It is a commonplace to say that the director plays God, and it is an intended irony at the heart of Michael Frayn’s new play Afterlife in the Lyttelton that his heroic divinity, the Austrian Jewish theatre director Max Reinhardt (1873-1943), is most renowned for his overblown productions of the Everyman morality play at the Salzburg Festival, which he founded in 1920.
After life, of course, there is death, and that’s a fair summary of both the subject matter of the play and its impact on the audience. This is a crushingly disappointing evening, one in which Frayn’s single tattered theme – that of the overlap between life and art – yields no variation.
The young Reinhardt championed Gorky and Wedekind, established Shakespeare for a modern audience in Germany and paved the way for Piscator’s Expressionism and Brecht’s political theatre. But this significant artist is not enshrined in any theoretical legacy, unlike Brecht, Artaud or even Peter Brook. So he’s largely forgotten. Frayn deals with the onset of the end, as Death comes calling and Reinhardt, driven out by the Nazis, fades in penury first in Hollywood and finally in New York.
Unlike the glorious theatrical frippery of Noises Off, this play is stuck in its own metaphor of self-aggrandisement: Peter Davison’s monumental grey design of the exterior of Salzburg Cathedral, where the Everyman play was performed every year, transmutes effortlessly into the hollow baroque splendour of Leopoldskron, the castle Reinhardt called home and presented as his own greatest production for 20 years.
Michael Blakemore’s production makes this point with a deliciously arranged banquet scene, Roger Allam’s pernickety Reinhardt supervising the servants in a clockwork cabaret of serving canapés while despairing at the sight of his guests wandering around with no direction and no script. Generally, though, Allam’s performance doesn’t take off (although I wish his two ghastly and unnecessary wigs would) and remains grounded along with the relentless rhyming couplets Frayn employs in his merging of the Everyman play with the automatic “real life” scenes.
You don’t feel that anyone’s heart is in the show, although Abigail Cruttenden wafts elegantly throughout as Reinhardt’s mistress, David Schofield is reliably sinister as an alternative Everyman figure who dons the death mask as a Nazi gauleiter, and Glyn Grain is smoothly efficient as Reinhardt’s valet. David Burke is a somewhat tedious old archbishop. For once, Frayn is caught in a no man’s land between his own forensic intelligence and his baser theatrical instincts: result, astonishingly, dullness.
- Michael Coveney
Reader Reviews
Score
Comment
Date
Roger Allam as always is superb in this production which I throughly enjoyed. - ILS
21 Aug 08
I must be getting generous in my old age otherwise why would I award this 3 stars? Well I suppose it's because it's not quite as bad as one would imagine from reading some of the many one star reviews here. I rather enjoyed the rhyming couplets which seemed pretentious to one reviewer, but was, if one knows anything at all about Reinhardt, seemingly not so. I had enough by the interval though and left. I hate doing that, but life's too short to waste it on something one is getting much from. I didn't feel Mr Frayn was taking me anywhere that I couldn't go more successfully from reading a book. Hey Ho! Not the end of the world, but yet another less than inspiring production from our NT which has had a less than inspiring run of late under the current stewardship of Mr Hytner who must surely be coming up for "retirement"? My choice to replace him would be Michael Attenborough if only we could prise him away from the Almeida. I know, let's get a campaign going and start voting here. - rds
20 Aug 08
After the recent 4 and even 5 star feedback, I feel that is only right to redress the balance, but even Roger Allam excellent as ever, could not save this from being a really poor play. I left the theatre wondering why on earth Michael Frayn decided to write it the way he did. - CAA
13 Aug 08
Fortunately I hadn't read any reviews before seeing this thoroughly entertaining production - otherwise I may have been adversely influenced. However, despite knowing little of Max Reinhardt and nothing of the Everyman mystery play beforehand, I found this play entertaining, amusing, well-staged, superbly acted, and with Michael Frayn's luminous intelligence shining through as the text skipped seamlesslessly from prose to amusing loose quadrameter translations of Everyman and back.
It may not hit the heights throughout, and the subject matter is certainly a touch obscure, but I was entertained throughout and cannot understand why anyone would want to leave at the interval. - Robbie
06 Aug 08
I cannot understand why so many of the reviews of this play have been so negative. I found it totally absorbing, very witty, beautifully directed and superbly acted, especially by Roger Allam as Max Reinhardt. His transformation from the confident, gregarious man of the first three quarters to the disillusioned, tired old man of the American scene was nothing short of breathtaking. A packed auditorium plainly agreed with me, for nobody left at half time and the applause at the end was generous and prolonged. The NT, with this play and Tony Harrison's 'Fram', have triumphantly done what a national theatre should do - brought us new, exciting work which makes you think. - sc
05 Aug 08
An interesting and layered play - superbly acted - Patricai Kliman
05 Aug 08
Wanted to like this play and definitely did not. Wonderful sets and competent acting did not compensate for pretentious and repetitive script. - Jean Prior
05 Aug 08
Based on almost all the reviews I was severley regretting booking a ticket for Afterlife and even prepared for an interval exit so it came as a very pleasant surprise to find that it is not only thought-provoking but very entertaining. OK the rhyming couplets are pretentious and, like Stoppard, Michael Frayn enjoys displaying his intellectual superiority, particularly if you do not have an encyclopaedic knowledge of the Everyman morality play. Peter Davison's design is majestic and Michael Blakemore directs an exceptional cast at a great pace (Selina Griffiths sounds identical to Annette Crosbie). Afterlife apparently takes liberties with the true facts but it is a fascinating portrait of Max Reinhardt, a man who treated the world and everyone in it as a vast theatrical production but was incapable of directing himself. - David Baxter
23 Jul 08
How does one of Britain's best playwrights turn a clearly interesting life into such a dull play? The answer seems to me to lie in the sructure; Frayn has tied his hands behind his back by choosing to weave the biographical story in and out of casting, rehearsals and productions of Reinhart's morality play Everyman, played annually at the Saltzburg Festival. This provides a large dose of of monotony and irritation and makes the real story seem secondary to the 'device'. By the interval, I was bored. The second half picked up, but in the end I wish I hadn't gone - and I never thought I'd say that about a Frayn play! - Gareth James
09 Jul 08
An utterly boring production. The good cast and interesting art direction can't make up for Frayn's dull play. I also left at the interval - Manolis D.
05 Jul 08
Oh dear! Who let this slip through the net? Did they just take it on spec or were they too scared to disappoint Frayn? It's the sort of .... that we in Scotland have had to suffer, from the likes of Liz Lochhead, for years. Great work from the tireless cast, especially Roger Allam who deserves a Platinum Blue Peter Badge. - joesmith
25 Jun 08
Hugely disappointing play, terribly edited, ina dull and predictable production. Casting-by-numbers again - will Poppy Norton Taylor ever get cast without a clipboard? - not that the cast was bad, just an auto-pilot. This was significantly worse than Fram, and that really is saying something.
Of course as an established, British, male and (normally) very talented playwright, Bilington is obliged to give it 3stars. Don't be fooled: avoid.
- dgr
12 Jun 08
Taken with Fram the National has had two serious duds in a row. When they saw the script of Afterlife they would have done MF a great favour if they had sent it back tetrameters and all for a re-think and re-write . Fine actors and designers were lost in a text that bogged itself down in pretentious repetition. Surely almost anyone would guess that text would not work without using the whole Lyttleton to prove it. It wasted my evening. - David Fisk
12 Jun 08
Left at the interval, this sort of thing is what gives the theatre a bad name. Middle aged, middle class audience trying hard to pretend to enjoy it, saw so many people nodding of throughout the first act. Can't comment on the second, never I have been so bored (well ... not since the National's production of that Coward play recently) and what a waste of everyone's talents. Shame. - LLKK
11 Jun 08
I hate giving negative reviews, but I'm afraid this play just didn't do it for me. It was sumptuously produced, and the scenery and lighting were marvellous, really atmospheric. And the acting was superb, with Roger Allam playing the huge central part without a single fumble. But my view, sadly, is that the material didn't merit these efforts, and I couldn't shake the feeling that it was all such a waste; tremendous talent, spectacular sets, but I felt very little substance. And the conceit of the seemingly endless rhyming couplets, as well as what I saw as deeply inappropriate 'humour' just dragged it out for me. It's a shame, I was looking forward to the great Roger Allam, just a pity the play wasn't great enough. - LDE
10 Jun 08
"Noises Off!" is one of the best stage productions I have ever seen. In fact I have seen it twice, with a twenty year interval and it sparkled on both occasions. The chance of a new Frayn play at The National was irresistible. A beautiful summer evening [a rarity this summer] and sipping Champagne while watching the boats on the Thames could not have put us in a better mood. We noticed John Sessions in the audience and settled down to be amazed. And we were.. amazed how pedestrian, how dull, how pointless this whole production was. Where was the wit, the insight, the pathos. When were we going to be swallowed by the magic of Theatre, where was the invitation to suspend disbelief. [punctuate with question marks as appropriate]. The interval came and we retired to the bar, incidentally passing the Honourable Mr Frayn on the way. It was still a passably pleasant summer evening, so I find myself unqualified to criticise the second half. We cut our losses and left. - Grumpy Old Scot
06 Jun 08
It contains a barnstorming central performance from Roger Allam and a visual feast from designer Peter Davison. It is magnificently directed by Michael Blakemore, and all in all I really enjoyed myself. But...
As for the play itself, I'm not sure why Michael Frayn felt compelled to write it. He has homed in on the Jewish Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt, but the story he tells is less than riveting. Oddly, aspects of Reinhardt's life that I'd previously read about in biographical notes are more extraordinary than Frayn's angle, which is to take as a starting point Reinhardt's annual staging of the Everyman morality play in front of Salzburg Cathedral during the 20s and 30s. From this, Frayn draws dubious parallels with Reinhardt's own life... but his was no morality play: he was not martyred and neither his eventful life nor his quiet death can find a parallel in any kind of cautionary tale. So we end up with an elegantly told piece of stagecraft, full of pleasing in-jokes and stage trickery, but signifying very little. And it's told in verse, (mainly doggerel), a jokey nod towards Everyman that has a curiously distancing effect on the spectator: I was scarcely able to care two hoots about Reinhardt's unfolding destiny as I waited patiently for 'flunkeys' to rhyme with 'monkeys'.
Afterlife is a bit like one of those disappointing Easter eggs: the ones you buy because they have such a pretty shell, but which turn out to be hollow on the inside. - Job
06 Jun 08
Never been so bored in my life. Possibly when reading another dull work of Frayn's, Spies. Please don't waste your time going to see this especially if you are under the age of 65. - Tony
04 Jun 08
The medieval audience for the mystery plays was often unschooled, illiterate and unsophisticated, and in this work Michael Frayn has attempted to give his own version of such a play by using the 1920's Austrian impresario Max Reinhardt as the subject. However the 2008 NT audience is of a somewhat different complexion to the earlier one -experienced,probably atheistic and unlikely to believe in an afterlife.Yet we were subjected to a couple of hours of repetitive moralising (you are going to die one day, you know) so that one longed for the storm troopers to march in. When they finally arrived (hooray!) the monotony of the first act had already lulled one into a stupor and a character disappearing down a trap door followed by a gust of smoke could only elicit a rolling of the eyes. In fact the last half evoked some unintended laughter from the audience. Tedium. - kilburncat
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