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Showing posts with label The Picture of John Gray. Show all posts
Showing posts with label The Picture of John Gray. Show all posts
Friday, December 26, 2014
Friday, December 26, 2014
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Whenever the big yearly theatre awards swing around I always a get a bit befuddled. Half the plays nominated I've never even heard of, and the winners tend to be things I thought stunk up the place. This is a symptom of living in a city with upwards of a hundred theatres, not just the big plastercast and chandelier glitz palaces of the West End, but the sweatboxes above pubs, tucked into the basements of shops and the very streets of London itself. Once again I've seen an awful lot this year, but here's my favourites:
HONOURABLE MENTIONS
'The Picture of John Gray' at the Old Red Lion Theatre, 8th August 2014
While watching The Picture of John Gray I assumed it was a revival of some unjustly forgotten classic. I was blown away when I later learned that this was the first staging of a new work by C.J. Willmann. Emulating the cut and thrust conversations of late Victorian aesthetes is a tricky prospect, much less interweaving a genuinely touching love story and interrogation of hedonism versus Christianity. That script, coupled with a confident cast and intelligent staging, made for a total triumph. Best of it, it spurred me on to learn more about the people featured within, a gaggle of people with outstanding biographies.
'King Charles III' at the Wyndham's Theatre, 13th December 2014
That a play so virulently anti-monarchy can be released to wide acclaim in 2014 warms the cockles of my heart. Merely voicing suspicions of the monarchy makes you feel like a social pariah, let alone advocating their safe, smooth but quick removal from power. Their laminated, rubbery faces peer from the front of every magazine, every new familial development greeted with hushed deference from the media. I shudder when I see the submissive masses furiously tugging their forelocks at the neverending cycle of weddings, jubilees and births.
Yet in the midst of all this Mike Bartlett's King Charles III reminds us that a) these people are morons, b) they're a medieval anachronism and c) the Royal family are a potential political catastrophe. I was all a-quiver with enjoyment from minute one until the curtain fell; a play that may as well have been made for me.
'Cans' at Theatre 503, 7th November 2014
One major advantage theatre has over other narrative forms is the intensification of emotions. Obviously it's possible to be moved by television and cinema, but when you have a living human being being put through the emotional wringer mere feet from you, their tears glistening under stage lights, it's so much more visceral. This is further magnified when a playwright chooses to probe an open wound, in Cans' case the tendency of popular radio personalities to rape and abuse their way through their fans.
Stuart Slade even takes the difficult path through this subject, examining the limits of sympathy and empathy by showing us the impact of a destroyed reputation on the DJ's family members. Both Jennifer Clement and Graham O'Mara knocked their roles out of the park. A bold play that successfully picks its way through a figurative minefield. My kinda stuff.
WINNER
'Here Lies Love' at the National Theatre, 17th October 2014
Given my twin love of both Talking Heads and chunky dance beats, it is unsurprising that I dug Here Lies Love right down to its molten core. This is a musical like few others, less a passive experience and more like you're attending the greatest party on earth. The songs are upbeat, the costumes are dynamic and the performers simply sweat charisma. The performance space roughly simulates being in a nightclub, the audience either looking down on the dancefloor or right in the midst of things being bumped by elbows and catching the eyes of the pretty person dancing next to you. It's an intoxicating vibe.
Offsetting these good times is that Here Lies Love tells the story of Imelda Marcos, an egomaniacal monster who exploited the peoples of the Philippines, living a life of luxury while the people starved. But Byrne doesn't so much show us her life as try and seduce us into it, the show roughly emulating the amphetamine rush of living within a neverending party where anything flies. It's equivalent to Scorsese's The Wolf of Wall Street in condemning behaviour while showing it as enjoyable - but where Scorsese just lets us watch his wild parties, Byrne lets us dance, drink and lust away with Imelda. It's ace and it's still on in the National. If you dig cool theatre you've got to check it out!
Saturday, August 9, 2014
Saturday, August 9, 2014
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In C.J. Wilmann's The Picture of John Gray Oscar Wilde is the sun. Shining high in the sky his presence illuminates every corner of this dramatic world. Yet like the sun you can't look at him directly - Oscar Wilde is simply too big a force to be contained on stage. What Wilmann shows us are the planets caught in his orbit, each reflecting individual facets of the great man.
Set in the dying years of the 19th century, we open in the pleasantly scruffy bohemian elegance of The Vale. This is the home of Charles Ricketts and Charles Shannon, two artists lodged within the firmament of Victorian gay culture. The two men appear to able to happily live together as partners as long as they keep their sexuality under wraps, and have cultivated a close-knit social circle formed around a joint love of poetry, art and fine wine.
The first scenes introduce us to their set, all of whom are erudite, well-dressed and with sharply refined tastes. They are; John Gray, a charming would-be poet raised from the sticks; Andre Raffalovich, a very French arch critic and poet gourmand; and Bosie, Lord Alfred Douglas, extroverted and egotistically domineering. As they recite poetry to each other the atmosphere becomes a cocktail of verbal jousting and one-upmanship. We sense that places like The Vale are a sanctuary from a world of where a good reputation is everything, all governed by prudish morality - a place where visitors can drop their masks.
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| From L-R: Bosie (Tom Cox), Ricketts (Oliver Allan), Gray (Patrick Walshe McBride), Shannon (Jordan McCurrach) and Raffalovich (Christopher Tester) |
The play gradually zeroes in on the relationship between Gray and Raffalovich, who, despite Gray initially insulting Raffalovich as an "ugly French Jew", quickly fall head over heels in love with one another. It's this relationship that forms the bedrock of the play; which proceeds to sensitively explore same-sex relations through a number of different prisms: how it informs an artist's development, the attraction of Catholicism and what it means to live "the love that dare not speak its name".
Let's get two things out of the way, this is a tremendous bit of playwriting and a marvellous piece of theatre. These are intensely clever characters seeking to one-up each other's displays of verbal gymnastics, so it's to Wilmann's enormous credit that never once does his script come across as trying to impress or worse, a caricature of what the 21st century imagines Wildean wit to be. Lying underneath this blizzard of wordplay is a bedrock of carefully considered historical research and some snatches of carefully considered philosophy and the odd moment of honest-to-god actual profundity.
Particularly striking to me was a moment where John Gray, torn between his love for Raffalovich and his devotion to Catholicism, explains precisely why Christianity appeals to him. He perceives life to be a series of unpredictable changes, and from his perspective he's entirely correct. One minute he's the plain old son of a carpenter, the next he's in a relationship with Oscar Wilde, the next he's in Berlin with a gay lover. With the ground unsteady beneath his feet he can at least rely on Christianity to remain static. No matter whether he attends Mass in London, Rome or Berlin it will always be the same ceremony, no matter when or where he picks up The Bible it will always contain the same commandments and morality.
It's not exactly fashionable for a play to extol the virtues of Christianity, especially when you're exploring gay rights issues. But Wilmann weaves the two together with surprising delicacy, showing us a life of priestly Catholicism as one of the few available Victorian avenues for two men to live together without suspicion of immorality or pressure of marriage. Tossing a pinch of salt into the mix is the observation that a gay man who goes into the church is merely forsaking worship of another man for worship of an omniscient masculine deity.
Similarly interesting is the examination of how being gay in Victorian London influences artistic development. Purely by virtue of their sexuality all the characters are outsiders, rebels against societal norms. Wilmann subtly argues that it's this factor that enables them to produce such beautiful art; the poetry recited, the paintings breathlessly described and even the allusions to Wilde's work. The beauty and demeanour of Gray is referred to as the inspiration for Dorian Gray and, in The Importance of Being Earnest, the characters present different personalities depending on their surroundings, mirroring the division between public and private life. The excellent stage design underlines these themes, the walls featuring a gently homoerotic painting of a man's jaw, pots of white paint dot the se and the floor itself is splashed with suggestively white liquid.
Material this good demands a worthy cast, and this doesn't disappoint. Everybody is excellent in their roles, charging the dialogue with crackling, unrehearsed electricity. With repartee this calculated and verbose there's a risk that it could come across as artificial, yet as we watch them react to each other it's as if we can see the cogs turning in the character's heads as they formulate their laser-precise responses. The structure of the play means that fine though their performances are, Bosie, Ricketts and Shannon remain roughly constant for the entire run-time. Their circumstances change, by and large their personalities do not.
It's Gray and Raffalovich that really go through the wringer, their characters gradually evolving over the course of the evening. Patrick Walshe McBride as Gray has the not inconsiderable task of conveying nervy, faintly shy talent masked by false confidence. There's moments where he purposely stumbles a little over his lines, reminding us that while the others are able to effortlessly dish out razor-keen conversation, he has to struggle to keep up. As his spiritual, moral and emotional journey continues we're magnetically drawn to his struggle - taking the difficult dramatic struggle of making earnest faith attractive and succeeding brilliantly.
But it's Christopher Tester as Raffalovich that was my undisputed highlight. It's difficult for me to pin down precisely what it is that I liked, but there's a core of humanity to the performance that straight up knocked my socks off. Perhaps it's that in the opening scenes he seems invincible, the most verbally dexterous of all, followed by all this being gradually stripped away from him to reveal deep vulnerability and longing. It's a powerhouse of a performance, and if you're going to see it I recommend sitting as close to the front as possible to get the full effect.
As a new play this is a huge success and I feel privileged to have seen it so early on. I can't imagine that it anyone seeing it won't enjoy it, especially not anyone with the remotest interest in Oscar Wilde who, even as an off stage presence influences everything we see. Simply put, this is a wonderful bit of theatre that deserves a wide audience.
The Picture of John Gray is at the Old Red Lion Theatre, Angel until the 30th of August. Tickets available here.
All photographs by Miriam Mahony
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