Theatre
Krapp's Last Tape (New Ambassadors) The Island (National) My Best Friend (Hampstead) OJ. Othello (Riverside)
Sympathising with Kr app
Sheridan Morley
The problem with Samuel Beckett, for me at least, is that actors tend all too often to teach and preach rather than play him. Krapp's Last Tape, at the New Ambas- sadors, is after Godot perhaps his most famous text, a 45-minute monologue in which a prematurely old man of 60 recalls via some autobiographical tape-recordings what his life was like 30 years ago.
Written for Patrick Magee in 1957, and famously revived by Max Wall, Krapp has always been regarded as a kind of dessicat- ed dramatic aria; what John Hurt (looking and sounding eerily like the author him- self) does, in my experience for the very first time, is to make a real man of Krapp rather than just a symbol of past hopes and present disillusioned despair.
From the moment he comes on, chewing bananas and fiddling around with his reel- to-reel tapes, this Krapp is someone with whom we can immediately identify and sympathise; the cracked voice and the labo- rious shuffle are still there, but so too is the shadow of someone we might actually once have met. There is now in Hurt a kind of ravaged Irish majesty and it is the right kind; when he remembers all the old mis- ery, but also the joy of one night on a lake with a long-lost love, we are suddenly brought face to face with the most open- hearted and therefore accessible of all Beckett's subjects.
When The Island first opened at the Royal Court back in 1974, few of us had much idea of where it was or why it mat- tered; but Nelson Mandela had just started to serve a 22-year sentence there, and by the time he was freed both he and Robben Island had secured their place in the histo- ry books. It is even arguable that the play- wright Athol Fugard and the two actors who originally devised this piece were, through their subsequent work at the Mar- ket Theatre in Johannesburg, to become the principal dramatic voice helping to gain Mandela's freedom on behalf of the anti- apartheid movement in South Africa.
And now, a quarter of a century later, we have The Island back with its original cast in a new production originally designed for Peter Brook's theatre in Paris last year. It is not difficult to see what appealed to Brook here, not least a remarkable opening ten-minute sequence in which these two great black players, John Kani and Winston Ntshona, mime prisoners carting great weights of sand and stone across the stage. Sure they are now a little older and heavier than when they first took up these roles, but they are playing them at the National for the last time, and they still retain an extraordinary kind of internal energy.
The Island is by no means the greatest of Fugard's plays, but then it was always meant to be a performance piece and it is the performances here that matter most, as well as the final echo of Antigone, the Greek tragedy where 30 years earlier 'You're invited to some sort of jamboree — you're expected to donate a kidney.' Anouilh had also found his metaphor for the Nazis' withdrawal of human rights from the wartime Parisians.
The miracle of both plays (or all three if you include the original Greek) is the way in which, once so site-specific, they have now become universal in what they have to say about the need for freedom. As in two later but related scripts, Kiss of the Spider- woman and Bent, the two prisoners locked together are an ill-assorted couple, one (John Kani) all intellect and the other (Winston Ntshona) all instinct. But what they have to tell us about the degradation of imprisonment, the need for friendship in adversity, and the ability of the human spir- it to soar above its shackles, will sadly never date; right now, in Chechnya, there is an island just like this, even if you can't see the water.
Coming briefly to Hampstead from The Door in Birmingham, Tamsin Oglesby's My Best Friend could be seen as a feminist Lord of the Flies; three feisty if frustrated women, taking a brief summer holiday in a French farmhouse, recall the years they spent at school together roughly 30 years ago. Nothing much happens until a sudden, short, sharp, shock ending which it would be unfair to reveal. What I can tell you is that ngt quite as many of the women return from their holiday as started out on it, and the reasons are buried somewhere in their schoolroom of long ago.
Eve Matheson and Teresa Banham are the friends of the title, and in an unusually non-dizzy role Sara Crowe is the odd one out, the latecomer who somehow and somewhere always means trouble for the other two, and also in the end for herself. What the play has to tell us is nothing espe- cially new; the friendships and the rivalries and the loves and the loathing of our schoolmates stay with us forever, condi- tioning not just the way we later behave towards them, but also the way we our- selves lead the rest of our lives.
In that sense we are all children who never escape the classroom, and if the quarrels we started there do not get resolved before college, then they may well come back to haunt us much later in life. Antony Clark's quirky production does its best to overcome some lengthy moments when the play seems to be going nowhere very much very slowly, but when it sudden- ly leaps into life the effect is all the more startling for the long lead-in.
At Riverside, O.J. Othello is a curious solo show by Martin van Hinte from Ams- terdam in which the American actor Frank Shepperd, born and bred in the same gen- eration and environment as O.J. Simpson, tells his story as an update of Shakespeare; but the idea of these two men as similarly tortured black ex-heroes now involved with white wives and violent death falls apart once you start considering their differences, and we are left with the old Los Angeles video footage shown on screens above the stage, while not a lot goes on beneath them.
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