Beyond
A thriller set in NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab that chronicles the dawning of a new race to space, following an unspecified global crisis. Rachael plays Guilaen, a Dublin doctor who finds herself on the space research staff.
31 January 2007
29 January 2007
Apologies
Once again I would like to apologise for the recent lack of updates. Both Claire and I have been extremely busy since before Christmas and are getting busier by the day. I have taken on some extra responsibilities at work and all of our free time is being eaten up! When we're not working, we're busy at home. It's really hard to find the time to devote to web projects at the moment but I'm hoping I'll be able to find a free morning or afternoon at some point to update this site and reply to the emails that have come in.
I do apologise for the delay. I'm really looking forward to getting this place up-to-date again!
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Uncle Vanya
David Mamet's stripped-down Chekhov adaptation inspired a famous film, Louis Malle's Vanya on 42nd Street. I suspect that Hugh Fraser, in this informal, bare-platform staging, is striving to achieve the same rehearsal-room revelation. However, the result, in spite of a couple of outstanding performances, seems theatrically undercooked.
Chekhov's play shows how the disruptive visit of the Professor and Yelena to the Serebryakov estate leads to tragic self-recognition: the most the residents can hope for is to get through their days with stoic endurance. In Fraser's revival, there is little of the symphonic detail that is a vital part of Chekhov's genius. In the first act, one misses any sense of afternoon sultriness. And Sonya's heart-rending speech, at the play's close, lacks any aural context: the sound of departing harness bells, the click of the abacus, the gentle strumming of a guitar, which Chekhov specifies, all offer a crucial counterpoint to the spiritual desolation.
Significantly, the two strong performances, which alone make this revival worth catching, come from the play's visitors. Philip Voss's Professor is magnificent: a tetchy, querulous old man who realises that academic distinction offers no protection against private pain. There is a sublime moment when Voss smugly urges the virtues of work on Vanya and Astrov, already crippled with fatigue. Meanwhile, Rachael Stirling perfectly embodies not just the flawless beauty of the Professor's wife, Yelena, but also her casual destructiveness, in a manner that fully justifies Mamet's description of Yelena as "morbid with laziness".
The production's minimalism has a draining effect on the other characters. There is little sense of the joshing familiarity between Colin Stinton's Vanya and Ronan Vibert's Astrov that derives from their educated isolation. While Stinton conveys Vanya's eruptive anger, he lacks the clownish absurdity of a man who twice tries to shoot the Professor and misses. Vibert, meanwhile, has Astrov's charm but none of his vanity: I always recall Olivier, before launching into his diatribe against the destruction of the forests, checking his hair in a mirror. Although not helped by the absence of sound effects, Catherine Cusack's Sonya also misses the element of bravado that makes the final speech overwhelming.
It remains a great play. But in dispensing with Chekhov's careful detail, this production is in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater.
Uncle Vanya
When this Chekhov adaptation by David Mamet opened in Boston in 1988 its conventional approach surprised audiences expecting his usual brusque vernacular. But focusing on quiddities of character this version had its finest flowering with a series of rehearsed New York workshop performances directed by Andre Gregory, lovingly filmed by Louis Malle in the then ruined New Amsterdam Theater.
Hugh Fraser's revival with actors in casual clothes clearly draws its inspiration from Malle's Vanya On 42nd Street. But this first London staging in the faded splendour of Wilton's Music Hall never quite transmutes from rehearsal informality to the ensemble intimacy of the movie.
Costume has much to do with it. Ronan Vibert as Astrov gives a fine portrayal of laid-back Slavic passion combined with a keen intelligence and humanity. But in sweatshirt and jeans, lacking riding boots, it hardly suggests a saddle-weary district doctor neglecting his patients.
The exception is Rachael Stirling, a disturbingly beautiful Yelena costumed in a black, close-fitting dress: not the serenely composed wife bored with life, but an emotionally charged creature, with haunted eyes and husky voice, a fresh and intense interpretation worth crossing London to see, if sometimes lacking vocal energy.
Colin Stinton offers the jauntiest of Vanyas, angry mockery replacing melancholic despair, a transatlantic comic turn that undermines the laughter he would otherwise garner from his farcical pursuit of the Professor, pistol in hand.
As the lovelorn Sonya, Catherine Cusack plays a crop-haired gamin waif in blue jeans, her best moments in downstage, heart-to-heart conversation with Yelena. But the evening's strongest performance comes from veteran Philip Voss who powerfully suggests the Professor's pains and torments of old age while alone among this cast, winging his words to the back row of the stalls.
Uncle Vanya
Hugh Fraser's without-decor Chekhov production lacks most of the vital sound and lighting effects that help create crucial Chekhovian atmospherics, but still manages to cast a desolate, engrossing spell.
For this beautiful music hall, that now totters towards semi-dereliction, thanks to the bureaucratic dawdling or indifference of the Heritage Lottery Fund's philistines, makes an ideal setting for Chekhov.
It breathes an aura of dilapidation, decay and ghostly melancholia, thereby offering a suitable emotional correlative for the play's despairing mood: Uncle Vanya, like Chekhov's three greater dramas, deals with minor landed gentry, menaced by economic and social decline and personal anguish.
Designer Charlie Cridlan neglects Wilton's high, proscenium stage and builds instead a rhomboid playing area beneath it. She thereby achieves a valuable studio-like intimacy for David Mamet's slightly stripped down, faithful version of Uncle Vanya — a serviceable adaptation, but without the freshness of expression that distinguishes Christopher Hampton's Seagull at the Royal Court.
The defect of Fraser's production has to do with its limited emotional range. It is the governing irony of Uncle Vanya that although his chief characters are possessed by a sense of futility, inertia and passivity, they are variously powered by rage, sexual desperation and intellectual ardour.
Philip Voss's definitive Professor Serebryakov captures the forceful Chekhovian mood. Petulant, furious and bleakly comic in the cruel face of old age and physical decline, he greets Vanya's opposition to his plan to sell the family estate with blistering flurries of contempt.
Colin Stinton looks too mature to be playing Vanya. He adopts and maintains a misconceived air of placid calm, even when pining for Rachel Stirling's statuesque Yelena, who is steeped in sexy languor. His pent-up grief and fury mildly erupt, while Ronan Vibert's confident Astrov, fired with a desire for countryside reform, merely smoulders.
Catherine Cusack's cool, crop-haired, jeans-wearing Sonia seems rather lesbian and perversely more interested in Yelena than Astrov, but Lucinda Curtis as Vanya's scathing mother hits the right notes. A flawed revival but a seductive one.
