Romeo and Juliet (Maynardville Open Air Theatre)

Scott Sparrow (Paris) brings Theresa Iglich (Matriarch) on stage

This year’s Maynardville production is an inexcusably mediocre effort. Romeo and Juliet is the easiest of all Shakespeare’s plays to stage and to act. The venue is stunning; the budget is sufficient; and last year, Twelfth Night proved that we may not have entirely lost the alphabet to do Shakespeare.

Director Fred Abrahamse isn’t even guilty of directorial intemperance – the usual culprit that scuttles Maynardville. It is neither fish (straightforward and competent) nor flesh (a contemporary reading for which this play begs), nor good red herring (some audacious interpretation). Unusually for Abrahamse, this time around he is thoughtless and unimaginative. A brief respite, but rather tatty, out of place scene depicts Mexico’s Día de los Muertos. Otherwise, presumably we are in some fantasy version of Verona. At three hours, with almost no cuts, it becomes interminable.

The actors shout their way through the script as if unaware they have microphones (even though these are often faulty) – and several voices cracked on opening night. There seems to be a misconception among the cast that saying lines terribly fast makes it sound like they mean what they’re saying. They don’t, and it murders the poetry. This includes over emphasising the rhymes in a singsong manner after neglecting every other inflection. Creaky Shakespearean devices, like asides are kept, when the lines work as well naturally.

Without directorial vision, it is up to the players. But the casting is careless. While Abrahamse is at pains to make a homosexual subtext work between Mercutio (Jason Ralph) and Romeo, he is unable to manufacture any chemistry between the unsuited pair of Rolanda Marais (Juliet) and Marcel Meyer (Romeo). Having Ralph return as the apothecary is a nice touch. But Mercutio’s sexual assault on the old Nurse is inconsistent with the take on the character and distastefully portrayed. It is also shockingly glib given our society’s violence against women. It shows up the failure of this production to make any kind of interesting comment.

Meyer made a compelling Rosencrantz in Suzman’s Hamlet, but as Romeo he is out of his depth and without support. Theresa Iglich (Matriarch) and Scott Sparrow (Paris) give the best-judged performances, except when the latter falls in to undignified wailing at Juliet’s corpse. Meyer would have worked as Paris (and perhaps visa versa). Jason Ralph (Mercutio), Guy de Lancey (Capulet) and Anthea Thompson (Nurse) are capable and do their best to keep the first half together. Matthew Wild (Friar Laurence) is too busy trying to sound beneficent and avuncular to give his words any emotion.

Unfortunately, as the play is conceived, the last acts belong to Juliet. Rolanda Marais flips from spoilt brat to fishwife – the last thing you want from a Juliet. Her voice is hard to take – much like the lark Juliet describes: “sings so out of tune, / Straining harsh discords and unpleasing sharps”. Curiously, her only convincing moment, and she plays it well, is when she dissembles to her father about going to confession (Act IV Scene ii). Marais would have done well to pretend more and be less carried away by her method acting.

Lacking nuance, finesse, and beauty, this is a dull relapse into Maynardville’s chequered past.

January 20, 2007 | Tags: , , , , , , | Comments Closed

London Theatre January 2007

West End:
Frost Nixon (Gielgud Theatre)
Spamalot (Palace Theatre)
The 39 Steps (Criterion Theatre)
Don Juan in Soho (Domar)
The History Boys (Wyndham’s Theatre)

Musicals still dominate the theatres here as in New York and it seems increasingly in South Africa. Covered in previous blogs, but still pick of the crop and recommended if you’re visiting, are Billy Elliot (Victoria Palace) and Mary Poppins (Prince Edward). Having only seen the New York productions, I can’t comment on The Producers or Wicked, though both continue to good reviews. Word of mouth is less favourable on my previous recommendation of Jerry Springer – the Opera. Cast changes seem to have harmed Rock’ n’Roll with several people puzzled as to why I raved about it when it opened. Cabaret and Dirty Dancing are also getting frowns, while Avenue Q remains invincible matinee fun. The Seagull has transferred from the National to the Royal Court, though without Ben Wishaw – who does rather well in the recent film Perfume. South Africa’s own Spice Drum Beat – Ghoema has been rapturously received by London audiences at the Tricycle and deserves to be recommended to all friends in London.

Topping the list this time round is Frost Nixon by Peter Morgan. It has transferred from the Donmar Wareouse, but with the original cast on which its success has hung. Frank Langella gives an unchallengeable impression of president Richard Nixon, without attempting to imitate him exactly. He allows the essential glimpse into the defeated man and the old adage that politics in the end brings out the worst in people. After Watergate, these were the watershed interviews conducted by Frost in the spring of 1977. Nixon – pardoned by the recently late Gerald Ford – thought he had the upper hand with Frost, the celebrity, talk-show host playboy, as interviewer. At first he did, until a vital piece of evidence, overlooked by countless journalists and investigators, landed in Frost’s profligate lap. Whereas Nixon’s adversaries wanted a ruthless third degree trial by media, Frost understood television and letting the person reveal themselves in camera close-up. In the end, Nixon must come face to face with himself.

Alan Bennett’s The History Boys has just opened (January 3) at Wyndham’s Theatre with a new cast, after several sold out runs at the National (premiere was in May 2004). The new cast, still under the direction of Nicholas Hytner, and led by Stephen Moore (as Hector, the retiring teacher) are fresh and vital. There is no sense of this as a tired or second tier production. Thematically it’s filled with English clichés – the class conscious, priggish establishment, eccentric individualism, and the repressed homosexual schoolmaster – but with Bennett’s admirable scripting, this north England grammar school of the 1980s is given an unexpected immediacy. Ben Barnes (the sexually precocious Dakin) and Steven Webb (the gay boy Posner) lead the field of boys, though all are overly self-conscious when not speaking their parts. They act as ordinary people do when they know they are being watched. This kind of facial subtitling and underlining of whatever is happening elsewhere on the stage is not an uncommon fault in young professionals, but something Hytner needs to catch.

The greatest disappointment – not least because the Donmar as a general rule never disappoints – is Patrick Marber’s Don Juan in Soho (after Molière). It appears to have already been trimmed by fifteen minutes and with good reason. There is little to recommend it, or to justify it’s adaptation of the original. Ironically, the original Molière would have more currency. Celebrating decadence when it has already been celebrated in every possible way – to the point of boredom, and preaching prudery in what are currently conservative times, misses making any kind of meaningful comment on today’s morality. The kind of Soho debauchery it depicts is as out of date as the morality it teaches. Where it is faithful to the original, it is to a fault. There’s not a hint of HIV or AIDS in its entire promiscuous, drug binged flaunting.

In sharp contrast is Patrick Barlow’s derring-do stage adaptation of The 39 Steps – John Buchan’s adventure spy story and a classic 1935 Hitchcock film (widely available on DVD and worth watching). A cast of four play all the characters, with Charles Edwards (who I recently saw in Coward’s Hayfever with Judy Dench) in the lead. This entertaiments success pivots around the extraordinary theatrical partnership of Simon Gregor and Rupert Degas. The style of direction – actors playing multiple roles, clowning, physical theatre, mime, even shadow puppets, delighted the London audience. One had the distinct impression this was all very novel here, whereas this stylisation is commonplace in South Africa. Alan Swerdlow’s Around the World in 80 Days was as, if not more, inventive. The difference was in the calibre of the actors, though Catherine McCormack disappoints.

Monty Python fans will not be disappointed by Spamalot, the musical version of Monty Python and the Holy Grail. Originally staged for New York, this essentially British musical has benefited from Broadway know-how in a way few London musicals get it right, however not everything has crossed back across the Atlantic successfully. A key number about it being impossible to stage a musical without Jews, simply doesn’t work in London. With Tim Curry as King Arthur, a kind of mischievous teddy bear who ‘you could eat with a spoon’ as my companion remarked, Spamalot has much to recommend it. Hannah Waddingham as the Lady of the Lake is sensational, whose vocal high jinks form a parallel, mini-musical all of her own within the production, largely making fun of Lloyd Weber.

January 12, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

One Man One Goat

Nik Rabinowitz and Goat

Nik Rabinowitz is refreshing; he’s a white, stand-up comedian who is multilingual and reads the newspapers. In his latest show, One Man One Goat, he is also not afraid to be politically incorrect or religiously irreverent. It has been a while since I heard anyone include Muslims among their targets for humour.

Rabinowitz certainly enjoys celebrating his freedom of speech. Politicians are his primary butts, including Ebrahim Rasool, Yengeni and Selebi. He has Jacob Zuma respond to the outcry about his homophobic comments, by asking, “Why do the gays always have to take it up the wrong way?” That’s the cleverest line in the script. Zuma goes on to wash Nataniël’s feet. Goniwe forms a rock band called the Sex Pestles. On a diplomatic mission to Australia, Phumzile Mlambo-Ngcuka is mistaken in a shopping mall by an ex-South African madam for her maid: “Beauty is that you!” These are all amusing fantasies that appeal to a growing cynicism about politics. Rabinowitz is inventive, but his scenarios are too capricious to be satirical.

The right director might make his material work better. Specifically, Rabinowitz has difficulty finishing a joke, and he struggles to develop a story and link it to the next. Too often, he falls back on worn-out mannerisms, as if he’d graduated from comedy-speak academy dot org. Instead of moving nervously back and forth, he’d do far better standing his ground and delivering his funny material.

In an entertaining yarn about the sensitivity surrounding doing black accents, as a television host, Rabinowitz correctly senses the ambivalence today’s audiences feel toward the parody of black voices. If the material is good, the mimicry is unnecessary. The accent too often borders on the ‘stupid Bantu’ stereotype of old South African comedy. A better structure would have this sketch earlier in the show.

Impersonation is a different matter, and Rabinowitz’s trump card remains his extraordinary imitation of Desmond Tutu.

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Sizwe Banzi est mort (Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord) Paris

Currently on in Peter Brook’s atmospheric old theatre on boulevard de la Chapelle is the adaptation of Athol Fugard’s Sizwe Bansi is Dead into French by Marie-Hélène Estienne with direction by Peter Brook. Unfortunately this erroneous title, ‘Banzi’ not ‘Bansi’, has survived in to the translation. ‘Sizwe’ means ‘people’ and ‘bansi’ means ‘great’. Fugard intended the title as a political statement, but when the play first went to the UK a typo on a poster resulted in ‘banzi’, something only corrected in later English editions.

It’s inevitable that comparisons are drawn when one sees a foreign version, but it is not that comparisons are unfair, but rather that they are unhelpful. However, curiosity demands. The setting remains South Africa, and the script is relatively faithful to the original with some additional explication. The stage is bare using only the paint-flaked walls of the Bouffes as backdrop. Back, metal clothing-rails on wheels serve as doorways; props include a couple of chairs and two rubbish bags. Whereas the South African productions have tended to be more literal, Brook decorates the photographer Styles’s studio with ink wash impressions on cardboard to represent photographs.

The greatest difference from the recent revival with John Kani and Winston Ntshona, is in the physical presence of the actors and their interpretation of the rôles. Habib Dembélé is a slight man with a ponytail and an almost camp joie de vivre, an effeminate streak noticeable but greatly downplayed by Kani. In contrast to Ntshona, Pitcho Womba Konga (Sizwe) is a giant of a man with the silhouette of a door. Both actors handle their characters with sensitivity and humour. As a South African, it’s affirming to see Fugard’s remarkable script succeed as well in Paris as Cape Town.

January 7, 2007 | Tags: , , , | Comments Closed

Berlin January 2007

Die Zauberflöte (Komische Oper Berlin) Berlin

Provocative director Hans Neuenfels has in the current production of Mozart’s The Magic Flute extended it as a modern spielsang, with a cast of actors, and set it in a clinic for sexual neurosis. It’s a Freudian claptrap distillation of an imagined subtext in the original, which when it doesn’t make sense is elaborately worked in to the opera by inserting passages of clumsy text penned by Neuenfels himself. The magic flute is a four foot lacquered penis and the glockenspiel a set of silver testicles. Although trying hard to be camp and tongue in cheek, the humour is resolutely mirthless, lacking all Mozart’s sense of fun. The second half is particularly belaboured with Mozart’s beautiful score tediously interrupted by Neunfels’s self-important treatise. Though as a director he clearly has an excellent aesthetic eye, this production was truly an example over-subsidised self-indulgence.

January 5, 2007 | Comments Closed