London Report: Men Behaving Badly!
(© Simon Annand)
Right now, London audiences could come away thinking that theater is exclusively about men acting up and acting out (and actors acting well) before being set right by the women in their lives (played by actresses also performing extremely well).
Take for example, the men pushing their activities far beyond naughty-naughty in House of Games, Richard Bean’s adaptation of David Mamet’s film thriller, at the Almeida. Hoping to help troubled psychiatric patient Billy (Al Weaver) with his money woes, Dr. Margaret Ford (Nancy Carroll) goes to see what’s afoot in the pub where he apparently is heavily in the hole. What’s afoot is an elaborate flim-flam, engineered by Mike (Michael Landes) and a handful of card-sharp cronies adept at thoroughly bamboozling a mark.
The problem with Bean’s celluloid-to-stage transfer is that too much of what’s coming is signaled earlier than what Mamet cagily disguised. There’s no problem, though, with Lindsay Posner’s direction, designer Peter McKintosh’s notion of a dingy beer joint, or with the playing by Ford and Landes — who send sparks flying in their love scenes — and co-stars Dermot Crowley, Trevor Cooper, and Amanda Drew.
In the revival of Noel Coward’s Design for Living that Anthony Page has directed at the Old Vic, there’s one high-decibel moment when Gilda (Lisa Dillon) even exhorts her two BFFs Otto (Tom Burke) and Leo (Andrew Scott) to “stop ranting.” It’s a moment that comes late in the once-infamous work, which takes place over several years and three acts (respectively, Paris, London, New York) and in increasingly sumptuous Lez Brotherston settings, as the mercurial Gilda can’t decide which man she prefers so that eventually the men are living together without her.
The play is amusing in a typical Cowardian way, even if the master should have cut the many repetitious segments. The three leads, none of whom seem to know the definition of underplaying, get their laughs, but frequently by ranting more than even Coward wanted, while Maggie McCarthy does the best job as a cleaning-lady who has little time for the bright-young-things and their nonsense.
In Georg Buchner’s 19th-century historical drama, Danton’s Death, now at National’s Olivier Theatre under Michael Grandage’s direction, it’s the title figure (played by Toby Stephens), who does much of the ranting and raving, some of it in apology for his part in how the 1789 revolution went askew and some of it lashing out about his impending end at the guillotine’s rude bite.
Always someone who commands a stage, Stephens must stick to swaggering hither and yon while spewing grandiose statements like “When history comes to open our tombs, despots will choke on the stench of our corpses.” But Stephens swaggers and spews with the best of them, aided by an excellent cast, notably Elliot Levey as Robespierre.
in The Merry Wives of Windsor
(© Nathan Amzi)
While it often seems that William Shakespeare’s comedies date badly — since tastes in comedy are ephemeral, and rustics do tend to test one’s patience — that perception is obliterated when an inspired director steps up and gives new life to an old script, as Christopher Luscombe has with The Merry Wives of Windsor, now at the Shakespeare’s Globe, before traveling to the United States later this fall.
A strong argument could be made that the Shakespeare opus is dramatic literature’s seminal sitcom. John Falstaff (Christopher Benjamin, rotund, red-cheeked and rip-roaring) thinks Mistress Ford (Sarah Woodward) and Mistress Page (Serena Evans) have been making goo-goo eyes at him, and he contrives to woo them both. Getting wind of the old windbag’s scheme, the two ladies set out to embarrass the corpulent rogue.
Pulling any number of directorial tricks — not to mention having cast the play exuberantly — Luscombe keeps the laughs coming. Still, Luscombe knows how to change moods on a dime in order for the real lovers, Anne Page (Ceri-Lyn Cissone) and Fenton (Gerard McCarthy), to wax pastorally romantic.
Interestingly, the women giving men second thoughts in JT Rogers’ well-researched new play, Blood and Gifts, at the National’s Lyttelton, are never seen. They’re the wives of CIA agent James Warnock (Lloyd Owen) and British operative Simon Craig (Adam James), whom the two wedded-to-the-tricky-job men repeatedly leave — jeopardizing their marriage — while devoting themselves to clandestine plots for supplying Afghanistan fighters with weapons to thwart the 1981 Russian invasion.
What nips at the complete success of Rogers’ work is that in depicting the realpolitik machinations, Rogers scants script time given over to Warnock and Craig’s private lives. Contrarily, in depicting the private lives Warnock and Craig fear they’re forfeiting, Rogers scants script time given over to the international cloak-and-daggering. Ultimately, the public and private elements adversely affect each other. Nevertheless, the information, cunningly dealt with by Rogers and by director Howard Davies, warrants our attention.
