Yellow Face by David Henry Hwang opens tonight National Theatre Shed for 3 weeks

Gemma Chan and David Yip in Yellow Face, opening at the National Theatre Shed tonight.

Here's wishing that the cast of Yellow Face, by Tony-Award winner David Henry Hwang, break a leg in style when they open tonight at the National Theatre Shed.

I thoroughly enjoyed the play when it launched London's Park Theatre opening last year, reviewing it for the Morning Star. I also interviewed Hwang and found him to be charming, witty and self-effacing. He was still as politically aware as when he became the reluctant "poster-boy" for the Asian American community's angry campaign over Jonathan Pryce's reprisal of his role as the Eurasian Engineer when Cameron Macintosh's production of Miss Saigon transferred to Broadway.

This play, Yellow Face, was written as a response to the draining experience of that campaign, about issues of race and equality. The argument about sticking white actors in yellow face make-up to play east Asian roles resurfaced in Britain at the end of 2012 over the Royal Shakespeare Company's casting of only three minor roles out of 17 with Asian actors when they staged the The Orphan of Zhao, a Chinese classic play from antiquity. It was no surprise when Hwang and a host of East Asian American actors weighed in on our side, excoriating the RSC for their "contradictory and fallacious" self-justification.

Not one main role was played by an East Asian actor.

Various British theatre critics, including Mark Shenton, defended the RSC with some shockingly antiquated arguments. Shenton attacked both myself and Hwang in The Stage for daring to object to colour-blind casting that only goes one way. (Do check out the comments.)

One strawman argument was that the effniks were demanding that every character be played by an East Asian. Some of us were, but most of us were not, especially as The Orphan of Zhao was part of an RSC trilogy.

Shenton's position was that east Asian actors could not play roles in the other two plays produced in the same season and played by the same ensemble cast: Pushkin's Boris Godunov ('cause no Russian ever looked Asiatic, right?) and Life of Galileo by that master of defamiliarisation and arch-questioner of "reality", Bertold Brecht.

So it is with curiosity and optimism that we note Shenton's participation in the NT's Pre-show Platform on Wednesday 7 May, when he joins writer David Henry Hwang to discuss Yellow Face. One hopes that Shenton's presence on the same platform as the author of a play specifically dealing with the issues of racial exclusion from the culture means that some of what we've been saying has sunk in. I'm a great believer in the ability of human beings to learn from past mistakes and acquired wisdom.

So let us, like Bill Clinton, come from a place called Hope.

Yellow Face is on at the National Theatre Shed until 24th May.

Review: Mark Shenton

Review: Michael Coveney

Black T-shirt Collection by Inua Ellams: review

This review first appeared in the Morning Star 19th April 2012

Black T-shirt Collection
Inua Ellams — Cottesloe Theatre, NT
16 April 2012

In Inua Ellam's 75-minute monologue about how to be successful whilst keeping your soul unsullied, Matthew and Muhammed, two Nigerian foster-brothers from across the Muslim-Christian divide, set up their eponymous Black T-shirt Collection, a hip clothing venture which begins with a kick in the chest and ends with something far nastier. Their upwardly-mobile journey takes them from the streets of Nigeria, (via the swanky scotch-and-Ribena set) to Egypt, consumerist Europe and sweatshop China.

As their T-shirt brand goes global, the young entrepreneurs live the petit bourgeois dream where creativity and a bit of luck propel you into the upper stratum of society. Of course it goes sour, but in the meantime, Ellam explores issues including homophobia, social inequality and exploitation.

With his studious specs and relaxed thoughtful delivery, Ellam cuts a dash onstage as the multi-talented bright spark. His language has been acknowledged as beautiful, and indeed it is. His graphic design skills are also in evidence in the projected black and white comic frames that illustrate the story.

Over-egging factory exploitation in China provides a powerful climax, rich in metaphor. However, it is uncomfortably reminiscent of Mike Daisey who invented gun-toting factory guards, child workers and industrial injuries for his hit show, The Agony and Ecstasy of Steve Jobs, just in case we didn't think the real deal was bad enough. Ellams gives us a scene out of Bosch:

"There are children here, least a hundred of them, scruffy, eyes inflamed , fingers swollen from dipping hands in vats of boiling water ..." Then there are those giant dye cauldrons: " ... its blades slice the churning water, they slash the black broth like swords in moonlight."

Really? Is Ellams sure about this? Beautifully written it may be but this scene of bovine passivity is at best anachronistic when we're seeing the end of the era of cheap labour in China. Despite the thwarting of China's 2006 attempts to relax its draconian trade union laws when the American Chamber of Commerce (backed by their European counterparts) demanded the government nix workers' power, Chinese workers are slowly winning better rights and conditions.

Far from Chinese workers' struggle being a source of inspiration, increasingly, China stands for a horror location in the mental landscape where western guilt can be assuaged; another form of imperialism where the Chinese are the extras in western writers' stories. You get the examination of the inner life, the Chinese get the bit-part player credit.

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

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre 2010: review

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
Tom Stoppard, André Previn
Dir: Felix Barrett and Tom Morris
National Theatre January-Feb 2010

This may have been cold-war commie-bashing but it was superior cold-war commie-bashing.

I have previously sat through Tom Stoppard’s all-day trilogy The Coast Of Utopia in abject misery as boredom made me want to chew off my own limbs. Possessing tenacity and fortitude, and hoping against hope that some sort of political illumination or dramatic denoument would take place over the course of HOURS and HOURS of this drek, I stayed put. It didn’t. But I do remember someone done up like a large marmalade cat wandering through the Marx-Bakunin drinking and fighting marathon, presumably to ensure the audience (and cast) was awake. Or perhaps we did nod off and dreamt it. Collectively, of course.

I have endured Rock ‘n’ Roll (about Syd Barrett and communist oppression in Czechoslovakia) which, while feted by critics, disappointed me with its stagey dialogue and puppy Marxism, improved only a little by the addition of the historian Eric Hobsbawm as consultant and the presence of Brian Cox.

Yes, I have done all this and wondered what anyone saw in Stoppard except his usefulness in his role as one of our most prominent cultural cold war warriors.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour tells us what (actually, as does Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead). This 65 minute piece is the playwright at his absolute best. The dialogue sparkles and fizzes with some uproarious laugh-out-loud moments and clever-clever lines as well as intelligent ones. (And, yes, I can tell the difference.) He can flip from axioms of Euclid to some wonderfully bad puns about harps being “plucky” and throwing a trombone to the dog, and all within an informed argument on the brutality of the Soviet state towards dissenters.

Written in 1977, long before Guantanamo, creeping acceptance of torture closer to home and assassination, and the growing awareness that any state will do whatever it needs in order to counter meaningful dissent (whether that state be the old Soviet Union, China, the US or Britain), the play scathingly critiques the Soviet mental asylum system where political opponents were sent until they shut up or died.

Alexander Ivanov (Adrian Schiller) is an internationally renowned intellectual (based on Vladimir Bukovsky) whose complaint that the state locks sane people in asylums, lands him in one himself. He shares his cell, sorry, “ward”, with another Ivanov (Julian Bleach utterly believable as a lunatic) who really is demented and believes he has an orchestra. In a wonderful theatrical device, the play requires a full orchestra on stage (the Southbank Sinfonia), seen only by Ivanov and us, making us part of his madness. It’s also a master metaphor for how we function as members of an orchestra when we take our place in society.

The music, written by André Previn, references the great Russian composers and is so good that I later looked everywhere for a recording. Sadly, it appears that there isn’t one.

Alexander goes on hunger strike and begins to reek of acetone as his body eats itself, much like Soviet Russia is doing. During one visit from his son, Sacha, (Shea Davis or Wesley Nelson on different nights) Alex tells him, “A girl removing her nail-varnish smells of starvation.” “Russia is a civilised country,” he says, “very good at Swan Lake and space technology, and it is confusing if people starve themselves to death.” Bobby Sands, who died of his hunger strike four years later under Thatcher, might have agreed.

In one of many musical jokes, the violinist doctor (Jonathan Aris), who really does have an orchestra, uses emotional blackmail concerning Alexander’s son to get him to retract his accusations and abandon his refusal to eat, plucking the strings EGBDF as he tells him, “He’s a good boy. He deserves a father”.

The fifty musicians conceal several dancers who emerge at the climax when culture descends into chaos. The soldiers among them beat up the musicians and smash their instruments: the nail that sticks up has to be hammered down.

The play is resolved by a cheeky and most effective solution which has been perfectly set-up and which I can’t possibly reveal. You’ll have to catch it next time around. Which may be a long time as it is apparently pretty damned expensive to produce. Shame.

If you read this play as an indictment of authoritarianism everywhere then you will enjoy.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour at the National Theatre 2010: review

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour
Tom Stoppard, André Previn
Dir: Felix Barrett and Tom Morris
National Theatre January-Feb 2010

This may have been cold-war commie-bashing but it was superior cold-war commie-bashing.

I have previously sat through Tom Stoppard’s all-day trilogy The Coast Of Utopia in abject misery as boredom made me want to chew off my own limbs. Possessing tenacity and fortitude, and hoping against hope that some sort of political illumination or dramatic denoument would take place over the course of HOURS and HOURS of this drek, I stayed put. It didn’t. But I do remember someone done up like a large marmalade cat wandering through the Marx-Bakunin drinking and fighting marathon, presumably to ensure the audience (and cast) was awake. Or perhaps we did nod off and dreamt it. Collectively, of course.

I have endured Rock ‘n’ Roll (about Syd Barrett and communist oppression in Czechoslovakia) which, while feted by critics, disappointed me with its stagey dialogue and puppy Marxism, improved only a little by the addition of the historian Eric Hobsbawm as consultant and the presence of Brian Cox.

Yes, I have done all this and wondered what anyone saw in Stoppard except his usefulness in his role as one of our most prominent cultural cold war warriors.

Every Good Boy Deserves Favour tells us what (actually, as does Rosenkrantz and Guildernstern Are Dead). This 65 minute piece is the playwright at his absolute best. The dialogue sparkles and fizzes with some uproarious laugh-out-loud moments and clever-clever lines as well as intelligent ones. (And, yes, I can tell the difference.) He can flip from axioms of Euclid to some wonderfully bad puns about harps being “plucky” and throwing a trombone to the dog, and all within an informed argument on the brutality of the Soviet state towards dissenters.

Written in 1977, long before Guantanamo, creeping acceptance of torture closer to home and assassination, and the growing awareness that any state will do whatever it needs in order to counter meaningful dissent (whether that state be the old Soviet Union, China, the US or Britain), the play scathingly critiques the Soviet mental asylum system where political opponents were sent until they shut up or died.

Alexander Ivanov (Adrian Schiller) is an internationally renowned intellectual (based on Vladimir Bukovsky) whose complaint that the state locks sane people in asylums, lands him in one himself. He shares his cell, sorry, “ward”, with another Ivanov (Julian Bleach utterly believable as a lunatic) who really is demented and believes he has an orchestra. In a wonderful theatrical device, the play requires a full orchestra on stage (the Southbank Sinfonia), seen only by Ivanov and us, making us part of his madness. It’s also a master metaphor for how we function as members of an orchestra when we take our place in society.

The music, written by André Previn, references the great Russian composers and is so good that I later looked everywhere for a recording. Sadly, it appears that there isn’t one.

Alexander goes on hunger strike and begins to reek of acetone as his body eats itself, much like Soviet Russia is doing. During one visit from his son, Sacha, (Shea Davis or Wesley Nelson on different nights) Alex tells him, “A girl removing her nail-varnish smells of starvation.” “Russia is a civilised country,” he says, “very good at Swan Lake and space technology, and it is confusing if people starve themselves to death.” Bobby Sands, who died of his hunger strike four years later under Thatcher, might have agreed.

In one of many musical jokes, the violinist doctor (Jonathan Aris), who really does have an orchestra, uses emotional blackmail concerning Alexander’s son to get him to retract his accusations and abandon his refusal to eat, plucking the strings EGBDF as he tells him, “He’s a good boy. He deserves a father”.

The fifty musicians conceal several dancers who emerge at the climax when culture descends into chaos. The soldiers among them beat up the musicians and smash their instruments: the nail that sticks up has to be hammered down.

The play is resolved by a cheeky and most effective solution which has been perfectly set-up and which I can’t possibly reveal. You’ll have to catch it next time around. Which may be a long time as it is apparently pretty damned expensive to produce. Shame.

If you read this play as an indictment of authoritarianism everywhere then you will enjoy.

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

Burnt By The Sun, National Theatre review: bum-aching torture but don't blame Stalin

Someone should remind playwright Peter Flannery that drama is like real life but with the boring bits taken out. Last night’s preview of his adaptation of the movie Burnt By The Sun (press night tonight), broke an enjoyable run of great shows at the National Theatre which includes Steppenwolf’s August: Osage County, and Vanessa Redgrave winning me over after years of indifference in The Year of Magical Thinking.

The NT website promises us: “Amidst a tangle of sexual jealousy, retribution and remorseless political backstabbing, Kotov feels the full, horrifying reach of Stalin’s rule.” Terrific! Just what I wanted to see. Unfortunately, the end product looks like the outline before it was fleshed out and turned into a proper script, a disappointment considering this was written by the author of one of the best British TV dramas ever, Our Friends In The North.

Originally a hit Russian film made in 1994, Burnt By The Sun won a raft of awards including Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (I would have seen it by now, only Certain Someone taped two episodes of Angel over the videotape lent to us by a lefty friend, not that I’m using this opportunity to remind him of his crimes or anything, oh no, not me.)

Set in 1936 as Stalin’s Great Purge is getting under way, General Kotov (Ciarån Hinds), a hero of the revolution, is a big powerful Uncle Joe-loving family man on his summer holidays in his seaside dacha. Surrounded by his beautiful wife, Maroussia (Michelle Dockery) and her eccentric family, the remains of the old society, plus female servant Mochova and little daughter, Nadia, his idyllic world is disrupted by the return of Dimitri/Mitia (Rory Kinnear), Maroussia’s childhood sweetheart.

After much dense wordage and hotchka-potchka Russophiling (I’m wondering if Russian theatre represents Brits so stereotypically), it suddenly transpires, post-interval, that Mitia has an unpleasant mission he must carry out.

The story, such as it is, didn’t start until the second half, the (very long) first half consisting of a lengthy introduction of the characters with almost zero foreshadowing of what was to come. (I’d’ve said ‘the second act’, except there wasn’t a second act: just a first act split in two by an intermission.) Everything emerges as flat exposition, very little of it through drama. No suspense or build-up to the end, just a lot of thesping around an old piano and then The Thing happens.

The old people in Maroussia’s family sit around like cyphers, reminiscing and bemoaning a world gone to the dogs. The first signs of Stalin’s Great Purge are spotted in newspaper reports of the showtrials where “confessions” are declared to be the basis of justice, not evidence. But this thread, which I was looking forward to seeing developed in the course of the play, is lost in the love-lives of one-dimensional characters for whom I cared very little.

Appealing to middle-classes everywhere, BBTS shares a nostalgia for the good old days ven ve danced and played music and sang and the house was alive with culture and Chekovian loveliness before the philistines came and took it all away, pass the vodka. You’d think this would be a chance to have a look at the contrary needs of two contending classes, especially as we may be entering our own pre-revolutionary period if Britain suffers a depression, but no. The workers and their case are nowhere to be seen. You don’t have to agree with the Russian revolution, but at least give us an idea that you understand the dynamics of it.

I don’t believe, for example, that Mochova would explain the drill of defending themselves against “imperialist” attack by poison gas in such sneery knowing terms, a neon light invitation for the audience to laugh smugly at commie paranoia. Teenage Pioneers in gasmasks are supposed to mark an absurd lack of sophistication, so unlike our own dear Boy Scouts and Home Guard. Yet this was 1936, with memories of 22 foreign armies trying to snuff out the fledgling revolution, and not long before the horrors of World War II.

Perhaps the best moment, the only one that made me laugh, was when the clash of two worlds was played out in duelling feet (a strange motif that turns up elsewhere in the show, I’ve just realised): Mitia’s tap-dance, hampered only by the actor’s huge Sideshow Bob feet, versus an olde Russian army boot-slapping routine from Kotov. Kotov won.

One of the worst moments (there were several vying for top spot) was where, in a fit of what passes for passionate jealousy in this limp production, Kotov tries to shag Maroussia al fresco and the entire audience steeled itself for the ancient British theatre tradition of “groundbreaking sex”. Ooh, how transgressive. Thankfully, he only gets as far as stripping her top half and she’s wearing a flesh coloured bra underneath. Phew! They could have put me off sex for the longest time.

Then there’s the idiot plot crammed into the dying minutes of the production, when Mochova’s admirer stumbles upon Kotov’s arrest and, in a moment to rival Tippi Hedren under avian attack thinking, “I wonder what’s in the attic?” and charging in like she didn’t know the title of the movie was The Birds, he gets what every movie moron deserves.

Ciaran Hinds as General Kotov heads a strong cast

Burnt By The Sun is almost as bad as the (award-winning) Tom Stoppard trilogy at the NT, The Coast of Utopia, for which I saved up and spent all day almost in tears with boredom but refused to let it beat me and watched every tortuous minute until the end just in case something interesting happened. It didn't. The only thing I remember about it, apart from its stupendous failure to enlighten anyone as to the attraction of Marxism, was the presence of posh anarchist Bakunin in Marx’s home, and someone dressed up as a marmalade cat, a hallucinatory image which makes the play sound way better than it was.

Why is it that our National Theatre can produce no deep insightful examination of class politics, of the Marxism that affected, not only the world, but the generation now running things? The only working-class character, Mochova, is presented as a stupid middle-aged sex-starved buffoon against the luminous beauty of the distressed gentry. The NT’s excellent production of Galileo a while back contained some mind-boggling howlers — a working-class assistant with regional accent, whose child version is played by a posh kid with a Rank starlet accent, plus other revelations of antiquated class, race and gender assumptions peculiar to the theatre producers rather than Galileo and his contemporaries. Hey, you guys running the culture, this is your era. If you can’t work out what was/is happening, who can?

As usual, the designers walk away with the honours. The BBTS set is stunning — Kotov’s dacha centre-stage on a rotating platform, surrounded by bleakly beautiful forest, hauntingly lit.

If the original film even halfway deserves its reputation, then it also deserves an infinitely better adaptation than Flannery provides here. If it doesn’t, then I may have to apologise to Certain Someone tonight while we rewatch the episode in which Angel is turned into a muppet.

Spreaking of muppets ... HOI! Otchka-trotchka-motchka HOI! Otchka-trotchka ...

UPDATE: Neil Clark runs with the baton.

I'm in a minority of one.
Michael Coveney, What's On Stage and in the Independent:
Michael Billington, Guardian:
Charles Spencer, Telegraph:
Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard
Mark Espiner just about resists full lampoonery in the Guardian

Burnt By The Sun, National Theatre review: bum-aching torture but don't blame Stalin

Someone should remind playwright Peter Flannery that drama is like real life but with the boring bits taken out. Last night’s preview of his adaptation of the movie Burnt By The Sun (press night tonight), broke an enjoyable run of great shows at the National Theatre which includes Steppenwolf’s August: Osage County, and Vanessa Redgrave winning me over after years of indifference in The Year of Magical Thinking.

The NT website promises us: “Amidst a tangle of sexual jealousy, retribution and remorseless political backstabbing, Kotov feels the full, horrifying reach of Stalin’s rule.” Terrific! Just what I wanted to see. Unfortunately, the end product looks like the outline before it was fleshed out and turned into a proper script, a disappointment considering this was written by the author of one of the best British TV dramas ever, Our Friends In The North.

Originally a hit Russian film made in 1994, Burnt By The Sun won a raft of awards including Grand Prize at the Cannes Film Festival and the Academy Award for Best Foreign Language Film. (I would have seen it by now, only Certain Someone taped two episodes of Angel over the videotape lent to us by a lefty friend, not that I’m using this opportunity to remind him of his crimes or anything, oh no, not me.)

Set in 1936 as Stalin’s Great Purge is getting under way, General Kotov (Ciarån Hinds), a hero of the revolution, is a big powerful Uncle Joe-loving family man on his summer holidays in his seaside dacha. Surrounded by his beautiful wife, Maroussia (Michelle Dockery) and her eccentric family, the remains of the old society, plus female servant Mochova and little daughter, Nadia, his idyllic world is disrupted by the return of Dimitri/Mitia (Rory Kinnear), Maroussia’s childhood sweetheart.

After much dense wordage and hotchka-potchka Russophiling (I’m wondering if Russian theatre represents Brits so stereotypically), it suddenly transpires, post-interval, that Mitia has an unpleasant mission he must carry out.

The story, such as it is, didn’t start until the second half, the (very long) first half consisting of a lengthy introduction of the characters with almost zero foreshadowing of what was to come. (I’d’ve said ‘the second act’, except there wasn’t a second act: just a first act split in two by an intermission.) Everything emerges as flat exposition, very little of it through drama. No suspense or build-up to the end, just a lot of thesping around an old piano and then The Thing happens.

The old people in Maroussia’s family sit around like cyphers, reminiscing and bemoaning a world gone to the dogs. The first signs of Stalin’s Great Purge are spotted in newspaper reports of the showtrials where “confessions” are declared to be the basis of justice, not evidence. But this thread, which I was looking forward to seeing developed in the course of the play, is lost in the love-lives of one-dimensional characters for whom I cared very little.

Appealing to middle-classes everywhere, BBTS shares a nostalgia for the good old days ven ve danced and played music and sang and the house was alive with culture and Chekovian loveliness before the philistines came and took it all away, pass the vodka. You’d think this would be a chance to have a look at the contrary needs of two contending classes, especially as we may be entering our own pre-revolutionary period if Britain suffers a depression, but no. The workers and their case are nowhere to be seen. You don’t have to agree with the Russian revolution, but at least give us an idea that you understand the dynamics of it.

I don’t believe, for example, that Mochova would explain the drill of defending themselves against “imperialist” attack by poison gas in such sneery knowing terms, a neon light invitation for the audience to laugh smugly at commie paranoia. Teenage Pioneers in gasmasks are supposed to mark an absurd lack of sophistication, so unlike our own dear Boy Scouts and Home Guard. Yet this was 1936, with memories of 22 foreign armies trying to snuff out the fledgling revolution, and not long before the horrors of World War II.

Perhaps the best moment, the only one that made me laugh, was when the clash of two worlds was played out in duelling feet (a strange motif that turns up elsewhere in the show, I’ve just realised): Mitia’s tap-dance, hampered only by the actor’s huge Sideshow Bob feet, versus an olde Russian army boot-slapping routine from Kotov. Kotov won.

One of the worst moments (there were several vying for top spot) was where, in a fit of what passes for passionate jealousy in this limp production, Kotov tries to shag Maroussia al fresco and the entire audience steeled itself for the ancient British theatre tradition of “groundbreaking sex”. Ooh, how transgressive. Thankfully, he only gets as far as stripping her top half and she’s wearing a flesh coloured bra underneath. Phew! They could have put me off sex for the longest time.

Then there’s the idiot plot crammed into the dying minutes of the production, when Mochova’s admirer stumbles upon Kotov’s arrest and, in a moment to rival Tippi Hedren under avian attack thinking, “I wonder what’s in the attic?” and charging in like she didn’t know the title of the movie was The Birds, he gets what every movie moron deserves.

Ciaran Hinds as General Kotov heads a strong cast

Burnt By The Sun is almost as bad as the (award-winning) Tom Stoppard trilogy at the NT, The Coast of Utopia, for which I saved up and spent all day almost in tears with boredom but refused to let it beat me and watched every tortuous minute until the end just in case something interesting happened. It didn't. The only thing I remember about it, apart from its stupendous failure to enlighten anyone as to the attraction of Marxism, was the presence of posh anarchist Bakunin in Marx’s home, and someone dressed up as a marmalade cat, a hallucinatory image which makes the play sound way better than it was.

Why is it that our National Theatre can produce no deep insightful examination of class politics, of the Marxism that affected, not only the world, but the generation now running things? The only working-class character, Mochova, is presented as a stupid middle-aged sex-starved buffoon against the luminous beauty of the distressed gentry. The NT’s excellent production of Galileo a while back contained some mind-boggling howlers — a working-class assistant with regional accent, whose child version is played by a posh kid with a Rank starlet accent, plus other revelations of antiquated class, race and gender assumptions peculiar to the theatre producers rather than Galileo and his contemporaries. Hey, you guys running the culture, this is your era. If you can’t work out what was/is happening, who can?

As usual, the designers walk away with the honours. The BBTS set is stunning — Kotov’s dacha centre-stage on a rotating platform, surrounded by bleakly beautiful forest, hauntingly lit.

If the original film even halfway deserves its reputation, then it also deserves an infinitely better adaptation than Flannery provides here. If it doesn’t, then I may have to apologise to Certain Someone tonight while we rewatch the episode in which Angel is turned into a muppet.

Spreaking of muppets ... HOI! Otchka-trotchka-motchka HOI! Otchka-trotchka ...

UPDATE: Neil Clark runs with the baton.

I'm in a minority of one.
Michael Coveney, What's On Stage and in the Independent:
Michael Billington, Guardian:
Charles Spencer, Telegraph:
Nicholas de Jongh, Evening Standard
Mark Espiner just about resists full lampoonery in the Guardian