No roars for Rory in an anti-banker production
Olivier Theatre
I’VE DEVELOPED this thing about Rory Kinnear, star of the film Spectre and now Sky Atlantic’s Penny Dreadful in which he plays Frankenstein’s Creature. He is always among the most compelling reasons to see any play. His Hamlet was witty and his Iago a chillingly psychotic presence. But, for my money, he is at his best when playing the victim of events, not the cause of them and, as is the case here, he is too often cast against type.
In this new version of Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill’s 1928 masterpiece, which wallows in a pleasingly profane rewrite by Simon Stephens, his killer, Macheath, has eyes as dead and dark as stagnant ponds. But as the (stone cold) heart of Rufus Norris’s deliberately rough and ready production, Kinnear’s charisma is not the bold and extrovert kind that this show’s anti-capitalist, banker-hating mayhem needs. And why so many women throw themselves at his Macheath (and why so many men follow him) is hard to say. It can’t be sex appeal, nor his charm.
No, the strongest personality in this show –— apart from Nick Holden’s vampish, cross-dressing gang-master Peachum — is the production itself – a mixture of Dickensian London, Weimar Berlin (where Weill and Brecht first staged their show) and silent era flicks with keystone cops and even a version of that immortal Buster Keaton gag featuring a falling wall. But it is anti-banker anger that defines this show and, in that sense, where it falters too. It is far better at expressing it than making you feel it. fancy the hell out of each other, even if Madden reprises perhaps too much of the dashing Prince he played opposite James’s Cinderella in Branagh’s film version of the fairy tale. His bearing is more officer-class than testosterone teen. James, though, is spot on, suggesting not only that there is a wanton passion beneath her demure, lily-white wardrobe but, as she swigs a bottle of plonk during the balcony scene, something mischievous, too.
Where Branagh and Rob Ashford’s stylish, 1950s-set production goes awry, however, is with Meera Syal’s Nurse who doubtless is aiming for Italian matriarch but ends up with Jewish mother. Even more problematic is that her instinct to go for laughs is often deployed at exactly the wrong moment, draining the play of the pathos on which it depends. However, Derek Jacobi as an ageing swashbuckler is a master-stroke of casting. Thing is, once his Mercutio is dead, he takes much of this handsome production’s pace, urgency and tension with him. Upstairs at the Gatehouse
JENNY SELWAY’S new play tells one of the best-known stories from one of the least explored perspectives. Where you might expect it to be populated with Whitehall mandarins muttering their disapproval in corridors of power, we have instead American heiresses and a couple of gossipy British servants providing catty commentary on our promiscuous, decadent often Nazi-loving upper classes.
The title, of course, refers to the American social climber whose charms caused a constitutional crisis in 1936 when King Edward VIII (Grant McConvey) gave up the monarchy to be with her.
If there’s a moral to this show, it’s be careful what you wish for. As the married Wallis, an excellent Emma Odell transmits the steely determination with which the socialite betrayed her husband and inveigled her way into the royal court — only to be marooned in Mischief Theatre’s latest comedy is a success