MARCH 21 AND WHEN LOVE SPEAKS……

Today my east London garden has a Wordsworthian air – bitter winds tossing the daffodils about beside the water. Walthamstow Marsh Reservoir Number Five perhaps lacks the resonance of Ullswater in Regency days, but it affords a context for reflection on the concerns of great poets – on love, on survival and on mortality – great themes abroad these last weeks.


“And when love speaks, the voice of all the gods
Makes Heaven drowsy with the harmony”
This from Shakespeare’s “Love’s Labours Lost”, potent lines delivered last Saturday with relish by the brilliant Edward Bennett in the closing performance of Chris Luscombe’s magical RSC production at Stratford.
This show and its companion-piece “Love’s Labour’s Won” (a.k.a “Much Ado About Nothing”) brought us lyrical echoes of love and war, while at Jermyn St there’s love constrained, at the Southwark Playhouse a struggle to survive in post-war London, tragic beauty at the Barbican, and at the Royal Court one of our finest actors achieves grace and dignity amongst corporate greed and raw, ruthless terror.

The Southwark Playhouse – a buzzy two-auditoria venue adding a dash of sparkle to the traffic fumes around the Elephant and Castle – currently offers a rare and engrossing play by the late Michael Hastings, called “The Cutting of the Cloth”. Hastings was a BAFTA and Emmy award-winning writer who left us four years ago (he wrote the highly successful “Tom and Viv” about T.S.Eliot), and this piece echoes much of Arnold Wesker’s writing. Like Wesker’s “The Kitchen”, it’s what used to be called a “slice of life”, re-creating the energy and tensions of a work-place. Set in a cellar, the work-room for a firm of bespoke Savile Row tailors during the 1950s, we experience the grimly cheerful tenacity of Jews whose craft-skills have been their means of survival through years of oppression. The characters share pain, wry wisdom and salty wit.

Alexis Caley James El-Sharawy Abigail Thaw  Picture: Philip  Gammon

Tricia Thorns directs a fine cast in a superbly detailed, evocative setting by Alex Marker – and it’s one of those shows where you see the need for properly-trained, highly efficient stage managers! There’s lots of real-time sewing, lots of props created and then scattered about the room – all to be tidied up, re-set or replaced every performance. I found it fascinating and moving – with strong work from all the actors. Mention must be made of Andrew de la Tour’s touching study of a world-weary master-craftsman taking refuge in the bottle, falling asleep each night under his work-bench. I acted with Andy many years ago – he was a delightful Flute the Bellows-Mender in “The Dream” at Pitlochry Festival Theatre, and the journey from bellows-mender to master tailor has clearly been fruitful! “The Cutting of the Cloth” runs till April 4 – see the link below.

Fans of the playwright Terrance Rattigan’s work will find lots of interest in “The Heart of Things” over at the Jermyn St theatre, where Giles Cole follows up his own biographical play about Rattigan “The Art of Concealment’, with a story of his own, exploring sexual tensions in a family in a contemporary context, but with distinct echoes of  Rattigan’s style. Jermyn St recently gave us an appealing revival of “First Episode”, and this is an intriguing modern contribution to the genre, with a talented cast given assured direction by Knight Mantell.

From small-scale theatre to high-investment art at the Barbican. Tickets to see Juliet Binoche in Sophocles “Antigone” have been hard to come by, and understandably so. Mlle Binoche is a genuine movie star of great beauty and talent, the script has been adapted by a significant poet, Anne Carson, and the production put together by one of Europe’s most celebrated directors, Iva Van Hove, whose West End production of “A View from the Bridge” is similarly providing lucrative opportunities for ticket-touts. 

                                             Photo: Jan Versweyveld

It is visually STUNNING – and for those of us who experienced Friday’s solar eclipse, the phenomenon is re-created onstage by designer Jan Versweyveld, as a backdrop to the unfolding tragic drama. However, I have to say I left not entirely convinced. It seems to be set in a sort of latter-day desert state, with Creon in a business-suit – echoes, I guess, of Assad of Syria. The chorus don’t move about much – they tend just to come on and comment, albeit in front of a series of breath-taking background images. It’s brilliantly cast with terrific actors. And yet…while I’d happily pay to see Juliet Binoche in anything – I love her work in cinema, and boy is she lovely to look at – nonetheless, it has to be said that as with many actors who work mostly for the camera, the vocal strength needed to fuel big tragic roles onstage isn’t, at present, quite there.

At first I found myself struggling, not so much to hear as to be engaged. Then Kirsty Bushell started to speak as Ismene –  with all the authority of a LAMDA-trained, real theatre voice –  and I relaxed, my attention to the story, the poetry and action immediately held. That said, if you’ve booked to see this show on tour it’s really worth seeing, and it may well be that Ms Binoche will play herself in and find the right vocal level. If you do catch it, please report back via the “comments” link at the bottom of this post.

And so to Stratford. I chatted briefly with Christopher Luscombe, the director of the inspired “Love’s Labours” duo of productions, over a glass of wine during the interval last Saturday evening. Chris shares my (oft repeated in these columns) aversion to “concept” Shakespeare – but I was very happy to agree that the choice to set these two plays in Edwardian England, the first reflecting gathering war-clouds, the second a country recovering from years of catastrophic conflict – was both inspired and inspiring. The ultra-watchable Radagrads Ed Bennett and Michelle Terry carry off the lead roles in both plays with great panache, and the overall effect – I saw both plays on the same day – is of a company of brilliantly talented, splendidly directed actors thoroughly enjoying themselves, and sharing the joy with a happy, enraptured audience. In other words the RSC at its very best. When Ed and the other 3 young men in “Love’s Labours” appeared at the end of the play in First World War officers’ uniforms ready to march off to the front I started welling up – Ed had been in a production of “Journey’s End”  I directed at RADA, and the poignancy of that show, in which the actors had been the same age as the ill-fated characters – came flooding back.

Pulling myself together – and nursing a mild hangover after an end-of-season glass or two with the cast at the Dirty Duck  – I  topped off the weekend by taking a group of young visitors from Virginia on a visit to Charlecote Park, to see the house used as the setting for the Love’s Labour’s productions – a soothing, restorative Sunday excursion. 

In the church by the house is the tomb of Sir Thomas Lucy and his wife Joyce, owners of the original Elizabethan mansion, from whom the young Will Shakespeare is reputed to have poached a deer. Your starter for ten: which character in the history plays is supposedly based on the man in the tomb?

I gather there are some “encore” digital showings of the “Much Ado” due in cinemas – check the link below. I wonder if current digital recordings of major theatre events will become available in DVD form? I think the royalty issues are tricky – Maxine Peake, whose “Hamlet” is in cinemas this coming week – very kindly came to talk to some of my NYU students last Monday, and said that to reach an agreement guaranteeing the actors a decent cut of cinema box-office takings had been a struggle – it seems the age-old fight for artists to gain due recompense never ends.

And finally, along with two thousand or so others, I went on Tuesday to Westminster Abbey to say farewell to Richard Attenborough. 

Throughout my time as RADA’s vice-principal he was our Chairman, and what privilege it was to work alongside, and be spurred on by,  his  deeply humane, high-octane energy. Some people born with that kind of single-minded, charismatic drive become dictators, billionaires, superstars, cardinals, ayatollahs, gurus and/or saints. Richard used his to become a brilliant actor, a great director – and along the way to try to make the world a better place. You would expect (as would he) any ceremony with his name on it to be spectacular, appropriate and in immaculate taste, and this event – presumably overseen by Michael Attenborough  – was all of the above. As David Puttnam said in his address, Richard would have loved it, with a delightful first reading by his brother Sir David, others by Penelope Wilton, Tom Hiddleston, Ben Kingsley and Geraldine James, plus great, singable hymns like “He who would valiant be”, and a solo Indian mantra sung from the organ loft.
Quotes from Gandhi, the subject of one of one of his greatest films, stayed in the memory:

“An eye for an eye only turns the whole world blind”

“Terrorism is a weapon not of the strong, but of the weak.”

At a time when young playwrights write of a world descending into chaos through cynicism, exploitation and murderous fanaticism, there is reassurance and comfort in knowing that enlightened, constructive spirits like Attenborough’s do come into our world, and leave us knowing we mustn’t just hope things will get better –  we have, as did he, to labour night and day to make sure they do.