The Merchant of Venice - Shakespeare's Globe

The Merchant of Venice is an uncomfortable play, dealing as it does with racism, religious enmity and revenge.

It would undoubtedly have had different resonances in Shakespeare’s time from the resonances it has for audiences now. But I can’t imagine it would have been any less uncomfortable back then. Almost every character in this play does or says something questionable, and they are each called out on it by another character. The uncomfortableness is right there in the text.

The conflicts enacted and the complexities of these conflicts are not shied away from in the play. And the Globe’s production of The Merchant of Venice (which I saw Saturday 6^th June 2015) really drew this out.

The ending was particularly powerful – with Jessica’s Jewish identity reasserting itself as her father was forced to convert to Christianity – but the lighter moments also explored the same theme. When Launcelot Gobbo got two audience members up on stage to play his conscience and a fiend, it was hilarious. The guy playing the fiend got three rounds of applause all to himself. But it also signified the confusion over what’s ‘right’ and ‘wrong’ in the play. Gobbo got the audience shouting out for one side or another, all in fun, until all that could be heard was a great muddled din.

It’s interesting, watching The Merchant of Venice from the position of someone in a multicultural, increasingly secular society, where it is not assumed that the majority of the audience is Christian. The audience at the Globe is not expected to automatically identify with the Christians in the play. But what we do see – particularly in this production – is one culture asserting its dominance over others in troubling ways.

In the Globe’s production, this is not just about race and religion. Antonio’s love for Bassanio is also used to show how homosexuality is suppressed. And the female characters, of course, are quite clearly shown to be trapped in a man’s world.

For once, I didn’t mind that there was no jig at the end here. It would have seemed inappropriate after those troubling final scenes. As it was, we left the theatre still feeling troubled and uncomfortable. The world has not resolved these problems yet.

Rebecca - Kneehigh

I’ve not read the novel or seen any other adaptations of it, so I was coming to Rebecca fresh. But regardless of my knowledge of the book, it’s clear that Kneehigh’s stage production of Rebecca is a very inventive adaptation.

As soon as you see the set, you know you’re in for something special. Part grand house in ruins; part seashore; broken staircases running across the stage. And the boat looming centre-stage throughout the first half, reminding us always that Rebecca’s absence is a very real presence in the house.

If any of the audience at Eastbourne’s Devonshire Park Theatre (15^th April 2015) was expecting a straight adaptation, with ‘realistic’ sets and the usual period drama tropes, they would have been taken by surprise by Kneehigh’s Rebecca.

This is a much more stylised adaptation. Set, sound, lighting, puppetry and music all combine to tell the tale and draw out the themes. Such as the combination of jazz music on a gramophone and sea shanties being played by the actor-musicians: the clash of the sophisticated and the elemental.

Obviously if you’ve seen Kneehigh before, or know them by reputation, then you know that they’re nothing if not inventive. Rebecca features their trademark music, comedy and playfulness and ties these up in a full on, dark, ambitious production.

I remember seeing Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge in the cinema when it came out, and having to take a moment at the end just to recover from the force of the visual and aural whirlwind that had just swept around me.

I felt a bit like that at the end of Rebecca.

Very much worth seeing.

Shakespeare in Love - Noel Coward Theatre

Clever, fast-paced, energetically played and slickly mounted, this stage adaptation of the film Shakespeare in Love is worth seeing before it closes. I caught it on Saturday 11^th April 2015.

Like the film, the play is littered with references to Shakespeare’s plays and poems. Other well-known playwrights and actors of the period feature as characters – as do monarchs, come to that. The audience is expected to know these references and to recognise them quickly. The pace does not let up for a moment.

Being a regular Globe-goer, I appreciated how the set on the stage of the Noel Coward Theatre cleverly mimicked the Elizabethan-style theatre. The scenes where we were watching the characters backstage (in the foreground) looking out onto the actors onstage were particularly well done.

(It perhaps goes without saying that I thought the way the play within a play was handled here was much better than in Peter Pan Goes Wrong).

With Elizabethan-style music and a jig at the end of the play, Shakespeare in Love consciously echoes the conventions of Elizabethan theatre. I couldn’t help thinking how fun it would be to see this put on at the Globe. Some of the cleverness of the set might have to be jettisoned, but it would bring the kind of immediacy and sense of fun to the production that is a struggle to achieve in a proscenium arch theatre.

As it is, though, Shakespeare in Love has a pretty good go at recreating that atmosphere, and it’s undoubtedly a clever, witty show.

On the Road by Jack Kerouac

I’ve just realised that I’ve only been writing about theatre recently, and haven’t told you about any of the books I’ve been reading.

The most recent one I finished was On the Road by Jack Kerouac. This is an incredibly vivid evocation of a time, a place and an attitude. So much so that you almost feel as if you’re experiencing it yourself.

Except that there are jarring points for a 21^st century reader. You rush along with it up to a certain point and then you think – oh, hang on, that’s not on.

This is especially true, for me, in the depiction of and attitudes towards women. I’d be really interested in reading a Wide Sargasso Sea kind of novel from a female character’s perspective. Maybe one of Dean’s wives, or one of the Mexican prostitutes, or even Sal’s aunt. What are their stories?

But On the Road is about capturing one man’s impressions of his travels and of his friends and of the people he encounters. And what it sets out to do, it does perfectly. You can definitely see why it’s called a classic.

Peter Pan Goes Wrong - Mischief Theatre

Laughter is a funny thing. (Pun intended). I can spend all day laughing at little things – but go into a theatre to watch something that’s designed to make people laugh and my laughter becomes something different. Suddenly it’s a reward I can choose to bestow or not. It’s an effort. It’s something that has to be cajoled out of me.

Or at least, that’s how it felt while watching Mischief Theatre’s Peter Pan Goes Wrong at the Devonshire Park Theatre, Eastbourne, on 24^th March 2015.

People around me were in hysterics. I found some bits quite amusing. I suppose it’s all personal taste.

This play comes from the same people as The Play that Goes Wrong, which by all accounts is very funny indeed. So I went into Peter Pan Goes Wrong ready and expecting to be entertained.

The conceit of the play is that a small amateur dramatics society is putting on a Christmas production of Peter Pan. For me – while they squeezed the mileage out of the am dram bit – they could have made more of the Peter Pan bit.

The original Peter Pan (without anything going wrong) is a playful, mischievous text. It’s full of knowing winks to the audience and doesn’t shy away from the fact that it creates an imaginary world where fantastical, ridiculous things happen. I can’t help but feel that if Mischief Theatre could have found a way to tease this out in Peter Pan Goes Wrong then they would have had a much funnier play on their hands.

But they weren’t really interested in Peter Pan. Their main focus was the am dram aspect of it all, which they played well. They were completely committed to the world they created for the amateur theatre company.

The programme on sale had biographies for the characters within the play who were the cast of Peter Pan. There were fake adverts in the programme which related to the world of the play. In the interval, Christmas music was played – as Peter Pan was supposed to be the amateur company’s Christmas production.

We, the audience, were very much cast as the audience at the amateur company’s performance. When the cast addressed us as the audience, they were in character as the amateur actors addressing their own local audience. They played it straight in this respect.

There was no suggestion of the third layer – that we were an audience at the Devonshire Park Theatre watching a professional company pretending to be amateurs. There was no knowing wink to the audience, nor any acknowledgement that they were creating an imaginary world where ridiculous things happen.

Any why should there be? Judging by the laughter around me, this wasn’t a problem for most of the audience. But I found it a tricky position to be in. I was being asked to suspend my disbelief – and yet I was also being asked to laugh. If I really did buy into the world of the play, then the evening was not funny but painful. Lord knows I’ve seen enough not-very-good amateur productions in my time.

Despite these reservations, there were moments that made me laugh out loud. And there were moments that I recognised with amusement from real productions I’d seen. I just felt that it could have been much funnier if only Mischief Theatre’s writing and direction had been a little more mischievous.

Farinelli and the King - Sam Wanamaker Playhouse, Shakespeare's Globe

I went to see the last performance of Farinelli and the King at the Globe’s Sam Wanamaker Playhouse on Sunday 8^th March 2015, and I haven’t had much time to write about it since. So sorry this is rather short!

This was a strange, sad little play – both humorous and melancholy. Musing on the relationship between dreams and reality, madness and reason, the physical and the metaphysical, the court and the forest, private and public.

The dual casting of Farinelli – singer (William Purefoy) and actor (Sam Crane) playing the same role – only heightened this sense of duality. The voice as separate from the man.

And surely the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse is the ideal setting for this play. Close, candlelit, intimate, but with obscured sightlines meaning you could only ever see part of the action. A wonderful acoustic, too – important for the music.

It was my first visit to the Globe’s indoor theatre and it felt a little strange coming to the Globe and not worrying about the weather. It’s another magical space, though. And it’s always a pleasure to see Mark Rylance do his thing. Especially here.

Alice's Adventures in Wonderland - The Royal Ballet

Is there a better start to a performance than the sound of an orchestra tuning up? That single A note and then the rest of the instruments joining in… And then the conductor comes on and we all applaud and we’re off!

The Royal Ballet’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland (at the Royal Opera House Dec 2014) has all the trappings of a traditional ballet, which it at once subverts and enjoys beautifully. The music and choreography feel as if they would fit in one of the classics, at times nodding to ballets such as Swan Lake in an affectionate pastiche.

The notorious multiple curtain calls of a ballet are also in some evidence here – but they are lampooned by the Queen of Hearts’ unashamed milking of the audience applause at the end of her solos.

It’s interesting that the Queen of Hearts (Zenaida Yanowsky) is the only one to break the fourth wall and acknowledge the audience’s presence mid-story. Twice, still perfectly in character, she encourages the audience to applaud more – and then signals when to stop. Perhaps inevitably, she’s the dancer who gets the biggest cheer of the night at the final curtain call.

But then who would have thought that a classical ballet could be so funny? The Queen of Hearts, in particular, is a great comic creation, but Alice (Sarah Lamb), the White Rabbit (Ricardo Cervera), and others all prompt laughs too. It’s all so perfectly choreographed and performed, it seems effortless in managing to be both funny and beautiful, traditional and new.

And it’s imaginatively put together besides the actual dancing and music too. The use of projections and puppetry in telling this dreamlike tale are incredibly effective, the floating Cheshire Cat is inspired, and the costumes (particularly the tutus in the shape of suits of cards) are very clever.

The story of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland has been adapted to fit a ballet style and structure in this production. So we have the usual characters and set pieces like the Mad Hatter’s tea party (in this ballet the Mad Hatter tap dances!), but we also have a framing narrative (or two) and a bit of a love story as well. We see roles being doubled up – along the lines of Hook/Mr Darling in Peter Pan, here we have Queen of Hearts/Mother – and the bringing of part of the story into the present day provides another fresh angle.

All of this draws on and feeds into the sense of Alice in Wonderland as a sort of modern myth or folk tale. Like Peter Pan, the story and characters are so well known that they can be shaped and pulled any which way and still feed back into the myth. The ‘original’ almost ceases to matter when a story has permeated the culture to such an extent. Alice is like Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty now – she’s in a book, a Disney film, a ballet. A story that gets retold. Re-imagined. And surely that’s the best any story can hope for?