I’ve written once or twice about making
allowances when assessing a performance, of evaluating it as “good,
considering…”. I’m against it: I think what I said was that
audiences don’t pay to make allowances. External considerations
shouldn’t bear on one’s opinion of the quality of a production, any
more than whether it was an unpleasant journey to the theatre.
And yet (1): I increasingly find myself, when seeing a show with modest
beginnings that has subsequently come into the West End, thinking that
it was probably fine in its more limited original context but simply
can’t claim a place in the most exalted rank. Most often this is
a matter of value for money: is a show worth West End ticket
prices? Is any show worth some West End ticket prices? It
was only a couple of years ago that, if I recall aright,
Jerry Springer – The Opera broke
the £50 ticket barrier. Shortly afterwards,
Acorn Antiques The Musical upped
the ante to £65… to pay for the names involved, I hope, rather
than the uncertain production. In April, the latter show’s venue,
the Haymarket, is reported to be ready to break the ton: top-price
tickets for Judi Dench in
Hay Fever,
£100. Sure, this will include complimentary programmes (so
that will be, what, a £3.50 value) and what is described as
“V.I.P. service”… which, frankly, for my hundred quid, would have to be
the kind of service once legendarily given and received in one of the
boxes at the Victoria Palace during a performance of
Jolson. In any case, what’s
the difference between evaluating a production in terms of ticket price
and, say, in terms of a company’s professional qualifications or
whatever? Moreover, it won’t be my hundred quid: since reviewers
get free tickets in any case, how hypocritical is it of us to gripe
about what others pay but we don’t?
Perspective
And yet (2): sometimes there are circumstances which are hard not to
set on one side. When Strathcona TC staged
Notre Dame de Paris a few years
ago, it was clear that the theme of judging by appearances was one that
chimed deeply with this company for people with learning
disabilities. The result was a richer, more complex and far more
satisfying reading than the hollow spectacle of the same tale’s musical
treatment a little while earlier in the West End. There have been
instances, some of them recent (one of them, indeed, not yet
published), when experience or knowledge of an actor’s circumstances
has led me to see a production from a perspective not available to most
of its viewers. How far should such things be deliberately
ignored, or how much used to give a more informed review?
Even when such a factor is widely reported and known, how far should it
impact on the way we watch a play or a performance? This is where
the general musings become particular with regard to one of this
issue’s shows,
Who’s Afraid Of
Virginia Woolf? I’m in the minority on this one, along
with Rebecca Tyrrel and Aleks Sierz: I reckon this was a very good
production indeed, but ultimately it didn’t excite me. In
particular, I was not excited by Kathleen Turner’s performance as
Martha. The best Marthas I have seen have carried an air not just
of undeniable physical presence, in boozy, blowsy seduction and
whatnot, but of suppressed physical threat… as if, when George gained
the psychological upper hand, Martha might just conceivably change the
rules and floor him with a roundhouse punch. Turner’s Martha had
no such air: her movements were economical, almost languid.
Jazz
hands
Now, here’s the thing. Turner has for over a decade now been
living with the pain and damage of rheumatoid arthritis, and in recent
years has addressed it publicly on a number of occasions. I found
that I simply couldn’t help wondering to what extent the physical
aspect of her performance was determined by this condition. Let’s
take one particular moment as an emblematic example. There’s a
set-piece in which Martha explains to George that she has lost the last
of her patience with him; it contains the repeated motif, “SNAP! It
went snap…”. The first of these “snap”s is explicitly, in a stage
direction, a snap of the fingers; the rest are implicitly so, and I
can’t recall seeing a production in which they weren’t played as such:
finger-snaps, with the suddenness and almost the sound of slaps across
the face. Turner, instead and almost grotesquely, made sudden
“jazz hands” gestures, flinging her arms out. In other
circumstances, this could have been made to look like feinted lunges to
attack George; here, to me, they simply looked as if she needed to find
something else to do because the arthritis prevented her from snapping
her fingers.
I may be wrong; these physical points may all be actorly and/or
directorial choices with no relation to Turner’s illness. But
it’s all part of the same issue. To what extent should I have set
that knowledge on one side when considering her performance? To
what extent might it have informed the way I watched the production
and, now, have written about it, or to what extent might it have sent
me striding up a blind alley? When and how can information lead
to condescension? I don’t know. What I know for certain is
that, for me, Turner wasn’t fully there on the stage of the Apollo.
Invisible
The Soldier’s Tale wasn’t
fully there, either. Ian Herbert writes about it in this issue’s
…At The Back column, and I agree
with him and pretty much every other reviewer whose main criticism was
that there was altogether too much of it there, and that in effect
performing the originally spare and angularly elegant piece twice over
made for a laudable gesture but a leaden evening in the theatre.
However, in one crucial respect there was a conspicuous absence.
Director Andrew Steggall staged the piece by placing his musicians on
either side of the stage, beyond the proscenium arch. This is a
piece of music theatre; the musicians, whether simply playing their
instruments or taking an active role, are a crucial part of the
proceedings. We reviewers, seated as we were by convention on the
aisles down either side of the Old Vic’s auditorium, were simply unable
to see one or other group of musicians, British or Iraqi, depending on
which side we were sitting on. It seems not to have occurred to
Steggall to do something as basic as checking his sightlines.
This is not nearly as rare a complaint as it ought to be. Last
summer I grumbled that a director as experienced as Lucy Bailey had
failed to take account of the difference in sightlines when moving
The Postman Always Rings Twice from
the open stage of the West Yorkshire Playhouse’s Quarry space to the
pros-arch environment of the Playhouse on London’s Embankment, with the
result that the production’s big name, Val Kilmer, was invisible from
several dozen seats during two climactic scenes. Once, on the
Fringe, I pointed out to a director that the wide but shallow staging
she had opted for meant that, playing as the show was to an audience on
three sides, half the house had their view of most of the actors
entirely blocked by the body of the one nearest them; she replied that
yes, she was aware of this, but she had chosen this staging. It
didn’t seem to occur to her, even with such prompting, that the
audience of a theatre event was a party worthy of consideration.
It shouldn’t need saying, but alas it seems to, that the audience’s
experience is the point.
Slabs
And… breathe…
The Schuman Plan
was not quite there in terms of drama. A decade or so ago, Tim
Luscombe suggested in
EuroVision that
the universal language was music; here, he seems to be arguing that
it’s fish. But for the programme notes, it would never for a
moment have occurred to me that Luscombe originally set out to write a
play lauding the European Union but that his attitudes grew more
ambivalent as the process of composition continued; to me, it looked as
if right from conception it had been a rather trite polemical piece in
which callow youthful idealism was repeatedly tempered by iniquitous
reality. Personal disagreement with a play’s ideology is, of
course, something to put on one side; what can’t be discounted is that
he has simply written great unwieldy slabs of exposition and
debate. Meaning no disrespect to the intellectual powers of
Suffolk fishermen’s wives, but I doubt I’d ever hear one of them
casually use the phrase “commercial extinction”; it’s just not the way
the idea would be phrased in conversation, even a conversation with a
reporter and an official from the Ministry of Agriculture, Fisheries
and Food. That, for me, was the emblematic moment – the “jazz
hands” moment – of Luscombe’s play.
The Creeper was hardly there
at all as a play. There’s generally a broad consensus among
reviewers, but seldom such a degree of unanimity as here: even raves
and pannings don’t usually march so closely in step as the reviews of
Pauline Macaulay’s revival (with the sole, inexplicably generous
exception of John Peter). Every single star rating I saw was
two-star, and when I finally saw the show I couldn’t find any reason to
disagree in the slightest. Alan Cox’s performance is amusing,
especially if one knows Alan Cox; other than that, nada, zip,
zilch. Ian Richardson’s performance could have been phoned in on
a heavy, period, Bakelite apparatus.
As You Desire Me temporarily lifted
from the Playhouse the stigma of being one of the West End’s blighted
venues which seem seldom to house successful or long-running shows;
with The Creeper, it’s not just Richardson who is cast once again to
type, but the venue itself.
Written for Theatre
Record.