Imperium - Gielgud Theatre There is an almost irresistible temptation to draw too-rigid parallels between Trump’s America and Cicero’s Rome, especially when General Pompey (pompous? Pompeo?) has orange hair in a, ahem, pompadour, but that’s, alas, too easy. Imperium, Mike Poulton’s masterly adaptation of Robert Harris’s trilogy of novels of Roman history through the eyes of Tiro, secretary to the great orator, Cicero, is nothing less than the story of a great democracy corrupted by political and commercial greed. Sound familiar? I read, no, devoured, Imperium, Lustrum, Dictator, as soon as they were published, being both a Roman history nerd and a Robert Harris addict from the publication of his first novel, so when it was announced that the RSC was having them adapted for the theatre, I feared that they would lose the immediacy and dramatic relevance that had kept me reading obsessively. I needn’t have worried. A long day in the Gielgud – seven hours, spread over six plays, split into two halves – passed in a moment, leaving me panting for more and furious with Cicero for dying and leaving me with no more story and therefore no more play. The less addicted can see these plays across two evenings of three plays each. The story is told by Tiro, Cicero’s secretary throughout most of his life in an amusing performance by Joseph Kloska. Tiro invented stenography, the better to keep up with the torrents of words that made Cicero the greatest orator and lawyer of the Roman world, through his years as Consul, the political fights with Julius Caesar and the other politicians and businessmen who cared nothing for the principles of the republic but only for power and money, through an uncaring and generally supine Senate always ready to take the easy way, and through the many attacks on his honour, his honesty, and his hard-won positions on the side of the people of Rome. Cicero, wonderfully well played by Richard McCabe who is rarely off stage for seven hours, was a self-made man, a new man, a man who came from a nowhere village outside Rome, a man without money or connections or good looks, whose ability to use words, on behalf of himself and others, was his only calling card. That, coupled with his towering intellect and political savvy, was enough to project him to the highest ranks of Roman society. He was also conceited, self-promoting, sometimes ludicrously focused on his own public image (sound familiar?) and convinced his enemies were out to get him which, of course, they were. The plays tell the stories at breakneck speed. Shakespeare barely mentions Cicero in Julius Caesar but that assassination is only one of the many events during those turbulent 60 years of uprisings, coups, insurgencies, and personal murders that occurred during Cicero’s life at the top, or near the top, of Roman politics. Some of the characters are necessarily just sketched – there are a lot of them – and there’s no need to keep them straight. There are very few women and those there are, are sex objects or marital pawns. Senators are interchangeable and only interested in maintaining their own power. I’m trying to stay off the Trump parallels. You’ll see them for yourselves and they are truly blinding. There’s something a bit depressing in realising after seven hours of sitting in the same seat that nothing much has changed in 2000 years and that we’re still fighting the same battles our ancestors fought in 42 BC. Fun Home – Young Vic I’ve never read or even looked at a graphic novel and had to be told what it was so I came pristine to Fun Home, a wonderful American musical based on an autobiography in graphic novel form by Alison Bechdel. The songs (I’m on firmer ground with songs than graphic novels) are by Jeanine Tesori and Lisa Kron. You’d think it enough that Tesori had written the tuneful, soulful, and wonderful music for Caroline or Change and then up she pops almost immediately with this one, using a completely different musical language, but equally tuneful, soulful….etc. Kron’s book and lyrics are equally on the money making the adaptation from the novel organic and original. How much is novel, and how much autobiography, is unclear but all the main elements of Bechdel’s story are taken from her own life so we accept them as being authentic. Alison is a successful artist looking back at her childhood as the oldest child of a secretly gay father and a worn down exhausted mother who wanted more from her marriage and her life (Jenna Russell whose warmth and stunning singing radiates her character). This is a coming of age play as Alison comes to accept and develop her own sexuality and talent. She is played at three different stages of her life and the three young actors who portray her growing understanding of herself are simply marvellous, as are those who play her siblings. You may deny this but I believe every family is dysfunctional in one way or another. True, a homosexual father who is a funeral director obsessed with home decorating (Zubin Varla in an unusual singing role for him) is a lot to take for a young girl but the best scenes are those where Alison in college falls in love for the first time with all the insecurity and embarrassment that entails and takes her first steps towards understanding who she is. This is a relationship play as well as a coming of age musical and those relationships are so deep and warm that it’s possible, indeed essential, to believe in all of them. The Lieutenant of Inishmore – Noel Coward Theatre The plays of Martin McDonagh are a guilty pleasure. At various times I get a flash of shame but it’s easy to ignore it because I’m having such a good time, laughing so hard, that it’s only afterwards that I remember that what I was laughing so uproariously about was unimaginable gore, pain, and the casual cruelty of mindless murders. The Lieutenant of Inishmore is a case in point. Aiden Turner, Ross Poldark himself, doesn’t become less sexy when he’s wearing a bloodstained t-shirt instead of ruffles and a tricorn, in fact he’s more so when wielding a gun and a knife to attack whoever is annoying him at the moment, whether it’s a member of another IRA group or someone failing to look after his beloved cat. How appalling, you think, admiring this miserable excuse for a human being, a man so mad he’s even been thrown out of the IRA and had to form his own splinter group, a study in stupidity. We first meet him when he’s about to kill a man who turns out to be his brother, hanging upside down by his feet. He lets him off when he hears that his cat is ill and runs off to take care of him. In fact, his brother has run over the cat and killed him and the plot turns on whether another cat can be found who looks enough like him to fool Padraic. OK, I know this doesn’t sound funny when recited like this but the shenanigans with the cat are enough to have you, yes, you, shrieking with laughter before you realise that this is an intensely serious play about the trivialisation of violence and our apparent ability to justify any inhumanity if we can ascribe a semi-logical rationale to it. Michael Grandage has directed this play before and displays total confidence in disporting his company of hopeless but loveable losers to advantage whether it’s murdering a rival or feeding a cat. Much of the fun comes from their inability to get anything right. Only when you think about how many innocent people (and cats) have been slaughtered in the Irish conflict do you sober up, stop laughing, and hate yourself for your complicity. Then, it’s not so funny. But it is. And that’s what makes it the wonderful play it is. Finishing the Picture – Finborough Theatre Critics are always being asked for their favourite play or playwright and mostly we say that it’s Shakespeare because that’s the easy answer and because it’s true. But beyond Sweet William, who is the playwright that speaks with your voice? Who is the writer whose preoccupations are also yours? Who would you cross town or cross an ocean for, even if you know the production or the acting will be less than premium? For me, that playwright is Arthur Miller. So, although I knew that Finishing the Picture, Miller’s last play, completed only a few months before he died, wasn’t going to be a patch on All My Sons or The Crucible, I’m still grateful to the Finborough for putting it on. As everybody now knows, Marilyn Monroe was a very disturbed young woman who was paralysed with doubts and fears, who found it difficult if not impossible to get herself to the film set most days towards the end of her life, a life that ended in a drug overdose, possibly inadvertent, possibly deliberately self-inflicted, possibly administered by others. For the nine years he was with Marilyn, so dependent was she on Miller, that until he left her this most successful of all Broadway playwrights, wrote nothing except the screenplay for her last movie, The Misfits. Finishing the Picture isn’t really a play. It’s a parade of misidentified but easily recognisable characters – her faithful personal assistant, her cinematographer, her acting coaches, her director, her producer, Miller himself – trying to persuade her out of bed and onto the set of an unidentified picture. It’s a bitter exercise and a self-vindicating one when you know it was written by her former husband after she was dead, which doesn’t reflect well on my favourite playwright. The portrait of Lee and Paula Strasberg is particularly excoriating, clearly Miller loathed them and pulled no punches in saying so. In fact, in trying to finish the picture, all of those people were, deliberately or not, exploiting a delicate, vulnerable and ill woman.
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AuthorRuth Leon is a writer and critic specialising in music and theatre. Archives
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