Collective folly
Lloyd Evans
Playboy of the West Indies Tricycle Old King Cole Cochrane Aladdin Hackney Empire Philip Larkin stormed out. ‘I’ve never seen such stupid balls,’ he wrote about a performance of The Playboy of the Western World. He only made it to the first interval. And he’s right, the play is ‘stupid’, but its weird and macabre premise is a dramatic device for examining the collective folly of small communities. A stranger arrives in a village claiming to have murdered his father. He is treated as a hero and wooed by the womenfolk. He is about to be married to the daughter of the local bar-owner when his father turns up, gravely wounded, hunting for his son. They come to blows. The son completes his unfinished attack. But the villagers, now that they’ve witnessed the murder, turn against the killer and try to hang him for the very deed that earlier won him their favour. (There’s more, but I won’t give it away.) The narrative composition is simple and has an irresistible internal logic. With his sublime gift for character, J.M. Synge portrays a vast range of archetypes and does it with a searching and pitiless eye. But the play has always been problematic. There was a riot at the Dublin premiere in 1907, the public apparently deploring Synge’s cruel depiction of the rural poor. Cruel, maybe, but he is also fearlessly honest. He fills his stage with country bumpkins and gets them to behave just as country bumpkins would.
In this version, the writer Mustapha Matura has transplanted the action to the West Indies. To my faint alarm, I read in his notes about the ‘cultural similarities between colonial Ireland and colonial Trinidad’. But luckily the play has nothing to say about colonialism; its subject is humanity and human error. And this is a superb adaptation. The Trinidadian dialect alone — taut, terse, snappy and springy is a treat to listen to, although it takes a few minutes to attune the ear to its bristling harmonies.
Joy Richardson puts in a glorious performance as the rapacious old witch Mama Benin. Ben Bennett brings notes of sly avarice to the shifty landlord, Stanley. And what a relief to see Remi Wilson, liberated from the Almeida’s disastrous Two Step, given a role she can sink her teeth into. She plays a shy, giggling virgin alongside the highly watchable Tracey Saunders. The mysterious stranger, Ken, is the trickiest role of all. He’s a liar who has to win our confidence, a violent outcast who must seem attractive to a village full of frustrated women. Kobna Holdbrook-Smith gives a finely judged performance that ranges effortlessly from charming diffidence to swaggering brutality. Wherever this play is next revived, I’ll be sitting in the front row.
At Christmas, serious theatre takes a break and the West End is given over to gap-toothed whelps who shriek into the rafters and leak into the upholstery. I joined a crowd of pups helping to irrigate the Cochrane Theatre. Old King Cole by Ken Campbell isn’t the greatest panto ever written but the theatre is conveniently close to Oxford Street. The characters are dependable grotesques, the plot is a blend of whimsy and cartoon knockabout, the performances are zanily enthusiastic, but it’s marred by cheap staging and the show never really gets off the ground. The smaller kids loved it, but they would, wouldn’t they? A clever ten-year-old would find it a bore.
Far better is Aladdin at the Hackney Empire. Here you get the absolute works. Pouting dames, genies in lamps, singing camels, boo-hiss baddies, tap-dancing pandas, clowns dressed as policemen and unemployed acrobats hired to soar across the stage dangling from bits of cheesewire. The sets are lavish, the costumes spectacular and the cast is led by the amazing Clive Rowe. Watch out for Tameka Empson (one of the 3 Non Blondes), whose comic gift is so natural that she even had the sound technicians laughing. And they see the show every night. At the end, the pandas bring the audience to their feet for a singalong. ‘Out of your seats, one two three/ Follow the panda mime, just like me.’ On press night, we critics glanced around us, cursing and muttering. But there was no escape. We climbed gruffly from our pews and went through the motions while doing our best to maintain professional decorum.
The Panda’s paws are up, The Panda’s paws are down, The Panda gives a high-five The Panda turns around.
Sometimes you wish you’d been posted to Iraq.
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