Tag: Martin Crimp

Cyrano de Bergerac at the Playhouse Theatre review *****

Cyrano de Bergerac

Playhouse Theatre, 30th January 2020

I appreciate the utter pointlessness of me rabbiting on right now about theatre productions that have come and gone but since I am ill equipped to do anything but stay out of the way as instructed, then forgive me my indulgence. Actually I can, as maybe some of you can, by shifting a few quid in the direction of those that need it. Theatres, homeless charities, food banks and women’s refuges all need the money you are saving from staying. If you find yourself, like me, in a position of fortunate security right now this is the least you can do.

The Tourist is not a big fan of the value/comfort ratio offered at the Playhouse Theatre. Compounded with the aggressive pricing strategy pursued by the Jamie Lloyd Company and producers in the current season as they seek to hook the punters in with big name stars of the big screen. And, whilst being a big fan of his librettos for the operas of George Benjamin, I have been a little underwhelmed by recent productions of Martin Crimp’s own plays.

Still there is a reason why (I think I am right in saying this) Edmond Rostand’s Cyrano de Bergerac is the most oft performed play in the French language, subject to many interpretations at home and abroad. And, plainly, the critics adored it. So, after a long wait, the Tourist finally secured a ticket for his favoured pitch at said Playhouse at a fair price and settled in to see what all the fuss was about.

Well if you have seen it, live or via the cinema broadcast before you know what put paid to Life As We Knew It, then you will know that the hype is to be believed. It remains just a slam dunk brilliant story but MC’s jaw dropping contemporised verse translation/adaptation, Soutra Gilmour’s stripped bare set and a magnificent cast led by a magnetic James McAvoy, have turned it into landmark theatre.

Modern dress, microphones, bare wood stage, cast always on show, minimal propping. All the art regie-theatre tropes are on display. You don’t get much to look at for your money. Not even a false nose. But what you do get is brilliant story telling which thrillingly celebrates the art of language and communication. Between characters, actors and audience. This is still supposed to be a French theatre in 1640. But there are no visual clues. Everyone is miked. With supplementary beat-box courtesy of Vaneeka Dadhria.

Of course the style, in all senses, was set to appeal to a younger than normal audience. The young adults at the performance the Tourist attended brought infectious energy which melted even this curmudgeonly heart. but the real triumph is the way that James McAvoy as proud artist/hero Cyrano, Eben Figuieredo as sincere jock/lover Christian and Anita-Joy Uwajeh as a feminist/intellectual Roxane are all simultaneously confident and vulnerable, desperate for and dismissive of, love, in a way that is both right now and timeless. This yin and yang from the central menage a trois, with the added prodding, pimping and pumping from the other characters, (notably Michele Austin as cook/poet and Tom Edden as baddie De Guiche), seeps into the rhythm of the text, alternately muscular and tender. The cast never lose sight of the story and there are, even with the threadbare visual resources, some stunning scenes, aided and abetted by Jon Clark’s lighting and the Ringham boys’ sound design, notably the classic wooing switch. But it is MC’s text that is the star of the show. Along with the amazing Mr McAvoy. Like Jamie Lloyd we all know the Scottish fella has just got it. White Teeth, Last King of Scotland, State of Play, The Ruling Class. All proof for me with no need to touch any of his Hollywood blockbusters.

Jamie Lloyd’s triumphant direction, (with a shout out to Polly Bennett’s movement), make this stylised take zip along, nothing getting in the way of poetry or character. OK so there are times when the imperative to claim immediate relevance masks the pathos, especially at the rushed conclusion, (though there were still plenty of throat lumps, oohs and aahs in my audience), but this is a still price to pay for the meaning uncovered and excitement generated by the production.

Detroit at the Guildhall School review ****

Detroit

Guildhall School, Milton Court Theatre, 5th February 2019

The Tourist has remarked before on the benefits of checking out the productions staged at Britain’s major theatre schools. Excellent actors and creatives destined to to go on to greater things, usually professional directors, interesting repertoire, often first revivals of recent lauded plays, and usually a bargain, no more than a tenner in most cases. Right now a quick perusal shows a production of Orca by Matt Grinter at the Bristol Old Vic, one of my top ten plays of 2016, Alice Birch’s Anatomy of a Suicide at the Royal Central School opposite the Hampstead Theatre, similarly a top tenner in 2017, Woman and Scarecrow by Irish dramatist Marina Carr at RADA, Pomona by Alistair McDowall, (who should turn up with a new play at the Royal Court soonish), which I contrived to miss at both the Orange Tree and the National, a Doctor Faustus at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland, Boy at the Mountview Academy, a success a few years ago at the Almeida, a production of Peter Flannery’s Our Friends in the North, which you might know from the TV adaptation, at the Manchester Metropolitan School of Theatre, the adaptation of Nikolai Erdman’s classic The Suicide by Suhayla El-Bushra, which I loved at the National in 2016, and man of the moment Martin Crimp’s shocker Attempts On Her Life at the Guildford School.

Not bad eh. I strongly suggest you follow what they are up to if you love theatre. Makes a change from spunking £60 or £70 on a West End or NT turkey.

So this is how I came to see Lisa D’Amour’s Detroit. Ms D’Amour was, and still, is something of a bright young thing in US theatre, and now interdisciplinary performance, (for which read site specific extravaganza), circles, with a long association with the Steppenwolf Company. Detroit was a Pulitzer finalist and it is pretty easy to see why. It focuses on the unravelling of the American Dream (as do, I loosely estimate, 50% of all US plays, with the other 50% centred on dysfunctional families), but with a twist as it is set, metaphorically at least, in the suburban sprawl of Detroit, colonised, like so many American cities by whites fleeing the centre in the 1970s, 80s and 90s. Around half of all Americans live in suburbs apparently.

Anyway all is not well in this particular street. The marriage of Mary (Poppy Gilbert) and Ben (Oli Higginson) is under pressure. Ben has been made redundant from his job at the bank but claims to be seizing the opportunity to strike out on his own as a financial adviser by setting up a website, armed with self-help homilies. Neurotic paralegal Mary is all about appearances and is a bit too fond of the drink. Things seem to take a turn for the better when younger couple Kenny (Nick Apostolina) and Sharon (Laurel Waghorn) move in. They come with an admitted past of drug abuse but our now clean, working in a warehouse and a call centre and, whilst they haven’t much in the way of bucks, they appear excitingly YOLO’ish and curious to make friends. Cue a round of BBQs in their respective backyards. Eventually they all get sh*tfaced and things, shall we say, get a little out of hand. The truth, and a blast of nostalgia, emerges when Kenny’s uncle Frank (Wyatt Martin) pays a visit.

Ms D’Amour’s dialogue is vibrant and dynamic, the characters are interesting and well matched, the plot is sufficiently engaging and the themes it examines are never oversold. It resembles a kind of modernised, reversed, Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf which is no bad thing. It doesn’t have the range, acerbity, humour or pain of Albee’s classic but in its odd, twitchy, serendipitous way it manages to make the mundane come to life on the stage. It asks for performances from the four leads beyond the naturalistic, but not lurching into the exaggerated, which director Charlotte Westenra grasped, and the set design of Charlie Cridlan, albeit with a little man-handling from cast and SMs, did the job.

At the end of the day I guess the point is that all four of them are living a lie, unhappy with their lot, and looking for a way to escape. A satire on precarious middle-class America, the shattering of dreams, and the urge to connect in misfortune, in an increasingly uncertain world. Worked for me. Especially with some fine performances. Poppy Gilbert was a particular delight, though Mary’s unravelling gave her plenty of opportunity to shine. Oli Higginson brought an air of vulnerability to Ben, Nick Apostolina made sure we saw the chip on Kenny’s shoulder and Laurel Waghorn revealed Sharon’s emotional, if not intellectual, intelligence.

Next up from the School an Orestes. Reworked. Like we would ever get a literal translation from Ancient Greek.

Dealing With Clair at the Orange Tree Theatre review ***

Dealing With Clair

Orange Tree Theatre, 30th November 2019

The Orange Tree, along with the Royal Court, must presumably be one of Martin Crimp’s favourite theatres. Whilst he has primarily been engaged with writing libretti for George Benjamin’s excellent trio of operas in recent years, Into the Little Hill, Written on Skin and Lessons in Love and Violence, and will have his next play, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other, premiering at the National next year (the Tourist has tickets, yea), many of his early plays started life at the Orange Tree, where he was championed by Sam Walters.

So it was nice to see the Orange Tree hosting English Touring Theatre’s revival of MC’s breakthrough play 30 years after its premiere in this very house. Surprisingly I managed to rope the SO and the Blonde Bombshells into the evening. Now, whilst I have an inordinate amount of time for the opera collaborations and his Chekhov translation, I am still making my mind up on Mr Crimp’s original drama. Mind you this was only the second such exposure, after The Treatment at the Almeida. Now there is no doubt there is something substantial there in his caustic stories which pick away at the underbelly of human behaviours, and in the painfully direct language he employs to tell them, but there is also a streak of irksome pretension which needles me.

Clair (Lizzy Watts) is an estate agent acting for the increasingly loathsome bourgeois yuppie couple Mike (Tom Mothersdale) and Liz (Hara Yannas). Anna (Roseanna Frascona) is their ill-used Italian au-pair. Art-dealer James (Michael Gould) is the increasingly threatening potential buyer. The cast is completed by Gabriel Akuwudike who variously plays Clair’s colleague, a builder and Anna’s boyfriend.

Now the play was originally written a couple of years after the still unsolved disappearance of the estate agent Suzy Lamplugh in Fulham (and who is commemorated in a stained glass window just down the road from the OT in East Sheen). Coincidentally the police were pursuing a new lead in the case as this revival opened. For those familiar with the circumstances of these tragic events it isn’t too difficult to guess where MC goes with the plot. But what he was really trying to expose was the venality of the time, the greed of the property owning classes, as well as playing with his usual themes of power and violence. It could have been written yesterday alas.

Fly Davies has delivered a cube on a raised platform in the centre of the OT stage masked by diaphanous gauze curtains and coldly lit by Joshua Carr. This only serves to heighten the voyeuristic quality that permeates MC’s play. We begin with Clair in her tiny, train-blighted flat on the phone to an unseen caller setting out, for want of a better term, the aggression that underpins the “art of the deal”. Every one of the cast, (even Gabriel Akuwudike at the end), is tasked with drawing out the worst traits in each of the protagonists, (and way more in the case of Michael Gould as James’s sadistic intent is revealed), whilst making sure we know they are still “one of us”. It is an unsettling watch in that respect and, for me, Lizzy Watts, given the truncated part she played, was particularly adept in capturing Clair’s ambitious pragmatism to get on and get the sale done even as her discomfort with James’s behaviour grew.

Clair’s flat also serves as the location for the disturbing, and slightly hyperbolic, ending but most of the action tales place in Mike and Liz’s house which they are looking to trade up from, (see how transactional language now permeates the everyday and which MC cleverly elides with the “business” of relationship). They start off blathering on about their “ethical” stance but their evasive attitudes, their treatment of Anna and the conversations they have behind the backs of Clair and, after his first viewing, James, reveal their true avaricious and condescending colours. Pretty soon they are making jokes about the “crumbling spine” of the buyer they happily gazump and gleefully ramping up the price they will settle for. Hara Yannas and, especially, Tom Mothersdale have plenty of opportunity to reveal the odiousness of the couple which, in terms of their performances, they relish.

Michael Gould as James runs the gamut from curt and business-like, through slightly odd, to Pinteresque menacing, then into creepy, sinister and finally full blown abusive psycho. I do hope in real life he is a kindly uncle type for here, in the scenes with Clair especially, he genuinely made me fell queasy, which is ironic in some ways, given that in a particularly memorable scene, Mike is the one who is actually sick in the play.

So some very fine performances, dextrously directed by ETT director Richard Twyman, of an intelligent play, built out of considered language and symbols, with streaks of dark humour, which deals with the dark side of human nature. So what’s not to like Tourist? Well I think it might just be the cumulative effect of the slightly off-kilter naturalism of the action and dialogue. It feels to me, with the odd stresses and unbroken pessimism, to be about 5% away from where it should be. I appreciate that is a daft thing to say, and I wish to be clear that it is not the subject or the form that I mildly object to, just the tone which I found a little wearing over the 100 minutes. And, whilst I am sure that MC is, like Pinter, merely highlighting the iniquity of misogynistic threat through his characters, thereby to condemn it, it would be reassuring if he this was occasionally made a little more explicit.

Mind you, like all good theatre, the bloody thing has got stuck in my head ever since, and, even with the misgivings, I am looking forward to his new play, so clearly MC is doing something right even as I think he might not be. The SO, hasn’t volunteered much of an opinion on DWC, not one to waste her words, but is happy enough to join me in the next leg of the Crimp journey.

Lessons in Love and Violence at the Royal Opera House review ****

Royal 20 A.II, f.10

Lessons in Love and Violence

Royal Opera House, 26th May 2018

Here is an extract from an illuminated manuscript showing Eddy II getting a crown. Or more precisely a second crown. Not sure what that is all about but given he was by reputation a high maintenance sort of fella maybe two crowns makes sense.

George Benjamin and librettist Martin Crimp had a massive hit, (by contemporary opera standards), with their previous collaboration Written on Skin, which in terms of repeat performances has gone down better than BB’s Peter Grimes. Having finally seen it at the ROH in January last year I can report that it is pretty much as good as it is cracked up to be. GB is a superb dramatic composer for drama and, specifically, for the very particular prose that MC creates. I was not entirely persuaded by the only play of MC’s that I have see, The Treatment (The Treatment at the Almeida Theatre review ***), but I think he is growing on me.

This time round they have taken seven “events” in the life of the infamous Edward II, wisely leaving out his messy end, to tell the story of his relationships with lover Gaveston, wife Isabel and rival Mortimer. The two royal kids are thrown into the somewhat unusual household and we also see associated flunkeys and down trodden hoi polloi who were suffering under Eddy’s spendthrift ways. We begin with the banishment of Mortimer, then Isabel joining the plot to murder Gaveston after seeing the desitution of the people, Gaveston predicting the King’s future and then being seized, the King disowning Isabel after Gaveston’s death, Mortimer and Isabel setting up a rival court and grooming young Eddy (to be the III), the King’s abdication at Mortimer’s behest and finally the young Edward III seizing control from his Mummy.

As you might surmise the focus of MC’s story here is more on the “domestic” struggle between the “couples” and less on the conflict between King and nobles. The relationship between Mortimer and Isabel and Isabel and Edward II is given as much weight as that between Gaveston and the King. This, together with the truncated plot, makes it very different from its most obvious precursor, Marlowe’s Edward II, or, more precisely, The Troublesome Reign and Lamentable Death of Edward the Second, King of England, with the Tragical Fall of Proud Mortimer. Now I happen to believe Marlowe’s play is one of the finest ever written, comparable with Shakespeare’s History Plays. But it does go on a bit. If MC and GB had attempted to set the whole story as an opera I would still be sitting there two weeks later. So Kent, Warwick, the Spensers and all the other nobles. Canterbury and the bishops, Hainault, the Welsh, the sadists and various other hangers-on are absent. As are France, fighting, Kenilworth, scythes and pokers. The key themes in Marlowe’s play, his two fingers to his own contemporary society, namely homo-eroticism, religion and social status are downplayed, Isabella’s role and the passion between the four main protagonists are foregrounded.

Extracting these key episodes and, in some cases, manipulating them to allow GB to weave his marvellous score around them, was a classy move by MC. His libretto, as in pretty much all he writes, swings from the prosaically direct to the cryptically poetic. I mean this as a compliment but his writing is not florid but quite angular with intriguing turns of phrase and clear delineations between characters. I gather that once they have agreed the shape of the work, MC goes off and writes the whole thing, with minimal consultation, before handing it over to GB, who then slowly and patiently builds up the music from the “bottom up”. At least that is what is sounded like from the interview in the programme. But given how distinctive, dark and clever MC’s approach is I can see why it works. GB knows the “voice’ he will write around and, as in their prior collaborations, he knows his musical style, which has itself been through iteration, will fit the libretto.

The music is superb. The orchestration is immensely colourful but GB only uses large scale forces occasionally. Most of the time small clusters of instruments are used to create different moods in each of the seven scenes, notably from bass clarinet, bassoons and brass. The percussion section gets to play with all sorts of new toys. A cimbalom gets an frequent airing. There are probably motifs, patterns and structures within this but you will need to find that out from someone who knows what they are talking about. All I know is that music and drama were perfectly matched across the compact 90 minutes. I think the emotional extremes were more pronounced that in Written on Skin which had a more mythic feel. GB ratcheted up key points in the action by plunging us into dramatic silences. In Scene 3 when Edward and Gaveston private tryst is interrupted by Isabel, the kids and the courtiers and in Scene 2 when the people impinge on the Court a rich musical chaos is invoked. Harmony and counterpoint are wound up into a ball before collapsing.

The production, courtesy of the genius director Katie Mitchell, regular design collaborator Vicki Mortimer, lighting from James Farncombe and movement from Joseph Alford, reflected the enclosed and intimate nature of the drama. Each scene was set in a royal bedroom, which revolved to offer a different perspective. This included the “private” entertainment in Scene 3 with Eddy II and Gaveston and the mirroring “public” entertainment in Scene 7. The “people” were given an audience before Isabel in the bedroom in Scene 2 to air their grievances. Mortimer’s household and the King’s imprisonment at Berkeley are also presented in the confined, intimate setting of the bedroom. A massive fish-tank, which drains of water and therefore life through the scenes, is both visual treat and prominent symbol. There is a Francis Bacon style painting on the wall: that probably tells you all you need to know about the uncomfortable, existential aesthetic the production seeks to traverse. There are one or two predictable Katie Mitchell cliches, slow motion soft-shoe shuffles anyone, but the tableau are undeniably effective, When you are stuck up in the Gods, (you would be hard pressed to be further away from the stage than I was, me being such a tightwad), this matters. At this distance the Court becomes a dolls house, an interesting perspective in itself, so the “choreography” that the director brings to proceedings, matters more than the close up expressiveness of the singers.

The ROH orchestra was on top form. Mind you if you have the composer himself conducting then there is little room for error. This is not a chamber opera, GB’s sound world is too rich, but some of the textures require various players to push their technique which they certainly did. I can’t really tell you much about the skil of the cast, they all amaze me, but Barbara Hannigan, as she always does, was off the scale as Isabel, vocally and as an actor. Stephane Degout bought a petulant, entitled air to Edward II, Peter Hoare’s Mortimer was a mixture of ambition and pragmaticism. Gyula Orendt stood out as Gaveston in his scenes with the King, a mystic of sorts. Samuel Boden’s sweet high-tenor stepped up very effectively towards the end as the Boy King and Ocean Barrington-Cook, (well done Mum and Dad for the name), artfully portrayed the damage done to her and her brother by having to witness the turmoil, despite not having a voiced part (another clever idea from the creators). The children were, I suppose, the ultimate recipients of the “lessons in love and violence” that we the audience were also privy to. Though the production was smartly modern-dress there was no crass attempt to draw any lessons for our own times but the plot, MC’s libretto and GB’s music combined to underscore the tension between the private and the political for those that wield power across history.

My guess is that if I saw and heard this again, perhaps from a more advantaged position, it would merit 5*. A few punters trotted out at various junctures which intrigued me. This surely is as digestible as contemporary. “modernist” opera gets. The historical subject is not obscure, the plot direct, music is beautiful, the libretto intriguing, the staging is excellent and it is hard to imagine the performances being topped. (the vocal parts were largely written for exactly this cast). Not much in the way of tunes and no arias, but surely the most cursory of examination would have revealed this in advance. The dissonance is never uncomfortable and is rooted in chordal progression. And it is short so why not see it through.

I would assume that GB and MC will, in the fullness of time, have another crack at this opera lark given how good they are it but I wonder if they have exhausted for now the “Medieval”. Like Written on Skin there is something of the illuminated manuscript here, (see what I have done there), a jewel like morality tale, (without all the God stuff). Suits me but with this amount of goodwill, (this is a seven way co-production), surely they could get away with something genuinely of the moment next time.

 

The Treatment at the Almeida Theatre review ***

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The Treatment

Almeida Theatre, 24th May 2017

I didn’t really get on with this. The premise is interesting, the acting was accomplished (all the leads were new to me) and there were ideas to ponder upon, but I just didn’t find it that involving, either emotionally or intellectually.

I had wanted to see a work by writer Martin Crimp. I had previously only encountered his work through the libretto for George Benjamin’s haunting contemporary opera Written on Skin. So with an Almeida production directed by Lyndsey Turner (Chimerica, Faith Healer, Tipping the Velvet, Hamlet, Posh, Light Shining in Buckinghamshire – all fine productions that I have seen and that she has directed in recent years), and heartened by positive reviews, I had hoped to find a new favourite.

The plot focusses on how Anne’s (Aisling Loftus) story of her odd relationship with husband Simon (Matthew Needham) is appropriated by husband and wife “facilitators” Andrew (Julian Ovenden) and Jennifer (Indira Varma who for me stood out – a character that appears to speak first and then not really think too much afterwards). This is then turned into a film with the help of has-been writer Clifford (Ian Gelder), star actor John (Gary Beadle) and assistant turned starlet Nicky (Ellora Torchia). From this is spun a meditation on the fractured nature of modern urban (specifically New York) existence, the relationship between art and life, the restless superficiality of modern culture and the perversion of attraction.

Mr Crimp is a favourite of the Continental European stage and a go-to translator and the tone of this work shows why. It is mostly naturalistic (with a few curveballs to keep us on our toes – a blind cabbie for example, mirrored by a Gloucesterian eye gouging). For me it evoked that flat, clipped, precise almost vapid style beloved of novelists who worship at the altar of Brett Easton Ellis. Nothing wrong with that but I am not sure I go along with the idea that this play was somehow ahead of its time. For me it was very much of its time, despite I assume some deft updating (exhibit A – the smartphone – the gift that keeps on giving to the social commentator bereft of a commentary).

I normally find myself able to recognise what critics, programme writers and all the creatives say that they can see in terms of ideas, sub-texts and the like, but here I was a little off the pace I think.The satire of how the big bucks movie world takes a “real life” voyeuristic story and then twists it beyond recognition to make it more “real” unerringly hits the target and the delusions of the creatives in this tale are well observed. As a more profound enquiry into the alienation and neuroses which bedevil Western urban existence, I would be more circumspect. In its different way something like Scorsese’s Taxi Driver makes a better fist of nailing these themes I think, though again it is firmly locked in its time.

To be clear I didn’t mentally drift off (a happily rare but sure sign that the play is not for me) nor would I put anyone off who wants to take this in. It was just that it felt a little less than the sum of its parts. Not a no, not a yes, but a maybe.