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| A lonely Macbeth |
MACBETH - Almeida
By TOM FOOT
IT is the story of thoughtless butchery, where ambition leads
to tragic downfall and great power falls into the wrong hands.
Shakespeare’s plot provides a pretty good summary of what happened
when director Travis Preston took his hand to Macbeth.
It was always going to be hard to top the African Macbeth put on
by Out of Joint at the Arcola Theatre last month.
In that no-nonsense production, the audience were dragged through
the mill as Shakespeare’s blood-splattered tragedy was given
a new lease of life with fright wigs, machetes and child soldiers.
In this solo performance, the audience are taken into the mind of
Macbeth. There are no props and just one actor, the energetic Stephen
Dillane, in a minimalist set.
Macbeth’s lines: “If it were done, then ‘twere well
it were done quickly,” seemed particularly apt.
With Dillane, half-crazed, prancing around with no socks, his jacket
on back-to-front, rubbing soot into his long hair and wildly talking
to himself in a number of debatable accents, I began to wonder who
was to blame.
Turning to the director’s notes, I read: “I was startled
to discover how much of the text was spoken by the single character
of Macbeth. Moreover, what he didn’t speak seemed to emanate
from the consciousness of the major protagonist. I began to feel
that to access the ulterior power and truth of this great work was
to embody the entire text in a single actor.”
This is a classic case of what happens when Shakespeare gets into
the hands of over-thinking academics. True, Macbeth has many soliloquies
and he becomes isolated. But there is nothing private or internal
about his thoughts.
His most memorable passage – the “tomorrow, and tomorrow,
and tomorrow” – speech uses “our” not “my”
and talks about a common humanity. Macbeth is not a Hamlet figure,
full of brooding and procrastination. The true power of the play,
brought out so well in Dalston last month, comes from his thoughtless
action coupled with the play’s rampaging and bloody drive.
I am always suspicious of standing ovations, which often begin with
family and friends and grow, like a Mexican wave as others, who
do not want to appear churlish by staying seated, stand.
Nevertheless, Dillane – who put every ounce of his strength
and undeniable talent into this animated performance – received
rousing applause.
Until November 5
020 7359 4404
Maxwell’s myth
LIES HAVE BEEN TOLD - New End
By TOM FOOT
ROBERT Maxwell loved to ring his editorial staff with a great
idea for a splash: himself.
It became an in-house joke in the old corridors of Fleet Street.
The Daily Mirror became known as the Daily Maxwell.
It’s a safe bet that Maxwell would have approved of this one-man
show about his life, especially as this production does its best
to vindicate the man best remembered for stealing £440 million
from the Mirror pension fund.
Lies have been told, wrote the newspapers. “So what?”
booms Maxwell (Toby Young), “We’ve all told lies before.
But none are as bad as those told about me. Let’s start with
the facts, the undisputed truth.”
Born in Czechoslovakia, a poor Jew, Robert Maxwell made a miraculous
escape from the Nazis. He was awarded the Military Cross for bravery
during World War II. He returned to build a media empire against
all odds and a DTI judgement that said he was not fit to run a public
company. He bullied countless secretaries at the Mirror and imposed
himself upon the editorial staff before stealing from the company
to subsidise his £3 million-a-day debts.
We love to paint Maxwell as the unloveable rogue. But was he really
such a sinner?
The play begins with Maxwell retelling lesser-known facts about
his life. We hear how he was made a captain in the war and how he
escaped the Nazis who held him captive on a train. How he was the
victim of racial discrimination when he tried to buy the News of
the World. We hear how his autopsy revealed his fingers were blue
with bruises – apparently from holding on to his yacht as his
great bulk forced one way and the boat another.
The argument is that he was never fully fed. As a child he was always
hungry and wanted more. In later life, he was the same with money.
This was his tragic flaw.
Philip Young looks and sounds the part, and his performance will
make you think more fully about the man. But his portrayal of a
spluttering, self-centred bully, up to his eyeballs in debt and
pushed to the brink, is more likely to have you paying your credit
card bill than singing his praises.
Until December 3
0870 033 2733
Holmes hunts down Ghoul
SHERLOCK HOLMES: THE ATHENAEUM GHOUL - Bloomsbury
By MARTINA ANZINGER
NOW you know why you never see Dr Watson with a stethoscope.
He’s too busy writing plays, in a bid to make the West End
theatre respectable.
For him – and this play’s author, Carl Miller – it’s
dark Gothic whodunnits, complete with monsters, to rival even the
ghastly Baskerville beast.
Only in this touring production from Theatre Royal, Bury St Edmonds,
it’s not the big pooch haunting the moors, but the ghost of
a murderous actor eager to rip off your head.
In Poe-like Rue Morgue fashion, a woman drops dead on to the stage
from behind the fireplace.
Enter the real Sherlock Holmes, depressed and craving his seven
per cent cocaine solution because Watson has left for married bliss
in Camberwell.
The trouble with Conan Doyle was he pitched his narrative through
the prism of a Victorian netherworld of drawing room gentility and
table-rapping séances. Miller makes a brave stab at unpicking
this world, introducing a storyline from 19th-century Britain’s
seedy underbelly – the ruling classes’ inclination to
buy young girls for prostitution.
This scandal provided the lurid material for the first shock horror
investigative journalism – by Pall Mall Gazette editor WT Stead
– he went out and bought a young girl and was jailed.
Doyle famously told American dramatist William Gillette, the first
actor to play the detective, to do anything to his hero. And Miller
has taken him at his word, piling in just about every dime novel
and Hollywood cliché, including billowing smoke and revolver
shots. He’s even spiced it all up with a homoerotic kiss.
Colin Blumenau’s direction was a bit slow, and the dramatic
pace suffers from a ponderous plot without a proper denouement.
But it’s all reasonably engaging – thanks to a committed
cast of Luke Shaw as Watson, Jonathan Keeble as Holmes and Jack
Blumenau as his servant boy Billy. Only the dialogue is delivered
a tad too melodramatically – especially by the ladies, whose
shrieking isn’t all directed at the Ghoul.
Elementary? This play is not really.
Until November 5
020 7388 8822
Quirky and irreverent fun
AND BABY MAKES SEVEN - Lion and Unicorn
By DEAN MATTHEWSON
AND Baby Makes Seven “may contain scenes unsuitable for
imaginary children”.
The promotional blurb lets us know we are in for a thick slice of
irreverence. Pulitzer Prize winning playwright Paula Vogel’s
comedy deals with the bizarre relationship between pregnant Anna
(Hannah Parker), her partner Ruth (Alysha Westlake) and the donor
father Peter (Allen Lidkey).
Completing the septet are the children Henri, Cecil and Orphan,
characters who live firmly in the imaginations of Ruth and Anna.
Following Peter’s concerns about their vivid forays into fantasy,
Ruth and Anna hatch a plot to kill off the children once and for
all – a task that will by no means be easy.
Part of the play’s charm is that the imaginary characters are
as fully realised as the ‘real’ ones.
The wisest, most sane voice in the play comes from Cecil, a young
boy who can rationalise and express himself in a way that Anna,
burdened by the stresses of impending motherhood, cannot.
With punchy scene changes and a snappy pace, the play is imbued
with a refreshing youthful energy.
If you scratch beneath the surface, it offers some interesting conclusions
about the importance of imagination and how even when faced with
impending parenthood, we have to make time for the child in us all.
But let’s not get carried away – at its heart the play
is a lighthearted, quirky piece of undemanding theatre that is well
worth a look.
Until November 20
020 7244 5980 |
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We should get on our bikes and ride
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