Kate Maltby

Kate Maltby’s essay on artists’ responses to the terrorist attacks of September 11th will appear here in two halves. This is the first. There’s a moment in Rupert Goold’s latest production, Decade, in which a gaunt widow (Charlotte Randle) stares up and into the empty space just left of where the North Tower used to stand at Ground Zero, New York. Each day, she tells her listeners, she is staring not at the space where the tower used to be, but trying to find the patch of air through which her husband might have tumbled, voluntary but unwilling, to his death. She doesn’t have to describe exactly what she sees in her mind’s eye, because we’ve all seen it ourselves. It’s a simple, iconic image.

As our television screens luxuriate again with images of Downton Abbey, one of its cast members is starring in an altogether grittier production in the heart of West London. Last time we saw Kevin Doyle, he was pleading a lung condition to escape being sent to the Battle of the Somme. Here he starts off as another lugubrious chauffer, awakening in an even more chaotic world than that of the Somme, before morphing into the charismatic, careworn but chatty interrogator in the torture cells of a faceless, totalitarian state. The occasion is the first professional revival in London of Harold Pinter’s double-bill, Victoria Station and One for the Road since its opening in 1984.

It’s a slightly surreal time to be a theatre-goer in London. Two of the most exciting productions running at the moment both trace descents into the more disconcerting reaches of human fantasy. But, while Richard Jones’s production of The Government Inspector at the Young Vic turns Gogol’s political satire into the blithest of comic capers, the absurdist nightmare of a somnolent, small town, small time bureaucrat, Arthur Schnitzler’s Dream Story, at the Gate is an altogether darker take on the boundaries of sexual pathology. In The Government Inspector, a group of corrupt town bureaucrats discover that St. Petersburg is sending an incognito inspector to check up on them.

The text that codified the old legend of the learned man who sells his soul to the devil, Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is one of the most influential plays in English history. It’s also one of the worst, from the point of view of the director. Scenes of intense religious struggle are intercut with the crudest of groundling comedy skits, in the most incongruous of juxtapositions. It may be Marlowe’s way of emphasizing that, under his silks, Faustus is as ineffectual and decayed as the world he inhabits, but it doesn’t do much for narrative flow.

Like most Shakespeare comedies, Much Ado About Nothing is often performed as a garden party fantasy of Merrie England – so it’s a treat to see two major productions both committed to restoring the Mediterranean flavour of this hot-blooded piece, which Shakespeare actually set not in Stratford, but Sicily. 

 At the Globe, Jeremy Herrin strews the stage with oranges and Moorish lattice work. Amidst the almost Pagan street festival, this really is a place where a sun-addled youth might blindly search for a metaphor to describe his unfaithful lover and find it to hand in ‘a rotten orange’.

No one can accurately imagine Hell. In Terminus, a magical paean to the art of storytelling, playwright Mark O’Rowe wisely does not try. No one can accurately imagine Hell. In Terminus, a magical paean to the art of storytelling, playwright Mark O’Rowe wisely does not try. The one soul in his universe who does manage to escape the place, finds himself, like Old Hamlet, unable to unfold its horrors to the youthful melancholic he encounters in a run-down corner of Dublin. But Miltonic questions of salvation, punishment and survival are infused through every phrase of the language his characters inhabit.

Neil LaBute is hard to like but easy to admire. So goes conventional wisdom on the subject of one of America’s most verbally violent playwrights. It’s a shame, therefore, that in this new tale of Hansel and Gretel grown up and gone wrong, there’s still plenty to discomfort but little to impress. Fortunately, Hollywood stars Matthew Fox (Lost) and Olivia Williams (Rushmore, The Sixth Sense) lend real wit and power to LaBute’s depiction of sibling warfare. In their capable hands, LaBute’s rehash of clichés about the opposition of educated woman to working class man becomes highly entertaining, if never quite enjoyable. LaBute seems to delight in the role of macho moralist.

We theatre hacks are running out of superlatives to describe the current flowering of Terrence Rattigan revivals around the centenary of the writer’s birth. Notorious in his own day for his ability to dissect the morality of the midcentury Establishment, Rattigan follows in the grand tradition of Wilde and Coward in crafting witty, sexually ambiguous and quintessentially English social dramas, scored through with darker, more urgent concerns with the search for a moral existence. It would be a cruel irony if this run of productions were to have the effect of lifting Rattigan’s oeuvre out of a temporary unpopularity, only to leave it suffering from overexposure.

A new opera has breezed through London’s Barbican Centre. It’s a tale of arduous quests, initiation and male friendship, lyrical in its romantic sweetness, and vaguely reminiscent of the later Mozart. But Mozart’s The Magic Flute it most certainly is not. It is always courageous to take on the opera purists, but it is not quite clear how bold the usually fearless Peter Brook has been in titling his adaptation A Magic Flute. It is scarcely a step away from the original title: just enough of a retreat to avoid comparisons to conventional productions, but not exactly a leap into the unknown.

Few living artists compare to Robert LePage when it comes to balancing sparkling, sizzling, soul-boggling technical virtuosity with profound emotional punch. The actor-director’s productions are usually heartbreaking multi-media installations that play with the isolation at the heart of human life. As Ian Shuttleworth put it back in 1991, ‘see Robert LePage and die’. LePage hasn’t killed me, but he nearly broke up my relationship: when my date, now my fiancé, failed to weep at a performance of The Anderson Project in 2005, I did wonder if I’d just become involved with a man without a soul. Evidently, the relationship survived, but it was touch and go for a while.

Scramble the last RAF jets, re-commission Concorde, or do whatever else it takes you to get down at supersonic speed to the box office of West London’s Finborough Theatre.Today, the tiny theatre announced that two more matinees have been added to the blink-and-you’ll-miss it run of Emlyn William’s forgotten 1950s gem, Accolade. The production started its run last week and is already almost booked out thanks to the presence in the cast of that recent victim of violent death, Graham Seed, better known as nice-but-dim Nigel Pargitter from The Archers. But, with apologies to my fellow Archers fans, it’s taken something more than a genteel radio soap star to send ticket sales soaring into the stratosphere.