Tag: Ashley Zhangazha

Death of a Salesman at the Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester review *****

Death of  a Salesman

Royal Exchange Theatre Manchester, 12th November 2018

The greatest English language play from the second half of the C20? Waiting for Godot? All That Fall? Or maybe Beckett’s Endgame? No, too tricky by half. A Streetcar Named Desire? It just about sneaks in time-wise but too narrow in scope. Long Day’s Journey Into Night? Maybe but O’Neill has one tone, though certainly not one dimension. Staying in the US perhaps yu might say Glengarry Glen Ross or Angels in America? Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? Or perhaps you think us Brits top the Yankees. Stoppard or Pinter. Or, my personal favourite Caryl Churchill. Serious Money, Top Girls, Cloud 9 or The Skriker anyone?

Nah. It is pretty hard not to argue that Arthur Miller comes out on top. So then it is just which play. A View from the Bridge? Perhaps though much depends on performance. The Crucible? Bullet proof and the mighty Billers reckons it is Miller’s best. For me though it might just be Death of a Salesman. Mind you I have only seen it once before this, though I see London is set to have a bite of the cherry next year with a new production at the Young Vic directed by Marianne Elliot (War Horse, Curious Incident, Angels in America, Company) with Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman, Sharon D Clarke as Linda and Arinze Kene as Biff. I wouldn’t hang about if I were you. This will sell out before it opens I’m sure.

Anyway this production will follow the Manchester Royal Exchange production in seeing Willy through African-American eyes. Adding an extra dimension to the unravelling of his particular American Dream, particularly here with a white wife, making Willy’s and the boys “exclusion” even more pointed. The thing about Death of a Salesman is that you get the big picture satire of the “Dream”, the promise that everyone in America will have the opportunity to achieve riches and success through hard work, application and initiative, but you also get a family tragedy, set across just 48 hours, of near Grecian proportions. All filtered through a formal experiment, as time and event overlap in Willy’s head, which demands attention, but is never intimidating, for the audience. From the very first line Willy utters “it’s all right, I came back” you know what these characters are saying and why they are saying it. If you cannot feel the pain of Willy and those around him then I respectfully suggest you go back to your home planet.

Sarah Churchwell, who is a professor of American Literature at the University of London, has written a very interesting programme note which explains that Willy’s failure to reap the rewards he thinks he deserves, the wealth and the status, the “success”, also points to the perversion of an original “American Dream” which was predicated not just on the trappings of consumerism, but was rooted in a “pursuit of happiness” that hadn’t been degraded by individualistic capitalism. If you “win” all the material trappings are yours. If you “lose” then don’t expect any reciprocal duty of care from the society around you. Blimey. Even if you might not entirely agree with this, the point that Miller’s play, and it’s not so sub-by sub-texts, can hold up under the weight of such interpretation, whilst still putting you through the emotional grinder, is testament to its brilliance. 

I’ll spare you, and me, some half-baked amateur analysis. You can do that yourselves. What about this production? Well this was the Tourist’s inaugural visit to the Royal Exchange now that he is a full-time layabout. Mancunians have much to be proud of in their city, but surely the Royal Exchange must rank somewhere near the top. A super space, a sphere plonked inside the Great Hall of the Victorian commodities exchange, refurbished last after the 1996 IRA bomb, with vibrant public spaces and bars/restaurants spaced around the auditorium. Sorry if I sound like a patronising London twat but I was bowled over. Inside is even better. Now I may have benefitted from splashing out on a front row, stalls seat, but this is, by some way the most comfortable perch I have ever viewed from. I am back for the Mother Courage next year, (and the revival of The Skull in Connemara up the road at the Oldham Coliseum). Can’t wait. 

Now obviously this being my first visit to the Royal Exchange this means that I have missed AD Sarah Frankcom’s previous hits as director, notably the collaborations with Maxine Peake. The Masque of Anarchy, Hamlet, The Skriker, A Streetcar Named Desire, Happy Days. For which I can only blamed personal greed for just like Willy I spent too long chasing money and not enough time feeding the brain. 

Anyway, holding back the tears of disappointment, at least now I was able to see another Royal Exchange regular, Don Warrington, collaborating with Ms Frankcom. I saw his Lear from Talawa Theatre on the telly, which, unlike many others, did not disappoint, but seeing Mr Warrington in the flesh here was mind-blowing. He is a few years older than Willy who is 63, and I assume that Arthur Miller saw Willy as white not black, but as far as I am concerned Don Warrington was Willy Loman. Maybe I am losing the plot like Willy but this for me was as real as theatre gets. It probably helps that I was front row, in the round, with Leslie Ferguson’s stripped back set presenting no obstructions, but this was electric. 

When Mr Warrington was sat in front of me, hunched forward, fingers twitching, the weight of his disappointment weighing down his body, it was as much as I could do to stop myself jumping forward and shouting “don’t do it Willy”. When the inevitable happened at the end I admit to a tear. Maybe Don Warrington is petulant, snappish, irritable and dominating in real life. Maybe he has been crushed by the weight of his own expectations. Maybe he hears things. I doubt it. I reckon he is more like the wry, smooth, relaxed-in-the-paddock police commissioner in Death in Paradise. Either way he is a brilliant actor. Performance of the year so far this year, no question, and there has been some pretty stiff competition. Only wish I had seen him in All My Sons here in 2016.

Mind you Ashley Zhangazha’s Biff runs him pretty close. It has been my pleasure to see Mr Zhangazha’s on a few occasions now, Terror, The Lottery of Love, Human Animals and most, recently, carrying the Public Arts  community version of Pericles at the NT, but again this was another step up. That is not to downplay Maureen Beattie’s Linda or Buom Tihngang’s Happy, or the supporting cast, but the scene where Willy and Biff argue is hair on the back of the neck stiff. It felt like Biff, even in his football days, just didn’t want to believe. Another highlight is the first appearance of Trevor A Toussaint’s imposing Uncle Ben, Willy’s successful, but now dead, brother. Don Warrington’s Willy visibly shrinks when he sees him. Or Howard’s (Rupert Hill) agonising embarrassment when Willy begs him, getting ever hoarser, for a desk job. Or Willy’s pathetic excuses when Biff turns up, in flashback at the Boston hotel, to find him with “Miss Francis” (Rina Mahoney). Or the touching devotion that Linda shows in believing the family’s money problems are on the brink of being solved.

The original title of Miller’s play was, famously, The Inside of His Head. Willy’s interior world and the exterior reality are in constant flux. To stage a production with this much clarity, on a copper disc, with no scenery bar a few branches overhead, no rooms, and few props, in a raised circle on which the non-speaking cast rest.and watch, in a theatre in the round, which itself is in a sphere, could hardly have been more apposite. This staging, together with the casting, may make for a less immediate connection than in other, more “traditional” productions but, for me, Death of a Salesman is as much food for the brain as blood for the heart, if you will forgive the mangled metaphors. And it brings home, from this now 70 year old play, that Willy is still right here, right now in many men. 

A triumph. 

Pericles at the National Theatre review *****

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Pericles

National Theatre Olivier, 26th August 2018

So how do you like your theatre? Or more particularly how do your like your Shakespeare? Utterly faithful to the First Folio? Set in the time and place that big Will intended (however baffling)? All blokes in tights? Performed by elite, public school grandees plummily sing-songing the verse?

Of course not. He’s for all time, not just his time, so there’s a million ways to show him off. Yet it seems from some of the reaction to Emily Lim’s three night production of Pericles at the National, the first in the planned large scale, annual, Public Acts initiatives, that some misanthropic types, (who probably weren’t there), have got the right hump with this. “It’s not “proper” Shakespeare”. Well neither is the mangled, reconstructed Pericles text that has been handed down to us with half of it penned by George Wilkins. “Very little of the precious Shakespeare lines make it through the production”. Fair enough but I defy anyone to sit through the whole bonkers story of Pericles without thinking this is a cracking tale that needs fearless pruning to properly emerge. “Adding music and dance scenes cheapens the entertainment”. Who says so. Will Shakespeare was all about entertaining the punters and making money. Chris Bush’s adaptation, with music by Jim Fortune, succeeds admirably in the first aim and, if it were possible, would, I guarantee, deliver on the second. “It is all well and good having these “amateur” types making their family in the audience proud but it gets in the way of the “professionals””. Bollocks. That is not what was intended here and if you can’t grasp that then I respectfully suggest you p*ss off to wherever you think you might find a “correct” performance of this messy play.

So ditch the moaners and pay attention to most of the proper reviewers and, I humbly suggest, me. For this was one of the most uplifting nights I have spent in a theatre. It was a very. very long way from the last Pericles I saw, the Cheek by Jowl production at the Barbican, (in French, heavily chopped, with our Prince of Tyre in a hospital bed, tut, tut, what were they thinking). (Pericles, Prince de Tyr at Silk Street Theatre review *****). But it was just wonderful.

OK so, at first, realising just how far Ms Bush and Ms Lim have deviated from the “original” is a bit of a shock. But once I saw how this allows them, and everyone involved, to incorporate the community performers, whether in dance, in song, in walk-, or wheel-, ons and memorably, in named parts, I just started smiling, and then grinning, so that by the end, (after manfully holding back the tears and trying not to audibly gulp), I was overwhelmed with joy. I know how daft that sounds but I can only offer up my genuine reaction.

The professional cast, led by Ashley Zhangazha as Pericles himself  and Audrey Brisson as daughter Marina, were superb. Mr Zhangazha was as natural as you like, (insofar as you can be natural in such a daft plot), in shifting from the retained verse to the sharper rewrites. This momentum ensured the ensemble set pieces didn’t really get in the way of the story. Not that it would have mattered anyway if they had. Whether it be the marriage scene of Pericles and Thaisa, (here interrupted by a recalcitrant maypole set malfunction which, if anything, made the production even more communal), or transforming the Mytilene brothel into something a bit more family friendly thanks to the ministrations of the effervescently camp Kevin Harvey as Boult, these tableaux were marvellous. All the performances were terrific though, though, and I feel guilty for saying it, the London Bulgarian Choir simply blew me away.

Maybe some of Jm Fortune’s songs were a bit cheesy but who cares when you can clap along within seconds. Maybe the sheer amount of stuff that was thrown at the Oliver stage sometimes bewildered, as one reviewer said, like the biggest am-dram production of all time. Maybe the sheer number of bodies on stage, the cast in total is over 200, occasionally threatened to topple even Robby Graham’s masterly choreography. Yet this was what made it so much shared fun.

If this is what the Public Acts enterprise has kicked off with then I say bring on next year’s. The idea, taken from New York, is to involve an array of community and theatre partners, (here the Queen’s Theatre Hornchurch who will host the next instalment), from the outset in creating a mass participation slice of theatre around the country. Time, patience and, yes all you misery-guts, money will be involved but the benefit to participants, communities and audience surely justify the investment based on this production.

Immense credit must go to NT resident director Emily Lim who has decided in specialise in community productions. To co-ordinate a work of this scale is mind-boggling. To impose a resonant vision, the idea of “finding one’s home”, upon Pericles’s journey, even more so. And to create this much love, (you soppy old git Tourist) deserves our eternal gratitude. I really hope everyone involved gets another opportunity to put this on. If they do please go.