From my limited amount of digging, it was not an easy ride... all the more reason to applaud this man for sticking with it, he's still AD but will step down next year (2015) after a tenure of 12 years. That in itself is a remarkable feat in my opinion, this is a man that has a busy career in movie and tv making, yet commits himself for 12 years to a theater that was on the brink of getting lost, it takes time and effort to pull things back together, being the famous face of the theater, be available for fundraising efforts, putting together the Theatre's season, wooing the talent.
Of course he didn't have to do it all alone, every theatre has a creative and administrative team, and running a theatre is definitely teamwork, but that doesn't take away anything from the dedication this man must have for the theatre, for the stage and for the people involved.
He had a rough start, came under attack of the critics since he took over the helm, A Hollywood actor taking over as AD of a London Theatre, that can't be good after all, must keep a close eye! was likely the thought of many Arts journalists
Culminating in an early closing of 'Resurrection Blues' (2006), that got such terrible reviews that I'm sorry I didn't see it to judge for myself. Big name cast, big name director, apparently a complete disaster... time to take a few more shots at the Vic's celeb guy in charge.
***
a few quotes (italic) from Michael Billington's 2006 interview with mr Spacey after they closed down "Ressurection Blues" with its stellar cast and director a week early, playing to about 50% capacity:
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| Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum in Speed the Plow |
"Spacey's questions point up the problems of living in a celebrity culture. The fact is that it is his Hollywood name and reputation that have helped rescue the Old Vic - while also guaranteeing that it is subjected to endless media scrutiny. And it is a dilemma he acknowledges.
"I knew coming in," he says, "that we would be put under a microscope that no other theatre and no other artistic director would experience. Things also happen here that happen at every theatre in this country. But because my name can be placed in a headline, the press rake over everything since I arrived. And my only question is - are we being judged on a level playing field? But I'm not going to get into a debate with the press I can't win. I made a choice that I'm not going to play the game and get baited into an argument with people who have their own agenda and opinions. I also don't want to live my life having to answer everything people write. My answer is to look at what's going to happen on that stage at the Old Vic over the next eight years."
Of course he is not judged on a level playing field... but then again, other, relatively more anonymous AD's probably have a harder time getting an interview if they want one, will have a tougher time at fundraisers and so on, in the end I'd say being a celeb going in, mr Spacey knew what to expect from the press, and it's not as if he's had no experience at all in dealing with the press... his celeb status had an up and a down side going in.
Let's not forget The Old Vic, with it's illustrious past was no longer illustrious, no longer a production house but a booking house... to turn that around would have taken anyone time, let alone someone with a vast acting experience, with a lot of connections, but essentially a rookie AD.
"In the first year, I chose plays I thought would be entertaining, challenging and have audience appeal. You and your colleagues questioned that because you have a great emotional connection to the history of this theatre but I'm interested in its future. My mission in the first 18 months was to bring an audience back into the Old Vic."
Spacey claims to have done that. He has had two artistic and box-office flops: Cloaca and Resurrection Blues. But Aladdin, with Ian McKellen, played to 95%, Richard II with Spacey himself to 90%, and both National Anthems and The Philadelphia Story, also starring Spacey, achieved figures of more than 80%. More than 400,000 people have come through the doors in the past 18 months. For Spacey that is sufficient justification for his policy. But, whether he likes it or not, he is also saddled with memories of the Old Vic's classic past dating back to Lilian Baylis; and, even if bland crowd-pleasers such as Philadelphia Story and National Anthems have done the business, they have failed to create the buzz of artistic excitement one associates with the Old Vic. "
Give the man some time! any AD would have gotten a little more credit coming in, turning around a theater is not easy I imagine, making bold artistic choices is great, I for one would come and see... but it's probably not a good idea to do that coming in, if you have 1000 seats to fill, a staff to pay, a building to keep up... that all costs money. There is something to say for bold, edgy programming, but you'd need to be lucky drawing in a loyal audience and not have a huge overhead cost so you don't go down on a miss fired season. I don't know the financial position of the Old Vic obviously, but they are not a small theater, they need revenue coming in just to keep paying the bills and then some to try and build a bit of a buffer to create opportunity for more risky programming.
"Spacey also has to acknowledge that it's his name that gets people into the theatre. He points out that he has spent 41 weeks on stage so far, that he is about to take Richard II to a German theatre festival in May and that he will be back in the autumn in O'Neill's A Moon For The Misbegotten. "But," he says, "because I'm often accused in the press of being arrogant, incredibly vain, of having no humility whatsoever, I chose not to be in the first production. I also didn't come here to start a theatre company that was going to be all about me. I might be at the centre of the wheel but, believe me, it's a big wheel and there are a lot of spokes. If, after 10 years, I hand over a theatre that's been successful because I've been in all the plays, then I will have failed."
The dilemma of the celeb AD... again, I applaud the man for taking it on... and now, 8 years later I think he's proven his point.
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| Kevin Spacey in Sam Mendes' production of Richard III at the Old Vic |
***
How it Came to Be... Mr Spacey's own words
from KevinSpacey.comThe Old Vic theatre has always retained a strong grip on my imagination – I remember visiting this great Victorian stage when I first came to London as a young child, and coming back years later to see many of the theatre’s iconic productions. I finally had the chance to tread the boards of the stage myself when we transferred Howard Davis’s production of Eugene O’Neill’s “The Iceman Cometh” from its initial run at the Almeida Theatre to the Old Vic.
During our 16 week run at the Old Vic in the spring/summer of 1998, I was asked if I would join a committee to help the new Trust Board. The Old Vic had recently been purchased by a Trust and needed the committee’s help to find an Artistic Director to take on the re-vitalization of this famous and admired theatre.
This was a task I took very seriously, as The Old Vic is one of the best known and best loved theatres in the world, synonymous with the greatest acting talent that Britain has ever produced; from Laurence Olivier, Peggy Ashcroft, John Gielgud and Ralph Richardson to Judi Dench, Maggie Smith, Albert Finney, and Peter O'Toole. This iconic 195 year old building has a rich history and has always been know for the great performances that have graced its stage.
I spent the following year learning all I could about the more recent history of this iconic building. I discovered that after the National Theatre departed the building – after 14 seasons of work under the Artistic Directorship of Laurence Olivier – the theatre became a booking house. This meant that it no longer held a company, and didn’t receive subsidies from the government which in turn lead to a decline in attendance as it ceased to be a destination theatre. There were a number of occasions when a few remarkable directors began their own companies in the building (most notably perhaps Jonathan Miller and Peter Hall), but neither of these companies managed to overcome the difficult challenges the funding presented in order to continue working there.
In 1999 while I was in London for the premiere of American Beauty, I requested that an evening be organized for a free-flowing discussion about the future of the Old Vic. Gathered in the main rehearsal space at the top of the Old Vic were playwrights, directors, actors, theatre personnel and friends of the Vic. The questions discussed revolved around the status of the theatre: when had the Old Vic been at its best? What made it work when it was a major venue in London? What happened to it? What is its future? I left this evening with my mind swirling, and decided to take a walk rather than go to bed.
These discussions and ideas came at a time in my life when I was reflecting on my career and I was feeling that I’d arrived at a cross-roads. Having started my professional life in the living theatre I had spent the previous 12 years focused on building a film career. I was, however, beginning to have a sense that I did not want to spend the next ten years continuing down this same path.
Typically for London it was drizzling this night, and I ended up hailing a taxi which drove me to the National Theatre. I walked to the edge of the Thames and looked up at the grand structure reflecting on what this theatre means today and where Olivier was in his career when he decided to take on the challenge of creating a National Theatre. I then walked the six blocks to the Old Vic and sat across the street in the Emma Cons Garden looking up at the theatre. Sitting there, my swirling mind seemed to settle and I realized that all my musings were leading me to the same idea – to a secret dream I had been nurturing since I was a teenager: I should take on the Artistic Directorship of the Old Vic myself!
Even though I was only announced as Artistic Director a few years later, after that night I immediately began working on an economic model that I believed could work without having to take subsidies, as well as starting to raise the money. I also began to find people who would join me in this major enterprise. First on board was producer David Liddiment whom I convinced to leave his post as the head of ITV. It is now eleven years later and we have a staff of over 75, both behind the scenes and front-of-house, and are working on about 49 main stage productions.
An important part of re-vitalizing the theatre was to introduce a ticket scheme to bring theatre to a wider, younger and more diverse audience. As the Old Vic doesn’t rely on subsidies and ticket sales alone are not enough to cover all of our costs, the financial support of generous individuals, companies, trusts and foundations have been vital to our existence.
The Old Vic also hosts a vast educational department which is involved in community work and runs programs in schools. In addition to this we also host a program in which we nurture emerging actors, producers, writers and directors called Old Vic New Voices.
I am now in my last 18 months as Artistic Director and am excited about the legacy I will be leaving for the next person to step into this role. I have always believed that the best asset the Old Vic has is its future and it has been my honor to dedicate myself to the theatre’s revival and to ensure its continued existence without losing sight of its illustrious past.
***
His Plays at the Old Vic during this tenure:
2014 Clarence Darrow 
2011 Richard III
2009 Inherit the Wind
2008 Speed the Plow
2006 A Moon before the Misbegotten
2005 National Anthems 
2005 Richard II
2005 The Philadelphia Story
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| Desk job ... Kevin Spacey in the Old Vic's production of Richard lll. Photograph: Tristram Kenton |
all Guardian reviews:
Clarence Darrow review - Kevin Spacey shines in barnstorming performance
Old Vic, London
What emerges clearly in this magnificent performance is the famed American lawyer's renegade spirit
What emerges clearly in this magnificent performance is the famed American lawyer's renegade spirit
Kevin Spacey's performance as Clarence Darrow leaves one hoping that it will not be his farewell to the London stage. Photograph: Manuel Harlan for the Guardian
Kevin Spacey gives a big, barnstorming performance as the famed American lawyer, Clarence Darrow. But that is entirely appropriate for a man who was a fervent champion of the poor and oppressed and of whom it was once said, after he had been accused of corruption: "Darrow doesn't bribe juries: he just frightens them to death."
Spacey has been here before. He played Darrow in a 1991 PBS film and, on stage at the Old Vic, in a 2009 production of Inherit the Wind. But David W Rintels's one-man play, first performed by Henry Fonda, makes different demands in that Darrow is looking back over his entire life. And, in the Old Vic's new configuration, Spacey is having to perform in the round.
He does this magnificently. His Darrow has a slight stoop and sagging walk as if his knees were buckling under the weight of his moral indignation. But the dominant impression is one of ferocious energy as Spacey roams around the cluttered law-office set and periodically bursts out of its confines to eyeball members of the audience as if they were jurors he was seeking to persuade or harangue.
What emerges clearly, both from the text and in Spacey's performance, is Darrow's renegade spirit. As the son of small-town Ohio freethinkers, he was always on the side of the weak and strenuously argued that the real cause of crime is poverty and ignorance. He was also a showman: championing the cause of Pennsylvania coalminers, you see how he shocks a jury, and us, by gradually revealing that a supposedly seditious striker is a damaged 11-year-old working a 14-hour shift 365 days a year. And even when Darrow got into trouble, after having supposedly corrupted jurors, he used his ingenuity to get off the hook. Confronting in court an aide caught red-handed planting money on a juror, he shrewdly asks: "Would I have given you a cheque?"
The first half shows us Darrow the Chicago-based radical. The second half manipulates chronology to tackle some of Darrow's most famous 1920s cases: his defence of a black doctor protecting his family against the Ku Klux Klan, his support of an evolutionist teacher in the Scopes monkey trial and his unfashionable determination to save two privileged young killers from the death sentence in the Leopold and Loeb case. Spacey is especially fine in this last instance, softening Darrow's tone to enter a moving plea for mercy over societal revenge.
The play doesn't tell us much of Darrow's private life other than that he left his first wife and, even after he married his adored second wife, remained a philanderer. But under Thea Sharrock's skilful direction Spacey fills in the gaps and gives us a rich picture of a buccaneering nonconformist who prided himself on saving 102 individuals from the death penalty and who was always ready to take on privilege and power.
It is a mighty performance that brings out Darrow's bravura humanitarianism and it leaves one hoping that, even after Spacey hands over the Old Vic to Matthew Warchus next year, it will not be his farewell to the London stage.
Spacey has been here before. He played Darrow in a 1991 PBS film and, on stage at the Old Vic, in a 2009 production of Inherit the Wind. But David W Rintels's one-man play, first performed by Henry Fonda, makes different demands in that Darrow is looking back over his entire life. And, in the Old Vic's new configuration, Spacey is having to perform in the round.
He does this magnificently. His Darrow has a slight stoop and sagging walk as if his knees were buckling under the weight of his moral indignation. But the dominant impression is one of ferocious energy as Spacey roams around the cluttered law-office set and periodically bursts out of its confines to eyeball members of the audience as if they were jurors he was seeking to persuade or harangue.
What emerges clearly, both from the text and in Spacey's performance, is Darrow's renegade spirit. As the son of small-town Ohio freethinkers, he was always on the side of the weak and strenuously argued that the real cause of crime is poverty and ignorance. He was also a showman: championing the cause of Pennsylvania coalminers, you see how he shocks a jury, and us, by gradually revealing that a supposedly seditious striker is a damaged 11-year-old working a 14-hour shift 365 days a year. And even when Darrow got into trouble, after having supposedly corrupted jurors, he used his ingenuity to get off the hook. Confronting in court an aide caught red-handed planting money on a juror, he shrewdly asks: "Would I have given you a cheque?"
The first half shows us Darrow the Chicago-based radical. The second half manipulates chronology to tackle some of Darrow's most famous 1920s cases: his defence of a black doctor protecting his family against the Ku Klux Klan, his support of an evolutionist teacher in the Scopes monkey trial and his unfashionable determination to save two privileged young killers from the death sentence in the Leopold and Loeb case. Spacey is especially fine in this last instance, softening Darrow's tone to enter a moving plea for mercy over societal revenge.
The play doesn't tell us much of Darrow's private life other than that he left his first wife and, even after he married his adored second wife, remained a philanderer. But under Thea Sharrock's skilful direction Spacey fills in the gaps and gives us a rich picture of a buccaneering nonconformist who prided himself on saving 102 individuals from the death penalty and who was always ready to take on privilege and power.
It is a mighty performance that brings out Darrow's bravura humanitarianism and it leaves one hoping that, even after Spacey hands over the Old Vic to Matthew Warchus next year, it will not be his farewell to the London stage.
Richard III – review
Old Vic, London
Kevin Spacey’s powerful Richard faces the moral revulsion of Haydn Gwynne’s Queen Elizabeth. Photograph: Tristram Kenton for the Guardian
There are basically two ways of presenting Richard III: as the culmination of a cycle or as a standalone drama. And, although I think it only makes total sense when seen in the context of the Wars of the Roses, Sam Mendes has come up with a beautifully clear, coherent modern-dress production in which the protagonist becomes an autocratic archetype.
But the real buzz and excitement stems from Kevin Spacey's powerful central performance.
Spacey doesn't radically overthrow the Olivier concept of Richard the Satanic joker, as Sher and McKellen did. What he offers us is his own subtle variations on it: a Richard in whom instinctive comic brio is matched by a power-lust born of intense self-hatred.
You see this right from the start when Spacey sits moodily slumped in a chair watching newsreel footage of his brother's regal triumph. As he reaches angrily for the zapper, you get an instant sense of exclusion: Richard as the misanthropic outsider who will use a veneer of quick-witted charm as a ladder to the throne.
What is impressive about Spacey is that he acts with every fibre of his being. His voice has acquired a rougher, darker edge. With his left leg encased in a calliper splint, he still bustles about the stage with ferocious energy.
But it is the eyes that one remembers. They reveal the depth of Richard's self-loathing when Lady Anne succumbs to his wooing and finds in him, as he does not, "a marvellous, proper man".
The eyes also view the uppity Buckingham with a lethal, basilisk-stare. But the moment I shall cherish from this performance is that of Richard newly enthroned at the start of the second act. Spacey's eyes express the momentary exultation of power only to move in a second to a restless insecurity.
Inevitably one has to ask what difference modern-dress makes to Spacey's Richard. The production doesn't use it, like Richard Eyre's with McKellen, to comment on the fascist potential of 1930s England.
Instead, contemporary clothes remind us how today's dictators seek spurious constitutional legitimacy and become skilful media manipulators.
There's a brilliant sequence when, as Richard seeks the votes of the London citizens, Spacey is seen on video at prayer with a pair of bogus monks whom, at a crucial moment, he shunts out of shot.
But I shall remember Spacey's Richard less for its political insight into the world of Gaddafi and Mubarak than for its psychological understanding of solitude. In the excellently staged eve-of-Bosworth scene, where Richard's victims sit behind a long table like a committee of the dead, Spacey cries, "there is no creature loves me". That strikes me as the keystone of a superb performance.
The stress on Richard's aloneness exacts a certain price. Chuk Iwuji's smooth-suited Buckingham never seems close enough to Richard to make his rejection politically tumultuous. And, although Mendes and designer Tom Piper preface each scene with a caption announcing the name of the protagonist, the characters often seem like ciphers in the drama of Richard's psyche. Intriguingly, in such a male-dominated play, it is the women who emerge most strongly.
Haydn Gwynne catches perfectly the moral revulsion of Queen Elizabeth at being enlisted by Richard in seeking the hand of her daughter even though he has murdered most of her relatives. Gemma Jones also makes Queen Margaret not some ranting harpie but a stern-faced necromancer who uses sticks and earth to put a curse on Richard and who turns up at Bosworth as his nemesis. And Annabel Scholey makes Lady Anne's capitulation to Richard's saturnine charms almost credible.
I still like to see Richard III as the climax of a cycle. But this production brings the Bridge Project, with its mixed Anglo-American cast, to an exciting conclusion.
What's more when the history of Spacey's Old Vic regime is written, I suspect it will be his Richard, left dangling upside down like the slaughtered Mussolini, that will be most vividly remembered.
And, even if Olivier used the same trick in Coriolanus, that simply shows Spacey is part of a great tradition.
But the real buzz and excitement stems from Kevin Spacey's powerful central performance.
Spacey doesn't radically overthrow the Olivier concept of Richard the Satanic joker, as Sher and McKellen did. What he offers us is his own subtle variations on it: a Richard in whom instinctive comic brio is matched by a power-lust born of intense self-hatred.
You see this right from the start when Spacey sits moodily slumped in a chair watching newsreel footage of his brother's regal triumph. As he reaches angrily for the zapper, you get an instant sense of exclusion: Richard as the misanthropic outsider who will use a veneer of quick-witted charm as a ladder to the throne.
What is impressive about Spacey is that he acts with every fibre of his being. His voice has acquired a rougher, darker edge. With his left leg encased in a calliper splint, he still bustles about the stage with ferocious energy.
But it is the eyes that one remembers. They reveal the depth of Richard's self-loathing when Lady Anne succumbs to his wooing and finds in him, as he does not, "a marvellous, proper man".
The eyes also view the uppity Buckingham with a lethal, basilisk-stare. But the moment I shall cherish from this performance is that of Richard newly enthroned at the start of the second act. Spacey's eyes express the momentary exultation of power only to move in a second to a restless insecurity.
Inevitably one has to ask what difference modern-dress makes to Spacey's Richard. The production doesn't use it, like Richard Eyre's with McKellen, to comment on the fascist potential of 1930s England.
Instead, contemporary clothes remind us how today's dictators seek spurious constitutional legitimacy and become skilful media manipulators.
There's a brilliant sequence when, as Richard seeks the votes of the London citizens, Spacey is seen on video at prayer with a pair of bogus monks whom, at a crucial moment, he shunts out of shot.
But I shall remember Spacey's Richard less for its political insight into the world of Gaddafi and Mubarak than for its psychological understanding of solitude. In the excellently staged eve-of-Bosworth scene, where Richard's victims sit behind a long table like a committee of the dead, Spacey cries, "there is no creature loves me". That strikes me as the keystone of a superb performance.
The stress on Richard's aloneness exacts a certain price. Chuk Iwuji's smooth-suited Buckingham never seems close enough to Richard to make his rejection politically tumultuous. And, although Mendes and designer Tom Piper preface each scene with a caption announcing the name of the protagonist, the characters often seem like ciphers in the drama of Richard's psyche. Intriguingly, in such a male-dominated play, it is the women who emerge most strongly.
Haydn Gwynne catches perfectly the moral revulsion of Queen Elizabeth at being enlisted by Richard in seeking the hand of her daughter even though he has murdered most of her relatives. Gemma Jones also makes Queen Margaret not some ranting harpie but a stern-faced necromancer who uses sticks and earth to put a curse on Richard and who turns up at Bosworth as his nemesis. And Annabel Scholey makes Lady Anne's capitulation to Richard's saturnine charms almost credible.
I still like to see Richard III as the climax of a cycle. But this production brings the Bridge Project, with its mixed Anglo-American cast, to an exciting conclusion.
What's more when the history of Spacey's Old Vic regime is written, I suspect it will be his Richard, left dangling upside down like the slaughtered Mussolini, that will be most vividly remembered.
And, even if Olivier used the same trick in Coriolanus, that simply shows Spacey is part of a great tradition.
Inherit the Wind
Old Vic, London
Passion and wit ... Kevin Spacey and David Troughton in Inherit the Wind. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Can fine acting make up for a clunky old play? Absolutely. And, in this case, it has to. Based on the Scopes monkey trial of 1925, when a Tennessee teacher was arraigned for reading a passage from On the Origin of Species to his pupils, the piece itself by Jerome Lawrence and Robert E Lee is shaky stuff: the real pleasure comes from watching Kevin Spacey and David Troughton going head to head for the defence and prosecution.
Given the arguments raging in the US, the piece has topicality. But there is little in the way of intellectual debate, and the characters surrounding the two legal Titans are mostly ciphers. The exception is a cynical journalist, clearly the villain of the piece, who amounts to a gross slur on the real-life HL Mencken.The teacher is a callow Darwinian. The real battle is between the counsels. For the prosecution, in a small town where Bibles are regularly belted, we have Matthew Harrison Brady, a thrice defeated presidential candidate and a hectoring fundamentalist. Opposing him is Henry Drummond, a wily Chicagoan who believes in the right to individual thought.
But the acting and production overcome the play's defects. Kevin Spacey is a particular joy to watch as the liberal, closely based on Clarence Darrow. Blessed with a silvery wig, Spacey presents us with a man whose walk is an arthritic lope and whose jutting head and thrusting trunk betoken a boundless curiosity.
Spacey's great achievement is to combine passion and wit. He thumps the table as the judge denies him witnesses; yet, putting his opponent on the stand, he uses instinctive comic timing to destroy biblical literalism.
Troughton is equally fine in this scene, capturing the character's naked defencelesness when his certainties are eroded. Even earlier Troughton hints at the humanity beneath the fundamentalist rhetoric as he taps his knee anxiously when a hellfire preacher condemns his daughter to the flames.
Trevor Nunn's production also gives the setpiece debate a context by creating a sense of community. Scenes are cunningly linked by revivalist hymns; a prayer meeting becomes a display of mounting, small-town hysteria; and, in the trial, the jurors occupy the front stalls. And, if the minor characters are thinly written, Mark Dexter as the sceptical hack, Ken Bones as the demented preacher, and Sonya Cassidy as his divided daughter all impress.
If the piece is a typically Broadway treatment of a big issue, it yields some first-rate acting and a vivid production.
David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow is infinitely more than a brutal satire on Hollywood. It is a study of male panic and the denial of redemptive grace. And in Matthew Warchus's exhilarating revival we not only get some bravura, high-octane acting from Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum but a also sense of the ultimate hollowness of an industry, and a society, based on buddy-buddy values.
The set-up is classic Mamet. Charlie Fox, a struggling producer, comes to his old mate Bobby Gould, a newly elevated studio boss, with a surefire commercial package: a prison movie combining "action, blood, a social theme". But, as the two men get high on dreams of profit, Bobby asks his temporary secretary, Karen, to give a courtesy read to a novel by an "eastern cissy writer" about radiation and the prospect of human survival. Bobby's aim is to bed Karen. But he finds himself converted by Karen's faith in the book and tempted to greenlight it ahead of the prison project.
Superficially, the play would seem to be an exposure of Karen as one more Hollywood hustler. Underneath, it is a far more complex, quasi-Faustian study of moral temptation: either Bobby can surrender to corporate values and his Mephistophelian chum or he can acknowledge his fear and take a risk on a formula-busting movie. Admittedly the choice would be even better if the radiation book didn't sound quite so worthy. What lifts the play above a simplistic attack on Hollywood degradation like Swimming With Sharks, however, is Mamet's awareness of alternative possibilities.
In Warchus's helter-skelter production we grasp the spiritual overtones while relishing the air of satanic buoyancy; and Spacey, in particular, gives a masterly performance as Charlie. He's so pumped up by the bitch-goddess, success that he does yoga exercises while frantically puffing on a cigarette. He also essays a parodic Groucho-like lope in pursuit of the departing Karen and, when Bobby naively asks "what if she just likes me?", Spacey stares at him with a prolonged pause worthy of Jack Benny. The greatness of Spacey's performance, however, lies in the suggestion that, under the comic bluster and feverish energy exists a desperate human being and a source of infinite corruption.
Goldblum offers a perfect foil as Bobby. He is sufficiently complicit in Charlie's schemes to rock back amazedly in his chair when Karen asks of the prison project: "Is it a good film?" Yet with his lean, whippet-like frame and look of grizzled bemusement, Goldblum also suggests a man riddled with insecurity and momentarily attracted by purity. And as Karen, originally played in New York in 1988 by Madonna, Laura Michelle Kelly has exactly the right teasing ambiguity: she's an indecipherable mix of Joan of Arc and ambitious studio go-getter.
It's the acting that motors the evening; and what comes across, through the hectic, often overlapping dialogue, is the sense that language is a form of camouflage rather than a means of communication. But what you smell, in Mamet's play, is the terror and fear that drives a homosocial world like Hollywood and, by implication, that of American capitalism at large.
Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh first drew Kevin Spacey to the Old Vic. Now another late O'Neill, again superbly directed by Howard Davies, proves the highlight of the Spacey regime to date. With the exception of Richard II, this theatre has lately roamed the foothills of drama; now at last it seems to be aiming for the peaks.
O'Neill's play is deceptive. The setting is a broken-down farm in rural Connecticut in 1923 and we seem to be in for a folksy mortgage melodrama. Cussed old Phil Hogan, an Irish-American tenant farmer, is apparently concerned that the property will be sold from under him. Deserted by his three sons, he is helplessly dependent on his daughter, Josie, who poses as a rustic trollop. The only hope of saving the land it seems is for Josie to trick their drunken landlord, Jim Tyrone, into her bed.
But this is only the shell of a scorching play about the eternal American theme of reality and illusion. It is in the third act, when the onion layers of pretence are finally peeled off, that we get to the play's core. Josie and Jim, we realise, are two "misbegotten" people who in the moonlight are forced to confront the truth. While Josie is a desolate virgin aching with love for Jim, he is hiding a profound sense of guilt under the guise of a heartless city slicker. And even if there is no hope of a permanent union, they achieve a moment of transcendent self-realisation.
This scene, which justifies the whole play, is breathtaking. Eve Best makes no pretence at being the ungainly, 180lb figure O'Neill describes in his stage directions. Instead, her Josie is a hard-working rustic slave who has grown used to hiding her feelings and who deflects every compliment with a shy, nervous laugh. It is a beautiful performance, about the pain of living a constant lie, perfectly matched by Spacey's Jim.
Above all, Spacey reminds you that Tyrone is a one-time actor who masks his self-loathing under the carapace of the constant drinker. Spacey grasps each glass of bourbon like a drowning man and even flinches when offered water. But the brilliance of his performance is its suggestion that even this is a public act designed to hide the remorse he feels over his shameful behaviour when accompanying his mother's funeral coffin. Watching Best and Spacey together is like seeing two desperate people stripping their souls naked.
Bob Crowley's ramshackle rural set and Colm Meaney's self-deceptive Hogan lend weight to a production that offers that rarest of theatrical treats: an evening of raw, powerful emotion.
Kevin Spacey is at last back where he belongs: on the stage of the Old Vic. After the dismal start to his artistic tenure here with the play Cloaca, he now stars in Dennis McIntyre's play which he first performed at the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, in 1988.
But, while Spacey is mesmerising to watch, McIntyre's play offers a glibly mechanical metaphor for American life. Spacey plays an uninvited guest who one Saturday night invades the home of a neighbouring yuppie couple, Arthur and Leslie, in suburban Detroit.
Plying his hosts, who are just recovering from a party, with questions, Spacey's apparently beneficent Ben quickly learns all the secrets of his neighbours. He's a lawyer, she's a teacher. Everything, from their hi-fi to their garden, is a swish foreign import. And their friends are all comparable high-flyers including Arthur's boss who's a world-class ice-boater.
McIntyre sets the situation up nicely with Ben as the catalyst on a hot suburban rug destined to expose the cracks in the American dream. And, up to a point he does, challenging the highly competitive Arthur to a series of games which Ben invariably wins.
But, with the revelation that Ben is a fireman lately involved in a brave rescue, the play takes a severe downward turn. McIntyre establishes Ben as an enigmatic eccentric reminiscent of Priestley's Inspector Goole. He then, by a devious narrative switch, turns into him into a symbol of heroic, if troubled, ordinariness.
On the sheer level of plausibility, the play doesn't make total sense: why, you wonder, would the snotty Arthur beg this unwanted gatecrasher to stay? And when the two men engage in a bout of macho bragging about the respective toughness of Detroit and Pittsburgh football players and prove their point on the living-room floor, the contrivance is palpable.
Even worse is McIntyre's misogynistic treatment of Leslie who reverts to her old role of cheerleader and blithely switches her affections to the contest's winner.
I'm all for plays that take apart American values. But where Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf turns a living room into a national metaphor by laying the psychological groundwork, McIntyre treats his characters as off-the-peg symbols. The moment you see Arthur fiddling with his game watch, you know he is meant to represent modern materialism. Leslie, fussily tidying up while spouting Japanese phrases from her Walkman, is instantly labelled as the embodiment of aspirational chic.
But, even if McIntyre's play fails to deliver, it creates a fine part for Spacey. And he succeeds in investing Ben with a faintly manic strangeness. Outwardly, with his receding hairline and moustache, he looks like an average guy. But when he learns that Arthur and Leslie have been married for nine years, he claps his hands with mockingly ostentatious delight. Told that Arthur's watch cost $7,200, Spacey announces "you really know what time it is, don't you?" with a guttural Grouchoesque drawl.
Spacey doesn't just occupy the stage, he seizes it by right. And, even in the stagey football contest, he is devastatingly funny. "Detroit," he swaggeringly proclaims, "doesn't have football, it has ballet." And when he tackles and fells his host, he jives and dances around his prostrate form with insulting hip-twitching gestures.
Spacey is an actor who enjoys acting. But precisely because he is so sly, ironic and smart in exposing Arthur's macho fatuities, it becomes hard to swallow the character's descent into neurotic normality.
Attentive though it is to suburban detail, David Grindley's production cannot disguise the play's awkward gear change. And Steven Weber and Mary Stuart Masterson as Arthur and Leslie do what they can to camouflage the fact that they are playing national symbols. Weber lends the feverish Arthur a restless tension though the character is mainly a monster in an Armani suit. And Masterson uses all her technique to lend depth to a character that's a male dramatist's fantasy.
But the evening belongs to Spacey. And I would simply beg him, as the Old Vic's artistic director, to bombard us in future with masterpieces. There is a wealth of work in which one would love to see him: Shakespeare, Ibsen, O'Neill, Mamet, the great American comedies. In McIntyre's play he gives a dazzling performance but he looks like a great boxer in an exhibition bout.
Irony of ironies. The first night of Richard II at the Old Vic was briefly affected by a local power-cut. But, whatever the odd technical glitch, there was a good deal more electricity on stage than at any time in Kevin Spacey's low-voltage first season: more, though, I feel because of the actor himself than because of Trevor Nunn's production.
Perceptions of the play have changed radically in recent years. For decades, Richard was viewed as the conscious verbal artist, tipsy with grief and homosexually inclined; a tradition kept alive only by Mark Rylance in a recent performance at Shakespeare's Globe. But latterly the trend has been to politicise the play and see Richard and the usurping Bolingbroke as parallel rather than antithetical figures: two men who, although radically different in temperament, discover the solitude of kingship and the limitations of power.
To his credit, Nunn largely follows that line. This is an aggressively modern-dress production that sees the play in political terms and makes full use of TV screens, videos, microphones and machine-guns. But this raises as many questions as it answers. You wonder how Richard retains absolute power in an England of mobile phones and text messages. And, if this is some kind of oligarchical despotism, how come Julian Glover's John of Gaunt is allowed to broadcast his subversive message about national decline on public TV? Even stranger is that Bolingbroke's accession to power is greeted by Copland's Fanfare For the Common Man when he has clearly staged a military coup.
But, even if the play wears modern-dress rather uneasily, Spacey's fine performance confirms his Shakespearean credentials. He starts as a man who combines the empurpled trappings of power with a self-delighting irony. He greets Mowbray's fierce protestations of his innocence with a deflating murmur and, having paid the briefest of tributes to John of Gaunt's death, whimsically cries: "So much for that."
It is in the great central scenes of Richard's return to England after the Irish wars that Spacey really comes into his own. Often Richard's speeches are treated as virtuoso arias of grief. Instead Spacey, having sentimentally kissed the English soil, flies into impotent rages at the discovery of Bolingbroke's treachery. "Am I not king?" he barks as if to compensate for his collapsing power. By not openly begging for our pity, Spacey genuinely earns our compassion.
This is not your traditional Richard. Even in the famous deposition scene Spacey speaks "like a frantic man" exactly as the text prescribes. Used to the comfortable accoutrements of power, he seems sadly empty and desolate without them. And when he says "I have no name", you realise this is a Richard who has no real identity when divorced from office. The result is a fascinating performance that makes you long to see Spacey's Iago, Richard III and Hamlet.
For the rest there is a good Bolingbroke from Ben Miles. The tricky relationship between him and Oliver Cotton's haught-insulting Northumberland is also firmly established. Even the rare comic moments come off well with Susan Tracy's Duchess of York turning up at court in her motorcycle helmet to try to save the life of her treacherous son.
As a production, it is lively and energetic. But it still leaves me wondering what kind of England we are in. Nunn's best achievement, however, is to have released the Shakespearean inside Kevin Spacey and shown that he has the kingly authority naturally to command the Old Vic stage.
Kevin Spacey's first Old Vic season ends better than it began with a decent enough revival of Philip Barry's urbane 1939 Broadway comedy. But I still feel the Old Vic deserves bigger, bolder, more exciting fare: perhaps we shall get it next season with Trevor Nunn directing Spacey in Richard II.
For the moment Barry's play is amiable, butter-bland stuff. It concerns, as all moviegoers will recall, the moral education of Tracy Lord: a wealthy Philadelphia heiress who has brains, beauty but a shocking intolerance of human weakness. On the eve of her second marriage to a mining magnate, she is condemned by her first husband as a "virgin goddess" and by her father as "a prig and a perennial spinster". Only after she has got wildly squiffy with an intrusive, infatuated journalist does she confront her own frailty and revise her plans.
What gives the play its curiosity value is Barry's equivocal attitude to the rich: having started out by satirising them, he ends up adoring them. His most telling point is that 1930s America was full of iron maidens such as Tracy who promised but never delivered: when Spacey, playing Tracy's first husband, waspishly said of their marriage "it was an affair of the spirit, not the flesh" it even struck me it had never been fully consummated. But Barry's attack on America's Tracys soon turns into an embossed Valentine to the rich in which anyone who questions their privileges is instantly deemed a snob.
In truth, Barry's play lives or falls by the casting of Tracy herself; and rarely in history can there have been a part so immaculately tailored to its original actor. The critic George Jean Nathan claimed Barry spent two months with Katharine Hepburn, "noting carefully every attractive gesture she made, every awkwardly graceful movement of her body, every little odd quirk of her head and every effective dart of her eyes". No wonder the role on stage and screen fitted her like a glove: it had been manufactured to meet her body language and metallic persona.
Wisely, Jennifer Ehle makes no attempt to impersonate Hepburn; and she is very good in the early scenes at capturing both Tracy's lordliness and starched sexiness. She also conveys Tracy's pain at being cruelly told by her scapegrace father that what she lacks is "an understanding heart". But, although Ehle has Tracy's moneyed style, I missed the melting eroticism of the scene where she drunkenly unbends with the adoring journalist: Jerry Zaks' fastidious production never quite captures the sense that we are seeing a new, more emotionally generous woman.
As with National Anthems, the chief acting pleasure lies in watching Spacey himself at work. As CK Dexter Haven, Tracy's first, still unsatisfied husband, Spacey constantly reminded me of Jack Benny: there is the same dapper precision, mocking smile and immaculate comic timing. When Tracy's pompous groom says, "I've got eyes and imagination, haven't I?", Spacey gives him exactly the same long, hard stare that Benny used to reserve for the band that would interrupt him in mid-joke. There is also a hint of the mischievous Machiavel about Spacey's performance that for me lifted the whole evening.
For the rest we have a mixed Anglo-American cast that uneasily straddles two continents. DW Moffett, an authentic American, plays the intrusive, working-class journalist with a dull, rock-jawed solidity. On the other hand, Nicholas Le Prevost is lewdly funny as the bottom-pinching Uncle Willie but is as defiantly English as cheddar cheese. One of the best performances, however, comes from Lauren Ward, who endows the journalist's photographer chum with a watchful acerbity that reminded me of Hollywood's Eve Arden.
It is, in short, a mixed evening. It looks pretty enough in John Lee Beatty's designs and passes two and a half hours perfectly pleasantly. But there are many better American plays demanding revival: how about a look at early O'Neill, Odets or Rice? And, in the age of the video, one can't help making invidious comparisons with the George Cukor movie. Having entertained us sufficiently, I just hope Spacey remembers in his next season that he who dares wins.
Given the arguments raging in the US, the piece has topicality. But there is little in the way of intellectual debate, and the characters surrounding the two legal Titans are mostly ciphers. The exception is a cynical journalist, clearly the villain of the piece, who amounts to a gross slur on the real-life HL Mencken.The teacher is a callow Darwinian. The real battle is between the counsels. For the prosecution, in a small town where Bibles are regularly belted, we have Matthew Harrison Brady, a thrice defeated presidential candidate and a hectoring fundamentalist. Opposing him is Henry Drummond, a wily Chicagoan who believes in the right to individual thought.
But the acting and production overcome the play's defects. Kevin Spacey is a particular joy to watch as the liberal, closely based on Clarence Darrow. Blessed with a silvery wig, Spacey presents us with a man whose walk is an arthritic lope and whose jutting head and thrusting trunk betoken a boundless curiosity.
Spacey's great achievement is to combine passion and wit. He thumps the table as the judge denies him witnesses; yet, putting his opponent on the stand, he uses instinctive comic timing to destroy biblical literalism.
Troughton is equally fine in this scene, capturing the character's naked defencelesness when his certainties are eroded. Even earlier Troughton hints at the humanity beneath the fundamentalist rhetoric as he taps his knee anxiously when a hellfire preacher condemns his daughter to the flames.
Trevor Nunn's production also gives the setpiece debate a context by creating a sense of community. Scenes are cunningly linked by revivalist hymns; a prayer meeting becomes a display of mounting, small-town hysteria; and, in the trial, the jurors occupy the front stalls. And, if the minor characters are thinly written, Mark Dexter as the sceptical hack, Ken Bones as the demented preacher, and Sonya Cassidy as his divided daughter all impress.
If the piece is a typically Broadway treatment of a big issue, it yields some first-rate acting and a vivid production.
Speed-The-Plow
Old Vic, London
David Mamet's Speed-The-Plow is infinitely more than a brutal satire on Hollywood. It is a study of male panic and the denial of redemptive grace. And in Matthew Warchus's exhilarating revival we not only get some bravura, high-octane acting from Kevin Spacey and Jeff Goldblum but a also sense of the ultimate hollowness of an industry, and a society, based on buddy-buddy values.
The set-up is classic Mamet. Charlie Fox, a struggling producer, comes to his old mate Bobby Gould, a newly elevated studio boss, with a surefire commercial package: a prison movie combining "action, blood, a social theme". But, as the two men get high on dreams of profit, Bobby asks his temporary secretary, Karen, to give a courtesy read to a novel by an "eastern cissy writer" about radiation and the prospect of human survival. Bobby's aim is to bed Karen. But he finds himself converted by Karen's faith in the book and tempted to greenlight it ahead of the prison project.
Superficially, the play would seem to be an exposure of Karen as one more Hollywood hustler. Underneath, it is a far more complex, quasi-Faustian study of moral temptation: either Bobby can surrender to corporate values and his Mephistophelian chum or he can acknowledge his fear and take a risk on a formula-busting movie. Admittedly the choice would be even better if the radiation book didn't sound quite so worthy. What lifts the play above a simplistic attack on Hollywood degradation like Swimming With Sharks, however, is Mamet's awareness of alternative possibilities.
In Warchus's helter-skelter production we grasp the spiritual overtones while relishing the air of satanic buoyancy; and Spacey, in particular, gives a masterly performance as Charlie. He's so pumped up by the bitch-goddess, success that he does yoga exercises while frantically puffing on a cigarette. He also essays a parodic Groucho-like lope in pursuit of the departing Karen and, when Bobby naively asks "what if she just likes me?", Spacey stares at him with a prolonged pause worthy of Jack Benny. The greatness of Spacey's performance, however, lies in the suggestion that, under the comic bluster and feverish energy exists a desperate human being and a source of infinite corruption.
Goldblum offers a perfect foil as Bobby. He is sufficiently complicit in Charlie's schemes to rock back amazedly in his chair when Karen asks of the prison project: "Is it a good film?" Yet with his lean, whippet-like frame and look of grizzled bemusement, Goldblum also suggests a man riddled with insecurity and momentarily attracted by purity. And as Karen, originally played in New York in 1988 by Madonna, Laura Michelle Kelly has exactly the right teasing ambiguity: she's an indecipherable mix of Joan of Arc and ambitious studio go-getter.
It's the acting that motors the evening; and what comes across, through the hectic, often overlapping dialogue, is the sense that language is a form of camouflage rather than a means of communication. But what you smell, in Mamet's play, is the terror and fear that drives a homosocial world like Hollywood and, by implication, that of American capitalism at large.
A Moon for The Misbegotten
Old Vic, London
Stellar performances ... A Moon for the Misbegotten. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Eugene O'Neill's The Iceman Cometh first drew Kevin Spacey to the Old Vic. Now another late O'Neill, again superbly directed by Howard Davies, proves the highlight of the Spacey regime to date. With the exception of Richard II, this theatre has lately roamed the foothills of drama; now at last it seems to be aiming for the peaks.
O'Neill's play is deceptive. The setting is a broken-down farm in rural Connecticut in 1923 and we seem to be in for a folksy mortgage melodrama. Cussed old Phil Hogan, an Irish-American tenant farmer, is apparently concerned that the property will be sold from under him. Deserted by his three sons, he is helplessly dependent on his daughter, Josie, who poses as a rustic trollop. The only hope of saving the land it seems is for Josie to trick their drunken landlord, Jim Tyrone, into her bed.
But this is only the shell of a scorching play about the eternal American theme of reality and illusion. It is in the third act, when the onion layers of pretence are finally peeled off, that we get to the play's core. Josie and Jim, we realise, are two "misbegotten" people who in the moonlight are forced to confront the truth. While Josie is a desolate virgin aching with love for Jim, he is hiding a profound sense of guilt under the guise of a heartless city slicker. And even if there is no hope of a permanent union, they achieve a moment of transcendent self-realisation.
This scene, which justifies the whole play, is breathtaking. Eve Best makes no pretence at being the ungainly, 180lb figure O'Neill describes in his stage directions. Instead, her Josie is a hard-working rustic slave who has grown used to hiding her feelings and who deflects every compliment with a shy, nervous laugh. It is a beautiful performance, about the pain of living a constant lie, perfectly matched by Spacey's Jim.
Above all, Spacey reminds you that Tyrone is a one-time actor who masks his self-loathing under the carapace of the constant drinker. Spacey grasps each glass of bourbon like a drowning man and even flinches when offered water. But the brilliance of his performance is its suggestion that even this is a public act designed to hide the remorse he feels over his shameful behaviour when accompanying his mother's funeral coffin. Watching Best and Spacey together is like seeing two desperate people stripping their souls naked.
Bob Crowley's ramshackle rural set and Colm Meaney's self-deceptive Hogan lend weight to a production that offers that rarest of theatrical treats: an evening of raw, powerful emotion.
Extracting secrets ... Kevin Spacey as Ben Cook (centre) with Mary Stuart Masterson (Leslie Reed) and Steven Weber (Arthur Cook). Photo: Manuel Harlan
Kevin Spacey is at last back where he belongs: on the stage of the Old Vic. After the dismal start to his artistic tenure here with the play Cloaca, he now stars in Dennis McIntyre's play which he first performed at the Long Wharf Theatre, New Haven, in 1988.
But, while Spacey is mesmerising to watch, McIntyre's play offers a glibly mechanical metaphor for American life. Spacey plays an uninvited guest who one Saturday night invades the home of a neighbouring yuppie couple, Arthur and Leslie, in suburban Detroit.
Plying his hosts, who are just recovering from a party, with questions, Spacey's apparently beneficent Ben quickly learns all the secrets of his neighbours. He's a lawyer, she's a teacher. Everything, from their hi-fi to their garden, is a swish foreign import. And their friends are all comparable high-flyers including Arthur's boss who's a world-class ice-boater.
McIntyre sets the situation up nicely with Ben as the catalyst on a hot suburban rug destined to expose the cracks in the American dream. And, up to a point he does, challenging the highly competitive Arthur to a series of games which Ben invariably wins.
But, with the revelation that Ben is a fireman lately involved in a brave rescue, the play takes a severe downward turn. McIntyre establishes Ben as an enigmatic eccentric reminiscent of Priestley's Inspector Goole. He then, by a devious narrative switch, turns into him into a symbol of heroic, if troubled, ordinariness.
On the sheer level of plausibility, the play doesn't make total sense: why, you wonder, would the snotty Arthur beg this unwanted gatecrasher to stay? And when the two men engage in a bout of macho bragging about the respective toughness of Detroit and Pittsburgh football players and prove their point on the living-room floor, the contrivance is palpable.
Even worse is McIntyre's misogynistic treatment of Leslie who reverts to her old role of cheerleader and blithely switches her affections to the contest's winner.
I'm all for plays that take apart American values. But where Edward Albee's Who's Afraid Of Virginia Woolf turns a living room into a national metaphor by laying the psychological groundwork, McIntyre treats his characters as off-the-peg symbols. The moment you see Arthur fiddling with his game watch, you know he is meant to represent modern materialism. Leslie, fussily tidying up while spouting Japanese phrases from her Walkman, is instantly labelled as the embodiment of aspirational chic.
But, even if McIntyre's play fails to deliver, it creates a fine part for Spacey. And he succeeds in investing Ben with a faintly manic strangeness. Outwardly, with his receding hairline and moustache, he looks like an average guy. But when he learns that Arthur and Leslie have been married for nine years, he claps his hands with mockingly ostentatious delight. Told that Arthur's watch cost $7,200, Spacey announces "you really know what time it is, don't you?" with a guttural Grouchoesque drawl.
Spacey doesn't just occupy the stage, he seizes it by right. And, even in the stagey football contest, he is devastatingly funny. "Detroit," he swaggeringly proclaims, "doesn't have football, it has ballet." And when he tackles and fells his host, he jives and dances around his prostrate form with insulting hip-twitching gestures.
Spacey is an actor who enjoys acting. But precisely because he is so sly, ironic and smart in exposing Arthur's macho fatuities, it becomes hard to swallow the character's descent into neurotic normality.
Attentive though it is to suburban detail, David Grindley's production cannot disguise the play's awkward gear change. And Steven Weber and Mary Stuart Masterson as Arthur and Leslie do what they can to camouflage the fact that they are playing national symbols. Weber lends the feverish Arthur a restless tension though the character is mainly a monster in an Armani suit. And Masterson uses all her technique to lend depth to a character that's a male dramatist's fantasy.
But the evening belongs to Spacey. And I would simply beg him, as the Old Vic's artistic director, to bombard us in future with masterpieces. There is a wealth of work in which one would love to see him: Shakespeare, Ibsen, O'Neill, Mamet, the great American comedies. In McIntyre's play he gives a dazzling performance but he looks like a great boxer in an exhibition bout.
Richard II
Old Vic, London
'I didn't come here to start a theatre company that was going to be all about me' ... Kevin Spacey as Richard II with Ben Miles as Bolingbroke. Photograph: Tristram Kenton
Irony of ironies. The first night of Richard II at the Old Vic was briefly affected by a local power-cut. But, whatever the odd technical glitch, there was a good deal more electricity on stage than at any time in Kevin Spacey's low-voltage first season: more, though, I feel because of the actor himself than because of Trevor Nunn's production.
Perceptions of the play have changed radically in recent years. For decades, Richard was viewed as the conscious verbal artist, tipsy with grief and homosexually inclined; a tradition kept alive only by Mark Rylance in a recent performance at Shakespeare's Globe. But latterly the trend has been to politicise the play and see Richard and the usurping Bolingbroke as parallel rather than antithetical figures: two men who, although radically different in temperament, discover the solitude of kingship and the limitations of power.
To his credit, Nunn largely follows that line. This is an aggressively modern-dress production that sees the play in political terms and makes full use of TV screens, videos, microphones and machine-guns. But this raises as many questions as it answers. You wonder how Richard retains absolute power in an England of mobile phones and text messages. And, if this is some kind of oligarchical despotism, how come Julian Glover's John of Gaunt is allowed to broadcast his subversive message about national decline on public TV? Even stranger is that Bolingbroke's accession to power is greeted by Copland's Fanfare For the Common Man when he has clearly staged a military coup.
But, even if the play wears modern-dress rather uneasily, Spacey's fine performance confirms his Shakespearean credentials. He starts as a man who combines the empurpled trappings of power with a self-delighting irony. He greets Mowbray's fierce protestations of his innocence with a deflating murmur and, having paid the briefest of tributes to John of Gaunt's death, whimsically cries: "So much for that."
It is in the great central scenes of Richard's return to England after the Irish wars that Spacey really comes into his own. Often Richard's speeches are treated as virtuoso arias of grief. Instead Spacey, having sentimentally kissed the English soil, flies into impotent rages at the discovery of Bolingbroke's treachery. "Am I not king?" he barks as if to compensate for his collapsing power. By not openly begging for our pity, Spacey genuinely earns our compassion.
This is not your traditional Richard. Even in the famous deposition scene Spacey speaks "like a frantic man" exactly as the text prescribes. Used to the comfortable accoutrements of power, he seems sadly empty and desolate without them. And when he says "I have no name", you realise this is a Richard who has no real identity when divorced from office. The result is a fascinating performance that makes you long to see Spacey's Iago, Richard III and Hamlet.
For the rest there is a good Bolingbroke from Ben Miles. The tricky relationship between him and Oliver Cotton's haught-insulting Northumberland is also firmly established. Even the rare comic moments come off well with Susan Tracy's Duchess of York turning up at court in her motorcycle helmet to try to save the life of her treacherous son.
As a production, it is lively and energetic. But it still leaves me wondering what kind of England we are in. Nunn's best achievement, however, is to have released the Shakespearean inside Kevin Spacey and shown that he has the kingly authority naturally to command the Old Vic stage.
The Philadelphia Story
Old Vic, London
Amiable ... Kevin Spacey and Jennifer Ehle. Photo: Tristram Kenton
For the moment Barry's play is amiable, butter-bland stuff. It concerns, as all moviegoers will recall, the moral education of Tracy Lord: a wealthy Philadelphia heiress who has brains, beauty but a shocking intolerance of human weakness. On the eve of her second marriage to a mining magnate, she is condemned by her first husband as a "virgin goddess" and by her father as "a prig and a perennial spinster". Only after she has got wildly squiffy with an intrusive, infatuated journalist does she confront her own frailty and revise her plans.
What gives the play its curiosity value is Barry's equivocal attitude to the rich: having started out by satirising them, he ends up adoring them. His most telling point is that 1930s America was full of iron maidens such as Tracy who promised but never delivered: when Spacey, playing Tracy's first husband, waspishly said of their marriage "it was an affair of the spirit, not the flesh" it even struck me it had never been fully consummated. But Barry's attack on America's Tracys soon turns into an embossed Valentine to the rich in which anyone who questions their privileges is instantly deemed a snob.
In truth, Barry's play lives or falls by the casting of Tracy herself; and rarely in history can there have been a part so immaculately tailored to its original actor. The critic George Jean Nathan claimed Barry spent two months with Katharine Hepburn, "noting carefully every attractive gesture she made, every awkwardly graceful movement of her body, every little odd quirk of her head and every effective dart of her eyes". No wonder the role on stage and screen fitted her like a glove: it had been manufactured to meet her body language and metallic persona.
Wisely, Jennifer Ehle makes no attempt to impersonate Hepburn; and she is very good in the early scenes at capturing both Tracy's lordliness and starched sexiness. She also conveys Tracy's pain at being cruelly told by her scapegrace father that what she lacks is "an understanding heart". But, although Ehle has Tracy's moneyed style, I missed the melting eroticism of the scene where she drunkenly unbends with the adoring journalist: Jerry Zaks' fastidious production never quite captures the sense that we are seeing a new, more emotionally generous woman.
As with National Anthems, the chief acting pleasure lies in watching Spacey himself at work. As CK Dexter Haven, Tracy's first, still unsatisfied husband, Spacey constantly reminded me of Jack Benny: there is the same dapper precision, mocking smile and immaculate comic timing. When Tracy's pompous groom says, "I've got eyes and imagination, haven't I?", Spacey gives him exactly the same long, hard stare that Benny used to reserve for the band that would interrupt him in mid-joke. There is also a hint of the mischievous Machiavel about Spacey's performance that for me lifted the whole evening.
For the rest we have a mixed Anglo-American cast that uneasily straddles two continents. DW Moffett, an authentic American, plays the intrusive, working-class journalist with a dull, rock-jawed solidity. On the other hand, Nicholas Le Prevost is lewdly funny as the bottom-pinching Uncle Willie but is as defiantly English as cheddar cheese. One of the best performances, however, comes from Lauren Ward, who endows the journalist's photographer chum with a watchful acerbity that reminded me of Hollywood's Eve Arden.
It is, in short, a mixed evening. It looks pretty enough in John Lee Beatty's designs and passes two and a half hours perfectly pleasantly. But there are many better American plays demanding revival: how about a look at early O'Neill, Odets or Rice? And, in the age of the video, one can't help making invidious comparisons with the George Cukor movie. Having entertained us sufficiently, I just hope Spacey remembers in his next season that he who dares wins.
Very interesting and informative. I love to do this kind of work too but with all the copyright in Germany you are so limited. No snippets, photos or quotes - even with naming the sources. So I'm glad I can read your blog, kerstin
ReplyDeletethanks, here, we warn first and then act... a little simpler for a blogger to handle the internet.
ReplyDeletedid you know KS was the artistic director? when I first read it I could hardly believe it, seemed like such a big commitment, I didn't think a Hollywoood star would donate that kind of time.