4 August 2007
Deja Vu
Two years ago, Howard Davies directed a rather poor production of The House of Bernarda Alba. It was marred by a wholly misjudged version by David Hare, a monumental set that turned the mercurial passions of the play into stolid architecture, and a central performance that played for laughs and thus turned Bernarda Alba, one of the most ferocious and terrifying creations in dramatic literature, into a comic part. It was Bernarda Alba at St Trinians, all girls in nighties dashing about in the moonlight having trysts while the dotty Latin teacher tried to keep order.
It’s a funny thing but four nights ago, sat in the Lyttelton, I had the oddest sense of déjà vu. The current production of Gorky’s Philistines, directed by Davies, has a superb version of the play by Andrew Upton, and, on the whole, it’s a tremendously enjoyable evening, that can turn the mood on a sixpence and shows a hugely confident ensemble performance from an excellent cast.
But here, as there, we have a strange monumental set that is both dominating and inert. Just like Bernarda Alba, it features an internal courtyard which here, as there, is quite unnecessary to the production. The action takes place in a room. It’s a tribute to the imprecision of the set that we never really know what sort of room we’re looking at. The family and the lodgers eat in this room. They lounge in this room. It is straight off the main entrance and links to the kitchen, stairs to the lodgers’ flats, and, perhaps, to one family room. Is this a private or a public space? It’s also enormous; the two girders we see running from floor to ceiling, and the industrial lights that are suspended from the enormously high ceilings, suggest a converted factory. Is this supposed to suggest that the house of founded in commerce? Maybe, but Vassily is a decorator, not an industrialist. So why is a decorator in a converted factory?
Phil Davies plays Vassily, the father in the play. And it is a superb comic performance. He is a bundle of pent-up resentment and self-importance, consumed by humiliation that his children are better-educated and less committed to business than he. He aspires to a nauthority and ease which he immediately undermines with his brusque assertions of position. (’This is my house,’ he barks continuously at no one in particular.) Its a beautifully timed comic performance, full of generosity on stage, clarity and vigour.
Unfortunately, it’s not the performance that the play needs and Howard Davies has gorn and done it again. Philistines is Gorky’s first play and, one suspects, he hadn’t really thought very hard about the play before he sat down to write it. At the end, somewhat out of nowhere, we discover that the father has informed on a group of naive but well-meaning theatre radicals and that they have been rounded up. This precipates the collapse of the delicate relationships in the house, the disappearance of the lodgers, one of his servants, and most important, of his own son and his new bohemian girlfriend.
We are to see this as the collapse of a social system, founded entirely on money. It rhymes with the radical energies we understand to be circulating outside the house (the son has been suspended from university for his radical political activities). We are watching the collapse of the bourgeoisie at some level. The production rather heavy-handedly adds a stone thrown at a window to bring the play rather closer to the revolution that it deserves, but it is at least picking up on genuine radical currents in the text, even if Gorky is at this point uncertain of what he thinks of them. The dethronement of the father is a rehearsal for revolution.
But in this production he’s never on the throne. He’s a comic figure, a pompous boor and a father who has no control over his kids (see picture), two sitcom staples in one. (That comment is very harsh and says nothing about the very great comic mastery of Phil Davis’s performance.) What this does is leave very exposed the weakness of Gorky’s play: that the ending does not arise organically from the rest of the play. The actors are too sketchily portrayed for us either to believe that they really would be worth denouncing or for us to care all that much for their peril. The spatial organisation of the action doesn’t give us a clear sense of the structure of the living environment: they spend so much time downstairs that it’s unclear what they distinctively do upstairs and they come and go so freely and so drunkenly that when they do all go at the end, well, it’s not the end of A Doll’s House is it?
It’s a good thing when directors can find flawed plays and make them work. But sometimes a director can just trample the play in his or her rush for conventional crowd-pleasing types of staging. And, for all the pleasures on offer in this production, that is the case here.
3 Comments currently posted.
John Morrison says:
Himadiads says:
Спасибо, пост действительно толково написан и по делу, есть что почерпнуть.
mark says:
i want more of the barron knights on virgin pc and to c all records on cd every one no matter what
every record available record firms r greedy
Just got round to reading your blog on this play. Better late than never. I discovered by reading Gorky’s original that Andrew Upton did awful things to this play, including inventing the silly plot point in the last act about people being denounced to the police. I don’t want to repeat my arguments here but you can read them on my blog site http://blackpig.typepad.com/.
I agree with you about the House of Bernarda Alba play which had many of the same faults and was also taken out of its context of time and place. I had forgotten that Howard Davies was the director. However I feel on stronger ground critcising his Gorky play as I speak Russian and have lived there, so I know the context., which I don’t where Spain and Lorca are concerned.
I will put a link to your blog on my site and Id be happy if you can consider doing the same.
John Morrison