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.

 

 

The Homecoming

I thought The
Homecoming was chilling and scary when I first saw it in the early 1970s.
It still is. The passage of time, though, has made it a lot easier to
understand, although the experience of seeing it in theatre is still gripping.
You want to know what these ghastly people are going to do and say next.

I hadn’t realised forty years ago that it’s a study in
repetition compulsion in that despite his PhD Teddy marries his mother and Ruth
acts out what the rest of the family are denying. Max immediately recognises
her as a whore, treats her as one, welcomes her into the family and shows that
he, too (as well as Teddy and Joey), wants to sleep with her. Pimp Lenny just
wants to make money out of her. Nasty stuff, only just redeemed by making Sam
some sort of moral yardstick or, at least, some sort of reflection of
“normality”.

Perhaps it’s the non-ticking clock which keeps Lenny
awake that is the key metaphor in this production. Linear time is unimportant.
The present repeats and overlays the past and vice versa.

The play is superbly acted. Jonathan Slinger’s Lenny,
is full of Pinteresque menace, every muscle controlled. Richard Riddell’s Joey
is stolidly dim, devoid of feeling or evident brain activity. Nicholas Woodeson
as Max shows an enormous range of expression, changing like quicksilver. Aislin
McGuckin’s Ruth is wholly controlled, enigmatic and inscrutable. Justin
Salinger’s Teddy, rarely displaying any emotion at all, is just as chilling as
the rest. A ghastly crew. Des McAleer’s Sam is the only character the audience
can begin to identify with. He tries to be creative in the kitchen and tries to
clean up dirty things. Sam dies, of course. In this world to speak the truth,
to reveal what life was really like in the past, is your death warrant. Attacks
of the heart are rare but fatal.

David Farr’s production is coherent, superbly paced
and characterised by appropriate empty physical spaces. I wouldn’t have missed
it, but I don’t want to see it again. It’s a fine production of a beautifully
written hideous play.

P.S. I’m adding Jonathan Slinger, Richard Riddell and
Aislin McGuckin to my list of impressively versatile actors.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

This is a must see production (as is The Merchant of Venice). The playing is
outstanding, the direction imaginative and often lovely to watch and the
interpretation is conceptually coherent. I have never seen such a vibrant Helena.
Lucy Briggs-Owen’s shrill athletic Helena is a million miles away from her
Luscinda in Cardenio but the
character is just as fully realised. An often hilarious triumph. Alex Hassell
as Demetrius shows off his acrobatic skills and Nathaniel Martello-White speaks
the verse beautifully as Lysander. I didn’t warm to Arsher Ali’s Puck but he
did make the idea of Puck as Philostrate and vice-versa thought provoking and
interesting. As Puck he was more of a manager of “mirthlessness” than of
“mirth” taking on some of the grumpiness of his 60s court character. Jo Stone
Fewings as Oberon and Pippa Nixon as Titania were delightful, serving to
contast their RP fairy characters with their London-accented human alter egos.

One of our friends said that it was well worth going
just to see the play within the play. Rehearsal scenes and the play itself were
brisk and clever. Chike Okonkwo’s muscled wall was a hoot, as was Felix Hayes’s
lion. I loved all of them but Marc Wooton’s braying was the best thing. He was
a completely convincing ass and his series of parodies of film versions of
Shakespearian actors an unexpected delight. Be prepared for a surprise when the
mechanicals’ curtain is accidentally parted.

For those who know the play very well there are some
very interesting moments. The doubling
of Theseus and Hippolyta and Oberon and Titania is very cleverly done. There is
no love lost at all between Hippolyta and Theseus at the beginning of the play.
She thinks nothing of Theseus’s attentions nor of his support of Aegeus’s
dominant patriarchal view of socety, claiming his daughter Hermia as his
property to dispose of how he wants. She wouldn’t as a captive Amazon Queen.
But at the end the wedding is harmonious. She appears to like Theseus and is
full of smiles. Why? How? It seems to be that it’s her contact with magic. Not
only are the pairs doubled but our attention is drawn to the doubling. After
Theseus has released Titania from her spell, they undress each other from their
fairy king and queen’s garments and dress each other in their earthly
characters’ garments. Theseus and Hippolyta are Oberon are Titania and vice
versa. It has always seemed odd to me that Titania shows no resentment towards
Oberon for having made her become besotted with an ass. However, here,
Hippolyta (who is Titania in some sense) learns from Titania’s forgiveness of
Oberon and is reconciled to marriage with Theseus. Not just reconciled but
happy about it. Forgiveness and love in the spirit world transfers into the
human world.

Something similar happens with the four lovers. Their
experiences in the spirit world allow them to become harmonious partners.

I wasn’t sure about the ballet of suspended chairs but
I think that was because I was sitting in the stalls. If you sit in the
Galleries then you have to look through the wood of the chairs in order to see
what is going on. Wood. Chairs. The wood of the fairy world clouds but softens
the human world. A bit the same with the Mechanicals using the new deep trap.
They entered and descended on their first entrance in Act II to do electrical
work after the lights have fused and at the end they descended again to do the
same thing. Despite the rude comments of the courtiers (mercifully somewhat cut
in this production) they cannot survive without the underclass.

One of the delights of the repertory system is seeing
fine actors play such different parts in the same season. So far it’s Lucy
Briggs-Owen and Christopher Godwin who have wowed me with their versatility.
And I wait eagerly too see what brilliant director Nancy Meckler does next. I
have not seen her work before and I want lots more.

A Merchant of Venice

 The Merchant is set in Las Vegas. My partner thought I wouldn’t like it. He was wrong. I loved it. First of all, I thought the ideas came from the text. Secondly, I wished I had thought about these ideas when I taught the play for GCSE and A Level. I didn’t.

Las Vegas is about gambling (established at the beginning and before the dialogue begins. Make sure you’re in your seats at least 10 minutes before the start time). Antonio gambles with his money in argosies. Bassanio gambles for Portia in the casket game. Shylock gambles on a naive reading of the law. Portia and Nerissa gamble on a silly psychological game of the rings. Even Launcelot Gobbo gambles on being with the right religion because he doesn’t care about either. He only cares about Elvis. At the end it’s possible that Portia gambled at reading the emotional and psychological dimensions of the suit for her correctly; she might not have done. Brilliant! And complex.

Then, now and whenever are all muddled up, intertwined, and time becomes irrelevant. Portia is filmed for a ghastly TV programme with her suitors. She is a great performer and hates the show.  She, a Texan hussy heiress,  is on the make. Bassanio is on the make (why had I not seen this from the text when he makes absolutely clear that he is wooing Portia because she is ‘richly left’and because he has lost (squandered?) his money?). Antonio is on the make. He is gambling in a casino even though all his money is in his argosies. Shylock is on the make because he thinks he can get one over on the Christians.

These ghastly materialists all lose out. What is unusual and what I had never thought of before is that the only one who is in the same place at the end as at the beginning is Antonio. He is alone, gambling at the beginning. He is alone at the end. And Scott Handy, with an expressionless face, distant blocking and sometimes quite flat delivery, played him as boring and unattractive. Not the dishy, betrayed guy that the gays can feel sorry for. It isn’t the way I would have asked someone to play the part. It was much more interesting than I could have thought of. If Bassanio was in love with him (as one friend who saw it thought), then there was no obvious reason except money. Idea and theme again.

There are some very unexpected things. You don’t expect Launcelot Gobbo to be an Elvis Impersonator in a casino. You don’t expect that the caskets are the basis of a TV game show where the winner gets the Texan dollybird heiress. You don’t expect that the first half Portia will manage to be Balthazar at all – that’s a good gin and tonic topic for discussion. You also don’t expect the ending. Maybe I will add something to this blog towards the end of the run, but I don’t want to put my ideas in your head before you see it. But I can pretty well guarantee that you will come out at the end asking each other “Well, what did that mean, then?”

And there’s Patrick Stewart as Shylock. He’s a bigot (but so is this Antonio). He can be very charming. His mafia friends who are involved in the Las Vegas meat business no doubt find him so. And he has some dignity. I was delighted and surprised at Stewart’s restraint. It made his character much more credible than Shylock often is, and less of a stereotype, I thought it was a wonderful performance in a production which had many fascinating performances.

Here are some questions to think about while you’re seeing it:

           We know what Bassanio’s motive is – to marry a “lady richly left”. What is Portia’s?

           What is the relationship between Antonio and Bassanio?

           What do Lorenzo and Jessica think they are up to?

           Does anyone come out with any moral credit at the end?

I thought this was a very fine production and one of the RSC’s most coherently conceptual for a long time. I shall certainly be seeing it several more times.