I sleep heavily in the country, and I am a poor dreamer--that is, I don't often have dreams that I remember, let alone that are amusing or vivid when I wake.
Last night, though, after a seafood feast with La Caterina and one of her sisters, I had a doozy.
I dreamed that I was asleep, and woken by music. Live music. I came to myself, at a gala where bishops and archbishops were walking past me, and a kindly Cardinal, clearly seeing I was at the right event (I was casually dressed; the lay people were in evening dress) extended a hand, beckoned me to a seat next to him, where, among a panoply of Roman Catholic dignitaries, including Pope Francis, I watched a performance of, of all things, Chess.
Somehow or other, I came adrift from my friend the Cardinal (Leo McKern, in Shoes of the Fisherman, I believe), and ended up in quiet area, where I resumed sleeping.
Until the lights came on, and actors moved in for the second act. One of them signaled me to move, before the big second act number got started.
I left, covering my inappropriate presence with a comic bit of business, and got a good laugh. Several actors thought I was a directorial innovation, and congratulated me offstage.
And the band played on, as I resumed my seat with Cardinal Leone.
Just in time for the Endgame.
Seafood. Drags up the damnedest things from the subconscious. And too much musical theater in my youth, clearly.
(Pope Francis couldn't have been kinder, by the way, and Cardinal Leone was excellent company. And I clearly need therapy.)
Showing posts with label Theater. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Theater. Show all posts
Saturday, June 14, 2014
Thursday, May 22, 2014
The Joys of Live Theater
So, in proofreading, I need music, but not music that is too challenging or so engrossing that it pulls me out of the weird zen state--something a little frivolous, say. Pandora served up some interesting varieties, and that led me to discover this:
Yeah, the chorus-singer takes over the female lead for the ailing Barbara Dickson, and nails it.
The clip reminds me of something that happened to my old friend known on the blog as Athos. In the days before I came to Fordham, and Athos was an undergraduate, he was cast as Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew. Now, Tranio is the servant of Lucentio, and they open up the play-within-the-play, with Lucentio's monologue about why they are arriving in Padua in the first bloody place. Well, the production dropped the frame story, and just opened up with Lucentio and Tranio, who came out on stage.
On opening night, they made their entrance, and Lucnetio drifted moodily about the set, taking out his sword, swishing it about, but ….not saying the opening lines. After a few minutes, Athos prompted him, asking "Whyfor, my lord, fairest we to Padua?"
[Pause]
Lucentio: Oh, I don't know.
You or I, Gentle Reader, might have acted reasonably. Turned on our heel and left, say, or sung some Elizabethan ditty with a lot of hey-nonny-nonnies, and hoped to God that the blockhead would snap out of it. Not Athos. I am informed (and not by him) that what he did was this:
Trumio:
Alas, the next passage belonged to Tranio, so Athos continued:
Yeah, the chorus-singer takes over the female lead for the ailing Barbara Dickson, and nails it.
The clip reminds me of something that happened to my old friend known on the blog as Athos. In the days before I came to Fordham, and Athos was an undergraduate, he was cast as Tranio in The Taming of the Shrew. Now, Tranio is the servant of Lucentio, and they open up the play-within-the-play, with Lucentio's monologue about why they are arriving in Padua in the first bloody place. Well, the production dropped the frame story, and just opened up with Lucentio and Tranio, who came out on stage.
On opening night, they made their entrance, and Lucnetio drifted moodily about the set, taking out his sword, swishing it about, but ….not saying the opening lines. After a few minutes, Athos prompted him, asking "Whyfor, my lord, fairest we to Padua?"
[Pause]
Lucentio: Oh, I don't know.
You or I, Gentle Reader, might have acted reasonably. Turned on our heel and left, say, or sung some Elizabethan ditty with a lot of hey-nonny-nonnies, and hoped to God that the blockhead would snap out of it. Not Athos. I am informed (and not by him) that what he did was this:
Trumio:
My lord, hastthou not oft expressed the great desire thou hadstA good save, no?
To see fair Padua, nursery of arts,
We are arrived for fruitful Lombardy,
The pleasant garden of great Italy;
And by thy father's love and leave are arm'd
With his good will and my good company,
thy trusty servant, well approved in all,
Here let us breathe and haply institute
A course of learning and ingenious studies.
Pisa renown'd for grave citizens
Gave thee thy being and thy father first,
A merchant of great traffic through the world,
Vincetino come of Bentivolii.
Vincetino's son brought up in Florence
It shall become to serve all hopes conceived,
To deck his fortune with his virtuous deeds:
And therefore, my lord, for the time you study,
Virtue and that part of philosophy
Will thou apply that treats of happiness
By virtue specially to be achieved.
Tell me thy mind; for thou hast Pisa left
And art to Padua come, as he that leaves
A shallow plash to plunge him in the deep
And with satiety seeks to quench his thirst.
Alas, the next passage belonged to Tranio, so Athos continued:
And indeed, gentle master mine,If only Luecentio had not replied, "Well said!" and feinted an attack on on stage fern. But, alas, he did. Athos nobly went another round:
I am in all affected as yourself;
Glad that you thus continue your resolve
To suck the sweets of sweet philosophy.
Only, good master, while we do admire
This virtue and this moral discipline,
Let's be no stoics nor no stocks, I pray;
Or so devote to Aristotle's cheques
As Ovid be an outcast quite abjured:
Balk logic with acquaintance that you have
And practise rhetoric in your common talk;
Music and poesy use to quicken you;
The mathematics and the metaphysics,
Fall to them as you find your stomach serves you;
No profit grows where is no pleasure ta'en:
In brief, sir, study what you most affect.
Perhaps, Master, we could at once put us in readiness,Thereby winning the Karin Glenmark Award, some years before the lady herself created the title….
And take a lodging fit to entertain
Such friends as time in Padua shall beget.
But stay a while: what company is this? Surely some show to welcome us to town.
Friday, May 9, 2014
Did We See The Same Show? [The Rivals]
I had initially planned to write up my most recent play-going experience, but my partner in crime beat me to it. So I didn't. There, that'll teach you, hmmm….? Quonk? (OK, that's more Sir John Tresize than William Hartnell, but what would you?)
And then, I read yesterday's review by David Rooney of The Pearl Theatre's production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals. Quoth Mr. Rooney:
That said, Eighteenth Century comedy could be excessive in its love or wit and wordplay, and sometimes was done in an artificial manner utterly disconnected from human life--Blackadder had some fun with the notion:
--and, several rather irritating people behind us expressed themselves displeased with the play because "Sheridan should be more mannered."
Absolute rubbish. Sheridan in fact fought two duels in 1772 with a rival suitor for his wife, and was seriously wounded in the second duel. That experience colors The Rivals, staged less than three years later. The theme does not concern, as Rooney's review hints that it does, the harms of too much novel-reading (a theory limited to women as expressed by Sir Anthony Absolute in the play, and he's not exactly an oracular figure in the text), but is rather best summed up by its most sensible character, Julia, who replies to her over-romantic friend Lydia's declaration that "our happiness is now as unalloyed as general," with a caution:
Sheridan nearly lost his life to just such passion, in a situation not too different from that in which Jack Absolute finds himself; the notion that this play should be played in a brittle, artificial manner is, frankly, at odds with the text. By bringing life into the play without losing the elements of farce,the Pearl Theater Company did Sheridan justice, and should be proud.
As Karen noted, I tried to start a standing ovation. It was well earned.
And then, I read yesterday's review by David Rooney of The Pearl Theatre's production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan's play The Rivals. Quoth Mr. Rooney:
Restoration comedy, however, is tricky, requiring a canny balance of theatrical artifice and delicacy to animate its wit, wordplay and satirical irreverence. Push too hard, as this cast tends to do, and it lands with a thud. This is language to be savored for its playfulness, not bellowed with declamatory bluster.Now, I am no Sheridan expert, but I was an English major, and studied Eighteenth Century literature with Verlyn Klinkenborg (who deplored my going to law school, kindly saying he thought I'd make a literature scholar), and I can tell you this: For once, Wikipedia is right: Restoration comedy spans 50 years, 1660-1710, that is, from the Restoration of the Monarchy (that'd be Charles II, in 1660, d'ye see) to 1710. The Rivals (1775), is a Georgian comedy of manners.
***
Mr. Donaldson deploys droll charm in the central role, and Ms. Love has an amusing way with a petulant flounce. There are also lonely notes of understatement from Ms. Botchan and Mr. McNall. But for the most part, the buoyancy is pummeled out of the play by all the shouting, straining and busy gesticulating of the colorfully outfitted and bewigged cast.
That said, Eighteenth Century comedy could be excessive in its love or wit and wordplay, and sometimes was done in an artificial manner utterly disconnected from human life--Blackadder had some fun with the notion:
--and, several rather irritating people behind us expressed themselves displeased with the play because "Sheridan should be more mannered."
Absolute rubbish. Sheridan in fact fought two duels in 1772 with a rival suitor for his wife, and was seriously wounded in the second duel. That experience colors The Rivals, staged less than three years later. The theme does not concern, as Rooney's review hints that it does, the harms of too much novel-reading (a theory limited to women as expressed by Sir Anthony Absolute in the play, and he's not exactly an oracular figure in the text), but is rather best summed up by its most sensible character, Julia, who replies to her over-romantic friend Lydia's declaration that "our happiness is now as unalloyed as general," with a caution:
Then let us study to preserve it so : and whileJulia's words (and not the frivolous epilogue the author tacks on at the end) makes the point surely--in this play, "ill-judging passion" creates a series of potential, all too unnecessary, tragedies, whether that passion be the arbitrary "frenzy" of Sir Anthony Absolute--a sort of infantile temper tantrum done to indulge his own desire to be at the center of all things, the morbid pre-disposition of Faulkner to find betrayal and calamity at every turn, the fire-eating desire for dueling, on any pretext, of Sir Lucius O'Toole, Lydia's romantic desire for dramatic martyrdom, or the intellectual pretensions of Mrs. Malaprop. None of these characters is, at bottom, presented as evil--they all have charming moments. But each in his or her own way invites tragedy by rejecting the good in life that is offered to them, in preference of giving way to ill-judged passion.
Hope pictures to us a flattering scene of future bliss,
let us deny its pencil those colours which are too bright to be lasting.
When hearts deserving happiness would
unite their fortunes, Virtue would crown them with an
unfading garland of modest hurtless flowers : but ill-
judging Passion will force the gaudier rose into the
wreath, whose thorn offends them when its leaves are
dropped!
Sheridan nearly lost his life to just such passion, in a situation not too different from that in which Jack Absolute finds himself; the notion that this play should be played in a brittle, artificial manner is, frankly, at odds with the text. By bringing life into the play without losing the elements of farce,the Pearl Theater Company did Sheridan justice, and should be proud.
As Karen noted, I tried to start a standing ovation. It was well earned.
Tuesday, March 4, 2014
The Trouble With Torvald: Plot Contrivances and Torvald's Tsuris in "A Doll's House"
(Above, Young Vic Director Carrie Cracknell's "Nora: A Short Film Responding to Henrik Ibsen's 'A Doll's House'")
Right, sorry; a little breather from the blog. In the week since I last posted, though, I did get to see the Young Vic's extraordinary production of Ibsen's A Doll's House (of which Ben Brantley's review and my theater companion, Karen Clark pretty much say it all).
The production was, as Brantley writes, harrowing:
What we had just witnessed was a harrowing account, directed with breathless momentum by Carrie Cracknell, of a woman pushed to the breaking point by the fear of being found out. Yes, I mean Nora Helmer, the pretty, childlike wife of an adoring businessman and a woman whom no one, not even Nora herself, would believe capable of illicit doings.Let me just add that Dominic Rowan, as Torvald, more than holds his end of the play up, turning in a nuanced, three-dimensional--by turns a paternalistic, loving, creepy, terrified, and, ultimately, pitiable Torvald. The added complexity enriched the play, as did the set. As Karen writes:
As played in a galvanizing, star-making performance by Hattie Morahan, Nora is forced into devastating awareness of just how devious she’s become and how warped she has been by the subterfuge. That’s a revelation from which no one is likely to recover quickly, including anyone lucky enough to see this production, which runs only through March 16.
Don’t go, though, expecting a highbrow equivalent of the latest Liam Neeson nail-biter, or not only that. Working from a sharp new adaptation by the playwright Simon Stephens, which underscores the imprisoning powers of sex and money without sounding didactic, Ms. Cracknell’s canny production knows that the quickest route to the head is through the guts.
Feeling Nora’s concentrated fear forces us to ask just what it is about her situation that turns a comfortable home into a hell. What we have here is visceral consciousness-raising, a venerable form of theater that was the favorite of the ancient Greeks, I believe, but is seldom so successfully practiced these days.
The "doll's house" quality of the revolving set gained a visual piquancy from our being seated that high up. I was reminded, gazing down, of the dollhouse I'd had as a child, of creating and directing the lives of the small stand-ins for who I thought I was going to be when I attained the coveted status of grown-up, and the twinkling charm of a peek from above at an unreal reality. So must the gods upon Olympus see our lives.So, an admirable production of an admirable play, yes? Yes. Nothing specially for me to add? We-eelll…
The efforts involved in getting the plotting of Phineas at Bay right has, perhaps made me a little more aware than I used to be of how other writers do it. So, in viewing A Doll's House, which I hadn't seen in some two decades (!), I noticed something I might not have previously: Torvald is indeed a very weak, and quite possibly a stupid man--or Ibsen has blundered, not in his amazing depiction of these characters, but in the contriving of his plot. I'm not sure, and your thoughts solicited. (Let me point out that my beloved Anthony Trollope had made legal errors that undermined his plots, leading him to, in frustration, commission an opinion by counsel to avoid legal errors in The Eustace Diamonds; I dread the pointing out of any errors in my own plotting, come to that.)
But I get ahead of myself. Here is the situation. Torvald is presented as an able young lawyer, with a head for affairs:
Nora. Just fancy, my husband has been made manager of the Bank!(Act I)
Mrs Linde. Your husband? What good luck!
Nora. Yes, tremendous! A barrister's profession is such an uncertain thing, especially if he won't undertake unsavoury cases; and naturally Torvald has never been willing to do that, and I quite agree with him. You may imagine how pleased we are! He is to take up his work in the Bank at the New Year, and then he will have a big salary and lots of commissions. For the future we can live quite differently--we can do just as we like. I feel so relieved and so happy, Christine! It will be splendid to have heaps of money and not need to have any anxiety, won't it?
On a smaller scale, so too is his former friend, Nils Krogstad:
Nora. Who is it?(Act I)
Krogstad [at the door]. It is I, Mrs Helmer. [Mrs LINDE starts, trembles, and turns to the window.]
Nora [takes a step towards him, and speaks in a strained, low voice]. You? What is it? What do you want to see my husband about?
Krogstad. Bank business--in a way. I have a small post in the Bank, and I hear your husband is to be our chief now--
Nora. Then it is--
Krogstad. Nothing but dry business matters, Mrs Helmer; absolutely nothing else.
Nora. Be so good as to go into the study, then. [She bows indifferently to him and shuts the door into the hall; then comes back and makes up the fire in the stove.]
Mrs Linde. Nora--who was that man?
Nora. A lawyer, of the name of Krogstad.
Mrs Linde. Then it really was he.
Nora. Do you know the man?
Mrs Linde. I used to--many years ago. At one time he was a solicitor's clerk in our town.
In all of the interactions between Torvald, Nora, Dr. Rank (their great friend, in love with Nora), or Mrs. Linde, there is nothing to suggest that either Torvald or Krogstad is unintelligent or imprudent, rash or foolish in business or professional affairs--Krogstad's respectability has been ruined due to a scandal, not ineptitude and his work at the bank is unobjectionable. Got that? Good.
Now here is the plot contrivance upon which the marriage of Nora and Torvald is wrecked: Seven years before the action of the play, as Nora relates, Torvald "over-worked himself dreadfully. You see, he had to make money every way he could, and he worked early and late; but he couldn't stand it, and fell dreadfully ill, and the doctors said it was necessary for him to go south." Nora raises the money by a loan from Krigstad (by then, a usurer, after the unspecified scandal that wrecks his respectability--clearly some kind of professional misconduct), but forges the signature of his father as co-signer, mistakenly dating it three days after his death (of which she had not yet received word). When Torvald fires Krogstad from the bank, in part to oblige Nora by hiring Mrs. Linde, but really because his former friend's misconduct rankles him (Act II), Krogstad blackmails first Nora, and then, by a letter describing Nora's fraud, Torvald. As Krogstad describes the letter and its goal:
Krogstad. Besides, it would have been a great piece of folly. Once the first storm at home is over--. I have a letter for your husband in my pocket.(Act II)
Nora. Telling him everything?
Krogstad. In as lenient a manner as I possibly could.
Nora [quickly]. He mustn't get the letter. Tear it up. I will find some means of getting money.
Krogstad. Excuse me, Mrs Helmer, but I think I told you just now--
…
Nora. What do you want, then?
Krogstad. I will tell you. I want to rehabilitate myself, Mrs Helmer; I want to get on; and in that your husband must help me. For the last year and a half I have not had a hand in anything dishonourable, amid all that time I have been struggling in most restricted circumstances. I was content to work my way up step by step. Now I am turned out, and I am not going to be satisfied with merely being taken into favour again. I want to get on, I tell you. I want to get into the Bank again, in a higher position. Your husband must make a place for me--
Nora. That he will never do!
Krogstad. He will; I know him; he dare not protest. And as soon as I am in there again with him, then you will see! Within a year I shall be the manager's right hand. It will be Nils Krogstad and not Torvald Helmer who manages the Bank.
When Torvald reads the letter, he exclaims "I am in the power of an unscrupulous man; he can do what he likes with me, ask anything he likes of me, give me any orders he pleases--I dare not refuse." So it's blackmail, savvy?
By now, you have probably anticipated where I am going with this. Krogstad can raise a scandal involving Nora and her efforts to protect a dying father whose heir she was and a sick husband by a forgery that, in view of the mores of the time, would probably dish Torvald's career.
And Torvald can send him to jail using the blackmail note. They have mutually assured destruction--if anything, the facts involving Krogstad, thanks to the letter, are much less equivocal, much more recent, and are written in the culprit's own handwriting.
In sum, Torvald has--if only slightly--the upper hand And as lawyers, both he and Krogstad should know it. Yet Torvald, in his panic, is anxious only for himself, abusive to Nora, and utterly mean-spirited in his extremity, which, in fact, is no extremity at all.
So, there you have it. A dazzling bit of character drawing, underscoring Torvald's abject weakness (and it may very well be, if Torvald's breakdown was as much psychological as caused by overwork--Nora is hardly a reliable narrator)? Or a ploy contrivance designed to put the screws on Torvald, which he should have been able to effectively reverse--I mean, who signs a blackmail note?
Well, gentle reader, what say you?
Monday, February 17, 2014
House of Ricardus
I'm seeing a certain amount of criticism of the practical and ideological politics in House of Cards (see here, especially in the comments, and here--the latter rightly pointing out that Underwood "persuades his fellow Democrats to go along with his plan by arguing—incorrectly, as our recent history has demonstrated—that the Democrats alone would be blamed for a shutdown."
The politics are incredible, of course--the Democrats casually offering up "entitlement reform" to avoid a shutdown is so contrary to the recent past, and the notion that such a move would credibly be seen as a Democratic win, is so contrary to our recent experience and current ideological stances of the parties as to be make the show risible as a political commentary on our times.
Just as well, then, that that isn't what the show is.
House of Cards has a peculiar DNA, one that in part predetermines its contours, and possibly even its outcome.
It originated, of course, as a novel, published in 1989, a result, the author writes, of a bruising election in which Dobbs, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, observed that "Margaret Thatcher won that election comfortably, but she made many enemies while doing so – too many, I thought." This, and "a furious row" with Thatcher, led him to write "a novel based around the dark political arts." He chose as his subject a fictional plot to get rid of a Prime Minister. The novel depicts its protagonist, House Whip Francis Urquhart, using all the secrets he has garnered (and favors he is owed) in rescuing errant MPs from their own follies in his years of faithful, neglected service for his own political gain.
It's a pretty good read--though many elements we associate with House of Cards do not exist--Urquhart's wife (Miranda in the novel) is essentially a walk-on part, there is no affair with Mattie Storin, the journalist who unravels the skein of Urquhart's plots, and, far from killing her, Urquhart's nerve fails him in his final confrontation with Mattie, and he instead kills himself, throwing himself off the roof of the House. Urquhart not only lacks the steel of his later incarnations, he also lacks the charm, and the story is told in an omniscient third person voice.
As to the BBC television adaptation, Dobbs informs us, "during a week that had the nation holding its breath in astonishment, the first episode of the television series aired almost on the day she was forced to resign. It seemed almost impossible, but she was gone." The casting of Ian Richardson (whose performance as Urquhart, by his own account, drew from his portrayal of Richard III), the addition of a perverse--very perverse--sexual affair between Urquhart and Mattie Storin (parallel to the seduction of Lady Anne over her husband's tomb), and most of all Urquhart's mix of scheming and charm are redolent of Shakespeare's Richard III. Andrew Davies's brilliant contribution to the story is just that--he took an entertaining political thriller, and buffed it, re-shaped it, and drew from it, the stuff of Shakespeare's history plays. The adaptation even features a catchphrase that has entered the political lexicon:
As in Richard III, Davies has Urquhart address us, the viewer, and makes us complicit in his crimes:
A genuine soliloquy, that--one of many dotting the BBC trilogy--and in as close to Shakespeare's own form as one could get away with in the 1980s.
James Cappio, in "If Richard III Had Married Lady Macbeth" has pointed out that House of Cards has not one but two Shakespeare plays in its DNA:
[HERE BE SPOILERS, albeit for a nearly twenty-year old series]
Note how, as Urqhart dies, Elizabeth is there to--comfort him? Seek absolution? And Cordor (Cawdor mixed with cordite, yes?) offers his services to Tom Makepeace--presented as a good egg, but, as Corder informs him "You'll be in charge now," we hear the strains of "Francis Urquhart's March", as the theme is titled, suggesting that the new regime will be much more like the old than expected.
All of this makes up the DNA of the new series. Kevin Spacey, of course, is also an actor noted for his Richard III:
Set in America, without a Parliamentary system and its tools that the Whip would more commonly have, and two full decades after the novel, the creative staff had its work cut out for it. With Dobbs, Davies and Spacey as Executive Producers, their vision is deeply embedded in the new show. Dobbs in his novels was interested primarily in intrigue--means, and stratagems, and much less so in policy; he kept trying to craft a moral ending (indeed, had the BBC accepted his ending, the parallel to Shakespeare's play, in which the natural order is restored, the usurper vanquished, would have been even more clear).
The American show takes the most intriguing new dimension to the BBC's ersatz-Shakespearean history play--the partnership of Francis and (in the US) Claire Underwood, played with astonishing discipline, and cool-banked fire, by Robin Wright--and places it firmly front and center. It's pace is at once quicker, cinematically very much so, and slower--halfway through season 2, we have not yet reached the equivalent point of the ending of the first series of the BBC adaptation--which only had four episodes; I have just finished watching episode twenty-two of the U.S. version. So, yes, there's some filler, but there is also much more character development, and some twists we don't expect--last season I was faked out into thinking at one point that, unlike his UK counterpart, Peter Russo was going to survive the season. So Beau Willimon deserves a lot of credit for doing more than an extended dance remake of the BBC original. He has translated the history play into an American milieu, and made it work.
Did he get the politics wrong? Well, yes. But then, so did Shakespeare.
The politics are incredible, of course--the Democrats casually offering up "entitlement reform" to avoid a shutdown is so contrary to the recent past, and the notion that such a move would credibly be seen as a Democratic win, is so contrary to our recent experience and current ideological stances of the parties as to be make the show risible as a political commentary on our times.
Just as well, then, that that isn't what the show is.
House of Cards has a peculiar DNA, one that in part predetermines its contours, and possibly even its outcome.
It originated, of course, as a novel, published in 1989, a result, the author writes, of a bruising election in which Dobbs, Deputy Chairman of the Conservative Party, observed that "Margaret Thatcher won that election comfortably, but she made many enemies while doing so – too many, I thought." This, and "a furious row" with Thatcher, led him to write "a novel based around the dark political arts." He chose as his subject a fictional plot to get rid of a Prime Minister. The novel depicts its protagonist, House Whip Francis Urquhart, using all the secrets he has garnered (and favors he is owed) in rescuing errant MPs from their own follies in his years of faithful, neglected service for his own political gain.
It's a pretty good read--though many elements we associate with House of Cards do not exist--Urquhart's wife (Miranda in the novel) is essentially a walk-on part, there is no affair with Mattie Storin, the journalist who unravels the skein of Urquhart's plots, and, far from killing her, Urquhart's nerve fails him in his final confrontation with Mattie, and he instead kills himself, throwing himself off the roof of the House. Urquhart not only lacks the steel of his later incarnations, he also lacks the charm, and the story is told in an omniscient third person voice.
As to the BBC television adaptation, Dobbs informs us, "during a week that had the nation holding its breath in astonishment, the first episode of the television series aired almost on the day she was forced to resign. It seemed almost impossible, but she was gone." The casting of Ian Richardson (whose performance as Urquhart, by his own account, drew from his portrayal of Richard III), the addition of a perverse--very perverse--sexual affair between Urquhart and Mattie Storin (parallel to the seduction of Lady Anne over her husband's tomb), and most of all Urquhart's mix of scheming and charm are redolent of Shakespeare's Richard III. Andrew Davies's brilliant contribution to the story is just that--he took an entertaining political thriller, and buffed it, re-shaped it, and drew from it, the stuff of Shakespeare's history plays. The adaptation even features a catchphrase that has entered the political lexicon:
As in Richard III, Davies has Urquhart address us, the viewer, and makes us complicit in his crimes:
A genuine soliloquy, that--one of many dotting the BBC trilogy--and in as close to Shakespeare's own form as one could get away with in the 1980s.
James Cappio, in "If Richard III Had Married Lady Macbeth" has pointed out that House of Cards has not one but two Shakespeare plays in its DNA:
Very much like Richard, Urquhart so thoroughly seduces us that we root for him in spite of ourselves. That is largely due to Ian Richardson’s indelible performance. Richardson, one of the great Shakespeareans of his generation, had just played Richard III for the Royal Shakespeare Company before taking the role of Urquhart; by letting Richard influence him, he created one of the most iconic characters in all of British television. Urquhart’s signature phrase—“You may think that. I couldn’t possibly comment”—is still widely recognized in Britain even today.Indeed, at the end of the Trilogy (the second installment is To Play the King (1993), the finale is 1995's The Final Cut; interestingly, Dobbs again in the novel ends with Urquhart primed for a fall; the television adaptation changes the ending again. Only in the third novel and series do the story lines essentially coincide), Elizabeth Urquhart surpasses her husband in villainy. With Urquhart's "house of cards" at last beginning to collapse, his powers beginning to fail, and his last ambition, to surpass Margaret Thatcher as the longest-serving Prime Minister of Great Britain, Elizabeth arranges a special gift for her husband on the day he does so.
House of Cards borrows from the Scottish play even more blatantly than from Richard III. When it’s first suggested to Urquhart that he could be Prime Minister, he actually says “Glamis, and Cawdor, and King hereafter” and shortly his wife is insinuating that he should topple his leader. To be fair, he doesn’t need nearly as much persuasion as Macbeth did. Diane Fletcher’s movie debut was in Roman Polanski’s bloody Macbeth, so her brilliantly menacing performance as Elizabeth Urquhart can be said to have Shakespearean roots.
[HERE BE SPOILERS, albeit for a nearly twenty-year old series]
Note how, as Urqhart dies, Elizabeth is there to--comfort him? Seek absolution? And Cordor (Cawdor mixed with cordite, yes?) offers his services to Tom Makepeace--presented as a good egg, but, as Corder informs him "You'll be in charge now," we hear the strains of "Francis Urquhart's March", as the theme is titled, suggesting that the new regime will be much more like the old than expected.
All of this makes up the DNA of the new series. Kevin Spacey, of course, is also an actor noted for his Richard III:
Set in America, without a Parliamentary system and its tools that the Whip would more commonly have, and two full decades after the novel, the creative staff had its work cut out for it. With Dobbs, Davies and Spacey as Executive Producers, their vision is deeply embedded in the new show. Dobbs in his novels was interested primarily in intrigue--means, and stratagems, and much less so in policy; he kept trying to craft a moral ending (indeed, had the BBC accepted his ending, the parallel to Shakespeare's play, in which the natural order is restored, the usurper vanquished, would have been even more clear).
The American show takes the most intriguing new dimension to the BBC's ersatz-Shakespearean history play--the partnership of Francis and (in the US) Claire Underwood, played with astonishing discipline, and cool-banked fire, by Robin Wright--and places it firmly front and center. It's pace is at once quicker, cinematically very much so, and slower--halfway through season 2, we have not yet reached the equivalent point of the ending of the first series of the BBC adaptation--which only had four episodes; I have just finished watching episode twenty-two of the U.S. version. So, yes, there's some filler, but there is also much more character development, and some twists we don't expect--last season I was faked out into thinking at one point that, unlike his UK counterpart, Peter Russo was going to survive the season. So Beau Willimon deserves a lot of credit for doing more than an extended dance remake of the BBC original. He has translated the history play into an American milieu, and made it work.
Did he get the politics wrong? Well, yes. But then, so did Shakespeare.
Saturday, October 12, 2013
"My life is run his compass": The Donmar Julius Caesar
This afternoon, I saw the Donmar Warehouse all-female production of Julius Caesar at St Ann's Warehouse in Brooklyn. I really think that, if anything, the Times review was not laudatory enough.
From the moment we audience members were herded into a bleak, cavernous receiving room, hemmed in by guards and watched as if not entirely to be trusted, the production's conceit that we were attending a production at a women's prison was credibly and consistently maintained. At various times, that conceit surfaced, whether to allow for a moment of humor (perfectly played by Harriet Walter, who starred as Brutus), or to infuse a cruel intensity to the Cinna the Poet scene, the conceit served the play throughout, adding layers of meaning.
The cast was remarkable; without wishing to dispraise any member, I was especially impressed by Jenny Jules's Cassius and Susan Brown's Casca. And Claire Dunn, doubling effectively as Octavius and Portia, took two roles that can, if not handled just so, seem weak in comparison to the higher octane characters on stage, and made them formidable in different ways. (Also, she speaks verse so naturally that it seems utterly spontaneous, and her own.) Not to mention Cush Jumbo's manipulative, sometimes epicene, sometimes steel-hard, Mark Antony, who drew laughs of recognition of the various rhetorical moves in the famous "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech without losing any of its intensity. She neatly let us know that she knew that we knew all of the various manipulations she was performing--and dared us not to fall for them, anyway.
But, I must confess, for me the play belonged to the two titanic figures at its center. Harriet Walter's Brutus was superbly a man of honor, and not a pompous windbag (as the role can degenerate into); she inhabited so completely the inmate inhabiting the Roman that it was hard to know where one began and one ended. Ms. Walter's face was drawn, ascetic, and strong throughout; she used her lanky physicality to create both a dangerous woman and an equally dangerous man, each of whom was haunted by conscience.
And Frances Barber's Caesar? Deglamorized by the conceit, Ms. Barber was by turns jovially bullying, charismatic, commanding, and cruel. She depicted a Caesar whom Ms. Walter's Brutus could truly love--and yet see as a tyrant "in the egg." Her calling out of Cassius, her effectively jocular strutting with her gang, all carried absolute conviction--but nothing more than her last laugh before uttering the play's most famous line.
After the doors had slammed, with the inmates back in lockdown, but before the curtain call, a lone audience member strayed across the stage area in a motorized wheelchair. The cast came out as she crossed to receive a standing ovation. Brutus gracefully disengaged and avoided the lady; Julius Caesar paused, checking his advance to let her pass, with the sort of benevolent, if dangerous, smile Cassius was wont to receive earlier on.
Now that's acting.
From the moment we audience members were herded into a bleak, cavernous receiving room, hemmed in by guards and watched as if not entirely to be trusted, the production's conceit that we were attending a production at a women's prison was credibly and consistently maintained. At various times, that conceit surfaced, whether to allow for a moment of humor (perfectly played by Harriet Walter, who starred as Brutus), or to infuse a cruel intensity to the Cinna the Poet scene, the conceit served the play throughout, adding layers of meaning.
The cast was remarkable; without wishing to dispraise any member, I was especially impressed by Jenny Jules's Cassius and Susan Brown's Casca. And Claire Dunn, doubling effectively as Octavius and Portia, took two roles that can, if not handled just so, seem weak in comparison to the higher octane characters on stage, and made them formidable in different ways. (Also, she speaks verse so naturally that it seems utterly spontaneous, and her own.) Not to mention Cush Jumbo's manipulative, sometimes epicene, sometimes steel-hard, Mark Antony, who drew laughs of recognition of the various rhetorical moves in the famous "Friends, Romans, Countrymen" speech without losing any of its intensity. She neatly let us know that she knew that we knew all of the various manipulations she was performing--and dared us not to fall for them, anyway.
But, I must confess, for me the play belonged to the two titanic figures at its center. Harriet Walter's Brutus was superbly a man of honor, and not a pompous windbag (as the role can degenerate into); she inhabited so completely the inmate inhabiting the Roman that it was hard to know where one began and one ended. Ms. Walter's face was drawn, ascetic, and strong throughout; she used her lanky physicality to create both a dangerous woman and an equally dangerous man, each of whom was haunted by conscience.
And Frances Barber's Caesar? Deglamorized by the conceit, Ms. Barber was by turns jovially bullying, charismatic, commanding, and cruel. She depicted a Caesar whom Ms. Walter's Brutus could truly love--and yet see as a tyrant "in the egg." Her calling out of Cassius, her effectively jocular strutting with her gang, all carried absolute conviction--but nothing more than her last laugh before uttering the play's most famous line.
After the doors had slammed, with the inmates back in lockdown, but before the curtain call, a lone audience member strayed across the stage area in a motorized wheelchair. The cast came out as she crossed to receive a standing ovation. Brutus gracefully disengaged and avoided the lady; Julius Caesar paused, checking his advance to let her pass, with the sort of benevolent, if dangerous, smile Cassius was wont to receive earlier on.
Now that's acting.
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