PATRICK MARMION reviews Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

PATRICK MARMION reviews Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

01/20/2023

Who’s afraid of Downton’s Lady Cora? You will be now: PATRICK MARMION reviews Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf?

Who’s Afraid Of Virginia Woolf? (Ustinov Studio, Bath) 

Rating: *** 

Verdict: Long and louche with small reward

 For me, the pleasures of Edward Albee’s notorious marital slugfest are a well buried mystery. Every production of his 1962 drama about a middle-aged couple serving each other seven helpings of hell seems a kind of theatrical task force: an archaeological expedition hoping to solve its enigma.

That mission in Bath now falls to Elizabeth McGovern (Lady Cora in Downton) and Dougray Scott, the Scottish actor known as Ray Lennox in Irvine Welsh’s ITV series Crime.

McGovern plays Martha, the dipso daughter of a wealthy university president. Scott plays her defeated, no less boozy history professor husband. To their lair in fictional New Carthage they lure a young, not yet jaundiced couple to bear witness to their bizarre mind games, in which they taunt and ridicule each other.

When Elizabeth Taylor and Richard Burton took the roles in Mike Nichols’s 1966 film there was a real sense of mutually assured destruction. Their performance was a kind of domestic Cuban Missile Crisis.

Elizabeth McGovern plays Martha, the dipso daughter of a wealthy university president. Scott plays her defeated, no less boozy history professor husband. To their lair in fictional New Carthage they lure a young, not yet jaundiced couple to bear witness to their bizarre mind games, in which they taunt and ridicule each other

And here again the gloves come off, as the childless duo are mercilessly foul to each other, take lazy potshots, detonate emotional IEDs and go thermonuclear, by exposing each other’s most intimate secrets. And all this is rendered as a sodden, through-the-night drinking bender which descends into pseudo-religious Latin babble, in a three and a half hour theatrical marathon.

But what, really, is the point? Where is the fun? Albee’s vicious domestic drama hails from a period that relished taking down what it saw as middle-class illusions. There is a fair bit of creaky Freudian psychology and, at one point, the playwright seems to forecast the end of Western civilisation.

McGovern revels in the psychological mess of her high-maintenance daddy’s girl. Wearing sleek 1960s fashions, she looks like a spider (or perhaps a mummy-long-legs) with a bottle blonde rug on top: a scuttling alpha female with a filthy mouth and a nasty mind, concealed behind an exoskeleton of social graces.

Scott is a cardiganed prof rendered beige by his day job. Measured and bespectacled, he affects a drawl somewhere between Gore Vidal and Richard Nixon.

He pretends he doesn’t mind being a doormat, but he is savagely disappointed in himself and this domestic warfare helps him feel more alive.

There is chemistry between McGovern and Scott, but I’m not sure they fully let rip with Albee’s invective. They make it sound plausible, rather than raucous.

There is also a strong sense of what psychologists call co-dependency, where the two main characters’ bickering feels like a safe space. But still it’s hard to know what’s in it for us, the audience. Maybe the small pleasure of vicariously exorcising long-held resentments?

The perspective of Gina Bramhill and Charles Aitken, as the younger couple temporarily trapped in this hell, affords the modest amusement of some social embarrassment. She is a secret lover of brandy who’s out of her depth; he is a buff biologist who falls short of McGovern’s hopes for him as a campus stud.

Nor does Paul Wills’s set give us many clues. It is a bohemian compound of compromised upholstery, mismatched rugs and books shoved under chairs.

And so, for all of the excellent work in Lindsay Posner’s production, digging down into this marital plague pit, the mystery of the play’s attraction, for me at least, remains unsolved.

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George Takei’s Allegiance (Charing Cross Theatre, London) 

Rating: *** 

Verdict:  Oh my, Mr Sulu!

George Takei, best known as Mr Sulu from the original Star Trek on telly, has boldly gone where no Trekkie character has gone before — a London fringe theatre.

Allegiance is a wholesome musical about an unwholesome subject: the internment of Japanese-Americans in the aftermath of Pearl Harbor during World War II.

Takei (85) was just five when he and his family were locked up in a camp in Texas. He is the inspiration for this story, not its author (or its subject). Instead, he plays our fictional hero Sammy, looking back on the War from the shores of old age.

Sammy recalls being interned in the rat-infested, dust-blasted camp with its racist guards and loos without walls. As a proud American, he is bitterly affronted; but determined to prove his loyalty by enlisting as a GI.

The curious thing is that despite being an indictment of the US government’s treatment of Japanese-Americans, Jay Kuo’s music and lyrics are a loving homage to the American Dream and its theatrical analogue, the Great American songbook. Allegiance has all the ingredients of a cherry pie love story, as our hero falls for the prison nurse, and his sister fights the military draft for the male internees.

Kuo’s score also reminded me of the soundtrack for the Disney film Frozen; and there is a peculiar symmetry about the stories of two siblings divided by fortune.

And yet, although there is disgust at Japanese-American GIs being sent on suicide missions, there is unswerving dedication to musical conventions, with the sometimes ear-splitting big band sound of woodwind, brass and piano — as well as haunting Japanese flute.

Tara Overfield Wilkinson’s choreography includes jazz-hand boogie-woogie, a lively Charleston and much virile striding back and forth.

Telly Leung, as the younger Sammy , is an upright pin-up and rebel with a cause: namely, steadfast loyalty to Uncle Sam.

And while Megan Gardiner warbles sweetly as the love-interest nurse who falls for him, the loveliest voice belongs to Aynrand Ferrer, as Sammy’s sister, who seeks to hold the government to account.

Above all, it’s a real treat to see Mr Sulu in the flesh: encased in a sort of Ready-Brek glow even after all these years. His show may be a belated and soft-centred reproof of war crimes, but it pulls off the unusual feat of mixing anger with schmaltz. Captain Kirk would be proud.

STOP CLOWNING AROUND, PLEASE…I’M ALLERGIC! 

By LUKE JONES

Cirque du Soleil: Kurios (Royal Albert Hall) 

Rating: **

Verdict: 

Some people are reduced to snotty fits by freshly cut summer lawns; for others, it takes a cat to make them lose all sinus control. Me? I’m dangerously allergic to clowns.

In Cirque du Soleil’s latest show, Kurios, they’re diluted by actual performers with skills, but the chippy mutes are present nonetheless.

Like all Cirque outings there’s a vague attempt to build a world of characters. The Royal Albert Hall has become a sort of laboratory for a rotund scientist the programme tells me is ‘The Seeker’, who ‘believes in an invisible world where ideas too audacious to be shared and dreams too radical to be realised are stored’.

Not quite. It’s the usual assembly of cunning stunts, although far less impressive than previous years.

It is, though, as bonkers as ever. A group of men with bushy beards and yellow raincoats mounted a giant trampoline to strip off and reveal themselves as bouncy fish. No idea why.

But this, two bodybuilders flinging themselves round the building with rope, a man balancing on a tall tower of little cylinders, and a team of acrobats throwing and catching colleagues were the only acts worth leaving the house for; 40 minutes max.

The other hour and a half? There’s a man dancing with just his hands, another chap with two yo-yos, three young women eager to show us they could place their own feet on their own shoulders in a variety of combinations, and clowns. Achoo.

Clowns mincing round in tall hats, gurning. One even bored us with an entire routine about invisible acrobats (as mind-numbing as it sounds).

There’s also a woman whose only role appears to be to show us that she’s 3ft tall. Is that acceptable circus entertainment in the year of our Lord 2023?

This famous franchise has been flinging little women and buff blokes from dizzying heights for the best part of 40 years. But it’s become a tame cash-cow: £80 for a ‘restricted view’ seat at the back of the hall. Want a souvenir hat and glasses as well? £559. Send in the clowns.

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