The gap between expectation and reality that is even bigger than that between fantasy and reality that theatre usually trades in has come to the fore once again at the Old Vic last week, with the British premiere of Arthur Miller’s penultimate play Resurrection Blues on Thursday that has been trampled upon almost unanimously by the critics. “It is the most terrible embarrassment. Who could possibly thought it a kindness to stage a play that can only do grievous damage to the dramatist’s posthumous reputation?” wrote Charles Spencer in the Daily Telegraph, adding, “I doubt whether the Old Vic has seen quite a fiasco since Peter O’Toole gave his notorious Macbeth at this address 25 years ago.” The Evening Standard’s Nicholas de Jongh, also calling it “a towering embarrassment”, assigned it “a one way-ticket to the theatrical mausoleum”.
And both the Independent’s Paul Taylor and the Mail on Sunday’s Georgina Brown asked even bigger questions about how this production happened at all: According to Taylor, “Once again, the taste and judgement of Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic regime are called into question”; while Brown simply states, “Once again, Kevin Spacey’s Old Vic has bungled.”
Interestingly, of course, this is a production that Spacey himself doesn’t have his name on as director (as he did for Cloaca) or actor (National Anthems, The Philadelphia Story, Richard II), yet it is right and proper that if tickets are sold and bought by his name association, then living by that sword, he should die by it, too. And as artistic director, everything that takes place on his ‘watch’ is also, ultimately, an expression of his taste and judgement, even if he employs others to execute it, in this case the veteran film director Robert Altman who only last night was presented with a special Oscar for lifetime achievement.
This latest Old Vic fiasco may only be a career misstep for Altman, but for Spacey it is turning into a catastrophe. On paper, it all looked so promising: a late Miller (that he was apparently revising right to the end of his life), a brilliant film-maker returning to his theatrical root, and a cast of major movie actors. But like all but Richard II from his first season’s work (for which Trevor Nunn was brought on board as director), it has been all promise and no fulfillment.
But why have we been at all surprised that Spacey’s Old Vic isn’t delivering? Though Spacey served an early theatrical apprenticeship as a stage actor, he has no qualifications beyond movie star charisma for actually running a major theatre. Of course, since this is a commercial operation, not a subsidized one, they can choose whoever they wish to do so; and the allure of Spacey’s name – and the helpful sponsorship it can attract, in this case from Morgan Stanley – was no doubt a huge factor. But in that case, wouldn’t it have been better to have paired him with someone who was more theatrically experienced in the executive role? Instead, former ITV executive David Liddiment is in post as his right-hand man and London producer: a very able and experienced TV commissioner, to be sure, but whose professional theatre experience was previously confined to being a governor of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds, where he also once tried his hand as director when he staged the world premiere of A Passionate Woman by one of his television writers, Kay Mellor.
Someone at the Old Vic should have been able to step in and challenge, not just the initial choice of the play, but also the direction the production was taking, in every sense (there were two weeks of previews in which it was publicly being reported that there were problems). When Trevor Nunn was at the helm of the National, he twice had to publicly intervene to attempt to right productions that were going off the track, with Romeo and Juliet and Peer Gynt. At least Nunn could act as his own in-house show doctor; but who could do so here?
By a curious triple coincidence, the week that also brought this weak new Miller to the Old Vic also brought one of his defining masterpieces back to Stratford-upon-Avon when the RSC revived The Crucible (ahead of an expected West End transfer to the Gielgud) to remind us of his genius; but it also brought Miller’s Two-Way Mirror to the Courtyard at the Theatre Museum, with another fish-out-of-water transposition, Abi Titmuss leaving the fashion model shoots and tabloid cover stories to make her “serious” acting debut. In the crisp words of The Independent’s Rhoda Koenig, “Titmuss sounds like a little girl carefully acting at being grown up; her strongest emotion seems to be pleasure at remembering her lines. If she was told that these plays would be a good vehicle for someone with a sexpot-next-door image, she was ill advised.” There’s obviously a lot of bad advice going around at the moment, from Covent Garden to the South Bank.
