RICHARD II

Donmar Warehouse

10 Jan 2012
Present: NM, RM, CC, RW

Director: Michael Grandage
Talent: Eddie Redmayne

CC wrote: I liked it. Other club members dry-eyed, but I found the deposition scene, in particular, moving. Lovely set, all gothic arches and gold-leaf; incense and plainsong in abundance.  John of Gaunt rather raced through his famous lines, didn't invest them with any real passion.  I for one couldn't shake the memory of Ron Cook having been the Fool in Jacobi Lear, so couldn't take him very seriously as Duke of York. Not helped by the fact that the character is quite silly. Hard to see pin-up appeal of Eddie Redmayne, who kept reminding me of the young Edward Fox, or possibly the young Edward Fox playing Edward VIII, as if he had grapes wedged in his upper lip. But you couldn't fault him for energy and intensity of feeling. Nice pace, never a dull moment.  Ten quid tickets a real bargain, you could see and hear all. My one cavil was that no-one except Daniel Flynn as Northumberland had the voice to carry the lovely lines, all of them a bit breathy and high-pitched.

The Happy Existentialist

Rarely can have this monologue have been performed more cheerfully.  The odd thing is that I really rather like it.

HAMLET

Young Vic
1 Dec 2011
Present: WW,RP, NM, SS + Andrew Mee, Jacob Wheldon, Caitlin Line , Stephen Graham

Director: Ian Rickson
Talent: Michael Sheen

The most startling moment of the evening was the audience reaction at the end of the show. Young women leaped to their feet and started hooting and hollering and clapping.   I had no idea Michael Sheen had that kind of fan base. Jude Law as Faustus a few years back in the same venue drew similar responses.  That was more understandable.  I rose, myself, to leave, and it was then that the truth struck me.  So uncomfortable are the Young Vic’s bench seats that people were leaping up with joy at the sheer relief of no longer having to sit down.  Or maybe it was simple pleasure at finally reaching the end of this unsatisfactory production.

There is a High Concept at work here.  The audience is required to trail through the backstage, which has been turned, University-of-Sussex-circa-1973-style,into what is, we think, supposed to represent a lunatic asylum. It is at once clear that this is going to be a reduced version of the play.  Which is OK – it is impossible to do all the Hamlets that are in Hamlet, which is what makes it so constantly replayable. What is not OK is to stick it into a straightjacket  and hope that no-one notices that none of the straps do up.  Hamlet teeters on the edge of incoherence as it is.  The best productions are those that aim for clarity.

The High Concept simply didn’t work.  Who was mad and who wasn’t?  The question of Hamlet’s state of mind became rather redundant, and his soliloquies, which so brilliantly disassemble the fourth wall instead became questionable rambles, unhelped by Sheen’s constant swallowing of words and lines and his odd Michael Footish pauses in the middle of phrases.

Sheen was terrifically energetic though, and a galvanising presence on stage (when he wasn’t there things grew quickly tiresome), and at least he conveyed the sense of a man in torment.  In the end however I didn’t really care what happened to him.  And he really wasn’t witty enough.

It was generally agreed that Laertes was shockingly poor,his outrage unbelievable. NM didn’t believe Sheen either. RP liked Gertrude in the first half but was dismayed by her second half performance.  We all agreed she was very good at crouching and standing with her legs quite wide apart, like that.  Ophelia was a problem, but then Ophelia is always a problem.  I liked Polonius but RP thought him “too ordinary”.  SS left at half time: “I don’t really see the point of staying.  We got the idea before we got to our seats”.

Our medical guest slept through much of Acts One and Two.Our schoolmaster friend thoroughly enjoyed the first half, but was disappointed by the second.  My son was taken with the lighting and my niece was scathing about the costumes, in particular three buttons on Ophelia’s blouse.

This is Hamlet lite, Hamlet filleted, but nevertheless Shakespeare just survives, and so perhaps this production can be recommended if not applauded, for the words if not for the direction.  And Sheen’s performance, if not to everybody’s taste in terms of interpretation or indeed actual clarity of diction, is a star turn. 

It is a blessed relief to stand at the end though, for all sorts of reasons.

Stark raving sane

"He talks to himself which you'd think was madness except that he makes sense when he does it. And the way I see it is that a man talking sense to himself is no madder than a man talking nonsense NOT to himself. Or just as mad. He does both. So there you have it. Stark raving sane." - Rosencrantz & Guildenstern are Dead

Omelette reviews

They appear to be divided. Lloyd Evans in The Spectator (whose opinion I have never trusted, although i can no longer remember why) calls the production "poison". Billington is so-so. You can read his review here. Reading through comments and blogs some people have found it rivetting and others atrocious. Intriguing anyway. Don't forget to be early....

When coming to see Hamlet, you'll find a new way into the Young Vic. Please arrive at the main box office 30 minutes before start time to experience this different route, which is fully accessible.

Some recent Hamlets: Paul Rhys (1999), Simon Russell Beale (2000), Ben Whishaw (2004), David Tennant (2008) and Rory Kinnear (2010). For me the first of these remains the best, but actually they were all first class princes if not always in first class Hamlets.

Orson and Winston

WPW

The Yobs in the Park

Rationally, of course, it matters not a jot who wrote ‘Shakespeare’. Those of us interested in the art trust the tale, not the teller, as instructed by D.H. Lawrence. We do know that insofar as it is possible to be objectively factual the plays were written by William Shakespeare. We also know that so long as his ghost does not come back and proclaim it is so from the stage of the Olivier (along with other, independently minded ghostlinesses to bear witness of course) then people less interested in the art will support or pursue tales of other possible authors, from Bacon to Marlowe and further yet afield. There will always be creationists, people who think the royal family are lizards, that man has not walked on the moon, and so on.

Generally their pestilence is tolerable, but I think even the rational among us are allowed a feeling or two. And the feeling, as put to me by my sister, is that denial of Shakespeare as the author of Shakespeare is an insult to the friendship we have with him. To a degree generally far more intense than with almost all other writers, those of us who love the plays love Shakespeare – or at least we have a singular relationship with him - and the feeling of a bunch of cranky actors (who should know better) and a sci-fi movie director (who doesn't) stomping all over this intimacy is disagreeable. The sense is of yobs setting fire to the roses in the local park: thoughtless, ignorant, destructive, vulgar and stupid. Fuck 'em.

WPW

Nicholas Owen on Classic FM

"There's something mysterious about Shakespeare. Did you know that there are only five examples of Shakespeare's signature, and each one is spelled differently?"

I begin to understand how Richard Dawkins feels when confronted by a Creationist...

WPW

Another good piece from The New York Times

Wouldn’t It Be Cool if Shakespeare Wasn’t Shakespeare?

Sony Lessons

Good grief! Have just read the Shapiro article. Can it possibly be true that Sony are handing out this mendacious garbage to schoolchildren? That schools are accepting it? The best analogy I can think of is with Creationism. WPW

Shapiro Strikes Back

Come on McCrum. Much more aggressive piece in NYT from Shapiro

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/17/opinion/hollywood-dishonors-the-bard.html

I'm off to the premiere Tuesday eve at London Film Festival as the producer's date. I will represent Club with vigour.

Mr McCrum greets the opening of 'Anonymous'

During an age of conspiracy theories, nurtured by the world wide web, none perhaps is as persistent as the mystery of William Shakespeare. How could one man write such universal plays?

Anonymous, a forthcoming film by Roland Emmerich, the director of disaster movies such as Independence Day and The Day After Tomorrow, addresses the Shakespeare authorship question in a mash-up of fact and fiction that will reignite the perennial fascination with an elusive genius, some say the greatest writer who ever lived.

It's always the frustration of Shakespeare that, although his words are everywhere, the man is invisible. Anonymous exploits this, inviting audiences to entertain the ultimate plot: that the writer of Macbeth or The Tempest is not, in fact, a man named William Shakespeare, but …

Well, why not? All we know for certain is that Shaxpere, Shaxberd, or Shakspear (he spelled his name in as many as 25 different ways) was born in Stratford-upon-Avon in 1564, that he was an actor whose name was printed, with the names of his fellow performers, in the collected edition of his plays in 1623. We know that he married Anne Hathaway and died in 1616, according to legend on his birthday, which happened to be St George's Day. What's known as the "Stratfordian" case for Shakespeare rests on these and a handful of other facts, but, basically, that's it.

Yet this shadowy author's work has become a global phenomenon. According to a recent issue of the New York Times, "Shakespeare surrounds us this season, perhaps even more than usual. On any given summer's day, somewhere in America, you can find fairies frolicking alongside young lovers in flight from Athens in A Midsummer Night's Dream."

Forget the frolicking, watch the potential box office. In 1998, Shakespeare in Love, Tom Stoppard's witty and ingenious historical romcom about the poet's rivalry with Christopher Marlowe, starring Joseph Fiennes and Gwyneth Paltrow, scooped seven Academy Awards and grossed more than £60m. Globally, Shakespeare plc has an annual turnover of several billion dollars. He's one of our biggest exports.

The identity of the writer who has such a sure grip of his audience has puzzled commentators for centuries. Even in his own day, long before he had emerged as "William Shakespeare", the playwright drove people mad with his modest Stratford origins. In 1592, rival dramatist Robert Greene made a celebrated deathbed attack on the "conceit" of the "upstart crow" from the provinces who, with intolerable airs and graces, considered himself "the only Shake-scene". For Greene and every subsequent Shakespeare naysayer, there is something enraging about the poet's genius. The explanation must be that Shakespeare is not – simply cannot be – original, but an impostor "beautified with our feathers". Snootily, how could someone born and raised in provincial Stratford have such a command of language, plots and ideas ?

Over four centuries, the mystery of William Shakespeare (whose singular genius some compare to Mozart's) has animated several increasingly bizarre conspiracy theories. There was such an unbridgeable chasm between the complex brilliance of the plays and what they suggest about their author's education and experience, on the one hand, set against the bare facts of Shakespeare's life, on the other, that a better explanation of his "genius" had to be found.

It was impossible, said the "anti-Stratfordians", as the sceptics came to be known, that the recorded life of the man called Shakespeare could yield the astonishing universality and dazzling inventiveness of the canon. Anonymous is the latest, quixotic attempt to fill this vacuum and to create a "Shakespeare" that's the work of a more obviously accomplished writer, a certain Edward de Vere.

The Earl of Oxford, as he was, is first among a roll call that includes Sir Francis Bacon, Christopher Marlowe, Sir Walter Raleigh, John Donne and even Elizabeth I, the virgin queen herself, who makes a walk-on appearance in Anonymous, played by Vanessa Redgrave. Actually, Emmerich is in good company. The unholy alliance of "anti-Stratfordians" boasts Mark Twain, Charlie Chaplin, Orson Welles and Sigmund Freud among its members. In the British theatre today, Mark Rylance and Derek Jacobi (who appear in Anonymous) are vociferous spokesmen for the Earl of Oxford.

Conspiracy theories are always touched with a bit of madness. Those who are convinced Edward de Vere is the real author of the Shakespeare canon – the plays, they contend, are his surrogate autobiography – have to brush aside some inconvenient truths. The most challenging of these is that the crafty earl died inconveniently young in 1604, well before Macbeth, King Lear, Coriolanus, The Winter's Tale and The Tempest were written and/or staged.

Does it matter? The world of "Shakespeare", who – or whatever – he might be, continues to revolve on stage and screen and across the traffic of countless web pages. Audiences, actors and directors are still drawn to "Shakespeare plays", whose stories flow through the world's imagination from day to day. Many actors are defined in the public mind by their interpretation of Shakespeare's characters. He is a playwright who has given them their defining roles: Vanessa Redgrave's Rosalind, Chiwetel Ejiofor's Othello; Simon Russell Beale's Iago; Mark Rylance's Hamlet; Derek Jacobi's Lear. These are performances (everyone has their favourite) that find an extraordinary depth and subtlety in the playwright's "fire-new words".

Against Emmerich, these plays – the canon – have an internal consistency, a natural authenticity that makes its own "Stratfordian" argument. There are three unmistakable hallmarks to Shakespeare's writing.

First, there's his humanity, his benign capacity to find in the darkest villainy something with which the common man or woman in the pit can identify, from Macbeth's obsession with witchcraft to Richard III's antic humour.

Second, there's Shakespeare's instinctive theatricality, so different (actors always say) from the majestic speech-making of Christopher Marlowe. Arguably, only Shakespeare could have written act three of King Lear, in which an old king on the edge of insanity, his Fool and another character clad only in a blanket conduct an imaginary trial of the king's termagant daughters in a scene that is more Beckett than Bacon.

And finally, with Shakespeare, audiences are never far from a fundamental domesticity: sly allusions to his father's glove-making business; obscure Warwickshire dialect words; Ophelia picking wild flowers from the river bank; Touchstone rhapsodising about his sheep; Othello driven to jealous rage by a simple cambric handkerchief; the warring citizens of Verona in Romeo and Juliet sounding for all the world like Stratford townspeople.

All of this – what Sir Peter Hall has called "the sheer bloody Englishness of the whole thing" – makes it hard to believe that the plays were not written by one man. Who that man is, or was, will always remain a matter for debate. You can call him Anonymous, or you can call him Shakespeare. Does it really matter? He is for Everyman, and the work remains.

Read a further sidebar plus lots of fatuous comments here.

Would anyone be up for an Occupation of the Odeon West End? I thought of bringing a tent and a large sack of self-righteousness, plus of course The Complete Works of the Earl of Oxford ( a slim volume, but nicely tooled). WPW

Fiennes & Logan on 'Coriolanus'

Coriolanus

Not strictly speaking a club outing, but nevertheless great Shakespeare.

Coriolanus is a difficult play; this is a first class movie. Ralph Fiennes directs and stars. His performance is outstanding. He is, I think, a better film actor than theatrical. On stage he can seem inanimate; on film, in close-up, we become aware of his eyes, which are the main tools of his talent. He is perfectly cast as Coriolanus. This is a tragic figure for whom honesty, both emotional and intellectual, is a weakness. He is not particularly sympathetically portrayed here, and yet the “lonely dragon” does garner our pity, as he surely must for the play to work, and this is due to Fiennes’s uncanny combination of fragility and brutality. This same quality I think gave weight to his part in Schindler’s List, in which, although he plays a monstrous character, he is not wholly monstrous, to the extent that we rather chillingly recognise him as human.

The supporting cast is equally good; even Vanessa Redgrave fails to irritate as Volumnia, and indeed the penultimate scene with Fiennes is riveting and bravely long (John Logan, screenwriter, producer and progenitor of the affair, has remained on the whole faithful to Shakespeare, and he and Fiennes have been unafraid to keep in what is central - but this is emphatically a movie, nonetheless). Brian Cox, as usual, is first rate and Gerard Butler looks very much the part as Coriolanus’s rival Aufidius, bravehearting his tattooed crew in his native Scottish accent. At any moment I expected him to declare “This is GLASGOW!”

Actually, the film is set in the recently-contemporary Balkans, and uses mock newsreel footage and Sky Newsflashes. The former works, the latter doesn’t, the sight of Channel 4 Newsreader Jon Snow speaking Shakespeare raising an unhelpful giggle rather than adding any verisimilitude. However, more than making up for this is the visual geography: a scarred, unfamiliar landscape. This is a world in which brute force thrives – in which, sometimes, it is morally necessary – and in which the sight of the warrior “sweating compassion” is therefore all the more telling.

Coriolanus is an undeservedly underperformed play. It is Shakespeare’s most overtly political, and provides perfect counterpoint to Julius Caesar (Caesar, unlike Coriolanus, having no principled scruples when it comes to loving the mob). Is Coriolanus a good man? Yes and no. Is Coriolanus a good film? Assuredly yes. Highly recommended.

WPW

Cautelous

My mother, you wot well
My hazards still have been your solace: and
Believe't not lightly—though I go alone,
Like to a lonely dragon, that his fen
Makes fear'd and talk'd of more than seen—your son
Will or exceed the common or be caught
With cautelous baits and practise.

Coriolanus IV, iii

cautelous = Full of cautels; deceitful, crafty, artful, wily.

THE TEMPEST

The Haymarket
14 Sept 2011
Present: CC, NM, RW, BM, SS, RP +Catherine Gibbs

Director: Trevor Nunn
Talent: Ralph Fiennes


Ralph Fiennes spoke the lines very well, but somehow forgot to give Prospero a character. Since no-one else in the cast had one, this was a problem; a problem which Trevor Nunn attempted to overcome by turning large chunks of the play into what looked and sounded like a junior-school musical. Tubby 11 year olds wore dog masks and did daft movements, while the wedding masque (always tricky to pull off) was unbelievably silly. I'm afraid there was open sniggering from some of us. Caliban very well spoken and played, but one man can't save this production. The set was dreary, Ariel's best lines lost in falsetto singing or gabbling. The potentially very moving final exchanges between Prospero and Ariel lacked heart. I'd give it 4 out of 10.

CC