|
|
|
|
|
||
|
Articles
|
||
|
Articles |
The Best of This, That and the Other in 2005Dateline: 3rd January, 2006In an average season I file around 160 reviews for The Stage newspaper and other publications, now including British Theatre Guide which—since April 2005—has been giving me the rare opportunity to write freely without keeping a distracting eye on the word count. BTG also publishes my pieces as written, a heady experience for an old theatre hack like me, but which means I cannot pass the blame for my own errors and omissions on to the editorial assistants at the subs’ desks. I had my customary fill of theatre in 20-Oh-Five. But this was no average year, a fact which soon emerges as one embarks on the Yuletide pleasures of writing roundups and selecting ‘the Best of this and that’ for the various Theatre Awards. Take for example, ‘Best Actress’. One name usually stands out as a foregone conclusion. This year I can name at least six Bests, starting with the revival of Schiller’s Mary Stuart, which alone boasted no less than two rival tragediennes in leading roles. As I said in my BTG crit: “These performances seem certain to feature strongly in the upcoming Theatre Awards: Janet McTeer, a tall, golden-haired Amazonian with a lust for life as the Queen of Scots, and Harriet Walters as the embittered Virgin Queen dressed in the height of fashion.” Howsoever, just weeks earlier, after seeing Richard Eyre’s new version of Hedda Gabler, I had already told my BTG readers that “the slender, raven-haired Eve Best makes theatrical history with her standout performance in the title rôle, a headstrong, capricious monster, almost certain to feature in the annual roundup of best acting performances.” But three other actresses will stay just as long in my memory, led by the gorgeous Francesca Annis, who brought cool beauty and a transfixing vulnerability to her performance in John Osborne’s Epitaph for George Dillon. Rada graduate Andrea Riseborough made an astonishingly versatile and assured professional debut in A Brief History of Helen of Troy at the Soho, playing a ‘plain Jane’ teenager in drab casuals, who suddenly becomes a ravishing creature in flowing locks, heels and couture gown, which cruelly unsettles her widower Dad. Star potential—make a note of her name. And in the starriest performance of the year, Kristin Scott Thomas first fascinates the audience with her Dietrich-like cabaret number in a backless glittering sheath, then is transformed into a mysterious aristocratic lady of the manor, going through a harrowing identity crisis in Pirandello’s superbly revived As You Desire Me at the Playhouse—catch it while you still can. I suspect Simon Russell Beale and Kevin Spacey will do well in this season’s Awards. Alas I did not see Russell Beale’s Philanthropist at the Donmar. But I found his Macbeth at the Almeida last January an introspective worrier, a fretful chairbound character who finally slumps to his knees in submission to Macduff’s killer sword thrust. Half a decade ago at Stratford, Sam West had tellingly revealed the emotional and intellectual aspects of Richard II. However I remained unmoved and unconvinced by Spacey’s cool insolent reading at the Vic. When faced with Bolingbroke’s insurgency he offered us something of Maurice Sendak’s smirking Max, ruling the Wild Things with sudden bursts of anger, while never taking the dangers too seriously. For me the year’s Best Actor was David Oyelowo in Prometheus Bound at the new Sound studio theatre, not only one of our best black performers but also a gifted classical actor with a vocal style recalling the glory days of Olivier at the Vic. Twinkle-eyed Christopher Godwin gave a magic performance at the Arcola as Schnitzler’s eponymous hero Professor Bernhardi, also the leading performer in Mark Rosenblatt’s The Last Waltz season, and starring in one of three rarely seen plays by Shaw’s German-speaking contemporaries. More surprising, 30 years after making his name as a matinee idol at the RSC, Terence Wilton attained the tragic heights as Belarius, grand old man of Welsh Wales, in the unlikely setting of a Regent’s Park Open Air production of Cymbeline, showing him now more than ready to play the great Shakespearean parts from Lear to Falstaff. Finally—if you will indulge me—the great theatrical triumph of 2005 was Thea Sharrock’s incumbency at the Gate Theatre in London, first with her promenade staging of Fermin Cabal’s Tejas Verdes, an enthralling, almost poetic study of Pinochet’s notorious detention centre for Chilean dissidents; then a masterly ‘bear-pit’ production of Eugene O’Neill’s The Emperor Jones, the most ambitious since the Robeson movie, with the benefit of a 21 strong cast of Caribbeans, Southern Belles and their dandy beaux, sharpening O’Neill’s focus on black ambition and white power. John Thaxter
|
|
|
|