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Noises Off – Lyric Hammersmith Stand by for a sweeping statement – Noises Off is the cleverest and funniest farce written in the past 100 years. It started its on-stage life 37 years ago on the same stage as it is now playing and then set off around the world, playing in theatres from China to Finland and everywhere in between, often with unintentionally hilarious adjustments to Michael Frayn’s already hilarious script. He remembers that it played for months in Prague without its third act because someone had forgotten to include it. Apparently, it worked fine, which just shows what a brilliant farce it is. The premise initially seems simple enough. A company of professional actors is engaged to perform a standard English farce on a tour of the UK. Farce requires split-second timing, ensuring that each actor is where they are supposed to be, opening and closing the right door, making the right entrances and exits, carrying the right props, wearing the right quick-change costumes, doing the right pratfalls, saying the right lines, and staying in the right character. It requires total concentration and interdependence of the actors because if only one moment goes wrong – an actor isn’t where he’s supposed to be, for instance, or says the wrong line, then the scene goes wrong, and the play goes wrong. The genius of Noises Off is that Michael Frayn has not only imagined, but plotted, what would happen if it all went wrong. As the tour proceeds, the cast begin to fall out with one another and their individual foibles come to the fore, so performances collapse, they become sloppy, precision goes out the window, and the farce they are performing becomes more and more problematic. Are you still with me? This cast – Meera Syal, Lloyd Owen, and the ever-brilliant Debra Gillett (they’re all excellent so it seems unfair to single out just these three) is therefore playing two plays simultaneously, the ‘real’ Noises Off which works like clockwork and the notional ’Nothing On’ which doesn’t. I have no idea how they do it. While Jeremy Herrin’s new production isn’t quite as funny as the original by Michael Blakemore, it’s funny enough to make you remember the first time you saw it. And forget it in the same moment as you fall off your seat with laughter at this production. And all the others worldwide. I wish I’d seen the one in Sicily where two different touring companies showed up on the same Christmas Eve to perform the same play. And wouldn’t you love to have seen two English farces performed on the same night by an all-Japanese cast? A Midsummer Night’s Dream – Open Air Theatre, Regent’s Park It’s midsummer. It’s hot, well, sometimes. So it’s time for your annual love affair with A Midsummer Night’s Dream. This year there are three major productions, all playing at the same time, at the Bridge Theatre, at the Globe, and in Regent’s Park. I opted for the Park, all green leaves and late-blooming roses. The most romantic setting for the most romantic of Shakespeare’s comedies. Magical, yes, but, in Dominic Hill’s new production, there is much strangeness among the magic. The fairies are not pretty little things with gossamer wings but quite scary creatures who move on stilts and sticks, sometimes creepy, sometimes downright threatening. Titania’s adopted little boy over whom she falls out with Oberon is a jointed puppet who moves with Japanese-style helpers. Myra McFadyen is a formidable Scottish female Puck permanently poised on the edge of insurrection and even the human lovers have fights that look frighteningly real. For some odd reason, Bottom is played very well by Susan Wokoma but, for me, much of the fun of Bottom is lost if he’s a girl. The lovers have sensibly been cast with actors who don’t look alike (always my complaint with the Dream is that you can’t tell them apart and therefore who’s in love with whom at any moment) and while there is no chemistry between Oberon and Titania and their alter egos, Theseus and Hippolyta – I don’t give that marriage much of a chance, human or fairy – there is a playfulness in the lovers and a sense that they have a life outside the play. The Rude Mechanicals are really wonderful. Hill has clearly given as much attention to the play-within-the-play as to the two main plots and the balance of drama and comedy is well drawn. And the magic is always there, shimmering on the surface. Without that, what kind of Midsummer Night’s Dream could it possibly be? The Night of the Iguana – Noel Coward Theatre A man struggles with himself. Saint or sinner? That one’s easy, he’s a sinner. A former priest turned tour guide, sacked from his church for heresy (he calls God a senile delinquent) and fornication (seducing a young girl) Shannon, never a stable personality, has arrived at the hotel belonging to his friends Fred and Maxine Faulk while escorting a group of Baptist schoolteachers through Mexico. Fred has just died, leaving Maxine to run the hotel and Shannon, arguing with the tourists, a family of Nazis staying in the hotel, with his bus driver, and with the young girl he has already seduced on the bus, has confiscated the ignition key for the bus and run to Maxine for shelter where he has a psychotic episode and has to be tied to a hammock. Into this melee comes an itinerant sketch artist, Hannah Jelkes, and her dying nonogenerian grandfather. With exquisite calm and simple goodness, Hannah calms Shannon, makes him poppyseed tea, and reactivates his will to live. We know it’s only temporary, though. Soon his demons will again present themselves and he will be, as Tennessee Williams himself was, his own worst enemy. A fascinating excerpt from Williams’ autobiography, reprinted in the programme, shows how closely his summer of 1940 was then reproduced in The Night of the Iguana, complete with his depression and suicidal tendencies. Williams was in Tahiti that summer, not Mexico, but otherwise the mirror description of a man broken and desperate is precise. The conventional wisdom that Iguana is not one of the great ones, not The Glass Menagerie or Streetcar Named Desire or Cat on a Hot Tin Roof may well be true but for me, this portrait of a man ravaged by his internal fight to be good while his every instinct is for self-destruction is unbearably moving, and the two women – Maxine and Hannah – who represent his carnal and his spiritual sides are wonderfully shaped as characters who, themselves flawed, each in her way has something of redemption in her for Shannon. It would be hard to imagine a better production of this play. James Macdonald never gets in the way of Williams’ poetry although the set is somewhat overwrought and he should perhaps have intervened with his designers for something a little less garish. But that’s a quibble next to the four performances that carry the play. Clive Owen, rarely seen on stage, is a febrile Shannon, by turns loveable and out of control in a beautiful performance, as clear mood by mood as Shannon himself. Anna Gunn’s Maxine, usually played as a blowsy sexual temptress, is here understated as an earth mother who might actually, given the chance, make something of him and Lia Williams is absolutely brilliant as the quiet but assertive Hannah, the still centre, the woman who knows herself and has no doubts about her place in the world. This is a stunning performance, all the more admirable for being so unshowy. The fourth member of this terrific company is Julian Glover as the dying old grandfather, a poet determined to finish his last poem before he dies. The extraordinary strength of the old at the end of their lives, has never been more movingly portrayed. Great Williams or not, I wouldn’t have missed this evening for anything. Equus – Trafalgar Studios I remember thinking, when I first saw Equus in its first production in the early ‘70s, that Peter Shaffer had written a psychological masterpiece, a play that laid bare that curious R.D. Laing theory that there is no such thing as madness. Shaffer was saying that every act of insanity could be explained, or at least analysed logically. It was a fascinating theory as it pertained to the plot of Equus which concerns a teenager who, apparently randomly, blinds six horses with a spike. I was less sure when I saw the play again, but it contained a blazing performance from Daniel Radcliffe as the boy and still seemed to me to have deep psychological significance. This time, with a good-looking but one-note young actor, Ethan Kai, in the same part and an underpowered Zubin Varla as the psychiatrist who attempts to treat him while himself falling into extreme neurosis, the play seems less universal and more domestic. The strongest performance is from a minor character, the boy’s father, who, like everyone else, is unable to understand why his son has performed this terrible act, and is played with furious bewilderment by Robert Fitch. The other element worth noting is Shelley Maxwell’s choreography for the horses. If you’re not familiar with the play that will sound like gobbledegook but Maxwell has examined the movement of horses so that the actors who play them are believably equine. It is worth seeing major plays in revival, if only to re-evaluate one’s own first judgment and, perhaps, to learn not to be so adamant the first time around. Jesus Christ Superstar – Barbican Theatre I had the opposite experience at Jesus Christ Superstar. Having been fairly sniffy about it when Andrew Lloyd Webber and Tim Rice first turned it from a concept album to a stage show, I now see how fresh and innovative it was in its time. Of course, we were a little jaded with updated religion then, having already had Joseph and the Amazing Technicolour Dreamcoat, so JCS didn’t seem all that radical. But it was. Both lyrically and musically the show found a new language for telling a familiar story and, in doing so, gave a new generation of theatregoers an appreciation for the stage. The actors and singers in this production are better than adequate and there are some intentionally funny moments such as when the officials’ staffs reverse to become microphones. The performers often manage to rise above the idiotic choreography which seems to fill every moment. Someone thought it was necessary to have the entire cast performing repetitive and meaningless movements throughout but, if you can ignore a stage full of cavorting actors and concentrate on the story and the songs, Jesus Christ Superstar is well worth seeing again. It is a young and juicy show by two superstars – Lloyd Webber and Rice – at the beginning of their careers and, with hindsight, it is easy to understand where they were going and how fast they would get there.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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