BURNT BY THE SUN

6/4/09, National (Lyttleton)

A perfectly decent, well-acted, well-crafted piece about the early days of Stalin's purges.

It might have made a bigger impact if I hadn't read Orlando Figes' The Whisperers, a huge and distressing book about memories of the purges. Among the victims of the terror were many Old Bolsheviks like this play's General Kotov, a civil war hero... and victims of another sort like his betrayer, Dimitri, an NKVD man sent abroad to spy for his country for 12 years then brought back and tasked with reeling in Kotov, the man who'd sent him away in the first place and then stolen his beloved. Dimitri stood for all those forced by circumstance to betray those they loved. At the end of the play he shoots himself.

The implausibility of Dimitri's career jarred somewhat. The Party didn't need to make it personal, and surely would not have bothered, preferring to send anonymous functionaries to arrest Kotov, who initially believes his war record and his closeness to Stalin afford him immunity from what's happening to others.

A very good, mercurial performance by Roy Kinnear as Dimitri: an actor who can make quite stagey lines sound natural. Ciaran Hinds equally strong as the General: Irish accent, bluff, no-nonsense manner, fierce drive and fierce temper (generally held in check among his wife's relatives, a collection of bourgeois layabouts straight out of Chekhov). Michelle Dockery a bit colourless as the love interest.

The set an exploded wooden dacha on the revolve: large verandah out front, music room at the back. The second scene takes place at the river bank during a festival, indicated by moving blocks of wooden fencing (close-packed uprights) into position in front of the dacha.

It was Chekhov largely without the jokes, and with the politics made much more explicit (the original was a Russian film of the 90s; this stage adaptation in English was by Peter Flannery, the man who gave us Our Friends in the North). Perhaps it's what Chekhov would have written himself if he'd lived through the purges.

An interesting range of reactions in the posts on the National's "talkback" site. Here's a few:

No sun lotion required. -WillBird (Thu 5 Mar 2009 23:06)
Very disappointing. No-one comes out of this well except perhaps Ciaran Hinds and the little girl who played his daughter. This seems to have divided opinion, with some dazzled by the set and applauding the acting of the West End's two rising stars, Michelle Dockery and Rory Kinnear (yes, you Mr Billington) but I'm sorry, that's where the problems started. The tedious revolving mechanism slowed up the action unnecessarily when much of it could have just been set on the balcony and the scene at the beach with the actors clinging to the edge of the stage looked ridiculous. Kinnear's Mitia is no-one's idea of the dashing hero (from the our seats he looked and sounded like William Hague) and the characterisation was just plain irritating, especially after the most cringe-worthy dance-off scene since "The Office". Rather pleased that the smug Mitia turned out to be the bad guy, but no great surprise. Dockery looked pretty but the character demanded more depth from perhaps an older actress. Worst of all Ciaran Hinds's Kotov didn't actually have anything to do, instead he looks impassively on behind a giant Stalin moustache as his houseful of pet ,self-pitying Chekhovian stereotypes whine on about the good old days when they could go to the opera "twice a week" and his young wife has a mini breakdown. The actual plot kicks in about 10 minutes before curtain, but by this time much of the audience had gone to sleep. It lacked intensity and a sense of a hot sticky summer that the script implied and the ending was cliched, gratuitous and designed to wake up the audience so they didn't miss the night-bus home. A wasted opportunity to bring something bold and cinematic to the stage and another dud after the muddled "Mrs Affleck".

Burnt by the Sun -Valerie Passmore (Mon 9 Mar 2009 12:27)
Comparing this with the film on which it is apparently based misses the point: the play should be judged in its own right and many like me will not know the film.
Criticisms I agree with which presumably are easily remedied are the distracting lights and obscuring balustrade. Aso identifying exactly who all the old biddies and others were.
Otherwise it was a marvellous imaginative staging and Rory K's performance especially very striking. Such talents: acting, singing and dancing!
It's new, has drama, comedy and pathos. Excellent

Re: burnt by the sun -kate beswick (Fri 6 Mar 2009 16:49)
There was nothing terribly wrong
with this production but there was
nothing new, exciting or revelatory
about it either. I kept asking
myself 'what was the point of this?
Burnt By the Sun is a great Russian
film, with stunning performances by
outstanding Russian actors. It is a
classic. What is to be gained or
added by doing an English version
(much watered down and heavily
underlined ) with English actors To
have the leading man made up to
look like Stalin was a bit over the
top - was it in case we didn't 'get
it?' The process of film gave the
story a lot of its power- to put it
on stage dumbed it down - for
examle, the scene by the lake was
eliminated, and ti's a key scene.
As I said, it was all OK but I was
left unchilled and unmoved. What
made the National Theatre think it
wouldl be a good idea to snaffle
such a Russian story, created for
another medium? Did they think they
could do ti better? The answer is
'no, they can't. They shouldl have
used the money to stage a new play
or a seldom seen classic, of any
country.If they wanted to do
something Russian, why not revive
something by, for example
Ostrovsky- too seldom seen here, or
stage a play by one of the present
day young Russian playwrites, of
whom there are many. Russian
theatre does not begin and end with
Chekhov!

Burnt by the Sun -Martin H (Fri 6 Mar 2009 09:46)
A tremendous play, starting with echoes of Chekhov and Gorky, and developing into something distinctly more devious, and awful.
I do not understand most of the cavils -- I thought Howard Davies' direction was, as ever with him, exemplary.
Only one small criticism: I was not clear early one who all the people in the house were, or why they were there; only later did I gather this was a dacha and they were down for part of the summer.
But overall, a fine evening, with a gallery of splendid performances. And I loved the set and costumes -- it was worth the ticket just for those '30s swimsuits!

THE PITMEN PAINTERS

30/1/09, National (Lyttelton).

Very good. Thankfully lived up to expectations, having been exceedingly well reviewed on its original appearance in the Cottesloe last year. It's a transfer with the original cast, none of whom I'd heard of, from Live Theatre in Newcastle which commissioned the play from Billy Elliot writer Lee Hall.

The true story of the Durham miners from Ashington who came together for art appreciation classes under the auspices of the Workers' Educational Association in the 1930s; were lucky enough to have as their tutor Robert Lyon, who later became principal of Edinburgh College of Art, and decided they should "learn by doing"; and who turned out to have real talent, continuing to paint long after Lyon had moved on (the last one died in the 1990s).

They meet in a hut, display their work on easels, comment and criticise. We see the pictures projected onto screens hanging in front of the back wall -- not only their pictures, but other work with which they come into contact as their fame starts to spread and they're picked up by the cognoscenti, taken on a trip to London (Lyon travelling first class, the rest of them third) and encounter the work of people like Ben Nicholson and an exhibition of Chinese painting.

It started strongly: one reviewer complained there were too many easy jokes, but I'm a sucker for easy jokes. The comedy was rooted partly in class distinctions: Lyon's middle class values, the miners' Geordie dialect, both baffling to the other. It partly sprang from character: the organiser of the class is a petty rulebook bureaucrat. It partly came from politics: one young lad is unemployed and the organiser tries to exclude him on the grounds that the class is run by the Workers' Educational Association, and he's not a worker; the token Marxist insists he stay, arguing it's not his fault he's a victim of capitalism's cyclical nature - that got a big laugh from an audience staring down the barrel of the credit crunch.

The more thoughtful second half was punctuated by seasonal fusillades of coughing during the quieter scenes, which was a shame. The play asks what it means to be "an artist": one of the most talented of the group, Oliver Kilbourn, is offered the chance to escape the pit and become a full-time painter by a local Lady Bountiful; he eventually declines, because (I take it) accepting would mean cutting himself off from his subjects and his community, the source of his inspiration.

There's a nice scene when the group visits the exhibition of Chinese paintings. The miners are knocked out. Then the toffs, including Lyon, arrive; they are dismissive - they think it's formulaic, derivative. But by now the miners are confident of their own judgement. To Lyon's surprise they stick to their guns, arguing forcefully that this is folk art, just as what they do themselves is folk art.

Upstairs in the Lyttelton foyer they'd mounted an exhibition of the group's work, almost all (it turned out) by Kilbourn, though there were one or two by James Floyd, a truly naive painter who produced spectacularly colourful pictures of whippets and allotments and the other paraphernalia of life in a mining village, and a few by Harry Wilson.

Kilbourn's early stuff is reminiscent of Sickert. His paintings of life down the pit play with light and shadow, like his wartime paintings of blackouts and "dimouts". His later painting, full of sturdy figures who might have come out of a Stanley Spencer, include sequences devoted to women's work including washday. He seemed to my untutored eye a genuine talent, whose work is also a personal record of a vanished world. One of his paintings is below.

AUGUST: OSAGE COUNTY

12/12/08, National (Lyttelton)

3hr 30 mins. Chicago’s Steppenwolf Company. Correction, “Chicago’s legendary Steppenwolf”(they presumably sing of little else around the camp fire when the harpist is in town). Written by Tracy Letts (a man) about his own Oklahoma background (and how happy he must have been to escape). Comes trailing clouds of glory and Tony awards, and gratifyingly lived up to expectations.

It’s really a very conventional well-made play about a nightmare family reunion. It even has three acts (and two intervals). There’s a big cast, a surprising amount of plot, with a constant drip-feed of revelations, a death, a love-story, a stolid sheriff, a family meal etc etc. There are some really peachy roles and a few very good jokes. It might be a theatrical cliché if it weren’t for the quality of the acting – the benefits of a long-standing ensemble, I imagine. They convincingly created a family, talking over one another as families do (that was very well done, without any essentials in the dialogue getting drowned – each actor presumably modulating their voice so that whichever character’s lines were essential at a given moment actually cut through the background noise). There was a real sense of long-established relationships being picked up where they’d left off last time they’d met (quite some time ago, in some cases). The play made horribly explicit the tensions and confusions in many families.

Good things. The mother, Violet: monstrous, manipulative, utterly destructive, addicted to pills, ruining her three daughters’ self-esteem and love lives and also destroying her alcoholic husband, long ago an award-winning poet. The aunt, Violet’s overweight sister, superficially noisy and jolly, who turns out to be almost as self-absorbed and destructive as her sister. The set, a cross-section through an old-fashioned Plains house, with steeply pitched roof. The grace at dinner, interminable, extemporised, interrupted by someone’s mobile phone. The eldest daughter’s academic husband, intense, earnest, decent, totally selfish (like the rest of’em) (all the men pretty hopeless, actually). Above all Amy Morton as the eldest daughter herself, her husband “porking Pippi Longstocking”, her 14-year old daughter smoking dope and allowing herself to be felt up by the oily fiancé of the middle daughter, eventually falling apart as she is abandoned in her mother’s home by the rest of the family and finds herself taking over her father’s role as the washed-up companion/sparring partner of her mother: a smart woman whose life just upped and walked out on her. D says she was “very three-dimensional”, her dialogue much more naturalistic than most of the rather stylised writing (or just better delivered?).

Less good things. The rather underwritten part of the native American girl hired to look after the house, who is a largely silent observer and occasional participant in events; presumably intended as a symbol of some sort of integrity which the ghastly family have lost (if they ever had it). The bits of the play largely devoted to delivering plot rather than developing character: the audience was admirably quiet and attentive most of the time, except at these moments when a fusillade of coughs rang out and the dramatic energy sagged, often when the sheriff was on stage, poor chap – someone should record the audience one night and analyse the script and performances to work out why that happened and whether it could be fixed. The Lyttelton acoustic (or is that just me?). Melvyn Bragg in the gents during the interval, complaining loudly to no-one in particular that it was the worst National Theatre programme he’d ever seen, with nothing to read in it.