Review: Ben Jonson's Volpone at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

Review: Ben Jonson's Volpone, RSC at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon

The current RSC production of Ben Jonson’s Volpone at the Swan Theatre must rank as one of their slickest, funniest and most glorious productions yet. It has certainly been my highlight of the year.

First, the plot. The eponymous anti-hero, Volpone (The Fox), has a lot in common with Marlowe’s Jew of Malta. Both are charismatic and seemingly amoral individuals with a covetous love of wealth. But both have passions which are ultimately more powerful than their greed. Where Barabas had a pride which when offended drove him to the most horrible acts of revenge, Volpone’s early and enduring flaw is a need to use the greed of other wealthy men to con them out of their possessions. As the victims of his plots are themselves so unappealing, the audience’s sympathies cannot help but side with the flashy and witty Volpone. The plot owes much to popular stories about wily foxes which lay down in fields pretending to be dead. When a bird comes to feast on the corpse, the fox springs into action and banquets on the carrion bird instead. In Volpone, the wealthy fox pretends to be

older, decrepit and close to death. His fellow grandees see an opportunity to inherit the wealth of the childless Volpone and attempt to buy his affection (and a place in his will) with expensive gifts. It is clear that more than greed motivates Volpone: he glories ‘more in the cunning purchase of my wealth than in the glad possession’. What he really enjoys is conning his ‘friends’, the lawyer Voltore (the Vulture) and the merchants Corvino and Corbaccio (ravens).

All is going well and Volpone decides to take his plan to the next level: his parasite Mosca encourages Corbaccio with a scheme to guarantee a place in Volpone’s will. If Corbaccio alters his will to leave his estate to Volpone, despite having a son of his own, then the dying Volpone will surely make Corbaccio his heir out of gratitude. The flaw in Corbaccio’s thinking is that Volpone is actually in the prime of life and it is Corbaccio who is the doddering old codger. The plan is working well until Mosca lets slip to Volpone that the young wife of Corvino is exceedingly beautiful. After going out in disguise and seeing her for himself, Volpone develops a passion of another sort. He and Mosca fashion another scheme so that Volpone can have his way with Celia (Rhiannon Handy). Mosca lets Corvino know that Volpone’s doctors have suggested that sleeping with a young maiden would aid his recovery and that by lending Volpone  his wife, Corvino will guarantee himself a place in Volpone’s will. Since Volpone is apparently a drooling, near-comatose invalid, what could be the harm? Unfortunately for Volpone, his two clever schemes become tangled and things begin to go awry…

The stage setting is a real treat. Volpone’s house is like a modern art gallery, all shiny whiteness with his wealth displayed in stylish glass cases. Volpone has a remote control on which he can turn on his CCTV when guests arrive at his door, as well as a large digital stock market ticker surmounting the set. The whole effect is that of a rich and discerning connoisseur. Unlike recent RSC productions, in which the costumes have been somewhat disappointing, in this case the stylish suits of the greedy and the outlandish attire of Volpone’s troupe of freaks are a perfect accompaniment to the elegant set and lively story. Volpone’s regular changes of appearance from powerful grandee to dribbling wreck are impressive, if somewhat revolting up close (think streams of bilious snot hanging off an old man’s chin).

Volpone’s four greedy victims are well-cast. Miles Richardson as Voltore makes an excellent posh but amoral lawyer, Matthew Kelly as Corvino is again excellent (following his turn as a lusty friar in the Jew of Malta) as a buffoonish no-nonsense northern businessman, Geoffrey Freshwater as Corbaccio is likewise again excellent (following his turn as Kelly’s equally slimy and hypocritical brother friar in the Jew of Malta) and Annette McLaughlin as Lady Politic Would-Be plays an excellent tartish gold-digger from a slightly lower societal echelon (Eastenders-esque). Orion Lee’s Mosca is a model of understated, servile cunning, manipulating his social superiors with élan. Volpone’s also gets his kicks from the entertainment provided by

his three freaks, Androgyno the hermaphrodite (Ankur Bahl), Nano the dwarf (Jon Key) and Castrone the eunuch (Julian Hoult). The three oddballs are perfectly cast, exuberantly well-acted and, more than anything else, fun. I suspect there were more than a few women in the audience jealous of Androgyno’s graceful deportment as he sashayed confidently across the stage in his high, high heels. Volpone is a sybarite, who needs ever wilder pleasures and takes ever greater risks to maintain his interest in life; but the results and accoutrements of his empty moral turpitude are a joy to behold!

More than anything, this play gives licence to its leading actor to showcase his talents – and Henry Goodman is clearly very, very talented. The shifts from ailing invalid to wily Machiavel are dazzling enough as displays of raw panache, but then he takes the RSC to another place entirely in the balcony scene. Disguised as a charismatic street vendor, adopting a thick Italian accent and hawking his ‘miracle’ juice (‘To buy or not to buy, that is the question…’), Volpone becomes a different kind of conman entirely, and the results are genuinely hilarious. There was even a touch of improvisation when Volpone interacted with an audience member and received an unexpected answer. In the attempted seduction scene, Volpone shifts gear again and becomes an energetic, if unsuccessful, singing Lothario. Again, credit should be given for the set design: the neon lights, ‘sexy’ music and the bed rising through the floor are like something from a teenage boy’s fantasy circa. 1975. Cheesy, but a perfect match for Volpone’s animated self-confidence. Eventually, Volpone’s tragic flaws are his need to screw over the other characters and his overweening self-confidence. Like the Jew of Malta’s Barabas, Volpone cannot quit while he’s ahead and he tries one more jape out of ‘sheer wantonness’. But Goodman makes what is really an unlikely act of hubris look entirely natural.

This production was marketed as an analogy for the greed and corruption that is so often blamed for the 2008 financial crisis. This connection is strained, partly because Volpone is so clearly more interested in the human aspects of wealth acquisition (getting one over on his rivals) rather than any City slicker hunger for big bonuses. But partly it just wouldn’t work because the play is not a simplistic morality tale about the dangers of corporate greed. Luckily, the marketing doesn’t match the reality and there is no sustained attempt to stress the topicality of Volpone vis-à-vis today’s greedy bankers. Besides the stock market tracker in his living room, Volpone’s only business dealings are the con tricks he inflicts on his friends. Volpone might be a bit of a Bernie Madoff, but Madoff was really a sideshow to the main event. The other small flaw in the production is there in the original. There is a parallel plot involving Sir Politick Would-be which has almost nothing to do with the main story concerning Volpone and it looks like an entirely superfluous effort to add some buffoonish humour to a play that really doesn’t need it.

This is a high-spirited play, joyful and boisterous, but it is also refined. The balance that has been struck between these two aspects should probably not be a surprise from a director as renowned as Trevor Nunn and an actor as versatile as Henry Goodman. Go and watch it.

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.

Week Eighteen, Much Ado About Nothing Redux

24th August 2013, Much Ado About Nothing by the Shakespeare Theatre Company

This will be a short and sweet final instalment of my DC Culture Diary. During my busy final few days, I don't have time for an in-depth review, and this particular play, although not this production, has already been dissected on this blog here. This is probably my favourite Shakespeare play (according to the mother of my theatre companion, it's everybody's favourite Shakespeare play), and all that really needs to be said about this production was that I wasn't disappointed. The Cuban setting made for a raunchy, salsa-filled and passionate production, which managed to seem both novel and traditional at the same time (Sicily being a Spanish-owned island as well, when the original play was set). The comedy was as funny as in Whedon's film, but more impressive for being live, and the biting banter between Benedick and Beatrice both charming and edgy. Recognising an actor from television (Tony Plana, from Ugly Betty) was also a nice bonus. All in all, a great performance, and all the better for being free - after four entries to the Free for All ticket lottery I was just beginning to think I might have to join the queue outside, but my persistence finally paid off.

Now, it's back to England - my next appointment with the Bard will be in his home town for a performance of Antony and Cleopatra by the RSC.

Week Fifteen, A Midsummer Night's Dream

1^st August 2013, A Midsummer Night’s Dream at the Synetic Theater

This is my second visit to ‘DC’s premier physical theater’ so I had a fair idea of what I would be getting. The Synetic’s speciality is wordless theatre, telling stories though action alone. My first visit was for a performance of The Three Musketeers which included some dialogue alongside the dance though, so I wasn’t getting the full-force of the Synetic experience in that show. In that earlier case, the dance/mime aspects were better than the spoken sections, so my expectations for a full dance/mime play were high. Even the thought of seeing a ‘daring’ and ‘innovative’ interpretation of Shakespeare doesn’t cause me the usual fear, for the simple reason that A Midsummer Night’s Dream is one of my least favourite Shakespeare plays. They could have distorted the story as much as they fancied without blighting any beloved memories of mine.

The performance opened in darkness, with unseen dancers moving, seemingly haphazardly, across the stage holding small lights. It was as though a swarm of fireflies were floating frenetically in the night. But as the stage grew lighter, the music took on a tenor suggestive of eastern mysticism, the performers moving like Indian temple dancers and the lights now obviously mini electric candles, evocative of Diwali, the Festival of Lights. Finally, two more dancers emerged, more gloriously arrayed than the others, Titania and Oberon. But Titania as Hindu Goddess. There then follows a bizarre prologue to the play in which we see Puck being born (fully grown) years earlier from a mother who then dies, leaving him to be reared by the faerie monarchs.

Outlandish and captivating so far.

Then the story cut to the more prosaic present, in Athens, where Hermia is due to be married by Duke Theseus to Lysander. But Hermia really wants to marry Demetrius and Hermia’s friend Helena wants to marry Lysander (but he’s seemingly in love with Hermia). So there follows the standard Shakespearean story of the youngsters fleeing into the woods where they are the focus of Puck’s mischievous magic, and all is chaos until the denouement when everybody loves the person they are supposed to love and Theseus agrees to let them all be married. Along the way we have the domestic tiff between Oberon and Titania and the incredibly dull sections with Bottom and his fellow actors. All told without words.

The Synetic is a small theatre and for this show I’d bagged an especially good central second row seat from which to appreciate the physicality of cutting edge dance. I was not disappointed. There are some fantastic uses of movement to create illusion, such as the early section with Demetrius running on the spot and somebody running past him breaking paper doors over him to create the illusion that Demetrius is running through a building and barging through doors (you probably had to be there). Titania and Oberon’s battle over Puck, with the three actors suggesting magical forces at play purely from their own movements, was delightful and stunning. The crowded movement scenes, as in The Three Musketeers, were the most engaging, and another excellent scene was that when the enchanted Demetrius and Lysander were fighting over Helena and fighting off Hermia. There was lots of playfully raunchy humour in that scene too (more Benny Hill than anything actually erotic), which was charming in its knowing innocence. But Puck (Alex Mills), even when alone on the stage, was the real star of the show throughout. Whether climbing up a rope, jumping onto the moon, doing back-flips, contorting himself like a yogi or walking around on his hands, every leap and twist was so natural and, seemingly, effortlessly that one could not help but be impressed. The scene where is was seemingly being pulled all over the stage by a small flower in his hand sounds pretty feeble in description, but actually both funny and beautiful. Really.

Of course, Shakespeare is rightly loved for the power of his words, so you can’t take all the words out and expect every single thing to be hunky dory. For one thing, the performers’ actions have to be extremely obvious to make sure everybody sees them, especially when there are multiple actors on the stage. The jokes were often particularly banal (fart noises, really?), such as depicting Helena’s unrequited longing by having her swig dramatically from an oversized bottle whisky and Hermia overacting when appearing drunk at her engagement party. Shakespeare was at fault for the most tedious, cringe-worthy sections, which were the scenes involving Bottom and the play within a play. These sections are the key reason, for me, that the play doesn’t keep me gripped whoever is performing it. Dull with dialogue, dull without. Nonetheless, there were a number of laugh out loud moments, especially relating to Helena’s attempted wooing of Lysander. The actress playing Helena (Emily Whitworth) has a real gift for comedy.

One of the strongest aspects of the performance was the original score by Constantine Lortkipanidze, who really ought to be scoring major films. The music always added to, and never distracted from, the action. He also had a small part in the cast as the pianist accompanying Bottom’s play, where his musical accompaniment was the highlight (indeed, the only light) of those otherwise dull sections.

Overall, it wasn’t always as funny as I might have liked, but I was still swept along by sheer admiration for the acrobatic feats of dance and movement. For me, this made a bad Shakespeare play watchable. I would love to see a Synetic version of a Shakespeare play that I actually like, but unfortunately I’ll be leaving before the new season begins. The Synetic gives me one more reason to return to DC in the future.

Week Fourteen, The Book of Mormon

25^th July 2013, The Book of Mormon at the Kennedy Center

Mark Evans as Elder Price

I had a few complaints about The Book of Mormon, but these were essentially ethical (see below). Of the key components needed for a good musical – captivating songs, delightful dance routines, a story that keeps you hooked, characters you care about – The Book of Mormon is handsomely kitted out. The songs are not quite up there with the best efforts of Rice and Webber, but then what is nowadays? The song ‘Hello’ is incredibly catchy and gets the show off to a flier, and ‘You and Me (but mostly me)’, a duet between the talented, hardworking Elder Price (Mark Evans) and the lazy, laid back lying Elder Cunningham (Christopher John O’Neill) is also solid. A couple of the better ones were simply comedy copies of other musical hits; for example The Lion King’s ‘Hakuna Matata’ became ‘Hasa Diga Eebowai’ (‘Does it mean no worries?’ ‘No, it means F#!k You, God’), and Annie’s ‘Tomorrow’ morphed into ‘Orlando’ (one of the Mormon missionaries vision for the afterlife involves becoming the god of a new planet based on Disney World). ‘Joseph Smith American Moses’, the African villagers’ version of Mormonism as explained to them by Elder Cunningham, is a hilariously messed up mélange of Mormonism and sci-fi. And Evans is so perfectly cast as the good but soon to be disillusioned, all-American Mitt Romney lookalike that I was surprised to learn later that he’s a fellow Englishman.

But then we come to the shortcomings. I don’t especially like jokes about raping babies or the number of Africans with AIDs, but I accept that my delicate moral qualms are out of sync with our wider culture. If there were any absolute moral standards to cling to such personal discomfort might begin to engender thoughts about Western spiritual decline. But, of course, moral standards are a repressive pre-modern myth. And I’m sure the creators would be disappointed if there weren’t still a few old fuddy-duddies like me around to offend. ‘Pushing boundaries’ has become the key criterion for judging art. Inevitably this means ‘transgressing’ the rules that art should be beautiful and uplifting, and the only way to get a response is to produce something ugly and offensive. So how do you shock the audience? You get everybody chuckling by drawing attention to the incongruity of our images of Africa from The Lion King and the ‘reality’ portrayed here of prevalent AIDs, men raping babies and the mutilation of girls’ genitals. These issues do demand attention (though not necessarily through the medium of musical theatre); but I was also struck by another distasteful, but this time unintended, incongruity: here was an audience of predominantly liberal, progressive types, many having paid $250 a ticket, guffawing at jokes about disease ridden, mutilated Africans.

The overwhelming popular acceptance of The Book of Mormon does reveal something interesting about the extent of hypocrisy surrounding the values of modern progressive culture (because, of course, relativism is really only applied to debunk traditional moral standards). One doesn’t need much imagination to know that if any known conservative had depicted Africans with anything approaching this level of idiocy and depravity, they would have been mercilessly castigated as a racist reactionary. However, because The Book of Mormon’s more obvious target is religion, a perfectly acceptable progressive object of ridicule, the overt liberalism of anti-religiosity earns them a pass on any potential question of racism. The treatment of Africans here is an echo of the contrived controversy last year in America when a conservative talk-show host called a graduate student a slut. This was clearly not a very nice thing to say and it reflected badly on the man who said it (Rush Limbaugh). The storm of abuse Limbaugh received and the line taken by feminists, that the use of that word reflected Limbaugh’s misogynism and the entire Republican Party’s ‘War on Women’, was unsurprising. But that liberal response to Limbaugh would have been more convincing if an equally strong line had been taken when prominent liberal Bill Maher called Sarah Palin a c&*t. Instead, Maher’s textbook liberalism on other issues allows his sexism to be passed over in silence; just as The Book of Mormon’s more obvious send up of religion lends it the leeway to lampoon Africans as well.

But my main criticism of the musical goes beyond nauseating baby-rape jokes, the hypocrisy of politically correct progressivism and even the obvious conclusion that we’re living in the sort of degenerate era usually followed by a dark age. No, the main weakness of the musical is its lack of controversy in its key selling point. Is a satire on religion really especially daring in 2013? Jesus Christ Superstar took some liberties with the Bible and earned some controversy, but that was back in 1967. Monty Python’s Life of Brian was even more evidently a satire on religion, and was banned in a number of cinemas across the world. That was back in 1976, when church attendance and respect for religion were much higher than today. And the religion under attack was Christianity. A satirical musical on Islam would also be daring… but the Mormons? Only a tiny percentage of Americans are Mormons and they have few defenders outside their sect. Atheists and agnostics see it as a joke religion already and even mainstream Christians find them suspect. And unlike certain religions noted for their angry attitude towards perceived insults, Mormons are nice too. There were no Mormon pickets outside the theatre, and the programme actually contains friendly adverts from the Mormon Church pointing out that ‘you’ve seen the play, now read the book!’ The current head of the Mormon Church, Thomas S. Monson, may have once been voted ‘The MostPowerful Octogenarian in America,’ but he isn't in the fatwa-issuing habit, so the cast and creators probably don’t need to go into hiding just yet.

There was plenty of emphasis in the musical about Mormonism being the American religion, created in America and having a uniquely American character. This makes it fair game for attacks from leftist anti-religionists who would normally avoid attacking non-western religions because their anti-religious sentiment in those cases is cancelled out by their anti-western sentiment. We don’t have to imagine how liberals react when non-western religions are insulted because there is a good recent example to hand. In 2011 the American ambassador to Libya and his security team were attacked and killed in an attack originally (mistakenly) attributed to Muslim anger about an internet video produced in America by an Egyptian Copt named Nakoula Basseley Nakoula. This low quality film depicted Mohammed in a very bad light and provoked a good deal of anti-American anger. President Obama was quick to label it a ‘crude and disgusting video’ and he ‘made it clear that the United States government had nothing to do with this video,’ whose ‘message must be rejected by all who respect our common humanity.’ It was also ‘an insult not only to Muslims, but to America as well.’ He went on to add that ‘the future must not belong to those who slander the prophet of Islam.’ He did also point out that America believed in freedom of speech and would not ban the video; however, then Secretary of State Clinton told one of the victims’ parents that the administration would ‘get’ the perpetrators of the video. Despite the video itself breaking no American laws, Nakoula was duly investigated and found to have violated his parole for a former offence and imprisoned for a year. It is hard to escape the conclusion that Nakoula was really locked up to appease Islamic anger. Now, picture an alternate reality where a Republican president had made a similar speech attacking the creators of The Book of Mormon, where the Secretary of State had promised to ‘get’ its creators and where they had been duly ‘got’ and locked away on trumped up charges. There would be a liberal outcry. Islam cannot be attacked, Mormonism can.

There has been no real controversy over The Book of Mormon because they are a weak religion, unpopular with both Christians and atheists, with no defenders. Satire should bring the powerful down to earth. It should be a tool of the weak against the strong, but The Book of Mormon does exactly the opposite. In essence, its creators are bullies, and we, the tittering audience, are their supportive stooges. And this isn’t altered by the fact that Mormonism was such an enticing target because of the apparent wackiness of some of their beliefs (getting your own planet after death, the gold tablet that nobody was allowed to see, the 2,000 year old Jewish civilization in America that has vanished without a trace).

Despite these scruples, I still enjoyed the show. It ends on a happy, and even slightly pro-religious, note. It’s not an endorsement of religion as the truth, but it does portray the Mormons as extremely decent and blissful people (despite the occasional need to repress their un-Mormonic urges), and it does portray religion as something socially useful in backward places (and the Uganda of the musical is definitely a backward place). Essentially, the show shows us that a ‘good’ religion is one which has no regard for the truth but is instead tailored to solve the social problems of the local area. It isn’t exactly an uplifting view of religion but, with the catchy songs, a few great lines, and the joyous finale, it would be difficult for even a curmudgeon like me to leave the theatre without a spring in his step.

Next week,a silent version of A Midsummer Night's Dream at the Synetic Theater