Theatre
Mother Clap's Molly House (National) Sliding with Suzanne (Royal Court Upstairs)
Sex and seduction
Sheridan Morley
Given that he is now widely if informally tipped backstage to become the next director of the National Theatre, we had better consider what Nicholas Hytner's current staging there of Mark Ravenhill's Mother Clap's Molly House tells us about the new man. Ravenhill made his name a year or two ago with Shopping and Fucking, the most controversial title of the 1990s, and this new work is also likely to raise a hackle or two among the National's more conservative loyalists.
But it becomes increasingly clear that Ravenhill is not just a sensationalist: Mother Clap is a vastly ambitious tragicomedy of sex and seduction, the first half set around 1720 and the second in an identical part of London at the present time. Were we to consider this contemporary act in isolation, it could be seen as The Boys in the Band given a more overtly sexy, transvestite and sado-masochistic agenda. But by cross-casting contemporary Londoners with their 18th-century counterparts. Ravenhill is clearly trying to tell us something about the unchanging nature of sexual desire, repression and confrontation. Here are men dressed up as women, men enacting mock-marriages and even mock-births, all watched over by Deborah Findlay and assorted period and modern whores, all of whom are there to act as some kind of commentators on the bizarre needs of their customers, relatives and sometimes even loved ones.
This whole baroque structure takes some getting used to; but once you fall into Ravenhill's scheme of things, and realise that what we effectively have is a Restoration comedy played out in the kind of gay bath-house setting familiar just pre-Aids to New Yorkers and their offBroadway theatres, a pattern of considerable fascination and dexterity slowly emerges.
Overcoming the first 20 plot-heavy minutes is admittedly a problem that Hytner has not entirely solved, but once he and his author and cast get into their stride the result is closer to Genet's The Balcony or even Tennessee Williams's Camino Real than might have been
expected from a young London writer. Characters matter more than plot, there is a curious carnival of the damned in progress, and yet what matters most is that Mother Clap in its own gothic, fantastical way works dramatically in a way that, say, The Romans in Britain (the play that infamously led the National and its writer into a courtroom some 20 years ago) never does. Above all, Mother Clap has something to tell us about the timelessness of violent sexuality, and Hytner's rambling, colourful, intermittently mesmeric staging has a lot to tell us about what may well become the house style of the National over the next decade.
In a strong cast, Ian Mitchell is just wonderful as the predatory, queeny gay for whom no camp is too high, no home video too explicit; and although this is elsewhere a team effort, when they start to think about its Broadway chances they'd be well advised to check Bette Midler's availability. She and Ravenhill turn out to have a lot more in common than might hitherto have been guessed.
Brighton, in the immortal epithet of Keith Waterhouse, is the town which always looks as though it is helping the police with their inquiries; going hack more than half a century to Graham Greene's Brighton Rock, it has also always been accepted (on stage and screen as on the thriller page) that something very nasty lies just beneath the surface of that apparently cheery Sussex seaside town. And now Judy Upton's Sliding with Suzanne confirms the theory that whatever kind of trouble you are in before you get to Brighton will be doubled before you leave.
We are in Upton's home territory, at least as a dramatist: earlier plays of hers, such as Ashes and Sand and Bruises have also been about life at the wrong end of the pier, that seaside Sussex hinterland full, as she says, of 'people that nobody wants'. The truth about Upton is that she writes soap-opera of a special kind, and will doubtless soon be profitably employed on EastEnders or Coronation Street. She understands that critically underrated and amazingly difficult tradition whereby you need to keep half-adozen characters or more going through overlapping strands of narrative disasters. Effectively this is plot-knitting, but when it works, when these dysfunctional, interrelated characters finally grab you by the heart, Upton becomes a surprisingly, stealthily powerful dramatist. Among the characters here are Suzanne herself, 35 going on 17, foster-mothering a series of misfits whom she takes to her bed, and that's before we even start on her mother and a widowed coach driver obsessed by route maps.
Max Stafford-Clark's production for his Out of Joint company comes as yet another reminder of how curious it is that he seems to have fallen off the current lists of likely heirs to the National or the Almeida, given his many years at Court and his mastery of the theatrical close-up.
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