Should the theatre reflect the outside world, or be a refuge from it? Ingmar Bergman puts the question explicitly in his 1982 movie Fanny & Alexander. No wonder playwright Stephen Beresford felt he should put it on stage. It is a risk: this (the third Bergman adaptation to be seen in London within six months) is a theatrical version of a film about a theatre family. What could seem more niche? Yet at its best, Beresford shows that the theatre can be mirror and shelter: a safe place in which to consider harshness.
Bergman’s most exuberant film – not a hotly contested award – is sumptuous and stark. Full at first of richly coloured fabrics, snow, sleds and candles; later swallowed up by abstinence and a puritan palette. This tale of a boy torn between bohemian warmth and clerical rigidity is an autobiographical collage, a source book for themes of Bergman movies. A boy’s imagination running wild, a repressive father figure, wobbling identities, religious doubts and the terror that death is behind each locked door: a cloaked figure with a scythe is on the skulk.
Max Webster’s production begins unpromisingly, semaphoring its distance from the screen. Tom Pye’s design features swishing red curtains on a bare stage: ah, theatre! Chunks of action are described by characters. After behaving quite normally, when the family tuck into a feast they do it in embarrassing mime.
Yet the evening gathers strength and inner life. Guillermo Bedward is nimble as Alex. There are strong performances from a poised Lolita Chakrabarti and clenched Kevin Doyle. In terrible scenes of beating and imprisonment, Pye’s design becomes a box of plain wooden planks: you can almost hear Strindberg’s approval. Most of all, as the family matriarch, Penelope Wilton is an animated advertisement for having a good time when ingénue roles are behind you. Egotism – or shall we call it self-assurance – helps. Wilton is wonderfully funny as she bosoms her way over everyone else’s lines at a Hamlet rehearsal, and snobbishly quells an upstart wife with a flick of her eye. But she is also generous and skittish. No wonder her grandchildren want to be in her arms, nor that she has a long-time admirer: a Jewish patriarch and magician – twinkling, dapper Michael Pennington.
“I want to be that woman,” said the young woman next to me at the interval. There was no need to ask who she meant.
Elsewhere, theatre is clearly reflecting change. This is the age of the female monologue. As so often, all was foreseen by Caryl Churchill who two years ago in Escaped Alone provided highly wrought dystopian prophecies delivered as stand-apart speeches. In recent weeks, audiences have seen Carey Mulligan in Dennis Kelly’s Girls & Boys, Patsy Ferran in Anoushka Warden’s My Mum’s A Twat, as well as Monica Dolan and Milly Thomas in their own plays, The B*easts, and Dust.
This is an important shift. As significant as any change in the subject matter of plays, or as personal revelations about bullying, sexual or mental. Audiences are seeing that different narrators have their hands on the reins.
In Jude Christian’s production (she has tweaked the order), Falk Richter’s 2009 play Trust begins with one of those sustained feats of memory that stimulate and stun an audience. Christian herself delivers this state-of-the-world, topsy-turvy, free-wheeling address. She describes large parts of the urban landscape covered in a living installation, with sofas on which people snooze over social science books. Capitalism may be collapsing, possibly because members of the Baader-Meinhof group (Richter is German) have become heads of industry and banks. An Uber driver is writing a book about this theory. But let’s not worry about what we might do if any of it is true: change involves too much trouble and pain.
This is by far the best written part of Trust, which mixes ingenuity and wryness with scattergun silliness. A couple may or may not be breaking up: just like capitalism, you see. They talk with amnesiac blankness. A woman delivers a solemn speech, intriguing but over-extended, about how, being unsure of her value, she is “like money”. In a leaden episode towards the end, Christian and the other cast members – Pia Laborde Noguez and Zephryn Taitte – do yoga: no one wants to watch a trio of downward-facing dogs.
There are fascinations. Ben and Max Ringham have created an unsettling soundscape, which makes a woman in sneakers sound as if she is striding through a marble hall in boots. In what is becoming a Gate trademark, members of the audience are unnervingly approached from the stage – offered food, and a chance to learn Mandarin. But the subject of where we put our trust deserves more than mere flickers. It needs a flare.
Star ratings (out of five)
Fanny & Alexander ★★★★
Trust ★★★
• Fanny & Alexander is at the Old Vic, London SE1, until 14 April
• Trust is at the Gate, London W11, until 17 March
