Director-proof Much Ado met its match in Mark Rylance

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Gregory Doran, James Earl Jones, Mark Rylance, Much Ado About Nothing, Old Vic, staging, Vanessa Redgrave, William Shakespeare

On the most basic level Much Ado About Nothing at the Old Vic should have been absolutely brilliant if for nothing else than the two leads. James Earl Jones and Vanessa Redgrave are arguably two of the best Shakespearean actors of their generation from either side of the Atlantic. They also clearly enjoy working with one another as this project seems sparked by their previous stint in the West End in Driving Miss Daisy, so chemistry should not have been a problem either. Yet the production got slated by the critics and it was indeed disappointing. The high point for me was that at the matinee I saw Vanessa Redgrave was off and the excellent Penelope Beaumont was in her stead.

After seeing Gregory Doran’s Richard II at the RSC (review to be published in Shakespeare Bulletin, possible scratchings to come after I’ve finished that) and The Winter’s Tale in Sheffield (musings here), to come back to mediocre Shakespeare was dull in the extreme. And that was largely the problem with Much Ado: it was exceedingly dull and lacklustre. Without seeing it multiple times (and since I didn’t take notes), I can’t comment on nuances within the production but there were several things that were worth noting in the staging.

The director seemed to make no compromises to the fact that he was no longer at the Globe’s open air space with its square stage in close proximity with a portion of its audience standing in the yard. Mark Rylance’s designer had provided a set that was a polished wooden surface, doors that opened at the back like a large aircraft hanger and a square canopy that stood centre stage crafted from the same polished wood as the rest of the set. No doubt due to the presence of Jones, Rylance had set it on or near a US Air Force base during World War II (ish), which turned Benedick, Don Pedro and their comrades – including Don John, Borachio and Conrade – into USAF officers. On a logical basis, this makes no sense given the wars are over at the beginning of Shakespeare’s play.

Shakespeare himself is also key – although the director loves Shakespeare so much that he thinks the playwright’s actually Edward de Vere. Which may explain the dismal use of text (or not). Having both worked with directors and observed the rehearsals of others (see piece on David Thacker’s rehearsals here) who are meticulous in their attention to text, Rylance’s method was blatantly obviously one that had little connection with the words other than that his actors said their lines. No nuance was pulled out of the script, little emotion that wasn’t provided through technique (i.e., faked) was present in the delivery and almost every scene contained extraneous background business that distracted from what was being said, rather than added to it (which is one of the best indicators, I find, that the text has been worked with only on the most superficial of levels). For example, when the audience is supposed to be finding out why Don John is so unpleasant, characters were scurrying around upstage placing chairs, moving furniture, and just walking across the stage on the pretext of setting up the next scene (the revels), preventing the audience’s concentration on the important dialogue taking place downstage. In well-staged productions, this scene change happens between scenes but in Rylance’s the eye was completely distracted by the business to the point that I wasn’t listening to the words; the text was superfluous to the action rather than the action coming out of the text. This happened throughout the production.

As touched on before, the setting was also layered on to Shakespeare’s script rather than being an organic part of it. Yes, there needs to be a military-infused element to it but very specific questions need to be asked about the society in which the play takes place, not least of which are those dealing with ideas of patriarchy, honour and male attitudes to women. These can be difficult concepts for a contemporary audience to comprehend – despite the fact that women are still disadvantaged in the workplace and domestic abuse, both physical and mental, is still present – because as a society we no longer overtly (key word: overtly) tolerate the idea that women are property and a woman’s chastity linked to male concepts of honour. Productions that succeed in drawing out these elements are often those that place the play in a society that parallels the action of the play, for example John Barton’s 1976 British Raj setting and Gregory Doran’s 2002 Sicilian omerta-infused 2002 productions. Doran’s in particular highlighted the notion of women as property with the result a particularly violent rebuttal of Hero by not only Claudio but Leonato and an Antonio who menacingly threatened Claudio with a switchblade. I have written about it at length in my thesis and in the shorter article “Much Ado, Sicilian Style” (available here), but essentially Leonato’s language in the church scene is unpleasant in the extreme as he threatens his daughter with death because she has sullied the family’s honour – there is no room for doubt in Leonato’s head that his daughter could be slandered; he believes the men, not the women. None of this was apparent in Rylance’s production largely because the setting was not a society associated with this mindset; Leonato paced and yelled and circled the large wooden object in the middle of the stage, but his shouting was over-compensating for an incomprehension of Shakespeare’s text (it goes back to lack of work on the script).

In short, Rylance’s directorial style was clearly lazy with too much movement and seemingly no work done on the script. When Jones did get his teeth into it, he began to soar – but those moments were rare and were just that: moments. Penelope Beaumont rocked it, though – very strong, assertive and funny.

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Fences by August Wilson at the Duchess Theatre, London, 25 July 2013

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Arthur Miller, August Wilson, Duchess Theatre, Fences, Lenny Henry, Paulette Randall, Tanya Moodie, William Shakespeare

I think the first thing to say about Paulette Randall’s stunning production of August Wilson’s Fences is that it is historic in one – possibly more than one – important way. Although the production began life at Bath’s Theatre Royal, its transfer into the West End makes her the first black woman to have EVER directed a play in the West End. (I’m also currently wondering whether this is the first time an August Wilson play has made it to the West End as well.)

Lenny Henry has – rightly – been praised for his performance as Troy, which I have to say is a monumental part and the time, energy, lines, physicality of it puts me in mind of the joke about Richard Burbage telling William Shakespeare to never do anything like that to him again after Richard III, who is also almost never off stage. But along with Lenny Henry’s tour de force stands that of the rest of the cast – each and every one of them turned in finely nuanced performances which I wish I could capture and bottle, or at least describe. Facial expressions, body language, and – in the case of Tanya Moodie’s Rose – a stillness as she watched events unfold around her, sometimes standing in the shadows on the other side of the screen door (the set was the front porch and yard of a modest house in Pittsburgh – and, speaking as someone from that part of Appalachia, the front of that house was very familiar).

Henry’s already tackled Othello, but with this Troy I would like to see him give King Lear a whirl. Troy’s journey is one that is not unfamiliar in African-American (and, as I see in news reports, also in the black British experience): a troubled past with crime figuring heavily in his early life, but by the time we – as audience – meet Troy he’s turned his life around and has held down a steady job and been married to Rose for 18 years. A core of disappointment eats away at Troy because he was never able to play professional baseball, something he puts down to the color barrier and which Rose strikingly says is because he had been too old by the time he got out of prison. Whatever the reason – and both are more than plausible – Troy is haunted by his failed dream.

There is nothing so viscerally raw in American drama as the failure of the American dream – Arthur Miller’s plays are infused with the consequences (think Willy Loman) and  Stephen Sondheim’s musical Assassins is about the extremes of what happens when people can’t get the prize purportedly offered by the American dream. One of Troy’s tragedies is that he stops his son from being recruited by a college football team – which would have been his ticket out of the working class environment with the chance of a college education. When he messes up his relationship with his wife, he is a truly broken man. Lenny Henry played the arc beautifully, beginning as a highly engaging and likable man to someone who nearly beats his son with a baseball bat.

Baseball and fences. Two other things that recur in the play. The American dream is predicated on home ownership and that home has a white picket fence around it. There was no Tom Sawyer moment with the fence that Troy is perpetually building, although it would not have been out of place. (Ignoring the racial implications of Mark Twain’s work here.) The baseball nuances I feel didn’t resonate very well with the audience this afternoon (the power of three strikes you’re out within the context of the play didn’t seem to raise the tension for those around us, although I was horrified; my knowledge of the Pittsburgh Pirates today as a multi-racial team made it difficult to hear Troy dismiss them as a white team). But you replace football with baseball and you’ve got the same analogy – it’s one of the ways (albeit highly unlikely to succeed) that children from underprivileged backgrounds can escape – and that is one of the ways I think the play speaks to a contemporary British audience. That and the ways in which we see Troy as both a human being and one whose race has clearly stopped him from trying for the American dream in full, despite at least attaining home ownership.

What I look forward to is having a conversation about August Wilson with someone who knew him very well. And talking about the ways in which his plays have become important to British theatrical life. To be continued (although possibly in the book)(when I manage to get a book deal and write it). In the meantime, I want – no, probably need is better – to see it again.