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| Edinburgh : A&E : Theatre: Review of 2004 Autumn RSC Season in Newcastle. |
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Theatre listings > Royal Shakespeare Company at Newcastle
Theatre Royal and Newcastle's
Playhouse - 1 Nov - 27 Nov 2004. Review of RSC's
Newcastle 2001 Season. Dates, Times and Venues Details. This year, you could say, there are two RSCs heading towards the border for November in Newcastle. At least, the Company's split between one handling a collection of Shakespearean tragedy and another finding its way around the Spanish Golden Age - the remarkable outburst of fine drama from the late 16th and the 17th centuries. The Tragedies troupe has a strong Scottish contingent. Whether or not because of RSC Artistic Director Michael Boyd's past at Glasgow Tron, there's a fair number of faces known to audiences. And, of the three productions, one pick of the crop - Bill Alexander's production of King Lear. Corin Redgrave's Lear enters bent-double with a walking-cane, which he then throws off. He's a humourless man, alright, but like many such he keeps coming over with hearty, obvious and misplaced attempts at joviality. They contrast the perceptive wit of John Normington's Fool, old in practical wisdom. A strong company throughout, the thankless daughters well-balanced in their easy sophistication, in contrast to Louis Hilyer's dependable Kent and David Hargreaves' trustingly bluff Gloucester. Hamlet's notable for Toby Stephens' elegant Prince, more back to the John Gielgud mould than the rebel outsider often seen since the sixties. For once his injunction to Ophelia (Meg Fraser, familiar to Royal Lyceum and Dundee Rep audiences) sounds like helpful advice than aggression. Also notable is the ghost of old Hamlet, Citizens Regular Greg Hicks slowly dragging his very material sword across the metallic grill of his pathway through the audience. No son could be unimpressed by such a weighted-down vision. That leaves Macbeth, with a suitable Scottish contingent; Fraser again as a Weird Sister and as the Porter (alas, the only character speaking in Scottish tones - always a sign of English condescension) Forbes Masson, going serious between writing Tron pantos. A neat enough two-and-a-quarter-hours straight through but with no distinctive feature to make it essential in an autumn that's already seen productions at Dundee Rep and a radical adaptation touring from Theatre Babel. The Spanish season unearths some real rarities - they are golden, the showpiece probably being Lope de Vega's Dog in the Manger. It's not Laurence Boswell's first go at it, and the experience shows. This is the opposite of every value 17th century Spain's supposed to have stood for, which is perhaps why it's set in a far-flung colony, the Netherlands. The dog is actually a bitch, Countess Diana who's turned on to her steward when she finds another woman after him. Unlike the Duchess of Malfi she can't let love across the class divide and her alternating enticement and repulsion's reflected in his off/on relationship with his more lowly love, who's now very much second-class. It's all beautifully played, with a freedom born of confidence and technical expertise, the modern feel never falling into anachronistic intrusions. Sheer joy end-to-end, not least for Simon Trinder, a young actor who's clearly master of the servant class, something he proves again in House of Desires. This is by Spanish nun Suor Juana de la Cruz and it makes you wonder what dreams went on in some convents. This love intrigue comedy has a clear understanding of women's feelings and isn't patterned neatly to bring about happy ever after couplings. Compromise is called for among the females. And the second-half's star-turn cross-dressing by Trinder may have no impact whatsoever on the plot but makes for blissful comedy. A surprise to find the author of Don Quixote, Cervantes, as playwright, and the separate tableaux in Pedro, the Great Pretender make for a shaggy dog story. Director Mike Alfreds employs the storytelling style upon which he founded Shared Experience (who now specialise in dramatising novels). The deliberate breaks between scenes, with unused actors observing from chairs behind the action, emphasises the episodic nature and Pedro himself is marginal to several. But there's honesty and depth in the playing, and a dramatic kick when we learn the final way in which Pedro earns his title. The Spanish season's completed by Simon Usher's revival of Tamar's Revenge, a tragedy by Tirso de Molina (originator of Don Juan), which proved critically controversial enough for the performance I'd hoped to see to be changed to a performance of one of the other shows. Some events from the RSC's end-of-Stratford-season New Works Festival also make their way to Newcastle. In Tynan, there's an irony to Corin Redgrave playing critic and dramaturg Ken Tynan. Among his generation of Redgraves he's the one to achieve his finest work in his maturity. Tynan's flame burned early and the diaries adapted here by Richard Nelson and Colin Chambers were begun in 1971 when, at 43, he had a glorious past and little sense of a future. He was a brilliant, influential writer about theatre and celebrity, but could only write when he smoked and had lungs genetically disposed to collapse in the presence of nicotine. He also had a sexual obsession with spanking, raw sex and the joy of play as theatre's bases and liked high-stakes players, praising boxer Mohammed Ali's "flair, audacity, imagination, outrageous aplomb". Redgrave's deceptively laid-back stance is undermined by wry, rueful or pained expressions, his apparently colourless voice actually filled with muted tones (and his light grey suit subverted by bright tie and shirt - clock the patterned socks too). Essential for anyone interested in theatre, but also it's the tragedy of a great talent being thoroughly spanked by life. As are the characters in Zinnie Harris' 90-minute play Midwinter. Harris has links with both Traverse and Tron, and her play, set in an unidentified war-torn land - not hard to relate to ex-Yugoslavia - fits somewhere between the documentary events of Communicado's Zlata's Diary and the theatrical statement of Boilerhouse in The Bridge, seen at this year's Edinburgh Fringe. The play works on the borderland between individuals and representative
characters. But its stance is clear. In a world where identity's malleable,
Maud (Ruth Gemmell hitting an apt balance between personal feelings
and expressing a wider human state) looks for humanity through adopting
a silent child. Little is as it originally seems, herself included, and
values clash. The younger male characters are least well-drawn and the
brief, overt violence is a weak link in a dramatic chain that's otherwise
strong and gripping. Details and Box Office Numbers Plus Tynan 10-12 November The Spanish Golden Age at The People's Theatre 8-27 November in repertoire
- Tamar's Revenge, The Dog in the Manger, House of Desires and Pedro,
the Great Pretender. Midwinter and Nowhere to Belong at Live Theatre 2-6 November. Tickets: 0191 232 1232. Theatre listings >>
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