South Pacific

It’s such a strange musical. It has its place in popular memory, thanks to half a dozen unforgettable songs. It is solidly there in musical theatre history, because of its evident attempt to tell a story of depth, political sophistication, and darkness. The soundtrack to the movie was at number one in Britain for 115 weeks, including one unbroken stretch of 70 weeks from November 1958 to March 1960. It’s a good story and the songs are perhaps the richest emotionally that Rodgers and Hammerstein ever wrote. Certainly I can’t think of anything sadder and more truthful from their catalogue than ‘This Nearly Was Mine’. In America, it won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama, only the second musical to do so.

But it’s very strange, for two reasons. The politics of this musicals are much celebrated but, in truth, they are a bit half-cocked. It’s meant to be a great liberal musical that tries to display and anatomise racism. Lieutenant Cable finds himself drawn sexually to the island woman Liat, but when her mother asks him to marry her, he is repelled; he could never marry her. Similarly, Nellie Forbush has fallen in love with Emile de Becque but when she discovers his mixed-race children she is, despite her sunny nature, disgusted at the thought of being with a man who has slept with a black woman. The play shows both of them having some kind of conversion: Nellie finds that her love for Emile overcomes her prejudice; Cable bitterly articulates the cruelty of racism in the song ‘You’ve Got To Be Carefully Taught’.

But neither of these conversions make much sense, narratively or theatrically. We never really discover why Nellie converts; she just does. And it’s not clear that she understands what’s wrong with her prejudice; she just stifles it with love. Her change is very sudden and almost entirely unplotted. I suppose it goes with her character, the cockeyed optimist, but it kind of implies that she lurches unthinkingly from racism to - what? - forgiveness? willed forgetting? Through her story, the play doesn’t so much address racism and brush it under the carpet.

Cable’s song is the high-point of the musical’s articulacy about racism. The song is making the case that racism isn’t natural, it’s drummed into you, by your relatives, so the song says. While I would love to say that this song is a searing indictment, I find it rather feeble. First, the fussy little syncopated arrangement doesn’t seem to me an effective vehicle for searing political anger. It’s more ‘Gee Officer Krupke’ than ‘Mississippi Goddam’. Then the lyrics: while the word ‘carefully’ is viciously chosen and placed, the rest of it seems to stay in a tone of superior sarcasm (‘It’s got to be drummed in your dear little ear’) and then a half-hearted attempt to parody the thing being criticised (‘people whose eyes are oddly made’ ‘people whose skin is a different shade’). And the ‘six or seven or eight’ line just feels like padding. The melody is one of Hammerstein’s least memorable. The song is probably at its most effective in the movie where the deep colours, the close ups and an aggressive orchestration make the song feel more like the turbulent interiority of Cable’s frustration.

Further, the musical does deal in racial stereotyping, in the characterisation of Bloody Mary and the orientalist exoticism of Bali Ha’i. I guess you could say that the musical is deploying the stereotype in order then to wrongfoot us by unexpectedly deepening the representation, but I’m not sure we ever really get a sense of Bloody Mary as much more than a Polynesian Mother Courage, brutal, exploitative, money-chasing. Even her best wishes for Liat are wishes for the luxuries of an American life; she’s more pimp than matchmaker. And while it’s not unreasonable for her to wish a life of comparative luxury for her daughter, the musical would benefit from a little more subtlety in the drawing of her character.

The second thing that struck me as curious in this musical is that people seem to be able to hear the songs. Some of the songs are clearly diegetic: ‘Dites Moi’, ‘Honey Bun’ but there are some odd other moments. Is ‘Bali Ha’i’ actually being sung in the world of the musical? Bloody Mary sings it, but then Billis sings it a little later ‘throatily’, suggesting that he’s heard the song and is awkwardly trying to mimic Mary. Even more strangely, it seems that Nellie really is singing ‘I’m Gonna Wash That Man Right Outa My Hair’ because Emile notices and asks where the song came from (and later sings a snatch of it while pretending to wash his hair). Later on, the nurses mockingly mimic Nellie singing ‘I’m in Love With a Wonderful Guy’ as if they can hear her singing. I’ve written elsewhere about the complexity of the so-called integrated musical and, needless to say, this isn’t something that troubles me as I watch it, but on reflection I wonder how far Rodgers and Hammerstein were programmatic about integration - and the sharp separation between diegetic and non-diegetic music - or whether they made it up as they went along, interested in the flexibility of the form and the blurring of fantasy and reality.

These thoughts all occasioned by the Lincoln Centre revival of South Pacific which has just made it to the Barbican with a largely new cast. It’s a good, solid, traditional production that sticks close to the original book. The productions works well; songs sung well, characterisations fresh, bold but serious, and the show kept moving well. The sets and choreography didn’t quite match up to the National Theatre revival a decade ago but the performances were better and the tone surer. Samantha Womack was a very strong Nellie, though she doesn’t get the bluesiness of some of her songs (there’s the middle eight in ‘Wash That Man’ [‘rub him outa the rollcall...’] and that lovely little bridge in ‘Honey Bun’ [‘I am caught and I don’t wanna run / Cos I’m having so much fun with Honey Bun’] which need a whole lot of sassiness, which I didn’t see here), though I felt it was a serious attempt to root her in Arkansas while seem keeping her the romantic dreamer. A decent production.

Demos, Riots, and Theatre

When my students first arrive at university, they are often in the middle of a process of transition. Most of them have come to Theatre through enjoying the intensity of performance. What usually takes longer to come is a sense of the complexity of reception, how their performance will affect an audience. Tracing those effects and affects through the audience and beyond begins a process of cultural analysis, as does a questioning of the sources and functions of that performance intensity. Both of these sides - the intensity of performance and the complexity of reception - are key to understanding the whole theatre situation. An exclusive interest in performance generates - stereotypically - the worst kind of amateur theatre, where the performers are basically just showing off. An exclusive attention to reception leads to insipid audience-pandering, the desperation to be liked, throwing random pleasures at the terrifying mob.

I thought about these two aspects of theatre this week as some of Britain’s largest cities have exploded in disorder. On Saturday, 6 August, the police in Tottenham, North London, shot and killed Mark Duggan, a young black man, in his car. The police released information that he had opened fire first, a claim since demonstrated to be false (though the right-wing press happily repeated these claims). Also, the police did not officially inform his family. The death, the misinformation, and the disregard of the family’s feelings inflamed lingering resentments in the community and a small group gathered at the police station to protest his and his family’s treatment. Still getting no response from the police, and being barred access to the station by a police line. There have been reports that a 16-year-old girl stepped forward to try to speak to the police and was attacked with batons and shields. Some in the crowd retaliated and tried to break through. This soon grew into wider attacks between the police and the protestors. The violence spread; two police cars and a double-decker bus were set alight. Bottles and bricks thrown at the police; the police charged at and arrested demonstrators, it would seem, randomly. Shops were broken into and others set alight. Looting started in the late evening and continued into the early morning. Boots, JD Sports, O2, Currys, Argos, Orange, PC World and Comet were targetted; Aldi was set alight, Carpet Right completely destroyed by fire.

The following night, similar disturbances broke out across London: Enfield, Walthamstow, Islington and Oxford Circus saw trouble. On Monday Bromley, Camden, Clapham, Croydon, Hackney, Lewisham, Peckham, and Woolwich joined in. David Cameron returned from his holiday and ordered that the streets be flooded with police officers, which dampened down protests in London, only to see them flare up in Birmingham, West Bromwich, Manchester, Salford, and Wolverhampton. In the Birmingham demonstration a car hit and killed three Asian youths who were trying to defend their community. The next night, a mixture of heavy rain and perhaps a feeling that the momentum was lost or a point had been made, the troubles died down.

What’s this got to do with theatre? The theatre is no stranger to riots. At times, theatrical performance has itself been a kind of public disorder, spilling beyond social boundaries, overturning hierarchies, challenging definitions of place and identity. Even the very tame Sultan’s Elephant in May 2006 had some homologies with a riot, massed intensities of people, sudden new uses of familiar places and objects, streets closed and impassable. Riots have erupted within theatres, from the Old Price Riots in 1809 through the Playboy Riots in 1907, to 1989’s Velvet Revolution in the former Czechoslovakia, an uprising organised through the theatres. Today, we did a three-hour cycle ride through the parks of South London; on Rye Lane in Peckham, we were stopped; the road was closed as building work was being carried out on some of the riot-damaged buildings; there were unusual sounds, unusual routes (we were told to wheel our bikes through the Netto supermarket), the area slightly re-experienced, re-imagined. Two hours later, we were on the South Bank. The courtyard at the front of the National Theatre was filled with hundreds of performers from the National Youth Theatre; the audience stood around the square, on the terraces, on Waterloo Bridge. The streets were re-purposed, the area re-intensified, re-imagined.

But what strikes me, in fact, is the lack of theatre in these riots. Demonstrations are obviously theatrical: the costumes, the banners, the chants and songs, the spectacle of the whole thing. But when, as sometimes happens, demonstrations blur into a riot, the riots sometimes retain some of that spectacular quality: the improvised barricades, the shows of strength, the massed bodies, the taunting, chanting and jeering, defending an arbitrary line. In saying this, by the way, I don’t mean to diminish the violence, the fear, the underlying causes, to trivialise the riot, simply to point out that maintenance of a spectacular quality is, in some ways, part of the riot. The Tottenham rioters, at the very beginning of the disturbances, are supposed to have shouted ‘Whose streets? Our streets!’ at the police, a slogan that has been heard at demonstrations and disorders for a few years, but it points to the way that some see disorder as a symbolic transfer of territory. In becoming symbolic territory, the streets become theatricalised, they become a stage. But the theatre quickly drained from these disturbances.

In Brixton in 1981, the first riots I can remember, the images were spectacular. The damage, the violence, on all sides, was horrendous too, but the riots were legible, they were articulate. There was a clear challenge to the nature of the street, from the police’s bullying rule of ‘sus’ laws and stop-and-search to that bullied community brutally asserting their ability to occupy the street their way. There was looting, sure, but there was a frontline, there was a stand, barricades. It draw lines in the symbolic territory.

I saw little of that in Peckham or Clapham. This was an inarticulate riot, because it had no theatre. There were skirmishes, kids with scarves round their face smashing shops and then burning the evidence, running from the police. The element of theatricality remaining was only that initial impulse: the intensity of performance. Occupying the stage, flexing your muscles, robbing with impunity, plasma screens being carried through smashed windows in the full view of the police. But there was none of that other side, the sense of an audience. It was a shapeless protest. Of course, this doesn’t make it inarticulate in broader sociological terms: when you smash up shops in your own neighbourhood, there’s a kind of nihilism there that suggests all kinds of deprivation and anomie. It’s obvious to most people in London, I should think, that police-community relations have never been good, the disruption always just under the surface. With unemployment rising and the cuts already beginning to be felt, it doesn’t take much of a spark to set the blaze. But it seemed that the political articulacy of the riots was exploited by others who saw a means of personal gain. As such the theatrics faded, and with it a sense of any community staging itself, reinventing itself through performance.

Instead the theatre has been confined, unusually, to those opposing the disorder, particularly in the communities. There have been reports of people joining hands in chains to protect buildings. There was a remarkable moment when a young woman harangued Mayor of London Boris Johnson at an attempted meet-and-greet event in Clapham. Her hairdressing salon had been invaded, vandalised; what, she demanded, was he going to do? The ruffled Mayor simply, and for him damagingly, turned his back on her and walked off. And then there’s #riotcleanup. Launched and organised through Twitter, thousnads of people across the country occupied the streets, in a kind of saintly revisioning of a riot, brooms in hand to help put right the damage. The photograph by Andrew Bayles (@Lawcol888 on Twitter) of the brooms hoisted into the air like the Standards of some Roman Legion was viewed and reprinted across the world, an image of positivity against the atheatrical nihilism of the riots. 

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?