Literary juggler
Lloyd Evans
Afterlife Lyttelton Dickens Unplugged Comedy
Afterlife is pH-neutral. It doesn’t enhance Michael Frayn’s reputation and doesn’t damage it either. Max Reinhardt was one of the great theatrical magicians of the 20th century and it’s easy to see what drew Frayn and his long-standing collaborator, the director Michael Blakemore, to the challenge of putting his life on stage. The result is a grand, beautiful, finely acted and richly imaginative show. One snag. Frayn shouldn’t have written it. Reinhardt is now almost forgotten so first up you need some plain-speaking nuts-and-bolts data entry. Who is he, where’s he from, what did he do? But Frayn the literary juggler wants to create a multilayered text spilling with intellectual delights so he starts the show opaquely with a play within a play. You get hints about the location (1920s Germany) but you need to refer to the programme notes every minute or two to keep abreast.
In the lead role Roger Allam does his Cowardly Lion routine, busy, silly, sympathetic, heavily gestural. You get touches of pathos, touches of humour and that’s all. Touches. You notice but you don’t feel. That’s not Allam’s fault. The characterisation of Reinhardt keeps tripping over another of Frayn’s conceptual blunders. He shows Reinhardt as a figure so besotted with his work that he’s incapable of ordinary human relationships. So where are the conflicts? How can you personify tensions between a director and his packed diary, or between an artist and his obligation to art? The sources of friction are abstract and can’t live or breathe on stage. Reinhardt comes across as a theatrical electron, full of mobility but entirely elusive.
Then there’s Reinhardt’s work itself. He specialised in fabulously lavish settings of classic plays sometimes using a cast of 300, with 1,700 different costumes. Here at last is something theatrical. Until you try representing it in the theatre. It’s impossible unless you have the budget of the nuclear submarine fleet. Reinhardt stands gazing into the wings while one of his Byzantine productions unfolds luxuriously off-stage and a prerecorded audience cheers and applauds. And since we can’t see what Reinhardt is seeing he might as well be in a pub theatre staring into a broom cupboard.
Frayn has a final lethal conceit to deliver. One of Reinhardt’s favourite texts was Everyman, a medieval morality play written in rhyming couplets, and Frayn has merged this script with Reinhardt’s story. Genius! But unless you know Everyman, and few do, the act of welding lacks any resonance. It mires everything in confusions and dud double meanings. The sole virtue of the conceit is it appeals to Frayn where it matters most to Frayn. In the brain. He isn’t alone in having an overdeveloped cerebral faculty. When future scholarship surveys the English comic playwrights who emerged in the 1970s, the quality that will appear to have deprived them of greatness is their cleverness. Cleverness is a substitute for feeling. And at the same time it’s no substitute at all. As I left the Lyttelton I heard a punter complain, ‘Boring boring boring.’ That’s unfair but also accurate. The play struggles to hold one’s interest over three hours but it contains something valuable. Ideally it should be mounted as a gallery performance with the audience free to come and go as they please. Let them glimpse a vanished era in all its radiance, beauty and power and then move on.
Dickens Unplugged is a new show from the Reduced Shakespeare team. The cast has grown from three to five and they deal with Dickens’s life as well as his work. This fuller approach is strangely damaging to the concept. Watching three radioactive acrobats rattle through the complete works of Shakespeare in 90 minutes was peculiarly thrilling. It wasn’t just an act of literary homage but a blood-and-guts marathon, a feat of physical endurance with all the clarity and purity of record-breaking athletics. The Dickens show, more knowing and more scholarly, is performed by a team of West Coast dudes with guitars. Their laidback attitude cuts very nicely against the Victorian idiom at first but their zaniness soon becomes sameyness and the show’s sparkle fades towards the end. Best moment: a reformed Scrooge offers Bob Cratchit a pay rise and Tiny Tim flips over his crutch to reveal a Fender Stratocaster on which he belts out a screaming guitar solo. This show belongs in a summer festival. Inside a marquee with the scent of trodden grass and beer in the air it would work a treat. As a night out in the West End it’s a weeny bit threadbare.
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