All entries for Sunday 27 April 2008

Hamlet @ The Tobacco Factory

With only a short night's sleep, and barely recovered from Black Watch, it was an early start for the Bristol train to catch Jonathan Miller's new production of Hamlet for the Tobacco Factory. I should thank Carol Rutter here for managing to secure me a couple of tickets to a production that has sold out thanks to its spectacular reviews, reviews well deserved.

Clocking in at 3 hours 45 minutes, this was something of an endurance test in the cramped and stifling auditorium of the Tobacco Factory. The theatre is fundraising for a badly-needed ventilation system, the ceiling is low, the room is pitch-black and the seats very close together, making for an extremely uncomfortable experience on a hot spring afternoon. Despite all that, it's a great space, reminiscent of the venue in which I saw The Pianist last July, and the extreme close quarters allowed for an intimate, near-full text production that concentrated on providing a clear, no-frills interpretation and some fantastic performances.

Leaping straight in with the main source of praise for the production, Jamie Ballard's Hamlet was a revelation. I've seen Ballard a few times before, notably as a solid Mercutio in Nancy Meckler's Romeo and Juliet, and I knew he had promise, but I wasn't prepared for Ballard's phenomenal energy and committment. Never dull for a moment, this Hamlet was by turns hysterically funny and gut-churningly moving, desperate and confident, brutal and gentle, and yet never self-contradictory. Ballard's Hamlet was a deepy troubled young man who embarked on a scheme and followed it through to its inevitable conclusions, weathering everything that he encountered and single-handedly bringing down the state in doing so. And he did it with a smile.

Ballard's greatest strength is his ability to not only be very funny, but to be funny while also being desperately sad (witnesses of his performance as Flute-as-Thisbe in Greg Doran's 2005 A Midsummer Night's Dream may recall how he turned the riotous comedy into a sobering lament in his final moments). His Hamlet began slumped on a chair, but as soon as his course towards death was begun by his encounter with the ghost, his own personal comedy began. No-one was safe from his dark humour - Yorick's skull was mercilessly turned into a ventriloquist's doll before being tossed aside, Laertes had faces pulled at him as their duel began, Polonius was treated to insults even as his dead body was tugged away and the jokes he made to Claudius as his banishment to England was pronounced were scathing in their sarcasm. For most of the middle three acts, almost every word Hamlet spoke was with a jest, and yet behind it all Ballard's eyes remained serious and joyless, watching the reactions to his words with deep interest and using it to his advantage.

Yet the veneer of humour was frequently broken. As Annabel Scholey's Ophelia tried to hug and caress his face during the nunnery scene, the tears he shed while shouting at her became real. Ophelia was his weakness, the hardest part of his life to reject (his joking with her during The Mousetrap was particularly cruel), and his screams as he realised whose funeral he was watching were heartfelt. Elsewhere, his screams at the weasely Guildenstern who tried to play upon him belied the feeling of betrayal he felt from his former friends while his interview with Gertrude became desperate in his imploring of her. Hamlet's humour was his key to survival, and when the humour was removed one could see how close to the edge events were drawing him. His wonderful delivery of 'To be or not to be', making it sound like a genuine part of the character's mental process rather than a set-piece, epitomised the skill and dexterity with language that Ballard brought to the role.

Desperation was also a key part of Jay Villiers' excellent Claudius, an unusually sympathetic reading of the villain. No apologies were made for his murder, but his love for Gertrude was genuine and almost every action he took during the course of the play was an attempt to survive the aftermath of his crime with minimum disturbance. One could almost believe that he would be a good king, were it not for the albatross weighing him down. As he and Gertrude spoke in the bedroom after Polonius' murder, he kissed her with a desperate urgency, fearful of his sin catching up with him and clinging on to a true and pure feeling of love. His attempts at contrition seemed genuine and, in one of the play's most powerful images, he accepted his death unconditionally. Facing Hamlet, he closed his eyes and spread his arms wide, exposing his chest and embracing oblivion. He willingly drank from the cup of poison, and his final act was to crawl across the floor, touching the hand of the fallen Gertrude in a final gesture of genuine love which Hamlet, amazed, finally accepted, placing the cup next to their hands but leaving them linked in death.

The other two characters who emerged in this production in particularly clear focus were Polonius, played capably by Roland Oliver, and Nicholas Gadd's Osric. Polonius was the central figure at court, running events while the smiling Claudius sat in a pew at the edge with Gertrude. Bustling and comic as one would expect, this Polonius nonetheless felt like someone who achieved things and had a real power and influence, the King and Queen accepting his recommendations unhesitatingly. Osric, on the other hand, only gradually came to prominence. Serving as the court clerk throughout, he was present at the sidelines of all the dodgy transactions that took place, receiving his education through watching Claudius and becoming increasingly embedded in the seedy world of the court while simultaneously becoming dissatisfied with the intrigues. When he finally came to his invitation to Hamlet, he gave it with a dignity unique to this character, and Hamlet's bawdry teasing of his manners was made to seem ridiculous by his calm and slightly despising attitude towards the prince. This Osric was not ostentatious and had no time for jokes, the severity of events having made such an impression on him.

Scholey didn't stand out in her early scenes, but was excellent in the scenes of Ophelia's madness - made up in the garish face paint of the players and stabbing a straw doll brutally with a twig before clutching at whoever was closest, her depiction of Ophelia's mental collapse was deeply affecting. Elsewhere, Philip Buck and Francesca Ryan provided excellent support as Horatio and Gertrude, the latter particularly coming into her own in later scenes as the enormity of events started to oppress her.

Despite being excellent throughout, the play managed to step up a gear for the final scene, coaxing a final amazing display of energy and skill from its cast. The fencing duel was spectacular (all credit to Kate Waters' fight direction), Ballard and Oliver Le Sueur's Laertes diving about the stage and Laertes eventually being smashed painfully into a pillar. Hamlet deliberately swapped rapiers, grabbing Laertes' as he thrust it, tapping the end in full knowledge of what was going on and tutting at his opponent before lunging at him in anger. His final death, too, had a powerful impact, he suddenly collapsing and spluttering out his final words in Horatio's arms.

Of several Hamlets I've seen on stage and screen, this was by some distance the best I've encountered and, by hook or crook, I urge you to try and get a seat before it closes and is forgotten in the wake of David Tennant and Jude Law's upcoming performances. It's a shame that this production won't have a life beyond its Bristol run, but I feel pretty privileged to have seen it. A good weekend for theatregoing!

Peter Kirwan : 27 Apr 2008 19:01 |  Tags: Hamlet Productions |  Comments (1) |  Close comments |  Report a problem

Black Watch @ Warwick Arts Centre

Black Watch must be one of the most hyped new plays of the year so far. Its original Edinburgh performances made an enormous impact, particularly as the National Theatre of Scotland were still at the time in their immediate infancy, and the subsequent world tour has been hugely successful. The queue to get into the Butterworth Hall on Friday night, winding around most of Warwick Arts Centre's large foyer, spoke volumes about just how anticipated this performance was.

Happily, the hype wasn't unjustified. Black Watch is an audacious and powerful piece of theatre, and this performance was wonderful. Sadly, owing to a bereavement, the cast was slightly depleted: Paul James Corrigan was missing, forcing David Colvin and director John Tiffany to take on new responsibilities and causing a delay in the start of the show as they re-rehearsed. It says something about the company's ensemble ethic and committment to the show that the recasting was flawless. Only right at the end, in a piece of formation movement, was it clear that the cast were a man down, but until that point the understudies had blended in seamlessly.

The sheer scale of the production was the element that immediately struck me. The Hall had been converted into a large traverse space, with scaffolding towers at either end. The sense of space created in the cavernous hall was essential to giving a sense of the epic quality of the story, the stage seeming barely able to contain the action. In one technically astonishing moment, the soldiers grouped themselves on the balcony of one tower while the noise of fighter jets screamed overhead, seeming to pass right over the audience, and explosions flashed on a large screen at the far end.

Yet, despite the scale, the play excelled in its intimate moments. Black Watch was created out of interviews conducted by writer Gregory Burke with former members of the titular Scottish army squadron and, in a stroke of brilliance, these interviews themselves were dramatised. This had two particularly beneficial effects. First, it allowed a unique investigation of the ongoing psychological effects of the war for the soldiers, some of them reacting violently to what they perceived as the writer's exploitative use of their stories and his inability to truly understand their situation, culminating in a gripping moment as Ali Craig's Stewarty grabbed the writer's arm and put his foot against it, threatening to break it so he could understand his pain. Secondly, it gave the story an unusual and affecting honesty; as if, by including this framing device, the play was admitting to its own inherent inability to truly do justice to the experiences of these men. This could never be anything more than a representation of another world.

The actual plot, relating the series of events leading up to the death of several members of the squadron at the hands of a suicide bomber, was relatively simple. Most of the narrative, though, focussed not on events but on the day to day life and relationships of this group of soldiers, revelling in the rituals created by the soldiers to survive the banality of life out there - whether their obscene version of tig (rubbing their genitals against the faces of unsuspecting colleagues) or the "10-second fight" to resolve personal conflicts. Much of this was hugely funny, both in their down to earth observations of their situation and their coarse ribbing of each other. Those offended by strong language shouldn't attend, the Scots dialogue containing more four-letter words than Trainspotting.

The characters were better understood as a group than individuals. They had their own personalities - Kenzie the naive rookie, Stewarty the slightly unhinged and later depressive, Fraz the 'ugly bastard' and, centrally, Paul Rattray as Cammy who was our narrator. Cammy arranged the interviews with the writer, introduced his crew, talked us through the history of the Black Watch and acted throughout as the stolid soldier, diligent and industrious but ultimately disillusioned and hurt by his experiences and the death of his friends. It was through Cammy and a series of voiceovers/spoken e-mails/news reports that the wider political issues (the controversy over the Iraq war and the amalgamation of the Scottish regiments and subsequent loss of identity of the Black Watch) were brought up, acting as a backdrop to the story of these men to highlight the ultimate futility of their experiences. Jack Fortune's Officer had perhaps the most pertinent summary of the play's political point:

"It takes three hundred years to build an army that's admired and respected around the world. But it only takes three years pissing about in the desert in the biggest western foreign policy disaster ever to fuck it up completely".

An excellent script isn't enough though, and the most moving moments of the play came through the triple-headed direction of Tiffany, Steven Hoggett (movement) and Davey Anderson (music). The action in the desert was repeatedly punctuated by physical sequences which were powerfully effective. Of these, the best was a sequence in which the soldiers received mail from home. As they read, they dropped their letter and began a series of movements - cradling a baby, stroking hair - that represented the contents of the letter. As each man began his movements, the next came in and picked up his own letter, until they all stood around completely lost in their own recollections of home, still and quiet. Other sequences were more spectacular: the "10 second fight" sequence where all the cast engaged in short but violently choreographed fights, the history sequence where Cammy described the regiment's past while the rest of the company moved him about, spinning him upside down and dressing him in period uniforms, and the final explosion which saw the three dead men raised high in the air, spiralling downwards to their deaths. Elsewhere, the gorgeous Scottish army songs, folk music set to a backdrop of deep bass melodies, provided the perfect aural accompaniment to the action and set the pulse racing.

So, what is it about Black Watch? Is it the natural and entirely believable dialogue? The awe-inspiring sound and lighting design? The comedy? The tragedy? The political and emotional sledgehammers? The simple truth of the story? I'd suggest it's no one of these, but the fact that Burke and Tiffany have managed to successfully assemble all of these elements, along with a stellar cast, in one single tour de force piece of theatre. If there's any justice, it's a play that will be talked about for years to come. My one recommendation is to get a seat away from the edges, as I was occasionally distracted by the stage management team constantly moving about in the wings, but it hardly mattered. Simply brilliant, and a triumph for the National Theatre of Scotland.

Peter Kirwan : 27 Apr 2008 17:58 |  Tags: Productions |  Comments (0) |  Close comments |  Report a problem