THE CORDELIA DREAM. To 10 January 2009.
London.
THE CORDELIA DREAM
by Marina Carr.
Wilton’s Music Hall Graces Alley, Ensign Street E1 8JB To 10 January 2009.
Mon-Sat 8pm Mat Sat 4pm.
no performance 24026, 31 Dec, 1 Jan.
Runs 1hr 55min One interval.
TICKETS: 0844 800 1118.
www.rsc.org.uk
Take your choice, or What You Will…
Review: Timothy Ramsden 17 December.
After the bustling, ill-focused Tragedy of Thomas Hobbes from American writer Adriano Shaplin, the Royal Shakespeare Company season on the high stage of Wilton’s Music Hall concludes with Irish writer Marina Carr’s tight two-hander played by a couple of members from the RSC’s Taming of the Shrew cast.
Though its title refers (and the script repeatedly hammers) the Lear link of father and daughter, there’s an aptness in thinking of the Shrew. Father and daughter though they are, this pair battle as much as Shakespeare’s Paduan lovers. It’s definitely a generational rivalry. Both are composers and both feel the other has stifled their creative personality.
The problem is, it’s difficult to care. As the drawing-board becomes ever more plain behind the script, with ‘The Cordelia Dream’ being a piece of the father’s music, part, presumably of his ‘Cordelia Suite’, and related to the Lear score we’re eventually told he’s working on, it becomes clear that this is a literate, literary play, synthetic and calculated, with little sense of life about it.
David Hargreaves rolls around semi-naked on a piano; later he follows recent Lears in having his moment of nudity before reaching something like lucidity. On 4 monitors (that serve no real purpose) he’s seen in formal-dress conducting. The mutual bile between himself and Michelle Gomez as his daughter is played as well as can be, though her couple of sudden angry moments smack of theatre direction more than personal temperament.
But the bare room and generic character names point to the play’s bloodless abstraction. The Cordelia music we hear suggests a musical language no more advanced, in its most adventurous moments, than Shostakovich, making it hard to place where the Man would have fitted in to an Irish, or any other, musical world in the last fifty years.
Yet Conor Linehan’s score is by far the most interesting aspect of the production. At least until the last part, where death takes over from mere lifelessness. Then a sense of lost possibilities quite movingly emerges. But it’s very late in what has been till then an artificial-seeming act of derivation.
Review: Carole Woddies 16 December
Anyone watching Shakespeare’s later plays must sometimes wonder about the family dynamics of plays distinguished by a consistent absence of mothers.
Elaine Feinstein and The Women’s Theatre Group tried to fill in some of the missing blanks in 1987 with Lear’s Daughters. Now, iconoclastic Irish writer Marina Carr has come up with another variation on a theme of Lear. The Cordelia Dream doesn’t so much ask the question of `where is mother?’ but more demandingly places Lear in a contemporary setting and asks: what kind of a father was he? Carr’s answer is not much of one.
In The Cordelia Dream the Lear character is now a famous composer who has seen better days. His ingratitude takes the form of megolomaniac self-centredness and a music genius that has left him because, he accuses the daughter, Cordelia who has come to see him in his reclusive hideaway; she has stolen the muse from him. She too is a composer.
Thus begins a titanic duologue, a struggle of wills in which the emotional advantage swings first one way then the other. Lear the arrogant aggressor becomes the vulnerable, ageing father; Cordelia the silent, submissive punch-bag of a daughter the assertive, angry retaliator. It is bloody, violent and, in the setting of Wilton’s Music Hall, in Giles Cadle’s claustrophobic attic room made the more haunting by Conor Linehan’s music played live, utterly compelling.
For what The Cordelia Dream amounts to in Carr’s Shakespeare-flecked but also Gaelic-influenced, and often poetic drama is the story of competition – of one generation supplanting the next and of the older generation’s resentment of that fact. It is the story of artistic and family creation and most beguilingly, it is the story of drama itself.
Because, in Selina Cartmell’s beautifully directed RSC production, in David Hargreaves’ and Michelle Gomez’s monumental and symbiotic performances, what is most magnetic is the sense of a world and people living unmissably in this moment, unrepeatable in any other place or form. Tense, white-hot, it is perhaps the finest piece of new writing we have seen from the RSC or anybody else this year.
Woman: Michelle Gomez.
Man: David Hargreaves.
Musicians:
Violin: Eloise Prowse.
Viola: Amy Wein.
‘Cello: Ben Davies.
Piano: Conor Linehan.
Director: Selina Cartmell.
Designer: Giles Cadle.
Lighting: Matthew Richardson.
Sound: Fergus O’Hare.
Music: Conor Linehan.
Music director: Eloise Prowse.
Movement: Anna Morrissey.
Text and voice work: Stephen Kemble.
Dramaturgy: Jeanie O’Hare.
2008-12-28 00:08:50