Worth a Read: Theatre Books Round-up – Apr 2011
With Sienna Miller drawing rave reviews in Flare Path at the
Haymarket and Anne-Marie Duff being praised for her electrifying
performance in Cause Celebre at the Old Vic, we can’t move for
Terence Rattigan revivals. Someone is making up for the lost years
when Rattigan was deemed inferior to the Angry Young Men of the
fifties and sixties. We’re trusting you haven’t had enough just yet,
as we’re recommending the scripts of both these plays as the
must-reads of the month.
Ecstasy, first staged in 1979 and now just about to transfer to the
West End from Hampstead, and Enda Walsh as a new anthology of his work
is published. Meanwhile, Aleks Sierz casts his eye over new plays of
the past decade, and Michael Nunn and William Trevitt celebrate ten
years together as the Ballet Boyz.
Laura Silverman
Book reviewer
Nick Hern, £9.99
It’s a nice touch: at the end of this script, there are some snippets
of music manuscripts for songs that appear throughout the play. Now
you too can sing “Danny Boy” and “Hairy Eggs and Bacon” in a
drunken state, like Mike Leigh’s characters. Ecstasy, of
course, is the play Leigh, now recognised more for films such as
Vera Drake and Another Year, has just returned to
directing, after it opened in 1979. The production, which has garnered
great reviews at Hampstead, is about to transfer to the Duchess, where
it will run to 28 May.
The script follows four friends in a Kilburn bedsit in 1979, and was
developed in typical Leigh style with the original actors, including
Julie Walters and Jim Broadbent. In rehearsals, he is known to have
encouraged improvisation and in-depth character research, lending the
lines a delicious element of authenticity. Ecstasy is bleak –
the main character Jean is an alcoholic, suicidal petrol station
assistant who sleeps with unsuitable men – but it ends on a note of
hope. “This is tragedy,” says Leigh, “albeit it’s funny”.
Clybourne Park by Bruce Norris
Nick Hern, £8.99
Bruce Norris’ brilliant satire on race and property, exposing and
exploding modern-day liberal hypocrisy, is one of the must-see plays
of the year (it’s at Wyndham’s Theatre until 7 May). In response to
Lorraine Hansberry’s 1959 classic, A Raisin in the Sun, the
first half is set in that same year in a suburb of Chicago, where Russ
and Bev are selling their house to a black family (the first in the
neighbourhood). The second half jumps forward 50 years. The make-up of
the neighbourhood has changed (the community is now mainly black) and
a black couple want to sell the same house to a white couple. You
wouldn’t want to go round repeating the non-PC jokes, but in the
context, they work especially well.
Cause Celebre by Terence Rattigan
Nick Hern, £9.99
Based on the 1930s trial of Alma Rattenbury, Cause Celebre
received its London premiere a few months before Rattigan’s death in
1977. Since then it has been rarely performed. The current Rattigan
revival, of course, is changing that: Anne-Marie Duff is the star of
the electrifying Old Vic production, on until 11 June, while this
newly published script should ensure Cause Celebre‘s place on a
few more living room shelves.
In his introduction to the script, Dan Rebellato, a lecturer at Royal
Holloway, gives a clear outline of the historical case which saw
Rattenbury go on trial with her 18-year-old lover for her husband’s
murder. Much of the play, he says, bears remarkable resemblance to
documentary theatre: taking lines of dialogue from the court
transcript and inserting them into dramatised flashbacks of the murder
as well as taking inspiration from Alma’s letters. But there is also a
strong fictional aspect. Rattigan has invented a fictional character –
the foreman of the jury, Edith Davenport – who plays a key role in the
plot. She may be a “coded portrait” of Rattigan’s own mother,
Rebellato says, creating a whole new area to explore.
Flare Path by Terence Rattigan
Nick Hern, £9.99
Flare Path, says Royal Holloway lecturer Dan Rebellato, was “the
turning point” in Rattigan’s career. It was “the moment where he
convinced not only the critics but also himself that he was a writer
of sustained talent, with a future of emotional excavation and
exploration before him”. Written and set in 1942, the narrative is
based on Rattigan’s own experiences as a tail gunner in the Second
World War, and follows a love triangle between Teddy, an RAF bomber
pilot, his actress wife Patricia and Peter, Patricia’s former lover
and a Hollywood film-star. It’s a story that now sounds fascinating,
but at the time was thought by some to be sentimental and
melodramatic.
Rebellato shows “the underlying seriousness” of the play with
admirable effectiveness, examining Rattigan’s use of subtext and
praising his verbal and emotional reticence – qualities that would
come to epitomise Rattigan’s body of work. Flare Path, starring
Sienna Miller and James Purefoy, runs at the Haymarket until 4 June.
Enda Walsh Plays: One by Enda Walsh
Nick Hern, £14.99
This anthology of the Irish dramatist’s first eight plays, written
between 1995 and 2005, includes Disco Pigs, his breakthrough
work about two 17 year-olds from Cork, and his favourite, The Small
Things, about the relationship of his dead father with his alive
mother. Even from his previously unpublished debut, The Ginger Ale
Boy, about a ventriloquist, Walsh’s preoccupations with Irish
dialects, the limitations of language, claustrophobic relationships
and mental unstable characters are on show, which makes this a great
introduction.
Ballet Boyz by Michael Nunn and William Trevitt
Oberon, £20
Lavishly illustrated, Ballet Boyz charts Michael Nunn and
William Trevitt’s ten years together as two of the greatest innovators
of the dance world. Known as much for their television documentaries
as live performances, the former Royal Ballet principals have opened
up ballet to new audiences and explored the creative possibilities of
a pair of male dancers – rare in ballet until now.
This anniversary book offers a tantalising glimpse into life on the
road with the Boyz, its tone firmly celebratory. Naked, for
example, might have been “a huge production. The stress nearly killed
us,” but that’s as much as the boys reveal about the strains. A cross
between an elaborate programme and a coffee-table book, this 160
glossy soft-back publication comprises many an outstanding full-page
photograph of dancers in rehearsal, on stage or in stills from TV
programmes, annotated by Nunn and Trevitt.
One of the most interesting pictures is of a sheet of handwritten
studio notes, showing the dynamism that goes into some of the
performances: “cartwheel DIVE”, “jump off my back (headstand)”, read
two lines. A must for anyone interested in the art of movement.
Rewriting the Nation by Aleks Sierz
Methuen, £16.99
From 2000 to 2009 about 3,000 new plays were staged in Britain. In
this lively, detailed study, Aleks Sierz explores what they say, as a
group, about national identity. His thematic approach, comparing how
playwrights treat topics such as family and war, shows that plays
contribute to this debate from a range of directions: they need not
all be along the lines of Richard Bean’s England People Very
Nice, for example, which examines different communities directly.
One of Sierz’s strengths is to include established writers producing
new work, such as David Hare (The Power of Yes), alongside new
writers, such as Lucy Prebble (Enron): too often new writing
gets matched exclusively with new playwrights.
Sierz also examines what new writing has meant in the past with an
admirably critical eye: how much of work being staged in the late
Fifties and early Sixties was really by Angry Young Men, such as John
Osborne? Were most Eighties playwrights really writing about race and
sexual orientation? This is a useful and authoritative survey of work
created during the previous decade. Here’s hoping Sierz is thinking
about a sequel.
