Plain English: March 2009 Archives

Cheek by Jowl's Andromaque is a co-production with the Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, and I managed to catch up with it while on tour at Oxford Playhouse. Director Declan Donnellan and his designer/partner Nick Ormerod have devised the most spare production imaginable - a bare stage with only a few chairs, and costumes that amount to Ruritanian uniforms for the men and sexy 1930s/40s French dresses for the women. Such movement as there is, is provided by the cast of nine actors processing around the stage and moving the chairs. Gloriously, the play is delivered in French, with English surtitles keeping the audience informed about what the actors are declaiming.

Charles-Geneviève-Louis-Auguste-André-Timothée d'Éon de Beaumont (1728-1810),  le Chevalier d'Éon, was a career diplomat, in addition to being a part-time soldier and an amateur spy. But it was only the last of these that attracted the difficult-to-categorise Canadian art/performance producer Robert Lepage. For d'Éon, says the programme for the performance called "Eonnagata" (at Sadler's Wells recently), "was probably the first spy to use cross-dressing in the pursuit of his duties." I doubt this, but can't cite from memory a Homeric or classical counter-example. The same note says that he incurred the wrath of "Louis XVI, who forced him to wear a dress all the time." In the end d'Éon appears to have been so used to his frocks, that no one really knew his sex.

At the Royal Opera House (with one more performance, tonight [March 7] and a BBC Radio 3 broadcast on May 30) is one of the musically finest productions of Wagner's  Die Fliegenede Hollander I can remember. Bryn Terfel looks more like a Monty Python lumberjack than a sailor, let alone the Wandering Jew, but his singing of the role of the Flying Dutchman is so nuanced and dramatic that it's an astonishing bonus that the same is true of Anja Kempe's Senta. There have been a certain number of critical complaints that the costumes, the wavy curtains during the overture, and the large curving set all ignore Wagner's (over)explicit stage directions. However, I feel that Tim Albery's contemporary dress production with splendid, simple sets by Michael Levine,is simply straightforward, with the confidence, unusual as it is welcome, to let the story tell itself. And its single departure from simplicity, when the spinning song takes place in a factory full of sewing machines, is such a good visual joke that it made me love the production even more. Mind you, it was so different from last month's concert performance at the Barbican that it really could almost be another work entirely - but isn't that a good thing? Doesn't it mean that the staging actually adds something significant?

T: +44 871 911 0200

www.eno.org