4/12/09, National (Olivier)
3hrs 10 mins. Brecht's classic in a new translation by Tony Kushner. The production, by Deborah Warner, had a troubled genesis. One preview had to be abandoned. Jane at work said she saw the press night performance, a fortnight after it was originally scheduled.
Fiona Shaw in a sprawling, noisy, intermittently moving but generally unsatisfactory affair. Hard to tell if this was Brecht's fault or the fault of Ms Warner and co. D thought Fiona Shaw's performance was magnificent. I thought it was OK, but I felt rather detached from the whole thing. There was only one moment I thought the theatre fell truly still, when Mother Courage mourned the death of her second son.
Great white sheets dropped down with the details of each scene, also intoned in voice-over by Gore Vidal (of all people). Additional information was supplied by a soldier in combats and shorts speaking into a mic at one side of the stage; when we arrived he was doing close-miked shooting/explosion noises and he also had a footpedal which produced a (very loud) explosion noise which became very annoying as the evening wore on. All good Brechtian alienation.
There was also some deeply alienating music by someone called Duke Special: dull, characterless stuff. We agreed the pace slowed drastically when he was on. During some of the songs a video camera showed a close-up of his face, projected onto one of the sheets, but like a number of things about this production (G Vidal's presence was another) it felt like an idea that hadn't been properly developed.
There was a large cast and the show was long (it might have been longer, but the cast list included characters in at least one scene who didn't appear). On the other hand, the shape and narrative of the piece was much clearer than when I saw it previously with Kathryn Hunter at the New Ambassadors. Though much of what happens, in any version, is bound to seem arbitrary because that's the way it's written and that's the way war is.
Mother Courage's problem is that she loves her children but she loves making money too. One son dies because she bargains too hard for his life. The Catholics catch him and kill him and her grief when she sees his bloodied body laid out on a bier was very affecting (S thought she detected visual hints of the dead Christ and a thousand pietas).
The second son enjoys soldiering and violence too much and pays the price, calling for his mother as he's executed.
The dumb daughter is raped(?) and dies banging a drum to alert her mother, away doing deals in the besieged city, that the enemy are at hand. They shot her down from the roof with a very real-looking and very loud general-purpose machine gun.
The cart was splendid: a square framework on wheels, surrounded by a white sheet, which became a double decker at the height of her pomp and success as a profiteer, and then a tattered old thing at the end.
The performances largely forgettable: this isn't a play which welcomes subtelty in the actors. But we warmed to Stephen Kennedy (the nice Ian in The Archers) as a Protestant chaplain forced into civvies as a Mother Courage fellow-traveller.
Showing posts with label kathryn hunter. Show all posts
Showing posts with label kathryn hunter. Show all posts
Sunday, 6 December 2009
Thursday, 2 April 2009
KAFKA'S MONKEY
1/4/09, Young Vic.
50 mins. Played in one of the Young Vic's numerous studios, on an almost bare stage with steeply raked seating. Based on Kafka's A Report to an Academy.
An extraordinary tour de force by Kathryn Hunter as an ape in white tie, tails, bowler hat and unruly hair, silver hip flask concealed about his/her person, addressing "the Academy" about life as a chimpanzee passing for a human, or at least a performing monkey in variety. By imitation alone our hero has acquired the rudiments of civilisation (or "reached the level of the average European"), many of them (spitting, drinking, smoking) from the sailors on board the ship that brought him, tightly caged, from Africa.
It's a bleak piece, which has very little positive to say about the human condition or human society. Humanity, indeed, still revolts our hero, who is perceptive enough to know that "freedom" is an illusion, and who only seeks "a way out" from the cage in which he finds himself.
Hunter's performance is little short of miraculous. You watch her becoming an ape. She twists her arm under and behind her, gesturing with the palm upwards. She hangs horizontally from a ladder attached to the wall. She squats, walks, fidgets for all the world just like a chimp. And her face, with eyes wide, brow furrowed, mouth in a chimpanzee's round moue, is uncannily like the real thing. The movement is credited to someone called Ilan Reichel, but with Hunter to work with Reichel must have thought he had all the peanuts he could eat.
There were few props: a suitcase and cane (which with the tails and the bowler hinted at Chaplin's tramp, an early 20th century Everyman), a lectern at the start, a big projection of a chimp, those bananas.
Even the artificial, declamatory nature of Kafka's text, as adapted by Colin Teevan, does not defeat her though you feel it's a little too formal sometimes for her purposes. In moments of interpolated business (offering bananas to a member of the audience before picking through the woman's hair for fleas, for instance) a more informal note creeps in and you feel suits her better.
In lesser hands the piece would be a rather heavy-handed and slight satirical squib. With this team (including director Walter Meierjohann) it becomes a searing and rather moving picture if the ghastly world in which we are all trapped and must all perform.
Some stood to applaud at the end.
It reminded me of Me Cheeta, which I read just after Christmas: the spoof autobiography of the chimp who co-starred with Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O'Sullivan in the Tarzan films. The account of Cheeta's capture in Africa and transport to the New World owes a lot, I should say, to Kafka's version.
50 mins. Played in one of the Young Vic's numerous studios, on an almost bare stage with steeply raked seating. Based on Kafka's A Report to an Academy.
An extraordinary tour de force by Kathryn Hunter as an ape in white tie, tails, bowler hat and unruly hair, silver hip flask concealed about his/her person, addressing "the Academy" about life as a chimpanzee passing for a human, or at least a performing monkey in variety. By imitation alone our hero has acquired the rudiments of civilisation (or "reached the level of the average European"), many of them (spitting, drinking, smoking) from the sailors on board the ship that brought him, tightly caged, from Africa.
It's a bleak piece, which has very little positive to say about the human condition or human society. Humanity, indeed, still revolts our hero, who is perceptive enough to know that "freedom" is an illusion, and who only seeks "a way out" from the cage in which he finds himself.
Hunter's performance is little short of miraculous. You watch her becoming an ape. She twists her arm under and behind her, gesturing with the palm upwards. She hangs horizontally from a ladder attached to the wall. She squats, walks, fidgets for all the world just like a chimp. And her face, with eyes wide, brow furrowed, mouth in a chimpanzee's round moue, is uncannily like the real thing. The movement is credited to someone called Ilan Reichel, but with Hunter to work with Reichel must have thought he had all the peanuts he could eat.
There were few props: a suitcase and cane (which with the tails and the bowler hinted at Chaplin's tramp, an early 20th century Everyman), a lectern at the start, a big projection of a chimp, those bananas.
Even the artificial, declamatory nature of Kafka's text, as adapted by Colin Teevan, does not defeat her though you feel it's a little too formal sometimes for her purposes. In moments of interpolated business (offering bananas to a member of the audience before picking through the woman's hair for fleas, for instance) a more informal note creeps in and you feel suits her better.
In lesser hands the piece would be a rather heavy-handed and slight satirical squib. With this team (including director Walter Meierjohann) it becomes a searing and rather moving picture if the ghastly world in which we are all trapped and must all perform.
Some stood to applaud at the end.
It reminded me of Me Cheeta, which I read just after Christmas: the spoof autobiography of the chimp who co-starred with Johnny Weismuller and Maureen O'Sullivan in the Tarzan films. The account of Cheeta's capture in Africa and transport to the New World owes a lot, I should say, to Kafka's version.
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