I take no pleasure in saying this but the director of the National Theatre, Nicholas Hytner, appears to have lost his sense of propriety. Or possibly the balance of his mind. He’s asked John Hodge (author of the Trainspotting screenplay) to write a sitcom about the Great Terror. And, rather than bunging it in the nearest skip, Mr Hytner has decided to direct it at the Cottesloe.
The blood-stained gag-fest begins in 1938 when a secret policeman orders Russia’s leading satirist, Mikhail Bulgakov, to write a play about Stalin’s early life. Bulgakov meets the Great Leader and Teacher and finds him keen to assume personal control of the scriptwriting. So Bulgakov takes over Stalin’s day job, running Russia. This inspires many hilarities in the horror-slapstick genre. After reading a forge-master’s report from Kazakhstan, Bulgakov writes in the margin, ‘More steel, or else! J.S.’
This quip gets a hollow laugh from those blessed with the ability to overlook the fact that the subject of the joke is ten million corpses. The comedy continues. When the secret policeman (played with indolent charm by Mark Addy) decides to direct Bulgakov’s play himself, he delivers a stream of ironic wisecracks to the writer. ‘As your producer-director, I admit I overstepped the mark when I threatened to shoot your wife.’ That one’s a belter, provided you accept that emptying gun cartridges into the skulls of innocent people is a source of mirth.
The script’s mood is rushed, shallow, jumpy, uncertain, as if unnerved and embarrassed by its own content. And it seems fearful of approaching true emotion or real sentiment. Frenetic bathos is the only register it can find. The wonky, custom-built stage, like a catwalk made of crazy paving, seems to mock the subject matter further. We also get snatches of the play-within-a-play about Stalin’s youth. These are done in a comedy-caper style that takes the surrounding drama’s buffoonish tone and cranks it up by a factor of six.
Simon Russell Beale gets the measure of this cadaverish pantomime and creates a sort of Ronnie Barker version of Stalin: charming, vain, eccentric and, basically, a twit. It’s a shame Hytner can’t commission a dramatist to write a piece of theatre. Instead he gives us this side-project screenplay which could never be made into a film because its scope is so limited and its moral temper heartless and revolting. According to the NT website, the show is a sell-out. Well, there were plenty of unwarmed seats at the performance I saw. I’m sorry to report that this is good news. London has taste.
More nostalgia at the Trafalgar Studios. Ben Brown’s play Three Days in May takes us into the darkest days of 1940 when Churchill and his war Cabinet discussed the option of making a deal with Hitler. The show runs into difficulties with its material. Great dramas require three things. Mighty personalities, gripping action and uncertain outcomes. Here, we have only the first ingredient. Warren Clarke, who stars as the Lion’s Roar, can impersonate Churchill all right. But then I can impersonate Churchill all right too. So can you probably. Grip a lapel, mime a cigar, do a lisp and a growl and sing out a few of those thunderous sound-bites. Easy-peasy. What Warren Clarke does, in addition, is to make Churchill sound like Bill Deedes channelling John Prescott. And, just like Deedes, Churchill seems a decent, bumbling but pretty doddery sort of cove. And, like Prescott, he seems morose, cowed, anxious and out of his depth. It’s a very unfamiliar portrait. And the hair is wrong. Churchill, most of us will agree, was rather bald. Clarke sports a thick dark quiff.
The play, which relies heavily on dialogue, occasionally shifts the action outdoors and lets the characters have a chinwag in St James’s Park. But the production can’t register the shift of location because the backdrop is an unbudgeable map of Europe with two doorways, east and west, set in the extremities. (Lord Halifax enters through the Bay of Biscay. Clement Attlee exits through the Urals.) So the outdoor locations are signalled by a dimming of the lights and the appearance of some green branches over Iceland. Try as it might to turn these events into a drama the show can’t overcome the intractability of the story. What does it amount to in the end? Five old geezers sitting around a table discussing whether to lose a war they later won.
Despite decent performances from the supporting cast, it never ensnares one’s loyalties. Jeremy Clyde is wondrously slippery as Lord Halifax. And Robert Demeger’s injured decency as Chamberlain comes across so strongly that he, not Churchill, emerges as the show’s hero. For all his faults, Chamberlain is the only Briton who could boast that he declared war on Hitler.
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