Tamburlaine, The Elephant Man, Peter Pan

The New Criterion, February 1, 2015

Planning a date ought to involve hope, care, and a reasonable expectation that the invitee will enjoy what has been laid on. Simple enough principles, but judging by what I witnessed during the RSC veteran Michael Boyd’s powerful production of Christopher Marlowe’s Tamburlaine (Parts I and II) at Brooklyn’s Theatre for a New Audience, the man sitting two down from me had not followed them. He and his date (perhaps his wife, which would be no excuse) were, I would guess, leftish intellectuals of a certain age, herbivores by the look of them. This was not the play for her, and that shouldn’t have been too tough to work out in advance. Tamburlaine the Great, which was first performed in the late 1580s as two separate plays, is the wildly inaccurate retelling of the story of Tamerlane (Timur), the fourteenth-century khan who built an empire on the corpses of millions, a character very different from those commonly found in Park Slope.

Two stage directions:

He brains himself against the cage.

She runs against the cage and brains herself.

Demonstrative rummaging through a handbag began shortly after the first glimpses of Tamburlaine’s abattoir. It probably did not help that the killings were sometimes accompanied by a bucket of (stage) blood being poured over the dead, a neat touch that reinforced the brutal gaiety—four centuries or so before Tarantino—running through so much of the carnage on stage. Gore was and is good box office. Tamburlaine the Great was a huge hit at the time. Audiences have changed less than Left (trusting in progress) or Right (warning of decline) imagine. And not just audiences: in the prologue to Part Two, Marlowe refers smugly to “the general welcome Tamburlaine received/ When he arrived last upon our stage,” something that “hath made our poet pen his second part.” “Made?” The appeal of a lucrative sequel long predates Saw. And so do the excuses for it.

Some deserved their fate. I felt little pity for Mycetes, King of Persia, a mincing bully (well played with first menace and then cringing by Paul Lazar), but any sense of just deserts seemed lost on the increasingly agitated lady to my right. The impaling of four virgins—rather more sympathetic victims—was received very poorly indeed. And it was not even shown. The luckless girls were merely dragged off to meet their fate, subsequently announced by blood dripping down the transparent plastic sheeting that cut off the rear of the stage. Their now opaque figures stood behind it, symbolizing the fact that their “slaughtered carcasses” had been “hoisted” upon besieged Damascus’ walls, harbingers of worse to come.

For the city had ignored Tamburlaine’s rapidly depreciating offers of mercy. Initially, as was his habit, he flew “milk-white flags,” a signal that speedy surrender would be gently received. Later, vermilion tents warned that those capable of bearing arms would be butchered. The final stage—“coal-black tents”—meant that only “slaughtering terror” lay ahead “without respect of sex, degree or age.” Like some mafia boss, Tamburlaine took pride in his rules. It was a matter of honor that he stuck to them. And they were shrewd tactics too, designed “to terrify the world” into submission. Damascus could not be spared, and nor could the four girls who had come to plead for it.

Mr. Boyd had whittled down the two plays to a combined length—some three and a half hours—digestible in a single performance, while leaving their basic structure intact, something not so hard in a narrative with no small degree of repetition—conquest after conquest after conquest.

After an intermission enlivened by the sight of cleaners mopping up a stage soggy with stage blood, the dueling duo next to me returned for part two of the play and round two of their own quieter war. On stage the shenanigans included Tamburlaine’s murder of a disappointing son (an “effeminate brat”), a mother killing her child to spare him torture, and defeated kings being bridled and yoked to Tamburlaine’s chariot: one has his tongue chopped out for bad manners, quite a tasty slice by the look of it as it slid across the stage. When, at the play’s conclusion, the cast took their bows to thunderous applause, my near neighbor—by then shrunk back in his seat—managed a few, tentative claps of tiny rebellion. His date picked up her belongings, muttered “horrible, utterly atrocious” to no one in particular and stormed out, leaving her companion behind. No white flags would be flying in her apartment that night.

Now it has to be admitted that Tamburlaine is not the prettiest of plays, but then the “scourge of God” was not the prettiest of topics, even if Marlowe treated him more kindly than might have been expected today. A century and a half after his rampage, Tamerlane was seen as something of a Great Man (Napoleon was later to go through a not entirely dissimilar rehabilitation). More than that, Marlowe, a cobbler’s son, was clearly taken by how far his “base-born” Tamburlaine, a shepherd’s son, had risen from “nothing” (the real story is not quite so Horatio Alger). In the play a sultan sneers at this “presumptuous beast” but it is kings who end up yoked to Tamburlaine’s chariot. Marlowe, I think, relished the thought of that.

And it’s intriguing to speculate how much Marlowe may have used the undeniably outré Tamburlaine as a device to explore his own less-than-respectable views. Marlowe may or may not have been, as some enemies alleged, an atheist, but his Tamburlaine, who believes that he holds “the Fates bound fast in iron chains,” at one point invites “Mahomet” to take vengeance upon him, thereby anticipating the challenge that the English atheist politician Charles Bradlaugh issued to God some three centuries later. Bradlaugh survived, but—in a possibly tactful gesture on Marlowe’s part to the pieties of his era—Tamburlaine does not, falling sick and dying almost immediately afterwards while planning “the slaughter of the gods.”

Above all, this play is a study of power, of how this “fiery thirster after sovereignty” craves it and achieves it by manipulating men as well as armies, words as well as deeds. We see how he wields that power, and how in the end he is curdled by it. In later sequences, Tamburlaine, played with monumental force by John Douglas Thompson, is a terrifying presence, dominating the stage from that chariot drawn by his captive kings, and towing an effigy (or is it a mummy, an embellishment not found in Marlowe?) of his late wife Zenocrate (who, in a clever, sensitive performance by Merritt Janson, had evolved from captive to devoted bride). He is accompanied by an entourage of his chieftains, visibly uneasy—nicely conveyed by quick, careful glances of a type that a Molotov or a Khrushchev might have exchanged in the days of the ageing, paranoid Stalin—that they too might fall victim to the dangerous caprices of an ever more unstable tyrant, a tyrant who burned down a town just for being the place where Zenocrate had taken ill and died.

It is also a play about the spectacle of power, a spectacle choreographed by an impresario of empire, magnetic, dominant, and controlling: so much so that—in a shameful Nuremberg moment—I could not resist being swept away by the barbaric surge of Tamburlaine’s greatest victory march. Arthur Solari’s fine, threatening score, heavy on percussion and foreboding, only added to the sense of a conqueror—and events—on the march, an impression bolstered by the names of some of the cities—Cairo, Damascus, Gaza, Jerusalem—that run through the script: this is not some antiquarian entertainment.

And yet that is how it has been treated. The last major production of Tamburlaine in New York was in 1956. Unabridged, the two parts together would be too long, but separate productions would not work so well. A cast of sixty or so doesn’t suit cost-conscious times (TFANA got around this by having some of the actors play two or more roles, generally without much absurdity, although making the excellent Patrice Johnson Chevannes play both a Turkish queen and a Syrian king was too much of a stretch for me). Maybe the play’s bleak, uncompromising arc, unsanctified by that magic Shakespeare name, was deemed too much for modern tastes. In any event, this production made a brilliant case for a revival that had been delayed for too long.

Somewhat to my surprise, The Elephant Man (a lightly abbreviated version of Bernard Pomerance’s 1977 play), running at New York’s Booth Theater, was a rather more edifying evening. The idea of the movie star Bradley Cooper, People magazine’s Sexiest Man Alive (2011), playing Joseph Merrick (who is named “John” in the play), the hideously deformed Job who was possibly the ugliest man of the nineteenth century, smacked of stunt casting and a vanity project, a fear not assuaged by the revelation in Playbill that Cooper saw his hips (one is apparently lower than the other) and a hole in his right ear as “milder parallels to some of Merrick’s problems.” Milder, I’ll say.

But I was too cynical. Cooper was outstanding. In contrast to the treatment of John Hurt in David Lynch’s filmed and more dreamlike take on Merrick’s life, this production took the course recommended by Pomerance: There was no attempt to make Cooper look like Merrick—no special make-up or prosthetics—instead Cooper acted those disabilities, twisting his face and body into an echo of the horrifying photographs of Merrick displayed near the beginning of the play. And strange to say, it worked. This was testimony both to the haunting persistence of those gargoyle images and to the strength of Cooper’s performance: beauty became the beast, softly delivering his often drily amusing lines in a cultivated accent (not so different from that used by Hurt in Lynch’s film, or, it seems, Merrick himself) that, like the intelligence and charm of the actual Merrick, belied the poor man’s monstrous exterior.

As Dr. Treves, the savior who extracts Merrick from the freak show twilight in which he had been living (a twilight depicted more darkly than was really the case) and finds him a permanent home in the hospital where he works, Alessandro Nivola turns in a touching performance. His Treves is a decent, extraordinarily kind man who has some sort of breakdown towards the end of the play for reasons that seemed to owe more to the politics of the 1970s (something about the injustices of late Victorian England) than anything else.

To be blunt, this is not, as written, an outstanding play (and it is only an approximation of the true story), but the poignant tale it tells gives its slight lines a potential that a good cast can exploit to the full, and this cast did so—Cooper most notably, Nivola certainly, but also Patricia Clarkson, wonderful as Mrs. Kendal, a prominent actress who befriends Merrick and introduces him to grand folk, gentler and more generous gawpers than the Elephant Man had encountered before. The scene where she, an actress, rehearses the way she will react on first meeting Merrick—something that other women had found too difficult to bear—was funny, subtle, and marvelously done. When the two do meet and shake hands, we watched Ms. Clarkson acting Mrs. Kendal acting, and we saw Mrs. Kendal’s genuine kindness and Merrick’s genuine delight. How does the phrase go? Not a dry eye in the house. Perhaps it is graceless to point out that in reality the two probably never met, although Mrs. Kendal was one of Merrick’s benefactors. But there was indeed a woman, “a young and pretty widow,” wrote Treves in a later memoir, who gave that first handshake that meant so much.

According to Treves, the first time that Merrick went to the theater it was to a “popular pantomime . . . then in progress at Drury Lane.” The “panto,” a terror of my childhood, is a typically British show, nominally based on a traditional children’s story and performed over Christmas and New Year. It has distant (very distant) roots in commedia dell’arte, but has now devolved into a blend of singalong, slapstick, and audience participation (three horrors, with the danger of actually being dragged up on stage a fourth) aimed mainly at children. For older folk there are gently risqué jokes, a spot of sometimes faded showbiz glitz, and, for dad, a “principal boy” played by an attractive woman in a tight costume, a cuter counterpoint to the “pantomime dame,” an older lady played by a man for laughs.

The Peter Pan I saw in December in a packed Theatre Royal in my home town of Norwich would have astonished J. M. Barrie but checked the panto boxes. The principal boy was a hot girl, and so, for that matter, was Tiger Lily, jewel of one of the least PC Indian tribes since F Troop went to the syndicated hunting grounds. Showbiz was represented by veterans of a BBC children’s channel, a long-running soap opera, and Cromer Pier (in Norfolk we’re proud of our own). Captain Hook was Captain Evil (sneeringly claiming responsibility for, amongst other outrages, Norwich’s new traffic system, just the latest in the history of central planning’s long series of disasters) and cheerfully jeered for his villainy. Unscripted anarchy made its not altogether unexpected appearance: bags of sweets were thrown into the audience, someone threw a bag back. A boulder gave way to a light shove, prompting the observation from one of the pirates that the ticket money hadn’t been invested in the scenery. A tiny child brought on stage had no answer when asked where she lived.

But the audience—the children too—knew the rules. It knew the ancient responses (“oh yes there is”) to the ancient calls (“oh no there isn’t”), it bellowed out the lines needed to keep Tinker Bell alive, it laughed at the ancient jokes (“he was so stupid that he thought Sherlock Holmes was a block of flats”), it clapped along to the fragments of ancient songs (My Old Man’s A Dustman, Knees up Mother Brown) slotted into an introductory medley. Shout-outs were local, to places nearby: Dereham, Holt, Wymondham (Americans, don’t try to pronounce that one). This was a people enjoying itself, complete—tut-tutters take note—with demonization of the Other: there was a jibe at Scotland’s expense.

If Merrick’s first pantomime (Puss in Boots, as it happens) had come a very long way from commedia dell’arte, so today’s panto has continued to evolve, changing with the culture, but somehow (despite gestures such as inserting that song from Frozen into the show) lagging it too, a combination of adaptation and nostalgia that has probably done much to keep the genre alive. Well, that and the fun and the spectacle that might not have won over this curmudgeon-in-training fifty years ago, but quite clearly delighted the children—and not just the children—watching Peter Pan on a chilly Norwich winter night.

Oh yes it did.