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Author
Jean Anouilh
Director
John Caird
Designer
Stephen
Brimson Lewis
Lighting
Peter Mumford
Original
Score
John Cameron
Historical
Consultant
Alison Weir
Thomas
Becket
Dougray Scott
King
Henry II
Jasper Britton
Archbishop
of Canterbury
John Quentin
Gilbert
Folliot,
Bishop of London
Sean Baker
Queen
Mother
Ann Firbank
Eleanor
of
Aquitaine
Polly Kemp
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Theatre
Royal, Haymarket
27
October 2004 |
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It is
hard to say which is worse,
the play or the production.
The production is unlikely
to be with us long, after
the appalling reviews it has
already received (see, for
example, the comprehensive
demolition jobs by Michael
Billington in The Guardian
and Charles Spencer in The
Daily Telegraph). More important,
in the long term, is the damage
this will do to the reputation
both of Anouilh and Becket,
one of his best-known plays.
The critics have dismissed
the play out of hand, as a
tired old costume drama, which
tells the story of Becket's
friendship with King Henry
II, which ends in conflict
and his brutal murder at Canterbury
Cathedral in 1170. There is
a lot wrong with the play:
it is slow, historically inaccurate
(Becket, a Norman, is presented
as a Saxon) and psychologically
crude. As an account of the
clash between Church and State,
it is strangely tedious, a
poor man's A Man For All Seasons,
which appeared at almost exactly
the same time (1960).
The language has neither beauty
nor poetry and is not helped
by the translation by Frederic
and Stephen Raphael. Peter
Brook, an important champion
of Anouilh here in the Fifties,
once wrote, 'To translate
Anouilh is no matter of matching
chat with chat: it demands
re-creation, a re-shaping
of ideas into phrases that
have an English elegance and
grace.' The Raphaels have
tried to give Anouilh a tough
vitality ('God's having a
laugh', 'His Royal Highnarse,
Henry the Turd'), but it's
hardly 'elegance and grace'.
It just adds to the sense
of a dead museum-piece, with
no relevance or topicality
today.
If director John Caird had
an idea about how to give
this play a new life there
is no evidence of it here.
His production manages to
be both too slow and too fast.
It's not fast enough, and
needs to lose at least twenty
minutes, with endless bitty
scenes of no interest. At
the same time, the actors
rattle off their lines and
rarely stop to look at each
other to give the dialogue
any significance or impact.
There are moments of great
cruelty and violence in the
play, yet their impact just
flies past, because none of
the actors will pause the
action and just look at each
other to register what has
happened.
Caird has one central problem.
Becket is a famous two-hander
and has always attracted top
stars. The 1960-61 award-winning
Broadway production starred
Olivier (as Becket) and Anthony
Quinn (as Henry). At the RSC
in 1961 the parts were played
by Eric Porter and Christopher
Plummer. The film (1964),
starred Burton and Peter O'Toole
and when the play was last
performed in the West End,
in 1991-92, the parts were
played by Derek Jacobi and
Robert Lindsay.
Caird's production has no
big names which are remotely
comparable. Jasper Britton
makes a brave fist of playing
the tortured, almost hysterical
Henry. Dougray Scott, however,
shows what happens when you
give a big stage part to an
actor whose reputation is
based on TV and film work.
He is wooden throughout, unable
to speak the Raphaels' thin
lines or show any emotion.
To call Scott's performance
pedestrian would be too kind.
What he is doing playing such
a large part in a major new
West End production is unimaginable.
Why the producers set out
with this revival without
two bigger names is just as
impossible to fathom.
The worst piece of miscasting,
after Scott, is Henry's wife,
Eleanor of Aquitaine, a fiery,
formidable queen, one of the
great figures of the Middle
Ages. Anouilh does little
with the part, but Polly Kemp
does still less, and seems
a pale blonde waif of a thing.
Michael Fitzgerald has received
some flack for his marvellously
camp performance as the French
King, but at least he has
tried to make something of
his part and gives the audience
a sense of some of the issues
that might be at stake in
Anouilh's play. That's more
than can be said on anyone
else apart from Jasper Britton.
It is sad to think what this
production will do to Anouilh's
reputation. It is some time
since his post-war heyday,
and it is hard to recall that
at one time he was one of
the major figures in the golden
age of modern French theatre.
In the twenty years beteween
the first production of Antigone
in nazi-occupied Paris and
the film of Becket, which
received twelve Oscar nominations,
Anouilh's plays attracted
the biggest names in British
theatre: emerging young directors
like Hall and Brook, and major
actors like Vivien Leigh,
Paul Scofield and Olivier.
Perhaps the key fact about
Anouilh is that he was one
of that extraordinary generation
of French writers born on
the eve of the First World
War, who came of age in the
1930s and lived through the
Nazi occupation and experience
of Vichy. Anouilh was born
in 1910, the same year as
Jean-Louis Barrault and Genet,
a little younger than Sartre
and de Beauvoir, and two or
three years older than Ionesco,
Camus and Marguerite Duras.
This was the generation that
dominated French drama and
literature in the 1940s and
'50s. Anouilh's Antigone was
first performed in 1944, year
after Camus wrote, Le Mythe
de Sisyphe, the same year
as Sartre wrote, Huis-Clos,
and the year before Barrault
starred in les Enfants du
Paradis. In 1952 he wrote,
The Waltz of the Toreadors,
the same year that Ionesco
wrote, The Chairs. In 1953,
he wrote The Lark, about Joan
of Arc, the year Beckett wrote,
Waiting for Godot. When Anouilh
wrote Becket
in 1959, it was the year Barrault
took over the OdČon-ThČ’tre
de France, Roger Blin directed
Genet's Les NËgres and Duras
wrote her greatest screenplay,
Hiroshima Mon Amour.
We should hesitate, then,
before writing off Anouilh
on the basis of this production.
He is a major name in mid-20th
century theatre, part of an
extraordinary moment in French
cultural life. These dates
are not incidental to Becket.
The theme of occupation, so
clumsily handled by director
and cast alike, is crucial
to the play. Anouilh's play
is about the conflict between
Norman occupiers and Saxon
occupied. Billington and others
have assumed Anouilh was just
plain ignorant when he made
Becket a Saxon, when he was
in fact a Norman. Anouilh,
however, was quite happy to
bend history to serve his
dramatic needs. He wanted
to explore the dilemmas of
occupation: do you collaborate
or fight? Is resistance simply
one thing, or can it take
many forms? These were not
trivial questions for Anouilh
or his contemporaries who
lived through the Vichy years.
Arguably, Becket should be
seen as part of an extraordinary
trilogy, together with Antigone
(1944) and The Lark (1953).
All three plays are set against
the background of war or civil
war. More important, they
are about the choices that
such historical traumas raise.
In the face of occupation
‚ whether by the Normans as
in Becket or by the English
as in The Lark ‚ or in the
aftermath of bitter conflict
(as in Antigone) what do you
do? How do you respond? Anouilh's
characters take two paths.
First, there is idealism or
honour, you don't make any
concession to power but do
what is right. This is the
path taken by Antigone, Joan
of Arc and Becket. In each
case, it is the path of honour
but leads to death. Alternatively,
there is the path of compromise
and pragmatism, do what works,
whether it is right or not.
This is the choice of Creon
(in Antigone), of the Bishop
of London (in Becket) and
of other French characters
in The Lark. In each case,
the compromiser distrusts,
even hates the idealist. Behind
Becket is the shadow of Vichy.
It is the deep background
to the play.
What is distinctive about
Becket, is the relationship
between the two men. It starts
as friendship ‚ lost of macho
roistering about women, drink
and sport. Then it becomes
conflict ‚ between Church
and State, God and law ‚ overlaid
with homo-eroticism. Henry
misses Becket's friendship.
More than this, he misses
his love. Married to the cold
Eleanor of Aquitaine, driven
crazy by his demanding mother,
he yearns for Becket's companionship,
and it is no coincidence that
the moments of cruelty and
conflict in the play follow
scenes between Henry, his
mother and his wife.
The problem is that neither
the language nor the drama
bring these conflicts to life.
There is much talk of occupation
and of Becket's Saxon background,
and you could hardly miss
the Freudian homo-erotic themes,
but neither live in the play.
What emerges instead is a
troubling absence. Other characters
talk of Becket as a mystery,
as an enigma. No one understands
why he changes from the king's
drinking partner and sidekick
to an austere man of principle,
unbending, refusing to compromise.
This should be mysterious
and troubling, raising deep
questions about motivation
and the moral dilemmas of
how we deal with occupation
and historical tragedy. Instead,
because of a much flawed production,
it is just uninteresting.
At the end of this terrible
Becket,
it is worth asking what kind
of production could bring
these important, always timely
issues to life?
David Herman |
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