Theatre
Leeds benighted
Kenneth Hurren
The Tempest by William Shakespeare (Wyndham's) Two Gentlemen of Verona by William Shakespeare (Young Vic) It is one thing for those of my colleagues who have the opportunity to augment their modest incomes with lavish travelling expenses to write kindly notices of productions in remote provincial towns. It encourages the natives and does no particular harm, and reminds me a bit of the district commissioners, in the old colonial days, on a quick morale-sustaining flip round the outlying schools. The trouble is, though, that the encouragement can go too far, and it is another thing entirely when the poor provincials, beaming with pride, are promptly induced to bring their tatty little shows up to the West End of London.
This is what seems unfortunately to have happened in the case of the Leeds Playhouse production of The Tempest. though it is likely to do very profitably at Wyndham's because they have Paul Scofield in it, and his is a name for box offices to reckon with. Scofield's presence, grey-maned and wrapped in the aura of the Distinguished Actor, put me somewhat in mind of Billy Bremner doing a guest appearance with Bishop's Stortford, and there can have been nothing like it in the theatre since the late Sir Donald Wolfit took his last curtain-call surrounded by his hand-picked team of enthusiastic mummers.
Anyway, the Distinguished Actor did his Prospero with sonorous gravity and many eccentric emphases, earnestly suggestive of a Significance of interpretation that had come to him in a personal vision and that he would like genuinely to share with his subordinates. They all seemed pretty much in the dark, but offered him loyal and well-meaning support. A more picturesque set might have helped, but money is evidently not spent lightly on such fripperies in Yorkshire. These are times demanding economies of all us, and no one was looking for the sort of spectacular ostentation that the National Theatre offered us in the same play last year, but an enchanted isle of stark platforms in a black infinity, with the masque of goddesses no more than a few curtains caught by the wind machine, is probably carrying thrift too far.
The Young Vic operators have the measure of their audiences by all accounts, but they could be pushing their luck with this Two Gentlemen of Verona, a wretched comedy with a plot rooted in bogus romanticism and full of such awful jokes as to be an active nuisance. Someone named Jeremy James Taylor has directed it with roguish gusto. He has the eponymous pair embracing each other so often as to arouse concern over precisely what kind of gentlemen they are; and another wheeze is to have Thurio played as a mincing midget, perhaps in the hope — doomed, I fear — that a few laughs can be mined from the incongruity of his suit to Silvia, who is a tall girl. (She is played by Joanna McCallum, an actress of impish authority who, in circumstances less arch, will be worth keeping an eye on.) Most of the reviewers wrote about the dog, the inevitable refuge when confronted with this absurd play. The animal barked a lot, understandably suspicious of the company he had been betrayed into, and I thought him unusually forbearing In offering no more unseemly co.nment on the proceedings.
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