Therese a Mess

Well, I'm two for three this week, anyway.

Marianne Elliot's production of Therese Raquin at the National got very mixed reviews, and now I understand why. Nicholas Wright has written a deliciously Anglicized adaptation of Zola's first play. You can see how Zola's goal of showing people as they actually are was so revolutionary in his time.

The acting is first-rate as well. Patrick Kennedy is a delightfully inept as Camille; you're sorry to see him go after the first act, which he dominates verbally if not physically. Judy Parfitt is in fine form as his mother, and Ben Daniels and Charlotte Emerson as the adulterous leads are really rather good.

The first half of the show is much better than the second, and this has very little to do with the actors themselves or the script rather than with the staging. Elliot has interspersed all these sort of freeze frame moments in between the four acts of the play. A scrim comes down at the front of the stage, and the actors are illumined briefly in nonverbal moments. I loved the way this was done at the end of Act One, as Therese went to the bathroom, removed her top, and washed herself. Wonderfully symbolic, and very fitting with Zola's whole scheme.

I got concerned though at the end of Act Two. As Laurent and Therese kiss, signaling their engagement, the actors freeze as the scrim comes down and we hear the sounds of splashing water and Camille screaming "Stop her! Stop her!" Now on the one hand, this was a nice moment, as it signaled the guilt that underlay the lovers' official union, and cut against Laurent's account of Camille's dying words -- that he asked him to take care of his wife.

But the splashing sounds and Camille screaming have absolutely nothing to do with naturalism and everything to do with expressionism. I am hardly an aesthetic purist, I don't think it's necessarily a problem to mix different theatrical styles.

But Therese Raquin is all about the small moments. That's where its symbolism derives its greatest power. For instance, the domino game that ends Act One -- with Camille about to play -- is echoed at the start of Act Two, with Laurent taking his place (and the domino box similarly raised in his hands). There's the painting of Camille, with its garish green glow, which hangs on the wall throughout the first half, is moved off stage for the wedding night in Act Three, but appears again in Act Four when the door to Mme. Raquin's room is left open and Camille stares out from the interior at the back of the stage.

These touches are great, but unfortunately they are overwhelmed by special effects. Yes, that's right, Marianne Elliot has managed to make a groundbreaking naturalistic play all about the special effects, at least in its second half, as the newly married couple is overcome with guilt and shame.

I wouldn't have a problem with special effects in a Zola play if they worked -- as they did, operating minimally for maximum effect, in the first half. But in the second half, they really do take over. And in most annoying fashion: Laurent describes hearing a hammering sound in his head, which the audience hears for a good twenty minutes before and after his remark. (I for one needed an aspirin after.)

In the most excessive moment of the night, as Therese waits for Laurent to come up after their wedding, she has a vision of him in a darkened, windy passage. This is formed by having an enormous wall of the set (some three stories high) swing open into the room, with all the requisite sound and lighting effects to indicate a windstorm. The moment is pure expressionism, and about as far from Zola as you can get.

The other big problem with Elliot's approach is that some of the moments later in the show ended up verging on camp. Perhaps this is because many of the elements of the play have been so often repeated since Zola pioneered them, in cheesy movies and soap operas as well, so that the tropes are all too familiar. The live music, very heavy on violins, was so constant in the second half (except during the hammering sound) that it amped up the cheese effect. This was most notable in the sequence with Mme. Raquin after her stroke, particularly when she started to write out a message with her fingers. The moment was not so much suspenseful as ludicrous -- not what Zola had in mind, nor I should think Ms. Elliot's intention, either.

I am looking forward to more Nicholas Wright, anyway. His new play The Reporter opens soon -- once again, in the Lyttleton. Have to go and have a butcher's at that.

Keeping Up

So I am going to see show number 3 for the week tonight (Saturday): Therese Raquin, again at the National, again at the Lyttleton. I'll try not to set my expectations too high, they weren't too high for Caroline or Children of Men. And we'll see what happens, and I'll write about it here.

That was why I set this blog up in the first place after all, to talk about what I'm seeing, doing, experiencing in London. And seeing such shows (and films) was a big incentive for moving here in the first place.

Probably won't always go on as long as I did on Caroline -- that show is a rare gem, and had such a powerful impact on me -- up there with Katie Mitchell's Uncle Vanya at the Young Vic from 1998. (And you know it's serious if I mention it in the same breath as Vanya).

That aside sounded really pretentious, didn't it? I will have to explain about Vanya at some point, and all will be clear (and perhaps not quite as pretentious).

Astonishing Week

All in all it's been an astonishing week. I came back from the States on Sunday morning, stayed in sick Sunday night, went to see a show Monday night, worked Tuesday to Thursday, saw a film tonight, working tomorrow and another show tomorrow night.

One of my professional theater friends (since I'm doing this semi-anonymously, let's call her "Kate") said I should go to the theater three times a week. I wasn't able to do that right when I moved here, getting settled at work, life, etc. But I'm going to try in the New Year.

I cheated a little by going to a film tonight. I wanted to see Mark Ravenhill's solo piece which has a splashy interview in Time Out but as I found out by going to the Bush Theatre Web site -- does not actually have a performance until Tuesday (the first preview).

Instead I managed to get a seat to see Children of Men, largely on the http://frankswildlunch.blogspot.com/2007/01/i-just-started-reading.html">advice of a blogger-playwright with good judgment and refreshing honesty. (I get teary-eyed over aesthetic brilliance myself, even when reading a review after seeing something, but I've never fessed up to it before.)

The ad campaign when it came out in October really put me off, I'm not entirely sure why now. Usually Clive Owen and Julianne Moore would be enough to draw me in, but there was something too sci-fi-ey about it. Instead what Alfonso Cuaron has done is diced and chopped our contemporary anxieties and laid them out on the screen in a film that manages to be extraordinarily harrowing and continuously original while maintaining its faith in humanity and even a wickedly fitting (and British) sense of humor. Michael Caine is a hoot as a hippie pothead, and Clive Owen does his intense brooding thing, making you glad in every frame he didn't get suckered into that Bond business.

It's rare that a film or a play absolutely astonishes me, but it happened tonight.

Change Come Fast and Change Come Slow

It's all the more remarkable because I was astonished by the show I saw on Monday. At the very last minute, I managed to get an eighth-row center seat to Caroline, or Change, which wrapped up its run at the National's Lyttleton Theatre on Thursday.

I hadn't seen a show in the Lyttleton before -- I've only been to the Cottesloe to see The Overwhelming, which was all too underwhelming. The seats at the Cottesloe are sort-of fold down bench like things which I found utterly uncomfortable. The seats at the Lyttleton, by contrast, are plush and padded, with lovely armrests in between.

The seats are a minor point, because I would have quickly forgotten my discomfort, so captivating was the production. They'd managed to bring in Tonya Pinkins as Caroline and George Wolfe to direct an otherwise British cast (as far as I can tell from the programme notes).

I am so disappointed I didn't see it sooner, because I totally would have gone again. The only real faults I can note are that the first scene does go on a bit long, but it does go a long way toward establishing the tedium of Caroline's daily routine in the Gellmans' basement (the scene wasn't tedious, just a bit long).

A bigger issue was the occasional incomprehensibility of the lyrics. Judging by crosstalk during the interval and after the show, it was a bigger problem for British people than for me (being well-seasoned with American black, Jewish, and Louisianan accents and phraseology). But it was something of a shame that Tony Kushner's poetic words weren't always understood.

I've been harsh on Kushner in the past, I have very mixed feelings about Angels in America -- particularly the second play, which I still think goes on a bit too long and overindulges in the characters. And I had stayed away from Caroline originally because I figured it would either be horribly sentimental (being based, as it is, on his relationship with his childhood maid) or else stridently bracing and hopeless in its critique of American life (a la Belize in Angels).

But I was wrong. What Kushner has done in Caroline is no less than his highest accomplishment. The boy's relationship with Caroline is insubstantial but weighted with indirect implication. Caroline herself has a difficult relationship with her teenage daughter Emmie, who turns out not to be shiftless, but instead up to her own thing.

The play (I'd call it a libretto, but there are few moments that aren't sung) is profoundly concerned with loss. The boy, Noah, has lost his mother to cancer, and his father, who has quickly remarried, has not yet recovered, losing himself in his daily clarinet practice. The loss of JFK, and the hope and promise he represented -- however flawed and incomplete -- is beautifully expressed.

Then there is the loss of Caroline herself, left behind in Lake Charles as the civil rights movement moves on without improving her lot. Caroline finally vents her frustration in a soaring, angry blues number addressed directly to God. Pinkins performed it at the Tonys, and it requires amazing range of voice and emotion. She blames herself for hoping, for expecting too much, too soon, and she wants to be set free from the rage that has resulted. The last line really stuck with me: "Don't let my sorrow / Make evil of me."

As soon as that number ends, Caroline's kids come in, Emmie and the two younger boys, dressed for church. Emmie hands Caroline her hat, and Caroline grabs her and hugs her close. It's a very powerful moment, and I knew then how the show was going to end (or at least how I hoped it would, for maximum emotional and aesthetic impact. And I was immensely delighted to find that Kushner had written this moment exactly as it appeared onstage in a stage direction in the book).

Because the show isn't just about these things, it's also about the generation gap within African American communities and families. Caroline's generation is of the 40s, all too ready to settle down with her handsome man when he's back from the war. Emmie's generation is of the 60s, when the civil rights movement of the 50s was already (by 1963) giving way to new movement less trusting of nonviolence, more given to direct (and forceful) confrontation.

Thus it was perfectly fitting at the end to have Caroline hand the stage over to Emmie, who reveals what she was really up to while her mother thought she was shiftless. And shows us that while change comes fast and changes comes slow, it does come, sooner or later, even to the most remote corners of the republic, all the way down to the Gulf of Mexico.

It's an astonishingly beautifully written play, and I mean that in terms of its language and its characters. Kushner has managed to write poor black characters who sound authentic without verging into dialect or stereotype. Rather, he's refreshingly fresh, even with small touches: Dotty, Caroline's friend, is going to night school, and dresses like a bobby-soxer, a few years behind the times and many more past her age, given she's in her 30s.

The lyrics, too, are a rich black/Jewish/Louisiana patois. Jeanine Tesori's score drives the play's roots home, with her joyously inventive mixes of blues, klezmer, and Motown. In the end, Caroline, or Change is a sad play -- the gap between Caroline and Noah will never be bridged -- but also a hopeful one, as the sun rises on Emmie. It's an essentially American play, and one that leaves me looking forward to whatever Kushner does next.