Theatre
After Darwin (Hampstead) Shakespeare's Villains (Haymarket) What You Get and What You Expect (Lyric Hammersmith)
Poisoned chalice
Sheridan Morley
If you are thinking of enrolling in a sum- mer school, you could do a lot worse than the current London theatre: Michael Frayn on the Uncertainty Principle (Copenhagen) at the National, Tom Stoppard on the secret life of Housman (The Invention of Love, recently at the National, soon to reopen in the West End) and now, at Hampstead, the redoubtable Timberlake Wertenbaker's postgraduate crash course in the Darwin legacy (After Darwin).
For those of us who have always avoided the origin of the species, this update on evolution confirms Wertenbaker's theatri- cal courage, if not always her stage skills. She has always been good at the linking of two apparently disparate worlds: Our Country's Good, which made her name a decade ago, was about Restoration comedy and the first convicts to be despatched to Australia, and now we have two actors and an immigrant director from Eastern Europe and their black American drama- tist rehearsing a pub-theatre play about the conflict between Darwin and the Captain of his discovery ship Robert Fitzroy.
In one sense, the last two are a perfect Peter Shaffer couple: the Captain is the head man, determined like Salieri to sup- press evidence for political or social rea- sons, while Darwin is here the Amadeus figure, all heart and brilliant revelations which could make life difficult for everyone else. And once again, Wertenbaker has two scenarios clashing by night: we get a good summary of the relationship between Dar- win and Fitzroy across the 30 years or so between Darwin's original discovery in the Galapagos that man is indeed (to put it somewhat crudely) descended from apes rather than Adam, and Fitzroy's eventual suicide because he could not bear the weight of being the sailor who took Darwin there in the first place.
In their modern dress, Darwin is a flaky actor eager to abandon his theatre contract and head for Hollywood fame, however fleeting, while Fitzroy is the dedicated, old- fashioned stage luvvie fighting a losing bat- tle against showbiz triumphalism and the coming of the violent video. In its way this is a brilliant time-warp, since what is forev- er under discussion is precisely where we came from and what we owe to our mak- ers, whoever they might have been.
After Darwin only ever gets into logistical trouble when the latterday drama of the actors in the pub threatens to become rather more interesting than the original conflict between Fitzroy and Darwin a cen- tury and a half ago.
But Michael Feast as Fitzroy and Jason Watkins as Darwin give two mesmerising performances, while Colin Salmon and Ingeborga Dapkunaite have more of a struggle with the infinitely less developed roles of the playwright and the director. As we and the play lurch backwards and for- wards across time and place, there are moments when you wish that Wertenbaker had stuck to just one plot; but her whole point here is that Darwin lives, and, although we sometimes lose the focus, `Does my broom look big in this?' there is no doubt that After Darwin is an evening of considerable dramatic daring, agilely staged by Lindsay Posner.
And if a strangely poetic ending, in which all four characters restate their posi- tions in both past and present, comes across as deeply bleak, then that too is surely the intention here: in sacrificing blind belief for detailed knowledge, Darwin did indeed leave us a poisoned chalice and I guess that after all is said and done is essentially what Wertenbaker wants us to take home.
Something very curious is going on at the Theatre Royal Haymarket: Dame Edna having packed her bags rather sooner than might have been expected, the manage- ment are continuing through the summer a series of solo shows in one of the most beautiful and magnificent playhouses ever built for full-scale drama.
First of the summer solos is Steven Berkoff in a memorably dark and daft 90- minute ramble around Shakespeare's Vil- lains, one which with traditional modesty he bills as 'a masterclass' but which resem- bles in truth a kind of leftover lecture to first-year drama students interrupted by a few over-the-top rantings from the Bard. The curious thing about Berkoff, for whom I have a lot of time when he is working on some kind of established text, is that the more he struggles to reach the cutting-edge of modern acting the further he reminds us of what it must have been like to see Charles Dickens belting out his own novels on reading tours, or Henry Irving chewing the scenery.
Having decided, and perhaps rightly, that the only playwright and director really worth dealing with are himself and himself, Berkoff gives us some grudging purple pas- sages, in which he scores best when turning Lady Macbeth into a drag act for seaside pantomimes and Oberon into an unexpect- edly malevolent villain instead of the usual fairy king. But the trouble with doing everything yourself is that you are ultimate- ly, as here, left alone on stage with no scenery, no costumes and no one to help when the going gets rough, as it does here in a disgracefully sloppy and undeveloped evening at full West End prices.
Briefly and finally, Jean Marie Besset's What You Get and What You Expect at the Lyric Hammersmith comes from Paris and the elegant, bleached school of Yasmina Reza. Though this is not another Art, it does in Jeremy Sams's translation share an air of high chic and low cunning; the tale is of industrial espionage and, as the title might suggest, the gap between well-laid plans and unforseen emotional and profes- sional happenings. Thierry Harcourt's stag- ing is as chic as a cover of Parisian Vogue and also, as I have always and alone found Reza, curiously devoid of any real feeling. The result is much like a French film of 40 years ago, elegant and somehow empty and minimalist, all style and precious little con- tent except that which is unsufferably pre- cious itself.
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