Samuel Beckett or Eeyore? One of theatre’s best-ever viral videos (who thought of it?) was unleashed on Twitter in advance of the Old Vic’s brace of Becketts last week. The stars of Endgame and Rough for Theatre II – Alan Cumming, Jane Horrocks, Karl Johnson and Daniel Radcliffe – were shown quotations and asked which came from the character in The House at Pooh Corner and which from the author of Waiting for Godot. “No Give and Take. No Exchange of Thought… It gets you nowhere.” Who is that? It’s harder than you think.
This doesn’t prove that Beckett should have switched to writing bedtime stories, or that AA Milne was predicting life under nuclear threat (Endgame was written in 1957), but it does provide a useful check on reverence – and suggests that individual lines are weighted by what surrounds them. It also bears out one of Endgame’s famous saws: “nothing is funnier than unhappiness”. Other people’s, obviously.
Director Richard Jones emphasises the comic woebegone, both in the skimpy, rarely seen Rough for Theatre II – in which a florid Alan Cumming and a bureaucratic Daniel Radcliffe swap notes about a man threatening to jump from a window – and in Endgame, the baleful deathwatch drama, which is more pungent than the sanctified Waiting for Godot.
The result is an evening that is studded with arresting moments but lacks really powerful darkness. The deadly dynamic between central characters is not urgent. Still, Cumming, blind and gap-toothed, is a commanding presence. Stuck in a high armchair, sometimes with crook in hand like a parody good shepherd, he is posh and wittily malign, proving that even when wan, Beckett can be luscious. Radcliffe puts in an extremely agile turn, scampering up and sliding down ladders, but his acting is almost entirely in gestures. He never suggests that his movements are generated from inside; when he hobbles you can almost see the stage directions.
in Endgame. Photograph: Manuel Harlan
The two aged dustbin dwellers are magnetic. Karl Johnson, as Nagg – “He’s crying.” “Then he’s living” – is simple and grave. Jane Horrocks is extraordinary as Nell – her face is a sort of holding operation, completely taken over by a gummy mouth that slides around wildly. I can’t be the first person to wonder, as these two rear up from their bins, whether Beckett ever tuned into British TV in the early 50s and watched Bill and Ben, the Flower Pot Men. Is children’s entertainment at the root of everything?
“Young adult” wasn’t a category that existed in Beckett’s day, when teenagers were waiting to happen. Louise O’Neill seized on the category four years ago with her novel Asking for It, and produced a fierce fiction about sexual assault and consent. A teenager, high on drink and excitement at a party, is set upon by schoolboy “friends”: penetrated, roughed up and dumped half-naked on her parents’ doorstep. Pictures are posted on social media; she gets blamed, not least by herself – after all, she was flirting. And she is pretty…
Annabelle Comyn’s production of Asking for It the play comes with advice about where audience members can find help should they have been disturbed by the play’s subject matter. It’s an impeccable project and delivers some jolts. In a strong cast, Lauren Coe is particularly impressive as the girl who has always been a belle and, who, when she fails to please others, feels cut off from herself: her thoughts present themselves as voiceovers. Design by Paul O’Mahony (set), Jack Phelan (video) and Sinéad McKenna (lighting) traps her in a world which starts off super-bright and ends in utter darkness: transparent glass walls become a black box riddled with worms of light.
Photograph: Ros Kavanagh
This stage version by Meadhbh McHugh, in collaboration with Comyn, is vivid in showing adolescent sexual tumult – a terrific dance sequence is both exhilarating and alarming – and powerful about the practical consequences of speaking up: a victim doubts herself, a family is undermined. Yet too much is explained rather than embodied; the action feels silted up and protracted. It does not need an interval; it does need a cut. There is a fierce play in here but it needs to be shorter and sharper.
Riverside Studios has reopened gleamingly after six years in redevelopment, with an impressive spread of cinemas, screening room and restaurants, an astounding use of a musical instrument – and a drab production.
The Earth Harp – billed as the world’s longest stringed instrument – is the highlight of Persona. Its base is on the stage, its 1,000ft strings stretch across the auditorium above the audience’s heads: played by William Close, who invented it and sways behind it as if he were pumping it up, it becomes a performance of its own.
Director Paul Schoolman’s leaden new adaptation of Ingmar Bergman’s 1966 film cowers underneath these sonic thrills. The story of two women – one an actor suffering from unexplained muteness, the other her nurse – who suffer first a loss of identity and then a kind of fusion was, on screen, inward-looking but powerfully projected. Here it is muffled. Most of the audience are not close enough to the stage to make out the facial expressions of the silent Nobuhle Mngcwengi; the veteran Alice Krige cannot rescue her lines from flatness. Schoolman has mistakenly swathed the action in a narrative: he reads out stage directions as if the women could not make things clear by themselves. A film of closeups becomes a far-away, hard-to-see play. Not intense but desultory, this is a non-persona.
Star ratings (out of five)
Endgame/Rough for Theatre II ★★★
Asking for It ★★★
Persona ★★
• Endgame/Rough for Theatre II are at the Old Vic, London, until 28 March
• Asking for It is at Birmingham Repertory theatre until 15 February
• Persona is at the Riverside Studios, London, until 23 February
