We’re not at all keen any more (and
rightly not) to give succour to the view that theatre is part of an
imagined citadel of high culture which can be perceived in
contradistinction to a more lumpen mass culture. However, it
continues to be the case that the vast majority of critics are
middle-class, in culture if not in family background. In
particular, a high number of English critics went to university at
either Oxford or Cambridge. (For no readily apparent reason, most
of the fifty- and sixtysomethings went to Oxford, the thirty- and
fortysomethings to Cambridge.) I think this says more about
journalistic recruitment channels than about theatre reviewing per se,
but occasionally it shows through in our writing.
Cast an anthropologically curious eye, for instance, over the reviews
of
Donkeys’ Years.
Michael Frayn’s comedy is set in “one of the lesser colleges, at one of
the older universities” – in practice, clearly Oxbridge. (Frayn,
as it happens, went to Cambridge.) Note that the two reviewers
who employ the specifically Oxford term “gaudy”, which does not occur
in the play – Charles Spencer and Paul Taylor – are both products
of Oxford. But then the cosy assumptions begin to go awry.
Almost every reviewer, when describing the play’s setting, sticks to
the unspecific portmanteau term “Oxbridge”. However, Nicholas de
Jongh (University College, London) opts for “Cambridge”, whilst
Alastair Macaulay (Cambridge) goes for “Oxford”, as does Patrick
Marmion (whose university background I don’t know). Does this
tell us anything? Only that some of us (by which I mean me),
although protesting egalitarianism, still try to draw conclusions from
a person’s university.
Assiduous
I’ve been reminded of my own time at Cambridge (there!) by a number of
productions during these weeks, but not usually in so dramatically
direct a way as in the case of
Donkeys’
Years. For instance, during my time as a rather muddled
postgraduate I did a term’s work supervising some undergrads in
Practical Criticism. (The mind boggles, doesn’t it?) My
tutees included a young Jonathan Cake. Now, I have to admit that
almost all of Jonathan’s acting performances that I’ve seen since then
have struck me as very much in the vein of his criticism essays:
competent, solid but unspectacular and with the effort showing a
little. I think “assiduous” sums it up quite nicely.
It was a pleasant surprise and a considerable relief, then, to see him
in
Coriolanus at the Globe,
in a piece of casting and characterisation which meshes excellently
with his natural predilections. Kate Bassett (who, as it happens,
was at the same college at roughly the same time as Cake) describes his
Caius Martius well in her
Independent
on Sunday review: like “a
public-school rugger champ” and an “overgrown adolescent”. This
is the point, and it can be easy to overlook. Coriolanus is often
played as an overgrown child, but adolescent is rather more complex.
There is a strong element of peer-bonding, such as makes Martius want
the approval of Rome even as he is unable to submit to the prescribed
civic rituals, in a display of petulance which is more that of a
caricature teenager than a big infant. His homosociality with
Aufidius is also a teen-like trait, as – most tellingly, in Dominic
Dromgoole’s production – is his response to his family’s embassy: he
does not capitulate at once, but holds out as long as he can, trying to
prove that he is his own man, all grown-up, before conceding in effect
that he isn’t quite, not yet, after all. A number of reviewers
see this production as an unpromising start to Dromgoole’s tenure at
the Globe; I’m much more upbeat about its auguries.
Micro-management
An example of sub-editors at work: my
Financial
Times review of
The Changeling,
as published, ends by speaking of a performance style “that at times
makes the narrative itself hard to follow.” The
FT subs cut the words which had
followed that observation: it originally read “…hard to follow, even
for those of us who have acted in it.” I understand absolutely
why the cut was made: it looks like a piece of rather precious
showing-off or a spurious claim to authority. My point, though,
was that through the Cheek By Jowl presentation I kept remembering
lines from the student production I’d been in twenty years earlier, to
a far greater extent than I’d expected (I don’t think I’ve read the
play at all, and have seen it on stage only once in the interim
period), and yet even with such a close knowledge, I still couldn’t
entirely keep tabs on what was going on in the final scenes of Declan
Donnellan’s staging.
And yes, the student version in question took place at Cambridge, and
for some unambiguously precious showing off, it was directed by Sam
Mendes. As with my supervising Jonathan Cake, that early experience of
being directed by Sam gave me some insight into his skills as a
director. The opening speech of
The
Changeling is far knottier than it looks, a real devil to make
sense of in speech. (Donnellan trimmed it judiciously.) Our
student Alsemero was not a great acting talent. But Sam explained
that speech phrase by phrase, not simply telling the actor how to
deliver it but illuminating each separate element, hanging shifts of
intentionality on a comma or a fractional pause, in a way that made its
delivery crystal clear. Through his early years as a professional
director, it continued to strike me that Sam was unparalleled in his
micro-management of actors and text, but that sometimes he left the big
picture to fend for itself somewhat. (It was his first years of
work at the Donmar, in particular
Assassins
and
The Glass Menagerie, that
persuaded me to drop those reservations at last.) And it was
Sam’s micro-lucidity that I missed in the Barbican production; instead,
Donnellan once again makes psychological space manifest in the physical
space of the stage, but in ways that often make a nonsense of any sense
of actual location, and while also disdaining obvious cues in the text
for physical business (at least two such moments with Beatrice-Joanna’s
glove in the opening scene alone being muffed).
Liar
That completes this issue’s bout of Varsity nostalgia. I must, however,
share one delicious moment from the second-night performance of
Donkey’s Years: when two characters
onstage reminisce about a third who had been sent to prison, both
editorial assistant Hannah and I heroically avoided glancing to our
immediate right to see how the line had been taken by our neighbour,
Jeffrey Archer. He didn’t seem to laugh a lot during the evening;
but then, his Oxford experience had its own complexities.
Written for Theatre
Record.