The shows covered in this issue which I saw but did not review for the
Financial Times included
Design For Living,
House Of Games,
Krapp’s Last Tape and
Passion. Of those four, I
felt warmly only about
Passion…
and that, as many reviewers have noted, is a feeling more of admiration
than affection: it’s not a show that gives itself to being loved with
anything like the intensity its own characters display. (I’ve
recently taken to posting single-tweet reviews on Twitter of every show
I see – my Twitter username is @ianshutters – and it’s been interesting
to observe my own behaviour and see how the pressure for succinctness,
the attempt to convey the essence of a production in a mere 140
characters, can lead to flippancy. In the case of
Passion, I tweeted that “it’s not
one of the Sondheims with a tune”… which is a glib way of putting it,
but is fundamentally no different from the views expressed with more
elegance by Quentin Letts, Henry Hitchings and the Pauls Callan and
Taylor in their reviews.)
Perfunctory
Of the other three, I felt that Richard Bean’s Mamet adaptation was an
agreeable revisitation but no substitute for the erstwhile Chicago
bull’s original screenplay; like several reviewers, I felt similarly
entertained by
Design For Living,
especially Andrew Scott’s performance and the central drunk scene, but
had no sense of the erotic and emotional intensity that the central
trio supposedly share. My greatest surprise, though, was
Krapp’s Last Tape.
Michael Gambon is, by common consent, a towering actor. (
The Stage newspaper, perhaps a
little too keen to generate stories of its own, is currently running a
reader poll regarding the greatest stage actor of all time – I mean,
there can’t be that many of its readers who actually
saw Sarah Bernhardt, let alone
David Garrick, so how informed can the result be? – and Gambon is one
of the front runners.) His power and vitality (strange word to
use about a Beckett performance, but even so) are clearly apparent in
everything from his initial stillness onstage to his subsequent little
games as he discovers the limits of the lit area on the stage, stepping
in and out of shadow as if mutely commenting on the Beckettian
universe. That honey-and-nuts voice is also used to great effect
on the tape recordings in the play. Yet when he came to speak his
“live” lines as the 69-year-old Krapp, I couldn’t help feeling he was
being somewhat perfunctory: rather faster than one expects with
Beckett (
Not I aside), and not
giving full weight to them. A surprising and disappointing
experience, and not one of the more solid
Krapps I have experienced.
Embarrassed
Of course, some things are best passed over rapidly. At a recent
National Theatre press meeting, Nicholas Hytner referred to a
particular vitriolic review of
Blood
And Gifts which seemed not to grasp the difference between
fictional characters’ remarks and theatre policy. Hytner was
asked whether he responded to the review; no, he replied, “because we
were faintly embarrassed for him.” The identity of this reviewer
is, as they say, left as an exercise for the reader…
Written
for Theatre Record.