Theatre
Bodies (Orange Tree) Two Gentlemen of Verona (Globe) Kiss the Sky (Shepherd's Bush Empire)
Shrink power
Sheridan Morley
Out at Sam Walters's Orange Tree in Richmond, there is a celebration of their quarter-century: the revival of James Saun- ders's 1977 Bodies, written for that theatre and again starring Dinsdale Landen in the performance of his career and one of the greatest given by any actor in a contempo- rary play, then as now. The play is the clos- est we have ever come on this side of the Atlantic to Edward Albee's Virginia Woolf game of Get the Guests: in this case they are David and Helen (Stuart Fox and Liz Crowther) who nine years ago had extra- marital affairs with their hosts (Landen and Carole Nimmons).
But since those halcyon wife-swapping days of yore, David and Helen have been in America undergoing some violent if unspecified therapy which has relieved them of all their neuroses, but unfortunate- ly also of all other human feeling. Now they are back home, semi-lobotomised targets for Landen's epic, raging, hilarious and massively powerful performance.
Like Shaffer's Equus, Bodies is about the totally destructive power of psychiatry; but Landen, alternately raging like Lear and camping like Butley, prowls the stage like a manic evangelist for the imperfect but feel- ing society, and this is quite simply, as it was all of 19 years ago, the greatest perfor- mance currently being given by an actor on any London stage in a modern play. If you missed it first time around, this is a rare, indeed unique, chance to catch precisely what you missed: the years have been unkind to the play, but not to its star who should now pick up the awards he was shamefully denied first time around. The good news this week is, of course, the official opening of the Shakespeare Globe on Bankside; fully 50 years after the late and great Sam Wanamaker first arrived on these shores, on the run from Senator McCarthy, and demanded to be taken to Shakespeare's theatre only to find that it didn't exist, his dream is at last made concrete or rather timber. A few hundred yards from its original 16th-century site,
the playhouse that for years nobody except Sam and his architect, Theo Crosby (who also tragically died a few months before the opening), seemed to want, let alone pay for, now stands as a remarkable monument to the endeavours into which they put the best part of their working lives. It was Bernard Shaw who noted that the English never want any building until it is already there, and though he was talking a century ago about the concept of a national the- atre, nothing much has changed; we now depend crucially on our American visitors, not only Sam but also Dan Crawford who gave us the first-ever pub theatre at the King's Head in Islington, to build us what we are too lazy or mean or feeble to con- struct for ourselves.
Sadly, at least for the moment, the good news ends there; the first director of the Globe, Mark Rylance, in an act of what seems to me wilful lunacy, has chosen to open his magical new-old site with a truly disastrous modern-dress Two Gentlemen of Verona which does nothing for the Globe save to define precisely what should not be going on there. The production, by an admirable actor and playwright (Jack Shep- herd) who is not on this evidence yet a director, is catastrophically undercast, aim- less and often even embarrassing in its amazing amateurishness. Rylance himself turns up as Proteus, seemingly unaware that the production is in every way an insult to Sam's memory. We are told that all kinds of trouble beset the production and that this is to be judged as a prologue to the official first season next summer; but Rylance will have to do a great deal better than this if he is to justify what already seems his very curious and possibly self- destructive appointment as artistic director.
As we head into the millennium, an all- time record number of London theatres are in the process of construction or recon- struction either now or within the next two seasons: they include the Royal Opera House Covent Garden, the London Colise- um, Sadler's Wells, the Lyceum, the Royal Court, and, if you add to that the number of theatres with new directors starting in 1997 (Peter Hall at the Old Vic, Trevor Nunn at the National and, though I may be as yet alone in this belief, a palace revolution waiting to happen at the RSC), you begin to understand the general feeling of uneasy transience in and around the West End.
And not only there: the first of the cur- rent crop of temporary relocations can in fact be found on the fringe, at the Bush in West London where a redevelopment pro- gramme is led by (again) a newly appointed director, Mike Bradwell, who has moved his company next door to the old Shep- herd's Bush Empire, a vaudeville theatre long fallen into the hands of BBC televi- sion but now brought back to legit life at least for a few late-summer weeks.
Again, sadly enough, the good news ends there: Jim Cartvvright's Kiss the Sky starts quite wonderfully as a savage parody of
Sixties rock concerts, complete with brain- dead hippies plucking guitars and offering us well-remembered inane thoughts on Vietnam and peace. But then, with a terri- ble lurch, the show becomes a weird cele- bration of the very thing it had set out to parody, so that well before the interval a deafening sub-Woodstock score has driven out all coherent thought and we end up being told to keep on the grass. You can drink during the show, and I strongly sug- gest that you do.
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