Michael Blakemore - In Conversation with Jonathan Baz

Michael Blakemore (r) pictured with playwright Michael Frayn during recent rehearsals for Copenhagen

At Chichester right now, director Michael Blakemore’s revival of Michael Frayn’s Copenhagen has opened to rave reviews. Blakemore has a remarkable history with the piece, having directed it to award-winning success in both London and New York when it premiered 20 years ago, and in the interim, staging the play in France and Australia too.

Finding a window in his hectic schedule, I spoke with Blakemore whose understanding of the play and its commentary upon nuclear conflict is probably unsurpassed. Our conversation was to range from theatre to politics and even the director’s take upon the internet and how we communicate today.

JB: Michael, how have you seen Copenhagen's philosophies evolve into the 21st century? 

MB:    Well, I think the science is still as it was. Some of the history of the Heisenberg story after the war has had additional material added to it. And indeed, Michael Frayn has modified his play in order to accommodate these changes (of which there were very few).

But I think that the messages it discussed are the same as they were 20 years ago. What has changed however is the world in which the play is being presented. In other words, towards the end of the last century, when the Cold War was over, the possibility of any kind of nuclear confrontation seemed remote. But since then, many more countries have acquired a nuclear capacity and suddenly the possibility of a nuclear accident appears much closer than it was then.

JB:    You are returning to the show after 20 years, and making a rather wonderful habit of this. Last year with the musical The Life at Southwark Playhouse last year, and now with Copenhagen.

MB:    Well, I revived The Life because we almost got it to the West End when it launched on Broadway back in 1990. We’d had very good London reviews of the New York production and everybody said, this will go across to London. But we couldn't find a management brave enough to take it on, because they found the subject too disturbing. So, I was sort of trying to make something happen that I felt deserved to happen. There may yet be a transfer of that Southwark production that I hope will happen.

But of course, that's very different to Copenhagen. Michael (Frayn) very much wanted to get it revived, while I was unsure as to whether he would want to go with another director, but he wanted to go with me, and I'm pleased.

Of course, I didn't know how I would react going back to this material and in fact it's been a thrilling experience. I know so much more about the play now and with this exceptional cast there is so much more to learn and new possibilities to see. 

I'm doing it largely, in principle, the same way I did it before, but with a lot of the technological advances that weren't available to me when I first did it. And so, I think it's going to seem very, very different. Not just because of the personalities of this cast’s actors, but also, I have changed, theatre has changed and the audience has changed too. A lot's changed!  But Copenhagen is undoubtedly a great play which does not date.

JB:    When we spoke earlier, you mentioned your view that technology and the internet have changed the world, and not necessarily for the better. 

MB:    What I don't like about the new technology is that I think we've done a swap. We've invented this new two-dimensional world that takes place on a screen. And this new world we've invented allows us everything: It allows us instantaneous communication with all our friends; It allows us to travel; It allows us access to a glut of entertainment. You can spend six hours every night in front of Netflix and find something to entertain you.

It gives you everything. It gives you sex. It gives you everything you want, except that it's artificial. And we've virtually exchanged the real world, which is three-dimensional and smells and is covered, and we can run around in, for this substitute world, which is comparatively valueless.

I speak as a grumpy old man who doesn’t like it because I'm no good at it. I'm hopeless at technology. But I also don't like it. I have a computer and I receive emails, even if I don't like sending them. And as a research tool, the internet is invaluable.

But as a way of communication, I think it's hopeless, particularly in the theatre. The great thing about theatre is that it is entrenched in human relations. Theatre is live people getting up in front of a live audience, to whom they have to make an effort to pretend that they're playing other people!  It's a much more sophisticated and real experience than, say, seeing a film, because you've got to make all sorts of adjustments during a performance.

JB:    I would completely agree with you, but the staging of any theatrical piece, even if it's playing to a 1,000-seat auditorium, is only going to scratch the surface of a tiny proportion of a population, whereas a movie, and in particular a big, acclaimed and successful movie, can ultimately reach the world. 

MB:    There's no doubt about that. I agree with that. And initially, I was interested in movies! I wanted to be a movie director and didn't want to do theatre at all.

But equally, you can say that the theatre is so cheap that you can mount a show, even if it only plays to 500 people, you can mount it for a tiny bit of money, and you can have a greater freedom to explore subjects and say things that the movies would never allow you.

And any theatrical endeavour is tied to more of a village society. Your audience has got to be within walking (ok, travelling) distance of the theatre, so they're more of your neighbours than they are with a movie. 

And it may be, in the event of some horrific political catastrophe, that the theatre is the only kind of dramatic entertainment readily available to us.

JB:    And of course, theatre offers a great challenge to performers too. As Terrence Mann said, "Movies will make you famous. Television will make you rich. But theatre will make you good."

MB:    Oh yes. I think that's probably true.

Copenhagen plays at Chichester's Minerva Theatre until 22nd September

Photo credit: Conrad Blakemore 

The Life - Review

Southwark Playhouse, London

*****

Music by Cy Coleman

Lyrics by Ira Gasman

Book by David Newman, Ira Gasman, and Cy Coleman

with additional material by Michael Blakemore

Directed by Michael Blakemore

Charlotte Reavey and Cornell S. John

Cy Coleman has a fine track record of taking an acerbic view of iconic American cities. With City Of Angels his score parodied a film noir view of Los Angeles - and here, with The Life, he peels back the fairytale of New York to reveal the truer uglier side of 42nd Street and Broadway that persisted throughout much of the last century.

It is hard to believe that this same city location fuelled the narrative to Frank Loesser's Guys And Dolls. Coleman and Ira Gasman pitch their show uncompromisingly on the streets around Times Square in the 1980s, when crime and sleaze were endemic to the area. But where Loesser's Joey Biltmore or Big Jule may well have been looked on as lovable rogues, The Life's villains are terrifyingly monstrous.

And yet - amongst the filth and destitution of its city setting, The Life's story, fuelled by Coleman's richly flavoured score, moves us all in depicting the fragile shoots of hope and humanity struggling to survive.

T'Shan Williams leads the show as young hooker Queen - desperate to make enough money to break away from vice and build a new life with her boyfriend Fleetwood (David Albury). We know their love is doomed from the outset - he's a drug-dependant Vietnam vet, battling PTSD and for whom Queen will always take second place to his addiction. It is Williams’portrayal of Queen's self-belief that drives the show. Her relative youth belying an ability to play a desperately damaged, vulnerable woman who's struggling to make her life work. Vocally Williams is a dream too, holding sensational notes with a range that is at times spine-tingling.

Williams is more than matched by the powerhouse that is Sharon D. Clarke. Playing Sonja, a compassionate ageing woman who's only known life as a whore, Clarke is majestic and compelling. Her duetting with Williams offers some of the finest musical theatre performance to be found, the spirituality of You Can't Get To Heaven being an electrifying glimpse into the bond of humanity that spanning the decades between them, unites the two women. Living in a world of profound ugliness, they display a dazzling inner beauty.

There's impressive womanly work on stage not just from Clarke and Williams but from a striking ensemble of street-hookers, who frequently suggested (to this reviewer at least) that if one were to take back the mink and the pearls from Loesser's Hot Box Girls, then what Coleman and Gasman have created is so much closer to a far harsher reality.

There's a cracking turn too from Joanna Woodward as the (apparently) naive Mary, straight off the bus from Duluth and quickly hustled. Woodward's Easy Money routine offering a polished glimpse into the truth of the tawdry sleaze of the strip scrub - in a routine that again defines so much more dismal honesty than the glossed over burlesque of Louise's strip routines in the closing act of Styne and Sondheim's Gypsy.

The Life shines in its diversity. Not just in a cast that is unequivocally multi-racial, but rather one which is refreshingly spread across a range of ages and body sizes that don’t conform to the conventionally clichéd tropes of beauty.

Where the show is unashamedly partisan however is in its treatment of men. By the final curtain, we've learned that every man on stage is ultimately a deceitful, exploitative scumbag.

Notwithstanding their characters' moral vacuity, the guys on stage are, to a man, outstanding actors. John Addison sets the stage as Jojo a middle ranking hustler, whose Use What You've Got defines his oleaginous duplicity. There's classy work too from Jo Servi's bartender Lacy, who in a small but critical moment defines the malicious misogyny permeating the streets. It is however Cornell S. John as Memphis, the city's prime pimp who both stuns and horrifies. John has a presence rarely encountered in Off West End theatre. With magnificent understatement he oozes an abusive, fearful force, which when played alongside his striking vocal resonance in both Don't Take Much and My Way Or The Highway, proves as chilling as it is compelling.

It's taken twenty odd years for Michael Blakemore, who directed the show's Tony-winning Broadway premier to bring it to London and his maturity and wisdom is evident in this carefully nuanced production's impact. Slick movement matched with a simple design motif of sliding parking-garage doors that slide to reveal the scenic trucks, and all staged underneath visionary projections of New York (the projection of the Hudson River's ripples is inspired), combine to create an ingenious treat.

Above the stage, Tamara Saringer conducts the first 11 piece band to play Southwark coaxing an exquisite treatment of Coleman's soaring score. Yet again, Joe Atkin-Reeve's work on the reeds is sensational - as Coleman's compositions range from ballsy brassy belting numbers to ethereal Gospel and heartbreaking ballad. 

The show marks Broadway and West End producer Catherine Schreiber's welcome arrival into leading a team of producers (co leads Amy Anzel and Matthew Chisling) on London's fringe. Together they display a commitment to production values throughout the show that rank alongside the sector’s best.

Scorchingly unmissable, The Life is one of the finest shows in town.

Runs until 29th April

Picture credit: Conrad Blakemore

T'Shan Williams talks about The Life at Southwark Playhouse

T'Shan Williams

Set in and around the sleaze of Times Square in the 1980s, Cy Coleman and Ira Gasman’s The Life garnered Tony and Drama Desk awards when Michael Blakemore directed its opening on Broadway in 1997. Twenty years later and with Blakemore again at the helm, the gritty musical crosses the Atlantic to open at the Southwark Playhouse next week.

The story focusses on Queen, a young woman of proud, principled intention who let down by the man she loves finds herself drawn into the complex criminality of prostitution. Sonja, an older and wiser hooker takes her under her wing… 

T’Shan Williams plays Queen and we spoke during a break in rehearsals. 

Update: To read my 5* review of The Life, published after its Opening Night, click here

JB:     Tell me first of all - What excites you about playing this role?

TW: Oh, the fact that Queen is not born into life that you see in the show. She's come from out of town, from a different area in the States and she’s moved to New York with dreams and aspirations. She's quite optimistic about what her life could be.

It just so happens that in the part that you see in the show, she has had to put her dreams on hold as she is sucked in to a mess that she didn't agree to.

JB:      What are the complexities of your character that you're having to explore and discover?

TW:     She has a certain sense of naivete because she didn't expect this to happen. She kind of got herself into a relationship where it just didn't work out right, so, it's basically I guess, her trying to be independent.

She's got a drive to be a better person, yet she's in a relationship where her partner is just quite happy with the situation they've ended up in.

So she is forced to choose between wrong and right, between love and a better life, that kind of thing, which is really quite hard for her.

What makes her such an appealing character though is the continuous optimism that she has, which is actually so inspiring and uplifting.

JB:     I was lucky enough to be invited to your rehearsal last week and see a glimpse of the show up close, in particular duetting with Sharon D. Clarke who plays Sonja. What is it like working alongside Sharon?

TW: Oh, absolute pleasure. She's so amazingly talented, and Cornell S.John too. I'm learning new things from them everyday.

Sharon’s like a big sister. She's got such a powerful energy in the rehearsal space. It's such a lovely time working with her. The whole cast too, they're all just so talented.

Sharon D. Clarke and T'shan Williams

JB:     Tell me about working with and being directed by Michael Blakemore.

TW: He's just such a gent, a charming man. And, I've never worked with such a director before that's just so detailed. He doesn't miss a beat. Of course, this is kind of his baby, because obviously he directed it originally on Broadway. The show really has a place in his heart and it's just such a pleasure to be in the room with him.

JB:     You are coming to The Life after a year in Book of Mormon. Have you worked in any off-West End productions before this?

TW: Yeah....ish! I did a season at the Arts Theatre in Leicester Square over Christmas and Ive toured But, that's kind of where my journey has been so far.

I only graduated in 2015 from drama school, so it has all been quite recent. But I've been lucky and had a good run in contracts so far. I love fringe theatre and I've always wanted to perform at the Southwark Playhouse because it's so intimate.

JB:     That's great to hear. The rehearsal that I saw was electric - I'm looking forward to your press night next week.

The Life will run at the Southwark Playhouse from 25th March until 29th April.

Photo credit: Simon Turtle