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Articles
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2006: the Theatrical Year in London (The National, the RSC and the Barbican)Dateline: 27th December, 2006Under Nick Hytner, the powerhouse that is the Royal National Theatre goes from strength to strength. Once again, it has had a tremendous year with major productions in the two main houses and interesting experimentation in the Cottesloe. The Life of Galileo by Bertolt Brecht sounds rather forbidding for the average viewer with a three-hour running time, but with Simon Russell Beale in the lead role, proved to be memorable. He managed to double this with a leading role opposite Alex Jennings in a modern version of Ben Jonson's The Alchemist. This was extremely funny in parts but not entirely consistent. Late in the year, Caroline or Change, reviewed under musicals, and Conor McPherson's The Seafarer, a great competitor for best new play, proved Hytner's knack for picking winners. The Voysey Inheritance reminded us that Harley Granville Barker is an unjustly neglected playwright who can still speak to us today, thanks to a well-directed revival from Peter Gill. Surprisingly, this play managed a second revival in 2006 in a version by David Mamet in New York. Katie Mitchell had two goes at adaptations. Using Martin Crimp's translation but far too much hocus-pocus, The Seagull rather lost many viewers. By contrast, her highly unusual radio play/home movie version of Virginia Woolf's novel The Waves proved very imaginative and might well win Miss Mitchell some avant-garde Best Director award. The other major adaptation of the year was Marianne Elliott's steamy view of Zola's Thérèse Raquin which combines naturalism with a little something extra. Amongst the more adventurous, experimental work in the Cottesloe, Burn, Chatroom and Citizenship by Deborah Gearing, Enda Walsh, Mark Ravenhill was a brave and well acted attempt to bring youth into the National and succeeded thanks to the quality of the writing and its ability to communicate with younger viewers. The Overwhelming by J T Rogers, about genocide in Rwanda, was also a revelation and one of those plays that remains in the memory long after one has left the theatre. The adventure did not always work, with two plays about London, Samuel Adamson's Southwark Fair and David Eldridge's Market Boy, telling us quite a lot about the city and some of its characters but neither really working as staged dramas. The RSC has been engaged in its Shakespearean marathon in Stratford and London has so far only had a small sample of which the excellent Much Ado About Nothing, set in Cuba and once again directed by Marianne Elliott, as a fine taste of things to come. Early in the year, the company offered us a season of enjoyable Shakespearean comedies of which the best were The Comedy of Errors directed by Nancy Meckler and Greg Doran's Midsummer Night's Dream. The very best that they had to offer though was the London transfer of Dominic Cooke's completely gripping version of Arthur Miller's The Crucible. With Iain Glen playing John Proctor and Elaine Cassidy as Abigail Williams this was one of the year's highlights and bodes well for the Director's new job running the Royal Court. In addition, Londoners had the opportunity to see The Gunpowder Plot season of plays at the Trafalgar Studios, which demonstrated that while there were other playwrights writing at the time of Shakespeare and possibly collaborating with him, they could not really compete. The RSC also gave us new writing with a social conscience at Soho including David Greig's look at American imperialism The American Pilot, which is currently playing in New York, Debbie Tucker Green's short but witty Trade and the highly politicised but insightful Breakfast with Mugabe by Fraser Grace. Finally, the RSC came up with one of those all-day extravaganzas that only they or the National can manage with its six-hour adaptation of The Canterbury Tales under no fewer than three directors, far the most distinguished of whom is Greg Doran. Inevitably, it was patchy but at its best, it gave a real feel of Chaucerian England and a good few laughs as well. The Barbican now plays an unusual role in theatre introducing London to a wide range of high quality imports from around the world. There was also an Anglo-Russian angle now that Cheek By Jowl have taken up residence at the centre. Declan Donnellan and Nick Ormerod always offer good value for money with their adventurous takes on the classics. This year, the Barbican offered us Twelfth Night and King Lear in Russian and Middleton and Rowley's The Changeling in English, all well worth seeing. Children were not forgotten either with Mark Ravenhill's relatively clean new version of Dick Whittington and Robert Lepage's inevitably quirky one-man look at Hans Christian Andersen, The Andersen Project. That other In-Yer-Face expert, the late Sarah Kane, was seen at her best in Thomas Ostermeier's calmly paced but deeply meaningful Zerbombt, the German word for Blasted. Philip Fisher
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