It is an unlikely phenomenon in the West End. Women slamming their arguments against the fourth wall of a proscenium arch theatre as if it were a wall of death. Within the past two years, Emilia and Six have supplied feminism in farthingales. Now J’Ouvert, the third play in producer Sonia Friedman’s Re:Emerge season at the Pinter, roars across the stage in Lycra and feathers and sequins, turquoise and pink and scarlet, bumping and grinding. It is greeted, even by a socially distanced, quelled-by-Covid-regs audience, with whoops and a stirring among the stalls: in other circumstances there would be dancing.
Yasmin Joseph’s play, first seen two years ago at Theatre503, is set during the Notting Hill carnival soon after the Grenfell fire; the tower is not mentioned by name, but loss is talked about, and there are other shadows weaving through director Rebekah Murrell’s exuberant debut production. There is affection but also division between the two young black women powerfully played by Gabrielle Brooks and Sapphire Joy, as one reaches to express herself in dance, the other in invective; there is strife between them and their earnest mate Nisha (Annice Boparai); there are sour memories of exclusion by white residents. Most striking is the division between the swaggering youths who think they have the right to touch and the women who see them off: ah, the excitement when Joy lands a punch.
Claudia Jones, the firebrand who found that black women were not always welcome in the Communist party of Great Britain of the 50s and who helped lay the foundations for the carnival, is invoked as an ancestor guide, in arbitrary moments of misty otherness. The play, finely overseen by DJ Zuyane Russell, does not need this spirit level. It is strong in its celebration of comradeship, and of fleshy contact. “In a world of swipes and pixels, carnival is touch.” The same might be said of live theatre.
The National has invitingly converted the Olivier stage – notoriously too wide easily to command – into the round. It’s a good choice for Lyndsey Turner’s production of Under Milk Wood. Dylan Thomas’s 1954 “play for voices” conjures up the “dead dears” of the village of Llareggub (read it backwards) in wraparound poetic prose. There are moments when the duskily lit rows of spectators on the far side of the stage look like a settlement on the slopes of a hill.
At the centre, a wild-haired Michael Sheen is mighty but never grandstanding, gracefully carrying the extraordinary weight of the dense narration. There are versatile, multitasking cameos from Susan Brown and Siân Phillips, the latter playing – and singing – as the nostalgic sexpot Polly Garter, and a fine, melancholy performance from Karl Johnson. Comic moments of Thomas’s play, particularly those featuring a stealthy would-be wife poisoner, come up fresh.
Still, the evening seems, to me, misconceived. “Additional material” by Siân Owen wrenches the action too obviously into the 21st century and “relevance”. In a care home, a man (Sheen) visits his elderly father (Johnson), seeking reconciliation, bringing fragments of the past to his failing memory. It is a logical device but suggests a lack of confidence in Thomas’s original. As a lifelong listener to the play, I also wonder whether its particular qualities won’t always be diminished by the addition of imagery. The rippling evocations – the “sloeblack, slow, black, crowblack, fishingboatbobbing sea” – are so tightly spun that even seeing the speaker is confusing.
Thomas’s scenes are susceptible to considerable variation. As a child, magnetised by Richard Burton’s narration, I was swept away by its juiciness, jokes and sadness. More recently, I was entranced by George Martin’s lesser-known, less mellifluous audio production (1988), featuring Bonnie Tyler, Mark Knopfler, Alan Bennett and Jonathan Pryce (oh and Siân Phillips), with music by Elton John. Very different, but both these versions clung to Thomas’s idea that audience members were, like his blind narrator, not seeing the action but pervaded by it, swimming between dream and daily life, present and past. Under Milk Wood is always, for me, an example of how the radio play was once its own art form, not something reaching for completion on stage.
No one has been longing to see a big Covid play. Yet it’s a mark of the marvel that is Happy Days and the radiance of Lisa Dwan that, without skewing Samuel Beckett’s text, Trevor Nunn’s production illuminates the experience of the last year and a half.
Everyone – apart from perhaps Stanley Johnson, zipping around his far-flung properties – is likely to respond to this extreme version of lockdown: to the image of Winnie, buried first up to her waist, later to her neck, in a mound of earth, completely stuck in an apparently inert landscape. Also to the desperate search for compensations: the blazing attention to tiny details, the making of a territory out of tussocks of grass and the contents of a bag (though why is this grey when it is described as black?). Dwan investigates the movements of an ant through her magnifying glass with the excitement of an anthropologist who has discovered the unsuspected survivor of an extinct tribe. Simon Wolfe provides good snorting-and-sneezing support as Willie.
I have never felt so clearly the way time and daily events are slugging it out for supremacy. Never noticed so sharply Beckett’s challenge to spectators who ask what it means. Never also felt so acutely the terror of sudden change. The first and second halves are made magnificently different – by Dwan and by Tim Mitchell’s spectacular lighting, which goes from golden to ashen. Dwan – expansively Irish – is at first hurdy-gurdy, tweaking her black bra, hair up but tumbled, arms stretching out to inspect her hands as if they were planets spinning around a sun. In the second act she is bleached and static, like a monumental figure on a gravestone. This and Krapp’s Last Tape are both in my view far richer than Waiting for Godot: Beckett’s His and Hers.
Star ratings (out of five):
J’Ouvert ★★★★
Under Milk Wood ★★★
Happy Days ★★★★
J’Ouvert is at the Harold Pinter theatre, London, until 3 July
Under Milk Wood is at the Olivier, London, until 24 July
Happy Days is at the Riverside Studios, London, until 25 July
