Romeo and Juliet
Royal Shakespeare Theatre
We nearly always go to the previews of the plays at the RSC and we have yet to go to one directed
either by Gregory Doran or Erica Whyman which isn’t completely ready for public performance.
I enjoyed this brilliantly paced production, splendidly directed by Erica Whyman, for many reasons. It
was great to see characters who are the age Shakespeare intended. You can believe that Juliet (Karen
Fishwick), talking ten to the dozen, is fourteen and her mother (Mariam Haque) twenty eight. Romeo
(Bally Gill) is also a convincing teenager with streetwise swagger, rapid changes of emotion,
impetuosity and body in perpetual motion. It is also refreshing to see a modern production which is
contemporary. It is dominated by gangland culture where the races and genders are mixed and knife
crime is rife. I think it’s most inventive of Whyman to present iambic pentameter and rhyming
couplets as characteristic of rap-like street culture; the form of language itself becomes myth. And
Romeo’s purchase from the apothecary makes clear that drug dealing is in contemporary cities a
response to poverty and threatened destitution.
You can see that although Shakespeare calls the feud an ‘ancient quarrel’ it is passed down from
generation to generation. Tybalt’s irrational belligerence is mirrored by Capulet in his vile and
abusive treatment of Juliet. In that scene you can easily imagine Lord Capulet in a street gang fifteen
or twenty years previously. The verse is well delivered throughout but the language and rhythms are
from the street. Splendid. There is impressive attention to detail, too. Don’t miss (as most of the
audience did when I saw it) the dumb show with Romeo and Juliet in bed together during the interval.
I had not noticed before how Lord Capulet talks about Juliet in the third person even while she is
present. The most highly political and social statement comes at the end of the play where the dead
walk among the living and where there is little understanding of how to change the world except by
splitting and violence – timely for me in week where the irrational President Trump took on Iran,
alienated Europe and was busy cosying up to North Korea.
Tom Piper’s set is simple. No need for the RSC to spend loads of money just for the sake of it when
the play is what we have gone to see. There’s a big cube with an open face which can be turned roun
as which deals with all the location changes prompting the thought that no matter who is involved and
wherever it is taking place the same things recur. There’s a small ladder, some ladders on the outside
of the cube and an armchair which is carried on and off. It’s all the more effective, therefore, when
after Tybalt’s death red candles, red roses and a red shroud are brought on. The complete lack of
unnecessary frills is demonstrated when the dead Tybalt is placed on the shroud which is then pulled
easily off stage – far more effective than trying to heave a sizeable Tybalt (Raphale Sowole) off by
muscle power. The music composed by Sophie Cotton, too, is contemporary and effective in creating
moods. The rock music at Capulet’s feast, with its undertones of energy and anarchy, creates
wonderful prolepsis and dramatic irony.
There are some subtleties of characterisation, too, all of which make sense of some of the problems in
the play. Rather than gloss over it, Whyman deals with the behaviour of Lady Capulet. She is faced
with a dilemma: she loves her daughter but is scared of her husband. She knows that he will react
violently towards Juliet when she refuses to marry Paris; that is why she leaves Juliet to him. It is for
her own survival that she sides with her husband. Paris is gentle, loyal and charming, genuinely
distressed at Juliet’s death. That is why he visits the monument at the end. Friar Lawrence (Andrew
French) is also interestingly characterised. In a different way from the street gang members he, too,
acts on the spur of the moment. All his decisions are made because he has just thought of them. This
is a clever choice because he’s just like Romeo, really. And one of the real problems of the text is
what to do with Mercutio and how. As a female gang member this Mercutio, played with
extraordinary physicality and energy by Charlotte Josephine, tries to outmale the gang’s males but
suffers in the end for it .The Duke, too, is female, striding on stage in her sharp suit and shoes and
making pronnouncements which sound authoritative but do little to solve society’s problems. We
cannot avoid thinking of our present Prime Minister. In this way Whyman invites us to think about all
the females in the play and their places in their society. And if we do that she has forced us to reflect
on contemporary Britain.
We are also invited to think about class, ethnicity and background. It becomes clear that some
members of the lower classes such as Balthasar (Tom Padley) have unfailing loyalty to their masters
in refusing to leave the monument even when instructed to do so, unlike Friar Lawrence who flees in
fright in order to save his own skin. Whyman gives the one illiterate character in the play a West
Indian accent. Lady Capulet and Juliet have Scottish accents. Benvolio a northern one. The Nurse
(splendidly played by Ishia Bennison), having escaped from her position merely as a wet nurse, has to
side with her masters in telling Juliet to marry Paris because she needs to keep her job. The black
characters, like the white, have a range of accents.
I feel I haven’t done justice to the depth and sophistication of the problemisation and interrogation of
the text which Whyman has undertaken. It is a play about extremism and impetuosity. It is a study in
false logic. It is truly contemporary with much to say about a multi-ethnic society. I have seen it
twice already and I am looking forward to seeing it again.
Antony & Cloepatra. Review by Dr. Peter Buckroyd
Antony and Cleopatra
There are plenty of problems with this play for a director and it’s always a surprise to me when the actress playing Cleopatra makes it work. When we hear Enobarbus describe Cleopatra we usually take it as romanticised hyperbole by someone who has been bewitched by her, possibly besotted. Not so here. Enobarbus describes exactly what we have seen. Cleopatra is a creature of ‘infinite variety’. We never quite know what she is going to do or how she is going to behave next. And age has certainly not withered her in any way: she is elegant, charismatic, slim, sexy, dangerous alluring and changeable.
I have to admit that I didn’t really want to see another production of this play. Despite its mixed critical opinions I was smitten by Kathryn Hunter’s amazing physical and vocal performance as Cleopatra in the RSC’s last production. But Josette Simon is equally alluring, though in very different ways. You can see why Antony is so besotted with a middle aged woman who looks thirty. And who wouldn’t be?
Director Iqbal Khan gives us a Cleopatra focussed production with some psychological depth. The extraordinary intelligence and imagination he showed in Much Ado About Nothing is abundantly evident here too. Cleopatra doesn’t just put her robe on at the end; she strips herself bare of earthly trappings before she does so and prepares for the afterlife sans power, sans wig, sans clothes, sans everything mortal as she makes an existential breakthrough from the physical world to mythical timelessness. And the asp, unseen inside her costume as she dies, is a projection of her own physical and spiritual reality rather than an external agent of mortality. And we are never allowed to forget that Cleopatra is an outsider in Egypt; she may command it but she is not of it.
But it is not just the brilliance of Josette Simon’s performance which makes this a must-see production. From the very beginning we are presented with an exciting and vibrant dance, but one which foreshadows a dance of death. And Cleopatra’s ‘fearful sails’ are another dance of death, beautiful to look at but shrouded in empyrean dry ice, paper/cardboard ships which are inscrutable projections whose movements are unpredictable and unfathomable. The sea battle ends with a metaphorical burning ship in the storm and clouds, betokening the crumbling of empires.
Although the story is very clearly told, by downplaying the changes in political allegiance in the play the director highlights an important and contemporary message. When things are rough at home fight foreign wars. Caesar does it; Thatcher did. Mexico, North Korea and Gibraltar are lurking somewhere in the back of my mind. There is no doubt that in political terms Caesar plays his cards right, but this production suggests that Shakespeare filtered through Iqubal Khan is interested in what happens to everyone else.
Robert Innes Hopkins’s design for the production is sumptuous. Following the gorgeous dance opening a bed arises from the trap and we are presented with Egyptian luxury in costumes and cushions, an appropriate theatrical location for Cleopatra’s self-indulgence. There is some fine male flesh and a steam bath in Rome. The architectural background is at a sharp angle in in Egypt but straightens up for Rome, although we slowly notice that it is only almost straight on; there is a suggestion of a skewed society despite its apparent brazenness.
Lepidus (Patrick Drury), Antony (Antony Byrne) and Caesar (Ben Allen) are clearly delineated: the peacemaker, the passionate and the narcisissistic pragmatist. The characters become part of the architectural plan of the play and by the middle we become aware of the parallels between Cleopatra’s narcissism and Caesar’s. His eating grapes as he meets Cleopatra is a wonderful detail, conjuring up ideas about appetite, sensuality and the beast that devours. There are beautiful groups and pictures throughout. The freeze on Pompey’s ship is marvellous.
This production is not to be missed. Neither is Julius Caesar with largely the same extremely strong cast. Come and make your visit even more enjoyable with a stay at Moss Cottage.
Orchestra of The Swan, Review.
Orchestra of the Swan
Stratford ArtsHouse
8 November
In the past when Orchestra of the Swan has featured a newly commissioned work the audience has stayed away in droves. Not so in this 21st Anniversary year, mainly because of the imaginative way in which the new work has been introduced. At each of the concerts a newly commissioned work will be paired with a familiar classic, on this occasion Douglas J Cuomo’s Objects in Mirror with JS Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto no2 in F major which formed Cuomo’s inspiration for his new work. David Curtis made this new work accessible for the audience by having the orchestra play very short extracts of the Bach followed by short extracts of the Cuomo in order to show how Cuomo used some of Bach’s ideas and motifs, thereby helping the audience to find ways of listening to and accessing this new work. Brilliant. Particularly as the last two works on the programme were Bach’s Brandenberg Concerto no3 in G major followed by Stravinsky’s Concert for E flat for chamber Orchestra ‘Dumbarton Oaks’, a tribute to Bach’s work.
The programme began with Steve Martland’s arrangement of JS Bach’s Toccata and Fugue in D minor, an extraordinary arrangement which captured some of the ways in which Bach prefigures dynamic shifts and emphatic moments of contemporary rock music.
The harpsicord is barely audible in most Baroque music but Cuomo gives it real character and moments to itself so that for a change we could admire David Ponsford’s skilled playing and interactions with other instruments. I loved the intense and passionate second movement, the Ballad, where Cuomo showed he was not frightened to create slow delicacy, epitomised by Hugh Davies’s lovely playing of the muted trumpet.
Bach’s decision to have three violins rather than the customary division between first and second violins in Brandenberg 3 gave the audience quite a different string ensemble sound with just the four string lines rather than the customary five. And who said that minimalism was a twentieth century phenomenon? The two chord second movement must have been as startling to eighteenth century audiences as it was to us on Tuesday.
What a wonderful concert it was. I can’t wait for the next one.
Volpone, Review by Peter Buckroyd.
I would be very surprised if you will see a more engaging and more accomplished acting performance this year than Henry Goodman’s as Volpone in Trevor Nunn’s current production of Volpone at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre. From his famous opening line to the last line of the epilogue Goodman has the audience transfixed and delighted by this chameleon character. From the astute businessman to the hilarious mountebank to the sophisticated seducer, to the disguised officer, Goodman dominates both physically and vocally. Every word can be heard perfectly – no mean feat in a theatre where this is rarely the case – Â and his range of facial expressions and physical poses constantly delights.
One of the challenges of this text is when to make the characters ‘real’ and when to make them caricatures. Â Volpone is a character. Whereas the four gulls have elements of caricature in that they are simply obsessed by the prospect of riches, we believe Volpone when he says that he has more joy in the acquisition of wealth than in the wealth itself. He needs constant stimulus. When he can’t find it externally he provides it for himself, from calling for entertainment from his dwarf, Nano (John Key), his hermaphrodite Androgyno (Ankur Bahl) and his castrated clown Castrone (Julian Hoult), when he senses that he might be bored, to providing it for himself when he delights in the possibilities that the role of officer can provide him in and around the court scenes at the end.
Another challenge is trying to balance the moral patterning which is at the heart of Jonson’s satire. It is compounded by Jonson’s apparent lack of interest in developing the conflict between good and evil. Celia and Bonario need to be strong for this to work and I didn’t feel they were strong or ‘real’ enough. Andy Apollo’s Bonario is very pleasing to look at, but Nunn makes no attempt to present him as Corbaccio’s son except perhaps to suggest that he has been snooping round Volpone’s house in that he is told to hide through one exit and then appears from a different one. Celia whines and cowers, capitulating easily to her husband. Rhiannon Handy shrilly shrieks through her third role this season and her accent is so peculiar (is it meant to be cod eastern European? if so why?) that it makes it almost impossible to understand a thing she says. A real shame. She is miscast.
Nunn does much to make the play contemporary. Stephen Brimson Lewis’s set is modern and there is one unexpected visual delight after another. Narcissistic media celebrity Lady Politic Would-Be is followed almost everywhere by a video recorder; Volpone has installed CTV screens; his fake heartbeat in on screen for the scenes where he pretending to be at death’s door; the stock exchange is relayed to his house; Peregrine is a young twenty first century American travelling hippy. There is also a lot of clever and appropriate verbal updating and some satirical gags (such as Volpone’s Italian mountebank’s ‘your shitty’ and good shitizens’.
Another problem with the text for a modern audience comes about in the scenes where Volpone is not present. The interchanges between Sir Politic Would-Be (Steven Pacey) and Peregrine (Colin Ryan) are there to widen Jonson’s satirical canvas but they are not well integrated into the plot and these scenes are bound to drag a little, despite everything Nunn has done to update the references. The scenes are well-played, but I did wonder whether the play might have been enhanced by cutting them.
All four gulls are very well played. Miles Richardson’s Voltore is a corrupt contemporary lawyer – authoritative, confident, single-minded and, when need be at the end living off his enfeebled wits. Matthew Kelly’s Corvino is a vile hypocrite; Kelly shows that there is no end to his selfish, destructive exploitation of his wife – to him just another possession of no value. Annette McLaughlan’s Essex it girl cum celebrity Lady Politic Would-Be is a joy to listen to and watch. Geoffrey Freshwater’s Corbaccio is superb. Freshwater gives the character real development as he ages; his deafness opens up the possibilities of lots of unexpected gags and laughs; he is brilliant.
What else to say? The music is great. John Key leads the trio of weird servants in several terrific numbers, several of the rap. Goodman is brilliant in the seduction scene and shows off his wonderful singing voice splendidly. The minor characters (Celia apart) are very well played giving depth and credibility to the court scenes at the end which are so often rather an anti-climax. And there is Mosca, played by Orion Lee. I didn’t understand the characterisation, I couldn’t fathom the Bond-film-style Chinese servant idea and while it was evident that Lee was working hard I didn’t get his character’s motivation.
Still, this is a fascinating production. Maybe it was because so much of it was so good that I began to see for the first time some of the flaws in the play itself. It think it would be a mistake for any theatre lover to miss Goodman’s performance. It has been the highlight of my theatre year so far.
If you haven’t seen it yet, come to Stratford to do so. And you will have a warm welcome (as well as homemade bread, marmalade and jams) at Moss Cottage if you do.
Review, Orchestra of the Swan Spring Sounds. 22nd May
Orchestra of the Swan Stratford ArtsHouse Friday 22 May
Friday’s concert given by Orchestra at the Swan at Stratford ArtsHouse was a real treat. When you buy a ticket for an Orchestra of the Swan concert you don’t just get the concert; you also get a pre-concert talk and sometimes introductions to one or more of the pieces before they are played.
Friday’s pre-concert talk was by conductor and artistic director David Curtis and composer Dobrinka Tabakova whose Centuries of Meditations and the world premiere of High Line formed the first half of the progamme. Centuries of Meditations was written for the Three Choirs Festival in Herefored Cathedral in 2012, based on poems by the seventeenth century mystic poet Thomas Traherne and four of the 2009 stained glass windows by Tom Denny in the cathedral. Tabakova’s music is very accessible. She draws much of her inspiration from places, creating their mood and atmosphere in sound. The first movement is characterised by the perpetual motion of rich English sound and the second by repeated rhythms and musical phrases with which the listener becomes quickly familiar and can therefore trace both the creation and the progress of the mood. In the third movement the tonality moves in and out of choir and orchestra before the work culminates in the fourth movement, picking up the harmonic and textural threads of the three previous movements and adding the sound of the cathedral’s D flat major bells which move from orchestra to choir and back again.
High Line was introduced to the audience by Curtis and Tabakova with the playing of short extracts so that they could then pick them up and follow their progress through the piece. It was inspired by a visit to the High Line in New York – a modern garden space created from a disused railway line. Musical motifs characterise the underground activity, the bustle of the streets, the higher garden space, the cultural activity represented by the flugelhorn and the observer walking through the garden represented by the violin. Each is presented separately but they then all interact as the violin/obsever becomes an integrated part of the city gardenscape, marking the transition from observer to participant. The brilliant playing and precise interaction between Hugh Davies’s trumpet and Tamsin Waley-Cohen’s violin gave body and substance to the depiction of the cosmopolitan bustling city.
The second half on the concert was a performance of Faure’s Requiem in its early 1887 version with small orchestra, most ably led by violist Adrian Turner. David Curtis always does something which surprises me on the rare occasions that he conducts choral music. There was a surprise at the very beginning with the unusually slow tempo of the first movement. The Requiem was a marked contrast to the dramatic romantic Requiems which preceded it and Curtis emphasised the lyricism of the voices with very restrained clear, pure vocal lines created in part by the downplaying of all the sibilants in the vocal score in what was a reflective, introverted restrained performance. The only blot on the interpretation was the momentary shrillness of the sopranos pushing too hard towards the end of the Hosanna. He gave the drama to the orchestral instruments instead. Soloists Simon Oberst and Naomi Berry were completely in accord with the vocal restraint of the Orchestra of the Swan Chamber Choir
There is a wonderful opportunity to hear more of Tabakova’s music in the Orchestra of the Swan concert on Friday 29 May, again at the ArtsHouse.
