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That Face at the Duke of York Theatre, May 14 2008
Written by Polly Stenham
Directed by Jeremy Herrin
‘The family that separates dominos separately into crisis’, could be the by-line of alcoholic Martha’s upper middle class family in Polly Sternham’s ‘That Face’. Left by her husband, for a younger, more amicable alternative, Martha (Lindsay Duncan) flounders, self absorbed, into a cycle of escalating madness dragging her children with her; her son, Henry, (Matt Smith) held oedipal-ly close, her daughter, Mia, (Hannah Murray) held at arms length in boarding school like a pedigree stray.
It is the toppling of Mia’s domino that brings father, Hugh (Julian Wadham), back to London to deal with his erstwhile responsibilities. Armed with Martha’s valium, Mia ‘accidentally’ sends a younger girl, comatose, into hospital and is tossed out of school to Martha’s unwelcoming door, behind which Martha is engaged in a dangerous relationship of mutual and uncomfortably sexualised enabling with her son Henry. The play’s crisis coincides with Henry’s as he, who at 18 has held Martha together for the five years since Hugh’s exodus, has his need for her effortlessly bypassed by his father’s will to have her and her dependencies removed from the equation.
‘That Face’ is a bit like an after school special dealing with alcohol and drug abuse (and possibly even incest) gone wrong. Individual scenes feel real, suggesting an element of the autobiographical but the characters have a short journey making them hard to see as real people. Lindsay Duncan as Martha does a beautiful, graceful, quite Blanche Dubois, alcoholic from her first scene to her last, her walk a language of degraded glamour in itself. Mia begins as an unpredictable, lonely, fifteen year old, boarding school girl and ends similarly and Henry’s downhill gradient is slight: he’s already left school to heal a mother who doesn’t want it. So who is the main character taking the journey most narratives revolve around? Martha commands the greatest attention but the most interesting chapters in her story happen on either side of the play and Mia and Henry’s dominos wobble so wildly in the first two scenes that it feels like being first on the scene of a car crash wondering what happened. Despite this the play has great structure; each scene is well crafted and flows seamlessly into the next helped by the staging, which centres around an increasingly crumpled and detritus accumulating double bed. A dream for drama students, many of these scenes would lose none of their power if seen on their own.
A lot has been made about Sternham’s age, she was 19 when she wrote ‘That Face’, and it shows. Not in an amateur way but in a lack of light and shade. The intensity is there from the first scene, a boarding school initiation more Abu Ghraib than St. Trinians, and then continues to increase to heart attack rate rather than allowing pressure remissions before ramping up the adrenalin to a tremor level crisis. By the climactic scene, where the family is reunited, the dialogue and acting are already at fever pitch and the hysteria that sees Henry, drunk, clad in his mother’s jewels and negligee, pissing on the bed couldn’t push me above my the intensity plateau. It felt like that point in an argument where you’ve already thrown everything breakable and are down to the cushions.
The one comic scene shined out as one of the most memorable: Martha, drunk, but in good spirits, chats cheerily to the talking clock, brilliantly taking up both sides of the conversation. In this play Sternham’s writing is strongest when her stage has only two speaking characters and this scene was no exception.
One of the great benefits of Sternham’s age was the language used by Mia and Henry. It’s good to hear teenage banter that doesn’t sound like the OC sprinkled with try hard hip hop lyrics. Her older characters have strong voices as well; Martha’s dialogue bubbles messily fleshy beneath her well brought up shell and Hugh is the perfect cardboard cut-out absentee father.
This is a well crafted, well written play which takes a fresh, real perspective to themes not much dramatised. Individual scenes easily enlist emotions but without an obvious character to back and the intensity woodpeckering away for its one 90 minute act it left me feeling more hollow than I would have hoped.
‘That Face’ debuted in a much more intimate setting and could have been lost in a west end size theatre but the staging used the extra space to accentuate the feeling of each character being lost instead of just losing them in the emptiness.
The Lover and The Collection, a double bill of The Lover and The Collection, by Harold Pinter
The Comedy Theatre 30th April
The Lover, a Pinter one act two hander, sparkles with emerald style (diamonds being just a bit too obvious.).
An intimate look at a marriage where a set of careful compromises are in play, the tone is glib and the actors (Gina McKee and Richard Coyle) are clearly ’acting’ but the emotions are surprisingly raw. No one would expect the writing to do anything less than whip, dice, turn and sing, but in The Lover, Pinter leads the audience up a very twisting garden path with a lot of nice flourishes and witty moments along the way.
The couple, ten years into their marriage, are exploring their differing desires for duality on that rickety old bridge between love and lust and instead of finding a spot in the middle they’re moving straight from one end to the other by conducting very civilised affairs – with each other. The brilliant frission between the terribly British Mr. and Mrs. amicably discussing the affair as if it’s being conducted outside the marriage, and the role playing, bongo drumming, intimate personal fantasies they act out had me on-side from the start. I got the impression that the audience felt in safe hands with the actors and narrative and were eagerly following the couple as they began to explore a bit more than just the difference between being a man and a woman or a whore, lover, mistress or wife.
The two-roomed staging was suitably stylish and clever and the era was 40’s – 50’s chic (and that goes for the dialogue as well as the look.). The sex was less suggested, more real, and more sexy and honest than overt (with coitus performed under the tea table.) as were the emotions – I thought they all trod the line awfully well, darling.
The Collection, with two extra characters (played by Charlie Cox and Timothy West), was a similar dip into the intimate world of personal relationships, partnerships and desire, with the extra characters adding the possibility of homosexuality into the mix. The story centres around the confession and re-confession of a one night stand; did the young married woman really do ‘that’ with the louche but glamorous toyboy? As the partners of the standees become involved events are revised and the winners’ and losers’ roles are cleverly re-assigned. Insecurity reigns as does the clever arrangement of the actors’ bodies on stage which is suggestive but without being an utter farce, and more witty dialogue, including what has to be one of the best monologues I’ve ever seen: a tremendous moment from Timothy West as he explains that his young ‘friend’ is a “slum slug”. More emotive words have never been spoken in love and I will keep that one for future use.
In both plays it is the female characters who come off best, playing cat and mouse games with the truth and kneading and seasoning the situation to their own tastes. Both girls (both played by Gina McKee) are durable and comfortably capable of duality and expertly play their strengths and weaknesses. Both plays explored the themes of love, partnership, sexual desire and insecurity but I still appreciated the underlying sisterhood of those graceful slips of things playing to get what they need and winning . Without this edge, The Collection would be a bit like the decadent versus the ‘proper’, but the bourgeois tone Pinter allows his characters shows up their flaws warmly.
In spite of the comic and unerring tip of the banter flashing across the surface of this evening’s theatre, I found the underlying emotions honest. I like the idea of these characters being real people. In fact, I hope very much that there are people creative enough to add this kind of drama to their personal relationships as they tread back and forwards on the love-to-lust bridge via insecurity. I just hope they’re not living next door to me (unless they’re a slum slug, of course, and then I may get the opportunity to utter those words.).
P.S. It should have been called ‘The Pinter Collection’…
The Internationalist at The Gate Theatre, 25th April 2008
Written by Anne Washburn
Directed by Natalie Abrahami
Ever considered how many ways there are to misunderstand someone? If you don’t speak the lingo you’ve already got that going against you, but to add to that you can misread their body language, misinterpret cultural nuances, have different expectations of your relationship or just not get what‘s going on. In The Internationalist, written by Anne Washburn, the characters misunderstand each other on all of these levels and probably some deeper ones I didn’t get either because I was soundless-laughing too hard at how clever she is.
Witty dialogue set up characters and scenes quickly and distinctively, speedily immersing the audience in the story as Lowell (Elliot Cowan), the internationalist of the title, gropes his way, almost drunkenly, through a foreign business trip. Washburn makes it clear that the characters and their relationships are the focus by leaving other details slightly blurry. We don’t know what kind of business Lowell is in, which country he’s visiting (though it’s definitely European) or what kind of person Lowell is at home.
Arriving at the airport after a disastrous flight he ineptly meets Sara (Jennifer Higham), a company colleague, who begins to guide him along the garden path of unexplainable distractions which is her country, leading him into an exotic, romantic situation where he’s suddenly cast as the Hollywood heartthrob. Their relationship is only just recovering from the problematic meeting before it goes awry again at the office where it turns out that Sara isn’t what she’d seemed (a colleague) but his junior in the company. Brilliant use of a second language, Washburn’s own creation, which hovers somewhere around Latin (a hybrid of Germany and Scandinavia in sound), has the other four actors (who play the rest of the characters) slipping in and out of understanding. When Lowell’s in the room they speak Washburnian, when he’s not they’re understandable to the audience. One of the funniest touches is their differing grasps of English and the delicate but cleverly logical ways they misuse it as they welcome Lowell. Taking on the Hollywood heartthrob role Sara has ascribed to him, Lowell starts looking for more adventure but only ends up in confusing situations without a guide or a phrasebook.
There are a couple of great stories and monologues thrown into the mix by the ’other’ characters which are a bit like divertissements in a play so closely focused on the character’s relationships. One was mostly told in Washburnian but escalated my silent chuckling appreciation of cleverness to proper laughing-out-loud-‘cause-its-funny (all I really know is that it had something to do with a naked man wearing flippers but the body language of the cast made it contagious). They also offered their observations about Americans from an international perspective, some quite philosophical, expressing not just an interest in what Americans do and don’t know but also in the relationship between their isolation and power “America hasn’t lost in the same way other countries have, hasn’t had our own people killed on home soil.”. An interesting glance at international cultural hierarchy was presented alongside some feverish un-packaging of cultural clichés.
My companion found the ending slightly ambiguous (some of it was spoken in Washburnian) but for me it summed up the whole play. It also resonated with my twenty-something’s need to be understood but difficulty in knowing how best to make that happen. More importantly it made me smile and think.
Logistically The Gate Theatre is a challenging space. Small, with only one possible exit the director, Natalie Abrahami, chose to have everyone on stage all the time – but the acting had me totally focused on what I was supposed to be looking at so this was a far less distracting choice than it could have been. She used a couple of nice movement moments and some clever backlighting to smooth out the scene changes but all these touches complimented the writing so well that I’m only really noticing them in hindsight. The actors warmed into their roles and could have been more naturalistic in such an intimate space but now I’m just in the realms of constructive criticism ‘cause I pretty much wish I had written this play myself.
Fram at The National Theatre, 15th April 2008
Written and Directed by Tony Harrison
You know there is a problem when a theatre review begins: “The set was engrossing.”
Creative use of the space and wiz bang, National-Theatre-budget-standard effects compelled the action from the moonlit interior of Westminster Cathedral 2008 to the Arctic 1895 and back again via original footage, film and a brief, inexplicable trip to the ballet. The performers were equally strong, and the topic, the life and times of arctic explorer, Fridtjof Nansen, comfortably worthy of dissection and theatrical reproduction. It was the fusion of these parts – the text and direction – which was the ice flow which sunk Fram (taken from the name of Nansen’s boat.).
Writer/ director Tony Harrison thought Nansen’s need to be a hero, first as a North Pole racer then as an international envoy for the 1921 Russian famine, was best explored in a rhyming prose somewhere between Roald Dahl and a classical Greek play. This was delivered to the audience panto style with added overt dramatic outbursts and confronting projected images which alternated in belittling the seriousness of the material and emotionally sensationalising it. I was provoked but I doubt it was for the right reasons.
A naff projection of the narrator, Gilbert Murray (Jeff Rawle), a 19th Century translator of classical Greek plays and his muse, actress Sybil Thorndike (Sian Thomas), entering the National Theatre settled me into the idea of this being a schools production. That was until the swearing started, including a tirade of Mamet worthy f***s and a c***, still a step too far for most audiences, which made me wonder who the h*** this production was for. Jokes about ancient Greek texts even a theatre student wouldn’t get only confused me more (I don’t know many anarchic ancient Greek scholars with a passion for the history of Arctic exploration?).
I did develop a sympathy for Nansen (and I certainly learnt a lot about him over the three hours), but it was mostly concern about him turning in his grave. Desperately inviting the image of a starved victim of the Russian famine (one of Nansen’s projected slides) to throw off its theatrical pretence of death, only to have it do so with a cackle made me feel angry at Harrison rather than conveying the emotion Nansen must have felt when he took the photo to show the world . Again I was confused: Why was the audience being provoked? What was I supposed to be getting from this? The only character I really connected with was Hjalmar Johansen (the excellent Mark Addy), Nansen’s storm-darkened Arctic companion, who, like me, gave the impression he would rather be somewhere else and was unhappy about where the production was headed. He would have likened the evening to spending an Arctic winter in a shared bear skin sleeping bag with the stench of two men and Nansen’s recited poetry (another thing Fram taught me about Nansen – which made me think censored it could still be a successful schools production?).
After a random ten minute ballet which had no clear reference to anything before or after (other than getting another top stage name, Wayne McGregor, enticingly added to the programme?) and a painfully long, frustrating scene re-enacting a meeting between famine relief agencies, the interval came offering a chance to sit back and try and understand why… My companion wanted to leave but Nansen and Johansen stuck it out in the Arctic and I said damn it, we would too. Later when he had his coat over his eyes and I was repeating a mantra of ‘please stop, please stop, please stop…’ as a poet with his mouth, eyes and ears sewn up hummed for five minutes I was questioning my decision.
The long-promised Fram only appeared at the very end, half sunk in the ice (in real life it survived the arctic) and the characters of Nansen and Johansen tried, I think, to summarise what we’d just seen. It was a dramatic image, them sitting on top of the sinking ship…I’m not a theatre cretin and I wanted to get it and to enjoy it – but I just didn’t.
