Abstract
This was an unusual opportunity to see a rarely staged play but it was an opportunity squandered and I left the theatre feeling bewildered by Blanche McIntyre’s RSC debut. Whether this is a play that suffers rather than profits from its collaborative authorship is a moot point but there was very little attempt to paper over the cracks between the play’s varied story lines. Lacking a sense of narrative cohesion, this production collapsed into a series of more or less (mostly less) interesting but entirely separate sequences. The morris dance of Act 3 had even less to do with the rest of the play than usual. Here, it was a long and tedious interlude with dancers straddling huge phallic hobby horses and presided over by a beaming schoolmistress (Sally Bankes). Perhaps the raw sexuality was supposed to address the sexual frustrations of the jailer’s daughter (Danusia Samal) but this was more by accident than design.
The only consistent decision the production had taken was to portray most of its courtly figures as bi-sexual. Gyuri Sarossy’s Theseus was clearly involved sexually with Chris Jack’s Pirithous though the camp iconography of their fey gesturing and their stifled yelps as the virile knights were described trivialized their feelings for one another. Emilia’s (Frances McNamee) reluctance to be married was clearly to do with her erotic attachment to Diana (Eloise Secker) though their relationship was signalled by little more explicit than the odd intense look.
Hippolyta, played by Allison McKenzie, spent most of the production downstage staring out into the audience as though she really wanted to be somewhere else (one couldn’t blame her). When she did take part in the play, it was only to shout and flounce about in a way that was supposed, I think, to indicate her contempt for these feeble-minded lovers. She seemed totally asexual and her relationship with Theseus was blatantly a marriage of inconvenience.
Anna Fleischle’s design was completely alienating. I was assured by a (much younger) colleague that we were in a world of futuristic dystopia – The Hunger Games apparently (though I have never seen that). To my untrained eye, some of the absurd costumes were closer to the budget rubbish of Dr Who or Star Trek. Hippolyta wore a glittery crash helmet and Wonderwoman breastplate – Amazonian queen perhaps but here more reminiscent of an extra in a 1970s outer space cheesy sci-fi programme. McNamee’s Emilia wore a white dress with shoulder pads so large she resembled an American footballer – shades of Dallas? – but, if so, why? Sarossy’s Duke of Athens wore a Napoleonic greatcoat over leather biker’s trousers and a child’s shirt emblazoned with bright flying birds. He also had a pair of wings tattooed on either side of his throat while Emilia had a huge pair of angel’s wings on her back and Hippolyta’s arms were lined with patterns. Again, some youthful reference I should have understood?
The court scenes were painfully bad and there was only a single mode of delivery which was full volume shouting. Relief came in two forms – the story of the jailer’s daughter and that of the rival lovers. Samal’s jailer’s daughter was plain and knowingly outclassed by the social rank and sophistication of Palamon. Initially, these scenes were winningly pathetic and her heartfelt performance made a nice change from the declarative noise of the aristocratic characters. Her father, Paul McEwan, was genuinely touching especially as he rallied his servants to impersonate the activities of a ship’s crew, raising an anchor chain on an invisible capstan. But even here Leander Deeny’s doctor, in World War I trench coat and red-cross armband (in case we missed the point?), was a Dublin stereotype with panto ‘Oirish’ accent and an annoyingly cajoling manner. Patrick Knowles’s Wooer was empathic until he was forced to pronounce his longer speeches in a single breath. The character’s ‘I’ll tell you quickly’ (4.1.52) seems to have been interpreted as an implicit stage direction but the resulting lightning recitation had the effect of a party piece and the words spoken disappeared into amazement at the actor’s breathing capacity rather than what the character was saying.
The narrative centre of the play is of course the loving/rivalry relationship of Palamon (James Corrigan) and Arcite (Jamie Wilkes) – here, mirror images of one another. Both were costumed in rough boots, tracksuit pants, sweaty vests and fingerless mittens. Both scaled at various points two parallel metal grids which crossed the playing space front to back. These grates were obviously prison bars as well as vantage points from which to peep down and observe the beauty of Emilia. Later, they functioned as screens round a pair of cage fighters as each one was thrown by his opponent towards a cowering audience, only to bounce back from the trampoline-like grates. But even these exchanges were not free of the gimmickry which infected the other plots. Their duelling swords and armour were dragged on in a bag of golf clubs and elsewhere Arcite wandered around swatting the air with a badminton racket.
In spite of all this nonsense, the death of Arcite, his body distorted by his equine accident, was surprisingly moving. He lay twisted on a gurney, as Palamon cradled his agonized form in a homosocial pietà. Arcite’s death rattle was particularly effective. Following Arcite’s dying gasp, Palamon briskly exited followed, in a dash, by Emilia so that Theseus’ final speech was a failed attempt to console those remaining. Hippolyta clearly thought little of this and haughtily stomped off, pulling focus away from the story of the two central heroes and underlining what was only the most marginal of narratives. That the ending of this production should have been so off balance was merely an unfortunate symptom of its tendency throughout towards miscalculation.