The Real Review

Sunday in the Park with George (Wyndham’s Theatre, London)
The Seagull (National Theatre)
The Life of Galileo (The Olivier, National Theatre, London)
Market Boy (The Olivier, National Theatre, London)
Avenue Q (Noël Coward Theatre, London)
Tocororo – A Cuban Tale (London Coliseum)
Hay Fever (Theatre Royal Haymarket, London)
Rock ’n’ Roll (Duke of York’s Theatre, London)
The Life of Galileo (The Olivier, National Theatre, London)

The Seagull (National Theatre)
Certainly, there are inaccuracies in early translations of Anton Chekhov’s masterpiece, but whatever the criticisms, the current The Seagull “in a version by Martin Crimp” (as it is billed) undermines Chekhov’s dramatic integrity. Crimp’s version is highly enjoyable for its freshness and for his successful adaptation to modern dramatic conventions, rather than keeping to the starchy old devices preserved by the faithful. But, that’s where the benefits stop. Crimp’s meticulous removal of almost all historical context does not do for Chekhov what a modern dress version does for say Shakespeare.

Running for and one and a half hours before a 20 minute interval, the last stretch is an unsatisfactory 50 minutes, ending with the bang of Konstantin’s gun and the announcement of his suicide. This last act has been tampered with far too much, and it disappoints.

Konstantin is played by the exceptional Ben Whishaw, who I last saw in the eponymous role of Trevor Nunn’s acclaimed Hamlet at the Old Vic. He’s a truly magnetic performer and his interpretation of Konstantin is sympathy inducing, – a rarity given the awkwardness of the role.

However, director Katie Mitchell, ridicules Konstantin’s talents by turning the play he stages in the first act into risible drivel. We chuckle heartily along with his mother Arkadina. We cannot understand how several of the other characters are moved by it. It works far better to present his work as immature, rather than rubbish. Mitchell is playing for laughs here and ironically undermining the power of Chekhov’s cruel comedy.

The same goes for Nina (Hattie Morahan), also played brilliantly, but again Mitchell has interpreted her as a silly hysteric for whom we struggle to find sympathy. And when she performs Konstantin’s play, the words are inaudible, rendering Arkadina’s jealousy of the young beautiful actress implausible.

The cast are uniformly strong, though on the night I attended (2 August 2006), leading lady Juliet Stevenson (Arkadina) seemed rather flat. Perhaps in this toned down reading of the character, as if Mitchell instructed “no star quality please”, Stevenson is struggling to produce an interesting performance.

The setting may be controversial: there are hardly any references to Russia; the costumes are modern; the characters dance to tangos on a gramophone; but the design, a cavernous, dilapidated villa makes for a spectacular set.

Sunday in the Park with George (Wyndham’s Theatre, London)
It might not be the most sought after ticket on London’s West End, but James Lapine’s (book) and Stephen Sondheim’s (music and lyrics) Sunday in the Park with George is far away the most interesting production currently running in London.

Based on biographical details of the French pointillist George Seurat (1859 – 1891) it explores the classic ménage a trios: the artist, his work and his lover / model. It is refreshing to have a musical that has as it primary concern art and the nature of creation.

Centred on the Seurat’s painting Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte, it is only in the current age of high tech that the Sondheim / Lapine vision can at last be fully and brilliantly realised on stage. The painting is recreated live; the actors appear to step in and out of the frame; drawings become animated on canvasses. One character, a solider, exists entirely as a projection. This production is worth flying to London to see.

The cast are unanimously strong both as actors and singers – an accomplishment in itself, for Sunday in the Park is a notoriously difficult work.

Well done to Cameron Mackintosh for bringing the production from the Menier Chocolate Factory to the West End.

Market Boy (The Olivier, National Theatre, London)Market Boy is a coming of age story set on the Romford Market during the years 1985 to 1991. This is one play to be missed while in London. If one was looking for evidence that workshopped productions have had their day, Market Boy serves as a good example. It’s as if each participant came up with a banal, stereotyped character and then contributed some clichéd idea towards the plot. The cast list will give you an idea – Boy, Mum, Mouse, Girl, New Boy, and so forth. The story line is as predictable as it is boring. The subject matter has been done to death and this is no reincarnation. The characters are pale shadows of familiar types that appear in far better works, like Shopping and Fucking, the mother and her boyfriend in Jonathan Harvey’s A Beautiful Thing, the yobs and observations on clubbers in John Godber’s Bouncers. The political commentary is feebe in comparison to (and feels borrowed from) Billy Elliot. Thatcher makes cameo appearances, in one instance with giant lobster claws during a recreation of Boy’s first acid trip, which has all the corniness of a sixth form school play. The politics are superficial and confused. It fails to make any kind of statement. It’s for and against Thatcherism, for and against Labour, for and against the market economy, but offers no worthwhile ideas. It’s protest for the sake of sounding off.

It also tries to keep everything light, trivialising the issues it contains. Boy gets sodomised as part of his initiation into Romford Market life, but this is breezed over in seconds and far less traumatic for him than when he discovers his mother (who is single after all) bonking his boss in the back of the shoe van. Boy goes all prudish. Then he spurns his girlfriend for being a ’slag’ and ‘a slut’. Yet the play merely observes, never comments. It has no moral compass.

The actors are agile and highly competent; this play is a waste of great acting talent. It would be survivable in another space, perhaps a school hall. But what this adolescent romp is doing in the National Theatre and the capital of English language theatre in the world is a mystery to this visitor from Africa.

Friday August 4 2006 04:01 PM

Avenue Q (Noël Coward Theatre, London)
After three successful years on Broadway, the people-and-hand-puppet musical Avenue Q transferred to the West End in June. This is great matinee idea while in London. The Americans are at their best when they’re acerbic and ruthlessly candid – with songs like “Everyone’s a little bit racist” and “The Internet is for porn, porn, porn”.
The music leans towards amusing the little ones and the book is at times preachy and sentimental, but overall the first act is charming fun. The cast all have excellent voices and manage somehow to sing wonderfully well, unrestrained by the comic book accents.
Amusingly, the leading talent Jon Robyns has the same profile as his puppet Princeton.

Tocororo – A Cuban Tale (London Coliseum)
Having received rave headlines at Sadler’s Wells, former principal dancer at the Cuban National Ballet Carlos Acosta is at the Coliseum with his own libretto and choreography in Tocororo. It’s the semi-autobiographical story of a straw hatted country boy (Tocororo) who goes to Havana and comes up against a slick city gang leader, The Moor (Alexander Varona).

The conventional themes of the macho dancing duel and the fight for a young lady’s heart are refreshingly recast using the sultry rhythms of Cuban dance. The wonderfully unaffected corps de ballet are physically exceptionally strong and for that unusually delicate. The are as at home as they sauté, pirouette and fouetté, while they salsa and rumba, in what is one of few successful dance fusions one could hope to see. Varona has a long, lithe body that can move like a bullwhip; and where else will you see a solo male jeté across the stage while puffing volumes of smoke from a cigar?

Acosta is of course the star. He has astonishing precision, a beautiful expressiveness and is a rare treat to watch.

The parallels with contemporary South African dance movement and music were particular striking for me. In the story too, which includes a santera “throwing the bones” to diagnose Tocororo’s troubles.

Hay Fever (Theatre Royal Haymarket, London)

I was fortunate enough to catch the second-last night of Noël Coward’s classic 1925 comedy Hay Fever, directed by Peter Hall. Amazingly, it has survived its eighty years, as winningly as lead Judi Dench has weathered her seventy odd years in the theatre. Her performance surpassed the public’s high expectations. The first act felt slightly dated, though there was enough wit to keep one interested. Much of the satire and meaning are lost on today’s milieu, but the second act and the ending of the third act makes this one of the cleverest plays I’ve seen.

Rock ’n’ Roll (Duke of York’s Theatre, London)It’s heartening that serious intelligent theatre still gets an audience in London and generates such excitement and enthusiasm. Sunday in the Park with George might not be sold out, but extra shows are being added for what is perhaps the hottest ticket in town right now – the unapologetically cerebral new Tom Stoppard play Rock ’n’ Roll directed by Trevor Nunn and starring Rufus Sewell and Brian Cox.
There could be no better illustration of what Stoppard is on about in Rock ’n’ Roll than by contrasting it with a show like the vanity musical We Will Rock You (currently on at the Dominion Theatre and now advertising ‘booking until October 2007’!). We Will Rock You is about as intellectually stimulating as walking on tactile paving. It is also phoney. We Will pretends to be about the power of rock to subvert mass culture, but just how glaringly counterfeit its spin is becomes obvious when watching Stoppard’s brilliant analysis and carefully chosen samplings of seditious music – Bob Dylan, the Stones, Velvet Underground, Pink Floyd. As Max, Stoppard’s diehard Marxist Cambridge academic says, the masses: “eat crap, they read crap, they watch crap…”
Max (Brian Cox) was born the same date as the 1917 revolution. Set in Prague and Cambridge, the play starts in 1968, the time of the Paris student riots and the anti-Vietnam protests in America, and concludes with the Rolling Stones landmark concert in Prague in 1990 after the cold war. It centres on the lives of two men and their stormy friendship – Max and Jan (Rufus Sewell). There is something of Stoppard in Jan, both Czech, both Anglophiles.
It is primarily concerned with the ideological struggles between capitalism (with its extreme expression in Thatcherism) and communism (with its extreme expression in Stalinism). It is an overtly political play, but Stoppard is brilliant in avoiding the lectern feel or the author’s megaphone. The conversations, many of which are lengthy debates about politics, are always in keeping with character. The dialogue is razor sharp and often witty. The characters speak directly from their experiences in life. Stoppard is a master at having his characters react in unpredictable ways, but always truthfully. He keeps his audience on their toes.
South Africa’s many political dramatists should take note. Stoppard’s ability to integrate arguments into drama makes him one of the foremost playwrights in the world. The play includes one of the clearest elucidations of the philosophical problems surrounding the nature of consciousness. Is it a machine that could be constructed, or is it something immaterial? As an illustration, this particular scene climaxes in a powerful outburst from Max’s wife, Eleanor (Sinead Cusack), who is dying from cancer and sobs: “ I don’t want your [Max’s] ‘mind’ which you can make out of beer cans. Don’t bring it to my funeral. I want your grieving soul or nothing. I do not want your amazing biological machine…”
The layers are manifold. We have the personal dramas of the characters, ideological as well as generational conflicts, the interplay between the political systems and countries, the theme of rock music, and a historical profile covering thirty years.
There are numerous short scenes, each prefaced with a fragment of music and a projection on the front cloth of record sleeve notes. It is little disjoint, but not destructively; the longer scenes do play better. The cast have the play down pat, and their characterisation is spot on. Nunn has the perfect ear for Stoppard; the dramatic rhythm and the timing are matchless. In terms of the acting, the night belongs to Sewell.
This is a must-see.

The Life of Galileo (The Olivier, National Theatre, London)This is a new version by David Hare based on Bertolt Brecht’s The Life of Galileo (Galilei).
The play covers the period of Galileo’s life from 1609, when he ‘invents’ the telescope, through the traumatic time of his trial by the Inquisition, until his dotage under house arrest in 1637. It is the debate between dogma and discovery, between the ignorant serfs and the paternalistic oppressors, between honesty and corruption, between faith and science.Brecht’s interpretation is of course naively Marxist, and he has Galileo saying all kinds of things for the modern audience. Yet, the debate is always pertinent – state thought control, and in unexpected ways. As recently as 1990, then Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger (now Pope) complained that Galileo had been unreasonable. (see Times Literary Supplement May 12, 2006).
Production qualities are high and Howard Davies’s direction of the play competent. However, there are a few asides that are faintly ridiculous – the opening of Act 2 with a bizarre masked ball and the opening of Act 3 with a feeble interwar cabaret. These would be best cut. It is over three hours after all.Simon Russell Beale approaches the role of Galileo with a riveting passion that is superbly watchable, while Oliver Ford Davies subtly creates a cardinal Inquisitor that makes your skin crawl.

Share on Facebook