John Morrison

The Habit of Art

What's it about?  But what's it really about?  That's the question we ask every Monday night at Player-Playwrights when discussing new plays.  Alan Bennett's new play is superficially about Benjamin Britten and WH Auden, but it's really about lots of other things:  the relationship between artists' lives and works, about biography, about theatre, about homosexuality and about the relationship between Bennett himself and the National Theatre, where it's currently in previews.  Not surprisingly, the initial run is sold out and as befits a a new play by a national treasure, there are long queues for returns.  So anything critics or bloggers say will make no difference;  this play is a guaranteed hit, though the esoteric subject matter means it is unlikely to equal the phenomenal success of The History Boys.

But is it any good? (That's the other question we ask on Monday nights.)  It's flawlessly directed by Nicholas Hytner, has a familiar cast of NT regulars (Alex Jennings, Richard Griffiths, Adrian Scarborough and Frances de la Tour) and it's stuffed full of excellent jokes, mostly about actors and acting, but also about Oxford.  We're in a rehearsal room at the National Theatre, with a half-built set  representing Auden's squalid rooms at his old Oxford college in the early 1970s.  Around the sides there's a table for the stage manager and her assistant, a sound desk and an electronic piano, a few chairs for the actors and other backstage bits and bobs.  The actors in this play-within-a-play wander in to find that their director has had to go to Leeds for the day to give a lecture, so stage manager Kay (Frances de la Tour) is in charge.  There's tubby Fitz (Richard Griffiths) complaining about the lack of cake, who plays Auden, and camp Henry (Alex Jennings) who's playing Britten, plus young Tim (Stephen Wight) who is playing Stuart, an Oxford rent-boy, and Donald (Adrian Scarborough) who is playing Humphrey Carpenter, the broadcaster and author who wrote biographies of both Auden and Britten.  Bennett is a sophisticated theatrical gamester and the way he peels off the layers of dramatic wrapping in the first act is a delight to watch.  'I want to hear about the shortcomings of great men,' declares Donald/Carpenter as the play opens.  As a biographer, he is sometimes part of the action and sometimes outside it.  When he first appears in Auden's rooms, the poet mistakes him for a rent-boy.  'I'm going to suck you off,' he declares. 'But I'm with the BBC,' replies the nervous visitor. 'I'm not a rent boy -- I was at Keble!'  When he's commenting on the action, the two principal actors find Donald is just getting in the way, provoking him into an actor's crisis of confidence.  'I just feel I'm a device!' he proclaims in despair.  Kay the stage manager negotiates her way through these thespian tantrums with consummate skill, mostly by postponing tricky issues to the director's return.  Also in the wings is the author Neil (Elliot Levey), who manages to get up everyone's nose.  All this theatrical pass-the-parcel is very funny, and very much in the style of Michael Frayn's Noises Off.  The problem comes when Bennett casts aside the wrapping paper and gets to his core subject, which proves less rich in interest.  The scenes between the ageing semi-senile Auden and the still boyish, diffident Britten don't really come to life.  Whether such a meeting ever took place in Christ Church in 1972 between the two former friends is immaterial;  the conversation is mostly in a minor key and in dramatic terms, it leads nowhere.  Britten, it seems, simply wants a bit of moral support as he wrestles with composing Death in Venice.  There is nothing really at stake for for either character, and the result is a desultory conversation about art and life which never gets out of second gear.  The ending of the play is rather weak, and I suspect it's something of a compromise between the author and the director.  Bennett's own negotiations with Hytner are echoed in post-modern style in the on-stage argument between actors and author about how the play should finish -- with an Auden poem or with a biographical postscript. 

Richard Griffiths took over the role of Fitz/Auden at short notice after Michael Gambon pulled out for health reasons;  it may seem highly unfair to snipe at an actor in these circumstances, but I found myself wondering non-stop what the great Gambon would have made of the part.  Griffiths was ideal as the eccentric teacher Hector in The History Boys, but he's far too cuddly for this role.  Although Bennett hedges his bets by creating not Auden but an actor playing the part of Auden, there's a dimension that is missing from the portrayal of the poet.  Auden was in many ways a nasty piece of work, and Gambon would undoubtedly have conveyed this much better.  De la Tour, Scarborough and Jennings are outstanding as always, and there's another excellent performance from Stephen Wight (Mugsy in the  revival of Dealer's Choice at the Menier Chocolate Factory.)

This play has its self-indulgent, self-referential aspects;  nobody would begrudge Bennett his chance at the age of 75 to pen a love-letter to the National Theatre and to his adoring audience.  The lines at the end about the importance of plays and writing have a valedictory feel, as if the writer is coming on for a final bow.  Even when he's not quite on top form Bennett outclasses almost all other English playwrights, so let's hope this isn't his final goodbye.

The Spanish Tragedy

Police sirens wailed from all directions as I took the bus up Kingsland Road to Stoke Newington and the Arcola theatre.  Shortly afterwards the road was sealed off as it emerged there'd been yet another murder in the area.  Just right to put me in the mood for this revival of Thomas Kyd's gory Elizabethan tragedy, which ends with bodies littering the stage.  This was a play that quickly became a popular classic and had great influence on Shakespeare, and I can understand why.  There are scenes which clearly look forward to Hamlet and Macbeth, lots of raw emotion and violence, some grand guignol horror and an evil villain.  The final scene is a play-within-a-play in which the revenger Hieronimo slaughters his victims for real -- a fantastic dramatic device which Shakespeare obviously admired, taking elements from it into the play scene and the final duel scene in Hamlet.  It's the Elizabethan equivalent of a good gangster movie and well suited to a modern dress production in the gloomy low-ceiling warehouse space that is the Arcola. 

Unfortunately this production by Doublethink Theatre that leaves a lot to be desired.  Dominic Rowan (excellent as a deadpan Touchstone at Shakespeare's Globe this year in As You Like It) is badly miscast as Hieronimo the avenger.   There's a wide variation in the quality of the acting between experienced professionals such as Keith Bartlett, Guy Williams and Richard Clews on the one hand and some of the younger cast members who gabble their lines. It's quite an achievement not to be audible in an intimate theatre like this, but I found myself straining to make out what some of them were saying.  On the plus side there's a young actor from southern Africa (I guess Swaziland from his CV) named Msimisi Dlamini who manages to be both audible and convincing as Balthazar.  The direction by Mitchell Moreno is full of 'look-at-me-aren't-I-clever' elements borrowed from here there and everywhere, and lacks the pared-down simplicity that Declan Donnellan manages to achieve in his modern dress productions of Shakespeare.  A dead body surrounded by red roses is a cliche which has been done lots of times before.  There's plenty of realistic fake blood in this show, but when the villain Lorenzo is killed the director and designer can't resist the temptation to change the visual style and introduce trailing red ribbons as well.  You might call it doublethink but I couldn't possibly comment.  

Comedians

Something misfires in this revival of Trevor Griffiths' play at the Lyric Hammersmith, but I'm not quite sure what it is.  Never having seen the play before, I'm not sure whether Sean Holmes the director has made some wrong choices, or whether it's the fact that the play itself is confused.  I'm inclined to the latter view;  it certainly isn't the fault of the all-male cast, who are excellent.  For anyone who doesn't know the story, Griffiths takes a group of would-be standup comedians in Manchester in around 1970.  The three acts take place in real time as they meet their tutor in the classroom for a warm-up session before they try out their acts in the local club, then reassemble in the classroom for what is known in military circles as a debrief.  The comedy acts are mostly antedeluvian in their political incorrectness by the standards of 2009, relying on racism, sexism and crude stereotyping.  But there are plenty of plays from the 1970s that work very well despite the fact that they are now period pieces.  Rather than being dated, the racism and sexism in the comedians' scripts adds an extra edginess to the play for a modern audience.  I think the problem lies elsewhere.  I can't help feeling that once he'd got his premise and his three-act structure and sorted out the characters, the author couldn't quite work out what questions he was trying to raise and how to turn them into a convincing theatrical form.  I have to make comparisons with Lee Hall's far superior play The Pitmen Painters, which also starts off with a group of men in a classroom.  Hall's play is by far the funnier of the two, thanks to its brilliant dialogue and characterisation, and the subtle way it explores the dynamics of the group.  Comedians has five very ordinary comedians and one rule-breaker who may be a creative genius, but they remain a collection of individuals rather than a group.  Their coach Eddie Waters (another great performance by Matthew Kelly) is a veteran pre-war comic whose sense of laughter seems to have died inside him. The key scenes are the ones between the mercurial oddball Gethin Price (David Dawson) and Eddie.  Dawson, in the part originally played by a young Jonathan Pryce, reminds me a lot of Alan Cumming.  But his extended mime show in Act Two goes on a bit too long.  There's only one really good joke in the play  and it comes right at the end, from the mouth of an Indian immigrant who has wandered into the classroom by accident.  That's deliberate. There's a lot of debate and discussion about comedy, but not much of the real thing. It's told and not shown.  Of course, the play is about other things than just comedy, but this is where Griffiths' writing seems to me very much at sea.  Lee Hall, by contrast, effortlessly builds up from his group of art-loving coalminers a wider context and a range of questions about the nature of art, of class and of cultural aspiration.  These questions don't get answered, but they are put with punishing clarity, and it seems to me that this is what Comedians lacks.  I left the theatre wondering if my long trek westwards to Hammersmith on the District Line had really been worth it. I'd love to hear from someone who has seen earlier productions of this play and can make comparisons.

The Power of Yes

"David?  It's Nick Hytner here on the South Bank. How are you coping with the financial crisis?"

"Nice of you to ask, Nick. Not too bad, actually.  Like an old leftie, I keep all my money in the post office."

"That's not what I mean.  I was wondering if you would like to write something about it. All those hedge funds and trillion dollar bailouts, the collapse of Lehmann Brothers.  I've been reading about it in the FT and it's the real stuff of drama."

"You mean write a play about the City?  My last effort at the Cottesloe about New Labour didn't set the world on fire, did it?  I might be able to do something documentary,  You know, go and talk to bankers and write down what they say, then get actors to say it on stage."

"Bringing the bankers to the South Bank?  I like the sound of that.  And we've done men in suits before -- Stuff Happens filled the Olivier, after all."

"Not the Olivier.  Perhaps the Lyttelton this time.  Does it matter if it isn't really a play?"

"Don't worry about that.  The National has put on fifteen David Hare plays so far, and we're still counting.  Our audience will come to see anything with your name on it.  You're like Noel Coward."

"It's a deal, Nick. Can you put the money straight into my post office account?"

David Hare is careful to lower audience expectations right at the start.  Anthony Calf, the actor playing The Author, marches up to the footlights and tells the audience they're not going to be seeing a real play, just a story.  But it's too late to ask for a refund of my £10.  A large cast, all male except for three females, stride purposefully in neat diagonals across the stage regurgitating things which their real counterparts have told The Author during his research. Various key words are projected above them in the style of a powerpoint presentation for those who have trouble keeping up with the lecture. The performance lasts for about 95 minutes, though for those who fall asleep halfway, as I did, the ordeal is somewhat shorter.  I nodded off during an explanation of collateralised debt obligations. When I woke up Mr Calf was still poised quizzically with his notebook and pencil, asking diffident questions.  The play has one or two interesting moments, but it's journalism, not drama. Possibly my long career in journalism explains why I found it less than riveting.  David Hare has organised his material quite well and laced it with a few dashes of humour.  Some of the sharpest lines come from an unnamed Financial Times journalist presumably based on Gillian Tett, whose training as an anthropologist gave her articles on the big crash a lot more human insight than her colleagues.  But as a piece of theatre, it falls well short of Hare's earlier documentary plays The Permanent Way and Stuff Happens.  The Permanent Way worked well on stage for two reasons;  the opening scene had commuters scrambling into a crowded carriage to find a seat, forging an instant bond with the audience;  and in Max Stafford-Clark's production there was a spectacular backprojected rail crash.  Stuff Happens was also a men-in-suits sort of play with little action, but it at least had some invented dramatic dialogue featuring Tony Blair, George Bush, Colin Powell and others.  The Power of Yes features only bankers, traders and journalists and is thus devoid of any characters who might set off an empathetic spark across the footlights.  The playwright's portrayal of himself as an interviewer is a device which worked very well for Gregory Burke in Black Watch because it was used only briefly as a framing device, after which the real play took over.  But Hare keeps it going all the way through. It's like going out to dinner and finding that the restaurant kitchen is closed and there are only crisps and peanuts.  During my moments of wakefulness I fervently wished I was back in the Royal Court watching Lucy Prebble's Enron, which is an object lesson in how to bring obscure financial material to real dramatic life.  I think I am probably going short on my holdings of David Hare until further notice.  They're not worth what I thought they were worth when I bought them.  Perhaps HM Treasury might like to take the shares off me in return for a nominal sum?

Enron

I'm going long on Goold futures at the moment;  there have been some sharp criticisms from analysts of this company's recent venture into the opera market with Turandot at the ENO; and last year's King Lear at the Liverpool Everyman also caused the share price to dip sharply.  But on the evidence of this play the underlying brand is still outpeforming the market.  STRONG BUY.

This play by the young (very young) Lucy Prebble has been met with a well-deserved deluge of praise already, and there are signs that Rupert Goold is starting to revise his habit of throwing everything but the kitchen sink at his productions.  He's learning to subtract as well as add, and a quick look at the playtext for Enron confirms that the show has been tightened up, losing quite a few lines since it was first performed early this summer at the Chichester Festival Theatre.  It's a co-production between Chichester, the Royal Court and Goold's Headlong Theatre.  It's slick, fast, fantastically visual and theatrical in the way it tells the story of the rise and fall of America's most innovative company.  Financial engineering isn't really the stuff of drama, but Goold and his designer Anthony Ward unfailingly find the right visual metaphors to tell their story.  Showing traders at work in a bear-pit exchange floor is the easy part;  but how do you dramatise the accounting wheeze that Enron devised to disguise its losses in opaque dummy companies?  The companies become raptors or dinosaurs, prowling around the stage in the half-light greedily munching up debt but eventually threatening their creators.  The set has a giant skyscraper at the back of the stage on which is projected a ticker with the Enron stock price. First it climbs inexorably, then falls back as doubts grow about the company's claimed profits. The ensemble become Jedi knights with illuminated swords in a scene about the devastation of California's deregulated electricity market.  But the good thing about this play is that the four main characters, while unsympathetic, are all fascinating and well-drawn.  Samuel West is terrific as the villainous chief executive Jeffrey Skilling, who begins as a bespectacled nerd but once promoted to the top job displays a chilling ruthlessness.  One of his victims is Claudia Roe, played with great pizzazz by one of my favourite actresses, Amanda Drew, whose deep sexy voice should have made her more of a household name by now.  As Claudia, she dons a Monroesque giant blond wig and delivers a cracking performance as the ballbreaking female executive who loses out to Skilling in the race for the top job and is later stabbed in the back and sacked, allowing her to sell all her stock before the companny collapses. Tim Pigott-Smith bumbles around to great effect as Enron's genial chairman Ken Lay and Tom Goodman-Hill is Andy Fastow, the obsequious chief financial officer who designed the company's financial trickery but collaborated with prosecutors and got a lighter sentence than Skilling.  This is the play that should perhaps have been written about Royal Bank of Scotland, the closest British equivalent to Enron, but I fear the libel laws will make such a venture impossible for any playwright.  Enron is fair game as its bosses went to jail, but it's going to be hard to put the disgraced RBS chief Fred Goodwin on stage.

After Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem this is the second smash hit play in a row for the Royal Court; both will be seen by bigger audiences paying higher prices in the West End next year, and I imagine both will be fighting over the same Olivier awards.  My instinct would be to go for Jerusalem as best play and Mark Rylance as best actor, while giving the best director and best design and lighting design to Enron.

The Gift

The Irish 'ghost play' has become a bit of a cliche in the hands of the very over-rated Conor McPherson (The Weir, Shining City, The Seafarer) but I've just been to see one that is much much better.  The Gift is by my fellow Player-Playwrights member Eamon McDonnell and it avoids all tricksy cleverness designed to send shivers down the audience's spine.  It begins with an elderly Irish farmer getting in the cattle, coming into his kitchen and making himself a pot of tea.  His wife sits in a chair at the back of the room, sometimes watching silently, sometimes speaking to him, sometimes caressing him and rebuking him.  Only gradually to we realise that Ned Bash's wife Brid is actually dead;  how she died we discover later.  Ned is joined by his new neighbour Callum Hammill, who is tormented by a female demon of his own.  One of the themes of this challenging play is the relationship between the dead and the living; it has some wonderful poetic language and its slow unfolding challenges the audience to find their own meaning in what they see.  There are four terrific performances from Chris Prior, Georgina Bryce, Philip Philmar and Victoria Johnston and it's directed by Dimitry Devdariani at the Greenwhich Playhouse next door to Greenwich railway station for a four-week run.  I chaired a very stimulating post-show discussion at which one audience member from County Wexford said he had an 89-year-old neighbour exactly like Ned Bash.  So much for non-realistic drama.   Anyway, this is a play that deserves a wider audience. Director Dimitry Devdariani says he is convinced this is not just a good play but a great one that touches on universal themes of life and death and conscience in a way that few writers manage.  I agree.

Judgment Day

I used to wonder if it might be possible to issue an ukaz banning diesel and electric trains and making everything run on steam. I abandoned that particular fantasy when I realised a) it wouldn't be very good for the planet and b) I'm unlikely to be appointed dictator any time soon.  But I do quite like steam trains, especially in the theatre, where the designer gets a chance to use lighting and sound and smoke to conjure up the illusion of the real thing.  Which is a way of saying I enjoyed the design for this play at the Almeida.  Judgment Day is by Odon von Horvath, and so to say it's a play about a train crash sounds rather banal.  Written in the 1930s, it's a parable about the rise of fascism and the importance of individual moral responsibility. Thomas Hudetz is a stationmaster whose moment of inattention to the signals leads to an express crashing into a goods train and killing 18 people.  The only witness to his failure is Anna, the innkeeper's daughter who was kissing him at the crucial moment.  Her evidence gets him acquitted of negligence, while his unpopular wife's eyewitness statement is disbelieved.  But the truth eventually comes to the surface.  It's the kind of earnest social-realist drama which Arthur Miller perfected in such plays as A View From The Bridge, but the difference between von Horvath and Miller is that the former's characters remain resolutely two-dimensional.  Joseph Millson as Hudetz doesn't add very much to his thinly written part, and the other actors seem equally unable to get out of second gear.  James Macdonald is a director I rate highly (he was responsible for an outstanding revival of Joyce's Exiles at the National about three years ago) but here he is unable to resolve a conflict between the demands of what is really a big ensemble play with vigorous crowd scenes and the narrow confines of the Almeida stage.  Miriam Buether's design is excellent, using a narrow platform which allows the passing steam trains to pass between the actors and the audience, and then revolves into a thrust stage for the other scenes.  The problem is that the narrow platform doesn't give much space for a cast of 14 plus several non-speaking extras to create the kind of mob psychology and dramatic movement that Trevor Nunn conjures up in Inherit The Wind at the Old Vic.  On a bigger stage I think the play might work better, but as a political metaphor the story is rather clunky and tips over into melodrama towards the end.  Hudetz is held up as a man who always follows orders, with the implication that this isn't enough;  but he's a character who seems to lack any kind of inner conflict or conscience.  The link between individual actions and their social consequences which Arthur Miller's plays outline so brilliantly is here somewhat fuzzy.  Despite Buether's period design and the lovely puffs of steam from the imaginary engine, the railway disaster itself doesn't have the impact of David Hare's The Permanent Way, in which some very clever back-projection effects were used to recreate a crash on the stage of the Cottesloe.  Steam or no steam, director Max Stafford-Clark really made the audience wince on that occasion, but in this play neither the crash nor the characters really come alive.

Endgame

What does it all mean?  I used to worry about not being able to answer that question when I went to a Samuel Beckett play.  I think I have gradually and painfully learned that sometimes the best moments in the theatre aren't fully understood in a rational sense.  That's particularly true with Beckett, and to some extent with Pinter.  Now I try just to sit back and watch.  The comforting thing is that often the actors don't really know what's going on either, but it doesn't matter.  In the programme for this revival at the Duchess Theatre Mark Rylance, who plays Hamm, says the play is closer to a piece of orchestral music. 'It's made up of contrasts, rather than necessarily a narrative arc or form.'  Rylance is in this Complicite production by Simon McBurney as a bit of light relief before the West End transfer of Jez Butterworth's Jerusalem, in which he gives what I imagine will be an Olivier-winning performance as Johnny 'Rooster' Byron.  Beckett's plays pose a challenge to actors and the truly great ones, like Rylance, relish what he offers.  The last time I saw this play it had Michael Gambon playing Hamm, with Lee Evans as his sidekick Klov, a part played this time around by McBurney.  Originally this production was to have featured Richard Briers and Adrian Scarborough, but both withdrew, and I can't help feeling that in the case of Rylance the production has probably gained a lot in the switch.  Twisting and squirming in his leather armchair on wheels, Rylance turns the blind Hamm into a savage but eloquent monster, a character who is alternately malevolent and joyful.  He's odious but fascinating.  McBurney, an actor who can be irritatingly mannered, isn't quite as funny as Lee Evans but he's pretty droll as the downtrodden Klov, moving around the stage and climbing up ladders as if he has two wooden legs.  Lovely performances also from Miriam Margolyes and Tom Hickey in the two 'dustbin' roles of Nell and Nagg.  The amount of longing and regret that Margolyes extracts from the single word 'Yesterday' is a joy.  There are moments of great pathos and tenderness and unbelievable cruelty in this play, and the suggestions of a post-apocalyptic world where nature has died give the play a 21st century meaning. Did I say meaning?  That was a deliberate mistake.  Go and see this play not just for the superb acting but for a necessary antidote to linear, rational and realistic theatre.

Inherit The Wind

Kevin Spacey's reign at the Old Vic has swung wildly between scintillating hits and complete turkeys;  this production, which I saw in preview, is a gold-plated hit.  It's a bold choice of play which without Trevor Nunn as director might have misfired, but every element works beautifully and Spacey himself gives a performance to treasure.  (Readers of this blog with short attention spans who want to go back to Twittering can leave at this point)

There's something hugely entertaining about going to see a courtroom drama and passing newspaper billboards on the way to the theatre announcing that the attorney-general Lady Scotland turns out to have broken the law, has paid a £5000 fine for employing an illegal immigrant as her cleaner and still refuses to resign. You really couldn't make it up. The law sometimes seems to be there not to keep us in order but merely to entertain;  real life trials are almost always better than the ones that playwrights invent.  But this American courtroom drama, written in the mid-1950s by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E. Lee, was based quite closely on a real story -- the trial in Tennessee in 1924 of a schoolteacher for teaching evolution.  What became known as the 'monkey trial' of John Scopes became a three-ring circus long before O.J. Simpson and Michael Jackson;  photographs from inside the courtroom brought it to a national audience and it was even broadcast on live radio.  This play became a famous film in 1960 starring Spencer Tracy as defence lawyer Henry Drummond (based on Clarence Darrow) but had only a short stage production in London before being forgotten on this side of the Atlantic.  Great credit to Trevor Nunn and Kevin Spacey for taking the risk of reviving it for this year's Darwin anniversary.  Unlike most things from the Eisenhower era, it comes up smelling fresh as a daisy. It's well-constructed, well-designed in an old-fashioned way and rolls along the freeway like a vintage 1955 chromium-plated Cadillac, showing no signs of rust.  The authors understood that the Scopes trial wasn't just about the rival truths of science and religion but about the right to free thought and the conflict between small-town American values and the wider world.  The probable reason this play hasn't been revived before is that it demands a huge cast of around 30 and another 20 or so non-speaking extras.  That rules it out for almost anyone except the National Theatre, but somehow Spacey's Old Vic has cajoled enough money out of sponsors and donors to make it possible. 

Trevor Nunn has no equals as a director when it comes to moving around a big cast on a big stage; there's just nobody else who can use a large ensemble the way he can.  The stage at the Old Vic isn't all that wide but it's very deep, and I think this is a play where the view from the stalls is probably not as good as from higher up. I saw the play from the grand circle but a friend who was down below said there was 'too much going on'.  The original 'monkey trial' pitted Clarence Darrow against William Jennings Bryan as prosecutor.  Bryan was a three-times presidential candidate for the Democrats and one of the most admired men in America -- not just a reactionary bigot but a progressive on many issues.  In the play he is thinly disguised as Matthew Harrison Brady.  David Troughton plays Brady as something of a buffoon, which jars with the fact that his opposite number Drummond clearly respects him and happily acknowledges that he once supported him for president.  That aside, Troughton is excellent.  Spacey, however, is breathtakingly good as Drummond.  When this grey-haired man in his mid-sixties first slouches on stage, round-shouldered and with a slight stoop, it's hard to believe this is the same protean actor who hopped around the Old Vic a couple of years ago as a youthful Richard II.  I had to get my binoculars out to make sure that the man in the grey wig really was Spacey.  But it was.  Using sardonic humour to puncture Brady's pomposity, Drummond loses the case but wins the argument.  At the end he picks up the Bible and the Origin of Species, weighs one in each hand and seems to find them equal, making the point that religious belief and scientific fact aren't mutually exclusive.  There are several other standout performances, including Sonya Cassidy as the defendant's girlfriend Rachel Brown and Mark Dexter as the sharp-tongued journalist from Baltimore E K Hornbeck (based on H L Mencken), who makes the most of the play's best lines. 'I may be rancid butter, but I'm on your side of the bread,' Hornbeck says to Rachel Brown. 

It was a fairly warm autumn evening in the grand circle at the Old Vic but as in the original trial, the actors convincingly struggled with 100F heat on stage;  it felt hot just looking at them sweltering in the makeshift courtroom, which is another way of saying Trevor Nunn, his designer Rob Howell and the rest of the production team have got everything just right.  Even the monkey who appears in the street scenes outside the courthouse plays his part to perfection.  Preview-schmeview.  Now he's got this production into tip-top shape, perhaps Trevor Nunn might like to stroll up Waterloo Road to the National and give Deborah Warner a hand with her apparently very troubled production of Mother Courage?

A New World

About 20 years ago when I spent a year living in Massachusetts I drove north with the family to Concord to watch the annual reenactment of the first skirmishes with the redcoats that led to the Declaration of Independence and all the other things, good and bad, that followed.  As the redcoats in their immaculate historical costumes retreated under a hail of musket fire, I asked a local cop if the British were ever allowed to win.  'No sir, I'm afraid not,' he replied.

This new play by Trevor Griffiths about Tom Paine at Shakespeare's Globe has some of the same faults as the historical reenactment genre; it's overly pious about its subject, overly concerned to give a complete narrative even when some scenes don't generate conflict or drama, and it relies heavily on a narrator to explain what's going on.  Using a narrator is generally the theatrical equivalent of running a race on crutches -- it's a confession of weakness.  The main problem with Griffiths' script is that it shows its origins as a film screenplay, which is a very different animal from a stage play.  There are far too many short scenes which fail to develop into anything interesting, and it becomes more of a narrative than a drama.  At three hours, it's considerably shorter than the screenplay about Paine which Griffiths wrote for Sir Richard Attenborough but which never got made.  I'm happy to share the view that Paine is a neglected figure from our history, a writer of astonishing modernity who badly needs rehabilitating.  His pamphlets were printed in their millions, but because they were the equivalent of cheap paperbacks, they haven't survived in large numbers.  Luckily I have a nice rebound original edition of Paine's Rights of Man on my bookshelf, as well as a handsome teeshirt with his face on from Harvey's brewery in Lewes where he once lived.  But however much one admires the man himself, this play doesn't quite cut the mustard, despite spirited direction by Dominic Dromgoole and some excellent individual performances.  John Light is on stage throughout as Paine, and he's excellent.  So are Keith Bartlett as Benjamin Franklin the narrator, Dominic Rowan as George Washington and James Garnon as Danton. I also liked Laura Rogers and Alix Riemer as Paine's two female companions, who between them produced some of the play's best moments. 

There are two questions that I keep asking myself after seeing this play.  The first is why the Globe has yet to find a big modern historical drama that can compete with Shakespeare.  A New World and Jack Shepherd's 2007 play Holding Fire about the Chartists are probably the best two new works I have watched at the Globe (I didn't see Glyn Maxwell's play about the French Revolution in 2008) but both have the same flaws.  Holding Fire had the extra handicap of a complex narrative and no single central character.  What I felt was lacking in both plays was a Brechtian cutting edge;  I find Brecht's dogmatic Marxism as tedious as the next person, but he certainly knew how to write historical drama.  As the Young Vic's stunning production of The Good Soul of Szechuan in 2008 showed, Brecht can be radically rethought.  So why not try him out on the Globe stage next year and see what happens?

The second question is about how different playwrights tackle the biographical play.  It's a very tricky genre.  I was bowled over by Tom Stoppard's idiosyncratic take on the life of A E Housman The Invention of Love at the Cottesloe, but I recently re-read it and it seemed incomprehensible on the page.  The element that made the play such a success a decade ago was the pairing of Paul Rhys and John Wood as the young Housman and the old Housman;  splitting the central character is a device that Howard Brenton used rather less successfully in Never So Good, his play about Harold Macmillan. Can you tell a whole life on stage or should the playwright concentrate on just one or two key moments?

As always, I think Shakespeare has the answer;  without any rigid sticking to the unities of time and place, he unerringly goes for the key moments and that's the difference between historical pageant and real drama.  Needless to say, he is happy to play fast and loose with the facts when he needs to, which is what makes the difference between real drama and drama-documentary.  Like Trevor Griffiths, I'm a big fan of Tom Paine, but hagiography doesn't really make good theatre.