The Vapour Trail

To merely step into the auditorium of the Old Vic Theatre in Southwark, London, got up at present for Anna Mackmin’s production of Dancing at Lughnasa, is to experience a kind of dusky thrill. Once the home for blood-and-thunder melodrama and reviled by West End critics for its crude sensationalism, the theatre is now a great, airy, elegant space, its elaborately-decorated Victorian tiers and boxes kept discreet in shades of cream and pale green. There is no stage, but rather a flat space in the middle in which the actors perform in the round.

The set for Dancing at Lughnasa is a simple kitchen arranged as if outdoors, with the bare boughs of a tree overhanging the room, and grass and rocks beneath the feet of those in the front rows. With the plain rusticity of the set and all that space beneath the great dome of the auditorium, taking one’s seat felt like stepping into a clear still evening, in the near-night of an entirely different place. This feeling of muted enchantment which came before Dancing at Lughnasa began lasted to its end. I am still of two minds, however, as to whether this was a good thing or not.

Written by Brian Friel, perhaps Ireland’s most esteemed playwright, Dancing at Lughnasa is set in rural Donegal during the Great Depression, during a week of festivities for the Celtic harvest-god, Lugh. It tells the story of five sisters, the Mundys, all living together and unmarried, who are collectively bringing up the illegitimate son of one of them: Michael, son of Chris (played by Andrea Corr, of The Corrs, here making an impressive theatrical debut).

Really, the play is all about loss or the presentiment of it: the coming loss of the pagan rituals of old Ireland and the Catholic faith of its austere rural communities in the 1930s, loss of the enchanted greenness of one’s childhood and more specifically, of the fierce intimacy shared by the sisters at the centre of the play. But the whole thing is told with such a beautiful modesty and with a hushed almost-detachment that one feels at one remove from the sadness throughout. This was a difficult and ambivalent experience, to be honest, and I am still wondering about it.

I think one of the reasons one feels this almost-numbness during the play is because it is presented as a series of memories by Michael, the illegitimate son. The action is framed by Michael’s narration of events taking place in his childhood, a week in which his uncle Jack, a disgraced priest, returns from years in a Ugandan leper mission. Occasionally, the adult Michael steps in to tell us things about his memories of Jack’s return and his family’s reactions to him. But we never see him as a child himself in those memories. He is always either hiding in nearby bushes or else represented as an invisible presence – the characters, if speaking to directly to him, address a mere space in the air.

The rest of the time, Michael is merely standing to one side of the set, looking on passively at his mother and aunts’ complex relationships, just as we do in the audience. Through this means one is thus made to inhabit his own semi-aloofness, and to feel at best his restrained nostalgia for people and hopes and customs now long gone.

Another reason for my hard-to-place reaction to this play comes, I think, from the fact that Friel writes in such a delicately-wrought and yet humble way. There is no aggressive tilting for dramatic effect here  (although occasionally one or two of the actors overstepped themselves, including the crucial scene  in which the sisters dance together at a supposedly artless juncture, shrieking and leaping with what I thought was an overdone gaiety). The script is instead written with an unassuming lyricism and its multi-layered events are quietly woven together, like a plain but dense circlet of leaves. Because of this, I keep finding myself returning to it now, touching its unglossed surfaces in jet lag-induced moments like this one, feeling a slow ache rising from it like a deep-set bruise.

The ultra-commercial end of the carnivalesque market. That’s the variety-show, La Clique, currently playing at the London Hippodrome. It’s very much the queer people doing their thing for the straights. No one in the audience dressed up for the show, and it was punctuated by inducements to the patrons to buy programs and overpriced drinks at the bar. Let not that deter you, though: with a sense of the feel-good as well as the freakish, it still makes for a happily rollicking night out.

Fancy watching a double-jointed ‘rubber man’ push his body through the frame of a tennis racket a mere ten inches in diameter, squeezing it painfully over protuberant nipple rings? Listening to a mountainous black drag queen singing Radiohead’s ‘I’m a Creep’, her voice vibrating somewhere between Shirley Bassey and Antony & the Johnsons? Clapping as a girl burns off her pasties and the front of her g-string with a cigarette bummed from the crowd? Well ladies and gentlemen, well fellow tourists and suburbanites, La Clique is the walk on the wild-side we’ve waiting for. Prepare to laugh and groan and sing Queen lyrics during proceedings, and to applaud a lot at the end.

What struck me most during La Clique was how little removed this kind of show is from the variety theatre or music halls of the late-Victorian years. Certainly, the knowing queerness of some of its acts gives La Clique an inflection that variety theatre did not possess back in the day of the portly queen. But still, the similarities are striking enough. There’s the same emphasis on physical oddity, the same exhibition of bodily virtuosity, a similar instance of cross-dressing and the encouragement of participation from the crowd. Even the hard sell with the drinks, I gather, is pretty much the same. Then of course there’s the tendency to blue humour: Laura Ormiston Chant surely turns in her grave when La Clique begins of a night.

Seeing La Clique at the London Hippodrome, in the heart of the West End’s Theatreland, emphasised these historical connections for me. As a consequence, the whole night was full of the ghosts of variety-acts, adding an agreeably spectral dimension to its boisterous display.

Last year I wrote a post about Dan Leno’s act ‘Queen of My Heart’, in which he played a bashed wife in a parody of romantic song. Really, the post was about the whole genre of songs concerning domestic violence and masculine anger towards women which I had encountered in acts performed on the 1880-90s Australian variety stage.

The post, perhaps provocatively entitled ‘Clownish Misogyny’, attracted a number of comments by Leno aficionados. They objected to his act being singled out in this way. It was wrong, they said, to make Leno the poster-boy for music-hall songs about misogyny. Most of his repertoire was about men making fun of themselves, and when he played women it was with a pathos and a knowingness underlying the comic shtick which gave them an emotional complexity of their own.

I was amazed, given this exchange, to find Tony Lidington performing ‘Queen of My Heart’ in his performance, Dan Leno: The King’s Jester (reviewed in my last post). Having seen it, I can see that in many ways those commenting on the post were right. That song, at least, is more a painfully matter-of-fact commentary on the reality lived by battered women than a humorous attack upon them. And yes, it portrays the ‘heroine’ getting ready to give back as good as she got later in the night.

The joke, then, is on romantic sentimentality far more than the woman herself in the song. But still, there is something highly uncomfortable about it from this retrospective vantage. The notion that a woman being bashed about might be presented in comic mode in any sense is uncomfortable, however much of a pathetic undercurrent the performance possessed.

As Lidington presents it in Dan Leno, songs about the underside of lower working-class married life were a feature of Leno’s early routines in the London halls, as indeed they were of others’ routines at the time. Leno was steered away from this subject matter by the managers of the halls once he went big towards the end of the 1880s, however, when the business was aiming aggressively at a wider-than-working-class clientele.

‘Queen of My Heart’ may not have been representative of Leno’s entire oeuvre, then, but it was characteristic of a certain genre among his performances early in his music-hall career. The recordings he later made did not cover this period of his performing life,  and so do not capture the tenor of those early songs.

Note: The above image is a picture of Leno as a panto dame by Stanley Cock, and was sourced from the About Postcards blog.

He may have died in 1904 in a mental asylum at 43, but the Victorian music-hall comedian and pantomime dame, Dan Leno, lives on in an extraordinary travelling production about his life. It has often been lamented that no film of Leno’s acts were made, so that a sense of what allegedly made him ‘the funniest man on earth’ can only now be imagined from written reports and a few crackling recordings. In Tony Lidington’s extraordinary performance as Leno in Dan Leno: The King’s Jester, however, one finds the next-closest thing.

Although he was the most highly-paid musical-hall performer of his generation, achieving celebrity at the same time that the London halls themselves reached the peak of their acclaim, Leno was a vulnerable and ultimately broken-down man. He came to success only after grinding years as a child performer and competitive clog-dancer on the gritty Victorian travelling-show circuit, with a drunken and probably violent father (and later, stepfather) blighting his early life. Leno was also a committed unionist who atttempted to take on the fat cats of the entertainment industry by setting up rival music halls of his own. They crushed the endeavour as ruthlessly as they exploited their performers in the years just before Leno’s breakdown.

No doubt in part because of these things, there was always something troubled and painful about Leno’s acts, infusing even the brightest of his comic routines. This observation was often made by those who attended his shows, and contributed to the compelling nature of his persona on stage. 

This mix of melancholia and hilarity is also what makes Lidington’s performance so arresting. During Dan Leno, he performs a goodly number of the man’s most famous routines (‘Queen of My Heart’, ‘The Shopwalker’, a set-piece from one of his dame performances, and ’The Hard-Boiled Egg and the Wasp’ among them). In each case, the acts are rendered as emotionally fraught, simultaneously funny and sad. They are also interspersed with a narrative about Leno’s life in a beautiful, eloquent, and tautly structured script which Lidington wrote himself on the basis of careful research.

Dan Leno: The King’s Jester is a collaboration between the Georgian Theatre Royal (Richmond) and Lidington’s own company, Promenade Productions. It isn’t at all a slick show – it’s built to be shown in anything from large halls to smallish rooms, with a basic-looking though cleverly-designed pack-away set. I saw it during a theatre-history conference at the University of Exeter last week; it is now in North Yorkshire and will continue touring until late May (see the tour schedule here).

Still, slick would be all wrong for this glimpse into Leno’s difficult and arguably glorious life. And given his origins as an itinerant performer, its own character as a travelling show is certainly apt. If you’re interested in the music hall or the history of stand-up comedy, and if you can see Dan Leno before it ends in late May, I really think you must.

(NB the above image comes from this web-page about Leno, and also appears in the V&A Museum’s theatre collections. Now I wonder where Charlie Chaplin got his sartorial sense from?)

The fact that a male Japanese playwright became intrigued by the life of the Marquis de Sade and chose to present it from the perspective of women closest to him whet my interest in Yukio Mishima’s Madame de Sade, now playing at London’s Wyndhams Theatre. Perhaps it was an attempt to demolish the indulgent misogynist from a proto-feminist vantage, I wondered? How interesting.

Well no, actually. Notwithstanding the fact that Judi Dench and the lovely Rosamund Pike play the starring roles, Madame de Sade is a ridiculous and (what is worse) an uninteresting play.

It really is ridiculous. For a start, the characters narrate background facts about the Marquis de Sade’s various scandals in an annoyingly didactic way while pretending to be in ordinary conversation. And then periodically, one or other of them – Pike’s Madame de Sade or her sister Anne (Fiona Button) or their dissolute acquaintance, the Comtesse de Saint-Fond (Frances Barber) – launch into soliloquies about epiphanies they’ve experienced while contemplating the Marquis’ deeds. Some of them decide that they are the Marquis in some mystical, glorious fashion, or that his evil is holiness and at one with the universe, or that he is building a light from filth and a back stairway to heaven: yes, the talk really is as breathless as this, only it goes on much longer. The script is so full of avant-garde posturing my muscles ache just thinking about it.

There was also a strange disconnect between the characters throughout the play, which may it clear that Mishima, that deeply troubled playwright, was essentially uninterested in the relationships between them. Far from presenting an empathetic feminine perspective, he doesn’t appear to have cared about the women in the play at all. They are simply there to be mouthpieces for his views, props for his own confused insights about sadism, beauty, pain, &c &c &c – the very antithesis of a proto-feminist approach.

This disconnect between the characters was most apparent in the case of Judi Dench’s Madame de Montreuil, mother to the Madame de Sade. Her character is yet another crotchety dowager, much like her Elizabeth I in Shakespeare in Love. The Madame de Montreuil is constantly scheming to save the family’s name or her daughter’s virtue: motivated by self-interest, but genuinely affronted by her son-in-law’s corruptions. While other characters speak beatifically about their love-making with him, however, or while yet another preposterous soliloquy about the sacredness of profanity is offered in her presence, this dowager stands woodenly about on the stage, as if somehow unable to hear. Her next lines are delivered almost as if oblivious to what happened just before them.

There is nothing terrible about her performance – this is Judi Dench we’re talking about, after all, and I am grateful for the chance to have seen her. But her character is so hopelessly stiff, and was so evidently of little interest to the playwright himself, that there is nothing to love about it either.

Perhaps some of this sourness on my part is the curmudgeonly jet-lag talking. Admittedly, I saw the play through a fog of sleep-deprivation. And there were other people around me making positive noises among themselves once the curtain went down. The production is well-acted, with a fabulous cast, and sumptuous to look at. But really, I tell you, I’m shocked that this ‘little-seen’ play (as the publicity describes it) was here given the light of day.

Madame de Sade plays at Donmar at Wyndham’s Theatre, Charing Cross Rd, London, until 23 May 2009.

The above image comes from skyARTS.