Lloyd Evans
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The last comment is relevant because Twelfth Night has already been supplanted by Frankenstein starring Benedict Cumberbatch and Jonny Lee Miller. After seven days, this will also be uprooted from the NT site and replaced. The idea is to funnel an audience into particular time slots and to increase charitable donations. But the NT could make far more money from a rolling pay-per-view system, as requested by numerous viewers worldwide. Too bad. Anyone who missed Twelfth Night can no longer see it. Even the stupidest YouTuber makes all his videos available permanently. And this is happening at a time when every theatre in the English-speaking world is dark. The NT has responded by locking up its Shakespeare archive and fending off the public with pitchforks.
Southwark Playhouse is offering two plays online, for free. Bound, a drama about Cornish trawlermen from 2011, is filmed on a single lens with inadequate sound. The static camerawork stiffens the drama, and the actors, without individual mics, are hard to understand. Doubtless the show was chosen because of its lockdown themes: eight fearful, angry and badly paid men are trapped in a vessel adrift in uncharted seas. The show’s brutal tone never varies and the irascible hearties spend every waking moment screaming and bullying each other. An escapist frivolity might have been preferable.
Further to its lockdown motif, Southwark offers Wasted (nicely shot with excellent sound), which is set in an isolated parsonage where four siblings are struggling to win artistic fame. Yes, it’s the Brontës. So why is the word ‘Brontë’, recognisable all over the world, not in the title? Carl Miller, who wrote the book, has done his research and discovered that ‘Bront-ee’ is the correct pronunciation and that ‘wuthering’ is a dialect word for ‘wiwld’ or ‘in tumult’.
Branwell is over-prominent, and yet he’s a fascinating character, well worth a play in his own right. He fancied himself as a painter, composer, novelist, poet, flautist and pugilist and he expected to achieve great things in every field he entered. But he was a quitter. ‘Artists must experience things. I am currently in the experiencing phase, not the finishing phase.’ A line that could have come from Withnail. His true talent lay elsewhere. ‘The only thing more tedious than living in Haworth is living in Haworth without sixpence for a drink.’ Jilted by a lover, he set fire to the family home. Evidently this inspired the climax of Jane Eyre which Charlotte is shown diligently writing. Before the sisters succeeded as novelists, they invested their life savings of £1,000 in a collection of their poetry. It sold two copies.
The show’s sparky first act succumbs to gloom and despair in the second. Emily croaks. Charlotte, boringly married to a clergyman, takes out her frustrations on Branwell. ‘You’re nothing but a self-obsessed, social-climbing, talentless, provincial nobody. And your painting was crap.’ This verbal style doesn’t quite square with the earlier, more poetic Charlotte, who admired a portrait of Wellington. ‘So broody and distant, with lips like wine.’ But the show deliberately mixes modernity with antiquity and delivers a snappy, energetic and entertainingly chaotic portrait of four fascinating characters.
Because you read about comedy
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