My worst night in the theatre
Sunday, April 26th, 2009
Next week I’ll be off to Vienna for the German-language première of Lee Hall’s The Pitmen Painters which I translated. As the director is Max Roberts who already did the first production at Live Theatre Newcastle, moving on successfully first to the Cottesloe and then to the Lyttelton, I am rather optimistic. Hopefully the result will lay the ghost of another version of a Lee Hall play over here turning into one of the most unmitigated disasters I ever had the misfortune to attend: Cooking With Elvis in the studio of the Maxim Gorki theatre Berlin in 2000.
Hall’s plays always have an exactly defined social background. The family home in Cooking With Elvis does not seem to be a daunting challenge for a set designer. Imagine my disbelief when I entered the studio of the Gorki and saw a cross between a sushi-bar and an American diner in rectangular shape surrounded by 63 bar stools for the audience. Immediately I thought of the old theatre joke when at the opening of the curtain a spectator takes a single look at the set, calls out: “Already bad” and heads for the cloakroom. This is what I should have done myself. Instead I took my seat next to the theatre’s artistic director of the time, incidentally a conspicuously overweight man, putting on my best poker-face.
The façade was already hard to keep up when at the start of the performance a tiny pink Cadillac trundled along on a track bearing amuse gueulles, either miniature pies or fruit gums in the form of hamburgers. Their stale taste provided a presentiment of things to come. The appearance of the two actresses was the biggest shock: The 38-year old bulimic Mam was played by a sturdy actress rather looking like 55 who for the whole evening signalled to us that she thought herself dreadfully miscast which was undeniably the case. The young girl with the weight problem was given to an actress as thin as a rake. This made a complete nonsense of all the conversations referring to the characters’ nutritional problems. I was accompanied by a friend who did not know the play and had to explain it to her later on the tube, as she thought these passages were written by a feeble imitator of Eugène Ionesco at his most surreal. Occasionally the characters came out of display cases stocked with Big Macs, French fries, wine gums, red paprika, pumpkins and cakes or went back there to lie down contortedly. Sightlines were a nuisance throughout, especially for the actor playing Dad who needs all the rapport with the audience he can get for his songs and monologues. Unfortunately he seemed intent on demonstrating what a dreadfully bad Elvis-impersonator his character used to be, whilst the only sensible advice from a director would be: Try to be as good as you possibly can, you will remain a very feeble copy of the real Elvis anyway.
One of the critics thought the play was situated in a “prole-milieu” which is not at all the case despite the rather low pay for schoolteachers in Britain, as the family received a substantial amount of compensation from an insurance company after Dad’s accident. He went on to say: “The cast permanently act hysteria, but you never feel even a hint of the desperation behind all this hysteria.” All the humour did not cost anything, but came across as clumsy and forced, and the individual scenes just clunked along. Another reviewer claimed that in Christina Friedrich’s production the characters remained “freaks”, because the director was only interested in the food metaphor and ignored the rest of the play. Therefore “everything appeared banal”, and there was not a single complex situation in sight. What is particularly infuriating on such evenings is that the audience will blame the author for all the misguided “ideas” the director had. At the Gorki theatre already during the meeting when the designer first presented his model for the set it would have been the artistic director’s duty to intervene. You do not need to be a theatrical genius to realise that from the start in such an environment even a more suitable cast would have been completely lost. In her day job at the Ernst Busch acting school in Berlin Christina Friedrich trains young directors. One can only wish her students all the best.
