A poignant Jane Austen spin-off, plus the best of May’s streamed theatre
Being Mr Wickham, Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds ★★★★☆
It is a truth universally acknowledged that a limitless number of potential spin-offs lie in the work of Jane Austen. Her half-dozen novels continue to delight readers and detain the minds of academics; they also offer a rich bounty for the artistic hanger-on.
Pride and Prejudice, in particular, seems to be continually combed through. “Literary” adaptations include such retellings as last year’s Being Mrs Darcy, and Mr Darcy’s Clan (“a supernatural variation”), while the comic horror yarn Pride and Prejudice and Zombies made it from page to screen in 2016. The hit Netflix Regency romp Bridgerton plainly owes a debt to the book too.
Now, into a crowded field comes a monologue performed and captured in an empty auditorium. Being Mr Wickham gives us the inside scoop as to what becomes of the roguish militia officer whose reckless elopement with Lydia Bennet, the heroine’s youngest sister, was mitigated by the intervention of the rightfully disapproving Mr Darcy.
The credentials of the co-authors impress. Adrian Lukis, taking to the stage at the Theatre Royal Bury St Edmunds (which opened in 1819, six years after the novel was published), played Wickham opposite Colin Firth’s Darcy in the 1995 BBC series. He has collaborated with Catherine Curzon, an historian of 18th-century royalty. Running at 55 minutes, the piece neither outstays its welcome nor feels like a disposable bargain-bucket item.
As befits its sly, charismatic subject, it doesn’t try too hard to grandstand or allude in too punctilious a way to its adored fictional forebear. Its strength is to turn us back to the book, to assess Wickham anew, while holding a mirror up to the type of man he represents – one who seizes his chances given limited opportunities, and becomes, as he turns 60, a figure of almost modern vulnerability, aware that life is a brief candle and youth an essential asset that all too swiftly slips through our fingers.
Wistfulness and wry self-mockery combine as Lukis’s cravat-sporting roué confides his birthday blues to camera; Lydia has barred him from the bedroom in fury at his perceived flirtations with another woman. There’s nothing for it but to keep reaching for the brandy decanter and ruminate aloud. Intimations of mortality have been stirred by the news that Harriette Wilson, one of the celebrity courtesans of the age, is no more.
Wickham rewinds to his shared but contrasting childhood with Darcy; the latter went to Eton, he was dispatched to an abusive boarding school. “The Darcys of this world,” he grouches, “can afford morals. It’s not so easy when you’re surviving on wit and talent alone.” It’s one of many assertions formed by the school of hard knocks.
Some backstory elements from the original are probed. Fans might crave a more thorough catch-up. Yet the hazy, nocturnal-spectral mood of the production, directed by Guy Unsworth with suggestive bits of period décor by Libby Watson, offers its own authenticity. Lukis is all throaty chuckles and twinkling mischief; his eye keeps darting to an unfolding elopement over the road. His character’s undying enthusiasm for misbehaviour is infectious, and his worldview challenges our priggish age, as he shudders at the Victorians: “Muslin, starch and piety, good God!”
Available until August 11. Info: originaltheatreonline.com
Still Life, Nottingham Playhouse ★★★★☆
What have our leading playwrights been up to during this long Covid year? There has been oodles of time to think and write, but a numbing deadness has lurked as well. James Graham confided as much recently, though at least he mustered a swift response to the first lockdown, his romantic comedy Bubble. A recording of that is currently being streamed as part of Spring Loaded, a festival of (mainly) digital work from the Nottingham Playhouse.
The latest – highly assured – festival addition is Still Life, five short films that further relay our locked-down experience. Its closing coup is the premiere of Muriel, a brief vignette penned by Alan Bennett at the request of Playhouse boss Adam Penford, who co-directs the batch with Matthew Xia. Penford revived Bennett’s The Madness of George III here in 2018; Muriel is a world away in terms of scale, but perhaps it isn’t so far from the madhouse.
Sitting alone before a dressing-table mirror, amid plush surrounds, Frances de la Tour’s female character rehearses a funeral oration as she powders her face. It’s a planned tribute (perforce via Zoom) to her husband George. Clasping her cheeks and ruffling her grey hair, de la Tour gives each phrase its due emphasis, and with similar control succumbs to – then emerges from – convulsions of grief. Combining drollery and sadness, with a sting in the tale, it’s the essence of Bennett, who learned early in his career (before he became the doyen of the talking-head monologue) how to load a skit with tart phrases. “Over this last year, as with so many couples, he had been by my side day and night.”
Is this a wry portrait of the artist himself? Some distance might have been travelled since Bennett’s contented diary entry of March 2020 (as published in the London Review of Books): “With Rupert [Thomas, his partner] now working from home, my life is much easier, as I get regular cups of tea and a lovely hot lunch.” If there’s something worse than cohabitees getting on each other’s wicks, it’s being on your tod, day after day.
The curtain-raiser, Amy Guyler’s Out of Stock, finds Julie Hesmondhalgh as a food-bank volunteer rattling round a deserted drop-in centre in a friendly, fretful way, unpacking anguished revelations about her troubled, disappeared brother. There are matchingly understated performances from Conor Glean and Karl Haynes in Olu Alakija’s Handle with Care, in which two time-pressed delivery men stop for a lunch break and chew over the signs of domestic abuse they might have witnessed at a drop-off.
The ethical quandaries thrown up by Covid restrictions are thrown into sharper relief by Emteaz Hussain’s Pimp My Ride, which engagingly (if protractedly) conveys the comic neurosis and fear of a sanitation-obsessed cabbie, and the huge emotional cost of the pandemic, on which his student fare is quietly sitting.
Best of the bunch, though, is Nathan Ellis’s Facts. Anna, a house-bound pre-teen schoolgirl (Amelia Harding, superb) attempts to put a brave face on things by enumerating the details of her curtailed life in a notebook. “Maybe I missed my chance and now forever I’m just going to be a shy person,” she flatly worries. Bennett himself couldn’t have expressed the scarring nature and searing pathos of these times more succinctly.
Available as part of the Spring Loaded online season until June 26. Info: nottinghamplayhouse.co.uk
The Dame and the Showgirl, Audible ★★★☆☆
Radio 4 is, lamentably, doing away with the 15-minute drama slot on Woman’s Hour. The amount of time given over to afternoon dramas and Saturday Plays seems on the long-term wane. Yet as one audio-drama door closes, another opens. Knowing that Audible customers listen to an average of two hours of content a day, the Amazon-owned company has figured that drama should play a more prominent role in its output. It recently streamed Sebastian Barry’s On Blueberry Hill, the London run of which was cut short by the pandemic, and has just announced a new production of Brian Friel’s Faith Healer, with a cast including Toby Jones.
And it’s providing a platform for original drama, too, the latest being The Dame and the Showgirl, which offers a fictional slant on a 1953 encounter in Los Angeles between Marilyn Monroe and Edith Sitwell – youthful Hollywood royalty and ageing British literary aristocracy. In the kind of coup that the Beeb would envy, another Dame, Emma Thompson, stars as the snooty Sitwell, opposite Sinead Matthews as Monroe.
Debutant playwright Simon Berry, who retired as a wine merchant at the age of 60 in 2017, and picked up a pen, was inspired by a black-and-white photograph of the pair taken by George Silk. Sitwell, semi-reclined on a sofa, contemplates Monroe through dark glasses with an amused smile. Facing her, her interlocutor (whom Sitwell was supposed to write up for Life magazine, though the piece never materialised) beams back, one stilettoed foot tucked behind the other.
Their imagined conversation is less captivating, but here it settles into a pleasing groove. Rather than proffering ice-breakers, Sitwell is frosty at the start, proclaiming ignorance of Monroe’s film work and, once being brought up to speed, disdain for it. O Henry’s Full House (1952) comes up, and Monroe – sounding so air-headed you fear her brain might float away – explains: “I play a hooker!” “A Madonna of the pavements,” La Sitwell replies grandly. Monroe delightedly repeats the phrase, and opines: “That’s swell!”
But, before you can say “Gentlemen Prefer Blondes”, a thawing process is underway. Monroe flatteringly quotes lines from Sitwell’s The Web of Eros; the latter rummages in her bag to rustle up a dry Martini; the pair bolt the door against their asinine handlers (sent off on errands). There’s no revelatory dramatic conflict, more a pattern of contrasts and affinities that explains why they kept in touch, and met again (in New York, and in Britain, during the filming of 1957’s The Prince and The Showgirl). They compare notes on childhood unhappiness and parental neglect. Sitwell smarts at being derided as ugly, while Monroe – dreading the impending Playboy use of old nude shots – knows she’s being used and objectified.
Thompson’s natural warmth adds gradual flesh to the bones of Berry’s outline, sketchy but succinct, of burgeoning female solidarity. Still, she can’t avoid Sitwell sounding like an agony aunt near the end. “Give it up, all this stardom nonsense – have children, that’s true immortality,” she tartly advises as the hour winds up. My own advice to The Dame and the Showgirl’s latecoming author is to persist, and enlarge this work to encompass the pair’s other meetings. As things stand, with clunky exposition meeting gentle charm, it’s a toss-up as to whether it warrants one of your precious Audible credits.
Available on Audible now
The Barre Project, Sadler’s Wells Digital Studio ★★★★☆
Blessed with one of the dance world’s most subtle and sophisticated minds, the American choreographer William Forsythe has never taken the safe or obvious route, and his latest endeavour shows that at the ripe age of 71 he is still taking risks and turning unexpected corners. The fruit of the pandemic’s lockdown restrictions, The Barre Project is his latest creation: a 25-minute work dreamed up at Forsythe’s home in Vermont, and rehearsed and performed via the miracle of Zoom by four dancers in California.
Its theme has no direct relation to the virus or the attendant tragedies: what interests Forsythe is exploring the significance and use of that horizontal pole that runs around every dance studio, serving as a support for the first part of the morning class on which every dancer builds their technique. The barre has made an appearance in several other modern dance pieces – notably Jerome Robbins’s Afternoon of a Faun and Harald Lander’s Études – but Forsythe’s may be the first to ask us to focus on its role, not as something clutched or even held, but something that functions as a stable point of reference, a borderline and a guide.
Driven by James Blake’s hypnotically pulsating dubstep score, New York City Ballet star Tiler Peck responds to the barre as though it were an electric wire, her sharply angled turns and lightning footwork stretching the classical vocabulary to its absolute limits. This is fast-burn dance, explosive in energy and precise in its complexity: it’s astonishing to learn from an accompanying filmed interview that Forsythe regards himself as “a glacial thinker”, because everything here seems born in the white heat of the moment.
Peck’s is a fascinating talent, and this is a star turn for her. Dancing without pointe shoes, she rules as the ballerina and sets the pace, leaving the three men (Lex Ishimoto, Roman Mejia and Brooklyn Mack, all excellent) to play her dutifully scurrying courtiers, their brief solos and contrapuntal duos covering for her occasional breath-recuperating exits.
Peck’s physical type is far from that of the cool elegant gazelle so beloved of Balanchine, the master chef of her home company. Short and powerful, she has a bullet-proof, high-octane style in which everything is lucidly defined and vividly projected even across a flat computer screen. It’s unsurprising that as a sideline to her ballet career, Peck has enjoyed considerable success in Broadway shows and Radio City Music Hall spectaculars: she blazes with pizzazz. There’s no messing.
Forsythe has clearly been inspired by Peck’s can-do energy both on and off the barre, but he hasn’t stopped there. In a central meditative interlude coloured by Blake’s song Lullaby for My Insomniac, he taps into a more sinuously seductive aspect of her personality. As self-absorbed as a queenly cat, she licks herself and lazily stretches the elastic in her limbs.
The final image, however, is one of human contact, as the hands of the four dancers lie on the barre and fold gently over each other, mutually reassuring. It makes a touching and surprisingly anti-climactic climax: the barre as the dancer’s silent friend. This may be Forsythe-lite – a jeu d’esprit in comparison to the more complex statements of his days at the helm of Ballet Frankfurt. But its clarity and force are irresistible.
Available until May 16 via sadlerswells.com
