It must be the moment that any artistic director dreads, when an esteemed playwright arrives with a dubious piece of work. Do you rupture the relationship by dismissing the script out of hand? Or stage the play regardless in grateful acknowledgment of past glories? Michael Frayn’s ‘Copenhagen’ and ‘Democracy’ have both done the National proud in the past, and here the playwright is again drawing on his knowledge of northern Europe to explore the life of the once-famous, multi-talented theatre director Max Reinhardt. Only this time, Frayn’s interweaving of Reinhardt’s production of the medieval mystery play, ‘Everyman’, with events in the director’s own life results in a laboriously artful evening. The stagy medieval costumes and endless fanfares don’t help, nor the fact that much of the text – not just the extracts from ‘Everyman’ – has been written in rhyming couplets.
Roger Allam revels in Reinhardt’s contradictions: a spendthrift Jew who enjoys staging Christian dramas about the virtues of poverty. Settling in Salzburg in the baroque palace of Leopoldskron after World War I, he initiates his yearly productions of the haunting medieval mystery play. One of the more delightful moments in Michael Blakemore’s production blurs the boundary between reality and illusion as Reinhardt controls the weather and the setting of the sun, as he is able to do on stage. While Everyman is stalked by the figure of death, Reinhardt is pursued by David Schofield’s Nazi, until the director and his entourage are forced to abandon their home and leave for America. It’s not the first time that Frayn has tackled a theatrical subject matter. He did so brilliantly in ‘Noises Off’ and disastrously in ‘Look Look’. The trouble with this play is that it feels as if the theatre is talking to itself and doesn’t have much to say.
Once you've got your head round the various plays within plays, this is brilliantly acted and thoroughly enjoyable. The set is awsome and as you'd expect the quality of the acting extremly high. Well worth seeing
1 comment
Once you've got your head round the various plays within plays, this is brilliantly acted and thoroughly enjoyable. The set is awsome and as you'd expect the quality of the acting extremly high. Well worth seeing