A Midsummer Night's Dream

A Midsummer Night’s Dream (Michael Grandage Company) runs at the Noel Coward Theatre on the West End from September 7 – November 16 2013. By William Shakespeare, directed by Michael Grandage.

A Midsummer Night’s Dream is arguably Shakespeare’s fluffiest play. It’s insubstantial, like fairy floss – glimmering gossamer strung together by a thin plot and some good jokes. The Michael Grandage Company’s production of this at the Noel Coward Theatre on the West End beautifully realises the play’s dreamlike qualities. The scenes with the fairies are gorgeous. But I can’t help wondering whether the way they’ve treated the human characters exposes some darknesses that maybe should be left uncovered.

We all know the plot. The bit I’m especially interested in here is the quartet of four human lovers, Hermia (Susannah Fielding), Helena (Katherine Kingsley), Lysander (Sam Swainsbury), and Demetrius (Stefano Braschi). Lysander loves Hermia. Hermia loves Lysander. But Demetrius also loves Hermia (and has her father’s blessing to marry her), despite the fact that he’s basically being stalked by another woman, Helena. There’s some wacky shenanigans in the woods on a midsummer’s night where Demetrius and Lysander find them both magically compelled to love Helena, leaving Hermia totally bereft, but then eventually Lysander is cured and everyone pairs up and lives happily ever after blissful monogamy. Right? Right.

The bit that worries me isn’t so much that Demetrius is forced to love Helena, his personality essentially changed, and no one really seems to care. (I mean, obviously this is problematic, but treating this text too seriously will leave you in a world of pain.) The problem I have is the way that this particular production seems to equate love and sex. It starts off with Helena. In her pursuit of Demetrius, she tears a lot of her clothes off, as well as many of his, totally against his will. Similarly, when Lysander falls in love with Helena, he starts stripping, and spends nearly half the show with an undone belt buckle. And then, depending on who is in love with whom at that present moment, everyone chases each other round the stage like Pan chasing nymphs. With scary Pan-level aggression.

Basically, it’s really, really rapey, and the fact that it’s played for laughs makes me deeply uncomfortable.

Love and sex are not, I would contend, the same thing in this play. Sure, this is a “sexy” play, an aspect often emphasised in performance, but the portrayal of love in this play is, I would argue, more about idealisation than sexualisation. The one overt sexual overture we have is when Lysander wants to sleep beside Hermia in the wood. She turns him down pretty firmly and he takes it without much sulking. This is a couple in love. Why, then, would the love-juice turn them into sex maniacs? I’d argue that it’s not only disquieting, but not a particularly sophisticated reading of the text either, even if it does lead to some moments of slapstick humour.

What this production does do well, however, are the fairies. The fact that they’re continually smoking spliffs and getting high made me laugh – in many ways, A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a drug trip of a play, as well as being preoccupied with the use of “magical” potions itself. Sheridan Smith is lovely as Titania, and her scenes with David Walliams’ Bottom are fabulous. Gavin Fowler as Puck is wonderfully impish, and the whole chorus of fairies are gossamer as could be desired. And the show belongs, undoubtedly, to Pádraic Delaney as Oberon, who prowls around the stage with a wonderfully sexy mixture of menace, magic, and mischief. He’s like Richard Armitage playing a David Bowie-esque Goblin King, and it totally works.

And of course, I should mention the show’s celebrity factor. David Walliams is very funny as Bottom. The way he plays his utter self-righteousness and narcissism is pinpoint accurate, and the scene at the end where the Mechanicals do their play? Screamingly funny.

This is a really, really watchable production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream. The aesthetic – that playful, sexy magic it possesses – is certainly realised. I just really wish a little more consideration had been put into the way “love” and “sex” were figured, particularly when it came to the humans. Maybe it would mean a few moments of physical comedy were lost, but when the alternative is a river of disquiet pulsing below the surface? I’d suggest that’s a worthy trade.

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?

Once

Once has been playing at the Phoenix Theatre on Charing Cross Road since March 2013. Book by Enda Walsh, music by Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, directed by John Tiffany.

I should start with this with a disclaimer: the movie Once is my favourite movie in the world. I must have seen it at least twenty times since it first came out in 2006, and I love it to bits. I love that it’s a small story – a fragile story, an ephemeral one, a platonic romance that does not end but is perhaps unfinished. I love that it doesn’t try to be about everything but is just about one thing: these five days in the lives of these two people.

And so I was apprehensive about seeing the musical, and I seriously questioned whether or not I wanted to do it. The musical, as a genre, is not suited to the small story. Everything about musicals is big and exaggerated and stylised, and so I was really, really worried that seeing it on stage might ruin the movie for me.

I needn’t have worried. This is probably the best musical I have ever seen in my life.

It reminded me not so much of the traditional musical but of Midsummer (a play with songs), which toured Australia from Glasgow last year and was probably one of my favourite shows of 2012. Once, translated to the stage by playwright Enda Walsh (who wrote The New Electric Ballroom, also seen on Sydney stages last year), is not so much a musical but a play with songs. I wrote in my review of Viva Forever that there’s an argument to be made linking the structures of the musical and pornography, songs functioning as climaxes, linked together by a veneer of plot. That doesn’t happen in Once. Instead, the songs arise very naturally out of the plot. The focus is not on the music but on how the two lead characters, the Guy (Declan Bennett) and the Girl (Zrinka Cvitešić) are changed by their music, how they fall in love through music. Music is a thread that runs through the show rather than being the reason the show exists. Both writer Enda Walsh and director John Tiffany write in the program about the need to find a new theatrical language to translate Once from screen to stage, and they certainly succeed. This show is just gorgeous.

It’s not exactly like the movie. It’s lost some of that sense of ephemerality, of fragility. It’s more robust: there’s less sense that either the Guy or the Girl could disappear out of the others’ life with no warning at all. The Girl is far more aggressive figure than she was in the film – she drives the action much more than any other character. But these are not necessarily bad changes – they are, as Walsh and Tiffany wrote, translations. The subtleties of the film would not translate on the West End stage. Walsh and Tiffany have found a way around this that doesn’t involve massive dance numbers and glitter cannons. (There is a little bit of dancing. It’s probably the weakest thing in the whole show. It doesn’t need it. It stands alone.) There is also a little more focus on some of the surrounding characters. This didn’t necessarily work for me all the time – particularly at the beginning of the second act, when there seemed to be a lot of messing around with the secondary characters before the focus was shifted back to the Guy and the Girl – but I understand why they did it.

One thing that particularly appeals to me about Once is actually a really nerdy literary criticism thing. A major plot point revolves around the Guy’s music: he’s written all these songs for another girl, but they take on new meanings when he meets the Girl. He actually explicitly tells her that the meaning for him is different now, because he’s singing them for her. I love this idea of the flexibility of text: meaning isn’t fixed or rigid, but adapts and shifts, even for the same reader. (I might have just been talking about this a lot at a conference I was at the week before, so it was on my mind – it was kind of gratifying to see it endorsed on stage.) Once is kind of the perfect text to explore this with, because it’s so ambiguous. Do they end up together? Is their love romantic or platonic? Is it a love story that ends sadly or is just unfinished? Will they ever meet again? The text doesn’t tell you. You get to decide. For everyone, Once is a little bit different, and in every viewing, it’s a little bit different again. The theatre, that most transient of art forms, becomes the perfect venue for Once.

Not all the songs from the film make it to the musical. I was sad not to hear Lies and Fallen From The Sky, but I also wouldn’t have wanted them to shoehorn them in when there wasn’t room for them. There’s also a couple of new songs that are just gorgeous (especially Sleeping) and amazing interpretations of older songs: the a capella version of Gold is just astoundingly beautiful. I was a little worried that the music wouldn’t seem the same without Glen Hansard and Markéta Irglová, but the cast is phenomenal. Bennett and Cvitešić have amazing chemistry. They have a moment at the end of the Act One which is just spine-tinglingly good. The Guy has just sung Gold at an open mic night, and he looks across at the Girl, and the lights are just on them for a moment before they go down for interval, and... wow. Chills. CHILLS.

I could rave about how much I loved this show for a long time more, but it might get embarrassingly gush-y, so I’ll stop here. If you are in London, go and see this show. Just go. It is charming and funny and tragic and romantic and just incredibly, incredibly lovely.

And also it has an on stage bar. I don’t know what more you could ask for.

Viva Forever

Viva Forever has been running at the Piccadilly Theatre in the West End since 2012. Based on the music of the Spice Girls. Book by Jennifer Saunders, directed by Paul Garrington.

So it’s been a little quiet around here lately, because I’ve been overseas. By day, I’m an academic, and I’ve been travelling the world talking about popular romance fiction and Fifty Shades of Grey. But there’s no way I’d circumnavigate the globe and not manage to squeeze in a little theatre! I was so busy in the week I was in the USA that I didn’t get a chance to see anything, but now I’m in the UK and my conference is over, so my first stop was the West End.

In retrospect, maybe the cheap tickets were a giveaway that this was not exactly going to be the greatest musical experience of my life. I should have remembered that I don’t particularly like jukebox musicals. But I was 11 when Wannabe first hit the charts in the 1990s – the exact right demographic – and I loved the Spice Girls sick, so when I got the chance to see Viva Forever at a ridiculously tiny price, I took it.

There’s an argument to be made that the structure of the musical is very similar to the structure of pornography: a thin plot connecting together the climactic moments that are the songs. In a good musical, you don’t notice – often because the plot isn’t quite as flimsy, or the songs build to some kind of crescendo rather than seeming to proceed by small algorithmic variation. You get swept away by it, rather than simply waiting for the next song. This is perhaps a large part of why I don’t really like jukebox musicals, because waiting for the next song – for those familiar lyrics – is the attraction, and the story is the distraction. It’s not a narrative form that particularly appeals to me, and sadly, it’s exactly what Viva Forever does.

Viva Forever is set against the backdrop of a reality TV show called Starmaker, one of the many descendants of Simon Cowell’s Idol format. Viva (Hannah John-Kamen), Holly (Dominique Provost-Chalkley), Diamond (Lucy Phelps), and Luce (Siobhan Athwal) have formed the girl group Eternity, quite obviously a knockoff version of the Spice Girls, and have been put through to the next round (whatever that next round is – I was never quite clear on the show’s structure). They swear, in true Spice Girls fashion, to be BFFs forever, but disaster strikes when their TV mentor Simone (Sally Dexter) announces that the group cannot proceed, and that she will choose one of them to continue in the competition as a solo artist. She chooses Viva, and the other girls must leave. Inevitably, the friendship that seemed unbreakable begins to fracture as Viva is catapulted towards stardom and her friends are left behind.

I think the reason I felt so let down by this show, despite the fact I already knew coming in that the jukebox musical format did not appeal to me, was because Jennifer Saunders wrote the book, and damn it, I expected more from her. Viva Forever felt very clumsy and crowded. There’s a whole side plot to do with Viva’s mother Lauren (Sally Ann Triplett), her almost-boyfriend Mitch (Simon Slater), and her friend Suzi (Lucy Montgomery, who plays the role with obvious shades of Joanna-Lumley-as-Patsy in Absolutely Fabulous). And then there’s the whole apparatus of the Starmaker show: the three judges, ageing Simone, desperately trying to reclaim her youth and fame through exploiting Viva, the sleazy Johnny (Bill Ward), and the chavvish, fake-tanned Karen (Tamara Wall), as well as all the related cast and crew. There’s a romance between Viva and MD Angel (Ben Cura) which could have been really sweet, but it’s given no time to develop: it feels very tacked on. Likewise, the story of the girls’ friendship got lost, especially in the second act. There’s just too much going on here. Perhaps Saunders is trying to combat that thing that happens in jukebox musicals where the plot gets really thin, but what’s happened is that instead of having one thin plot, there are about seventeen, all functioning as distractions before the next song starts.

Speaking of the songs... sometimes they just didn’t feel relevant to the plot at all. There are numbers in there which should be showstoppers, and they just aren’t. Angel’s softly sung version of Viva Forever was a lovely moment, and when Mitch and Lauren sang 2 Become 1 to each other in the most awkward sex scene ever, it was genuinely hysterical, but others just didn’t seem to be related to the story. Who Do You Think You Are? for example, felt weirdly misplaced and shoehorned in (especially when it would have worked better earlier in the show). Likewise, Mama – wasn’t feeling it. There’s some great moments (like the scene where the ensemble are all dressed in tearaway costumes and transform from faceless corporate types to Camden leisure pirates), but overall, the pizzazz is missing. While the big dance numbers – Wannabe, Stop, and Spice Up Your Life – were fun, they never inspired that feeling you want to get in musicals: the feeling where your hair stands on end and you almost shiver with delight. It should have been ridiculously easy for the cast to encourage the audience to get up and do the Stop dance at the end of the show. Instead, it was very laboured indeed.

And on the subject of the ending – there wasn’t really one. There was no satisfactory conclusion. The show just stopped. With Stop. (There’s a joke. Right there. The show just walked right into it.)

Maybe I’m going to have to come to terms with the fact that jukebox musicals just aren’t for me. Maybe the form just doesn’t work for me, even in the hands of someone like Jennifer Saunders. But I feel like this show has the material to be a smash hit – and god knows I’d love for something like this, with its many female leads and emphasis on that Spice Girls ethos of friendship and girl power, to take off – and it just doesn’t deliver. And that makes me sad. And it makes 11 year old me, who was devoted to the Spice Girls, even sadder.

(Also, apropos of nothing, there is a dude in the ensemble who looks EXACTLY like Steve Hooker. I kept waiting for him to pole vault over something. Seriously, it’s eerie.)