Film Review: The Awakening (Murphy, 2011)

For those underwhelmed by James Watkins's mediocre film adaptation of The Woman in Black, here’s a much more substantial proposition. Nick Murphy’s superior ghost story - the director’s debut feature - failed to generate much interest on its brief theatrical release last year. But it turns out to be a stylish, intriguing and highly distinctive piece of work that marks Murphy out as a talent to watch. The movie is so rich, visually, that I regret not having seen it on a big screen, but I was very glad to have the opportunity to catch it on DVD, and would recommend it highly.

The film unfolds at Rockwood, a boy’s boarding school, in 1921. Rebecca Hall plays Florence Cathcart, a writer and academic of (you guessed) an unwavering rationalist stance who revels in exposing the supernatural as a falsity. (She’s introduced hijacking a séance.) Florence is approached by a schoolmaster at Rockwood, Robert Mallory (Dominic West), who seeks her advice about a ghostly apparition at Rockwood, which has apparently resulted in the death of a child. Arriving at the school, Florence is eager to uncover a logical explanation for this happening, but soon finds her cynicism tested by a series of strange events and appearances.

The premise - a sceptic’s awakening to the "reality" of the supernatural - is familiar enough. But while tipping its hat to a few classics of the genre - The Turn of the Screw and The Others, most notably - Murphy’s movie avoids getting bogged down in a tedious game of spot-the-homage. Instead, the film moves into some unforeseen territory as it progresses - with erotic and emotional undercurrents rising powerfully to the fore. Murphy proves himself a master of the eerie set-piece - a stunning sequence involving a doll’s house is especially fine - and the movie becomes genuinely disturbing and disorientating in its final stretch, a few scenes achieving a hallucinatory intensity as  what, precisely, Florence needs to "awaken" to is gradually revealed.

Well supported by West and by Imelda Staunton in a pivotal secondary role, Hall gives a strong, distinguished performance that compellingly charts Florence’s journey from smug assurance to uncertainty, terror and recognition. Her presence anchors this sensual, elegant, chilling and moving film - one that’s deeply rooted, as the best ghost stories tend to be, in the experience of loss and grief.

Theatre Review: Othello (Sheffield Crucible)

At the Sheffield Crucible, Daniel Evans directs a highly accomplished Othello that’s notable for its clarity, pace and excellent performances. Evans has pulled off something of a casting coup in reuniting two of the stars of HBO’s The Wire (a series whose intricacies have sometimes been described as Shakespearean) for this production, which pits Dominic West’s Iago against Clarke Peters’s Othello. That billing is all that Evans has needed to ensure a sell-out run, but the production’s success is fully deserved, for this is a stark, sharp and powerful staging that grips and involves from beginning to end.

Fresh from his brilliant star-turn in Lindsay Posner’s revival of Butley, West delivers another scintillating performance here. Employing a broad Yorkshire accent to underscore the confidence-inspiring “hail-fellow-well-met” persona that’s central to his Iago, the actor gives a vivid, characterful interpretation. There have been more perverse and chilling Iagos than this but few that have been more convincing and persuasive as successful manipulators, and West unearths a surprising amount of humour in the role too, while not stinting on the underlying bitterness. He’s well-matched by Peters whose Othello has gravitas and tragic grandeur, and who movingly conveys the character’s deep love for Desdemona (a touching, fervent Lily James) in a way that makes the tragedy feel both inevitable and deeply shocking. And, while Colin George's Brabantio is a mite feeble and Leigh McDonald's Bianca somewhat shrill,  there’s good work from Gwilym Lee as Cassio and from Brodie Ross as an amusingly lachrymose Roderigo.

And then there’s Alexandra Gilbreath as Emilia. At times, Gilbreath seems to be doing a tad too much in this relatively minor role: her incredible voice, with its exhilarating depths and husky layers, turns the simplest, most straightforward of lines into sweeping, grandiose pronouncements. But her big moments here - from the tenderness with which she invests the “willow” scene and the quiet passion of her plea for female equality to her grief at Desdemona’s murder and fierce denunciation of the men at the end - leave you in no doubt that she’s one of the most magnetic actresses that we currently have the privilege to see on stage. This Emilia starts out as a (slightly frustrated) bawd, and Gilbreath is especially adorable when popping Desdemona’s handkerchief into her cleavage for Iago to find and declaring “I have a thing for you.” But the clarity with which the actress charts Emilia's increase in awareness and refusal to “obey” turns the character into the heroine of the evening, in a production that restores vibrancy and power to even the play’s most familiar, shop-worn moments. Who needs HBO?

Sheffield Theatres website here.

Theatre Review: Butley (Duchess Theatre)

Simon Gray’s play Butley, which focuses on a few hours in the life of an academic in meltdown, premiered in the West End in 1971 in a production starring Alan Bates in what was to become something of a signature role. The play has not been frequently seen since then (a Broadway production with Nathan Lane had a limited run in 2006) but now, 40 years on, it gets an excellent and very well-cast revival directed by Lindsay Posner at the Duchess Theatre.

Our eponymous protagonist, Ben Butley, is an English Literature lecturer at a college of London University. Self-absorbed and drink-dependent, we encounter him on the first day of term as he dodges persistent students, and learns that his estranged wife, Anne, is to divorce him, and that his protégé/lover, the assistant lecturer Joseph, is to leave him. Butley’s response to these and other disasters is a stream of barbed insults and a dose or two of mischief-making, a default mode that masks the protagonist’s pain regarding where his professional and personal life have ended up.

Gray’s play doesn’t feel dated: the portrait of academia - its rivalries, frustrations and insecurities - still rings true, and the dialogue retains its freshness, pungency and wit. And in our monstrous hero Gray has fashioned a vivid creation indeed. Harold Pinter, who directed the 1971 production, described Butley as “a character who hurls himself towards destruction while living, in the fever of his intellectual hell, with a vitality and brilliance known to few of us. He courts death by remaining ruthlessly - even dementedly - alive.”

All of these interesting contradictions are embraced in Dominic West’s dynamic performance. His Butley is at once petty and shrewd, captivating and awful, charismatic and impossible. Physically lithe and vocally dexterous, the actor brings a marvellous gusto to the invective while also communicating the insecurity and sheer neediness that underpin it. Indeed, what’s especially impressive about West’s performance here is how it shows - without a hint of sentimentality - Butley’s bluster to be the recourse of a man who’s sick at heart, and who can deal with loss and failure only by lashing out, alienating those he desires to bring closer. It’s an indelible portrait of a man set upon sabotaging himself that gives the piece its measure of poignancy and power.

West is well supported by Martin Hutson, who is at once deeply sympathetic and ever-so-slightly irritating as Joseph, the young man who knows he must escape Butley’s grasp. As the stolid Reg, Joseph’s new lover and facilitator of that escape, Paul McGann also makes his mark in a memorably tense and funny encounter with Butley in which the latter’s penchant for insult goes into overdrive. (McGann’s brilliantly controlled performance lets us know that Reg will give Joseph neither the pain, nor the excitement, that he’s experienced with Butley, and that that’s why he’s necessary to him.) Amanda Drew, meanwhile, brings a marvellous straightforwardness to her brief appearance as Anne, but it’s a woefully underwritten role. Penny Downie is luckier: as Edna, a colleague of Butley’s who’s dealing with a problem student, this expert actress manages to pack the suggestion of a whole life history into a handful of scenes, imbuing them with fresh and surprising touches. And I also enjoyed Emma Hiddleston as Miss Heasman, the student whose eager persistence at gaining a tutorial with Butley is finally shaken when she finds him pretending to projectile vomit over her essay on The Winter’s Tale.

Set as it is in one room on one day - a conceit that leads to a good self-reflexive joke on the “three unities,” one example of much enjoyable “literary” banter in the play - there’s a static quality to Butley that Posner’s production can’t quite solve. Even though Peter McKintosh’s office set is both imposing and expressive, there’s little to engage the eye here except the actors. In addition, the play doesn’t, ultimately, go quite as deep as you might hope, and there’s a sense of anti-climax about the ending, which requires a stronger punch-line. Nonetheless, this is a highly entertaining evening, and a must-see for West’s tour-de-force alone.

 

Butley runs for 2 hours 20 minutes. It's at the Duchess until August 27th.

 

Reviewed for The Public Reviews.