HABIT OF ART

20/1/10, National (Lyttelton)

Alan Bennett's latest. Entertaining but disappointing. Some very good jokes, but structurally a mess.

He seems to have started with an idea for a play about W H Auden and Benjamin Britten meeting again in Oxford shortly before Auden's death, years after they stopped talking to one another (why? never explained). But then presumably decided that that alone was not enough to sustain a full length play, and perhaps was too weak an idea anyway, so cast around for something to pad it out.

The result is a wonderful play about a play, with a shambling Richard Griffiths (deputising for Michael Gambon, who fell ill when rehearsals were due to start) playing an insecure if successful (Tesco voiceovers) actor called Fitz, and Alex Jennings as a splendidly camp actor called Henry. Fitz is playing Auden, Henry Britten, and Frances de la Tour is playing the stage manager co-ordinating a run-through in the absence of the director, and also playing the parts of absent actors and acting the role of mother hen and confessor to her demanding, raggle-taggle charges. At the end everyone else departs, leaving her alone to turn the lights out (literally): a symbol of all those women who keep the show on the road for little thanks and no recognition in families, businesses and organisations everywhere.

This is all great stuff, with for the most part first-rate performances (only the writer, an unwelcome presence to the actors, fails to have much impact -- is that the writing or the performance?). But there are problems. In the first half there's a running gag about the actors being unable to remember their lines, and Griffiths sometimes chants his lines as Auden as if he's only just learnt them, which doesn't help one grasp the substance of what "Auden" is saying; mercifully the conceit is dropped in the second half for the big encounter between Auden and Britten. I'd have liked more of this, but judging by the coughing the rest of the audience wouldn't. The trouble is there are no jokes in the confrontation (which is mainly about Britten's repressed paedophilia), but the earlier parts of the play have conditioned us to expect comedy, especially from Richard Griffiths whose timing is simply miraculous.

There were some lovely moments but it didn't hang together being very much a play of two halves, or perhaps several. In some ways it was a succession of sketches: Jennings and de la Tour as a pair of cleaners, standing in for the absent bit-part actors who have a matinee of Chekhov (we see one of them, dressed in his serf's coat and fur hat, at the start of Act 2, before he's shooed away by de la Tour who tells him he'll miss his cue); Alex Jennings recalling his drama school "friend's" career as a rent boy; the attention-seeking, anxious actor playing the biographer (Adrian Scarborough, very good -- "I still haven't got him, have I?") performing Doris the Goddess of Wind ind rag with a tuba at the start of Act 2; etc etc. The comedy overwhelms the serious stuff, whereas usually in Bennett they're very well integrated.

The set a rehearsal room with Auden's rooms sketched in (labels saying "fridge" and "cooker", bed up some stairs, two doors but no walls) and a grand piano high up on a stage above for Britten to play while rehearsing his young boy singers (and Jennings turns out to be a very accomplished pianist).

As a love letter to Theatre it worked very well. As a fully-functioning play it disappointed.

TURN OF THE SCREW

4/11/09, ENO

Once again, fatigue spoiled this. But it was jolly good. Britten's music spooky and thrilling. The production ditto. Big empty stage, semi-transparent screens flown in from the wings to signify changes of scene, hefty bits of furniture (beds, tables and chairs) moved on and off by silent stagehands dressed as servants. The Governess becoming increasingly hysterical (we think).

Reservations: the words given to Quint and Miss Jessel during their haunting appearances are too obscure, full of knotty imagery signifying (to my ear) not much. The lad we saw singing Miles struggled to fill the hall.

Directed by David McVicar, conducted by a truly venerable Charles Mackerras; Rebecca Evans excellent as the Governess, all sweet good nature and bustling good sense at the start, gradually undermined and driven to paranoia by the hauntings.

PETER GRIMES

21/05/09, ENO

Stunning.

I made a note immediately afterwards as to why it was so good, which I have lost.

But I have found some additional jottings.

It's not clear what drives Grimes: what's his motivation? He's a tragic outcast, man versus the crowd but also man versus the sea (both represented by the chorus).

An article in the programme suggests we shouldn't read it as a parable of the gay conchie returning to England post-war, but that's mad.

Musically it's haunting: the sea interludes, of course (which sound anaemic in the concert hall but tremendously evocative here) but also the choruses, especially the last (which reprises something from Act 1???) and some of the solos and duets, especially the Grimes/Ellen duet in Act 1, Grimes's solo at the close of Act 1, ditto Act 3.

Towards the end Britten gives up. There's no music at all when Balstrode tells Grimes to go to sea and sink the boat. The lights are even out in the pit. Then the music returns with the chorus.

Great set. Grimes's hut at a crazy slope, the trestle tables in the market.

Clever was the way the chorus hem Grimes in at the end of the dance scene, shouting his name with dramatic pauses: one of several moments when the hairs stood up on the neck.

Stuart Skelton as Grimes can certainly act; Amanda Roocroft as Ellen and Gerald Finley as Balstrode both very good. David Alden directed.

It suffered from Act 2-itis. The establishment was fine; the denouement was fine; but the bit in the middle, explanatory with less dramatic tension, failed to fizz rather. Though the hue and cry starts with the drum and reaches Grimes's hut just after the boy has died, so there's quite a lot of action in fact!

Act 1 was hugely impressive for its momentum. It was clear who everybody was, there were effective cameos and the recitatives needed no subtitles. None of this is necessarily true of many operas.

There were trestles on stage which served for the fish market tables. I noted the back wall in the pub in the storm (though I can't now remember why). The "nieces" were played cleverly as twin sisters in school uniform.

There were some problems with the updtaing to the 1940s (when it was written). There are spivs, flat caps, period women's fashions, but that does leave you with some difficulties over sailing boats, carts and what not.