Weird and vengeful
Lloyd Evans Reverence Southwark Playhouse The Emperor Jones Olivier outhwark Playhouse has moved. Its new home is a warren of arcades carved out of the massive viaduct that carries commuter trains into London Bridge station. Its latest show is a 'promenade performance' about Peter Abelard, the thinker and cleric, and Eloise, the thinker and sex bomb. 'Promenade' means the audience don't just sit there being entertained, they have to work. We gathered in a damp dark hall at the start of the show while the cast of black-robed monks milled about muttering ominously. We were split into small groups and herded into a vestry where we each received a hooded cloak and a belt of cord. Togged up, we filed into a gloomy pit where a pool of water shimmered in the half-light. Audience and players were now identically dressed. Creepy. Patrolling monks adjusted our gowns. An abbot mounted the rostrum and began hectoring us about sin and damnation. Paucorum improbitas est multorum calamitas,' he thundered. He made us repeat it three times. Loose translation: 'A naughty minority can create nuisance levels out of all proportion to their numbers.' Too true. Then, a weird ceremony of sado-Christening. A monk stripped to his undies and was thrust deep into the water by the abbot, who glared at us with the malevolent leer of a traffic warden. The queue shuffled forwards and a second monk was peeled and rinsed.
As the line advanced I began fiddling with my robes, worried that I too was about to be slam-dunked for Jesus. But the third monk was accused of some unforgiveable crime and instead of beingblessed he was drowned. Thank God for that. We shuffled out past his white body slumped in the holy water. Thus the play developed as a set of tableaux performed in gruesome locations. Through veils of cobwebs wewatched Eloise breathlessly seduce Abelard. Beneath a putrid arch we saw Eloise's uncle demand that she produce her menstrual tissue as proof of her virginity. The brickwork dripped appropriately.
In a lobby rattling with the clunk-clunk of trains we peered at Abelard being flagellated by a grinning acolyte, and finally we were greeted by the sight of a castrated Abelard strung from a pig-hook while his groin wept gore. Sounds original. Presentation-wise it is, but the Mills & Boon script is full of high Victorian sentence and the acting has too much huff-and-puff. And it's no fun being badgered and nudged through squelching corridors by look-at-me actors fussing around and being oh-so-terribly-medieval and monkish. A laugh for the performers but to the audience it seems a weird and vengeful prank.
At the National there's a revival of a flawed and sensational one-act play by Eugene O'Neill. We're in a tropical African state dominated by a black American usurper, Brutus Jones, who styles himself Emperor. He struts around his golden palace boasting to his chief of staff about how he tricked the 'bush-niggers' and plundered their wealth. His position is precarious but he has an escape plan worked out and a stash of loot awaiting him in a safe haven.
A gripping start but then the plot goes haywire. A revolt begins. Jones has just three hours to escape. The revolt accelerates and he must escape right now.
And off he races into the jungle wearing his white naval uniform with gold epaulettes and dancing tassles, presumably for camouflage. He immediately loses his way, though earlier he stressed that he knew the terrain intimately. As darkness descends he is haunted by the ghosts of his victims. The story gets stuck here and turns into a series of flashbacks, nightmares and choreographed interludes, like an X-rated pageant. The dances are energetic and spectacular, sure, and the thumping drums certainly jangle the nerves, but so does a road drill sufficiently amplified. A pit. The script promised to be a searching and thorough examination of criminal megalomania but it veers off into flashy claptrap and wastes its prime asset, Jones, who is reduced from a fascinatingly eloquent narcissist to a shrieking loon, a mere noise in the dark.
Paterson Joseph, in the lead, gives a captivating account of high-camp malice. A star turn, nearly worth the ticket price alone but the choppy, truncated script lets him down. This production began life on the fringe, and to justify its presence at the Olivier there are 39 extras (yup, 39, I counted them, there was nothing else to do) who come on stage, mooch about a bit and exit. Costly add-ons like that don't disguise the play's narrow range, they underline it.
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