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Friday 9 January 2009

Acting up

Oedipus
Olivier

La Clique
Hippodrome

Here it is. The National’s autumn blockbuster, Oedipus. Of all the plays of classical antiquity this is the best, the most accessible, the least tedious, and Jonathan Kent’s impressive production allows the beautiful and awful symmetry of the storyline to work its magic. Yet Kent and his designer Paul Brown aren’t quite immune to the tempting follies of conceptualism. The set has big ideas. It’s a convex platform,  a sort of upside-down wok, with a steep gradient which makes the actors stand at a tilt, like Charlie Brown and chums on their pitcher’s mound. And it revolves with painful and inexorable slowness, completing a full cycle during the course of the play. One can imagine the peals of ‘genius!’ that tolled around the rehearsal room when this breakthrough was first unleashed. The decision to put the male actors in dark suits and white shirts looks like a helpless shrug rather than a design idea, and though it works well enough for the principals it makes the chorus look like a convention of Jewish tailors. (How to integrate the chorus is a problem few modern productions solve.  This is no exception.)

There’s a lot of Big Acting on view too, none bigger than Alan Howard’s Teiresias. Dressed like a Beckett tramp in crumpled flannels and sunglasses, he tap-tap-taps his way up the wok and proceeds to sing the role as if giving a lecture on the elastic properties of English vowels. Who could have guessed that ‘you’ and ‘me’ (‘you-ooo-ooo’, ‘me-eeee-eee’) might have three syllables apiece or that ‘Apollo’ (‘Apollo-ooo-oo’) might have five? Amazing. Clare Higgins as Jocasta gives her standard three-hanky performance. Ralph Fiennes, who can be superb in light comedy, always stiffens up when playing tragic heroes. He seems hollow and over-emphatic here as if struggling to mask some deep awkwardness. There’s plenty of power to his Oedipus but no fluency. Then again it’s a hellish role, all nerves and panic and gory emotion. He has barely a single memorable line either because nothing can speak louder than his predicament. And when the truth breaks over him what can he do but howl? Fiennes’s howl is one of those long ones. Eyes screwed tight, he first emits a high mosquito wail which slowly expands and deepens into the rich curdled roar of the mating buffalo accompanied by a classic gesture of impossible anguish as he attempts to cram both fists into his mouth. Fiennes’s best theatrical quality, his forcefulness, feels forced.

More articles from: Lloyd Evans | this section

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