Sorry!
Footsbarn Theatre, Victoria Park and touring
As You Like It
Old Vic, until 21 August
Footsbarn Theatre’s new production Sorry! isn’t the greatest show on earth but it may well be the strangest. The conjunction of opposites permeates every level of this peculiar enterprise. The name is English. The players are French. They perform in English and French simultaneously. Sponsored by the Barbican, the show is staged several miles from the City in an east London park. The arena is a big top but the show transcends the circus tradition and offers a bizarre mixture of drama, acrobatics and trained livestock. Most strangely for a circus it has no scruples about frightening small children. My four-year-old son panicked as soon as the entertainment began. We were plunged into total darkness and two scary old men crept into the ring wheeling a coffin and followed by a third actor dressed as a crow or a vampire.
I held my boy’s hand and soothed him as he pleaded, ‘I want go now.’ Opposite us, a three-year-old was led out, sobbing. Some animals arrived in the ring. A cockerel mounted the coffin and nibbled a wreath. A white horse ambled on and had a nibble, too. My son began to regain his composure. Musicians played gavottes and dances while the coffin-bearers stomped about huffing angrily. The point was, I think, to contrast the empty pomp of a funeral with the joys of party-going and pleasure-seeking.
Further stunts followed. The most daring of these was performed by an equestrienne who trotted around on horseback juggling three blunt meat cleavers. ‘Requires practice’, is how I rated this rather than ‘dangerous’ or ‘injury-threatening’ which seem to me to be the minimum standards required of a circus routine. As she dismounted we saw that her saddle was fitted with sturdy thigh-mounts to hold her in position during the ride. So in fact the worst jeopardy she faced was cramp.
In moments of idleness, of which there were many, my gaze wandered upwards to a taut cable suspended a few feet below the big top’s zenith. There, I assured my son, skilled acrobats would soon be performing death-defying perambulations and somersaults of exquisite peril. I was wrong. The cable was the mounting on which a limp sail dangled at the show’s climax which, rather sadly and pointlessly, involved the disposal of the scenery into the resemblance of a ship. Outside I hoicked the lad on to my shoulders and began my St Christopher labours homeward across the park. Overhead the little voice trilled its latest insight. ‘I want see it again. Tomorrow. I want see it again.’ ‘No way,’ I grumbled. ‘I didn’t like it.’ ‘Why?’ ‘It didn’t make any sense.’ ‘What’s sense?’ And that seems to encapsulate the limitations of Footsbarn Theatre. Only those below the age of reason will want to go back.
Sam Mendes’s Bridge Project has landed on the London lap of its world tour. It must be fun to be cast in Sam’s annual circumnavigation. You get to travel the world. You get to hobnob with Sam and his glam chums. And you get a chance to advertise your suitability for a role in Sam’s next off-beat blockbuster. Unfortunately, you also have to perform in whatever Sam wants to direct and this year he’s decided on As You Like It.
This middle-period comedy, or rather ‘comedy’ (and those inverted commas should be rendered in a font so bold they can be seen through the covers of this magazine), was not only one of Shakespeare’s weakest scripts, it also ranked as the most embarrassing performance by a major English playwright until Harold Pinter started writing anti-war poems. The plotting is woefully ill focused. We get an hour of mundane political backstabbing and then two hours of bucolic frivolities which culminate in no fewer than four marriages being contracted. Waterboarding is more fun than this.
The comedy derives from the contrast between the refinement of Londoners and the cruder manners of their rustic cousins. This feels strangely off-kilter. In today’s Britain the bumpkins dwell in urban ghettos while the sophisticates are roaming the sweet and wholesome countryside raising vegetarian superfoods and organic llamas. (A note in the programme hints at the script’s true quality. ‘It must have been hilarious in its own day.’)
The production isn’t helped by the fact that its best asset, Stephen Dillane, doesn’t appear until halfway through the action. Dillane manages a rare combination of graceful humour and philosophical elegance and he’s the only performer who understands that comedy requires more than exaggerated diction and hyperventilating grimaces. But even he, I’m afraid, couldn’t raise this offal sack from the floor of the charnel house. We should remember that Shakespeare didn’t write any of his plays down. With As You Like It he reveals the great acuity of that omission.
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