[...] One doesn’t always need to delve
deep in order to give the most efficacious impression of what a
production is like. Look at Tim Walker’s
Sunday Telegraph review, towards
the back of this issue, of the current touring revival of
Me And My Girl. He finds the
production’s most noteworthy factor – indeed, for him perhaps its one
saving grace (no pun intended) – to be a single performance, and from
an unexpected source. So he spends about half his review describing
what Trevor Bannister is like now, for those of us who remember him
principally or only from the thirty-year-old TV sitcom
Are You Being Served? And it
paints a telling picture.
It’s not always necessary to give an account of every significant
aspect of a show in order to make you feel you’re there. Alastair
Macaulay has a gift for describing voices; one can hear a line as one
reads his account of its delivery. Charles Spencer also has a keen eye
for detail, even if he is unjustly remembered for one occasion when he
couldn’t tear it away from a particular female form. Yet if you
go back and read his review of
The
Blue Room, you’ll see that, contrary to popular legend, Charlie
does not refer to Nicole Kidman as “pure theatrical Viagra”: in fact,
he’s alluding to the production’s atmosphere of eroticism as a
whole. Yes, he describes the vision of
la Kidman at some length, but as
one factor among several, each of which swims into vision as you read
his account of it. More than once here I’ve quoted Michael
Coveney’s description of the job of a theatre critic as being “to
explain culture to itself”. This is so, certainly, but theatre is
not just part of a social and cultural discourse: it is, first and
foremost, an experience. Sometimes we do best when we simply try,
as it might be, to oblige the request of the protagonist’s blind father
in John Mortimer’s
A Voyage Round My
Father: “Be my eyes.”
Bends
And sometimes the visibility varies radically in different
atmospheres. It’s that time of year to start considering
transfers from Edinburgh. Fiona Mountford alludes to this
phenomenon in her review of
Particularly
In The Heartland, as do I in mine of
Shamlet – neither of us having
seen the piece in question when it played north of the border. I
did see
Heartland up there
(though not in London), and I think Fiona may be too quick to ascribe
its reception to the syndrome known to some journos as “Edinburgh
bends”, that critical equivalent of oxygen-starvation to the brain
which can result in torrents of praise for a Hungarian woman in a
Perspex box, or whatever.
Heartland’s
problems were apparent to me first time; indeed, they have been common
to all the shows by young American company The TEAM that I have seen,
and to a number of other companies besides.
In The TEAM I see a keen and questing intelligence, vibrant creativity,
delightful playfulness and adventurousness, and of course performance
skills galore as well. Every time I’ve seen them I’ve wanted to
be as enthused as others. But what I don’t see is focus.
They have something to say, and they know what it is, and they have the
nous and the articulacy to say it compellingly… but, as it were, they
don’t put it into sentences. I’m not saying that theatre needs to
be linear and explicit, God forbid… just that, when appropriate, it
could do with being a bit more so than this.
Shamlet is in some way the
opposite: a potentially interesting idea (perhaps) that has been
hideously over-developed, specifically to fill a London main-show
slot. Be your eyes, for this show? No, really, you wouldn’t
thank me for it.
Integrating
Too many ideas, or not enough… those are the pitfalls on either side of
the tightrope that most theatre walks. It’s rare to be able to
fall on both sides at once, as Toby Young alleges of Nina Raine’s
Rabbit on its transfer to
Trafalgar Studio 2. He has a point, though I think Raine could
have solved it as well by integrating the more sombre family/memory
drama with the fizzy chat as she could by ditching the former
altogether. For Raine certainly has a keen ear for believable,
ordinary speech – in terms both of individual turns of phrase and the
directions conversations take as a whole. She also has
significant ability as a director… enough, as director of Liverpool
Playhouse and Everyman’s verbatim drama
Unprotected, to have persuaded the
judging panel of the Amnesty International Award on this year’s
Edinburgh Fringe of the play’s “refreshing lack of victimhood”, when in
fact victimhood is the play’s whole
raison
d’être.
Astute
And it’s also – as I suggested in the case of
Heartland – a matter of deciding
how best those ideas can be put across. It’s important, for
instance, that someone – Robert Shore, as it happens – recognises that
Howard Brenton’s best known work in the UK now is not
The Romans In Britain,
Pravda or any of his other stage
work, but four seasons of screenplays (ordinarily uncredited, for some
unexplained reason) of the TV spy series
Spooks. And very astute work
it is, too, using the standard variations on plot and character to
explore contemporary issues of surveillance, civil liberties,
interference in private life, state over-reaction and the like.
(In much the same way, G.F. Newman made headlines in the 1970s with the
mini-series
Law And Order,
and followed it up with a number of hard-hitting TV dramas about
injustice, but his greatest success in making such televisual-dramatic
indictments has been since he created the dashing, heroic figure of
Judge John Deed, as played by
Martin Shaw, to do the investigating on the author’s behalf.)
So, in revising
In Extremis,
Brenton has taken on board not simply the demands and tastes of a
modern audience, but in particular the kind of play that works well in
the space of Shakespeare’s Globe. And he’s just as canny in this
regard; I think Benedict Nightingale and Dominic Cavendish (the
dactylic reviewers!) are ungenerous in their responses to Brenton’s
balancing act. Would that Harley Granville Barker had learned
similar skills almost a century ago, and we would have in
The Madras House a play that goes
somewhere resolutely enough to deserve Sam Walters’ skilful revival of
it.
Written for Theatre
Record.