Notes on Shakespeare-on-stage-on-screen (2016)

Romeo and Juliet (7 July) (Rob Ashford, Kenneth Branagh, Benjamin Caron)

Richard III (21 July) ((Rupert Goold, John Wyver)

The first live transmission of a theatre production I saw at Curzon Richmond was the Kenneth Branagh company’s The Winter’s Tale, which Sally and I went to last November.  Co-directed by Rob Ashford and Branagh, the production was memorable for an appealing Christmas-time setting (it gave the proceedings a Fanny and Alexander-ish flavour), Judi Dench’s beautifully moving Paulina, John Dagleish’s entertaining Autolycus and Branagh’s own playing of Leontes (impossibly difficult as some of the character’s emotional transitions are).  I didn’t put anything in writing about The Winter’s Tale at the time because (a) these are film notes and (b) I struggle to keep up to date even with them.  But seeing the Branagh company’s Romeo and Juliet  from the Garrick Theatre and the Almeida Theatre’s Richard III at Curzon Richmond in the space of a fortnight this month was an interesting experience for a filmgoer – not least because the two transmissions were so different in the degree to which the productions were ‘cinema-tised’.

As with The Winter’s Tale, Kenneth Branagh gave a lengthy but worthwhile voiceover introduction to the transmission of Romeo and Juliet.  Shortly before curtain up, he made a less expected appearance on the Garrick stage to announce that the production’s Romeo, Richard Madden, had sustained what was described as a serious ankle injury, forty-eight hours previously.   Branagh did this very well, building the suspense before revealing that Madden, after intensive physiotherapy, would be appearing.  ‘Live theatre – live cinema – the show must go on,’ Branagh added, with a winningly apprehensive laugh.  He explained that a few adjustments had been made to the staging to take account of Romeo’s delicate condition.  (The injury clearly is a bad one:  Madden had to cry off from the production shortly after the 7 July transmission to cinemas.)  A mixture of admiration and concern for what the actor was putting himself through naturally affected the viewing:  there were times when Madden seemed to move a little tentatively but I may have imagined this – and he coped remarkably well in the sword fighting.

Those sword fights were problematic in a different way, though:  why were they taking place at all, in the 1950s setting of the play chosen by Ashford and Branagh?   Unless I missed something, the modernised setting in Rupert Goold’s Richard III was less time-specific but a similar issue arises there too.  As the title character, Ralph Fiennes plays the first half in a roll-neck sweater, trousers and blazer; by the time they’re at Bosworth Field, Richard and the other combatants wear suits of armour.  I don’t have a problem in principle with the temporal updating of Shakepeare.  I do have a problem with updating that isn’t followed through – with a production that reverts to the traditional time and place for any elements that can’t be accommodated within a different historical (or, indeed, futuristic) setting of the play.

In his spoken introduction, Kenneth Branagh described the transposition of Romeo and Juliet to the world of ‘passionate, hot-blooded’ films of the 1950s, ‘like La dolce vita’.  Fellini’s classic, which was actually released a few weeks into 1960, is rather an exploration of dispassion but you got Branagh’s point.  In the event, though, the modernisation is mostly a means of making the production superficially distinctive and ‘accessible’.  The effect is sometimes counterproductive.  In the opening scene-setting, the hints of bad blood, illustrated in the aggressive behaviour of younger male characters, inevitably evoke West Side Story.  When Escalus, the Prince of Verona (poorly played by Taylor James), appears in uniform, you think:  Officer Krupke.   Lily James’s little-girl outfits at the start underline that Juliet is only fourteen years old:  why then, at the Capulets’ ball, does she perform a song in the manner of a rather experienced chanteuse?  In the balcony scene, Juliet is intoxicated not just by love but by alcohol:  she delivers her lines between swigs from a bottle until Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh decide the gimmick has served its purpose.

What’s fundamentally a lack of confidence in Shakespeare may be detected even in one of the production’s undeniably interesting ideas, the casting as Mercutio of seventy-seven-year-old Derek Jacobi.   Branagh explained the inspiration for this elderly Mercutio as an anecdote told by David Garnett to D H Lawrence:  as very young men, Garnett and a friend were spending an increasingly inebriated evening in Paris.  They bought drinks for a much older man too – a man visibly down on his luck but full of witty stories about Paris and instructive tips on how to enjoy the city.  Garnett and his friend never got their companion’s name before they’d run out of money and he’d wandered off into the night.  They asked a barman if they knew who the man was.  The barman did:  the fellow was called Oscar Wilde.  There’s something seriously wrong with this story – David Garnett was eight years old when Wilde died, in 1900 – but, again, you see what Branagh has in mind.  He wants to present  Mercutio as an inveterate verbal entertainer, past his sell-by date but still inspiring amusement and affection in his audience.   Derek Jacobi conveys strongly the idea of a garrulous wit who’s said it all (and often) before.  Jacobi’s theatrical verve and dexterity with the verse ensure that Mercutio is entertaining.  Yet you still feel the character is being done in this way partly out of nervousness that people nowadays will find the Queen Mab speech etc tedious – unless, that is, they can feel reassured that the production is well aware that Mercutio is an old windbag.

The audience entering the Almeida for Richard III sees figures in coveralls and gloves handling excavated objects and hears a 2012 news report on the discovery of Richard’s remains under that car park in Leicester.  It’s a valid device to bring Shakespeare’s Richard into the present day.  As Rupert Goold recognised in an interview with Verity Sharp, transmitted in the cinema in the minutes before the start of the play proper, our willingness to accept as contemporary the story of unscrupulous fifteenth-century struggles to Take Control has increased thanks to the extraordinary political events of recent weeks.  But Goold’s production, like the Ashford-Branagh one, isn’t without the use of jokey modernisms and you understand why:  each time an iPhone appears, it gets a laugh.   To be fair to Ralph Fiennes as Richard, he way he peers at what’s on the phone screen is inventive enough to merit the laughter.

Benjamin Caron didn’t impress with his direction of the la(te)st BBC series of Wallander, in which Kenneth Branagh starred, but there’s no doubt that these two and Rob Ashford devised for the live-on-screen Romeo and Juliet a substantial cinema experience.  For a start, and in keeping with the 1950s movie inspiration for the piece, the transmission was in black-and-white – that, of course, makes you wonder how this inspiration can have been reflected in what audiences at the Garrick see on stage.  The same goes for the two leads.  Branagh had directed Lily James and Richard Madden on screen in Cinderella last year and their performances in what I saw at Curzon Richmond are successful in cinematic terms.  Madden’s Romeo appears to have received middling-to-poor notices from theatre critics; for me, he was the best thing in the production.  His prince in Cinderella was no more than likeable (and I haven’t seen Game of Thrones) but Madden was an excellent Mellors in the BBC’s ninety-minute Lady Chatterley’s Lover later last year and he’s clearly a gifted screen actor.  Here he’s refreshingly ‘inside’ the lines:  they’re not passionately declaimed – they suggest thoughts that have newly occurred to Romeo.  Madden is a finely receptive audience too – watching his Romeo listen to Mercutio is one of the highlights of the evening.  These aspects of his acting are so satisfying in the cinema that you wonder how much less satisfying they may be in the theatre.

Perhaps because Juliet’s experience of love is more thoroughly transformed in the first half of the play, it’s harder for Lily James, for a while anyway, to be as natural as Madden but her emotional engagement with the role is appealingly strong – and she has surprising vocal range and power.  In the second half, she becomes the dominant presence.  I was inclined to think this came from a combination of factors:  Juliet’s having more stage time than Romeo in the fourth and fifth acts; the cumulative power of James’s playing of her; and, maybe, Richard Madden’s  increasingly feeling the strain of his injury.   It’s a little frustrating that he and Lily James aren’t at their best at the same time but they’re standouts in the cast – and for reasons beyond having the plum roles.  As suggested above, the Oscar Wilde take on Mercutio justifies Derek Jacobi’s enjoyably practised theatricality but there’s not the same pretext for some of the other histrionics in evidence.   If the mugging Meera Syal (as the Nurse) and the oddly cast, uneasy Marisa Berenson (Lady Capulet) could pool their self-confidence and divide it in half, they might both be (somewhat) better. Whereas Jack Colgrave Hirst is conscientious but dull as Benvolio, Ansu Kabia’s Tybalt is a dashing figure – and quite hollow.  I liked Samuel Valentine as an unusually young Friar Lawrence.

Things get serious for the young lovers in Romeo and Juliet unhappily soon:  this feature of the play is reflected in Rob Ashford and Kenneth Branagh’s swift production and reinforced through Benjamin Caron’s choice of camera angles. Rupert Goold’s Richard III isn’t fast-moving in comparison.  It’s slower too than the 2011 Old Vic production of Richard III, where Sam Mendes achieved such clean, rapid scene transitions that they sometimes felt, even in the theatre, like cuts in a film.  The pace of the Almeida Richard III certainly wasn’t enough to obviate what I find to be longueurs in the play – the later serial killings, the chorus of bitterly lamenting royal women.  I’m not clear, from what I’ve gleaned online, as to the division of responsibility between Goold and John Wyver in preparing the Almeida production for the screen but there was little evidence of a thoroughgoing attempt to make it ‘filmic’.  Even in the car-park excavation prologue, close-ups revealed actors acting scrutinising a piece of scoliotic spine bone etc:  although the Almeida isn’t that large a performing space, this probably looks less artificial from the theatre auditorium than it did from a cinema seat.

In the interval interview with Verity Sharp – which covered the nature and work of the Almeida more generally – Rupert Goold described the theatre, rather fancifully, as a combination of ‘somewhere where film stars perform and a local rep’.  What distinction this Richard III has is thanks largely to its star:  Ralph Fiennes is a truly complex Richard.   He’s eloquent and convincing on the screen in ways that make you believe that’s how he’ll be in the theatre too.  He fuses very successfully the character’s self-disgust (that is, disgust for his physical deformity) and malign determination.  He handles the verse with wit and agility.  Fiennes is physically less extraordinary than Kevin Spacey was in the Mendes production but he’s still very fine;  and he has a great silent moment, when Richard eventually gains the throne and struggles up to and into it.  With orb in one hand and sceptre in the other, Fiennes looks uncomprehendingly at the regalia.  Now that he’s on the throne, this Richard looks exhausted by the effort of getting there and unsure what to do next:  he then quickly regains his murderous poise and paranoia.   One advantage of watching this performance in the cinema comes from seeing the effort that Fiennes is putting in expressed through the sweat on his face:  when he’s up close and personal with Lady Anne, the audience experiences something of her sense of Richard as both repellent and irresistible.  There’s real spittle being projected as well as fake blood being shed.  Fiennes’s Richard receives the spit in his face as a deserved humiliation.  He licks a sample of the blood with a startling mixture of interest and satisfaction.

Ralph Fiennes’s playing of Richard is anchored in character to an extent that few others in the cast come within a mile of matching.  Too many of the performances come across as emoting in a vacuum.  Some of this emoting is accomplished (Joanna Vanderham (Lady Anne), Aislín McGuckin (Queen Elizabeth)); some of it NBG (Joseph Arkley (Rivers), Joshua Riley (Dorset)); but the effect is ultimately the same.  As Clarence, Scott Handy is excellent describing his nightmare though less persuasive elsewhere.  The stronger supporting performers include Daniel Cerqueira (Catesby) and Oliver Whitehouse (the younger of the princes in the Tower).  Another thing that marks Fiennes out:  he inhabits his modern-dress costume so well that he modernises the man wearing it – yet he does so without compromising or degrading Shakespeare’s language.   Several of the other actors look uncomfortable saying what they have to say in the clothes that they have to say it in.  Finbar Lynch as Buckingham is the reverse of this problem:  Lynch’s dark-suited politico is physically a most convincing figure but he lacks vocal colour – too many of his lines seem thrown away.

Ralph Fiennes isn’t the only star in this production:  Vanessa Redgrave is Queen Margaret.  She’s dressed in fatigues – this seems an almost humorous comment both on Margaret as the battle-hardened survivor of the Wars of the Roses and on the seventy-nine-year-old Redgrave’s public political persona.   She’s unarguably charismatic but there’s a disconnect between the power of  her presence and her sketchy, rather fragile handling of the lines.  The grave from which Richard’s bones are exhumed forms the centre of Vincent Olivieri’s set throughout.  It’s a convenient receptacle for more than one of Richard’s victims and eventually, of course, for the main man.   The grave threatened to be more of a pitfall for the elderly actresses moving around it:  I was relieved that Vanessa Redgrave and Susan Engel (Duchess of York), who’s now eighty-one, negotiated the set without mishap.

7/21 July 2016