Afterlife

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