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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Juno and
the Paycock
Loft Theatre, Leamington
***** MICHAEL
Billington, dean of London’s theatre critics today, wrote of Christopher
Hampton’s The
Philanthropist - the
next play to be staged (in March) by the endlessly gifted Loft Theatre
company, Leamington - ‘This is a play that transcends its time and
enlarges one’s human understanding.’ One can certainly say
the same of Sean O’Casey’s ‘Trilogy’, the last of which,
The Plough and the Stars,
was staged by the Loft a season or so back.
Its predecessors were
Shadow of a Gunman
(1923), which the Loft has already mounted some seasons ago, and the
best known, Juno and the Paycock
(1924), which the Loft has just staged in its
bristling-with-life theatre beside the Leam. The company certainly
does its bit by Irish repertoire: not long ago it added Martin
McDonagh’s black comedies The Cripple
of Inishmaan (the next step in Daniel
Radcliffe’s burgeoning stage career) and
The Lieutenant of Inishmore,
set amid more recent tensions in the Aran Isles off Galway (J. M. Synge
country), and the same playwright’s The
Beauty Queen of Leenane (Connemara is
also part of Galway; hence the Loft has pulled off what might be equally
called the McDonagh trilogy) to its roster.
Thus no stranger to comedy, or tragi-comedy, the Loft takes serious theatre seriously, and triumphs in it. This is a so-called ‘amateur’ company that can switch from Hamlet to The History Boys with equal professionalism; from the Angsts of Chekhov (Three Sisters) to the hilarious parody of Dylan Thomas (Under Milk Wood); from full frontal sexiness and haunting, sinister threat (Peter Nichols’ Privates on Parade) to Samuel Beckett’s absurdist Endgame, without blinking an eyelid. There are no fellow-travellers. The Loft has
strength in depth; impressive acting talent to call on; endless
intelligence in production; a capable, creative technical department, in
both design and execution; and the twin gift of laughing at itself yet
taking its task of presentation very seriously indeed. The more
functional of its stagings are polished; the outstanding ones,
momentous. Thus, a
Lear. And a
Macbeth.
The Scottish thane (the lead role) was played there by Gus MacDonald,
and while he took on minor roles here, in
Juno and the Paycock,
it was his direction - shrewdly judged,
seeking out those curious moments where O’Casey has comic relaxedness
and horrific threat joust with one another in early 1920s Dublin, and
prising from each the maximum poignancy, that guaranteed this had the
edge on the Loft’s serviceable but less involving
Plough and the Stars,
which MacDonald (who has however overseen their
Equus,
Calendar Girls, Noises Off
and Brassed Off)
did not direct. One doesn’t have to
have seen Neil Jordan’s biopic Michael
Collins to know, as Stephen Rea and
Liam Neeson showed us, how the period around 1922 was even more horrific
in ‘Free State’ southern Ireland than at the time of the wartime
uprising against the British. Civil strife is, if anything more brutal and
unforgiving (Alan Rickman’s De Valera) than war between states (on a
lesser scale, think even of the ‘scab’ abuse between South Yorkshire and
Nottingham miners in 1984-5). War, though omnipresent
as a background, breaks in only from time to time in
Juno and the Paycock,
and we know that Johnny (Jimmy Proctor), the son of the Boyle family,
has got dangerously mixed up with the combatant His part will come back to haunt him, thanks to
the ‘Irregulars’ marshalled by their grim recruiting boss (MacDonald
himself). But much of the play gives us life going along regardless, all
on the same splendidly conceived set - part sparse, part (when a dream
of an inheritance comes true) crazily plush, with a superb duo, Tom
O’Connor, playing the family’s father, ‘Captain’ John (Jack) Boyle, the
once, not very long-time sailor, and - endlessly interesting to watch,
in moves as in gestures - his wife, Juno (Mary MacDonald).
Actually the sense of imminent tragedy and pain is best conveyed through the daughter, Mary (Flora Garner in a notably touching performance). Her guilt is about jettisoning her amiable boyfriend, Jerry (Connor Bailey, here subdued, but one of the hit performances in Privates on Parade); her armless brother’s (Jimmy Proctor) is about a betrayal of a young IRA-sympathiser, a friend and neighbour, to Collins’ Free State aficianados; in the gruesome if abrupt end, not one but two lads will lie dead. But it is the now pretty-haired, blossoming
Mary’s revealing of her own pregnancy near the end, and her self-centred
father’s appalling reaction, which help O’Casey reveal how the grimness
and inflexible opinions of males at home can match the awfulness of a
national uprising, whether on the doorstep or braking down the door. One thing that worked notably well in MacDonald’s
patient, detailed treatment was the pacing - just a little slow to get
going (partly O’Casey’s fault), yet beautifully controlled by Tom
O’Connor’s Dad, who seemed to take the script by the gills and squeeze
from it every kind of ambience. Thanks to his skill, you are treated to
unforeseen changes in pitch, and shifts of timbre, all the time: and it
generates that golden unpredictability so crucial to plays - like Ibsen
and Chekhov - that masquerade as comedy while deep down marching
headlong towards tragedy. Mood switches are what families are about, and
in this ensemble the rapidity of alternation between laughter, malicious
ribbing and brief bouts of fury made the interpretation wonderfully true
to life. As in many a good or
flawed family, mother rules the roost, or -
in absentia aliorum
- tries to (Juno because ‘she was born in June, christened in June, we
met in June, Johnny was born in June’; and, we should add, Mary was born
on a Tuesday in June, 1901 - the year, see below, of the premiere of
Chekhov’s Three Sisters).
It is Jack, spuriously complaining about his legs
to weasel off work, and forever wingeing (‘because of what Johnny did
for his country you expect his old father to work’) - who is the paycock
(self-satisfied peacock) Juno is saddled with: ‘Oh, he’ll come in when
he likes; struttin’ about the town like a paycock’; and again, ‘’I
killin’ meself workin’, an’ he sthruttin about from morning till night
like a paycock’. Ever the evader, Jack, moreover, tries to dodge
what is going on outside (IR Juno’s great soliloquy comes at the Ibsen/Strindberg-like end, when Johnny Boyle has been brutally fetched and summarily executed by the IRA - O’Casey’s text, for all its fame, seemed underwhelming, but Mary MacDonald’s delivery of it, played utterly straight, was weighty and spellbinding notwithstanding: ‘Maybe I didn’t feel sorry enough for Mrs.
Tancred when her poor son (the boy betrayed to Collins’ side for
whatever reason - fear?) was found as Johnny’s been found now - because
he was a Die-hard (pro-De Valera). Ah, why didn’t I remember that then
he wasn’t a Die-hard or a (Free-)Stater, but only a poor dead son . . .’
(a powerful explosion of grief came earlier from the bereaved mother,
played by Angie Collins); and then, ‘Sacred Heart o’Jesus, take away our
heart o’stone, and give us hearts o’ flesh! Take away this murdherin’
hate, an’ give us Thine own eternal love!’ Actually you feel Juno (despite ‘why didn’t I
remember...?’) has known all the time that tragedy would touch their
family in all its forms. Yet one feels that if Andrew Davies (almost a
local to the Loft) had been given this script to convert for television,
he would have fleshed out Juno herself considerably.
No peace for those in
tenements: things looked up - or shuddered - as often as the bossy,
smug, debt-collecting neighbour, Mrs. Maisie Madigan (Maddy Kerr, once
their Nora in The Doll’s House;
now, aptly, a little beefier) looked in: ‘I’ll pull some o’th’ gorgeous
feathers out o’ your tail!’); even though I found her moves a bit
pallid, something MacDonald might have picked up on. Jack, like many a
tenement-living, near-impoverished Paddy, lives by bravado, especially
when he foresees himself coming into a fortune; but his display is
empty. Now John Boyle owes money galore, and the bailiffs impend, when
the wheel of fortune predictably swings, after the supposed inheritance
turns out to be a chimaera. If Jack, ever out for a
jar, is utterly, blissfully unreliable, he cannot match his
fellow-imbiber, the hilarious but impossible ‘Joxer’ Daly. Phil
Reynolds, constantly stretching himself to invent unpredictable new
characterisations (several disparate roles on top of each other in
Under Milk Wood,
following the maudlin Hector in The
History Boys and spruce senior officer
of Privates),
excels himself as the hanger-on-cum-leader-on who you simply can’t get
rid of. ‘It’s a terrible thing to be tied to a woman that’s always
grousin’. I don’t know how you stick it.’) In a wonderfully mischievous, rubbery performance
- you never know where his hands are going next, or his neck or his
knees, his trousers forever crumpled and awry - twiddling with a fork or
arching to scratch some elusive part of his anatomy, shifting and
flexing his stance as if he’s had a bullet in the knee (as opposed to
‘in me kisser’): a sort of constant nervous tic such as only a practised
scene-stealer can perfect. This was
the
performance of the evening, histrionically trumpeting ‘Let me like a
soldier fall, My breast expanding to the ball’, a deliciously ludicrous
favourite from Vincent Wallace’s hit opera
Maritana,
also quoted by James Joyce). Could one take one’s eyes off this crazed person,
this blissfully bizarre creation? No. Joxer’s exits, and equally his
shambolic entries rearstage, were a hoot. His endless use of the word ‘darlin’
(‘a darlin, darlin’ man’; ‘a darlin’ funeral, a darlin funeral’; ‘a
darlin’ story’; ‘a darlin’ word’) has the gift of inserting comedy into
the most abrasive and awkward parts of O’Casey’s scenario. But ‘battling the
wind’, bursting into verse or song (then stumbling over the words) and
soaking up a large intake of Liffey Guinness, a sort of escapee f If anyone apart from the instinctive Juno knows the kind of messy end that may befall them all, as the distant, or sometimes nearer, patter of rifles is heard (setting up a tension not wholly dissimilar to the Malaysian jungle of Privates on Parade), it is sly old Joxer. Through him, too, we get this vexing feeling that
the greatest comic moment may mask the most unhappy truth. Reynolds’
Joxer lives for today because, though he is an almost Chekhovian
optimist-pessimist fusion, due to the world’s folly and foolery there
may be no tomorrow - whereas pal Jack exudes sorely misplaced optimism
in his desire for this windfall of wealth, so that he can deck out the
flat, if not his own regalia, like a peacock: all crimsons and velvets,
the plush, the showy and the fancy. Showy or shoddy, Jack has no belief
in an end: as owner of the world, why should he? Whence the optimism? Who brings him this, as it
turns out, duff news? The young lawyer, and the one who (if not his
superiors) has failed through inexperience to read the last will and
testament correctly: Mr. Bentham. Neither George Heynes
(as a gently suave, attentive - indeed solicitous - Bentham) nor Jeremy
Heynes (as ‘Needle’ Nugent) - despite an amiable affinity with, say, a
doddery Eric Sykes as servant Adam and a bibulous cleric, the first
straight out of Brian Rix, in Peter Hall’s late
As You Like It
- had much of a part to get their teeth into. The younger Heynes was
one of those impudent successes in
Privates On Parade; his father, one of
the Loft’s most celebrated long-term performers, a striking, guilt-laden
presence in their recent Three Sisters
and an unforgettable Narrator in Under
Milk Wood, is inevitably more
persuasive when he has a few hundred lines to deliver. By common consent one
of the most accomplished character actors to grace the Midlands stage in
the past three decades, a born Prospero, Jacques or Aguecheek, a Henry
IV or Buckingham, it was Heynes’ blinded, cliff-suicide-seeking
Gloucester that, when time was, brought such withering, aching tragedy
to the Loft’s King Lear;
just as a hair-raising Hamlet’s
Ghost lent the young hothead his fatal fire. As all this suggests, his
royals have to be seen to be believed: an Emperor Joseph to upstage
Jeffrey Jones in Amadeus;
a George III to match Nigel Hawthorne, guardian of pigs and ‘Mrs. King’,
in The Madness of George
III. Meanwhile George Heynes seems to be fast
emerging, with aspirations to turn professional as his father, to many’s
regrets, elected not to; and has a healthy share of those paternal
gifts. It’s difficult to see
him as a Prince Hal quite yet, but he would make a marvellous Ferdinand
(The Tempest;
here he is just as elegantly courting the Boyles’ daughter, Mary)
or Henry Tudor, or one
If the set was a
treasure, somehow more durable and convincing and less cardboard , more
subtly coloured than the rather bald
Plough and the Stars,
the ensemble’s first major set move or scene
change was effected by the entire cast - exchanging dour Act 1 (though
including a delightful stove) for the ludicrous ostentation of Act 2
(Richard Moore to thank for both) - in one of the most enjoyable
pièces-de-resistance
of its kind (together with the dissolution of the family meal table) I
can remember from a recent amateur staging: more like The Swan at
Stratford.
A treat to watch, it earned its own outburst
of hearty applause from the audience, and justifiably so. Three Sisters One has seen this
seasoned ensemble in play after play, and somehow everything gels: they
play off one another like a team of true professionals. A fair amount of
that was to be seen in their recent
Three Sisters (Tri Sestri),
a stagework (Moscow Arts Theatre, 1901) where one has to struggle
against the glorious wordiness of Chekhov to keep things moving. It was a treat to watch
the young Prozorovs (or Prozorovas), Emma Cooper (the gloomy Olga, most
obviously the General’s daughter - the old man dead exactly a year -
matronly and schoolmarmly, a close relation of Dorothy Tutin’s Varya in
The Cherry Orchard);
Masha (Rachel Adams) and Flora Garner (‘little’ Irina, 23 going on 18,
and longing hopelessly to make her mark in life) gracing the Loft’s
deliberately darkly lit stage, two of whom were making their Loft debut:
and what finds they were (Cooper was their Ophelia, and their young Jane
Eyre in the play based on the novel. With them came the prematurely
family head, the brother Andrei (Joe Riley), arguably the real
intellectual of the cast, There were numerous other pleasures in David
Fletcher’s production, laden with atmosphere, and sometimes laden with
personnel: Chekhov is quite happy to put nine, and later 11, then 13 on
a stage and let them jaw-jaw (at times when the men talk shop it feels
like a militarists’ club): or to run three or four meaty speeches in a
row, tail on tail. There was the widely
experienced Dave Crossfield (Richard III, Rudyard Kipling in
My Boy Jack,
Eliot in Tom and Viv,
Downey in A Few Good Men)
as the (as it happens, doomed) Baron, Tuzenbakh, a Chekhov stock
character (‘I’ve never done a stroke of work in my life’: you can just
hear Ronald Pickup saying it; but economic times are changing); and Mark
Crossley, like MacDonald an actor-director, as the inevitable
Schoolmaster (here, Masha’s slightly tedious, workhorse, yet omnipresent
husband, ever ready with snippets of Latin; I liked his performance
enormously). I wasn’t too sure of the dramatic value of Glynis
Fletcher’s brief, sad, folklike vocal interventions, but she sang each
of them exquisitely. One had the pleasure of seeing Anne Wood (Mrs.
Ogmore-Pritchard) recycled as the old nurse Anfisa: she has as many Loft
credits under her dramatic bra as anyone (Miss Marple, for instance);
gracelessly maltreated by Natasha (‘She’s a peasant, she ought to go
back to her village...’), you would think her, octogenarian or no,
perfectly capable of sticking up for herself. Actually she looked like a
Caravaggio, and very beautiful, too. Everyone yearns, as
usual, to go to, or go back to, Moscow (Irina above all:‘Moscow, Moscow,
Moscow’. Amid this we learn the pleasures of ‘krupotnik’ (krupnik)
vodka; watch a splendidly blocked family meal that looks more like one
of Prince Orlovsky’s banquets in
Fledermaus; the aching of Andrei for
Natalia (Catherine Hazell, another Loft debut); the inept lusting after
Irina of men of sundry ages, the gadding about of Marya (Masha) and her
beau, the senior officer Vershinin (Richard Marshall), the mayhem so
easily caused when the new wife starts setting new rules, and Olga’s
promotion, that at last releases her from the
materfamilias
or châtelaine
role, stolen from her by the pert, role-grabbing new arrival. Jeremy Heynes had the tangibly enjoyable, fun
role of Ivan Romanovich Chebutykin, the sexagenarian army doctor,
eccentric in an amiable way, once passionate ‘Then I was madly in love
with your mother - and of course she was married’), generous (genuinely,
not least to Irina) and later clumsy and pissed enough to give away, in
a half-line, the state of others’ extramarital dawdlings. As Masha has
it, a bit cruelly but perhaps aptly, ‘You’re sixty years old, but you
talk rot like a schoolboy, just to raise hell.’ Well, he has a twinkle,
more like. Here, slightly subdued,
was classic Heynes, perhaps obscured or inhibited sometimes by the
beautifully shifting but invariably dark lighting (despite turquoises,
and sombre yellows - at one point brilliantly pinpointing from above).
How one would have liked to see his lumbering, apologetic
Simeonov-Pischik, in the Loft’s The
Cherry Orchard - although only other
responsibilities can have deprived him of the made-to-fit role of Gaev.
But among the
youngsters, both Joe Riley (a convincing, and at times touching Andrey -
it is his and Natalia’s baby whom Fletcher wheels on as a kind of Act IV
prop: the infa
It is a play riddled,
not surprisingly, with Chekhovisms. One of his favourites is to
introduce a soliloquy quite unexpectedly into an otherwise
fast-interchange passage. Act 3 is enfolded by, first, a gem from
Chebutykin (‘They think I can treat all sorts of complaints; in truth I
know nothing, I’ve forgotten it all, I remember absolutely nothing...’),
followed by Russian self-pity (‘that woman I killed on Wednesday...It
was my fault she died’), and then philosophy disguised as twerpery
(‘Perhaps I don’t exist at all’) and lugubrious memories - ‘Shakespeare,
Voltaire, of course I hadn’t read a page of either, but I
looked as if
I’d read them; and all the others did the same’ ...; ‘everything seemed
nasty, disgusting and all twisted in my soul’: hence the inevitable - ‘I
went and got drunk’. But in a year he will get his pension: ‘and I shall
return and be quieter, more well-behaved’ (as usual in Chekhov, some
chance.) As if to put a curse on
the whole business, Chebutykin smashes the family’s (late mother’s)
clock: and as he spills the beans (about Natasha’s dalliance with Local
Council kapo
Protopopov), before a sneery exit singing,
Heynes opens the door to the second set-piece soliloquy, for Richard
Marshall (Vershinin), to whom Chekhov allots a double bite: a horrid
evocation of saving his daughters in nightgowns from a fire; and then,
‘In another two or three hundred years - what a wonderful life it will
be; it’s as if everyone (now) was asleep: we will be out of date;
generations will be born who will be
better than you.’ And, still in pure
Chekhov vein, which could actually be Chebutykin speaking, ‘I have a
great desire to philosophise tonight. I’m in the mood. Forgive me airing
my theories again! I have such a desire to
talk about the future.’
Chekhov’s well-to-do folk, in city or country, have the gift of
impotence: they do, feel they can do, nothing about the world around
them. Their role, in the main, is to be passive, and to cling to talk as
their only safety valve. Vershinin catches the 1890s (or 1900) spirit
perfectly: Chekhov depicts an era that is
dying, and in some cases knows it is
dying, on its feet. And the pessimism invades even Irina (delightful
Flora Garner), the child of the family: ‘I’ve had enough: I’m already 23
and my brain is frying up . . . I’m getting thin and old and ugly,
there’s no satisfaction, I don’t really understand why I haven’t killed
myself . . . ’. She has kept thinking they would go to Moscow and she
would find the right man there; but it isn’t going to happen. Sandwiched between
Uncle Vanya
(1900) and The Cherry Orchard
(1904), Tri
Sestri is a joyous cavalcade of
Chekhovian observation: the inevitable guilt and social content (‘We
should always help out the poor: it’s a duty’); the woman’s iron rule
(‘There should be order in this house. That’s how I like it.’ -
Catherine Hazell’s domineering Natasha, anticipating Varya three years
later); mildly offensive folklore: ‘She’s a witch’; whiffs of local
geography (‘You’ve never been to the Caucasus’); passion ‘I have a fire
raging in here’; morose resignation (‘You snatch up happiness whenever
you can’); pooh-poohing relations (‘If I lived in Moscow I wouldn’t care
what the weather was like’); frightening honesty: Paradox - Riley’s
Andrey: ‘I love Natasha, I really do, but sometimes she seems to me
completely vulgar’. Life in Chekhov is rarely ideal. And yet it could
still be today - hence his enduring power, as this finely conceived Loft
production proved. The human attempts of his characters to be ‘modern’
or anti-modern still hold good in today’s world. Back to Michael
Billington’s rating: ‘This is a play that transcends its time and
enlarges one’s human understanding.’ Moore’s sets paralleled the quality of the
hardworking cast - perfectly chosen metal garden seats, imaginative
plants and bushes, slat-like floor, small stepped adjustments in levels.
The costuming, devised by Wardrobe head Helen Brady, I thought fabulous,
with a huge beneficial effect on the staging’s impact. The translation
is David Fletcher’s own: line after line came off admirably. But perhaps
the enduring thing, apart from the cast’s speaking and delivery, was the
natural way in which all the characters seemed to move - and even dance.
It all rang true. That’s one of the qualities that lifts the Loft above
so many others. The Philanthropist,
directed by Sue Moore,
runs at the Loft Theatre from Wed 16 to Sat 26
March, and Moonlight and Magnolias
(set in Hollywood) from Sat 9 to Sat 16
April. The company will present Agatha Christie’s
And Then There Were None
from Wed 25 May to Sat 4 June. Completing the season is Stephen
Sondheim’s Musical Sweeney Todd
(Wed 13 to Sat 23 July).
www.loft-theatre.co.uk/shows Roderic Dunnett 02-16 |
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sides and the growing hostilities. 
rom
an Irish 
of
Ibsen’s or Strindberg’s younger leads. There is an earnestness and a
decency which might prove a hindrance, but, as here, can be played on as
an asset. He would make a delightful Lorenzo. But while a natural
Antipholus, Orlando or Lucentio (
nt
Bóbik, heir presumptive; this sweet infant stems from a generation that
will give Russia its white and red armies, and Communism) and newcomer
Jacob Meadows - as the somewhat crude and unappealing Solyony, whose
presumption, moody self-deception (he sees himself ‘as a sort of
Lermontov: I’ve even started writing poetry’), preoccupation with
corpses and