LONDON TRIP REVIEWS

Mar 98

I am a professor of English Drama on sabbatical, and I have just returned from a three week theatre trip to London, during which I saw 21 plays, 1 platform performance, one opera and three films.

My theatre going began on Saturday 7 March with a matinee of A Letter of Resignation a play about Harold Macmillan and the Profumo scandal. The play itself did not seem a very memorable one, it was more a star vehicle for Edward Fox as Macmillan. He did a remarkable impersonation, although I am not familiar enough with the historical Macmillan. The entire play takes place in a single room during a single evening although there is a flashback to 35 years earlier when Macmillan learns that his wife is expecting a child of which he isn’t the father, that she is carrying on an affair with Bobby Boothby and intends to continue the affair no matter what. This, in contrast with the Profumo affair which brought down a government, seems to have no serious political effects, and Macmillan is even in the position of getting a title for his wife’s longtime lover.

I rushed from the Comedy Theatre to the Young Vic where the RSC was doing Shakespeare’s Henry VIII. I had some trepidation because I had seen the play done before and it had always struck me as the only dull play in the Shakespeare canon. However I was pleasantly surprised. Jane Laportaire made the role of Queen Katherine come alive, and Ian Hogg was a very effective Wolsey. Paul Jesson was a Holbein portrait of Henry VIII come to life. The production was done with some effective spectacle. The only touch that I found questionable was the appearance of Anne Bolyn at the end of the christening scene raising her hand to her throat.

On Sunday 8 March I went to the Bridewell Theatre to see Max Frisch’s The Fire Raisers. This marks a change from my first visits to London when there was no theatre to be found on a Sunday. Frisch is part of the theatre of the absurd, and there is something very absurd in a prosperous middle class hair-oil manufacturer to allow extremely suspicious men into his attic where they accumulate highly inflammable materials. Both Beidermann and his wife are incapable of opposing these unwelcome tenants. This production with its chorus of firemen seems to be more a morality play on the complaisance of the average person than a political allegory it has sometimes be seen to be. It was great fun, even though the ending declares that if the characters are given another chance they will repeat their mistakes.

Monday, 9 March. To the Chelsea Centre at World’s End to see TimeZone present Shaw’s Saint Joan. Although Monday tickets were only 5 pounds there were only six people in the audience. This turned out to be a very odd production. All the male characters were played by women and Joan was played by a man. Actually the women as men were more effective than a man as Joan. Shaw’s Joan is a superior personality who is able to bring powerful men to do her will, but a man playing Joan seems more an effeminate man than a strong woman. The play was severely cut .

Tuesday 10 March. I got a ticket at the Tristan Bates Theatre (which is part of an actors’ workshop) to see John Webster’s The Duchess of Malfi. It was done in modern dress: Ferdinand had a velvet jacket, Antonio at the beginning was in formal attire. The play was cut, much of Bosola’s misanthropy was missing but Simon de Deney did well with what was left him. The Cardinal (Toby Eddington) was a study in evil, which Debra Beaumont did a very good job as the Duchess. Julia lost her husband, so her reason for being the Cardinal’s mistress was reduced. It was a minimalist production, which I like for Jacobean plays, and effective.

The Magistrate by Arthur Wing Pinero at the Savoy was my play for Wednesday 11 March. This was my first visit to the Savoy since the fire in 1991. It was also my first Pinero comedy. The play is a Victorian farce, which means that none of the characters is really trying to do anything improper, they are just suspected of misconduct. The play is based on one improbable premise: a widow had told be husband-to-be that she was 31 when she was actually 36 and so everyone believes that the 19 year old son is really 14--including the son. From this arises all the complications of the plot. Ian Richardson played the confused second husband, the title Magistrate, who cannot understand why his 14 year old stepson is taking him to rather adult places. As in a good farce everything is worked out in the end, with many laughs in the process.

To the NT on Thursday 12 March for a double bill. First a platform performance Playing Peter at the Olivier during which seven women and three men who have played the role a Peter Pan talked about their experiences in the part. This was something I was very interested in as I planned to see the production later in the month.

In the evening, it was The London Cuckolds by Edward Ravenscroft at the Lyttleton. This is a very rarely done Restoration Comedy, and made a sharp contrast to yesterday’s The Magistrate. In that play everyone had pure intentions while in The London Cockolds no one does. Three city husbands have different ideas about how to have a faithful wife: Wiseacres, an alderman, is marrying a simple girl who knows nothing about men and their wiles. He seems a follower of Pinchwife in The Country Wife. Doodle, another alderman recommends his own wife Arabella, a wit, and Dashwell, a city Scrivener, thinks they are both wrong, the ideal faithful wife is his, a religious woman. All are judging without really knowing their wives. Ned Ramble almost cuckolds all three of the city husbands, but is plagued with the worst lick imaginable. His friend, Frank Townly, who prefers drinking to wenching gets the fruits of two of Ned’s efforts, while Valentine Loveday, a former suitor of Eugenia, succeeds with her. All wives are satisfied, all husbands cuckolded and all maids accomplices of their ladies. Only poor Ned gets left out in the cold.

On Friday 13 March I saw the film Wilde with Stephen Fry in the title role. It was a wonderful and sympathetic portrait covering the period from his American trip to just before his death. It is a film that could not have been made twenty years ago because it is explicit in presenting Wilde’s behavior, but it is not in the least pornographic. Except for Lord Alfred Douglas and his father the Marquis of Queensberry, all the characters are presented sympathetically.

In the evening to the ENO to see an excellent production of Offenbach’s The Tales of Hoffman. It was not only fine singing, it was great theatre with seamless transitions between the scenes. A single soprano, Rosa Mannion” sang all four heroines, and the Guiletta act followed the Antonia act. The diction was so clear that I could understand every word spoken, and most of those sung. (For those who have not been there, the ENO always performs in English).

Saturday 14 March. The Mysteries at the Barbican Pit. In 1985 I saw the “Doomsday” play of Tony Harrison’s “The Mysteries” at the Cottesloe Theatre. In 1991 I saw “The Passion” section at Westminster Cathedral. Therefore when I heard RSC was doing “The Mysteries” I had high hopes--my only fear was not being able to get a ticket. When I learned that the RSC was not doing Harrison’s version but a new one by Edward Kemp, I was disappointed but I still wanted to see it. It turned out to be one of the more depressing evenings I have ever spent in the theatre. The play was in three acts. The first covered the first half of the book of Genesis and was in large part derived from the Mystery Plays, although it was Adam not Eve who first ate of the fruit. The act ended with the sacrifice of Isaac. Act 2 covered Genesis to the nativity, but the problem was not the amount of material it covered by the complete lack of respect for the Biblical texts it demonstrated. Moses is summoned by God to give the people the law (there is no mention of the Egyptian bondage. Later he is called on by the people to give them a king (right out of 1 Samuel) and God tells him to chose the next person who comes to his door, which turns out to be Saul looking for his father’s asses. During Saul’s reign the “enemy” attacks and Saul’s handwoman Judith goes to the enemy camp and cuts off the head of the enemy general (Holofernes--from the Apocrypha). During the war Jeremiah saves a baby from a burning house. Meanwhile God tests Job and when his last son is killed and his body is taken by the enemy Job goes to the enemy general to ransom his son’s body (right out of “The Iliad, Book XXIV) and is cheated (like Rigoletto). David tries to seduce Bathsheba, and when the prophet upbraids him David stabs him to death. Gabriel tells Mary (played by the same actress as Eve and Bathsheba that she is going to have a baby. At the end of the Act Mary cries out that she hates the baby and hates God and gives birth to a full grown son. Act 3 covers Jesus’ ministry. In the first scene he is sent into a prison cell with a gun to murder John the Baptist (or is it Jeremiah--there are no identifications in the play). When he fails to do so John/Jeremiah takes the gun and kills himself, allowing Jesus to go free. He is tempted in the desert by the devil both of them straight out of Dostoevsky’s “Grand Inquisitor.” A mugger (the future Saint Peter) makes Jesus take all his clothes off. Mary Magdalen tells him to leave her alone. He stands outside the door of the middle-class Matthew and eventually persuades him to be a follower. He raises Lazarus from the dead because Mary M. says that’s the only way she could believe in him. He invades the temple throwing holy objects around, while Matthew tells everyone what Jesus has in mind. Caiphas has a long scene with Jesus, again taken from “The Grand Inquisitor.” During a hearing before Pontius Pilate, Jesus tells Pilate that Matthew is always misquoting him (!). After the Crucifixion Matthew drags Jesus’ naked, dead body across the stage--the last we see of him. Pilate shoots Judas. God appears to Mary M. and she mistakes him for Jesus. There is no resurrection, no atonement, no resolution. I cannot say I liked this play. It started at 5:00 PM and ended at 11:00.

Sunday 15 March. At the Shakespeare Centre, the old Red Bull, they are doing a series of readings of Elizabethan/Jacobean Plays with Jewish characters. Today the play is The Custom of the Country by Fletcher and Massinger. As Fletcher and Massinger plays are very rarely done this century I really wanted to see this staged reading. There were no costumes, no props, no sets, just a bare stage with actors in street clothes and scripts in their hands reading a play. But it was effective. The play is a Jacobean melodrama about the adventures (often bawdy) of two brothers who flee their homeland because of the custom that gives the prince the right to the first night with the bride of one of the brothers. They arrive in Lisbon where the bride is sold by pirates to, Hiippolyta, a lusty rich woman, who becomes enamoured to the husband. The other brother becomes the main attraction in a male bordello that accommodates lusty women. Eventually everything works out satisfactorily with all the characters paired off. The Jewish character is Zebulon, servant to Hippolyta who tries to accommodate her desires by fair means or foul. He is not a villain. The afternoon was well spent, but it was a single performance that is not to be repeated. It may be my last chance to see this play.

In the evening to the Courtyard Theatre, a true hole-in-the-wall theatre near King’s Cross Station. The play was The Frogs of Aristophanes, which they performed with almost no up-dating. Their faithfulness to Aristophanes text was admirable. The play, directed by Jane Abbott, the founder of the Courtyard theatre, was very enjoyable. Chris Davies played the god Dionysus, who has traveled to Hades to bring back the recently dead Euripides as there were no more decent tragic playwrights in Athens. The major action of the play was a contest between the two dramatists Aeschylus and Euripides for superiority. Aeschylus wins hands down. Sophocles remains above the fray. Aristophanes loved to ridicule Euripides, and this gave him one of his best opportunities. The show was fun from beginning to end.

Monday 16 March: Shakespeare’s Cymbeline by the RSC at the Barbican. This was a much more satisfying evening than the RSC’s “Mysteries” two days ago. “Cymbeline” is one of Shakespeare’s plays that I have seen life only once before. There was a very strong Japanese influence on this production. The costumes were a mixture of Druidic, Japanese and Roman. The set was covered by a large sheet of cloth that could be raised, lowered or even walked through. The Italian scene was dominated by a large chessboard like area suggesting the gambling/game aspect of Italy. Edward Petherbridge did what he could with the title character, although not much was provided by Shakespeare. The final scene is the most complicated denouement anywhere in Shakespeare. Every time we thought the play was winding to a close some new revelation gets made. I enjoyed the play, but was not overwhelmed by it.

Saint Patrick’s Day, Tuesday 17 March. There is a theatre club in Hampstead over a pub. It is called Pentameter’s, and there there was a new translation of Moliere’s Les Femmes Savantes under the name of Women of Intellect. This was Moliere’s next to last play, and typically of Moliere it centered on a romance, but this served as the hook for his real purpose, comedy of character. Here a group of women have made themselves an academy in which they hope to lay down aesthetic laws for the rest of the rest of the country. They champion a dreadful poet and with named Trisottin, and the mother intends for her younger daughter, Henriette, who is NOT a member of the group to marry Trisottin, while the girl herself wants to marry Clittandre, the rejected suitor of her sister, who is a member. The father is thoroughly under the thumb of his dominating wife, and his sister, Belise, believes every man is secretly in love with her. It is all very funny and ends with the proper wedding. This is the sort of thing that the fringe theatre does very well.

Wednesday 18 March. Middleton and Rowley’s The Changeling does not seem the ideal text for a movie, but such a film has been made. But the film is something of a stylistic mess. Parts of it are set in the 16th century Alicante of the play, but other parts are very 1990’s. The Governer, Beatrice-Joanna’s father rides around Alicante in a stretch limousine, accompanied by motorcycles. There are shorts of a modern city. The violence of the action is accentuated. In the final scene Beatrice-Joanna is not merely stabbed but literally covered with blood. De Flores’ face is a mass of pustules. The defloration of B-J does not take place off-stage but in full view, on the chest in which the body of her fiancé Piraquo has been placed, which oozes with blood. The scene itself is interspersed with a real bull fight, which provides much more blood. There is a modern rap singer in the asylum, and after the defloration scene raps “fuck” about fifty times. The film makers seem to believe that nothing succeeds like excess. Actually parts of the film were effective, but the total picture was too much. I would not use it in my Elizabethan/Jacobean Drama class.

That evening I went to the Duchess Theatre to see Brief Lives, with Michael Williams as John Aubrey. I did not see Ron Dotrice’s performance of the play. It is a one-man show and has virtually no plot, one day in the life of the antiquarian, John Aubrey. It was very funny in places, but part of the audience did not return for the second act. Patrick Garland had rewritten the text for this production, and today was actually the first preview performance. I had asked London Theatre Guide Bulletin Board for advise on what to be sure to see, and Brief Lives was the only suggestion. I was not disappointed.

Thursday 19 March. Once again to the NT, this time to see a matinee performance of Tom Stoppard’s new play, The Invention of Love. I will put this as one of the highlights of my London sojourn. It is a delightful play (especially if you know much about the aesthetic movement and events in England between the 1870’s and 1930’s. The central character is the Poet Scholar A. E. Houseman (called AEH) and the play begins just after his death, when he is picked up the Ferryman (Charon) to be taken to Hades. But before he gets there he sees himself in the 1870’s as a new Oxford student (called Houseman), along with Pollard and Moses Jackson (the great secret love in Houseman’s life). We have sconces of Ruskin, Pater, Jowett and Pattison (an Oxford Dean) playing imaginary game of croquet and discussing aesthetics. In one scene Jowett mistakes Houseman for Oscar Wilde, who was also an Oxford student at the same time. There is a fine scene in which AEH and Houseman discuss their interests (Houseman not knowing who AEH is). In the second act we meet other historical characters including Stead, the newspaper publisher, Frank Harris, and Jerome K. Jerome. Toward the end of the play there is an imaginary scene between Wilde (after his prison term) and AEH. Wilde is a person who acted out all his impulses, contrasted to Houseman who concealed his. But AEH is redeemed by being a poet as well as a scholar. I loved every minute of the play, although other members of the audience were more confused.

That evening I went to Ealing to see the Questers’ production of Jarry’s Ubu Rex. The play suffered in comparison with the Stoppard play earlier in the day. This was more of a student production. There were six different actors playing both Ubu and Mrs. Ubu. I enjoyed watching this play, a forerunner of the absurd, but I did become conscious of the discomfort of the seats.

Friday 20 March. There is a fatality against my seeing Babe the Sheep Pig at the Hackney Empire. When I arrived at the theatre in plenty of time I learned that there were no seats to be had, every seat was taken by school groups. Was I blessed or cursed by not seeing this play amid hundreds of school children? In the evening I did get to Epitaph for the Whales by Yoji Sakate at the Gate Theatre. This is a very contemporary play which is sometimes hard to understand. The main character is the only surviving son of a family of seven who is engaged to a girl who we eventually learn is pregnant, but not by him. In what seems to be a dream he is visited by his aunt and five of his brothers. It seems the brothers were killed (or not killed) after hunting a whale, which proved to be a mother with a young calf. The terrible guilt of this killing has haunted the entire family. Near the end of the play, the eldest brother appears as an incarnation of the Whale God, and the brothers’ further guilt is accentuated by the revelation that they killed the own brother. After the protagonist awakes--what in his dream was real?--his fiancee reveals that she plans to have an abortion that day, and that the father of the child was no one he knows. The protagonist goes off state with a knife, after reading that whales and humans are the only animals that commit suicide. After he returns his brothers and Aunt return to him. This is a very Japanese play, and it would have been more satisfying with an all Japanese cast. The mysticism of the play was not always clear.

Saturday 21 March. In the morning to Richmond to see the RSC production of The Herbal Bed, by Peter Whelan at the Richmond Theatre. This is a play about a slander against Shakespeare’s daughter Susannah Hall and how she is falsely accused of adultery and of having venereal disease. The interaction of the characters. The questions of guilt of intention and commission, of truth and lying, of love and passion ,of faith are examined. There is one wonderful moment in the second act in which the maid is asked a question by the examiner who tells her to look up to the ceiling of the cathedral and see God there. Later she says to the principals, she did see God and He told her to lie! At the end of the play we are told that Susannah’s father is suffering from an advanced and incurable case of clap (this is in 1612--Shakespeare lived until 1616. The play ends just before Shakespeare is to be brought in. Not a great play, but worth the trip.

That evening to the Triangle Theatre to see Strindberg’s The Dance of Death Part 1. In 1969 this play was being performed by the NT at the Old Vic with Laurence Olivier as the captain, and I was unable to get a ticket. Twenty nine years later I finally got another chance to see the play (but without Sir Larry). The play is a typical Strindberg marriage play (he hated marriage). An army Captain and his former actress wife have been married for twenty-five miserable years. An old friend that they have not seen for fifteen years comes to the island on which they are stationed and on which they have no friends. He becomes a middle-man through which they send their venom against one another. The play seems a forerunner to “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf” and “The Lion in Winter”; in the end the love/hate couple plan to face the silver wedding anniversary together. This production set the play on an island off the coast of Ireland in 1913. The name of the third character is changed from Kurt to Conner to accentuate the Irish quality of the production.

In my last week my wife and eight-year-old son joined me, and the play-going declined.

Tuesday 24 March. We went to the NT for Peter Pan by James Barrie. My wife and I had seen the RSC production about 1985 and this one was somewhat based on that. This is an augmented “Peter Pan” with a narrator character speaking some of the lines that Barrie had written for the book version of the story. (In the RSC version as I recall, his lines were more based on the stage directions from the printed text of the play.) The narrator was originally Alex McCowan, but an illness of his caused him to be replaced by Paul Webster, who did a very good job, but I missed McCowan whom I had seen recite “Saint Mark’s Gospel” and was enthralled by it. Ian McKellan was a fine Mr. Darling/Captain Hook, chewing the scenery it a way appropriate for the part. Jenny Agutter personifies Mrs. Darling, and Jan Knightly almost stole the show as Nana. The RSC had broken with tradition by casting a man to play Peter Pan, and the National has continued this new tradition. Daniel Evans played Peter with a Welsh lilt, but his performance accentuate the underlying sadness of this perennial play. The ending of this version comes from the book version rather than the play. Wendy grows up, and Peter goes off to Spring cleaning with her daughter Jane, and in time will come back for Jane’s daughter and on and on “as long as children are young, and innocent, and heartless.” The audience warmed to the production and (although I prefer my memories as the RSC version) this is a fine moment in theatre.

Wednesday 25 March after getting child minding for our son my wife and I went to the Playhouse to see David Hare’s The Judas Kiss. This is an interesting play about Oscar Wilde at two key moments of his life: in 1895 after the collapse of his case against Lord Queensberry and before his arrest during which he could flee from England, but failed to do so, and in Naples in 1897 after he had returned to Alfred Douglas (Bosie) against his vows not to do so. The play begins with a gratuitous shocking scene, two hotel employees engaging in heterosexual oral relations in the bed of the hotel room reserved by Lord Alfred Douglas. Most of the act is a struggle between Robby Ross and Bosie over whether Oscar should flee while he has a chance. Oscar chooses to do nothing. Act 2 begins with Bosie in bed with a Neapolitan fisher while Oscar sits by the bed and comments. For those with a taste for male nudity the Italian remains totally unclad for about fifteen minutes. Oscar, visited by Ross refuses to leave Bosie because he loves him, but when Bosie gets a letter from his mother offering a pension if he leaves Oscar he does not hesitate. Oscar declares that the Gospels did not get the story right: Jesus should not have been betrayed by Judas but by John, the beloved disciple. Liam Neeson was a first rate Oscar Wilde, but the play as a whole was disappointing.

Thursday 26 March: the last show. My son is really interested in trains so we went to the Apollo Victoria for Starlight Express. It is loud. It is fast. The play is pure sentimentality. It is cute. I far prefer Cats which at least has T. S. Eliot’s poems. However, my son liked it very much, and we went to it for him. Our seats were among a group of about 50 German teen-agers who seem to have come over with a teacher. This did not help.

The one film I didn’t mention was Mrs. Brown with Judi Dench. While I was in London she did not win the Academy Award.

(March 1998 / Stephen J. Teller / steller@pittstate.edu)