Tag Archives: Danny Boyle

“Frankenstein” from NTLive

Bringing out a blockbuster as its weekly offering to entertain and raise funds during lockdown, the National Theatre’s production of Mary Shelley’s story was a must-have ticket back in 2011. If you love the theatre, you love others getting exciting about it. So, it’s nice to relive some of the buzz about director Danny Boyle and his star casting of Benedict Cumberbatch. At the moment, it’s as exciting as things get… but to be honest, the show itself isn’t very good.

The production is impressive. Not least Bruno Poet’s lighting design, which Boyle uses so spectacularly. The massive rig of bulbs, which seems to take up the auditorium’s whole ceiling, is breath-taking. Boyle’s direction is swift and efficient (although based on the assumption that we all know the story), and the whole thing looks fantastic. Boyle isn’t scared of minimalism, revelling in the size of the stage, coming into the crowd and showing off the Olivier’s mechanics with pride.

During the show’s run, the title role and that of The Creature were played in rotation with Jonny Lee Miller. For the recording, Cumberbatch is the latter and gives a performance to win respect. It’s a success yet a laboured affair. The long opening “birth” scene, with The Creature as a giant toddler, is studied, well thought out, impeccably prepared and, yes, affecting – as he literally finds his feet – but it reeks of the rehearsal room.

It’s when The Creature acquires language that real problems arise. Sad to say, you wish nobody on stage, let alone the rather pompous monster, spoke. The script from Nick Dear is leaden and (sorry) without a spark of life. Shelley’s philosophical concerns are ticked off rapidly. A bit like The Creature, you end up feeling “ideas batter me like hailstones”. The characters can’t help but suffer. Lee Miller makes Frankenstein’s arrogance believable, but the character does little apart from shout. And, while there’s strong work from Naomie Harris, as his fiancée Elizabeth, her appearances feel forced.

Boyle keeps up the pace, so much so that The Creature’s thirst for revenge arrives too suddenly. Also rushed is a thematic battle between rationality and love – which could have proved interesting. Cumberbatch manages to be frightening, Miller compelling and Harris holds her own, despite the scene of her wedding night hampered by some clumsy filming that I assume had an age guideline in mind. But the show feels like Frankenstein’s motivation for his experiment – “a puzzle to be solved”. It’s impressively tackled yet, like the man himself, lacks depth and feeling.

Available until Wednesday 7 May 2020

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Photo by Catherine Ashmore

“Collaborators” at the National Theatre

Having welcomed Danny Boyle earlier this year, the National Theatre now stages a new play written by his frequent collaborator John Hodge. A fantasia inspired by Mikhail Bulgakov’s play about Stalin, commissioned for the dictator’s 60th birthday, Collaborators is a romp around censorship and responsibility.

Working in the round for the first time in many years Nicholas Hytner directs with zeal. Designer Bob Crowley’s constructivist inspired set doubles as the Bulgakov home and a bunker under the Kremlin where the writer and tyrant meet. The theatre-loving Stalin can’t resist helping out. “Leave the slave labour to me,” he says, offering himself as amanuensis, then taking up the pen in person – on the condition that Bulgakov has a turn at running the country. It’s a glib allusion, but performed with such brilliance that its questionable taste is pushed to the back of your mind.

The wonderful Alex Jennings is Bulgakov, a “smack head groin doc turned smut scribe,” as Hodge brilliantly describes him. Jennings brings every nuance out of the role showing convincing relationships with Jacqueline Defferary, who plays his wife, and Mark Addy, who excels as the Secret Service man tasked with directing the play. Addy’s changing attitude to his artistic challenge, and the snippets of the play we get to see performed so skilfully by Perri Snowdon and Michael Jenn, are a real joy.

There aren’t many stage actors that can rival Jennings. But Simon Russell Beale is among them. His despot with a West Country burr is a hilarious and chilling creation – one who manipulates the audience as skilfully as his character plays with the writer.

Collaborators suffers slightly from the brevity that is also frequently its virtue: Hodge’s writing is immediate and clear but, as the drama increases, the play itself is not always dark or detailed enough to satisfy. Nonetheless, Collaborators is very funny indeed and, with its stellar cast, is an unmissable winter highlight.

Until 31 March 2012

www.nationaltheatre.org.uk

Photo by Johan Persson

Written 8 November 2011 for The London Magazine