WEST END REPORT: HOW TWO BAD PERFORMANCES WERE ACTUALLY GOOD AND ONE BAD ONE REFLECTED THE BADNESS IN WHICH IT WAS EMBEDDED
PATRICIA CLARKSON, CARA DELEVINGNE, and SHERIDAN SMITH
(Above: Cara Delevingne as the latest Sally Bowles in the West End revival of Cabaret at the Kit Kat Club at the Playhouse Theatre. Photo from the Daily Mail.)
I saw a lot of theatre and ballet and opera my last six months in London. A lot. Some people go to church or take nature walks as part of their spiritual practice. I go sit in a theatre and have a communal experience one-on-one with culture. I love the feeling of all the channeling going on, humans aspiring to something higher than just the grubbing around in the lowness of our humanity and therefore the service that is conjured to embody an artistic endeavor, the imbuing of grace in all its forms, the gratitude enhanced, the grudging need for more knowledge, the grappling, the paying witness, the wonder, the willingness to well up, the letting go of what won’t allow laughter to exist, then laughing. Sometimes I even like how hard it is to stifle a cough and even to stifle my anger at those who don’t. Oh, there are now the phones not turned off that thus ring and the be-lighted rudeness of those who text and the clinking of ice in plastic cups after an intermission and the crinkling of wrappers. There is all of that just as those who litter along a nature trail or snore in church can snare us in their less spiritual take on what is going on. But we pick up the litter, gently nudge the snorer, and touch the shoulder of those who shouldn’t be texting and find in that a contextual gentleness within us and then offer it, that gentleness, to ourselves in order to double-down on the concentration it takes to get back to the meditative connection to what is happening onstage as we sit in the dark but no longer the darkness. We return to our having earlier returned to a sense of hope. That is what art is spiritually to me, the instilling of hope, the de-hobbling of it that can feel like we, in turn, are being healed along with hope itself.
And then there is the incongruity embedded in performative art, the displaying of what is interiorly motivated. I find the sacred in the incongruous. Indeed, all religious mythic narratives have the God-experiencing-humanity incongruity embedded in them. I just remove it from religion and place it - the incongruity - in the little deeper, less certain wonder of art with which we also try to make sense of this realm in which we find ourselves.
Three shows recently in London made me think of one of the most fascinating incongruities one can encounter in the theatre: the bad performance that ends up being good because of its badness. When I did a cover story on Barbra Streisand for Vanity Fair years ago, I was talking to composer Jule Styne who wrote the score for Funny Girl. He told me, “Barbra's all about the work. After we cast her, I even flew to Las Vegas, where she had already been booked as the opening act for Liberace, and taught her the score between shows—that is, when I could drag her away from the gambling tables. When we were finally in rehearsals for Broadway—now, this was before the girl was a star, she was just this strange little creature who walked out at her first audition looking like a Russian Cossack —she had her manager write me a note telling me that there were two songs that she didn't like, 'People' and 'Don't Rain on My Parade.' She didn't think she wanted to sing them. I called her right up and said, 'Barbra, if you don't sing “People," you don't sing my score.' You've got to be straight with her. This reputation about being difficult comes from untalented people misunderstanding truly talented ones. Because she's so talented she had a tendency—maybe she still does—to show off a bit. She was always shoving shovelsful of her talent in your face. Jerry Robbins summed her up. He said she does everything wrong, but it comes out right."
I have seen lots of doing-everything-wrong-coming-out-right performances in my half a century of going to the theatre. Christopher Walken as Chance Wayne in Sweet Bird of Youth opposite Irene Worth as Alexandra del Lago. Sharon D. Clarke as Linda Loman opposite Wendell Pierce as Willy in Death of a Salesman. Tony Perkins as Dr. Dysart in Equus. Carol Channing as Dolly. Hello? Yes, Carol Channing as Dolly Levi. Amanda Plummer and Elizabeth Ashley and Geraldine Page in Agnes of God. Page always found the wrong way to the right choices; that was her genius, the vibration of that in the living center of her artful stillness. In some way, Patti LuPone sometimes fits this bill in the way I assume Ethel Merman always did and Bette Davis certainly could. Tommy Tune also could be described this way. Faye Dunaway in her Callas-mode in Mommie Dearest. Callas herself.
(Above: Patricia Clarkson as Mary Tyrone and Laurie Kynaston as Edmund Tyrone in the latest West End revival of Long Day’s Journey into Night at Wyndham’s Theater. Also starring Brian Cox as James Tyrone and Daryl McCormack as Jamie, it is directed by Jeremy Herrin. Photo by Johan Persson.)
I thought of the converse of Styne’s quoting Robbins about Streisand when I saw Patricia Clarkson as Mary Tyrone in Long Day’s Journey into Night and Cara Delevingne as Sally Bowles in Cabaret, each doing everything right but it seemed to be coming out wrong. At first I thought I was seeing bad performances but what I was witnessing instead was the essence of each character really - so instead of seeing a bad performance I was seeing a more deeply lived-in than usual one, and not performative in the way those two roles are usually played. I have seen so many Marys and Sallys, so many different takes on the roles. I have seen Mary played by Geraldine Fitzgerald and Vanessa Redgrave and Jessica Lange and Lesley Manville and Elizabeth Marvel and Bethel Leslie and Colleen Dewhurst. I have seen Sally portrayed by Natasha Richardson and Michelle Williams and Emma Stone and Jennifer Jason Leigh and Sienna Miller and Jessie Buckley and Amy Lennox and Aimee Lou Wood and Rebecca Lucy Taylor. Clarkson as Mary has the audacity to become the morphine addict which does not lend itself to the stage actually. Morphine is a downer, a duller of pain. It kills the kinetic need to … well … act. Redgrave literally climbed the walls; Manville willfully became the fog; Marvel shot up and crawled and slithered around on the floor like a critter; Lange crept about in the only way that Lange can brilliantly creep (and be one, a creep, in the most alluring of ways); Dewhurst as usual entered the stage and dared you to fucking look away from her. Clarkson just is. And her sadness is not displayed because it is so deeply soaked into her. It is one of the bravest Marys I’ve seen because her dare to us is to witness how dulling a morphine addict can be to those who have to take her in doses themselves. There is a feeling of just being rendered listless at the end of the play, resolved, resigned, defeated. Stoned. Stilled. Everything stifled but the male family member’s own addictive need to drink in order to draw the courage to exist alongside the wife and the mother who no longer knows how to be either even, yes, in a performative way. Drunkards, they themselves are dulled into her own addiction living there in the house with her. A friend said to me that it were as if Brian Cox, who is playing patriarch James Tyrone in his best blustering Brian Cox mode, and Patricia Clarkson were in different plays, but I pointed out that was the whole point of O’Neill’s writing the play: James and Mary are in different houses in their ways even if in the same room, different homes, different pasts, different lives. The limning of that living in those differences was the heart of this very different Mary Tyrone that Patricia Clarkson is giving us. It is not stunning really because she chooses to be the one stunned.
(Above: Cara Delevingne as Sally Bowles. Photo from the Daily Mail.)
Cara as Sally? She might be as close to being Sally in her public personae as any of the actresses I’ve seen in the role. A one-off. A ravishing renegade. An ear for the sound of her own drummer. Delevingne was still finding her stage footing the night I saw her. She had a tendency to drop her voice at the end of lines and swallow each sentence’s last words in a little gulp of getting ready to say what’s next. And she really is not a singer. But I don’t think Sally Bowles was either or she would have been playing a bigger club. That has always been the conundrum of Sally: how do you play the lead in a musical about a woman who is not a good enough performer to be living a life somewhere else and in a different manner. In her own way, Delevingne is doing everything right and arriving at the rightness of her character so that it has to come out wrong to us at first if we think we are there to see a polished performance. Delevingne is unpolished - gloriously so - but so is Sally Bowles. I was wondering how she would deliver the title number since Rebecca Frecknall, the production’s director, has a very specific macabre concept for Sally in the number but of all the Sallys I’ve seen sing it in this production - including the original Sally of the remarkable Jessie Buckley in this specific revival - no one has reached the macabre magnificence, the anger, the desperation of Cara Delevingne. I will never forget her chest-pounding, heart-pounding version. It shockingly - and, yes, incongruously - found all the awes: awe-inspiring, awful, awesome. I was awestricken.
(Above: Benjamin Walker as Maurice and Sheridan Smith as Myrtle in Opening Night at the Gielgud Theatre in the West End. Photograph by Jan Versweyveld.)
I saw each of the performances of Clarkson and Delevingne before their opening nights so some of my observations are about sensing where each woman was going in her role and each almost being there and trusting she would arrive at the destination I spotted so close by. I also alas saw Sheridan Smith before her opening night in the egregiously bad Opening Night which is a musical based on the 1977 John Cassavetes film of the same name. Nothing incongruous about any of that - or ironic or moving or witty. Rufus Wainwright, an artist I usually admire, wrote the tinkly music and lyrics. I’ll just leave it at that: tinkly. Ivo van Hove, whose early work I too often admired, conceived the production and wrote its hoary, rather horrible book. I felt bad for all the actors having to play the scenes he wrote for them. At times I had to avert my eyes from the stage. Yes, he utilizes his trademark use of video but even that is ersatz - even dishonest- because it appears it is being shot live outside the theatre in moments but has actually been prerecorded. It is a show about a show about to open but which we are told is having lots of problems and is not good enough which is compounded by the lead actress - Smith’s character - who is a disturbed woman with a drinking problem.
Smith has been nominated for an Olivier this year - the ceremony is on April 14th - for her role in the recent revival of Shirley Valentine, her last foray on the West End. But it was an earlier one in Funny Girl which in some ways mirror this story because she was missing performances as Fanny Brice and there was a rash of rumors about why. That meta aspect of her appearing as this character in Opening Night could be brave and heartbreaking if this work itself had any integrity, but instead it just made me embarrassed for her and angry at van Hove for putting her in this vehicle in what to me is an act of cynicism instead of artistry - a lazy one at that, and one that holds its audience in contempt and, in some deeper shallow way (more incongruity) its actors who have to perform it.
Smith has a huge fan base in London but she is woefully miscast in this role which was created in the film by Gena Rowlands. Smith can certainly turn on the waterworks and the tears flowed from her freely the night I saw it. Let’s just say that Rowlands isn’t a teary actor. In fact, crying is not acting. That’s a fallacy. Being able to cry is a facility. At least Smith’s doing-everything-wrong-but-it-comes-out-wrong performance proved that for me. In some way, she was in service to the production and remained true to it by reflecting its appalling badness in her own bad performance. It was saddening because she is capable of such great work. I guess there is a kind of bravery in that. Give her a medal for that, but not an Olivier for this. I hope she does get one, an Olivier, for Shirley Valentine. That would be a lovely incongruity - winning the award as an affirmation for her earlier work while doing such awful work in this abomination of a production. One can only hope.
(Above: Patricia Clarkson as Mary Tyrone and Laurie Kynaston as Edmund Tyrone in the current West End revival of A Long Day’s Journey into Night also starring Brian Cox as James Tyrone and Daryl McCormack as Jamie Tyrone.)
What a great read—such interesting and observing claims. I loved the intro too—why we go to the theatre.
Great to read your take on these and actually makes me want to go and see cabaret now!