The End of History at The Royal Court

The majority of us have some kind of issue over our parents and their parenting, but it’s another matter entirely to write a play based on them and admit to doing so.  Jack Thorne, the very successful playwright and script writer has done just that with The End of History at The Royal Court.  Alongside his frequent collaborator, Director John Tiffany, Thorne has produced a very intimate play, the title of which is taken from Francis Fukuyama, the political theorist who coined the phrase in 1989.

David Morrissey and Lesley Sharp play David and Sal, parents to Polly (Kate O’Flynn), Carl (Sam Swainsbury) and Tom (Laurie Davidson) and the action takes place in their overcrowded kitchen in Newbury.  The nonconformist, very left-wing couple’s raison d’etre has always been equality.  Their kids are now adult and so they feel their work with regard to passing on their values, is now accomplished. The utter conviction that their beliefs are the right ones and how this has shaped their family is brought under the microscope in three acts (no interval) at ten-year (1997 to 2007 to 2017) intervals.

Morrissey and Sharp are excellent at radiating the couple’s commitment, imbuing David and Sal with great gusts of passion and humour.  Sharp, in particular, is very funny, especially when discussing anything sexual. As far as she (well actually both of them) is concerned anything goes; there is no filter.  This directness isn’t moderated even when son Carl introduces the family to new, rather smart and rich, girlfriend, Harriet, (well played by Zoe Boyle).  This isn’t to say that Sal is at ease with the visitor and the fidgety Sharp is able to convey a mother’s nerves that perhaps this time she’s overstepped the mark. Underneath the bravado she has become anxious as to what her children think of her.

As with most, if not all, families, each child is different.  The always excellent Kate O’Flynn gives the Cambridge educated Polly an ungainly air and shows her inability to disguise any uncharitable thoughts she may be harbouring.  Laurie Davidson as Tom is superb as the gay, waggish younger son, who is a little too fond of dope and is inclined to give into suicidal thoughts.  Meanwhile, Sam Swainsbury as Carl, portrays a shy, rather depressed older son, all too aware (as are his siblings) that his parent’s judgement of him is not altogether favourable.

Taken as a whole, David and Sal come out as rather daunting parents with a capital D.  Not that we don’t get the sense that, despite the criticism they heap on their children and their strange decision with regard to leaving their inheritance to charity, this Leftie pair do love their brood.  Sal isn’t afraid to show it from the offset, and at the end of the play we get a glimpse of a gentler, less judgemental David as he quietly sits upstage reading a very poignant letter.

It may seem that not much happens in The End of History, and nothing does really.  Just round the table truth telling and sweary banter.  But there is much humour, John Tiffany stages the whole thing with aplomb and he and Movement Director, Steven Hoggett ensure that the ongoing domestic life between the three scenes is beautifully realised.

Perhaps not one of Jack Thorne’s best works but an interesting insight into his background and an homage to his parents, Mike & Maggie who he describes as, ‘ They’re tricky, amazing and brilliant.  I want to shake them sometimes, but I love them very much’.

Peter Gynt at The Olivier

Henrik Ibsen’s play, Peer Gynt was published in November 1867 to divided opinion, with Clemens Petersen, a theatre and literary critic of the time, saying ‘Not real poetry …. full of untenable ideas …. and riddles so empty that there is no real answer to them …. A piece of polemical journalism’.  Not an auspicious start and opinion has been divided ever since.  It’s even mentioned in Noel Coward’s Present Laughter when Liz Essendine says to husband Garry ‘We stopped you in the nick of time from playing Peer Gynt’.  It requires an outstanding actor to portray Gynt and staging it is notoriously difficult.  Oh, and let’s not forget that it is inordinately long.

However, the version currently playing in The Olivier has been re-written by David Hare and Gynt (here named Peter) is played by James McArdle, who was so, so good in Hare’s adaption of Chekhov’s Platonov and in Angels in America, both staged at The National.  There is therefore much to be applauded in this latest production, although it’s not all gold stars. 

Although much of Ibsen’s text still shines through and Hare adheres to its original structure, much has been radically changed so it fits in with today’s world.  There are many references to modern living, such as Peter, here a young Scottish soldier, pointing out that ‘people don’t have lives any more – they have stories’.  Stories that are improvised and where we favour material riches over and above wisdom.  Hence Peter’s default mode of creating his own legend by pinching bits and pieces from the various war movies he has seen; a serial fantasist who eventually adopts many varied personalities from successful capitalist to would be spiritualist via false prophet.  It’s only when he returns home to Dunoon that he realises he is in fact mediocre and his tall tales are just that.

The staging of the play by Director Jonathan Kent and Designer Richard Hudson is very adroitly done and they’re helped by having the enormous Olivier stage at their disposal.  It’s used to the max and Peter’s journey from Scotland (undertaken following his abduction of a young bride and desertion of the doting Sabine, a young immigrant) to far flung corners of the globe is cleverly realised; especially his time on a storm lashed ship.  A sticky problem when putting on Peer Gynt is the depiction of the terrifying trolls, headed by the Troll King, played here by an excellent Jonathan Coy.  Jonathan Kent has the trolls all wearing large pig snouts and their kingdom is presented as a dimly lit, steeply inclined high table, as if this is some kind of nightmarish dream. 

Hare’s script is amusing and his decision not to alter two defining moments in Ibsen’s version, namely when Peter returns home to comfort his dying mother and when he is finally confronted by the The Button Moulder (Oliver Ford Davies), is the right one.  McArdle imbues the default self-obsessed Peter with a tenderness and warmth whilst cradling his mother in his arms and a true contriteness on hearing Ford Davies’s quiet explanation of the difference between self-discovery and self-improvement.

The production may be long, too long, but its saving grace is McArdle’s limitless energy and the excellent support from the large cast.  Where it lets itself down is in some of the gimmicky scenes, aka dancing cowgirls, and the attendant music which, for me doesn’t work.  Give me Grieg’s original score every time!

Bitter Wheat at The Garrick Theatre

When I saw that John Malkovich was to appear in a brand-new David Mamet play in the West End, there was no question that I would buy a ticket.  But then the “proverbial hit the fan” when it became obvious to whom Barney Fein (the main character) alluded.  A Twitter storm ensued with supporters of the #MeToo Movement strongly criticising the fact that a middle-aged successful man had the temerity to write “their” story.  Whilst having a certain amount of sympathy for their argument, I wasn’t prepared to make judgement until after seeing the production and certainly had no intention of boycotting it.

And I’m really glad I did go as it was quite an honour to see an actor of Malkovich’s calibre transform himself into a monster.  And there is no doubt that Barney Fein is a monster of the highest order.  In the programme is a statement saying that “This is a work of fiction.  Names, characters, places and incidents either are products of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously.  Any resemblance to actual events or locales or persons, living or dead, is entirely coincidental”.  Whilst they would say that, wouldn’t they, it would need a theatre goer who has spent many years living in a cave not to link Fein with the film producer Harvey Weinstein.

John Malkovich, complete with fat suit, portrays an egotistical, bullying and extremely nasty movie mogul, with no redeeming qualities whatsoever.  As he shuffles, walrus like, around his penthouse office (designed by Christopher Oram) sarcastically bringing down everyone within a metre radius, we wait for a chink in his relentless nastiness, but none appears.  His doctor (a very weirdly bearded Teddy Kempner) panders to his every request for illegal pills for his ailing mother and pills and injections to aid his sexual drive, whilst his P.A. (a brilliant Doon Mackichan) although obviously disdainful of her boss, does nothing to prevent a young, rising actress, Yung Kim Li (Ionna Kimbook) falling prey to his molestations.

The play opens with Fein lambasting a screenwriter, refusing to pay him his dues because the work he’s done is “a piece of shit”.  On threatening to report the mogul to the Writers’ Guild, the response he gets is “The Writers’ Guild would drink a beaker of my mucus if I asked them to”. 

We then move onto his lascivious nature when he arranges to meet Yung Kim Li, the young Korean who has just arrived on a flight from her home in Kent.  If you’re not repulsed by Fein’s bullying nature, the scene with Yung Kim Li will definitely do the trick.  Any laughter from Mamet’s uncompromising and usual coruscating wit, dies during this scene in an hotel room, to be replaced by a very uncomfortable silence as we will her to get the hell out of there.  The crude dialogue is imbued with a little lightness when the wheedling Fein, uses a seduction technique of promising the girl a role in a Korean Gone With The Wind or a gay version of Anne Frank.  When she doesn’t immediately fall for his “charms”, the mogul resorts to whining that the only reason he’s being rejected is because he is fat.  That old chestnut is also resurrected following the young girl’s complaint to the police about his behaviour, when he laments that “the overweight get no sympathy”.

Mamet ensures that Fein gets his just deserts with the mogul’s career and life imploding following the police intervention, but what is strange is the sub plot he devises concerning a Syrian with a gun.  Odd?  Very.

But, despite these reservations and the relentless hideous nature of Fein’s personality, I am more than happy to have seen Bitter Wheat.  The cast are excellent and you can’t help but applaud John Malkovich for agreeing to portray such an unsympathetic character and David Mamet for his thick skin in penning one, even though this particular play is not his best work.

Present Laughter at The Old Vic

Noel Coward has never been so funny.  Ok, Matthew Warchus may have altered the play slightly in introducing some gender fluidity by switching Henry Lyppiatt into the female Helen and Joanne Lyppiatt into the male Joe, but if you have the wondrous Andrew Scott (Garry Essendine) in the cast anything and everything tends to work. It can also be argued that this alteration is quite a clever ploy considering that Noel Coward (who wrote the part of Essendine for himself) was homosexual, although this was not publicly acknowledged during his lifetime.

That Essendine is an anagram of neediness is, of course, no coincidence, for this talented, self-obsessed actor is the very essence of the word. Wound up like a coiled spring due to a pending tour of Africa, Essendine’s friends, associates and estranged, but still loving wife, Liz (Indira Varma) are all caught up in his agitation.  His anxiety isn’t helped by the fact that he’s about to turn forty, so he tries to sooth his woes by indulging in brief love affairs.  They mean nothing to him, but, unfortunately the same cannot be said for those on the receiving end of his attention.

I can’t find enough expletives to describe Scott’s brilliant portrayal.  We first see him emerge the morning after the night before dressed in the remnants of a pirate costume.  Theatrical with a capital T, Scott, postures and preens, wheedles and twinkles and displays charm when it suits.  He should be profoundly irritating but, such is this actor’s skill, that a vulnerability shines through all the egotistical, boyish vanity.  It’s easy to understand why his separated wife and friends, including long suffering secretary, Monica (Sophie Thompson) always end up forgiving and adoring him.  In fact, the scene between him and Monica, on the eve of his departure to Africa, highlights the maternal nature of their relationship.  I think that most of the female audience members wouldn’t turn down the change to mother him either!

The performances from the entire cast work brilliantly even though a couple land just short of teetering over the top.  Indira Varma (never knowingly underwhelming) is her usual brilliant self.  She certainly knows how to lend weight to words to give maximum impact, as in accusing Garry of “scampering about” and there is never any doubt that, despite her exasperation at his errant behaviour, she will always love him.

Sophie Thompson is always top notch when it comes to a funny part and some of the most delightful moments result from her comic delivery, heightened, in part because her Monica is imbued with a strong Scottish accent.

Mention, too, is warranted for Joshua Hill as Fred, Essendine’s cockney valet, whose upraised eyebrows at his employer’s goings-on are an absolute joy.

This joyful production is staged on Rob Howell’s handsome, predominately blue art deco set and his choice of costumes are spot on, especially those worn by Liz.  How I covet her entire wardrobe.

The whole evening is a complete joy from beginning to end and I pity those naysayers who were able to find fault.  Anything that produces the volume of laughter and number of upstanding audience members at the close of play can only be termed a gigantic hit.