Synopsis The play revolves around an ordinary man with a shocking secret. At home, he is a loving husband and father. But at work, he administers the Cut. In a society sickened by his profession, he struggles with his conscience and longs to tell the truth. Contains strong language
Is there currently a more versatile or compelling actor on the London stage than Ian McKellen? Straight from the exuberant, over-the-top, cross-dressing camp of his panto dame turn as Widow Twanky in the return of Aladdin at the Old Vic, he now segues directly to a far more sober, sinister mode in The Cut, Mark Ravenhill’s bleak (and rather oblique) new play at the Donmar Warehouse.
Two nights before the opening of this production, McKellen deservedly took this year’s Laurence Olivier special award for lifetime achievement, and was presented with it by the director of this production Michael Grandage, who said that during rehearsals the actor became affectionately dubbed “the king of logic”, since he “cannot proceed until everything has been logically and truthfully worked through.”
Rehearsals can only have been a slow and painful process in that case, since Ravenhill’s play is full of questions but few answers. Like a Pinter puzzle that has an air of Pinteresque menace looming large, it is torture to watch in every sense. Quite what the point of the procedure that McKellen’s character administers is (cryptically called The Cut), how exactly it is administered and why, isn’t clear even after we’ve seen it happen. Is this, like The Exonerated, an anti-capital punishment, or at least anti-torture, polemic? Or a fetishization of those proceedings (since the “victim” actually seems to crave the punishment)? Or is it a wider parable of the effects of his job on the torturer, since he is clearly unwilling to exercise it and is haunted by the bad memories of what he does?
All of this beats me; but Grandage, directing not only his first new play for the Donmar but also (as far as I could tell from his programme credits) his first new play anywhere, isn’t as defeated as I am. His production pulses with the kind of brooding atmosphere that he has brought to bear on far more substantial plays, including the stunning production of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck that immediately preceded this and recently won him the Critics’ Circle Award for Best Director.
He has also been magnificently served by the tour-de-force of McKellen’s performance (that will be forced to tour after its season here, taking the Donmar on the road), as we follow him across a trio of encounters: first with prisoner John (Jimmy Akingbola), then wife Susan (the always-splendid Deborah Findlay) and finally son Stephen (Tom Burke). They do their best to make something mesmerising out of a play that keeps putting its own meaning frustratingly out of reach.
A frustrating play given that the acting and the rest of the production are superb.
Ian McKellan in an award winning performance? - 213.86.133.215)
23 Mar 06
Yes, it is too obscure for its own good, but you'd be struggling to fine such terrific performances and impeccabe staging anywhere else. Even the scene changes had you on the end of your seat! Craftsmanship par excellence - pity about the play. - 86.138.64.115)
21 Mar 06
Acting is fine but the play bizareness leads nowhere and is at the same time awfully banal.
I'm glad there was no interval because I'd be stuborn enough to stay and see if there was a point, then would have kicked myself for not leaving then.
I'd never seen a Ravenhill play...I won't ever again. - 87.194.53.250)
14 Mar 06
Loved it, loved it, loved it!! Well done, Donmar, for staging this piece and for giving us something genuinely new, exciting, flawed, tight, beautifully-paced, still-working-it-out-as-a-whole-idea, suspenseful, funny, moving and clever. Grandage is a god, McKellen is stonkingly good. It's by no means completely satisfying and is not a 'great' or 'worthy' work, but it definitely makes one think and question and talk. There is an active engagement between audience and cast. It serves up everything required of good theatre and it does so under the sure and gifted hand of Grandage against a great set and a fabulous soundtrack. The central performance is a masterclass of timing, character work, observation and humanity. Sir Ian uses every fibre in his performance, but we see no wires or levers or strings or tricks. I was massively uplifted at the end and would recommend it to anyone who loves acting and wants to use their brain. - 82.108.212.250)
10 Mar 06
THE CUT has the potential to be about so much and, in its first two acts, it sparked huge potential theories in my head, but with each passing scene its power dissipates. Badly.
The more Ravenhill writes, the less it becomes.
It was firstly, I think, a fundamental misjudgement to actually show us the act of cutting itself. It would surely have had far more allegorical potency if we didn't actually see it. It could be so many things (the mind races to imagine) and then it becomes one actual thing (and the imagination is put out of service).
But that said, all is not lost at that moment. I found myself in the second act thinking oh boy, if you imagine the cut as some kind of evolution of suicide bombers, a kamikaze ritual in which men give up their lives for what they believe is freedom, then I thought wow, this is a play about what happens when extremism becomes the norm, becomes just part of the system. And I thought the second act was showing us how domesticity is affected in such a situation...what happens when spontaneity doesn't exist any more.
But no.
All that falls to pieces in the third act which says this play is nothing more than an indictment of tyranny.
I was desperately searching for the irony when the son tells the father he is evil, but could see none.
Maybe I'm wrong, but it's surely not sufficient, in fact a little redundant, for a playwright at this stage in the history of playwriting to just be dealing with concepts of 'good' and 'evil'. Haven't we got a little more sophisticated than that?
And while the cut at first suggests it may be some complex mortal equivalent of the oblation in His Dark Materials, the denouement suggests it's just a tyrant act, a final solution perhaps, although one in which the victim is complicit.
Still, if that is the extent of it then for all its futurist feel, this play seemed to me have been written in the 1930s.
It has seemingly nothing to say about the world since then.
(And ion that note, the notion of a student uprising is so phoney in contemporary society. Doesn't Ravenhill realise that students are largely idlers who watch daytime telly? Students don't uprise anymore.)
However, it had me and a friend speculating for two hours afterward, so I still commend it as a night out. Sometimes bad plays sharpen you as much as good ones. And it's ennobled far beyond its merit by a superbly poised production - Grandage and McKellen and the consistently-brilliant Adam Cork put their all into wringing more resonance from this material than it possesses. They're so impressive. Deborah Findlay is her usual class act too and even Tom Burke has presence but in a lousy underwritten role.
But harshly put, its a very evocative production of a very hollow play. - 194.81.216.130)
07 Mar 06
Mr Ravenhill has based a career on brilliantly witty writing , and a dead-on sense of the zeitgeist. Here, he eschews both, and his difficulty in structuring a compelling stage narrative (visible in his earlier work, but disguised to some degree by the moment-to-moment entertainment he provides) is brought into sharp relief. This play is no fun - dour, tedious and dramatically inert. Even Ian McKellen and Deborah Findaly, acting their socks off, can't bring it to life. There are some interesting ideas, and, still, a strong sense of a searching intelligence at work, but there's no life in the writing. 'The Cut' is a play that's partly about emotional and social disconnection, but Ravenhill shows us the characters only when they're so distanced from each other, and so verbally and behaviourally uninteresting, that it's almost impossible to become involved in their fate. We watch a married couple eating dinner in silence for several minutes, and this moment could , in the right hands, be heartbreaking - but here, it's just unutterably tedious. The central character is supposed to be ridden with guilt (and despised by society) because he implements the 'cut' - but the only character we see being cut wants it, very badly, and we don't really see the cutter facing the full force of society's disgust - so we're never really convinced by, or involved in, his dilemma. The cut itself is an act that is never fully defined in the world of the play, and, as a result, is allowed to bear the weight of too many interpretations - Ravenhill clearly wants to write about the emotional deadening implicit in a bureaucratic society that wants to believe itself liberal, and the cleansing possibilities of pain, but because the 'cut' itself is sometimes imposed on those being cut, and sometimes desired, and the writer shows us very little of the social framework in which we should understand this choice, and very little that is believable of the emotional states of those imposing or suffering the treatment, the meaning of the act (and eventually,the play), becomes murky rather than resonant - - 213.78.70.48)
Re-opened in 1992. Seats 254. 1999 - Ambassador Theatre Group takes over from the Associated Capital Theatres as the landlord of the Donmar Warehouse. 2002 - Michael Grandage succeeds Sam Mendes as Artistic Director of the Donmar. Nick Frankfort succeeds Caro Newling as Executive Producer.
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