Ancient and modern | 31 March 2007

In Competition No. 2487 you were invited to submit a theatrical critic’s response to a production of a modern play in ancient costume. There were easy laughs to be had at the expense of ropy chitons and inadequate loincloths and in general you took a harsh line. Most of you set your jaundiced sights on productions of works by just a few (Pinter, Osborne and Coward loomed large). None, though, scaled the scornful heights of Kenneth Tynan’s much-quoted take on Gielgud in modern dress, whom he described as having ‘the general aspect of a tight, smart, walking umbrella’.

A more or less lone chorus of approval came from W.J. Webster, who nets the bonus fiver. The other prizewinners, printed below, get £25 each. I am still unwell and so, for the time being, as of next week, the competitions will be set and judged by a colleague.

When the curtain went up to reveal the mouths of two adjoining caves, there was a rustling of programmes as the audience checked that they hadn’t mistakenly booked for Beckett instead of Coward. They hadn’t. This is the notable first production of Private Lives in a prehistoric setting. And by and large, surprisingly, it works. Can one be debonair in a pelt? Tim Trimm is there to show one indubitably can. And brittle in woad? Arabella Mellor is effortlessly so. These are bright young Neolithic things. The 20th-century façade has been stripped away from the aeons-old comedy of human coupling and uncoupling. Even the anachronisms produce a telling resonance. ‘Very flat, Norfolk’ now conjures a picture of a vast, plashy fen. And something plangent is added to the potency of cheap music when it is played on a three-hole pipe. We are ourselves in an exhilaratingly different time and place.

Pinter’s enigmatic exploration of vicious grudges and frustrations in family life is given a strangely distorted perspective in Perverse Theatre’s decision to set and dress The Homecoming in ancient Greece. Inevitably it evokes that great archetype of return, Ulysses, yet this fails to illuminate Perverse’s Greek family in dress-down-day shabby chitons, the Greek equivalent of jogging suits. Nor is it the return of a patriarch we view, but Teddy, a professor from ‘America’. Does Perverse equate the USA with the defeat and fall of Troy? If so, is Hackney a modern Ithaca? And what of Ruth, the incomer, a Penelope in reverse, subject to sexually predatory advances from the four men? What sort of suitors are these? Whether the ‘scissors’ (anachronistic here) of the famous opening line are recalling Iphitus’ gift of the great bow is intriguing — but a distraction. We were grateful for Pinter’s generous pauses (all retained) to consider these imponderables.

In relocating Ayckbourn’s Norman Conquests to the time of the Norman Conquests, director Peter Vestibule continues his re-imagining of the dramatist’s oeuvre so successfully commenced with his August Bank Holiday-set Season’s Greetings. Here, with the titular Norman encased paradoxically in Anglo-Saxon armour, accentuating his sexual frustrations considerably, this trilogy of suburban comedies acquires a pathos which more than compensates for occasional jarring moments when motor cars or East Grinstead obtrude into the dialogue. Placing the character of veterinarian Tom aboard a temperamental destrier expertly demonstrates a shortfall in his professional abilities, causing audience members in the stalls some uneasy moments into the bargain. While the female cast members fail to exude the requisite allure in visibly hot and itchy woollen dresses, creaky leather undergarments and a hauberk furnish Reg, here inventor of a Bayeux tapestry-based board game, with a camp subtext sadly absent in the original.

Dull, dowdy, dire and depressing are words that come to mind: the plot is dull, the stage set dowdy, the costumes dire and the script depressing. The plot, if there is one, centres on the mindless outbursts of a jumped-up pseudo-intellectual who mopes around in a squalid bedsit railing at his partner and sundry acquaintances who flit in and out in their chitons treading on or tripping over each others’ garments. Why 20th-century characters are dressed in Greek attire is anybody’s guess. If it was meant to add gravitas, it fails miserably. After watching robes unravel, unfastened fibulae fall on the floor and carelessly slung himations slipping off shoulders, any sense of gravitas degenerates into pure farce. With no change of scenery throughout and the central character forever fuming, the final curtain comes as a blessing. Look Back in Anger? You certainly will after seeing it.

By setting The Caretaker in the late Elizabethan era, Gilmore seems at first reckoning to have set himself a series of insoluble problems. However, gifted with a magnificent cast of classical actors, he rises effortlessly above them. The phenomenon of ‘double-effect anachronic alienation’ is nowhere more tellingly demonstrated than in Aston’s soliloquy describing his electric shock treatment. Garbed as Tom O’Bedlam in ‘looped and windowed’ doublet and ‘down-gyved’ hose, the unfortunate brother seems to his eponymous interlocutor to be a madman describing a bizarre hallucination. But to the audience, who recognise the process he’s describing, Aston is invested with apparent prophetic powers; in his tortured brain he is able to access the future. Additionally, the audience is subliminally referred to the range of folly and insanity explored in Lear, whose terrible outcome they know. Thus Gilmore adds a Shakespearean resonance to the subtle menace always present in Pinter’s work.

It’s easy to see that in Look Back in Anger a kind of civil war is being waged. Now the idea has been literalised in a revival at the Morecambe Orpheum. It makes for some striking stage images. Jimmy rants away in the dark, heavy uniform of a Cromwellian while his wife wears the faded finery of the Stuart cause to iron his plain white shirts. Her father, ornately wigged, is all lace and embroidery, a man who will never understand the Puritan soul. A scruffy Midlands flat becomes a Jacobean cottage.Yet without some rewriting to justify the costumes, the play suffers from a surfeit of anachronisms, many of which are liable to undermine rather than support the production style. A Parliamentarian would hardly complain that there are ‘no good brave causes left’, and religion, historically quite central, receives only slighting asides. A failed experiment.

No. 2490: Fast living

In the 19th-century children’s nursery rhyme, Solomon Grundy was born on Monday and dead by Sunday. You are invited to give the account of the life of a historical figure condensed into seven days, either in verse (maximum 16 lines) or prose (maximum 250 words). Entries to ‘Competition 2490’ by 12 April, or email to lucy@spectator.co.uk.