Real life set to music and digital wizardry
Committee... The Public Administration and and Constitutional Affairs Committee Takes Oral Evidence On Whitehall’s Relationship With Kids Company. Donmar Warehouse ★★★✩✩
WHAT THE title of this intriguing new show doesn’t include are the words, The Musical!
And yet, as improbable as it may sound, the 2015 parliamentary inquiry into a charity that was once the darling of the establishment before it became a byword for mismanagement, has been set to Tom Deering’s sweet and sour score.
The lyrics are drawn from the transcripts, and although the stated purpose of this show is to reveal the workings of British civic life, it mostly feels as if the charity and those who ran it are on trial.
A better title might have been The Odd Couple. Facing an array of middle-ranking parliamentarians the two star witnesses here are Alan Yentob (Omar Ebrahim) and Camila Batmanghelidjh (Sandra Marvin), respectively the former chair and flamboyant chief executive of the charity.
Neither are flattering depictions. Batmanghelidjh’s skill here is in replying to questions without ever answering them while Yentob comes across as a disingenuous, self-aggrandising name-dropper. One wonders if they see the show they will judge their characters to have been assassinated or fairly represented. Either way, the overriding impression is that a huge organisation that addressed the needs of children was kept going by the charisma its two leaders rather than their competence.
You leave somewhat enlightened and depressed.
THE LATEST Royal Shakespeare Company production of Shakespeare’s final play stars the finest Shakespearean actor of his generation and a much-heralded use of high tech. The former is Simon Russell Beale whose silvery Prospero delivers a depth and lightness of touch to which anyone who has seen his Benedict, Malvolio or Hamlet (to name but three) has grown used.
Here Beale’s deposed Duke of Milan, now a wizard stranded on an island, conjures a beautifully observed portrait of a man whose generosity of spirt has been subsumed by the bitterness of betrayal. There is decent support from Simon Trinder’s quirky, jerky Trinculo, a music-hall clown of a jester, while Jenny Rainsford as Prospero’s homeschooled Miranda is a lovely mix of intelligence and naivety. But that’s enough about the acting.
Tickets for this show, first seen last year at the climax of the RSC’s 2016 season marking the 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, are also being sold on the strength of special effects. Though none of these eclipse Stephen Brimson Lewis’s design. His fantastically evocative set depicts a shipwrecked vessel’s hull. The exposed struts, in which all the action takes place, are like a dinosaur’s ribcage.
Yet for anyone who has seen the stage version of Harry Potter, or follows theatre’s experimentation with virtual reality, the “cutting edge” technology being touted here as “today’s most advanced” generally falls flat.
It’s mostly used in respect of the spirit Ariel. Mark Quarterly’s onstage performance is relayed to digital versions of the character that appear suspended above the stage, though without ever quite giving the sense of flight.
The RSC and its tech collaborators make a lot of the fact that the moves and facial expressions of the digital Ariel mirror that of Quarterly’s real-life one. And no doubt it’s a hugely complex thing to pull off. But it must have sounded a lot more impressive in the production meetings than it turns out be in the show. The digital Ariel is as wooden as the tree in which the sorceress Sycorax once imprisoned him. (Although granted, that backstory is wonderfully depicted in flashback by the production’s best use of SFX.) Yet director Gregory Doran’s production falls into a trap well known in tech circles. It’s called the “uncanny valley” and describes the credibility gap that can exist between a computer generated human and the real thing. It wouldn’t matter so much of the techniques here hadn’t been heralded as some kind of breakthrough in theatre design. But unlike Harry
Potter and the Cursed Child, where the effects are so special they leave you blinking in disbelief, there is little here that feels organically integrated into the show. The result leaves Beale’s Prospero somewhat, well, marooned.