Prescient artistry?
D.
On 29/06/2012 7:05 PM, Ray Harrell wrote:
Horror begins in the possible mind.
REH
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June 28, 2012
Britain, Amid Austerity, Turns Rather Cutthroat
ByBEN BRANTLEY
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/people/b/ben_brantley/index.html>
LONDON
WHEN the cannibal pie maker Mrs. Lovett sings, "Times is hard" in the
popular revival of"Sweeney Todd" <http://sweeneytoddwestend.com/>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. That's 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 Wheeler's "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 country's 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 hauntthe Great Depression
<http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/g/great_depression_1930s/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier>.
Played by Michael Ball, a dimply sweetheart of the West End
transformed beyond recognition, this Sweeney isn't just a bogeyman;
he's 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 mostLondon critics,
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/21/sweeney-todd-review>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 can't 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 Rourke's lively production of Friedrich Durrenmatt's
seldom-seen"Physicists,"
<http://artsbeat.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/06/19/london-theater-journal-seeing-patterns-in-a-nuclear-cloud/?hpw>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 Theater's 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 thatJamie Lloyd's
<http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture/2011/sep/12/jamie-lloyd-director>production
of John Webster's "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. Lloyd's thrilling
production of Webster's 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 you're 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. More's 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 Webster's 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
Duchess's 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 doesn't let you linger on its
conceptual aspect while you're watching. It's 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 byMs. Best,
<http://www.nytimes.com/2007/12/24/theater/24best.html?ref=evebest>a
great London stage star seen on Broadway in revivals of"A Moon for the
Misbegotten"
<http://theater.nytimes.com/2007/04/10/theater/reviews/10moon.html>and"The
Homecoming,"
<http://theater.nytimes.com/2007/12/17/theater/reviews/17home.html>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. Best's 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 Shakespeare's tragic heroes. Nonetheless she doesn't
die easily, as is evidenced by the graphic, protracted scene of her
murder. On the edge of extinction she blazes. (Let's hope she's
resurrected in New York.)
As designed by the busy and very talented Ms. Gilmour, the National
Theater's "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 Taylor's 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 we've 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 thedreamspeakthink company
<http://www.dreamthinkspeak.com/>(and part of the far-reachingWorld
Shakespeare Festival <http://www.worldshakespearefestival.org.uk/>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 Hamlet's 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 Hamlet's
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." You're 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, they're 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 mindPatrick Hamilton's dark and
bitter novels <http://www.bookforum.com/inprint/014_05/2046>of that
period. Yet because Mr. Sondheim's score plays so artfully with
conventions of Victorian music, there's 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"Vera Drake,"
<http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/08/movies/08DRAK.html>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
whatever's 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 Sweeney's first victim, she responds with a sustained noise
that's 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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