The summer of culture continues . . . with theatre

Sunday, 8 July

Nothing says London like theatre. In truth that statement should be expanded to the whole of the British Isles, which includes the Republic of Ireland's prodigious contributions. Theatre is deeply embedded in the national character. Elite Ivy League students in the States want to start-up the next Facebook or join the street gang of looters in private equity. Here every Ox-bridge student has a burning ambition to be on the stage. (If that doesn't happen, they will join the Ivy Leaguers on the alternate route of course.)

Maybe it's just having Shakespeare as a native son, but I suspect Shakespeare is the result of the national passion rather than the cause, as the roots of English theatre are very long. More than a few years ago, Bob and I went to York to see the Medieval Mystery Plays the city is working to revive as a regular festival. The plays date to the 14th century when city guilds and confraternities took on a particular Biblical story and using wagons paraded through the city performing the tale at various stops for Corpus Christie. Many other cities had traditional Mystery Play cycles to celebrate various Holy Days. The Reformation put a stop to these Popish spectacles, but York's plays have been revived off and on over the past hundred years. When we saw them, community groups took on the role of the medieval guilds to produce a specific tale. Carts were used to travel to staging areas around the city where the cart would be turned into a set — often a magnificently elaborate set — with a few flips of lids and side panels, and the play would be performed before moving on to the next staging area. This year the pageant is returning to a mid-20th century model with an outdoor theatre set up in a central park on the site of the ruins of York's medieval abbey with an afternoon and an evening showtime lasting throughout August. York is so crowded with tourists in the summer, it will probably be a sell out.

All of this is to admit that we have become very lax in our theatre attendance so far this year. I can't even say what "must sees" we have missed because I haven't even been paying attention. This summer's cultural barrage has given us a chance to make up for our insufficient interest. One of the problems with theatre is that the niche theatres sell out production runs to their dues-paying members and friends before the general public even hears about the season schedule. A second problem is that the "must-see" pre-opening projection occasionally winds up as the "why would you want to waste time on that" post-opening review.  Not a good feeling with the steady rise in the price of tickets over the past few years.

Crow was a collaboration
between illustrator Leonard Baskin
and poet Ted Hughes.

Our first theatre foray does come under this particular cloud. The Greenwich and Docklands International Festival production of a dance and reading performance of Ted Hughes's Crow with the South African Handspring Puppet Company who did the puppetry for War Horse was pegged as a winner. Sadly the initial buzz from the personal theatre bloggers, who are sometimes more accurate than the professionals, all hated it. The professionals said it was a worthy effort, blah, blah, not completely successful, blah, blah taking on too much, blah, blah, blah. We were indebted to the bloggers who said: the theatre is terrible. Yes, that was true. The Greenwich Borough Hall Municipal Auditorium, much like a high school auditorium with a much too small stage area. And they said: who thought a black background behind black puppets (they are crows after all) was a good idea if you want to see anything beyond the third row. So we sat in the front row.

Ted Hughes

Bob and I did not hate it at all. We actually thought it was quite interesting. The dancers/actors were excellent. The puppets were fantastic. Some were figures manipulated by sticks; some were large winged costumes worn by the dancers. The performance lasted about an hour, reduced by a quarter after the first negative previews, which was just about right for sitting through something where my senses were stimulated while my brain had mostly no idea what was going on. The musical score was eerie and wonderful by Leafcutter John, who is apparently well known and well regarded in the electronic music sphere. Spending an evening outside the cultural comfort zone is always illuminating in some way. I still haven't found a way to appreciate modern dance, but I find I am much more intrigued by modern music. And I still wish I could read poetry without my brain clicking off after the second line to wonder what that could possibly mean, and maybe I should check my e-mail now.

Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley

Next we were off to see a production by one of our very favourite theatre companies, Shared Experience, who do plays adapted from the lives and works of writers. One of the gold star most remarkable theatre experiences of a life time was Shared Experience's After Mrs Rochester, a play that conflates the troubled life of Jean Rhys  with the story of Jane Eyre. Rhys wrote the novel The Wide Sargasso Sea, a pre-quel to Jane Eyre with a plot explaining how Mrs Rochester traveled from her birthplace in the West Indies and ended up in the attic somewhere in the Yorkshire moors. Throughout the play, a mad woman lies writhing and moaning on the floor of the stage.

Percy Bysshe Shelley

Nothing could be as good as After Mrs Rochester, but this year's Mary Shelley was excellent. Teenaged Mary, daughter of radical philosopher William Godwin and feminist Mary Wollstonecraft, who died at Mary's birth, runs off with dreamy, and married, poet Percy Bysshe Shelley to live in penury until his title and inheritance come through, and of course to write Frankenstein. The suicide of Mary's elder half-sister Fanny, the issue of Mary Wollstonecraft's dalliance with Gilbert Imlay, an American land speculator who did her wrong. And the dalliance of Mary's younger step-sister Claire (née Jane) Clairmont with Lord Byron who did her wrong are subplots. An interesting family. They are a physical theatre company with a limited cast and short scenes that move very rapidly, so it is easy to get caught up in the constant action on stage. Among the audience was quite a large class of teenage students. When Shelley steals a kiss with Claire Clairmont the entire class of teenaged girls drew in their breath and gasped at once. It was pretty funny.

F. Scott Fitzgerald

Finally for a third literary theatre experience, and one that will be added to the gold star list which includes After Mrs Rochester, was the eight hour production of Gatz. The one where The Great Gatsby is read in its entirety over six hours. The extra 2 hours are the intervals and dinner break. As the book is read, by a modern day office clerk trying to get his computer to boot up, the office workers begin to act out the events of the novel using the book's dialogue as their script. The idea suggests the making of a disaster, but not to worry, the performance was riveting, even in an old London theatre without comfortable seats or leg room. A New York theatre company called Elevator Repair Service came up with the idea in 1999 according to the programme notes, but there were copyright issues with the Fitzgerald estate. A few years later, ELS was given rights, and since 2004/2005 Gatz has been playing, first in Europe (but not London), then in the States, in New York in 2010, and now brought to London as part of the London International Festival of Theatre.

Gatsby's Long Island:
North Shore of Nassau County and Queens

I have always had a special place in my heart for The Great Gatsby. When I first read the book, I was in high school on Long Island not far in miles (but very far in family income) from the Eggs, East and West, and not at all far from the Valley of the Ashes which was the site of the 1964 World's Fair when I was reading Gatsby. These were real places. As a teenager I thought Long Island was the worst place in the world, yet here was this famous book, a book everyone was supposed to know and read, and it took place on Long Island. Most great works of literature are read by people much too young and inexperienced to make any sense of what the story is really all about. Perhaps the worst sin is that they are read by people who may not know what is going on but they do know great literature must always be taken seriously.  I have read Gatsby three times, and quite possibly I never laughed once through those readings, but by the first interval of Gatz, that would be 2:05 hours of reading, I discovered The Great Gatsby is a comic novel because I had just laughed my way through the play with the rest of the audience. Yes of course ultimately, we have a tragic tale of obsession and treachery and loss, but getting there is a comedy of manners, the Yalies and the Southern Belles and the hangers-on enabling each others worst qualities. As the reviewers and the programme notes remind us, the similarities between Fitzgerald's 1920s Jazz Age and the pre-financial crisis Noughties are starkly apparent. Our reader/narrator Nick Carraway has come to New York from the boring Midwest to make his fortune as a  bond salesman. That line got a good laugh as you would expect.