Monthly Archives: November 2019

  • Present Laughter (theatre)

    Old YorkerTheatre on screen review

    Matthew Warchus (2019)

    This revival of Noël Coward’s Present Laughter ran for a limited season at the Old Vic from mid-June to mid-August 2019.  A performance during the last week of the run was broadcast live to cinemas; Sally and I saw a recording of the broadcast at Curzon Richmond.  The play was preceded by a pair of introductions – first from Dustin Lance Black (the writer of Milk), next from Matthew Warchus and the cast, headed by Andrew Scott.  Black’s contribution, which he read inexpertly from autocue, was otiose and irritating.  Telling the audience that what they’ll be seeing is wonderful, as he did, is liable to be counterproductive:  at the least, it reinforces your determination to make up your own mind.

    Warchus and his actors talked quite a bit about reinterpreting Coward’s eighty-year-old[1] comedy to reflect modern, more enlightened sexual attitudes.  In Andrew Scott’s phrase, ‘It’s been good to emancipate the play’.  The protagonist Garry Essendine is a big-name theatre actor, fearfully entering middle-age and approaching career decline.  The narcissistic Garry needs admiration and attention from others (as Warchus points out in the programme note, the curious surname Essendine is an anagram of neediness).  At the same time, he feels suffocated by his celebrity.  The three-act play shows him contending with, among others, his nearly ex-wife, Liz; his critical but loyal secretary, Monica Reed; his manager, Morris Dixon; his producer, Henry Lyppiatt; and Henry’s wife, Joanna.  These are the members of Garry’s inner circle or, as he calls them, his ‘family’.  He also has to deal with the attentions of a couple of young devotees:  Daphne Stillington, a groupie with theatrical ambitions; and Roland Maule, an unhinged playwright.  Act I begins on the morning after Daphne has spent the night chez Garry; Act II ends on the morning after Joanna has done likewise.  Peter Hall wrote of Present Laughter (in his diaries for the period 1972-80), ‘what a wonderful play it would be if – as Coward must have wanted – all those love affairs were about homosexuals’.

    Warchus’s version of Present Laughter goes some way towards adjusting things in just that way by gender-switching the characters of Henry and Joanna Lyppiatt.  Garry’s manager is now Helen (Suzie Toase), who’s married to Joe (Enzo Cilenti).  He’s been having a clandestine affair with Morris (Abdul Salis), who adores him, but Joe really desires Garry, whom he succeeds in seducing.  When all is revealed to all concerned in the closing stages, it also emerges that Helen has been in a secret relationship with another woman.  I’m ambivalent about these changes.  Pace Peter Hall, the substitution of straight proxies for gay characters in the work of Coward (and of other homosexual writers of the period like Terence Rattigan) gives an unspoken tension to, and sometimes deepens the interest of, the plays in question.  Besides, I’m not sure that changing the sexes of characters without significant other changes to the text of Present Laughter is sufficient.  In the context of this production, though, you can hardly complain that Joanna has become Joe.  The dependably good (and versatile) Enzo Cilenti  is outstanding among the supporting cast.  The exchange that ends with Garry succumbing to Joe is emotionally richer than any other.

    It’s widely assumed that Garry Essendine is a self-portrait of Noël Coward, who originated the role.  Photographs of the 1942 production show him dressed in a silk dressing-gown – looking, in other words, just as we expect Coward to look.  We take it as read that he also sounded as we expect him to sound.  He casts a long shadow over the play.  It’s not surprising that a present-day interpreter of Garry wants to distinguish himself decisively from Coward.  Andrew Scott’s much-admired portrayal (awarded this year’s Evening Standard Best Actor prize a few days ago) is a physical and vocal tour de force.  It must be an exhausting performance to give; it’s exhausting to receive too.

    Other characters keep telling Garry that he’s an inveterate actor to the extent that he never stops acting – and can’t see that he never stops.  Scott certainly vindicates these remarks.  He also repeatedly impresses with his comic timing and vocal dexterity.  What he does demands great skill, as well as colossal stamina.  Yet it’s based in an essentially reductive idea of acting as egomaniac showing off – and becomes an example of just that.  Garry’s relentless performing is affecting only when Joe is seducing him, and Garry resorts to pretence in an unavailing attempt to resist.

    I might feel differently about Scott’s playing if we hadn’t seen his Hamlet in the West End two years ago (in the flesh rather than via a cinema screen).  There too he was tirelessly witty but increasingly gave the impression that his priority was a series of inventive, unexpected line readings rather than coherent characterisation.  He achieved his main aim, in spite of a speech pattern uncannily like Graham Norton’s – a resemblance that’s even harder to ignore listening to Scott’s Garry.  There’s another, surprising issue.  At forty-three, he’s exactly the age Noël Coward was in the original production and a couple of years older than Garry is meant to be.  Andrew Scott should be just the right age yet he looks too boyish, not remotely on the turn – another element that detracts from Garry’s supposed vulnerability.

    Like it or not, there’s a logic to Scott’s interpretation but why is nearly everyone else competing with his high-energy, high-decibel performance?  (Scott wins the competition hands down.)  Garry makes his first entrance to join Monica (Sophie Thompson) and Daphne (Kitty Archer) on stage.  The effect of this trio going full tilt is disorienting:  you know there are three different characters speaking but you seem to be hearing the one, same, exaggerated voice.  Sophie Thompson’s swooping vocals are particularly disappointing – a re-run of what she did so enjoyably (along with much more) as Adelaide in the Guys ‘n’ Dolls that Sally and I saw at the Savoy Theatre in 2015.  When Thompson calms down in Monica’s last scene with Garry, she’s expressive and touching – making what’s gone before seem all the more a waste of her eccentric talents.

    The same thing happens, in miniature, with Liza Sadovy as the emphatically Scandinavian cleaner, Miss Erikson:  her best moment is the only moment that Sadovy doesn’t overplay.  (She doubles up as Daphne’s aunt, a wheelchair-bound dowager, in a more broadly farcical scene that suits her histrionics better.)  Luke Thallon’s turn as Roland Maule takes some doing but is the most blatant attempt to take Andrew Scott on at his own game.  No wonder that Joshua Hill, contrastingly naturalistic as Garry’s droll manservant Fred, scores a hit with nearly every line:  he speaks rather than shrieks.  Indira Varma’s Liz is more varied than most of the others; it’s a pity her range extends to blandness.  In this company, Enzo Cilenti’s strong presence, in combination with his easy, effective switches of mood and pace, is manna from heaven.

    Yet the theatre audience, whose reactions naturally drowned out most of those in the cinema, laughed loudest when the acting was at its coarsest.  Plenty of people seem to feel the art of stage acting is a matter of putting on an improbable voice, exaggerating it as much as possible and expending maximum physical energy – regardless of whether any of this makes sense in terms of character or situation.  I realise the style of playing here wouldn’t have been so overpowering watched in a theatre.  Most of the time, the camera was quite close in on the action.  In a smallish space like Curzon Richmond’s single screen, the players seemed on top of you in a way they couldn’t have been in the stalls and circle of the Old Vic.  We saw the play through but were unhappily glad to get out.  Present Laughter, which Noël Coward considered ‘a very light comedy … written with the sensible object of providing me with a bravura part’, is recognised as having an underlying strain of melancholy but watching it was a thoroughly lowering experience.   It left me feeling guilty for loathing most of what the hard-working cast was doing, and depressed about what punters want from a visit to the theatre.

    28 November 2019

    [1] Coward wrote the play in 1939 although the outbreak of war delayed its performance until 1942.

  • The Report

    Old YorkerFilm review

    Scott Z Burns (2019)

    Compared with the recent Scott Burns-Steven Soderbergh collaboration The Laundromat, The Report is a strikingly disciplined piece of work.  Burns wrote both screenplays; this time, he directs too.  (He and Soderbergh are among the producers.)   The film’s title refers to the US Senate Intelligence Report on the CIA’s use of torture in the interrogation of suspected terrorists in the years following 9/11.  The protagonist is Daniel J Jones (Adam Driver), an investigator on the staff of Senator Dianne Feinstein (Annette Bening), chair of the Senate committee under whose aegis the report was produced.  Jones’s commitment to the project is all-consuming.

    Burns expresses this literally.  Except for a few brief sequences – including one where he’s out jogging and (rather improbably) bumps into the White House Chief of Staff, Denis McDonough (Jon Hamm) – we don’t see Jones outside his place of work.  In a job interview (also with McDonough) at the very start of the film, he summarises his education and career plans.  Later on, he mentions that he was in a relationship at the time he first became a Senate staffer but isn’t now.  Jones has no backstory beyond this.  Burns thus ensures that a document, rather than a person, has not only the title role but also the starring part.

    The report authored by Jones and his small team, which details the history of the CIA’s Detention and Interrogation Program during the ‘War on Terror’, runs to 6,700 pages.  In December 2012, the bi-partisan committee chaired by Feinstein voted by a 9-6 majority to approve the report, which found that the CIA’s ‘enhanced interrogation techniques’ were brutal (as well as largely ineffective), and that the Agency routinely misrepresented the facts of what went on at Guantanamo Bay and elsewhere.  Two years passed before the report was published, in heavily redacted form (525 pages, including executive summary and key findings).  Today the full report remains classified.

    Burns’s film is, unsurprisingly, information-heavy and I struggled to take everything in.  An Amazon Studios production, it’s had a limited theatrical release before streaming on Amazon Prime Video:  viewers who watch it there may find it worth keeping a finger on the pause button in order to receive the information in digestible chunks.  That advice hints at a question that keeps occurring as you watch The Report:  shouldn’t this be a documentary, instead of passing itself off as a drama?

    Perhaps it isn’t naturally screen material at all but a piece of written journalism that Scott Burns is forcing into talk and movement.  The least typical aspect of the narrative comprises scenes of suspect torture, supervised by a couple of ‘psychologists’ (Douglas Hodge and T Ryder Smith) recruited by the CIA.  These sequences are unpleasant without being garish.  They’re not exactly a breakdown in Burns’s self-imposed discipline.  They do come across, however, as an admission of anxiety on his part that he needs more conspicuous action than either Daniel Jones, hard at research in his basement office, or the film’s various talking heads are able to provide.

    It’s not unusual to read about actors preparing for a role by imagining, either independently or on the director’s instructions, not only their character’s past life but how he or she would speak or behave in situations that won’t feature in the play or film they’re part of.  What Adam Driver and Annette Bening do in The Report struck me as an extreme example of this.  Both deliver their lines with such purpose and conviction that they create the semblance of complete personalities.  Yet the film’s severe dramatic limitations restrict them to a tip-of-the-iceberg job.  The same is true of other good actors in the cast – Michael C Hall (a senior CIA person), Matthews Rhys (a New York Times reporter) and Corey Stoll (a high-fee lawyer), to name but three.  The problem is less insistent in their cases simply because the roles are so much smaller.

    Driver and Bening aren’t faced with identical challenges.  Because Dianne Feinstein, for American audiences anyway, is a well-known public figure, Bening has the advantage of not having to create a character from scratch and the disadvantage of being judged according to how accurately she represents the real thing.  Her dark wig, particularly with the hairdo she wears in the early part of the film, is somehow disfiguring – seems to show too evidently that Bening is pretending to be an actual other person.  Otherwise, she’s entirely credible and, as always, a pleasure to watch.  Daniel Jones’s relative anonymity gives Driver a greater challenge in bringing the character to life (especially since he has much more screen time than Bening) but a greater freedom to invent.  The result is remarkably convincing.  Driver is aided by Burns’s skilful, patient writing:  Jones’s preoccupation with the report and determination to resist government attempts to suppress its findings develop naturally rather than in big, phony leaps.  Driver is also physically well cast, both as a backroom boy whose pallor suggests he’s rarely seen the light of day and, thanks to his looking not in the least a conventional film star, as an unsung hero.

    The integrity of Adam Driver’s acting, in spite of how circumscribed his performance is bound to be, functions almost as an expression of Scott Burns’s approach to the material.  He wants to communicate important things to a large audience with a minimum of commercial compromise.  Even though I have problems with the form of The Report, I found myself admiring it.  There’s an irony, though.  The timeframe extends from around 2003 to midway through the present decade.  According to Burns, the Obama administration, both during the run-up to the 2012 presidential election and subsequently, was hardly less nervous than the CIA about Jones’s report seeing the light of day.  Yet the political calculations and conflicts of interest at work seem understandable and, compared with the workings of today’s American regime, less than outrageous.  In bringing to the screen the history of a scandal of establishment malpractice and obfuscation, Scott Burns has also created a piece of political nostalgia.

    27 November 2019

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