Theatre
Summerfolk (National) Inherit the Wind (King's Head) Stones in his Pocket (Tricycle) The Triumph of Love (Almeida)
Glory from gloom
Sheridan Morley
For those of us who have always believed there is no point in having a National Theatre if it doesn't stage produc- tions that no other theatre can, this has been the best of years, conceivably its best ever and certainly its best since the golden Olivier summers of the late 1960s. Trevor Nunn's ensemble comes to the end of its first, though hopefully not its last, season having scored five tremendous hits from Candide through to the Merchant of Venice with only its one new play, Rita Dove's The Darker Face of the Earth, a tremendous dis- appointment. But the resident companY now goes out in a blaze of century-turning glory with Gorky's 1903 epic Summerfolk, written for a cast of 30 at just the moment when the Moscow Art Theatre was rehearsing Chekhov's Cherry Orchard, of which this is essentially the tabloid, pop- ulist version. While Chekhov gives us a fundamentally aristocratic elite in personal or financial meltdown, Gorky gives us the much broad- er picture of an entire society in millennial and pre-revolutionary change; if Cheldm.v wrote of a closed society behind the rail- ings of private estates, Gorky writes of what was going on in the parks and streets of the same period. Here we get not only doctors and lawyers but a vast range of oth" ers, from millionaires to nihilists, all drift- ing into a 20th century about which the only thing they really know is that it is not going to live up to any of their private or public hopes.
Where Chekhov has idealists and vil- lains, Gorky just has ordinary people mud- dling through unhappy marriages and unsatisfactory careers; in a sense they could be refugees not from the coming bloodbath but from a contemporary comedy of bad marital manners by Michael Frayn, and the brilliance of Trevor Nunn's vast, nearly four-hour staging is to give them all their moments, if not in the sun, then certainly in their very own personal thunderclouds.
Again it is the ensemble which triumphs, though by now it is clear who have become its real stars: Simon Russell Beale as a hen- pecked doctor; Patricia Hodge as another doctor, this one falling heartbreakingly into a late-life love even as she discovers femi- nism; Roger Allam as the smug, wastrel lawyer; Henry Goodman as the disenchant- ed novelist and Michael Bryant as the lone- ly old millionaire all give performances that echo down the years, so that we recognise them as figures of our own and of all time. Summerfolk is about life at an endless pic- nic where nobody really wants to be, except that going home is no alternative either.
It must be more than 40 years since Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee's old origin-of-the-species melodrama Inherit the Wind last surfaced on stage over here, and if you know it now then you are probably thinking of the 1960 movie which allowed Fredric March and Spencer Tracy to slug it out in a courtroom of the deep South.
The story is of course the 1925 'Monkey Trial' in which a backwoods schoolmaster was charged with the blasphemy of teach- ing Darwin rather than the Bible. Terrify- ingly, as the century comes full cycle, such teaching has just once again been banned in certain Southern states. But what has always made the trial work dramatically is the clash of three great real-life egos: Clarence Darrow for the defence, William Jennings Bryan, a three-time presidential loser, for the prosecution and H.L. Menck- en for the press bench. All three turn up thinly disguised in the play, and are won- derfully played here by Larry Lamb, George Sewell and John Warnaby in Tim Childs's production, which brilliantly con- verts the claustrophobic King's Head space into a courtroom in the round.
Not since the advent a couple of decades ago of the National Theatre of Brent has there been a double-act as funny, inventive and touching as that of Sean Campion and Conleth Hill, who come to the Tricycle from the Lyric Theatre Belfast with Marie Jones's infinitely touching duet for two actors about the making of a Hollywood movie in rural Ireland. Campion and Hill play all the characters, from deadbeat extras come to make a few quid as down- trodden peasants in some unspeakable script through to the female star of the pic- ture, its director and his gay assistant. There's also an old survivor of John Ford movies made on the same location 60 years or so ago, but what starts out as a brilliant satire on Hollywood egos and location crises turns suddenly darker when a young man drowns himself (hence the title Stones in his Pocket) having been given the brush- off by both the movie's star and its makers. What ensues in the second half is a thoughtful drama about the costs of films and filming, the morality of movie-making and the devastation that can inadvertently be caused to a small, incestuous community when the cameras come to town and money is suddenly hurled at fading farms and failing lives.
And finally at the Almeida, The Triumph of Love is a characteristically cutting-edge, chic rediscovery of the 1732 Marivaux which I last saw a couple of seasons ago as a somewhat unlikely Betty Buckley Broad- way musical. In Martin Crimp's new trans- lation, James Macdonald's production returns us to the original romantic comedy of mistaken identity, a bittersweet amalgam of Twelfth Night and Much Ado in which we get infinite insights into the human heart but precious little else, and precious is still alas the word for Marivaux, even in as col- loquial a translation as this and with Helen McCrory, like a young Vanessa Redgrave, as the gangling, aching heroine.
The good news this week is that Charles Gray is alive and well; the bad news is that in last week's column I accused him of being deceased. Ashamed and embarrassed as I naturally am, there is something oddly cheering about discovering that someone you thought you had long lost is still there after all; rather like finding some cherished posession you had totally given up as miss- ing. Will he now just please get back to the acting?
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