Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, March 27, 2007.

Directed by Darko Tresnjak and starring F. Murray Abraham.

There are times when theatre reasserts itself, making it once again an essential ingredient of life; this is the case with the RSC’s current production of Coriolanus - soon to be on tour - as it was with the renowned New York based Theatre For A New Audience’s production of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice, which stared the legendary F. Murray Abraham, which, along with Coriolanus at the main house, was the last show to be seen in the Swan, on the 30th March, before the long awaited rebuilding programme begins.

Set in the ‘near future’, which is tomorrow - which never comes of course - this smart, fast-paced, modern-dress production, which kicks off with a grey-suited, obviously wealthy, unsmiling, and seemingly confident merchant, Antonio (played superbly by Tom Nelis), who, for no apparent reason, suddenly starts to question himself - in the company of Salarino and Salanio - amidst the strange silence of a financial trading floor…

In sooth, I know not why I am so sad:
It wearies me; you say it wearies you;
But how I caught it, found it, or came by it,
What stuff ’tis made of, whereof it is born,
I am to learn…

And learn we did, learn that Shakespeare’s language, once decoded and made new by new thinking, with the application of that new thought used cleanly in this beautifully updated production, directed by Darko Tresnjak (and made even more appropriate by the American accents), that included the subtle use of mobile ‘phones - and the brilliant replacement of caskets by laptops - the, on the whole very young audience, became quickly engaged, and actually take notice of what was going on and being said. The play was, again, seemingly relevant.

Antonio’s worries and sadness were soon explained when we learned that he needs money, has over-stretched himself. We all do it, and if we say we don’t we are either very lucky, or lying. He’s in a spot, needs cash, and, well, in the world of this play, there’s only one man who can help him - Shylock.

Which is strange, because one would have thought that in the world presented to us (even in the near future) there would be banks out there demanding Antonio borrow from them (they demand it of me in this world most days), but no, Shylock is the only hope. And why? Because Antonio has become a bad risk, which is something you realise when you take another look at him, at the cut of his jib so to speak - he is self-indulgent and self-pitying; the world owes him a living, at least according to him.

He is also two-faced, and when Shylock makes his appearance, the cool, calculating, cliff-like, character that F. Murray Abraham’s has created knows this Antonio well, knows his kind better than his own daughter, and quickly reminds our sharp-suited Antonio that…

Signior Antonio, many a time and oft
In the Rialto you have rated me
About my moneys and my usances:
Still have I borne it with a patient shrug,
For sufferance is the badge of all our tribe.
You call me misbeliever, cut throat dog,
And spit upon my Jewish gaberdine,
And all for use of what is mine own.
Well then, it now appears you need my help:
Go to, then; you come to me, and you say
‘Shylock, we would have monies:’ you say
so;
You, that did void your rheum upon my beard
And foot me as you spurn a stranger cur
Over your threshold: monies is your suit.
What should I say to you? Should I not say
‘Hath a dog money? is it possible
A cur can lend three thousand ducats?’ Or
Shall I bend low and in a bondman’s key,
With bated breath and whispering humbleness,
Say this;
‘Fair sir, spit on me on Wednesday last;
You spurn’d me such a day; another time
You call’d me a dog; and for these courtesies
I’ll lend you this much moneys’ ?

In fairness Antonio responds by saying he may very well spit upon Shylock again, and kick him like a dog, but is it not best to lend money to an enemy, the easier to extract the penalty should the venture fail.

And it is in these early exchanges that Shakespeare sets out the complexities, the evils, the duplicities, and the simplicities, of anti-Semitism, of the future horrors perpetrated by the uniformed Antonios’ of this world (as they ‘borrowed’ the money, the spectacles, the shoes, the homes, the department stores, the factories, and the lives of Shylock’s tribe), encapsulated beautifully, and emotionally, in Abraham’s depth of characterisation, in his utter absorption of Shylock. The story of the Jewish people is in that one character, brought alive - for me - for the very first time in a production of this play. I believed every word, every gesture, every demand for his pound of flesh, for the courts to support him, not deny him. I wanted to see Antonio’s heart cut from his body.

In fact, such was the power of Abraham’s performance that the scenes where Portia is confronted by her suitors were both a welcome comic relief from the high tension, but also slightly out of place within such high octane drama. Nevertheless they were superbly well done, with the aforementioned use of laptops and screens, instead of caskets, a simple and effective idea, with Ezra Knight’s Prince of Morroco, and Marc Vietor’s Prince of Arragon, wonderful comic inventions.

Overall the cast of this production were some of the finest young American actors on the scene today, with Kate Forbes’ Portia something of a master class in how to create two characters (Shakespearean cross-dressing) that are wholly believable, although I felt this particular Portia would never have forgiven Saxon Palmer’s Bassanio quite so readily, if at all.

But, if we’re honest, this was F. Murray Abraham’s show, who had the audience spellbound (and the Swan is a very intimate space) every time he walked on stage, with his stillness utterly compelling, and working like a cinematic close-up so that all eyes were focused on him, on every eye movement and muscle twitch, with ears tuned to every syllable, word, and sentence. Such was his power that no one in the audience coughed or moved - in fact they, we, dared not move or cough because Abraham had somehow encompassed us within his Shylock’s demand for justice, within his Shylock’s demand that we listen and take note before evil is done again, that his Shylock’s tribe is not spat upon for using that which is their own.

It was another Oscar winning performance.

For more information about the work done by Theatre For A New Audience, click here.

And for information about the RSC go to their website.

A Review of the RSC Production of Pericles at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Wednesday, December 6th 2006

” Bill, you don’t have a play we could use do you?”

And Bill Shakespeare was a nice, helpful sort of bloke, and naturally said yes to the above question and started searching through his drawers, which were big - you’ve seen the pictures - and full of all sorts of stuff, including a dusty old script of Pericles, written by George Wilkins, based on his own novel The Painfull Adventures of Pericles, Prince of Tyre, which was itself based on Lawrence Twine’s Patterne of Painfull Adventures, inspired not only by an old French tale but John Gower’s Confessio Amantis of 1385, which is a damned convoluted way of writing a play, unless someone is offering you money, quick money, and you don’t have anything else ready. Pericles is a re-write job, and it shows.

The first two acts are obviously by another hand - one assumes Wilkins’ - as is most of act four, plus great chunks of the rest. The result is that this isn’t a very good play - how could it be - although certain parts are dark and challenging and full of coded language, with dialogue that flows like water, which is the mark of Shakespeare at his best, with the non-Shakespearean bits dire in the extreme. And that’s the reason it’s seldom produced these days (and there’s more than one of Shakespeare’s plays that should be burned ceremoniously), and wouldn’t have been now but for the Complete Plays Festival.

Which is good because it’s always interesting to see how a company like the RSC can create something out of such a mess; and they do try to make something out of this one with a vengeance.

But this production is little more than a thespian fest, with director Dominic Cooke throwing everything into the mix, which, at its worst, includes a lot of stuff from what can only be called the ‘I am a tree’ school of acting (especially in the pitifully weak storm scenes), with, at its best, some of the finest acting I’ve seen in a long time, most especially the work of Lucian Msamati as Pericles, whose second half scene with his long lost daughter Marina, played with dignity by Ony Uhiara, is a small piece of very moving theatre indeed, making clear that it’s some of Shakespeare’s finest writing. It’s worth seeing just for that one scene alone.

The setting of the play - at least in the first half - is a disease ridden and politically corrupt African state, which I guess was meant to give it some modern relevance (the new Bond film Casino Royale does it better) but instead adds even more confusion to a very confused state of affairs that actors Nigel Cooke as Lysimachus, and Richard Moore (his deep voice is a joy) as Simonides and Pander, do their best (and their best is exceptional) to unravel and clarify, which, in a good play - such as a The Winter’s Tale - only adds to the brilliance, but in a bad play, for all its fun and occasional sparks of magic, makes you wish they had something better to get their teeth into.

Pericles runs in rep with The Winter’s Tale until Saturday the 6th of January 2007.

To book tickets go to the RSC site.

A Review of the RSC Production at the Swan Theatre, Stratford-upon-Avon, Saturday 25th November 2006

When the RSC do something well they do it very well. When they do something badly they do it very badly, as was the case with the excruciating Hecuba a couple of years ago. But when they do something exceptional it remains in the memory for all time, as Greg Doran’s hilarious A Midsummer Night’s Dream has done, and most of the plays in the hard-hitting Gunpowder Series at the Swan last year. Dominic Cooke’s new production of The Winter’s Tale is exceptional.

And it’s exceptional at many levels, not least the acting, which is flawless, especially the interpretation of Shakespeare’s language, which must seem increasingly foreign to both speaker and listener alike in these text-sending abbreviated times, but can, when spoken well, be enlightening, mystical, humorous, and dark, very dark; and all of those elements apply to The Winter’s Tale. Try getting your chops around the following short speech by Leontes, and making sense of it, and giving the audience a chance - in the time it takes to count ten - to make sense of it…

No, in good earnest.
How sometimes nature will betray its folly,
Its tenderness, and make itself a pastime
To harder bosoms! Looking on the lines
Of my boy’s face, methoughts I did recoil
Twenty-three years, and saw myself un-
breech’d,
In my green velvet, my dagger muzzled,
Lest it should bite its master, and so prove,
As ornaments oft do, too dangerous:
How like, methought, I then was to this
kernel,
This squash, this gentleman. Mine honest
friend,
Will you take eggs for money?

Obviously, by reading and re-reading the above you are able, eventually, to get a sense of Shakespeare’s meaning, but it’s not easy. Put those lines in the mouth of a bad actor and they are gone forever, put them in the mouth of an actor with heart and intellect, or better still in the mouth of Anton Lesser (Leontes in this sparking production), an actor of huge heart and intellect, and you understand immediately how those words are the code to the inner paranoia that drives this King of Sicilia.

The man becomes the words, the words the man.

The Winter’s Tale was most likely written in 1610, with the London Globe performance of May 15th 1611, witnessed by a Dr Forman, who briefly describes the event in his unpublished manuscript, Booke of Plaies and Notes thereof - which is now locked away in some Oxford College gathering dust - where he criticises the fact that there are no five-measure lines of rhyme, but many double endings. And he’s right. The whole play is written in hard blank verse, or plain, steel-chiselled prose that pre-echoes Samuel Beckett in the way it can drive straight to the heart. It’s writing that takes no prisoners.

And like most of Shakespeare’s late plays The Winter’s Tale is too little performed these days because it’s often thought to be too difficult for modern players and audiences, which is double speak for saying it won’t attract good houses, as would, say, Romeo & Juliet at the one extreme, or Measure for Measure at the other. This RSC show puts the lie to that.

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