PROMPT CORNER 08/2012:
Wild Swans / Misterman
Various venues
Opened April, 2012

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.

Copyright © Ian Shuttleworth; all rights reserved.

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