PROMPT
CORNER 05/2007
Equus / Treats / King Of Hearts / The Tempest
Various
venues
February / March, 2007
Richard Griffiths, of course, is currently struggling against a second
contemporary theatrical blight: celeb-focused hysteria. On the
night I went to see Equus, a
couple of young men were circulating among the punters outside the
theatre at the interval, asking them, “Has he taken his clothes off
yet? We want to find out how big his penis is.” Well, it
could have been the size of a matchstick and still have dwarfed their
brains. (You can even spot a couple of coy willy-size references
in the reviews reprinted here.) As ever, it’s interesting to see
people responding to the furore rather than the play. There’s
even a touch of that in Lloyd Evans’ way off-beam prediction that “The
trade will adore it”. And as for Tim Walker, in fulminating mode
again, about “a 17-year-old superstar commanding thousands of his
disciples to come and worship…” – I don’t actually think that Daniel
Radcliffe is that astute a self-marketer. He’s allowing himself
to be used, certainly, but why fume as if he were the culpable one?
That’s not enough, though; Tim continues, “Let us anyway consider this
disreputable little play on its own terms”, thus doing the precise
opposite by getting his damning judgement in before he even
begins. (He also plumps for the wrong Firth as the star of the
original production; Peter Firth, who played the role for the National
Theatre, is no relation to Colin Firth, whom Tim names and who was 12
at the time.)
Pretty much every reviewer gets het up to some degree about the state
of the play in the issue’s other famous-face opening, Treats. There is
near-universal observation that Christopher Hampton didn’t do a very
good job of examining what leads people to return to abusive
relationships. I don’t recall seeing any claims that he meant to
set about examining the whys, only to write about this strange,
unsettling thing that sometimes happens. We want the play to
judge; it doesn’t, so we judge the play instead. As regards star
Billie Piper, note simply that elsewhere Quentin Letts admirably
maintains the old-school practice of referring to actors as Mr or Miss
Such-and-Such, but in Treats the
cast apparently consists of “Mr Marshall”, “Mr Fox” and “Billie”.
Quentin is one of the last people I would have expected to succumb to
the illusion that we’re all on first-name terms with some celebrities.
Wimped
And, indeed, some royals. No-one mentioned one of the finest bits
of discreet set-dressing by King Of
Hearts designer Tim Shortall: the politicians’ red boxes of
state papers were monogrammed G-VII-R,
a reference to Prince Charles’ remark once that as king he would be
likely to take the regnal name of George VII. Pity the play was
so like much of Alistair Beaton’s other recent political-satire
writing: time and again it got close to making really sharp
observations, only to veer off towards fish-in-barrel easy targets or
plain fantasy. But then, I’m among the minority that didn’t rate
his breakthrough stage work Feelgood
either, believing that it wimped out of far more political shots
than it dared take.
Final brief observation re. Rupert Goold’s magnificent Tempest: how many other recent
stage works can you think of that deal with Arctic shamanism?
Only one occurs to me. The parallels don’t work in detail, but in
many respects the look and feel of this production are of Prospero’s Dark Materials, right
down to (what is effectively) the death of its world’s God at the end.
Written for Theatre
Record.
Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights
reserved.
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