I love the British theatre, so whenever I'm here, I contribute my bit in the form of ticket buying and playgoing. :) Review time!

1.) Man and Superman, at the National Theatre. This one I wanted to see rather badly, because a) it's the complete version, which is almost never shown - they usually cut the Don Juan in Hell interlude-, and b) it stars Ralph Fiennes as John Tanner and Indira Varma as Ann Whitfield. Also, the NT always does well with Shaw. This production is another case in point. This is a three hour play, not counting the break, and an idea play at that, i.e. Shaw uses the flimsiest comedy conventions of his day (parodied and turned upside down by him, of course, but a century later what was then original reverse and parody has long since become the new convention, such as women as the pursuer, men as the pursued etc.) to provide minimum plot so he can use the characters to spout his philosophy. Which is also outdated now. It shouldn't work. And yet, it does, both because Shaw's display of rethoric fireworks always comes with witty flourishes, and because the actors are up to the task.

As a result, you have a long play which doesn't feel long at all. I've heard Fiennes as John Tanner in a radio production of the play before, so I knew he was up for the language (and given his character has to carry the majority of the rethorics, you really need an actor who can deliver them!), but on stage he also gives Tanner a manic physical energy. Not Don Juan in the interlude, btw; I thought that was a neat and subtle choice, because Juan after centuries in the afterlife is a far wearier version of the character, and so to let him be far more self contained and low scale in his movements as opposed to Tanner who is often crossing the stage was a logical difference.

Indira Varma (whom I've seen in a lot of tv, from Rome to Torchwood to Luther) was also up for both the charm and the ruthless go-getting of Ann, though given she's not just drop dead gorgeous but has such an aura of self assurance, it was a bit defying belief that everybody but Tanner and her mother would buy the "obedient and dutiful helpless woman" act instead of immediately seeing through it. Then again: this is one of the ways in which what was a present-day play in Shaw's time, dealing with contemporary people, can't really be transported into the current day in our part of the world because for starters Ann and her sister, both of whom are adults by our reckoning, wouldn't need guardians after the death of their father, and even if they were made a bit younger they still wouldn't need them since they have a living mother. This production doesn't go for Edwardian costumes, btw, it has everyone wear (our) present day clothing, and has added some updating (so John Tanner receives a text from Rhoda on his mobile cell phone instead of a written message on paper), and on the one hand, I think Shaw would be pleased because other than his actual historicals, he never wanted to write costume plays, but on the other hand, like I said, the whole guardian bit makes no sense in the current day, and the opening scene - which had people chuckling and laughing within a few minutes of the play starting, proving the gags still work - really depends on it. Also, the Violet subplot which is Shaw's parody of a Victorian melodramatic convention (so everyone expects Violet to be A Fallen Woman swept away by passion when she turns out to be a very sensibly organized and married one very aware of the need for money to finance her life style) is more believable in the period that it's set in if you think about it, but again, the energy of the performances and all the well delivered punchlines make you buy it while you're watching.

In conclusion: very worth watching, if you can get a ticket; I had to queue early in the morning for a hopeful return, andn lucked out.


2.) Oppenheimer, a new play by Tom Morton-Smith, produced by the RSC and moved to London. The other one I wanted to watch, not just because the recent tv series Manhattan reminded me of the subject and themes again. If you're German and my age, chances are you've read In der Sache J. Robert Oppenheimer by Heiner Kipphardt in school or seen a production, because that particular play by now has achieved modern post WWII German literature/theatre status. (We read it in conjunction with Friedrich Dürrematt's Die Physiker and had to analyze how both dealt with theme of scientific discovery in the service of power, ethical responsibilities of scientists etc.) Now Kipphardt's play - which was first produced in Oppenheimer's life time, and he wasn't thrilled, quipping that it "turned the whole damn farce into a tragedy" - was based on the transcripts of the 1950s McCarthy era hearings in which Oppenheimer's loyalty had been questioned, and that's an era Morton-Smith's play stays away from, though it's obviously conscious of it; the new play starts in the later 1930s and ends a few weeks after Hiroshima.

In the program, you can read the author commenting that for a while Oppenheimer had been as well known as Einstein to the general public but while Einstein was cast in pop culture as the wise and cheery old uncle in pop culture (never mind how questionable that is in reality), Oppenheimer, quoth Morton-Smith, "retains something of the mad scientist about him. He is the 20th century's Victor Frankenstein - a man who pushed science beyond what whas natural and brought forth a monster."

"Victor Frankenstein" is as good a character description as any for Morton-Smith's Oppenheimer, which is perhaps why the actor who plays him, John Heffernan, is better in the second half of the play than he's in the first one. In the first half, when Oppenheimer is supposed to be optimistic, charismatic in a drawing-people-to-him way, you don't really buy it (case in point: the opening monologue which is Oppenheimer addressing his students in Berkeley, which is obviously meant to sound witty and thought provoking - but the actor just plain doesn't come across as either) but in the second half, when he's simultanously hubristic and increasingly self loathing, aware he's selling out more and more of his former ideals but clinging to it being worth it because of the end goal, with, to borrow a Joss Whedon phrase, an inferiority complex wrapped around his superiority complex (or the otherh way around), you do believe the character from both a writing and an acting point of view.

Other than Oppenheimer, the scientists given enough lines to get characterisation are his brother Frank, Hans Bethe, Edward Teller, Giovanni Rossi Lomanitz, Robert Wilson and Charlotte Serber. (Klaus Fuchs shows up, but briefly, and has a quick exchange with Hans Bethe in German in which the actors impressed me because while it was evident neither of them was German they did pronounce the things they said correctly, with the right speech rhythm, so they must have taken the trouble to get coached for what were only two or three sentences. (Bethe asks him about Leipzig and his family, Fuchs says that all of his family are dead.) ) I'm especially glad about Charlotte Serber's existence as a dramatic character, because the two women in Oppenheimer's life follow traditional roles and come more across as aspects of him rather than characters in their own right - Jean the idealistic Communist who commits suicide (which kills the last of Oppenheimer's idealism), Kitty the ambitious wife urging him onwards in his career. Charlotte otoh as the only female department head can be both ambitious and idealistic (and have a good relationship with her husband).

Idea-wise, perhaps the two key scenes are the argument between Oppenheimer and Wilson after VE-day, in which Wilson brings up that since the bomb won't be used on Germany anymore, and the Japanese don't have the capacity for a nuclear program of their own, why use it at all, wouldn't a test site demonstration be enough, or couldn't Oppenheimer tell the military the science doesn't work after all, etc., and Oppenheimer replies in an outburst: "The bomb must be used... and used on people.. before the war ends. If the world is not aware that these weapons can and do exist... if it was to be keppt a military secret... then the first strike of whatever war comes next would be an atomic one. It would be Edward Teller's super-bomb."


This is of course the still debated argument to which there is no answer (yet): is the whole reason why nuclear bombs were never used in any war post WWII the fact they WERE used and everyone could see the results? Would they have been used during the Cold War if that hadn't happened? The idea to create a weapon so awful that nobody dares to use it has haunted the 20th century, and it certainly didn't work with nerve gas, but whether or not it worked with the atomic bomb... I guess we'll still find out. Given current politics.

Anyway, the counterpoint to this scene is the final one. Now the play actually includes Trinity but has Oppenheimer remain silent during it (and staggers away while everyone is celebrating afterwards), and I was curious whether Morton-Smith would actually not include the famous quote. But no. Instead, he has Oppenheimer use it in the very last scene, in a bitter conversation with Kitty (and after a bitter one with Lomanitz (L: "You were a radical. And now...finally now...you are in a position to act on your ideals." O: "Let me tell you how you become a man of power. Of influence: you trade your ideals for self interest.") That very last scene plays up the ambivalence again, the old hunger for fame and the new abhorrence for the full implication, has him declare "I accept on my soul... on my back...I accept the weight of those Japanese... if I have brought atomic power to the world...if I have nullified war... then I welcome it all. But no. Instead I feel like I've left a loaded gun in a playground." And this monologue culminates in the famous line: "There's a passage in the Hindu scripture, the Bhagavad Gita, it came to my mind at the Trinity test".

So the very last words of the play are : "Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds."

Which is perhaps the only way you can end a play with this temporal frame. I'm not sure that as a play, it will uphold the way the Kipphardt play did, because it changes focus a couple of times, and there is some clumsy exposition (Oppenheimer delivers a key memory of his teenage years to a psychiatrist who never shows up before or after), but it certainly kept my attention while I was watching, and continues to make me think.

It's always a bit odd to observe the various November 11th remembrance day actities in other countries, because we don't have that in Germany; we're remembering on November 9th, a lot of things and for various reasons (it's like the worst and best of German history all happened on that day throughout the 20th century; the end of WWI and the start of the first German republic is just the beginning of that), whereas November 11th is simply when you take out the kids and celebrate St. Martin's Day with lanterns, singing and possibly a goose.

However, re: both WWI in particular and wars in general, what comes to my mind even before any of the poetry are quotes from letters. Heinrich and Thomas Mann in their fierce argument before and throughout WWI (Thomas at that point was as conservative and nationalistic as the majority of the population; Heinrich was one of the few anti-war voices from the start) which is the conflict of the time in the family dimension by two masters of literary expression. And George Bernard Shaw's letter to Stella Campbell, after learning that her son died, in the final year of the war. Their never-quite-consumated affair was long behind them, but here's what he wrote to her on January 7th 1918, and I hear it every time when the news report yet more deaths in various corners of world:

Never saw it nor heard about it until your letter came. It is no use: I cant be sympathetic, these things simply make me furious. I want to swear. I do swear. Killed just because people are blasted fools. A chaplain, too, to say nice things about it. It is not his business to say nice things about it, but to shout that "the voice of thy son's blood crieth unto God from the ground."
No, dont show me the letter. But I should very much like to have a nice talk with that dear Chaplain, that sweet sky-pilot, that...
No use going on like that, Stella. Wait for a week, and then I shall be very clever and broadminded again and have forgotten all about this. I shall be quite as nice as the Chaplain.
Oh damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, damn, DAMN.
And oh, dear, dear, dear, dear, dear, dearest!
GBS

Because YouTube keeps surprising you with nifty things you didn't know existed: having once written at length about why I love Shaw, I was delighted to find scenes from his play Caesar and Cleopatra in a tv production from 1976, starring Alec Guinness, no less, as Caesar, and Genevieve Bujold as Cleopatra. Here's the opening scene, a great example of the way Shaw subverts expectations. How his rethoric flaws and how the dialogue sparkles:



Two Torchwood links, both related to and spoilery for Children of Earth, one fanfiction, one meta:

The Time Traveler's Daughter: Alice and Jack before and after. Yes, someone was brave enough to tackle the after, and for decades, no less. Very moving story, and I do love when fanfic explores Alice.

Children of Earth: Ethics, narrative structure and meaning: meta focused on the most debated point in fandom: whether and why that event at the end of Day Four was necessary for the overall dramatic structure to work.

Back in Germany, dead exhausted. In a good way; it was a great week. After working in the British Library, I treated myself to the absolutely gorgeous exhibition there, Sacred, which presents basically the holy books of Judaism, Christianity and Islam through the centuries. Now of course I had seen numerous medieval bibles before - and beautiful they were - and even the occasional Talmud, but never before so many Qu'rans, ranging from editions like the one penned for Sultan Baybar which has just six words written in gold per page to handy Qu'rans made of and written on leather so you could carry them in the saddle bag. The exhibition might as well have been subtitled "people of the book", because that Muslim description of the the other two Abrahamic faiths sums it up for all three there. And no matter whether New Testament, Thora or Qu'ran, standing there, looking at those books that must have taken decades to create, each letter painted so carefully, one felt awed and silenced by both labour and beauty.

On a more chatty note, I had a delightful lunch with londonkds, and we geeked out afterwards in the sun; this week has been something of a mini convention to me, only with one friend at a time instead of all of them at the same time. But I need to make introductions the next time; living in the same city as they do, they need to meet each other!

My last theatre treat was Saint Joan at the National Theatre, with Anne-Marie Duff in the title role. It's my favourite Shaw play, and so I was both gratified it was sold out (I think I got the last ticket) a few days earlier when I bought it) and somewhat nervous (what will they do with it?). It was performend in the Olivier, where I had seen Sophocles' two Oedipus plays - which was an amazing experience, especially since the Olivier is build somewhat like a Greek amphitheatre - and Macbeth with Derek Jacobi as Macbeth and some noneentity, sadly, as Lady M (it's a curse - other than dream team Ian McKellen/Judi Dench on video, I never ever saw a Macbeth with both M and Lady M played by great actors). They went for minimum scenery (basically just chairs and flags) and a mixture of present day and vaguely historical costume (the inevitable armour for Joan, mainly). Acting-wise, it was good, with one reservation I had about Anne-Marie Duff - as long as Joan was still ascendant and got her way, she was a bit one-note and too high strung for my taste, and I kept wondering where she would go from there, considering what was to follow; but after the interval, from her fallout scene after the coronation at Reims onwards, she was great. The two crucial scenes, which must be fiendishly difficult for an actress - the trial scene in which she finally does recant only to recant her recantation when she sees it will only give her a life time in prison, and the end of the epilogue were incredibly intense. She played Joan's breakdown so painfully real, not quieter and quieter as I had seen it done before but with cries and sobs that really made you believe this was a woman a) who had been imprisoned for months and b) in fear of her life; and yet you also completely believed her when she went from there to "light your fires". The horror of imprisonment, the horror of death in flames; I can't think of another production which pulled that of.

In the program, one of the essays makes the caustic comment that Joan today would wear the red of a Guantanamo prisoner; our Regietheater being that it is, you can bet she would have done in a German production. The Brits didn't go there, presumably trusting the audience to make their own uncomfortable analogies, and thus remained more universal.) Stogumber's breakdown after Joan's burning when faced with the reality of her death as opposed to the bloodthirsty rethoric and Cauchon's question - "does a Christ have to die in every generation for those of too little imagination" rarely have so resonated.

I'm in two minds about what they did with the epilogue; they basically cut it down to the characters in it saying what happened to them post-trial, left the interaction between them and Joan out altogether (until the very final one), along with the English soldier and the visitor from 1920, and gave the announcement of Joan's canonization to Brother Martin. However, from then onwards we did get the rest of the epilogue, and the bit which is the crucial point; everyone praising Joan, Joan's "woe to me if all men praise me" (which Michael Holyrood appropriately observed is very much old GBS talking about himself, too) and offer to return from the dead, everyone turning away in horror at the prospect, and Joan's final question, which was as powerful as in every other version of the play I've seen and heard: "O god that madest this beautiful earth ,when will it be ready to receive Thy saints? How long, o lord, how long?"

The reason why I'm in two minds about the cuts: on the one hand, they didn't take a way the core of the epilogue, so I'm good with it, on the other, they did take away something that's important - to me, at least - about the play, something of its, in lack of a better term, Shavian dimension. The going from the horror of Joan's death to the chit-chat in Charles' dream only gradually turning into the haunting final point is so very GBS; the Shaw version of a tragedy is still wonderfully witty, after all, and to make the epilogue bleak-only is to make it more of a classical play than he ever wanted to write.

Ah well. Otherwise, I was gratified to see the gags worked as reliably as ever, many decades after Shaw wrote them. The big discussion between Warwick and Cauchon, with Stogumber as the occasional third, is pure talk, pure debate, no action, and if it's not one of the most riveting and funny scenes of the play, you're doing something wrong. They got it right. (And I was very amused how many people in the interval which immediately followed that scene referred to Shaw being Irish in their conversation; though maybe they're right, maybe you have to be Irish to make as relentlessly fun of English nationalism (with Stogumber's English patriotism being the comic mirror of Joan's French one) as Shaw does.)

I'm not sure GBS would have approved of them actually showing - well, miming - the burning. It did work for me, but I also remembered the fact that the play doesn't show Joan's death as written was one thing T.E. Lawrence argued, letter-wise, with Charlotte Shaw and thus by proxy with GBS about. Lawrence was friends with the Shaws at that point and Holyrood argues, not implausibly, that Shaw used some of his characteristics for Joan. He got sent an advance manuscript of the play and loved it. After praising it to the skies, he came to his one cricticism, which was: "It was good to make her sign that confession... and then she died, 'off'. I have a prejudice against the writer who leaves the reader to make his top-scene for him. I funked it, in the deaht of Farraj, faced it, in the plain narrative of my mishaps in Deraa the night I was captured. Here in St. Joan the climax will be the red light shining from the courtyard. It's indirect art and direct shirking. Of course if he'd dipped his pen in all his strenght and written straight forward the play could never have been presented: but the more honour so. I twould have cleaned us all to have seen Joan die."

(Charlotte Shaw wrote back, not surprisingly disagreeing, and got in return an autobiographical confession: "The trial scene in Joan. Poor Joan, I was thinking of her as a person, not as a moral lesson. The pain meant more to her than the example. You instance my night in Deraa. Well, I'm always afraid of being hurt: and to me, while I live, the force of that night will lie in the agony which broke me, and made me surrender. It's the individual view. You can't share it. About that night. I shouldn't tell you, because decent men don't talk about such things. I wanted to put it plain in the book, and wrestled for days wiht my self-respect... which wouldn't, hasn't, let me. For fear of being hurt, or rather to earn five minutes respite from a pain which drove me mad, I vae away the only possession we are born into the world with - our bodily integrity. It's an unforgivable matter, an irrrecoverable position; and it's that which has made me forswear decent living. You may call this mordbid: but think of the offence, and the intensity of my brooding over it for these years. It will hang about me while I live, and afterwards if our personality survives. Consider wandering among the decent ghosts hereafter, crying, 'Unclean, unclean!'" The sting of the burning was very big in Joan and GBS would have made his play impossible by portraying it.. Yet if the play was to be not a morality but life itself, he would have given the physical its place above the moral." )

Today was travel back day; and for the first time since last I was in the US, I had to remove my shoes again. Note to self: be grateful you wore socks. I wouldn't want to go barefeet on that ground at Heahtrow...