Tag: Paul Higgins

The Doctor at the Almeida Theatre review *****

The Doctor

Almeida Theatre, 13th September 2019

He’s only gone and done it again. Robert Icke, the departing Associate Director at the Almeida, has ended on a high. Like that is any great surprise. Once again he has taken a classic text, this time Arthur Schnitzler’s dissection of anti-Semitism in pre WWI Vienna, and updated it for our contemporary age. Though to be fair it is a pretty good story even without the deconstruction and reconstruction. Yet by expanding the critique, and the central dilemma which underpins it, beyond religion and cultural identity and into gender and race, through both his adaptation and the casting, Mr Icke opens up a whole Pandora’s box of unresolved questions.

There are times when the clever dick nature of the project can irritate but, as I have said before, in the context of his Wild Duck on this stage, he is so, well, clever, that he gets away with it. His self professed aim is to clear away the fusty patina of performance history and get back to the roots of these often disturbing and radical plays. Professor Bernhardi fits the bill perfectly. But as well as bringing the play alive for a modern audience, and making them think, so hard that sometimes it hurts, Mr Icke also rarely fails to entertain us, ensuring the plot is as transparent as the message and the characters.

Of course we are fortunate that one of his favourite collaborators Juliet Stevenson was up for the central role of Doctor Ruth Wolff, an authority in Alzheimer’s disease, who heads up the Elizabeth Institute. She is a secular Jew who doesn’t suffer fools gladly and is dedicated to her calling. She is however unable to prevent a 14 year old Catholic girl from dying who has been admitted to the hospital after a self-administered abortion. She refuses to allow a priest to see the girl just before she passes, a decision that splits her team and has repercussions, social media outrage, petitions and political debate, when it leaks to the outside world. The Institute’s funding is threatened and Dr Wolf is forced to choose between her principles and self sacrifice.

This plot sticks fairly closely to Schnitzler’s original but divisions within the Institute, and outside, open up along gender and racial lines, as well as between Catholic and Jew. This is made more striking as we see that the cast largely plays characters which do not “fit” our perception of their identity and are not identified by name in the programme. Even after you grasp this central conceit it can still surprise, notably when we discover the priest is black. We see how medical ethics are shaped by professional and public opinion, and economics, and how identity, and the language which defines and contains it, can be co-opted for personal and political gain.

Naomi Wirthner is outstanding as the deputy plotting to oust Ruth, accurately capturing male entitlement. Paul Higgins plays the passionate priest with an agenda and Ria Zmitrowicz is once again captivating as the young transgender friend that Ruth inadvertently betrays. Pamela Nomvete and Oliver Alvin-Wilson, as Ruth’s loyal colleagues are pitted against Daniel Rabin, Mariah Louca and, eventually, Kirsty Rider who all see warped principle and pragmatic advantage, in turning against her. All this takes place against the clinical, fluid set design of Hildegard Bechtler, never black or white but shades of grey, with lighting and sound from Natasha Chivers and Tom Gibbons to match. And a live drumming performance from Hannah Ledwidge which serves to discomfort and ratchet up the tension.

If all this sound too tricksy, or woke-y, well it isn’t. Juliet Stevenson brilliantly portrays Ruth as some-one who is right, but hard to like, obdurate and emotionally naive. Her final monologue is shattering, played in conjunction with Joy Richardson, her lost partner, “Charlie”. RI keeps pulling us into arguments that simultaneously assert the inviolability of identity and the strictures and contradictions it can impose. The dichotomy between “freedom to” and “freedom from” as my old history teacher taught me all those years ago. The scene where the sceptical Ruth is interrogated for a TV show “Take the Debate” is the most acute satire of identity politics. And all this is done with sacrificing any momentum in the story: quite the reverse, the near 3 hours just bombs along.

The religious schism which informs the original play just about survives the expansion (primarily through the “right to life” debate which the unseen girl’s abortion precipitates), and there will be some for whom all this subversion detracts from the plot but the Tourist, once again, was awed by Mr Icke’s theatrical genius. I am signed up for his next outing with ITA in Amsterdam based on The Doll’s House and I see his version of Chekhov’s Ivanov is currently pulling then in in Stuttgart. I hope we see him back in Blighty soon though too, ideally having another pop at the Greeks, or maybe some Marlowe or Webster.

No great surprise to learn that this is transferring to the Duke of York’s Theatre from April next year. If you didn’t catch it at the Almeida here’s your shot at redemption.

Aristocrats at the Donmar Warehouse review ****

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Aristocrats

Donmar Warehouse, 20th September 2018

Brian Friel, like his own dramatist hero Chekhov, can take a bit of time to get going. Faith Healer, at this theatre a couple of years ago, exerted a vice like grip on me from the open, though that may have been because it is such a brilliantly crafted and slippery multiple monologue, and thanks to the directorial magic of Lyndsey Turner (the director here as well), and the heavyweight thespian trio of Stephen Dillane, Gina McKee and Ron Cook. Translations, at the NT earlier in the year, is painted on an altogether broader and more thematic canvas, so required a little more cerebral investment (Translations at the National Theatre review ****). Aristocrats is closer to the Russian master, but once again we have a diversity of characters, all with, shall I say, the gift of the gab, so it takes some time for the pot to come to the boil.

But when it does Mr Friel certainly scales the dramatic and semiotic heights,as revelations tumble out, and we watch this sad, trapped family fade from view. The play is set in “the big house”, the Hall, in Friel’s fictional Donegal settlement of Ballybeg. These (largely) Georgian country mansions were found throughout Ireland apparently, but were largely the domain of the Anglo-Irish Protestant families exported by us British to b*gger up Ireland through the centuries, and gifted their land by the Penal Laws from 1695. in Aristocrats the family though is, unusually, Catholic. Not quite Brideshead but cut from similar cloth.

The play is set in the 1970’s and the only income the O’Donnell family now derives from the land is through sales. For three generation the law has been their prime source of income with the largely unseen, and terminally ill, Father (James Laurenson) having been a District Justice. The only son, effete fantasist Kasimir (David Dawson), has failed as a solicitor and now, implausibly, works in a sausage factory in Hamburg with wife Helga and three kids. This leaves long suffering oldest daughter Judith (Eileen Walsh) to look after Dad and shoulder the burden of the decaying house and estate, with substantial help from local fixer Willie Diver (David Ganly). London based daughter Alice (Elaine Cassidy), mired in drink, is unhappily married to Eamon (Emmet Kirwan), the son of an ex-housekeeper, who fully grasps the family’s, and his own, plight. Youngest daughter Claire (Aisling Loftus) is recently engaged and the reason why the family has come together, though clearly vulnerable in her diagnosed depression.

The family is completed by the taciturn Uncle George (Ciaran McIntyre) who has lived in the house since the year dot, and, for the weekend that they all initially come together, an American academic Tom Hoffnung (Paul Higgins), who is researching the history of these very families and houses. The family celebration, predictably, evolves into a bout of ugly soul-searching and thwarted ambition.

This is a family isolated by geography, class, religion and history. Long resented by, and now largely irrelevant to,  the local “peasantry”, ignored by their Protestant peers, wealth dissipated through long economic decline, waiting for the patriarch to die so they can be set free. Dysfunctional, motherless, fearful families are meat and drink in the Irish dramatic tradition, indeed BF himself took this (and the O’Donnell surname) as the starting point for his breakthrough Ballybeg play Philadelphia Here I Come! Both feature three sisters, (well four here as it momentously turns out), and one brother, just like Anton, indeed Aristocrats might be best viewed as a bit too reverential a mash up of Three Sisters and The Cherry Orchard. This is, at heart, a story of a family who haven’t really come to grips with the reality of what they have become, just like Chekhov’s families. The past, in BF’s world, is constructed through the language of the present, “false” memories abound.

Indeed this is a little big a part of the problem with Aristocrats. BF’s evident enjoyment in building layer upon layer of character development and in analysing this particular social, cultural and economic milieu does make the first couple of acts just that teensy big tardy. The set of Es Devlin is the non-naturalistic, bluish sunken box, and carefully arranged objects, including a dolls house to signify Ballybeg Hall, that we have come to expect from her which doesn’t offer any visual distraction, adding further distance. When not involved the cast sits at the back, killing time. Uncle George is largely employed to peel away the covering on the back wall to reveal an idyllic C18 arcadian scene, the history of the house in reverse. This play is, after all, one long goodbye.

Fortunately we are treated to some vibrant performances and it is this that brings BF’s melancholic language to life. I expect it didn’t take long for David Dawson to be cast in the role of the “peculiar” Kasimir. Now nervous Kasimir clearly has a bunch of issues, probably caused by Mummy (a suicide) and Daddy. His elaborate invention of a family in Germany, presumably to mask his own sexuality, his apparent inventions about the distinguished literary and musical figures, most improbably Yeats, who visited the house in the past, his belief in Mother’s piano playing ability. Yet there is a kind of child-like desire to be liked which elicits sympathy. it would be pretty easy to under- or over- play Kasimir but Mr Dawson avoids both temptations.

Elaine Cassidy’s Alice is a more recognisably damaged character, purposeless, and here visibly lost to alcohol, with occasional painful glimpses of self-awareness. Eileen Walsh is persuasive when Judith finally gets to free herself from the house and its routine, and the ambiguity of her relationship wth David Ganly’s Willy (as it were), is neatly conveyed. After all his regard for Claire surely explains why he keeps helping, or maybe there is some residual duty and/or pity.

If the family cannot see the truth then it is left to the outsiders to supply it and Emmet Kirwan shows us Eamon’s duality as part of of, but not born into, the family, and the one who may perversely be most attached to the house. Paul Higgins can’t really convince us as to the reasons why Tom is there, he really is a device for BF to “look into” the play and prompt context, but it isn’t too intrusive.

There are some plays that work better after you have seem them. Aristocrats may be one of them for me. Not as perfectly constructed as Faith Healer, as pointed as Philadelphia Here I Come! or as densely clever as Translations, it takes time to break free from its artifice (which this production does nothing to allay). Yet, and in contrast to received critical wisdom, I have a feeling that the impressions left by the characters and the play may linger as long, if not longer, than these masterpieces. Funny things, memories.

The Seagull at the Lyric Hammersmith review ***

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The Seagull

Lyric Hammersmith, 9th October 2017

Right where I come from seagulls are a bloody menace. There are times when I feel the same way about Chekhov. You sit there thinking all his people are self-indulgent, lovelorn whingers who just need to lighten up and get a grip. But slowly, or more rapidly if it is class production, the lines pile up, you begin to understand and care about the characters, and the unsettling mix of everyday tragedy and comedy wields its magic. Life probably is a series of frustrations and missed expectations, which can sometimes get out of hand. When an audience collectively connects with one of AC’s characters mid-monologue it is one of theatre’s greatest pleasures. But this “theatre of mood” isn’t always the easiest of drama to pull off so I get why some people approach our Anton with trepidation.

I always think of AC’s four “great” plays as a sort of theme, more accurately themes, and variations. An impoverished landowner, the beautiful, and sometimes ageing woman, maybe an actress, who returns, and is constantly seeking validation, maybe a matriarchal dame, a young idealist/artist head over heels in love, the frustrated sibling stuck in the country, the young innocent woman (one or both parents lost to her) in love with the wrong bloke, a successful artist/writer/academic looking back to his youth, a discontented schoolteacher, maybe cuckolded, a wise doctor, a faithful retainer, soldiers of various rank, various lippy servants. You can mix them all up and they vary in each play, and Three Sisters deviates a fair bit, but these egotistical archetypes of Russian society populate the plays.

We are normally a long way from the city, to the frustration of all and sundry, and money, getting it and keeping it, is a big issue. Always bubbling away in the background is the ossified nature of the Russian society and economy at the time and the fact that this could not continue. The disparities of wealth and opportunity between AC’s characters is acute, remember these are provincial bourgeoisie so not the very richest, and serfs are generally absent or incidental. The life of the mind, and therefore some riffing on the nature of life and art (and specifically the theatre in The Seagull), will usually get worked over by AC. And, of course, love, romantic and familial, permeates the whole.

And that gun, real or metaphorical.

Back to this Seagull. You may have guessed from the above that I don’t like my Chekhov to shift too far from the socio-economic backdrop against which it was written. That doesn’t mean I need naturalistic sets and costumes. Just that the class structure should be articulated and the sense of place palpable. AC was a father of naturalism, and the plays to me are more about theme, character and rhythm than plot or spectacle. In this production, director Sean Holmes and designer Hyemi Shin have opted to shake it up a bit visually which I think de-emphasies the context I describe above,

I also found the performances a little variable in tone which meant that the whole took a bit longer to get going than normal. This is definitely not the fault of Simon Stephens new adaption which I thought was terrific. It just seemed to me that the actors approached the characters in slightly different ways, so that the multiplicity of love triangles was a little veiled at first. However after our poor seagull puts in his appearance things started to coalesce.

Nicholas Gleaves’s Boris started off in slightly diffident fashion but once he got into the monologues lamenting the fate of the writer, and the prison of the creative impulse, he found his stride. Lesley Sharp’s self-obsessed Irina, unsurprisingly was on the money from the off. Brian Vernel’s Konstantin was initially more petulant than idealist, and I wasn’t entirely won over by his passion for Nina, but his final scenes were very persuasive. I have seen more guileless Nina’s than Adelayo Adedayo’s, but that made the scenes with Boris more tenable. Paul Higgins’s Hugo and Nicholas Tennant’s Peter were striking but the other “minor” characters seemed a little less vivid than in other productions.

Now I hasten to say that once I had adjusted to the shape of the production it did the business, such that by Acts 3 and 4 I was firmly in the Chekhovian zone. If you fancy a Chekhov fix then this is certainly one to see. I just prefer my Chekhov to be a little more obviously rooted in its time and place, and for all the instruments in Chekhov’s orchestra to be in the same key if that makes sense. The version of The Seagull offered up at the NT last year, as part of the Chichester Young Chekhov trilogy, was certainly in the groove, and I also preferred the one served up at the Open Air Theatre a couple of years ago. Mind you the performance I attended there was interrupted by the noise from a party at the US ambassador’s gaff next door. I could just about forgive the near hour long break in my entertainment but not the fact that the Yanks had chosen Duran Duran to colour theirs. Appalling taste.

BTW. I remember seeing Duran Duran in the early 80s. Backcombed hair and full on make-up. Me that is. Meant I ditched the specs to preserve my illusion of New Romantic glamour. Which then meant I couldn’t see a thing. Which then meant there was nothing to detract from the music. Purgatory.

Second BTW. Has anyone else noticed the preponderance of Lesser and Greater Black Backed Gulls popping up all over London. Herring and Black Headed Gulls are ten a penny but these big b*ggers shouldn’t be here should they? Maybe Hitchcock was on to something in The Birds. Other than fawning over Tippi Hedren of course.

Third BTW. Talking of Hitchcock and Ms Hedren I see there are still a fair few tickets fat the ENO for Nico Muhly’s new opera Marnie based on the Winston Graham book which Hitchcock committed to film. I think this will be a belter. And I hope the new ENO season can pull in the punters and get the haters off their backs.