Revenger’s is sweet
Tonight’s opening of The Revenger’s Tragedy at the National is a reminder of the spontaneous combustion that often leads to the the most exciting theatre.
This is the play that in 1966 made Trevor Nunn’s reputation overnight and convinced Peter Hall that the young Turk should succeed him as head of the RSC.
In fact, Peter Hall is alleged to have said at the Stratford dress rehearsal that Nunn’s production marked the most exciting directorial debut in the town since his own.
And it was virtually a stop gap at the end of depressing season. It was Nunn’s first solo RSC production, mounted on a minimal budget on the set being used for David Warner’s Hamlet with only one well known actor in the leading roles, Ian Richardson.
The rest of the cast, though, included Alan Howard, who was new to the company that season, as well as John Kane, Norman Rodway and Patrick Stewart, all of whom went on to build impressive RSC careers.
By the time I saw Nunn’s production in one of its returns to the repertoire, Helen Mirren was also in the cast. With the emergence of Janet Suzman and Michael Williams, here was the nucleus of the RSC over the next decade, and Nunn’s star was set.
The NT bills Melly Still’s revival as written by Thomas Middleton. Nunn’s was written by Cyril Tourneur, and so was Di Trevis’s wonderful 1987 version for the RSC starring Antony Sher. The academics have now decided that Middleton, not Tourneur, was the principle author, and who are we to argue?
Curiously enough, the first RSC show that the critics defined as setting its ensemble style was another stop-gap production, The Comedy of Errors directed by Clifford Williams in 1962. Between Comedy and Revenger’s, there was of course the mighty Peter Hall and John Barton Wars of the Roses (predecessor to Michael Boyd’s History Cycle) and the Warner Hamlet: the RSC was fully launched!
But not without internal controversy. According to Sally Beauman’s history of the RSC, John Barton wasn’t too keen on the stylization of Nunn’s production of Revenger’s and Christopher Morley’s design.
The new Berliner Ensemble naturalism of the company was challenged by what became known as the “moss on the tomb” scandal.
If a messenger arrived wearing boots, there had to be mud on them. But here was a production — famously arrayed in black and silver Renaissance costumes, with a self-conscious choreography of death — and there was a tomb. Why, John Barton wanted to know, was there no moss on the tomb?
The row raged on for three days, but Nunn had his way and the show opened to ecstatic reviews. The play was completely unknown. And within a year, Hall had asked Nunn to succeed him. I wonder what the consequences of tonight’s revival will be?
