Happy Christmas, New End
The Seagull; King Lear, New London
A blast of seasonal cheer at the New End Theatre. Paul Birtill’s bitter and hilarious family satire, Happy Christmas, starts like a subversive salute to The Homecoming. Upwardly mobile John introduces his posh fiancée Mary to his dysfunctional all-male family. The script is crammed with offbeat gags. ‘Strange taxi-driver,’ giggles Mary as she enters; ‘do you really think his granddad was on the Titanic?’ She refuses to be cowed by John’s ghastly brothers. Kenny is a workshy alcoholic — ‘There’s an art to being on the dole’ — who immediately bums a tenner off her and later rifles through her purse. Schizophrenic Mark insists on boring her with his mad, painful poetry about the pain of being mad. And her prospective father-in-law, Jack, demands £5 for a Christmas dinner of peas boiled in tomato sauce. Finely portrayed by Colin Hill, Jack develops into the most complex character, a hypocritical Jesus-freak who worships at the local church in order to stalk teenage girls. This gruesome mixture of misogyny and thwarted lust has the unmistakable tang of lived experience and Birtill’s script elevates it into bizarre and scintillating comedy. A treat.
The RSC has spent a year touring the world with Lear and The Seagull and the two plays arrive in London for a final lap of honour. The sets by Christopher Oram cleverly disguise their IKEA-like collapsibility. In The Seagull, the exteriors are suggested by five silver birches, and the interiors by a table, a dresser and a desk. Thrifty and highly portable. The outstanding performance is William Gaunt’s Sorin. In a smallish role he transforms the self-pitying grouch into a sad, twinkly, funny and wonderfully affecting old codger. Frances Barber has a great opportunity with Arkadina but she shows too much of the role’s toxic nastiness. At one point she turns into Cleopatra and rears up like a cobra spitting her lines with psychotic fury. That harshness makes her charm and maternal warmth harder to engage with. As Nina, Romola Garai has an exquisite beauty like a dewdrop ready to disintegrate at the slightest touch. She’s extraordinarily watchable but she’s been allowed, or perhaps encouraged, to mimic forgetfulness and hesitancy before delivering her lines, as if the words had only just flown into her brain. Not wholly convincing. Any attempt to suggest that the pretence is not a pretence, that the actors aren’t actors and that the audience is somewhere other than a theatre is doomed. Balalaikas off-stage and drunken serfs singing ‘Kalinka Kalinka’ are no doubt intended to remind us we’re in Russia. Thanks, but we knew that. Same with the cooing wood pigeons and crickets chirping away like nutmeg being grated. They’re supposed to say ‘countryside’. They say ‘sound design lecture’. This is a decent and perfectly admirable Seagull yet it failed to move or astonish me half as much as Ian Rickson’s magnificent version at the Royal Court earlier this year. And it hasn’t quite sold out. There were unwarmed seats at last Saturday’s matinée.
Lear, meanwhile, is totally packed. The sets are adapted so that the crumbling grandeur of Sorin’s estate now has an air of imperial splendour with golden lights and sweeping crimson banners. Again it’s William Gaunt who stands out. His noble, unhurried Gloucester gives the verse an ethereal booming clarity, like a choir of oboes rumbling in an oak bower. Frances Barber’s Goneril is a sexy, serpentine plotter with the map of her next scheme traceable in her twisted eyebrows. She gives one of the best interpretations of this weird, underwritten role that you’ll see. And Ian McKellen is easily the most relaxed and commanding presence on stage. With his velvet voice and potato face McKellen has never been ideal as a male lead but Lear suits his tender ravaged looks pretty well. He’s not perfect. The storm scene defeats him, as it defeats every actor, because the thunderous effects shove the lines to the brink of audibility. In fact, the only way to do the storm scene is alone in the bathroom, book in one hand, wobble-board in the other. The closing moments, with Lear and Cordelia robed in saintly white, have the simple grace of a religious painting. But for all its superficial stylishness there’s something overly amenable and faintly complacent about this Lear. The fact that both plays have toured the world, provoking ululations of rapture everywhere, says less about their qualities than about the absolute supremacy of British theatre. We are the only superpower. Let’s enjoy it. Next comes decay.
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