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Bitter Wheat – Garrick It brings it all back. And not in a good way. When the revelations started emerging about Jimmy Savile, the executives who had been in charge at the time smote their foreheads. “What?” they bleated, “Jimmy was a sexual predator? Who knew?”, and I, and every girl who had worked for the BBC or ITV then, thought, “I knew, and so did you”. We were very young but we knew enough to tell every new arrival, “Don’t ever get into a lift with Jimmy, never go to his dressing room for any reason, and, if you find yourself alone with him, leave immediately.” He was the worst but he wasn’t the only one. There was no redress then for groping, sexual talk, inappropriate behaviour, because those to whom we could have complained were our bosses, they held our jobs, our very careers, in their hands and, often, they were the perpetrators. I wish I had a pound for every time I was asked, “where’s your sense of humour?”, a penny, even. But it wasn’t funny then and it isn’t funny now. Which is why it makes me uncomfortable to laugh at the funny lines in David Mamet’s new play about Harvey Weinstein. There are several. That said, Bitter Wheat is a terrible little play, disjointed, sloppy, shapeless and indulgent. If it had been written by anyone other than one of our most celebrated playwrights it would never have made it to the stage. It would certainly not have attracted the talents of an actor of John Malkovich’s standing. He never leaves the stage and where there is sense to be made of the flabby monologue that Mamet has written for Barney Fein, his Harvey Weinstein avatar, Malkovich struggles with it and often succeeds. But to what end? There is probably a ‘Me Too’ play to be written but it is not this one. The Hunt – Almeida This may turn out to be the play of the year even though it’s only July. On the face of it, it’s a story that has been told before. Lucas is a primary school teacher in a small town who is falsely accused by a 6-year old of exposing himself to her. In the absence of any evidence except the child’s word he is immediately suspended from his job and reported to the police. Several other children come forward, all claiming to have been molested by the same teacher, except that what they claim can’t possibly have happened. He is vilified by his lifelong friends and neighbours, beaten up, his dog shot. Still, being a quiet and introverted Scandinavian, he doesn’t defend himself. Eventually, of course, the child admits to her mother that she was being ‘silly’, he is exonerated and returns to school and community. So far, so straightforward. But there is another element here. The Hunt is based on another Danish movie by Thomas Vinterberg (his Festen was a worldwide success for the Almeida and beyond) and its real subject is masculinity. How does a man define himself? Through his family? His friends? His work? His sexuality? His community? What is his place in his world? Lucas (a superlative performance by Tobias Menzies) and the men in his hometown are all members of a drinking and hunting lodge where they go to indulge in what looks, to a female eye, like a lot of silly rituals. They sing drinking songs, dance, drum and cavort together in the forest until they’re well and truly drunk and then they go home to their wives. But these rituals matter to them, they define them to themselves, and when Lucas is ostracised by the lodge and thereby denied the rituals, he effectively loses his identity. His imagination transforms his friends into stags taunting him in a hunting ritual. This male bonding can turn toxic. All the men act in concert, nobody speaks up for Lucas, not his best friend, not even himself, the men acting as an indivisible unit. This happens to be a hunting lodge in rural Denmark, but it could be a Los Angeles street gang or a South American football team. This kind of mindless adherence to a male group is what led to Hitler Youth. Fascinating. And more than a bit scary. Director Rupert Gould encases them, courtesy of designer Es Devlin, in a revolving glass box they can barely fit into. All that testosterone in such a small space, no wonder they’re nuts. Lucas’ story is interesting enough, and Tobias Menzies is simply dazzling as a Danish introvert unable even to defend himself from the most terrible accusations, but the toxic masculinity that informs The Hunt is what makes it a mesmerizing play. Present Laughter – Old Vic Noel Coward wrote Present Laughter in 1939 to be played in tandem with This Happy Breed, his affectionate panorama of working class life from the Armistice to Munich but the war started and rehearsals had to be abandoned. Coward volunteered for war duties and was a sometime spy in France but most of his war work was concerts entertaining the troops and writing for the movies. He wrote several, including one of the most successful war films of all time, In Which We Serve, and he adapted his play Still Life into Brief Encounter. In the event, then, circumstances prevented Present Laughter’s production until 1943 when he embarked on a backbreaking year-long tour playing the lead in not only Present Laughter, but also This Happy Breed and Blithe Spirit, turn- and turnabout, two nights in each town, then pile all the props and costumes into whatever conveyance could be found in wartime, and on to the next place. Sometimes they played in church halls to a handful of locals, sometimes in cavernous theatres to hundreds. Judy Campbell, who played Elvira in Blithe Spirit, used to tell marvellous stories about trying to keep warm in unheated halls by tucking Noel’s hands into the sleeves of her dress while she was wearing it on-stage. Coward played all three and was fond of saying subsequently that he invented Garry Essendine in Present Laughter with the express intention of writing a ‘stonking great part for me’. And a stonking great part it still is, and has been a gift for a succession of great actors ever since – for Peter O’Toole, Kevin Kline, Ian McKellen, Douglas Fairbanks, Jr, and now for Andrew Scott. In a remarkable turn as Garry, the Coward alter-ego, stalking the stage like a panther, dissolving into tears like a 4-year old in a tantrum, spewing charm as a weapon to anyone within range, and spitting Coward’s cascades of words into the fourth wall, at once Garry and Noel, at the same time a genuine portrait of the price of fame and a ribald sendup of it. It’s an evening to eat with a spoon, revelling in a large supporting cast without a single misstep, the gorgeous costumes of Rob Howell (which do what theatrical costumes are meant to do, enhance the characters), director Matthew Warchus’s totally serious approach to Coward’s silliness and featherlight touch with vulnerability, and, above all, the bravura playing of Andrew Scott. There’s some gender reversal in this production which does no harm at all, and a certain excess of shouting, which does, and a welcome sense that the audience can just relax and scream with laughter if it wants to because it’s in safe hands. I think Coward would have loved it. Europe – Donmar Warehouse This revival of David Greig’s 1994 play about the way the original concept of European unity is flaking away into fractious and fragmented groups of dissatisfied, disappointed refugees, is timely. Set in an indeterminate railway station in an indeterminate town in an indeterminate country, it’s about borders, real and imagined. Borders are more than artificial lines between countries here, they are also the individuals’ separation from one another whether through nationality, language, economic status, or personal predilection. We make those barriers, the play is saying, and we can cross them if we like. We could make a Europe that works, but we don’t. A father and daughter (refugees, but we don’t know from whence) have taken up residence in a defunct railway station to the annoyance of the stationmaster. They have nowhere to go but they know they must go somewhere. The town is dead, the factory has closed, there is no work for the young men but they don’t want to leave and they cannot stay. So, hardly understanding the circumstances which have killed their town, they mill around, making trouble, drinking, and taking out their aggression on any stranger unlucky enough to cross their path. Odd friendships spring up. The old father finds common cause with the stationmaster, the assistant stationmaster falls in love with the refugee daughter, the town ‘fixer’ brings a suitcase of contraband vodka to the young men and gets beaten up by his erstwhile friends. The evening is retrieved from depression by the performances of an unusually large cast. Ron Cook is the stationmaster who manages to deliver his message of doom with the officiousness of officialdom everywhere and gives us the few laughs there are, and Kevork Malikyan as the old father, a gentle philosopher who believes in the concept of Europe and is willing to suffer to remain in it. Europe feels completely contemporary, which is tragic considering that it is 25 years old, written when the Baltics were falling apart, and nothing in Europe has changed for the better since it was first produced.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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