Waiting For Godot - Review

Theatre Royal Haymarket, London

****

Written by Samuel Beckett

Directed by James Macdonald

Ben Whishaw, Lucian Msamati, Tom Edden, Jonathan Slinger

With a luxurious cast, Samuel Beckett’s opus drama returns to London’s West End.

Lucian Msamati and Ben Whishaw are Estragon and Vladimir, the hapless duo prescribed to await Godot’s arrival on Rae Smith’s set that is as bleak as the narrative. A barren setting, save for a tree, captures the pair’s desolation in a story that is hard to define. 

Beckett’s tragicomedy plays with aspects of loneliness, co-dependency, base humanity, cruelty and abuse - there is also a theme of faith and divinity that underpins the whole piece. Premiering some 71 years ago, in Vladimir and Estragon we can see some of the comedic duos that were to follow in the 1960s and 70s. Think of Albert and Harold Steptoe, Rigsby and his tenants in Rising Damp, Basil and Sybil Fawlty to name but three examples - all relationships doomed to an eternity of complex mediocrity from which no protagonist can ever escape. But unlike a 30minute sitcom episode, Waiting  For Godot is a challenging 2 1/2 hours (including interval) that at times makes huge demands on its audience to keep up with its dry genius.

Msamati and Whishaw are superb in their interpretations. They are brilliantly assisted by Jonathan Slinger as the cruel yet ultimately vulnerable Pozzo and Tom Edden as his unfortunately named slave, Lucky. Edden’s first-act monologue is a masterclass in spoken and physical drama. On the evening of this review Luca Fone played the (Christ-like?) boy, perpetually sent to herald the next-day’s arrival of Godot.

A rare treat to find this work on a major London stage and for those with an appetite for Absurdist Theatre, the show is unmissable.

Runs until 14th December

Photo credit: Marc Brenner

The Night Of The Iguana - Review

Noël Coward Theatre, London

*****

Written by Tennessee Williams

Directed by James Macdonald

The play's company

Set in a rundown hotel in 1940, atop the cliffs of Mexico’s Pacific coast ,  Tennessee Williams’ The Night Of The Iguana offers up a glimpse of troubled lives in a dramatic cocktail that proves as intoxicating as a well mixed rum coco. The play was inspired by Williams’ own 1940 Mexican travels and his evident love for both time and place – and all set in a period before America had been sucked into the maelstrom of World War 2 – are evident. 

Clive Owen plays the Rev Lawrence Shannon, a defrocked minister now banished from the USA and reduced to leading guided tours around the world’s less glamorous regions. Shannon has led a reluctant party of Texan schoolgirls and their teacher (Finty Williams as a wonderfully Southern Baptist Judith Fellowes) to the hotel - a stop not included on the published itinerary - and their apparent entrapment at the remote location only heightens aspects of the story’s tension. We learn that Shannon has committed statutory rape (sex with minors) and as the evening unfolds we witness this priapic priest barely able to control his lust. Owen (who bears more than a passing resemblance to Jeremy Clarkson) is on stage throughout most of the play, and his delivery of this strangely, vilely, complex role is a tour de force.

Playing Maxine Faulk, the wise and recently widowed hotelier, is Anna Gunn. There is evidently a complex history to Faulk and Shannon. She knows him inside out, replete with all his failings and yet is passionately drawn to the deeply damaged man. Gunn’s work is masterful – sassy yet vulnerable, and hinting at an absolutely fascinating back story.

And then arriving at the hotel are the penniless Hannah Jelkes played by Lia Williams, a middle-aged (con) artist accompanied by her nonagenarian poet grandfather, delightfully fleshed out by Julian Glover. Williams lays down yet further sadness as Jelkes outlines her back story of a woman who has seen love pass her by, save for two seedy encounters over many decades - and a childhood that she hints at as having been traumatised by profound emotional and sexual abuse. 

This being 1940, (and the play having been written in 1961) Williams also cheekily lobs in a family of raucous Germans to his “Mexican Berchtesgaden”, Nazis fleeing Europe and using Mexico either as a gateway to South America or a back-door to the States. 

The play’s themes are as complex as they are ultimately simple - but what stands out from this three hour opus is that it was written at a time when literary craftsmanship was at its finest. Williams touches upon some of the most painful and intimate aspects of humanity - sex, love, loneliness and abuse – but does so throughout with a beautiful and carefully worded prose that displays a complete absence of profanity. The strength of The Night Of The Iguana rests upon a sensational cast bringing the most sensitive of images into relief, via their spoken word. As they perform, the most moving and painful vignettes play out in our minds’ eyes - and it makes for a truly rare event to see theatre that is so richly created and performed.

James Macdonald has assembled a masterful team of creatives. Rae Smith’s mountainous Latin mountaintop convinces on its own – but accompanied by Max Pappenheim’s exquisite soundscape, the suspension of our disbelief is complete. The Night Of The Iguana is world class theatre.


Runs until 28th September

Photo credit: Brinkhoff Moegenburg

Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? - Review

Harold Pinter Theatre


*****

Written by Edward Albee
Directed by James Macdonald

Imelda Staunton

There's a dark and barely speakable void at the core of George and Martha's relationship. Middle-aged and married for twenty odd years, he's an Assistant Professor at the University of New Carthage who's not going to rise any further, while she is the daughter of the University's President, both of them brutally aware that the chance to achieve the dreams and aspirations of their youth has long since passed them by. (British TV in the 1970s had a sitcom fuelled by marital frustrations entitled George and Mildred - older readers may well recognise a resonance...)

The shared vacuum of George and Martha's lives is filled by bitter sniping, infidelity and alcohol, the pain of their desperate mutual neediness broken late one evening by a drunken and impromptu invitation to Nick and Honey, a much younger married couple, newly employed on the college's staff. 

Over one long and boozy night, the action never leaves George and Martha's lounge which slowly evolves into the cruellest of emotional bear-pits. Much like a cat will tease a mouse before pouncing, so too here do the old toy with the young. The cruelty of George and Martha is magnificent - they've worked this routine before as Get The Guest, becomes Hump The Hostess, culminating in a devastating endgame of Bringing Up Baby. Spite, betrayal and humiliation are constant themes with even the perfectly preppy Nick revealed to be a swine - necessary, as George tells him, "to show you where the truffles are".

Conleth Hill and Imelda Staunton

The three-hour, three act show is gruelling, but driven by James Macdonald's gifted foursome, the pain that Albee subjects us to  is always bearable, sometimes witty and constantly poignant. Conleth Hill plays George - always an ultimately a step ahead of Martha even when she is at her most devastating and also with a gimlet eye, speaking witheringly of the youngsters with a comment that could so easily apply to today's young people craving their safe spaces - "the social malignancy of youth who cannot take a joke". Clearly little has changed since Albee's 1965.

The engine room of the play however is Imelda Staunton's Martha. Profoundly sexual yet emotionally devastated, from Momma Rose to Martha (and maybe throw in Mrs Lovett too) Staunton's recent West End outings have defined domestic dysfunctionality. Throwing everything at George that she can lay her hands on - including cuckoldry - she takes our breath away with her energy and breaks our hearts as, almost Clinton-esque, she herself is broken at the finale. 

Imogen Poots is the "slender-hipped" Honey, slight in both physique and nature - Albee doesn’t pull any punches in seeing both women come off worst by the end of the play. Opposite her, Luke Treadaway captures his own youthful insincerity as the ultimately shallow yet muscular Nick. 

James Macdonald delivers a perfectly weighted take on a 20th century classic. The 1965 allegories are as true today as they ever were - and in the hands of this stellar cast, Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf ? makes for unmissable theatre.

Luke Treadaway and Imogen Poots

Rns until 27th May
Photo credit: Johan Persson

The Father - Review

Duke of York's Theatre, London


*****


Written by Florian Zeller
Translated by Christopher Hampton
Directed by James Macdonald

Kenneth Cranham

With three Olivier Nominations just announced, Florian Zeller's modern French masterpiece The Father and its remarkable insight into the effects of Alzheimer's Disease makes a four-week return to the West End. Translated by Christopher Hampton, himself unrivalled in capturing the nuances of French prose for an English audience, this one act journey, thrusts us into the world of the ageing André, whose mind has succumbed to the ravages of the disease.

Zeller's genius is not only pitching us into André's world, but rather making us both spectator of and, remarkably, a participator in that crumbling world too. To a typically intelligent theatre audience, possessed of decent mental faculties, Alzheimer's Disease and its gradual erosion of memory and reason is a nightmare that we may have observed in people close to us, but may not have considered from the perspective of the sufferer. Zeller makes that perspective happen - and as his narrative unfolds, so do we find ourselves drawn into André's whirlpool of confusion. To reveal more would be to spoil, suffice to say that with the final scene and André's lonely frightened eyes, staring at us as he clings to his carer, we are left with having shared the tiniest glimpse of the desperate fear and uncertainty that Alzheimer’s wreaks upon its victims.

Kenneth Cranham as André is up for one of those Oliviers and his is a tough act to beat. As we witness the confusion he displays to those who care for him and love him, what is at first disquietingly comic, becomes increasingly desperate and tragic. Cranham masters André's early indignant irascibility and there are snatches both of Shakespeare's Lear and Arthur Miller's Willy Loman as he slowly descends into uncomprehending terror.

Opposite Cranham, Amanda Drew steps in to the Duke of York's production to play his daughter Anne. We witness Drew offering a sensitive performance, struggling with her father's mental decay and its impact upon her own life. Or do we? And just beneath the surface there's a hint of a historic family tragedy, underlining the memories that André struggles to retain.

It's not just Zeller's words that mark The Father out as an Olivier nominated piece of new writing, it is his understanding of stagecraft too. The play marks an inspirational deployment of technical skill as sound, light and scenery subtly combine to create a world in which nothing is what it seems. Credit to Miriam Buether's design, Guy Hoare's lighting and Christopher Shutt's Olivier nominated sound design

Profoundly disorienting and disturbing, if you can bear it The Father makes for essential, unmissable theatre. Sure, it messes with our minds, but only for 90 minutes. Alzheimer's lasts forever.

Runs until 26th March, then tours to Richmond and Brighton.