Swept away by a lush Scandi saga
Fanny & Alexander (Old Vic) Verdict: Long, but worth it
AMID suitably Scandinavian weather, London’s Old Vic has opened a sprawling family saga in Fanny & Alexander.
Set in Uppsala, Sweden, Ingmar Bergman’s early 20th-century story could be described as a Chekhovian fairytale with cautionary moral extremes and dollops of lifeaffirming merriment. All this is staged with panache and long, scarlet curtains on the Old Vic’s vast stage — but you may well miss your last train home.
Sailor-suited little Alexander and his sister Fanny are the children of theatre owner and actress Emilie Ekdahl (Catherine Walker in a pinched Edwardian waist). The Ekdahls are rich sybarites who like nothing better than a family banquet. Random members of the cast stand at vintage microphones to list, for the audience’s benefit, the sumptuous delicacies served at each course of these feasts. These narrative touches point to the play’s origins as a 1982 Bergman film.
Into this paradise steps the cloaked figure of the Grim Reaper, complete with scythe. Alexander is the only person to see him and from that chilling moment we know Something Bad is imminent.
Emilie Ekdahl, widowed, soon remarries disastrously. Her new husband is the austere Bishop Vergerus, whose home is as stark as the Ekdahls’ was velvety. Fanny and Alexander are flung from theatrical gaiety into a Brothers Grimm world of warted aunts, a bare-walled bedroom and Calvinist discipline.
Max Webster’s production has tableaux to ravish the eye and enough quirks to keep the clock ticking along so the evening’s three- and- a- half hours (or more) seldom seem to lag. The lighting (by Mark Henderson) accentuates the behavioural contrasts that are being related. The costumes and styling are almost those of a doll’s house.
The ensemble delivers highgrade character acting. Jonathan Slinger, in watchspringcurled moustache, plays one uncle, libidinous but lovable. Thomas Arnold plays another, careworn and broke. Gloria Obianyo and Karina Fernandez are their wives.
The impeccable Penelope Wilton presides over the household as the loving grandmother and Michael Pennington is perfectly cast as her benevolent gentleman, Isak Jacobi. Kevin Doyle’s bishop is as weird as he needs to be — one of those clergymen who points to the ceiling every time he mentions heaven. BUT
the evening really belongs to Fanny and Alexander who, on Wednesday, were played by Katie Simons and Misha Handley (one of four boys in the role).
The part of Alexander, in particular, is enormous for a child and Handley is extraordinary. Totally believable.
I swung between enjoyment and bouts of thinking it was all becoming a touch pretentious, with references to Shakespeare and the theatre world pushing it dangerously close to a sort of self-reverence not much better than that of the nasty bishop.
In the end, the luxuriant staging and the sheer force of Bergman’s concluding message — that ‘there is no shame in deriving pleasure from this little world’ and that we mortals cannot hope to understand everything under God’s sun (if God there be) — won me round and I felt like cheering when that lad Handley, flanked by the great Wilton and Pennington, took his curtain call.