I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me.
I bumped into a restoration expert last week. ‘What’s new in heritage these days?’ I asked him. ‘Oh, same old, same old,’ he told me. In similar vein, London has been enjoying a spate of classic revivals on stage. At the Donmar a production of Schiller’s Kabale und Liebe (Intrigue and Love) has been barmily retitled Luise Miller. This promotes a minor character to the protagonist’s role. It incorrectly suggests the atmosphere of Romford roundabouts and roaring hen parties. And it echoes the author’s name too so you can’t write ‘Luise Miller by Schiller’ without having to delete and think again.
Happily, the production, designed with tremendous panache by Peter McKintosh, is a treasure. We’re in a German principality in the 1780s. The chancellor’s dashing son has been ordered to marry the prince’s discarded mistress. Mistress loves dashing son. Dashing son loves low-born wench. Low-born wench is loved by chancellor’s evil deputy. It sounds closer to algebra than to drama but these intricate triangulations are elaborated with perfect lucidity by Schiller’s pacey narrative. His aim here, beyond treating us to a thrill-a-minute melodrama, is to give the corrupt German nobility a hefty wallop on the head. The show is gripping on many levels, as a romance, a satire, a revenge tragedy and a psychological investigation. It’s also hilarious without having a single instance of what we might call ‘a gag’. The humour emerges from the venality and selfishness of the scheming characters. Alex Kingston, buxom and blooming, is magnificent as the prince’s flinty but brilliantly eloquent concubine. There’s a wonderfully camp performance from David Dawson as a feckless popinjay, a sort of junior Osric. The tension slackens very slightly in the second half, and the denouement, involving last-minute poisonings and deathbed speechifying, feels like a pub quiz of Shakespearean endings. But minor failings apart, this is the sort of production that will create a new generation of fans for its author. Another triumph for Donmar boss Michael Grandage.
One wonders how he might have approached Ibsen’s sweeping religious drama, Emperor and Galilean. This long and rarely revived play has been rejigged by director Jonathan Kent and translator Ben Power. Kent Power, eh? Sounds like a firm supplying energy to the national grid. It turns out to be a firm draining energy from the National Theatre.
The script, focusing on the death throes of Roman paganism in the Middle East during the 4th century, was written in the 19th century by a Norwegian domiciled in Italy. Already many layers of cultural complexity accrue here. To add more would be unwise. So, unwisely, they add more. The costumes are a fusion of antiquity and modernity which succeed in locating the play precisely nowhere. The script is rendered in a special dialect, Victorian Obtuse, which was popular in epic movies of the 1950s. ‘Onward! We march to Babylon!’ is a standard utterance. Every fourth word is punctuated with an exclamation mark. Complexity or subtlety of expression are all but impossible to achieve. ‘The omens speak! Burn the boats!’ says the emperor at a climactic moment. Instantly the theatre is engulfed in a spectacular fireball-based lighting show that will doubtless win all the main prizes for fireball-based lighting shows. A messenger then tumbles on stage and tells the emperor that he shouldn’t have burnt the boats after all. He’s been tricked. He needs the boats. He needs them unburnt too.
Oh dear. At this point a soft ebullition of tittering fluttered across the stalls. It had the same effect as powdered dust landing on a coffin. It was over. The play had expired. I was tempted to leave at that point but I had, I think, one or two or three further hours of tractor-volume turgidity to sit through. So I stayed and I stared as the time bled away. Kent Power, evidently contemptuous of religious faith, seem to regard every doctrinal controversy as a bitch-fight between competing hysterias. The actors meet the script at its own level by honking, barking and squeaking their lines without sympathy or understanding. Rarely have I seen a comp-any of men look so exposed and overawed by the task in hand.
Unusually, Ibsen shows little interest in women in this play. That indifference, I expect, is shared by Kent Power. The beautiful Genevieve O’Reilly plays the emperor’s aunt, a thin and sexually provocative role, in a thin and sexually provocative costume. Her big scene involves a frenetic display of simulated coition which allows her to show off all of her seductive physique and absolutely none of her training or talent. She then dies of a seizure apparently brought on by lap-dancing.
This long and merciless production lasts fully 210 minutes. I left home at six and got back just before midnight to find my wife reporting my disappearance to the police.
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