Review – Alone in Berlin, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, 13th February 2020

Posted on February 14, 2020 by therealchrisparkle

Here’s yet another play, that’s an adaptation of a book and a film, that neither Mrs Chrisparkle nor I had heard of, read or seen. The original book, Jeder stirbt für sich allein, (Every Man Dies Alone) was published in 1947, written by Hans Fallada, based on the true Resistance story of Otto and Elise Hampel. Surprisingly, it wasn’t translated into English until 2009. That’s a long time for such a significant work to remain virtually unknown to the English-Speaking public. Alistair Beaton has translated and adapted the original book, and the result is this play, Alone in Berlin, which received its world premiere in Northampton, before embarking on a short tour.

It’s a simple story. Otto and Anna Quangel live a humdrum but respectable life in Berlin. He, a carpenter, quietly goes along with the powerful Nazi regime in order to put food on the table; she, quietly but privately, opposes the regime. They have to break the news to their son Markus’s fiancée Trudi that he has been killed in action. Her coping strategy is to join a Resistance movement at work. This inspires Anna to want to do something practical to oppose the Nazis, but what? Her keenness for action brings Otto out of his rut, and he decides to start writing postcards with anti-Nazi messages and leave them in blocks of flats all around the city.

This simple act of resistance carries on for some time. Local Gestapo officer Escherich must trace the perpetrator, and in turn he is under pressure for results from his boss, the SS Officer Prall. It’s inevitable that Otto and Anna will be found, and punished – but how did the Gestapo track them down, what will be the punishment, and what of the human collateral that suffers as a result? I’m not going to tell you that – or else there’s no point you’re going to see it.

Let’s concentrate on the good stuff. Firstly, at the blunt end, it reveals the unease of day-to-day living, with the enforced Heil Hitler greeting, and the threat of being reported if you don’t use it. There’s the casual hatred of Jews, and the fact that their lives and property are easy meat for abuse. If you want to just break into a Jewish person’s apartment and steal their goods, no one’s going to blame you for it. Whilst at the sharp end, it shows the brutality and mental instability of the Nazi officers who enforce the regime, with a shockingly unpleasant torture scene, masterminded by an SS Officer gleefully snapping fingers off his victim and giggling whilst he does it. These are people whose Mr Hyde aspect has been given full permission to run riot. We used to say, it couldn’t happen again, but don’t you be too sure.

Also, and, thankfully, more subtly, it reveals what happens when an essentially good person remains good whilst evil thrives all around him, and what happens when another essentially good person chooses to go along with the evil – which one fares better under those same circumstances? Otto, admittedly laboriously and ineffectually at first, starts composing his postcards because it’s the only thing an insignificant man can do. Inspector Escherich, however, a police officer of longstanding experience and presumably reasonably high repute, makes the decision to toe the Nazi line and satisfy his new masters’ cruelty. During his investigation he weaselly offers two suspects the chance of suicide as a means of his “solving the case” whilst not directly involving himself in the dirty details. Comparing the personal journeys of Otto and Escherich, essentially the brave versus the coward, was, for me, the most interesting aspect of the evening.

However, it does take a long time and a lot of effort to get there. Sadly, this fascinating story is told in an over-stylised and slow manner. The decision to narrate/interrupt the story by an angel statue that comes to life and sings, Cabaret-style, repetitive (very repetitive) lyrics that reflect the downfall of the age, is a curious one to say the least. By the time the war was in full swing, the decadence of the Weimar years was a thing of the past anyway, so this feels anachronistic. Should the angel statue represent a nostalgia for a better time? She waits on the sidelines and observes all the action so perhaps she is meant to suggest that what happens to Otto and Anna is fate. Maybe? Not sure. What she unfortunately does achieve is to minimise what should be growing tension. Tension grows out of a sense of real threat, but her presence is ethereal, invisible, mystic even, which, I would suggest, works against what the play sets out to achieve. Whenever the statue interrupts the flow of the play, down comes the suspense. Worse, it actually feels pretentious – and it doesn’t even have the benefit of being tuneful. I’m afraid I didn’t like that element to the production one bit.

To be fair, it wasn’t technically a great performance either. In a very unfortunate error early on, Charlotte Emmerson, as Anna, broke the news to Abiola Ogunbiyi’s Trudi, that Otto had died. Pause to take that in… isn’t Otto (Denis Conway) sitting next to her? Oh, she meant Markus…. and that left three actors with nowhere to go apart from carry on regardless, but the atmosphere had gone. As a result, I was never certain whether Ms Emmerson’s occasional dithering over the lines was a deliberate characterisation point about Anna, or whether she was simply under-rehearsed. There were similar incidents of ragged prop-handling, with Trudi searching for ages to find the photo in her bag, Escherich having difficulty getting the gun out of his coat pocket, and the statue fumbling with a postcard on the floor. Added to which, as the curtain fell at the end of Act One, a stagehand walked on stage left before the curtain had fully dropped. Have to say, I wasn’t that impressed.

That aside, there are some very good performances to admire. Jay Taylor’s tetchy, and gradually increasingly unhinged SS Officer Prall, is a superb portrayal of growing evil. He’s like a sadistic, spoilt child, who’s grown too big for his boots and in a decent society would have been taken down a peg or two – but in wartime Nazi Germany, with status and power, he’s uncontrolled, off the radar, wicked. Horrific, but excellent. Denis Conway is also very good as Otto, particularly in the last quarter of the play when he starts to face the consequences of his actions. Those were genuine tears welling up his eyes. Abiola Ogunbiyi gives a clear and precise performance as Trudi, the only other character who develops during the play – from radical to housewife. And I really enjoyed the performance of Joseph Marcell as Escherich, increasingly faced with his own cowardice, trying to wheedle his way out of trouble – totally convincing.

It’s a great story of quiet heroism, but sometimes it struggles to get its voice heard over the stylised production and lack of tension. I was expecting more, sadly. Thank heavens for some good performances. Alone in Berlin plays at the Royal until 29^th February, then continues to York and Oxford.

P. S. Mrs C didn’t like the harsh bright lights at the beginning and end of the show that blind the audience from the back of the stage. What was the point of them? She asked. Not a clue, I’m afraid. Is it fair on the audience to blind them like that? Ermm, no, I don’t think so.

Production photos by Manuel Harlan

Three-sy does it!

Review – Eden End, Royal, Northampton, 16th June 2011

Posted on June 17, 2011 by therealchrisparkle

It’s been a long time since I’ve seen a J B Priestley play. I think the last one was Stephen Daldry’s Inspector Calls which Mrs C and I saw in London sometime in the 1990s, but we were stuck at the back of the Garrick Theatre in London with the actors so distant they might just as well have been in Cardiff for all that I could connect with them. We saw a production of “I Have Been Here Before” at the Wycombe Swan also in the 90s with Mr Rumbold from Are You Being Served as the mysterious German Doktor. Before then it was just a production of An Inspector Calls at the Shaw Theatre in London in 1978 and a TV adaptation of Dangerous Corner around the same time.

So it was good to have some renewed exposure to this 20th century British stalwart. “Eden End” is not so often performed – perhaps because it doesn’t have the beguiling “time tricks” of Inspector Calls and Dangerous Corner. And maybe it is easy to see why it could have fallen out of favour in this modern age – what could a play from 1934 set in 1912, that doesn’t really have a very strong storyline, have that is relevant to today?

Well you just have to see it to answer that question. Laurie Sansom’s production of Eden End takes a simple tale and makes it riveting. As usual he has brought together a cast that works wonders as an ensemble. You get the feeling that in every performance the actors get a new truth out of the material, so fresh is their connection with the audience. On one level the play is about the return of an actress daughter to the family home after eight years’ absence, and the emotional ripples it creates through those left behind. On another, it reveals the reality of “the other man’s grass is always greener”; how people cope with the knowledge that life could be better somewhere else. And are they right? Very Chekhovian, Laurie Sansom refers to its similarities with “The Cherry Orchard” in the programme; there’s also a lot of “Three Sisters” in there too, as everyone has their own private Moscow.

Fantasy and reality are blurred with the brilliant set – ostensibly a traditional drawing room, but with a stylised stage curtain as the back wall and stage footlights around the edge. The fantasy suggests a glittering stage career elsewhere, but does the reality agree with that? If you saw the recent production of “Love Love Love” by Mike Bartlett, it features a daughter character who is bitter at her failed music career because no one told her when she was young that she simply wasn’t good enough. The returning actress Stella also implies that the fantasy of a brilliant acting career was a much more comforting place than the reality of being barely adequate at it.

Stella is played by Charlotte Emmerson, fab when last seen here at the Royal as the Duchess of Malfi. It’s a beautiful performance – combining the apparent starry glamour of her profession with vulnerability in the uncertainty of whom she loves, and the worry of whether she can sustain a career. At one stage, for a little while fantasy reigns as she meets up again with long lost love Farrant; then reality returns in the form of her ex-husband. Charlotte Emmerson wonderfully portrays this movement into the light and then back into darkness.

Farrant, played by Jonathan Firth, is also a winning creation. What could easily be just another stock Edwardian stiff-upper-lip chappy with a gammy leg, becomes a real person who overcomes the reservations of the era to tell Stella how he feels. Overflowing with decency, his sense of correctness and his openness are very genuinely acted and I enjoyed his performance very much. There’s an excellent moment when he encounters Charles Appleby. His reactions are simple, but perfectly executed.

Stella’s sister, Lilian, played by Daisy Douglas, comes across as deeply repressed and embittered, left behind to look after Father, sacrificing her own happiness for the perceived selfishness of her sister. There’s a great scene between the two of them where they challenge each other’s motives for how life turned out. Gripping stuff. You felt some sympathy for her – but also appreciated that she’s a bit cunning. Daisy Douglas puts over the shades of grey with the character very effectively.

Her brother Wilfred – looking like how you would imagine a 24 year old Gordon Brown to look but don’t let that put you off – is played by Nick Hendrix. Dashing and ineffectual, still patronised by the family retainer Sarah, sniffing (largely metaphorically) at the skirt of a barmaid, wasting his days at home in idleness, it’s a great study of youthful underachievement. It was very rewarding to see that even in 1934 young people couldn’t get the jokes in those old Punch cartoons! His build-up routines to ringing the girlfriend were very nicely done too. According to the programme, Nick Hendrix is fresh out of RADA and this is his first professional engagement. Well we thought he was absolutely first class, and are sure he’s going to have a great career.

Daniel Betts plays Charles Appleby, Stella’s estranged husband, a bit of a jack-the-lad actor, dressed like you would imagine Max Miller would if he had an office job. Cheeky and charismatic, you could see why Stella might have fallen for him – and after his night out with Wilfred, you could also see why she would have gone right off him. I have to commend Daniel Betts on his brilliant drunk act. Completely credible, nothing farcical or over the top about it; really well observed and very very funny. Mrs C and I were not entirely sure about Charles and Wilfred’s music-hall song and dance act between Acts Two and Three; they did it very well and I can see how it continues the theme of blur between fantasy and reality; but on the whole, we didn’t “get it”. I note that it’s not in the original text.

William Chubb’s Dr Kirby was very convincing as the elderly GP father with a care for his community and a gentle cynicism about life as a whole. Sarah was played by Carol Macready and was a subtle reading of the role of the old retainer, both cantankerous and kindly; occasionally wanting to keep hold of her old niche as authoritative nurse with the children, but knowing her power is gone. When, at the end, she is left behind in a very Chekhovian moment, and she realises Stella has gone without the parcel – I confess it brought a tear to my eye.

This is also a production really suitable for congratulating the usually unsung heroes. I’ve already mentioned the imaginative set of Sara Perks, suggesting a balance between reality and fantasy, stability and instability (the traditional room but set on a jaunty angle) and openness and secrecy (the back room that lights up to reveal Lilian desperately alone). I also thought the music by Jon Nicholls accompanied the mood perfectly, never monopolising a scene, gently suggesting more than it explained – lovely quiet sounds of an orchestra tuning up, for instance; so much more subtle than other sound effects we’ve been subjected to recently.

The sad feeling I had at the end of the play reflected how, throughout the whole play, the emotions were strong but beautifully understated. This gave the whole production a surprising additional energy. It’s a quiet gem, and I’m glad it’s going to be touring after its Northampton run. I recommend it highly.

Review – The Duchess of Malfi, Royal & Derngate, Northampton, 20th October

Posted on October 21, 2010 by therealchrisparkle

“Anyone local got a thurible?” came a tweet from the Derngate’s Chief Executive a few weeks ago. I knew I didn’t, so regretfully couldn’t help. But now I know why he wanted one. Because as you enter the Royal auditorium for this production of The Duchess of Malfi, you are confronted by this huge swaying thurible, puffing out its incense against the pitch black, giving that eerie sensation of a hallowed monastic environment, and bringing to mind all those feelings of religious guilt that make you shudder at the prospect of High Church. (Well it does me.)

If that thurible was being wafted around by some officer of the church, on the same scale you’d be absolutely diminutive. And so too, when the set opens up and is dominated by a large golden cross against the background, you feel really small in the stalls. It’s no ordinary cross, this one looks like a segment of an old window frame; on the same scale you’d be about the size of an ant, powerless to oppose the evil that’s about to unfold on stage, much like the Duchess herself.

“Webster was much possessed by death”, as Eliot says, and wasn’t he just. By the time the interval has ended and the audience is brought crashing back to attention by the sound of the prison gate clanking shut, there is no way forward but for mass destruction of almost all the main characters. I’ve never seen this play before and I haven’t read it in almost thirty years, so I wasn’t really prepared for its content. It’s fascinating to see a play that was contemporary of Shakespeare but not written by him – today we’re familiar with the usual Shakespearean play construction and poetic language, but in this play the words are so obviously not Shakespeare’s, that this alone makes for a revealing experience. To my ears, he’s less poetic, and less adept at explaining the character’s motives, but still there are some wonderful passages that you feel would not be out of place in modern drama.

Well what can one say about this production. It’s sheer magic. Laurie Sansom is a creative genius. Don’t let him go to another theatre! In fact I hope they won’t let him out of the building; well maybe, tagged, and allowed to stray no further than Prezzo’s. His artistic insight is amazing, he creates a company that bonds together so well and he has an extraordinary ability to get to the heart of the text and lay its truth bare.

He had the idea to introduce contemporary madrigals to this otherwise music-free play, which at first I thought might not work; but actually this intensifies the emotion and the spookiness. The singers double up as minor courtier roles occasionally taking part in the action, which allows for unnecessary passages to be cut easily to keep the pace up. The music is stunning; the effect inventive.

Charlotte Emmerson is the Duchess, with ardour, horror, compassion, sadness and forgiveness in her eyes. She takes you through the stages of recent widowhood, taking happiness with a new husband in secret, being a loving mother, kind to her lady-in-waiting; then you see her easily out-tricked, but bravely committed to survival; and finally too insignificant to fight the evil. It’s a great performance.

Daniel Fredenburgh as the Cardinal has an excellent steely glare; and there is a marvellously realised scene in the confession box where his hypocrisy is most obvious as he paws at his mistress Julia. There is superb use of the chorus of madrigalers in this scene too. David Caves’ Bosola is no ogre but a calculating chancer, with a warped but understandable morality, and Nick Blood’s Antonio convinced throughout as the scribe who had greatness thrust upon him and who was out of his depth in the trickery and evil of Calabria.

But the real star of this show is Laurie Sansom. The sound effects; the lighting effects; the clever cutting, the deft use of the Royal’s stage, which isn’t big – sometimes people just try to cram too much on there. The man is gold dust.