Ian Grant

Paulina is the prime mover in Shakespeare’s The Winter’s Tale.   It is she who announces the death of Hermione, she who brings Leontes’ baby daughter to him, she who is brave enough to tell him he is insane to believe that Hermione and Polixenes have cuckolded him.   And it is Paulina who requires that all ‘awake your faith’ in the goodness of her magic that brings Hermione back to life and sets in motion the fairy tale dénouement.

Colin Gregory, director of the Garden Suburb Theatre’s production in the appropriately fairy-tale setting of Little Wood at the foot of Hampstead Heath, cast Paulina well.   Playing Paulina, Mary Groom grasped the production with both hands and in her key speeches in the first half, delivered with great clarity and emotional force, she gave Steven Maddocks, playing Leontes with assurance, something substantial to work with.    His response, as his self-generated jealousy moved through realisation of his terrible error to grief and the germ of repentance, grew in emotional depth.   In the second half Leontes was very clearly an older and wiser man, the character’s development fully conveyed.   Paulina’s authority continued into the final scene of the play.

Also strong was Camillo, played by Amos Witztum, whose misery at his forced departure from Sicilia and his strong desire to return, after 16 years exile in Bohemia, were believable.    Jessica Lowery played Hermione, a difficult part, well.   She conveyed clearly the dignity of her heartfelt protestation of innocence at her trial and the warmth of her forgiveness of Leontes in the final scene of the play.   Geoff Prutton and John Colmans as Shepherd, son and father, got Bohemia off to a good start.

Too many voices were underpowered for the outdoor setting, coming from the throat rather than the diaphragm and tending to the higher registers, creating a thinness of tone.   There was a lack of variety in pace, giving a slightly heavy-footed rhythm to the performance.    The wide stage of Little Wood led to some unnecessary route marches to and fro when stillness and a concentration on the words and their meaning would have been preferable.   The music, essential to create the atmosphere of the sheep-shearing feast and the mystery of the unveiling of the statue, was too quiet.

The costuming was a delight,  well designed and made, forming coherent patterns of bright colour appropriate to the changing scenes.   The tableaux of characters were elegant and created charming stage pictures set against the deep green of the foliage and the trunks of the trees.   The choreography by Rachel Berg was good, the dancers well-practised, and a dance with tragic masks before the statue scene was particularly poignant.   Jessica Lowery’s statue of Hermione was still, well-lit and offered an elegant surprise as she came to life.

It was a lovely evening watching and hearing a strange story well told, the audience was closely attentive, held by the performances of the actors and by the visual and psychological magic of the production.

A distinguished critic wrote that ‘it is what it is’. A punter behind me in the theatre said that it was ‘total crap’. This is Peter Brook directing Kathryn Hunter and Marcello Magni.   Are these judgments reasonable?   Or are they missing the point?

The Valley of Astonishment, by Peter Brook and Marie-Hélène Estienne, is about synaesthesia, a neurological condition in which people experience sensations through an apparently unrelated other sense – words become colours, touch is experienced as smell and so on.    Brook and his company have explored the hidden and the unexpected in human behaviour for many years.    The plays derive from extensive research and the script, structure and performance emerge from lengthy rehearsal.    This performance was at the Young Vic, in London.

I saw Peter Brook in a platform discussion after a performance of 11 and 12 at the Barbican in 2009.    He sought, he said, those moments between actors and audience when the house knows that a connection has happened, that a moment of real experience has been made in the theatre.    He spoke of the tide that flows between stage and audience, communicating and receiving.    When the participants, through skill, concentration, expression, listening, behaving create a common understanding at a more than, deeper than intellectual level, that shared human experience is a priceless moment of communion.    It may last for just a few seconds.   It may happen, said Brook, only once or twice not in a performance, but in the whole run of a play.

James Joyce speaks of something similar, through one of his characters, which is apparent in his own writing – the epiphany, the ‘showing forth’ of a moment of experience.   Joyce creates such moments by gradually repeating images, lines, phrases through the course of a story or passage, so that an awareness or familiarity with an idea or sense or expression may develop between writer and reader.   At the moment of epiphany, the phrase or image is placed into the character or narrative context and if the connection is made a recognition, a subconscious nod or shiver of understanding, a communion is formed.

Did this happen in the performance of The Valley of Astonishment?    Perhaps, kind of, maybe not really.   Marcello Magni, in his various characters in the play, is real and creates belief and understanding.    There is a clear connection with the audience, but most strongly when he is playing an entertainer whose overt job is to contact the audience and ask for a response.    This is not communion.    Kathryn Hunter inhabits her character, the main protagonist who has the story, and we hear what it is to have a prodigious memory, in which words are seen in colours and pictures.  We hear and see the stress and anxiety caused by being unable to forget.   This was touching, full of images and believable but it was not communion.    The music was subtle and plangent and set a tone.   The third actor did not project well, and was inaudible to some members of the audience.

Did the audience come with inappropriate expectations?   This is Peter Brook at 85, exploring the human senses and what ‘mind’ means.    It is not Coriolanus or A View from the Bridge.      In his catalogue note, Brook writes that ‘as we explore the mountains and valleys of the brain, we will reach the valley of astonishment…..we will take the spectator into new and unknown territories through people whose secret lives are so intense, so drenched in music, colour, taste, images and memories that they can pass any instant from paradise to hell and back again’.    He did this in A Midsummer Night’s Dream in 1970, which left me in tears and scarcely able to breathe.    In this production, we reached some foothills of interest in the presence of two of our finest actors, performing beautifully.

It wasn’t total crap, and the punter who wanted to be taken on a journey with fully rounded characters had come unprepared, with the wrong expectations.    It was what it was, something like a chamber piece, carefully done with simplicity and elements of wonder and surprise.   It wasn’t what Brook wrote it was going to be, which was a puff, but it was ‘deeply human’ as in his description of the research and rehearsal process.

So that is what it was – human interest, humanely and carefully expressed in the theatre by fine actors.

‘…not purely good, but himself purely, for he allowed himself to be wholly known…’    In the final lines of Arthur Miller’s A View from the Bridge, the lawyer Alfieri, a chorus to the tragedy, releases the power of the play.   We have seen the central character, Eddie Carbone, driven by nothing but his own half-awareness of his desire for his niece, blow apart his wife, his family and his world and destroy himself in the way of it.    Alfieri told us this was coming, and shows us how he encompasses the troubling fact of the illicit passion – he nods, humanely, to Eddie’s inability to hide anything of himself.

Ivo van Hove, the director of this production at the Young Vic in London, strips everything bare, stripping down the cast even, to the central characters.   The staging is simply a shallow white rectangle surrounded by a continuous bench.  There is one door, there is no furniture, there are no props.    This is tragedy as ritual, with all the inevitability of its conclusion foreseen from the beginning, set in motion by the stately music of Faure’s Requiem (in itself an extraordinary juxtaposition with the naturalistic American language).    The characters are intensely acted by an excellent cast.    We know exactly where and when the action is taking place.   The language and the story flow through powerful conversation which is minutely paced.   A passage of text, written as post-dinner conversation, is played with long pauses, more tense as more time than we think we can bear passes between the lines.   The end of the scene, a play-acting of physical violence through a boxing lesson, is the only possible release of Eddie’s entwined anxiety, anger, desire and jealousy.

The long semi-circle of the audience surrounding the bare stage intensifies the pressure of his destiny on Eddie Carbone.  Faure’s setting of the ‘dies irae’ lines of the requiem mass – ‘that day, the day of wrath, calamity and misery, that terrible and exceedingly bitter day’ – music of stately inevitability, perfectly supported the rhythm and drive of the text, so that line by line, minute by minute, Eddie Carbone laid himself bare.   At his end, he was wholly known to us – and, therefore, we know a little more of ourselves – through a most remarkable piece of classic theatre.

‘Here comes the king’ – and a praetorian guard of dark-clad soldiers streams in and circles the Olivier stage, surrounding the formal table at which the daughters sit.     Only then does Lear enter, to interview them.   He is in charge, in a rasping autocratic manner.    Sam Mendes’ production for the The National Theatre proceeds lucidly, intelligently and coherently to strip Lear of his family, his nation, his kingship and eventually his life.

The cast is strong.   Outstanding are Adrian Scarborough as the Fool (channelling Max Wall), Kate Fleetwood and Hannah Stokely as Goneril and Regan, both severe, vicious and flawed but clearly individuals.   Tom Brooke, playing Edgar, made a surprising first entrance as a drifter in the house of his father Gloucester, and was easy meat for Edmund’s treachery.   From the moment on the heath when he became simply ‘unaccommodated man’ he steadily grew into a full-hearted human being.

The hovel on the heath is the turning point, and the Olivier stage turns slowly, slightly disturbingly, as the revolution of the wheel of Fortune makes itself felt, as Lear and Edgar exchange philosophy and Lear beats his head against the storm.

The staging and production values are of the highest quality and presence.  Goneril’s hall is filled with soldiers sitting around the feasting table, with a complete stag, just killed, as its centrepiece.    The stage is open, dark, stark and simple as Lear is raised up on a narrow incline to face the elements.    Gloucester’s eyes are put out in a wine cellar.   The battlefield near Dover is a semi-circle of golden corn, ready for harvest, peopled by troops.    A field hospital and trestle table are the support for Lear and Cordelia as they meet and die.   The play is perfectly paced.

We read Lear clearly in Simon Russell Beale’s performance.   He rasps and misunderstands, beats himself for foolishness and loses his language and wits, plays the fool and yet becomes not mad finally, but elegiac.   And he faces Cordelia’s death with dignity and simplicity.

Yet when I saw Frank Langella play the part in a studio production at Chichester last summer, I wept.

And then is done again and again as the tide flows out and in and welcomes the River Liffey, from James Joyce’s Dublin and all Dublins and all rivers that flow down to the sea.   This riverrun flowed through the voice and body of Olwen Fouéré at the National Theatre’s Shed.    Fouéré’s voice spiralled through five or six selected sections of Finnegans Wake as her body moved and swayed to the music of the language and the pace of the river as it makes its way down.   Fouéré’s voicing created a senssurround, her features were magnetic and her soft breathing through the microphone of the noise of waves softly punctuated the pattern of the text.

The text of Finnegans Wake is made to be spoken and performed.    Its boundaries are only in the minds of its readers.   Joyce was beyond them, the permanent exile always personally and artistically standing apart.   Gerry Kearn, in an article that complements Fouéré’s own comments, says, ‘As the Liffey enters Dublin Bay and loses coherence, it is thinking about separation, even exile: ‘And we’d be married till delth to uspart. And though dev do esparto’.

In her programme note, Fouéré quotes Joyce – ‘…we must write dangerously…A book, in my opinion, should not be planned out beforehand, but as one writes it will form itself.”   And Fouéré adds, ‘He could have been speaking about performance.   Embrace the danger’.   Joyce’s remark was slightly disingenuous, given how much planning underpins Ulysses, but Fouéré’s setting forth on her wordsong monologue has a real sense of letting go and sailing into the unknown, as the sun rises over the river of Dublin and the river of life.

The full house was attentive, sometimes rapt, certainly warm to the jokes and enlightened by Fouéré’s powerful presence and gifts.

Winnie’s happy days and the Duchess of Malfi’s catastrophic days are expressed in and by totally contrasting settings on South Bank stages.

Beckett’s Happy Days is playing at the Young Vic.   Juliet Stevenson is Winnie.   It’s the best performance of this character we have seen and the play reveals more of itself as one gets older.   We recognise the apparent protection that daily routine provides against the searing reality of the human condition.   Unless we are strong and self-sufficient (since ultimately we are alone) the fierce and relentless power of circumstance, like the blazing, bleaching sun in Beckett’s dramatic metaphor, will consume us.    Winnie’s world becomes more and more circumscribed as the hard, dry sand in which she is half-buried, then buried up to the neck, steadily restricts her range of acts.   But her range of seeing, in her mind’s eye, and expressing herself in speech is not restricted.    At the very last, the outgoing and benevolent impulse, and gratitude for sentient life -‘great mercies, great mercies’ – is still in her words to her largely wordless husband as the light finally goes out.   We believed her.

The Duchess of Malfi’s life is brutally extinguished by strangling in a foul prison, yet even her last words express gratitude for the comfort of knowing that her husband is (for the moment) still alive.   But did we believe her trials and her misery?   True, her mantra is ‘I am Duchess of Malfi still’ so she, like Winnie, is hanging on.   But Gemma Arterton’s demeanour was too unruffled, her resistance to the malevolence of her crazed and murderous brothers too simply  social, too polite, for us to connect fully with Webster’s churning characters.

The production is fascinating for the setting, the new Sam Wanamaker Playhouse at the Globe.   A close replica of the late 16th-century indoor theatre at Blackfriars, it is an intimate wooden space, lit principally by candlelight.   The period music, the shape of the space, the intricacies of the stage entrances and balcony supplied much intriguing atmosphere.   The changing light from the ‘day’ seen through windows which were closed as the play progressed, to the different effects achieved by full chandeliers or small sconces showed what possibilities there might be.   The darker the scene the more dramatic, particularly in a play so melodramatic as this, were the effects of the candlelight.   Future productions will explore this.

Two very powerful female leading roles, in utterly contrasting settings, carry us from the 17th to the 21st century, and explore again the unchanging forces that create and play upon us as human beings.

The ghosts nestle, rustle, pinch and pierce the psychology of the five characters.   Terror brushes across the face of Helene, wealthy wife and mother, as she catches the noise of her son giggling softly with the maid, a shuddering reminiscence of her husband’s adulterous behaviour.   The son, dying of syphilis, is hastened on his way as his mother reveals that the maid, Regina, is his half-sister.   Pastor Manders may have ignited the fire that consumed the new orphanage erected to celebrate the memory of Helene’s husband.

This is not melodrama.   Richard Eyre’s production of Ibsen’s play, in fresh language, is subtle, taut and completely absorbing.    The text is full, but played without an interval it drives relentlessly through the emotional tissue of the play’s characters.   Lesley Manville’s Helene, the centre of the play, is utterly believable as she reveals her own and the other characters’ secrets and repressed memories and hopes.

Hiding and revelation are built into the beautifully conceived and constructed set, in which firm, enclosing walls fade into opacity and then translucence.   Snow and rain give way to pale dawn.   Stately, bourgeois surroundings are shown to enclose desire, anguish, brief moments of joy and of understanding.

The pace is everything.   The inexorable bass notes and deep rhythms of the play are given shape by the different characters, in time with each other, then suddenly out of time, jarring us into awareness of a new emotional revelation.   The rhythms merge and part, crossing more and more fiercely as the play builds to its climax, followed by a dying fall, that lets us out into the night.    The faces of the actors at the curtain call were marked by the effort of creating and inhabiting the highly charged world of Ibsen’s Ghosts.

Sinead Morrissey’s collection of poems Parallax, published by Carcanet, won this year’s T.S.Eliot Prize.

At the preview readings of the ten short-listed poets, the public study group attended to Morrissey’s poem, Baltimore, selected by the session’s chair and leader, Professor Vicki Feaver. In the poem, Morrissey creates the sensation of listening for a child’s voice at night, imagining it hidden beneath other extraneous sounds, or even in the sounds of silence.   Each word, rhythm, pause and beat is part of the sculpting of language that delivers a detailed, telling rendering of human experience.

“…silence itself
its material loops and folds enveloping
a ghost cry…”

In the public performance of her work last Sunday evening, Morrissey was the only poet of the short-listed group to recite rather than read.    This gave her performed work a measure of greater immediacy than the readings of the other poets, fine as they were.   It edged closer to the connection between artist and audience to which theatre aspires.

In Bloodshot, currently playing at the St James Theatre in London, Simon Slater performs his heart out in a noir detective puzzle set in seedy 1950s Notting Hill and Belgravia.    The play connects because of the central character, a mid-life talented but undisciplined photographer, a former CID officer inclined to drink, who narrates the action and wants to draw his audience into complicity with his highs and lows.    Slater plays all the characters – the photographer, the three suspects to a murder, the investigating CID man who is his former boss.   His fine acting skills build our belief in the characters, his musical prowess on ukulele and saxophone adding to the richness of the characterisation.     Lyn Gardner’s review in The Guardian is complimentary.

It is a complex and sustained piece of building with words, sights and sounds.   It makes and conveys characters and emotions.  We respond by listening intently and working with what we hear and see.   To Morrissey we respond by listening intently to her public voice and to our inner voices as we read.

Two solo artists taking flight, relishing and risking exposure to communicate.

On January 1st 1962, Dick Rowe , head of A&R at Decca Records, said to the manager of the group he had just auditioned, “Go back to Liverpool, Mr. Epstein. Groups with guitars are out”.   Organised by date, 99,000 music facts (count them) from Johnny Black and his colleagues at MusicDayz  lead to many hours of wonderful wandering in the archives – music, video, text – of this inimitable collection.

It is impossible not to be sucked into the video recordings of bands and artists that have formed the soundtrack of our lives.   Clips from movies, studio sessions, concert performances – holiday hours are consumed.    Don’t put this link onto your business computers (except for professional research purposes, of course).    The text is succinct, just to the point.    The organisation is simple and the navigation straightforward – yet one can reach the facts and the music from a number of different angles – day, date, year, theme, artist, genre and so on.

Johnny has been writing great pieces on music for years as a journalist – and the MusicDayz site lets us benefit from the never-ending research which has produced the huge archives that exist in Johnny’s basement.   From the basement to the cloud – I recommend we join the journey that Johnny is taking day by day with MusicDayz.   Let him know you’re on board.

Two live performances we have attended this last few days:

The Endellion Quartet, four musicians at the peak of their powers, after 35 years of playing together; Massive Dad, three comic actors three years together, playing their way in.

Showcase of 18th- and 19th-century string quartet music at the Wigmore Hall; showcase of 21st-century absurdist sketch comedy at the Courtyard Theatre, Shoreditch.

A cashmere audience, most benefiting from free travel around London; a winter cotton audience, most sharing flats.

The Wigmore Hall virtually sold out; the Courtyard Theatre had set out too few seats.

The Endellion played for two hours or more, and responded to the applause with an encore; Massive Dad did a one-hour show, and the audience wanted more.

The Endellion are the finest exponents of the string quartet repertoire; Massive Dad write their own material, at the beginning of their own organic repertoire.

The Endellion and Massive Dad played, created rhythm and pace, developed musical and verbal ideas, moved together, played off each other, made journeys for and with their audiences, connected and expressed.    We were enriched and entertained by them both.