|
|
|
|
|
|
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. |
|
|
Daniel Wilkinson as Gondarino, the Woman Hater. Pictures: Mark Ellis. The Woman HaterThe Other Place, Stratford*****
If we ever
thought of Beaumont and Fletcher as tag-ons to the Elizabethan-Jacobean
literature, mere adjuncts to Shakespeare’s final collaborative plays,
and shadows of the era’s other true greats - Marlowe and Jonson - then
the merest glance at
The Woman Hater,
written by Beaumont (mainly) in the aftermath (staged 1606) of James I’s
accession and one of Shakespeare’s most daunting tragicomedies,
Measure for Measure,
should scotch that idea. Brought to
life by that most gifted of ensembles, Edward’s Boys, spawned by
Shakespeare’s own school in Stratford-upon-Avon, this was bound to be a
performance to treasure: clever, articulate, fabulously well-spoken,
effortlessly inventive, riddled with brilliant and by no means obvious
touches: a fusion of the daring, the presumptuous, the self-righteous
and the hilarious. In Beaumont, the boys were as buoyant as ever. As one
scholar observed, it seems ‘outrageous that a playwright could ever
consider writing such a play for boy actors’. The play is like Jonson
writ large: a forceful, endlessly parody of all levels of society and
every kind of societal fad and quirk. ‘You never quite know what kind of
a play you are experiencing’, writes another academic observer, acutely. In an
Italy more Visconti than Medici, Edward’s Boys’ gloriously flamboyant
staging combines a Duke and his acolytes, fond of plumbing society’s
seedier corners; a glutton as poetic as he is ravenous for
. . . fish (the double
entendres, both elegant and smutty, begin here and abound); a virtuous
noble lady nearly undone by others’ perjury; a smart, slick,
aristocratic narrator whose outward flippancy is matched by a serious
sense of right and wrong; a gullible merchant with philosophic
aspirations; a whore with a heart; and a More to
the point, it was written for the Boys of Paul’s, a cathedral
choristers’ ensemble wound up scarcely a year later: the very idea seems
astonishing, when one considers the elegant flourishes, seductive wit,
daring and subtlety of its verse, and the rapid whirl of ideas and fluid
situations that change before our eyes like the twirl of a kaleidoscope.
Edward’s
Boys are a company like no other. The entire cast is made up of boys
from King Edward VI, Stratford. In Perry Mills’ production, here as
previously, one is aghast at the quality of their delivery, their
intelligence, their mastery of vast swathes of Jacobean utterance -
Francis Beaumont and his (to a degree) collaborator John Fletcher share
the big speeches around to notable effect, so that even the lesser parts
periodically have their say. One
wonders also at the brazen confidence of their acting; the sharpness of
their wit; the shrewd interpretation, stock-full of invention, scene
after scene; the deft, rapier-like, insolent verbal interchanges, the
lines sometimes galloping along, supercharged with the competence,
aptitude and confidence of professional performers; the sheer savvy and
nous
that the performers bring, making light of tricky, verbose exchanges;
and the obvious passion of this whole young cast - a proficient team if
ever there was one - to communicate, which they do with aplomb. Often seen
nowadays at Shakespeare’s Globe, Edward’s Boys’ productions, fiendishly
innovative, feel up to Mark Rylance standards: productions are in your
face, impudent, gloriously unpredictable, shamelessly skilled, cheeky,
presumptuous. Most of the main leads are retreads: seasoned King Edward
hacks, fiendishly abreast of the craft of acting; even where they waver,
or momentarily droop - something that rarely happens - the impact is
rarely less than first-class. It is a
boys’ play peopled by tarts, spies and informers, and Plautus-like
servants cannier than their masters. One might start with the last.
Those who were yesterday’s youngsters (often, but not always, in girls’
roles) have come on apace. Ritvick Nagar, Lazarillo’s (the glutton’s)
servant, is a natural scamp, who caught the eye last time and is now an
accomplished - if not scene-stealer, scene-enlivener. His range
of exasperated facial expressions outdid even those of his impossible,
wild-eyed master. Cleverly directed, so that his exits alone tended to
be an event, he looks to be a future (as we Even Joe
Pocknell’s affable narrator, the hip, easy-goes, not-quite-mafioso Count
Valore, suffered from that. He is, by miles, one of their best: from
such oodles of talent, one expects, and often gets, miracles. This is
one hell of a pro. But he needed to find more in, to squeeze more out,
of his casual master of ceremonies role.
He
was at his best when standing up for his increasingly beleaguered
sister. Pocknell does righteous anger well. He also holds a stage
effortlessly (though must never take that for granted), as he did in the
two previous productions, Lyly’s
Galatea and Ford’s
The Lady’s Trial,
where it was he that was maligned, and he who drew, with stunning,
poignant expertise, all our sympathy. To be
honest, we were hooked from the outset, by James Williams’ Prologue,
exquisitely delivered, each word a polished pearl, just like his
Epilogue and - an intriguing doubling - the old country ‘gentlewoman’
who is wheeled out, almost with ear-trumpet, further to muddy the ducal
waters. Like Nagar, these smaller roles delivered the goods: the two
rotten spies (‘Intelligencers’, with Soviet propensities), Nick Jones
and Alistair Campbell, were among the clearest speakers amid a team
where there was no weak link.
Charlie Waters has been promoted from hapless nymph to brazen courtesan,
and did so with such style, pirouetting and skedaddling on high heels
you’d think he’d walked or gavotted on them all his life (it must have
taken some practice). Already a provenly attractive verse-speaker, here
as Julia he delivered his lines (mostly audible, a near-cousin to
Oliver’s
Nancy) with such assurance that he seemed to me in both respects to have
come on several miles. But it is also Julia who gets one of those Feste-like
moments of pure beauty in the play: Fletcher’s verse ‘Come,
Sleep, and with thy sweet deceiving’,
the music for which was enchanting and Waters’ singing of it even more
so.
Another who has transformed into a shrewd, polished actor is Waters’
Galatea
inamorato, Pascal Vogiaridis, whose full potential I didn’t spot then,
but whose mature performance here as the gulled Shopkeeper or Mercer
lent colour and character to every scene he appeared in. He (almost
alone, bar perhaps Lazarillo)
offered a nice foreign accent: not Italian, scarcely Hispanic: was it
possibly tinged with Greek? Spectacles a-dangle, a bit of a book-worm,
Vogiaridis
gave us a classic Jonsonian dupe, and seemed to design and fit his
studious role perfectly. A treat to watch and a treat to listen to. If
this pair has come on apace, one who didn’t need to was Jack Hawkins, in
the lead female role. He has it all there. A delightful Aston
And when he burst into ‘Hey, mambo Italiano’ - perfect, as Rosemary Clooney’s hit (‘Just make-a with a big bambino / It’s like a vino...’) dates from 1954, the very year in which Edward’s Boys’ Director and onlie begetter Perry Mills sets this production - not only was Hawkins’ singing, including high up, quite wonderful, his dance was amazing. To
mix earnestness with sensuality, high spirits with tenderness, as he
did, is a pretty remarkable dramatic achievement. Quite simply, he’s got
it.
Hawkins’
Oriana takes it upon herself, more empathisingly than cruelly, to tease
the hopeless Gondarino: ‘You are no
image, though you be as hard as marble.’
Daniel Wilkinson’s evocation of the misogynistic Gondarino was a plum of
parody. The staring eyes, the screwed-up mouth, the looks of triumph
every time anything surfaces to support his distaste, all veiled a
rather sad, sympathetic obsessive. One ached
to cure him of his illness, his ague, for so it is portrayed. What I
missed - or what Beaumont doesn’t quite make plain - is an analysis of
his fretful ailment. We know a little of his history. But to sustain a
play, or a large part of it, Gondarino needs variety, and perhaps we
were a little short on that. Yet Wilkinson’s was a joyously entertaining
performance, packed with funny moments; side-splittingly squirming when
teased: a hopeless case. Oriana
aside, there were plenty of teasers around. Among those were Ben Clarke
and Dominic Howden, two young Edward’s Boys stalwarts.
Clarke could not
hope to match the pathos of his Hebe in
Galatea, the
late soliloquy so endlessly touching. But
he, both of them, have progressed to make a sound job as the Duke’s smug
and sleazy acolytes. A jump further up was Finlay Hatch’s Duke, who
seemed to slip easefully into the role, a believable and at times
domineering capo,
providing a rather matey twosome with Pocknell’s manipulative Count,
(‘It is so rare a thing to be honest
among you women’),
sharing their ‘cavalier’ approach
to the opposite sex: when these two were onstage, the ante got upped.
Never mind the spies: with this Sforza
offshoot, life felt like
one glorious plot. The evening was a feast of the wigmaker’s, or wig-fitter’s, art: from Brenda Leedham, Alistair Campbell (Intelligencer 2) and Adam Hardy we were treated to a Fellini-quality blonde in Waters’ Julia, outrageous splurges of colour or monochrome for the other women, and a miracle of hairstyling for Hawkins’ Oriana. Julia’s garb was pure cinema italiana, and Oriana’s likewise. But even Francissina (Felix Crabtree), grumpily mastering the tart’s art, or Abhi Gowdha, as the tetchy, long-suffering waiting-woman, if they observed their elders closely, may have something to offer the company anon.
Daniel Power’s Lazarillo all but walked away with the show. Half
crackers, a self-appointed gourmand, source of a large proportion of the
fishy jokes and risqué
double-entendres which
pepper the play. The
staring eyes suggested an escapee fro
Power also
sometimes played the same visual
card once too often. But no
matter: this was a delicious creation, blissfully outrageous,
wonderfully conceived, soaring away on
his own tangents, and ably
directed. But this
is Edward’s Boys. There may be school plays up and down the country, but
surely few come within yards of
the professionalism, the bravado
and the ingenuity of this unruly
posse of
superbly-drilled
boys. By any standards, adult or
youthful, this was a masterclass in how to act, how to speak and how to
present even in the near-total absence
of a set. In the case of
guitarist Maninder Dhami and one vocalist from the acting ensemble it
was also a demonstration of how to make striking and affecting music. Near the
end of this ‘bewildering tour-de-force
of tragi-comic,
self-parody writing’ the production built to an astonishing climax, or
rather a positive whirl of climaxes, as each plot and sub-plot seems to
grow to an almost Mozart-like
conclusion. This
was a dénouement
of real class, as befitted a staging of almost incessant originality. It
did not stop there. You
can almost always tell a star-quality
production by the calibre
of its curtain calls. Here, characters poured from every orifice in a
kind of whirling
pastiche of the highly effective street scene at the start, ending up in
a massive huddle. Edward’s boys don’t
stop acting. They just go on delivering till they drop.
Roderic Dunnett 03-16 Edward's Boys appear in France this month as part of the Year of Shakespeare festival organised by the University of Montpellier. 22nd March: Collège de l’Assomption, Montpellier 23rd March: Maison des chœurs, Montpellier 24th March: Sortie Ouest, Béziers Edward's Boys |
|
|
|
clutch of extras whose every utterance casts unexpected light on the
goings-on of their lords and masters.
ll
as current) asset. Not wholly, for all of the characters, from Daniel
Wilkinson’s woman-terrified (rather than woman-hating) lead tended
slightly to over-repeat certain smirks or grimaces, stances and
gestures. So there was both range and limitation, the latter of which
could run the risk of making characters fractionally cardboard; that
danger was mercifully avoided.
Villa-clad
miladdo in 