6 ★ FINANCIAL TIMES Friday21 February 2020

ARTS

Charisma:

Yesenia

Ayala,

centre, in

‘West Side

Story’

Jan Versweyveld

Max McGuinness

Ivo van Hove and West Side Story rea

not an obvious match. The Belgian

director specialises in stripping densely

cerebral classic works of theatre and

cinema down to their dramatic essence.

“I Feel Pretty” are three words that

would appear to have little place in his

austere world.

So it’s little surprise that the chirpy

number has been axed from his revival

of Jerome Robbins’s boisterous musical

pageant (with a book by Arthur Lau-

rents, music by Leonard Bernstein and

lyrics by Stephen Sondheim) about

racially charged gang violence in 1950s

New York.

That excision sets the tone for Van

Hove’s boldly reworked staging, which

is darker, grungier and more violent

than the 1961 film adaptation. The som-

bre-toned streetwear and tattoos

sported by most of the 39-strong cast

indicate that the setting has been shifted

to the present day. The action still nomi-

nally takes place on Manhattan’s now

thoroughly gentrified Upper West Side.

But Luke Halls’s haunting slow-motion

video sequences of deserted street-

scapes, which fill a screen covering the

entire width of the mostly bare stage,

seem to depict the grittier parts of the

Bronx, Brooklyn or Queens.

Van Hove has also updated the show’s

racial politics by casting a mixture of

black and white actors as the previously

all-white Jets, while the Puerto Rican

Sharks have become more generically

Latino. The gang members now stalk

Danny Wolohan’s Krupke with their

phone cameras as the police sergeant

wields his gun in one of several timely

allusions to police brutality.

In the most striking innovation of all,

Anne Teresa De Keersmaeker has re-

choreographed the show to blend con-

temporary street dance with formal

geometric patterns. Echoes of Robbins’s

graceful balletic dance routines do crop

up here, but the overall feel is punkishly

avant-garde.

The virtues of Van Hove and De

Keersmaeker’s approach are particu-

larly apparent during the climactic

“rumble”, where the rainswept street

fighting acquires an eerie pathos remi-

niscent of Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai.

Coming straight after we have witnessed

a double murder, “Gee, Officer Krupke”

then strikes a jarringly bathetic note,

which reminds us why Robbins moved

that jaunty number to Act One in the

film version.

A more general problem is that

the characters tend to get a bit

lost within the sweeping dark-hued

tableaux of Van Hove’s staging. As

Maria, Shereen Pimentel exhibits an

opera-standard voice with a rich

vibrato. But there’s not enough playful

chemistry between her and Isaac Pow-

ell’s Tony. And, with the exception of

Yesenia Ayala’s charismatic Anita, the

cast struggle to bring out the musical’s

lighter, comic dimension.

Another mis-step is Van Hove’s over-

reliance on video. Several sequences are

performed in partially hidden nooks at

the back of the stage and relayed on to

the screen via handheld cameras. Simi-

lar techniques have served Van Hove

well in past productions, such as his

adaptation of Network. Here they often

seem gimmicky and distracting.

The original West Side Story was years

in the making and had two out-of-town

tryouts before reaching Broadway. Van

Hove’s ambitious version might have

benefited from a similarly extended

process of trial-and-error.

BookingtoSeptember

westsidestorybway.com

Van Hove adds grit to a classic

T H E AT R E

West Side Story

Broadway Theatre, New York

aaaee

Above, from left, Louis

Martin, Lesley Manville

and Troy Alexander in

‘The Visit’. Below:

Amaka Okafor in ‘Nora:

A Doll’s House’

Johan Persson; Marc Brenner

equality: 1918, 1968 and 2018. The

story rolls forward on its usual path, but

the three women share it, passingit

around, in Elizabeth Freestone’s

deftly orchestrated production, as if in

musical canon.

It’s an intelligent, probing approach,

mulling on the question of what

progress has really been made. Nora’s

debt shifts with the timeframe — a loan

agreement, a credit card, a payday loan

— as do her mannerisms (Amaka Oka-

for, calm and dignified; Natalie Klamar,

anxious and twitchy; Anna Russell-

Martin, gutsy and funny); but the

upshot remains the same. Driven to des-

perate measures by poverty, she is dev-

astated by her husband’s brutal

response to her confession.

There are losses, too, however: the

other characters remain sketchy

(despite a skilful turn from Luke Norris

as the three controlling husbands) and

the gathering panic of the plot isdif-

fused and muddied. A revealing, if

mixed, take on a pioneering piece.

It’s the ghost of Waiting for Godot hatt

lurks behind Antoinette Nwandu’s

excellent Pass Over. Nwandu fuses the

basic set-up and arc of Beckett’s ground-

breaking play — two dispossessed guys

marooned on a road with nowhere to go

— with a scorching attack on race rela-

tions in America, both now and in the

past. Here the duo are young black teen-

agers, the tree has become a lamppost

and in the wings lurks not Godot but the

spectre of death — particularly at the

hands of the police.

Death is a constant companion for

Moses and Kitch: the opening words

of the play, “Kill me now”, might

echo Estragon’s original “Nothing to be

done” in spirit, but they have specific

weight. The two have seen many young

men shot (including Moses’s brother)

and they while away the time imagining

Paradise. They inhabit a limbo,

both real and fantastical, their only visi-

tors two sinister, hyper-real white

characters: a thuggish policeman

(Ossifer) and a creepily charming

stranger (Mister), who offers food and

chit-chat (both unnervingly well played

by Alexander Eliot).

It’s a searing fusion of politics and

poetry: playful, unsettling, blazingly

angry and desperately sad. And it’s

superbly delivered by Paapa Essiedu

(Moses) and Gershwyn Eustache Jnr

(Kitch) in Indhu Rubasingham’s elo-

quently choreographed staging. They

tumble through the play like puppies,

wrestling, joking, daydreaming. But

their optimism is tinged with loss and

fear; their bravado mixes with vulnera-

bility. Essiedu, in particular, is outstand-

ing in this potentplay.

There’s another terrific double act at

the Bridge Theatre, where Roger Allam

and Colin Morgan play the father and

son(s) at the heart of Caryl Churchill’s

60-minute masterpiece, A Number.

Written in 2002, Churchill’s dystopian

drama opens with a young man con-

fronting the discovery that, thanks to

cloning, there might be several more of

him walking around out there.

Churchill skilfully builds on this

premise: what starts out as a play about

science becomes a deep, rich study of

identity. Questions about tempera-

ment, about nature versus nurture and

about parenting surge through the

L

esley Manville has long been

one of our finest, most precise

actors. She has an exceptional

ability to suggest that a char-

acter is carrying emotion, like

an overfilled vase, and dare not lose con-

trol for a moment. Now she has been

given a monster of a messed-up woman

to play and the mammoth arena of the

Olivier in which to play her. And, boy,

does she fill them both.

The woman in question is Claire Zach-

anassian, the super-wealthy serial

widow at the heart of The Visit ,

Tony Kushner’s new version of Frie-

drich Dürrenmatt’s 1956 play. Kushner

relocates the action to1950s America

and the town of Slurry which, as the play

opens, is living down to its name. Times

are tough: the local men cool their heels

on the station platform, watching

plumes of dust rise from the tracks as

trains whistle through en route to some-

where else. Excitement that Claire,

former Slurry resident, is making a

return, rubs shoulders with dismay that

the bells intended to welcome her have

all been sold.

But arrive she does, in a deafening,

grinding squeal of locomotive brakes

and a vast plume of steam that fills the

auditorium (a brilliant coup de théâtre

from designer Vicki Mortimer). Man-

ville steps out of this cloud, platinum

hair gleaming, like a cross between

Madonna on tour and an avenging

angel. Flunkies carrying valises parade

aroundlike elegant wading birds.

Delight turns to consternation,

however, when the townsfolk realise

that their celebrity benefactress also

brings an empty coffin and that their

job, in return for her cash, is to fill it.

“We don’t want blood money,” cries

Nicholas Woodeson’s bustling little

mayor. “I’ll wait,” purrs Manville, curl-

ing into the glorious sedan chair with

which she travels.

In Kushner’s hands, Dürrenmatt’s

darkly comic cautionary tale becomes a

macabre fable about American capital-

ism and moral relativism. Slurry’s resi-

dents, tantalised by the shiny new appli-

ances of budding consumerism, eventu-

ally crumble — to the mounting horror

of Alfred, the childhood sweetheart who

wronged Claire and is the intended

occupant of the coffin (Hugo Weaving,

very good as a man slowly slumping

into despair).

But, like the old lady herself, this Visit

outstays its welcome. Kushner’s script is

often pungently witty, but he extends

the drama way beyond its comfortable

length, making it feel heavy-handed and

overblown. This holds back what is

often an impressive and sombrely spec-

tacular show. Director Jeremy Herrin

confidently fills theOlivier to create a

dark Expressionist nightmare. Paul

Englishby’s melancholy jazz score hangs

over the action like smoke.

And through it all stalks Manville’s

Claire: tiny, imperious and unyielding.

Yet her face, in repose, sinks into blank

sadness, suggesting irreparable emo-

tional damage. She exits, silently, like a

character from a myth, leaving Slurry to

justify itself as best it can.

Another classic; another rewrite;

another mighty female role. In Stef

Smith’s Nora: A Doll’s House , a response

to Ibsen’s drama, however, that role is

refracted into three.

In place of Ibsen’s solitary heroine, we

have three Noras, each at a key staging

point in the journey towards female

When a monster

comes to town

piece. How would you feel if you were

cloned? What if you were the clone?

Would you, as a parent, like a second

chance to get itright? Meanwhile there

is mischief built into the very structure

of the piece — a two-hander that relies

on one actor playing three copies of

ne man.o

Morgan is superb, giving a dexterous

and beautifully textured performance.

Tiny shifts in body language, in stance

and in speech mannerisms suggest the

three identical-yet-different sons. B1,

brought up in care, is angry, disillu-

sioned, resentful; B2, disturbed and

increasingly distraught; Michael, the

original, blithely cheerful about the

whole thing. Allam, in Polly Findlay’s

production, also subtly shape-shifts, his

manner conditioned by each son, by his

memories and by his own growing guilt.

Meanwhile Lizzie Clachan’sset spins to

give us four surprisingly different angles

on the same anodyne living room.

That ability to combine familiar

domesticity with horror is one of

Churchill’s great talents. You see that,

too, in Churchill’s Far Away , a haunting

45-minute splinter of a play that draws

nightmarish visions of a world where

high-end consumerism sits cheek-by-

jowl with war and people are trafficked

in lorries.

Currently chillingly revived by Lynd-

sey Turner, it no longer feels far away,

but all too close to home.

‘TheVisit’toMay

nationaltheatre.org.uk

‘Nora:ADoll’sHouse’toMarch

youngvic.org

‘PassOver’toMarch21,kilntheatre.com

‘ANumber’toMarch

bridgetheatre.co.uk

‘FarAway’toApril

donmarwarehouse.com

THEATRE

Sarah

Hemming

The Visit

National Theatre (Olivier), London

AAAEE

Nora: A Doll’s House

Young Vic, London

AAAEE

Pass Over

Kiln Theatre, London

AAAAE

A Number

Bridge Theatre, London

AAAAE

Far Away

Donmar Warehouse, London

AAAAE

Gershwyn

Eustache Jnr

and Paapa

Essiedu in

‘Pass Over’

Marc Brenner

FEBRUARY 21 2020 Section:Features Time: 2/202020/ - 17:39 User:david.cheal Page Name:ARTS LON, Part,Page,Edition:EUR, 6, 1