Tag Archives: Brexit

September 14, 2017 · 9:42 am

BOUDICA – REVIEW

“By Jupiter’s arsehole”, but I came out of the first half of Tristan Bernay’s new play at The Globe, Boudica, feeling confused. Was this a masterstroke, to commission a bold new work with such obvious political overtones, considering Brexit, but partly in street-squaddie speak and partly in semi-Shakespearian Iambic pentameter? With the stark backdrop of a bronzed army stockade, to conjure the sense of Roman occupied Britain and a whirlwind of writhing, dancing forms, amid the stage smoke, was I being given a truly filmic experience, as the writer and director seem to have hoped? Yet if so, why was I beginning to feel bored?

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I had high hopes as the female Goddess- narrator first conjures the piece like some Druidical incantation, since the story of the British warrior queen was really rediscovered in the 16th Century, and the sudden interjections of antique modernisms like Jupiter’s arsehole were both funny and seemed to work, at first.  Gina McKee is an actress I love, and as the dispossessed wife of a British King in bed with the decadent Romans, until the soldiers arrive from back home to inject some martial steel, offered a striding, heroic feminism, driven on and justified by Boudica’s own beating and the appalling rape of her two daughters by an entire Roman garrison. The problem was that in fact the language and poetry are just not very good, both derivative and becoming a kind of Shakespearean pastiche, while the play itself is a stockade of non relationships. Where were the quislings, the Britain’s really in bed with the Romans, in love or lust, the cross cultural relationships beyond a Monty Python cry of “what have the Romans ever done for us?”, the grit, grime and high life too, to give these characters any real reality and make this a play?  Bernays should study Christopher Logue’s astonishing War Music, a modern translation of Homer, to see how a poet can make the centuries come alive with thrilling modern resonance.

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For those of us who remember the shock and hoo-ha caused by the National’s production of the Roman’s in Britain though, the nasty bits precipitating revolt and tragic bloodletting just aren’t very shocking, or moving either, perhaps we’ve all seen too much on all those films, and from there the play fails to find a real centre to support all the noise and pseudo poetry, as the drums go on beating. There is some good choreography, Samuel Collings is particularly entertaining as the effete Roman consul in charge of the collapse, Catus Deciamus, and Boudica’s daughters are both great, if they had the lines. I did wake up a little when the entire cast at the start of the second half, again summoning that ensemble player’s tradition, do a thumping rendition of  The Clash’s “London’s Calling’, though as if from absolutely nowhere.  The actors clearly thrilling to their presence so close to the site of Shakespeare’s original Globe by the Thames when they proudly belt out “Down by the River!”  But in the meantime, Londoners were largely Remainers and they felt like actors in need of a cause, or a really articulate voice.

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Perhaps that’s the problem, when you can’t believe that all the skill, artistry, and money of the Globe and some great actors too wasn’t directed towards Boudica precisely because the artistic powers-that-be felt it would be highly topical and highly political too, and yet Tristan Bernays says he is not a political writer.  There seems a problem there from the start, for Shakespeare could be unashamedly political, so much so that his Roman plays directly sounded contemporary events in Elizabethan England and punters flocked to the literally life and death debate. Which is why the RSC did so well to try and make something of Cymbeline and Brexit.

What Bernays is, meanwhile, or wants to be, is a ‘portentous’ writer.  The play aches to be significant and of course the three tribe union and split inevitably echoes all that is going on with Brexit and the Union. But if a point is being made, I couldn’t see what it is. There are no true character arcs, or internal jeopardies, and in the end Boudica is just spikely lofty, though with splendid posture, and disappears back into Myth.  Sure, it calls to a certain atavistic instinct certainly around to tell everyone to fuck off and let rip, it makes great points as a black actress cries “I was born here”, and Roman Britain was more multicultural than we realise. It ends with a portentous note about the horrors to come, as the stockade literally cracks up. But in reality our perceptions of and problems with that Treaty of Rome today have little or nothing to do with whatever really happened in Boudica’s story and Europe is hardly any invading army.   In that the play’s desire somewhere to Brexitly stick it to them too is somewhat irresponsible, while having its cake and eating it, in warning of the darkness below the surface.   But in the end that wasn’t my problem with it, but the fact it doesn’t really go anywhere, misfires some very noisy energies and in the last analysis, to quote the man himself, and his real poetry, “is full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”

David Clement-Davies saw Boudica courtesy of The Globe Theatre. For tickets Click Here

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July 17, 2017 · 11:26 am

A FAIL OF TWO CITIES – REVIEW

It’s heart may be in the best of places, but it’s only that magical Open Air setting that just about saves Matthew Dunster’s adaptation of A Tale of Two Cities from being the worst of times.  Three huge revolving blue cargo containers set the alienating modern scene in Regent’s Park, then hit you over the head with the message that those 18th Century emigreés from France’s Revolutionary Terror are now today’s tragic migrants on the borders of Brexit Britain, warning us of blood.

Claire-Louise Cordwell as Mdm Defarge. Photo Johan Persson

Meanwhile the implication that we are all on the unstoppable Super Tanker of the Nasty Rich is symbolised by the figure of Monseigneur, dressed like Elton John, riding the metal juggernaut of capitalist brutality through Paris, then and now, mowing down the peasants, so perhaps we’re all in this together. Not me, I’m afraid.  Call me an old bourgeois, and perhaps it was the sloppy treatment of a much-loved classic, but bring back Shakespeare, apparently now banished from those leafy groves forever.

With the play and programme notes throwing in anything from Donald Trump to Grenfell Tower to be relevant, when the story is so obviously relevant, we are served not with a real and potentially smouldering drama, but modulated in its scenes, moods and social levels, so allowing for various kinds of empathy and the grand build to that eventually thundering Dickensian social rhetoric. Instead we get a hefty kit pack of modern tricks, poor improvisation and lazy messaging, highlighted by images cast on two pointless screens referencing Teresa May, Trump, or weirdly the chariot race in Ben Hur. The show may have heart, but has had its head guillotined from the start, like the rubbery decapitation that signals the horror.

Nicholas Khan as Monseigneur. Photo Johan Persson

The production is as sloppy as its political assumptions too, for just as it is right and very timely to highlight traditions of British tolerance and legal protection, in a country once a proud refuge of the refugee, it also seems irresponsible to assert that there is some easy equation between The Terror that succeeded the French Revolution and religiously motivated Fundamentalist terrorist attacks in Manchester and London.  Or perhaps we need a  play truly dealing with Grenfell Tower, burning in London’s richest Borough, that does explore the relationship between poverty and the failure of social, religious and ideological integration and also made the Tower a centre of Muslim immigrants.

A Tale of Two Cities becomes more accessible in the second half,  and there is no doubt crusading Dickens could be a man to sound the crises of the hour. But in an exhausting splurge of ensemble acting, with ponderous chapter announcements to bring needed narration, and give supposed dramatic impact too, that just become irritating, I was left feeling how much this falls down in comparison to the RSC’s famous, astonishing production of Nicholas Nickleby, so it can be done well.

There actors were allowed to breathe, explore and bring to life the very texture of a rich Dickensian novel, his marvellous characters and language too, lost here in easy modern effings and blindings  and meagre narration.  The magical changing of clothes is the actors’ very art, which also involves the changing of class and status, of place as well, that tests or reveals their ultimate humanity. Precisely the point of a tale of two cities.  Here the over small cast are encouraged mostly to be the threatening mob, or the tragic and angry container victims, which is only one element of that story and itself can alienate. 

This has no subtlety then, and no real modulation of human experience either. Where too in Fly Davis’ designs are those Capitals of degradation but splendour as well, London and Paris, that  also created the comforts, ideals and intimacies of those essentially middle class heroes, the Manettes, but also attracted and attract migrants, political and economic, in the first place?

Nicholas Karimi as Sydney Carton. Photo Johan Persson

So to the conscious voiding of Dickens’ famous identity trope,  the physical similarity between Sydney Carton and Charles Darnay, née Evremonde, that reviled name that suggests somewhere the world is ever thus, so securing Darnay’s release from court in England, on false charges of espionage. That was the political threat and paranoia here at the time. With a black and white actor, Jude Osuwu and Nicholas Karimi, who, though both good, look nothing like each other, it certainly serves the purpose of ensemble acting and insisting we are all human beings under the skin. The problem is it voids Dickens’ interest in the swings of fate, in character and in clever plotting, that help him describe the injustices and vagaries of real life, while ringing the human heart-strings.

In not even attempting to be convincing, or make it important though, suspending far too much disbelief, firstly it gives absolutely no chance for dramatic tension later. But so it comes to reflect the writer’s general laziness and lack of concern for presenting truly realistic and moving human relationships, in a deepening play that might make us really love and care about the fate of the characters. The encounter between Carton and Lucy Manette, for instance, Mariéme Diouf too wooden or just not given the script to capture Lucy Manette’s enormous courage and enduring loyalty for her father, just doesn’t earn its spurs. So it fails to persuade us of Carton’s redeeming love for Lucy, vulnerable in her fainting but no easy victim, and through her Darnay too, especially a love that could make the ultimate sacrifice for both of them.  Karimi’s performance is the best thing in the play, but if you are making points why not have a black look-alike play Sydney Carton instead?  As my companion said though, in the general meleé, if he had not known the story, he doubted he would have had a clue what was going on.

As importantly though, ignoring what happens in court and why, testing our credulity over it, voids one of Dickens’ novelistic obsessions, and an English obsession too, the imperfect but also necessary processes of Law, founded in vital aspects of fact and proof, of presumed innocence too, so dismantled to allow for the mechanism of The Terror in the first place. A process that has been true of Revolutions from Robespierre to Stalin and Pol Pot. Carton himself is after all a brilliant but disillusioned barrister, and it is not just the rage of the mob that threatens the characters, but malign human agency and lies in the figure of the paid double-agent Barsad pointing the finger. Just why that trick of identity – and eye-witness accusations are notoriously unreliable in Law – becomes so important.

Company of A Tale of Two Cities (1). Photo Johan Persson (1)

Moments are good, like the weary, tragic procession of immigrants on the revolve, falling by the wayside, or trying to find some kind of home. The final execution denouement just about works too and almost touches Dickens’ always eloquent humanity. Claire-Louise Cordwell, knitting those ultimately arbitrary and bloody revenges in Dickens’ brilliantly captured historical symbol, seen with a jourbalist’s eye, is a good actress,  though she doesn’t make Madame Defarge nearly nasty enough.  Patrick Driver is subtle as Dr Manet and works hard, Kervork Malikyan stands out as the loyal lawyer Lorry and Nicholas Khan makes an amusingly vile Monseigneur, but is underused. For a moment Sean Kernow’s angry description of a little girl’s death touches the agony of real poverty and pain that migrants and others experience here and around a world where sadly there are a lot nastier things out there than cargo containers.  

But over all, especially in a Brexit torn country that seems as confused as this production, in a world of the doubling inequalities of Super Capitalism since 2008, and with economists saying Brexit may not only make us irrelevant on a world stage but, by impoverishing, raise fear and mistreatment of immigrants further, frustrations not with the message but with the art make me misquote Wordsworth on Milton – “Dickens, wouldst thou were living at this hour, England has need of thee.” 

David Clement-Davies went courtesy of Regents Park Open Air Theatre. Timothy Sheader’s production of A Tale of Two Cities runs until August 5th.  For tickets Click Here

 

 

 

 

 

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January 24, 2017 · 1:06 pm

THE PHOENIX ARK CULTURAL ESSAY

THE INAUGURATION OF DONALD JOHN TRUMP

Despite the new attempt at an Orwellian Ministry of Truth from the Washington Press Spokesman in this statement that crowds at the 45th US President’s inauguration were huge, but Media coverage doctored, and of what has been universally described as a low turnout, I’ve been a bit confused by the coverage too, on TV and especially Radio Four. With commentators, although mentioning minor riots in Washington, in fact talking about the razzamatazz, glamour, triumph and good support. Perhaps we should all have been invited to the parties, or they are trying to ride some wave.

To me the entire thing felt and looked like a funeral, subdued, fearful, ominous and Trump’s speech was sinister.  That super hotelier of a President, who does not read, clearly looked as if he needed a hug, and at times you were even tempted. But when he came out with that frightening garbage, I and I hope any of the civilised world, hung their heads in shame.  It lacked any breath of oratory or Statesmanship – from sea to sea, from ocean to Ocean (!), blah, – and was Messianic in its American bombast and virtually illiterate.  Protectionism, Isolationism, America First, wiping things from faces of the Earth, God leads us, We The People, or You, when he lost the popular vote. God, what a contrast to Obama’s superb and needed oratory, especially after George W.’s damage, so much a part of the rise of World Terrorism, with the arrival of a First Black President and his inspiring humility on his departure. Not that oratory is enough, but then, as Edith Clavell once said too, Patriotism is not enough either! Or not enough for the Planet now.

Trump is not only a Plutocrat with a dodgy history, but the First Americo-Russian Oligarch. Probably why he so seems to admire Putin. Or is that Putin’s grabbing of Pussy Riot? Perhaps that’s unfair, America was forged by big business men too, from Carnegie to Rockerfeller, as Putin’s power was secured with the rise of the Oligarchs, but you’d hope something might move on and it was Government’s job to hold their likes in check. His scornful comment about those people congratulating him who had once attacked him though is so totally to misunderstand what difficult but always preferable Democracy must deal with, and why others were at such pains to celebrate the peaceful transfer of power.  But now his arrogance and stupidity, not in the commercial sense, I’m sure he’s very savvy about how big business bullies, or he does, how his wife can get a commercial leg up, or how he goes serially bankrupt so he can make more money, as others loose out, and according to Channel Four advised by a lawyer to Crime Families , will try to take a chainsaw to complex checks and balances.  Rowe V Wade, the EPA, the PAA already negated, the end of abortion assistance in Developing countries, you name it.

Is it right to attack the corruption and swamp of Washington though, as if the only movie Donald ever watches is Mr Smith Goes to Washington?  He’s certainly no James Stewart or Frank Capra. Well actually I think elements are right, have experienced the corruption at the top,  yet the power of The Hill and US social divides is really about the problems of Super Capitalism and Wall Street, exactly what Trump is such an arch and tasteless exponent of, despite what he claims. Now in his cabinet he has several members of Goldman Sachs, that ‘Universal Spider’ so implicated in the Greek crisis. What is so wrong with a liberal elite anyhow, in comparison to a new hyper Conservative and Right wing elite of pure money and capital? Though it must be said that the Liberal Media seems to have just got it spectacularly wrong in the new series of Homeland, predicting that a Woman and Anti War President would now be in the Whitehouse.  Perhaps they are indeed deeply out of touch. As for movements, Hitler too really was a revolutionary, though at least he far Trumped Trump in being  a very eloquent demagogue. I am sorry though America, but for a Country that is rather great, the only Super Power, actually perhaps you deserve the Politicians or the Democracy you get.

So, The Paris Accord on Environmental initiatives and emissions is now a dead letter, because, er, it’s just not true, cos The Donald says so, any reference has been removed from the Government website, those guys are just making money out of it, Tump’s bottom line, and because we don’t want or can’t afford for it to be true! Um, it is true, 95% of scientists agree, while it is fatuously obvious that the little Earth is a finite resource, Rainforests are being decimated, species vanishing every second and the Ice caps going. Now admittedly, in the bewildering Extinction and Evolution of species, once upon a time the entire Earth was one great big snowball, but frankly that was 65 Million years ago and I don’t think the super survival of Donald Trump and family is the pinnacle of Human or Animal Evolution, or indeed taste.  Meanwhile Russia becomes more and more aggressive, but Trump denies that his own Secret Services are right in pointing to Russia’s attempt to influence the election, precisely because he is exactly of Putin’s dictatorial stamp and we will see far more of that. Already he has struck at Nato. His Office’s attacks on the Press are also symptomatic.  While here, We The Fractious People of once Great Britain, are now rushing as ever up America’s special arse, which included Tony Blair’s corrupt and also semi-messianic support of the war in Iraq, that caused so much extremism, because we are still obsessed with having once had an Empire, including America.  Can’t we see that now is exactly the time to turn back to a United Europe though, with the values that made or make us too, quite as much as anything American?

Britain always trailed its feet in Europe, could never take any lead and perhaps a tragedy is that was just a fact of life, De Gaulle never wanted us in, although many here wanted reform, especially with the terrible example of Greece.  In that sense Europe is as much to blame, though Brexit is surely greatly to blame for Donald Trump, even more  worrying with the growth of far Right parties, and if a leader emerged who could sound that clarion call, economic, political, but cultural too, including the needed culture or awareness of World Environmentalism, perhaps there might be a Geopolitical shift away from what is happening now. But where is that kind of leader made in Britain anymore?  Nowhere.  It certainly isn’t Jeremy Corbyn, who seems eternally confused. Well, there is an interesting moment with the Supreme Court ruling here that both houses of Parliament need to decide on the enacting of Article Fifty to take us out of Europe. Ironically of course a true lead probably needs to come from that most recently reviled of Empire builders, Germany.

Henry Kissinger was interesting in saying maybe Britain can play the most unique of roles in still uniting America and Europe, but there is nothing that suggests it will do so in the right way for the World, or for what still drives the most decent and admired of British values. That Little Englander Nigel Farage is also a Trump kind of guy, our Foreign Secretary Boris Johnson makes fatuous jokes about punishment beatings, which forget that not everyone had fun at Eton and why should Europe give Britain everything it wants, and Theresa May has potential, though is no Margaret Thatcher, if I’ not sure if that is a compliment. What is it intellectually though that any of them can truly stand up for in the arrival of Donald John Trump, or that inauguration speech? These are very nervous times, or interesting times, as the Chinese might say.  Just before Christmas one of the most famous Shorters of shares and markets, Bill Bonner, who predicted the fall of Communism, The Dot Com Crash, The Japan Crisis, and 2008, and has a very interesting track record, came out with an almost apocalyptic prediction about a crisis beginning in America, the like of which the World has never seen.  Because of trillions in US debt, and the absence of actual physical US currency, since up to 50% and higher is in Foreign hands, and the ability of global bankers and private individuals to take vast amounts suddenly out of the Markets, he talks of ATM Machines just stopping, fuel stations running out,  Social Security cheques ending.  He says he doesn’t want it to happen, but feels duty bound to warn people how to protect their friends and family.  It has a survivalist American stamp, and of course he is a natural shorter who benefits by calamity, while his warning preceded a suggestion we buy into his monthly newsletter at his Global company Agora, which has two million followers around the world. Most people can’t afford to play at that level anyway. But even the FT this weekend was talking ominously about Black Swan theory, of unseen things around the corner, of Neom Chomsky’s warning now about the biggest and most dangerous centralisation of power in the form of the American Military-Industrial Complex.  And of course America’s spending on the Military is massively higher than any Nation on Earth and about to go up, as The Don talks new Arms Races and First Strike capabilities.  It is also the greatest consumer of Energy on Earth.

Well, what can you say?  Donald Trump has certainly stuck to being Donald Trump. If in fact his words have always wobbled like any businessman. Perhaps he is planning Soviet Style Show Trials of the likes of Hilary Clinton. Does he have a vision for American regeneration though, the likes of which Roosevelt used to inspire and unite a Nation?  I doubt it very much.  Roosevelt’s National works programme, that helped to build access to the Grand Canyon, was rooted in a sense both of Nature and good works.  Meanwhile, as the machine hurtles on, and we are all caught up  and implicated in it, Government should always have acted to enforce new Research and Development initiatives into different energy capture technologies, storage, emissions targets and so on, by powerful companies, to make them responsible at every level.  We could do with such a Roosevelt style initiative of regeneration in Britain. In the meantime, as Bill Bonner might say, you have been warned!  Then everything about Trump was a warning and America still let him in. Go on, The Don, give the World some hope, don’t put up walls at everyone else’s expense.

 

 

 

 

 

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September 28, 2016 · 10:29 am

CYMBELINE FINDS HER TIME, OR BRITAIN ALSO LOSES THE PLOT?

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Thanks to the RSC, and Gillan Doran’s wonderfully ambitious programme for the 400th anniversary, not least for bringing me to a play I’d never even read, Cymbeline. Despite a sinking heart opening the programme to see a picture of Dave Cameron, and a journalist lecturing on about Brexit and why after being neglected for so long this is a play that has at last “found its time.” Hmmm. Shakespeare is always profoundly politically attuned, though better at exposing the imperatives and mechanisms, the nasty guts, than being didactic or ever lecturing. Was the graffiti on the concrete wall then, along with the programme’s nod to Banksi, or an anguished model of a Refugee boat, to make us suffer a Referendum all over again? I think the real irritation is that for nearly three and a half hours it had me imagining Gillian Bevan’s stout, very capable Cymbeline, part Britannia, part Boudicca, as Theresa May, (with respect, a bit of a look-alike), or is that Theresa-may-not? Not that Bevan is at all Lilly livered, and now I know Cymbeline means Cymbeline and there we are!

As for their Brexits, or their Entrances, in a proudly multi-cultural cast, what also irritated is directors (now trendily called Creatives at the RSC) thinking that a lot of running on and off stage and gabbling difficult lines passes either for theatrical energy or realism. Though when the actors settle into thinking and feeling through the words and poetry, there are some excellent performances. Not least from Bethan Cullinane as Cymbeline’s much tested daughter Innogen, the black actor Markus Griffiths as a very funny Cloten, James Clyde’s excellently malevolent Duke, and the Irish actress Jenny Fenessy throwing off the tyranny of the poor understudy to play Pisania, while a treasure chest of language is thrown open.

Jokes aside, busy director Melly Still it is quite right to suggest Brexit’s relevance, since Shakespeare was born out of the trauma and liberation of a disintegrating Christendom, (a reason today’s violent Religious and Scientific divides  or Terrorism might be even more pertinent), if Europa was a word and concept only just emerging at the time. As still Top Monarch, Queen Bess, who made a lot of cash from Hawkin’s African nastiness, and thugs like Francis Drake, saw the loss of any kind of Empire in France, though viciously trying to plant Ireland. While King James mooted but failed to achieve a Union with Scotland. So how did Britain really thrive and invent herself? By putting money in everyone’s purses, well those at the top, from little London, and ruling the waves elsewhere, away from the internecine battles  erupting in Europe. Oh brave New World.

You can argue then that much of Shakespeare is also inevitably about the very writing of a new English Imperial identity, if only through the most glorious expression of the English language. The world’s centre of Gravity was certainly shifting violently though by 1600, in a moment that probably did define how Globalisation and Capitalism would develop and which has not seen an equivalent sea change until now. It’s not just Brexit, of course, but how the Internet is probably the equivalent of the Printing Press revolution. Perhaps Shakespeare is a bit to blame then, at least for that outburst by Tory MP Jacob Rees-Mogg limply invoking tigers, to give Cameron a prod. I think Henry V is about the conscious manufacturing of a powerful new political rhetoric, soon adopted by the ‘Establishment’.  Even as a once far more intimate Monarchy separated itself from the lower orders, and banished honest Jacks to the bilges and top sails, it conquered half the World, with planting, privateering trade and slavery, and owned it for a very long time indeed.Is that what modern Breixteers want? Not of course that Bill did all this alone, bless him. The Virginia Company was founded in the year the Globe went up on Bankside, 1599, just opposite that walled fortress of London, still a Global epicentre today in UK PLC, and the little Tudor cannons of the terrifyingly powerful and private East India Company were bristling from a fort in Madras by 1607.

That year Shakespeare’s youngest brother Edmund died at just 27, an actor too, and his daughter Susanna was married in Stratford. While ‘savages’ were attacking the new fort at Jamestown, King James’s town, and a little merchant ship called the Red Dragon, Henry Tudor’s badge, did performances of both Hamlet and Richard II off the coast of Sierra Leone. Britain had truly set to sea, and it was coming back in bucket loads. For hundreds of years the scholarly Establishment claimed that record had to be a forgery though, because the Common Man could not possibly understand their Bard, if still stuffing him down School children’s throats. To improve us all and claim Shakespeare was essentially Conservative and there’s nowhere like an England!

If we think Euromillions is an innovation though, the first free standing lottery was launched in 1612 to help colonise Virginia, soon taken up by all thirteen original Colonies, to give very early origins to that ‘American Dream’. Talking of which, having a snack in Café Rouge before the show I’d opened The Times to read with even more sinking heart that the usually balanced and liberal Matthew Paris had just suggested we toughen up on the asylum rules by suggesting what constitutes danger should now only be the threat of Death! Then that Donald Trump was ahead in the bell-weather State of Ohio, invoking the example of Brexit. If we think our own Liberal sentiments (or not) can sway US Politics though, when people were asked to email Americans to complain, they got some very rude replies indeed, about being stupid, Lilly-livered Brits and worse.

A little credence then to the relevance of the traumatised Brexit line, four centuries on, although the production has faced much criticism. Some slack too in Ms Still peopling a Roman court with Mafiosi Eurotrash in lounge suits, sipping cocktails and speaking in Italian, translated onto big screen sur titres, that then translate Latin too, when the big Romans claim their imperial tributes from the smelly Britains. Who dares to translate the greatest translator and interpreter of them all – Shakespeare? Well, Melly Still! That rather heavy handed moment is about the river of history, peoples and languages that made Britain and which Shakespeare’s astonishing English emerged from too. The first dictionary was only printed in England in 1604 and Shakespeare is profoundly a Renaissance writer. While to set us up for losing our heads, the set is dominated by a tree stump, in a glass box, perhaps to echo the production of King Lear. The rest is as hip, with film, and part concrete and vegetative back revolves, to suggest Nature will always break on through, complete with images of modern Rome’s Empire-littered streets and Dad’s Army Invasion maps to have you suddenly asking – Who D’yer Think Yer Kidding?

Actually I should underline that Cymbeline is a tragi-comedy. So to any grasp I got on the plot, untangling which might win you Brain of Britain. Cymbeline’s daughter Innogen and Posthumus are star crossed lovers, or most crossed by Cymbeline, so Posthumous has to flee abroad. There, boasting of Innogen’s love and fidelity, he is tested by Oliver Johnstone’s excellent Iachimo, who travelling to Blighty, as Rome seeks tribute, emerges from a chest in her bedchamber to discover Innogen asleep, nick her bracelet, and spy a starry mole by her breast, rude fellow. So being able to trick Posthumous into believing he has done the act of darkness and Innogen is false. Like Michael Gove Iachimo pays Manhood’s price later, when the War of Men without Women erupts into horror, or is that Boris Johnson?

There is a tangle of poison that isn’t poison and lots of people trying to bump each other off, like Boris Johnson and Michael Gove. As Cymbeline revolts against Rome, Innogen flees to the forest, to encounter an exiled General good-of-heart, Graham Turner’s splendid Belarius, and her kidnapped brother and sister, Arveragus and Guideria, emphasising all the healing Nature virtues, and played very well by James Coonie and Natalie Simpson, especially Simpson as Guideria. Though in the tangle of tree roots or Brain-stem ganglia they first appear swinging from, and the whooping hunting cries, perhaps nicking far too much from Avatar. Mind you, did you see that article in the Sunday Times about tree roots being connected and talking to each other, even nurturing or throttling their young, in this global world of ours? With a very peculiar dream Mask, when Jupiter is invoked, to explain the meaning of names via a prophecy, everyone loses identity in going to war, or finds their manhood, though the Brits win, but still need a Cultural head, so pay tribute to Ancient Rome. So Cymbeline ends with the most astonishingly uncomfortable series of resolutions, more than any in Shakespeare, that had many laughing aloud, including me.

Cymbeline is certainly about a crisis of identity, but it sits not at all in Shakespeare’s overtly Historical or straight political plays. It comes among the later Romances, like Pericles, The Winter’s Tale and The Tempest, when politics, life and suffering had probably confounded the Bard a great deal and he turned his hand to achieving effects through acts of artistic magic. Perhaps his brother Edmund’s tragic death was influential in that sea change. Pericles was written in 1607, for instance, all about incest and lost daughters, but with a family crest that shows a withered branch only flowering at the top. It may be more true though that rather than Cymbeline not being popular for centuries because we had an Empire now, imposing its own tributes, it is because it is a very easy plot to lose. Melly Still throwing the baby and the bath water at it hardly simplifies, or leaves us quite knowing how to vote either. Even if Jacob Rees-Mogg should be told that despite the Histories, most of Shakespeare’s plays are set in interesting foreign and Renaissance climes. I thoroughly enjoyed Cymbeline though and it did not drag for a moment, though the bloke playing the School Master at the new Edward VI museum, backed I think by Mr Gove, told me, rightly or wrongly, it originally ran to five hours! Enjoyed it because just when you’re wondering how Cloten, chasing after Innogen, can get away with possibly being Posthumous in his very ill fitting clothes, so to trick Innogen into believing her lover is dead, his beheading by Guideria is almost hysterical. While Innogen’s burial, then waking to mistaken grief, and true horror, is probably one of the strangest things I’ve ever seen in the theatre. Not least too because Shakespeare, inventing everything, even comes up with the phrase “Brain of Britain”!

 The photo is from the RSC’s rather startling and controversial production of Cymbeline, directed by Melly Still, showing a disguised Posthumous going to war with the Romans, as everyone wrestles for their identity and they try to shake us over Brexit.  Photo Copyright Ellie Kurttz. Ticket courtesy of the RSC Stratford on Avon.

 

 

 

 

 

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