PLAYBOY OF THE WESTERN WORLD
Abbey Players
September 1990
Seeing the Abbey
Players perform John Millington Synge’s Playboy of the Western World is
akin to watching the Moscow Art Theatre do Chekhov or the Berliner Ensemble do
Brecht. It just seems to be part of
them: they aren’t so much acting as remembering and reliving a collective
heritage. Historically, of course, this
is so. Dublin’s Abbey Theatre, dubbed
the National Theatre of Ireland, premiered Playboy in 1907, and has
continued to present Synge’s works, along with those of other Irish authors,
ever since. This material does belong to
them, and they cherish it, as the performance at the Eisenhower Theatre of
Washington, D.C.’s John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts demonstrates.
The story of Synge’s
most famous play is simple enough. Young
Christy Mahon stumbles into the tavern of Michael James Flaherty (the set is by
Noel Sheridan) and confesses that he is running from the “polis” because he has
mur-dered his father. After the
townsfolk, particularly the young girls, make a hero of him, Old Mahon turns
up, alive but with a crack in his skull, and the villagers turn on
Christy. There are half a dozen
interpretations of the play’s meaning, including seeing Christy as a Christ
figure, a Don Quixote, or a new Ireland rising up against its old masters,
England and the Catholic Church. Synge (1871-1909)
has never given credence to any of these, saying, “I follow Goethe’s rule, to
tell no one what one means in one’s writings.”
He did say that he “wrote the play because it pleased me,” and that it
was “made to amuse” his audience. The
current Abbey production, directed by Vincent Dowling on a small but evocative
set by Noel Sheridan, does this with a vengeance.
All the performances
are praiseworthy, each actor finding the little idiosyncrasies and character
traits that make even the briefest appearances alive and integral to the life
on stage. At the center of the
production are Frank McCusker as Christy and Roma Downey as Pegeen Mike. Downey is simultaneously romantic and strong,
a dreamer who despises the weak, sniveling suitor, Shawn Keogh (Macdara O
Fatharta) picked for her by her father (John Cowley). She has a sweet face that turns a pout into
an irresistible magnet, but she can set her jaw and mount a steely glare that
cows the whole village. It’s no wonder,
in this production, that it is Pegeen Mike of all the fawning village lasses
who attracts Christy. McCusker’s
would-be parricide is a boy-man: tall, blond and lanky with a baby face that
seems most often to be gape-mouthed whenever he isn’t talking. McCusker can effect both the blank gaze of
utter incomprehension and the wide-eyed stare of childlike wonder.
Among the wonderful
character roles with which Synge populated his County Mayo village, cowardly
Shawn Keogh stumbles and trips over his own feet in O Fatharta’s round-eyed
performance and the Widow Quin is both sly and openly lustful as portrayed by
Nuala Hayes. Singling these players out
should not, however, suggest that this company is anything less than a
perfectly integrated ensemble.
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In the end, it is
neither the plot nor the characters which makes the Abbey’s Playboy a
special theatrical experience. It is
Synge’s language in the mouths of actors for whom it is like a mother
tongue. Oscar Wilde, an expatriate Irish
writer, once said, “The English took our land and left it desolate. But we took their language and gave it a new
beauty.” Synge, who immersed himself in
the study of the language of Irish peasants, has written what is arguably among
the most beautiful prose poetry in English literature. It was written to be spoken, and here it is spoken—almost
sung—by people who know and love it.
Listening intensely, you could easily get lost in the thick brogues and
unfamiliar vocabulary (the program includes a glossary), but by allowing the
prose to flow over you, you can enjoy both the lyric beauty of the sounds the
words make and the sense they convey.
The apparent effortlessness of the verbal performances enhances the
enjoyment.
The Abbey has not made
a tour of the U.S. in 55 years. In case
it takes another half-century for them to come back, which Heaven forbid, you
would be doing yourself a favor to try to catch it on its current tour,
arranged by American Theatre Productions, Inc.
After closing in Washington on 21 October, the production moves on to one-
and two-night stands across the mid-west, with stops in the southwest and
south, then closes in Toronto in late November.
(There is a tentative plan to add a Boston stop before returning to
Dublin, but no play dates have been set.)
* *
* *
TWELFTH NIGHT & UNCLE
VANYA
Donmar Warehouse
22 & 30 Jan. 2003
The first
thing about Donmar Warehouse’s Twelfth Night (at the Brooklyn Academy of
Music’s Harvey Theatre) is that it’s not terribly funny most of the time.
(I’d say that’s a problem.) To begin with, Sam Mendes has paced it very
deliberately, as if it were a drama. Aside from the obvious, this also
accentuates the consequences of the Malvolio plot (which has always presented a
problem for me anyway), making it more portentous and horrific than it
otherwise is played. Everything else is played so soberly (Ben Brantley
in the New York Times refers to the style superseding the content,
and I interpret that to mean this effect) that there is little mirth, even
among the buffoons. The songs Feste sings are all also melancholy, even
the drinking song with the two Sirs. I was never under the impression,
even given the Malvolio subplot, that William Shakespeare’s Twelfth Night (1601-02) is a dark comedy.
Brantley mentions the ill-conceived picture fame, which is
practically the only set piece on the stage. (There are a few other
occasional pieces of furniture—tables, chairs, a couch—but the rest of the set
is the twinkling lights he mentions—upstage, forming a background of stars or,
as I interpreted them, the lights of the rest of the town as seen from the two chateaux. The sets are by Anthony Ward and the lighting
design is by Hugh Vanstone, recreated for BAM by David Holmes.)
This huge frame, center stage and silver-gray, becomes an unavoidable
focus of the performance, and it was entirely confusing as to what Mendes means
when a character appears inside it. All the characters—except possibly
Orsino, but I’m not sure—stand in the frame at one time or another. Sometimes they face outward, like a portrait
hanging in one of the living rooms (that’s what I thought it might be at first,
but that doesn’t hold up), and sometimes they have their backs to us.
(Diana, my frequent theater companion, thought Mendes might have been trying to
say something about mistaken identity, which isn’t far from Brantley’s idea
that it was about the way others saw the various characters. I had no idea what to make of it. And
that was a problem of its own—I kept trying to figure it out, distracting me
from what was happening on stage.) In
any case, the device doesn’t work and adds only confusion to the
production—exacerbated by the fact that it’s so prominent.
In the end, it was an interesting production without being
good. If Much Ado is my favorite Shakespeare (1564-1616), Twelfth Night is my second favorite comedy, and this wasn’t really enjoyable—just
curious. Diana thought it was a case of wanting to do Hamlet on
rollerskates, but I suspect Mendes, who ought to be too good for that kind of
conceit, had something more portentous in mind—and it just doesn’t work.
By the way, Brantley spends a lot of his review praising
Simon Russell Beale, the actor who plays Malvolio (and also plays Vanya).
I can’t argue that he’s not a good actor—even an excellent one—but I think
Mendes steered him in an ill-chosen direction here. Until he’s imprisoned
and tormented at the end of the play, Malvolio ought to be a legitimate figure
of ridicule; this Malvolio is unpleasant, a prig and a martinet—but not
funny. It’s of a piece with the whole production.
———
Well, the Donmar’s Uncle Vanya is an interesting experience to try to
describe—or evaluate, I guess. All the parts of the performance of the
classic play (1899-1900) by Anton Chekhov (1860-1904) were good, even
excellent. The acting was superb, and the physical production was nicely
conceived. Even the music (live) worked
nicely with the show. Brian Friel’s translation is very good—contemporary
without being anachronistic—and nicely poetic. What was the problem,
then? Like Twelfth Night, it was slowly paced and deliberate, but that didn’t seem wrong in
this case—even if the show went for three hours. I can only say that
Mendes fell into the Vanya trap. The play’s about boredom; a play
about boredom can’t end up being boring. In spite of all the good
elements that made up the production, it added up to a lassitude that was
self-defeating. I don’t know how else to explain it. What’s more, I
don’t think I’d know how to fix it, either. The shame here is that the
work is so good in all other respects. The acting really is an object
lesson in 19th-century Realism and the casting is superb: everyone just made
their roles fit like gloves. I can’t say it was too slow—like the Twelfth
Night, which I thought was—but I
don’t know what made it work so unsatisfyingly in the end. I feel
inadequate because I can’t diagnose the problem; I feel like I should be able
to. (I suppose it’s proof that a theater production is more than the sum
of its parts.)
*
* * *
GHOSTS
Royal
Dramatic Theatre of Sweden
11
June 2003
Before I report on Ingmar
Bergman’s production of Henrik Ibsen’s Ghosts at BAM’S Harvey Lichtenstein Theater, let me tell you a few things about his
translation and adaptation. First, this staging is based on Bergman’s own
translation, not some existing text. Second, he amended it—with some
scenes from two Strindberg plays and one scene he wrote himself. (I wasn’t
as familiar with the text as I thought; I didn’t recognize for sure which
scenes weren’t Ghosts.) The
program note, at least the part that I got to read before the show started,
didn’t say if Bergman also cut some of Ibsen’s text to accommodate the
additions. The play ran 2½ hours, but that only seems right—even short,
perhaps—for an Ibsen; that suggests he might have cut some to allow for his
inserts.
Third, he has
clearly sexed up the play some. Oswald (Jonas Malmsjö) and Regine (Angela
Kovács) are pretty randy: he runs after her relentlessly, feels her up and down
and jumps on her, usually between her legs, at every opportunity. Manders
(Jan Malmsjö) and Mrs. Alving (Pernilla
August) aren’t exactly passionate on stage, except for one Hollywood kiss that’s
far from paternal, but it’s clear from the text that she did try to entice him
to take her into his home—and, presumably, his bed—when she briefly leaves
Alving after his fling with Regina’s mother. They are also clearly closer
friends from years past than most conventional productions indicate: she calls
him Gabriel (I didn’t even know he had a first name), and Oswald calls him
Uncle Gabriel. Finally, it’s not sexual, but in the end, Oswald strips
off his clothes in the throes of a syphilitic attack and rolls around the stage
nude before his mother. It’s not a sexual moment, but it’s decidedly
un-Victorian, even, I suspect, for Scandinavians—either Norwegian or
Swedish. Oh, and Bergman’s text had a lot of vulgarity I know Ibsen (1828-1906) never used; one character even yelled “Fuck
you” at Mrs. Alving (though I don’t know what she said in Swedish, of course).
I make these
observations because, as you might have expected, I had Leo Shapiro’s
production on my mind [see my report “Staging Classic Plays: Traditional or
Experimental? (SHALIKO’S GHOSTS, 1975,”
6 September 2014) and the contretemps he had with the New York Times’ Walter Kerr and other critics who accused him of “messing
around with Ibsen,” as one review headline put it. The sexiness was
castigated pointedly, though Shapiro didn’t change the text (he used a Rolf
Fjelde translation). Now, I suppose an argument can be made that a “great
artist” like Bergman can “mess around” with Ghosts,
but an upstart like Shapiro has no business doing it. I won’t buy it, but
you could argue it. And Bergman has the temerity to fool with Ibsen’s
text adding in Strindberg—whom Ibsen didn’t much like, I don’t believe—and
words of his own. Now, that’s arrogant. (The word “bowdlerize”
comes to mind—derived from the name of Dr. Thomas Bowdler who “improved”
Shakespeare in the early 19th century by expurgating “offensive” bits. I’m
also reminded of a German practice of the 19th and early 20th century in which
works like Shakespeare’s were published in versions verbessert—that is, “improved”—by an
editor.) Now, I’m not offended by Bergman’s having done this—just by the
opprobrium heaped on Shapiro for doing much less. It’s the hypocrisy,
stupid.
Now, as for the
production itself: it was a disappointment. Once again, the acting was
terrific, but the actors were subverted by one choice Bergman made that seemed
ill-advised. His main set, designed by Gören Wassberg, is a revolve, with
three playing areas wedged into it. (There’s a little area on stage
right, with an upholstered chair and an end table, which is used in conjunction
with some of the revolving areas when appropriate, and Mrs. Alving is seated
there, quietly, in the first scene when Regina and her father have a scene down
center. Now, the problem with this set-up is that, except for one open
playing area, the set pieces restrict the actors to a tiny little space at
the front of the turntable (plus a little platform in front of
that). There’s no room to do any movements, and Ghosts is a talky play
with little innate action.
The first act, which
took place mostly on or in front of a sofa (area “one,” if you like) and around
or in front of a small table (area “two”), was virtually enervating; act two
was a little more active—Bergman used area “three” more—an open floor bordered
on each side by a small bench and chair, and there were more three- and even
four-character scenes. But it was still essentially a static
production. As my companion, Diana, pointed out, we felt little of the
emotion that the characters seemed to be feeling on stage—it was remote and
cold for all the realism of the acting. I blame the staging for most of
this. It is, however, exacerbated by having to listen through earphones,
which makes the dialogue flat, but also very prominent—it’s right in your
ear. (In past experiences with translations, the devices haven’t
caused this sensation by themselves, so I attribute the effect to the
production, but increased by the earphones.)
(I was thinking of Bertolt
Brecht, of course. Alienation works in Brecht’s own stuff and
others’, but I don’t think it works in Ibsen. I think Ibsen intended us
to feel along with the characters, to identify with them. That’s
precisely what Brecht didn’t want—identification. I saw a
production of Ghosts
at Arena in D.C. in 1997, directed by Liviu Ciulei, in which he tried to turn
the play into a Symbolist drama—stuff was hanging from the ceilings. It
doesn’t work—Ibsen’s not a Symbolist, he’s a Realist. I don’t think
you can make those kinds of wholesale shifts in major style without either
damaging the play or doing some heavy rewriting/reconceiving. Turning
Ibsen into Brecht is the same thing. Not all plays are as flexible as the
Greeks and Shakespeare—even great classics. What Shapiro did, from what I
can tell, is heighten the Realism in a sense. I don’t think Shapiro
violated Ibsen’s spirit; he took it the next few steps along the
continuum. I’m not sure that’s what Bergman did. Ciulei certainly
didn’t.)
Bergman was also
obviously doing something with the color scheme, but I haven’t figured that out
yet. The whole set was green—the carpet, the drapes, the upholstery, the
table cloth, the column and sculpture in the background, the lampshades—and the
characters seemed to be wearing symbolically-colored costumes designed by Anna
Bergman. The Alvings were in gray—for ghosts, I’d guess. Oswald
even had what appeared to be grayish make-up—for his illness, to be sure, but
also ghostly. Regina’s father (Örjan Ramberg) was in brown, the color of
earth, and I interpret that as an indication of his basic goodness and honesty,
at least in contrast to the other characters who are all duplicitous and
corrupt one way or another (either by their actions or by heredity).
Regine is in various shades of red (though not scarlet), which I take to be an
indication of her lustiness and slight shamelessness—but this isn’t at all a
secure interpretation because it doesn’t entirely fit. The one I don’t
get at all, not even remotely, is Manders, who’s all in purple (even his hat
and shoes!). Now, purple is the color of royalty or nobility, richness,
or passion—none of which fit Manders at all. But the colors are so
clearly selected for a purpose other than just decoration, and purple is
certainly not a common color for any man, especially a pastor (he’s not
a monsignor or bishop—it’s the wrong denomination; besides it’s a suit, not a
clerical robe).
Still, as I said,
Bergman is always provocative, even when he doesn’t work. I didn’t think the production worked on its
own level, but seeing Bergman try to say something of his own through the play
was worth it. I’ll be interested to see what the reviews say.
They may be in today’s papers, since this was opening and the show only plays
through the 14th. (And it was sold out—people were out front looking for
spare tickets. On the other hand, some people left at intermission.)
I didn’t see Shapiro’s
Ghosts in ’75—I
had only just gotten here and didn’t know what was happening around yet, and I
was in grad school at Rutgers in those days, often 10-15 hours a day—but from
what I’ve read and seen in photos, whatever liberties he may have taken with
the spirit of 19th-century Norway, it was more exciting as theater than Bergman’s
take. And Shapiro, too, was working on something concrete: it wasn’t “Hamlet on roller-skates,”
as it were. (To be fair, of course, not all the critics lambasted Shapiro’s
show—but the ones who did were the big names.)
———
The New York Times review of Bergman’s
Ghosts was in
Thursday’s paper, 12 June. Aside from anything else, it says that this is
supposed to be Bergman’s last stage production. Ben Brantley’s never
really said how he felt about the production. I mean, it’s fairly
obvious, I guess, that he liked it for the most part, but he didn’t actually
say so.
* *
* *
THE TAMER TAMED
Royal Shakespeare Company
13
January 2004
While I was in Washington
for the holidays last year, I saw the Royal Shakespeare Company’s production at
the Kennedy Center’s Eisenhower Theater of The
Tamer Tamed (first published in 1647, but written
perhaps between 1609 and 1622), a sequel to Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew by John
Fletcher (1579-1625). (Think Lysistrata
meets Shrew.
Except that it’s awful.) There’s a word
often used to describe bad theater, and it is very apt for Tamer Tamed: leaden.
It just lay there lifeless. The RSC tried so hard to animate it—the
reviews all focused on the performances—that they ended up looking just manic,
as if they were trying desperately to bring a dead body back to life.
There’s not a single line of poetry or even memorable prose; not one
attractive, or even sympathetic, character; and a one-joke plot (the women are
all denying the men sex) that reduces everyone to a cipher. I couldn’t
even keep most of the characters straight—but that was mostly because I didn’t
really care. Not only wasn’t it funny, it wasn’t even clever. I
repeat a caveat I’ve used numerous times: often an unknown or neglected play is
unknown and neglected because
it’s bad!!! Why RSC decided to dredge this one up
is a mystery to me.
* *
* *
IMAGINARY INVALID
Comédie-Française
14 June 2004
Well, I’m batting
1.000! Even the Comédie-Française was a disappointment. Can ya beat
that? (And, then, why would you want to?)
There was a short
article in the “Arts & Leisure” section on 6 June (“An Intricate Malady From the House of Molière”) that pointed out that the company is
broadening its base by doing some contemporary stuff and using outside
directors. This guy, Claude Stratz, is Swiss German and it’s his first
encounter with both the Comédie-Française and Molière. This may have turned
out to be a mistake—the latter more than the former, perhaps. I’m not
sure what he was up to, exactly, but whatever it was it didn’t really work.
I can’t really
say that the play wasn’t funny because I don’t know if it was or not.
(I’ll try to explain this in a mo.) I don’t know Imaginary Invalid (1673) by heart or anything, but I do know
Molière some. My French isn’t good enough to comprehend the 17th-century
poetry without a trot—and the Brooklyn Academy of Music did provide supertitles
at the Harvey, but even that was a problem for me—but I can get the gist of
what’s going on what with my familiarity with the play and all. I may
have tittered once or twice, but more from a line than anything someone did on
stage.
I had two problems
even seeing/watching what was going on on stage, as a matter of fact.
First, those supertitles: they’re so high above the stage floor that it’s
impossible to read them and watch the stage at the same time. You have to
choose between watching the actors and trying to understand the French, or
reading the translation but missing all the action. (And the supertitles
went by pretty fast—I have the impression, too, that the actors spoke fast as
well—so trying to glance up and then down doesn’t work at all. That only
ends up being like watching a flick that’s missing some frames while listening
to a soundtrack with gaps in it—and the gaps don’t match!
Sometimes—often—I felt like I might as well have stayed home and read the
script. I think I would have preferred either headphone translation, even
though that means you can’t hear the actual actors very well, or side titles
(which some operas use now instead of overhead supertitles). Either case
would have at least meant I could have kept my eyes on the stage.
The other problem
with seeing the action on stage was that the director had lit the play so dimly
(by Jean-Phillippe Roy) that I really couldn’t see very well even when I
was watching the actors. The lighting scheme seemed to be that Argan
keeps his house unlit and the only light there is filters through the curtained
windows. Aside from making everything hard to see, this also gives
the play a somber feeling more conducive to Macbeth
or something Gothic than a Molière farce. There were, in fact, no colors
on the set and few in the costumes (Argan’s wife wears a blood-red dress),
either—everything was subdued and grim. (Both set and costumes were
designed by Ezio Toffolutti.) Umm—comedy anyone? Ever heard of it? (I
hate to get ethnic here, but maybe asking a German to direct a comedy isn’t
such a hot idea. Name me a German stage comedy, or even a Swiss German one.)
Margo Jefferson in
the Times on 11 June said that what was missing was
“lightness.” (I don’t think she had the illumination in mind,
however. But she gets megapoints for having written the only review I
ever remember reading that quotes Italo Calvino! Very erudite. [See my post “Calvino Is To The Mind What
Exercise Is To The Body,” 14 and 17 March 2016.] I wasn’t entirely sure
what she meant by that when I read the review, and I still don’t after seeing
the play, but something was certainly amiss. I don’t know if the cast was
too earnest, or if they were trying to play Realism, or if they were just going
too fast to have any fun. (I don’t mean to place all the blame on the
actors—surely it was the director who conceived all this, whatever it
was.) I might have been able to analyze the problem(s) better if I had
been able to watch (and see, for God’s sake) what was going on on the stage
consistently, but I have already explained why I had trouble doing that.
Even while I was watching (ahem), I kept wondering why I wasn’t enjoying
this—what was going wrong. (The very fact that I was busy wondering this
while the play was going on is telling, I think.) I still haven’t figured
it out—maybe because I just didn’t see it—literally.
I hate to stress the
non-performance problems, like lighting and supertitles, but I have another
complaint that I think contributed to—or exacerbated—the trouble with this
show. It was a full two hours long, but it had no intermission. It
wasn’t a matter of attention span, but of fanny fatigue. (BAM’s seats, at
least at the Harvey, are less than plush.) And sitting for two straight
hours is enervating, even if there are no other problems. I always figure
a 90-minute stretch is about as long as an audience ought to go without an
intermission. (As a result of this three-act marathon—at least as far as
I could tell, this was the cause—people started leaving the auditorium about
two-thirds of the way through the show. I don’t know if they left the
theater or just had to hit the john and then found seats near the entrances so
they didn’t have to pass in front of the rest of us again, or what, but about a
dozen or so spectators started moving out from different parts of the theater
at about the same time.)
You shouldn’t assume
from this that everyone sat stone-faced. Many in the audience seemed to
enjoy the performance, and it was probably too large a number for them all to
have been Francophones. Language, by the
way, should not have been a barrier for me. I have seen many shows in
languages I don’t understand at all, like Swedish and Bulgarian and even Marathi
(the language spoken in Maharashtra State, India), and have enjoyed them
immensely. Indeed, a Lithuanian play I saw some years ago, The Square by Eimuntas Nekrosius (produced
by the State Theater of Lithuania in Vilnius) was one of the best theatrical experiences
I’ve ever had, and it remains with me even today as a vivid impression.
Obviously, if there weren’t also something else important missing from Invalid at BAM, the language/translation thing
wouldn’t have been a problem, would it? It loomed larger than it really
was, I’m sure, because the production was so lacking.
I still don’t know
what wasn’t working—I can’t pinpoint it, and that bothers me. Hell, I’ve seen English-language productions
that I haven’t understood at all, so language isn’t always the big impediment,
is it? That Bulgarian play, Retro, a comedy (by Russian playwright Alexander Galin presented by the
Ivan Vasov National Theatre of Sofia) that was part of the Theatre of Nations
in Baltimore in ’86, had no translation or supertitles (which weren’t yet
common), but I “understood” everything that was going on because the acting,
which was classic—and superb—Stanislavsky Realism, was so good and clear that
the words were virtually unnecessary. [I think I mentioned this
experience in my report “Theatre of Nations: Baltimore, 1986,” republished on Rick On Theater on 10 November 2014.]
I can’t remember now if the Marathi performance I saw at TON, Vijay Tendulkar’s
Ghashiram Kotwal (Theatre
Academy of Pune), had a translation other than the synopsis in the
program (which the Bulgarian play also had) but I followed that, too. (I
seem to recall that none of the Theatre of Nations performances had
translations—the organizers decided that the technology was too complex for the
many venues, a number of which were either outdoors or in non-traditional
theater spaces. In any case, I don’t recall having had any problems with
comprehension at all. But, then, I could see those shows!)
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