Cumming Hamms it up in brutish Beckett
Endgame (Old Vic, London) Verdict: Frisky Cumming lights up Beckett gloom ★★★II Asking For It (Birmingham Rep) Verdict: Salutary and sobering ★★★★I
WHO would have thought this could happen? Alan Cumming, Daniel Radcliffe and Jane Horrocks on the same stage?
Cumming is the king of camp best known from The Good Wife on Channel 4; Radcliffe is the prince of Hogwarts; and Horrocks is the queen of batty from Ab Fab. And we find all these in a double bill of bleak comedies from the ace of despair, Samuel Beckett. Wasn’t there a danger they’d all cancel each other out?
I’m pleased to say they don’t. Instead, Cumming completely steals the show as Hamm, the disabled, blind curmudgeon who is confined to a chair on castors in the main play of the evening, Endgame. The set-up is the famously dismal scenario in which Hamm is entombed in a viewless dungeon that he shares with his parents, who live in dustbins.
Yet Cumming defies the gloom. His take on Hamm is more naughty child than grumpy old man. Despite being immobilised — withered legs exposed like two strands of spaghetti — he’s the friskiest Hamm I’ve ever seen.
His eyebrows do most of the work, leaping up from behind small, round sunglasses to express surprise, delight, and resignation, before diving back down in fear and trepidation. And he finds laughs not intended by Beckett when he whimpers: ‘I feel a little queer.’
RADClIFFE holds his own as clowning servant Clov (pronounced ‘Clove’). The play is notorious for its ladder and dustbins, and Radcliffe handles his steps like a veteran window cleaner. He stamps up eagerly to scan the empty horizon outside, and slides back down deftly. Getting overexcited, he wins a gasp when it looks like he’ll fall off… but it is (I hope) rehearsed.
Horrocks is almost unrecognisable. Hair and make-up add three decades to her appearance (for barely five minutes) as Hamm’s mother Nell. She brings a touch of sadness and pathos to her sparky persona, stuck in a wheelie bin next to her loving husband Nagg (Karl Johnson, also binned). Pathetic and yet gutsy, rugged and resolute, Johnson looks a bit like Beckett himself.
But if the actors lift the mood in Richard Jones’s energetic production, this is still tough-love Beckett. The not- so- cheery curtain-raiser, Rough For Theatre II, sees two bureaucrats auditing the life of a man about to leap from a ledge. Radcliffe is once more the straight guy and Cumming plays his colleague, with full-blown Scottish camp and an Adolf Hitler tash.
It’s great Cumming and co found so much levity in these potentially sombre works. But much as I admire their efforts, I’ve always preferred the idea of Beckett to the reality. His message is life is nasty and short, and our resistance is funny and pitiful. I get all that after about five minutes. As my teenage daughter likes to say when she’s talking street: ‘It’s not that deep, bruv.’
I WON’T pretend I enjoyed Asking For It, but I am glad I saw it. It’s the UK premiere of a harrowing drama about a gang rape in Ireland. I’ve never seen issues associated with this vile crime set out so thoroughly. This is a salutary adaptation of a novel by louise O’Neill about a popular 18-year-old, Emma, who is given the drug ecstasy by the local football team’s captain. He assaults her before he’s joined by two friends.
Don’t expect sensitivities to be spared. Meadhbh McHugh’s play is a forensic account of every aspect of Emma’s traumatic experience, before, during and after.
We start with Emma’s failure to believe a friend’s stories of abuse, before her assault, which is shared on social media. In the aftermath, Emma’s mother turns to drink, her father fears losing his job thanks to local hostility, friends struggle with divided loyalties and even the parish priest turns his back on them. Only her brother insists on justice. The once feisty young woman starts self-harming and grows dependent on drugs.
As Emma, lauren Coe is enormously impressive. How she does the three-hour show eight times a week I can’t imagine.
I did wonder if voice-overs explaining her thoughts should have been dramatised, and the shiny black floor below an all-glass set feels cold. But the play is about issues, not aesthetics, and having children of my own, a chill settled on me. I couldn’t help thinking: ‘There but for the grace of God go I.’