Tangled phonetics
Lloyd Evans
Pericles Globe The UN Inspector Olivier This Is How It Goes Donmar Strange goings-on at the Globe. After a Tempest performed by Mark Rylance as a Reduced Shakespeare skit, we now have Pericles directed by Kathryn Hunter. This is a tricky, strange and fascinating dreamwork. The text is so complex and elusive that the obvious approach is to play it straight and let the audience’s imagination fill in the gaps. Imagination. Audience. Not words many directors would welcome, since they imply a minimum of intervention. And here we have maximum intervention.
Kathryn Hunter has created a brash, stylish, modern-dress production which unfolds like a set of magazine photoshoots. Everything is gorgeous, calculated, cocksure and superficial. On its own this would not be too bad but she has chosen two lead actors, Robert Lucksay and Marcello Magni, who were born not to play Shakespeare. One is Hungarian, the other Italian, and they perform the verse as if they’d learnt it on the way from Heathrow. Staging Shakespeare with actors who can’t speak English is like orchestrating Mahler for comb-and-tracing-paper or rebuilding Ely Cathedral with chewing gum. Consider the effect. Shakespeare’s language is already distant from ours by 400 years. Even in a performance of Lear or Macbeth, the keenest ear in the house must strain hard to catch every shade and complexity of his gnarled grammar and his dense, elaborate and highly idiosyncratic usages. In a lesserknown play like Pericles, these difficulties are compounded. To heap yet more obstacles on us by introducing the tangled phonetics of foreign actors is to dismiss the audience out of hand. What a shame that the Globe is so indifferent to Shakespeare’s music.
Things aren’t helped by Patrice Naiambana in the central role of Gower. Naiambana has no trouble elucidating the verse. Quite the opposite. He throws himself into every line, every word and every syllable. The problem is volume. His performance is a sort of rocket-fuelled manifesto for his evident belief that he is the finest comedian ever to plant his feet on a public stage. His favourite moments are the passages of topical jokes and improvised satirical comment which have been added, presumably, to please the multitude. And they do. Claptrap works but it is just claptrap. And around the edges of this shambles prowls Corin Redgrave, a tired, wasted and rather noble exquisite, like a darted lion waiting for the tranquilliser to kick in. I shudder to think what he makes of this fanciful experiment.
The production, I should add, makes strenuous efforts to attract a younger audience. There are circus stunts, madcap acrobats, muscular supermen dangling from high wires. It’s all very impressive and irrelevant. And it doesn’t even succeed in its popularising purpose. On the night that I went, I saw a crowd of school children watching with expressions of pained bewilderment, exactly the look that kids wear when receiving their inoculations. Unfortunately, they were being inoculated against Shakespeare.
The Olivier’s big summer disappointment is The UN Inspector, a vain, silly and histrionic reworking of a dated comedy by Nicolai Gogol. Writer/director David Farr uses the National’s stage to hammer home his not-terribly-interesting prejudices about exploitation and capitalism. Excellent performances from Geraldine James and Jonathan McGuinness, and a splendidly ingenious set by Ti Green, are not enough to compensate for a shallow, preachy script. Yet again the Olivier’s stage proves too large even for a company of 25 actors. Social comedies like this are entirely defeated by its vast and vacant spaces. Even a Shakespearean battle-scene looks like a catfight in a pub carpark. There’s no reason not to rebuild. Shove the playing area back by ten yards and put in an extra hundred seats.
Better news at the Donmar. This Is How It Goes is the kind of exquisite theatrical frippery with which Somerset Maugham used to delight the smart London set. It’s pretty cheap to stage, too — three actors, two sofas and a pot plant — so if the Donmar is sold out, don’t panic. It’ll run till Christmas in the right West End venue. Neil LaBute’s jokey and loquacious dialogue is a seductive joy to hear. There are excellent performances, especially from Ben Chaplin, once an indifferent sitcom actor who has blossomed into a heartthrob with all the quirky charm of a major Hollywood lead. One might even call him the next Hugh Grant but that would make stardom sound like a bus service. What the hell. He is the next Hugh Grant. And stardom is like a bus service.
Previous page
