Private Lives

Gielgud Theatre

20 September 2013

Tame violence in the climax to the second act in the 1976 BBC TV production.

To the extent Coward is 'modern' this potentially upsetting scene is the touchstone.

Although the marital violence is thankfully not underplayed in this production, this comedy has less to say about romantic love than self-love.

Coward’s biographer Philip Hoare, in the programme, claims his subject imbued this drama with tragedy, and that he is the descendent of Wilde and precursor to Beckett. All this is ridiculous, and not simply because the Irish dramatists are on a different order of achievement.

The physical violence in this comedy would be unthinkable in Wilde’s equivalent, and is far too easy compared to Beckett, who after all lived through a terrible war. Coward’s surrogate Elyot is that type of overcompensating sissy that Gore Vidal memorably identified in many of the warmongers of our age.

Nor, in this drama at least, does Shakespeare seem to be a strong presence, and this is probably a good thing for its survival. Though superficially about the battle of the sexes, in fact the bickering lovers are almost identical narcissists, as if the same character were duplicated on stage.

This may be a consequence of Coward’s closeted nature, but in any case, as he said about this work, it lacks a complete psychology. Elyot and Amanda are the same person, and I was struck with the thought that the real precursor here was Wagner’s Tristan und Isolde, except that this really is the unintentional satire on romantic love that some critics bizarrely find in Wagner, presumably because they are deaf to his transfiguring music.

The core of the work, indeed it’s only interesting scene, is the second act, where the principles are together on stage. The first act is exposition, and the third act is a weak farce with an unsatisfying conclusion: we simply don’t care enough about the underdeveloped secondary characters, again something Coward acknowledged.

The central act remains effective in showing how self absorption can be self destructive, especially if you are as basically childish as Elyot/Amanda. Perhaps they are child-like, which would be much more charming and interesting, but this production nudges these precariously balanced characters towards the annoying.

Coward may have intended to make points about how intense romantic love operates in the real world, that such lovers neither cope together nor apart. But lovers are usually different people, indeed sometimes opposites in personality – I can’t believe Elyot and Amanda are different at all, except that Amanda is slightly sharper than her entirely tedious first husband.

Jonathan Kent’s production is too reverential. Some dated lines should have been cut (the audience knows what brioche is) and some crude aspects should have been subdued (an angry servant is not funny simply because she speaks only French). At least the set looked gorgeous.

Toby Stephens is miscast as Elyot: he doesn’t do camp very well, approaches hysteria at points, and is too muscular to make his fights with Amanda seem plausible. Anna Chancellor is an excellent Amanda, and if she gurned excessively, I suspect she had no choice given the script.

Rigoletto

Barbican

15 September 2013

A new star tenor? An example of his Duke of Mantua, if you are into that. From here.

An inspired concert performance of this dark-tinted drama.

Rigoletto not only announced Verdi's maturity as a dramatic artist, it is also better than most of his subsequent works. Perhaps Victor Hugo's source drama contributes but it is an uncomfortable, wholly Verdian idea to make the audience fall in love with the Duke, quite as much as Gilda does.

The second act is nearly perfect, though so distressing I can only assume applauding interrupting audiences aren't paying sufficient attention. The Duke sympathises with the abducted Gilda, swears vengeance, proclaims a new leaf, and is entirely convinced of it himself, according to the music. When he learns the girl was abducted for his benefit, he quickly forgets about her distress and focuses on his upcoming pleasure. When we finally see Gilda the tense duet with her father makes it clear she has been raped. Rigoletto gets bitter pleasure from the thought of vengeance, but the suddenly banal music shows it is a weak compensation.

Admittedly Gilda is a pathetic figure, of a type the composer avoided using again until his Desdemona, who is much more spirited. What might properly be her tragedy is transferred instead to her father, a more complex and unlikeable figure, even compared to the Duke.

It may be a flaw that we are manipulated into caring more for the two most unpleasant characters – the Duke and his jester – than for the person who sacrifices herself at the end. The drama’s verdict is damning. Both the fortunate sybarite and the wretched waspish Rigoletto survive, indeed thrive in some form, while the innocent lover sacrifices herself without meaning.

Given the bleak situation throughout the work, in direct contrast to at least the singing of the Duke and Gilda, this is much more of a conductor’s opera than is typically supposed. Recordings by Giulini and Sinopoli should have established that, and the recent Covent Garden performances with Eliot Gardiner confirm it.

I didn’t find Gianandrea Noseda quite as convincing as Eliot Gardiner, but my memory may be faulty, for it was still a very impressive performance with the LSO, even if they were reduced to ‘opera pit’ size. Only a few times did the prominence of the on-stage orchestra threaten to overwhelm the singing, but Noseda maintained the necessary momentum and when needed obtained suitably vigorous climaxes.

The cast were excellent, with some genuinely impressive acting, despite this being a concert performance. A highlight was when Rigoletto turns his back on his newly disgraced daughter: a response both understandable and horrific.

Dmitri Platanias was open-throated in the title role, and this is surely the only way to do it, much as it might wreak havoc with the voice. Desirée Rancatore was a limpid, girlish Gilda, though hers is a lyric not dramatic soprano voice. Saimir Pirgu’s Duke was appealing in both voice and appearance. Smaller roles were taken well.

Brahms, Mozart, Mahler: concert

 St Alfege's church, Greenwich

14 September 2013

First movement of Brahms' clarinet trio, in a classic performance by Kell, Pini and Kentner. 

From here.

Ambitious and interesting free concerts showing that even the largest scale works can be given revealing performances in more intimate surroundings.

My heart sank when I learned that instead of Schoenberg’s Transfigured Night, the Kantati Ensemble were going to play a chamber version of Mahler’s First Symphony complete their free concert in Hawksmoor’s relatively intimate St Alfege’s Greenwich.

My fears proved mistaken. Undoubtedly some weight was lost, but the cramped acoustics ensured that conductor Lee Reynolds carefully worked up to the climaxes. And this helped strengthen the performance: I think Mahler benefits from a measured, rather than rhapsodic or excitable approach.

As this quixotic programme selection indicates, his rise in popularity and esteem continues. Perhaps his musical anxiety and neurosis reflects our present condition, but I don’t believe this is what we feel when while we listen. Surely his success is due to his sheer sound, the remarkable lyricism and orchestral colour combined with resounding climaxes.

Mahler’s makes famously original use of the different sections of the orchestra, so that a chamber version really highlights that variety.

The first is his most straightforwardly enjoyable work, also relatively unambitious, so didn’t lose as much with reduced forces. Chamber orchestras rarely get to make so much noise, but on the evidence of this performance they can produce revealing performances of these orchestral monsters.

Before the interval, Mozart’s fifth violin concerto made an interesting, perhaps unintentional comparison. Ideas are thrown around with a similar profligacy, but the effect is different. Mozart certainly didn’t intend to throw his audience around, as Mahler did.

Soloist Beatrice Philips gave a sweet-sounding, quasi-romantic account of the violin part, though this is not an inspired work: I assume the composer wanted to write it for piano instead.

A desultory performance of the same composer’s Figaro overture opened the concert, but in fact this industrious ensemble had already provided a more effective opening an hour before, as three of its members played Brahm’s masterful Clarinet Trio in the same church.

Here the comparison with Mahler was explicit. The programme pointed out that both composers used a ländler in the works we heard, and handled them very differently. And the finale of the chamber piece prefigures later rhythmic developments. Brahms the progressive, indeed.

This is a subdued work, far removed from the exertions of Mahler (the programme notes plausibly suggest the latter was attempting to blow Brahms out of the water with his first). It was given a committed performance, though given the venue I would have liked softer playing.

West Side Story

Sadler's Wells theatre

12 September 2013

The trailer, which gives some idea of the drama's vitality, and wetness. From here.

Authentic, youthful production captures the impact of the astonishing original, but 55 years on, there is room for improvement.

The first thing to note about this revival is that it is taking place at Sadler’s Wells rather than say English National Opera. And that is appropriate, because although composer Leonard Bernstein and lyricist Stephen Sondheim contribute significantly to the effect of this work, the words and music are rather less important than Jerome Robbin’s choreography.

Which isn’t to say that the words and music aren’t effective – some of the finest songs in the Broadway canon, and Bernstein produced a masterpiece in his dance music, which captures youthful energy and brashness as no other music does.

But this drama is weaker than its parts, and relies more on the dancing to maintain interest than the music, the lyrics or the text itself. The first part feels overlong, and is required to cover too much ground, right up to two murders, which feels at least as tragic as Tony’s death at the end of the second part.

In the second part, the marvellous comic number Gee, Officer Krupke does not operate in the Shakespearean manner of diffusing tension but rather seems crassly inappropriate, especially as these are not ‘low characters’ irrelevant to the main plot but the Jets, who have been involved in a murder earlier that night. Sophisticated rhymes seem wildly inappropriate.

Some of the most serious dramatic weaknesses could be salvaged in a less reverential production: the dated slang, or the painfully chic Somewhere dream sequence. The final procession, hinting at reconciliation, should be ditched. In Romeo and Juliet hope is spoken, not shown, thus leaving it open to justified doubt after so many deaths.

The visuals are the absolute highlight of this near-masterpiece, and have dated the least, except in the trivial sense that Robbins’ moves have been widely imitated. Overall, the work is part of the US invention of the teenager throughout the 1950s, and strikes me as the greatest description of teenage energy and futility we have.

Someday, somewhere, somebody will update the setting, remove the sogginess and produce a version that properly respects what is great about the piece. Until then, if we must have dusty museum performances that undermine the original freshness, let them be as good as this one.

As usual with music theatre, there is one vital caveat: the unnecessary amplification. It seemed to me that even the energetic dancers could probably project clearly without it, so good were they, and so the amplification does harm by effectively generalising their voices and preventing an unmediated understanding of who on stage in singing.

But the singing was fine, the accents authentic (so vital, I think, in US music theatre) and there was the pep so vital in the key numbers such as America, while A Boy Like That was as urgent and distressing as it ought to be.

It is rare to experience Broadway music theatre in London rather than an anglicised approximation. The difference is important, and this is the real thing.

Much ado about nothing

Old Vic theatre

7 September - 30 November 2013

James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave an untypically  elderly Benedick and Beatrice.

When only Dogberry sparkles, a production of this comedy must be a failure, despite some interesting ideas. 

In the one brilliant idea in Mark Rylance’s production, the moment when Claudio accuses Hero of being a whore – on their wedding day, to maximise the pain, as Beatrice points out – the association with Othello is visually reinforced. Claudio, and his friends, are played entirely by black actors. Hero’s circle is white.

In both Othello and Much Ado, catastrophe results from sexual jealousy on absurdly weak grounds. If sense is restored in this comedy, in some ways that is actually less justifiable than in the tragedy.

What motivates Leonato’s horrifying response when he believes his daughter has deceived him? After she has witnessed these rages from her father and future husband, can Hero genuinely forgive and forget?

So “much ado”, even if it were about something, rather than nothing. This other great exploration of sexual jealousy is just as shocking as Othello, though the author stabilises us by adding the wonderful Dogberry and company at the key moment.

The catastrophe is almost impossible to ruin in the theatre, and this production conveys its power, thanks principally to a marvellous performance of Michael Elwyn as Leonato.

That Claudio is subsequently willing to marry practically anyone, so long as he can reduce his guilt over this catastrophe, provides the Shakespearean uneasiness over endings in marriage.

This is ingeniously signposted by the parallel betrothal of Beatrice and Benedick, and the boisterous expectation of infidelity. Given prior events and with Othello in our mind, theirs is a healthy attitude, though nihilistic, raising the question of quite why they decide to give in to each other.

New light is shone on this question by the production’s major innovation: having the bickering lovers played by James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave, 82 and 76 respectively.

“The world must be peopled” is Benedick’s rejection of his sempiternal batchelorhood, but it can be peopled without marriage. Perhaps he is thinking of the effect being a bastard has on the villainous Don John. Here, given their considerable ages, Benedick’s argument is especially unconvincing.

Unfortunately neither actor is especially convincing in these roles, which are the glory of the drama. Redgrave has the stronger part, as usual with this author, and does more with it, but the prose is especially hard to bring off in the theatre, and much of their bickering was lost on me.

When actors fear Shakespeare’s now-archaic jokes are going to fall flat, they are tempted to broad physical comedy, and Rylance should have reined this in. There is a difference between two elderly actors rejecting the dignity we assume they must want, and actors of any age whatsoever behaving like buffoons to get a  laugh.

The setting is 1940s England, with Don Pedro and his team being African-American airmen stationed in a cosy English village. In fact, cosy is the word for at least the whole first half, which was so enervated I struggled to maintain any interest at all.

If after the interval things picked up, at no point did they fizz as needed in a witty comedy.

Othello

National Theatre

23 April – 5 October 2013

Rory Kinnear (Iago), Adrian Lester (Othello). Photo by Johan Persson.

In failing to make sense of the key characters, this contemporary Othello is a relative failure, though that doesn’t significantly reduce the powerful impact of this tragedy in the theatre.

Since FR Leavis argued that Othello is clearly supposed to be a villain, the older view, which rather took the hero’s own position that he loved not wisely, but too well, has been harder to maintain, at least in the theatre.

I think this is partly due to our mistrust of heroism. In Nicolas Hytner’s updated production, the Venetian general is in the British army, in either Iraq or Afghanistan, and consequently wears combat fatigues. This pretty much guarantees he will be seen as ambiguous, if not downright villainous, as soon as he wears them.

Luckily this isn’t how we first see him, after he has successfully wed Desdemona. He wears a smart suit, looks attractive and seductive, although not necessarily heroic.

I don’t think the creative team intended to confirm Leavis’ interpretation, but that only reveals the pitfalls of modern productions of this drama. The central conceit, that a supposedly great man kills his wife in a rage of sexual jealousy over a handkerchief, might be thought almost too absurd, though it is clear to me that the author was fully serious, including stressing Othello’s genuine greatness.

I take the drama as an attempt to illustrate the degradation of a great man and the sickening reality of murder. Iago, who tends to dominate the drama with his multiple soliloquies, is too quick-witted a creation if we assume Othello is credulous. A malevolent buffoon does not need an honest Iago to lead him by the nose.

Undoubtedly Shakespeare did not help a modern producer or actor in trying to convey his central character’s positive qualities. At the beginning, and then pathetically at the end, Othello reaches great poetic heights, but otherwise he is perhaps undercharacterised.

Gravitas, charisma; these are the essentials in playing Othello, and sadly these are not parts of Adrian Lester’s performance. There are many fine details, but these tend towards the Leavis view, as when he essentially bullies his men after striking Desdemona in public. Conversely, he makes too little of some of the greatest lines, such as ‘the pity of it Iago’.

Rory Kinnear’s Iago is better, but this is very often the case. A very blokey performance, which makes sense in context, though as usual, it is not easy to see why he is willing to risk so much to destroy Othello, given that he is cunning enough to exploit people like Roderigo with no-one the wiser.

Ideally, an Iago would somehow make his absolute loathing of the moor obvious in almost every scene, and Kinnear doesn’t do that – in fact, he doesn’t convey convincing hatred at any point. This seems a mistake.

As if to compound criticism of Shakespeare’s characterisation in this drama, Desdemona is also a fairly passive thing, which makes her on stage murder all the more shocking, even now.

But the actress can grant her greater presence than does Olivia Vinall, who creates a convincingly flirtatious teenager, but one who is merely petulant in response to her husband’s mistreatment, thereby avoiding the possibilities of being either noble or pitiable.

After all this, Emilia’s characterisation would surely be unimportant, except she somehow connives with Iago over the without handkerchief connecting this to later events. I didn’t see this explained through Lyndsey Marshal’s portrayal, though Hytner highlights the fateful handkerchief theft appropriately.

The production has many good touches, such as Othello’s epilepsy taking place in a lavatory. And the final scene is indestructibly powerful and affecting. Finding fault in a performance of Shakespeare is something to do upon reflection, for in the theatre I am simply grateful for the overwhelming experience.

Bach, Bruckner: concert

Royal Albert Hall

6 September 2013

Looking suitably excited, Maazel conducting the finale of Bruckner's eighth, with the Bavarian Radio Symphony Orchestra. 

From here.

Resounding night-before-the Last-Night Prom.

I spent the majority of the Bruckner 8 in a state of rapt attention, in what I imagine would be a suggestible hypnotic state. It is an effect peculiar to Bruckner, and different from the state that, say Gorecki or Glass can induce with their slow or fast repetitions respectively.

Unlike our contemporary long-spanned composers, Bruckner is not exploring a single emotional state at great length. His symphonies are intensely dramatic, in the line of Beethoven, and actually the older school of Brucknerians, archetypally Furtwängler, created a much less rhapsodic effect with extreme tempo fluctuations.

The current tradition in playing these masterpieces is a steady, broad pulse with emphasis on projecting their astonishing grandeur. As happens here, this risks downplaying the significance of the final climax of the first movement, a moment of terrible crisis which haunts the following two movements and is only resolved after a struggle in the finale.

In other Proms concerts, some members of the audience applaud particular movements, and this is understandable. Here, I doubt anyone imagined applauding until the end of this enormous work, and this could either reflect the exhaustion we feel after each movement, or our awareness that the symphony must obviously continue, to resolve in some way.

The Royal Albert Hall felt saturated with sound, a wondrous experience, and I assume that conductor Lorin Maazel must take some credit for this, as the ‘sound’ of a work is one of the areas in which he is highly regarded. I imagine the Vienna Philharmonic could play this music in their sleep, and so deserve even more of the credit.

The finale is a great challenge, and part of this is because Bruckner must have found it formidably difficult to compose, much as he later did with sketches of a finale for his ninth. What can properly relieve the previous three movements, most especially the intensity of the preceding slow movement?

I didn’t notice any great difficulties in the tricky transitions in the finale, though I did wonder if Maazel had really plumbed the depths and heights in the slow movement. But the only serious blemish was the trio in the second movement, driven too hard and fast.

The first part of the concert was almost inevitably obliterated in comparison, but was a thoughtful example of programming: Bach organ works and transcriptions, played by Bruckner’s current successor as organist in St Florian.

Klaus Sonnleitner grappled with the unwieldy brute of an organ, hardly optimised for Bach, and produced excellent results. His encore was much better suited to the instrument, but that didn’t matter. The sense that Bruckner was at the organ, as indeed he was in 1871, was a magical prelude to what I believe is the greatest of orchestral works.