Theatre on screen review

  • 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.

  • All About Eve (theatre)

    Old YorkerTheatre on screen review

    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

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