- The Observer, Sunday 16 April 2000
Richard II Gainsborough Studios, London N1
The Force of Change Royal Court Upstairs, London SW1
Blue/Orange Cottesloe, London SE1
The Villains' Opera Olivier, London SE1
You cross the pavements of Shoreditch, step into an old Metropolitan Railway power station, and find yourself in a version of pre-industrial England. The space is huge; around it are long windows, domed as if they belonged in a cathedral. Light drizzles through the dusk; you can see a few knights standing around; you hear birdsong and plainchant. The stage of the Gainsborough is a wide, green field. You might begin to think things are all right, but at the back of this pleasantness a brick wall is cleft by a giant jagged fissure the shape of a lightning streak.
It's long been obvious that the Almeida's short tenancy of the old Gainsborough Studios was going to provide some of the hottest tickets of the theatrical season. Any Almeida Shakespeare is an event, as the theatre's Hackney Hamlet proved: at Shoreditch, Jonathan Kent directs first Richard II and then Coriolanus . Any production with Ralph Fiennes will be sure of an audience, and he appears in both plays. The surprise factor is the building itself: the Gainsborough is its own drama.
Constructed 100 years ago to generate electricity, this lofty brick slab has been visited by glamour and neglect. In 1919 it was converted into film studios by the Famous Player-Laskys; it later became a base for Hitchcock, who made The Lodger there, starring Ivor Novello, and in 1938, The Lady Vanishes . It had a further life as a whisky-bottling plant and as a warehouse for oriental rugs. When the Almeida moves out, the building will be redeveloped as flats.
It is brilliant of the Almeida to have alighted on this space, and brilliant of them to have given it to the architectural firm of Haworth Tompkins to convert. This was the firm that refashioned the Royal Court, plaiting together contemporary and Victorian features. It is a firm that is helping to redefine the idea of what a theatre can look like, sheering away both from twentieth-century concrete blocks and the enduring nineteenth-century notion of a West End theatre, fantastic and imperial, with an interior like a ballgown, folded and looped and swagged with gold. The new idea is more intimate, more democratic.
In the Gainsborough, nothing is made to look perfect: you can see where the bones are buried, with the existing surfaces - bricks and timber and steel - being re-used, and rubble from demolition piled up for the rake of the seating. What could be better for a history play? The aim is to use the building's ecclesiastical qualities for Richard II and its industrial strength for Coriolanus .
There is a powerful sense of history in Kent's production of Richard II , very much helped by the space. It does not have the biting, dangerous quality which the play had recently at Stratford, with the crisply sardonic Sam West; there are too many blurred moments early on, and too much roaring, particularly from David Burke as John of Gaunt. But it does have its own coherence. Ralph Fiennes's Richard is always intelligent and always interesting. There's not an unthought moment, from his early appearances - awkwardly pleated like a playing-card king, all elbows, sceptre, crown and frown - to his later pets and rages and sudden introspections. He has the perfect foil in Linus Roache who is chillingly contained as Bolingbroke. He has perfectly judged support from Oliver Ford Davies. And the stage is ignited by the great and insufficiently praised actress Barbara Jefford, who makes a small part sing with a Shakespearean truth and makes you wish that Shakespeare had written Queen Lear .
Gary Mitchell is unlike any other Irish playwright. He's a Protestant. He writes thriller plots. And his settings are thoroughly urban. He has always written with verve and edge; and now he has produced his best play to date, a high-voltage, disputatious examination of the Royal Ulster Constabulary. The Force of Change sets the Theatre Upstairs alight. Simon Higlett's revealing design makes a traverse stage into a rat-run, with the audience banked on each side increasing the claustrophobia. Two interrogation cells in an RUC station are set at each end of a corridor: the officers pace between them as if caged up, and as if - which is indeed the case - each is compulsively rehearsing an argument.
At the centre of Mitchell's play is a charge of collusion between the RUC and the UDA. The moment in which this accusation comes out involves a clumsy plot-wobble with a mobile phone, but there's nothing clumsy about Mitchell's probing of the constabulary's psychology. Scrutinising a range of attitudes in the shape of four officers - one of them corrupt, one an embattled new female recruit - he shows a force bewildered and threatened by the political changes engendered by the peace process. He lays bare both reactionary and honourable traits. Mitchell is a dramatist, not a debater: his ideas are embodied in the action of the play. And they are given brilliant embodiment under Robert Delamere's direction. All these performances are first-rate. To see Gerard Jordan's juddering, slack-faced joy-rider, and Stephen Kennedy's taciturn, stealthy UDA suspect - who delivers a flick of the hand on a police file like a karate chop - is to be taken into a world behind the headlines. Stuart Graham's vicious and principled officer is a wonderful hard case. This is the play which makes the new Royal Court Upstairs look explosive.
There's something about a threesome that gets theatres buzzing. Two of the most successful plays of the last few years - Michael Frayn's Copenhagen and Yasmina Reza's Art - have featured not a triangular relationship in the pre dictable sexual sense, but a triangular argument. And now Joe Penhall has come up with a poised three-person play in the Cottesloe which, in a skilfully twisting production by Roger Michell, breaks with the National's recent record of dull new work. It sparkles.
Blue/Orange pits the theories of two psychiatrists against each other and over the head of their sectioned patient. In a finely judged performance, Bill Nighy as a senior consultant at first seems to offer himself - nonchalant, elegant and wry - as a cartoon disciple of R.D. Laing's: it's the human condition to be deranged; most patients should be discharged. Andrew Lincoln - persuasively earnest as a young doctor - is apparently all conscience and caring, arguing for further hospitalisation for the young black patient who thinks that oranges are blue, and Idi Amin is his father. Penhall's achievement is to lightly tweak these positions until they unravel: the consultant's stance has an economic and perhaps a racist aspect; the younger man's nurturing can look like oppression. What seems to be a debate about principles shades into an ambitious competition between the two professionals. Meanwhile, Chiwetel Ejiofor maintains a radiant presence, flashing from charm to alarm.
In the Olivier, things are less happy. The Villains' Opera is to The Beggar's Opera what the Millennium Dome is to St Paul's. Nick Dear's overblown updating of Gay's musical drama has drawn the sting out of the original and lost its charm. There's a glimpse of some good lines: in this neighbourhood, one navel-studded innocent is warned: 'Body piercing is something you do to someone else.' As Mrs Peachum, Beverley Klein is comically vibrant. But Stephen Warbeck's music straggles; the modernising references are lifestyle clichés - Chardonnay, cappuccino, the Groucho. These low-lifes caper to a band got up as as toffs in DJs and bow-ties. You could be back in a Victorian theatre.
