Candide: 'If this is the best of all possible worlds, what then are the others?'

Last Thursday night I went to see a performance of Candide at the RSC's Swan Theatre in Stratford. In many ways, it was one of the strangest plays I have ever seen. Ignorantly, I anticipated a straightforward performance of Voltaire's tale, yet what emerged was a far more loosely interpreted interweaving of the traditional Candide story with various, heterogenous narrative strands; threads ranging in setting from the idealised, antiquated past, to harsh, black contemporary London, to a futuristic neon dystopia, and ranging in humour from comic, comical-tragical, tragical-historical & c. *see Polonius' list in Shakespeare's The Winter's Tale.

The play, misleadingly, begins in the original Renaissance setting of Voltaire's story. Candide has found himself in the lavish home of a wealthy, older lascivious Countess (Ishia Bennison). In order to wake him from his depressed stupor (we begin, oddly, after many of the story's actual sad events have taken place), the Countess plans to put on a play of Candide's life and journey (using details surreptitiously gleaned from his journal). This meta-theatrical twist is perhaps the first signal that the RSC's Candide is not going to be your standard, run-of-the-mill performance - as the play develops classic is insistently replaced with 'original' and diverting. 

The play within a play ensues - beginning with the beginning of Voltaire's story. Candide is the ward of Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh, (Baron of Westphalia, a region in Germany), and receives instruction from Dr. Pangloss, a professor of 'metaphysic-theologo-cosmonigology' and proponent of the 'optimism' theory, which teaches that we live in the 'best of all possible worlds': in essence, it is a deterministic theory which states that 'things cannot be other than what they are'.* On seeing Pangloss 'real' Candide (Matthew Needham) rushes to embrace him. One would be quick to point out - as the actor Pangloss is - that he is a mere representation of Pangloss, not the 'real thing'. I like the way that  'real' Candide can't seem to grasp the idea of a play, it highlights his impenetrable naiveté, and unshakeable - if ridiculous - optimism: although he is watching a play of his own life, and knows what must and will occur next, he still preserves a futile hope that he can alter the past. This bleeding of 'real' life (play life) into theatre (the play within the play) continues with the arrival of Cunegonde, Baron Thunder-ten-Tronckh's beautiful daughter, and Candide's life-long love. Candide tries to embrace the actress Cunegonde - seemingly unaware that she is an actress, a mere representation of his 'love' - desperately and vainly attempting to pluck nourishment from art to feed his bleak reality.

Back to the play, and Candide happily finds himself engaged in a rather dirty kiss with Cunegonde; unfortunately, Baron and Baroness Thunder-ten-Tronckh are also engaged in watching this kiss, and he is quickly given the boot. I didn't expect to see a woman simulate orgasm on stage (the kiss is on the mouth in Voltaire), and it made for uncomfortable, but nonetheless humorous viewing - the old women opposite me were in stitches! As Candide is evicted, the humorous vein continues with a reprise of Pangloss' reccuring interlude 'this is the best of all possible worlds'. At this stage in the play, when the damage is still relatively jejune and light (although Candide is banished, he still heartily vows to be reunited with his love) the song is free from ironic inflection. The song catches its first darker, more cynical notes when Candide is tricked into joining the Bulgar army. Two officers emerge on stage, and playing 'good cop', 'bad cop' they effectively jostle Candide into an alliance he was helpless to resist. Inexperienced and incompetent, he is pushed into war and kills a kindly, innocent man. The chants of the song by both sides 'this is the best of all possible worlds' respectively (they both seem to think they have won, as far as I can tell) is drenched in irony, given the level of bloodshed and fatality such a war would incur. As for Candide's own song? Is it the best of all worlds when you must kill a man for a war you truly do not know why is being fought. In the book Candide does not fight, but decamps and is captured and tortured. However, I like this deviation; Ravenhill makes us question the validity of blind optimism from the outset, and links it to wider issues - such as war and power - that are extremely relevant (and very close to the bone) in contemporary society.

Candide is soon met by Jaques (in Voltaire, James), a wealthy Anabaptist who takes Candide under his wing. Now wealthy, Candide gives some florins to a poor beggar as he passes through the town square: said beggar turns out to be Pangloss himself. Pangloss informs Candide that the palace in Westphalia has been destroyed and Cunégonde raped and disembowelled by soldiers. We also discover that Panquette, a maid from the palace in Westphalia, gave Pangloss the syphilis that has reduced him to his sick, beggarly state. Pangloss still looks upon everything - the death, the disease - of course, as the 'best possible of worlds', and tries to convince Candide of the same: at this point, however, we become doubtful. Candide gets Jaques to pay for Pangloss to be cured, and he loses 'only' an eye and an ear (the best possible of worlds). The trio subsequently embark for Lisbon. Aboard the boat, Jaques and Panlgoss argue over philosophy. Jaques proposes that 'men [...] must have somewhat altered the course of nature; for though they were not born wolves, yet they have become wolves' destroying each other, becoming bankrupt etc. Pangloss retorts with the utilitarian argument that 'private misfortunes contribute to a general good', and their abstract argument soon descends into a hilarious physical fight - Pangloss chucking Jaques from the boat as a storm ensues, affirming all the while that this is 'the best of all possible worlds', and that Lisbon was made for Jacques to die.

This comic scene is (with extreme bathos) immediately contrasted with a sombre one. Lisbon has been hit by an earthquake, tsunami and ensuing fire that has killed tens of thousands of people. The earthquake in Lisbon on All Saint's Day 1755 was one of the main inspirations for Voltaire's text. It (literally) shook the very foundations of contemporary optimistic theory. How can this be the best of all possible worlds, when devastating, horrific natural disasters such as this occur on a near-daily basis? Voltaire uses his narrative to massage this paradox, challenging Leibniz' theodicy of God's benevolence. Upon re-living the trauma of the earthquake (presented before him in play form) 'real' Candide loses it, puncturing the play-within-a-plays sing-song affirmation of optimism and insisting that the world is black, terrible, and - above all - negative. 

From an insistence on metaphorical blackness we are plunged into actual blackness, as the Renaissance setting is rolled away and replaced with a 'modern-day', shiny party scene. Now things get really weird. All the original Voltarian characters - Candide, Cunégonde, Pangloss - are replaced by Sophie, Sarah, Emma et al, a dysfunctional, insipid cockney family celebrating their daughter (Sophie's) eighteenth birthday. The birthday girl remains menacingly silent, while members of her family try to speak for her, her drunk mother (Sarah) berating her 'weird' mysteriousness, and her 'optimistic' step-mother Emma affirming the beneficence of the cosmos and their plan for Sophie's life. Sophie does eventually talk, whipping out a gun and declaring her intention to kill all her family. Her reasons for doing so are (to me anyway) very unclear - something to do with people not treating the earth with enough respect, of being ignorant of their own ignorance, of expecting a lot from life, of wanting to make life better with every generation. Anyway, I didn't quite 'get' this bit. Honestly, if it was meant to link to anything we'd seen so far, that link was tenuous to say the least. I suppose Sophie's negativity is meant to be an antidote to Panglossian optimism - her insistence that everything is not 'all right' a counter to his affirmation that this is 'the best of worlds'. I'm not too sure, but I do know I wasn't a particular fan of this scene, or of Sophie (Sarah Ridgeway's), shouty, brash, amateurish manner. One thing leads to another, and despite their pleas, Sophie shoots every member of her family - including herself (her plan is apparently to depopulate the world) - leaving her mother as the only survivor. 

Now it's some months after the event, and Sarah is visiting a screenwriter (she has already written a book), with plans to make a film of her story. She is accompanied by I think the term was 'narrative guider' (or something to that effect), and they begin with the intention of focusing the film on the aftermath of the disaster - the positive, cathartic steps Sarah has taken towards acceptance and recovery. This is, of course, the optimistic view. However, Sarah (influenced by the boss-man and screenwriter) soon begins to realise - like Candide before her, at the destroyed Lisbon port - that you can't magically make everything positive: the horror of the trauma always remains. 

Segway back to Candide, and some of the original Voltaire re-emerges (this chopping and changing really was exhausting). We meet Candide in the city of El Dorado, an isolated, rural utopia, where people love freely (as we are all 'each other' they affirm), have ample time for work and play and make all decisions in a democratic manner. Bingo, Candide thinks - he's hit the jackpot. Yet, holes in their lifestyle's quickly begin to emerge: Candide cannot believe that they do not mourn a dead man - we're all the same they insist, he lives in us - and eschew precious metals as worthless rubble. Candide decides to leave El Dorado. As it turns out, a world without selfish individualism, without grief, without greed - however manmade and evil those traits may be - is quite boring. It is here that we see Voltaire's second emphatic rejection of the optimistic theory (the first being Candide's horror at the earthquake): reality, he affirms, is beleaguered by both good and bad. A life of only good, a life lived by Leibniz' optimistic theodicy, is somehow unreal - as the RSC reflects in the day-glo colours and hazy smoke of the trippy El Dorado set - and ultimately unpleasant. This scene is filled with the laugh-out-loud comedy that I remembered experiencing originally reading Voltaire, as Candide straps himself to a sheep laden with balloons - pockets filled with gold - and willingly, nay ecstatically returns to a world of avarice and despair: optimism has dramatically failed. 

While in this scene the rejection of optimism is a good thing, in the next it is not. Here we see Sarah send Hannah (the narrative shaper) away, claiming she does not need her - literally banishing all optimism from her story. Sarah and the writer go and create a new script that is dramatically inflated and completely devoid of any positive slant, featuring all the possible suffering in the world, the rapes and ravishing and disembowl-ments and betrayals of the Candide tale. Sarah argues that she and Candide are kindred spirits, and only suffering can answer suffering. Although I didn't particularly like the acting or the actress (Katy Stephens just doesn't do it for me - I don't know why!), I see what Ravenhill was attempting to communicate; although suffering is a natural part of life, if negativity is made supreme, it is as dangerous as a purely optimistic existence. Suffering engenders suffering, but to wallow and thrill in it - as Sarah now seems to do - is anti-cathartic, unnatural, inhuman. As with all things, there needs must be balance. 

The next scene jumps forward once more, to the futuristic, sterile 'Pangloss Institute' where Sarah (her film created) is on an exhibition tour displaying artefacts from Candide's life. An info-graphic informs us that Pangloss (must be around 400 years old now - all realism has gone out of the window, absurd!) has manufactured a drug to make all humans optimistic (particularly disturbing in light of the NHS' current goto method for curing depression), imposing a worldwide, forced compliance to his theory - Pangloss is the bad guy, what?! Anyway, Sarah demands conference with Candide (his body is preserved and he comes back to life - I told you it was weird), and informs him of Pangloss' plan. She is interrupted, however by a surprise guest (yep, gets even weirder), Cunegonde (Susan Engel). Cunégonde is not the stunning, buxom beauty she once was, but a time-ravaged, 300 year old woman, trailing a shabby dress behind her. Cunegonde begs Candide to fufill his promise and kiss her - battered as she is - successively listing the multiple horrors she has suffered and endured, all in the hope that Candide will 'one day' kiss her. Engel is a commanding, passionate and talented actress, and although she is on stage for a mere five minutes, she steals the show. Over 300 years Cunegonde has preserved the optimistic fervour all characters in the play so far have lost, and the accreting anger and frustration in her cries for a kiss evidence the desperation of a theory worn thin by consistent abuse. I like this reversal at the end. In Voltaire's story Candide is the protagonist, and Cunegonde's personal journey is overlooked. Ravenhill has shown in Candide and Sarah that optimism can falter, but here he presents a character who sticks with it - for better or worse. Yet she is not happy, Cunegonde is distinctly unhappy. She ultimately achieves her wish (very disturbing to see a 20-ish-year-old 'snogging' a 70-plus-year-old on stage, but there you go), yet it is tinged with ambivalence. Was it worth it? Did the years of optimism help? What was the alternative, to lay down and die? Everyone has to believe in something, after all. Technically, the play doesn't end on this moment - Sarah returns to stage and slits her wrists, but this is just so pathetic and gratuitous, and such an obvious attempt to draw the several threads of the plot together that I just can't tolerate it - but it was certainly the moment I find myself dwelling on.      

Sarah Engel as Cunegonde

Overall, I think Ravenhill has done well enough in his attempt to diversify an old tale. But my question is, did we need the modern references in order to 'get' the message? Is that not a link the theatre audience could have made on their own. We know some people live in luxury while others starve, we know that people use technology as a distraction from everyday life, and we also know that 'happiness' is, more often than not, unattainable. Personally, I don't feel like the blind amoeba Sophie (and vicariously Ravenhill) seems to tell me I am, wandering around cherishing a vain notion of idealistic living just around the corner, and selectively turning a blind eye to the world's suffering. I liked Candide, but it insistently felt like it was trying to tell me something about myself, or about society, that I already know: Ravenhill was preaching to the choir. The RSC's Candide could have done with being a smidgen less didactic, a lot less faux-modernistic, and a heap more faithful to the text. 

*** Three stars. 

* All direct quotations from John Butt's 1947 translation of the original, published by Penguin Classics 1982.

The RSC's Hamlet 2013, a review: suffering the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune.

On Saturday night I went to see the RSC's (Royal Shakespeare Company's) performance of Hamlet in Stratford. As we live fairly close to Stratford, I have been to the old and new, refurbished theatre on a number of occasions. Last year I saw Romeo and Juliet - a rather lack-lustre performance - and the year before enjoyed The Winter's Tale, which was excellent. In light of these variable recent experiences, I didn't quite know what to expect from Hamlet - but I was not pleasantly surprised.

Before I say anything about the performance, I think it is important to establish that - as it is well-known - Hamlet is one of Shakespeare's longest, weightiest and more complex plays, and poses a daunting task for even the most skilled and experienced of directors: including David Farr. Yet, the RSC is itself a formidable company - the defining establishment of British theatre - and Hamlet's cast includes some stellar theatre stalwarts. Despite the magnitude of the venture, the RSC had the tools and talent to produce a fantastic show.

Firstly, I must begin with our Hamlet - Jonathan Slinger. My criticisms of Slinger are multitudinous, and my praises (sadly) lacking.

• My primary problem with Slinger is his age. At the expense of appearing ageist, at 40 years old Slinger is simply too old to convincingly perform Hamlet. With a balding pate and distinctly middle-aged mannerisms Slinger is void of the youthful charm and spirited fervency one would expect a scholar recently returned from Wittenburg to posses; also - and I'll probably sound shallow as well as ageist now - he lacks any sense of Hamlet's animated attractiveness. These may sound like very superficial, pernickty points, yet, arguably our sense of Hamlet's youth and attractiveness are essential to our appreciation of his character; in the RSC's performance, there is ultimately no viable reason why Ophelia, and more importantly the audience, would be drawn to Hamlet. This inappropriate casting marrs every aspect of the play. When Hamlet is 'mad' (or feigning madness), his witty speeches and silly phrases lose effect; delivered, as they are from the vessel of a middle-aged man, they seem more like a joke your dad (or specifically my dad) would make, than brilliant flourishes of a quick, resourceful wit [in conjunction with this, Slinger's tedious - and ofttimes cringeworthy - tendency to hyperbolically elongate words or repeat them in a silly, childlike manner is unduly incongrous with his 'grumpy old man' facade, and very Jack Dee-esque, but I shall say more on his poor delivery later]. Perhaps more blasphemously, due to Slinger's maturity Hamlet's philosophical speeches on the nature of time, death and life concurrently emerge more as the embittered, dulled, disillusioned mumblings of one J. Alfred Prufrock than the fired-up, ebullient, exhaustive interrogations of a youthful Hamlet, struggling to comprehend the world's inherent complexities as he experiences the thrilling epoch of newly-burgeoning philosophical and worldly consciousness; the essential expansion of the mind (from considerations merely of the self, to musings on mankind as a whole), that occurs primarily when one makes the tentative, perplexed, perplexing transition from boyhood to manhood. [For a portrayal of Hamlet fat and oozing all his intended youthful, spirited brilliance, rhetorical skill, playful wit and philosophical aptness, see - the ineffable, unparalleled - master that is Laurence Olivier: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K0xYbpYgdPQ]

• Another unignorable aspect of Slinger's portrayal of Hamlet, is his in excruciating tendency to over-act. Indeed, Hamlet is an intense, tragic, dramatic play; however, Hamlet's passionate speeches or mad ramblings are more poignant when considered in isolation. In Slinger's performance there is no respite, no relief from the relentless harangues of his constant crying/laughing etc.. A truly great dramatic performance climaxes, crescendos, deftly works up to moments of intense emotion or compelling action. Slinger's decision to play Hamlet all on one (ebulliently dramatic) level erases the subtle nuances of Shakespeare's original text: in his interaction with his father's ghost the audience's pathos is negated and the sublime cadences of the actual verse are lost, as we are unrelentingly subjected to Slinger's cringe-inducing, childish, repulsive cries. Where is the delicacy? Where is the simplicity? Why is a revered, well-known RSC actor performing like a naively exuberant, unexperienced teenager straight out of acting-school (and don't tell me that's what Shakespeare's Hamlet is - he is anything but). Unfortunately, it seems that the word 'subtle' is not in Slinger's vocabulary. 

OK, so enough about Slinger (although I could say more), and onto Hamlet's other problems.

• The staging was confused, and quite frankly, ridiculous. Although I appreciate that the RSC is always striving to do new, exciting things with their sets, here they have massively overreached. The stage is a confusing conglomeration of high-school gymnasium, old-fashioned Scottish country-pile (see James Bond's family home, in Skyfall), littered with incipient fencing paraphernalia. There are simply too many 'themes' in conflict here, and, whats worse, none of them are remotely interesting/engaging/titillating. If anything, the play would be better suited to a simple, blank stage: at least then it would avoid the criticism of being confused/amateur in design.  (A couple of extra notes on staging. The stage was littered with skulls - I assume to foreshadow Hamlet's famous 'Yorick' speech, but which actually debase it. In addition, the 'movers' took far too long to clear away the stage in preparation for the graveyard scene, totally distracting the audience from Hamlet and Horatio's conversation). 
• Hand-in-hand with staging, naturally, goes costume. Again, there seems to be no consistent theme (or even thought) behind the costumes: Hamlet appears wearing a suit (circa 1950's), then time-travels back to a doublet and hose, before donning an absurd 'modern-day' hooded parka and jeans in the closing scene. Horatio and Ophelia suffer with the trials of dodgy knit-wear, meanwhile Claudius, the Queen, and their court are attired in a similarly inexplicable/clashing array of old-world fashion, 'modern' attire and fencing vizors. Yes, Hamlet is a play that thrives on the inherent inconsistencies and inconstancies of life, human psychology and physiology - but the RSC's costume choices seem more like an un-planned, accidental menagerie than a carefully-coordinated, intentional, thematic jumbling. 
• A flaw I have touched upon, but find too ridiculous to merit discussion is the 'fencing' dimension of this production. It is unnecessary, un-textual, unriveting and - and this is perhaps the most offensive aspect of the whole sodding conundrum - isn't even executed well. Hamlet may have been a skilled swordsman - but these actors are not. The average theatre-goer in 2013 is sophisticated enough to appreciate this aspect of Hamlet's character without having it literally (and poorly) rammed in front of his eyes. 
• I found Ophelia ill-cast and ill-concieved. I can see that Farr was attempting to make more out of her character, but really, in Shakespeare's text and in almost every other production of Hamlet, she is on the periphery. Hamlet has dimensions of 'love', yes, but it is not a 'love story'. Our focus  is meant to be on Hamlet alone, which is why his relationship with Ophelia is largely left unwritten/open to the imagination. Forgive me for sounding anti-feminist, but Ophelia is an unimportant antecedent. If any female character is interesting in Hamlet, it is Gertrude: the character whose decision to marry her husband's brother tears the rug from under Hamlet, and corrupts the very fabric of the play's moral universe (On that point, Charlotte Cornwell's Gertude was bland, unmemorable, and dire: when, in the play, she is actually a rather interesting, ambiguous paradox of a woman. I do concede, however, that her performance was not exactly helped by having Mr. Over-actor - Slinger - as her counterpart, who prevented her from getting a word in edgeways, anyway). On a different note, Ophelia's eventual 'madness' was as unconvincing as Slinger's, and her smearing blood on Claudius and Gertude etc. a trivial, predictable motif - which crowned my dislike for Pippa Nixon's performance. *also, extremely superficially, I did not like her hair. Where are the famous locks intwined with flowers and weeds that drag her to her watery-grave - WHERE?!

• Hamlet is long, yes, but at four hours (including interval) the RSC's production was looong (with extra 'o's'). Given, Farr may have felt that he wanted to give the play its full-run, and allow all of Shakespeare's verse to be included - but there were scenes which were tedious and un-engaging, and could have benefited from being shortened. Although I largely believe in the 'sanctity' of the written text, it is natural and necessary that a literary piece should be formally (as opposed to thematically) modified and altered to fit its new, dramatic context. I read recently that Renaissance theatre goers were extremely adept listeners, and would sit through a four-hour performance of Hamlet with no qualms/discomfort. It is a lamentable, but real fact that modern audiences do not posses this astonishing faculty. In order to keep engaging audiences with albeit, the same material of the Renaissance, contemporary directors must at least attempt to make that material palatable and enjoyable for them. I am sad to say that if this was my first experience of professional theatre (as I suspect it was for some of the 14/15 y/o's sat in front of me) I would be unlikely to return. * NB I am not suggesting a dulling-down/de-elevation/modernisation of the text (these sorts of productions are repugnant) - my suggestions are merely in a formal sense. 
• The final scene was inexplicably poorly acted.
• As the play ends, a fire alarm goes off and sprinklers flood the stage. Why was this necessary? The audience were not surprised, taken-aback, or even momentarily affected by this (shoddy, half-hearted) 'spectacle': in my mind, the only thing it achieved was making Ophelia's white dress extremely dirty - the RSC's dry-cleaning bill is going to be extortionate by the end of the play's run. 

Despite my criticism there are a few - sparse - parts/factors of the RSC's Hamlet that I genuinely enjoyed. 

•  I thought Robin Soans was an excellent Polonious. He exquisitely portrayed all of Polonious' comic idisyncracies: from his inclination for proverbs (many of which have now entered common speech), his pompous verboseness, his sycophantic manouvers, and his insuppressible dislike for Hamlet. Soans pulled-off the character perfectly, and shone as, arguably, the most experienced and well-suited to his role. 
• The dumb-play was extremely engaging, combining humour and dark-tragedy. The use of costumes/setting that would have furnished an actual dumb-show in the Renaissance conveyed the same sense of jeopardy and titillation Hamlet's first audiences would have undoubtedly felt: as they watched Claudius, watching the play of himself. There was menace, there was sexual-innuendo, there was unease and enjoyment: in this brief dumb-show Farr manages to engage and amuse the audience wholly, when in the actual theatrical performance - of which the dumb-show is a mere part - he only half-captivates them, and merely sporadically amuses them. 

Evidently, as I warned you at before beginning, my criticisms vastly outnumber my praises. Overall, I feel extremely let down by the RSC: I expected an excellent performance of one of my favourite Shakespeare plays, what I got was a paltry 'show' of amateur dramatics, shoddy staging and sore-eyes from watching such a dull play for so long. I have booked tickets for a dramatic production of Venus and Adonis at Shakespeare's Globe theatre in May - I can only hope that it will outshine Hamlet, although that should not be too difficult. 

JEM.