Silk purse/sow’s ear

Cast Robert James Waller’s dazzlingly awful 1992 novel out of your mind. While you’re at it, you might as well forget Clint Eastwood’s almost-as-stinky 1995 film adaptation. This is, yes, still the soapy, predictable story of a four-day love affair between an Italian-American housewife and an itinerant photographer in 1960s Iowa, and until the last ten minutes of the show you’ll be (at least) three steps ahead of the plot. Somehow, though, bookwriter Marsha Norman and composer Jason Robert Brown have managed to dig behind Waller’s laughably purple prose to uncover a surprisingly effective portrait of two lonely people who find themselves awakened by a chance meeting.

The key – and the element that makes the show a must-see, whatever your opinion of the (dismal) source material – is Brown’s beautiful score. Norman has done an admirable job of stripping away the novel’s (many) excesses so that the story is told simply and clearly, but the songs are the star here. The show was a relatively fast flop on Broadway, but this is among the best theatre scores of the last decade, although it’s not always easy listening. Brown isn’t afraid of dissonance, and he isn’t afraid to experiment with song structure, but this is a lush, lyrical, haunting set of songs that have an astonishing emotional pull. It’s a pleasure, too, to hear Brown’s own orchestrations for a ten-piece band in a space as small as the Menier; under Tom Murray’s musical direction, the band gives a superlative account of this gorgeous but demanding music.

The production, on the other hand, is more of a mixed bag. There’s no faulting the performances, although neither Jenna Russell nor Edward Baker-Duly have the pristine, lightning-in-a-bottle voices of their Broadway counterparts. They’re both good singers – really good singers – but this music stretches them. That said, the show gains immeasurably from being seen in such a small space, and Russell in particular is quietly heartbreaking, offering a delicate, finely-shaded portrayal that gives Francesca a level of complexity you’d never imagine possible from reading the novel. There’s fine support, too, from Gillian Kirkpatrick as a nosy but caring neighbour, and (in several small roles) from Shanay Holmes, whose rendition of the lovely ‘Another Life’ is the production’s musical highlight.

Less impressive is John Bausor’s overly-complicated set, a combination of turntables and flimsy sliding panels that sometimes threatens to bring this already slow-paced show to a grinding halt. Yes, Tal Rosner’s video projections (a starlit sky, Iowa cornfields, a small-town Main Street) look exquisite against the bleached wood planks of those wooden panels – but at the performance I attended (a very late preview) a truck unit momentarily juddered to a halt before it moved all the way offstage, the two sliding wooden panels wobbled every time they moved in a way that called into question whether they’ll survive the run (I’ll find out, I suppose, I’m going back for the final matinee), the door of Francesca’s fridge kept stubbornly refusing to close, and several ominous crashes were heard from backstage during the (numerous) set-changes. It’s one of those sets that would look great if everything worked, particularly as sensitively lit by Tim Lutkin – and it’s great to see designers trying to push the boundaries of what can be achieved in a venue with so little backstage space, but the show might have been better served by a simpler design.

That said, though, Brown’s score is so lovely, and Jenna Russell’s performance is so exquisite, that any shortcomings in the production surrounding them seem almost irrelevant. I don’t know whether I’d call this a great musical, and I wouldn’t say it was a completely unimpeachable production, but the good elements are so good that it’s more than worth an evening of your time. To draw music this beautiful, and a performance so brimming with yearning, out of a novel as truly, thoroughly, overwhelmingly bad as The Bridges of Madison County is a remarkable achievement. You aren’t going to get very many opportunities to hear a live performance of this score in this country, and Jenna Russell is doing some of the very best work of her career. Don’t miss it.

Bitter lemon

Oh, come on. You didn’t think a David Mamet play about the Me Too movement with a thinly-disguised Harvey Weinstein figure as the central character was actually going to be good, did you?

Please.

YES, Bitter Wheat is a thoroughly, utterly, completely dreadful play. Once upon a time, David Mamet might have been capable of writing a pungent, sharply funny satire about horrible Hollywood people doing horrible things and then trying to evade the consequences of their horrible behaviour. That time, on the evidence of the fiasco currently lumbering through a summer run at the Garrick, is long past. The plot is predictable enough – Barney Fein, producer and all-round sleazeball, invites/entices jet-lagged young Anglo-Korean film-maker Yung Kim Li into his apartment and attempts to Do Nasty Things To Which She Doesn’t Consent, she sets off the fire alarm, and the scandal finishes his career – after which, God help us, wacky hijinks, or what Mr. Mamet believes are wacky hijinks, ensue in the final scene. Mamet seems to be somehow under the impression that he’s written a comedy. To say he hasn’t is a breathtaking understatement.

It’s not the scenario, actually, that’s at fault here. It would be as good a starting-off point as any for a satire about the repulsive behaviour of a powerful Hollywood shitbag-in-a-suit. Mamet, unfortunately, doesn’t appear to be attempting anything as evolved as satire here. Bitter Wheat, it turns out, is less a play and more just an over-the-hill reactionary prick ejaculating sexist/racist/unpleasantly right-wing comments over the stage for 85 minutes, interspersed with feeder lines from a cast of (very good) supporting actors who all have too little to do. That might be OK, or at least not completely excruciating to sit through, if Barney Fein’s verbal diarrhoea was funny; there are two or three reasonably big laughs in the first half of the play, but it mostly isn’t.

And that, in turn, might not matter so much if the production’s above-the-title star seemed to be in any way awake. John Malkovich – an astonishingly potent stage actor when he wants to be, as anyone who saw him in Burn This (also far from a first-rate play) years ago will tell you – is phoning it in here. And by ‘phoning it in’, I mean he seems to be faxing his performance over a dodgy connection from a small town somewhere in Uzbekistan. It can’t be easy to take a starring role and then have to get up eight times a week in front of a less-than-completely-enthusiastic audience, wearing a laughably bad fat suit, to deliver an incoherent string of witless lines in a slack mess of a play sloppily directed by its entirely too self-regarding author, but when hundreds of people per performance have paid mostly to see him it would be nice if he could give the impression that he is actually in the building when he’s onstage. Apparently that’s too much trouble.

The supporting actors, while they don’t have enough to do, all emerge with their dignity intact. Matthew Pidgeon is lucky – he has nothing to do between the first scene and the curtain call, which means he’s spared having to navigate the (considerable) worst of his brother-in-law’s writing – and Teddy Kempner, whose epic beard is worth at least a couple of bonus points, does as much as he can as Fein’s slightly dubious doctor, a role Mamet possibly wrote while unconscious. Doon Mackichan, as Fein’s PA Sondra, makes by far the strongest impression, and she’s the most interesting person onstage – a woman working for a man she knows is a serial sex abuser, who disapproves of his behaviour but has made a great deal of money because of him, who has never been on the receiving end of that side of him herself, and who isn’t inclined to rat him out to the FBI when the shit hits the fan. Somewhere within those contradictions there’s a much better play, and a much more insightful look at how people like Harvey Weinstein managed to get away for so long with behaviour everybody knew about. The key, probably, would be to keep the Weinstein character offstage for as long as possible, rather than wallowing in his repulsive behaviour for 85 minutes of stage time. Twenty-five years ago, that’s a play Mamet could possibly have written. Twenty-five years is a long time… as you’ll learn in the twenty-five-minute second act of Bitter Wheat, which feels like it.

ATTENTION!!!!

There’s a danger sometimes in waiting until the end of the run to see a show that everyone has praised to the skies and back again. When you go in after hearing an almost neverending chorus of people telling you it’s stunning/shattering/brilliant/revelatory/whatever, your expectations are going to be high. Perhaps unfeasibly high.

It’s not that this a bad revival. At least, not precisely. It’s lovingly directed, sometimes stunning to look at, has a superb cast, and Femi Temowo’s music is beautifully performed. And yet somehow, for me, it never quite catches fire. It’s a doggedly earnest effort, ploddingly intelligent, and it would be both more interesting and more moving if the director and several of the actors didn’t go to such drearily strenuous lengths to underline Every. Single. Piece. Of. Subtext. in red pen.

There’s no doubt Wendell Pierce is a very, very good actor. The trouble is, his Willy Loman (do I really have to outline the plot?) is so clearly heading for a breakdown right from the top of his opening scene that there’s nowhere left for him to go except way over the top, so that the climactic confrontation between Willy and his two shiftless sons is mostly about volume rather than emotion. Possibly it’s a performance that will work better once the production has transferred to a larger space; in the Young Vic, from where I was sitting, less would have been much more.

That goes, too, for Femi Temowo’s music – lovely to listen to, beautifully played, but a little bit too obvious in the way it telegraphs the play’s emotional content. Instead of allowing the audience to find their own emotional response to the material – and this can be an extremely moving play – directors Marianne Elliott and Miranda Cromwell seem desperate to do all OUR work for us, using light cues (I mean, beyond the ones in the script), music cues, set changes and other theatrical tricks to let us know in no uncertain terms what we should be feeling in any given moment. In a play which is all about subtext, that’s not an approach that is going to pay dividends.

The glorious exception: Sharon D. Clarke’s exceptional Linda Loman. Somehow, in the middle of a production that seems desperate to keep hitting us over the head, Clarke’s performance is a model of restraint. Of course that speech is delivered flawlessly, but she’s remarkable throughout, and that’s largely because in the middle of a stage full of Really Big Performances, Clarke knows how to be still. So, to be fair, does Matthew Seadon-Young as Howard, Willy’s boss – but that’s a much smaller role. His two scenes are terrific, though.

The biggest problem, though, is simply that there’s more than a whiff of smugness surrounding the show: everyone here – with the exception of Clarke and Seadon-Young, who not coincidentally are the best things in it – very clearly knows how brilliant they are, and I can’t shake the impression that the play might have been better served by people who approached it with a little more humility. Linda Loman says “attention must be paid” in one scene. This production’s directors seem hellbent on saying it subliminally about every two-and-a-half minutes, and in doing so they take the play’s (many) subtleties and more or less announce them via a megaphone. It’s all very clever, and all very reverent, and there’s no question that making the Lomans a black middle-class family with a white neighbour and – for Willy – a white boss – adds fascinating layers to the play, but the overall effect, I’m afraid, is more than a little stifling. Elliott and Cromwell seem more interested in telling the audience to, in effect, shut up and eat their bran flakes than in allowing us to feel for Miller’s characters for ourselves. It’s never less than engaging – but if you’re expecting to be moved, manage your expectations.