Paradise

This was my first visit to the National Theatre since The Death of England in February 2020 and first visit to the Olivier since Translations in October 2019. I have a strange affection for the Olivier, because that’s where I, age 12, made my first autonomous visits to the theatre, getting (I think) 10p tickets to stand at the back of the Olivier circle to see Michael Gambon directed by John Dexter in Brecht The Life of Galileo and, a year later, Peter Hall’s masked Oresteia. A couple of years later, I saw - can one believe this cast - Fiona Shaw, Geraldine McEwan, Edward Petherbridge, Tim Curry and, yes, Michael Horden, in The Rivals, a preposterously funny and beautiful production featuring a magnificent John Gunter set that swept the Royal Crescent in bath across the stage in great glorious arcs. So the Olivier, for all its faults, was my first theatre, really, and it was emotional to return.

I say ‘for all its faults’ because there has been a nagging feeling among directors and actors that there’s something not quite right about it. It certainly is a very exposing theatre and many plays have withered under its heat. The great drum revolve was notoriously unreliable for the first decade of its use but more than that, directors have sensed that somehow the dynamics and relationships with the audience are slightly off. Trevor Nunn has the stage moved a few inches forward (I never quite detected the difference); other directors have lowered the stage, others raised the stage, some blending it into its surroundings, others making its stark circle a feature; in 1997, directors have added seats, taken away seats and in 1997 the whole Olivier was turned into a theatre-in-the-round for productions of Caucasian Chalk Circle and the Marat/Sade.

For this production of Kae Tempest’s Paradise (a free rewriting of Sophocles’s Phioctetes), director Ian Rickson and designer Rae Smith have done a bit of all of this. The Olivier is a theatre in the round for this production. The stage appears to be reduced and lowered and the stage space extends up to take over the stage right raised Olivier stalls, while Philoctetes’s ‘cave’ is built up alongside the stage left raised stalls. There are additional (I think) seats close to the stage. A word on the design first: it’s wonderful. In theatre in the round, perhaps the most important scenographic element is the floor and they have created a scrubland of dirt and sand and stone, entirely desiccated, contrasting nicely with the lush landscape suggested by the title. The area built up over the stage-right stalls is the encampment for the Chorus who are reconstituted as a kind of group of stranded refugees. This part of the set looks improvised, with mismatched bits of rescued wood, a tent or two, bits of crockery, furniture borrowed from somewhere, territory marked by fabric and occupation.

Of course it isn’t actually improvised at all. At the beginning of Howard Renton’s 1973 play Magnificence, the curtains rises (or lights go up) on an ordinary but unoccupied middle-class front room. And then squatters smash a window to get in (the stage directions tell us ‘NB real glass’). I’ve always thought that this was Howard Brenton, making his main stage debut in a major national theatre, telling us that the fringe is also breaking in and occupying your theatre. And here, in Paradise, I felt something excitingly, thrillingly similar. The Chorus is a diverse cast and they have a swaggering, witty cockiness in the way they occupy the Olivier. And yet it also feels theatrically confident, not just a challenge. I notice on the walls of the raised stalls a platform has been built that perfectly mimics and extends the wood-patterned concrete (see picture) and it felt like a beautiful image of the design and the production and the feel of the show: taking over the space, but responding to an extending the space.

And then the show. Sophocles’s Philoctetes is a wonderfully brutal play about the disgraced, abandoned, wounded warrior, hero of the Trojan War, abandoned on an island by his fellow Greeks when the festering wound on his foot became too noxious for them to bear. In this play, Odysseus, who left him there and that Phioctetes therefore hates, and Neoptolemus, son of Achilles, return covertly to the island ten years later with a plan that Neoptolemus will befriend him and bring him back to bolster the floundering Greek campaign. Neoptolemus is a very reluctant participant in this scheme and indeed while he is initially successful, his conscience provokes him to honesty and finally he does bring Phioctetes back. It’s a strange play, a bleak and fierce play, in which the central character is a kind of feral, wounded animal; the debates are about honour, archery, and armour, but the central character is there because he has a stinking wound on his foot. A God makes an appearance at the end. And, odd for a tragedy, no one dies. It is wonderfully odd and if you’re anything like me and you are irritated by the idea that plays have to be universal and relatable, this play is invigoratingly alien in its attitudes.

(Parenthetically, it seems both an anomaly in Sophocles’s work and entirely typical. Oedipus is another protagonist wounded in the foot who becomes an outcast from his society. I always associate this play with Ajax, written decades earlier, but also featuring an objected warrior, debates about armour, and a character who seems to be long dying, perhaps one foot in life and death. And despite the relative oddity of Sophocles including the appearance of a god, Sophocles always seems to me the most godless, specifically in the sense that he forces our gaze onto the human being in extremis. He is bracingly incurious about the metaphysics of Philoctetes’s position - or Ajax’s, or Oedipus’s. He seems sometimes almost to be saying, the universe is cruel and arbitrary, how do we live? We see Philoctetes in the moment of his deepest degradation and it must have seemed remarkable and strange for the audience who would know him as later the conqueror of Troy; how to reconcile the two? Sophocles poses the question but offers no answer.)

What Tempest has done is follow the structure but, like Katie Mitchell’s Women of Troy, excise all the gods and make it an existential story about human beings. The Chorus are transformed; in Sophocles they are sailors who have come with Neoptolemus; now they are refugees stranded on this island, longtime observers of Philoctetes. They seem to come from various places, some dreaming of a return, others content on the island. They are at times wise but also they mock one another, squabbling amongst themselves. In the original, the appearance of the God (Heracles) is what turns Philoctetes from defiant refusal to agreeing to return to the Greeks. In Tempest’s version, there is a moment of revenge, as Philoctetes shoots Odysseus in the leg. As Philoctetes leaves with Neoptolemus, Odysseus crawls into Philoctetes’ cave, giving the play a circular structure.

I don’t honestly know that I think that circularity is a great idea. It felt like a structural idea rather than an idea that lived in the world of the play. What it does do is emphasise the play’s remarkable antiheroism, its suspicion of the ethics of Greek militarism (Odysseus is a awful prick, really, and seeing him reduced is quite satisfying).

The cast are magnificent. I’ve spoken about the Chorus, who give the play and the sense of place wit and articulation. The three main characters are great. Anastasia Hille is breathtaking as Odysseus. It’s an interesting version of the all-female cast idea because here, unlike elsewhere, I felt that these actresses were genuinely playing men and Anastasia Hille is a devastatingly convincing man. She has a gruff military bearing and manner, but haunted with a sense of wounds from the past and desperation about the future. Lesley Sharp is strong, smart, vicious, wily. I thought, just at moments, that she tilted a little too much towards the comic; it is a funny performance and I’m not sure the play quite needs a comic turn. Lesley Sharp of course has prodigious comic gifts and maybe it gave proceedings some light and shade. I similarly felt - though this is in Tempest’s script - that the Chorus’s interventions occasionally undermined rather than amplified the debates.

But the absolute knock-out performance is Gloria Obianyo as Neoptolemus. She’s completely persuasive as an adolescent on the brink of manhood, having to decide the boundaries between her own convictions and the needs of war. I swear you watch her mature through the show. She is electric to watch, the moral thread through the production, but she puts these debates about truthfulness, honour and betrayal into her body so it never feels abstract, always three-dimensionally what is happening in that space. I hope the Olivier Awards recognises her extraordinary performance.

Ian Rickson and Rae Smith’s decision to play the play in the round is perfect. There is something about theatre in the round that constitutes, when it works, the theatre as a civic space, the audience as jurors or witnesses to something shared. I felt that very strongly here. The contemporary resonances are not forced but this is a play about refugees and war and who is left behind. It felt big and grand because of that. It’s also appropriate because the original and Tempest’s version are not interested in psychological interiority; even when Neoptolemus is tricking Philoctetes, we are more interested in the transaction than the psychology. Tempest’s language thus has a declamatory quality that is nonetheless grounded, theatrical.

And Ian Rickson. Oh man, he is such a good director. He never takes shortcuts; he never approximates; he sits with the play and the characters and the events and he lets them unfold, crisply, clearly, vigorously in front of us. His actors always have their feet planted on the ground. He is or was best known for new plays; I guess he’s now carrying out the old Royal Court mantra ‘do new plays like they’re classics; do classics like they’re new plays’. In the last few years, Uncle Vanya, Rosmersholm and this are magnificent revelations of the fairly familiar, productions that take risks but with supreme confidence. He’s one of our best directors right now.

The title Paradise is, to say the least, ironic. There are no paradises in this play. Paradise is, if anything, a continually deferred dream of perfection that we know is impossible. But in the company of Paradise, it felt pretty great to be washed up on the shores of the Olivier again.

Leopoldstadt

I have been round the houses with Stoppard. When I was 17, I found his emotionally-light, intellectually-playful plays very suited to my emotionally-averse, would-be-intellectual budding personality. Plays like Travesties and Jumpers and After Magritte and more just seemed to fizz with theatrical energy. When I read and saw more plays by other people and read more actual philosophy and grew up a bit, I found I looked more for an emotional pull and found Stoppard’s intellectual dazzle less impressive. It was still a somewhat pretentious position, a personality in search of an identity. In the early nineties, he seemed adrift, to have lost his way, his best work behind him and so he was quite easy - well, I found him quite easy - to dismiss. But then he wrote Arcadia, which, even at the height of my facile rejection, I had to admit was fucking superb. But then he wrote The Invention of Love, which I liked but not as much as Arcadia, and then the trilogy The Coast of Utopia, each part of which I liked less than the last. I found Rock ‘n’ Roll a misfire (and really shouldn’t have been on at the Royal Court in its 50th year), and I wasn’t convinced by The Hard Problem, his knotty take on the problem of conscious (though when I chaired an event at the National Theatre about Stoppard and his work and had to interview him, as he came up on the stage my heart was fluttering with nervous awe and I realised that my teenage adulation was still in there somewhere).

But now I’ve seen Leopoldstadt and everything is up in the air again. Is there a precedent for a playwright writing perhaps their best play in their eighties, fifty-seven years after their first produced play? Ibsen wrote the magnificent Little Eyolf in late age, but he was still only 66, which by comparison to Stoppard makes him a whippersnapper (and it was only 44 years after his first produced play). Beckett was 66 when he wrote the incomparable Not I and 75 when he wrote Rockaby. But that’s still not Stoppard’s 82 - and, good as they are are they his best?

But Leopoldstadt is extraordinary. It’s breathtaking. If you haven’t seen it, it follows various generations of a Viennese Jewish family from 1899 to 1955, that period of time crucially, of course, passing through the Holocaust. It is a vast play in time and in cast, though not in geography remaining in the same huge drawing room for almost all of its many scenes. Despite the vast number of characters, we come to love many of them; we understand the family rivalries, the secrets, the in-jokes. And so, as time jerks forward, as it does, it is with a real sense of grief that we find this person has taken their own life, this person has left the country, this person has fallen ill, this person and this person and this person have been killed.

A motif that runs through the play is the person who has become an unperson. There are images of people who have denied their identity; people who have died and live on only as a portrait and then the portrait is displaced, anonymised; photographs of people in an album whose names none of the living can supply. These hints appear from the beginning and they are not just a foreshadowing of the death camps; in some ways it’s also an image of family and memory and how the present falls bumpily into the past. But it is also an image of the Holocaust, the almost-innumerable millions who died.

Almost innumerable. There are restrained hints of the old intellectual dazzle in the multiple generations of mathematicians in the play which delicately reminds us that sometimes the great statistics (six million) are hard to connect to their real referents (all the individual dead). It asks whether the world of numbers is a way of making sense of the world or escaping from it. There are other elegant touches like this: the play begins in 1899 with two cousins discussing the recently-published Interpretation of Dreams by Sigmund Freud and there are moments where the overlay of past and present, the sudden ageing of a character, seems dreamlike but then Freud himself is brought into the story, given refuge from the Nazis in 1938. They also discuss Schnitzler’s Reigen (La Ronde), whose serial couplings are echoed in the story at one point (indeed a copy of Reigen seems to be a key tool in the seduction). But unlike the Stoppard of the 70s to the 90s, there is no bravura intellectual glitter here; it’s just part of the intellectual seriousness of the world of the play and of the play. The numbers are not allowed to take over and turn into paradox; the innumerable missing millions - through their avatars in this family - stay on the retina and indeed, at the end of the play, return briefly, magically, plangently, restored to heartbreaking theatrical life.

How to describe the writing? It is, in a certain way, old-fashioned. The wit of the dialogue takes us back to the middle of the twentieth century. It’s absolutely sparkling. Clever people saying cleverer things than even very clever people say, even cleverer than Stoppard would say. But this works, because it’s not just entertaining the audience. It’s giving us an intense sense of the cultural richness of the Viennese Jewish life at the turn of the century, amid Freud, and Mahler and Schnitzler and Klimt. It is verbally opulent as these characters are mentally opulent. It’s beautiful and heartbreaking that the play begins in 1899, a moment of confidence, of modernism, a sense of a new century. (Memorably one character notes of The Interpretation of Dreams ‘There’s something about a new theory being published at the very beginning of a new century. Like an augury. Like the curtain going up on something’. They don’t realise that what Freud’s theory perhaps augurs is less the new lucidity of dreams, but the eruption into the world of nightmare.)

But if the dialogue is, in the best way, old fashioned, the structure is beautifully contemporary, expertly mixing together short and long scenes, making exquisite choices about what scenes to show and what to imply, where to focus and where (for example the Holocaust itself) to leap across. The rhythm of this play, my god, it’s impeccable. My one regret is that, for social distancing reasons, I guess the theatre have decided an interval is impossible: there is what I am assuming most have been the curtain moment at the end of scene six, where the character, before the First World War, behind dancing together. They dance with a brisk, almost martial confidence, and couples join them and the music swells and then it starts to be punctuated by gunfire and artillery, the dancing getting more and more clipped and defiant, the music building to a deafening and threatening point and then - the curtain comes down.

The play does lurch from era to era, taking us from the turn of the century in the first scene to the post-WWI period, then into the late 30s and then into the 50s. But these lurches are always emotional pulls. The work of the audience is like someone in the aftermath of an earthquake: we have quickly to check what has happened, whether everyone is alright, what has changed and what has broken. Cumulatively, it’s devastating. I only had my doubts about the writing once; there is a scene where the Nazis bullyingly and sneeringly requisition the house and I wondered if these weren’t slightly off-the-peg-Nazis, but in fact because we have come to know the family - and the house - so intimately, the scene still packs a punch, perhaps even gratifyingly giving them a richer fuller life than their persecutor.

There are hints of other Stoppard plays. In the discussion of Herzen and the calls for a Jewish homeland, we feel like we are watching a fourth part of Coast of Utopia. In the way we see the same house over generations, I thought of Arcadia, particularly in the 1955 scene as the survivors, the link to the past almost entirely broken, struggle to remember the meaning of what happened there in the past. There is the classic sparkling Stoppard dialogue throughout and a typically brilliant little image at the beginning that speaks sonorously about the cultural conflicts and conflicts that the family will make throughout: a Star of David atop a Christmas Tree.

Most important, though, there is, as in The Real Thing, a sly, oblique self-portrait. In the final scene, we meet Leonard, who was once Leopold (and thus is almost the eponymous hero). He was a refugee from Vienna, whose Jewishness has been effaced in that English way. Leonard is comic writer and a celebrated witty speaker. He is fairly clearly a bit of a Stoppard. When Leonard reflects that ‘in England, it wasn’t something you had to know, or something people had to know about other people’, you sense a tension, both in Leonard and Stoppard too. On one hand, how wonderful, after all we have seen, the gloating anti-semitism, the agonies over cross-faith marriages, the parsing out of one’s identity into Viennese, Jew, internationalist, liberal, democrat, and then the rise of the Nazis, the cruelty, the mob violence, kristallnacht, and the camps. By comparison, how wonderful to find a life where these things don’t matter, where perhaps ignorance or distance or good manners sweep so much of that away. (This is not to claim, of course, that antisemitism was or is absent in British life; the last few years have made that horrifyingly clear.) But Leo and Tom are torn because that also feels like an evasion and a lie. An evasion of the real horrors that have imprinted a fugitive, haunted, quicksilver brilliance to Jewish cultural identity, an eye for the escape route, an ability to absorb culture fiercely because you know, at some moment, you may have to take it with you, in your memory. In the scene, We have seen Leo in an earlier scene holding in the pain and the tears from a bad cut from a broken cup, not wanting to make his presence any more felt than it need be when there are Nazis in the house. Now, his cousin, Nathan, points out the scar and Leo, in the same but stripped room that the accident occurs, finds it flooding back. The scar is not just physical. And one senses here that Stoppard, too, has recovered in preparing for this play a moment of reckoning and responsibility to his own identity, wanting to locate, under the dazzle and the glitter, the truth of things, the weight of the past, to bear witness to suffering, and to take himself seriously. It’s a beautifully written scene, the most powerful of the whole play.

Stoppard is not the sort of writer to force contemporary parallels on his audience. Indeed, he could hardly have predicted what the scene where they discuss the reluctance of western countries to exceed their quotas for taking in Jewish refugees would feel like in a theatre in August 2021 after the collapse of Afghanistan to the Taliban. But the early scenes and the later scenes as the characters complacently insist that the worst will not happen or will not happen again, as we all note the reappearance of fascism in the heart of European and American politics, send an appropriate frisson through its audience.

Sorry for not saying much about Patrick Marber’s production: it’s beautifully paced, open, witty, serious where it needs to be. The enormous cast are blistering as they take us into hell, not putting a foot wrong. Richard Hudson’s set is opulent and haunted, solid and evanescent.

Anyway, I’m 20 months late in seeing this play but it may be Stoppard’s best and, I now find myself thinking, Stoppard’s best is pretty close to the best of the best.

Playwrights in Lockdown: Season 4

After a brief hiatus, I’ve just released Season 4 of my Playwrights in Lockdown series. There’s a good mix of veterans and newcomers, English and Scots, planners and improvisers. They were such fun to do (stay for the very end of Kieran Hurley and Terry Johnson’s to get a strong sense of what they were like to interview). There’s lots of wonderful inspiration here for any

Dennis Kelly https://youtu.be/qUlgVCeHGYI
David Edgar https://youtu.be/6s5rZpaY7q4
Kieran Hurley https://youtu.be/YDJiC7rEpXQ
Vinay Patel https://youtu.be/LNkBfYAWSUI
Linda McLean https://youtu.be/3ln_jbw6Wxo
Terry Johnson https://youtu.be/NrHnt5NcQvg

For boring scheduling reasons, there’s only one woman in this season, but in the final season (due in July) the balance is improved, I promise. 

Playwrights in Lockdown: Season 3

I’ve been doing interviews with playwrights in lockdown and Season 3 has just dropped. There are some great discussions here. I‘m particularly pleased at how different the experiences are. Kwame Kwei-Armah and John Godber couldn’t be more different. Ella Hickson’s approach is a long way from Joe Penhall. Mark Ravenhill and David Eldridge have quite contrasting approaches to their own work. But they all share a brilliantly articulate passion for what they do.

You can catch the videos here:

• David Eldridge https://youtu.be/jhfjhiA6KHU

• Ella Hickson https://youtu.be/aIsUahE9wiY

• Kwame Kwei-Armah https://youtu.be/3Fgk0fjvtR4

• Mark Ravenhill https://youtu.be/At-JNuET0dA

• Joe Penhall https://youtu.be/xPkZgp2PqKw

• John Godber https://youtu.be/uKJRbEic8Eg

More coming soon!

Playwrights in Lockdown: Season 2

Why am I calling them seasons? Search me. But it feels manageable to drop these interviews in batches of six and, hey, why not call them seasons.

As I explained before, I’ve been interviewing playwrights from our respective quarantines and posting the results on YouTube. I’ve been really cheered by the positive response to the first season and here’s season 2.

The internet connections were a bit flakier this week so have necessitated a bit more editing but I’ve been getting used to iMovie, which really does make this stuff very simple. I’ve generally not tried to hide the edits; they are what they are. The format is kind of similar for all the interviews; there’s a series of questions about their particular processes, from having the idea to doing the final rewrites. I’m hoping that standardisation might help make comparisons across the videos. In the conversation with the wonderful James Graham, we started talking about fonts, so that has now become a standard question (and one, I might say, that the playwrights approach with a level of seriousness that I adore).

There are some great interviews here. Laura Wade on structure is great; Lucy Prebble is hilarious on rewriting; James Graham is brilliant on the first draft. But they’re all good I think.

Here are my season 2ers.

• James Graham https://youtu.be/qqrqyvXTs44

• Laura Wade https://youtu.be/I00CgsoiyTo

• Roy Williams https://youtu.be/k7RvstYDu60

• Simon Stephens https://youtu.be/D0ZMp_a62sI

• Chris Goode https://youtu.be/3ajhwWwP4E0

• Lucy Prebble https://youtu.be/CpWWVQ6rE48

Enjoy!