Fathers and Sons, 11.7.14

 

Arkady and Bazarov, the two students who return home
in Friel's warmly humane 'Fathers and Sons'

Brian Friel’s deft 1987 stage adaptation of Turgenev’s landmark 1862 novel (set just after the Emancipation of the Serfs) was directed at the Donmar by Lyndsey Turner (ex of “Chimerica”).  Rob Howell designed a beautifully organic matrixed wooden set redolent of Russian birch forests. It was encouraging to see how many Russians were in the audience for this, one of their national masterpieces. 

L: Joshua James as Arkady
R:  Seth Numrich as Bazarov

The plot was simplicity itself:  two Petersburg students imbued with a fashionable commitment to radical change return home only to find that family, love, disease and the harvest all conspire to obstruct the dawn of a ‘new Russia’. 

Twinkly-eyed newcomer Joshua James (~22yo), a gawky jug-eared youth at first clearly in his comrade’s shadow, was impressively supple at conveying the underlying decency of Arkady, the less dogmatic of the two students, from a traditional land-owning family.   

Revolution is no laughing matter: 
Seth Numrich's Bazarov

US import Seth Numrich (27) had the harder role of making one warm to the less appealing Bazarov, a doctrinaire nihilist who’s beastly to the humble parents who are so devoted they celebrate his homecoming with a ‘Te Deum’.  Bazarov’s facile rejection of emotional ties for political reasons is compromised when he falls head-over-heels for glacial wealthy widow Anna Odintsova (played by Irish beauty Elaine Cassidy). 

Karl Johnson, one of the proud fathers

Karl Johnson made a strong impression as Vassily, Bazarov’s bumbling country doctor father, a man incapable of finishing a sentence without a trio of Latin tags.  As so often with the Donmar, a large cast (thirteen in all) gave an object lesson in ensemble-playing.  Stand-outs amongst the smaller roles included Siobhan McSweeney’s lovesick maid Dunyasha, Anthony Calf’s distrait Nikolai (Arkady’s father, a well-intentioned but inept landowner with a younger wife he’s raised a social peg or two) and Susan Engel’s batty Princess Olga (who grasps for the blunderbuss at the merest whiff of cat or accordion player).    


Tim McMullan's magnificently
disappointed Uncle Pavel

Tim McMullan’s Uncle Pavel, a fastidiously world-weary Europhile dandy whose world-view is most directly-challenged by Bazarov’s brash nihilism, was the play’s emotional pivot.  Billington put his finger on it beautifully by calling McMullan’s Pavel “one of the best displays I’ve ever seen of the superfluous man” (a type Motley has no difficulty empathising with).

Ivan Turgenev (1818-83): 
prophet of a lost Russian liberalism

A typhus epidemic brings matters to a suitably tragic ending, but it would be wrong to classify ‘Fathers & Sons’ as a tragedy.  Its emotional core, which rang so true, lay in its affectionate depiction of how families (doting fathers, idealistic sons, disappointed uncles, anxious second wives, mad aunts, brisk sisters and truculent servants) function as a microcosm of the almost Burkean “wider ties that bind”, which no one political philosophy can truly encompass.  It was Russia’s tragedy that a subsequent generation of idealistic students rejected Turgenev’s humane liberal vision. 

Translations, 1.5.14

Brian Friel’s 1980 play about the linguistic confrontation between English and Gaelic in Nineteenth Century Ulster was poignant and moving.  The setting was County Donegal in 1833 as the Ordnance Survey moved in to compile the first reliable maps of this remote corner of the Empire.  Two army officers of dramatically different temperaments (Lancey and Yolland) arrive to map a rural backwater but are unable to communicate with the Irish-speaking villagers.  

Beth Cooke as Maire and John Conroy as Jimmy Jack

The play memorably gave voice to a Gaelic-speaking generation soon to be decimated by the Potato Famine (“Sweet God, did the potatoes ever fail in Baile Beag?”).  Friel dramatized that hinge moment in Irish history when Gaelic (still the language of c50% of the Irish in 1830) was displaced by English (the language of c75% of the Irish by 1850).  Ironically, the Irish-speaking peasants could only be represented on stage by characters speaking English. 

Niall Buggy bouncing along as the
hedge school master Hugh

The central character of Hugh Mor O’Donnell was a gift to any actor (in this case to the impressively stentorian Niall Buggy), an “aul drunken schoolmaster” who communicated floridly in richly orotund Latinisms (“Silentium!”).  Through Hugh, Friel asserted an authority for Gaelic by claiming an affinity between it and the classics (“our own culture and the classical tongues made a happier conjugation / English ... couldn’t really express us”). 

Friel used the character of Hugh's oddball buddy Jimmy Jack (John Conroy) to underline that being non-Anglophone didn't mean being uneducated.  Self-taught Jimmy was so deeply ensconced in the classics that he addressed the Gods of the Greek myths, who were as real to him as his neighbours, in Greek.  There was more than a hint that languages may have functional specialisations:  English for commerce, but Gaelic, Latin or Greek for learning.

Not all the villagers were keen to keep up their Gaelic though and the chief facilitator of English linguistic colonialism was Hugh's shopkeeper son Owen (played by the chirpy bearded Cian Barry).  The strongest scene of the play was when Owen watered down the more egregious elements of the official proclamations from the ramrod Captain Lancey (Paul Cawley), systematically mistranslating his English to make it less offensive to the Irish. 

James Northcote as Ltnt Yolland

In contrast, the other, far more idealistic, Englishman, Lieutenant Yolland (a slimly winning James Northcote), primarily responsible for translating (or mistranslating?) all the Gaelic place-names into English for the new maps, was seduced by the countryside, the "poteen" and by local girl Maire (Beth Cooke).  This latter entanglement put him in competition with Hugh's younger son Manus (Ciaran O’Brien).  In this 'linguistic war' it was Yolland, the character who strove hardest to bridge cultural differences, that had to pay the highest price. 
‘Translations’ was far being from a Nationalist tract.  In many ways, the characters like Yolland, Maire and Owen who tried to find a middle ground between colonisers and colonised were the most attractive. The serious political points were also lightened through the inclusion of much classic Beckettian-style blarney, particularly from the vaudevillian pairing of Hugh and Jimmy. 




Brian Friel

The under-rated Friel has a strong claim to be considered our greatest living playwright (though Stoppard runs him close).  As "The Times" put it:  "Nobody can write as wrenchingly as Friel about the ache of the soul and its yearning for ecstasy". 

Friel's greatest skill is his ability to capture twilight moments, the melancholia of the marginal and the displaced, and to give them voice through language of limpid beauty and precision (see also "Faith Healer", "Dancing at Lughnasa" and "Molly Sweeney"). 

In "Translations", Friel's message, through Hugh, was that:  
“It is not the literal past, the ‘facts’ of history, that shape us, but images of the past embodied in language”. 

Hugh boasted Friel’s best lines and most acute insights, such as: 
“Remember that words are signals, counters.  They are not immortal.  And it can happen... that a civilisation can be imprisoned in a linguistic contour which no longer matches the landscape of ... fact”.  

Or again:  “You’ll find, sir, that certain cultures expend on their vocabularies and syntax acquisitive energies and ostentations entirely lacking in their material lives. It (Gaelic) is a rich language, Lieutenant, full of the mythologies of fantasy and hope and self-deception – a syntax opulent with tomorrows.  It is our response to mud cabins and a diet of potatoes; our only hope of replying to ... inevitabilities.”

Sheffield Crucible’s impressive touring production (directed by James Grieve on a suitably rustic set by Lucy Osborne) gathered strength from its faithfulness to Friel’s powerful text.  And Kingston's smartly suburban Rose Theatre made an ironic contrast to the tumbledown setting of the play.  This was a show guaranteed to make a ‘Hibernophile’ of anyone!

Happy Days, Young Vic, 10.2.14



Juliet Stevenson as Winnie in
the Young Vic's 2014 'Happy Days'

Man:  "What's it meant to mean?  Stuck up to her diddies in the bleeding ground?"
His wife:  "And you, what's the idea of you?  What are you meant to mean?"

Peggy Ashcroft (who took the role in 1975) described Winnie, the protagonist of Beckett’s ‘Happy Days’, as 'the summit part’ for any actress, the female equivalent of ‘King Lear’.  


Stevenson in 1991's 'Death and the Maiden'
at the Royal Court

Shamingly, this was Motley's first exposure to the play, although I first saw Juliet Stevenson, the star of the show, as far back as 1991, playing Paulina in Dorfman’s “Death and the Maiden” (with just the right mixture of vulnerability and vengefulness).  Her comic timing as Amanda in the NT’s 1999 production of ‘Private Lives’ was so perfect it demanded a rare repeat ticket purchase.  And she was excellent too as Stephanie, the violinist laid low by MS, in the Almeida’s 2009 revival of Tom Kempinski’s ‘Duet for One’.  Few actresses are so good at conveying spirited suffering. 


Stevenson & Anton Lesser in
the NT's 1999 'Private Lives'

It was, inevitably, a rather different actress on display in Natalie Abrahimi’s Young Vic production of Beckett’s threnody.  



Stevenson & Henry Goodman in the
Almeida's 2009 'Duet for One'

Now 57, Stevenson bravely performed entirely without make-up and opted (unlike Eileen Atkins in 2012’s stand-out production of ‘All That Fall’) to play Winnie sans brogue.  Stevenson played Winnie naturalistically, trying to 'keep on' and 'muddle through' with typical English middle class phlegm (“Another heavenly day. Begin Winnie. Begin your day”).
  

Juliet Stevenson does battle with Winnie's demons

The slapstick humour of Beckett’s early works (‘All That Fall’, ‘Waiting for Godot’) had darkened considerably by the time ‘Happy Days’ was written in 1960, towards the height of the nuclear panic.  It's a kind of distillation of Beckett’s work, a somewhat static meditation on the fear of extinction ("To sing a song too soon is a great mistake, I find"), on ageing (“To have been always what I am – and so very changed from what I was”) and on the inadequacy of language to mitigate those processes (“Words fail. There are times when even they fail.  ...  There is so little one can say, one says it all. All one can. And no truth in it anywhere.”). 

Famously, Winnie is progressively buried alive up to her waist in Act One and up to her neck in Act Two, wreathed in a type of shingle surgical collar, while her grunting husband (“my Willie!”) busies himself inconsequentially to one side, largely failing to engage and mysteriously neglecting to dig her out.  

Winnie startled by an insect

Designer Vicki Mortimer had erected a jagged escarpment as the setting for Winnie's confinement, giving her a bird’s eye view over the stalls but emphasising her vulnerability to rock-slides. Nerve-jangling metallic roars, like tectonic plates
shifting beneath her trapped feet, marked the passage of time:  a device considerably more insistent than Chekhov's 'breaking string' but serving much the same function. 

Predictably, of course, nothing much happened.  The tragicomic Winnie (“if only I could bear to be alone”) prattled away, stream-of-consciousness-style, progressively emptying her handbag, with dogged but transparently artificial optimism, trying to keep her spirits up as the end approached (“ah well – no worse – no better, no worse – no change – no pain – hardly any – a great thing that – nothing like it”). 


"Things have a life.  Take my looking-glass, it doesn't need me"

The challenge for the lead in 'Happy Days', amply fulfilled here by Stevenson, is to act in progressively more 'minimal' fashion, making use of first hand movements and then face movements to compensate for her immobilisation and slow decline.  



Monsieur B lui-meme

Winnie finally makes peace with approaching death by breaking into song (“It is perhaps a little soon – to make ready – for the night – and yet I do – make ready for the night – feeling it at hand – saying to myself Winnie – it will not be long now, Winnie”).  Stevenson powerfully stayed silently buried up to her neck on stage as the lights dimmed and the audience filed out, hushed in the presence of great art. 

Beckett (then 56) never wrote anything as good again.