Review - The Hollow Crown: Henry IV, Part I

Mini-review: Shakespeare’s Henry IV, Part 1 (BBC Hollow Crown series)

To whet our appetite for Henry V at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, let's have a quick look at Henry IV, Part I from the BBC’s HollowCrown series (originally shown in 2012). Before Henry V was Henry V, he was Hal, a binge-drinking hooligan trickster… or so he would have everybody think. In fact, his plan all along was to lead a life of debauchery and then, just when everybody had completely written him off, he would reform and thereby dazzle people all the more with his excellence. While Hal is putting this meticulously executed, if largely pointless, plot into effect, his father is threatened by rebellion. The star of the rebel camp is the son Henry IV thinks he really wants: Harry Hotspur, a dutiful son and brave warrior. Luckily for Henry IV, his actual son comes good by the end and slaughters his spiritual brother to save the kingdom.

Tom Hiddleston as Hal is magnificent. There is a sadness about him at even the merriest times, which

humanises him (for what short of person would really break their father’s heart and betray his best friend, just to make himself look better?) He’s funny too, and seems to be channelling a little Loki as well in this performance. Simon Russell Beale is likewise wonderfully cast: as funny a Falstaff as you could hope for, and as pitiful as a kicked do (not that I’ve ever kicked a dog. But kicked dog seems catchier than ‘like a dog you refuse to give a bit of your dinner to’).

The Voice: Informing and Educating

This is a beautifully made production. It’s clearly a work of love and the BBC has invested real cash in it too. Some would perhaps use this as an example of how wonderful the BBC is and how lost we would be without it. Being more of a glass half empty type, I’d say that by showing they can still make programmes which conform to the BBC’s original mission (to ‘inform, educate and entertain’), programmes like this actually highlight just how much complete bilge the Beeb turns out the rest of the time…

Anyway, all in all a great film; now roll on Henry V in Stratford.

Review: Richard III at Leicester's Curve Theatre

Shakespeare's Richard III at the Curve Theatre, Leicester, 25th July 2015

A bit of a change this week after a visit to a community production of Richard III at Leicester’s Curve Theatre. My expectations beforehand were not especially high, but the production gave me a number of pleasant surprises. The set had a professional look. The industrial minimalism thing is getting a little tedious at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, but this looked just as good as the ones they’re churning out in Stratford. There was an unpleasant David Lynch-esque humming sound effect before the show started: it reminded me of the last moments of consciousness before having a seizure, but for people without such a point of reference it probably wasn’t so bad. An unpleasant but arresting moment occurred at the very beginning of the play. A shirtless Richard gave his ‘winter of our discontent’ speech and we were treated to a very realistic, scabby, sore looking hump which a nurse then injected with a syringe. It was always unlikely that such a great beginning could be maintained, and so it proved.

It would be harsh to single out any individual because the problems ran through most of the cast. Many of the speeches were given at breakneck speed, giving the impression that the lines had been learned without being understood. This might also have been a problem caused by lack of editing: it would have been a good idea to make a few changes here and there, but perhaps being amateurs there was not the confidence to start messing editing the Bard. As it was, there was too much hurried talking and not enough acting. Some of the cast found it difficult to project their voices clearly, whilst others overacted their scenes (my companion actually preferred the latter approach, as it at least had the benefit of making sure you could understand what was happening). The industrial setting sort of went with the kleptocratic Russia theme, but this theme was only applied intermittently in costume and there was no real effort to draw deeper parallels. Occasional fur coats, orthodox priests and paramilitaries wandered around with a Church of England Bishop and, at the end, a bunch of World War One Tommies. The fighting at the end perhaps went on a little too long for a professional production, but this cast have clearly had a lot of fun arranging the battle scenes that it is hard to begrudge them a little fun with them.

The actor in the title role, Mark Peachey, was the highlight of the night and, on balance, made this a pretty

good performance. I could point out that he managed to be comprehensible without shouting every line, but this would damn him with faint praise. In fact, his Richard was charismatic, humorous and menacing – everything you could ask for. This was a warrior Richard, more Stannis Baratheon than Frank Underwood. Overall, he would not have been out of place at any of the RSC performances I’ve seen over the last couple of years: one hopes that he soon gets a shot at acting on a stage that will do his talents more justice.

Merchant of Venice at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre Review

Review: The Merchant of Venice, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon, 16^th May 2015

Having so recently written about Marlowe’s Jew of Malta, there is no need to rehearse the relationship between the two, though it is worth emphasizing again their paradoxical performance history in recently years. Marlowe’s play was originally called The Tragedy of the Rich Jew of Malta, but is now usually performed as a dark comedy; Shakespeare’s play was originally The Comedy of the Merchant of Venice, but is now usually (always?) performed as a tragedy (with occasional comic elements). The transformations reflect our changed attitudes and the problematization of race in the modern era. Marlowe’s Jew is so irredeemably bad that we can only read the portrayal ironically; Shakespeare’s Jew is treated so badly that we can only read the portrayal tragically. Whether or not the problematic elements were there in the original productions is another matter (though I’m inclined to believe they were). In this respect, both recent RSC productions have trod familiar ground: we sympathise with both Jewish characters and feel discomfort at the behaviour of most of the avowedly Christian characters. Polly Findlay, directing the current RSC production, takes the same familiar track as, for example, the 2004 film starring Al Pacino. Shylock has an understated but solid nobility, Gratiano is an oaf, Bassiano is shallow and Antonio is a bigot. But though it covers familiar ground, it glides over it very elegantly.

The Duke and Antonio

One of the most arresting features of this production is the stunning set design by Johannes Schütz. There are none of the clichéd accoutrements for plays set in Venice (Gondola moorings, the Rialto painted in the background and so on), and neither is it conventionally modern. The stage floor and back wall of the stage are covered in metallic reflective tiles, making the theatre seem much bigger than it is. The only piece of scenery is a large metal ball hanging from a wire. Reflected on the back wall, it is perhaps meant to evoke the three-ball symbol of money lenders associated with the Medici. The cast sit on stools at either side of the stage (being a bit of a thickie, I initially thought this was a new space the RSC had set aside for people with mobility problems). The stage is spare but not stark, because light and shadow are bounced around erratically by the reflective tiles, accentuating both the lighter and darker episodes in the drama. At the conclusion, candles are placed on the stage, beautifully realising the magical unreality of Belmont; and throughout the play the musical accompaniment, evoking haunting renaissance church music, helps to underline a rising atmosphere of heavy unease.

One disappointing aspect of the play is the costumes. The actors wear modern dress, which makes sense (Elizabethan dress would probably not suit the nightclub feel of the stage), but the outfits are either tediously drab (Antonio, Lorenzo, Bassiano) or garishly ‘street’ (Gratiano). In either approach, the results are bland and often ill-fitting, completely ill-suited (bad pun intended) to the Venetian setting, in which glamour, even an understated or decaying glamour, might have worked better.

As the audience enter, Antonio stands alone on the stage. Only after a few minutes, does it become clear that he weeps. At first, this seems to humanise Antonio. Much more so than the hard but melancholy Antonio of Jeremy Irons in the 2004 film, Jamie Ballard’s Antonio might at last be a character we connect emotionally connect with. This intriguing approach (a likeable Antonio!) might cast a penetrating light on the relationship between Shylock and Antonio, but it is quickly and disappointingly stubbed out. Soon after, Antonio is hard and unattractive, whilst being at times frighteningly close to a nervous breakdown. Perhaps the director thought that taking two new approaches to Antonio would be too much for the audience to take, because she does make clear (does she ever!) that the love between Antonio and Bassiano goes far beyond even the strongest heterosexual friendship. By keeping Antonio both gay and un-likeable, we end up with both the gayest character, as well as the character played by a black actor (Gratiano), being the most bigoted.

The sparseness of the stage decoration helps to emphasise the moments of extreme physicality. Jamie Ballard’s convulsive torment in the moments before his expected execution is intense, but the most shocking moment of the play occurs when Antonio tells Shylock to ‘lend it rather as to thine enemy’, taking the menace to a new level as he grabs Shylock by the throat and spits three times into his face. Besides Antonio and Shylock, Ken Nwosu does well in the lesser role of Gratiano and Patsy Ferran as Portia is also excellent, although perhaps not really beautiful enough for the part. Her ‘which the merchant and which the Jew’ line, played for laughs as she says it facing the two men, one in a skullcap, allowed for a moment of brotherhood between Shylock and Antonio, as both roll their eyes at the idiocy of the young jurist sent to decide their case. Tim Samuels is a riotous and riveting Launcelot Gobbo, almost singlehandedly putting the humour back into a play that has largely lost it.

Makram J. Khoury

Makram J. Khoury as Shylock is the standout performance, making up for the predictable characterization and making the production truly memorable. The nobility of his character is fully realised, but so too is his fragility. Dressed like somebody’s grandfather, shuffling along and with shaking hands, his physical weakness in contrast to the young hooligans of Venice helps to clarify the life of communal contempt he stoically endures and the terrible vengeance he feels entitles to take after the Christians have humiliated him and destroyed his family. This solitary obduracy gains tragic grandeur combined with his physical frailty. We cannot get around the fact that killing a person for not paying a debt is bad. But so too is Shylock’s treatment by the Venetians. The laws of Venice are his only chance to attain a semblance of justice and that justice is not only taken away, but new injustices are heaped upon him. When Shylock’s justice is denied, we see the limits of state sanctioned equality. No matter how cosmopolitan the laws of Venice claim to be, Jews like Shylock will never be equals as long as men like Antonio call the shots.

The Shoemaker's Holiday Review

Review: The Shoemaker’s Holiday, Thomas Dekker, Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. 14 February 2015

Shakespeare’s contemporaries get a raw deal in the game of glory but, although they were all dealt a poor hand, some still managed to win bigger shares of the pot than others. Partly for the seedy and mysterious glamour of his life and death, Christopher Marlowe lives on in our collective imagination; and Ben Johnson also managed to find a little space in our hearts. But we’d have to work our way a long way down the list before we got to Thomas Dekker. This is in some ways unfair. Like Shakespeare, he was competent in different genres, including a successful side-line as a pamphleteer, and he was perhaps ahead of Shakespeare in seeing the future of comedy. Modern rom-coms like Love, Actually are closer to Dekker’s city comedies, set in London and featuring ordinary folk, than Shakespeare’s tales of Italian aristocrats. And whereas the little we know about Shakespeare’s private life suggests it was a fairly ordinary (some might say boring) journey towards comfortable respectability, Dekker’s life included such fascinating if unfortunate titbits as a seven year stretch in the slammer. Even so, there is no dishonour in being outshone by Shakespeare. The real indignity has been inflicted by Google: search for Thomas Dekker and you’ll find our playwright appearing below his modern namesake, an actor renowned for appearing in TV versions of The Terminator and Honey, I Shrunk the Kids.

So, it’s nice of the RSC to put on a Dekker at the Swan Theatre. The Shoemaker’s Holiday consists of two intertwined love stories. One story revolves around the aristocratic Rowland Lacy and the rich but un-aristocratic Rose Oatley, both of whom are despised by the others’ families. Rowland is tasked with rounding up men to send as soldiers to fight in France under Henry V (the play was put on shortly after Shakespeare’s Henry V and is in some ways a comedic response) and he rounds up married shoemaker Rafe, who is sent to France, from whence he eventually returns a cripple to find out that his wife thinks he is dead and is about to marry somebody else. Rowland deserts the army and stays in London disguised as a shoemaker, taking Rafe’s job so that he can continue to woo Rose. SPOILER ALERT: the two couples wind up together at the end.

The play begins to go wrong almost immediately by including a needless introduction which gives much of the plot away before the play begins. The introduction does say that ‘Nothing is purposed here but mirth’, which is at odds with the anti-war theme picked up by some critics and focused upon in the RSC programme. But were Elizabethans anti-war in a recognizably modern way? Or were they more fatalistic – war was a tragic but inevitable part of life, to be avoided if possible, to be accepted if necessary.

The humour is juvenile: fart jokes, names like Cicely Bumtrinket, much pissing, talk of bums, a character named Firkin, around whom there are numerous uses of ‘Firk you’ and ‘Firked’, a couple of ‘prick’ puns, and everything is excessively, needlessly, tediously spelled out. Where the humour does initially work well, it is often repeated until it becomes stale. The phrase, ‘Prince am I none, yet am I nobly born, as being the sole son of a shoemaker’ is said at least four times. To ‘Dance the shaking of the sheets’ is a good description of sex, but repeating it smacks of desperation. Likewise, the play overall dragged on much too long, with seemingly irrelevant issues cropping up at the end such as a new hall where the shoemakers could trade leather two days a week: presumably this was once topical, and perhaps interesting, now it is neither. Despite the over-simplicity of the story, the needless repetition and the reliance throughout on the lowest common denominator, the play is paradoxically more difficult to understand than anything by the much more complex Shakespeare. The reason is Dekker’s over-reliance on jargon, whereas Shakespeare had the gift of being able to use simple language in clever ways.

David Troughton as Simon Eyre

Perhaps the biggest weakness, for what is, after all, a love story, was that the two pairs of lovers are both incredibly dull. The actress playing Rose Oatley, Thomasin Rand, gave a game performance, but neither she nor the others had much to work with. The most interesting character is Simon Eyre, whose language is odd but not especially clever: much of it relies on the incongruity of calling London bums ‘Brave Hyperboreans’, ‘Mad Mesopotamians’, ‘Babylonian Knaves’, ‘True Trojans’ and so on. The programme describes Eyre as Falstaffian and there is something in this, which fits in nicely with the Agincourt link: Shakespeare had killed off Falstaff so by introducing his new Falstaff and having him befriend King Henry V , Dekker was perhaps trying to tap into Falstaff’s, and Shakespeare’s, popularity. Even so, the programme goes a little too far in suggesting that Eyre shares Falstaff’s moral qualities. Eyre is a much more upright, though less interesting, character; extremely loyal to his workers and the soul of generosity. David Troughton, playing Eyre, was excellent but again let down by some mediocre dialogue: I suspect he would make a fantastic Falstaff. It was a very nice idea of the director’s to have the clothes of Eyre and his wife change as their social standing improved during the play. They begin the play in rags but by the end of the play she is Queen Elizabeth I and he is Henry VIII.

From a social perspective, there is more here for the common man than we would get in the average Shakespeare play: cross class love affairs, the victories of the apprentices over the gentlemen, the rise of Simon Eyre to Lord Mayor, and the sympathetic portrayal of an entire profession (the ‘gentle craft’ of shoemakers). Even Henry V turns out to be an egalitarian at the end: ‘Does thou not know that love respects no blood?’

Historicist readings of Shakespeare attempt to explain his plays based on the historical context, explaining why and how he covers certain themes because of the society he lived in. This can be an enlightening approach, but it can also blind us to what is unique about Shakespeare: his genius. Watching a play like this reminds us of a simple truth: Shakespeare is better remembered than his contemporaries because his plays are better than theirs. But if Shakespeare was the towering genius that the old ‘Great Men’ historians might have portrayed, could he have been so great as to transcend his historical context? If we moderns can discover ‘history’ then we are exempting ourselves from its grip (by knowing ideas are historically determined, then can’t we disregard the ideas we recognize as determined by our own historical context?) But in discarding such ideas, does that leave us with nothing, nihilism, or does it free us to recognize eternal ideas? And if we can put aside our historically determined ideas (a big if) isn’t it possible that other people (like Shakespeare) might have done so in the past? Perhaps the ability to transcend his historical conditioning was one of the factors that made Shakespeare such a great playwright (ok, this is getting a little circular). The Socrates of Plato’s Republic argued that society is a cave of opinion, from which only a few philosophers find their way out into the sunlight of real truth. Many of today’s intellectuals accept that society is a cave of opinion, but think there is nothing at all outside the cave. All supposed truths are mere opinions. On this evidence, Dekker is firmly ensconced inside the cave. Take away the play’s topicality and there isn’t much left. The Shoemaker’s Holiday is an interesting picture of the Elizabethan cave, but it doesn’t point the way to any deeper idea of what it is to be human. A number of Straussians have examined Shakespeare’s plays for the eternal problems, believing that Shakespeare was able to see that sunlight of real truth. Maybe there’s something in it.

Welcome Back... and Five Memorable Midlands Outings

Five Memorable Midlands Outings

Ok, this is supposed to be a ‘DC’ diary and I don’t live in DC anymore but… as I’d like to start keeping track of my cultural encounters again, this seems as good a place as any to put them. It’s been a year and half since I returned from Washington and during that time there have been a few interesting trips to the theatre, of which these five are the most memorable as I’m sitting here at this moment…

1)   Mozart’s Magic Flute at the Curve Theatre, Leicester. April 2014. This performance was put on by the English Touring Opera company. I would guess that some of the people who like and understand opera look down a little at the really popular examples of the genre: Carmen springs to mind, and the Magic Flute is also in that category – so popular that a real aficionado can’t really demonstrate their superiority by praising it. To make matters worse, this version of the Magic Flute has been translated into English, which probably makes it about as déclassé as Cats. Still, being an operatic dunderhead, I loved it. My experience of opera largely consists in watching the film Amadeus, but this was a much jollier affair. The Queen of the Night’s aria, so manifestly the handiwork of a composer with swagger, was simply mind blowing; and the song of the bird catcher and his new missus is a delight. Sitting on the front row and getting to look straight down and close-up on the orchestra doing their stuff was fun too. Philosophically, I found the enlightenment mumbo jumbo a little hard to swallow, and ended up rooting for the dark powers of reaction and superstition by the finale (but what’s new?)

2)  Antony and Cleopatra at the Swan Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. November 2013. Cleopatra would be one of history’s great characters even if Shakespeare had never mentioned her. Seducing Caesar, ruling half the Roman Empire with Mark Antony and frolicking away madly in oriental luxury while Octavian plotted against her. And then her final epic victory, defeating defeat by serpentine suicide. But with Shakespeare’s assistance, she has left the other feminine enemies of Rome (Boudicca, Zenobia) in her wake to became the ultimate icon of feminine power and mystery, even achieving that acme of honours: her own Lego mini-figure: 

               

So the performance of Cleopatra should decide the success of the production. In this case, it didn’t. Joaquina Kalukango as Cleopatra was not the force of nature the role calls for but, somehow, the play managed to be a winner anyway. Perhaps it was Jonathan Cake as a particularly hunky and sculpted Antony, or the stand out performance of Chukwudi Iwuji as Enobarbus, or perhaps it was the experience of seeing such an epic play in such an intimate theatre, but the result was a triumph all the same.

3) The Two Gentlemen of Verona at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. August 2014. The BBC made the effort to produce television versions of Shakespeare canon in the late 1970s. The budget can’t have been great and some of them fell a little flat, The Two Gentlemen of Verona included. This version at the RST didn’t have a particularly famous cast and walking into the theatre to see the stage set up like an Italian piazza, complete with café and gelateria, set a few alarums ringing. I needn’t have worried. The audience interaction was fun (although being introduced to Julia as Silvia’s boyfriend was initially a little discombobulating), the acting was great and some of the scenes were weirdly hypnotic (the nightclub dancing scene was a little like Twin Peaks set in Milan). But one role makes or breaks the Two Gents: Crab the Dog. In this case, an up and coming actor by the name of Mossup was a revelatory force of comic genius.

4) Much Ado About Nothing at the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, Stratford upon Avon. October 2014. Ok, ok, I should probably stop watching this. In Washington alone we had this and this. But it’s just so gosh darn enjoyable. In this case, the result was a little disappointing. The first intimation of trouble was renaming it Love’s Labours Won and arguing in the programme that Much Ado is really an alternative name for one of Shakespeare’s plays considered lost, the sequel to Love’s Labours Lost (except with, er, a completely different group of characters and plot). The slapstick didn’t quite hit the right notes (although the rest of the audience sounded their appreciation) and the setting (England immediately after World War I) wasn’t remotely compatible with the warmth of the dialogue. Setting it in Italy (the Kenneth Branagh film), California (the Joss Whedon film) or somewhere latino (the version in DC) reflects both the characters’ names, the summery feel and the pure joy we feel in rooting for Shakespeare’s most likeable couple. The sombre shroud cast over proceedings by the horror of the Great War, not helped by the wintry stage décor, took something special away from what might otherwise have been an excellent production. Later in the play, time seemed to skip forward a few years and we had the flappers of the roaring twenties, which suited the play much better. Michelle Terry was brilliant as Beatrice, although Dogberry was played as somebody with genuine mental health issues, which again undercut the humour, and Benedick (Edward Bennett) was so camp that an entirely new dimension was added to the play (intentionally or not). Imagine, if you will, a Benedick played by this guy’s double. Beatrice at one stage dressed up in a suit a tie which on its own might not suggest much but, with Benedict's Matthew Kelly impression, it did raise an interesting question… did Benedick and Beatrice want to remain single because they were gay, and was their eventual union then a lavender marriage?

As an aside, why did we change enigmatical to enigmatic and politic to political?

5) Antigone at the Lakeside Theatre, Nottingham. October 2014. This adaptation of Sophocles’ tragedy stuck closely to the plot whilst setting it today in gritty urban interiors. Classics is a rich, white person’s thing, populated by progressives who genuinely want it to be less white and rich, so I suspect this version got good reviews from lots of people who felt a lot of right on condescension towards it. Unfortunately, for me it was memorable only in the way that the things we really want to forget are the things we can’t forget. Putting ancient works in new settings can work fantastically well, for example the film O Brother, Where Art Thou?, and Antigone itself has been cleverly adapted, or perhaps used, since it became almost unrecognizable, in the anti-apartheid play, The Island. This is not one of those times. It is not even a brave crack at one of those times. It is New Jack City minus the charisma crossed with Eastenders minus the humour. No. Just, no.

Anyway, with this brief round-up out of the way, next up will be a more in-depth review of Thomas Dekker's The Shoemaker's Holiday at the Swan Theatre in Stratford.