The Young Vic is well known for its radical approach to the classics. Australian director Simon Stone’s truly remarkable reworking of Yerma is so radical that nothing is left but the title and the terrible agonies of not being able to have a child. Since yerma is Spanish for barren, Stone could have called his play Barren.
The rural drama is taken out of early 20th-century Catholic Spain and relocated in a modern, urban world. The heroine is now a professional journalist who longs to be pregnant, and writes about her failure to become so in a frank and hurtful blog, which humiliates her partner and family.
The audience sits either side of a traverse stage and the actors perform inside a glass cage. Stone did the same thing in his arresting re-working of Ibsen’s The Wild Duck at the Barbican a couple of years ago. The script is a series of short scenes punctuated by blackouts and chanting. The scene changes are remarkable for their swiftness.
The immensely likeable Billie Piper gives an extraordinary emotional performance which moves skilfully from joy and laughter to disillusion, depression, obsession and self-destruction. Brendan Cowell is excellent, too, as her unhappy partner who ends up spiritually and financially bankrupt. IVF treatment does not come cheap. The production builds to a shattering climax.
The Plough and the Stars, Sean O’Casey’s masterpiece, is a slice of Dublin tenement life during the Troubles and leading up to the Easter Uprising in 1916.
The Abbey Theatre audiences on the fourth night of its original run in 1926 did not take kindly to the Irish being represented as cowards, looters, windbags, drunkards, prostitutes and, most shocking of all, mothers who brought their children into a pub, forgot them and left them there. But it was the Irish Citizen Army flag (the plough and the stars) being brought into a pub which set off the riots.
Jeremy Herrin and Howard Davies’s production at the National Theatre switches from farce to tragedy and back again seamlessly, and especially in the memorable third act – with the dying (serious) and the looting (comic) side by side. The play is saved from melodrama by the intensity of the feeling and the humanity of the characters, so vividly realised.
The play is deeply moving. Who would have thought the coward Fluther Good (Stephen Kennedy) would have risked his life for anybody? Who would have thought the termagant Bessie Burgess (Justine Mitchell) would take Nora (Judith Roddy) who has lost husband, baby and mind, into her own home and look after her?
Also at the National Theatre, Jonathan Kent directs a season of plays by Anton Chekhov under the collective title of Young Chekhov. You can see Platanov, Ivanov and The Seagull separately or all three on the same day. I enjoyed them so much when they were at Chichester Festival last year that I am seeing them again. “In life,” Chekhov said, “everything is mixed up: the profound with the trite, the tragic with the comic.” It is his masterly ability to balance all three at the same time which has made him so popular with the profession and audiences. All the great stage actors have wanted to appear in his plays. Don’t hesitate. Go.
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