FEATURE: Look Left – London Dispatch
Last week I hopped about Europe and landed in London, where I caught three plays. Below is a quick roundup look at each:
The cast of “The Antipodes” at the National Theatre. Photo by Manuel Harlan.
“The Antipodes” (New Play, The National Theatre): Pulitzer Prize-winner Annie Baker’s play “The Antipodes” left me so flabbergasted when I caught its 2017 world premiere at Signature Theatre in New York that I jumped at the chance to see it again. Now enjoying its London debut with Ms. Baker doing double duty as director, this intentionally ambiguous and ambitious play is set in a writer’s room for an unnamed project as five dudes, one token lady, and a notetaker share stories in an attempt to develop something new for their boss, Sandy, whose only real guidelines seem to be: “No dwarves or elves or trolls.” Huddled around a conference table for the entirety of the play—the passage of time punctuated by assistant Sarah taking lunch orders, entering the room in a new outfit each time—the proceedings become increasingly fantastical and surreal as the group procrastinates and spitballs, hours of block stretching into weeks as time and reality seem to spin into oblivion. How many kinds of stories are there? Is it possible to come up with one that is wholly original? Where did those take out containers come from? These are just some of the many questions that populate your mind during this hysterically funny and ultimately mysterious play. A modern triumph.
Claire Skinner, Toby Stephens, and Storme Toolis in “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg”. Photo by Marc Brenner.
“A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” (Revival Play, Trafalgar Studios): playwright Peter Nichols passed away just a few weeks before this revival of his greatest and most-celebrated play began on the West End. Written in 1967 and inspired by his own experience, “A Day in the Death of Joe Egg” is about a married couple, Sheila and Bri, struggling to keep their marriage afloat as they care for their 16 year-old daughter, Josephine, who has cerebral palsy that renders her non-verbal, immobilized in a chair, and given to seizures. As popular discourse around disability has thankfully evolved considerably since the 1960s, the play remains remarkably current precisely because it is the product of a writer who cared for, and buried, a daughter with cerebral palsy. As is so often the case, Sheila and Bri cope with the caregiving difficulties they shoulder in different ways: she with a cheerful grace and he with a casual comic façade hiding his own frustration and personal disappointment. A visit from two supposedly well-intentioned friends in act two reveals how ignorant the outside world can be of the love a parent holds for a disabled child, and how unaware it can be of the added routines of care that become second nature. Having grown up in a home with an older sister who had multiple disabilities, and ultimately passed away, I was deeply moved by Nichols’ authentic portrait of this family, the truth of which had made his play a timeless classic.
Natey Jones, Wendell Pierce, Sharon D. Clarke, and Sope Dìrísù in “Death of a Salesman”. Photo by Brinkhoff Mogenburg.
“Death of a Salesman” (Revival Play, Piccadilly Theatre): Arthur Miller’s 1949 Tony Award and Pulitzer Prize-winning masterpiece “Death of a Salesman” features an all-black Loman Family in this new production by directors Marianne Elliot and Miranda Cromwell for the Young Vic now on the West End. Casting the Lomans as an African-American family shifts the impact and meaning of this play about the illusion of the American Dream in ways big and small. Most glaringly, it speaks to the universality of Miller’s text that the predicament and tragedy of his characters transmutes easily across race and time. Though still set in 1949, but for a handful of contemporaneous references, the play could have been written yesterday. Indeed, the brilliance of Miller’s words is also a reason why Ms. Elliot and Ms. Cromwell’s decision to interpolate songs into the play is so distracting and unfortunate. Instead of letting the fact of an all-black Loman Family speak for itself (as it would, otherwise), a range of songs reflecting a culturally-wide pallet of musical styles in the African-American tradition unnecessarily punctuate moments of the play, and their lack of cultural specificity to the time and place of the setting is baffling (and borderline offensive). This would not fly in America, nor would the painfully inaccurate Brooklyn accents. Still, the production is saved by a magnificent set design and a duo of outstanding performances by Wendell Pierce as Willy Loman and, most notably, Sharon D. Clarke as his wife, Linda.
