Horror begins in the possible mind.
REH _____ June 28, 2012 Britain, Amid Austerity, Turns Rather Cutthroat By <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ben_brantley/i ndex.html> BEN BRANTLEY LONDON WHEN the cannibal pie maker Mrs. Lovett sings, Times is hard in the popular revival of <http://sweeneytoddwestend.com/> Sweeney Todd at the Adelphi Theater, the words reverberate. Played by Imelda Staunton as the ultimate avatar of British can-do gumption, Mrs. Lovett inhabits a visual landscape guaranteed to set off alarm bells in audiences here. Thats in addition to the usual tensions that come from knowing that many throats will be cut before the evening ends. Directed by Jonathan Kent and designed by Anthony Ward, Stephen Sondheim and Hugh Wheelers Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street has been transported from its original Victorian setting to the bleak, battered London of the 1930s. The abject huddled masses onstage summon images that are still a living and disturbing part of this countrys collective memory. (A recent front page of The Guardian led with the headline Breadline Britain: 7m adults just one bill away from disaster.) Yes, Sweeney Todd, murderous and mad as hell, has risen from his grave to haunt <http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depres sion_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier> the Great Depression. Played by Michael Ball, a dimply sweetheart of the West End transformed beyond recognition, this Sweeney isnt just a bogeyman; hes a folk hero wreaking vengeance on the fat cats and self-serving politicians who have consigned his lot to perdition. I have mixed feelings about this revival. But like most <http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/21/sweeney-todd-review> London critics, my fellow theatergoers gobbled it up with gusto. When the blood started spurting and spurt it does, in big globular arcs the audience roared like the Romans watching the slave-devouring lions in Quo Vadis. Consider it an alternative for those who cant score tickets to the 2012 Olympics. Bloody-minded times call for bloody circuses, I suppose. I have never known a London season in which the onstage body count has been quite so high. Josie Rourkes lively production of Friedrich Durrenmatts seldom-seen <http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/london-theater-journal-seeing- patterns-in-a-nuclear-cloud/?hpw> Physicists, at the Donmar Warehouse, begins with the sight of a lovely young corpse center stage and proceeds to contemplate the nuclear annihilation of the world. The National Theaters contemporary staging of Antigone, directed by Polly Findlay, ends with the reverberant image of a bloody handprint smeared across a wall, an emblem of slaughters past and those to come in Sophocles war-shredded world. And I attended a reformulated, present-day 90-minute Hamlet in which every single character died. But the most compelling of the carnage-heavy productions I saw was set firmly in its own period, five centuries ago. Not that <http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/sep/12/jamie-lloyd-director> Jamie Lloyds production of John Websters Duchess of Malfi, which recently ended its run at the Old Vic Theater, is without latter-day relevance. As embodied with genuine tragic grandeur by Eve Best, the title character of this production evokes thoughts of another noblewoman, much feted of late, who would also seem to be a prisoner of royal protocol and public perception. I mean Queen Elizabeth II, whose 60 years on the throne were lavishly and extensively celebrated here last month. Had she chosen to visit the Old Vic during that week, Her Majesty might have found a soul sister of sorts in the doomed Duchess of Malfi. Or perhaps her thoughts would have turned to women in her family who were unlucky in love and paid a price, like her sister, Margaret, or her daughter-in-law Diana. Mr. Lloyds thrilling production of Websters 1613 revenge tragedy written when memories of the first Queen Elizabeth and her sacrifices to the state were still fresh makes it all too clear that if youre stuck on a world stage in a royal role, you had better keep your passions to yourself. The deep stage at the Old Vic is transformed (by the designer Soutra Gilmour) into a tiered Gothic-cathedral-like space that echoes with intimations of both eternity and decay. The inhabitants of this sepulchral, candle-lighted world step out of shadows amid clouds of incense in Venetian-style masks. In ceremonial procession, they scarcely seem mortal. But observe that one woman who stands taller than the others. The strong light behind her reveals the silhouette of a naked body. The lady is definitely of flesh and blood. Mores the pity, for that will be the undoing of the Duchess of Malfi, who presumes to fall in love with her own steward (Tom Bateman, a worthy lust object). With these opening images Mr. Lloyd establishes a visual vocabulary that matches Websters stark poetry of paradoxes. T. S. Eliot memorably wrote that Webster was always conscious of the skull beneath the skin. And I have never seen a production of any Jacobean tragedy that is so fully imbued, on so many levels, with a sense of doubleness. I mean not only the hypocrisy of state and church, embodied by the Duchesss conniving brothers, Ferdinand and the Cardinal (Harry Lloyd and Finbar Lynch, in juicy and credible performances). More far-reaching dichotomies of appearance and reality, of shadow and substance, of the spiritual and the physical, are also always in play. As with all well-told stories this one doesnt let you linger on its conceptual aspect while youre watching. Its only afterward you realize how seamlessly presentation has matched theme. The production moves with such involving momentum that even its notoriously grisly coups de théâtre and far-fetched instances of mistaken identity seem not only feasible but also natural. Portrayed by <http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/theater/24best.html?ref=evebest> Ms. Best, a great London stage star seen on Broadway in revivals of <http://theater.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/theater/reviews/10moon.html> A Moon for the Misbegotten and <http://theater.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/theater/reviews/17home.html> The Homecoming, the Duchess is the most compelling contradiction of all. She is clearly accustomed to command. And living with the privileges of her title had made her cocky and careless; she believes that her stature is an all-concealing veil. But what ultimately makes this Duchess more than human is, strangely enough, her great humanity. Subjected to some of the nastiest forms of psychological torture in literature, Ms. Bests Duchess sheds her courtliness to become a figure of centered, radiant naturalness. She brings to the acceptance of her death the inspiring resignation we associate with Shakespeares tragic heroes. Nonetheless she doesnt die easily, as is evidenced by the graphic, protracted scene of her murder. On the edge of extinction she blazes. (Lets hope shes resurrected in New York.) As designed by the busy and very talented Ms. Gilmour, the National Theaters Antigone is a classic yesterday-is-today production, set in what looks like a contemporary war room, with the chorus transformed into military and political personnel. Curiously, this ripped-from-the-headlines presentation had, for me at least, the effect of further distancing the events onstage than a more traditional or abstract version. Even speaking Don Taylors uncluttered, vernacular translation, the performers (who include Jodie Whittaker as a scrappy, of-the-people Antigone and Christopher Eccleston as a power-hypnotized Creon) seem frozen in formal debate. Yes, they all look like folks weve seen on television, if not next door. But dressing them up in contemporary power suits and battle gear feels like too easy a bid for relevance. The one time I felt truly moved was when a horror-struck messenger (Kobna Holdbrook-Smith) described, with pained hesitation and disbelief, two suicides he had witnessed. The blood-drenched corpses that were subsequently dragged onto the stage registered, by comparison, as mere clinical evidence. The Rest Is Silence, a production of the <http://www.dreamthinkspeak.com/> dreamspeakthink company (and part of the far-reaching <http://www.worldshakespearefestival.org.uk/> World Shakespeare Festival in London), asks us to press our noses against the glass to observe the power players of Hamlet and perhaps to see our own images there. Staged by Tristan Sharps at the Riverside Studios, Silence places its audience members in a seemingly empty room, where they will stand for the next 90 minutes or so and watch the walls around them. Those walls turn out to be windows, and illuminated they reveal the royal boudoirs and state rooms of Elsinore, which are the last word, my dear, in Danish modern. Pared to a mere nine characters and to less than a third of the normal length of Hamlet, this interpretation deliberately repeats itself, with characters reciting their lines in anticipation of statements they will later deliver to others. As for Hamlets most-quoted soliloquy, the one that begins To be or not be, everybody recites it together, after discovering copies he has scribbled in various notebooks. And Rosencrantz and Guildenstern spend much of their time taking apart and reconstructing Hamlets speeches, like giddy, fatuous semantics students. Silence astutely addresses the verbal self-consciousness that is so much a part of Hamlet, an awareness of both the inadequacy and potency of words, words, words. Youre caught up in the parlor game aspect of it and then suddenly reminded that this play is about mortal flesh as well as immortal language. When the bodies pile up in the final scene, theyre within touching distance. You are suddenly grateful for those panes of glass; you may also think, perhaps self-reproachfully, of the distance and closeness of what we watch on television and computer screens. Even without glass walls I felt safely removed from the carnival of gore that is Sweeney Todd. Mr. Kent conjures up a squalid, shabby Depression-era London that brings to mind <http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2046> Patrick Hamiltons dark and bitter novelsof that period. Yet because Mr. Sondheims score plays so artfully with conventions of Victorian music, theres a disconnect between the look and the sound. This is underscored by the imprecision of much of the singing, in which notes and words are often lost. Mr. Ball has two gears as Sweeney: old-school cinematic psychopath and light lyrical crooner. And the epic scale of the show, with its moving Les Misérables-style scenery, often undercuts what should be bravura climaxes. But Ms. Staunton, who received an Oscar nomination for playing the back-room abortionist in <http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/movies/08DRAK.html> Vera Drake, is a scarily credible Mrs. Lovett earthy, pragmatic and hungry. Like Vera Drake her Mrs. Lovett is a woman who knows from privation and will do whatevers required to keep poverty at bay. She is, in her way, the very model of chin-up, eyes-ahead British resourcefulness. She brings to mind another cozy British archetype too, that of the devoted tabloid reader who finds cathartic pleasure in accounts of grisly murders. When Mrs. Lovett comes across the corpse of Sweeneys first victim, she responds with a sustained noise thats somewhere between a scream and a gratified coo. At that moment she seems to be summing up just how the audience feels.
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