LONDON TRIP REVIEWS

12 to 25 Nov 00

It is unusual for us to visit London once a year, let alone twice in the same year, but a bi-annual conference in the Netherlands called us again to Europe.  There is only one daytime flight from Toronto to Europe and that flight goes to London.  Therefore, is was not difficult to persuade ourselves to add on another bout of theatre-going in London.  As last time we began planning the trip about six weeks beforehand.  In order to accomodate the plays on our must-see list, it became clear we would have to see some before the Netherlands meeting and some after.  Once we discovered that going to the Continent by Eurostar and connecting trains would be cheaper not to mention more comfortable and about as fast as flying, our plans were settled.  I arranged all our tickets by phone directly with the theatres, leaving one night free in case something sold-out should open up at the last minute.

As last time we stayed at the Strand Palace Hotel, not because it is a lovely hotel (it isn't),  but because its location is so perfect for theatre-going.  It's only about a ten-minute walk to most West End theatres and walk just over Waterloo Bridge to the National Theatre complex.  Our first play was an evening performance of THE DUCHESS OF MALFI by the RSC at the Barbican Theatre.  As fans of Shakespeare's contemporaries, this was on our must-see list.  I had taught the play numerous time in a university "Drama to 1642" course but had never seen a professional production before. Unlike our experience with "Othello"  and "A Midsummer Night's Dream" in February, this was an adequate but not a revelatory production.  By setting the play in the near future, director Gale Edwards robbed the play of the richness an historical setting can give it, making seem unnecessarily abstract.  The set seemed to be based on a deliberate misconstruing of the word "glass house", which means a glassworks not the conservatory we were given.  I was disappointed in Aisling O'Sullivan as the Duchess.  It is true that a major point of the play is that she is unwavering, but there must be some other way to show this than by speaking virtually all lines in the same vehement tone.  Some subtext should be suggested that maintaining this steadfastness is increasingly difficult.  The four main men in her life were all excellent--Colin Tierney as her insane twin brother; Ken Bones as her brutal elder brother the Cardinal; Richard Lintern as her lover Antonio, who is pulled unawares into tragedy; and especially Tom Mannion as a Scottish Bosola.  Mannion's performance was so strong that the play seemed really to be more about him than about the Duchess.

We normally choose something light for our first night, not knowing quite how inattentive jet-lag will make us.  But the RSC schedule dictated otherwise.  After taking in a tour of the Globe Theatre on the South Bank (making us wish to visit some summer to see a play there), our comic relief came the second night in the form of Noël Coward's 1925 play FALLEN ANGELS at the Apollo Theatre.  This play proved a delight from start to finish.  It was written primarily as a showcase for two leading ladies, but its production history shows that it is often difficult to find two leading ladies who can get along with each other, let alone play off each other as the play demands.  Luckily, director Michael Rudman has the perfect pair in Felicity Kendal and Frances de la Tour.  Their quite distinct personalities complement each other beautifully and make it believable that they should both have had an affair with the same man and still not be jealous of each other.  The centrepiece of the play when the two women get progressive more intoxicated as they wait in vain for their former lover to arrive is absolutely hilarious.  Special mention should also be made of Tilly Tremayne, who is a real treat as Saunders, the very Jeeves-like maid.

The following day we saw the Théâtre de Complicité's new work LIGHT at the Almeida Theatre in the afternoon and HAMLET at the Royal National Theatre in the evening.  Normally, we don't see two shows in one day in London (there is so much else to do!), much less such a heavy programme as this.  I had arranged the tickets for HAMLET first (one of our must-see plays).  I knew that LIGHT had sold out before it even opened, such is the fame of Complicité.  Nevertheless, I phoned the Almeida every day for about a week, and one day, instead of the usual recording, I was connected to a person who told me two seats were available but only for the Wednesday matinée.  I snapped them up feeling our good luck overrode whatever difficulties this might cause.

As a play LIGHT is extremely difficult to describe.  It is an adaptation by Simon McBurney and Matthew Broughton of a novel by Torgny Lindgren set in a medieval Norwegian village.  A plague borne by rabbits wipes out virtually all the inhabitants of the village.  As the years wear on, the villagers attempt to recreate the way their society worked or should work.  One villager in particular, Könik, needs the clarity or "light" that firm rules can bring.  It's rare to find a new play dealing with such fundamental issues as "How should a society be run?", "How should authority be limited?" and "Is there a point to making laws when there is no one to enforce them?" The questions are very similar to those in William Golding's "The Lord of the Flies", but where Golding is keen to show man's swift descent from civilization to barbarity, Lindgren (as viewed through McBurney and Broughton) focusses on the re-emergence of civilization from barbarity.  The rabbit as a symbol of death again becomes a symbol of fertility.  All these questions are presented through a highly imaginative theatricality--from the use of puppets and narration to the discovery of all manner of props under the floorboards of the stage to constructing even larger props from these boards.  The actors of Complicité work as an ensemble with each intense performance contributing to the whole.  Especially forceful were Tim McMullan as Könik and Lilo Baur as his wife.  The play is so filled with linked images and ideas, it is difficult to take it all in in one viewing, but the experience is powerful.  We had been told that Complicité was an exciting theatre company.  Now we know why.

That evening we moved from medieval Norway to pre-reformation Denmark. The primary reason John Caird's production of HAMLET has been playing to full houses is the performance of Simon Russell Beale in the title role. Beale is just the opposite of the tall, slender, handsome neurotic that has become the caricature of this part.  Instead of seeing extraordinary events happening to an extraordinary man, this HAMLET shows extraordinary events happening to an Everyman.  The gains in playing Hamlet this way are enormous.  No longer are we watching some rarified study in psychology but an ordinary man whose every action is understandable and whose life is only more tragic because of this.  When Beale speaks, every line is clear and natural--every line seems new.  Lines that never made sense before now make sense.  The famous soliloquies flowed from the dialogue that went before and were not underlined (as so often with Shakespeare at the Canadian Stratford) by a change of light or accompanying music.  Beale's performance and Caird's direction give the play a clarity I've never experienced before.  All foolish interpretations are cast aside: Hamlet is not mad and never is. Hamlet treats the Ghost as a ghost not as his father.  Hamlet is not in love with Ophelia.  She is also not in love with him (only her father thinks so). In "To be or not to be", Hamlet is musing on death but not contemplating suicide, and so on.  One cliché after the next is exploded so that every previous performance you may have seen seems false.  Simon Russell Beale may stand out, but Sara Kestelman is also the best Gertrude I have ever seen and Cathryn Bradshaw the best Ophelia.  In this closet scene Hamlet does not change Gertrude's view of herself because it has already changed, an interpretation that avoids making her seem hopelessly foolish.  For the first time I hung on Ophelia's every word in her mad scene, clad as she was in her father's cloak, instead of wishing, as usual, that she'd hurry and drown herself. 

Yet, there were aspects of the production that were not so clear.  Why do all the characters seem to be wearing clerical robes?  Why does the scenery consist entirely of trunks and suitcases?  Is this to pick up the travelling metaphor in Hamlet's speeches?  Why has everything to do with Fortinbras been cut?  Why does the play begin and end with all the characters in niches in the walls lit to look like portraits, whence they step à la Ruddygore onto the stage?  Is the play before us being enacted entirely by ghosts?  Fortunately, the acting is so powerful and the action so clear, these questions tend to pale in significance.  This is the best directed and best performed HAMLET that I have ever seen.

The afternoon this remarkable double bill, we set off for the Continent (to business and more theatre) via the Eurostar train to Brussels. Considering the chore it used to be by ferry, it's amazing that in only 2 1/2 hours one can go from downtown London to downtown Brussels.  Six days later, our conference over, we returned to London by the same delightful method.

On the evening before our return, we had seen a 4-hour-long grand opera by Rossini in Liège.  So we thought it best that our first show back in London be on a completely different scale.  Thus we made our first-ever visit to a pub theatre, the Finborough Arms, to see Steam Industry's production of THE ROARING GIRL, a comedy from 1614 by Middleton and Dekker. (This sort of theatre in London falls under the category of "fringe" theatre.)  The theatre, which is literally above a pub, has a tiny three-quarter thrust stage with room around the sides for at most 50 audience members.  A side benefit of its situation is that you can bring beverages from the pub below to enjoy during the performance.  Steam Industry normally specializes in new plays, so this excursion into the 17th century was quite unusual, but one could easily see the attraction of the material.  This raucous comedy must be the most feminist play of the period. The title character, Moll Cutpurse, is based on a real woman of the time who was constantly being arrested for swearing, carrying a sword, gambling and wearing men's clothes.  Surprisingly, the playwrights are completely on her side and the play mocks the superior attitude of every one of the male characters.  As one might expect the play was done on a very low budget, but as so often happens, wit and imagination provided more than enough compensated.  Modern suits were cleverly modified to suggest Jacobean outfits and the cast brought comic awareness to the artificiality of the cut-out props.  The energetic cast spoke verse as clearly as the RSC and Abigail Anderson provided the inventive direction.  This is a play that really should be part of the regular repertoire since it provides such a useful antidote to such plays as "The Taming of the Shrew".  It is always a pleasure to see a rarity brought to life, even moreso when the play has been so unjustly neglected.

The following day had been the one blank space in our schedule, but we had filled it in before going to Brussels when the Arts Theatre box office came up with tickets so good we couldn't pass them up.  The play was ANOTHER COUNTRY by Julian Mitchell from 1981, later made into a movie of the same name.  We chose this revival over a number of tempting possibilities not just because it had received universal praise but also because we thought it unlikely to travel since its subject matter is so specific to Britain.  We felt (and still do) that only a British cast could play it properly.  The work is an indictment of the British public school as a training ground for the politics of blackmail and betrayal.  The play is infinitely superior to the movie which, by trying to open up the action, does away with the crucial sense of claustrophobia.  The play shows how the central character, Guy Bennett (based on the real spy Guy Burgess), could have been led to his future career as a kind of revenge for the injustices he experienced in school.  The cast, design and direction were so perfect that one couldn't imagine a better production.  Particularly impressive were Tom Wisdom as Bennett, Ben Meyjes (in his professional debut!) as Bennett's communist friend Judd, Alex Avery as the house master Delahay and Edward Purver as the nasty politician-in-training Menzies.  They, along with director Stephen Henry and designer Tim Hatley are people whose careers will be well worth watching.

We always like to have as part of a theatre trip the latest work by a well-known author.  When picking up the tickets for HAMLET at the Royal National Theatre, I thought I would just ask since I was there if there happened to be any tickets to Pinter's latest work, REMEMBRANCE OF THINGS PAST.  I expected to hear "No" and walk off since I had been told over the phone that the first six weeks of the play were completely sold out.  To my great surprise, the woman at the box office said there were two restricted view seats available for the day after the world première.  I did not hesitate!  The seats were in the second balcony of the Cottesloe Theatre. The view was "restricted" only if one sat back and let the balcony rail be in the way.  A slight lean forward and everything was fine.  The balcony was perfect for this play because we could better enjoy the intricate blocking patterns that director Di Trevis had created.  As some may know, this play is the stage adaptation by Trevis and Pinter of Pinter's famous but never filmed screenplay of Marcel Proust's mammoth seven-volume novel.  I am not normally a fan of adaptations of novels into plays.  Too often the language is pedestrian and the adaptor is too concerned with trying to fit in all the famous bits.  This adaptation was completely different.  Hopeless as it would be to fit all the action of the work into a mere three hours, Pinter and Trevis were clearly presenting the play as one man's impression of the novel.  This solution meshes perfectly with the impressionism of the novel where image leads on to image.  Pinter's minimalist style, where the surface conveys volumes more of subtext, causes the three hours of the play to have the resonance of an epic work.  The production itself is gorgeous, one scene dissolving into the next.  This is facilitated by an open playing area and the elegant use of chairs and tables to set up simultaneous scenes.  One sequence of scenes that epitomizes the whole play is when a friend of Marcel's wife alternately affirms and denies his suspicions about her.  This sequence, like the play itself, suggests that people are both interconnected and unknowable at the same time.  Except for the central character Marcel, the rest of the enormous cast play a multitude of small roles in a perfect example of ensemble acting.  Sebastian Harcombe is well cast as Marcel, moving from a perplexed passivity vis à vis the world around him to a futilely active attempt to uncover its secrets.  Duncan Bell is excellent as the tortured, enigmatic Swann, whose fate seems a precursor of Marcel's. David Rintoul makes the horrid Baron Charlus seem pompous, foolish, depraved and dangerous all at once.  Indira Varma is suitably beautiful and sphinxlike as Marcel's beloved Odette.  Diana Hardcastle is hilarious as the Duchess de Guermantes, who seeks to outdo everyone in artistic sensibility. And I could go on so vivid are these small portraits.  By the end we felt we had seen a writer, director and cast accomplish the impossible in so elegantly capturing the essence of Proust's great work.

After visiting the fascinating exhibit on Oscar Wilde at the British Library, we headed off to our final show, a Saturday matinée of Matthew Bourne's THE CAR MAN.  Having been bowled over by his "Swan Lake" in February, this show was one of our must-sees.  Although the ending of both acts was very exciting, I couldn't avoid thinking that the ballet as a whole was not as remarkable as "Swan Lake".  Moving "Swan Lake" from a mythic Germany to an alternative contemporary London is much more an imaginative leap than transposing the story of Carmen from a gritty setting in 19th-century Spain to a gritty setting in the 1950s American Midwest.  The toreadors are now car mechanics and the cigarette girls now work in a diner. Carmen's role has been divided somewhat pointlessly between a femme fatale and an homme fatal.  Composer Terry Davies has expanded Rodion Shchedrin's 40-minute score to a full two hours and, unlike "Swan Lake" this ballet seemed to suffer from padding.  A drag race scene in Act 2 comes to nothing and the men's various displays of machismo and the women's displays of lewdness eventually become repetitive.  The dances themselves are like more angular versions of Jerome Robbins' dances for "West Side Story".  Bourne's troupe shows once again that they are expert as actors as well as dancers. All five principals for the performance I saw--Scott Ambler, Saranne Curtin, Emily Piercy, Arthur Pita and Ben Hartley in the title role--were excellent. Pita was especially impressive as Angelo, the role with the widest emotional range.  While "Swan Lake" had psychological depth and the impact of tragedy, THE CAR MAN ultimately lacked both.  Where I was totally drawn in in the earlier ballet, I felt distanced from the action in the new one.  I was interested to see Bourne trying out a film noir style in a realistic setting, but it seems that fantasy draws more insight and inventiveness from him.

    Excluding the first and last of these eight shows because of their various flaws (though we were still glad to see them), we were hard pressed to choose what might be the best of the middle six.  The differences in venue, focus, style and intent made each of them so dissimilar they can hardly be compared to each other and yet all these were excellent.  To encounter so much variety and so much excellence in so short a time left us both overwhelmed and invigorated.  London had again provided an unparalleled embarras de richesses.  

(Christopher Hoile)
c.hoile@sympatico.ca