Theatre Review | Civilian Theatre

Revisiting…King Charles III

King Charles III – Wyndham’s Theatre, booking until 31 January 2015 (tickets)

Following on from my post revisiting The Scottsboro Boys, Civilian Theatre continues his trip down memory lane (via helpful West End transfers that kind-of legitimises the whole exercise and makes it look rather less like a pointless and desperate act of content generation) by going back to Mike Bartlett’s Shakespeare-inspired take on what might happen when our future monarch finally faces his destiny…

(This review is for a production that took place at the Almeida Theatre in May 2014)

Civilian Theatre was one of many celebrating when Rupert Goold snagged the job of Artistic Director at the Almeida and given the unenviable task of continuing the success of Michael Attenborough’s 11-year tenure. Based on his opening salvo; the intentionally eye-catching American Psycho: The Musical before bringing in his former company with the Headlong-produced 1984, it appears Goold has a canny sense of how to blur the boundaries between popular and elitist theatre.

Appropriately enough the issue of succession is at the heart of the first play Goold has personally directed at the venue; Mike Bartlett’s King Charles III. Another well-judged choice, Bartlett’s play cannot fail to appeal to all audiences. Much has been made of the Shakespearian overtones but the true success of the play is that it is a hugely enjoyable piece of, what Bartlett calls, ‘future history’, which also raises questions that Britain as a country will need to confront in time.

Like Jerusalem this is proper state of the nation theatre and it is heartening to see a playwright unapologetically examine ‘big issues’ on such a grand scale. Bartlett demonstrates that verse has its place in modern drama and that audiences needn’t be turned off by the use of heightened language. The use of iambic pentameter isn’t purely to demonstrate Bartlett’s skill as a poet but because he is dealing with characters that are simultaneously entirely real and, to the majority of us, entirely unknowable.

The greatest PR trick that royalty has ever pulled off was to create this public image and then to strenuously avoid revealing their true face. Our current Queen has studiously kept to this template and it is notable that it is only when the mask slips that the public begins to question their value. As we enter a new era, the age of Will and Kate and of smartphones and public accessibility, this model is in a state of flux and Bartlett has pitched Charles’ succession as the moment that the new and old world will collide.

The use of verse is a way into this private world. How can prose be placed into the mouths of people who are so recognisable but so unknown? We cannot know how they really speak behind closed doors and so creating a state of unreality through artifice is a way to reach some kind of truth. It also allows Bartlett pre-existing conventions to slip seamlessly between conversation and monologue. We are permitted into an inner-realm, not just the closed world of the monarchy but the private consciousness of its key figures.

The allusions come thick and fast and for those who know Shakespeare there is much fun to be had in spotting the references. However Bartlett ensures that this is not to the detriment of those who haven’t been schooled in all the History plays and a fair portion of the tragedies. The characters he draws are fascinating in their own right and capture the essence of who they are. It is perhaps Prince Harry who is closest to caricature but how could one resist when he is built to be modelled on the classic arc of Hal in Henry IV Part I and II.

His entrance to the nightclub and his night of revelry is a clear echo of The Boars-Head Tavern in Eastcheap and whilst Jess is a far cry from Falstaff, one senses that it is only a matter of time before there will be a rejection. In a play of many highlights, it is Harry accepting the duty that has been placed upon him and thus leading to the final abandonment of Jess that is the true tragedy of the play. Jess is the one innocent, drawn unwillingly into Harry’s world and the one target that press can attack. It is a superb and understated performance by Tafline Steen; she gives Jess a stoic dignity in her humiliation and the image of her standing alone before the coronation tears at the heart. It is a brutal reminder, if any was needed, that above all this is a club whose very survival depends on its exclusivity.

The play is a tragicomedy, with a comedic start slowly giving way to the grand tragedy as the crisis develops. Like so many tragedies it is one action that sets the direction on its course and it inexorably rolls towards its conclusion due to man’s frailty. It starts with a funeral, amidst a wonderfully staged requiem scene, and inevitably ends with a coronation. It also features the great dramatic device of signing a document, and it is here that for all the idiocy of Charles we find sympathy for him; he does not fall as far as Lear but the moment that he realises that he must sign is reminiscent of Lear (‘reason not the need’) pleading Goneril and Regan for his knightly retinue.

We know Lear has brought himself to the pass but we sympathise because of, rather than despite, his foolishness. It is the same with Charles that with one rash act, to challenge Parliament, he has like Lear, to split his Kingdom, condemned himself with an unworldly pride and a fatal inability to distinguish between power and authority.

Misunderstanding of royal power leading to constitutional crisis and abdication cannot help but remind of Richard II. However there is less to be drawn into this than in other Shakesperian characters. Tim Pigott-Smith’s Charles may share Richard’s naivety but he does not share his cruelty. There is no moment in the play that Charles echoes Richard’s splendidly cold moment when, on hearing the illness of John of Gaunt, he states ‘pray God we may make haste, and come too late!’, instead he is more a kindred spirit with Shakespeare’s less-performed tragic heroes, Coriolanus and Timon of Athens.

The tragedy of Charles is his unwavering sense of moral principle. He does not recognise flexibility to be an option and even making a gesture towards reconciliation cannot be achieved. Like Coriolanus and Timon he see himself as a good man in a bad world, and that if he does not have his virtue then he will have nothing of himself. People desperately present solutions that require compromise on all sides but they are rejected because there is principle at stake. It is foolish but it is not evil. In many way Pigott-Smith presents a very warm, and almost lovable, Charles and the frustration one feels with him is not with his cause but with his approach to the solution.

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Visceral thrills and society’s ills

This is how we die – Battersea Arts Centre, until 14 November 2014 (tickets – returns only)

At the end of Christopher Brett Bailey’s performance of This is how we die the audience are subjected to – and it is a case of being subjected to rather than being passive observers of – a sonic assault that is best imagined as the sound of an imploding, decaying universe and the tentative hope that something new and beautiful can rise from the fading flickering light. The stage lights turn their impassive bulbs on the audience, bathing the observers in a harsh, unforgiving light whilst ear-shattering, fuzzy rhythms rise and fall, roll and repeat, looping and overlaying motifs amongst discordant sounds. It is the white-noise of paranoia and of an overwhelmingly claustrophobic hopelessness. And then suddenly, within this kaleidoscope of fear, emerges the purity of higher-pitched strings, cutting through the chaos and providing the possibility of escape.

This antagonistic ending, this attritional warfare waged between performer and observer is only eight minutes long but it could easily have been eighty. It is a wonderfully considered reflection and response to the sixty minutes that come before, and adds to the impression that Christopher Brett Bailey has talents and intelligence far beyond being a highly articulate performer blessed with startling verbal dexterity.

Having not previously heard of Bailey, and without looking at the show’s synopsis, I hadn’t really considered what to expect. Whatever I might have expected wouldn’t have come close to the reality. This is a performance that is felt rather than seen. The audience are almost immaterial; nothing has been created for our benefit. The stagecraft is defiantly un-staged. It is a man at a desk, talking, talking and continuing to talk, from notes, for sixty minutes, without stopping, almost without breathing, he continues to talk, to himself, to the walls, to the room, whether the audience is in the room or not, it feels as if he would continue to talk, possibly until all words had become exhausted.

It leaves you in a state of mental and physical exhaustion. Listening to the dialogue, focusing on the words is mentally draining, but there is also palpable tension, as a result of a deliberately abrasive delivery style, that creates an adrenalin rush so intense that by the end of performance you leave the auditorium woozy, unsteady and in need of air.

Bailey arrives as an unassuming, almost diffident presence – perhaps the only hint of what is to come is the resemblance to a young David Lynch – but as soon as he begins he exerts a magnetism that pulls in whatever direction the flight of fancy will take him. He is a remarkably assured performer and is blessed with a lyrical nimbleness that allows what, are assumed to be, tightly crafted pieces the air of stream-of-consciousness dialogue.

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Entering The Aztec Zone

Las Maravillas – Rose Lipman Building, until 01 November 2014

The last time I was at the Rose Lipman Building was to watch Toby Jones and Imelda Staunton in Circle.Mirror.Transformation. I didn’t investigate the basement at the time but I am pretty sure it didn’t act as a portal to the Aztec underworld. Naturally I could be wrong; I hadn’t expected to see Toby Jones in the building either.

The Dreamery call themselves a ‘horror and fantasy art experience production company conjuring magical and mysterious performance art and installations’. That is a hugely ambitious remit, particularly for a fledgling company still looking to establish themselves. Genre fans of any ilk are a pernickety bunch and are notoriously quick to point out any perceived flaws – often volubly and with extreme irritation.

Still, the transformation of the Rose Lipman basement was an impressive achievement. Despite clearly operating with a tight budget the space had been neatly compartmentalised to form a number of small rooms, each with its own clear sense of space and purpose. The overall effect was to create a number of different sensory environments to unsettle the audience. Some areas had clearly suffered from financial limitations, where the money clearly hadn’t stretched as far as needed. It could be a sign of a rookie company that this was most apparent in the opening room and the transition back to reality, as what it meant was that the good bits in the middle were bookended by less impressive memories and often this can be what the audience will remember.

In a small, merry (there were a few stifled giggles to be heard) band of companions, it appears that we are to escape Mitclan and return to the questionably more pleasant surroundings of the De Beauvoir estate. Except, like most ‘immersive’ experiences, this wasn’t really the case; the reality of the fantasy is always more prosaic than can be conceived in fevered imaginings. It is actually a linear journey through a series of classic horror scenarios. There is little in the way of interaction and a number of the scenes feel as if they have no obvious connection to the concept of the Aztec underworld. Instead the feeling was much closer to that of a journey through that icon of Americana – the local funfair’s haunted house (and anyone who spent their teenage years reading Point Horror knows exactly how scarifying that can be).

The unevenness was undeniable and, without giving away too much of the shocks, there is your classically creepy psychotic, ghostly girl and some disturbingly alluring savages but then the next room would be a new scene and you’d be presented with a half-formed idea that reminded you this a young company still learning to refine its product.

It was the lack of narrative thread that gave the production this disjointed quality. We were ushered from one frame to another, and whilst each individual experience was interesting it never really had the opportunity to come together as something greater than the sum of its parts.

However it never tries to be pretentious and there are few moments where the cast seem to be tipping the audience a knowing wink to the comical element that underlies most horror. The production demonstrates you can be committed to interactive theatre without being incredibly po-faced about it, something that both Punchdrunk and dreamthinkspeak would do well to remind themselves of occasionally.

No doubt The Dreamery will reflect on the successes (and it sounds like it has been a total sell-out) but I hope that, as a young company, they end-up taking more away from what didn’t go to plan than what did. They clearly have huge reserves of invention and are savvy enough to be working in one of theatre’s growth areas so learning to really focus on what they can deliver for the money and by spending more time building coherence into the audience’s experience then The Dreamery could find a very successful niche for themselves as purveyors of high-class interactive horror and fantasy.

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Its ‘bloody’ good

Grand Guignol – Southwark Playhouse, until 22 November 2014 (tickets)

With the arrival of Grand Guignol at the Southwark Playhouse there is finally something in south London more terrifying than the underpasses that crisscross Elephant and Castle. Well more terrifying, and more kitsch. For within Carl Grose’s knowing script is contained both a loving homage to the famous Theatre du Grand-Guignol and also a gory melodrama in which the old Parisian theatre specialised.

Grand Guignol has disappeared from the theatrical repertoire; it became a casualty of cinema’s ability to create a more naturalistic form of horror. Audiences had grown tired of the old tricks and the arrival of F.W. Murnau’s expressionist classic Nosferatu or Jacques Tourneaur’s remarkable Cat People were signs that cinema could deliver a more refined product that provided genuine psychological chills instead of cartoonish gore.

Grose’s evident love of the genre – seen through its close alignment with real characters and a smart eye for the detail – is combined with a blend of high-camp, knowing winks and straight out jokes played entirely straight. This approach is clear from the opening scene which throws the audience into the midst of the action; hearts are in mouths, not due to blood-curdling terror but rather down to the terrible dialogue, stilted delivery and risible premise. It is only when the set is rolled back and we realise that we are backstage in the theatre that we acknowledge that the scene was itself a spoof and one of many meta jokes for the theatre literate audience.

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I must thank the good people at Official Theatre for the tickets. Even without this shameless plug, please do check out their website to find out what is going on across the West End; it has links to tickets, venue contact details and bits ‘n bobs about all the theatres – the sort of thing I would do if I wasn’t so damn lazy. (www.officialtheatre.com/fringe)

Humanity put on display

The Wild Duck – Barbican Theatre, until 01 November (tickets)

The last time I watched an Australian theatre company was when Sydney Theatre Company, boasting the talents of Cate Blanchett, Benedict Andrews and Martin Crimp, pitched up at the Barbican with a rather underwhelming production of Boho Strauss’ Big and Small.

Two years later Benedict Andrews’ star has reached the stratosphere with a highly-lauded Three Sisters being followed by the smash-hit of the summer; the Young Vic’s A Streetcar Named Desire. Meanwhile it is time for another Australian-import, as the Belvoir Sydney take part in the International Ibsen season at the Barbican, to go alongside invited productions of Peer Gynt and An Enemy of the People. Over the course of a tumultuous ninety minutes they prove they can certainly hold their own against strong competition.

Simon Stone has taken scissors to Ibsen’s The Wild Duck and, in stripping out exposition and characters, has created an entirely modern, rigorously taut and emotional devastating portrait of a family in collapse. In short, tightly drawn scenes he presents with discomforting acuity the fragility that surrounds us.

Portrait is a carefully chosen word, and Stone appears to continually have in mind Hjalmar’s job as photographer. Scenes are punctuated by a sharp cut to blackout in a move that apes the flash of a photographer’s bulb, and which serves to sear images into the mind. Direction is highly stylised and all of Ibsen’s naturalism is stripped away. The play is presented within a glass box that suggests a photographic studio and also works as a specific commentary on theatre’s ability to put human beings on display for the audience’s consumption. Trapped within the glass box, the characters come to resemble animals in a zoo – living entirely in their own world but permanently open to an unseen audience.

It is only at the very end of the play that characters venture out of their glass prison, and it is this final scene that will break even the hardest of hearts. After the rapidity of scenes building up to a crescendo that it is inevitable as the gun on Hedda Gabbler’s wall, we suddenly have the quiet calm. The storm has blown itself out and the survivors slowly, quietly regroup to survey the damage and tally-up the losses. Brendan Cowell’s Hjalmar and Anita Hegh’s Gina present the raw reality of humans bereft and broken by circumstance. Here Hakon’s macular degeneration acts as both crucial plot point and metaphor for the way that Hjalmar and Gina must now grope their way blindly towards the future.

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Simon Stephens’ takes axe to Chekov’s orchard

The Cherry Orchard – Young Vic Theatre, Until 29 November (Tickets)

Every regular theatre goer has their blind spots, the playwrights that don’t just pass them by but they go out of their way to avoid. Civilian Theatre will happily spend an evening debating the merits of the musical or delivering a polemic against those who worship at the pedestal of Sarah Kane. However in the dark, locked away from public view, is a secret shame; a failure to comprehend, or even by interested in, the merits of turn of the century Russian naturalism.

Being aware that Chekov is, arguably, thought of as second-only to Shakespeare as a playwright and that the finest writers, dramatists and critics hold the likes of Tolstoy, Gorky and Dostoevsky in the highest regard only increases the sense of a personal failure. Add a disinterest in Dickens and Ibsen and the feeling there is a black hole in my cultural awareness grows.

This is not to deny the obvious talent on display; it is impossible, even if you don’t like them, not to respect Dickens’ sentences or Chekov’s details but appreciating the building blocks is a very different thing to admiring the final structure – take the ArelorMitttal Tower, it is certainly impressively constructed but that doesn’t stop it being a hideous eyesore that is nothing more than a well-captured Freudian representation of Boris Johnson’s ego.

Sticking with Freud, I suspect the problems spring from childhood – an A-Level interrogation of A Doll’s House through the lens of Stanislavski is enough to break the spirit of anyone. Task, Objective, Super Objective; it may be true, it may be necessary, it certainly sucks the spirit of the unknown out of theatre. It went in hand-in-hand with experiencing a lifeless, long and boring production of Gorky’s Summerfolk at the National (although seeing the cast included Roger Allam, Patricia Hodge and Simon Russell-Beale, I am willing to concede the problem may have been with this particular reviewer).

Whether the production was good or not, it came at one of those moments you only later realise was ‘formative’. In the same year I saw Complicite’s Mnemonic and a revival of Steven Berkoff’s East – how could a staid, hundred year old drama possibly compete with the vitality of Berkoff or a company showing an impressionable young mind all that theatre could be.

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