A Night on the Bog

PUBLICATION DATE 3 OCTOBER 2011
Written for londonist.com






Have you heard the one about the Irishman who walks into a bar and says he’s killed his father with a potato spade? The landlord gives him a job and immediately leaves him alone with his daughter whilst he goes to a wake… It sounds like the set-up to a shaggy-dog joke rather than the essence of a plot by one of Ireland’s most famous dramatists.

Some London revivals have “important” written all over them. You can tell by the dressy South Bank-ish audience, and by the way broadsheet critics fall over each other to show their Google-enhanced erudition.  The Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer called it a “tragicomic marvel”, Paul Taylor in the Indie cited its “dangerous iconoclasm” and Michael Coveney compared it to Gogol.  They all refer to the riots in 1907 after J M Synge’s depiction of the Irish as bog-trotters too easily bedazzled by storytelling and superstition, and harp on the play’s influence over any and every subsequent writer.

Gobshites, as they say in Co. Mayo.

It was a grand night for half-Ethiopian half-Irish and total babe Ruth Negga. In between wowing the press with her stage performance as fierce barmaid Pegeen she was scurrying upstairs to catch herself as Shirley Bassey on BBC2.  As the wayward patricidal bedazzler, Negga’s ‘Misfits’ co-star Robert Sheehan divided the jury, some seeing him as better at the geeky inadequate and less convincing as a silver-tongued charmer whom all the women adore.

Most of the cast are experienced Irish actors, and play heavily and emphatically on the lilting language – in fact it’s hammered home with such vigour that surtitles might be preferable and give them more freedom to act naturally.  First among equals is surely Niamh Cusack portraying a wily and seductive Widow Quin, and like Negga arguably too lovely to be totally credible as a barefoot goat-breeding peasant woman.

The two acts are bookended with some vogueish Pogue-ish drum and flutery evoking the Corrs on their night off, there’s a goat-skin bodhrán for goodness sake.  The hyper-realistic set depicts the single location of the bar and kitchen of the shebeen, yet it slides and whirls like the Tardis in a totally unnecessary display of stage mechanics: it’s a hundred-year-old Irish drama, not the Sound of Feckin’ Music.

You Me Bohème Bohème Train

If you’ve been to site-specific arts events before, like Punchdrunk or Bum Bum Train or Theatre Delicatessen, you’ve probably ricocheted from one scene or event to another, feeling somewhere between a film extra and a peeping tom.  Heritage Arts and the crew behind Silent Opera bring you closer to the action and whilst there’s a certain amount of herding involved, you’re much more directly engaged with the performers and the drama.

Snap on a pair of Sennheiser HD headphones, snap OFF your mobile, and find first a beanbag or a patch of crowded floor in the ‘attic’ space of the Old Vic Tunnels rigged up as the realistically shabby student squat in which Rodolfo and Mimi fall in love: you can almost smell the stale joints and congealed pizza.

The orchestra’s a recording but the technician in charge is also a trained conductor who can adjust its speed to accommodate the singers: he might not be flailing his arms in an evening suit, but it works.

You don’t really need to know the story of La Bohème either, many of the audience were opera virgins and it’s sung in modern English with laugh-out-loud libretto lines like ‘fetch the Cillit Bang’ and ‘here's a feast worthy of Come Dine With Me: Beans' enriching what’s basically a story of two boy-meets-girl romances at the end of which one dies.  As with most modernised Bohèmes, Mimi’s condition is updated from ‘consumption’, here to anorexia, but we wish they’d go the whole hog and make her a drug addict, it’s time for a Mimi Winehouse.

So when in the shabby flat the students decide to go off to the Christmas market and then to the night café, it’s YOUR arm they’re pulling to get up off your beanbag, and you join the drunken queue for the nightclub where Musetta’s singing, and eventually you’re standing at Mimi’s bedside when she dies.

You’re certainly carried along, although less emotionally than you might expect for such a heart-tugging tale – the headphone music didn’t seem to swell as passionately as in conventional theatre settings, and we weren’t quite swept away by the romance and the beautiful tunes although Emily Ward's Mimi was in fine voice.

It’s a young cast – when will someone do one of these fantastic immersive site-specifics with established opera singers - some of the acting is clunky, and despite the smooth shepherding of the 150-strong sellout audience up and down stairs and through the different scenes, neither the singing nor the on-stage movement was quite as fluid as it could be, although we were quite early in the run.

We’d have liked even more direct engagement between the actors and audience, in the Gatehouse’s Traviata, Violetta does a lapdance, and Bohème’s Musetta is no less a tart.  Being allowed to bring your wine would help the atmosphere too.

But it’s such an enjoyable night out – well worth the ticket price of £20 – with a young and cool Superdry-chic audience many of whom seemed to be on date night, and supported by a good popup bar, Hammer Horror flick club cinema, comedy, music, interactive film, and the rest of the Vault experience.

The Norman Failures

As newspaper reviewers have said, comparisons are odious but I'm going for it anyway. In 1974, The Norman Conquests trilogy was a landmark in theatre comedy, Ayckbourn's coming of age and coming to town in the first of the interlinked/alternate ending series of plays. It was also cast with actors who WOULD BECOME household names in TV sitcoms, not those who had already achieved the dubious honour and thereby lies the failure of the Old Vic production.

Tom Courtenay and Michael Gambon already had impressive stage credentials, and it's not fair to set their reputations against Stephen Mangan and Ben Miles respectively. Mangan is an excellent TV actor, deservedly rated for Green Wing as much as his Barclaycard adverts, but he's miscast as the wild and woolly Norman, failing to emulate Courtenay's touching pathos and vulnerability, and whilst magnetic on the small screen, unkempt and undressed for the stage he seems to have lost his allure.


MANGAN

MINGIN'

Ben Miles does much better in the role of Tom the vet, but his tragic flaw is simply that he is not Michael Gambon.

Ayckbourn writes best for women and two of the three female characters became archetypes for possibly two of the most popular TV characterisations ever. 'The Good Life' writers John Esmonde and Bob Larbey chose Felicity Kendal and Penelope Keith after seeing them perform on stage together and the characters of Margo and Barbara represent a tangible debt to The Norman Conquests.

Amanda Root doesn't have the stature to be as commanding as Keith, and seems all the more peevish by comparison: her transcendence into passionate woman is far less believable without the physical hauteur to set up the situation. Jessica Hynes (Stephenson) is another solidly talented TV writer and actor, but can't achieve the girlish vulnerability of Kendal's Annie and has been dressed appallingly by a costume designer whom I would guess didn't live through it and has therefore treated the period as a joky freak show, instead of researching more accurately suburban fashion of the mid-70s.

Pitching the play in the round lends it a fresh initimacy, taking it back to the original Scarborough production of 1973 - although these are not necessarily characters with whom one would wish to be intimate since all of them have an unpleasant side - and this encouraged some of last night's audience to make audible contributions. Perhaps Ayckbourn should develop an interactive script.;

Saw Andrew Lloyd Webber in the audience, I hope he's not considering turning it into a musical.