Notting Hill’s Print Room and Kingston’s Rose Theatre bring two plays and two seasons to life
We’re all aware of the significance of 2016 in the Shakespearean calendar, but it is also a landmark year for Samuel Beckett, a doyenne of Irish literature. And it is with thanks to the bold moves made by two London theatres that the lesser known works by these two icons of English literature are being staged.
The Print Room / Coronet in Notting Hill, a space which has played host to Edward VII and countless contemporary stars when it first opened in 1898, is presently hosting a ‘Beckett in London’ season to mark the 110th anniversary of Beckett’s birth and the 100th anniversary of the Easter Rising, otherwise known as the Easter Rebellion in Ireland. After being converted into a cinema and fighting off closure threats, the Print Room sees a return to form with an excellent adaptation of The End, an original piece of Beckett’s prose exploring the end of a man’s life (running until 5th June).
In this production, the auditorium was given over to a subtle performance by multi-award winning actor Conor Lovett, whose rendition carries us gracefully through the days of a human being – the “actor” – whose past, present and future remain largely unexplained, even at the end. We gather the actor was in military service and was then discharged from a psychiatric institution, but the audience is otherwise left in the dark. Skilfully steered under the direction of Judy Hegarty, his soliloquy takes us to physical places where he travels, alongside much greater psychological ones. Lovett’s actor looks at himself, from the outside inwards, in inimitable Beckett style, watching his own life pass by and coasting quietly towards the end. Unfazed by the adversities thrown in his path, he continues to remain calm and instead expresses a wry amusement at his lot in life, realising the futility of resistance. In exploring the wit and intricacies of Beckett’s play on words, Lovett’s character expresses himself with a colourful palette of language as the actor depicts his resignation to his life.
This rich use of language continues in Shakespeare’s King John, another lesser known and rarely staged play. The production has been tasked to Kingston’s Rose Theatre (also ends 5th June), which has seen a return of Trevor Nunn to take on this challenging work. Like the Print Room, the Rose Theatre is also enjoying a run of interesting plays. King John is classified as part of an early history genre, but is in fact primarily about political shenanigans, double talk, compromises and short-term gain. Set against the backdrop of an unstable Europe, it is a work about a society divided by the question of who should have legitimate rule, so bestows a more direct relevance to today’s big political questions than many of the Bard’s later works.
That said, the first half of the play left the audience feeling rather deflated with somewhat turgid performances, where even actors on the edge of a scene were standing around rather nonchalantly. What the first half lacked, however, was more than made up for post-interval, when both cast and script were given a new lease of life, resulting in performances which were almost unrecognisably transformed. The use of large television screens throughout both halves was an innovative addition, giving us a view of bloody battles between the French and English without conventional make-believe sword fights on stage.
The suspense intensifies in this latter half, with child Prince Arthur imprisoned under the king’s instructions and nearly blinded by scolding iron to prevent him ever posing a threat as an adult. We let out a collective sigh of relief when the boy’s ingenious appeal to the better side of his captors pays dividends. The weakness of King John, portrayed by Jamie Ballard, as well as his eccentricities, manipulations and playing dumb when confronted with the results of his ineptitude, all come across in various shades in Ballard’s performance, with his oddities symbolised in his costume. In one instance, this causes us to question whether the jeans under his regal frock is an oversight, or an intended accentuation of his eccentricity.
As it ends, the narrative and character shifts remain somewhat unexplained, such as the turn against the French which seems to happen without due introduction or reason. Such gaps, however, must be tolerated – the original text of King John has chunks missing, resulting in unaccounted developments which Nunn has overcome by inserting material from an early anonymous work, The Troublesome Reign of King John, which he believed Shakespeare was commissioned to write. While such anomalies and dead ends in the developments make King John less watchable than most other works in the Bard’s collection, it is an interesting attempt to breathe life into a play that’s usually lost on us. But above all, the courageous decision to tackle relatively unknown works by off-West End theatres deserves a huge round of applause.
Both the ‘Beckett in London’ season and King John are playing until Sunday June 5th June 2016.
Photo Credit: Mark Douet