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Merry Wives of Windsor. Review by Peter Buckroyd

The Merry Wives of Windsor
RST

There are several quite different ways of going about mounting this play. One extreme is to highlight all the darker edges: the cruelty to Falstaff; the scheming malevolence of women; generational conflict; the subjugation of young people by parents; male power; satire of the rising Elizabethan middle class; subduing the old order. At the other is a light hearted romp, with farcical elements.
Director Fiona Laird chooses the latter in a very funny and delightful comedy. In order to gain some contemporary resonances she uses the Essex cliché, choosing the Old Lady of Brentwood (rather than Shakespeare’s Brentford) in order the make the audience think about The Only Way is Essex. It works beautifully, the mood and genre established right at the start by a messenger announcing that Queen Elizabeth wants a new play with Falstaff in it and wants it quickly.
There is a lot of light hearted music, some of it country and a long dumb show dance which introduces the characters. Falstaff’s arrival is heralded by cacophonous music Liz Brotherston’s costumes are wonderful, combining modern dress, tastlessness and Elizabethan ruffs. There is lovely detail such as Slender’s chavvy rings and Falstaff’s codpiece. There are some clever and witty jokes. The statement that there are ‘some simples in my closet’ is made hilariously literal because Simple is hiding in the closet. Dr Caius’s franglais is a joy throughout, with some Brexit allusions and jokes. Ford’s disguise as Brook is great with plastic nose and coat while he still wears the same posh M and S carpet slippers that he wears as Ford. I guess he knew that Falstaff never looks at anyone’s feet! The director also has fun with Nym, Pistol and Bardolph, the latter played by Charlotte Josephine who is also splendid as Mercutio in Romeo and Juliet. Nym (Josh Finan) is used as the boy who dresses up to masquerade as Anne at the end, giving rise to a lovely joke as Caius (Jonathan Cullan) realised ‘it’s a Nym’ (it’s an him’). Nima Taleghani has very little to do as Robin but executes an audience focussing role splendidly in several scenes where he has no lines as well as being very welcome eye candy. Nym and Pistol (Afolabi Alli) act as the servants who manipulate the laundry basket (here transmogrified into a wheelie bin) with delightful cod Slavic (Polish?). Fenton is short sighted and accident prone, falling over frequently when he isn’t wearing his glasses. Sir Hugh’s Welshness is highlighted by a Welsh choir. The Essex girls display themselves on sunbeds which Falstaff attempts to hide under. Mistress Page displays Carry On style Barbara Windsor (get the joke?) tits. There is an absurd remote control golf buggy. Slapstick and high farce and well handled for Falstaff’s escape.
David Troughton is close to perfection as Falstaff. I don’t think I’ve ever seen an actor play Falstaff before when I haven’t been drawn to the farcical nature of the fatty prosthetic padding. Not so here. I could have been deceived into thinking that Falstaff was grossly fat.
Laird just gets rid of the Herne’s Oak stuff and sets the final scene in the town square presided over by a statue of Queen Elizabeth with a Spanish carnival like atmosphere. I always find the Herne the Hunter stuff irritating as well as barely comprehensible, despite my work on provenance and footnotes and Laird obliterates the problem so easily.
It’s all great fun.
I only had one disappointment. Shakespeare’s text is striking in its use of prose except for Mistress Anne and Fenton. Their parts were cut and I could not hear any verse. I ended up caring only for what happened to Falstaff (in keeping with the way the play began and with what Laird was doing) but I missed the extra layer of aural stimulation and seriousness that Shakespeare creates.

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Romeo & Juliet. Review by Peter Buckroyd.

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.

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Rsc Twelfth Night, review by Peter Buckroyd

Royal Shakespeare Theatre
Twelfth Night

Maybe it’s because Shakespeare chose Illyria as the setting for his play – part of the western Balkans in the time of classical antiquity – a place with no particular resonances either for an Elizabethan/Jacobean audience or for us, particularly when Sebastian and Antonio are staying at a hostelry at the Elephant just down the road from Bankside in London – that directors and designers have chosen to set the plays anywhere they like. Most of those I have seen have been decorative. But the best productions choose somewhere which enriches the text rather than just decorates it. I’m thinking particularly of the RSC production about thirty years ago which set the play in Stratford and made the entertainer Feste’s home ‘hard by the church’ New Place, setting off a mass of possible biographical allusions in the play. But I haven’t seen many productions like that.
Director Christopher Luscombe and designer Simon Higlett have chosen the 1890s for their production, maybe fortuitously but particularly appropriately timed because of the current Oscar Wilde season at the Vaudeville theatre in London. The sometimes dodgy sexual and gender issues in the play are seen in a new light. Orsino (Nicholas Bishop) is not the usual Chattertonian melancholic but a dandy about town who really doesn’t care very much what gender his love object is. established right at the beginning with his kissing Valentine. Olivia (Kara Tointon) indulges herself in fashionable Victorian prolonged mourning but is quite open to the attraction of a bit of eye candy. All this is set against the twin stuff. Of course it was obvious that after Hamnet’s death Shakespeare was always reminded of Hamnet when he saw Judith; maybe that’s why he doesn’t appear to have liked her very much. In their normal clothes Viola (a spirited and rather splendid Cesario played by Dinita Gohil) and Sebastian (Esh Alladi) are dressed identically and we can begin to understand why people can’t tell which is which when we realise that the great English unwashed say that all Chinese people look the same or that the Chinese call white Westerners ‘big noses’ because they all look the same. Further use is made of the 1890s by the references to Queen Victoria’s patronage of Abdul Karim, mirrored by Olivia’s patronage of Feste (and, possibly Queen Elizabeth’s and later King James’s patronage of Shakespeare). There is an aesthetic exoticism about the households of both Olivia and Orsino which unifies the setting. The production is a rich presentation of ideas which a twenty-first century can engage with.
That is not to say that the setting solves all the problems in the play. Antonio’s misery and disillusionment at the end of the play picks up on the complex sexual dynamics in the play but (and maybe this is a costuming issue) doesn’t quite convince that he is a pirate or that he belongs in the 1890s. And I didn’t see how Sir Toby or Sir Andrew were from the 1890s either. I did get Malvolio, though. Adrian Edmondson gives him a rather sinister and unpleasant edge, familiar both in Shakespeare’s dealings in the theatre world of the 1590s and Oscar Wilde’s encounters three hundred years later.
It took a second viewing of the production for me to realise that this is very much a contemporary, twenty-first century interpretation of the play, showing that where sexual attraction, and even love, are concerned, gender is not a significant issue. So Orsino can give Cesario a passionate kiss while sending ‘him’ to woo Olivia. Olivia can fall for Cesario while ‘he’ is pretending to be Orsino’s emissary. Olivia can fall for and marry Sebastian as it doesn’t matter what gender he is and whether he is really male or just masquerading as male. Orsino loves Cesario anyway so it doesn’t make any difference at all when ‘he’ turns out to be female.
Of course there are casualties of all this. The older generation, with more conventional views of love and marriage – Sir Andrew’s (Michael Cochrane) that they can be bought, Sir Toby’s (John Hodgkinson) that they are a reward for misdeeds and favours done, Antonio’s (Giles Taylor) that a gay relationship is all that counts, Malvolio’s that he can overreach his status and class – all suffer because they have not been able to enter this new world, characterised on one hand by metrosexuality, on the second hand by the covert bisexuality of the 1890s and on the third hand (eh?) by the hidden and unspoken sexuality of Elizabethan and Jacobean England..
Maybe this is all too much about ideas. What about production values?
This is the first production I have seen where I have been able to believe that Viola and Sebastian could be mistaken for each other. They are dressed the same and to a considerable degree mirror each other’s postures and gestures.
Simon Higlett’s design is outstanding and beautiful to look at. The exotic and opulent cushions, furnishings and pre-Raphaelitish paintings in Orsino’s establishment give a clear indication of the aesthetic decadence of the 1890s while evoking in the interior of Leighton House. The painting being done by Orsino at the beginning is very similar to one of Linley Sambourne’s photographs, though here the model is the dishy Tom Byrne rather than Sambourne’s servant. Feste, described in the programme’s dramatis personae as Olivia’s munshi, wears Asian/Middle Eastern costume, linking him in terms of ethnicity and culture with Viola and Sebastian and therefore providing a kind of prolepsis of the Olivia/Viola/Cesario/Sebastion plot. A railway station entrance hall establishes the idea of a journey, sets period and gives a new and interesting geographical dimension to the distance between Orsino’s and Olivia’s courts. The Gilbert and Sullivan style patter song at the end frames the whole play in the 1890s. Olivia’s garden provides the setting for the best comedy in the play – Sir Andrew, Sir Toby and Fabria’s spying on Malvolio being statues behind a fountain – at the same time as providing ideas about Malvolio’s blind self-absorbtion and the gullers’ ridiculous posturing.
Luscombe’s use of short pauses and caesuras, particularly in his presentation of Viola, made me listen afresh, and his decisions about when characters would address the audience rather than each other drew attention to a range of details and phrases often skated by.
This production is shaped with changing tones which create the effect of an exquisite piece of music.This rich production is not only worth seeing. It is worth seeing more than once. Splendid.

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Coriolanus. Review by Peter Buckroyd

Coriolanus

This isn’t one of Shakespeare’s most frequently performed plays, and for several reasons. Coriolanus doesn’t have any soliloquies so the audience cannot hear what is going on in his head and why he changes his course and allegiance several times. Although he dies at the end the play is more of history play than a tragedy unless the actor can let the audience feel the sense of tragic waste at the end. Coriolanus is also dominated by his mother, Volumnia, and her ambitions for him.We need to understand why. His wife Virgilia has little to say or do and so it is hard to see anything of a relationship. Virgilia has few lines and some of them were cut. This robbed the scene in Act V of any significance because we had seen so little of the relationship between husband and wife earlier. The relationship between Coriolanus and Aufidius also has to be accounted for. All these are challenges of character and relationships which are not easy to solve. The director needs to work hard to fill in some of the gaps that Shakespeare left in the play.
Angus Jackson’s production establishes the play’s modernity at the beginning with a fork lift truck moving sacks of grain into a secure area so that it cannot be accessed by the people who rush on as an angry modern dress mob in hoodies as soon as it has been secured for the patricians. It is a shame that the truck plays no further part in the play, suggesting that it is just an expensive gimmick. Indeed the visual spectacles were all limited in their usefulness – the fork lift truck, the sacks of corn, the big bleachers, the Venus statue and the Rome statue merely to denote location.
Robert Innes Hopkins’s design is four square, symmetrical, uncomfortable and unyielding. Grey is the dominant colour. The whole thing is bleak and cold to look at. Given the rigidity of the set, I didn’t understand the untidy asymmetrical group pictures throughout.
I did think it was an interesting choice, however, to make Coriolanus so unappealing. Sope Dirisu’s utterances as Coriolanus are uniformly uninteresting, with repeated inflections and a very narrow vocal range. By the time the interval came, at the point of Coriolanus’s self-banishment from Rome, I agreed with the two tribunes that it would have been better if he had been thrown from the Tarpeian Rock there and then. Dirisu gave his character a little more range and variety in the second half but I could never warm to him.
Jackson had obviously decided that Aufidius was by far the more interesting character although it was, I thought, a shame that James Corrigan’s plentiful beard robbed him of some of the facial expressions that he has shown off to tremendous advantage in his previous roles. But this Aufidius was full of power and authority and the sword fights and wrestling match with Coriolanus were skilfully choreographed and exciting to watch. There was a moment, too, where Corrigan was allowed to show some depth and motivation, with his summary dismissal of his wife’s importance and the hints of his bisexual (?) attraction for Coriolanus. I was a bit disappointed that this did not seem to have been worked through the whole production.
Also exciting to watch was Haydn Gwynn’s wonderful Volumnia (although I didn’t understand the dowdy second half women’s costumes which looked as if they had come from a charity shop, unless it was an attempt to parallel their position at the end of the play with Coriolanus’s in his gown of humility). The scene between Coriolanus and Volumnia where she is advocating hypocritical pragmatism while he is affectless and almost autistic brought an unexpected warmth to her character, albeit at the expense of the hero.
The decision to make Sicinius Veletus (Jackie Morrison) and Junius Brutus (Martina Laird) female was interesting throughout, especially as it brought to mind Scottish and Welsh nationalism, opposing the conservatism of the patricians.
Other characters were worth watching. Charles Aitken was striking as Cominius and Paul Jesson had some convincing moments in the thankless and difficult role of Menenius.
I didn’t think that the modern dress worked very well. I could draw few contemporary parallels except of the most general kind. Coriolanus’s arrival to join up with Aufidius dressed as an American student in Europe backpacking for the summer was not an inspired choice. I didn’t think the music contributed anything worthwhile, either, particularly the singing and the blinding lights at the end.
This is a bleak production of a bleak play. In that it is suceessful. But it is the first of this season’s productions that I don’t want to see again.

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Dido, Queen of Carthage. Review by Peter Buckroyd.

Dido, Queen of Carthage

I read this play by Marlowe fifty years ago when I was an undergraduate. I thought it was unputonable. So I read it again before I went to the Swan to see Kimberley Sykes’s production. I still thought it was impossible.
It certainly isn’t a very obvious twenty-first century blockbuster, but it’s always good to see an old play by a great dramatist for the first time. I wasn’t disappointed. It helps to know a bit about the Trojan wars in order to be able to follow some of the references, but it’s easy to mug that up on the internet before you go.
This is the first Marlowe production at the RSC where I have heard Marlowe’s ‘mighty line’ and I suspect that the RSC’s voice coach Anna McSweeney did a great deal of work with the company to make the verse speaking so effective,
The story is very simple. Aeneas is shipwrecked in Carthage after the Trojan war. The gods manipulate Dido into falling in love with him. She rejects her would be lover Iarbus. Aeneas eventually leaves her. She kills herself.
There is a lot of talk in this play, even though many of the long poetic speeches are cut or curtailed. But it’s made very palatable by Ti Green’s wonderful design. There are some splendid effects and lovely use of the stage space. The banquet scene where Aeneas tells the story of the Trojan War has an authentic middle eastern meal on small benches while the other characters are the audience and the audience watches the audience watching Aeneas, played by Sandy Grierson. Lovely frames.
The set is a sandpit, creating the footprints of the gods at the beginning – a metaphor for the whole of the action – the dousing of fire and the connections of the characters with shifting ground, both physical and metaphorical. Wonderful effects are created by proscenium rainstorms, characters arriving through the water – sea, rain – proleptically preparing for the play’s conclusion.
Dido’s suitor Iarbus (Daniel York) was not at all what I epected from reading the play. He held the audience’s fascinaion throughout. I had also not expected my reaction to the gods. They even control the music (a wonderful eclectic score by Mike Fletcher). It is they who are responsible for the tragedy at the end and it is their conspiracy to make Dido fall in love with Aeneas which leads to our complex reactions to her death at the end. It isn’t just a thwarted love story; it all happens because of blind belief in the gods (God? Protestant? Catholic? Marlowe as atheist?)
There are other hints of Marlovian subtext, nicely but subtly brought out. There is the relationship between Jupiter the (splendid Nicholas Day) and Ganymede (the cute Andro Cowperthwaite) and between Juno and Hermes. It was good to see a hilarious Cupid played by Ben Goffe. Watch out for some fascinating details. There are some tattooed feet. There are presaging echoes of Doctor Faustus. I ended up thinking how powerful this play must have been when Dido was played by a teenage boy.
I wish the ending had been more subdued and subtler. I could have done without all the squirming as Dido dies, and the end was shouty and screamy. The last very few minutes apart I really enjoyed this rarely played piece. You should see it. Come and make your stay complete with a night at Moss Cottage.

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