Report from London (November – December, 2018)

European Stages https://europeanstages.org Report from London (November – December, 2018) London’s theatrical scene at the end of 2018 seemed centered on a response to the year’s many #MeToo revelations and newspaper headlines. I saw over a dozen plays in three weeks, while taking a group of students from Union College on a theatre-focused “mini-term” course. In productions at Shakespeare’s Globe’s Wanamaker Playhouse, the National Theatre, the Royal Court, and on the West End, women and the challenges they face from patriarchal oppression were, in many of the shows I saw—with a few notable exceptions—placed front and center. Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke, directed by Rebecca Frecknall. Photo: Marc Brenner. The first two shows I attended were American plays on West End stages. Tennessee Williams’s Summer and Smoke was staged at the relatively small Duke of York’s Theatre, having transferred from a critically lauded run at the Almeida Theatre. Rebecca Frecknall’s haunting production was presented on an almost bare stage; Tom Scutt’s set consisted primarily of a set of pianos surrounding a bare wooden playing space. The actors were barefoot throughout, and at many times playing the pianos, which were also rigged to light up “like fitful lightning in a cloud” at dramatic moments. Williams’s play depicts the tragic failed romance of Alma, a young woman searching for spiritual love, and John, a doctor grounded in physical and sensual pleasures. Frecknall’s production was unabashedly feminist, focusing on Alma. Patsy Ferran was luminous in the role, commanding the audience’s attention and empathy from the opening moment, when she stepped alone onstage and began to vocalize, as if having a seizure or religious experience 1 / 19 European Stages https://europeanstages.org (Ferran won the Olivier Award for her performance, and the production won the Olivier for Best Revival). Frecknall’s production depicted her disillusionment and descent from minister’s daughter to local prostitute—while John ends up relatively okay, married to Alma’s former music pupil—as the result of her societal marginalization due to her unapologetic acceptance of her female sexuality. As Alma’s dreams disintegrated, a mess accrued on Scutt’s set: cards, dirt, bits of dropped ice cream—all of which the actors had to walk over in their bare feet, further muddying the world of the play with their human stain. Sam Shepard’s True West, directed by Matthew Dunster. Photo: Marc Brenner. The second show I attended was one of the few not focused on women’s stories: a celebrity-led production of Sam Shepard’s True West at the Vaudeville Theatre. Kit Harrington, who had finished filming the yet-to-be-released final season of Game of Thrones, starred as Austin, and musician and actor Johnny Flynn (who also co-wrote the music for the show) played his brother Lee. The two were superbly matched in Matthew Dunster’s production. The show opened with Harrington onstage, trying to write. Wearing shorts, sporting a ’70s moustache, and using a perfect Californian accent, he looked and sounded nothing like the character of Jon Snow that brought him to immense fame. Flynn’s Lee entered like a menacing desperado. Yet each carefully revealed his potential to transform into the other: Harrington’s shorts showed off his muscular calves—he was clearly a man with the potential to perform violence. And Flynn’s Lee clearly longed for the stability represented by their mother’s bungalow. Jon Bausor’s design was meticulously detailed down to American power outlets—and numerous working toasters, as demonstrated in a key scene in which the smell of toast wafted throughout the Vaudeville 2 / 19 European Stages https://europeanstages.org theatre. Yet as Bausor’s angular forced perspective demonstrated, there was something off, not quite real, about this world, and in the final moments of the play, as the set disappeared to reveal the fantastic desert landscape present in Shepard’s closing stage direction, we saw that the two brothers were like mirror images of one another, locked in an eternal struggle. (It’s worth noting that running at almost exactly the same time as Dunster’s production, another production of True West, directed by James Macdonald and featuring Paul Dano as Austin and Ethan Hawke as Lee, appeared on Broadway to mediocre reviews—I missed that one.) Both Summer and Smoke and True West deal with reversals. Williams’s Alma turns from religious fanatic into a sex worker, and John from a sexually obsessed atheist into a man searching for the transcendent, yet unable to find it in the girl he’s lived near his whole life. Shepard’s Austin and Lee are like the two halves of the playwright: as Austin transforms from author into troubled outsider, his brother Lee performs the reverse transition. Both were effective and entertaining West End productions, but little more could be said about True West. Summer and Smoke, though, was much more: through Ferran’s performance and Frecknall’s feminist vision, the production tapped into a deep well of feminine anguish that made the play as tragic today as it was when Williams wrote it over half a century ago. In London, the reconstructed Shakespeare’s Globe is perhaps more of a tourist attraction, educational institution, or gimmick than it is a venue for innovative and exciting theatrical work. Nonetheless, I saw two shows there, in the venue’s Wanamaker Playhouse, an indoor recreation of the King’s Men’s Blackfriars space, which is utilized by Shakespeare’s Globe for performances during the winter months. The shows were Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus and Shakespeare’s Macbeth, paired around a theme of “the dark night of the soul”: there was also a symposium of scholarly talks on 8 December at the Globe’s Education Center entitled “Perdition Catch My Soul: Shakespeare, Hell and Damnation,” at which I presented a paper on Othello and Twelfth Night. Both Faustus and Macbeth were mediocre productions: museum theatre, or what Peter Brook would call “Deadly Theatre” for the most part, that almost put me to sleep. 3 / 19 European Stages https://europeanstages.org William Shakespeare's Macbeth, directed by Robert Hastie . Photo: Johan Persson. Each did have exciting moments or elements. In Robert Hastie’s production of Macbeth, which starred the Globe’s Artistic Director Michelle Terry as Lady Macbeth and her actual husband Paul Ready as Macbeth, those few moments came during periods of darkness, when the Wanamaker was transformed into an immersive space. Owing more to contemporary productions like Sleep No More than to historical traditions of performance, actors circled the halls outside the auditorium, banging on doors, spooky voices emanated from who-knows-where, and then the darkness would be pierced by candlelight. These few moments evoked bits of primal terror—and I wish I could have said the same for the performances of Ready, Terry, or any of the rest of the cast. Director Paulette Randall’s gender-swapped production of Doctor Faustus was a bit more engaging throughout. Still, the most exciting moment came from a bit of staging, as Faustus’s books and study were suddenly swallowed into the pit below the stage in the moments when she decided to summon the devil. Randall cast a black actress, Jocelyn Jee Esien, as Faustus and the deliciously Machiavellian Pauline McLynn as Mephistopheles. There was great potential for a strikingly relevant production here: a brilliant black female scholar certainly could have faced immense oppression in her career, and we could further empathize with her decision to abandon her scholarly life in order to “live deliciously” and burn down the whole system. Yet despite the casting, Randall’s production virtually ignored the bodies of its lead actors, rarely altering the text and continuing to use the male pronouns “he” and “his” for Faustus and Mephistopheles. The production seemed to be at war with its own obviously relevant concept. 4 / 19 European Stages https://europeanstages.org Christopher Marlowe's Doctor Faustus, directed by Paulette Randall. Photo: Marc Brenner. In giving this assessment of the Globe’s Faustus and Macbeth, I must make a few caveats: one is that I’m not a great fan of “original practices” Shakespearean performances—I think the very term is deceptive, promising something that is entirely impossible to deliver—and that in both cases my experience was hampered by the sheer discomfort and terrible sightlines from the Wanamaker’s gallery. While part of the theatre-going experience at the Wanamaker involves “hearing” plays in conditions very like those in which Early Modern English playgoers experienced theatre, the inability to see the stage or sit comfortably can be confounding to modern audiences. I would probably have rather seen something during Emma Rice’s brief tenure as Artistic Director of Shakespeare’s Globe, before she was sacked for being too innovative and ignoring the theatre’s stodgy mission. However, Terry should be lauded for one notable departure from “original practices”: she has announced a commitment to producing seasons with diverse, gender-balanced casts. Although some shows will still be all male (in line with Early Modern English tradition), others will be all female to balance this out, and the rest will have gender parity. My final caveat about my experience in the Wanamaker is that it is an undeniably exciting experience to watch (what one can of) a play entirely by candlelight. It also requires a totally expanded skillset from all actors involved, since they must perform their roles while carefully carrying the production’s lighting devices! 5 / 19 European Stages https://europeanstages.org David Hare's I'm Not Running, directed by Neil Armfield.

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