Theatre Review: Richard III (Almeida)

Hamlet may remain the prized part for the younger Shakespearean actor, and King Lear the Holy Grail for the older, but, for those aged in between, there’s no denying that Richard III still retains a strong attraction, as evidenced by the high-profile names – including Kevin Spacey and Benedict Cumberbatch – who’ve taken on the role in recent years.

Shakespeare’s characterisation of the monarch as a charismatic villain, merrily murdering his way towards the throne, may send certain historians into a fit, but the role clearly remains as appealing to actors as the play itself does to audiences. The attraction lies in part, perhaps, in the way that Shakespeare makes Richard himself a performer, counterfeiting and pretending, and, at one point, essentially coaching his co-conspirator Buckingham in effective acting technique.

This emphasis on performance can turn the play into something of a pantomime; Richard Loncraine’s 1995 film version, starring Ian McKellen, arguably fell into this mode. But Rupert Goold’s excellent new production at the Almeida, which dynamically re-teams Ralph Fiennes and Vanessa Redgrave after their previous collaborations in the films of The White Countess and Coriolanus, doesn’t take that route. There’s humour, certainly, in Fiennes’s witty delivery and in the memorable darkly comic performance of Daniel Cerqueira as the killer Catesby, coolly bringing out the block and axe to chop off the head of James Garnon’s Lord Hastings.

Yet, from Jon Morrell’s dark costumes to Hildegard Bechtler’s spare set to Jon Clark’s crepuscular lighting, this is a production that takes the play seriously and illuminates it in intelligent ways. A postmodernist framing device, referencing the 2013 discovery of Richard’s skeleton under a Leicester car-park, is striking but superfluous. Otherwise, though, the production, which mixes cell-phones and breastplates, offers a fine blending of the traditional and the contemporary.

At the centre, of course, is Fiennes, hunched and with his right side braced, his body seemingly at odds with itself yet frighteningly nimble when need be. Fiennes has always been a great actor, but in recent years his performances on both stage and screen (not least his superb, uninhibited turn in A Bigger Splash) have taken on a looser, riskier quality. Always exceptionally clear in his delivery, with an expert approach to the soliloquies, Fiennes does terrific, surprising things in this role: whether it’s mocking Rivers with a Cockney “What, marry, may she?”, letting out a bashful “Aw!” when it’s suggested that the throne might be his, making the line “Are you Tyrrell?" into a question for the audience, turning on Hastings with startling ferocity, or chillingly letting his mask of benevolence slip when Baxter Westby’s bound-for-the-Tower Prince Edward jumps on his back.

   

The dramatic face-offs with Joanna Vanderham’s strongly characterised Lady Anne and with Aislín McGuckin’s Queen Elizabeth, are particularly disturbing, Fiennes grabbing the crotch of the former and forcing the latter to the floor in a full-on sexual assault,  before railing against “shallow, changing woman” in a moment that powerfully exposes the character’s violent misogyny.

Redgrave, always bold and inventive, makes something equally original of the mad prophetess Margaret. Boiler-suited and carrying a battered doll as the emblem of the character’s losses, she dispenses her curses with stealth rather than stridency, wiggling her finger as she refers to “the worm of conscience”, kissing and caressing the doll  (and reacting with open-mouthed horror as Fiennes grabs its head) and, in a great moment, finally passing her mantle of insight and grief to McGuckin’s Elizabeth. Of the play’s female characters, the critic John Jowett has noted: “Shakespeare empowers them as chroniclers, the voices of those who understand and know”. Redgrave, in particular, embodies that understanding and knowledge here.

Although the production makes good use of the Almeida’s intimate space, Goold’s staging has some problems. The imperfect construction of the play leads to some awkward transitions, “The Citizens” scene feels under-directed, and a couple of the performances aren’t everything they might be: Susan Engel, for one, indulges in some surprising hamming as Richard’s mother, the Duchess of York. Complaints about pace during the preview period may also have resulted in the ending now feeling rushed: the eve-of-Bosworth apparition scene is effectively and unfussily done, and Fiennes invests Richard's fractured final soliloquy with a compelling mixture of self-justification, self-hatred and vulnerability. Yet the battle itself, with blaring lights and a very weedy rain effect, feels somehow stilted, leading to a muted finale. Still, if Goold’s production doesn't match Propeller's amazing take on the play, it remains essential viewing, not least for the chance to see one of our finest actors at the very top of his game.

Richard III is booking at the Almeida until 6 August. The production will also be broadcast live to cinemas around the world on 21 July as the first “Almeida Live” broadcast.

Theatre Review: Before The Party (Almeida)

Alex Price and Katherine Parkinson in Before the Party (Photo: Keith Pattison)

Of all the playwrights swept aside by the Royal Court revolution, Rodney Ackland had a more chequered career than most. Celebrated in the 1930s and 40s, when plays like Birthday and Strange Orchestra were big hits, derided in the 1950s when The Pink Room bombed, Ackland ended up enjoying a late renaissance thanks to the Orange Tree, whose rediscovery of The Pink Room in the late 1980s led to Ackland rewriting the play for TV and the NT as Absolute Hell to great acclaim. Scattered Ackland productions have followed this, including, at the Orange Tree in 2004, Ellie  Jones 's revival of Strange Orchestra: one of my all-time favourite productions. 

I think there'll be very few audience members who don't leave Matthew Dunster's revival of Before The Party at the Almeida hoping to see yet more of Ackland's work on the UK stage. For Dunster gives Ackland's 1949 play a truly luscious staging here, one that reveals the playwright as a distinctive anatomist of English mores, a satirist for whom wit doesn't exclude sympathy. From its cheeky animated opening to its perfectly judged end, this is the kind of confident production that the viewer watches in complete happiness, and the best that I've seen at the Almeida since A Delicate Balance.

Adapted from a W. Somerset Maugham short story, the play focuses on a few fraught hours in the household of the Skinner family as they prepare for - and then return from - a social-climbing function that the father, Aubrey (Michael Thomas) - a lawyer pursuing political office - can't afford to miss.  Recently returned to the family fold is eldest daughter Laura (Katherine Parkinson), a widow with a new man, David (Alex Price), in tow. This set-up has caused some consternation in the family already - especially from Laura's uptight sister Kathleen (Michelle Terry). But the drama gets a further kick when Laura ends up making a confession that threatens the family's position - one that might just have been overheard by her inquisitive 13-year-old sister, Susan.

A summary of the theme of Before the Party - the moral bankruptcy of the middle classes, post WWII - may make you groan, but the play is more nuanced than such a description suggests. What's admirable about Ackland is that, even as he subjects most of the characters to satiric treatment, he doesn't make them one-dimensional monsters as a lesser writer might. Rather, they remain all-too-human, even at their pettiest and most self-preserving. The material may not be Ackland's originally but he succeeds in making it his own: he's a writer who can create a wonderful comic hum scene-by-scene, as his characters interact, and who can swerve a moment from merriment to melancholy with consummate skill.

Dunster's production is fully alert to these sharp shifts of tone and presents the play with clarity and conviction. He's helped by a creamily gorgeous design by Anna Fleischle and by performances that are everything they should be. Katherine Parkinson is wonderfully sympathetic as she reveals the deep emotions that Laura  has had to hide and her insecurity about the prospect of future happiness. Michelle Terry, last seen rocking out at the Royal Court in In The Republic of Happiness, here makes Kathleen the hilarious epitome of uptightness: just listen to her bite into her description of Laura as "man-mad." Stella Gonet twitters gleefully as the daffy mother, June Watson is endearing as the family's Nanny, and there's fine work from Polly Dartford as Susan (one of three young actresses alternating the role), who declares early on that she's "going to take poison before I get old" and who by the end of the play has more reason than ever to question the conduct of her elders. A delicious evening all round.

The production runs until 11th May. Further information at the Almeida website.

Theatre Review: Reasons To Be Pretty (Almeida)

If one thing’s for sure it’s that London Theatreland loves and loves to hate Neil LaBute in just about equal measure. The mere mention of the writer/director’s name - and the misanthropy, misogyny and sometimes shallow provocations associated with his films and plays - is enough to raise the hackles of some. But LaBute clearly has major fans on this side of the pond, judging by the frequency with which his work is staged here. Just opened at the Almeida, Reasons To Be Pretty is the third LaBute play to be seen in London this year, following the Pleasance's revival of his super-controversial 9/11 drama The Mercy Seat and the West End premiere of In A Forest, Dark and Deep, an exceedingly  poor and predictable two-hander whose most memorable feature turned out to be the excellent selection of rock songs that rattled the auditorium before the performance proper began.

Though not without its problems, Reasons To Be Pretty is certainly a much more substantial piece of work than was In A Forest... With a title that tips its hat to the Hole song “Reasons to be Beautiful,” the play, first staged in New York in 2008, concludes LaBute’s loose trilogy on contemporary perceptions of beauty, a saga that he began ten years ago with The Shape of Things and continued in 2004 with Fat Pig. The focus this time is on two couples: Greg (Tom Burke) and Steph (Siân Brooke) and Carly (Billie Piper) and Kent (Kieran Bew), and the fall-out from Greg’s observation that, unlike that of a new work colleague, Steph’s face is just “regular.” That comment, reported to Steph by Carly, becomes the catalyst for a breach between Steph and Greg, while Kent pursues an affair with said work colleague, gradually arousing the suspicions of his pregnant wife.

A seasoned director of LaBute’s work, Michael Attenborough delivers a crisp, clear production here, with the snappy scenes playing out on a neat revolving trailer set by Soutra Gilmore and punctuated by lovely blasts of Queen. Proceedings start out shrill - with a bedroom barney so ostentatiously attention-grabbing that you may find yourself switching off in protest - but get subtler as the drama progresses. The tone is, ultimately, less acrid than that of much of LaBute’s output, with some surprising swerves into tenderness in the second half. If a certain shallowness and obviousness still lies at the heart of the material it may be due to LaBute’s tendency to put generalisations about male and female behaviour into the mouths of his characters (“I don’t know why God had to make it so hard to trust you guys!” wails Carly at one point) and pass them off as rude truths.

Though the play feels a little under-populated, the performances that Attenborough has elicited from his quartet are mostly winning. Tom Burke charts Greg’s growth in awareness and conscience with compelling understatement. Playing an archetypal LaBute male - a smugly self-satisfied dumbass and perennial jock - Kieran Bew comes through with a vital, funny, lewd caricature. But Billie Piper delivers the most surprising performance of the evening, managing to quietly turn her security-guard Carly - variously perky, vulnerable and shrewd - into the heroine of the play. Piper's scenes with Burke were the highlights of the production for me, tracing a compelling arc from hostility to complicity that I found far more affecting than the trajectory of Greg and Steph’s relationship.

I must admit to not enjoying Siân Brooke as Steph so much. Thought and hard work have clearly gone into the performance, but Brooke is so full-on in some scenes - and lays so heavily and affectedly into her Yank twang - that she’s an off-putting presence most of the time. It doesn’t help that Steph seems, in some ways, the most poorly-conceived role of the four, a part that’s overly reliant upon undistinguished profanity masquerading as devastating invective, and that’s also the subject of LaBute’s sickliest assumption: that a woman’s self-esteem is entirely contingent upon the way in which a man views her. (What the play seems to lack - and might, I think, benefit from - is a strong scene between Steph and Carly that gives us some perspective on their relationship and perhaps another perspective on Steph as well.)

In spite of this, Attenborough’s production amounts, overall, to an entertaining and enjoyable evening. LaBute fans will of course need no encouragement at all to check out the writer’s latest dispatch from the sex war. But even those who may have felt that they’d had their fill of LaBute should find some very good reasons to enjoy Reasons To Be Pretty.

The production runs for 2 hours 10 minutes and is booking until 14th January. Further information at the Almeida website.

Theatre Review: A Delicate Balance (Almeida Theatre)

Edward Albee’s Pulitzer Prize-winning 1966 play A Delicate Balance takes place entirely in the well-appointed drawing-room of Agnes and Tobias, an ageing, affluent couple who are seemingly content with their life in suburbia, except for their problems with Agnes’s alcohol-dependent sister Claire and their daughter Julia, a multiple divorcee who’s on the run from yet another marriage. But the couple’s relatively comfortable existence is rocked by the arrival of two friends, Harry and Edna, who turn up at the house unannounced and desperately frightened by an undefined feeling of imminent disaster. Over the course of a weekend, Agnes and Tobias are forced to come to terms with this crisis, and to re-consider the demarcation lines of friendship as Harry and Edna decide to move in with them. The situation is further complicated by the presences of Claire and Julia, the latter increasingly hysterical at the realisation that she’s been usurped from her room by the unexpected visitors.

Last seen in London in 1997, in a well-regarded production directed by Anthony Page and starring Eileen Atkins and Maggie Smith as the sisters, Albee’s enigmatic drama now gets an absolutely exquisite revival by James Macdonald at the Almeida. Combining elements of drawing-room comedy-of-manners with chilly overtones of existential dread, Albee’s play is a challenge for actors and audience alike, and to many, it seems, it looks like nothing more than an overlong, excessively verbose piece about that most familiar of theatrical subjects: WASP angst. At some level that’s exactly what it is, but there’s also a searching, visionary, philosophical quality to the play that transcends the apparent limitations of its scope. And Macdonald’s sensitive production, which plays out on Laura Hopkins’s attractive set (beautifully lighted by Guy Hoare), achieves a wonderful clarity and richness of tone. It’s a glittering, stylish production that still cuts close to the play’s dark heart, brilliantly capturing its contradictory moods. The thorny questions that the play proposes - what exactly are our “rights and responsibilities” to our family and friends?; how is the daily "delicate balance" between survival and awareness of the abyss to be negotiated? - emerge subtly as so many sad (and funny) refrains.

And it’s hard to see how the performances could be bettered. Always subtle and economical, Penelope Wilton brings a marvellous mixture of elegant imperiousness, intelligence and awareness to Agnes. She handles the withering put-downs with aplomb - listen out in particular for her delivery of the line “My pudenda” - but when Agnes recalls the son she and Tobias lost the mood is suddenly charged with deep sorrow. It’s a wonderfully rich interpretation. The hard-drinking, yodelling, accordion-wielding Claire is the showier role, and one that constantly threatens to become merely a comic turn. But Imelda Staunton modulates her performance beautifully, finding fresh details in her scenes, whether its lying on the floor with her leg seductively outstretched as Claire reminds Tobias of a significant moment in their past, or slipping her arm tenderly around her beloved accordion. Tim Pigott-Smith gives a brilliant slow-burn of a performance as the apparently passive, rather befuddled Tobias. His aria about Tobias’s relationship with a cat generated uneasy laughs and a few gasps of shock, while a late break-down scene is also brilliantly sustained.

As Julia, Lucy Cohu brings her distinctive presence and lovely Streep-ish inflections to a rather difficult role, finding real pain in a character who spends a great deal of the play (too much, perhaps) whining. And in support Ian McElhinney and Diana Hardcastle are superb as Harry and Edna, Hardcastle in particular moving unsettlingly from heart-rending vulnerability to the chillingly serene arrogance of the interloper. She has a classic mid-play scene with Cohu and her delivery of the line “I do sometimes [speak my mind] … when an environment is not all that it might be” is especially cherishable. Indeed, the entire cast handle Albee’s highly mannered, Henry-James-goes-Pop dialogue with a wonderful lightness of touch throughout, while evidently relishing its odd rhythms and strange digressions. The brilliance of Albee’s writing here is to keep the audience on their toes - you’re never quite sure where he’ll head next, and for viewers who get on the play’s strange wavelength, this generates an incredible tension and excitement. The playwright describes A Delicate Balance as being about “people [who] are teetering between being able to survive and being thrown into chaos.” And Macdonald’s stunning production is perfectly attuned to the play’s own very delicate balance between comedy and tragedy, philosophy and bitchery, craziness and calm. What a great evening.

The productions runs for 2 hours 55 minutes. It’s booking until 2 July. Further information at the Almeida website.