Bad Behavior: The Treatment, Gloria, Ink

Aisling Loftus in The Treatment at the Almeida Theatre in London. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

London’s Almeida Theatre revived Martin Crimp’s 1993 play The Treatment in late spring, and I was lucky enough to catch it before it closed. Crimp’s plays are unfamiliar to North Americans, but this is the work of a very gifted playwright – an absurdist comedy roughly in the style of Harold Pinter, but funnier and more sly. Lyndsey Turner’s first-rate production showcased those qualities. In New York City, a young woman named Anne (Aisling Loftus) answers an ad to tell her story to a husband-and-wife producing team (Julian Ovenden and Indira Varma) who are on the lookout for promising film properties. As Anne relates a bizarre tale of a husband who locked her in their apartment, tied her to a chair and gagged her, Jennifer, the female half of the team, adds her own commentary, subtly changing the story to make it more camera-worthy. As the project acquires a screenwriter (Ian Gelder) and a star (Gary Beadle), it undergoes more alterations. Everyone has his or her own take on Anne’s story, including the young intern (Ellora Torchia) in the production company office who winds up playing the leading role in the movie. Eventually we realize that everyone – including Anne – is operating in an entirely self-serving mode, except, ironically, for her notorious husband Simon (Matthew Needham), who is crazy and violent but not toward her, and who is devoted to protecting her from a crazy, violent world. There are no reliable versions of the narrative; everything’s up for grabs, including the truth about whether Anne or Simon is the controlling figure in their marriage. Turner had an excellent cast, including Ben Onwukwe as a blind cab driver and Hara Yannas, doubling as a waitress and a madwoman; Varma, memorable as Ann in the Simon Godwin’s production of Man and Superman at the National, was the standout.

Shakespeare in London

The closing image of The Comedy of Errors at the Globe. (Photo: Marc Brenner)

One of the consequences of Covid and its attendant economic challenges for London theatre is the shortage of classical English productions this summer – even, and most glaringly, Shakespeare. This is the only time I’ve ever been in London at this time of year when the National Theatre isn’t mounting a single play by Shakespeare. All I’ve managed to see are The Comedy of Errors (his first comedy) at Shakespeare’s Globe and Romeo and Juliet (his earliest tragedy) at the Almeida.

1984 in the 21st Century

Simon Coates, Christopher Patrick Nolan, Hara Yannas, Sam Crane, Tim Dutton, Stephen Fewell, Mandi Symonds & Matthew Spencer in 1984, at London's Almeida Theatre. (Photo by Manuel Harlan)

Robert Icke and Duncan Macmillan’s exciting production of George Orwell’s 1984 (they did the adaptation as well as directing it) began two years ago at the Nottingham Playhouse and toured around the U.K. before opening at the Almeida in London and subsequently the West End earlier this year. (It will tour the U.S. this fall, including a stop at the American Repertory Theatre in Cambridge.) Orwell’s 1949 classic is inherently dramatic, though both movie versions – one in 1956 and a second, naturally, in 1984 – were disappointments. (A 1953 television production for  CBS's Studio One attracted some notice, but I’ve never seen it.) Icke and Macmillan’s 1984 is relatively modest, though the stagecraft in the climactic scene where the Thought Police arrest Winston (Matthew Spencer) and his lover Julia (Janine Harouni) is quite sophisticated. The show has a cast of nine and Chloe Lamford’s set, which looks like a slightly moldy English library from the Depression era, also does service as an office, an apartment and a canteen; it manages to both look anonymous and suggest a nostalgic glimpse of an earlier England.

Secrets and Lies: Ghosts, A View from the Bridge, and Cymbeline

Jack Lowden and Lesley Manville in Ghosts, at Trafalgar Studios. (Photo by Hugo Glendinning)

Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s Ghosts, starring Lesley Manville, which opened at London’s Almeida Theatre in 2013 and then moved to Trafalgar Studios, is booked into the Brooklyn Academy of Music for a month beginning Easter weekend. Aside from Manville, I’m not sure which members of the original cast will be appearing in Brooklyn; it is to be hoped that all of them will. I’ve seen a digital transcription of the production as it appeared at Trafalgar Studios, and it’s gripping. Eyre, who also adapted the text, orchestrates the play at a breathless pace, bringing it in at just over an hour and a half without intermissions. (There are three acts, and other versions of it I’ve seen have tended to run about an hour longer.) The urgency of the show dominates the experience, as well as the intimacy of the house, which you can feel even when you see it in HD; I’m not sure how well the second will translate in the BAM space, but certainly it’s well worth seeing in any environment.

More Kings, More Turmoil: The Return of The Hollow Crown

Benedict Cumberbatch as King Richard III in The Hollow Crown.

Extending the British television series The Hollow Crown to include all the rest of Shakespeare’s history plays (except King John) is a boon for completists, perhaps. (PBS ran all three parts of Season 2 before the new year.) But moving from the Henriad, which covers the reigns of Richard II, Henry IV and Henry V, to the next chronological section, from the crowning of Henry VI to the crowning of Henry VII, is anti-climactic. Richard II, Henry IV, Part 1 and Henry V are masterpieces, and Henry IV, Part 2 contains some great scenes, but the three parts of Henry VI, which Shakespeare wrote – or perhaps collaborated on – at the beginning of his career, aren’t very good plays. I applauded the first act of Ivo Von Hove’s Kings of War, which cut Henry VI to the bone and made it dramatically exciting; after sitting through Dominic Cooke’s version (from an adaptation by him and Ben Power), I admire it even more.

Modernists: Naked and Uncle Vanya

Tara Franklin and James Barry in the Berkshire Theatre Group production of Naked. (Photo: Emma Rothenberg-Ware)

Among the virtues of the Berkshire Theatre Group is its dedication to reviving forgotten plays, both American and European. The BTG summer season included The Petrified Forest, and currently you can see an excellent mounting of Luigi Pirandello’s Naked. Italy’s famous modernist playwright, who invented a new style of theatre, theatre of identity (usually known simply as Pirandellian theatre), with Six Characters in Search of an Author in 1921, wrote Naked the following year. It was a remarkably prolific time for Pirandello, who turned out fourteen plays and a novel between 1921 and 1929; Naked was one of three plays he wrote in 1922 alone, including his second masterpiece, Henry IV. But I’d never read or seen it before. It’s rarely performed, and though I have six or eight Pirandello plays on my shelves, Naked isn’t among them. BTG is using the Nicholas Wright translation, which was produced at the Almeida in London nearly twenty years ago 2000 with Juliette Binoche and then in New York with Mira Sorvino.

Absurdists: A Delicate Balance, Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead & Betrayal

Imelda Staunton and Lucy Cohu in A Delicate Balance. Photo: Hugo Glendinning

Among the wide range of plays in revival in London last summer were three absurdist classics – Edward Albee’s A Delicate Balance, Tom Stoppard’s Rosencrantz and Guildenstern Are Dead and Harold Pinter’s Betrayal. The Albee, an attack on upper-middle-class family life, was the first thing he wrote after Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, and you can see all the marks of an American playwright struggling to follow a runaway critical and popular success: it’s hyper-conscious and overstated and the last act in particular seems to go on forever. Gerald Gutierriez mounted it in New York in the mid-nineties with a brilliant cast (led by George Grizzard and Rosemary Harris as the aging couple, Agnes and Tobias, and Elaine Stritch as Agnes’s bitchy, alcoholic sister Claire) and had the good sense to treat it as a high comedy, which made it work quite marvelously for two of the three acts – the characters’ maddening articulateness made sense. James Macdonald’s production at the Almeida was a more standard reading, like the droning 1973 Tony Richardson movie version with Katharine Hepburn, Paul Scofield and Lee Remick, and unless you’re more of an admirer of Albee’s language than I am it’s rough going.

London Theatre High Points: Two New English Plays

Elizabeth Chan, Benedict Wong and David K.S. Tse in Chimerica

Lucy Kirkwood’s Chimerica, which just finished up a run at London’s Almeida Theatre and is relocating to the West End, is constructed as a political mystery in which, thirteen years after Tiananmen Square, an American photojournalist named Joe Schofield (Stephen Campbell Moore) tries to hunt down the unknown Chinese man with two shopping bags in his hands who faced off one of the tanks. The “Tank Man,” an iconic figure of the protest-turned-slaughter, was the real historical figure Kirkwood began with (just as John Logan began with an authentic literary-historic footnote, the meeting of the models for Alice in Wonderland and Peter Pan in a London bookshop, in Peter and Alice). In her otherwise fictional script, Joe, only eighteen at the time, is one of several people who immortalized him, in a photograph that he snapped from the balcony of his hotel room. So the play is also about the power of the photograph and the many ways in which it can be reinterpreted and manipulated. And it’s an exploration of life in a totalitarian state, of the frightening speed of China’s industrial progress, and of the bizarre relationship between China and the west, represented here by both the U.S. and Britain: the main female character, Tessa Kendrick (Claudie Blakley), who becomes Joe’s lover, is an English market researcher whose specialty is counseling western companies that seek to expand into China. (Kirkwood borrowed the title from Niall Ferguson’s book The Ascent of Money.) The play, which is set at the time of the 2012 presidential election but includes flashbacks to 1989, is also a study of heroism and compromise. It’s insanely ambitious, flawed and overlong. Yet it’s a true political drama, thoughtful and complex, and in Lyndsey Turner’s production one of the most exciting evenings I’ve spent at the theater in the last few years.

Haunted: Ibsen's Ghosts at Lincoln Center

Lily Rabe and Levon Hawke in Ghosts. (Photo: Jeremy Daniel.)

When she reviewed Shoot the Moon in 1982, the film critic Pauline Kael wrote, “I’m a little afraid to say how good I think [it] is – I don’t want to set up the kind of bad magic that might cause people to say they were led to expect so much that they were disappointed.” Every critic who has been at the job for a long time recognizes this dilemma, though God knows it doesn’t come around very often. Kael’s next sentence is “But I’m even more afraid that I can’t come near doing this picture justice.” That’s my mood as I sit down to compose my thoughts on Jack O’Brien’s revival of Ibsen’s Ghosts, from a new adaptation by Mark O’Rowe, which will be playing upstairs in Lincoln Center’s Mitzi E. Newhouse Theater through April 13. O’Brien, who served as artistic director at the Old Globe in San Diego for four and a half decades, has helmed dozens of plays, many of them high-profile, and I have loved some of them, like Hairspray and the 2016 Broadway revival of The Front Page and the two runs he took at All My Sons, on TV in 1987 and in New York in 2019. (The earlier version, which was released on DVD, is unforgettable.) But his work with a quintet of actors in Ghosts is one of the most staggering evenings I’ve ever spent in the theatre.

Roundabout’s Machinal

Rebecca Hall & Morgan Spector in Machinal (Photo by Joan Marcus)

Before it was rediscovered in the early nineties – it was produced at the Public in New York in 1990 and three years later at the National Theatre in London – Sophie Treadwell’s Machinal was a forgotten artifact of the experimental American theatre of the twenties. (There was a TV adaptation in the mid-fifties and a short-lived off-Broadway revival in 1960.) The script was out of print for decades; when I wanted to teach it, I had to rely on an old anthology of early American plays. Now the play pops up occasionally on college campuses – my own department has mounted it – though Lyndsey Turner’s production at the Roundabout Theatre marks the first time it’s appeared on Broadway since its 1928 premiere. Treadwell adapted the generic German Expressionist protest drama (the protagonist moves through one episode after another, on a journey of self-discovery that leads inevitably to disaster) most famously developed by Georg Kaiser in From Morn to Midnight. She wasn’t the first American writer to do so – O’Neill had got there before her with The Hairy Ape, and Elmer Rice with The Adding Machine – but to the usual themes of this kind of play (the soulless mechanization of modern society, the restrictions of class, the grim triumph of materialism) she added a specifically feminist orientation. She wasn’t the only playwright working to take this genre in new directions: the first American Expressionist drama I know of, O’Neill’s 1920 The Emperor Jones, was about race. But she and Susan Glaspell, whose 1916 Trifles was in last summer’s season at the Shaw Festival, were pioneers, since hardly any women were getting plays of any description produced in the early decades of the twentieth century, let alone feminist ones.

New Plays: Tell Me I’m Not Crazy and The Hunt

Mark Blum and Jane Kaczmarek in Tell Me I’m Not Crazy. (Photo: Joseph J. O'Malley)

The four characters in Sharyn Rothstein’s new play Tell Me I’m Not Crazy, playing at the Nikos Stage in Williamstown, represent two shaky marriages and two generations of a contemporary Jewish-American family. Sol (Mark Blum) is at loose ends after coming to the end of a career in human resources. His wife Diana (Jane Kaczmarek), an elementary-school teacher, hoped that Sol’s retirement would allow them to spend the kind of quality time together that his job has prevented but is dismayed to discover that they’re more distant than ever – and that their sex life has dwindled to nothing. Their son Nate (Mark Feuerstein), having failed to find his niche in the photography world, has been playing the role of caregiver for his two young children while his wife Alisa (Nicole Villamil) pursues a career in advertising that demands more and more time away from the family. When their three-year-old’s behavioral problems at daycare prompt immediate action, it’s Nate who has to carry the ball. Both marriages threaten to implode when Sol, distressed over some recent home invasions in their nice middle-class neighborhood, purchases a gun. Alisa and Nate stop bringing their kids over to his folks’, Diana throws Sol out of the house, and rather than back-pedal on his vow to take extreme steps to keep his family safe, Sol exacerbates the problem by joining a neighborhood vigilante group.

Rothstein has a talent for funny one-liners, and for the first half-hour or so (the play runs an hour and forty minutes without intermission) you think she’s onto something: a satirical comedy about couples trying to negotiate gender roles in the twenty-first century – as well as racial realities, since Alisa is Hispanic and Sol’s anger and paranoia about the danger to his suburb provokes him to assume that the perpetrators must be illegal immigrants. Rothstein keeps piling on more and more issues and revelations, and the only way the play could possibly support all of them is in the form of a nutty absurdist comedy that keeps threatening to go off the rails, like the ones Christopher Durang is famous for. Instead it gets more and more serious and you stop believing in it at all. I think that happens as soon as Sol comes clean about joining the neighborhood enforcers, a totally implausible development for this character except in an absurdist work. The play is a mess. The dramaturgy falls apart completely in a series of second-act scenes where each of the characters makes an announcement that, we find out five minutes later, is actually a lie. It feels as though Rothstein is making it all up as she goes along.

To Own Your Creation: Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein and The Children

Krysty Swann and Robert Fairchild in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein. (Photo: Shirin Tinati)

Robert Fairchild gives a supremely touching performance as The Monster in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which just ended a brief run at the Pershing Square Signature Center in New York City. His role in Eve Wolf’s adaptation is a hybrid of dance (which he choreographed) and acting, and Fairchild, the New York City Ballet alum who spent most of the last couple of years playing Jerry Mulligan in the stage adaptation of An American in Paris, is a great dancer who also happens to be a fine actor. Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein was produced by a company that calls itself Ensemble for the Romantic Century, and Fairchild’s Monster, childlike and exuberant, fragile and openhearted, gets at the Romantic (capital “R”) core of Shelley’s novel, in which a man-made creation struggles to understand his place in the universe and rebels against his creator.

Rarities at Stratford and the Shaw Festival: Nathan the Wise, Sex, and Rope

Diane Flacks (centre) with members of the company in Nathan the Wise. (Photo: David Hou)

Nathan the Wise by the German Enlightenment playwright Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (it was written in 1779) is so seldom performed that I’d never heard of it until Canada’s Stratford Festival elected to produce it this summer. It’s a fable, set in ancient Jerusalem, with more narrative complications than a Shakespearean romance. The title character (played by Diane Flacks) is a wealthy Jew who has used his fortune to maintain friendly relations with the powerful Muslim and Catholic forces in the city, represented respectively by the young Sultan, Saladin (Danny Ghantous), and the old Patriarch (Harry Nelken). When Nathan returns from a business trip, Daya (Sarah Orenstein), the Christian woman who manages his household and takes care of his daughter Rachel (Oksana Sirju), tells him that Rachel was rescued from a fire by an itinerant Knight Templar (Jakob Ehman) with whom she has fallen in love. The Knight Templar, a soldier in the service of the Catholic Church, has also won the affection of the Sultan, who slaughtered his fellows – prisoners captured in the holy war between the Christians and the Muslims – but spared his life because he looks so much like Saladin’s long-lost brother. The story is a series of revelations of the true identities of the characters, not just the Knight Templar but also Rachel, and of Nathan’s own past. And of course, it’s a plea for tolerance in which two of the three voices of racial hatred – Saladin and the Knight Templar – prove to be capable of crossing the boundaries that separate Christians, Muslims and Jews. The Patriarch, who at one point advocates burning Nathan at the stake, is the third, and he doesn’t alter his point of view.