I’m afraid I can’t help feeling that
there is something simplistic about
Wild
Swans.
I haven’t read Jung Chiang’s original book, so I hope the fault (if it
exists) is in Alexandra Wood’s adaptation only. Wood has
understandably decided that any attempt to capture the entirety of the
book would be doomed to failure, and so her stage version is more a
series of semi-discrete episodes from which the rest of the chronicle
can be extrapolated. My problem is that these episodes all make
the same point again and again: individualism good, bigger social
structures bad. The bigger structures may be Communist or
Nationalist, they may be as broad as the Cultural Revolution or as
narrow as an individual cadre carrying out a Maoist self-criticism
session. But even when they make gestures towards showing a
glimmer of conscience on the part of one of the oppressors, it is
always in these terms. Shou-Yu’s persecution and imprisonment may
arise from his genuine concern for the people as a whole, which
overrides the
diktats of the
Party or its various mandarins, but he takes his stance because of
personal, individual, conviction; the final permission for Er-Hong to
go abroad is given because of just such an episode in the past.
This is not a liberal perspective, but a neo-liberal one. And in
arguing this, I am not in any way aligning myself with the Maoists as
portrayed. (I still have the copy of Mao Zedong’s
Little Red Book
I obtained in my teens, and I could quote from that collection to rebut
and condemn the doctrinalism and brutality practised by the Red Guard
and others in the play.) But I found myself surprised and
disappointed that this family saga, so popular and so widely lauded,
came over to me in this version as so narrow at its core – arguably
every bit as narrow as the various -isms it rightly excoriates.
Where I unreservedly join with other reviewers is in praise of the
design. Miriam Buether has long been a bold, adventurous
designer, and her work here is the apotheosis of that approach: it
dramatises, as Wood’s script does not, the changing world in which the
family live and move.
Energy
In all honesty (“I need to change,” as the Maoists say in
Wild Swans),
I have sometimes in my career made staggeringly wrong judgements.
In the early 1990s, when watching David Farr’s post-student company
Talking Tongues, I was sure that the performer destined for greatness
was the intense Sasha Hails (who now heads the distaff side of Dominic
Dromgoole’s household), rather than her committed but effortful
colleague, who looked beautiful but for me showed no real spark.
Yes, whatever became of Rachel Weisz? Ahem. A few years
later, when Enda Walsh’s
Disco Pigs
crossed the Irish Sea and in effect exploded all over the Edinburgh
Fringe, my rhapsodies were of Eileen Walsh, whose subsequent acting
career has been disappointingly sparse (her last major appearance being
as Rosencrantz in the Ian Rickson/Michael Sheen
Hamlet
at the Young Vic), rather than for her piercing-eyed, energetic but
generally les sensational opposite number, Cillian Murphy. Ahem
again.
The latest of Murphy’s returns to the stage following his film stardom
is in a revision and revival of Walsh’s 1999 solo piece
Misterman. (I was surprised
to find that, according to
Theatre Record’s
comprehensive archive, Walsh’s original outing with this play never
made it to Britain.) To be sure, Murphy’s energy and intensity
are admirable, and a world away from his portrayals in such other stage
appearances as Peter Stein’s
The
Seagull or that 2006 misfire, John Kolvenbach’s
Love Song. And yet... I found
myself wondering whether it is a point in Murphy’s favour that, 15
years on from
Disco Pigs,
he can still unleash all that vigour and throw inhibition to the winds
as he did in that breakthrough production, or a point against him that
after all this time he seemed to me to bring little more to the play
than he could have done way back then?
Personal
Once again, my reservations vanished when it came to the design.
This time, however, my reasons were much more personal. On my
first day at school, in 1968, I was assigned a seat next to a smiling,
open-faced lad who became my first ever school friend. That was
Jamie Vartan, who more than 40 years on is a flourishing stage designer
and the man responsible for the multimedia warehouse through which
Cillian Murphy careers in
Misterman.
Nice one, Jamie.
Written for Theatre Record.