Tag: Griffin Stevens

Leopoldstadt at Wyndhams Theatre review ****

Leopoldstadt

Wyndham’s Theatre, 29th January 2020

A new play from the venerable 82 year old Sir Tom Stoppard. Not our greatest living playwright. That is Caryl Churchill, but he does know his way around a text. So booked early, for early in the run and before knowing too much about it.

You will likely know by now that Sir Tom has chosen to delve into his family’s own history and his Jewish heritage for this play, which I can see would be a fitting swansong, if swansong it is. He was born in Czechoslovakia, but escaped to Britain with his family ahead of the Nazi occupation, and was educated in India and then Yorkshire. Whilst he had become aware in the 1990s of the full extent of his roots, (which his mother had chosen to shield him from), as well as the fact that many of his relatives had died in Nazi concentration camps, and he had indicated that he would likely write a play based on this history, he had been ambivalent about making it too personal.

I don’t know how much of the plot, and specifically the key events which punctuate it, are drawn from TS’s own family history, nor indeed how closely the characters resemble his own forebears, (though the character of Leo is surely autobiographical), but there is no doubting his emotional investment in this grand saga. Particularly at the end, in an epilogue which is as moving as anything you might ever see on stage.

We kick off in Vienna in 1899 at a gathering of the Merz and Jakobovicz families at Christmas (and later passover). Bullish businessman Hermann Merz (Adrian Scarborough, on his usual top form) is married to gentile Gretl (Faye Castelow), having, pragmatically, converted to her Catholicism. They have one son Jacob. Hermann’s sister Eva (Alexis Zegerman) is married to obsessive mathematician Ludwig Jakobovicz (Ed Stoppard, yes, he is) who has two sisters, Wilma (Clara Francis), married to Ernst (Aaron Neil), and Hanna (Dorothea Myer-Bennett, continuing the Tourist’s fortunate habit of seeing everything she does on stage), who is married to Kurt (Alexander Newland, who we meet later on). With their various kids, cook Poldi (Sadie Shimmin), parlour maid Hilde (Felicity Davidson), nursemaid Jana (Natalie Law) and all presided over by Grandma Emilia (Caroline Gruber). Thank goodness for the family tree in the programme which the Tourist furtively turned to early doors.

With this many characters, and to set the contextual and didactic balls rolling, and because this is what Sir Tom does best, there is a lot of serious chat going on, as we learn how these well-to-do, educated and largely assimilated Jewish families see themselves, their faith, culture and economy, at a time of great change in Europe’s still premier metropolis. And, inevitably in the first act, bucketloads of exposition. The Merz family doesn’t live in Vienna’s Leopoldstadt district but its status as the centre of Jewish life in the city looms large. The anti-semitism is subtle as well as overt, but its deep historical roots are unmistakeable. Hermann tries and fails to join the jockey club, Ludwig’s hopes of a professorship are far-fetched, and ugly truths are revealed, along with the superb Luke Thallon’s cruel Aryan officer, Fritz.

The play really gets going then after the interval, as we move first to 1924, another family gathering for a circumcision, meeting the cosmopolitan children of the four couples, and then, momentously 1938, and the grandchildren. This is the cue for high drama, for example, the forced repossession of the Merz family home, and eviction, Kristallnacht (vividly realised through Adam Cork’s brilliant sound design), the memory of Pauli (Ilan Galkoff) lost in the WWWi trenches. Then, finally to 1955, when Leo (Luke Thallon), the English emigre son of Nellie (Eleanor Wyld), daughter of Eva and Ludwig, and Nathan (Sebastian Armesto, also doubling), son of Sally (Ayve Leventis), daughter of Wilma and Ernst, are brought together by Nathan’s sister, Rosa (Jenna Augen). This, or something like it, is, I’d like to think, how Sir T first encountered his own history, and planted the seed for Leopoldstadt.

The dialogue is direct, even during the debates on, variously, identity, assimilation, prejudice, Zionism, the recurring history is familiar and there is none of the intellectual trickery that powers Sir T’s back catalogue though there is a bit of heavy lifting from a recurring cat’s cradle metaphor. The family’s beliefs in science, justice and rationality are crushed by the rise of Nazism, but it is the personal loss more than the collective that, eventually strikes home, with Hermann’s descent the most affecting. It is a slow burn mind you, and Patrick Marber’s direction is perhaps a little too respectful. Richard Hudson’s painterly design. together with Neil Austin’s lighting and Brigitte Riefenstuhl’s costumes ooze period detail, but further hinder any opportunity for many of the 26 strong cast (not including the kids) to make a distinct mark.

Still if this is to be Sir T’s last play then why shouldn’t he tell his story his way, given his immense contribution to British and World theatre across his career. At our early viewing (the SO was a more than willing accomplice) the audience was engrossed throughout, if nor utterly captivated, and I suspect many will have been grateful to have had their emotions, perhaps even more than their intellects, engaged. The story of this horror has been told in many ways before, and should continue to be told, but Sir T has found a way to tell it that, whilst not theatrically radical, is profoundly moving, as well as stuffed with learning.

I have no doubt it will be back when we reach the other side, and it is not hard to see it being repurposed for the small screen.

A Skull in Connemara at the Oldham Coliseum review ****

A Skull in Connemara

Oldham Coliseum, 28th February 2019

Two successive nights. Two revivals of comedies looking at the nature of “Irishness”. Martin McDonagh’s A Skull in Connemara and Marie Jones Stones in His Pockets. Which did the Tourist prefer? McDonagh’s black comedy of course. Bit trickier to get to, train to Manchester, then an admittedly convenient tram to Oldham on a wet and windy evening, vs a 10 minute walk, but effort rewarded.

Thanks in large part to Chris Lawson who is the Acting Artistic Director (an entertaining if accidental play on words) at the Oldham Coliseum, an alumni of the Almeida and was responsible for this revival. Based on his work here, and the intelligent and accessible programme he has devised for this season, an in-house revival of Barney Norris’s Visitors, co-productions of Moira Buffini’s Handbagged and the musical The Hired Man, and touring productions of Approaching Empty (from the Kiln and worth seeing) and Charlotte Keatley’s local, and now global, smash hit My Mother Said I Never Should, if I were the Board of the OC I would give him the permanent job. Good people of Oldham and Greater Manchester I enjoin you to pitch up for any, or all, of these entertainments. You won’t be disappointed. I might join you for Visitors if I can rustle up the train fare.

I have bored you enough before on this site about the genius of Martin McDonagh’s plays so I’ll pipe down this time. Suffice to say A Skull in Connemara, first performed in 1997, was the second of the Leenane trilogy after The Beauty Queen of Leenane and before The Lonesome West and may be gets slightly overlooked compared to its peers, the later plays and the two produced plays in the Aran Islands trilogy, (the first of which, The Cripple of Inishmaan would provide an even more fruitful compassion with Stones in His Pockets – same conceit, Hollywood comes to rural Ireland – and both written in 1996).

Too often the words “black humour” or “black comedy” are the precursor to an entertainment that is neither dark nor funny. Not here though. This is quite literally graveyard humour. There is normally an expanding kaleidoscope of high (Synge and Beckett) and low (cop shows) culture references in MM’s work. Here surely Elsinore and everyone’s favourite, overly literal grave-digger has been transported to the west coast of Ireland. Loner Mick Dowd (John O’Dowd), amongst other things, is tasked each year with digging up and disposing of the skeletons in the local churchyard to make room for new entrants. His wife, who died seven years earlier, is interred there but, when he finally gets to her exhumation, she has disappeared. Bad news, especially when the village rumours is he bumped her off in the first place, so the story goes, for burning his scrambled eggs. He is assisted in his work by the local gobshite Mairtin Hanlon (Liam Heslin), whose chain smoking brother Thomas (Griffin Stevens) just happens to be the bumptious, corrupt local Garda, role models Starsky and Hutch. The cast is rounded off by the Hanlon’s elderly gran, Maryjohnny Rafferty (Jenny Lee), prone, like Mick to a shot of poteen, to tittle-tattle, cheating at bingo and bigotry.

Now for all his playful meta conversions, inversions and reversions (especially in the “fairy-tale plays” and the films), MM knows how to work structure, plot, character and rhythm. With just four characters in an isolated location, turned in on itself, where everyone’s business and history is shared, MM creates even more opportunity than usual to explore the personal dramas and relationships within the world he has created. Little does she know that he knows the she knows …. And then what do we know? All four characters have secrets of a more or less heinous kind.. Though this is still, by MM’s standards, a pretty “straight” play within the overall literal metaphor of “digging up the past”. He does treat us to some of the devices we have come to know and love: moral instability, dark, ironic humour and plot twists but this is gentler than many of the later plays.

Apart from the Tarantino-esque bone crushing scene choreographed to the sound of Dana’s All Kinds of Everything, Mairtin’s juvenile fascination with violence (road deaths, children drowned in slurry, boiling hamsters as well as his description of a bottle attack he perpetrated to revenge a slight oh how. trainers), his head wound and Thomas attempting to strangle Mick. Around this “comic” aggression though is some fairly good-natured verbal sparring, intended to upend “Oirish” stereotypes but not really with the vehemence, subversion and unpredictability of the later plays and films. The ending is satisfying ambiguous. We never find out whether Mick was responsible for his wife’s death but it feels like he might.

Katie Scott’s set, alongside the twilighted lighting design of Stewart Bartlett and resonant sound of Dan Bottomley, and a large helping of dry ice, is largely responsible for conjuring up a sense of chilly mystery and connection with the (Celtic) past. It slips seamlessly between graveyard (with falling crucifix looming out of the shadows) and the interior of Mick’s cottage. John O’Dowd, who was excellent as Jim in ETT’s touring production of Conor McPherson’s The Weir (another play which springs from the same place, not literally mind, as ASIC and Stones in His Pockets and was also premiered in 1997), brings the right tone of bluff pensive inscrutability to Mick and Liam Heslin’s explosive Martin seems unable to rein in his wild, morbid impulses in the face of repeated incomprehension. Griffin Stevens shows Thomas as a man supremely confident in his own inabilities. Jenny Lee understandably seems to take great pleasure in serving up Maryjohnny’s choicer acerbic lines.

Mining MM’s texts too insistently for laughs can play up the cartoonish tone at the expense of the darker overtones and pointed referencing . Not here though. Mr Lawson gets the balance right, the four characters are larger than life but the interplay between them is convincing and the simultaneous mocking and celebration of the form is well observed. I would have preferred the play ran straight through, and a fuller house would have served the cast better, but if this is what a portent of what is to come, in this very friendly space (I managed to get lost, don’t ask), then Manchester theatre-goers have even more to celebrate.