Although different in form from the
Tricycle’s tribunal plays,
The Great
Game season springs from the same impulse towards citizenship,
not simply of our country but of the world. Theatre can engage
with specific issues and we can engage through it, and that engagement
need not at all be one of agit-prop manipulation, righteous ire or
futile liberal guilt.
The Great Game may be the
biggest opening this issue in terms of staged material, but in terms of
media profile there is simply no competition:
Waiting For Godot was a sensation
long before it arrived at the Haymarket after its preparatory
tour. Many reviews note the extent to which director Sean Mathias
has emphasised the play’s artificiality and staginess, with some
speculating that the notoriously protective Beckett estate might have a
thing or two to say about such liberties. After all, back in the
mid-1990s Deborah Warner was banned from future Beckett undertakings by
the estate after she took rather fewer liberties with
Footfalls. Perhaps they’re
loosening up; I recently saw the Berlin Schaubühne production of
Krapp’s Last Tape (Das Letzte Band),
which makes few departures from Beckettian orthodoxy (beyond the use of
video instead of audio recording) but manages to stretch the action out
to 75 minutes or so from the more usual 40-45. (I noted that a
full 20 minutes passed before the first bit of banana business.)
Or perhaps the estate now realise that their strictures against
high-profile productions reflect badly upon themselves. After
all, to the best of my knowledge no complaint was made against the
Royal Court version of
Krapp’s Last
Tape which saw Harold Pinter in a motorised wheelchair and
eschewing bananas altogether, nor against Peter Brook’s production of
Rockaby without either a rocking
chair or a recorded voice-over and of
Act
Without Words II with words. What next –
Quad with only three figures?
Irony
Ruth Leon remarks at the end of her
Spring
Awakening review in this issue that “the cast is very raw but
will probably settle in.” In a grim irony, it has since been
announced that the show will close at the end of this week. A
pity: when I finally got to see it I was as impressed as almost every
other reviewer, and I thought – frankly, I hoped – that the youth
market might give it sufficient “legs” to run for several months.
I may have time to go back and see it again before it closes, which for
me is virtually unheard-of.
Written for Theatre Record.