Lloyd Evans
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Strange, perhaps, to define a good production by what it lacks but The Burial at Thebes (a version of Antigone translated by Seamus Heaney) is an exemplary production of a Greek tragedy. The Athenians wrote small plays. The scripts are short, the cast few and the staging simple to the point of crudity, but directors are often intimidated by the 5th century and feel they need to put on a gymkhana. So you get garish multilayered designs, sets made of helmets and crockery, complicated dances and ‘big’ acting. Quite often you get jackboots. None of that in Lucy Pitman-Wallace’s superbly grave and finely acted production which lets the horror and the grandeur emerge on their own. Abby Ford beautifully captures Antigone’s prim, urgent self-righteousness and Paul Bentall (with his balding hair done in a Napoleonic comb-forward) is excellent as the weak, blinkered tough guy, Creon. I’d recommend this production to anyone, especially those who are put off by the bloodthirsty weirdness of Greek tragedy.
Peter Brook, rather like the 5th century, has an aura of menacing profundity and I wasn’t looking forward to Fragments, a set of five Beckett playlets at the Young Vic. Some of it is ill conceived and boring so it’s best, as always with Beckett, to ignore the obscure and celebrate the good. In the first sketch a cripple asks a blind violinist if he’s going to die. ‘Not yet. I’m not unhappy enough.’ The second piece, Act Without Words II, is a mime involving a pair of characters, one absurdly happy, the other absurdly sad, who sleep in sacks and are rudely awakened at dawn by a silver rod that falls from the sky to prod them on the head. Jabbed to life they go about the day’s business like automata. This brief, silly sketch somehow encapsulates something shocking and ludicrous about life. Vintage Beckett. Come and Go — a well-known short piece — can be ponderous and pretentious but Brook brings out its daft, elegant melodrama brilliantly. In Rockaby an old woman comes to terms with loneliness and extinction by muttering a few simple phrases to herself. The piece is literary but its effects seem to belong to other media, to music, or even to architecture. The delicate crenellations of the words, constantly repeated with tiny, flowering alterations, are as tender and fascinating as an Isfahan mosaic. It’s an easy piece to do badly. It’s an easy one to mock, too, but not here: Kathryn Hunter’s ghostly face and frail throaty voice are beautiful, terrible and unforgettable.
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