Synopsis Widely regarded as the man who laid the foundations of modern British theatre, Harley Granville-Barker was famed for his Shakespeare productions and wrote and produced ground-breaking new plays in the early twentieth century. He lectured at Cambridge, Oxford, Yale and Harvard. Richard Nelson’s new play finds him embittered and world-weary in Massachusetts in 1916, with war raging in Europe, having fallen in with a group of British expatriates endeavouring to find their way in an academic, theatre obsessed community.
The play follows legendary actor-manager Harley Granville Barker's estrangement from theatre, as he exiles himself to Williamstown, Massachusetts during World War I.
"What is in effect a sober conversation piece with insider historical information is presented with stark clarity in Roger Michell’s admirably cast production ... But the flame of the play, and of Ben Chaplin’s performance, burns quite low, ending in an almost embarrassingly unremarkable Mummers Play in the garden ... Granville Barker has rediscovered that theatre matters, but this is all talk, not show, and it’s a struggle to remain interested for the uninterrupted 105 minutes’ playing time. Still, it’s very good to see Chaplin on the stage again. Jemma Redgrave as the widow manageress, Henry’s sister, emotes quietly in the background and Tara Fitzgerald as a flighty lecturer impresses once again with her ability to inhabit any period or indeed costume without seeming false or unnatural. As a testament to Granville Barker, the play is obviously positive but also too knowing for an audience unaware of his then radical, now taken-for-granted, approach to Shakespeare."
Paul Taylor Independent ★★★ "Michell once again turns up trumps with a production exquisitely attuned to the Chekhovian mix of rueful melancholy and sharp-eyed objectivity about the absurd ... This new work almost combines elements from its two predecessors in that it is an agonising comedy ... Radiating languid irony and emotional reserve, Ben Chaplin is superb in the role of protagonist ... Jason Watkins's endearing Frank Spraight ... Sunk in sardonic disillusion, Barker is in a personal and professional limb ... It boasts some lovely performances (especially from Jemma Redgrave and Tara Fitzgerald). But the echoes of the Shakespeare feel contrived; the presentation of Barker through his effect on a campus squabble feels faintly too non-momentous; and the happy-ish Mummers' Play ending unearned."
"Ben Chaplin does an unshowy job of conveying his character’s passion for theatre and simultaneous desire to change it with a mix of playful charm, geniality and soulfulness ... A touching Jemma Redgrave ... is embroiled in a furtive relationship with the much younger Charles, and we understand that she and Granville-Barker share certain frustrations. But this is underdeveloped, and Tara Fitzgerald feels underused in the role. Jason Watkins makes the strongest impression as Frank Spraight ... Through Frank, Nelson introduces touches of poignancy and moments of humour. Yet Granville-Barker’s emotional turmoil is thinly sketched. Roger Michell’s well-cast production has a quiet dignity. But Farewell to the Theatre suffers from a cloying earnestness. Granville-Barker’s pioneering talents don’t come across. The writing, though elegant, is bloodless; the key relationships are undernourished."
Libby Purves The Times ★★★
"Frank Spraight, beautifully played by Jason Watkins as initially a bit of a buffoon, finally dignified ... Chaplin’s performance is low-key, repressed with flashes of anger. I found it gripping ... Farewell to the Theatre is a play for people who already care about the theatre, and at a hundred minutes it is a pretty slow-burn. Jemma Redgrave is impressive as Henry’s sister who keeps the boarding-house; Andrew Havill has a curiously pointless role as a visiting cousin ... It is only the introduction of an invisible villain, “Professor Weston”, which brings the play to life; the most dramatic scene is related, albeit with brilliant force, by Barker ... It suitably echoes the real Barker’s credo: that his art is a living, nourishing form of communication and consolation, not an insider hobby or a vehicle for show-offs and visual effects. If that fellowship of feeling and philosophical questing is what theatre is about, it should not get mired in technicality and scholarship, and certainly not in spite."
"Richard Nelson's extraordinary play...combines a command of realistic detail with a sense of suffering and loss that genuinely evokes the Russian masters ... There is not a lot of plot: simply a mesmerising record of a group of people all in flight from their own unhappiness ... Roger Michell's exquisite production also fulfils the play's mission of interesting us in characters because of who they are as much as what they do. Ben Chaplin has just the right air of thwarted idealism as Granville Barker ... Jason Watkins as the peripatetic Dickensian burying his sadness under a Pickwickian exterior and Tara Fitzgerald as the hopelessly lovelorn Beatrice are also first-rate. And although Jemma Redgrave, as the widowed manager of the Williamstown boardinghouse, spends much of her time laying and clearing tables, everything she does reveals her unhappiness in a way that Chekhov would have approved."
"Ben Chaplin captures, with much thoughtfulness, the sense of desolation that Granville-Barker experienced when he slipped away from the theatre, fame and the hypnotic power of the Bright Lights. You witness his inner anguish and the inevitable fact that theatrical ideas are still spinning in his head ... There are some neat performances, in particular that of Frank (Jason Watkins), who takes his one-man Charles Dickens show around America ... Tara Fitzgerald...excellent as the young actress-cum-lecturer Beatrice ... Young student Charles...a neat performance by William French ... Jemma Redgrave is a suffering Dorothy ... Hers is one of the most beautiful voices on the English stage and she uses it cleverly with its sad cadences. Roger Michell directs firmly in this sad picture of English expats in safe America during war-torn 1916."
"A sweet, sorrowful, defiant play about the cultural bond of drama ... Jason Watkins gives a beautiful performance as the nobly discreet husband of an ill wife ... Ben Chaplin combines a bewitching inner stillness with an almost balletic quality when he moves. We never see the production of Twelfth Night (thank goodness). Instead, we meet its nervous director (done well by Louis Hilyer, all jerky hand movements) ... Andrew Havill, playing a lonely chump, is as good as the rest of the cast. Director Roger Michell schools them well but should maybe ask them to speak louder ... It is perfectly credible this lot would miss English plays ... There may be something a little thespily self-indulgent about the enterprise yet the characters are shrewdly written, prettily caught and the whole thing classily staged."
Richard Nelson has stolen his title for his elusive new play about Harley Granville Barker in America from the short play Granville Barker wrote in 1916 before going into the army; he’d already served with the Red Cross in France and made his reputation as the outstanding actor, director and playwright (second only to his great friend and colleague, Bernard Shaw) of his day.
Granville Barker’s two-hander shows an actress on the brink of discovering that theatre must change and that “truth lives where only other people are.” Nelson gives us a portrait of Granville Barker (Ben Chaplin) at a similar crossroads in a boarding house in Williamstown, Massachusetts, where he is renewing his faith in theatre.
But his life is complicated by his separation from the actress Lillah McCarthy and his new attachment to Helen Huntington, neither of whom appear in the play, alas. He is being sounded out for a job in the university, and he’s on a lecture circuit with a Dickens specialist, Frank Spraight (Jason Watkins, suitably Dickensian).
He becomes embroiled in university politics and a conflict between amateur and professional theatre represented by the sad ambitions of a thwarted professor, Henry Smith (Louis Hilyer), and a bumptious star turn in the college Cap and Bells society, Charles Massinger (William French).
What is in effect a sober conversation piece with insider historical information is presented with stark clarity in Roger Michell’s admirably cast production, on a bare boarded set (by Hildegard Bechtler) that obliterates the division between stage and audience, much as Granville Barker did away with the footlights in his day.
But the flame of the play, and of Ben Chaplin’s performance, burns quite low, ending in an almost embarrassingly unremarkable Mummers Play in the garden, suddenly lit in full sunshine (by Rick Fisher) with a glimpse of summer trees beyond. Granville Barker has rediscovered that theatre matters, but this is all talk, not show, and it’s a struggle to remain interested for the uninterrupted 105 minutes’ playing time.
Still, it’s very good to see Chaplin on the stage again. Jemma Redgrave as the widow manageress, Henry’s sister, emotes quietly in the background and Tara Fitzgerald as a flighty lecturer impresses once again with her ability to inhabit any period or indeed costume without seeming false or unnatural.
As a testament to Granville Barker, the play is obviously positive but also too knowing for an audience unaware of his then radical, now taken-for-granted, approach to Shakespeare. And as a study of English people dislocated from their home culture “on the edge of the earth,” as Frank puts it, well, we have to take their word for it.
Disappointing - a chance to explore the life and techniques of the man weho changed our approacch to Shakespeare -here sidelined to a varsity debate between academic rivals in America where HGB was in linmbo -so is the play - Dave J
20 Mar 12
Dull, dull, dull; gleaned little, felt nothing. No dramatic content and poor perfs; how did Chaplin/Nelson manage to make Barker so tangential and insignificant? And the seats just like Soho Theatre - why so uncomfortable? Word of mouth can't be gr8 - only half full! - Peter Harlock
16 Mar 12
This is wonderful production. This is not 'feel good' theatre, the play has the word "Farewell" in the title, after all. Not much happens either. Harley Granville Barker (Ben Chaplin), an Andre Gregory prototype, makes a point of saying he dreams of a theatre where "being" is more important than "doing," where "intimacy" is established with the audience, and you really feel like you "know" the characters, rather than watch them engage in action and plot. The most important antagonist (a sly professor at an American college) in this play does not even make an appearance. But the play is spellbinding, and the performances are flawless. All-consuming disappointment is effectively the leading 'character' in this play, as it systematically swamps the lives and expectations of all the expatriates trying to rebuild their lives in a Massachusetts boarding house. One such expatriate is Harley Granville Barker, a brilliant Ben Chaplin, who is by turns witty, distant, passive, interested, outraged, but always holds on to an affecting melancholic dignity. Chaplin makes a lot of eye contact with the audience too, in his successful bid to create the intimacy between performer and audience that Granville Barker so wanted. In her understated yet supremely expressive way, Jemma Redgrave creates perhaps the most frustrated female character I have seen. It's truly upsetting to see even Granville Barker, who mostly knows better, thoughtlessly ignore what this fiercely intelligent yet marginalised woman has to say. As a man who recites Dicken's Pickwick Papers for a living, Jason Watkins is marvellous, upbeat, knowing, intellectually undiminished by his rote profession, restraining glass shards of great pain by the force of affable verbosity. The initimacy I felt with Watkins when he did his Dicken's recital (while they changed the scene behind him) mere inches from my face was palpable. Tara Fitzgerald is also superlative, her jittery anxiety more keenly reflecting her lowly status than her delusional words and deeds. The last actor of major note is Andrew Havill, who plays the most humbled demeaned corrupted character with a moving pervasive brave cheeriness. The staging of this play is illuminating, with a huge deep stage offering opportunities for the foreground and background to comment on the (in)action elsewhere. Jemma Redgrave's silently frustrated widow is frequently placed into the foreground and background of scenes in this way to comment on the (in)action elsewhere. All in all, I'd agree that this play is talky and has little action, but I'd recommend it above most of those that do. - steveatplays
12 Mar 12
I found this compelling and surprisingly moving. The structure is occasionally clumsy and the last scene forced, but it's one of the most subtle and richly detailed plays I've seen in awhile. And the cast is absolutely stellar. Lovely! - David
08 Mar 12
A pretentious snail moving terrible play.rain must havre been mentioned 50 times .whata bore.Pity there was no interval so that we could leave .the director should have known better
Another Hampstead disaster - Lenny
08 Mar 12
this was one of the best productions I've seen in the past 12 months - a superb cast, a stunningly effective spartan set design, and dramatically engaging from start to finish. Fantastic! - Louise
Eton Avenue Swiss Cottage Inner London London NW3 3EU
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Description
[TMA] member. Housed for 40 years in a 'temporary' prefab. In 1999, the Arts Council of England awarded the theatre a National Lottery grant of £9.86 million to fund a new building. The new Hamstead Theatre opened in 2003. The Hampstead Downstairs is a studio space dedicated to new writing.
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