The Prisoner, Edinburgh International Festival 2018

The Prisoner

Théâtre des Bouffes du Nord, directed by Peter Brook

Lyceum Theatre, Edinburgh, 22^nd August 2018

This was a play I felt I had to see.  Legendary theatre director Peter Brook who has lived in Paris for the last several decades brought a new production to the Edinburgh International Festival.  The text was written by Brook and his co-director, Marie-Hélène Estienne.  The theme sounded strange.  Was it a ‘Waiting for Godot’ for our times, or was it the Emperor’s New Clothes?  I am firmly in the latter camp.

On a relatively bare stage, a few withered looking trees and some dirt, some stones i.e. somewhere in Africa; the production was 1 hour and 10 minutes long.  There was an Everyman figure, a white man.  Was he a journalist, a visitor, or just there for some commentary?  The other actors were of many races – Sri Lankan, Malian, Mexican, Indian.

At the start we are told very quickly that the central character has committed an unspeakable crime.  Incongruously we very quickly learn what it was.  He returned to his home to find his 13 year old sister having sex (consensual) with his (and her) father.  He then kills his father.  His uncle takes on the role of policeman, judge, executioner – at least he hits him on all four limbs with a stick, then turns him over to the authorities who pass a long prison sentence.  After a while his uncle intercedes on his behalf with the governor but tells him that although freed from prison he must sit in front of the prison for the foreseeable future.  The Prisoner faithfully undertakes this, irritating anybody who happens by, from the prison, the local village, the white man, and even later on his uncle.  Then for reasons that are unclear he skedaddles.  In the meantime, in a victim made good cliché, the daughter grows up and goes away to medical school, returns, and her uncle is very proud of her. It’s clear that one reason why her brother was enraged was his secret desire for his sister as well.  Perhaps this is why he finds his guilt difficult to expiate.

The acting is wooden, the script turgid, and as Dylan Thomas said ‘time passes’, though for me very slowly.

There is a metaphor in here somewhere, isn’t there?  There must be.  Perhaps I am too stupid to work it out.  A psychiatrist friend in the audience has a theory that it is a plea for the plight of refugees.  The only possible message that I could take away was that ‘stone walls do not a prison make, nor iron bars a cage’.  Has somebody said that before perhaps?  Yes, in 1642 to be exact.  While not in prison, we are perhaps prisoners of what we have done, at least if we have the conscience to seek redemption for it.  Psychopaths of course do not worry about niceties like that.

Now in ‘Waiting for Godot’, at least nothing happens twice.  In the Prisoner quite a bit happens but it doesn’t seem to have the same impact.  My own feeling about Waiting for Godot is that it takes some remarkable actors to make it work.  Watching Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart in the play recently I was struck by what the actors do when not saying their lines.  In Godot this is at least as important as the lines themselves.  It’s no coincidence that one of the greatest interpretations of Vladimir was that of Max Wall, who, although a fine actor, could be classified (in the greatest and most admirable sense) as a Pierrot.  As Brook says in his introduction, the pauses are often as important as the lines, and he specifically mentions Beckett’s theatre directions which say (Pause).  The pause often heightens the menace in Pinter’s plays as well.  But here it seemed stilted only.

In all fairness, I should add that Joyce McMillan, writing in The Scotsman, took a different view.  In a breathlessly gushy rave review headlined ‘Captivating set of brief encounters’ she finishes by telling us that the show ‘…achieves a magnificent balance of stillness, relaxation and narrative tension; compelling us to pause, to breathe and to reflect, but also moving the story towards its end with the inevitability and energy of a natural force, harnessed by an absolute master.’  Hmm.

A Midsummer Night's Dream - Stratford 2011

A MIDSUMMER NIGHT’S DREAM – ROYAL SHAKESPEARE COMPANY, RST STRATFORD, SATURDAY 29^TH OCTOBER 2011

Long awaited and booked as soon as Charles Spencer’s ecstatic review of the ‘Dream’ appeared after the first performance in July, we trekked to Stratford-upon-Avon for the full Shakespeare experience.  It was high praise indeed to suggest that Nancy Meckler's production was a new dawn of MND productions in the same mould as the groundbreaking Peter Brook ‘Dream’ of 1970.  After some research, we decided on a background walk the day before, taking us from Snitterfield over the Welcombe Hills, where Shakespeare is thought to have purchased the rights to some tithes with money earned from his theatrical life in London.  There is documentary evidence of a dispute over inclosure of common land, though precisely what happened is unclear.  David Hare, of course, given his political leanings, decided that Shakespeare must be the villainous landlord of the piece in his play ‘Bingo’, and it was hard not to shout Bingo, every time we came upon some neatly clipped yews or some Elizabethan half timbered cottages...

It’s some years since I was last at the RST, and opening this year, the theatre has had a £100M refit.  Although we booked nearly three months ago and tried for the best seats, we weren’t particularly disappointed to get seats in the third row of the circle.  We discovered that the new circle only has three rows, and the back row, or seat C69, where I was billeted, was constructed along the lines of an Elizabethan torture device.  The perch was high, difficult to get up and down from, and on levelling the seat, a mechanism beneath brings a metal grille underneath the feet, providing that one doubles one’s feet back underneath.  It would truly be more comfortable standing up, and this opinion is endorsed by contributors to the website ‘What’s On Stage’.  In addition, the fixed spotlights are a distraction and limit the view of the upper part of the set.  The heat that they produce is intense so that it feels as though one is in the top part of an old fashioned oven, without the benefit of the fan assistance.  Looking down at the stalls one is struck by how few seats there are.  Reading an interview with the architect of the development, it emerges that the old theatre meant that some of the audience were as much as 30m from the stage, whereas the revamp has halved the maximum distance.  I address these words to all those who suffer seat C69 in future: the number may conjure up visions of sexual contortion – but believe me it will not be a pleasurable experience.  £100M – and it’s awful.  Other friends sitting in the circle a little further round had an even more limited view.

This preamble should have been about the play, the production, the players, but sadly it hasn’t.  When stretched upon the rack of seat C69, it’s hard to feel magical, but I certainly tried.

The cast tried hard too, and at times they succeeded.

Having been to a Tristan and Isolde this year which seemed to be located on a rather utilitarian cross channel ferry, I was not unprepared for a set which seemed to be in some sort of speakeasy warehouse, with metal doors and fire escapes.  In contrast to Charles Spencer’s opinion, the production does not create a rival to the Brook ‘Dream’, rather it builds on it.  The set is mostly white, as in 1970; the famous swing is there, and some of the costumes are borrowed from the sixties.  When one reads the names of the actors involved in the great RSC productions of the past, Alan Howard, Sara Kestelman, Ian Holm, Ian Richardson, David Warner, Diana Rigg, Helen Mirren, Frances de la Tour, Patrick Stewart, Ben Kingsley, it’s hard not to ask oneself if today’s actors will achieve these heights.  Well, I’m not sure.  During the performance I saw, Lucy Briggs-Owen was indisposed, and Amanda Wilkin, one of the fairies played the role – and well.  It is demanding, with long speeches of pleading and bewilderment, which test our powers of sympathy to the utmost.  It was a shame not to see Lucy Briggs-Owen because Charles Spencer particularly praised her.  What of the rest of the cast?  Whether it was the theatre, my location (Circle C69 in case you’ve forgotten), or an insistence on estuary English rather than received pronunciation, there does seem to be a problem with diction in modern Shakespearian thesps.  Egeus was incomprehensible; Theseus proved to me that it was the third of these three problems which bedevil comprehension.  As a London autocrat (gang boss, nightclub owner, footballer – it was never made clear) he was difficult to understand.  Doubling as Oberon, however, he proved to be the revelation of the night, his beautiful verse speaking of some of the most poetic lines of the play making one sigh with pleasure.  Jo Stone-Fewings (one might have thought he would adopt a more mellifluous stage name) was the actor concerned.  Hippolyta/Titania (Pippa Nixon) was a pleasure to watch and listen to as well.  She was a genuinely beautiful queen, with astonishing blue eyes, and clear and perfectly paced verse speaking skills.  It would be harsh to pick on some of the other cast members, and sometimes the fault appeared to lie with the director.  Whoever thought that it would be a good idea to make Thisbe speak in a shrieking female voice which rendered the lines incomprehensible?  Why did the fairies speak like Terry Jones in ‘The Life of Brian?’  Marc Wootton who played Bottom however clearly has a future as a comic actor of great conviction.

Charles Spencer spoke of the set as like a 60s trip.  Presumably he meant the multicoloured steel office chairs which descended from above the stage during some but not all of the scenes in the wood.  But the most effective scene was where the lovers, struggling to negotiate the forest at night, were intercepted by the sprites and spirits of the wood in the most balletic fashion as they tried to make their way diagonally across the stage.

My companions at the evening were unhappy that Puck was not small and mischievous, though I note that Brook’s Puck, John Kane, appeared tall, at least in the historic cast photos.  Arsher Ali has great promise – and was audible.  One of the dissenters has had her world view of Puck fixed forever by a magical experience at Oxford, as Puck appeared, diminutive and mischievous, from the top of the Tudor mound at New College, some time in the 1970s.  We all agreed how effective it is to double the roles of Theseus/Oberon and Hippolyta/Titania.  The dream world selves of the King and Queen become so much more credible as reincarnations of their Athenian alter egos, and their resumption of a more reasonable state of mind and behaviour becomes a resolution of their quarrels in the dreamland of the wood.  In fact, it was Peter Brook who introduced this device.  It seems strange that it took 370 years to discover how effective it could be.  Given the possibly smaller casts available at the time of first performances however, this may have been the norm in the early 1600s.  So overall, a very enjoyable ‘Dream’, not quite ground-breaking, and less a dream than something of a nightmare for the groundlings in Row C.