Tag: British Drama

Back to the Future: The Musical—27 June 2024

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment
Back to the Future: The Musical Show Poster

I’m not really a musicals person, especially in the West End/Broadway style of musical, so Bob Gale and Robert Zemeckis’ Back to the Future: The Musical (with music and lyrics by Allan Silvestri and Glen Ballard) is not normally the kind of show I would seek out. I bought tickets because the movie version is amazing, and I was hoping that John Rando’s production at London’s Adelphi Theatre would turn the camp up to 11. I was hoping tents and an archery range would need to be set up on stage because of how camp it was.

Unfortunately (for me), that’s not really what happened.

By and large, the show (which we only ended up staying for the first half of) was fine. It followed the plot of the original 1985 film relatively closely, while adding in a set of musical numbers. Essentially, the show takes itself relatively seriously as an example of musical theatre, which simply wasn’t what I was hoping for. Yes, musical theatre is always camp to a certain extent, just by nature of the genre. But they didn’t play into that—with the exception of Cory English, who played Doc Brown. English was the only person I genuinely enjoyed watching, and whom I felt was having tremendous fun with the role. His responses, his vaguely suggestive song lyrics and dance moves, and the physical excessiveness of his reactions made English far and away the most exciting performer of the show. For instance, when Marty (Ben Joyce) tells Doc that they need to generate 1.21 gigawatts, English flings himself all over the stage in consternation, muttering about how impossible it is, and even ending up throttling a scarecrow that Marty had used to “camouflage” the DeLorean, asking the scarecrow if it heard what Marty said. English, more than any other performer, had his camping gear for this show.

An advertising poster

As far as Joyce goes, I wasn’t incredibly impressed. On one level, the standards may have been set unfairly because Michael J. Fox played such an iconic Marty McFly in the film, and it is unlikely that anyone will ever live up to that. And some of my disappointment with Marty was not Joyce’s fault, so much as the material he was given to work with. Certainly, in the film, Marty is occasionally saddened when people tell him that he’s never going to succeed at anything. But giving that part of Marty’s character several major musical numbers early on really makes that central to the character—instead of the cool, rebellious, Ferris Bueller-type person of the movie, we get a relatively depressed, hopeless sad sack for much of the musical.

Lorraine’s creepy line to her future son, used on an advertising poster

The other big issue with the addition of the music was that the 1955 versions of Marty’s parents were ten times creepier. George (Oliver Nicholas) gets a solo number during the bit where George is watching a girl through her window. This is not an ideal moment to really give that character the spotlight, if we want the audience to have any sympathy for him. Apart from this incredibly uncomfortable choice, I thought Nicholas was a very funny performer, who really went for it with George’s nerdy lack of confidence. Another issue where the musical numbers made the show more uncomfortable was with Lorraine Baines’ (Sarah Goggin) scenes where she’s aggressively pursuing Marty romantically. It’s temporal-flux incest-iness, which is always awkward, but having several songs in which she sings about her desire to have sex with the guy we know to be her future son just ramped up the creep factor exponentially.

My video review of Back to the Future: The Musical

Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap—20 June 2024

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment
Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap

To get the standard info out of the way first, Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap is famous for having the world’s longest single production run, opening at the Ambassadors Theatre in 1952 and playing uninterrupted (despite a move next door to its current location at St. Martin’s Theatre in 1974—though they never missed a performance, so the initial run wasn’t actually interrupted) apart from a brief hiatus due to Covid. That incredible performance run alone makes Christie’s play one of the most significant pieces of theatre in the world. But apart from that, it’s a genuinely enjoyable play in itself. The current director is Philip Franks.

Christie’s The Mousetrap is a murder-mystery set in a smallish guest house slightly outside London in 1952. The Ralstons, Mollie and Giles, have just opened the guest house, and they’re joined by a range of guests, including the eccentric and flighty Christopher Wren, the domineering and severe Mrs. Boyle, the helpful Major Metcalf, the androgynous Miss Casewell, and—the unexpected guest—the suspicious foreigner Mr. Paravicini. When Mollie receives a phone call from the police telling them a Detective Sergeant Trotter is on the way, the Ralstons are confused about what they’ve done. However, Trotter—who arrives on skis because the house has been cut off by a blizzard—informs them that it’s “more a matter of police protection.” Someone in the house is going to be murdered. Trotter tries to gather clues, but the occupants of the house are generally reluctant to actually give him the information he needs. And then one of them dies. The second half is devoted to Trotter trying to solve the murder and prevent another one, and the plot thickens…

I was actually somewhat concerned going into this performance because I directed a production of The Mousetrap for Sock & Buskin, my community theatre, and my actors and crew did an amazing job. On the one hand, I was worried that my view of this world-famous professional production would be colored by my affinity for how we had put on Christie’s play, and that I would be overly critical of this performance merely because of how invested I was in ours. At the same time, I worried that I would have seen the play so many times in rehearsals and in our performance that I wouldn’t really be able to enjoy this one.

Thankfully, I was wrong on both counts.

Mostly.

I did genuinely enjoy this performance, and for the most part I thought the acting and production choices did really work for me. Though I know the script well enough that I could identify places where the cast/production dropped or added material, and there were a few tricky scenes that I compared unfavorably with our production.

One thing that struck me was that the cast or the production actually changed some of the words, and I’d be very interested to know whether those changes were ad libbed by the actors or whether the production has specifically chosen to add or remove them. Some it makes sense to change. For instance, when Mollie (Lucy Doyle) is speculating that the killer could have been a prisoner of war, in the script she says, “a prisoner of the Japs perhaps,” but this performance dropped that. Now, in 1952, it’s unlikely that many British people would have batted an eye at that, but today is would likely raise some eyebrows. It is not necessarily a slur, but it’s also not that far off one—and in our S&B performance we did discuss cutting that word, but ultimately our licensing agreement prevented us choosing to cut language. However, I could see why a production would, on an institutional level, choose to forego a word that hasn’t aged well. On the other hand, there were instances where alterations did not seem purposeful necessarily. Like Paravicini’s (Lorenzo Martelli) line “You English are a funny people.” I don’t know that it added anything meaningful that wasn’t already clear about Paravicini’s character—though it did get a laugh. From a theatre production perspective, I wonder whether these are standard changes or whether there is some degree of ad libbing allowed for the actors, since after all they are playing the same role night after night, and that can get quite boring I imagine.

My other concern had been about preferring our production choices to those of the St. Martin’s performance. There were a few instances where this was the case, but for the most part it was different without being better or worse. One place I really did think we surpassed the professionals was when Casewell (Elyssia Roe) has a brief breakdown while being questioned by Trotter (Sam Stafford). In our production we had a really hard time navigating what was going on in this scene and why, because it’s such an odd departure from the rest of Casewell’s behavior, and it seemingly comes out of nowhere. For my money, Haley Libran, who acted the role in our S&B production, pulled off that breakdown in a way that felt more natural and purposeful.

My video review of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap

Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution—12 June 2024

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment
Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution

Agatha Christie is, as many people know, one of the most popular and beloved British authors. Theatrically, her most famous piece is The Mousetrap (review forthcoming after I see it next week), but an ongoing production, begun in 2017, is her play Witness for the Prosecution, running at London County Hall, and directed by Lucy Bailey. The play revolves largely around a courtroom drama testing the innocence or guilt of Albert Vole—and the physical space of the County Hall ideally suits the performance.

Witness for the Prosecution follows the trial of the young and attractive Albert Vole, who is accused of murdering Emily French—a wealthy woman in her mid-late fifties whom he had befriended. Shortly after French changes her will to leave the bulk of her fortune to Vole, she is brutally murdered. The questions becomes whether Vole killed her for the money, whether he is the victim of unfortunate circumstances, or whether there’s some more sinister conspiracy swirling around. Vole manages to charm many of the people in the play, including Mr. Myers, who takes his defense case and passionately argues for his innocence. Myers does contend with the prosecutorial barrister, Sir Wilfred Robart, but perhaps more so with Vole’s wife, Romaine (who isn’t precisely his wife, because she was—supposedly, at least—already married when she “married” Vole to get out of Berlin and to England), who gives quite different testimony on the stand than she had told the police and Myers before. The jury—a dozen audience members—have to ultimately decide the question of Vole’s guilt or non-guilt.

View from the gallery to the stage space of Witness for the Prosecution

The space of the County Hall—no longer the seat of London county government—is one of the best potential spaces in which this play could be performed because the physical set up of the space resembles a court room. Where I sat in the gallery gave an excellent view of the entire performance space from above (see the picture), which repurposes the seats where the heads of the London county government (I don’t know their proper titles) had once sat as the seat for the judges, and repurposes the seats for the county officials as seats for the audience. With a purpose built stage in the middle of the space, there is a tight, formal fit of the stage within this space created originally for official business. On the stage itself, the wooden platform has some degree of malleability, as it becomes Myers’ office, the court room floor, and even the execution space for the opening scene playing out Vole being hanged. But the reason the space works well is precisely that it is a repurposed official space, a space that is imbued through its history and form with the appearance of authority, an appearance lent to the theatrical set up of the play.

The performances in the play were excellent, and the rollercoaster of contradictions and changes in how the various characters behaved was consistently effective at bringing the audience along for the ride. George Jones’ performance as Leonard Vole, for instance, perfectly brought us along with the idea of his innocence, his almost gullible naivety. Of course, Myers (played by Gyuri Sarossy) and his associate Mr. Mayhew (Ewen Cummings) both discuss how charmingly innocent Vole seems to be, but Jones’ performance struck perfect accents of the simplistic cockney who continually blunders into saying potentially incriminating things because he’s so naïve he lacks the criminal cunning to lie. Vole’s most direct counterpoint is his “wife” Romaine (played by Meghan Treadway), who perfectly embodied what her character says about wanting to be hated by the jury and by Myers in order to achieve her goals. Treadway’s confidence and mockingly cavalier attitude to issues of truth, innocence, and justice is especially pointed in its contrast with Sarossy’s earnest faith in the legal system.

The one thing about the performance that left me wanting more was actually Sarossy’s performance—not because he was bad, since he is definitely an excellent actor, but because one element of the performance did not seem entirely justified. When Myers either confronted Romaine in court or discussed her with Mayhew outside the courtroom, Sarossy performed with an intensity and rage that suggested a deep-seated personal animosity to either Romaine individually or to “her type of woman” specifically. But this is never really explained in the play. Based on the passing reference Myers makes to his wife, his own marriage seems relatively happy, so it’s not clear from whence the depths of Myers’ anger comes.

Video performance review of Agatha Christie’s Witness for the Prosecution

William Shakespeare’s Richard III—8 June 2024

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment
Me with the Richard III poster at the Globe

As part of a Literary London study abroad course on crime and justice in British literature, I assigned William Shakespeare’s Richard III. It was a marvelous bit of serendipity that Shakespeare’s Globe was putting on that very show while we visited London. Even before the Globe posted their summer 2024 season, I knew we would visit the recreated theatre where Shakespeare’s plays debuted—but getting to see a world class production of a play we are studying in the theatrical setting the Bard would have known was an amazing educational opportunity.

The Globe’s production, directed by Elle While, was absolutely amazing. Michelle Terry played a Richard who was exceptionally funny—I don’t think my students realized from reading the play how witty and clever Richard actually is—while also being casual, energetic, conspiratorial, and irrationally unhinged at the requisite moments. She dominated the stage space, even for being a relatively smallish person, and drew eyes to her wherever she was on stage at any given moment. One element of her performance that especially stood out was the crowd work. The same was true of Helen Schlesinger, who masterfully played a city-trader style Buckingham. Between Terry and Schlesinger, they effortlessly engaged with the groundlings standing near the stage—from the time they noticed a man who had nodded off while leaning on the stage to the time when Schlesinger came down into the crowd and took someone’s beer. For modern audiences, trained by contemporary theatre conventions to sit silently and observe, rather than participate, this kind of crowd work gives a taste of what the theatre must have been like in 1593(ish) when the play was first performed.

The Globe theatre stage for Richard III

Stylistically, the play had an interesting blend of modernization and traditional elements, which drew out aesthetic and thematic elements. On the thematic level, one of the most obvious modernizations was the incorporation of direct references to Donald Trump. This included added dialogue, like Richard quoting the infamous Access Hollywood tape as part of his self-aggrandizement, and Richard’s supporters wearing red hats during one portion of the play.

On the visual level, there were blended costumes, with some characters having more traditionally Elizabethan inflected costumes and some having entirely modern costumes. Rivers (Em Thane) and Grey (Tanika Yearwood), for instance, were clothed in ruffs, doublet, and knee breeches, but wore modern sneakers. However, when Thane transitioned from Rivers to the Commissioner, she put on a modern British police commissioner’s uniform. Richmond (Sam Crerar) was costumed in boots, ripped jeans, a multi-colored shirt, and a worn brown leather bomber jacket with red rose patches on it. Very much a modern look. And for Richard, there was a blending, including an initial costume of black doublet, black jeans, and black cowboy boots. But this was replaced variously with white pleated shirt, black jeans, and gold boots; with a green feathered doublet and sculpted chest piece (which may have been sculpted in such a way as to suggest Richard’s scoliosis); or with an almost entirely gold royal ensemble.

Speaking of Richard’s scoliosis, this has been one of the controversies surrounding this play—that Terry is not a disabled actor, but was cast in the role of Richard, which is one of the most famous disabled characters in all of theatre. I’m not going to delve too deep into this controversy, though here are some links to articles about it:

One point of potential controversy that did strike me, however, was the choice of who was cast as Richmond. Crerar is a great actor and there was nothing inherently problematic about his performance as Richmond—on the contrary, he was quite good, as he was in his other role as Catesby. However, he is the only cast member who presents as male (though Crerar uses both male and gender neutral pronouns). Everyone else in the cast presents as female, and so one might be forgiven for reading the casting choice as reflecting the toppling of the tyrannical female (playing at being male) by the male as being some kind of implicit endorsement of cis-het patriarchy. I doubt that was an intended element of the play, but the triumphant defeat of a female Richard by a male Richmond could be read as signaling support for traditional gender hierarchies. And the glorious defeat of the female coded body “pretending” to be male, even using prosthetics (i.e., Terry’s chest plate) to appear more male may, without too much stretching, be read as the destruction of a transman by a “real” man. Again, I don’t think the production team purposefully sought out these thematics, but I do find troubling the choice of casting the single male-presenting member of the cast as Richard.

Video review of Shakespeare’s Richard III by Andi Stout and I

Sonnetfest ’21: 4th Annual Shakespeare on the Bluff Festival—23 July 2021

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment

Sonnetfest ’21, directed by Kevin Wetmore, introduced Shakespeare’s sonnets as fourteen-line plays, and that promise was borne out. The performance consists of several sonnets read (not in numerical order) and acted out by Loyola Marymount University’s College of Communications and Fine Arts. I watched the final performance, which was streamed over YouTube– https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dsHyQUA0hK0 (this link may or may not work as the video is unlisted at time of writing).

Sonnets are short love poems—though they sometimes deal with love only tangentially, perhaps focusing more on themes like death, nature, art, etc.—with fourteen lines in iambic pentameter with a set rhyme scheme of ABAB CDCD EFEF GG for English/Shakespearean sonnets. Iambic pentameter means each line has a regular rhythm of five metric feet (two syllables) with unstressed-stressed pattern to each foot. In other words, the sonnet is an extremely regular form, which means the rhythm and the sound of the poem is consistent and should, therefore, be relatively easy to read aloud, since poetry was traditionally an oral form, only transitioning to widespread silent reading relatively recently. Shakespeare wrote a sonnet sequence, which was quite common during the English (and European more generally) Renaissance era. The 154 sonnets of the sequence were largely dedicated to two enigmatic figures, the Dark Lady and the Fair Youth, both of whom the poet persona—which does not necessarily mean Shakespeare himself, though some try to infer biographic information from the sonnets—desires, admires, loves, and suffers for. In addition, many of Shakespeare’s plays include sonnets. Taken as a whole, the sonnets provide much dramatic material.

Indeed, each sonnet in Sonnetfest ’21 was given by a single actor/reader, and through their location, props, and performance, each sonnet really did become a short play. Considering the relatively limited amount of material provided by each sonnet—only fourteen lines—and the strong associations of some sonnets—like 18 or 116—with specific themes or contexts, the actors showed amazing creativity in finding ways to bring new life into the poems.

For instance, Sonnet 18, which begins “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day,” is generally regarded as one of the most beautiful love poems of all time, with its promise to immortalize the beloved through literature. This production, however, tied the sonnet to the California wildfires and climate change by opening with an image of a news article about climate change. Instead of the beloved being immortalized, the immortal subject becomes the devastation of climate catastrophe. Similarly, Sonnet 116—”Let me not to the marriage of true minds”—is one of the most commonly used marriage poems, often being read at weddings as a signifier of the couple’s devotion to one another. Challenging this standard use, the speaker in this performance seemingly addressed her daughter, therefore changing the focus of the love promised by the poem. Other performers used their poems to show they are thinking of relative across the globe, or stalking an ex’s Facebook page, or aligning the words with drawing from an artist’s model, or a texted conversation keeping the speaker from falling asleep, or addressing the band KISS. The range of approaches the actors brought was incredibly impressive, and the limited materials they had to work with makes the way these stories were told all the more impressive.

My video review of Sonnetfest ’21

Julius Caesar, by William Shakespeare–2 Nov. 2019

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment

Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar is, perhaps surprisingly for people who don’t know the play, not really about Caesar, it’s about Brutus and his struggle with the decision to be drawn into the conspiracy to murder the increasingly imperial Caesar in the hopes of restoring a free Roman Republic. And then once the murder is committed, he must stand by his decision and defend it, not only ethically, but on the field of battle. The Juniata College production, directed by Cosimo Sciortino, was a somewhat classical, but not necessarily inspiring, rendition of the play.

Julius Caesar begins with a parade in honor of Caesar who has become the most popular man in Rome, and who many Senators fear will try to become a king. Cassius, one of Rome’s leading men, draws Brutus aside and tells him of a plot to free Rome from Caesar’s dominance. Brutus is torn between his great friendship for Caesar and his dedication to the ideal of Roman freedom, but finally he agrees to join the conspiracy. As the plot comes together, Brutus repeatedly insists that only Caesar can be killed (not his friend Mark Antony) and that the killers must immediately proclaim their motives publicly. The appointed day arrives and a group of Senators kill Caesar. Mark Antony arrives and gets permission to speak at his friend’s funeral, on the condition that he doesn’t condemn the murderers. Brutus gives a funeral speech about liberty, then Antony gives a speech pointing to the many virtues of the slain man and implying—though carefully never stating outright—that the conspirators were fiendishly wrong. A civil war breaks out pitting Antony and Octavius against Brutus and Cassius, with Antony and Octavius in the ascent. Finally, there is a climactic battle, where the tide turns back and forth until Cassius, having heard (incorrectly) of his friend’s death, commits suicide. As the battle turns against his forces, Brutus finally kills himself as well, and when Antony and Octavius find his body they acknowledge his nobility and honor.

One of the big problems with Caesar from a performance perspective is that it’s so rhetorical. There are so many speeches that, while they’re well crafted according to the Classical principles of rhetoric, they lend themselves to simple recitation/declamation rather than the more naturalistic acting that contemporary audiences tend to expect. And I think much of the Juniata performance fell into this trap. While the actors knew the words, their intonation, inflection, and emoting often didn’t show that they understood the emotional timbre of the words they spoke. Will Shearer (Cassius) and Ashley Purvis (Casca) especially had this problem. Shearer did a fine job emoting when Cassius blames Brutus (Ben Josefson) for not trusting him, but throughout the opening portion it wasn’t clear what style Cassius was supposed to have. Was he a cunning manipulator, a concerned citizen driven to desperate measures, a sinister assassin? As Shearer was recruiting Josefson into the conspiracy, he was largely just flat. In some sense, this was a classical performance, as the lack of clear emotional display put the words front and center—which was very Elizabethan, as Shakespeare’s original audiences would have expected to follow the storyline verbally much more than through naturalistic action. Again, however, modern audiences don’t typically find this approach to performance engaging, and the play did seem to drag.

There were some bright spots, however. Mark Antony’s (Veta Piscitella) funerary speech praising—or, rather, burying him—Caesar was high energy and impassioned. But the standout for me was Josefson’s Brutus. He was not high energy, but the subtlety of the performance did an excellent job conveying the moral dilemma at the heart of Brutus’ internal conflict. Josefson was especially strong when performing alone, like in the soliloquies alone in his house the night before the assassination, or shortly before the final battle. These musings gave a great psychological depth to the character through the performance.

Julius Caesar Set
Set of Julius Caesar at Juniata College.

The other noteworthy thing is that the Juniata performance was in the round, which is always a challenging performance style because the actors need to try and divide their attention between the multiple sides of the space. Much of the action was actually performed around the outside of the stage proper (see the image above), which meant that it was occurring farther away from at least one group of audience members—a logistical problem. Thematically it made sense to have much of the conspiratorial discussion occur around the outside of the main area, but it sometimes made seeing the performers a challenge.

A Man for All Seasons, by Robert Bolt–8 Aug. 2019

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment

*For full disclosure, I worked as dramaturg for this production*

Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons is a complex, philosophical play grounded in history, theology, philosophy, ethics, and existentialism. But it’s one of the best plays of the 20th century. Bolt’s play is dynamic and challenging, raising issues that are not only relevant for 1960 (when the show premiered) but remain important today. The Nittany Theatre at the Barn production, directed by Mike Knarr, did an excellent job navigating the challenging philosophical waters and bringing this historically grounded play to life for 2019.

The plot of A Man for All Seasons follows Sir Thomas More, who rose to prominence as one of early modern England’s most brilliant thinkers and statesmen, known for his scrupulous honesty. However, when Henry VIII seeks a divorce from Catherine of Aragon in order to marry Anne Boleyn, More refuses to swear to the Act of Supremacy making Henry head of the Church in England. Although More makes no public statement, people on each side of the debate—Henry and Thomas Cromwell, his sadistic Secretary of the Council, in support of the new Church, and Chapyus, the Spanish ambassador, supporting Rome—believe they know More’s opinion of the matter. And so, it becomes impossible for Henry’s Church to be legitimate without More openly declaring allegiance or being found guilty of treason. Cromwell conducts a campaign against More, who uses his strict silence as an absolute defense against the charge of treason, until a young official desperate to make his fortune perjures himself by testifying that More denied the supremacy. Alongside this political plotline there is a personal element, because many scenes present More with his family, emphasizing first his devotion to his wife and daughter and then later their suffering in his absence.

The Nittany Theatre production had a number of excellent performances. Obviously, the most central role is Thomas More himself, and Ben Whitesell did a great job showing both the serene confidence and the deep emotional anguish of More when called upon. For instance, Whitesell brought this emotion to Act 2 Scene 7, when the imprisoned More is briefly allowed to see his family. Thomas argues with his wife, Alice (Laura Ann “Dellie” Saxe) because she doesn’t understand why he cannot give in. Both Whitesell and Saxe played the scene fantastically—he desperate for her understanding as confirmation that he’s doing the right thing, and she the pragmatist who wants her husband back alive, rather than valuing a moral stand.

Some of the other standout performances were by Stephanie Whitesell as The Common Man, Mercer Bristow as the aged and wheezing Cardinal Wolsey, Michael Russell as the sadistic Thomas Cromwell, and Dave Saxe as Henry VIII.

A Man for All Seasons Set
The set for A Man for All Seasons

Probably the most problematic element for me was the lighting. The production used a very deep stage with two different portions—a raised upstage area and a ground level downstage orchestra type space. As the characters moved dynamically back and forth between these areas, the lighting often went up or down on a particular portion based on whether there were actors there, but in some scenes (especially night scenes) the lighting didn’t quite hit all portions of the stage. So, for instance, in the first scene, at Sir Thomas More’s house, Stephanie Whitesell—at this point in The Common Man’s guise as More’s servant Matthew—delivered some of her lines from an ill-lit upstage, while the main action of the scene was going on in the better lit downstage orchestra.

The Duchess (of Malfi), by Zinnie Harris–28 May 2019

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment

The Duchess of Malfi was originally a Jacobean play by John Webster—one of the best early modern plays, in my opinion. But what Zinnie Harris has done with her new version is amazing. She has kept the dark, violent, misogynistic themes of the original, but updated it to feel fresh, contemporary, and even (perhaps surprisingly) empowering. The performance at Edinburgh’s Royal Lyceum Theatre, directed by Harris, was a fantastic example of making an old text relevant to the contemporary world, without sacrificing either Webster or Harris as distinct voices and perspectives.

IMG_20190528_191122.jpg
The set from the Royal Lyceum production of The Duchess.

Harris largely maintained the basic storyline from Webster’s version. The play begins with the widowed Duchess of Malfi ignoring her brothers’ advice and deciding to marry her steward Antonio in secret. The brothers—Ferdinand and the Cardinal—put their cynical henchman Bosola into the Duchess’ house as a spy to find out if she is entertaining any potential suitors, and when Bosola determines that she’s pregnant, Ferdinand loses his mind. He imprisons his sister and psychologically tortures her, including making her believe that Antonio and her son have been killed. Finally, on Ferdinand’s orders, Bosola murders the Duchess, but he is so touched by her purity and selflessness even at the point of death that he foregoes his cynical allegiance to the brothers and vows revenge. Antonio and Bosola agree to kill the Cardinal and Ferdinand, but during the assassination attempt, Antonio is accidentally killed and Bosola is grievously wounded.

Many of the changes Harris has made are cosmetic, though they effectively modernize the play. For instance, in Webster’s version Ferdinand shows the Duchess waxworks figures which he tells her are the corpses of Antonio and their son. But (as Harris said during the postshow talkback), that wouldn’t really work for modern audiences, so the substituted video projections of her family being shot. By projecting this image across the entire back wall, the show put the audience in the uncomfortable position of being shown the images used to torture the Duchess—we, in a sense, became the tortured. Similarly, Harris expands more on some of the minor characters, principally Julia and Delio, who are relatively minor characters in Webster’s version. Harris gives them each complex emotions and develops them as individuals, including Julia’s ambivalent relationship with the Cardinal, who is both her lover and her rapist.

One of the most significant and moving changes is that after their murders, the Duchess, her daughter, and her servant Cariola don’t leave the stage, but remain as ghostly presences haunting the living. This is a great embodiment of what is, in Webster, merely thematic. The Duchess, in particular continues to interact with people, largely on the level of whispering to them—like when she repeatedly disturbs the Cardinal by whispering “Murder.” Having these murdered characters on stage also provides a great way of staging the scene where Antonio has a significant conversation with an echo, with the specific words it repeats convincing him that the Duchess has been murdered. The echoes are performed by the Duchess, Cariola. The choice to keep these women on stage also helped produce the strange hopefulness of the end of the play—despite male violence and the attempts to limit the Duchess’ choice and sexual freedom, she continued to assert her power, even after death.

The premier run at the Royal Lyceum was fantastically performed, with excellent acting from everyone. Kirsty Stuart was a fantastic Duchess, vivacious and self-confident in the first portion, then stridently defiant as she tried to maintain her composure and dignity in prison. Ferdinand was played by Angus Miller, who did an excellent job portraying the incestuous obsession of Ferdinand for his sister, and the dark menacing insanity that eventually leads him to lose control entirely.

Adam Best’s Bosola was an interesting, dynamic portrayal, highlighting the complexity of the character. Bosola is a kind of chameleon, able to change his skin to blend with his surroundings. In his first appearance, Best’s Bosola was a shuffling, downtrodden mess, but as he became established in the Duchess’ household his entire demeanor changed, becoming more refined and standing straighter. However, Harris’ Bosola is somewhat less complex than Webster’s, which is one of the few issues I have with Harris’ version—though that probably reflects more that I find Webster’s Bosola one of the most interesting characters in all of drama. Harris has kept the misogynist diatribe against women wearing make up, and Bosola’s philosophy about loyalty. But one of his most important attributes in the Webster is that he follows the Cardinal and Ferdinand out of a cynical belief that all the world is corrupt, and therefore he must equally be corrupt to succeed. This is the belief that is shaken by the Duchess’ willingness to sacrifice her life with dignity, and for me it is a fundamental element of what makes Bosola so fascinating. But Harris has cut his early speech establishing the cynical philosophy that will motivate him throughout the first roughly 2/3 of the play. However, Best’s performance ensured that Bosola was still an amazingly complex character, particularly through his interactions with Cariola (Fletcher Mathers), who challenged his misogyny, his philosophy, and his whole outlook.

Top Girls, by Caryl Churchill–5 Apr. 2019

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment

Mad Cow Theatre’s production of Top Girls was the first Caryl Churchill play I’ve seen other than Cloud Nine, which I’ve seen twice. While Churchill is an amazingly influential playwright, in the US, Cloud Nine is almost certainly her most performed play (not without good reason) so it was great to see another of her works on stage.

Top Girls is an interesting pastiche play, with an ahistorical opening, then a major plotline carried out through fragmented scenes which come together to give a complex assessment of the kind of Thatcherite second wave feminism that identified women’s liberation with a woman at the head of a corporate board of directors (even if that meant that neoliberal capitalism went merrily along crushing millions of other women). The first scene brings together a set of historical/mythological women, including the Victorian era travel writer Isabella Bird, the 13th century Japanese imperial concubine Lady Nijo, a militant (and taciturn) woman taken from a Pieter Breughel painting named Dull Gret, the legendary 9th century Pope Joan, and the mythical Patient Griselda. These women congregate at a party for Marlene (a 1980s Thatcherite), who has just been promoted at the Top Girls employment agency. They talk about their various experiences with men, trying to determine their own lives, sexuality, violence, etc. throughout the meal.

Following this scene, all of the action takes place in the present (meaning the early 1980s). Marlene is shown in her office at the Top Girls employment agency, where she and her colleagues discuss the problems and possibilities of placing various women in different types of jobs. The related plot strand is her niece Angie, who detests her mother Joyce and yearns to run away to live with the wealthy, successful aunt she admires more than anyone else in the world. When Angie eventually does end up in Top Girls, having come unannounced to live with her aunt, Marlene is less than thrilled. The final scene flashes back a year to when Angie developed her fascination with Marlene. On a visit that Angie arranged without telling her mother, Marlene gives Angie a dress and recounts some of her travels in America and elsewhere. But Marlene and Joyce fight, rehashing the contemporary battles between labor and the emerging 1890s financial class. Marlene defends the monetarist position that anyone can succeed if they just work hard enough and have sufficient internal fortitude, while Joyce follows their father’s militant labor rhetoric about the importance of unions and working-class solidarity. During this argument, Marlene’s horrible secret is revealed, that not only has she given up real relationships with her sister and mother in the name of her career, Marlene also gave up her daughter Angie to be raised by Joyce so that she could pursue her professional ambitions.

The Mad Cow Theatre production, directed by Tony Simotes, did an excellent job staging a play that presents quite a few challenges. One of the most substantial problems is with the first scene, where the characters continually talk over one another—beginning lines before other characters have finished, having fully audible side conversations, and arguing, questioning, or challenging simultaneously. The scene definitely moves more like a real dinner party than with the somewhat artificial stage convention of dialogue where each character waits to speak until the others have stopped. What makes this scene difficult is that it seems almost as through it weren’t designed for an audience—we do lose so many individual lines in the clamor—and yet it works really well on stage. The Mad Cow performers made the scene’s naturalness (or at least the naturalness of the party dialogue) work to their advantage in giving us a complex scene where the work of deciphering individual points was somewhat less significant than the complexity of the whole.

Following the first scene, the play becomes more realistic, though the plot also becomes more fragmented as it switches back and forth between the Top Girls agency and Joyce and Angie’s home. At the interval, I wasn’t a big fan of the fragmentation, but as the two storylines came together in the second Act, the play really started to click. The interconnections between the sets of scenes/spaces made increasing sense, especially with the culmination in the final scene. Fundamentally, this is a play about Marlene and the human relationships one has to give up to climb to the top of the neoliberal heap. Cynthia Beckert gave a great performance as Marlene, combining a tricky combination of aloof professionalism with a very human vulnerability, especially in the final scene when Marlene and Joyce gets drunk and Marlene begins to recognize just how much she’s had to give up to become the person she has.



The Winter’s Tale, by William Shakespeare–27 Mar. 2019

On By phillipzapkinLeave a comment

Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale is one of his oddest plays. It’s essentially divided between two halves, the one set in the court of Sicily and the other in the pastoral idyll of Bohemia. The first half is a psychological portrait of paranoia, violence, and oppressive patriarchy, and the second half blends rustic charm with redemptive reunifications.

The play begins in the court of Leontes, king of Sicily, who is hosting his childhood friend Polixenes, king of Bohemia. Polixenes insists he must go home, but the pregnant queen Hermione (Leontes’ wife) entreats him to stay and Polixenes agrees. This raises Leontes’ suspicion who rapidly convinces himself, despite the testimony of the entire court and Apollo’s oracle, that Hermione cheated on him with Polixenes, and that she’s pregnant with the Bohemian’s baby. Polixenes is warned of Leontes’ plot to murder him and heads home, but Hermione is arrested and tried for treason. She has her baby in jail, and Leontes orders a courtier to take it out and expose it in a deserted area. During Hermione’s trial, it’s reported that their son has died, whereupon Hermione dies of grief, and Leontes promptly repents his tyranny seeing the deaths of all his family members as Apollo’s punishment for doubting the oracle. In the following scene, we see the courtier leave the royal baby, named Perdita, in Bohemia (then immediately get eaten by a bear, in a bizarre twist), where she is found by two shepherds who decide to raise her as their own. Sixteen years go by, and Florizel, prince of Bohemia, has fallen in love with a shepherd girl, much to the chagrin of his father. After Polixenes threatens to disinherit Florizel if he goes through with the marriage, the two lovers flee to Sicily to try and find sanctuary in Leontes’ court, but Polixenes follows them, bringing along the two shepherd who had raised Perdita. When they all arrive, it is promptly revealed that Perdita was the royal baby left to die, therefore, the living daughter of Leontes, making her both his only surviving family and a fit match for Florizel (because she’s royal and the marriage will restore amity between the two estranged kings). Paulina, one of Hermione’s fiercest champions, reveals that she’s had an incredibly live like statue of Hermione made, and Leontes and Perdita decide to go see it. After some musing about how awesome Hermione was, Paulina “casts a spell” and the statue begins to move, revealing that it wasn’t a statue at all, but Hermione herself, who didn’t really die but has just been hiding with Paulina for sixteen years hoping her daughter would turn back up.

The ASC production, directed by Kevin Rich as part of their Hand of Time tour, did an excellent job blending these two different styles/aesthetics into one generally coherent play, in part by not trying too hard to smooth over the contrasts. The aesthetics of the Sicilian court were definitely different than the visual aspects of rural Bohemia. In Sicily, the costumes were very Renaissance-inspired, with rich tapestry type patterns in heavy fabrics. In the Bohemia scenes, the costumes were more Germanic, with simpler solid colored fabrics, sashes for the men, and kroje-style dresses (a Czech style, similar to the German dirndl) for the women.

While the costuming distinguished the two portions of the play, the performances often echoed one another between the two portions. In particular, Kenn Hopkins Jr. (Polixenes) took his cue from Ronald Román-Meléndez (Leontes) when he raged at Florizel (Josh Clark) over the prince’s plan to marry Perdita (Constance Swain). The two performances of tyrannical jealousy/domineering were very similar. The tendency to tower over others and shout down any attempt to offer explanations, justifications, or alternative perspectives really showed a thematic links between the two otherwise very different kingdoms.

However, the most distinct and moving performance of the night was Ally Farzetta’s Hermione. During her trial scene, Hermione’s speech is a rhetorical tour de force, and Farzetta’s delivery was perfect. Hermione masterfully generates arguments based on the violent but unfounded distrust Leontes bears for her, and Farzetta played that speech superbly, blending a kind of retiring introspection with a passionate desire to get back her husband’s love and her position within the family, and with a deep despair at having lost her husband’s love. The emotions of the speech are a good part of its power, and Farzetta matched the emotions precisely to the rhetoric.