Ensemble plays all the rage in London Theatre

London theatre is definitely alive, varied and in rude health if my last few theatre jaunts are anything to go by. Ensemble productions are everywhere, including John Antrobus’ 60s therapy-fest, ‘Captain Oates’ Left sock’, Stephen Berkoff’s theatre adaptation of ‘On the Waterfront’, ‘We Will Rock You’ from Ben Elton and Queen, and the National Theatre’s premier of Richard Bean’s ‘England People Very Nice’.

‘Captain Oates’ Left Sock’, directed by Richard Bolam, was performed by a shockingly brilliant cast of fifteen upstairs at the Finborough Arms. The Finborough is a long-established theatre venue in the tradition of the room-above-the-pub and although the idea of sitting in a circle along with assorted actors playing psychiatric ward inmates was alarming and even potentially cringeworthy the effect was electric. In the course of the play, the audience effectively and unwittingly become non-speaking parts in the unfolding drama, as group dynamics are played out and various traits and tragedies are revealed. In fact, the cast in this instance hardly outnumbered the audience and I found myself uncomfortably close to one character’s bare bottom in a brief moment of abandoned nudity. Antrobus, Spike Milligan’s co-writer, a seasoned playwright and sketch writer (he wrote for the Two Ronnies and for Tony Hancock) has a sharp ear for dialogue, an ability to create well-rounded characters and of course he can crack a good joke. I emerged uncertain as to whether I was now a member of the motley community of inmates or separate from it, which is a measure of the play’s success; the line between ‘normal’ and mentally ill is convincingly blurred.

Berkoff is now almost a blast from the past himself, but just like London theatre, still very much alive and kicking. One can see why the subject matter of ‘On the Waterfront’ might have appealed to him, a great proponent and adapter of Greek tragedy, with its grand themes of fatal flaws, loyalty and betrayal, and cycles of revenge. This production transferred from the Nottingham Playhouse to the Haymarket Theatre in London’s West End. The Haymarket, with its traditional frills and furbelows and huge proscenium arch is a big theatre to fill, and the carefully choreographed ensemble cast seemed to flatten out oddly when viewed from my vantage point near the back of the stalls, almost becoming one-dimensional silhouettes indistinguishable from each other. The theatre wasn’t full, so I crept forward for the second half and found myself much more engaged sitting closer to the actors. A sparse set, clever use of lighting and sound bring the story to life. In one scene, the beleaguered hero Terry Molloy (played by Simon Merrells), says his immortal line ‘I coulda been a contender’ to his brother Charlie whilst sitting in a car brilliantly portrayed with the help of four chairs and some convincing engine sounds made by surrounding actors and a miming driver. Any actor playing the part of will have Marlon Brando’s performance to live up to, but Merrells is full of pent-up testosterone, even if he does lack Brando’s smouldering sex-appeal. The largely male cast generate terrific mood and atmosphere, even though they’re fighting with a space that seems to work against the drama and staging. Perhaps because of this, despite the tragedy — the flawed hero falls in love with the sister of a man whom he has helped to kill — there is little in the way of catharsis, the audience are (literally) held at a distance, which is a pity. In a smaller venue, I can imagine the effects would have been distilled and the tragedy would have come through in a thoroughly Aristotelian fashion.

And here, before I get onto the National Theatre’s latest extravaganza, I must do a brief nod to ‘We Will Rock You’, another ensemble production, which is now, I believe, in its tenth year at London’s Dominion Theatre. Watching it is a strange experience, more because of its audience than the production itself. The audience behave as though in a rock stadium, popping out frequently for refreshments and toilet breaks, standing up and waving their arms in the air during the songs and calling out at odd moments. Perhaps this is a tribute to the tired old warhorse that the show has become. The drama is thin as rice paper, but the cast can really sing and it’s a reminder that however you might try to sanitise Queen’s repertoire, the songs are still monumentally great.

‘England People Very Nice’ is a grand ensemble production in the tradition of what the National Theatre do best. It’s staged in the Olivier, which is, after all, a purpose-built indoor amphitheatre, ideal for this sort of spectacle, and the space is filled with energy, colour and music. The direction is in the creative and capable hands of Nicholas Hytner. As an ensemble piece it’s fizzy, vibrant and runs like a well-oiled machine.

In this cheery frolic through several hundred years of the history of immigration to London, Bean focuses on four groups: the French Huguenots, the Irish, the Jews and the Bangladeshis. These stories are told in the time-honoured ‘play within a play’ format. Each act begins and ends in the present, in an immigrants’ holding centre, where the inmates are putting on a play whilst at the same time awaiting their individual fates following appeals. The envelopes containing the news have arrived, but it’s not until the end of the play that they are finally opened.

The play’s tone is light-hearted, though its themes are not. It is slickly performed, even in preview, making clever use of back projections. The action is chronological, so there is not much room for surprises or turnarounds, but since the pace is fast and the action varied, the lack of conventional plot structure is no barrier to enjoyment. Much of the action takes place in a tavern or pub which is transplanted into each time-frame along with certain updated characters — in particular the star-crossed lovers (Sacha Dhawan and Michelle Terry). These two characters, one of them always playing the new immigrant, are repetitively thwarted in their efforts to get together. Another ongoing figure, a repeatedly reincarnated barmaid with a talent for invective, is played by an exuberant Sophie Stanton reappearing in each era with a different but entirely familiar set of prejudices.

The cycles of immigration, backlash, violence and prejudice are revisited with each new wave of foreigners, ‘fucking frogs’, ‘fucking yids’, and so on. Mostly the tone is well judged. The stereotyped Irish, who keep pigs in their living quarters and are incestuous as a matter of course, the stereotyped French who seem only interested in lace and love, and the stereotyped Jews who are either anarchists or say ‘oy’ a lot are all equally lampooned. The husband who forces himself on his wife, or the man who is beaten because of his origins, are glossed over and we have to accept that this is a piece of light entertainment, and not a tragedy. When it comes to an Irish Catholic baby who is discovered to have been born with only one eye, construed to be a child of the devil and then thrown out of the window by the indigenous English, the tone becomes a little less assured. Later still, the fanatical Imam with his fake beard and hooked hand perhaps goes a touch too far. Similarly, a weak joke about someone thinking that the twin towers were actually the Wembley towers falls flat.

However, the humour is mostly well-placed and the majority of the jokes are funny. Mushi, the contemporary restaurant owner is told that his chicken tikka is too dry for the English palate and he should ‘drown the whole thing in gravy’. Instead of calling it ‘chicken tikka disaster’, as his friend suggests, he decides to call it ‘chicken tikka masala’ and thus invents a whole new dish. The middle class couple, St John and Camilla who move to Bethnal Green, witness a murder and declare ‘A murder! How visceral!’. Later, St John tells his daughter’s hijab-wearing teacher, ‘I refuse to be lectured about normality by a woman wearing a two-man tent’.

The lines ‘This is the only paradise you’ll ever know’, ‘What? Bethnal Green?’ are repeated in each new era, giving us a sense of continuity, and, I suppose, déjà vu. With the ongoing motifs of the tavern, the time-travelling Star Crossed Lovers and the comical cartoon back projections, I could be forgiven for thinking I was watching a cross between Blackadder, Romeo and Juliet, and Monty Python. Not a bad combination, you might say, but perhaps the result is just a little thin and throw-away for its own good. These are heavy themes treated lightly. Immigrants to this country have generally escaped from repressive, violent and life-threatening regimes and there is no room in this type of narrative to touch upon any of that. In the more contemporary sections, Bean bravely tackles terrorism and fanatical Islam, but because we’re on a whistlestop tour of history, we don’t have time to get to grips with the subject matter, and neither does he. Since all the characters are only sketched in, retaining a Brechtian sort of distance, it’s impossible to feel much empathy with them. This would be absolutely fine if the play were really engaging us intellectually, making us think and re-evaluate our own ideas and preconceptions. But does it? Most of the audience will know about the cycles of immigration, prejudice and violence and the waves of peoples coming and going, integrating, and intermarrying. In fact if the hope of a successful multicultural Britain lies anywhere in the play, it’s in the inevitability of love, intermarriage and interbreeding. If only the characters were a little more fleshed out. The Muslim community’s modern fanatics and moderates are perhaps portrayed in a little more depth than the previous generations, but the picture is still one-dimensional. We do have Mushu, the restaurant-owning moderate at his wits’ end with his daughters who have ‘gone hijabi’ sitting at the feet of the mad Imam, but one of them intermittently spouts pro-muslim rap rhymes, a device which once again undercuts any potentially significant moment. As in the rest of the play, there is not much light and shade — anything potentially serious is joked away. Even when the baby is thrown out of the window, it’s shown as a projected cartoon, lest we should start to feel emotionally engaged. In the end, even the more finely drawn characters provide little in the way of enlightenment or surprise.

When we reach the end of the second act, and the ‘play-within-the-play’ is over, most of the inmates of the holding centre receive the results of their appeals. By this point we have somewhat lost touch with these contemporary characters. Apart from one or two jokes that enter the ‘play’ after being set up in the first scene, the contemporary characters don’t interject between bits of historical action (as the characters do in the play within a play in ‘Marat-Sade’ for example), so it’s hard to remember them at all, let alone feel sympathy. Most of those who receive their envelopes leave without the audience being privy to the contents, but one or two receive bad news. I was sorry that I didn’t care more, but it’s not that kind of play. It’s a feel-good, musical, jokey journey through several hundred years of history, less equipped to give us pause for thought or move us, and more to keep us entertained, and it certainly succeeds admirably in that.