A Woman Killed With Kindness at the National Theatre

Two households. Two women. Katie Mitchell’s new production of Thomas Heywood’s 1603 play splits the stage down the middle: on one side, there is an ancient family manor house and, on the other, an elegant early twentieth century home. This division allows for a process of mirroring, for moments of both harmony and discordance between the play’s two plot strands.

Heywood’s play begins on a joyous note, on the day of the wedding of John Frankford. But the celebratory spirit of these opening moments is soon diluted when his wife Anne embarks on an affair with Wendoll, a friend of her husband who has been invited to stay at their home and treat it - and its contents - as his own. The idea of women as property is made explicit in the secondary but more potent account of Sir Charles, the wealthy landowner imprisoned for his shooting a servant, who in order to free himself from mounting debts, offers up his sister, Susan, to a man she can’t abide.

Mitchell’s production continually contrasts these two women and their predicaments. The events have been transplanted from the early seventeenth century to 1919, in the immediate aftermath of the First World War, when social structures were shifting. The Representation of the People Act had recently granted women over 30 the right to vote, but both of these women remain trapped by entrenched social codes, the need for female purity most pressing among them. Whiteness. The wedding gown takes on a toxic symbolism as Susan stands shrouded in lace awaiting the man Charles would have her give herself to and, on the night of her wedding, Anne’s white nightdress is tainted by her own blood, so it seems apt that, later, when her husband interrupts her in bed with Wendoll, she emerges from the room clad in turquoise silk. Heywood’s play offers little in the way of insight into why Anne gives herself so quickly to Wendoll but the walls of the Frankford home are pointedly hung with butterflies under glass. On the other side of the divide, the walls of the Mountford home are methodically stripped of their finery, of the oil paintings and the chandeliers, as their once grand family seat becomes little more than a decaying, chilly prison.

The stage space is actually split into four rather than two since both sides of Lizzie Clachan and Vicki Mortimer’s set are spread across two levels, each connected by a staircase, while Mitchell’s production plays with the vertical as much as the horizontal. Servants are forever flurrying up and down the stairs or gently ascending to the bedrooms above; in one striking moment, Susan, amid a blizzard of activity, walks slowly backwards up the stairs as if tugged by a cord. Visual paralleling also occurs between the upstairs and downstairs worlds: when Anne is in labour both Frankford and Wendoll rattle back and forth across the stage like fingers being impatiently run up and down the keys of a piano.

For all this visual intricacy, Mitchell sometimes seems to be sparring with Heywood’s play rather than dancing with it; a constant process of negotiation with the text seems to be at work. There’s wit here - when Frankford faces his wife over card table and they debate whether to play Hearts and Cheat – but the play is often merely functional, shoving its characters from point A to point B without giving much thought to the journey. It’s full of emotional lurches and leaps in plausibility and neither play nor production ever fully gets under Anne’s skin as a character, neither makes the audience grasp quite why this woman is so quick to hop into bed with Wendoll (Mitchell suggests that sex with Frankford is a brusque, abrupt affair but this feels like a tacked on explanation).

The production is better at painting the fall-out of Anne’s adultery, the pain Frankford inflicts through his stoic determination to drive his wife from her home and her children and the awful punishment she inflicts on them both as a result. There’s a continuing resonance to Anne’s decision to starve herself; a woman of appetite remains a suspect figure and self-denial is a kind of power, a means of taking control. Yet at times the production seems to be pushing too hard to make its point: the final hospital scene – which finally unites the two women’s stories – is as clinical as the space in which it is set, and an earlier scene in which Susan clutches a noose and contemplates escape, are blunt in execution and out of step with the production’s particular rhythms.

Of the performances, Paul Ready’s decent, bemused and ultimately shattered Frankford stands out, as does Sandy McDade, a still, drifting presence as Susan. But this is very much an ensemble piece, elegantly and intricately choreographed. Mitchell seems particularly interested in the relationship between servant and master, the bonds of dependence and affection, and there are always large numbers of bodies on stage, clearing dishes, serving drinks. Gawn Grainger’s turn as Frankford’s paternal, no-nonsense butler, Nicholas, provides a necessary note of warmth.

Amid the near-constant motion and the dramatic use of the domestic interior it’s the moments of connection that mark themselves out. The most memorable image, the one you are left with long after, is of these two women on either side of the wall picking out notes on the piano, briefly connecting with one another, before life spirals away from them.

Reviewed for Exeunt

Two Nights At The National

Things have been a bit quiet around here recently. Well that’s not strictly true, life has been the opposite of quiet, with weddings to attend and house-moves to plan. But, in theatre terms, things have been quiet. However at the end of last week I did have a couple of lovely back-to-back nights at the National. On Thursday I met up with my friend Nikhilesh for the opening night of Rebecca Lenkiewicz’s Her Naked Skin, a big sweeping play set against a backdrop of the Suffragette Movement and, as nearly every reviewer – me included – felt obliged to point out, the first original work (not an adaptation) by a living woman writer to be staged in the Olivier.

Certain elements of this I adored. The scene where Jemima Rooper’s Eve was forcefed is one of the most upsetting things I’ve seen on stage in a long time – I found the image following me around all weekend, refusing to vacate my mind. The performances of the three women, Lesley Manville, Rooper and the wonderful Susan Engel, were also superb. But – and it’s a big ‘but’ - I found the central love story, the relationship between Manville’s Lady Celia Cain and Rooper’s seamstress character, far less involving than the era evoked. And I agree with all those who’ve mentioned the fact that there are too many short scenes, that the revolve is forever revolving, the cage-like set constantly swinging in and out of view. The play reminded me, favourably, of some of the things the Orange Tree has been staging of late, but it was crying out for a good monologue, a good, long passionate piece of oration.

On Friday I returned to the South Bank to see Katie Mitchell’s …some trace of her. But first I stopped to pick up coffee and nibbley things from the Slow Food Fair behind the Royal Festival Hall, then I settled on the ‘grass’ outside the theatre to half-watch something that may have involved juggling and mime, but made me laugh on more than one occasion. Feeling warm and content, I tottered around to the Cottesloe and my mood was not dented by the production. I was worried that not knowing the book – Dostoevsky’s The Idiot - would be a handicap but I did not find this to the case, the production conveyed the essence of the thing well enough, it did not try to be retain every element of the narrative, that was not the point, but as a riff on the text, a kind of game played with it, there was much to take pleasure in.

I have not seen Mitchell’s Waves, which I gather uses many of the same techniques (though I will try to rectify this when it returns next month) and so much of what she was doing here was new to me.

A screen fills the back wall of the stage and the actors create scenes which are filmed and projected onto this screen. Every frame is beautifully composed and lit, shot in rich black and white. The performers double as technicians, setting up props, positioning cameras, wielding microphones, and all the while hitting their cues with perfect timing. It’s a hypnotic process, thrilling to watch.
While the images created are already, individually, arresting (a vase apparently spinning in midair, a plate of burning banknotes, a soup bowl teeming with maggots) the contrast with the manner of their construction is equally fascinating. Sound effects are created in front of us, music is played live and rain comes out of a plastic bottle.

There is an intentional dislocation between what can be seen on the screen and what is taking place on the stage below. Moments of conversational intimacy are filmed with the actors sitting on opposite ends of the stage with their backs to one another, each facing a separate camera; close ups of hands and faces are filmed using different performers and then seamlessly edited together on screen; a couple who appear to be lying in bed are actually standing upright with a sheet wound around them, the camera tilted to give the impression they are horizontal. In this way the onscreen image, the illusion of reality, is picked apart, deconstructed, but in a way that adds to, rather than detracts, from the image itself.

If I’d seen this done before, I wonder if my response would have been quite so positive, but I hadn’t, so it was. Yes, it was frustrating at times, having performers such as Ben Whishaw and Hattie Morahan on stage and having to see them running around all the time moving props and fiddling with cameras when I was hoping for a bit more acting, but again, from a technical point of view, there was something quite fascinating about seeing the differences, the contrast, between what works for stage and screen, the tiny gestures and expressions that can took on new meaning. Ultimately the piece excited me on an intellectual level more than on an emotional level, though I’m not sure that’s a criticism, not in this case at least.

Sometimes London starts to wear me down and I seem to forever be running for (and missing) buses or fretting over bills or skating along on too-little sleep. Sometimes I think a change would be good, an adventure, a new start, somewhere less frantic and friendlier, and then I have a couple of nights like this where everything seems to slide together in a satisfying fashion and I reconsider. Surely I’d miss this, I’d long for this, this richness, if I lived anywhere else but here?

The Unsettling City

There is a bus that takes me almost literally from my front door to the entrance of the Royal Court and there is something about this ease of arrival, this smooth transition – from sofa to stalls – that always puts me in an excellent mood: open, excited.

My most recent trip there was earlier this week to see Martin Crimp’s latest play The City, a strange and twisty thing indeed. The play begins with a scene in which a married couple discuss their respective days. The husband, Christopher, is anxious about the impending restructuring of the company for which he works, while the wife, Clair, describes an unusual encounter with a man at Waterloo Station, a writer with a young daughter, which resulted in her being given a diary as a present. A strong sense of tension underlines this entire exchange, as with every subsequent scene.

In the following scene, a woman, Jenny, a nurse you assume from the uniform, arrives at the couple’s house to complain about the noise their children make when playing. This has been preventing her from sleeping following her night shifts. She then tells them a lengthy story about her husband who is overseas, working as a doctor in a war in an unnamed country. Later a young girl appears – the couple’s daughter, you presume – also clad in a nurse’s uniform and the feeling of discomfort that has already been building grows even stronger. There is something about the casual exchange of smutty limericks between the Cumberbatch’s character and this child that makes you fear for this small, vulnerable person surrounded by all this unspoken aggression and anxiety.

This ninety minute play is a taut and finely crafted piece of writing where every detail, no matter how inconsequential it initially appears, carries weight. Katie Mitchell’s direction accentuates these qualities. Every nuance of speech and movement feels as if it has been carefully thought about. Disconnection is the dominant theme. Crimp’s characters seem to be permanently on the cusp of a volatile outburst and each carefully constructed scene is, as I’ve said, an exercise in tension.

An air of unreality is also apparent. The stories that the characters tell frequently fail to ring true: everything feels slightly askew. The reasons for this only become apparent at the end, when Crimp overturns what has gone before with what feels less like a revelation than a new layer seems the perfect conclusion, cementing the underlying sense of despair. The city of the title refers not only to a physical place but a place of the imagination. Clair works as a translator, dealing only with the words of others, her own attempts at creativity are lifeless, fractured – disconnected, her internal world barren

As Christopher and Clair, Benedict Cumberbatch and Hattie Morahan give excellent performances, ditto Amanda Hale as their timid, quivering neighbour. Cumberbatch in particular is proficient at giving an edge of menace to even seemingly mundane statements and all three of them speak with an intensity, a clarity that is oddly unnerving. This, as with everything else we are given, seems designed to unsettle, an effect enhanced by Vicki Mortimer’s stark, very white set and the babble of white noise that accompanies the scene changes.

The world Crimp presents us with, is anonymous yet also familiar - also very sinister. Not a place to linger long: unspecified unpleasantness lurks beneath the surface, constantly threatening to bubble up. Some parts didn’t quite click, when Cumberbatch came out in a supermarket butchers garb, it was a predictable joke, but I enjoyed the games that were being played, the knottiness of it.

On the way home, my bus took longer than unsual, going on an unexplained diversion and meandering all round the house. I didn’t realise why until I read about the shooting in Markham Square the next day, somehow this seemed disturbingly apt.