Theatre
One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest (Barbican) Mr Peters' Connections (Almeida) Moving On (Bridewell) The Gift (Tricycle)
Flying high
Sheridan Morley
When the RSC, in the greatest and most shameful fit of sulking ever indulged in by a subsidised theatre company, pulled back from the Barbican, which had been purpose-built to its requirements, whingeing that it could no longer manage to stay there for summers, it can scarcely have suspected that the Barbican would be the winner.
In fact, however, the best thing that now (or possibly ever) happens in that City arts centre is the annual Bite, the Barbican International Theatre Event, which this year, as in 1998, gives us the great Chicago ensemble Steppenwolf on a fleeting visit. Curiously, the company does not play to us on its original strengths of Sam Shepard and a grainy, tough, windy-city alternative to Broadway or Hollywood. Instead it first brought us the best Man Who Came To Dinner I had ever seen, and now One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, Ken Kesey's won- derfully subversive 1960s novel about men- tal patients taking over their asylum in the name of human rights.
The other great bonus here is Gary Sinise, one of Steppenwolfs founders, in the leading role of Randle P. McMurphy, the jailbird outsider who gives his fellow- patients the courage to go back in search of their old, untranquillised selves and souls. After the ego-trip of the Jack Nicholson movie, the director (and another Steppen- wolf founder) Terry Kinney magnificently restores One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest to a contemporary ensemble piece for 20 players. And when did you last see one of those over here?
Few if any playwrights have ever made it to 85 in the robust good health of Arthur Miller, and fewer still have continued at that time of life to write, as Miller does, a new play virtually every year. The obvious comparison, and the only one that comes readily to mind, is Bernard Shaw, but you would have a hard time defending many of his late plays as anything more than fantas- tically verbose epilogues or afterthoughts. Miller is different: where Shaw goes increasingly over the top, he cuts back to the bone. His spare and lean late plays, such as The Ride Down Mount Morgan, which Patrick Stewart has just closed on Broadway, and Mr Peters' Connections, which played off-Broadway a couple of years ago with Peter Falk and Anne Jack- son, may not have the classical greatness of All My Sons or Death of a Salesman or The Crucible, but they are still kind of fascinat- ing and resonant, if only for the way Miller continues to explore his own realities. Where once he was the keeper of Ameri- ca's moral conscience, he is now more inclined to address personal issues of old age; Mr Peters' Connections (directed in its British premiere at the Almeida by Michael Blakemore) is about a man caught between waking and sleeping, life and death per- haps, and trying to work out whether his mysterious visitors are loved ones, or ghosts, or total strangers encountered on the route to some new-found land that may well lie just beyond the grave Though much improved since its first New York outing with Falk, the play still doesn't quite work; Barrie or Strindberg would have called it a dream play, but Miller is too sturdily earthbound to allow for much fantasy, and Mr Peters's connec- tions are never fully made in this life or the next. But the good news is not only Blake- more, director of the greatest All My Sons I ever saw, coming to terms with late-life Miller, but also the veteran Broadway star of half a century of great musicals, John Cullum, making a very long-delayed Lon- don debut in a one-act mirage which can never quite decide if it is a dream or a play.
Twenty years or more after he first had the inspiration for Side By Side By Sond- helm, David Kernan at the Bridewell directs and devises another Sondheim singalong, this one to celebrate Steve's 70th birthday, and once again it is just wonderful. Using Sondheim's own voice in interview to lead us into familiar territory (New York, rela- tionships, loneliness), Kernan assembles a cast of five to sing not just the familiar clas- sics, but some long-lost early, movie and sometimes totally unheard numbers.
Of these five, Robert Meadmore and Geoffrey Abbott are charming if a little predictable, Linzi Hateley brilliantly rethinks 'Parade in Town', and Angela Richards is definitive 'In Buddy's Eyes'; but the revelation of this evening is Belinda Lang who, having never sung on the Lon- don stage, comes to every number for the first time, and therefore brings it a devas- tating new life.
As always with Sondheim, the keys are intimacy and minimalism; the less you wear and do (and Miss Lang seems to have had the entire costume budget), the better he sounds. While other 20th-century corn- posers wrote of the possibilities of love, he alone has consistently written of the impos- sibilities of it, and his quicksilver, heart- breakingly savage brilliance is superbly showcased here with all the necessary whipped cream and knives.
Jason Carr's orchestrations are breath- taking in their intelligence and fidelity, and time and again this new show reminds us of the lyrical brilliance of a man who could write 'Loving you is not a choice, and not much reason to rejoice' and still make it sound romantic.
More and more, I think of Sondheim as Edward Albee set to music; two of the greatest of all 20th-century writers, both effectively orphaned in childhood, alone have chilled their way to the heart of where the American dream goes over the border- line into nightmare, and of that rough crossing these are the songs. Hasten along; Moving On is only at the Bridewell for another three weeks.
Roy Williams is a London-born Jamaican dramatist who has already won two of the top awards given to young play- wrights in this country, the John Whiting and the George Devine; but his new play at the Tricycle, The Gift, is a curiously disap- pointing and aimless account of a Jamaican homecoming and the somewhat hopeless attempts to summon up some of the local dead.
Previous page
