Murray Ross

Hamlet Tonight!

Two weeks ago a few of us were lucky enough to see Rory Kinnear's Hamlet at the National Theatre in London, and then to have him come round to talk to us after breakfast the following morning. 

 
He turned out to be an awfully nice guy, and a very natural human sort of chap.  But even if you can't ask him a question or see him in person, you can still see his Hamlet up close and personal on the big sceen in our theatre Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday nights this week at 7:00.  I'm really looking forward to it.  The broadcasts have been excellent, and the National mounted an eastern block surveillence style spectacle on the Olivier stage that should transfer well to the big screen.  But best of all is the chance to see and hear Rory Kinnear, the latest in a remarkably good series of Hamlets to recently appear on the English stage (Simon Russell Beale, Ben Wishaw, David Tennant being other notable Danes).  Kinnear is the very best thing about this often self conscious new production--his Hamlet is sympathetic, intelligent, with at least as much hair as another prince recently in the English news.

In conversation, Kinnear said he grew up in unusual circumstances, as the child of two actors (his father Roy was a much beloved character actor and funny man). This meant he thought of acting as a job you could do, something you could make a regular living out of, like plumbing.  And so it has proved.  Kinnear has steadily plied his trade as a working actor on the British stage.  A few years ago he played Laertes, now he plays the Prince of Denmark.  His Angelo in Measure for Measure last year was much admired ---and he was selected by some critics as the British actor of the year. He's not a super stud.  He's not haunted looking.  He's not especially tall or handsome or impish or rugged or demonic. He looks very much like a nice looking English bloke who could be standing with a scarf and coat next to you waiting for the train to Charing Cross. His wife has just given birth to their first child.  He would be the first to tell you he's had a good life so far.

When someone asked him if he had accessed the grief he felt over his father's death in playing the role of Hamlet, he said no.  In the first place he was 11 years old when his dad died suddenly; in the second he said the the grief he felt for his father's death was not the same as Hamlet's grief.  Grief is not interchangeable.

He said approaching Hamlet he was concerned to represent a man who was not really cut out for the revenge business. He said he also wanted to be quite clear about Hamlet's madness---or rather to present a Hamlet that might play mad but that was not actually mad himself; he felt that "madness" was a generalized trap many Danes have fallen into. Seeing his performance in the Olivier, you can see he has been true to his intentions.  I have rarely seen a Hamlet who drew the line so clkearly between his sanity and his "antic disposition."  And his Hamlet remains sympathetic throughout-- he's even visibly shaken and saddened to have killed Polonious (this in spite of a text which is consistenly ironic and mocking: "I'll lug the guts into the neighbor room").   His mother is a drunk, his stepfather is Putin, Laertes is a roaring boy, Ophelia is a cypher, his pals are twerpy spies, Polonious is a bureaucrat pol, and there is no one else in Elsinore with any claim on our affections.  We are alone with Hamlet, and yet with Rory Kinnear we are in a world of tragic but excellent company.

 

 

The Light Through Yonder Window

Two weeks ago, after lunch with my son Orion, I repaired to my London hotel with my magic iphone.  This message appeared in my mailbox:

"Hello, Murray,

I was walking through Regents Park on my way to work in Charing Cross listening to some Buddhist talks (it comforts me, ok?) when I thought of Orion.  What is he doing now, I wondered?  Who did he turn out to be?  I remember babysitting for him all those years ago. A quick google search revealed he is in London,and further following my train of thought I was quickly led to your blog and the Theatreworks newsletter, to discover that you were in the neighborhood just last month.

Madi Weland was a young woman when you knew her, and you plucked her from her high school to play a virginal Juliet in your production of Shakespeare's classic.  Her world changed when you opened that door.

I'm an executive for a publishing company now, a mother of and 11 year old daughter, celebrating fifteen years of marriage to a film maker, and living in North London .. .

When you find yourself in town again, won't you give me a ring?  It would be wonderful to share a meal, a pint, or a cuppa, and thank you for my life."

Even in the brave new world wide web, this is not the sort of email I get every day---or ever.  Madi was 17 years old when she appeared in Dwire auditorium to audition for our very first Shakespeare production.  She was bright, light, quick and radiant. She had just come over from Air Academy High School, but she seemed like a gift from heaven.  We cast her on the spot, and she was a truly enchanting Juliet.  I looked forward to going to the performance every night so I could fall in love with her again and watch everyone else in the audience do the same.  She was innocent but alert, tender but tensile, a Juliet with beauty and go power, and watching her at herbalcony after the dance no one bothered to think it was rather a short balcony (about four feet high in Dwire auditorium)--we only saw her face, her hand upon her cheek, a young moon in moonlight, her heart high and rising on a summer night.  Madi was magic.

Not long after she died for the last time in the Capulet tomb, Madi went off to collegein Boston,and I never saw her again. We heard a thing or two--she was on a short lived television series . . . she was working for a wealthy art collector in L. A. . . . otherwise nothing.

I wrote Madi back in the instant, saying she was off by a month and was she by chance available for dinner tonight at the National Portrait Gallery? She was, and she was waiting for us at the top of the gallery's escalator.  I told Orion, who joined us, there would be a mystery guest at dinner, and he saw her by the lift and recognized her immediately, almost before I did--- rather impressive considering he last saw when he was five years old.  Madi must have been a great babysitter too. We had a very good dinner.

I am fully conscious that if one lives long enough, the chances of improbable chance meeting are surprisingly likely.  There she is, your high school prom date 40 years ago, selling cobras in the Calcutta market!  Such things are too strange not to be true.  I learned this as a five year old child on the Queen Mary in the middle of the Atllanic when my dad suggested we write a note and put it in a bottle and throw it overboard.  We did, and two months later I got a letter from a fisherman in Ireland who found the bottle in his net.  Still, it is remarkable to find yourself having dinner with a lovely person who was special in your life but who you haven't seen or heard from in 35 years.  And of course we both looked exactly the same!  And Madi still knew all her lines!

Here she is as a 14 year old Capulet in Verona, 1975:

 

And here she is as Mrs. Solomon of London, Director of Content Standards for Pearson, with the same foolish gentleman who put her on that short  balcony 35 years ago.  O, She doth the teach the torches to burn bright!

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Ah, civilization

There are leaves on the trees here. A light jacket is all you need. It's quite a different country from the London of our winter theatre tour. But inside, the theatre is very much the same--and still very good.

I got last minute obstructed seating to Beyond the Horizon at the Cottesloe, an early Eugene O'Neill play I didn't know and no one else in the audience did either. Two brothers on a farm, both in love with the same woman. She confesses she loves the one who's about to go to sea. So he stays with her, and the other brother, a farmer, gets on the boat. Things do not go well on the farm. At the interval over hazlwnut ice cream we were all guessing how it would end. Not well, as it turns out: the brother on the farm gets TB and dies. We should have known. But it was strong stuff, and it's an amazing fact you have to go to London to see a 1920 pultizer prize winner-- the National theatre does more O'Neill than you'll ever see on Broadway.

Yesterday after a good English queue i got the last return ticket to the sold out Posh at the Royal Court Theatre. This is pure Brit drama, a play about ten Tory undergraduates behaving very badly. They've gathered at a pub to have a ten bird dinner, get very drunk ("chateaued" as they call it), and trash the place. This they do in a great bit of destructive choreography. The play's characters bear a
more than a coincidental reference to the Bullingdon club, of which David Cameron, the new Conservative prime minister, was a member-- there was a well publicized photo of him all dressed up like the cast members of the play. This is probably very unfair, but it is sensational, and persuasive about the callousness of privilege and power. The play is very accurate about boys being boys, very bad boys, moving from uncertain and tentative wit into a drunken savage pack. I had a great time watching these terrific young actors work out-- singing, drinking, trading insults, drinking, bonding, drinking,wrecking havoc.

Only in England would you walk out of an incendiary play like this and find yourself in the middle of Sloane Square, one of London's famously posh neighborhoods. Then a leisurely stroll through Hyde Park, past the Serpentine and Peter Pan, watching the late afternoon sun kiss the soft clouds gold and lavender. A glass of rose on a high street cafe, then a bus home. And it's still light! The night is still young! Ah, civiization!

One Night Only---or Two

There's action tonight (Wednesday, 5 May) upstairs and downstairs at THEATREWORKS. Upstairs in the Bon Vivant, there's our first screening of THE HABIT OF ART, a broadcast of a live performance of Alan Bennett's new play direct from London's Royal National Theatre.  I saw the play in January, and it's a treat.  A bit of a mess of a play, but entertaining throughout, with marvellous performances.  It's a play about making art, and making theatre, and also about the poet W.H. Auden and the composer Benjamin Britten, two men with the habit of art, and also about their homosexuality, their growing older, and their imagined meeting together. The play on the big screen works surprisingly well--- you see and hear everything perfectly, even better than if you were actually there. The last few moments of the play, given over finally to the stage manager (the play is staged as a rehearsal of a play in progress), are moving and memorable.

Downstairs, on a smaller stage, there's some actual live theater.  LOVE! FIGHT! DIE! is an evening of Shakespeare scenes, some wild and crazy, peformed by our talented theater students in the Osborne Studio.  The show begins at 8:00---admission is free, and on a first come basis.  The kids are good--take it from a man who knows them--and Shakespeare can't be beat.

If you find yourself torn in agony about which show to see, we have a solution.  See the Shakespeare tonight,and THE HABIT OF ART next Wednesday, when there will be a second screening of the play in the Bon Vivant Theater.

Whatever your pleasure,this is another good night to spend with THEATREWORKS.

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare

It's Shakespeare's birthday, or so we like to say. He's 446 years old and doing just fine, very much in his prime. In news from his native land, he's still making headlines even as the election draws nigh.  Today, for instance, we learn that Simon Russell Beale will be playing King Lear at the National Theatre, hopefully in 2012.  We'll be there, though even Simon will have to go a ways to match Bob Pinney in out tent, the winds howling, the thunder cracking its cheeks on his 70th birthday.  I also see that over at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the actor playing Marc Antony has shot himself in the arm with a revolver during rehearsals, which some barolators will interpret as a sign from the gods that Shakespeare should never be played in modern dress.   We're not doing Shakespeare at this exact moment (though we'll be back in the tent this summer), but he'll make an appearance on our stage tonight even so.  In the third act of Arsenic and Old Lace, Officer O'Hara, a member of Brooklyn's finest, has spent the whole night telling the plot of the play he has been writing.  When the lieutenant shows up he looks at O'Hara and says sourly, "O, Shakespeare!"

Like O'Hara, Shakespeare wrote a lot. He seems to have been writing all the time, while also acting and being a partner in the Globe Theatre.  But curiously, and very unlike Officer O'Hara, he seems not to have always been enthusaistic about his principal day job. Over and over again he makes bold claims for himself as a poet, but never as a playwright.  Indeed, he even famously apologizes for being a man of the theatre in Sonnet #111 where he seems to regard his theatrical life as a kind of stigma:

Thence comes it that my name receives a brand

And almost thence my nature is subdued

To what it works in, like the dyer's hand.

The lines resonate with anyone who works in the theatre, a profession so regularly obsessive and consuming that it often seems to exlude any other "nature."  I won't begin to tell you the many times my marriage has been on the rocks the week before a show opens-- it's fair to say that at these timnes I am nowhere else but in the theater.  And that's not always a good thing, as Sheakespeare well knew.

In the previous sonnet (#110) Shakespeare seems to be dwelling on the same theme.  He confesses his life as a playwright/actor has led him astray.

Alas 'tis true, I have gone here and there

And made myself a motley to the view

Gored my own thoughts,sold cheap what is most dear,

Made old offences of affections new.

Most true it is I have looked on truth

Askance and strangely. . .

That's about as direct a condemnation of the life of the touring actor playwright as you can find-- adrift, narcissistic, clowning, devaluing the inner life, taking liberties with the truth.

But then, Shakespeare says something else about these blemishes on his character:

 . . .  But by all above,

These blenches gave my heart another youth

This too will speak to anyone who has loved and worked in the theater--it keeps you eternally young, it's good for the heart. And that perhaps is defense enough for Shakespeare, and for all of us.

Of course it's not just the theatre that gives us another youth, it's Shakespeare.  He's still at it showing no sign of age or decay.  "After many a summer dies the swan," sayeth Alfred Lord Tennyson, but he could not have meant the swan of Avon, who is still afloat, still paddling, still gracing our streams, and whose immortaliytt ha been anything but cruel. 

Happy Birthday, William Shakespeare!  We'll see you again this summer at Rock Ledge Ranch. And tonight too, garrulously represented by Officer Patrick O'Hara.

 

 

 

Tea with Tom Stoppard

In London last month we were rich and smart enough to invite Sir Tom Stoppard to stop by for tea, and lucky enough for our invitation to be accepted.  As official host, I was petrified, not a usual teatime state for me.  I spent two days reading everything I could about the great man, almost inarguably the most brilliant person now writing for the stage.  As it turns out, I needn't have worried.  He arrived promptly at 4:30, looking rumpled and wearing red socks. After a very brief introduction he was off to the races. You had the feeling he might have done this before. Silly me to worry about talking to the guy who writes the best talk written for the modern stage. So I did the right thing; I listened,and happily. Here is living proof.

Rumor had it Tom Stoppard was a lovely man, and so he proved.  He spoke very openly about the new production of his play with  full orchestra at the National Theatre-Every Good Boy Deserves Favour-- which we had seen and admired.  He liked its theatricality, didn't like the staging at the end (too dismal), and was not eager to share production details with his collaborator and friend, Andre Previn, since he was worried the composer might (rightly) think the very physical staging could detract from attention paid to the music. I confess I might have missed some harmonic nuance when the cellist did a back-flip and the trombonist was savagely beaten with his own brass. 

Sir Tom was very candid and open about his own theatre life in London.  He confessed it was hard to keep up with all the work of all his colleagues (just last night he had gone to the first act of one play at the National, then crossed the hall to see the second half of another).  He obviously tries to be a good citizen, but he confessed that when he sees something that's really great the experience "stops" him---compelling attention from his own work, pulling him with a magnetic force that perhaps isn't useful. And he confessed that just at this moment he was experiencing the very last thing you would expect of him: writer's block. He had finished writing a television series two months ago, then taken a glorious trip across Russia to see a performance of his orchestra play in Japan.  The grandchildren had a good holiday; he was a single man again,and now------nothing.  I asked him if this was making him anxious.  He said "yes, it is."  He has lots of boxes all over the house filled with notes and clippings of stories and subjects that interest him--and nearly everything interests him---but he still doesn't know what to write.

It was at this moment my research paid off-- I remembered an interview he had given years ago.  "Didn't you once say," I asked, "that when you know you know what your next play is you feel as if you were sitting in an armchair in palace, and at the far end the doors swing open, and a footman appears walking slowly down the colonnaded hall, with a silver tray with a note bearing your play's title, which is presented to you with the sound of trumpets?"

There was a brief silence from a man not known for pauses (that would be Pinter,and he's dead). A little smile,then: "I demand to know your sources!"  I told him I was sure the footman would be coming out of the palace kitchen very soon.  He thanked us, and took his gracious leave.

How different from this intimate and rather personal conversation was the colloquium of playwrights sponsored by Colorado College a few weeks ago.  The college had brilliantly assembled three of America's most distinguished writers to talk about culture, politics and theater. For the first time ever, we were told Suzan Lori-Parks, David Henry Wang and Tony Kushner would be be sitting down together for a public conversation. It didn't quite turn out that way. The panel moderator, a media critic of some prominence, felt obliged to begin with a long largely irrelevant monologue describing how he had first met each of the playwrights. When he got round to asking questions, they were answered in turn--each playwright getting a brief shot at the question before passing the baton, and when each had taken a single turn a new question was asked, another round completed.  The result wasn't really a conversation at all--at no point were the playwrights really talking to each other, exchanging ideas or opinions. It was very mediocre PBS television.  This was a pity since it was obvious each of the guests had quite a lot to offer, and at least we did get some sense of their individual personalities:  Suzan Lori-Parks cellphone keep going off in her purse, reminding her it was time for her meditation program.  Tony Kushner was characteristically eloquent and comprehensive, David Henry Wang modest and wise (he proposed that the new cultural challenge in the US was no longer race, but internationalism--an awareness that we all now belong to the world).  There was a lot of talk about theater and none of it amounted to very much.

The event finally reminded me of how difficult it is to have a good conversation, an actual conversation, in a format like this. "If you want to really talk," my father told me, "invite one person over for dinner."  Or to tea.

As for Tom Stoppard and his writer's block, I believe we might be able to be of some help.  We have a play to write for next season about Nicola Tesla, the brilliant physicist who came to Colorado Springs in 1899 to conduct a series of radical experiments designed to create wireless energy and make it free to everyone. What in fact happened was a blackout of the entire town for better part of four days. I believe this might very well be the subject of Tom Stoppard's next great play.  It has all the crucial Stoppard requirements: science, comedy, a titanic central figure, disaster, international politics, questions metaphysical, and core voltage. Somewhere in the palace, Sir Tom sits,taking his tea. There is a distant sound of trumpets. The doors of the golden hall open, and I appear in tails, carrying a silver tray with a card on it. His block will soon be over.

London 2009: Harold Pinter

As we have for the past ten years, we went to London to see theatre in new year-- 42 of us. And what was London like?  Very cold--the coldest it's been in a decade. But also dry. And dark.  And fabulous.

We saw six shows.  What follows will be a brief review of our theatregoing--I'm going to take it day by day, with a little blog for each show.  They were that worthy.

First up: Harold Pinter's No Man's Land, seen the night we first arrived. Pinter is not someone I would normally inflict on jet lagged theatre worthies. But our first night was the production's closing performance; we had no choice. It had to be done. When we booked the show, we did not know Harold Pinter would die at the first of the year, or that a passage from the play, recited by the show's leading actor would be the only reading from Pinter's work at his 15 minute funeral service, but we did know the show was special---a major work by Englands most influential playwright of the last 50 years, performed by two master actors (Michael Gambon and David Bradley), and directed by the country's hottest new directing sensation (Rupert Goold).

Pinter can be daunting in performance, especially for an audience that likes their plays clear and well made, as most of us do. Meaning and action are elusive in No Man's Land. One man seems to been invited to another man's house for a late night drink--actually several drinks. The visitor, a slightly down at heels character, seems to want to make a place for himself with his more prosperous host, but the nexct morning  the visitor is evidently repulsed in this attempt by two resident servants.  The end. Possibly.

Audiences are often befuddled by Pinter, but actors are not--the good ones take to him like ducks to water. Pinter gives great actors--especially great male actors--something to do, aspace to charge the air with menace, insinuation, eloquence, subtext,and the famous signature Pinter pauses.  Gambon and Bradley were a wonderful team: Bradley, slight, slithery  and sharp; Gambon majestic, slow and graceful: the ferret and the lion. I too was a little foggy on our first night, but I feel I could watch Gambon until dawn. The living room chair enthroned him, sitting luxuriously and completely at ease. He has huge hands, he is a large man and not a young one, but when he slips drunk to the floor (Pinter likes to put grown men on their knees), he is at home there too. I've never seen a great actor crawl on all fours like Michael Gambon, or skip across the stage in delight as he does in the second act. 

I thought it was a great night in the theatre, notably enchanced by the set--a living room that belongs halfway between reality and dreamland (the way some hotel lobbies feel, or expensive London restaurants), and the extraordinary lighting, which bathed the room with a quality which had never seen the full  light of day. In this space, Pinter's dialogue, a series of dazzling turns and variations. found its unnatural home, and the famous set pieces (getting lost in Bolsover Street, the exchange of university memories) were effortlessly brought forth for our delight.

"What was that?" I heard muttered more than once by our gang stumbling out into the cold night.  I wished I could have warnedthem before hand, or recounted the converstion I had had with one of my cousins who told me he hated Shakespeare because he couldn't understand him. "You must really hate Pinter then,"  I said.  "O no," he said, "I love Pinter. You're not supposed to understand him. So you can just relax and enjoy yourself and talk about it afterwards."

Which is pretty much what we did the next morning, though I found I had to massage quite a few of our gang's stiffened brain muscles.  Pinter can do that t othe unsuspecting brain.  But I love him.