The Two-Character Play by Tennessee Williams – Jermyn Street Theatre ****

[written for The Public Reviews]

The small studio space of the Jermyn Theatre is perfectly conducive to watching Tennessee William's claustrophobic psychological play about the despair of insanity and the threat of confinement. Clare and Felice, played mesmerisingly by Catherine Cusack and Paul McEwan, are brother and sister players who arrive in a cold, unknown town to deliver 'The Two-Character Play' in a decrepit theatre to an audience who may or may not be present. Their company have abandoned them with a note stating 'you and your sister are insane' - the first gesture towards the idea that things are far more sinister than they first appear.

Clare and Felice are a double-act with a troubling past which is dramatised in their play; they are left alone, confined to their house through fear of the outside world, behind a 'barricade of sunflowers'. They have been branded murderers and left with no inheritance after their mother and father have been killed or committed suicide - the reason for their death is never resolved. Catherine Cusack performs the erratic Clare with a convincing frail and hysterical demeanour; she changes from a drunk to a childish dependant to a mother, and all of these versions of her are fully realised. Paul McEwan's Felice is weak and scared one minute and vicious and sinister the next; the master-stroke, though, is his abhorrent latent violence towards and sexual persecution of Clare which is hinted at in McEwan's sinister narrowing of the eyes and hissing through gritted teeth. With Felice intimating that the two have them had played Antony and Cleopatra, and having earlier called Clare a 'castrating bitch' and 'old demented whore' and referring to their mother as 'frigid', it is a moment fraught with danger when they are left alone in the theatre at the end of the play and he pulls himself close to Clare, putting his arm around her in what seems to be more than a brotherly embrace.

This is a very different offering from something like Tennessee's Spring Storm which played at the National Theatre this summer: that play was full of young love, parental restrictions, and moral didacticism. The Two-Character Play is far more experimental in form and ambivalent in it's tone. As an audience, we aren't able to come to a quick moral judgement about these two characters who are at the same time guilty and innocent, nurturing and vicious. The situation is absurd, in a very Beckettian sense, where Clare and Felice re-enact the same play night after night, a play which becomes indistinguishable from their own lives ('this still feels like the performance of the two-character play') not least because the names of the characters they assume are the same as their own. Like Waiting for Godot, the characters in this play are doomed to repeat ad infinitum with no resolution; Felice isn't sure that even death will offer closure as Clare tries to reassure him that all things must come to an end and so their play must draw to some sort of conclusion. Ultimately the dramatic craft, performance itself, becomes a delusional form of madness where the cold reality of the stage is transformed into the summer of the deep south in the minds of Clare and Felice, so that they no longer need the protection of their coats from the icy winter.

This play is a very intriguing reflection on the dramatic form, where the players can never be sure whether they are inside or outside of the performance, where their lives are just an illusion constantly being formed and reformed by themselves as directors. But this play offers more than a reflection on the nature of theatre; Clare is thought to be based on Tennessee's own sister who suffered from poor mental health, and we can see him grappling with these personal themes to devastating effect here. This is an original, often funny, dark, and rarely performed play which shows another side to the famous playwright, and I would encourage you to catch this whilst the Jermyn Theatre are giving you the opportunity.

Picture Source

Faust – Young Vic **

Winners of this year’s European Theatre Prize, the Icelandic Vesturport theatre company reinterpret Goethe’s Faust for a modern audience this autumn at the Young Vic. They have teamed up with Nick Cave and Warren Ellis who provide the musical accompaniment throughout. I desperately wanted to like this as I am a huge fan of Nick Cave’s, but even his ethereal piano pieces and occasional seismic goth-rock outburst couldn’t elevate this production from the level of pantomime. And I don’t think I was alone in thinking this; the audience were palpably underwhelmed – we were obviously expecting more from the lauded Vesturport.

There is nothing inherently wrong with the pantomime tradition, and this is definitely more Halloween farce than metaphysical tragedy, but I don’t think this is what Vesturport and the director, Gisli Örn Gardarsson, were aiming for despite the Christmassy setting. There is no character named Faust, but rather an actor who plays Faust only to become him as a result of a devilish pact, entered into merely as part of the ‘play’ – he only mimes slitting his throat for blood to sign the devil’s pact, he is only ‘acting’. When we are introduced to ‘Faust’ he is an old man in a nursing home, reflecting on his life and regretting the choices he has made. He was a famous actor and quotes Macbeth on the actor’s craft: ‘Life's but a walking shadow, a poor player/That struts and frets his hour upon the stage/And then is heard no more: it is a tale/Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury,/Signifying nothing.’ Perhaps taking this speech too much to heart, the players here are ‘full of sound and fury’ gambolling about the stage, with garish make-up and attention-seeking costumes, performing mildly entertaining acrobatics all to tell a well-known story, much reduced by their telling. What was a straightforward but powerful parable of human greed and spiritual depravity has been reshaped into a jumbled performance with confusing plot developments and non sequiters. The women are dressed in flimsy lingerie and corsets, which could be forgiven if used sparingly on the she-devils ( if wanting to make such a clichéd link between sexuality and wickedness) but even Greta, the pure love-object, cavorts in her underwear, stripping naked to the waist at an impassioned moment with Faust. I’m no prude, but this blatant sexiness and the occasional gestures towards necrophilia and sodomy make this production unsuitable for a younger audience, just the crowd that might find this play appealing.

Energetic and visually pleasing, this performance isn’t a total flop but the acrobatics, which make it such a departure from the norm, are on occasion sloppily executed with Mephisto prematurely crashing into the papered-over trap-door, spoiling his later summoning of the devils -from-below stunt. By its design this isn’t a play for a teen audience so these slip-ups aren’t easily forgiven by a hyper-critical adult audience – the magic of Christmas and Halloween doesn’t work for us either. If the production had been geared towards a younger audience it would have been a great way to get students interested in a difficult and important classic, as it is Vesturport’s Faust is a flimsy thing lacking the existential clout of the original.

Picture Source

Hamlet – Olivier, National Theatre ***

Elsinore, in Nicholas Hytner’s production, is a foreboding modern dystopia and a surveillance state. The cast are dressed in dark suits and efficiently move around Claudius’ court in a businesslike manner, haunting the corridors of power. Ophelia is driven mad as much by the behaviour of a distracted Hamlet towards her, as by the guards who follow her everywhere and are, at one point, seen to back her screaming into a corner. This idea of persecution creates a potent atmosphere on stage but is problematic in that it detracts from the real rot at the centre of Elsinore, the fratricide visited on old Hamlet by Claudius and his subsequent incestuous marriage to Gertrude. Disappointingly, Patrick Malahide is a very weak Claudius; he sits quite comfortably as his murderous action is recreated by the players before his eyes and his outburst is unbelievably muted when it does come. A much more energetic performance is given by Ruth Negga as a young and vulnerable Ophelia whose madness is convincingly swift-acting and all-consuming. She drags her shopping trolley around the stage in an unhinged frenzy – it is a modern madness where her flower tokens are replaced by childhood toys, her Barbie doll and a stuffed toy.

Rory Kinnear’s Hamlet alone makes this show a must see despite the disappointing supporting cast. A more lacklustre Laertes I haven’t before had the misfortune to witness and Clare Higgins, usually such a pleasure to watch, makes for a hysterical Gertrude who scuttles about the stage in her high heels, working herself up into a high-pitched wail at Hamlet’s murder of Polonius and never managing to convey the powerful nuances of her character. But Kinnear redeems this production from the charge of being just another mediocre modern interpretation. His eloquence transforms the blank verse into something so much more natural than any of the other actors achieve with Shakespeare’s words in their mouths. His language isn’t fraught with the manifold interpretations which precede his, so the big speeches seem fresh – there is no bombastic emphasis or peculiar locution which marks Kinnear’s delivery out from any other. ‘To be or not to be’ and ‘O, what a rogue and peasant slave am I’ are delivered quietly and thoughtfully like a philosophical man contemplating his place in the universe, not like a bawling actor self-consciously delivering his lines with all the rhetorical flourishes he can muster. Perhaps it is right that those surrounding him are mere shadows in comparison to this Hamlet’s luminescence – it is Hamlet after all who has been received through the ages as ‘real’ in all his doubt and self-loathing and this realness is only intensified in this production which surrounds him with insubstantial puppets.

Picture Source

Or You Could Kiss Me by Neil Bartlett – Cottesloe Theatre ***

The Handspring Puppet Company returns to the National Theatre after their breathtaking work on War Horse but to much more intimate and subdued effect. In Or You Could Kiss Me the puppetry is, again, enthralling; the two male protagonists are represented by a pair of decrepit and diminutive dummies, with a very convincing shuffling gait, manipulated skilfully by an on-stage team. The intimacy of the stage-hands with the bodies of the old men echoes the closeness that Mr A and Mr B enjoyed as young men in love. Having met in 1971, the two have been together for sixty-seven years and the ‘little one’, Mr A, now finds himself caring for his larger companion who wheezes and splutters, suffering with the advanced stages of emphysema and memory loss. The men must come to terms with Mr B’s hospitalisation and imminent death which spells the end of their life-long bond which has already been threatened by Mr B’s failing memory.

The ensemble cast switch between portraying the two men in their youth and old age which can appear rather chaotic on stage but manages to maintain narrative coherence. Adjoa Andoh's role as master of ceremonies, narrator, nurse, and house-keeper allows the story to be told from a perspective beyond that of the two men, but her swift role changes and fragmented monologues leant confusion to what would have otherwise been a powerful and simple tale. The play also suffered from being too concerned with its temporal setting; for the two men to be in their late eighties and to have met in 1971, the present time has to be 2036, yet there is no visual evidence that we are situated in the future. Of course, this isn’t an important aspect of the play, and it would detract from the action to have this futuristic aspect foregrounded. But props are a major part of this production and the ‘old-fashioned’ answering machine and laptop are anachronistic and conspicuous because it. Yet the moving portrayal of an enduring love, imperilled first by the homophobia of 1970's South Africa and then by the ravages of old age, transcends the particular downfalls of this production.

Picture Source