Britain – and this blog – may have ground to a halt for the last few days, but although I may have given my keyboard a rest, I’ve not entirely stopped myself. I’ve had several thrilling cultural experiences – the kind that make the endless pursuit I make of such things worth the while.
First off, and very much a case of better late than never, I caught the final performance of the short run of one of Noel Coward’s earliest plays, The Rat Trap, at the Finborough. Written in 1918 when he was just 18 years old, but not seen since its original 1926 production – long after later plays like Fallen Angels, The Vortex and Hay Fever had been successfully produced – had played for just 12 performances at Hampstead’s Everyman Theatre (now, of course, an art-house cinema), its 80-year neglect is very curious, but this is no mere curiosity piece. Though you would have thought that there might be more than 19 hardy souls – including the director and myself –with enough curiosity to take it in at the 45-seater Finborough, even on the eve before Christmas Eve, we were the lucky ones; for this was not only an astonishingly mature play about an imploding relationship between a couple both of whom have artistic aspirations, but Tim Luscombe’s exquisitely-judged in-the-round production also did it proud. (And we were able to do something that Coward never did himself – he never saw it onstage).
Luscombe, who has resourcefully previously given successful life to neglected Coward plays like Easy Virtue and Point Valaine, has weathered a curiously chequered career of his own – after early West End successes with Easy Virtue and Stoppard’s Artist Descending a Staircase (that both transferred from the King’s Head, with the latter also going to New York), as well as his own play EuroVision, first seen at the Drill Hall and subsequently transferring to the Vaudeville, he hasn’t been in the West End mainstream that seemed to be his destiny for a while now; that position seems to have been taken by his younger brother Christopher instead (who curiously also made his West End directorial debut with a rare Coward, when he directed Star Quality at the Apollo in 2001). But Tim’s production of The Rat Trap confirms his rare abilities to not only uncover a rare gem but also to give it an utterly convincing inner and outer life.
Meanwhile, a sense of separate but colliding lives is amazingly animated in Duckie’s dinner-theatre-with-a-difference, The Class Club, at the Barbican Pit. I’ve already written about experiencing this show in the upper class, but returning for the middle-class evening on Friday evening was to feel that there was a party happening there that night – but we were entirely excluded from it in a lonely pool of dull, smug isolation. Of course, I knew now just what the party was like in Upper Class – a fine, silver-service gourmet meal – but with the working class party just on the other side of the curtain in full raucous swing, the one we were being served – self-regarding and embarrassed, by turns – was sometimes excruciating in the spot-on (im)pertinence of its social satire. Of course this was the class that we were most likely to feel the pain of our social exclusion from the other classes in, since this was where the majority of the audience (and, if truth be told, the performers too) actually belonged. But when, at the end the toffs were toasting “God Save the Queen” and the lower orders were joining hands for “Auld Lang Syne”, the fact that we had merely had a group shake-out of our energies and then had a few embarrassed hugs from the performers, was to feel completely left out. I am greatly relieved that, though I may have to live this every day, I won’t have to do it again there; instead, when I go again next week, I’m letting my hair down (or at least covering what’s left of it with a paper party hat) in the working-class.
Then last night I did something very rare for me: I went to the cinema! As someone who loves the theatre, I obviously love storytelling; and the great joy of going to the cinema for me is that I’m being told stories but I’m not working! But also the cinema can do its storytelling with a different kind of economy; close-ups and imagery can take the place of words. I went to see the extraordinary Perfume: The Story of a Murderer, and it was sensational, in every sense. The story of an apprentice perfumer, so obsessed with smells that he makes it his mission to capture the essence of women he captures and murders, this is a man who could have turned the fragrant Mary Archer into a fragrance…
But the thrill, too, for me is that the lead role of Grenouille is taken by Ben Whishaw, the young actor who came from nowhere (or more specifically, direct from graduating from RADA) just two and a half years ago to take the title role of Hamlet for Trevor Nunn at the Old Vic. And true to the promise that this amazing, unusual young actor revealed then, he’s extraordinary. In an interview in the Daily Telegraph last week, he said that when he read the screenplay, he found it “a bit alarming. Usually the lines are the first thing you gravitate towards for information about your character. But with Grenouille there was nothing to get hold of.” That’s because his role is virtually silent. “I began to feel that he was a character who, left to his own devices, wouldn’t really speak at all. I thought about him as being autistic in some way. He simply doesn’t understand human beings. Social situations terrify him.”
And I suspect, having interviewed Ben in front of a National Theatre development department audience when he was in The Seagull there earlier this year, the actor isn’t too keen on them, either. He tugged on his jumper and avoided eye contact much of the time – but if he is physically awkward offstage and screen, that becomes a key asset when he’s onstage or screen: he has a unique, troubled vulnerability that is articulate even when he’s not speaking.
And I was obviously not the only one to find this offstage awkwardness: the Telegraph interviewer Benjamin Secher writes, “Ben Whishaw is fed up with theatre. ‘I’ve got a little bit, I dunno…’, mumbles the 26-year-old actor, head down, eyes fixed on the contents of his teacup. ‘I guess I’m more pedantic about the theatre these days. I find it harder to lose myself in the experience.’ He looks up and his prominent brow, until now a perfect horizontal, becomes a rumpled ‘w’. ‘Perhaps’, he says, ‘some of the magic has gone.’”
Let’s hope not. He’s fantastic on screen – but we also need him back onstage.
