All My Sons, Apollo Theatre, London’s West End, September 2010

For a fistful of dollars would a man supply defective equipment to the front line of his own side in a war? Yes, because those dollars provide for his family, his sons, and his largesse to his neighbours. Such crooks can be good family men — think of the Mafia barons. But in this play, Joe Keller — brilliantly portrayed by David Suchet — is a warm character who loves everyone and would never stoop to any such shenanigans. Or so it appears. Arthur Miller wrote the play in 1945, and honed it to perfection before releasing it in 1947. Miller was a craftsman, with his hands as well as his pen, and saw this play as a make or break for him. It’s as close to perfection as you can get, and with direction by Howard Davies and a beautiful set by William Dudley, along with superb acting by the whole cast, it must be the best thing on the West End stage at the moment.

Zoë Wanamaker and David Suchet, photo by Nobby Clark

The play revolves around one character, Larry, who’s never on stage. He’s the son who disappeared during the war, but there was no body, no proof that he died, and his mother Kate — beautifully played by Zoë Wanamaker — refuses to believe he’s gone forever. She even gets a neighbour to construct an astrological chart to show he couldn’t have died on the day he disappeared. Stephen Campbell Moore was superb as the other son, Chris who survived the war, showing him to be the most reasonable, level-headed character you could imagine, and Jemima Rooper as the late Larry’s sweetheart Ann Deever was equally wonderful. They want to get married, but Kate won’t have it while Larry is still alive, and if she admits he’s dead . . . well her whole world will crash down. Why? When Daniel Lapaine as Ann’s brother George flies in to stop the marriage the audience hears another side of the story. Ann and George’s father, who was once Joe’s neighbour and business associate, went to prison for producing that defective equipment but George has just visited him and now thinks he’s innocent. Was he imprisoned unjustly? Can the wonderful, homely Joe Keller be the real culprit?

Ann, Joe, Chris and Kate, photo by Nobby Clark

Surely not, and they talk George round into being reasonable, until he eventually says, “I never felt at home anywhere but here”. But there’s more to come, including the issue of the impending marriage, and Kate’s denial that Larry is dead. So Ann is finally forced to bring out a letter from Larry she carries with her, and this leads to the final dénouement.

David Suchet, Zoë Wanamaker, and the others were so natural, I believed all the emotions I saw on display, and Miller’s play has a deft logic that packs a huge emotional punch. I came out feeling utterly drained . . . and I was merely in the audience! How do the actors do it — night after night?

Unfortunately there are very few nights left, as the run ends on October 2^nd. It’s a sell-out of course, but worth any number of phone calls and trips to the theatre to get returns.

Blood and Gifts, National Theatre, NT Lyttelton, September 2010

On September 9^th, 2001 Ahmed Shah Massoud (aka The Lion of Panjshir) was assassinated by two suicide bombers — Al Qaeda agents posing as journalists. Two days later more suicide bombers crashed planes into the World Trade Center and the Pentagon. The rest is history, as they say . . . meaning history that we remember. What we don’t remember is what led up to these events in 2001, and more particularly what led up to the Soviet retreat from Afghanistan in 1989 to 1991, and the subsequent evacuation of American interest in the country. That’s what this new play by J T Rogers is about.

Lloyd Owen for the CIA and Adam James for MI6, photo by Richard Hubert Smith

The characters are fictitious, but true to history, and various historical figures, such as the Northern Alliance leader Massoud, and the viciously fundamentalist warlord Gulbudddin Hekmatyar, are mentioned in passing. I particularly liked Lloyd Owen as the young CIA agent James Warnock, who understood what was going on, and was able to some extent to influence the raising and spending of American funds. His British counterpart, MI6 agent Simon Craig, was flamboyantly portrayed by Adam James as a brilliant chap who had no money to spend, even on his own transportation, and fell rather too easily into an irascible mood, catalysed by alcohol. His criticisms of Mrs. Thatcher’s tight-fisted policy with money for MI6 were trenchant, and made a stark contrast to the well-lubricated CIA machine, where the issues were of policy rather than lack of interest by the powers at home. The CIA tried calling the shots and circumventing the ISI (Pakistan’s InterServices Intelligence) by supporting another warlord, rather than Hekmatyar, but in the end Craig was right about not trusting anyone, “All this — it’s chess, Jim. Never good to get attached to one particular piece”. We found that out the hard way following the rise of the Taliban in Afghanistan, and we ought to realise it now with the ground prepared for a second Taliban takeover.

The CIA with the Mujahideen, photo by Richard Hubert Smith

Among the large cast, Demosthenes Chrysan was very good as the fictitious Abdullah Khan, an Afghan warlord who looked rather like the real life Ismail Khan, one-time governor of Herat. His son Saeed was well played by Philip Arditti, and Matthew Marsh played the KGB agent Dmitri Gromov as a very sympathetic character. The ISI head, Colonel (later Brigadier) Afridi was played as decisive and smug by Gerald Kyd, leading an organisation that was, and still is, trying to hold Pakistan together by promoting Islamists to fight battles around their borders, but it’s a doomed strategy, just as was the American strategy of supporting Islamist extremists against the Soviet Union. You feed a monster to fight your perceived enemies, but when they are defeated the monster turns on you to feed its increased appetite.

Good direction by Howard Davies, clear simple designs by Ultz, and atmospheric music by Marc Teitler. If you don’t really know the chain of events, this play is a good history lesson, and if you do remember all this stuff, it’s well worth seeing if only to feel yourself trapped within the frustrations of the secret agents. They try to avoid being pawns of the ISI, as well as battling the personal frustrations of being barely in contact with their pregnant wives, yet unable to share the pain that their postings put them in. The play ends as 1991 turns into 1992 and the Americans leave for home — I await the sequel.

Performances continue until November 2.

The White Guard, National Theatre, Lyttelton, May 2010

Stalin loved this play by Mikhail Bulgakov about the aftermath of the revolution in 1917. It’s set in Bulgakov’s home town of Kiev, capital of the Ukraine, which had achieved autonomy in 1917, before becoming a founder member of the Soviet Union in 1922. He’d served as a doctor during the second half of the First World War, and writing later about the years between 1917 and 1920 he said, “The inhabitants of Kiev reckon that there were eighteen changes of power. Some stay-at-home memoirists counted up to twelve of them. I can tell you that there were precisely fourteen, and what’s more I personally lived through ten of them”.

In 1920 he wrote a play about these confusing events, called The Turbin Brothers (the name Turbin came from his mother’s side of the family), but destroyed it, and during 1921–23 turned it into a novel, The White Guard. In 1925 he adapted the novel as a play for the Moscow Art Theatre, and after the censor passed it, with various cuts and additions, the premiere took place in 1926, under the title, The Days of the Turbins. This play, full of pathos and humour expressing the confusion and misplaced sense of honour surrounding the aftermath of the revolution, became a huge success, but the critics were almost entirely hostile, and in 1929, after Stalin made adverse comments about Bulgakov’s work, it was taken off. Then in 1932, Stalin, who had already seen the play numerous times, casually enquired why they were no longer performing it. The theatre immediately put it on again, and in 1934 at its five hundredth performance, wrote to Bulgakov that, “The Turbins has become another Seagull for the new generation . . .”. But it was not to last, and as Bulgakov’s wife Elena wrote in her diary in 1937 and 1938, “Today in Pravda there was an article . . . about the Moscow Art Theatre. There was not a single word in it about The Turbins, and when they listed the Soviet-era dramatists who have been performed in the Art Theatre, Bulgakov’s name wasn’t even there!”

This new production of The Turbins, now called The White Guard, has been adapted by Andrew Upton.  Its large cast of over twenty was headed by Richard Henders and Justine Mitchell, who brilliantly played the roles of Nikolai Turbin and his sister Lena, a sympathetic woman much adored by all the men staying in the house. The last to arrive at the Turbin household is the student and poet, Larion, very well portrayed as a bit of klutz and dreamer by Pip Carter. The Hetman — the Ukrainian leader — who flees under the protection of the Germans, was strikingly played, almost as a Yes Minister character by Anthony Calf, and his aide-de-camp Leonid, the only occupant of the house in whom Lena has any romantic interest, was very well portrayed as a man of the world by Conleth Hill. Good direction by Howard Davies, and the designs by Bunny Christie gave a fine sense of space to the Turbins’ apartment and a claustrophobic sense to the spaces occupied by the military. They were complemented by Neil Austin’s excellent lighting, and the production was enhanced with music arranged by Dominic Muldowney.

Performances continue until July 7, and the £3 programme is a gem containing helpful excerpts and comments by Julie Curtis of Wolfson College, Oxford. The quotations I wrote above are all taken from her notes.

Burnt by the Sun, National Theatre, May 2009

This is based on a 1994 movie by Rustam Ibragimbekov and Nikita Mikhalkov, and was turned into a play by Peter Flannery. The story takes place in 1936 as Stalin’s reign of terror is just picking up steam, and it deals with the destruction of General Sergei Kotov, whose idealism and strength of character were well portrayed by Ciaran Hinds. His wife Maroussia was convincingly played by Michelle Dockery, and her ex-fiancé Mitya (Dmitri Andreevich) was coolly and engagingly played by Rory Kinnear. He arrives unexpectedly at their dacha where Kotov lives in retirement with his daughter, wife, and members of her family of ex-aristocrats, and it is clear that Mitya and Maroussia still have strong feelings for one another. Mitya is a cultivated lover of the arts who plays the piano and listens to recordings of Puccini operas, and has been living abroad since disappearing suddenly several years ago, with no word of explanation to Maroussia. The reason was that Kotov got rid of him by having him forcibly recruited into the NKVD (a secret police and intelligence service), which sent him to Paris to spy on Russian émigrés. Kotov realises Mitya may try to take revenge, but feels secure in his personal connection with Stalin. He is close to the sun, but burnt by it, as Mitya falsely accuses him of spying for the Germans and Japanese, has him beaten up and taken away by NKVD agents. As for Mitya, he commits suicide. Throughout the play there are sexual undertones. Kotov seems to have a relationship with his ten year old daughter that some matrons in Maroussia’s family regard as too close, and he calls Mitya ‘pretty boy’ in a demeaning way that may reflect consciousness of a repressed adulation that Mitya bears him.

The acting was excellent. Not only did Ciaran Hinds, Michelle Dockery and Rory Kinnear play their parts extremely well, the members of Maroussia’s family were all realistically portrayed. Howard Davies directed well and the designs by Vicki Mortimer were very effective.

I understand there was once a plan to end with historical information on a screen — I would have liked that. Sergei Kotov, Commander in the Red Army was shot on 12 October 1936; his wife Maroussia was sentenced to 10 years in a prison camp where she died in 1940; his daughter Nadia was arrested with her mother, and now lives in retirement in Kazakhstan. They were rehabilitated on 27 November 1956 — Stalin died in 1953.