FAREWELL TO THE THEATRE

26/5/12, Hampstead

100 minutes, no interval. Smoking alert (justified by the period). Harley Granville-Barker, actor, producer, director, is lecturing in America during World War One. He has been in France to write a book, and clearly doesn't want to go there to fight. His wife, we learn at one point, won't give him a divorce. He has no money. He is weary. "Everything I do," he says at one point, "I'm just waiting for it to be over. I have breakfast and wait for it to be over. I go for a walk and wonder when it will be finished. Its not a great step from there to wondering when the whole thing will be over."

He has pitched up in a small college town in Massachusetts in a boarding house run by an English widow, and a whole bunch of other expat English people: the widow's brother, a professor of English at the college; their cousin, a rather silly-arse schoolteacher, a bore and a lost soul; a man who tours a one man show about Dickens (reciting chapter after chapter of Pickwick or Tale of Two Cities); an ex-actress with three children having a fling with a college student, the president of the college Cap and Bells dramatic society who is playing Feste in a production of Twelfth Night.

At one point Granville Barker dreams of a theatre in which nothing much happens, but we observe the people and get to know them intimately, as people in the same room with whom we form a connection. This kind of play, in other words.

What does happen happens off-stage, and we are told about it in the manner of Greek tragedy. Granville Barker relays the news to the widow that her brother Henry has been publicly humiliated by his monstrous boss who belittles his Twelfth Night and discusses loudly enough for others to overhear false claims that he has been drunk at rehearsals and in lectures; Barker says the boss has a habit of sticking his tongue in his cheek after his most outrageous remarks, and makes a note if he ever directs Richard III to get the king to do the same. The Dickens man receives a telegram telling him his wife in New York has died but hides it from the rest of the household: the widow reveals that she has read the telegram, but even when he knows the others know none of them can find anything to say, in a very British way.

It was old-fashioned in other ways too. The women's roles weren't as strongly written: the widow's task mainly to listen, the ex-actress's to flirt and flutter giddily.

Most of the characters were escaping -- England, their spouses, the war. The Dickensian says they are treating America like some magical Shakespearean forest: a wonderful place to run away too, but in the real world nothing changes.

A very classy cast: Ben Chaplin as Granville Barker, Jemma Redgrave as the widow, Tara Fitzgerald as the ex-actress, Louis Hilyer as the prof, Jason Watkins (very strong) as the Dickens man, who has the best moments. Four scenes, the first and last in the garden; the middle two in the dining room, the design using the full depth of Hampstead's surprisingly large stage. The second scene (when they eat before going off to see the play, the light fades and the candles are lit, a scene which culminates with the telegram) was the strongest; scene three (after the play) necessarily downbeat, dominated as it is by the tale of Henry's humiliation and played in near-darkness; scene four a coda a few weeks later in which an old English mummers' play is briefly performed to the widow and the now-widowed Dickens man... and us.

Written by Richard Nelson, whose work I can't remember having seen before but who (according to A) is an American; directed by Roger Michell.

Dr T said it didn't quite have sufficient heft to live up to its ambition, which was right. There were moments of theatrical magic but they weren't especially magical; there was a case for theatre as a life-enhancing form in a disappointing world but I'm not sure it was made strongly enough. But worth it to see such a strong cast working together so well.

Reviews here. Billington thinks it's Chekhovian; the others concur that, despite the starry casting, it fails to take wing and is never quite the sum of its parts:

http://www.whatsonstage.com/reviews/theatre/london/E8831331128718/Farewell+to+the+Theatre.html

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/9138735/Farewell-to-the-Theatre-Hampstead-Seven-magazine-review.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2012/mar/08/farewell-to-the-theatre-review

http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/farewell-theatre-hampstead-theatre

I've just discovered that Granville Barker himself wrote a play in 1916 called Farewell to the Theatre, which was done at the Rose in Kingston last year. Reviews here:

http://www.britishtheatreguide.info/reviews/farewellimportance-rev

http://www.thestage.co.uk/reviews/review.php/33768/farewell-to-the-theatre-the-importance-of

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/07/farewell-to-the-theatre-review

DAVID HOCKNEY RA: A BIGGER PICTURE

25/3/12, Royal Academy

I was initially dubious. I'd seen the media coverage; I was worried Hockney's new Yorkshire landscapes would turn out to be brightly-coloured, meretricious crowd-pleasers, representational in a rather unsophisticated way. (Hark at me! How patronising I sound.)

The first room reinforced that impression: four huge pictures, each of nine panels, showing the same three trees through the seasons. Behind them a sketched-in landscape of hills; in the foreground a field. Bright and shiny, they looked as if they were painted in acrylics, though they were in fact oils.

The contrast was striking in the next gallery, a retrospective of Hockney landscapes going back 50 years, from gloomy student daubs of West Yorkshire through deconstructed Californian landscapes to the photo-collages and a vast image on several panels of the Grand Canyon. Here was the contemporary artist playing with perception and perspective and colour in the approved fashion, I thought. He's gone off since, I thought.

What made me think again was the fourth gallery, full of oil (and watercolour!) landscapes done in situ of fields and woods and roads and tracks and hedgerows and lines of trees. This being Hockney the showman they're all the same size and he fills whole walls with these identical panels. But the draughtsmanship is superb, the colours vivid but not exaggerated, the landscape in all its different moods captured brilliantly. They're not subtle but they have tremendous impact and allure. D said they reminded her of the landscapes we walk through -- indeed, of why we walk at all.

Having established his credentials as a (more or less) straightforward landscape painter in the English tradition, he then sets off on a series of formal exercises, variations on the theme. There's a room full of big, multi-panel pictures of the same small section of wood through the seasons, with all the differences in light and vegetation and colour, the repeated verticals of the trees the only constant. There's a room full of "tunnels" -- views along tracks between hedgerows and trees with the foliage arching over as the road recedes into the far distance (he does love receding roads, does Hockney, as a way to draw you into the picture and give it some sort of structure). There's a gallery of images of cut logs beside a tree stump, some more or less straightforwardly representational, others involving Fauvist experiments in colour, one a spectacular piece filling an entire wall in which the tree stump has become a gnarled face. Similarly a gallery devoted to images of hawthorn blossom includes one in which the hawthorn bushes have become grotesque shapes and the bunches of blossom look like seething maggots.

The biggest room of all contains two or three score images of the arrival of spring at different points in a large wood, done over three months and blown up from iPad sketches. The room is set off (as with the cut logs sequence) by a giant painting which pulls together many of the motifs, with spring glowers and bright green stylised "leaves" floating over the surface. The iPad turns out in Hockney's hands to be as good as a sketchbook and watercolour for capturing the changeable landscape.

In several rooms are charcoal sketches done in the field, and very good they are too. In another is a series of films he's made, shot with a nine-camera rig and projected onto nine or eighteen screens, the saturated colours of the real landscape and hedgerows a reminder that the colours in the paintings aren't so very far from the real thing.

More recently he's started to explore the sublime, and here he lost me. There's a gallery devoted to deconstructions of a Claude landscape, The Sermon on the Mount, and a giant reconstruction of it which just screamed "kitsch". And a gallery of big prints blown-up from iPad sketches of Yosemite: at that scale the iPad images lack impact and colour.

But we were won over. We liked it so much we bought the book.

We'd turned up at 18.00, having read that queues on a Saturday evening were shorter. The young man marshalling told us we'd have to wait two hours. We went away for an hour and a half to eat and came back to find the queue only marginally shorter. The marshal, by now a young woman, told us the wait would be 90 minutes. In the end it was an hour. Not too bad: we had books, the Academy's courtyard is well-enough lit to read after dark, it had been a remarkably warm (20 degs) and sunny day. Inside it was rammed, which is usually death to an exhibition. But here it added to the sense of occasion and, since most of the work was on the grand scale, it was possible to appreciate it despite the crowds.

GOING DARK

24/3/12, Young Vic

70 minutes, no interval. Another immersive drama from Sound & Fury, the team who brought us the wonderful Kursk at this venue last year (the Young Vic's Clare studio). We entered in near-total darkness (they'd even persuaded the authorities to let them dispense with illuminated exit signs), though as your eyes adjusted you realised there were soft pools of light under each seat. Parts of the performance (one man, John Mackay) were in complete darkness as well, others in soft pools of understated light.

The man works as a planetarium lecturer. We see the stars on the ceiling, he talks about the Pole Star and how to find it, Sirius and why it scintillates, about the unimaginable vastness of the universe, about the distances from here to Andromeda, about the big bang, about entropy. He is a single parent with a six-year old son, Leo, who's mad on Thunderbirds. We hear recordings of Leo as he plays and he and his father talk: a real child with a child's phrase-making skills and capacity for imitating not just Thunderbirds dialogue but the solemn, sententious tones of voice that adults adopt.

We see the man at his hobby (photography, developing images in a bath), and at the hospital where they diagnose retinitis pigmentosa, progressive loss of eyesight, and on the phone to his parents. Gradually his sight diminishes. We see him tying on a blindfold to practice making his son's sandwiches for lunch with the ingredients from the fridge: a success, except it turns out he's given him a can of beer, not Coke.

Towards the end he records his presentation as a voice-over, haltingly because he can barely read the script, and then finds it was so bad they hired a professional voice-over artist to do it again; though blind he agrees to take questions from the audience, only to be terrified by hallucinations (the mind does this, the programme says, conjuring up vivid visual images to fill the hole left by the absence of sight: it's called Claude Bonnet Syndrome).

We never really establish whether he has managed to tell his son what's happening to him, or whether Leo has fully grasped it. Towards the end when, panicked by seeing his face dissolve and crumple in the shaving mirror, he shouts at Leo we hear no more from the boy, only the sound effects of those Thunderbirds toys. At that point I was touched.

And interspersed through all this the most wonderful sounds, often played thrillingly loud and unaccompanied by narrative in complete blackout: the terrifying and disorientating noise of heavy traffic, of a tube train; the noise of rain drops and a thunderstorm (which is what the piece starts with and ends with). As good a sense, I imagine, of what the world must feel like to a blind person as one can get while sighted.

Technically almost faultless, thanks largely to the sound (by Dan Jones) and a series of projections on walls, ceiling, sheets of paper, a "mirror" (by Dick Straker): the sky at night, photographs, the colours of the spectrum, an electric hob. In some cases I was frankly baffled as to how the effect was achieved.

I thought it was a play about going blind, though reading the programme afterwards it seems the makers thought it was about the cosmos and our place in it. Dr T was rather sniffy -- "not much drama" -- and A complained she couldn't see (hah!) because there were tall people in front of her. D and I liked it a lot.

A NOTE ON THE PAST YEAR...

... or rather more.

Somewhere towards the end of 2010 the steam ran out of this blog. Lack of time probably had something to do with it (having to read a good many books for work was certainly a contributory factor), although there other reasons for giving up: disenchantment with the fact that nobody seemed remotely interested in it; ambiguity about just how it meshed with my other work as a journalist; the fact that I'd started tweeting regularly and (apart from the time-consuming distraction that represented) I wasn't clear how to combine the two activities, particularly when we'd been to a preview and tweeting/blogging views ahead of the official first night meant in effect breaking an embargo.

However, the reason for starting it in the first place (the fact that I wanted a purely personal aide memoire because so many of the productions we see subsequently fade dramatically in the memory) hadn't gone away. And over the past year I've often regretted not being able to look back at what we've seen and what I thought of it, and occasionally also regretted not having a forum to record a strongly-held opinion or a vivid impression.

So I'm starting again, or planning to. Probably at less length than in the past. No doubt erratically.

And we'll start with a few brief notes, month by month, on what we've seen during the break.

NOVEMBER 2011

On 10/11/11 we were supposed to see Terrible Advice at the Menier. I didn't, presumably because I had to work. I'm not sure I missed that much. Here's Charles Spencer's review:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8797619/Terrible-Advice-Menier-Chocolate-Factory-review.html

On 11/11/11 we saw Inadmissible Evidence at the Donmar. This is John Osborne's play about a middle-aged solicitor cracking up, with Douglas Hodge frenetic and desperate in the lead. Memory is now hazy but I do remember it, which is something. It resembled Simon Gray's Butley: a self-loathing male protagonist whose outrageous behaviour was probably seen as very funny on first outing (1971 in the case of Butley, 1964 in this case) but to our politically-correct, post-feminist eyes now looks just boorish and selfish, which means one has trouble maintaining the necessary sympathy with the man. A fine set (by Soutra Gilmour), as so often at the Donmar: Bill Maitland's chaotic office, his desk centre stage, the rest of the office glimpsed through transparent panels behind. The action I can catch glimpses of as through a glass darkly. Maitland is a drunk (they always are) and a lecher. His rebellious daughter, much talked about, comes to see him and their encounter does not go well. His secretary-mistress announces she's leaving her job and him. Likewise his put-upon partner. You really can't blame them. It is, we're told, a self-portrait and not long after he wrote it Osborne too cracked up. Makes one glad one never met him. Apparently it runs for over three hours uncut. This was trimmed, but Charlie Spencer in the Telegraph said: With judicious cuts the Donmar’s staging lasts a little over two and a half hours, but it still feels like a punishing marathon devoid of the faintest scrap of comfort or hope. The rest of his review, along with others, here:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8835430/Inadmissible-Evidence-Donmar-Warehouse-review.html

http://www.guardian.co.uk/stage/2011/oct/19/inadmissable-evidence-review

http://www.ft.com/cms/s/2/b9d96a0e-fb0c-11e0-bebe-00144feab49a.html#axzz1rtxqCt15

http://www.theartsdesk.com/theatre/inadmissible-evidence-donmar-warehouse

On 14/11/11 we saw Castor & Pollux at ENO.

On 17/11/11 D saw Danny and the Deep at Southwark. I missed it: had to work.

On 18/11/11 we saw The Veil at the National.

On 21/11/11 we saw The Last of the Duchess at Hampstead. Now this I do remember.

On 29/11/11 we saw Kitchen Sink at the Bush. This also was memorable.

JANUARY 2012

On 14/1/12 we saw Colchester Chamber Choir at St Teresa's, Colchester, because my old mate A is now a member of the choir. Ambitious programme: Gesualdo's Tenebrae (or some of them -- a candle on the altar extinguished after each one), Allegri's crowd-pleasing Miserere (for which they split, with the bulk of the choir remaining in front of the altar and a small detachment coming to the back of the church), some Lotti, some Palestrina. Not easy to sing, the Gesualdo especially, and they struggled here and there. But generally very satisfying. St Teresa's a 1950s structure, undistinguished outside, very handsome inside, though my efforts to discover the architect proved fruitless.

The flyer here:

http://www.colchesterchamberchoir.org/?p=447

On 19/1/12 we saw Lovesong at the Lyric Hammersmith. The girls liked this more than me. I couldn't fault the performances but the script seemed somehow unsatisfactory -- surprising, given that it was by Abi Morgan, whose recent credits include The Hour, The Iron Lady and the film adaptation of Birdsong. Produced by physical theatre specialists Frantic Assembly, whose pool hall Othello we much admired at this address. Two couples, one in childless old age, the other just starting out. It gradually becomes clear that they're the same couple, though Sam Cox as the older man and Edward Bennett (who played Laertes and often Hamlet in the David Tennant Hamlet), though both quirkily-featured, look nothing like one another; and nor really do Leanne Rowe and Sian Phillips. He's a dentist, she's a homemaker (as they say): they're English (or at any rate they speak with English accents) but for some reason they're in small town America. We see the relationship develop. They row over his decision to buy his own practice. There are (I think) problems with money. He takes (does he?) a lover. Their childlessness troubles them. Few props and no set. They move between living room and kitchen and garden by means of words and sound (Carolyn Downing). There is a bed. They climb in and out -- and sometimes spectacularly (a touch of the horror films about that). And they move, dance, intertwine, sometimes across the generations. So let's hear it especially for Sian Phillips, nearly 80 and amazingly supple. There was a moment when I felt moved (can't remember when or by what now), but otherwise one to admire coolly, with detachment.

On 21/1/12 we went to York to see the panto, York Family Robinson at York Theatre Royal. Berwick Kaler has been writing, directing and starring in the York panto for 33 years, which must be some kind of record. He is apparently a legend in Yorkshire... and beyond, which is how I'd heard of him. At the time I tweeted that he effortlessly steals every scene, which he does: as a dame he's right up there with the best, raucous, rude, with fine comic timing, a great ability to ad lib and an impressive command of slapstick. He has a regular stock company of supporting players, each of whom gets a spot, and none of whom come near him in skill. But that's really the best that can be said of it. He shouldn't really be writing and directing and starring, and certainly not after 33 years on the trot. It had all the elements of a proper panto, but the plot was absurdly complicated and it went on far too long, losing energy towards the end and then making sure to send everyone out looking bored by doing the birthday messages and such after the final curtain rather than halfway through.

And the following day, 22/1/12, we went to see an exhibition of paintings by William Etty at York Art Gallery.

On 25/1/12 I saw Ralph Fiennes' film of Coriolanus at the Mayfair Curzon. Set in some contemporary Balkan civil war and filmed with Serbian extras.

On 27/1/12 we saw Constellations at the Royal Court Upstairs.

At some point we saw Made in Dagenham on DVD at home. Feelgood nostalgia aiemd at the over 50s who can remember the 60s. The bosses are baddies. The union bosses are sexists with snouts in the trough (except for cuddly old Bob Hoskins). Miranda Richards' Barbara astle has a heart of gold and a terrifying way with hidebound civil servants, and bonds over borrowed Biba with our heroine (them were the days when Biba were the height of high street fashion). The Ford ladies are all much younger, better-coiffed and better-looking than their real-life counterparts in shockingly tight perms (not surprising, given they include current Essex girl lookers Andrea Risebrough and Jaime Winstone among their number, both given remarkably high billing for actors with relatively small parts). Sally Hawkins very good as Rita, harrassed, passionate, unconfident leader of the strikers. Daniel Mays as her goodhearted husband who's a duffer in the home when his wife neglects her domestic duties to become a campaigner. Geraldine James moving as the older shop steward, burdened with a husband suffering from wartime PTSD. The serious issue: should the men get more money ebcause they all have wives and kids to support and a woman's place is in the home? The precise casus belli: the "girls'" insistence that stitching together seat covers for Escorts from assorted precut shapes is at the very least "semi-skilled" work and entitles them to be paid as such. A sometimes saccharine treatment, manipulatively (and successfully) designed to bring a lump to the throat. The grey crowd packed it out in cinemas apparently, and you can see why: nostalgia for youth and an optimstic decade (the pristine 60s lovingly recreated), politics lite, sugar-coated recent history and a happy ending.

OCTOBER 2011

On 3/10/11 we went to Stephen Poliakoff's My City at the Almeida. I have no unprompted memory of this whatever.

Here's a review. It starred Tracey Ullman, apparently, but still the memory remains unjogged, from which one must conclude it failed:

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/theatre/theatre-reviews/8767813/My-City-Almeida-Theatre-review.html

On 7, 8 and 9/10/11 we were at Harwich Sea Shanty Festival. I have quite a few (happy) memories of this, which considering how much of the weekend was spent in Harwich's charming pubs is striking. Here's a few best bits. Two old boys in big white beards, boots and jerseys singing South Australia and the Rosabella and other standards on an old Thames wherry moored on the floating jetty from which the ferry across the estuary leaves. Taking the same wherry out under sail up past Parkstone Quay and back while listening to (a not very good) trio from Clacton or Frinton or somewhere. A German male-voice choir singing in Harwich's extraordinary circular fort, their voices echoing around the great round open air well inside: they weren't very good, their English was a bit galumphing and the youngest was about 65 but they were enjoying themselves. Paul Sirman, a singer-songwriter and a lovely man, performing solo in one of the pubs despite being unwell, apparently: you couldn't tell. Watching the gigantic container ships coming and going, loading and unloading, across the estuary at Felixstowe (nothing to do with the music, that, but memorable). Less good: the interminable evening concert in the overcrowded sailing club, marred by one particularly egregious man who evidently thought he was brilliant but wasn't, and wouldn't get off.

On 12/10/11 we went to The Marriage of Figaro at ENO.

On 17/10/11 we went to Bang Bang Bang at the Royal Court.

On 18/10/11 we went to a concert of Tudor Music at Austin Friars.

On 21/10/11 we saw The Flying Dutchman at Covent Garden.

On 22/10/11 we saw The Taming of the Shrew at Southwark.

On 24/10/11 we saw Fabulous Beast at Sadlers Wells.

On 25/10/11 we saw Edward Bond's Saved at the Lyric, Hammersmith. This was the only truly memorable thing we saw this month (apart from the Sea Shanties and Fabulous Beast).

On 31/10/11 we saw Jumpy at the Royal Court.