Old Yorker

Ivo van Hove (2019)

At nearly seventy years of age, Joseph Mankiewicz’s All About Eve (1950) has been adapted for the stage, which could be considered its natural home.   Its people are theatre people whose characters are developed and expressed in action but more noticeably in talk – lots of it:  Mankiewicz’s script is one of the most self-confidently voluble in Hollywood history.   All About Eve was the basis for the stage musical Applause half a century ago but that inevitably meant paring away dialogue to make way for songs.  Ivo van Hove’s new adaptation, which opened at the Noel Coward Theatre in early February for a three-month run, might be expected to restore the primacy of the spoken word in the material – and so it does, technically.  Yet it comes as no surprise to anyone familiar with van Hove as a theatre director that the verbal doesn’t dominate the visual in his interpretation of Mankiewicz’s story.

All About Eve was broadcast live from the West End in cinemas on 11 April.  (The ‘National Theatre Live’ programme of live broadcasts includes plays staged at other theatres, as well as NT fare.)  Curzon Richmond screened a recording of the broadcast later in the month and it was this that Sally and I saw, though we hadn’t planned to.  We’d seen van Hove’s production of A View from the Bridge at Wyndham’s Theatre in 2015, mainly to take the opportunity of seeing on stage two screen actors whom we both like, Mark Strong and Nicola Walker.  Both were very good (and true to their screen selves) but the experience didn’t make us eager for more of van Hove’s work.  Besides, All About Eve is a favourite film; however ‘theatrical’, it may be, a version of it in another medium is surplus to (my) requirements.  It was only when I found out that another favourite, Monica Dolan, was in the cast that I changed my mind.

The broadcast preamble included a few, fascinating minutes of Ivo van Hove describing how he got into theatre while at boarding school in his native Belgium and what drives him as a director.  He pointed out that he was keen to work on All About Eve as a result not of seeing the film but of reading Mankiewicz’s screenplay (as part of van Hove’s preparations for adapting another film for the stage – John Cassavetes’s Opening Night, which itself draws upon All About Eve).  Van Hove described its theme as an ‘existential’ one – the subject is ‘growing old’.  He drew attention to features of his production like the repeated use of video.  Although it would be an overstatement to praise his introduction as more engrossing than what it introduced, van Hove’s combination of quiet charisma and clarity was impressive.  What he had to say also provided a foretaste of what is unsatisfactory in the play that followed.

As was evident from A View from the Bridge, van Hove has a conceptual sense that can overwhelm a production.  In All About Eve, this has both a limiting and a tautologous effect.   The specially commissioned music by P J Harvey reinforces the prevailing bleak mood.  The set designed by van Hove’s longstanding professional (and life) partner Jan Versweyveld and the director’s preferred placing of the actors within it give the impression of people adrift in a space too big for them and which they can’t control.  Van Hove may see that as existentially right but it’s dramatically monotonous.  We can infer the ageing theme without the assistance of the technology van Hove deploys:  as Margo Channing (Gillian Anderson) sits at her dressing-room mirror, her face appears on a large screen above the stage and turns gradually into that of a wizened crone.

Video can certainly be used fruitfully in the theatre to reveal something not taking place on stage.  In Robert Icke’s production of Hamlet, which we saw in June 2017, Gertrude and Claudius sat in the front row of the stalls of the Harold Pinter Theatre to watch ‘The Murder of Gonzago’; CCTV revealed, to gripping effect, their facial reactions.  All About Eve gets closest to this kind of impact when it presents on screen only the confrontation between Eve Harrington (Lily James) and Karen Richards (Monica Dolan) in the ladies’ at the Cub Room, while Margo, Bill Sampson (Julian Ovenden) and Lloyd Richards (Rhashan Stone) remain on stage, at their table in the adjoining restaurant.  The effect is very different when van Hove uses the screen to show greatly magnified images of what a performer is doing before our eyes, though at a distance away from us.  This strikes me as an admission of the limitations of what actors in the theatre can achieve – or, at least, of how a camera can help them achieve more.

There’s a particular significance to this when the play is an adaptation of a classic movie.  When a theatre director uses big-screen close-ups – or, in the extreme case of the time-lapse withering of Margo’s face, close-ups plus special visual effects – it’s hard to avoid wondering what’s been gained by adapting the source material for the stage.  When he shows Margo grow old in a matter of seconds, it’s tantamount to Ivo van Hove’s saying:  ‘I’m doing this because I think it’s crucial to the play and it’s physically impossible for Gillian Anderson to achieve the same effect’.

I’m probably in a small minority in thinking stage acting a less evolved form of the art than screen acting.  I know very many actors think ‘real’ acting happens in the theatre.  That’s not surprising:  it’s hard work learning lines and repeating a performance that needs to be right first time every time.   But the effort involved in delivering that performance is often very evident.  Because voice training isn’t what it was, lack of vocal colour and agility is an increasing issue – even with the also increasing use of mics for actors.  These concerns also register especially strongly when you’re watching about All About Eve as theatre.  It’s an obvious, unfortunate irony that a brilliantly talky motion picture has become a play much of whose dialogue isn’t delivered with the dexterity and variety needed to do it justice.

Although I’ve not seen enough of his work to be sure, I wonder too if van Hove’s preoccupation with conceiving a production in strong visual terms doesn’t tend to be at the expense of attention to detailed characterisation through line readings.  As Margo, Gillian Anderson is a vibrant image of vulnerable beauty and authority but seems to be interpreting an idea rather than portraying a woman or, at least, acting at one remove – as if playing an actress playing an actress.  Anderson overdoes the inebriated rants – this Margo doesn’t hold her alcohol at all well – although she does bring off one spectacular dead-drunk plummet from vertical to horizontal.  She’s vocally too relentless, though, and, to be honest, rather humourless.  I laughed at her only a couple of times – and only because, after she’d spoken the line, I then heard Bette Davis saying it in my head.  I’m afraid I preferred the later stages of the play because Margo featured less in them.

Anne Baxter’s Eve isn’t a hard act to follow to anything like the same degree as Bette Davis’s Margo and Lily James, whom I’ve enjoyed on stage-via­-screen before (in Kenneth Branagh’s Romeo and Juliet), gives an original and, for a while, plausible account of the character.  When Karen first brings her to Margo’s dressing-room and she gushes gratitude and praise for the star and for Lloyd, James makes Eve surprisingly appealing.  She and van Hove interestingly suggest that Eve is so thoroughly egotistical that even she can’t see her campaign to depose Margo for what it is.  Eve here is less a transparently calculating fraud than someone compelled to get what she wants.  Things go wrong, though, with her hardening into an overtly self-serving bitch.  In this case too, it’s partly a voice problem:  James’s vocal transition is almost comically abrupt.  And she’s weak – prematurely vanquished – in the scene in which Addison DeWitt (Stanley Townsend) cuts Eve mercilessly down to size.

Except for Addison, you think of All About Eve as a piece with great roles for women rather than for men:  I found myself surprised that Bill and Lloyd featured in van Hove’s version as much as they do.  Neither character is a success, though – partly because they look wrong.  The costume designer An D’Huys has cleverly dressed the women in clothes that, if not timeless, succeed in blurring the issue of when the story is meant to be taking place.  In contrast, Bill and Lloyd’s outfits, facial hair (designer stubble and beard respectively), and gym-toned look make them more obstinately de nos jours.  (As a result, the script’s retention of references to Broadway and Hollywood names of a bygone era – Jeanne Eagels, Helen Hayes, Zanuck, DeMille – are puzzling in a way they needn’t be.)  It’s hard to accept Rhashan Stone’s Lloyd and Monica Dolan’s Karen as a married couple and that Lloyd is used to calling the shots in their relationship. Van Hove has allowed or encouraged Julian Ovenden to try to make Bill dramatically forceful.   Ovenden lacks the weight and dynamism to succeed but this reading of the character wouldn’t make much sense if the actor brought it off.   In Mankiewicz’s film, Bill is exercised more by precious conceptions of ‘Theatuh’ than in exchanges with Margo, whose demands and insecurities exasperate him but whom he loves.  There are plenty of times in van Hove’s production when you wish Bill would deliver a rejoinder to her other than by shouting back.

The same is true, though for different reasons, of Stanley Townsend’s Addison DeWitt.  Along with Gillian Anderson, Townsend has the hardest job in the production for anyone who knows the film, in which George Sanders, a limited actor, triumphed as the sharp-eyed and-tongued, conscienceless theatre critic.   The heavily-built Townsend is naturally very different from the tall, slim figure of the film.  He also takes understandable steps to distance himself vocally from Sanders’s dry-as-a-bone delivery but you miss the verbal coups de grâce that Sanders made so calmly devastating.  Townsend creates a more brutish figure, which probably links to van Hove’s description of Addison, in the interview at the start of the broadcast, as a sexual predator.   It’s become unacceptable to present a man who exploits his position of power as this one does as outrageously entertaining.  Like Bill and Lloyd at a more superficial level, the production’s Addison DeWitt is updated.  Stanley Townsend is physically more substantial than George Sanders but the character has shrunk.

That’s more literally the case too with the casting of the role of producer Max Fabian:  Ian Drysdale is a shadow of the comically grotesque figure that Gregory Ratoff cut on screen.   In the smaller female parts, Jessie Mei Li, as the young actress Marilyn Monroe played in the movie, and Tsion Habte, as Eve’s uninvited wannabe guest in the final scene, are both OK.  As Margo’s dresser Birdie, little Sheila Reid makes sense of the character’s nickname but doesn’t get much of the ornery, plain-speaking loyalty that Thelma Ritter conveyed so strongly.  In the film, Birdie, the Fool to Margo’s Lear, disappears from the action as suddenly and completely as her Shakespearean forebear.  Van Hove’s attempt to keep her involved in the story is commendable but, in the event, perfunctory:  Birdie reappears a couple of times but with nothing more to say.

My reason for wanting to see All About Eve turns out to be the best reason any theatregoer has to buy a ticket for it.  On television, Monica Dolan is such a reliably great character actress that I was apprehensive about seeing her in a stage play:  would she be anywhere near as good?  I was uneasy at the start, when Karen Richards came downstage to take over narrator duties from Addison DeWitt:  it took a while to get used to the artificiality of what Dolan was required to do.   Once she has the chance to interact with other people on stage, however, she’s marvellous.  Karen (the Celeste Holm role in the original) does plenty of listening, as well as talking; and Dolan builds a personality through both.  Her unobtrusive but telling gestures and facial expressions suggest a continuous emotional life to a degree that no one else in this production comes close to matching.  Karen’s tearful remorse after tricking Margo into missing the show that gives Eve her big chance is a particular highlight; an even brighter one is Karen’s outburst of laughter – barely suppressed hysteria – in the Cub Room restaurant, after the showdown with Eve in the ladies’.  Monica Dolan has recently won the Olivier for Best Supporting Actress for this performance.  I didn’t see any of the other nominated work but I’d be surprised if the award wasn’t very well deserved.

28 April 2019