The week in theatre: Inside No 9: Stage/Fright; Cymbeline – review
Gleaming with comic gore, intricately written, showered with adulation, replete with cryptic clues, Inside No 9 ended its television run last year – on, of course, its ninth series. Now its creators, Steve Pemberton and Reece Shearsmith, have whipped up a theatrical version, directed by Simon Evans.
Inside No 9: Stage/Fright is not a lazily dumped transfer from screen to stage, but nor is it completely new invention. An anthology of the anthology series, in which each star-sprinkled episode busts into a new genre behind a different door marked No 9, it is something like an evening by a tribute band in which the impersonators turn out to be the real thing.
In an informative though gush-clogged BBC documentary over Christmas, Shearsmith said he thought the two of them were at their best live, rather than recorded. The series included a live episode – paradoxically entitled Dead Line – and the hallmark throughout the 10-year run was edgy unguessability: swerving in mood, swerving in plot, spattered with red herrings.
The audience is warned that terrible things happen in Wyndham’s, such as ‘Kenneth Branagh’s King Lear’
The stage show is less high-voltage, partly because it has not mastered the telly’s zooming closeups, both naturalistic and startling. Comedy and alarm are both dimmer. Still, it’s a sellout. Hats are tipped to favourite celebrities – Sheridan Smith, Matthew Kelly – some of whom appear on stage. As top scenes are rerun, murmurs of recognition rise from the stalls, packed with connoisseurs.
Occasionally something is more remarkable on stage than it was on screen: without the possibility of special-effects tweaking, Pemberton is more evidently a magician when he conjures a character out of a coat sleeve hanging over his arm. The freshest moments are the newest. There is a nifty spin on the No 9 door, reallocated to a place in the auditorium. The audience is warned that terrible things happen in Wyndham’s, such as “Kenneth Branagh’s King Lear”. A sharp opening sketch is set in the stalls, with one man on his mobile (“Can’t speak long – I’m in the theatre”), another eating sushi out of an ultra-crackling bag, and a third eager and able to take revenge. An usher walks down the aisles with a sign – plus illustration – instructing: “No masturbating”.
Cymbeline: it is as if Shakespeare had sprayed his canon with a musket. The tragicomedy, written in 1609 or 1610, eight years after Hamlet and a couple of years before The Tempest – is a mad mingle of half-baked plots, fairytale, Roman history, past and future comedies and tragedies.
Look to Iachimo, who whips up a jealous rage with false news about a lover, for a shadow of Iago: even the names echo. Find Romeo and Juliet in the drug that fakes death; see Pericles and The Winter’s Tale in the reconciliations of parent and children. Cymbeline is an enormous shaggy-dog story wagged by its tail: the piled-up coincidences so ridiculous that they might have been concocted simply for the joke of their sudden resolution.
Yet the play has some of Shakespeare’s best moments of myopic intensity: when he swoops down and peers, rendering the smallest detail as if a microscope lens has been suddenly wiped clean. Innogen watches as her banished lover leaves, melting “from the smallness of a gnat to air”; a mole on her breast is “cinque-spotted, like the crimson drops i’ the bottom of a cowslip”. (This being the most dermatologically inclined of dramas, another sib has a mole like “a sanguine star”.)
The play’s most celebrated speech is a lingering closeup. Iachimo makes description a seduction as he spies on the sleeping Innogen and reports the details of her bedchamber as if he has slept with her. In Jennifer Tang’s production, Pierro Niel-Mee lasciviously conjures the scene amid Basia Bińkowska’s muted design of cream and bone-patterned walls, with the trademark Wanamaker candelabra hovering. Niel-Mee’s Iachimo – like the other villain Cloten, played by Jordan Mifsúd – is demonically rutting and randy: pelvic thrusts are a speciality of the evening. Gabrielle Brooks is a vivid Innogen, candid and forthright throughout.
It is hard to imagine any director totally soldering the plot together, but Tang makes a bold attempt, and does no damage to the dynamics by the gender swap that makes Cymbeline a woman and puts her daughter into a same-sex relationship. She wimmins it up too evidently from time to time: alongside Laura Moody’s enticing music on glass bells there are too many plaintive ululations from the musicians’ gallery, but the lovely ambiguous sexuality of Shakespeare’s comedies is in the air. Nevertheless, next time I see this rarely performed play I would like to see the bedchamber scene played as reimagined by Harriet Walter in her recent book She Speaks! Imogen takes charge of things: she is only pretending to be asleep, and quite keen on the odd embrace.
Star ratings (out of five)
Inside No 9/Fright ★★★
Cymbeline ★★★
