Tag: Antony Byrne

As You Like It at the Barbican Theatre review ***

As You Like It

Barbican Theatre, 15th January 2020

As You Like It? Not really like this. Mind you I have yet to see a production of the play that really bowled me over. The NT production from 2016 directed by Polly Findlay looked great, office chairs becoming the Forest of Arden, and reminded us of the immense talent of Rosalie Craig and Patsy Ferran, but didn’t quite do it for me and I have a vague recollection of a previous RSC outing with Niamh Cusack as Rosalind and David Tennant as Touchstone. So maybe it is the play that doesn’t quite persuade.

I get that Will’s exploration of gender roles, sexuality and the rules of attraction still intrigues and resonates. And I get that, as a paean to the joy of love, and specifically the slippery notion of “love at first sight” there isn’t much better in the Shakespeare, or any other, canon. And it has a couple of pukka roles for women. As a generally miserable f*cker I can’t help but be attracted to eeyore Jaques and there are plenty of laughs, though they don’t always land from the lips of the sketchier supporting characters and some are just too knowing. What I don’t really buy is the whole pastoral, simpler life vibe, the magical forest is more convincing in AMND, and, absent Rosalind and Celia, I have never been convinced by many of the relationships, courtly and common, of which there are too many to really round out character. The banishments, and reconciliations, of Fred and Duke Senior, and the du Bois boys (here Leo Wan and Aaron Thiara), isn’t properly explained or resolved. The songs are a bit ropey. The prose and verse inversion and switching can be distracting and adds to the bitty, “a string of chance encounters”, quality of the play.

There are however plenty of other WS plays where similar criticisms might be levelled. But plot, character, language, message and spectacle, or some combination thereof normally finds a way to lift you up and into the world of breathless, nothing else matters, concentration that is the magic of the Bard. So maybe as I say I just need the right production of AYLI.

Here Kimberley Sykes, the brains behind the RSC Dido from 2017 which the Tourist annoyingly overlooked, has offered up a timeless Arden, supported by Stephen Brimson Lewis’s design, which focuses on the key connections, between the excellent Lucy Phelps’s confident Rosalind, her forthright bessie coz Sophie Khan Levy and a gentle, though ardent, Orlando in the form of David Ajao. Sophie Stanton, as a detached, almost inert, female Jaques, was polished, and Sandy Grierson, once again, stood out with his grotesquely camp Touchstone.. A whole bunch of gender switching for the other roles left the characters even less defined than normal, and, whilst it was not difficult for an actor of Antony Byrne’s quality to pull off the roles of both Dukes, I am not sure I got the point in a play already stuffed with mistaken identities.

There were a lot of nice visual touches, but there were also times when the cast seemed to be keen to move on to the next scene, lines a bit too hurried, and some of the blocking felt a little unconnected on the roomy Barbican stage. And then there was the lighting, designed, as were the costumes, by Bretta Gerecke, which was often the wrong side of insistent. And then there was the audience participation. And a giant puppet of Hymen, god of marriage, looming over Lucy Phelps as she delivers her, slightly desperate, epilogue at the end.

Measure for Measure at the Barbican Theatre review ****

Measure for Measure

Barbican Theatre, 8th January 2020

I like Measure for Measure. I find the weird cocktail of morality play and satirical “comedy” fascinating. No one comes out of it well, not even the ostensibly virtuous Isabella who goes into bat to save brother Claudio from death, but is prepared to sign off on a pretty dodgy deal to further this aim. The stench of corruption infects even the pure. This makes it a very “modern” play I guess, which is why it is getting multiple airings, with much to say, in the right hands, about the complexities of power and desire. Not quite at the top of Will’s oeuvre but certainly in the top ten. Which, for your edification, I set out below.

  1. Othello
  2. Hamlet
  3. Julius Caesar
  4. Much Ado About Nothing
  5. Richard III
  6. Coriolanus
  7. Henry VI, Part I, II, III
  8. Richard II
  9. Measure for Measure
  10. Pericles

What no Lear? Or Dream? Or Romeo and Juliet? Or Tempest? Or Twelfth Night? And Coriolanus included? And, are you mad mate, also Pericles? Well yes I like the latter’s daft fantasy travelogue, even those bits which stem from the unsubtle hand of George Wilkins, and Coriolanus strikes me as the very model of classical tragic hero, not prone to bouts of soul sharing pace Lear, Macbeth or your boy Hamlet. And the list shows pretty clearly that I like history plays. Power, politics, virtue, honour, social as well as individual psychology, the ruler and the ruled, corruption, narcissism, jealousy. These are the things that interest me. The dark side of human nature that Will explored forensically and which make many of these plays relevant to our, or any other, time. Don’t worry though. I am not a weirdo. Much Ado About Nothing is in there.

Of course much depends on the productions I have seen and I think I have been blessed in recent years in the history and “Roman” play departments in particular. Maybe one day I will see a Macbeth or Lear that truly persuades. That’s the thing with Shakespeare. Ultimately malleable, such that creatives and cast can usually find something, language, message, narrative, character, spectacle, in which to delight and illuminate.

As here. Gregory Doran is probably the most reliable Shakespearean director of our time, useful when you are the big cheese at the RSC. Maybe not the most spectacular of interpreters but always clear in purpose and execution. No gimmickry with this, which I think is his first stab at MFM, unless you count setting the play in fin de siecle Vienna, a point in the city’s history when virtue and corruption, intellect and expedience, reached there apogee, and, arguably laid the ground for what followed, good and bad, very bad, in much of the Western world through the first half of the C20. It is almost as if big Will, with his fictional late C16 fictional Vienna could see what the real city would become three centuries later. (I gather this connection has been made in previous productions).

Otherwise GD, and designer Stephen Brimson Lewis using the set structure common to the season’s productions of As You Like It and The Taming of the Shrew, with added monochrome projections as well as 1900s period costume, don’t muck about with text or cast. Paul Englishby’s score echoes with waltz. Escalus, in the hands of Claire Price, is re-gendered, as is the Provost (very effectively by Amanda Harris), but then again Mistress Overdone is, campily, handed to Graeme Brookes. But there is no wholesale gender politics reinterpretation here. And the text is, I think, complete so that said Overdone, Pompey (David Ajao versed with Afro-Caribbean sonority), Elbow (Michael Patrick) and the major, (Joseph Arkley especially as supercilious Lucio), and minor fops and fop-esses, all get their due, though the wordplay comedy requires our close attention.

RSC veteran Antony Byrne unsurprisingly nails the Duke/Friar, a man convinced of his own righteousness as he is blind to the flaws in his exercise of power, James Cooney is a quietly desperate Claudio and Lucy Phelps excels as the virtuous novice, at least until the scheme to uncover Angelo’s hypocrisy is set in motion, Isabella. But the whole is held in place by a marvellous performance by Sandy Grierson as said self-scourging Angelo, who really gets to the heart of said Angelo’s conflicted nature. Or is he, as here, not really quite as conflicted as he makes out, revelling in the opportunity to root out Vienna’s impurity whilst lusting after the eloquent nun. The ghost of an approving Freud was probably sitting in the gods.

Mr Grierson stood out in Jude Christian patchy OthelloMacbeth at the Lyric, Pity at the Royal Court and in As You Like It (of which more to come) in this RSC season but, unfortunately, I have missed him in the other RSC roles he has played in recent years, and on various stages in his native Scotland. I suggest you ensure you see him next time he treads any accessible boards.

The trick in MFM, assuming no re-interpretation, is having the two main characters in Isabella and Angelo both repelled by sex, but also, somehow, fascinated by the idea of desire, which drives the pivotal argument scenes between them. They are both, literally in joint prayer, holier than thou, at least until Angelo cracks. GD’s clear headed direction, and Lucy Phelps’s and Sandy Grierson’s delivery of the text, expertly unfolds the dichotomy between the sacred and the profane. And there is no hiding from the fact that Angelo, and, through his casual “proposal” at the end, the Duke, even maybe against his preference, are choosing to be rapists.

Lots of detail, well thought through, ambiguity and double binds not brushed away. This is not a problem play. The problem, as ever, is us humans. If you want a contemporary feel-gooder with a happy ending go see Everybody’s Talking About Jamie.

Antony and Cleopatra at the Barbican Theatre review ***

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Antony and Cleopatra

Barbican Theatre, 18th January 2018

The last instalment, for me, of the Rome season at the Barbican, and so late in the run that it has been and gone. Sorry. Anyway I have to say this was my least favourite of the four productions, though there was still much food for thought.

I think the reason for this is simple. I prefer the other three plays. Titus Andronicus for its over the top, knowing black comedy, Coriolanus for its astonishing insight into pride, the democratic ideal, the mother-son relationship and homo-eroticism and Julius Caesar for, well, everything you will ever need to know about the use and abuse of political power.

Titus Andronicus at the Barbican Theatre review ****

Coriolanus at the Barbican Theatre review *****

Julius Caesar at the Barbican Theatre review ****

The language in these three is flintier, more muscular, more direct. The drama is played out across a broader backdrop even if this is still measured across individual psychology and the relationships between friends, enemies and family. In A&C the language is way more florid, despite the similar source material as JC (Plutarch via Thomas North), and the focus is firmly on the mature lovers. High Baroque not Early Renaissance if you will.

There is a curious ironic, detached quality to our observation of A&C. I am not saying I identify with unhinged sadist and novelty pie maker Titus A, by way of example, but I can sort of see where he is coming from. Elsewhere in Shakespeare the thrill of recognition is never exhausted, no matter how many viewings, but with A&C I can’t escape the performance, the spectacle. That may well be the whole point. There are times where the pompous grandiosity of these two entitled mid-lifers sets me spluttering, internally and, embarrassingly, externally. Certainly Will S has the right words and right scenes to skewer them. But all the poetry  and “look at me” gets a smidge wearying. I know that complaining that Shakespeare sometimes has too many words is like saying Mozart has too many notes but the platitude applies.

Of course it could just be that I haven’t come across the right A&C yet. I see the NT is set to stage a production with Simon Godwin at the helm, (who sucked all the meat off the bones of Twelfth Night and Man and Superman at the NT), with Ralph Fiennes and Sophie Okonedo. If those two get fired up sparks can fly. Let’s hope so.

Designer Robert Innes Hopkins here chooses to go with a look straight out of Cecil B DeMille. Josette Simon as Cleo has more frock changes than I have underpants, including, at one point, sporting her birthday suit. Costume supervisor Sian Harris, and all the unsung heroes who cut and stitch, must have thought Christmas came early, just in greaves alone (google it). There is a big black cat. natch, and I hear Southall high street is now short of kohl. There are even some steamy Roman baths and an impromptu harbourside bar on display. I bet they only ruled out the incense sticks at the first rehearsal. Mind you I get it is tricky to take A&C out of its historical context.

Ms Simon captures Cleo’s unpredictability, grace and caprice but maybe not the extremes of cruelty and vulnerability. Some of her vocal delivery, to use football commentator parlance, “takes the wrong option”. She does have stage presence though, even when brooding on the sidelines. Workaholic Antony Byrne, who knows his way about the Shakespearean stage, has a cursive way of delivering lines and character and a grizzled, martial look about him. Yet, at times, he felt a bit mechanical and MA’s intense fear of shame was not fully realised.

I was never entirely persuaded of the couple’s passion or plotting.  There was none of the seemingly spontaneous physicality that Hans Kesting and Chris Nietvelt brought to the parts in the TA Roman Tragedies. That really stank of sex, with Marieke Heebink’s Charmian the …. well I better stop there as I am getting hot and bothered. Alexandria never looked so decadent, and the cropping of action and lines, as well as the translation process, seemed to help me overcome my objections to the play.

I am not sure if Ben Allen’s Octavius here was intended to be quite so limp, and the contrast with David Burnett’s roister-doister Pompey, quite so sharp. Andrew Woodall swapped Caesar for Enobarbus, taking world-weary to a previously untested level. When it comes to ironic commentary on what is going on around him, Enorbarbus has some of the best lines in the play and these were delivered with relish by Mr Woodall, though he does have an uncanny resemblance to my brother-in-law. I am much taken with James Corrigan here playing Agrippa as upright conciliator. Amber James as Charmain and Kristin Atherton as Iras provide sterling support as ego-masseurs-in-waiting to Queen Cleo.

Director Iqbal Khan offers a straightforward account of the play, in line with the staging, and somewhat of a contrast to his previous Shakespeare, where he has mixed it up a bit. That means that each line is pretty clear but the overall rhythm a little baggier than Angus Jackson’s Julius Caesar. There comes a point in many a Shakespeare history play, when the to-ing and fro-ing between locations, and the long line of messengers bearing news, can distract. A&C, nominally a tragedy, can fall into the trap. If your head is filled with contemplation of motive or poetry you won’t see the joins. Here, once or twice, I did.

So there you have it. It seems I was far more taken with Angus Jackson’s Coriolanus and Julius Caesar in this season than consensus, reckon Blanche McIntyre fully got to grips with the uncertain tone of Titus Andronicus and agreed with most that this Antony and Cleopatra was more stately than seductive.