14 November 2005
Posted by Bonnie on 14 November 2005 at
12:00
Here gracing the Young Genius season at the Barbican is David Farr's epic adaptation of Christopher Marlowe's 1587 play Tamburlaine the Great and its sequel, which premiered at Bristol Old Vic last month. Marlowe, stabbed to death in Deptford when he was just 29, saw Tamburlaine performed six years earlier and he probably wrote it in his last year at Cambridge University. Marlowe was born in the same year as Shakespeare and undoubtedly influenced him. Marlowe's blank verse is of the very finest, soaring and romantic, but in the case of Tamburlaine much of his poetic description is bloodthirsty, brutal and graphic.
Marlowe has embroidered on the legend of Tamburlaine (Greg Hicks), a 14th century conqueror from near Samarkand of humble origin. His enemies called him a Scythian shepherd. Sources say that sheep stealer and petty thief might have described him better. The lands he conquered included Iran, Mesopotamia, Armenia, Georgia, India and Syria. He even took on the Ottoman Empire and captured the emperor Bajazeth (Jeffery Kissoon), and he captured, wooed and married the Egyptian daughter of the Soldan, Zenocrate (Rachael Stirling). Marlowe dramatises Tamburlaine's merciless subjugation of conquered peoples, for instance, the caging of the Ottoman Emperor, the slaughter of the Virgins of Damascus and the chariot pulled by kings. He was ruthless and accepted no authority, not kings, nor emperors, nor any religion, nor God.
Greg Hicks has a magnificent voice and his verse speaking is second to none. His stage presence is much larger than his wiry frame and Tamburlaine is his triumph as he commands our every attention. His first sheepskin jerkin is swapped for imperial robes but the curved sword is ever at his side. His speech to woo Zenocrate is a show stopper in its power and persuasiveness. Rachael Stirling, too is wonderful as Tamburlaine's wife who sees eye to eye with him on the meting out of violence — her voice deepening to a sonorous pitch and sounding like her mother Diana Rigg. Chuk Iwuji is excellent as Tamburlaine's Persian lord and ally, Theridamus. In one scene he thinks he is demonstrating the power of a miracle drug when the captive Olympia (Katy Stephens) persuades him to cut her throat having told him that the drug would save her. She wanted to die but he is devastated.
Other memorable moments in this production are of the Ottoman emperor and his empress Zabena (Ann Ogbomo) bashing out their own brains on the bars of the cage, after Tamburlaine has used the emperor as a footstool to ascend his throne. I was also taken by the beginning of the second half where giant bags of golden dishes, trophies and plunder hang in black nets over the action like huge string bags of foil covered chocolate money, reminding why these wars are fought and what the rewards are. We get some insights into parenting Tamburlaine style as his three sons are urged to become bloodthirsty warriors like their father. Quentin Tarantino could not have delivered more violence than this.
Part Two features the exit of Tamburlaine's beloved wife and partner in gore, Zenocrate and for the first time he seems to be at a loss for words. This act also has the moving and passionate speech of Theridamus to Olympia, widow of an enemy. The chariot is pulled by princes in a magnificent image of subjugation, of the mighty fallen. The staging has tall girders which drop to form an angle as the city falls. Finally Tamburlaine defies all Gods, daring them as he burns the books of the prophets and then drowns all the inhabitants of Babylon. My attention only wavered at the end when Tamburlaine takes almost twenty five minutes to die. In most scenes the costume changes hang on rails at the back of the stage. The final moment after the title character's somewhat prolonged exit shows the massed white dresses now bloodied, descend on hangers, a chilling and evocative reminder of the deaths attributed to one man's ambition for crowns.
David Farr's adaptation has combined both Tamburlaine plays into one three hours long. This is not theatre lite but the component parts of Greg Hicks' magnificent voice, Farrr's thrilling direction and Ti Green's design coup make it very worthwhile, especially for those of us who appreciate the staging of a dramatic rarity. We can't possible admire Tamburlaine's slaughter or even thrill to it the way his Elizabethan audience might have, instead we will recoil at the barbarity, the inhumanity.
No Comments
Posted by Bonnie on 14 November 2005 at
12:00
It can be no great surprise that this is one of Christopher Marlowe's least-performed plays. Even though director David Farr has condensed the two parts into one, Tamburlaine remains a largely unknowable anti-hero who displays a frustrating lack of inner life. What exactly propels him on his ransacking way?
We first encounter a lowly Scythian shepherd but, with clinical efficiency and loyal followers, Tamburlaine mutates into a lean, mean all-conquering machine. Enemies are confusingly dispatched before we can get a handle on them and, lo, the map of the world starts to have a big 'T' scrawled in blood across it.
With his supercilious, inscrutable demeanour, Greg Hicks is just the actor to portray this morality-free man, whose hubris extends as far as employing subjugated foes to draw his chariot. The magnificently voiced Rachael Stirling, as Tamberlaine's betrothed, alternates between cavilling at his treatment of her homeland and filing her nails on his sword.
Farr's enjoyably sinuous production moves to martial rhythms, exploiting the extra space of the opened-up playing area. Props, costumes and even actors hang around onstage waiting their turn. When you have this many dominions to subdue, you can't waste time on scene changes.
No Comments
13 November 2005
Posted by Bonnie on 13 November 2005 at
12:00
Damascus, sacked and bloodied, is one of the many war-weary places glimpsed in Tamburlaine. Marlowe's glittering study of tyranny is hard to stage: swollen with rolling phrases, chopped about with short, vicious scenes and far-flung geography, but David Farr's production is so fine that it makes you feel that the theatre has been impoverished by seeing so little of this poetic dramatist. The treatment is bold. You expect one long hullabaloo: wave after wave of ranting and gore. Farr offers something more monumental.
Ti Green's marvellous design is richly coloured but unadorned: on an almost bare stage, tall, bright banners slowly unfurl; the different parts of Tamburlaine's expanding empire appear in turn, spotlit among the smoky air. A group of women in white burkas pleads for life; when they are massacred, they slip out of their garments, leaving them lying on the stage like shrouds.
This stateliness and simplicity makes the gruesomeness of the action more shocking. And there's no stinting on the grisly, what with several twitchingly realistic throat-severing incidents and the dashing out of brains by regal captives (the excellent Jeffery Kissoon and Ann Ogbomo). In what's proving to be the year of the theatrical vomit (the recent Agatha Christie revival contains a major example of the genre), there's also a graphic throwing-up episode.
Greg Hicks, who played the rape victim in the original Romans in Britain, is a matchless Tamburlaine, with his carved-looking face and graceful, intent movements. His conquering compulsion is unexplained, but you never forget he's a self-made despot; every now and then, you see his early life as a sheep-stealing yob.
He's as convincing when spearing a son for his pansy tendencies as when dissolving into grief at the deathbed of his wife. He is fully human and completely inscrutable.
No Comments
11 November 2005
Posted by Bonnie on 11 November 2005 at
12:00
The Barbican stage is littered with wooden coffers. It looks as though there has been a break in rehearsals and indeed, when the cast of Tamburlaine strides on, they are led by a clipboard-toting Katy Stephens in jeans and T-shirt. She sits, stage left, taking notes.
A strip of red cloth descends: the actors gather round Vinta Morgan — Mycetes, King of Persia — who intones the first celebratory address with that self-conscious, overstressed enthusiasm that is the curse of so much Elizabethan verse-speaking. Tamburlaine is a long, long play and if it is all like this it will be a tedious night.
In fact, David Farr's new staging of Marlowe's first great drama is quite tight — at less than three hours, at least a third of the text has gone — and generally unaffected. Proceedings are dominated by Greg Hicks, playing Tamburlaine: he is authoritative, clipped but articulate and ungarbled in speech (though why does "majesty" have to be "majestay"?) — a lean, hungry warrior and not a grotesque.
What the show lacks — Marlowe's fault, not Farr's — is any sense of inner journey, so characteristic of Shakespeare's histories; Hicks's determination to stay grounded leads him to deliver his lines in a monotone. Whether he is crushing kings, wooing his paramour Zenocrate (a warm and bold performance by Rachael Stirling) or stabbing his own son Calyphas (John Wark) for being a weed, he rarely varies pitch or volume, though he never looks less than utterly commanding.
Farr wisely resists pointing up contemporary military parallels, opting for simple robes, wooden boxes for thrones and, for a whiff of the Orient, slightly pointed helmets. This is an inexorably rhetorical play and much of the "action" is static, although Jeffery Kissoon (Bajazeth) and Ann Ogbomo (Zabina) bludgeoning themselves to death on Bajazeth's cage raises the show's tempo gruesomely. Farr has pulled off an intriguing production, even if his decision to stage the play does not feel fully vindicated.
No Comments
Posted by Bonnie on 11 November 2005 at
12:00
It's difficult to imagine a richer, more compelling production of Christopher Marlowe's Tamburlaine the Great than this, adapted and directed by David Farr for the Young Vic, Bristol Old Vic and Bite:05's Young Genius season.
Written in two parts when Marlowe was only 23, the play, despite its ravishing language, can seem a bewildering succession of battle scenes and stage spectacles that lacks a satisfying sense of psychological complexity. Not so here; Farr turns the Marlovian antihero, who is as dangerously hubristic as Faustus, into an individual driven and divided by demons, whose nature is coruscatingly exposed in the spellbinding performance of Greg Hicks.
Ti Green's design is sparse — little more than steel columns, wooden blocks and swaths of jewel-coloured fabric. The costumes combine combat boots with robes and armour, and Keith Clouston's thrilling score swirls together Arabic and contemporary Western sounds, so that, watching Tamburlaine's armies blaze a bloody trail of conquest across Africa, Asia and the Middle East, we feel the play's connection with our own war-torn world.
Hicks struts and swaggers through his ever-growing empire like a rock star, his cruelly curved sword always at his hip. Here is the low-born Scythian thief and shepherd boy made spectacularly good, destroying his adversaries not only with military might but also with eloquence. Hicks uses his words like weapons, to win over rivals and to humiliate enemies. Yet when wooing Rachael Stirling's Zenocrate, the Egyptian king's daughter, he is all honey. So seductive and potent is his blend of virility and tender passion, it's unsurprising that the traumatised princess, torn by her conflicting feelings, finds herself falling for her captor. The warrior who imprisons Jeffrey Kissoon's powerful but poignantly ageing Turkish emperor Bajazeth in a cage — a torment that eventually causes the King and his Queen to brain themselves on the metal bars — regards his love for Zenocrate as womanish weakness.
When she dies, he is struck dumb with grief and disbelief. His only solace is in slaughter, and Hicks shows us an emotionally damaged man who grows terrifyingly psychopathic.
There's not a moment when Farr's production isn't dazzlingly clear and utterly involving — and its violent imagery has all the more impact for its economy. Tongues of flame leaping as a woman sets alight the body of the son she has just killed to save him from Tamburlaine's hordes; vanquished rulers forced into harness and made to draw his chariot; the Koran ablaze in an oil drum as Tam burlaine defies gods and humanity. It's disturbing, darkly beautiful and searingly brilliant.
No Comments
