I fully expected to headline this article “A Brolly Good Time.” Outdoor theater, in the spring, in England? I must have been mad to plan a theater-going trip around that quixotic notion. But instead, I was outrageously lucky. The sun shone out of a ravishingly blue sky every single day.
Last month I saw two open-air performances in London, where I lived for a decade before coming to the Valley, and two at the Brighton Festival on England’s south coast. I also caught two productions of the National Theatre, my favorite British institution, both of which were inventive, risky and enchanting. The outdoor offerings were, well, as unreliable as the English weather usually is. And wherever I went, I kept running into Romeo and Juliet.
Star-crossed lovers on sun-drenched stages
First stop is the Globe, a faithful replica of the Thameside playhouse built by Shakespeare’s company— a thatched-roofed “wooden O” of tiered galleries surrounding a thrust stage open to the sky. This afternoon, as I stand with the “groundlings” in the open space in front of the stage, the show is Romeo and Juliet. It begins with period songs performed by the four actors who will play most of the supporting roles. The last number has an added verse admonishing us, in high-flown language, to turn off our mobile phones.
This R&J is a spirited affair, with nice comic touches, athletic swordplay and creative use of the playing area. In contrast to some modern productions that present the play’s feuding families in racial or ethnic terms, West Side Story-like, this one is cast “color blind.” Romeo is black, but so is Juliet’s cousin Tybalt (Ukweli Roach).
In Shakespeare’s day, plays didn’t have directors in the modern sense. The actors learned their lines and played their parts, with a kind of blocking coach on hand to organize the stage action. That seems to be the case here, too, with each of the performers doing things their own way. That works okay with the more experienced players, but not in the title roles. Adetomiwa Edun and Ellie Kendrick are attractive young actors, but their inexperience shows. Edun’s Romeo is full of passion and grand gestures, but it’s so studied it looks like an over-rehearsed audition piece, and while Kendrick shows flashes of spontaneity, she tries so hard it’s unconvincing.
In Brighton The Globe on Tour, an adjunct of the London company, is presenting The Comedy of Errors at the city’s annual arts festival. Brighton is a graceful seaside resort that has lately become the unofficial gay capital of England. The festival is a smaller replica of the Edinburgh Festival, complete with a scruffy fringe component.
Here the Shakespearean venue is a portable platform and backdrop in a city park, recalling the makeshift setups of Commedia dell’ Arte. The production is well-paced, but—like the Globe’s R&J—virtually uncut, resulting in wandering attention among the families spread across the grass on blankets and lawn chairs. And again, two of the leads are not yet up to speed, just out of drama school and in their first professional production.
So, on to another Romeo and Juliet, this one a fringe performance—and I do mean fringe: a pass-the-hat affair more than a mile from the town center, with no stage and a boxful of props. And it’s the most delightfully unexpected surprise of my theatrical tour.
The Pantaloons are five fresh young performers who sport knee britches with color-matching socks and T-shirts. Their R&J is the most fun-filled and affectionate demolition of Sweet Will I have ever seen. The hectic, loose-limbed performance includes a duel with cricket bats (broken up with a water gun), joky narration to fill in the plot gaps, and lots of mischievous interplay with the audience. But it also display some genuinely good acting and authentic passion in moments when the text is allowed to take over.
The Regent’s Park Open-Air Theatre occupies a leafy amphitheater in one of London’s royal parks. This summer’s lineup includes The Importance of Being Ernest and Hello Dolly, but the season opener now playing is—inevitably, I guess—another Shakespeare, Much Ado About Nothing.
The stage is a series of sloping, snaking platforms that wind out of the woodsy backdrop, and Timothy Sheader’s staging flows gracefully along them as dusk settles to the sound of nesting birds. This comedy of love hiding behind banter and marriage sabotaged by envy mostly achieves the right balance between tension and foolery. Anthony O’Donnell’s clueless pomposity as the malaprop-prone constable Dogberry and Peter Bramhill’s alcoholic bile as the conspirator Borachio are particularly watchable.
Once again, the problem is with the leads. Samantha Spiro and Sean Campion are a middle-aged Beatrice and Benedick, and their witty sparring to disguise their mutual affection has a seen-it-all air. But Spiro is way too cutesy and Campion too fond of mugging for laughs, so I can’t work up much affection for either of them.
The National
I also spend two evenings indoors, at performances of the Royal National Theatre. Both are new plays, stylistically adventurous and politically charged. The National’s three theaters occupy a concrete-clad experiment in ’60s architecture, famously compared by Prince Charles to a nuclear power station. It sprawls on the South Bank, just a leisurely riverside ramble from the Globe.
In the expansive Olivier Theatre is this season’s success-de-scandale, England People Very Nice. It’s a cheeky history of immigration to England, from French Huguenots in the 17th century to South Asians in the 20th, and it’s controversial because it’s outrageously, unapologetically un-PC.
Richard Bean’s script adopts a Marat/Sade-like framing device: a bunch of motley outcasts putting on a play-within-the-play. In this case, the players are present-day immigrants and refugees from all the places in the world touched by the British Empire.
The chronology feels like a time warp, with the same prejudices, laughable misunderstandings and cruel scapegoating repeated with each new wave of immigration, and with essentially the same characters reappearing in each succeeding generation. Like the proprietress of an East End pub, who has essentially the same thing to say about each group—“Fahkin’ Frogs… fahkin’ Yids… fahkin’ Pakis.” But then she marries a Jew and their daughter falls for a boy from Bangladesh.
Indeed, the play has (here we go again) a Romeo and Juliet through-line. In each era, there’s a love-at-first-sight moment between a boy and girl from opposing groups. One of the points of the piece is that prejudice and misconceptions run both ways between the newcomers and the “natives” and don’t subside until there is real intermingling.
The best is last: War Horse, the latest of the National’s occasional family-oriented entertainments. It was such a hit in its run on the South Bank that it has transferred to the West End, London’s Broadway. Based on the book by Michael Morpurgo, it’s the story of a farm horse drafted into service on the killing fields of World War I. Nick Stafford’s stage adaptation is superior in every way to the clunky, sentimental original, expanding the story, deepening the characters and expressing even more effectively the fear and horror of the battlefield.
As with England People, there’s a large and lively ensemble of players who embody the best in British character acting. But the show’s eye-popping triumph, created by the astonishing Handspring Puppet Company, is the horses. Two of them are full-size, fully articulated, people-powered machines that are so substantial they can be ridden but so lithe they can rear and canter. Fashioned from bent cane and translucent fabric, they make you believe you’re watching a moving, seeing, feeling animal even as you marvel at the human choreography that’s animating them.
All the action of War Horse takes place outdoors, in an English farmyard and French battlefields. Hovering over Rae Smith’s open-plan set is a ragged storm cloud—and it’s the only one I saw on my entire English adventure.
Local Echoes
Coming back to the Valley, I can't help but notice echoes on this summer's stages of what I saw in England. There's open-air Shakespeare, a couple of shows that resonate with the theme of ethnic prejudice in England People Very Nice, and giant puppets that evoke the impressive figures in War Horse. What's more, the National Theatre is coming to the Valley.
Performances under the stars begin next week at Hampshire Shakespeare Company with Henry IV Part 1, followed by Twelfth Night. That crowd-pleaser is also in Shakespeare & Company's season, which includes four other works by the troupe's eponym. S&Co's White People and Chester Theatre Company's Dov and Ali look at people struggling with racial and cultural biases, like England People's Londoners. The Ko Festival hosts the annual visit of Mettawee River Theatre Company with a family-friendly puppet-and-people show, Beyond the High Valley, based on a Peruvian folktale.
And live theater comes to the Amherst Cinema Center with the first in a series of four productions filmed in high-definition during performance at the National Theatre. Jean Racine's version of the Greek tragedy Phedre, starring Helen Mirren, screens on July 22.
