Preachers and other wind machines

Jenny on Everyman

Sometimes what the National Theatre does is so flawless, so utterly perfect that you watch feeling you scarcely dare draw breath. Nicholas Hytner’s Othello was like this: a story unfolding into tragedy so raw and so believable with such perfect casting, such naturalistic acting and direction that you saw the whole familiar play in a new light. But sometimes it all seems to go horribly wrong on a scale only the NT can aspire to.  

There is a special style of NT over-the-topness: machinery clunking its way out of the depths of the stage, howling wind, thunderclaps, flashing lights, huge objects descending unexpectedly, unpleasant music, scenes involving refuse and trash, people tearing their clothes off for no very good reason. And, oh, that shouty, gurning, spitting style of performing: why? why? All their actors have learnt pro-jec-tion from their time at RADA or Central; their attractively articulated whispers would be heard perfectly at the back of the stalls.

Everyman is a 15th century morality play that has been rewritten in strange doggerel, maybe intended to be amusing, by Carol Ann Duffy and given a contemporary setting. The message: curb your wicked ways you hedonistic sinners clubbing your way through cocaine and booze and spending stupidly with your Mastercards in temples of consumerism like John Lewis. Even you nice middle class people in the Olivier auditorium with your glasses of prosecco are not exempt. Death is coming for you anyway and you will have to account for yourselves before God – in this case a cleaner who keeps her Marigolds on at all times, perhaps to avoid accidentally touching any disgustingly contaminated human.

But yes, it has been thoroughly National-Theatre-ised: high level noise throughout, a wind machine trundled around the stage, gaudy persons (inspired by Star Wars perhaps, but dressed in gold), objects and people flown in, flown out, jerky music, debauchery and dancing, and something embarrassingly ostentatious about the whole concept. The trouble is: where is the story? Answer: there isn’t one, it’s a morality play, silly, you don’t look for emotional engagement, you come to be improved.

One of my companions fell asleep during the noisiest scene, despite having tried vainly to keep herself awake with salted popcorn and despite knowing that salt is very bad for her blood pressure. Her main worry on being jogged discreetly awake was to ask whether she had been snoring, not what she had missed in the plot. The performances are wonderful; Chiwetel Ejiofor is especially brilliant but what can even the best actor do with such insubstantial material?

So the question is, did this morality play improve us? Sadly not. We went straight out to a noisy tapas bar and consumed a lot of wine in double quick time, paying for it with our Mastercards.

Joe's heckle

You’re right about the tapas and the wine, Jenny. At least we resisted the jug of sangria, which we might have had free with my loyalty card. But you’re wrong about the play. I’d call the National’s Everyman bold, brash and innovative, though riddled with paradoxes and contradictions. 

 

Our companion fell asleep too soon. She was nodding off during the domestic scene, poignant and comic, in which Everyman calls unexpectedly on his neglected family – sick mother, senile father, resentful sister left holding it all together. Startled to see the oxygen cylinder his mother pulls behind her, Everyman asks, “What’s that?” And his sister replies, “Well it’s not a Dyson.” The mad old man keeps making a break for the door – “somebody knocked” – to be steered back to his chair by the sister. Yes, she explains, increasingly exasperated, it was your son, your son knocked, he’s here. Until at last the knocking comes again and it’s death, still in pursuit. A brilliantly paced interlude, full of sadness, laughter and menace.

She snored her way through the powerful scene where Everyman meets Knowledge in the person of a homeless drunk and is confronted with his own selfishness and the impact of his self-indulgence on the planet: “I thought it was a coin I could spend every day”. And with impressive dedication, she even slept through the simulated tsunami that followed, and so missed Duffy’s  rhyming of tsunami with “You and whose army?” You see, Jenny, I’m a sucker for a rhyme. I’m also a sucker for a wind machine, particularly one that’s dragged about the stage by the cast and has the force to tear people’s clothes off. And I’m conscious that climate change is the most important danger we face – more important than Grexit, more important than the defunding of the BBC, more important even than ISIS – and yet the hardest to dramatize. Did they pull it off? Not really, but they gave it some welly.

And of course it was preachy. To no effect, in our case. As you say, we didn’t mend our ways. In fact the whole project was inherently absurd – to take a 600-year-old text with the title “A treatyse how the hye fader of heven sendeth dethe to somon every creature to come and gyve a counte for theyr lyves inthis worlde”, without any characters as we understand them but only allegorical representations of abstractions such as Fellowship, Good-deeds and Discretion, and whose original purpose was to promote a strange medieval notion of debt-bondage to God that hardly any of us, performers or watchers, can still actually believe in, and to turn this into a vehicle for exploring contemporary concerns – utterly absurd and yet madly, gloriously so.