Theatre
Ivanov (Almeida) American Buffalo (Young Vic) Cardiff East (National Theatre)
A doctor in the house
Sheridan Morley
Our definition of the supremacy of the British theatre could just be this: where else in the world would you walk into a 150-seat fringe playhouse and find, even as you take your seat, an actor alone on stage reading a book, an actor more- over who is being paid less than £200 a week despite the fact that he is almost cer- tain next month to win his second Oscar in five years?
The actor in question is Ralph Fiennes, and the production is Ivanov, an early and usually rather unsatisfactory Chekhov here given a blazing new lease of life by David Hare as the adapter and Jonathan Kent as director. What the new version establishes, and for the first time, is that this is not some sort of early dry run for Uncle Vanya; instead, it is a play about a man in deep depression, having a suicidal nervous breakdown several decades before Freud began the programme of analysis which would give it a name.
Chekhov was himself a doctor, and it becomes clear that he is writing here of symptoms all too familiar to him, either from within his own character or those of some of his patients. The title character thus, instead of the usual failed Hamlet, becomes a figure of considerably more fas- cination engaged effectively in a race from death the result of which we learn only in the very closing moments.
But Chekhov's first play was never a solo star vehicle, and one of the great highlights of this production is the hilarious vodka- and-cards sequence in which three of the best character actors in London (Oliver Ford Davies, Anthony O'Donnell and Bill Paterson) offer a master class in competi- tive playing which should be caught by every drama student in town. And that's not all: Diane Bull as the appalling heiress, Ian McDiarmid stepping into the role of yet another obsessive card player, and Colin Tierney as the puritanical doctor are all at the very top of their form, as is Harri- et Walter as the dying wife. Hare has realised that this is not a failed first attempt at tragi-comedy but rather a vibrantly successful mix of moods, in which the energy of the writing has at last been matched by both staging and editing in translation. This is a production which does more than deserve a long West End and Broadway season; if it fails to get one, either for economic reasons or because of the lunatic intransigence of unions both here and in America who are making actors the very last species of worker unable to cross the Atlantic at will, both London and New York will be considerably the poorer.
In a rich London week, two major plays from the United States: RiChard Nelson's The General From America is the latest in his series of scripts about Anglo-American misunderstanding, and as I was writing in this column from Stratford last summer, one of his very best: it comes in now to the Barbican with James Laurenson and Corin Redgrave at the head of the original cast.
`I'm a back number. There's no place anymore for the petty pilferer.' Over at the Young Vic, Lindsay Posner has a revival of David Mamet's American Buf- falo, the play which 20 years ago shot sever- al thousand volts through the American theatre and started us on the long, bloody march to Tarantino.
I'm still not convinced of this as a great play, but it does have an immense theatri- cality which is why presumably it has always appealed to such stars as Al Pacino (who has played it here) and Dustin Hoffman (who made the movie); the script turns if not on a dime then at least on a nickel, that being the Buffalo of the title and at the centre of an elaborate if ever more circular series of power games revolving around three small-time losers and a possibly valu- able coin.
The star performance in Posner's pro- duction comes from the immensely power- ful and charismatic Douglas Henshall, with Nicholas Woodeson and Neil Stuke in vital support; all of them, in a junk shop 00 Chicago's South Side, come to the conclu- sion that they can really only hope to sur- vive as a family, no matter how dysfunctional. In that sense, American Buf- falo owes a considerable debt, one I have never seen acknowledged by author or crit- ics, to Arthur Miller's The Price which Was also about the detritus of the American dream and the scavenger instinct; Mamet's is much the more immediately powerful of the two scripts, but I sometimes wonder if it will live as long as, say, The Caretaker to which it also owes an obvious debt in both characterisation and setting. And finally, on the National's Cottesloe stage, Peter Gill (as both author and direc- tor) premieres Cardiff East, which is that total rarity, a play about latterday Wales. It was Paul Scofield as Thomas More who queried one of his clerics selling out his principles for that particular area: 'What, shall it profit a man to betray his own sot!' for the world, but for Wales?' and that atti- tude of shameful dismissal persists theatri- cally to this day. Plays about Ireland and Scotland are almost weekly events; for great plays about Wales you have to go back to Emlyn Williams and Dylan Thomas. But Gill's thesis is that all the world comes together in Cardiff: he has written and staged a prose update of Under Milk Wood in which a group of often soap- operatic characters come together to con- sider what if anything their Welshness actually means today, if they are not to be just a group of immigrant strangers who happen to have made their home there. Across an often raucous and rancid human landscape of the mind, Gill has assembled his witnesses in comedy and ultimate tragedy to reflect a cross-section of a soci- ety he evidently knows and loves intimate- ly; and if the play doesn't altogether hang together, then neither does the society It represents. A large cast led by Kenneth Cranham make of this complex patchwork both a celebration and an epitaph for Wales.
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