The Pride

The Pride plays at Trafalgar Studios in London from August 8 – November 9. By Alexi Kaye Campbell, directed by Jamie Lloyd.

So if you’re thinking to yourself, “wow, Jodi really hasn’t reviewed very much stuff this month, especially considering last year during the Sydney Fringe she was routinely reviewing three shows a night – I wonder what’s going on there?” let me explain: I’m overseas! I’m in the UK doing academic things, and so sadly have missed the entire Sydney Fringe (as well as the Sydney mainstage shows for the month of September). But I have been seeing some things in the UK, and when I see things, I write about them, so here goes.

A good friend of mine brought me along to see The Pride, and helpfully explained to me the background of the company. Young wunderkind director Jamie Lloyd has engaged the (relatively small, by West End standards) space at the Trafalgar Studios for a whole season – the ‘Trafalgar Transformed’ season – in an effort to enliven an area in danger of being drowned by musicals. The Pride follows his revival of Macbeth (starring James McAvoy) and The Hothouse (starring Simon Russell Beale), and has its own star drawcard in Hayley Atwell. It is a revival – if you can call a play that first went on in 2008 a “revival” – of Alexi Kaye Campbell’s play, which first played at the Royal Court.

To describe the problem I had with this play, I must first briefly describe the plot. There are two separate stories woven together here: one, of Philip (Harry Hadden-Paton) and Sylvia (Atwell), a married couple in the 1950s, and Sylvia’s colleague and collaborator Oliver (Al Weaver). Weaver is quietly gay in an era where this could lead to prosecution under “gross indecency” laws, and Philip is horrified at the attraction he has towards him. The second story includes the same triangle, but it is set in the present day. Weaver’s Oliver has an addiction to anonymous sex and being dominated (in one especially memorable scene, he hires a rent boy whom he asks to dress as a Nazi), which has ruined his relationship with his ex Philip. His only emotional support is his friend Sylvia, to whom he clings far too tightly for it to be healthy.

On their own, there is nothing wrong with either of these stories. Both are engaging – enthralling, even, in some moments – and independently, would make awesome plays. However, when you read them together, read them against each other, some really problematic things begin to bubble to the surface. The parallels have implications that I really don’t think are intended. The most obvious of these is locating the 1950s social imperative for gay men to be closeted against the modern Oliver’s promiscuity. The blurb for the show says that “societal repression gives way to self-deception”, but... why? Why must the gay man who was trapped by his society in the 1950s be trapped by his own mind in the modern period? The modern Oliver is clearly meant to be portrayed as mentally ill, and that seems to suggest that the 50s Oliver would also be that way if he wasn’t socially compelled to be repressed. Which leads to a very troubling place. So...

The other consequence of the parallel stories is Atwell’s character, Sylvia: specifically, that she doesn’t get to have much of a character. Despite the fact she has star billing, she seems to exist only to provide the role of emotional support. This seems to be especially true of the 1950s Sylvia, who behaves very strangely at times – just once, I wanted her to get angry, but she is entirely selfless. You’d think that if your husband slept with someone else, you’d be pretty angry no matter who it was, but she is disarmingly Zen about the whole thing: a little sad, but not much beyond that. Similarly, modern day Sylvia is defined almost entirely by her friendship with Oliver. Her strongest moments are when she is torn between being his friend and her new relationship with Italian boyfriend Mario, but the fact that said boyfriend is never seen onstage is, I think, telling. This character is underwritten and in many ways, sacrificed to the narrative.

I actually quite enjoyed The Pride, although it might not sound like it from this review. Lloyd is obviously a great director. Playwright Campbell excels in writing vignettes, something which he has turned to his advantage in this picaresque play. But I feel like some of the implications have really not been thought through all the way. In the curtain call, the actors come out with signs that say, “To Russia, with love”. This is an awesome sentiment, but this play isn’t exactly an anti-homophobic call to arms. Obviously, this is not to say that the play is homophobic. I don’t think it is, at all. Nor should any non-homophobic depiction of gay characters have to be some great activist call: theatre should and needs to be more complex and nuanced than a for/against binary. But considering the problematic implications of some of the story parallels, the “To Russia, with love” signs seemed a little bit... I’m not even sure how to phrase it. Incongruous?

Say It With Flowers

Say It With Flowers runs at the Hampstead Theatre until May 4, 2013. By Gertrude Stein, directed by Katie Mitchell.

Say It With Flowers. Maybe instead of reviewing this show in my usual manner, I should just draw a picture of a flower and make that my response. It would probably make about as much sense as the actual show.

There’s some real novelty at work in this performance – the fact that it’s played in promenade, for one, so that the audience follows the actors from room to room – but I’m not sure that there’s more than that novelty. Say It With Flowers takes some frankly obtuse texts from Gertrude Stein and attempts to impose meaning on them via performance, and I just don’t think it works. Oh, in some places it does: I don’t think it’s any accident that the third section of the show, which has a compressed version of the conventional theatrical five act structure as well as clearly defined characters, works the best. But overall? If someone was to say to me, “hey Jodes, you saw Say It With Flowers, right? what was it about?”, I’d be hard-pressed to come up with an answer.

If I thought about it, I’d probably say “waiting”, an idea which seems to be a common thread throughout the piece (albeit a fraying thread). Everyone in this show is waiting in some way or another. The people in the first section are waiting for a fifth person to sit at their table, simultaneously intrigued and terrified at the prospect. In the second, the protagonist has been bitten by a viper and does not do what to do next, trapped in a kind of hysterical waiting state. And in the third section, waiting itself becomes a kind of pleasure, anticipation better than the events themselves.

But what does this add up to in the end? Waiting is complicated and confusing and sometimes scary and sometimes nice? Surely there is a better message than that. I felt a little like I did in the Gorky play yesterday, like the meaning had gone over my head (not a pleasant feeling for a theatre critic, let me tell you, especially experienced two nights in a row). This show was just plain weird. There were, however, some great performances. I don’t normally commend actors for remembering their dialogue, because, come on, that’s perhaps the most basic skill of acting, and if you can’t expect actors to know their words then what can you expect?, but in this case, I’ll make an exception, because remembering Gertrude Stein must be heinously difficult. (This is particularly true if you’ve ever seen Stein written – her punctuation is peculiar, to put it politely.) The ensemble did a great job with some truly bizarre material. Their ability to change character quickly and seamlessly was especially impressive.

But at the end of the day, this show was just strange. There’s not much more I can say about it. Worth seeing for the novelty of the promenade set, but... well, here’s a picture of a flower. ---<-@