What a cultural weekend we have had. Yesterday evening we went to see Michael Sheen star as Hamlet at the Young Vic, then today we went to see Meryl Streep's tour de force as Mrs Thatcher in The Iron Lady at the Ritzy Cinema in Brixton. I had always had it in mind to review the two productions together because of the obvious, stark contrast between central characters in each. Hamlet is the ultimate embodiment of indecisiveness, an unlikely hero in so many respects (you can certainly see why he was not made king of Denmark after his father's death but was passed over in favour of his ruthless but effective uncle Claudius). Hamlet is not a natural leader. As Mitt Romney, the probable Republican nominee for president in this year's elections, has fumed, "We don't want Hamlet in the White House", his target being, of course, President Obama (if he was a true Shakespeare aficionado he might have realised that comparing Vice President Biden to Polonius might have been more apposite). Romney presumably sees himself as more of a courageous, Frenchie-bashing Henry V type, although I have a feeling that he may turn out to be Malvolio instead.
Margaret Thatcher, meanwhile, has faced many criticisms over the years from other parties, hostile foreign leaders and disgruntled members of her own party - but I don't think any of her enemies or opponents would ever have tried that one! As Mrs Thatcher famously said herself, "The lady's not for turning!", an approach aped by Tony Blair a quarter of a century later when he, equally famously, stated that "I've got no reverse gear", (thereby seeking to reassure voters that he was a safe person to have in charge of the nation's well being by...er...comparing oneself to an unroadworthy car). But no political figure in my lifetime, not even Blair, has really been able to compete with Mrs T when it comes to forthrightness and firmness of purpose. One suspects that if our Maggie had found out that Claudius had bumped off her father he would have found himself bludgeoned to death with a blunt handbag by the middle of Act Two.
But actually shoving the two reviews in together is even more fitting than I might have expected, because I essentially ended coming away from both productions with much the same feelings - great acting (and I mean really great), but I wasn't too keen on the area that each of them decided to focus on.
Hamlet, first of all, was set in a mental hospital. I can see why they did it, the idea is superficially quite attractive - madness is one of the central concepts of the play - Hamlet feigns madness (or does he?), Ophelia genuinely goes bonkers, and with Shakespeare being performed so often (and this play more than most) I can understand (although I do not completely agree with it) the desire for directors to try to go for a new take on the play. But ultimately it didn't quite work for me.
However, the director just about got away with it because he resisted the urge to ram it down the audience's throat too much. Julie tells me that she decided to just completely ignore the whole hospital idea and enjoy the play for its own sake - I was not quite able to do that, but the fact that she was able to do so was telling - at the start there was one worrying moment where we both thought that they were going to do the whole play as a "therapy session". Which would have been rubbish (not to mention undynamic). They got a bit more carried away in the second half, with reappearances from Polonius and Ophelia that the Bard (or the Earl of Oxford, if you believe that eminent Elizabethan historian Roland Emmerich) somehow forgot to mention. The scene with Osric, for example, was done with Ophelia's ghost assuming Osric's role - for those amongst my reader(s) who enjoyed Kenneth Branagh's 1996 film of Hamlet - this is essentially the equivalent of Kate Winslet and Robin Williams morphing into one person (which presumably would end up as some sort of bizarre younger south-of-the-border version of Mrs Doubtfire!)
But ultimately it was considerably less annoying than, for example, Rupert Goold's production of Merchant of Venice that we saw in Stratford-upon-Avon last year (set in Vegas, obviously, because Vegas is famous for its problems with anti-semitism!) That production caused Julie and I, for the first time in our lives, to walk out of a stage production at half time, so incensed were we by the ludicrously offensive American stereotypes, the lazy "ooh, what gimmick can we throw at this scene" thinking, and appalling waste of Sir Patrick Stewart's considerable talents. This production avoided such embarrassing lows, but did nevertheless slightly hold back what could have been a superb evening's entertainment bearing in mind the calibre of the cast and director (yes his concept was a bit dodgy but he coaxed wonderful performances from literally everyone in the cast). And the writer was no slouch either.
Michael Sheen is someone I always enjoy watching on film and TV, but those performances are as nothing compared to what he can do on stage. It really is his medium, and he is hypnotically compelling (in terms of sheer stage presence he is in the top three actors I have ever seen in action, along with Peter O'Toole and, interestingly, Martin Shaw). Ideal for the Dane, at the age of 42 he was running out of time to take on the role on stage (he previously did it on radio), so I remain pleased that he decided to join this production whatever its other shortcomings. Veering between being ferociously active and cautiously contemplative (sometimes changing from one to the other every few seconds) he really threw himself into the role with magnificent energy, exploring multiple facets of this endlessly complex role and owning it. He was even better than David Tennant who I saw take on the role a couple of years ago (although to be fairness the good Doctor had a bad back at the time). Sheen also played the Ghost, and, quite frankly, scared the willies out of me.
Powerful and eyecatching though Sheen was, the other actors in the production also got an opportunity to shine, from Sally Dexter's twitchy, vulnerable, pill popping Gertrude to Michael Gould's hilariously befuddled Polonius (one gag, where he presents Laertes with the same jumper worn by Sarah Lund in the Danish series "The Killing" - what with this being Denmark an' all - completely passed me by until Julie pointed it out to me in spite of the fact that we are currently working our way through the series! As Sherlock Holmes famously said "You see, Watson, but you do not observe"!) James Clyde was also a fine Claudius despite one of his finer monologues being stripped out. He is a bastard, but he is not completely without a heart, and his death scene (he goes willingly to be stabbed by Hamlet after realising that he has killed the woman he loves) was subtly effective in a way that Branagh's version, for example, wasn't (DEATH BY CHANDELIER!)
I also liked the sandpit in the second half!
On to The Iron Lady, then, I guess that my main problem with this film was that it just wasn't the film I expected to see, nor was it really the film I wanted to see. For what it's worth, whilst I voted for her party (and I use the phrase "her party" deliberately, as her influence is still very much felt) at the last two elections, I suspect that Lady Thatcher would regard me as one of the "wets". I am not a Thatcherite, but I don't regard her as the root of all evil either (whilst others go for Che Guevara tattoos, if I were forced to get a tattoo of a political figure on my arm I would probably end up going for someone like Sir Malcolm Rifkind. Note to my friends - never let me get that drunk!)
But in going in to see this film, one's political opinions are largely irrelevant. Love her or loathe her (and believe it or not, there are actually a fair number of people who are equivocal about her nowadays, willing to both praise her successes and criticise her failures, something that would have been thought implausible about this highly polarising PM when she was in power), most people would agree about this at least - Margaret Thatcher is a remarkable woman, and there are many extraordinary things about her. My problem with the film is that having dementia is not one of them.
Sadly dementia is an affliction that affects millions of people, in the UK and worldwide, and I have no objections to films being made about it (indeed many great films have been made about it, most of them seemingly starring Jim Broadbent as the sufferer's husband). Nor, provided that the filmmakers did their research properly, do I have a problem with Thatcher being presented in this way, even whilst she is still alive (from what little I know, I suspect that unfortunately if anything her condition may actually be slightly worse now than it is portrayed in the film). Dementia is something that should be addressed, talked about, not swept under the carpet. And I think that this was a convincing, if slightly laboured, portrayal of dementia (although I don't think that it worked particularly well in terms of a cinematic arc - she is seeing Denis, then he is gone, then she spends ages clearing out his closet, then he is back, then he is gone again - I thought it lacked focus).
As ever, Julie put it more brilliantly than I could - with Hamlet she kept thinking "this will be good, I can't wait to see them do it in proper costumes", whilst with The Iron Lady she said it was like watching extracts of a really good film through a window and then missing bits, so never getting a coherent whole.
Anyway, whilst I knew that this sad end to The Lady's career would feature in the film before going to see it, I had not thought that it would be the dominant feature of the film. And it is. Almost half of the film, in fact, with the rest being a breathless paced canter through her career in a series flashbacks, which never pause to cover the various stages of her rise and fall in sufficient detail to satisfy.
I discussed this with my mum on the phone an hour or so ago and she made the extremely cogent point that showing someone "Great" or "Powerful" suffering from this most ordinary of diseases and thereby humanising them is in fact a very valuable exercise. Maybe in wanting a bit more of the "meat" of politics, I am missing the point. I am a bit of a political junkie, perhaps this film is not aimed at me. If it was, it probably would not have done as well as it appears to be doing (the cinema was packed!) Insofar as it does handle the politics, it plays it pretty safe and I would rank it as broadly neutral - she is portrayed as clearly being a remarkable leader but it does also cover her increasingly erratic behaviour in the run up to her fall from power, and also the havoc that resulted from the poll tax. This was probably a wise approach: either a hatchet job or an adulatory paean of praise would have alienated large swathes of the film's potential audience.
Had I been unwisely entrusted with the funds to make this film, I would have focused more on her rise to power - that was the really remarkable story, of how she made it as the first woman to the "top of the pile" not only in the UK but in the whole of the Western world (I haven't checked this btw...do correct me if there were others first!) The story of "The First Woman Prime Minister" would have been something both the Thatcherites and the Thatcher haters could have got behind. And insofar as they cover this aspect, they cover it reasonably well (with some stylish cinematography showing her arrival at the House of Commons, voting in amongst a huge crowd of indistinguishable middle aged grey men in suits). But I was left wanting more. And judging by the comments I overheard on coming out of the cinema, thankfully none of which were "This franchise has really gone downhill now that Robert Downey Jr's not in it!", I was not alone.
Having said that, Meryl Streep was absolutely brilliant (narrowly beating out the marvellous Patricia Hodge in the excellent "Falklands Play" from a few years ago as the best Maggie ever) and certainly Oscar worthy (it would be her third, but her first since 1982 - as one of the best actors/actresses/performers/whatever working in the world if not THE best, I would suggest that it is about time she picked up another one). The rest of the cast was also pretty good, although none of them were quite as close a match for their real life counterpart as she was (I kept forgetting I was not watching the real Maggie tbh). Olivia Colman was superb casting for her daughter Carol (mark my words, she won't just be Sophie from Peep Show for long), and I was particularly pleased to spot our Assistant Vicar from St Paul's Covent Garden (also a very fine bit part actor) as the Speaker of the House of Commons (an avuncular but very left wing fellow, he was probably roped into it because he thought it was the Oliver Stone version that was once mooted!) I am afraid that I let myself down and yelped with excitement when I saw him in the cinema, much to my embarrassment. But then again, it is quite something to know a genuine bona fide film star (and by the standards of my own brief film career, Rev Richard Syms is practically Marlon Brando).
Anyway, enough of this - I am now going to watch the next episode of Sherlock - The Hounds of Baskerville! Let us hope that this will be my first viewing experience of the weekend that is 100% satisfactory.
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