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The Painter of Dishonour Review
by Nicholas de Jongh
from the Evening Standard, 7/7/95
An expert on the Spanish Golden Age, Laurence Boswell nonetheless seems uncertain quite how to play Calderon's unwieldy story of lost lost and tarnished honour in his accomplished directing debut for the RSC.
The melodramatic elements of the play - not Calderon's best - where declarations of heart-rending anguish are common lend themselves to humour. At times Boswell can't keep his tongue out of his cheek, but at heart his production tries to recreate a society where a rigorous form of honour supersedes the urgencies of love.
Central to this interpretation is the performance of John Carlisle, all sonorous gravitas as an elderly gent dishonoured when his faithful wife is kidnapped by the lover she thought drowned. Carlisle makes credible the moral code that turns Don Juan into a pariah (well, a painter to be exact) until he has killed not only his rival but also his wife, whose impeccable behavior in captivity won't save her from guilt by association.
A subplot involving the changeable affections of the Prince of Ursino suggests a world where, once the blood is set racing, it must be split. No wonder the dapper figure of death stalks the stage like a patient vulture.
The main problem with taking this seriously comes from the lovers. Jennifer Ehle is fine indeed as the wife Serafina, voice and bodice a-tremble as she is racked between the demands of love and honour. But the estimable Douglas Henshall is at sea as the lover Alvaro.
The urbainity of Don Gallagher's Prince as he flutters between Serafina and Sophie Heyman's overemphatic Pocia, borders on parody.
The Painter of Dishonour tails off somewhat at the denouement, as the loose ends are either tied up of abruptly cut off. It is, after all, a play with more throbbing emotion than linear direction. Although his production lacks polish and some charisma in the acting, Boswell ensures that each tug on the heartstraings and the guts is keenly felt.
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The Painter of Dishonour Review
by Jane Edwardes
from Time Out, 7/12/95
Over the years, I have become accustomed to trotting along to the Gate to have my eyes opened to another European masterpiece that has never before been played in this country. So why hasn't Laurence Boswell, ex-director of the Gate, managed to pull off the same trick at Stratford ? Plays require an imaginative leap, especially those written in another era, but on this occasion I fell at the first hurdle. Ramrod pride, hot-blooded jealousy and ruthless revenge is the stuff of Spanish drama and all this is on display in Calderon de la Barca's passionate drama. But it's never quite clear how much Calderon endorses a code in which it is acceptable for a father to forgive his daughter's murder with the words 'Revenge taken in honour's name cannot offend', or for a prince to ask for the hand of a woman he doesn't love over a couple of corpses. Boswell undercuts the high-minded tone with flashes of humour, but alongside moments of pure melodrama and bizarre reversals of character, they only call into question why the play is being revived at all.
As Serafina, Jennifer Ehle's bosom heaves affectingly apparently possessed by a fear of death as much as dishonour, hardly surprising given that a figure of death in a red mask pops up at all the best parties. Meanwhile, John Carlisle as her old husband and the painter of the title is forced into the wilderness because, so he says, it is dishonourable to be pitied. Boswell orchestrates with impeccable timing: doors fly open, lights flash and in a spectacular dance Serafina is wooed by her lover, but the lasting impression is that this is very silly way for life to be conducted.
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The Painter of Dishonour Review
by Alastair Macaulay
from the Financial Times, 7/8/95
The golden age of Spanish drama has still made too few inroads into the mainstream of British theatre.
Between 1990 and 1992, London's Gate Theatre did much to bring it to the forefront of the British fringe; and the director who was most involved in this minor renaissance was Laurence Boswell. Now the Royal Shakespeare Company has brought him to Stratford-upon-Avon, to stage The Painter of Dishonour - by Pedro Calderon de la Barca, one of the three master dramatists of that golden age - at The Other Place. But Boswell is a very variable director. The play is extraordinary; his production is not.
In The Painter of Dishonour, Serafina is married to an older man, Don Juan Roca, although she had previously fallen in love with the young Don Alvaro and had only married when she presumed him dead. Don Alvaro, returning, is consumed with jealousy; his pursuit of her prompts Don Juan to jealousy; and everything conspires to stop her being the model wife she desperately wants to be. The themes of sexual jealousy, adulterous love, and - above all - honour are vintage Spanish golden age stuff, of course.
Calderon makes virtuoso play, too, with the different masks of theatre. Is this tragedy ? comedy ? suspense thriller ? sex farce ? fateful melodrama ? He - a baroque artist - keeps juggling its elements right up to the end. And, by making Don Juan a painter, he adds another artful layer. Though he is a master-artist, he finds that, in painting his wife, her surpassing beauty defeats her art. Later, however, when he expresses his own jealousy in allegory, he achieves a masterpiece. Finally, he is asked to paint a subject which he finds, when he beholds it, calls not for paint but for action.
Boswell - who has co-translated the play with David Johnston - finds less ambiguity about the nature of the play, however, than my synopsis has suggested. To him it is almost all fateful melodrama. From the first, he introduces a red-masked silent Death figure who stalks the proceedings with ever more prominence, and he brings in ominous music to underline cheaply the big moments.
Several of the characters should surely be more mult-faceted. Juanete (meaning not only "Johnny" but also "Bunion") is surely the most ambiguous character - an irrepressibly loquacious servant whose running gag is a story that nobody will let him finish, whose bright chatter nonetheless darkens the mood on several occassions, and who is a reluctant participant in Don Juan's journey into revenge tragedy. Here, however, he is played by Tony Rohr as a dour and sour Irishman who is simply a mean-spirited bore. Porcia, a successful huntress who plays games with love and jealousy, is given a simple and superficial performance by Sophie Heyman. Jennifer Ehle - equipped with strikingly beautiful cheekbones and breasts - is so constrained by Serafina's high nobility that she almost never once sounds natural.
Better is Douglas Henshall as Don Alvaro. It is hard to believe in this soft-voiced and Scots-accented actor as an impetuous Spaniard, but this utterance is so sure that you hang on his every word; and he can switch from smouldering pianissomo to fortissimo explosion convincingly. Best by far, however, is John Carlyle as the painter Don Juan. Everything about him has such natural authority that in his scenes alone do we feel the high tension of Calderon's dramatic mastery. Boswell and Johnston have chosen to avoid Caleron's rhymes in their translation, but they miss also the tautness of his metre. Carlyle, however, by sheer force of spirit, supplies this otherwise missing dimension.
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The Painter of Dishonour Review
by Benedict Nightingale
from The Times, 7/8/95
At the beginning of Calderon's Painter of Dishonour a gentleman-artist called Don Juan drops in on an old chum, a diplomat named Don Luis. Asked to spend the night, the visitor says what we would all say under the circumstances: that he doesn't want to be a nuisance and will stay in the local inn. The result ? Don Pedro goes nuclear, talking of the terrible slight he feels and threatening the end of their long friendship. You get the feeling that, were Don Juan to go even further, and turn down a bedtime cup of cocoa, scores of Castilian cousins and aunts would pour from the closet and stiletto him to death.
In Laurence Boswell's production at the Other Place the stakes seem high even when smallish matters of decorum and propriety are involved. Imagine how much higher they are when a wife is kidnapped and her husband is, as he thinks , cuckolded. No wonder Segovia's third cousin is ominously clunking his guitar somewhere offstage to the accompaniment of the odd thunderbolt. No wonder Boswell has the Grim Reaper stalking around the halls of his Spanish grandees dressed in a scarlet mask, as if on a weekend pass from Poe's Masque of the Red Death. You are never in much doubt that his special services will be needed by the end.
Calderon wrote the play 30 years after the death of Shakespeare, but might have done so 300 before, given its alien feel. "Oh for an hour of Herod," famously cried Anthony Hope after the premiere of Peter Pan. "Oh for an hour of Falstaff," I found myself muttering as anguished Spaniards in black hose stumbled across black flooring, beside black chairs and through black doors, earnestly debating the demands of honour. To a contemporary English mind the play is preposterous - but not without a kind of grisly fascination.
Apart from anything else, Calderon pulls plenty of surprises. Some are comically silly, but one or two not. When the beautiful Serafina hears of the drowning of the man she loves, Don Luis's son Alvaro, she agrees to wed the relatively elderly Don Juan on the rebound. It is the sort of marriage that usually turns out to be a diaster in drama, and she enters it pretty despairingly. But the nice twist is that she comes geniunely to care for her husband, and is appalled when Alvaro appears from nowhere in an accusing, demanding and decidedly undrowned mood.
Despite the verve of Boswell's cast, and the colloquialisms of the translation he has made with David Johnston, matter rapidly escalate into convoluted melodrama. Don Juan rescues Serafina from a blazing house, shoves her for safekeeping into the arms of a passing sailer, and the passing sailor turns out to be Alvaro in disguise. Don't ask me how: but the poor lady lands up with an amorous prince in the cellar of Don Luis's hunting lodge, intermittently shoving her head through a hole in the floor to say things like "Is there no escaping from love and the utter havoc it wreaks ?"
Jennifer Ehle, Douglas Henshall, Clifford Rose and others resist the temptation to send it all up, which is much to their credit: and John Carlisle goes further. His Don Juan ends up in one of those moral predictaments so loved by Spanish Golden Age dramatists. He must pot both the woman he loves and the son of his best friend if he is to recover what matters, his honour. Somehow he makes you half-believe in his bewilderment and pain. In the circumstances, that is a triumph.
More than pretty
Heritage Industry Expectation Is That The Rsc Will Be Merely Polite And Acceptable. Happily, Joyce Mcmillan Finds It Is Not That Simple
Stratford-Upon-Avon was in the news last week, and not because the Royal Shakespeare Com-pany down on the riverside was offering its usual astonishing 10-plays-in-six-days winter season, without so much as a pause for the New Year holiday; for on Wednesday evening, as the mob in Julius Caesar tore the poet Cinna apart in an orgy of bloodlust and mistaken identity, Stratford shot into the headlines as the home of Anthony Erskine, the 19-year-old boy viciously kicked to death outside his home on a run-down housing estate.
It was an incident that sent the headline-writers into overdrive, another example of the 'market-town madness' that is said to be sweeping the once-tranquil shires; from this tide of squalid violence, came the message, not even the 'birthplace of the bard', the very heart of idealised England, is safe.
For of course Stratford is a place where the current English infatuation with the past takes a peculiarly emphatic form. Some of those who visit the town come to see the plays of Shakespeare and other play-wrights, and to confront the real issues they raise. But most of Stratford's millions of tourists come in search of something else, of an idyll, a dream, a half-timbered image of Jacobethan England from which everything ugly, violent or disturbing must be excised. And over the last 30 years, the power of that yearning for the past has come to dominate the life of the place in ways that range from the comic - the timid pseudo-Elizabethan architecture that spreads across the town like a stodgy brick plague - to the downright tragic; for if lack of hope for the future provokes anti-social behaviour, it takes no great leap of the imagination to see why Stratford's young people, surrounded by the paraphernalia and shrines of what has grown into a pas-sionate cult of 16th-century nostalgia, might feel more alienated than most.
And the Royal Shakespeare Company - one part great artistic powerhouse, one part heavily-pressurised centrepiece of a tourist industry that thrives on the prettifying of the past - cannot help but reflect these same tensions between cosy nostalgia on one hand, and confrontation with contemporary issues and audiences on the other. It is a tension that runs through the company's work, and also through its administration. Late last year, for example, RSC artistic director Adrian Noble announced a well-intentioned plan to reorganise the company's two-year work cycle, to reduce its year-round operation in London to a six-month winter sea-son, and to spend more time touring to major cities around Britain, and developing new 'residencies' along the lines of the RSC's annual February-March season in Newcastle.
From Noble's point of view, this must have seemed like a bold and positive move, a signal that the RSC - as a huge national company almost 10 times the size of Scotland's biggest theatre operation, with public subsidy in excess of £ 10m - recognises its obligation to serve the whole country, and to draw strength from the widest possible audience. But such is the mood in British theatre that Noble's move has been greeted with dismay not only in London, but also in 'the regions' and in Stratford.
Many theatres outside London seemed anxious that the RSC would be competing for their audiences, replacing good local product with posh heritage theatre, threatening diversity. Stratford, for its part, fell to calculating the cost of the disruption of a long-established pattern of production and performance around which visitors, students and tour operators have structured their schedules over many years. And both reac-tions tended to reinforce the assumption that the RSC is all about heritage, tourism and culture-as-business, rather than about the artistic challenge, exploration and creativity that keeps 'live' theatre alive.
All of which is a pity; for once inside the Stratford theatres - with the doors closed and the house-lights dimmed - what seems remarkable is not so much the extent to which the company is forced to serve the heritage-and-costume market, as the extent to which, despite that pressure, it still manages to produce vi-brant and substantial pieces of theatre with the power to trouble and engage contemporary audiences. The secret of this stubborn artistic vitality lies, of course, in the quality of the basic material - over three days I saw plays by Chekhov, Euripides and the Spanish golden-age playwright Calderon, as well as Shakespeare - and of the actors the RSC attracts.
No season graced by rising stars like the glowing Jennifer Ehle, fresh from her television triumph as Elizabeth Bennett in Pride And Prejudice, or by performers as skilled or passionate as Penelope Wilton, Alec McCowen, Josie Lawrence, can ever be entirely dead; these are actors who need real communication with an audience, and will push through layers of undistinguished direction and insensitive design (both plentiful in Stratford this year) to achieve it.
Gale Edwards' big, awkward production of The Taming Of The Shrew, starring Josie Lawrence as rag-ing Kate who is bullied, starved and adored into wifely submission by her unconventional husband Petruchio, is perhaps this year's most telling case in point. Staged on an hideous flesh-pink set cluttered with Vespas, Fiats, and other sad visual clich_s associated with the attempt to give the appearance of 'relevance' in the absence of the real thing, it limps on for hours in an ingratiating mess of strained visual humour and shocking lack of confidence in the text; only to be saved at the last gasp by Lawrence's stunning performance of Kate's final speech of submission, so laced with rage, disappointment, bitter irony and despair that the pro-duction literally cannot bring itself to utter Shakespeare's final words of reconciliation, and whirls off into a magnificent visual coda that suggests male-female relations in an agonising late-20th-century impasse.
And if this troubled Shrew finally manages to wrench a sense of meaning from the jaws of artistic failure, the other four productions I saw avoid disaster by a wider margin. Laurence Boswall's production of Calderon's Painter Of Dishonour, in the Other Place, is the outstanding artistic hit of the season, a breathtak-ingly choreographed, gorgeously designed, beautiful and sensuous production of a play which questions the whole idea of patriarchal honour, and of women as a form of property whose theft dishonours not only them-selves, but their 'owners'.
Sometimes, the bleakness of the story seems almost overwhelmed by the sheer beauty of the staging; to die in one of Jennifer Ehle's glorious decollete gowns might, it seems, be a better fate than to live in a Woolworth's pak-a-mac. But by and large, the gorgeous lushness of the production justifies itself; and the glowing intensity of the key performances - from John Carlisle as the elderly painter surprised by love for his young wife, Jennifer Ehle as the lovely Serafina herself, and young Scottish actor Douglas Henshall as the love-crazed former fiance who cannot resist the temptation to abduct her - pushes the production far beyond prettiness, into real tragedy.
Adrian Noble's acclaimed production of The Cherry Orchard, in the Swan Theatre, is an actors' tour-de-force of a show, rich with contemporary resonance in its study of a society in moral and spiritual decline, and featuring unforgettable performances from Penelope Wilton as an adorable, witty, lethally self-willed Ra-nevskaya, and from an achingly poignant Kate Duchene as Varya; although the play's setting in the Swan does provoke thought about how little Chekhov gains from this kind of in-the-round presentation.
Stephen Pimlott's Richard III, in the main theatre, is a pacey, thought-provoking production, full of ech-oes of compulsive tribal warfare from Yugoslavia to Northern Ireland; it offers David Troughton as an amoral entrepreneur of a villain, leaning on the dark strength of Shakespeare's poetry with a relish and precision that delights the ear, mocking the values of virtue and hope even from beyond the grave, and encountering sus-tained opposition only from the chorus of women, the bereaved Queens who finally curse his evil and vio-lence as an abomination against life itself.
And Katie Mitchell's Other Place production of Euripides' Phoenician Women, although disappointingly predictable in style, offers a searing reflection on the same theme of women and war through Lorraine Ashbourne's astonishing performance as Jocasta, the Theban queen, whose attempts to defuse a murder-ous conflict of honour between her two sons end in tragic failure.
The RSC, in other words, is a company in reasonable artistic form, identifying big contemporary themes in classic drama and drawing them joyfully or painfully to the surface; but it suffers, even more intensely than most theatre companies, from the divisive and insidious idea that it is - even ought to be - something polite and prissy, 'nice' and upmarket, posh, prestigious, uncontroversial, escapist, and worlds away from the bleak street where Anthony Erskine met his death.
On my last day in Stratford, in a mild January morning of steady rain and slanting sunlight, I went and sat for a while in the garden of New Place, where Shakespeare lived the last years of his life. The earth was soft and silent, the grass lush, the old brick mellow from centuries of sun and rain; here, as all over Warwick-shire this winter, the bushes were laden with berries, the country still palpably the place that gave birth to some of the most powerful evocations of landscape and garden, woods and fields, in the English language. But I did not feel worlds away from the Erskines' tragedy; I felt the closer to them, because close to the spirit of a writer who wrote of brawling and hate and the sudden stupidity of violent death, as passionately as he wrote about the poignant loveliness of things. It is to stay in touch with that precious wholeness, that vision that embraces life in all its complex sweetness and horror, that the RSC struggles, at the centre of a powerful post-modern culture that thrives on disconnection, of life from art, past from present, rich from poor, specta-cle from meaning, understanding from emotion. And although the company's work has its weaknesses, and its occasional dangerous capitulations, it seems to me a sign of hope that even here in the heart of heritage country, that struggle for truth and wholeness still goes on, and is by no means lost.
Scotland on Sunday - Sunday January 14, 1996