Twelfth Night: Comprehensive Guide

At the time of writing, there are various productions of Twelfth Night going on: The National, Salisbury, Globe ...  and the Winchester players are taking it to the Minack in Cornwall this summer. And of course thousands of school students have the joy of being examined on it. So, here is my guide to the play, scene-by-scene, published as a downloadable, photocopiable resource by zigzag. Hope someone, somewhere, finds it useful.

https://zigzageducation.co.uk/synopses/7517-twelth-night-comprehensive-guide-as-a-level-english

How to Read a Poem

I'm delighted to be involved in this short guide to reading poetry. It was quite a collaborative effort. I was able to draw on excellent work by Andrew Hodgson, the thoughts of Caroline Moore, and the editorial work of Jon Connell. The result is intended to be accessible for readers from 13 upwards. It's published simultaneously with the snappy, sensible guide How to Write Well by journalist Tim de Lisle. Connell Guides aim to help those facing exams, but to go well beyond exam mentality. If this helps readers young or old find or refresh their confidence and pleasure in poetry, then it will have done its job.

https://www.connellguides.com/products/the-connell-guide-to-how-to-read-a-poem

The Threepenny Opera

I was up at the National Theatre at the weekend for the New Views teachers' course, and a trip to The Threepenny Opera was thrown in. Never one to turn down an evening with Brecht and Weill featuring gangsters, beggars and prostitutes, I happily grabbed the ticket, realizing I'd only ever heard, but never seen, this Weimar masterpiece. Once, when the earth was in an earlier stage of its development, I wrote an A Level thesis, unpretentiously entitled 'Art in the Weimar Republic: Development and Dissemination'. Memories flooded in of the Bauhaus, of the Expressionists, and of those merry souls Beckmann, Grosz and Dix. The designers had clearly been looking at the same images: the look of Celia Peachum here, for example, was clearly modelled on Dix's portrait of Anita Berber, and Peachum's hairpiece was the exact same style as sported by Dix's wife Martha. Although the piece had been transposed in the script to London (not, perhaps, such a leap from the festering rancour of 20s Berlin to modern hard-Brexiting  Britain), it was a German twenties visual we saw, and all the stronger for it.

As for the work itself, it's hard to get a grip on. Taking off from Gay's A Beggar's Opera, which parodied the operatic conventions of the day with a story featuring a highwayman as hero and a medley of popular songs, The Threepenny Opera is a satire based on satire. It's very very knowing and self-conscious about what it's doing.  Over its own genesis the work turned from being mainly a musical to a play with musical numbers, the main credit shifting from Weill to Brecht. What is it now? An anti-musical, perhaps one might call it, a feel-bad show (as MacHeath reminded us, verfremdungheitingly out of character, when we dutifully came back for the second half). It promises at the outset that no moral ending is envisaged, and throughout laughs knowingly at its own operatic formulae. Choruses, duos, arias are all poured out in a thick tar of  cabaret songs, delivered with a snarl, and rendered naughtily delightful by an exhilarating set of obscene lyrics provided by translator / adapter Simon Stephens. And at the end, a deus ex machina and a parting moral are provided, the first for a laugh and the second for, perhaps, real. Brechtian alienation is a more dynamic thing than we are sometimes told, I think: instead of keeping us at a kind of arm's length from emotional engagement, it draws us in and then pushes us away again. Passages of bleak realism are undercut with a caustic joke or piece of knowing stage action; a storyline involves us then calls attention to its unreality.


The production itself made full use of the Olivier space, building up from a backstage look of platforms and flats to some clever designs, which quickly assemble and equally quickly collapse. Rory Kinnear was a suitably seductive MacHeath, who we can't hate as much as we know we should (I hear what he did at Kandahar and I still want him to escape - what's wrong with me? Aha! thus is the Brechtian mirror held up to my self-contradicting little mind). That's partly because those after him are if anything even worse, and because the world of sewers can, logically, only produce the sewer-dwelling rodent. There is a problem, though, in hammering on at length about how squalid and corrupt the world is and I must admit, by the end of the very long first half the songs were starting to sound pretty much the same as each other and to say the same things over and over again. Powerfully delivered, though. Nice - by which I mean not nice - movement work, neat differentiation of characters among MacHeath's gang, some fine choreography in, for example, the arrest of our vile yet strangely dashing hero. Still, that first half did feel long. The second was tighter,  the story coiling  around us. There was no escaping the sense of the play's bold, blustery bigness by the end. Great programme essay, too, by Dan Rebellato, on why we need Brecht today. His first reason is that Brecht is fun - it's the fun of kicking over a sandcastle and making, say, a sand abattoir instead. That sort of fun. But what was left after the fun, that evening? A sense of self-satisfaction at having seen a European classic at the National? Is the socially probing mischief lost among the well-heeled theatregoers of today's London theatre? Has the anti-classic simply joined the dinner party as another member of the canon? Well, Brecht would want me to be leaving with that kind of question, I suppose, hastening down the tunnel past Imax to catch the 10.35, developing and disseminating as I go.

Romeo and Juliet

Before the live streaming of the Kenneth Branagh production of Romeo and Juliet there were some brief video interviews with teenagers. The interviewees were asked what was best and worst about being a teen, and - moving into the Shakesperean zone - whether they believed in love at first sight. They weren't asked whether they thought it would ever be a cool idea to fake death through drugs in order to meet their exiled beloved in a tomb, though. And the question of arranged / forced marriage was not brought up, either. Anyway, this warm-up was a refreshing change from the somewhat gushing interviews we sometimes get at the start of live theatre screenings.

The production itself was strikingly broadcast in black and white. It can't have been much different in the theatre: the whole white-grey-black chromatic design was inspired by the films like La Dolce Vita, with sharp suits and slick or laid back movement styles to match. In the Capulet ball there seemed to be a nod to the amazing protracted party sequence of The Great Beauty, with its short electro score and angular choreography. There was the architecture of Fellini, too. A simple set of stone walls and columns was used to suggest a flow of scenes from piazza to café to sepulchre, in dramatic mediterranean light. Some jazzy numbers were added, with well-chosen moments of ambient soundtrack at key moments. Lily James and Richard Madden shone as the lovers, finding a seductive playfulness in the verse. This is the first production I can remember where comedy was discovered in the balcony scene, and it made their joyous discovery of love all the more affecting. Given the poster, the erotic aspect was played down here.  Senior actor Derek Jacobi was cast as Mercutio, which seemed a peculiar choice as this part is normally seen as a hot-blooded, even manic, natural stand-up and hell-raiser; but it all made sense when in the preamble Branagh explained his inspiration in reading of the ravaged Oscar Wilde haunting cafés in Paris: and so we got Mercutio the faded playboy, hanging out with the young bloods, not manic but mellow, dreaming of past conquests. His brief song was charming, and the death that followed soon after was very touching, making a lot of the idea of a 'scratch', of the pointless contingent nature of it all. Overall the production did what it should do, allowing the emotional realities behind the narrative to unfold, so we could see that the play is also the tragedy of the Nurse, of Paris, of the now childless Capulets, of a culture in the chiaroscuro of love and death.  

Of course there is always the oddity of the Friar. What the hell does he think he is doing? Would it have been possible - or prudent, anyway - for a priest simply to marry off the children of seriously powerful families in the city just like that, without, you know, checking it was OK? And you don't need to be obsessed with risk assessments to see that the whole precision-timed escape through drugs business is a non-starter. It did look in this production that the herb-dealing Friar wasn't going to be allowed to scamper back to his breaking bad lab any time soon, at any rate. But, hey, Shakespeare is allowed creaky plots. The production was powerful, balancing quick passages of movement with stillness. Star of the evening was Lily James, who balanced passion with clarity, conveying a girl at once in command and hopelessly out of her depth. The 50s look worked to good effect (though the Prince looked more like a traffic warden than an absolute ruler), and for me it was a night at Okehampton Carlton well spent, even if I did have to move grumpily away from a row of people who felt the need to chomp on crisps through the whole thing. Seeing a London show on the edge of Dartmoor, many a mile from London, brought home the value of live streaming. With one cavil, though. A superb touring company in Winchester not so long ago had undeservedly small houses. If there's any evidence that streaming shows with big names is impacting on live theatre in this way then I hope something could be done - some share of profits recycled back through the relevant funding body, perhaps? It was something to ponder, on a memorable drive back in the dark and rain through winding, deer-haunted country roads.

Les Blancs

The big new show at NT's Olivier is Les Blancs, by Lorraine Hansberry, the brilliant American playwright who died aged just 34. I'd been gripped by A Raisin in the Sun a few weeks ago, so was easily tempted by a preview offer to see this production of her last, unfinished, work. Both plays are issue-driven: A Raisin throws a spotlight on the life a black family in Chicago in the 1950s, while Les Blancs explores the topic of African independence at the same period. There is not quite the same sense of going inside a family and its complicated internal relations here, though we do get to know the 'family' of The Mission compound and the African characters around whom the action develops: Tshembe Matoseh, who has returned home from extended travels in Europe and America to bury his father, an emblematic patriarchal figure in a country in the first stages of violent uprising against the oppressor; there is Tshembe's elder brother Abioseh, who has integrated with the colonisers to the extent of becoming a Catholic priest; and there is his half-brother Eric, literally a product of the West's possession of the dark continent. Tshembe seems quite unacculturated to the world of the whites, which he has seen quite extensively and even married into. Indeed, his sojourns abroad have thrown him back into a passionate reclaiming of his African identity. He angrily rejects overtures from the journalist Charlie Morris to find common ground, believing that the ills suffered by Africa are simply too great to be dissolved in civilised conversation over whisky and cigarettes. He implies, but does not quite state, the inevitability of some kind of violent cleansing expiation. By contrast, his brother Abioseh follows a pacific path - 'Christ has given me no choice' - and reminds Tschembe of the atrocities of the rebels who are attacking families at night and killing children. In a mood of complete despair at finding any kind of entente, things march to an apparently destined disaster.

The script is the final text adapted by Robert Nemiroff, Hansberry's husband. From the script alone, it must be said it is in several passages thuddingly didactic, with scenes that would be handy in a textbook of colonial history and international politics. Characters fall neatly into types that illuminate positions in the conflict: the bad English Major, the good doctor at the Mission who nonetheless sees that in the wider scheme of things he is part-healer, part agent of a genocide brought about by making Africans live a particular kind of life. Other characters have the same typological recognisability: the wise Cassandra-like English woman, the African dealing with his own identity crisis, the onlooking journalist trying to understand it all on behalf of the audience. Their various attitudes are delivered with the subtlety of a megaphone. This is quite different from, say, Friel's Translations, another play about history, colonialism and independence (or, say, Elizabeth Bowen's novel The Last September). One feels this Brechtian epic would be an improving read, and indeed I feel I should read it as I don't imagine I took in on a single viewing all of the ideas being energetically exchanged. At least the arguments do not go all one way, and there is a genuine sense of difficulty, as we are reminded of the suffering of innocents on all sides. The points one can immediately think of for and against taking up arms are all stated by some character or other, though I think it is significant that while we see before us the murderous conduct of the Major we only hear about the slaughters committed by rebels. Weirdly, the wise old white woman appears to give permission for Tshembe to join his brothers in their fight for liberation, one which begins with fratricide. So if you wanted to find colonial arguments that the natives are not up to the job of self-government, you wouldn't have to look very hard here. Hansberry did not have a chance to visit Africa, and there is a feeling of intellectualising distance in the character typology here. Playwrights 'on the ground' like Athol Fugard and Wole Soyinka can take us closer - I am imagining, of course - to the idiom and domestic circumstances of African life. Having said all that, the cast, led by Danny Sapani as Tshembe, work wonders in bringing emotional colour and nuance to a text that could easily come across as clunky and predictable.


The production, directed by Yael Farber, makes the most of the Olivier stage to bring out the epic sweep of the play. The Mission compound is surrounded by great dark spaces which suggest the vast territory of the state and continent beyond. A Ngqoko Cultural Group act as a Chorus, providing African language and music between and during scenes; and there is much excitingly choreographed movement to balance the wordy script, with the speechless emaciated female figure representing the spirit of Africa providing a visual anchor to the whole production. As is common these days, there is a constant ambient score and soundscape. Live theatre moves inexorably in the direction of film. The revolving stage is kept very busy and seemed to me to be over-used. It can be very effective at suggesting the passage of time or breaking up the scenes, but I don't see why it has to keep going during scenes themselves. One passage of dialogue between the journalist and the older lady Madame Neilsen turned into a kind of game of hide and seek as they clambered around the mission building as it span around. Why? That doesn't help me follow what is being said, instead it distracts my attention from it. Towards the end it looked like the stage would whack into a character's legs, but of course he moved at the right time. (Apparently on the first preview the revolve stopped working altogether and some of the audience begged to see the rest of the play without it. Request denied.) The production team of 28 (that's twenty-eight) created a gallery of effects - especially spectacular at the conclusion - that lengthened the play to three hours, which I imagine is longer than the author had in mind


Towards the end there is a  rousing speech by a rebel leader urging his people to 'Kill them all'. This conveys a sense of the Greek-like ineluctability of tragedy when a people feel driven to extreme measures (it has been carefully spelled out to us that all peaceful intents at negotiation have been rebuffed; I wonder if real historical cases are quite so clear). It was disquieting to see this a day after the bombing of Brussels airport by a group with presumably the same mindset. Curious, too, to see a play with so much dialogue that in the end despairs of dialogue altogether, either between cultures or within families. I got the feeling that this is a work which was still finding its final form at the author's death, and the 'final text' can only be an approximation to something more subtle and poised that might have resulted. Or not. Subtlety and poise might be responses altogether too comfortable for the issues under scrutiny here.  It is not a bad thing to be returned to a Brechtian idea that drama can teach and provoke.

A Raisin in the Sun

At the centre of Western theatre is the family. The tragedies of Sophocles and Aeschylus are essentially family dramas, and the same is true of most of Shakespeare, the Jacobean canon and the twentieth century too: Shaw, Rattigan, Osborne, Wesker, Pinter, Miller... Again and again a family, with is tensions, fractures and subterranean bonds, serves as a distillation of wider issues. Great reckonings in small rooms. In Lorraine Hansberry's A Raisin in the Sun, it is the black family of the Youngers whose journey we share for the two hours traffic of the stage; and, through them, we come to learn something of the situation of black people at that point in history, relegated by reason of their colour to an inferior status, on the margins of respectable white society in late fifties America: " Never before, in the entire history of theatre, has so much of the truth of black people's lives been seen on the stage" said writer James Baldwin. The Youngers live in a cramped rented apartment in Chicago in 1959: matriarch Lena, son Walter, his sister Beneatha, wife Ruth and son Travis, who has to sleep on the couch. Walter is a chauffeur with dreams of going into business, Ruth does occasional household work while Beneatha has aspirations to train as a doctor, but appears to be drifting from one hobby to another and is in the grip of an identity crisis. A life insurance policy on Lena's husband comes through, and the action of the play is concerned with the family's decisions on what to do with this money.

Over the evening, I felt a growing awareness of the nature of the Youngers' condition. Beneatha's boyfriends represent - perhaps a little obviously - the avenues available to her: return to Africa and the adoption of a clear ancestral identity; or assimilation into modern American life. Her intellectual questioning attitude leads her into trouble with her mother and her men. The dangers of free-thinking youth is not a race-restricted problem, needless to say. Meanwhile Walter is driven to distraction by his condition of servitude but lacks the savviness and education needed to make a go of business. His lack of preparation and tendency to fantasise make him dangerously vulnerable to exploitation. When Lena spends a portion of the insurance money on a down payment for a house, it looks as though a door has been opened for the Youngers. But the house is in a white neighbourhood, and the purchase leads to a visit from a representative of the 'Clayborne Park' community attempting to buy them out. 'Racial prejudice doesn't come into it,' of course.


It was a delight to see a traditional well-made play, introducing the characters then setting the spinning wheel going and leading us through their purgatory to a fateful decision, which takes them into a future full of risk - including, it is broadly hinted, actual physical risk. Hansberry wrote Raisin at the young age of 28 and it was, apparently, the first play by a black writer on Broadway, where it was produced in 1959. At that point, the question of what would happen to the Youngers after the final curtain was a question to the audience. Not that it has gone away, of course. Eclipse Theatre Company, who are taking their fine production on tour, is committed to drama and theatre-based projects which raise awareness of inequality and other race-related issues. Uneasily, I recalled I had been at a rather grand establishment dinner the evening before and I don't remember seeing a single black face there. And then there is the furore over this year's Oscars... So the work of Eclipse Company and other similar outfits is as necessary as ever.


This production was satisfyingly true to the work's origins: a drab single-room set, simple lighting plot, clear characterisation and full-blooded attack on the climactic speeches which may seem a little melodramatic now, but were part of the dramatic rhetoric of the time. It was entirely respectful to the aesthetics of the work, as conceived by the author. No production razzmatazz or modernising was needed to help us understand or feel the ideas and passions of the play. I must say it came as a refreshing relief after the National's ostentatiously lavish As You Like It to be reminded what can be done with a standard fourth wall set-up without a battery of special effects.  The play itself is a tremendous work of social theatre: Walter Younger should be as well-known to English audiences as Willy Loman. Indeed they are similar in several ways: dreamers, victims of society but with enough flaws to make us edgy and stop the flow of easy sentiment. The whole ensemble worked beautifully together to create a gripping and moving evening of theatre. Fine work from the smaller parts along with the leads. This was another great night at the Nuffield, Southampton. We feel so lucky to be within easy distance of this venue, showing some of the best work currently being done on the British stage. It brought back memories of Jacobs-Jenkins Neighbors, another remarkable play about the black experience in America, which I also saw at the Nuffield. If you happen to come on this post and are considering getting a ticket to A Raisin in the Sun, don't hesitate!

Roger Scruton, Culture Counts

In Culture Counts, Roger Scruton mounts a defence of the heritage of high culture of the West against what he perceives as its enemies: fanatical Islam (only glancingly referred to), the operations of the market (briefly discussed near the end) and, above all, the attitude of 'repudiation' advanced by multiculturalists in the universities. He argues that the literature, music and art handed down to us - or at any rate the best of it - contains a body of emotional and moral knowledge that is intrinsically valuable and provides the imagination with a purer and better air to breathe in than the popular confections of the moment. The purpose of education in the humanities should not be to benefit the student with a set of instrumental skills, but rather to look after the culture itself by training a fresh set of guardians to look after it. The criticism we teach and practise should be to do with elucidating the aesthetic value and moral lessons of works. Despite the depredations he sees wrought by the multiculturalists, Scruton sees hope in the efflorescence of traditional practice in neoclassical architecture, music that returns to pre-Modernist tonality and writing that is similarly embedded in the conversation of canonical works.

One strength of Scruton is always the writing. He frames his arguments clearly and gracefully in a rhythmical prose that is a pleasure to read and a standing lesson for the tone-deaf scribes of the journals. His style is precise but also conveys deep feeling. Consider the phrasing and cadences of this sentence from his description of the decline of architectural teaching: 'Students of architecture were no longer to learn about the properties of natural materials, about the grammar of mouldings and ornaments, about the discipline of the orders, or the nature of light and shade'. Whatever one's views on building design, that is a beautiful summation of the essence of the classical view. The author is particularly strong at explicating philosophical points. I came away from his discussion of the different kinds of knowledge, for example, with that pleasant sensation of having had my mind tidied and cleared. And similarly with the passage on the thin crust of normality, with barbarous instincts beneath and the serene air of art and spiritual empathy above, and in many other instances. Some points are made in a single striking sentence: the few pages on Foucault, for example, ask us to consider whether that thinker can help us at all in elucidating the truth-value of any part of a governing discourse. He can be very funny, as in the attack on Le Corbusier. And I warmed to Scruton's sense of battling against the powers-that-be in academia. Though I am out of touch with the academic world now, I sense that his kind of traditionalism still has little purchase in the modern seminar and lecture hall. The book is an interesting contrast to John Carey's What Good are the Arts, which had the peculiar quality of an author sounding cross at the very idea of a higher culture, even though he was clearly on the winning side. One has to look hard for Carey's enemies - presumably Scruton and a few senior members of Oxford college common rooms - but Scruton's are at any rate easy enough to discern. I wonder if both authors overstate the influence of university courses generally.

Some parts of the book left me with reservations. Perhaps the weakest part is his chapter on teaching, with its wildly romantic vision of children rote-learning and acquiring a love of medieval Latin and the classic texts. There is no sensible suggestion here how such a programme could possibly be implemented, and I don't even see what he imagines happening in a lesson. Most of what he posits, concerning the slow acquisition of moral truths, would happen on a subliminal level anyway rather than by direct instruction. The chief enemy of promise in schools is not an academic culture of scepticism, but the dominant discipline of accountancy, which demands that any piece of work should be judged against a hyper-rational scheme which breaks down skills and 'objectives' into specific categories, each carrying percentage points. It is an insane approach to the business of learning (for a business is what it has become in all sectors of education), and has nothing whatever to do with the way the mind works or how culture lives. But unfortunately it is the system which dictates the practices of every single school and teacher in Britain today. Next to this one can gaze at Scruton's vision and sigh a little. But he must know that his kind of education has no chance whatever of taking effect, and so the chapter really reads as the indulgence of a fantasy.

Nor am I sure what our author would like to happen at university level, except for a mass removal of feminists, Marxists and the like. He castigates universities for adopting a programme based on various kinds of scepticism; but perhaps it is the job of a university to be sceptical. There are some well-aimed shots about some kinds of study which simply deaden the mind because the only tolerable answers are those known in advance; and the point that the so-called liberalism of some kinds of theoretical inquiry is simply a way of excluding anything off-message seems hard to counter, at least at an abstract level. It does seem to be the case that the same dismal left-wing dogma is preached across many university courses. What alternative is being offered, though? Elevating selected cultural artefacts to the 'high' category carries its own dangers. It misses the internal tensions which the great works and their creators leave us with. Is it repudiation to point out that in our greatest literature we also find anti-Semitic caricature? What are we to make of the fact the The Faerie Queene carries in its sumptuous verse the notion that the Irish are savages and should be exterminated by some kind of murderous robot? Is this a denial of our heritage? The issues seem to me rather to be things worth discussing. His reading of texts as embodiments of moral lessons seems painfully reductive (the single example of what we are meant to take from King Lear is most unconvincing. Nor do I see that one has to choose between Scruton's kind of reverence for art as embalming the best that has been thought and said on the one hand, and the hard-edged world of modern criticism on the other. I can be moved by King Lear one day and read a cultural materialist discussion of it the next, without the second experience damaging the first. This is, to be sure, a cognitive challenge, but the human mind is well equipped to perform distinct and even opposite operations at the same time.

Scruton's view continues a tradition from Arnold, Eliot and Leavis, and it is important that this tradition persists. In this book at any rate it seems to be deeply informed by a sense of some lost world of collective values, located chiefly in the shared beliefs of religion. Around Scruton's writing there hovers the yearning for community, for a way of thinking that confers membership in a society resting on firm foundations, at peace with itself. I simply have no idea where in history that world is to be found. I gained a great deal from this book, and would recommend it as a stimulating read; but I do not find myself sufficiently enchanted by the lament for an imagined golden age to seek membership of this particular club.

Hamlet (Cumberbatch)

We went to see Hamlet in what is rapidly becoming my favourite way of seeing London productions - streamed from the theatre onto a cinema screen, cutting out the expense and fatigue of travel and bringing you up close to the acting. It was particularly appropriate to this record-breaking-sold-out-within-minutes production directed by Lyndsey Turner and starring Benedict Cumberbatch. For this show had so many cinematic effects, it felt like watching a film turned into a stage play and then turned back into a film again. Lyndsey Turner was working with Designer Es Devlin; their last collaboration, which I saw in the NT Lyttleton, was Caryl Churchill's A Light Shining in Buckinghamshire. Both productions in their joint vision have featured a large and well-stocked banqueting table and large amounts of earth (in neither case required by the texts, both of which can be performed on a nearly empty stage). The Turner-Devlin Hamlet was set a vast palace interior and used Richteresque ambient music to underscore the emotions of the scenes. There were chases under strobe, freeze frames and a stunning dust-storm at the end of the long first half, leaving the palace a half-sunk ruin for the second, symbolising the moral decay of Claudius and Denmark no doubt. Heaven knows how many lighting cues there were; the whole thing was certainly visually exciting to watch, with a wardrobe ranging from evening dress to modern military and a delightful large toy fort.

I start with the look of the thing because that did, over time, become a distraction. Shakespeare's verse is deeply visual because it was written for a less furnished stage than a lavish London show would dare to put before us. A clever design can accentuate the feelings of a work, but it mustn't work against the words themselves. Here it did. when Claudius is giving his first speech on the death of the old Hamlet and his marriage to Gertrude, we shouldn't be gawping at ornate evening dress and weird table props. There were moments when what we saw and what we heard took us in different directions. For example, we saw in mime Hamlet put on an Indian head-dress in what appeared to be an affectionate, playful scene with Ophelia. But then we saw Ophelia reporting Hamlet's appearance (2.1), 'My lord, as I was sewing in my closet'. But what she was describing was not what we had just been seeing at all. What were we to make of this? Was the idea that she was making it up? But why would she do that? Then there is design and stage business when none is really needed. Consider the brief scene about the fight for a scrap of land in Poland, setting us up for 'How all occasions do inform against me' (4.4). It's an odd afterthought of a scene in any case, and hardly needs a whole military camp with soldiers in tents blowing on their fingers to bring it alive. This is theatre adapted to the hyper-visual world of the modern audience, I suppose. But it must first and foremost adapt itself to the text. The Players scene (shortened to lose the dumb show) didn't work simply because in order to see the lovely mini-stage on the stage we couldn't see Claudius, and everything is meant to be about his reaction (the camera helped us cinemagoers a bit).


All this can be justified by theatre's constant need to recreate itself, and the changing expectations of a younger audience (it was great to see some youngsters at Vue Cinema when we saw it, apparently there of their own volition and not part of a school trip; if Cumberbatch brought them and cool visuals held them then that's an undiluted good). But that brings me to a further grumble. If you're going to bring Shakespeare to the people, then it really should be Shakespeare, untampered with. In this showing, the opening battlement scene was lost and sort of transposed into Hamlet's meeting with Horatio; but that first scene, amongst other things, establishes Horatio's character as the studious sceptic, a foil for Hamlet's more intuitive cast of mind. Polonius was heavily cut. His first speech amounted to 'He hath. my lord. I do beseech you, give him leave to go.' In the text you'd get in a bookshop, we get: 'He hath, my lord, wrung from me my slow leave / By laboursome petition ...' and so on in leisured rhetorical fashion. Notice how this speech characterises Polonius as a windbag, a trait developed in his advice to Laertes (also edited), his spying on Laertes (cut entirely), and his meeting with Hamlet (reduced). In this production, Polonius was in fact turned into a model of concision, making the Queen's exasperated 'More matter, with less art' quite meaningless. Shakespeare's character of Polonius had been turned into a fairly nondescript elderly courtier. But of course, we must concede, Shakespeare's company cut, and we must regard the texts we have as flexible things, at best approximations to what the first audience heard. Still, I don't think flexibility should reach to simplifying and modernising the words themselves. Instead of 'Good Hamlet, cast thy nighted colour off', we got 'nightly colour'. Why? Is 'nighted' really too brain-achingly tough to figure out, especially when he's wearing black? Accents shifted. Claudius gave 'comméndable' in the modern stress, against the metre of the line, but the correct 'perséver' a couple of lines later. We heard, or I think I heard heard, 'Things rank in nature possess it merely', and I contend that the missing 'do' matters. In Gertrude's description of Ophelia's death the 'hoar' leaves were kindly translated for us into 'pale'. Unless I am mistaken, every mention of a Polack was nervously corrected to 'Polish'. Everything was delivered in the modern naturalistic style: Gertrude's 'I thought thy bride-bed to have decked, sweet maid' had at least two heavy pauses breaking up the line, just to take one example among many. Well, this is Shakespeare today and it can bring lines alive in unexpected ways. I don't think I'd ever really registered 'The sun no sooner shall the mounains touch' (4.1) but something about its delivery on this occasion put the image vividly in my mind. This is why one goes to Shakespeare repeatedly. I wonder if there will be a swing towards a more verse-oriented delivery of Shakespeare in coming years. Perhaps I should forget these reservations and get into the flow. Perhaps. But orchestras don't change Mozart's notes, and art galleries don't alter their masterpieces to make them easier to a modern sensibility. There is something indicative of a deep lack of confidence in altering the thing you are bringing to the public, however slightly. Wedges continue to have thin ends.


All that being said, I did enjoy this Hamlet and was glad I went. There were some excellent performances. Ciaran Hinds was a menacing Claudius, and Karl Johnson was brilliant, doubling as Ghost and Gravedigger and getting both parts across vividly. Sian Brooke was an affecting Ophelia, making her frankly tedious mad scenes into something touching, especially when she went to the piano, and Matthew Steer was an amusing Rosencrantz. Benedict Cumberbatch himself was full of vocal and physical energy, bringing across Hamlet's relish of exercise both mental and physical just as he is saying he has had enough of it all. In fact his action-packed performance perhaps diverted us from the point that the play revolves around his hesitation, his in-action when it comes to the moment of vengeance. But this is just hard to get. How many in a modern audience are worried that they might go to Judgement unconfessed? Yet the failure to kill Claudius while he is a-praying revolves around this. Cumberbatch made sense of the soliloquies and his Hamlet overall was humorous, genial and engaging.  I did find the music, the antics, the imaginative staging, the cool visuals exciting. And there were moments which came across effectively and poignantly - 'there's providence in the fall of a sparrow' struck me as a particularly well-tuned moment. But after the immediate excitement had faded I felt the production tried a little too hard to be like a movie and lost the intimate verbal drama of Shakespeare's creation. Somewhere at the back of my mind was a speech by Steven Berkoff reported in the paper that same day, on how young actors these days don't know or care about the history and traditions of their craft. I don't know whether that is true, but practitioners can always benefit from opening themselves to older styles. Also in my mind, a letter to the paper a while back wondering why it is that while musicians work hard to fathom what Beethoven meant by a phrase or passage and try to bring it out in performance, productions of plays and operas often push the author to one side and 'interpret' their material into some bizarre places, and sometimes out of recognition. There must be an answer to that, but I can't think what it is. Perhaps it's to do with markets, directors and designers needing to have a brand. We mustn't overstate the role of the 'creative team' as it's unfailingly called these days. I love directing plays, but I can't see it as a creative act comparable to writing one. Shakespeare is the Creator we should be left thinking about. All unresolved issues pattering round the brain. Hamlet, more than any other work, at least gets you thinking.

John Finnemore, Teddy Lester

John Finnemore, author of Teddy Lester Captain of Cricket (London: Chambers, 1916), you have given me a joyous lifelong memory. I discovered this book as a boy in my uncle's house. Its orange boards and thick flaky paper intoxicate me still. Now I have rebound Captain of Cricket, I have one other  title in the series, and I search for more whenever I'm in a second-hand bookshop. Teddy, easily the best cricketer in Slapton School, takes the reputation of the house seriously and comes down hard on bullying. He is firm but fair and does what is right. Frank Sandys, brilliant new boy, bowls with a queer shuffling run. His stock ball is a googly (odd, since that is meant to be a surprise delivery), occasionally mixed up with a straight fast one. Ito the Bat is Japanese and bowls with a bizarre action, hence his soubriquet. Teddy and his chums play cricket, in a strange form of the game where bowlers 'find a spot' and become unplayable. They stroll around Slapton school and save the country. Their teachers barely exist.

Penny for your thoughts, Ito, old man.

Who were you, John Finnemore? Wikipedia says there is nothing left now but census returns, and reconstructs your (childless) life with Emma, teaching in Welsh schools, and eventually making real money from writing. I imagine you in your elementary classroom, speaking Welsh, dreaming up Boy's Own plotlines. Is there really nothing out there? No school archives In Aberystwyth, no letters, no manuscripts? Why did you buy a house with fifteen bedrooms?

John Finnemore, you died aged 52. Your books are rare finds today. You are not listed on goodreads, but you are a good read. When I pass by an empty cricket ground, sometimes, at dusk, I stand quite still. The whole of Slapton watches with hushed breath. Everything depends on this last wicket stand, and Frank Sandys is shuffling in to bowl.

'Tis Pity She's a Whore

Third time to the Nuffield in a week, second viewing of this production in a week, second Jacobean tragedy in a day (what is ... happening ... to me?) - on Tuesday I went down the M3 yet again to see 'Tis Pity She's a Whore by John Ford, production by Cheek by Jowl (who are probably better known in the modern theatre world than Ford). C by J founder Declan Donnellan's The Actor and the Target is a bible for modern actors, and it is always instructive to see a production which follows such a carefully-thought-through attention to a text, with acting technique rather than directorial concept the centre of gravity.

This version of 'Tis Pity updates to modern dress, with Anabella a contemporary teenage girl and her bedroom the single setting for the action - not so very different from the bare Jacobean stage where time and space equally collapse into a single platform and the audience are similarly required to 'see' the different settings of the action. Second time around, I noticed the attention to detail in the room: red cd player, red lampshade, red book cover .. Exciting opening choreography, creating a sense of a girl both empowered and controlled by the surrounding male culture. It's easy to get this sort of thing wrong and start with clever staging, but this production had clearly started with deep thought about the language and characters and worked outwards from there.

Every detail of staging had a reason for being there, and though some speeches were given a modern twist (Hippolita's offer of herself in marriage to Vasques becomes a full-on seduction scene, Soranzo's already horrible beating becomes something unspeakable) it was never twisted out of credibility and the business brought out the nastiness that seeps from between the lines of Ford's writing. Easy, too, for frantically inventive staging to become a distraction from the core action and speech, but only once - Hippolita at the party  - did the interpretation take over from the text for me (it took the second viewing to figure out how all the things going on fitted together), suggesting a certain lack of interest in the niceties of remitting breach of betrothal in the seventeenth-century and a desire to give us something busy to look at instead.

Notes. Plenty of circular movement, inevitable when a bed is plonked in the middle of the stage, and devastating deployment of the bathroom offstage. Effective use of onstage singing, an object lesson in juxtaposition (eg something atrocious happening against soft music offstage). Speech hard to discern over the music at times, Friar and Cardinal looked out of place as the Catholic context of the original doesn't belong in the secular hedonistic world of this interpretation (how many students these day go around with a tutor Friar in tow?). There should be some kind of quota on how many tops can be ripped off enthusiastically in the space of two hours, as there was a diminishing return in the constant revelation of torsos. Will Alexander a terrifying Vasques, honey-voiced and brutal; Orlando James and Eve Ponsonby convincing throughout as the doomed brother and sister. Overall impression one of excitement at the spectacle, a creeping sense that, yes, these people are really psychopathically sick, and an overpowering atmosphere of corruption - all in the Jacobean spirit. Or part of it: this production of a not-frequently-performed play omitted entirely the comic subplot and made other cuts, most oddly to the ending - so we were listening to a symphony with sections of the orchestra missing. But what it set out to do it achieved wonderfully well: it yanked this piece out of its cosy heritage habitat and made the material visceral, shocking and affecting to a contemporary audience using the full resources of its company. Hit the target, one might say.

The Duchess of Malfi

A Jacobean day, starting with the very welcome BBC4 screening of John Webster, The Duchess of Malfi, the inaugural production at the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse. The theatre is a close replica of Blackfriars, built following drawings in Worcester College, Oxford. It certainly looks sumptuous, a beautiful wooden stage against an elegant three-doored screen with balcony, enclosed by decked seating. And the candles (£400 a day, hmmmm) were gorgeous, even on the telly. The period costumes gleamed and shimmered, as did the make-up. Still don't think I'd want to train it up there and pay London prices (up to £60) to sit on a hard wooden bench at a 70 degree angle to the stage with columns and candelabra in the way, though. Also not sure how well the voice would travel upwards with a balcony of (over-used) musicians tootling away above it, but would have to go to find out. The authentic has a certain allure but engineering has moved on a bit.

Watching it on TV had plenty of advantages: you could see the expressions close up, the sound quality was excellent and the thrilling bareness of the satge had even more impact on a screen, usually so crowded with detail. The production was preceded by a documentary by Steven Shapiro, full of enthusiasm, who offered some unilluminating interviews with star actors and presented the thesis that the author of The White Devil and The Duchess of Malfi might have been someone of a not altogether sunny disposition. Two pages of an Arden / Mermaid introduction would give you more information. The TV introduction by Andrew Marr seemed to be vaguely inspired by the Proms and added nothing at all apart from plot spoilers and a stupefyingly condescending warning not to alter our TV sets when the stage goes dark. Thanks, W1A!

The verse was well delivered throughout: I haven't seen the Duchess for 12 years (Salisbury, 2002 to be precise - excellent show), but the strange similes and distinctive seventeenth-century treatment of the verse line brought it all back: compass, tennis balls, medlar trees, pyramids... what a unique consciousness is here. Throughout I kept realizing what Eliot got from the period, not that he made any secret of it. A world-weary Bosola, going through the motions of seeking preferment and sinking further into self-disgust. Ferdinand was really compelling: that moment when the strange repeated laughs signal he's flipping will stay with me. Gemma Arterton was excellent as the Duchess, upright alabaster among the ruins, far better than the reviews I'd seen had led me to expect (I wonder, by the by, if £60 seats have the effect of turning viewers and reviewers into bogus connoisseurs of how Jacobean drama ought to be interpreted, which is something we know very little about indeed). Shafts of comedy (the doctor) piercing but also drawing attention to the darkness. Only thing I didn't like was the music: it was beautiful and beautifully played, but a distraction from the action - the opening was ludicrously over-extended - and far too sweet to bring out the moods of the piece. But I'm delighted that the BBC are now doing this, sparing us the cost of an NT Live showing, and quiver with anticipation for more.

By the way, have just come across Peter Kirwan's impressive early modern drama in performance blog, Bardathon.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time

Latest NTLive experience was Curious Incident, whose in-the-round staging made it particularly amenable to camera coverage: we did indeed 'breathe the same air' as Christopher, which was the director's intention, the grid-like patterns and enclosed rectangular space simulataneously suggesting his consciousness was both sadly cut off (difficulty with processing emotional reactions and metaphor) and curiously infinite: his hilarious dialogue with the vicar showed how a completely literal interpretation of things can lead to its own exhilarating imaginative posibilities - "they'd have to fire dead bodies into space on rockets ..."

Coming to it from a 'what could we do here?' perspective, there was much to pick up. Simple furniture, expressive use of staging and the immensely powerful deployment of features like the train set and chalk drawing. Loved the physical side, with Frantic Assembly providing some moves that were effective because not over-used. Well-judged music, again economically employed. And of course, the acting was pitch-perfect throughout, Luke Treadaway, although clearly somewhat more than fifteen, making a deeply sympathetic Christopher (his and has been going round in my head all day). The play gave a convincing account of the world from Christopher's point of view and from outside as well. Effective doubling by a small company. All of this is theatre that any school should aim at. But the programmed light systems and the underground scene would take some replicating, I imagine.

It was lovely to to be reminded of the novel's story. There were some deeply moving moments, like the mother's monologue near the end of Act One and the ending, and serious and comic played off each other beautifully throughout. In the novel, the digressions on maths conundrums like Conway's Soldiers and the Monty Hall problem were part of the fascination, but these couldn't really be staged; something like it was left until the problem explanations at the end, but we had to leave before we heard them. How many plots are there in literature? Twenty? Seven? Essentially there's just one, which is always to do with someone trying to overcome obstacles to achieve something - the story of human life - and this novel and play give us an elemental version of this tale. I have no idea how clinically accurate it is. Mark Haddon says he wasn't writing about autisim, but difference. Would seasoned police officers and transport workers really be so nonplussed by a character like Christopher, though? Surely they see all types over a week? Perhaps they're better prepared now than when Curious Incident appeared, and both book and play have something to do with that. No explanation on stage of the title; perhaps it is assumed that a modern audience knows its Holmes stories well enough not to need any.

Tonight at 8.30 (Trio 1)

Happy to catch the first Trio of Tonight at 8.30, having caught 2 and 3 on the opening day(authoritatively reviewed somewhere below). Instead of being a light frothy entrée as I'd imagined, this trio included the heaviest piece of the lot, The Astonished Heart, a shriekingly intense study of tragic obsession  (and an early version of the idea of the psychiatrist being the most messed up of the lot, a topos later to yield Cracker, Frasier and Hannibal Lecter). The core ideas came over clearly and the dénoument(s - one onstage, one off, Coward seems to have a thing with double endings) had real power. Before that, We were Dancing, on quickly evaporating affairs in an ennui-soaked world where substantial relationships are impossible; and to round off the Trio, Red Peppers, in which we see  the eponymous comic duo grinding through their act at a variety palace, then look behind the curtains at bickering among theatrefolk. Across the three pieces music, shifting rhythms, shafts of wit and through it all a palpable strain of misery. Tonight at 8.30 plays with genres, but the keynote is tragic.
     
Taking these pieces together, one catches Coward at the tailend of a classical tradition in which tragedy is reserved for the privileged and the working man is a clown; and while he is not Ibsen he does subvert this in interesting ways: the Red Peppers acquire a kind of grandeur in  their valiant attempt to 'keep it fresh, keep it fragrant' and the acidic portrait of decadence among the (precariously) privileged makes one think of Ivy Compton-Burnett or Henry Green's Party Going.  Again I was struck by correspondences to later writers: We Were Dancing gave a foretaste of Pinter's The Lover, the minute verbal analysis of emotional currents in An Astonished Heart has something in common with, say, Albee's A Delicate Balance; while Red Peppers could be an early sketch for Osborne's The Entertainer (both were astute critics of a world they were nostalgic for). Coming back to the show after a week, I could better appreciate the mixture of period and modern in the performance: imitating Coward's clipped diction and the postures captured in the programme photos would have drenched it in sepia; while observing Coward's rhythms with the contemporary voice certainly brought out the rawness and immediacy of the emotional situations. Staging was clear and unfussy, the acting wondrously versatile. Hugely enjoyed Tonight at 8.30, delighted it started at The Nuffield, and hope it has a really succesful tour. More good stuff to come at The Nuffield - looking forward to Rich Hall tomorrow, Cheek by Jowl (saw them a few days ago in Oxford) on Tuesday and Catch-22 in a couple of weeks.

Henry IV Part 1

Henry IV, Part 1 (not Shakespeare's title, or, possibly, even his intention) was conveniently screened at Winchester Everyman just days before older inmates were due to go under the examiner's lash on it. And as with RII, Doran delivered a beautifully clear and well-paced account. Attention drawn by Alex Hassall, who gave us a likeable warm-hearted Hal (though as a result the strategic coldness of  'But herein will I imitate the sun' was lost; and my all-time-favourite Shakespeare line 'I do, I will' didn't have the heart-stopping impact I expect, nay demand, dammit). Jasper Britton was a pinched and bitter Henry, a boxer who's played dirty but comes out of the corner fighting.

The big decisions were to make Hotspur a kind of Midlands psycho - I think there's more humour in the Glendower scene than we got here - and of course star name Anthony Sher as Falstaff. Now here was something different. It's been good to see two parts normally given to bass-baritones - Lear and Falstaff - played by different voices recently (Simon Russell Beale and Sher). Sher gave us a wheedling decayed knight, who loves playing to the tavern; his grin during the exchanges with Hal was lovely, and we got real affection from the various insults directed at Hal for not being fat. I liked the way he didn't hurry the speeches but felt for the balance of each sentence. He got a well-earned laugh just for the way he called out some names: 'Poooiins ..' As for staging, same set-up as for RII, only without any ex machina gallery. Good use of the enormous depth of this set-up. Watching these plays in a modern production makes one realize how they were written for smaller companies. Seeing, for example, the lovely Jennifer Kirby in her one scene - the domestic with Hotspur - and as a crowd member in the tavern and that's it is a bit odd, like a football player being brought off the bench for five minutes then called back in. In the whole of Richard II, Jane Lapotaire has one scene, and can read a book for the rest of the evening. What's that like? Nice work if you can get it, or frustrating? Shakespeare's company would have done much more role-sharing, and that idea is in various ways woven into the plays themselves.

Digressions. A production that relaxed into and relished the multifarious language of the play that has everything, including first tremors of the tragedy to come. Good attention paid to individuating the secondary characters, Worcester and Northumberland nicely distinct. The complex narrative of the conspiracy has never been clearer to me, and with one stroke of business the parallels between court and rebels were brilliantly brought out. Loved the bed gag, but must wait a decent time before stealing it.

Titus Andronicus

Lucy Bailey's production of Titus Andronicus has been revived and is currently on at The Globe. What a spectacular experience, a 16th-century play sending into shock an audience brought up on Saw and Tarantino. The staging effects initially seemed straightforward, nothing remotely scary: a semi-awning over the pit, braziers, weird sounds of hammering and sawing; yet over the evening these grew into something dark and strange. William Houston was electrifying as Titus, suffering from some kind of mental pain at the outset (the soundworld of Django Bates brings this out brilliantly), drawing us into his private hell scene by scene. Superbly judged use of comedy: the use of Aemilius / Bacchus was terrific. The big lesson I got was to juxtapose comedy and savagery, which I suppose is obvious and pure Tarantino come to think of it. Indira Varma chilling as Tamora, Obi Abili charismatic as Aaron. Flora Spencer-Longhurst well-nigh unwatchably affecting as the mutilated Lavinia.

Moving some actors around on scaffolds brought out the political nature of the piece, though at the cost of slowing the thing down: watching extras trundle platforms along is not very exciting. The mob chants and sudden violence around it were properly alarming, though. Effects brutally er, effective, and the vengeful slaughter of the brothers made me think nervously, I trust they've had medical advice on this ... Plenty of press stories of people fainting. I'm sorry to say I didn't see anyone keel over, though I did see a few leave, including one young lady with a hand over her mouth, and the lady next to me (thanks for sharing the blanket, by the way) was moved to shout out on the lines of 'No! What? Why?' on several occasions. Aaron's murder of the midwife is probably the most horrible thing I've seen on a stage. Great stuff. Verse well spoken (for my dodgy ear, Aaron a little soft in one spot), the whole thing stagewise a tremendous lesson in how big things can be made out of simple ideas. Fantastically convincing delivery of this piece. Would have loved to join in the elaborate curtain call more, but had to run for train. Such are the travails of the provincial pedagogue. Managed Creed, Matisse and this all in one day, though. Still in therapy.

Tonight at 8.30

ETT (English Touring Theatre) is coming to have the same illustrious acronymic aura in my world as RSC, NT and ROH. Recently I have seen great productions of Translations and The Misanthrope put together by this production company. Now they have come up with the outrageously bold scheme of putting on all of Noel Coward's Tonight at 8.30, a series of one-act plays comparable to a set of piano preludes, each exploring a different key and atmosphere. We went on the press day / night, enjoying the Nuffield's fantastic 2-for-1 offer, and managed to see two of the three trios, so between 3.30 and 10.00 enjoyed six plays (and a good supper at The Crown Inn in between).

Noel Coward had been vaguely catalogued in my mind as a period writer, author of bittersweet witty drawing room dramas. No longer! There's clearly much more going on than that. Was he kicked aside by kitchen sink drama? No, Osborne is clearly anticipated in the distinctly dodgy Fumed Oak, in which a stifled husband lets go at his womenfolk in a bilious outpouring of grievance and resentment. Was Coward's flow of verbal elegance answered by the still waters of modern drama? No, listen to the silences in Still Life, first outing of the material that became Brief Encounter. Full of evocative space and shadow. Family Album, in which a Victorian grieving family are gloriously deconstructed, still feels fresh in its experiment and sudden launches into song; while the dreamworld of Shadow Play had a bleak raking over of an ashen relationship that made me think of Pinter's Betrayal. Speaking of Brief Encounter, it was odd to hear all the plays in largely modern accents: I suppose it would all have been in Celia Johnson cut-glass speech patterns at the time; but reviving that would simply seem affected today. The limits of so-called authenticity.

Coming back to it... not that Coward needs to be validated by later work. He has his own universe, one of quiet desperation under a genteel exterior, a feeling for dis-connect that can be tragic or comic (the magnificent Hands Across the Ocean), and a capacity for the exalting power of wit that puts him in the tradition of Goldsmith, Wilde and Shaw. What happened to brilliant wit, by the way? Stoppard carries the torch, I suppose, but it's the Americans who are the real champions of the one-liner: see any Sorkin-scripted episode of The West Wing.

Wonderful actors, supported in bringing out the jazz-like rhythms and emotional score by director Blanche McIntyre. The players sparked and sparkled throughout the dazzling day. It's all about ensemble, so wrong to pick out names, but I must grant myself the pleasure of typing out the name of Kirsty Besterman, who moved across roles with immensely charming aplomb, and in Hands Across corpsed and got out of it. Rupert Young took a succession of second-tier parts with great charisma. And simply seeing actors change roles with each piece was a pleasure that theatre-going doesn't normally provide. Ominous that all plays had to be cancelled yesterday owing to an actor's illness, which is the flipside of such an enterprise. Hope it's nothing serious: longing to see Trio 1 next weekend!

RSC Richard II

First in the RSC production of the tetralogy. Here are some notes, more memos to self than any kind of review:

• Totally loved the floor! Because (a) the thrust / traverse approach just seems to be perfect for staging this kind of work, which craves a public forum space, and (b) the digital design was beautifully effective, creating wonderful transitions and establishing atmosphere without taking over. Really want to learn how to do this!
• RII and other plays of the period (MND, R&J) are particularly challenging as they have a relish for verse form that a modern audience doesn't share (sorry, everyone, you're all ignorant pigs), and the verse has a regularity that the modern actor bred into naturalistic bend, compression and stretch needs to accommodate. Here the actors found their way into it convincingly (pedant Hebron noted only one missed antithesis), Tennant especially good, and took us on an enthralling psychological journey. One huge homoerotic pause was worked in really well.
• Close harmony singing and small ensemble playing the perfect music here and in 1H4
• Lesson: if something's dotty, don't conceal the dottiness. York begging for his son to be executed and the gauntlet-throwing scenes were given their proper comic value (perhaps they are meant to be comic relief?); conversely, thank goodness no funny business was added to the gardener scene which is pure renaissance allegory. In general the comic strain was played well (it was Mark Rylance at the Globe who made this aspect of the play clear to me).
• Another lesson. One challenge of plays like this is what are the non-speaking characters meant to be doing during the endless speeches (eg York listening to Duchess of Gloucester)? Here the handling of gesture / pose / movement / expression seemed just the right foil for the voice.
• Execution of the caterpillars oddly tame (perhaps I'm contrasting it to the shudder-inducing treatment of this scene in The Hollow Crown), but then it is pretty clearly meant to happen offstage.
• Absolutely lovely to see Jane Lapotaire on stage, and her remarks in the interval interview about working in theatre being nurturing and supportive were so moving and so right. At school - or anywhere - a play should never be an opportunity for a teacher-director to boss young people around. So say I, bossily.
• And touching to see Michael Pennington just after seeing him in younger years in a re-watching of John Barton's awesome Playing Shakespeare
• Thank you director Greg Doran for telling the story without overlaying it with unnecessary directorial interpretation and for focussing on the emotional narrative.
• I would very happily listen to Oliver Ford Davies read the phone directory.

King Lear (NT)

Live screening of theatre - the poor man's option (that's me, £50 + travel + food, come orfit!) or is it in some ways actually better than being in the building? Yes, you miss all the chemistry of being under the same roof while the actors are doing it then and there for you. But then if you're at the back of the dress circle wishing you'd brought your binoculars and praying that someone two rows down would stop texting then maybe you're missing out too. Especially when so much of the action is in the eyes ... SRB's staring face in the division scene suggesting he's already a few biscuits short of a full picnic hamper, or Anne Maxwell Martin's orgasmic crumple in the unwatchable bit, to name but two ocular pleasurings.

For me, a production of hits and misses. I liked the approach of showing Lear as bloody impossible and clearly dangerous from the off, the rapid barkthrough of the first big scene, the deep permeating coldness of Edgar and Cornwall. Some sense was made of the loopy Edgar plot and the blank of Albany's character was filled in convincingly. The Stalinesque sculpture of Lear was a good touch and the general sense of a bleak tyranny setting (thanks, Edward Bond by the way) held together. Above all the mad scenes were the clearest I have ever heard, and showed SRB's naturalist clarity at its best. I've never listened so hard to the 'who would scape whipping' scene with Gloucester. The recognition of Kent at the end was oddly more moving than the death of Cordelia. There were some nice Mendes touches ('Tis a good block', 'She cannot deny it').

Misses: I wasn't wowed by the Fool, and the notorious addition to the script to explain his sudden disappearance didn't add much (in any case, there's not much mystery to explain: Cordelia and the Fool were probably played by the same boy, making 'And my poor fool is hang'd' one of the most extraordinary lines in the canon, taking us inside and outside the play world in the same moment; one day I'm going to see a production which gets this, or I'll just have to do it myself). Having rows of non-speaking soldiers is just a rather obvious way of trying to fill in the Olivier stage (what are they actually for in a closed council scene, anyway?). Similarly the storm scene looked like they needed to give the rotating drum an MOT, since - on screen anyway - it served no real theatrical purpose. Stuff like waterboarding is just a theatrical cliché these days. The end was a bit of a mess: Shakespeare gets Edmund and the ugly sisters offstage for a reason, lads! We need that space clear for the ending! Cordelia looked none too convincing with a gun, which anyway worked against her image as the spiritual opposite of her sisters.

And then, I thought, hold on, aren't there things wrong with the play? Would any script editor accept King Lear in its present state? Except as a folk story, on another plane from the warp and woof of real human psychology, the opening scenes make no sense. Lear and Gloucester are in some kind of competition for The Most Stupid Old Man in Britain award, a trait inherited by their beloved: Cordelia's ostentatious sincerity is tiresome, and Edgar bolting off to the heath without even speaking to dad is incredible (as is the jumping off the cliff bit - why not just say who he is? 'Why I do trifle thus with his despair / Is done to cure it' - and how's that going?). And - a question mark which becomes bolder in a production like this with warplanes whizzing around - who's actually in charge of the English army? Cornwall's dead, Albany's in a dither, this lot wouldn't even manage to charter a taxi to the Dover ferry terminal let alone meet an invading an army (and why no re-appearance of France, Mr Shakespeare? Ah, I think I get it. The actor's busy playing Albany!) And Sam Johnson was surely right to find it  flawed. It's not the trite reason that it's too tragic, it's that any aesthetic of checks and balances is offended by the fact that Cordelia's death has no payoff whatsoever: the closing speeches do not add up to any kind of hard-won wisdom and bear no relation to what we have seen (you might think that 'speak what we feel, not what we ought to say' is exactly the wrong moral to draw: that's how all the trouble started, for gawd's sake!). Platitudes anyway (a problem with slavering schoolmaster bardolatry is that people who read nothing but Shakespeare don't realize how many of the ideas are renaissance commonplaces). Anyway, the play is absurdly over-produced and companies should be doing more Massinger, Middleton and Co. and giving Mr Lear a rest for a bit. The blog has spoken!

Ayckbourn, Relatively Speaking

Relatively Speaking (1965) was Ayckbourn's first big hit in the West End, played by big names (Richard Briers, Michael Hordern, Celia Johnson) and earning a congratulation from Noel Coward. Radio 4 Extra broadcast a production yesterday in celebration of the playwright's 75th birthday. It's evocative of its time - the speech habits somehow conjured up the seventies programmes of my youth - and perhaps a valuable period piece in its insight into the shifting value systems of the swinging sixties. Yet for all its patina of age it comes over freshly today, thanks to the brilliant writing and deft characterisation. Ayckbourn had said he set out consciously to write a well-made play, and Relatively Speaking has the precise farcical clockwork of Wilde, and behind him Sheridan and Goldsmith. It's a delight to find oneself caught up in the elaborate machinery of this tight four-hander. The humour comes from a ludicrous series of mistaken identities, delivered quickly enough to be convincing and yielding wonderful sustained passages of dialogue which can be taken two ways. The bite comes from the hints of dark duplicity at the core of things, and the end leaves us doubting whether any enduring relationship is possible in the world the play creates. Beneath the gentility lies something deadly: Pinter's image for his plays, 'the weasel in the cocktail cabinet', applies equally to Ayckbourn. A brilliant theatrical moment in the 'father's' plan for a business trip, then topped by the lining of a pair of slippers. Only the innocent young man at the centre of it all comes over as an improbably naïve drip in the harder cooler 21st century. A joy to listen to after Sunday lunch while more intrepid souls are pounding the London Marathon, and a reminder in the days of experiment and shock drama of the enduring richness of craftsmanship and a good ear for the follies of man, ay and woman too.

El chico de la última fila / Dans la Maison

A couple of weeks ago Drama on 3 broadcast The Boy at the Back, an English translation of a play by Spanish writer Juan Mayorga, a name hitherto unknown to me. It was an intriguing story of a disillusioned literature teacher encouraging a promising student with his creative writing. All very worthy, except that the writing comes out of the boy's project of insinuating himself into the house and family of a schoolfriend, snooping around in a voyeuristic way, spying on the parents' conversations and pursuing the mother. The play at the same time brings us into the house of the teacher and his wife, who runs a struggling art gallery for trendy work which  the lit teacher scoffs at.

The play is extremely clever: it examines the sources and effects of literature, upsetting the liberal humanist piety that reading and writing are good for us; it exploits the fourth wall convention of theatre, whereby we are all voyeurs of another life (this element is less strong in radio, of course); the relation of teacher and student is a witty variation on the Pygmalion myth; and throughout there are satiric observations of education, modern art, middle class life, sport obsession and business. The cleverness is anchored in a simple narrative, coming from the boy Claude's visits to the house, and charged with a sinister atmosphere as it becomes clear that this is not going to end well.

The play has been adapted into a film by Ozon, Dans la Maison, centred on a great central performance by Fabrice Luchini as the teacher, Germain. The play seems to move across to France quite comfortably - indeed, the running references to Flaubert and Un Coeur Simple made it seem naturally gallic. This time around, the teacher did seem almost incredibly foolish in his 'encouragement' of the pupil, and as ever with school dramas I wondered where all the time for these one-to-one sessions with the budding Flaubert was coming from. Claude is not sure how to end his story, and it is a doubt apparently shared by Mayorga / Ozon, as the piece tries out a number of conclusions before going for a particularly dark dénoument which once again tested credibility. Listening to the play I enjoyed not knowing how much of the boy's narrative was real, how much a fantasy - there seems to be an analogue in the imaginary numbers discussed in the maths sessions -  but in the film things were played more literally (though the device of having Germain pop up in the middle of scenes was amusing and effective). And although Claude stands out from his abysmal teenage peers for having a smidgeon of intelligence, it was hard to see that his factual observations mixed with the odd caustic remark really added up to the great gift that his teacher sees in him. Indeed what seems to be admired is a total absence of empathy or compassion, quite the opposite of Flaubert's imaginative operations. Odd that we are told so little of the boy's home background, which prompts these longings to belong to a normal family. But in all a nice piece covering many topics neatly, and an enjoyably acidic alternative to more sentimental treatments of creativity and the mentor-pupil relationship.