E’s please
Why do we go to the theatre? What are we seeking? Everyone, obviously, has his or her private answer. Many people are simply looking for what playwright John McGrath once called A Good Night Out. Others are devotees who approach theatre with the fervent enthusiasm of a stamp collector. In the end, I suspect, we are all looking for a combination of the three E’s: Entertainment, Enlightenment and Ecstasy.
Entertainment is itself a loaded, highly subjective word: some may find it in Coward, others in Corneille. But clearly we are all hungry for something that keeps us engaged from moment to moment. Enlightenment is possibly easier to define: it’s the notion that we gain some new experience or understanding from a piece of theatre. I got it recently from a double-bill of early Brecht plays at the Young Vic, in particular, The Jewish Wife, which told me exactly what it must have been like to have been living in, and escaping from, 1930s Berlin under the shadow of the Nazis.
Ecstasy is the big E: the one we are all really after and all too rarely find. For many people it comes in musicals which, at their best, offer a kind of transcendence. It can also come in plays. I remember years ago Bernard Levin saying, of a production of Love’s Labour’s Lost on a perfect summer night in Regent’s Park, that it offered a pleasurable experience of almost sexual intensity. As a practised ecstasy seeker, I would cite the last-act duel in Shaw’s Pygmalion between Higgins and Eliza which I once saw Alec McCowen and Diana Rigg play with a comic finesse I’ve rarely seen equalled.
Where, though, can you find Ecstasy today? I offer three recent experiences. The first was at the London Coliseum where I saw Philip Glass’ Satyagraha staged by Improbable’s Phelim McDermott and Julian Crouch. Yes, I know this is opera and we’re meant to be talking about theatre, but this was a show that made a bonfire of such distinctions and, in its evocation of the early South African years of Gandhi, both stimulated the senses and lifted the spirit.
Previous Improbable shows have left me impressed but unmoved. I came late to Shockheaded Peter and got tired of being told, in advance, how brilliant it was. Theatre of Blood at the National Theatre never quite persuaded me that killing off all the theatre critics was such a richly funny idea. But Satyagraha really did have touches of genius. At one point, the stage was filled with endless streams of newspaper to symbolise Gandhi’s reliance on a weekly publication, Indian Opinion. At another moment, yards of sticky tape unwound in constricting parallel lines to show how striking miners and their families were forced to leave their homes. Allied to the minimalist beauty of the music, the effect was overwhelming. In a word, ecstatic.
Sticky tape – this year’s must-have prop? – was also at the heart of another ecstatic experience: Tim Supple’s Indian production of A Midsummer Night’s Dream which I’ve now seen in Chennai, at Stratford’s Swan and at the Roundhouse. The tape was used by Puck to enmesh and entrap the quarrelling lovers. In a production of dazzling beauty and extraordinary sexiness, the great moment of ecstasy came when Archana Ramaswamy’s beautiful, raven-haired Titania encased herself in bolts of red silk that became a mixture of fairy bower, giant orchid and womb. The whole production was a hymn to the fathomless mystery of Shakespeare’s play. If you missed it at the Roundhouse, it is now on a national tour of smaller venues where, I suspect, its impact will be even greater.
My third ecstatic experience this year came with the revival of Marc Camoletti’s Boeing Boeing at the Comedy. Regular readers of this column will know that I am dotty about farce. It is, as critic Eric Bentley once said, “the quintessence of theatre” in its orchestrated panic and dependence on audience response. If played with the expertise as it is at the Comedy, it also lifts us all into seventh heaven. Above all, I shall never forget Mark Rylance’s look of shy embarrassment as compromising female undergarments are found in his overnight bag or his mixture of delight and astonishment as the delicious Tamzin Outhwaite tested her kissing-technique on his surprised lips.
Ecstasy is in the eye of the beholder, and others may find it in different places – in, perhaps, The Sound of Music or The Entertainer or in Cabaret. All I can say is that you recognise it not just by the tingle in your spine, but by a sense of transportation into a realm of pure delight. When people ask me why I still keep going as a critic after all these years, I can only reply that I’m still in search of Entertainment, Enlightenment and the kind of Ecstasy that the theatre uniquely provides.