THE THREE SISTERS by Anton Chekhov,
 

adapted by Christopher Hampton.The Filter Theatre Company.

A review by Julia Gasper 10 March 2010

We are being treated to more Chekhov than usual this year because it is the 150th anniversary of his birth. However, there are some people who have seen too much of him, or so it seems from the programme which speaks of “de-familiarising the over-familiar”. So this is not The Three Sisters just as Chekhov wrote it but a version by Christopher Hampton, (best known for his adaptation of Les Liaisons Dangereuses from the novel by Laclos for the RSC 25years ago). Hampton wants to present Chekhov without nostalgia, wistfulness or yearning.

Here we have no prettily decorated drawing-rooms or girls in pin-tucked blouses, indeed the Prozorov family home is distressingly shabby with plastic chairs eking out the inadequate number of wooden ones in the dining-room. Olga, the eldest sister, wears a denim midi-skirt that would just about do for her teaching job, while Masha wears trousers and Irina, the youngest, a mini-dress. Their brother Andrei appears such a shuffling, scruffy lout from the very outset that we are not surprised when his great ambitions for becoming a professor end in nothing better than a secretarial job with the local council. I was completely puzzled at why Irina had an Irish accent unlike the rest of her family. Had she gone to school in Dublin?

There are many problems with trying to update The Three Sisters or even to situate it in a vague unhistoric dimension. It very firmly belongs to a time, a century ago, when unmarried sisters stayed at home; when people who got married stayed married despite the fact that most of them are in love with somebody else – Vershinin with Masha for example; a time when if two men like Tuzenbach and Solyony were rivals for the hand of the same woman, the result could be a fatal duel. Few people nowadays live in the sort of extended family circle where servants and relatives stay for thirty years and the same people drop in for lunch, tea or dinner day after day, lingering to chat or read or philosophize. For this reason alone, The Three Sisters produces a curious effect when done, even partly, in modern dress, and what makes it odder is that some characters like the maid Anfisa and the schoolmaster Kulygin are dressed in Edwardian clothes and appear to be living in a time-warp. When Irina decides to marry Tuzenbach we wonder why she has no other options

The translation includes some inappropriate language such as “a pig in sh-t” and the dreaded “you’re always sat on your own” (instead of sitting). I think that to make this production work better, the first Act should be done in a more subdued and less emphatic style. The actors should speak out less firmly, worry less about being audible in the back row, and try to create more of a feeling of intimacy and inwardness through the dialogue. All of them are good character-studies, particularly Nigel Cooke as the drunken old Dr Chebutykin and Gemma Saunders as the ghastly, bossy Natalya, and there is plenty of comedy here, but what is not quite discernible in this production is the subtlety and that is what we go to watch Chekhov for.
 

Tuesday 9 to Saturday 13 March Three Sisters Lyric Hammersmith and Filter Production www.oxfordplayhouse.com

ART FROM THE AFRICAN KINGDOM OF IFE.

An exhibition at the British Museum.

An exhibition review by Julia Gasper 2 March 2010

This small but significant exhibition of sculptures from West Africa is very different from most of what we think of as African art. Ife (pronounced Ee-fay) was a city-state flourishing in Western Africa, within what is now Nigeria, in the Middle Ages. Most of the pieces in this display were produced between the twelfth and the fifteenth centuries of the European calendar. The most impressive pieces are undoubtedly the copper and brass heads, which seem to be depictions of kings, queens and divinities. They were intended to stand on wooden bodies. In some cases, there is also a metal torso which has survived.

The fact that these sculptures were mostly cast in bronze or copper helped to preserve them, and proves that the people who made them were very skilled in their craft. They were made using the lengthy and elaborate lost-wax technique, also used in Renaissance Italy. Some also survive in terracotta, and there are a few carvings in granite. As they are life-size, possibly for some of them a wax-mask technique was used. The notable thing about these heads is that each one is different, a portrait with individualized features and subtle, inward expression. The faces are bold, with thick lips and high foreheads, and each one is a recognizable person. You would know them at once if you saw them outside in the street. Some, particularly the young queens, are beautiful, and some almost smile. On some, the elaborate headdresses and beads survive to embellish them and give height to the crown of the head. Most of the faces have tiny stripes running down them, which people of this region liked to make in their skin, as an adornment. [1]

There is one intriguing seated figure, in dark shiny copper, from Tada, which looks to me as if it could have been a musician, although sadly the arms do not survive, and nor does any instrument. [2] The face and upper body are androgynous and the loin-cloth is wrapped tightly and modestly so as to suggest to me that this could have been a woman. From the same area and period there are terracotta figures of rams, goats, elephants, alligators, chameleons, owls, a dog and a monkey, together with some artefacts that hint darkly at human sacrifice.

Curiously, we are told, neither copper nor any other metal is found in this area, so it must have been obtained through trade. Whether there were any outside influences on the production of these busts and figurines is a matter for speculation, but undoubtedly most people who see them will have their opinion of African art and civilisation raised.

• To find out more http://www.britishmuseum.org/whats_on/future_exhibitions/kingdom_of_ife.aspx

• To download video about the exhibition  http://www.britishmuseum.org/files/British-Museum_Ife4.mp4

• IFE exhibition 2010 images kindly supplied by British Museum.

Recent Reviews

THE_THREE_SISTERS_

ART_FROM_THE _AFRICAN_KINGDOM _OF_IFE.

Jane Austen's_ Pride_and_Prejudice

Medea

The_Magic_Toyshop.__

Die_Fledermaus

THE_SECRET_LOVE _LIFE_OF_OPHELIA_

Past Reviews

La_Bohème_On_Blu-Ray

Concert at the Ashmoleum

Dame_Emma_Kirkby_in concert

THE_MADNESS_OF_GEORGE_III

THE_BROWNING_VERSION

SWANSONG

The_History_Boys

Les_Misérables

Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice

Adapted for the stage by Simon Reade and performed by the Theatre Royal of Bath Stage Company.

 A review by Julia Gasper   23 February 2010

 It seems that Susan Hampshire has always wanted to act Mrs Bennett, the excitable and slightly obsessive mother who is determined to marry off her five daughters in Jane Austen’s classic story. In most productions of this much-loved novel, such as the recent film starring Keira Knightley, Elizabeth Bennett clearly stands out as prejudiced heroine, while in some – such as the well-known BBC production of about fifteen years ago – Mr Darcy, her proud suitor, attracts the limelight. This is the only production in which it is Mrs Bennett who steals the show and while it is a wonderful part, full of comic variety, the result is somewhat unbalanced. One can’t help reflecting that Mrs Bennett is not altogether a likeable character, and considering that she tries to force Elizabeth unwillingly into marriage with the boring, snobbish Mr Collins, her triumphant happy ending is lucky rather than completely merited. 

 It has to be said that in this production, it is the older generation who manage to dominate much of the time, with strong performances from Peter Ellis as Mr Bennett and from Carolyn Pickles as Lady Catherine de Bourgh (whose name, by the way, ought to end in a silent gh like thorough and though). As Elizabeth Bennett, Katie Lightfoot is pleasing enough but not outstanding, and her long trailing hair defied the fashions of Jane Austen’s time. Some of her costumes seemed very plain and dull, especially in the second Act. Alex Felton was a handsome Bingley and Nicholas Taylor a suitably dashing-looking Darcy but the telescoping of the plot into a limited number of scenes made some of the transitions too sudden, even abrupt, for the psychology to be convincingly developed. Darcy proposes to Elizabeth almost as soon as he arrives at Rosings, his aunt’s house. Similarly, when Bingley returns to Longbourn, he proposes when hardly over the threshold to Jane whom he has not seen for six months. Turning a novel this length into a stage play of eighteen scenes necessitates cutting it down and squashing it in ways that are not entirely satisfactory. As Dr Johnson said about a dog walking on its hind legs, “It is not done well, but it is astonishing to see it done at all.”  

Mr Bingley has only one sister, and Colonel Fitzwilliam has vanished. The resulting scenes in drawing-rooms are too much like a confrontation. Darcy says to Elizabeth, “You were dull and silent and gave me no encouragement,” when in fact there has been no time for her to do so or not. Lydia is supposed to accidentally let drop that Darcy was at her shotgun wedding to Wickham, but here she says it on purpose, which is less subtle. And the scene in which Mr Bennett ridicules the rumour about Darcy liking Elizabeth is here amalgamated with the later one in which he is told Darcy has proposed.  

I would suggest that to brighten this production up, they give Elizabeth a proper Regency hairdo with ringlets and replace her drab grey gown with a prettier sprig muslin. Instead of the violin music and recorded piano tracks, use more attractive authentic works of the time, such as the piano pieces of Mozart, Beethoven or Clementi. Then re-write some of the final scenes so that instead of bringing Mr Collins back to Hertfordshire – a quite unnecessary addition to the plot – they restore some of the lines of the main characters, making the story less abrupt and jerky.

Medea

 A review by Julia Gasper 07 February 2010

 Tom Paulin has written a new English version of this sombre tragedy by Euripides, about the sorceress Medea and the terrible revenge she takes when her husband, Jason, discards her to marry another, younger, woman. She does not only murder her rival, but to inflict the deepest and most lasting horror on Jason, she puts their children to death as well. Then, remorseless and triumphant, she speeds away in her winged chariot to take refuge with the King of Athens, Aegeus. 

Is it something new or unnatural for women to be killers? In the news lately we have heard many examples of women who have carried out ferocious crimes: Amanda Knox, convicted of the murder of her flat-mate, and Jessica Davies, convicted of cutting the throat of a man she picked up in a bar for sex. Cases of people killing their own children seem to be getting commoner as well – fathers or mothers who, often with a suddenness that amazes everybody, wipe out their own offspring. If the Greek legend is anything to go on, such crimes of rage have always taken place. The chorus in this play cries out in unison against an act so opposed to nature, one that “makes the river run uphill”, desecrating maternal love and instinct. Yet Medea will not listen, and goes ahead with her horrible revenge. Luckily, as this is Greek tragedy, it takes place off-stage.

 Jason, once a legendary hero, attracts no sympathy at all in this story: he ruthlessly discards the wife who helped him perform his great heroic deeds, and then appears stupid when he falls straight into her vengeful trap. As Medea, Nina Kristofferson gave such an intense, impassioned performance that she carried the whole play, and while she was on stage she dominated it entirely. The style of the production is eclectic, with Jason and Creon, dressed in Edwardian suits, Medea wearing a draped, semi-classical costume and the chorus speaking with a Yorkshire accent, or singing and playing music in a jazz or blues style. The language of the play is modern and colloquial, and in some respects this can be effective. When Medea defines herself, not as a “foreigner” or even a “stranger”, but an “immigrant”, the word suddenly politicizes the entire story. The fact that she is the only black or at any rate mixed-race person there, combined with the colonialist outfits worn by all the Greeks, puts the whole story in a context of imperialism. Medea seems to represent a whole group of exploited people, while Jason’s desire to marry again is a return to his own kind and his own class. Medea’s fury is thus not entirely personal, but a collective rage.

 Not all of the language is equally felicitous. Creating a timeless effect is not easy, and when in the opening scene, the tutor says, “I was sat there…” it just sounds like the language of soap opera. We are used to hearing this bad grammar on TV or on the rougher radio stations, but can’t Tom Paulin find room for the extra syllable “I was sitting there…” just to make sense?  

 This play is not really Paulin’s masterpiece. There is some awkwardness, some uncertainty about how the elements work together. Not everything was successfully synthesized, though so long as Medea was on-stage, Kristofferson’s powerful performance held it together and concealed any shortcomings. It is not such a fine work as Ted Hughes’ Alcestis, another tragedy by Euripides which was given its first production by Barrie Rutter, the director of Medea.  Nevertheless, it did occasion some fine acting and succeeds in throwing a new light on an age-old myth.

Medea by Euripides, translated by Tom Paulin, was performed at the Oxford Playhouse by Northern Broadside Productions in association with the Onassis Programme.

 The Magic Toyshop.

A stage review by Julia Gasper 28 January 2010

 The Magic Toyshop, an adaptation of Angela Carter’s novel of that name, is the first production of the student company which has dubbed itself Flipping the Bird Productions. It is a perplexing, surreal story about an adolescent girl and her experiences of growing up. Adolescence can be painful, and this is particularly disturbing, and full of horrid shocks.

 Melanie Flower is fifteen and brought up in a cosy world of family values and certainties. She looks forward to a white wedding and a husband who will create a secure future for her, like her parents’ marriage. Instead, they are suddenly killed in a plane crash, and she is plunged into a different environment. She is sent to live with her sinister, dictatorial uncle who keeps a strange toyshop where the puppets give bizarre performances and every member of the household is compelled to attend. In this gloomy, shabby house nothing is right, and nothing is certain. The production does its best to create the surrealistic dimension where toys speak and move, but people – such as her uncle’s wife – are oddly mute. There is mystery, but there is no solution. Melanie learns to doubt everything and to wonder if there is any difference between the real and the unreal. Desire becomes an ugly, threatening thing, in the form of rape or incest, not romance.

 Written in the 1960s, it referred to romantic ideals and a generation brought up to have faith in them. Did anybody really believe them so implicitly? Well, yes, actually, it has to be confessed that we did. We fell for it, hook, line and sinker. We did grow up highly influenced by all those Cinderella stereotypes. Sometimes it would be nice to go back to them. There was supposed to be a chap, a hero, who would come along and make everything wonderful… Women have learnt a lot since then.

 The Magic Toyshop is not a “fun” play, and it creates an uncomfortable atmosphere. If you want to be shaken out of your bourgeois complacency, you can go and see it at Oxford Playhouse until Saturday.

Die Fledermaus  at the Oxford Playhouse.

A review by Julia Gasper  22 January 2010

Opera della Luna has come a long way since its inception in 1994. Its productions are now on the unmissable list. With lead singers of high quality and a brilliantly funny libretto, their latest show gives the audience an intoxicating evening.

 This new version of Johann Strauss the Younger’s fizzing operetta Die Fledermaus (The Revenge of the Bat) has been freshly translated by Jeff Clarke, the artistic director of the company, and freely adapted to bring it bang up to date. It is surprising just how well the plot can be made to work in a modern setting, but this is true of all really good stories. The Eisensteins’ house looks like a banker’s apartment in Canary Wharf, the wild bash at Prince Orloffsky’s resembles what one would expect at Elton John’s birthday party, and the prison has been replaced with a drug rehabilitation clinic, which Eisenstein (the very amusing Andy Morton) dreads just as much.

This is not a full orchestral performance, the score being arranged for piano, wind and percussion, but the quality of the singing, the choreography and the acting make up for that. As Adele, the maid who goes to the party in her employer’s gown (Versace in this case) Helen Massey was lively and sang enchantingly, as did Lisa Anne Robinson whose richer, fuller voice suited the role of Rosalinde. Her natural Austrahlian accent was contrasted for comic effect with the Eetaliano of her old flame and lover-boy Alfie. When she attended the party incognito, her performance of the Hungarian czardas was full of verve and style and had the audience longing to dance. One of the few things I would change about this production is the wig that Rosalinde wears to the party. Blonde would be better than orange, and something on the lines of Zsa-Zsa Gabor’s hairstyle might go better with her assumed persona.

 As the AC-DC, decadent and blasé Orloffsky, Simon Butteriss gave us a very rich, rippling voice and a flamboyant performance. When we came to the point where Eisenstein dresses up as his own lawyer, the fact that the lawyer in this version was a woman gave an extra comic dimension. The whole production has a great deal of wit and panache, and throughout there were spontaneous bursts of applause from the audience, who had a jolly good time. Die Fledermaus showed for only one night in Oxford, but if you missed it, you can still see it at Cheltenham, Wycombe, London, Windsor or elsewhere as it is on tour until March.

See the company’s website http://www.operadellaluna.org/diary-2010.asp  

You’d be batty to miss it!

THE SECRET LOVE LIFE OF OPHELIA

by Steven Berkoff.
Mustard Seed Productions, directed by Amy Mulholland.

A theatre review by Julia Gasper 14 January 2010

Why should Rosencrantz and Guildenstern have a whole play to themselves while Ophelia is overlooked? There have been other attempts to dramatize her and adapt Shakespeare’s Hamlet, putting her at the centre, but in my opinion, this new one by Steven Berkoff does a very good job of creating a believable Ophelia and offering a solution to some of the many mysteries that surround her.

This take on their tragic love-hate relationship is a fresh and insightful one.
Not only is it written in blank verse but it also uses poetic language, some of it very elaborate and metaphorical – a huge risk for a modern author to take, competing with the Bard. The demands it makes on the two actors who play Hamlet and Ophelia, with no supporting cast, are considerable. Ophelia in this play has far more lines than she ever did in Shakespeare, and Hamlet has to be – well, Hamlet, intense, touchy, half-mad, brooding, violent, you know the routine. It gets more successful as it goes on and by the end convinces us that this really is Hamlet and Ophelia.

The trouble with Ophelia in Shakespeare’s play is that we never see her really alone with Hamlet – she only speaks to him when others are eavesdropping, and the way that she rejects him when her father tells her to, casts doubt on whether she ever truly loved him. Many people also feel doubtful about whether Hamlet ever really loved Ophelia, as he insults her so humiliatingly with “Get thee to a nunnery.” Yet when she dies, doesn’t he leap into her grave and shout, “I loved Ophelia”? In this play we go behind the scenes and we are left in no doubt that they really loved each other, passionately, and went to bed together too. Ophelia (acted by the very pretty and talented Amy McGavin) is writing love-letters in return for the ones Hamlet sends her, and after the rapture of love the pair of them start to dread the king forcing him into an arranged marriage. She is intelligent too. She suggests up a plan to cope with her father’s demand that she break off with Hamlet. They pretend to go along with it, and fake the whole scene, including his angry denunciation of her, acting in order to fool Polonius and Claudius. So this scene becomes a sort of play-within-the-play. Later we hear Ophelia being angry with Hamlet for talking to her bawdily in front of the King and Queen – he almost gave away their secret.

However, when Hamlet has to confess to her that he has killed Polonius, their relationship really does fall apart. Ophelia here gets a chance to express the dilemma she never speaks in the play, when the man she loves murders her father. Though ghastly, he was still her father. She starts to go mad gradually, before Hamlet even leaves for England. For some reason in this version, we never get the funeral scene. The description of Ophelia drowning is heard in a voice-over, as if Hamlet is reading it in a letter. Andrew Johnson, who acts Hamlet, is a brave man, as David Tennant is a hard act to follow. Altogether he gives an impressive performance in this very demanding role, as an impetuous, angry and always rather unstable young man.

There are many problems and mysteries in Hamlet, among them the role of Queen Gertrude and the confusing time-scheme, and no play can solve them all. There were many oddities of this production, the beginning with its use of film and stark 1960s music being particularly unpromising, and it is not such a good idea to have Hamlet and Ophelia writing letters in the air. However, Berkoff’s play deserves to be successful, and to get a longer run at a larger venue. It could make good television and it should be seen by every Shakespeare scholar and enthusiast of Hamlet.

Julia Gasper.

The Secret Love Life of Ophelia was performed at the Burton-Taylor Rooms 12th-14th Jan 2010. The run which was sold out, is now over.