On the London Stage.
A Slow-Burning ‘Phèdre,’ and an Agile Mendes
How do you squeeze blood out of a theatrical stone, finding something resembling a recognizable humanity amid the unyielding rigors of that French neo-Classicist, Racine? By way of response, I commend to you the National Theatre’s new production of “Phèdre,” which returns to the stage Helen Mirren, best-known of late for giving us a celluloid Queen Elizabeth II hemmed in by propriety, this time playing an Athenian queen who takes a decidedly improper interest in her stepson.
States of mind are forever announced flat out in Racine, a forbidding realm made doubly hard by the severity of a version of the play from the late Ted Hughes, at one time Britain’s poet laureate, that ups the anatomical ante. “My bowels are twisting with a horrible foreboding,” snarls Theseus, Phèdre’s errant husband, with the sort of directness to make you glad you didn’t eat beforehand. But as if to enact a slow burn in direct contrast to the emotional seizures that grip our doomed heroine, Nicholas Hytner’s exacting production eventually gets under the skin through the gathering tenaciousness of the psychic rot on view.
Interested parties (almost) the world over can make up their own minds when “Phèdre” later this month inaugurates NT Live, a four-play sequence of transmissions from the South Bank venue to movie theaters here and abroad; so far, there are 270 participating venues, some of which will transmit the play live on June 25, others with delays in various cases of a week or more. What may not be evident from that venture is the quality of silence that attended the show’s opening last week: in a London theater climate increasingly given over to displays of catarrh, the press night public barely coughed or sniffled once.
The evening boasts the immediate benefit of mass-appeal eye candy in that onetime “History Boy,” Dominic Cooper, who has traded in the Romper Room shenanigans of “Mamma Mia!” on screen for the grim-voiced dilemma of Phèdre’s beloved Hippolytus, here first seen resembling an anguished Gap ad. The actor impresses in a role that rivals Jude Law’s recently opened “Hamlet” when it comes to glamour boy suffering. Whereas London’s last “Phèdre,” with a mightily disheveled Clare Higgins three years ago, suffered from a Hippolytus who wasn’t worth the fuss, the casting here is of a piece with a play whose inhabitants very specifically cannot find peace: a point there for the making in what would appear to be the bullet holes riddling a (beautiful) Bob Crowley set that looks at any minute as if it might snap shut, swallowing these poor, sexually importunate souls alive.
The defining face-off between the older woman and younger man is some time coming, allowing the ensemble to leave its own, bruising imprint. Oenone, Phèdre’s none-too-innocent sidekick, is in the gratifyingly sly, spry care of Margaret Tyzack, a doughty figure in black whose most fully developed ruses come home grievously to roost. John Shrapnel makes a riveting Theramene, the counselor of Hippolytus to whom it falls to relate the overwhelming eleventh-hour narrative that, as is the way of Racine, leaves climactic incidents reported as opposed to shown.
Our Academy Award winning lead has the tricky task of having to play a woman derided by her husband as “hell itself” and to effect variations on a lustful note that sickens no one more than herself. Her ever-building intensity aside, the actress is smart to alight upon the mordant humor that coexists with Phèdre’s murderous desires. “They love each other,” she says upon realizing that Hippolytus only has eyes for another in the youthful Aricia (Ruth Negga, in feisty form). Ms. Mirren speaks the line as if the victim of an abidingly sick joke, except that no one’s laughing in a play whose sunlit climes make mockery of the darkest passions of the heart.
Minutes away, at the Old Vic Theatre, the director Sam Mendes has pitched up in London following an international tour of his Anglo-American Bridge Project, repeating a repertory pairing of Shakespeare and Chekhov - same idea, different plays - that the theater-hungry Oscar winner first proffered in 2002 as his farewell after a decade running the Donmar. (This latest venture runs through Aug. 15, and plans are already well advanced for a follow-up duo next season.)
Playgoers attuned to sudden surges of feeling will savor Mr. Mendes’s Bardic half of the equation, a staging of “The Winter’s Tale” that fully honors the undercurrents of faith and wonder coursing through this late Shakespearean romance. And if that entry’s Russian companion piece, “The Cherry Orchard,” feels comparatively pro forma, well, Chekhov can be the trickiest of authors to calibrate emotionally, as Mr. Mendes already knows with this play, having directed it previously on the West End in 1989, with Judi Dench, when he was all of 24 years old.
As always with the endangered species that is theatrical repertory, there’s the delight that comes with seeing the same company of actors cross-cast over two plays that share an interest in adults who allow themselves to be infantilized: the designer Anthony Ward’s nursery for “The Cherry Orchard” tips us off visually to a community that, in varying ways, refuses to grow up.
But whereas the missed connections that fuel Chekhov’s play don’t connect this time around, “The Winter's Tale” is shimmeringly alive pretty well throughout - literally so given lighting from Paul Pyant that lends crucial passages from the play the feeling of a candlelit vigil or Mass.
It’s tough to make sense of the “tremor cordis” that afflicts the suddenly undone ruler, Leontes, at this play’s start, Simon Russell Beale in the part shadowing the easy physicality between his wife Hermione (Rebecca Hall) and the Bohemian king, Polixenes (Josh Hamilton), as if waiting to pounce with proof of the jealousy that ultimately devours the Sicilian monarch. Before long, Leontes is taking action, separating Polixenes from his young son, Mamillius (here played by a grown actress, Morven Christie, doubling later as Perdita) and causing in his pregnant queen a hollowing-out that I have rarely seen more harrowing than as enacted by Ms. Hall: a human willow who snaps under the full weight of censure.
The second half lands us 16 years on in the contrastingly jolly realm of Bohemia, a place whose generally trying rumbustiousness is on this occasion redeemed by Ethan Hawke as the rapscallion Autolycus, the balladeer who functions in this play like a more elaborate version of the Porter, that unexpected cut-up in “Macbeth.” Trying on a range of accents that might give even Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean” pause, a guitar-strumming, increasingly growly Mr. Hawke suggests Johnny Cash and Tom Waits in turn, and the same actor against the odds cuts a commendably low-key, unsentimental Trofimov, the eternal student, in “The Cherry Orchard.” (In London, both shows opened the same day, which was not the case when these productions were first seen earlier this year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.)
One intends any fellow Americans no disrespect, however, to assert that Mr. Mendes’s “Winter’s Tale” belongs first and foremost to its British contingent, which extends beyond Mr. Russell Beale and Ms. Hall, both in peak form, to include Paul Jesson as Camillo, the Sicilian lord and confidante to Leontes who ends up fleeing his leader’s house of rage and grief, and the sublime Sinéad Cusack as an unusually generous Paulina, a putative scold who in this version seems driven by an overriding sense of right.
“A sad tale’s best for winter,” the production tells us twice, but it’s terrifically welcome, too, as London advances into the summer.
Source
How do you squeeze blood out of a theatrical stone, finding something resembling a recognizable humanity amid the unyielding rigors of that French neo-Classicist, Racine? By way of response, I commend to you the National Theatre’s new production of “Phèdre,” which returns to the stage Helen Mirren, best-known of late for giving us a celluloid Queen Elizabeth II hemmed in by propriety, this time playing an Athenian queen who takes a decidedly improper interest in her stepson.
States of mind are forever announced flat out in Racine, a forbidding realm made doubly hard by the severity of a version of the play from the late Ted Hughes, at one time Britain’s poet laureate, that ups the anatomical ante. “My bowels are twisting with a horrible foreboding,” snarls Theseus, Phèdre’s errant husband, with the sort of directness to make you glad you didn’t eat beforehand. But as if to enact a slow burn in direct contrast to the emotional seizures that grip our doomed heroine, Nicholas Hytner’s exacting production eventually gets under the skin through the gathering tenaciousness of the psychic rot on view.
Interested parties (almost) the world over can make up their own minds when “Phèdre” later this month inaugurates NT Live, a four-play sequence of transmissions from the South Bank venue to movie theaters here and abroad; so far, there are 270 participating venues, some of which will transmit the play live on June 25, others with delays in various cases of a week or more. What may not be evident from that venture is the quality of silence that attended the show’s opening last week: in a London theater climate increasingly given over to displays of catarrh, the press night public barely coughed or sniffled once.
The evening boasts the immediate benefit of mass-appeal eye candy in that onetime “History Boy,” Dominic Cooper, who has traded in the Romper Room shenanigans of “Mamma Mia!” on screen for the grim-voiced dilemma of Phèdre’s beloved Hippolytus, here first seen resembling an anguished Gap ad. The actor impresses in a role that rivals Jude Law’s recently opened “Hamlet” when it comes to glamour boy suffering. Whereas London’s last “Phèdre,” with a mightily disheveled Clare Higgins three years ago, suffered from a Hippolytus who wasn’t worth the fuss, the casting here is of a piece with a play whose inhabitants very specifically cannot find peace: a point there for the making in what would appear to be the bullet holes riddling a (beautiful) Bob Crowley set that looks at any minute as if it might snap shut, swallowing these poor, sexually importunate souls alive.
The defining face-off between the older woman and younger man is some time coming, allowing the ensemble to leave its own, bruising imprint. Oenone, Phèdre’s none-too-innocent sidekick, is in the gratifyingly sly, spry care of Margaret Tyzack, a doughty figure in black whose most fully developed ruses come home grievously to roost. John Shrapnel makes a riveting Theramene, the counselor of Hippolytus to whom it falls to relate the overwhelming eleventh-hour narrative that, as is the way of Racine, leaves climactic incidents reported as opposed to shown.
Our Academy Award winning lead has the tricky task of having to play a woman derided by her husband as “hell itself” and to effect variations on a lustful note that sickens no one more than herself. Her ever-building intensity aside, the actress is smart to alight upon the mordant humor that coexists with Phèdre’s murderous desires. “They love each other,” she says upon realizing that Hippolytus only has eyes for another in the youthful Aricia (Ruth Negga, in feisty form). Ms. Mirren speaks the line as if the victim of an abidingly sick joke, except that no one’s laughing in a play whose sunlit climes make mockery of the darkest passions of the heart.
Minutes away, at the Old Vic Theatre, the director Sam Mendes has pitched up in London following an international tour of his Anglo-American Bridge Project, repeating a repertory pairing of Shakespeare and Chekhov - same idea, different plays - that the theater-hungry Oscar winner first proffered in 2002 as his farewell after a decade running the Donmar. (This latest venture runs through Aug. 15, and plans are already well advanced for a follow-up duo next season.)
Playgoers attuned to sudden surges of feeling will savor Mr. Mendes’s Bardic half of the equation, a staging of “The Winter’s Tale” that fully honors the undercurrents of faith and wonder coursing through this late Shakespearean romance. And if that entry’s Russian companion piece, “The Cherry Orchard,” feels comparatively pro forma, well, Chekhov can be the trickiest of authors to calibrate emotionally, as Mr. Mendes already knows with this play, having directed it previously on the West End in 1989, with Judi Dench, when he was all of 24 years old.
As always with the endangered species that is theatrical repertory, there’s the delight that comes with seeing the same company of actors cross-cast over two plays that share an interest in adults who allow themselves to be infantilized: the designer Anthony Ward’s nursery for “The Cherry Orchard” tips us off visually to a community that, in varying ways, refuses to grow up.
But whereas the missed connections that fuel Chekhov’s play don’t connect this time around, “The Winter's Tale” is shimmeringly alive pretty well throughout - literally so given lighting from Paul Pyant that lends crucial passages from the play the feeling of a candlelit vigil or Mass.
It’s tough to make sense of the “tremor cordis” that afflicts the suddenly undone ruler, Leontes, at this play’s start, Simon Russell Beale in the part shadowing the easy physicality between his wife Hermione (Rebecca Hall) and the Bohemian king, Polixenes (Josh Hamilton), as if waiting to pounce with proof of the jealousy that ultimately devours the Sicilian monarch. Before long, Leontes is taking action, separating Polixenes from his young son, Mamillius (here played by a grown actress, Morven Christie, doubling later as Perdita) and causing in his pregnant queen a hollowing-out that I have rarely seen more harrowing than as enacted by Ms. Hall: a human willow who snaps under the full weight of censure.
The second half lands us 16 years on in the contrastingly jolly realm of Bohemia, a place whose generally trying rumbustiousness is on this occasion redeemed by Ethan Hawke as the rapscallion Autolycus, the balladeer who functions in this play like a more elaborate version of the Porter, that unexpected cut-up in “Macbeth.” Trying on a range of accents that might give even Johnny Depp in “Pirates of the Caribbean” pause, a guitar-strumming, increasingly growly Mr. Hawke suggests Johnny Cash and Tom Waits in turn, and the same actor against the odds cuts a commendably low-key, unsentimental Trofimov, the eternal student, in “The Cherry Orchard.” (In London, both shows opened the same day, which was not the case when these productions were first seen earlier this year at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York.)
One intends any fellow Americans no disrespect, however, to assert that Mr. Mendes’s “Winter’s Tale” belongs first and foremost to its British contingent, which extends beyond Mr. Russell Beale and Ms. Hall, both in peak form, to include Paul Jesson as Camillo, the Sicilian lord and confidante to Leontes who ends up fleeing his leader’s house of rage and grief, and the sublime Sinéad Cusack as an unusually generous Paulina, a putative scold who in this version seems driven by an overriding sense of right.
“A sad tale’s best for winter,” the production tells us twice, but it’s terrifically welcome, too, as London advances into the summer.
Source