On Closing the Gate and Burying the Great
To follow the performing arts involves more than just attending performances. Before reviewing one concert and one play this week, I briefly note four recent developments that show different ways in which the performing arts in Britain have been changing, for both better and worse: a closure, a study day, a death, a class.
I: Closure of the Gate Theatre
On 9 September, the Gate Theatre announced that it would permanently close in October, “due to unsustainable funding pressures.” Few would claim that the Gate - from 1979 to 2022, a pub theatre in Notting Hill - been an exceptionally important part of London theatre at any time this century, but I hope I never forget how intensely it mattered in the early 1990s. Concentrating mainly on new productions of older foreign plays in translations, it introduced many of us to a torrent of masterpieces by Euripides, Lope de Vega, Calderón de la Barca, Tirso de Molina, Carlo Goldoni, Maxim Gorky, Ödön von Horváth. Mario Vargas Llosa, and more, masterpieces unknown on the British stage. The directors Stephen Daldry and Laurence Boswell in particular - Katie Mitchell too - directed many of those Gate productions in ways that made superlative use of limited space. The actors Jude Law and Sophie Okonedo gave some of their earliest important performances there; such more experienced actors as Paola Dionisotti, Peter Eyre, Barbara Flynn, did lastingly memorable work. Above all, though, the Gate Theatre productions, while expanding London’s notion of great plays from across the world. world theatre For a few years, truly did the best work in all of London theatre.
II: Ashton Redisoverered, “Ondine”, Sunday September 20, Royal Ballet School
Frederick Ashton, Britain’s greatest choreographer, died in 1988. In the subsequent years, both an Ashton Trust and an Ashton Foundation have been established. His works are now danced around the world. Some ballets that nobody expected to see again onstage when he died - notably the three-act “Sylvia” (1952) and the one-act “Marguerite and Armand”(1963) - have been danced this century by companies from Buenos Aires to St Petersburg.
In recent years, the Ashton Foundation has presented a series of “Ashton Rediscovered” events at the Royal Ballet School. On Sunday 20, the subject was his fourth and final three-act ballet “Ondine” (1958, to a commissioned score by Hans Werner Henze): one scene from Act Two was shown on screen, and other scenes from Acts One and Three were rehearsed, with notator-régisseur Grant Coyle and coach Edward Watson working with young Royal Ballet soloists Marianna Tsembenhoi (Ukrainian) and Leo Dixon in the roles of Ondine and Palemon. Ballet people used to find the Henze score difficult; today, it sounds not just unchallenging but importantly neo-Romantic. Coyle and Watson both remarked, rightly, on the high standards of musicality shown by today’s young dancers: Tsembenhoi, they observed, can negotiate modernist music with far greater ease than most dancers in the last century. Throughout this rehearsal, Tsembenhoi and Dixon showed the kind of fresh talent and theatricality that brings Ashton choreography into keen new life.
III: The funeral of choreographer Richard Alston, Wednesday 23
After Ashton, the finest British choreographer has been the modern-dance creator Richard Alston. In 1982, when both men were alive, I wrote that Alston was “Ashton’s heir”. On September 7, however, Alston died, aged seventy-seven, after a prolific and multi-award-winning career. He was also a superb and influential teacher, and a illuminatingly generous critic of choreography by others.)
People have spoken of the rich legacy that Alston leaves - there is a Richard Alston Foundation - but the British modern-dance scene will have to change hugely (it should change hugely anyway) before we see the many revivals of Alston’s choreography it deserves.
His funeral took place on Wednesday 23, a wonderfully touching celebration. In a particularly historic touch, his first muse and closest friend, the choreographer Siobhan (Sue) Davies, now in her late seventies, showed two phrases from a duet he had made in 1978 for her to dance with him in the 1978 “Doublework”.
IV: Jeannie Steele teaching Cunningham dance teachers at the Jacqueline du Pré Music Building, Thursday 24
In the 1970s, the Anglo-American dance critic David Vaughan - one of Alston’s early critical admirers, and to whom Alston dedicated his “Doublework” in 1978 - loved to speak of the “ABC of contemporary classicism”: Ashton, Balanchine, Cunningham. For me, too, those have been the three choreographers of my era whose work has best repaid re-watching. Cunningham, like Balanchine, was also a great teacher.
This week, the Cunningham alumna Jeannie Steele has been working at the Jacqueline du Pré music building at St Hilda’s College, Oxford, for Dansox, the invaluable Oxford dance society, with teachers on issues that emerge for today’s teachers when teaching Cunningham dance technique - establishing the larger intentions within the technical rigour. A sold-put public event was given on Saturday 26; I was allowed to watch a preparatory rehearsal on Thursday 24.
I marvelled anew at the full-bodied beauties of Cunningham style: they permeate you, kinaesthetically and affectingly, as you watch. Very interestingly, Steele made the point that Cunningham’s teaching will prove his greatest legacy of all. She quoted Cunningham himself: the larger point of technique is that, while training the body, you release the spirit.
V: Elisabeth Leonskaja at the Wigmore Hall, Tuesday 22
The Georgian-born Austrian-naturalised pianist Elisabeth Leonskaja is eighty. I’m sorry that I’d never seen or heard her play until this year; I’m grateful that I’ve now attended three recitals by her. She enters with minimal fuss or preparation, scarcely acknowledging her applause before sitting and playing.
On Tuesday, she played Schubert: the sonata in B D575, the four impromptus D935, and the sonata in D D850. Everything she does, despite its immense dynamic range, exemplifies “the flow of movement”, a phrase used for many years by Russian ballet teachers (many of whom also use the musical phrase “cantilena”, likening dance phrasing to the flow of breath in song). You can see the current of motion, like thick cream, from Leonskaja’s shoulders to her fingers. She has power, force, and weight - and many shades of delicacy: she shows how much of Schubert’s writing is a stream of consciousness. Most of the time she’s like a dreaming Titan - though in the first impromptu the Titan seemed thrillingly awake.
VI: Judgment Day, Old Red Lion Theatre, Thursday 24
London has seen several stagings of plays by the great Hungarian playwright Ödön von Horváth (1901-1938) - “Don Juan Comes Back from the War” and “Figaro Gets Divorced” (both 1936), “Judgment Day” (1937) - but too seldom, and surely too few. Von Horváth, who was also a novelist and who wrote in German, perfectly caught the tone of how middle-European society was changing in the 1930s, with harsh conflicts opening up even in small societies, and with history itself seeming to be shaken in its foundations. I very much hope someone revives “Figaro Gets Divorced”: it has twice been adapted into operatic form, but London has only seen it as a play in a brilliant 1990 production at the Gate Theatre (see above), directed by the young Stephen Daldry. It has often been said that Beaumarchais’s Figaro plays pointed the way to the French Revolution; but Von Horvàth’s play takes the “Figaro” characters and shows political revolution will change their world out of recognition.
In 1989, the year before his Gate Theatre “Figaro Gets Divorced”, Daldry had directed the UK premiere of von Horváth’s “Judgment Day” at the Old Red Lion (Islington), with a cast that included the actress Matilda Ziegler as Anna. Now, thirty-seven years on, she has founded the theatre company Fright Train, which has begun by staging “Judgment Day”. She now directs; her daughter, Faye Ziegler, plays Anna. I missed both the 1989 Daldry “Judgment Day” and the 2009 Almeida Theatre one, directed by James Macdonald. But Ziegler’s 2026 production should be seen - above all for showing, with authority and clarity, the marvellous stuff of which von Horváth’s play is made.
“Judgment Day” is set In and around the railway station of a small town. Cross-sections of society are coming and going. We see the townsfolk’s irrational dislike for one woman, Frau Hudetz, and her brother. Conversely, we see how her husband, Hudetz the station master, is attractive to the townsfolk as she is not. (We can’t help wondering if antisemitism is an issue in their hostility to her and her brother. The play leaves this ambiguous.) She, older than him, watches his behaviour with fierce possessiveness. Anna, an attractive younger woman and daughter to the innkeeper, manages to spend time alone with Hudetz. She pulls him into a kiss that makes him fail to deliver a railway signal on time. A major train crash follows. Eighteen people are killed.
Town opinion is already inclined to absolve Hudetz of causing the crash before any official investigation. Anna then perjures herself to support his innocence, whereas Frau Hudetz, vindictively telling the truth (she saw the kiss), is widely disbelieved. Yet, once the official investigation is over, perceptions change. The mutual attraction between Hudetz and Anna becomes suffused by guilt. There is another death. Characters - the whole little town - become drastically altered.
Ziegler’s production, using minimal scenery but no fewer than fourteen actors, vividly shows how Von Horváth’s play takes on expressionistic tones. Thr Old Red Lion Theatre is a small space: its audience sits, in three rows, on two sides of the little rectangular stage. In such conditions, von Horváth’s play might be murmured intimately - but Ziegler’s actors all use their voices firmly, showing the theatricality of von Horváth’s style without exaggeration. (This is a production that could easily transfer to a larger venue. The only problem is a tiny one that could easily be fixed: the word “Fräulein”. Most of the say “Frowline”, which happens to be incorrect, while one says “Froyline”, which happens to be correct.)
These performers all make their stage world real with the naturalness of their responses to one another. Some of the acting is close to caricature - admirably, enojoyajly - without ever tipping too far. Ziegler’s staging is at its most audacious in the play’s least realistic scene, a ghost scene in which Hudetz (Craig Hamilton) is haunted by the ghosts of the train-crash victims. It’s a nightmare, exaggerated but entirely persuasive. Especially fine is how the production reverts to realism, suddenly but smoothly: this perfectly catches a sense of waking from a disturbingly dark dream into a reality that, though far more subdued in mood, remains grim. This Old Red Lion production of “Judgment Day” ideally illustrates, as did so many Gate Theatre production, a phrase from the playwright Christopher Marlowe: “infinite riches in a little room”.
@Alastair Macaulay