Discovering Beckett's 'lost masterworks'

Theatre Claus von Bulow
Trevor Nunn's triumphant reign at the National Theatre ended, not surprisingly, with another songfest, a quasi musical version of Shakespeare's Love's Labour Lost. The play was, of course, the Bard's first comedy and contains some of the most beautiful love poetry in the English language. In order to make this palatable for the audience there is added music by Steven Edis and the Olivier Theatre's special system of microphones, which successfully removes any hint of intimacy.
The King of Navarre and his little group of elite scholars have foolishly sworn to avoid the company of women, and use analogies of war to illustrate the resulting conflict with nature. This gives Nunn his cue and he has added a short cacophonous prelude to the play with the shell fire of 1914 Flanders, so as to make Shakespeare relevant to the evening news. This is not original. Ian Judge's production at the RSC also gave us the elegiac Edwardian setting with the ominous artillery coda, as did that brilliant film of Isabel Coleridge's novel, The Shooting Party. The cast is excellent, and includes Simon Day as the King of Navarre, Joseph Fiennes as Berowne, Olivia Williams as the Princess of France and Kate Fleetwood as Rosaline and the production economically runs in repertory with Cole Porter's musical, Anything Goes. John Gunter the designer, has created a truly idyllic and pastoral so, which should not be difficult to move for an intended transfer to the West End.
This, of course, raises the question of whether Britain should be the only civilised country where the great subsidised theatres, like the National and the RSC, can only survive financially by living off the royalties of low-brow musicals. Transfers like Oklahoma! and My Fair Lady have become essential, since the Government is raiding the Lottery Fund, originally reserved for the arts. I do not object to such transfers also making a fortune for talented
directors, like Trevor Nunn. They deserve it.
Terrorism is another Russian import at the Royal Court Theatre, and must he praised for its lashings of imaginative Kafkaesque angst. The evening consists of six dramatically unconnected stories, showing a society contaminated by fear. The first, in which the audience is recruited to participate, takes place in an airport closed down because of a bomb threat. This is followed by some adulterous bedroom bondage, then an office suicide, a brace of murderous ladies on a park bench, a changing room at the security police headquarters with the colonel singing, and the final "fear of flying" agonising by the passenger we met in the first scene. There is a lot of talent here, and more surrealism than Salvador Dali's mother ever thought of.
The authors, the Presnyakov brothers, come from Siberia. In order to stress this, the theatre air conditioning regurgitates icy verismo blasts into the tiny Jerwood auditorium. This is unkind to the cast, as the production includes a lot of gratuitous male nudity, and half the audience were also reduced to continuous fits of helpless coughing. In the eighteenth century. Scotland sent men, like David Hume and Boswell, to enrich London's intellectual life. Today we get last season's prize-winners from the Edinburgh Festival.
At the National we are promised the much publicised, Jerry Springer, The Opera, and currently at the Riverside Studios we are given a double-bill directed by the talented John Clancy. Horse Country by CJ Hopkins stars two actors, David Calvitto and Ben Schneider, who only rarely address each other. The language is vernacular, confrontational, circular, and at times truly inspired. Ninety minutes of pure oxygen.
This was followed by a rather elaborate joke, The Complete Lost Works Of Samuel Beckett, as found in a dustbin in Paris, including his masterpiece, written when he was seven, Happy Happy Bunny Visits Sad Sad Owl! There are opera directors who specialise in dressing up gargantuan Wagnerian singers to look ridiculous. Taking the mickey out of Beckett is about as inventive. Old Sam did it better himself. Both. productions, like our weather, started life in America.