Category: Spoken Theatre

Circa Theatre presents:
Winding Up , written by Sir Roger Hall
and directed by Susan Wilson

Featuring Ginette McDonald (Gen) and  Peter Hayden (Barry)

Set and AV Design – Lisa Maule
Lighting – Marcus McShane
Costumes – Sheila Horton
Music and Soundscape – Michael Nicholas Williams
Technical Operator – Niamh Campbell-Ward
Stage/Production Manager – Deb McGuire

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Sunday, 1^st June, 2021 (until 28^th August)

Sir Roger Hall’s “Winding Up”, an exploration of love weathering age and untoward circumstance, has finally made the stage at Circa Theatre, over a year after being first scheduled and then waylaid by Covid-19 and Lockdown. This afternoon its performance by Ginette McDonald and Peter Hayden as the play’s two characters, Gen and Barry, flickered all about to begin with, gradually warmed, then connected with, and finished up conflagrating an appreciative audience.

Its unfolding all somehow reminded me of pianist Artur Rubinstein’s account of first going to hear Russian classical superstar Sviatoslav Richter play  – “I thought at first the playing was nothing special – then I realised that tears were actually rolling down my cheeks….”Similarly, Hall’s window-view of “us” gradually penetrated our reserve, awoke our recognitions, tickled our fancies, engaged our sympathies and touched our hearts, giving us more and more “moments per minute” as we delved deeper and deeper into what were, either by direct experience or dint of association, our own lives.

For this reason, it’s very much a play one would ideally share with someone rather than view alone – I was grateful to go with a long-standing friend with whom, by dint of shared sideways glances, wry gesturings and occasional in-tandem chortles and spontaneous comments, I could relish the shared recognitions and empathies generated by the action’s plethora of impulses and nuances via word and gesture. And if not quite “tears rolling down my cheeks” I certainly registered, towards the end, some lump-in-throat moments, making the recognitions and empathies apparent. The playwright’s own attitude to his characters was summed up during a 2019 radio interview as “a terrific couple”, Hall adding that “Anybody in a long-term relationship recognises them and what they talk and argue about”.

Gen and Barry are two retirees, septuagenerians very much in “what’s next?” mode, and equally as much dealing with the “life is what happens when you’re planning something else” phenomenon that happens in the best families – and which certainly brings the same dynamic to bear on the action throughout the evening. The genesis of these two characters sprang from an earlier Hall play, Conjugal Rites, which featured the same Gen and Barry thirty years before, on the point of celebrating their 21^st wedding anniversary, and about to examine their marriage, their children and their respective occupations, dealing with both a balance of power change in the relationship (Gen becoming a practising solicitor) and infidelities on both sides (Barry with one of his dental patients, and Jen with a fellow-solicitor), issues that the present play revisit, albeit with passage-of-time mitigating philosophical perspectives.

Are the preoccupations, idiosyncrasies, quips, jokes and life-issues showing signs of wearing thin after thirty years? It’s almost as though Hall has written a kind of “laundered” quality into the first exchanges, something of an implicit “how many times have we heard that one” feeling, which is as much about style as content – like having to gradually get on someone’s “wavelength” so as to fully appreciate what is said (and “how”, as well, incidentally). Ginette McDonald as Gen conveys this nonchalance in her exchanges with Peter Hayden’s well-practised (and nicely “in-character theatrical”) delivery as Barry with a casual brilliance that leaves one open-mouthed with admiration. Opposite her, Peter Hayden’s Barry is something of a “performer”, with a certain command (perhaps historically occupational?) of repartee – “You’ll have to speak up – I’ve got my hearing aids in!” he quips to his daughter during a ‘phone call. Their differences reinforce an “opposites attract” quality that manifests itself elsewhere in their exchanges, more of which below.

As the business of ageing crowds in over the course of the play one realises just how “in tune” the couple are despite their differences – McDonald’s characteristic no-nonsense style as Gen complements Hayden’s ostensible heart-on-sleeve manner for Barry, revealing a “vive la difference” quality of being and doing in an arrangement that has worked long-term, despite the speed-bumps and the debilitating temporary detours along the way. Neither has been diminished by the other in the long haul – perhaps for some people a cloud-cuckoo-land scenario that falls apart in the face of harsher realities, but (on the basis of art suggesting an example for, rather than merely imitating, life) it’s a depiction that’s life-enhancing, and therefore a worthwhile, “act of theatre” to take in and ponder.

The issues are classic and resonantly recognisable, some even from a distance! – they range from individual attitudes to possessions (Barry is a “hoarder” whose responses to enjoiners from Gen to “downsize” regarding clothes and books are priceless! – “My ideal life-style is a mess!” he expostulates at one point!), to sex (a spontaneous “making-out on the shag pile” episode elicits “last of the Mohicans/end of the drought?/in the bed or out here?” comments from both of them as the embers are raked over to risibly indeterminate but still touching effect!) and to dancing to “their” music (“The first time I ever saw your face” to which Gen and Barry dance so touchingly and tenderly – and I think here of my own parents dancing foxtrots and twosteps to Mills Brothers’ tunes) – the music might be dated, but the shared enjoyment is timeless…)

The play’s “elephant in the room” isn’t one really, but it’s all-pervading enough to both “figure” and be “disregarded”, taking cues from the couple’s laudably ornery attitude to the news at the action’s beginning that Barry has been tentatively diagnosed with leukemia. The couple’s plans for a longed-for visit to see distant grandchildren are put under stress and jeopardy – though the outcomes at least didn’t at that time have to deal with Covid-19 as a factor. Funeral plans come into reckoning, then, the situation further pushed near the bone when news of Gen’s brother-in-law’s unexpected death arrives, necessitating the couple’s attendance at a funeral, and inevitable post-funeral talk – not here, but much later, Barry confesses to Gen that, were there “menus” for methods of dying, his preferred choice would be “to wake up dead!”

So, there’s much, and more, to take in from this script which, as I’ve already indicated, felt to me as if it moved from superficial exchange at the beginning to almost Faustian transcendence at the end, where one is confronted with a strangely dream-like set of scenarios in which time, matter and energy are redeployed. Hall here brings his play’s characters to their apotheosis in unforgettably iconic “Goodnight Kiwi” fashion, ensuring their immortality, while keeping us suspended in conjecture as to “what was happening”, as great art is wont to do…….

Credit needs to be articulated in many directions for all of this, firstly to director Susan Wilson for settings and dynamics that had here an inevitability of perspective, seeming to know what to bind and what to loosen, where to space out and where to hone in, and what to specify and what to leave to us to “figure”. Hand-in-glove with all of this was Lisa Maule’s set whose centrepiece was the painting with the “iconic” Wellington Harbour view, complete with Matiu/Soames Island and the resplendent Rimutaka Ranges in the background. Marcus McShane’s on-the-button lighting caught every atmospheric and dynamic nuance, while Sheila Horton’s costumes were everything one might expect from people of this couple’s socio-economic status. And I loved the music, particularly the dance  sequence of “The First Time I ever saw your Face”, which, as Noel Coward might have observed, “took” us, along with the others with surprising potency backwards to times and places, demonstrating the sure touch of Music and Soundscape designer Michael Nicholas Williams.

There’s been a suggestion that this work might be Sir Roger Hall’s swansong as a dramatist – if so we in New Zealand will be the poorer in no longer having “updated” portraits and scenarios from his perceptive sensibilities of people and things we know but perhaps can’t find the words to express for ourselves, or in such a recognisable way. We owe him a great debt of thanks.

WAITING FOR OURSELVES?
Circa Theatre presents: “Waiting for Godot” by Samuel Beckett

CAST:  Estragon  –  Jeff Kingsford-Brown
Vladimir  – Andrew Foster
Pozzo  –  Peter Hambleton
Lucky  –  Jack Buchanan
Boy  –  Alex Buyck

Director  –  Ross Jolly
Set Designer –  Andrew Foster
Lighting Designer  –  Marcus McShane
Costume Designer   –  Sheila Horton

Circa Theatre,
I Taranaki St, Wellington

Saturday, 4^th May 2019

(until 1^st June 2019)

It’s interesting that my first, completely “out of the blue” experience of “Waiting for Godot” was provided some time during the mid-1960s, by a group of actors who called themselves “The Southern Comedy Players”, a foursome if I remember, who frequently toured the country’s secondary schools, and fortunately for me, had our school in Palmerston North “on their list”. The group performed excerpts from various plays, presenting a wide range, including classics (Goldsmith – “She Stoops to Conquer”), New Zealand works (Mason – “The Pohutukawa Tree”), and twentieth-century works (Beckett – “Waiting for Godot”).

I saw this group perform in their “school visits” context at least twice, and perhaps even three times over those years – but the trio of presentations mentioned above are the ones that have stuck in my memory. The name of the troupe “The Southern Comedy Players”, and the droll, whimsical humour of what I remember of the “Waiting for Godot” excerpt on that occasion indelibly etched in my brain the idea that Samuel Beckett’s play was indeed a kind of bizarre, bare-bones comedy. I would imagine that the performance on that occasion would have shared many of the qualities I enjoyed in Circa Theatre’s new production, most strikingly of all, a laconic, home-grown, “she’ll be right” way with the engaging characterisations of the two major protagonists, Estragon and Vladimir.

In fact my initial reaction here to the personas and interactions of each of these characters was a kind of “Hang on a minute, mate/One of Us” familiarity, as if both Vladimir and Estragon had wandered out of the pages of the Sam Cash novels by Barry Crump, the “everyman” characters fitted out both visually and vocally with a rugged, old-fashioned Kiwi context, however skin-deep. I somehow “knew” them of old, and reflected as the play’s essential inactions mirrored, refracted and regurgitated throughout how those archetypal Kiwi blokes had, in Beckett’s hands, become emasculated by the enactment of what seemed like a never-ending ritual of “waiting for Godot”.

Whomever Godot is or was, we in the audience never found out – the “waiting” consisted instead of a variety of discussions, mostly between Estragon and Vladimir, interrupted by encounters in each of the two Acts with a man and his servant, and also with a boy, the latter telling them on each of his appearances that Godot could not come “today” but would come “tomorrow” instead. We were left at the very end with the omnipresence of the play’s “theme” of essential inaction brought about by the “waiting”, when both men agreed to leave – but neither moved!

So, like figures performing a slow dance, the two characters pirouetted painstakingly through the play’s two Acts, one for each day, displaying with both word and action what seemed like endless preoccupation with minutae, every so often punctuating their exchanges with resonances that promised much but led to little (Vladimir’s Biblical reference to the two thieves crucified with Christ, for instance, or the inconsistencies between the four Gospel accounts regarding the thieves’ presence). Uncertainties abounded – the place, the time, the objects, the circumstances – everything mentioned was unconfirmed, made more nebulous than it was before being mentioned – For example, what day was it? Saturday? – Or Sunday? Or Monday? Or Friday!? Was the tree where they were to meet Godot really a tree? Or a bush? – perhaps a shrub? Were they here yesterday? What did they do, yesterday? Did they recognise the place? Did it make any difference?

These two “chapters” of dysfunctional connectivity between co-dependent characters were similarly interrupted by two ”arrivals”, firstly by a kind of master-servant pair roped together, respectively Pozzo and Lucky; and then by a boy bring the news of Godot’s “postponement” of the promised rendezvous with Estragon and Vladimir. Of the master-servant combination, Pozzo’s portly, well-heeled figure presented a stark contrast with that of Lucky, who, though dressed more as a carnival-performer-cum punk-rocker complete with bleached-blonde hair, appeared to be his slave. Pozzo’s cruel and disdainful treatment of Lucky, tethered at the end of a rope, made for directly uncomfortable watching, as did Lucky’s almost shell-shocked obedience of Pozzo’s every curtly-delivered command. The former’s sickening obsequiousness was allayed for a few spectacularly-delivered moments of maniacal speech and dance, outpourings of controlled energy which justly earned the actor a round of impulsive applause from an agog audience!

The reappearance of these two in the Second Act reversed their situations, with Pozzo having gone blind and Lucky guiding him while taking refuge in dumbness, Pozzo’s previous overbearing manner now replaced with humility and some insight (in the play as a whole there are a handful of parallels of this kind –  the vagabonds’ reflections on “nothing to be done”, Estragon’s thoughts of madness, and Pozzo’s blindness – with Shakespeare’s King Lear). In stark contrast to all of this  was the fresh-faced, straightforwardly-spoken boy messenger from the enigmatic Godot, a ray of equable sunshine on each of his appearances, when compared to the idiosyncratic tramps, Estregon and Vladimir, and the almost hallucinatory pairing of Pozzo and Lucky. How Beckett was able to imbue his work with so distinct an “everyman” quality via characters of such idiosyncrasy and grotesquerie is one of the miracles wrought by both a playwright’s skills and the theatre’s transforming power of suspended (and, here, metaphoric) belief.

All of this was realised for us with a directness of presentation in its sight, sound and general physicality which brooked no interference with whatever messages we in the audience chose to receive. Designer Andrew Foster put us in the action’s space, with everything clearly and mercilessly-focused – not especially rugged, but satisfyingly bleak, and in what seemed like the middle of nowhere, a tree and a block of concrete-like material forward of a suggested pathway running along the upstage. In tandem with Marcus McShane’s unambiguous, implacably advancing “day’s journey into night” lighting, the scenario unerringly conveyed a feeling of the characters’ utter helplessness against and subjection to endless cycles of time, the action of each act framed beautifully by sombre string-quartet-like music and an ambiguously striking half-sentinel, half-spectre presence of a moon.

I’ve already commented on Estragon’s and Vladimir’s engagingly familiar kind of “down-under vagabond” garb, Sheila Horton’s costumes for the pair for me hitting the spot, with Vladimir, as befitted his more philosophical and pro-active speech, somewhat more organised appearance-wise than his more bedraggled companion. Pozzo and Lucky couldn’t have been more of a contrast, the former most nattily attired, formality enlivened with colourfully psychedelic shoes, and the latter part-punk, part-gothic in his garb and coiffure – each, nevertheless, lost in their respectively-stated worlds of self-expression, and even in their visual assurance as helpless as were the two vagabonds in their “live-and-sleep-rough” garb. A hat-play sequence between the characters allowed Beckett scope for certain vaudeville goings-on, as well as symbolising certain aspects of each individual’s identity (in the first productions everybody wore bowler hats – a standard vaudeville prop, incidentally, though nowadays, as here, directors tend to opt for discernably different headgear). Lucky’s hat was important to him for thinking, Pozzo’s for social status, and Vladimir’s as a source of knowledge – only Estragon seemed “liberated” from whatever talismanic potential possessed by his headgear, putting his trust instead in his boots.

Unfortunately I never saw director Ross Jolly’s previous (and legendary) production of “Godot” in Wellington twenty years before. Without directly knowing what his earlier approach was, I’m wondering whether he’d decided to more consistently “lighten” the interactions, ambience and textures of the whole this time round – for the simple reason that I was expecting something more deeply disturbing, more extreme at each of the spectrum’s ends, the humour more manic, the desperation blacker and more cutting. It would be in line with a “distillation of response” over that time involving a more insoucient touch, a freer use of humour – though all of this is pure conjecture on my part. However it all was, nothing here was superfluous or wasted or lacking in motivation or conviction in the results achieved by his direction and the audience’s outward responses to them.

In fact his actors seemed here to relish the freedoms of light and space and warmth at the work’s beginning, with both Jeff Kingsford-Brown as Estragon and Andrew Foster as Vladimir readily filling the opening spaces with their respective preoccupations, Kingsford-Brown at intervals  beautifully conveying almost child-like sequencings of curiosity, puzzlement, irritation, delight and impishness, however quickly each impulse returned him to his default-setting of anxiety and “wanting to be off”. His introductory struggles with the removal of his shoes had a Blake-like “world in a grain of sand” preoccupation which put him akin to an animal struggling to survive in, let alone make sense of a world of nightly beatings and daily vigils of hopelessness.

More of a thinker and a free-wheeling philosopher, Andrew Foster’s Vladimir readily and more pro-actively fleshed out his curiosities and irritations with an engaging charm and bright-eyed quickness of manner, though as the play unfolded we realised that his somewhat more energised and quixotic impulses and responses to things were actually more style than substance. More superficially rational and empathetic than Estragon, he repeatedly reminded his companion, even amid their most trenchant tribulations of whom they were supposed to be waiting for.

Peter Hambleton’s well-dressed, arrogant, self-regarding Pozzo ably pushed all of our buttons in the expected manner upon his arrival with the rope-bound Lucky, whom he treated as his slave with the utmost contempt and degradation, while addressing Estragon and Vladimir with hardly less disdain, the episode presumably a kind of “comfort stop” for Pozzo on his journey to wherever. As Lucky, Jack Buchanan’s physical control of his back-breaking position of utter servitude was no less remarkable than his sudden outburst of both manic dancing and clearly-enunciated nonsensical diatribe whose completion compelled his audience to spontaneous clapping – that it was more entertaining circus-act than piteous lunatic raving was due as much to Beckett’s alienatory settings as to the production’s more absurd than tragic leaning.

When Pozzo and Lucky returned in the Second Act, their roles were somewhat reversed, Lucky leading his now-blind master back across the vistas, the cortege collapsing in a heap midway to the piteous cries of the once-dominant and overbearing Pozzo, Estragon taking his opportunity amid the melee to kick Lucky in revenge for his first-Act injury. The play ended as the first half ended, with the boy arriving carrying the message that Godot will not come today but tomorrow for sure, and Vladimir and Estragon agreeing that they will go, but instead stay.

By the play’s end the hopelessness of the situation of Estragon and Vladimir was complete – amid the chaos they remained trapped, steadfast to the idea that their only choice was to wait for “Godot”. In this way, the production consistently expressed the dictum (not Beckett’s) “a tragedy to the heart and a comedy to the intellect”, and in the best existential tradition, left the question of “the best course” unanswered. A question for humanity at large, perhaps, waiting for us to “wake up to ourselves?”.

BLOOMSBURY WOMEN AND THE WILD COLONIAL GIRL
A play by Lorae Parry

Directed by Susan Wilson
Music by Michael Nicholas Williams
Set Design by Lisa Maule
Lighting by Marcus McShane
Costumes by Sheila Horton
Audio-visual Design by Haami Hawkins and Lisa Maule
Soundscapes by Oliver Buckley

CAST:  Katherine Mansfield – Isobel MacKinnon
Virginia Woolf – Jessica Robinson
Ida Baker/Leslie Moore aka LM – Jessica Robinson

Circa Theatre, Taranaki St., Wellington

Tuesday 21^st August – (until 15^th September)

Writer Lorae Parry’s dramatized exploration of Katherine Mansfield’s brief but stellar trajectory throughout different worlds on each side of the globe is a miracle of recreation. It takes a particular kind of genius to flesh out convincingly and organically the bones and sinews of someone else’s work, a process for which Parry obviously has the gift of instinct allied to the electric charge of empathy. Mansfield’s own words are filled with the energy and impulsiveness which characterised her formative years, as the “wild colonial girl” cuts an outwardly gauche but essentially compelling figure in London’s literary circles, by turns attracting, appalling and fascinating some of the leading figures in those circles, most notably a fellow-writer, Virginia Woolf. In a ninety-minute tour de force of theatre, Parry puts a girdle round about the earth along which her subject runs, dances, leaps and spins, the result being a warts-and-all self-portrayal of thoroughly engaging spirit, determination and courage, a real person with something for everybody, if disconcertingly volatile and at times tangental in her actions and responses.

Beginning with voice-quotes which appear in tandem with photographs of people who knew Mansfield and whose sounds both echo and resonate, or sparkle with kaleidoscopic immediacy,  we’re instantly plunged into a sea of different impressions of Mansfield, each adding a kind of onion-layer to the body of the personality, and as consistent or contradictory as each had a right to be. My favourite at the time was Frieda Lawrence’s remark, talking about KM’s  “terrible gift of nearness, she can come so close….”, and adding “If she tells lies, she also knows more about the truth than other people….”. It’s a kind of pre-sequence to Mansfield’s own “Who am I” moment, one which she plays with as thistledown on the wind.

At first it seems as if she is a child composed almost of whimsy – “in my life so much love in imagination- in reality, eighteen barren years” she rhapsodises partly to us, partly in thrall to the thought of Edith Bendall (E.K.B.) a woman with whom she had a passionate relationship when young, describing their intimacy to us in the most heartfelt terms before, with a sudden volte-face,  remarking on their “maudlin affair”….people such as Oscar Wilde and Arnold Trowell (a young New Zealander with whom she was involved) slip into and through her thoughts, along with the memory of a schoolmate, Maata Mahupuku, whom she had been intimate with – “I want her as I have had her” – which excites her passions (“savagely crude and powerfully enamoured”) as much as awakens the present absurdity of it all – “Heigh-ho! – my mind is like a Russian novel”. All of this is superbly crafted, weighted and teased out by Parry as words, and in turn by Isobel MacKinnon as Katherine, her quick-draw reflexes portraying a three-dimensional being in the grip of formative emotions and impulses, open-ended and empathetic, so that we can’t help but love her despite some of her more abrasive volatilities.

Aiding and abetting MacKinnon’s compelling characterisation is an equally virtuosic Jessica Robinson bringing to life diametically opposed forces and foils in Mansfield’s life in the personas of both KM’s long-term London friend Ida Baker (otherwise known as Lesley or LM) and her redoubtable literary contemporary-cum-rival Virginia Woolf. Robinson is both separate and oddly empathetic between her two alter egos, with in places a hint of suggestiveness of a commonality between each woman’s response to her “wild colonial girl” – in Ida she invests the character with both constancy and servility towards Katherine, everything suggesting the vulnerability of someone who’s seeking to live through somebody else, and placing herself entirely at the service of someone she loves as a kind of fulfilment, despite KM’s demonstrative ambivalence towards her.

Her portrayal of Virginia Woolf could almost rate a review in itself, so convincingly does she bring the character to life, aided, of course by Lorae Parry’s judiciously-chosen words throughout. There’s a whole gamut of response packed into relatively brief sequences, conveying something of Blake’s “world in a grain of sand” kind of feeling, Woolf’s initial patronising tones (worn like a mask), comparing KM’s apparent commonness to “a civet cat that has taken to street-walking”, while acknowledging her undoubted intelligence and interest. Robinson gives her a compulsive “moth to the flame” aspect regarding KM, as she relishes both her “unpleasant but forcible and utterly unscrupulous character” and “her love of writing”. Later, amid a farrago of convoluted reaction, comes Woolf’s admission that “there’s no-one else I can talk to about writing”, and after KM’s death, the cri de coeur  – “there was no longer any point in writing, Katherine won’t read it.” – altogether a fascinating and absorbing portrayal of somebody who at one stage compares life to “a little strip of pavement over an abyss”.

Where Parry’s play scores equally brilliantly is in relating Mansfield’s work to her life, something also commented on by Woolf in places, as much in jealousy as in outward disgust regarding the story “Bliss” in particular – “I threw down “Bliss” with the exclamation “She’s done for!”, and later, “….is it absurd to read all this criticism of her into a story?…..” Earlier, KM relates an excerpt from “In a German Pension”, following with the thought, “I’ve acted out my sins, and then excused them with “it doesn’t do to think about these things….it was experience”, and then delineates the influence of her brother Lesley (killed in the war) on her story “Prelude”, with a charmingly macabre sequence involving the idea of standing on one’s head and breaking one’s neck! – throughout these “art is life, etc.” sequences we were captivated, as throughout, but especially so here, by MacKinnon’s lightness and surety of touch, far more than a more self-consciously “felt” approach would have done. In places it was almost a theatrical master-class given by actor, director and playwright in the art of when to hold and when to let go…..

Into the play’s ninety minutes there was poured, set and crafted so much more that can’t be covered here – enough for the moment to say that Susan Wilson’s direction seemed “hand-in-glove” with the writer’s intentions throughout, Sheila Horton’s costumes seemed to have a “rightness” that helped bring to life each different sequence and change or development of character, and Lisa Maule’s set inestimably helped ‘rivet” our sensibilities to particular times and places. The whole was given an ambient glow by Marcus McShane’s sensitive lighting, occasionally galvanised by the vivid presence of the AV images (Maule with Haami Hawkins), to which the oddly nostalgic effect of Michael Nicholas Williams’ slow-motion realisations of Debussy’s music and the atmospheric sound-effects by Oliver Buckley gave an appropriate dream-like quality.

In sum, I thought Parry’s play and its production here easefully and unselfconsciously “placed” Mansfield on a mainstream literary stage, with nothing either overly dismissive or narrowly parochial about her conception – the character comes across as, in her own words, “a conscious, direct human being”, for us to accept as we find her. All up, a pretty stunning achievement.

Circa Theatre presents:
William Shakespeare’s KING LEAR

Director: Michael Hurst
Set and Lighting: Andrew Foster
Costumes: Gillie Coxill
Music and Sound: Jason Smith
Producer: Carolyn Henwood

Cast:
King Lear – Ray Henwood
Earl of Gloucester – Ken Blackburn
Goneril – Carmel McGlone
Regan – Claire Waldron
Cordelia – Neenah Dekkers-Reihana
Fool – Gavin Rutherford
Duke of Kent – Stephen Papps
Edmund – Guy Langford
Edgar – Andrew Paterson
Duke of Albany – Todd Rippon
Duke of Cornwall – Peter Hambleton
Oswald – Nick Dunbar

With: Alex Halstead, Callum McSorley, Charlotte Cook, Connor McNabb, Hailey Ibold,
Jamie Wallace-Thexton, Jordan Murphy, Kelly Willis-Pine, Monica Reid, Morgan Hopkins,
Olivia Fox and Samantha Geraghty

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Saturday 14th May, 2016

Shakespeare got his “King Lear” story from an early chronicler, Holinshed, (who had in turn got it from an earlier source). As well as this there had been an anonymous stage adaptation of the story “doing the rounds” and performed in London about ten years before Shakespeare’s play appeared. Both of these told the story of the semi-legendary Leir of Britain and his three daughters Gonorilla/Gonerill, Regan/Ragan and Cordeilla/Cordella. In both Holinshed’s version and the anonymous play, there is a happy ending, with the aged king reinstated on the British throne by his daughter Cordelia’s arrival with her husband the King of France’s troops to defeat the armies of the traitorous dukes of Albany and Cornwall.

Shakespeare’s dramatisation, with its bleaker denouement to the story held the stage until the Puritans closed down all the theatres in 1642. With the Restoration theatres were reopened, but a new generation of playgoers found the uncompromising tragedy of the Bard’s Lear too much to stomach – this  encouraged the Poet Laureate of the age Nahum Tate to rewrite the play along the ”happy ending” lines of the earlier versions. It wasn’t until over a century later that the great actor Edmund Kean reinstated Shakespeare’s tragic end to the drama – and even then the battle for fidelity’s sake continued to be fought well into the first half of the twentieth century over heavily cut scripts, and reducing or taking out supporting roles by various managers, directors or actors themselves, wanting to emphasize the role of the eponymous leading character.

Today, people responsible for productions pride themselves upon up-to-the-minute historical research and textual fidelity, even if there’s an equally compulsive desire on the part of directors to update the context of the play’s action, ostensibly for purposes of better connecting with modern audiences. It seems that British comedian Michael Flanders’ throwaway line during the course of his and Donald Swann’s revue “At the Drop of a Hat” concerning a dissertation on Tudor England theatrical performance – “Anything to stop it being done straight!” has become true of most present-day performances of theatrical and operatic classics.

Stage traditionalists must feel as though they get a hard time of it these days, but they can take heart from the pleasure and satisfaction to be had when encountering updated productions whose creators and organizers know what they’re about. So it was on Saturday night at Circa Theatre with director Michael Hurst’s production of Lear, which seemed to me to be securely grounded in its own “time”, the ambience suggesting the Second World War era, and the context one of military conflict. Once the frisson of encountering the update’s impact at the play’s very beginning – a shadowy, almost “film noir” scenario featuring people furtively smoking and soldiers with guns checking the environs in a “put that light out” kind of way – had been squared up to, and the King and his court been introduced to us in their gloriously-arrayed mixture of 1940s military and civilian clothes, we settled down to listening “past” our visual realignments and into the heart of the business, contained of course in the language and its interchanges.

Lear’s court resembled a smartly-run consortium’s board-room, one involving both military and civilian personnel. And there, in the commanding personage of Ray Henwood was the king himself, autocratic and imperious, walking with a stick, and wielding it with complete authority. His daughters and their respective entourages awaited the King’s pleasure, Goneril and Regan, the two eldest, seeming to anticipate the demand that they declare absolute and unequivocal love to their father. The elder sisters spoke in reply first, Carmel McGlone’s Goneril honeyed of voice, beautifully modulated and completely without spontaneity, and Claire Waldron’s Regan fulsomely sing-song but mechanical, and sounding increasingly like clockwork as she proceeded – both declaring their actual feelings and intentions as clearly to all excepting their father as if they had spoken their thoughts out loud.

A marked contrast came with Lear’s questioning of his youngest daughter, Cordelia, portrayed with youthful wholeheartedness by Neenah Dekkers-Reihana, her sincerity palpable and vulnerable in manner, but steady and unswerving in effect, engendering shock among allies and antagonists alike – the King’s anger was perfectly in context with his disappointment at Cordelia’s “Nothing” answer and his “Nothing will come of nothing” warning reply. The reaction to all of this of Lear’s uniformed right-hand man, the Duke of Kent (played by Stephen Papps) I found a bit puffy and blustery of manner at first, but once his defence of Cordelia in front of Lear had earned him his banishment, and occasioned his return in disguise to continue serving his master, I thought the actor’s portrayal as a loyal retainer deeply moving, rich in truth and honesty.

Articulating his “stand up for bastards” speech while having his way on an office desktop with some acquiescent “temp” girl, was something of a virtuosic theatrical feat on the part of Guy Langford, playing the role of Edmund, illegitimate son of the Earl of Gloucester, a loyal friend of Lear’s. Very much the young rake on the make, Edmund racily and almost engagingly outlined for us his scheme to undermine his half-brother’s legitimacy in his father’s eyes, and wheedle his way into favour with either (or both) Goneril and Regan. He made the most of his “heavenly portents” speech before convincing his brother Edgar that the latter had incurred their father’s displeasure, and that he (Edgar) had better go and hide out until further notice. I liked how Edgar (played by Andrew Paterson) convincingly presented a more rough-hewn, less “courtier’d” manner than his half-brother, credible in his despair at his father’s anger, and his bewilderment regarding what he might do to right the alleged wrong.

Edgar’s course, to take refuge in the countryside as a beggar, brought him into direct contact with the estranged Lear and his Fool (the latter a virtuoso portrayal by Gavin Rutherford of one of literature’s most powerful archetypes, the wise jester – more of him below….) at the height of a storm. In some of the most visceral language ever accorded the elements by any storyteller or poet, the words became stinging, biting, oak-cleaving cataracts and hurricanes. All of this was superbly and variedly detailed by Henwood, his character’s troubled place in the cosmos transfixed at that moment by a squared volume of rain-spattered light mid-stage, drawing our focus into the square and similarly flailing our own sensibilities – a most telling piece of interpretation and production. Having been then directed by the solicitous Kent to a hovel, Lear encountered Edgar, disguised as “Poor Tom”. Andrew Paterson’s portrayal forcibly put across the character’s deranged quality with heightened volume and dramatic gesture. Though much of his diatribe couldn’t be deciphered, his piteous sotto-voce asides kept the character’s purpose clear for us amid all the bluster.

So to Gavin Rutherford’s Fool, something of a “Billy-Bunter in an airman’s cap” Fool, but obviously a force to be reckoned with, a presence off whom Lear’s own words bounced and faltered, as when the king responded to the banter about making something from nothing with a hollow-sounding and throat-catching “Nothing can be made out of…….” And how tellingly was the Fool’s “old before thy time” jibe underscored with just enough music of derangement as to indicate Lear’s unnerving by his own fears, with “Keep me in temper! – I would not be mad!” Throughout, the characterizations of each of the actors made me more aware than ever of how both the Fool and Kent tried to protect and safeguard their lord and master, Kent from his enemies without and the Fool from Lear’s own foibles within.

As for Ken Blackburn’s playing of Gloucester, the portrayal graciously and naturally conveyed the character’s one-dimensional amiability right at the outset, along with a comprehensive lack of insight into either of his sons’ true mettle. This obtuseness led to his downfall at the hands of ruthless ambition – and only in the wake of his savage blinding by both Regan and her husband Cornwall in revenge for his continued support of the king, did the first glimmerings of truth begin to shine for him from within. The blood-drenched beginning of this process brought us into direct contact with Peter Hambleton’s single-minded depiction of Cornwall’s ugly thrust towards power, and, even more disturbingly, Regan’s naked blood-lust, Claire Waldron here most viscerally and repellently conveying her delight at Gloucester’s disfigurement. Less overtly but as slyly evil was Nick Dunbar’s beautifully-crafted Oswald, ostensibly a tool of his mistress Goneril’s machinations, his impulses at her beck and call, his manner as pragmatic as any soldier of fortune.

Small wonder, then, that Gloucester’s subsequent wanderings with his son Edgar (disguised as a beggar and becoming his father’s unidentified protector) evoked such pity and even (after his abortive suicide attempt) an almost sacramental transfiguration into a martyr-like figure, one who had paid a price for his understanding of things and for his short-lived reunitement with the child who truly loved him. His coming-together with the crazed Lear on the heath was a moment of sweetness amid the carnage, a briefly applied balm of shared understanding, here, with the flower-bedecked Lear embracing the blinded and blood-drenched figure of Gloucester, their theatrical duet beautifully voiced by both Henwood and Blackburn, a moment for the ages.

With the other treacherous sister, Goneril, and her husband Albany (Todd Rippon subtly and effectively  signalling his ambivalence as a conspirator in the scheme of things, perhaps, like his father-in-law, a man more sinned against, etc….), their dissolution seemed partly wrought by the former’s long-standing marital dissatisfaction. How cruelly and unequivocally Shakespeare characterized this with Goneril’s brief Act 4 tryst with the free-wheeling Edmund, complete with suggestive body-language and hints of impending mutual delight. As for Carmel McGlone’s transported, almost orgasmic delivery of “O, the difference of man and man!”, it ironically brought the house down, the more effectively so for its sudden, highly-modulated expression! By contrast, I thought Todd Rippon nicely judged Albany’s awakening of his own strength of character, both in the face of his wife’s intention to cuckold and usurp him as a husband through Edmund, and in his rediscovery of a sense of loyalty to his king, leading to those words of his bitterly-wrought understanding at the play’s end – “…speak what we feel, not what we ought to say”’.

Director Michael Hurst’s acute observation in his programme note that Lear “goes too far”, beyond what words can say or do, was conveyed in a myriad ways by this production, by its sheer noise, by its stricken silences, by its insensible furies, by its sardonic humour, by its grim desperations and its blazing illuminations  and by its unspeakable brutalities set against displays of equally unspeakable love. On stage were both experienced actors playing in a sense their own ripened experiences, cheek-by-jowl with various youthful players fronting up to snippets of ideas and concepts which had the potential to change, modify, augment, enrich their own as yet youthful existences – Lear’s doomed yet enduring gesture of union with his daughter Cordelia – “we two alone will sing like birds i’ th’ cage” spoke for this outlandish theatrical amalgam of old and young as beautifully and deeply as any other quality one might think of.  For Circa and for the people involved in this production it all seemed to this audience member as beautiful and as deep as one might have a right to receive.

A CHILD’S CHRISTMAS IN WALES
Reminiscences of childhood by Dylan Thomas

Narrated and performed by Ray Henwood
Dramaturg: Ross Jolly

Circa Theatre, Wellington

Tuesday 1st December 2015

I thought I knew Dylan Thomas’s enchanting youthful evocation “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” pretty well, in the wake of numerous encounters with the work over the years. As each Christmas approached I would read the work to the class of children that were in my charge as a teacher,  a kind of ritual that extended over more years than I care to remember. And every now and then (invariably when my classes consisted of older children) I would bring out my precious copy of a Caedmon LP containing the voice of the great man himself reading the story (as well as five poems) in that unforgettable, peculiarly ritualistic sing-song voice of the kind attributed to bards of ancient times.

So, as I’d neither read nor listened to the story for some time, I anticipated with the greatest of pleasure the prospect of hearing one of Wellington’s most illustrious theatrical figures, Ray Henwood, present the work at Circa Theatre. While I assumed that it would be a one-man show, I was intrigued as to what Henwood would actually do, as I remembered the reading I did in my classes taking around twenty minutes in all – which seemed short measure for a complete Circa production.

Dylan Thomas’s own recording of this story was made in February 1952 in New York while the poet was on the second of his three “recital tours” of the USA. The LP format could accommodate far more recorded space that “A Child’s Christmas in Wales” could fill up, so Thomas recorded five of his best-known poems to include on the record as well. I wondered whether Ray Henwood was going to do a similar thing, “filling out” the evening by reciting for us some of these iconic verses, such as “Do Not Go Gentle into that Good Night”, and “Fern Hill”.

In the event what Henwood did was even more wonderful – having been brought up in Wales in the same places as Thomas himself, though a handful of years afterwards, he spent the entire first half of the show “setting the scene” for his audience from the persecutive of his own experiences as a boy in Swansea, bringing the poet’s world vividly to life. His account was a kind of amalgam of personal reminiscence interspersed with fragments of Thomas’s own earlier writings, some of which managed to find their way into the finished story this time round.

Thomas himself regarded Swansea ambivalently, writing to a publisher about his early poems growing out of “the smug darkness of a provincial town”, and describing his cultural environment as “depressing and disheartening” – interestingly his childhood reminiscences, which appeared in various incarnations, are almost entirely free from any such depression, boredom or frustration, filled as they are with wonderment and magical reinterpretation of a child’s world. Completely non-literal, and delightfully, and in places theatrically imbued with a sense of the fabulous amidst the ordinary, the writing envelops the reader with a vivid sense of time and place in the classic storytelling manner – an example in the finished version is the way in which Thomas’s sequence “whether it snowed for six days and six nights when I was twelve, or…..” so delightfully evokes and disarms at one and the same time, leaving the listener/reader subsequently ready for anything.

Previous versions of the poet’s childhood Christmas memories included a 1942 radio talk “Reminiscences of Childhood” which was further developed into another talk “Memories of Christmas” for the BBC’s “Children’s Hour” – legend has it that Thomas came not to be trusted broadcasting “live” by this time, and so his talk on this occasion was pre-recorded. The story then appeared in the photojournal “Picture Post” in 1947, and then in the American “Harper’s Bazaar” in the early 1950s, during one of Thomas’s American tours. During this first-half setting of the scene Ray Henwood quoted freely from these different versions, conveying not only a sense of the poet’s reworkings of his material, but of the kind of ambience that fostered both the style as much as the content of the things we were being presented with.

So we were primed up, good and proper, for the presentation of the finished story after the interval, the stage settings (the parlour at Thomas’s family home in Swansea, on Cwmdonkin Drive) similar to that throughout the first half, helping to give the whole a kind of organic flow-on effect. How beautifully and securely the story’s opening (“One Christmas was so much like another….”) placed the happenings in that country called the past, where “they do things differently”, fancy given licence to enlarge, intensify, heighten, in the pursuit of essential truths. To my fallible ears there seemed numerous additions to the story I remembered, references near the beginning to “tobogganing on the teatray” and to “boys who have three helpings”, each of which added a jewel to the sparkling whole.

Other references which I thought enlarged the range and scope of our pleasure at both detail and overall ambience included a mention of Christmas stockings just before the inventory of Christmas presents began (we enjoyed once again the familiar “mistake that nobody could explain, a little hatchet”, and the delightful reference to “the little crocheted nose-bag from an aunt now, alas, no longer whinnying with us”). Another, more poignant incident recounted that was new to me was the boy’s finding of “a dead bird – a Robin, perhaps – with all but one of its fires out….”

Henwood judiciously varied his delivery throughout, not only as regards pacing or alternating sequences and characterization of different voices, but in presenting the storyteller in different guises, sometimes as a kindly grandfather reading directly from a book’s pages, and sometimes as a character from the story come to life before our eyes, with a tangible presence to boot. Again this was keeping both the homespun and the magical on speaking terms, each to the other’s advantage, as well as to ours as the enthralled audience.

Aiding and abetting the unfoldings was a judicious use of sound effects, on the one hand firemen’s bells and associated noises, and then similarly sensitive lighting variations accompanying the carol-singing episode at the story’s other end – in general these technical things were sparingly used, allowing us to focus unerringly upon Henwood’s richly-wrought voice and the poet’s own word-painting to full effect, which were, after all the two things that mattered most about the venture.

What gave me the biggest surprise, I think was something which changed the whole concluding ambience of the story – the decision to finish the presentation with lines from one of Thomas’s most well-known poems, “Fern Hill”, the verses added without a break in the narrative flow. As concluded by Thomas, the “Child’s Christmas” account has the boy getting into bed, saying “some words to the close and holy darkness”, and then falling asleep, thereby preserving inviolate the memory of the day for all time. With those few lines from “Fern Hill” included, however, a shadow is cast retrospectively over the whole work, the events of the day made open-ended and subject to the ravages of time, the poem being a meditation on the transitory nature of life, and in particular, childhood.

Though time is initially presented by the poem as a benign force it holds sway in an all-pervading way, a feeling the “Child’s Christmas” story on its own manages to avoid by encapsulating time within the framework of a single day. It’s ironic that, on my copy of the aforementioned Caedmon LP containing the story read by the author, there’s space afterwards on the same side for one of the additional poems that were recorded in the same session – no prizes for guessing which poem it was!

So, a solid personal triumph for Ray Henwood and a success in terms of dramatic focus and literary quality for Circa. If you didn’t get the chance to enjoy the show and admire the actor’s skills, the theatre’s 2016 programme has scheduled for May a new production of Shakespeare’s King Lear, with Henwood in the title role – one would imagine that, even if one saw nothing else at the theatre, such an event would come into the category of “unmissable”.