St George and yet another National disaster
St George And The Dragon (Royal National Theatre) Verdict: A Rufus Norris stinker ★✩✩✩✩ Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle (Wyndham’s Theatre) Verdict: The problem’s in the title ★★★✩✩
WHAT a rotten run the Olivier Theatre is having. Apart from the jolly Follies, London’s premier state-funded stage has, this summer, had a mad Salome followed by a naff Common.
Some people said Common was the worst thing they had seen at the Royal National Theatre. They might change their minds if they catch St George And The Dragon.
Oh boy, it is risible! Below the standards of a bad university drama club production. Rory Mullarkey has written a rambling ‘state of the nation’ effort in which St George visits England in different centuries. He is not the only time-traveller. The characters (initially ooh- arr rustics, latterly 21st- century Londoners) are the same lot. My countrymen, we are in ye kingdom of Allegory!
St George is played as a Spamalot- style goon by John Heffernan. He has a certain naive charm if you like surreal wetness. His enemy is the dragon, played with Alan Rickman-esque touches by Julian Bleach. So far, so Footlights revue.
George keeps having to rescue the same damsel (Amaka Okafor) from the dragon. In medieval days this involves sword fighting and magic carpets (neither of which we see, although a couple of dragon heads do descend from on high).
In later times the wickedness of the dragon is manifested in the greed of an industrial revolution capitalist. In modern Britain, claims playwright Mullarkey, the infernal dragon exists in all of us.
England seems to have become a country beyond hope of salvation. You could say the same about the National under artistic boss Rufus Norris.
Is Mullarkey trying to say something about Brexit (I was not sure if he was pro or agin) and the ravages of progress? Clarity is not one of the evening’s merits. Nor is brevity.
The second half gives us St George in a pub, watching an England football match, dressed in a silly disguise and becoming boringly drunk. I feared the evening might never end.
Characterisation is skimpy. The plot plods. In the numerous crowd scenes, actors keep advancing on George when they speak, like something from an old Spike Milligan Q8 sketch.
The only interest to be had, for National oldtimers, was waiting for dopey Gawn Grainger (who plays the damsel’s father) to muff his lines. When the inevitable moment came, I almost cheered.
THEATRE types, a ‘me, too’ lot, have recently regarded science as the hot thing — a magic ingredient to make plays feel intellectual. Perhaps that is why playwright Simon Stephens gave this 2015 effort the title Heisenberg: The Uncertainty Principle.
Gosh (audiences might think), this sounds like a clever show about 20thcentury theoretical physicist Werner Heisenberg and his idea that particles have complementary values. You always enjoy Reader’s Digest articles about science, Basil; let’s book some expensive tickets and have a quantum physics lesson while we munch our way through a bag of Revels.
As it turns out, this play is little more than a slender if charming love story about a 42- year- old American woman throwing herself at a loveless 75- year- old butcher in London. Two particles, you see?
They should be independent atoms but they acquire a shared direction for a while. Stroke chins and marvel at the truths of science, Earthlings!
Anne-Marie Duff plays American bunny- boiler Georgie and Kenneth Cranham is butcher Alex (both pictured below).
Is Mr Cranham entirely convincing as a butcher, or even on top of his lines? Let us leave such vulgar concerns aside and hail two experienced actors who have that indefinable quality of stage presence.
The story starts with Georgie spotting Alex sitting on a bench. She mistakes him for her dead lover.
Old Alex is not pleased to have his privacy interrupted, but eventually they end up in bed, despite the age difference. Georgie’s attraction to Alex may not be entirely romantic.
The whole thing is done in 90 minutes. The staging is terrifically slick — you almost wonder if it is compensation for the thin plot. Lighting designer Paule Constable and set designer Bunny Christie should get their own curtain calls.
The set’s walls keep moving and Georgie is almost crushed by them, as though trapped in a glacier’s crevasse. More could be made of some Bach music that is discussed briefly, and of Alex’s butchering skills.
The acting is certainly bespoke, but the scientific element is marginal and pretentious. Poor Herr Heisenberg is mentioned but briefly.