Producer Sonia Friedman’s plan to change the face of West End press-night routine was finally realised as follows: the reviewers turned up on the official opening night of By The Bog Of Cats, which started at the usual early-press-night hour of 7pm. Not a great deal of radical alteration in evidence, to the naked eye. But look closer, and there still isn’t. (Except for the case of Quentin Letts, who affected to take Friedman’s desire for something more like a Broadway arrangement as grounds for breaking the embargo on review publication which is, er, a crucial part of said Broadway arrangement.)
Friedman’s stated aim was to relieve the pressure on actors of having a show stand or fall in critical terms on a single performance by inviting critics to any one of several preview performances but maintaining the embargo on publication before the official opening night It’s been pointed out that, arguably, such a set-up could actually increase actors’ uneasiness by making them feel exposed to press judgement for several successive nights rather than getting it over in one go. One suspects that the proposed changes might not have been made out of consideration for actors in general, but for stars in particular – indeed, for overseas stars such as Kim Cattrall in Whose Life Is It Anyway? and Holly Hunter in By The Bog Of Cats.
Playing the accent
And one can almost sympathise. Almost. It’s conceivable that Hunter’s accent was having a bad night on …Bog Of Cats’ opening. Conversely, it’s possible that the accent was running in and would have been even more pronounced, so to speak, in preview. I once heard an actor asked what part of Ireland his character in a play came from; before he could answer, a wag interjected, “Most of it, judging by the accent.” That holds true here: Hunter’s character Hester Swane evidently comes from most of Ireland. Also from a number of regions of Latin America and one or two parts of Sri Lanka. Nor is the point that it’s a bad accent per se. Rather, Hunter seemed to be expending so much effort playing the accent that the language of her lines suffered… in fact, less due to duff phonemes than monotonous cadence patterns. For Marina Carr writes with intensity at the best of times. Here, combining a version of Medea with the gloomier strain of Yeatsian Celtic imagery, it’s a dense mix; and however physically committed Hunter’s performance may be, if she loses the linguistic grounding, it’s all for nothing.
A dense mix, but a dramaturgically lumpy one. The Greek and the Irish simply don’t blend here. Carr has stuck to the classical Greek template in structuring her play almost entirely as a series of duets. Each pair argue their conflicting cases, then another opposition is set up, and so on; the Act Two wedding scene stands out as being more lively not least because it’s the only real ensemble segment in the whole evening. Dominic Cooke directs with half an eye on that Greek formality, and Hildegard Bechtler’s stark design does nothing to counter it. However, give such a spare, ritualised performance to Gaelic poeticism and it’s all too easy to sound ridiculous. The language needs to take flight, but here it’s as earthbound as the dead black swan that Hester’s dragging along on her first entrance. As more than one reviewer has noted, the business of the swan, followed by that of the spectral Ghost Fancier, is spitting into the wind of self-parody. And when even an actress of the calibre of Bríd Brennan is called upon to suppress her usually audible Ulster twang beneath a broth of a cod-Oirish brogue, you know things have gone too far, never mind forcing her to dress and behave like the kind of character you’d find used for a throwaway gag in Blackadder. None of these flaws – the accents, the static staging, the Hiberno-Hellenic conflict of dramatic register – is disastrous in itself, but they mount up, and the production really can’t survive their aggregation.
Febrile
Peter Whelan’s The Earthly Paradise falls prey to a similar kind of accumulation of weaknesses. The (narratively and logically) clunky memory-play structure would not be fatal if the central love-triangle plot were played out in external events rather than in the various parties’ peculiar flavours of angst. Like my FT foreman Alastair Macaulay, I am a committed fan of Alan Cox – in my case, ever since I saw him in 1997, in a brave 29-hour battle against mental and physical meltdown in the central role of the first modern-times revival of Neil Oram’s The Warp, in which Cox was playing the protagonist who appears in virtually every scene of the ten-play cycle. Here, the character of Dante Gabriel Rossetti is of a kind whose wry elements Cox can pitch beautifully as a matter of course, but which gives him little substantial help in finding an uninterrupted through line for his portrayal. Nigel Lindsay’s William Morris is endearingly blundering, but somehow not quite enough so. And Saffron Burrows as Morris’s wife (and Rossetti’s beloved) Janey is visually a pre-Raphaelite canvas come to life, but really ought to consider the option of delivering one or two of her lines without a nervous, febrile pant to show the stress under which Janey feels herself. Robert Delamere’s production is excellent in its sensitivity to the material but, as with much of the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood’s artwork in various media, there’s a slightly awkward sense that, to appreciate the full emotional intensity, perhaps you had to be there.
Piquant
Striking a happy emotional medium is likewise an issue with Grand Hotel at the Donmar. Some reviews have considered that Wright and Forrest’s musical sells out the astringency of Vicki Baum’s novel by allowing happy, or at least momentarily hopeful, endings to a couple of the many plot strands. I’d look at it conversely: that this faintly relenting compromise is the best they could get away with in the circumstances. A wholly unmodulated downbeat conclusion to a musical? No, not even West Side Story, not even Sunset Boulevard. The movie comparison of the latter example is apt, because – albeit that this musical in its original 1958 form anticipated the genre by a decade and more – the form here is effectively that of the 1970s disaster movie, in which the major calamity served simply as a portmanteau into which to pack the stories of various passengers bound for the Airport or folk on the umpteenth floor of The Towering Inferno or whatever. The only difference is that the Grand Hotel in Berlin isn’t subjected to flood or bomb attack or the like (although the overdone protest number by the militant shoeshine boys of the lumpenproletariat might feel like such a threat if it weren’t so blatant). It’s the grind of disappointment or tragedy for one character after another that gives the show its piquant flavour, and Michael Grandage’s production does well to maintain this grimness whilst telescoping the whole business into an uninterrupted hour and three-quarters. (Side note: review comments about the breathtaking backdrop mural serve to sort the sheep from the goats. Like others, I would have mistakenly attributed the inspiration to George Grosz, because I too was in error regarding the painting’s central figure of Otto Dix’s Journalist, the principal giveaway as regards graphical sources.)
Unfashionable
Period can be a tricky thing to deal with directorially, especially when it’s almost but not quite close enough to the present to get away with signalling few significant differences. This is the problem which bedevils a number of aspects of Thea Sharrock’s revival of Blithe Spirit, now at the Savoy. Aden Gillett’s behaviour as Charles Condomine is plausibly natural from a contemporary point of view in his response to being haunted by first one wife then both, but it lacks the brittle Cowardian poise from which much of the comedy derives. Similarly, Amanda Drew is full of feline allure as the ethereal Elvira, but – unfashionable though it may be to point out – her accent marks her down as middle-class in a period and milieu when that was a stratum looked down on rather than up to. Charles might well have had a passionate affair with such an Elvira, but he would never have married her. It’s left to Joanna Riding’s Ruth to show both her co-stars the territory they should be inhabiting. As for Penelope Keith’s Madame Arcati, yes, she’s pretty much exactly as one would expect; consequently, I and my neighbour on press night, playwright Tim Fountain, found ourselves compulsively imagining the elderly medium being played not by Keith but by Fountain’s H-O-T-B-O-I star Bette Bourne. If Bourne hasn’t already essayed the role, he surely must. I’d even sink a quid or two into the production myself, just for the joy of seeing it.
Written for Theatre Record.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.
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