The Upstart Crow
by Ben Elton
Directed by Sean Foley
Gielgud Theatre, London
Saturday, 22nd February 2020 14.30
The Gielgud Theatre, Shaftesbury Avenue, London … “House Full … Alas.”
CAST
David Mitchell- William Shakespeare
Gemma Whelan – Kate
Mark Heap – Dr John Hall
Helen Monks – Susanna
Rob Rouse – Bottom
Steve Speirs – Burbage
John Callender – Arragon
Danielle Phillips – Judith
Rachel Summers – Desiree
Reice Weathers – Mr Whiskers
Upstart Crow (Series one to three) is one of our favourite TV sitcoms of recent years (OK, Episodes is the ultimate favourite, Mum‘s another). We’ve seen most of Upstart Crow three times. We never miss David Mitchell in Would I Lie To You. Then Richard Burbage is played by Steve Speirs, who was in Big School, another contender for funniest sitcom. Sean Foley is the most consistently funny stage director. I was surprised reading the press reviews of The Upstart Crow (the play adds “The”) how often reviewers dissed Foley’s The Man in The White Suit from last year, which we both loved. The question is how well the sitcom will transfer to the stage with a TV experienced cast rather than a stage experienced cast, and also how well it will sustain a story three or four times the length of a sitcom episode. It’s the Christmas Special syndrome as we know that 30 minutes is the optimum sitcom length. However, both Dad’s Army and Hi-de-Hi had successful stage versions (we saw both).
Comparison with the TV series is inevitable. They have David Mitchell as Will, and Gemma Whelan (Game of Thrones) as Kate. It’s the character of Kate who wants to be an actress but can’t perform because of Elizabethan / Jacobean rules against women on stage. They have Rob Rouse as Bottom, the put-upon servant.
Walking from Stratford: Will (David Mitchell) and Bottom (Rob Rouse). A minute after this Bottom gets one of the biggest laughs in the play.
In the TV series Shakespeare regularly treks back and forth between Stratford-Upon-Avon and London, with running jokes about failed transport. They have abandoned the Stratford parents … the TV series had Liza Tarbuck as the Brummy Anne Shakespeare (ne Hathaway) and Paula Wilcox and Harry Enfield as Will’s parents, Mary and John Shakespeare. They’ll be missed, but we retain Helen Monks as Will’s stroppy teenage daughter, Susanna, and add Danielle Phillips as her sister, Judith, and he still goes to Stratford. Anne’s absence is explained … she’s not talking to him, still angry about The Sonnets, and The Earl of Southampton and The Dark Lady.
They’ve scrapped Robert Greene (the minor jealous playwright who originally described Shakespeare as “an upstart crow”):
There is an upstart crow, beautified with our feathers, that with his tiger’s heart wrapped in a player’s hide supposes he is as well able to bombast out a blank verse as the best of you: and being an absolute Johannes Factotum, is in his own conceit the only Shake-scene in a country.
Robert Greene, A Groats-Worth of Wit, 1592
Mark Heap as Dr John Hall. Waist-up only to protect innocent eyes.
Greene died in 1592, apparently writing his attack on Shakespeare while dying, and this play is set in Jacobean times. However the actor who played him, Mark Heap, is now a new character, Dr John Hall. John Hall married Susanna Shakespeare in 1607 and presumably financed the tomb right by the altar in Holy Trinity, Stratford, with his and Susanna’s next to it. In this play John Hall becomes a fanatic puritan (or Purititty) until he gets a “Malvolio” done upon him. We find out late than John Hall is a doctor because “he identifies as a doctor” one of many great Ben Elton lines. I will try not to reveal many.
Grave of John Hall, “Physician and Son-In-Law of William Shakespeare” with Susannah, elder daughter of William Shakespeare, Holy Trinity, Stratford. Ben Elton has dropped the “h” in Susannah.
While we retain Richard Burbage (described by Will as ‘That slice of Wiltshire honeyroast’ i.e. ham, and Burbage is indeed a Wiltshire village) I felt the loss of the Globe company … Dominic Coleman as Henry Condell, who did the female roles, and the know-it-all smartarse Wiliam Kempe (played by Spencer Jones, channelling his inner Ricky Gervais). It’s inevitable. You can’t put a large TV cast together for a long run.
Richard Burbage (Steve Speirs) – A slice of Wiltshire honeyroast – with Kate (Gemma Whelan)
They more than make up for it with the Egyptian princess, Desiree (Rachel Summers) and her brother, Arragon (John Callender). In an echo of Twelfth Night the two African princely siblings turn up. I’ll fall over backwards not to plot spoil by revealing too many lines.
As we’ve noted throughout the TV series, Ben Elton is erudite on Shakespeare’s biography and on the plays. Most episodes revolve around or reflect upon the writing of one play or another. This time the references are Twelfth Night, Othello, The Winter’s Tale and King Lear.
Let’s not be anally-retentive about exact chronology, but it’s 1605 and Shakespeare’s just had two flops, All’s Well That Ends Well and Measure For Measure and needs to recover his audience. As Bottom says, he’s getting obsessed with plot hinges using people shagging the wrong woman in the dark. Kate gives us a stern homily on the sex in Midsummer Night’s Dream too.
Will (David Mitchell) has to listen to Bottom’s criticism (Rob Rouse)
More importantly, he has to please the new King, James (who is known to be a gaysome hugger-tugger). I’m not as enamoured as some by Elton’s word plays (futtocking, Purititty, gaysome hugger tugger, puffling pants, tartingslaps) but actually I thought they worked a lot better live on stage than they do on TV.
Ben Elton is on top form with plot and dialogue. He pins so much about London Woke Theatre, particularly via Desiree and Arragon. I loved Desiree saying how amazing it is that her black face draws no attention in 16th century London. There must have been lots of BAME people, thus enabling the colour blind productions of the 21st century to be historically accurate. Elton does it on colour, gender, trans, PC … maybe that’s why it gets a little clutch of sniffy three star reviews from London critics! I noted that three “London only” publications agreed on three stars … Time Out, The Standard and Metro. I was surprised he didn’t project forward and imagine three female Hamlets within a couple of years, with the third one black AND female (The Young Vic, Summer 2020).
The way the plot weaves to cover King Lear and Othello simultaneously is marvellous. Will Shakespeare (as ever actually inspired by Kate) gets the idea of changing ‘King Leir’ to ‘King Lear’. He decides to share out his estate three ways … his two daughters, plus Kate who he thinks of as a daughter … cue the King Lear plot. Helen Monks and Danielle Phillips are a double act as Susanna and Judith Shakespeare, with perfect timing, and we loved the Brummagem accents. The Time Out reviewer, Andrzej Lukowski, begged to get irate on behalf of a community he’s not part of:
The ‘joke’ that Shakespeare’s daughters have OTT Midlands accents is lazy and contemptible (it’s hard to imagine any other accent being mocked this way in 2020).
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out
Think about it. Why do you think Lenny Henry and Jasper Carrott are so popular in their native West Midlands. People love their accent being sent up. It’s always been a delightful conceit that Shakespeare’s family are all Brummies. (This is linguistically interesting in that Stratford is the meeting point between Southern English accents and Midland English accents, and probably was so then. Actually, you don’t hear much West Midlands accent in Stratford, but you do in all the neighbouring towns. That might be an effect of people moving to Stratford from many other areas because it’s a nice place to live).
L to R: A man with three “daughters” Susanna (Helen Monks), William (David Mitchell), Judit (Danielle Phillips), Kate (Gemma Whelan)
The play starts with the shipwreck sequence (Comedy of Errors, Twelfth Night and The Tempest) with waves and a model galleon, plus the turquioise rippling cloth to represent waves across the stage, so Desiree opens the play as castaway African princess. Of course she has lost her twin brother in the wreck, and frightened of a strange land decides to dress as a boy, ‘Des.’
Shipwrecked! Rachel Summers as Desiree
Des seeks employment with Shakespeare and Kate falls for her and she falls for Kate. When her twin brother Arragon turns up, he decides he’d better disguise himself as a girl, Sharon. We loved the tall burly Arragon and small feminine Desiree being regarded by the cast as indistinguishable twins.
Arragon (John Callender)
There’s a lot of references to staging conventions. Painted backcloths drop into place. Large characters “hide” behind spindly stage trees. A tiny mask renders a character completely unrecognizable, even when the character is Mr Whiskers, a dancing bear. The dancing bear has been rescued by flute-playing Kate from exploitation at The Globe. Conveniently, Will is trying to think of a “best ever stage direction.” I’ve mentioned on The Winter’s Tale reviews that I’m sure the Kings’ Men would have had a real bear. Dancing bears were common, and I saw them often in Turkey in 1975. Bears, being of the canine family, are trainable. well, small brown bears are. This is a big one and the dancing gets Ahs! Very well done.
The Brummie daughters persuade the lovelorn Desiree that Kate fancies Will and so Desiree decides to kill Kate out of jealousy, so inspiring Othello. That gets produced on stage. Kate pretends to be Shane, a boy, so she can play Desdemona (a girl pretending to be a boy so she can pretend to be a girl when actually she is a girl), and Arragon becomes the first ever black Othello. The set with its red pillars directly references the current Shakespeare’s Globe stage (we have no idea what colour the original pillars were).
Kate as Desdemona (Gemma Whelan), Arragon as Othello (John Callender)
Will contemplates the cross-dressing shipwrecked twins and declares that he is justified … The Comedy of Errors and Twelfth Night in the past were examples of his ‘forensic naturalism.’ Twelfth Night gets a further reference … it gives Will the idea of writing a note to the Puritan Dr John Hall suggesting he dresses up to court Kate who Dr Hall initially fancies madly. Instead of cross gartered stockings, Hall gets huge slashed puffling pants and a giant projecting codpiece – or rather model penis, which is yellow and cross-gartered. Eventually he turms his attention to Susanna, falling in love with her right at the end, as so often happens.
The end … then they start dancing …
I rate this as five stars. I’m still going to add a couple of minor criticisms though. Mark Lawson in the Guardian (5 stars too) compares it to One Man, Two Guv’nors. A lot of the joy of One Man Two Guv’nors was that James Corden was allowed space to improvise. I made this comment on Sean Foley’s The Man in The White Suit where I thought giving Stephen Mangan more freedom to ad-lib would have boosted it. When Sean Foley directed The Miser in 2017, he gave Lee Mack (David Mitchell’s co-star in Would I Lie To You) plenty of licence to ad-lib. The most memorable was after bringing the house to tears of laughter plus massive applause, Lee Mack walked forward and said “Three stars. Michael Billington. The Guardian.” David Mitchell, like Lee Mack, is incredibly quick-thinking. I’d have encouraged him to ad-lib if he felt like it. Maybe he does if the situation arises.
The cast are heavily mic’d, at stage musical levels. I wondered if this was because so many of the cast are TV / film experienced and they needed to even up the stage projection. We were near the front, right at the side and it sounded amplified rather than not, but the theatre is a huge lofty space with two high galleries. so they were probably checking it for audibility in the back row of the top gallery – I’m glad to see someone is. You should.
A further minor quibble was racing at times. Desiree in particular did a couple of speeches a little too fast, and needed to just pause a little, insert a little air. It’s such a fine line, and while you don’t want pausing to gloat over laughter from the audience, you also don’t want to carry on speaking through loud reaction laughter from the previous line. We’re still early in the run … actors have to find out where the consistent loud laughter comes and adjust timing to fit. There’s a good joke about matinees when Arragon, awarded the role of Othello, announces ‘My own dressing room … No matinees’ and actors have mentioned the tendency to speed up in matinees. I think that very unlikely here. Not only was it “House Full, Alas” on the board outside but Saturday matinees are the times when I have most often seen the famous faces in the audience in Central London. I saw three actors I recognize from TV but couldn’t name today.
David Mitchell as Will Shakespeare
Because I do a “Best of …” for each year since I started this blog, I keep a running Word document and add to it after each play. At this point The Upstart Crow tops the play list, with David Mitchell and Gemma Whelan topping best actor and best actress. I have four of the cast in “Best supporting actor.” I can’t think they’ll be far down the list by the end of the year. David Mitchell is in his first professional stage appearance. He does actual bits from King Lear too. You would never know. Gemma Whelan is outstanding, skipping, jumping, miming, emoting. A true leader in the cast.
Gemma Whelan as Kate
Overall: five stars
*****
WHAT THE CRITICS SAID
5 star
Mark Lawson, The Guardian *****
Staged TV comedies sometimes simply stitch together telly scripts, but Elton commendably creates a largely new piece. In transferring from BBC2 to the Gielgud theatre, the show has added “The” to its title, which is fitting, as The Upstart Crow is, theatrically, the definite article … Oddly, Elton’s writing credit is for the “book” (more usually applied to dialogue in musicals), but this is emphatically a play – the most consistently funny and expertly staged comedy since Richard Bean’s One Man, Two Guvnors, which similarly ignored recent social memes about the need for humour to tread carefully.
Will Twigger, Daily Mirror, *****
David – who is cheered from his very first moments on stage – looks totally comfortable and confident in the lead, delivering lines that perfectly match his comedic style. Gemma Whelan’s Kate, who’s plot revolves around the classic Shakespearean tropes of mistaken identity and gender fluidity, beautifully demonstrates her range after moving on from the dark and brutal Game of Thrones to stage comedy.
4 star
Domenic Cavendish, The Telegraph ****
Throw in daft eavesdropping scenes, a dancing bear, terrific work from Rob Rouse as the Baldrick-like sidekick Bottom and scene-stealing business from Mark Heap (Shax’s rival Robert Greene on TV) and this is just the hey nonny-nonny nonsense the doctor ordered. Much to crow about, then, for Elton, the former comedy upstart. Let none speak of plague or theatre closures!
Clive Davis, The Times ****
Luke Jones, Daily Mail ****
Paul Taylor, The Independent ****
Sarah Crompton, What’s On Stage ****
This play – like the TV sitcom from which it sprang – deserves the love lavished upon it. It is, it’s true, full of a lot of daft gags about bottoms and codpieces and a fair amount of politically incorrect historical hindsight about BAME casting and the conditions of the Elizabethan stage. But it taps beautifully into two strong British traditions of writing: the immaculately conceived vaudevillian sight-gag and the cod historical drama, while revealing great knowledge of the Bard himself. And any show that features a sad-faced, tap-dancing bear, making regular appearances from the wings, gets my giggling vote.
Veronica Lee, The arts desk / the i, ****
The script is non-stop gags, Shakespeare in-jokes and some gloriously anachronistic lines, and Elton has fun mocking modern-day preoccupations with diversity and animal rights. But in among the knob gags – of course there are knob gags, it’s Ben Elton – in the twins’ plot-line he makes some telling points about how white historians have written black people out of history, and in Kate’s (she really, really, really wants to act on stage) how women being elbowed out of the way by men is nothing new.
3 star
Tim Bano, The Stage ***
Robert Gore-Langton, Mail Online ***
Nick Curtis, Standard ***
Claire Allfree, The Metro ***
Andrzej Lukowski, Time Out ***
That everyone says ‘futtock’ when they mean ‘fuck’ is irritating to the point of distraction. The ‘joke’ that Shakespeare’s daughters have OTT Midlands accents is lazy and contemptible (it’s hard to imagine any other accent being mocked this way in 2020). There are discussions about race, sexuality and gender that are probably well-meaning but come across a bit ‘OK boomer’ … And yet… the tittering Shakespeare-bashing is largely confined to the start, and Elton ends up weaving a somewhat endearing tribute to the Bard, as the plot – which very loosely follows the events triggered by a pair of shipwrecked African royals being washed up into town – becomes a knowing mashup of ‘Twelfth Night’, ‘King Lear’, ‘Othello’ and ‘The Winter’s Tale’.
David Jays, Sunday Times, ***
This guy gave four stars to the mediocre “A Number” which we saw the day before, and is a radio play at best. He referred to this as “pantomime.“
not using stars
Holly Williams, The Observer
Some aspects of the humour that sailed by in a sitcom can feel more laboured over two acts: the hilarity of faux-Elizabethan naughty words (“cod-dangle”, “twatlington”) is a matter of taste, and I grew weary of jokes about how “woke” theatre will become. But then, even if you don’t like one gag, another will be along before you can say “tufting muffle”
Jack Hudson, London Theatre Review
All in all, Director Sean Foley (The Ladykillers) has brought the sitcom’s devastating pairing of Ben Elton and David Mitchell to the stage in a powerful way. Shakespeare fans will exeunt with glee, it’s all in there! Suspect hiding places, tiny masks, rants about stagecoach delays, puffling pants and the world’s greatest stage direction… this is a marvelous mash-up of the scholarly and totally ridiculous, performed by some of Britain’s finest comedians and comedy actors.
LINKS ON THIS BLOG:
SEAN FOLEY (director, writer)
The Man In The White Suit, written by Sean Foley, Bath 2019
Present Laughter, by Noel Coward, Chichester 2018
The Miser, by Moliere, 2017
The Dresser, by Ronald Harewood, Chichester 2017
The Painkiller, Francis Veber, Kenneth Branagh Company 2016
Jeeves & Wooster in “Perfect Nonsense”, tour 2013
The Ladykillers, 2011
[…] is one of the jokes; it refers to the trunk hose, with lining visible between the slashehttps://peterviney.com/stage/the-upstart-crow/He might (also?) be a? the? Prince of London in Darkness. I wouldn’t speculate, he might take […]
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