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ARTIKEL
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18.12.2002
Modern life is rubbish
by Michael Billington
The Guardian
In many ways, 2002 was a good year for the theatre. Standards of acting, directing, design and lighting were astonishingly high. New plays poured out in abundance. And the effects of the government's extra £25m in funding began to be felt, not least in more adventurous regional programming. Yet there was something missing: a strange dearth of plays that grappled with public issues or portrayed what it is like to live in Britain today.
Of course, there were exceptions. Carlo Gebler's 10 Rounds (at the Tricycle in London), which I undervalued on the night, was a dazzling attempt to apply Arthur Schnitzler's La Ronde to contemporary Belfast. Michael Wynne's The People Are Friendly (Royal Court) used domestic comedy to explore the shift from manufacturing to service industries. Roy Williams's Sing Yer Heart Out for the Lads, in the National Theatre's Transformation season, dealt openly with racism. Tony Kushner's prophetic Homebody/ Kabul arrived at the Young Vic.
But it says a lot about British theatre that the most socialist play in London this month is George Bernard Shaw's Mrs Warren's Profession, written in 1894. And the only work I saw all year that offered a genuinely comprehensive world view, embracing global capitalism and militant Islam, was Hyperlynx, written by John McGrath, who, sadly, died in January.
Does it matter? Isn't there some territory that belongs to journalism and some to theatre? The issue was seriously debated at a series of writers' seminars on political theatre at the Royal Court. I spoke at one of them and was the first to concede that it was easier to write political theatre in the late 1960s and early 1970s, when Britain was ablaze with ideological conflict. But I also argued that art and journalism are not incompatible, and that writers need to go out with pen and notebook to explore what is happening in society. Caryl Churchill did it for Max Stafford-Clark's Royal Court and produced Serious Money. David Hare did it for Richard Eyre's National Theatre and wrote a remarkable trilogy. David Edgar has done it all his life and is now writing two state-of-America plays in Oregon. But who is doing it in Britain today?
The most homeworked play of the year was obviously Tom Stoppard's The Coast of Utopia at the National. Whatever its faults, and they were many, at least there was the exhilarating spectacle of the stage being used to explore ideas through the clashing visions of 19th-century Russian revolutionaries.
The year also yielded a number of good domestic plays. My own favourite was Peter Gill's The York Realist, which used a gay love affair in 1960s rural Yorkshire to explore the stranglehold of class and origins on English life. The scene where a farm labourer's family return from a trip to the York Mysteries to shyly reveal their embarrassed enthusiasm was masterly. I also had a great time at Richard Cameron's The Glee Club, also set in 1960s Yorkshire, which looked at the dissolution of a group of colliery singers. Both shows transferred, from the Royal Court and the Bush respectively, to the West End. Lacking star names, they died a quick death.
This raises the vexed question of whether our theatre has become absurdly dependent on Hollywood star power, and here I find myself in something of a bind. I increasingly question the Americanisation of our culture and our slavish acceptance of Broadway/Hollywood values. Bad sight of the year was the automatic standing ovation for Madonna, who seemed to have undergone a charisma bypass, in Up for Grabs at the Wyndham. But, while I wish our theatre looked more to Europe and less to the US, it seems stupid to dismiss either plays or players purely because of their origin. Gillian Anderson in Michael Weller's What the Night Is For was savagely slaughtered simply because she was a star on American TV. Glenn Close's radical take on Blanche Dubois in A Streetcar Named Desire also came in for a lot of abuse. But then critics have set ideas on how certain roles should be played: witness the current attacks on Chiwetel Ejiofor in The Vortex for daring to play Nicky Lancaster as a confused hetero rather than a closet gay.
What we need, in theatre as in life, is less reliance on stock responses. No reference to the Royal Shakespeare Company, for instance, is currently complete without the epithet "crisis-ridden". Equally, the National is seen to be riding high because it has just recorded a modest £99,000 surplus. Do we now judge our national companies purely by their bank balances? I was extremely critical of Adrian Noble's triple whammy - restructuring the company, quitting the Barbican and rebuilding Stratford's main house - which undeniably left the RSC in a mess. The work on stage, however, has been remarkably robust. Michael Boyd's Roundhouse Tempest was brilliant. Gregory Doran's season of Jacobethan rarities - first seen at the Swan, now at the Gielgud - restored the company idea. And an American critic who saw the imported trio of new plays by Peter Whelan, David Edgar and Martin McDonagh in London asked me, in genuine bewilderment, why the RSC always got such a bad press.
On the other hand, no one seems to have questioned, or even noticed, Trevor Nunn's startling shift of policy at the National. In some respects, the theatre has had a good year: the Stoppard trilogy, Nicholas Wright's excellent Vincent in Brixton (with beautiful performances from Clare Higgins and Jochum ten Haaf), and the mixed-bag Transformation season have created a sense of liveliness. But the ensemble idea has been abandoned in favour of project-led companies, as for the Stoppards and the current Anything Goes-Love's Labour's Lost pairing. This is exactly what Adrian Noble was proposing for the RSC. Far more seriously, repertoire has been ditched in favour of straight runs, even for new plays in the Cottesloe. We have a phrase for this: commercial theatre. But no one seems to mind that Nunn has jettisoned one of the National's founding principles, which for a quarter of a century sustained the directorships of Laurence Olivier, Peter Hall and Richard Eyre.
But, for all these caveats, it has not been a bad year. Best of all has been the sense of renewed purpose in the regions. Michael Grandage has been doing fine work at the Sheffield Crucible: I especially admired the Kenneth Branagh Richard III and an illuminating Peter Gill season in the Studio. Manchester's Royal Exchange offered a stunning version of Beaumarchais's The Marriage of Figaro from Helena Kaut-Howson. And the itinerant Oxford Stage Company turned up in Salisbury with a stylish revival of Terrence Rattigan's virtually unknown After the Dance. Glancing through the brochures for next year from Leeds, Bristol, Nottingham and points north and south, I also get the sense that an old Thatcherite adage is being disproved: that you actually can solve a problem by throwing money at it.
In London, it is the smaller houses that have most impressed. At the Orange Tree in Richmond, Sam Walters consistently comes up with a programme worthy of a pocket-sized National Theatre. Lately he has given us three unjustly neglected classics in Thomas Holcroft's The Road to Ruin, John Whiting's Saint's Day and WS Gilbert's Engaged. David Lan at the Young Vic and Nick Kent at the Tricycle have also turned their theatres into genuinely internationalist, inquiring houses. Kent's recent revival of The Price, almost certainly transferring to the West End, made me wonder if the work wasn't Arthur Miller's best play.
But one can't let the year disappear without paying final tribute to Sam Mendes's 10-year tenure at the Donmar. I sometimes wished he had done more new British plays and been less New York-oriented. But his departing productions of Uncle Vanya and, more particularly, Twelfth Night, were for me among the theatrical experiences of a lifetime. In Twelfth Night, Mendes cracked the secret of Shakespearean comedy: the fact that the plays exist in a dual world of dream and reality. After his crumpled, spaniel-eyed Vanya, Simon Russell Beale gave us a sad, proud Malvolio locked in a world of private fantasy. Helen McCrory's picture-framed Olivia became an unattainable erotic ideal counterpointed by the slightly giggly reality. And the sight of Paul Jesson's Sir Toby and David Bradley's Aguecheek quietly farting in the twilight after a heavy evening's drinking was absurdly comic and strangely touching.
Having begun by urging dramatists towards contemporary reportage, I end with the sound of a classic report. But that sums up as well as anything British theatre's pressing need to engage with the smell of reality.
copyright: The Guardian
10.12.2002
Speaking against war
A group of celebrities will issue a statement today protesting an attack against Iraq.
By Hilary E. MacGregor
Times Staff Writer
More than 100 Hollywood actors, producers and directors will out themselves today as antiwar activists. Mike Farrell, Alfre Woodard, Ed Begley Jr., Tony Shalhoub and others will hold a news conference at 10 a.m. at Les Deux Cafes in Hollywood to issue a statement protesting the costs and risks of going to war with Iraq. Calling themselves Artists United to Win Without War, the celebrity signatories to the statement range from Gillian Anderson and Kim Basinger to Matt Damon, Laurence Fishburne and Michael Stipe.
Denouncing war talk in Washington "alarming and unnecessary," the simple, five-paragraph declaration urges the disarming of Iraq through "legal diplomatic means."
"We are patriotic Americans who share the belief that Saddam Hussein cannot be allowed to possess weapons of mass destruction. We support rigorous U.N. weapons inspections to assure Iraq's effective disarmament," the statement reads. "However, a preemptive military invasion of Iraq will harm American national interests. Such a war will increase human suffering, arouse animosity toward our country, increase the likelihood of terrorist attacks, damage the economy, and undermine our moral standing in the world."
The glitterati in the group will fill the talk shows and entertainment magazines soon enough. This is the story of how two friends armed with nothing but their computers and e-mail accounts quietly rounded up some of the biggest names in Hollywood for the antiwar effort.
Last summer, Robert Greenwald (director of "The Burning Bed" and director-producer of the upcoming "My Dark Places") started talking to his buddy, actor-activist Farrell (of "MASH" and "Providence").
"We owe it all to Andrew Card," recalls Greenwald. "It seems like a lifetime ago now, but he said, if you have a product, you don't release it in the summer."
Greenwald recalls thinking the comment by the White House chief of staff and former vice president of General Motors -- explaining why the Bush administration would wait until September to make its case for war in Iraq -- was outrageous. "I was talking to Mike Farrell, saying, 'Did he really say that?' Here were people who were using the language of the world we function in, only they were selling things that were life and death decisions for an enormous number of people."
On Oct. 2, Farrell and Greenwald set up a teach-in at the home of Stanley Sheinbaum, the Democratic fund-raiser. Speakers included Scott Ritter, the former U.N. weapons inspector turned peacenik, and David Cortright, a professor in the peace studies department at Notre Dame who also runs the Fourth Freedom Forum, a private research group that advocates the reduction and elimination of nuclear weapons. More than 50 figures from politics and entertainment attended the gathering, including Warren Beatty and wife Annette Bening, Tom Hayden and Gary Hart.
It was a turning point.
"We began to discern the extraordinary amount of concern out there -- and confusion," Farrell says. "We didn't pull that meeting together to start another organization. But we realized something had to be done."
In the weeks following, Greenwald found himself growing more alarmed.
"I was watching the news more and more, and seeing one message," he says. "Even before the elections, it was being brilliantly done by the administration. There were no other voices out there. The argument was about when you bomb them, not if you bomb them. It was about when you go to war, not if you go to war. The underlying assumptions were not being questioned."
Greenwald and Farrell realized that there are people with high profiles and strong opinions who could speak out -- "and they happen to be actors and actresses," says Greenwald.
On the weekend of Nov. 15, Cortright and a group that called itself the Win Without War coalition met in upstate New York. There they crafted the wording that would become the basis for the Hollywood statement.
Greenwald and Farrell began circulating the declaration by e-mail. They sent it to friends, business associates, acquaintances. It was a low-key campaign, but steady. There were no political advisors, no formal announcements, no fund-raisers. Word spread quietly, over dinner tables, at preschool pickups, on movie sets.
Some celebrities declined to sign, saying they preferred to wait and see. But many leapt on board, telling Greenwald and Farrell they were thankful finally to have an outlet to express both their patriotism and their antiwar views.
"Tea and I would love to sign the letter," David Duchovny replied in an e-mail. "Tea was just saying at dinner -- 'We're going to be at war soon and it's like we're just blindly accepting the drift ... ' "
"I feel the current administration and the mainstream media are bullying the American public into blindly supporting acts of aggression," wrote Janeane Garofalo before signing on.
At best, Greenwald says, they hoped to get 15 to 20 stars to sign. Instead, signatures of support continued to pour in over the weekend and into Monday.
The statement has also been signed by some impressively titled non-Hollywood names, such as Edward Peck, the former U.S. ambassador to Iraq; retired U.S. Navy Rear Adm. Eugene J. Carroll; and former ambassador and arms control negotiator Jonathan Dean.
The Los Angeles news conference will be followed by the release of a similar statement by the Win Without War coalition Wednesday in Washington, D.C.
The coalition worked hand-in-hand with the Hollywood group in drafting its statement and orchestrating its news conference. The Washington coalition is made up of 15 organizations, including the National Council of Churches, the NAACP, the National Organization for Women and MoveOn.
Artists United to Win Without War also plans to run a full-page ad in the national edition of the New York Times. The statement will then be forwarded to President Bush.
"There was an environment created after 9/11 where somehow it wasn't patriotic to speak out," says Greenwald. "I think there have been an increasing number of voices raised against war, but they have not done an effective job of reaching TV, radio and the print media.
"This is a way to get attention."
copyright: calendarlive.com
06.12.2002
The first night of 'What the Night is For'
from London Evening Standard magazine.
What is the night for? You may well ask. In theatreland there's only one answer: for another American to hit our stage. This time round it's Gillian Anderson, aka Agent Dana Scully, who madegeek chic. Now she's after the title of smouldereer of the year, all eye-popping black dress and silk pyjamas in her X-rated role as the adulterous Melinda. Among those spotted enjoying the show were Michael Frayn, Sebastian Faulks and Felicity Kendal. The performance was followed by drinks at the Radisson's Dial restaurant and the sight of Ms Anderson in yet another daring black dress.
05.12.2002
Anderson - Striking stage presence!
from The Stage
Tim Hatley's revolving room setting cleverly defines the four sustained scenes as we move from the dining table to their shared bed and then to possible departure. John Caird's pacy premiere production reveals the play as a superb vehicle for mature stage stars, none more attractive or more perfectly matched than British theatre luminary Roger Allam and American screen actress Gillian Anderson. Both are at the peak of their performing powers, he warmly masculine and resonant, she mercurial and larky, together generating a powerful sexual chemistry.
Anderson, best known here as Agent Scully of The X-Files, comes with a Broadway pedigree, striking stage presence, expressive hand gestures - if too often masking her features during their first, tentative scene - and an ability to deliver one-liners with a wry edge that defines both her kooky character and the moment.
Allam's assured performance is one of the most watchable things he has done since leaving the RSC and this delightful and engaging stage partnership should surely launch him as a bankable West End star.
28.11.2002
Ex-files play fails to impress
by Keily Oakes (BBC News Online)
X-Files actress Gillian Anderson's West End debut has been much-anticipated after the end of the long-running cult TV series.
The list of Hollywood actors and actresses crossing the pond to appear in the West End smacks of attempting to add credibility to their CV - but Gillian Anderson hardly gives a career-defining performance on her debut.
What the Night is For is a two-hander revolving around a woman and a man, Lindy and Adam, who meet up 11 years after their extra-marital affair ended.
Here starts a lengthy and at times painfully clichéd talk about the merits of their affair and whether they can pick up where they left off.
The action takes place in Lindy's hotel room, on the pretence she is waiting for a telephone call, so already there is little doubt they will fall into bed before the evening is through.
Rendezvous
Lindy is a special needs teacher and mother of two, whose husband is a well-connected, yet failed, businessman running for senate. Adam is a successful architect.
The pair's illicit affair ended when Lindy and her family relocated, without a word to Adam.
Anderson plays the first half with an affected embarrassment at their rendezvous, constantly touching her face and staring downwards in an irritating girlish manner.
Lindy's mental instability soon emerges
The very English actor Roger Allam plays his Adam as a middle-aged New Yorker seeking affection, something his hard-bitten wife cannot give.
But there is little chemistry between Allam and Anderson, and their kiss, which is meant to reignite the passion, was as uncomfortable to watch as it looked for them to perform.
The audience is expected to be convinced Anderson is a middle-aged mother-of-two, past her prime.
Yet it was just a few years ago she was voted the sexiest female in a men's magazine, and at 34 she is simply stunning.
Closure
Hence the line where she tells Adam he would not want to see her in a bathing suit rings rather hollow.
The first half is slow as the pair get re-acquainted but the second half becomes more animated.
Lindy tells Adam that she orchestrated their meeting as one final fling to give them "closure", while Adam is intent on having her as his bit on the side.
But Lindy is not as mentally stable as she makes out and in the throes of a bi-polar attack she admits she wants a new husband.
Anderson's decent into manic depression is fairly convincing as she spectacularly flies off the handle, but Allam's reaction is rather wooden considering he does not yet know what is wrong with his mistress.
What follows is much hand-wringing and self-pitying nonsense which makes it difficult to feel any warmth for the characters.
A tale of love and deceit is hardly a new idea and Anderson's trumpeted arrival in the West End is less than spectacular.
copyright: BBC News Online
28.11.2002
What's on Stage Review
by Mark Shenton
Here's a possibly supernatural mystery for Mulder to investigate: how did his partner Scully get involved in What the Night Is For? Since the occasion marks the London stage debut of Gillian Anderson, the latest American star to be appearing in the West End, Mulder might also enquire what it is about lousy two-handers that seems to draw star actors like moths to flames, where instead of flying they tend to get their acting wings severely singed?
The last few years have produced any number of examples, from Donald Sutherland in Enigmatic Variations and David Warner in A Feast of Snails to the Comedy Theatre's most recent tenant, On an Average Day, with Woody Harrelson and Kyle MacLachlan. Now we have another less than average play at the Comedy, where laughter is hardly on the menu as it earnestly seeks to replay the re-ignited passion of two former flames.
Eleven years ago, Melinda Metz (Anderson) and Adam Penzius (Roger Allam) - she an aspiring poet (now a teacher), he a budding architect (now a successful one) - met in New York and had a passionate affair. But she was, and still is, unhappily married to Hugo, heir to a bicycle business and now running for the Senate; while he was, and still is, married to Jan.
Now, as they meet again in an anonymous hotel room - number 410, anonymously rendered on a revolving platform by designer Tim Hatley whose usual flair for visual invention seems to have deserted him - playwright Michael Weller chronicles a long, dark night of the soul for them, and creates an even longer one for us.
There's nothing much likeable or remotely compelling about these two self-obsessed creatures, or the everyday predicament they find themselves in: trying to sort out the unfinished business between them as they sport and parry, howl and whimper about what might have been, and what could still be.
Both Anderson and Allam are good sports in seeking to keep our attention with these two tedious people and their selfish concerns. As she registers a range of emotions from doleful deer and petulant pup to mad monkey, Anderson has poise and a certain polish, but in the end cannot save a character who can barely save herself. Allam is solid support, but is dullish where he should be dashing.
Weller has the temerity in a programme feature to compare his very minor league work to David Hare's far more bracing play about former lovers, Skylight, and says he was struck by "how differently British people would deal with an encounter after years apart". Whereas Hare's characters "were talking very much about circumstance rather than the movements of their hearts," he goes on that he "wanted to write a play which would be much more focussed on the emotions involved".
But it's because Hare provided a wider context to his characters' lives that addressed their place in the world, not just this room, that his play lived - whereas this one, with its morbid introspection, barely comes to life.
copyright: whatsonstage.com
28.11.2002
What the Night is for
by Michael Billington
Back in the 1970s Michael Weller was a hippie Boswell charting American alternative culture in plays such as Cancer and Fishing. Now he is back with this two-hander about middle-aged emotional angst, but has lost none of his gift for uncomfortable home truths.
Weller presents a familiar situation: two ex-lovers meet up after an 11-year gap for a nerve-jangling reunion. Lindy, who abandoned the affair for the sake of her marriage to a dull midwest businessman, plays the anxious hostess over a hotel room dinner. Adam, her equally fretful guest, is now a thriving, married New York architect supposedly on a professional trip to the midwest. As the two fence awkwardly over dinner, the question is not whether they will hop into bed: that much you can almost guarantee. It is whether they can rekindle the old spark and make a bonfire of their existing, unfulfilled lives.
Obviously we have been here before: this is Private Lives for the ravaged American middle classes. There are also times when you get impatient with the couple's endless self-obsession. But Weller's great virtue is his unflinching honesty and ability to show how two people who have a desperate need for each other can still entertain different dreams. Adam craves an emotional intimacy he cannot find in a functional marriage he is loath to destroy: Lindy, who turns out to be a pill-popping manic depressive, is the one who really wants to burn her boats. Out of this intractable dilemma Weller weaves a play both painfully honest and unexpectedly funny.
It would not work half as well if it were not superbly played. Gillian Anderson happily swaps Agent Scully for a role that requires her to do an emotional striptease; and what she does, with uncommon skill, is peel off Lindy's protective layers. Starting off as a charcoal-suited hostess, she gradually reveals a woman living on the edge and yearning for someone who can cope with her instability. What Anderson excellently conveys is the sharp wit that often accompanies flakiness. When her lover tells her he wants a woman he can be close to, she snaps back: "Am I a finalist, or was this the first cut?"
She is strongly partnered by Roger Allam, who catches precisely Adam's mixture of cool calculation and desperate love: even if the character wants, so to speak, to have it both ways, Allam implies he still has an obdurate decency.
John Caird directs with a needle-sharp awareness of the couple's mixture of attack and evasion. Tim Hatley's set has all the bleak luxury of a midwest hotel room. The real surprise is to find on a West End stage a play that tells the truth not just about sex but about the miasmic uncertainties of infidelity.
copyright: The Guardian
28.11.2002
Truth is, this ex-file has no mystery
from Daily Mirror
by Kevin O'Sullivan
RELATIONSHIPS. The truth is out there. But I am not sure there is anything to be learned from this les than profound play about a man and a woman attempting to rekindle their extramarital affair.
X-files Gillian Anderson fresh in from Hollywood, looks a million dollars. And at the onset I was thinking: I wouldnt mind a quick illicit romance with her.
But as Michael Wellers very American and rather one-track drama evolved, Gillians character Melinda Metz fell resoundingly into the dont touch with a barge pole category.
Both Ms. Anderson and her extremely able co-star Roger Allam delivered first-class performances in what I must sadly chassifly as a second-rate piece.
After more than two hours of interminable shall we? shall we? I was past caring.
And when Mrs. Metz established herself as a pill-popping, chemically-challenged poetry writing lunatic, if I was her lover Adam Pentius I would have run a mile.
OK, so I am sounding a bit shallow. But, I am not sure what is to be gained or learned from this kind of realtionsjhip. Affairs happen. Sometimes the participants leave their families, sometimes they dont.
And the truth is - or- there isnt any truth out there. So in the end there was precious little to be discovered from What The Night Is For.
The ideas is that 11 years after their comparatively useful extramarital dailiance ends Melinda and Adam are convinced that they were made for each other and they are living a lie with the wrong partners.
They are both on the verge of quitting their families for disgrace, guilt and all important togetherness.
Its a type of Friends Reunited thing where former sweethearts meet to see if the flame still burns. But throughout the drawn out proiceedings in Melindas Mid-West hotel room we get not a single reason for their alleged fatal attraction.
Good performances, nice set, well directed. But the material was just too perfunctory.
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