23 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 23 August 2006 at
12:00
Peter Gill's nicely acted, 50th anniversary production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger will bolster the convictions of those disputing the claim the play was either revolutionary or served to transform the character and tone of the English stage.
As handled by Gill, Osborne's play emerges more as a misogynistic, marital melodrama than a rancorous attack upon a class-ridden, calcified England. It was, surely, Samuel Beckett's Waiting for Godot, directed by Peter Hall in 1955 and again in his Bath season, that exerted a seminal influence on our stages.
This revival, though, reveals the temperamental affinity between Osborne's play and Beckett's. Both concern trapped people, waiting to be released from lethargy's hold. Gill, prime exponent of Royal Court realism, allows attention to shift from Richard Coyle's suitably aggressive but too armour-plated Jimmy Porter, the lower-middle class graduate with a talent for abuse, and a socially superior, masochistic wife — Mary Stockley's sexy, spiritually battered Alison.
The collapse of Porter's fragile marriage looms more significant than Jimmy's verbally inventive but thematically repetitive tirades. How trivial the period-references seem now. Osborne's hero appears more nostalgic Edwardian with a social chip than 1950s, politically aware rebel.
The play, it struck me last night, adheres to the conventions and mechanical plotting of Sir Arthur Wing Pinero's Victorian marriage dramas. When Rachael Stirling's haughty, scarlet-lady Helena lusts for Jimmy, she effortlessly arranges Alison's return to her parents. After Alison returns out of the blue the language turns embarrassingly purple. "What I have been doing is wrong and evil," Stirling's contrite Helena explains before departing, to leave the couple to resume their infantile flights of embarrassing, erotic whimsy as a bear and squirrel double-act.
Gill has a flair for illuminating classic texts, but not here. Bill Dudley's attic-design, with only roof beams slanted above it, vainly hints at some non-realistic conception. Soliloquies are selfconsciously delivered, framed by sound effects and music. The relationship between Porter and his live-in best friend Cliff, an enigmatic Richard Harrington, ought to have the odd, homoerotic hint about it, but does not.
We are left with Coyle energetically raining down insults upon Alison, basking in self-pity over his dead daddy and sympathising with his wife's soldier father (effective Ronald Pickup), the one character whom Osborne respects.
How dated, how aimlessly self-indulgent it all seems now.
No Comments
20 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 20 August 2006 at
12:00
I didn't record that last week I went to the first run through of Peter Gill's production of John Osborne's Look Back in Anger. Somewhat unsettlingly they've been rehearsing in a newly refurbished (and rather swish) church hall just round the corner from me. Thus they've been having lunch in the pub opposite my flat. All a bit claustrophobic-making, having these colleagues so near. Nice in one way, naturally, but absurdly I do feel that I need to get dressed up if I want to go and get a pint of milk, just in case, and at one point find myself scurrying out of sight with my shopping bags.
What a deeply strange play. I just recently had another read of Osborne's marvellous autobiography A Better Class of Person and am shocked to find that it's all in there, in detail. It's a more or less accurate account of what actually happened to him, though compressed somewhat. The key thing, from the book and touched on in the play, is him finding the correspondence between his young wife and her mother: the fact that the mother doesn't mention him is taken in his stride; that his new wife doesn't refer to him is an abyss-opening discovery and in some ways the animus of the play.
Peter and his company appear to have decided not to take any notice of what has been said about the play over the years and concentrate on what Osborne wrote. The result is that you keep fearing that, whilst fantastically absorbed in what's going on, the boring old play they disparage might be about to start. It doesn't. Richard Coyle plays Jimmy and conveys his mischievousness and sex-appeal: for once (maybe the first time?) the squirrels-and-bears stuff seems real and awful and like people's lives. And a strong clue that sex binds them. Rachael Stirling is terrific as Helena and made me realise that she, Helena, actually telegraphs the father to fetch Alison in order to get rid of her after Jimmy breaks her heart talking about his dead father. And that in some ways Alison returning in Act Three breaks up a rather happy life for her and Jimmy.
What's also clear from Richard's performance is that there isn't any contradiction between some supposed socialist young Osborne and his later manifestation as a lover of Tory England, its hymns and poetry and music: it's all there. (About a concert on the radio that Sunday evening: "Oh, yes. Vaughan Williams. Well, that's something anyway. Something strong, something simple. Something English.") What he despises is the 'Butskellism' of the day (roughly our New Labour/Cameron-type affair).
Also clear is a family tree of tone. Osborne's high style of compacted, rhetorical wit; caustic dismissal combined with yearning for something else; his puritan inability to let anything just go by without correction; that crisp whiplash turn of phrase; the romantic scepticism — "it's such a long time since I was with anyone who got enthusiastic about anything": I hear it in Peter and in Bill Gaskill and in Anthony Page. I heard it in Lindsay Anderson. I never met John Dexter but he was supposed to be the offstage character of Webster (he and Osborne had been in rep together). Described in the play as "a sort of female Emily Bronte. He's the only one of your friends who's worth tuppence anyway. … He's not only got guts, but sensitivity as well. That's the rarest combination I can think of", you can't help warming to the idea of him.
Jimmy: Is your friend Webster coming tonight?
Alison: He might drop in. You know what he is.
Jimmy: Well, I hope he doesn't. I don't think I could take Webster tonight.
Alison: I thought you said he was the only person who spoke your language.
Jimmy: So he is. Different dialect but same language. I like him. He's got bite, edge, drive -
Alison: Enthusiasm.
Jimmy: You've got it. When he comes here, I begin to feel exhilarated. He doesn't like me, but he gives me something…
In other words, it's the old Royal Court. All too tempting to fall into (last night at David Eldridge's wedding party I found myself doing it) it can be a self-defeating trap. But is the new alternative, the trite, everything is as interesting as everything else, let's-pretend-there's-a-consensus-about-what's-good sort of affair which waterlogs all theatrical conversation at the moment, any better?
No Comments
16 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 16 August 2006 at
12:00
The three-act play takes place in a one-bedroom flat in the British Midlands. Jimmy Porter, lower middle-class, university-educated, lives with his wife Alison, the daughter of a retired Colonel in the British Army in India. His friend Cliff Lewis, who helps Jimmy run a sweet stall, lives with them. Jimmy, intellectually restless and thwarted, reads the papers, argues and taunts his friends over their acceptance of the world around them. He rages to the point of violence, reserving much of his bile for Alison's friends and family. The situation is exacerbated by the arrival of Helena, an actress friend of Alison's from school. Appalled at what she finds, Helena calls Alison's father to take her away from the flat. He arrives while Jimmy is visiting the mother of a friend and takes Alison away. As soon as she has gone, Helena moves in with Jimmy. Alison returns to visit, having lost Jimmy's baby. Helena can no longer stand living with Jimmy and leaves. Finally Alison returns to Jimmy and his angry life.
No Comments
11 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 11 August 2006 at
12:00
You get the feeling that there's nothing half-hearted about Rachael Stirling, currently preparing to star in the 50th anniversary production of John Osborne's Look Back In Anger.
The briefest scan of previous press interviews reveals that this is an actress who does not suffer fools lightly.
The fiercely intelligent London-based actress, deeply proud of her degree in History of Art from Edinburgh University (because it proves she's not just 'some dumb actress'), shot to stardom playing Nan in the BBC's controversial lesbian drama, Tipping The Velvet.
Ballsy, a smoker, and not averse to swearing like a trooper, Rachael has been described, in previous clashes with the media, as 'Audrey Hepburn with a touch of a building site thrown in'.
So it's entirely appropriate that the 26-year-old daughter of Dame Diana Rigg should tackle a role in Osborne's masterpiece at the Theatre Royal Bath. Bravery, it seems, is her thing.
"It's exhilarating," she says, taking a break during rehearsals. "I've never been the type of person who just dips my toe into something. I throw myself in completely, and that's why this profession is so glorious, so haphazard. You never know how it's going to turn out until you're actually taking the risk and doing it."
The process of rehearsing, particularly in comparison to filming rehearsals which don't allow the same luxury of time to explore themes, is something she enjoys too, relishing the 'arc of the journey' that the rehearsal takes the actors on.
"We're busy researching the realities of life in the 1950s right now. Was there running water in these little bedsits for instance, and how would you wash the leaves of some lettuce for supper, that kind of thing. It's the practicalities of existence in that era which give the production its authenticity."
When John Osborne's original 'kitchen sink' drama premiered 50 years ago, the critics were astounded by its realism. Legend has it that the audience gasped at the sight of an ironing board on stage, and some theatre critics cited it as 'grubby' and sordid. However, the Observer's Kenneth Tynan spotted the play's true potential and famously wrote: "I doubt if I could love anyone who did not wish to see Look Back In Anger."
Now, half a century later, Rachael believes the play is just as relevant as ever.
"It stands up very well because it's about basic human relationships, what it means to be human, and how often we cause each other pain. Emotionally, it's just as shocking as when it first appeared. In fact, I would say it has yet to be surpassed in terms of shock value."
Jimmy Porter (Richard Coyle), passionate, articulate and educated is trapped within a dead-end job and the claustrophobia of the bedsit where he lives with his wife and best friend. As sensationally gripping as a soap opera and as faithful to reality as fly-on-the wall documentaries, Look Back In Anger has all the elements that appeal to audiences today — that is, the cruelty that people are capable of towards each other, and how involving that is to watch.
"As John Osborne was venting his spleen through the character of Jimmy, as an actor you have no choice but to react. He's like a magician, producing handkerchief after handkerchief; just when you think there's no more that can possibly be thrown at you, out comes another jolt."
According to a fan website set up in her honour, Rachael has an unusual technique to get under the skin of a new character she is playing — she finds a perfume which sums them up and wears it throughout the production.
"This time I'm wearing something called Mandragora, which is a plain perfume, appropriate for the 1950s perhaps. Sometimes when I'm walking down the street I suddenly come across Nan Astley from Tipping the Velvet because somebody's wearing Clinique Happy."
Earlier in the year, Rachael auditioned for a part in the new James Bond movie, Casino Royale, a role which would have been a neat coup de grace as her mother was a Bond girl (in fact, Bond's wife, killed at the end of On Her Majesty's Secret Service).
"Yes, how glorious was that experience, swanning around in several thousand pounds worth of Versace gowns?"
She did not, however, feel quite ready for the role so, for the moment, Rachael will not be joining her mother on the list of top Bond babes.
For now, she's happy to go where the work takes her — usually work that's not run of the mill, low budget British films, for instance, would be just up her street. She has recently completed filming a drama for BBC Four, The Haunting of Toby Jugg, and will be probably moving to Los Angeles to follow up on positive responses to some screen tests she did over there.
"I don't have a game plan. In some ways I wish I did have one because in some ways it would be great to know that next February I've got a play lined up, followed by a film in September, but for now, I'm still a gypsy at heart."
No Comments
1 August 2006
Posted by Bonnie on 1 August 2006 at
12:00
Many of the West End's brightest stars take to the Prince of Wales stage on 10 September for the John Betjeman Gala to honour of the centenary of the poet's birth. Barry Humphries hosts the evening, which hopes to feature appearances from Dame Judi Dench, Richard E Grant, Prunella Scales, Timothy West, Sinead Cusack, Rachael Stirling, Bill Nighy and Stephen Fry, though all appearances are subject to availability.
The evening promises to blend variety, music and dance, with tunes coming from British Sea Power, Suggs, Jools Holland and St Paul's Church Choir. There will also be a video link to Australia, where Dame Edna Everage will join the proceedings.
Proceeds from the evening, which is sponsored by Shell, will go to mental health charity SANE. The charity aims to raise awareness and respect for people with mental illness and their families, research the cause of serious mental illness and provide information and emotional support for those suffering from mental health problems.
In addition to being one of the 20th century's most highly regarded poets, Betjeman was also a journalist and broadcaster. In 1969 he was knighted, before being made Poet Laureate in 1972. Betjeman died in 1984; he was suffering from Parkinson's Disease.
No Comments
