The RSC’s big Christmas show this year is The Tempest directed by Gregory Doran in association with Intel and The Imaginarium Studios. Starting from the premise that Shakespeare used the cutting edge of Jacobean technology for his masque in The Tempest, this production attempts to use the cutting edge of twenty-first century technology for the production. There is an avatar of Ariel; there are all kinds of projections; the masque is unusually played in full and is full of ostentatious spectacle. I’m sure that members of the audience interested in digital whatsits are going to be very impressed.
Steven Brinson-Lewis’s set design is also spectacular combining with projections of sea, forest and the mysteries of the island. The broken hull of a ship becomes the location of Prospero’s cell and there are some wonderful forest and landscape projections onto the backdrop. The use of Hockney’s paintings delighted me and I wondered whether it was a tribute to the way Hockney had experimented with the uses of new technology in his art.
For me the star of the show was the stage floor with wonderful red cut-out effects and constant visual changes. I’m very glad that we had decided to sit upstairs rather than in the stalls.
All the effects for me got in the way of the play and seemed unbelievably un-Doranlike. There was so much stuff going on – visual and aural – that one of Shakespeare’s most magnificent speeches, Ariel’s ‘You are three men of destiny’ speech was only partly intelligible. And spectacle dominated.
Not throughout, though. I really enjoyed Simon Russell Beale’s understated Prospero. There were almost none of Beale’s characteristic physical and vocal tricks. It was still and poised, although not to everyone’s taste. Our friends were distinctly underwhelmed by his performance and did not see much of a connection between him and Miranda. There was certainly a connection between Ferdinand (a very cute Daniel Easton) and Miranda (Jenny Rainsford). I enjoyed watching Mark Quartley’s Ariel, although some of his movements were clearly for digital rather than character reasons.
The most enjoyable acting came from the wonderfully entertaining Tony Jayawardena as Stephano (what a pleasure to see him back on the RSC stage), Simon Trinder as Trinculo and Joe Dixon as Caliban.
In the end I wasn’t sure what it all was. Not really a play. Not focussed sufficiently on motivation and character development to be a drama. Maybe a spectacle. Maybe an experiment. Maybe just spending money and showing off.
I think you should come and see it because it is apparently breaking new theatrical ground and is probably the first of what becomes a tradition where the different elements are better integrated and more purposefully used to serve the play itself.
The Rover, review by Peter Buckroyd.
The Rover
This is a fast-paced high energy production directed by Loveday Ingram which is great fun to watch
and to listen to. Action spills all over the stage and there is lots of singing and dancing as it is set at
carnival time. The music is Spanish in style and there is lots of it. The costumes are Spanish and
sumptuous.
Joseph Millson portrays the main character, Willmore, the only character to have relationships with
two women, with gusto in piratical swashbuckling style and there is plenty of energetic acting to
complement his physical agility.
The style overall is appropriately informal with some witty asides and clever jokes as well as
interaction with audience members which keeps those in the front row alert and on their guard.
The four couples are nicely differentiated enabling Aphra Behn to make a study of the relationships
with regard to sexual attraction, love, lust, honesty and deceit. Of course because she constructs
the play by comparing the behaviour of the couples time and time again, there are some moments
when one is tempted to count how many have had their moments and therefore how many there are to
go before the plot can move on. But this is a small price to pay for some very entertaining scenes.
Blunt’s duping by the prostitute Lucetta is one end of the failed relationship spectrum and they are not
really essential to the plot, but discombobulated Blunt is splendidly played by Leander Deeny in a
virtuoso performance which makes the character more than bearable. At the other end of the
relationship spectrum is Belvile, believable and very well played by Patrick Robinson who displayed
bsome chemistry with Frances McNamee’s Florinda, particularly in their very well played
reconciliation scene at the end.
Faye Castelow’s Helena is a joy to watch and to listen to. I had not realised before how closely she
and Willmore are based on Beatrice and Benedick. This interpretation makes her more credible than
most Helenas and her interaction with Willmore is great fun to watch.
Women in this play have the upper hand and Ingram brings out Behn’s proto-feminism well
throughout the play. Famous courtesan Angelica Bianca played by Alexandra Gilbreath several times
asserts her dominance from the beautifully designed wrought iron balcony but I was a little
disappointed that when she was at stage level she did so much shouting. We could get to understand
Helena, but I wasn’t able to understand Angelica; I thought she asserted all the time rather than
Demonstrating. In some ways she is the most interesting character in Aphra Behn’s play but she
isn’t in this production. Even her lovely crimson velvet dress smelt like caricature. Jamie Wilkes
made an attempt to give Don Antonio some character but he was not as effective here as in Two
Noble Kinsman, I thought.
Swashbuckling fun though it was, I still came away thinking about love, sex, trust, honesty and
Relationships which makes me think that this is a really good production.
Cymbeline, Royal Shakespeare Company. Review by Peter Buckroyd
Cymbeline
Royal Shakespeare Company
Cymbeline isn’t very often done. It’s easy to understand why. There are several plots: the Roman colonisation of England and the conflict between England and Rome, the love story between Cymbeline’s daughter (here called Innogen) and the more lowly born Posthumus, the theft of Cymbeline’s two other children when they were in infancy and what happens to them, the Machiavellian Italian Iachimo’s attempt to besmirch Innogen’s virtue and make Posthumus insanely jealous. These eventually come together after a number of unlikelihoods to create a problematic happy ending.
Set in the capital, Wales and Italy, the action moves between the three locations. Weird things happen throughout. When Posthumus arrives in Rome he finds Italians, a Spaniard, a Frenchman and a Dutchman. Innogen runs away to Wales and without difficulty finds her siblings, even though she’s not looking for them. Cloten gets his head cut off. Jupiter descends in a chariot.
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It’s long and unlikely so you have to do something with it. Director Melly Still certainly does lots with it. She draws parallels between Britain refusing but eventually agreeing to pay tribute to Rome with the Brexit debate. Should we or should we not pay tribute to the EU? In previous productions I have seen Posthumus as tall and strong and Cloten small and dumpy. Here Cloten is big and tall, Posthumus small, slim and a bit wimpy. Cymbeline is male and his wife the wicked witch. Here Cymbeline is female and her husband (the Duke) the wicked one. The two stolen boys are both male. Here Arviragus is male and Guideria female. Posthumus’s servant is male. Here Pisania is female. Shakespeare writes all his play in English but in this production when they are in Rome they speak Latin as well as Italian and there are smatterings of other languages, too. When Posthumus arrives in Rome he goes to a disco playing techno and ambient techno. The costumes are suggestive, related to character and situation rather than to a particular time period. As in Doctor Faustus the music is modern and brilliant, especially in the wonderful setting of ‘Hark, hark the lark’ and ‘Fear no more’. Jupiter is Posthumus. It is he who descends in a chariot, he who plays with paper cutouts of people in a series of set pieces about moral dilemmas. Posthumus dons Innogen’s dress in another dream sequence. The battles are completely non-realistic with a wonderful slo mo sequence. Asides are denoted by the dimming of lights and a spot. Early on there is an extraordinary moment of shag interruptus with Innogen wearing a kind of Miss Havisham tutu. The play is also often very funny, though never played for laughs.
I wouldn’t and probably couldn’t have thought of doing any of these things. That’s why I loved it. It made me think about Shakespeare’s play throughout. For me there was never a dull or idle moment.
It’s an inspired idea to make Cymbeline female; the theft of a mother’s children hangs over her throughout. The cliché of the wicked queen turns into a more powerful examination of the envy and rage which can kick in when it is one’s wife who has all the power. It is his unconscious which leads Posthumus eventually to self-realisation. Innogen can only find herself by running away from court and being in touch with wild but consoling nature. The play’s denouement heightens the growth of the play’s young people, but it also points to the difficulties which lie ahead as Arviragus and Guideria learn who they are, as Posthumus and Innogen have to learn to know each other again and Cymbeline has to face her situation of being a rather ineffectual capitulating queen and now a widow too.
When you have seen the same actors in two different productions over a short period of time it’s inevitable that you link them together in your head. Melly Still gains a good deal by casting James Cooney as Arviragus and Natalie Simpson as Guideria. They were brilliant I thought as Rosencrantz and Guildernstern. Here they are brilliant together again, the chemistry of the first roles feeding into these very different ones. But the performances are so different that I still find it almost impossible to grasp that they are the same actors. Their scenes with the wonderful Graham Turner as Belarius are powerfully moving. I loved watching Horan Abesekera again, too. Both as Horatio and Posthumus his vocal and physical skills are unflashy but consummate. In each part he interprets the character differently from what I expected and in each he is convincing. Gillian Bevan as Cymbeline brings out the character’s changeability and even manages to accrue some audience sympathy or at least empathy at the end – no mean feat. Marcus Griffiths avoids playing Cloten as a stereotypical stage villain and forces you to think about what he is up to. Similarly, Oliver Johnstone is a modern embodiment of evil in Iachimo, not a stereotype. The more you think about what he is up to the worse it is, but you can begin to understand him a bit. James Clyde’s Duke is nasty, but he has a certain charm. Spooky.
I loved Dave Price’s music. It creates a modern/ancient/timeless backdrop to the action. And Anna Fleischle’s design facilitates quick transitions from location to location while offering the audience some powerful images which complement the action. This is a world where growth is difficult. The people gathering herbs have to dig these tiny signs of life from small cracks and with considerable difficult. Thus pieces of added action create metaphors for the ideas underpinning the play, the concrete and literal becoming metaphorical and sometimes symbolic.
In the centre of the stage is a huge tree trunk. There was life once but the tree is limbless. It is also encased in a cubed frame. One of the delights of this conceptualised production was to consider what happened on the cube; when characters sat and stood on it; what was signified each time this happened; how that space becomes a mental space which many characters unknowingly share. It is a wonderful unifying idea.
This Cymbeline and the concurrently playing Hamlet are productions which I shall never forget. It was a privilege to see them. Don’t miss out. Come and see both of them if you can and enjoy a stay at Moss Cottage as you relish the RSC’s outstanding season.
The White Devil, review by Peter Buckroyd.
Maria Aberg’s last production for the RSC, the modern dress King John turned out to be critically controversial, but it persuaded me that King John was a better, more interesting play than I had previously thought. Her modern dress productiion of John Webster’s The White Devil leads me to think that this play is much less good than I had thought before. Part of the problem comes from the cutting, part from the modern dress and part from the decision to play Flamineo (called Flaminio in the programme and the RSC cast list) as female.
In King John the Bastard was played by a female. That decision created a range of extra layers. A female Flamineo (Flaminio?) created nothing. If Aberg directs Othello I don’t want to see it; presumably Iago will be female, with a lesbian wife.
The point of modern dress productions is to make clear that the play has something to say to us about now. I thought King John did. I couldn’t figure out what was being said about us now in this White Devil, though. At one moment I thought we were getting a glimpse of American interference in the Middle East but it turned out that that was me rather than the production. Some of modern dress was very odd. A minor character seemed to be wearing an outfit from a Kylie video. The Cardinal wore a scarlet jacket, white trousers, black shoes and a big cross until he became Pope at which point he was arrayed in a ridiculous meringue. There were large numbers of costume changes but without much significance, I thought, except to make some of the very cute male actors look cute in different clothes. I couldn’t always relate the decisions to the play.
Upstage was a balcony and under it a light box which was several locations – a night club (why?), bits of court, the House of the Convertites, the location for Bracchiano’s coffin among them. It provided another separate location 0n stage but loose dumbshows in it were sometimes distracting. Not as distracting as the ‘music’, though. There was the thud of a beat underneath much of the dialogue early on and dirge music distracting from the dialogue later in the play. It was a shame that the director didn’t seem to trust the words to have power on their own, because many of Webster’s words are very fine indeed, particularly the passages where vice and immorality are expounded ironically through lovely pastoral verse. The play is littered with such oxymorons, but the only ones I caught were in the contrasts between what Francisco says and how he says it.
I enjoyed some of the performances. Kirsty Bushell was strong as Vittoria Corombona, opening both parts in her underwear and donning her clothes on stage, providing the audience with an obvious but useful metaphor of moral as well as physical shape changing. The character has sufficient depth and authenticity for me to understand some of her character’s utterances and decisions. Faye Castelow was good as the good Isabella, although I wasn’t quite convinced that her rage was an act. Â Liz Crowther was refreshingly restrained and therefore all the more effective as Cornelia. David Sturzaker played Bracchiano well – here a superficial character with no moral fibre – but I would have liked him and Aberg to have done something to make us understand and maybe even empathise with some of the abrupt changes which Bracchiano exhibits. The most interesting characterisation was in Simon Scardifield’s Francisco whose change into villain was shown by his discarding his spectacles. I got very weary of Laura Elphinstone’s northern accented Flaminio [sic.]. I didn’t understand the character, I couldn’t hear everything she said and I found her swaying tiresome.
I guess the decision to make David Rintoul’s Cardinal Monticelso the loudest character on stage must have been a deliberate one. Rintoul has a lovely voice.
I should mention Giovanni, played very well by Oscar Webster the night I saw it. Giovanni is the only moral centre in the play. It was a shame that his suit was so baggy, though.
The RSC’s trailer for this production is full of blood and gore. There is mercifully very little in the production – indeed, less than I have seen before. There were things I didn’t understand about the blood, too, though. Why does a poisoned helmet produce so much blood for Bracchiano when he’s a ghost and why does a poisoned picture produce so much quasi-menstrual blood?
The White Devil is one of the most important Jacobean plays. If you haven’t seen it you should make sure that you do. If you have seen it, then one of the other plays in this otherwise splendid season might be a better bet. A night or two at Moss Cottage will enrich your stay even more.
