Bleak house
Lloyd Evans
Uncle Vanya
Rose Theatre, Kingston
The Death of Margaret Thatcher
Courtyard At last the Rose has burst into bloom in Kingston. Luckily I allowed myself twice the suggested 40 minutes to get there from Waterloo. It took me quarter of an hour to extract a ticket from the computerised machines, which have been brilliantly programmed to be thicker and slower than human beings. On reaching Kingston I got instantly lost in a jungle of contradictory signposts. Best advice, make for Kingston Bridge (visible from outside the station), turn upstream and walk for three minutes along the riverbank. And there you are. Peter Hall’s new theatre is a modernist redoubt arranged across three floors. The lobby and bar have been designed with no inventiveness or artistry. The builder has been ordered simply to create the largest possible enclosure for the smallest sum of money. It’s bleak. Nihilistic materials are Meccano’d together and bask in their nakedness; copper pipes snake across bare concrete; shadeless lights swing from exposed wires; glittery mesh connects steel banisters to the stairs. The outside walls are glass, the internal ones breeze block, and the floorboards are made from some queasy functional woodstuff. Perhaps this chicken-coop chic is part of some bracing design revolution but it reminded me of the pool-room on an oil rig. Inside, the auditorium is much more inviting although for some reason it’s painted a mulish dark grey. The floorboards seem pleasingly bright and the stage is very wide and set low down so that you feel close to the action even if you’re at the rear of the stalls. The disc-shaped design, based on Shakespeare’s Rose, achieves a highly successful marriage between spaciousness and intimacy. Just in front of the stage there’s a small clearing reserved for students and cheapskates who pay £7 a ticket. Unlike the Globe, where standing is enforced by capos with cattleprods, sitting is encouraged. But bring your own cushion or you’ll pay an extra £3 for the hire of a skinny foam bum-rest.
The Rose’s opening show, Uncle Vanya, sets off on tour this week. It’s not quite the triumph many critics have described. Nicholas Le Prevost is a brittle, impatient Vanya, an eccentric comedian who gets laughs yet his despair has little tragic intensity. His attempts to seduce Yelena never once seem plausible. Michelle Dockery is
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a very beautiful and listless Yelena but her boredom is all twiddle-my-thumbs rather than the overwhelming Russian ennui described by Tolstoy as ‘the desire for desires’. Neil Pearson, always good at affable broodiness, is excellent as the tree-hugging medic, Astrov. The besotted Sonya (Loo Brealey) is the only performer who uncovers the pathetic poetry beneath the indolent superficialities. Her big disadvantage is that she’s too attractive for ‘plain’ Sonya, but she disguises this by suggesting a lack of sexual allure with awkward giggles, squirrelly movements and a stupefied beaming naivety. All brilliantly done. It was only during her brief final speech (a miracle of rhetorical compression that starts as a celebration of toil and becomes a sublime and mystical appeal for endurance) that the production reached out and imprisoned my heart. A decent Vanya but hardly a great one.
And now news from the sacrilege industry which brings us The Death of Margaret Thatcher. Writers don’t want applause any more. They want controversy, infamy, censorship and disgrace. The technique is to fire off pre-emptive abuse in the hope of converting retribution into publicity. It helps if your targets enjoy being shocked but Tom Green’s muddled effort will provoke barely a miaow of indignation. Opening with Lady Thatcher’s death, the play quickly loses momentum and becomes a sad opportunistic peg on which the author suspends his hang-ups: mother-love and a morbid school boy humour. The best segment involves a sacked miner who marches from Hartlepool to London just to spit on Lady Thatcher’s grave. That idea has edge. Reaching the Midlands, the protester attracts thousands of supporters who are then attacked by Thatcherite rioters. A promising theme, promptly discarded in favour of dull irrelevances, an embalmer’s monologue, an Oedipal therapy session (complete with dream sequence) and a spectacularly nasty romance between two journalists. These disparate ideas fail to converge and the play grinds to a climax with a drunken newsreader dancing half-naked on the baroness’s coffin — a gesture as gratuitous and mercenary as the title. The play’s only true offence is to be tedious and Green must be profoundly dismayed that no one has shouted, ‘Off with his head.’ I suggest he has a stab at Mohammed next time. Islam is far more likely to divide opinion. And him too.
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