Here’s one solution to the old problem of how to make Lorca work in English: a Polish director (Helena Kaut-Howson), an Estonian designer (Lilja Blumenfeld), an Afro-British composer (Tayo Akinbode), a multiracial cast who are not embarrassed by tackling the pains and joys of love and sexuality, and a choreographer (Sian Williams) who may be British, but who understands the language of love and violence. The play is like Greek tragedy, not because it ends in death, but because it’s a tragedy of a community. Yerma and her husband are made to feel ashamed of being childless; this is their doom, as much as the incompatibility of their souls. Vincenzo Nicoli gives a rock-like performance as the man Yerma is drawn to. Kathryn Hunter plays Yerma not with the fury of a young wife who needs the heat of love as much as the pleasure of sex, but as a women whose body clock is about to stop. It is her extraordinary charisma that finally wins you over.
Long Life
Two stars
The Hub, Edinburgh
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What are the limits of comedy? I ask because Long Life, from Latvia’s New Riga Theatre, showed every sign of wanting to be touchingly funny. So what’s the problem? The setting is a dingy interior. Four rooms have been knocked into one and are shared by five people: a couple, a woman, two men. This could be the Soviet period: this is how people often had to live while their leaders marched towards socialism and spent billions on missiles.
Or could this be post-Soviet Latvia? There’s a photograph of Hemingway on the wall: in Soviet days, that would have been risky. But isn’t Latvia in the EU? What is the great European hullabaloo about if not helping its poorer members? Either way, this is a miserable place, crowded with crumbling furniture, pathetic possessions that are useless now, but tie you to memories or fantasies of better days. You can almost smell the grime on everything, including the tenants. There is no dialogue, only coughing, mumbling and muttering. You spend your day doing little chores: trying to repair ancient radios, television sets, a sewing machine; whitewashing a few square inches of the ceiling; frying grim-looking bits of food. The smell is depressingly authentic. You give your husband his daily injection or go out to buy a bundle of plastic bags. Are these people old? They don’t look old, but they totter about looking decrepit or as if suffering from brain tumours. Perhaps it’s simply bad acting. Either way, you end up with a freak show: two unbroken hours of carefully choreographed misery that makes you neither angry nor amused, only exhausted.
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Three Sisters
One star
King’s, Edinburgh
If it’s true Chekhov invented The Pause, he would be appalled by the use it’s being put to in Krystian Lupa’s preposterous American Repertory Theatre production. It’s the pauses, long and pointless, that give it its grotesquely pretentious air; they also make it nearly four hours long. Some of the text has been barbarously cut, while Lupa has added a few passages, presumably his own, in case Anton Pavlovich hadn’t made things clear.
Lupa’s set is awkward: it makes for clumsy, improbable exits and entrances. The Prozorovs’ house bears no resemblance to Russian architecture of any period.
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The furniture and fittings are a mess, and so are the costumes: the sisters’ clothes are from different periods and the uniforms are inaccurate. Perhaps this is intentional: perhaps Lupa is striving for universality.
The characters are almost unrecognisable. Vershinin is charmless. The sisters range from the ditsy to the hysterical: Masha is remarkable for her cartwheels, and Olga calls Natasha, in her green belt, an “emerald c***”. Brother Andrey masturbates vigorously behind a door; you hear his groans before he appears doing up his flies. In Act III, he tries to get it on with Olga. People come on when they are not meant to be on, for no apparent reason — except, perhaps, for the dead Baron, who appears briefly, as if to confirm that he is now indeed an ex-Baron. There’s something ghostly about all the characters, something zombie-like: walking and gesticulating waxworks who seem not to realise how laughably bizarre they are.
This is a dire production, intellectually muddled and artistically vulgar; its presence at the festival is a scandal.