{"id":726,"date":"2010-03-26T17:04:51","date_gmt":"2010-03-26T17:04:51","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp\/2010\/03\/hit_or_miss.html"},"modified":"2010-03-26T17:04:51","modified_gmt":"2010-03-26T17:04:51","slug":"hit_or_miss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/2010\/03\/hit_or_miss.html","title":{"rendered":"Hit or Miss"},"content":{"rendered":"

Funny that the same theatre company sometimes has a hit and a flop in the same week; but that’s exactly what the Royal Shakespeare Company did recently. Denis Kelly’s new play, his take on King Lear<\/i>, called The Gods Weep<\/i>, and starring Jeremy Irons, opened at the RSC’s current London base, the Hampstead Theatre. It was so very bad (and this is, I believe, the unanimous view of all us London critics) that you have to wonder why someone didn’t say, at an early stage, “Look, this is not good enough to stage. Go home and rewrite it, and we’ll see if anything can be salvaged.” But the next day in Stratford-u-Avon, the RSC opened Rupert Goold’s superb Romeo and Juliet.<\/i> http:\/\/online.wsj.com\/article\/SB126955523847067631.html <\/a><\/i> <\/span>Go figure. <\/p>\n

\"production<\/div>\n
<\/div>\n
Cheek by Jowl Macbeth<\/b><\/i><\/div>\n


\n<\/p>\n

 <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The National
\nTheatre has recently mounted a pair of new productions, one of which I found
\nmildly amusing, while the other I thought a real masterwork. The ho-hum play (for
\nme) was a revival of Irish playwright Dion Boucicault’s 1841 romp, London Assurance<\/i>, directed by Nicholas
\nHytner, and redeemed only by designer Mark Thompson’s period sets and costumes
\nand the performances of its stars Simon Russell Beale and Fiona Shaw.
\nBoucicault was a jobbing playwright, and the original version of the play
\n(nicely updated for the NT) was really a vehicle for the Russell Beale and Shaw
\nof his day. And that’s still the problem with it. Despite the funny character
\nnames (she’s Lady Gay Spanker, he’s Charles Courtly) and hint of Restoration
\ncomedy naughtiness, it’s just a trifle about money and marriage, with lots of
\nopportunities for camp acting.<\/span><\/p>\n

Mikhail
\nBulgakov’s The White Guard<\/i>, on the
\nother hand, is another one of the NT’s hugely successful productions of Russian
\nplays directed by Howard Davies. The chequered history of the work (first
\nnovel, then play – or maybe not) is undetectable in Andrew Upton’s new version,
\nwhich brings the slang of the dialogue up to date without detracting from the
\nhistoric credibility of the characters. It is the Ukraine 1918, and the
\nbourgeois Turbin family is caught up in the civil war that followed the October
\nRevolution. (The background is supremely well explained in the programme essay
\nby the Oxford Russianist, Julie Curtis, one of the best such efforts I’ve ever
\nread.) The large, hospitable apartment household in Kiev is held together by
\nthe sole woman in the play, Elena Vasilena Turbin (Lena, played gloriously and
\nbelievably by Justine Mitchell), wife of the White Guard’s (i.e., the armed
\nforce of the Tsarist White Russians) Deputy Minister for War, and her two brothers,
\na country cousin and several hangers-on, including her admirer, Lieutenant Leonid
\nShervinsky. Conleith Hill plays him as a puffed-up dandy, whose physical
\nself-confidence would seem completely misplaced – except that Lena really is in
\nlove with him. The casting is so luxurious that the wonderful Anthony Calf has
\nonly a small role as the preposterous White leader, the Hetman. He even looks a
\nbit like John Cleese in this part, which emphasises the Monty Python aspects of
\nthe whole staging. Which is very appropriate, for the playwright seems almost
\nto have anticipated their surrealist streak, and joined it to a Chekhovian view
\nof his characters crossed with the Tolstoy of War and Peace<\/i>.<\/span><\/p>\n

In the 30 or 40
\nplays I must have seen on the stage of the Lytteton Theatre over the course of
\nthe 17 or 18 years I’ve been the Wall
\nStreet Journal’s <\/i>critic, I’ve never seen the stage machinery better used
\nthan in Bunny Christie’s amazing designs. The whole, vast apartment set recedes
\nmany, many metres to the very back of the outer wall of the stage, to be
\nreplaced by another huge set for Hetman’s Palace – in the blink of an eye. It’s
\nbreathtaking.<\/span><\/p>\n

Bulgakov’s great
\nfeat is to make a sort of comedy of this tale of the White Guard losing the
\nwar, first to the evil, Jew-torturing 
\n<\/span>Ukrainian Nationalists commanded by Petlyura, and then to the
\nBolsheviks. The play is filled with singing, eating and vodka (and some of the
\nbest-directed drunk scenes I’ve ever seen); and the Turbins and their friends
\nexude warmth and good feeling. Nevertheless the play has scenes of Nationalist
\nviolence and plentiful tragedy surfaces through the comedy in the production’s
\nsecond half. Cynicism seems the only possible way to protect yourself, in the
\nend. Betrayed by his boss, the Hetman, and by their German allies, Shervinsky
\nof course discards his White Guard uniform, When he shows up at the flat in
\nKiev, he’s asked  <\/span>by Lena whether
\nthe new overcoat he’s wearing means he’s gone over to the Bolsheviks? “This overcoat
\nis neutral, darling, neither Bolshevik nor Menshevik. Just essence of prole.”<\/span><\/p>\n

Declan Donellan
\nand Nick Ormerod’s Cheek by Jowl troupe are performing their spare version of Macbeth<\/i> at the Barbican. I’m still in
\ntwo minds about it. I love the first scene and reappearance of the Weird
\nSisters (“witches” is not used in Shakespeare’s text) as the whole ensemble
\n(which includes only two women) whispering menacingly in the background, the
\nuse of mime, even for the violent scenes, and the absence of props (all the
\ndaggers here are daggers of the mind). I wasn’t so sure about the minimal
\ncostumes – the black T-shirts sported by most of the men make it difficult to
\nknow who’s speaking. <\/span><\/p>\n

Taking a clue
\nfrom the programme again, the production seems to endorse Freud’s view that Mr
\nand Mrs Macbeth are one being split into two bodies, both feeling the same
\nambition, and the same apprehension, and both needing to be told to screw their
\ncourage to the sticking point. Anastasia Hille and Will Keen capture the
\nintensity of their situation, and make very good, essentially narcissistic
\nlovers. In this very physical production the boys can’t keep their hands off
\neach other, and in the midst of this constant homoerotic cuddling, the scenes
\nof heterosexual love are actually a wee bit shocking. I am convinced this was intentional,
\nbecause the only other woman in the cast, Kelly Hotten, plays a sluttish
\nPorter, mini-skirted, knickers showing as she runs her metal detector
\nlecherously over the crotches of the men seeking entry to the castle. <\/span><\/p>\n

Does the
\nproduction illuminate the play? The bar is very high, as last year we had
\nRupert Goold’s unforgettable version of the Scottish play. Yes, I think the
\nconcept of the Macbeths as a single soul in two bodies is interesting. But if
\nthere really was a homoerotic subtext in the production, one expects to see it embodied
\nin the relationships of Macbeth to Duncan, Macduff and Banquo; and if it was
\nhere, it somehow eluded my attention.<\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/o:p><\/span><\/p>\n

<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Funny that the same theatre company sometimes has a hit and a flop in the same week; but that’s exactly what the Royal Shakespeare Company did recently. Denis Kelly’s new play, his take on King Lear, called The Gods Weep, and starring Jeremy Irons, opened at the RSC’s current London base, the Hampstead Theatre. It was so […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_genesis_hide_title":false,"_genesis_hide_breadcrumbs":false,"_genesis_hide_singular_image":false,"_genesis_hide_footer_widgets":false,"_genesis_custom_body_class":"","_genesis_custom_post_class":"","_genesis_layout":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-726","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","6":"category-uncategorized","7":"entry"},"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pbv6zV-bI","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=726"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/726\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=726"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=726"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/plainenglish\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=726"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}