Royal Court reunions
Two plays on successive nights, The Vertical Hour by David Hare and The Sea by Edward Bond, have overlapping histories. Both were directed by Sam Mendes (the first in New York, the second at the National). And the Bond originated on the Royal Court stage where the Hare has just opened.
The Hare piece is cleanly, sparely presented in a way that the Bond was originally by Bill Gaskill thirty-five years ago. The Royal Court aesthetic, influenced greatly by the visit of the Berliner Ensemble to London in 1956, the same year as Look Back in Anger, is one of performance in the cause of meaning. Jonathan Kent is a highly intelligent director, but for once his antennae have been skewed in his production of The Sea at the Haymarket. It’s over-wrought and over-designed.
We shall see how the new Rose at Kingston works out later this week, but I loved Peter Hall’s phrase about the rake, that it “presents” the actor to the audience. That’s how the Court’s stage works, too. And of course the fact that the best shows there have minimal designs does not mean there is no design at all.
A bare brick wall, or a single chair, is a far bigger, and far more daring, design decision than a stage cluttered with video projections, scrims, sliding panels and chunks of slate rock.
Of course the more scenery there is the more some audiences think they are getting value for money, more bang for their buck. But it ain’t necessarily so. Trevor Nunn is a genius in many ways, but his tendency to swamp even musicals in too much clutter is sometimes disturbing. His productions of Aspects of Love and The Woman in White, for instance, were both over produced; the first is a chamber musical, the second a psychological mystery, yet both were done in a panic, a blur almost, of visual compensation.
But the demands of the market bring a lot of pressure to bear on directors. Perhaps Jonathan Kent likewise felt that the Haymarket audience had to be convinced they were seeing “a show” rather than a play. If so, I think he has miscalculated an audience’s tendency to ask, while watching a show, what happened to the play?
On the other hand, you can hardly imagine a “stripped down” version of Hairspray, but all the pink and scenic kerfuffle in Jack O’Brien’s production is so well done, it becomes the show as well as an endemic part of the performance. The costumes are brilliant. And the television studio scenes have a deftness that is beautiful to behold, rather like the equivalent scenes in a very different kind of theatre experience, Richard Eyre’e production of The Reporter by Nicholas Wright last year.
I guess it’s a trick of good design that the physical world of a play or a musical grows seamlessly into the performance, rather than a performance having to compete with a pre-arranged scenic setting. And I daresay, too, you never know in the theatre whether you’ve got that the right way round or not until the customers are sitting in their seats.
Hare today, Bond tomorrow. They are playwrights a world apart in temperament and theatrical instinct. But they do write, in the first place, words that are worth hearing. And only one of them has been really well served this week.