State of the plays
Irish revival of a classic detective is too talky for its own good.
IN THE COURSE of discussing King Lear, Michael Hurst unburdened himself of some concerns about the state of theatre in Aotearoa New Zealand.
“One of the things that is a problem is that people all want to be television and film actors – not that that’s a bad thing, but theatre is a craft. It’s a 2500-year-old thing. We so undervalue theatre, generally. It’s ‘everybody gets a go’. And then we have a race to the bottom.”
Is there a worry that in 30 years, there will be no one left who can “do” Shakespeare?
“If we don’t pay attention, we’re not going to have actors who can get through any play on stage. No one who can make the audience lean forward in their seats and not look at their watch every five minutes.”
He names some oldfashioned but fundamental values.
“There’s all of the accumulated years of craft and timing and pace, and breath control, as well as the basics of diction, and clarity and projection. These huge wells of emotional content that need to be either sprayed out or sat on. All of these things are essential. And if you don’t have them, a play can’t move forward.”
With the freelance model dominant and theatre companies a thing of the past, “nobody gets a lot of practice. I was so lucky back in the early 80s. I did play after play after play …
“I’m not despairing, exactly. I’m just aware of it. I go to a lot of plays where I can’t actually hear what’s going on.” That’s a really good link for an audience to cling to. If you’re directing a play, you need to take a cue from Hamlet, who says that the purpose of theatre is to ‘show the age and body of the time’.”
In our time, and in our arts funding and education discussions of late, there has been pressure on Shakespeare on the grounds of relevance and cultural sensitivity. “All of Shakespeare’s plays are now under review, aren’t they, given the political climate?”
Hurst has addressed this in part by casting three male parts as female. The Fool – Lear’s jester, sidekick and the voice of his conscience – is played by Hester Ullyart.
“Having a woman as the Fool [raises] the question: What’s Lear doing with that young woman? That gives us another whole layer that I don’t think we would have had 20 or 30 years ago.”
Beatriz Romilly is the play’s villain, the bastard Edmund. “I don’t want to make her a woman playing a man. I want it to be a woman. Then you get a double whammy – bastard and woman, so doubly unable to inherit in this world.” Near the end of the play, Edmund also becomes the romantic focus of Lear’s daughters Goneril and Regan, so this now becomes a same-sex triangle.
Audiences may wonder where all this will end up. So does Hurst. “I think at the RSC [Royal Shakespeare Company] recently, a man who was disabled and had a munted arm played Richard III,” traditionally played as a hunchback. “Does that mean that an ordinary abled man will never be able to play Richard III again? We’ve made some strong
“I have not seen Succession. I’ve deliberately done that. I’m trying to avoid watching anything.”
decisions. In the end, though, you still have Lear coming on, with [the dead] Cordelia in his arms. Nothing changes that.”
The character is 80. Hurst is “65, so it’s actually within cooee. What I am at the moment is someone who has sore knees and all sorts of things falling apart. It’s about lungs and having the puff.”
The other Shakespearean tragic heroes are much younger. It’s a pinnacle part, sometimes seen as crowning a career. “What’s interesting is getting the question: ‘Are you doing King Lear?’ And then this implicit idea: ‘Oh, does that mean you’re retiring?’ No.”
Brian Cox, who plays a tyrannical father in Succession, was a particularly fine Lear. Surely, Hurst has noted the parallels? There’ll be a bit of Logan Roy in there?
He buries his head in his hands. He may have had this question before.
“I have not seen Succession,” he avows. “I’ve deliberately done that. I’ve read a lot of stuff about various Lears, but I’m trying to avoid watching anything, because I want to be able to go: ‘Look, this is the feeling I had, this is what I wanted, and this is where we’ve gone.’” ▮
MARLOWE directed by Neil Jordan
When Irish novelist John Banville, writing as Benjamin Black, added The Black-Eyed Blonde to the long list of Philip Marlowe detective stories in 2014, it was lauded as a faithful recreation of Raymond Chandler’s seminal style. However, this film adaptation by Banville’s countryman Neil Jordan, which stars Liam Neeson in the title role, is less convincing. It’s a very pretty but uneven emulation of a classic film noir.
Neeson doesn’t fill the private dick’s shoes quite as comfortably as forebears Humphrey Bogart or Robert Mitchum, and his low-key performance just feels bland.
As has often been the case before, Marlowe is hired by a sultry blonde (Diane Kruger) to find her missing lover. “Normally, they don’t disappear easily,” purrs the married Clare Cavendish, a woman full of enigmatic comments and withheld truths. Meanwhile, her faded film-star mother (a perfectly cast Jessica Lange) also has mysterious motives for wanting Marlowe’s aid. As the PI tugs at one lead, he’s led from one shifty character to the next in a low-stakes search that sadly never gives the viewer a reason to care.
Among the cast of mostly British and Irish actors dressed up in American accents and 1930s garb, Ian Hart’s grumpy cop is a highlight who elicits a few chortles. But the script is too smartarse for its own good, feeling glib rather than clever, and making for a film with a lot of talk and not enough consequence.
“Stick to the point, Mr Marlowe,” huffs one character early on. Mr Jordan, you might have done well to take the same advice.
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