Hard To Beat? Butley.

Harold Pinter loved Butley, he “found its savage, lacerating wit hard to beat.”*  And I trust Pinter so I’m pretty sure I’ll love Butley too.  What’s more, this production has Dominic West (swoon) in it.  What’s not to love?

Come the interval and I’m perplexed.  I deliberately haven’t read anything about Simon Gray or the play because – in a fit of New Critical fervour – I’m trying not to let my preconceptions neatly box it all up into its appropriate pigeonholes.  Come on, try and appreciate it on its own terms.  Well, the script is sharp, pithy, funny and pathetic at times.  But I can’t help feeling it is being let down by over-theatrical performances.  West has lost his understated television personality and is taking an almost Wildean turn, oscillating between his own deep-voiced machoism and someone else’s funny but ridiculous prancing camp.  I’m not sure Butley’s lines call for such an overt depiction of his bisexuality.

Dominic West as Butley

That’s the problem with much of the characterisation in this production.  The actors do most of the reading between the lines for you, leaving their audience with little to do and, therefore, little reason to stay.
The point of the play (and this is where my New Critical fervour fizzles out) is to poke fun at the English intellectual middle class male’s self-denial.  In the 1970s, when Butley was first performed, the eponymous character’s inability to talk straight about his homosexual feelings would have been put down to his internal struggle to accept them.  In 2011 West makes it about power.  While he (Butley) refuses to be open about his feelings for Joey, Joey (who does not conceal his homosexuality) is in the weaker position.  The minute Butley feels himself losing ground in their verbal duelling, he reminds Joey – and himself – that he can’t be hurt by Joey because he’s not gay anyway.  It’s a childish move and eventually hurts Butley more than Joey.

If I’ve been hard on the actors in this production it’s probably because I haven’t read the script.  It may be that this cast, halfway through a long run at The Duchess, were losing energy – the momentum certainly felt lacking throughout the play.  But it might also be that Gray’s script, with its reliance on words over theatricality, is better in the reading than in the watching.

The “rapier wit” feted by the billboards felt more like a machete to me, often too deliberate and dropping into the pauses with a smug expectation of laughter.  What Gray attempts, in the poignant yet humorous portrayal of his lead character, has been done better by Alan Bennett.  So on this occasion I think I’ll disagree with Pinter – Butley is not so hard to beat.

Butley continues at The Duchess, London until 27th August 2011.

*Harold Pinter, from his introduction published in Simon Gray: Plays 1  (Faber, 2010)

Lost In Translation: Schiller’s Love And Intrigue

Friedrich Schiller isn’t a name you see very often in the West End.  So it was adventurous of Michael Grandage to choose the 18th Century German playwright’s third play to put on at The Donmar last month.

Love, lust, court intrigue, betrayal, despotic power, plotting: Intrigue And Love (the play’s original title) has all the elements of an Elizabethan or Jacobean tragedy.  The trouble is, almost two centuries later, Schiller seems unable in this play to offer his audience any development on the themes rehearsed by his British predecessors Shakespeare  and Middleton.  Schiller’s main achievement is transferring the genre to a German setting.  By definition this means that any English performance of Intrigue And Love will, in translation, lose its only merit.

Max Bennet and Felicity Jones as Ferdinand and Luise

Mike Poulton does a great job translating the German and Grandage renames the play Luise Miller to signify emphasis on the tragic heroine rather than the ridiculous Sheridan-style courtly antics.  Yet I still couldn’t help feeling that I was watching a second-rate tragedy.  You couldn’t compare the language with Shakespeare’s (it would have helped to hear the original German for this).  And the plot, after Othello and Romeo and Juliet, was predictable.

But the staging, direction and acting were as impeccable as ever at the Donmar.  In particular John Light, as the Chancellor’s ingratiating and Machiavellian apprentice Wurm, stood out with his silkily rough-edged deep voice and impenetrable manner.  David Dawson provided a modern touch of comedy with his uber-camp Horfmarshcall Von Kalb and Ben Daniels was a perfectly chilling court-climbing Chancellor.  It is always hardest to play the innocent protagonists in tragedy, but Max Bennett and Felicity Jones managed to tread the line between pure-hearted innocence and flawed realism without falling into self-righteous tedium.  Jones especially shone with her childlike yet thoughtful delivery.
An adventurous, if odd, choice of play.  Perhaps the reason one doesn’t see more of Schiller in the West End is because his plays simply don’t work that well in English.