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Stars explained: * A production of no real merit
with failings in all areas. ** A production showing evidence of not
enough time or effort, or even talent, and which never breathes any real
life into the piece – or a show lumbered with a terrible script. *** A
good enjoyable show which might have some small flaws but has largely
achieved what it set out to do.**** An excellent show which shows a
great deal of work and stage craft with no noticeable or major
flaws.***** A four star show which has found that extra bit of magic
which lifts theatre to another plane. |
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Borsada is a Greek with a gift
Greek tragedy: Peter Borsada as Ajax (centre) with the chorus - Rory Gill, Seb Salisbury, Olly Layzell, Jason Ho, Harry Jenkins, Sam Woodyatt Ajax Bridge House Theatre, Warwick ***** SOPHOCLES, Aeschylus and Euripides are
invariably mentioned in one breath. Yet there were a good many other
tragic playwrights competing for – and winning prizes at that time; just
as Aristophanes was just one of many comic poets. However these are the three tragedians whose
plays have survived, in such numbers as for us to be able to weigh up
their achievement. They are by no means of the same temperament.
Aeschylus, the earliest, represents a severer morality moving forward to
a reconciliatory one – almost like, say, the abolition of capital
punishment. Euripides points far ahead to – or by the 410s reflects - a
more complex, troubled, questioning society. Sophocles, in ways the most
cautious and conservative, seems in many ways the sanest. All three wrote an Electra play. It is
Sophocles' that is usually seen as the masterpiece (as well as the
source for Richard Strauss's opera). Yet the Electra story - the
classical Hamlet, with its brutal avenging murder and matricide
at the end, is as unforgiving as any. Ajax, which lies early in Sophocles'
output and thus nearer to Aeschylus, and which Warwick School Classical
Society has just presented at an ideal venue for the plays, the
projecting stage of the Bridge House Theatre, in a beautifully judged,
careful, perceptive and evocative production directed by David
Stephenson, is scarcely less unyielding. It tells of little more than the preface to,
preparation for and carrying through of the suicide of the Homeric hero
Ajax (Peter Borsada), maddened by a vindictive Athene into slaughtering
flocks and herds (believing them to be Agamemnon and his lackeys)
following the (post-Iliad) awarding of the dead Achilles' arms to
Odysseus. The last is an appalling slight to In a way the story itself seems slight; but not
so: as this intensely moving Warwick performance demonstrated, with its
massive cyclorama Athene towering over the stage, its self-disciplined
limiting to a blue and/or pink backdrop (Michael Ballard oversaw the
lights), the kaleidoscopic shifting emphases of the characters advising
and consoling Ajax to stave off the inevitable – with their finger in
the dyke, so to speak – and above all the empathetic, rationalising
chorus, this tragedy, like (say) Aeschylus' Prometheus Bound or
Euripides' Alcestis, reveals Greek drama at its most refined, its
most pared-down, its most bald and spare. The ancillaries suggested to a fine, on the ball
production even before it started. The printed programme's uncredited
cast photos, imaginatively shot and laid out more neatly and stylishly
than many a professional staging, were exemplary; so were other aspects
of the programme, notably historical notes, neither too much nor too
little (Melvin Cooley), with the inevitable but here well-chosen
illustrative vase paintings. This was to be no mere laudable but schooly
presentation; nothing pedestrian; but rather, something which took
itself seriously as a theatrical undertaking, and hit the mark.
The set (Rachael Brown), unveiled from the start,
looked professional too. A low hedge of reeds or brushwood, realistic,
sturdy-looking yet in no way cramping the action, ran across stage like
a hirsute nape of a neck. One recalls a similar restraint and simplicity
working well for a similar subject, Tippett's King Priam. A
plain, believable slightly rumpled but utterly apt-looking tent, a bit
medicinal, something Saladin might have known, or a Hellenic equivalent
of something out of Mash (and actually such tenting actually
features on vase paintings), as if one could sense a ward full of Ajax's
insomniac rantings, or splattered with his spurting blood. And not much
else to the set, apart from the hostile Athene's almost brutalistic
image, grotesquely towering above. It was enough to set the scene for the brilliant
Borsada's entry. Overpraising – though this was none - is rarely a help
to youthful performers. But Borsada is ahead of the game: already as
self-critical, scrupulous and mature a performer – and as gifted - as to
merit treating as a professional. To all intents and purposes he is one:
no mean feat for a boy at GCSE stage, the True, both characters. Sophicles' and Bennett's,
have Angst in droves. But the level of pain this You could believe this man-boy, bloodied like
some ghastly Expressionist outpouring, has just arrived from
slaughtering a flock of sheep. Bloody-tunicked, Borsada looked, as
Stephenson intended (presumably we owe it too to Costume Designer Judy
Reaves), as if he had just escaped the abattoir: and as if he himself
had narrowly avoided butchering. Thus he was doubly a victim when he arrived
onstage. Were This five-strong, likewise tunic-attired chorus
team (Rory Gill leading off, Olly Layzell, Sam Woodyatt, Harry Jenkins,
and the tenderly sympathetic Jason Ho) – it should have been six (Seb
Salisbury was missing - so surely some late line-reallocation was
needed) acted as sensitively as they did attentively from start to
finish. A visible feat of concentration. As so often with Attic Tragedy,
they were the other, the balancing stars.
How? Because of their differing, albeit meek
personalities, which offset each other effectively. Because of their
exemplary verse-speaking, largely impeccable: true, not so much as an
ensemble (which was fine, not out of the ordinary); but one by one, with
individual lines teased out by Stephenson from the main chorus – a
device needing careful prudence and planning - in the most natural way
imaginable (and these boys took to the art like ducks to water.) Because
of their patent empathy, mixed with puzzlement and devotion.
And above all, most dazzlingly of all, because of
the amazingly fine blocking – never predictable, and much of it wholly
original: the lads huddled, arched, tense, relaxed, tightly enclosed,
fusions of upstage and downstage facing; crafted like sculpture, and
looking like blocks one had never quite seen elsewhere. This shaping,
never gratuitous or approximate, was as much a visual feast as an
artistic and directorial triumph. The script which served these chorus boys so
superbly, although also uncredited, was E. F. Watling's Penguin
translation. Some five decades old, it seems today as bright as a
button. Many of the Penguin play translations were scrupulously honest
and tangibly more powerful for that. With these young voices this text,
with its natural poetry, would have been a joy to listen to, even had
there been no staging.
The quite substantial if lesser roles were well
taken, too, if more on a good ‘school play' level (Borsada is
unmistakably in a class of his own). The baddies are more
straightforward to pull off – Josh Heathcote's smug Agamemnon, not quite
a Brian Cox, was suitably arrogant, Joel Othen-Lawson's Menelaus
genuinely threatening, though both needed extra guidance on how to
differentiate, accentuate and vary character (perhaps Sophocles' fault,
more than the boys'). Ralph Davis was a stalwart, if stayed, Messenger.
Chloe Wilson as Tecmessa, Ajax's hapless Trojan wife, managed by her
mere presence to convey the helplessness of slave alongside that of
spouse, and did rather well. But the leads who mattered were, first, Bryn
Jones as not a vainglorious but deferential Odysseus – Cooley's
notes drew our attention to the wandering hero's vain attempts at
reconciliation with Ajax's ghost in the Odyssey's underworld
scenes – who joins the team of those seeking to alleviate Ajax's anguish
(albeit not by offering to give him the armour). Bryn Jones is almost too gentle, too
understanding, too philosophic a figure to get the right balance between
warrior and reconciler. But Odysseus was above all wily – ‘polymētis'
is his regular Homeric epithet; and Jones had wile and intelligence
galore – enough to get him through the ten year's wandering that await
Odysseus, and away from the clutches of Circe, Calypso and (sadly)
Nausicaa. It is Jones, here, who will dictate the play's ending – the
proper burial of Ajax, by convincing all that even one's enemy merits
decent burial (a telling, if not barbed, allusion to the Patroclus-infatuated
Achilles' gross maltreatment of Hector's body). Smart, then. But demure. Servant-like in
demeanour, loyal and attentive, he seemed the sort of figure one would
have liked for one's table-slave, appointments secretary, personal fag
or study-mate. And thus the unexpected role of Odysseus in this play,
the bridging and conciliatory, at the heart of Sophocles' intention, was
brought out markedly well. Jones had detail, a quietly complex
personality, and thus produced variety: this was a shy but involving, in
its way rather deft performance.
More important still was Teucer, Ajax's
half-brother (Elliott Grocock), more masculine and forceful than all of
them (Sophocles' two kings, despite their incontinent, vociferous
posturing, seem trivial and wet by comparison). Teucer (greatest of
archers) is the one who strives to turn the clock back, or bend the bow
back, by preventing Ajax from killing himself. His is the last ditch
attempt. And in the confidence, optimism, striving against
the odds, disappointment, disillusion, and then recovering authority,
Grocock too achieved a very full characterisation in a short time (Teucer
only enters late, after the Messenger who announces him and before the
brother monarchs appear). He has royalty and seniority mixed with youth
and impetuousness. Grocock brought a lot to this staging. But it was Borsada's It tells. The immaturity of Ajax's miffed,
humiliated gesture, the outpouring of passion and punctured pride, the
Expressionist protest of the self-immolation (with its Kandinsky-like
blood-red colouring), become more understandable if one realises these
are still thug-like lads, scarcely as mature as school prefects. The impact of Roderic Dunnett |
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