Breakfast at Tiffany's

We were in London yesterday to see Anna Friel in Breakfast at Tiffany's at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. The play was directed by Sean Mathias, whose Waiting for Godot we saw at the same theatre earlier this year, and it was characterised by similarly imaginative and innovative staging. Although this production goes back to the original Capote story (which I have to confess, I haven't read), which is apparently grittier than the universally-known Blake Edwards film, it's really difficult to get Audrey Hepburn's iconic performance out of your head - and to avoid comparisons.

Anna Friel turns in a spirited and energetic performance, and she is always (as they say) easy on the eye, but she lacks the magical elusiveness and lightness of touch of Hepburn. I'm no expert, but I'd say her accent was a little strained at times, and as often happens, you get the impression that studied attention to the externalities of the character has meant less work on the more internal aspects.

Playing opposite her as the aspiring writer, Joseph Cross (seen most recently alongside Sean Penn in Milk) was also impressive, but one of the problems with the production is that there is insufficient contrast between the two main characters. Whereas in the movie the wry, if naive urbanity of the writer contrasts with the many-layered mystery of Miss Holly Golightly, here they are too similar in their out-of-town newness, pushiness and emotional flightiness.

The cast members worked their socks off, with most of them playing two or three parts. Thank goodness they decided not to repeat Mickey Rooney's offensive cartoon Chinaman in the portrayal of landlord Mr. Yonioshi. Among the supporting cast, Dermot Crowley's performance as dependable but Holly-obsessed barman Joe Bell stood out as particularly memorable..

All in all, it was an absorbing and thought-provoking afternoon in the theatre. And London itself looked autumnally beautiful yesterday, with the newly-restored whiteness of St. Martin in the Fields gleaming in the afternoon sunshine, and Quakers and soldiers mingling peacefully in contrasting Remembrance weekend demonstrations in Trafalgar Square, as we walked to the theatre. The woman who does those imitations of Renaissance paintings in chalk was, as always, on the pavement outside the National Gallery - and, as always, we didn't catch her actually doing any chalking. My son has the idea of setting up a webcam in the square to prove that she doesn't produce the pictures herself - but instead arrives before the crowds, tapes down the finished product, scatters a few chalks around and waits for the beguiled tourists to fill her hat with coins.

Keith Waterhouse, R.I.P.

The death of Keith Waterhouse has just been announced.

Despite his later self-reinvention as a florid-faced Daily Mail columnist of the 'We're all going to hell in a handcart' variety, he'll be best remembered for his earlier work, especially the screenplay for Whistle Down The Wind in which Alan Bates plays an escaped murderer hiding in a barn, mistaken for Christ by some local children (best line: 'He's not Jesus, he's just a feller!'), and of course for the immortal Billy Liar.

Confession time: I played the title role in a best-forgotten amateur production in Manchester in the early Eighties. I think the reason I got the part was that the only other person in the cast of the right age was an ex-public schoolboy whose attempt at a Yorkshire accent was even more execrable than mine. Tom Courtenay and Julie Christie did a rather better job:

Godot, Alice and Abercombie

Yesterday we were in London to see the new production of 'Waiting for Godot' at the Theatre Royal, Haymarket. Some reviewers have suggested that by emphasising the comic aspects of the play, and by making the two main characters more explicitly into old entertainers, director Sean Mathias has somehow undermined its serious, philosophical content. Don't believe it. This is certainly a hugely enjoyable production, but if anything the rich comedy deepens the existential drama.

Then there's the treat of watching some of our finest actors at their peak. Even the smallest part, that of the mostly-mute slave Lucky, is taken by veteran character actor Ronald Pickup, whose nonsensical 'thinking' speech is an almost unbearably intense tour de force. I love Simon Callow and I'm always pleased to see him on the cast list: his Pozzo was certainly a compelling, larger-than-life monster, but it was just a bit too Simon Callow-ish for me, if you know what I mean. By contrast, Patrick Stewart's Vladimir and Ian McKellen's Estragon were completely fresh and newly-imagined characters. McKellen especially was almost unrecognisable as the forgetful, put-upon old tramp 'Gogo', and his performance, in particular, made me realise that, as much as anything, this is a play about ageing.

However, ascribing 'meaning' to Beckett's many-layered masterpiece is probably a pointless exercise. I was struck by a comparison that hadn't occurred to me before, but which I'll probably discover others have written about. Last week, thanks to a post over at 'On A Raised Beach', I found myself watching part of Jonathan Miller's 1966 TV strangely wonderful production of 'Alice in Wonderland' on Youtube. Watching Callow and Pickup yesterday, it occurred to me that Pozzo and Lucky resemble some of the outlandish characters encountered by Alice, and that to ask what they 'represent' is as pointless as asking what is signified by the Cheshire Cat, or the hookah-smoking Caterpillar. At a deep level we 'get' their meaning, and any attempt to put it into words risks simplifying it.

Beckett's play is the same kind of philosophical fantasy, brimming with profound existential and spiritual portent (and whatever the man himself said, the religious undertow of 'Godot' is inescapable), but it's also, like 'Alice', a mad, metaphorical entertainment. It's Mathias' achievement, and that of his stellar cast, that the rich comedy of this production draws us towards its dark, serious heart, and not away from it, so that its many layers of meaning linger in our thoughts and our dreams long after we have left the theatre.

H. and I reflected that, incredibly, it's been about 27 years since we last saw a production of 'Waiting for Godot': it was back in the early '80s that we saw Trevor Peacock and Max Wall take the leading roles at the Royal Exchange in Manchester. No wonder I was sensitive to the ageing theme yesterday. To think of the Royal Exchange in those days is to conjure up at once the distinctive spicy, wholefood-y smell of the theatre bar, to remember queuing in the early morning for banquette tickets in the 'lunar module', then retiring to the Danish Food Centre for coffee, all the whole thinking that we really must get back to the John Rylands Library and do some work on our unwritten theses...

Yesterday, the price for dragging our two sceptical teenage offspring to a play in which 'nothing happens', was a spot of West End shopping, including an hour spent mingling with the beautiful people at Abercrombie and Fitch. What can you say about a shop that has no sign outside, yet has customers queuing around the block before it opens, is so poorly lit that you can't be sure of the colours of the clothes you're buying, and employs staff just to dance and to pose stripped to the waist in the entrance lobby, not to mention having a queue to pay that snakes half-way round the shop? Having said all that, the beautiful and well-toned young assistants are always charming and helpful, even to fifty-something parents who feel embarrasingly out of place (as I say, I was feeling old yesterday). But you can't help longing for the day, surely not far away, when A&F loses its exclusive image (in the US, there's now one in almost every city mall, but the London branch is the only one in the UK) and has to do a bit more for the comfort and ease of its customers.

Oh, and to get to London we had to stand like cattle, crammed into a train carriage with Stevenage supporters, some of them already cracking open the Stella, on their way to Wembley for the FA Trophy final (I think they won). But it was worth it.

Footnote

I quite liked this Garland cartoon in the Telegraph last week (in case you're wondering: no, I haven't changed my political colours - my Tory-voting in-laws read it):

Realism and artifice in bohemia

We were in London again at the weekend, this time to see Jonathan Miller's new production of La Boheme at the English National Opera. Now, although I'm a fairly keen listener to opera on CD, I've been to very few live performances, so what follows is by no means an expert review.

As with our visit to the RSC the week before, our expectations had been lowered by some of the reviews, which suggested that Miller's translation of the drama to a sepia-tinted 1930s Paris had drained the production of much of its glamour and colour. I half-agreed. The opening and closing acts, set in the garret shared by the struggling young artists and writers, were rather dull on the eye. But I thought the staging for the middle two acts, and especially Act 2's monochrome re-creation of a Parisian cafe, was quite stunning.

A bigger problem, for me, was the tension between Miller's attempt to infuse the opera with naturalism and the intrinsic artificiality of the operatic genre. Whether as a result of directorial planning or inherent acting ability, the performances of Hanan Alattar as Musetta and Roland Wood as Marcello, and the interactions between them, were dynamic and engaging. But although Alfie Boe as Rodolfo and Melody Moore as Mimi turned in musically perfect performances, their relationship was rarely convincing. In contrast to the attempted realism of the setting, the two lovers hardly looked at each other. And although she's obviously an accomplished singer, it took a leap of the audience's imagination to see Moore as a frail Mimi, or to believe that her polished articulation was that of a poor seamstress.

I see that Boe sang Rodolfo in Baz Luhrmann's Broadway production of the opera - and I wonder whether Luhrmann's knowing artificiality actually suits the genre better than Miller's half-achieved realism.

Brush up your Shakespeare

We were in London yesterday. Not for the Convention on Modern Liberty, though we passed by the place where Henry Porter et al were holding forth on the state of the nation. Nor for the flash mob pillow-fight in Hyde Park. (Incidentally, don't you agree that this craze has passed its sell-by date? The mass freeze in Grand Central Station was stylish, and the T-mobile dance-in at Liverpool Street a joy to behold, but now that everyone's in on the joke, hasn't this pastime lost whatever coolness it once had?)

No, we were in town to see the RSC's production of The Taming of the Shrew, which is currently at the Novello Theatre. As a literature graduate, I'm ashamed to admit that it's not a play I know well. In fact, until yesterday most of my knowledge of the plot was derived from repeat viewings of the 1953 film of Cole Porter's Kiss Me Kate, a long-time favourite in our house. Our expectations of the play had been lowered by some pretty dismal reviews, and by discovering (after booking) that the director was Conall Morrison, who directed the unrelentingly grim Macbeth that we saw at Stratford in 2007.

The verdict? Well, the RSC always deliver a quality production and fantastic performances, and it's difficult to go completely wrong with Shakespeare, even in such a problematic play as this one. But you certainly couldn't accuse Morrison of lightness of touch, or of leaving the audience in any doubt about the points he's trying to make. In this production, he lays on the theme of male misogyny and predatory sexuality with a trowel. As in his Macbeth, Morrison has added an additional scene before the dialogue begins, and once again it serves to reinforce his message in no uncertain terms. Instead of Shakespeare's framing scene in an inn, we witness a lewd stag-night/boys' night out, complete with pole dancers and a blow-up doll. 

The second half of the play is particularly bleak in its depiction of male sexual cruelty, and Morrison rarely misses an opportunity to disgust his audience. The brilliant comedy, played with great gusto by a fantastic cast, goes some way to relieving the grimness of the director's vision. I wasn't sure, though, whether the final scene, in which Petruchio is left (almost) naked and vulnerable on stage, did much to undercut the feminine submissiveness of Kate's final speech. From such an impressive line-up of actors, it seems invidious to single out particular performances, but Michelle Gomez as Kate was spirited and intense and appeared emotionally drained at the end, while among the minor characters Keir Charles was a wonderfully comic Tranio.

The programme for the show was good value too, with a piece on the language of gender politics by one of my academic heroes, Deborah Cameron, an informative article by Robert Henke about the influence of commedia dell'arte on Shakespeare, and an extract from Jack Holland's history of misogyny which, refreshingly didn't hesitate to include 'veiling, seclusion and clitoridectomy' as symptoms of contemporary misogyny.

Anyway, after all that gloom and intensity, here's some light relief from Kiss Me Kate:

Theatre of war

The Tricycle Theatre in north London has commissioned a series of plays about Afghanistan 'in the belief that the history of the country is not well known in the UK, even though thousands of British troops are there in operations against the Taliban.' Artist director Nicholas Kent stated: 'It's a history project, without being in the least dry'.

Sounds like a worthy initiative, in the best traditions of theatre as public education. But what kind of history lesson are theatre-goers likely to get? Here's Nicholas Kent again: 'We have a lot to learn about the historical backdrop: about how British and Russian self-interest caused so many of the problems in the country.' 

A lot to learn? Seems like Kent has made up his mind already. You'll notice he doesn't mention the damage caused to Afghanistan by feuding warlords or the oppressive Taliban regime. But perhaps he shares the dominant pseudo-left belief that these 'problems' were 'caused' by western 'self-interest' and that Afghans are simply passive pawns of outside forces, rather than having any agency of their own.

I hope the dramas commissioned by Tricycle end up challenging, rather than merely confirming, the political prejudices of the north London theatre-going classes.

From Studio 60 to Shakespeare in one post

Of relevance to this, this and also this: check out this excellent review by Andrew of the now sadly defunct Studio 60 on the Sunset Strip. Meanwhile, what's a conoisseur of US TV imports to do over the summer, now that Brothers and Sisters, Mad Men, and even the gloriously hyper-real Dirty Sexy Money have finished? We've been reduced to working our way through DVD boxed sets of Ally McBeal, which somehow passed us by first time around. Watching five series in quick succession, at a rate of about an episode per night, is strange: Christmas seems to come round every few days.

I also enjoyed Andrew's enthusiastic post on David Tennant's Hamlet. We haven't been to Stratford for ages, but Andrew's review has made me keen to see the play when it transfers to London later in the year.

The hills are alive (sort of)

What's the point of reviving a classic musical? We were at the London Palladium on Saturday to see The Sound of Music, and though it was generally a warmly enjoyable family experience (there were three generations of us in attendance), this question passed through my mind a number of times during the afternoon.

On the positive side, the set designs looked fantastic and the rapid scene and costume changes caused frequent intakes of breath from the audience. Musically, the production was faultless, and special praise must go to Margaret Preece as the Abbess whose belting 'Climb Every Mountain' reached every corner of the cavernous theatre. The kids playing the Von Trapp children were delightful too, and newcomer Amy Lennox as Liesl almost stole the show. 

Which brings us to the leading roles. Simon Burke's voice has a beautifully warm tone, but he was an extremely wooden Captain Von Trapp. I know he's supposed to be buttoned-up at the outset, but there was little sign of an emotional thaw as things progressed. And I think he's been told to take Prince Charles as his model of masculine awkwardness: hence the stiffly besuited stance and constant fiddling with his hands. His change of heart towards Maria was unconvincing and the love scene between them was clumsily handled.

As for Maria: well, Andrew Lloyd Webber has been up to his reality-TV tricks again. With original competition winner Connie Fisher leaving the show, he's come up with a new wheeze to pack in the crowds, planting his new Maria as a character in teen soap Hollyoaks and turning up in person to audition her. The lucky winner this time is Summer Strallen, who brings more stage experience to the role than Fisher, and certainly has a refreshingly youthful take on the role. But I'm not sure she's quite settled into the part yet: I found some features of her interpretation a little grating. Why the posh vowels, for example - is the legacy of Julie Andrew so inescapable? - and surely Maria would work better as a simple country girl thrown into the aristocratic stiffness of the Von Trapp household. At times Strallen comes over as a slightly annoying CBBC presenter - all exaggerated grins - and at other times she's just too - well, modern - for a 1940s Austrian ex-nun. 

The problem, I think, lies in the direction - which brings me back to my original question. I don't think Lloyd Webber or anyone in his team have thought through what it means to make a musical written in the late 50s/early 60s, and set in the Second World War, come to life in the early twentieth century. There's little sense of the show being given a fresh interpretation for a new century, and a new audience.

And you can't escape the fact that everyone in the audience will know the film almost by heart, and will judge any new stage version against it. I came away with renewed admiration for the film version, realising that much of the magic was in the cinematic direction, rather than in the original show, which (despite the fantastic songs) without the movie stardust can at times seem stagey and unconvincing. 

ENO 'Mikado' doesn't quite conquer anti-G&S prejudice

When H. and I first met we found that one of the things we had in common was a deep antipathy to Gilbert and Sullivan. For me, their work conjured up too many memories of stodgy Methodist amateur dramatics, while H. declared it was the kind of music liked by scientists (such were the snobberies of twentysomething arts graduates).

Strange then to find ourselves at the Coliseum on Saturday for the English National Opera's revival of Jonathan Miller's Mikado. The production was hugely enjoyable. I loved the Twenties-style black and white design which, together with the programme notes, brought out affinities with Astaire-Rogers and Marx Brothers movies. Ko-Ko declaring his 'love' for the battleaxe Katisha could almost have been Groucho fawning over Margaret Dumont, while the same character's comically delayed first entrance was a dead ringer for the opening scene of Animal Crackers. There were some fantastic individual performances too, most notably Richard Suart as a hugely funny Ko-Ko, stepping into the part created for the original Miller production by Eric Idle (his 'little list', regularly updated with audience contributions via the ENO website, included topical digs at Derek Conway and Mohammed al-Fayed). And I thought Sarah Tynan was delightful as Yum-Yum: a true operatic star in the making.

In recent years it has become modish to declare a (possibly ironic, postmodern-ish) liking for 'G&S'. None other than the great Aaron Sorkin has revealed his affection for their work by featuring songs in both The West Wing and Studio 60, and I notice that Jo Brand is starring in a new production of The Pirates of Penzance. But for all its qualities, the ENO Mikado didn't quite make Gilbert and Sullivan fans of us. Beneath the witty songs and the sharp satire, their plot and characters remain doggedly one-dimensional and incapable of engaging the deeper sympathies of an audience. Much as I enjoyed our outing to the Coliseum, it didn't make me want to rush out and buy the soundtrack. Instead, I hurried home and put on a CD of The Marriage of Figaro: now there's proper operatic comedy for you. Thirty years on, I'm still a snobby arts graduate at heart.

An offence and an anachronism

Christian fundamentalist activist Stephen Green wants the BBC prosecuted over its 2005 screening of Jerry Springer - The Opera. The charge? Blasphemy. I wonder how the particular target of his wrath - the corporation's director general Mark Thompson, who was last year named as one of Britain's top 100 lay Catholics - will feel about that.

The human rights group Liberty argues that the blasphemy law violates the European Convention on Human Rights. According to its legal officer Anna Fairclough: 'These blasphemy laws should be shelved in dusty archives, not used as a tool to bring mischievous prosecutions against the arts.'

Nice to see the Christian thinktank Ekklesia agreeing. In the words of its co-director Simon Barrow:

Human rights advocates, including people of faith, have quite rightly campaigned against blasphemy laws in Pakistan and other countries, and having one on the statute in the UK is both an offence and an anachronism.

Privileging one religion above other views is indefensible in a democracy, and for Christians there is the added irony that Christ was himself arraigned on a charge of blasphemy. Using the law to attack opinions about belief is to misuse it, and suggesting that God needs protection against free speech makes no theological sense at all.

The Christian message is about the power of self- giving love, not the love of one's own power. This is why it is wrong religiously as well as legally and democratically.

...which is rather similar to what I was trying to say here (scroll down to point no.6).

Light versus dark blue

Coincidentally we found ourselves in Oxford last weekend and Cambridge the weekend before. Both cities have strong personal associations: I was a student at Cambridge in the mid-70s and worked in community education on the outskirts of Oxford in the mid-80s.

We were in Cambridge to see Peter Gill's production of The Importance of Being Earnest (which transfers to London in January), starring Penelope Keith as Lady Bracknell, and with a supporting cast that included Rebecca Night who recently achieved fame as the star of the BBC's Fanny Hill. It was an enjoyable production, though you could almost hear the disappointment in the audience at Penelope Keith's low key interpretation of the famous 'handbag' speech. Our reason for visiting Oxford was more mundane: to do a spot of early Christmas shopping.

The two visits, so close together, revived our old debate about which city we like best. I used to prefer Cambridge's small-town, semi-rural feel, by comparison with the more urban, semi-industrial atmosphere of Oxford. And I've always liked the way you can walk freely through the colleges in Cambridge, whereas Oxford's tend to be hidden away behind high walls and 'keep out' signs. But this longstanding preference was challenged when we lived and worked in Oxford in the '80s. We grew attached to the city and its surroundings: there's a certain magic when you drive through the 'canyon' on the M40 from London and see Oxfordshire and the Cotswolds spread out before you, a first glimpse of the West Country.

In fact, the two cities now feel remarkably similar, with their identical Borders bookstores and anonymous new shopping centres. Interestingly, on both visits we found ourselves eating in restaurants located in converted public institutions. In Cambridge we had lunch at Browns, in the old Addenbrookes Hospital building, and in Oxford we ate in Carluccios, one of a number of new eateries situated in the old prison: the Malmaison hotel, in the same complex, has even retained the bars on the windows.

Is gender mere disguise?

To Stratford yesterday afternoon, to see the RSC in Neil Bartlett's production of Twelfth Night. It's attracted publicity due to Bartlett's decision to contribute his own layer of gender confusion to Shakespeare's drama of cross-dressed mistaken identity. Not only is the part of Viola given to a male actor (as, of course, would have been the case in Shakespeare's day), but a number of the secondary male characters - notably Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek - are played by women. Michael Billington, for one, was unimpressed, giving the production only two stars in his Guardian review earlier this week.

I thought the production got off to a faltering start, with neither the 'straight' leads nor the comic characters succeeding in grabbing the audience's attention for the first few scenes. Things livened up when Malvolio, played by veteran US actor John Lithgow, appeared, and his performance was one of the delights of the production. (The presence of the star of Third Rock from the Sun and the voice of Lord Farquaad from Shrek was also a bonus as far as our children were concerned.)

Chris New turned in a charming performance as Viola/Cesario, making you want to suspend disbelief and imagine that this really was a girl disguised as a boy, rather than a boy disguised as a girl disguised as a boy (if you see what I mean). He's certainly a young talent to watch, and his performance as one of the two Dromios - the other being Iain McKee who played Sebastian here - in the forthcoming revival of Nancy Meckler's outstanding Comedy of Errors, should be worth seeing - though Jonathan Slinger's original characterisation will be hard to beat). The audience also enjoyed James Clyde as Feste the fool, played as a louche piano-playing MC with more than a hint of Bill Nighy in Love Actually in his voice and mannerisms. And Siobhan Redmond as Maria the housekeeper was delightful, managing to make even a black Victorian bustle seem alluring.

Overall, though, I agree with Billington that the additional cross-dressing didn't add much to our understanding of the play. I take it that the general gender-swapping, together with the final gesture of the actors handing their costumes to a parlourmaid as they left the stage, was meant to convey a sense that gender roles are little more than disguises. If so, this was quite a facile and hackneyed point on which to hang so much. I'm not sure it added much to the comedy and at times I felt it definitely detracted from it.

The play was staged in the Courtyard, the RSC's temporary home while the main theatre undergoes its huge refurbishment. It's a foretaste of what the new theatre will look like, with its thrust stage and tiered seating offering seemingly excellent views from wherever you're sitting. The children thought it smelled like IKEA.

Going to the theatre in Stratford is a more intimate experience than in London or other big cities. You run the risk of bumping into actors you've just seen on stage in the street afterwards: we came across 'Sebastian' shopping for his tea in M&S not half an hour after the matinee. Oh, and John Woodvine was in the audience: we saw him queuing up for the gents in the interval.

Fair is foul

To Stratford-on-Avon on Saturday, to see Conall Morrison's production of Macbeth, part of the RSC's 'Complete Works' season. The main theatre is closed now for a couple of years for a major refurbishment, so we were in the more intimate Swan Theatre round the back, where we saw Tamsin Greig in the Cuban-set Much Ado About Nothing last year. This was a rather darker experience, the grim drama on stage complemented by the stormy weather outside.

There were some powerful performances - notably the superb Patrick O'Kane in the title role, Derbhle Crotty as Lady Macbeth and Jude Akuwudike as Banquo - but we weren't convinced by Morrison's interpretation of the play. An additional - gratuitously bloodthirsty - opening scene was added, which undermined any sense of Macbeth as an initially noble leader slowly warped by ambition. And the famous 'night porter' scene, whose humour usually defuses the murderous tension in the second act, was spoiled by substituting the witches for the porter, thus adding to the sense of unrelenting grimness. There was a more than usually Celtic feel to the production, with a mixture of Irish and Scots accents on stage, plus a leavening of black voices from an ethnically diverse cast.

The 'Complete Works' festival is coming to a close, and it's been an amazing season. We've seen a number of productions, mostly comedies - our way of gradually introducing our teenage offspring to Shakespeare - and they've been almost uniformly impressive. We even surprised ourselves by enjoying the musical version of The Merry Wives of Windsor earlier this year, but then, with Judi Dench and Simon Callow starring, it couldn't really fail.