Jonno Davies in A Clockwork Orange
Grompky great shooms to the bratchified milicent viddy the kovvy.
This might sound like gobbledy-gook to viewers unfamiliar with “A Clockwork Orange”—Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel, Stanley Kubrick’s 1971 film, or both. Even fans of these works might well wonder, is this stage Clockwork Orange another one of those British imports with indecipherable accents? It turns out that the characters do speak English; at least mid-way in, when the street toughs are taken off the street. But the decipherable English is not all that more palatable than the patois.
The evening starts with four stage teenagers (whose teenage years are clearly long behind them) entering in black jeans, black undershirts, white braces—suspenders, to you—and black eye-makeup. The droogs, as they describe themselves in Burgess-speak, are met by another quartet—these with white undershirts and black braces—and they indulge in what seems to be a dystopian Jets v. Sharks, only without Lenny’s music or Jerry’s finger-snaps or any of that “sperm-to-worm” lingo. But plenty of eye makeup.
The cast of A Clockwork Orange
The head droog is fifteen(?)-year-old Alex deLarge. He is the center of the plot and the center of the evening, and Jonno Davies gives what might in any view be termed a remarkable performance. Mr. Davies, who was acclaimed when this production was revived in London in February at a 200-seat neighborhood theatre—the Park, in Finsbury Park—gives a muscular, menacing performance as rounded as his biceps. He is surrounded by U.S. actors here, although that’s hard to tell between the dialect, the accents and the amplification.
Burgess (1917-93) wrote his own stage adaptation, back in 1987. (I had the privilege to manage the 1984 U.S. transfer of the RSC production of Cyrano de Bergerac, starring Derek Jacobi, and I must say that Burgess’ adaptation of Rostand was considerably more mellifluous.) Clockwork, now at New World Stages, was directed by Alexandra Spencer-Jones for her Action to the Word Theatre. It made its London debut at the Soho Theatre in 2012 and has been touring ever since, with Davies joining up in 2014 in Norway.
We know this is A Clockwork Orange, by the way, because there is a big bowl of big oranges on a platform upstage.
The play follows the novel: a band of street-toughs menaces everyone until their leader (Alex) is thrown into jail. He volunteers for a top-secret aversion therapy, the Ludovico Technique. This brainwashes him into lamblike pacificity, until it wears off and he turns back to (ab)normal. There’s also a whole lot of Beethoven’s Ninth running through his mind and the evening, usually set against harsh rock, and poor Ludwig (Ludovico?) has a hard time of it. The action, such as it is, builds to what one might call The Aerobic Bunny Rabbit Nightmare Ballet.
After about eighty-five of the not-so-brisk minutes, Mr. Davies yells out “I’ve had enough!” So have we all, dear sloosy-creechy-grompky boy, so have we all.
Aleksander Varadian, Beethoven (top) and Jonno Davies in A Clockwork Orange
On the bright side, let it be said that we haven’t seen anything like it since Squonk.
Anthony Burgess’s “A Clockwork Orange” opened September 25, 2017 and continues through January 6, 2018 at New World Stages