BOOKS & ARTS
Theatre
A Bridge too far
Lloyd Evans
A Very Very Very Dark Matter
Bridge Theatre, until 6 January 2019The Wild Duck
Almeida Theatre, until 1 DecemberIn the year since it opened, the Bridge has
given us the following: a harmless Karl
Marx comedy by Richard Bean; a mod-
ern-dress Julius Caesar with Ben Whishaw
playing Brutus as a frowning existentialist;
a dreary rustic soap opera written by new-
comer Barney Norris; and an enjoyable
NHS romp by Alan Bennett. Not quite the
string of triumphs everyone had expected
from Nicholas Hytner who used to produce
two dozen shows a year at the National but
now manages one every three months at his
bankside garret.
Time on his hands. But not enough to
script-edit the efforts of fashionable wags
like Martin McDonagh whose silly, mean-
spirited skit about Hans Christian Anders-
en is a humiliating low point in the Bridge’s
short history. The setting is Copenhagen.
Hans Christian Andersen, played as a bump-
tious egomaniac by Jim Broadbent, nur-
tures a terrible secret. In a cage in his loft, he
keeps a one-footed female pygmy (a digni-
fied performance from Johnetta Eula’Mae
Ackles) and he uses her folk memories as
the source for his world-famous tales.
He also enjoys taunting her physical frail-
ties. ‘You’re like a tinier Tiny Tim but African
and not as amusing.’ This gag, which typifies
the show’s level of humour, rests on two
assumptions. First, the audience will consid-
er a disabled child such as Tiny Tim funny.
Second, they will regard another invalid as
a less fertile source of mirth because she’s
Congolese. These are very grating, puerile
sentiments. Which of us believes, as McDon-
agh appears to, that every instance of human
adversity, penury or impairment has been
laid on by providence to keep us amused in
our theatres?
The play moves to London where Hans
Christian Andersen billets himself on
Charles Dickens. Phil Daniels plays the nov-
elist as a colourless grouch who can’t stop
saying ‘fuck’, especially when Andersen mis-
takes him for Charles Darwin, as he does
several times. The repetition of this gag is
mirrored by another instance of replication
when it emerges that Dickens, like Anders-
en, has secretly purloined all his stories from
an African captive. At the heart of this mud-dled and idiotic play is an attempt to parrot
the orthodoxy that the wealth of Europe is
the plunder of a superior culture in Africa.
Were McDonagh not a Hollywood bigwig,
he would have struggled to find a home for
this bleak, childish frivolity. On press night
I was seated a few yards behind the author
in a pew full of actors whose fruity cackles
were obviously intended for his ears. And I
had an unimpeded view of Phoebe Waller-
Bridge, a fabulously gutsy comic writer, who
laughed only sparingly at this. Brave of her.
She’s the author’s girlfriend.
The Wild Duck at the Almeida is in the
unsteady hands of Robert Icke. This laud-
ed director regards himself as a theatri-
cal seer who alone is capable of rendering
non-English writers intelligible to the unlet-
tered brutes who swarm London’s playhous-
es hoping to learn something of overseas
drama. The show starts with a Scouse actor,
Kevin Harvey, challenging those who clam-
our for ‘original Ibsen’. Are they serious-
ly asking to see the script performed in the
original Danish? Drama is about truth, he
goes on. We don’t ‘say the truth’, we ‘tell the
truth’, he explains, so the truth is ‘a tale’, notan objective fact. Gosh. The primary school
waffle continues for several minutes, and it
includes this priceless addition to the inven-
tory of western art. ‘The stories we tell, tell
us who we are.’
The play begins and Ibsen’s delicate tap-
estry of betrayal and dishonour collapses
in a tangle of absurdities. An English fam-
ily, curiously named Ekdal, are running out
of cash because James Ekdal, the dad, has
invested his cash in the near-extinct trade
of photographic portraiture. Why is he such
a fool? And why is he convinced that his
father’s spell in jail has ruined his reputa-
tion for ever? And why is no doctor attempt-
ing to treat young Hedwig’s progressive eye
disease? And why is Grandpa Francis stum-
bling around the house with a loaded gun?
This puzzling character (sweetly played by
Nicholas Farrell) is a dotty old alcoholic who
keeps a warren of rabbits in the attic. Every
night he dodders up the stairs and executes
a bunny for the pot using a firearm issued
legally, it would appear, even though he’s a
dipsomaniac with a prison record who lives
in the same house as a child who is going
blind. Out-and-out barminess.
Ibsen gets more of a look-in the second
half and even Icke can’t spoil the narrative
intricacies of the closing scenes. These sud-
den reversals are so beautifully planted and
so artfully disclosed that I was left gasping,
almost audibly, in admiration. As I left the
theatre I vowed to see The Wild Duck again,
as soon as possible, but with Ibsen and not a
pompous vandal in charge.McDonagh’s silly, mean-spirited skit
is a humiliating low point in
the Bridge’s short historyalong but never dominating or intruding,
allowing the personality of her guests to
shine through.
What kind of student were you? she
asked Ramakrishnan. He admitted he was
not a model student and that everyone ‘gave
up’ on him as he slipped from top of the
class to trailing at the bottom. Even at uni-
versity he used to sit by the window so that
if the class was boring he could wait until
the attendance check was made and then
jump out and run off. Aged 19 he left India
to study for a PhD in physics in the USA.
‘How did you fit into that?’ asked Lav-
erne. ‘I’m trying to imagine you.’ Just the
right way to provoke an explicit response
from Ramakrishnan. Only after achieving
his PhD did he decide he wanted to be a
biologist, going back as an undergraduate
to study the basics.
His first choice of music was Johnny
Cash. ‘One of the most important things
human beings do is fall in love,’ he said as
Laverne spun ‘Ring Of Fire’ on the turn-
table. Gold, who transformed her father’s
company from a male bastion of adult-only
content, told Laverne that she was just 19
when she began working at Ann Summers.
She was told then that women were not
interested in sex; a challenge which she
sought to disprove. That was back in 1981,
when she had to talk about selling the
new products at ‘exotic’, rather than ‘erot-
ic’, parties.
The Essay on Radio 3 this week (pro-
duced by Kate Bland) has been looking at
organs of the body. The poet Imtiaz Dhark-
er was tasked with finding good things to
say about the liver. She grew up in Glas-
gow, the daughter of parents from Pakistan.
Her mother, she recalled, used to think of
her as ‘a piece of her liver’. Dharker knew
exactly what she meant because in Urdu the
liver (and not the heart) is the location of
the deepest feelings. Physicians understand
this because they know the liver does not
just pump blood around the body, it cleans
and purifies it, throwing bile and poisons out
of the system. It’s the only vital organ that
has the power to regenerate itself, growing
back in weeks if properly treated. ‘This fran-
tic heart has etched your name on my liver,’
she quoted from Rumi.
Patrick McGuinness gave us the ear,
powerfully connecting our inner and outer
worlds, not just biologically but also cog-
nitively and spiritually. It’s ‘the portal into
our brains’. Ears are formed in the foetus
by 20 weeks, so we’ve heard a lot by the
time we enter the world. Visiting the house
where Beethoven lived, McGuinness was
struck by the number of ear trumpets, huge
things, shaped like ladles, which could be
In Urdu the liver, and not the
heart, is the location of the
deepest feelingsattached to his head leaving his hands free
to compose, reminding us that Beethoven
never heard his own late quartets.