
the head speak volumes throughout the play. His body reveals a huge range of
emotion through tiny nuances. His enunciation is brilliantly clear and his
control complete. It is as good as performance – perhaps even more powerful –
than his Lionel in Racing Demon at
the National all those years ago. I found the scene between Andrews and Tyndale
at the end of the play extraordinarily powerful, perhaps because both Ford
Davies and Boxer can understate, too.

The other highlight of the production for me was the
scene between Tyndale and the Young Catholic Priest in the first half. The
latter visits Tyndale ostensibly to save his soul but smuggles the manuscript
of the translated Bible instead so that it can be published as the Rogers
Bible. The scene is daringly staged on a small raised block in the centre of
the stage and in semi-darkness. Neither actor moves very much. Mark Quartley as
the Young Catholic Priest mirrors Boxer’s physical circumspection. Vocally and
physically he is in complete control. It is a wonderful scene.

The music is glorious, Paul Englishby’s old-modern,
catholic-protestant ecclesiastical interludes beautifully sung by Anna Bolton,
Alexandra Saunders, Mitesh Khatri, Matthew Spillett and Lewis Jones.

Cohesion is achieved by the frequent use of the play’s
title and its enigmatic link to love and by the burning of hands in candleflame,
as well as by the passing of the chalice eventually to Andrews and the passing
of Tyndale’s translation into Andrews’s pile of
books. The play is carefully framed by Edgar who places Andrews’s internal
dilemmas at the beginning, in the middle and at the end of the piece and
invites us to wonder whether when Andrews looks out at the audience and asks
‘Who is there?’ he is looking for the spirit of Tyndale or whether we as
observers have some part to play in the political, moral, ethical and spiritual
debate which the play explores.

Left, right, centre, compromise, pragmatism, ambition:
is there the possibility of triangulation or are we heading to disaster? I had
not expected before I went to Written on
the Heart that I would end up thinking about so many of the issues raised
by Marat/Sade. And both plays, too,
are about words and their potential for multiple meanings and translations. A
brilliant piece of programming.

You’ve only got another ten days to see Peter
Weiss’s Marat/Sade in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. It’s a rare
opportunity to see a production of perhaps the best example of Theatre of
Cruelty from almost half a century ago.

First produced by the RSC in 1964 the play was
controversial, mainly because of its overlapping quadruple metaphor – that
madness, politics, theatre and sexual behaviour are metaphors for each other.
The play shocked when it was first performed in Britain because audiences were
not used to graphic sexual content. We have become so used to this that I
expected the play to look creaky and old-fashioned and to a certain extent it
does. Awash with alienation techniques, ensuring that the audience does not become
engaged emotionally with the characters, it certainly doesn’t adhere to any of
the quick, sharp sound-bite techniques that we have become used to in this
digital age. It is very long, designed to be so, all the more since it is
almost an hour and three quarters to the interval by which time the idea has
been hammered into the audience’s heads that, in contrast to the naive optimism
of the early sixties of Beatlemania, we are all buggers or all buggered,
graphically shown by the rape scene and the end of the first part. All very
straightforward stuff.

So imagine my amazement to read the front page article
in Stratford’s free rag, Midweek Herald,
by a modern-day Mary Whitehouse called Sandy Holt (as naive as Mary Whitehouse over
Romans in Britain and as ignorant of
theatre) which begins:

The Royal Shakespeare Company has
said it has no intention of pulling the show

that has seen hundreds of its
audience walk out because of its gross indecency,

nudity and scenes of torture.

 

Apparently
audiences (perhaps tainted by the twenty-first century popularity of
fundamentalism) are no more able to deal with metaphor and no more able to
engage their brains than some members of London audiences were in the 1960s and
70s. And, curiously, it’s sex that shocks these modern-day Whitehouses. Not
religion, not politics, not psychosis – sex.
Amazing.

 

The
production is beautifully choreographed. A large cast is deployed with
consummate ease through a vast range of blocking movements. The timeless, placeless set with metaphorical
scaffolding and a padded floor are constant reminders of the asylum that the
play is set in, that we are witnessing and that we ourselves are metaphorically
part of. The alienation technique of having characters break character, of
featuring actors playing asylum inmates assuming characters which are only
intermittently consistent because they can’t remember the play means that it is
hard to sit back and admire the acting. In a sense this, too, is part of the
metaphorical patterning of the play. We may be alienated from the realness of
the characters but we can still become from time to time engaged with some
aspect of what they are enacting. I had not realised in 1964 how Adrian
Mitchell’s rhyming couplets also strike a dissonant tone – a further metaphor
at the heart of the text’s structure.

 

Marat/Sade
is a fine ensemble piece where the audience is never sure what will happen next
because the world it depicts is Absurd, all enacted by mental patients – Absurdity on a quite different
level.

 

There
are, of course, oddities. Perhaps nowadays audiences are less familiar with
Brechtian devices than they were half a century ago, but within play audiences,
multiple shifts of character, characters playing characters playing characters,
improvisation and pseudo improvisation have all found their way into movies and
television.

 

But this
production is no mere historical reconstruction. It is brilliantly updated,
with masses of references to what has happened since 1964 – Thatcher’s
‘glorious years’, Guantanamo Bay, the final days and death of Bin Laden, Islamic movements, even Big
Brother, to name but a few – both
intentional and unintentional. Â The
director cannot have thought of the power of seeing the production on the day
that Gaddafi was killed with all the complex moral horror associated with that.

 

Theatre
of Cruelty speaks of the unspeakable. Amazingly and quite against my
expectations this 2011 production did, too. Â Watch for the many ways in which the brilliant
director Anthony Neilson has created contemporary resonances and references.
Listen carefully to Khyam Allami’s wonderful score (and buy a programme to read
his excellent article).

 

Go see it
before it’s too late. And if you want to stay overnight a warm welcome awaits
you at Moss Cottage.