In the Play term Busby's gave us John Dryden's The Wild Gallant. One of his really early works, it was a simple play concerning slightly absurd romantic problems facing the hero, dashingly played by William Pym. The other strengths of this production were its set and its supporting cast; the Gallant himself did not have to carry the play. The real fun in these comedies comes from the smaller caricatured parts, of which there were many: Rachel Byng-Maddick as his landlady, Vineet Dewan as an impossibly camp nobleman, and Cecilia Mortimore slinking on stage towards the end of the play as a whore - to credit only a few of a remarkably together cast.
The set was fantastic - an innovative design from the director, Carol Jacobi. Strips of differently coloured fabric hung from the ceiling of the Drama Studio all around the stage, setting a colourful vibrant tone for the play. The many jokes and innuendoes stood out beautifully from this backdrop and really brought the play alive. The night I went the audience responded well to the humour: booing, applauding and gasping at the right moments. This was the greatest tribute to the production and one that cannot often be made about Restoration comedies - Busby's House dragged their audience into Dryden's surreal world - and they whole-heartedly enjoyed the experience.
The setting for the Liddell's production of Willy Russell's Stags and Hens could not have been more different. The play is set in the toilets of a seedy northern nightclub and director Ruban Yogarajah pulled no punches when building the stage (Men's on one side, Girls' on the other), covered in lewd graffiti. The plot involves an engaged couple holding their stag and hen nights in the same club. It opened with the semi-conscious groom-to-be being dragged into the Gents' by his friends. The bride began to have doubts and ended up running off with the singer of the band playing that night at the club.
It sounds terribly serious but was actually incredibly funny. The cast was neatly divided into some very amusing characters and although it was set entirely in these small cubicles the play was fast-paced and witty. Once again the whole cast rose to the occasion perfectly and sustained beautiful and hilarious performances; it was impossible not to feel sorry for Katya Aplin as the bride-to-be, and Nicholas Matthews in full New Romantic mode will be talked about for years. The best thing about the production was that it looked like the cast were fully focused and giving everything and, without meaning to patronise, having a lot of fun (which of course the audience finds infectious). Too often School productions seem dominated by the same group of people who sometimes look like they feel obligated rather than excited to be on stage. Performances that night were energetic and loud - and wholly appropriate to the play. It was a brilliant production and will no doubt set a pattern for House plays to follow.
Howard Gooding (Dryden's)
That did nothing to lift the essential pessimism of the playwright. This is a story about a godforsaken place where domestic dramas are pitiful in their banality, where poverty and coercion and crime are so ineluctable they can scarcely be anything else. Manus is a schoolteacher of heroic - herculean - intentions. His scholarship, classical or Irish, may be prodigious but it is certainly misplaced. He is inevitably going to be second best for Maire, and only in conditions of utter desolation will he ever get half that distance. Sarah's efforts to articulate a single sentence are in sharp contrast to his tumbling fluency, but he is more pathetic even than she. Yolland is moonstruck, youthful - but ultimately venal, but in Baile Beag, it is enough that he is different.
This is a tough play: the intonation is Irish, definitely not English, and much of the humour as well as the pathos depends upon understanding the idiom. David Odgers as Manus was clever in depicting frustration as well as humility, a man aware of the desperate limitations that circumstances have foisted on him, but still wheedling and dishonest in his forlorn hope of a brave new world. Avye Leventis as Maire gave a finely judged performance; she had evolved a real Irish brogue which was both consistent and remarkably convincing, articulating with clarity and understanding. Connie Emerson turned in a strong performance of a near mute figure, conveying both strength and longing, as well as a legacy of suffering. Michael Gooding (Doalty) had a coltish zest, quite consistent with his role, and there were spirited and pleasing performances from others: Jack McGee (Jimmy Jack), Gemma Game (Bridget), Jannen Vamadeva (Hugh) and Tom Balogh (Captain Lancey) all showed insight and dexterity. Jamie McClelland as Yolland was nearly excellent, but succumbed to playing to the rowdy gallery the night I went. A pity.
Where Manus is speculative but ultimately passive, his brother Owen is hotheaded, angry and impulsive. However disastrous the consequences of his defection, however supine resistance may be alongside the might of the occupying power, he is at least a man of action. That grants him a great prestige in a subject people and is a powerful bromide to the verbiage which brings Manus, discretely, into contempt. Rollo Jackson's treatment of this focal part had moments of excellence - a sort of growling virility and impatience which gave him great credibility, but he knew his lines imperfectly.
There are important lessons for the future: for the directors - don't trust your cast to learn their lines over the holidays for one; for the cast - plays are raw teamwork, and everyone has to mind equally about the success of the production: for the audience - support the cast by concentrating upon what they're seeking to do, or don't come. Don't turn drama into slapstick.
This reviewer, while pulling no punches, admires pupil drama, and House plays. He admires especially pupil directors who, in addition to facing the artistic and logistical landmines of production, have the ferociously hard task of dealing with their peers. I congratulate Howard Gooding and Sam Spanier on a bold choice, impressively executed.
David Hargreaves
We were also very much on home territory: there were plenty of gags and asides, fanned by Subhi Sherwell's world-weary slave, Xanthias, and a part smug, part inhibited audience-conscious performance from the remoter dormitories of College, many of them new to the Mysteries.
We don't know much about Aristophanes, though he gets an affectionate mention in Plato's Symposium as a convivial companion who gives an amusing turn to a serious discussion. I imagine him regarding his immediate literary forbears with both envy and awe, determined to respectfully ape their grander measures, recruiting them to his own comic needs. Athens - as the programme notes informed us - is in 'a political and moral crisis' (not unlike Major's Britain) and needs good poets to save city and stage. This gives Aristophanes an opportunity to let Dionysus - the patron god of drama himself - 'boldly go' his frog-infested way through Hades disguised as Heracles, and stumble by good fortune upon a competition for the Chair of Tragedy between the deported soul of Euripides and Aeschylus.
Ed Tyerman's Dionysus had the air of a happy amateur, going rather reluctantly through his picaresque motions and failing to live up to the punishing consequences of his disguise. He was not the big shiny happy Heracles portrayed by Christian Coulson, but more of an Ealing Athenian, out on a jolly.
A number of minor characters enlivened this first half of the play: Howard Ryland and Tassos Tsitsopoulos's donkey added a little panto; David Ranki's 'corpse' was lugubriously eloquent and Yemon Choi's Charon disturbingly introspective. Lefkos Kyriacou and Stephen O'Brien's landladies had been exposed to hours of Monty Python videos and there was plenty of knock-about dynamic between Subhi Sherwell and Asad Abedi's Aeacus, Pluto's slave, who tips him the wink about the forthcoming contest.
The costumes were - I suppose - in period, and reminded me of many an 'Up Pompeii' or 'I Claudius' set (wrong civilisation, Pyatt - Ed.). I marvelled at Freda Bates's frog masks - they will, no doubt, be recycled in the Green Room, or linger on with their sinister trepanned presence for years to come.
I've never been sure about all these Greek choruses and I felt uneasy as the alien tribe of Initiates to the Mysteries trouped on and motioned to us, or harangued us with cries such as 'You're not welcome here!' The frogs were sportive and fun during their Stygian party, but were later sprinkled around in bored lilypad isolation. Maurice Lynn and I spotted one frog picking at his toenails. And why do theatre-goers quote their Greek verbalisation of a croak with such affection? 'Ah, you should have heard that Greek frog chorus on those immemorial lawns' etc (get on with it - Ed.). The fact is, we don't really know what the Frogs are doing in Frogs.
The second half of the play disappeared deeper up School, and echoed futilely about the magnificent temple set designed by Dale Inglis. This was a mistake I felt, though I understood the necessity of hosting the 'game show' part of the play in a glitzy distance, but I had been denied my coffee and bourbon, and was less willing to chuckle. Mohan Ganesalingam's Pluto was powerfully cool yet awkward, building up an unhealthy cult following in the audience, whilst Florrie Evans glided about at one with her trailing glory. Alastair Sooke and Thomas Wood, our two competing tragedians, had to carry the play and put a great deal of gusto into their vain and moody characters. Aristophanes's parody of their respective literary styles - Aeschylus, lofty; Euripides, popular appeal - gets plenty of coverage here and the literary conventions threatened to crowd us out. Failing to find any guidance to all this in the programme, I nodded off, finding some of the posturing a bit gawky and empty. This may be unfair given the lion's share of lines that Alastair and Thomas had to field. The measuring of literary merit in the scales was funny and thought-provoking, but I couldn't cope - neither should Aeschylus - with the castanet interlude.
Still, what larks, and doesn't School make a lovely Hades. One more mention must go to Sinan Savaskan's eerie music which brought out some of the strange mysticism of the play. A good night out - and good to see College keeping the Latin play tradition of Westminster alive and kicking. Much more fun than listening to Westminsters ape American accents etc.
Richard Pyatt
TOM GENTLEMAN IS WOYZECK proclaimed the posters, and if (as I suspect) many members of the audience were present primarily to witness this most eagerly awaited of dramatic debuts they were not disappointed. He portrayed all sides of Woyzeck's character with insight and sensitivity: his love for Marie and their child, his friendship with Andres, his resigned submission to the Doctor, his fear and anguish in relation to the voices he hears. Victimised and persecuted, he preserved the integrity and humanity of his character, while granting full weight to the fatal philosophical streak in his personality.
James St Clair was a splendidly self-centred and uncaring Doctor, motivated entirely by his science, without humanity or compassion, a performance which brought out the melancholic depression in Tom Hart-George's Captain, similarly uncaring for the fate of anyone but himself. Sophie Powell conveyed well the spontaneity of Marie, easily seduced by Peter Cole's suitably stereotypical Drum Major, but as easily brought to contrition. Sebastian Savage, as Andres, was appropriately sympathetic while still failing to comprehend Woyzeck's inner turmoil.
David Odgers was a more convincing monkey than one would have imagined possible, while James St Clair doubled up as an energetic, prancing horse (a role which, ominously, I had myself been offered the day before), both animals being skilfully exhibited by John Hampton as the Showman. Such parts of the play can create difficulties in production, and if the doll performing the role of the baby was somewhat less than convincing, this was an entirely understandable lapse; and while the cat looked much too much the cuddly toy it was to actually inflict any pain on Woyzeck, the sound effects as it was hurled through the air were perfect.
Jacob Kenedy's specially formulated blood and carefully modelled, fittingly repulsive bodily organs added a great deal to the autopsy in the final scene. Here, as throughout this highly enjoyable production, the largely School audience appreciated the pleasing degree of disparity between the unrelieved tragedy of the play itself and the amusement afforded by certain aspects of its performance in an excellent House play atmosphere.
Tom Balogh (Dryden's)