Theatre
The Tempest (Almeida) Merrily We Roll Along (Donmar Warehouse) Ancient Lights (Hampstead)
Stormy weather
Sheridan Morley
There can seldom if ever have been such a spectacular start to The Tempest: as the storm breaks, a seaman high on a mast is deluged with several hundred gallons of water which then turns the stage of the Almeida into a lake. The theatre itself is now to undergo a two-year rebuilding pro- ject, and Jonathan Kent, the director who turned the old Gainsborough movie studios into a grass-growing field for the Ralph Fiennes Richard II this summer, has again gone for a breathtaking visual effect, one which would not have been possible if the Almeida, like the Gainsborough, were not to be demolished anyway.
It has to be said, however, that nothing in this Tempest quite lives up to that bril- liant opening on Paul Brown's waterlogged set; Ian McDiarmid is an academic, dis- gruntled, weary Prospero, wonderful at suggesting the old magician's despair and anger and disillusion, but oddly unable to explore his love for his daughter or his relationship with Ariel. When, therefore, he breaks his staff and bids us farewell on behalf of Shakespeare himself, we find it difficult to care that the old, cranky, aca- demic exile has found himself at last a kind of peace. Along the way there are some brilliant, momentary insights into the text, but, as with the current Peter Brook Ham- let in Paris, the parts are always better than the whole; in a patchy supporting cast Aidan Gillen is a fiercely unexpected Ariel, especially adept at underwater swimming, and, inspired perhaps by all that water, Adrian Scarborough plays Trinculo as a rerun of his Moley in Wind in the Willows at the National. Altogether a very Almeida kind of Tempest: brisk, chic, chilly, on the cutting edge as well as heavily cut. In exile at a disused bus depot near King's Cross next year, the Almeida promise us an Anna Friel Lulu and Oliver Ford-Davies as King Lear as well as a new David Hare transla- tion of Platonov.
In celebration of the Stephen Sondheim 70th, the Donmar Warehouse gives us a fourth annual Christmas rediscovery of one of his long-lost scores. Merrily We Roll Along barely survived three weeks on Broadway 20 years ago, and even led to an eventually healed rupture in Sondheim's partnership with Hal Prince, its original director. Never before seen in London, the show remains (like so many of Sondheim's) a work in progress; its central problem, though this is curiously seldom acknowl- edged, is not his at all but that of the origi- nal play, a Kaufman and Hart comedy from the middle 1930s which had the courage to tell its story backwards, a device more familiar to modern audiences from Harold Pinter's Betrayal.
What happens here is that we meet a group of disillusioned fortysomething movers and shakers, Hollywood trash of assorted varieties, and from that opening encounter we move slowly back through 20 years to see them as they were at college, young idealists awaiting the arrival of the Sputnik and John F. Kennedy. In that sense, Merrily is an obituary for the dreams and aspirations of America in the late 1950s, which is precisely why it has never gone down well in its native land, where failure has always been regarded as danger- ously contagious.
But there is another marathon problem which has never been entirely solved; either you cast a very young company, which is great for the end of the score but a little unconvincing in the early scenes of middle age, or you cast the beginning of the show accurately and then have to watch some rather elderly students at the end. The cur- rent staging by Michael Grandage goes for an essentially unknown and (with one or two exceptions) somewhat nondescript cast, and it crucially fails to establish the triangu- lar relationship between the three central characters whose fame and fortune we fol- low through the show, albeit backwards.
Broadway gossip has always had it that this trio owes something to the relationship between Sondheim and Prince and the pro- ducer's wife Judy; watching it again, I am more inclined to believe it is inspired by Leonard Bernstein and Betty Comden and Adolph Green, with the latter pair as the ones who refuse to sell out to showbiz, and Bernstein as the more treacherous, oppor- tunist Franklin Shepard.
These shadows really do matter here, because Merrily is all about who people really turn out to be, and what might have happened way down the path you never took. Of all his twentysomething scores, this is often the most haunting and the most brilliant; the worlds to change and the worlds to win have seldom been better analysed, and not a day goes by when something from Merrily does not come back to mind and memory.
At Hampstead, Shelagh Stephenson's Ancient Lights starts from the notion of the Fetch, a ghost who confronts you with your own identity; each of her characters, among them a closet-gay Hollywood movie star, a public-relations hostess, an ex-televi- sion reporter and a novelist from Hull who finds he does better when claiming to be Irish, is duly brought up against an alter ego offering the unpalatable truth about the reality as opposed to the fantasy of their existence. The idea is better than the play, which becomes instantly repetitive, but Ian Brown's production is elegantly Hampstead, with strong performances from Joanne Pearce and Dermot Crowley.
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