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February 10, 2020 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Rsc review. The Whip.

The Whip

The RSC’s most recent play in the Swan Theatre is just as good and just as interesting as A Museum  in Baghdad which it has replaced.

Ostensibly about the passing of the Slavery Abolition Act in 1833 it goes far beyond the superficial and often somewhat PC and sentimental treatment of the topic, showing the political wrangling involved in the passing of the Act and some of the hidden history behind it. Playwright Juliet Gilkes Romero manages to intertwine two stories – that of the anti-slavery legislation and also the pressure to do something about child labour in factories which led to the Factory Act, also in 1833. All of this is played to the backdrop of the Reform Act which was passed the previous year and which brought to an end the purchasing of most parliamentary seats and increased those entitled to vote to about one fifth of the population. It was a time of considerable political turmoil. For me the play was even more interesting in that it was so timely, coming hot on the heels of the UK’s separation from the EU, and that it was so relevant to our political situation in 2020.

Democracy was said over and over again. Does that ring a bell? Can there be democracy when fewer than half the men and no women have the vote? Is there democracy when we have an antiquated first past the post system and when both Conservative and Labour MEPs said when we visited the EU in Brussels that because of our method of electing MPs Britain was the least democratic country in the EU?

But what came out loud and clear in the play – over slavery, slave ownership, factory ownership (and in the whole Brexit business) – was the masking of political self-interest by ostensible moral righteousness.

The play points to the iniquities following the Slavery Abolition Act of the ‘apprentice scheme’ whereby the lives of ‘emancipated’ slaves was even worse than under slavery, a scheme which had to be abolished in 1838. It does, of course, make one wonder what privations will occur after our emancipation from the EU legislation which is so widely chattered about.

So this is an important play, not only because it shows hidden and suppressed history but because of its relevance to our situation today.

Juliet Gilkes Romero tells her story well. She focusses on the relationships between Government Chief Whip, Alexander Boyd, who has adopted as ward a runaway slave Edmund who has made good, become a parliamentary assistant to Boyd but receives no salary even though he is over sixteen, on Horatia Poskett, an ex-cotton worker who has become Boyd’s housekeeper and on Mercy Price, a runaway slave and abolitionist.

Corey Montague-Sholay is outstanding as Edmund. So is Debbie Korley as Mercy Price, a remarkable performance which makes it hard to believe that it is the same actress who played the American soldier in A Museum in Baghdad. Richard Clothier held my attention and interest throughout in a performance which ranges from dignified, powerful, vulnerable, self-seeking and principled by turns.

There are some striking decisions made by director Kimberley Sykes. Which accent do you use when? Both Mercy Price and Horatio Poskett are made parallel in their manipulation by pronunciation variations and are therefore undercut at times as moral characters, making the play more complex and interesting.

I did get a bit irritated by Ciaran Bagnall’s highly stylised set but that’s just me. The whole thing is a square boxing ring surrounded by a slightly raised area where the actors spend much of their time. A rectangular table flies up and down, up and down, up and down throughout and lots of people stand on it to deliver speeches, mostly political. Akintayo Akinbode’s music score is excellent and really enhances the play. I particularly enjoyed the various takes on hymn tunes which are integrated with more contemporary and atmospheric sounds.

The play also has my favourite line of the year so far, that we are ‘leaping into the arse-end of oblivion’:  a line for all seasons.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: abolition, new play, parliament, rsc, slavery, Swan theatre, theatre, workers rights

April 2, 2019 by billbruce Leave a Comment

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

When you know it’s a great play and when you’ve already seen over twenty productions of it you can sometimes feel reluctant about seeing yet another production, particularly if you have memories, as I do, of wonderful things you have already seen.

Tread the Boards Company is doing its double act again this spring – two Shakespeare plays done by the same company, playing in repertoire. King Lear is the first, directed by John-Robert Partridge. Much Ado About Nothing is following next week.

It’s a wonderful coincidence that Kunene and the King, a play where a dying actor has the chance of his last role as King Lear, is playing at the Swan Theatre at the same time as King Lear is playing at the RSC. If you don’t know King Lear back to front you need to see it. If you don’t know Kunene you have to go to the RSC after you have been to The Attic.

Because John-Robert Partridge’s production is played with eleven actors there is a great deal of doubling. Right from the opening Robert Moore impresses with his presence as the King of France, impresses again as Edgar and then wows us with his very physical and often lightning speed Poor Tom. Matilda Bott is a beautiful Cordelia played with apparent simplicity and a vigorous Fool. I’ve been to lots of productions where it’s not easy to remember which daughter is Goneril and which Regan. Not so here. Kate Gee Finch’s lively sinuous Regan, all over her husband Cornwall when occasion allows, is contrasted by Alexandra Whitworth’s steely Goneril, stuck in a loveless marriage to the delightfully wimpy Albany . Joe Deverell-Smith differentiates his roles splendidly and is the best Doctor I have seen. Pete Meredith is chilling as the villainous Edmund.

The revelation is Philip Leach as Lear. The hardest thing an actor has to do is to look as if there is no acting. It takes tremendous skill and control and Leach does it perfectly. We never quite know why Lear does and says what he does. He’s always in the moment. It’s a most impressive performance.

Those who know the play well will enjoy some splendid touches – Regan putting on Lear’s crown once he has cast it aside, Albany’s rather insipid milky tenderness, the Fool and Kent (Philip Jennings) as attentive but unobtrusive onlookers in the storm scene, the stunning end to the first half where Partridge takes away the metaphor from Act V’s  ‘And my poor fool is hanged’, the way Georgia Kelly is used as Oswald and other servants as a thread which binds the whole play together, the Fool’s fear of lightning.

Rarely has the way Lear makes the transition between the stale court and its stuffy characters and the transformative power of nature shown by Poor Tom in the storm been so clear.

Partridge made me think again about different manifestations of madness and the ways in which image, metaphor, symbol and reality collide. I loved it.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Attic theatre, King Lear, shakespeare, theatre, William Shakespeare

May 17, 2017 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Vice Versa. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd

Vice Versa

This new play at the Swan is ‘A new Roman Comedy by Phil Porter inspired by the plays of Plautus’. I haven’t either read or seen any plays by Plautus and am therefore reliant on the RSC programme where I am told that they were borrowed from Greek comedy, ‘quite slight and short’, with stock characters, an author on the side of the underdog, puns, vaudevillian silliness, song, dance and lots of broad and bawdy jokes. Vice Versa has them all. Polonius says ‘Seneca cannot be too heavy nor Plautus too light.’ I’m not so sure. Vice Versa was too light for me. Also too long at just over two hours playing time.
The RSC programme has a discussion between assistant director Emma Butler, director Janice Honeyman and writer Phil Porter where much is made of adding some depth to the characters. If they have done this then I dread to think what it would have been like without the additions. I could find very little depth in anyone. It just seemed to be good fun, although rather lengthy and repetitive good fun (the repetition was part of Plautus’s style, we are told).
Constant addresses to the audience are designed to make the audience have a good time and to feel part of the vacuous world depicted. Granted there is a little very simple undeveloped satire – the play is anti-slavery, depicts women taking control, a little anti-war and anti-establishment – but most of it is based round a scheme by the slave/servants of General Braggadocio to take control and frame their freedom and the struggle that characters who are very dim have in being able to make any plan work.
Colin Richmond’s set is very pretty to look at. It’s a nice Italian street scene with two house facades and all the action takes place outside the house fronts. There is loads of stuff, much of which has a joke attached, the costumes are appropriately comedic: overblown, silly and unrealistically exaggerated. There’s a great deal of running about the auditorium. Sam Kenyon’s music is rousing and energetic.
Because it’s farcical it’s hard to say much about the acting. Carry On and Up Pompei provide many of the references, gestures and walks as well as allusions. Jon Trenchard’s monkey is fun to watch, Nicholas Day’s Philoproximus is a delight, with far more subtlety of comic gesture and timing than anyone else’s and Katherine Toy’s Melodius amused me whenever she appeared.
Felix Hayes’s General Braggodicio, having graduated from the School of Silly Walks and Postures, lived up to his name and Sophia Nomvette as the centre of the play was energetic.
I managed eventually to stop my mind trying to find an idea where there wasn’t one but I wish there had been something.
There’s a temptation to think that this is populist. It isn’t really. It’s entertainment for the theatre-aware middle classes who want to have an evening where they can laugh without thinking. Go see it if that’s what you like. You will enjoy it.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: rsc, rsc review, Stratford-upon-Avon, theatre, theatre review, Vice Versa

October 11, 2016 by billbruce Leave a Comment

Two Noble Kinsmen, review by Peter Buckroyd.

Two Noble Kinsmen

The RSC’s 1986 production of Two Noble Kinsmen made a big impression on me and I can still visualise much of it. It wasn’t just the brilliant playing of Hugh Quarshie and Gerard Murphy that impressed; it was also the oddity of the play itself with the interpolations of the story of the Jailer and his daughter and the tangential material about the Schoolmaster and countrymen.
Faced with this odd text with its many soliloquies, one after another towards the end, director Blanche McIntyre does something even more interesting, not all of which I grasped. The overriding theme of her production is that real love lies in same sex relationships which don’t necessarily have to be sexual. Even Hippolyta, about to be married to Theseus, acknowledges this and McIntyre follows the theme throughout.
Emilia’s insistence that she has no interest in marrying is followed through by the attentions of the character known in the 1977 New Penguin edition as ‘Woman, servant of Emilia’. This character is oddly omitted from the Cast list in the programme. She has very few lines but, splendidly played by Eloise Secker, is an almost constant presence. Emelia is clearly attracted to her and she to Emelia. The on the lips kiss between Theseus and Pirithous at the beginning in front of Theseus’s fiancée drew ooh and ahs from the audience but was crucial in establishing the production’s primary idea. The most important same sex relationship is between the cousins Palamon and Arcite, wonderfully played by James Corrigan and Jamie Wilkes. They are made for each other, mimick each other’s speech and gestures and are perfectly matched physically. It is an unmarriage made in heaven.
Beside these relationships the others pale. Hippolita is Theseus’s war trophy. Both Palamon and Arcite ‘fall in love’ with an image, Emilia, and remain faithful to their adolescent fantasy until the very end when, on Arcite’s death, they realise that it is only their love for each other which matters. The Jailer’s daughter also falls in love with an image, Palamon, ignoring her faithful wooer.
In political terms McIntyre makes clear that power lies with women: the three queens dominate Theseus into submitting to a war against Creon; Hippolyta with her strong Scottish voice dominates Theseus and the Jailer’s daughter ends up controlling several men through her madness.
So far, so good, much of it brilliantly good.
Then the Schoolmaster and the Countrymen. They aren’t, at least according to the programme. They are the gods, one of whom looks like Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz. It is a Schoolmistress of course (to fit in with the theme) but the relationship between the Morris dancers and the gods eluded me and still does. Surely the play says that we make our own foolish decisions, based on impulse and ridiculous notions of romantic ‘love’, not that we are controlled by the gods who kill us for their sport. I think this is very much a post-King Lear play. The jailer’s daughter replaces her red cardigan for a dirty white one when she goes mad but takes the curtain call with her red one back on. This to me suggested that she recovered from her madness and did end up marrying her wooer, rather than thinking that the Jailer’s account of her marriage was simply to prevent Palamon from seeing her at the end.
The end of the play, after all the soliloquies, the combat and Arcite’s death (the only moment in the production which descended to actorly deathbed spluttering) is powerful and affecting. The characters are all on stage. Having learned that he is to marry Emilia, Palamon merely walks off upstage and exits. Pause. Then Emilia leaves. Pause. Then her Woman leaves. Then Theseus tamely utters his concluding platitudes. Theme continued right to the end.
I had another thought, too, but I won’t labour it. Was there some Brexit material lurking round the edges? Was the Jailer’s daughter’s red, white and blue costume telling us something? Was Hippolyta’s Scottish accent a reminder that the conquered are now in the ascendancy? Was there a tiny hint of the return of grammar schools?
There is so much more to say about this splendid production. You had better come and see it for yourself. If you treat yourself to a night at Moss Cottage you can have homemade jams and marmalade on homemade bread to follow your full English breakfast or smoked salmon and scrambled egg.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |, Stratford-upon-Avon, Swan theatre, theatre, theatre review, Theatre Stratford upon Avon, Two Noble Kinsmen, William Shakespeare

May 17, 2016 by billbruce 2 Comments

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.

Filed Under: RSC Reviews Tagged With: Cymbeline, reviews, rsc | Theatre review | White Devil |, RSC | Theatre reviews | RSC reviews | Theatre |, shakespeare, Stratford-upon-Avon, theatre, William Shakespeare

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Reviews from the RSC

Rsc review. The Whip.

King John. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

A museum in Baghdad. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

The boy in the dress. Review by Dr Peter Buckroyd.

King Lear, The Attic Theatre, Review by Peter Buckroyd.

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