Theatre Review: Look Back in Anger (Almeida)

"Hope deferred makes the heart sick, and many hearts are sick at what they see in England now." (John Osborne, 1959)

Given its (perhaps overinflated) reputation as the play that single-handedly blew the doors of off fusty ol' 50s British theatre and put working-class grievances centre stage, Look Back in Anger is revived with surprising infrequency in the UK. 

Times change, tastes change, and what once looked radical, now - in form at least -  may look tame, since Osborne's play is in essence a static Three Act relationship drama which, apart from the often stinging language delivered by its iconic protagonist, seems not very far removed from the middle-class domestic dramas that the playwright and others of his generation so aggressively critiqued. As Richard Eyre has put it: "However abrasive and excoriating, far from looking back in anger, the play looks back with a fierce, despairing nostalgia."

All of this makes Arti Banerjee’s revival at the Almeida quite welcome - even just as an opportunity to see how the play stands up from a contemporary vantage point. Staged alongside Arnold Wesker's Roots, with which its partially cross cast to form the rather cringingly named "Angry & Young" season (t-shirts available in the foyer!), there's much that doesn't quite work in Banerjee’s production: feeble Expressionist movement flourishes; an unhelpful red carpeted circular set by Naomi Dawson that's too obvious a representation of a domestic hell; and some miscasting. 

But damnit if the power of the play doesn't peek through in the end. That's mostly due to a great performance from Billy Howle (last seen on stage in a more revelatory revival, of Dodie Smith's Dear Octopus at the NT) who, without any sentimentalising, manages to humanise Jimmy in surprising, unexpected ways.

In Tony Richardson's film version of the play, the character's rants as delivered by Richard Burton were effective but felt over-rehearsed. Down to his restlessly twitching toes as Jimmy reads the paper in the opening scene, Howle makes the character's frustration more subtly palpable and demonstrates how it manifests in domestic tyranny. He doesn't stint on conveying Jimmy's cruelty - mostly directed at his wife Alison -  but also shows that to view the character as a "toxic masculinity" exemplar is simply a diminishment. Whether you like the content or not, Jimmy's outbursts against the post-war English scene are often bitingly acute and funny and have a theatrical charge: even if last Friday's audience seemed determined to register their disapproval of the character by responding only with the occasional tut. But Howle's triumph in the role is to reveal Jimmy as at once infantile and insightful, a rebel without a cause who's clearly in pain but also thinks he has a monopoly on it. 

Overall Banerjee's production gets better as it goes along, and some of the sketchier performances start clicking into place as well. As Alison's friend and (apparent) defender, Morfydd Clark lacks the sensual quality that Claire Bloom brought to the part on film but gradually manages to make sense of the character's tricky trajectory  - especially a moral awakening that's powerfully conveyed here.

Playing Alison, Ellora Torchia hits odd notes in most of the earlier scenes. But from the character's touching encounter with her Empire-and-Establishment-representing father (a well-judged Deka Walmsley) onwards the performance begins to find its shape and I wasn't prepared for the depth  of emotion she reaches in the final scene. As a combined portrait of the pain of marriage and the state of a nation, Look Back in Anger reveals itself as a flawed work, but while Banerjee's revival isn't ideal I came away moved in the end. 

Look Back in Anger is at the Almeida until 23 November. Further details here. 

Photos: Marc Brenner

Theatre Review: "Why Greeks Matter" Discussion + Oresteia (Almeida)

With Ben Whishaw heading up the Bakkhai from July, Kate Fleetwood tackling Medea in the autumn and Robert Icke’s production of the Oresteia now under way, the “Almeida Greeks” season is one of the most highly anticipated theatrical events of the year. “For theatre, to begin at the beginning is to begin with the Greeks,” notes Artistic Director Rupert Goold, and the exciting season is also being supplemented by a series of context-providing talks and Q&As. The first of these, held last Monday before the performance, found Goold, Deborah Warner and Ivo van Hove sharing their thoughts on “Why Greeks Matter”. With Goold serving as interlocutor, the directors talked insightfully, wittily and sometimes even movingly about their experiences of directing Greek tragedy over the years. (The discussion can be viewed at the Almeida website.) 

Deborah Warner

All agreed that these plays pose unique challenges for practitioners, actors and audiences, mostly because, as van Hove noted, they’re built around very specific “conventions that have to be approached in a new way.” Frank about her dissatisfaction with some English approaches to the plays, Warner reminisced about her first foray into the field with her influential production of Electra in 1988. The director recalled the “frightening” experience of not making any progress after three weeks of rehearsal (a soon-to-resign Orestes with a drug problem didn’t help, apparently) before ordering an impromptu run-through that – thanks primarily to Fiona Shaw’s dynamic brilliance – showed her that the play could indeed “release pure emotion” as she intended.  

Warner was particularly interesting when discussing the limitations of a text-based approach to Greek tragedy, emphasising that the words can be a mere blueprint or membrane in this case: “With most plays you think you can go to the words on the page and something will happen. But you can speak a Greek play and nothing may happen.”

Ivo van Hove

Both directors talked about the importance of specific collaboration with actors - Warner with Shaw, of course, and van Hove with Juliette Binoche on their recent Antigone - with van Hove stressing the importance of researching the characters’ context and back-story: his first direction to Binoche when preparing Antigone was to go away and read Oedipus at Colonus. Van Hove discussed his strategies for involving the Chorus in Antigone while  Warner warned directors to be wary of the “Choral Revolt” – which happens  when cast members realise that they’re not playing one of the main roles. Hilariously, she recalled how the Chorus for her Medea came to her and announced that they couldn’t be in the play, after all, because they didn’t approve of child murder. (Warner: “I’m not sure that I do, either…”)

Especially memorable (and moving) were the directors’ remarks about the contemporary resonances, or political parallels, of the plays. Warner recalled how a performance of Electra in Co. Derry in 1992 affected the audience to the extent that they didn’t applaud but instead demanded a discussion with the cast afterwards. Suggesting that his approach has become more politicised over the years, van Hove, meanwhile, talked with palpable emotion about the impact of the shooting down of Malasia Airlines Flight MH17 last July on his staging of Antigone. Warner, however, was adamant that such parallels shouldn’t be forced or imposed on the plays but rather emerge organically from specific contexts. Ultimately, the plays are family stories, she said, and, as such, “they go to the core. To something essential. They define the profound experience that theatre can be.”    

Jessica Brown Findlay  and Angus Wright in Oresteia (Almeida Theatre) 

The idea of “approaching conventions in a new way” is unsurprisingly central to Icke’s take on the Oresteia: sometimes  scintillatingly, sometimes less successfully so. Icke’s production of Anne Washburn’s Mr. Burns last year was one of the great polarising productions of recent times and his take on Aeschylus, on which he serves as both adaptor and director, could prove just as divisive. Running at a lengthy 3 hours 45 minutes, Icke’s production approaches the trilogy with a good deal of irreverence, replacing the Chorus with a "doctor" figure (Lorna Brown) who’s interviewing Orestes (Luke Thompson), for example. Hildegard Bechtler’s fine design is filled with meandering, ghostly presences as the evening progresses, as Icke, a shrewd and often daring manipulator of pace, tone and mood, languorously stretches out some scenes, allowing particular flourishes to really resonate.

Some of the production’s innovations (mics and screens, the employment of an iconic pop song) aren’t really innovations at all. Rather, they’re borrowed wholesale from the precedents set by the likes of van Hove and Warner. But while there’s perhaps too much recourse to elements that have essentially become the "lingua franca" of contemporary takes on classical tragedy, the actors come through: Angus Wright with a memorably conflicted Agamemnon, Jessica Brown Findlay with an intense Electra, and especially Lia Williams as a stunning Klytemnestra, galvanising when screaming “I’ll wake the house!” as her husband confronts her with his murderous plans for their daughter or raising a shriek of pleasure at her own violent acts. The production, with its share of excitements and irritations, makes for a memorably bold and potent start to this season. 

Theatre Review: The Turn of the Screw (Almeida)

Henry James’s suggestiveness and super-subtlety get fairly short shrift in Lindsay Posner’s rather laborious new production of The Turn of the Screw at the Almeida. Inspired originally by an Archbishop’s anecdote, and inspiration, in turn, for Susan Hill’s The Woman in Black and Alejandro Amenábar's The Others, James’s devious 1898 novella - about a Governess’s conviction that her two young charges, Flora and Miles, are possessed by the spirits of depraved dead servants - has been the subject of about as many adaptations as critical interpretations over the years. And its central ambiguity - are the ghosts “real” or hallucinated by the imagination-prone (and love-struck) Governess? – is still capable of provoking a very heated class discussion or two even today, I can attest. Alas, despite some scattered flashes of interest and a few chills, Posner’s ploddy production doesn’t contribute a great deal that’s new to this oft-adapted, much-debated enigma.

Overseen by Hammer – the rebooted studio responsible for James Watkins’s lame film of The Woman in Black and here making a first stage foray – the production attempts to steer a course between psychological study and Gothic spook-fest and thereby retain a certain amount of ambiguity. Posner adds thunder storms and lightning flashes; there are shadows, sudden flares, chalk scraping down a blackboard and all sorts of things going bump in the night. Peter McKintosh’s set revolves to become parlour, bedroom and riverbank and to suggest, as the novella does so brilliantly, the workings of the Governess’s mind: what Edna Kent called “the ebb and flow of troubled thought.” For all these effects, the production lacks atmosphere, though, and there’s a formulaic, workmanlike quality to the scares that means that the proceedings don’t generate enough tension or terror. (Hey, even webcowgirl didn’t scream!) An unnecessary interval doesn’t help, either.

Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s script has its effective and witty touches (“It’s hard to do interesting things and keep your hands clean at the same time,” chirps Flora early on) and nicely brings out the elements of class hostility underpinning the narrative. Yet other notions tend toward the crass and crude (a spot of groping; a masturbation moment for the Governess). The production also cribs rather liberally from earlier adaptations - especially Jack Clayton’s classic 1961 film The Innocents – without coming near to matching the beauty and horror that Clayton’s great images managed to achieve. Throughout, indeed, the material cries out for a more imaginative, theatrical approach than Posner and Lenkiewicz seem able to provide. Watching the production, I began to think more fondly of the 2009 BBC version which, for all its shortcomings, at least attempted to offer a fresh take on the material by vindicating the Governess’s visions and wagging an unfashionably feminist finger at those who’d prefer to view the character as a sexually repressed neurotic.

Here Anna Madeley’s performance certainly gives ample space for such a reading; the actress delivers a solid turn though perhaps not a truly disturbing one. Emilia Jones as Flora (alternating with Isabella Blake Thomas and Lucy Morton) and Laurence Belcher as (a rather too-teenage) Miles both work hard at their demanding roles, and Mrs. Grose’s shift from belief to scepticism is sharply caught by the always-reliable Gemma Jones – once a memorable Fleda Vetch in the BBC’s adaptation of James’s The Spoils of Poynton. (“From Spoilin’ to Screwin’” as a dear James-freak friend of mine wrote me when informed of Ms. Jones's casting.) But the ghosts themselves – Eoin Geoghegan as Quint and Caroline Bartleet as Miss Jessel – are fairly weak presences here, seldom made sufficiently vivid to us to “raise the dear old sacred terror” that their creator desired.

An odd amalgam of the OTT and the undercooked, the production feels inessential, then. Those unfamiliar with James’s tricky tale might glean some enjoyment from this particular turn of the screw. But given the richness and potential of the source material, Posner’s well-intentioned yet ultimately lacklustre take seems a missed opportunity overall.

Interview with Kieran Bew at One Stop Arts

Following his performances in The Knot of the Heart, Reasons to be Pretty and King Lear, the Almeida must feel like something of a second home to Kieran Bew these days. I interviewed Kieran for One Stop Arts about playing Edmund in Lear. You can read what he had to say right here.

The Wheel Is Come Full Circle: Interview with Kieran Bew at One Stop Arts

The Almeida must have begun to feel like something of a second home to Kieran Bew by now: in the past 18 months he's acted in three shows at the theatre. Firstly, in what Susannah Clapp termed "a feministly thrilling cast-list," Bew played all the male roles, no less, in David Eldridge's addiction drama The Knot of the Heart. He then brilliantly brought to life an archetypal example of LaButean maleness as Kent in Reasons to be Pretty. And last month he finished playing a witty, wily Edmund in Michael Attenborough's production of King Lear, with Jonathan Pryce. Though currently busy filming a 5-part BBC drama series, Kieran kindly took the time to talk to One Stop Arts about his experiences in King Lear, reflecting on the particular pleasures and demands of the play, on what he likes most about performing at the Almeida, and on why playing Edmund can sometimes make an actor feel a little bit like Bill Hicks.

 

 

AR: King Lear remains one of the most highly regarded and frequently performed of Shakespeare's tragedies. What do you think are the reasons for the play's reputation? 

 

KB: I think given the scale of the play, the ambitiousness of what he covers and the size of the cast, the reputation of the play is understandable. Before I read it, many people referred to it as their favourite play. I couldn't pinpoint one thing specifically, but perhaps it's the family: two families torn apart by money, greed, power. It's those base human desires that distract us from what really matters in life. Of course, the poetry's not bad either.

 

How would you describe the arc or journey that Edmund undergoes in the play? 

 

Edmund is damaged; he is chronically human, fallible and hurting. I'd say it's a tragedy. If you label and mistreat people, they will become reactive. He has the capacity to be evil, but there is provocation. The vacuum created by Lear's actions gives him fertile ground to slither through. I'm not saying his evil deeds are legitimate or right, but I believe Shakespeare is warning us about the nature of prejudice.

 

 

 

 

How much fun was it to play the villain of the piece? 

 

It is enormously fun to play the villain. They are often the engine of drama, and Shakespeare takes the edge off the severity of his deeds with the soliloquies. Ingratiating yourself with the audience with wit and charm helps keep it theatrical and fun for the audience. He's the anti-hero – hopefully; each performance is different. Otherwise he would be unbearably brutal and cruel. 

 

Was there anything that you found surprising or unexpected about the play during the rehearsal period or in performance?

 

I found the journey of Kent to be incredibly moving. When you read a play with your character in mind you tend to concentrate on that. Watching Ian Gelder's very delicate portrayal of Kent was wonderful. Obviously Lear going mad is what people talk about, but seeing this friend, caring and desperately trying to reach a man who is slipping away was very beautiful. Those who care for the mentally ill, suffering through their love, it's quite brilliantly observed. 

 

Is there a line/scene/moment that you particularly looked forward to performing every night?

 

I would look forward to the second scene, it has three soliloquies! Edmund lays down his case for action, asking the audience to go with him. He makes a very compelling argument with his first speech. The second is in prose and sometimes feels like a bit of a Bill Hicks stand-up routine. The challenge is of course in the live aspect of theatre; what worked and was charming last night may not necessarily work the next. That's why I love doing theatre. I might fall on my arse but at least I'm going to go for it.

 

 

 

 

Did anything surprise you about Edmund as a character, or about the audience reaction to him and the production generally?

 

In rehearsals, I found playing Edmund strangely lonely. He is incredibly quick-witted. He suits the manipulation to the person he is with so deftly, that you can end up feeling slightly hollow afterwards. Of course he feels elated with his success, but it's hard to separate your own feelings on the moment. Most of the time he plants the language of treason or doubt very delicately, and then uses his victims' paranoia or anger against them, like Iago. His vocabulary echoes theirs to create a feeling of collusion and trust. He is brilliant. But it can leave you feeling a little isolated. I'd have a soliloquy which, after five weeks rehearsing it to the wall, I was desperate to talk to the audience. Once we began performing, the interaction of the theatre was just wonderful. It's the third character you are missing in rehearsals, and suddenly there are so many more possibilities. Audiences at best participate in the action, and at the Almeida, even with the intimacy of the space they were not afraid to show their allegiance or distain. It's really fun having that push-and-pull with them. It was the same with Kent in Reasons to be Pretty and the reporter in The Knot of the Heart. 

 

The audience reaction to the "incestuous" aspect of our show was surprising. I was largely unaware of that colour given Edmund is in the other thread of the play. Sometimes with a classic, particularly one which so many people have studied at school, there is a great sense of ownership as to what a play should be about. Shakespeare has such depth and is so multi-layered that there will be thousands of productions highlighting some bits and not others.

I also think it's great if the work is provocative and gets people thinking and talking. In the last two plays I did at the Almeida, there was plenty to get upset about. Its good when people's ideas are challenged, not in a gratuitous way, but surely that's what theatre is for, to get us thinking and debating?

 

Unlike many current productions of Shakespeare plays, your production was traditional: it didn't seek to make obvious parallels with the modern world or "current events". As an actor, what's your attitude to modern-dress productions of Shakespeare? Do you have a preference for modern or more traditional approaches? 

 

It's strange that the word "traditional" gets used almost as a derogatory term. Our play was set in a nowhere time, really, a pagan-esque world with swords, wheelchairs and electric lighting. I loved the asylum-like feel of the castle.

 

For me the most important thing about the play and the interpretation is the human element. Clarity: Do you relate to this? Do you identify as a human being? Shakespeare has written these extraordinary, well-rounded, flawed, contradictory people. They are us. If a concept or a setting is getting in the way of you hearing the play or the poetry, what's the point? 

I don't think Shakespeare needs to be updated or signposted with a modern setting necessarily, but of course it's wonderful to see the parallels. Greg Doran's Julius Caesar and Ralph Fiennes' film of Coriolanus for example, I thought were brilliant. And I loved the setting Tom [Scutt] and Mike [Attenborough] chose for King Lear. It allows you to play the play. Having said that, I'd love to do Shakespeare set in space... can anyone make that happen? 

 

Do you remember the first Shakespeare play or production that had an impact on you as a reader/audience member? 

 

The first play to have a major impact on me was Richard II. I asked an English teacher from my school to help pick scenes for my audition. I had never even heard of it. He chose a few soliloquies and I just fell in love with it. The complexity of language and poetry were totally new to me. I struggled with spelling and English at school; I was intimidated and felt like it wasn't something I was capable of doing. I had terrible marks in my work. Acting changed that completely. I found that once I was speaking it and seeing it as people rather than an academic exercise, I could learn. Before that it was incredibly frustrating. 

 

I watched the Derek Jacobi version filmed for the BBC and thought yep, that's what I want to do. Coriolanus was another, I studied it at drama school and learned most of it off by heart. I used to carry copies of both around with me.

 

You've performed at the Almeida in several different shows now. What do you like most - or find most challenging - about the space? 

 

I love the intimacy of the Almeida; the staff are so friendly and it has such a great history of shows. I feel very lucky to have been part of it while Mike Attenborough has been in charge. I think what I enjoy most is the warmth of the space; you are close to the audience but still on a "stage". You can really feel the temperature of the audience. Which, of course, with a play dealing with heroin abuse, was incredibly moving. Thank god I had some moments of comedy in that one. In Neil LaBute's play, I could actually feel the hatred emanating from the female audience members. There was a line I had which would shift them from, "Oh, he is a lovable douchebag" to "I want to cut off that guy's nuts!" Getting to chat and befriend them as Edmund was great fun. It's a very cool theatre.

 

Theatre Review: King Lear (Almeida)

From Ian McKellen to Derek Jacobi, the late Pete Postlethwaite to Tim Pigott-Smith, the last five years haven’t exactly stinted British theatre-goers for high-profile King Lears, a testament both to the enduring power of one of Shakespeare’s most gruelling and gripping tragedies and to the eagerness of veteran actors to get the role under their belts while they’re still physically capable of lugging Cordelia around the stage. Now, pre-empting Simon Russell Beale’s rumoured production with Sam Mendes, it’s the turn of the excellent Jonathan Pryce to venture out onto the heath, in a fine production by Michael Attenborough that makes up in focus, clarity and intimacy what it lacks in apocalyptic vision.

Indeed, Attenborough’s approach to the play is determinedly unfussy. The storm scene is simply staged - smoke and a few sound effects, no water as drenched poor Oliver Ford Davies’s Lear for the Almeida ten years ago - and the overall look is low-key: Tom Scott’s set and costumes could have come directly from a BBC Shakespeare circa 1976. Still, having been somewhat under-whelmed by Nicholas Hytner’s strenuously modern, straining-for-relevance Timon of Athens at the NT just the other day, Attenborough’s gimmick-free take felt extremely refreshing to me. The focus is firmly on character and relationships here, rather than an overriding “concept,” and the production puts some striking spins on the protagonists. A few of these do feel a tad forced: Richard Goulding’s highly engaging Edgar - a character more usually found with his nose in a book, prior to his Poor Tom transformation - is here introduced indulging in a hearty spot of servant-snogging, while the Lear-as-sexual-abuser card gets played for the first time in a while, and to little effect.

Other elements work beautifully, though. Phoebe Fox makes something original and unsentimental of Cordelia, giving the character a combative, steely resolve that melts movingly in the reconciliation scene with Lear; she’s a study of goodness without a hint of sweetness. Kieran Bew - last seen gracing the Almeida stage as the dumbass Kent in Neil LaBute’s Reasons to be Pretty - renders a gorgeously amused and cocksure Edmund (the play’s best role, IMHO!). Bew makes the character’s villainy entirely winning; he gets an audience-rapport going from his opening soliloquy and sustains it up to the character’s final (wonderful!) moment of repentance. Jenny Jules and Zoe Waites offer well-drawn takes on Regan and Goneril, and Ian Gelder’s faithful, stoic Kent and Clive Wood’s moving Gloucester are equally fine.

And Pryce himself delivers a marvellously compelling quicksilver turn. A more agile, robust Lear than many, he puts fascinating twists on the most familiar speeches, subverting sentimentality at every turn, whether by ripping savagely into “Reason not the need!” or undercutting the “great stage of fools” speech with ironic  sermonizing. Everything he does feels fresh, alive, spontaneous. His moments of tender connection with Gelder and Wood win through to genuine emotion, and his connection with Trevor Fox’s Fool - whose riddling speeches come accompanied by magic tricks, and who’s capable of cracking Lear up even when he's at his most enraged or despairing - is beautifully done. Attenborough takes the action at a fair clip, and locates the black comedy in the play’s bleakness without overselling it. The evening has both pace and feeling. Those who like their Lears wilder - or more high-concept - may not be stirred, but this was, for me, a terrific night in the theatre, and by far the strongest production I’ve seen at the Almeida this year.

Running time: 3 hours. Further information at the Almeida website.