Theatreguide.London
www.theatreguide.london
The Theatreguide.London Review
Vassa
Almeida
Theatre Autumn 2019
Maxim Gorky may not be the
world's greatest playwright. But whatever adapter Mike Bartlett and
director Tinuke Craig saw in his 1911 look at Russia's home-grown brand of
capitalism has not found its way successfully to the stage.
Vassa is a lifeless, shapeless plod of a play, and an increasingly desperate-looking cast seem like ten actors in search of a director.
In a very brief period at the
start of the Twentieth Century capitalism in Russia was born, flourished
and rotted away. The play focuses on one family business in crisis.
Father is dying, his sons are
in their various ways totally unequipped to take over, uncle is determined
to strip the company and live hedonistically on his takings, and mother is
struggling to seize and retain control.
There are at least two
murders, one suicide, a blatant forgery and rampant adulteries and
cross-blackmailing throughout the family.
And what are we to make of
this? There is the raw material for angry exposure of a corrupt system,
social satire, high and low melodrama, soap opera and even farce.
The problem with this
production is not that director Craig keeps switching between tones and
modes, but that she doesn't seem to have chosen any.
Unsure what tone they are to
establish or, indeed, what acting style to employ, the actors go their
separate ways, too often not seeming to inhabit the same reality.
As the mother totally
unscrupulous in getting what she wants, Siobhan Redmond sometimes suggests
a Panto villain, but without that figure's delight in her own nastiness.
Danny Kirrane seems to sense
the comic potential of the son with so little imagination and drive that
his highest ambition is to open a small jewellery shop, but he is not
allowed to go anywhere with it, while Arthur Hughes as the disabled and
cuckolded other son plays for pathos while everyone around him treats him
as comic.
Imagine an Arthur Miller play
without the moral outrage, a Woody Allen dissection of middle class
hypocrisy without the wit, the old American TV soaps Dynasty and Dallas
without the high-camp melodramatics. That's what you have here.
There is no assurance that any of these approaches – or any other – would have been successful. But the surest way to theatrical lifelessness is not to choose any.
Gerald
Berkowitz
|
Receive
alerts
every time we post a new review
|