Hamilton

Hamilton / book, music and lyrics by Lin-Manuel Miranda

Victoria Palace Theatre / directed by Thomas Kail

Seen on April 11, 2019

Score: 5 / 5

(I know I’m late to the party with this, but here it goes, short and sweet.) A consummate production with big brawns, a big brain, and a big heart, Hamilton is an artistic achievement whose stakes and borders go well beyond those we often associate with musicals. This true symphony of visual, aural, and kinetic energies works almost in the vein of a Wagnerian Gesamtkunstwerk. Whether the stage hosts the entire cast in one of the many scenes of vibrant, hectic choreography, or only one actor standing stiffly (but singing heartily), the effect is consistently visceral: every detail counts and works. Lin-Manuel Miranda rewrites the rulebook of musical theatre with astonishing dexterity and imagination, in ways that both interrogate and entertain the audience. The London cast, led by Jamael Westman as Hamilton, is immensely talented and could not be more comfortable in the skin of their characters. Not only Thomas Kail’s direction and Andy Blankenbuehler’s choreography create magnetic fields of sincere bravura, but all elements of the design are supremely blended with one another and interwoven into the fabric of this enchanted world. (In particular, Howell Binkley’s lights set a whole new bar for his craft.) In my annals of theatre-going, neither hip-hop nor American history had never been this aesthetically pleasing and rousing. An elegantly wild meditation on history, nationhood, and the very idea of biography, Hamilton more than lives up to the hype.

All About Eve

All About Eve by Joseph L. Mankiewicz

Noel Coward Theatre / adapted and directed for the stage by Ivo van Hove

Seen on March 7, 2019

Score: 4 / 5

Adapted from Joseph L. Mankiewicz’s 1950 film, All About Eve brings to the theatre a story that already belongs there, that of the increasingly toxic relationship between two women—Margo Channing, a popular but aging Broadway star, and Eve Harrington, a mysterious young fan who insinuates herself into Margo’s life, progressing from being her assistant to her understudy and finally her rival. As Eve threatens Margo’s career and personal relationships, not only do the real roots of Margo’s insecurities come above ground, but Eve’s own ambition finds itself headed to a trap of its making. Ivo van Hove’s production builds up and rests on great stretches of surface tension, but without putting anything deeper beneath them.

A sort of flatness reigns over this glassy world from start to finish: evocative, certainly, of the predictable lack of depth that characterises many of these showbiz lives, but also evident in and of itself, tugging at the seams of this explicitly monochromatic production. With so much glam and glitter parading around, the underlying critique—assuming there is one—starts to get countervailed by its own means, letting itself be tempted by its very subject. Perhaps some of this has to do with the generally unexceptional performances, as moments of nuanced and muscular expression are the outliers, rather than the norm. Something is certainly missing: the energy—or the chemistry, if you will—not so much lags as never takes off in the first place.

Gillian Anderson delivers a needlessly mannered performance that flirts with hyperbole, though at her best, she tantalisingly offers peeks of Margo’s hidden depths, assuring us that they are there, but not to be delved into. For a play that sets much store by the allure of its titular character’s evasiveness, the casting of Lily James as Eve speaks of poor judgment: James does anger very well, imbuing two of the play’s most crucial scenes with a charmingly alien menace, but the remainder of her performance is consistently stagnant and disappointing, devoid of any convincing complexities. But we are, thankfully, treated to the endless wonders of Monica Dolan, whose dynamic rendering of Karen is one of the absolute highlights of the production. Julian Ovenden and Stanley Townsend follow closely behind: Ovenden is magnetically alive as Margo’s partner Bill, and Townsend renders with surprising vigour the critic Addison’s ultimate transformation into a melodramatic force of evil.

All About Eve plays host to many of Ivo van Hove’s signature theatrical gestures. Most of the scenes feature live recordings of on- and off-stage action projected on a big screen, which pulls our attention in several directions more than it provides us with the luxury to get beneath the skin of certain moments. A strong emphasis on simultaneity thus undergirds the play; we are often given access to scenes that unfold concurrently but in different spaces. It’s worth pointing out the slight overuse of projections: it’s not always clear what purpose they are meant to serve. When we see close-ups of Margo’s and Eve’s faces reflected on the mirror, for instance, the effect is stark and the dramaturgical intent clear. Yet our prolonged exposure to, say, the silent goings-on in a kitchen during a party rarely amounts to much.

Jan Versweyfeld’s expansive set reinforces the play’s self-reflexivity; it lays bare the artifice of the theatre in elegant ways, alternately exposing and hiding the brick walls and slight clutter of the backstage. An D’huys’s costumes are anachronistically sleek reflections of the characters’ taste and class, while Tom Gibbons’ sound, which plays for long stretches of time as a sort of ambient noise, creates permanent tension (sometimes at the expense of clarity). The look of the whole is undeniably velvety and lustrous, though it has a disquieting coldness of its own. The vanity mirror that often stands centre stage works superbly: as the lights around it glow with intensity, it almost creates another experiential realm within the world of the play. Ivo van Hove’s longstanding interest in creating deeply resonant, even painterly, stage images comes to the fore here most forcefully when our perceptual angle is anchored on this mirror.

In terms of story, All About Eve neither promises nor delivers any mind-expanding substance. This is a melodramatic tale that knows itself and does little to play with its own bounds and rules, whether seriously or light-heartedly. It would, of course, be marvellous if what started out as a plot of ambition teetering on (self-)destruction had taken slightly different directions and thrown us off a bit. But we end where we start, both thematically and structurally. It appears that we already know, more or less, somehow, how things will end. So that final tableau is far less surprising than it is aesthetically moving. Maybe that’s a statement in itself, maybe not.

Medea

Medea by Simon Stone, after Euripides

Internationaal Theater Amsterdam & Barbican Centre / directed by Simon Stone

Seen on March 8

Score: 5 / 5

Simon Stone’s radically reimagined and decluttered Medea is a visceral take on Euripides’ classic tragedy. In this bold and minimalist adaptation, in which Medea has become Anna, she and her husband Lucas are medical scientists living in a world of YouTube videos, McDonald’s, and sexting (each of which finds its way into Stone’s elegantly written script at pivotal moments). The play is firmly embedded within a contemporary milieu, but its scenic backdrop is none other than Peter Brook’s empty space taken to its lyrical extreme, as timeless as it gets: an all-consuming sea of whiteness, upon which, at some point, the ashes of Anna’s tragedy begin to fall with ominous grace. Even though our attention is occasionally diverted to projections that capture close-ups of the onstage action, in ways that are narratively integrated into Stone’s version, it is the razor-sharp performances of the actors that claim the entirety of our focus, charging this production with its unadulterated power. And that without any grand gestures: a near-geometrical but poetic sense of blocking and physicality infuses the actors’ ownership of this disquieting space. Marieke Heebink, as Anna, is especially dazzling: in a performance that throbs achingly with life, she unleashes and contracts, lets go and takes it all in.

Both Stone’s text and Heebink’s rendering portray Anna as a rightfully unhinged victim, but without brushing over the extremities of her cunning and steadfastness. Save for a few moments in which she knowingly pushes Lucas’s buttons, we are mostly asked to sympathise with her, and we are given such a finely wrought perspective into her feelings that her subsequent actions gain a tender luminosity. “I have given you everything!” she exclaims at one point to Lucas, who appears to have squandered all her love and support for the sake of a girl half his age. Over the first half of the play, it becomes clear that Anna, recently discharged from psychiatric treatment for having poisoned her adulterous husband, genuinely wants to make things better, pick them back up and put into order. Heebink’s eyes glisten with the intensity of her desire for a return to normalcy, to a loving family. Because we witness her sincerity and insistence in this attempt, the eventual downfall unfolds even more disturbingly, with a sense of utter inevitability on Anna’s part, and one of strong culpability on Lucas’s.

This humbly handsome production runs for no more than 80 minutes, but by the end, it feels as though we have been in this scorching world for much longer. And what a world it is—bare, bleak, but fully alive.

The Son

The Son by Florian Zeller

Kiln Theatre / directed by Michael Longhurst / translated by Christopher Hampton

Seen on March 7, 2019

Score: 5 / 5

Transfixing and electrifying, Florian Zeller’s The Son is the sort of play that puts a lump of unease right into your stomach and doesn’t take it back even after the curtain falls. Yet as the haunting reach of this feeling grows, the play rarely lets you forget how deceptively simple its story is. Deceptive, because it’s virtually impossible to process and give an account of the plot without making certain interpretive leaps, without taking sides. From one perspective, The Son is about a divorced couple’s inability, due to their shocking self-absorption, to manage their adolescent son’s severe depression and suicidal tendencies. From another, it’s about their inadvertent—indeed, universal—encounter with the vexing question of how much their love for him can actually help him heal.

If these descriptive alternatives take the focus away from Nicolas, the tormented, struggling soul responsible for the play’s mounting tension, it’s not at all because his complex character is not central to it, but rather because Zeller’s chief preoccupation is how his parents respond to his illness. Partially blind as Anne and Pierre seem to be to it, the pressing gravity of Nicolas’ depression is actually all too evident: the play rather pulsates around, and chronicles, the ways in which they do and do not deal with it. I, for one, have found myself, at several times, audibly gasping at their selfish misguidedness, but not without the awareness that the play easily accommodates opposing tendencies to approach their parental challenge from a more tolerant perspective. Though the plot gets a bit predictable towards the end, Zeller’s treatment of his characters is anything but so, particularly when it comes to the words with which they try to bridge the gulfs separating them. Zeller’s language deftly combines the prosaic with the profound (in ways that reminded me of Duncan Macmillan’s People, Places & Things), and Christopher Hampton’s fluid translation is obviously integral to this effect.

As richly textured as Zeller’s play is, it owes a good deal of its cumulative impact to Michael Longhurst’s searingly calibrated production. This is, all in all, a work of great finesse: The cast is uniformly brilliant—especially John Light as the slowly unravelling, smugly controlling Pierre and Laurie Kynaston as the pained and manipulative Nicolas. Longhurst stages this Ibsenite tragedy in an environment of estranged realism, designed superbly by Lizzie Clachan. A chic but spare living room accommodates all the scenes, even when exact locations change. What at first appears to be painstaking realism gradually subverts itself: as the material signs of Nicolas’s disturbed, disruptive behaviour invade an otherwise ‘logical’ space and accrete grotesquely upon it, the increasingly off-kilter set becomes a visual counterpart to the story’s disturbing trajectory and embodies its tame uncanniness. Lee Curran’s lighting, which subtly helps the play oscillate between its moments of filial warmth and clinical despair, contributes to this strange but powerful tone. The sonic background to much of this, composed and designed by Isobel Waller-Bridge, is indispensably ambient; razor-sharp in its timing and changing dominance, it keeps exhaling wafts of harrowing beauty through the entire piece. Orchestrated with sensitive precision by Longhurst, all these elements harmonize strikingly and testify to the whole team’s meticulous engagement with the play’s covert rhythms.

Even when The Son comes daringly close to luxuriating in the pathos of some of its scenes, it manages to keep its distance from that realm of directness. Instead, a sense of unassuming ambiguity runs through it all, and does so with gusto, capturing something both ineffable and familiar. It’s at once delightful and frightening to be so engulfed by it.

Shipwreck

Shipwreck by Anne Washburn

Almeida Theatre / directed by Rupert Goold

Seen on February 16, 2019

Score: 3 / 5

It might not be best critical practice to think about a new play and its first production in different terms and as separate entities, as though one had only a passing bearing on the other. There are times, however, when the quality differential between the two is so stark that the distinction has to be made. Probably the more common vice is to subject great plays to disappointing renderings, but the reverse is also possible, with a disappointing play receiving a laudable production. Shipwreck at the Almeida is a case in point, as Rupert Goold’s fantastic cast and notable staging are wasted on Anne Washburn’s dramatically inert, shockingly dull play.

Let’s begin with the play. Shipwreck alternates between two narrative strands that purport to intersect at the very end: One depicts a group of predominantly white, upper-class friends who come together for a weekend retreat at a country house and get lost in an endless, meandering discussion on Trump’s presidency. The other is primarily a series of introspective and inquisitive monologues centred on the coming-of-age story of Mark (played with great finesse by Fisayo Akinade), a Black man who has been adopted and raised by a white couple. Further intercutting these is a diptych of satirical scenes that imagine Trump in highly caricatured episodes of political scheming: in the first one, presumably taking place in the early 2000’s, he is visited by George W. Bush, whom he ends up combating for the presidency, and in the second, much closer to our time, he demands loyalty from James Comey in a now-infamous dinner.

If all this sounds like a jumble of ill-fitting pieces, then it’s because Washburn’s play is exactly that. It is a baggy hodgepodge of random scenes of political commentary—a dramaturgical mess that doesn’t even make an effort to pull itself together. It looks more like a rough draft, which is potentially pregnant with multiple plays, than the latest work of a dramatist who is one of the most inventive of her generation (and whose Mr. Burns, in my opinion, is one of the greatest American plays of this decade). In Shipwreck, Washburn’s loosely constellated scenes either drag on forever or come to an abrupt halt before they even start rolling; most of her characters are mind-bogglingly flat and serve merely as argumentative mouthpieces; and her attempts to infuse the quotidian with the mythical—which was the superb achievement of Mr. Burns—keep falling flat. Overarching and aggravating these weaknesses is the glaring problem of structure, as the play’s many discrete components refuse to fit together in any exciting or meaningful way. With thoughtful characterisation and plotting thus discarded, there’s virtually nothing that propels the play forward. And in a production that runs for 3 hours and 30 minutes, this is problematic at best.

The play’s political discourse is blindingly explicit, so much so that one of the scenes is self-reflexively—and gratuitously—devoted to a discussion of what it means to write a political play today, with the characters spouting examples from Shakespeare and Euripides, and one of them concluding that our immature penchant for “mystery” is what has created these “eternal” plays with no political specificity. Taking this as its own maxim, Washburn’s play desperately wants to make specific and provocative points about the manifold absurdities and woes of contemporary American politics. Names of political figures keep buzzing in the air; references to specific events of the last few years abound in every scene; and many of the political questions asked by the characters end up getting directed at the audience itself. All this, of course, within a seemingly diverse group: the country-house crew includes liberals, conservatives, and at least one self-designated radical; also thrown into the mix is a person of colour, who happens to be one of the two gay men. We learn at some point, in passing, that one of the couples is “1% rich,” whereas another one is going through a rough patch financially. (That covers economic diversity, right?) It’s hardly a surprise that issues of race, class, sexuality, and gender are virtually absent from any of the diatribes voiced by the characters: they can get quite myopic when it comes to matters of identity.

Not that a play about Trump, or any political play, ought to deal with any or all of these categories of experience, but one can’t help but wonder why Washburn keeps eliding such concerns, not even gesturing towards them. Is it because this particular group of characters is in no position to relate to and comment on the plight of the precarious under Trump’s government? Perhaps. Is this why we have Mark in this play? Yes, I suspect, even though his story has very little to do with Trump.

Besides its farcical tokenism, the ways in which the play engages with political realities and questions are consistently trite. Only a handful of the views articulated by the characters are actually worth pondering and pursuing in detail; the rest are clichés by now. It is telling that Washburn doesn’t actually do anything with these positions; there’s no intellectual or dramatic arc drawn with—or through—any of them. There is not even an intriguing debate of opposites, of the sort that one would rightly expect to witness in a play so insistently political. What happens is that ideas come and go, pseudo-debates rise and fall. And they fall not with a bang but with a whimper. Whenever this prolonged chitchat loses steam, characters resort to spiritual or mythical meditations that always find their way back to Trump. In one of these, Trump is the Antichrist, whom Pope Francis may or may not have recognised in their meeting; in another, Trump is actually an angel, and it is we who are demons, thinking poorly of him.

Amidst such cringe-inducing speculations, the closest Washburn comes to gripping our attention sustainedly and meaningfully is when one of her characters, who is clearly anti-Trump, admits to having voted for him in a purple state—a fact he has hidden even from his husband. His protracted, but intermittently unfolding, account of this perplexing act constitutes one of the few episodes in Shipwreck where we feel we are in the presence of a dramatic character whose politics and psychology are somehow connected.

To give credit where credit is due: There are moments when Washburn’s language soars to affecting heights of lyrical power, when a throwaway remark gets imbued with an otherworldly halo or a brief scene of intellectual back-and-forth glows with life, even if fleetingly. This is often the case in Mark’s monologues, in which he reflects on his upbringing in a white community and ponders, with impressive imagination and eloquence, how the history of race and racism in America has long haunted him. These are dramatically vibrant instances, but they are a minority in this sprawling work and fail to develop into resonant through-lines. If anything, they should encourage the audience to wonder how things might have turned out if Washburn had just picked one central idea for this play and nurtured it with care.

It is, then, not the play itself but pretty much everything else that makes this production not merely endurable, but oddly watchable. It is an absolute pity that such an overwhelmingly strong cast has to make do with this imperfect script. Rupert Goold has assembled a formidable group of actors without even a slightly weak link. All of them do their best to stretch these quasi-characters beyond their narrow limits, not allowing them to slide into cartoon, while doing full justice to their peculiar Americanisms. Goold’s direction, too, deserves praise, as the cast handle the play’s many clunky transitions with minimal awkwardness and animate even the most stagnant moments with sleek blocking and sharp delivery.

Goold stages the play primarily on a round wooden platform, which also doubles as a giant ceremonial table, around which sit not only the actors, but also a dozen audience members. The onstage audience acts, at least in theory, as civic voyeurs or silent participants of what passes as political debate (and, later, ritual) in this work. This configuration of the space, designed by Miriam Buether, is an ideal choice to represent the play’s (aspiring) straddle between the epic and the intimate: actors alternate between occupying the far edge of the platform (thus leaving the whole thing empty) and dispersing all over its surface, at times coming almost face-to-face with the spectators. Indeed, from candlelit intimacy to phantasmagorical spectacle, the range of moods that materialize upon this platform is refreshingly expansive. Apropos of this, there’s a sense in which the play keeps citing, whether intentionally or not, the first and final acts of Mr. Burns, where the characters chat around a campfire and perform an elaborate musical pageant, respectively. Shipwreck overindulges in the former mode, which is why, I think, the free-floating bits of overstated parody have been added to the play ex post facto—as a sort of dramaturgical compensation, a would-be reward for our patience.

In most of the transitions, Luke Halls’ videos are projected on the Almeida’s brick wall in flashes of energising grandeur. Though it is often unclear what these satirical visuals of fictive Trump iconography have to do with any of the stage action, they are nonetheless invigorating. Deftly atmospheric, Jack Knowles’ lighting conveys the play’s near-manic mood swings with much refinement. Visually speaking, then, there’s a lot that keeps one engaged, and it is partly thanks to these elements that the runtime of the production does not become a recipe for boredom.

Ultimately, it would not be an exaggeration to conclude that the real shipwreck here is no other than Washburn’s play. But the same cannot and should not be said of the production as a whole, as much as it can be extricated from the text it embodies (though there is obviously a limit to such conceptual division). With its nuanced performances, imaginative staging, and arresting tableaus, this is commendable work. There is surely a good play to be written about the whole Trump hellscape, and this cast and this creative team might be what that play deserves, but Shipwreck is far from rising to that challenge.

Pinter Seven: A Slight Ache & The Dumb Waiter

Pinter Seven: A Slight Ache & The Dumb Waiter, by Harold Pinter

The Jamie Lloyd Company / directed by Jamie Lloyd

Seen on February 16, 2019

Score: 4.5 / 5

The seventh instalment of Jamie Lloyd’s Pinter season brings together two one-acts that are each unnerving in its own way. Both are two-handers, but both depend greatly upon the presence of a third figure, who is completely silent (and unseen) in A Slight Ache and offstage in The Dumb Waiter. As these relational triangles lead marital and collegial tensions to mount to a shattering climax, Pinter offers us profound instances of the clash between the social and the personal. Lloyd executes both plays excellently, reaching and shedding light on even their deepest, most elusive caverns.

In A Slight Ache, a married couple invite into their a home an old, enigmatic match-seller, who does not (or cannot) speak and thus becomes an empty slate upon which his hosts project various kinds of psychological and spiritual venom. As Edward and Flora dominate the man by the sheer force of their speech, their cross examination sets the stage for an ultimate unearthing of the repressed and an unexpected reversal of roles. John Heffernan and Gemma Whelan are astounding in their parts, to which they bring a spellbinding clarity that does not flatten but rather intensifies and enriches the play’s poetic ambiguity. Their physicality, pacing, and registers are relentlessly pitch-perfect. Lloyd’s staging pays homage to the original status of A Slight Ache as a radio play: he sets the scene in a radio station, where the actors speak to microphones, move minimally, and, at times, create ambient sounds. But soon enough, the logic of this initial set-up starts to crumble in riveting ways, with microphones getting dropped off in bouts of panic and moments of striking visuality increasing in number and intensity. As the line between actor and character blurs, Jon Clark’s lighting and George Dennis’ sound design, too, convey these unsettling swerves with great subtlety. The result is not only an immensely well-calculated and captivating depiction of linguistic terror and unassuming catharsis, but also a tempting invitation to experience the play’s quirky relationship to sound and vision through multiple layers.

The Dumb Waiter comes very close to being as perfect as A Slight Ache, but Danny Dyer and Martin Freeman’s occasional tendency to play for laughs slightly blemishes an otherwise masterful production. With multiple echoes of Waiting for Godot, the play presents two hitmen, Ben and Gus, trapped in a basement and waiting for instructions about their next “assignment” from a man implied to be their boss. Hints of gallows humour and an undercurrent of existential despair make the dynamic between the two men both symbiotic and antagonistic. The play’s hauntingly staged ending hits the right note, leaving a memorable aftertaste. Dyer and Freeman are often quite careful and inventive about the dramatic contours of their respective characters, even though there are moments when the impulse for slapstick takes over. Still, their treatment of this challenging piece is remarkable in its precision and attention to detail.

Berberian Sound Studio

Berberian Sound Studio / conceived for the stage by Joel Horwood and Tom Scutt; written by Joel Horwood

Donmar Warehouse / directed by Tom Scutt

Seen on February 15, 2019

Score: 4 / 5

Based on Peter Strickland’s 2012 film of the same title, Berberian Sound Studio is a work of sonic ingenuity that both celebrates and interrogates sound as a medium. At its centre is Gilderoy, an English sound designer recruited to work at a studio in Italy, where a small group of foley artists and voice actors are dubbing over an allegedly avant-garde horror film by an auteur named Santini. With his expertise in nature documentaries, Gilderoy is especially needed, it seems, for the film’s hyper-violent and technically demanding climax—an “indelible kiss” of tortures—which necessitates, among other things, an all-consuming, guttural scream.

Amidst the complaints of the lead voice actor about the absurdities of the script, and Gilderoy’s communicative discords with his bizarre colleagues, this pursuit of the ideal cocktail of sounds takes on a dubious character. As the thin line between representation and documentation gets increasingly perilous and permeable in the studio, ethical questions start to rear their heads: How far will the ambitious sound designer will, or can, go to capture the “perfect” scream of unspeakable pain? What is the extent to which he is responsible for—and complicit in—the patriarchal, offensive aesthetics of Santini, whose penchant for gratuitous violence might have even darker instincts behind it? And what is one to do with the gap between where a sound comes from and what it can ultimately represent?

Much of Berberian Sound Studio deservedly glories in a long succession of sonic exposés. A leek is broken in half to suggest the breaking of bones; watermelons are stabbed to pieces to simulate the sounds of a murder; a gaff tape is stretched rhythmically to sound like a heartbeat. But then an actual nail gets cut off, and before long, this striving after veracity knows no bounds. Things get messy.

It is tempting to watch the play with the presumption that the story will culminate in a certain sort of bodily harm for the sake of Gilderoy’s art, but very little prepares one for what actually transpires at the end. The narrative takes strange and clever turns that ask us to look back on the entirety of the play and revisit its many details, though some clarity is sacrificed for a particularly lyrical ending. All the sounds in this production are breathtakingly crisp, but the same cannot be said for the quality of storytelling. The fact that nearly half the play is in Italian makes it all the more important for the production to convey clearly the main joints of the plot. Which it does most of the time, but certain transitions—and a few scenes—prioritise style over substance, slightly clouding a play that is already opaque in otherwise commendable respects. Perhaps relatedly, the intriguing questions that the work opens up do not mature into a robust thematic of their own, but rather hang in the air as striking but incomplete thoughts.

Both the cast and the creative team deftly create and nourish a trademark balance between dark humour and slowly mounting terror: As Gilderoy, Tom Brooke is humbly (and somewhat self-effacingly) penetrating in his descent into madness. Lara Rossi’s Sylvia is elegantly but earnestly outspoken, and Enzo Cilenti’s Francesco is at once disquieting and amiable. Of course, Ben and Max Ringham’s composition and sound design are simply immaculate and indispensable—in both diegetic and non-diegetic registers. While Lee Curran’s lighting provides the ideal visual complement to this intense soundscape, Anna Yates and Tom Scutt’s set compartmentalises the action in interesting ways. Overall, as a directorial debut, Scutt’s work is subtly impressive.

Berberian Sound Studio might be a piece whose sonic acrobatics ultimately trump all else, but that does not mean that the surrounding elements are not remarkable. Quite the contrary: without its uncanny story, full of strange characters and mystifying details (at times evocative of a David Lynch film), the production’s sonic texture would have no real punch. Rest assured that the punch is there—but beware where it comes from.

When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other

When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other by Martin Crimp

National Theatre / directed by Katie Mitchell

Seen on January 26, 2019

Score: 4 / 5

‘I’d rather be raped than bored.’ So remarks one of the characters in When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other. And such is the spirit in which the play wants to awaken its audience from what it takes to be a certain torpor (or timidity) characteristic of some contemporary discourse on sex and sexual politics. Provocative it surely is, but to what exact end—that is harder to unpack.

In his new play, aptly subtitled ‘Twelve Variations on Samuel Richardson’s Pamela’, Martin Crimp deploys an infamous 18^th-century novel’s plot as an incubator to generate a series of sexually charged scenes that depict an unnamed couple, Man and Woman, engaged in twisted pursuits of power, pleasure, and autonomy. In Katie Mitchell’s disquietingly stark and tonally monochromatic production, all twelve scenes take place, with nearly indiscernible transitions, in a bleak but bizarrely well-equipped garage, where Cate Blanchett and Stephen Dillane frequently exchange the characters (and costumes) of Pamela and Mr B—the servant and the master at the heart of Richardson’s novel. Not for nothing is all this cross-dressing and role-switching: it insistently brings to the fore the performative constructedness and indeterminacy of such categorical binaries as masculine/feminine and dominant/submissive that run through the play (not to mention our lives). This is, through and through, a battle of sexes on steroids, where the frontlines are always changing and nothing is fixed or fixable. At stake is not only the ethics of sex, but its economics—the ways in which sex implies and feeds on differentials of ownership, reach, and need. Indeed, the play’s discourse on sexual agency and ascendancy is entangled with its abiding interests in social class and age, particularly as they pertain to—and shape—the body.

Running through every vein of Crimp’s script is the notion that power in any sort of sexual relationship is inherently performative. Man and Woman insist on, and amply demonstrate, the crucial and excruciating role of language—either as speech or as writing—in carrying out that performative work. The levers of power in these twelve scenes are pulled by what does or doesn’t come out of the characters’ mouths, what they put into words (and how, and when), what those words reveal or obscure. The question of who gets to speak or write looms over the play’s elusive nexus between domination and submission, pointing to the apparent victor of each scene, while exposing how transient, and merely theatrical, such victory may be. The disturbing scene where Man holds Woman in a grip and tyrannically dictates the (seemingly) happy ending of Pamela for her to type (as though she were recording her own thoughts) is a perfect example of the perilous slipperiness of the terrain that the characters tread, and of the discursive deceptions that it may easily beget.

The play’s trenchantly critical spirit is at times countervailed by its fast-paced, shape-shifting dramaturgy. There is hardly any space to breathe, either for the main characters or for us. We are asked to digest a lot, and continuously, which leads to interpretive plateaus at certain moments. There is, in other words, much provocation going on, but the margins for reflection are minimized. Still, it’s a cause for wonder that a play this relentlessly cryptic is also intensely watchable. Its manifold challenges, including the uncertainties it creates as to what we can, or should, expect from such a strange work, arrest one’s attention to a considerable degree. It’s a slow burn, but it does end up burning its imprint on one’s mind.

So far, so good, but what the production really needs is a stronger frame to convey, or imply, its rules of engagement. It doesn’t have to be clear or explicit, but it needs to be there. Granted, Mitchell’s production opens with five characters joining the Woman in the garage, entering the space silently and hurriedly, with mouths taped shut, getting ready to (en)act whatever they have been contracted (or convinced, or forced) to do. It’s a frustratingly unrevealing, rather than temptingly ambiguous, prelude to an already opaque work. From there we swiftly plunge into the first scene, between Man and Woman, and it’s not until halfway through the play that the rest of the cast join the action, though slightly and often silently. It really takes no less than half an hour to glean the mechanics of the play, at least partially. Given that Crimp’s script does not provide any details or instructions about the material context in which his scenes dwell, it is entirely up to the director to imagine and construct the theatrical word within which these fragments cohere. Crucially, the amount of details that Mitchell provides of her world is at once too great to allow the play to operate as a full-fledged allegory and too small to explain its logic through a concrete meta-narrative.

So, we are led to ask, what is this that we are seeing unfold? Is this a (married) couple putting themselves through a particularly exacting form of sexual therapy? Or a group of professional performers investigating the sexual boundary between the self and the other by extreme means? Or a self-aware, hyper-theatricalized response, on the part of these six characters, to Richardson’s novel? That the production makes it possible for all these options (alongside many others) to coexist without annulling each other might be deemed an achievement, but the result would have been much more satisfying if such hermeneutic openness was buttressed by more particular and self-assured details regarding the architecture of the play.

Despite these dramaturgical blurs, both Blanchett and Dillane deliver razor-sharp performances of harrowing tension: Blanchett is simultaneously commanding and vulnerable in all the different shades of her part, whether she is enacting the narcissistic Mr B or the deceptively naive Pamela. Those few moments when she fleetingly slips out of her given character, reminding us of the production’s other layers, are especially phenomenal. Dillane, too, is thoroughly impressive in his finely calibrated renderings of a number of personas, ranging from a distressed, out-of-character Man to a loquaciously oppressive Mr B. Though four other actors join them, they are sadly sidelined to near-negligible parts, except for Jessica Gunning, who delivers towards the end a tantalising performance as the sexually erupting Mrs Jewkes. (One can’t help but wonder if the play could have benefitted from the elimination of the two Girls, and if more use could have been made of Ross and Mrs Jewkes.) But let’s face it: this is Blanchett and Dillane’s show, so much so that it feels like a two-hander at times.

Melanie Wilson’s perfectly ambient sound design contributes to the steely tonality of the production, as does James Farncombe’s slyly modulating but consistently wintry lighting. Vicki Mortimer’s set is often unfriendly to those audiences seated on the sides, but its crammed, claustrophobic, and realist simplicity is part and parcel of Mitchell’s rendition of this play. It’s not the most cunning combination of design elements, more restrictive than facilitating, especially in and around the car. But it does work: for a play so preoccupied with the penumbral dynamics of intimacy, such uncomfortable closures and kinetic limitations are both practical and evocative.

At the end of the day, When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other is a work as demanding as it is engaging. Crimp and Mitchell give us a lot to process (probably more than is feasible at a single sitting), and they rightly request, in return, a high level of critical attention and a spirit of openness. The ride is neither smooth nor safe, but it is certainly—and sufficiently—riveting.

Sweat

Sweat by Lynn Nottage

Donmar Warehouse / directed by Lynette Linton

Seen on January 12, 2019

Score: 5 / 5

One theatrical firework after another: this is how Lynette Linton’s superb production of Sweat lures you into its world of struggle, pain, and redemption. These fireworks—to stretch the metaphor—are all the more impressive for not deafening or blinding one in an over-the-top, self-aware display of virtuosity. All is impeccably balanced here: even the most riotous burst of anger, or the loudest laughter, is strictly sincere. Virtually every single moment, then, has its distinct charm and charge, and what makes this production such a success is its ever-present spirit of moderate dynamism.

Lynn Nottage’s Pulitzer Prize-winning play hardly needs further praise. Set in Reading, Pennsylvania, Sweat depicts the interconnected lives of a group of factory workers as their bonds of friendship and family are increasingly threatened and ultimately torn apart by economic and social pressures of the early 2000’s. Throughout, it takes a long, hard look at how realities of gender, race, and ethnicity further bedevil an already messy system of industrial oppression and alienation. Deftly locating—and letting us feel—the beating human hearts in a national tragedy, Nottage unleashes the dramatic power of such real-life torments and ends up holding a mirror up to an America haunted by its own hypocrisy.

Lynette Linton’s direction has its own enviable virtues, but her greatest asset is an altogether terrific cast, who are fully at home in the world of the play and under her strategic and lively direction. Martha Plimpton, Clare Perkins, and Leanne Best are absolutely stunning as the three women at the centre of the story, and they all breathe near-tangible life into their characters. Plimpton continually sustains the inextinguishable, roaring fire in Tracey; Perkins masterfully vacillates between Cynthia’s self-preserving humour and levelheaded resilience; and Best renders Jessie with nimble but well-defined touches. Patrick Gibson and Osy Ikhile, as the two young men whose appalling crime is the focal point of the play’s dramaturgy, deliver richly textured performances. With everyone at the top of their games, the emerging work feels like a naturalistic, slice-of-life display of a shattering and shattered reality.

Frankie Bradshaw’s humble but efficient design is full of thoughtful and evocative details. George Dennis’s sounds are partially responsible for never allowing the pace of the play to drop. Polly Bennett’s movement direction and Kate Waters’s fight choreography also deserve a hearty applause, in that much of the production’s success stems from the pitch-perfect physicality of the actors, including their flawless blocking.

After the curtain call, Childish Gambino’s “This is America” starts playing in the house. “This is America,” we are warned, “Don’t catch you slippin’ up / Don’t catch you slippin’ up.” America, as a gigantic aggregate of shocking slip-ups, comes fiercely, beautifully alive in this production that never slips up.

Pinter Five: The Room, Victoria Station, & Family Voices

Pinter Five: The Room, Victoria Station, & Family Voices, by Harold Pinter

The Jamie Lloyd Company / directed by Patrick Marber

Seen on January 10, 2019

Score: 3.5 / 5

At first glance, not much unites the plays brought together in this triple bill: the harrowing obfuscations of The Room, the weighted humour of Victoria Station, and the poetic disintegrations of Family Voices are not necessarily perfect bedfellows. But what they do, when put into such close proximity with one another, is to testify to the rich variety of Pinter’s work. That, and they sleekly draw our attention to how estrangements of language and speech are part and parcel of his dramatic imagination. What gets spoken, what remains unsaid, what resists verbalisation: these are the narrative and philosophical corners that constitute the architecture of each of these three one-acts.

Of the three, The Room is by far the most satisfactorily imagined on stage, as well as the one whose atmospheric impact is the boldest. Jane Horrocks is fascinating as the on-edge Rose Hudd, and Colin McFarlane gives a finely cryptic performance as Riley. Victoria Station takes unexpected turns and redeems its bland opening, though its static blocking could have been adjusted in certain ways. Similarly, the abstracted realism of Family Voices could have accommodated riskier choices in both staging and design. Much of the play’s verbal beauty gets sidetracked by its somewhat boring blocking and uninspired set. Yet both Jane Horrocks and Luke Thallon fuel this hard piece with meticulously calibrated performances, handsomely straddling the line between past and present, memory and desire. On the whole, this fifth instalment of the Pinter season has its ups and downs, but it’s certainly worth seeing.