From our critic in residence Alastair Macaulay:
One of the great thrills of theatre-going is projection, the projection of the human body and the human voice in space. But which actors now try project their speaking voices into large theatres without technical assistance? I remember how ballerinas in their eighties – Phyllis Bedells, Ninette de Valois – could speak, apparently without effort, in Sadler’s Wells and (in de Valois’s case) the Covent Garden opera house. Today we have the opposite: trained actors who nobody dares to ask to project the voices into most theatres without technical support.
When the play is good and the technology is fine, sure, we enjoy the results. But something wonderful has been lost. Or almost lost: this year I’ve seen productions at the Haymarket Theatre Royal and the Sam Wanamaker Theatre where human voices have reached to three tiers of audience without apparent strain. (I’ll also concede that some theatres were unkindly built for the voice: although I’ve heard great actors fill the Olivier Theatre vocally, I could hear how it encouraged a certain barn-storming quality that could become falsely grandiose.) Even so, those of us heard how actors from Ralph Richardson to Maggie Smith could cast vocal magic without amplification can’t help but miss qualities of voice that would have been not assisted but dininished by amplification. There are living vocal magicians – they include Kenneth Branagh, Deborah Findlay, Alex Jennings, Juliet Stevenson, Lia Williams, Penelope Wilton – but we’re given too few chances to hear what they can do.
Suzy Miller’s one-act play “Inter Alia” (running at the Lyttelton Theatre until September 13) is a modern example of a play designed to be amplified. It’s a portrait of a working wife and mother, Jessica Parks, specifically of a judge: how can Jessica sustain her effort for fairness in legal decisions when she is under intense pressure to look after her busy husband and demanding son? Hence the play’s title: “inter alia”, meaning “among other things”, is a metaphor for the lives of working women. It’s a hundred-and-five-minute stream-of-consciousness monologue in which Jessica (Rosamund Pike) talks rapidly to us interrupted by occasional scenes with the husband (Jamie Glover) and/or son (Jasper Talbot): she never leaves the stage. The gimmick of Justin Martin’s production is that poor Jessica has to maintain her rapid-fire think-aloud talk over sounds from a drumkit and a guitar.
At no point does “Inter Alia” achieve the intense pathos of Richard Eyre’s 2017 film of Ian McEwan’s play “The Children Act”, in which Emma Thompson plays a British judge whose marriage comes close to breakdown while she copes with a series of demanding cases about children. The point of “Inter Alia” emphasises something quite different: the woman as virtuoso multitasker. From very early on, we can tell that MIller and Martin have constructed this as an award vehicle: that Pike (in her debut at the National Theatre) wins a standing ovation is unsurprising, for sheer stamina and life-juggling. Ultimately, however, Jessica’s life as mother reaches one larger cause for alarm: her son is accused of rape. Without revealing how the play resolves its plot, I’ll say that it’s entirely interesting. I do wish, however, that it tried harder to move us than to wow us. Pike, a beauty, is glossily compelling; but although she certainly shows us how hard it is for Jessica to maintain her façade, Pike never allows her to become seriously vulnerable.
Also at the National Theatre, but in its smaller Dorfman space, Shaan Sahota’s debut play “The Estate”, as directed by Daniel Raggett, sometimes uses amplification (its climax occurs at a party political conference), but is also a domestic drama. Over fifty years ago, the West End used to present drawing-room comedies by William Douglas-Home, in which members of the same family debated politics adorably. For a while, “The Estate” seems to continue that comic genre – but only gradually do we discover the full financial and political implications of being a man in a British Punjabi family. The rich father of Angaad, a British Indian politician, has not distributed his wealth equally among his three children; Angaad’s two sisters are incensed. Since Angaad is being nominated as leader of the Conservative parliamentary opposition, the domestic squabble becomes public.
Adeel Akhtar, as Angaad, plays comedy naturally and intimately – you almost want him to deliver the lines with more panache, and yet his decision to play the domestic sides of the role quietly deepens a play whose serious aspects become more intense and surprising. The more political the play becomes, the less funny it grows – and the more gripping. (Since Britain’s last Conservative Prime Minister was British Asian, you watch much of it thinking “What if-?”)
For Akhtar, this leading Opposition role is a nice counterpart to his Christmas-TV role as Prime Minister in the marvellous six-part thriller “Black Doves”. Onstage, Akhtar’s style is to draw the audience in: you watch what feels like the evolution of a new style and a new comedy – though both are so natural that they hardly seem new.
Voice, again, is a central issue in the Royal Shakespeare Company’s new production of “The Winter’s Tale”. Earlier this century, not long ago, the Royal Shakespeare Theatre, in Stratford-upon-Avon, was drastically reconfigured to make a more congenial space – yet already the company, once the nation’s foremost place for developing voice skills, now keeps resorting to microphones.
The RSC cast, directed by the South African playwright-director Yaël Farber, is led by Bertie Carvel (Polixenes) and John Light (Polixenes), with Madeline Appiah (Hermione) and Aïcha Kossoko (Paulina), among others. A play that is already more multinational than most Shakespeares – its scenes are set in both Sicilia and Bohemia, but Hermione expands the frame yet further when she tells us “The Emperor of Russia was my father” – becomes usefully refreshed by a range of skin colours and accents. Less useful is Farber’s decision that Time and Autolycus – the two least similar characters in the play are really the same person (Trevor Fox) – Autolycus is a thief, so Time becomes Time the Thief, you see (or do you?) – which Farber assists with hefty insertions of non-Shakespearean lines. Florizel (Lewis Bowes) praises Perdita in some of the most ravishing lines ever spoken (“What you do/ Still betters what is done. When you speak, sweet./ I’ld have you do it ever: when you sing,/ I’ld have you buy and sell so, so give alms,/ Pray so; and, for the ordering your affairs,/ To sing them too” Not a good idea, then, to cast Leah Haile as Perdita: her voice is weak and unmusical.
Faults notwithstanding, this production is vivid, compelling. Shakespeare, who loved tackling problems, here defied the “unities” of Aristotelian drama (time, place, action) with a tragicomic inclusiveness that makes this an astonishing work. Still, I’ve admired both Carvel and Light in leading roles so much in the past that I wanted them to make more of the language. Shouldn’t we know something has changed, shockingly, within Leontes’s psyche when he refers to his wife Hermione as a “bed-swerver” and a “hobbyhorse”?
@Alastair Macaulay
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