Theatre
Disenchanted
Giles Gordon
Lear (RSC: The Pit) The Communication Cord (Hampstead) Other Worlds (Royal Court) Much Ado About Nothing (RSC: Barbican)
Edward Bond, in the preface to his ..I-Lear, states that he writes 'about vio- lence as naturally as Jane Austen wrote about manners'. This is typical of the sen- sitivity Mr Bond brings to language. Jane Austen is the supreme artist she is precisely because she didn't write 'naturally'. Anyway, did her writing about 'manners' result in society's behaviour improving? Does Mr Bond really think that because his plays are so revolting the world will take note and reform itself? The truth is that he has the artistic sensibility and discretion of Russian tanks rumbling into Budapest. Brecht (for irony and stagecraft) and Beckett (for saintliness and using language to plumb the depths of the human psyche) might have written in vain. But you can't win with Mr Bond: the new Methuen Stu- dent Edition (sic) of Lear — with a com- mentary of Bond-struck banality — insists that whatever is complained about in the unhappy dramatist's work is intended. Barry Kyle's production couldn't, I regret to say, be bettered; and nor could any actor other than a great one achieve more than Bob Peck does with poor Lear, less mad monarch than Donald Pleasance's caretaker revisited and run to seed. Sara Kestelman and Jenny Agutter are horrible as the daughters, and Mark Rylance luminous as a holy Fool. The fact that male members of the audience were carried out, white and col- lapsed, as knitting needles were poked into actors' ears, eyes extracted, proves nothing about the play — some, including me, are more squeamish than others — but no one, not even my esteemed colleagues on the Times and the Guardian who both, this morning as I write, call the play 'great', have persuaded me of what there is of in- terest in Mr Bond's plays beyond their determination to shock. The only stimu- lus in the play is to spot the pieces — lines and ideas — purloined from another drama- tist's work about the same king. The communication cord, in Brian Friet's farce, is — as it was, or wasn't, in his last play, Translations — language: the ability to comprehend what human beings are On about. It's a subject well suited to the dou- ble and triple entendres of farce, and IA! Friel's play is funny enough on that level, It not watertight. Eileen Diss's set is the in- terior of any and every Irish bog cottage. Synge was certainly here, and The Playboy of the Western World is a lengthentig shadow with Tim (a reticent, bashful Stephen Rea), part-time lecturer in WS: uage, attempting seduction in the village M Ballybeg, County Donegal. In NY, Meckler's production T. P. McKenna play a senator whose daughter Tim wants ,„ marry. The funniest thing of the evening.1! to watch this distinguished actor comingtrIll_ to his inheritance (as he sees it), crouchhlo g down, chaining himself to a wall to s. how cows used to be tethered, then fallift to be unchained and becoming a CO'' n' empathy with the tradition he r. espouses more complete than he'd ed. Only in Ireland would such a assortment of people — including a muaer. man who spekes ze Eengleesh lik ziz (Mar- tin Cochrane) and a barrister (Brian theroe) pretending to be ze Jarmuu ".c fthroe e mmsaenlvyewshineruet.ter chaos in a cottage ma., In 1797 a monkey, dressed in blRobiun jersey, is taken by the fishermen of Hood's Bay to be an invading Frenchha a."ri rtsgito Before being hanged — together wit dressed as a boy — the monkey sta may talk, more ET than King Kong. sound amusing but Robert Holman's le Worlds is a three-hour bore, not.e 1,7. a because of Richard Wilson's still-life °f production. John Byrne's rather based sets, and costumes that seem to be _,_:tby tive evoea-
those Victorian photographs of will fisherfolk;.Matthew Richardson s This .er lighting; and the performances of Juliet Stevenson as a mother and her daughter; Paul Copley as her lover and her father; and Rosemary Leach as a most pragmatic and misguided Yorkshire old boot all work with an inspiration which cannot derive from the listless text.
Terry Hands's effervescent production of Much Ado about Nothing begins with a cellist, in Carolian costume, on Ralph Koltai's perspex, mirrored set playing Nigel Hess's lush music. It's a magical evening, although surprisingly the Dogberry scenes are usually funnier. John Carlisle is a very dark, very romantic Don John, surely a relative of Captain Hook; and Derek God- frey gentle and melancholy as his brother. He's closely related in mood to Antonio, merchant of Venice, and whether or not solitary by nature he ends the play alone, and the audience feels mildly disturbed. Derek Jacobi's Benedick strikes camp in Messina to such a degree that his entangle- ment with Beatrice ('Lady Disdain') is all the more wondrous: human nature is ab- surd, and delicious. He's hooked on her in the church scene, and 'Kill Claudio' causes him to laugh hysterically. His Baryshnikov fete is outrageous but reminds us that campery is a substantial part of the inner man, and that Benedick exults in his Beatrice. Who wouldn't: Sinead Cusack is more feminine, in spite of her self-defensive shrewishness, than most we've seen in re- cent years. Being a woman, and therefore more self-aware and grown-up than men, she knows from the very beginning of the Play (`Signior Mountanto') that she loves Benedick but doesn't dare trust that he reciprocates. At the end of a superbly spo-
ken evening, the lights fade on the couple still bicker)ng, looking like white Hilliard
miniatures come to life.
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