Review – Straight Line Crazy, Bridge Theatre, London, 26th March 2022

Posted on March 29, 2022 by therealchrisparkle

It’s always a pleasure to visit the Bridge Theatre, and especially on a crisp but stunningly beautiful day like last Saturday, with the sun high in the sky giving a glorious view over Tower Bridge and the Tower of London from outside the theatre’s front door. I booked this show fairly pronto after it was announced last year because the promise of the Bridge Theatre, Ralph Fiennes and a new David Hare play is, for me, about as winning a combination as you can get.

Straight Line Crazy doesn’t tell the full story of hugely influential New York urban developer Robert Moses, but rather two significant periods in his life and career. I’d never heard of Robert Moses, apparently a very famous figure, which makes me frankly ignorant and I’m not proud of it. Act One is set in 1926 – pre-crash – where Moses has his heart set on opening up the beaches and parks of Long Island by creating new expressways for the motor car, no matter the nimbyism of the local landowners. Act Two takes us to 1955, and his proposal to carve up Washington Square Park with a road straight through the middle, which he says would alleviate the traffic congestion into Lower Manhattan.

The young Moses is brash and bold, with a propensity to start digging his new roads before he gets the official go-ahead; consultation is for wimps, problems can be glossed over with a little help from his influential contacts, and official fines are just part and parcel of his daily work. The older Moses doesn’t seem to have learned from his mistakes – in fact he doesn’t recognise that he can make a mistake; and his practice of riding roughshod over authority has developed into full-scale bullying of anyone who gets in his way.

Not only that, his personality flaws that are suggested in Act One have grown into proper monstrosity by Act Two. His misogyny, his racism and his contempt for the poor have run riot. He wants to open up parks and beaches but only for the right sort of people. No rapid transit access, just the motor car is king. And if you can’t afford a car – you can’t take advantage of his planning, simples. He brooks no criticism, under any circumstances; in the early days, his colleagues opted to be yes men, to stay in his good books and protect their own careers. Come the 1950s, Moses is surrounded by one faithful worker who has supported him throughout and sacrificed his own life and health as a consequence; another who realises they have taken their relationship as far as they can stand; and a third, younger, employee who has the guts to tell him how it is. You’re no different from anyone else, Mr Moses. Sometimes you’re right and sometimes you’re wrong.

Nicholas Hytner’s magnificent production uses that wonderfully adaptive thrust stage at the Bridge to perfect effect, suggesting the opulent but sterile home of the Vanderbilts, the cantankerous atmosphere of the Washington Square Park protest meetings, or – mainly – the extensive draughtsmen’s workspace at Moses’ office. David Hare has written a play dripping with telling lines, mixing humour and hideousness in equal measure, revealing its characters’ motivations and personalities with subtlety and delicacy. As always, David Hare has a lot to say, and it’s a pleasure to take it all in. There are themes of democracy and truth, prejudice and bullying, corruption and decency, community and selfishness; all woven together in Hare’s inimitable intelligent and gripping style.

The whole cast give us a masterclass in acting, but you can’t take anything away from Ralph Fiennes’ extraordinary performance as Moses. As a younger man provocative and insinuating, ambitious and determined; as an older man complacent and indulged, implacable and deaf to criticism. At a risk of sounding like Pseuds Corner, Hare provides all the ingredients for a characterisation of complexity, and Fiennes cooks them to perfection. You can’t take your eyes – or ears – off him.

Siobhán Cullen is fantastic as Finnuala Connell, the draughtswoman who must tread a fine line between her natural assertiveness and her requirement to give the boss what he needs to hear. She is accompanied by the excellent Samuel Barnett as Ariel Porter, Moses’ other long-time employee, quietly suppressing his own thoughts and needs, whilst genuinely wanting to support his boss and help him through hard times. There’s a brilliant cameo performance by Danny Webb as Governor Al Smith, full of bluster and exuberance, trying to assert his own authority over Moses but fighting to resist dipping his toes in the world of corruption.

Alisha Bailey is excellent as the young Mariah Heller, who’s not afraid of saying what she thinks (actually, she portrays perfectly that she is afraid, but is going to speak her mind anyway!) There are smart supporting performances from Guy Paul as the arrogant Vanderbilt, Alana Maria as the enraged Shirley Hayes and Helen Schlesinger as the journalist and activist Jane Jacobs, who opposed Moses’ vision of town planning and whose role in the play you might have thought would have been developed further than it is. Perhaps it would have been, in a play about his life as a whole, rather than concentrating on just these two major moments of his career.

One of those fantastic theatrical experiences where all kinds of brilliant collide together to make a superb production. Straight Line Crazy plays at the Bridge Theatre until 18^th June and it’s a must.

Production photos by Manuel Harlan

Five Alive, let Theatre Thrive!

Review – Four Quartets, Royal and Derngate, Northampton, 9th June 2021

Posted on June 10, 2021 by therealchrisparkle

T. S. Eliot’s Four Quartets comes to the Royal and Derngate hotfoot from its opening at the Theatre Royal Bath last week, with star of stage and screen Ralph Fiennes ambitiously presenting these four connected poems as a theatrical event; the perfect antidote to COVID, as it’s a naturally socially-distanced play in front of a socially-distanced audience, and lasting 75 minutes so that it needs no interval. It examines the concept of time, and who wouldn’t wish to go back to the relatively carefree days of 2019 when all we had to worry about was who would win the General Election.

Personally, I’ve always struggled with the Four Quartets. The first poem, Burnt Norton – which isn’t an obscure colour on an artist’s palette but a manor house in Gloucestershire – was published in 1936 as a stand-alone work. Later, Eliot decided to write three more poems, sharing the same five-part structure, to create an extended collection. Each poem starts with a series of statements and counterstatements; then moves into a more lyrical mode; then movement becomes the central theme; then a short lyric precedes a final resolution. Reading them, some of his lines bounce off the page with elegant clarity and inspirational thought. The still point of the turning world, for example, is a phrase that has seamlessly floated into everyday language. Other parts come across as intractable and turgid, and you resent Eliot for being just too darn clever-clever for his boots, with his classical allusions, religious façade, and use of deliberately obfuscatory language. No wonder Toilets is T. S. Eliot spelled backwards.*

Back in the day, Eliot recorded a reading of the Four Quartets, and his recitative skill was utterly abysmal. Every word sounds the same, portentously, and dully given the same emphasis. It’s a very boring experience. The challenge for Mr Fiennes is to make the four poems come to life as a dramatic narrative, that either clarifies their meaning for us, or makes us look at them in a new way, or somehow gives us something more than just sitting down and getting our old Faber edition out.

And Oh My Giddy Aunt does he succeed! From the moment he gives extra, inquisitive weight to the word perhaps in the second line of Burnt Norton, you know this is going to be a real interpretation of Eliot’s words, not mere recitation. Imagine that Mr Fiennes is Mr Eliot, trying to grapple with a complicated concept that is emerging in his brain, speaking out his mind’s words to see if they make any kind of sense; if they do, he runs with it, excitedly giving them meaning and truth; if they don’t, he falters, his words fall away and we all feel as though we’ve reached the same dead end. If the Four Quartets were a game of rugby, and Mr Eliot the fly-half, he winkles an idea out of the scrum and either scores an instant try in a blaze of glory, or gets tackled by half a dozen burly opponents and gets squished. Either way, Mr Fiennes takes us every step of his journey, and it’s irresistible.

There’s no doubt that he is helped by Hildegard Bechtler’s domineering and eerie set – two big revolving drab slabs that evoke the dry concrete of Burnt Norton, Christopher Shutt’s sound designs that bring the crashing waves of the Dry Salvages thundering into the auditorium, but above all Tim Lutkin’s superb lighting that guides us through the sections of the poem, radiating light onto Mr Fiennes’ face when the surface glittered out of heart of light, beaming red to evoke pentecostal fire in the dark time of the year. Dressed in sombre colours and barefoot, Mr Fiennes takes Eliot’s words and eludicates and clarifies them, entertains us with them, surprises us with them, invests them with humanity rather than just dry and dusty theory. He demarcates each individual section of the poems with a change of tone or stance, so you always get a sense of the progress being made. He brings out the very slight moments of gentle humour; Eliot would be aghast at how populist his twittering world could be interpreted in the social media age.

From the audience’s perspective, the show can be as active or as passive as you wish it to be. The beautiful glossy programme starts with a quotation from Eliot’s own The Frontiers of Criticism: “As for the meaning of the poem as a whole, it is not exhausted by any explanation, for the meaning is what the poem means to different sensitive readers.” It’s entirely up to you. You can listen and watch, alert as a rabbit with your whiskers twitching, munching down whatever meaning you feel appropriate from the words and movements; or you can recline back, and let Mr Fiennes’ voice simply wash over you. Because I have always found the Four Quartets very hard to understand, I really wanted to come out of this show feeling better acquainted with it, with greater insights and awareness of what’s going on. And Mr Fiennes gives us that with huge generosity and patience. I can’t imagine how anyone could have converted Eliot’s words into a stage show better.

* It isn’t, but I made you think twice.

Production photographs by Matt Humphrey

Five Alive, let Theatre Thrive!

Review – The Grand Budapest Hotel, Errol Flynn Filmhouse, Northampton, 31st March 2014

Posted on April 1, 2014 by therealchrisparkle

To be fair, gentle reader, we probably weren’t sufficiently match-fit to see this film. Mrs Chrisparkle and I have been on our travels again and haven’t really been home long enough to regroup. Thus tiredness, jetlag, and upset tummies are still taking their toll. Nevertheless we went, as I was looking forward to this film as I’d seen the trailer last time we went to the cinema and it looked like it would be dashed funny.

And indeed it is. The Grand Budapest Hotel itself stands as a monument to faded glory in the heart of fictional Zubrowka, and its owner, Zero Moustafa, invites one of its few guests to have dinner with him in order to explain how he came to possess such an extraordinary building. The majority of the film is one long flashback, as young Zero, the lobby boy, accompanies charismatic concierge Gustave on their quest to prove Gustave’s innocence of the murder of Madame D, whilst securing her valuable painting – his inheritance – “Boy with Apple” – in the process. The plot takes many unlikely and wacky turns and moves at a fast and furious pace, including chases, prison break-outs, handling intimidating military police and a wonderfully ludicrous shoot-out across the landings of the hotel. Think Mel Brooks at his zaniest mixed with a touch of The Pink Panther, a hint of Feydeau Farce and all dressed up in classy art deco style and you have something of the feel of this film.

However, you also need to be fully alert and, above all, consistently awake to appreciate all its finer points. Hence my introduction above; unfortunately Mrs C and I spent the evening nodding off despite the fact that we were really enjoying it. You know that feeling when you just can’t keep your eyes open even though you desperately want to stay awake; so you risk a brief eyelid droop when you think nothing’s going to happen for the next minute or so, and you think you can still keep with the plot – and then you’re awoken by the rest of the audience suddenly laughing and you realise you missed a good bit. Well I had quite a lot of that.

It’s all delightful to look at with terrific attention to detail, capturing the hotel both in its heyday chic and in its latter-day distress. The script is wry, without ever being laugh out loud hilarious. It’s beautifully crafted with its mixture of screen aspect ratios and the music by Alexandre Desplat perfectly matches the story and characters. At the heart of the film is a wonderfully quirky performance by Ralph Fiennes as Gustave, the Clark Gable of concierges, elegant and refined, courteous and charming, but with the ability to burst the bubble of pretentiousness with uproarious coarse language when you’re not expecting it. Following him like a faithful bloodhound is 17 year old Tony Revolori as the young Zero – hilariously impassive while all sorts of ridiculous things happen all around him until he suddenly spurts into action – a bit like the cartoon dog Droopy but not quite so lugubrious. The only time Zero has to face up to his boss is when Gustave slides into flirtatiousness with Zero’s girlfriend, the lovely Agatha, played with gentle humour by Saoirse Ronan. The surrounding cast include such notables as Jeff Goldblum, F Murray Abraham, Jude Law, Harvey Keitel, Tilda Swinton and Tom Wilkinson, all of whom bring their own touches of magic to their roles.

It’s all purely for fun; there’s no great secret message hidden away for us to learn from, or innovative insight into the human condition, just a farcical cavorting around some Ruritanian backwater, and the happy news that the good guys win in the end (at least temporarily). I’m sure it’s even better than I have described – but I was probably asleep through those bits.