I’m the first to nod in agreement when women directors chafe at articles that inevitably lump them all together. We are directors who happen to be women, they are quick to reply, not Women Directors (capital letters mine). And yet, I couldn’t help but feel that gender makes a discernible difference – and thrillingly so – as regards the newly opened Old Vic revival of Brian Friel’s luminous Dancing At Lughnasa, which is directed by a woman, Anna Mackmin, whereas Tony winner Patrick Mason directed the play the first time around.
Telling of five spinster sisters inhabiting the same tumultuous Ballybeg, Co. Donegal, household in 1936, Lughnasa indeed benefits from the careful attention afforded it from Mackmin, who is quietly growing into one of Britain’s most confident and compassionate directors: her West End incarnation last year of David Eldridge’s Under the Blue Sky was one of the glories of 2008, its absence from the year-end handing out of gongs puzzling to this day.
For one thing, you get a real sense here of the physical intimacy between the Mundy sisters and the way in which they act in differing ways as one another’s protectors. There’s a natural ease between Niamh Cusack’s ready quipster Maggie and Michelle Fairley’s wrenching schoolteacher Kate that finds the two eldest of the five readily intertwining arms as if to buttress themselves against the cruel world that Peter McDonald’s narrator, Michael – a surpassingly empathic performance – tells us about at wounding length. Elsewhere, when the “simple” sister Rose (Simone Kirby) returns from an assignation, her bespectacled sibling, Agnes (Susan Lynch), pauses to do up her blouse before reintroducing her to an anxious household: a small but telling detail in a production full of the same.
It’s not that a male director is innately incapable of such feeling: Mason’s production made considerably more, for instance, of the sheer ecstasy informing the sisters’ first-act dance – a moment that, for many spectators, the original Tony winning production never again matched. One could argue, however, that Mackmin is right not to present the dance as such an obvious set piece; there’s no opportunity, for instance, for this image of momentary release to garner applause in the way that it sometimes did all those years ago. (Hard to believe I first saw this play in 1990, since it has stayed with me so completely in the nearly two decades since.)
But I don’t recall that earlier go-round providing such a full sense of a household knitted together by care and concern even as it is about to become undone altogether. And near the end, when Michael in his reveries reaches across the divide of memory to stroke the chin of his mother, Chris (Irish singer Andrea Corr in a notable stage debut), a single gesture serves to encapsulate the reservoirs of feeling coursing through a play that leaves you floating in accordance with the language of Michael’s gently exalted final speech.
Are women directors therefore condemned only to do delicate, “intimate” work, leaving the more macho requirements of the job to their male colleagues? Not at all. Easily the most testosterone-fuelled National Theater production in recent years was Marianne Elliott’s summer, 2007, production of Saint Joan, much of the excitement of which came from the play’s lone female, star Anne-Marie Duff, fully holding her own amidst a rabidly blokish ensemble. I’d put money on Duff’s performance being less compelling without Elliott on hand to drive at, just as the presence of Phyllida Lloyd at the helm redoubled the power of her Mary Stuart leads, Janet McTeer and Harriet Walter: let’s hope that magic is retained for the Schiller revival’s forthcoming Broadway run.
In the meantime, London has a new Lughnasa to treasure, which must surely have a life beyond its limited run. (The play is scheduled to close May 9.) But when those stage sisters – and the fine trio of men in the cast, as well – come together for their bows, you’d be well advised to imagine another woman up there bowing with them: Mackmin, a director in superlative control of a play about the last summer before a family’s life was overtaken by chaos.
Tags: London Theatre Reviews