Theatre Paul Bailey
JOHN THE BIRTHDAY PARTY JULIUS CAESAR
Why is Annie Baker’s wonderful new play at the Dorfman Theatre called John? That is just one of the many mysterious things about the piece the responsible critic is duty-bound not to reveal. It is set in the Gettysburg Bed & Breakfast in Gettysburg, Pennsylvania, within walking distance of the site of the bloodiest battle in the American Civil War, in what one can scarcely believe is the present day.
This peculiar Gettysburg address is part-owned by an elderly woman named Mertis, whose bedridden husband, George, is mentioned affectionately but never appears.
Mertis is as eccentric as the house she runs. As she parts the proscenium curtains, allowing access to the manifold surprises in store for the unwary visitor, the audience gasps in amazement at the clutter the brilliant designer Chloe Lamford has assembled. There are dolls everywhere you look, and curious objects, including an illuminated jukebox which will play Bach, Handel and Offenbach, and an upright piano with a will of its own. There’s a dining area with three tables and chairs in front of a pink wall emblazoned paris. It’s the week after Thanksgiving – so the Christmas tree is already in place, and the banisters leading to the upstairs bedrooms (all named after famous soldiers) are decorated with fairy lights.
John opens with the arrival of a young couple, Elias and Jenny, played superbly well by Tom Mothersdale and Anneika Rose, who are stopping over for a couple of nights before they head back to Brooklyn. They have spent the holiday with Jenny’s family and are uneasy with each other. Their uneasiness increases, with Mertis shuffling in and out of her kitchen, smiling to herself and adjusting the hands on the grandfather clock to indicate the passing of time.
It seems, at the outset, that John is going to be an excursion into Stephen King territory, so strong is the sense of eerie menace that’s almost immediately established. But that turns out to be an illusion, even when Mertis’s best friend, Genevieve, who is blind and given to gnomic utterances, turns up to add to the confusion.
June Watson conveys every nuance of Genevieve’s caustically funny, seriously wounded character in her mesmerising
performance, and Marylouise Burke, making her National Theatre debut as Mertis, is simply magnificent. James Macdonald has directed this uncanny masterpiece, which invites comparison with the novels and stories of Shirley Jackson, with his customary respectful attention to detail.
I left the Dorfman in a state of happy bewilderment, thinking about the human beings whose curious lives I had been involved with for over three hours.
A week earlier, I had been to see a brilliantly acted revival of Harold Pinter’s The Birthday Party at, appropriately, the Harold Pinter Theatre. Ian Rickson’s production of Pinter’s first full-length play, which was reviled by all but one of the London critics when it was staged in 1957, is immaculate. Like Macdonald, he is very much an actor’s director, encouraging his cast to give of their best. Stephen Mangan, as Goldberg, the sinister, chameleon-like bully who, along with his Irish sidekick Mccann (Tom Vaughan-lawlor), reduces the hapless Stanley to catatonic imbecility, is horribly, memorably funny. He seems to have two sets of teeth – those that are visible when he opens his mouth and another hidden pair that he talks with.
The Birthday Party is set in a seaside boarding house, designed here by the Quay Brothers with a keen eye for its manifold problems with rising damp. It’s run by Meg, a woman of limited intelligence in late middle age, and Petey, who works as a deckchair attendant during the holiday season. Meg lusts after their single lodger, Stanley, who would have people believe that he once had a promising career as a concert pianist, which culminated at a sold-out performance in a hall in Lower Edmonton. This observation is a reminder that Noël Coward, with his penchant for place names, was as much an influence on Pinter as Beckett or Ionesco.
The reviewer who described The Birthday Party – with its two thuggish visitors who arrive at the house for no reason – as a cross between Agatha Christie and Kafka got it just about right. Although Toby Jones (Stanley), Zoë Wanamaker (Meg), Peter Wight (Petey) and Pearl Mackie as an unnecessary character called Lulu, are all excellent, they rarely engaged my sympathy, unlike the quartet of lost souls of Annie Baker’s imagination.
Nicholas Hytner’s production of Julius Caesar at the Bridge takes place in an arena where the stalls seats have been removed to accommodate a crowd composed of actors and members of the public who pay £25 for the privilege of being part of the action. It’s an arresting notion and it works very well.
The play has been judiciously cut and runs for exactly two hours without an interval. The actors wear modern dress, and a rock band opens the proceedings as a reminder, perhaps, of Jeremy Corbyn’s triumph at Glastonbury. Our dumb friend from over the water is invoked, too, in this cleverly orchestrated demonstration of the abiding perils of populism.