Luise Miller

Schiller’s 1784 play is an interesting one to see in the same week as A Woman Killed With Kindness. Both juxtapose bourgeois family life with the venality of the nobility. Both are tragedies, both concerned with a spiky triangle of sex, marriage and desire.

In order to reinforce his influence at Court, the Chancellor to a German Prince decides to marry his son off to the Prince’s mistress, Lady Wilford. Unfortunately, the son, Ferdinand, has already fallen in love with a fiddler’s daughter, Luise, and refuses the match. A plot is hatched; Luise’s father is arrested and, with the promise that he will be released, she is persuaded to write a letter that seems to imply her infidelity. Ferdinand, having staked everything on Luise, poisons himself and her, only finding out the truth as he dies.

I think the play covers a very short period of time, something quite close to 24 hours. It alternates dialectically between Court and the Millers’ home. In the Court, we are presumably at the Chancellor’s quarters, perhaps in some semi-public place, and also in a couple of memorable scenes Lady Milford’s bedchamber. This production kept location often very indeterminate. The plot unfolds fairly logically and in chronological sequence.

I’ve never seen - in fact, never come across - this play before and it stands up extremely well in Mike Poulton’s translation which balances a necessary heightenedness with contemporary clarity. The play is plainly standing on the shoulders of Romeo and Juliet and the death scene was genuinely moving. The Court scenes were often very funny, though I suspected this was more Poulton than Schiller. One problem this gives the play is that the plot seems like a comic turn - in fact, I never really felt that Ben Daniels’ Chancellor was a genuinely threatening man. That said, John Light and David Dawson were really delightful as Court sycophants. The father is a beautiful character, played with great humanity and feeling by Paul Higgins, who reveals him as sane, modest, and righteous. I was not terribly engaged by the two lovers until the very end.

What interested me most were the ideas in the play: the play is at a turning point for European aristocrats, which had always used marriage as a means of shoring up reputation, making crucial alliances, ensuring the controlled passing-on of wealth, estate and name. The rise of the Enlightenment offered a different attitude to human sexuality and desire and to individual autonomy, with nascent Rousseauian romanticism seeing desire as a kind of self-assertion perhaps for the first time. The simultaneous rise of the bourgeoisie established a class for whom name, estate and wealth were less significant and whose numbers were far greater and so marriage could be more a matter of choice. So this is a play that is dramatising a clash between two, quite different ideas about love. At the same time, Schiller was determined that the play would have a moral function by re-asserting divine love as the ultimate horizon of judgment, appealing, as it were, over the heads of the Court and asserting the ultimate goodness of the world. This is, to my atheist eyes, the least persuasive and indeed appealing part of the play and is played down considerably in this production. What is left is some rather dubious Jesuitical bits and pieces about when it is permissible to break a solemn oath which is probably more coherent in the original but becomes confusingly arbitrary when so much else of the theology is removed.

This is the kind of show that the Donmar’s become known for: a semi-obscure European classic given a sparky new version and cast to the hilt with a fine set and austerely beautiful lighting. Life is a Dream, The Prince of Homburg, Creditors, Ivanov, John Gabriel Borkman, Henry IV, Caligula, and more. They always kind of work. But underneath, I wonder if there’s a level of deep boredom that threatens to break. It’s about the lack of intellectual rigour in the productions, the preference for superficially beautiful sets, the incoherent acting styles, the sense that we’re all watching An Important Classic. The evenings feel slightly literary (in a bad way), heavy-handed, finessing away the complexity of engaging with a remote and difficult play and instead delivering something worthy with a few bonus laughs. Classics with benefits. It reminds me of what Peter Brook almost half a century ago called ‘Deadly Theatre’. It’s dazzling and entertaining and distracting and deep down a bit dull.

In this production the ideas in the play remain inert, as if no one was terribly interested in them, or had even much stopped to think why they were doing the play at all. The play felt pointlessly reinvented for the present; yes, with a bit of effort one might spot glimpses of the establishment’s present corruption, but not really. Maybe there’s something about religion and rationalism, but we’d have to do all the work. Is Schiller a good playwright? Is this a good play? The production doesn’t even seem to care much about that. People do things on stage, often very effectively, but there’s a deep dimness to the whole experience, a grey fuzziness where the thought should be. I’ve enjoyed a lot of things in that theatre but I’ve increasingly felt the tendrils of Deadly Donmar choking off anything more genuinely rewarding. It’s a theatre that needs reinvigorating. Let’s hope Josie Rourke is the right person for the task.

A Woman Killed With Kindness

Katie Mitchell’s new production of Thomas Heywood’s 1603 domestic tragedy is a radical reworking of the piece. The  play is relocated to the late 1910s. The inter-war years are a favourite of Mitchell’s, with The Pains of Youth, The Seagull, and Waves being set or moved into that era. It’s the shocked aftermath of war; there’s a fundamental shift of power to the middle class; it’s the period of High Modernism. And this production finds parts of all of that in this play.

There are two parallel stories - an aristocratic woman forced into a loveless marriage to save the estate and a middle-class woman shamed when he extra-marital affair is discovered - and Mitchell has interwoven these even more intricately than did Heywood. There are parallels between the two stories both in narrative terms and, in this production, visually. In particular, Mitchell has created a series of movement sequences that punctuate the action, in which the two women, like ghosts wander through the bustle of their homes, apparently unnoticed by the staff (in the aristocratic case) or just moved about like a chattel (in the middle-class home). The two women only meet at the end of the play, but even then Mitchell keeps most of the width of the stage between them. The aristocratic Susan, watching Anne die at the end of the play having starved herself in misery (or protest - the Suffragettes come to mind strongly here), keeps her distance. Why? Perhaps because she clings to the class distance between them - or perhaps because the dying Susan represents a horrifying image of the consequences of sexual self-assertion that she dare not approach. (The play ends, sententiously, with John Frankford announcing his dead wife’s epitaph: ‘Here lies she whom her husband’s kindness kill’d’. In this production, Susan says it - a horrified realisation that prevents the line focusing on the man’s self-knowledge and forgiveness and keeps the semiotic energy of the play circulating between the women.)

Class is really hard at work here. The stage visually is divided in two, left and right. On stage right is the grand entrance hall of an aristocratic country house; on the left, is the hallway and sitting room of a suburban middle-class house. (The lefthand part of the stage reminded me very strongly of the set for Season’s Greetings...) The suburban home is all brightly painted and bustling; the country house is shabby, old-fashioned, faded, a large crack in the ceiling, damp peeling the paint, the brick rotting beneath the surface. The two homes are paralleled visually in a number of ways; chandelier vs. lampshade, arch and rose window vs. fanlight; double vs. single doors; rugs vs. carpets; metalwork vs wooden bannisters; stone vs wooden staircase. There appear to be far too many servants in Suburbia but far too few in the Country. This may also be the point to remark - as many have remarked - that the set is sensationally good; the stone staircase of the manor house sweeping emptily down the centre-right of the stage. At one haunting moment the curtains on each side billow out, but in different directions...

This distinction between the two plots in terms of class certainly changes the emphasis of the original, since the class conditions of 1919 are very different from those in 1603. But this is one of the first ordinary domestic dramas (alongside near-contemporaneous pieces like A Yorkshire Tragedy and Arden of Faversham) and it dwells on simple, almost cosy things like dinner, a game of cards, people having to go off to work. The Frankford plot certainly lends itself to a middle-class setting, while the emphasis on good name and estate that drives the Mountford plot suggests the peerage. What the transposition does, rather brilliantly, is allow the aristocratic shenanigans to become images of deep moral decadence. In the ‘original’, Sir Francis Acton falls immediately in love with Susan, tries various devious ways of trapping her into marriage, but then has a conversion to goodliness, pays off all their debts with no strings attached, and thus allows Susan to enter freely into marriage with him. Here, it becomes yet another piece of financial settlement and Susan is still passed between her brother and the predatory Knight like a bargaining point. We see around her the decaying home and it is all the more clear that her sacrifice is in vain.

The production is two hours long. This has provoked the usual bleating about Mitchell’s disregard for the audience (in fact, it seemed to be an engaged and attentive audience when I saw it). It is emotionally quite cool, but while some have found that unengaging, it seemed to me a production that places sexual trauma at its heart. There was a frozen horror waiting in the play and it can’t be denied that John Frankford’s decision to humiliate his wife in front of the entire household is cruelty above and beyond. Mitchell also includes a ‘wedding night’ scene in which we see, almost wordlessly, Anne, creeping painfully downstairs, having had sex for the first time, blood on her nightdress. Sex in this production is traumatic. But note too that the play is structured in a number of short scenes, cutting between the two locations. Also, while the play might have been more sensational, lingering on the infidelity, in fact it concentrates on the married couple. It’s the play which behaves coolly to its characters.

It’s a revelation of a production.

Chicken Soup With Barley

We get to see Arnold Wesker’s first two plays this year. The Kitchen is on the Olivier stage of the National in the Autumn but now the Court has given us the first part of Wesker’s Trilogy, Chicken Soup with Barley.

It falls into three parts, 1936, 1946 and 1956, and it traces the rise and fall of a family held together by political convictions from the Cable Street anti-fascist demonstrations, through to the Soviet invasion of Hungary in 1956. The character who emerges most strongly through the play is Ronnie Kahn, a child in 1936, but a fierce socialist in 1946, but a disillusioned nihilist in 1956. That said, this is an ensemble piece. Wesker is - very unusually - better at writing group scenes than duologues. The opening with its chaos of comings and goings, plans and politics, jokes and hopes, is a wonderfully exuberant way of showing the Cable Street action, politics embedded in the home and a way of living. We see the physical decline of Ronnie’s father, the escapology of his sister, and the persevering optimism of Sarah Kahn. Against that we see Monty’s drift from one side of the battle between capital and labour to the other.

It’s a really beautiful production of a tremendous, generous, big-hearted, ramshackle play. Just like Look Back in Anger, it’s feeling that drives it on. It’s all about the final clash between Ronnie and Sarah and her anguished ‘If you don’t care, you’ll die” which is a mother’s care for her son and an optimist’s care for the world. Samantho Spiro’s beautifully heartfelt and remarkable in her transformation through the evening.

Wesker’s writing is skilful, intuitive, sprawling and joyful. It’s not always good; there’s a lot of clunky insertions of contemporary fact that probably didn’t work then and doesn’t work now. The characters have a tendency to say exactly what they mean, which means you are being handed the whole play on a plate which, if you’re feeling jaded, means it’ll seem a bit boring. But where it’s good, it’s very good: the ensemble first scene, the tracing out of Harry’s physical decline; the final confrontation. The scene with Monty is well done.

What struck me watching it is that he may have deliberately or inadvertently have developed a quite original historiographical dramatic form. The first scene bubbles along buoyantly ending with Harry alone on stage swaying a huge red flag on the stage. My initial feeling is to distrust it - not because of the politics so much as because of the dramaturgy - are we supposed to be swept up in the feeling? In fact we know that Harry’s a bit of a thief and a coward and his socialist fervour is strictly temporary. But it quotes a kind of agitprop dramaturgy which by 1956 will certainly have felt completely outdated. It’s that moment of suspicion that prepares us, I think, for the final scene and the collapse of faith. Just as the play asks what the meaning of all that pre-war socialist optimism was, it also asks how could we have written plays like that?

I Am The Wind

I saw Jon Fosse’s I Am The Wind a month ago and it’s taken me a while to feel able to write anything about it. Not that I didn’t like it, didn’t respect its integrity, or didn’t respond in various ways to it, but it is a show that clearly resists encapsulation. It offers you a very still, unadorned experience, depriving you of most facets of character and story and offering a kind of pure experience of itself, stripped of expectation.

Summarising the play, therefore, is absurd so let me just say that I Am The Wind involves The One and The Other. The One seems horrified by something he (?) has done, some impulse that made him do an awful thing; but more, he seems horrified by action itself, by doing or saying anything, feeling everything to be a weight, his very existence a kind of dull, concrete weight. They agree to take a boat out into a bay, and then out onto the open sea. They eat and drink and then, at one point, far out at sea, The One ‘sort of stumbled’ into the sea and drowns. This, it seems, is that action the horror of which has animated the whole play.

It’s this strange circularity that asks you to abandon demands for character and story. The drowning is the beginning and end, and reflected on throughout, so the characters are both here and not-here, now and not-now. The One and The Other are typically post-Beckettian abstract names and there are no anchors in ‘real-world’ experiences to encourage belief that they are real people at all: I often wondered if they were perhaps aspects of a single mind, the one shrinking back and fearful, the other impetuous and despairing. This circularity, the abstraction, the simplicity of the language (beautifully rendered by Simon Stephens, I thought) make this a cool, still piece of theatre. It doesn’t really ‘move on’ over the course of its 65 minutes; instead a terrible sense of atemporal stasis unfolds before us. 

This is evoked most beautifully at the beginning. The Other appears on stage, holding The One in his arms. Occasionally, his grip slackens and The One appears to sag, threatens to fall; then he hoists the other up. Their clothes are wet and heavy. It’s the beginning and it’s also the end and when they talk, it’s clear they are both inside and outside the situation, their clothes wet, their minds, as it were, dry, describing a situation that they seem no longer to be in.

The show is kind of about theatre’s battle with itself, the tension between art and materiality. Everything about the theatre that aspires to be weightless, immaterial, aesthetic, pure affect and intensity is always negotiated through the blunt materialism of its circumstances of production, the foursquare stage space, living, breathing, mistake-making actors, hard seats, finite duration, hot lights, ticket prices. The One complains:

if I’m on my own
​and all I can hear is myself
​Then there’s nothing there
​and then I start getting heavy
​I turn into a rock
​and it gets
​the rock
​gets heavier and heavier
​I get so heavy that I can barely move
​so heavy that I
​that I sink
​I can barely speak
​it’s a struggle
​to get a single word out
​to extract a single word
​and then
​when the word is out
​when the word has been spoken
​it feels so heavy
​that it drags me down too
​it makes me sink and sink
​(All stage directions and several lines omitted - pp. 29-31)

The feeling here is a mixture of writer’s block and stage fright, combining in a general sense of horror at the very physical experience of theatre. In this, the play connects to a very nineteenth-century, early-modernist sense of theatre’s mission to transcend the material conditions of its enactment. Think of Symbolism, with its gauzes and dim light, its auratic figures intoning poetic evocations of the Beyond. Think of Maeterlinck’s insistence that Shakespeare should only be read, not acted, because when we see Hamlet on stage, something of Hamlet dies for us. Think of the wave of interest in puppet drama, shadow dramas, that fascination in the idea of effacing the physical presence of the actor altogether. Think also of the earlier, Romantic tradition of the closet drama, the “spectacle dans un fauteuil”, the play designed to be read, not acted, the mind being the perfectly immaterial stage. I Am The Wind (what an evocatively evanescent title) sits squarely in that tradition, in its attempt to explore a wholly mental landscape.

That said, the visual centrepiece of this production is an extraordinary thing: the boat is a kind of raft, a section of the floor that rises up hydraulically, tilts and pivots, and gives a sense of effortful grace, as The Other pushes and eases the raft around with a kind of gondolier’s pole. It’s the experience of being in a boat that provides the play’s central metaphor for a floating above the dull earthly physicality of things. ‘I like,’ says The One, ‘being light / rocking gently / in the heavy boat’ (p. 57). It’s beautifully achieved in this, both light and heavy, simple and yet cluttered with meaning. And the small amount of water on the stage surges and floods as the raft rises and falls (see picture). 

There was a witty piece by Martin Cohen in Times Higher Education a month ago detailing some myths about the French. He lists things like the French being proud of the Revolution, being literary people, and having a great train system, all of which he thinks are much overstated. We might add to that list their intellectualism. It is, of course, true that the French have produced a huge number of intellectuals who get interviewed on mainstream chat shows and write bestselling theoretical books. But perhaps we understate how cerebral our own theatre can be: this production, co-produced by the Young Vic, text by Simon Stephens, from Jon Fosse, sold out its run and was treated respectfully by many reviewers. Patrice Chereau, who directed it, is famous for his deconstructionist productions, but here offers clarity, lucidity, and a kind of bleak, wintry theatre spectacle in this punted, pivoting raft. Our language is rather good at capturing this; in the simplicity of the words, we are able to capture a densely rich barrenness and the play really does evoke a vision of theatre as intellectual experience.

Flare Path

Flare Path is not Terence Rattigan’s finest play. It’s certainly not his most adventurous play. It was written at a time of great uncertainty, with him fearing for his career, his career, his abilities. He had been burned by the relative failure of his rather more daring After the Dance and, of course, it was wartime, so he needed a play to meet the mood of patriotism, sentiment and wishfulness. When Trevor Nunn revealed that he was going to revive Flare Path as part of the centenary celebrations, I had serious doubts that it was a good idea. What about Ross? What about a reinvigorated Winslow Boy? Why not, even, First Episode or Variation on a Theme? But it’s been the great surprise success of the centenary so far, so what do I know?

Flare Path is set in a small hotel in Lincolnshire near an air force base. The cast are the staff of the hotel and various bomber pilots and their wives. Into this setting comes the film star Peter Kyle, who is having an affair with Patricia, Flight Lieutenant Teddy Graham’s wife. In the central act we listen alongside the wives to the planes taking off on a night raid and coming back. It seems that one of the men has been killed after ditching into the sea, and this precipitates Patricia to decide that her place is beside her nervous husband. Peter leaves and in the final minutes the lost pilot returns to the delight of all.

David Hare has written a rather sour article claiming that the Rattigan revival - and the belief that he was hard done by - is an example of the right-wing cultural climate we are living through. Hare has been on record as admiring Rattigan very much; he’s written South Downs, a companion piece to The Browning Version, for Chichester, and one might observe that the central idea of Plenty, the difficulty felt by those who experienced the thrilling dangers of fighting for justice during the war in adjusting to life after it, was articulated rather well twenty-five years earlier in The Deep Blue Sea. He’s right to say that one can overstate Rattigan’s martyrdom - he was always being produced - but nonetheless, it is evident that Rattigan suffered personally by his rejection. Perhaps he shouldn’t have cared so much about being liked, but he did care and the withdrawal of love hurt him like the end of a thousand love affairs. Is it right wing to lament his rejection? Hardly. What’s conservative is to insist that the meaning of Look Back in Anger and all that came with it - and all that came before - is unambiguously fixed in the way a handful of critics understood it.

This play can seem somewhat conservative and in this production it seems so. Patricia is presented as a woman sacrificing herself for the war. We uncomplicatedly admire the RAF officers. The working class characters are sometimes figures of fun. This is, basically, the way the play’s always been seen and it might have been risky to shift the play too much.

But shift the play it does, a bit. In fact, the working-class characters are played with verve and seriousness, for the most part. Dusty (a Sergeant in the RAF) is played by Joe Armstrong without a hint of mockery; his lines come off fresh and true. Maudie is a bit of a caricature but Emma Handy finds more and more in it as the show goes on and the moment where the three wives find themselves together joining forces to distract themselves from their overwhelming tension is very powerful: it reminds me of the exemplary moment in The Deep Blue Sea with the three women left alone in the flat, sharing just a glance of complicity in their disappointment with their men. Most magnificently, Sheridan Smith, whom I’ve hymned before, brings out Doris as a breath of sheer life, urgent vitality, warmth and feeling, cutting through the slang and the stiffness, she just seems wholly alive. It’s a completely satisfying performance, adorable and moving.

Sienna Miller is not, to my mind, completely comfortable as Patricia. It’s a part that could be played such as to suggest deep ambivalence between lust and loyalty, dark thoughts in the night, and terrible conscience in the day. Miller’s just a bit flat in this. The ending, following Rattigan’s stage directions, has her silently long to follow Peter out of the hotel, which keeps alive her dignity and complexity, but I would like to see a production that dared to show Patricia unwillingly prepared to see her husband die, releasing her to her lover. In this, Trevor Nunn has given up on the emotional complexity for some CGI antics with crashing planes that weren’t a replacement. For me, the revelation among the leads was Harry Hadden-Paton as Teddy. The scene where he confesses his terror at flying is really shocking, raw and unexpected. In the War, it must have seemed absolutely on the edge between humanising and dangerously defeatist. Hadden-Paton is manically convivial - and rather camp too - and suggests increasingly a hysterical unmanliness or rather a retreat into unmanliness to cope with the funk that overwhelms him in the cockpit.

Much of Rattigan’s stagecraft is rudimentary, compared to the elegance his later work. Patricia and Peter conduct their affair in the public lounge, in which there are four entrance points which could be used at any point. This stretches credibility, especially when he also has a key moment where a conversation (on another matter) is overheard by Doris. But there are expert moments of compression and concision: the moment where Peter reads the Count’s letter to Doris - he’s translating a letter in French, written by a Pole, into English, to the man’s wife. The layers are expertly done, funny and tremendously touching. And the scene contains two revelations: Doris discovers that the man she always dared hope truly loved her truly did; Peter realises what Teddy means to Patricia. And none of this is verbalised; it’s all a dab of a hanky, a dignified walk upstairs, a slump of emotional defeat.

I don’t know that this production will establish this play entirely in Rattigan’s canon, but here it comes up shining like a new penny and I hope one day to see a production that explores the play’s darker corners.