British Chinese Richard III on national tour

David Lee-Jones as Richard III

Britain's first Chinese Richard III — David Lee-Jones — is currently on national tour from Scotland until 22nd August at the Penlee Park Open Air Theatre in Penzance.

I was part of a rehearsed reading of The Other Shore last year at the New Diorama where David's presence and gravitas stood out, so I'm really sorry to have missed the London performance at Peckham Rye last Sunday. Here's a great review by Avril Silk of the Somerset performance.

Event Venues & Times
29/07/12 only Newhailes | Newhailes Road, Musselburgh, Edinburgh, EH21 6RY
04/08/12 only Falkland Palace | Falkland, Cupar, Fife, KY15 7BU
03/08/12 only House Of Dun & Montrose Basin | Nature Reserve, Angus, DD10 9LQ
27/07/12 only Leighton Hall | Carnforth, Lancashire, LA5 9ST
finished New Inn | 16 Northgate Street, Gloucester, Gloucestershire, GL1 1SF
25/08/12 only Jewry Wall Museum | St. Nicholas Circle, Leicester, LE1 4LB
finished Chepstow Castle | Bridge Street, Chepstow, NP16 5EY
26/08/12 only Oakham Castle | Off Market Place, Oakham, LE15 6DX
finished Highcliffe Castle | Rothesay Drive, Highcliffe, Dorset, BH23 4LE
Showing until 19/08/12 Halls Croft | Old Town, Stratford-upon-Avon, CV37 6BG
08/08/12 only mac | Cannon Hill Park,, Birmingham, B12 9QH
finished Beaudesert Park School | Minchinhampton, Gloucestershire, GL6 9AF
finished The Gate Farmhouse | Itchington, Alveston, Bristol, BS35 3TA
10/08/12 only Cressing Temple | Witham Road, Braintree, CM77 8PD
finished Caerleon Roman Amphitheatre | Broadway, Caerleon, Newport, NP18 1AG
18/07/12 only Shaftesbury Abbey | Shaftesbury, Dorset, SP7 8JR
19/07/12 only Sand | Sidbury, Sidmouth, EX10 0QN
28/07/12 only Higham Hall | Bassenthwaite Lake, Cockermouth, Cumbria, CA13 9SH
01/08/12 only Pitmedden Garden | Ellon, Aberdeenshire, AB41 7PD
05/08/12 only Threave Garden | Castle Douglas, Dumfries & Galloway, DG7 1RX
12/08/12 only Langar Hall | Langar, Nottingham, NG13 9HG
20/07/12 only Poulton House | Poulton, Gloucester, Cirencester, GL7 5HW
14/08/12 only Raglan Castle | Raglan, Monmouthshire, NP15 2BT
finished The Royal Crescent & York Gardens | Clifton, Bristol, BS8 4LN
finished Bosworth Battlefield Heritage Centre ... | Bosworth, Sutton Cheney, CV13 0AD
finished The Mill House | Netherbury, Dorset, DT6 5LX
23/08/12 only The Swan Theatre | The Moors, Worcester, WR1 3ED
finished Wolvesey Gardens | Bishops Palace, Winchester, SO239NB
finished Sterts theatre | Upton cross, Liskeard, PL14 9AZ
finished Frampton Court Estate | , Frampton on Severn, GL2 7EP
finished The Manor House Museum | Hall Green Road, West Bromwich, B71 2EA
11/08/12 only The Chequers | High Street, Yelden, Bedford, MK44 1AW
24/08/12 only Woodchester Mansion | Woodchester Mansion, Nympsfield, GL10 3TS
22/08/12 only Penlee Park Open Air Theatre | Morrab Road, Penzance, TR18 4HE
finished Whittington Castle | Castle Street, Whittington, SY11 4DF
finished Cothay Manor | Greenham, Wellington, TA21 0JR
finished Little Chalfont Village Hall | Cokes Lane, Little Chalfont, HP8 4UD
finished Kingston & Dormston Village Hall | Cockshot Lane, Dormston, WR7 4LB
finished Pontefract Castle | Castle Chain, Pontefract, WF8 1QH
finished Bartons Mill | Bartons Lane, Old Basing, Basingstoke, RG24 8QE
finished Cafe on the Rye | Strakers Road, Peckham Rye Common, London, SE15 3UA

Titus Andronicus at the Globe: review

Titus Andronicus
Tang Shu-wing Theatre Studio, Hong Kong
Globe 2 Globe World Shakespeare Festival
Review by Anna Chen
4th May 2012

With the scarcity of east Asian faces in British culture, this past week has been a revelation for London's theatre-goers.

An appetite for Chinese performance yielded almost capacity audiences and praise for both the National Theatre of China's Richard III in Mandarin and the Hong Kong Titus Andronicus in Cantonese at the Globe Theatre's Shakespeare festival.

Director Tang Shuwing's minimalist physicalised approach eschews the Mandarin production's Beijing Opera and kung-fu, bringing us a pared-down version closer to Tang's Parisien theatre training. The only overt Chinese influence is the mesmerising qigong framing device where the actors raise their energy and then ground it after the roller-coaster story ends.

Roman general Titus (Andy Ng Wai-shek) crushes the Goths and returns home with their captive Queen Tamora and her horrible sons in tow. Nobly refusing the throne, he gives it instead to the undeserving Saturninus, whose recklessness make you wonder what the old soldier ever saw in him. When Titus's daughter Lavinia (an ethereal Lai Yuk-ching) declines the new Emperor's proposal in favour of his brother to whom she is already betrothed, he weds Tamora and unleashes hell.

Stupid men manipulated by ruthless women have long exerted a misogynistic fascination across the world: in Titus we get it in bucketloads of blood, albeit off-stage in this version. Dowager Empress Cixi, Madam Mao and Gu Kailai have all fed this most enduring of scapegoats, and in the wrathful Tamora (Ivy Pang Ngan-ling in fine scheming form), we see "female evil" personified.

However, it's a melodrama well served by stylisation. Murder, sex, power and revenge drive this first of Shakespeare's tragedies, a shocking spectacular famous for the queen who eats her sons baked in a pie, a slew of murders, plus rape and mutilation of the beautiful heroine.

Chu Pak-hong as Tamora's lover Aaron the Moor is another Iago, a devilish agent of malicious misdeeds. He's enough of a love-god, though, to make you believe that his "witty queen" would go silly over him even if the birth of their mixed-race baby threatens their downfall. Some disquieting racial banter demonstrates why this "thick-lipped slave" rarely makes it onto the stage nowadays.

With each Cantonese word requiring one syllable, the actors get through the dialogue at quite a lick. Told straight, some of the beauty of the language will have been lost. Nevertheless, there's more than enough imaginative business in the text to keep cast busy and audience happy.

Richard III from China at the Globe: theatre review

An edited version of this review appeared in the Morning Star.

Richard III — National Theatre of China
Globe to Globe International Shakespeare Festival
Review 29th April 2012

Their stunning costumes may have been languishing in a container ship just off Felixtowe, but even if the cast had been wearing sackcloth, rather than a wardrobe hastily assembled from the bowels of the Globe Theatre, it wouldn't have diminished the fire of Wang Xiaoying's exhilarating production of Richard III.

The National Theatre of China makes Beijing-Opera-meets-Shakespeare every bit as exciting as you could imagine this history refracted through Chinese sensibilities and performed in Mandarin.

Lady Anne, the tragic heroine widowed by the man she is about to marry, is perhaps the clearest exemplar of the demanding Beijing Opera discipline, her fluting delivery and fluid movements mesmerisingly communicating her miserable circumstances.

Richard's two henchmen perform their murderous duties in full martial-arts mode, with expert clowning and tumbling skills. Some wonderfully crude Yo Mama expletives hint at Shakespeare rewritten for Chinese audiences, all aided by an atmospheric soundscape from a one-man traditional percussion band.

Stylised to the eyeballs it may be, yet there's enough naturalism — conveying nuance of emotion and clear delineation of characters — to satisfy modern audiences.

Resisting the temptation to crowbar current Bo Xilai parallels into this review, let us merely report that the opening scene — where dissembling Richard, Duke of Gloucester (the charismatic Zhang Dongyu), lays out his villainous ambitions to rise to the top on a wave of havoc — has a familiar ring, building inexorably to the climax.

Power games abound in this mire of corruption. From the outset, Tricky Dicky congratulates himself on the virtuosity of his various manipulations. With the major conflict of the War of the Roses over, the new dynasty established and Richard's brother Edward on the throne, our anti-hero plots to wipe out his rivals beginning with his brother Clarence. Preying on innocents, he leaves a trail of dead before finally dispatching the young nephews blocking his path to the throne.

Surtitles, giving descriptions of scenes rather than complete translations, announce: "To win over the people, Buckingham praises Richard's virtues." And "Richard pretends to be modest, making a show of refusing to accept power."

So no analogies here, then.

Buckingham's fawning foray into the auditorium in the coronation scene to rouse the masses with cries of "wànsuì" (meaning "long live") sparked mirthful recognition among the Chinese half of the audience. Strangely, they seemed to derive a jolly catharsis from seeing their crafty leader wracked with guilt, suffering and ultimately dying.

And the rest of us still got it, too: proving both the universality of Shakespeare, and that we have more in common than we have differences.

Morning Star review 3rd May 2012

Militarised Hamlet at the National Theatre: review

A fighter plane roars overhead. Lights come up on a bleak black-and-white Elsinore Castle. Soldiers in camouflage strike the familiar high-shouldered automatic rifle-toting power-pose so beloved of army recruitment ads, sorry, TV & movies. Who needs a bare bodkin when a Bullpup SA80 can do the job?

Two youths — Hamlet and Laertes — lose their fathers and seek revenge, leading to much blood-letting and misery all round. The plot is familiar but director Nicholas Hytner tries to find a modern spin for his first-ever bite at the great Dane.

Hytner chooses a modern militarised setting with new king of the castle, Hamlet's Uncle Claudius, ruling by way of a surveillance society, and bumbling old Polonius actually a Walsinghamesque head of the secret service. Something is indeed rotten in the state of Denmark, possibly the whiff of testosterone permeating the masculine iconography. Armed spooks in snappy suits and earpieces lurk like club bouncers, while soldiers in trousers at half-mast over sexy high-laced bovver boots are on call at the flick of a switch to coked-up banging techno.

No wonder poor sensitive Hamlet is driven half mad.

When his father's ghost (James Laurenson) tells his son that his Uncle Claudius (Patrick Malahide) is both regicide and fratricide as well as schtupping his dipso mother, tough-as-old-boots Queen Gertrude (Clare Higgins), Hamlet, recently-bereaved Prince of Denmark, is galvanised into inaction. Should he take arms against a sea of troubles or smoke a fag?

It's a mark of any good Shakespeare production that the audience can understand words from another age requiring a different register of thought, and Hytner's Hamlet is excellent on this score. Marred only by appalling sound at the beginning (the actors are all mic'ed up), and vastly improved by sneaking into the empty balcony seats further towards the middle of the Olivier auditorium where the acoustics thrive, the text is delivered with full clarity and meaning.

Rory Kinnear earns all the plaudits he's been getting. Looking well for his age, this star of the NT repertory company gets away with everything except murder. Playing two modes — loony and ultra-sane — he uses his feigned madness to outwit an entire oppressive regime. Although you have to ask if this was the status quo way before Claudius's promotion, implicating Hamlet senior in the creation of this grim world, and makes you wonder if he got what he deserved.

Hamlet's quicksilver backchat is matched by leaping and gambolling, running rings around his antagonists in every way. But if he's so smart, why can't he restore nature's equilibrium, right wrongs and correct an off-kilter world? Lacking the nerve to self-slaughter, he must marshall his internal forces to wreak revenge and lay ghosts to rest ... at least in the outside world, if not in his own mind.

There's a satisfying amount of "business" — the stuff not in the text — discovered in the creative process as well as thrust into play by the director, who will have been wrestling with his production for months if not years. In conversation with the stolid Polonius, Hamlet transforms an open book into a bird as his thoughts fly away apparently unanchored to terra firma. His smiley-face Watchmen graffito becomes a symbol of defiance, the gormless mask he is able to slip on to facilitate his deceit. When Ophelia (Rugh Negga) wears the smiley T-shirt you know she too is caught up in the game: in this version, the power-play of her puppeteer father. Ophelia, whose madness Ruth Negga strains for but never quite grasps, comes to her watery end by an unexpected means that feels a bit forced.

The choreography for Hamlet's play-within-a-play which will unmask his father's killer is brilliant and the scene becomes a vital building block in the story rather than a tacked-on addendum. The star of the show for me is James Laurenson who stood out as the deceased King and Player King, possessing the sort of charisma you just don't get any more.

These positives aside: if each Hamlet reflects each age, then what is the National Theatre's production telling us about ourselves?

The bouncer/squaddie trope is cringingly patronising to the National Theatre audience — although Team Hamlet is probably banking on approval when it tours the provinces from next month — and a sense of pandering to an audience brought up on the stale TV imagery of media, muscle and sex. Is this all we can understand? Each time another camera crew came on to capture the moment I wanted to reach for my AK47.

A deeply conservative vision runs through this production: the air of an etiolated middle-class establishment appropriating imagery of working-class males serving the ruling class as its bully-boys, rather than challenging the power structure. It may be a comment on the creeping authoritarianism of successive governments, but it ultimately communicates a pessimistic view of our society's potential while keeping usurpers of power in the driving seat.

Fascism wins out when the hippy Prince dies, embodied curiously in the shaven head of Fortinbras as revealed in a news bulletin tableau when he surveys the carnage at the end. My Lovely Companion noted a visual reference to the paratrooper in Pontecorvo's Battle Of Algiers. No time for grand thoughts and grooming here. The shaven male head becomes a symbol of raw male power, the jettisoning of sentiment and human tenderness for the great smell of brute function, the quality required to survive in the world. This scene comes perilously close to celebrating military restoration of order: it's a dirty job but someone has to do it.

Hamlet
By William Shakespeare
Starring Rory Kinnear
Director: Nicholas Hytner
National Theatre ends this week.
National tour from 11th February 2011: Nottingham Theatre Royal; Salford Lowry; Plymouth Theatre Royal; Milton Keynes; Woking; Luxembourg

All's Well That Ends Well at the National Theatre: review

Parolles and Helena

This is one of the rarely-staged Shakespeare plays that has eluded me thus far but I'm glad I got to see this three-hour production at the National Theatre Olivier auditorium at long last thanks to their £10 Travelex scheme.

All's Well That End's Well is a light romcom with an ironic punch hinted at in the title that's driven home in the final flash-photography horrorstruck pose from our loving couple, Helena and Bertram.

Blond handsome Bertram (George Rainsford), son of the recently widowed Countess of Rossillion (Clare Higgins) really is a dick with his floppy hair and slappable boyish charm. It's a wonder that the perky Helena wants him in the first place, but then I never found Hugh Grant a dish, either.

Played by Michelle Terry, who does a great job of filling in the spaces within the text with her appealing effervescence and would make a terrific Dr Who assistant, Helena is the orphaned daughter of the late Count's physician and has fallen in love with the brat. The Countess has taken her under her wing and facilitates her introduction at court where she treats the King of France (Oliver Ford Davies) who's been ill with a fistula.

Even though the King gives us a clue as to what a fistula is by clenching his hand into a claw (I had images of certain exotic activities hopping into my smutty mind), I just had to search and got " ... an abnormal connection or passageway between two epithelium-lined organs or vessels that normally do not connect."

None the wiser, I'll accept the hand job.

Anyhow, fist unclenched, we know that Helena has cured this powerful dude and now claims her reward. A lesser being would have demanded title, treasure, a palace or three, but values they are a changin'. Helena keeps it real in a society that now has room for romance and asks for marriage to Bertram.

Shallow and spoilt, he rejects her for being common, and goes off to war to avoid consummation, stating that should she manage to get his magnificent ring, handed down through generations, and fall pregnant with a child of his, he'll fulfill his duty.

There follows a comedy of mistaken identity and subterfuge wherein men are revealed to be treacherous snakes in the grass, cowardly liars and deeply closeted. It leaves you wondering why any fabulous woman would spend so much time and suffering in order to lock themselves into a lifelong relationship with them.

Duh! Oh, yeah, I geddit. Money and power, romance being but the superstructural offspring of the economic base. And this, comrades, is why capitalism (OK, the last days of feudalism where aristos are being displaced by merchants and professionals) distorts the human soul.

The burgeoning bourgeoisie has triumphed and secured its position but at what cost?

If that makes it sound like a flat polemic, it wasn't. That's just me cutting to the chase of what it was about. This production is actually a lot of fun and a special mention goes to Parolles (Falstaff lite played by Conleth Hill), a hilarious vain repository of everything sluggish and snailish in the male of the species dressed up as a superannuated heavy metal peacock who gets his humiliating comeuppance at the hands of his brother soldiers.

Of course, female ingenuity, wit and solidarity win out with a midnight tryst and Helena swapping identities with Diana, a great beauty who Bertram is crazy for. Helena fulfills Bertram's demands and wedlock can now ensue with celebrations and a wedding photographer to freeze the cast in a succession of telling tableaux.

All's Well That Ends Well, except for that very last shot ...

Bertram defies the King of France

All's Well That Ends Well at the National Theatre: review

Parolles and Helena

This is one of the rarely-staged Shakespeare plays that has eluded me thus far but I'm glad I got to see this three-hour production at the National Theatre Olivier auditorium at long last thanks to their £10 Travelex scheme.

All's Well That End's Well is a light romcom with an ironic punch hinted at in the title that's driven home in the final flash-photography horrorstruck pose from our loving couple, Helena and Bertram.

Blond handsome Bertram (George Rainsford), son of the recently widowed Countess of Rossillion (Clare Higgins) really is a dick with his floppy hair and slappable boyish charm. It's a wonder that the perky Helena wants him in the first place, but then I never found Hugh Grant a dish, either.

Played by Michelle Terry, who does a great job of filling in the spaces within the text with her appealing effervescence and would make a terrific Dr Who assistant, Helena is the orphaned daughter of the late Count's physician and has fallen in love with the brat. The Countess has taken her under her wing and facilitates her introduction at court where she treats the King of France (Oliver Ford Davies) who's been ill with a fistula.

Even though the King gives us a clue as to what a fistula is by clenching his hand into a claw (I had images of certain exotic activities hopping into my smutty mind), I just had to search and got " ... an abnormal connection or passageway between two epithelium-lined organs or vessels that normally do not connect."

None the wiser, I'll accept the hand job.

Anyhow, fist unclenched, we know that Helena has cured this powerful dude and now claims her reward. A lesser being would have demanded title, treasure, a palace or three, but values they are a changin'. Helena keeps it real in a society that now has room for romance and asks for marriage to Bertram.

Shallow and spoilt, he rejects her for being common, and goes off to war to avoid consummation, stating that should she manage to get his magnificent ring, handed down through generations, and fall pregnant with a child of his, he'll fulfill his duty.

There follows a comedy of mistaken identity and subterfuge wherein men are revealed to be treacherous snakes in the grass, cowardly liars and deeply closeted. It leaves you wondering why any fabulous woman would spend so much time and suffering in order to lock themselves into a lifelong relationship with them.

Duh! Oh, yeah, I geddit. Money and power, romance being but the superstructural offspring of the economic base. And this, comrades, is why capitalism (OK, the last days of feudalism where aristos are being displaced by merchants and professionals) distorts the human soul.

The burgeoning bourgeoisie has triumphed and secured its position but at what cost?

If that makes it sound like a flat polemic, it wasn't. That's just me cutting to the chase of what it was about. This production is actually a lot of fun and a special mention goes to Parolles (Falstaff lite played by Conleth Hill), a hilarious vain repository of everything sluggish and snailish in the male of the species dressed up as a superannuated heavy metal peacock who gets his humiliating comeuppance at the hands of his brother soldiers.

Of course, female ingenuity, wit and solidarity win out with a midnight tryst and Helena swapping identities with Diana, a great beauty who Bertram is crazy for. Helena fulfills Bertram's demands and wedlock can now ensue with celebrations and a wedding photographer to freeze the cast in a succession of telling tableaux.

All's Well That Ends Well, except for that very last shot ...

Bertram defies the King of France