The Rivals

I went to this with some apprehension since the last time I saw it was in 1983, when I was 15, in the National Theatre’s production that starred Geraldine McEwen, Michael Horden, Tim Curry, Fiona Shaw and Edward Petherbridge. I remembered John Bury’s huge sweeping Bath crescent set, and of course I remember laughing and laughing and laughing.

Well the good news is that this production is very funny. Mainly, I think, it’s because The Rivals really is a very funny play. The production is mixed - the costumes are lovely, the set is rather drab and uncertain. There is strange variation in acting styles and abilities. Some are excellent, others are weak; some are in period, others are contemporary; some are detailed and meticulous, others are broad-brush and out-front. I didn’t really get much of a sense of a director’s hand and where it worked it was always the actors (and the play) you had to thank, not the director.

For me the great revelation of the production was Tony Gardner’s performance as Faulkland. Gardner’s spoke the words beautifully but inflected the performance with a superb contemporary comic style, so that this awkward subplot about a jealous lover testing his relationship to death emerged as both hilarious and terribly sad. I was reminded of another of my favourite comic actors, Mark Heap, though Gardner has a richer voice. It’s a subplot in a rather classical sense though it emerged for me far the most interesting story. The moment where Faulkland is left alone in his chair, staring rejection in the face, realising that his love really has gone, his mind it seems reeling, his emotions inadequate to the loss, was wretchedly funny.

Penelope Keith and Peter Bowles were enjoyable as Mrs Malaprop and Sir Anthony Absolute, though the writing seemed to me to be doing the funny more than the actors. It was weird to feel the ripple of pleasure that ran through the audience as the To The Manor Born actors were reunited on stage. This was a nostalgic murmur in a rather nostalgic evening of theatre, redeemed by some inventive actors.

As You Like It

I didn’t know this play at all. Never seen it, never read it. Of course, I kind of know it, because the Rosalind/Ganymede story is widely discussed and Touchstone and Jaques famous Shakespearean characters. And its scree is embedded in the language ‘thereby hangs a tale’, ‘laid on with a trowel’, and of course ‘all the world’s a stage’. But, no, I didn’t really know it.

What do I think of the play? Who cares! I’m an ignoramus and. hey, it’s As You Fucking Like It. But anyway.

Many things startled me about this play. First, it takes a very long time for the story to get going. The first two acts are all set-up, sending most of the cast into the Forest of Arden. It’s all rather delightful and the banishments are variously enjoyable, cruel, funny, bleak and so on. But it’s only when Orlando meets ‘Ganymede’ (3.2) that one feels the set-up is beginning to pay off.

This is understandable because what really struck me was the remarkable number of stories that Shakespeare establishes and manages to keep going. There’s Orlando and his brother; there’s Orlando and Rosalind; there’s the Duke and his Court; there’s the exiled former Duke and his merry men; there’s Jaques; there’s Silvius and Phoebe. There are no less than six love stories, requited and unrequited. As the friend I went with noted, there are two fools, perhaps because, with all this love and all this foolish authority, there is much to make fun of.

It’s massively enjoyable. Orlando distributing his love letters through the forest, some genuinely funny stuff with the fools, a beautiful little double act with Rosalind and Celia, the subplots with the Phoebe, with Audrey, and more, all giving the play tremendous vigour and muscularity. The production by Michael Boyd for the RSC is frothy but not escapist and Katy Stephens’s confident, sexy Rosalind has great support from Mariah Gale’s Celia. Forbes Masson’s sweet-voiced Jaques is balanced by Richard Katz’s crazy, wild-haired, unkempt Touchstone.

The ending puzzles me. First, because the way Rosalind tricks Phoebe into marrying Silvius seems a bit heartless. Second, the wider political story is solved in such a ludicrous way. A messenger enters to explain that the Duke was on his way to the Forest to have his exiled brother killed but met a holy man, converted to the religious life and has abdicated so he can live in a monastery. How would a turn-of-the-century audience have responded to this? What was Shakespeare meaning?

Were they supposed to enjoy it, panto-like, as one of the magical, absurd, fun things happen in this enchanted Forest and this enchanted play? Was plausibility a far lesser consideration than neatness and closure? Would they recognise this as a kind of classical touch; the last-minute messenger explaining the intervention of the Gods (think of Phaedrus, Iphigenia and so on)? Did that express a world view, something about the capriciousness of fate and chance, the constant possibility of redemption? Maybe the title is knowingly reassuring: everything will turn out as you like it to do.

One masterstroke was to have the epilogue sung rather than sententiously spoken to the audience. This made it feel as if we were at a celebration of love rather than being ticked off in some obscure sixteenth-century way. I wondered if there was an influence of the Rylance-era Shakespeare’s Globe which was forever blending the curtain call with a merry jig and a bit of a sing. If so, good for Michael Boyd. 

None of this spoiled my enjoyment of the play, I might say. There’s quite a lot of incomprehensible comic satire in here (Touchstone’s description of a quarrel and the various kinds of justice invoked is typical), but somehow the performance carries you through. The characters and actors are all so massively likeable. There are so many changes of focus and story. It’s like electrified froth.

David Bradby

My friend and colleague, David Bradby, died this morning. Caridad Svich asked me to write something for Contemporary Theatre Review, the journal that he took over - with Maria Delgado - and asked me to join as associate editor. I was of course happy to write something; well, no, not happy. I’d rather not have had to write anything like this, but this is what I wrote.

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David Bradby, our friend and colleague, died this morning.

I wouldn’t have had a career without David Bradby. He interviewed me for my PhD, advised on it, helped me to get my job, mentored me through some of my early attempts at lecturing. He was even external examiner for my undergraduate degree. More broadly, he has encouraged me and others to think that an academic stance of almost geekish enthusiasm for the obscurest corners of a theatre culture is no bad thing.

Enthusiasm. That’s what David had in such boundless quantities. He studied at Oxford in the 1950s and was very much of the John Osborne generation which is probably why whenever I hear that speech from Look Back in Anger, I think of David: ‘Oh, heavens, how I long for a little ordinary human enthusiasm. Just enthusiasm—that's all. I want to hear a warm, thrilling voice cry out “Hallelujah! Hallelujah. I'm alive!”’ His enthusiasm was infectious. In classes, he had a spirit of youthful play. I’ll never forget observing his Ubu Roi class and watching him demonstrate Jarry’s anarchic impulse by chasing a room full of students, most of them a third his age, with a rolled-up newspaper, trying to whack them on the arse.

In staff meetings he had a devil-may-care attitude that was immensely reassuring. I still laugh to recall the misjudged memo that came down from on high and was passed round from worried hand to worried hand. When it reached David, he glanced at its contents and, without a beat, tore the thing up. He sat there beaming at us all – that’s what makes me laugh to think of it, the beaming smile – and the proposal was never heard of again.

As a colleague, enthusiasm reigned. He was forever passing me new French plays he’d read: the austere L’Arche volumes, the sepia covers of Actes-Sud editions, the white uniformity of Éditions de Minuit (the Frenchest-looking books I’ve ever seen). Sometimes he would stop me in the departmental office to read aloud some sweary bit of French monologue, chuckling at the profanity. One Friday in 1997 he mentioned he was popping over on the Eurostar to see M(o)uettes a radical rewrite of Chekhov’s The Seagull by his great friend Patrice Pavis in Paris-Marly and he insisted that I came along. The next morning there I was with my travelbag full of French phrasebooks and confused changes of clothing. I won’t say David exactly had a knotted handkerchief on a stick but he certainly travelled light and, to this anxious traveller, seemed enviably at home wandering onto trains, taking in the landscape, sitting outside French bars with a glass of beer.

And the books kept coming; he was an early advocate of Arthur Adamov, then a partisan for Vinaver and a zealot for Koltès. He got me into Durringer, Pellet, and Lagarce and others. How did he persuade Methuen to publish two volumes each of Vinaver and Koltès? A collection of plays by Eric-Emmanel Schmitt? These were improbable miracles of publishing. He tirelessly translated and wrote about new writers, new directors, new productions. His Modern French Theatre 1940-1990 is rigorous and elegant. In his books on Planchon and Vinaver he writes like someone thrilled that he got to bring you the news. I can’t bear the thought that he won’t be bringing me the news any more.

His books were terrific but he had a much broader sense of the responsibilities of an academic. As a public advocate for our discipline, as a giver of papers and chairer of panels, he had a commitment to clarity, lucidity, of inviting everyone to join the broadest possible conversation about the theatre and its relation to the world. I don’t think he was ever completely convinced of the value of theory as it swept through our discipline in the 1990s, but he loved the conversation. ‘I’m hoping to be told I’m an old fart!’ he used to roar delightedly. He was one of the founders of the modern discipline, in so many ways, but not least with his small but admirably punchy Director’s Theatre, written with David Williams, making the case with typical energy and verve that the work of the director is as vital to theatre studies as the work of the writer. He borrowed a term from Planchon (in whose company he briefly performed): ‘écriture scénique’. As the playwright writes on the page, so the director writes on the stage. I would debate this with him: does the metaphor of writing not betray a persistent reverence for a literary theatre? I would ask. Is there not some lurking conservatism in this call for directors to have the same canonical systems and status as the playwright? He would disagree and then agree and disagree again, thoughts and memories of vivid productions tumbling from him.

He had quite an appetite for politics. Not for departmental politics – he saw no point to that and happily managed to spread this spirit of benign collegiality to the rest of us. But as a young man his political consciousness was raised by reports of French atrocities – massacres, the use of torture – in the French-Algerian War and then again by les événements of May 1968, in particular their theatricality, their pataphysicality, their playfulness. He was one of the first academics to celebrate the work of Joint Stock, inviting them to a conference at Kent University, whose Drama Department he co-founded.  He wrote on popular theatre, political theatre, with energy and commitment but never finger-wagging sententiousness. He remained loyal to a vision of a theatre that mattered, that changed things, that spoke to the world and let the world speak to it. He had an enthusiasm for justice. An exuberance at the fun of protest. ‘Quelle connerie la guerre!’ wrote poet Jacques Prévert towards the end of the Second World War, a line that became a slogan for the pacifist left in France and which David was fond of quoting during the first and second Gulf Wars.

A few years ago, Maria Delgado approached me to see if I’d like to co-edit a festschrift to mark David’s retirement. Of course I accepted, but it became clear to us that the usual dry and unread academic volume would not be a fitting tribute to David’s many contributions to our field. We agreed quickly that this should be a book that would be used, that students would want to buy and read and keep. We wanted it to be a book that lived in the hand and the mind, not on a shelf. It’s a measure of the affection in which David is held that everyone we asked to contribute to the book responded with tremendous enthusiasm; even if they could not contribute, they conveyed their warmest wishes to David. Contributors voluntarily refused payment for the volume, allowing Contemporary European Theatre Directors to be lavishly illustrated, generously laid out, and compendious in scope.  He was delighted with the book, which pleased me immensely.

At the launch we held to mark its publication, David was, naturally, centre of attention. We were anxious that he would be too weak, that he would find the event a strain. Instead, he bounced, he positively bounced, renewed by appreciative company, starting by sitting down, then standing, and eventually rushing from friend to friend in his enthusiasm for friendship and theatre and fine things. Enthusiasm again.

I last heard from him three weeks ago. I’d sent him a newsy message, telling him some of the things I’d been up to. He responded, as he always did, with generosity, fascination, and an eye for the absurd. He seemed so sharp and energetic I dared to hope he was rallying, turning a corner. It’s a metaphor, of course, to say that someone is ‘full of life’. But David would have had no time for any pious anglo-scepticism about metaphors. David was full of life, which makes his passing even more incomprehensible, even more meaningless.

David Bradby, my friend and colleague, was a huge presence in my life, in the life of the Department of Drama and Theatre at Royal Holloway, and in the life of our discipline. I am so lucky to have known him and, however I do, to carry an imprint of him and his endless, magnificent enthusiasms.  

Dan Rebellato
17 January 2011

Alarm Clock Heroes

Nick Clegg’s written an editorial for The Sun. 

What a pathetic piece of electioneering this is. There’s a by-election in Oldham East and Saddleworth tomorrow. It was caused by the previous result being annulled because the narrow winner, Phil Woolas (Labour), was found to have made false statements about his Lib Dem opponent by an election court. At that annulled election Labour got 31.9% against the Lib Dem’s 31.6%. Despite all that, it’s looking as though Labour are going to romp home. Hence Clegg’s desperate editorial.

First we have this ludicrous coinage ‘Heroes of Alarm Clock Britain’. It’s intended to immediately connect with people. I have an alarm clock, ergo I must be a hero. But it doesn’t feel heroic to wake up to an alarm clock. It feels annoying. I feel resentment towards it. Frankly, for Clegg to describe us as alarm clock heroes sounds dangerously close to a rich man taking the piss.

Second, there is an ugly attempt to divide us. We who are addressed are heroes because we are ‘people, like Sun readers, who have to get up every morning and work hard to get on in life’; ‘we are those who ‘want their kids to get ahead’. These terms of address and these virtues are extreme opaque (get on, get ahead); they might just as well refer to pushy, arrogant, selfish people as to saintly toilers for the good of all.

No more meat is put on the bones elsewhere. Who are these people? They are ‘hard-working’; they are ‘the backbone of Britain’. They are ‘prepared to roll up their sleeves and get Britain back on its feet’. They are ‘busy making this country tick’. What does any of this mean?

Oh I see what it means. It means we’re not THEM. THEY ‘want to rely on state handouts’; THEY ‘need politicians to tell them what to think or how to live their lives’. Ah, I see, THEY are feckless scroungers, criminals, asylum seekers, that lot. Bastards. I’m glad I’m not THEM.

Wait a second, we have a legal system. I have disputes with parts of it, but broadly I think it’s appropriate that the government institutes a series of legal principles, enforceable by the prison system, that tells us how we may live our lives. I don’t consider the laws against rape and murder an unwarranted intrusion on my magnificent freedom.

Ah, but you don’t need a politician to tell you what to think, do you, Dan? No, I certainly don’t. But who does? Who is Nick Clegg talking about? Who does he think he’s talking about? Who actually looks to politicians to provide the contents of their minds? No one, surely. It’s just a general way of othering people; it implies that out there, somewhere, are people unlike you; they are so lazy they don’t have an alarm clock, but instead loll in their fetid languorous beds well into the afternoons, waiting for politicians to fill their heads with ideas, and cascade banknotes into their grasping hands.

And here’s another thing. I rely on state handouts. I work in the university sector, which is still mainly state-funded. My salary is largely provided by the taxpayer. And I write plays that are mainly put on in publicly-subsidised places: I write for the BBC, for the subsidised theatre sector. I don’t believe a privatised university sector or a privatised theatre would provide much of an income, so yes I do rely on the state. Of course these are not handouts. What are? Disability benefits? Are they handouts? The lazy, feckless, chair-loving crutch-fetishists, do they get handouts. What about child benefits? The irresponsible, libidinous, condom-avoiding halfwits, expecting the state to hand cash to their ghastly spawn.

Oh no, hold on, he means the unemployed and probably asylum seekers. What are you going to do, Nick? Not give people who have fled torture, genocide, persecution any means to live? Are you going to allow the long-term unemployed to die of starvation? Or are you just othering them to pander to our prejudices? Whip us up into self-righteousness and resentment? Happily, I’m not someone who needs a politician to tell me what to think (and, even if I were, I wouldn’t start with you).

And why all this? Oh it’s because we’re in the ‘hole Labour left us in’. We’re still struggling with the ‘problems Labour left us with’. These are ‘Labour’s debts’. This has been repeated like a mantra since May.

It’s a classic rhetorical strategy. Bombard people with lies while still insisting on the listener’s independence. ‘Of course, I wouldn’t dream of telling you what to think about those lying, scrounging immigrants’. But let’s put a bit of pressure on this strategy. The cuts proposed by the Coalition are only estimated to bring the public finances back to where they were before the banking bail-out. They are intended to restore the status quo ante but no more. There’s a larger question about the ability of a country to live quite comfortably with debt but let’s just look at our recent history. I certainly remember that the Tories floundered when the banking crisis began; they had no idea what to do. They criticised the government; then they supported it; never, then or now, did they propose a coherent alternative policy to taking the failing banks temporarily into public ownership. On the other hand, it was Gordon Brown’s finest hour (yes, he did have one). He was recognised internationally as one of the few leaders with a grip on the crisis. What about the Lib Dems? Would Nick not have bailed out the banks? And does he believe that if he hadn’t bailed out the banks, we would be in a better position than we are now?

So how is this Labour’s debt? It’s a debt necessitated by the ignorance, greed and stupidity of the banking sector. Nick and David are agreed on the wisdom of the market. They didn’t call for greater banking regulation. They are part of a political system that accepted - and, as is perfectly clear, continue to accept - that governments should not interfere with the financial services industry’s divine right to make money. Nick, it’s your debt as much as anyone’s.

And then, though it’s almost too cruel to mention it, Clegg tries to rally support by talking about his tax plans about which ‘the Liberal Democrats made a promise to voters on the front of our manifesto’. Ah yes, the manifesto. That binding Liberal Democrat document. I’m not a politician, but if I were you, Nick, I wouldn’t want to remind people about the commitments you made in your manifesto.

Well anyway, glad to have got that off my chest. And all before sunrise too.

Act IV of Hamlet

The National Theatre’s Hamlet is pretty good, and Rory Kinnear’s very good indeed. Lucid, clear, funny, eccentric. Ever since David Warner for the RSC in 1965, it’s become conventional to play Hamlet as a rebellious student, and it’s a good time for rebellious students and do a good time for Hamlet. Rory Kinnear’s student is stifled by living with his parents, longs for the companionship of his student friends, plans to travel in his gap year and rages blindly at authority. The production’s nicely updated to, to, to, well I suppose some kind of contemporary Eastern European state, stuffy, over-decked out in palaces, television coverage and security detail.

Not for the first time, I’m struck by what a weird and shapeless play this is. Tons of it is incoherent and implausible; there’s really no clear answer to why Hamlet treats Ophelia the way he does and his plan to catch the conscience of the king is rubbish. It’s a mystery why the king fails to spot the depiction of his crime when the players do it in dumbshow and I always feel his treatment of Rosencrantz and Guildenstern is pointlessly cruel.

Now, I’m not dumb. There are reasons one can concoct for all these things, but the play doesn’t seem overly concerned about answering them. It’s a clotted play; clotted with language and with the complexity of human motivations. It is striking how obsessed the play is with the idea of human beings as rational animals, whether it thinks this is right or wrong. Perhaps in the very confusions of the play lie a vision of human thought.

The thing that always surprises me in performance is the fourth act. The first act is battlements and the ghost; the second and third takes us through the actors and then the two failed murders of Claudius - one when he mistakenly thinks the king is at prayer and the other when he kills Polonius. The fifth act is Hamlet’s return and the duel. The fourth act is close to farce, with Hamlet hiding Polonius’s body around the palace, being sent to England and returning, Ophelia’s madness and drowning.

It’s a very difficult act to get right. It both broadens the play out - it’s an act about intrigues and power play, about authority and chaos, Hamlet as a kind of Fool. In David Tennant’s version, the last I saw, the political dimension was less to the fore than the idea of Hamlet as a zany pricker of pomposity (from memory, they may even have cut his encounter with Fortinbras’s army?). In this, it’s very much about an authoritarian state coping with a rogue element (in Hytner’s production, Ophelia is clearly killed by agents of the state, giving Gertrude’s narration of it a horrifyingly disingenuous quality).

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​Glenda Jackson's Ophelia

Those like Hytner who want to tell us a story about power and its instabilities will find plenty here; those who find Hamlet to be a play about Hamlet, his intensity, his brooding, his anguish and indecision, will enjoy this act too. The only people I can’t imagine getting much out of this act are those who want the play to be in any sense a classical tragedy. In some productions - like Greg Doran’s - the farcical aspects are brought to the fore, but they’re impossible to entirely dismiss. The speed at which we find Hamlet dismissed to England and then returned to Denmark tends towards funny. I have never seen a production that makes Ophelia’s mad scene genuinely moving (I would love to have seen Glenda Jackson play Ophelia to David Warner’s Hamlet, though; the pictures are so astonishing).

When I think of Hamlet I generally forget this act; in my memory the play goes pretty much straight from the death of Polonius to Hamlet’s exile. But whenever I see it, it’s this act that strikes me anew. It’s where the play’s fascination with what makes a person, what the springs of action are, the unfathomability of the self to itself is turned outward into a vision of the state and the precariousness of political power.