The Tempest; Passion Play; The Weir
Shakespeare’s Globe, London SE1;
Duke of York’s Theatre, London WC2;
Donmar Warehouse, London WC2
In his speech at the end of his daughter’s wedding masque – delivered here with great poetry by Roger Allam – Prospero makes literal sense of what every theatregoer fancies. Actors, or at least the characters they inhabit, are spirits who melt into thin air at a play’s end. The lines have particular resonance at the Globe, not least because “the great globe itself” gets a namecheck. They also provide a challenge for this production’s director, Jeremy Herrin: to create magic on the bare boards of the replica Elizabethan stage. Technically it is not possible to create the kind of effects available to, say, Jonathan Kent at the Almeida in 2000, who plonked a swimming pool in the middle of the stage.
There is another curious thing about the Globe. It is a tourist attraction but it delivers Shakespeare at RSC standards, against the elements, which were little short of tempestuous themselves on the night I went. Like Gonzalo, every cagouled groundling would fain die a dry death. The Globe heavily relies on the magic of Shakespeare’s language.
Not all of the production soared. Colin Morgan, whose supernatural provenance is impeccable, having played the BBC’s Merlin, was an unethereal Ariel. James Garnon was far too sleek and pretty to be the monster Caliban, although he worked hard to compensate, early on pulling off an audience member’s see-through mac and eating it. Jessie Buckley was a delightful Miranda, however, looking for once the required 15 years of age, and Sam Cox as the drunk butler Stephano had good moments, including a brief impersonation of David Attenborough: “This is some monster of the isle – with four legs.”
Magical, though, this production was not and that may even have been deliberate. The arrival of the shipwrecked parties was interpreted as a gigantic reality check for Prospero – but his magic was coming to an end anyway. Allam played the duke as an aphasic and failing tyrant, more irritable than terrifying, forgetful of the plots against him, barmily preoccupied with his daughter’s virginity. Like the shivering audience, he demands at the end to be released of his supernatural bonds.
Formally speaking, there are two magical elements in Peter Nichols’s Passion Play, a 1981 piece about middle-class, middle-aged adultery revived under David Leveaux’s spare direction. The first is that the parts of the husband and wife are split so that there are sometimes two Jameses and two Eleanors onstage. The second is the religious music of Bach and Handel that pipes up on the excuse that Eleanor is a singer. Zoë Wanamaker and Samantha Bond make a good fist of exploring the pain of Eleanor’s betrayal. Owen Teale and Oliver Cotton are less successful at generating sympathy for the adulterous James, a scruffy picture-restorer with no obvious charms or views beyond a churlish atheism. The real mystery is Kate, played by the barely dressed Annabel Scholey as pure body: what is in it for her, this shagging with old men? Perhaps she, too, needs a double on stage to tell us.
It is the play’s theatrical conceits that do for it. The stage becomes crowded with viewpoints. Not only are they not always clearly differentiated, they trip over one another. Perfectly zingy dialogue is interrupted, as it were, by footnotes. As for the sacred music, its main effect is to make this shabby tale look monumentally irrelevant and also dated – a product of a pre-Aids society in which educated people behaved in a manner these days most often seen on The Jeremy Kyle Show.
Tales of the supernatural are the stuff that Conor McPherson’s The Weir are made on. A couple of old soaks and their more successful neighbour Finbar scare each other and the barman with ghost stories. The tales speak to the lonely ghostliness of a depopulated land but they are also treasured, polished to perfection in each retelling, because they are means of connection: to the past and, for the narrators, to one another. Brian Cox, Risteárd Cooper and Ardal O’Hanlon outdo themselves in the excellence of their monologues, so much so that one fears for Dervla Kirwan, playing a newcomer to the community. Will she be able to compete? Yet when her story of personal tragedy comes, it sweeps all away.
Josie Rourke’s revival of this 1997 play reveals it to be a masterpiece, a study of the inadequacy of male company, the insufficiency of consolation and humanity’s determination to get by on what it has. It is funny, wears its sadness lightly and grips from the moment that Cox, as the bachelor Jack, enters the pub and aggressively wipes his boots. For the next 100 minutes, you believe you are in the pub with him and his almost-friends. The Donmar dissolves in favour of Sligo. That is magic.
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