I’ve made a great discovery. . . and I’ll tell you what it is: the strongest person in the world is the one who stands alone
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.

Henrik Ibsen’s opening play at the newly refurbished Sheffield Crucible, is An Enemy of the People, with Anthony Sher in the role of Dr Stockmann.

It’s a disturbing drama, constituting an attack on democracy and the theory of majority rule, a position with which Ibsen himself had some sympathy.

Stockman, a scientist and an idealist, quite unworldly in this production, almost a natural innocent, discovers that the waters of his Spa town are polluted and poisonous. He immediately wants to go public with this news, shut the Spa down and, at whatever expense, cleanse and reroute the water. But his brother, the Mayor, suppresses the report. The bureaucrats, the local small businessmen’s association, the town newspaper and eventually the workers of the town, turn on Stockman, his family and his friends, and reduce them to penury.

The play works as a forum for ideas. For a modern audience to empathize with Stockmann entirely is almost impossible. He does, of course, stand for truth against the suppression and lies of his brother and the other organs of the democratic process, but he does not understand the need to educate his audience and become instead self-righteous and arrogant and a chilling and contemptuous social darwinist in his remarks about “disgusting, mangy, vulgar mongrels” whose brains don’t develop in the same manner as gently reared pedigree dogs.

On the other hand his sense that truth, any truth, has a limited lifetime, and that time always brings us round to the realisation that what was once true has now become untrue, is never less than fascinating.

And his fear that the suppression of material facts and the acceptance of political lies will lead, inevitably, to a kind of spiritual corruption and decay of society, is a companion to each of us in the twenty-first century.

A disturbing play, then; one that still, in our own time, offers an audience no place to hide.

This production, directed by Daniel Evans, with Antony Sher as Dr Stockmann, in a new version by Christopher Hampton, runs until the 20th March.

If you go out and fight for freedom you should never do so in your best trousers.
Dr. Tomas Stockmann.

Derived from and inspired by the 14th-century Chinese play Circle of Chalk, Brecht changes the ending so that the child lives, not with his birth mother but with the mother who cares for him most. Echoes of the Judgement of Solomon here.

I was more than a little thrown by the perceived need for a new translation. The original translation into English was by by Brecht’s close friend and admirer, Eric Bentley, who also went on to direct the first professional production of the play. This new version has been translated by Alistair Beaton, and I suppose in a way it’s brought the Caucasian Chalk Circle up to date as far as language is concerned. But I thought it added little and detracted more than once from the historical perspective of the play.

Grusha, the servant-girl, played by Matti Houghton, is excellent; as is Azdak, the judge, played nonchalantly by James Clyde.

Nancy Meckler directs a tale of justice, corruption and morality, not entiely flawlessly. The first act seems too linear and is one-paced, and by the time of the interval I was looking for something to happen.

In the second act the linearity of the piece falls apart and out of the ruins of that something very special begins to happen. The audience is engaged in a way that seemed impossible during the first hour and, in spite of Brechts stated aim that a play should not cause the spectator to identify emotionally with the characters or action, but should instead provoke self-reflection and a critical view, I was definitely moved here, and touched deeply by the experiences of these characters. Not least when the child, Michael, previously only seen as a bunch of swaddling, miraculously morphs into a toddling and wholly engaging puppet.

During the course of the play one is reminded, inevitably, of other theatrical experiences and references. In the case of this performance I was haunted by the spectres of Chaplin and Beckett, an actor and director who was perhaps a contemporary, and a playright who would follow and extend the work of the early modernists.

After Leeds the play tours to:
Richmond Theatre, Richmond 20-24 Oct 2009;
Nottingham Playhouse, Nottingham 4-21 Nov 2009; and the Unicorn Theatre, London 24 – 29 Nov 2009

The Oresteia follows the fortunes of the house of Atreus. The first play, Agamemnon, portrays the victorious return of that king from the Trojan War and his murder by his wife, Clytemnestra, and her lover, Aegisthus. The second play, Choephoroi (The Libation Bearers), deals with Agamemnon’s daughter Electra and his son Orestes. Orestes avenges his father’s murder by killing his mother and her lover. The third play, Eumenides, shows Orestes driven by the Furies (Erinyes), for, though he was required to avenge his father’s death, a matricide is infamous in the eyes of the gods.

And quite a strange and controversial performance it was. I suppose a translation of an ancient Greek tragedy should carry some responsibility for its acceptance and enjoyment by a modern audience. But to do that and at the same time preserve and enhance the original meaning and wider ambitions of its conception is perhaps too much to ask.

This translation and production will not, I suspect, be praised by lovers of traditional Greek drama. On the other hand there were, in the audience, a goodly number of teenagers, most of whom looked as if they would have been more at home in a scary movie. It would have been interesting to talk to some of them after the show. There was blood aplenty, over-the-top physical action from a young and dynamic cast, risqué jokes and wordplay, and zombies and ghosts enough for the imaginative life of the most wayward of adolescents.

I enjoyed it enormously, but came away wondering exactly what had been sacrificed by a production so intent on humour. When a play is still doing the rounds after two-and-a-half-thousand years, I suspect it has something more going for it.

Back in March 2007 I posted a review of the same play with Jessica Lange in the starring role, and it was interesting and instructive to compare and contrast the differences in the two productions.

In Lange’s case one could really believe she was a faded beauty. She certainly believed it herself and the possibility of receiving 27 gentlemen callers in one day didn’t seem to stretch the point too far. With Blethyn’s portrayal, so many gentlemen in one day was a remote possibility, or, rather, a creative act of the imagination. Lange had looked after herself as much as possible, whereas Blethyn was quite content to pad around the flat in a worn old dressing gown. On the other hand Blethyn is interesting to watch and, especially, to listen to. She makes extraordinary sounds. Sounds of sympathy or incredulity which come from somewhere towards the back of her throat, a kind of vocal interrogation chamber where words are put to the rack and meaning squeezed out of them.

One has to wonder if so many revivals of the play (there was another one up in Edinburgh last month) are coming because America once again resembles Tom Wingfield’s opening remarks about the thirties when the huge middle class of America was matriculating in a school for the blind. The coming election where all candidates are lying through their teeth and the series of denials about the real effects of Iraq, Afghanistan, Guantanamo, gun control.

Because, although The Glass Menagerie concentrates its focus on one family, we are left in no doubt that Williams’ is concerned, by extension, with the community which was also his life. And this one family, the Wingfields, tell each other and themselves, lies all the time.

There are no clear victims or victors here. Each family member is complicit in locking himself or herself into the rigid web of the family. Each of them needs to be exactly as they are in order to maintain their own position and to support the position of the others. The almost terminally shy and crippled Laura has made the same decisions as her mother and brother and forfeited (as far as any audience is concerned) her special claim to pity. We only pity her as much as we pity her brother or her mother.

In the final analyses none of them can escape their chains. Tom runs away but is still tightly bound in his mind: Oh, Laura, Laura, I tried to leave you behind me, but I am more faithful than I intended to be! I reach for a cigarette, I cross the street, I run into the movies or a bar, I buy a drink, I speak to the nearest stranger — anything that can blow your candles out! . . . For nowadays the world is lit by lightening! Blow out your candles, Laura...

A tremendous production, really enjoyable. And although Brenda Blethyn stands out, the cast has a real feeling of ensemble about it. The language, the language . . . is magical . . . it lifts you out of your seat and pushes, pulls and cajoles you around the gamut of possible emotions.

The picture shows Brenda Blethyn as Amanda Wingfield and Emma Hamilton as Laura Wingfield.

Over the weekend we were lucky enough to catch the touring version at Sheffield’s Lyceum Theatre. The play opened at the National Theatre in 1973 and was subsequently performed all over the world. There was a film version by Sidney Lumet with Richard Burton and Colin Peter Firth, for which the two leads and Shaffer were nominated for Oscars.

The touring company is led by Simon Callow as the psychiatrist, and by Alfie Allen (brother of Lily, recently seen in the feature film Atonement) as Alan Strang, the boy with a pathological religious/sexual fascination with horses. The horses are played superbly by six actors wearing heavy metal masks and shoes. The magic of theatre done well leaves you in no doubt of their authenticity from start to finish.

Psychiatrist Martin Dysart (Callow) is presented with a challenging case by magistrate Hesther Salsman (Linda Thorson). Alan Strang (Allen) presents like a normal seventeen year old. At first sight his life is routine and he lives in the bosom of a loving family. Through a series of events in his childhood he has developed a passion for horses and recently he has been involved in an initial sexual experience with Jill (Laura O’Toole) a stable-hand. The results have been devastating. He is an unresponsive patient who is woken each night by nightmares. And it is now up to Dysart to resolve this psychological puzzle.

A child is born into a world of phenomena,
all equal in their power to enslave.
It sniffs, it sucks, it strokes its eyes
over the whole, uncountable range.

Suddenly, one strikes.
Then another. Then another.

Why?

Moments snap together,
like magnets forging a chain of shackes.

Why?

And there certainly is something of a detective story in the formal structure of the play. We know almost from the beginning what has happened. But our imagination cannot deduce the sequence or the reasoning behind the events we know have taken place. Dysart (Simon Callow), the psychiatrist is deep in the midst of his own mid-life crisis, and Shaffer loses no opportunity to compare and contrast the worlds of doctor and patient. Strang’s (Allen) parents, his Christian mother and Atheist father have their own guilt to deal with, their own fears and insecurities to work through, and their own justifications to make. Though the play, although it does use Freudian theory, never strays into the hackneyed territory of the psychological thriller.

Instead, Shaffer has thrown into the pot of Freudian theory and Christian imagery the whole contemporary issue of meaning and identity. The question underlying the play is: What makes life worth living? Is it what we, in the west, have been very busy carving out for ourselves.? Is it safety and security? Or is it passion?

On an intellectual level the play never flags. It contains argument and reference enough to keep you thinking from scene to scene and act to act, and when the final curtain comes down you continue to think and talk about the experience. The group I was with talked together well into the wee hours, and I could imagine other groups of theatre-goers who had seen the play were similarly reluctant to go to bed.

But perhaps even more than the obvious intellectual stimulation, what I took from Equus was the genius of the writing. Broad brush-strokes, like the coup of setting the main action of the play in a stable, the hallowed ground of Christian tradition.

And fine detail in the language of the play, the metaphors and single-word allusions to, for example, the ‘reining’ in of the boy’s excesses; quite apart from the obvious sexual references to the sweat and tackle associated with the magnificent animals who come to represent deity in the mind of the boy who is the centre of all our concerns and the ‘only son’ of his benighted mother.

The tour has moved on from Sheffield now, so you’ll have to catch it at one of the following venues. Let me know what you think:

Monday 21 – Saturday 26 April
Theatre Royal
New Road BRIGHTON
Box Office 09800 606650

Monday 28 April – Saturday 3 May
Alhambra Theatre
Morley Street BRADFORD
Box Office 01274 432000

Monday 5 – Saturday 10 May
Theatre Royal
Sawclose BATH
Box Office 01225 448844

Monday 12 – Saturday 17 May
Festival Theatre
Grange Road MALVERN
Box Office 01684 892277

Monday 19 – Saturday 24 May
Richmond Theatre
The Green RICHMOND
Box Office 0870 060 6651

When, of course, it was Bette Davis in the 1949 King Vidor film, Beyond the Forest, who first spoke the lines in the part of Rosa Moline. We could have had Bette Davis imitating herself in the part of a woman bored with life in a small town and insisting that George, her husband, guess who it was.

Thanks to NYCWeboy (on the Newcritics Site) for reminding me 

*

Joan Didion’s memoir about trying to come to terms with her husband’s death became ‘the indispensable handbook to bereavement’. Then her 39-year-old daughter also died. As The Year of Magical Thinking arrives in London, David Hare describes the challenge of bringing a writer’s grief to the stage.

*

Heather Christie is On Time in The Kenyon Review:

The answer to “Where do the days go?” is that they don’t. It’s just convenient to use a conceptual metaphor to take an abstraction like time and cut it into nouns that have a habit of running away. But all week I have thought “Goodbye Monday,” and “Goodbye Tuesday.” And now I am wondering what Monday is up to these days.
Nothing!
Because time is cut into nouns, it has the privilege of getting to use verbs. It elapses and expires . . .

FRÉDÉRIC MISTRAL in recognition of the fresh originality and true inspiration of his poetic production, which faithfully reflects the natural scenery and native spirit of his people, and, in addition, his significant work as a Provençal philologist

and

JOSÉ ECHEGARAY Y EIZAGUIRRE in recognition of the numerous and brilliant compositions which, in an individual and original manner, have revived the great traditions of the Spanish drama.

Mistral was from an old and well-to-do family of landowners that had settled in Provence in the sixteenth century. He was deeply influenced by his early years in the leisurely and patriarchal manor of his father.

Echegaray y Eizaguirre was a mathematician, statesman, and the leading Spanish dramatist of the last quarter of the 19th century. He wrote more than 60 plays, which were a mixed bunch, including both enormously popular melodramas lacking verisimilitude of character, motivation, and situation and serious bourgeois dramas of social problems based on a serious study of Ibsen.

1904, then, a very poor year . . .