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

The School for Scandal at the Barbican

Deborah Warner’s production of Richard Brinsley Sheridan’s delicious comedy is a shouter. As the audience make their way into the auditorium the soundtrack is already pounding while a number of cast members strut across the stage as if on a catwalk wearing blue steel stares, Hoxton specs and man-bags along with their knee breeches and crinolines; occasionally someone in a technician’s headset and a Barbican BITE T-shirt throws a few shapes.

If you saw Warner’s production of Mother Courage at the National, you’ll recognise this stylistic landscape. Scene titles unfurl on banners or are held up on cards, the flats are intentionally flimsy and rough drawn, and there is no attempt to disguise the rumble and clank of props being assembled. The whole thing is thick with anachronism, the 18thcentury violently colliding with the 21st: there are Vivienne Westwood shopping bags, bottles of Bombay Sapphire and a whiff of urban decay. There’s something very modern in libertine Charles Surface’s debauchery; he glugs from a jug of Burgundy while sporting fashionably ratty jeans and an Indian headdress, his associates and hangers on slumped and sozzled around him.

Some of these anachronistic flourishes are inspired – particularly when Charles slakes a hangover with a can of full fat Coca Cola and something greasy and possibly from Greggs or when a vital piece of gossip is confirmed via iPhone – but sometimes it feels like Warner has taken one of those banners of hers, scrawled This Is The Concept on it in fat marker pen letters and is waving it in your face.

All that said, the exuberance of the production is seductive, compelling even, and the rapidity of Sheridan’s wit is only occasionally dampened by the racket. The principle joys come from the performances. Amid all the noise Alan Howard gives an elegant and understated performance as Sir Peter Teazle, grumbling, dogged, with an air of being permanently put upon: “was ever a man so crossed as I am?” He is well paired with Katherine Parkinson – whose delivery, as ever, is superbly measured – as his wayward and (much) younger wife. Though her character has succumbed to all the trappings of life as a lady of fashion, she is not without a heart and somewhere beneath all the snapping and sparring of the couple’s “daily jangle” they manage to suggest a degree of real affection.

Leo Bill is suitably nervy and spaced as the rakish wastrel Charles, yet beneath his array of twitches he suggests the existence of some small nugget of inner decency, however eroded. Aidan McArdle, as Joseph, the other Surface brother, a noted man of sentiment, conveys a strong sense of superficial moral solidity whilst suggesting a lack of any real resolve; at one point he is even seen enjoying some 18th century porn. This is a production particularly interested in the things underneath, the padding and girdles – and, in one case, a pair of Superman underpants – beneath the mile wide dresses and towering wigs.

The broader ensemble seems to have been differently instructed; here are performances dialled up to eleven, all snivelling and screeching, pratfalls and harsh caricature. This results in some over the top mugging but also, with the character of Moses the Jewish moneylender (played with an extravagant lisp by Adam Gillen), it presents something more testing as Warner looks the play’s anti-Semitism in the face and doesn’t attempt to pull back or soften it any way.

Sheridan’s play, with its strong distaste for hypocrisy and the pedlars of slander, remains a joyous thing to behold and Warner is faithful to its spirit; despite the 21st century visual vocabulary, she lets the play speak for itself. This is theatre as event – over three hours long and big, big, big – and it’s nothing if not memorable in its own bludgeoning way.

Reviewed for Exeunt

The Glass Menagerie at the Young Vic

Tennessee Williams intended The Glass Menagerie to have the texture of memory. The events of the play, as he envisioned them, would have a delicate relationship with the real, an evocative and almost expressionistic atmosphere. Music was to play a key role and a series of title cards and images were to be projected on a screen between scenes, a snippet of dialogue or a spray of blue roses. This last device was abandoned before the original staging and director Joe Hill-Gibbons does not resurrect it here, but he does attempt to honour other aspects of Williams’ ‘memory play’ through his use of lighting and music.

The production opens with a beautifully executed visual flourish, a splash of stage magic, but though a solid attempt has been made to integrate these elements into the production (that superb opening moment being a good example) some of the early scenes feel heavy and tethered. Things only really coalesce in the second half when many of the stylistic devices are dropped and Williams’ dialogue is allowed to stand alone. Amanda, the Wingfield matriarch is an ageing southern belle transplanted to a St Louis tenement but still ‘clinging frantically to another place and time’, to her girlhood in Blue Mountain where she once entertained seventeen gentlemen callers in one afternoon. Terrified that her daughter Laura, a desperately shy girl whose chief pleasures are her Victrola records and her collection of tiny glass animals, will end up an old maid, she pesters her son Tom – an overt stand-in for Williams - to invite one of his warehouse colleagues to dinner. It is the scene between Laura and the Jim, the gentleman caller, a man she hankered after at high school, which makes this production sing rather than hum. Until this point it totters along - there are moments of overplaying and sudden shifts in tone - but a kind of calm descends when Jim arrives at the door. As in his recent Young Vic production of The Beauty Queen of Leenane, Hill-Gibbins is fond of placing actors at the very front of the stage with their backs to the audience during key exchanges, thus shifting the attention to the face of the listener. In this context it’s a successful tactic, creating a connecting thread between the audience and Laura, allowing them to study her face as it relaxes and brightens. Played out against a white dividing curtain, Williams’ rich dialogue, with all its pathos, humour and warmth, is foregrounded. As Amanda, Deborah Findlay is sturdier than the mother described by Williams and she uses this as an advantage. Decked out in the lace and sparkle of her cotillion dress, she captures some of the poignant absurdity of this middle aged woman giggling and flirting with abandon, but she also captures her fierce maternal spirit, her nous (women, she declares as she buttons Laura into a hill of frills and ribbon, are “pretty traps”) and her determination to provide a secure future for her daughter. In the publicity material Sinead Matthews’ Laura is shown with glorious, almost white blonde hair, but in the production itself, she is saddled with a mousy, lumpy wig and her performance sometimes seems like a collection of tics – a limp, a (not always convincing) stutter – her fragility more external than internal, but this changes as the play progresses. When Jim arrives Laura emerges as a person: brave, funny and self-knowing. Leo Bill is angular and aggressive as Tom, the shoebox Shakespeare longing for escape; his frustration with his lot is evident even in the rapid, ravenous way in which he eats. Kyle Soller, given permission by the text to be ‘a nice ordinary young man’, is charming and self-confident as Jim, his performance less heightened than the others, his character vain but not unperceptive and not unkind, a man not unfamiliar with disappointment. Dominated by a smiling photo of the absent father in his army cap, Jeremy Herbert’s set is an inside-outside affair, combing fire escapes and raw brick walls with the trappings of the Wingfield apartment. The music is supplied live by a pianist and percussionist perched up on the gallery; the latter, appropriately, has a collection of glasses at his disposal. It is, however, the snippets of song coming from the dancehall across the street that have the biggest emotional impact. As Jim and Laura listen he asks her to dance with him and, after some hesitation, she gives in; she dances. Reviewed for musicOMH