A load of cobblers…

Oh shut up, Balders. You’d laugh at a Shakespeare comedy.

– Blackadder: Blackadder II

It’s been a long time since I’ve not been utterly gripped by a night at the theatre – the last occasion being a production of The Tempest, with the late Richard Briers (who had been one of my favourite actors until then…) as a somewhat wooden and uninvolved – and therefore quotidian and non-magical – Prospero. Sadly, it was also my young son’s introduction to live-staged Shakespeare (although he loved the retelling of the story in Forbidden Planet, with Walter Pidgeon) – but it doesn’t seem to have caused him any lasting harm!

But, at the Swan, this weekend, I found myself sniggering occasionally, rather than guffawing frequently; and clapping politely, rather than enthusiastically, before leaving the theatre less engaged, excited and involved than I usually am – and it wasn’t for lack of effort from either the actors, designers or musicians: all of whom gave their all (sometimes over-enthusiastically…).

To be honest, the play itself was probably the thing at the root of my disenchantment: especially as I had tried hard to read it beforehand; but found it laborious. Usually such a problem is then remedied by an imaginative production suspending any remaining disbelief – but I’m not convinced that this is possible in this case. Unlike the majority of Shakespeare’s dramas (and, it has to be said, all of the previous contemporary plays in the Swan, this season: including The Roaring Girl, co-authored with Thomas Middleton) – which somehow manage to stay permanently relevant – “One of the most popular Elizabethan plays”, The Shoemaker’s Holiday, by Thomas Dekker (this time solely (sorry)) – just opened, and on until 7 March 2015 – appears, to me, to have aged (and therefore dated) rather badly. (As it overran by nearly twenty minutes, perhaps things will have improved later in the season: and it will be panned in – as my mother would say – rather than simply panned….)

The production itself, though, was – as it was designed to be – gloriously staged: “full of modish costumes: not only fine shoes, but also hoods, farthingales, and periwigs”, as its latest editor, Jonathan Gil Harris, points out, underlining “how the commercial playhouses relied on expensive stage properties… to lure spectators”; and this was exemplified by the foppish Hammon: wonderfully, beseechingly, played by Jamie Wilkes. The RSC’s wardrobe department (under costume supervisor Nicky Fitchett) certainly and skilfully went to town (a bawdy very, very late 16th-century London): at one point dressing the nouveau riche David Troughton’s Falstaffian Simon Eyre as Henry VIII; complemented by Vivien Parry, as Mrs “Lady Madgy” Eyre – the twin of ‘Queenie’ Elizabeth I, from Blackadder II.

The evocative stage design (by Max Jones; lit beautifully by Tina MacHugh) took many of its cues from Westminster Hall (and the rose window from Westminster Abbey?) – suiting the Swan’s wooden galleries and brick walls extremely well; although the deep, stained turquoise flagged floor seemed a little out of place.

Although there were true moments of great comedy (and occasional farce – which I’m not a real fan of…), these, to me, were spread too thinly, and too far apart, and some of the jokes – such as Josh O’Connor’s scripted over-Dutch-accented disguise (in the mould of Officer Crabtree) of Hans the shoemaker; and obvious puns on journeyman Firk’s (Joel MacCormack) name – too repetitive. It also felt (my hearing aids were turned down two notches) like much of the dialogue was shouted, rather than projected – as if the actors (and director Phillip Breen), in trying to authentically recreate the periodic effect, were aiming for the rafters of the original Rose playhouse. For something billed by artistic director Gregory Doran as a “a glorious festive comedy” (featuring the poem The Merry Month of May…!) there was, sadly, very little whole-audience-involved mirth.

The acting (apart from being frequently loud, like a lot of the garb…) was of a uniformly high quality: with many of the company making their RSC debuts. The star of the show, though – from perfectly and authoritatively delivering the prologue to actively taking part in some very vicious morris-dancing – was young Sebastian Dibb: who was a lot more than incidental to the play, and seemed to be on stage as much as any member of the shoemakers’ gang: helping them party like it really was 1599. You could say, I suppose, that they really gave their awl.

I can’t stand all that shouting in the evening.
– Patrick Troughton

The devil’s in the dog-tail…

Ever since the Swan Theatre opened in 1986, there’s been a running quip in the Bard family – when one of us attends a play there we get asked: “Have they changed the seats yet?!”

As much as I adore the Swan as a venue – it’s probably my favourite theatre, just above (sorry) the Barbican’s Pit; the acoustics (because of the size, and the beautiful walls of exposed, aged brick) in my (deafened) opinion are superior to the main Royal Shakespeare Theatre: and I therefore hardly needed the captions at Thursday evening’s thrilling performance of The Witch of Edmonton (only on for one more week) – I do find the reupholstered seats still quite challenging: especially as the majority are nothing but shared, padded benches, some with cinema-style bases. (I noted John Woodvine – whose daughter, Emma, is in charge of the company’s text and voice work – also struggling to fold his imposing frame into one of the stall seats: although he had wisely, and knowledgeably, picked one with somewhat better legroom.)

This time, unusually, I was in the first gallery, directly opposite one of the two surtitle screens; but the Lebensraum (I originally put “wriggle room”: but I like my fellow audience members to keep still, please…) must have been designed by someone (Michael Reardon himself?) with shorter trousers and smaller boots than I: because I felt tightly squeezed between the chair (in front of a standing rail) and the (sumptuous golden wood) balcony – although this did have the advantage of almost forcing me to lean over the stage, gaining what, at times, felt like a private performance, because of the intimacy of the space. (Which is one of the reasons I so love it.)

Being disabled, I always ask for (and so far, have always been granted – by the brilliant RSC Access team) a seat at the left-hand end of a row: which does provide many, many options in the Swan. This week, though – because there was nowhere for me to rest my duff left leg in such a constricted gap – the flip-down seat immediately to my right, fortunately, was vacant: but I therefore spent most of the second half twisted round, at a peculiar angle, resting my right side on the seat-back, to make things a little more expansive. Let me just say that this gemelli impersonation didn’t do the core injury in my neck many favours; and, although I easily ignored the growing pain whilst enthralled in the play, boy, have I paid the price since.

I would therefore ask (by way of drawing the RSC’s attention to this post – them having kindly promoted my previous writing on disability matters) that, as well as flexible wheelchair spaces (which seem so accessible, from what other disabled patrons have told me), can we please have designated chairs with more space in and around them for the walking wounded, as well (of which there were quite a few, on Thursday: some even with crutches): perhaps just moving back, say, one of the single Gallery One rows a couple of feet (ahem) – assuming that Health and Safety would not mind the incursion into the walkway behind…? (In the main theatre, most of the left-hand positions leave plenty of leg-stretching and walking-stick room: so this isn’t usually an issue.)

Apart from that, Mister Bard, how was the show?

Well, it certainly was entertaining, thank you, and distinct (Swan traits, I think); and, although I had read through the prompt book in the Swan Reading Room, beforehand (as is my wont), the company was uniformly excellent in pulling real thrills from it and bringing it to more than life (and death) – as they have consistently throughout this immensely successful Roaring Girls season: from the blood-soaked Arden of Faversham and The White Devil to the uproarious The Roaring Girl itself; and whose Moll Cutpurse was compared to the (supposed) witch’s devil of a Dog at one stage (oh dear) in this play.

The season has also shown how adaptable the bare bones of the Swan can be: and Niki Turner’s deceptively austere set of labyrinthine whispering withes at the rear of the stage – through which Tim Mitchell’s lighting creates haunting spookiness (paralleled with Paul Englishby’s music – especially violinist Zhivko Georgiev’s fiendish demonstration of the darker side of ‘the devil’s instrument’…) – continues behind the stalls, where some of the hectic action takes place.

Each of these productions has featured a guest ‘star’ in the lead rôle: and this time it is the charismatic Eileen Atkins as Mother Sawyer – not so much “roaring” as cursing (and rightfully so) as the eponymous ‘witch’ (who brings a new meaning to ‘spell checking’…) – directed imaginatively, and prudently in period, by the RSC’s artistic director, Gregory Doran (“an honorary Roaring Girl!” according to Erica Whyman: under whose stewardship the season was put together).

The text – somewhat chunkily assembled from the multiple authors’ contributions (you can definitely see the joins…) – ranges from scenes of the sublime (the grief of Ian Redford’s Carter and Geoffrey Freshwater’s Old Thorney is heart-tugging indeed; as well as the grace of Faye Castelow’s murdered bride) to the undoubted star of ridicule, Dafydd Llyr Thomas, as cocky Cuddy Banks (part of a crew of somewhat rude Morris men mechanicals).

This isn’t to say that the play’s messages are dulled in any way by such piece-work; and Doran – who also edited the performed text – gives it air, and lets it speak for itself: thankfully not stopping the audience from seeing – and thus delighting in – its obvious dénouements and dramatic irony. Nor does he shield us from the violence – the blood which is spilled eventually flows into true forgiveness: a salve to the prejudices and differences at the core of the drama.

Ma Sawyer is something of a stooge, a scapegoat for “scandalous malice”, because of her age, sex, and looks: anything or anyone unusual is feared or taunted, or both – “’Tis all one To be a witch as to be counted one…” – sadly, still a leitmotif with applicable significance, nearly four hundred years on. (The play – by William Rowley, Thomas Dekker, John Ford “&c” – was first performed in 1621.) Although initially peeved by this, once she actually gains the powers she has already been accused of having and using – granted by a magnificently cunning Jay Simpson as Satan in canine form (“Were it not possible for thee to become an honest dog yet?”) – revenge is far too tempting: and Atkins portrays this grasping of dark (but not fatal) energy with great subtlety; as well as its eventual, inevitable loss, and her eventual, inevitable (although possibly undeserved) fate – both prompted by devil Dog’s malevolence. Only Cuddy’s simple goodness and strength is a match for the manipulative Lucifer, who is never far from – especially behind – the action: “I know thy qualities too well… therefore henceforth I defy thee. Out, and avaunt!”

The almost accidental nefariousness of Sawyer is contrasted with tangible, innate evil – the eruption of a seed we are all said to possess… – principally Ian Bonar’s astute portrayal of Frank Thorney as an emerging swindler and bigamist: who, rather than trying to extricate himself peaceably from his predicaments, spirals crime upon crime. At first, it is hard not to sympathize with him – perhaps another “scapegoat”? – as he takes us in (knowingly), as well as those around him. But it is not long before we see him for what he truly is – and he gets what he truly deserves. However malevolence emerges and is practised, we are shown, it must be punished.

So let’s every man home… with heavy hearts, yet as merry as we can, though not as we would.

Shall fill with laughter our small theatre…

In the prologue to The Roaring Girl – currently running in the RSC’s Swan Theatre, ‘Mad’ Moll, the heroine (if that’s the right description), dares only promise laughter – as “Tragic passion, And such grave stuff, is this day so out of fashion”.

She – or rather, the Thomases Dekker and Middleton, who co-authored the play – could have a point. Henry IV, part II was on in the main Royal Shakespeare Theatre, whilst we were filling the “small theatre”; however, when I went to see Shakespeare’s history (certainly nowhere near as comedic as part I…), a few weeks ago, there were many, many empty seats – and tonight did not appear, from the size of the crowds, to be any different. Even though the Swan was not quite sold out, last night, there weren’t that many seats free; and the stalls and circle were full – of people, as well as laughter!

Although there is a strong, central theme of female independence – feminism, even (amazing, when you consider the play was written, and first produced, over 400 years ago – and by two men… – although based on the very real Mary Frith…) – this does not mean that all the expected riotous ingredients of lewdness, debauchery and wicked punning of Elizabethan and Jacobean ‘city comedies’ (as also demonstrated by Falstaff, of course, in Eastcheap…) disappear behind the sexual and social politics; nor the (oft-criticized) Victorian setting. As director Jo Davies says, in her introduction to the RSC’s prompt book for the play: “The exuberant materialism of [the Victorian] era seems to fit well… and there’s a stark dramatic contrast between remarkable wealth and the lawlessness of the streets” – especially when you remember Dickens’s notion of “slumming”, and of “the attraction of revulsion”.

Nevertheless, nothing is to be taken too seriously: as is obvious from the first scene onwards; although you may be slightly misdirected by the permanent cross-dressing of Moll, if you are used to such shenanigans – in, say, As You Like It – being a vehicle for romance and comedic misunderstandings: as these are of only of passing interest in the tangle of plots and continually weaving interactions of Moll and the other characters (whose lives she often facilitates).

Yet, in a way, our protagonist takes the idea of Rosalind – especially in her ‘protection’ of Celia, and her transformation into Ganymede… – to its ultimate conclusion: making it a life-choice; showing her command of the stage, her world, and the other characters. It signals her independence; her difference; her refusal to be seen as ‘the weaker sex’.

I have no humour to marry: I love to lie on both sides of the bed myself; and again on the other side. A wife, you know, ought to be obedient, – but I fear me I am too headstrong to obey, therefore I’ll never go about it…. I have the head now of myself and am man enough for a woman: marriage is but a chopping and changing, where a maiden loses one head and has a worse one in its place.

If you take the play as it is, though – a recipe of Shakesperean-era farce, social observation (erring on the side of ridicule), and pantomime – albeit with the added condiments of wantonness and jazz (oh, yes!) – then you will not be disappointed. This is pure entertainment; and to look for anything much deeper – despite Moll’s cleverness; and insistence on being blatant, not latent, in every aspect of her dealings – will probably lead to disappointment.

Lisa Dillon is astounding as Moll; and – although she dominates the stage; and takes the majority of the lines – the rest of the cast (including the creative team and musicians) are wonderful in support: especially in the final scene, which will ensure you have a huge stupid grin on your face (if you’re like me), and maybe a tear (from the jollity, as well as sadness that the night has ended…) in your eye, as you leave the theatre.

Quite possibly the best thing on at the RSC, at the moment.

The journey home was marvellous, too: with a barn owl flying by me, as I left Stratford; a repeat performance of last night’s ‘honey moon’ rising over the Edge Hills; and a muntjac deer investigating the car, as I drove through – and then stopped in, of course – Lower Tysoe. I’m still buzzing, four hours later…!