TheatreReviewBarbican, London
A pair of Lion King fans blunder into a highbrow drama in Declan Donnellan’s gallant update of the class-collision comedy
In Francis Beaumont’s 1607 burlesque, a grocer and his wife disrupt a performance of a citizen comedy, The London Merchant, to demand a heroic role for their apprentice, Rafe.
It is still a good joke about the collision of separate worlds and you can approach it in one of two ways. You can preserve the original setting, as was successfully done at the Sam Wanamaker Playhouse in 2014. Alternatively you can update it, as Declan Donnellan does in this intermittently funny Russian-language version (with English surtitles) for Moscow Pushkin Theatre and Cheek By Jowl.
Donnellan starts well by sending up internationalist theatrical chic: the actors somnolently drag chairs on stage and adopt archly stylised poses. There is even a videoed prologue spoken by a director with a Bertolt Brecht haircut who delivers much talk of a “concept”. Into this rarefied world burst a couple of spectators, George and Nell, who’ve only come to the Barbican because they couldn’t get in to The Lion King. They not only thrust their nephew into the drama but constantly intervene: Nell wants a selfie with an actor she recognises from TV even though he proves to be a “cupcake”. It’s a nice idea but, even in a cut-down version running 100 minutes, it is hard to sustain.
The play within the play loses much of its initial Euro-theatrical modishness and Rafe, rather than a surrogate Quixote burning for chivalric romance, simply becomes a bumptious amateur whose head is stuffed full of Shakespeare quotations. The best scenes are those involving George and Nell – excellently played by Alexander Feklistov and Agrippina Steklova – with the latter finally leading the ensemble in the kind of song and dance she came to see. In the inserted play there are also striking contributions from Anna Vardevanian as the fiercely fought-over heroine and from Anna Karmakova as the neglected wife of a drunken rocker. It is all very jolly but, good as it is to see the fashionable devices of today’s art-theatre being spoofed, my laughter was spasmodic rather than continuous.
At the Barbican, London, until 8 June.
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