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TV REVIEW: Trollope’s ‘He Knew He Was Right’

Posted on April 16, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – From the moment wealthy young Louis Trevelyan sits down with Sir Marmaduke Rowley, governor of the Mandarin Islands, to negotiate his betrothal to Rowley’s beautiful and spirited daughter Emily, two things are obvious: They are made for each other, and it can’t last.

Something else is soon clear too. “He Knew He Was Right” is comfort television of the highest order; intelligent drama, well acted with crisp dialogue and all the ingredients required for a period piece. There are horses and carriages on crunching driveways; languorous English country gardens; rubicund gentlemen in muttonchops and weskits; stout matrons in bonnets and frowns; and the most handsome young men and women struggling to find their place within the formalities of Victorian life.

Anthony Trollope’s 930-page 1869 novel has been adapted into four hour-long episodes by the prolific Andrew Davies, whose television work includes the miniseries “Pride and Prejudice,” “Vanity Fair,” “Dr. Zhivago” and one based on Trollope’s “The Way We Live Now.”

Davies benefits hugely from Trollope’s style of writing, which as well as being extraordinarily well crafted is also painstakingly detailed. No reader of Trollope is ever in doubt as to a character’s mood or meaning; no action is unexplained. The “he” who knew he was right in the title is rich young Louis (Oliver Dimsdale) who becomes convinced that his lovely wife Emily (Laura Fraser) has behaved in an unseemly manner with one Col. Osborne (Bill Nighy), a bachelor gentleman of middle years known to enjoy making mischief with married ladies.

All that has happened is that Col. Osborne, who is a friend of her father and her own godfather, has called upon Emily, and enjoyed innocent conversation with her. But news of his visits becomes known in London society and soon Louis becomes outraged even though he accepts not the slightest impropriety has occurred.

Still, in Victorian England, the husband has the right to impose his will and he demands that Emily apologizes and never willingly sees Osborne again. She promises obedience but knowing she has done nothing wrong, declines to say that she has.

On this trifling difference, Trollope hangs a plot that allows him to explore universal issues of love and trust, fear and madness and the impositions of a rigidly stratified society. For, as Louis banishes Emily and their son to increasingly impecunious shelter, he shrinks from his well-mannered life, eventually kidnapping his son to flee to a hideaway in Florence.

Meanwhile, the subplots are many and various and they all serve to amplify the central question of women rebelling against the Victorian notion that they are chattel. Emily’s sister Nora (Christina Cole) must choose between proposals from a lord and a penniless journalist named Hugh (Stephen Campbell Moore), whose sister Dorothy (Caroline Martin) similarly is caught between a vain cleric and a handsome young heir.

Davies limns all these characters expertly, often having them address the camera directly in order to speed the exposition along. They are rich characters, too, Dickensian in their particularity, especially the erratically strict Aunt Jemima (Anna Massey), the ruefully flirtatious Reverend Gibson (David Tennant), and the determinedly upstanding but ineffably seedy private eye Mr. Bozzle (Ron Cook).

As Louis, Dimsdale, who played Shelley in last year’s “Byron,” has the convincingly haunted look of the gifted early dead, and Fraser, who was outstanding in the film “16 Years of Alcohol,” never lets her loveliness mask the confusion, heartache and rage inside Emily.

Produced handsomely by Nigel Stafford-Clark and directed winningly by Tom Vaughan, ”He Knew He Was Right” is another triumph for writer Davies and all the bookstores that inevitably will have a major run on Trollope.

Airs: April 18, 25, May 2, 9 BBC1; Cast: Oliver Dimsdale, Laura Fraser, Christina Cole, Stephen Campbell Moore, Bill Nighy, Anna Massey, Goffrey Palmer, Geraldine James, John Alderton, David Tennant, Caroline Martin, Claudie Blakley, Fenella Woolgar, Ron Cook; Producer: Nigel Stafford-Clark; Director: Tom Vaughan; Screenplay: Andrew Davies, adapted from the novel by Anthony Trollope; Executive producers for the BBC: Sally Haynes, Bill Boyes, Laura Mackie; Executive producer for WGBH: Rebecca Eaton; Director of photography: Mike Eley; Production designer: Gerry Scott; Composer: Debbie Wiseman; Costume designer: Andrea Galer; A BBC Wales/WGBH Boston co-production in association with Deep Indigo.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

Posted in Reviews, Television | Tagged 'He Knew He Was Right', Andrew Davies, Anthony Trollope, BBC Wales, Bill Nighy, Caroline Matin, Christina Cole, Debbie Wiseman, Laura Fraser, Oliver Hinsdale, Rebecca Eaton, Stephen Campbell Moore, WGBH Boston | Comments Off

THEATRE REVIEW: Jonathan Pryce in Albee’s ‘The Goat’

Posted on April 16, 2004 by admin

Eddie Redmayne and Jonathan Price in ‘The Goat’ at the Almeida PHOTO: John Haynes

By Ray Bennett

Following a much publicized Broadway run, it is testament to the power of Edward Albee’s play “The Goat, or, Who is Sylvia?” and the conviction of this Almeida Theatre staging of it that the central character’s declaration that he has fallen in love with a goat retains the power to shock.

It says much too of the fine acting of Jonathan Pryce as the man in question and Kate Fahy as his understandably distraught wife. Few playwrights have captured the art of marital warfare as insightfully as the author of “Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?” nor as wittily.

To take a sophisticated, cultured and hitherto happy couple and drop on them the one thing no husband and wife might reasonably expect takes nerve and a very steady hand. Albee has both and the sudden introduction of bestiality into a formerly happy home is both devastating and hilarious.

Had it been in “Monty Python,” Graham Chapman’s military censor might have yanked it as being “too silly,” but whereas the Pythons would have had their Billy Goat jokes and moved on to something completely different, Albee takes full advantage of the opportunity it provides to lay bare conventions, assumptions and a bizarre taste for the barnyard.

Inevitably, the jokes are wonderful and Pryce and Fahy render them delightfully but Albee’s getting at serious things here too and both performers are more than up to it. There’s good work also from Matthew Marsh as their friend Ross and Eddie Redmayne as their gay son Billy. Anthony Page’s direction is firm and direct, making excellent use of Hildegard Bechtler’s impressive Manhattan apartment setting.

Martin, the goat fancier, is facing his 50th birthday and a candid television interview on his successful career as an architect, but he fears his memory is going. Not for nothing does Albee make him a designer of the city of the future and then have him discover the second love of his life amid livestock out in the countryside.

At first, his wife is pleased to think that this Sylvia is at least not someone she knows and even when it begins to sink in that Sylvia has four legs and a beard, she’s relieved that she learned of it from a friend and not the NSPCA.

But Albee makes sure we know how much this woman loved this man. She didn’t fall in love with him, she says, she “rose to love him.” And even as the illusions crumble and the furniture starts to crash, each of them is likely to pause to admire the other’s delivery of cut or thrust. “That was good, by the way,” they’ll say after a sharp line. It’s Albee’s reminder that humor is almost always the only remaining lifeline. They know the price of their sophistication, however. “I wish you were stupid,” she says. “I wish you were stupid too,” he replies.

But they’re not and Albee doesn’t shrink from depicting the pain of unimagined hurt as they realize that something has broken that cannot be fixed. The point is that there’s no protection against the unexpected except to keep going. In “Monty Python” no one expected the Spanish Inquisition or a giant pig to land on them. It could just as well be a goat.

Credits: Playwright: Edward Albee; Director: Anthony Page; Design: Hildegard Bechtler; Lighting: Peter Mumford; Sound: Matthew Berry. Cast: Stevie: Kate Fahy; Martin: Jonathan Pryce; Ross: Matthew Marsh; Billy: Eddie Redmayne.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter

Posted in Previews, Theatre | Tagged 'The Goat, Almeida Theatre, Anthony Page, Eddie Redmayne, Edward Albee, Jonathan Pryce, Kate Fahy, Matthew Marsh, or, Who is Sylvia?' | Comments Off

FILM REVIEW: Edgar Wright’s ‘Shaun of the Dead’

Posted on March 30, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – A great joke is recycled to very funny effect at the start of this engaging zombie movie spoof. In “Love at First Bite” in 1979, George Hamilton fetched up in full Dracula regalia on the streets of nighttime Manhattan to the complete and utter disregard of the locals.

Here, agreeable slacker Shaun (Simon Pegg), wanders about his North London neighborhood after the pubs close at night and first thing in the morning completely oblivious to the fact that he’s strolling amidst the living dead.

Outside of the slick Richard Curtis school of Hugh Grant humor and television’s “The Office,” British comedy is in dire straights these days and so Pegg, who co-scripted this clever and well-crafted movie is a major find.

There are certainly touches that only the homegrown crowd will get but there’s sufficient energy and scattershot horror movie references that it should please fans of gross-out humor everywhere.

Shaun is a no-hoper content with his job at a high street electronics store and nights at the Winchester Pub with girlfriend Liz (Kate Ashfield) and best mate Ed (Nick Frost). He’s full of promises, however, even if he forgets to book a table for a romantic dinner with Liz and overlooks his mum’s birthday.

But when the streets of London do begin to crowd with bloody and sometimes limbless zombies, Shaun is quick to act. Learning from the television news that only removing the head or brain will render a zombie harmless, he sets off with cricket bat in hand to rescue all his loved ones. Ed trundles along with a shovel but being the tiresome staple of British comedy, the fat stupid friend, it’s his job to prang the car, make too much noise, and generally put everyone in harm’s way.

Pegg and co-writer and director Edgar Wright keep their eyes firmly on the ball to follow the absurd logic of a genuine zombie film so that it becomes essential to gather a small crowd that includes the reliably amusing Dylan Moran and Lucy Davis (pictured above on either side of Ashfield and Pegg) in a place that can be defended. Inevitably, that means the Winchester Pub and the setting offers Shaun and Ed lots of means in which to combine two key goals: killing zombies and drinking beer.

There are clever gags along the way, including a very nice bit with Bill Nighy (“Love Actually”) as Shaun’s stepfather, who’s been bitten by a zombie. “It’s all right,” he says confidently. “I ran it under the cold tap.”

In a very funny sequence, Shaun and Ed try whipping vinyl record albums at the walking corpses, prompting a discussion of what albums can be sacrificed, such as the soundtrack to “Batman.”

One of the problems of recent British comedies has been that they run out of steam early. This one gains pace pleasingly and unsentimentally adheres to the horror film convention of losing popular characters along the way. “It’s been a funny sort of day, hasn’t it,” says Shaun’s mum (Penelope Wilton) just before she succumbs to a zombie’s bite.

It’s worth sticking around for the coda too, as it contains some hilarious and very politically incorrect suggestions as to how zombies might be put to work once they’ve been tamed.

Opens: UK: April 9 / US: Sept. 24 (Universal); Cast: Simon Pegg, Kate Ashfield, Nick Frost, Lucy Davis, Dylan Moran, Penelope Wilton, Bill Nighy; Director: Edgar Wright; Writers: Simon Pegg and Edgar Wright; Director of photography: David M. Dunlap; Production designer: Marcus Rowland; Music: Daniel Mudford; Editor: Chris Dickens; Costume designer: Anne Hardinge; Executive producers: Tim Bevan; Eric Fellner; Natascha Wharton; James Wilson; Alison Owen; Production: WT2 Production in association with Big Talk Productions presented by Universal Pictures, StudioCanal and Working Title Films; Rated: UK: 15 / US: R; running time, 99 minutes.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

Posted in Film, Reviews | Tagged 'Shaun of the Dead', Bill Nighy, Dylan Moran, Edgar Wright, Kate Ashfield, Lucy Davis, Penelope Wilton, Simon Pegg, Studiocanal, Universal, Working Title Films | Comments Off

THEATRE REVIEW: Samuel Becket’s ‘Endgame’

Posted on March 11, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – John Fowles, author of “The Magus” and “The French Lieutenant’s Woman”, once pictured Samuel Beckett as he goes home to Mrs. Beckett after a long day spent writing. He puts on his slippers and sits down to supper, and says something like, “Well, dear, found no meaning to life again today.”

Which is why it’s a profoundly good thing for the playwright’s legacy that in this first big West End presentation of “Endgame” in years, it’s in the hands of three men who appear gratifyingly to take the play as a riotous piece of nonsense.

If you don’t know what’s going on before you arrive to see the enigmatic and surreal “Endgame,” you won’t be any the wiser for seeing it.

Beckett liked to claim that his work was pointless and he even has his characters deride those who seek meaning in who they are or what they do. Most of the audience appear to know the piece, as they might a movement by Brahms, and they are there just to see how well it’s played.

For the uninitiated, it’s like watching a sport you didn’t grow up with in a culture you don’t know. You always seem to miss the action and wonder why there’s cheering. Or it’s like being at a display of modern art where everyone else is nodding, yes, or sighing in awe, but you can’t see the faces for the cubes.

The setting for “Endgame” is a high-ceilinged dungeon a bit like the one at Chillon where Lord Byron was a prisoner except the windows are too high up to see out of without a ladder and there are no pillars to be chained to except in the mind.

It’s not Lake Geneva outside, however, but a nameless zero in a landscape of nothing as the world is ending. The effect, as has been observed before, is of being inside the skull of the last man alive.

There are four people in the dungeon, two of whom are old, have no legs, and live their dread lives in garbage cans, with the lids on most of the time. They babble about “yesterday” and occasionally ask for a biscuit, but are otherwise ignored and left to die. Beckett laid no claims to subtlety either.

At the center of this sparse post-apocalyptic fragment of nightmarish life is Hamm, a little bit Lear, a little bit Falstaff, and a little bit Mr. Creosote looking for that last wafer thin mint. Wheelchair bound and blind behind dark glasses, and wrapped in nasty looking shawls and blankets with a bloody handkerchief on his head, Hamm bullies all he surveys.

Which is to say he bullies the only other person in the place, Clov, who may be Hamm’s son but is certainly his servant and who cannot sit down. Clov runs the larder and controls the painkillers, running his wounded legs at the shriek of Hamm’s whistle to give Hamm a ride around the grim floor of the dungeon, or climb the ladder to peer through a telescope at the nothingness outside. But he won’t kiss, Hamm, oh no, nor even give him his touch.

They do talk, however, mostly about the meaninglessness of life, the cruelty of an absent God, the emptiness of existence, the wish never to have lived, and the desire to die. The usual things.

Director Matthew Warchus sets everything up behind a huge shabby curtain with drum rolls leading into the action. Lee Evans, who plays Clov, is an eccentric standup comedian and movie star (“Mouse Hunt,” “There’s Something About Mary”) whose comic instincts derive straight from Chaplin and Keaton. Wearing tired longjohns, Evans invents an entirely new way to stand, one that suggests cruciate ligaments irreparably torn, pain constant. With an awkward walk, his extended routine to set up the ladder in order to look out the windows is pure music hall.

Gambon (“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” “Gosford Park”) is a giant of the London stage and his Hamm is a vast stricken beast, wailing and railing, and occasionally blithering in piteous nostalgia for things he cannot recall. “Do you believe in the life to come?” he says. “Mine was always that.”

With Warchus’s help, Gambon and Evans re-invent the play. Beckett wrote it in French and translated it only later into English. Here, it is played in Irish accents and lines such as “You weep and weep for nothing so as not to laugh,” take on a mordant humor.

With the Irish music in their voices, Gambon’s especially, Beckett’s Gallic nihilism becomes a Celtic rage against the dying of the night. Not perhaps what the playwright intended, but a good deal more entertaining.

Venue: Albery Theatre, runs through April 24; Cast: Michael Gambon, Lee Evans, Liz Smith, Geoffrey Hutchings. Playwright: Samuel Beckett; Director: Matthew Warchus; Designer: Rob Howell; Lighting: Mark Henderson; Music: Gary Yershon; Sound: Paul Groothuis; Presented by Sonia Friedman Productions and Matthew Mitchell.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photo by Manuel Harlan.

Posted in Reviews, Theatre | Tagged 'Endgame', Albery Theatre, Gary Yershon, Geoffrey Hutchings, Lee Evans, Liz Smith, Matthew Warchus, Michael Gambon, Samuel Beckett | Comments Off

THEATRE REVIEW: ‘Calico’ by Michael Hastings

Posted on March 4, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – In the moving and brilliantly acted new play “Calico” by Michael Hastings, James Joyce’s daughter Lucia (Romola Garai, pictured above) falls in love with Samuel Beckett. She is caught, therefore, between a father who uses words too much and a lover who barely uses words at all.

Joyce (Dermot Crowley) and Beckett (Daniel Weyman), however, not only have strange and extraordinary imaginations but also the ability to harness them in the service of famous literary works, and that is called genius. Lucia’s fantasies are banal and out of control, and that is called madness.

Garai, in her West End debut, is unforgettable as Lucia. At once juvenile and nubile, she plays incipient madness as something that grips the soul as well as the mind. Her awkward body pines for solace as her imagination races and her tongue spills out words that in the company of geniuses simply tumble into the dirt.

The entire cast is formidable with Crowley’s Joyce a half-blind mad poet filled with pain; Staunton’s Nora a fireplug of confused outrage; and Weyman’s Beckett well-meaning but hapless and ineffectual.

It is 1928, and Joyce and his partner of 23 years, Nora Barnacle (Staunton, pictured below, right, with Crowley and Garai), the mother of his son Giorgio and daughter Lucia, have finally settled in Paris after many restless years of peripatetic exile from Ireland. He has already published “Dubliners”, “A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man” and “Ulysses”, works that Nora says, “no-one can read with words no-one understands”.

Joyce is working on a massive project that will be called “Finnegans Wake” and even though Lucia is slave to his every whim, he decides he needs a new “secretary of words”. Beckett, a sickly 22-year-old lecturer, takes on the unpaid job. Lucia, who is also a modern dancer of the Isadora Duncan ilk, responds by declaring that Beckett is her once and future husband and promptly declares her love.

Her loosening grip on sanity, however, soon has her venture onto the streets of Paris alone in the middle of the night and literally play with fire. In what might have been something like Tourette’s syndrome, she is given to sudden bouts of spewing obscenities that she instantly forgets.

She steals into Beckett’s room and peels naked before everyone in the family living room as her bewilderment grows. But when she speaks of herself as Mrs. Beckett and of their child together, the young man plays along compassionately. He knows it’s fantasy but he fears she doesn’t and when he stops playing she’s dismayed that he thinks she cannot see it too, and so the circle becomes vicious.

Meanwhile, brother Giorgio, the sanest one of the bunch but an untalented opera singer, is keen to marry a married American whose New York ways outrage Nora.

As Hastings portrays it, the Joyce household is a perfervid hothouse of literary brilliance fanned by lust, guilt and hypocrisy. Nora’s admission that she and Joyce never married emerges along with histories of feverish masturbation, hints of whoredom, and intimations of incest. And the question is: will the family break or will Lucia?

Director Edward Hall is masterful in knowing always what to emphasise in a busy play well served by designer Francis O’Connor’s sliding, split-level set. The household might be filled with Irish madness but it is played out in very French brass beds and rumpled sheets.

Hastings suggests a tyranny of the brilliantly gifted over the ordinary and untalented. “I only know how to say nothing,” Beckett tells Lucia, and our hearts break for her even if his doesn’t.

Venue: Duke of York’s Theatre, runs through May 29; Cast: Robert Portal, Daniel Weyman, Jamie Beamish, Romola Garai, Dermot Crowley, Imelda Staunton, Issy Van Randwyck, Helen Washington, Elaine Heathfield; Playwright: Michael Hastings; Director: Edward Hall; Designer: Francis O’Connor; Lighting: Ben Ormerod; Sound: Matt McKenzie for Autograph; Music: Mick Sands; Movement: Cathy Marston; Presented by Sonia Friedman Productions, Maidstone Productions and Matthew Mitchell.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

Posted in Reviews, Theatre | Tagged 'Calico', Daniel Weyman, Dermot Crowley, Duke of York's Theatre, Edward Hall, Imelda Staunton, James Joyce, Michael Hastings, Romola Garai, Samuel Beckett, Sonia Friedman Productions | Comments Off

THEATRE REVIEW: Paul Lucas’ ‘The Dice House’

Posted on February 24, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – The inmates are definitely in charge of the asylum in Paul Lucas’s lively variation on the theme created by Luke Rhinehart in his 1970s American novel, “The Dice Man,” in which fate is handed entirely over to chance.

The setting has been Anglicized, not to say Monty Pythoned, with the principal action taking place in a rural establishment run by a psychiatrist named Ratner (Neal Foster) whose patients allow every significant move they make to be decided by a throw of the dice.

In the case of Polly (Lucy Scott), this meant she has abandoned a quiet middle-class life; deserted her husband; dresses always in pin-up outfits; and copulates with whomever the dice chooses. She is encouraged in this by her shrink who himself dresses according to the dice’s whims, which largely lean towards gymslips and leather.

Distressed by her actions, Polly’s psychiatrist husband, Dr. Drabble (Jeremy Crutchley, pictured left), blackmails one of his patients to kidnap her. As Dr. Drabble also is a thoroughgoing loony with murder on his mind, and his patient, Matthew (Matthew Noble, pictured top with Scott), likes to tie up innocent victims in ribbons, their arrival at the Dice House only adds to the farcical permutations.

There is a fairly serious philosophical reflection beneath the comedy having to do with freedom of choice and predestination. Ratner is given to declare that to use dice to decide things “returns a wonderful sense of uncertainty” to life. Good luck, he argues, is only “a temporary absence of misfortune”.

Dr. Drabble calls these sentiments “the incoherent ramblings of a deviate clown” but when push comes to shove he’s willing to put his trust in the dice too.

Lucas provides his cast with some darkly amusing dialogue: “Why is it that people who claim to have had previous lives are always wide-eyed lunatics in this one?” and “It’s always pleasing when random events conspire to ruin the plans of people you can’t stand.”

The cast gets into the spirit of things winningly with physical comedy to match the verbal sparring. It’s a revelation at the end of the first scene as to who is the patient and who the doctor as Jeremy Crutchley’s Dr. Drabble is quite obviously and hilariously out of his mind.

Matthew Noble as the put upon kidnapper grows from bemusement to become a beacon of almost sanity as he meets the young woman (Celia Meiras) who was his lover in a previous life.

Neal Foster, with a rigidly straight back in his assortment of ill-fitting women’s clothes, plays Ratner as a stern but quite cracked schoolteacher. Lucy Scott, in vinyl bustier with stockings and suspenders, is fetching and funny as the quiet matron turned strumpet.

There are some other very odd characters including an old codger named Smith, played heartily by Neil Boorman, who gives proof to the maxim that even paranoids have enemies as he loses body parts to a dedicated assassin as the evening goes along. And there’s James Low, very convincing as a deluded chap named Victor who remains dangerous even after four lobotomies.

Director Graeme Messer keeps things moving over 110 minutes and if the farce isn’t entirely free flowing, it is great fun.

Venue: Arts Theatre, runs through April 4; Cast: Jeremy Crutchley, Matthew Noble, Celia Meiras, Neil Boorman, Neal Foster, Lucy Scott, Benedict Martin, James Low; Playwright: Paul Lucas; Director: Graeme Messer; Designer: Norman Coates; Lighting: David W. Kidd; Music: Matthew Scott; Sound designer: Tom Lishman; Presented by Dice House Productions Ltd.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photos by Ian Tilton.

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THEATRE REVIEW: ‘His Dark Materials Parts 1 & 2’

Posted on February 10, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – For kids and adults who like to read children’s books, Philip Pullman’s “His Dark Materials” trilogy of fantasy novels are second in popularity only to the Harry Potter stories.

They are rich with colorful characters with exotic names, high adventure in far-flung places, mystical creatures, bears that speak, witches that fly and parallel worlds that can be crossed into only with a magical knife.

Mounting them on stage has taken every skill that the National Theatre can muster and the result is an epic production on a vast scale, comprising two 3-hour shows that may be seen on the same day or split between separate dates.

The large space of the National’s Olivier Theatre is employed fully for a sequence of massively impressive sets, designed by Giles Cadle, that rise, spin and fall, going from an Oxford college to an arctic vista, from a mad scientist’s laboratory to a marvelously spooky descent of a rowboat to the land of the dead.

We are in a world where humans have daemons that take animal form as opposed to the inner demons we’re used to. And daemons are not evil, far from it, although they are the target of the church, which in Pullman’s world is the chief villain.

There is no mention of Catholicism but there is talk of a Pope although the papal seat is in Geneva. Its leader, the President of the Consistorial Court, oversees an outfit called the General Oblation Board, which seeks to rob children of their daemons and end their search for the “dust” of individuality, knowledge and reason.

At the center of the story is an abandoned child, Lyra Belacqua (Anna Maxwell Smith, pictured top), whose uncle, Lord Asriel is a sort of Intergalactic Jones, an adventurer whose goal is to end the church’s oppression and bring about a Republic of Heaven

So it’s all a bit “Paradise Lost” with echoes of “The Wizard of Oz” and bits of “The Lord of the Rings” and Harry Potter thrown in. But the fate of the girl, played with great verve and at times considerable poignancy by Anna Maxwell Martin, is wholly captivating as she discovers who her parents are, grows to love a boy from a parallel world, and learns that her fate is to be a modern Eve.

Despite the huge sets, which could easily overwhelm, the humans mostly come off well. Dominic Cooper is appealing as the girl’s reluctantly heroic lover, Will. Timothy Dalton commands the stage as the reckless adventurer although Patricia Hodge (pictured above and below with Dalton), as a vassal of the church who changes sides midway, is less threatening than she might be.

Niamh Cusack (pictured above) is radiant as Serafina Pekkala, Queen of the Lapland Witches; John Carlisle is a splendidly oily Lord; Stephen Greif employs an eerily American accent as the head of the church; Danny Sapani is magisterial as a one of a breed of armored Polar bears who has lost his armor, and Nick Sampson and Jason Thorpe have fun as a duo of camp angels.

Jon Morrell’s splendid costumes, especially for the bears and a group of strikingly nasty harpies, and Michael Curry’s highly inventive puppet designs also deserve great praise. Most of the daemons are seen as animal heads with flowing cloth bodies manipulated by actors on stage dressed and masked in black. They shimmer and cavort with their eyes glowing, bringing much humor with them.

There are also fully formed miniature puppets, flying and racing, with their puppeteers dark figures behind them. Brilliantly imagined and rendered, they earn some of the heartiest laughter from the audience.

Despite its length and the size of its ambition, “His Dark Materials” is surprisingly easy to watch. Its epic sweep allows time for tender and funny moments, and some scenes, especially when the two young protagonists discover they are condemned to live in separate worlds, that are very moving.

Pullman’s message is essentially the simple one that it’s important to live life to the full without worrying about a later reward. It’s wrapped up in vast amounts of enjoyable tosh that becomes increasingly muddled but that really doesn’t matter. When Lyra and Will have that magical knife and whole new worlds beckon, the fun of it will do very nicely.

Venue: National Theatre, runs through March 27 and will return next winter; Cast: Anna Maxwell Martin, Samuel Barnett, Dominic Cooper, Timothy Dalton, Emily Mytton, Nick Sampson, Patricia Hodge, Ben Wright, Tim McMullan, Patrick Godfrey, Russell Tovey, John Carlisle, Danny Sapani, Stephen Greif, Niamh Cusack, Cecilia Noble, Chris Larkin, Nick Sampson, Jason Thorpe; Based on the novels by Philip Pullman, adapted by Nicholas Wright; Director: Nicholas Hytner; Set designer: Giles Cadle; Costume designer: Jon Morrell; Puppet designer: Michael Curry; Lighting designer: Paule Constable; Choreographer/Assoc. director: Aletta Collins; Music: Jonathan Dove; Music director: Steven Edis; Fight director: Terry King; Sound designer: Paul Groothuis.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photos by Ivan Kyncl.

Posted in Reviews, Theatre | Tagged 'His Dark Materials', Anna Maxwell Martin, Ben Wright, Dominic Cooper, National Theatre, Niamh Cusack, Nicholas Hytner, Nicholas Wright, Patricia Hodge, Philip Pullman, Russell Tovey, Samuel Barnett, Tim McMullan, Timothy Dalton | Comments Off

THEATRE REVIEW: David Hare’s ‘The Permanent Way’

Posted on January 27, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – When successive Conservative governments under Margaret Thatcher and John Major sold off most of the nationalised British rail system to private industry, former Tory prime minister Harold Macmillan described it as “selling off the family silver”.

David Hare’s powerful new documentary play about the impact of privatizing Britain’s railway system argues that it has not only robbed the country of a reliable train service but also made traveling on it very dangerous.

“Britain!” a passenger declares in the opening scene: “A beautiful country, shame we can’t run a railway.”

Central to Hare’s argument are four rail disasters that have occurred in Britain over the past six years and his play is largely based on interviews he’s done with bereaved family members of people who lost their lives in those crashes and with survivors.

Nine cast members play various roles from the businessmen who planned the rail takeover to politicians, engineers, policemen and campaigners for survivors and the bereaved.

Director Max Stafford-Clark employs a stage bare except for chairs but uses a video backdrop that at first evokes the romantic view of trains chuffing across English countryside but later depicts a high-speed crash complete with searing sound effects.

For much of the time, the video screen shows a railway station timetable board displaying the routes of the trains that crashed, causing many deaths and scores of injuries.

The tone is set in the opening scene in which nine passengers await a train and express their disparate but mostly angry views of the railways directly to the audience.

In privatizing British rail, the rolling stock and passenger services were sold with geographic monopolies to an assortment of companies. The entire track — the permanent way — and responsibility for its maintenance went to another company called Railtrack.

All of the companies had seven-year licenses and part of Hare’s case is that this arrangement was a recipe for the triumph of profit over people. When the disasters occurred, all involved fled from responsibility leaving a hapless government minister to say, over and over, “This must never happen again.”

As Hare documents, it not only continued to happen but investigations proved meaningless and response to those who suffered loss or injury in the crashes was negligible.

The mother of a boy crushed to death in one rail disaster says simply, “My son was destroyed.” Another parent comes across a new acronym: VOL, meaning “value of life,” for how civil servants could evaluate the cost figure of someone who died. “They even asked me how much he spent at Christmas,” she says.

It is powerful stuff and while the politics of a domestic railway system sounds parochial, Hare’s topic is as much about the way a society deals with its responsibility for the care and safety of its citizens.

There is bleak humor in many spots and stark grief as the play gains pace over 110 minutes much like a train gathering speed. The cast is uniformly fine but Lloyd Hutchinson (pictured top with Bella Martin) stands out for the bluff characters he plays plus his wicked mimicry of a Richard Branson-like entrepreneur and British deputy minister John Prescott.

Sam Graham and Flaminia Cinque (pictured above) are harrowing as bereaved parents; Ian Redford’s depiction of a top Railtrack executive catches the man’s ambivalence and defensiveness and Kila Markham plays a campaigning solicitor persuasively.

Hare’s Broadway plays have included “Plenty,” “The Secret Rapture” and “The Blue Room,” and he scripts movies such as “The Hours” and the upcoming adaptation of Jonathan Franzen’s “The Connections.” It’s impressive that he has taken the time to craft an angry political play that may not travel well but is essential viewing in Britain.

Not only that, but he continues to update “The Permanent Way” to keep it fresh, which is more than can be said for the people who run British railways.

Venue: National Theatre, runs through May 1; Cast: Ian Redford, Nigel Cooke, Bella Merlin, Souad Faress, Lloyd Hutchinson, Sam Graham, Matthew Dunster, Flaminia Cinque, Kika Markham; Playwright: David Hare; Director: Max Stafford-Clark; Lighting designer: Johanna Town; Sound designer: Paul Arditti; Co-production between Out of Joint and the National Theatre.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter. Photos by John Haynes.

Posted in Reviews, Theatre | Tagged 'The Permanent Way', David Hare, Max Stafford-Clark, National Theatre, Out of Town | Comments Off

THEATRE REVIEW: R. C. Sherriff’s ‘Journey’s End’

Posted on January 22, 2004 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – That war is hell is not a new theme in the theatre, or anywhere else. That World War I was an especially foul kind of hell is also not new but in R. C. Sherriff’s “Journey’s End” it is authentic as the play is based on the author’s own experience on the front line.

Sherriff was at St. Quentin, France at the time of the Germans’ last great offensive of the war. He wrote the play in 1929 and so this revival celebrates its 75th anniversary. His setting is stark, an officers’ dugout less than 100 yards from the enemy front line.

In command is young Capt. Stanhope, a gifted winner in all life’s races who’s been at the front “far too long” and fears he’s losing his mettle, steeling it with whisky. Bracing him loyally is the older Lt. Osborne, known as uncle, whose stalwart bonhomie steadies the men around him, especially Stanhope, as they await the German onslaught.

Then arrives fresh-faced young 2nd Lt. Raleigh who not only hero-worshipped Stanhope at school but also is the brother of the captain’s fiancé. Terrified that Raleigh will portray him to his sister as a drink-sodden wreck, Stanhope fights the impulse to put the younger man in harm’s way while at the same time threatening at gunpoint another officer he believes is malingering due to cowardice.

The tension ramps up when the company is ordered to make a raid behind enemy lines in order to bring back a prisoner to be interrogated ahead of the coming offensive. Two officers are to lead the raid.

This was a war of cruel paradoxes and astonishing bravery to achieve worthless ends – to win patches of land that would be abandoned a week later. The soldiers were “the men” and officers were “chaps” who everyone knew would “put on a good show.” The men lived in watery, rat-infested trenches. The chaps had cots in the dugout with a servant to cook and make tea. There was whisky and champagne, and when they ran out of a condiment, say pepper, a signalman could be ordered to run down to headquarters to fetch some.

It’s stiff upper lip stuff where being shelled every day “tells on a man rather badly,” and it’s easily lampooned. In fact, Rowan Atkinson’s television comedy series “Blackadder Goes Forth” mocked it mercilessly. But here director David Grindley gives it his full respect and so do his actors.

Geoffrey Streatfeild is not quite shockingly young enough for the courageous but shattered Stanhope but he skirts cleverly close to the madness, his ashen features and shell-shocked expressions reminiscent of a young Leslie Howard or Robert Donat.

David Haig brings to the ill-fated uncle both gravitas and a convincing acceptance of a fellow’s need to do the decent thing. Christian Coulson (pictured with Haig) is suitably dashing and appropriately dismayed by events as the new young officer and Ben Meyjes is persuasive as the cowardly Hibbert.

Designer Jonathan Fensom’s finely detailed dugout set is claustrophobic and unsettling, safe haven promising imminent threat. And Gregory Clarke’s sound design is outstanding in evoking the terror outside and at the end the mounting clamor as the bombardment commences.

Grindley freezes his cast at the final curtain as statues in front of a wall of the names of the fallen. The image bears the searing austerity of genuine memorials on the battlefields of World War I, and gives Sherriff’s worthwhile play a resonance it fully deserves.

Venue: Comedy Theatre, runs through May 1; Cast: Geoffrey Streatfield, David Haig, Guy Williams, Phil Cornwell, Christian Coulson, Paul Bradley, Alex Grimwood, Ben Meyjes, Guy Williams, Rupert Wickham, Max Berendt, John R. Mahoney, Alex Grimwood; Playwright: R.C. Sherriff; Director: David Grindley; Designer: Jonathan Fensom; Lighting designer: Jason Taylor; Sound designer: Gregory Clarke; Casting: Sam Jones; Fight director: Paul Benzing; Dialect coach: Majella Hurley; Music advisor: Annette Battam; Presented by Phil Cameron for Background.

This review appeared in The Hollywood Reporter.

Posted in Reviews, Theatre | Tagged 'Journey's End', Ben Meyges, Christian Coulson, Comedy Theatre, David Grindley, David Haig, Geoffrey Streatfield, R. C. Sherriff | Comments Off

MUSIC REVIEW: Ennio Morricone’s 75th birthday concert

Posted on November 13, 2003 by admin

By Ray Bennett

LONDON – The machine-gun drum of his Oscar-nominated score for “The Untouchables” opened Ennio Morricone’s 75th birthday concert at the Royal Albert Hall on Nov. 10 and signalled that the Italian maestro’s film music enthrals even without the pictures.

Stately and commanding upon the conductor’s podium, Morricone directed the 94-piece Roma Sinfonietta and massed voices of the Crouch End Festival Chorus in an almost three-hour review of some of his most memorable scores.

To demonstrate his seriousness of purpose, the pieces were separated into four sections, “Life and Legend” and “The Modernity of Myth in Sergio Leone’s Cinema” in the first half, and “Social Cinema” and “Tragic, Epic and Lyrical Cinema” in the second.

Morricone employed his original film orchestrations and followed the “Untouchables” rat-a-tat-tat with the plangent strings of “Once Upon a Time in America”. That led to the clarinet intro to his astonishing work for “The Legend of 1900”, which soon soared with strings and horns and the pulsating power of six bull fiddles and nine cellos.

Solo harpist Vincenzina Capone took over before muted trombones teased into the full orchestra and then emerged the piano of Gilda Butta and the beautiful melody from “Cinema Paradiso”.

What marks Morricone’s music, besides his peerless ability with melody, is his inventive use of found instruments. Here, he used musical instruments to replicate those sounds but they still sounded fresh, from the piccolos’ coyote cry of “The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” to the soaring chorale and violins of “ The Ecstasy of Gold”.

“The Good, the Bad and the Ugly” surprises with its smooth beginning before the instantly recognisable cues break forth. Morricone’s mastery in evoking visual images in music are demonstrated once and forever in his breathtaking score for “Once Upon a Time in the West”. Soprano Susanna Rigacci’s heartbreaking solo rode within and above the surging full chorus over music that echoed sagebrush and a wild frontier, filled with yearning.

From the romance of the west, Morricone turned in the second half to the realities of such films as “Battle of Algiers”, “Sacco and Vanzetti”, and “Casualties of War.” Portuguese fado singer Dulce Pontes lent her emotion-filled voice, wrenching in its purity, to these scores. Pontes used her Fado improvisation on other classical Morricone pieces, as she does on their new Universal album, “Focus”, in which Morricone allowed lyrics to be set to some of his most popular works.

Elsewhere, the concert matched Morricone’s own new Warner Bros. Release, “Arena Concerto”, taken from performances in various Italian cities. Both albums reflect the Italian’s passion for film music that not only illuminates cinema but stands boldly on its own.

His orchestrations put every member of the Sinfornietta to work and revealed the newly refurbished acoustics of the Royal Albert Hall in all their spectacular glory. You could taste the ashes of battle during “Casualties of War” and it was impossible not to be moved by the full power of orchestra and chorus in the inspiring “The Mission”.

In one of the many standing ovations at the end, the sell-out crowd insisted on singing “Happy Birthday” to Morricone and you were left to wonder how it is possible that this remarkable septuagenarian doesn’t yet have an Oscar.

This story appeared in The Hollywood Reporter but is not available on thr.com. For more about the concert

Posted in Film, Music, Reviews | Tagged Crouch End Festival Chorus, Ennio Morricone, Roma Sinfonietta, Royal Albert Hall | Comments Off

RAY BENNETT | movies • stage • TV • music

TV REVIEW: Trollope’s ‘He Knew He Was Right’

THEATRE REVIEW: Jonathan Pryce in Albee’s ‘The Goat’

FILM REVIEW: Edgar Wright’s ‘Shaun of the Dead’

THEATRE REVIEW: Samuel Becket’s ‘Endgame’

THEATRE REVIEW: ‘Calico’ by Michael Hastings

THEATRE REVIEW: Paul Lucas’ ‘The Dice House’

THEATRE REVIEW: ‘His Dark Materials Parts 1 & 2’

THEATRE REVIEW: David Hare’s ‘The Permanent Way’

THEATRE REVIEW: R. C. Sherriff’s ‘Journey’s End’

MUSIC REVIEW: Ennio Morricone’s 75th birthday concert

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