Martin McDonagh, the most politically incorrect Irish writer since John Millington Synge, or maybe Jonathan Swift, has written a play about a dead cat. In The Lieutenant of Inishmore a youngster in a Galway village finds the cat on the road, and brings its carcass to the father of the owner, the eponymous Lieutenant, who is off in Belfast, busily engaged in IRA-style activities. The scene shifts to a desolate Northern Ireland warehouse, where the Lieutenant is busily pulling out the toenails from a bloke hanging upside down from the ceiling. A terrorist's day is never done; shooting, torturing, and blowing people up makes a fellow weary and homesick. He longs to get back to his cat, Wee Thomas, which he loves more than life itself-certainly more than the life of his victims.
Since the father (who loathes his son, but has a healthy fear of him) and the lad are terrified that the Lieutenant will blame them for the cat's death, they desperately seek a substitute. Because the dead cat was unfortunately black, however, while the only live one they can find is an orange tabby, they try a quick dye job with shoe polish. Meanwhile, on the way home, the Lieutenant, also known as "Mad Padraic," encounters a teenaged girl named Mairead toting an air rifle. She adores the IRA so fervently that she has been training for membership by shooting out the eyes of cows. Love quickly blooms between these two kindred killers, but when Padraic gets home he immediately sees through the phony dye-no fool he-and blasts the substitute cat to smithereens. He is ready to bestow the same treatment on his father and the boy, when members of his terrorist organization show up. The INLA is a splinter group from the IRA (Padraic was too crazy for the latter), which is itself splintered. Padraic's mates killed the cat to lure Padraic home, in order to execute him.
McDonagh's loony play continues in this vein, growing even crazier, but no crazier than the terrorism he is satirizing. How refreshing to laugh at terrorists these days! One of the most appalling results of the World Trade Center attacks is the grudging admiration one hears for the hijackers. Sure, what they did was horrible, but they were brave, dedicated, and shrewd. ("Unlike us," is usually added in some form or other.). No, they were not, they were cowardly, cruel, and damned lucky. Terrorists are not even worthy enemies; they deserve not respect but ridicule.
The Lieutenant was produced last summer in London by the Royal Shakespeare Company, though the cast members were mostly Irish; Wilson Milam directed. Rumor had it that the RSC only agreed to do the play after much internal disagreement. I did not hear what the IRA thought of it.
The quality of productions at the restored Globe Theatre in London continues its sad decline. The theatre, still under its first Artistic Director, Mark Rylance, keeps on selling out most performances, but the tour buses lining up at the entrance are more and more disgorging the kind of audience that the Globe's detractors always predicted, full of schoolchildren and tourists rather than Shakespeare lovers or discerning theatregoers. Thursday they do the Tower of London, Friday the Houses of Parliament, Saturday the Globe. The first two attractions are at least comprehensible, but onstage at the Globe the theatrical neophytes will see confusing, concept-oriented productions that only those who know the texts beforehand will be able to follow. The schoolchildren and tourists will simply decide that Shakespeare is what they had always thought-old, obscure, and boring.
Only a decent King Lear, staged by visiting director Barry Kyle, salvaged the disastrous 2001 summer season. The 2002 season lacked even a Kyle. A tame Twelfth Night and a miserable Midsummer Night's Dream were the extent of the Shakespearean effort; there was also a new play by Peter Oswald, The Golden Ass, which I missed. Twelfth Night, directed by Tim Carroll, had an all-male cast, a concession to the original idea of doing one production per year in an Elizabethan style, but the staging was busy and the performances humorless, while the otherwise period costumes were monotonously cream, brown, and black. (When Feste maintained, "I wear not motley in my brain," I wanted to shout, "Nor on your body!") Mike Alfreds' Midsummer-I swear that I am not making this up-had the entire cast wearing pajamas. They lay around the stage on mattresses, as if the play were called Midsummer Night's Snooze. It was a typical Shakespearean "concept" production, with the concept drawn vaguely from the text (the word "dream" in the title), then belabored insufferably, at the expense of clarity or emotional efficacy. Jenny Tiramani, who also did the disastrous Cymbeline the year before, designed costumes for both shows; at the Globe, nothing succeeds like failure.
There is a saying among theatre people that there are actors' plays, directors' plays, and designers' plays. There is a tendency nowadays to try to turn the works of Shakespeare into the second or third of these, but Shakespeare, an actor himself writing long before the professions of stage director or designer even existed, was always thinking in terms of the first. Unless the modern director or designer focuses on boosting the work of the actor, productions will be at best intellectual curiosities, fit for writing up in avant-garde theatre magazines, but unwatchable in the theatre. Every actor has felt the magic that occurs when he sees himself in the mirror in a good costume, and feels it on his body, shaping his moves and gestures, bringing the character to life. An inappropriate costume is a hindrance, which may in the end make little difference, or which may kill the character in his cradle.
Thus, while it is common to see concept productions as anti-- playwright, more subtly they are also anti-actor. This may account for the generally wretched performances in the two productions, from actors whose track records are by and large good. Timothy Walker, for example, underplayed Malvolio to an extent that destroyed the humor in the role, while Michael Brown's Viola was stiff, gawky, and unattractive, a totally unconvincing female. (The Globe has had good drag actors in the past.) The mechanicals in Midsummer were slow and dull, indulging in endless, random byplay rather than the specific actions called for in the text. It is of course impossible to say whether they would have been better in a production whose costumes served the actors rather than the director's and designer's brainy concoctions, but when those costumes tell the audience nothing about a character's social status, occupation, age, or even sex, they are similarly incoherent for the actor. And, as I have patiently had to explain to costumers in shows I have directed, footwear is very important for the actor. It would be hard, for example, for someone playing Bottom (John Ramm, in this case) to preen and swagger, when showing off his hammy acting, if he is barefoot, as was the entire cast here.
A far better Shakespearean production in London last summer was Rose Rage, the best staging I have ever seen of the Henry VI plays. These have been done a lot in recent decades, after centuries of neglect, because, to everyone's surprise, they turn out to be highly theatrical. They were directed in this instance by Edward Halls son of the famous director Sir Peter Hall, who could learn a thing or two about directing from the young man. Hall fils manages to combine a respect for text with a flamboyant imagination and a focus, always, on the actors.
Like Twelfth Night at the Globe, Rose Rage had an all-male cast and figurative staging, but there the resemblance ended. Unlike the vapid Globe productions, Hall's work was vigorous, intense, and terrifying. It was set, quite bluntly, in an abattoir. Michael Pavelka's design used a raked stage with a constructivist metal setting, with wire mesh, ladders, and meat hooks. At the opening, men in white coats and facemasks were scrubbing the place down, while another man sharpened a cleaver. (Pavelka also designed the costumes.) Singing "Abide with Me," they removed the coats to put on uniforms, which were adaptations of World War I and World War II British military garb. Henry VI appeared, a small, wide-eyed young man, dressed in a costume that made him look like a messenger boy. In contrast to the dark, drab military uniforms, the Bishop of Winchester, standing over the catafalque of Henry V at stage center, wore an intense, blood-red robe.
I was going to add "of course" to the mention of the red robe, but then I shudder to think how they would have costumed the Bishop at the Globe-maybe as a cricket player. The problem at the Globe is not lack of realism-the Rose Rage costumes were anything but realistic-but lack of iconographic meaning. The Rose Rage set and costumes were a visual poetry that addressed us powerfully, while the Globe equivalents stammered and whimpered.
The visual iconography continued throughout the two-part production. All the violence (and these are very violent plays) was stylized, mimed to drumbeats or depicted purely symbolically. Beheadings were done by chopping red cabbages! Battles were presented by having the men in white coats chopping up real animal entrails. This may sound a bit obvious, but what else is war about, if not slaughter? I had been reading Stephen E. Ambrose's recent book on D-day, which draws on many oral histories; again and again, men speak of body parts floating in the sea, or a human head rolling down a street. The offal in Rose Rage was not just some bright directorial notion, but a potent reminder of the horrid reality of warfare.
Despite the strong visual elements in Rose Rage, Hall, like Trevor Nunn, showed himself to be an actors' as well as a designers' director. Shakespeare's early history plays were written before his association with Richard Burbage, which may be the reason they are more ensemble pieces than star vehicles like the great tragedies to come. Hall has been working with a regular male ensemble of actors-known as Propeller-- for five years, based at the Watermill West Berkshire Playhouse, but touring all over the UK and occasionally venturing abroad. The ensemble work shows. The cast worked beautifully together, with the looks between actors often telling more than their words. Not that they spoke poorly; their verse work was excellent, as good as at the Globe, where speech is the one good thing going for it. This reflects Hall's announced goal, to perform Shakespeare with a contemporary aesthetic while maintaining emphasis on the spoken word. Edward Hall is a young director to watch out for; I can only wish that the Globe is looking and listening.
Notes:
Ironically, Edward Hall was also the name of the Tudor chronicler of the War of the Roses, whom Shakespeare drew on for his history plays.
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