Waiting for Godot in Khayelitsha

Waiting for Godot performed in Khayelitsha


Photos: Damian Crook

One look at the sprawling shacks literally across the road from the O.R. Tambo Sports Centre in Khayelitsha and the seemingly endless agony of waiting for a better life is quite apparent. At a once-off performance here on a cold Monday evening (August 2), Waiting for Godot, Samuel Beckett’s masterpiece and a watershed play in the history of theatre, struck an immediate chord.

The British production directed by Sean Mathias started at the Theatre Royal Haymarket in London’s West End and is on a world tour, with a cast that includes Sir Ian McKellen. The renowned actor is well known to a wide audience for his role as Gandalf in the blockbuster film trilogy The Lord of the Rings.

Godot is perceived to be a notoriously difficult text. When first performed in London in 1955, it was greeted with incomprehension. The story goes that critic Harold Hobson left the auditorium, but was persuaded to go back inside and trust the experience. The legendary critic Kenneth Tynan, required a few weeks to understand the work, but then concluded: the play ‘forced me to re-examine the rules which had hitherto governed the drama’. Beckett went on to receive the Nobel Prize.

It might be a revelation for those who intellectualize Beckett, how the local citizens of Khayelitsha, many with limited exposure to formal theatre, enjoyed and understood the performance. After all, Athol Fugard directed a production of Godot in 1962 at the Rehearsal Room in Johannesburg with an all-black cast. One of the earliest productions was in San Quentin prison, where Beckett’s absurdity is still all too real.

Mathias and his cast were determined despite real logistical challenges to tour to Khayelitsha, if only for one performance. They describe it as a highlight of their world tour. McKellen has also been visiting schools in the area. He has now performed this production of Godot in 17 theatres.

When we arrive at the hall, they are still rehearsing, having re-blocked the performance for this one show.

An audience of around 600 gathered, about a third white, among all of them many recognisable faces from the arts community. People started queuing from 5pm; the play was scheduled to start at 6pm, but “curtain” – there was of course no curtain or proscenium arch – “went up” only at 6:30pm. A marimba band entertained patrons while they waited.

Admission was on a “pay-what-you-can” basis. The box office says tickets sold for as little as ten cents, while one person paid R1000. People continued to trickle in right up until interval, filling the stands at the back of the hall.

Dressed as a dishevelled tramp, McKellen (Estragon/Gogo) enters first, removing his boot to show a bleeding, suppurating foot. When Gogo says: “We’ve no rights anymore? . . . We’ve lost our rights?’, you can feel the audience’s ears prick up.

Soon he and his vagrant cohort, Vladimir (Roger Rees) are talking of hanging themselves from a tree, which will give them the added benefit of an erection. There is loud laughter. The entire evening is punctuated with applause and laughter. Gasps when Lucky (Brendan O’Hea), with his sad face, enters with a rope lead noosed around his neck, weighted down with a huge leather bag, wicker-basket and folding chair. His master, Pozzo (Matthew Kelly), has all the comic horror of the child-killing clown in the film of Stephen King’s It. When he demands of the homeless men: ‘Waiting? . . . Here? On my land?’, a series of ‘Yo! Yo! Yo!’ is emitted by a woman sitting behind me. There are protests as Lucky is called “pig”, “hog”, and obediently holds Pozzo’s whip in his mouth – the subjugated complicit in his oppression; dead silence when Rees shouts: ‘It’s a scandal! . . . To treat a man like that!”; loud chuckles and pointing as McKellen gnaws Pozzo’s discarded chicken bones from the floor.

More applause after Lucky’s avalanche of a monologue ends with his collapse; belly laughs when the exhausted Lucky topples over again and Gogo says, ‘Oh, his doing it on purpose’.

Near the conclusion of Act 1, a follow-spotlight accompanied by an eerie sound effect falls on the two tramps. Someone in the audience mutters, “Ooh! Police!”

In the second half when the characters all crumple in a heap, children squeal with delight.

The performance ends to whistles, cheers, and synchronised clapping. The actors exit the stage into the audience, shaking hands, posing for photographs on cellphones. It has been a success.

Waiting for Godot closes at the Fugard Theatre on August 14.
Tel: 021-461 4554.

August 13, 2010 | Tags: , , , , | Comments Closed

London (June 2009)

War Horse

At dinner last night I was rightly chastised for not keeping my blog up to date with the productions I have seen while travelling. So here’s a quick catch up for those interested and some arbitrary comments on what’s happening out there.

War HorseAfter an incredibly successful series of runs at the National Theatre this has now moved to the New London Theatre. Starring the horse puppets of our very own South African Handspring Puppet Company, this is one of the most beautiful, mesmerising and gruelling things you will ever see. Set in World War 1 it traces the story of two horses that go into battle. At times the direction is in danger of anthropomorphising the animals, but the production manages to avoid this trap. The result is deeply affecting. (Strange how many of us find the peril of the animals somehow more upsetting than when it is about human characters such as in a film like Gallipoli.

Hamlet (Donmar West End at Wyndhams)The ingenious Donmar Theatre concludes its year-long residency at Wyndham’s with Jude Law as Hamlet. Law does not disappoint and he pulls of the role. He does some things beautifully, but I feel the director could have been harder on him; I think he is capable of even more. There are a few moments playing to the love sick fans in the back rows, but it is wonderful to see youngsters in sleeping bags hoping to get a ticket to a Shakespeare.

Waiting for Godot (Haymarket)This is a real gem. With Ian McKellen (Estragon) and Patrick Stewart (Vladimir), it is beautifully conceived and directed by Sean Mathias (someone Cape Town likes to lay claim to). Simon Callow (Pozzo) is on top form and Ronald Pickup (Lucky) delivers a tour de force.

A Little Night MusicThe Menier Chocolate Factory’s latest Sondheim production of the musical A Little Night Music, directed by Trevor Nunn, has transferred to the Garrick Theatre. It is not packing the audiences in, but Sondheim seldom does. This is one of the cleverest and most entertaining works of art you’ll ever see.

All’s Well That Ends Well (National)
A solid production in repertory at the National.

The Cherry Orchard (The Old Vic)
This is rather a dull production for Sam Mendes. On the night I saw it, Sinéad Cusack was uninspiring; and Ethan Hawke feeble. Simon Russell Beale (as the merchant) stole the show. He’s one of my favourite actors in London. I saw him last year in the title role of Brecht’s Galileo, and a riveting performance as Edward in Pinter’s masterpiece, A Slight Ache (both at the National).

July 12, 2009 | Tags: , , , , , , , , , | Comments Closed

The Tempest

Photo: Ellie Kurtz

Photo: Ellie Kurtz

Many great directors, among them Richard Eyre, believe Shakespeare’s The Tempest can be interpreted as ‘a play about colonialism without the least distortion – which is not to deny that it is about other things: fathers, daughters, power and magic’ and theatre itself.

This is perhaps optimistic. The hiccup for a modern audience is that The Tempest read through a colonial lens turns Shakespeare into a racist by anachronistic reduction, in the same way that The Merchant of Venice is anti-Semitic and The Taming of the Shrew is seen as sexist.

When Roy Sargeant last year set the Merchant in fascist Italy he torpedoed the happy comic ending which requires Shylock to be a villain, for after his humiliation how could we celebrate the petty love intrigues amongst a bunch of selfish and vainglorious fascist kids?

By using extensive directorial license Janice Honeyman is more successful in negotiating such pitfalls for the Baxter Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company’s co-production of The Tempest.
For modern audiences it is necessary sometimes to sacrifice the textual integrity of the work for accessibility, for what is lost or contradictory in the narrow confines of such readings is compensated for by the enjoyment and understanding brought in the fresh experience of the play.

At the time of writing the play (around 1610), Shakespeare was probably only referencing reports from the briefest and very first tentative, mostly failed, attempts to establish colonies in the Caribbean. The frequent references to freedom can only be ahistorically read as identifying with the aspirations of colonial subjects. Shakespeare was more concerned with freedom in his own society, with moral and creative freedom, freedom through love and willing servitude.

The colonialist reading makes our response to Prospero complex and more fascinating, for he is now the villain, a cruel, irascible, ignoble conquistador screaming and wielding a sjambok. Providence Divine he believes has given him the island, which he in fact stole from Caliban, now his slave. Antony Sher’s emotional reinterpretation of the role does keep our sympathy and ultimately succeeds with his ‘De Klerk’ moment in which he abrogates power and in the last two lines asks, “As you from crimes would pardon’d be / Let your indulgence set me free.” Something which didn’t exactly happen in the colonies, but did in South Africa.

John Kani delivers a first class performance as a humane if foolish Caliban for whom we feel great compassion, but the post-colonial construal makes his job problematic. So Honeyman cleverly has Prospero address the closing couplet to Caliban, and Caliban the last figure on stage.

But if Caliban represents the aboriginals, it is grossly insulting, despite Kani’s empathic characterisation in chains. The Martinican poet Aimé Césair tried to ‘correct’ this with his play Une Tempete told from Caliban’s perspective. Scholars of course disagree among themselves, but some commentators hold Shakespeare’s Caliban as responsible for justifying the British establishments patronising view of the colonised.

Not only does Prospero describe Caliban as subhuman, but the whole play constructs him as subhuman and irredeemably recidivist lusting after Miranda who by his own admission he wants to rape. A ‘thing of darkness’, a ‘beast’, a ‘monster’, ‘thy vile race’ freed from superstition and witchcraft by Prospero, who has taught him ‘how to name the bigger light, and how the less’. Of course, the first nations had perfectly good languages of their own. Caliban’s rebellion is comic ignorance, pandering after false Gods. Unlike Prospero he has no Mandela moment or Gandhi quality.

The effect is to shift the primary relationship. This Tempest revolves around the dynamic between Ariel and Prospero. In a handsome performance, Atandwa Kani, as the native sprite and politically correct reading of the colonial struggle, takes centre stage and steals the show, abetted by Neo Muyanga’s superb musical compositions.

Visually the production will stun audiences, especially in the UK where it will tour. Extensive use of colourful African fabrics and costumes designed by Illka Louw, giant Bamako-style puppets by Janni Younge and African masks, almost overwhelm the performances. Pantomime can so quickly supplant allegory. Though not illegitimate in our post-modern world, given the colonial reading, there is some irony in this as it is of course unavoidably faux, an appropriation of African culture and ritual objects, decontextualised and limited in function to exotic appeal.

The sheer visual density of the staging means audiences will be rewarded on a second viewing.

February 6, 2009 | Tags: , , , , | Comments Closed

London Theatre September 2007

The Emperor Jones (Olivier, National Theatre)

Thea Sharrock’s restaging of her acclaimed production (at The Gate Theatre) of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones in the massive Olivier Theatre is beautifully designed and fills the space effortlessly.

Brutus Jones (played by risen star Paterson Joseph who is also in Saint Joan in repertory), escaped convict and murderer, establishes himself as a self-styled emperor and kleptocrat on a Caribbean island taxing and lauding over the “bush niggers”. Facing a revolt, he decides to flee the island. Lost in the forests, exhausted and frightened, Jones sees the ghosts of the men he has done wrong and in what is the most powerful scene, finds himself auctioned in a phantasmal slave market.

The subject matter of the play is as pertinent today as it was then. O’Neill used Haiti’s dictator Henri Christophe (who like Joes eventually committed suicide with a silver bullet) as inspiration. The staging in its day was revolutionary. When the production went on a road tour in the 1920s, death threats from the Ku Klux clan stopped its performance any further south than Norfolk. However, the theatrical devices have not weathered as well, and are today decidedly creaky. The play is eighty per cent soliloquy. Joseph plays the part in exaggerated period style as a Southern Negro. Perhaps historically accurate, though the imprecise accent once again interferes with verisimilitude, the effect edges on clowning. As a result, the terrified Jones is often comic – a buffoon. As he is stripped of his trappings, we come no closer to empathy for the man, except perhaps in the slave scene.

The action is accompanied by musicians, but the instruments are all electronically amplified, so that the drumming is more like a recorded soundtrack than a live performance. South Africans will find the effect particularly feeble. So too, the witch doctor, who has as much credibility for an African audience as the Simba chip lion.

Mention must be made of Robin Don’s brilliant revolving stage design, and superb lighting effects by Neil Austin.

September 13, 2007 | Tags: | Comments Closed

House of Holy Afro

House of Holy Afro

Although it has still not been seen in South Africa, Brett Bailey’s The House of the Holy Afro has had successful runs in Switzerland, Austria, Germany, Sweden, Australia, Zimbabwe, Belgium and even Reunion Island. I finally catch it at the Edinburgh Festival. Quite unlike his other work, though carrying his signature stylistically, Afro is a quality ensemble funky camp club entertainment with house DJ Dino Moran (Ibiza, Ministry of Sound).

Bailey tells me how people have attempted to discuss the deeper symbolic meaning of the piece, such as the holy cross backdrop. “There isn’t any,” he insists. “I’m just having a bit of fun.”

The show balances cheap township tat, designer chic and pricey Vegas kitsch. As a theatre man, the acts that work best are those lead by the disguise of a charismatic character. Bailey sources a range of star iconography, from Adam Ant to Brenda Fassie. The entertainment runs the gamut of clubby reworkings of jive, gumboot dancing, Gospel and Afro-pop. Easily accessible, it’s uniquely popular in theatreland with young, late night audiences. And in Edinburgh, I saw a seventy-year-old dowager and her mousey husband tapping away with their feet to the Ugandan Yalimunyenye (“Ancestors, come down from the stars”).

At a seminar hosted by the Africa Consortium UK and The Africa Contemporary Arts Consortium (USA), Bailey is pointedly asked whether he isn’t pandering to European prejudice and exploiting African exoticism.

Bailey replies that he no longer carries his youthful arrogance. “I was naïve,” he says bluntly. This is not to deny the integrity and power of his early works. Artists must be allowed to experiment and find their way, and not be dictated to by academicians and ideologues. But he has learned lessons. Never, he says, will he bring works like iMumbo Jumbo to Europe again. Or Safari, his play about CG Jung’s central African travels. “I made the unforgivable mistake of dressing the Ugandan cast in red clay and raffia skirts. The standing ovations every night were patronising. They were not appreciating the quality of the performance.”

Yet even our official tourism marketers still promote our country with a luxuriously maned male lion and a Zulu with shield and an assegai. Looking at some of the brochures, you wouldn’t think we’d built a standing structure. “But,” counters Bailey, “when black cultural makers bring the same work it comes from the pride of a nation.”

I recall the opening night of Umoja at Artscape. There were German coach tourists with binoculars unabashedly ogling the topless African singers, while several of Cape Town’s recognisable black politicians were beaming and cheering that ‘our people’ had taken the hallowed main stage.

Bailey says he now makes works with either Europe or local audiences in mind. He does not translate works into another culture. Without the cultural literacy, Europeans cannot be blamed for seeing a work about witchcraft as whacky and absurd. “You can’t in theatre give the audience a cultural primer beforehand or some ethnographic display.” This was once seriously considered by his producing hosts.

Bailey has moved away from his initial trilogy – the plays of miracle and wonder. Recently, he has been accessing Greek mythological figures, such as Medea and Orpheus and making site-specific works.

He describes sitting in a tiny shack in Gugulethu where a goat was killed and as the red blood gushed on to the blue linoleum from China, on the television facing him Ridge and Brooke kissed in The Bold and the Beautiful.

“There is an extraordinary flavour of life in South Africa. So much that was previously dominated and destroyed is now bursting through.” The European structures and formats of theatre are no longer the be all and end all. Bailey achieves the apex of theatre – he transports his audience so thoroughly that we once again believe in the experience and ritual of theatre at the very core of what makes us to be human.

The world is taking note. Next year Bailey’s remade opera of Macbeth will tour to Austria, Switzerland, Greece and Germany and The House of the Holy Afro will tour Sydney, London and Zurich. Norrlands Opera, Sweden, have commissioned him to direct a new work. His production of Orfeus has been bought by Linz, Switzerland, which will be the European Cultural capital in 2009. Brett Bailey is co-curator with Jay Pather of the next Spier Arts Festival.

September 2, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

London September 2007

All About My Mother (The Old Vic)
The world premiere stage adaptation by Samuel Adamson of Pedro Almodóvar’s hit film Todo Sobre Mi Madre, is the first time Almodóvar has allowed his work to be done in English and the first stage adaptation he has permitted in 20 years.

It remains in its original setting – Barcelona and Madrid in 1998. Thank God the cast make no attempt at Spanish accents. The Welsh accent of Mark Gatiss as the transsexual hooker Agrado works well. It takes some time however to get used to the restrained Englishness of the performance, especially if one is familiar with Almodóvar’s fabulously volatile characters.

Diana Rigg is a treat as the larger-than-life actress Huma Rojo, but at her best when she plays Rojo playing Blanche in Streetcar Named Desire. The film does lend itself to staging, containing as it does performance themes, the subtext of Tennessee William’s play, and Agrado’s interactions with the audience. Hildegard Bechtler’s rapid fire set design achieves effortlessly the fast movie scene transitions.

Rafta Rafta… (Lyttelton, National Theatre)

The straight play is on the back foot these days. Musicals are sweeping plays from the West End stages, half of them TV show and film derivations (including can you believe it Lord of the Rings?), of which about half appear to be American. Even a venue such as the Aldwych Theatre now has Dirty Dancing. And on the horizon – Desperately Seeking Susan to the music of Blondie, and a musical recension of Gone with the Wind.

And of the few standing straight plays the most exciting new works recently created and staged are by a veteran guard of septuagenarian playwrights – Alan Bennett (The History Boys), Tom Stoppard (Rock ’n’Roll), Michael Frayn (Democracy, The Crimson Hotel) and of course Harold Pinter.

While critics are lamenting the parlous state of the straight play, Steven Berkoff told The Scotsman bluntly that he wasn’t surprised by the success of musicals because “most new plays bore me to death.” Based on the new plays by new playwrights I’ve seen I’m afraid I agree.

Rafta Rafta… is a case in point. To use the critics’ poison phrase, the audience loved in. It was quaint, competent, and despite a sprinkling of Bollywood, boring. The design was clever, the acting excellent. But it was no more than a family television sitcom, and not a very funny one at that, on stage.

Based on Bill Naughton’s All in Good Time (1963) it is set in an Indian immigrant community in Britain, lightly touching on conflict between the first and second generations.

September 1, 2007 | Comments Closed

South Africans at Edinburgh 2007

Comparisons are invidious, but instructive. An ex-South African (to use that colloquialism peculiar to white South Africa meaning a highly qualified fellow with two passports who now lives in London) tells me our National Arts Festival is no different from the Edinburgh festival. Make that festivals – half a dozen separate simultaneously held events. The Scottish capital – their host –– is architecturally splendid and multitudinous, beautiful but unsurprising, built as it is on the discreet greed of the financial instrument – banks and insurance companies forming the bedrock. Started in 1947, to affirm the creative achievements of the human spirit after the near annihilation of meaning during World War II, this year marks the 60th annual celebration of the arts.

The festival first-timer notices similarities to the Grahamstown event: the desperate fringe artists swatting patrons with flyers; the stone university buildings; makeshift venues that recall a Gothic student digs’ life; and a High Street with a dirty great cathedral (theirs is dirtier); the seething crowds – though in SA we don’t usually get teams of drunk, middle-aged women stumbling home. It’s also wet. The height of Scotland’s summer is equivalent to the depths of our winter. Robert Louis Stevenson described Edinburgh’s climate as “meteorological purgatory”. Global warming seems to have slowed the Gulf Stream denying the country any future summers, instead scorching tinder-dry Europe. And like Grahamstown, the city is teeming with an outbreak of comedians.

There is no comparison in scale. There are more stand-ups at Edinburgh than there are fringe shows at Grahamstown. Over 300 comics and over 600 comedies. Bring back King James VI for he licensed comedians (and beggars) in the 16th century. With 2000 fringe acts and over 17 000 performers, Edinburgh is seven times the size of our National Arts Festival (NAF). The only absence this year appears to be that of American patrons, so complain some impresarios.

The problem is partly that the ever-growing number of shows has outstripped the audience. Like our National Arts Festival, the open fringe has no curatorship. However, and this is a concept the Grahamstown event should seriously consider, two reliable brands of quality have been established on the open fringe – the Assembly and the Pleasance. The Assembly banner, consisting of eight separate venues scattered throughout the city, hosts over 300 shows, itself producing 25 shows, two of which so favoured are South African: Michael Lessac’s Truth in Translation and Brett Bailey’s House of the Holy Afro.

This year, Assembly founder and CEO, William Burdett-Coutts, anticipates his first financial loss in seven years, but he’s taking it in his considerable stride. It happens in this business; no need to panic.

Without a financial guarantee, it seems insane for a South African artist to even attempt Edinburgh. The economics are as foreboding as those of our NAF, except in British Pounds ten times the stake at risk. Even if sold out, the show is lucky to break even. Innumerable shows find themselves playing to audiences of fewer than twenty. Most British artists really come hoping to be discovered for television and radio. After a workshopped Jerry Springer the Opera was picked up by the National Theatre and went on to a spectacular West End run Edinburgh is awash this year with new musicals – over one hundred! There’s Orgasm the Musical, Zombie Prom, two musicals about Tony Blair, as well as several other facile agitprop pieces going by such jingles as Jihad the Musical and Failed States.

On the Royal Mile, I bump into Stef Junker (of Stef’s Sidesplitting Hypnosis) parading in the cold drizzle wearing nothing but an exiguous speedo. “We’ve decided to bring you some sunshine from sunny Souf Efrica,” he shouts, exaggerating his accent and pressing a flyer on me.

There seems to be a rite of passage, peculiar to South African performers, perhaps a hangover from cultural cringe, who feel that to stage at Edinburgh is to graduate after they have ‘passed’ Grahamstown. And there were many gold stars awarded this year. All the proudly South African productions – Lucy Heavens and Sarah Jane Scott’s Eurafrica, the Cape Dance Company, the Grammy-winning Soweto Gospel Choir’s African Spirit, as well as Translation and Afro received much coveted and judiciously awarded four-star reviews. While an exhibition of William Kentridge’s prints has introduced this master artist to a new audience.

The print critics, because of the bewildering number of shows, are powerful here, though more by way of their recommendations that bring an audience, than by their ability to put people off. However, one pities those shows listed in the daily review paper under ‘Not Recommended’– surely their titles should have sufficed – Beckett in a Bucket, Songs About Vaginas, and Find Me a Primitive Man?

The LA production of Athol Fugard’s Exits and Entrances is being favourably received too, though marred by the appalling apery of Fugard’s accent by the young man playing the autobiographical character. I preferred our Jason Ralph, but overall this production is superior because director Stephen Sachs understands that it is a struggle of styles. Morlan Higgins as André Huguenet, flamboyant not flaming, manages the crucial transition, to be stripped of disguise and affectation, not “an actor puffed up on stage”, but “an ageing fat old gay ham”, the real man bursting through his artifice.

Truth in Translation kicked off in the headlines with Hugh Masekela declaring to The Times that the ANC had sold out the struggle and he felt he was no longer welcome to trumpet transformation. He is quoted as saying, “People fight for freedom and then they forget and oppress their own people.” As if to prove his point the following week The Scotsman ran a 36-point headline: “A bully, thief and drunk who jumped the transplant queue to ‘steal’ liver – meet Dr Beetroot, health minister”, accompanied by a suitably frightful picture of Tshabalala-Msimang.

Critics seem to agree with this newspaper’s assessment that Translation is aesthetically and structurally flawed, but the subject matter transcends its formal detractions. Extracts from Lessac’s Translation will be performed at the Fringe Awards ceremony.

South African artists have certainly made good at Edinburgh this year following in the footsteps of a history of quality productions at the festival by stalwart theatre practitioners such as Andrew Buckland, Mbongeni Ngema, David Kramer, Greg Coetzee, Paul Slabolepszy, Pieter-Dirk Uys and Nicholas Ellenbogen.

August 30, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

London Theatre August 2007

Saint Joan (Olivier, National Theatre)

As George Bernard Shaw approaches the end of copyright, directors will hopefully approach his work with a renewed vigour and less reverence. Having seen a couple of museum pieces at the Shaw Festival in Canada a few years back, I approached the three hours of Saint Joan, his 1923 work, somewhat circumspectly.
I was well rewarded. Although the production was competent with Paul Ready (The Dauphin), Angus Wright (Warwick), Oliver Ford Davies (Inquisitor) turning in solid performances, it was the play itself that did the trick.
It tells the story of the brief and brutally ended life of Joan of Arc. Caught up in the machinations of the Hundred Years War, she was burned at the stake shortly after turning 19, as thanks for leading the French in victories. Twenty-five years later, in 1456, she was declared innocent. Ironically, the court that produced this just verdict was entirely corrupt, while the court that had sent her for burning was conducted with the far more sly hypocrisy of church dogma and Christian superstitions. In 1920 she was canonised a saint.
The gamine Anne-Marie Duff (of TV series Shameless fame and the film The Magdalene Sisters) plays the feisty peasant girl employing a broad Irish accent. It’s a sprightly performance, though I admit that towards the end, I was not sufficiently taken with her portrayal to wish for a delay or be heartbroken by her burning.
Shaw’s subtle arguments and his extraordinary command of the language – there are only a handful of practicing playwrights that approach his authority over English – is a rare treat.

Philistines (Lyttelton, National Theatre)

This new version by Andrew Upton of Maxim Gorky’s first play Philistines (1902) is beautifully staged by the National Theatre’s Associate Director, Howard Davies. Its naturalism caused riots in the theatre when it was first performed (Stanislavsky directed).
Set in a bourgeois home in the first years of the 20th century, this revolutionary work prefigures the cataclysmic societal upheavals that would sweep Russia. It’s worth remembering that the revolutionary Gorky, a friend of Lenin’s, and denounced and imprisoned by Tsar Nicholas II, was not much later to have his plays closed and banned by Lenin.
Magnificent production values and carefully observed performances from Phil Davis (as Vassily playing a similar role to the one he played in the BBC’s Bleakhouse) and Conleth Hill (who I last saw in Democracy) deliver the quality of production one expects, but don’t always get at the National.

A Resounding Tinkle – N.F. Simpson
Gladly Otherwise – N.F. Simpson
The Crimson Hotel – Michael Frayn

This triple bill of British ‘absurdist’ theatre is a refreshing treat. Not to be confused with the tortured existential ‘theatre of the absurd’, this is absurdity as humour. N.F. Simpson was a contemporary of the Goons, who play with paradox and logic, and a precursor of Monty Python’s extensive use of absurdity for humour in which the extraordinary is treated as the everyday. So, in A Resounding Tinkle , written fifty years ago, a suburban couple (whose surname is Paradocks) are trying to come to terms with an oversized elephant that has been delivered to their home in a scenario that is today described anachronistically as Pythonesque. The show is full of such delightful whimsy.

Frayn’s The Crimson Hotel is a particularly cunning piece of deconstructed farce in a similar vein to Woody Allen’s Lovborg’s Women Reconsidered. The script is a gift for drama teachers.

The Donmar as always makes ingenious use of sound and set design. Crimson Hotel concludes with the female lead, Lyndsey Marshal, literally disappearing in to an average-sized picnic basket!

Unfortunately, the best London critics it seems are in Edinburgh at the Festival and the third rung that have remained behind have given Absurdia a perplexed dismissal – ‘just nonsense’ declares a major daily. Fortunately, Billington managed to squeeze it in before his departure and gave it heaps of hard-earned praise.

August 27, 2007 | Tags: , | Comments Closed

At the Edinburgh Festival 2007

Ranking top of my festival experience here has to be The Battle of Stalingrad (Tbilisi Marionette Theatre). Rezo Gabdriadze, writer and director, using small puppets, recreates the tragedy of the apocalyptic battle that saw the death of a million human beings. His two protagonists, imaginatively take the form of horses (around a 100 000 horses died in Stalingrad).

I have always felt it interesting that there is no adjectival form for the English noun ‘pathos’ (from the Greek pathos meaning ‘suffering’). ‘Pathetic’ it isn’t. And the ability to arouse pathos, beyond empathy, is the essence of theatre. Without pathos, it is entertainment. Pathos has to be created – always made anew. It cannot be described. It is firmly a noun. And by concentrating on individual stories in this vast canvass, Gabdriadze’s delicately made puppets bring the full horror of a detestable history home. This is powerful, refined theatre, visualised with a freshness and ingenuity that allows us to respond to the horrific slaughter with feeling, rather than a dulled sense of the futility of man.

I highly recommend that anyone who comes within the vicinity of this theatre master makes every effort to see his work.
Visit their website www.gabriadzetheatre.ge or www.georgianseason.ge

Drawing crowds and splashing endless photographs of Alan Cumming’s cute naked butt across the magazines and newspapers is a new production of Euripides’ The Bacchae by the National Theatre of Scotland. It’s a pleasing enough entertainment, but it really boils down to a wonderful vehicle for impish Cumming, who is superb.

The experimental Wooster Group’s production of La Didone combines Francesco Cavalli’s 17th century opera with Mario Bava’s 1965 Sci-Fi B-movie horror film Planet of the Vampires in a hi-tec staging. It is visually exciting; the singers are not only technically brilliant, but blessed with pleasing voices; though once we have the concept it becomes a one-trick pony and soon begins to wear thin. The effects are clever, but alienating. You never get into either story – the opera and its parallel movie. Much of the action is awkward, the cast negotiating their way around screens and the hi-tec equipment.

Though not well received by some starchy critics and some bemused, rather literal-minded balletomanes, the Royal Ballet of Flanders production of William Forsythe’s satirical ballet Impressing the Czar is a coup de théâtre. Originally performed in Frankfurt in 1988 it shared notoriety among the outraged city fathers who eventually had enough and closed the Ballet Frankfurt.

The Brazilian dance company of Lia Rodriguez are here with Incarnat. It’s an hour long disembowelment with naked male and female dancers making gut-wrenching screams and smearing themselves with blood, gore and gruesome bits of viscera. With all due respect for these brave artists and acknowledging their sincere creative aspirations, it simply doesn’t work. I kept asking, what are they so angry about? This is protest art as mindless and the senseless violence against which presumably they are trying to draw our attention.

Also experimental and not much more successful is the Israeli-Russian physical theatre piece Orpheus. Referencing the great clowns of the stage and the silver screen, the artists employ a range of imaginative props. Unfortunately, it overplays the tricks and the result is somewhat gimmicky and sits uncomfortably.

The American one-man monologue Nijinsky’s Last Dance has played to sold out audiences. The nudity of the incredibly well-shaped and handsome soloist may have more to do with this. A professional dancer foremost, his acting can be a little hammed at times, but the script is good and it’s an easy hour on the eye.

Critically acclaimed and also sold out, but disappointing is Damascus, a new play by Scotland’s David Greig. This success of this work is that it deals in a lucid way with the issues surrounding the present crisis in the Middle East. The public is desperate for an intelligent and dramatic exposition. In other words, people need theatre to deal in a personable and accessible way with the political and abstract issues arising out of different cultures chafing against one another in a world suffering the imbalance of power and resources. But this is not Gorky, who manages that kind of dramatic dance effortlessly. Damascus becomes debate theatre. It also employs monologue, with al the awkwardness that comes form directly addressing the audience and asking rhetorical questions.

August 12, 2007 | Comments Closed

London Theatre July 2007

Cabaret (Lyric Theatre, London)
We were warned. Visiting South Africans and several London theatre practitioners told us to give this version of Cabaret a miss. I also knew it was certain to be a let-down after the superbly executed, imaginative interpretation I saw a few months ago at the Spiegeltent in Berlin, not far from Isherwood’s Nollendorfsraße and around the corner from where Gestapo’s headquarters once stood. But Kander and Ebb’s Cabaret is such a robust work, surely it would shine through? And this is the theatre capital of the world, so how bad could it possibly be?

Readers of this site know I’m not a fan of the mini-me versions of musicals we get to see at Theatre on the Bay. I am revising my opinion. Without lowering one’s standards, I can at least say that the Bay casts may not have the technical prowess or the production resources, but at least they are charismatic.

The West End is struggling for audiences this summer. Today’s Sunday Telegraph reports “Curtain comes down early on 25 West End shows”. Straight plays especially are suffering. A handful of critic-proof mega-musicals are sponging up the audiences. It’s perhaps not surprising then that several of the major daily London newspapers currently list Cabaret among their Top 5 and Pick of the Theatre. I can only guess they’re trying to be nice and are throwing a parochial lifeline to something that should have more artistic merit than We Will Rock You or Mamma Mia.

Let’s start with the set and then work out way down to the direction. If you can imagine what it must be like to be physically inside a swastika, you have some idea of the ugliness of the design.

Why Bob Fosse’s scintillating choreography has been removed is a mystery. Even more mysterious is how what has replaced it managed to earn Javier de Frutos this year’s Laurence Olivier Award for Best Theatre Choreographer. It can’t hold a candle to the original.

The emcee is James Dreyfus. South Africans note his striking resemblance to Mark Banks wearing black lipstick. Banks is funnier. A stand-up comedy version of the emcee role was not to my taste as the best reading of the part, but seemed to go down well with the hoi polloi. Kim Medcalf’s Sally Bowles is competent but uninspired. The best performance is by Andrew Maud as Ernst Ludwig – convincingly Teutonic and comfortably suave.

Director Rufus Norris, whose last production at the National, Market Boy, sent me scurrying from the theatre, plays the gay card heavily in his Cabaret. It’s now a sort of coming-out version of the original. There’s front to back nudity, however the sexuality is anything but erotic, and about as transgressive as a bout of adolescent masturbation. The ensemble indulges in puerile playground frolics. Several times the impression was created that the cast are playing at pranks. Why would any director have a lone member appear at the back of the stage doing the hula every time Fraulein Schneider says ‘pineapple’?

The Hothouse (Lyttelton, National Theatre, London)
Harold Pinter wrote his fifth play, The Hothouse, in 1958 when shock therapy was in vogue and the lobotomy had become the psychiatrist’s panacea. Set in a surreal mental institution that has sinister links to an undefined government ministry, Pinter’s Hothouse reminds one of the cult film Oh Lucky Man. The man in charge is a bumbling, authoritarian ex-colonel called Roote. Arbitrary injustices, individuals lost in the paperwork, bureaucratic mistakes, the abuse of power and torture are regular occurrences in this world. The patients are referred to only by number and not by name. I have a nasty hunch that if we knew enough we’d find out that the Hothouse could serve as a spine-chilling spoof on the inner workings of Guantanamo Bay. Stephen Moore, who I last saw as the lead in The History Boys portrays Roote (Pinter played the role himself in 1995) and gives the part just the right mix of baleful stupidity and humour.

One of the incarcerated numbers has died and another given birth to a child. The ambitious menacing Gibbs (Finbar Lynch) is charged with finding a fall guy and cleaning up the mess.

The second act holds disappointingly few surprises and the ending seems tacked on, but Pinter’s play is rewarding viewing and could have been written yesterday. A strong and even cast are tightly helmed by director Ian Rickson.

The star of the night however is the magnificent set designed by Hildegard Bechtler. Eerie, echoing metal stairways and landings, towering tiled walls, faded green enamel coated interiors, rusted radiators, dented grey metal filing cabinets – every detail recreates the depressing decay of a thoroughly unpleasant utilitarian hospital come government administration.

On accents on stage and The Rose Tattoo (Olivier, National Theatre, London)
There should be a ban on doing accents on stage. In the way that jingoist jokes and cultural stereotypes no longer hold, they belong to a time and style that has passed. Not for reasons of political correctness, but simply that today we know better. It’s unlikely anybody would pen a song like Mad Dogs and Englishman today. Besides, our ears are sharper. With global exposure, we’re becoming far harder to convince.

If a character has an accent that belongs to their native language, and they are speaking in their native language – the Queen speaking English, GW Bush struggling along in American – that’s all very well. It’s also fine if the character is speaking English as a second language and they have an accent. That is part of verisimilitude; though a challenge few actors ever really get right. Personally, I take a more radical position as I believe we’re sophisticated enough today as audiences to ‘see through’ accents. I don’t see much sense anymore in having British or South African English-speaking actors attempting American accents. I’d prefer it if they concentrated on being intelligible and convincing. I do agree to differ with those who feel accents make the make-believe of theatre more authentic.

But why should actors pretending to be Sicilians speaking to one another – presumably in Italian – which the playwright is rendering for our benefit in English – speak with ludicrous accents, and as if they have a poor grasp of their native grammar? The grammar is the playwright’s fault – an unrevised convention of mistaken imitation that dates many works – as silly as casting subtitles on a film in pidgin.

It is simply absurd to perform Chekhov in English with Russian accents; as absurd is it would be to try and imagine what kind of accent Julius Cesar or Oedipus would have attempting to pronounce modern English.

A director could of course use accents of the culture in which the work is performed, for instance to draw class parallels. This could be a way of transposing a work.

Language ability and intelligence are regularly confused. Accents make people sound stupid. That’s why film-makers made Nazis speak zat wey. It was part of ridiculing them. Faux accents are yet another artificial barrier between us and the performer, and another filter that stifles the performance, diluting the emotional energy.

In film, it is increasingly the practice that people speak the language they would speak normally to one another and subtitles are employed. Some films make use of numerous languages in this way.

The situation is even more complicated in today’s multicultural and peripatetic theatre world. Actors can be drawn from the far corners of the globe. Casting is often colour blind. Ophelia can be played by a black actress while Polonius is white. What of it?

This finally brings me to the current London production of Tennessee Williams’s The Rose Tattoo. Unfortunately this was museum piece theatre. Flat and lacking passion, the thick use of typecast Italian accents destroyed what was left. Why not get a real Italian actress?

July 12, 2007 | Tags: , , | Comments Closed
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