London—Emma Rice, now ending her short stay as artistic director of Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre, is celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of the Summer of Love. (Yes, 50 years have flown by for those old enough to remember it.) Whether love is an abiding theme in current productions here is questionable. At a time when Great Britain is reeling from incipient Brexit demands, other intense emotional tugs prevail.
Salomé — National Theatre’s Olivier. While standing on a runway into the audience, an older woman identified as Nameless (Olwen Fouéré) darts ominous imprecations at the sky. She’s fearful that Salomé, or Salomé so-called (Isabella Nefar), who sometimes grasps handfuls of sand she lets fall meaningfully (meaninglessly?), is up to no good in the court presided over by Herod (Paul Chahidi).
She’s right to be concerned. Herod gets word that Iokanaan, the Zealot (the buff Ramzi Choukair), more familiarly known in these parts as John the Baptist, is stirring up discontent and needs to be stopped. Salomé takes on the duty but without shedding seven veils. Afterward, someone comments that no one will ever remember the carpenter and the zealot, since history is written by the strong. Strong, it’s implied with easy irony, the carpenter and the zealot are not.
Yael Farber’s work (no, this isn’t Oscar Wilde’s take on the matter), which she directed, is more ritual than play as it includes various Biblical passages and unfolds with Adam Cork’s music waxing ominously plangent just about throughout. (Susan Hilferty designed the virtually empty stage set and the period costumes.)
There’s a great deal of stylized movement (Ami Shulman, the movement director), much of it slow and meant to lend sobriety to the occasion. It does but not with a noticeable abundance of religious resonance.
For the record, Abaddon the Executioner (Aidan Kelly) performs a stylized beheading, which means nothing dripping blood is carried triumphantly around, as is so often depicted in Renaissance paintings.
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Romeo and Juliet – Globe Theatre. There are two schools of directing. There are the directors who examine a script for its innate values and strive to maximize them. On the other hand, there are directors who appropriate a script and overlay it with their self-satisfied distinguishing directorial notions.
Daniel Kramer, who directed this Romeo and Juliet, belongs to the latter category. Indeed, he’s presenting not William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet but Daniel Kramer’s Romeo and Juliet.
This is a Romeo and Juliet unlike any previously seen. Instead of delivering, as the second quarto announces, “The Most Excellent and lamentable Tragedie, of Romeo and Juliet,” Kramer has uncorked “The Most Excellent and lamentable Comedie, of Romeo and Juliet.” And yes, “lamentable” is appropriate here.
Kramer opens his traged—check that, his comedy—with cast members in white face doing a kabuki rock routine complete with red streamers flying, (Are they meant to foreshadow the eventual blood-letting?). He goes on to flaunt, also in white face (as are all cast members) a sullen Romeo (Edward Hogg) and an almost-14-year-old Juliet (Kirsty Bushell) so sexually precocious that he might as well have retitled the play Romeo and Lolita.
And on he goes for the first three acts, massaging the text for giggles and guffaws. The egregious choices are too many to list, but a few will suffice. At the Capulet’s ball, those attending in outlandish costumes dance to The Village People’s “YMCA.” Many in the audience sing along and provide the familiar gestures. Lord Capulet (Gareth Snook) leads around a floppy dog (no actor credited). For the balcony scene—perhaps the most romantic love scene ever written—there’s no balcony, but there are two leads making risible hay with the lines. Incidentally, Friar Lawrence (Harish Patel) is a Muslim.
When the star-crossed events of the final two acts follow all the chicanery, Kramer has trouble establishing the right temperament. Actually, he doesn’t establish it, and something poetically beautiful just ends dully.
No actors can be blamed for this tragedie of a tragedie. They’re only doing what they’ve been directed to do, but, oh, is it nearly criminally misguided! Emma Rice may be honoring the season of love at her post, but Kramer is more visibly honoring a season of lust. That’s Brexit for you.
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Common – National Theatre’s Olivier. Not infrequently, plays by English playwrights are considered too English to be exported. Often, that proves untrue, e.g. Alan Bennett’s The History Boys.
One that looks as if it’s unlikely to visit many foreign shores is DC Moore’s Common, also at the Olivier. Moore is intrigued by the gradual shift of common agricultural lands into fewer and fewer hands. Although the change, a process known as enclosure, occurred over centuries, he concentrates on a period in the late 18th- and earlier 19th-centuries when the harsh activities cruelly intensified.
Moore introduces Mary (Anne-Marie Duff) and Laura (Cush Jumbo), through whose eyes the rural population is gradually but inexorably forced into the cities in time for the industrial revolution to get underway. Some of the incidents are grittily realistic. (Fight directors Rachel Bown-Williams and Ruth Cooper-Brown of RC-ANNIE Ltd had much to organize). Others incident are grandly stylized. Much here, as directed by Headlong artistic director Jeremy Herrin (this is a Headlong co-production) is abstruse, but much—as Stephen Warbeck’s atmospheric music plays and supernumeraries abound—is also affecting. And not just for the historical content.
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Lady Day at Emerson’s Bar & Grill – Wyndham’s. After something of a delay, Audra McDonald has opened here and is continuing to give her phenomenal Tony-winning performance as the late, beloved and troubled Billie Holiday. This is no mere impersonation of a singer on a night when booze takes her over. It’s a case of full possession by one singer of another. The rendition of Holiday’s signature song “Strange Fruit” is worth the admission price.
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Working – Southwark Playhouse. Adapted in 1977 by Stephen Schwartz and Nina Faso from Studs Terkel’s bestseller, this top-drawer revue features songs by several incisive songwriters on aspects of often blue-collar careers. Schwartz updated his musical a decade ago and, given the way the working world ceaselessly changes, could do so again here and there. For the European premiere, Luke Sheppard muscularly directs and Fabian Aloise athletically choreographs a topping cast of 12.