Hamlet at Elsinore

There's so much early modern drama going on in the next few months that I'm having to be pretty ruthless with myself about what I'm allowing myself to go to. I'll be focussing on personal favourites, locals and rare plays: so, plenty of room for the National's Women Beware Women, the RSC's Lear, the Globe's Henry VIII and the Tiny Ninja Romeo and Juliet. I'm less sure at the moment which plays will be the casualties, though it's particularly unlikely that I'll make it to Bristol for either of the Tobacco Factory's shows, or the Bristol Old Vic's take on Romeo. Even big productions like the Peter Hall Dream may have to take a back seat, unless I start renting in London as well as Kenilworth.

The biggest omission, however, is undoubtedly Hamlet at Elsinore, a performance-cum-conference at Elsinore Castle in Denmark. With players from Cambridge University performing the play on the battlements and in the castle's core rooms during the nights, it sounds like it'll be a spectacular and memorable event. It's currently only open for priority booking by members of the British Shakespeare Association, but I'll try to post a link up here once public public has opened. I'll be fascinated to hear thoughts from anyone who makes it!

Peter Kirwan : 01 Feb 2010 09:34 |  Tags: Thoughts |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

A Yorkshire Tragedy (Tough Theatre) @ The White Bear Theatre

Writing about web page http://www.whitebeartheatre.co.uk/productions/

As regular readers will know, I'm currently writing a PhD thesis on the Shakespeare Apocrypha, and it's therefore extremely exciting to be starting the year with a very rare performance of one of the apocryphal plays, A Yorkshire Tragedy.

The venue was the White Bear Theatre pub in London, a tiny black box space at the back of a pub with space for about thirty-forty audience members. A wood-chipping floor marked the stage, while a wooden framework filled the back wall, from which hung various location placards and pieces of costume. Eight crates were rearranged throughout to suggest furniture and doorways, while the cast themselves wore white shirts and breeches, augmented in cases by small costume signifiers (a cap for the Son, gown for the Master, waistcoat for the Husband etc.). Sparse and representative, at first sight the production suggested an economy of design entirely appropriate for such a stripped-back play.

An introduction by one of the cast to the play touched on some 'facts' about the piece, which I've discussed at greater length over on my apocrypha blog. More relevantly, the cast member then proceeded to explain the design: that the boxes would be used to signify furniture, that a 24 year old man would be playing a 4 year old boy, that placards hanging on a particular piece of wall would signify the scene's location. Quite why we needed to have such basic staging conventions explained to us is beyond me: I'm unsure as to whether the company thought they were dealing with a particularly theatrically-illiterate audience, or whether they were attempting to achieve a particular metatheatrical effect, but it came across as reductive and - hopefully unintentionally - extremely patronising.

The economical design proved to be little but, as each scene was divided by an extended scene change, performed in half-light with intrusive incidental music as the cast broke out of character and moved boxes, placards and costume pieces into a new configuration. There was nothing intrinsically wrong with this, but the fact that scenes in Yorkshire Tragedy are so short meant that there were occasions when the scene changes took longer than the scenes they preceded, particularly in the burst of action following the Husband's first murder. This also acted to badly interrupt the pace and flow of action which really demanded to be played continuously. What the sets did achieve, however, was a sense of the domestic: the rustic wood, organised into small, compartmentalised playing spaces with fixed entrances and exits, acted to make the area claustrophobic and inescapable.

In the tiny auditorium, the presence of an audience could not be avoided. The Husband and Wife's soliloquies were directed directly to us, particularly in the case of Charlotte Powell's Wife, whose defence of and complaints against her husband became familiar and pleading. In taking the place of the Wife's confidante, the audience were invited to judge her from an invested point of view: we sympathised, but there was also a dangerous blindness in her actions that only we - as the outsiders - could see. One of the play's most shocking moments came, not in the murders, but in the Wife's response to the Master's "You have a boy at nurse; your joy's in him" with "Dearer than all is my poor husbands' life", delivered with an unnerving lack of interest in her children, living or dead.

This lack of interest, coupled with the production's refusal to present the bodies of the children in the final scene, focussed attention on the leading couple and their journey through disaster, repentance and forgiveness, from which the children were barred. In doing so, this became a story about love rather than family, with the children essentially objectified products of that love. The officers escorting the Husband to trial showed active disgust at the Wife's forgiveness of the Husband, tutting and exchanging confused looks as she knelt down beside him and shared a long, lingering farewell kiss from which the two were eventually forcibly torn apart.

The play's slow pace was complimented by Lachlan Nieboer's Husband. The division into scenes prevented him building up a continuous head of murderous steam: the production's insistence on giving each scene a definitive 'close' meant that he began each scene at a low pitch before building up his anger. While I felt that this rather spoiled the play's pace, Nieboer used it to imagine the Husband as a far more reflective and considered figure than would otherwise be possible. His muttered trains of thought, spoken to himself, gave the impression of constant internal dispute and fractured logic, with the decision to kill his children coming as a result of that cold logic instead of from frenzy. This was particularly effective in Scene V, where the murders came with an element of planning: the Maid was held for a time before he snapped her neck and dropped her to the floor, and after stabbing his Wife and taking his second child, he sat with the baby (a doll) for a long time, dandling it and comforting it before resolving himself and slowly, almost gently, pressing the knife into it. The coolness of his actions was terrifying, and what was lost in the move away from frenetic madness was compensated for in this more chilling, more believable evil.

The opening scene, played with Yorkshire accents (reserved in this play only for servants in what appeared to be a standard decision to find comedy in the lower-class characters - though in this play, doomed to failure) was set in a pub and didn't really add anything to the play other than starting on a relatively lively note. Oliver broke the banter with worries for his young mistress's health, but it seems that the scene needs much more intervention than a straight reading to be effectively integrated with the rest of the play. More effective was the opening of Scene III, where Daniel Blacker's Servant bantered with the Wife in a good-humoured discussion of the Wife's concealment of her Husband's prodigality. With both characters' hopes uplifted, and the Wife's overwhelming optimism brought to the fore, the moment at which the Husband brutally slapped her hard across the face had real impact, destroying in a second the faint hopes of averting disaster.

The progression of Gentlemen into the Husband's house felt awkward, with the three men marching into the room and their leader immediately confronting the Husband (as opposed to the text's implication of a more casual overhearing in a public place, thus prompting a spontaneous intervention rather than a planned one). Nonetheless, this was staged effectively, the Husband squaring up to their leader and addressing him with a despising tone, while being emphatically friendly to his two companions. The following encounter with Phineas Pett'sfourth Gentleman worked extremely well: here, the determined and deliberate invasion of the Husband's space felt justified by the dialogue, which saw a friend of the Husband attempting to talk some plain sense into him. The two sat together, until the Husband picked up on the Gentleman's comment on the Wife's virtues and advanced on him. As the Gentlemen leapt up to defend his honour, the two embarked on a surprisingly violent and well choreographed stage fight, which ended with the Husband flat on his back, laughing in despite even as he was physically bested. This contrasted with his encounter with the quietly-spoken Master (Stephen Barden), who brought a quiet authority to the character as he stood over the subdued Husband. In many ways, the production identified this conversation as the moment at which the Husband decided to pursue his course of action: humiliated by the Master's words, his suicidal determination to murder rather than shame his family began here, prompted by the appearance of his son who crouched behind him as he sat, teasing his father and ultimately occasioning his wrath.

Despite the repeated references to devil-possession, the production played the Husband's strength and actions as entirely natural, even to the point of one officer scoffing at the Husband's late declaration that "Now glides the devil from me." The Servant was bested easily by the more physically imposing Husband, not by demonic intervention, and he was quickly restrained after being thrown from his horse by the officers who emerged from the back wall (where all off-stage actors stood, watching the action as if a continually-present jury) to apprehend him. When presented to the seated officials for his initial trial, the Husband was thrown to the floor and made to justify himself from that position. The shock displayed by the officials was carried over into their disgust with their prisoner as they escorted him to his final judgment.

In the play's final moments, a sense of undeserved forgiveness reigned as the Husband and Wife held each other close, looking offstage towards the unseen bodies of their sons. The key line became "If the law could forgive as soon as I", delivered with a tenderness treated by the onlookers as entirely inappropriate. In a final twist, however, the words were made immediately resonant: as the Husband was dragged back on stage to kneel before the audience, news reports of the recent Christopher Foster scandal were played over  the sound system, the two stories sharing a disquieting level of commonality. While relevant and important for emphasising the topicality of the play, it felt a little superficial to simply bring this in at the end of the play, the link rendered gratuitous by the lack of exploration. It could even be considered to be quite tasteless: in the Foster case, there was no forgiveness, just murder, suicide and death. The company's emphasis on the Wife's forgiveness, though, left the purpose of the connection hanging: are we to assume that the deceased Mrs. Foster should also have forgiven her husband, or would if she had survived? Or are we meant to condemn the Wife's easy forgiveness? These are important questions which deserved a fuller exploration than merely being tacked on at the end, where their perfunctory inclusion instead rendered the parallels far more reductive than this sensitive and nuanced story required.

Director Andy Brunskill's production, then, was a timely resurrection of the play that suffered from too-literal adherence to its text and an interrupted structure that damaged the pace, but that boasted fine performances and a powerful grasp of the sentimental in its dissection of the 'real' relationships destroyed by desperate action.

Peter Kirwan : 11 Jan 2010 12:36 |  Tags: Productions Review Yorkshire |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Trackbacks (1) |  Report a problem

Review of the Year

Rather than do a 'Top Ten' this year, I thought I'd be less reductive and do a month-by-month breakdown of my year's early modern theatre-going. It's been an interesting year, with some real ups and downs and productions which I still feel conflicted about. Still, here goes!

January

Propeller's The Merchant of Venice at Liverpool Playhouse started the year on a fantastic note. Elaborate re-settings can be either curse or blessing on a production, but here the relocation to an all-male prison which turned the play into a story of masculine power struggles, illicit bribes and sexual cruelty worked wonderfully well.

February

Production of the month was the Tobacco Factory's Julius Caesar, which used its intimate space to turn the play into one of subterfuge, shadow-games and boardroom politics. The Donmar's Twelfth Night was a classic production in the worst sense: entirely obvious and with no real creative spark or interest for me, despite solid performances. Less dull was the Baxter Theatre/RSC The Tempest, a lively and colourful piece of theatre though still surprisingly conventional. More interesting were Propeller's A Midsummer Night's Dream, an utterly magical evening, and the RSC's touring Othello. With the focus too solidly on one (okay) central performance, the production remained unbalanced but with occasional flashes of imaginative brilliance.

March

My personal highlight in March was the chance to see the boys of King Edward VI School in Stratford perform two rarely-played pieces: Lyly's Endymion and Middleton's A Mad World, My Masters, both entertaining, hugely enlightening and a real pleasure. It was a good month for non-Shakespeare, with Marlowe's Dido, Queen of Carthage getting a long-overdue airing at the National. Solid, if a little dull, but strong central performances justified the production. WUDS took Much Ado about Nothingto the Belgrade, while the first As You Like It I've ever enjoyed allowed me to see Leicester's new Curve. With an immigration agenda, Dash Arts found beauty and intelligence in the play that created a thoroughly fascinating production. Finally, the Royal Exchange's no-holds-barred Macbeth forced its audience to confront a barrage of brutal imagery, to great effect.

April

Back to the Tobacco Factory for Antony and Cleopatra, a fine and well-performed reading of the play. When considered in conjunction with February's Julius Caesar, though, the two productions became parts one and two of a larger-scale piece that dramatically altered the focus of the story around Octavius and Antony. Northern Broadsides toured a high-profile Othello which was, in places, extremely good, and the CAPITAL Centre indulged in a bit of grave-robbing by resurrecting an early 20th century version of Hamlet.

May

Television brought us Compulsion, a reworking of The Changeling which was an interesting watch, and it was a good month for student theatre with an academic re-imagining of themes surrounding The Tempest and an enthralling 'Tis Pity She's a Whore at Warwick Arts Centre. The RSC's new season kicked off with a good Winter's Tale, design-heavy and with several strong performances,and a less good As You Like It which I found smug, artificial and not particularly funny, despite a stunning Oliver Martext. Both featuring the new long-term ensemble, giving some sense of what to expect over the next three years. Shakespeare's Globe started their year with a surprisingly decent Romeo and Juliet: I didn't like the Juliet, but a strong Mercutio and some good fight scenes left me entertained.

June

WUDS continued an early-modern-heavy year with A Midsummer Night's Dream, a heavily-directed and physical piece, full of energy. The best production of the year was at the National, with All's Well that Ends Well re-imagined as a fairy tale. With stellar performances, intelligence chopping and, among other things, a Parolles that allowed the character sympathy as well as mockery, this was one I would have happily revisited several times. Shakespeare's Globe produced the best As You Like It I've ever seen: genuinely funny, moving and engaging. The Bridge Project's The Winter's Tale completed my London excursions with a play of two halves: a wonderful Leontes and compelling Sicily scenes matched by a pretty silly and not very lively second half, though still a great production overall. In Stratford, Julius Caesar didn't turn out as well, with an over-fussy design and too many ideas- though several of those were great.

July

Hamlet in the West End was the celebrity performance of the year, with Jude Law excelling in the title role, though weakly supported by a production that just didn't push itself, and featured the horrendous sight of understudies trooping on stage and standing in lines when court scenes needed extras. The RSC's Comedy of Errors, meanwhile, was their best of the year: I've never seen a cast appear to have such a good time, and I hope the kids on the school tour loved it.

August

Just one, in a quiet summer. Troilus and Cressida at Shakespeare's Globe was an overall triumph, with a couple of reservations. A strong ensemble company brought the play to life, and Laura Pyper's Cressida was, to my mind, one of the most important performances of the year.

September

was my month off!

October

I'm not quite sure how I managed to have such a quiet Autumn, but a chance to see All's Well that Ends Well on screen via the National's NT Live Project was welcome. It's still nowhere near as good as seeing it in the flesh, but this screening persuaded me that there is some merit to seeing the play up-close: subtleties, particularly in the character of Parolles, came across very well.

November

A children's version of The Tempest, designed with the hard-of-hearing in mind, made sign language a beautiful part of a physical performance. It's a difficult one to judge, but I found it entertaining enough. At the complete opposite end of the spectrum was Toneelgroep Amsterdam's marathon Roman Tragedies, grouping together Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra into a six-hour promenade performance in Dutch. A near-indescribable event, with invigorating performances, incisive commentary on the mediation of news and history, and a set-up that allowed me to eat, drink and check my e-mails while watching theatre, which is an approach I would heartily encourage as many theatres as possible to embrace. The RSC's Twelfth Night featured a ludicrously obscure setting (Byronic Albania?!) but was a hugely enjoyable night out, with good comic performances. It was slight, though, compared to the improved Days of Significance which toured the country. Still with plenty of intelligent things to say about both Much Ado about Nothing AND UK foreign policy, it remained as powerful a piece of theatre as when I first saw it two years ago.

December

Aside from Warwick's Shakespeare Society giving a low-key All's Well that Ends Well, there was only one production this month, but a good 'un. Two Gents Productions gave a township-influenced The Two Gentlemen of Verona; or, Vakomana Vaviri ve Zimbabwe which remade the play in its own image. Very, very funny, but ending on a dark note of pain and humiliation that resounded far more powerfully than any other image I've seen in the theatre this year. It's a great way to end 2009, and I can only hope that the coming months bring more moments like it.

Peter Kirwan : 20 Dec 2009 19:13 |  Tags: Thoughts |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Two Gentlemen of Verona; or, Vakomana Vaviri ve Zimbabwe (Two Gents Productions) @ North Wall Oxford

Writing about web page http://www.twogentsproductions.com/wordpress/

Two Gents Productions are a three-man company made up of performers Denton Chikura and Tonderai Munyevu, and director Arne Pohlmeier. As their name suggests, the company was founded as a result of the trio's work on their devised production of Two Gentlemen of Verona, retitled Vakomana Vaviri ve Zimbabwe. While the company have since begun producing other work, 2009 saw their profile enormously raised with an extensive UK and international tour of their debut production, which played to full and enthusiastic houses around the world.

In "township" style, this two-man show was disarmingly informal. Forgotten lines or scenes that the actors claimed to be bored with were jettisoned, the action was frequently paused in order to check that the audience were keeping up (with an implied rebuke to the mother behind me who kept up a running commentary throughout for her two children), and at one point Chikura asked the lighting technician to fetch him a Coke.

This informality of approach was apparent from the start, as the actors strolled out on stage as themselves bearing a large trunk, welcomed the audience and introduced the play. In the intimate but still formally arranged surroundings of the North Wall, the audience at first struggled to interpret how to respond: an opening round of applause was greeted with a bemused bow by the performers, and the audience laughed politely at the jokes while shying away from the moments of suggest interaction. It was testament to the skill of the performers at handling their medium that the barriers between performers and audience were quickly broken down, however, to the extent that the actors occasionally had to good-humouredly tell audience members not to improvise their own lines.

A Prologue riffing on Romeo and Juliet established that "In fair Zimbabwe we lay our scene", although the production may more properly have been said to be set everywhere and nowhere. From a trunk, the performers pulled out a range of props and pieces of costume which were hung on a washing line at the back of the stage. While African culture, such as the use of a sanza for musical accompaniment, was visible throughout, any sense of a "real" location was suggestive only; the transparency of the storytelling techniques employed ensured that the co-existing realities of performers and characters were in continual dialogue with one another. We were to invest in Chikura and Munyevu, rather than Valentine or Proteus.

The production depended on a variety of items and objects to enable the multiple transformations of place and character which the two actors underwent. Thus, the underside of the trunk was slammed in order to formally end scenes, and single items of costume represented characters: braces for Valentine, an upturned collar for Proteus, a ripped arm-length glove for Silvia, a sarong for Julia, and so on. These items were donned with some ceremony, with Julia's self-indulgent sigh of pleasure in her appearance as the sarong was donned becoming something of a running joke. The ability of the actors to transform themselves was incredibly effective in its simplicity: as Munyevu became Sylvia, his voice rose a register and became softer; a benevolent smile flickered upon his face; and his focus softened, giving the character a dreamy aura. As Proteus, his shoulders hunched, his stance and voice hardened and his eyes looked piercingly at Valentine. While we were always aware first and foremost of the actors as themselves, the subtleties of expression and gait allowed the characters to be effectively differentiated, the audience following the shifts even when characters passed from one actor to another: thus, as Munyevu removed Silvia's glove and passed it to Chikura, so too were Sylvia's distinctive mannerisms and tics adapted by Chikura, the audience following the character along with the physical indicator of their presence. This was used to great comic effect in Julia's disguise as Sebastian, with multiple items of costume layered on each other; and even more complicatedly as Speed explained Silvia's letter-writing conceit to a befuddled Valentine. Realising that neither Valentine nor the audience had any idea what he was talking about, Speed "stopped" the play, and proceeded to re-perform Valentine and Silvia himself, while reminding the audience "I'm still Speed, by the way", explaining the action through a series of performances concealed within his own performance.

The objects that represented characters came to bear remarkable resonance in their own right. At times when more than two characters were required, the actors would often give props to members of the audience, casting them in that role and then directing the action towards them, most entertainingly at one point when the swaggering Turio's jacket was gifted to one gentlemen who was then subjected to an energetic tirade from Valentine. The objects gradually began to take on a life that existed independently of their animation; thus, in one fight scene, the fight was conducted as a comic beating up of a piece of clothing, while the other actor responded remotely to the pain at the other side of the stage. More interestingly, in the final act, Silvia and Juila were often no more than their empty objects, lying on stage as Valentine and Proteus fought over them. The objectification of the women in their discourse was thus literally figured on the stage, the women becoming wordless prizes unable to defend or speak for themselves.

The comedy of the production often came from unexpected places. Lance and Crab, here even more irrelevant to the main plot than usual, were relatively static, Chikura's Lance simply holding a leash and collar attached to Munyevu, who stood with arms folded and tongue panting. Lance responded to being shown up by tightening the leash gradually until Crab's eyes bulged. In their subsequent scene, Crab sat moodily at the edge of the stage, staring fixedly into the distance with chin on fist. Lance's speeches were themselves spoken straight, though with audience members asked to provide the shoes representing his parents. The comedy here came more from the subversion of expectations of farce, with the moody Crab surprisingly captivating in his human sulk. Elsewhere, the comedy was more obvious; Julia and Lucetta's scene took place in an imagined bathroom, with both actors miming the concealment of Julia's modesty, and Lucetta herself was made up of comically exaggerated mannerisms and affectations that spoke of the servant's irreverent attitude towards her mistress.

In a nice touch, Julia's overhearing of Proteus's wooing of Silvia was recast as a visit to a witch doctor, who "conjured" an image of Proteus. The two actors then leaped onto a platform to perform as Turio and Proteus, before jumping back to ground level to speak as Julia and the witch doctor. Chikura's comic songs as both Valentine and Turio, consisting usually of the words "Silvia, Silvia, Silvia" sung repeatedly or of pastiches of more recent songs (notably Valentine's lamenting rendition of "Lonely, I am so lonely"), were highlights, and countered nicely by the tuneful melodies of Proteus. Most of the comedy came from the actors as themselves, whether Chikura forgetting his lines as the Duke on the news of Valentine's love for Silvia and instead improvising deliberately mundane dialogue ("Oh no. I am shocked"), or the apology for use of the word "codpiece" in front of the young children in the third row and Chikura's explanation that "It's a fish". Most impressive was a bravura piece of physical comedy in the depiction of the banditti, in which three members of the audience were dragged on stage and treated as human puppets, the actors waving their victims' arms around in increasingly expressive movements to match their ventriloquised dialogue, while the puppets themselves creased up with laughter.

All this comedy served to underscore a rather more serious undertone. Proteus and Valentine were barely friendly even in their opening scene, displaying clear resentment of each other's choices; already, these were friends who had grown apart. Valentine's welcome of Proteus to court was cold and stand-offish, while Proteus's arrogant demeanour suggested open animosity. As Proteus worked his plans against Valentine, he took increasing glee in their success. In the forest, however, all pretences were dropped. His attempted rape of Silvia was exactly that. Munyevu threw Chikura's Silvia to the ground and advanced threatening on her as she cowered, slowly but deliberately forcing her legs apart and lowering himself. At this point, and with no laughter, Chikura removed the glove, left it at Munyevu's feet and made his way to the other side of the stage to 'appear' as Valentine, interrupting the rape. Valentine's anger at Proteus was manifest, and their reaffirmation of friendship was anything but; the offer of Silvia was made with deep sarcasm and loathing, a furious and scathing damnation of Proteus's actions; and Proteus's acceptance of Julia shortly thereafter was a shamefaced step-down on Proteus's part, the only way out of the predicament into which he had put himself.

Throughout this, the women lay on the floor as objects; yet after the Duke's closing words, the play had its final trick to play. The actors resumed the sarong and glove of Julia and Silvia, and the latter was discovered, weeping and bruised on the floor. Julia moved to her, took her head in her lap and began comforting her, the lights (which had been set to a single state throughout) fading on their embrace of solidarity. The sobriety and theatricality of this final moment, in contrast to the transparency and good humour elsewhere in the production, ended the play on a deadening note of condemnation of both Valentine and Proteus, human kindness forgotten in their selfish and myopic actions. It was perhaps not the comic conclusion we might have expected, but one which fitted the community-rooted motivations behind this production. Laughter gave way to a severe reading of the play that was all the more effective for the irreverence and mockery of what had come before. An entertaining and expertly-performed production, that achieved more with a shoe-string budget than most established companies.

This review originally appeared at Shakespeare Revue.

Peter Kirwan : 13 Dec 2009 18:43 |  Tags: Productions Review Twogents |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Shakespeare and Co. in 2010

Here's the so-far full list of Shakespeare and other Early Modernists I'm aware of for 2010. Almost certainly there are omissions, and if anyone has any tips of anything else relevant coming up in the new year, I'll be happy to add it to the list (Duncan, I'm looking at you, but anyone else as well!).

Antony and Cleopatra (RSC)

Antony and Cleopatra (Nuffield, Southampton)

Arden of Faversham (Theatr Clwyd)

As You Like It (Bridge Project)

Comedy of Errors (Royal Exchange)

Comedy of Errors (Globe Touring)

Hamlet (National)

Hamlet (RSC Youth Ensemble)

Hamlet (Sheffield Crucible)

1 Henry IV (Globe)

2 Henry IV (Globe)

Henry VIII (Globe)

King John (Platform 4, tbc)

King Lear (RSC)

Macbeth (Globe)

Macbeth (Cheek by Jowl)

Measure for Measure (Almeida)

The Merchant of Venice (Theatre Royal, Bury St. Edmunds)

The Merry Wives of Windsor (Globe)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Tobacco Factory)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Rose)

A Midsummer Night's Dream (Globe Touring)

Romeo and Juliet (Mercury Colchester)

Romeo and Juliet (RSC)

Juliet and Her Romeo (Bristol Old Vic)

Romeo and Juliet (Tiny Ninja)

The Tempest (Curve)

The Tempest (Tobacco Factory)

The Tempest (Bridge Project)

Twelfth Night (Filter)

Twelfth Night (National)

Women Beware Women (National)

A Yorkshire Tragedy (Tough Theatre)

Peter Kirwan : 05 Dec 2009 16:24 |  Comments (13) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Another Comedy

Nice to see Errors so popular at the moment! The Royal Exchange's Macbeth was one of the more interesting Shakespeares I saw this year, so I'll definitely be back for their new Comedy of Errors. And the fact it's directed by a new RSC Associate Director is worth noting, it'll be interesting to see how this relates to her forthcoming work for the larger company.

Peter Kirwan : 27 Nov 2009 18:35 |  Tags: News |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Roman Tragedies (Toneelgroep Amsterdam) @ The Barbican

Writing about web page http://www.barbican.org.uk/theatre/event-detail.asp?ID=9488

A six hour version of Shakespeare's Coriolanus, Julius Caesar and Antony and Cleopatra stitched together. With no interval. In promenade. In Dutch with surtitles. It's been a while since I've subjected myself to a Shakespearean endurance test (The Histories), and this was the kind of hardcore event which doesn't come around very often. Happily, Toneelgroep Amsterdam's first visit to the UK in ten years was one to be enjoyed rather than endured, an intelligent and exciting reworking of these three plays that forced one to confront our changing attitudes to the stories that matter.

It's a rather difficult event to review, as everyone who went would have had an entirely different experience. For the majority of the afternoon/evening, audience members were invited to wander freely around the auditorium and onto the stage, watching the action from any number of vantage points. Thus, while it was possible to watch the production 'normally' from the auditorium, most of us spent long periods promenading among the actors.

The stage and set-up require some explanation. These were the corridors of power, like the back rooms at the UN. Comfortable sofas, pot plants and coffee tables were complemented by coffee bars, a running buffet, an internet cafe and newspaper stands, among which both cast and audience spent their evenings. We were actively encouraged to check our e-mail, to grab a paper, to sit down with a meal or a glass of wine; there were no breaks among which we might do so communally, and events were continuous apart from short breaks for scene changes. We were not expected to 'watch' everything that happened; rather, we were encouraged to take control over our own experience, to choose what we wanted to watch.

Almost all of the action was filmed by a variety of fixed and mobile cameras, the political events being edited live for TV. Some reports were delivered by 'anchors' from a newsdesk at the back of the stage, others were staged for television such as a live debate between Coriolanus, Menenius and the Tribunes, or Brutus and Antony's orations, while other action was caught on handhold cameras with the characters apparently unaware. This filmed footage was screened both above the stage for those in the auditorium (essential on a deep stage with many compartmentalised seating areas, where the action wasn't always visible), and onto a number of televisions grouped around the stage. It was thus possible to select a sofa and essentially sit watching television for the evening, enjoying politics as mediated by the television cameras.

The result of all this was to recast the events of ancient Rome as modern day news events, with the audience placing a similar kind of value on them. While many of the audience deliberately ensured they made their way back to the auditorium for the 'live' experience of Brutus and Antony's addresses to the people, for example, I caught the whole thing on television. In the corner of my eye, meanwhile, another screen showed clips of Barack Obama giving speeches, instantly recasting what I was watching as a worldwide broadcast, an intensely intimate, yet live, television event that communicated personally what was experienced massively by the audience in the auditorium.

The cameras were used to great effect throughout, highlighting tiny details that could not have been communicated without them: the intense eyes of Coriolanus as he hid his face from his mother; the frozen scream of Cleopatra as she prepared to send word of her death to Antony; the hidden expressions of Portia as she buried her face in her pillow. The cast were liberated to perform in a variety of keys; both grandstanding performances to the seated audience, and 'private' moments that the camera took responsibility for distributing. It also allowed for more virtuoso effects: the ghost of Caesar, for example, was superimposed only on the broadcast picture, with the live Brutus talking to an empty chair; and Enobarbus' flight from his own guilt took him out of the Barbican and into the car-park, where his screams caused some consternation to the catering staff on a cigarette break, the whole thing captured on the roving camera and relayed back to the auditorium.

The production was insistent on displaying to us history in its many and varied forms, in keeping with the idea of this history as a real and living one, rather than one author's idea of the past. Thus, while Shakespeare's action shaped the body of the plot, a ticker-tape reel countered the stage story with running commentary on the 'real' history, with dates of battles and deaths, explanations of the political shifts and roles of various officials, and further details that Shakespeare ignored in the plays. As the play ended, a long list of questions: "Is the ideal of democracy worth the sacrifice of an individual?" "Can tyranny be justified?" etc. scrolled across the screen, asking us to consider history as a battle of ideologies. Other screens displayed relevant newsreels throughout, whether accompanying the campaign against Aufidius with footage of the Afghan war or displaying the Olympics while Caesar's Rome celebrated the Lupercal, imagining history as a series of events endlessly repeated. To complicate matters even further, the news ticker also displayed information such as "150 minutes until Julius Caesar's death" for the key characters, emphasising the inevitability of history: the interest here was not in what happens, but in how we get there.

In director Ivo van Hove's Rome, history became something that was created privately and domestically rather than publicly. All scenes which gave the masses a voice were cut, and increasingly the focus of events was narrowed and humanised. Thus, Coriolanus was fragmented and heavily cut. The Tribunes emerged from the audience, speaking ostensibly on our behalf though far more obviously for themselves. The longest, core scene was performed as a press conference, with a chafing Coriolanus (Fedja van Huet) soothed by Menenius at one end of the table and attacked by Sicinius and Brutus at the other for disrespect to the people. In between the two groups sat Cominius and a Senator, attempting to maintain order over the physical fights which continually erupted, the overturned chairs and angry threats of an impassioned political debate that resulted, ultimately, in Coriolanus' banishment. These public scenes were contrasted with the dominant Fried Pittoors as Volumnia, who held state in a raised seated section from which she rarely moved. To her, in this private setting, flocked senators, rulers and her son, and it was in her presence that the real decisions were made. Pittoors' commanding presence made her plea to Coriolanus, a fixed bow from the waist from which she refused to raise herself, all the more compelling. van Huet's performance, meanwhile, turned the story of Coriolanus into one of a reluctant public figure, a hero forced to play a game he does not understand and with which he bore no patience. As he agonised over his decision to sack Rome, the cameras captured a haunted, confused gaze which spoke of a man completely lost.

Julius Caesar, for my money the best part of the production, gave a fuller text which happily trimmed the final scenes mercilessly, turning the play into a lean and thrilling descent into chaos. The only real public scene here was one of the production's highlights; Brutus first addressing the audience from a podium in a commanding performance, before Antony's far more informal engagement. An accident had confined actor Hans Kesting to a wheelchair, but this only made him the more compelling: as he rolled around the stage with surprising speed and agility, Antony's apparent disability only belied the danger he posed. Rolling around to the front of a podium he could not see over, and forcing the fixed state camera to yield to a handheld, unmediated broadcast, Antony addressed himself to the camera as much as the crowd, pulling out an image of Caesar and scrawling over it with red pen as he described the wounds. As he spoke, the conspirators who stood in a line behind him slowly sidled away and made their exit, whispering in a corner until an enraged Antony wheeled and made a beeline straight for Brutus, onto whom he launched himself in an attempt to throttle the murderer. In the absence of a performed crowd for Antony to play to, Kesting conveyed the power of revolution in words that demonstrated the power of the camera to turn a close-up into a seismic shift in world order.

Several characters were recast as female, as part of van Hove's mission to turn the events into a relatively realistic reflection of contemporary politics. Octavius and Cassius were both women, and this made for a fascinating dynamic between Renee Fokker's Cassius and Roeland Fernhout's Brutus. Cassius here became a powerful yet frustrated politician, unable to enact events on her own terms and reliant on Brutus for the necessary support to carry through her actions. Fernhout's reflective Brutus was matched for power by her sheer determination, and the two of them were intimidating when together, and terrifying when opposed. As the two of them quarrelled in a dim office, late at night, Brutus was here rendered far from stoic; a tired and emotional man with the weight of the world on his shoulders who screamed defiance at Cassius' questioning of his commands. The relative equality of the two was revealed in an almost tender farewell as the two parted for the last time.

Antony and Cleopatra cranked up the intensity and domesticity a further notch, with a comparatively full text that ran to two and a half hours by itself. Split into two halves, and with the audience forced to return to the auditorium for the second half, this was the part of the play that we were required to watch, to experience as a unified group without the distractions offered on stage. For this world, presided over by Chris Nietvelt's Cleopatra and Marieke Heebink's highly-sexualised Charmian, politics moved into the bedroom. Charmian ran Cleopatra's court with a disturbing combination of seduction (especially of other women) and devil-may-care pragmatism; as they waited for Octavius to arrive, she marched for a champagne bottle as if it was a necessary weapon. Hadewych Minis's Octavius offered a stark contrast, her white shirt and tie belying a puritanical and sparse personality that accepted events with a sense of inevitably and necessity. Upon giving away Octavia, she kissed her sister tenderly, then with increased passion. This one moment of emotional urgency was instantly cut into by Charmian's distant cries for "Music!" before, to the eruption of the Red Hot Chili Peppers onto the video screens, the scene cut to a wild orgy in Egypt as Cleopatra and her ladies thrashed about on the floor to the loud rock tunes.

The final scenes, captured closely by the cameras, were played out in full as Cleopatra and her ladies followed the deaths of Antony and prepared themselves for the inevitable. Centrally in the stage was an area into which, almost superstitiously, audience members were instructed not to go. Between two glass screens stood an empty space which symbolised death; every time a character was murdered or committed suicide, they moved to that space and lay down on a trolley, and an overhead snapshot of their 'body' was taken and displayed, frozen, on the video screens. As this space increasingly became the focus, the characters were uncontrollably drawn to it, surrounding Antony's body which lay splayed out. As the space became laden with bodies, Octavia sent first aid teams to resuscitate the fallen, but to no avail. The history of Rome, with all its scale and worldwide ramificaitons, ultimately ended up figured in the four dead bodies that filled this empty space.

History was too big for this production, just as the production was too big for this review. This was, perhaps, the production's greatest strength - its recognition that history is best realised through the all-too-human stories of individuals, through the representative rather than the comprehensive. In this, the production was possibly the most Shakespearean history I've yet seen. There's far more that could have been discussed: the wonderful chaotic drumming that stood for the various wars; the hysterically floozy Casca; the tenderness of the mirrored Caesar/Calphurnia and Brutus/Portia scenes; the homely picture of Antony lying across Octavia's lap and her disgraced return to Rome; the traumatic effect that Coriolanus' final fall had on Aufidius. Perhaps it's enough to say that this was the only production this year to which I've yet given a standing ovation. A beautifully performed, expertly produced and deeply provoking reading of the Roman histories which really demands repeat experiences.

Peter Kirwan : 21 Nov 2009 10:27 |  Tags: Antony Caesar Coriolanus Productions Review |  Comments (2) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Coriolanus: The Movie

Not really news, because there's very little to report, but the casting information available so far about this new movie of Coriolanus is pretty tantalising.....

Peter Kirwan : 13 Nov 2009 23:13 |  Tags: Coriolanus News |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Twelfth Night (RSC) @ The Courtyard Theatre

Writing about web page http://www.rsc.org.uk/whatson/8209.aspx

Here's an interesting question. If one is updating the setting of a Shakespeare play, but needs to incorporate a vast amount of explanatory material in the production's programme and on its website, are the resonances of the updated setting not then too obscure to hold any meaning for its audience?

Gregory Doran's new Twelfth Night for the RSC was such a production. As attentive to history and reference as always, Doran chose to play with the geographical Illyria (modern day Albania) as visited by Lord Byron, identified in the programme notes as a key reference for Orsino. The world of this Twelfth Night, therefore, was remade as the final stopping point on the Romantic 'Grand Tour', a place of East-meets-West, European sensibilities and manners thrown into relief by local colour. The idea was coherent and interesting, but (in the eyes of this reviewer, at least) rendered effectively meaningless to the uninitiated as the references were so specific and distant. The colonial politics were not interrogated, and the core action of the play (duels, breeches, big houses, servants, what you will) didn't differ in its essentials from any of the other dozens of Georgian/Victorian-set productions of the play.

Perhaps it's ungenerous to demand insight, though, when the setting allowed for such a lovely aesthetic. Paul Englishby's music drew heavily on Eastern influences, with both on- and off-stage bands creating an ambient atmosphere (helped by strong incense) that evoked perfectly the luxuriousness of Orsino's lifestyle, the bazaars of the streets that linked the two houses and the Orthodox Catholicism, represented by the bearded priest who followed Olivia with an icon of Mary. The setting did also allow for some nice distinctions between "the lighter people"; Toby and Andrew were both Englishmen abroad, while Maria and Fabian were locally-recruited servants, and Feste a Mediterranean musician and purveyor of folk tales, who was shocked and appalled to be addressed by Sebastian as a "Greek": the only time any tension was drawn between the different ethnic groups living in otherwise apparently perfect harmony.

This harmony was key to a production that embraced Twelfth Night as a generally jolly and often hysterical romp pierced with moments and hints of sadness, but never allowing its good spirits to be damagingly compromised. Nancy Carroll's Viola summed up the play's general tone, reminiscent of no-one so much as Julie Andrews in The Sound of Music, in voice, look and attitude. Far from being a criticism, Carroll's Cesario was jaunty without attempts at laddishness, and relentlessly positive, but with a dignity and poise that set her above and apart from the people of Illyria. When being confronted with either Olivia's adoration or Orsino's praise for her rival, Viola's gentle frown and upheld chin spoke simultaneously of her wistfulness and defiance; enduring without much hope, but resilient. While a traditional Viola, Carroll succeeded in making her situation affecting and drawing a melancholy from the character that allowed her plight to matter. This resulted, too, in a rivetting reunion with Sam Alexander's Sebastian, with the intensity of her shock and happiness all the more compelling for the sadness of her earlier performance. As with all good reunion scenes, for the duration of this scene everyone else on stage seemed to disappear, with nothing else existing for Viola and Sebastian (or the audience) than each other.

Viola's sadness both echoed and threw into relief the rather more superficial melancholy of Jo Stone-Fewing's Orsino. This self-consciously poetical figure made show of calling for more music from his young male minions, moving slowly through them attending to every strain. Later, he entered in floods of tears before seeing his courtiers, turning to compose himself, then returning with a wide smile on his face. While there was some sympathy for him at first, it quickly became apparent that this man was in love with the idea of his own melancholy, rather than with Olivia. As he and Cesario spoke of love, he became rapt in the conversation and only Viola's mention of Olivia drew her back to mind; for Orsino, it was love itself that held his fascination. His attitude was particularly mocked by Feste in II.iv, who stood clicking impatiently as Orsino told Viola what to "mark" in the song, and made fun of his "melancholy god" when he was done. In the final scene, moreover, Orsino's extremes of passion were further criticised as he drew his sword first on Olivia then on Viola, threatening both in a parodic portrayal of desperate violence that illustrated all too clearly the dangers of his narcissistic performances.

Miltos Yerolemou's Feste was one of the production's highlights, the dark conscience of the play. A consummate performer, in one scene he would be rolling through Fabian's legs and across his back to avoid giving over Olivia's letter, and in the next banging a washing tub to accompany his drinking songs. His performance of "Come away, come away death" was a tour de force solo piece: unveiling a skull in a deliberate parody of Hamlet, he sang to the dead face, acting out its burial and strewing with flowers. Upon being paid by Orsino, however, he immediately cast off his sober air and began using the skull as a ventriloquist's dummy, mocking Orsino with its mouth. Yerolemou demonstrated the same skill he showed in his recent performance in Othello of being able to simultaneously act while providing meta-commentary on his own performance. Thus, in his weak attempts to entertain Olivia in his first scene, he delivered the flat jokes which failed to raise a laugh from the on-stage audience, before shrugging to the off-stage audience as if apologising for doing the best with the script he was given.

There was a darker side to this clown, however. On Malvolio's condemnation of him as a "barren rascal", he dropped the flowers he was carrying in genuine hurt at the insult, before taking cold delight in reminding the defeated Malvolio of his earlier words in the final scene. His railing tone often came close to anger in scenes such as the tormenting of Malvolio as Sir Topaz, and his constant wheedling of money from people was increasingly treated as pestering by Orsino, among others. Single-handedly, in fact, Yerolemou created most of the tension that drove his scenes, pushing the Fool's role to its limits by challenging the bourgeoise and making fun of his peers, allowing no-one to comfortably inhabit the role they had created for themselves. This was echoed in a neatly-arranged final song, used to allow Feste to comment on the play's various loose ends: Antonio marched across the stage as Feste sang "Gaint knaves and thieves men shut their gate"; Andrew left with packed bag to the sounds of "By swaggering could I never thrive"; an already-warring Maria and Toby passed by on "With tosspots still had drunken heads" as Maria threw her ring back at her new husband; and Malvolio himself entered and stopped next to Feste as the latter admitted "Our play is done", the laughter forgotten as the tension between the two threatened to spill into an unknown future.

Simeon Moore played an intense, stammering and piratical Antonio, hand always ready on his sword even as he proclaimed a deeply-felt love for Sebastian. He displayed an unusual amount of anger at Cesario, seeming to feel a deep personal betrayal of affection in Cesario's non-recognition of him. Pamela Nomvete made for a fiery and strong Maria, who had no qualms about threatening Sir Toby and Feste physically when they irritated her. Her story felt oddly unfinished, though perhaps only in relation to a consistently scene-stealing Richard McCabe and James Fleet as Toby and Andrew. McCabe's farting, swearing, slurring Sir Toby swaggered (or staggered) through his scenes, dominant and confident while in full control at all times; whether making strangling gestures behind Andrew's back or lowering his tone severely as he plotted Malvolio's imprisonment, he remained a powerful force that was only ultimately matched by Nomvete's equally strong Maria.

Fleet was the real star of the show though, in a piece of pitch-perfect casting. Bumbling and unusually self-effacing for an Aguecheek, Fleet managed the trick of making his character both ridiculous and lovable at the same time. Whether pitiful in his attempts to give Olivia flowers, comical as he became stuck in a tree, pathetic as he flailed a sword at Viola or completely lost as he forlornly admitted "I was adored. Once.", Andrew was never less than amusing but always with a sadness that made one feel mean for laughing at him. His gormless smiles were inviting even as they emphasised his basic stupidity, and his delight in recognising Malvolio's reference to him as a "foolish knight" even constituted a small victory in his own mind. He contrasted wonderfully well with Tony Jayawardena's excellent, self-aware Fabian. Often an overlooked role, Jayawardena achieved great effect with small gestures, sharing glances and shrugs with Toby that placed him on an intellectual level above Andrew that allowed him  to take the lead in manipulating the knight. Blunt and to the point, Fabian provided an earthiness that countered the shenanigans of the drunks, sharing a servant's care with Maria and, ultimately, being burdened with the responsibility for the joke: Feste, as the licensed fool, received a short tongue-lashing, but Olivia's anger focussed on Fabian as the supposedly rational, responsible servant who should have known better than the drunks and fools.

This Olivia was unusual in the range - and extremes - of her emotions. Alexandra Gilbreath's performance was summed up perfectly as she dismissed Toby, alternating screaming herself blue in the face at her departing uncle with simpering apologetically to Sebastian. Even in her dignified melancholy in the opening scenes, there was an undercurrent of playfulness; Feste's jokes quickly had her rolling in her seat, and she adopted a deliberately provocative and mocking attitude with Cesario both as she sat among her other veiled gentlewomen and in their later discussions. Cesario's "Excellently done... if God did all" was greeted, not with anger, but as a challenge in a war of wits that echoed Beatrice and Benedick at their best. Other highlights included her jumping up and down in glee as Sebastian agreed to be ruled by her, and a breathy, sexually-charged "Most wonderful!" as the possibilities for two husbands occurred to her.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, considering the star-casting and his obvious appropriateness for the role, Richard Wilson gave a straight and traditional performance as Malvolio, impressive for a first-time Shakespearean but a little disappointing in light of the innovative performances elsewhere. He wasn't helped by cliches of staging, such as his appearance bound in a cage poking through the trapdoor for the 'Sir Topaz' scene, which left him little space to do much with. However, this older Malvolio made for an extremely creepy 'cross-gartered' scene, with him tucking his long black cloak into enormous white briefs and running his hands down his legs "sexily" to Olivia's utter horror. His ecstatic cries of "To bed?!", followed by a chase around the stage, reduced the auditorium to hysterics. However, the comic set-piece remained, as ever, the garden scene. A box tree on a high trunk was lowered onto the stage (to Andrew's shock, in a metatheatrical moment reminiscent of Judi Dench and the small house in Doran's Merry Wives), into which the three over-hearers crammed themselves, peering over the bench on which Malvolio sat and reaching down in anger as their names were mentioned. The tree shook in anger and laughter, Malvolio stood on the envelope which stuck to his foot, the plotters pleaded dramatically with God that Malvolio be inspired to read aloud. It's perhaps the best image to end with, that of a production which aimed first and foremost to please and entertain. Uncomplicated but not trivial, and the best thing I've seen at the RSC for some time.

Peter Kirwan : 11 Nov 2009 15:04 |  Tags: Productions Review Rsc Twelfth |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Days of Significance (RSC) @ The Belgrade Theatre

Writing about web page http://www.daysofsignificance.co.uk/page/1/home

Roy Williams' play debuted as part of the RSC's Complete Works Festival back in early 2007, and it's a pleasure to have the chance to revisit a production I enjoyed so much the first time round. The play has gone from strength to strength since its initial short run, and it is testament to the perceived importance of the subject matter (the effect of the Iraq conflict on ordinary Brits) that Williams has been given the opportunity to extensively rewrite the play, ensuring that it remains up-to-the-minute and in tune with the concerns in the news.

* * * * * * * * * * * * * *

The plot remained straightforward, and is worth recapping in some detail. On a Friday night, two lairy groups of lads and lasses caused havoc on a night out on the tiles. This was the part of the play that was loosely inspired by Much Ado about Nothing: Ben and Jamie (Benedick and Claudio) were soldiers enjoying a final night of fun before shipping out to Iraq. Dan (Don John), their friend, was against the war and bitter at them for going, while Steve and Tony (loosely Borachio and Conrade) just wanted to get plastered. Among the girls, Trish (Beatrice) was the sex-mad ringleader who once had a fling with Ben, while Hannah (Hero) was starting university and under a great deal of pressure to be the "good" girl. Jamie and Hannah fell in love over the course of the night, and Trish and Ben hooked up again. However, a jealous Dan used the careless gossip of Clare (Margaret) and Steve against "Hannah the slapper", resulting in Jamie insulting her in front of the group. Although everyone was eventually reconciled, Jamie and Ben were still due to ship out in a couple of days.

The play's second act moved to Iraq, framed by two video messages from Ben to Trish; the first newly-arrived and excited, the second jaded and haunted by ominous hints at a revenge mission against the killers of a friend. In between a scene saw Ben, Jamie (an addition to this scene since the play's original production) and two other soldiers, wounded and scared, hiding after an ambush to wait for back-up. As they sheltered, it transpired that Ben had shot a child in cold blood on suspicion of helping the enemy. The scene confronted in a realistic way the atrocities that happen in the heat of combat, and the various strategies used to justify them afterwards: Ben rewrote history to justify his actions, Jamie froze and cowered, their Sergeant threatened to tell all but died of his wounds instead.

Part Three was entirely redesigned from the original production. Originally, this was an abstract scene which saw Hannah stood in a bare square, holding simultaneous conversations with Jamie, Dan, Trish and her father-in-law Lenny. Now, the scene was far more conventional, set at Clare and Steve's wedding. Ben had died in Iraq, apparently heroically, while Jamie was home facing trial for prisoner abuse, keeping secret the fact that Ben had been the ringleader. The scene remained focussed on Hannah, as she tried to reconcile her abhorrence of Jamie's actions with her love for him and wish to support him. Reverting to the "Hannah the Slapper" tag in an attempt to escape the pressures put on her, she was sleeping with Dan - whose views on the war she now shared - while at the same time hating him for his disdain for Jamie and Ben. Meanwhile, a grieving Trish was bitter at what she perceived as Hannah's abandoning of her for her university friends. While Hannah fielded the attacks on all fronts, Jamie pitched up at the wedding, only to end up in a fist fight with Dan. The play ended with Hannah's resolve to accompany Jamie to his court hearing, prioritising love above all else.

* * * * * * * * * * * * *

While Williams protests in the programme that the connections with Much Ado are very loose, the play actually provided a committed and fascinating reading of the play in its first act. The bickering of Beatrice and Benedick translated perfectly to the politics of city nightlife, with Ben and Trish balancing their lust for each other with the need to not lose face in front of their gangs. Insults, as Trish said, were just part of the foreplay. The setting also allowed for an interesting inversion of the slandering plot: here, in a flurry of text messages, overheard toilet conversations and petty jealousy, it became spontaneous rather than coldly-calculated, and Dan's decision to go ahead with the plot was motivated as much by love for his mates, leading to anger at their choice to go to war, as by jealousy and spite.

Most potently, though, this was a deeply pessimistic view of Much Ado, in which love was fleeting, flawed and conditional, and where "happy endings" were only pauses in a longer action which led ultimately to death and disgrace. It showed a Hero-figure breaking under the stress of accusations, parental expectations and romantic disillusionment and embracing the identity constructed for her by her detractors. It showed a Benedick whose fiery temperament and casual approach to life resulted in him committing unspeakable atrocities, and a Claudio whose weakness of character and susceptibility to suggestion found him following his friend in those actions. Perhaps most distressingly, it gave us a Beatrice who only let her guard down for Benedick and was hurt badly by it, and who consoled herself by sloping of with other girls' partners at the wedding feast. Pervading all was an emotional desperation and isolation that displayed, with a disheartening impression of truth, the ability of the war to destroy the lives of the people it touched.

Running through this was an underlying concern about education. All characters in the play were working-class, with Hannah's posh university friends pointedly absent from the stage. The arrogant, obnoxious and violently-disposed Dan was also the only character who understood the politics and motivations behind the war, who went on peace demonstrations and openly criticised his friends for not thinking about their actions. It's the liberal viewpoint that we are perhaps normally most encouraged to sympathise with; and yet here his words - and the reported words of Hannah's friends - felt removed and ignorant, theoretical without an understanding of the realities of war. This was contrasted with Ben and Jamie's confused rhetoric about going "for their country" and proving themselves to be men, without a real understanding of what they were fighting for. In this kind of argument, no-one could be right; Williams' point seemed rather to be that those who talk most about the war are those who it least affects, while those who are deliberately targetted to be directly involved in fighting are the ones disadvantaged by education or an understanding of the concerns. People in this world either think, or do; not both.

With an excellent young cast and a good-humoured (and gruesomely fluid!) recreation of a night on the town, Days of Significance proved it could entertain, and the play provided a surprising amount of comedy throughout, from Clare's hideous karaoke at her wedding to Sean the soldier's claims that a photo of Victoria Beckham was actually his girlfriend. The comedy, though, came from seeing ourselves in situations that felt all too familiar, making the intrusions of death and horror all the more powerful. Humour was, for the people of this play, far more a defence mechanism than an expression of any real joy.

The rewritten third act largely improved the play, turning what had been a rather preachy, abstract scene into something more dramatically compelling. A few crucial changes also served to make things more interesting: in the original version, Hannah's stepfather Lenny had admitted to being in love with her; here, she came onto him as he tried to tell her she was worth something, deliberately trying to degrade hersel in an attempt to hide from being the good, responsible girl he wanted her to be. Jamie's attempts to reintegrate himself into 'normal' society by attending the wedding also broke up the attention to Hannah in the final act, making the alienation of the returned soldier apparent and visually showing the conflict that Hannah faced in choosing between the different worlds that fought for her attention.

The most sobering realisation is that Days of Significance is still as relevant today as the troops are pulled out of Afghanistan as it was in the immediate aftermath of the Iraq war. As an appropriation of Shakespeare, it took the essential themes of Much Ado, intelligently transposed them and followed them through to seemingly inevitable and shocking conclusions. As an RSC production, it showed the company engaging conscientiously with a section of society who perhaps wouldn't normally be in attendance at the Courtyard. As a performance in its own right, it was skilfully played and engaging. As a piece of work, though, its importance transcended theatre, as all good political theatre should. By engaging with war from a defiantly street-level perspective, evaluating the human cost in terms other than body counts, it reminded us that this is an issue which affects Britain's streets as well as Basra's, and gave stark warnings for those of us who intellectually engage with the war that, without this perspective, our theorising is simply irrelevant.

A version of this review originally appeared at Shakespeare Revue.

Peter Kirwan : 04 Nov 2009 10:37 |  Tags: Muchado Productions Review Rsc |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem