Twelve Angry Men – The Garrick Theatre
Why would you wish to see this very faithful production of a classic film? Partly, of course, for the bravura ensemble acting, but also, in this cynical age, for its statement of faith in the American (and hence the British) legal system and the implicit trust and belief in the democratic system. The play, an undoubted minor masterpiece by Reginald Rose, a journeyman 1950s TV writer, is a beautifully crafted story of a jury’s deliberations on the guilt or otherwise of an 18 year-old accused of killing his father in a fit of rage and impotence.
For those of us, who have been fortunate enough to have been jurymen (or women) in interesting cases, there will be references, which relate to our own experiences. Some of us may even have felt that we played the part of Juror 8, played exquisitely at the West End’s Garrick Theatre by Martin Shaw and in the film by Henry Fonda. For me Fonda’s film character comes over as a rather pompous, almost saintly figure. Shaw is a much more convincing and far less sanctified and hence a more human character.
The play is, of course, dated. There are no women or ethnic minorities in the jury. The closest approximation is an Eastern European, probably a Jewish emigrant from 1930s fascism, who is both a vehicle for the most explicit pro-democracy speeches and the butt of the most virulently bigoted and prejudiced comments from the “know-nothing”, hard-liner “hang ’em and flog ’em” brigade.
The dominance of white men expresses a truth about the time. Rose wrote the play following his own experience in a 1954 New York jury. But in his play, originally called Thunder on Sycamore Street, the story was about a black family. However, to appease the powers that were on 1950s Broadway, it was changed to what I guess was meant to be a Puerto Rican family (the play is not explicit on this point).
The scene is set in the sweltering heat of a New York summer afternoon. The claustrophobic atmosphere is heightened by the coming storm, after which the play was first named.A big baseball game is dues to start in a couple of hours. At least one juryman has a ticket and so there are time pressures to add to the climatic ones.
The action unfolds with the bigotry and indolence of some jurors, plus a fair amount of apathy, slowly but surely losing out to the voice of reason expressed by others “led” by the Shaw/Fonda character. But it is a close struggle. The message is not exactly hidden, or perhaps even subtle, but it is a peaon of praise for democratic values, whilst at the same time sharply observing how dependent they are upon the importance of “taking part”, of standing up for individual rights and for defending individual liberties. It should be compulsory viewing for anyone intending to take part in political or civil processes – my fellow councillors (not to mention MPs), please take note and go.
Rose is rightly dismissive of one juror, who wants a quick decision so that he can get to the game, and of another, who gets bored with the argument and will go whichever way brings a quick result regardless of whether an innocent man gets sent to the electric chair or a murderer goes free. Rose is not, however, without compassion for the troubled juror 3, who has covered up his own inadequate parenting, by holding out to the last for a guilty verdict. And, for my money, Lee J Cobb in the film and Jeff Fahey at the Garrick take the acting prize. In towering performances they display arrogant prejudice, gradually collapsing and leading to personal, political and moral disintegration.
Finally, it was interesting to note that this classic film, known and seen by millions, had by West End standards a relatively young audience, who gave it a storming curtain call. Rose clearly has a message which many of today’s audience believe still to be highly relevant. And they are right.
30/12/13
The Duck House – a comedy of modern politics, Vaudeville Theatre, 20/12/13
Sir Peter Viggers’ Duck House was almost certain to star in a comedy at some point and here it is in the eponymous play by Dan Patterson and Colin Swash. It appears on the Vaudeville stage along with hanging baskets (Margaret Beckett), wisteria (David Cameron), elephant lamps (Michael Gove), a glitter toilet seat (John Reid) and a massage chair (Shahid Malik).
The star of the show is Labour MP, Robert Houston, played enthusiastically and manically by Ben Miller. The story centres on his attempt to jump the Labour ship as the June, 2010, election approaches, hopefully to become a Tory Cabinet Minister under David Cameron. To do this he has, of course, to appear squeaky clean to Tory grandee, Sir Norman Cavendish.
Houston’s desire for a more sophisticated lifestyle compares the cultivation of his ambitions with the pathetically low aesthetic tastes of so much of the expenses saga – a glitter toilet seat – really! And it therefore becomes a beautiful target for farce especially when Sir Norman’s bizarre sexual habits are revealed.
It’s great slapstick stuff and well worth a visit, especially to see how many of today’s news stories appear in the script. We had amusing references to Nigella’s problems as a witness and to the current “recommendation” to raise MP salaries by 11% and the audience did have fun working out how many particular references they got. But how the German tourists sitting in the seats behind us were doing I couldn’t quite imagine.
But the amount of custard pie thrown at Sir Norman smacked a little of desperation. Both the play and the players found it difficult to keep a consistently high volume of laughs. I rather wonder whether this displayed a difficulty between the two authors. That obviously works well on occasions – see Frank Muir and Dennis Norden but the Duck House left me feeling that sometimes we were watching a not completely happy compromise between a subtle political satire and an uproarious Whitehall farce.
At the heart of the saga is the belief, of course, amongst many MPs (and residents of what Washington would call the Beltway – not exactly the metropolitan elite more the M25 Ringway) that they are under-paid and, since they deserve to get paid more, then clearly it is perfectly acceptable to buck the system. Indeed, as the curtain falls, Miller as the hapless Houston, his career falling apart, makes a very explicit plea for some decent objectivity from the audience.
But surely the problem is that most people do not think of £70K being a very low salary. Moreover, there is no evidence that the pay levels are seriously detracting from the numbers wishing to become MPs. And the script did not look at both sides of what is surely a valid debate. As a result, the audience was left feeling that, if anything, MPs as venal and incompetent as those on stage are over-paid and not under-paid.
Noel Coward’s Private Lives
“Strange how potent cheap music can be”, says Elyot Chase in the opening scene of Noël Coward’s Private Lives, currently playing at the Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue. It could equally apply to the comedy of manners that so often is represented in plays about love-besotted relationships between strong characters. In that sense this play is part of a tradition in the English theatre, which stretches back to The Taming of the Shrew and forward to Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf, with references to Sheridan, Wilde and Shaw.
Beautifully staged and directed by Jonathan Kent and his team it is also wonderfully acted by Anna Chancellor as Amanda Prynne (Chancellor was “Duckface” from Four Weddings and a Funeral) and Toby Stephens as Elyot Chase, with great support from Anthony Calf, as Victor Prynne, and Anna-Louise Plowman, as Sibyl Chase.
The drama opens with a scene of two hotel balconies at the oh-so British resort of Deauville in Normandy, with one balcony linked to the Chase honeymoon suite and the other to the Prynne honeymoon suite. Unfortunately but surely not coincidentally one of the suites had also been Elyot’s and Amanda’s honeymoon suite five years previously before their marriage broke up in vicious quarrels and perhaps not quite criminal violence. We can only imagine how the two were drawn back to the same hotel and the same room for their second honeymoon.
There follow ludicrous scenes of embarrassment and forbidden titillation, with Coward using the story set in the present as an illumination of the five intervening years of passionate but turbulent marriage between Elyot and Amanda. It reaches a head as they come to the realisation that the very dull and uninspiring spouses that they are now linked to are completely unsuitable soulmates, for either of them and that the worst mistake that they had ever made was to divorce.
The scene moves to an expensive but bohemian flat in Paris and farcical scenes of love and confusion, of misunderstandings and of humour. Elyot can neither live with Amanda or without her, nor she with him. They are tracked down by their new spouses, who are beginning to find their mutual dullness more re-assuring than their legal spouse.
The play ends without any question answered. Are Elyot and Amanda going to get together? Probably yes but for how long? Can Sybil and Victor ever have enough passion to get it together? The play hints Yes, perhaps. Do any of the four of them have a job or work for a living? Clearly not a consideration for Coward.
So what is the point? These are the lives of the effortlessly rich. They are the jet-set of the age – a kind of decadent ocean-going liner class at the end of the Swinging Twenties, whilst most around them are sinking into the economic and political storms of the thirties.
Amidst the wit and humour of the play, and it is full of laughs both of the belly and the brain, this comedy uses the desperate difficulty of finding a life partner as a tragic plea to find purpose in a world not so dis-similar to our own. Why should we care? A legitimate question for today just as it was in the thirties but let’s hope we do not have to go through the same horrors to find the answer as that generation did.
This House – a new play by James Graham, reviewed by Tony Belton & Penny Corfield
This House, written by James Graham and playing at the National, is a must for any lefty of a certain age. A saga of the Wilson/Callaghan governments of the 1970s it is set in the Commons, but almost exclusively in those unknown jungles, known as the whips’ offices. A mention of the dark arts of politics recalls the jocular asides of rugby front row forwards; like the prop forwards, the whips appear to have more in common with their opponents than their so-called allies; like the front rows, they maintain their own club and its rules against all-comers, particularly their subjects, the lobby fodder of the backbenches.
The play is beautifully and wittily staged with some lucky members of the audience seated on the green Commons benches as serried ranks of silent MPs during scenes in the Commons. But when the scene moves to the whips office, the benches swing round to create theatre in the round. The script is funny and clever with Hal Miller, MP for Bromsgrove and Redditch, complaining that in the home of the needle industry he could not find a haystack.
The script and the action is, as Americans might say, designed for the Beltway audience. Not quite simply for those immersed in the Westminster Bubble, since there would be many, living well outside London, who would enjoy the play. However, the author undeniably demands considerable knowledge of the political intricacies of the period.
Graham has immersed himself in the history of this incident-packed five years, starting in the late days of the Heath Government and finishing after Thatcher’s ’79 election victory. He has clearly done a lot of research with particular assistance from Joe Ashton, one of Labour’s whips. It is not surprising that some of Graham’s sources claimed that this particular Parliament was the most dramatic in their various long and eventful parliamentary careers.
One fascinating theme that emerges is the mutual respect that grows between the two rival Deputy Whips. On Labour’s side was Walter Harrison, MP for Wakefield, admirably played by Reece Dinsdale, and on the Tories side Bernard (Jack) Weatherill, MP for Croydon NE, impeccably suited and played by Charles Edwards. A minor running joke refers to Weatherill’s career in his family’s bespoke tailoring business. MPs from all sides comment on his smart appearance or make some reference to tailoring. One cheeky Labour Whip even requests his help to repair his own scruffy suit. To which Weatherill delivers a superb put-down: ‘I don’t deal in man-made fibres’.
But, joking aside, the class and political differences between the two parties are shown not to cloud the growing personal respect between the two Deputy Whips. The most dramaticmoment of the play indeed occurs between the two of them, alone in the Tory Whips office – near the end of the play. Harrison needs a controversial pairing of MPs, to save the Labour majority. Weatherill after due consideration accepts, offering to be the pair himself – knowing that it will make him hated by his own party. After a very long pause, Harrison declines the offer. Politics move on.
The Callaghan government fell to a vote of no-confidence in 1979. There were many reasons for its fall and this unrecorded and imagined scene may or may not have been critical. The play, however, highlights this moment of drama between the two Whips. Thus, ultimately, the playwright endorses the essential value of personal integrity, even amidst the storm of political battle.
The Thatcher victory arguably marked the beginning of the end of the post-war consensus about the welfare state. Now as this play is premiered in the third year of a Cameron Government we are seeing the end of not just that consensus but also the demolition of the tools of the state that made it possible – a professional civil service, a powerful and independent local government, professional and independent public servants in the health, education and judicial services.
Some of our contemporaries told us that they were in tears of laughter for most of the play and tears of regret for the last 20 minutes. The laughter was, of course, testament to the writing but the regret was about the loss of a romantic, idealised memory of our lost youth spent in a welfare state that gave us good health, a better education than any of our forefathers, jobs for life and good occupational pensions. But the tears were also for the tragedy, as it appeared, of Labour’s failure and of lost opportunity.
But for us, the emotion was more of sadness than anguish. The period, as Graham sees it, was rather too mundane to be tragic. The scale of Labour’s ambition and vision seemed limited to the maintenance of power not to the achievement of any great ends. Even the first steps towards national devolution were inspired by the necessity of maintaining a majority and not out of any real political commitment. This, of course, made it all the more appropriate that the whips’ office was right at the centre of the action and of this play.
Should others go to see this play? Yes, it’s part of everyone’s civic education. But be prepared to be indignant as well as amused – and who knows, you might be moved to join the battle for more meaningful politics and a revived, even if different, Welfare State.
The Briefcase – a play by Timothy Turner
I am a “prop star”; well at least I own a prop star. All because fellow
Labour councillor Billi Randall emailed her friends asking if anyone had a briefcase and I, being of an older generation, confessed that I had, which is why some weeks later I was seated in the front row of community arts theatre, Theatro Technis, watching this new play starring my briefcase.
Timothy, the author, is the 26 year old son of my Council colleague Billi and she was also there proud to see the launch of Tim’s play-writing career – and a very promising one it is too, at least judging by this opener.
A one hour duopoly, beautifully acted by Harry Lobek and Joel Samuels, the Briefcase is a philosophical discussion on the nature of decision making and indeed of discussion itself. Was the glass half full or half empty? Should the briefcase be opened or left shut; if opened it could reveal something that would make life better or worse? Was it worth the possible joy of one or the risk of the other?
As Turner explored one could see clear references to Stoppard, Beckett and Pinter not least the lack of action in this style of theatre and the difficulty of beginning and ending. Indeed in my view the ending was the weakest element of the play – it just stopped. But the format avoids the dramatist’s perpetual problem of how to get the actors on and off the stage – we all know that even the greatest once descended to “Exit followed by a bear” – since both actors were on at both beginning and end.
However, Turner very ingeniously reversed the roles of the two characters halfway through the play when the action man suddenly became the prevaricator and vice versa. This gave him all kind of licence to play with the arguments and characters. The conclusion? I think Turner believes the means is more important than the ends; or perhaps that self-discovery is more important than action. It would, though, also be perfectly possible to conclude that Turner is very critical of over-rationalisation and much in favour of getting on with life.
The play was witty, complex and sophisticated. It was also clever and polished and hugely enjoyable. Turner also directed the play and no small feat that. Billi tells me that he is planning other plays. I hope he manages it. This was a very, very promising opening.
Timon of Athens, starring Simon Russell Beale or Shakespeare on today’s political dynamic
I saw this late Shakespeare play at the Olivier last night (22/10/12). I will leave it to the professionals to review Beale’s performance, safe to say that he was brilliant, but I want to talk about the play.
Surely this is Shakespeare’s least known play, and perhaps deservedly so. The ending is a dramatic failure; the character development is limited at least by the bard’s standards. What is more in the whole play I did not recognise a single quote or aphorism. You know how it is in a normal Shakespeare play – that instant recognition – Oh, that’s where that phrase comes from. But not once did this happen in Timon.
What was striking was the central role of money. Unlike any other of his plays, money is the oil, the black, nasty, sickly sweet blood pumping through the whole play corrupting first the rich, lazy, feckless rich living off Timon’s generosity; then Timon himself as he corrupts the artists living off his wealth and then as he abuses the power that it gives him; then the rich and mean, who refuse to bail him out of debt; then the rabble, who want to foment a revolution but have neither the discipline or the skills to do so, and finally the revolutionary leader, the Stalin as I saw him, who like all the rest sold out to the power that is – money.
The tragedy was set in Athens and played rather poignantly in modern day Athens and for anyone who has been there recently (I was there at Xmas 2010) the rubbish strewn, graffiti blown, wreckage of a great city was all too real. However, the first scenes are in Timon’s luxurious mansion, where he is surrounded by his sycophantic, rich, scrounger friends. He believes himself to be “wealthy in my friends”. They marvel at his honour, his generosity; they thank him for buying their debts, providing their dowries. I felt it to be a Shakespearean commentary on the celebrity culture, but perhaps that is a little anachronistic.
Timon’s descent to the slums is tragic and his acceptance of it and his rejection of humanity, his bitter hatred understandable given the rejection he faces from the beneficiaries of his gifts. The self-righteous, self-serving, posturising of these n’ever-do-wells had me in mind of Wandsworth Tories on a bad day. I particularly liked the woman, who would have paid off all his debts if only he had asked her first rather than leaving her to the end of the queue of requests. I rather felt with Timon. He walked off to his death, though how and by what agency it is not clear.
Meanwhile the beggars, who stole gold from him go off to fight, untold but no doubt to the death after the trio in Chaucer’s Miller’s Tale, the rich and powerful oligarchy re-establish the control of the state and the leader of the rabble join them, no doubt to become the strong man, the Stalin, of the re-imposed state.
It is a bitter and black tale, in which money plays “the universal whore, the universal pimp of men and peoples” as Karl Marx wrote in an 1844 review. But it is also a play with some relevance to the modern day as we see austerity bringing Athens to its knees, and the British version of austerity imposing massive housing benefit cuts only months after riots in the streets.
I don’t think I had Shakespeare down as such a socialist, even if a rather pessimistic one, until I saw Beale’s riveting performance as Timon of Athens.
Tony Belton
Tony Belton 