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.

After the Dance, National Theatre, NT Lyttelton, June 2010

“I love you, now change” is not a line in this play, but the young Helen lives this cliché, and at first seems to make it believable. Within a month she’s fallen in love with David Scott-Fowler and manages to get him to stop the drinking that’s destroying his liver. Her determined superficiality shatters her fiancé Peter Scott-Fowler, upends David’s 12 year marriage, and destroys his wife Joan. While these people wear the masks of gaiety and jest, and seem almost to have become their masks, reality persists beneath the surface, and the only person to fully comprehend it is John Reid, who lives with David and Joan in their spacious London flat as a self-confessed court jester, with a strong penchant for the drinks tray.

David with Helen

In the end it is John who tells David the truth about himself that kills the incipient marriage to Helen, and returns him to his former life, now as a widower. In the meantime we are treated to superb acting. Adrian Scarborough is brilliant as John, and Benedict Cumberbatch and Nancy Carroll are entirely convincing as the ever cool David and his wife Joan, who loves him but gaily pretends to be just as cool, so as not to bore him. Faye Castelow portrays Helen as a bossy little ingénue, and John Hefferman is a rather edgy Peter, who tries to take life seriously, but doesn’t quite succeed.

David playing Avalon for Joan

What I loved about this fine production by Thea Sharrock, apart from the spacious and elegant designs by Hildegard Bechtler, was the music. Certainly the play features the 1920s foxtrot ‘Avalon’ towards the end of each act, but the melody was pinched from Puccini, albeit in a disguised form, and in this production we also hear the original. For those who know it, this is powerfully suggestive because it’s the music behind E lucevan le stelle from the opera Tosca. Cavaradossi sings it before he dies, knowing that these are his last moments, and it was played here just before Joan goes out to the balcony on her own, never to return, and again at the end when David decides to return to the drinking that will destroy him.

This riveting play by Terence Rattigan had the misfortune to open in June 1939, shortly before war was declared, and when the country’s mood rapidly changed it was taken off. So it failed to enjoy a good run, and Rattigan left it out of the collected plays he published in 1953. It’s been somewhat ignored for that reason, but this production and cast do it full justice, and I recommend booking tickets before word gets out.

Performances continue until August 11^th — for details click here.

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.

The Power of Yes, National Theatre, January 2010

In Spring 2009 the National Theatre asked David Hare to write a play about the financial crisis precipitated on 15^th September 2008. That was when the US Government rejected an appeal to rescue Lehmann Brothers in New York, and liquidity between banks collapsed. The result is this play about a writer trying to get to grips with what happened and why. He has meetings with numerous experts and important players, including that magnificent Hungarian guru, George Soros, who tells us how he learned from his father all about the Russian revolution, a lesson he never forgot. Things can go suddenly very badly wrong, defying the self-professed experts, who can’t imagine that the worst-case scenarios will ever happen. This is backed up by another of his interlocutors, David Freud, a government advisor who now works with the Conservative opposition, when he mentions his father leaving Austria in 1938, the year of the Anschluss with Nazi Germany. By contrast many of the bankers were unable to see what was coming because of a lack of historical perspective, and in the case of the Royal Bank of Scotland boss, an acquisitions geek named Fred Goodwin, couldn’t see anything beyond their own aggrandisement.

The powerful people who attract the most contempt are the previous British Chancellor of the Exchequer — now Prime Minister — Gordon Brown, and to a slightly lesser extent the previous Federal Reserve Chairman, Alan Greenspan, with his zeal for Ayn Rand’s book Atlas Shrugged. The governor of the Bank of England, Mervyn King also attracts a few negative comments, but otherwise the author’s interlocutors come over as sensible, intelligent people who were caught up in events beyond their control. David Hare has constructed a play that gives the audience a nuanced insight into what happened and why, and it should be required viewing for anyone who thinks it was all simply a question of greed.

Most of the performance took place on an empty stage, with only the occasional chair, and at the end two chairs and a long table, to disturb the clear telling of a story. It worked very well, with a large cast headed by Anthony Calf as the author. He was entirely convincing, as were the other actors, some of whom appeared in different roles. The exits and entrances came fast on one another, giving the story drive and urgency. I liked Bruce Myers as George Soros, and he has the last word in recounting a conversation with Alan Greenspan in Zürich, when he flatly contradicted Greenspan’s airy optimism. Perhaps the man who invented the phrase “irrational exuberance” had a little of it himself.

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.