DARK MEANING MOUSE. To 4 October.
London
DARK MEANING MOUSE
by Tony Haygarth
Finborough Theatre To 4 October 2003
Tue-Sat 7.30pm Mat Sun & 1 October 3.30pm
Runs 2hr 5min One interval
TICKETS: 020 7373 3842
Review: Timothy Ramsden 14 September
Shakespeare's sonnets here and echoes in the plays ingeniously extrapolated.This is a play I'd love to like. Don't stop reading there are likeable things, that inspire affection. But it is deeply unfashionable a labour of love never destined to be caviar to the general.
What actor Tony Haygarth known for TV work but someone who's rubbed up against Shakespeare over many years (including an unlikely Hamlet in Charles Marovitz's reconstructed script) has done is give us an investigation of the woman hymned and deplored in Shakespeare's sonnets.
Like the mediaeval 'Dark Ages' this 'Dark Lady' is 'dark' in more ways than one. First, her literal complexion. And by extension her temperament. But, too, she's 'dark' like those earlier centuries, in her remoteness and mystery. Did she exist as much, say, as the lady of the Strachey to whom Malvolio incidentally refers?
Haygarth notes we know little about Shakespeare. His lesser fellow-dramatists are somehow more specific. Dave Allen's play Cheapside brilliantly passed this off some years back, showing Shakespeare as a whining Midlander with no evident personality among a rough, toughly assertive field. Yet the playwright's dramatic achievement, combined with this elusiveness, makes our ignorance about his biographical personality infuriatingly provocative.
Haygarth uses the plays brilliantly to explore the Dark Lady - and vice versa. Shakespeare hopefully and affectionately calls her his 'mouse' but she's not that type at all. She's in Kate the Shrew, Rosaline the darkly provocative one among Love's Labour's Lost's French princesses, the greater Rosalind to follow, and the tempestuous Cleopatra. And Haygarth's Lady sees these plays, recognises herself and demands her poet explain himself.
As he does this, the play builds a complex picture not only of the possible relation between life and Works if without explaining how the latter achieved the force lacking in the pleading, self-excusing former.
Through Cornelius Booth's gleeful, playgoing Doctor Astronomer, it indicates too how the plays conveying the artist's response to the Dark lover are seen by an outsider. Stuck at his desk in a tight corner of the Finborough's tiny stage, Booth's character includes both the mediaeval superstition and Renaissance science of Shakespeare's age one where Dark mysteries informed new humanist light.
So far, forsooth, so good. The drawback is that two hours of pastiche Elizabethan English dialogue doth, however well executed, and with ye best Will in the world, become somewhat tedious uponne the ear. Still, there are good performances (including James Akers sad lute riffs) and Stephanie Street achieves a fine verisimilitude for a complex, intelligent Dark Lady, with a mind and forceful personality forever fully out even of Shakespeare's ultimate reach.
The Doctor Astronomer: Cornelius Booth
The Lady: Stephanie Street
The Poet: Harry Burton
Musician: James Akers
Director: Adam Meggido
Designer: John Marsh
Lighting: Paul Nulty
Sound: Robert A White
Costume: Mia Flodquist
2003-09-22 16:40:55