An Ethereal Dystopia: Review of the RSC's Cymbeline 


Melly Still, the director of the RSC's latest production of Shakespeare's Cymbeline has created a dark, elfin dystopia, which highlights the rather topical issue of national identity already present in the original play. 

There are conflicts within this production as the dystopia seems to foreshadow a post-Brexit war for Britain whilst also aspiring to return to the past to a time of faeries, goblins and gnomes. The costumes certainly have a hint of the fay about them in their tattered, torn layers of tulle most notable in Innogen's costume, which makes a re-appearance later in the play stained with blood. Perhaps hinting at the death of Britain's fairy folk with the imminent war with Rome? This is most evident with Belarius' entrance with his stolen children, Guideria and Arviragus as they emerge singing and dancing from their badger-like sett of a home in the forest. However, the conflict between the desire to return to the past versus the threat of the oncoming future is enjoyable to watch.

Another innovative approach which Melly Still takes is to have a Queen Cymbeline (Gillian Bevan). The impact of having a Queen Cymbeline rather than a King Cymbeline is that there is a more tender relationship with Innogen (Bethan Cullinane). Despite Cymbeline's initial anger at the opening of the play because of Innogen's love of Posthumus played by the talented Hiran Abeysekera. Their young lust results in their secret marriage before Posthumus is banished into exile, with the hope of encouraging Innogen to marry Cloten, her step-brother, played with energy and comedy by Marcus Griffiths. 

Innogen becomes the true focus of this production (to the extent where it might have done well to be retitled Innogen instead of Cymbeline) and this is rightly so. The character is rich with potential. I particularly admired the bold choice to stage her self-discovery  to say it politely. The painfully dark scene wherein Jachimo (Oliver Johnstone) sets about to win his bet by stealing into her room hidden in a trunk and manipulating her vulnerable sleeping body is brilliantly staged with small capsules of humour thrown in to break the tension with much needed comic relief. Arguably the comedy here could be seen to be inappropriate, however I think it makes staging such an unpleasant violation bearable whilst still making it evident that his actions are criminal. Something which sadly still needs to be said today as issues regarding what constitutes rape are argued daily. What then happens to Innogen as a result of this defilement highlights the fragility of women's reputation today as much as in the 1600s. Something which Pisania (instead of Pisanio, another example of the gender exchanges made by Still) played by Kelly Williams makes all to evident when she receives Posthumus's letter instructing her to kill her mistress for her alleged adultery. 

This is a truly fresh look at Cymbeline, one really worth seeing because of its marriage of the play's universal issues of national identity and the role of women. The run is on until the 15th October in Stratford upon Avon before it moves to the Barbican in London from October 31 to 17th December. 

Kit Marlowe; the New King of the Psychological Thriller 
Review of the RSC's Dr Faustus 

Director Maria Aberg has, for me, transformed the legend of the man who sold his soul to the devil into a surreal, Steam Punk cabaret redolent of Gerald Scarfe's illustrations. The accompanying music also supports the re-figuring of the play as a rock opera. When interviewed, Aberg said that when she started working with the composer Orlando Gough they had discussed Tom Waits as the inspiration for the musical style wanting to create a "grotty, sexy quality" as well as "Duckie-style cabaret" as she felt like "it needed to be something fun, dangerous and seductive without being slick" (https://www.theguardian.com/stage/2016/feb/12/maria-aberg-rsc-stratford-doctor-faustus-sandy-grierson-oliver-ryan-christopher-marlowe).

The danger is apparent as soon as the lights dim with the lead actors Sandy Grierson and Oliver Ryan each lighting  a match at the start to determine who plays which character that night. The tension mounts as the flame crawls flickering to their fingertips. The fraught mood is sustained throughout the play even through the punk cabaret of the personified Seven Deadly Sins in their Dali-esque costumes. This breaks into a palpable sense of unease throughout the audience when the child spirit of Helen of Troy child emerges after Faustus has summoned her to him through Mephistopheles to be his paramour.

The Wittenberg scholars in their uniformal suits and matching bowler hats stalk menacingly through the performance punctuating the scenes with a reminder of Faustus' deadly deal and the lead actors, Grierson and Ryan, are excellent. The night I attended, the match had selected Grierson as the ambitious Dr Faustus and Ryan as the cunning, wheezing Mephistopheles, whose voice was surprisingly like Ren of Ren and Stimpy fame! The set was simple but effective and the intimacy of the play was enhanced by its appearance on The Swan Theatre's thrust stage.

Whilst the play is more about Dr Faustus as a man and his motivations than philosophical ponderings on divinity, the after life and God and the Devil, Aberg's production is a very personal and intimate examination of man's failings. She has teased open the already present human elements of the play so rather than a questioning of divinity being the last message of the play, it is instead a questioning of man's desire to be known, remembered and to be a success at all costs that remains with you far beyond the final curtain call.

Still Wicked! 

The Apollo Victoria,  London - 9th of April 2016

I have been wanting to see this production since I heard about it which now feels like forever ago! As I find adaptations fascinating, the idea of this production focusing on the backstory of Oz's Wicked Witch has had me intrigued for sometime. After seeing the production, I'm still intrigued! Whilst I appreciate that there will be many people who have seen this production already I still don't want to reveal any spoilers for anyone yet to see the show, so I'll just say that I thought that the conclusion of the plot was very clumsy and didn't seem to make sense when considered in tandem with the film. At one point the conclusion of the original film's plot is running side by side with the play so it is vital that the two plots do mesh together well. Sadly this was not the case! Despite this, Wicked is one of the best musicals I have ever seen!

I strongly recommend anyone and everyone to see this production! The musical talent is remarkable, the costumes look like something straight from a Jean-Paul Gaultier catwalk and the set is seemingly steampunk-inspired; a new look for a set but one that works really well in the context of the show.

The ensemble, despite pumping out so many performances a week for such a long time now, seems as fresh as a daisy and it genuinely feels like your performance might well have been the opening night! There is certainly no sense that anyone is getting stale, bored or complacent and Elphaba (Wicked Witch) played by Emma Hatton is amazing. That girl has a set of pipes!

I also adored the ditsy blonde Glinda the Good Witch played by Savannah Stephenson. And Oliver Savile looks very good in a tight pair of pants! Although I was expecting them to split embarrassingly revealing a pair of red polka dot pants at any point in his leaping around... The university where all of the core characters met was like a Hogwarts version of Oxbridge which was also very amusing! Definitely one to watch on a jaunt to London!

To Go or Not To Go? Hamlet at the RSC - Spring Summer 2016

Simon Godwin's production is certainly colourful and at times exuberant, but sadly a lot of it falls very flat. This might be because The National Theatre's startling production starring Benedict Cumberbatch is still so fresh in my mind from last year. Papa Essiedu's Hamlet is performed well and there are certainly moments of humour in his performance and I'm looking forward to seeing him in more, but what really troubled me was Ophelia. I'm so bored of seeing another presentation of a pathetically mentally inferior Ophelia. Why, oh why can't someone jump on the possibility of making her a strong, feminist character? Why in the 21st century with our obsession with adaptations has no one done an amazing world renown production focusing on Ophelia's story? Now that's what I'd go to see!

Natalie Simpson's Ophelia is poignant and tragic and tender, all the things that we expect Ophelia to be but there was nothing fresh in her characterisation. The only sense of innovation in this production was the relocation of the story to Africa. At times this really really worked, in the main when the Players arrived to perform at Elsinore but this shift could have been made much more of, particularly in the duel scene at the play's climax.

Why Godwin couldn't have put more twists like the romantic interest between Rosencrantz (James Cooney) and Guildenstern (Bethan Cullinane) I do not know. There is so much potential for excitement and variety with Hamlet and the RSC has the strength of cast, set, costume, you name it to wholly throw themselves at a new idea and run with it at 110 miles per hour to make it soar. I did love the sneaky students nearly getting caught by the King and Queen with their bong though! More of that please!

This is a production to see if you want a comfy, cosy adaptation of the classic story. Do not go expecting to leave reconsidering the themes of the play or Hamlet's plight. This play treads all too familiar ground, but admittedly it does do it rather well. Go for a fun night with friends, for a drink and chat, do not go to be dazzled by the genius of Shakespeare or the RSC.

Review of the RSC's Peter and Wendy

Playwright Ella Hickson's adaptation of J. M. Barrie's Peter Pan is much closer to the novel than the pantomimes, Hook starring Robin Williams and the other Hollywood/Disney films that have preceded it. There must have been many people in the audience who have never read the novel and whose sole experience of the story is from the Disney film - like partner Tom - as such they would have been surprised by  the restoration of the focus on to the novel's key themes of death and the death of childhood. Whilst this might have been a surprise, it would have been a very pleasant one! It is a fantastic production with a truly modern take on the classic children's story. It's also far more obviously feminist than the recent National Theatre production of Jane Eyre that I reviewed in my last blog. 

The, I hesitate to say, feminist approach to this production meant that the Darling's mother became a suffragette in response to the death of one of her sons and Wendy (Mariah Gale) loudly proclaimed the injustice of her being forced to grow up before her brothers. She loudly voiced how unfair it was that she was being encouraged into the stereotypical role of helpmeet and maternal guide from a very young age whilst her brothers carry on careering around playing soldiers. The reason that I hesitated to say 'feminist' was because really the play dances around the subject at times, however it does make concerted efforts to show the pressure of the conservative image of feminist on girls and women alike. The Darling's suffragette mother (Rebecca Johnson), for instance, discovered the political movement when she was grieving the death of her child as she found the inane chatter of polite ladies' society too much to bear afterwards.

The performances of the central cast are also remarkable. Peter Pan was played by a commendable actor, Rhys Rusbatch, whom I hope to see treading the boards of the RSC stage again soon. Hook (Darrell D'Silva) and Smee (Paul Kemp), it is suggested at times, have an hilarious homoerotic love affair! Tink is played as a feisty, voluptuous Brummie by Charlotte Mills adding moments of pathos and comedy throughout the performance. 

And the set ... Oh, the set... This is truly the masterpiece designs that make the RSC remarkable. Colin Richmond has really outdone himself with this visual, technological treat. I was at all times left speechless by the abilities of this set! 

I'm sad to see this production come to an end, but it is high praise to the RSC that the original production of Peter Pan in the Autumn/Winter 2013/14 period was so popular that it called for this second production this season. As such, it will be a long time before another adaptation of Barrie's beautiful, thought-provoking, coming of age story next appears in the theatre.  However, it would be great to see another classic children's story adapted for the RSC for the Autumn/Winter season this year or in 2017, who knows maybe we'll see a feminist Jungle Book maybe or Alice in Wonderland. 

Have a Very Feminist 2016!

Blog Review of The National Theatre's production of Jane Eyre directed by Sally Cookson 

I was so excited to finally see this reputedly fiery and apparently obviously feminist production! The nineteenth-century stage adaptations of Jane Eyre are the main subject of the first chapter of my thesis, so I was ready to get all up in Sally Cookson's grill in a nice, middle-class, purely academic way of course. But in all honesty, it wasn't as ragingly feminist as I was expecting it to have been. From reading the reviews in the papers I was expecting to be hit in the face with Germaine Greer's The Female Eunuch, and whilst there wasn't as much fire as I was expecting, that isn't to say that this isn't a feminist production of Jane Eyre.

Obviously, the germinal feminist elements of the original novel remain in Cookson's production and the minimalist, bare set with its carpenter's workshop-esque set highlight them by allowing plenty of visual room. It is a brilliantly effective construction designed by Michael Vale. The play opens with Jane Eyre coming into the world breathing her first breath and crying out for her parents. Whilst this happens one by one her parents and then her uncle die leaving her with her cold, uncaring and jealous aunt.

Sally Cookson has commented on her approach that any telling of Jane's story should begin with Jane's childhood and in the case of Jane Eyre this works well with the plot as it's often called a Bildungsroman. This is the German for a story which charts the maturation and moral and psychological growth of a character. Charlotte Bronte's Jane, like Cookson's, spends her life fighting her voice and the right to live her own life on her own terms.

The production started as a two-parter over two consecutive evenings at the Bristol Old Vic in 2014 and due to its success the National Theatre approached the company about bringing the play to London. The success continued in London as the reviews have shown and this is due to the strength of the cast. Bertha Mason (played by Melanie Marshall) has an amazingly rich mezzo voice that soars through the performance intensifying the high emotion. She is present throughout the production as a magnificent crimson-silk clad premonition.

Jane played by Madeleine Worrall is impressively rounded capturing Jane's appearance as a timid mouse-like delicate bird woman as well as her very vocal  desire for equality and love. Felix Hayes as Rochester is domineering, aggressive, brusque and powerful. Particularly in the scene after Jane has found out about Bertha's existence when she is telling Rochester that she has to leave, Hayes manages to reach a great surge of violence. Critics have viewed this scene as an attempted rape as Rochester physically restrains Jane preventing her from leaving Thornfield. This frenzy of emotion isn't managed to this level which is unfortunate as it would have intensified the feminist approach to this classic photo-feminist novel. However this is an example of the way, for me, that Cookson's Jane Eyre could have gone further in their 'feminist production'.

This is definitely a production with plenty of mileage and the run is just too short! More people should be given the chance to see this extremely thought-provoking production! And what's more, it's a great way to see in 2016!

May your 2016 be one of equality and love!