Harlequinade / All On Her Own

Well, the panto season has started early, and what a stellar cast this one has. Terence Rattigan’s 1948 one-act comedy, usually paired with the more serious and earnest The Browning Version, is a clever curtain raiser for Kenneth Branagh’s Garrick Theatre season and has a curtain raiser of its own with the very odd monologue All On Her Own. Though I enjoyed the evening, it doesn’t really add up to enough to launch this venture, particularly at West End prices, though it does, somewhat appropriately, have a real theatre company feel.

Rattigan’s play features a company rehearsing Romeo & Juliet for a tour for the newly formed CEMA (which evolved into the Arts Council). Archetypal actor-manager Gosport is playing Romeo way over his age against his wife Edna’s Juliet. The rest of his cast are a combination of old pros and newbies keen to make their mark. Whilst in the first venue, Gosport is visited by someone who’s a product of his last visit some twenty years before and this forms the basis of the farce amongst theatre folk.

Rattigan had a small part in a university production of Romeo & Juliet directed by John Gielgud and his character is featured here having the same problems with his one line that Rattigan had. Branagh’s new venture is an actor-manger led company like the play’s so it’s a good show to launch such a venture. Rattigan’s views on arts funding, and in particular taking culture ‘to the people’, still resonate today. Despite these pleasing convergences, it still isn’t quite enough to carry the evening, though it does whet your appetite for the season.

The quirky 20-minute monologue which precedes it was written as a BBC TV commission. It features a widow returning from a party where she has met a woman who talks to her dead husband at the same time he died every evening. She proceeds to do the same as she drinks heavily, imitating or perhaps channeling him. Zoe Wanamaker performs it well, but it’s a slight and odd piece nonetheless.

Branagh has put together a fine company. In Harlequinade, Wanamaker shines as a theatrical Dame. Branagh himself reminds us what a good comic actor he can be. Miranda Raison is great pairing as Edna and Tom Bateman is excellent as company manger Jack Wakefield. There are so many good supporting performances, but it’s worth singling out John Shrapnel’s fine turn as George Chudleigh.

 

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The River

The Royal Court has taken a lot of risks with its decisions surrounding this play, including the risk that they generate so much hype they are setting the audience up for a disappointment (more risk evaluation later!). After giving us Jerusalem, in my view one of the greatest plays in decades, playwright Jez Butterworth is a hot property. Though at least four good plays preceded Jerusalem, this was inevitably going to be the theatrical equivalent of ‘the difficult second album’.

Whether he set out to produce the antidote or not I don’t know, but he has. Where Jerusalem was epic, this is intimate. Where Jerusalem was in your face, brash and loud; this is subtle, gentle and almost trance-like. The reason for staging it in a space so small that only just over 3000 people will see it was apparently ‘artistic reasons’. Though it does clearly benefit from the intimacy, I’m not convinced it benefits so much as to deprive another 10,000 from seeing it (the number it would have played to with the same length of run in the main house).

Designer Ultz has delivered one of his extraordinarily immersive sets which put you right there in the situation at the moment; this time a cabin by a river. Our nameless main character, obsessed with fishing, is there at his favourite time – the one night of the year with no moon. There is a woman with him and as the play unfolds we have more than one woman. He appears to be giving different women the same experience at different times. Or is he? If the script hadn’t specified ‘The Other Woman’ I might have thought it was the same woman at different times or different outcomes with the same woman or….. It’s a bit obtuse.

Director Ian Rickson has taken this material and created something highly atmospheric and mysterious. It’s hypnotic and compelling, I don’t really understand it, but I enjoyed the ride. Amongst many such moments, The Man preparing a fish for dinner was mesmerizing. Moments later, you could smell it as it came out of the oven and onto the dinner table. There are outstanding performances from Dominic West, Miranda Raison and Laura Donnelly and Charles Balfour’s lighting and Ian Dickinson’s sound contribute much to casting the spell.

The risk of over-hype may have paid off, but I don’t think the risk of day-seats-only has. The Royal Court is a publicly funded theatre and you can’t expect the taxpayers that fund it to block out a month in their diaries just in case they win the lottery that getting a ticket was. You either queued outside (if you’re nearby and don’t have work to do to pay the tax that funds the theatre) or participated in an online game of who-clicks-first at precisely 9am. This is no way to distribute tickets to a publicly funded show. It’s unfair on people who work and who don’t live nearby and it has brought the touts to Sloane Square. It has pissed off loyal ‘Friends’ like me and if it transfers to the West End with tickets at 2.5 times the price and fat royalty cheques to the writer and director, don’t go anywhere near the fan! Dominic Cooke has hardly put a foot wrong in his all-too-short tenure as AD of the Court, but this is one big mistake.

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Anne Boleyn

I really regretted not seeing this at The Globe last year. I’d booked for Henry VIII, but by the time I decided I also wanted to see this, I couldn’t make any of the remaining performances. So I was delighted when they brought it back – and that Miranda Raison was to return as AB.

Of course, four hundred years on there is a degree of speculation. Playwright Howard Brenton’s is that Anne was hugely influential in Britain’s return to Protestantism and lays the foundation for her grandson James I’s bible. In fact, the play starts with James, before flashing back to Anne, and returns to his time again later. Though it covers a fairly brief period, it was a very eventful one, packed with manipulation and intrigue by big hitters like Thomas Cromwell, Cardinal Wolsey and William Tyndale as well as the royals. We begin with the seeds of the romance between Anne and Henry VIII and end with her execution (well, actually start with that, but that’s the magic of theatre!).

Mirana Raison is excellent, but there are also fine performances from James Garnon as a punkish James I riddled with nervous twitches, Julius D’Silva as a manipulative Cromwell, Colin Hurley as an arrogant Wolsey, Anthony Howell as a besotted Henry VIII and a whole host of good supporting performances. John Dove’s staging is excellent, with entrances from front and sides as well as the back and a walkway thrust into the groundlings’ space providing an extra intimacy. Michael Taylor’s period costumes are authentic and elegant and William Lyons music highly effective.

I found the play fascinating and compelling, not in the slightest bit dry and earnest. It was captivating throughout, playful and funny and one of the best new plays they’ve ever done here at The Globe.

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Henry VIII

This isn’t a particularly good Shakespeare play. It was his last, may have been written with John Fletcher and it’s really just a slice of history with some pageantry and a prophetic / sycophantic ending. It’s rarely performed and the Globe is a great place to see it.

The play covers the period from the last years of his marriage to Katherine of Aragon through to the birth of Elizabeth I soon after his next marriage to Anne Boleyn. No executions (you have to go to the National for those) but you do get a coronation and a christening! You also get a historically accurate game of real tennis (squash), the demise of a corrupt and manipulative cardinal (you don’t get that in 2010!) and a rather drawn out death scene during which one is sorely tempted to shout ‘get on with it’. Apart from the royals themselves, there are other’s we know from our history – Cardinal Wolseley, Thomas Cromwell and Thomas Cranmer. It ends by telling you how good the newly christened Elizabeth is going be as queen – from the point in history when the play ends, it’s prophetic but from the point when it was written (she had already reigned) sycophantic.

Mark Rosenblatt’s production is very good, bringing out the best of the play. It plays the humour and pagentry well and there are terrific costumes (acres of silk, satin and taffeta and lots of ermine!) by designer Angela Davies, great music (Nigel Hess) and some fine performances. Henry is presented as a bit of a good guy (for a man whose main claim to fame is despatching wives in significant numbers) and Dominic Rowan plays him well, far from the fat king stereotype. Kate Duchene plays Katherine as a histrionic Spaniard complete with accented English. Miranda Raison (the lovely Jo from Spooks, almost unrecognisable as a long-haired brunette) is a very good Anne, though occasionally upstaged by Amanda Lawrence’s terrific lady-in-waiting (doubling up as an equally terrific fool). Ian McNeice is perfect as the baddie Wolsey. It  took a while to forget all of his turns as the Stratford East panto baddie before one could appreciate Michael Bertenshaw’s deliciously funny Lovell and Porter (and rather more serious Cardinal Campeius).

It might be a long way from being the best of Shakespeare, but it’s one of my most enjoyable visits to the Globe.

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