The Gods Weep
Hampstead, until 3 April
Mrs Warren’s Profession
Comedy, booking to 19 June
Finding fault with Shakespeare is one of the RSC’s favourite activities. It’s now so fed up with King Lear that it has decided it needs to be scrapped and rewritten. A tall order? Not a bit of it. The company maintains a team of ‘embedded’ writers whose talents rival those of the bard, more or less, and Dennis Kelly has been given the tiresome but necessary job of correcting the faults of this famously ill-written drama. Kelly’s previous works — Debris, Orphans, Osama the Hero, and Our Teacher’s a Troll — give some hint of his artistic range. He likes controversy, violence and macabre humour. (He dedicates the text, in the third person, to ‘Jeanie and Marie for putting up with him even when he’s being a prick’.)
Coyly entitled The Gods Weep, the play opens with a mysterious billionaire named Colm dividing his international business empire between two underqualified subordinates. War breaks out within the company. The conflict spreads to one of the firm’s Caribbean territories and then boomerangs back and engulfs the whole of Britain. Though the plot consists of a few simple gestures, it’s also strangely hard to follow. There are entanglements involving astrology and faithless romances. Colm discovers that he has a daughter and in the final act we watch them camping out during a nuclear winter, eating squirrels, talking balderdash and getting wet.
The dialogue is brutish throughout. Everyone swears. Ugly fights and ketchupy slaughter abound. The director, Maria Aberg, keeps resorting to adolescent shock tactics, to firecrackers, gunshots, flashing lights and those trick knives that leave trails of blood across slashed flesh. As the red sauce flew, a woman just ahead of me slumped forward in her seat and stuck her fingers firmly in her ears. Her husband beamed stoically. He must have been deaf. Several audience members walked out in full view of the cast, a pointed snub.
The production’s only highlight is Helen Schlesinger, who graciously maintains the pretence that the script might be worth performing. Jeremy Irons is hardly stretched in the role of Colm, which he plays with his characteristic air of broody gusto, like an Irish setter with a tragic secret. It’s hard to know why he chose to waste his talent in this frivolous nightmare when the more obvious option, to play Lear itself, was available. The RSC’s motives are equally baffling. In the middle of a recession the company has used its vast resources, and an Oscar-winning actor, to mount an extraordinarily powerful campaign against the renewal of its own grant. Luckily, politicians rarely go to the theatre. And on this evidence no one from the Arts Council takes much interest either. The contents of this suicide note will be restricted to the handful of masochists who make it to the show. Don’t tell anyone else.
Shaw’s early play, Mrs Warren’s Profession, was considered so subversive it remained unperformed for decades. The argument it presents is that marriage and prostitution are morally indivisible but a century after the première its capacity to shock us is rather limited and this drastically undermines the play’s impact. How thrilling it must have been to attend one of those first performances where the audience had to perform the legal ceremony of joining a private-members’ club before they could be exposed to the play’s subversive logic and revolutionary oratory. After the first New York performance, the entire company was arrested and jailed. Though Shaw later claimed this was his greatest play it shows all the signs of an apprentice work by an uncertain trainee. Some of the stagecraft is laughably crude. At one point, Shaw needs to get four characters off while leaving two on, so he arranges for a supper to be served in a next-door room with only four chairs. His rhetoric, always forceful, of course, hasn’t yet acquired the magical suppleness and vigour that make his mature works so exhilarating.
Michael Rudman’s fetching production gets the sense of period exactly right. In the title role Felicity Kendal tempers her natural sweetness with an enjoyable dose of peppery truculence. Some of the lesser parts, truth be told, come with too much prepackaged feeling but there’s good work from David Yelland as the sexist baddie — boo-hiss — who tries to purchase Mrs Warren’s daughter for an annual sum. Lucy Briggs-Owen plays Vivie with an amazing tenderness and fragility, almost like a tear drop, and at the same time captures the character’s zeal and inner strength. A lovely turn. This is a polished and pleasing production of a play that was anything but. It was supposed to start riots, to raise fire-storms, to turn the earth on its head. Now it gets a round of applause and appreciative nods from old dears surrounded by bags of shopping. At heart it’s just a feminist curiosity.
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