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Synopsis Afterlife explores the life of the Austrian impresario and founder of the Salzburg Festival, Max Reinhardt. Max Reinhardt, one the greatest impresarios of theatrical history, had a lifelong ambition - to dissolve the boundary between theatre and the world it portrays. Each year at the Salzburg Festival he directed a famous morality play, Everyman, about God sending Death to summon a representative of mankind for judgment. The victim he chooses is a man who, like Reinhardt, rejoices in his wealth and all the pleasures that money can buy. Then in 1938 Hitler declares his own day of reckoning and sends Death into Austria - whereupon Reinhardt, a Jew, is left as naked and vulnerable as Everyman himself. Afterlife is the story of how Reinhardt achieves his great ambition; though in a way he can scarcely have foreseen Running time 2 hours 25 minutes inc. interval
Five years after Democracy, playwright Michael Frayn, director Michael Blakemore and actor Roger Allam have reunited back at the National Theatre, where Frayn’s latest play Afterlife received its world premiere last night (4 June 2008, previews from 27 May) in the NT Lyttelton, running in rep until 14 August (See News, 7 Apr 2008).
Afterlife investigates the life of the Austrian impresario and founder of the Salzburg Festival, Max Reinhardt (Allam). Each year at Salzburg, Reinhardt directed the morality play Everyman, about God sending Death to summon a representative of mankind for judgement. Then in 1938 Hitler sends Death into Austria where Reinhardt, a Jew, is left as vulnerable as Everyman himself and must now face judgement himself.
After premiering at the National in 2003, Frayn’s last, multi award-winning full-length play Democracy, directed by Blakemore and starring Allam, transferred to the West End and was subsequently mounted on Broadway. Frayn’s other plays include Copenhagen, Noises Off, Donkeys’ Years, Alarms and Excursions, Benefactors and The Crimson Hotel.
Afterlife is directed by Frayn’s long-term collaborator Michael Blakemore and designed by Peter Davison. The cast also features David Burke, Abigail Cruttenden, Peter Forbes, Glyn Grain, Selina Griffiths and David Schofield.
Overnight critics were in the main underwhelmed by Afterlife, which they variously described as “crushingly disappointing”, “repetitive”, “spirit-sapping” and “pretentious”. Several conceded that they could see what Frayn was attempting, but nevertheless decided that “in practice, it does not quite work”. Despite some “exquisite moments” in Blakemore’s “superbly marshalled” production, even the “usually fine” Roger Allam was unable to rise above the flawed material for critics. The fact that the play, written largely in rhyming couplets, comes so soon after Tony Harrison’s critically panned verse drama Fram also prompted unhappy recollections and comparisons. However, Afterlife did find a big fan in The Times’ Sam Marlowe who, while acknowledging that the “writing is unashamedly contrived”, felt that the overall “experience still dazzles”.
Michael Coveney on Whatsonstage.com (two stars) – “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 … 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 … Unlike the glorious theatrical frippery of Noises Off, this play is stuck in its own metaphor of self-aggrandisement … Generally, 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 … For once, Frayn is caught in a no man’s land between his own forensic intelligence and his baser theatrical instincts: result, astonishingly, dullness.”
Nicholas de Jongh in the Evening Standard (two stars) – “Is anyone at the National Theatre responsible for protecting their most famous writers and ensuring they do not risk their reputations? Does its director, Nicholas Hytner, ensure the latest works of these playwrights are produced on grounds of merit rather than of reputations for masterworks like Copenhagen? … This slightly amusing new play by Michael Frayn … comes less than two months after the endless, haphazard trek of Tony Harrison’s Fram at the National … Afterlife strikes me as an arid eccentricity, best suited to remain in the bottom drawer of a remarkable playwright. Michael Blakemore’s production with designer Peter Davison’s imposing, high windowed exterior of Reinhardt’s own baroque Baroque palace … seems designed to dazzle us with spectacle and high life rather than conflict or debate … Roger Allam’s suave, smart-suited Reinhardt, with ever gesturing hands and mobile head, doggedly tries to energise a character who remains an outline figure … The rich Everyman becomes, in Frayn’s tiresomely underlined and repetitive treatment, Reinhardt’s alter ego … Frayn blurs the lines between reality and fantasy, just as Reinhardt believed the theatre director should. But such theorising was not enough to give him a theatrical Afterlife, anymore than this play deserves one.
Sam Marlowe in The Times (four stars) – “The insoluble mysteries of art and existence are evoked in Michael Frayn’s new play. As in the writer’s recent works Copenhagen and Democracy, the point of lift-off is located in real life; as in 1982’s Noises Off and 1990’s Look Look, the treatment is metatheatrical … Afterlife, directed with cool precision by Michael Blakemore, is a playful exploration of the ways in which language, faith and art express and shape our world. It presents not merely a notion of art reflecting life, but multiple mirrors reflecting back and forth an infinity of possibilities, bright, shining surfaces between which words and actions fly faster than light. Frayn’s intellectual preoccupations tend to crowd out immediacy, but the experience still dazzles … Roger Allam’s engaging Reinhardt is an erratic dynamo whose dream is to erase the boundaries between theatre and life … Frayn’s erudition sparkles and there’s a buoyant sense of fun in Blakemore’s production to match its braininess. The writing is unashamedly contrived – but artifice is part of its point … Frayn could have made the journey more emotionally engaging; but he makes a stimulating travelling companion.”
Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph – “A couple of months ago, I ripped into Tony Harrison's verse drama Fram at the NT … Now comes Michael Frayn with a play about Max Reinhardt, a once celebrated Austrian impresario, who mounted stage productions with vast casts and served as the model for Uncle Max in The Sound of Music … If Reinhardt is remembered for anything today, it's probably for … his epic productions of the medieval English morality play Everyman, which he staged every year in Salzburg from 1920 … The parallels often seem excessively laboured. And because Hugo von Hofmannsthal's German version of Everyman was written in rhyming couplets, Frayn has seen fit to do likewise. Afterlife isn't quite as bad as the Harrison play. There are blessed intervals when Frayn actually allows his characters to speak in plain prose … At his considerable best Frayn can be both splendidly funny and intellectually stimulating, though rarely, like Stoppard, at the same time. Here, however, I fear he often seems like a pretentious bore. One is reminded of such earlier Frayn turkeys as Look Look and Here, and realises with a lurch of regret that he has another flop on his hands here … That usually fine actor Roger Allam is largely reduced to actor laddie bluster as Reinhardt … I felt a bit like the figure of Death myself as I emerged from this punishing, spirit-sapping production.”
Michael Billington in the Guardian (three stars) – “While Frayn's play ripples with invention and is beautifully staged by Michael Blakemore, it is difficult to discover universal resonance in Reinhardt's career … Reinhardt, like Everyman, is an acquisitive materialist, and just as the symbolic figure of Death claims Everyman, so Reinhardt's career is destroyed by the 1938 Anschluss. You can see what Frayn is driving at: to suggest that art offers an equivalent to the religious afterlife and that the survival of Reinhardt's visionary idea of theatre as a waking dream matches Everyman's ultimate redemption. But, in practice, it does not quite work, because Frayn seems straitjacketed by the morality play format … In seeking to transform Reinhardt into Everyman, Frayn is forced to be factually selective … Blakemore's superbly marshalled production also contains some exquisite moments: best of all is one in which Reinhardt directs his footmen and maids in a mealtime minuet. This also allows the excellent Roger Allam to demonstrate that Reinhardt was most vibrantly alive when confronted by practical staging problems.”
- by Terri Paddock
** Decide for yourself! DON’T MISS our Whatsonstage.com Outing to AFTERLIFE on 4 August 2008 – including a FREE drink & EXCLUSIVE post-show Q&A – click here to book now! **
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.
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.
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