27 February 2020. Rough for Theatre II and Endgame at the Old Vic

The evening started with the comparatively brief (25 minutes) Rough for Theatre II. It is an extraordinary piece with a man standing motionless on a window ledge while two bureaucrats (Alan Cummings and Daniel Radcliffe) process his paperwork – testimonials etc that bear on his worth. It is bleak, so bleak, but funny and staged with precision.

The main item was Endgame with Cummings playing the always seated Hamm and Radcliffe the always standing Clow. Also with us are Hamm’s parents Nagg and Nell, housed in a pair of wheelie bins. The staging was precise and Hamm spat his words out as poor Clow ran around obeying his wishes. His was a life of routine at the beck and call of his master. Nagg and Nell added a completely surreal element to what was already an unusual situation.

I enjoy Beckett’s words for their own sake, no matter what he is getting at and so it was with this evening. There are so many lines that seem to capture something about our human existence. If only I could remember them.

I didn’t feel this was an outstanding rendition of the play but cannot quite put my finger on the reason. It just did not electrify me nor, I felt, the rest of the capacity audience. Each of the actors was great and the production was clever but somehow it did not quite come together with a real bang. Nevertheless, I’m glad I went.

26 February 2020. The Visit at the National Theatre

Overall, I enjoyed this play but it certainly had its shortcomings. On the plus side, the acting by Lesley Manville was superb. She could easily have tipped into over-acting the way she went for it, but it always stayed the right side of that line as simply energetic, precise and withering. She plays the richest woman in the world, Claire Zachanassian, who at a ripe old age has returned to her home town of Slurry. It is a town down on its luck and hoping she’ll bail them out. Indeed she will – but at a price. She offers a billion dollars as long as the man who wronged her in her teens, Alfred Ill played by Hugo Weaving has his life ended. He regards the past as past but she fiercely nurses the grievance of having been made pregnant and then portrayed as an easy lay by Alfred and his witnesses all those years ago. Indeed, two of those who lied to attest they and others had fucked Claire (the play’s language) are on stage as a pair of castrated and blinded oddities.

So we are left to see how the town reacts to this bargain. On the face of it, there is outright rejection but in fact the billion proves too tempting. The problem is that this is all dragged out over three and a half hours (albeit with two intervals) and I think the real  criticism is that the town’s selling itself to the filthy lucre could have been so much more interestingly handled. There was no real sense of tension or of a psychological journey. This seems down to Tony Kushner’s re-writing of Friedrich Durrenmatt’s original play.

This was a lavish NT production with full use made of the Olivier’s facilities particularly the revolving stage as well as its budget for actors. We had a full stage including children who put on the After School Tumblers show for Claire. Despite this, the theatre was by no means full, perhaps because of the mixed reviews that complained of its length. For me, the performance by Lesley Manville made it worthwhile but I’d hate to catch it on a day when she was replaced by her understudy.