Tag Archives: Minerva Theatre

I Found My Horn – October 2009

8/10

By Jonathan Guy Lewis and Jasper Rees, adapted from the book by Jasper Rees

Directed by Harry Burton

Company: Sweet Spot Theatre

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Saturday 31st October 2009

This was much better than either of us expected or hoped. I’m familiar with the Flanders and Swann track, but this play was a different beast altogether. Based on Jasper Rees’s experiences of re-learning the French horn and taking us up to his solo performance before an assembled throng of French horn players after just a year of practice, this piece took us through a roller-coaster of emotions. There were glimpses of his time in the school orchestra, a trip to ‘horn camp’ in the States where he was confronted by some superb players, the run up to the final performance and of course the performance itself. Despite being a bit ropy at the start, once he let go of his fears and realised it couldn’t get any worse he started to relax and enjoy himself. His playing improved considerably.

Although based on Jasper’s book about his experiences, the part of Jasper was in fact performed by Jonathan Guy Lewis whom Jasper describes in the program notes as “rather better than me”. He certainly covered a range of parts, from the school orchestra’s conductor through to a semi-crippled but still brilliant German horn player who was the teacher at the camp. Jasper’s teenage sons featured occasionally as well, and all this with only a couple of costume changes. It was a superb performance and much appreciated by everyone.

The other great thing about a play like this is that the music tends to be bloody brilliant as well. And so it was. It left me wanting to log on to Amazon and buy some CDs immediately, so I’m glad the excerpts were identified in the program. Makes searching easier. We would happily see this again.

© 2009 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

The House Of Special Purpose – August 2009

6/10

By Heidi Thomas

Directed by Howard Davies

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Monday 3rd August 2009

This was another new play, originally intended as a film but adapted for the stage. Set in the house in Ekaterinburg where the Romanovs were imprisoned and finally executed, it was a well-rounded drama showing the various relationships, mainly amongst the family but including their guards and other staff as well. One of the guards used to work in a laundry, and quite frankly seems to take a bit too much pleasure from getting underwear clean. He’s seconded to teach the girls to do their own laundry, and soon finds one of the girls even more attractive than a bundle of washing. She reciprocates, and so he’s the only guard who doesn’t take part in the final slaughter.

The family themselves are moderately interesting, with Anastasia being the live wire, and Olga being the worrier who looks after Alexei, the Tsarevich. Turns out she was raped during their trip to rejoin their parents. (She was also played by Annabel Scholey tonight, SATTF’s Bianca and Ophelia.) Tatiana and Maria were the other two daughters, but didn’t stick in my mind so much. The main interest however, is in seeing how they lived, and getting some understanding of their situation – not knowing whether the notes they were being sent were from friend or foe (started out friend, ended up foe) nor whether they were about to be rescued or not. They seemed to be valuable pawns for the new regime, but would that last if they were close to being liberated by the counter-revolutionaries? I felt this aspect of their confinement was evoked very effectively.

The guards and prison workers were, if anything, more interesting, probably because their stories aren’t usually told. They were based on real people, and showed the diversity of people brought into the Bolshevik army at that time. Most had been country folk or labourers in factories. They knew nothing about being soldiers – one chap didn’t even know how to load the gun he’d been given, let alone fire it. The experienced guard eventually offered to teach him how to do it, but he was later arrested for being too friendly with the royal family. His father had been a gamekeeper at one of the royal family’s summer residences, so he spent time reminiscing with family and even gave them a book taken from one of their kitchens, a recipe book, which they fell on like starving people. (To read, not to eat.) He wasn’t the one bringing the notes in, and he refused to take a message out, but he was just too fond of remembering the old times, especially when a new man was put in charge of the house. This chap was much less friendly to the family, interrogating the staff at the house, and putting pressure on them to inform on the other staff, never mind the family. The original commander had been quite amenable, letting the ex-Tsar stop work for a bit and even smoke a cigarette while they had a chat.

The final scene, with the family being told to pack for another change of prison, was quite moving. They went down the stairs, with the laundry guy (Yakunin?) staying on stage to give us some reactions to relate to. After some sound effects of them being led into the cellar, the shooting and the screaming started. As the shots were fired, bullet holes appeared in the back wall, with white light shining through them, a very effective way to get across the number of bullets fired. After the shooting and other noises stopped, another guard came back up to tell him (and us) what had happened. The women had so many jewels sewn into their corsets that the bullets couldn’t penetrate, so they had to be finished off at close range. The floor was slippery with blood, and fragments of the precious stones had flown back at the shooters, causing some injuries. It was the expected ending, of course, but emotive nonetheless.

There was an interesting section about the language of fans, and the period detail was excellent, without turning the play into a docu-drama. The set was suitably flexible, with both inside and outside locations evoked simply and effectively. Chairs, tables, etc. were brought on and taken off efficiently, and although I was briefly concerned that this would slow things down too much, the changes were usually covered well by the cast, as in the way the girls all trooped on for their laundry lesson carrying the tubs. All the performances were good, which made for an enjoyable evening.

© 2009 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Wallenstein – June 2009

2/10

By Friedrich Schiller, adapted by Mike Poulton

Directed by Angus Jackson

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Wednesday 10th June 2009

It’s rare for me to miss the second half of something, as even quite dull productions can improve after the interval, but tonight’s performance was too much even for my boredom threshold. I wasn’t interested in the political manoeuvrings, the characters were largely insipid, there was no tension or drama for me and although I’d smiled at a few of the jokes, there were too few of them to keep me coming back. I admit it’s been a tiring week so far, but in similar circumstances I’ve managed to enjoy a number of productions more than this one, so I don’t think it’s entirely down to me.

The set was a sprawl of paving slanted across the stage with a slight rake. At the back was a peculiar wall – couldn’t really make it out – with double doors in the middle facing the slanted paving. A couple of bare tree trunks completed the picture. We could see through to the back at either side, and presumably through the doors when they were open (we weren’t in the right position to see).

The story concerns Wallenstein, the leader of the Holy Roman Empire’s forces for a large part of the Thirty Years War. He was promised the Kingdom of Bohemia by the Emperor when he took the job on, but the Emperor has not been “in the giving vein” for quite some time, so ambition is vying with loyalty and Wallenstein is contemplating a pact with the Swedes (currently enemies) so he can turn his forces on Vienna, clear out all his political opponents and gain his crown. His daughter and wife are involved (in a minor key), he has various generals who are loyal to him and some who are in the pay of the Emperor’s people, there are emissaries from Vienna and the Swedes (at least in the first half) and we get an early glimpse of a friar who preaches against Wallenstein to his own men (he’s bundled off stage pretty quickly).

It’s the familiar story of the successful leader brought down by the jealousy and fears of others, albeit a version with lots of nooks and crannies, and for once the leader himself has plenty of ambition and arrogance. There are a lot of arguments presented but few real feelings, which is probably why I found it difficult to get involved. Steve had seen a previous adaptation years ago at the RSC so perhaps he enjoyed this one more because he’s already seen a good production. Schiller had so much material when writing about Wallenstein that another version apparently runs to ten hours on stage, so at least this adaptation is a reasonable length but perhaps that’s its problem – too much to cram into the time. The actors were all doing a fine job, as usual, but it wasn’t for me.

I did like the emphasis on the fact that Wallenstein and his generals were paying their men out of their own coffers. It makes it seem even more unreasonable for the Emperor to sack Wallenstein and still expect to keep his armies to fight with, but that’s politicians for you. I wish they’d made more of the fact that this was a war where people kept changing sides, enemies becoming friends and vice versa. Despite the apparent principles involved – Catholicism versus Protestantism – there’s little to be seen of principles through the smoke of war, and bringing out that contrast more could have given the piece more humour and more focus, but it was not to be. Ah well.

I did attend the post-show, and there were some interesting questions and answers. Nothing that changes my opinion of this production, alas, but I’d be more interested in seeing a different version. The adaptor’s focus was on showing a man who had a fantasy of kingship but who didn’t really understand what it was about. I might have engaged with the piece better if that aspect had come out more in the first half. The cast apparently didn’t do much research into the history or the full Schiller version as it wouldn’t have helped; the real history and geography are merely ‘inspirational material’ for Schiller in a similar way to Shakespeare’s histories. The audience were generally appreciative, and I’m glad there were so many staying behind for the post-show as it made for a better discussion.

© 2009 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

The Last Cigarette – April 2009

6/10

By Simon Gray and Hugh Whitemore

Directed by Richard Eyre

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Monday 6th April 2009

I was torn between giving this production a 6 or 7/10 rating. The acting was very good, there was a lot of humour and some moving moments, yet overall I found it not as interesting as other pieces on the same subject; the John Diamond/Victoria Coren A Lump In My Throat, for example.

The set was a three-way split, with three identical desks, chairs, pile of books and pair of slippers carefully arranged along radiating patches of carpet. From what I could see (and from a surreptitious feel of the texture) the carpet was a basic mid-blue, with ray-shaped bands which had been speckled with gray paint, resembling cigarette ash. There was a large screen at the back, and although there was a selection of images to illustrate the story being told, the main image was that of a man, presumably Simon Gray himself. Unfortunately, and I don’t know if this was intentional or not, the image was blurred, with two identical pictures being projected slightly out of sync. It was mildly distracting, as I tried to figure it out at first, and then, once I’d realised what it was, I occasionally looked at it again when the offerings on stage weren’t so engrossing.

The three actors, Felicity Kendal, Jasper Britton and Nicholas le Provost, played three versions of the author. Like some gargantuan inner conversation, they took us on a reminiscence through Simon Gray’s life and some of the circumstances around his experience with cancer. The advantage of having three actors doing this was that the ‘spare’ ones could play the parts of the other people in each scene, and the down side to that was that I wasn’t always clear when they were back playing the author again. Felicity Kendal was the hardest for this; although she was very good as a man, so to speak, she naturally played all the woman’s parts required, and I sometimes found I lost track of who she was. But this is a minor quibble; the play was still very entertaining, and we enjoyed ourselves more than we’d expected to.

One more point. Having read one or two reviews beforehand, and at least one from a critic who’d known the man himself, I was glad that we hadn’t known him at all as we didn’t expect accurate impersonation, just a tribute in play form to his life and work. Which we got, and were well satisfied.

© 2009 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Mine – November 2008

6/10

By Polly Teale

Directed by Polly Teale

Shared Experience

Minerva Theatre

Saturday 8th November 2008

This is one of those plays that probably only a woman could write. It’s very focused on motherhood, and the awkward relationships between not only mothers and daughters, but also a birth mother and an adoptive one. It’s quite nice, after a lot of Shakespeare, to see a play about the one thing he just didn’t do – mothers and daughters.

The set was interesting. The back wall comprised a series of sliding panels, all silvery-grey, which served as a projection screen as well as various doors. There was another door to the far left, and the only furniture at the start was a doll’s house about three or four feet high to our left, and a modern chair and table to our right. There were other chairs brought on as needed, and the second half started with lots of boxes on the stage and the furniture overturned, which the cast sorted out in the early stages, removing the boxes and righting the furniture. They also started packing up the doll’s house before moving it back from our right to its original position.

The back panels had an image of the lighted windows of a high rise apartment block projected onto them early on, to set the scene. The image also reminded me of DNA results, the little blobs that descend down the page. These were across the way, but even so the connection was there for me, and I was reminded of it occasionally during the play. Otherwise, the screen was mainly used for images of a young girl, at play or whatever, to add an extra layer to the action or between the scenes.

We also saw a young girl wandering about (Sophie Stone) in a white dress, and carrying a doll or teddy. She played with the doll’s house, and even talked with the woman (Katy Stephens). The woman was a high-powered business type who seemed to be organising some event or project, almost impervious to outside concerns. Her partner (Alistair Petrie) tells her they’ve got an appointment somewhere the next day, and she starts planning some major changes, cancelling work, etc. It turns out that a young baby, whose mother is a drug addict, is available for them to foster, and if the mother drops out of rehab they’ll be able to keep her. The play follows the process of the handover and the woman’s need to keep a connection going with the birth mother, which her partner finds disturbingly obsessive. The woman goes as far as taking the baby to the birth mother, Rose (Lorraine Stanley) while she’s actually on the job (touting for customers), and the final resolution comes out of that episode.

I found it a moving play, though not in the early stages when the scenes were a bit too choppy and clinical to engage me emotionally. It was in the woman’s relationships with her own family, a sister (Clare Lawrence Moody) and mother (Marion Bailey) that the play came alive, while her insistent desire to find Rose after she’d left rehab was both disturbing and understandable. Disturbing because of the areas of life she and we had to look at – the drug taking, sexual abuse and prostitution – and understandable because she instinctively knew that the baby was going to need that connection to her birth mother some day, and that that relationship had to be acknowledged as part of her life for her to be happy and at peace. Or that’s how I saw it anyway.

I realised early on that the girl in the white dress could be a number of things. She could be the woman herself as a child, or the ideal child that she was fantasising about, but on the whole I think she represented the spirit of the child that the baby would grow up to be. The woman had a number of conversations with her, as well as having dreams which included her, such as playing a game of hide and seek which ended up with the girl hiding in the doll’s house, and then being sealed up in it (the start of the second half). In fact, the whole play had a kind of dreamy quality to it, with the action shifting from ‘reality’ to the imagination all the time, and often these levels were going on simultaneously. On one occasion Rose appeared, and took the baby from the woman, carrying her over to the sister when she arrived, then walking off at the back. I assume that was symbolic, though I’ve no idea of what.

The sister was the one who had children of her own, and who felt less valuable because she didn’t have an important career. But unlike the woman, she did have experience in bringing up children, which the woman thought was the most important thing. Clare Lawrence Moody also played Katya, the home help, who added a touch of humour to proceedings with her no-nonsense approach to child rearing. The mother was the controlling sort, and the woman had felt under tremendous pressure to make something of her life. Now she wanted a child, and didn’t want her mother watching her every move and criticising her. The mother certainly wanted to be involved, even to the extent of waiting outside their house in her car for hours, trying to get the woman on the phone.

The partner is the only representative of the male half of the world’s population, and it’s fair to say that he doesn’t get much of a look in. He does have some good arguments, and a short piece about how he feels, but he’s mainly there to show us the completely rational point of view, and this play makes it clear that there’s more to life than that. There’s a different perspective, a sense of the connections between people, which don’t always operate in a logical, rational way. The woman feels this, and responds to it as best she can, and I could relate to that, while his pleasure that Rose has left rehab, so that they can keep the baby, is quite repulsive; even though it’s understandable, it was played to be unsympathetic. The playing of Rose was important in this respect. We can see what kind of life she leads, and yet she has that connection with her baby, and for a while she seems to want to change her life to be able to keep that connection going. I couldn’t judge her, as she was having a tough time just living.

The play also looks at the way so many busy working women are trying to fit babies into their lives, and aren’t always able to adjust. This woman has a lifestyle that’s beyond hectic, yet she wants a child as well. We see her trying to ignore the baby while trying to get her work done, and having difficulty knowing what to do when the baby won’t stop crying. This sounds like typical drama fodder, but there’s a sense that something isn’t right, that the woman is missing something. Katy Stephens started off playing her very calm, almost too calm and controlled, but as we see her with her mother and sister, we find out more about her emotional life, and Katy is able to express more of the power we saw on stage during the Histories.

It’s a challenging piece, and not to everyone’s taste, I’m sure, but I enjoyed it, and never felt bored, though as I say it did take some time for me to feel involved. I liked the use of imagery, and the performances were all fine. We applauded for quite some time after the cast had gone, but they didn’t come back for another bow, sadly. Steve reckoned there was some kind of supporters’ do that night, so they had to be quick.

© 2008 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Aristo – September 2008

6/10

By Martin Sherman

Directed by Nancy Meckler

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Monday 29th September 2008

I enjoyed this play very much. More so than the several people who left during the first half, or didn’t return after the interval. There was some swearing, and some sexual language which might not be considered appropriate before the watershed, but this is theatre, and we’re all supposed to be grown-ups, so I had no problem with it. In fact, given Aristotle Onassis’s reputation for coarseness, we were probably getting the polite version.

It did take me a short time to get into this play at first. The mildly pornographic story of Aristo’s encounter with a Turkish lieutenant certainly livened things up, and I warmed to the characters from then on. After the opening scene, with Onassis and Jackie on board his yacht, the curtain at the back of the stage slid aside, and a platform came forward with seven people on it, two of them musicians. I realised fairly quickly that this was the chorus, and that we were being given a Greek dramatic structure as well as subject matter. The music was Greek, too, and very good.

The first to speak was Costa, played by Julius D’Silva, who had stepped up to this role replacing another indisposed actor. His prior role, as Theo, was played by Hywel Morgan, another super sub, as he’d stepped in to play the captain and many other parts in Our Man In Havana (August 2007). Anyway, Costa goes into a long spiel about Aristo’s past, the women he’s slept with, the other men they’ve slept with, the marriages, the divorces, the plotting, the business deals, the loves, the hates, etc., etc. It was pretty complicated, but I just about kept tabs on it all, and Costa’s delivery brought out a lot of the humour. Then the technical wizardry started up.

To explain. At the start of the play, the set looked very simple. There was white planking everywhere, and a long rectangular pool, with actual water, along the front of the stage (well guarded during the interval). A flat white wall at the back had a long rectangular window, with a white curtain drawn across it. The sound of Greek music could be heard coming from behind this curtain. There were a couple of chairs, and that’s about it, apart from a door far left, almost completely hidden in the gloom over that way. Once the curtain was drawn back, and the platform came forward, the rest of the white wall was used as a projection screen, allowing for extra settings without much effort. In particular, it was used to create the idyllic island that Aristo used as a retreat, and also to show diagrams of the complicated connections between the many people involved in Aristo’s story, like now, when Costa has been explaining it all to us. The names appeared on the wall, with Onassis in the centre, and with lots and lots of lines drawn everywhere between the people. The chorus all turned and pointed to it, which was very funny. Costa then had even more names to give us, and got a deserved round of applause when he’d finished his stint, as it was mind-boggling how he remembered it all.

Yanni then took over. Played by John Hodgkinson (Absurdia, August 2007), he was instructed to be brief by Costa, which was a bit cheeky considering how long he’d wittered on for. But it soon became clear that brevity was not in Yanni’s repertoire. He kept prefacing the actual information by phrases like “if you’ll permit me to say this”, and “if I can put it this way”, which slowed things up tremendously, but also gave us some good laughs. Yanni was the financial chap, while Costa was the right hand man. Theo didn’t come into it until later, when Aristo asked him how his son, Aristo’s that is, was doing running a plane company. Aristo is furious when Theo describes his son as “nice”, and claims he’s liked by everyone. Not what Onassis expects from his son, obviously.

We also get to meet Maria Callas. She storms on, refusing to be left out of the litany of lovers, and we even get to hear a few snippets of her marvellous singing earlier in her career. It’s a lovely performance by Diana Quick, culminating in the second half in a marvellous cursing sequence followed by an “I wish them all the luck” for Onassis and Jackie’s marriage, which got one of the best laughs of the evening.

Apart from that, we get a brisk review of the tensions between Aristo and the Kennedy clan, his wooing of Jacqueline Kennedy before the death of her husband, and their subsequent marriage, and we’re taken into the speculative area of his involvement in the death of Bobby Kennedy. With this foray into assassination, the tide turns, and Aristo himself becomes one of the hunted. His son is killed in a helicopter crash, and now the man is convinced “they” are out to get him. It’s a study of a particular type of larger-than-life hero, a man who takes on the world and wins, doing what he feels he needs to do for business success. I was very aware during the scenes with his son, Alexander, that it would be impossible for his son to be anything like his father, because Aristo had such hard challenges as young man, while Alexander had been relatively pampered. Hard-won wealth creates its own generation gap.

Robert Lindsay as Aristotle Socrates Onassis was in fine form, showing us his character’s ruthlessness and cunning, along with his charm and passion for life (or should that be sex?). There was plenty of opportunity to sing and dance, including one Greek dance that all the men joined in, hopping over the pool one after another. There were a number of occasions when I felt I was watching the man himself, but occasionally the accent slipped a bit, and brought me back to reality. The changes of mood were very well done, as Aristo was a roller coaster of emotions. Living with him would have tested a saint, and he didn’t seem keen to surround himself with those.

Elizabeth McGovern played Jacqueline, and gave her a kind of dreamy quality. She never seemed to be fully there, even when sober, and certainly not when drunk. I could see the marriage would fail, as she was simply a trophy for Onassis, a way of getting one up on the Kennedy clan, as well as all other men on the planet, and there wouldn’t be anything in it for her other than the money, once Onassis no longer had to woo her into marriage. She came across as someone who wasn’t intellectually gifted, but had spent so much time around those in power that she understood how things worked, and wasn’t particularly bothered by morals. I quite liked this representation of her.

Alexander, Aristo’s son (Joe Marsh), was going through those difficult teenage years, made all the more difficult by his father’s wealth and power. How do you rebel against the man who has everything? And who can seduce you with a helicopter, or expensive car, without worrying where the next mortgage payment’s coming from? Life’s tough just below the top. The chorus, especially his nanny, made it clear he was for the chop, but he did show us another side to Aristo’s character when he was around.

His nanny (June Watson) and another maid in the Onassis household (Denise Black) completed the chorus. Denise did a lot of the singing, and has a very fine voice. I liked the way the chorus talked among themselves, giving us different points of view about the various events, as well as giving us the necessary information about the people. Their prayers to the gods were clear reminders of the cultural background of the main character, and I felt that that culture had a very strong presence in both his life and this play. No plates were broken, but that’s about all that was missing. It was a really good evening, with only a few spells that flagged a bit, and I was very glad to have seen it.

Post-show discussion 1st October 2008

We couldn’t get to this night’s performance, so we came over just for the post-show discussion anyway. Almost all the cast came out, eventually, and we had the writer and director there too, so it was an interesting chat. We learned that the understudies we saw on Monday had only had about a week to learn all those lines, so the achievement was all the more remarkable. The subject of audience involvement came up as usual, and tonight’s audience had apparently been quieter than most, which some reckoned was because there was so much information to take in. Robert Lindsay was asked about what had got him into Onassis’s character, and replied “sex drive”, which made us laugh, though it was evidently true. I forget most of the other points now, sadly, but I remember we laughed a lot, and the cast seemed to be a good unit, though somewhat tired after their exertions.

© 2008 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Collaboration – August 2008

6/10

By Ronald Harwood

Directed by Philip Franks

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Tuesday 26th August 2008

The set was as for Taking Sides, but whole. The wall is unripped, the floor uncracked. There are no suitcases on the balcony or anywhere else, and so we have a door back left. The furniture is period (don’t ask me which one), with elegant legs and lots of lovely wood – piano, tables, chairs. There were two (or possibly three) telephones, a footstool and a radio. Warm orange light shines through diamond patterned windows, casting long shadows across the stage. This represents the Strauss villa, while a curved pattern of light and shadows slanted the other way shows us Zweig’s pad in Vienna.

The title Collaboration is a nice play on words. The story concerns Richard Strauss’s artistic collaboration with Stefan Zweig on an opera, The Silent Woman (based on Ben Jonson’s play Epicoene). We also get to see some of the effects the Nazi government had on artistic affairs, and the pressure that was put on Richard Strauss to collaborate with them. His son had married a Jewish woman, so she and the two grandchildren were under direct threat. This point was hammered home by a thoroughly unpleasant chap called Hinkel, one of those oily young thugs the Hitler Youth was so good at producing.

The story ranges in time from 1931, when Strauss is desperate for a new librettist after the death of his previous collaborator, to 1948, when he had to testify before a Denazification Board in Munich. In 1931, his wife, a practical and formidable woman, suggests he write to Zweig, and the response is both immediate and rapturous. Zweig can’t believe his luck, admires Strauss’s work beyond praise, and already has a couple of ideas for operas. The second one, an adaptation of the Jonson play, is the one that appeals to Strauss, who goes by gut instinct on these things. I was so aware during this scene how familiar educated Europeans were with a wide range of literature, plays, etc., and it reminded me how insular we Brits can be sometimes.

Zweig comes up with a synopsis that greatly pleases the composer, and after a major tizzy when Zweig announces he can’t start on Act 1 for a month (Strauss wants it yesterday), the two settle down to a companionable working relationship. Strauss’s wife has established for us that Zweig has an attractive young secretary who’s devoted to her boss, and an absent wife, so at least one of the plot developments won’t be a surprise.

It’s taken us quite a while to get this far, and although the performances were fine, I was finding it all rather dull; a bit too much biography and not enough drama. The next scene started the adrenalin flowing, with the secretary, Lotte, turning up at Zweig’s house with blood on her head and on her blouse. Although Austria was still independent, the Nazi influence was spreading across the border (Zweig lived close enough to see Hitler’s country retreat up in the mountains), and a couple of young men had tormented Lotte and her friend, with no one intervening on their behalf. It’s the first signs of the brutality to come, although none of that is shown in any great detail.

The Nazis start to control the arts in Germany, and soon appropriate their most famous composer for their own ends. As they’re having a spot of bother with Furtwängler, they appoint Strauss as President of the Reich Chamber of Music, with Furtwängler as his deputy. This is just the first step. When Strauss insists that he must work with Zweig, a Jew, the authorities allow a few performances of The Silent Woman, but do their best to keep Zweig uncredited. Strauss overrules this, and gets into more trouble. He writes a letter which would seem innocuous now, but in declaring himself not to be anti-Semitic, he falls foul of Nazi dogma and has to be put in his place. This is where the threat to his family is spelled out, and it’s also when the wall rips apart. He’s told to resign from the Reich Chamber of Music post, and ordered to write a hymn for the Olympics the following year, which he does. Meanwhile, in Austria, Zweig and Lotte scarper while they still can, and end up in Brazil, where they carry out a suicide pact in 1942. The final scene shows us Strauss, with his wife’s help, giving evidence to a denazification hearing. This covers the rest of the war, and supposedly gives us Strauss’s real feelings, though I would take that with a pinch of salt.

The biggest problem with this play is the lack of dramatic tension. Zweig and Strauss get on so well that there’s none there. They get on so well that they find themselves actually becoming friends, an unusual experience for both of them from what they say. The conflict with the Nazis does improve things a bit, but it’s so one-sided that it doesn’t last. It’s sad to see what happens artistically, of course, but that’s just narration, and we don’t see much of the later horrors as the bulk of the play takes place before the war. So without some gripping focus to the play, what do we have?

Well, it’s interesting to see something of how the Nazis developed prior to the war. It’s always difficult to see this sort of thing clearly with hindsight, as we can’t really know how much the German people knew, what other speculations and rumours were part of daily life, etc., but from this play it seemed to me that only an idiot would have been unaware of the Nazis’ intent, even if the full extent of their activities was hidden. Zweig knows enough to leave ahead of disaster, and Strauss’s own efforts to rescue his daughter-in-law’s family, unsuccessfully, shows that he didn’t believe they were off to some sunny holiday camp where they could get on with their lives without inflicting their sordidness on the pure Aryan race (they did talk some rubbish, these Nazis).

There were some good lines, the running time was only two hours, and from what I saw of the performances, they were very good. The staging, with the two main locations being on the diagonals, had one unfortunate side effect. Particularly at the Strauss villa, one or other character would sit in the chair almost directly in front of us. This meant we had such an oblique view of their profile that they might as well have had their back to us. This is to be expected in this kind of acting space, and it can work as  long as the characters move around. Sadly, once a character was in that chair, they rarely moved, so we found ourselves in some of the worst seats in the house. I admire Michael Pennington greatly, and I would have loved to see his performance when Strauss is being confronted with his family’s vulnerability, but alas, I missed it all. Fine as Martin Hutson’s Hinkel was, seeing only one side of that discussion was not enough.

Of course, Steve has had a moderating effect by explaining his view of the play. In Taking Sides, the difficulties are in the conflict between the two men at the centre of the play, whereas in Collaboration, the two central characters do have a good relationship, but external forces make it impossible for them to work together. It’s a good point, and had the external forces been better represented, and from earlier in the drama, I might have changed my mind a bit. We both felt the play was a bit slow in the first half, but picked up in the second. Had the people at the post-show for Taking Sides not been so enthusiastic about this play, we might have had different expectations and enjoyed it more. As it was, we both felt it was not as powerful as others had made out.

© 2008 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Taking Sides – August 2008

7/10

By Ronald Harwood

Directed by Philip Franks

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Thursday 14th August 2008

We saw this play when it premiered in the Minerva back in 1995, with Michael Pennington playing the part of Major Arnold. Tonight he was playing Furtwängler, so apart from anything else it was going to be interesting to see his performance in the other main role. We’ve also seen a touring production which had Neil Pearson and Julian Glover as the two leads; as I haven’t got any notes for these priors, I’ll probably discuss them a bit later on.

The set had a white painted panelled wall across the back, coming apart at the seams – the top was starting to lift away on the right hand side, and the panelling on that side of the wall was disappearing. The balcony on our left held a jumble of suitcases, which also cascaded down onto the set below, covering a doorway on that side. The suitcases were ghostly with dust. There were three desks, filing cabinets, chairs and a phonograph. The grey wooden flooring also had a crack running across it. Things looked bad. The balcony also turned out to be a waiting area for the first two interviewees – we saw them up there when the play started. Delightfully, this set didn’t do anything in the course of the production, it just sat there allowing the action to happen. Much as I like the technological magnificence of all-singing, all-dancing sets, it’s nice to let the play speak for itself occasionally, too.

The story is set in Berlin in 1946, and concerns some interviews conducted by an American major who’s checking up on Furtwängler’s potential involvement in the Nazi regime. Did he support them or didn’t he? Although the play is fictitious, there was an investigation into Furtwängler’s activities at that time, as part of his denazification request. There are no notes or records of the interviews, so this is all guesswork on the author’s part, but I like the result.

There are two other members of the interrogation team. One is David Wills, a young Lieutenant, Jewish, who’s helping Arnold, but whose love of music makes him inclined to help Furtwängler, and the other is Emmi Straube, working as Arnold’s secretary. She’s German, and is the daughter of one of the conspirators who tried to assassinate Hitler but failed.  There are a number of references to that, and to the respect people have for her because of her father’s heroism.

We see two brief interviews before the great man himself enters the room. The first is with Helmut Rode, his second violinist, who praises Furtwängler and tells them the mandatory baton story, and the second is a woman called Tamara Sachs, whose husband Furtwängler saved from the Nazis before the war. Her husband had been the most promising pianist of his generation, but also Jewish, and Furtwängler agreed to help once he heard the young man play. Unfortunately, they went to live in Paris, and when the Germans took over France, her husband ended up in the camps, where he died. She is passionate in Furtwängler’s defence, and has a list of some of the people he helped to get out of Germany. From the major’s response, it’s clear he’s not interested in the evidence unless it points to Furtwängler’s guilt.

When he interviews Furtwängler, things don’t go quite according to plan, and the major loses his temper. Furtwängler is also capable of throwing a strop – he is a musical genius, after all – so the scene gets quite lively. The matter is unresolved when a call comes from the British, informing Major Arnold that they’ve found the archives of a man who helped run the Nazi’s culture ministry, so there’s a chance that they’ll be able to dig up some dirt from those files. Arnold sends Furtwängler away so he can check this out, and hopefully nail him another day.

The second half reiterates the first. First there’s a short scene where Helmut Rode is persuaded (some might say bribed) to turn against Furtwängler and dish the dirt. He does his best, but it’s mostly pretty tame, and I found myself thinking of how unreliable evidence can be when the source is being paid for it. The alleged telegram to Hitler on his birthday, for example, never actually emerges into the light of day. Then there’s a reprise of Tamara Sachs’ evidence, when a large bundle of letters arrives with a covering letter for “to whom it may concern”. These letters are from lots of people whom Furtwängler helped, and Tamara has passed them on as she is back in Paris, and worried that she won’t be able to attend when they hold the hearing in order to give this evidence herself.

Ignoring all the letters, Arnold presses on with the interview. This time, he’s got more specific questions to ask. When he tackles Furtwängler about the birthday telegram to Hitler and Furtwängler denies all knowledge, David helpfully suggests that Arnold produce the telegram, to refresh the maestro’s memory. Arnold has to concede defeat on that one, but soon brings up other information which suggests Furtwängler has less than pure motives for staying in Germany. He had a steady string of women, for example, and has lost count of the number of his illegitimate children, suggesting he’s produced more than a few. He was offered a house and bomb shelter, but refused both. The evidence that he had his competitors and critics sent off to the Russian front was shaky to begin with, and Furtwängler soon deals with Arnold’s botched attacks on these grounds. But now he’s less confident than before, and feels the need to explain, to justify himself. He’s realised how his situation looks to outsiders who haven’t been through the nightmare that was life in Germany under the Nazis, and he tells us about the difficulties of working under a regime that was constantly looking to undermine anyone with authority who wasn’t fully supportive of their ideals and power. He describes himself as naïve for believing that art and politics could be kept separate, but asserts that in his view the importance of music in assisting people to escape from the horrors of their lives took priority for him. Where there’s music and beauty, life can’t be all bad.

This provokes a furious outburst from Major Arnold. We’ve heard earlier that he has actually been at the camps, and seen for himself the horrors they contained. He’s already shown us he has nightmares, and now the terrible effects of what he’s seen come pouring out of him. He’s beyond angry at what the Germans have done to their fellow human beings, and the idea that somehow the playing of beautiful music could compensate for that makes him snarl with rage. This is why he wants to ‘get’ Furtwängler – he wants revenge. He wants to determine who were the ‘bad’ Germans, and who were the ‘good’ Germans, like Emmi’s father. He sees Emmi has her hands over her ears – she greatly respects Furtwängler, and has been distressed by his treatment in the interviews – and he tells her to remove them (the hands, not the ears). She does, but when he goes on about how heroic her father was, she snaps, and lets out an almighty scream, which stops everyone dead in their tracks. Finally, she admits what she’s known all along; that her father only joined the conspiracy when the war was already lost – he was no hero.

Furtwängler himself is overcome with the strain of it all, and has to be helped off stage. With Arnold making a telephone call to confirm that they can mount some sort of prosecution, even if they have to use tame journalists to spread lies about the man, David puts on one of the records of Furtwängler’s work to try and drown out everything else. Arnold yells at him to turn it off, but he just turns it up louder. And so the play fades out.

This was quite a powerful production. As I watched Michael Pennington’s performance, I found the memory of the earlier production became clearer. Daniel Massey had played Furtwängler then, and he kept his character much more imperious and confident throughout. When left with the silence in the first interview (this was Major Arnold’s trick – he left a gap which the interviewees felt compelled to fill; not so Furtwängler) Daniel Massey was calm and self assured. Julian Glover was equally unconcerned. But Michael Pennington played it with more variation. His Furtwängler was slightly nervous, looking around a little before deciding to wait for another question. Not so much guilty as unsure of what he was expected to do.

There were other variations I noticed as well. The first production was directed by Harold Pinter, so naturally the emphasis then was the two men confronting each other in a room cut off from the outside world, having a verbal battle of wills (seem familiar?). It was very intense and powerful. Michael Pennington’s Major Arnold was more focused, more intelligent, and I wasn’t so aware of the war time context, nor do I remember the other characters so well. With the second production, which we saw at the Theatre Royal, Brighton, the proscenium arch stage naturally made the action less intimate and less intense, but I was much more aware of the situation in which these people were working. Julian Glover was just as commanding as Furtwängler, but Neil Pearson’s Major Arnold gave me the impression of a man close to a nervous breakdown, who had been so deeply affected by the sights at the death camps that it was only this work that was keeping him together. I also remember Emmi’s scream from this production – it was the strongest of the three, and had the most impact on me.

What I liked most about this production were the performances from the minor characters. Helmut Rode (Pip Donaghy) was a broken, shuffling man, ready to do whatever it took to survive, as he would have done during the Nazi years. Tamara Sachs (Melanie Jessop) was a strong woman, who had known great love, and who was prepared to go to great lengths to help someone she revered, not only as the saviour of her husband, but as a great man in his own right. Emmi (Sophie Roberts) was a tense, self-contained young woman, who saw much and said little, and David Wills, the young lieutenant (Martin Hutson), was a strong presence, representing the person with an open mind and a love of music, giving an insight into the dilemma that was facing us, the audience, as we tried to figure out right from wrong. Where I felt this production let the play down somewhat was in the relatively unambiguous playing of Major Arnold. He came across as a bully with an agenda, totally unprepared to listen to any point of view but his own, and with absolutely no regard for any evidence that didn’t fit into his pre-arranged scheme. His arguments always seemed slanted and irrelevant; this may be partly due to our familiarity with the play, so that revelations about Furtwängler’s illegitimate children, for example, don’t come across as significant now – the papers are full of these sorts of stories about public figures so we’re not so shocked as we used to be. Perhaps I was also influenced by the pre-show talk we went to, where we learned of Richard Strauss’s greater involvement with and support of the Nazi regime. In this talk, Furtwängler was clearly referred to as not being a Nazi sympathiser, so perhaps that coloured my judgement more than I realised.

But in the end, I still found that the basis of the Major’s arguments was completely unsound, and given the extent of Furtwängler’s help for endangered musicians, I could only feel sympathy for the man. I can still see Major Arnold’s point of view, but it wasn’t presented strongly enough for me this time around. In fact, checking the play text for the order of events, I found myself reading lines that I just didn’t hear during the play. Were they cut, did I miss them, or were they just not delivered clearly enough for me to register them?

There was a post-show discussion, and I find more people are staying behind for these now. Michael Pennington was asked about the differences between the two productions he’s been in, and was very diplomatic, but did point out that while he had a pretty good memory of Daniel Massey’s performance as Furtwängler, given the number of times he’d seen him do it only a few feet away, he found those memories faded quite quickly as he got into the part for himself. The ambiguity of the play was mentioned quite a bit, and the way that everyone is left to make up their own minds was definitely appreciated. Ronald Harwood has obviously been closely involved with both of these productions (see Collaboration later this month), as there were a number of references to his input. When someone questioned the accuracy of the dialogue, we were told that Ronnie had said ‘you know, Richard the Third didn’t actually say “Now is the winter of our discontent”’, which got a good laugh, as well as being a very good point. Although I didn’t enjoy this performance as much as I’d hoped to, I have found it very thought-provoking, and it’s nice to finally get down my rapidly fading memories of the other productions we’ve seen.

© 2008 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Six Characters In Search Of An Author – July 2008

6/10

By Luigi Pirandello, in a new version by Rupert Goold and Ben Power

Directed by Rupert Goold

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Wednesday 2nd July 2008

This was a typical Rupert Goold production – a number of really good ideas but patchy in execution. I have wanted to see this play for a long time, as I’m a great fan of Pirandello – I’m still waiting! The adaptation was so wide-ranging that I felt I wasn’t necessarily getting a reasonable picture of the original intention. I may be wrong, but without knowing more about the play, I won’t be able to tell. Even so, there was a lot to enjoy in this production, although it did have some tedious bits as well.

The ‘plot’ is almost irrelevant. The intention of the piece is to explore the nature of reality and truth, and to challenge the audience’s perceptions. The overall idea was of a documentary film team, reviewing their work on a euthanasia story with the executive producer, and then being hijacked by a bizarre group of people who claim to be six abandoned characters looking for an author to help them tell their stories. The performance then unravels layer upon layer of reality, often with disturbing or uncomfortable images, including paedophilia, rape, murder, etc. Pirandello himself even puts in an appearance, to complain that he doesn’t know how to end the piece. He didn’t know what should be in the rest of it, either, if one of the conversations in this adaptation is anything to go by – he wrote six different versions of the play.

The set was a suitably bleak utilitarian office space, with various tables, chairs, computers, etc. spread around. Behind this office, visible through the windows, is a widthways corridor with another office space on the other side of that. The opening scene has the documentary team reviewing the tape, and stopping it a couple of times to make comments. At one point, a doctor who’s speaking to camera puts her hand up to her eye as if she’s crying – well, it’s a sad subject. However, as a long-standing contact lens wearer, I could see that the hand movement wasn’t quite right for an emotional reaction – I guessed she had something in her eye, and so it turned out. Her contact lens had shifted. It was a neat trick, though, reminding us how easily these sorts of things can be exploited in the editing suite to give a completely false perspective of the situation.

The discussion during this phase was full of topical references, and almost constantly referenced the current climate where so many revelations of fakery have led to program makers cracking down in all areas. There was also an explanation of the difference between drama documentary and docu-drama – don’t expect me to tell you now, I didn’t really understand it at the time. A lot of it seemed like splitting hairs, but what did come across, here and elsewhere,  was the definite belief that faking an event can somehow be more ‘real’ and truthful than filming the actual occurrence. (Doesn’t work for sporting events, mind you.)

The executive has left, to the accompaniment of a finger and several gratuitous insults, and the team are considering their options when six people troop into the room. All dressed in black, three of them, the father, mother and one of the daughters, start to plead to be given the chance to tell their story. The other three characters, a young boy and girl, and an older boy, pretty much stay silent throughout this scene, and indeed for most of the play.

The father and the feisty daughter (not actually his, we discover) are at odds, and it soon becomes clear that he’s been doing something he shouldn’t have with her. The mother is a highly dramatic person, very Italian and expressive. Played by Eleanor David, she’s also drop-dead gorgeous, and sings divinely, but more of that later. The basic story is that the father employed a handsome young secretary, the secretary and the mother fell for each other, the father allowed it and even encouraged them to set up house together with his financial support, they ended up leaving town and when the secretary died, the mother returned with her three children – the two girls and the younger boy – and the father knew nothing about it. When he visited a local brothel (twinned with a hat shop), he doesn’t recognise the girl in the bedroom as his step-daughter. The mother discovers them together, and is deeply shocked. The father then takes them all back to his house, where his son, the legitimate one, takes against the new family members with all the resentment of the young. He’s not too keen on his mother for deserting him, either. She felt she was turned out by her husband, and so it goes on, each person having a different view of the events. Actually, the story that does emerge is fairly coherent, and I felt it was only the interpretations and reactions to it that varied, rather than actual ‘facts’, if a fictional story can have any of those.

The producer is gradually won over by this bizarre crew. Not interested at the start, she becomes intrigued by their pleading. She’s initially torn by her desire to do justice to her original story about assisted euthanasia, and she takes some persuading to put that aside and spend some of her precious time recording the details of this new account. She already has a couple of actors available for dramatic reconstructions, so she asks her team to get a suitable set prepared for filming. This takes some time to set up, and instead of an interval, we sit through the cumbersome set construction, with a couple of clips from the documentary footage showing on the screens. The first clip is simply recording the producers feelings as they arrive in Holland, and the second I’ve forgotten the details of, but I think it showed more of the euthanasia stuff. The first wasn’t particularly interesting, the second was a bit better, but on the whole I would have preferred to have taken a break at this point.

The second scene was definitely the most entertaining of the evening. The installed set represents the bedroom in which the father and the daughter are found by the mother in a sexually explicit, though not climactic, situation. The two main participants are concerned to get the room right, while the film crew just want to get on with it. There’s a lot of fun in the way the producer tries to placate the characters, especially when they find out that they won’t be doing the scene themselves. The actors will be recreating the scene for the cameras. This is where most of the ideas about recreations being more faithful to the truth comes out, and I found it hugely entertaining to see actors, playing ‘real’ characters telling another actress, playing a producer, that they could do a better job than the actors because they are the events, i.e. the events are entirely what they are about, and they only live through these events. It’s fun juggling all these different levels of reality, though I can see why Pirandello found this play so difficult to write. Anyway, the characters eventually accept the situation, and after describing their experiences a bit, the actors get down to it.

This was the funniest bit of the play, as the actors do their warm-ups and try to get into their roles. As they attempt to do the scene in the bedroom, the characters fill in more of the details, and it turns out that a certain Mr Pace (pronounce Pa-chay) had been present at the time – owner of the hat business as well as pimp. The hat business employed the mother, and Mr Pace employed the daughter in other ways. The producer asks if they can get hold of Mr Pace, and the characters oblige by summoning him with lots of hats (from the studio’s store). With much grunting and a few other weird noises, Mr Pace emerges from underneath the bed, an impressive trick, and one I didn’t expect after seeing the stuff brought on to build the floor. Mr Pace is what I would call a grotesque, all flailing arms and a weird accent. There’s some sexual action on the bed, which the producer cuts short, and then we get the scene between the father and daughter. Turns out he brought along a child’s dress for her to wear, and since we’d heard he also stalked the girl when she was still known to him as his step-daughter, it’s clear he’s someone who prefers them young. It’s a dark and quite powerful section of the play, strong meat for now never mind the 1920s when it was written. Now they’re into their stride these two warring characters are working together to tell this story, and it’s brought a lot of depth to what was a relatively superficial piece up to this point.

Just as the father is about to get more deeply involved, as it were, the mother bursts into the room, and starts singing. Not any words, just sounds, amazing sounds, expressing her emotions wonderfully. I was taken aback at first, but after a few seconds I realised what was happening and really enjoyed it. I felt in need of something to express the emotions that the previous bit had stirred up, and this was perfect. The singing went on for some time, and the father joined in with a weird barking howl that I can’t adequately describe. It got across both his suffering and his disfunctionality.

I think the interval came just after this, but I don’t really remember the detail. With such a mixed up play, it’s hard to get a grip on the order of things. The second half started with a video clip of the producer talking about how important documentary making was to her, and how she saw her role in that process. There were a couple of screens for viewing these clips. One dropped down centrally, and gave a big but grainy picture, while another was positioned over to our left, and gave a better quality but smaller picture. From our distance, we couldn’t see much detail on that one. When the film crew were working, there were often other screens in the office showing the pictures as well, and I could also see the screen on the camera, for example when they were filming the daughter being interviewed about the bedroom events.

During the interval the installed set and most of the office paraphernalia were cleared, and a large rectangular water tank was wheeled on. Placed centrally, it had what seemed to be fronds and rather milky water in it. Other than that, and possibly a chair or two, the room was bare. The characters arrive, with the producer, who is carrying a camcorder. She doesn’t know where they are, and the father explains she’s now in the story with them. She resists this notion, but he questions her on who she is, even showing her a clip from a much earlier interview where she expresses a completely different point of view about euthanasia from her current one. The father’s argument seems to be that as they (the characters) are unchanging, and she, and all other ‘real’ people are constantly changing, then the fictional characters are more real than the ‘real’ people. It’s a load of rubbish, but he is so convincing, and she is so uncertain that she accepts it in the same way as a rabbit accepts the oncoming car bumper.

The final part of their story is now revealed. With so many negative emotions swirling around in that ‘family’, it’s not surprising that  a tragedy happens. The tank represents a pond in the garden of the house. With the mother and father away, the elder daughter and legitimate son head off to the forest to get to know one another better, leaving the two younger children unsupervised in the garden. First the girl falls into the pond and drowns (she had a hidden breathing tube, so she could stay under for a horribly long time), and then the boy gives himself a fatal injection and dies. The producer is horrified by this. She doesn’t appear to do anything to try to save the girl, but then this is only a representation of the garden – she may have been many yards away instead of a few feet. However, her scream at the drowning is what the other characters hear, and which alerts them to the deaths, mingling the layers of ‘reality’ beyond any hope of disentanglement.

With the boy, the producer tries to get help for him, and picking him up she runs out of the theatre. We know she does this, because the screens now take up the story and show us a film of her running downstairs, across to the main house (oh, of course, it’s The Music Man tonight) running into the main house, into the auditorium, onto the stage (seventy-six trombones, if you’re interested), off again, and back the way she came, still clutching the boy, and still not getting any help, despite the fact that the theatre staff were very obligingly holding doors open for this poor woman who’s carrying a young boy in her arms, clearly distressed. I found this part quite boring. It’s been done before (Fram, Brief Encounter), it didn’t add anything to my understanding of the emotional content of the scene, the attempted layering of realities would have worked better if the theatre staff hadn’t been so obviously present (I’ve always found them very solicitous and helpful on the rare occasions I’ve been in need), and I can’t for the life of me think of any good reason why this film was necessary. The boy was just as dead at the end of it as he was before, and she was just as distressed.

Returning to the Minerva stage, the producer collapses in a heap by the back wall of the office, and from there she witnesses a strange series of events. On the big screen, the director’s comments option is highlighted, and we hear a couple of voices talking about the film they’ve just made. It’s about a documentary team who get taken over by some characters, etc. The fun here was in the reshowing of the first scene. All the original characters are there, and apart from the producer, go through the same actions. The voices don’t need to see it all, however, so they fast forward through bits of it, and the actors on stage have to do the scene very fast. It’s hilariously funny. As I recall, the producer stays where she is, but says her lines as needed. Then the back office is lit up, and the same executive is listening to two guys selling him their concept for adapting Six Characters. It’s just out of copyright and they want to get in before the National does its version. The executive goes along with it, finding the idea of the stupid executive in the adaptation very funny, and phones up somebody to get clearance from the estate for this version to go ahead. This is where we get the information about Pirandello writing six different versions.

Then there’s a strange bit where the two guys pitching the idea are butchered by the father and daughter, and then we see Pirandello working hard to finish at least one version of the play. His servant(?) comes in to tell him dinner’s ready, and they have what appears to be a forgettable conversation, and then that’s all cleared and the back office lights up again. This time it contains the family of characters, preparing a bed for the producer. She goes through, takes to the bed, and accepts the syringe she’s given, injecting herself before lying down in the bed, lovingly looked after by the fatal group. I think that’s how it ended, but it seemed to disintegrate in the later stages, so I may be misremembering.

There was a suitably Pirandello-ish moment at the end when the actors came trooping on to take their bows. The young lad who was ‘dead’ at the back of the office didn’t move, and for a moment or two I wondered if this was another level of confusion for the audience. But it wasn’t. He got up, they all took their bows and headed off, while we hung on for the post-show (where we found out he had simply fallen asleep).

Before I mention any post-show comments, I’ve a few of my own concerning the evening’s entertainment. All the actors gave excellent performances. Ian McDiarmid as the father was wonderfully creepy, yet authoritative. Eleanor David I have already mentioned, and Denise Gough as the step-daughter was superb at showing us her anger and her disturbing involvement in prostitution. I will also mention Dylan Dwyfor as the legitimate son, whom we have seen before in The Comedy Of Errors in the RSC’s Complete Works Festival (Young Person’s Shakespeare). He didn’t get a lot of lines, and his character mainly sulks in the background, but he did it well.

My main praise though has to be for Noma Dumezweni as the producer. In many ways she holds this piece together, and as the crossover character she allows us into that nightmare world of uncertainty about our own existences. The producer had been deeply affected by her sister’s long illness and death, and that had caused her attitude towards euthanasia to shift 180 degrees. She was also perhaps looking for a way out for herself, and so this final choice didn’t feel like a new idea, but something that had been building for quite some time. I did feel at times that the characters were actually mass murderers, and that they’d be off to find another victim as soon as they’d buried this one, offering to tell their story again with equally deadly results.

One point that was made during the play and again in the post-show was that fictional characters are eternal. Bollocks. There are a lot of lost works of fiction that nobody remembers, so as far as this physical level is concerned, all their characters are dead. As dodos. For other levels of existence, that’s a different matter, but then the rules for ‘real’ people change at other levels too, so it’s still a silly point. Comes of people fearing death and wanting something to live forever, I suppose.

The post-show attracted a lot of people this time, more than usual for the Minerva. There were the inevitable questions about what the play meant, what was going on and what actually happened. No satisfactory answers were forthcoming, unsurprisingly. A woman expressed a more general concern about the young boy being present during some pretty disturbing activities, but we were reassured by the cast that he wasn’t at all bothered about it. He often had his back to the action, and didn’t really understand what was going on. We found out about the breathing tube, and apparently the actress diving in to ‘drown’ found it really exciting to do. (If you ever needed proof that actors are strange…..) I found I was out of step with the majority of the crowd, so I refrained from making any comments as I see no need to spoil the party on such occasions and I couldn’t think of any constructive questions to ask. On the whole, the audience were puzzled but appreciative, whereas I was not so much puzzled as disappointed, but on reflection it may have been a better production than I experienced on the night. It was still in the review period, so there may well be changes as they get more experience.

It’s certainly a very Chichester-based production, and with a lot of contemporary references, it won’t transfer to another stage or time easily. However the central idea of the adaptation wasn’t bad, and it seems other directors have made huge changes as well in the past, so we may never see a ‘traditional’ production ever in our lifetimes. Get used to it.

© 2008 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me

Funny Girl – May 2008

7/10

Music by Jule Styne, lyrics by Bob Merrill, book by Isobel Lennart

Directed by Angus Jackson

Venue: Minerva Theatre

Date: Tuesday 13th May 2008

I’m not a great one for musicals, but I was interested to see this one. Barbara Streisand made the part of Fanny Bryce so much her own that it’s understandable that there’s been no major production of it for many years, so as I haven’t seen the film, this was pretty new territory for me.

Of course, many of the songs were familiar, and the story, despite being based on Fanny Bryce’s life (or parts of it), was incredibly familiar. Piaf, Marie Lloyd, etc. all seemed to have similar themes to their life stories. But here we only get to see the unpromising beginnings, the rise to stardom and the glory days – no descent into post-stardom for this show.

To get across the show-biz nature of the piece, most of the sets showed the back wall of the theatre itself, which also doubled as the outside walls of the apartment blocks in the run down area Fanny comes from. There were some more opulent sets as well, for when she’s made it big, but I really don’t remember noticing the changes, they were done so slickly.

The story is one long reminiscence, as Fanny prepares to go on stage. Starting with her early attempts to get a job, we see her shoehorn her way into a tall, leggy chorus (she’s short and plump), take over the act completely by improvising comic business, and gradually make herself the star of whatever show she happens to be in. She’s helped in this by a tall, good-looking chap, Nick Arnstein, who seems to be well-off, and is certainly charming. He bids up her salary with the current management by claiming to represent another theatre, so she’s naturally grateful. Not that that matters, as she fell hook, line and sinker for the guy as soon as she clapped eyes on him. He, of course, is a chap with no real job, who just loafs around the theatre circuit taking advantage of whatever’s on offer. He soon realises that Fanny is an all-you-can-eat meal ticket, and it’s not long before they’re married. Naturally, there’s another chap who adores Fanny, but whom she regards as a good friend, and who would have been a much better match for her.

To do him justice, Nick does actually want to make his own way in the world; he’s just hopeless at doing it. He invests Fanny’s money in at least one get-rich-quick scheme (a golf course or hotel or casino, or some such), and loses it all. Later on he gets an amazing offer of a job that seems to be right up his street, but he realises it’s too good, and that Fanny has arranged it to give him some self-respect. That proves the clincher, and they split up. Fanny had even given up her career to be Nick’s wife, but now she has to go back on the stage to earn her living, and the play takes us up to her return.

It’s a moving story, with some very good songs, and this cast do it pretty well. The musical numbers with the dancers were all excellent, some of the duets were a bit weaker, but Samantha Spiro gave us a very good Fanny Bryce. Her voice isn’t as strong as Streisand’s, obviously, but she got the vulnerability across, and still got my toes tapping to the songs. I prefer musicals like this which do at least have some depth of character to them, so I enjoyed myself more than I expected.

© 2008 Sheila Evans at ilovetheatre.me