Peter Viney's Blog

Bartholomew Fair
by Ben Jonson

Directed by Blanche McIntyre

Designer Ty Green
Composer: Grant Olding

The Sam Wanamaker Playhouse
Shakespeare’s Globe, London

Tuesday 27th August 2019, 19.00

CAST

Jenna Augean – Zeal of the Land Busy / Ursula the pig woman
Heddyd Dylan – Ned Winwife / Bristle the security guard / Scrivener
Bryony Hannah – Grace Wellborn / Daniel ‘Jordan’ Knockern
Richard Katz – Lantern Leatherhed / Trouble-All
Joshua Lacey- Littlewit . Ezekiel Edgeworth / Officer
Forbes Masson – Humphrey Wasp aka Numps / Costermonger woman /Sharkwell
Anne Odoke – Mistress Alice Overdo / Joan Trash / Prompter
Jude Owesu – Tom Quarlous / Punk Alice
Anita Reynolds- Dame Pure craft / Whit / Corncutter
Boadicea Ricketts – Win Littlewit / Nightingale the busker
Dickon Tyrell – Adam Overdo JP / Technician
Zach Wyatt – Bartholomew Cokes / Mooncalf / Haggis the security guard

MUSIC

Richie Hart – Musical director, bass, tuba
Samantha Norman – violin
Phil Ward – guitar

My irritation about putting the WRITER Ben Jonson and the DIRECTOR (Blanche McIntyre – she is the reason we booked it)  in the middle of the cast and creative list has no bounds. It’s why, after missing not one major production since the Wanamaker opened, we have booked nothing this winter. Until they get rid of overbearing personal gender and equality politics (Hotspur and Falstaff played by women. Text consultants equal status with the writer and director) I can’t see us booking there often.

I’ve said before, the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse concept has been taken extremely seriously- i.e. a candlelit winter venue as in the private theatres when the main open air public theatre is closed, just as in Shakespeare’s time. Dark in summer. Having built it, it might as well be used for more than odd concerts or talks in the summer, and once you’re inside you can’t tell it’s summer. I used to think it would function like The Swan was originally intended to at the RSC: non-Shakespeare plays of the period. Its much smaller capacity is also ideal for the Shakespeare plays which don’t have bums rushing to seats like Pericles or Cymbeline – both have been done here in the winter.  Why not run them through the summer? So many of my non-UK readers express a desire to see the Wanamaker in action, but take their holidays in the summer so can’t. This production is a positive move, and they’ve taken over all of the cast here from The Merry Wives of Windsor at the main theatre, as kind of a summer break before Merry Wives resumes in September. That would have dominated the casting decisions.

The stage as we came in … very different from usual

It’s modern day. They have dispensed with the Wanamaker candle lighting entirely, but have not introduced a dynamic lighting plot. It’s just well lit all over with electric globes replacing  the candelabra. Like a Globe daytime outdoor production the audience is also fully lit throughout, which affects acting styles. The wooden balustrades have been covered with mirrors on both levels, as have the rear and the inner doors. The stage is a modern pale grey, and all but the back row of the pit seating has gone. In Act One white curtains cover the rear and there is white leather furniture. The curtains pull back to reveal a row of pig carcasses representing the fair, and a hanging rack descends covered with modern fairground tat. A very positive point is a strong directorial concept at last. The Globe has sorely lacked that.

Ben Jonson’s play dates from 1614, the year after Shakespeare retired, and is being shown the actual Bartholomew Fair Week – St Bartholomew’s Day is 24th August. The fair ran from the 13th to 19th century at Smithfield. Of course, the Notting Hill Carnival is the same week, though it didn’t reference that.

The programme synopsis reveals the issue with the play. In 1614 it was highly experimental. It’s a City Comedy, i.e, urban, ordinary people not kings and queens, or mythical Italians, which Jonson excelled in writing. It starts with meta drama, with backstage personnel (allegedly) introducing and apologising for the play, then there is a dizzying array of characters, thirty two in the original, played in this production by just twelve actors with astonishingly fast costume changes. They use regional accents to distinguish their character changes and they play across their own genders. The play has picaresque comedy characters interacting in the wildness of the fair, so back to that synopsis. The Globe programmes used to take pride in how tight they could get synopses. Here they run to two pages with four columns of small text. I wish I hadn’t read it as it shed chaos and confusion with the vast number of names. If you want a synopsis, Wikipedia does it more clearly and far better in one third of the length. The thing is Ben Jonson was envisaging something like film high speed intercutting, incredible for 1614.

The original is a very long play, and in the programme the director, Blanche McIntyre, describes how hard it was to cut:

Blanche McIntyre: Some of it is easier to cut – Jonson repeats a lot of jokes – but some of it is much harder: it’s more tightly plotted than people think. It reads like a big, sprawling tale, but in fact it’s a tightly-plotted farce, so if you take out a scene, a piece of plot later on that is crucial will be lost. So I’ve had to be very careful and keep the bones of the plot as a whole.

However, given the added issue of twelve actors doing all those roles, it’s extremely difficult to follow any kind of plot or who anyone is. Yes,  it is a rapid series of events at the fair with pickpockets, hucksters, madams, pimps, puppeteers, buskers, whores, punters, disguised magistrate, security guards. A lot is very funny but it is also disjointed, scenes clashing rather than flowing.

It’s 21st century, so we have contactless payments by phone, wraps of cocaine for Littlewit and Quarlus in the first scene, spiked drinks to render Win Littlewit and Alice Overdo unconscious enough to be taken off and dressed as prostitutes.

Zach Wyatt (not sure as who) with Dickon Tyrell as Justice Overdo

The cast all differentiate very well, as e.g. Dickon Tyrell does Geordie as a technician stagehand introducing the play, then rich RP as Justice Adam Overdo. His Justice Overdo is a particularly engaging performance … well-intentioned without having a clue what’s going on.

Heddyd Dylan as Security Guard arrests Zeal of The Land Busy (Jenna Augean)

Jenna Augean is unrecognisable in switching between Ursula the madam, or pig woman, who seems to run everything, then as Zeal-of-the-Land Busy (the silliest name in a play full of silly names) the Puritan of the original. In this Busy becomes a Southern US bible thumper in a fat suit. According to my New Mermaids edition, the main themes of the play are defending the theatre against Puritan attack, and the iniquities of wardship, which meant people feeling they had been bought. The main attack on theatre and fun would be our Southern bible thumper. Justice Overdo complains about poetry too.

Dickon Tyrell as Justice Overdo in disguise, Bryony Hannah as Knockern, the punky kid

Bryony Hannah was an Irish punky lad in the fair, but a Russian woman in black as Grace, Justice Overdo’s ward. She is a fine actress (we loved the film Cemetery Junction) and making the ward Russian sheds interesting light on the “wards being bought” theme. She looks downtrodden Russian, not Selfridges cosmetics department furs and gold Russian. However, I don’t think the (surviving) text brought that wardship issue out clearly (or at all) if you had no prior knowledge.

Heddyd Dylan channels Hugh Grant as a floppy haired Ned Winwife, is a stroppy Welsh security guard and a very funny Scrivener giving us the ‘audience contract’ before the play starts.

Too long at the fair> Forbes Masson as Numps after a buying spree, with the musicians

Forbes Masson plays a permanently angry Scots Numps, though we never quite workedout what Numps was about.

While it is clear that Quarlus (Jude Owesu) is disadvantaged in wooing Dame Purecraft because she has been told she would marry a madman, I hadn’t realized for ages that the character in shorts with a row of pens in his pocket and a head mic after the interval was Quarlus pretending to be mad. I just saw it as a different and new character, some kind of security officer. I probably missed a line, but confused? I was. When everyone’s doubling, having someone not doubling, but in disguise instead is doomed to fail.

The trouble is, as ever with all this gender switching, is that mainly it forces actors to play ‘too large.’ Women playing men exaggerate male movements and voices. The 50% women rule at The Globe is destroying its credibility for Elizabethan and Jacobean drama for us. To repeat, it was never written for that. As Bartholomew Fair intrinsically has stereotypes rather than characters, it’s not as problematic as usual. Forbes Masson as a female costermonger is the only example of switching the other way, and is hilarious, but it is inevitably pantomime dame. Anita Reynolds goes from stately African Dame Purecraft to a rapper, but basically her breasts show strongly and we couldn’t grasp that it was a gender switch, as we could with the slighter women.

Boadicua Rickets as a pregnant Win, Anita Reynolds as Dame Purecraft

Boadicea Ricketts came out very well as the pregnant Win Littlewit, then as the busker with a guitar case full of CDs, Nightingale. She is a first rate singer, and as Anne Page in the Merry Wives and here in the final dance, proved she is a great dancer too. Prediction is she will go far. And here she didn’t have to switch gender.

Joshua Lacey as Edgeworth

Joshua Lacey is a major talent, here doubling Littlewit and the wheeling dealing ducking and diving Edgeworth in a smart suit. We thought he was under-employed in the Merry Wives, and I would have cast him instead as Master Ford without hesitation. Here at least he got a decent part. Coincidentally, before we went in, I bought the DVD of Emma Rice’s Twelfth Night at the Globe shop,  in which he played Orsino.

Richard Katz does the puppet show

Full marks to Richard Katz for doing the puppet show so well, with new text, I think, from the balcony. I loved Zach Wyatt’s punter who distributed “loadsamoney” over everyone and everything.

Zach Wyatt as Cokes loses loadsamoney. Jude Owesu as Quartus at rear

The songs by Grant Olding are very strong, with the three piece band coming down to the stage and Boadicea Ricketts taking lead vocal superbly. The final dance is the Globe’s trademark and as usual, leaves a great mood.

It is a given at the Wanamaker that some entrances will be climbing through the audience and jumping the balustrade. Most plays do it a few times, but here it happened so often and from so many angles that it as was eventually tiresome.

We were in the Lower Gallery, Row C, the best seats as they have the back wall to lean against- the Wanamaker’s benches without backs are excruciating and were always a really bad idea – but at the interval, we lost six or eight people just in our row, and two in front. More at the sides. This happens very often at the Wanamaker, and I blame discomfort rather than the play, they always lose some, but looking around they lost far more than usual at half time. Too hard to follow? Or too modern a treatment for the candle-lit fans? I don’t know. The detailed review on the Nottingham University blog indicates that it was only half full in the first few days, which must mean that the play lacks box office appeal. It’s a pity as I would like the Wanamaker to run plays all summer.

On the Wanamaker Playhouse as a concept. I always thought the strict insistence on candles and benches was somewhat over the top. We want to see what plays were like in a Jacobean private theatre, but seat backs and low electric light could have been used with the candles reserved as a special occasion. People in 1614 sat on benches a lot. We don’t and get backache and the richer audience members in 1614 may have had  chairs for all we know. However once you cover the fabric of the building with mirrors and light it brightly, and have modern dress and modern props,  it becomes simply a space in the right shape with uncomfortable seats. Other small theatres can reproduce the audience / stage shape with decent seats. While candles every time is too limiting, the concept was reproduction Jacobean private theatre. Maybe this moves too  far from it. The modern market photo on publicity is honest, but I suspect it may not have sold the play.

In theatre history, it’s an important play. It is early city comedy and points the way to Restoration drama frolics rather than Jacobean comedy. I was glad to have seen it with such an accomplished cast and they are to be applauded in presenting it. The character naming says it all. They are all 2D not 3D.

Just looking at that  half time audience decimation, part of which must be inability to follow the plot, (neither of us could at all) I can’t go over three star. Karen went for two star.

***

WHAT THE CRITICS SAID

I recommend Peter Kirwan’s review on the University of Nottingham blog linked here. He knows the play much better than I do and describes the production in greater detail.

I reviewed before press night. It didn’t do well. My favourite critics, Billington & Cavendish, both make the same point: that it would have worked better on the main stage. So do the others quoted below. Let me add, “and with a cast of at least 24 to play the 32 roles.” The main stage is a huge space. Employ more actors!

3 star
Sarah Hemming, Financial Times ***
Natasha Tripney, The Stage ***
Nick Curtis, The Standard ***
Alex Wood, What’s On Stage ***
Simon Parsons, Morning Star ***

Only performed a handful of times in living memory, Bartholomew Fair has once again proved difficult to stage successfully. But the decision to cram it into such a compact and confined space rather than use the much larger, open, Globe stage has not done it any favours.

2 star
Michael Billington, The Guardian **

Ben Jonson’s 1614 comedy is an unwieldy beast at the best of times. But a carnivalesque satire that cries out to occupy the Globe’s main, open-air theatre is instead done in its intimate, indoor playhouse. Although the space has been reconfigured and electricity has replaced the usual candles, Blanche McIntyre’s production sheds little light and resembles an attempt to cram the contents of a house into a single trunk.

Domenic Cavendish, Telegraph **

The Globe’s main stage would seem to be the ideal location, but it was unavailable to or shunned by director Blanche McIntyre. Instead, a company of 12 – doubling and tripling roles – deliver a textually pruned version at the Sam Wanamaker, where there’s barely enough room to swing a goldfish in a bag.

Clive Davis, The Times **

uncategorized
Vera Liber, British Theatre Guide

Any open-air theatre (Regent’s Park, where it was done in 1987) would better serve the play’s convoluted intersecting plots and give its thirty named characters, here played by twelve actors, room to breath.

LINKS ON THIS BLOG
All of the cast were in The Merry Wives of Windsor at The Globe this year.

BEN JONSON PLAYS
The Alchemist, by Ben Jonson, RSC 2016
Volpone, by Ben Jonson, RSC 2015

BLANCHE McINTYRE (director)
The Winter’s Tale, Globe 2018
The Norman Conquests, Ayckbourn, Chichester 2017
Titus Andronicus, RSC 2017
The Two Noble Kinsmen, RSC 2016
Noises Off, Nuffield, Southampton, 2016
As You Like It, Globe 2015
Arcadia by Tom Stoppard, Brighton, 2015
The Comedy of Errors, Globe 2014
The Seagull, Headlong / Nuffield 2013

JOSHUA LACEY
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
Macbeth, National Theatre, 2018
Imogen (Cymbeline Renamed and Reclaimed) – Globe 2016
wonder.land by Damian Albarn, Moira Buffini, National Theatre 2016
Richard III – Trafalgar Studios, 2014
Twelfth Night, Globe 2017(Orsino)

RICHARD KATZ
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
As You Like It, Globe 2018

DICKON TYRELL
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
Measure For Measure, Globe 2015
Knight of The Burning Pestle, Wanamaker, 2014
Duchess of Malfi, Wanamaker, 2014

JUDE OWUSU
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
Tamburlaine, RSC 2018
Julius Caesar, RSC 2012

FORBES MASSON
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
Boudica, Globe 2017
Travesties, Menier, 2016
A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Bath 2016
The Ruling Class, Trafalgar Studio, 2015
Richard III, Trafalgar Studio, 2014
Macbeth, Trafalgar Studio, 2013

BOADICEA RICKETTS
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019

ZACH WYATT
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019

ANITA REYNOLDS
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
Absolute Hell, National Theatre 2018

BRYONY HANNAH
The Merry Wives of Windsor, Globe 2019
Cemetery Junction (FILM)