ENLIGHTENMENT

18/10/10, Hampstead

A month on and I could remember absolutely nothing about this production. Nada. Zilch. That's what comes of not writing 'em up at the time.

Then I found half a page of scribbled notes and it started coming back to me. Nice middle-class couple's son goes missing on his gap year in the Far East. The mother has resorted to a "medium", a clearly fraudulent old woman, in an effort to find out what happened. The grandfather (ex-Labour Cabinet minister) has called in a 30-something TV producer who wants to feature the boy in a missing kids programme. Everyone's going spare. Then news comes through that the boy's turned up in a hospital. The embassy are putting him on a plane to London. Act 1 ends with the boy's appearance and a shocked cry from the grandfather of "Who the fuck are you!?"

In Act 2 the boy, apparently some lost soul whose memory has gone awol and who assumed he was the son because he had his rucksack when he woke up in hospital, has been taken in by the family. Gradually he turns from a sympathetic waif, with a wrily humorous take on his amnesiac predicament, into a mendacious monster who has clearly played this kind of trick before, a frightening cuckoo who has to be ejected from the nest.

I'm at a loss to explain why all this left so little impression. Among the many reasons to like and remember it: it was wittily and thought-provokingly written by Shelagh Stephenson; we have personal experience of the student-aged child on a gap year travel in the Far East; the TV producer, though a grotesque caricature and a gross libel on the profession, behaved in ways I have seen TV producers behave; it was generally well-acted by a very classy cast (my scribbled note reminds me that there was a lot of listening in this play and the actors listened convincingly and well, which isn't necessarily easy to do: I spent a lot of time watching and enjoying their reactions).

I liked especially the way it played with ideas of truth and mendacity and performance. The boy (Tom Weston-Smith) starts by nicking things (the missing son's T-shirts, the father's socks) and brazenly denying it (and the parents of course believe it). Then he gets drunk and vituperative in a scene with the mother (Julie Graham)... except that after he's gone she smells the wine and realises it's Ribena, so he was just shamming. The TV producer (Daisy Beaumont) lies from the start, quite casually: she seeks the mother's sympathy by saying "As a mother myself..." when she has no family. She asks to film the reunion and when told she can't does so anyway, with a hidden camera. And when she rumbles the boy and tries to alert the parents he turns her past lies back on her, undermining her credibility.

The father (Richard Clothier) is actually the step-father. He is a sceptic, in contrast to the mother's desperate need to know what happened to her son. He mocks the medium (Polly Kemp), and we see that he is right to do so, until towards the end the old biddy turns out to be pretty shrewd -- a successful exponent of what Terry Pratchett's witches call "headology".

The grandfather was Paul Freeman, a veteran. Old-fashioned style (watch the way he stands) but a powerful stage presence. A nice exchange when he introduces the TV producer to his daughter. "Are you sleeping with her?" she asks. "No!" he instantly replies. Then it emerges that they've "had a few lunches". To begin with he seems pompous and vain and a bit of a clown; later he's the only one with the sense to cut through the crap and make things happen.

All in all a sophisticated piece of theatre. Not everything worked. It was a play of two halves, evidently deliberately, but they sometimes jarred. There may have been a shade too many gags in the first part. Dr T had a friend visiting from Canada who remarked on the number of four-letter words: there was only one in the first act (see above) but loads in the second. There was a bit too much shouting in part two as well. And the set (by Francis O'Connor) was a problem: all white, with only one proper entrance. Things like occasional tables emerged from the floor, there was a staircase down through a hole in the floor, and there was a big window to one side of the curved back wall which also served as an occasional entrance/exit. All a bit of a mess. There were also, my notes tell me, overhead projections but I don't remember those.

Directed by Edward Hall, is first play as the new artistic director at this address. The critics were critical. Maybe the first night was a disappointment. I reckon it wasn't half bad. And somehow appropriate that I should so completely have forgotten a play about amnesia.

LATER

It turns out I did write it up at the time. I've just found the text...

This has had mixed reviews and I went fearing the worst. In fact it was a thought-provoking evening, though it had its longeurs.
Shelagh Stephenson play about cuckoos in the nest, identity, loss, truth and falsehood etc etc.
Middle class couple (her daddy a Cabinet minister) have lost their son: he went missing in the Far East while backpacking during his gap year and no-one has the faintest idea what's happened to him. He (stepfather, university English teacher) is sceptical; she (researching the life of a Victorian woman who lost her son at Lucknow during the Mutiny and ended up living in India and going native) is distraught. They are first seen with a medium, a fraudulent old busybody. Then grandad turns up with a young television producer who's going to make a documentary about the boy. Cue phone all from the Embassy in Bangkok, or wherever it is. The boy has turned up. Act One ends with his appearance at the airport and the horrified reaction of parents/grandparent when they realise it's not him.
Act Two charts the boy's progress from hapless and rather charming victim (lost his memory, no idea who he is, woke up in a hospital bed with the missing son's backpack next to him, assumed that was who he was, a waif and stray they take pity on and invite into their home) to a manipulative monster who lies routinely, uses aggressive language and violence and eventually has to be expelled.
It was well-acted, mostly well-written and mostly intelligently directed by Edward Hall (first play in his new job as artistic director at this address).

THE PRINCE OF HOMBURG

10/08/10, Donmar

Heinreich von Kleist's piece about the conflict between duty and the individual, written at the height of early 19th century Romanticism... and controversially given a New Ending in this Donmar production.

The Prince of Homburg is the adopted son of the Elector of Brandenburg. It's the 1670s, and they are fighting the invading Swedes. At the Battle of Fehrbellin the Prince disobeys the Elector's direct orders not to attack with his cavalry until the Swedish army has been surrounded and cut off. The prince was distracted by love for his cousin at the pre-battle briefing. The battle is a victory, but not the total one the Elector had hoped for. He court martials the prince. The only possible sentence is death. It all shapes up as a fascinating clash between 18th century Enlightment ideas of order, rules and structure on the one hand, and the 19th century Romantic belief in the autonomy of the individual on the other.

So far so good. Ian McDiarmid suitably scary as the calculating martinet of an Elector; Siobhan Redmond extremely impressive as the Electress; Chris Cox an appealing prince; intelligent direction by Jonathan Munby who also did Life is a Dream (another play about a tyrannical monarch and imprisoned prince).

But then the play goes off the rails a little. There's a scene in which the prince leaves his prison on parole to beg for his stepmother's intervention and, having passed the grave opened for him on the way, finds his bravery deserting him and says he'll do anything to live. This scene proved so problematic for the 19th century that it was usually cut (the play wasn't produced until after von Kleist's death in any case) and you can see why. He dumps his girlfriend in order to live (she's promised to the Swedish king in a diplomatic marriage alliance). She tells him he's behaving badly. By the interval he's lost our sympathy and so has virtually everyone else in the play (the Elector because, having made his point, he refuses to do what everyone expects and pardon the boy, or at least commute the sentence).

An historical descendant of the Elector, of course, was the King of Prussia who forced his homosexual son, later Frederick the Great, as a boy to watch the execution of his lover, so rigidity bordering on mania clearly ran in the family.

Things pick up in the second half, with a lot of military coming and going, letters written and received, the girlfriend developing a quite unexpected capacity for decisive action, the Elector having to face down a mutiny from his officers and the prince finding himself once more when the Elector offers him a reprieve provided he can say the Elector acted wrongly (he can't, of course). There's a very fine scene indeed between the Elector and one of his veteran officers in which they debate what matters more in battle: victory or obedience to orders.

In von Kleist's original the prince is pardoned, having presumably learnt his lesson. The historical Prince of Homburg went on to live a long life. But in this version the Prince is executed as the Elector looks on from a balcony at the back of the stage and tries and fails to get his silent officers to join him in the triple "hail" we have come to know as the electorate's official military salute. The reference to the ultimate rise of Nazism, a bastardised child of Prussian militarism, is clear.

I'd forgotten (despite having read the reviews) until reading up on von Kleist and the play later that the ending had been changed. This one worked well dramatically and didn't bother me at the time: it gave the play a contempoary resonance it would otherwise have lacked. But how does this differ from 18th century rewritings and bowdlerisations of Shakespeare about which we're always so sniffy?