Theatre
The Mystery of Charles Dickens (Comedy) Hamlet (National/Lyttleton) They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (Apollo) Martin Night (King's Head)
Vintage victuals
Sheridan Morley
Like Soviet citizens under Stalin, we live now in a theatre where there is no acknowledged past; you read of, for exam- ple, 'the Hedda Gabler of a lifetime', only to realise with a sickening thud that the writer can only ever have seen about two others. Similarly, in all the enthusiastic attention rightly given to the new Simon Callow entertainment, The Mystery of Charles Dickens, at the Comedy, nobody seems to have bothered to refer back to Emlyn Williams, who created a Dickens roadshow in about 1950 (the first actor to do so since Dickens himself a century earli- er), and thereby invented the whole post- war tradition of the solo dramatic recital; nor yet to Bransby Williams, who was still touring immediate postwar music-halls with dramatised Dickensian extracts of unfor- gettable awfulness.
Yet this heritage does matter, if only as a way of judging what Callow, his author Peter Ackroyd and his director Patrick Garland have achieved that is actually new. Garland is himself no slouch at solo shows, having directed them since the John Aubrey Brief Lives with Roy Dotrice more than 30 years ago, and Ackroyd has always been one of our most flamboyantly theatri- cal biographers and novelists, while Simon Callow has precisely the right aspects of an over-the-top old thespian determined to fix his audiences with a glittering eye, a kind of Ancient Mariner on speed.
Thus the team is the right one, and what they have done is to move the Dickens stage saga triumphantly forward, so that we now get not just a reading or dramatised highlights, but instead some critical and historical and geographic and even psycho- logical attempt to set the greatest author of his (and maybe still our) period within the context of his work and life, and often hard times. Sure, the purple passages are all here, from the killing of Nancy in Oliver Twist to the great fog opening of Bleak House, and Callow duly delivers them with a predictably Victorian relish, letting the text sluice around his throat as though it were vintage brandy.
More interestingly, he also acts as a guide to Dickens's state of mind and body at any one time: his barely suppressed desire to be the actor he finally became in America, his marital and paternal cruelty, his natural inclination to be Scrooge rather than Tiny Tim. All this adds up to a detailed psychiatric portrait of a man in semi-permanent nervous breakdown, one who could do nothing by halves and went to an early grave unable at the last to sort out his own life as successfully as he had those of so many of his characters.
I have often seen Hamlets without the Prince, but seldom the Prince without Hamlet; yet so firmly is the new John Caird production built around the unusual char- acter of Simon Russell Beale that we are often in. some danger of losing the play while rediscovering its central character. This is a Hamlet without Fortinbras or the Second Gravedigger, with no sense there- fore of any outside threats to the Danish realm; we are in a cathedral of a court at -Elsinore, where minor characters wander through piles of period trunks clutching candles. Laertes with Luggage would seem to be the idea here, and suitcases can indeed easily be piled into false walls or convenient hiding-places for the likes of Polonius. They also lend a transient air to this touring production, as though none of the courtiers will be staying around for long enough to sort things out.
Apart from Beale himself, and the ever- reliable Denis Quilley doubling as Polonius and the only surviving gravedigger, Caird's cast is curiously fragile, with neither Peter McEnery as Claudius, nor Sara Kestelman as Gertrude, nor yet Cathryn Bradshaw as Ophelia carrying anything like the right weight. This leaves us with Russell Beale, and at times one almost wishes that, like Simon Callow, he would just abandon the rest of a curiously lacklustre production and give us a solo evening with Hamlet. For like the other Simon, he is mesmeric; an older, chubbier, sometimes even jollier Hamlet than we are generally offered, and one who at least until the Play scene seems genuinely to hope that he may have been It seems this lot is his peak period - between his second and third marriage.' misinformed by the Ghost, and that things will somehow work themselves out with his mother before he has to return to universi- ty at Wittenberg, where he is presumably a mature student.
Caird is usually a brilliant stage-manager of crowds, but the intimacy here seems to defeat him, so we are left with a memo- rable and massive star portrait in a curious- ly feeble and forgettable frame.
It was clever of Edward Wilson, director of the shamefully underfunded National Youth Theatre, to move his teenagers into They Shoot Horses, Don't They? (at the Apollo) instead of the usual late-summer Shakespeare. For Ray Herman's play, from the novel by Horace McCoy which became in 1969 the great Gig Young movie, is about the destruction of youth, or at least those 1930s youths who in the depth of the Wall Street depression risked their lives, rather like Christians in a Roman arena, to assuage the hunger of audiences for blood. This time there were no lions, and they had to kill themselves only by marathon danc- ing, but nothing really changes and Wil- son's production brilliantly captures the borderline across which the American dream of utopian improvement becomes a nightmare of broken lives and hopes.
And finally, at the King's Head, there's another example of that unlucky crossover in Joshua Goldstein's Martin Night, a truly terrible little play about a dysfunctional suburban American family in the 1960s, which not even Kika Markham can save. I also have a terrible feeling that it may all be at least semi-autobiographical.
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