“Fanny and Alexander”, Old Vic
Christine Eccles on the South Bank
13 May 2018
The Old Vic’s version of Ingmar Bergman’s celebrated semi-autobiographical 1982 film Fanny and Alexander runs for three hours and 20 minutes. However, bearing in mind that the director’s cut of the film (as a TV mini series) runs at over five hours, adaptor Stephen Beresford has made pretty hefty use of the scissors.
It begins with the boy Alexander – spellbindingly played by Misha Handley on press night – coming before the red velvet curtain to warn us that we are about to see the longest play ever produced in the history of the world but that it will contain everything that a play should contain – ghosts, deaths, swords, and a camel.
This is the story of the fearless and fantastic Alexander. The scenes we watch are refracted through his eyes by the unreliable prism of memory. Although theatre can never capture the intensity of the cinematic point of view – and Bergman’s films are always pretty intense – it does allow us to roam over the whole picture. The Old Vic with its rich theatrical history is a natural home for this show which celebrates all things theatrical. It features their life on stage come out of stage, and backstage of the jolly Ekdahls, a thespian dynasty who ran a well-loved theatre somewhere in the Swedish provinces.
We meet them in 1907 during the run up to Christmas, they are putting on sentimentally kitsch nativity and rehearsing snippets from Hamlet. So we easily feel Alexander’s shock – like an unexpected cold shower when this world is snatched away from him. Following his father’s unexpected death his mother Emilie (Catherine Walker) – repenting an earlier adultery in her first marriage – takes a second husband, the harsh and unrelenting bishop Edward (Kevin Doyle) whose Calvinistic insistence on the truth, the truth and nothing but the truth is totally at odds with the Ekdahls’ world of make-believe and pretence.
Tom Pye’s design – stripped pine, hard stone, white-washed glare – turns Alexander’s world into a frozen and fractured and frightening place. Be scared, be very scared – some of the scenes are truly chilling. You really need a sofa to hide behind whilst watching some of this middle act.
Doyle is superb as the tortured sadist who inflicts punishment “out of love”. But he knows that he himself is seriously out of control. In this middle section Alexander is haunted by the Grim Reaper and by the ghost of his father (shades of Hamlet abound). Appearing to him in a dapper white suit alternately laughing and crying, his father says, “ This is life … and Christ I miss it! Alexander is a boy who lives in his imagination but doesn’t shy away from the big questions. (God, death, Truth and What’s It All About?)
The final third is about healing common, regeneration, and growth. A soft peachy light enfolds the reunited family. Throughout, Mark Henderson brings a cinematic sensitivity to his lighting design. The production creates a fast-moving saga – and there is indeed a camel.
Although Alexander is our focus, Beresford and Webster have created a true ensemble in which Wilson is the jewel n an ornate crown. Pennington creates an elderly Jewish antiques dealer who is in touch with the spirit world and can manipulate the boundaries between illusion and reality.
Complex performances are given by Thomas Arnold as the avuncular Le Pétomane, Lolita Chakrabarti as the embedded sister, and Jonathan Slinger as the worldly uncle pulling out all the stops in the battle of wits to reclaim the children and their mother.
It’s a fitting play for the Old Vic in an anniversary year. There are snippets of Shakespeare and Strindberg, echoes of Ibsen who has to be the original creator of Nordic noir, and a nod to Chekhov’s family ensembles. The ghostly forays into Bergman’s supernatural world even conjure up the very presence of Lillian Baylis herself – the legendary manager of this celebrated and much-loved theatre. Perhaps she’s hiding in her curtained-off box, frying sausages and nodding with recognition at these people and all their dramas?
