FAUST

20/10/10, Young Vic

Teenage boy on the way out: "That was so athletic." Teenage girl: "This may sound really gay, but the health and safety on that must be really intense."

The latest from the (highly athletic) Icelandic company Vesturport, this time directed rather than starring Gisli Orn Gardarsson. A version of the Faust epic -- in English rhyme, no less -- as performed by the inmates of an old people's home including an ancient, broke actor who played every tragic part in his time except Faust and whose attempted (successful?) suicide sparks the arrival of Mephisto and his henchpeople Asmodeus and Lilith and the telling of the familiar story. The love interest is Greta, the virginal nurse with an overly-protective elder brother, who also works at the care home; in the old actor's dream of Faust she turns up not in her white nurse's uniform but a white basque and tutu-like skirt, and v sexy she is too.

The whole thing played out on a wide stage with a mesh back wall and three windows, allowing us to see through to the snow falling outside, and with three traps, from one of which Lilith first appears bursting through the floor and flying on a rope which deposits her on a black net stretched right across the auditorium ten feet above the stage, on which actors and acrobats disport themselves from time to time (at the end of the interval the audience returns to find a silent actor in a dressing gown performing rather laboured silent film-style stunts with a runaway folding wheelchair). Actors fall backwards onto the net from the flies in sudden flashes of light. They swing from a trapeze above it. They somersault over the edge and hang by their hands to drop onto the stage. In the love scene the happy couple spin above the stage on ropes twined round their wrists.

Vesturport are really good at integrating the physical into serious drama, but less good at the straight acting. The first scene in the old people's home drags. Not helped by the fact that English is not the cast's first language: they speak it well, but often with intonation just that little bit "off".

There are a number of meta-theatrical gags. The silent oldster is warned to "mind the pit" as he walks towards one of the on-stage traps: he steps into it and literally bounces out. At the end of the first half there's a gag about forgetting one's lines and having to be prompted by one of the care home residents with the text... who then comes on with the same text a minute or two later and reads out (in rhyme) the announcement of the interval.

There are some nice gags generally, indeed: the care home residents keep fit by doing synchronised dancing in their wheelchairs to a George Michael track.

The general aesthetic is grungy. Mephisto wears a string vest with blood stains, and a frock coat and white leggings.

It all ends in tears. There's a Walpurgisnacht orgy (with only one witch, but then the cast is only nine strong) during which Greta loses her inhibitions to the extent of removing the basque, downstage centre, before matters are broken up by her furious brother who is put to sleep with a potion only to awake once more to break up the subsequent aerial love ballet. By this stage, in a move typical of the rough and ready approach, the older actor playing Faust has switched bodies with the younger actor playing Asmodeus, to make him both a more convincing suitor for Greta and a more capable acrobat.

In all this the moral issues raised by the Faust legend, or this version of it, get a little lost. Mephisto is infuriated by Faust's insistence for much of the time that however much he lusts after Greta he intends her to remain pure.

The music was by Nick Cave.

Ian McKellen was in the audience.

EURYDICE

2/6/10, Young Vic

A disappointment after The Brothers Size though it was, we were told, by the same team. A US re-telling by Sarah Ruhl, directed by Bijan Sheibani, of the Eurydice story, set in the 1940s or 50s, which left one asking the question, Why bother?

Orpheus was a bit of a drip. The principal innovations were to have Eurydice's father sending her letters from the Underworld where he's the only inhabitant not to have lost all memory of his former life, and thus the only inhabitant with any self-awareness; and a chorus of "stones", who whisper and chant and try to persuade the underworld's residents to go with the flow: one was played by Becci Gemmell, who was so good in Fucked at Edinburgh.

Production details here:

http://www.youngvic.org/archive/eurydice

KURSK

17/4/10, Young Vic

1 hr 45 mins straight through. An immersive (ho ho) piece of theatre about life on board a Royal Navy nuclear submarine and about the loss of the Russian sub the Kursk in 2000. A promenade performance on the floor of the Young Vic's studio space, the Maria, entered via a metal walkway at first floor level. Some of the audience (like us) walked down onto the main playing area; others stayed up on the walkway to look down at the action, which happened all around us. Notable for many excellent things but chief among them the sound design which made brilliant use of the undersea noises of sonar and whales and the Kursk exploding and of the tannoyed commands on board the vessel.

We were in the sub. The control room was in the middle; the captain's cabin in one corner; a torpedo in another; the crew's mess room at one end; their bunks along one wall with the washroom and heads in the other corner. For much of the time the principle delights came from observing the life of the vessel on a 12-week secret mission to observe Russian manoeuvres in the Barents Sea: the bickering and bonding, the sexual frustration, the rituals of diving and setting course, and the other rather different rituals of surfacing at the North Pole and becoming "bluenoses".

There was the coxswain, who'd brought a "teach yourself poetry" book with him and was learning to craft haiku (an excuse to elevate the tone of the dialogue now and again); the new dad, obsessed by his baby daughter, who died of cot death during the voyage and presented the captain with the dilemma of whether to tell him or not (in the end he decided not, because they couldn't get the poor chap off the ship mid-voyage); the captain worrying about the onerous responsibilities he faced. The coxswain, in the great tradition of fictional NCOs, was a brick who kept the whole thing together, mediated the crew's bickering and, when the Kursk had gone down and the captain was struck dumb with horror stepped in to fill the vacuum to "suggest" what should be done.

Inevitably we were reminded of Das Boot, especially in the scenes in which our sub glides silently and undetected right underneath the Kurks on order to photograph its propellers. The audience was as silent as the crew. There were also periods of complete darkness, including one towards the end when the Kursk had sunk and we heard the heavily amplified voices of two of its surviving shivering crew, trapped in the stern compartments.

(The dilemma for our sub: having detected knocking from the wreckage, suggesting signs of life, should they surface and alert the rescuers, betraying their presence and touching off an international incident, or should they sail away as per their orders?)

Most of the performances were pitch-perfect. The captain was perhaps the weakest. Our experience of submarine captains (Isabelle's two brothers-in-law) is that they exude self-confidence and would not have made it into the job unless they did; actors nowadays (the heyday of the Kenneth Moore-style stiff-upper-life war hero having long since passed) are too anxious to invest their characters with doubts.

The production is credited to a company called Sound & Fury: Mark Espiner, who directed; Tom Espiner, who played Newdadmike; and Dan Jones, who co-directed and did the sound.

SWEET NOTHINGS

1/4/10, Young Vic

2 hrs 20 mins. David Harrower version of an 1895 Arthur Schnitzler play (Liebelei) updated to the late 1920s, directed by Luc Bondy.

Disappointing first half, much stronger second. In part one two lower-middle-class good time girls (milliner's assistant Mitzi and her shyer friend Christine) go round to the apartment of posh Fritz and his friend Theodore for a drunken party. Mitzi and Theo seem uninhibited (though the action never gets beyond drunken pawing, and whenever it threatens to she throws him off with apparent disdain), Christine fancies herself in love with Fritz. Fritz however is conducting an affair with a married woman, though clearly attracted to Christine as well. The party is interrupted by the married woman's husband, a model of wronged rectitude in hat and overcoat and scarf. The girls are taken into another room and shushed; a duel is offered and accepted.

In the second half we're in Christine's flat, which she shares with her father, a violinist in a theatre orchestra, and much of the time a nosy and disapproving neighbour. She imagines heself fervently in love with Fritz; Mitzi comes round; Fritz and Theo come round; Fritz and Christine embrace but he won't say he loves her; he goes off to fight duel and is killed. At the end, when the news is broken to her, she is utterly distraught.

The ending was evident a mile off, but the script neatly fixed the ambiguities of Fritz's position. It helped that Tom Hughes, who played him, has a narcissist's face; he was good at suggesting Fritz's self-absorbed brooding on the impossible position he'd got himself into, and incipient panic at the prospect of the duel; but vocally he was a bit underpowered.

The women had it. Kate Burdette as Christine utterly convincing, girlish, flirtatious, petulant, only just out of adolescence; and she brought off her hysterics at the end remarkably convincingly (when they took the curtain call Hughes looked smug, she still looked distraught). Hayley Carmichael (who co-founded Told by an Idiot) very funny as the neighbour. Natalie Dormer (who was apparently Anne Boleyn in The Tudors on TV -- Wikipedia claims this is her first stage role) pert and worldly as Mitzi.

Hughes looked the part (a touch of the Jonathan Rhys-Myers about him, in fact) but needs to project more; Jack Laskey as his friend Theodore had no trouble projecting as the noisy, jokey (though ultimately serious) good time boy with spectacle and in the first act extraordinarily sticky-up hair which was slicked down and neatly combed making him look quite different when he arrived at the end of act two in officer's uniform, not so much to bring Christine the bad news (she divined it herself) as to react petulantly when she collapsed and he complained angrily of how much pressure he'd been under himself.

Audience on three sides of a circular raised playing area, which slowly revolved. Bed, screen, grand piano, a couple of chairs and a small table in the first act and a black-framed window which revolved with the stage; bed, screen, rocking chair, white-framed window ditto in the second. Entrances and exits had to be up steps strategically placed around the revolve; there was a trolley with drinks and cakes and crockery in the well at the front in the first act, and music stands as if in an orchestra pit in the second. The steps might have been a disaster; in fact the cast negotiated them with aplomb, and occasionally the set-up was used to positive effect, like Theo coming on at the very start, teetering on the edge of the revolve, or the wronged husband stiffly and deliberately negotiating the window, which had got in his way at the top of the steps.

Great dresses -- flapper-style in the first act, a lovely white cotton number for Christine in the second act.

MY NAME IS YUSUF AND THIS IS MY BROTHER

25/1/10, Young Vic

A Palestinian production in English and Arabic (surtitles projected onto a bath hanging above the stage!) which rather confirms one's suspicion that, for the Palestinians, there is only one subject and therefore there can only be one Palestinian play.

I made notes shortly after seeing it, but I can't find them.

Yusuf is a simpleton. His brother looks after him. It is 1949. The British leave, the Jews come, there is fighting, they flee. The brother returns to the village in search of his girlfriend, and is shot. Yusuf and the girlfriend survive to live the rest of their lives in a refugee camp (we see them at the beginning, old and cranky, and the aged Yusuf acts as a kind of chorus, commenting on the action).

There was some good stuff with water. At one point towards the end the stage filled with water, so that the actors had to splash about in it. There was some satire at the expense of the Brits. But the accents were too strong, and quite a lot of the dialogue got lost in the unforgiving spaces of the Young Vic configured with the stage at one end.

AFTER DIDO

17/4/09, ENO at Young Vic.

1hr 10 mins. A Katie Mitchell interpretation of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas. My gob was smacked, my mind was boggled and my gast well and truly flabbered by the sheer ambition and technical achievement. But at the end of the day I was left asking "why?" and wondering what it had added to the original.

A small period band conducted by Christian Curnyn sat off to one side. Above the playing area was a large screen onto which was projected the output of at least six or eight lightweight video cameras. The playing area itself consisted of three interlocking sets: a bedsit in which a young woman, presumably jilted, prepared to commit suicide; a kitchen in which another young woman lamented the absence of her dead husband/lover; a living room in which a young man plotted to abandon his fiancee, leaving the ring on the coffee table: so three simple narratives (like the Purcell) of love, loss, abandonment. The present-day protagonists were played by actors; then there were singers, including Susan Bickley as Dido and Katherine Manley, performing the Purcell largely as written (so far as I could tell) though with some added extras, including a couple of snatches of 20th century verse and a kind of prelude in which a radio announcer introduced the Big Number, Dido's lament.

What made it utterly extraordinary is that actors and singers alike doubled as technicians: camera operators, sound effects operators (at the opposite side of the stage to the band), props handlers, rushing around moving cameras, rustling bags and turning taps on and off in time with the action on stage etc etc. Every set-up seemed to have an accompanying close-up in which the action of popping pills or doing the washing up was repeated by a second crew (often an actor or singer or technician with fake sleeves) and the big screen cut between the two... with sound effects added on top. From time to time the singers would break away to perform a solo to one of the mics scattered about the set... and sometimes the whole crew would stop to sing a chorus, often beautifully.

Not even in the heyday of live television studio drama would a director have attempted anything so insanely ambitious, even with a wholly professional studio crew, with quite so many set-ups and quite so many cut-away close-ups and without using studio natural sound. Yet they carried it off near-perfectly. Bravo. Bravissimi. But... why?

The modern-day parallels seemed to add little to the original; there was clearly a danger (though it didn't happen) that worrying about camera angles and framing and sound effects would compromise the singers' performances; and there was so much happening that it was hard to know where to look or what to marvel at -- the complexity of what was being attempted, and the often ravishing look of the thing on screen (a special mention here for the lighting designer, Philip Gladwell, and the DP, Leo Warner).

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.