McTEER the McNIFICENT

And Other Thoughts about London's National Theatre's Four Great Productions: PHAEDRA, STANDING AT THE SKY'S EDGE, ROMEO AND JULIE, and THE LEHMAN TRILOGY

(Above: Janet McTeer, and her husband,. poet and fly-fishing Maine guide Joseph Coleman, at the opening of Cush Jumbo’s one-woman show, Josephine and I at New York’s Public Theater back in 2015. From broadway.com)

I am now in Paris for two months after my four months in London and I am already missing going to the theatre in the latter - especially the National - since the language barrier here precludes anything other than ballet and opera and orchestral concerts. I am however going to La Comédie-Française, France’s own “National Theatre,” as an experiment to see Ibsen’s The Lady and the Sea and an abridged version of Kushner’s Angels in America because I know both plays and thought it would be interesting to watch them performed in French as if I were watching a silent movie with sound. Also, I want to witness the company’s acting style. I am curious about what it all will teach me about the essential experience of going to the theatre and more deeply understand why I love it so even if I can’t - especially if I can’t - comprehend the language. I have been here in Paris a bit over a week and seen the all-Balanchine program of the Paris Opera Ballet twice at the Palais Garnier, a new opera, L’Inondation, at the Opera Comique, and this weekend I will be seeing Donizetti’s Lucia and then the opening night of Ambroise Thomas’s Hamlet at Opera Bastille in which one of my favorite sopranos, Lisette Oropesa, will play Ophelia. But I miss theatre. Today on my long walk to the Bastille from my place in the 8th Arrondissement, I was longing for London as I remembered the last four productions I saw there produced by its National Theatre, a place that actor Billy Crudup once told me was his temple. It is also mine in many ways. I feel a reverence for the reveries that often have been conjured there.

I don’t even have to be inside the Brutalist structure itself to feel that way since I had a finally troublingly transcendent experience at The Lehman Trilogy which the National has moved to the West End in its latest revival scheduled to run until May 20th, the kind of transcendence one can feel when one is in a house of worship and is patient enough to listen to some longueurs of preachy longwinded-ness to get to the complicated heart of the experience. A celebrated playwright friend called the play a “Wikipedia drama” and didn’t stay after the first of two intervals in the over three-hour production. It speaks to the brilliance of this latest cast - Michael Balogun, Hadley Fraser, and Nigel Lindsay - and to the masterful theatrical instincts of director Sam Mendes that a play built on so much exposition (it is a tale told to us, a family saga filled with more narrative sentences than delivered dialogue) can still be so enthralling. I had seen the National Theatre Live cinema version with its original cast but seeing it truly live at the Gillian Lynne Theatre gave me an additional appreciation of what it takes to act in such a vehicle that arrives with so much verbal baggage to unpack and give it a wary, wounded wit and the kind of wanton life with which the best of actors - and Balogun and Fraser and Lindsay are some of our best - engender in their work when they succeed in rivetingly taking on a role or, in this case, multiple ones. There is an additional hurdle these actors have to overcome, however, and that is how unsympathetic this family saga is - from its original three brothers, living in Alabama (after immigrating from Bavaria) making their initial fortune on the tortured back of slavery in the cotton business to their sons continuing enriching themselves investing in tobacco and depending on addiction to fill their coffers further to its company saga emblazoned with the family name ending in bankruptcy entangled in the subprime mortgage crisis and thus leaving millions of people destitute who had invested their savings there. It speaks to how amoral the business world is portrayed that the upstanding and culturally curious descendent of the original three brothers leaves the family business for the higher calling of politics and becomes Governor or New York. Some have accused the play of anti-Semitism with its depiction of this Jewish family striving so for money finally for money’s sake alone - click here for Dave Rich’s column doing so in The Guardian. I think it is more an indictment of capitalism itself than one Jewish family that excelled in it. It is not a morality tale but an amorality one. Although that troubling part of the transcendence I mentioned earlier was how moved I initially was when the actors who have been portraying all the varied members of the family say Kaddish at the end of the play and then I realized they weren’t saying it for their family, per se, but the death of a company. It was the company for which they had compassion and a sense of loss, not seemingly the millions of people who lost what little they had in savings compared to them at the end of this saga greedily seeking grace without stopping to realize that it can’t be sought in that way. Indeed, this play about greed ended with a note of grace even as greed itself was being mourned. Is that anti-Semitic? I am left with that troubling question but great theatre leaves you with those kinds.

The only question with which I was left after seeing the musical Standing at the Sky’s Edge was how soon it will move as well to the West End. My first response to this show was that the National “has a big fat hit.” The title concerns how it feels to live in a housing estate in Sheffield through multiple generations with a cross section of races and reasons and how one person’s being enraptured by such a view from such a place can make another feel enraged, entrapped. The score and lyrics are by Sheffield’s musical bard, Richard Hawley, a kind of Bob Dylan if he were more soaringly folksy than searingly folk. These Sheffield folk who populate the show are beautifully played by the talented cast - including Olivier Award nominees Maimuna Memon and Faith Omole. The production itself was nominated for Best New Musical. The direction is stunningly realized with a keenness that carefully carves out each performance in the panoply of people we are meeting who have lived in one archetypical apartment over the decades by Robert Hastie, the Artistic Director of Sheffield Theatres, who was also nominated for an Olivier as were Hawly and orchestrator Tom Dearling, choreographer Lynn Page, sound designer Bobby Aitken, and set designer Ben Stones. As deeply appreciative and stirred as I was by it all, I didn’t bring with me knowledge enough of the Sheffield area and housing estates themselves to be as deeply moved as those around me. But it - along with Allegiance at the Charing Cross Theatre - were the best sung musicals I saw during my recent four months in London. Don’t get me started on the trying treacle of the West End’s The Best British Bake Off Musical that tries too hard yet not alas hard enough. I had a hard time getting the taste of it out of my mouth since it was the last show I saw on my stay there this time. I didn’t know the source material of that show since I had never seen the series, but I know a bad musical when I sit through one. But not knowing in-my-bones what it is like to live in Sheffield or in estate housing did not stop me from being so deeply stirred by this musical at the National. I wasn’t standing at the sky’s edge along with the cast but I was sitting on the edge of my seat at the discovery of a great new musical and was part of the instant standing ovation it got at the end on its opening night when I went with a member of the National’s Board to see it who was also the person to whom I directed that first response above. The production is scheduled to run until March 25th. Please: further life.

(Above: Callum Scott Howells and Rosie Sheehy in Romeo and Julie. Photo by Marc Brenner.)

The National also has a play running until April 1 in its smallest house, the Dorfman, which would be right at home as a smash hit all its own at the Donmar or Almeida; it has that kind of feel about it. Don’t let the title, Romeo and Julie, put you off as it first did me. I am enough of a theatre nerd to have been reminded of Peter Ustinov’s hit 1950s Broadway boulevard comedy, Romanoff and Juliet, which was made into a later film, that pitted the Communist Soviet Union and the Capitalist United States against each other in its plot when the Romeo stand-in Igor Romanoff the son of the Soviet Ambassador in a mythical country within Mitteleuropa falls for Juliet, the daughter of the American Ambassador. I have always wondered if the young actor who played Igor, Gerald Sarracini, died from injuries from being gay bashed. Only 30, he and a young male friend were walking together in the early hours of Christmas morning in 1957 after a Christmas Eve performance of the play when they were set upon by a group of other young men and badly beaten. Sarracini’s head injuries proved fatal a few days later. I was thinking of that gay angle watching the remarkable young Welsh actor, Callum Scott Howells, who plays Romeo after his starring in the television series It’s a Sin and wowing West End audiences as the Emcee in Cabaret, the latter which he was performing at night while rehearsing this play during the day. He can at times signify a bit - as a lot of young actors do onstage - but he even does that brilliantly. It speaks to his gifts as an actor that all thoughts of his making such an impression on me as his gay character in It’s a Sin then displaying his floridly innate fluidity as the Emcee were quickly forgotten as he became this rather dense, deeply decent straight bloke who as a teenager has become a dad after impregnating his much smarter girlfriend from a slightly better class of family who has dreams beyond her love for him because her other love of quantum physics includes finally a stronger longing for Cambridge and all that could mean for her not-even-the-sky’s-the-limit intellect and the life to which it could lead. Rosie Sheehy conveys both those aspects of her character with a wondrous dry wit shot through with hormonal urges that find a home in her body along with that baby as they try to cohabit with theorems and mathematic formulas inside her brain. The rueful Welsh dramedy directed by Rachel O’Riordan and written by Gary Owen could easily have tipped over into the formulaic but it firmly keeps its feet grounded in reality and yet makes room for the headier yet heavenly regions of young love yoked to both the hope that physically harbors within it and the physics of possibility.

(Above: Janet McTeer and Assaad Bouab in the poster art for Phaedra.)

And now it’s about bloody time, huh, I got to Janet McTeer who is certainly having a bloody time of it in the title role of director and writer Simon Stone’s updating of Phaedra which uses as its source material versions of the story by Racine and Seneca and Euripides. The goddess-like woman he has created is a British diplomat with an Iranian husband and a past in Morocco where she was once stationed that includes a libertine youth filled with drugs and private dangers (not just geopolitical ones) and the death of her lover in a car crash that she survived. Stone takes this female myth even more ancient than the Madonna/whore Christian one and creates a narrative and a character even more mythic in its reach and emotional stakes. It is just that: a high stakes approach to modernize this story of a woman’s love bested by her deeper lustful needs that she utilizes for neither self-forgiveness nor self-fulfillment but a kind of annihilation of the self as a selfish act. The bones of the narrative are that the dead-ringer Moroccan son of her dead lover - beautifully, quietly played by Bad Sisters and Call My Agent’s Assaad Bouab in counterpoint to McTeer’s fiery Furies-filled female - finally finds her so that they can reconcile the past they each share proving the power of personal narratives to define differently the same factual circumstances. Phaedra’s daughter is having marriage problems that mirror those of her mother and both women end up bedding and falling in love with the son, although the younger one is the only one capable of being impregnated. It all leads to Phaedra’s reckoning at her own hand. The approach that Stone has taken - and even set designer Chloe Lamford - is rather heightened and the skillful cast executes it with aplomb while plumbing an even deeper reality to make such uber-reality rife with belief. It is a directorial choice even pointed up by the production’s auditory aspect by the purposeful much-too-obvious miking and ominous scoring of composer and sound designer Stefan Gregory. It is all highly pitched, yet carefully honed. It made me want to go back and watch director Jules Dassin’s Phaedra which he based on Euripides (I once had its movie poster framed by my bed) and which starred Melina Mercouri in the title role as her follow-up to Never on a Sunday and Anthony Perkins as the son of her husband - she’s his second wife - with whom she has the love affair.

(Above: McTeer and Bouab in Phaedra. Photo by Johan Persson.)

McTeer plays the mercurial character with an intensity that makes room somehow for a visceral vulnerability. All six feet of her body is alive in that wanton way I wrote about above when great actors are artfully in the throes of their own art, lost in it as they somehow incongruously navigate for us a way through their characterizations with them. McTeer’s husband is a poet who serves as a guide in the wilds of Maine where they live and I thought of him (and them) as I watched her poetically guide us through the wilds of Phaedra herself who becomes beguiled by her own transgressive wildness as much as the son of her dead lover on whom she focuses it. [You can hear McTeer and other famous actors reading Coleman’s poems at his website here.] I was overwhelmed by McTeer in this role and not since I visited the National for the first time in 1978 and saw Kate Nelligan in David Hare’s Plenty, have I left the building where the company is located on such a cultural high from witnessing a great actor at the top of her game. For those of you who only know McTeer from her stellar work on Ozark with its stunning character arc, trust me when I tell you she is one of our greatest stage actors. I have now seen her on Broadway in Mary Stuart and Les Liaisons Dangereuses and her now legendary performance as Nora in A Doll’s House, a kind of Lucille Ballsy interpretation. I am writing this last section of this column after having just seen another of Ibsen’s plays, The Lady and the Sea, performed by actors from La Comedie-Française here in Paris at the Théâtre du Vieux-Colombier. I would love to witness McTeer taking on the role of Ellida in that play. Hell, she could play the whole fucking sea.

You have until April 8 to see her in what will become another legendary performance for which she is nominated for an Olivier Award for Best Actress. Go.