1992
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
William Shakespeare
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore
John Ford
State Theatre Company
Playhouse
Reviewed by Murray Bramwell
Simon Phillips’ season of classics in tandem, -Elizabethan and Jacobean, comedy and tragedy, dream and nightmare- is an ambitious one. It is physically demanding on actors, tricky to design and difficult to publicise. More than just works in repertory, A Midsummer Night’s Dream and ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore have been joined at the hip, or more likely at the heart, with a common theme, a one size-fits-two set and some intricate cross-casting. The inclination is to wonder whether the connection is merely an imposition, an idea determined to happen. Whatever is the case, each production is likely to have an effect on the fortunes of the other. Like Siamese twins, if one gets a cold, the other is bound to sneeze.
On first night A Midsummer Night’s Dream looked like it would sink the whole enterprise. Giddy, disconnected, listless in performance, it was a farrago of ideas and styles each taken out as insurance against the other. The decision to set the play in 1945, on the cusp of VE day- while giving everybody a chance to look like Bryan Ferry or an out-take from Waterloo Bridge- has a lingering arbitrariness about it. Unlike their Magritte Comedy of Errors or the Wall Street Caesar, this time Phillips and designer Shaun Gurton have not succeeded in turning a choice into something incontrovertible.
A Midsummer Night’s Dream is a disparate play. Three quite distinct sub-plots are carefully enunciated before they are drawn together in Acts Four and Five. It takes a lot of voltage and clarity to make the conclusion happen but when it is successful the victory is exponential. In State’s production there is a profusion of set pieces and design notions which do not easily knit. The opening scene, for instance, is instantly striking. Like a penny from heaven, a lone gramophone bleats a popular song about it being a Barnum and Bailey world. Puck- played by Leigh Russell like a louche bookie’s runner- enters, abruptly graunches the needle, grabs the record and presses it against a page of The Times. Swiftly tearing out a circle shape, he hurls it at the back of the stage. With the drop of a curtain a gigantic paper moon appears and Puck leaps on to an hydraulically elevating pedestal. Later in the play Puck pulls from his pocket a set of connected cut-paper trees while, behind him, a giant replica unfolds forming the forest of Athens.
These are strong conceits but texturally confused by the presence, on first night, of a disc-shaped performance space filled with powdered brick. The decision, later in the season, to replace the surface with magenta carpet not only spared the actors the possibility of silicosis but greatly integrated and improved the stage decor. Similarly, the costuming complicates the look of things. The use of military uniforms, not only for Theseus and Egeus but for the artisans, is not problematic in itself, in fact it’s quite neat. But, combined with the set, the brick grindings, the lovers in St Trinians gym slips and Adrian Mole blazers and the tizzied up fairies, it all becomes a bit de trop.
Any production of The Dream has to work out whether it believes in fairies or not. Many in Shakespeare’s audience took them seriously and regarded their mischief as little short of psychopathic. The playwright domesticated his fairies quite considerably, beginning a literary tradition of benign, gossamer pygmies that by the end of last century had reached kitsch proportions. It has become more common these days to highlight a dark energy in Puck and an equally dark eroticism in the co-dependent relationship between Oberon and Titania. State’s production acknowledges this. So it is then disappointing to have Titania’s retinue portrayed as Benny Hill mechanicals with flickering fairy-light wings and mincing manners. Philip Holder’s lisping sylph is a particularly egregious instance of a gag which costs the production more than it gains. Like the scooby-doo lullaby chorus around Titania’s bower, with fairy jokes a little fey goes a very long way.
On first night many performers were not equal to the task and so it was more than usually instructive to see the production three weeks on- after ‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore had opened. While many of the whimsies are irretrievably entrenched in the production it is as if the force of Ford’s play has had an anchoring effect on the Dream. Certainly it needed some battening down. When everything else is gaudy it is up to the performances to find some focus and balance. In this respect Helen Morse’s Titania has gathered a necessary intensity and the four lovers- Hermia played by Joey Kennedy, Yves Stenning and Luciano Martucci as Lysander and Demetrius and Angie Milliken as Helena- create much crisper comedy in Act Four. The exertions of the pratfalls set the physical comedy at odds with the wit (and the diction) at times but Angie Milliken particularly has found a centre of gravity in Helena that is not only entertaining but enriches the play.
As Theseus and Oberon, Robert Menzies, while saturnine and often droll, seems to be over-reaching to find a requisite authority in the roles. On the other hand, the mechanicals led by Richard Piper as Bully Bottom and a nicely restrained Edwin Hodgeman as Peter Quince create likeable comedy as the Home Guard thespians. Dad’s Army is the reference point, complete with Carmel McGlone as Clive Dunn, but it works well – except when the formation marching turns into chorus kicking and we glimpse the limp dead hand of It Aint Half Hot Mum. Piper, as the translated Bottom is Pyramus to the life (and the death) and is graciously given room to move by Maurie Annese as Flute, Peter Dunn as Snout and Frank Whitten as Starveling.
The larger question of the success of the conclusion is less clear. The staging of Pyramus and Thisbe with a half curtain and the somewhat desultory nuptial gathering muddles the stage when it should be most lucid and the on-stage costume change from artisans to fairies introduces an entirely different convention perilously late in the proceedings. Leigh Russell, strong and inventive throughout as Puck, closes well. But with a snipped text and boffo fairies you don’t get a sense of night terrors, allayed or otherwise. For all the hints at larger meanings this Dream is disappointingly short on revelation.
‘Tis Pity She’s a Whore is a very different kettle of pescare. The austere, relentless cadences of this Jacobean gorefest are in stark contrast to the luscious, intricate verse of the Dream. ‘Tis Pity is as tightly woven as the Dream is digressive and every action is directed towards death and doom. The incestuous love between Giovanni and Annabella is a paradox- a monstrous violation of a basic taboo and yet, in the context of the vulpine society in which they live, a haven of innocence, a Hansel and Gretel sanctuary in a world of perfidious adults.
With ‘Tis Pity both director Phillips and designer Gurton are more assured in the choices and the production has a galvanising pace and intensity. In Gurton’s design a huge cross looms above the proceedings, a heftily obvious image but effective all the same. Lowered to the horizontal it also functions as a suspended mezzanine acting space – albeit a vertiginous one. The purplish set and the winedark central acting disc, highlighted by Nick Schlieper’s plummy tints, give the production a shadowy, mannerist look. Bronwyn Jones’ costumes suggest Forties cosa nostra but the effect is mercifully subdued.
The intrigues are swiftly established, co-incidentally encircling the unsuspecting other-worldly siblings. Florio, their father machinates marriage while Soranzo and his viperous servant Vasques also contrive an advantageous match with Annabella. Bergetto, spurred by his uncle Donado, provides a grimly comic echo to this courtship while Richardetto, accompanied by his niece Philotis, seeks revenge on his enemies- in this production, a truncated sub-plot. Everywhere the church hovers – with feckless advice from Bonaventura and malign influence from the Cardinal. Ford’s play develops with frightening clarity and inevitability – such that composer Ian McDonald’s increasingly predictable keyboard blasts punctuating the scene changes become gratuitous and intrusive.
At the centre of the production are vigorous performances by Luciano Martucci and Angie Milliken as Giovanni and Annabella. In the difficult, final scenes in particular, they create the kind of intensity necessary to prevent the carnage of revenge tragedy becoming ludicrous. As Soranzo, Yves Stening has a dangerous stillness, while Richard Piper provides ergs and considerable intelligence as the Iago-like Vasques. It is a characteristicaly strong performance although marred by bellowing when a quiet menace would more than suffice. Leigh Russell is creepy as Grimaldi, Edwin Hodgeman judicious as Bonaventura and Maurie Annese, handy in both productions, is carefully goofy as the luckless Bergetto. Robert Menzies, hesitant in the Dream, finds memorable detail as Richardetto and Helen Morse, again playing Hippolita, is startling in her vignette of the conspirator scorned.
Tis Pity She’s a Whore is a play more problematic in prospect than in the telling. At least Simon Phillips has made it seem so. Despite the bombast and affectation this production makes an extraordinary plot intelligible and credible. That is the measure of Ford’s skill, of course, but this State production- especially if it finds its level as well as its twin the Dream has done- has made a good fist of a difficult task.
The Adelaide Review, No.105, August, 1992, pp.38-9.