A bitter-sweet play about mortality lies behind this elaborate production
A Matter of Life and Death
Olivier Theatre, London SE1
In an attempt to adapt one of the most hallowed treasures of British cinema, Michael Powell and Emeric Pressburger's A Matter of Life and Death, the National Theatre has come up with the incoherent solution of throwing everything possible at the stage and hoping for the best. Cycling nurses do synchronised leg raises, acrobats leap from the sky, video clips are projected on a giant orb and a live band pumps out - what? Funky waltz music, rap and a bit of jive. Why? Who knows? Mercifully, after about half an hour of this fevered and chaotic activity, the show settles down and remembers it is a play.
The story is simple: in the dying days of the Second World War, Squadron Leader Peter Carter's Lancaster bomber is shot down. Carter (Tristan Sturrock) bales out. The only catch, as he confesses to the plucky radio controller June (Lyndsey Marshal), is that he has no parachute. A certain death, surely; yet, miraculously, he lands on an English beach alive, bumps into June, and falls in love with her.
That's down on earth. Meanwhile Carter is expected up in heaven, where everyone is dead, but having fun in pyjamas and slippers. A not very funny comic Norwegian magician (Gísli Örn Gardarsson) is sent down to bring him back. But Carter resists. He has just found the love of his life, and he doesn't want to die.
If you like your theatre rather surreal and funky, then this show is for you. It won't be, however, if you dislike scenes such as the one set on a hospital ward where a doctor is attempting to stage A Midsummer Night's Dream. Patients bed-hop in synchronised rhythm, and the nurses dance a mean calypso. Emma Rice and Tom Morris, who have taken on the task of adapting Powell and Pressburger's "unstageable" film, have put in a pile of such comic diversions, besides ropes, aerial harnesses and abseiling, presumably to dramatise the notion of moving between heaven and earth. Yet, despite being full of fireworks, the show doesn't really find its way into the argument until the very end.
Carter, desperate to give love a chance, goes back to heaven to plead for life. At which point another dead airman (Mike Shepherd), takes him to the back of the auditorium and points at us, the audience. Fine art and literature can go on living for hundreds of years. Theatre cannot. In, say, 80 years' time, the audience won't be pretending to be dead: we will all be dead.
"You've had a good life," shouted Shepherd to an elderly patron, and "Bad luck! You died young," to a teenager. Talk about a sobering audience moment. But what a brilliant metaphor to demonstrate the ubiquity of death.
Meanwhile, back in heaven, a bunch of other soldiers has arrived. If Carter can cheat death, then what about the youth of Europe cut down in the First World War, or those killed in the Boer war, the Franco-Prussian war, and so on? Various dead witnesses (mothers from firebombed Dresden and Coventry; a First World War soldier; er, William Shakespeare) step up to defend the importance of knowing when you have to go, and why it is impossible - morally wrong, even - to cheat the Grim Reaper.
The play ends in a nicely unsentimental manner. Life is a gift, it tells us, but the manner in which one leaves it can be its enduring definition. Sturrock and Marshal pull off the trick of looking utterly enraptured by one another, while Shepherd is a nimble-footed delight. Douglas Hodge also puts in a thoroughly decent turn as the thoroughly decent doctor who battles to save the airman's life.
If you can put up with the high-kicking nurses and the jazzy live music, A Matter of Life and Death shows itself to be a thought-provoking and bitter-sweet piece of theatre.
For further info and booking details visit: http://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk
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