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True West – Vaudeville Theatre It’s probably a lack in me, but I need somebody to root for in a play, even if it’s only the Second Grave Digger. Sam Sheperd’s characters are invariably people you wouldn’t want to meet, never mind root for, even in broad daylight on Rodeo Drive. There are four characters in True West – two brothers who fancy themselves as screenwriters, their sleazy producer, and their indifferent mother who has just spent three months in Alaska. Having already spent most of the evening with her sons, I can well understand why she needed to get away from them. Austin is holed up in her California house, having abandoned his wife and family for the bright lights of Hollywood, trying to write the script he will, this afternoon, try to sell to Saul. As soon as we lay eyes on Saul it is clear that he has no interest in Austin or his script so why is he there? He’s a plot device, plopped in just so the drug-ridden drunken layabout brother, Lee, can upend the non-existent deal and sell him his own non-existent screenplay. Lee, a boastful housebreaker, tells Saul a dumb story for a new Western and we are asked to believe that a professional movie producer falls for it, exchanging one brother for the other, apparently over a round of golf. Worse, by a series of hopelessly transparent devices, he makes Austin write it for him. There are more holes in this plot than fishnet stockings, not least the implausibility of any golf course allowing the deadbeat Lee within a mile of its greens. Now it is Austin who dissolves into a hopeless drunk by Act 2, promising to write Lee’s script in return for a new life in the desert, at which point along comes Mom, fresh from her Alaska sojourn, takes one look at her sons, and takes off for a hotel. Fortunately for Sheperd, who died in 2017, there are still enough theatregoers who either believe this tosh or find it funny enough to forgive it because it’s still being taken seriously. Many people see in his more than 40 plays insights into the human condition, a special understanding of the lost and marginalised, a way of formalising societal alienation, and the conflict, common I believe to all, that parts of us are at war with other parts of us. Some of his best-known plays are about fractured family relationships, brothers, sisters, parents, children, but not, I think, with any particular insight. For me, Sheperd was always a better actor than playwright but that might just have been because he was blessed from birth with stunning good looks and I loved to watch him. Talk about someone to root for, Sheperd could have played an axe murderer and I’d have rooted for him. Download The Right Stuff and wallow. Unfortunately for Sheperd, True West needs more than two television stars to make it work. The abrupt personality changes required of Kit Harrington’s Austin and Johnny Flynn’s Lee as their characters morph into one another are beyond the stage capabilities of these two good-looking young actors. Despite good American accents, they remain irredeemably English in style and movement and whatever violence and menace Sheperd wrote into the play are missing here. The other two characters, Donald Sage Mackay’s Saul and Madeleine Potter’s Mom, melt into the background as they are designed to do without Harrington and Flynn ever quite dominating the foreground. No-one to root for here. Uncle Vanya – Hampstead Theatre There’s plenty to root for in Terry Johnson’s new version of Chekhov’s great play of regret and disappointment and the passage of time, Uncle Vanya. I’m not sure of the wisdom of turning one of theatre’s great tragedies into a somewhat light comedy but all the jokes surely make for a more enjoyable evening than you might expect from Chekhov. Placing them not only in their correct historical period but also in the younger age range than is usual, we are better able to see the increasing frustration of Sonia, just passing into the old maid category, once Dr Astrov makes clear his lack of romantic interest in her, and the increasing hysteria of Vanya who says that, at 47, his life is already over. Astrov, the most autobiographical of all Chekhov’s characters, is probably ten years younger but feels that despite his busy medical practice and his serious interest in trees and wildlife, his live is wasting. What makes this version work is that Johnson has shifted the play’s centre from Vanya to Yelena, the beautiful but vacuous new arrival in the country estate so well run by Vanya and his niece, Sonia. Nearly everybody is in love, not with her but with what they think she can do for them. The indolent Yelena is a beautiful cypher on which they all hang their dreams. Astrov wants her to care about his trees, Vanya wants her to liberate him from his boring existence, Sonia wants her to make Astrov fall in love with her, and her husband, Serebriakov, the old Professor, merely wants her to fetch his medicines. This, in the end, is the job she finds easiest so she will, in the end, choose to serve his needs above the conflicting desires of the others. The other residents of the house simply want her to leave so they can resume their stultified but familiar rural routine so soon to be disrupted by revolution. Alan Cox is an unusually high-pitched Vanya obsessed not so much with his hopeless love for Yelena but by his need to change his life before he is too old. Alice Bailey Johnson’s rather querulous Sonia wants Astrov but actually likes her rural life where she’s in charge which is an interesting new take on the character. And as played by Alex Newman, Astrov is far too bright for the life of a country doctor and has actually just seized on Yelena as the first interesting interruption into his life for ages. Kika Markham turns in a typically perfect cameo as the feminist mother who lives her life through reading radical literature but doing nothing about it, and June Watson is pitch perfect as the nanny who just wishes everybody would stop changing mealtimes, and leave her be. The stunningly beautiful Abbey Lee makes a memorable stage debut as lazy Yelena. In this Uncle Vanya, you can root for all of them. Terry Johnson has done a satisfying job with the updated script and the direction of a much younger cast than Uncle Vanya normally fields. I just wish that, among some very good jokes, we had not lost nearly all of Chekhov’s poetic dialogue. Chekhov without his poetry seems somehow like bathtime with no rubber ducks. Fiddler on the Roof – Menier Chocolate Factory In New York, right now, in a tiny Fringe theatre, there is a smash hit production of Fiddler on the Roof, in Yiddish, of all things. In London, right now, in a tiny Fringe theatre, there is what deserves to be a smash hit production of the same show, in English. Even the most cursory of Google searches will unearth dozens of productions worldwide at any given moment. Translated into more than 30 languages, with, for instance, 100 different productions in its first decade in Germany alone, we have to ask, what is the special attraction of this most specific of musicals? The best answer I can offer is its universality. Based on Yiddish short stories by Sholem Aleichem about a put-upon milkman with 5 daughters to marry off, it is about family, tradition, and how even the most conventional of societies sooner or later adjust to their circumstances. It is about living while in fear of being wiped out, about enjoying a song or a kiss or a drink whenever they’re available, it is about community, and neighbourhood and parenthood. These things are universal, in every society, every environment, rich, poor, black and white, every parent worries about what kind of world they are passing onto their children and that’s what Fiddler is about. Thelma Ruby, who played the lead, Golde, in an early London production, told me a story about being on tour in Japan with the show. At the opening night party, a very grand Japanese lady in full traditional kimono and obi, came over to her and bowed low. ‘That was wonderful,’ she told Thelma, ‘but tell me, how you know so much about Japanese family?’ Set in a shtetl (rural village) in Eastern Europe at the beginning of the last century, a small population of orthodox Jews are being squeezed out of their centuries-old homes by the Tsar, the pogroms, the coming revolution, and the sheer awfulness of their environment. Poverty, sickness and fear are endemic yet they manage to celebrate anything that is worth celebrating – a wedding, a birth, the arrival of a sewing machine – because that’s what it means to be human. At the end of Fiddler, the entire population of the village is exiled, thrown out with only days’ notice, as Jews have been so often before, to find homes and livelihoods elsewhere. I know about this because my family was among them. When my husband and I took my late father to see the first London production, he looked at the stage as he was taking off his coat and said, casually, ‘That’s where I was born’. No, we explained, patronisingly, that’s a stage set designed by an artist called Boris Aronson, based on paintings by Marc Chagall. ‘I know that’, barked my dad, ‘I can see it’s a stage set, I’m in a theatre, but that bloke Aronson knew what those shtetls were like.’ He paused for a moment and then added, ‘They were terrible’. The new production of Fiddler at the Menier Chocolate Factory demonstrates how an outstanding director can take a show we thought we knew and reveal it in new and dramatic ways. Trevor Nunn, having done just about everything a director can do on the big stages, has turned his attention to a great show on a small stage and made it even greater. From the first moments, when the citizens of Anatevka meet for a gossip in the village square and we see them for the first time, we are aware of impending threat through the simple interactions and neighbourly laughter. By the time we hear the famous strains of the violin from the fiddler, scratching away on the roof, at the beginning of the show as written by Jerry Bock, Sheldon Harnick and Joseph Stein, we know them and are on their side. This is what a great director can do and it only gets better from there on. Andy Nyman was not born to play Tevye but his charm and personality carry him through the more difficult musical moments even though he’s trailing memories of the outsize performances of Zero Mostel and Topol in his wake. Judy Kuhn is a somewhat qvetchy (look it up) Golde but, then, Golde is a bit qvetchy. Each of the daughters finds or has been given a separate personality as she struggles to escape the parental trap, which speaks well for the players and their director. Inevitably, the dancing that was intrinsic to big-stage productions of Fiddler are unstageable here and the original director/choreographer Jerome Robbins would recognise only the bottle dance as his, but the smaller cast do well within the limitations of the space available. And the songs are, well, the songs are some of the best ever written for the musical theatre. As we watch the procession of the dispossessed leaving the village with their bundles and sacks, for an unknown future in an unknown place, it’s impossible not to think of the thousands of refugees currently making the same journey, also looking for a better life. I'm rooting for every one of them.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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