Keep on running
Lloyd Evans
The Maths Tutor Hamps.tead Romeo and Juliet Young Vic Oedipus Old Fire Station, Oxford, and touring nly a swine would be a theatre critic. 4...—/Think of it. You show up at 7.30, you glug back a glass of pre-warmed Shiraz, you slouch into the stalls with your unsmiling colleagues, you sit there blinking and staring through 90 minutes of laborious artifice (over which numerous gifted artists have sweated for many months) and when it's over, instead of slinking home in a mood of wordless lamentation, you rush to a telephone and repeat your meanest thoughts to a copytaker for the national press. To put it mildly, this is heartless cruelty. The truth is worse. Most reviewers are borderline psychotics.
And like all psychotics, they know how to camouflage their symptoms. I went to see The Maths Tutor, Dare McIntyre's new playlet in Hampstead, last week. I slumped in my seat, quelling many a fractious yawn and toying with the idea of bunking off at half time. I stayed, but only to watch the luscious Sally Dexter mischievously sending up the script. Next day I skimmed the papers, but instead of finding my fellow reviewers dutifully burning the play to a crisp, I discovered them warming the dough of praise and placing their approvalpies in the fan-oven at 250F. I was staggered. Had I even been to the same play? What I saw was a humourless, preachy melodrama with flimsy characters, insipid dialogue and a storylinc whose lumbering parts seemed to compete with each other, like sad lobsters jousting over a mollusc, to win this year's prize for improbability. But according to the national press, the
evening was a minor triumph, a stimulating and superbly acted piece of blah blah blah. Well, if the broadsheet reviewers aren't psychos, maybe they're too well-mannered for the job. Not me, though. If this show opens at a theatre near you, run in the opposite direction.
Better news at the Young Vic, where an Icelandic circus troupe are swinging their way though Romeo and Juliet. I admit I'm a purist when it comes to the stage. Experimental theatre, I suspect, is often guided by self-delusion. To borrow an analogy from Eros and its contemporary refinement, bondage, a chap who clads the rnissus in waders and a hooded catsuit isn't exploring his undiscovered sexuality — he just wants a new missus. Same with the theatre. If the play bores you, don't dress it in a leather harness and thrash its flanks with a studded flail; find a different play, one that excites you in all its unadorned simplicity. In this case, though, I sidelined my objections and allowed myself to be entertained by what was on offer — a tumbling Tybalt, a Mercutio breathing fire, a half-naked Nurse in drag and a Romeo, played by Gisli Orn Gardarsson, delivering half of his lines dangling upside down from a trapeze. It's a rare production of Romeo and Juliet where the actors look the right age for their roles. Juliet is played by Nina DOgg Filippusdottir, a cheerleader type who's barely into her teens. And Lady Capu let is usually cast as a wobbly-faced dowager even though the text specifies that she is 26. Prancing all over the place in fishnets and a leotard, Margret Vilhjalmsdattir gives Lady Capulet more athleticism than you'll ever see again. This is PlayStation Shakespeare and it won't be for everyone, but the schoolkids in the audience absolutely loved it. If you need a distraction just glance through the programme and marvel at the list of credits. Every name seems to bristle with philological mysteries.
If only the same attention had been paid to the casting of Oedipus by the Actors of Dionysus. In his production notes David Stuttard claims to have clarified the plot. I wonder. Sophocles' achievement in this play is to make the nightmare storyline believable and to compress its disclosure into 80 minutes. But the wise Athenian's hard work is casually tossed aside by wilfully blinkered casting. Kathryn O'Reilly (wife/mum/gran) looks about 25. Tas Emiabata (son/hubby/dad) must be a good 31 or 32. This scuppers any chance of the show functioning except at a schematic level, like the reading of an Easter gospel. It hardly helps that Kathryn O'Reilly is a white-as-a-sheet Irish girl and Tas Emiabata is a dark-skinned black man. Humph! I wasn't happy. And I've now been forced to mention the unmentionable as well. Colour. Well, there it is. If producers want to hide behind liberal pieties and to call white black and black white, it's left to critics to speak the truth. Oink oink.
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