Seven Reviews April 12, 2008
Posted by admin in : Brief Encounter, godofcarnage, lord of the rings, reviews , trackbackIn March 2008 an American theatre critic called Christopher Rawson visited London and attended plays, then published his reviews on the Post Gazette
The shows were:
- Speed-the-Plow
- Brief Encounter
- The Sea
- God of Carnage
- Lord of the Rings
- Dealer’s Choice
- Much Ado About Nothing
Speed-the-Plow
The Old Vic isn’t as impeccably British as its storied past would suggest, because it’s often been saved from the wrecking ball by colonials, most recently by America’s Spacey, who serves as artistic director and does one or two shows himself each year.
In Mamet’s satire of the unholy mix of art, ego and money that is Hollywood, directed by Matthew Warchus, Spacey plays the feral, desperate agent, Charlie Fox, opposite the vacillating, self-obsessed producer, Bobby Gould. In the role originally played on Broadway by Madonna (she wasn’t bad), is Laura Michelle Kelly, who was largely unknown in “Mary Poppins,” has since done the movie “Sweeney Todd” and here shows she can stick with the best.
The story is pitch, counter-pitch and kill. Fox brings Gould a blockbuster deal involving a big star, which he has one day to nail down. Gould, reveling in his new power (and office) as head of production, is set to take it to the studio head, but on a whim he gives a recent artsy novel to the pretty young temp to read; she gets into his mind (and bed) and persuades him to make that movie instead. So Fox has to fight for his life to save the world for greed, male bonding and commerce.
It’s a taut 90-minute dance of high comic obsession, slack only occasionally in the scene between Gould and the temp, but when Spacey and Goldblum are crashing egos, enthralling. Gould is right down Goldblum’s power alley: No one is better at comic indecision. And Spacey is flat out ferocious and funny.
Brief Encounter
This was my sleeper hit. Staged by a group from Cornwall called Kneehigh, it bears resemblance to work by our own Quantum Theatre in being designed for an unusual site, a plush movie theater. As you enter, the ushers serenade the audience with live music. Then the movie begins, the company’s own approximation of “Brief Encounter,” the 1946 movie based on a Coward play about a doctor and an unhappy wife who meet in a railway station cafe and have an affair that they must eventually end.
As the movie plays, a couple in the front row stand, arguing. Announcing her return to her husband, she climbs on stage right into the movie, while he stands bereft. The movie screen rises to reveal the railway station set, and the play begins.
But as Coward’s slim, tear-jerker story proceeds, it’s varied with movie clips, powerful rear projections, puppets and musical and comic vaudeville turns by the many-talented supporting cast of eight. All show wonderful range. This one is worth a London trip on its own.
The Sea
Fertile playwright Bond first came to notice in the 1960s for his Marxist, confrontational work that challenges national myths, such as a version of “King Lear” that attacks both Stalinism and bourgeois culture. The playwright of the intellectual Fringe, this is his first ever appearance on the West End — and at the Haymarket, normally home of starry revivals.
“The Sea” (1973) is a puzzler. Set before World War I, it starts as a comedy about an imperious dowager, Mrs. Rafi (Atkins), who bullies a seaside town, driving the poor local clothing merchant (David Haig) to despair. Meanwhile, a young man has drowned, though his fiancee doesn’t mourn much; the merchant is obsessed with space aliens; and in a perfect Bond scene the funeral turns into comic/horrid bickering, with the deceased’s ashes getting in everyone’s hair.
Whipsawed by comedy, tragedy and farce, the audience searches for its moorings. With its cast of 14, “The Sea” turns out to be a big, state-of-the-nation play, like a very sour, strange “Heartbreak House,” and indeed Bond comes across as an earthy mix of Shaw, Albee, the late, prophetic Ibsen and some cranky farceur.
Atkins is brilliant in her sour, dour mode, especially in a sympathetic tirade against social expectation. Haig’s bizarre character is best in comic desperation, maniacally shearing bolts of cloth. Jonathan Kent, late of the Almeida Theatre, directs. Bond is hard, but he’s full of pith.
God of Carnage
The most common denominator of the eight shows I saw was Warchus, who directed this one, too, as well as “Lord of the Rings.” He’s done much of Frenchwoman Reza’s work in England, from “Art” through “Life X 3″ and “The Unexpected Man.” Clearly he’s at home with her dark comedies of the professional middle class, baffled by the everyday and falling into emotional black holes.
Fiennes and Grieg are parents of a boy who has badly injured Stott and McTeer’s son. The very civilized couples meet to deal with this, as Fiennes, a high-powered lawyer, talks incessantly on his cell phone about a pharmaceutical case with ghastly parallels. Gradually it gets nasty, but with the four finding surprising alliances. In Reza, life really is a schoolyard writ large.
In early preview, I thought there was some irresolution in the latter stages, but this slick, gimlet-eyed comedy of insight ought to be a hit. I’m already casting it in my mind for New York and Pittsburgh.
Lord of the Rings
You could call it an epic with music, since the Finno-Indian-New Age score by A.R. Rahman, Varttina and Christopher Nightingale arises mainly from the action: Hobbits dance, Elves sing and men lament.
You know the story, whether told in three volumes, three movies or (here) three hours, which is indeed a 20-minute improvement on Toronto. I think they’ve mainly pruned the endless Orc battles, which needed it. My favorite parts remain the celebratory Hobbits chasing butterflies and clog-dancing with zest. The Elves are gorgeous, the men (Boromir, Strider/Aragorn) don’t overplay too much and Frodo doesn’t agonize forever, as in the movie. Malcolm Storry’s Gandalf, though, feels too laid-back.
Matching the score’s invention and grandeur are the elaborate setting, lights and costumes. And spilling into the audience, the show takes time for humor (not Tolkien’s strength), as when Orcs chase kids back to their seats after a brief scene change in Act 2.
In my online On Stage Journal, I said I thought that given better leads “Lord of the Rings” was ready for New York, but now it has announced it will close this summer, planning only an immediate international tour.
“Dealer’s Choice”
Marber’s play had a huge impact in 1995, when poker must have seemed a fresh if risky subject for the stage. Now, you can’t turn on the telly without running into poker tournaments. In Act 1, we meet the players — the owner and staff of a restaurant. Primed on their relationships, we sail into the poker game that fills Act 2. There’s no great revelation but plenty of chance for gut-bucket realistic acting.
It gets that only intermittently at the Trafalgar Studio on Whitehall. Most of the power comes from the canny performance of the one stranger by Roger Lloyd Pack. But the central relationship between the owner (Malcolm Sinclair) and his son (Samuel Barnett, who starred in “History Boys”) never feels very real, partly because Marber and Sinclair make it too obvious. Still, why haven’t we seen this in Pittsburgh?
Much Ado About Nothing
This inventive comic version of the battle of quick wit and shy love between Beatrice and Benedick comes last only because it’s now out of the National Theatre rep, with Beale moved on to “Major Barbara.”
Clearly in their 50s, Beale and Wanamaker gave the comedy of their late love a welcome edge — one we’ve seen before in such mature pairings as Brian Bedford and Martha Henry at the Stratford Festival. A greater novelty than age was Beatrice’s bottle, emphasizing her rejection of life and re-emergence.
Most famously, a small pond at Leonato’s Sicilian villa facilitated both stars’ getting doused, with a different joke in each case. It was another hit for the National’s head, director Nicholas Hytner, who filled it with telling detail, not to mention the funniest Dogberry-Verges pair I can remember.
Post-Gazette theater critic Christopher Rawson can be reached at crawson@post-gazette.com or 412-263-1666.
First published on March 30, 2008 at 12:00 am
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